Copyleft Hardware News 2011-08-08
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Copying is an act of love. Please copy & share.
Mimi and Eunice by Nina Paley
Contents |
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Join the new era of computing, slow fidelity on the freedom channel, and buy the world's best copyleft hardware
- Elphel 353
- Ben NanoNote
- Milkymist One
- ben-wpan
Projects
Milkymist
- Lars-Peter Clausen and Michael Walle significantly improved Linux 3.0 on Milkymist One. [1]
- Lars-Peter Clausen got an OpenWrt userland to run on Milkymist One, with static linking and uClibc. [2]
- 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. [3]
- Christopher Adam designed a new Milkymist logo and selected the free Orbitron font for logo and branding.
- 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.
- 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. [4] [5]
- 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
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.
- Xiangfu Liu setup the Milkymist OpenWrt daily build.
NanoNote
OpenCSG, showing artefacts
OpenSCAD, modeling artefact (internal structure)
OpenSCAD, modeling artefact (reversed face)
- Werner finished the design of the ben-wpan boards. [6]
- Werner wrote documentation and tools for the production and testing process of ben-wpan 802.15.4 boards. A total of five pages, overview page and four detail pages. Announcement Overview
Production and testing process flowchart.
- Tuxbrain produced the first batch of atben and atusb boards and started sales on June 13. [7] [8]
David depanelizing PCBs
atben
atusb
- 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. [9]
Ben NanoNote test point map, SoC mappings here
- 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. [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, galvanometers, dichroic mirrors 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
Prototype used in making the video.
Detail of galvo (Galvanometer).
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.
Presentations, Slides, Brochures
Several people gave talks about copyleft hardware projects worldwide, here's an opportunity to browse through slide decks, presentations, and a brochure.
Jon's slide deck on Milkymist One
Jon's slide deck on Copyleft Hardware
Werner's talk at FISL 12 in Porto Alegre about Copyleft Hardware
(source FISL 12 in Porto Alegre, Brazil)
Sebastien's talk at THSF 2011 in Toulouse about Milkymist One
(source THSF 2011 Toulouse Hacker Space Factory, May 28, 2011)
Sebastien's Milkymist One brochure
(source [11])
