Hardware Leftovers
-
Jonathan McDowell: Repurposing my C.H.I.P.
Way back at DebConf16 Gunnar managed to arrange for a number of Next Thing Co. C.H.I.P. boards to be distributed to those who were interested. I was lucky enough to amongst those who received one, but I have to confess after some initial experimentation it ended up sitting in its box unused.
The reasons for that were varied; partly about not being quite sure what best to do with it, partly due to a number of limitations it had, partly because NTC sadly went insolvent and there was less momentum around the hardware. I’ve always meant to go back to it, poking it every now and then but never completing a project. I’m finally almost there, and I figure I should write some of it up.
TL;DR: My C.H.I.P. is currently running a mainline Linux 6.3 kernel with only a few DTS patches, an upstream u-boot v2022.1 with a couple of minor patches and an unmodified Debian bullseye armhf userspace.
-
How to solve an energy crisis with technology and automation
Energy crises are nothing new, but they’re always painful. Right now, the world is dealing with a serious energy crisis that has led to skyrocketing utility bills, economic uncertainty, and widespread questions about how we supply our homes with power.
One of the biggest questions being asked right now is, “how do we avoid this kind of energy crisis in the future?” What steps can we take — as individuals and societies — to mitigate energy crises and deal with them more effectively when they do come around?
Automation is one powerful tool at our disposal here. It can be used not just by governments and energy companies, but also by individual households. The good news is that tools like Arduino and the Arduino Cloud can help you build automated devices to better manage your energy usage and save money in times of crisis.
In this article, we’ll take a look at how automation can help us use our energy more efficiently, avoid major crises, and pave the way to a more sustainable and reliable energy future.
-
Op Amp Challenge: What’s Your Monitor’s Delay?
In the days of CRT displays, the precise synchronization between source and display meant that the time between a video line appearing at the input and the dot writing it to the screen was constant, and very small. Today’s display technologies deliver unimaginable resolutions compared to the TV your family had in the 1970s, but they do so at the expense of all their signal processing imposing a much longer delay before a frame is displayed. This can become an issue for gamers, but also with normal viewing, because in some circumstances the delay can be long enough for it to be audible in a disconnect between film and soundtrack. It’s something [Mike Kibbel] has addressed with his video input delay meter, and it makes for a very interesting project.