Some follow-up on the Osmocom Berlin meetings

We've now had the first two incarnations of the Osmocom Berlin User Group Meeting. The start was great, and we had probably something around 10 attendees. Some were the usual suspects like the various Osmocom developers living in Berlin. But we also had a number of new people attending each of both of the meetings, which is good.

To my big surprise people are even flying in from other parts of Europe in order to be able to attend. Last time from Sweden, and for the next meeting some folks from the Netherlands have announced themselves.

To an even bigger surprise, the attendee from Sweden announced that he is working for an Ericsson research lab, and apparently they are using OsmocomBB quite a bit inside that lab. They think it's a great tool, and apparently nothing else with the same flexibility (i.e. full source code) is at their hands that can compete.

On the one hand it is surprising to see such a large traditional Telco supplier to start to use such amateur tools like OsmocomBB, which definitely have not had even a fraction of the testing (particularly with various operators in various countries) like the commercial protocol stacks.

On the other hand, if you think more about it, Ericsson is entirely a network equipment supplier today. They have spun off their baseband processor business to become part of ST-Ericsson, they have pulled out of Sony-Ericsson, sold their TEMS product line to Ascom and other bits and pieces to Tieto. So right now, if they need a MS-side protocol stack or engineering phones, they probably have to obtain what is available on the market. And that's unfortunately not all that great, as the products are either

• Measurement devices aimed at mostly L1 testing / QA (Racal, Agilent, Rohde-Schwarz)
• Trace mobiles primarily aimed at field testing (TEMS, Sagem OT) and while they provide traces they don't permit you to send arbitrary data or behave spec-incompliant
• Mobile Phone development platforms (Qualcomm, MTK, Infinenon, ...) which don't necessarily give you the full source code to the stack, and are only available if you actually intend to build a handset

So all in all, the more I think about it, it is actually not too surprising that they ended up with OsmocomBB. It's free (as in free beer) and they get the full source code with it. You need a lot of skills and time to get it running and find your way around how to use it, but I guess if you're working in cellular protocols and embedded systems, it's not that hard.

Syndicated 2012-05-07 02:00:00 from Harald Welte's blog

Name that UART: April 2012

It's sort of a cheap knock-off idea stolen from the Name that Ware on bunnies blog: I'm going to post one picture every month about a UART that I found on embedded hardware. Unfortunately I don't have much to offer in terms of a reward for whoever finds the true solution ;)

In any case, every month there are devices that I'm looking into either out of my own interest, or because the work at gpl-violations.org requires it. In most of them, you can find a UART to get to the u-boot / Linux serial console.

So here is the device that I just took apart earlier today:

The location of the UART pads was obvious, after looking at the PCB for a very short time. The entire unpopulated U1 footprint appeared suspiciously like a UART level shifter for true RS232 voltage levels:

• You can see two signals going directly to a small unpopualted3-pin header
• There are two other signals coming from somewhere under the main SoC
• There are capacitors (C440, C441) directly connected to the U1 for the charge pump

Syndicated 2012-04-09 02:00:00 from Harald Welte's blog

Prototype smart card chips in DIL-40 case have arrived

Finally, the first samples of the smart card chip (for the Osmocom CardOS project) have arrived. As opposed to the final smart cards, this one has been packaged in a DIL case instead of the usual thin credit-card sized plastic. The reason for this is quite simple: This way lots of I/O pins for debugging as well as JTAG can be accessible during COS development.

Here you can see the first incarnation of a veroboard connected to an adapter pcb inside an Omnikey smart card reader:

After confirming it worked, I soldered the wires directly to the adapter PCB, as can be seen here:

There is already a real PCB design that is currently manufactured, i.e. in a week or so there will be a picture of a clean, professionally-produced/etched PCB with all of the prototype pins exported.

In terms of the COS, I haven't done much more work than compared to the last posting, mainly due to a large number of other projects. But we will get there...

Syndicated 2012-04-09 02:00:00 from Harald Welte's blog

OsmoDevCon 2012 is over...

We just finished the 4th and final day of the OsmoDevCon 2012. It contained four days of in-depth presentations and discussions related to Free Software communications systems, most notably OsmocomBB, OpenBSC, OpenBTS, OsmoNITB, SIMtrace, OsmoGMR, OsmoSDR, rtl-sdr and many more.

I think it was a great chance to make sure the key developers involved with those projects are up-to-date with what everyone else is hacking on. I was especially happy with the presentations of Holger's smalltalk implementation of certain GSM protocols/interfaces, and it seems my small informal Erlang intro has raised some interest.

If anything, the 4-day conference has shown that there is a massive amount of work going on in the various different projects, and that it has clearly grown beyond anything that a single person could still be involved in all the sub-projects.

Personally, I'm happy to see what has grown out of this "we have a BS-11, let's see what we can do with it" that Dieter and I started in 2008. Now we're no longer talking about BTS/A-bis/BSC, but about SS7, MSC, TCAP/MAP, SCCP, HLR, Erlang, smalltalk, DECT, SIM/USIM, COS, SDR, GMR/Thuraya, TETRA and more recently also femtocells as well as NodeBs.

In the spirit of that 2008 presentation Running your own GSM network using the BS-11, Dieter Spaar has now demonstrated his talk on Running your own UMTS network, using NSN or Ericsson NodeBs. I'm really excited to see where that will take us - despite the fact that due to the 5 MHz wide channels, it's pretty close to impossible to get the experimental spectrum licenses that most of us have been able to get in recent years for our work.

As an outlook, over the remaining year 2012, I see progress in the following areas:

• osmo-nitb will get a VLR/HLR split (async database access)
• we will build a stand-alone osmo-msc with A interface
• the signerl TCAP/MAP implementations will be used in production
• OsmoSDR firmware will be completed, the hardware will start shipping
• a new card operating system (OsmoCOS) will emerge
• a UMA gateway will be implemented
• a Free Software GPRS/EDGE PCU and RLC/MAC implementation will appear
• last but not least, sysmoBTS will start commercial shipment really soon now

I'd like to thank our host c-base for having us block their conference room for 4 days, as well as all attendees who have travelled from all parts of Europe, but even the United States and Russia to participate. There definitely will be another OsmoDevCon, though we don't know yet at which point in time.

Syndicated 2012-03-26 02:00:00 from Harald Welte's blog

h-online article covering OpenBTS and OpenBSC

You can find a 3-page article about OpenBTS, OpenBSC and related projects available from the h-online web site.

Syndicated 2012-03-26 02:00:00 from Harald Welte's blog