Hardware hackers domain?

tro3 · January 6, 2020, 10:11pm

Nice!

scelles · January 7, 2020, 1:37pm

If some members of this org are interested… I did some months ago Nextion.jl
It’s an unofficial Julia library to communicate with Itead Nextion display
It should be considered as a pre alpha stage… some develoments are still required but I’m quite busy to tackle this now.

When I start developping this library, LibSerialPort.jl wasn’t registered (and wasn’t member of JuliaIO. Thanks to @andrewadare for the great work he did!

Maybe we should try to link here to some discourse forum posts which could be considered in the “makers” field…

Here is my list…

Forum posts

GH Org

Kind regards

yakir12 · January 7, 2020, 1:52pm

I could add my tiny COBS.jl package:
https://github.com/yakir12/COBS.jl

cstook · January 7, 2020, 4:26pm

I was thinking JuliaEmbedded, but I see that is already exists.

https://github.com/JuliaEmbedded

johnh · January 7, 2020, 6:21pm

I’m very interested that you mention scientific cameras. I know that there has been work done on this. Also on the lower end cameras, for example the Raspberry Pi camera.
I might be being controversial here, but it seems very easy to get Python to read from various camera types. Not so good with Julia.
I honestly don’t see how you could start (say) a robot project with an RPi or Jetson Nano camera used as input - and I have tried.
So I hope the maker community succeeds!

yakir12 · January 7, 2020, 7:32pm

Hi John,
For what it’s worth, I got an NOIR RPI camera to work from the RPI itself using only VideoIO.jl. No extra steps required.

anon92994695 · January 7, 2020, 11:33pm

COBS.jl - package would be great!
Nextion.jl - is totally welcome too!

Okay this is great, thank you @scelle for finding those posts.

Now I have an administrative noob question. How do I add repos to an org?
Who wants to be part of the Org? I will add you all happily because so far I’ve only seen genuine people posting about this :D.
How do we move posts to the JuliaMaker subdomain?
and is JuliaEmbedded it’s own thing, is it a subdomain? Maybe we should talk to @imcinerney ?

@johnh - sounds like we’ve got some work to do to make camera interfacing better :D. If python can do it, so can Julia :D. What problems did you run into using an RPi/Jetson for robotics? I’ve seen some simple things, nothing I’d consider polished, or purposeful I’m just curious.

My interests with cameras are, usually different then most peoples. I like to use CCD’s on diffracted light or frequency domain signals for spectroscopy. Computer vision is cool and all, but hyperspectral imaging is my

scelles · January 8, 2020, 9:51pm

@anon92994695 my login in this forum is @scelles (and my github login is scls19fr and I’m fine being part of this org… but only after creating a first repository named roadmap where we could define general goals of the org).

Similar to Issues · JuliaEditorSupport/roadmap · GitHub

(but please read the whole content of my post before considering adding me to JuliaMakers)

I must admit that I’m a bit skeptic about JuliaEmbedded

github.com

JuliaEmbedded/BLASFEO.jl/blob/66146325d786a3a2188e8c7517334347ca0bc233/src/BLASFEO.jl#L3


      
          module BLASFEO
          
          greet() = print("Hello World!")
          
          end # module

github.com

JuliaEmbedded/DigitalArithmetic.jl/blob/19bd152419fa27a49ae04c198e8e4e199775e06e/src/DigitalArithmetic.jl#L3


      
          module DigitalArithmetic
          
          greet() = print("Hello World!")
          
          end # module

Not sure if we need an Hello World package

It seems to me that it’s currently only a nearly empty Github org with one user and empty projects (at least currently and since August 2019).
I don’t see any “roadmap” in this Github org and the discussion about its creation is available at Bring Julia code to embedded hardware (ARM) - #32 by imcinerney

In this discussion I noticed that there’s also Julia-Embedded

So JuliaEmbedded (from @imcinerney) shouldn’t be confused with Julia-Embedded (@Amin_Yahyaabadi @terasakisatoshi )

My fear is that, without clear goals, JuliaMakers could end up like a set of Hello World packages also.

We probably need to find more other posts in this forum related to hardware hackers and count possible contributors (and possibly pinging them here to have a discussion) before going beyond.

About your specific question…

Now I have an administrative noob question. How do I add repos to an org?

you just can’t… an other repository owner can transfer ownership of a repository to a Github org not the opposite.

To be more precise if you are considering the opposite you can just fork a repository into an organization (but not transfer it).

Procedure for transferring repos is available at Transferring a repository - GitHub Docs

When you transfer a repository, its issues, pull requests, wiki, stars, and watchers are also transferred

But we should be aware that there is no value in transferring ownership of a repository to an org if there’s still only one developer (and maybe only one user… the developer himself) of this package.

To be able to create a kind of Julia Maker community you need to have a kind of “flagship project” and that’s an important goal to define.

Maybe people considering “making hardware” with Julia should first tackle the problem of being able to have a device able to quickly boot and run Julia (as I was asking in Running console Julia app with small hardware and small Linux OS but with fast boot)
What are examples of the lightest system able to run Julia (and that could be a good base for hardware making) ?
Can we be closer to metal that Raspbian on RPi while having Julia running?

