Open Hardware/Modding: Raspberry Pi, Old Netbook, Arduino, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 06, 2024

• Hackaday ☛ The Pi Pico, An SDR Receiver Front End

  Making a software defined radio (SDR) receiver is a relatively straightforward process, given the right radio front end electronics and analogue-to-digital converters. Two separate data streams are generated using clocks at a 90 degree phase shift, and these are passed to the software signal processing for demodulation. But what happens if you lack a pair of radio front ends and a suitable clock generator? Along comes [Mordae] with an SDR using only the hardware on a Raspberry Pi Pico. The result is a fascinating piece of lateral thinking, extracting something from the hardware that it was never designed to do.

• Arduino ☛ Track the location history of your devices in Arduino Cloud IoT dashboards

  Asset tracking has become increasingly crucial across various industries and applications. Whether you’re a logistics company monitoring your fleet, a conservation organization tracking wildlife, or an individual passionate about outdoor adventures, the ability to track and visualize the movement of assets in real-time can be invaluable.

  Today, we are excited to announce the release of the new Advanced Map widget in the Arduino Cloud, a powerful tool that allows you to track the movement and location of your IoT devices over time.

• Instructables ☛ Light Geometry: Building a Voronoi LED Uplight Decorative Lamp : 3 Steps (with Pictures) - Instructables

  For me, Voronoi diagrams aren't just visually appealing; they offer a natural way to divide a space into organic-looking cells. This makes them perfect for a lighting project where I want a blend of structure and randomness. Each cell will house its own LED, allowing for endless possibilities in light shows and animations.

• [Old] Jahed ☛ Running Linux on an ancient Netbook.

  So what's the solution? Linux of course! While a lot of popular distributions are dropping 32-bit CPUs, for good reason, a few still support it. And when it comes to limited RAM there's still plenty of options. I've tried antiX, MX Linux, Lubuntu, and some others.

  In the end, I went with antiX. While it doesn't have as many features as MX Linux, it still supports most Debian packages and uses less than 300MB of RAM while being fast and responsive.

• Jeff Geerling ☛ 55 TOPS Raspberry Pi AI PC - 4 TPUs, 2 NPUs

  I'm in full-on procrastination mode with Open Sauce coming up in 10 days and a project I haven't started on for it, so I decided to try building the stable AI PC with all the AI accelerator chips I own: [...]

• Raspberry Pi ☛ Make an LED glowing prom dress using RP2040

  Angelina Tsuboi created an LED glowing prom dress using our RP2040 with the help of her friend Ayesha’s gorgeous PCB designs. This dress took just four hours to make. So if you’re rushed for time and don’t know what to wear for prom, why not copy this maker’s idea?

• Ubuntu ☛ A look into Ubuntu Core 24: Robotics telemetry for your fleet

  In this fourth blog, Mirko Ferrati, engineering manager from our Robotics team, will show you how to deploy an observability and telemetry server with the corresponding clients in a robot. This observability system fine-tuned for robotics allows startups to quick-start remote supervision of their robot fleet, while mature companies will find the model easy to extend and adaptable to their needs. When combined with Ubuntu Core, this system offers roboticists an end-to-end infrastructure for managing a secure, modular deployment of their observability stack.

• [Repeat] Andrew Hutchings ☛ Amiga 1000 Repair

  I was at the Norwich Games Festival last week, along with six of Amigas and a BBC Master 128 with Valiant Turtle. Whilst I was there, OMTG Retro handed me his Amiga 1000 and asked if I could fix it for him, it wouldn’t boot. So, I had a look into it.