FOSDEM 2017 Open Source Meeting Schedule

FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting) is a 2-day free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate that happens on the first week-end of February, meaning it will take place on February 4 & 5, 2017 this year. FOSDEM 2017 will features 608 speakers, 653 events, and 54 tracks, with 6 main tracks namely: Architectures, Building, Cloud, Documentation, Miscellaneous, and Security & Encryption.
I won’t be there, but it’s always interesting to look at the schedule, and I made my own virtual schedule focusing especially on talks from “Embedded, mobile and automotive” and “Internet of Things” devrooms.

Saturday 4, 2017

• 11:00 – 11:25 – Does your coffee machine speaks Bocce; Teach your IoT thing to speak Modbus and it will not stop talking, by Yaacov Zamir

There are many IoT dashboards out on the web, most will require network connection to a server far far away, and use non standard protocols. We will show how to combine free software tools and protocols from the worlds of IT monitoring, Industrial control and IoT to create simple yet robust dashboards.

Modbus is a serial communication protocol developed in 1979 for use with programmable logic controllers (PLCs). In simple terms, it is a method used for transmitting information over serial lines between electronic devices., it’s openly published, royalty-free, simple and robust.

Many industrial controllers can speak Modbus, we can also teach “hobby” devices like Arduino boards and ESP8266 to speak Modbus. Reliable, robust and simple free software Modbus client will be used to acquire the metrics from our device, then the metrics will be collected and sent to Hawkular and Grafana to store and visualize our data.

• 11:30 – 11:55 – Playing with the lights; Control LIFX WiFi-enabled light bulbs, by Louis Opter

In this talk we’ll take a close look at a one of the “smart” (WiFi-connected) light-bulbs available on the market today. The bulbs expose a small API over UDP that I used to run an interface on a programmable buttons array. We will see how topics like reverse engineering, security, licensing, “self-hosting” and user experience came into play.

monolight is an user interface to control LIFX WiFi-enabled light bulbs. monolight runs on a programmable button array; it is written in Python 3.6 (to have type annotations and asyncio), and it interfaces with the bulbs through a more complex daemon written in C: lightsd.

This talk will start with a live demo of the button grid remotely controlling the light bulbs. We will then explore how it works and some of the motivations behind it (network isolation, trying to not depend on the “cloud”, reliability, user-experience). Finally, we will look into what kind of opportunities even more open IoT products could bring, and open leave the place to Q&A and discussion.

• 12:00 – 12:30 – Creating the open connected car with GENIVI, by Zeeshan Ali, GENIVI Development Platform (GDP) technical lead

A number of new components have matured in GENIVI to provide a true connected car experience. A couple of them are key connectivity components; namely SOTA (Software Over the Air) and RVI (Remote Vehicle Interface). This talk will discuss both these components, how they work together, the security work done on them and their integration into the GENIVI Development Platform.

This talk will also run down the overall status of GENIVI’s development platform and how it can enable an automotive stack to speak not just with the cloud, but with IoT devices via Iotivity interface.

• 12:30 – 13:00 – Making Your Own Open Source Raspberry Pi HAT; A Story About Open Source Harware and Open Source Software, by Leon Anavi

This presentation will provide guidelines how to create an open source hardware add-on board for the most popular single board computer Raspberry Pi using free and open source tools from scratch. Specifications of Raspberry Pi Foundation for HAT (Hardware Attached on Top) will be revealed in details. Leon Anavi has been developing an open source Raspberry Pi HAT for IoT for more than a year and now he will share his experience, including the common mistakes for a software engineer getting involved in hardware design and manufacturing. The presentation is appropriate for anyone interested in building entirely open source products that feature open source hardware and open source software. No previous experience or hardware knowledge is required. The main audience are developers, hobbyists, makers, and students. Hopefully the presentation will encourage them to grab a soldering iron and start prototyping their DIY open source device.

• 13:00 – 13:25 – Building distributed systems with Msgflo; Flow-based-programming over message queues, by Jon Nordby

MsgFlo is a tool to build systems that span multiple processes and devices, for instance IoT sensor networks. Each device acts as a black-box component with input and output ports, mapped to MQTT message queues. One then constructs a system by binding the queues of the components together. Focus on components exchanging data gives good composability and testability, both important in IoT. We will program a system with MsgFlo using Flowhub, a visual live-programming IDE, and test using fbp-spec.

