 So here the lunar connect and who are you I'm said syrup. I'm the applications engineer at 96 boards along with money And I'm a Robert Wolf 96 boards community manager and engineer So what are you talking about right here? So today we'll be talking about the mezzanine community initiative. It's open and collaborative initiative and Organized by the community and managed by the community. It's to bring open hardware spec mezzanine's on to the 96 boards platform So if you want to see what a mezzanine looks like this is a mezzanine And this is 96 boards and they usually just Yeah plug in like that and give you additional functionality on your 96 boards Development platform and they are compatible with the consumer edition and consumer edition extended specs So, so what does it mean to do a community around this? So the idea was to get a bunch of people together who are really interested in open hardware to provide a lots and lots of mezzanine to the ecosystem and While doing that even promote open hardware and open source Yeah, so it's led by Michael Welling the community. He's a very well-known open source hardware engineer and he kind of maintains our Mezzanine initiative Robert and I do a best to maintain the community side of things and we have Meeting every second week at 4 p.m. UTC. So you can go ahead on to our 96 boards get a page and Check out mezzanine community repository that has all the info where we meet and what we discuss so Yeah, so would be in the community. Is it the the companies that make mezzanine boards or is it the people? So it's both so there are individuals who are interested in doing that the universities Who are interested in doing that and even companies Sometimes join the call to kind of you know Check out what people want because we have issue lists that discusses what Mezzanines are not available yet and what's the demand for them? So even companies like to some sometimes go around and take a look at what the Ecosystem really needs at this moment. Yeah, so issue tracking and version control Allow us to basically keep kind of all of our thoughts organized as a community and as an ecosystem We try to look at what the community wants right and since we are a partner-based company 96 boards and lanaro We are always looking for ways We are always looking for ways to you know help our partners find out What the next mezzanine should be right and you can kind of see a pattern right and as You know whether whether our partners Believe it or not, you know consume it. They the community seems to be Seeding these are these ideas, you know, you start to see things like this Sheeratek LTE mezzanine or narrowband mezzanine And then you also start to see things like the arrow if you went down to the arrow booth here at lanaro connect You will have also seen a new mezzanine for a screen was a LCD screen, right? This is all these are all things that were brought up in this mezzanine community far long ago and so It seems that we are hopefully helping our partners and decide what mezzanine should be next but not only that The community has also taken charge and tried to make some of their own mezzanines And while we don't have any of them here to show unfortunately We have seen some mezzanines come out of the community such as another LTE mezzanine Which was built by some folks in Brazil and then a GPS mezzanine a proto mezzanine, and I think a few others I think it's important to note here though That in this community, right? We're not just kind of thrown into the wolves We are actually providing you with some of the bare essentials some of the the You know fine-tuned tools that you need to get started so inside this repository We give you several templates including an Altium template an Eagle template and a chi-CAD template Though the repository is not limited to these so if someone is out there and would like to work with another type of CAD software Then we would gladly accept your templates so that the community can start developing on those and contribute back There are however a lot of things we are continuing to work on right like we want to start You know putting some guidelines forward How do you choose a license to put on to your board etc etc so maybe Sahaj can talk a little bit more about that Yeah So the licensing was one of the biggest discussion we had before we uploaded any boards or started working on any boards and The conclusion conclusion we came towards everyone Wants to kind of tune and own their own hardware and have their own license open source license so what we do is the The repository as a whole has a common license But we allow each individual design to have their own open hardware license and the templates are completely open Yeah, the templates are completely. Yeah, so you don't need you technically you could go consume our templates and never come back But we would hope you do Yeah, so what is this community? I'm looking at here for example. Yeah, so this is the GitHub repository where Sorry, that's where we host the whole community and So that's that's online. Yeah, it's on GitHub. Yeah Yeah, so it should say github.com forward slash 96 boards forward slash mezzanine dash community And then what goes on there all the stuff you were talking about so on the main read me page You'll see most of the things So for example Yeah, we have our contribution guidelines detailed in the contribution doc if you open that up We have our meeting and notes section So we maintain issues regarding meeting notes as well and you can see where we meet it's an open meeting so anyone can join and we have acknowledgments for people who have contributed very heavily to the community and Yeah, so if you go into the issue section for example You can see we have all of our meeting agendas as well as mezzanine idea So if you have any mezzanine idea, you can just add that and we link that in so there's actually pretty much more there Yeah, and so There are different levels of contribution right and we've been discussing this as you know Let's call it the mezzanine community committee, but we've been discussing, you know, whether or not it is it is necessary to contribute a an entire layout to the repository, right because All in all if you had the layout files if you had the actual layout Then you could go get this board made and then you know put your board together yourself assemble it Or however you want to go about doing it now That is basically giving everyone everything right so we have kind of discussed this and thought You know that there is still a way for the mezzanine community to benefit someone who uses it Without having to give away your entire layout and what you could do is by providing schematics and getting feedback from the community You can also make your mezzanine a lot more robust And so this is also an important way to use this and we've talked about splitting off sections of this by now You can contribute boards, but you can also contribute schematics And this is something we might be launching in the coming year to allow a more, you know community-based review process in In your process to releasing a mezzanine a community-based mezzanine now One other thing I'll add to this is that we have been in talks and we've tried this Getting boards funded in low