 After the open hours live from Budapest, you had a panel over there and you won the panel and what were you talking about? I was, well, answering generic questions about 96 boards and the 96 boards hardware and specifically about the Qualcomm Dragonboard. So Qualcomm Dragonboard, I've been involved in Dragonboard work since the beginning. So when did you start the Dragonboard? I started the Dragonboard about seven years ago and five years ago, you interviewed me at Computex in Taipei and at that time we showed off the first Dragonboard which was an 8660 dual core based, but now we have this generation of Dragonboard, which is Snapdragon 410 based, quad core, 1.2 gigahertz. This is one of the ultimate ways to get into 64-bit ARM. This is the, this is a 64-bit ARM. It has Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS right on the board. You don't even have to go out and add anything to get it up and running. This particular individual is one of the early ones. It doesn't have the shielding over top of the processor, so you can see the processor. So this is a show and tell demo unit. Cool. And who are you? I'm Jean-Marc. I'm following the open hours community and I'm using the 410C, which is for me an excellent board. What do you do with it? I'm using it as an Android system and build application that is running on that board. Recently I just made a BL lead, so Bluetooth low energy collector, gateway and then this all my sensors are connected to that board and the board is bringing up the information to the cloud. Is it easy to use? Oh yeah, you use it as you would use a phone and you write your Android application exactly as it would be by your phone. It's one of the facts. I'm using it on the phone and test it on the phone and test it on the 410C, which is working perfect. You're actually rendering it onto your phone, I mean onto your watch, aren't you? Yeah, okay. I do that too. One of those sensors is going to this watch and show me the temperature in my room directly to the watch and show me where I'm and so on. Where are you based? Everything through... Where do you live? I live in Switzerland. Switzerland? Yeah. And then you have the open hours every Thursday? Every Thursday. Yeah. And you're based in the US? Yeah, so based on the west coast of the United States, South California, San Diego actually it's 8 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, 4 p.m. UTC and I know I was saying a bunch of it earlier on the panel, but John Mark is kind of like the core community there, he's there every episode asking questions, contributing to the forums and just kind of, you know, being a good guy. I'm going to 5 in the afternoon for me, so these guys drink the coffee, they always have a mug with them and I should be allowed to drink a beer, but I don't do it in front of everybody because it's for me it's the right time for a beer. So what kind of questions did you ask Lawrence at this panel? I was curious about the future of, you know, Qualcomm involved in the Dragon Board series, I guess you could say, or the Dragon Board products. And I'm kind of wondering if, you know, what's the future of Dragon Board 410C? I know that, you know, what was it in the last Connect? It was announced that the 410 series chip is now Snapdragon 410e, extended life. I mean, there's a lot of movements, right? So, you know, over the lifespan of this board it's gone from barely working to it now supports Windows 10 IoT, it supports Debian, it supports Ubuntu or various other operating systems, open embedded, they all run on this board, which is really nice, you don't know what you want to do, you put Android on the board and if you're an Android developer, put Android on it and develop Android apps. So how do you convince all these guys to put it on it, or is just because it's a board, it's available, it's affordable, it's open, that means they will support it. Mentally, everybody has said this is a good board and picked it up for support. And you also talked about something like a DSP at some point, what were you asking? Ah, yes, okay. Well, I mean, so throughout the community we've noticed that there are many people who are interested in getting access to the DSP and because, you know, Qualcomm has such a nice chip, they want access to Qualcomm's DSP. It's not surprising, but that was my question was, you know, is there any efforts and are we moving towards possibly getting that, you know, and I think Lawrence wants the same thing. There is a DSP in the chip, it's a very small DSP, but we need to do the work to enable it, which is make the DSP compiler available, teach you how to install the DSP compiler, how to build a binary for the DSP, how to load the binary from the ARM cores into the DSP, how to get the DSP to run your binary, how to get results back to the ARM core. So there's a whole flow and many steps in the process. And we're working on enabling the users to use the DSP in here. So then you can augment, there's quite significant compute power on the four cores, but you can augment that with further compute on the DSP. Because when I go to these trade shows and I try to do interviews at the Qualcomm booth, I think they talk about crazy things they're doing on a DSP like machine learning kind of stuff and image recognition. Is that where it is? So some of the later generation Qualcomm chips have much more powerful DSPs than the DSP on this one. So they can do a lot more, but it's a first step to get access to the DSP on this one. And you can do some of those things, maybe not as fast, maybe not as good, but it's there. And there's definitely coming some more dragon boards in the future, right? That we certainly are working on bigger, faster dragon boards, more memory, more IO features, more speed. And you'll be really happy when we get the new dragon boards. So you say you started the first dragon board seven years ago? Seven years. So what is your opinion about the whole 96 boards and putting dragon boards within that? So 96 boards has done a wonderful job of standardizing the hardware. So now I get, instead of me doing everything, I have third parties out building mezzanine cards for IO. So this particular one has an Arduino on board, and you can see all the Arduino connections. You can also see that there are Seed Studio connectors. And on this side, it mates to the 96 board connector. So this becomes a IO module that you can now stack all your favorite Arduino IO modules, motor drivers, sensors, whatever you like. We have another partner. Linker has built this board. This board has linker connectors on it. Again, it mates with the 96 boards connector on the bottom. This one also has a 10-bit A to D converter that runs on SPI. So now you can actually do analog to digital conversion directly into the dragon board or any of the other boards. So those are some examples of some of them. This one is an audio mezzanine card. And we've added a headset jack microphone. And we've taken all of the low-speed connector peripherals and brought them out to larger connectors, and level shifted them up to 