Sunday, January 9, 2011

Sumarizing 2010

After being so "silent" in my Open Source world, i need to sumarize the last year.

It could look that i leave the FOSS world, but nothing further from the truth. I've been FOSS advocate at my actual company, improving our FOSS ecosystem.
I had to fight in some fronts of the Computer Science that i never had contact with before:

  • I had a combat with binutils/gcc/newlib for ColdFire v1 devices, and i win (we get a multi platform toolchain ready to work), both Windows and Linux builds are working fine.

  • I also deal with other compiler: SDCC. It was hard, but it's our official PIC compiler :D

  • Configure and make an application with RTAI and comedi to measure quality and some important parameters of our physical final products (it was a working proof of concept, we need to improve it a little bit, but it's working). In the while i have to evaluate the use of Scicoslab, RTAI-Lab, Scicos-Hil, Scilab, Xenomai, RT-PREEMPT patch and robotics frameworks like Orocos.

  • I get hands dirty with LTSP, as sys-admin, and i configured some servers and services.

  • And some other propietary stuff or internal work.


Unfortunately, i didn't found time to work with Efika-MX, Ben-NanoNote and carry on hacking my Neo Freerunner (between all my hw toys), neither post some words about my advances. But, at the end of the day i did nice FOSS development, and i also touch the Linux kernel, in a personal way.
So... 2010 was not a bad year :)

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

My 0x1F day

As a bit mask, today is my 0x1F (31) birthday (i´m almost 0x20). But the day is going ok.

A lot of changes happens lately:
  • In my personal life, i moved my house from Spain to Brazil (really big change). One of the best consequence of this movement is the people i met at my new job, really nice people with a nice job.
  • In the job side i´ m working in a open-minded company for the hardwar/embedded path. That gets me happier.

So i´m comfortable and almost fully installed in my new home.

In the Open projects side, i´m improving my knowledge and i´m proud to announce that Wolfgang added me to the qie-hardware planet [1] :)
I´ve been testing the Ben Nanonote. A wonderful and amazing gadget that promise a lot. Wolfgang, with his efforts, is also engaging me to all the projects they are raising. I love the Milkymist project and the SAKC is a good hardware device for approaching the FPGA development. He is also encouraging some open-like hardware projects & putting them (or us) in contact to deal with "open philosophy" together.

Thanks Wolfgang & all the people involved in Qi-hardware. Some of them: Mirko. Xiao. Adam. .... & some old friends Tuxbrain (David & Victor), Ida Systems (Rakshat) I hope to see more people involved & growing this community effort.

See you soon.

[1] http://en.qi-hardware.com/planet/

Thursday, January 14, 2010

A lot of time without news

I've been busy with my daily/paid job, and i have not be able to put any update to this blog.
We start a new year and it's time to post some updates of whats going on from my part ;)

First, i'm moving to Brazil. This give me a lot of headaches, as i need to do a lot of paperwork. I'm almost finishing this issue, as i'm going to travel in 9 days!!

I would like to say thank you to my TuxBrain coleages (we get fun together and we work nicely together); i could not forget IdaSystems (that always believe in my hard work); news projects evolving like Genesi-USA (they finally sent me the EfikaMX board!! :D), Qi-hardware, Harald Welte & other hackers that are giving some GSM freedom :D; all OpenEmbedded hackers, that give me one of the better development tools that i never tested; all SHR & Openmoko comunity (they persist on this device and give us some usable software in that piece of hardware - and maybe a little bit more); and all the FOSS developers/hackers & communities that i'm involved :D (i don't have enough space to put all of them here).

I don't know if i'm going to post anything before i move, but.. this is my first 2010 post & i'm really happy with my future plans.

See you soon (from the south hemisphere) :D

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

What i've been doing

Hello to all specially to openmokers, as this is my first post that is going to appear at planet.openmoko.org

I'm being a little bit silent lately.
The good news is that i've not been quiet :)
What i've been doing? Well, first of all i'm being too busy with a lot of tuxbrain stuff :)
I put a smile because they are giving me the opportunity to develop/hack a lot of devices and they give e the opportunity to hardware hacking, that is not an easy one :)

  1. I've been doing some buzz fixes [1] [2] [3] [4].

  2. I've been hacking some devices [5] [6].

  3. I've been hacking some OE recipes (Porting some shr recipes from import/shr to org.openembedded.dev), and putting some patches [7].

  4. I've been following new interesting companies [8].


And off course i've been having a lot of fun, a real life, a paid job and a wonderful wife that supports me ;) until one holiday week :)

I put this post because i've one specific blog with some new stuff [9] An i.MX515 [10] development platform that i'm going to start to hack.

