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Fernvale Kits - Lack of Interest - Discount

Harald Welte — Fri, 28 Sep 2018 16:00:00 GMT

Back in December 2014 at 31C3, bunnie and xobs presented about their exciting Fernvale project, how they reverse engineered parts of the MT6260 ARM SoC, which also happens to contain a Mediatek GSM baseband.

Thousands (at least hundreds) of people have seen that talk live. To date, 2506 people (or AIs?) have watched the recordings on youtube, 4859 more people on media.ccc.de.

Given that Fernvale was the closest you could get to having a hackable baseband processor / phone chip, I expected at least as much interest into this project as we received four years earlier with OsmocomBB.

As a result, in early 2015, sysmocom decided to order 50 units of Fernvale DVT2 evaluation kits from bunnie, and to offer them in the sysmocom webshop to ensure the wider community would be able to get the boards they need for research into widely available, inexpensive 2G baseband chips.

This decision was made purely for the perceived benefit of the community: Make an exciting project available for anyone. With that kind of complexity and component density, it's unlikely anyone would ever solder a board themselves. So somebody has to build some and make it available. The mark-up sysmocom put on top of bunnie's manufacturing cost was super minimal, only covering customs/import/shipping fees to Germany, as well as minimal overhead for packing/picking and accounting.

Now it's almost four years after bunnie + xobs' presentation, and of those 50 Fernvale boards, we still have 34 (!) units in stock. That means, only 16 people on this planet ever had an interest in playing with what at the time I thought was one of the most exciting pieces of equipment to play with.

So we lost somewhere on the order of close to 3600 EUR in dead inventory, for something that never was supposed to be a business anyway. That sucks, but I still think it was worth it.

In order to minimize the losses, sysmocom has now discounted the boards and reduced the price from EUR 110 to to EUR 58.82 (excluding VAT). I have very limited hope that this will increase the amount of interest in this project, but well, you got to try :)

In case you're thinking "oh, let's wait some more time, until they hand them out for free", let me tell you: If money is the issue that prevents you from playing with a Fernvale, then please contact me with the details about what you'd want to do with it, and we can see about providing them for free or at substantially reduced cost.

In the worst case, it was ~ 3600 EUR we could have invested in implementing more Osmocom software, which is sad. But would I do it again if I saw a very exciting project? Definitely!

The lesson learned here is probably that even a technically very exciting project backed by world-renowned hackers like bunnie doesn't mean that anyone will actually ever do anything with it, unless they get everything handed on a silver plate, i.e. all the software/reversing work is already done for them by others. And that actually makes me much more sad than the loss of those ~ 3600 EUR in sysmocom's balance sheet.

I also feel even more sorry for bunnie + xobs. They've invested time, money and passion into a project that nobody really seemed to want to get involved and/or take further. ("nobody" is meant figuratively. I know there were/are some enthusiasts who did pick up. I'm talking about the big picture). My condolences to bunnie + xobs!

First actual XMOS / XCORE project

Harald Welte — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 16:00:00 GMT

For many years I've been fascinated by the XMOS XCore architecture. It offers a surprisingly refreshing alternative virtually any other classic microcontroller architectures out there. However, despite reading a lot about it years ago, being fascinated by it, and even giving a short informal presentation about it once, I've so far never used it. Too much "real" work imposes a high barrier to spending time learning about new architectures, languages, toolchains and the like.

Introduction into XCore

Rather than having lots of fixed-purpose built-in "hard core" peripherals for interfaces such as SPI, I2C, I2S, etc. the XCore controllers have a combination of

I/O ports for 1/4/8/16/32 bit wide signals, with SERDES, FIFO, hardware strobe generation, etc
Clock blocks for using/dividing internal or external clocks
hardware multi-threading that presents 8 logical threads on each core
xCONNECT links that can be used to connect multiple processors over 2 or 5 wires per direction
channels as a means of communication (similar to sockets) between threads, whether on the same xCORE or a remote core via xCONNECT
an extended C (xC) programming language to make use of parallelism, channels and the I/O ports

In spirit, it is like a 21st century implementation of some of the concepts established first with Transputers.

