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Hardware/Modding: ESP32, Banana Pi, and More
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CNX Software ☛ FireBeetle 2 ESP32-C5 IoT development board offers GDI display interface, LiPo battery support
Just the other day, I lamented the lack of options when it came to ESP32-C5 boards featuring dual-band WiFi 6 support. The FireBeetle 2 ESP32-C5 IoT development board made by DFRobot shows that I needed to be more patient… The ESP32-C5 board features 4MB flash, a USB-C port, a LiPo battery connector, and two GPIO headers for expansion, as well as a GDI display connector designed to add an SPI/I2C touchscreen display. The new RISC-V board has about the same features and form factor as the FireBeetle 2 ESP32-S3.
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Hackaday ☛ The Value Of A Worked Example
I was looking over the week’s posts on Hackaday – it’s part of my job after all – and this gem caught my eye: a post about how to make your own RP2040 development board from scratch. And I’ll admit that my first thought was “why would you ever want to do that?” (Not a very Hackaday-appropriate question, honestly.) The end result will certainly cost more than just buying a Pi Pico off the shelf!
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CNX Software ☛ Eazeye Radiant 15.6-inch portable transflective LCD review
Eazeye sent me a sample of the Radiant 15.6-inch transflective LCD review for review after I wrote about the Eazeye 2.0 24-inch reflective LCD monitor last August. Yes, there’s been a little bit of miscommunication as I got a transflective LCD (TLCD) launched last year, instead of the new reflective LCD (RLCD). But that’s OK. While those are two different technologies, both monitors are designed to rely on natural light, and I assumed either would perform better outdoors and reduce eye strain compared to traditional portable monitors or laptop displays.
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Hackaday ☛ (Neural) Networking With A Business Card
A PCB business card is a great way for electrical engineers to impress employers with their design skills, but the software they run can be just as impressive as the card itself. As a programmer with an interest in embedded machine learning, [Dave McKinnon] wanted a card that showcased his skills, so he designed one that runs voice recognition.
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Jonathan Dowland ☛ Jonathan Dowland: Zoom R8
When I started looking at synths again, I had a feeling I would want to record from them, and ideally not with a computer. To that end, I also bought a second-hand standalone multitrack recorder, the Zoom R8.
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Linux Gizmos ☛ Waveshare Pairs RISC-V ESP32-P4 and ESP32-C6 for Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5 LE, and PoE Support
Like the earlier Waveshare ESP32-P4-WIFI6 development board, this platform also uses a dual-processor architecture pairing the ESP32-P4 as the main MCU with an ESP32-C6 module that handles Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 LE connectivity. The ESP32-C6 communicates with the ESP32-P4 over an SDIO interface and integrates an external antenna connector for wireless operation.
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Linux Gizmos ☛ Banana Pi Previews Its First SOPHGO BM1688-Based Compute Module
The BM1688 datasheet does not appear to be available on the SOPHGO website yet, but Banana Pi notes that the processor integrates an eight-core Arm Cortex-A53 CPU running at 1.6GHz and provides 16 TOPS of INT8 performance.
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Linux Gizmos ☛ OAK 4 D and OAK 4 S Standalone Edge Vision Cameras with PoE and 48MP Imaging
Both devices are built around the RVC4 compute platform, incorporating an 8-core ARM CPU from Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8-series, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB of onboard storage. The architecture supports 48 TOPS of INT8 performance and 12 TOPS in FP16 workloads.