Excitement in the Open Graphics community is quite high as it approaches its first production run of the FPGA-based “Open Graphics Development” board, known as “OGD1”. It will be available for pre-sale this month with the first units expected to ship soon thereafter. The board is targeted at hardware developers, with the specific goal of supporting development and testing of designs for a fully-documented consumer Open Hardware Graphics Card to be implemented using an ASIC (thus resolving one of the biggest obstacles to free software on the desktop).

A general purpose Open Hardware tool for testing Open Hardware designs, the OGD1 is as important a step in promoting the Open Hardware movement as gcc or glibc was to promoting free software. It also represents one of the first self-consciously community-produced pieces of Open Hardware design to actually make it to the marketplace. An ambitious design, with a ten layer PCB based on surface mount technology, high-speed input/output channels, and one of the largest Field Programmable Gate Arrays on the market, the OGD1 is no garage project!

The first Open Graphics Development board is a powerful FPGA hardware developer board, an Open Hardware tool for testing Open Hardware designs. (Open Graphics Project)

As an insider in this group, I had a unique opportunity to interview several of its members, including: Timothy Miller (TM), the experienced hardware engineer who first started the project (as well as the company, Traversal Technology, which will produce and sell OGP designs), and Patrick McNamara (PM), an interested amateur tinkerer who founded the Open Hardware Foundation.

“The relatively sad state of FLOSS support from graphics vendors irked me”

Joseph Black (JB) is another amateur who assists the project primarily by maintaining its documentation. Dieter (DX) is an active contributor with specific technical interests. Attila Kinali (AK) is a recently graduated hardware engineer while Lourens Veen (LV) is primarily a software developer, but both have spent a lot of time promoting the project and are founding members of the Open Hardware Foundation.

In the first part of the interview I wanted to explore the motivations behind the project and what makes developers contribute to Open Hardware…

Q: Why did you start the Open Graphics Project?

TM: I had trouble finding a graphics card that was fully supported by free software. I did find one, but the relatively sad state of FLOSS support from graphics vendors irked me. At that time, I had about eight years of experience with graphics driver development and about four with graphics chip design, so I figured if I got enough other experts together, designing a completely open graphics solution would be feasible.

Timothy Normand Miller, founder of the Open Graphics project

Q: What specifically made you want to found the Open Hardware Foundation, and how do you see its scope compared to the OGP? What about relationships to earlier open hardware projects and organizations?

PM: The need for such an organization had come up as a topic both on the Open Graphics mailing list and off, and I found myself as a rather vocal proponent. Nobody else stepped forward or really showed interest in pursuing it. In the end, it was “put up or shut up”, and I found myself as the president of a non-profit corporation.

We still haven’t really engaged with any other community organizations, such as OpenCores.org. First of all, we aren’t really sure what the relationship would be, and we certainly don’t want to come off as the new kid on the block trying to take the spotlight. We also don’t really have much to offer yet. We are really just getting our feet under us. Finally, we really are trying to keep focused on making the Open Graphics Project a success. One of our key goals is to see the production of the OGC1. Until the OGP is much further along, I have been trying to keep our focus purely on it.

Patrick McNamara, founder of the Open Hardware Foundation

Q: What’s the strongest personal reason for you to help the Open Graphics Project?

DX: It used to be possible to maintain your own electronics. If the TV broke, just take the tubes out and take them to the hardware store and plug them into the tube tester. Buy a replacement for whichever tube was bad and plug them back in. There was a schematic stapled to the cabinet, along with a diagram showing which model tube went in which socket. Today of course, semiconductors are far more reliable than tubes were. But manufacturers no longer include schematics. In many cases you can’t even obtain the information necessary to use the product, much less maintain it or modify it.

LV: What keeps me coming back to the OGP today is the feeling that we are changing the world. Free and open source software is well-established now, but Open Hardware is relatively new. To me the Open Graphics Project represents a fresh look upon the ways in which our everyday environment is designed and manufactured.

“The Open Graphics Project represents a fresh look upon the ways in which our everyday environment is designed and manufactured”

JB: Previously the poor student could not do software design in his home—he could not afford the compilers. Open source broke down these barriers. Today, hardware is locked up in the same way. For example, I wondered if I could do anything with PCI. But I found out that I couldn’t even legally download the specifications without paying what would be a huge amount for a student to join a group which appeared to me to be designed to lock out PCI from the reach of the lone inventor who likes to tinker.

I realized I could never get into the PCI club. Yet, if I could do all this interesting stuff on my FPGA board, what about all the other guys in similar positions around the world?