My main interest in xMOS has been the flexibility that you get in implementing not-so-standard electronics interfaces. For regular I2C, UART, SPI, etc. there is of course no such need. But every so often one encounters some interface that's very rately found (like the output of an E1/T1 Line Interface Unit).

Also, quite often I run into use cases where it's simply impossible to find a microcontroller with a sufficient number of the related peripherals built-in. Try finding a microcontroller with 8 UARTs, for example. Or one with four different PCM/I2S interfaces, which all can run in different clock domains.

The existing options of solving such problems basically boil down to either implementing it in hard-wired logic (unrealistic, complex, expensive) or going to programmable logic with CPLD or FPGAs. While the latter is certainly also quite interesting, the learning curve is steep, the tools anything but easy to use and the synthesising time (and thus development cycles) long. Furthermore, your board design will be more complex as you have that FPGA/CPLD and a microcontroller, need to interface the two, etc (yes, in high-end use cases there's the Zynq, but I'm thinking of several orders of magnitude less complex designs).

Of course one can also take a "pure software" approach and go for high-speed bit-banging. There are some ARM SoCs that can toggle their pins. People have reported rates like 14 MHz being possible on a Raspberry Pi. However, when running a general-purpose OS in parallel, this kind of speed is hard to do reliably over long term, and the related software implementations are going to be anything but nice to write.

So the XCore is looking like a nice alternative for a lot of those use cases. Where you want a microcontroller with more programmability in terms of its I/O capabilities, but not go as far as to go full-on with FPGA/CPLD development in Verilog or VHDL.

My current use case

My current use case is to implement a board that can accept four independent PCM inputs (all in slave mode, i.e. clock provided by external master) and present them via USB to a host PC. The final goal is to have a board that can be combined with the sysmoQMOD and which can interface the PCM audio of four cellular modems concurrently.

While XMOS is quite strong in the Audio field and you can find existing examples and app notes for I2S and S/PDIF, I couldn't find any existing code for a PCM slave of the given requirements (short frame sync, 8kHz sample rate, 16bit samples, 2.048 MHz bit clock, MSB first).

I wanted to get a feeling how well one can implement the related PCM slave. In order to test the slave, I decided to develop the matching PCM master and run the two against each other. Despite having never written any code for XMOS before, nor having used any of the toolchain, I was able to implement the PCM master and PCM slave within something like ~6 hours, including simulation and verification. Sure, one can certainly do that in much less time, but only once you're familiar with the tools, programming environment, language, etc. I think it's not bad.

The biggest problem was that the clock phase for a clocked output port cannot be configured, i.e. the XCore insists on always clocking out a new bit at the falling edge, while my use case of course required the opposite: Clocking oout new signals at the rising edge. I had to use a second clock block to generate the inverted clock in order to achieve that goal.

Beyond that 4xPCM use case, I also have other ideas like finally putting the osmo-e1-xcvr to use by combining it with an XMOS device to build a portable E1-to-USB adapter. I have no clue if and when I'll find time for that, but if somebody wants to join in: Let me know!

The good parts

Documentation excellent

I found the various pieces of documentation extremely useful and very well written.

Fast progress

I was able to make fast progress in solving the first task using the XMOS / Xcore approach.

Soft Cores developed in public, with commit log

You can find plenty of soft cores that XMOS has been developing on github at https://github.com/xcore, including the full commit history.

This type of development is a big improvement over what most vendors of smaller microcontrollers like Atmel are doing (infrequent tar-ball code-drops without commit history). And in the case of the classic uC vendors, we're talking about drivers only. In the XMOS case it's about the entire logic of the peripheral!