3.3 volts. Because a lot of the makers have a lot of legacy hardware that runs at 3.3 volts. Whereas 96 boards runs at 1.8 volts, which is where all the new sensors will be. And one of the reasons people we like the dragon board a lot is there's something called Friedrino, right? And that's a differentiator in terms of, in the arm world, there's not that many open source performance GPU. So we have Friedrino, which gives you very good performance out of the GPU. And tomorrow you'll see demos of Friedrino running and video on a cube, rotating the cube, has its decoding video. Only one core, 10% to decode video, because we actually have hardware accelerated video decode pipelines available now. That wasn't available when we first started. And that's some of the things that community has brought up and really improved how good the dragon board is and the ecosystem around the dragon board. That's why there's so many different types of Linux in the dragon board, right? Because they wouldn't want to try to support it if they cannot figure out how to use the GPU. Exactly. So this gets you, basically, all the variants of Linux will come up on the board. What do you want to do next? Cool. So you like the LinarConnect and Linar in general? I love coming to the Connects, and I love all the work that Ladaro has done to enable the ecosystem and the community. How many have you been to, actually, Lawrence? I think this is only my third one. OK, so me too, it's my third. Let me just walk around here, because this where we're standing here, it's like a phenomenal place. This is a crazy, nice place here in Budapest. So it's pretty cool, right? What do you think? No, I'm loving it. So yeah, I mean, so I've been to three Connects so far. It's my third. What was it? First one was in Bangkok, Thailand. Is that beautiful? Also amazing. Yeah, so I mean, the people who are in charge of planning this event do a great job. They find the cool place and not too expensive, right? I guess. Well, Thailand was amazing. I mean, yeah, and Thailand is not very expensive. The hotel was, I mean, is there a 20-star hotel? I mean, it was awesome, yeah. It was really good. And then one after that was in Las Vegas, also fun. I mean, you know, you bring gambling into the mix. Is that in circus, circus? No, it wasn't in circus, circus. Yeah, in fact, I haven't been there in a long time. But it was fun, yeah, definitely. And Lawrence was on the panel over there too. Wish we could have got John Mark. John Mark was on the Blue Jeans call behind us during that open hours. So yeah. Blue Jeans, does that work good? This is how you do all the open hours, right? So yes, we do do Blue Jeans on all, we use Blue Jeans for all of our open hours episodes. It's been very good so far. I think our contract allows us to have 100 endpoints. So we've only maxed out, I think, once or twice. And one of those times was during Lawrence's demo using the Dragon Board 410C and Scratch and Arduino and built all these layers on top to eventually have a game, a brick breaker game. So do people, like, say, push a voice button and say, please let me talk, please let me talk? And you choose who you need to get to talk? They are free to talk whenever they want, actually. They talk on top of each other. There's 100 people, how can you do that? They're pretty polite. They tip turns. We haven't had issues yet. It'll be coming sooner or later, I'm sure. So it's been going on for kind of like a couple of years in IAC's boards, but it feels like it could, this could be the point where suddenly it could go huge. If some things fall into place and potentially a new one and stuff. There's multiple vendors building boards for 96 boards, both the CPU cards and the IO modules. And because 96 boards is the first open specification for, I'm gonna call it internet of things boards or small community boards, you know, it's not a big specification like a Windows PC. It's not a little tiny proprietary specification. It's not a specification that's owned by somebody and they can change it at will. It is truly an open standard. And it's got to be very cool for a company like Qualcomm to be engaged with the narrow to get all their stuff like in this crazy world of ARM. But all these optimizations that it's, I mean, it sounds like crazy magic science that these guys are doing here. Like finding how to optimize a chip. That sounds really cool. Getting everything turned on has been lots of fun. I want to, oh sorry. Go ahead, Robert. I just wanted to show something real quick. Lawrence, if you'd mind pulling up the dragon board. One of our people here who made the shirt disconnect. It's actually a dragon board shirt. So pretty interesting. John Mark's wearing one. What do you think? This is my shirt. Is that the coolest Lenaro shirt ever? It's pretty cool. It's definitely got its quirks. But yeah, it was Ubuntu right here who got this one for us. Definitely nice. And Ubuntu runs really smoothly on the dragon board. It does. Yeah. I use Ubuntu, even when I want to make small changes to the kernel, I will recompile the kernel on the dragon board, self-hosted. I don't go off to a PC or my laptop to recompile. Run it native. So you use this as your main computer? I don't use it as my main computer. It doesn't have a display and keyboard that's easy to carry around like my laptop. But I do use it for my development. It's getting closer. It's getting closer. I've got this right here. So this is a little demo that I built with a 3D printer. So I printed a 3D case for the dragon board, and you can see the connectors for the dragon board poking out of the case. And then we have a four and a half inch wave share monitor, which I also printed a 3D case for. And then we hinged them together with a hinge that's printed 3D at the same time. And you can connect the monitor to the dragon board with cables. Yeah, pretty simply just right there. USB and then the top one's the power plugs in. Is that battery? No, there's no battery. The dragon board powers the screen, so. Yeah. And then the HDMI. So you plug the normal power adapter into the dragon board and the whole thing comes up. Nice. Can you mass produce this? No. You just call up the factory, right? However, the files for this are available on Thingverse if you want to download them and print your own. Cool. So that's your laptop. That could be me. It's almost a laptop. Yeah, all you need is a, let me see, do I have it right here? Do you have a keyboard, Robert? One of these. Right, right there. There you have it. Dragon board 410C, laptop on the go, desktop machine for doing all your programming on the actual board. On the board. Rebuild the kernel right on the board, install the new kernel on the board, and bring it up and see your new hardware features or whatever kernel development you've been doing up and running right away. No waiting. Hopefully soon there will be a Linaro Connect where all the engineers have only ARM-powered devices to do all their work. Someday, it's coming step by step. We're getting better. But it's moving very fast. It is. Cool.