Today we’re opening the doors on something we’ve been quietly working on: Rufilla Labs, a new home for all of our open-source work.
At Rufilla we are absolutely obsessed with open source. Every product we build stands on it: Linux, Zephyr, Yocto, KiCad, and countless smaller projects maintained by people we will never meet. Giving back to that community is part of the deal for us, and Labs is where we do it properly, in public, with everything free to use, fork and break.
There is also a more honest reason. So much of our client work sits under NDA that we rarely get to show our workings. Rufilla Labs is the part we can show: real projects, real design files, real mistakes, all in the open.
What’s in the lab already
Foxbridge
RK3506 Yocto layers
ESP32-C6 HAT
ZephyrMLForge
Everything ships under proper open licences (Apache-2.0 and MIT), with design files you can actually open and documentation that includes the errata rather than hiding them. Revision A of Foxbridge has three documented hardware faults. We think that is how open hardware should be done.
What’s coming
This is only the start. The whole Rufilla team will be working on Labs, and we have many, many more projects queued up to post: more hardware builds, more Yocto layers, more embedded ML experiments, and all sorts of other interesting things we haven’t thought of yet. It is going to be a very active site, and even the site itself is open source.
The best way to keep up is to watch github.com/Rufilla, or simply check back at labs.rufilla.com now and then.
Built at Culham
Labs is also an honest window into how we work. The same team behind these experiments delivers production embedded Linux, hardware and long-term support for companies like Octopus Energy and Oxford Instruments. If you like the way we build in the open, we’d love to hear what you’re building.