Community news 2010-11-01

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Major

• Werner Almesberger completed his work on a schematics history tool for KiCad, which went live on the Qi projects server. Commits will now automatically generate PDF schematics, as well as a visual history of schematics changes (see the Xué video camera schematics history for a particularly nice example).

• Lars-Peter Clausen successfully submitted a large chunk of Ben NanoNote patches that now appeared in the kernel.org Linux 2.6.36 release - the first NanoNote and XBurst related patches in kernel.org. Congratulations!
• Sharism sold out the first 1000 Ben NanoNotes, and produced another 1000 which are now waiting for new customers in their Hong Kong warehouse. The new Bens were reflashed with an OpenWrt 2010-09-14 image. Order from Tuxbrain in the EU or from Sharism in Hong Kong for the rest of the world.

Bootscreen of OpenWrt 2010-09-14 image on new Ben NanoNotes

NanoNote

Ben exploded, thanks to Werner Almesberger and Solidify

• Werner Almesberger continued with his collection of raw 3D scans of NanoNote mechanical parts.
• Victor Remolina from Tuxbrain was so excited about Werner's new Solidify tool that he decided to write a blog post praising Werner's work. [1]
• Special Thanks to the people who helped with NanoNote OpenWrt images and packages in recent months (alphabetically from commitlog): Alan Post, Axel Lin, Ayla, bartbes, David Kühling, Erwin Lopez, Jiri Brozovsky, kristianpaul, kyak, Lars-Peter Clausen, Maarten ter Huurne, Mirko Vogt, Neil Stockbridge, Niels Kummerfeldt, Xiangfu Liu.
  THANK YOU ALL, without you the NanoNote could not move forward.
• Jane Andreas made a crocheted case for her Ben, source codes to follow later. [2]

Ben warm and safe inside the yarn, thanks to Jane Andreas

• Hanz The Beez' Bezemer wrote three episodes about his life with Ben (one, two, three).
• Tuxbrain is now selling the NanoNote Nanowar Special Edition featuring Nanowar's newly released album Into Gay Pride Ride, both of which were released September 15. See the press release for more, and make sure to visit Tuxbrain's shop if you want one. [3]

Potowotominimak, Mr Baffo and Mohammed Abdul from Nanowar of Steel with NanoNote

• Ornotermes had the idea to use the uSD slot for a breakout board. Ornotermes published a beautifully illustrated DIY guide, and Werner made ben-blinkenlights KiCad files and demo app.

In Ornotermes lab, things start to happen...

Tuxbrain demoing blinkenlights with the breakout board [2:03 min, 10 MB]

• Xiangfu Liu got xburst-tools and fped into Debian/NEW (not unstable yet). [4]
• kyak ported gcc-mips to the NanoNote in OpenWrt. [5]

SIE

• Professor Carlos Camargo from the National University of Colombia in Bogota decided to use the XBurst-FPGA board SIE for his students in the 2010/2011 academic period.
• 65 SIE boards were produced, 54 of which where shipped out to Carlos students who are now using them.
• We learnt some valuable lessons from the run, see the V2 errata or manufacturing videos and pictures. You can see a cool video showing a Yamaha pick and place machine mounting SIE boards here:

Yamaha Motor YV100Xg pick and place machine mounts components onto SIE v2 boards, needs about 40 seconds per board. [3:11 min, 68.5 MB]

Milkymist

• Sébastien Bourdeauducq released Milkymist v0.9, including many bug fixes, USB, MIDI and JTAG improvements. See the release announcement for a full list.
• Sharism and Sébastien Bourdeauducq decided to kickoff a run of 35 Milkymist One RC2 boards, in time for the 27C3 conference in Berlin in late December. Fully functioning RC2 boards will be offered for 350 USD plus shipping. You can follow the progress on the RC2 schedule page.
• Sébastien ran into a serious memory instability bug, but the nice people from Xilinx Paris office allowed him to use their 20Gs/s Agilent Infiniium 54855A oscilloscope with 6 GHz bandwidth and a 7 GHz Agilent differential probe for measurements to track down the bug, and improve board stability overall. Read the interesting full measurements report for more.

Milkymist One RC1 voltage instability on DRAM refresh.

• Even though the Xilinx measurements lead to several additions to our RC1 errata list, in the end it turned out that the 'memory instability' bug was in fact a bug in USB event handling, and fixed.
• Sébastien ran Qt4 tests on Milkymist One to stress-test GCC and LM32. Result for now is that C++ support on LM32 needs improvements.
• Yanjun Luo finished the design and then produced 4 JTAG-serial daughterboards.

JTAG-serial daughterboard on Milkymist One RC1, made by Yanjun Luo

• Michael Walle added support for Spartan-6 JTAG in OpenOCD and for the JTAG-serial board in UrJTAG. [6] [7]
• Chitlesh Goorah announced support for the Milkymist toolchain in fedora Electronic Lab, and setup a project tracking page. We can later create Milkymist development USB sticks. [8]
• Sébastien got many RTEMS features and drivers to work - shell, rendering engine, sound, graphics acceleration as well as the Ethernet, DMX and infrared drivers. [9] [10]
• Takeshi Matsuya continued to uplevel LM32 support in the Linux kernel, and can boot Linux 2.6.36+ on Milkymist One. [11]

Xué

• Andrés Calderón and Juan Briñez continued working on the KiCad design of our upcoming Milkymist-based video camera named Xué. There were 113 commits in August when things started, 8 more in September and 17 in October.
• Schematics are finished and schematics review and feedback is more than welcome.
• Layout is 95% finished, see yourself...

External links

• The H. open - Ben NanoNote support coming in 2.6.36
• Ornotermes uSD breakout board illustrated DIY guide
• Linux Journal October 2010, titled "Command Line", has a 4-page article about the Ben NanoNote
• Yamaha Motor pick and place machines
• ASML TWINSCAN lithography systems for IC production
• Agilent Infiniium oscilloscopes
• fedora Electronic Lab - Milkymist toolchain support