Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Open Hardware: Librem and Arduino Projects

Filed under
Hardware
Gadgets

  • Librem 5 USA At Shipping Parity: New Orders Ship Within 10 Business Days – Purism

    For anyone who is new to the product, the Librem 5 USA is our premium phone that shares the same hardware design and features as our mass-produced Librem 5, but with electronics we make in the USA using a separate electronics supply chain that sources from US suppliers whenever possible. This results in a tighter, more secure supply chain for the Librem 5 USA. The Librem 5 USA uses the same PureOS as our other computers and so it runs the same desktop Linux applications you might be used to, just on a small screen. PureOS on the Librem 5 USA demonstrates real convergence, where the device becomes more than just a phone, it becomes a full-featured pocket-sized computer that can act like a desktop when connected to a monitor, keyboard and mouse, or even a laptop (or tablet!) when connected to a laptop docking station. All of your files and all of your software remains the same and follows you where you go. Applications just morph from the smaller screen to the larger screen when docked, just like connecting a external monitor to a laptop.

  • LEGO-firing turret targets tender tootsies | Arduino Blog

    Stepping on LEGO bricks is a meme for a reason: it really @#$%&! hurts. LEGO brick design is ingenious, but the engineers did not consider the ramifications of their minimalist construction system. We’ve seen people do crazy things for Internet points, such as walk across a bed of LEGO like they’re hot coals — or in Adam Beedle’s case, build a LEGO-firing turret specifically to shoot plastic bricks under a person’s feet.

    This project consists of two distinct sub-systems: the mechanical turret that launches the LEGO bricks and the targeting system that recognizes feet. For the former, Beedle devised a clever rubber band-based mechanism that cranks into position with a rack and pinion. An Arduino Uno rotates the pinion with a continuous-rotation servo motor. The pinion gear has a few teeth missing, so it releases the rubber bands and flings the loaded LEGO brick after a few rotations. Another brick then drops down from a hopper and the cycle repeats, resulting in automatic firing.

  • Reducing automotive fuel consumption with an Arduino | Arduino Blog

    Every car sold in the last few decades is equipped with an engine control unit, or ECU for short. Its job is to control nearly every aspect about the vehicle’s performance by reading various sensors and acting upon those inputs accordingly. However, some older rides aren’t nearly as performant as they could be, which is why YouTuber Robot Cantina wanted to modify their 1997 Saturn coupe for better fuel efficiency.

    To accomplish this goal, Robot Cantina created a lean burn system that works by making the ECU think the engine is burning more fuel than the actual amount, thus decreasing fuel consumption. They took a cheap air/fuel mixture sensor and connected its input to the engine’s manifold. Due to how it outputs a wideband, linear voltage, the signal had to be converted with an Arduino Uno into a narrow, lower voltage range via a lookup table.

  • Over-engineered robotic scalp scratcher knows all the moves | Arduino Blog

    Those cheap wire-arm head massagers are great at giving your scalp a nice, relaxing rub. But they’re handheld implements that force the user to either manipulate the massager themselves or talk a partner into performing the task. David McDaid decided that the experience would be much more pleasant if a robot took care of the hard work, so he built this Stewart platform head massager.

    A Stewart platform is a dexterous manipulator often used with robotic end effectors or for orienting equipment. The standard setup requires six linear actuators, each with universal joints on both ends. The actuators mount between two plates in an arrangement that gives the top plate six degrees of freedom (DoF): pitch, roll, yaw, and linear movement in each of the three spatial axes. A Stewart platform is perfect for this application, because it lets the robot move the head massager in a variety of different ways that mimic manual movement.

And is this news or marketing?

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

More in Tux Machines

today's howtos

  • How to Change Comment Color in Vim – Fix Unreadable Blue Color

    Are you annoyed about the comment color in vim? The dark blue color of the comment is often hard to read. In this tutorial, we learn how to change the comment color in Vim. There are few methods we can use to look vim comment very readable.

  • How to Add Repository to Debian

    APT checks the health of all the packages, and dependencies of the package before installing it. APT fetches packages from one or more repositories. A repository (package source) is basically a network server. The term "package" refers to an individual file with a .deb extension that contains either all or part of an application. The normal installation comes with default repositories configured, but these contain only a few packages out of an ocean of free software available. In this tutorial, we learn how to add the package repository to Debian.

  • Making a Video of a Single Window

    I recently wanted to send someone a video of a program doing some interesting things in a single X11 window. Recording the whole desktop is easy (some readers may remember my post on Aeschylus which does just that) but it will include irrelevant (and possibly unwanted) parts of the screen, leading to unnecessarily large files. I couldn't immediately find a tool which did what I wanted on OpenBSD [1] but through a combination of xwininfo, FFmpeg, and hk I was able to put together exactly what I needed in short order. Even better, I was able to easily post-process the video to shrink its file size, speed it up, and contort it to the dimension requirements of various platforms. Here's a video straight out of the little script I put together: [...]

  • Things You Can And Can’t Do

    And it got me thinking about what you can and can’t do — what you do and don’t have control over.

  • allow-new-zones in BIND 9.16 on CentOS 8 Stream under SELinux

    We run these training systems with SELinux enabled (I wouldn’t, but my colleague likes it :-), and that’s the reason I aborted the lab: I couldn’t tell students how to solve the cause other than by disabling SELinux entirely, but there wasn’t enough time for that.

  • Will the IndieWeb Ever Become Mainstream?

    This is an interesting question, thanks for asking it, Jeremy. I do have some history with the IndieWeb, and some opinions, so let’s dive in.

    The short answer to the question is a resounding no, and it all boils down to the fact that the IndieWeb is really complicated to implement, so it will only ever appeal to developers.

  • How to Install CUPS Print Server on Ubuntu 22.04

    If your business has multiple personal computers in the network which need to print, then we need a device called a print server. Print server act intermediate between PC and printers which accept print jobs from PC and send them to respective printers. CUPS is the primary mechanism in the Unix-like operating system for printing and print services. It can allow a computer to act as a Print server. In this tutorial, we learn how to set up CUPS print server on Ubuntu 22.04.

Open Hardware: XON/XOFF and Raspberry Pi Pico

  • From XON/XOFF to Forward Incremental Search

    In the olden days of computing, software flow control with control codes XON and XOFF was a necessary feature that dumb terminals needed to support. When a terminal received more data than it could display, there needed to be a way for the terminal to tell the remote host to pause sending more data. The control code 19 was chosen for this. The control code 17 was chosen to tell the remote host to resume transmission of data.

  • Raspberry Pi Pico Used in Plug and Play System Monitor | Tom's Hardware

    Dmytro Panin is at it again, creating a teeny system monitor for his MacBook from scratch with help from our favorite microcontroller, the Raspberry Pi Pico. This plug-and-play system monitor (opens in new tab) lets him keep a close eye on resource usage without having to close any windows or launch any third-party programs. The device is Pico-powered and plugs right into the MacBook to function. It has a display screen that showcases a custom GUI featuring four bar graphs that update in real-time to show the performance of different components, including the CPU, GPU, memory, and SSD usage. It makes it possible to see how hard your PC is running at a glance.

Security Leftovers

How to Apply Accent Colour in Ubuntu Desktop

A step-by-step tutorial on how to apply accent colour in Ubuntu desktop (GNOME) with tips for Kubuntu and others. Read more