Copyleft Hardware News 2011-08-08

Copying is an act of love. Please copy & share.
Mimi and Eunice by Nina Paley

• Jon Phillips made two slide decks about the Ben NanoNote and Milkymist One. [1]

Milkymist

• Lars-Peter Clausen and Michael Walle significantly improved Linux 3.0 on Milkymist One. [2]
• Lars-Peter Clausen got an OpenWrt userland to run on Milkymist One, with static linking and uClibc. [3]
• Wolfson Microelectronics' WM9707 audio codec helped reduce audio noise on the Milkymist One RC3 video synthesizer by 90%, from about 500 mV to about 50 mV. Earlier runs used a National Semiconductor LM4550B codec. [4]
• Christopher Adam designed a new Milkymist logo and selected the free Orbitron font for logo and branding.

svg pdf

• roh from Raumfahrtagentur engraved a mirror version of the new Milkymist One logo on the inside of the top acrylic for the upcoming RC3 run.

Milkymist One logo on acrylic.

• Lattice Semiconductor released version 3.8 of the Mico32 core, which among small fixes comes with a major cleanup of the licensing header at the top of every source file. Earlier licensing headers were hard to understand and got some people to doubt the openess of the core. The new headers make the Mico32 core indisputably open source and GPL compatible. Lattice Download Comparison of old and new licensing header
• presentation http://lekernel.net/presentations/Milkymist_THSF2011/mm_thsf.pdf
• Jon Phillips gave a talk about Milkymist One at FISL 12 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. [5] [6]

Jon Phillips at FISL 12 (July 2, 2011, Porto Alegre, Brazil). [46:17 min, 78 MB]

• Adam Wang continued with Milkymist One RC3 production testing. In good copyleft style the production testing software is free software, and the test results for each board are tracked online for the benefit of future runs of the same or improved hardware. RC3 Test Results Test Software

Count it - thirteen wires in and out of Milkymist One during production testing.

• Cristian Paul had ported the namuru correlator to the mm1 soc (thanks Fabrizio Tapper and Peter Mumford for valious support), this IP core will allow to speed up the correlation process for getting a fix and track gps satellites, WIP is currently going the osgps receiver that will provide a high level software interface to process navigation data tracked with namuru (link to repo, namuru specs??..)

correlator port mm https://github.com/kristianpaul/milkymist/tree/gps-sdr-testing/cores/namuru datasheet namutu http://www.gmat.unsw.edu.au/namuru/documents/Namuru_GPS_datasheet.pdf

Also with the key help of David K, the SoftGNSS matlab code is now finally ported (link to repo) to octave, this also will allow offline analysis of raw real-data for a variety gps front-ends in the market.

code SoftGNSS https://github.com/kristianpaul/SoftGNSS

• Xiangfu Liu made the best quality recording of a Milkymist One performance so far.

Starfield rendered by Milkymist One. [0:57 min, 6.5 MB]

NanoNote

• Werner Almesberger continued his outstanding work on copyleft hardware fundamentals with great posts about CAD tool comparison, [7], [8], [9] - also package comparison, thoughts on measuring quality of datasheets
• Werner Almesberger gave a talk on copyleft hardware at FISL12 in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

• Werner documented and implemented the production and testing process for ben-wpan 802.15.4 boards. http://lists.en.qi-hardware.com/pipermail/discussion/2011-May/008076.html
• sujan and zedstar took x NanoNotes to Nepal, where they...

Ben NanoNote in Nepal

• Jadon Dutra made two nice Ben NanoNote tutorial videos. [10]

Tutorial: Hello World program on Ben NanoNote. [5:43 min, 52 MB]

Tutorial: How to boot Ben NanoNote into USB mode. [2:23 min, 38 MB]

OpenLase

• David from Tuxbrain found out about OpenLase, an open laser projector started by Hector Martin "marcan". We are learning about lasers, galvos, dichros and more now and are evaluating how to make good copyleft hardware out of this one day. Thanks David for bringing this up! OpenLase blog OpenLase sources

OpenLase laser projector. [2:17 min, 20 MB]

Nyan cat head at 100x zoom. The entire cat is around 600 microns long and 200 microns high.

Nyan cat head at 400x zoom. Pixels are 20 microns square.

Homebrew CMOS and MEMS foundry

• Andrew Zonenberg convinced The Nyan Cat to take a short break from her space travels and rest on his silicon wafer. This comes as part of Andrew's homebrew MEMS project by lithographic projection. The world's smallest nyan cat. Well done! Lab Notes Pictures

Nyon cat in the Toped IC layout editor.

Error creating thumbnail: sh: 1: /usr/bin/convert: not found Nyan cat head at 100x zoom. The entire cat is around 600 microns long and 200 microns high.

Error creating thumbnail: sh: 1: /usr/bin/convert: not found Nyan cat head at 400x zoom. Pixels are 20 microns square.