Flipper - A new embedded development platform.

[georgemorgan]

Hi OSDev community,

A few years ago I made a post here about a startup that I wanted to get off the ground. I wanted to create a development board that made it really easy to write embedded operating systems and let people get started with embedded hardware. I've been hard at work building this startup since we last talked and I'm very excited to announce that we launched last Thursday. If you want the full rundown, I gave a presentation at Mozilla that you can watch here.

Flipper is an embedded development platform that aims to redefine the traditional embedded programming model. Flipper lets you write code on a host computer that controls the embedded device remotely. This means that you can write code that interacts with embedded hardware peripherals from any programming language, on any platform. Our platform gives developers the ability to use the tools that they already know to control an embedded device. Since all of the application logic that is controlling the platform runs on the host, it can be developed and debugged using techniques already familiar to the developer. We hope that this will decrease the barrier to entry needed to work with embedded hardware and enable a greater number of projects that rely on embedded systems.

Flipper is powered by a simple embedded operating system called Osmium. I created Osmium to facilitate Flipper's new programming paradigm. Osmium has a simple scheduler, filesystem, and dynamic loader. It is just starting to take its first few baby steps towards being a full fledged operating system and I am confident that it will grow as Flipper grows. Flipper was designed with operating system development in mind. The Flipper hardware has a USB controller on it that is responsible for flashing new firmware images and controlling the primary processor. We are working on a solution that will enable the firmware to be debugged using this chip without any external hardware.

I am a firm believer that Flipper could be a really powerful tool for anyone interested in getting started with embedded development because you can ease your way into more complicated implementation. Flipper lets you start at a level of abstraction that you are familiar with and work your way down to lower levels of implementation. Advanced developers can uninstall Osmium and start developing their own operating systems that communicate with higher level languages.

If you are interested in picking up a development board to write your own OS for, or if you are interested in contributing to the platform, you can visit our site at https://flipper.io. You can also get all the software right now at https://github.com/flipper-io/flipper. I just want to say thank you to the community for teaching me a lot of what I know about operating systems. I hope I can give back to the community with what we have created.

Much love,
George

[georgemorgan]

Flipper boards started shipping today! Get one hot off the press.