LeMaker to pair its hardware expertise with Linaro’s open source software experience to enable software developers with new 96Boards hardware platforms
Shen Zhen, China; 20 June 2015
Linaro Ltd, the not-for-profit engineering organization developing open source software for the Arm® architecture, today at the Shen Zhen Maker Faire announced that Chinese Maker development platform vendor LeMaker has joined Linaro as a member of the new Linaro Community Boards Group (LCG).
The LCG has been formed to support the new 96Boards initiative. 96Boards is the first open hardware specification that provides a platform for the delivery of compatible low cost, small footprint 32bit and 64bit CortexA boards. Standardized expansion buses for peripheral I/O, display and cameras allow the hardware ecosystem to develop a range of compatible addon products that will work on multiple vendor’s 96Boards products over the lifetime of the platform. The LCG Steering Committee will manage the evolution of the 96Boards open specifications and the development of the 96Boards community. The 96Boards website provides software downloads and updates, information on compatible products, and forums for software developers, makers and OEMs to get community software support and downloads for all 96Boards products.
“The China Maker and University markets are an incredibly large and fertile ground for innovation,” said Joe Bates, EVP of Member Services at Linaro. “We are very happy to be working with LeMaker to provide these markets with the latest Armv8 hardware platforms at an affordable price with robust open source software support. We look forward to seeing what Chinese Makers and students can build on these platforms.”
LeMaker has joined the LCG to combine its professional experience of working with multiple SoC vendors and the LeMaker online community to deliver innovative development platforms to Chinese universities and the Maker community with Linaro’s software expertise to deliver a new platform built on the latest Linux kernels and toolchains. This new platform is expected to be available in the fourth quarter of this year.
“As a member of the Linaro Community Boards Group (LCG), LeMaker is pleased to participate in the marketing of the 96Boards in Chinese Universities and the Maker market,” said Mr. Tony Zhang, CoFounder of LeMaker. “Linaro is a key place for collaborative software and hardware engineering on the Arm architecture and we are proud of our longstanding work with the Arm ecosystem, enabling the ‘LeMaker makes innovations more easier,’ for consumers around the world. LeMaker has developed the opensource platform for Banana Pro and today released three new products alongside this announcement. We believe in providing cost-effective, best-in-class platforms for new developers to be able to create a wider array of applications with our SBC platform.”
About Linaro
Linaro is the place where engineers from the world’s leading technology companies define the future of Linux on Arm. The company is a notforprofit engineering organization with over 150 engineers working on consolidating and optimizing open source software for the Arm architecture, including developer tools, the Linux kernel, Arm power management, and other software infrastructure. Linaro is distribution neutral: it wants to provide the best software foundations to everyone by working upstream, and to reduce nondifferentiating and costly low level fragmentation. The effectiveness of the Linaro approach has been demonstrated by Linaro’s growing membership, and by Linaro consistently being listed as one of the top five company contributors to Linux kernels since 3.10.
To ensure commercial quality software, Linaro’s work includes comprehensive test and validation on member hardware platforms. The full scope of Linaro’s engineering work is open to all online. To find out more, please visit and http://www.96Boards.org.
About LeMaker
LeMaker is a global pioneer in establishing the open source innovation ecosystem, enabling the “LeMaker makes innovation easier”. Since March. 2014, with its powerful brand influence and great integration of resources, LeMaker has established the stable partnership with SoC firms and supplychain companies. LeMaker has been empowering the makers and people or firms with new ideas to always stand at the forefront of innovation, by providing people around the world with comprehensive SBC platform and global online community service. LeMaker is committed to accelerate the development of open source and innovations.
As used in this release, the term” LeMaker” refers to Shenzhen LeMaker Technology Co., Ltd. For more information, please visit www.lemaker.org