You can for example see that for their I2C core, the very active commit history goes back to January 2011.

xSIM simulation extremely helpful

The xTIMEcomposer IDE (based on Eclipse) contains extensive tracing support and an extensible near cycle accurate simulator (xSIM). I've implemented a PCM mater and PCM slave in xC and was able to simulate the program while looking at the waveforms of the logic signals between those two.

The bad parts

Unfortunately, my extremely enthusiastic reception of XMOS has suffered quite a bit over time. Let me explain why:

Hard to get XCore chips

While the product portfolio on on the xMOS website looks extremely comprehensive, the vast majority of the parts is not available from stock at distributors. You won't even get samples, and lead times are 12 weeks (!). If you check at digikey, they have listed a total of 302 different XMOS controllers, but only 35 of them are in stock. USB capable are 15. With other distributors like Farnell it's even worse.

I've seen this with other semiconductor vendors before, but never to such a large extent. Sure, some packages/configurations are not standard products, but having only 11% of the portfolio actually available is pretty bad.

In such situations, where it's difficult to convince distributors to stock parts, it would be a good idea for XMOS to stock parts themselves and provide samples / low quantities directly. Not everyone is able to order large trays and/or capable to wait 12 weeks, especially during the R&D phase of a board.

Extremely limited number of single-bit ports

In the smaller / lower pin-count parts, like the XU[F]-208 series in QFN/LQFP-64, the number of usable, exposed single-bit ports is ridiculously low. Out of the total 33 I/O lines available, only 7 can be used as single-bit I/O ports. All other lines can only be used for 4-, 8-, or 16-bit ports. If you're dealing primarily with serial interfaces like I2C, SPI, I2S, UART/USART and the like, those parallel ports are of no use, and you have to go for a mechanically much larger part (like XU[F]-216 in TQFP-128) in order to have a decent number of single-bit ports exposed. Those parts also come with twice the number of cores, memory, etc- which you don't need for slow-speed serial interfaces...

Insufficient number of exposed xLINKs

The smaller parts like XU[F]-208 only have one xLINK exposed. Of what use is that? If you don't have at least two links available, you cannot daisy-chain them to each other, let alone build more complex structures like cubes (at least 3 xLINKs).

So once again you have to go to much larger packages, where you will not use 80% of the pins or resources, just to get the required number of xLINKs for interconnection.

Change to a non-FOSS License

XMOS deserved a lot of praise for releasing all their soft IP cores as Free / Open Source Software on github at https://github.com/xcore. The License has basically been a 3-clause BSD license. This was a good move, as it meant that anyone could create derivative versions, whether proprietary or FOSS, and there would be virtually no license incompatibilities with whatever code people wanted to write.

However, to my very big disappointment, more recently XMOS seems to have changed their policy on this. New soft cores (released at https://github.com/xmos as opposed to the old https://github.com/xcore) are made available under a non-free license. This license is nothing like BSD 3-clause license or any other Free Software or Open Source license. It restricts the license to use the code together with an XMOS product, requires the user to contribute fixes back to XMOS and contains references to importand export control. This license is incopatible with probably any FOSS license in existance, making it impossible to write FOSS code on XMOS while using any of the new soft cores released by XMOS.

But even beyond that license change, not even all code is provided in source code format anymore. The new USB library (lib_usb) is provided as binary-only library, for example.

If you know anyone at XMOS management or XMOS legal with whom I could raise this topic of license change when transitioning from older sc_* software to later lib_* code, I would appreciate this a lot.

Proprietary Compiler

While a lot of the toolchain and IDE is based on open source (Eclipse, LLVM, ...), the actual xC compiler is proprietary.

The sad state of voice support in cellular modems

Harald Welte — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 16:00:00 GMT

Cellular modems have existed for decades and come in many shapes and kinds. They contain the cellular baseband processor, RF frontend, protocol stack software and anything else required to communicate with a cellular network. Basically a phone without display or input.

