Fomu will reuse most of the plastic case for Tomu. We’ll make some small changes, but since we have the mold already, we only need to make incremental changes. The plastic case was a huge deal during Tomu development, because it was an all-new development for us. Sean gave a presentation at LCA titled Plastic is Forever: Designing Tomu’s Injection-Molded Case. There are a few mentions of edits that we’ll make for Fomu, and the rest of the talk goes through the development process and some factory tours. If you’re curious about plastic, give it a look!

One of the exciting features of Fomu is the completely open toolchain. Tim is working on a project to gather documentation for various FPGAs and turn them into a usable toolchain. Tim also gave a talk at LCA titled SymbiFlow - The next generation FOSS FPGA toolchain. Symbiflow defines a method for understanding FPGAs, and provides a path forward for using that documentation in open tools. If you’d like to know how the toolchain is developed, check out Tim’s talk.

There were some other interesting FPGA talks at the conference as well. One such talk was FPGA based mobile phone: Creating a truly open and trustable mobile communications device, which in addition to being a talk about FPGAs, was actually delivered using an FPGA-based reimplementation of a Commodore 64. It’s exciting to see the community finding all sorts of cool things to do with FPGAs. And we’re looking forward to what you, our Fomu backers, do with Fomu.

There are just four days left until the campaign ends! Remember that the prices will go up once that happens, so tell your friends to back Fomu today! Let’s put an FPGA in every USB port.