Blog
Low Energy Computing for the Masses: Part 2
In my previous post I talked about the main track presentation “Who Ate My Battery” given at FOSDEM 2014 with my colleague Kerstin Eder of Bristol University. That was on the first day of FOSDEM, and part of our objective was to attract participants to our hands-on workshop the following day. We wanted people not […]
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FOSDEM 2014: Taking low energy computing to the masses
Early every February, around five thousand people take over the Free University of Brussels for a weekend for the Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting. The attendees at FOSDEM span the whole gamut of society: amateur beginners through to experienced professionals, teenagers just starting out through to silver haired senior citizens who once built […]
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Integer based sinf and cosf implementation
The transcendental function implementation in Newlib’s libm, like a number of other such software implementations, assumes that the target already has a fast hardware implementation of basic floating point arithmetic in the same or higher precision as that of the implemented function. Moreover, the evaluation typically goes to some length to raise the correct floating […]
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Energy-efficient computing at FOSDEM 2014
In a little over two weeks FOSDEM will once again be taking place in Brussels, with around 4,000 free and open source software (and hardware!) advocates set to descend upon the city for a weekend of talks, workshops and lively discussion. This year the entire Embecosm team will be in attendance and will be joined […]
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Softcores for FPGA: the free and open source alternatives
Free software is everywhere. You may be reading this article on a smartphone running Android, using a browser such as Firefox, with the article supplied by a web server running Apache. All this works, because software has a marginal cost of distribution, that is effectively zero. It costs no more to supply one million copies […]
Read moreThe trials and tribulations of adding a new port to GCC: Free software at its very best
My colleague, Jörn Rennecke, has just had his port of the GNU Compiler Collection for the Synopsys ARC processor family reviewed and accepted into the FSF mainline
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Microcontrollers for All: The Shrimp at Wuthering Bytes and So Make It
There is something of a race to make the cheapest possible computer and if the Internet of Things is to succeed, then we need such products. The good thing about many of these boards is that they are readily available to the consumer, and very accessible for the embedded non-specialist, whether a product designer, a teacher or a hobbyist
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ORCONF 2013 Next Month – Free and Open Source Silicon Chip Design for All
The annual OpenCores conference is now in its third year and comes to the UK for the first time. We’ll be meeting on 5-6 October at the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory. This is the ultimate informal conference, where all of those interested in open source silicon chip design can get together to talk, design, eat and drink
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Shrimping in the Pennines
No, your eyes are not deceiving you and there is a simple explanation to the curious title of this post!
The Pennines are a range of hills that have been described as the backbone of England and as this suggests are some distance from the sea. However, in a few weeks time the Pennine town of Hebden Bridge will once again play host to Open Source Hardware Camp (OSHCamp), and Embecosm will be running a ShrimpingIt workshop on the Sunday.
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