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.

 

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.

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

OSHW Audi style Bike Turn Signal LED Lights soldering kit is ready for Open Fest Workshop

Bike-TSL-Kit now is ready and we are looking forward to see you at Open Fest Workshop.

As always the workshop will be free to participate.

Do not forget to book kit by e-mail to info@olimex.com for Open Fest Workshop, as we will have just 100 kits for the workshop.

If you have soldering iron, twizzers and cutters take them with you as we will provide 6 sets, but previous workshops proven there will be long tail of people wanting to participate/solder and having soldering tools will spare you the waiting.

Here is small video clip how Bike-TSL-Kit works when assembled:

We are looking forward to see you there and have fun together!

Come to Open Source Hardware Day on October 19th in Plovdiv and learn about how Open Source Hardware is made.

The Open Source Hardware Association OSHWA.org choose October 2019 to be month of the OSHW. The idea is to have events all around the world which to popularize Open Source Hardware.

Here you can see the full list of registered OSHW events you may find interesting event in your country.

On October 19th in Plovdiv is the Open Source Day. It will be held at SiteGround and starts 11.00.

Come to learn about:

• What is Open Source Hardware;
• How to design electronic boards with KiCad;
• How to prepare your files for PCB production;
• Where to source your components from EU/USA/China;
• How to assembly your boards;
• How to certify your project as OSHW;
• How to organize crowdfunding for your OSHW project production;

As all other events organized by TuxCon, SiteGround and Olimex  this will be free to participate.

Open Fest 2019 is approaching,the traditional Olimex Soldering Workshop this year will be: Pimp your bike with OSHW Audi type turn signal lights

Open Fest is the biggest and most anticipated Open Source Technology event in Bulgaria!

This year it will be held in Sofia Tech Park November 2nd and 3rd.

The site already has CFP link where you can submit your proposal for talk.

Olimex submitted proposal for the traditional Soldering Workshop.

This year we prepared very interesting Open Source Hardware kit: “Pimp your bike with Audi like turn signal lights”, here is teaser. We use x5 pcs 10mm round LEDs on bothe sides, total PCB length is around 20 cm.

and back side:

it comes with pair of switches which allow you to activate left and right side lights.

This design is made purely analog, no processors, no programming. The design files will be uploaded on our GitHub account so anyone who has no chance to come can do his own version. Also we will have the kits on our web for sale after OpenFest.

On the workshop we will explain how it works, so you will learn what resistor divider is, what analog comparator is and how we achieve the Audi effect with the LEDs.

As we are preparing only 100 kits and there may be lot of people who want to participate, we solicit you to pre-register at info@olimex.com to have kit reserved.

As always our number of soldering irons are limited, so if you have your own, bring it to the workshop with you to speed up the process 🙂

Looking forward to see you at Open Fest!

 

TuxCon 2019 soldering workshop kits are now on our web for sale

The soldering workshop this year was for Open Source Hardware Universal Remote Control board using SMT components.

All files for this kit are at GitHub including hardware, software sources and Assembly instructions. For these who didn’t manage to participate, now the kit is on our web for sale: URC

This year we had massive participation of kids from 4 to 12 years old.

As the SMT components are bit odd to solder we prepared for them FOSDEM-85 kits with PTH components.

We were a bit concerned if they will not get burned by the soldering irons, but they surprised us as they were so precise and careful that all boards they soldered worked 100% from the very first time.

Just for comparison when we do soldering workshops with adults from 20 up to 70 years old about 10% of the soldered boards do not start due to problems with misplaced components or bad soldering and we have to help them to fix. So it appears kids do solder better than adults 🙂

The Minibot kits from TuxCon 2018 soldering workshop are also on the web now.

It was wonderful weekend with lot of fun.

TuxCon 2019 is coming on 8-9 June in Plovdiv, reserve these dates in your agenda and we are looking forward to see you there!

This year TuxCon Open Source Hardware and Software conference will be on 8 and 9th of June in Plovdiv.

This year the talks on 8th of June will be record numbers – 16 and will be held in 2 halls, there will be very interesting topics for FPGA, Home Automation, Car tuning, Linux, Robotics.

On June 9th there will be traditional soldering workshop in Olimex’s training building. We will have kits both for starters with just PTH components and for these who want to master SMD technology.

TuxCon is free to participate event, made by volunteers with aim to popularize the free and open source software and hardware.

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.