Copyleft Hardware News 2011-08-08

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Mimi and Eunice by Nina Paley

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Product	Starting At	Shipping
Ben NanoNote	99 USD/EUR	Tuxbrain for Europe Sharism for US/Japan/others
atben-atusb Combo	59,00 EUR	Tuxbrain
Elphel 353	880 USD	Elphel
Elphel Eyesis	24,000 USD	Elphel

Projects

Homebrew CMOS and MEMS foundry

• Andrew Zonenberg sighted The Nyan Cat on silicon!
  This Nyanotechnology comes as part of Andrew's homebrew MEMS project by lithographic projection, the world's smallest nyan cat. His next goal is a comb drive. Lab Notes Pictures

Nyan cat head at 100x zoom. The entire cat is around 600 microns long and 360 microns high.

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

Nyon cat in the Toped IC layout editor.

Milkymist

• Xiangfu Liu made recordings of four Milkymist One patches.

Starfield [57 s, 6.5 MB, download]	The Piper [1:10 min, 12.42 MB, download]
Slow Shift Matrix [1:8 min, 15.28 MB, download]	A Matter of Taste [1:10 min, 22.53 MB, download]

• Lars-Peter Clausen and Michael Walle improved Linux 3.0 on Milkymist One. [1]
• Lars-Peter Clausen ported an OpenWrt userland to Milkymist One, with static linking and uClibc. [2]
• Xiangfu Liu setup daily builds of OpenWrt for Milkymist One. [3]
• 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
• Christopher Adams 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 logo on the inside of the top acrylic for the upcoming RC3 run.

svg pdf

Milkymist One logo on acrylic.

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

PDF file sent to the printshop, prepared from a Scribus original.

Printed and die-cut box.

• Adam Wang continued with Milkymist One RC3 production testing.
  All production testing software is free software, results are tracked online.

Thirteen wires in and out of Milkymist One during production testing.

• 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]
• 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
• Jon Phillips gave a talk about Milkymist One at FISL 12 in Porto Alegre, Brazil (slides of talk below). [5] [6]

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

atben/atusb

• Werner finished designing the ben-wpan boards, a set of IEEE 802.15.4 wireless dongles. [7]

Range of ben-wpan boards measured at Werner's apartment in Buenos Aires (dimensions in cm).

• 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 135 atben and 117 atusb boards and started selling on June 13.
  One month later, David reported sales of 44 atben and 42 atusb boards.

David depanelizing PCBs

atben

atusb

Copyleft Hardware Explained

• Werner Almesberger published a two part comparison of Free scripted CAD tools - Part 1, Part2.

Cadmium	CGAL	OpenCSG, showing artefacts
OpenSCAD	OpenSCAD, modeling artefact (internal structure)	OpenSCAD, modeling artefact (reversed face)

• The names of component packages are often confusing and vary among manufacturers. This is Werner's first step (for small logic gates) towards a packageology.
• Some data sheets don't contain all the information necessary to make Copyleft Hardware. Here is Werner's anatomy of a datasheet.

NanoNote

• Jadon Dutra made two nice Ben NanoNote tutorial videos. [8]

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

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

• 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

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

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

OpenLase prototype used in making the video.

Detail of galvo (Galvanometer).

Presentations, Slides, Brochures

Jon,Werner and Sebastien talked about our projects, here's an opportunity to catch up and browse through slide decks, presentations, and a brochure.

Jon's slide deck on Milkymist One

(announcement, video)

Jon's slide deck on Copyleft Hardware

(announcement)

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 [10])

A happy continued summer everyone (winter for Werner). Cheers.