Open Hardware/Modding: Olimex, Arduino, and More
-
Hackaday ☛ Making The Alarmo Customizable, By Any Means Necessary
Last year, Nintendo has released the Alarmo, a bedside-style alarm clock with a colourful display. Do you own one? You deserve full control over your device, of course. [KernelEquinox] has been reverse-engineering an Alarmo ever since getting one, and there’s no shortage of cool stuff you’ll be able to do with an Alarmo thanks to this work.
-
Linux Gizmos ☛ (Updated) Olimex Launches POEv3 Add-On for ESP32-P4 Development Board
Espressif Systems announced the ESP32-P4 over a year ago. While the chip is not yet available for retail, a prototype development board featuring the chip was recently showcased by Olimex. This board includes multiple interfaces, such as an Ethernet connector and a camera connector, demonstrating its versatile capabilities.
-
Linux Gizmos ☛ ASUS NUC 15 Pro+ Starts at $810 with Intel Core Ultra 9 285H
ASUS has just provided pricing details for the ASUS NUC 15 Pro+, a compact computing system powered by Intel Core Ultra Processors (Series 2), offering up to 99 TOPS of AI acceleration and an 18% increase in performance compared to the previous generation.
-
[Old] Michael Waltz ☛ A Macintosh Story
This is the first post in what I am hoping a series of how I took my 512Ke “Fat Mac” and enhanched it to the state it is today.
-
Ken Shirriff ☛ The Pentium contains a complicated circuit to multiply by three
In 1993, Intel released the high-performance Pentium processor, the start of the long-running Pentium line. I've been examining the Pentium's circuitry in detail and I came across a circuit to multiply by three, a complex circuit with thousands of transistors. Why does the Pentium have a circuit to multiply specifically by three? Why is it so complicated? In this article, I examine this multiplier—which I'll call the ×3 circuit—and explain its purpose and how it is implemented.
It turns out that this multiplier is a small part of the Pentium's floating-point multiplier circuit. In particular, the Pentium multiplies two 64-bit numbers using base-8 multiplication, which is faster than binary multiplication.1 However, multiplying by 3 needs to be handled as a special case. Moreover, since the rest of the multiplication process can't start until the multiplication by 3 finishes, this circuit must be very fast. If you've studied digital design, you may have heard of techniques such as carry lookahead, Kogge-Stone addition, and carry-select addition. I'll explain how the ×3 circuit combines all these techniques to maximize performance.
-
Luke Harris ☛ Fixing my Blue Snowball
It’s ugly, but it works! No more interference, and the output is louder too. And if I happen to come across another Snowball for parts, I can easily pull out the “jumper” I made.
-
Doug Brown ☛ The gooey rubber that’s slowly ruining old hard drives
What’s causing this issue? Let’s open them up and find out.
There’s a common misconception in the computer world that as soon as you open a hard drive and expose it to a single particle of dust, you’ve completely destroyed it and it will never work again. Now to be fair, with many modern, higher-density drives it’s probably true — some of them are even sealed with helium inside — but older hard drives like the ones I’ve shown above are remarkably tolerant of being opened. That’s not to say I would leave it operating without the cover for an extended period of time, but for quick data recovery purposes in a decently clean environment, it’s fine.
-
Arduino ☛ Making a photo enlarger more efficient with precisely controlled LEDs
Responsible for acting as the light source, this project utilizes a total of 40 RGBW LEDs on the Adafruit NeoPixel Shield. They, in turn, are connected to an Arduino Nano ESP32 via a level shifter along with a 75W power source for the full range of brightness. In addition to producing far less heat due to their reduced energy consumption compared to a traditional lamp, these RGBW LEDs can output a wide range of colors over time for very fine-tuned control over the image’s final appearance.
-
CNX Software ☛ STMicro releases Teseo VI quad-band GNSS receivers for automotive and robotics applications
STMicro has launched the Teseo VI family of global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receivers for high-volume precise positioning applications. These quad-band GNSS receivers support multiple constellations and frequency bands, enabling high-accuracy positioning for various automotive and robotics applications.
-
CNX Software ☛ Citronics built a router based on the Fairphone 2 mainboard
Belgium-company Citronics has designed a router based on the mainboard of the Fairphone 2 smartphone, connecting the Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 “system-on-module” to a carrier board with Ethernet, USB ports, and other connectors, while leveraging 4G LTE, WiFi, and Bluetooth connectivity from the phone’s core board.