Submission + - Neo900 hacker phone reaches minimum number of pre-orders for production 2

Submitted by wick3t on Monday December 02, 2013 @12:31PM

wick3t writes: The Neo900 fundraising campaign has already achieved the milestone of 200 pre-orders which means that mass production is now feasible. This follows a successful first prototype that was showcased at the OpenPhoenux-Hard-Software-Workshop 2013. Their next target is 1000 pre-orders as they aspire to reduce the production costs of each device.

Submission + - NanoNote goes Wireless (qi-hardware.com)

Submitted by

dvdkhlng

on Saturday June 18, 2011 @06:56AM

dvdkhlng writes: "Even though completely copyleft, the NanoNote hand-held platform failed to get the attention of many due to its low specs and the lack of wireless connectivity. The objective to keep things open had its price, and especially wireless technology is a mine-field of patents and NDAs.
Now a few gifted hackers designed an add-on card to bring wireless to the NanoNote. It's not what you would expect: WLAN compatibility was sacrificed, going for the less encumbered IPv6 over 802.15.4 standard instead. The resulting dongles won't win a price for the highest bandwidth but excel at simplicity, energy efficiency and manufacturability.
Want to see the ugly details? Designs, source code and production documentation are published under open source licenses."

Comment here we go (Score 1) 3

by wpwrak on Wednesday June 15, 2011 @01:06AM (#36446168) Attached to: A Free and Open Replacement for Wireless LAN

Here is an up to date overview:
http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/wpan/web/

- Werner

Comment good news, but Wiki needs a bit of cleanup (Score 1) 3

by wpwrak on Tuesday June 14, 2011 @09:30PM (#36444980) Attached to: A Free and Open Replacement for Wireless LAN

As the engineer who has designed these boards, I'm very happy with what we have achieved. But at the same time, I feel that the information we have in the Wiki is not adequate for mass consumption yet. I'm preparing a more concise technical description and post a link as further commentary here in a few hours.

- Werner

Comment it's an entire system (Score 1) 99

by wpwrak on Tuesday May 10, 2011 @07:47PM (#36088944) Attached to: Consumer Device With Open CPU Out of Beta Soon

What makes this great (and unusual) is that there's an entire SoC in that FPGA, not just the CPU core. And it's all Open, including the graphics.

Comment Re:Available on Any microSD slot? (Score 1) 77

by wpwrak on Tuesday May 10, 2011 @11:56AM (#36084212) Attached to: Micro-SD Card Slot Abused As VGA-Port

This hack was tweaked until the MMC/SD controller in the SoC was happy with it. Other controllers may differ. In any case will you need the ability to switch CMD and CLK to GPIOs (without disabling the entire MMC controller) and to bit-bang them at a reasonable speed (at least a few MHz).

So it's quite platform-dependent in its current shape, but you can probably apply the same principles with other SoCs as well.

Submission + - Consumer device with open CPU out of beta soon (milkymist.org)

Submitted by

lekernel

on Monday May 09, 2011 @01:07PM

lekernel writes: "After years of passionate and engaging development, the video synthesizer from the Milkymist project is expected to go out of beta in August.
Dubbed "Milkymist One", it features as central component a system-on-chip made exclusively of IP cores licensed under the open source principles, and is aimed at use by a general audience of video performance artists, clubs and musicians. It is one of the first consumer electronics products putting forward open source semiconductor IP, open PCB design and open source software at the same time.
The full source code is available for download from Github, and a few hardware kits are available from specialized electronics distributors."