Category: Workshops

FPGA Workshop 4: Behind the Scenes (November 8)

DESCRIPTION
In the previous workshops, we have seen that FPGAs can emulate any logic circuit without moving (mechanical) parts.

FPGAs are however not magic nor mystical devices and this workshop will shed light on how they work internally. After theoretical explanations on their functioning, we will program them very close to the “bare silicon” by configuring manually each logic element on the chip, without any Verilog or schematics.

This will give you a better understanding of the challenges involved with writing open source programming tools, reverse engineering existing FPGA designs, injecting backdoors into FPGA bitstreams, and squeezing the most performance out of an FPGA chip.

PREREQUISITES
For the hands-on part:

  • Bring your laptop
  • IMPORTANT: Install Xilinx ISE. The installation takes a long time that we cannot waste during the workshop.
  • Bring a Xilinx FPGA board such as the Avnet Spartan-3A starter kit used in previous workshops.
  • The board must have a Xilinx FPGA. Boards with non-Xilinx chips cannot be used.
  • Your board must have at least 2 pushbuttons and 2 LEDs.
  • Bring any required programming (JTAG) cable and try to make sure that it works (driver installed etc.) before coming.

You can come to the workshop without a board, but obviously you might be unable to perform the manipulations yourself.

PRACTICAL INFO

FPGA Workshop #3: Computer Architecture, August 29th

Computer architecture is the science and art of selecting and interconnecting hardware components to create computers that meet functional, performance and cost goals (Wikipedia).

With the invasion of digital devices during the last decade (cellphones, wireless routers, digital TV…), it has become more than ever ubiquitous.

However, it is still a poorly known subject for most people. Even among the self-proclaimed hardware hacking community, most fanatics of the Arduino development board open source physical computing platform do not know that all the functionality of their much-hyped toy comes from an AVR microcontroller chip that has been being manufactured for years by Atmel. And among those who know, yet fewer people are knowledgeable about the inner working of the AVR microchip; in which computer architecture plays an important role.

The reason behind this might be that during decades, computer architecture was reserved to academic lectures and companies who had enough cash to build integrated circuits costing several hundreds of thousands of dollars. This left little room for the individuals, except those who had the guts to wire together hundreds of logic ICs together. But these amateur systems lag well behind commercial solutions in terms of performance, size, and power consumption.

But today’s falling costs of powerful FPGAs make it possible for individuals to build complete high-performance computer systems (System-on-Chips) from scratch.

This workshop will explore this possibility. After introducing basic computer architecture concepts and practices, we will load a simplified version of the Milkymist System-on-Chip design in the development boards and execute basic programs on it. Then, using Verilog HDL, we will design a simple peripheral for the system-on-chip, integrate it, and test it on the board.

This workshop is for people who want to discover practical computer architecture, and at the same time for those who already know about architecture and want to get an introduction about how to add a peripheral to the open source Milkymist System-on-Chip.

Date: August 29th, 14:00
Venue: /tmp/lab geek collective
Price: Free
Info+Registration: Workshop page

Distributed Crypto SAT Solving workshop, Sept 10th

In this workshop led by Mate Soos (PhD in INRIA Rhone-Alpes) we will take a distributed SAT solver design that works similar to SETI@Home and hack it until it works faster, gives better results. The results will be public and the solver downloadable, along with the server to enable anyone to crack much-hyped but useless crypto-systems using collaborative effort.

SAT solvers are mathematical tools that solve problems given in the CNF notation. Since all problems can be described in CNF, in particular, cryptographical problems, SAT solvers can be used to crack ciphers. They have already been used to solve Crypto-1, used in London (20 seconds to break the encryption…) and HiTag2, used in car immobilizers.
Difficult cryptographic routines such as those used in WPA (wireless internet access), SSL (bank transactions), etc. need much more computing power than older ciphers. This means SAT solvers must be designed to work in a distributed environment, and work similar to SETI@Home or Folding@Home.

Date: September 10, 2009
Location: /tmp/lab, near Paris
More info+Registration: Worskshop page

OpenWrt Workshop

Samedi 4 avril 2009 au /tmp/lab, de 14h30 à 20h30.

Voici les différents points qui seront abordés :

Sur OpenWrt :

  • de comprendre la structure générale d’OpenWrt ;
  • de construire votre propre image du firmware pour votre cible matérielle ;
  • de porter un logiciel de votre choix et de le tester ;
  • de le flasher depuis le firmware original ou depuis une ancienne version d’OpenWrt.

Sur le Wi-Fi :

  • de faire un petit rappel sur les différents modes de fonctionnement possibles : Master, Managed, Mesh, Ad-hoc, Monitor ;
  • de tester ces différents modes de fonctionnement (suivant le matériel)  et les configurations correspondantes dans OpenWrt.

Sur les protocoles de routage :

  • quelques réseaux de tests simples utilisants OLSR, 802.11s et Babel.

