Devices: Retro, Raspberry Pi, Librem 5, ESP32, and More
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Space Center Houston turns out to be awesome
It’s been excellent, and that’s before we get to the Space Exploration Educators Conference, which runs from Thursday to Saturday and provides educators with the latest teaching tools, interpreting what’s happening now in science and human space exploration. If you’ll be there, look out for us and say hi — we’re giving a presentation about the history of Raspberry Pi during the Thursday lunchtime session too.
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xa 2.3.14, the 6502/65816 cross-assembler
The new release and archived old versions are updated on xa's home page. Both xa and dxa are available under the GNU Public License v2.
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Need a Resistor? Thank Otis Boykin!
Otis Boykin was born in Dallas, Texas in 1920 to a working class family and graduated high school in 1938 as valedictorian of his class. He then began college at Fisk University in Nashville while also working at an aerospace laboratory as a lab assistant testing automatic controls for aircraft. After graduating, Boykin moved through a few laboratory jobs working on radio and TV components. He even ran his own company with Hal Fruth, another engineer he met while working as a clerk for a manufacturing company. There, he worked on his own various inventions beginning in 1946. Boykin holds 26 patents, but the one he is best known for is the wire precision resistor.
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Shipping new SparkLAN Wifi cards with Librem 5
One of the unique features about the Librem 5 is its modular cellular modem and WiFi/Bluetooth cards. This not only aids in repairing hardware, it also means when new, compatible cards become available (or previous cards unavailable), we have the flexibility to change modules.
Up until December 2022 all Librem5 phones had been shipping with the Redpine RS9116 M.2 module. New Librem 5 Phones are now shipping with the SparkLAN WNFB-266AXI(BT).
There were a few reasons for changing WiFi cards, but one of the primary ones was the lack of mainline driver support. Maintaining an out of tree vendor driver is a difficult task for a small team.
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ESP32 board with Cat-M & NB-IoT support can be pre-ordered for $44.00
LILYGO has introduced a compact embedded board based on the ESP32-S3 SoC with Wi-Fi/BL5.0 and the SIM7080G module for CAT-M and NB-IoT connectivity. The T-SIM7080G offers flexible peripherals such as an SD card slot, a SIM card slot, camera support, an 18650 battery holder and a connector for solar input.
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8 cents for an Arm Cortex-M0+ microcontroller. Meet Puya PY32 series MCUs
Back in 2016, when I searched for the world's cheapest MCU, I found Holtek HT48R002 8-bit microcontroller, and a few years later (2019), Padauk PMS150C “3 Cents” MCU came to my attention. However, both are 8-bit microcontrollers that come with OTG (One-Time Programming) ROM, meaning they can't be easily used for development or updated.
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Bluetooth 5.4 adds electronic shelf label (ESL) support
The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) has just adopted the Bluetooth 5.4 Core Specification with features such as PAwR and EAD designed for Electronic Shelf Label (ESL) systems. The Bluetooth 5.3 Core Specification was adopted in August 2021 with various improvements, and Bluetooth 5.4 now follows with features that appear to be mainly interesting for large-scale Bluetooth networks with support for bi-directional communication with thousands of end nodes from a single access point, as would be the case for Electronic Shelf Label or Shelf Sensor systems.
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Code along with our Astro Pi Mission Zero video
Today we’re sharing an Astro Pi Mission Zero codealong video to help even more young people send their code into space.