 here in Budapest at the Lunar Connect. And these are the 96 boards, hello. Hello there, hi. My name's Yang, I'm director of 96 boards in an hour. And so there's a lot of activity going on here, the 96 boards. And who are you? Hey, Robert Wolfe from 96 boards as well, community manager handling open hours most recently. The weekly show on YouTube, people can watch. Yes, actually it's every week on Thursday. You could check the countdown at 96boards.org slash open hours. I'd suggest giving it a look, it changes every week so we have new episodes, new guests every week. So why is 96 boards the perfect solution for developing community? Well, we like to think it's perfect, but obviously there's a lot of things we could do, I think it could do much better. Or we own a very good ramping path. So right now we're looking at 40 plus of designs either in, we know that in progress or in plan. More than 40. More than 40. 96 boards. That's including these kinds and those kinds? That's actually, the board member just recorded is only talking about the main boards. We didn't even start counting the mezzanine and boards yet. So this is really exciting for us because it's one of the, the reason we started this initiative really narrow is because we want to have an open platform specification supporting the latest and greatest arm technology, SOCs. So it's all this size? Exactly, so the CE specifications, also the board made it for CE specification. This is standard size CE. In fact, we do have another form factor which is CE extended form factor as well. And this, we can see on the other side? Yeah, that's cool. Right there? Yeah. So, and that's going to allow for more stuff. It's just double the size, right? Yes, more often, yeah. So more often than not that the certain application, certain segment market, you would require different more connectors and functionalities. That's why we allow additional form factors to be supported. And we also also have 96 boards, you know, IOT addition, that's much smaller as you can see from here. And we have a line of which those are the boards which are announced. Because Linar are doing all kinds of work now with the IOT segment. Indeed. And it's useful to standardize around the IOT SOCs, right? Is mostly Cortex-M? Yeah, actually, that's an interesting question because even though you saw this board in particular, as an IOT form factor, this is actually Cortex-A device. And which is this chip? And this chip is from RDA, a particular chip is from RDA made by ordinary pay. And they start coming with extremely interesting capability and also very competitive pricing point, you know, under $10. So that's kind of like a powerful IOT chip. It is very powerful IOT device and I will say the low-end gateway device as well. So how come is 96 boards so successful in terms of convincing so many SSE makers to join this and start making these and announcing them, making them, developing them? Well, I would love to say it's easy, but it's not, right? So in the beginning, we have two partners working with us with two of the 96 boards, being High Key and Dragon Boat and Sea. I think what's interesting is how quickly and obviously thanks to my staff for the very hard work and also all the colleagues and engineers in the Nauru and around the community supporting us. But we did witness a very interesting trend, which is slightly different to, you know, you will say the last episode of the SOC and the application development based on top of which. People are now more interested in focus on the application, the features, the functionality what they wish to choose and would like to be able to have the opportunity evaluate the SOC capability before they actually commit, especially when it comes down to mass production. So it's useful to have the same kind of like base and then be able to compare. Right. So I mean, the core philosophy, if you wish, we have behind 96 board specifications about standardization and differentiation. So we do not want to actually rip off the opportunity to for SOC to differentiate itself on one another because that's the key of the success of us or our member SOC vendors. But at the same time, we will standardize, well, it doesn't make sense to differentiate. It's the feature every developer would wish to see on the proper development platform. And it makes sense for every SOC vendor to do the same thing here. In fact, that's actually in the blood of the Nauru as well. And you've been seeing 42 episodes, right? There's lots of things happening. Yeah, no, in open hours, yeah, lots of things happening. I'd also like to add a little bit to the last question is the value add of people joining 96 boards as a program. In general, you're getting a huge ecosystem and an ever quickly growing ecosystem around the 96 boards product line. So you can kind of see in front of all these, we also have these mezzanine boards. And I wanted to point these out because when a 96 boards is created, according to the specification, you end up joining an already existing ecosystem, right? And you can see all these mezzanines. I don't know if you wanted to talk a little bit about that too. Let's show one or two. Yeah, okay. