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.

OpenFest 2013 and the Open Source Hardware

To be two days together with hundreds of people who share your values and view on the open source technology – NICE!

To open the event with full Hall and people even sitng on the floor just to hear your presentation for Open Source Hardware – GREAT!

To see the big smile on the face of people who never used to touch soldering iron, but built their first Arduino themself and programmed their first Blink LED program – PRICELESS!

OpenFest 2013 was two days event last weekend where hundreds people all around Bulgaria meet together and share their experience in number of talks.

I opened the even with my presentation for the Open Source Hardware, tried to explain what is Open Source Hardware, (as many of the people were familiar only with free / open source software), what is my motivation to do Open Source Harware, what are the differences between open source hardware (OSHW) and Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) and why others should join and do Open Source Harware too.

The slides are available here. Soon the video of my talk will be put online by OpenFest organizers.

Both days in the lobby of OpenFest were running Hardware Hackathon where we provide 100 OLIMEXINO-85 kits, anyone who wanted could participate and solder his own Arduino which then to test and program and take home free of charge. People with no any knowledge in electronics and soldering came and out of 100 kits just 2 were broken, all other 98 were successfully assembled!

I admit I didn’t expect such big interest in Hardware on so traditionally “FOSS” related event. From 10.00 till 17.00 there was always crowd of peoples around the tables, waiting on tail to take seat with soldering iron as we got only 4 with us, there were even few people who came with their own soldering irons from home in their backpacks.

Preparing for the OpenFest Hackathon

Do not forget tomorrow is OpenFest  and there will be Hardware Hackathon!

We are preparing 100 OLIMEXINO-85-KITs ready for assembly and 4 soldering stations, solder, flux, cutters and everything necessary to assembly these KITs.

No matter if you have experience or not with soldering we will teach you how to build your first Arduino yourself and then to check if it works and write your first code.

We are preparing also MOD-IO2 relay boards, LEDs, Breadboards, Jumper wires, temperature sensors, LED RGB stripes and many other gadgets to have fun with!

A20-OLinuXino with 15.6″ LCD running Debian and A20-OLinuXino with 10″ LCD with TS running Android will be also available for these who want to touch and test them.

Open Fest opening lecture had to be for OpenJDK but in last minute we understand that the plane of Mani Sarkar will late, so we have to open the event with our lecture for Open Source Hardware, so do not get late in Saturday as we start at 10.15 🙂

The slides for the lecture will be present on A20-OLinuXino running Debian and Libre office

First OpenFest hardware hackathon results

Open Fest is the biggest even for Open Technologies, Open Software and Open Hardware in Bulgaria.

This year Open Fest was last weekend 3rd and 4th of November and had 10 years Jubilee!

The program and the presentation slides you can see at http://openfest.org/archive/openfest-2012/program/

The wireless router on the event logged 820 unique MAC addresses so I guess at least so many people visited it 🙂 (do you imagine IT guy will stay whole day on such event without checking his e-mails?)

Olimex was invited to talk for the OLinuXino and together with the organizеrs we made the first Hardware Hackathon.

There was table with Olimex boards – iMX233, A13 OLinuXinos and different UEXT modules and everyone was invited to implement something interesting during the even, the most interesting projects had as prize the boards which were used to implement.

Not many people were hear for the Hackathon on the first day the interest was weak but many were preparing during the Saturday evening as in Sunday the table was always full:

The recap of the completed projects is:

1. 3D graphics on Android application – flying plane which you control with the MOD-WII-NUNCHUCK connected to A13-OLinuXino-WIFI UEXT connector. Programming language: Java. Boards used: A13-OLinuXino-WIFI + MOD-WII-NUNCHUK

2. RFID data logger and entry system: RFID cards are learned then different relays get closed when corresponding card is approached to the reader. Programming language: C. Boards used: iMX233-OLinuXino-MAXI +  MOD-RFID125 + MOD-IO + RFID125-ISO tags.

3. Web temperature logger. Programming language: Python, PHP. Boards used: iMX233-OLinuXino-MAXI, MOD-TC-MK2-31855, TC-K-TYPE

4. Fire alarm: when temperature passes threshold plays MP3 with someone yieling: Fire! Alarm! 🙂 Program language: C, Linux shell. Boards used: iMX233-OLinuXino-MAXI, MOD-TC-MK2-31855, TC-K-TYPE

there were several other attempts but the projects were not complete, overall I’m impressed with the complexity of the first two projects which were completed at so short time.

The Hardware Hackathon will continue on the next OpenFest events.

It was cool to see these people who came form the pure software world, how they discover how easy is to interface real world objects with OLinuXino and in the same time to stay in the comfortable Linux environment they know.