Category: Community

Get the latest news on developments in the wider community and topics including wireless, embedded and open source silicon.

The Things Network Launches Collos Geolocation Integration

Integration with the Collos collaborative location service from Semtech enables geolocation via TDOA and RSSI, with the option of WiFi augmented TDOA for WLAN enabled nodes. Initiator of The Things Network, Wienke Giezeman, this morning announced that geolocation over LoRa is now available on The Things Network. This comes… Read More

Google Acquires Xively for IoT PaaS Push

Advertising giant Google has announced it is pushing further into the Internet of Things (IoT) with the planned acquisition of cloud data platform Xively from current owner LogMeIn. Xively – originally a project of architect Usman Haque under the working name EnvironmentXML, then launching as Pachube (pronounced “patch-bay”) before being… Read More

Particle Announces Embedded Mesh Network Development Boards

Internet of Things (IoT) specialist Particle has announced the impending launch of a trio of development boards with Bluetooth 5 mesh networking capabilities, alongside Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Wi-Fi, and cellular connectivity. Designed to make it easier to deploy sensor networks and control systems where traditional infrastructure isn’t available, Particle’s… Read More

PULPissimo RISC-V Microcontroller Core Released

The PULP (Parallel Ultra Low Power) Platform, a joint project between ETH Zurich and University of Bologna, has announced the release of the PULPissimo RISC-V microcontroller core, designed to take over from the more basic PULPino – and is also teasing a 64-bit multi-core Linux-ready RISC-V core dubbed Ariane. “Today… Read More

CRU: Events, HiFive Unleashed, Open ASIC Design and More

The Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation has announced that ORConf 2018 will be held over the weekend of September 21st to 23rd in Gdansk, Poland. Now in its seventh year, ORConf is a free-to-attend conference for open source digital, semiconductor, and embedded systems design engineers. What started… Read More

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

Open Source Software Compliance in the Supply Chain Event (London, 22/03)

On Thursday 22nd March the BCS Open Source Specialist Group and Open Source Hardware User Group will host a free-to-attend event dedicated to the topic of open source software compliance in the supply chain. The ever increasing complexity of embedded device software stacks, coupled with the proliferation of new mechanisms… Read More

Bunnie Huang on Open-Source, Low-Cost ASIC Design

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has published an interview with noted engineer Andrew ‘Bunnie’ Huang on the topic of how small teams can design custom silicon in a constrained budget. “FPGAs [Field Programmable Gate Arrays] waste a large amount of silicon compared with an ASIC [Application… Read More

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

Multi-core 64-bit Linux-capable RISC-V Board Unveiled and Available to Pre-order

HiFive Unleashed demonstrated at FOSDEM 2018 running Linux, presentation software and a Quake port, with first boards to ship in around 8 weeks time. In a presentation entitled, Igniting the Open Hardware Ecosystem with RISC-V, we first heard from SiFive’s Palmer Dabbelt, who provided a background to… Read More

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

ORConf 2018 Announced

The Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation has announced that ORConf 2018 will be held over the weekend of September 21st to 23rd in Gdansk, Poland. Now in its seventh year, ORConf is a free to attend conference for open source digital, semiconductor and embedded systems design engineers. Read More