The PULP (Parallel Ultra Low Power) Platform, a joint project between ETH Zurich and University of Bologna, had a busy February beginning with the release of the PULPissimo RISC-V microcontroller core, designed to take over from the more basic PULPino.

“Today we are happy to announce PULPissimo, a new single-core RISC-V based open-source microcontroller system which is a significant step ahead in terms of efficiency and completeness with respect to the more basic PULPino, offering a number of new features,” explains Davide Rosse in the announcement. These improvements include an autonomous input/output subsystem dubbed micro direct memory access (uDMA) for improved energy efficiency, a new memory subsystem with improved performance and power management, support for hardware processing engine (HWPE) accelerators with direct memory access, a new interrupt controller, additional peripherals, and a new software development kit.

“PULPissimo, like its smaller brother PULPino, is a single-core platform and supports all our 32-bit RISC-V cores: RI5CY, as well as Zero- and Micro-RI5CY,” Davide continues. “and we are not done yet!”

More information on the PULPissimo is available on the project’s GitHub repository, under the permissive SolderPad Hardware Licence v0.51.

PULPissimo was quickly followed by the release of Ariane, a Linux-compatible 64-bit application-class RISC-V core design, published under the permissive Solderpad Hardware Licence.

A joint effort between ETH Zurich and the University of Bologna, Ariane marks the pair’s first high-performance application-class RISC-V core intellectual property (IP) with mainstream Linux kernel compatibility. Based on the open 64-bit RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) with the base integer instruction set, multiplication and division, and compressed instruction extensions – RV64-IMC – the core is written in System Verilog and is available to download in its initial release form immediately.

Although the design is usable as-is, the PULP team has confirmed it has further enhancements planned. “While developing Ariane it has become evident that, in order to support Linux, the atomic extension is going to be mandatory. While the core is currently booting Linux by emulating Atomics in BBL (in a single core environment this is trivially met by disabling interrupts) this is not the behaviour which is intended,” the team’s documentation explains. “For that reason we are going to fully support all atomic extensions in the very near future. Furthermore, we have major IPC [Instructions Per Cycle] improvements planned. Specifically this will resolve about the way branches and jumps are currently handled in the core.

The full Ariane IP is available now from the group’s GitHub repository.

Support, meanwhile, for Linux on the open RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) continues to improve, with patches to the QEMU emulator proving stable enough for the Fedora project to build and distribute RISC-V bootable disk images.

Announced on the RISC-V software development mailing list late last night by Red Hat’s Richard Jones, the disk images provide what Richard describes as “a reasonable although still rather minimal Linux distro for RISC-V development” featuring an OpenSSH server, around 6,000 packages including most core Fedora packages, Perl 5.26, Python 2.7 and 3.6, and GCC 7.3.1. The caveats: support for systemd is still in progress, and the C++ compiler – though not the C compiler – is known to be faulty, with a fix in the works.

The disk images are built in the open-source QEMU emulator and machine virtualisation platform, which has ongoing patches for RISC-V support led by Michael Clark. Confirmation of the stability of these patches was provided by Richard to the QEMU mailing list in a post describing the platform’s patch set as “rock solid.”

The Fedora RISC-V disk images are available for download now from the Fedora People website, and can be booted on RISC-V hardware or Richard’s patched QEMU build.

Parts supplier Digi-Key has announced its support for the open-source KiCad printed circuit board (PCB) and schematic design tool with the release of 1,000 common parts in a permissively-licensed library.

“With more restrictive licensing or licenses that don’t align with some of our customers’ needs, some users are looking to find a replacement EDA tool and are flocking to KiCad which is the most popular, open source option available,” explains Randall Restle, vice president of applications engineering at Digi-Key, of his company’s efforts. “Now, electrical engineers and students have a choice they can stick with forever without fear of restrictive licenses.”

The parts have been specially chosen as the most likely to be used yet not yet available within KiCad’s main library, and feature in a library with schematic symbols and PCB footprints along with additional fields which include part numbers and links to data sheets. The library is being released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 (CC-BY-SA), with a waiver for Article 3 which means that circuit designs and generated files using the library do not have to be licensed CC-BY-SA themselves.

The library, described by Digi-Key as being in beta status, is available now from the company’s GitHub repository.

