Open Hardware, Devices, and Retro
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Librem 5 Battery Life Improved by 100%!
Just like a great wine, the Librem 5 is getting better with age and it may well be the only smartphone to do so. That is because we don’t invest in obsolescence. In the opposite, our wonderful dev team is never giving up on their effort to optimize the software. After each major update, the Librem 5 gets faster and lighter on it’s hardware resources.
With the latest PureOS update, the “Suspend” feature has become reliable and when enabled, it can greatly improve the battery life of the Librem 5. As a reference, the phone’s battery could last around 10h in Idle mode and it can now last around 20h in Suspend mode. With Suspend enabled, I am now able to detach my phone from the charger in the morning, have a normal usage (with a few phone calls, using a few apps) all day long and it still has battery when I charge it at night.
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Refurb weekend: Commodore 128DCR
No question: the Commodore 128D is the finest Commodore 8-bit ever made. On this I tolerate no dissent, and that's not just because I sometimes hang out with Bil Herd. It's a 128, so it's got VDC graphics, 128K and 2MHz operation, but because it's a 128 it's also a 64. It's also an upgraded 128 with the fixed ROMs, (in this North American 128DCR) 8568 VDC and 64K of VDC memory, it's got a built-in 1571 (Commodore's finest 5.25" disk drive), and it doesn't have an external power brick. Plus, even though it has the desktop footprint of a 128, the detachable keyboard means you can just put a monitor on top of it (and the steel-cased North American 128DCR handles that very well) just like you can't with a flat 128, and you either get an actual cooling fan with the plastic 128D or the solder points to put one in a steel 128DCR. My only complaint is that the consolidated DCR motherboard is nearly devoid of socketed ICs, making it a little tough to do component level repair on. I like spares, so I have four DCRs, all of which completely or mostly work (and two spare keyboards, one rather yellow but fully functional and one even more yellow and useful just for parts).
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Things I've learned about building computers
Recently a computer upgrade went from one graphics card to a new case, new fans and a new graphics card. Along the way I learned a bunch and I'm writing this blog post for future reference when I next perform a PC upgrade.
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This beautiful lamp shows the moon’s phases from your nightstand
At first glance, this looks like the kind of moon lamp that has been very popular in recent years. Such lamps are common 3D printing projects, because it is possible to use real topographic data to create a 3D lithophane that makes the terrain visible. A lithophane is a piece of artwork made using a thin, translucent sheet of varying thickness. When backlit, the thicker areas look darker and the thinner areas look lighter. Like the popular moon lamps, this project starts with a 3D-printed lithophane of the moon. With a light source inside, it looks like an accurate lunar model.
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ZX-ESPectrum emulator tested with ESP32-SBC-FabGL, The Mensch computer with W65C256 got VGA display and Keyboard
At first it didn’t build but after Twitter consultation the problem appear with PlatformIO which was searching for obsolete version of ESP32 tools, after adding one line in platformio.ini
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Dragonfly Spectral Line Mapper
The design is based on the Dragonfly Telephoto Array, which was developed to find clues to the distribution and nature of dark matter in the universe by imaging faint and spread-out objects in the sky. The original Dragonfly is a telescope made up of a mosaic of Canon telephoto lenses on two mounts. The lenses all point to the same target in the sky: adding together all the images from the mosaic of lenses makes Dragonfly the equivalent of a one-metre telescope. One of those would usually have a starting price of around $500,000.
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Reliving elementary school with a robotic recorder
The recorder is a type of flute that is very popular in elementary schools because the instrument is so simple and inexpensive.
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Name that Ware, May 2023
This is yet another fine ware contributed by jackw01. I suspect this one may be guessed quite quickly, but I’ll leave one hint anyways: there is more than one board in this assembly.
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Compulab presents low-cost NXP i.MX93 embedded platform
Compulab introduced today a low-cost embedded device built around a dual-core ARM Cortex-A55 and the Arm Ethos U-65 microNPU. The company has also launched a compatible carrier board with mainline Linux support and RTOS.