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Retro, Hardware, Modding and ESP32
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Hackaday ☛ 39C3: Liberating ESP32 Bluetooth
Bluetooth is everywhere, but it’s hard to inspect. Most of the magic is done inside a Bluetooth controller chip, accessed only through a controller-specific Host-Controller Interface (HCI) protocol, and almost everything your code does with Bluetooth passes through a binary library that speaks the right HCI dialect. Reverse engineering these libraries can get us a lot more control of and information about what’s going on over the radio link.
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Linux Gizmos ☛ Fanless MS-CF19 3.5-inch SBC Uses Intel Meteor Lake-U and Arrow Lake-U
Processor options include Core Ultra 5 and Core Ultra 7 SKUs from both Meteor Lake-U and Arrow Lake-U families, with hybrid P-core and E-core configurations and integrated Intel graphics. Memory support consists of two DDR5 SO-DIMM slots operating at up to 5600 MHz or 6400 MHz depending on the processor, with a maximum capacity of 96 GB.
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John Calhoun ☛ Balsa “2001: A Space Odyssey” Model
There are modest CO2 lasers that are fairly affordable and a reasonable size that allows you to place them on a desktop. One shortcoming however is the rather small area that they can act upon with their laser—about the size of a sheet of letter-size paper. The other shortcoming is that laser power is kind of middling.
Something I really enjoy with a laser cutter however is cutting thin balsa parts with precision and assembling those pieces into a model aircraft—or even a model spacecraft.
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Doug Brown ☛ Finding a broken trace on my old Mac with the help of its ROM diagnostics
This was a little frustrating because last year I had already replaced all of the capacitors and cleaned where they had leaked, so I didn’t expect to encounter any problems with it so soon. The machine had worked fine the last time I’d tried it! But despite all that, something was failing during the power-on tests in Apple’s ROM, prompting it to play the chimes of death. I remembered that people have been working towards documenting the Mac ROM startup tests and using them to diagnose problems, so I decided to give it a shot and see if Apple’s Serial Test Manager could identify my Performa’s issue. Where was the fault on this complicated board? Sure, I could test a zillion traces by hand, but why bother when the computer already knows what is wrong?