XiVO Project Blog

The OpenHardware community is expanding more and more these past months and here a short landscape view of the community nowadays :

• OpenHardware large board projects

PandaBoard : http://pandaboard.org/sites/default/files/board_reference/EA1/720-2152-001_EA1_BRD.zip
Chumby : http://files.chumby.com/bunnie/chumbyone_hw/chumbyone_gerbers.zip
MilkyMist : http://en.qi-hardware.com/wiki/Milkymist_One_RC1_PCB_Specification
Tormenta v2 PCI card : http://www.zapatatelephony.org/t2/T2B2Gerber.zip

• OpenHardware smaller board projects

DIY boards : http://tuxgraphics.org/electronics/

• Open "specifications" Hardware products

Elphel camera : http://www.elphel.com/importwiki?title=353_in_a_nutshell

• Blogs/Events/Journals

OpenHardwareJournal : http://openhardware.org/journal/2011/11/index.html
Hack-a-day : http://hackaday.com

• Events/Conferences/Workshops

OpenHardwareSummit : http://www.openhardwaresummit.org/
OpenHardwareWorkshop : http://www.ohwr.org/projects/ohr-meta/wiki/OHWorkshop
OpenSourceHardware2011 (Madrid) : http://oshwcon.org/

• Licences

OHANDA : http://ohanda.org
CERN : http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cernohl/wiki/CernOhlProjects
OpenSourceHardwareDefintion : http://freedomdefined.org/OSHW

Once one approaches the final routing of a PCB for a hardware project, he should think about starting the sourcing of the components (at least the major part that is definitive on the design before the final tests/debugs/redesign without any change of the block diagram) in order to plan the right time in advance the arrival of the components to cable the PCB in the factory. This approach lead to find out which part will take the longest time to be arriving in the complete BoM and that could delay the cabling of the PCB (usually Tantalum Capacitor or specific suppliers of parts). We are now working on the sourcing of each of the component from the major part e-shop as well as the major parts supplier. The project planning can be drastically impacted by some difficulties on the sourcing and it is always important to forecast the part stock in collaboration w/ the production facilities.

We had the pleasure to visit the CologneChip AG engineering team this week in Koln, Germany and exchange on the ISDN markets and chips (and the different market penetration of ISDN, FTTH, DOCSIS, xDSL in Europe countries). ISDN is still strong in Germany w/ 29 Millions subscribers (22M analog subscribers and 6M subscribers w/ DOSCIS and xDSL - sources: Bundesnetzagentur) and still allow over the 144Kbits/s of net data rate, 2 bearer channels (B-channels) w/ 64Kbits/s each which is equivalent to 3.4Khz voice channel at 8 ksamples/second. The XiVO IPBX OpenHardware will propose 4 BRI (also called S0 for point-to-multipoint BRI type) interfaces to allow these data and voice applications.

• Please find below the Koln cathedral that you can find on the XHFC-4SU chip:
  

• The entrance of the CologneChip AG offices below:

It was a great pleasure to participate to the OpenHardwareSummit2010 in the New York City Museum of Science and representing the OHANDA trademark during the LAW panel. Thanks to Alicia and Ayah to have organized such an event that gives publicity to the OpenHardware movement out-there. I have surely pushed the usage of the world OpenHardware (versus the OpenSource-Hardware term that seems to close to OpenSource software) for the future as the common term for the hardware projects opening their production and design files. The audience was 200 people and mainly north-american and that was a great pleasure to speak and recall the great previous OpenHardware projects launched in Europe since years now (OpenMoko, OpenPCD, Milkymist, OpenPattern...).

