Hardware/Modding Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 25, 2023

• The Colorful Charm of Amiga Utility Disks

  Excellent dive into Amiga boot/utility disks, how they crammed so much onto one floppy, and the cool menus designed for them.

• Arduino speaks without any special hardware

  In this case, the Arduino can speak any number, from zero to nine, out loud through the speaker. This is possible because those are very short words (most only a single syllable) that are recognizable when the quality is very low. This audio quality wouldn’t be suitable for music or even general language, but it is enough for a sequence of numbers. By reducing the audio quality as much as possible and making the clips short, Harden was able to create audio files small enough to fit in the 32KB flash memory of the UNO‘s ATmega328 microcontroller with room to spare for the sketch.

• Getting to grips with Bluetooth on Pico W

  You can simply continue sending data using the GAP, however, it only allows one-way communication, and each payload can only contain 31 bytes of data. You can send data both ways, gain more security, and generally get more features by connecting with a Generic Attribute Profile (GATT). The GATT defines the services and characteristics. In BLE terminology, a characteristic is a piece of data, and a service is a collection of characteristics. To use services, a device has to have a GATT that defines which services and characteristics they offer. These GATTs are predefined – here’s a list of them.

  If you want to create a Bluetooth peripheral, the first thing you need to do is decide what GATT you want to use.

• Adding Wi-Fi to the Macintosh Portable

  Over the past year or so, I've been working with other BlueSCSI developers to add Wi-Fi functionality to their open-hardware SCSI device, enabling Wi-Fi support for old Macs and other vintage computers going back some 36 years.

  This article was originally supposed to be titled "Adding Wi-Fi to a PowerBook 100" since that laptop is much more reasonable to lug around, but its logic board died while working on this and I'm in the process of bringing it back to life.

• Hackaday Prize 2023: Ubo Project: Building For Builders

  The Ubo Pod by [Mehrdad Majzoobi] is a very highly polished extension pack and enclosure for the Raspberry Pi 4, which shows you how far you can go to turn a bare PCB into something that rivals the hardware offerings from Google and others. Gadgets like the Sonos speakers and Amazon or Google’s covert listening devices (aka Echo, Alexa, or whatever they’re branded as) are fun to play with. Still, the difficulty of hacking custom applications into them and god-forbid adding one’s own extension hardware, makes them fairly closed ecosystems. Add in the concerns of privacy and data security; they look less and less attractive the closer you look. Luckily the Raspberry Pi and its friends have improved the accessibility to the point where it’s positively easy to create whatever you want with whatever hardware you need, and to that end we think [Mehrdad] has done a splendid job.

• Youyeetoo YY3568 devkit review – Part 1: Unboxing, specifications, and Android 11 testing

  Youyeetoo has sent us a review sample of their YY3568 “Bundle 5” devkit with the Rockchip RK3568-powered YY3568 SBC, an 11.6-inch touchscreen display, a MIPI camera module, and all accessories required to get started. We were especially interested in using it to play with the 1 TOPS NPU in the Rockchip RK3568 in Linux, but we’ll start the Youyeetoo YY3568 review with an unboxing, some specifications, and a quick review with Android 11 before switching to Debian 10 in the second part of the review.

• Seguro 150 Bluetooth and NFC temperature logger works without mobile app (for the receiver)

  Sensified.io Seguro 150 is a 4mm thick waterproof temperature logger designed for cold chain shipping applications in the food and healthcare industries and can also be used in retail settings. Most IoT devices require you to install some type of proprietary app, but the Seguro 150 is said not to require any app for the receiver and the temperature logger instead relies on Bluetooth LE and NFC so he/she can tap his/her phone to access the data and it’s also possible to receive PDF or Excel reports by email.

• SimplyNUC reveals Onyx MiniPC with Raptor Lake H processors

  SimplyNUC released details for their upcoming Onyx 4×4 NUC powered by the latest Intel 13th Gen Raptor Lake H series processors. The company indicates that these devices can operate 24/7 in office workstations or in high-demanding applications including robotics, IoT networks among others.

• Khadas Introduces a New Modular Workstation with GeForce RTX 4060Ti Support