In MsgFlo each process/device is an independent participant, receiving data on input queues, and sending data on output queues. A participant do not know where the data comes from, nor where (if anywhere) the data will go. This strong encapsulation gives good composability and testability. MsgFlo uses a standard message queue protocol (MQTT or AMQP). This makes it easy to use with existing software. As each participant is its own process and communicate over networks, they can be implemented in any programming language. Convenience libraries exist for C++, Python, Arduino, Node.js and Rust. On top of the message queue protocol, a simple discovery mechanism is added. For existing devices without native Msgflo support, the discovery messages can be sent by a dedicated tool.

• 13:30 – 13:55 – 6LoWPAN in picoTCP, and how to support new Link Layer types, by Jelle De Vleeschouwer

6LoWPAN enables, as the name implies, IPv6-communication over Low-power Wireless Personal Area Networks, e.g. IEEE802.15.4. A lot of resources are available to allow 6LoWPAN over IEEE802.15.4, but how can one extend the 6LoWPAN feature-set for the use with other link layer types? This talk will cover the details about a generic implementation that should work with every link layer type and how one can provide support for ones own custom wireless network. The goal is to give quite a technical and detailed talk with finally a discussion about when 6LoWPAN is actually useful and when is it not.

Last year, as a summer project, a generic 6LoWPAN adaption layer was implemented into picoTCP, an open source embedded TCP/IP-stack developed by Altran Intelligent Systems, with an eye on the IoT. The layer should also be able to allow multiple link-layer extensions, for post-network-layer processing. This could be used for mesh-under routing, link layer security, whatever you want. This talk will cover how one can take advantage of these features and caveats that come with it.

• 14:00 – 15:00 – Groking the Linux SPI Subsystem by Matt Porter

The Serial Peripheral Interconnect (SPI) bus is a ubiquitous de facto standard found in many embedded systems produced today. The Linux kernel has long supported this bus via a comprehensive framework which supports both SPI master and slave devices. The session will explore the abstractions that the framework provides to expose this hardware to both kernel and userspace clients. The talk will cover which classes of hardware supported and use cases outside the scope of the subsystem today. In addition, we will discuss subtle features of the SPI subsystem that may be used to satisfy hardware and performance requirements in an embedded Linux system.

• 15:00 – 15:25 – Frosted Embedded POSIX OS; a free POSIX OS for Cortex-M embedded systems, by Brabo Silvius

FROSTED is an acronym that means “FRee Operating System for Tiny Embedded Devices”. The goal of this project is to provide a free kernel for embedded systems, which exposes a POSIX-compliant system call API. In this talk I aim to explain why we started this project, the approach we took to separate the kernel and user-space on Cortex-M CPU’s without MMU, and showcase the latest improvements on networking and supported applications.

• 15:30 – 16:00 – How to Build an Open Source Embedded Video Player, by Michael Tretter

Video playback for embedded devices such as infotainment systems and media centers demands hardware accelerators to achieve reasonable performance. Unfortunately, vendors provide the drivers for the accelerators only as binary blobs. We demonstrate how we built a video playback system that uses hardware acceleration on i.MX6 by using solely open source software including Gstreamer, Qt QML, the etnaviv GPU driver, and the coda video decoder driver.

The Qt application receives the video streams from a Gstreamer pipeline (using playbin). The Gstreamer pipeline contains a v4l2 decoder element, which uses the coda v4l2 driver for the CODA 960 video encoder and decoder IP core (VPU in the Freescale/NXP Reference Manual), and a sink element to make the frames available to the Qt application. The entire pipeline including the Gstreamer to Qt handover uses dma_bufs to avoid copies in software.This example shows how to use open source drivers to ease the development of video and graphics applications on embedded systems.

• 16:00 – 16:25 – Project Lighthouse: a low-cost device to help blind people live independently, by David Teller

The Word Health Organization estimates that more than 250 million people suffer from vision impairment, 36 millions of them being entirely blind. In many cases, their impairment prevents them from living independently. To complicate things further, about 90% of them are estimated to live in low-income situations.

Project Lighthouse was started by Mozilla to try and find low-cost technological solutions that can help vision-impaired people live and function on their own. To this date, we have produced several prototypes designed to aid users in a variety of situations. Let’s look at some of them. This will be a relatively low-tech presentation.

• 16:30 – 16:55 – Scientific MicroPython for Microcontrollers and IoT, IoT programming with Python, by Roberto Colistete Jr

MicroPython is a implementation of Python 3 optimised to run on a microcontroller, created in 2013 by the Physicist Damien P. George. The MicroPython boards runs MicroPython on the bare metal and gives a low-level Python operating system running interactive prompt or scripts.

