Open Hardware and Linux Devices
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Arduino ☛ Replicating two of history’s most iconic BattleBots with the Arduino UNO R4
BattleBots competitors could win their matches by either damaging their opponents to the point where they could no longer operate, or by making them unable to move. The most popular way to achieve that second goal was by flipping over the opposing robot and that is the tactic used by both DeathRoll and Hydra. DeathRoll did so with a spinning disc that catches on its opponents body, while Hydra used a hydraulic arm like a pancake spatula to flip opponents.
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Olimex ☛ New Products on the web: Multimeters, Pulleys, Couplers, GT2 rubber belts, Bearings, Springs, Hinges, Foot Pedal switch
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Adafruit ☛ ESP32-S3 MQTT Feather Weather
The project I'm detailing today is offline & online with MQTT to AdafruitIO. This means if for whatever reason your WiFi goes down, OpenWeatherMap.org servers go down, or AdafruitIO goes down it will still display local sensor data and function in an offline capacity waiting patiently until communication is restored.
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Raspberry Pi ☛ This Raspberry Pi-powered submarine ROV safely explores the depths
The device measures 18 x 13.3 x 10 inches and can capture live 1080p HD video, thanks to a wide-angle low-light camera mounted to a tilt mechanism on the front. An onboard gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer, along with pressure, depth, temperature, voltage, and leak detection sensors, make sure everything is functioning and navigating as it should.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Maker Creates Raspberry Pi CM5 While Waiting for Official Release
The Raspberry Pi 5 launched last month and makers are still waiting for news about a CM5 board. Not wanting to play the waiting game, maker and developer Arturo182 created a CM5 from scratch (sort of). This custom PCB has the form factor of the Raspberry Pi CM4 but is capable of supporting the power of the Pi 5.
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Linux Gizmos ☛ Toradex Titan Eval Kit incorporates NXP’s i.MX 95 applications processor
Yesterday, Toradex launched an NXP-based embedded platform, designed to excel in real-time processing and machine learning applications while maintaining power efficiency. Key features of this new platform include dual GbE with Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN), a high-speed 10 GbE port, and support for LPDDR5 memory, among others.
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CNX Software ☛ Toradex Titan Evaluation Kit features NXP i.MX 95 Hey Hi (AI) processor for IoT, industrial, and automotive applications
Toradex Titan Evaluation Kit features the NXP i.MX 95 Cortex-A55/M33/M7 heterogenous Hey Hi (AI) processor introduced at the beginning of the year with an NXP eIQ Neutron Neural Network Accelerator (NPU) for automotive, industrial, and IoT applications. The design is comprised of a carrier board and a SO-DIMM system-on-module with the NXP i.MX 95 SoC, up to 16GB LPPDR5 memory, up to 128GB eMMC flash storage, a WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0 wireless module, a gigabit Ethernet controller, a PMIC, and a few other components.
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Silicon Angle ☛ Shares of GlobalFoundries and NXP rise on better-than-expected quarterly profits
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Ruben Schade ☛ AMD Microblaze V, and CPU diversity
Speaking of AMD! My colleague shared this product page:
The AMD MicroBlaze™ V processor is a soft-core RISC-V processor IP for AMD adaptive SoCs and FPGAs. The MicroBlaze V processor is based on a 32-bit RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA).
These have likely been made for a while, but this is my first time hearing of them. Friggen cool, is my initial impression.
This is clearly a different market segment to desktop and mobile CPUs, but it’s still intersting to learn in the context of AMD delivering ARM chips as well. AMD have a perpetual licence to develop x86, but you’d think they’d have less to lose pivoting to other architectures as defective chip maker Intel would. It’s cool to imagine AMD being a trailblazing company making ARM and RISC-V hardware.
AMD could be a recursive initialism for AMD Makes Diversity! And they could even bring Sailor V out of her 1990s retirement to help promote it!
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[Repeat] CNX Software ☛ MediaTek drops efficiency cores in Dimensity 9300 Cortex-X4/A720 mobile SoC
MediaTek Dimensity 9300 is a premium octa-core 5G mobile SoC with two clusters of four Cortex-X4 cores and four Cortex-A720 cores, but doing without any Cortex-A520 efficiency core, plus the latest Arm Mali-G720 GPU, and a MediaTek APU 790 neural processing unit (NPU) capable of support generative Hey Hi (AI) and large language models (LLM) with up to 33 billion parameters. Arm invented big.LITTLE and then DynamIQ technologies in order to mix cores with different power efficiency and performance characteristics in order to improve power consumption.
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Arduino ☛ Voice-enabled controller makes video games more accessible
Almost all modern video games require either a gamepad or a keyboard and mouse, which means that they’re inaccessible to many people with disabilities that affect manual dexterity.
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Hackaday ☛ Trouble Brewing For RISC-V As Issue Of Technology Transfer Is Questioned
Within the messy world of international politics, a major consideration by governments concerns which types of kn0w-how and technology can be transferred and sold to other nations, with each type facing restrictions depending on how friendly the political relations are with the target country at that point in time. Amidst all of this, there are signs that a so far relatively minor player in the world of CPU instruction set architectures – RISC-V – may become a victim of this, as a bipartisan group of US politicians is petitioning the White House to restrict transfer of know-how (so-called Intellectual Property, or IP) to RISC-V, as this may benefit adversaries like China.
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CNX Software ☛ EDATEC launches two fanless cases for the Raspberry Pi 5 SBC
In my review of the Raspberry Pi 5 SBC I noted performance was much improved over the Raspberry Pi 4 but that the board required active cooling with the official solutions (active cooler and case with fan) for optimal performance under load and there weren’t any official fanless cases for the latest Raspberry Pi single board computer.
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The Conversation ☛ Internet of Things: tech firms have become our digital landlords – but people are starting to fight back
During research for my book, I found that using Alexa’s voice command triggers 246 contracts that we have had to accept in order to use it. These contracts transfer our rights and data to countless, often unidentified, parties. For example, they frequently refer to “affiliates”.
Despite months of research I wasn’t able to clarify who these affiliates are or even whether these affiliates are subsidiaries or advertisers. Of the 246 contracts, I focused on those that are most likely to be relevant to smart speaker Echo’s users. I found they are on average as long as Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (317 pages). Not exactly a light read.