CNXSoft – Embedded Software Development

FOSDEM is a 2-day (or 3 if you include Friday beer event) event where over 5,000 members of open source communities meet, share ideas and collaborate. It’s free to attend, and there’s no registration, so you just show up to attend. FOSDEM 2013 takes place on Feb 2-3 (yep, this week-end) in Brussels

There are 7 main tracks where sessions are organized:

• Operating systems
• Open source challenges
• Security Janson
• Beyond operating systems
• Web development
• Miscellaneous
• Robotics

There are also keynotes and devroom for a total of 488 sessions. Developers rooms that may particularly be of interest to readers of this blog are:

• Cross Desktop devroom – e.g. Wayland, gstreamer, razor-qt, Qt Project, Plasma Active, etc…
• Cross Distro devroom – e.g. Linux on Android, suse on ARM, ARMv8, systemd, etc…
• Embedded and mobile devroom – e.g. Baserock Embedded Linux, Guacamayo (Yocto), Nemo Mobile/ Mer project, arduino…

All in all that’s a lot of sessions, and even though I won’t attend, I’m going to select a few from the main tracks:

• Saturday 13:00 – 13:50 – Porting Fedora to 64-bit ARM systems by Jon Masters

This talk introduces the Fedora ARM Project and in particular the work we are doing to bring Fedora to emerging 64-bit ARM server systems.

• Saturday 15:00 – 15:50 – Open ARM GPU drivers by Luc Verhaegen

Where are we today, one year after the unveiling of the Lima driver. This talk will cover the Lima driver (ARM Mali 200/400), but also other open source GPU driver projects such as the freedreno driver (Qualcomm Adreno), open source driver for Nvidia Tegra, etnaviv project (Vivante GC) and cover the status for Broadcoms Videocore and Imaginations PowerVR GPUs.

• Saturday 16:00 – 16:50 – ARM support in the Linux kernel by Thomas Petazzoni

Based on the speaker’s experience of getting the support for the new Armada 370 and Armada XP ARM processors from Marvell into the mainline Linux kernel, this talk will detail the most important steps involved in this effort, and through this, give an overview of those changes and summarize the new rules for ARM Linux support.

• Sunday 11:00 – 11:50 – Firefox OS by Jonas Sicking

Firefox OS is the next product being developed by Mozilla. It’s an open source OS based on the web and following the principals which have made the web a success. A phone running recent builds of Firefox OS (it’s not a finished product yet) will be demoed, and  the technologies and ideas behind Firefox OS will be discussed.

• Sunday 12:00 – 12:50 – systemd, Two Years Later by Lennart Poettering

The systemd project is now two years old (almost three). It found adoption as the core of many big community and commercial Linux distributions. It’s time to look back what we achieved, what we didn’t achieve, how we dealt with the various controversies, and what’s to come next.

• Sunday 12:00 12:50 – Aldebaran Robotics and Open Source by Dimitri Merejkowsky

How Aldebaran Robotics is using open source on their NAO robot.

• Sunday 13:00 – 13:50 – ROS: towards open source in robotics by Morgan Quigley

This talk will provide an overview of the Robot Operating System (ROS), an open software integration framework for robots.

• Sunday 14:00 – 14:50 – Vroom! Free Software in your car by Jeremiah Foster

This talk describes how the automotive industry has moved to embedded Linux and Open Source to develop the next generation of In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) and how it has met the challenges along the way.

• Sunday 16:00 – 16:50 – UEFI SecureBoot by Cathy Malmrose

What, why, when, where and how SecureBoot changes the way we build F/LOSS

Last month, Gumstix announced the TurtleCore expansion board for iRobot Create Programmable Robot, featuring 3 USB ports, several male-header pins with GPIO access, as well as standoffs and screws to support the TurtleCore in the Create cargo bay.. The TurtleCore is a baseboard for TI OMAP3 and Sitara based Overo COMs or Overo STORM series of COMs that replaces the Command Module on iRobot Create to provide a more flexible and powerful solution.

Overo COMs have very good Linux support (OpenEmbedded) with source code, tools and documentation available, including support for the Robot Operating System (GumROS) for high level programming. They released the hardware early so that the community could work on the software, and there have been some good progress as you can see from the video below.

You can already download the schematics and PCB layout file, but the software and instructions do not appear to be available publicly yet.

The TurtleCore is available for $89, Gumstix Overo COMs prices start just above $100, and iRobot Create can be purchased for $130.

Further information can be found on Gumstix TurtleCore page.

Willow Garage announces the formation of the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF), an independent, non-profit organization founded by members of the global robotics community whose goal is to support the development, distribution, and adoption of open source software for use in robotics research, education, and product development.

The OSRF Board of Directors is composed of the following members:

• Wolfram Burgard. Dr. Burgard, a professor at the University of Freiburg,  heading the Laboratory for Autonomous Intelligent Systems. His major research interests lie in mobile robotics, state estimation and control, as well as artificial intelligence.
• Ryan Gariepy, co-founder and CTO of Clearpath Robotics. Clearpath Robotics is a company specializing in the design and manufacture of unmanned vehicle solutions for industrial R&D.
• Brian Gerkey,  Director of Open Source Development at Willow Garage who has worked on the open source Robot Operating System (ROS) since 2008. Dr. Gerkey will be CEO of the OSRF.
• Helen Greiner, co-founder of iRobot and currently CEO of CyPhyWorks.
• Sam Park, executive vice president of Yujin Robot, a south Korean company designing and manufacturing robots.

The foundation currently sponsors 2 projects:

• Robot Operating System (ROS), a project that provides libraries and tools to help software developers create robot applications. It provides hardware abstraction, device drivers, libraries, visualizers, message-passing, package management, and more. ROS is licensed under the BSD license.
• Gazebo,  a 3D multi-robot simulator with dynamics. It is capable of simulating articulated robot in complex and realistic environments.

If you want to get involved, the foundation recommends to work on the 2 above projects, although you can also be indirectly involved by working on the Arduino platform and the Make database that are both used in open source robotics projects.

The OSRF will participate in the DARPA Robotics Challenge that will start in October 2012 and offers a $2 million prize “to whomever can help push the state-of-the-art in robotics beyond today’s capabilities in support of the DoD’s disaster recovery mission.” The DARPA Robotics Challenge is planned to end in December 2014.

You can find more information on the Open Source Robotics Foundation page.