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, so here we have one from Aero. This is the link sprite and it comes in a kit. You get it with several sensors. Move it around here a little bit for you. But as you can see, it plugs right into the low speed expansion header. You have an opening for the high speed expansion header in case you still want access to that. And because it was designed around the specification, you end up being able to use it with pretty much any 96 boards consumer edition board. And you can see it just kind of plugs in and can be transferred across any of these boards. The value add to any new vendor who wants to come in and build the 96 boards around what we've already created gets to basically jump right in and get to use these right away. So it's definitely a plus. And you can see all these mezzanines kind of have different functionalities and breakouts depending on what the company or maker wanted to do. So how do you convince all the SOC makers that this is the right way to go? Well, mostly we talk to them. And in fact, right now the conversation is both ways. So we have been discussing about the concept of a community accessible hardware platform which allows developers having access to the latest and greatest SOC OMCO technology, those chip manufacturer has to offer. And in fact, now more and more SOC vendors realized that they are seeing the benefit of which they are seeing actually the possibility of being able to change previous design in only approach to actually allow the small makers and all the design house can actually choosing the LCA. But after evaluating, after all the evaluation work after the comparison, they are confident about the differentiation which brought up one of the chips. I can give you a very specific example. This one particular SOC vendors came to me just about a couple of days ago and say they did a 96 board in the beginning with some doubt in his mind. But actually after a period of time what he has witnessed, which I can't call the figure or name here, but he has witnessed it's measurable SOC volume cells increase which to us is music to our ears because that's exactly what we want to do to four of our members and four of those SOC vendors. And also that's generating a lot of derivative design which has the part, clear parts of production. And that is one of the key difference between 96 boards in this crowded SBC market. So there's lots of developer boards but you're trying to make it kind of like a standard. So it's easy to add differentiation on top, right? Yeah, exactly. I mean it's that people see standardization as the other option direction in terms of differentiation when we don't. We think by resolving the linearization mission is trying to de-fragment what has been probably I would say that from the beginning of this ecosystem but what we did realize based on the lessons we have learned ourselves isn't such, we can work along encourage standardization and also encourage differentiation at the same time as just how we approach that. And I think this board is a perfect example how the NARA took that approach is we standardize the things where it doesn't make sense to repeat the investment by every single SLC in our ecosystem. We want to do it once for everybody who work with us. And then everybody can really focus on their investment and on those part of differentiation which really matters. And so that's what 96 board is about as well. And some of the chip makers think it's so cool. They are launching the 96 boards at the same time as the chip is being released, right? And they even launching the chip on the 96 boards first, right? Yeah, I mean, that's actually something again is a very, very encouraging information. Very recently we have a few boards which was announced either at the same time or right after the 96 board was announced either at the same time or right after the commercial launch of the product we're using that chip. And to the point, you know, in these Mondays our keynote, our CEO keynote, so one of the boards which we announced, and this is a new brand new chip. This chip is currently being engineered sample. It's not even commercial sample yet. It's being announced on a community available development board. Obviously, that shows the SLC vendors' confidence and also willingness to engage community. And so that actually shows that we do have, you know, we do have a lot of confidence from the SLC vendors today who understand our thinking from trying to approach the developer community and want to be part of the family and part of the effort. Part of the NARRA family. They become part of the NARRA family by supporting this. Part of the NARRA, part of the open source community. Yeah, they don't even have to be a member or club member or anything. They can just release boards. Anybody can do. Well, we do, I mean, we do have a strong recommendation that if you want to produce a 96 board, if you want to be part of the effort from the beginning with your SLC vendor, need to be part of the 96 boards group. So that is something which we are, you can see on every single board we brought up. So, but in all those 42 episodes you've done, there's still, it's still the beginning, right? There's still a lot of things people would like to see. Still the beginning, we're just getting started on this effort and based on the growth, it's something that we're gonna keep pushing really hard. And this week, in fact, we're gonna have several announcements. I've been talking with Chauvin, who's done a lot of help in producing this whole effort. And we have some really cool stuff that we're hoping to push out tomorrow during the episode that will emanate throughout the rest of this whole series. So there's lots of stuff to happen this year, 2017. It's gonna be very busy on open hours, right? Year of the 96 boards. That's what we're calling it. There's gonna be lots of episodes. That's 52 in a year. Yeah, there's gonna be lots of episodes. Lots of episodes, lots of guests. I mean, and what I like to consider or what I like to look at open hours is as a channel for the development to meet community, right? So this is the ultimate way for you, as a community member, to be heard. I mean, we're moving real fast. You can get involved. You can move with us, develop, learn, and basically just be a part of this awesome movement. So the guy from CNX Software, he asked me to ask you about software support and what's called... Is there potential that more of these will get even sooner, faster software support for like running all