The Things Network has announced integration with the Collos collaborative location service from Semtech to enable geolocation via TDOA (Time Difference of Arrival) and RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator), with the option of Wi-Fi 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 courtesy of a new integration that is available with immediate effect via The Things Network Console, which allows applications to be configured for use with the new Collos multi-protocol collaborative location service from Semtech.

Currently in private preview, limited early access is being provided at this stage and developers can apply for a login via a web form. Documentation for setting up the integration is already available and it appears that this should be simple enough once you have access to the service and a key for use with your application.

Presumably a minimum of 3 or 4 gateways will be required for localisation via LoRaWAN, with these each also requiring to be equipped with GPS or a similar high accuracy time source if using the time difference of arrival (TDOA) method.

Example use cases include shipment, pet and livestock tracking. Using LoRaWAN, an accuracy of 2km is quoted for tracking of shipments on the road, with “house & street” level accuracy for a pet in an urban environment and using Wi-Fi fix + LoRaWAN. With livestock 100m accuracy is quoted for LoRaWAN-only in a field/grazing environment.

In other LoRa news Outernet, a project to provide multimedia data bursts via satellite to otherwise disconnected populations, has announced what it believes to be a world record for LoRa communication distances: a 71,572 kilometres round-trip.

Designed to provide multimedia content delivery where no traditional infrastructure is available – from less-developed countries through to disaster areas – Outernet’s latest incarnation uses the LoRa long-range radio modulation standard to vastly reduce the complexity of the hardware required at the ground station, with the group’s latest experiment working on a bare off-the-shelf low-noise block downconverter (LNB) without any attached satellite dish.

Compared to previous Outernet implementations – the first using the DVB-S standard to achieve 100kb/s data rate and requiring an expensive 60cm satellite dish which proved extremely difficult for users to align, and a simpler follow-up which was more portable and easier to use but cost significantly more for spectrum leasing and achieved just 2kb/s – the experimental LoRa version achieves 30kb/s with a view to increasing to 100kb/s in the near future, at a considerably lower operational cost.

Outernet’s use of LoRa for low-cost long-range satellite communications echoes Lacuna Space, which recently demonstrated its plan to use a constellation of low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites to expand the LoRaWAN network globally.

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 acquired by LogMeIn in 2011 and renamed again to Cosm then quickly switching to its current Xively moniker – is designed to offer Platform as a Service (PaaS) functionality for the Internet of Things (IoT). Based on the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) standard, Xively provides directory services, data services, a trust engine, and web-based application management for everything from a single Arduino through to vast networks of devices – and in 2011 was used by volunteers to interlink Geiger counters to monitor the fallout from Japanese nuclear incidents.

“By 2020, it’s estimated that about 20 billion connected things will come online, and analytics and data storage in the cloud are now the cornerstone of any successful IoT solution,” says Google’s Antony Passemard of his company’s motivations for the deal. “This acquisition, subject to closing conditions, will complement Google Cloud’s effort to provide a fully managed IoT service that easily and securely connects, manages, and ingests data from globally dispersed devices. With the addition of Xively’s robust, enterprise-ready IoT platform, we can accelerate our customers’ timeline from IoT vision to product, as they look to build their connected business.”

The Xively platform is to be integrated with Google’s existing Cloud IoT Core service, the company has confirmed. Financial terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed.

Finally, 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 third generation of development boards take advantage of the latest Bluetooth 5 standard to allow for full mesh networking whereby each node in the network connects to its nearest neighbours for communication to any other node on the network. Where one or more nodes then has further connectivity to a wide-area network (WAN), each device within the mesh can share that connectivity – and without the need to deploy any additional hardware.

The new boards come in three flavours: the base Xenon features Bluetooth 5 mesh and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) wireless networking only; the Argon adds Wi-Fi connectivity alongside the Bluetooth options; and the Boron allows for 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) or, in a higher-priced model, 2G/3G cellular connectivity alongside Bluetooth. All include the Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 system-on-chip (SoC) at their heart, featuring a 32-bit Arm Cortx-M4F processor running at 64MHz, 1MB of flash storage, 256KB of RAM, Bluetooth 5, IEEE 802.15.4 support, and an additional 2MB of flash storage connected via serial peripheral interface (SPI).

Pre-orders for the boards are available now from the official website, priced at a discounted $9 for the Xenon, $15 for the Argon, and $29 for the Boron LTE (around £6.50, £10.50, and £20.50 respectively, excluding taxes.)