The ps1 site

This page explains what the ps1 site offers a visitor, and what it plans to offer. It is for someone choosing a board to use. It does not list the boards or their hosts. The site’s own pages show those as they are.

What the site provides

ps1 is at Pumping Station: One, a hackerspace in Chicago. Its gateway and switch belong to the site’s own operator, and fpgas.online does not deploy to them. A host at ps1 is always written with its site in these docs, as in “pi20 at ps1”. Its gateway is on The ps1 gateway and switch, for someone who runs the site.

The ps1 site lists the boards a visitor can use. They are Arty A7 boards, each on a Raspberry Pi over USB. A board’s page gives a terminal in the browser, an upload for a bitstream and a camera feed of the board. Its reset power-cycles the host.

ps1 also has Compute Blades, each with a Raspberry Pi Compute Module and an M.2 slot for an Acorn card. A visitor reaches a blade with ssh: How to log in to a host at ps1. Whatever is installed on a blade is gone after its next boot.

What the site plans to provide

• The Arty A7 boards whose hosts do not answer, back in service: infra issue #272.

• Acorn CLE-101 cards on the Compute Blades, wired by the cable guide: test-designs issue #216.

• Those cards running the fpgas.online design: test-designs issue #213 and test-designs issue #214.

• A card for the blade that has none: test-designs issue #217.

• Tiny Tapeout chip boards and FPGA demo boards: tt issue #19.

• A page for each host that stays when its board changes: site issue #65.

For running the site and its gateway:

• A record of which hosts the shared boot directory serves, with every host named once: infra issue #273.

• Which blade is which host, and how the boot files set the blades’ serial port: infra issue #269 and infra issue #270.

• fpgas-verify in the shared root, so a blade keeps its packages across a boot: infra issue #271.

• A trixie root that fpgas.online-infra builds: infra issue #72.

• The switch model settled, among the three that host_vars names: infra issue #73.

• The site notes brought up to date with the gateway, and the Arty hosts’ root stated: test-designs issue #294.