The summit was a one-day long session of presentations and panel discussions followed by an exchange about the OpenHardware definition. During the LAW panel discussion, I had the opportunity to present the OHANDA trademark and

Some discussions panels attracted my attention :

* PRODUCTIZING: Scaling/ Manufacturing/ Moving beyond DIY :

This talk was a great opportunity to have the feedbacks of a production facilities (Clint Cooley from Circuit Co) that supports OpenHardware projects in the US and see a great ramp-up of the projects requesting small, medium and large fab of the their PCBs. We can see that some manufacturers will play a great role in this field and some OpenHardware project will be able to mutualize some aspects of the production for bigger PCBs (more layers, 200-500-1000 components-BOM...).

* BUSINESS: Open hardware business models :

This talk gives the occasion to hear several business model of OpenHardware companies ("yes" there is a business model for OpenHardware projects up to several 100k units per product a year) w/ the participation of prototyping and products companies such as Chumby (represented by Bunny skype-ing from Singapore). Definitely the opening of the design and production files is giving business opportunities for partners (resellers, hardware-mods, software-hacks, global solutions) rather than opening the pandora box of copies for cheaper was the global conclusion of this panel discussion.

* LAW: Open hardware licenses and norms :

This panel discussion was the occasion to have around the table several legal opinions (with lawyers, Peter Brown from the FSF, a hardware hacker) leading to the following topics :

* What is the interest of opening hardware ?
* How to protect a licence/trademark-ed OpenHardware project in case of legal violation from a files point of view ?
* What about the closed documentation of the chips used in an OpenHardware ?
* What about the firmware used in SoC -based OpenHardware projects ?

Perter Brown from FSF was applausing the 4 freedoms of the OHANDA trademark adapting the ones from the FSF licence.

Below I have collected some documentations and informations about the OHS2010 :

Pictures of the OHS 2010

Transcripts of the talks during the summit :

Transcripts of the talks

Audio MP3 archives :

Audio MP3 archives of the OHS

Audio MP3 archives of the LAW panel

The first article of this series was about using the EESchema schematic editor.

This short article will explain how to assign module footprints to schematic components.

We are very pleased to announce that we will be participating to the OpenHardwareSummit ^[1] in New York (on Sept. 23rd) representing the OHANDA Trademark during a discussion panel called "LAW: Open hardware licenses and norms" . This is a great opportunity for us (OHANDA TM, OpenHardwareInitiative, OpenTechSummit organizers) to present the work done w/ the OHANDA trademark and exchange about the best licenses/trademarks/standards to commonly use during our different OpenHardware projects to reach the same credibility to this community as for the OpenSource community.

The panel will be as followed :

LAW: Open hardware licenses and norms

• Moderator: Dave Mellis, Arduino & MIT Media Lab • Windell Oskay, Evil Mad Scientist • Wendy Seltzer, Harvard University: Berkman Center for Internet & Society • Matt Stack, Liquidware • Michael Weinberg, Public Knowledge • Peter Brown, Freedom Software Foundation • Xavier Carcelle, OHANDA

We will post during the OpenHardwareSummit to blog the outcome of the panel and others discussions there.

In the world of the OpenHardware projects, we do aim at giving to the community more hints about prototyping hardware, understanding (also reversing) existing hardware, hacking (in the sense of modifying and adding more unexpected features) equipments, reusing "old" hardware and sharing production and lab facilities. The last years had seen a number of blogs and URLs in this field such as:

• Name that ware: The famous blog from BunnyStudios that post regularly a pictures of a PCB where you should discover the name of the original electronic products behind. Bunny is also the hardware developper behind the Chumby.
• AdaFruit: A blog/portal dedicated to making some hardware devices (usually micro-controllers) and a load of tutorials
• Sump from Michael Poppitz who developed the hardware for the famous OpenBench LogicSniffer based on a FPGA that allows a very flexible LogicAnalyzer w/ up to 32channels (16 on a H10-2.54mm header and 16 on-pcb) and 200MHz frequence sampling
• DangerousPrototypes: A portal that proposes a new OpenHardware project everymonth and distributes numerous prototyping hardware and tools including some hints to make your own laser-cut case for your OpenBench logic analyzer or PirateBus analyzer.
• Hackmii: A hardware hacking blog dedicated mostly to the Wii hacking but with a lots of tutorials and hardware exploits and a link with forum that somehow more difficult to find.

