Introducing lowRISC

August 5th, 2014

There’s a new, open-to-the-RTL CPU project called lowRISC.

lowRISC is producing fully open hardware systems. From the processor core to the development board, our goal is to create a completely open computing eco-system.

Our open-source SoC (System-on-a-Chip) designs will be based on the 64-bit RISC-V instruction set architecture. Volume silicon manufacture is planned as is a low-cost development board.

lowRISC is a not-for-profit organisation working closely with the University of Cambridge and the open-source community.

This is a positive development for the open source hardware community and I’m excited and honored to be included on their technical advisory board. Can’t wait to play with it!

Name that Ware July 2014

July 30th, 2014

The Ware for July 2014 is shown below.

Sorry that posts and updates have been infrequent the past few months — been really busy!

Winner, Name that Ware June 2014

July 30th, 2014

The Ware for June 2014 is a Lantronix SLC RS232 I/O server. I’ll declare Jacob Creedon as the winner for being very close with his first response and providing some in-depth analysis to back up his guesses! Congrats, email me for your prize.

Name that Ware June 2014

June 27th, 2014

The Ware for June 2014 is shown below.

This is a reader-submitted ware, but the submitter requested to remain anonymous. Thanks, though, you know who you are!

Winner, Name that Ware May 2014

June 27th, 2014

The Ware for May 2014 was a “screamer tag” from Checkpoint Systems. The board bears the silkscreen markings “SC-TG001 Ver05”, and was made by the Kojin Company for use in Japan. Presumably, this tag is part of an anti-theft system that activates an alarm when connectivity between a pair of contacts, visible in the photo, is broken; or if a signal is received (or lost) via RF.

A lot of good and very close guesses this time, but I’ll have to hand the prize to Hugo for naming the function quite explicitly. Congrats, email me for your prize!