Open Hardware Collaboration: A Way to Improve Efficiency for a Team
YM . Abiven, P. Betinelli-Deck, Frédéric Blache, Guillaume Renaud, S. Zhang, Synchrotron Soleil · 2013
SOLEIL is a third generation Synchrotron radiation source located near Paris, France. Today, the Storage Ring delivers photon beam to 26 beamlines. In order to improve the performance of the machine and beamlines, new electronics requirements have been identified. Up-todate commercial products are preferred but sometimes customs hardware designs are essential. At SOLEIL, the electronic group comprises a team of eight people in charge of the design, implementation and maintenance of the control and data acquisition electronics for the beamlines and accelerators. A large electronics installed base and a small team mean that we have very little time left to focus on the development of new hardware designs. As an alternative, we focus our development around the Open Hardware [1] (OHWR) initiative from CERN, dedicated for electronics designers at experimental physics facilities to collaborate on hardware designs. Starting in 2010, we studied how we could be more active on OHWR. After checking a few legal aspects about the OHWR and the feasibility of sharing source file designs, we now collaborate as an evaluator and a contributor. As a contributor, we share some boards in the SPI BOARDS PACKAGE project [2] that we have developed to face some current challenges at SOLEIL. As an evaluator, SOLEIL collaborates with characterizations of the TDC core project [3], and plan to evaluate FMC carrier. This approach allows us to be more efficient with development. We will present our approach, the issues that we have to face, and the benefits we obtain.