What I've been busy with

Those who don't know me personally and/or stay in touch more closely might be wondering what on earth happened to Harald in the last >= 1 year?

The answer would be long, but I can summarize it to I disappeared into sysmocom. You know, the company that Holger and I founded four years ago, in order to commercially support OpenBSC and related projects, and to build products around it.

In recent years, the team has been growing to the point where in 2015 we had suddenly 9 employees and a handful of freelancers working for us.

But then, that's still a small company, and based on the projects we're involved, that team has to cover a variety of topics (next to the actual GSM/GPRS related work), including

  • mechanical engineering (enclosure design)

  • all types of electrical engineering

    • AC/electrical wiring/fusing on DIN rails

    • AC/DC and isolated DC/DC power supplies (based on modules)

    • digital design

    • analog design

    • RF design

  • prototype manufacturing and testing

  • software development

    • bare-iron bootloader/os/application on Cortex-M0

    • NuttX on Cortex-M3

    • OpenAT applications on Sierra Wireless

    • custom flavors of Linux on several different ARM architectures (TI DaVinci, TI Sitara)

    • drivers for various peripherals including Ethernet Switches, PoE PSE controller

    • lots of system-level software for management, maintenance, control

I've been involved in literally all of those topics, with most of my time spent on the electronics side than on the software side. And if software, the more on the bootloader/RTOS side, than on applications.

So what did we actually build? It's unfortunately still not possible to disclose fully at this point, but it was all related to marine communications technology. GSM being one part of it, but only one of many in the overall picture.

Given the quite challenging breadth/width of the tasks at hand and problem to solve, I'm actually surprised how much we could achieve with such a small team in a limited amount of time. But then, there's virtually no time left, which meant no gpl-violations.org work, no blogging, no progress on the various Osmocom Erlang projects for core network protocols, and last but not least no Taiwan holidays this year.

ately I see light at the end of the tunnel, and there is again a bit ore time to get back to old habits, and thus I

  • resurrected this blog from the dead

  • resurrected various project homepages that have disappeared

  • started some more work on actual telecom stuff (osmo-iuh, for example)

  • restarted the Osmocom Berlin Meeting