Open Hardware and Devices With Linux

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 08, 2023

• Small-footprint keyword spotting for low-resource languages with the Nicla Voice

  Beyond simply building a model to recognize keywords from audio samples, Nurgaliyev and Kuzdeuov’s primary goal was to also deploy it onto an embedded target, such as a single-board computer or microcontroller. Ultimately, they went with the Arduino Nicla Voice development board since it contains not just an nRF52832 SoC, a microphone, and an IMU, but an NDP120 from Syntiant as well. This specialized Neural Decision Processor helps to greatly speed up inferencing times thanks to dedicated hardware accelerators while simultaneously reducing power consumption.

• A strange Commodore 16 reset line

  I’ve mentioned a few times that my Commodore 16 has some strange boot behaviour, though its gradually getting worse. The machine won’t power on immediately, but doing a power cycle after a couple of minutes (usually) brings it to life. The hardware reset switch also does nothing.

• Stupidly Small eInk Font

  I have the new Watchy eInk watch. It has a cute little screen with a resolution of 200x200 pixels. How much text can we cram in there?

• Raspberry Pi Pico Intelligently Warms Your Butt

  Sure you could buy a heater and turn it on when you get cold but for many makers, it’s much more fun to create a system that does something for you. In Alan’s case, he complained that his butt was seemingly always cold. The obvious solution was to use the power of artificial intelligence to automate a system that will set his butt to a comfortable temperature.

• Raspberry Pi 4 based Pocket Computer

  A fully functional pocket computer with touchscreen, keyboard and trackpoint.

• Glyptodont performed on the... Qwertar?

  One thing I learned from the Commodordion project was that although the instrument was unwieldy on the whole, playing the right-hand-side keyboard—the one that remains stationary in front of the body—felt quite good. So with that in mind, I decided to build an instrument resembling a guitar. I went through a couple of iterations before settling on the final design. The first idea (which came to me in a dream, actually) was to have a little cart sliding on linear bearings along metal axles, and a rotary encoder to pick up the motion. The cart would have pushbuttons and a microcontroller on it, and the signals from the buttons and the encoder would be transmitted to the C64 electronically over the axles.

• Refurb weekend(s): Commodore/MOS KIM-1

  Actually, it was more like a whole stinking Refurb Two Months. The KIM-1 is the first MOS 6502 computer, a single-board system with 1K of RAM (actually 1152 bytes total) and a one-megahertz CPU developed by Chuck Peddle in 1975 as a way to introduce engineers to the new 8-bit microprocessor. However, its low cost meant it ended up taking on a life of its own as it was one of the cheapest ways to assemble an entire working hobbyist system, and Commodore continued to sell them for several years after they bought MOS. You could hand-key in programs with the hexadecimal keypad and the six LEDs as a display or wire up a TTY. It also supported saving and loading from cassette and paper tape, all built-in to the standard ROMs.

• Disco button makes any room funner

  Professor John Gallaugher openly welcomes those who “get down with GitHub”, and that’s behaviour we reward around here, so we’re sharing his two-part YouTube lesson showing you how to create a disco button which instantly transforms any room into a party.

• Rockchip dev kit comes with 2x GbE and Wi-Fi/BT 5.0 support

  The Youyeetoo YY3568 is a development board based on the Rockchip RK3568 quad-core 64-bit processor. This embedded product offers a range of versatile features, including a SATA 3.0 interface, a CSI connector, and support for multiple displays.

  At the heart of the youyeetoo YY3568 System-on-Module is the Rockchip RK3568 System-on-Chip with 22nm lithography process and ARM v8.2 architecture.

• AMD Versal Premium VP1902 SoC FPGA provides 18.5M logic cells for SoC emulation and prototyping

  AMD Versal Premium VP1902 adaptive system-on-chip (SoC) is said to be the world’s largest adaptive SoC with the FPGA providing 18.5 million logic cells in order to streamline the verification of complex ASIC and SoC designs.

• There’s Always Room For Another Cycle Accurate PC Emulator

  While many Hackaday readers will have their own pieces of classic hardware lovingly preserved, it still remains that most of us get our fix of retro goodness through emulation. And while there are emulators aplenty for almost every platform imaginable, the world of emulation is never complete. Thus we’re happy to encounter a new player in the form of MartyPC, a cycle-accurate 8088 PC emulator written in Rust.