Technology

  • After landing the Curiosity rover on Mars, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California built an educational model of the rover to teach robotics principles to high school and university students all over the US. While demonstrating this rover, they routinely received questions about how organizations could build one of their own, so the […]

  • BeagleBoard has been making popular System-On-a-Chip (SOC) boards for a number of years now. They have now released the PocketBeagle, a USB key fob computer. It’s based on Octavo Systems’ OSD3358-SM 21 mm x 21 mm system-in-package (SiP) OSD3358-512M-BSM which includes 512 MB DDR3 RAM, 1 GHz ARM Cortex-A8 CPU, 2x 200 MHz PRUs, ARM Cortex-M3, […]

  • The National Plant Genetic Resources Centre (NPGRC-Tanzania), in collaboration with Hivos, Bioversity International, Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management Africa and other partners are currently implementing a project to explore the possibility of an open source seed system. Their goal is to combat the threats climate change poses by providing greater availability and diversity of four […]

  • Aleph Objects, the maker of Lulzbot 3D printers, and IC3D Industries have partnered to produce what they claim is the first ever open source 3D printing filament. There is a lot of open source 3D printing technology available after the expiration of patents related to Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), but most of the open source […]

  • Toyota has announced that the infotainment system in their new Camry sedans to be sold in the US will run Automotive Grade Linux (AGL).  Toyota has been working on this platform along with 10 other automakers because it makes it much easier to customize infotainment systems that have well-developed features. The Camry models that run […]

  • OSVehicle is the group behind the open source car hardware platform named the Tabby Evo. The company has now released EDIT: an open source platform for customizing the Tabby Evo for specific purposes. The company looks to solve a number of problems associated with the traditional car manufacturing industry: For most the time to market […]

  • D-wave is a company that specializes in quantum computing systems. The complex nature of quantum computing has limited the software field primarily to individuals who have expertise in particle physics, D-wave looks to reduce the barrier to creating software that uses quantum processing with the release of qbsolv: software that greatly simplifies the process of […]

  • As part of a partnership with the OSVehicle community, Renault has announced they will release an open source vehicle named the Twizy EV. While OSVehicle has already released open source automotive platforms, this is the first time a major car manufacturer has done the same. The company hopes others will build upon this platform to […]

  • At the Open Hardware Summit in Portland last week, the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) announced the release of a new certification for open hardware. The purpose is to “provide an easy and straightforward way for producers to indicate that their products meet a uniform and well-defined standard for open-source compliance, benefiting both creators and […]

  • OSVehicle is a project to create an open source automobile platform, and the community is now taking orders for fully assembled versions of their electic car, the Tabby Evo. Purchasers can choose a 2 or 4 seat model that are priced between $12,480 – $19,980. This car represents more than 3 years of R&D and […]

  • Google has released Walt, a toolset for measuring touch and audio latency on mobile devices, as open source. Previous solutions to measure device latency have mostly focused on providing a single, round-trip number that shows overall latency by either detecting how long audio took to go from the microphone to the speaker, or how long […]

  • The Open Compute Project is an effort to make an open source data center. Facebook started the project to reduce the effort and money required to build a data center and to demystify the process of doing so. A number of major tech companies have gotten involved in this project over the last year, but […]

  • Building on the success of the Open Compute Project, facebook has launched a new open source project to design wireless broadband technologies. The program is called the Telcom Infra Project (TIP), and includes more than 2 dozen companies including Intel, Nokia, and many more. The focus of this project will first be on separating the […]

  • Valve, the company behind the popular video game distribution platform Steam, has announced that the first round of their Linux-based Steam Machines are now available to be preorderd, and will be shipped to preorder customers starting October 16, with retailers to have them available shortly thereafter. These devices run Valve’s own SteamOS, a derivative of […]

  • Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) is a collaborative environment to bring a Linux software stack to the connected car. The project has released its own open source In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) software that features a dashboard, home screen, navigation map, media playback, audio controls, and more. Each feature also includes detailed design requirement documents with descriptions, use […]

  • Canonical, the lead company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has announced an expansion of their effort to run Ubuntu on as many platforms as possible. The company announced that Ubuntu Snappy will be coming to the Open Compute Platform (OCP) network switches.Ubuntu will bring an assortment of benefits to the OCP, including the fastest, smallest, […]

  • Modern agriculture equipment is highly complex and often requires farmers to hire certified technicians whenever there are problems. Many companies have locked down the computers that run their equipment with proprietary software and hardware, and due to the DMCA anyone who modifies the proprietary DRM risks being targeted for copyright infringement. This has led to […]

  • Random Articles from the OST Archives