The welland site

This page explains what the welland 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

welland is a private test lab in South Australia. Its boards are open to visitors through the public sites named here. A bare host name in these docs means a host at welland. Its gateway is on The welland gateway, for someone who runs the site.

The welland site lists the FPGA boards a visitor can use. A board is listed while the check on its host passes, so the list is what works at that moment. The lab holds these kinds of board.

• Acorn CLE-215+ cards, each on a Raspberry Pi 5, with PCIe, JTAG and a serial port.

• NeTV2 boards, each on a Raspberry Pi, with JTAG and a serial port on the header.

• A Fomu EVT, with a USB analyser between the board and its host.

• 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. The page also shows the command for a visitor’s own ssh client. Whatever a visitor writes on a host is gone after its next reset.

The Tiny Tapeout site has the Tiny Tapeout boards. The chip boards carry manufactured Tiny Tapeout chips, and a visitor selects a design on the chip and drives its pins. The FPGA demo boards run a bundled demo or a visitor’s own bitstream. Each board has a camera feed.

What the site plans to provide

• Arty A7 boards a visitor can use again: infra issue #125.

• NeTV2 boards that pass their memory test: test-designs issue #86 and test-designs issue #91.

• The Acorn cards that are installed and not in service: test-designs issue #209.

• The Tiny Tapeout boards whose hosts are down, back in service: infra issue #274.

• The Tiny Tapeout chip boards tt09 and tt10: tt issue #20.

• Driving the oldest chip board from the browser, which shows a camera feed only: tt-commander-app issue #9.

For running the site and its gateway:

• Logins routed to a board by its own name: infra issue #187, tracked in infra issue #191.

• Per-board ports that answer on the gateway’s second global IPv6 address: infra issue #264.

• A jump account mode in which a restricted key can only hop: infra issue #283.

• Netbooted Pis that renew their DHCP lease: built into the NFS root by infra issue #230 (The network after boot). A board renews once it boots a root built after that change; one on an older root does not.

• Booting a Pi into another NFS root for a special job: infra issue #176.

• Sensor data from every Pi and the gateway, stored and graphed: infra issue #263.