What happens with Arduino project?

 

Arduino is always pointed as example for successful Open Source Software and Hardware project.

With thousands of contributors and millions of users this project is bespoken leader among microcontroller development.

No one remembers the tools used before Arduino.

There were few attempts to fork it for other platforms like Maple for STM32, Energia for MSP430, MPIDE for PIC32 but they never managed to make enough critical mass outside the main Arduino project and then simply were absorbed in Ardino IDE when it got possibility to merge different processor platforms. That was the end of all forks.

All this amazing progress would not be possible without Arduino being Open Source and the help of the thousands contributors.

With the success came the money and as always they were subject to disputes and all we know for the battles inside the Arduino team in the court.

Last year the problems have seemed to be resolved and Arduino Foundation was created and this was announcement as “new beginning”, but meantime some bothersome things were noticed by Open Source community.

All hardware projects listed on arduino.org are announced to be open source hardware, but none of them comply with OSHW definition. The sources are with status “coming soon” years after their release, or where these sources are available there are hidden black boxes which actually spoil the whole idea to allow other people to study, modify, improve and reproduce the design.

Makezine has published article this month with some bothersome facts about Federico Musto who seems to own major shares in the new formed Arduino foundation.

Wired also published article on this issue https://www.wired.com/2017/04/arduinos-new-ceo-federico-musto-may-fabricated-academic-record/

Meantime Philip Torone from Adafruit posted message on OSHW mailing list with list of boards on Arduino.org with problems in OSHW compliance

So many people now ask themselves the question: Is Arduino project hijacked and turn in to Closed Source Project and how this will affect the Arduino community in future?

iCE40HX8K-EVB OSHW FPGA board is in stock

iCE40HX8K-EVB is upgrade of our iCE40HX1K-EVB with more logic cells FPGA so bigger Verilog projects could be synthesized.

GPIO1 34 pin bus is same as iCE40HX1K-EVB and all DAC, ADC, IO, etc modules are compatible, on top of this there are plenty of additional GPIOs on 4 40 pin 0.05″ step connectors.

512KB fast SRAM is on board, with iCE40-IO board you  can connect VGA monitor and PS2 keyboard, so you can make your own custom CPU (for instance RISC-V) computer with monitor and keyboard.

 

 

Duinomite MINI, MEGA and eMEGA back in stock

Duinomite-MINI, MEGA, eMEGA boards were made specially to run BASIC on PIC32 processors, but are well packed with features boards, so people were using them not only with BASIC interpreter but also programming them in C.

There were not high runners, so at one point we were selling just few per month and when the blank boards were out of stock we had hesitated if to run them again or not, with the time lot of people signed for notification when back in stock so we decided to run small batch of all these three and re-stock.

Now we got them back in stock.

A64-OLinuXino Open Source Hardware board with 64-bit Cortex-A53 processor is in released

A64-OLinuXino OSHW board is now released. Current revision is Rev.C.

Features are:

• A64 Cortex-A53 64-bit SoC from Allwinner
• AXP803 PMU with Lipo charger and step-up
• 1 or 2GB or DDR3L @672 Mhz
• 0 / 4 or 16GB of industrial grade eMMC
• SPI Flash in SO8 package with hardware WP (not assembled)
• USB-OTG and USB-HOST
• HSIC connector (not assembled)
• Gigabit Ethernet
• BLE/WiFi module
• HDMI and MIPI display connectors
• microSD card
• Debug console serial connector
• Audio In and Out
• LCD display connector
• GPIO 40 pin connector (not assembled)
• UEXT connector (not assembled)
• 5V power jack
• Dimensions: 90×62.5 mm

For the moment we have three models:

• 1G0G with 1GB RAM, no Flash, no WiFi/BLE
• 1G4GW with 1GB RAM, 4GB eMMC and WiFi/BLE
• 2G16G-IND with 2GB RAM, 16GB eMMC with industrial grade components -40+85C

The optional connectors and SPI Flash etc may be assembled upon request for small fee.

Sneak preview of new OSHW IoT board: ESP32-Gateway

ESP32-EVB really took us lot of time to complete mostly due to the not so complete documentation around Ethernet and our own silly errors. Also we wanted to add so many interfaces there to may people evaluate them all: Ethernet, CAN, Infrared, Relays LiPo UPS etc etc and the board become 75×75 mm. The price also went from EUR 22 to EUR 26.

In parallel we quietly were working on stripped version named ESP32-GATEWAY, as the name says we wanted just to keep here the connectivity: WiFi, BLE, Ethernet, USB for programming and micro SD card.

All available GPIOs are made on 0.1″ step strip at the bottom of the board, and two nice mount holes:

Today we assembled the first prototypes and we will test tomorrow. If everything is OK we will run production. We already have 100 blank PCBs ready as after so much time spent on ESP32-EVB we do not expect any troubles, but still wanted to reduce the risk to throw in the garbage bin more than 100 boards if we missed something.

So hold your breath if everything is OK we will have 100 boards for sale next week 🙂

The price of ESP32-Gateway will be EUR 22.

A20-OLINUXINO-MICRO now available also in Industrial temperature grade -45+85C

We are selling for some time already A20-OLinuXino-MICRO Rev.J where few things were improved:

1. We changed the LAN PHY from Realtek to Microchip as latter is more reliable supplier for both commercial and industrial temperature components, we searched desperately Realtek PHY in industrial temperature grade but without success.
2. We extended the input working voltage from 6-16VDC to 8-24VDC
3. We changed the NAND Flash to eMMC (but old NAND style flash is still possible to assembly)

The Ethernet PHY change requires new patches on the Uboot and Linux images which are already uploaded.

TuxCon Open Source Hardware and Software Conference is this weekend in Plovdiv

This weekend is TuxCon, conference about open source hardware and software in Plovdiv, Bulgaria.

In Saturday June 3rd the conference will begin at 10.30 o’clock in Technical University in Plovdiv. There are seven interesting lectures and Lighting talks.

Our special guest this year is Igor Pečovnik who will present Armbian – special Linux distribution for embedded ARM SoCs. Armbian is well known in Allwinner community as it supports almost every board with Allwinner ARM SoCs.

In Sunday, June 4th we will have the traditional Hardware hackathon at Olimex training building.

This year our main street is under heavy reconstruction so prepare for the fun to pass by the border of the near gipsy ghetto to may come to us 🙂

 

TuxCon Kitty, it’s a badge with buzzer, LEDs and shape of Kitty, which play songs when you touch it nose.

The PCB is programmable by Arduino IDE and you can compose your own melody.

So far we have NyanCat, Mario Bross and Star Wars ready for upload.