Category: AB Open

News and updates on developments at AB Open.

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

Getting Started with the HiFive Unleashed

Creating a new bootable Micro SD card, building a custom Poky Linux system, and running Debian on the world’s first RISC-V-based, Linux-capable development board. The HiFive Unleashed was unveiled back at FOSDEM only a matter of months ago and so, unsurprisingly, it’s still relatively early days for Linux… Read More

Unique Circumference Datacentre-in-a-Box Clusters hit Crowd Supply

Halifax, UK, 18thMay 2018 —Open-source and technical communities consultancy AB Open and its hardware division Ground Electronics have launch a campaign for Circumference, a family of custom-designed desktop cluster computing units based around the popular Raspberry Pi and UDOO x86 single-board computer families. Available to pre-order now on crowdfunding… Read More

Six Years of Progress in Open Source Mobile Infrastructure

A look at open source cellular progress over the past six years and more recent developments which suggest that a bright future lays ahead. Six years ago today The H – Open published an article I wrote entitled, Building a GSM network with open source. In this I covered… Read More

Ground Electronics Unveils the Circumference Pi Cluster

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