You're on the Project VGA Page
Open Graphics
Posted on 2007/09/09 - 00:48The Finland thing was fun (ended up with a ten, or A+ if you like), I've worked my ass of this holiday to generate enough income for the next school semester, I'm (after a lot of lobbying) allowed to skip a required internship so it's time for the next school semester, or, as I like to say; wicked cool projects. Oh, and I forgot to update this blog. Guess I'm not really having any time to write as often as I'd like. Anyway, this project I'm trying to get pushed through the bureacrazy is mainly motivated by my disliking of another project. If you happen to participate in that project, please don't be offended and all that. Read on.
The project I'm talking about is the Open Graphics Project. This started out as a simple idea to build an open source Graphics Card with some big future ideas and sounded really cool. But, with the third year 'anniversary' coming up next month, all there is is an expensive $2000 fpga board, which was designed without barely any community communication (from my perspective) of which the bugs are identified, not fixed. Meanwhile the mailinglist is working out high speed nanocontrollers with some serious muscle like fullsize 32 bit multipliers, possibly interrupt support, and whatnot, which is supposed to do VGA emulation and DMA transfers in realtime simultaneously. Details about the actual hardware and what's possible is 'underway', but nobody can actually write it since nobody has access to the details of the card. Except for the two people who've seen it.
I partly blaim the creators of the project who are pushing for these design choices. If I can point at the cathedral vs. bazaar analogy, they're trying to build Taipei 101 while half their workcrew is still figuring out how to weld steel. If history has taught us anything, open source projects work best if they start small and get improved on over time. No matter how terrible the first implemenation is, if it's something new and people are interested, it'll get mostly rewritten, redesigned and refined over the years. A 2000 dollar card 3 years after the starting date with wild discussions about nanocontrollers while VGA still isn't working it not 'starting small'.
Now, I'm not usually somebody who complains about other people's efforts. I think it's very bold to try something like this, I just think their approach to the problem could be a lot better. Which is why my new project this semester is going to be to build a small ($100 range) PCI card with a VGA connector and hopefully some unstable VGA support. If Open Graphics is building Taipei 101, I'm building the Tower of Pisa equivalent. It's going to be an idea realised, proof that something like this can be done, and then hopefully the open source community will pick up on it and improve on the original. And maybe I fail and OGP succeeds, who knows. At least the game is on.
[: wacco :]
Comments
Posted by MrNGm on Sun, 09 Sep 2007 08:47:03
What's the use of a $2000 fpga board if noone knows how to handle it AND it's 3 years old?
Crazy people. Now you just have to figure out a way to start from scratch again :)
Posted by wacco on Mon, 10 Sep 2007 12:00:01
Actually, not really. I'm simply re-using some of their ideas. But where I'm using a $13 FPGA chip, they've got it's 'big' brother which I can't even order since you'll need a special contract with Xilinx or something.
Same for memory (DDR 256MB spread across 8 chips or just 1 chip) and CPLD, video connectors, etc..
Posted by Freak on Mon, 10 Sep 2007 15:14:26
not that I got any clue about this stuff. But wouldn't it be way better to make a agp/pci-e card?
Anyways, good luck this semester ;)
Posted by wacco on Mon, 10 Sep 2007 15:22:02
Yeah, that'd be version 2. PCI is tricky enough as it is but is widely documented so I can hopefully still debug it. After that, I want to make a switch to PCI-e if possible (but that'll be a fairly big step).
Posted by reinder on Thu, 13 Sep 2007 14:37:46
I'm VERY interested in this project ! lets IM about it .. i was on the OGC mailing list but is was too many mails/day to follow... and the price is totaly out of scope...
if you are going to make a 100-200 euro card i might buy one and help you develop/debug and i know that making more then one pcb cuts the price ;-)
Posted by wacco on Fri, 14 Sep 2007 02:03:21
Great to hear! I was hoping more people would be interested in getting their hands on hardware like this. I'm going to let a bunch of PCBs be fabricated anyhow so after I've gotten to the point of verifying that these are working properly, I'll get in touch ;)
Posted by Christopher Bowman on Tue, 06 Nov 2007 07:45:58
If you are considering going to pci express but think its a bit complicated as a first board, I would suggest you look at the Xilinx web site. They have a perfect board for $315 that has a PCIe interface chip connected to a fairly powerful FPGA, with a video DAC capable of VGA and 32 MB of DDR memory. I am playing with one now and it's really cool. It's nice to build your own board, but you can start working with PCIe and VGA video now with the Xilinx PCIe starter kit. Plus you can get a free limited time eval version of their PCIe core
Posted by wacco on Wed, 07 Nov 2007 00:59:45
Yep, that's definitely a nice card, and I wouldn't be able to give you a direct reason why you should use this card instead of that one - besides that this one will be open source. I'll keep an eye on it!
Posted by Long Tran on Wed, 26 Dec 2007 07:36:02
I am struggling searching the internet for FPGA-based, PCI-formed VGA card design. Most of the links I found routed me to that disappointed "Open Graphics Project" which made me feel bed weather. Now, at this time I find your work and it is really what I am dreaming for.
I wish you good health to continue this excellent work and that other people like me could reach this website instead of that "Open Graphics Project".
Posted by James Richard Tyrer on Tue, 22 Jan 2008 20:22:17
I think that you misunderstand the purpose of the Open Graphics project.
The details of the project are at:
http://wiki.opengraphics.org./tiki-index.php
The schematic of the DEVELOPMENT board is published there.
The purpose of the OGP is to develop hardware acceleration of OpenGL. To do this, a development board was designed. The purpose of this board is development only. It is not intended for use as a graphics board.
Since Linux has little use for VGA except to boot the computer, there is no VGA hardware support.
IIUC, the purpose of you project is to develop a VGA hardware core and BIOS that also support the VESA extensions. While this is certainly something that Open Hardware needs, I don't see that your board will have any usefullness as anything other than a development board since most graphics boards have VGA hardware that supports the VESA exesnsions and a VGA compatible BIOS.
I wish you well and hope your project succeeds.
Posted by wacco on Wed, 23 Jan 2008 17:08:35
@James,
I understand the purpose of the OGP perfectly. I'm just impatient and want to get my hands on a development board, and the OGP wasn't delivering fast enough at a reasonable price. I've started this project to fill in the gap, it's in no way intended as a graphics board either.
The purpose of this project is also to act as a development board with the exact same goals as OGP, but on a smaller (and imho easier to achieve) scale. After this works, we can simply scale up.
FYI the OGP is now working on full VGA support as well, so if you think these boards shouldn't support it because linux has little use for it, well, cue flame wars in 3, 2, 1.. :)
Posted by Austin Prior on Mon, 01 Dec 2008 18:45:37
The project sounds great. But I gotta ask: Why VGA? I can't wait to get rid of that dinosaur of a connection and am shocked at the number of motherboards that still carry it. I guess old technology is better understood and hence more hackable but DVI is an open standard too. If I were you, I'd skip VGA, DVI and HDMI and go straight to the beautiful and open DisplayPort.
Yours sincerely,
Someone with way less technical knowledge than you!
Posted by louis vuitton on Tue, 15 Jun 2010 12:21:55
The project sounds great. But I gotta ask: Why VGA? I can't wait to get rid of that dinosaur of a connection and am shocked at the number of motherboards that still carry it. I guess old technology is better understood and hence more hackable but DVI is an open standard too. If I were you, I'd skip VGA, DVI and HDMI and go straight to the beautiful and open DisplayPort.
Yours sincerely,
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