Author: Gareth Halfacree

Gareth Halfacree is a technology journalist and technical author best known for his work on the Raspberry Pi User Guide and an upcoming book covering the BBC’s micro:bit project. A keen open source advocate and RISC-V fan, Gareth is responsible for curating our fortnightly community round-up posts.

Huami Announces RISC-V Based Fitness Wearables, Smartwatch

Huami, a subsidiary of Chinese electronics specialist Xiaomi, has announced a new family of smartwatches and fitness wearables, and in doing so is set to become the first company to bring a product based on the open RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) to the consumer market. Announced by Huami at… Read More

PULP Platform Announces RISC-V HERO Heterogeneous Research Platform

The Parallel Ultra-Low Power (PULP) Platform team has announced the release of its latest creation: HERO, the open heterogeneous research platform combining an FPGA-based RISC-V many-core accelerator with an Arm Cortex-A host processor. “HERO combines a PULP-based open-source parallel many-core accelerator implemented on FPGA with a hard ARM Cortex-A multicore… Read More

OpenMV Launches MicroPython-Powered Cam H7 Crowdfunding Campaign

OpenMV, an open-source machine vision start-up founded by Kwabena W. Agyeman and Ibrahim Abdalkader, has launched a crowdfunding campaign for its latest creation: an open camera module based on the popular MicroPython environment. “The OpenMV project is about creating low-cost, extensible, Python powered, machine vision modules and aims at becoming… Read More

OsmocomBB SDR PHY Project Achieves GSM-on-Any-Frequency Milestone

OsmocomBB SDR PHY, a project to replace the currently-proprietary Layer 1 of the Osmocom GSM mobile baseband stack, has announced a major milestone: unlocking the ability to run a cellular network on any radio frequency, including unlicensed frequencies. The Osmocom project was founded with a laudable goal: to create a… Read More

Intel Promotes Open-Source Firmware Efforts Ahead of OFSC 2018

Computing giant Intel has announced its continued support in favour of open firmwares, having recently announced the release of Intel Slim Bootloader for Internet of Things (IoT) devices ahead of the first Open Source Firmware Conference (OSFC) this week. “The adoption of open source has had a significant impact on… Read More

Western Digital's Martin Fink and Steffen Hellmold

Western Digital CTO: RISC-V Offers “A Clean Sheet of Paper”

Western Digital has released a short video discussing how the open RISC-V instruction set architecture is changing its vision for data processing, as it pledges to ship billions of RISC-V cores in its future products. Western Digital had previously pledged support for the open RISC-V instruction set architecture with the… Read More

First Festival of Maintenance Lands in London This Month

The world’s first Festival of Maintenance is scheduled to take place later this month in London, offering attendees a look at the sustainability of making and the importance of maintenance – something all-too easily overlooked in the race towards innovation. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a classic example of… Read More

CRU: Vintage FOSSi, ORConf 2018, Tink Cryptography, and More

Chips4Makers has officially launched a crowdfunding campaign to produce the Retro-uC, an open-silicon microcontroller capable of acting as a Zilog Z80, MOS Technologies 6502, or Motorola M68K microprocessor. “I am delighted to announce that the Retro-uC crowdsupply campaign has now been launched. It has taken a little longer to straighten… Read More

Pwn2Own Tokyo Adds IoT Devices to Target List

The Pwn2Own security contest, in which researchers compete to exploit vulnerabilities in popular consumer products in exchange for cash prizes and ownership of the items in question, is to extend to cover Internet of Things (IoT) products for the first time amid growing concerns over the lack of security-focused thinking… Read More

Gdansk University of Technology, by Krzysztof Krzempek (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

ORConf 2018 Programme Finalised, Western Digital Confirmed as Headline Sponsor

The finalised programme for ORConf, the open-source digital design conference organised by the Free and Open Source Silicon (FOSSi) Foundation, has been published ahead of the event’s opening later this month – and with it the news that storage giant Western Digital has become the headline sponsor. Scheduled for the… Read More

Bootlin Issues Last Funded Allwinner Open-Source Driver Update

Open-source developer Bootlin has announced the end of its funded programme to develop and upstream open-source mainline drivers for the video processing unit (VPU) hardware in Allwinner’s system-on-chip products, but has pledged to continue best-effort development despite having exhausted the crowdfunded budget. Bootlin announced its campaign to fund development of… Read More

Google Releases Open-Source Tink Cryptographic Library

Advertising, search, and computing giant Google has announced the release of a new cross-platform open-source cryptographic library aimed at protecting implementers from common cryptographic mistakes: Tink. “In cryptography, subtle mistakes can have serious consequences, and understanding how to implement cryptography correctly requires digesting decades’ worth of academic literature. Needless to… Read More