Open Source Engineering

Fans of the BeagleBone single board computer, little brother to BeagleBoard, now have access to 20 plug-in boards to add a camera, LCDs, weather sensors, and other I/O, writes Steve Bush.

Educational charity Raspberry Pi Foundation has released a version of Linux optimised for the £25 computer's ARM11 processor, writes Steve Bush. Based on the ATmega32U4 MCU, which offers 32k of flash memory, the Leonardo board has built-in USB communications. As a result it can be connected to a computer the board appears as both mouse and keyboard at the same time, enabling much more complex programming.

This year's Millennium Technology Prize, the "Nobel" of the technology world, has for the first time been shared between the two nominees. Stem-cell researcher Shinya Yamanaka and Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system, will each receive €600,000. Linux underlies Google, Facebook and Amazon, but unlike commercial rivals Windows and Mac OS, Linux is open-source, free, and anyone can improve it. Jacob Aron, of our sister site New Scientist, talked to Torvalds in advance of the prize announcement.

Using Linux in medical devices is becoming common-practice, but there are important factors which developers and manufacturers need to consider, writes Ken Herold, senior systems engineer at Wind River

An add-on prototyping kit forRaspberry Pi is available from US-based hobbyists website Adafruit.

This one just caught my eye on the Google Developers Blog - an update on its Go project, an open source programming language. Yesterday it officially reached version 1.

Thanks to Steve Bush, our Technology Eduitor, for flagging this amazing graphic. Ever wondered what a document of Linux distros would look like, in graphical form? Wind River has collaborated with developer of Qt for desktop and embedded development Digia to offer platform support for the Qt Commercial development framework on Wind River's VxWorks real-time operating system (RTOS).

The Raspberry Pi Foundation, which intends to sell its educational computers directly, auctioned 10 of its beta production board on eBay.

For small firms, ARM has released Development Studio 5 Community Edition, a free version of its reference software development toolkit, writes our technology editor Steve Bush.

MulticoreWare has announced the beta availability of key OpenCL tools and libraries for download from its website, writes Richard Wilson.