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Devices/Hardware Leftovers

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Hardware

  • Researchers developed fabric-friendly NFC antennas that can be woven into furniture | Arduino Blog

    Near-field communication, or NFC for short, has started popping up everywhere as a way to easily pay, unlock doors, or even start a car. And now it can do one more thing: locate and track objects within a room. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Laboratory for Emerging Wireless Technologies have come up with an ingenious method to integrate NFC antennas into the fabric of pillows, furniture, and carpet to create smart environments.

    Their system, which they call “TextileSense,” takes advantage of multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) antenna arrays to make aimed beams of radio waves that can be measured when they interact with a conductive object, like a hand. 

  • ESP32-C3 board comes with 16340 battery holder, Mini D1 compatibility - CNX Software

    It looks like ESP32-C3 floodgates have opened. We’ve just written about several NodeMCU ESP32-C3 boards, and now there’s another board with the RISC-V WiFI & Bluetooth processor. Meet LilyGo TTGO T-OI PLUS equipped with a 16340 battery holder.

    Getting a battery-powered ESP32-C3 board could prove to be very interesting as ESP32-C3 power consumption is much lower than ESP8266 and ESP32, notably in deep sleep mode, where the RISC-V processor consumes just 5uA, against 20 uA for ESP8266 and ESP32, and the difference is even greater in light sleep mode (ESP8266: 2000 uA vs ESP32-C3: 130 uA).

  • Low-cost embedded router SBC offers 2.5 GbE, WiFi 6 through Qualcomm IPQ5018 SoC

    Wallys Communication has been offering Qualcomm-based embedded router boards for several years, including the higher-end DR8072A with dual 2.5GbE and WiFi 6 connectivity, followed by a lower-cost WiFi 6 SBC based on IPQ6010 with Gigabit Ethernet ports.

    But if you’d like to benefit from the lower cost while keeping WiFi 6 and 2.5GbE, the company has now introduced a new model based on Qualcomm IPQ5018 dual-core Cortex-A53 SoC, also found in Xiaomi Mi AX6000 router, with DR5018 embedded router board.

  • Building a Curve25519 Hardware Accelerator

    The “double ratchet” algorithm is integral to modern end-to-end-encrypted chat apps, such as Signal, WhatsApp, and Matrix. It gives encrypted conversations the properties of resilience, forward secrecy, and break-in recovery; basically, even if an adversary can manipulate or observe portions of an exchange, including certain secret materials, the damage is limited with each turn of the double ratchet.

    The double-ratchet algorithm is a soup of cryptographic components, but one of the most computationally expensive portions is the “Diffie-Hellman (DH) key exchange”, using Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) with Curve25519. How expensive? This post from 2020 claims a speed record of 3.2 million cycles on a Cortex-M0 for just one of the core mathematical operations: fairly hefty. A benchmark of the x25519-dalek Rust crate on a 100 MHz RV32-IMAC implementation clocks in at 100ms per DH key exchange, of which several are involved in a double-ratchet. Thus, any chat client implementation on a small embedded CPU would suffer from significant UI lag.

    There are a few strategies to rectify this, ranging from adding a second CPU core to off-load the crypto, to making a full-custom hardware accelerator. Adding a second RISC-V CPU core is expedient, but it wouldn’t do much to force me to understand what I was doing as far as the crypto goes; and there’s already a strong contingent of folks working on multi-core RISC-V on FPGA implementations. The last time I implemented a crypto algorithm was for RSA on a low-end STM32 back in the mid 2000’s. I really enjoyed getting into the guts of the algorithm and stretching my understanding of the underlying mathematical primitives. So, I decided to indulge my urge to tinker, and make a custom hardware accelerator for Curve25519 using Litex/Migen and Rust bindings.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.