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.

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.