Linux-Friendly Devices and Open-Ended Hardware

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 07, 2023

• Fanless media player integrates Tiger Lake-UP3 CPUs

  ADLINK presented today a fanless embedded media player built around the 11th Gen Intel Core processors. The EMP-510 can handle up to four simultaneous displays, two 2.5 Gigabit ethernet interfaces and other serial ports.

• Low-cost evaluation board for LPC86x microcontrollers

  The LPC860-MAX by NXP is an evaluation board targeting applications such as motor control, wearables and other consumer products. The eval board is equipped with a 32-bit ultra-low power Arm Cortex-M0+ and up to 54x GPIOs.

• A Dedicated GPU For Your Favorite SBC

  The Raspberry Pi is famous for its low cost, versatile and open Linux environment, and plentiful I/O, making it a perfect device not only for its originally-intended educational purposes but for basically every hobbyist from gardeners to roboticists to amateur radio operators. Most builds tend to make use of the GPIO pins which allow easy connections to various peripherals and sensors, but the Pi also supports PCI devices which means that, in theory, it could use a GPU in much the same way that a modern computer would. After plenty of testing and development, [Jeff Geerling] brings us this custom graphics card interface for the Raspberry Pi.

• Welcome back to CamJam

  After a long hiatus due to COVID lockdowns, CamJam — the meet-up for Raspberry Pi enthusiasts in Cambridge, UK — returned last month. The event at Makespace Cambridge was completely sold out, with lots of local tinkerers and professional geeks keen to get back and chat with each other about what they’ve been making over the past couple of years. Often called Raspberry Jams, these community-led events happen all around the world. You can find one near you, or start your own.

• Our most complex OSHW board – the iMX8QuadMax Tukhla project first prototypes are assembled and they boot!

  The Tukhla project was completed in April 2021. However, due to the COVID-19 semiconductor madness, we were unable to assemble prototypes because of the lack of semiconductors. The development of this project is financed by Ignitial SAS, a company based in France.

  Finally we got enough chips to complete the first three prototypes and we assembled them last week before the May’s Holidays.

• [Old] PiKVM Handbook

  Welcome to the PiKVM Handbook - a complete documentation of Open and cheap DIY IP-KVM based on Raspberry Pi. Here you will find comprehensive information about all aspects of the operation of PiKVM, get answers to your most difficult questions and be able to solve the problems that have arisen.

• Schneider Euro PC: Restoration Part 5

  For those who missed it in the previous post, the +12v and -12v lines are only used for the ISA card slot, these each have a tantalum capacitor and one of them failed short-circuit when powered, which caused a fizz noise and a familiar smell to excrete from the machine.

  Given what the capacitors are for, I don’t see any reason to replace with tantalum types. I instead replaced with electrolytic capacitors. I didn’t really need to replace them at all as those lines are pretty stable and any card that uses them should have their own large decoupling. But I thought it would be good to get it back to spec.

• CYBER: Apple II and How the Computer Became Personal

  That story is the subject of the new book The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal. This week on Cyber, author Laine Nooney comes on to talk about The Apple II Age and how the little machine ushered in a new world of personal computing. Nooney is also an assistant professor of Media and Information Studies at New York University and the founding editor of ROMchip: A Journal of Games Histories.