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.

Embedded.com’s Ville Baillie on Updating Embedded Linux

Embedded Design’s Ville Baillie is running a series on over-the-air updates for embedded Linux installations, a key feature of being able to keep Internet of Things (IoT) deployments functional and secure, with this week’s instalment looking at the currently-available off-the-shelf solutions. “Once an Embedded Linux product leaves the lab and… Read More

Darkriscv RISC-V Implementation LST file

Darkriscv: An Overnight BSD-Licensed RISC-V Implementation

Developer Marcelo Samsoniuk has demonstrated just how flexible the open RISC-V instruction set architecture is by creating his own implementation – in, he claims, just one night. “Developed in a magic night of 19 Aug, 2018 between 2am and 8am, the darkriscv is a very experimental implementation of the open… Read More

Retro-uC Brings Open Silicon to Vintage Computing IP

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

CRU: RISC-V Edge AI, microPlatforms, MQTT Woes, and More

AB Open is proud to confirm its sponsorship of ORConf 2018, the open-source digital design conference, to be held this year at the Gdansk University of Technology in Poland. Officially announced by the Free and Open Source Silicon (FOSSi) Foundation today, AB Open’s sponsorship follows our commitment in the… Read More

Karoly Pados Launches The Last USB-UART Dongle You’ll Need

Budapest-based Karoly Pados has launched an isolated USB to UART-TTL adapter, the μArt, which claims it “tolerates common user mistakes without being damaged or causing damage to other hardware” and has already raised more than its required funding on Crowd Supply. “It is no secret that there are many UART… Read More

Foundries.io Launches Commercial Linux, Zephyr ‘microPlatforms’

Foundries.io, a start-up emerging from a two-year stealth period, has announced the release of what it claims to be “the world’s first commercially available, continuously updated Linux and Zephyr real-time operating system (RTOS) microPlatform distributions for the embedded, IoT, edge and automotive markets.” “Over the past two years we have… Read More

SiFive, Nvidia Partner for RISC-V, NVDLA Edge AI SoC

RISC-V pioneer SiFive has announced a partnership with graphics and Arm-based processor giant Nvidia to integrate the former’s RISC-V core intellectual property with the latter’s deep-learning acceleration IP in a single high-performance system-on-chip (SoC) design. “Nvidia open sourced its NVDLA [Nvidia Deep Learning Architecture] architecture to drive the adoption of… Read More

Zephyr Project RTOS Gets RISC-V Partners, Board Support

The Zephyr Project, which maintains an eponymous open-source real-time operating system (RTOS) for the Internet of Things (IoT) under The Linux Foundation, has announced partnerships with SiFive and Antmicro to add RISC-V support to the platform. “RISC-V is about creating open source platforms for the entire world to collaborate on,… Read More

MQTT Misconfiguration Leaves IoT Users Vulnerable, Says Avast

Security specialist Avast has warned of misconfiguration in ‘smart home’ products that are leaving thousands of users vulnerable to attack, thanks to accidental exposure of Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) servers. “Both MQTT and [popular broker software] Mosquitto have broad security capabilities — for example, to provide fine-grained access control… Read More

Bluespec Releases Apache-Licensed Piccolo RISC-V Core

Massachusetts-based Bluespec, a founding member of the RISC-V Foundation, has released the first entry in its open-source RISC-V processor family: the 32-bit three-stage Piccolo. Designed, the company explains, for Internet of Things (IoT) and other embedded uses, the small-footprint Piccolo design uses the 32-bit RV32IM variant of the open RISC-V… Read More

Linux Kernel 4.18 Released, A Week Past Schedule

Linus Torvalds has officially released Linux 4.18, the latest version of the popular open-source kernel, following a week-long delay to fix networking and driver issues – including a problem with cryptographic operations on Arm architecture processors. Announced via the Linux Kernel Mailing List over the weekend, Linux 4.18 brings… Read More