all fun projects at Olimex Ltd
25 Jul 2018 6 Comments
in esp32, IoT, OSHW Tags: 7", esp32, iot, poe
You asked for it and we made it – this is one of our first prototypes of ESP32-POE board
These will be available for sale end of August.
25 Jul 2018 1 Comment
in esp32, IoT, OSHW Tags: 4MB, crypto, esp32, flash, pro, ram, USB-OTG
ESP32-PRO development started long time ago but with so many projects running in parallel it was always on the bottom of the priority list which was not quite fair for this board as it has excellent features:
32Mbit (4MB) PSRAM which maps on ESP32 memory space and can be used for your project.
32Mbit (4MB) fast QSPI Flash for program memory mapped to ESP32 program space.
Additional PIC32MX270F256DT processor with USB-OTG 256KB Flash and 64KB RAM which can be used as program or as USB profile like USB keyboard, serial, MIDI etc you name it.
LiPo battery charger and management IC.
Optional Crypto engine for IoT applications.
We made two demo projects with this board which create WiFi to serial bridge you can pair two such boards and use them as wireless UART or Wireless USB Serial bridge, but the possibilities are many as the USB-OTG allow you to connect Web cameras, Flash drives and many other USB devices.
20 Jun 2018 1 Comment
in Allwinner, ARM, embedded, olinuxino, OSHW Tags: a20, grade, industrial, linux, sbc
A20-OLinuXino-LIME now is at revision H. What is new?
We decided to drop the odd shape which was made specially to fit LIME in the Hammond plastic box, instead it range of Metal Boxes is available.
Latest image supports all new feature.
21 May 2018 Leave a comment
in arduino, event, fpga, KiCAD, open source, OSHW, Retro computers, verilog Tags: conference, foss, fpga, hackathon, kicad, oshw, Plovdiv, risc-v, soldering, tuxcon
TuxCon 2018 conference about Free Open Source Software and Open Source Hardware will be June 9 and 10th in Plovdiv.
This is community driven event done by volunteers with the support of local IT companies and it’s totally free to participate.
In Saturday 9th of June in the Technical University building there will be two rooms, for lectures and workshops.
Hacking Risc-V core, implemented on iCE40 FPGA and playing with it’s instruction set and making small “monitor” program which allow you to enter programs written on machine code and executed on iCE40HX8K-EVB + iCE40-IO will be demonstrated, so if you want to touch and make your first program on RISC-V “computer” with VGA monitor and keyboard you may find Rangel Ivanov lecture interesting.
Plamen Vaisolov is retro computer maniac and keep working on them, implementing modern floppy disk emulators and other peripherials. He will share his experience with all these who miss Karateka and Load Runner 🙂
Neven Boyanov will talk about his experience with LoRA network and how to start on low budged.
Dimitar Gamishev has two interesting talks, one is for the Open Source Hardware and Software GPS car navigation he made. In the second he will speak about the home assistants like Google Home and Alexa, how to implement them with small Linux computer like OLinuXino and even with ESP32-Lyra and how to impress your girlfriend by switching on and off appliances and lights with your voice.
There will be KiCAD workshop where everyone (even with no knowledge) will learn how to install, configure and make small robot PCB with KiCAD. Then some general knowledges about PCB materials and how to prepare all files and send to PCB board house for manufacturing. How to select the components, footprints, good routing practices, DRC/ERC checks, Gerber generation and tips how to design your PCBs in way to be produced at lower cost. At the workshop will be our design engineers and you can talk to them directly about issues you encountered when worked with KiCAD or other CAD product.
In Sunday 10th of June we will have traditional Soldering workshop at Olimex training building, where we will assembly and program with Arduino small robot which can follow line or escape from labyrinth. This will be the same robot which PCB we will design in the KiCAD workshop in the previous day. We will go detailed through the program and study how modifications affect it.
The workshop with end with barbeque in Olimex backyard 🙂
We are looking forward to see you in Plovdiv soon!
