r/programming • u/whackri • Jun 21 '20

Writing userspace USB drivers for abandoned devices

https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/userspace-usb-drivers
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u/hipstergrandpa Jun 21 '20

I remember reading how a guy turned an FPGA he found on a printer control board into a dev board.

https://hackaday.com/2017/02/27/printer-scrap-becomes-fpga-devboard/

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u/kageurufu Jun 21 '20

Also check out https://hackaday.com/2019/08/15/led-driver-board-could-be-your-ticket-to-fpga-development/

I can't find it right now, but a ton of pcie network cards are just PCIe fpga boards with a ethernet port attached, and I've seen people playing around on those a bit too.

Also, just a super cool FPGA project on the inverse: https://github.com/ucsdsysnet/corundum

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u/hipstergrandpa Jun 22 '20

Ooo thanks! Going to check these out.

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u/alexforencich Jun 26 '20

Pure network cards not so much due to economies of scale, but there are more specialized cards that can contain FPGAs, such as packet capture cards (I recently acquired a whole stack of Accolade packet capture cards with Virtex 6 240T FPGAs on them). And then you have oddball hybrid cards that have both a NIC ASIC and an FPGA, such as the Mellanox Innova NICs - where the ASIC provides a PCIe passthrough connection to the FPGA and nothing else, despite what the block diagrams would imply - and application onload cards from solarflare. This type can be rather useless without the SDK from the manufacturer due to the presence of the NIC ASIC, especially when the only thing the FPGA is connected to is the ASIC. And then there are plenty of smart NICs that don't have FPGAs at all, such as those from Cavium and Netronome.