Open Hardware: PureBoot, ESP32, and Raspberry Pi
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Introducing PureBoot Basic
Normally when you boot Pureboot, the Librem Key verifies the computer’s boot firmware is still in a verified state. Librem Key is a USB token that integrates with Pureboot and helps in protecting your system from snooping while you are away. Giving you peace of mind your computer software is untampered with.
For those that don’t need PureBoot’s extra security but want some of the other features, Pureboot Basic get’s out of the way and lets you boot by disabling tamper-detecting features.
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TRS-80 Model 100 Gets Arduino Heart Transplant
When [Stephen Cass] found himself with a broken Tandy TRS-80 Model 100 portable computer, the simplest solution was to buy another broken one and make one working computer from two non-working computers. However, this left him with a dilemma — what to do with the (now even more) broken one left over?
Naturally, he did what a lot of us would do and used modern hardware to interface with the original parts that still work. In this case it meant replacing the motherboard with an Arduino Mega 2560.
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Make a Lunar Light Tide Clock
The design is based on a ESP32 microcontroller attached to a real time clock with battery back-up running a tide program that allows it to output a light based corona that designates high and low tide. The microcontroller will run the tide script endlessly as long as it has power, requiring no internet connection for its calculations.
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Lunar Light Tide Clock
The TTGO version of the ESP32 board accommodates a screen that details the HI/Low tide Hour and Minute for the next 12 hours as well as the number of hours to next Hi/Low and the current tide level in feet. The back lighting of the moon changes with the hours of the day and can even accommodate hidden features such as celebrating birthdays or holidays with customized lighting patterns.
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Picamera2 beta release
One of the new features in the latest set of Raspberry Pi OS images is, for the first time, pre-installed beta release versions of the new Picamera2 Python camera library.
For those not familiar with Picamera2, it’s the replacement for the old PiCamera Python library. PiCamera proved hugely popular with users, as it provided a much more approachable way of accessing the Raspberry Pi’s camera system. But as we’ve discussed on this blog a number of times (An open source camera stack for Raspberry Pi, Bullseye camera system and A preview release of the Picamera2 library), we’re moving away from proprietary and closed camera APIs (Broadcom’s in this case) to an open framework based on libcamera.