GNU/Linux Devices, Open Hardware, and Arduino

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 05, 2023

• RIP, Don Lancaster

  Heard earlier this week that Don Lancaster, best known to us retrocomputing denizens as the man who developed the TV Typewriter, died at the age of 83 on June 7. That's my copy of one of his classic books (after the TV Typewriter Cookbook) for building a TVT 6 5/8 on anything with a 6800 bus like the 6502 and, yes, the 6800. This was a CPU-driven display that uses lines on the address bus to control the image: you lost 36K out of your addressing range as any address stored to or read there would be passed to the display interface, but gained an entire viewing screen in exchange. Even a barebones 1K KIM-1 could display a 32x16 text screen at $0200 to $03ff and it could be built out of just a handful of chips: [...]

• The Foenix F256k retrocomputer

  This looks like an awesome machine, but not only for its design and technical capabilities, but what it represents. This is my attempt to explain why, followed by a review of Jan Beta’s… review!

• Set sail in the Pico-powered ‘Roboat’

  Disclaimer: the Roboat is tiny, so only mice will be able to physically set sail. You could enjoy it vicariously by watching the sailing mouse, but Roboat can most definitely not hold your weight.

• Amazon Echo becomes charming animatronic robot

  There is no shame in taking advantage of a voice assistant device, like an Amazon Echo with Alexa. Those devices are useful and can add real convenience to your life.

• You have 3 ways to meet Massimo Banzi in the UK!

  Massimo Banzi and the Arduino Pro team will be crossing the Channel soon for a short tour of Southern England, touching base with long-time partners and meeting many new Arduino fans!

• Arduino Offers Up Two New Uno Boards

  Arduino's latest boards retain the same Uno form factor but upgrade the CPU and provide Wi-Fi and Bluetooth access via an ESP32-S3 co-processor

• Predicting soccer matches with ML on the UNO R4 Minima

  Based on the Renesas RA4M1 microcontroller, the new Arduino UNO R4 boasts 16x the RAM, 8x the flash, and a much faster CPU compared to the previous UNO R3.

• Nitrogen8M Plus boast NXP processor w/ 2.3 TOPS NPU

  The Nitrogen8M Plus SMARC from Laird Connectivity is a high-performance embedded computing module featuring a Quad-core Arm-A53 along with a 2.3 TOPS NPU for machine learning inference and onboard Image Signal Processor (ISP).

  The product page indicates that the Nitrogen8M Plus features the NXP i.MX 8M Plus with the following architecture: [...]