AgonLight2 now is officially certified by OSHWA as Open Source Hardware

AgonLight2 now is officially listed on OSHWA.org directory as true Open Source Hardware project.

Open Fest 2021 is back! Free your agenda for 14 and 15 of August when the biggest open source event in Bulgaria will take place in Sofia.

It’s good to see that slowly things come back to normal!

Open fest 2021 will be provided in normal face to face format in the open space – the King Boris garden – “Maimunarnika” where up to 1200 people can be hosted.

As always the participation is free of charge.

There will be the traditional soldering party with the help of the Open Fest 2021 volunteers from the Technical University club of Robotics.

Olimex is donating 50 pcs of our new Musical badge kits, which contain only PTH components and are very easy to solder even for beginners:

Musical badge is board with two sensor buttons which start and stop music play when touched.

The Open Fest dates are during our Summer Break so we are not be physically present there but will watch online the event.

Implementation of OPC UA on ESP32-EVB

OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) is an open, implemented under GPL 2.0 license, machine to machine communication protocol for industrial automation developed by the OPC Foundation.

The OPC UA protocol specification consists of 14 documents for a total of 1250 pages. Due to this complexity, existing implementations are usually incomplete.

This is why we were puzzled to see on Twitter post by Selftronics that they made OPC UA server running on ESP32-EVB!

Here are the details of the implementation, the sources are at GitHub.

Installing and running /e/ pro-privacy open source Android on Open Source Hardware Laptop TERES-I

Few days ago customer asked if we can ship our Open Source hardware DIY Hacker friendly laptop TERES-I with /e/ pre-installed.

For these who has not clue what /e/ is: The /e/ ROM is a fork of Android with focus on privacy. It’s open source  pro privacy compatible with most existing Android applications. The /e/ is alternative to the Apple/Google duopoly on the smartphone.

I have seen Mr. Gael Duval tweet about the /e/ support for TERES-I from March this year, but shame on me I wasn’t try it yet, so I though it’s good time to give it a try.

The install instructions here and are very clear. Unfortunately when I followed them there was no result other than displaying this spash screen for Pine64.

After waiting some minutes I decided that something is wrong and decided to write the image instead with dd command with balenaEtcher.

The image written with balena had same splash for a while then show /e/ install screen:

Be prepared to wait few minutes then the setup screen is shown, it’s same as first Android installation even you can choose Bulgarian language:

After setting up the date/time, your WiFi connection etc you got the home screen:

Settings show that TERES-I now run Android 7 (Nougat):

If you setup account you can go to app store:

Overall /e/ is running fine on A64 TERES-I and people who are used to Android environment, but do not want to be spy by Google service.

 

 

Build your own CPU and tools for it like Assembler, High level language compiler, simple OS, then write Pong game on it using only open source software and hardware. Check nand2tetris-13 project with iCE40HX8K-EVB + MOD-LCD2.8RTP + IceStorm

Michael Schröder sent us link to his project nand2tetris-13 yesterday.

He managed to build his own CPU, to write Assembler, Jack high level language, OS and then write Fibonacci demo and Pong game. All this done on Open Source Hardware FPGA  board iCE40HX8K-EVB with MOD-LCD2.8RTP as display and FOSS tools IceStorm project. Keyboard is done by UART but my guess is that it could be easily implemented by iCE40-IO .

This is perfect project to teach students about so many things: Combinatory Logic, Sequential Logic, Computer Achitecture, Machine code to Assembler, High level language Compilers, simple OS and so on.

And the best here is that you can see this working on hardware not just boring lectures. Student can experiment with their own CPU and write applications like small games etc.

OSHW 2020 report State of Open Source Hardware – Olimex Ltd with highest number of registered OSHW projects :)

OSHdata published 2020 report about the State of Open Source Hardware and we are extremely proud to be #1 OSHW contributor at OSHWA certification directory.

There is another company from Plovdiv which is #7 – ANAVI Technology, congratulations Leon! You seems to be two positions ahead of Google LLC 🙂

OSHW Audi style Bike Turn Signal LED Lights soldering kit is ready for Open Fest Workshop

Bike-TSL-Kit now is ready and we are looking forward to see you at Open Fest Workshop.

As always the workshop will be free to participate.

Do not forget to book kit by e-mail to info@olimex.com for Open Fest Workshop, as we will have just 100 kits for the workshop.

If you have soldering iron, twizzers and cutters take them with you as we will provide 6 sets, but previous workshops proven there will be long tail of people wanting to participate/solder and having soldering tools will spare you the waiting.

Here is small video clip how Bike-TSL-Kit works when assembled:

We are looking forward to see you there and have fun together!

The slides from Industry 4.0 meeting in Stuttgart are online

Open Source / Free Software for Effective Industry 4.0 Meetup  organized by Nexedi GmbH  and hosted by Fraunhofer IAO was held on 12th of November in Stuttgart.

