Devices: Raspberry Pi and More
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That Old ThinkPad Needs An Open Source 2.5″ IDE SSD
So you fancy yourself a FOSS devotee, do you? Running GNU/Linux on your old ThinkPad, avoiding devices that need binary blobs? Got LibreBoot installed too? Not bad, not bad. But what about the hard drive? Can you be sure you aren’t leaking some freedoms out of that spinning rust?
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A guide to Java for loops
In programming, you often need your code to iterate over a set of data to process each item individually. You use control structures to direct the flow of a program, and the way you tell your code what to do is by defining a condition that it can test. For instance, you might write code to resize an image until all images have been resized once. But how do you know how many images there are? One user might have five images, and another might have 100. How do you write code that can adapt to unique use cases? In many languages, Java included, one option is the for loop. Another option for Java is the Stream method. This article covers both.
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MSI Cubi 5 12M Mini PC available for pre-order
MSI presented their Cubi 5 12M mini PC at CES 2023 earlier this month. This mini-PC integrates Alder-Lake-U processors and it provides dual 4K displays, dual 2.5GbE LAN ports, 1x M.2 slot , Wi-Fi 6E/Bluetooth 5.2, etc.
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Radxa Taco Turns a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 Into a NAS
As it uses a Compute Module, the carrier board has to supply all the ports, and this one has been neatly designed for network storage use with five SATA interfaces, each capable of taking a 2.5 inch hard drive or SSD up to 15mm (0.6in) thick. If you want to use 3.5in drives, that’s possible too with an extension cable. You can arrange the drives using software RAID in RAID 0, 1 or 5 configurations (with the last one requiring at least three disks). There's no mention of a maximum drive capacity.
In addition to this you get an M.2 M Key 2280 socket for an NVMe SSD, and a Micro SD card slot. There's another M.2 socket too, an E Key for a Wi-Fi module or a Google Coral (opens in new tab) AI accelerator. There's an optional OLED status screen too, and activity LEDs for all the drives.
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The Lisa: Apple's Most Influential Failure
Happy 40th Birthday to Lisa! The Apple Lisa computer, that is. In celebration of this milestone, CHM has received permission from Apple to release the source code to the Lisa software, including its system and applications software.
Access the code here.
What is the Apple Lisa computer, and why was its release on January 19, 1983, an important date in computer history? Apple’s Macintosh line of computers today, known for bringing mouse-driven graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to the masses and transforming the way we use our computers, owes its existence to its immediate predecessor at Apple, the Lisa. Without the Lisa, there would have been no Macintosh—at least in the form we have it today—and perhaps there would have been no Microsoft Windows either.
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Raspberry Pi OctoPrint Powered by Ender3 3D Printer - CubicleNate’s Techpad
After almost a year of having my Ender3, it has received a lot of new parts, fixes and upgrades. The great thing about the Ender3 is that you can do so much with it and truly personalize it for your use case. One area that needed to be addressed was the power supply situation that powers the Raspberry Pi running OctoPrint. Having a single switch to shut the station down is a far more elegant solution to power down this 3D printing station.
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Quiet, ultrathin AirJet solid state active cooling chips could replace fans - CNX Software
Frore Systems Airjet Mini and Airjet Pro are active cooling chips that are just 2.8mm thick and quietly suck cool air in from the top of the chip before pushing it out the sides with the aim to replace traditional fan-based solutions in ultrabooks, or be integrated into VR headsets and smartphones for improved cooling.
Yesterday we saw that cameras could clean themselves with micro-vibrations, and it happens that processors can be cooled with vibrations too as the Airjet chips are comprised of tiny membranes that vibrate at ultrasonic frequencies to generate a flow of air that enters through inlet vents in the top and transformed into high-velocity pulsating jets exiting from one side of the chip.
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LILYGO T-RSC3 ESP32-C3 board features isolated RS232 - RS485 interfaces, 5 to 24V DC input - CNX Software
LILYGO T-RSC3 is a relatively compact ESP32-C3 board with WiFi 4 and Bluetooth LE 5.0 connectivity, support for RS232 and RS485 communication protocols through a DB9 connector and a terminal connector respectively, and a wide 5V to 24V DC power input.
LILYGO had already made an ESP32 board with CAN Bus and RS485 interfaces called the T-CAN485, but without any isolation. The new T-RSC3 offers both RS232 and RS485 interfaces, but no CAN Bus, protected by isolated transceiver modules that should make it safer to use in industrial environments.
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This DIY Apple Pencil writes with gestures
Released in 2015, the Apple Pencil is a technology-packed stylus that allows users to write on iPad screens with variations in pressure and angle — all while communicating with very low latencies. Nekhil Ravi and Shebin Jose Jacob of Coders Café were inspired by this piece of handheld tech to come up with their own pencil concept, except this one wouldn’t need a screen in order to function.
The pair’s writing utensil relies on recognizing certain gestures as letters, and once one has been detected, outputs the result over USB or Bluetooth® to the host device. They started by first gathering many samples of different letters and how they correlate to the change in motion on the Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense’s built-in accelerometer. From here, they designed an impulse in the Edge Impulse Studio to extract spectral features from the time series accelerometer data and pass it to a classification Keras neural network. The resulting model could accurately determine the correct letter from each gesture, making it suitable for deployment back to the Nano 33 BLE Sense.