Scott Murray, Principal Software Engineer at Konsulko Group presented at the summer Automotive Grade Linux AMM. Scott shared details around the work done the past few years to prepare AGL before it upgraded to the new Yocto Project long-term support release, Scarthgap, earlier this year.
Konsulko Group has had another great year. We’ve helped our customers build new breakthrough embedded products of all sizes, from semiconductors to medical devices to automotive to heavy equipment.
We continue strong relationships with the Linux Foundation, Yocto Project and Automotive Grade Linux. We work with our partners mender.io and PHYTEC, providing support and development for their customers.
We’ve expanded our footprint across the US and Europe, welcoming three outstanding engineers to the team: George McCollister, Darko Alavanja and Bryan Cisneros.
George McCollister has over 25 years of experience in Embedded Systems development. Starting with 8051 microcontrollers and quickly adopting Linux, he has worked on a wide range of technologies from network switches and storage appliances to automated utility fault restoration and process automation. He was a key designer and architect of an industry leading utility automation platform.
Darko Alavanja was deeply involved with robotics as a student, competing in several teams in the Eurobot contest. He designed mechanical components, PCBs, sensor electronics, actuator systems and software used for creating mobile robots. Darko has developed embedded systems for industrial devices such as FPGA-based hardware-in-the-loop equipment, controllers for industrial machinery and protocols for communication gateways.
Bryan Cisneros has developed embedded software, UIs, and test code across various industries, including medical devices, RF modules, and AI-enabled cameras. Before joining Konsulko, Bryan worked in the defense industry developing networked applications for weapons and information systems, focusing on redesigning outdated UIs and programs, and implementing CI/CD pipelines.
In addition to our consulting work for our customers, Konsulko Group continues to actively participate in the Open Source community and its conferences around the world.
Konsulko’s senior leadership have been contributors in the Linux kernel and other OSS communities since the late 1990s. The entire Konsulko team has been involved in a number of Open Source projects including U-Boot, Yocto Project, OpenEmbedded and Automotive Grade Linux (AGL).
Konsulko principal engineer Tim Orling serves on OpenEmbedded Board of Directors. He co-presented Maintaining a Community BSP Layer: Updating Meta-Tegra with Ilies Chergui (Medtronic) at Embedded Open Source Summit in June 2023, and Customize your CROPS containers with crops-generator with Eilís ‘pidge’ Ní Fhlannagáin (BayLibre) at Yocto Project Developer Day.
Principal engineer Denys Dmytriyenko and the Yocto Project Technical Steering Committee were instrumental in helping Yocto Project secure important new funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund. Denys also wrote about some of the technical highlights from the 2023 Linux Plumbers Conference.
Principal engineer Scott Murray presented Vehicle Signaling Specification and KUKSA.val at Automotive Grade Linux All Member Meeting Berlin, a “lightning talk” on VSS Updates in AGL at Automotive Linux Summit, Evolving VSS Usage in AGL at AGL AMM Japan, and Automotive Grade Linux: Status and Roadmap at Embedded Recipes Paris.
Senior engineer Leon Anavi spoke about RDP with Wayland, Weston & Yocto at FOSDEM, and Integrating VNC/Weston with the Yocto Project/OpenEmbedded at Yocto Project Virtual Summit 2023.
Vitaly Wool, principal engineer and General Manager, Konsulko AB presented Implementing secure boot for AOSP running U-Boot at the Lund Linux Conference 2023.
Finally, Konsulko Group intern Atanas Bunchev demonstrated remote updates and troubleshooting of connected embedded Linux devices using Mender.io at TuxCon 2023. The presentation (in Bulgarian) spread the word about the Yocto Project, OpenEmbedded and various Mender features among the local community. Atanas also co-wrote (with Leon Anavi) RAUC on CuBox-I/HummingBoard for Software Updates and Mender Add-ons: Remote Troubleshooting Devices in the Field.
Three Konsulko engineers traveled to Paris (left to right, in créatif senior Frank Tizzoni‘s great caricature): António Oliveira came from Portugal, Darko Alavanja from Serbia, Scott Murray from Canada.
Embedded Recipes was held over two days in late September at Fondation Biermans Lapotre. The event had a nice format: single room, single track. That meant everyone stayed together for its duration which made it easier to meet people.
We talked a little about everything: kernel internals, prototyping tools, software updates, Yocto Project, machine learning…
Scott gave a nice overview of the Automotive Grade Linux project, its history, current work and future plans.
Scott Murray
Embedded Recipes Paris 2023
Scott Murray
AGL AMM Japan 2023
Scott Murray
AGL AMM Japan 2023
Konsulko engineers will be giving two talks at Embedded Open Source Summit (EOSS), a new Linux Foundation umbrella event held in Prague, Czech Republic, June 27-30, 2023. Attending virtually is also an option. Incorporated into EOSS are the Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) and the Automotive Linux Summit Europe (ALS).
