Tag Archive for: year in review

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.

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.

CEO Pete Popov looks back on 2020

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As we approach the end of December, it’s time to review a year that we will certainly remember for the rest of our lives. It hasn’t been easy, but all of us at Konsulko Group are still working hard, supporting the open source community and helping our customers build forward-looking products.

Even at the start of 2020, we knew this year would be different. The coronavirus was the talk of CES in January with some companies pulling out at the last minute, and everyone wondering what the global business climate would be in the months ahead.

By the time FOSDEM rolled around a few weeks later, it was clear the virus would disrupt commerce worldwide, and by the end of February, we had to cut short our presence at Embedded World because of new travel restrictions.

Then the world locked down completely. Since at Konsulko Group we all work remotely by design, we didn’t have to adjust our way of developing software, but as it did for everyone, we had to significantly change our face-to-face participation in embedded Linux, Yocto Project and other community events.

We taught ourselves to use video editing tools, and gave “virtual” presentations from our desks at the Embedded Linux Conference North America and Yocto Project Dev Day at the end of June, the virtual Automotive Grade Linux All Member Meeting in mid July, Linaro Connect in September, Virtual ELCE and Yocto Project Virtual Summit Europe at the end of October, and participated in the virtual Automotive Linux Summit the first of December.

In December, we also presented an AGL Webinar, Getting Started with AGL using Raspberry Pi.

Early in the year, we announced that we had become a Mender Authorized Referral Partner, and that important alliance has provided dividends to both Konsulko Group and our customers as the year progressed.

Konsulko engineers continued our series of technical blogs…

Helping Yocto Project work with Python 3

Getting Started with RAUC on Raspberry Pi

How Mender works

Using Rust with Yocto Project

Building a DIY SOHO router, 18 months later

…and we posted six new videos of our presentations:

Building Containers with OpenEmbedded

Highly Scalable Yocto Project Build Automation

Security Hardening with OpenEmbedded / Yocto Project

Open Source License Compliance with Yocto Project

Demo: Using Rust with Yocto Project

Software Update Solutions for Yocto and OpenEmbedded

Still, we have all been touched by the physical and emotional toll of COVID-19. Two of our engineers have endured a bout with the virus (and thankfully recovered). Some of us have family, friends or acquaintances who have become seriously ill or even passed away. We can only hope the post-pandemic world is now in sight.

In the long run, the challenges that 2020 have brought us closer together in many ways, and hopefully taught us valuable lessons that will make us stronger in a better new year.

The Year in Review 2019

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Konsulko Group has completed another busy year, working hard to solve our customers’ problems, while building efficient and reliable open source software for their products in development.

We’ve helped our customers launch exciting new products across the spectrum of embedded systems: automotive, medical devices, networking equipment, and cutting-edge consumer electronics.

As Globally Employable Engineers, we are geographically distributed across North America and Europe, but thanks to today’s technology, we have worked together every day as a team, often in real time.

At Konsulko Group we believe production software should be closely aligned with OSS community work upstream, and we work to make that happen. Our community work in key open source projects includes the Linux kernel, Yocto Project, OpenEmbedded and Automotive Grade Linux. We participate in important OSS conferences like FOSDEM and SCaLE, sponsor TuxCon and OpenFest every year, and have published two new “how to” technical papers, useful to developers at all levels (available on this website).

We’ve continued our close relationship with the Linux Foundation and Automotive Grade Linux, supporting AGL development, demos and member meetings. Konsulko Group gave technical talks at ALS Tokyo, ELC San Diego, ELCE and Yocto Project Summit Lyon, and the AGL AMM Monte Carlo, and participated in the OSLS Half Moon Bay.

Through the Embedded Apprentice Linux Engineer program, Konsulko provided well-received training sessions in 2019 at SCaLE 17x Pasadena, ELC San Diego and ELCE Lyon. We’ve given on-site and remote training to major companies in North America, and remain a Linux Foundation Authorized Training Partner.

All in all, 2019 seems like it has gone quickly. We now look forward to working with you in 2020 and beyond.