FOSDEM 2018 Blog! New PINE64 Boards, Upcoming Hardware and Much More!
#3
Part 3. Day 2 - KDE on Pinebook and Turris Omnia Tetris 

FOSDEM has come to an end and so has this short blog. Day 2 of FOSDEM at the stall was as busy - if not busier - than the first. More questions about the practical applications of the clusterboard, more questions about the upcoming boards and many more questions about the availability of the clear-case Pinebook (for those who haven’t read carefully the previous entry, its not available for purchase) were asked and answered. In result none of us got to see much at FOSDEM this year other than our immediate surroundings and some projects of particular interest to PINE64 users. More on this later. 

We did, however, got a chance to meet a lot of new people and some whom we’ve chatted with for months (or years), but never spoken to face-to-face. Its always good to put a face on an internet handle. Thank you all for stopping by to have a chat —- it was really great to meet you all. We also had the pleasure of establishing contact with new projects and being fed ideas for the future by developers; we will let you know if and when some of come to fruition. 

Now onto more PINE64 stuff; for starters, I’m including another 2 pictures of the RockPro64 (I realise the previous photo was pretty terrible and pretty pointless); the first shows a PCIe expansion board with two SATA connectors and the second a PCIe NVMe SSD attached to the board. Ayufan got to take the prototype home with him - cannot wait to hear if either or both of these expansion boards will work without a hassle. Personally, I’d be more interested in attaching more than 2 HDD’s (remember that the RockPro64 also has USB 3.0 and USB C) to this SBC, but I have been told that there are viable applications for running high-speed storage on this board. Anyways, how cool is that ?

[Image: iyDOp0f.jpg](2 SATA ports expansion card) 


[Image: uj5iBeT.jpg](PCIe - SSD expansion card)

The guys from KDE came by our booth and showed us a Pinebook running the Plasma desktop. From what I could tell the end-user experience is very polished - there is even a GUI setup that helps you install the OS to the eMMC, sets up a username and password for you, connects to your WiFi, etc., Very neat, I can’t wait to see more. As a side-note, I know that there is a related project, which also uses the Plasma desktop due to be released sometime in the coming months. Over at their boot there was also a Pine A64+ which ran the Plasma desktop. In short, Its a given we will be seeing a lot more KDE on PINE64 hardware in the near future … 

[Image: BqrHkSV.jpg]
(Plasma on the Pinebook)

[Image: lZdSpyA.jpg](Pine A64+ at KDE Stall) 

But thats not all, there was more PINE64 at FOSDEM; a Pine A64+ running OpenHAB with z-wave module was shown in conjunction with the LaMetric smart clock at the Eclipse stand. Very cool I must say. This is a part of a much larger and still growing trend of open source IoT. There was a lot of talk about this subject at our stand too. One of the people I spoke to offered a number of suggestions as to whom we should reach out to for support in current and upcoming boards - I have duly noted the suggestions and spoken to TL about it. 

[Image: 3kEppOO.jpg](Pine A64+ at Eclipse stall; photo curtsy of Kai Kreuzer)

I have also promised to include other projects that catch my eye in this blog and so here are the two that I found particularly awesome and which got my attention. Our immediate neighbours - Turris Omnia - were showing off their open source router that can also function as a NAS, printserver, and much more. Its a great device and they certainly came up with a fun idea to attract attention to their stand; they stacked a number of Omnias on-top one another, so that the indicator LEDs on the front effectively acted as a display that one could play Tetris on. Not only did it look awesome but it was fun to play too. The winner could walk away with an Omnia of their own. 

[Image: 92GVB8L.jpg](Omnia Tetris Tower) 

The second amazing project shown was from Ham Radio and Libre Space Foundation. They were showing SATNOGS, an open source project of network satellite ground stations, and UPSAT - the first open source hardware and software satellite. Sadly I cannot not write much more on this subject simply because I know nothing about it - but I strongly suggest you check out their site to learn more about this awesome project.

[Image: I0AAyvN.jpg](The UPSat satellite)

You should check out the FOSDEM website and youtube as all talks and videos from the floor should be available online now. 

This is all for this year’s FOSDEM blog. All in all it was a great but tiering experience, and it exceeded our expectations in every way. Its was really great to meet so many existing PINE64 users and to talk to those who are interested in our existing and upcoming products. It has also proven to be a valuable experience in terms of feedback - we have taken all suggestions onboard and will consider them in the coming weeks and months. Hope to see more of you next year!
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Messages In This Thread
RE: FOSDEM 2018 Blog! New PINE64 Boards, Upcoming Hardware and Much More! - by Luke - 02-05-2018, 05:21 AM

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