Retro and Open Hardware: Raspberry Pi, Commodore, and More
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CNX Software ☛ PicoPD Pro – An open-source RP2040 development board with USB PD support up to 30V
The PicoPD Pro is an open-source Raspberry Pi RP2040 development board that integrates USB PD support up to 30V, and features like voltage negotiation and power delivery while still retaining the Raspberry Pi Pico functionality. It features the AP33772S USB-C PD3.1 sink controller from Diodes Incorporated. The AP33772S supports the full USB-C PD 3.1 specification, including Extended Power Range (EPR) / Adjustable Voltage Supply (AVS) up to 28V and Programmable Power Supply (PPS) up to 21V. The PicoPD Pro USB PPS/AVS development board is ideal for powering devices with specific requirements, such as motor control boards, LED drivers, custom battery chargers, and other high-power applications. It also features a 5V rail output for less demanding applications.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Maker builds drum machine from scratch using a Raspberry Pi Pico 2
The project essentially consists of a series of buttons that are programmed to play specific synthetic drum sound clips. These audio files are stored on a microSD card using a second module — the DFMiniPlayer. This board helps with the audio support and provides the ability to play different file types like MP3 or WAV. In this case, it handles the audio files used to create the drum synth.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Commodore 64 gets a true Full-HD HDMI plus stereo sound daughterboard
Commodore 64 devotee Side Projects Lab has released a video teaser showcasing a 'true Full-HD HDMI' adaptor for the iconic 8-bit home computer.
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Ken Shirriff ☛ Pi in the Pentium: reverse-engineering the constants in its floating-point unit
Intel released the powerful Pentium processor in 1993, establishing a long-running brand of high-performance processors. The Pentium includes a floating-point unit that can rapidly compute functions such as sines, cosines, logarithms, and exponentials. But how does the Pentium compute these functions? Earlier Intel chips used binary algorithms called CORDIC, but the Pentium switched to polynomials to approximate these transcendental functions much faster. The polynomials have carefully-optimized coefficients that are stored in a special ROM inside the chip's floating-point unit. Even though the Pentium is a complex chip with 3.1 million transistors, it is possible to see these transistors under a microscope and read out these constants. The first part of this post discusses how the floating point constant ROM is implemented in hardware. The second part explains how the Pentium uses these constants to evaluate sin, log, and other functions.
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Direction9 made a T9-based keyboard for better typing on TVs
Typing on a TV sucks. Those long and / or scrambled on-screen keyboards are both a nuisance to use, and a real problem for anyone wanting to make stuff for your TV.