On Tuesday, June 27, Konsulko Principal Engineer Scott Murray will present a Lightning Talk: Vehicle Signal Specification and KUKSA.val Updates in AGL at ALS.
The Vehicle Signal Specification (VSS) has been included in the AGL UCB by incorporating the KUKSA.val project. Scott will provide an update on the work done for the upcoming Prickly Pike UCB release.
On Thursday, June 29 at ELC, Tim Orling, Konsulko Principal Engineer and Ilies Chergui of Medtronic will speak about Maintaining a Community BSP Layer: Updating Meta-Tegra Through Major Changes.
The meta-tegra BSP layer supports the NVIDIA Jetson family of systems-on-module and has an active OpenEmbedded for Tegra community. Tim and Ilies will discuss changes in the latest SDKs including the bootloader and the trusted OS, and how these affect secure boot and disk encryption implementations. They will also discuss changes needed to support over the air updates and cover how the community keeps up with upstream Open Embedded/Yocto Project changes, as well as the roadmap for support for future Jetson platforms and Yocto Project releases.
Please join Scott, Tim, and a good-sized contingent of our engineers in Prague (or virtually). Register here.
Scott Murray
AGL AMM Berlin 2023
Konsulko Group Principal Software Engineer, Scott Murray will present Vehicle Signaling Specification and KUKSA.val in AGL at the Automotive Grade Linux All Member Meeting in Berlin on Thursday, March 9, 2023.
The Vehicle Signaling Specification (VSS) is an emerging standard to define and categorize vehicle signals. AGL members who attend the session will receive a high-level overview of what VSS and the related Vehicle Information Service Specification (VISS) provide. This will be followed by a discussion of how the KUKSA.val VSS implementation has been integrated into the AGL demonstration stack.
The following week, Scott will be on hand at the AGL stand at Embedded World (Hall 4, Stand 4-171) in Nuremberg, March 14-16. He’ll be happy to talk about VSS, KUKSA.val and many other AGL technical topics. Please stop by if you are visiting the show.
2022 went by quickly with Konsulko engineers working closely with our customers, our partners and the open source community. For the tenth straight year, Konsulko Group has helped our clients build outstanding commercial products with Embedded Linux, Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded, as well as deploying Over-the-Air (OTA) software updating.
We had particular success with our Konsulko Continuous Time Engagement™ offering, providing dedicated engineering resources for two of the world’s largest semiconductor companies. This model provides guaranteed engineering time for an agreed period. KCTE has allowed our customers to use our engineers on a variety of their requirements, and switch between these tasks as the rest of their project and in-house engineering required.
Of course, many of our clients prefer Konsulko OnDemand Time Engagement™, SOW-based engineering for high level consulting, on-demand support, and specific tasks within a larger project. KOTE is also best for longer term engagements without a hard deadline that can be stopped and started as necessary, and projects with an expected pause (such as bring-up of new hardware which almost always results in a re-spin of the PCB).
We continue our strong relationship with the Linux Foundation and Automotive Grade Linux. We worked with mender.io and PHYTEC, providing support and development for their customers. With our friends at ICS, we presented at a joint webinar in August, Software Update Mechanisms: Selecting the Best Solution by Konsulko’s Leon Anavi and ICS’ Jeff Tranter.
Our Konsulko engineers were active participants (often in person, sometimes virtually) in conferences and developer gatherings. Leon Anavi, Vitaly and Maria Wool, and Tim Orling made presentations at the Embedded Linux Conferences (North America and Europe), FOSDEM and Yocto Project Summits:
Tim also posted a technical paper on Using kernel config fragments to remove an unwanted feature.
The bar is pretty high for joining Konsulko Group. Some of our team have thirty years experience with embedded software and Linux. Most have over twenty and all have over fifteen years, working (and playing) with Linux and the open source community. So we were happy to welcome Denys Dmytriyenko and António Oliveira to Konsulko Group this year.
Denys is a long time Open Source Software developer, contributing code to many FOSS projects, like glibc, PostgreSQL, KDE, MythTV, LIRC, OpenEmbedded, and Yocto Project. Before joining Konsulko Group, he worked as Software Developer and Architect for Texas Instruments for almost 20 years on numerous Embedded Linux (MIPS and ARM-based) products. Since 2011 Denys has served on the OpenEmbedded Board of Directors, and since 2019, on the Yocto Project Technical Steering Committee. He is a long time contributor and maintainer of numerous recipes and layers in the OpenEmbedded/Yocto Project universe.
António has worked in development of highly optimized hardware and software ranging from deeply embedded microcontrollers to full-fledged graphical user interfaces. During this time, he has gained extensive experience in build automation tools, analog and digital circuits, powerline communications, and low power and low frequency radio communications. An active member of the open source community, he has contributed to Yocto Project and the Linux kernel. In addition to his work as an embedded engineer, António served eight years on the executive board of his local parish in Portugal, including four years on the municipal council.
We hope you will have the opportunity to work with Denys, António and the rest of Konsulko Group in 2023.
