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Open Hardware/Modding: Raspberry Pi, Linux on Nintendo Switch, and More
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peppe8o ☛ Manage your home stocks like a pro with Grocy and Raspberry PI
This tutorial will show you how to install Grocy on a Raspberry PI computer board, showing all the required commands to get it up and running. About Grocy Managing home stocks is a common need for all people.
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SparkFun Electronics ☛ Design It Your Way: Get the Bare RP2350A IC from SparkFun
The signature high-performance, low-cost RP2350 microcontroller is now available as a standalone IC.
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Kev Quirk ☛ My First Week With the Framework 13
I've had my Framework 13 for a week now. There have been some challenges along the way, but for the most part, I'm happy with my purchase.
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The Register UK ☛ Build your own antisocial writing rig with DOS and a USB key
But we discovered a useful loophole. In its early days, DOS ran entirely from floppy disks, which modern computers don't have any more – but the formats of those disks are still used. Any modern OS can happily read and write DOS media – including on USB storage devices. That means that pretty much any x86 PC that still supports legacy boot can boot DOS from a USB drive. When you do that, a little magic happens. The firmware (the BIOS, or UEFI with a "Compatibility Support Module" to emulate a PC BIOS) translates things for DOS. A bootable USB key suddenly looks to DOS like an ordinary hard disk, without any drivers. DOS can't read modern disk formats, and indeed struggles with any drive bigger than 2 TB, but that doesn't matter when the entire OS and a whole anthology of apps fits into a few hundred megabytes. That's less than the smallest USB thumb drive you can still buy.
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Android Police ☛ Will repairable phones ever go mainstream?
Still, some companies like Fairphone, Motorola, and HMD are at the forefront of the modular smartphone movement. For instance, the Fairphone 5 lets you easily swap out components like the battery, cameras, loudspeaker, and display without professional help. However, it is only available in European countries and is unavailable in the US.
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Linus Åkesson ☛ Kaleidoscopico
The microcontroller is the Raspberry Pi Foundation's own RP2350 which is a relatively powerful chip. It has two processor cores that can operate either in ARM Cortex-M33 mode or RISC-V mode. Physically there are two ARM cores and two RISC-V cores side by side on the silicon, but only two of them can be enabled at the same time since they share bus connections and some of the interrupt logic.
RISC-V is an open, royalty-free processor architecture, which is something I really want to encourage. On this particular chip, the RISC-V cores are less powerful than the ARM cores because there's no floating-point support, but as a demo coder I don't necessarily prefer the most powerful system.
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XDA ☛ I installed Linux on my Nintendo Switch, because why wouldn't I?
The Nintendo Switch is one of the most successful game consoles of all time, and with its successor finally unveiled, it's finally time to bid farewell to the original. Or is it? Nintendo argues that you can just buy the original if the successor is too expensive, and with a massive library of fantastic games, it's not as if the Switch is suddenly irrelevant. Plus, if you pick up one of the much older original Switch units, it's really easy to install custom firmware... or Linux, I guess.
In an act that can only be described as an affront to god, I've installed Ubuntu on the Nintendo Switch. "Why?" I hear you ask. "Because I can", is my response. You see, Nintendo and Nvidia left a pretty big hole in the bootROM of the original Nintendo Switch. With a little 3D-printed jig that goes into the Joy-Con rail (or you can even just use some tinfoil, if you're feeling daring, though you can damage your Switch doing that), you can boot basically anything on this device. With the Switch 2 around the corner, I broke out my original Nintendo Switch from retirement to have some fun with it one last time.