Open Hardware: Projects and Linux Devices
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Building Alex Taradov’s open-source USB sniffer
A couple of months ago I stumbled upon a post on Hackaday about an inexpensive open-source USB 2.0 sniffer created by Alex Taradov. This is a really cool project! Normally, USB sniffers like this can cost thousands of dollars, especially if you’re paying for fancy protocol decoding and also want high-speed 480 Mbps support. This one costs about $50 in parts to assemble yourself, although it will take hours to solder and you will need some experience with hot air (or reflow oven) soldering since the USB PHY is a QFN chip with an exposed pad underneath.
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Ohms being expressed with R instead of Ω
It was only in the clear light of morning that I realised what I needed was staring me right in the face. 75R is equivilent to 75 Ω!
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Raspberry Pis Found in Abandoned Spin Scooters in Seattle
As of writing, it’s not clear what the Raspberry Pi 4 Bs were actually used for inside the scooter. At first glance, it seems like an overpowered option for something like an electric scooter but without exact confirmation of its purpose, we can only speculate. No doubt it requires much more power than something smaller like a Raspberry Pi Zero.
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Raspberry Pi Zero W Turns Old CRT TV into Smart TV
When it comes to revitalizing old hardware, no SBC is quite as versatile as the Raspberry Pi. You can cram a Pi into anything from an old typewriter to a Commodore 64 with some exciting results depending on how far you want to take it. Today, we’re sharing another cool project that revitalizes old hardware with new tech created by Saugat Gamuwa with Maker Sci over at YouTube. In his latest video, Gamuwa shows us how he managed to transform an old CRT TV into a smart TV.
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Tools of the Trade: How a Device Called the Rejuvenator Is Keeping the Technology of Yesterday Alive Today
As I gained experience with repairing arcade games, I acquired some useful tools, including an obscure device known as a cathode ray tube (CRT) rejuvenator. As the name suggests, this device rejuvenates old CRTs, thereby extending an old television set’s life. Much like a defibrillator, a rejuvenator generates an electric shock to a TV’s heart. As I will explain, using this device requires more than simply reading the manual because what’s not in the manual is often just as important as its contents, and what you don’t know can do much more harm than good.
The goal of this article is to briefly describe the history of those old CRT television sets, and how one of the tools created to service them still serves a useful purpose in the restoration and operation of CRT-based arcade machines. I hope to convey how much the maintenance and restoration of old TV hardware depends upon the skill of the operator as much as the tools themselves. A rejuvenator is not as useful or as commonplace as a multimeter, but for a certain subset of games, it’s just as valuable and useful. I will then conclude by reflecting on the status of arcade conservation and how the rejuvenator can continue to keep game history alive today.
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An Open Firmware For LILYGO’s E-ink Smart Watch
The world’s first quartz wristwatches were miles ahead of electric and mechanical wristwatches by most standards of the time, their accuracy was unprecedented and the batteries typically lasted somewhere on the order of a year. Modern smart watches, at least in terms of battery life, have taken a step backwards — depending on use, some can require daily charging.
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Blinkenlights To Bootloader: A Guide To STM32 Development
While things like the Arduino platform certainly opened up the gates of microcontroller programming to a much wider audience, it can also be limiting in some ways. The Arduino IDE, for example, abstracts away plenty of the underlying machinations of the hardware, and the vast amount of libraries can contribute to this effect as well. It’s not a problem if you just need a project to get up and running, in fact, that’s one of its greatest strengths. But for understanding the underlying hardware we’d recommend taking a look at something like this video series on the STM32 platform.
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Star Wars Pit Droid Has A Jetson Brain
In the Star Wars universe, pit droids are little foldable robots that perform automated repairs on spacecraft and the like. They were introduced in 1999’s The Phantom Menace, and beyond the podracing scenes, are probably the only good thing to come out of that particular film.