During the last decade or so, the vast majority of cellular modems come as LGA modules, i.e. a small PCB with all components on the top side (and a shielding can), which has contact pads on the bottom so you can solder it onto your mainboard. You can obtain them from vendors such as Sierra Wireless, u-blox, Quectel, ZTE, Huawei, Telit, Gemalto, and many others.

In most cases, the vendors now also solder those modules to small adapter boards to offer the same product in mPCIe form-factor. Other modems are directly manufactured in mPCIe or NGFF aka m.2 form-factor.

As long as those modems were still 2G / 2.5G / 2.75G, the main interconnection with the host (often some embedded system) was a serial UART. The Audio input/output for voice calls was made available as analog signals, ready to connect a microphone and spekaer, as that's what the cellular chipsets were designed for in the smartphones. In the Openmoko phones we also interfaced the audio of the cellular modem in analog, exactly for that reason.

From 3G onwards, the primary interface towards the host is now USB, with the modem running as a USB device. If your laptop contains a cellular modem, you will see it show up in the lsusb output.

From that point onwards, it would have made a lot of sense to simply expose the audio also via USB. Simply offer a multi-function USB device that has both whatever virutal serial ports for AT commands and network device for IP, and add a USB Audio device to it. It would simply show up as a "USB sound card" to the host, with all standard drivers working as expected. Sadly, nobody seems to have implemented this, at least not in a supported production version of their product

Instead, what some modem vendors have implemented as an ugly hack is the transport of 8kHz 16bit PCM samples over one of the UARTs. See for example the Quectel UC-20 or the Simcom SIM7100 which implement such a method.

All the others ignore any acess to the audio stream from software to a large part. One wonders why that is. From a software and systems architecture perspective it would be super easy. Instead, what most vendors do, is to expose a digital PCM interface. This is suboptimal in many ways:

there is no mPCIe standard on which pins PCM should be exposed
no standard product (like laptop, router, ...) with mPCIe slot will have anything connected to those PCM pins

Furthermore, each manufacturer / modem seems to support a different subset of dialect of the PCM interface in terms of

voltage (almost all of them are 1.8V, while mPCIe signals normally are 3.3V logic level)
master/slave (almost all of them insist on being a clock master)
sample format (alaw/ulaw/linear)
clock/bit rate (mostly 2.048 MHz, but can be as low as 128kHz)
frame sync (mostly short frame sync that ends before the first bit of the sample)
endianness (mostly MSB first)
clock phase (mostly change signals at rising edge; sample at falling edge)

It's a real nightmare, when it could be so simple. If they implemented USB-Audio, you could plug a cellular modem into any board with a mPCIe slot and it would simply work. As they don't, you need a specially designed mainboard that implements exactly the specific dialect/version of PCM of the given modem.

By the way, the most "amazing" vendor seems to be u-blox. Their Modems support PCM audio, but only the solder-type version. They simply didn't route those signals to the mPCIe slot, making audio impossible to use when using a connectorized modem. How inconvenient.

Summary

If you want to access the audio signals of a cellular modem from software, then you either

have standard hardware and pick one very specific modem model and hope this is available sufficiently long during your application, or
build your own hardware implementing a PCM slave interface and then pick + choose your cellular modem

On the Osmocom mpcie-breakout board and the sysmocom QMOD board we have exposed the PCM related pins on 2.54mm headers to allow for some separate board to pick up that PCM and offer it to the host system. However, such separate board hasn't been developed so far.

How the Osmocom GSM stack is funded

Harald Welte — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 16:00:00 GMT

As the topic has been raised on twitter, I thought I might share a bit of insight into the funding of the Osmocom Cellular Infrastructure Projects.

