Olimex, a Bulgarian maker of open source hardware, blogs about its boards, laptops, FPGA designs and views on open hardware.
HN commenters praise its boards' mainline Linux support, and link it for open hardware projects like FPGA boards, a Turbo Pascal port and its Mastodon account news.
To go into the wider context, see
https://hub.fosstodon.org/fosstodon-kev-and-snowflakes/
https://olimex.wordpress.com/2020/03/05/bye-bye-mastodon-our-account-on-fosstodon-org-was-deleted-yesterday/
If there is a population on Mastodon that bothers me it is the "anti-resilient" people who think that disabled people are morally better than abled people, who build identities around suffering chronic pain, accuse you of being a "reply guy" simply because you hit "reply", see "marginalization" as a goal or destination [1], etc.
I have a good time on Mastodon because I systematically mute and block those sorts of people, mostly don't engage with them. I've yet to have anyone triggered by the "anti-resilient" concept, in fact it is common you can criticize the othering and other fascist-adjacent behaviors of an anti-fascist for days in the abstract in which case they will assume you are talking about an "other" until finally you tell them directly that you're talking about them.
I've met quite a few women on line and real life for whom chronic pain is a way of life and something they have in common is that they'll resist any insinuation that anything about their condition is in their mind/brain. People like that believe they are stronger in numbers but actually when they get together they drag each other down. You could be marginalized in the sense of "in the margin", but join an anti-support group and you can now be marginalized and hated rather than simply…
Come on, it's a middle of 2016, everyone gotta know about projects like http://icoboard.org/ , https://olimex.wordpress.com/2016/05/06/ice40hx1k-evb-open-source-hardware-fpga-board-designed-with-kicad-and-working-with-icestorm-foss-toolchain-first-prototypes-are-ready-and-run/ , etc. projects. They allow to have completely open-source process to bring up RISC-V CPUs on a reverse-engineered FPGA. When they collect enough funds (if people of the world will give it to them), they will make ASIC silicon too. The only risk is that big corporations won't give up their prerogative of being the only parties who make the world better, subsume RISC-V and shove out closed-down RISC-V chips like they did before. But how it should work is that there should be competition between classical NDA-ridden and close-down stuff and open RISC-V, to let customers decide what they want in a particular case.
A few notes why this project is interesting
* There are NO restrictions to manufacture and sell these boards for your own use or resale
* Open source and simple enough modify the hardware by most hardware hackers
* Affordable components even in small quantities
* Easy to hand assemble with a soldering iron or hot air gun
* Arduino shield compatible
* Runs Linux
It doesn't have the capabilities as the Beaglebone or Raspberry Pie, but that is not the point. It is for people that need an embedded Linux computer that they can modify and incorporate into their own project.
Links:
Yahoo groups: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/olinuxino/
Blog: http://olimex.wordpress.com/
The thing they seem to be missing here is that the CHIP isn't a sub-$10 computer. They did a sub-$10 Kickstarter as a marketing effort, but their BOM on this chip is over $10, so it's apparent that they were doing the Kickstarter at a loss just for publicity.
https://olimex.wordpress.com/2015/06/05/how-to-get-in-the-news-tell-people-that-you-will-make-and-sell-something-which-cost-you-20-for-9/
The C.H.I.P. manufacturers disagree, and say that it really will be $9 when shipping, but given that it's still vaporware at the moment, it doesn't really make sense to compare to something that has already shipped tens (hundreds?) of thousands of units.
If I prototype something with an Arduino, I can easily switch to directly sourcing ATmegas and spin my own boards.
The Pi Zero is the next thing over from vaporware. I know some people who have a few, but all of the official vendors linked from https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/pi-zero/ are either out of stock, or have "limit one per household."
I'd been having trouble figuring out where to source the BCM 2835 SoC that powers the Zero, and there's (allegedly) a reason for that: https://olimex.wordpress.com/2014/08/28/who-fears-from-the-competition-rpi-foundation-pressed-broadcom-to-stop-selling-bcm2835-to-competing-projects/
Olimex alleged[1] that the '$9' CHIP was being sold at a loss (which I guess is par for the course for a Kickstarter project).
>The Pi has not actually been all that cheap lately compared to the competition.
I'm not a big fan of the RPi Foundation & it's relationship with BroadCOMM, but which competition are you referring to? I tried searching for RPi-like boards a while back but only came up with HardKernel & the bananaPi, and I don't think either is a proper competitor.
1. https://olimex.wordpress.com/2015/06/05/how-to-get-in-the-news-tell-people-that-you-will-make-and-sell-something-which-cost-you-20-for-9/