FOSDEM 2015 is approaching

FOSDEM is the biggest European event for Free and Open Source Software. It’s a must see event for every open source software enthusiast.

This year it’s on 31/01-01/02 weekend, but it’s start traditionally with beer event at Delirium cafe Friday evening.

We have been three years there and it seems that every year the number of people almost doubles, like 3000-5000-8000 pcs. You can’t notice this inside the Libre University of Bruxelles, as there is plenty of space and rooms and the organizers do great job to make sure there is food and space for all participants, but you can definitely feel the crowd when the event is closing and thousands of people go out and wait on the bus stations to go back to their hotel 🙂

There are hundreds of lectures, workshops, events which you can participate there, meeting people all around the world who share same ideas. It’s different than Linux Con for instance, where there is high entry fee and it’s more corporate event. FOSDEM is free to participate which attracts much more people and you should definitely come and see the atmosphere of freedom there.

In 2014 we had two tables there making soldering workshop, we apply this year too, but no reply neither positive neither negative so far, so I don’t know if we will do the same this year, too much work for the organizers maybe so they can’t reply to everyone?

FOSDEM 2014 – one great event for all who like Free/Open Source Technologies

This year it was our second visit to FOSDEM and I think this year there were even more people than last year.
At least on FOSDEM 2013 Friday beer event at Delirium cafe we managed somehow to get to the bar and drink a beer, this year there was no way, Delirium was so loaded that we couldn’t get near on the streets in Friday evening. So we went to a pub near (fortunately there are plenty of bars in this area).

Some people say FOSDEM 2014 had 6000 other say 8000 visitors, the WIFI statistics say that about 3000 people were connected at same time in the peak hours, great job done by the organizers as the internet was good, and there were plenty of spots where you can get quickly something to drink and eat!
You can feel the crowd mostly when you decide to leave at the evening and can’t get on few buses full of people, but at least you are surrounded by good company and can chat meantime while next bus arrives.

FOSDEM is primary Free Open Software event. As we already blogged we made this cute Arduino Tiny85 kit for FOSDEM Hackathon:

It was cool to see how many people were attracted to try their first board soldering. We were surprised as in the first day out of about 100 kits soldered just one didn’t work, on the second day there were few more, but still less than 1% of all soldered kits were damaged, great achievment for beginners 🙂

For us the best reward was to see the big smiles on the people who see their boards working 🙂

The Hackathon was noticed and featured in the popular German c’t Hardware Hacks Magazine

Olimex also got approved this year for 15 minutes Lighting Talk about OSHW and OLinuXino

For these who missed this event, my slides are at SlideShare  and here you can see my video and hear my funny accent 🙂

Overall the feeling from FOSDEM is that FOSS people still don’t know what Open Source Harware is and how it slowly changes the world we know like FOSS software does.

People keep confusing and think that once some project have PDF schematics this make it open source hardware 🙂 you can hear this on Leon’s lecture for Tizen or Oliver lecture for Allwinner SOCs.

Also what we saw is that the people willing to solder were more than our one table with 4 soldering irons could handle 🙂

We apologize to all who didn’t manage to get seat, for next event we may prepare more soldering seats so more people to give it a try.
What we saw for sure is that among FOSDEM visitors there are lot of people who love to learn new stuff and to build thing by themself!

 

EDIT: we got from G+ picture of another 8 years old Hacker who built FOSDEM-85: http://flic.kr/p/jSUGrY

 

The Custom Boards for FOSDEM 2014 Hackathon are ready

Have look at FOSDEM-85 the custom board we made specially for FOSDEM 2014 Hackathon.

This is derivate from the well known OLIMEXINO-85-KIT which we used for OpenFest Hackathon.

For FOSDEM we made it in nice shape of Pinguino with OSHW logo and two LEDs as eyes 🙂

This board is fully functional ATTiny85 Arduino compatible and uses Digispark’s Arduino IDE and Micronucleus bootloader.

With it you can control addressable LED stripes, drive servos and stepper motors, measure temperature etc etc.

On OpenFest we had 100 kits which were all soldered for one day, this time we prepare 200 kits to give away at FOSDEM Hackathon.

We are in AW building:

Table 2 and 3 are ours and there we will place 4 soldering stations where people who want to try soldering their very first Open Source Arduino clone and then run program on it.

People who have no soldering irons with them will have to wait seat to be free to sit and soldering, alternatively if someone carry soldering iron with him can use it without waiting for seat 🙂

FOSDEM-85 board is so cute that we decided to carry it in our web shop as well, so these who have no chance to build one at FOSDEM will be able to buy online and solder at home.

EDIT: The board is now in our online shop.

FOSDEM 2014 – Hardware hackathon

OLinuXino / Open Hardware Hackathon info is now on FOSDEM page 🙂 so be ready to build your first open hardware there 🙂

For these who still don’t know what FOSDEM is, this is the biggest Free Open Source Technology event in Europe and will be at 1-2 of February this year.

We will have also Lighting Talk about OLinuXino in Saturday: Lighting Talk Room: Ferrer, Saturday, 13.20-13.35, “OLinuXino DIY Linux computer”

https://fosdem.org/2014/schedule/event/olinuxino/

Right behind us is Leon Anavi who uses A10S-OLinuXino to build his home Tizen device:

Lighting Talk Room: Ferrer, Saturday, 13.40-13.55, Leon Anavi: “How to Build a Tizen Device at Home?”

https://fosdem.org/2014/schedule/event/tozen_home/

and of course you shouldn’t miss Oliver’s main track:

Track: Hardware, Room: K.1.105, Sunday, 11.00-11.50, Oliver Schinagl: “ARM: Allwinner sunxi SoC’s and the community behind it.The most opensource (friendly) SoC!”

https://fosdem.org/2014/schedule/event/arm_allwinner_sunxi_socs/

OLIMEX is approved to have Open Source Hardware stand at FOSDEM 2014

FOSDEM is the biggest Open Source event in Europe. With lot of presentations, talks and workshops it is worth to visit. We wanted to have stand there where to present OLinuXino and all other OSHW boards we do, so applied for stand and today we got e-mail that our request is approved 🙂 yay!

Another good news is that Olliver Schinagl will have talk about Allwinner SoCs at FOSDEM named: The most opensource (friendly) SoC 🙂

FOSDEM – biggest open source event in Europe is this weekend in Brussels

Today we will skip the Friday Free board Quiz as fly to FOSDEM in Brussels.

What is FOSDEM? Meeting of 5000+ open source enthusiasts from all around the world. There are lighting talks, developer rooms, stands where people can show their open source projects (we late to book stand for OLinuXino this year as this is our first visit to FOSDEM).

So I hope to meet lot of people who helped with OLinuXino software development there and see them face to face.

Some interesting talks which are in my agenda to visit there are:

FreedomBox 1.0 https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/

Open ARM GPU drivers https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/operating_systems_open_arm_gpu/

ARM support in the Linux kernel https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/arm_in_the_linux_kernel/

Android freedom and Replicant https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/android_freedom_and_replicant/

Porting applications to 64-Bit ARM Architecture https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/porting_applications_to_64bit_arm/

UEFI SecureBoot https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/uefi_secureboot/