OpenMoko Hardware development on Fedora

Designing opensource hardware projects with opensource EDA software is a challenge for anyone, well not any-more with the upcoming Fedora 12.

While assessing the risk of the project, one first needs to ensure that he/she has a robust and complete tool set before starting up with the development.

In the past, the critical path of this risk assessment was setting up the development platform, compiling and installing the whole tool set (normally composed of least 8 software) from scratch. That said, the average user should allocate one or two days just for compiling all the dependencies, after he/she has roamed around the internet in search for some possible patches needed to ensure interoperability within his/her tool set.

As the community leader in opensource EDA provider, Fedora Electronic Lab strives to eliminate this painful process by preparing this development platform beforehand and gives Fedora users the opportunity to install the required tool set within 5 minutes. During the last two months, we have been focussing on ensuring that Fedora can satisfy the needs for the electronic hardware development of the OpenMoko community.

Fedora’s Kicad will follow OpenMoko’s development needs. That said, it will require Fedora’s Kicad be pulled from trunk. Jon Ciesla, Jacek Radzikowski and I revised the entire Fedora Kicad package and spec file. It was then updated to snapshot revision 1863. But, stability of kicad will be ensured. One of the goals of FEL is not to just talk how opensource software is good, but also to support opensource hardware development and helping users to develop products out of it.

We hope that the OpenMoko community can now work out of the box with

su -c “yum install kicad fped openocd psutils-perl”

svn co https://svn.openmoko.org/trunk/gta02-core/

cd gta02-core/

make update

make sch

instead of the time consuming process as described on this GETTING-STARTED document.

That said, we sincerely hope that our contribution might help OpenMoko developers seduce more contributors and reviewers easily.

Kicad’s module editor lacks automation and its output is difficult to review. Hence fped comes in as a footprint editor that captures more of the design process and allows one to annotate the footprint with measurements taken directly from the manufacturer’s datasheet.

Dean Glazeski, who was privately packaging OpenOCD, (an Open On-Chip Debugger (OpenOCD) provides debugging, in-system programming and boundary-scan testing for embedded devices.) joined Fedora Project and introduced OpenOCD to Fedora so that a wider userbase can benefit from it.

OpenOCD provides a human-readable telnet interface for manually halting/resuming the target device, reading/writing registers and memory, etc. In addition, it provides a RDI (remote debugger interface) on a TCP port. This interface can be used by gdb (the GNU Debugger).

We currently have the following list of packages under the Fedora Electronic Lab umbrella for the following architectures (i686,x86_64, PPC and PPC64). If you feel that we still lack tools that are important to OpenMoko’s development, please do not hesitate to let us know.

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Filed under: eda, fedora, Free Electronic Lab, openmoko