GNU/Linux Devices and Open Hardware
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Hackaday ☛ This Open Source Active Probe Won’t Break The Bank
If you’re like us, the oscilloscope on your bench is nothing special. The lower end of the market is filled with cheap but capable scopes that get the job done, as long as the job doesn’t get too far up the spectrum. That’s where fancier scopes with active probes might be required, and such things are budget-busters for mere mortals.
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Remy Van Elst ☛ Using a 1965 Dutch Rotary Phone via VoIP (T65) in 2024
Recently I was gifted a T65 rotary telephone. This was **the** standard telephone in The Netherlands in the seventies and eighties. I remember my parents having one as well. Because this phone does not use DTMF but pulse dialing it does not work with modern equipment, like the built in telephony / voip server on my FritzBox router. Using a hardware converter it is possible to convert pulse tone dialing to DTMF and to use your rotary phone again. This page covers two such devices, the DialGizmo and the GrandStream HT502 and a more homebrew approach.
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Bootlin ☛ Back from the Embededded Linux Conference: selection of talks #3
After a first and a second episode, our series of blog posts with our selection of talks we liked at the latest Embedded Linux Conference continues. Read on to discover the last 3 talks that we enjoyed and decided to summarize and highlight for you.
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Hackaday ☛ A LEGO CNC Pixel Art Generator
If you are ever lucky enough to make the trip to Bilund in Denmark, home of LEGO, you can have your portrait taken and rendered in the plastic bricks as pixel art. Having seen that on our travels we were especially interested to watch [Creative Mindstorms]’ video doing something very similar using an entirely LEGO-built machine but taking the images from an AI image generator.
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[Repeat] Linux Gizmos ☛ Luckfox Pico Ultra RV1106 is a Linux Micro Development Board with PoE Support
Embedded in the Luckfox Pico Ultra is Rockchip’s fourth-generation Neural Processing Unit, which supports int4, int8, and int16 hybrid quantization, as noted on the product page. This NPU delivers a computational power of 0.5 TOPS when using int8, and can reach up to 1.0 TOPS with int4.
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Linux Gizmos ☛ IBASE Launches IB200: 2.5″ Compact SBC with AMD Ryzen for Edge Computing
IBASE Technology Inc has announced the release of its first ultra-compact 2.5″ single board computer, the IB200, specifically engineered for edge computing environments. The IB200 leverages the AMD Ryzen Embedded R2000 Series, providing enhanced graphics processing capabilities, ideal for applications requiring high computational power in a small form factor.
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Hackaday ☛ How Good (Or Bad) Are Fake Power Semiconductors?
We all know that there’s a significant risk of receiving fake hardware when buying parts from less reputable sources. These counterfeit parts are usually a much cheaper component relabeled as a more expensive one, with a consequent reduction in performance. It goes without saying that the fake is lower quality then, but by just how much? [Denki Otaku] has a video comparing two power FETs, a real and a fake one, and it makes for an interesting watch.
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Hackaday ☛ 2024 Business Card Challenge: BAUDI/O For The Audio Hacker
[Simon B] enters our 2024 Business Card Challenge with BAUDI/O, a genuinely useful audio output device. The device is based around the PCM2706 DAC, which handles all the USB interfacing and audio stack for you, needing only a reference crystal and the usual sprinkling of passives. This isn’t just a DAC board, though; it’s more of an audio experimentation tool with two microcontrollers to play with.
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Stephen Smith ☛ Continuing the MiSTer Journey
Last time, we started our MiSTer journey and could run the various cores that didn’t require the add-on memory expansion module. I finally received the memory expansion board, so now theoretically I can run any of the MiSTer computers, consoles and arcade games. For game consoles, this seems to be the case as all you need is the software images from the original game cartridges, for computers it’s a bit more complicated.
MiSTer uses the FPGA to replicate the original computer hardware. This leaves out the software side of things. Typically, you then need the boot ROMs and operating system. Once you can boot the operating system, then you can run various programs such as games.
Further, many of these older systems are rather quirky and you have to spend a bit of time learning the system. First a quick recap of components I purchased and components I already had lying around.
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Wired ☛ The Mirai Confessions: Three Young Hackers Who Built a Web-Killing Monster Finally Tell Their Story
It was in early September 2016, while monitoring those botnet honeypots, that Nixon and some colleagues spotted an intriguing new sample of code that was infecting routers and internet-of-things gadgets: the one the world would come to know as Mirai.
This new code seemed capable of detecting when it was running on a honeypot instead of a real device and would immediately terminate itself when it did. So Nixon and her coworker ordered a cheap DVR machine off of eBay, connected it to the [Internet], and watched the device—they nicknamed it the “sad DVR” due to its life of victimization—get infected over and over again by Mirai and its competitors.
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Paul Tagliamonte: Reverse Engineering a Restaurant Pager system 🍽️
It’s been a while since I played with something new – been stuck in a bit of a rut with radios recently - working on refining and debugging stuff I mostly understand for the time being. The other day, I was out getting some food and I idly wondered how the restaurant pager system worked. Idle curiosity gave way to the realization that I, in fact, likely had the means and ability to answer this question, so I bought the first set of the most popular looking restaurant pagers I could find on eBay, figuring it’d be a fun multi-week adventure.
Order up!
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CNX Software ☛ ESP32-based CNC controller board targets pen plotters and lasers, runs FluidNC open-source firmware
FluidNC “TMC2209 Pen/Laser CNC Controller” is an ESP32-based 2-axis CNC controller that runs FluidNC open-source firmware and takes up to two TMC2209 stepper drivers to drive pen plotters and laser engravers ESP32 wireless modules have been used in a range of 3D printer and CNC controllers for years with boards such as Grbl_ESP32 CNC breakout board, Phi MainBoard 5LC 3D printer controller, and the Makerbase MKS DLC32 board we found in TwoTrees TS2 laser engraver and TTC 450 CNC router running MKS-DLC32-FIRMWARE open-source firmware.