Open Hardware: Jetson, Raspberry Pi, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 25, 2023

• Aetina carrier board supports Jetson Orin NX and Orin Nano modules

  Aetina unveiled earlier this month an embedded platform compatible with the Jetson ORIN NANO 8GB and Jetson ORIN NX 16GB SoM models. This industrial grade AI platform offers 1x RJ45 GbE port, 1x HDMI port, 1x M.2 2242 slot and many other peripherals.

• Hyperscale in your Homelab: The Compute Blade arrives

  He's been testing 40 of these in a rack at Jetbrains for months, and they're about to go live on Kickstarter.

  But why build a cluster with these Blades? And what good are they if you can't even buy a Compute Module 4 from Raspberry Pi? Do any alternative compute modules work? I'll get to ALL those questions in this blog post.

• Watch your fish with a Raspberry Pi camera

  This tutorial was inspired by the Entaniya waterproof case for the Raspberry Pi Camera Module. This case protects the Camera Module without distorting the image. With it, we can submerge a camera into the depths of an aquarium and keep an eye on our fishy pals by streaming video. If that doesn’t appeal, you can adapt this tutorial to be able to monitor a video stream of anything you like, whether it be indoors or outdoors. Combined with Home Assistant, you can soon be monitoring your cameras from anywhere in the world.

• Generating PAL Video With A Heavily Overclocked Pi Pico

  Barely a week goes by without another hack blessing the RP2040 with a further interfacing superpower. This time it’s the turn of the humble PAL standard composite video interface. As many of us of at least a certain vintage will be familiar with, the Phase Alternate Line (PAL to friends) standard was used mainly in Europe (not France, they used SECAM like Russia, China, and co) and Australasia, and is a little different from the�much�earlier NTSC standard those in the US may fondly recollect. Anyway, [Fred] stresses that this hack isn’t for the faint-hearted, as the RP2040 needs one heck of an overclock (up to 312 MHz, some 241% over stock) to be able to pull off the needed amount of processing grunt. This is much more than yet another PIO hack.

• SOCORAD32 ESP32 walkie-talkie board also supports data communication (Crowdfunding) - CNX Software

  SOCORAD32, aka ESP32 Software Controlled Radio, is a hackable, open-source hardware ESP32-based amateur radio board for walkie-talkie and data communication applications.

  The board comes with an ESP32 module with WiFi 4 and Bluetooth connectivity, an RDA Microelectronics RDA1846 RF IC used in many commercial walkie-talkies and offering a range up of to 5 km, a small display, a speaker, and a 18650 battery holder.

• Combining computing and maths to teach primary learners about variables

  In our first seminar of 2023, we were delighted to welcome Dr Katie Rich and Carla Strickland. They spoke to us about teaching the programming construct of variables in Grade 3 and 4 (age 8 to 10).