There were quite interesting talks mostly focused on Open Source Technologies and their possible use in Industry 4.0.

My slides are now uploaded at Slideshare.

This is FOSDEM 2018

Last weekend in ULB (University Libre of Bruxelles) took place the biggest Open Source event in Europe – FOSDEM.

With 678 talks, split in 55 devrooms this is something every open source enthusiast waits whole year.

It’s amazing how the organizers make such event possible, between 8 and 10 000 people all around the world come together at one place. If you want to meet some open source project, Linux kernel or Linux distribution maintainer there is great chance to meet him/her there.

FOSDEM usually is made in the weekend Saturday and Sunday, but traditionally starts with Friday evening welcome beer party at Delirium cafe. Do not be fooled by the name nobody go there to drink coffee.

Delirium usually can’t hold all people so the streets around it looks like this:

Every year this event become bigger and bigger. I was always wondering how they manage to keep their WiFi infrastructure in order with so many people attending. This year for the very first time the WiFi was impossible to connect to, so I guess we reach the infrastructure capacity 🙂

In Saturday the talks started, needless to say for me most interesting was the CAD and Open Hardware devroom.

One of the most anticipated talk there was about KiCad 5 new features.

Wayne Stambaugh the project manager started his talk with red T-shirt from Digikey and announced that Digikey made the single most significant donation to KiCad team just few days before the conference. So he said them “thank you” by presenting his talk wearing their red T-shirt.

It was very interesting to hear that Wayne got feedback from popular PCB prototype providers, that about half of PCB projects now they receive for prototyping production are made with KiCad! It’s amazing to see the progress KiCad made for the last 4 years!

I personally like more the T-shirt Wayne was wearing when he closed his talk 😉 KiCad team really like the complex boards we design with their product and this was very kind gesture.

Another interesting talk was Introduction to LibrePCB . This is the first time I hear about this project and it looks itneresting. The author is obviously capable young man and thinkered a lot about how to make component libraries more easy to use, but while I was watching the talk I was wondering (as many others) why the author just do not join KiCad, which is already well established project and leading as features and completeness. We all know that KiCad team is very small and more people joining the project will make much more sense than to re-inventing the hot water, because you do not like some feature in this popular project. Well this is the open source 🙂 and everyone is free to scratch his own itch, but I would love to see Urban Bruhin helping KiCad to become better instead to duplicate the work creating similar product alone.

Jesús Arroyo Torrens presented Icestudio – graphical way to program FPGAs. I would say this is quite entertaining and easy start for beginners with no previous knowledge about electronics.

Juan Gonzalez-Gomez (Obijuan) upgraded this talk with very entertaining presentation about what he did with Icestudio and small funny blocks he created. He is using his daughter as beta tester. I recommend you to watch this talk when the video is available.

Juan and Jesus are part of Spanish community working with FPGAs. You can see more about what they do on this site FPGAwars.

Staf Verhaegen shared his findings about is it possible today to implement ASIC design with open source tools. Very interesting topic, let’s hope the time Makers and small companies will be able to make their own chips with Open source tools is approaching.

My talk was about current TERES laptop status and the experience we got during the development with KiCad. Using FOSS tool like KiCad is great to make OSHW, but if you want to use latest features and the daily builds, they are available only via ppa repository for Ubuntu. This means if you use other distribution you have to build from sources every day. Windows daily builds are not available at all. This confuses many beginners who can’t manage to open our files when they want to study them as they use old builds (official Ubintu repository KiCad version is probably one year old, same for Windows version). My slides are now uploaded at Slideshare.

Other devroom talks I found interesting:

Exploiting modern microarchitectures Meltdown, Spectre, and other hardware attacks 

Programming UEFI for dummies 

Improving Linux Laptop Battery Life

Kodi and Embedded Linux

Linux as an SPI Slave

How to keep your embedded Linux up and running

Drive your NAND within Linux

Image capture on embedded linux systems 

New GPIO interface for linux user space 

It was nice to see three four other talks at FOSDEM by Bulgarian speakers!

Automating Your Lights with Open Source 
Turning On the Lights with Home Assistant and MQTT
Testing Red Hat Enterprise Linux the Microsoft way 

Current meta of video compression and probable futures

Overall FOSDEM is must see event for anyone who is interested in FOSS/OSHW.

Bruxelles is excellent location and offers lot to see, both Wizzair and Ryanair offer low cost flights to this destination and I don’t know where else you can drink beer from half meter glass (not half litter but half meter!) so looking forward to see you next year there!

 

Use Raspberry PI as Iceprog programmer for iCE40HX1K-EVB or iCE40HX8K-EVB

Andreas Seltenreich sent us message how he is using Raspberry PI to program his iCE40HX1K-EVB and we add to the wiki section.