TuxCon organized Arduino Day in PMG Konstantin Velichkov in Pazardzhik

Saturday 16.03.2019 was Arduino Day and celebrated all around the world by Arduino enthusiasts. On Arduino web site there is dedicated page with map where all events are listed.

TuxCon organized Arduino Day in PMG “Konstantin Velichkov” – Pazardzhik. The youngsters were around 20 and we split them in 5 teams with mentors.

eduArdu was used as educational board and it was really pleasant surprise to see how dedicated were all participants – they worked 4 hours and didn’t want to take a rest.

Some of them has never seen Arduino, but studied the existing demo codes and start to modifying them. Some even try to make their own snake game on the LED matrix. Another nice code was done for controlling the eduArdu RGB LED remotely with cell phone via the IR receiver, we expect these codes to go as pull requests to our GitHub repository soon 🙂

Obviously their teachers did good job, no wonder they got so many prizes:

TuxCon is open to organize such events in other schools too, if you want your school to have similar event please contact TuxCon.

 

FOSDEM slides and video

FOSDEM is always impressive, even for people like me who go there for 7th time. It’s great place where you can see developers for almost every FOSS big project and talk face to face.

It’s really pleasure to see that last years there is Hardware related dev rooms too.

KiCad as always attracted lot of attention

but CAD and OSHW devroom was pretty small, so people are waiting on long tails to get in and just few lucky ones succeed:

For security reason the organizers didn’t allow people to stay standing or sitting on the floor, but this didn’t stop all. Next day I spoke to lot of friends and they said – I knew there will be no space for all who want to enter, so I just stay at the cafeteria and watched the stream.

It was same situation at the Andre Przywara talk One image to rule them all. There was no space in the room to accommodate all people who wanted to attend it.

There were three talks from Plovdiv at FOSDEM this year 🙂 Our friend Leon Anavi had two talks Making Open Source Hardware for Retrogaming on Raspberry Pi and The Software Developer’s Guide to Open Source Hardware. It’s cool as his full time job is as software engineer but as you can see he does OSHW in his free time and obviously like to talk more about his hobby than his daily work 🙂

I talked about some new OSHW boards we are working on last few months.

The idea is to build LoRaWAN infrastructire and install some free Smart City solutions in Plovdiv which to set example and to put all our work on GitHub so if other cities want to follow to be able to replicate and scale what we did and hopefully people to get aware more about the power of the open source hardware and software solutions.

Here are my slides and here is my attempt to speak English at FOSDEM. Sorry subtitles are not available 🙂

It was incredible pleasant surprise to see OLinuXino-LIME2 mentioned in Danny Haidar‘s lighting talk Creating a Computing Revolution: from Personal Computers to Personal Servers.

TuxCon 2019 Open Source hardware and software conference in Plovdiv will be 8-9 of June!

Reserve these dates in your agenda now as there will be lot of tech talks and workshops.

Looking forward to see you in Plovdiv!

This year Plovdiv is also European Capital of Culture and we have amazing number of culture events. One more reason to visit our city!

FOSDEM 2019 is this weekend in Bruxelles

FOSDEM the biggest FOSS/OSHW event in Europe is this weekend in Universite Libre de Bruxelles

FOSDEM traditionally starts Friday evening in Delirium Cafe.

With 47 devrooms, 7 main tracks, Keynotes and Lighting talks everyone can find group with his interest.

Olimex will present our new IoT developments with KiCAD at CAD and Open hardware devroom in Sunday.

If you want to meet and talk please send email to info@olimex.com, we will be in Delirium Cafe this evening and at ULB in the weekend.

First Steps with eduArdu workshop on 15th of December!

On December 15th together with our friends from TuxCon we will make workshop with our new educational board eduArdu in Olimex training building.

If you want to be part of this even come and join us, the event is free to participate.

We will show you how to use all eduArdu features with Arduino and Snap.

Be prepared to play games with fruits and people-touch, to make animations with LED matrix, to generate music, detect intruders with the PIR sensors, to switch on and off air conditioners and even create music instruments!

Educators may apply for free board which to receive at this event.

 

NB-IoT event organized by Comet electronics on December 4th

NB-IoT is one of the promising LPWAN technologies I review in both my Industry 4.0 and OpenFest 2018 talks.

It’s lightweight LTE technology which has only 48 bytes of payload and 30kbps up and down link. Some call it 0G.

NB-IoT is specified by 3GPP standartization organization, same which standartize 2G/3G/4G/5G. It works flawless with existing cellular technologies with simplified RF and processing.

With these high speeds and small payloads the average consumption of NB-IoT make it more efficient even than LoRa, but there is many things to consider in your design.

First is that NB-IoT never will reach LoRa price point, it will be always about x2 more expensive.

Second – some modules like for instance the popular Ublox SARA-N2  which cost EUR 11 for 250 pcs, can’t work at lower than 2.75V power supply. Most Lithium batteries capacity is quoted with battery discharge from 3V to 2V so these modules will work only with fraction of the capacity of Lithium batteries. They are designed to operate from 2.75 to 4.2V i.e. targeting LiPO re-chargeable batteries, but these will never stay charged for 10 years as NB-IoT technology promises, so this is really odd design choice by Ublox.

Another thing to take into consideration is the high current pulses which LTE technology introduce (up to 2A when link is established). So even on paper NB-IoT to looks better than LoRa it still could be implemented with compromises where these benefits to be not seen.

Fortunately some Chinese vendors (like Quectel) made their modules BC66 to work from 2.1V.

Comet Electronics is organizing on December 4th NB-IoT event together with the first cellular operator which implements NB-IoT connectivity in Bulgaria – A1 and with Chinese module supplier Quectel.

It would be interesting to touch and evaluate this technology which is relatively new, has no infrastructure and is dependent by subscription fees only.

NB-IoT Gateways are not expensive and cost about $2000, but you can’t use them unless you have licensee to operate at GSM frequency (and these licensees cost millions of EUROs at least here in Bulgaria) so you can use your gateway only in Faraday cage :). This is where LoRa technology shine and this is what makes it so popular! No subscription, no fees for data transport, everyone can run his own gateway.

This is also one of the reason NB-IoT infrastructure is not so well developed – the investment is small, but the mobile operators still can’t figure out how to squeeze money out of this. There are already several providers on the net which sell NB-IoT SIM cards with EU roaming and with low cost like $12 per year, but local operators will find a way to shut these down and take their share.

Electronica 2018 highlights – AI, Smart Solutions, Communication and Security

Electronica in Munich trade fair is the most important meeting place for the electronics industry. Last week more than 3000 exhibitors and 80 000 visitors met together .

What was very visible this years is that beside the traditional big number of German companies the second biggest by number of companies exhibitor was China. There were both big:

 

and small companies:

Artificial intelligence, Machine Learning, Smart solutions, Connectivity and security were dominating topics among the exhibitors.

LoRa and NB-IoT solutions were present on almost every fifth booth 🙂