Keep in mind: Osmocom is a much larger umbrella project, and beyond the Networks-side cellular stack is home many different community-based projects around open source mobile communications. All of those have started more or less as just for fun projects, nothing serious, just a hobby [1]

The projects implementing the network-side protocol stacks and network elements of GSM/GPRS/EGPRS/UMTS cellular networks are somewhat the exception to that, as they have evolved to some extent professionalized. We call those projects collectively the Cellular Infrastructure projects inside Osmocom. This post is about that part of Osmocom only

History

From late 2008 through 2009, People like Holger and I were working on bs11-abis and later OpenBSC only in our spare time. The name Osmocom didn't even exist back then. There was a strong technical community with contributions from Sylvain Munaut, Andreas Eversberg, Daniel Willmann, Jan Luebbe and a few others. None of this would have been possible if it wasn't for all the help we got from Dieter Spaar with the BS-11 [2]. We all had our dayjob in other places, and OpenBSC work was really just a hobby. People were working on it, because it was where no FOSS hacker has gone before. It was cool. It was a big and pleasant challenge to enter the closed telecom space as pure autodidacts.

Holger and I were doing freelance contract development work on Open Source projects for many years before. I was mostly doing Linux related contracting, while Holger has been active in all kinds of areas throughout the FOSS software stack.

In 2010, Holger and I saw some first interest by companies into OpenBSC, including Netzing AG and On-Waves ehf. So we were able to spend at least some of our paid time on OpenBSC/Osmocom related contract work, and were thus able to do less other work. We also continued to spend tons of spare time in bringing Osmocom forward. Also, the amount of contract work we did was only a fraction of the many more hours of spare time.

In 2011, Holger and I decided to start the company sysmocom in order to generate more funding for the Osmocom GSM projects by means of financing software development by product sales. So rather than doing freelance work for companies who bought their BTS hardware from other places (and spent huge amounts of cash on that), we decided that we wanted to be a full solution supplier, who can offer a complete product based on all hardware and software required to run small GSM networks.

The only problem is: We still needed an actual BTS for that. Through some reverse engineering of existing products we figured out who one of the ODM suppliers for the hardware + PHY layer was, and decided to develop the OsmoBTS software to do so. We inherited some of the early code from work done by Andreas Eversberg on the jolly/bts branch of OsmocomBB (thanks), but much was missing at the time.

What follows was Holger and me working several years for free [3], without any salary, in order to complete the OsmoBTS software, build an embedded Linux distribution around it based on OE/poky, write documentation, etc. and complete the first sysmocom product: The sysmoBTS 1002

We did that not because we want to get rich, or because we want to run a business. We did it simply because we saw an opportunity to generate funding for the Osmocom projects and make them more sustainable and successful. And because we believe there is a big, gaping, huge vacuum in terms of absence of FOSS in the cellular telecom sphere.

Funding by means of sysmocom product sales

Once we started to sell the sysmoBTS products, we were able to fund Osmocom related development from the profits made on hardware / full-system product sales. Every single unit sold made a big contribution towards funding both the maintenance as well as the ongoing development on new features.

This source of funding continues to be an important factor today.

Funding by means of R&D contracts

The probably best and most welcome method of funding Osmocom related work is by means of R&D projects in which a customer funds our work to extend the Osmocom GSM stack in one particular area where he has a particular need that the existing code cannot fulfill yet.

This kind of project is the ideal match, as it shows where the true strength of FOSS is: Each of those customers did not have to fund the development of a GSM stack from scratch. Rather, they only had to fund those bits that were missing for their particular application.

Our reference for this is and has been On-Waves, who have been funding development of their required features (and bug fixing etc.) since 2010.

We've of course had many other projects from a variety of customers over over the years. Last, but not least, we had a customer who willingly co-funded (together with funds from NLnet foundation and lots of unpaid effort by sysmocom) the 3G/3.5G support in the Osmocom stack.

The problem here is:

we have not been able to secure anywhere nearly as many of those R&D projects within the cellular industry, despite believing we have a very good foundation upon which we can built. I've been writing many exciting technical project proposals
you almost exclusively get funding only for new features. But it's very hard to get funding for the core maintenance work. The bug-fixing, code review, code refactoring, testing, etc.

