Vintage/Open Hardware: RP2040, Raspberry Pi, ISA and PCB Issues
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RP2040 Feather module comes with Packet Radio
The Adafruit Feather RP2040 RFM69 Packet Radio is a compact board providing up to 21x GPIOs, 1x STEMMA connector, LiPo connector and it's compatible with Arduino/CircuitPython. According to the product page, this new Feather module is based on the Adafruit Feather RP2040 board launched last year.
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Using the Raspberry Pi Autofocus Camera Module 3 as HDMI camera
More than two years ago, I blogged about the use of the Raspberry Pi as an HDMI camera for the ATEM Mini. Although I have been using such a camera since then as my main Zoom camera, I wasn’t always happy with the image quality. The main problem was that the previous Raspberry Pi cameras had a fixed focus and it was quite hard to find the perfect focus.
But with the new version 3 camera module with auto-focus, this should all be solved… and… it is!
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New Expansion Module Brings Standard Slots To Ancient Laptop
Upgrading and repairing vintage laptops is often a challenge — even if their basic hardware is compatible with ordinary PCs, they often use nonstandard components and connectors due to space constraints. The Sharp PC-4600 series from the late 1980s is a case in point: although it comes with standard serial and parallel ports, the only other external interface is a mysterious connector labelled EXPBUS on the back of the case. [Steven George] has been diving into the details of this port and managed to design a module to turn it into a pair of standard ISA ports.
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Silkscreen Busy? Put Labels Inside Pads
When making a PCB informative and self-documenting, there’s often just not enough space to silkscreen all the labels you want, and slowly but surely, you collect a set of tricks: using different through-hole pad shapes to denote ground or power pins, standardized pinouts for connectors, your own signal name shortening notations, and so on.