Tag: FOSS

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

GNU Tools Cauldron Comes to Manchester (UK) in September

Annual conference for developers of the GNU Toolchain to be hosted at University of Manchester from the 7th through to 9th September 2018. The GNU Tools Cauldron is an annual fixture in the calendar of developers of GCC, GDB, binutils and runtimes etc. Having previously been hosted at venues including… 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

CRU: Circumference, the Pi 3 B+, El Correo Libre, SDR, and More

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

Linux Foundation Launches IoT-Focused ACRN Hypervisor

The Linux Foundation has announced the ACRN (pronounced “Acorn”) Project, an effort to develop a reference hypervisor for the Internet of Things (IoT) in the face of existing solutions being too bulky and unwieldy for embedded use. “With project ACRN, embedded developers have a new, immediately available hypervisor option,” claims… Read More

CRU: PULP Launches, RISC-V Fedora, LoRa, and More

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… Read More

Fedora Releases RISC-V Disk Images, Praises QEMU Patch Set

Support 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… Read More

Digi-Key Releases Open KiCad Parts Library

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… 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