I'm reading my mails from the last weeks (now last month), and i'm getting up to date.

.....

Stay tunned to know what i've been doing in next weeks :)

Hope to write here soon.

Greetings

--
The links
[1] http://www.openmoko-spain.org/tiki-view_blog_post.php?blogId=1&postId=10
[2] http://www.tuxbrain.com/en/content/buzz-fix-party-barcelona-movie
[3] http://www.tuxbrain.com/en/content/buzz-fix-party-madridphotos
[4] http://www.tuxbrain.com/en/content/there-and-back-againtuxbrain-debconf09-pics
[5] http://www.compulab.co.il/x270em/html/x270-em-datasheet.htm
[6] http://openinkpot.org/wiki/NetronixEB600
[7] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.handhelds.openembedded/25655
[8] http://www.qi-hardware.com/
[9] http://projects.powerdeveloper.org/project/imx515/752
[10] http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=i.MX515

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Remember my first OpenSource project

Today I'm in a melancholic mod. And i started to think about my collaborations to the OpenSource world. I did a lot of experiments at home, but i didn't made it public available, because i wasn't so proud of my code, and I feel scared that someone laughs about my style or my syntax.

I remember my first public project: RTL-EtherBootD is an Open Source project which consists of porting the Ethernet card drivers provided in the Etherboot project to RTLinux. It was my graduate work at University. Since that project, i didn't publish any OpenSource code. I worked in some different environments, but unluckily at my country (Spain) they didn't work a lot with Linux.

I started my actual job very enthusiastic, i was going to work developing Linux in Embedded Systems, but it's not what i'm doing right now :( I'm sad about that, i hope to work in Embedded Linux environments one day, but for now i've to work on this at home.

At work, i started my small patches to u-boot project here. Not really big, but a small step to start doing it more frequently (i've code to submit, but i didn't find it good enough to send it).

Personally, with the OpenMoko project, i started to hack the IDA Systems project, and the build system Openembedded. I found some problems with my working environment at home (Ubuntu 8.10 with a Core2Duo MacBookPro), but i'm solving the environment problems sending some patches to OpenEmbedded.

What i'd like to do is have a day to day work with Linux in Embedded environments, but actually i'm frustrated with a 8-bit PIC micro that i've to develop in Linux environments. Some time before, i was working with 16-bit Motorola uC, at R&D department devolping embedded systems from scratch, for ships. A lot of restrictions: hard-real time, fast response, 3 redundancy communication channels, .... I miss the hardware hacks that i've to do with our prototypes, the evaluation boards and all the stuff. It was funny and i miss the friends that still are there.

For now, i've to see to the future and look for another comfortable environment, Linux, and OpenSource development. I like to don't have to wait too much to find that change.

In my most important project, at the moment (the collaboration with IDA Systems), i suffer from the combination of OpenEmbedded and my environment. I hope to solve this soon. I'm going step by step :)

Now that i wrote some words about my senses, i start to feel better and i can afford my day-to-day job.

See you soon.

-- Edited --
My u-boot patch (the first): http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.boot-loaders.u-boot/44824/focus=45183
My OpenEmbedded patch: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.handhelds.openembedded/21425

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Delays in my updates

Lately i'm not being really active in my blog.

This is because i had a lot of changes in my personal life, and in my working environment.

First of all i've to announce (if someone has interest in it) that i changed my relationship status. Now i'm married. This has give me a lot of my responsabilities and a lot of housework.
Well, not all is bad, but i've less time ;)

Other delayed cause is that i've been traveling in my honeymoon. Now i'm back and i'm reading the news, and future developments (a lot of news missed).

In other order of things, i've been fighting with fso & openembedded to build some images. As allways, i see a lot of dependencies missed. And my build hardware is not really fast (i'm going to need an update) but it's hard because is a computer. My only options are upgrade the HDD to bigger 7200 rpm & upgrade the RAM from 2 GB to 4 GB, other upgrades means buy another hardware, and actually it's not possible.

More updates soon.

As everybody said:
"I'm trying to be more active in my development efforts, and post more often".

Sunday, November 9, 2008

Conference at LUG - Madrid

I'm proud to announce to the community my first presentation about OpenMoko.For the English speakers, i'm so sorry, but it's in english.

The UC3M LUG and the creator of the FDOM distro (es), David Samblas, give me the opportunity to talk about this amazing project.
The event was the Congreso GUL UC3M 2008. A lot of Spanish people talking about OpenSource projects. (i love it :D)

You could see the presentation in two parts.(in Spanish, sorry):




And the Presentation in OpenOffice format.