27 Mar 2018 1 Comment
in arduino, IoT, KiCAD, open source, OSHW, sensor Tags: bme280, humidity, iot, pressure, temperature
BME280 is digital humidity, temperature and pressure sensor with I2C and SPI interface.
You can see on this link comparison of different Humidity sensors
The operating conditions are:
The sensor works on 3.3V and is with very low power consumption 0,1..3,6 uA.
The easiest way to connect MOD-BME280 is with UEXT connector to any board with UEXT connector as shown on the picture above.
For boards which has no UEXT connector MOD-BME280 can be connected via four jumper wires on breadboard:
The KiCad files are uploaded on GitHub.
The demo software use Adafruit BME280 libraries with two small modifications. The default address in MOD-BME280 is 0x76 while Adafruit library is set to 0x77.
UEXT connector requires D8 to be set LOW to power and 10 ms delay to settle the power before addressing the sensor. The code is at GitHub.
When you run it you will see this:
The sensor is very precise, if you move board up and down you can see altitude changes. The 171 meter is the altitude of Olimex building.
MOD-BME280 is perfect for IoT application for environmental conditions logging due to the low power consumption and precise measurements. It can be used both for indoor and outdoor applications.
23 Mar 2018 2 Comments
in arduino, new product, open source, OSHW Tags: arduino, contactless, infra, red, sensor, temperature
MOD-IR-TEMP is UEXT module which could be easily connected to all our boards with UEXT connector. It has MLX90614 contactless Infra red thermometer which allow you to measure objects temperature from distance.
MLX90614 has internal temperature sensor which can sense temperature in range -40+125C and Infra red camera which can sense external objects temperature in range -70+380C with resolution 0.02C and is calibrated with precision 0.5C in range 0-50C.
There are two ways to connectMOD-IR-TEMP to other boards – first is to use UEXT connector:
MLX90614 works on +3.3V so it’s important if you use Arduino board to make sure it operates at 3.3V or you will damage the sensor.
OLIMEXINO-32U4 has jumper which selects on what voltage it operates 5 or 3.3V you must put the jumper in 3.3V.
The sensor is read via I2C, Adafruit has library included in Arduino library manager.
UEXT onOLIMEXINO-32U4 has power enable and to operate D8 pin should be placed in LOW state.
Here is code:
#include <Wire.h>
#include "Adafruit_MLX90614.h"
Adafruit_MLX90614 modIrTemp = Adafruit_MLX90614();
void setup() {
pinMode(8,OUTPUT); //the following two lines enable power supply 3.3V on UEXT connector
digitalWrite(8,LOW); //you do not need them if you use wire jumpers
modIrTemp.begin();
Serial.begin(115200);
}
void loop() {
Serial.print("Ambient = "); Serial.print(modIrTemp.readAmbientTempC());
Serial.print("*C\tObject = "); Serial.println(modIrTemp.readObjectTempC());
delay(1000); // can adjust this for faster/slower updates
}
If you use breadboard you should connect MOD-IR-TEMP GND, 3.3V and SDA to D2, SCL to D3. In this case you do not need to set D8 LOW to operate.
MOD-IR-TEMP allow precise temperature measurement from distance, we are doing some experiments to measure PCB reflow temperature from distance and to measure body temperature.
Our experiments show that how good the temperature is measured depend on object surface. Dark objects temperature is measured better than shiny objects.
If you place your hand in the front of the sensor the temperature is measured correctly from distance 0 to about 5 cm, then the measurement start to register lower temperature. Our guess is that the build in optics has limitation, if you want to measure temperature from greater distance you should add proper optics.
08 Feb 2018 5 Comments
in embedded, event, linux, open source, OSHW Tags: fosdem, foss, Open, oshw, Source
Last weekend in ULB (University Libre of Bruxelles) took place the biggest Open Source event in Europe – FOSDEM.
With 678 talks, split in 55 devrooms this is something every open source enthusiast waits whole year.
