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.

SC1000 Open Source Pocket size Portable Scratch Digital instrument you can build by yourself and impress your friends

[rasteri] released small pocket size digital scratch instrument and the video above explains how to assembly one. A13-SOM256 is used inside with small PIC to sense the rotating plate position and potentiometers.

Looks like a fun project! We are very tempted to build one for ourselves 🙂

It’s Friday again and time for our Guess What is this Quiz

We just finished the routing of this new board, so the question is Guess what is it?

It uses Quectel EG21-G module which works anywhere in the world covering all GSM standards and frequencies. It also has GNSS build-in.

It also can connect to any network 2G-3G-4G whichever is available (sorry no 5G yet 😉 ).

Once the prototypes are ready and check we are preparing Crowd Supply campaign for it! Hint Fits perfect to LoRa-GATEWAY and allow connection where no wires and optics like mountain hubs, remote areas etc.

You can post here or retweet/share/boost on Twitter/Facebook/Mastodon/Diaspora and in Monday we will let Random.org to decide who will win one of our new eduArdu educational board.

Have a nice weekend!

UODATE 22-04-2019: Random.org selected @netsigi as winner!

 

Open Source Hardware ESP32-POE-ISO is now in stock and we are very proud with the result

We are very proud of our new ESP32-POE-ISO and delighted to announce it’s already in stock ready for order!

What we did with this improved version of the low cost ESP32-POE power over ethernet solution for IoT?

1. As many requested we add 3000VDC galvanic insulation. Now you can program / debug while connected to PoE switch or router;
2. Many asked for more GPIOs so we set SD-card in 1 bit mode and this way released 3 GPIO pins for other use;
3. We got hints that new Espressif SDK allow ultra deep sleep modes for ESP32 and we re-designed the power supply part that now the ESP32-POE-ISO has consumption down to 200 uA (130uA of which are taken from ESP32-WROOM-32D module). The rest board without the module consumes just 70uA;
4. As per your request now battery level has option to be monitored with the ESP32 ADC;
5. There is External power detection option, so your software will be aware when run sole on battery and when have plenty of power.
6. The Isolated DCDC we use is 2W and provides 400mA @5V, 100mA are reserved for the battery charge (available if no battery is connected) and 100mA are provided for ESP32, which leaves up to 200mA @5V for your additional circuit.

We love to listen to our customers and we did our the best to complete most of the requests we got with this new version.

openSUSE leap 15 on the TERES-I

Torsten Duwe send us note that he is working on openSUSE Leap 15 image for TERES-I which is at same state like the Armbian image.

For these who are interested they can follow the progress here.

TERES-I Open Source Hardware Laptop has new experimental Armbian Mainline Linux image for download

We uploaded few days ago Armbian experimental mainline linux image for TERES-I on our ftp.

There are still few known issues which we work on, but we wanted to upload this experimental image so other people can start playing with.

What is new?

• eMMC now run x3 times faster which improves the overall user experience.
• OpenGL with LIMA

Known issues:

• Automatically turns on upon applying power via the PWR_JACK, we need time to patch mainline uboot
• No sleep or suspend, WIP.
• Bluetooth not working out-of-the-box – fixed in Olimex release if you install the package
  ftp://staging.olimex.com/Allwinner_Images/A64-Teres/linux/armbian_experimental/teres-bluetooth_0.2-1_arm64_armbian.deb
  with command:

  dpkg -i teres-bluetooth_0.2-1_arm64_armbian.deb

• Keyboard LEDs not working – fixed in Olimex release – install the package

  ftp://staging.olimex.com/Allwinner_Images/A64-Teres/linux/armbian_experimental/teres1-ledctrl_0.1-1_armbian_arm64.deb

  with command:

  dpkg -i teres1-ledctrl_0.1-1_armbian_arm64.deb

• The LCD brightness is low by default (20%) – fixed in Olimex release – to increase it type in the console

  echo 9 > /sys/class/backlight/backlight/brightness

• no video player acceleration, to be fixed in the next release planned for 22.02.2019

 

FOSDEM slides and video

FOSDEM is always impressive, even for people like me who go there for 7th time. It’s great place where you can see developers for almost every FOSS big project and talk face to face.

It’s really pleasure to see that last years there is Hardware related dev rooms too.

KiCad as always attracted lot of attention

but CAD and OSHW devroom was pretty small, so people are waiting on long tails to get in and just few lucky ones succeed:

For security reason the organizers didn’t allow people to stay standing or sitting on the floor, but this didn’t stop all. Next day I spoke to lot of friends and they said – I knew there will be no space for all who want to enter, so I just stay at the cafeteria and watched the stream.

It was same situation at the Andre Przywara talk One image to rule them all. There was no space in the room to accommodate all people who wanted to attend it.

There were three talks from Plovdiv at FOSDEM this year 🙂 Our friend Leon Anavi had two talks Making Open Source Hardware for Retrogaming on Raspberry Pi and The Software Developer’s Guide to Open Source Hardware. It’s cool as his full time job is as software engineer but as you can see he does OSHW in his free time and obviously like to talk more about his hobby than his daily work 🙂

I talked about some new OSHW boards we are working on last few months.

The idea is to build LoRaWAN infrastructire and install some free Smart City solutions in Plovdiv which to set example and to put all our work on GitHub so if other cities want to follow to be able to replicate and scale what we did and hopefully people to get aware more about the power of the open source hardware and software solutions.

Here are my slides and here is my attempt to speak English at FOSDEM. Sorry subtitles are not available 🙂

It was incredible pleasant surprise to see OLinuXino-LIME2 mentioned in Danny Haidar‘s lighting talk Creating a Computing Revolution: from Personal Computers to Personal Servers.