We see currently a great energy and interest for the OpenHardware movement with different groups or consortiums aiming at creating a common energy in this. The OHANDA Trademark is definitely a great baseline for the upcoming OpenHardware project to have a legal umbrella and present their project files in a central repository where the users/customers of the OHANDA trademark-ed products will be able to find the documents/files need to understand/modify/improve within the respect of this trademark.

This week, 2 more news came out in the OpenHardware movement with:

• A common definition of the OpenHardware 0.3. ^[1]. The definition is derived from the Open Source Definition, which was created by Bruce Perens and the Debian developers as the Debian Free Software Guidelines

• The announcement of the OpenHardwareSummit ^[2] to be held the September23rd in NYC, US. This event will be supported by Chris Anderson (Wired), Mako Hill (OLPC, Wikipedia), Becky Stern (Make), Jon Philips (Qi), Shigeru Kobayashi (Gainer), Thinh Nguyen and John Wilbanks (CC) and the sponsor of the event (littleBits, Eyebeam). Also the people from Creative Commons will be there and that is a great news as different people in the OpenHardware community had decided to use the CC licence to release the schematics and gerber files of their PCBs.

During this event, we will do a presentation of the OHANDA Trademark and the projects currently under this trademark as we will talk during the event.

As we move forward on the validation of the different functionnal block of the XiVO IPBX OpenHardware project, we can now describe more precisely the different blocks and the eco-system of the project.

The functionnal blocks are numbered now as followed for the validation and PCB Schematics :

1-CPU
2-ISDN
3-FXO-FXS
4-UART
5-EEPROM
6-ETH
7-SD-USB
8-SATA
9-LEDS
10-DDR2
11-SPI-FLASH
12-CPU-JTAG
13-PWR
14-CLK
15-RST

We will then follow-up on the documentation of the project for the validation and PCB Schematics with this numbering allowing sub-documentation and discussion for each functionnal block.

Concerning the eco-system of the project, the figure below describes the different steps to go to the production of the XiVO IPBX OpenHardware product.

The next posts will describe the validation of the communication between the CPU1 and the ISDN2 and the FXO-FXS3.

This post aims at presenting KiCAD ^[1], THE OpenSource EDA tool for CAD file used to design PCB (Printed Circuit Boards) originally designed and written by Jean-Pierre Charras, a researcher at LIS (Laboratoire des Images et des Signaux) and a teacher at IUT de Saint Martin d'Hères (France), in the field of electrical engineering and image processing. KiCAD aims at being a tool equivalent to the "closed-non-free" CAD software like Atium Protel, Eagle, Cadence with the benefit of a free and open-source with a community of developer and early-user implementing KiCAD for industrial hardware design of PCB up to 10layers and a growing collection of component footprints and reference in the library (the standard footprints like SOTs, QFPs, BGAs are crucial to have the maximum support of the ICs, chips of the silicon manufacturers)

Kicad is a set of four softwares and a project manager:

• Eeschema: Schematic entry.
• Pcbnew:Board editor.
• Gerbview: GERBER viewer (photoplotter documents).
• Cvpcb: footprint selector for components used in the circuit design.
• Kicad: project manager.

KiCAD early-users and developers can participate to the project on the subversion ^[2]

A bug tracker ^[3] is up and running for feedbacks from the users (GUI optimization for GNU users and Windows users mainly).

From our XiVO IPBX OpenHardware project point of view, we are also using KiCAD mainly for small PCB and Schematics of your interfaces between each functionnal block. The screen-shot below presents the KiCAD Eeschema to implement the TDM connexion between the CPU and the ISDN chip:

The right-side toolbar is for selecting the object to include in the schematic (component, power, ground, wires ...), the top part toolbar is there for the sheet preferences and settings and for the interaction with the PCB editor and gerber exporter and viewer.