Open Hardware/Modding: Raspberry Pi, AVX-512, and More
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Raspberry Pi ☛ CanSat: A tiny, can-sized, Raspberry Pi-powered satellite
“The challenge for students is to fit all the major subsystems found in a satellite, such as power, sensors, and a communication system, into this minimal volume,” the team tell us. They came third in the country for their final build. As the competition instructions explain, “After building their CanSat, teams will be invited to launch events across the UK to launch their CanSats on small rockets, with their CanSats returning to Earth using a parachute designed by the students. Teams are set a primary mission of measuring air pressure and air temperature during the CanSat’s descent, with data being transmitted to the students’ ground station.”
They also needed to design a secondary mission, which in the case of LittleBlueDot included taking photos of the ground below to map it. “The idea of mapping large areas, including foreign bodies, came up when we were discussing potential asteroid mining in the future,” the team say. “And also improving efficiency in agriculture, both fields where large benefits could be seen from mapping land cheaply.”
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Raspberry Pi Dune Weaver table draws images in sand using magnets
The table he chose to use as a base is the Vittsjö table from Ikea. It has a wooden circular shape on top that the sand rests on. Nguyen created a glass enclosure for the sand that fits on top of this wooden base. Underneath is a Raspberry Pi which is connected to two motors and a lazy susan magnet. The table is also fitted with a ring of LEDs to illuminate the sand which uses an ESP32 to operate.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Elecrow's Raspberry Pi powered CrowPi 3 educational kit offers plenty of scope for learning
Elecrow, creators of the CrowPi 2 and the CrowView has written to us to detail its new CrowPi 3, which will launch on Kickstarter "soon." This is quite a complex product, designed to be an innovative open-source learning tool built around the Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer. The comprehensive hardware consists of 30+ components, and Elecrow has prepared 100+ "meticulously planned courses" for your edutainment. Elecrow believes the versatile CrowPi 3 will appeal to enthusiasts and developers.
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Daniel Lemire ☛ AVX-512 gotcha: avoid compressing words to memory with AMD Zen 4 processors
The recent AMD processors (Zen 4) provide extensive support for the powerful AVX-512 instructions. AVX-512 (Advanced Vector Extensions 512) is an extension to the x86 instruction set architecture (ISA) introduced by Intel. These instructions enhance the capabilities of processors by allowing for more data to be processed in parallel. You can process registers made of 64 bytes!