Open Hardware: Arduino, Raspberry Pi, KiCad, and More
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UNO R4 Stars: Meet Gustavo Silveira
The launch of the Arduino UNO R4 marks a huge leap forward for our community. For us, it’s also the chance to celebrate the people who bring our ecosystem to life with their bright ideas, radiant enthusiasm, and shining insight.
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Raspberry Pi Shoos Away Birds Without Hurting Them
DevMiser is using a Raspberry Pi to keep birds away without hurting them by waving a dowel rod back and forth when they’re detected.
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Small PoV display uses CD drive motor for high-speed rotation
An Arduino Nano board controls the LEDs, while an ESP8266 ESP-01 module tells it what image to show based on time and weather data pulled from the internet via Wi-Fi®. Those mount onto a custom circular PCB spun by a small CD drive motor. Because that PCB spins, it would have been difficult to run wires for power. So this takes advantage of wireless power transfer through coils on that primary PCB and a secondary PCB underneath that exists purely for that purpose.
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Raspberry Pi Camera Module: More on video capture
We met libcamera-vid at the end of last month’s Camera Module tutorial, and found out how to record a short video clip. Like libcamera-still, libcamera-vid has many more options for controlling the resolution, frame rate, and other aspects of the video that we capture, and we’ll discover some of those in this tutorial.
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Stay Safe from BMC Tampering
Through June and July, AMI MegaRAC BMC firmware has been in the news owing to high-severity vulnerabilities that have existed for years but only recently come to light. Server hardware widely contains BMCs, and compromising one can give near-total control over the server. Many vendors shipped this firmware with their own branding.
But what exactly is a BMC, and what can we do to stay secure?
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Nail, Meet KiCad
You know the old saying. When all you have open is KiCad, everything looks like a PCB. That was certainly true for [Evan], who needed to replace a 2.5D small part recently and turned to PCBs to get the job done.
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Retro Gadgets: The Real Desktop Computer
People argue about the first use of the computer desktop metaphor. Apple claims it. Xerox probably started it. Yet, when I think of computer desktops, I think of the NOVAL 760. Not a household name, to be sure, but a big ad spread in a June 1977 Byte magazine was proud to introduce it. At $2995, we doubt many were sold, but the selling point was… well… it was built into a “handsome wood desk, designed to compliment any decor.” The desk folded down when you were not using the computer, and the keyboard recessed into a drawer.