The MicroPython boards currently use 32 bit microcontrollers clocked at MHz and with RAM limited to tens or hundreds of Kbytes. These are the microcontroller boards with official MicroPython support currently in the beginning 2017 : Pyboard, Pyboard Lite, WiPy 1/2, ESP8266, BBC Micro:bit, LoPy, SiPy, FiPy. They cost between USD3-40, are very small and light, about some to tens of mm in each dimension and about 5-10 g, have low power consumption, so MicroPython boards are affordable and can be embedded in almost anything, almost anywhere.

Some hints will be given to the FOSS community to be open minded about MicroPython : be aware that MicroPython exists, MicroPython is a better programming option than Arduino in many ways, MicroPython boards are available and affordable, porting more Python 3 scientific modules to MicroPython, MicroPython combines well with IoT.

• 17:00 – 17:25 – Iotivity from devices to cloud; how to make IoT ideas to real using FLOSS, by Philippe Coval & Ziran Sun (Samsung)

The OCF/IoTivity project aims to answer interoperability issues in the IoT world from many different contexts to accommodate a huge range devices from microcontrollers, to consumer electronics such as Tizen wearables or your powerful GNU/Linux system The vision of Iotivity is not restricted to ad hoc environment but also can be connected to Internet and make the service easily accessible by other parties. With cloud access in place, usage scenarios for IoT devices can be enriched immensely.

In this talk we walk through the steps on how to practically handle IoT use cases that tailored towards various topologies. To introduce the approach used in IoTivity, we first give a detailed background introduction on IoTivity framework. Then we will present a demo that shows a few examples, from setting up a basic smart home network to accessing the IoT resource via a third party online service. Challenges and solutions will be addressed from development and implementation aspects for each step of the demo.

We hope this talk will inspire developers to create new IoT prototypes using FLOSS.

• 17:30 – 17:55 – Open Smart Grid Platform presentation, an Open source IoT platform for large infrastructures, by Jonas van den Bogaard

The Open Smart Grid Platform is an open source IoT platform. The open smart grid platform is a generic IoT platform, built for organizations that manage and/or control large-scale infrastructures. The following use cases are now readily available: smart lighting, smart metering, tariff switching, and microgrids. Furthermore the following use-cases are in development: distribution automation, load management and smart device management. The architecture of the open smart grid platform is modular and consists multiple layers.

The open smart grid platform is highly unique for embracing the open source approach and the following key features:

• Suitable for scalable environments delivering high performance
• High availability and multitenant architectures
• Built with security by design and regularly tested.
• It has a generic architecture. More use cases and domains are easily added to the platform.
• The open smart grid platform is based on open standards where possible.

We believe the platform is interesting for developers who have interest in working on use-cases for Smart Cities, Utility Companies and other large-scale infrastructure companies.

• 18:00 – 19:00 – AGL as a generic secured industrial embedded Linux; factory production line controllers requirements are not that special, by Dominig ar Foll

There is no de facto secured embedded Linux distro while the requirement is becoming more and more critical with the rise of IoT in Industrial domains. When looking under the hood of the Yocto built AGL project (Automotive Linux), it is obvious that it can fit 95% of the most common requirements as a Secured Embedded Linux. We will look how non Automotive industries can easily reuse the AGL code and tools to build their own industrial product and why it’s a safer bet than to build it internally.

Industrial IoT cannot be successful without a serious improvement of the security coverage. Unfortunately there is as today, no of-the-shelves offer and the skills required to create such solution, are at best rare, more often out of reach. AGL as created a customizable embedded Linux distro which is nicely designed for reuse in many domains outside of Automotive. During the presentation we will see how to: – start your development with boards readily available on the Net, – change the BSP and add peripherals using Yocto layers or project like MRAA, – integrate a secure boot in your platform, – add your middleware and your application without breaking the maintained Core OS – develop a UI on the integrated screen and/or an HTML remote browser – update the core OS and your add-ons. – get support and influence the project.

Sunday 5, 2017

• 10:00 11:00 – How I survived to a SoC with a terrible Linux BSP, Working with jurassic vendor kernels, missing pieces and buggy code, by Luca Ceresoli

In this talk Luca will share some of his experiences with such vendor BSPs, featuring jurassic kernels, non-working drivers, non-existing bootloaders, code of appallingly bad quality, ineffective customer support and Windows-only tools. You will discover why he spent weeks in understanding, fixing and working around BSPs instead of just using them. The effects on the final product quality will be described as well. Luca will also discuss what the options are when you face such a BSP, and what both hackers and vendors can do to improve the situation for everybody’s benefit.

