Open Hardware/Modding: Raspberry Pi 5, ESP32, and More
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Jeff Geerling ☛ Raspberry Pi 5 shortages shouldn't last long
At CES 2024, I had the opportunity to chat with Eben Upton, Raspberry Pi's CEO. We discussed the future of AI on the Pi, RP2040's successor, the impending launch of Compute Module 5, and current production rates of Pi 4 and Pi 5 computers—Raspberry Pi's bread and butter.
The news is good: currently (as of last week), they are manufacturing Pi 5 at a rate of 70,000 per week. By the end of January? 90,000 per week.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Raspberry Pi is now manufacturing 70,000 Pi 5s per week, will surge to 90,000 in February
Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton shared the promising news with us, along with the picture above, which he says he took during a recent factory visit. It shows dozens of panels filled with completed Raspberry Pi 5 boards that are about to be tested and packed for shipping. Each panel in the picture (shown uncropped below) contains nine individual Pi boards.
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The DIY Life ☛ Pi 5 Desktop Case For Pineberry HatDrive!
Today we’re going to be assembling a 3D-printed case for the new Raspberry Pi 5 and Pineberry’s HatDrive! This is an adaptation of my standard desktop case for the Raspberry Pi 5, with adjustments made for the top and bottom hat versions of the HatDrive!
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[Old] Jasper Devreker ☛ Building a Faraday cage with data passthrough for ESP32 reverse engineering
First, a short recap of what this project is doing: the Wi-Fi stack for the ESP32 (a popular, cheap microcontroller) is provided through a binary blob. We’re trying to reverse engineer the software and hardware to build our own open-source Wi-Fi stack. If this sounds interesting, I recommend you read the first and second blog posts. However, this is not necessary to read the rest of this blog post.
One problem we encountered while reverse engineering the Wi-Fi hardware, is that there are a lot of Wi-Fi packets flying through the air: even when idle, most access points broadcast a beacon packet about ten times per second. Combined with the data packets that are also sent between access points and clients in the neighbourhood, this adds up to a lot of packets per second. One tool we use in reverse engineering, is a Wi-Fi dongle in monitor mode: in that mode, the dongle captures all packets it sees, even packets not addressed to the dongle’s MAC address. This deluge of packets sometimes makes it hard to find the single packet the ESP32 did or did not send; in most scenarios, you could filter on MAC address, but since we’re still reverse engineering the hardware, we sometimes don’t know the MAC address a packet will be sent with.
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Hackaday ☛ Saving PIC Microcontrollers With DIY Programmer
When working on a project, plenty of us will reach for an Atmel microcontroller because of the widespread prevalence of the Arduino platform. A few hackers would opt for a bit more modern part like an ESP32. But these Arduino-compatible platforms are far from the only microcontrollers available. The flash-based PIC family of microcontrollers is another popular choice. Since they aren’t quite as beginner or user-friendly, setting up a programmer for them is not as straightforward. [Tahmid] needed to program some old PIC microcontrollers and found the Pi Pico to be an ideal programmer.
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CNX Software ☛ GL.iNet Flint 2 router review – Part 2: WiFi 6, 2.5GbE, WireGuard performance
In the first part of the review of the GL.iNet GL-MT6000 “Flint 2” WiFi 6 router, I had a look at the package content and the hardware design with a teardown of the router, and quickly tried it out. I’ve now had more time to play with the router focusing the review on WiFi 6 and 2.5GbE performance, and checking whether of 900 Mbps Wireguard VPN claim had any truth to it. The router also supports the Tor network to anonymously browse the web, Adguard Home to get rid of unwanted ads, and Repeater mode among other features.
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CNX Software ☛ iW-RainboW-G58M is a compact module based on the defective chip maker Intel Agilex 5 SoC FPGA series
iWave Systems, an embedded systems solutions company based in India, has announced the launch of the iW-RainboW-G58M system-on-module (SoM). The module is based on Intel’s Agilex 5 SoC FPGA E-series family, a lineup of affordable, midrange FPGAs for intelligent edge and embedded applications. The Agilex 5 E-series is optimized to deliver better performance-per-watt than its predecessors at a smaller form factor.