So as a result, the profit margin you have on selling R&D projects is basically used to (do a bad job of) fund those bits and pieces that nobody wants to pay for.

Funding by means of customer support

There is a way to generate funding for development by providing support services. We've had some success with this, but primarily alongside the actual hardware/system sales - not so much in terms of pure software-only support.

Also, providing support services from a R&D company means:

either you distract your developers by handling support inquiries. This means they will have less time to work on actual code, and likely get side tracked by too many issues that make it hard to focus
or you have to hire separate support staff. This of course means that the size of the support business has to be sufficiently large to not only cover the cots of hiring + training support staff, but also still generate funding for the actual software R&D.

We've tried shortly with the second option, but fallen back to the first for now. There's simply not sufficient user/admin type support business to rectify dedicated staff for that.

Funding by means of cross-subsizing from other business areas

sysmocom also started to do some non-Osmocom projects in order to generate revenue that we can feed again into Osmocom projects. I'm not at liberty to discuss them in detail, but basically we've been doing pretty much anything from

custom embedded Linux board designs
M2M devices with GSM modems
consulting gigs
public tendered research projects

Profits from all those areas went again into Osmocom development.

Last, but not least, we also operate the sysmocom webshop. The profit we make on those products also is again immediately re-invested into Osmocom development.

Funding by grants

We've had some success in securing funding from NLnet Foundation for specific features. While this is useful, the size of their projects grants of up to EUR 30k is not a good fit for the scale of the tasks we have at hand inside Osmocom. You may think that's a considerable amount of money? Well, that translates to 2-3 man-months of work at a bare cost-covering rate. At a team size of 6 developers, you would theoretically have churned through that in two weeks. Also, their focus is (understandably) on Internet and IT security, and not so much cellular communications.

There are of course other options for grants, such as government research grants and the like. However, they require long-term planning, they require you to match (i.e. pay yourself) a significant portion, and basically mandate that you hire one extra person for doing all the required paperwork and reporting. So all in all, not a particularly attractive option for a very small company consisting of die hard engineers.

Funding by more BTS ports

At sysmocom, we've been doing some ports of the OsmoBTS + OsmoPCU software to other hardware, and supporting those other BTS vendors with porting, R&D and support services.

If sysmocom was a classic BTS vendor, we would not help our "competition". However, we are not. sysmocom exists to help Osmocom, and we strongly believe in open systems and architectures, without a single point of failure, a single supplier for any component or any type of vendor lock-in.

So we happily help third parties to get Osmocom running on their hardware, either with a proprietary PHY or with OsmoTRX.

However, we expect that those BTS vendors also understand their responsibility to share the development and maintenance effort of the stack. Preferably by dedicating some of their own staff to work in the Osmocom community. Alternatively, sysmocom can perform that work as paid service. But that's a double-edged sword: We don't want to be a single point of failure.

Osmocom funding outside of sysmocom

Osmocom is of course more than sysmocom. Even for the cellular infrastructure projects inside Osmocom is true: They are true, community-based, open, collaborative development projects. Anyone can contribute.

Over the years, there have been code contributions by e.g. Fairwaves. They, too, build GSM base station hardware and use that as a means to not only recover the R&D on the hardware, but also to contribute to Osmocom. At some point a few years ago, there was a lot of work from them in the area of OsmoTRX, OsmoBTS and OsmoPCU. Unfortunately, in more recent years, they have not been able to keep up the level of contributions.

There are other companies engaged in activities with and around Osmcoom. There's Rhizomatica, an NGO helping indigenous communities to run their own cellular networks. They have been funding some of our efforts, but being an NGO helping rural regions in developing countries, they of course also don't have the deep pockets. Ideally, we'd want to be the ones contributing to them, not the other way around.

