Along with a number of other Canonical staff I recently attended linux.conf.au
2019 in Christchurch, New Zealand. I consider this the major
Australia/New Zealand yearly conference that covers general open source
development. This year the theme of the conference was "Linux of Things"
and many of the talks had an IoT connection.
One
of the premium swag items was a Raspberry Pi Zero. It is unfortunate
that this is not a supported Ubuntu Core device (CPU a generation too
old) as this would have been a great opportunity to show an Ubuntu Core
device in action. I did prepare a lightning talk showing some Ubuntu
Core development on a Raspberry Pi 3, but this sadly didn't make the
cut. You can see it in blog form.
LCA
consistently has high quality talks, so choosing what to attend is
hard. Mostly everything was recorded and is viewable on their YouTube channel. Here is some highlights that I saw:
STM32 Development Boards (literally) Falling From The Sky (video)
- This talk was about tracking and re-purposing hardware from weather
balloons. I found it interesting as it made me think about the amount of
e-waste that is likely to be generated as IoT increases and ways in
that it can be re-cycled, particularly with open source software.
Plastic is Forever: Designing Tomu's Injection-Molded Case (video) and SymbiFlow - The next generation FOSS FPGA toolchain (video)
- FPGA development is something that has really struggled to break into
the mainstream. I think this is mostly down to two things - a lack of a
quality open source toolchain and cheap hardware. These talks make it
seem like we're getting really close with the SymbiFlow toolchain and hardware like the Fomu.
I think we'll get some really interesting new developments when we get
something close to the Rasberry Pi/Arduino experience and I'm looking forward to writing some code in the FPGA and IoT space, hopefully soon!
The Tragedy of systemd (video) - It's the conflict that just keeps giving ðŸ˜
Benno talked about how regardless of how systemd came to exist the
value of modern middleware is valuable. I had thought the majority had
come to this conclusion but it seems this is still an idea that needs
selling. I think the talk was effective in doing that.
Sequencing DNA with Linux Cores and Nanopores (video) - This was a live (!) demonstration of doing DNA sequencing on the speakers lunch. This was done using the MinION
- a USB DNA sequencer. As well as being able to complete the task what
impressed me was this was done on a laptop and no special software was
required. Given this device costs something around $1000 and is easy to
use this opens up DNA analysis to the open source world.
Around the world in 80 Microamps - ESP32 and LoRa for low-power IoT (video)
- This discussed real world cases of building IoT / automation
solutions using battery power (e.g. solar not suitable). It covered how
it's very hard to run a Linux based solution for a long time on a
battery, but technology is slowly improving. Turns out the popularity of
e-scooters is making bigger and cheaper batteries available.
Christchurch has recently started trialing Lime scooters.
These were super popular with a hacker crowd and quickly accumulated
around the venue. I planned to scooter from the airport to the venue but
sadly that day there weren't any nearby, so I walked half way and
scootered the rest. They're super fun and useful so I recommend you try
them if you are visiting a city that has them. 🙂
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