Softuniada 2020 is this weekend and we have Arduino workshop there with eduArdu

Softuniada is programming contest made by SoftUni. It will be held in Sofia Tech Park 22 and 23 of February.

Olimex will have Arduino Workshop with eduArdu board on 23 of February 10.00-16.30

eduArdu is Arduino compatible educational platform. During the workshop we will teach you:

• How to control servo motors;
• How to drive LED matrix displays;
• How to measure temperature;
• How to measure Lighting;
• How to measure distance with ultrasound;
• How to play melodies;
• How to drive RGB LEDs;
• How to make piano with banana keys;
• How to work with Joystick;
• How to receive and transmit IR remote control commands and to control TVs;
• How to measure noise;

To participate in the workshop you have to bring with you Laptops. The approx time of the workshop is 1 hour and 45 minutes.

 

Shipments to UK after Brexit

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Many people are concerned about shipments from and to UK after UK officially leaved the EU on 31.01.2020. We also were quite uncertain should we continue to ship UK parcels as intra-EU shipments, should we charge VAT or we have to do export paperwork like for shipments to Switzerland and Norway.

We asked our customs how to handle UK shipments and today we got reply that there is transition period to 31.12.2020 and everything stays as is till then. So we will keep shipping to UK as it’s still in EU till end of the year.

FOSDEM 2020 Bruxelles 1-2 of February OSHW room and soldering workshops

FOSDEM is this weekend and we will be very busy the two days!

Saturday 01.02.2020 at 10.30 will be my talk in “Open Source Computer Aided Modeling and Design devroom” “Designing and Producing Open Source Hardware with FOSS/OSHW tools”

Sunday 02.02.2020 at 13.00 will be my talk in “Hardware Enablement devroom” “Open Source Hardware for Industrial use”

The great news is that this year FOSDEM organizers let us have whole OSHW room UB4.228 where we will have two days Soldering workshops:

Saturday we will solder PTH components with special board we made for FOSDEM – FOSDEM-MUSIC-BOX

Sunday we will proceed with more advanced SMT soldering workshop of Binary-Watch

The soldering workshop participation is free as in beer and everyone is welcome.

We will bring with us limited number of 100 pcs FREE FOSDEM-MUSIC-BOX soldering kits for Saturday and 100 pcs FREE Binary-Watch soldering kits for Sunday.

We also will take with us soldering tools to equip 10 soldering seats. If you want to join and already have soldering iron, twizzers, magnify glass, wire cutters please take them with you and spare time on waiting on tail to get free soldering seat.

Also if you want to assembly some of our other soldering kits listed here (or any other boards) you can send us email at info@olimex.com with the boards/kits list you want to purchase and we will deliver to FOSDEM so you save shipping fee.

Lastly there will be plenty of space in the OSHW room, so if you have interesting project to show off or just want to chat about OSHW topic you are welcome, let’s make this room meeting point for Open Source hardware enthusiasts at FOSDEM.

The A20 driver for HDMI audio is almost done!

UPDATE 20-01-2020: Now the A20 HDMI Audio driver patches are submitted  and KODI images with working HDMI Audio are on our ftp

We blogged few weeks ago about the KODI image done for A20 and A64 by our friends Dimitar Gamishev and Stefan Saraev.

A64 had everything working fine, but the A20 image had no HDMI audio, as there is no such driver in the mainline kernel. This of course made A20 not useful for media center.

We decided to try to solve this problem by ourselves by writing this missing driver and today we have success!

The audio driver for HDMI is working, but is still far from complete as we have to add channel management etc, but with our driver we can hear audio via the HDMI with A20!

We will complete and send the patches to mainline after our Christmas-New Year vacation, so somewhere in January the KODI image (and of course all Olimex official images) for A20 will be updated and will have HDMI audio too!

 

FOSDEM 2020 – the must see EU biggest Open Source Technology event is approaching

If you work with Free Open Source Software and Hardware and you never have been on FOSDEM you don’t know what you are missing!

This is huge and every year becomes bigger. Join 8000+ hackers all around the world and watch your favorite talks – you can always find something interesting among the 480+ talks which will run during FOSDEM weekend 1-2 of February.

There you can meet lot of leading Linux and FOSS developers face to face.

I have two talks there:

• Saturday in Open Source Computer Aided Modeling and Design devroom
• Sunday in Hardware Enablement devroom

We are also promised dedicated Open Source Hardware room UB4.228 yay!

We are preparing special PCB and will run Soldering Workshop there

It’s music box, programmable with Arduino IDE, specially designed to be easy to solder by beginners.

As always the soldering workshop will be completely free (as in beer) to participate 🙂

In this room will be plenty of space and everyone who have interested in Open Source Hardware and want to come to show off something or just to chat is welcome.

So clear your agenda for February 1st and 2nd and book your flight to Bruxelles!

Looking forward to meet you there!

Tsvetan

Say Hello to Es-Ti-Em-Pai STMP1-OLinuXino the Open Source Hardware with mainline Linux support and -40+125C operating temperature

ST32MP1XX SOCs from ST Microelectronics has one unique feature: They operate from -40 up to +125 by default there is no other commercial or industrial or etc temperature range. What does this means – very well done production! It’s not secret that all SOC vendors produce their chips then test them and which pass -40+125 are classified automotive grade, which fail but pass -40+85C are classified industrial and it there are SOC which fail both automotive and industrial grade on tests are sold as commercial grade.

This chip has no other than automotive grade, so ST is confident in their process quality.

For this SOC ST Microelectronics guarantee 10 years rolling availability.

The peripherals ST32MP1XX has are also industrial and real time oriented:

• Cortex-M4 co processor, we know Cortex-A series when run RTOS has latency which do not allow fast processed like motor control etc. This is where this co-processor release the main OS processor of such demanding tasks
• FD-CAN ST32MP1 has two cans both support FD which offer less latency and faster speed, one of them has also time triggered CAN (TTCAN)
• 2 × ADCs with 16-bit max. resolution (12 bits up to 4.5 Msps, 14 bits up to 4 Msps, 16 bits up to 3.6 Msps)
• 2 × 12-bit D/A converters (1 MHz)
• 8- to 14-bit camera interface up to 140 Mbyte/s
• Gigabit Ethernet
• 6 × SPI (50 Mbit/s)
• 6 × I2C FM+ (1 Mbit/s, SMBus/PMBus)
• Documented Trust Zone and Secure Boot (may be subject to some export restrictions)

We designed our STMP1-OLinuXino to be with same layout as A20-OLinuXino-LIME2, with all connectors on same positions, so people who used LIME2 to may migrate to STMP1 if necessary.

We put the SOC on bottom this time to may attach easier bigger heat sinks or even connect it to the BOX-LIME-BLACK metal and remove the need for aluminum heatsink.

Note that schematic is not verified yet and the PCB is not routed, we just placed the components on their approximate locations.

All preliminary files are put on GitHub so people who are interested how we wired the GPIOs to match LIME2 functionality and existing customers find potential conflicts with their current design may signal while still routing is not complete 🙂

Looking forward for your comments.

KODI pre-build images are now on on our ftp, A20 HDMI audio patches will be ready soon

Few days ago I blogged about the KODI build scripts for A20 and A64 OLinuXino ad promised pre-build images on our server. This is now done and the images can be downloaded from our ftp for A64 and A20.

A20 HDMI audio currently do not work, but Dimitar and Stefan work on this and they say this will be fixed soon. So crossing fingers we may have good news for Christmas!