Open Hardware: Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 11, 2023

• Raspberry Pi Pico W gets Bluetooth support in SDK 1.5.0

  The Raspberry Pi Pico W board was launched with a WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 5.2 module based on the Infineon CYW43439 wireless chip in June 2022, and I wrote a tutorial showing how to connect to WiFi a few days after the launch, but nothing about Bluetooth.

• Computer Blade with PoE+ support launches on Kickstarter

  Kickstarter recently featured the Computer Blade which is an scalable ARM-based server designed to work 24/7. This device is compatible with the Raspberry Pi CM4 and it includes peripherals such as 1x GbE LAN port, 1x HDMI, NVMe SSD support, TPM 2.0 and many other features.

• The Colorful Charm of Amiga Utility Disks

  It was both cheaper and more cheerful than IBM's PC machines, but it was also a machine intended very much for home use and playing games. Hard drives, for example, were prohibitively expensive, costing nearly as much as the computer itself even in very modest sizes.

  Hence, people worked from floppy disks. This wasn't quite as terrible as it sounds today, for several reasons. The major one was of course that scarcely any home user knew just how smooth things were with a hard drive: everyone was used to the speed of the floppy drive and its soothing churn when reading or writing to disk. Programs were typically much smaller than they are today and, with a bit of axle grease and a shoehorn, you could fit quite a few of them on a single disk. If you were running a big, resource hungry program, you usually didn't have enough memory left for doing any meaningful multitasking anyway - especially not when working with music or graphics.

• Interfacing a Raspberry Pi Pico to an SSD1351 OLED Display

  Going through my box of microcontroller boards I figured this would be an ideal project to finally try out the Raspberry Pi Pico, I’ve got several of them but not had a project to apply them to yet. I also decided that I wanted a colour OLED display, this had to be large enough to show an image, but small enough that it wouldn’t be too much stress for a microcontroller. I decided on a SSD1351 based display. It is 1.5 inches in size with a 128×128 resolution supporting 65535 colours (in RGB565 format).

• Homemade rockets

  Shunning the fins found on many a model rocket, Scout F is built around the concept of thrust vector control (TVC). “Landing a rocket requires some type of attitude control at slow speed and fins only work when the rocket is moving fast. Right when the rocket is about to touch down you need a way to keep it pointed upright, so thrust vector control seemed like a straightforward way to solve that problem.”

  To this end, Joe created a thrust vectoring mount from machined aluminium to fit around the rocket motor, rotated by servos to control the direction of thrust. He also ended up designing a custom flight controller board, Signal R2 (available from his BPS.Space website).

• W-whoops, buying a Commodore VC-20

  The VC-20 was the West German version of the VIC-20, owing to the amusing meaning of the latter in German. Unlike the Japanese VIC-1001 that included Hiragana in lieu of PETSCII graphics, the badges are all that distinguish this machine from other VIC-20s. I’m fascinated by rebrands; check out my IBM WorkPad PDA post for another example. I’m thrilled that I have another curiosity like this.

• Sfera Labs’ Cutting-edge IoT Modules Based on Raspberry Pi CM

  Sfera Labs has developed two Strato Pi CM devices, essential IoT modules that are compatible with multiple Raspberry Pi Computer Modules.

• Iana’s smart glove in real life

  Rainbow Six is a series of tactical shooter video games dating back to 1998.