news
Open Hardware: ESP and More
-
CNX Software ☛ Battery-powered Seeed Studio IoT Button features ESP32-C6 SoC, supports ESPHome or Zigbee firmware
Seeed Studio IoT Button is an inexpensive ESP32-C6 button powered by a rechargeable 18650 battery and designed to easily and quickly control Smart Home devices over WiFi 6 or Zigbee wireless protocol. It will be especially handy to Home Assistant users since the device is pre-flashed with ESPHome firmware for easy integration (over WiFi), and the company also provides a Zigbee firmware for Zigbee Home Assistant (ZHA) integration.
-
Ken Shirriff ☛ A tricky Commodore PET repair: tracking down 6 1/2 bad chips
You'd think that a home computer would be easy to repair, but it turned out to be a challenge.1 The chips in early PETs are notorious for failures and, sure enough, we found multiple bad chips. Moreover, these RAM and ROM chips were special designs that are mostly unobtainable now. In this post, I'll summarize how we repaired the system, in case it helps anyone else.
When I first powered up the computer, I was greeted with a display full of random characters. This was actually reassuring since it showed that most of the computer was working: not just the monitor, but the video RAM, character ROM, system clock, and power supply were all operational.
-
Andrew Hutchings ☛ Amiga A3640 CPU Card Repair - LinuxJedi's /dev/null
Lately, I’ve been very busy, but haven’t had many interesting things to blog about happen. That will change soon, but today I thought I would cover a repair that came in for an A3640 CPU card.
-
Boiling Steam ☛ OrangePi RV2: The New Reference SBC for RISC-V Enthusiasts
OrangePi is fairly famous by now as an alternative manufacturer for Raspberry Pi-like mini-computer boards, usually based on ARM processors (but not only). Very recently they announced the upcoming availability of a new board, the OrangePi RV2, based on a new RISC-V SOC (the Ky X1, with 8 cores running at 1.6 Ghz).