Makerspace open next week

[Paul Campbell]

I hope everyone had a great summer holiday (don't stop!). Makerspace will be
reopening Thursday next week - see you then.

A number of people have expressed interest in doing something with Tiny
Tapeout - there's a third one coming up, I've written a 3 week course we can
run starting in late March once the students are back - it will be free (but
participating in Tiny Tapeout costs ~US$25). It will look something like:

1) Verilog for chip design
2) Using FPGAs
3) Tiny Tapeout

You'll need to bring a laptop and load some software on it before we have
classes (some software requires large downloads and/or [free] licensing so
must be done a couple of days before). I have a couple of FPGA dev systems we
can play with in the 2nd week, and I'll loan them out for people to take home.
If you want to buy your own (not required) we'll mostly be using the Arty-S7:

https://www.digikey.co.nz/en/products/detail/digilent-inc/410-352/7602775

Alternately I've also been playing with the much cheaper Tang Nano 9k,
available from Seeed (or AliExpress)

https://www.seeedstudio.com/Tang-Nano-9k-FPGA-board-Gowin-GW1NR-9-FPGA-8640-LUT4-6480-flip-flops-p-5381.html

More info when we get closer to the date.

Paul