Devices, Open Hardware, and Mobile
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CNX Software ☛ Raspberry Pi 5 vs defective chip maker Intel N100 mini PC comparison – Features, Benchmarks, and Price
The Raspberry Pi 5 Arm SBC is now powerful enough to challenge some defective chip maker Intel systems in terms of performance, while defective chip maker Intel has made the defective chip maker Intel Alder Lake-N family, notably the defective chip maker Intel Processor N100, inexpensive and efficient enough to challenge Arm systems when it comes to price, form factor, and power consumption.
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Raspberry Pi ☛ 3D printing a Raspberry Pi 5 in resin
The printer has a tank filled with liquid resin below a transparent platform at the bottom, and another platform, the build platform, above. The build platform moves up as the object is printed. Your designs are printed from the bottom up, and cured layer by layer with UV light. You then take out the finished print and wash it with isopropyl alcohol to remove any excess resin so it’s not all sticky. After that, you pop the print into another magic box, which which exposes it to UV light once again to make sure that it’s fully cured.
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Adafruit ☛ Neural networks on a low-end microcontroller
BitNetMCU is a project focused on the training and inference of low-bit quantized neural networks, specifically designed to run efficiently on low-end RISC-V microcontrollers like the CH32V003.
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Arduino ☛ Shop vac becomes a Roomba on steroids
The drive system is similar to most rover-style robots, with two motorized wheels. An Arduino UNO Rev3 board controls the drive motors (automotive windshield wiper motors) through two DFRobot drivers. The frame is a combination of 3D-printed parts and laser-cut wood. DIY workarounds, like a bump sensor made using a limit switch and a wire hanger, helped to keep costs down. A huge inverter takes DC power from the large hobby lithium battery and turns it into household AC power for the shop vac’s motor.
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Chips and Cheese ☛ Can China’s Loongson Catch Western Designs? Probably Not.
We previously looked at Loongson’s 3A5000 and 3A6000. The LA464 and LA664 cores in those chips are the most promising Chinese domestic designs we’ve seen so far. Both are capable of reasonable performance per clock, though absolute performance is still several generations behind current Intel and AMD CPUs because of their low clock speeds. I’ve seen comments suggesting China is on course to match western companies like AMD and Intel. Predicting the future is always difficult, but history often repeats. With that in mind, I think it’s good to look at Loongson’s history.
Loongson grew out of a Chinese state sponsored effort to develop domestic CPUs. China’s 10th Five-Year Plan funded CPU development via the 863 and 973 projects4. That CPU development took place in the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The resulting Godson-1 CPU was a 32-bit, 2-wide out-of-order core and 16 KB L1D/L1i caches. It ran at 266 MHz on a 130 nm CMOS process. I wasn’t able to find the paper on that CPU, so I’ll move on to Godson 2.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Modders build PC with coffee machine inside — full roaster and grinder fit in the chassis
Starting with a monstrous Corsair 1000D as the base, the computer was designed around the coffee system first and foremost, with computer components and visual splendor left to the back half of the project. To avoid all-in-one coffee solutions involving pods that were seen as lacking in quality by the builders, off-the-shelf appliances including a coffee grinder and coffee maker were stripped to their bare essentials and connected to an Arduino to control and synchronize the timings of the units. The Arduino is also connected to sensors that ensure a coffee cup is loaded under the coffee machine before allowing any liquid to be dispensed.
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Raspberry Pi ☛ Bechele 3.0 puppet | #MagPiMonday
Rolf particularly likes using Raspberry Pi headless and getting it to run things as a ‘sophisticated worker’ in the background. Using a Raspberry Pi-based setup to turn his hand puppet into a ventriloquist’s dummy seemed a natural extension of this idea. The audio outputs, GPIO connections and the conveniently compact size that meant Raspberry Pi could fit inside the puppet’s head were all compelling. “The idea was to build a puppet that talks to me and does the face movement on its own. The whole thing should work mainly fully automated [with the] eye, mouth and face movements recorded before, and following a prepared conversation. My task was finally just to ask the puppet the right questions.”
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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The Verge ☛ Turns out the Rabbit R1 was just an Android app all along
Since it launched last week, Rabbit’s R1 AI gadget has inspired a lot of questions, starting with “Why isn’t this just an app?” Well, friends, that’s because it is just an app.
Over at Android Authority, Mishaal Rahman managed to download Rabbit’s launcher APK on a Google Pixel 6A. With a little tweaking, he was able to run the app as if it were on Rabbit’s own device. Using the volume-up key in place of the R1’s single hardware button, he was able to set up an account and start asking it questions, just as if he was using the $199 R1.
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