State of funding

We're making some progress in securing funding from players we cannot name [4] during recent years. We're also making occasional progress in convincing BTS suppliers to chip in their share. Unfortunately there are more who don't live up to their responsibility than those who do. I might start calling them out by name one day. The wider community and the public actually deserves to know who plays by FOSS rules and who doesn't. That's not shaming, it's just stating bare facts.

Which brings us to:

sysmocom is in an office that's actually too small for the team, equipment and stock. But we certainly cannot afford more space.
we cannot pay our employees what they could earn working at similar positions in other companies. So working at sysmocom requires dedication to the cause :)
Holger and I have invested way more time than we have ever paid us, even more so considering the opportunity cost of what we would have earned if we'd continued our freelance Open Source hacker path
we're [just barely] managing to pay for 6 developers dedicated to Osmocom development on our payroll based on the various funding sources indicated above

Nevertheless, I doubt that any such a small team has ever implemented an end-to-end GSM/GPRS/EGPRS network from RAN to Core at comparative feature set. My deepest respects to everyone involved. The big task now is to make it sustainable.

Summary

So as you can see, there's quite a bit of funding around. However, it always falls short of what's needed to implement all parts properly, and even not quite sufficient to keep maintaining the status quo in a proper and tested way. That can often be frustrating (mostly to us but sometimes also to users who run into regressions and oter bugs). There's so much more potential. So many things we wanted to add or clean up for a long time, but too little people interested in joining in, helping out - financially or by writing code.

On thing that is often a challenge when dealing with traditional customers: We are not developing a product and then selling a ready-made product. In fact, in FOSS this would be more or less suicidal: We'd have to invest man-years upfront, but then once it is finished, everyone can use it without having to partake in that investment.

So instead, the FOSS model requires the customers/users to chip in early during the R&D phase, in order to then subsequently harvest the fruits of that.

I think the lack of a FOSS mindset across the cellular / telecom industry is the biggest constraining factor here. I've seen that some 20-15 years ago in the Linux world. Trust me, it takes a lot of dedication to the cause to endure this lack of comprehension so many years later.

python-inema: Python module implementing Deutsche Post 1C4A Internetmarke API

Harald Welte — Sat, 23 Jul 2016 08:00:00 GMT

At sysmocom we maintain a webshop with various smaller items and accessories interesting to the Osmocom community as well as the wider community of people experimenting (aka 'playing') with cellular communications infrastructure. As this is primarily a service to the community and not our main business, I'm always interested in ways to reduce the amount of time our team has to use in order to operate the webshop.

In order to make the shipping process more efficient, I discovered that Deutsche Post is offering a Web API based on SOAP+WSDL which can be used to generate franking for the (registered) letters that we ship around the world with our products.

The most interesting part of this is that you can generate combined address + franking labels. As address labels need to be printed anyway, there is little impact on the shipping process beyond having to use this API to generate the right franking for the particular shipment.

Given the general usefulness of such an online franking process, I would have assumed that virtually anyone operating some kind of shop that regularly mails letters/products would use it and hence at least one of those users would have already written some free / open source software code fro it. To my big surprise, I could not find any FOSS implementation of this API.

If you know me, I'm the last person to know anything about web technology beyond HTML 4 which was the latest upcoming new thing when I last did anything web related ;)

Nevertheless, using the python-zeep module, it was fairly easy to interface the web service. The weirdest part is the custom signature algorithm that they use to generate some custom soap headers. I'm sure they have their reasons ;)

Today I hence present the python-inema project, a python module for accessing this Internetmarke API.

Please note while I'm fluent in Pascal, Perl, C and Erlang, programming in Python doesn't yet come natural to me. So if you have any comments/feedback/improvements, they're most welcome by e-mail, including any patches.

Developers wanted for Osmocom GSM related work

Harald Welte — Sun, 01 May 2016 16:00:00 GMT

Right now I'm feeling sad. I really shouldn't, but I still do.

