Open Hardware: Raspberry Pi, Kicad, and ESP32
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Accelerating AI with the Raspberry Pi Pico’s dual cores
The summary is that I was able to get approximately a 1.9x speed boost by breaking a convolution function into two halves and running one on each processor. The longer story is that I actually implemented most of this several months ago, but got stuck due to a silly mistake where I was accidentally serializing the work by calling functions in the wrong order! I was in the process of preparing a bug report for the RPi team who had kindly agreed to take a look when I realized my mistake. Another win for rubberducking!
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Raspberry Pi Supply Improves. Here's Where to Buy One Now.
Getting your hands on a Raspberry Pi is now much easier than 2022 or even than it was a few weeks ago. Raspberry Pi stock levels are improving, with some units remaining in stock for hours, rather than minutes. In a December 2022 blog post, Raspberry Pi LTD's CEO Eben Upton wrote about how he saw stock levels in 2023. This data was then refined a few months ago to provide more clarity. Now, more than half-way through the year, we can take a look at home Raspberry Pi stock levels have improved, and more importantly, tell you where you can buy a Raspberry Pi.
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Big Dan the Blogging Man
This was one of those last minute decisions which was not well thought out. I found the component I wanted on mouser which had a foot print available for Kicad. I designed the PCB without actually seeing the component. I had worked on this for so long I wanted to get the PCB ordered without waiting to see get the actual component in hand.
Its not like I’ve never seen a Micro USB socket before, but when I finally got them in the mail and looked at the size of the pins, my thought was “OH WOW how am I going to solder that???”
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Solar Powered Conways Game of Life
The device hangs on a wall a few feet from the window. Around 9am on bright summer days I will see the first new generation being born for the day. By that time the small drawdown from the ultra low power core of the esp32 will have been replenished by the solar panel and the battery voltage will have recovered to 3.3v.
Each time that happens the ULP will wake up the main core to calculate the next generation based on the previous one which is stored in RTC memory. Then it will turn on the display driver board and push the next set of pixels to be drawn before writing this new generation to memory and entering deep sleep again.