Just over two years ago when we first announced BUG, our goal was to shake up the consumer electronics landscape by releasing something new, something groundbreaking, something needed – the first modular, open source device platform.   A few months and sleepless nights later, we began shipping our first units, albeit with some changes to the original plan. We would only ship domestically to the U.S. (due to certification requirements) and without WiFi in the BUGbase (due to open source licensing issues).  Since then we have heard, loud and clear, that we needed to address these shortfalls.  And we’ve worked hard to make it happen.

Today, I am happy to say, we’re announcing the availability of BUGbase WiFi.  In addition to integrated WiFi *and* Bluetooth, BUGbase WiFi is RoHS and CE compliant, allowing us to ship BUG to the 29 countries in the European Union. Other improvements include a friction-fit docking connector and improved power management, along with a few other under-the-hood enhancements. If you currently own a BUGbase, we haven’t forgotten about you – we’ll be releasing a special BUGWiFi module in the coming weeks. As you’d expect from us here at Bug, all of our modules are compatible with either base.

We’re especially thrilled to begin shipping internationally, given the great reception we’ve received from Europe since day one. In traveling to events like FOSDEM and meeting with customers in Italy, France and other EU nations, I’ve noticed the European market has a terrific appreciation for open source approaches and community-driven innovation models.  So it’s safe to say, we expect to see many interesting new BUG-powered applications in the near future.   In addition, our team is working hard getting BUG ready for the 200 or so other countries in the world.

We will have some more exciting product and partnership news to share in the coming weeks so please stay tuned.  In the meantime, go download Dragonfly (our free SDK), play around with the environment and if you like what you see, head on over to our store!

Last week, Brian C. posted details to BUGcommunity about BUG R1.4, the new production build of the BUG kernel and filesystem. After what seemed like an eternity to most of us here at BUG HQ, R1.4 is the most significant build to date, addressing many of the functionality issues BUG users have been facing since 1.0. In addition to providing software support for BUGsound, R1.4 contains several major and minor changes to APIs for existing BUGmodules, as well as U-boot and ipkg support.

The kernel and FS are available for download now, as is a new build of Dragonfly, the BUG SDK, v1.2.8.1, which is required for the upgrade.

If you have any questions, feel free to let us know via e-mail (support [a] buglabs [d] net) or on IRC (#buglabs on freenode).