Kirill Bykov

Its main objective is to learn. The cluster gives me a safe place to test networking, storage, and automation ideas before I depend on them elsewhere.

Proxmox hosts OPNsense firewall and OpenMediaVault for NFS, while the VPS carries public-facing traffic.

Lily58 uses nRFMicro boards based on nRF52840, so it stays wireless and low power while still being practical enough for daily use.

The next build leaned harder into RGB, low-profile switches, and screens. It is more of a show-off board, less efficient than the minimalist Lily58, and wired on purpose.

Me and three other members of the team were responsible for the event from the first idea through the gala ceremony.

Sponsors included John Deere, STI, Lattice, and others. It was equal parts engineering logistics, community building, and controlled chaos.

The goal was to accelerate RTL simulation of a memory controller while keeping the interesting parts cycle accurate.

The resulting setup was more than 100x faster than a fully RTL model while still remaining useful for validation work.

The system synchronized 16 bytes of ASCII data that appeared on the LCD after a key press on the keyboard, with the CPU acting as the bus master.

It was a useful exercise in crossing hardware interfaces, system integration, and getting the whole chain to behave under real constraints.

One audio output was modified with filters and mixed with a second source while an Arm processor read files from SD card and pushed status to VGA.

It was a fun combination of DSP, platform plumbing, and user-facing controls on actual hardware.