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.

• Yi Zhang finished the Milkymist One box design and sent it off to the box makers.

• Sebastien Bourdeauducq wrote a 4-page Milkymist One brochure. [5]

• 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
• Jon Phillips gave a talk about Milkymist One at FISL 12 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. [6] [7]

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 ported the Namuru GPS correlator to the Milkymist SoC (thanks to Fabrizio Tapper and Peter Mumford for their support). This core will allow speedup of the correlation process for getting a fix and tracking GPS satellites. Work continues on the OpenSourceGPS receiver which will provide the high level software interface to process the navigation data tracked by Namuru. Namuru port to Milkymist, Namuru datasheet, OpenSourceGPS code repository, OpenSourceGPS documentation
• David Kühling helped port the SoftGNSS matlab code to GNU Octave. This will allow offline analysis of raw data for a variety of GPS front-ends. SoftGNSS repo
• 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]

• Xiangfu Liu setup the Milkymist OpenWrt daily build.
• Sebastien Bourdeauducq gave a Milkymist talk at THSF 2011 (Toulouse Hacker Space Factory) on May 28, 2011.

NanoNote

• Werner Almesberger continued his outstanding work on copyleft hardware fundamentals with great posts about CAD tool comparison, [8], [9], [10]
• Werner wrote wonderfully illustrated production and testing process documentation for the ben-wpan 802.15.4 boards. A total of five pages, overview page and four detail pages. Announcement Overview

Production and testing process flowchart.

• Werner's packageology http://lists.en.qi-hardware.com/pipermail/discussion/2011-July/008483.html
• Werner's anatomy of a datasheet http://lists.en.qi-hardware.com/pipermail/discussion/2011-July/008487.html
• Werner published a test point map for the Ben NanoNote. [11]

Ben NanoNote test point map, SoC mappings here

• Werner Almesberger gave a talk on copyleft hardware at FISL 12 in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

• sujan and zedstar took some NanoNotes on a trip to Nepal. We don't really know what happened, but got this nice picture back...

Ben NanoNote in Nepal

• Jadon Dutra made two nice Ben NanoNote tutorial videos. [12]

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 to rest on pure silicon. 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.