It’s amazing how the organizers make such event possible, between 8 and 10 000 people all around the world come together at one place. If you want to meet some open source project, Linux kernel or Linux distribution maintainer there is great chance to meet him/her there.
FOSDEM usually is made in the weekend Saturday and Sunday, but traditionally starts with Friday evening welcome beer party at Delirium cafe. Do not be fooled by the name nobody go there to drink coffee.
Delirium usually can’t hold all people so the streets around it looks like this:
Every year this event become bigger and bigger. I was always wondering how they manage to keep their WiFi infrastructure in order with so many people attending. This year for the very first time the WiFi was impossible to connect to, so I guess we reach the infrastructure capacity 🙂
In Saturday the talks started, needless to say for me most interesting was the CAD and Open Hardware devroom.
One of the most anticipated talk there was about KiCad 5 new features.
Wayne Stambaugh the project manager started his talk with red T-shirt from Digikey and announced that Digikey made the single most significant donation to KiCad team just few days before the conference. So he said them “thank you” by presenting his talk wearing their red T-shirt.
It was very interesting to hear that Wayne got feedback from popular PCB prototype providers, that about half of PCB projects now they receive for prototyping production are made with KiCad! It’s amazing to see the progress KiCad made for the last 4 years!
I personally like more the T-shirt Wayne was wearing when he closed his talk 😉 KiCad team really like the complex boards we design with their product and this was very kind gesture.
Another interesting talk was Introduction to LibrePCB . This is the first time I hear about this project and it looks itneresting. The author is obviously capable young man and thinkered a lot about how to make component libraries more easy to use, but while I was watching the talk I was wondering (as many others) why the author just do not join KiCad, which is already well established project and leading as features and completeness. We all know that KiCad team is very small and more people joining the project will make much more sense than to re-inventing the hot water, because you do not like some feature in this popular project. Well this is the open source 🙂 and everyone is free to scratch his own itch, but I would love to see Urban Bruhin helping KiCad to become better instead to duplicate the work creating similar product alone.
Jes̼s Arroyo Torrens presented Icestudio Рgraphical way to program FPGAs. I would say this is quite entertaining and easy start for beginners with no previous knowledge about electronics.
Juan Gonzalez-Gomez (Obijuan) upgraded this talk with very entertaining presentation about what he did with Icestudio and small funny blocks he created. He is using his daughter as beta tester. I recommend you to watch this talk when the video is available.
Juan and Jesus are part of Spanish community working with FPGAs. You can see more about what they do on this site FPGAwars.
Staf Verhaegen shared his findings about is it possible today to implement ASIC design with open source tools. Very interesting topic, let’s hope the time Makers and small companies will be able to make their own chips with Open source tools is approaching.
My talk was about current TERES laptop status and the experience we got during the development with KiCad. Using FOSS tool like KiCad is great to make OSHW, but if you want to use latest features and the daily builds, they are available only via ppa repository for Ubuntu. This means if you use other distribution you have to build from sources every day. Windows daily builds are not available at all. This confuses many beginners who can’t manage to open our files when they want to study them as they use old builds (official Ubintu repository KiCad version is probably one year old, same for Windows version). My slides are now uploaded at Slideshare.
Other devroom talks I found interesting:
Exploiting modern microarchitectures Meltdown, Spectre, and other hardware attacksÂ
Improving Linux Laptop Battery Life
How to keep your embedded Linux up and running
Image capture on embedded linux systemsÂ
New GPIO interface for linux user spaceÂ
It was nice to see three four other talks at FOSDEM by Bulgarian speakers!
Automating Your Lights with Open SourceÂ
Turning On the Lights with Home Assistant and MQTT
Testing Red Hat Enterprise Linux the Microsoft wayÂ
Current meta of video compression and probable futures
Overall FOSDEM is must see event for anyone who is interested in FOSS/OSHW.
Bruxelles is excellent location and offers lot to see, both Wizzair and Ryanair offer low cost flights to this destination and I don’t know where else you can drink beer from half meter glass (not half litter but half meter!) so looking forward to see you next year there!
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