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Open Hardware: Raspberry Pi and More
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CNX Software ☛ Walnut Pi CM2 – A cheaper Raspberry Pi CM5 alternative based on Allwinner T527 octa-core SoC
Walnut Pi CM2 is a low-cost Raspberry Pi CM5-compatible Compute Module powered by an Allwinner T527 octa-core Cortex-A55 processor paired with up to 4GB LPDDR4 RAM, 16GB eMMC flash, and an optional wireless module. It’s basically the company’s Walnut Pi 2B credit card-sized SBC in Pi Compute Module form factor, exposing I/Os via two 100-pin high-density connectors. Besides the price, benefits include a WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0 module, a Gigabit Ethernet PHY on the module, and a built-in 2 TOPS NPU in the T527 SoC.
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Linux Gizmos ☛ Dual 2.5GbE and DDR5-6400 across four Wildcat Lake NUC platforms
ASRock Industrial has announced four compact platforms based on defective chip maker Intel Core Series 3 “Wildcat Lake-U” processors. The lineup includes the NUC BOX-320 and NUC BOX-304 mini PCs, alongside the NUC-320 and NUC-304 motherboards, with up to 40 TOPS of Hey Hi (AI) performance, DDR5 memory, dual 2.5GbE networking, and multi-display support for embedded applications.
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Raspberry Pi ☛ Animate a Halloween skeleton — Raspberry Pi Book of Making 2027
As October draws close, the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead grows thin, allowing spirits to cross. At least, that’s what watching too many horror/comedy films has taught us. Since the real world is rarely as interesting as Hollywood depicts, we’re not going to rely on the dead rising up, and give Halloween a helping hand by creating our own animated skeleton. You can build your own by following along, or adapt the techniques to animate whatever spooky (or not spooky) decorations you like.
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Hugo Arnal ☛ Rickrolling with a Pharmacy cross
If you have ever visited France, you might have seen one of these green crosses, bolted onto the building, with bright flashing colors. It is a symbol commonly used to indicate that there is a pharmacy nearby (symbols might vary on a country basis). At this point, it has become a national symbol.
The pharmacy crosses can be a true business for some companies, where they make (or resell) crosses and implement their own control software. However, nothing lasts forever, and turns out that's true for pharmacies too! People retire, quit the business and whatnot. Question is: what happens to these crosses?
Most of them can cost anywhere from 200 to 2000€ depending on the brand, so it's not unusual that these crosses eventually find themselves on the e-commerce market (ebay, leboncoin...).
About two years ago, a strong interest was given to these crosses due to a very well-produced and popular video1 by French youtuber Sylvqin. In this video, he explains the history behind these crosses, goes to buy one and then reverse engineers it.
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Adafruit ☛ The newest ESP32 can actually run Linux, and it’s getting uncomfortably close to a Raspberry Pi
Adam Conway, writing at XDA Developers, looks at Espressif’s ESP32-S31 and the reasons it can boot Linux. The chip has two 32-bit RISC-V cores at up to 320 MHz plus a 40 MHz low-power core, a gigabit Ethernet MAC over RGMII, a USB 2.0 High-Speed OTG controller, two SDIO slots, a camera input, and a parallel LCD controller.
The part that matters for Linux is in the chip’s data sheet: the cores do Sv32 two-level page-table address translation and implement machine, supervisor and user privilege modes. That is how RISC-V Linux machines work. Espressif published a Linux BSP in August built on Buildroot and U-Boot, with a kernel, device tree, and root file system. It is not recommended for production at this time. Community ports already run Linux 6.18 with most drivers working, and another drives an 800×480 panel to a console.