Tag Archive for: Automotive Grade Linux

Konsulko Group: The Year in Review 2023

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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.

Konsulko is growing

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in the defense industry developing networked applications for weapons and information systems, focusing on redesigning outdated UIs and programs, and implementing CI/CD pipelines.

Committed to the Open Source community

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.

Konsulko Group in Paris at Embedded Recipes 2023

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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.

Konsulko Group to speak at EOSS / ELC / ALS in Prague

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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 on VSS & KUKSA.val at AGL AMM & Embedded World

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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.

Konsulko Group: The Year in Review 2022

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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.

Engaging with our customers

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).

Partnerships and Conferences

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.

Two top engineers join the Konsulko team

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.

Embedded Linux engineers have a choice to make in June

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At Konsulko Group, we’ve participated in the “virtual” developer conferences created out of necessity over the past couple of years. We eagerly awaited the return of the face-to-face meetings of the embedded community.

Our first opportunity was the Embedded Linux Conference in Seattle last September. Although major components were still virtual, those who where able to attend in person experienced the event “together“ in ways that even the best remote simulation cannot achieve.

So we are very much looking forward to ELC (part of Open Source Summit North America 2022) in Austin, Texas, and the return of Embedded World in Nuremberg, Germany. Unfortunately, the pandemic initially forced rescheduling of both. Now they will occur on exactly the same dates (starting June 21, 2022) half a world apart, making it impossible to attend both onsite.

Which conference should you attend?

Unless you live in Texas or Germany, choosing by geography may not be the best option. The conferences are very different.

ELC is the premier event for companies and developers using Linux in embedded products. It gathers the technical experts working on embedded systems and applications for education and collaboration, historically paving the way for transformation in these far reaching areas.

ELC is also always a good time.

For 20 years, Embedded World has combined

  • an exhibition for engineers and technical management, and
  • a world-leading conference at the intersection of applied research and industrial applications.

The trade show is massive, filling several halls, with many of Konsulko’s friends and partners exhibiting year after year. (If you go, be sure to stop by the Automotive Grade Linux stand in Hall 4.)

We hope to see you at one of these important events in June.

Konsulko Group: The Year in Review 2021

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Thanks to our customers, our partners and our dedicated team of engineers, 2021 was a very successful year for Konsulko Group. 

We’ve been chosen to work on important projects in consumer electronics, automotive, medical devices, agriculture, mining, finance, and autonomous vehicles. Our engineers helped our clients, new and old, build outstanding commercial products with Embedded Linux, Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded, as well as deploying Over-the-Air (OTA) software updating.

Partnerships

“Konsulko is a recommended and trusted partner for helping Mender customers and prospects succeed in the Embedded Linux space. They have an excellent team of professionals who will deliver on time and as agreed.”

Thomas Ryd, CEO, mender.io

We continued our strong relationships with mender.io, and with the Linux Foundation and Automotive Grade Linux (AGL). 

We also launched a new partnership with PHYTEC at the Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) in Seattle. Konsulko is providing support and development for PHYTEC customers using their Systems on Modules (SOMs) and Yocto Project Linux distribution.

Conferences

As in previous years, Konsulko engineers were active participants (often virtually) in conferences and developer gatherings, making presentations at ELC and Yocto Project Summits, and writing technical papers on Yocto Project, security, and OTA. We hope for a time in the not-too-distant future when it makes sense for developers from all over the world to gather again face-to-face to share ideas. 

Contributions

As many of our engineers have been working (and playing) with Open Source Software (OSS) for over 20 years, Konsulko Group is proud of our continuing commitment to contribute to the community. Last month we were happy to hear that Konsulko is #3 in contributions to Yocto Project “Non Core,” just behind industry giants ARM and Fujitsu, and ahead of every other software or hardware company.

This was even before we welcomed OSS veteran Tim Orling to the team in December. Tim was recently Core OS Architect and Yocto Project Architect for Intel Corporation, and serves as a maintainer of meta-python and many recipes in openembedded-core. He has authored hundreds of applied patches for openembedded-core and meta-openembedded. 

Doing business with Konsulko Group

As a team we have found that the best way to work with our customers and prospective customers is to provide a high level of transparency about our business processes. This year, we’ve published blogs on scoping the effort required to successfully complete a customer project, and another describing our two models of engagement: 

  • Konsulko Continuous Time Engagement™ for dedicated engineering resources
  • Konsulko OnDemand Time Engagement™ for high level consulting, on-demand support, and specific tasks within a larger project.

We hope you have found these useful, and we look forward to working with you in 2022.

AGL members: Be sure to attend the virtual All Member Meeting

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Automotive Grade Linux Virtual AMM March 17-18

The Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) All Member Meeting takes place bi-annually and brings the AGL community together to learn about the latest developments, share best practices and collaborate to drive rapid innovation across the industry.

This All Member Meeting will take place virtually, March 17-18, 2021, allowing you to attend from anywhere in the world, and include opportunities to network with other attendees, attend sessions with live speaker Q&A, and much more.

AGL members can register here.

Webinar – Getting Started with AGL using Raspberry Pi

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Coming December 1, a new AGL Member Webinar by Konsulko Group’s Leon Anavi

In 2016 Automotive Grade Linux was ported to Raspberry Pi and since then this low-cost single board computer has become a preferred getting started platform among the community. Although Raspberry Pi doesn’t match the hardware capabilities of high-end industrial and automotive hardware platforms, its wide availability and low-cost makes it a great choice for rapid prototyping and exploring AGL. 

This presentation will provide guidelines and exact steps for building AGL image for Raspberry Pi. We will explore the past and present of AGL on Raspberry Pi, including practical experience for supporting Wayland, PipeWire, libostree for software over the air updates and various hardware peripherals. 

The talk is appropriate for beginners. No previous experience with AGL is required. Hopefully, the presentation will encourage more people to join and contribute to our open source community! Register here.

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Konsulko Group is going to Embedded World

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When Embedded World began in 2003, Linux and open source were still a very small part of the embedded software business. Year after year, Embedded Linux has grown steadily. This year at Embedded World 2020 over 120 companies will be highlighting over 130 Embedded Linux products and services, including the Linux Foundation and Automotive Grade Linux (Hall 4 / 4-171).

If you are coming to Nuremberg, February 25-27, we hope will see you around the AGL stand, on the show floor, or at one of the many social events. Please contact us directly if you’d like to set up a meeting.

Tag Archive for: Automotive Grade Linux