Many years ago I started OpenBSC and Osmocom in order to bring Free Software into an area where it barely existed before: Cellular Infrastructure. For the first few years, it was "just for fun", without any professional users. A FOSS project by enthusiasts. Then we got some commercial / professional users, and with them funding, paying for e.g. Holger and my freelance work. Still, implementing all protocol stacks, interfaces and functional elements of GSM and GPRS from the radio network to the core network is something that large corporations typically spend hundreds of man-years on. So funding for Osmocom GSM implementations was always short, and we always tried to make the best out of it.

After Holger and I started sysmocom in 2011, we had a chance to use funds from BTS sales to hire more developers, and we were growing our team of developers. We finally could pay some developers other than ourselves from working on Free Software cellular network infrastructure.

In 2014 and 2015, sysmocom got side-tracked with some projects where Osmocom and the cellular network was only one small part of a much larger scope. In Q4/2015 and in 2016, we are back on track with focussing 100% at Osmocom projects, which you can probably see by a lot more associated commits to the respective project repositories.

By now, we are in the lucky situation that the work we've done in the Osmocom project on providing Free Software implementations of cellular technologies like GSM, GPRS, EDGE and now also UMTS is receiving a lot of attention. This attention translates into companies approaching us (particularly at sysmocom) regarding funding for implementing new features, fixing existing bugs and short-comings, etc. As part of that, we can even work on much needed infrastructural changes in the software.

So now we are in the opposite situation: There's a lot of interest in funding Osmocom work, but there are few people in the Osmocom community interested and/or capable to follow-up to that. Some of the early contributors have moved into other areas, and are now working on proprietary cellular stacks at large multi-national corporations. Some others think of GSM as a fun hobby and want to keep it that way.

At sysmocom, we are trying hard to do what we can to keep up with the demand. We've been looking to add people to our staff, but right now we are struggling only to compensate for the regular fluctuation of employees (i.e. keep the team size as is), let alone actually adding new members to our team to help to move free software cellular networks ahead.

I am struggling to understand why that is. I think Free Software in cellular communications is one of the most interesting and challenging frontiers for Free Software to work on. And there are many FOSS developers who love nothing more than to conquer new areas of technology.

At sysmocom, we can now offer what would have been my personal dream job for many years:

paid work on Free Software that is available to the general public, rather than something only of value to the employer
interesting technical challenges in an area of technology where you will not find the answer to all your problems on stackoverflow or the like
work in a small company consisting almost entirely only of die-hard engineers, without corporate managers, marketing departments, etc.
work in an environment free of Microsoft and Apple software or cloud services; use exclusively Free Software to get your work done

I would hope that more developers would appreciate such an environment. If you're interested in helping FOSS cellular networks ahead, feel free to have a look at http://sysmocom.de/jobs or contact us at jobs@sysmocom.de. Together, we can try to move Free Software for mobile communications to the next level!

LaForge's home page (Posts about sysmocom)

Fernvale Kits - Lack of Interest - Discount

First actual XMOS / XCORE project

Introduction into XCore

My current use case

The good parts

Documentation excellent

Fast progress

Soft Cores developed in public, with commit log

xSIM simulation extremely helpful

The bad parts

Hard to get XCore chips

Extremely limited number of single-bit ports

Insufficient number of exposed xLINKs

Change to a non-FOSS License

Proprietary Compiler

Further Reading

The sad state of voice support in cellular modems

Summary

How the Osmocom GSM stack is funded

History

Funding by means of sysmocom product sales

Funding by means of R&D contracts

Funding by means of customer support

Funding by means of cross-subsizing from other business areas

Funding by grants

Funding by more BTS ports

Osmocom funding outside of sysmocom

State of funding

Summary

python-inema: Python module implementing Deutsche Post 1C4A Internetmarke API

Developers wanted for Osmocom GSM related work