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

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.

S3-OLinuXino OSHW IP Camera update: board routing complete, next to-do prototype.

S3-OLinuXino is now completely routed and we make prototypes to verify everything is well designed. If the prototypes are OK production will follow in Q1 2020.

A20 and A64 OLinuXino now with Libre Elec and Kodi support!

LibreELEC is small OS which has everything to run KODI on top of it. Thanks to Dimitar Gamishev and Stefan Saraev now A20 and A64 OLinuXino has support for it.

A20 has one annoying problem there is no HDMI audio as listed in Linux-Sunxi mainlining efforts.

If someone is capable to do this and have time to spend would be great, as it seems nobody cares to use A20 as media player 🙂

On A64 everything works and HDMI has audio as well.

so KODI is running full featured:

Both A20 and A64 decode up to 4K movies but of course can’t display  such resolutions.

Build scripts are on GitHub. Images will be add to our FTP.

 

New IP Camera OSHW board in design RFC

We started recently new design with Allwinner S3 SOC.

The board have these features:

• Allwinner S3 Cortex-A7 running at 1.2Ghz
• AXP209 PMU with Lipo charger and step-up for UPS
• internal 1Gb DDR3 RAM at 1333Mhz
• 100Mb Ethernet interface with PoE option
• NAND/eMMC/SPI Flash on socket
• WiFi / BT module with RTL8723BS
• Audio In and Out
• UEXT connector
• Lipo battery connector
• Configuration EEPROM
• LCD connector for LCD-OLinuXino
• MIPI camera connector with RPi pinout
• CSI camera connector
• Dimensions: 60 x 50 mm

S3 SOC is on bottom so heatsink could be add if overheating due to the small PCB area.

We want to build intelligent camera solution which can be powered by PoE and can work with both wired and wireless Ethernet connection.

We add MIPI camera connector with RPi pinout as there are plenty of cheap 5Mpix cameras available.

We also will provide CSI camera with 5-8Mpix separately.

Why we do this board? We want to have intelligent IP camera among our tools and we put features which are necessary to fit our potential projects. This board have also potential for Voice over IP , Video over IP, Security, Home remote monitoring etc.

Initial upload on GitHub is with our schematic and components put on PCB locations, routing is ahead, so we would like to hear your opinion.

Did we forgot something?

Can we do something differently or better?

Let us know what do you think.

If you need second (or third) Fast Gigabit Ethernet interface on your embedded Linux computer or desktop our Open Source Hardware OSHW USB-Gigabit adapter is what you need!

Many of our customers ask if we can design board with two or three Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. The Allwinner chips we use for OLinuXino are general purpose not communication chips so they usually have single Ethernet. The Sitara SOC we use AM335X advertise to have more than one Ethernet interface but it’s marketing as these are virtual interface i.e. share transfer speed.

USB-Gigabit allow you to add 10/100/1000Mbit interface to any of your computers which has USB host. It supports USB 1.1, USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 interfaces and speed depend on your USB port speed.

Our tests with A20 OLinuXino boards with USB 2.0 host interface show 319Mbit of Upload and 295Mbit of Download speed i.e. x3 times more than our other USB-Ethernet-AX88772B interface.