Category: AB Open

News and updates on developments at AB Open.

Solderpad Hardware License v2.1, SPDX inclusion and Move to FOSSi Foundation

The Solderpad Hardware License (SHL) was created by open source legal expert, Andrew Katz, as a “patched” version of Apache 2.0 which sought to extend the benefits of the popular software license to free and open source hardware designs. Achieving this primarily by updating the language used to make this… Read More

AB Open Joins OpenHW Group to Help Grow The Open Hardware Ecosystem

AB Open is proud to announce its membership of OpenHW Group, a not-for-profit organisation founded to provide an infrastructure for open hardware development with a focus on free and open source silicon, tools, and related software. Founded in June 2019, OpenHW Group aims to encourage adoption of free and open… Read More

Ten Years of Open Source Hardware

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the inaugural meeting of the Open Source Hardware User Group (OSHUG). As such it seemed only appropriate to take a look back over the past decade at not only the history of OSHUG, but some of the history and the future of open hardware also. Read More

Wuthering Bytes Early Bird Tickets Now Available as Festival Day Talks Confirmed

The first five talks for the Wuthering Bytes Festival Day, to take place in Hebden Bridge on the 30th of August 2019, have now been confirmed – along with an attendee gift kindly supplied by electronics studio Boldport. Produced by AB Open as part of its contribution to the… Read More

Building a RISC-V PC

How we assembled a RISC-V desktop computer. (video at the bottom of this post.) While it’s clear that the most significant opportunities for RISC-V will be in democratising custom silicon for accelerating specific tasks and enabling new applications — and it’s already driving a renaissance in novel computer architectures, for… Read More

Wuthering Bytes Launches 2019 Call for Participation

AB Open is pleased to announce a call for participation (CFP) in Wuthering Bytes, the annual community technology festival it produces, seeking those interested in hosting a talk, workshop, roundtable, or other event between Friday the 30th of August and Sunday the 8th of September. Wuthering Bytes — produced by… Read More

AB Open Confirms Sponsorship of ORConf 2018

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

Silicon Dreams: RISC-V from Emulation to FPGA to ASIC

When working with brand-new silicon designs, particularly free and open source silicon, there’s a bit of a bootstrapping issue: you want to write software for the new silicon, but there’s no silicon yet available; nobody wants to go to the expense of making the silicon, meanwhile, when there’s no software… Read More

OSHCamp 2017 Videos Now Available

We’re pleased to announce that talks from the Open Source Hardware Camp (OSHCamp) 2017 are now available on the AB Open YouTube channel, covering topics from the RISC-V instruction set and machine learning for embedded systems through to the BBC micro:bit and garden automation. Recorded during OSHCamp 2017, the annual… Read More

Wuthering Bytes 2017 Festival Day Video

Wuthering Bytes 2017 Festival Day uploaded to YouTube. We’re pleased to announce that video from the following talks has now been edited and uploaded to YouTube: Build communities, not products — Ian Drysdale Balancing the very hot and the very cold – how do you keep something “just right” in… Read More

Learning to Speak Machine, Caroline Gorski — Wuthering Bytes 2017 (VIDEO)

The next video from Wuthering Bytes 2017 to be edited and published to YouTube is of Caroline Gorski’s talk at Festival Day. Caroline is a commercial technologist, strategist and story-teller, who at the time was Head of Internet of Things at the Digital Catapult, and has since gone to… Read More

Dr David Hartley FBCS — Wuthering Bytes 2017 Keynote (VIDEO)

Last year we were truly honoured to have Dr David Hartley FBCS give the opening keynote at the Wuthering Bytes festival. Amongst his many achievements, Dr Hartley was Director of the University of Cambridge Computing Service from 1970–1994, Chief Executive of United Kingdom Joint Academic Network (JANET) 1994–1997, and he… Read More