Open Hardware and Linux Devices

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 13, 2023

• Raspberry Pi Helps Submarine Simulator Explore for Wildlife

  You can find tons of simulation games on the market today, ranging from tractors to goats, but there’s an entirely different side of simulators that is far more immersive. Today we’re sharing with you an extraordinary creation put together by a team known as The Explorandia Association. This team has developed a wonderful submarine simulator that takes you through an actual pond in real time with a bit of help from a Raspberry Pi 3B.

• Factory tour with Jeff Geerling

  We had a visitor at Pi Towers last month. YouTuber Jeff Geerling, who we’re all a little starstruck by, came to the UK for a whistlestop tour. He took in our offices in Cambridge and (most interesting of all for you, dear readers) the factory in Pencoed, South Wales, where Raspberry Pis are built.

• Introducing the [Raspberry Pi] Hello World newsletter

  Sign up to get news and insights about computing education from Hello World and the Foundation in your inbox every month.

• Upgrading my Chumby 8 kernel part 5: graphics

  I started out with U-Boot. As a very basic overview of the LCD controller in the PXA168, basically you just set aside some of your RAM for a framebuffer, copy image data into it, tell the controller the format and address of the framebuffer, set up the clocking and timing, and turn it on. Then it just handles everything in the background for you.

  The steps I listed above are overly simplified — there is more stuff going on with the PXA168’s display controller. But it’s enough to get a splash screen working in U-Boot. I booted into the old kernel and dumped the LCD registers using devmem. Here’s an example of this process. The LCD_SPU_DMA_CTRL0 register contains a bunch of format configuration bits for the framebuffer, such as which bits are red/green/blue. It’s at offset 0x190 in the LCD controller, and the LCD controller is located at an offset of 0xD420B000, so I could dump the 32-bit register value with this command: [...]

• 2023-06-09 [Older] Photoacoustic Revolution with SCD4x

• 2.5” Pico-ITX SBC is equipped with MediaTek Genio 1200 and supports ROS2

  A few weeks ago, Advantech released a compact single board computer built on the MediaTek Genio 1200 Octa-core processor with a 4.8 TOPs AI processing unit (APU). The SBC also supports Wi-Fi 6 and 5G connectivity for demanding IoT applications.