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.

Community Round-Up: RISC-V Workshop Proceedings, Open Virtual Platforms, Cortus’ Core, Arduino Cinque, MinnowBoard Turbot, PIC32MZ with GPU, ARM Cortex-A75, Cortex-A55, Intel Compute Cards, Doubling PWM Resolution, and Gordon Williams on Open Source Challenges

The RISC-V Foundation has publicly published the proceedings of the 6th RISC-V Workshop, held early last month in Shanghai, China. Video and, where appropriate, slide decks have been made available from the three public days of the four-day event. Highlights include updates from Rick O’Connor and Yunsup… Read More

Community Round-Up: Sysmocom 3.5G Kit, Shrinking Linux, MIPS for Sale, Google’s Open Source Site and TPU Cloud, Signal/Power Isolation, Microsoft on IoT Security, and Kickstarter’s Hardware Studio

Open source cellular specialist Sysmocom has announced a limited-edition kit offering an all-in-one 3.5G cellular network with base station, femtocell, and ten pre-provisioned SIM cards. Offering an open platform and designed for everything from Internet of Things (IoT) network deployments to local or extended voice network coverage, the SysmoNITB 3.5G… Read More

Community Round-Up: RISC-V GCC, Book, Workshop and Licensing, Mentoring GSOC, Linux 4.11 and EdgeX, BrickerBot, and an Open-Source Rigol Firmware

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has hit version 7.1 and now includes support for the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA), three decades after the toolkit’s initial 1.0 release. That support for the burgeoning RISC-V open instruction set architecture was coming to GCC was no secret, following the acceptance by the… Read More

Community Round-Up: RISC-V Improvements, Caffe2, PCBA Visualisation, Solar Supercapacitors, Arduino Sigfox, Intel Developer Forums, IoT Requirements Guide, and the Vinduino LoRa Project

Researchers at Princeton University have helped boost the robustness of the burgeoning RISC-V architecture, having developed a tool which has picked up on data storage and retrieval ordering problems that could otherwise have derailed attempts to use it in high-reliability applications. “Incorrect memory access orderings can result in software… Read More

Community Round-Up: Bluetooth 5 in Apache Mynewt, Microsoft’s Sopris MCU and CodePlex Closure, ARM Compute Library, Canonical’s IoT Push, Embedded World Videos, Sinclair Spectrum Flashing, and Bomb Squad Academy

The Apache Mynewt open-source embedded operating system has received support for Bluetooth 5, Runtime has announced during the Bluetooth World 2017 conference, with ports already under test for the Nordic Semiconductor nRF52832 and nRF52840 system-on-chips (SoCs). “Last year at Bluetooth World 2016, Runtime announced the world’s first open source,… Read More

Community Round-Up: ARM DynamIQ, GAP8, RISC-V Survey, BeagleBone Blue, Intel tinyTILE, Flow Batteries, Vint Cerf on Security, Employee IP Agreements, and an IoTUK Boost Extension

ARM, now under the ownership of Japanese technology giant Softbank, has announced a new microarchitecture for its next-generation processors, built with many-core and deep-learning projects firmly in mind: DynamIQ. “DynamIQ technology is a monumental shift in multicore microarchitecture for the industry and the foundation for future ARM Cortex-A processors. The… Read More

Community Round-Up: IoTUK Boost Deadline, RISC-V Workshop, Nvidia’s TX2, Microchip’s CEC1702, Cypress PSoC4 Hacked, DPS5005 Firmware, OpenScope Success, a Goodenough Battery, RF Modules, and Bunnie’s Book

Technology journalist Gareth Halfacree is running the AB Open Community Round-Up series, offering a fortnightly glimpse at what’s happening in and around open source hardware and software, wireless and related topics. Applications for the IoTUK Boost innovation programme, run in Calderdale by AB Open in partnership with IoTUK, RS… Read More

Community Round-Up: Liverpool LoRaWAN, RISC-V Events, SHAttered, Linux 4.10, DeviceHive, FPGA Tips, Kaspersky OS, and LimeNET

Technology journalist Gareth Halfacree is running the AB Open Community Round-Up series, offering a fortnightly glimpse at what’s happening in and around open source hardware and software, wireless and related topics. Community wireless effort The Things Network is a little larger today thanks to the official launch of The… Read More

Community Round-Up: LoRaWAN Projects, iolinker, OpenScope, SoC PoC, Autorouting in gEDA, an Open Laptop, and Wuthering Bytes 2017

Technology journalist Gareth Halfacree is running the AB Open Community Round-Up series, offering a fortnightly glimpse at what’s happening in and around open source hardware and software, wireless and related topics. If you’ve ever wondered how difficult getting into long-range, low-power wireless networking might be, our own Andrew Back’s post… Read More

Community Round-Up: RISC-V in GCC, Right to Repair, Sub-Threshold MCUs, Debugging, 32-Bit Upgrades, FPGA Follies, and Microelectrical Repair

Technology journalist Gareth Halfacree is running the AB Open Community Round-Up series, offering a fortnightly glimpse at what’s happening in and around open source hardware and software, wireless and related topics. The open RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) has taken a major step towards the mainstream with the news that… Read More

Hands-On with the SiFive HiFive1 RISC-V Development Board

It’s been many a decade since there was a shortage of microcontrollers to choose from, with everything from eight-bit low-power chips to 64-bit high-performance parts flooding the market in implementations ranging from hobbyist-friendly to engineer-approved. Now, though, there’s something new: RISC-V, a fully open processor instruction set architecture (ISA)… Read More

OnChip's Publicly-Accessible Open-V Dev Board

Community Round-Up: RISC-V Boards and Emulators, Harvey OS, Embedded Security Advice, and Open-Source Quantum Computing

Technology journalist Gareth Halfacree is running the AB Open Community Round-Up series, offering a fortnightly glimpse at what’s happening in and around open source hardware and software, wireless and related topics. It’s been a great start to the year for the open-source processor architecture RISC-V starting with the release of… Read More