jacobdbrown4 / computingbootcamp

The BYU Computing BootCamp

Bootcamp Planning for 2021

Published Units (in SelfPaced directory)

These are self-paced learning activities on the wiki. Typically, they have the students read about topic, install the tool, and then complete a series of mini-projects to actually use the topic's tool and do some useful things with it.

Last year we gave them a schedule to follow and adjusted it as some things took longer/shorter than we thought. I took a guess at grouping them into weeks for this year.

Week 1

• Getting The Pre-Canned Linux Virtual Machine
  • Creating Your Own Virtual Machine Instructions
• Learning Linux - Reference Materials
• Customizing Your Linux VM

Week 2

• Vivado Tcl: Command Line Scripting Using the Tcl Language
  • Using vivado -mode tcl for command line usage (non-project mode)
  • Using Tcl to control Vivado operation and synthesis/implementation phases
  • Writing Tcl programs to analyze/manipulate designs

Week 3

• Git, Github, Github Best Practices
• RapidWright Bootcamp
  • RapidWright Interchange Format

Week 4

• Symbiflow Bootcamp
  • Prjxray
  • FASM, fasm2bits, ...
  • Fasm2Bels

Week 5

• Symbiflow-VTR Bootcamp

Group Talk Schedule

These are talks presented by faculty/students (mostly faculty) at our weekly meetings. Last year we met 2x/week during May, then the Immerse talks started up on Wednesdays and so we switched to 1x/week until mid-July.

Date	Talk Topic(s)
Mon May 3	Welcome
	Linux VM ()
Wed May 5	VS Code ()
Mon May 10	Python
Wed May 12	C++ programming helps ()
	make and cmake ()
Mon May 17	GIT and Github ()
Wed May 19	RapidWright and Interchange (?)
Mon May 24	Prjxray & FASM ()
	fasm2bels, fpga-tool-perf, symbiflow-examples ()
Wed May 26	Start Immerse talks
Mon May 31	HOLIDAY
Mon Jun 7	VTR and Symbiflow-VTR ()
Mon Jun 9	LaTeX ()
	ReadTheDocs ()
Mon Jun 16	Docker ()
	Travis-CI ()

More Details on the Above Bootcamp Talks

• Talk on Linux VM's
  • Obtaining/creating
  • Configuring/modifying
    • Increasing memory/processors in VMWare
    • Hard code IP address, /etc/hosts file
    • Using package managers
    • SSH keys
    • Increasing disk size
• Talk on VS Code
  • Basic usage, extensions
  • Buit-in help
  • Configuration file
  • Ssh: remote use on other machines
  • Debugging python: setup and usage
• Talk on git
  • Git basics
  • Use of github: direct clone vs. forks
  • Contributing to SW projects using PR's or forks
• Talk on Python:
  • Virtual environments in general, conda in particular
    • System python vs. user python
    • Activating/deactivating
    • Preventing base frm starting up on login
    • The requirements.txt file
  • Scripts vs. stand-alone programs
  • Python path
  • Python pathlib module
  • Modules and the init.py file
  • Python argparse module
• Talk on C++ programming helps
• Talk on cmake and make
• Talk on prjxray and FASM
  • Fuzzers
  • The database and libraries to access
  • FASM
  • fasm2bels, fpga-tool-perf, symbiflow-examples
• Talk on VTR
  • Base VTR
  • Symbiflow-vtr
• Talk on LaTeX
• Talk on ReadTheDocs
• Talk on 'Travis CI'
• Talk on Docker
• Ideas from Tim
  • EDALize == Python library for "controlling" EDA tools.
  • FuseSoC == apt-get for IP cores.
  • You really need a general section on Docker / Containers too (like your Git sections).
    • Once you have that, it is very easy to use the containers from https://GitHub.com/HDL/containers with Edalize thanks to https://twitter.com/OlofKindgren/status/1374848733746192394?s=20
    • We want to support this as an alternative to conda in our user and development environments in the future.

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Other Things

Group 1 are the things discussed above.

Group 2: Things That Are Documented, But Only Pointed To (not covered in talks)

• Networking in a Linux VM
• SSH Keys
• SystemVerilog Testbenches - An Alternative to Tcl

Group 3: Things Mentioned as of Interest for Future Inclusion in Group 1 or 2

• numpy, pandas, and matplotlib
• gradle
• maven
• pandoc
• sphinx