Most microcontroller manufacturers give you some kind of free development toolchain or IDE with their silicon products. Often it’s crippled, closed source, and a large download. This is pretty inconvenient when you want to have firmware that’s easy to build and distribute. I’ve found many of these toolchains to be annoying to use, and requiring closed …
Making it Easier to Build Firmware
[Bunnie] builds a laptop for himself, hopefully us
[Bunnie Huang], creator of the Chumby and artisan of chips and electrons, is building his own completely open source laptop. It’s called the Novena, and is powered by a quad-core ARM CPU, it’s got enough bells and whistles to make any hacker happy including an on-board FPGA, dual Ethernet ports, and enough GPIO pins …
ARM powered rack mount USB test equipment
This is a device which [Limpkin] has been developing at his day job. It’s a high-speed testing interface for use with Physics experiments. We find it interesting because it uses an ARM microcontroller to implement CDC and MSD over USB. The design is in two parts to make it work in a rack-mount situation. That …
Rasperry Pi: Now mostly open source
If you’ve been following the developments of building Android, Chromium, and other OSes for the Raspberry Pi, you’ll come across a common theme. The drivers for the Raspi’s chip are closed source and protected by Broadcom with an NDA. This limits the ability of devs to take on projects that involve messing around deep inside …
Sparkfun recognized for their growth
The Denver Business Journal has recognized Sparkfun Electronics as the 2nd fastest growing company in the Denver area (in the $17.5-$46million class). This is fantastic news, not only for Sparkfun, but for Open Source Hardware. Sparkfun is the worlds largest manufacturer of open source hardware, located right in the middle of the country, Boulder Colorado. …
Parallax shows love for open source: GCC + Propeller
Parallax has done something that is unthinkable for most microcontroller manufacturing companies. They’ve decided to throw their support behind an open source toolchain based on GCC. That’s right, instead of fighting to get your code compiling on a platform whose example code uses crippleware, you can actually download, compile, and start using this toolchain without code size …
Open source graphics card
Even though NVidia and ATI have been open-source friendly for a while now, there still isn’t a true open-source graphics card. [Anton] and [Per] are trying to fix that by building his own graphics card around an FPGA. The project is called ORSoC, and it’s available on opencores.com. The guys are building the ORSoC graphics …
[Phil Torrone] interviews [Bunnie Huang] about chumby and more
Over at Make, [Phil Torrone] has done an interview with [Bunnie Huang]. [Bunnie] has been a major contributor to the pages of Hackaday as far back as we can remember. He started in 2002 hacking X-boxes and sharing his findings with the world. It is this sharing that makes [Bunnie] stand out. He has always …
Open sourcing everything… there’s an app for that
What happens if you’re a prolific developer and decide to release all of the source code from your work? Well, you should get a huge pat on the back from all interested parties. And so we say thank you to [Hunter Davis] for releasing the source code for his 70+ Android apps. But just making …
Hackaday Links March 8th, 2012
Solder Your Pin headers Straight If you’re worried about how to solder your pin headers straight, why not try this simple trick and put them into a breadboard before soldering? Etiquette for Open Source Projects If you use or develop open source projects, it’s worth checking out [Phillip Torrone]‘s Unspoken rules of Open Source article. …
