96Boards Mezzanine Initiative is a community-led, organized and maintained initiative. This initiative aims to expand the 96boards ecosystem and promote open-hardware.
Open Source Academics (OSA) by 96Boards (https://github.com/osacademics) aims to facilitate and expand the educational experience on a global stage by providing scalable curriculum and standardized course materials through an open source platform. To fully understand the diverse nature of OSA, this summary will be broken down into seven discrete sections: Motivation, Mission, Platform, Stakeholders, Infinity Committee, Incentives and Roadmap.
OSA wants to unite industry and academia to create, and host a fully functional and open sourced educational platform which facilitates consumption and contribution of standardized educational curriculum and incentivized course materials on a global scale (with a current focus on STEAM content). OSA will work with stakeholders to achieve a balanced set of standards and incentives which encourage collaboration and drive content quality and growth.
Fujitsu A64FX is the new fastest Arm processor in the world, built on 7nm it has 2.7 TFLOPS performance per chip suitable for high-end HPC and AI, they aim to create with it the world’s fastest supercomputer with it by 2021. A64FX is the first processor using the new Armv8-A Scalable Vector Extension (SVE) to accelerate a wide range of large-scale scientific computing, including deep learning. Fujitsu is working closely with Linaro to enrich the Arm HPC ecosystem. A64FX will be featured in the post-K computer, a supercomputer being developed by Fujitsu and RIKEN as a successor to the K computer, which achieved the world’s highest performance in 2011. The organizations are striving to achieve post-K application execution performance up to 100 times that of the K computer. It offers a number of features, including broad utility supporting a wide range of applications, massive parallelization through the Tofu interconnect, low power consumption, and mainframe-class reliability.
You can watch Fujitsu’s keynote at Linaro Connect here
System76 is a computer manufacturer based in Denver Colorado specializing in laptops, desktops and servers running Linux. System76 talks about their upcoming efforts to move manufacturing in-house, and what that may mean for the future of the ARM Powered Linux Laptop and Desktop.
Jem Davies is the General Manager of the Machine Learning Group at Arm, he talks about the new Machine Learning Collaboration with Arm NN and Linaro, where Arm is donating the Arm NN inference engine and software developer kit (SDK) to Linaro’s Machine Intelligence Initiative. As part of this initiative – which aims to be a focal point for collaborative engineering in the ML space – Arm is also opening Arm NN to external contributions.
Linaro’s Machine Learning Initiative will initially focus on inference for Arm Cortex-A SoCs and Arm Cortex-M MCUs running Linux and Android, both for edge compute and smart devices. The team will collaborate on defining an API and modular framework for an Arm runtime inference engine architecture based on plug-ins supporting dynamic modules and optimized shared Arm compute libraries. The work will rapidly develop to support a full range of processors, including CPUs, NPUs, GPUs, and DSPs and it is expected that Arm NN will be a crucial part of this.
You can watch Jem Davies keynote at Linaro Connect here
Chris Benson is an AI & digital transformation strategist, solution architect, and keynote speaker / evangelist who specializes in deep learning – the neural computation technology that is driving the artificial intelligence revolution.
He was a member of Accenture’s first dedicated AI Team, and went on to create and build Honeywell’s first dedicated AI Team.
Chris is the co-host of the Practical AI podcast (https://changelog.com/practicalai) – produced by Changelog Media – which makes artificial intelligence practical, productive, and accessible to everyone.
He is a frequent keynote speaker on artificial intelligence at conferences, broadcasts, and events around the world.
Chris is the Founder & Organizer of the Atlanta Deep Learning Meetup, one of the largest AI communities in the world, with about 2000 members.
In this video, @vielmetti, director of @worksonarm, discusses technical issues regarding integration, testing, Cloud Native and network workloads, and directions for the project for the coming year.
The Works on Arm cluster is run by Packet for Arm to provide test, development, and data center CI/CD resources for community projects to build on arm64. The project also includes a weekly video office hours, a weekly newsletter, and a channel on the Packet Community Slack and Freenode IRC (#worksonarm) for community discussion.
Linaro CTO David Rusling talks about some of the latest things Linaro is focusing on, to enable Arm development on Arm, working with companies to bring Arm Powered developer desktops and laptops standardizing systems with an Architecture for the Embedded Space (EBBR). He also talks about Automotive, Machine Learning and more.
UC San Diego Professor Thomas Bewley discusses his Segway-like educational robotics kit, eduMIP, based on the BeagleBone Blue at Linaro Connect Vancouver 2018. This inexpensive kit (available online, for $128, at Renaissance Robotics https://www.renaissancerobotics.com/eduMIP.html) is used in his Embedded Control & Robotics course at UCSD, which Prof Bewley is currently working on taking online as a MOOC. It is also beginning to be used by a community of researchers and educators at other universities around the world. In this video, Prof Bewley also introduces his early efforts in developing new (and, significantly higher-power) motor-control daughterboards in the 96boards and Raspberry Pi formats. He also discusses eduMIP v.2 and some other advanced prototypes in his lab, as well as the Robot Control (RC) software library that drives this hardware, and will ultimately enable easy porting of control codes across the BeagleBone, Raspberry Pi, and 96boards linux-based product lines, in addition to deployment onto very-low-cost custom targets based on Cortex M based processors running an RTOS. His ultimate goal with this ambitious effort is to facilitate a much more seamless pathway from lab prototype to commercial product.
