jhol's sigrok year in review (and 30c3)

Happy New year - 2014! I was barely used to the idea of 2013! - where does the time go?

So I decided it's time for a quick roundup of the year from my own very personal perspective.

Project Status

By any measure, 2013 was a great year for sigrok. The project has grown to over 100kLOC and the number of contributors is growing steadily. Last month was the project's best ever month for contributors - with 12 different people contributing code.

For me it's been particularly heartening to see that many people are interested in contributing. Some have come to provide whole drivers, others providing major features, others contributing all kinds of tweaks and bug fixes. It's great to see the people think that sigrok is a project worth giving their time to. There is even now a commercial fork of sigrok by the DSLogic team.

This year Uwe and Bert continue to be the commit-count-kings building features at all levels of the stack.

In recent months Martin Ling has provided a fresh burst of energy adding the libserialport library and writing drivers for many (all?) Rigol oscilloscopes.

In April we had the first ever PulseView release.

I'm really glad we reached this milestone, because there have been some false starts on the sigrok GUI front. I was keen for the project to get to the point where it was very basically usable. I absolutely did not want to add another tombstone to a graveyard of dead sigrok GUIs. Therefore, v0.1 was not meant to be anything very special, just enough to "close the loop", and provide a basic minimal, not to buggy GUI for sigrok.

Now that this has been achieved, I have been able to add some more exciting features to the project - most notably support for sigrok signal decoding.

PulseView pulseview-0.1.0-195-gdfb9f75 with mixed-signal data, and decoding.

Because of Martin's recent work, there is agreement that we need to make an all-sigrok release as soon as possible. However, PulseView decode support still has some way to go. Therefore, as a compromise I've decided to make decode support a compile-time option in v0.2, which allows fans of the bleeding edge to test this code, but without compromising the overall quality of PulseView in this release.

Once the release is done, I hope decode support will be completed within a short time, and then we can release PulseView v0.3 with the feature enabled.

PulseView is in reasonably good shape, but it's still quite small, and progress is slow. 12 people have contributed to the code in the last year, but I remain by far the largest contributor, contributing 79% of commits in the past 12-months. Some have said that they find the C++ rather impenetrable, but my hope for 2014 is that we broaden out the contributor base so that the project is not so dependent on one person.

It is now easier than ever to contribute to PulseView. I always find GUIs are particularly difficult to design by committee, but once there are some coherent concepts in place, it is much easier for people to understand how their feature should fit into the general scheme of things.

30C3

Many of the regular contributors to sigrok, including myself, met at 30c3 in Hamburg for four days of intense sigrok hacking. For me this was my first time to visit the conference, and my first time to meet many of the guys who I've been working alongside for the past two years.

The Sigrok Table at 30C3

We were extremely busy. There's nothing quite like face-to-face meeting to tackle large scale design questions, so much of the time was spent in design meetings trying to bash things out - which to my surprise was quite fruitful, resolving many of the big questions. Whether these ideas ever become code remain to be seen.

Walking round the conference there were a couple of cases where people were using sigrok to solve actual problems. Uwe met a team of guys investigating network controller backdoors, using sigrok to collect SPI data - this without any of us telling them to use the project.

Most of the time was spent working on the code. We hoped to complete the release during the conference. We didn't quite reach this goal - but we are very close. Therefore hopefully there will be a sigrok release within the next couple of weeks.

Finally, I have news that the sigrok project has made the news - specifically Aljazeera TV. The piece is mostly about NSA surveillance, but watch carefully at 0:13 to see a nice sweep of the sigrok table - with some guy, but I don't know who he is.