Open Hardware: Pi Pico, MiniPC, and Lots More
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A Pi Pico Oscilloscope
At the budget end of the oscilloscope range lie the so-called pocket ‘scopes. About the size of a deck of cards, they combine a microcontroller and an LCD screen to make an instrument with a bandwidth in the tens of kilohertz and a not-too-sparkling performance. They’re something of a toy, but then again, if all that’s needed is a simple ‘scope for audio frequencies, they make a passable choice in a small package. Now [jgpeiro] has made one which is light years ahead of the toy kits, using a Raspberry Pi Pico, a 100 MHz ADC, and an effort to design a better input circuit.
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Gateway MiniPC equipped with Celeron CPU and dual GbE ports
The T8 Pro is a MiniPC featuring a 15W Celeron N5095 processor along with Intel UHD Graphics. This device provides support for up to three 4K displays, dual GbE ports, Wi-Fi 5 and a couple of USB 3.1 ports.
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RISC-V news from T-Head Semiconductor and SiFive
Last week T-Head semiconductors announced their XuanTie C908 which implements a 9-stage pipeline along with an AI acceleration engine for AR/VR apps. Similarly, SiFive also shared details about their new P670/P470 RISC-V processors for wearables and smart consumer devices.
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Keropunk Part 3: Kerosene Radiant Heaters
The past few weeks, I talked somewhat in depth about kerosene lanterns and why you should buy one. This week, I’m covering a related technology - kerosene heaters. They’re a very useful thing to have around for when the power grid goes down in the winter, and you’d like to avoid freezing. I’m also going to do a teardown of a reasonably modern one, just so you can see what makes them tick inside. They’re quite simple!
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The Satisfaction of Fixing the Broken
I may not be handy, but my programmer's brain has made me particularly adept at designing workarounds, so through some minor trial and error I was able to keep the water contained in the laundry room and funneled into the drain while we assessed our options. After some inspection, I felt confident that the issue was caused by a big chunk of rubber that seemed to have been torn out of the gasket that kept all the water in the big spinny thing (that's the technical term, I looked it up) when the door was shut.
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[Old] The tools and tech I use to run a one-woman hardware company
Winterbloom is a boutique, open-source synthesizer company and it has exactly one engineer - me. I am responsible for everything - from the hardware design, to the firmware, to the documentation, and everything else! Because this is a ton of work I've had to be very deliberate with the tools and tech that I use.
This article is a look into our current tech stack one year in and some ideas I have for the future. I'll go from the microcontrollers, the firmware, and all the way up to user guide. I hope this is helpful, but if you want more details about something or if something doesn't make sense, feel free to reach out.
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Refurb weekend: Commodore SFD-1001
The Commodore SFD-1001 is an oddball and a rarity even among Commodore IEEE-488 5.25" floppy drives, which nowadays aren't particularly common either (though my preferred IEEE-488 device is the MSD Super Disk Drive SD-2, which also conveniently has IEC serial). The SFD "Single Floppy Drive"-1001 is a low-profile single drive version of the CBM 8250 dual drive and stores a whopping 1MB per disk, which in 1980 was really quite something. Unfortunately it requires 96tpi double density "quad density" floppies to do it — not the 48tpi double density disks you'd feed a more typical 1541 or 1571, nor the 96tpi high density PC floppy drives use — so there wasn't a whole lot of megabytes to store into even when these drives were newer. I also have a CBM 8050 which is the single-sided (but still dual drive) version of the 8250; it can store roughly a cool meg too but you have to flip it over for the second half.
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Creating a pick and place control board with the RP2040
This article will explore the hardware design of Starfish, a control board for a pick and place machine built around the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller and Trinamic TMC2209 motor drivers.