Pour plus d’informations, consulter la page sur le Wiki.

A samedi !

Workshop FPGA : la suite

Merci à tous d’être venus si nombreux au premier workshop 🙂

Pour la suite, un deuxième workshop se tiendra au lab le samedi 28 mars de 9h à 15h30.

Au programme :
– Utilisation des outils en ligne de commande
– Introduction à Verilog
– Hands-on: à peu près les memes + réalisation d’un petit synthétiseur audio.

S’il reste du temps :
– Simulation
– Survol de VHDL

Pour plus d’infos, consultez la page du workshop.

A samedi !

/tmp/lab @ wintercamp, Amsterdam, NL

This week is the wintercamp, and a few members of /tmp/lab and Art Sensitif are going there, along with Jaromil for Dyne, meeting 160 participants for a networked experience in order to create, cross-breed and develop what the collectives are doing. Very different than the traditionnal approach to CodeCamps or Hack Conference, wintercamp is organized by some great dutch organization giving it a very different flavor, at least in the making. Questions and projects that will be addressed will revolve around Open Education, Code and Open Source, Tech experiments for culture, Open Infrastructure development, Social and Creative network building and autonomous initiatives.

BattleWirelessMesh2009 – April 11-12 @ TmpLab – Sponsors Update

SPONSORS updates

The TmpLab is pleased to announce the support of two first sponsors for the BattleWirelessMesh to help this event to be the one occasion a have a real case mesh test-bed.

  • Wireless-fr (http://wireless-fr.org)  will be providing 8 nodes (Buffalo)
  • FON (http://fon.com) will be providing 25 nodes (WRT54G)

We are still looking for more supports from the community and from the vendors to complete our architecture.

DEVELOPERS updates

Already developers from BATMAN, BABEL and OpenWrt are scheduled to be part of the event to optimize their packages and BSP to improve the results of the contest.

The TmpLab is scheduling an OpenWrt workshop on Sat, April 4 @ /tmp/lab which will be the occasion to prepare and speak about the network constraints and infrastructure to build.

Each protocol team should be preparing a ready-to-flash built image to prepare the event.

Workshop introduction aux FPGA Samedi 21 Mars 14h30-23h30

Venez vous initier à l’utilisation et à la programmation de FPGA le samedi 21 mars au /tmp/lab.

Les débutant(e)s sont les bienvenu(e)s, y compris les gens qui ne savent pas ce qu’est un FPGA.

Plus d’infos sur cette page : http://www.tmplab.org/wiki/index.php/Workshop_Introduction_aux_FPGA

Merci de vous inscrire (infos sur la page) afin d’avoir une estimation du nombre de participants.

First TMPLAB Wireless Battle Mesh – April 11-12th 2009 @ tmplab

We are pleased to announce that the /tmp/lab  will be organizing a Spring Wireless OpenWRT Mesh Contest called “Wireless Battle Mesh” during 2 days (April 11-12th) with the goal of building 3 wireless mesh networks based on embedded hardware running OpenWRT and different concurrent mesh routing protocols.

The targeted architecture will be 3 networks of 25nodes + 1 wireless managment networks (10-20 nodes) to achieve realistic size of nodes number, data traffic, configuration problems. The architecture will be set-up indoor and outdoor around the building of the /tmp/lab.

OpenWRT will be the selected for the BoardSupportPackage running on the different hardware nodes and a core network configuration will be built on Linux servers with user-friendly features such as :
*VLANs
*Captive portal
*Authentication
*Admin portal

Concerning the mesh-protocols, selected targeted protocols are :

*OLSR : IP-based mesh routing platform (http://olsr.org and openWRT package available)

*BATMAN : Layer2-based mesh protocol (http://open-mesh.org) and available as a kernel module for Linux and packaged in OpenWRT

*BABEL : Layer-3 mesh protocol developed by University Paris 6, available for Linux and soon to be packaged for OpenWRT (http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/babel/)

Concerning the hardware node, we are looking for hardware sponsors that could enjoy this “real-case” contest by providing 50-100 nodes to the event. This sponsor will be actually displayed on the organization website as well as during the event. The feedbacks for the hardware manufacturers can be not only from the users but also from the network community running real-case test (academic- or community-wide).

The TMPLAB core team.

First OneDayBlast at /tmp/lab on SS7

We will be doing a Signal System 7 workshop this thursday at the Lab, so if you are interested, come there ! See the outline below.

It will be taking place as a One Day Blast : a free day during which you can promote your own project and/or participate to any ongoing project. It is free, free of charge and anyone can come !

More informations about :
http://www.OneDayBlast.org

Here is a short outline of the SS7 workshop :
* Setting up a SS7 stack over IP (SIGTRAN)
* Configuration
* More details about SIGTRAN and SS7
* Possibles attacks on SS7 infrastructures

If you wish to come and present another project or just hang around and have some coding time, feel free to come.