News

The latest on developments at AB Open and across the wider community.

DirtyPCBs Previews DirtyCables, New Editor Software

Dangerous Prototypes’ DirtyPCBs, a popular service for low-cost production of printed circuit boards, is expanding its custom cable offering and making it a dedicated website – called, unsurprisingly, DirtyCables. Originally based on a simple script designed to consolidate internal PCB orders for submission to low-cost manufacturers in China, DirtyPCBs quickly… Read More

Arm Offers Free-as-in-Beer Cortex IP to Combat FOSSi Threat

Cambridge-based processor giant Arm has telegraphed increasing concern regarding the threat from free and open source silicon (FOSSi) cores, offering engineers access to free-as-in-beer Cortex-M intellectual property (IP) in an attempt to keep them within its own ecosystem. That interest in free and open source silicon (FOSSi) has been growing… Read More

A Fernvale Kit in Ground Electronics Housing

Sysmocom Discounts Fernvale Open-Source GSM Development Kits

Sysmocom’s Harald Welte has announced a steep discount on his company’s stock of Fernvale kits, development boards put together by Andrew ‘bunnie’ Huang and Sean ‘Xobs’ Cross for cellular networking projects, dropping the price per kit from €110 to €58.82 (excluding VAT.) Unveiled during a presentation at the 31c3… Read More

Iridium, Amazon Partner on Globe-Spanning Satellite IoT Network

Satellite communications giant Iridium has announced a partnership with Amazon’s Web Services arm to launch a globe-spanning cloud-powered communications network for the Internet of Things (IoT): Iridium CloudConnect. Based on Iridium’s constellation of 66 cross-linked communications satellites, Iridium CloudConnect ties the company’s satellites into the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud… Read More

Embecosm's Buildroot RISC-V Patch Set in Action

Embecosm’s Mark Corbin Adds RISC-V Support to Buildroot

Buildroot, a tool for easily generating complete Linux system images for embedded platforms through cross-compilation, has announced official support for the open RISC-V instruction set architecture following the merging of a patch set by Embecosm’s Mark Corbin. Merged into the Buildroot source this weekend, as confirmed on the project’s… Read More

Western Digital's Fedora on RISC-V Demonstration

Western Digital Releases Fedora Desktop on RISC-V Tutorial

Storage giant Western Digital has published full instructions for building the Gnome Desktop variant of the Fedora Linux distribution for RISC-V, targeting the SiFive HiFive Unleashed development board. As part of Western Digital’s push to ship more than a billion RISC-V cores per year, as it moves away from… Read More

Wilson Snyder Officially Launches Verilator 4.0 at ORConf 2018

Project maintainer Wilson Snyder formally announced Verilator 4.0 at the ORConf open silicon event this weekend, following a month’s beta-testing of the popular Verilog hardware description language (HDL) simulator. Originally developed in 1994 by a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) Core Logic Group team led by Paul Wasson for the conversion… Read More

Ground Electronics' SiFive HiFive Unleashed Case

CRU: RISC-V Hits Consumer Products, GSM Freed, Festival of Maintenance, and More

Huami, a subsidiary of Chinese electronics specialist Xiaomi, has announced a new family of smartwatches and fitness wearables, and in doing so is set to become the first company to bring a product based on the open RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) to the consumer market. Announced by Huami at… Read More

Huami Announces RISC-V Based Fitness Wearables, Smartwatch

PULP Platform Announces RISC-V HERO Heterogeneous Research Platform

The Parallel Ultra-Low Power (PULP) Platform team has announced the release of its latest creation: HERO, the open heterogeneous research platform combining an FPGA-based RISC-V many-core accelerator with an Arm Cortex-A host processor. “HERO combines a PULP-based open-source parallel many-core accelerator implemented on FPGA with a hard ARM Cortex-A multicore… Read More

OpenMV Launches MicroPython-Powered Cam H7 Crowdfunding Campaign

OpenMV, an open-source machine vision start-up founded by Kwabena W. Agyeman and Ibrahim Abdalkader, has launched a crowdfunding campaign for its latest creation: an open camera module based on the popular MicroPython environment. “The OpenMV project is about creating low-cost, extensible, Python powered, machine vision modules and aims at becoming… Read More

OsmocomBB SDR PHY Project Achieves GSM-on-Any-Frequency Milestone

OsmocomBB SDR PHY, a project to replace the currently-proprietary Layer 1 of the Osmocom GSM mobile baseband stack, has announced a major milestone: unlocking the ability to run a cellular network on any radio frequency, including unlicensed frequencies. The Osmocom project was founded with a laudable goal: to create a… Read More