Open Hardware and Mobile Systems
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Ken Shirriff ☛ Reverse engineering the Intel 386 processor's register cell
The groundbreaking Intel 386 processor (1985) was the first 32-bit processor in the x86 line. It has numerous internal registers: general-purpose registers, index registers, segment selectors, and more specialized registers. In this blog post, I look at the silicon die of the 386 and explain how some of these registers are implemented at the transistor level. The registers that I examined are implemented as static RAM, with each bit stored in a common 8-transistor circuit, known as "8T". Studying this circuit shows the interesting layout techniques that Intel used to squeeze two storage cells together to minimize the space they require.
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Raspberry Pi ☛ PiArtFrame displays fractal art
The maker kept the assembly pretty simple, cutting a small hole in the picture frame’s back mount panel to slip the display HAT’s ribbon cable through, with the Raspberry Pi left free-floating behind it. The E-Ink display itself fits snugly inside the frame, with a card mount providing a little breathing space between the display and the glass.
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Arduino ☛ Improve recycling with the Arduino Pro Portenta C33 and AI audio classification
In July 2023, Samuel Alexander set out to reduce the amount of trash that gets thrown out due to poor sorting practices at the recycling bin. His original design relied on an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense to capture audio through its onboard microphone and then perform edge audio classification with an embedded ML model to automatically separate materials based on the sound they make when tossed inside. But in this latest iteration, Alexander added several large improvements to help the concept scale much further.
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Olimex ☛ The platic boxes BOX-ESP32-POE and BOX-ESP32-POE-ISO now have possibility to be fixed to flat surface
BOX-ESP32-POE and BOX-ESP32-POE-ISO now have version which allow to fix them with 3 mm screws to flat surface, very useful to wall mounting.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Nico Cartron ☛ WireGuard on iOS vs. Sailfish OS
Relatively easy setup - the only thing I'm missing compared with Sailfish OS is the ability to launch the VPN straight from iOS' Control Center - I didn't find a way to add the VPN icon to that section...
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Martijn Braam ☛ Megapixels 2.0
The Megapixels camera application has long been the most performant camera application on the original PinePhone. I have not gotten the Megapixels application to that point alone. There have been several other contributors that have helped slowly improving performance and features of this application. Especially Benjamin has leaped it forward massively with the threaded processing code and GPU accelerated preview.
All this code has made Megapixels very fast on the PinePhone but also has made it quite a lot harder to port the application to other hardware. The code is very much overfitted for the PinePhone hardware.
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