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Open Hardware/Modding: Adafruit, ESP32, and More
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Tom's Hardware ☛ iFixIt calls BMW’s new anti-consumer security screws 'a logo-shaped middle finger to right to repair,' Adafruit 3D prints a solution — BMW's connector reverse engineered using patent monopoly filing as a design blueprint
Automaker BMW has filed a patent monopoly for a new fastener which takes design cues from the its iconic segmented roundel logo. but it has been accused of creating this design for service and repair gatekeeping.
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Futurism ☛ They Gave a Robot a Sword
According to the Robotera website, the L7 features 55 degrees of freedom, the number of independent movements a robot can make. Its arm features seven degrees of freedom, while its hand alone is said to boast 12.
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Hackaday ☛ Real-Time 3D Room Mapping With ESP32, VL53L5CX Sensor And IMU
ST’s VL53L5CX is a very small 8×8 grid ranging sensor that can perform distance measurements at a distance of up to 4 meters. In a recent video,[Henrique Ferrolho] demonstrated that this little sensor can also be used to perform a 3D scan of a room. The sensor data can be combined with an IMU to add orientation information to the scan data. These data streams are then combined by an ESP32 MCU that streams the data as JSON to a connected computer.
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Ken Shirriff ☛ Instruction decoding in the Intel 8087 floating-point chip
In the 1980s, if you wanted your IBM PC to run faster, you could buy the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor chip. With this chip, CAD software, spreadsheets, flight simulators, and other programs were much speedier. The 8087 chip could add, subtract, multiply, and divide, of course, but it could also compute transcendental functions such as tangent and logarithms, as well as provide constants such as π. In total, the 8087 added 62 new instructions to the computer.
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Linux Gizmos ☛ xSDR packs 2x2 MIMO, Artix-7 FPGA, and 3.8 GHz tuning into M.2 2230 form factor
The LMS7002M supports dual-channel transmit and receive paths with channel bandwidths from 0.5 MHz to 90 MHz. Sample rates range from 0.1 MSPS up to 122.88 MSPS in SISO mode, and above 80 MSPS in MIMO configurations.