Open Hardware: Raspberry Pi, Retro CPUs, and More
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Virginia Tech researchers earn national recognition for advances in drone practices
The award-winning project, “Research and Extension for Unmanned Aircraft Systems in U.S. Agriculture and Natural Resources,” evaluates and identifies the most reliable, cost-effective, and user-friendly drone platforms and sensors for monitoring and managing stressors in agriculture and natural resources. To maximize the accuracy of the data collected, project members developed hardware, software, and detailed protocols for calibrating and using drones.
Maria Balota, a professor in the School and Plant and Environmental Sciences and Tidewater Agricultural Research and Extension Center; Daniel Fuka, a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering; Cully Hession, a professor and graduate program director in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering; and Joseph Oakes, the superintendent of the Eastern Virginia Agricultural Research and Extension Center, represented the university on the team of scientists.
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Raspberry Pi Controls Christmas Light Effects With Custom Web Server
The project is built around a Raspberry Pi 4 but you could easily recreate the concept using a Pi 3 or even a Pi Zero W. The Pi needs to have GPIO to control the Christmas lights, which in this case is a strip of individually addressable WS2812b LEDs, as well as an Internet connection to help host the web server interface.
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Return of the Mac
The free software library RetroPie, for example, lets people relive the Amstrad CPC, Dragon 32, Commodore 64, Master System, Neo Geo, Oric, TRS-80 and Vectrex among many, many other machines. Raspberry Pi has also effectively become a near-perfect Amiga thanks to the distro Amibian.
Recently, however, our heads were turned by a new tool created by Jarosław “Jaromaz” Mazurkiewicz called MacintoshPi. This open-source project allows users to run full-screen versions of Apple's Mac OS 7, Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9 (operating systems released between 1991 and 2001) and it does so complete with sound, an active internet connection and modem emulation.
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Teensy Twofer Of Plug-In Emulated Retro CPUs
[Ted Fried] wrote in with not one but two (2!) new drop-in replacements for widespread old-school CPUs: the Zilog Z80 and the Intel 8088. Both of the “chips” run in cycle-accurate mode as well as in a super turbo mode, which can run so fast that you’ll need to use the Teensy’s internal RAM just to keep up.