TuxCon the open source hardware and software conference in Plovdiv is June 10 and 11!

Make sure to mark your calendar and reserve the dates of June 10 and 11 because this weekend will take place the TuxCon conference in Plovdiv.

On June 10, at the Technical University in Plovdiv, there will be a series of 9 talks starting at 11 o’clock. Following the talks, there will be a quiz with prizes and lightning talks, during which visitors can share something interesting they have discovered or are working on in the field of Open Source. The first day will conclude with the FOSS beer event at Fabric bar.

On June 11, the traditional soldering workshop will take place at the Olimex Training Building. Participants can choose between soldering kits or creating art using broken electronic components.

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 FOSS and OSHW conference 2018 in Plovdiv is just 18 days away, so plan your visit properly ;)

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!

I’m going to speak at Hackaday Belgrade 26 of May.

My proposal:  Hacking soldering robot with TERES-1 DIY Open Source Hardware Laptop was just accepted!

I will speak about how we hack Soldering Robot and make it intelligent with additional camera, which makes possible use of fiducials. Making programming easy and post soldering quality check with OpenCV.

More about this event you can read (when available) on Hackaday Belgrade conference page.

DORS/CLUC 2016 Open Systems, Croatian Linux Users’ Conference is in Zagreb 11-13 of May

DORS/CLUC 2016 is oldest and biggest Linux even in Croatia. Here is the schedule of the conference: http://2016.dorscluc.org/schedule/

I have been invited to talk about Open Source Hardware, my talk is first day 11th of May at 14.00 o’clock. I’ll post the sildes on Slideshare later today.

 

EDIT: Slides are posted

Hackaday published the talks and speakers for Belgrade Hardware Conference in April

Hackaday just published the talks and speakers for the Hardware Conference in Belgrade April 9-10.

I will present our Do-It-Yourself Hacker Friendly Laptop there, hopefully we will have working A64 model by then 🙂

Looking froward to see you there!

 

TuxCon 2016 – Free Open Source Software and Hardware event in Plovdiv is 9-10 of July

TuxCon 2016 will be on 9th and 10th of July 2016 in Plovdiv 🙂

This year will be the third issue of this conference dedicated to Open Source Hardware and Software.

Many people are confused and think that Olimex is the organizer of TuxCon, which probably caused the mistake in the Hackaday article.

The real credits should be for the people who stand behind TuxCon organization and they are these 10 enthusiasts: Leon Anavi, Vladimir Dzhuvinov, Rangel Ivanov, Atanas Palavrov, Dimitar Gamishev, Stefan Saraev, Stoyan Germanov, Radoslav Kolev, Nikolay Apostolov, Tsvetomir Denchev.

We at Olimex are just helping as we love to support such even in our city.

As always the event will be free to participate, Friday 8th of July evening there will be traditional beer welcome party for the guests and lecturers.

On 10th of July in Olimex training building there will be traditional soldering Hackathon and FPGA basics course for beginners.

If you want to make talk at TuxCon send proposal to the organizers at info@tuxcon.mobi

 

LinuxCon/Embedded Linux Conference 2015 recap

LinuxCon and Embedded Linux Conference 2015 this year was in Dublin 5-7 of October in Dublin Convention Center:

We have been sponsoring the conference for second year:

As you see the “bad” Arduino team also was sponsor on this event 😉 I had chance to chat with some of their developers on beer and things seems not so black/white as most of the internet blogs make to look.
Usually all articles I read are about how these bad guys have not developed nothing in the software and how Arduino IDE and community are done alone by Massimo Banzi group while Gianluca Martino just produced the hardware and nothing else, but looks like YUN is developed completely by the bad guys. So nothing is simple black and white, Massimo Banzi always have been the face of Arduino in all articles, so it’s normal that people associate him with Arduino brand and simpatize him when the split become real, but the fact that Massimo Banzi dropped the use of Arduino outside USA and now name the boards Genuino also speak of itself.

Anyway I really do not follow so closely what happens with all their arguing. Arduino is still great for beginners, but now the development tools are very confusing, both teams use term Arduino IDE and similar revision numbering which is very confusing for instance arduino.cc IDE is version 1.6.5 while arduino.org IDE is 1.7.7!

C’mon guys Arduino used to be simple for beginners, now they will struggle even at the first step to install their software, wondering which and where to download to may work with their boards!

Most interesting at LinuxCon/ELCE of course is to see face to face lot of Linux developers which you usually otherwise see only in IRC and G+.

Try the famous Guinness beer:

Personally I didn’t like Guinness, but there were lot of other beers to try like: Murphy’s, o’Hara’s and even some 7.5%-8% alcohol content beers which are pretty strong which we found in the store near our hotel

There were plenty of talks, one of the most interesting (at least for us) was about DTS debugging.  We didn’t knew such thing exist!

Next talk to mention is from Linux-Sunxi developer Hans de Goede, who talked for the mainlining efforts for the new $9 CHIP computer with Allwinner A13 derivate inside. What I like is that Hans was using A10S-OLinuXino to present his slides as CHIP still have no video working.

Surprisingly there was lecture from Bulgarian Academy of Science about making cluster of small computers. Too bad these guys didn’t know about OLinuXino and made their experiments with some unknown Chinese board 😉

As on any other event here also had big “looking for job / offering job” panel. The Bulgarian presence at LinuxCon/ELCE was also noticed there:

For these who don’t know Bulgarian the cyrillic text in the right hand side “Бича Айляк – Hire me, please!” is slang used in Plovdiv area and could be translated like “I do nothing and enjoy it – Hire me please!”. We still investigate who wrote it to hire him/her here at Olimex 😀

SoftUni Conf June 2015, Borovetz

The already traditional SoftUni Conf this year was in Borovetz last weekend.

Olimex was invited to speak for ESP8266 and we presented there our latest development the IoT Firmware.

We demonstrated how easy is to work with ESP8266-EVB and other modules like relays, temperature sensors, GAS sensors, RGB displays, RGB Leds, etc controlling everything by HTML and JavaScript without any electronics background nor low level programming.

here is code snip which will switch the ESP8266-EVB relay ON, just make web page containing this code:

// Connect to ESP8266-EVB events entry point 
var socket = new WebSocket('ws://192.168.4.1/events');

// Send authentication message
socket.onopen = function () {
    this.send(
        JSON.stringify(
            {
                User: 'olimex',
                Password: 'olimex'
            }
        )
    );

// Switch relay on ESP8266-EVB
    setTimeout(
        function () {
            socket.send(
                JSON.stringify(
                    {
                        URL: '/relay',
                        Method: 'POST',
                        Data: { Relay:1 }
                    }
                )
            );
        },
        500
    );
}

We will speak more about ESP8266-EVB IoT Firmware on TuxCon  which is 11th of July in Plovdiv and there will be Hackathon on 12th of July for people who want to hack with it.