quantities, right? This is an issue that a lot of people may have and to do this We've been talking with a company called group gets group gets similar to you know Kickstarter Indiegogo go fund me It's a way to get Projects funded right but the difference between group gets in some of these other places is that group gets doesn't Allow you to seek funding for vaporware the only thing or an idea Let's just call it an idea. You can't get funded for an idea there You get funded for a finished product So you have to at least prove that you have something that exists, you know You print it out you get it done the first round at least one or two you prove that it exists You go through the test and you prove that it works And then if you want to do a run on that to lower your prices Then you can do a run with group gets and they will take care of all of that for you in a very nice very nice way They'll even try to get things shipped for you. This isn't a pitch for group gets But if you do have a chance you should definitely go check it out. There's a lot of cool stuff going on over there Yeah, nice So one of the big things the big promises and the big potential huge revolutions That could come out of the night's boards is potentially a whole bunch of mezzanine boards So people can start expanding a whole bunch of different things and share tech is showing Amazing five different what? Yeah, there will be more there will be more I think here they have five showcasing five of them, but one of the cool things about this and you know, you mentioned like community, right The these boards some of the boards that they have so far are literally just plug-and-play You know and when we start getting into a situation where more of our partners work on upstreaming their their components and their Their sensors Their chipsets then you start finding that you know the mezzanine companies the manufacturers and the people who are building these mezzanines Are gonna end up putting those to those particular devices on there. They're gonna end up putting their particular devices those devices on their Mezzanines right that makes it easier for the user to bring it up And then of course easier to then create a product out of it So the path the product becomes a lot more solid it's just plug-and-play This one is literally plug-and-play on any of these Not I wouldn't on most of them right on any of these if they're under units plug-and-play because the Better showing yes, they rooted all of the LTE stuff by USB and we have USB in the high speed connector So it just works. Oh, that's true. Yeah, it just works. Yeah So then you basically for example that one you add LTE to any board Yeah, and some sensors and stuff Yeah, and this one and they have a fast LTE and more like a NBA So, yeah, this is the NBA and Potentially suddenly you turn this into something that you just drop somewhere. Well. Yeah, we're talking about turning You know turning a 96 for it's like, you know, like I'll just show you right like I'm plug this in right now But if I then took this 96 boards We're talking about I'm gonna hopefully be demoing this for ArmTech on but don't quote me on it. Hopefully it makes it there the a 96 boards gateway on a base station with a LTE mezzanine and what we're gonna be doing is we're gonna be collecting the LTE signal and then pushing it out through a USB to Ethernet port and then feeding that LTE signal to another device a Somewhat of like a server hub so that you can get LTE signal Anywhere there's so you can get LTE signal out from your gateway to any device you want now The interesting thing about this particular project is that it's completely off the grid So we'll be running this on a solar Self-sustainable solar base station and if you are at ArmTech con October 17th through October 18th Definitely cruise by the innovator station Innovator booth and we'll be showcasing that 96 boards sheer tech LTE and and hopefully Creating a server out of that on a self-sustainable solar station developer station What would you envision or imagine could could be happening with all these mezzanines? What could it's gonna be some whole cup bunch of killer killer features? I'll show you I'll show you and this was here it was demoing downstairs is Is it the what's called the it's this is what I call a five layer cake Oh, the super stack. Yeah. Yeah, so all of those boards are just stacked over I don't know me. I think it's a dragon board and each one of them just works So this is kind of what we are pushing towards is stackable Mezzanine so you can just have a very customizable setup just by the mezzanine you want to add that particular functionality To prototype IOT ideas. Yeah, and then the next step is how do they get into much production? Just talk with some Yeah, so we actually have a group of partners who are very interested in this path It's almost like the gray area or that one missing link on your way from Prototyping developing and then actually getting into production but the question isn't really that right because There is a certain turning point when you're developing on a on a let's just say any single board computer a development platform can still be Surprisingly efficient cost wise until you reach a certain number, right? So as let's just say that turning point is 10,000 units at 10,000 units You might want to start entertaining You know creating your own design knocking off a USB port to save a few cents here and there, right? These are the kind of things that our partners want to help you with getting your derivative design out there And if you go explore the 96 boards dot org website, you can go to our about section You can explore see all of our different partners and then hopefully in the near future We will be launching a section of the 96 board site that allows you to have a more direct link with the partners that are geared towards Helping you on this path. So if you do, you know, follow us on 96 boards Twitter at 96 boards You can keep up with these types of updates. We do try to you know, keep that fairly current anything We're posting like every day now. So Anything new that happens we post any types of announcements like this We will also be posting and in the future there might be some new cool arm processors that that could get into 96 boards and All kinds of stuff that might come the oldest machine learning stuff So so new boards that are on the on the on the on the way out. Yes So I can't give you any hints on those but I will say that we do have quite the long list of boards that are coming This is I as far as I can tell right now. It's not going anywhere It's not going away if anything we're just getting more we're just getting we're gearing up for a nice storm in 2019 so there's gonna be a lot of stuff going on and we hope that you know The community can continue to grow and engage with us on this as we do grow We will be focusing a little bit more as you know, we the video with money over here He is going to be gearing up for more upstream work. Hopefully helping our partners to get more engaged with With this type of effort and then yeah, I guess I don't want to talk too much about it But yeah, there are a lot of boards coming up Yeah, cool. All right. Awesome. Okay. So see you next time. Thank you