Open Hardware and Devices: Projects and More
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Aaron Christophel Brings DOOM To Payment Terminal
Payment terminals might feel intimidating — they’re generally manufactured with security in mind, with all manner of anti-tamper protections in place to prevent you from poking around in the hardware too much. But [Aaron Christophel] thinks that level of security isn’t aren’t always in practice however, and on his journey towards repurposing devices of all kinds, has stumbled upon just the terminal that will give up its secrets easily. The device in question is Sumup Solo terminal, a small handheld with a battery, LTE connection and a payment card slot – helping you accept card payments even if you’re on the go.
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Recreating a century-old Argentinian rainmaking machine
You've heard about the many different snake oil concoctions shilled by con men over the centuries, but did you know that inventors created a variety of machines for similar purposes? The most well-known example is probably the belt vibrator, which purported to induce weight loss.
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How the 8086 processor determines the length of an instruction
The Intel 8086 processor (1978) has a complicated instruction set with instructions ranging from one to six bytes long. This raises the question of how the processor knows the length of an instruction.1 The answer is that the 8086 uses an interesting combination of lookup ROMs and microcode to determine how many bytes to use for an instruction. In brief, the ROMs perform enough decoding to figure out if it needs one byte or two. After that, the microcode simply consumes instruction bytes as it needs them. Thus, nothing in the chip explicitly "knows" the length of an instruction. This blog post describes this process in more detail.
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February update: things are taking shape
Let me start by apologizing to everyone for skipping yet another monthly community update. This has largely been my fault as I was rather busy in January and following FOSDEM at the start of February I found myself occupied with things related to the EU store. I hope for things to go back to normal now; you can expect future community updates at the end of each month as per usual. Again, I apologise, mea culpa.
I hope that this month’s update and the news it brings will more than make up for the wait: the Nestflash section ins absolutely packed this month, we’re revealing PineTab2’s pricing and SKU variants (both of which I’m sure you’ll be pleased with), announcing that Star64 will be available in the next 6 weeks (or so) and report on all the work that has gone into PinePhone (Pros) development in the recent two months … and much more
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Making Ghidra Play Nice With RP2040
Developing firmware for RP2040 is undeniably fun, what’s with all these PIOs. However, sometimes you will want to switch it around and reverse-engineer some RP2040 firmware instead. If you’ve ever tried using Ghidra for that, your experience might have been seriously lackluster due to the decompiled output not making sense when it comes to addresses – thankfully, [Wejn] has now released patches for Ghidra’s companion, SVD-Loader, that turn it all around, and there’s a blog post to go with these.