Open Hardware: Raspberry Pi, Arduino, ESP32, RISC-V, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 06, 2023

• Tom's Hardware ☛ Raspberry Pi Pico W captains toy boat via Wi-Fi, with Wukong2040

  This Raspberry Pi Pico W project is seaborne, thanks to maker Ramin Sangesari, who created this Wukong2040-powered toy boat.

• Arduino ☛ Creating a Microsoft Chaffbot client with the Arduino GIGA R1 WiFi and GIGA Display Shield [Ed: Promoting Microsoft hype, vapourware]

• CNX Software ☛ Orange Pi AIPro SBC features a 20 TOPS Huawei Ascend Hey Hi (AI) SoC

  Orange Pi AIPro is a new single board computer for Hey Hi (AI) applications that features a new (and unnamed) Huawei Ascend Hey Hi (AI) quad-core 64-bit processor delivering up to 20 TOPS (INT8) or 8 TOPS (FP16) of Hey Hi (AI) inference performance. The SBC comes with up to 16GB LPDDR4X and a 512Mbit SPI flash but also supports other storage options such as a microSD card, an eMMC flash module, and/or an M.2 NVMe or SATA SSD.

• CNX Software ☛ LILYGO Mini E-Paper Core IoT controller gets ESP32-S3 wireless microcontroller

  LILYGO Mini E-Paper Core has gotten an upgrade to the ESP32-S3 wireless microcontroller. The IoT controller was first introduced in 2021 with an ESP32-PICO-D4 system-in-package, a 1.02-inch E-Paper display, and a few GPIOs on the back, and the company kept the same design for the ESP32-S3 model called “Mini E-Paper Core S3”.

• Canonical joins the RISC-V Software Ecosystem (RISE)

  Canonical is delighted to announce it is now a member of the RISC-V Software Ecosystem (RISE) to contribute to commercial readiness of open source software for RISC-V. Canonical’s commitment to RISE aligns with its broader mission to empower developers and businesses with open source solutions that enable them to build, deploy, and scale applications efficiently.

• InfoQ ☛ Canonical Takes a Chisel to Ubuntu with Ultra-Small Container Images [Ed: Canonical pushing .NET for Microsoft]

  Chiselled Ubuntu containers solve a similar need for cut-down container base images as Google's Distroless and Chainguard's images, bringing the same benefits such as minimising dependency challenges, reducing bloat and resource usage, speeding up startup, and enhancing security through reducing the number of unneeded files in the image. Chisel itself uses Slice Definition Files, which relate to the upstream packages in the Ubuntu archives, defining subsets of those package contents needed at runtime. This provides fine-grained dependency management through a developer-friendly CLI, enabling more efficient containerization with enhanced security by reducing the container image attack surface and entirely eliminating some potential attack vectors.