kinds of Linux on them? Oh, that's a very good question. I mean, obviously that we, you know, it's a strong, linear as a software organization and we strongly believe that is not going to be a good development platform without good and proper continuous software support. So that is what we believe in. And we do see two different categories from 96.blog being brought out. One, those being, obviously, past our compliance in terms of hardware and documentation features require an in-specification. And with vendor provides, all community provides software build, which are not maintained by Linara and ourselves. And there are another group of both which have very good and upstream status and have very good support in terms of not only the SOC itself, but also the periphery components of being upstream, drive-up, upstream. This cross different distribution from Android to Debian. And we are engaging with all major distros and the community behind it. So we certainly would like to see the more and more 96.blog becomes in that category, which has a good Linara support and software with upstream status. But we do realize and appreciate sometimes there are community boards which satisfy specific purpose for the specific segments. And that is a 96.blog community board. That's why how we differentiate. This has been a five, six year struggle already for Linara to try to make things easy on arm, right? Like where you should just make it boot on whatever arm you get. You just get the stuff and it just works on any. Isn't that kind of like the dream? Well, obviously that for greater Linara, we have been working very hard. It's not easy a problem to solve, but we believe we have changed the situation a lot since we started. In fact, we have contributed a lot and back to the mainline kernel. And it continues and in fact, I think we were the top number one contributor in the 4.9 kernel. So yeah, that work hasn't finished. That work, I wouldn't, you know, we continue to push forward. That's a lot work to be done. That's the more SOCs, more variety of SOCs as ever coming out on every single day. And because the bar to actually produce SOC has been much lower than previous, you won't argue. And thanks to arms and it's updated architecture. So yeah, I don't think that we have finished the job, but we have been working very hard. We have done a lot. That's a lot more to do. We are very excited. And we hope 96 board and the platform brought out that SOC enabled about this platform will be a great vehicle to allow us to continue that software engineering and make it better. So in this year, 2017, potentially it's going to be a very historic year in the 96 boards community, right? It's going to be some really exciting stuff. Everyday exciting, right? Yeah. And you have lots of discussions with all the partners here at Linear Connect. Oh, yes. And they all have like suggestions and let's do this and that, and potentially then you have a new spec, right? At some point. Right, right. So yeah, so we continue receiving a lot of attentions and a lot of comments and how to help, mostly are trying to focus on how to help us to going forward, how to actually improve the arrow we're lacking. And by one of the commitments of Leonardo and the 96 board we made it from the outset is that we committed to enable the latest and greatest arm, SOC. With that, actually XLC technology keep moving forward and very in a very rapid space at pace. We, the specification we believe is a live thing as well. So the specification evolution has always been on the 96 boards, the initiative, and has always been something which 96 board standing committee and has been managing carefully. So that's something which we have been considering. We are gathering a lot of feedback along the way. And yes, at certain point of stage we will be trying to roll them in together and at a good time also consider the compatibility as well and have the specification evolution, the process carried out. Because the arm industry is growing crazy fast and there's so much new stuff happening and new tips and there's 10 nanometers and it's tiny and it's super low power. Exactly. So much performance, more memory bandwidth, more, so many different features and some new kind of like connectors potentially and all kinds of things people want to do. Right. You're going to be enabling the cutting edge, not the, so it's important to be in a cutting edge. Yeah, right. I mean, to be honest, we are, for example, as I said, our reference hardware. So we are on the mainline kernel, right? We are on, and there's a lot of technology we are building on the bleeding, we are as bleeding edge. So that's nothing to show away from that fact. And yes, for example, there's a lot of people talk about USB type, is that exactly something we already can see in the spec. If you go back and check out the specification, we already can see the type C, but we're probably making a stronger recommendation in many cases since we believe changes goods. We believe that the specification should evolve and the same time as SOC technology evolves itself. So that's something which we committed to keep bringing out to the community. And in a managed manner, we don't want to create more fragmentation. So the compatibility is one of the key issues here. Cool, so lots of work, I guess, in the remaining days here at the LunarConnect and in the near future to get everybody to agree on the right way forward and getting huge traffic to the show that you're doing. Hopefully, yeah. I mean, you can see, walking through the event, you've been doing it for the last couple of days, everyone's really excited. I mean, with the keynotes that are happening, all the announcements on Monday, we're definitely moving forward in the right way. And some of the smartest people that I've ever known right here deciding on the right path, so definitely.