• 11:00-12:00 – Open Source Car Control, by Josh Hartung

This fall my team launched the Open Source Car Control (OSCC) project, a by-wire control kit that makes autonomous vehicle development accessible and collaborative to developers at every level. In this presentation, we discuss the project and its implications on the development of autonomous cars in a vertically integrated and traditionally closed industry.

A primary barrier to entry in autonomous vehicle development is gaining access to a car that can be controlled with an off-the-shelf computer. Purchasing from an integrator can cost upwards of $100K, and DIY endeavors can result in unreliable and unsafe solutions. The OSCC project acts as a solution to these problems. OSCC is a kit of open hardware and software (based on Arduino) that can be used to take control of the throttle, brake, and steering in modern cars. The result is a fully by-wire test car that can be built for about $10K (USD), including the vehicle. In this discussion, we unpack the impetus and development of the OSCC project, challenges we encountered during development, and the role projects like OSCC have in a necessary “flattening” of the automotive industry.

• 12:00 – 13:00 – Kernel DLC Metrics, Statistic Analysis and Bug-Patterns, by Nicholas Mc Guire

SIL2LinuxMP strives to qualify a defined GNU/Linux subset for the use in safety-related systems by “assessment of non-compliant development”. To demonstrate that the kernel has achieved suitable reliability and correctness properties basic metrics of such properties and their statistic analysis can be used as part of the argument. Linux has a wealth of analytical tools built-in to it which allow to extract information on compliance, robustness of development, as well as basic metrics on complexity or correctness with respect to defined properties. While IEC 61508 Ed 2 always pairs testing and analysis, we believe that for a high complexity system traditional testing is of relatively low effectiveness and analytical methods need to be the primary path. To this ends we outline some approaches taken:

• Bug-age analysis
• Bug-rates and trend analysis
• Code-complexity/bug relationship
• Brain-dead correctness analysis
• Interface and type-correctness analysis
• API compliance analysis
• Analysis of build-bot data

While much of the data points to robust and mature code there also are some areas where problems popped up. In this talk we outline the used methods and give examples as well as key findings. FLOSS development has reached a quite impressive maturity, to substantially go beyond we think it will need the use of quantitative process and code metrics – these results from SIL2LinuxMP may be a starting point.

• 13:00 – 14:00 – Loco Positioning: An OpenSource Local Positioning System for robotics, presentation with a demo of autonomous Crazyflie 2.0 quadcopter, by Arnaud Taffanel

Positioning in robotics has alway been a challenge. For outdoor, robots GPS is solving most of the practical problems, but indoor, precise localization is still done using expensive proprietary systems mainly based on an array of cameras.

In this talk, I will present the loco positioning system: an open source Ultra Wide Band radio-based local positioning system, why we need it and how it works. I will also speak about its usage with the Crazyflie 2.0 open source nano quadcopter, of course ending with an autonomous flying demo.

• 14:00 14:50 – Free Software For The Machine, by Keith Packard

The Machine is a hardware project at Hewlett Packard Enterprise which takes a new look at computer architecture. With many processors and large amounts of directly addressable storage, The Machine program has offered an equally large opportunity for developing new system software. Our team at HPE has spent the better part of two years writing new software and adapting existing software to expose the capabilities of the hardware to application developers.

As directly addressable storage is such a large part of the new hardware, this presentation will focus on a couple of important bits of free software which expose that to applications, including our Librarian File System and Managed Data Structures libraries. Managed Data Structures introduces a new application programming paradigm where the application works directly on the stable storage form for data structures, eliminating serialization and de-serialization operations.

Finally, the presentation will describe how the hardware is managed, from sequencing power to a rack full of high-performance computing hardware, through constructing custom Linux operating systems for each processor and managing all of them as parts of a single computing platform.

• 15:00 – 15:25 – Diving into the KiCad source code, by Maciej Sumiski

Let’s be sincere, all of us would love to change something in KiCad. I bet you have an idea for a new tool or another killer feature that would make your life so much easier.

You know what? You are free to do so! Even more, you are welcome to contribute to the project, and it is not that difficult as one may think. Those who have browsed the source code might find it overwhelming at first, but the truth is: you do not have to know everything to create useful extensions.

I would like to invite you for a walk through the KiCad source code to demonstrate how easy it is to add this tool you have always been dreaming about.

• 15:30 – 16:00 – Testing with volcanoes – Fuego+LAVA, embedded testing going distributed, by Jan-Simon Möller

• 16:00 – 16:30 – Adding IEEE 802.15.4 and 6LoWPAN to an Embedded Linux Device, by Stefan Schmidt

• 16:30 – 17:00 – OpenPowerlink over Xenomai, by Pierre Ficheux

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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