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.
Mozilla Things Gateway UI

Mozilla Launches Things Gateway IoT Platform

Mozilla, the organisation behind popular open-source browser Firefox, has announced the release of a stable build of its Things Gateway, promoting its Internet-of-Things (IoT) focused Project Things initiative from a ‘hack’ to a launched – though early-stage – product. Originally unveiled as a prototype back in June 2017 under… Read More
NextThing Co. Pocket CHIP

Bootlin Launches Allwinner VPU Linux Mainline Campaign

Bootlin, formerly known as Free Electrons, has launched a crowdfunding campaign to provide support for the Allwinner Video Processing Unit (VPU) in the mainline Linux kernel, for out-of-the-box hardware accelerated video decoding and encoding. Found in many of Allwinner’s Arm-based system-on-chip (SoC) designs for embedded and low-power platforms, the… Read More
SiFive Freedom E310 processor

Busting the RISC-V ISA Myths

Electronic Design is continuing its 11 Myths series, which covered LoRaWAN last month, with a look at the RISC-V open instruction set architecture (ISA). “Many companies today are exploring free, open-source hardware and software as an alternative to closed, costly instruction set architectures (ISAs). RISC-V is a free, open,… Read More
LoRaWAN Display

Electronic Design Demystifies LoRaWAN

Electronic Design has put together a guide designed to demystify LoRaWAN, the increasingly widespread open-standard long-range low-power wireless area network technology. Written to address eleven common misconceptions or confusions surrounding the technology, ranging from confusion between the physical LoRa layer and the LoRaWAN protocol which sits on top of… Read More
'Tux' the Penguin

Linux 4.15 Hit by Last-Minute Delay

Linux kernel maintainer Linus Torvalds has announced a last-minute delay to the release of Linux 4.15, marking the first time a kernel version has needed a ninth release candidate since 2011. “I really really wanted to just release 4.15 today, but things haven’t calmed down enough for me to feel… Read More
lowRISC

LowRISC 0.5 Brings First Ethernet Support

The lowRISC project has officially announced the launch of lowRISC 0.5, a milestone release of the popular RISC-V implementation which brings with it open-source Ethernet support. Built upon a RISC-V implementation from the University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley), lowRISC 0.5 marks a major milestone release on the… Read More
Intel Movidius Myriad 2 VPU

CRU: RISC-V, LoRa, Movidius, and More

The rise of low-power long-range radio technologies like LoRaWAN has been a boon for the Internet of Things (IoT), but working in radio brings unique challenges – as demonstrated by Embedded.com’s new guide to optimising the performance of embedded radios. Written by Chris Lamb and Rod Williams, the guide… Read More