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.

Arm Adds LoRaWAN Stack to Mbed OS 5.8

Arm’s Jan Jongboom has announced the addition of a LoRaWAN stack to Mbed OS, as one of the new features added to the latest Mbed OS 5.8 release. “Arm is heavily invested in advancing the LoRaWAN standard. We’re an an active member of the LoRa alliance, and we were… Read More

Linux Kernel 4.16 Released with Arm, RISC-V Fixes

Linus Torvalds, creator and maintainer of the Linux kernel, has officially released Linux 4.16 – and, despite the announcement taking place on April Fool’s Day, it’s no joke. “So the take from final week of the 4.16 release looks a lot like rc7 [release candidate 7], in that about half… Read More

Arm, Nvidia Partner for IoT Deep-Learning

Low-power processor specialist Arm and high-performance processor specialist Nvidia have announced a partnership to bring deep-learning technology to Internet of Things (IoT) devices through dedicated hardware acceleration. As part of Arm’s Project Trillium initiative on machine learning, the company has joined forces with Nvidia to integrate its Deep… Read More

CRU: Circumference, the Pi 3 B+, El Correo Libre, SDR, and More

Ground Electronics, AB Open’s manufacturing division, today unveils a new “datacentre-in-a-box” platform targeting software development, testing, and education: the Raspberry Pi-powered Circumference. Presented to the public for the first time today ahead of a crowdfunding campaign launch in the coming weeks, Circumference is designed to offer all the functionality of… Read More

Lime Micro Working on RISC-V LimeNET Base Station

Lime Microsystems are working with SiFive to build an open wireless base station featuring the former’s field-programmable radio frequency (FPRF) IC and the latter’s RISC-V processor technology. Building on the existing LimeNET platform, which pairs the open LimeSDR software defined radio with x86 host hardware, the prototype design replaces the… Read More

Linux Foundation Launches IoT-Focused ACRN Hypervisor

The Linux Foundation has announced the ACRN (pronounced “Acorn”) Project, an effort to develop a reference hypervisor for the Internet of Things (IoT) in the face of existing solutions being too bulky and unwieldy for embedded use. “With project ACRN, embedded developers have a new, immediately available hypervisor option,” claims… Read More

Ground Electronics Unveils the Circumference Pi Cluster

A Look at the New Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has today launched the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, a revision to its popular single-board computer (SBC) which brings with it a faster and cooler-running processor, gigabit Ethernet and 5GHz Wi-Fi connectivity, and support for Power over Ethernet (PoE). Launched six years after the first Raspberry… Read More

Mike Wishart Calls for “Open Innovation” in the IoT

Mike Wishart, chief executive officer at electronics crowdsourcing platform efabless, has issued a call for a move beyond open source software and into the realm of “open innovation.” “Embedded open source software not only works; most our world runs on it today,” Mike writes in the introduction of an… Read More

CRU: Security, Open Consumer Products, Solderpad Hardware Licence 2.0, and More

GreenWaves Technologies has officially launched GAP8, its RISC-V based low-power application processor for Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Based on the work of the Parallel Ultra Low Power (PULP) project, GAP8 was first shown off as a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) core back in March… Read More

RISC-V’s Potential Highlighted in Low Start-up Costs

The benefit of an open instruction set architecture (ISA) like RISC-V have been laid bare in a piece by Stacey Higginbotham which puts the real-world cost of launching your own RISC-V semiconductor company below the cost of simply licensing proprietary intellectual property (IP) from a company like Arm. Following… Read More

UK Government Publishes “Secure by Design” IoT Policy

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport of the UK Government has published a policy paper on the development and sale of Internet of Things (IoT) devices from a security perspective, dubbed “Secure by Design.” “We want everyone to benefit from the huge potential of internet-connected devices and it… Read More