Open Hardware/Modding: PCBs, Raspberry Pi, and More
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Hackaday ☛ A Brand-New Additive PCB Fab Technique?
Usually when we present a project on these pages, it’s pretty cut and dried — here’s what was done, these are the technologies used, this was the result. But sometimes we run across projects that raise far more questions than they answer, such as with this printed circuit board that’s actually printed rather than made using any of the traditional methods.
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Chuck Grimmett ☛ Prototyping fly rod spoons
I read Tenkara Bum’s post about fly rod spoons, which aren’t really available anymore. If you are lucky you can find a brand from Japan like Rodio, but the shipping is killer and they are hard to find. It is easy to find larger spoons, but for throwing them with a fly rod you want a weight of 0.5g (roughly 1/60oz)or less. That’s tiny!
I was intrigued, so I decided to make some of my own.
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The Guardian UK ☛ How one engineer beat restrictions on home computers in socialist Yugoslavia
One person who really helped to boost the profile of the Galaksija in the early days was Zoran Modli. He hosted a show called Ventilator 202 on Radio Belgrade, and he was approached by the Racunari editor, Jova Regasek, with the idea of broadcasting programs for the Galaksija and other home computers, like the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64. Programs could be loaded on to the Galaksija via an audio cassette tape, so the idea was that Modli could play the beeps and squawks of a program on his show, then listeners could tape the broadcast and load the transmitted program into their machine. It was essentially a kind of wireless downloading long before the advent of wifi, or even the internet as we know it.
Computers exploded in popularity in Yugoslavia over the next few years. Ironically, the success of the Galaksija media campaign ended up being to the detriment of the computer itself. It was so successful that it highlighted the pressing need for Yugoslavians to have access to computers, and around a year after the first Racunari magazine was published, the authorities altered the regulations that prevented the legal import of foreign microcomputers. The Galaksija had done its job of introducing computers to a whole generation so well that it became outmoded almost immediately.
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Linux Gizmos ☛ ARK FPV NDAA Compliant Flight Controller for UAV Applications with Advanced Sensors & Connectivity
This controller features the STM32H743IIK6 microcontroller, a 32-bit Arm Cortex-M7 core, operating at 480 MHz with double-precision floating-point support and a 16 Kbyte L1 cache for data and instructions. It includes 2MB of Flash and 1MB of RAM, achieving 1027 DMIPS for efficient data handling and processing, and supports DSP instructions for advanced computation.
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Linux Gizmos ☛ Protectli VP3200 Series with 2-Port Modular Vault Featuring 2.5GbE Ports and Expansion Bay
The Protectli VP3200 Series introduces modular 2-port Vault devices: the VP3210 with an Intel N100 processor and the VP3230 with an Intel i3-N305. Both models support up to 16GB DDR5 RAM, include 32GB eMMC storage, and feature two 2.5GbE Ethernet ports for high-speed applications. Dual M.2 NVMe SSD slots offer up to 2TB of additional storage.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ FlexPi Kickstarter promises flexible Raspberry Pi Pico with a few upgrades
TOP Gadgets has created a Kickstarter for a totally flexible Raspberry Pi Pico board that comes with a few upgrades to the original Pico design.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ This scary Raspberry Pi bat flies around when people are nearby
This scary Raspberry Pi-powered bat is designed to fly around in circles when it detects people nearby.