MOD-LCD3310 OSHW monochrome LCD 84×48 pixels board with UEXT connector

MOD-LCD3310 is Open Source Hardware board released under Apache 2.0 Licensee.
It’s low cost 84×48 pixels LCD which can connect to any of our development boards with UEXT connectors.
The schematic in PDF format and Board and Schematic files in Eagle CAD format are on GitHub.

Examples how to connect MOD-LCD3310 to OLIMEXINO-32U4 (Arduino Leonardo), OLIMEXINO-STM32 (Maple), PIC32-PINGUINO (Pinguino), A20-OLinuXino-MICRO, LPC-P1227 (NXP) and STM32-P103 (ST) are on GitHub.

The LCD panel alone is also available for purchase on our web shop

backlight panel

and the matching connector

which you can use to make your own PCBs with this display for your next project.

Open Source Technology based micro satellite fly in Space for almost year

Sergei Gavrikov let us know on IRC channel #olimex that our board LPC-H2294 running eCos RTOS is working on small satelite Chibis-M for almost year.

The satellite is developed in Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Science. The design goal was to make small but highly efficient spacecraft for  detailed study of physical mechanisms of electric discharges (lightning) in the atmosphere is the widest energy range, from radio to gamma-ray emissions.

They choosed to use as hardware Olimex’s LPC-H2294 development board running open source eCos RTOS on it.

Sergei was involved in the software development, here is his message on eCos development forum http://ecos.sourceware.org/ml/ecos-discuss/2013-01/msg00009.html

The Chibis-M satellite, weighing 34.4 kilograms, started on its mission on January 25, 2012, and has been successfully operating in orbit for almost a year. Here you can see youtube video with the lauch of the satellite from the International Space Station (ISS) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnvWTGR22ZU

Now the satellite treactory can be seen in real time at http://chibis.cosmos.ru/trajectory , Chibi-M flying with 7.6 km/sec (approx 28 000 km/h) at 480 km orbit around the Earth.

Here is another video (in Russian language) explaining Chibis-M features – it’s less 40 kg but have all features the big over 400kg satellites have http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRxgwV3UdlU, the name Chibis comes from small bird which lives in Russia.

More details about Chibis-M satellite can be read in The Space Review at http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2213/1

PASCAL is STILL ALIVE :-)

For those who remember with sentiment the old days of Turbo Pascal there is one good news.

Although Pascal lost the battle as programming language of choice mostly because of the Linux fame, Prof. NIklaus Wirth continued the language development with the project Oberon.

Some of Prof. Worth books which were used by generation for teaching of structural programming are now available for free download: Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs, Theory and Techniques of Compiler Construction.

CFB Software has released Astrobe Oberon language development IDE for LPC Cortex M3 family, so you can now program your LPCxxx microcontrollers in Pascal-like language.

These devices are supported for the moment: LPC1343 / 1313 / 1759 / 1758 / 1756 / 1754 / 1752 / 1751 / 1769 / 1768 / 1767 / 1766 / 1765 / 1764 / 1763.

And there is BSP for Olimex LPC-P1343 and LPC-1766-STK

On this video you can see program written on Oberon working on LPC2378-STK so Astobe Oberon supports ARM7 too.

Here is the Oberon language definition by Niklas Wirth.