What can be flagship project(s) which could be interesting to Julia community / makers community?

Amin_Yahyaabadi · January 8, 2020, 10:05pm

Hey everyone!

I am happy to see that there is interest in embedded programming.

We already have an organization for it. Julia-Embedded:

Here are our goals and motivations:

You are welcome to join and contribute!

Just let me know if you are interested.

Now, it has 4 members
@tshort @terasakisatoshi @fapplin

And 5 original repositories (19 including forks).

StaticCompiler may be transferred to this organization too. Gateway to cross compilation, so Julia code can be compiled for other targets, including WebAssembly and embedded targets.

anon92994695 · January 8, 2020, 10:19pm

Thank you for addressing all the points you did. I do not want this to be a hello world organization.

I can kick off some kind of roadmap, but I also am not a dictator. I want people to put in their idea’s, and contribute. I’m a small fish, I just had an idea, and it expanded.

You have some valid concerns about running julia on SBC’s and smaller computer brains. Julia takes up a good deal of memory. That being said…

What Julia already has going for it:
Julia + easy USB access = dreamboat for hacking away on arduinos.
Julia for handling fast data coming from disperate sensors and sources is also more than realizable.

What Julia could have going for it:
A really nifty CAD package that offers crazy things only realizable in Julia.
Tools that leverage optimizers, autograd, diffeq’s etc to solve physical problems to make physical designs better.
A labview like toolchest, a simulink like library.
A crazy mesh-to-gcode that is way smarter then say Cura.
A nice flowcharty workflow tool?

I’ll have to think some more, but I also need some more insight from everyone else too :).

anon92994695 · January 8, 2020, 10:33pm

Awesome Amin! I’ve seen your posts before but didn’t know what part of the julia landscape you hung out at. StaticCompiler .jl is one of those projects I check up on every month or so :).

Amin_Yahyaabadi · January 9, 2020, 4:35pm

Haha, I am anywhere that I see something cool

So if anyone wants to transfer their packages to Julia-Embedded let me know.

There is also a Blinking-LED repo: https://github.com/Julia-Embedded/Blinking-LED, that I have not had much time to upload things to. It can be a good place for those Hello-world projects that you were talking about. You can make folders for different hardware.

anon92994695 · January 9, 2020, 10:53pm

Cool. Hey Amin, do you think if you make repo’s there are empty it might discourage someone from pursuing the same project?

@tro3 @scelles @everyone - could our star repo be a projects repo? Where people submit kind of crazy projects, or just have repo priviliges and the right to make their own space? So not a Julia package, more so, a collection of people sharing their fun-ness? Not everything made in Julia is a package.

tro3 · January 9, 2020, 11:00pm

Fine by me. Cool stuff!

Amin_Yahyaabadi · January 10, 2020, 4:06pm

Why should having an organization discourage people from contribution? I don’t understand the connection.

Julia’s community needs more cooperation between developers.
For instance, look these projects for other languages

anon92994695 · January 11, 2020, 10:46am

@Amin_Yahyaabadi Sorry I probably didn’t make myself clear.
Do you think making a repository in an organization with nothing in it or a roadmap to go forward, might deter someone from working on or contributing a more complete effort? I’m noticing a lot of the academic types really want credit for what they do to maintain their careers/source of income. So would they maybe feel like “why should I work on that if it immediately gets owned by someone else if it’s to be adopted”. I think the term is “Flag planting”.

anon92994695 · January 11, 2020, 10:48am

@tro3 @scelles - I kicked off the JuliaMakersProject repo: GitHub - JuliaMakers/JuliaMakerProjects: A repo to put the things you made with julia things

feel free to suggest anything!

Amin_Yahyaabadi · January 11, 2020, 12:54pm

@anon92994695 No, I don’t think so. Because I give owner access to every member who contributes. I consider myself like an initiator to encourage people to work on certain areas.
I know it is the same for other Julia organizations. For example, I got owner access as soon as I submitted my MusicXML.jl to JuliaMusic.

Being part of an organization does not reduce the credits. The main contributor can write papers. Even including others as co-others does not reduce their contribution’s value. See this paper in the biggest journal of the world with 31 authors!
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1799-6

Regarding that empty Blinking LED repo, it is just a place holder. I have not had a chance to submit anything yet, but for example, @yakir12 wanted to submit something for Arduino.

anon92994695 · January 11, 2020, 1:09pm

I see. I can agree with some of what you said definitely, I just don’t know if everyone else sees it that way. I think they “should” see it that way, but I think for JuliaMakers, I’m going to take a different approach.

I’m going to put a roadmap repository up, and leave some “Open areas/suggested packages” for people to get inspired by. But it won’t be added to the organization until the creator submitted it by their own accord. So they get whatever glory/recognition they want to have, and share what they want to share.

Fundamentally I don’t see much of a difference, but I just don’t want anyones thought ownership to impede people from doing the real work for whatever politics may be at play.

yakir12 · January 12, 2020, 6:10pm

Yea, so what’s the verdict, what repo is going to be the future of arduino at least? I apologize for not reading carefully…