RoseFinch7100 has passed the certification of China Mobile and China Telecom, and it has been widely deployed in gas meters, household appliances, municipal management (parking, manhole cover, street lamp, environmental monitoring) and other industries.
The demonstration will show the RoseFinch7100 running the Zephyr RTOS with integrated IP/TCP/UDP/COAP/MQTT/LWM2M protocols, IoT Cloud Engine and FOTA services. Sanechips has worked closely with the Linaro IoT and Embedded (LITE) group to enable upstream Zephyr support for the chip. The Sanechips Development Environment (SDE), based on OpenOCD (Open On-Chip Debugger) and Eclipse, will also be demonstrated.
Produced on a 55nm ultra low power technology process, the RoseFinch7100 is specifically designed for intensive low power IoT applications, such as cellular LPWA (low power wide area). The chip integrates the low power/high performance CEVA-X1 DSP IP for baseband and offers low sleep current of 2uA at 2V, which can provide an extended battery life. It also offers Cloud-Chip Global Security based on Trusted Zone, up to 30 GPIOs and all R14 Frequency Bands, and no need for an external MCU as the RoseFinch7100 can provide strong connectivity for most LPWA applications independently.
At the Linaro Connect, Sahaj Sarup, Applications Engineer at 96Boards, based on the IoT Edition Carbon Development Board powered by the STMicroelectronics STM32F401RE ARM Cortex-M4 running Zephyr. There are 6 ultrasonic sensors preventing it from bumping into things, 4 IR sensors preventing it from falling down, there are LED’s also representing the distance to the objects on each side of the self-driving rover.
From idea to design and from prototype to production, Avnet supports customers at each stage of a product’s lifecycle. A comprehensive portfolio of design and supply chain services makes Avnet the go-to guide for innovators who set the pace for technological change. For nearly a century, Avnet has helped its customers and suppliers around the world realize the transformative possibilities of technology.
Avnet has a very strong, technical community focus and is now home to such entities as Premier Farnell, Element14, MakerSource, hackster.io, and Raspberry Pi.
Avnet is Xilinx’ global distributor and technical partner. Xilinx has awarded Avnet a Premier partnership level in their Alliance Program. In addition to distributing Xilinx devices, Avnet also designs development boards, creates and delivers training, and also customizes and manufacturers Xilinx-based boards for customers around the world.
The Ultra96 is an example of this closer partnership, as Xilinx and Avnet have worked together to bring the board to market. Both companies will continue to support the board into the future.
Shiratech LTE and Sensor Mezzanine adds LTE connectivity and full context awareness to devices includes Quectel EC25 LTE Cellular Modem with LTE CAT 4 Max 150Mbps (DL) 50Mbps (UL), LTE category 4 module optimized for M2M and IoT applications, Worldwide LTE, UMTS/HSPA+ and GSM/GPRS/EDGE coverage, Multi-constellation GNSS receiver available for applications requiring fast and accurate fixes in any environment, MIMO technology meets demands for data rate and link reliability in modem wireless communication system, On-Board Sensor Key Features the Bosch BNO055 with fused sensor data – Quaternion, Euler angles, Rotation vector, Linear acceleration, Gravity, Heading. 3 Sensors in one device – triaxial 16bit gyroscope, triaxial 14bit accelerometor and full performance geomagnetic sensor.
Linux Kernel Functional Testing (LKFT) build uses OpenEmbedded to build a userspace image, along with the kernel, for each board and branch combination under test.
Bernhard Rosenkränzer of the Linaro Mobile Group shows some Android phones with updated Linux kernels on production devices, and those are working perfectly.
Vector Packet Processor (VPP) Works on various ARM platforms out of the box, All CI tests pass, ARM boards getting added to Fd.io lab, CSIT under progress, Performance benchmarking/analysis under progress.
Peter Griffin and his colleagues of the Linaro Home Group demonstrate some of their latest advancements with AOSP TV such as their OP-TEE DRM integrations, Playready, Widevine, ClearKey on HiKey, TI X15, iMX8M, Poplar using AOSP and Linux, Chromium and WPE. DRM Secure Data Path on i.MX8M.
Manivannan Sadhasivam of Linaro shows the simple photobooth based on 96Boards CE. You can pose yourself in front of it and press Filter button to change the overlay filters and press Capture button to capture the image. The captured image will be stored in AWS S3 bucket with 96Boards watermark and the tinyurl/qrcode will be displayed finally.
More information can be found in 96Boards Projects Org: