[Libre-soc-dev] Introduction

[Andrey Miroshnikov]

Hello everyone,

My name's Andrey and I'm based in the UK. I'm currently self-employed 
(building up my company, Scutum Electrum Ltd).

I've been aware of both EOMA-68 and Libre-SOC since late 2019, however 
my job at the time had a fairly restrictive IP clause (essentially 
anything I developed, even outside of work hours, would legally belong 
to the company). Didn't want to take the chances. Now that I'm not under 
a restrictive contract anymore, I'd like to join your team, as I agree 
with the goal (honestly can't believe that there are no SoCs with fully 
open-source drivers, of course mobile modems are even worse). Re-read 
the charter and I agree with it's terms (very straightforward and to the 
point).

Been looking at the mailing lists from Jul to Dec 2019, and let the 
unread emails pile up and got burned out pretty quick (not gonna repeat 
that mistake, now I catch up daily hahaha). Only re-subscribed last week.

Although my degree is in electronic engineering (graduated in 2019), for 
the last year and a half I've been looking into programming language 
grammar. It's a fascinating topic, here's a fun learning series where 
you build a Pascal interpreter in Python: 
https://ruslanspivak.com/lsbasi-part1/. After leaving my job I also 
started looking into One-Instruction Set Computing or OISC. Wouldn't be 
practical for Libre-SOC, but it's an interesting concept and perhaps 
will be a useful teaching aid for low-level programming once I start 
writing my report on it.

My last job was in system validation, where we tested our company's chip 
design (the digital part of it) on an FPGA emulator by writing a great 
set of test cases. Most of the job involved looking at a giant list of 
registers, and based on the designer's documentation, figuring out which 
functions should be prioritised for testing. Used a lot of C and Python 
for that.

Just saw bug #22 and I guess you already have something similar to the 
emulator that I described. Very, very cool, congrats on the first boot!

For the Libre-SOC project I'd like to do a bit of everything, so for now 
I'll just setup the environment, look at the current bugs, and see what 
hasn't been fixed yet. Today while installing the dependencies I noticed 
a Debian package in the HDL Workflow wiki page that must've changed 
names (python-nosetest3 now called python3-nose), so I could start with 
that once I create an account.

At home I have the following that might be useful:
-TinyFPGA BX (ice40 fpga), DE0 Nano (cyclone 4 fpga)
-Soldering station, rework station, cheap usb microscope - I'm not the 
greatest, but can solder 0402 (especially now that I have tweezers)
-ESD mat and wrist strap
-Current computer setup for Debian has 8GB RAM, quad core i5 sandybridge
-Cheap 16MHz logic analyser
-NanoVNA (might come in handy for antennas)

Unfortunately I don't have any proper measurement instrumentation or 
bench equipment such as oscilloscopes or lab supplies (except my trusty 
multimeter of course haha!), so for now there's not a lot of 
characterisation I could do.

My IRC nick is "octavius" (I participated for the first time today, will 
be back tomorrow).

If you would like to know more about me, my personal site is 
https://technepisteme.xyz/

Thanks for reading,

Andrey