KiCAD now with differential pair routing and trace length matching

KiCAD becomes better and better after the CERN commitment to support it. At FOSDEM 2015 there was interested talk about KiCAD. There were so many people wanting to be at this lecture that lot of them were standing as there was no free place to sit in the small room.

Today we got even better news: now KiCAD have differential pair track routing feature and trace length matching!

Here is the announcement video:

These features will shoot KiCAD directly in territory which was reserved for PADS, Altium etc high priced professional tools.

To the best of my knowledge none of the popular amateur tools like Eagle, Designspark etc. have these features available.

We are at Embedded World H5-157 next week! Meet you there!

 

Embedded World – the biggest embedded technology event in Europe in next week. We are exhibiting in Hall 5 Booth H5-157.

You are welcome to pass our booth and see latest developments with ESP8266, RK3188, AM3352, and our other OLinuXino boards as well!

 

New PIC32-HMZ144 Open Source Hardware development board is in stock

PIC32-HMZ144 is low cost development board for the new PIC32MZ2048HCM144 processor from Microchip with these features:

• PIC32MZ2048EHC144 512KB RAM 2MB Flash
• USB-OTG
• uSD card
• ICSP for debug and programming
• JTAG pins exposed on 0.1″ step 6 pins
• EXT1 and EXT2 50 pin 0.1″ connectors for all PIC ports
• RESET and USER buttons
• PWR and STATUS LEDs
• LiPo battery charger and connector
• UEXT connector
• Dimensions: 77 x 52 mm

PIC32MZ2048HCM144 is high performance MIPS core processor from Microchip with 10-bit, 500 KSPS, 48-channel ADC module, MMU for real time OS support, CAN, UART, I2C, PMP, EBI, SQI & Analog Comparators, SPI/I2S interfaces for audio processing and playback, Hi-Speed USB 2.0 Device/Host/OTG, 10/100 Mbps Ethernet MAC with MII and RMII interface.

Another board with Ethernet and LCD is on the way, PIC32MZ2048 is good candidate to run RetroBSD

Building Debian Linux image for A20-OLinuXino-LIME2 with mainline kernel 3.19 new tutorial by Remy van Elst

 

A20 is now in mainline which means you can build mainline kernel and it will work on A20-OLinuxino-LIME2.

Remy made blog post how to build Debian Linux with latest Kernel 3.19 from scratch – you can read how he did this here.

RK3188-SOM, RK3188-SOM-4GB and RK3188-SOM-EVB are in stock now!

RK3188-SOM and RK3188-SOM-4GB system on modules are now in stock, these modules have same size as A20-SOM 81.28 x 55.88 mm and use same 0.05″ connectors, well they are not exchangeable though.

RK3188 is quad core, Cortex-A9 running at 1.6GHz. What does this means? Comparing to A20 you can expect everything to run about 10 times faster.

As power requirements, it takes more power than A20 obviously you pay for the performance and the higher clock rates.

For these who want to make their own board we made RK3188-SOM-EVB template with:

• HDMI
• 100Mb Ethernet
• x4 USB hosts
• USB-OTG
• RTC clock and backup battery
• +6-16VDC power supply
• LCD connector where you can connect LCD-OLinuXino-XX LCDs
• 2x 40 pin 0.1″ step GPIO connectors

RK3188-SOM starts from EUR 35 for 1000 pcs and it’s probably least expensive quad core Cortex-A9 1.6Ghz module on the market, the RK3188-SOM-4GB starts from EUR 40 / 1000 pcs.

The evaluation board RK3188-SOM-EVB cost EUR 70

The most anticipated AM3352-SOM-EVB boards are now in stock

The development of this board was epic, mostly because of the messed up Linux SDK for Sitara and the absence of any real help neither from TI neither from Beagle Bone community, which do not care for anything but BB :) Also the comprehensive and confusing TI documentation.

Finally we have got working clean Linux with cut off vendor locked crap (we don’t say this is done perfectly, probably there are people who can do this better and faster than us), but we wanted to do it the hard way and to learn something meanwhile.

What we have on AM3352-SOM-EVB is:

• AM3352 Sitara running on 1Ghz
• 512MB of DDR3 RAM
• power management without using expensive TI PMU parts
• VGA output
• Dual Ethernet 100Mbit
• 4 USB hosts with power management
• USB OTG
• CAN with driver
• LCD connector where you can connect our LCD-OLinuXino with 4.3″ 7″ and 10″, 15.6″ LCD will not work as it require LVDS which Sitara do not have
• UART console
• JTAG
• 2x UEXT connectors with SPI, I2C and UARTs
• GPIO connector with Analog Inputs, PWMs, GPIOs etc.

all this for EUR 60

For these who want to build their own Sitara boards the AM3352-SOM modules start from EUR 25.90 for 1000 pcs and cost only EUR 27.75 for 100 pcs.

Industrial version of AM3352-SOM can be build on request, it will cost EUR 5.00 more and the minimum order is 100 pcs.

Free ESP8266 Workshop – March 7th in Olimex training building

ESP8266 is amazing low cost little device which allow you to run web server on it and to connect embedded devices to Internet via WiFi. We organize free ESP8266 workshop in our training building on 7th of March starting at 14.00 o’clock.

Some of the topics which will be discussed:

• Where we are with ESP8266 development boards, new boards and plans.
• How to install all tools necessary for development with ESP8266.
• How to make your first blink LED program.
• How to make simple web server.
• New Arduino style library for ESP8266 with GPIO, ADC, DAC(PWM), SPI, I2C, Serial. Access to the 2MB Flash in Olimex modules for data logging, web pages and more.
• How to develop with Lua and MQTT with ESP8266.
• New Plug and Play firmware for ESP8266-EVB with automatic recognition of UEXT modules connected for measurement of temperature, humidity, accelerometer, LCD, etc.
• How to make web server with secure access
• Low power modes and battery operation.

Everyone is welcome! If you have project with ESP8266 which you want to share or make lighting talk about please send us e-mail to include you in the workshop program.