Linux on Quick Turnaround Projects at Ball: No, We Aren’t Putting Linux in Canning Jars
summary
Ball Aerospace uses Linux on Xilinx Zynq FPGA boards (MicroZed) to control phased array submodules, steering beams at tens of Hertz across 50–100 subarrays with tens of antennas each. Per-board calibration lives in multiple on‑board SPI flash calibration chips so boards can be hot‑swapped; FPGA fabric provides extra SPI and I2C buses. Boot uses U‑Boot and Ethernet for central commands and SSH for test access. Device tree work and device tree overlays plus PetaLinux tooling proved critical and the system comes together and functions.
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chapters (29)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:15Overview
- 1:26Why am I here
- 3:28Projects
- 6:55Im not an expert
- 7:08Ive worked on 9 projects
- 9:25Phase Arrays
- 10:20How Phase Arrays Work
- 11:12The System I Worked With
- 12:17What is an FPGA
- 13:37Hardware Overview
- 16:01What did I need
- 17:13Why did I choose Linux
- 18:42Concerns with Linux
- 19:27Why are we locked in
- 21:37Things I learned
- 23:52Autogenerated files
- 24:44Linux doesnt know your SPI chain
- 25:45Developers will argue about everything
- 26:32Its not always about Linux
- 27:18Be nice to your techs
- 28:06Burn flash
- 29:12Embedded engineering
- 31:17Hardware will disappear
- 31:53Linux testability
- 32:59Keep a log
- 34:35Advantages of Linux
- 37:22Thank you
- 37:39Questions
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