Good question! The design of LiteScope heavily inspired Manta, and Manta's Ethernet functionality comes from the LiteX Ethernet core.
That said, I spun Manta out into a separate project for a few reasons:
- LiteX is written in nMigen, which has now spun off into Amaranth, and I wanted to use a language that's undergoing more active development.
- I wanted to provide better support for non-SoC workflows. LiteScope is awesome when you're already using LiteX for your design, but it's a pretty steep barrier to entry if you're just trying to debug a class project real quick.
- I wanted to provide a _lot_ of documentation! The original audience for the docs was undergraduate students that are new to the field and don't have a lot of time, so I wanted getting started to be as easy as possible.
I know the Amaranth project is working on it's own SoC tool, and I'll be curious to see how Manta evolves as the effort behind that ramps up.
Howdy everyone - Fischer here, I started this course last year along with my good friend Adi. Glad to see that this ended up on HN, and glad that people are excited about it and seem to find the content useful. The goal of putting this together was to help people have fun and feel empowered to build cool stuff, and from the comments here it looks like it's helping that. Yay :)
A quick note though: We're updating the site right now to get it ready for it's second running in IAP 2024, which is in about a week or two. So most of the content for this year is being built out, but everything from last year is available under the archive page:
It's really nice to see this IAP course! The lectures from last year are great!
You really covered a lot for a month, even for MIT students. I keep finding great stuff like, oh yes, they reference Ott for EMI right away in layout.
I particularly appreciate the slides for "Hardware's not dead".
It would be cool to do some advanced topics in physical modeling of circuit boards - electromagnetic, thermal, and mechanical/reliability.
Some internal links to the 2023 site are broken, and some google links too. It took me a bit to find the motor lecture from its mention on your technical resources page.
Some notes on resources:
If you're going to take a board to production, the Coombs handbook is nice to have handy. IPC standards can be helpful also, and you might access to them through your library.
For batteries, there really isn't a single reference as useful as the Linden handbook.
You mention Ott for EMI/EMC in lecture 3 already.
For motors I have found Fitzgerald&Kingsley and the old Electro-Craft handbook particularly useful. The Electro-Craft handbook is one of those fun old books that has crisp control theory block diagrams you can pretty much enter directly into Simulink and run.
I spent part of yesterday looking over Winnie's projects and was amazed. I continue to be blown away at the productivity of MIT students and their ability to make fun things (I'm thinking of the various high power LED projects, as I work with high power LEDss). I especially enjoyed reading about designing, simulating, and manufacturing a single-layer Aluminum PCB which acted as the substrate for the LEDs, but was impossibly hard to solder because it was a huge heat sink! And the solution to pre-heat the board with a board heater worked.
Please continue to post the projects, especially the git repos with the actual designs, as well as the reports.
Thank you :) LEDs are how I got into electronics-- they were a great way for me to burn crazy amounts of power when I was learning power electronics.
I'll continue to post projects since most of my learning happens when I make something that works... or more often doesn't work. I don't see a world where I can stop since there's so much to learn and explore. Currently I'm working on a ~100W LED driver that works off AC mains and it's really pushed me to be thoughtful and intentional with all the testing I do. It's my first project where I pull power straight off the wall, and it's both exciting and terrifying.
I didn't really understand the motivation for a 100W LED that runs off AC mains.
As for AC, I am generally quite scared by it but my very first maker project, some 40 years ago, was a nightlight, that every kid made in shop class (it's a resin-encased vacuum fluorescent light and a resistor connected to AC blades!)
And I also played with vacuum tubes, converting AC to DC on a protoboard. After a bit I decided to stop doing that, as it's a true shock hazard./
