Autonomy: Open Hardware and Self-Hosting
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Flashing Booby-Trapped Cisco AP With OpenWRT, The Hard Way
Certain manufacturers seriously dislike open-source firmware for their devices, and this particular hack deals with quite extreme anti-hobbyist measures. The Meraki MR33, made by Cisco, is a nice access point hardware-wise, and running OpenWRT on it is wonderful – if not for the Cisco’s malicious decision to permanently brick the CPU as soon as you enter Uboot through the serial port. This AP seems to be part of a “hardware as a service” offering, and the booby-trapped Uboot was rolled out by an OTA update some time after the OpenWRT port got published.
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Control six separate RGB LED strips with a single Arduino Nano | Arduino Blog
If you’re used to working with individually addressable RGB LEDs, then that title probably has you scratching your head — controlling six NeoPixel strips is easy with an Arduino, since each strip only needs a single I/O pin for data. But we aren’t talking about individually addressable LEDs; we’re talking about conventional common-anode RGB LED strips and Trevor Makes recently uploaded a video demonstrating how to control six of them with one Arduino Nano.
A common-anode RGB LED has four leads: one anode, and one cathode for each color. The anode always connects to the positive side of the circuit and connecting each cathode to the negative side of the circuit allows current to flow through that specific LED. A common-anode RGB LED strip expands on this concept, with all of the cathodes chained together by color channel. The operation is the same: connecting a color channel cathode to the negative side of the circuit causes all of the LEDs to light up in that color.
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Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?
With the upcoming 0.10.0 release of Zig on November 1st, we are going to ship the new self-hosted compiler. This is the result of a huge amount of work that brings a lot of benefits, some obvious, some others less so.
Even though the self-hosted compiler is now shipped, there’s still more work to do on it but, at the same time, now the door has opened to more exciting features, like Zig’s official package manager.
Let’s take a look at what’s next for the Zig project.