Ultrasound levitation soldering kits will be present at OpenFest for soldering workshop

Sound travels approximately at 343 meters per second. When two speakers are placed opposite one another and they generate sound with same phases, then acoustic standing sound waves are formed.

These sound waves have enough power to keep small objects in the air.

The wave length is calculated by dividing the speed of sound by the sound frequency. Our speakers are 40Khz ultrasound transmitters and the sound wave length is 8.5 mm long.

Ultra-Sound-Levitation soldering kit contains everything needed to build such a standing sound wave generator.

On 14th October is the 20th issue of Open Fest – the biggest Open Source event in Bulgaria.

Olimex will have its traditional soldering workshop there from 10.00 to 18.00 o’clock.

Participation in both OpenFest and the soldering workshop is completely free of charge.

Everyone who wants to test his/her soldering skills is welcome. Olimex employees will help you with the soldering and guide you at the workshop.

For these who can’t participate in the workshop, the Ultra-Sound-Levitation soldering kit is available on Olimex web site for sale and can build one at home.

New shield for STMP157-OLinuXino Industrial grade Open Source Hardware Linux computer

The open source hardware STMP157-OLinuXino industrial grade Linux computer got new shield which adds two UEXT connectors, second micro SD card and 40 pin GPIO connector in breadboard friendly 0.1″ (2.54 mm) step format.

STMP15X-SHIELD plugs on top of OLinuXino, the overlays are already included in OLIMAGE Linux images and no need for additional setup.

ESP32-C3-DevKit-Lipo RISC-V development board with build in USB JTAG, WiFi, Bluetooth5, Lipo charger and 15 GPIOs

ESP32-C3-DevKit-Lipo is EUR 6.00 Open Source Hardware compact development board with:

• RISC-V running on 160Mhz
• 400KB RAM, 8K data RAM
• 4MB Flash
• Two headers (soldered) with power supply and GPIO signals
• ESP-PROG-C compatible rescue connector (if you mess with bootloader)
• USB-C for programming and JTAG debugging
• LiPo battery charger allowing handheld applications with single LiPo battery
• 4 mount holes

This is all you need to get started with RISC-V programming in C and Assembly.

Shteryana Shopova recently did RISC-V workshop with this board and explained how to setup your tools for programming and debugging. Here you can find her work.

A64-OLinuXino Open Source Hardware Linux computer is back in stock

All variants of the Open Source Hardware Linux computer A64-OLinuXino now are back in stock!

GigaDevices GD32 boards replacements for the popular STM32 are now in stock

STM32 are one of the most popular Cortex ARM devices on the market as they are with aggresive pricing and nice features. The semiconductor crisis hit ST as all other semiconductor vendors and STM32 disappeared from the market. Many customers have been left for more than year without MCus.

GigaDevices is well known Flash memory manufacturer, they have range of ARM Cortex M3, M4 devices which are pin to pin compatible with STM32 MCUs.

We check GD32 assembled on our STM32 boards and they work equal the only difference we notice is that GD32 lack two wires JTAG SWD interface and only support the full JTAG, which is not big issue.

All code we test run equal on both STM32 and GD32.

Here are links for the GigaDevices based boards:

GD32-H103 header board equal to STM32-H103

GD32-P103 prototype board equal to STM32-P103

OLIMEXINO-GD32 Arduino like board equal to OLIMEXINO-STM32

OLIMEXINO-GD32F3 Arduino like board equal to OLIMEXINO-STM32F3

GD32-H405 header board equal to STM32-H405

GD32-P405 prototype board equal to STM32-P405

GD32-H407 development board equal to STM32-H407

GD32-E407 development board equal to STM32-E407

GD32-P407 development board equal to STM32-P407

TuxCon 2022 will be on 4 and 5 of June in Plovdiv

TuxCon is an annual event about free and open source software and hardware.

The entrance is free for all visitors.

TuxCon is a community event and it is organized by volunteers.

The twitter hashtag of the event is #TuxCon.

The conference is scheduled during the first day of the event (Saturday, 4 June 2022).

Workshops and unconference will take place at Olimex training during the second day of the event (Sunday, 5 June 2022).

New more compact design of ARM-USB-OCD-H(L) is released with USB-C connector

ARM-USB-OCD-H is very popular OpenOCD debugger supported by almost all IDEs and platforms. It’s in the Application notes of Intel and ARM processor vendors.

The ARM-USB-OCD-H initial design was made many years ago and some parts are obsolete like the USB-B to USB-A cable, big plastic shell from centronic 36/36 connectors etc.

As the centronic plastic became unavailable this year we decided that it’s good time to re-design ARM-USB-OCD-H completely.

Smaller and more compact plastic box is used. The USB connector now is USB-C, so popular USB phone cables can be used.

Our recommendation is customer to move to ARM-USB-OCD-HL it’s completely same as ARM-USB-OCD-H but supports targets with voltage levels from 0.65-5.5V

Metal Frames for our capacitive touchscreen 7 and 10 inch LCDs are in stock!

The popular LCD7-METAL-FRAME and LCD10-METAL-FRAME are made for resistive touch panel LCD-OLinuXino-7TS and LCD-OLinuXino-10TS LCDs.

Our LCD-OLinuXino-7CTS and LCD-OLinuXino-10CTS couldn’t be used with the metal frames as their touch panel area is different from that of the resistive touch panels.

These metal frames are made for very looking industrial panels and we had many requests to release a new design which could fit the capacitive touch screens LCDs.

It took some time, but now we are happy to announce that we already have stock of new metal frame versions, which match the capacitive displays: LCD7CTS-METAL-FRAME and LCD10CTS-METAL-FRAME.

iMX8MPlus-SOM is alive and boots!

This board development started in April 2021 and finished August 2021 but the semiconductor shortages didn’t allow us to test the prototypes until recently. We assembled 4 boards and all theyare alive and boot.

The features are:

• MIMX8ML8DVNLZAB – Quad Core Arm Cortex-A53 running at 1.8Ghz with Arm Cortex-M7 co-processor running at 800Mhz and 2.3 TOPS Neural Processing Unit.
• 6GB LPDDR4 RAM
• Power management
• configuration EEPROM
• status LED
• LCD LVDS connector compatible with LCD-OLinuXino displays
• MIPI DSI connector
• 2x MIPI CSI comera connectors with Raspberry Pi compatible pinout
• 220 signals on 6 0.05″ step connectors with essential peripherials like:
  • PCIe-3.0
  • 2x CAN FD
  • HDMI 2.0a
  • SPDIF
  • SAI
  • 2x USB 3.0
  • 2x Gigabit Ethernet one of them with TSN
  • eMMC 5.1
  • SDIO 3.0 200Mhz
  • 4 UART
  • 6 I2C
  • 3 SPI
  • JTAG

Unfortunately we only managed to find 24Gb LPDDR4 for the prototypes so instead of 6GB they are with only 3GB of RAM.

Now is time to prepare Linux and Android images! NXP provide iMX8MPlus with Linux Kernel 5.10 and Android 11.

MIMX8ML8DVNLZAB is industrial grade -40+105C

FOSDEM 2022 will be online event on February 5th and 6th

The biggest Free Libre Open Source Software and Open Source Hardware event in Europe – FOSDEM 2022 will be again online on February 5th and 6th. Check the devrooms and mark the talks you want to attend.

My talk will be in Computer Aided Modeling and Design devroom and I will speak about how we push the limits of KiCAD with our most complex OSHW board the iMX8QuadMax.

https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/track/computer_aided_modeling_and_design/

There will be chat channel and I will be available to answer your questions.