I found this attendant console in a thrift store in San Francisco for $4. It is covered with LEDs and buttons, and has a very high build quality. I thought about how hard it would be to make something similar today (with just the cost of LEDs and buttons), and decided to pick it up for a later project.

This repository is the result of my reverse engineering of the ATT26A hardware/firmware and includes:

  * Documentation of the hardware.
  * Documentation of the wire protocol.
  * Python library for driving the panel.
  * Example programs for using the python library.

These Attendant Consoles can be found on ebay for around $25 (at the time of writing). If you are into unusual display interfaces, pick one up and see what you can do.

New examples, patches, and new language bindings welcome.

Happy hacking!

I disagree that it is trivial. If we know what bits of the unencrypted bitstream do what, and have a cryptographically secure way of signing the stream, then GLHF with that. If it turns out that documenting the parts of the chip required for configuration makes the black box security not work, then it was crap security and provided no real security to anyone. As it stands there is no way to tell and we have to take the smiling sales guy's word that it is "SUPER secure, promise".

This is an interesting story. An unfortunate end. Most of these things sound like short term issues that get resolved as the tools are made. Alternately Xilinx could have just put the docs out there and said they only support ISE. That way if an open source developer makes a tool they have no responsibility, but can reconsider in a few years in case it gets wide acceptance. I am not a market strategist, but supporting everyone's custom tool sounds like a quick way to waste money and the wrong way to try and open source something. Similar to respecting every coupon people bring in, even hand written ones.

This feels like circular logic to me. We do not want the hardware companies spending time 'open sourcing' their docs because they need to spend that time and money 'making more features' which they wouldn't have to do alone if it was open, but we can't have it open because spending the time and money 'open sourcing' their docs......

I think there is a big difference between 'users wanting tools to be closed source' and 'users not caring if their tools are closed source'. And I would argue that even if the primary user base does not care, we can do better than that. It is no excuse to use these fragile lumbering behemoths of bad design and super seeeeecret tricks that you can learn in a university or the internet. And history keeps showing the problems of big black boxes with the words 'trust us' written on the outside. All we need is the layout and a map of the bitstream and open developers will do most of the work for these companies.

As for spending their resources 'driving prices down', that is quite relative. And if you look at the pricing model of their software it is clearly not their goal to make that reasonable (at least Xilinx). And every version of the software stretches to provide arbitrary bullet points on the back of a box that either mean nothing, were tested in suspicious conditions, or conflate multiple optimized tests together and say 'we are better than everyone at everything. How many times will that be said by all competitors at the same time, and how many times will it be believed? Anyways, with all those features, somehow ISE is still unstable on windows.

>>> which they wouldn't have to do alone if it was open

Well, that's an assumption. User base is very small, and potential contributors base is even smaller. So that would be a big bet hoping that someone would contribute to make it worthwhile.

However, your statement is true when it comes to more mainstream technologies like ruby or javascript.

But each company has it's own tools. That means redundant development. If they just worked on one set of open source tools, it should reduce development costs. It also opens the door to researchers to try things directly in the mainstream tools. That means not having to re-implement things published in papers, but instead deciding weather or not to merge a feature from a branch.

When you say 'good, efficient software' i wonder if you are talking about Xilinx ISE/Vivado, or any of the tools from their competitors. I can not imagine you are.

Have you noticed anybody else with better software and chips ? no ? maybe because it's extremely hard to to get to the level of ISE and the competitors ?

'get to the level' of ISE... I disagree. I do not want to build an IDE. I want an open toolchain, the thing that the ISE interface calls. There is some math in there that takes certain skills to implement, but I know several people who could do it if they had the layout of the chips. MAYBE the reason there are no open toolchains 'on the level' of ISE and competitors is not because Xilinx has some amazing secret sauce and is instead because the whole industry is caustically secretive and horribly anti competition.

Well Quartus isn't bad. It will be interesting to see what Intel does with it. They have a history of open sourcing things other folks don't want to open source (like Graphics Drivers).

Note that Altera's compiler for Open CL does not let you run your OpenCl stuff faster. It is intended so you can write your FPGA programs (that run outside of your computer usually) in OpenCL. Most of the imagined benefits kind of vanish, at least to me, when you realize that this is just a tool so if all you can hire if OpenCL developers, you can still get the job done.

Companies seem to be terrified of trying anything. That is why I was happy when Sony put The Interview up on the internet and theaters for simultaneous release. No one would try that first, and since it worked ok for them it is now an option other companies may consider. Even though both GPU companies and FPGA companies are in hardware, they do not see strategic experiments like opening documentation in the other to be sign of viability for themselves.

Those jobs also pay you to sell your ideas that you are never allowed to use again unless you continue working for the company you sold it to. And if you have the gall to use your own idea, lawyers!

Wow. The beatings just continue. I was headed straight into the worse engineering subfield for starting a company, economically as well as legally.

Amusingly the Xilinx license states that you are not allowed to use the bitstreams generated by their software in any device that they did not manufacture. This means if you implemented a xilinx fpga in an altera fpga, it would be against the agreement to program the inner xilinx fpga with the bitstream. The more you know!

OP here

I get there is a big difference between hardware and software, but I feel that certain parts of the gaps are closing. They will not CLOSE, but as they get closer we can learn from each other.

With that said, to address your point: Linux is one of the most dominant systems for servers. Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc use it for almost all of their backend systems. They use it not just because it is free but because it is proven and scalable. Open source databases and web servers also enjoy considerable (sometimes dominant) share. There are companies that provide support contracts for Linux (Suse, Redhat) and that model has worked to fund other open software.

So I think that establishes that a company will use open software.

As for being scary, you are correct that is a primary decision making motivation. It is why many professionals in tons of industries still run windows XP. Often they NEED XP because the software they rely on is so dependent on that specific ecosystem that huge rewrites are necessary in order for it to work on anything else, and this work (even if done by the original distributor) will take years for the tools to be stable again. This is not good engineering on the part of the tool designers. The crippling fear of NEVER TOUCHING ANYTHING is something that the open software alternatives seem to be alleviating in corporate environments since the late 90s.

The lifecycles of putting a phone together is much faster than Intel designing a processor, or Xilinx designing a new FPGA. building boards in phones and laptops is a complex game of Lego and placing them around so the timing diagrams work in all expected use cases. And if the timing does not work in some cases, whatever, people get a phone a year. Hell on my Galaxy S3 Verizon said 'oh yeah that is a known issue where sometimes the GPS just does not work because of loose wires, that was fixed in the S4, I think, which is only $$$.'

You are also correct about direct support from the company. In face make Xilinx enough money and they will share their secrets with you. But I am more targeting small to medium development. If open tools become popular and stable enough to get market share in hobbyist up to medium sized companies, it will only be so many years before bigger companies hire new engineers who grew up using open tools and have no patience for tools that have to be emulated in windows XP and have 35 nested sub menus for enabling a feature.

I do not feel attacked at all. You brought up interesting points. I hope i did them justice and did not ramble since there were a lot of points to hit.