MediaTek announces open-source development platform for IoT devices

MediaTek Labs has announced the launch of the MediaTek LinkIt Smart 7688, a development platform enabling rapid development of advanced Wi-Fi based devices such as IP cameras, surveillance devices, smart appliances and Wi-Fi gateways that make use of cloud services.

Two versions of the platform's hardware development kit (HDK) are available: the LinkIt Smart 7688, which includes a microprocessor unit (MPU) based on the MediaTek MT7688AN system-on-chip (SOC), and the LinkIt Smart 7688 Duo, which in addition to the MPU includes a microcontroller unit (MCU) and is Arduino compatible. Both development boards feature built-in Wi-Fi, 128MB RAM and 32MB flash, and a wide variety of options for connecting peripherals.

The MediaTek LinkIt Smart 7688 and 7688 Duo development boards are available to ship globally. The LinkIt Smart 7688 costs US$12.90, while the LinkIt Smart 7688 Duo costs US$15.90. A fully open-source version of the Wi-Fi driver is in development and expected to be made available by MediaTek Labs in the coming months, the company added. 

"MediaTek Labs is focused on stimulating innovation in IoT and is pleased to extend its LinkIt family of development platforms to the open-source and web developer communities, enabling broader product development for a more connected world," said Marc Naddell, VP of MediaTek Labs. 

"The new LinkIt Smart 7688 development platform will appeal to a wide range of developers because of its open-source software compatibility, support for several popular programming languages and use of Linux."

Now Microsoft's Visual Studio Source Code is Open-Source for GNU/Linux, OS X, and Windows

Visual Studio Code is now licensed under the MIT license

During the Connect(); 2015 developer event that took place on November 18, 2015, in New York City, USA, Microsoft had the great pleasure of announcing that its Visual Studio Code integrated development environment software is now open source.

Immediately after the huge announcement, Microsoft published the Visual Code Studio sources on the GitHub project hosting website, urging the community to contribute to the development of the software in any way they can. "You spoke and we listened. With this release, VS Code development is now open source on GitHub," said Microsoft.

The cross-platform web and cloud development code editor (IDE) is now distributed for free as an open-source application on GitHub, licensed under the MIT license for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and, of course, Microsoft Windows.

The latest available release at the moment of writing this article is version 0.10.1, but Microsoft announced that it put the software in Beta and declared it "the most significant release since the launch," and just by looking at the release notes, we can notice that Visual Studio Code Beta is a massive update with numerous new features.

Among the most important ones, we can mention support for TextMate snippets, debug console improvements, easy variable selection, debug environment configuration, node.js debugging, improved debug hover behavior, improved syntax highlighting, environment variable substitution, and new difference view settings.