Devices Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 02, 2023

• Alan Pope: RetroDECK > EmuDeck

  Goodbye EmuDeck

  I’ve had my GabeGear Steam Deck for over a year now, and I love it. When it first arrived, I considered using it to play retro games - via emulators. But a terribad experience with EmuDeck soured my opinon of retro gaming on the deck.

  The whole EmuDeck installation and configuration was less than straightforward, indeed somewhat cumbersome. I found it to be a loosely connected, and poorly integrated bag of spanners. Surprising for a project seemingly awash with community supporters and funding!

• Sipeed Tang Mega 138K Pro Dock features GOWIN GW5AST FPGA + RISC-V SoC

  Sipeed has launched another FPGA board part of their Tang family with the Tang Mega 138K Pro Dock powered by a GOWIN GW5AST SoC with 138K logic elements as well as an 800 MHz AE350_SOC RISC-V hardcore unit, and featuring a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface, DVI Rx and Tx, two SFP+ cages, a Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 port, and more. We’ve previously seen companies like AMD (Xilinx) and Microchip produce FPGA SoCs with hard cores such as the Zynq Ultrascale+ family (4x Cortex-A53) or the PolarFire MPSoC (4x 64-bit SiFive U54 RISC-V cores), but it’s the first time I see GOWIN introduce an FPGA + RISC-V SoC, as all the previous parts that came to my attention were FPGA devices.

• Introducing NEMO for the M5Stick C Plus

  I've been working on this project for a couple of weeks, and it's pretty close to finished. I've been trying to build some more skills in the embedded systems, microcontroller and Internet of Things realm, and when I decided it was time to expand my experience to ESP32, I wanted a dev kit with a little bit of everything built in. I already have breadboards, displays, servos, sensors, LEDs and accessories galore. I just wanted something cute that'd keep my interest for a while. Enter the M5Stack M5Stick C Plus. Powered by an ESP32, featuring an AXP192 power management unit, accelerometer, IR and red LEDs, a 100mAh battery, microphone, speaker, display, a few buttons and plenty of exposed GPIO pins, it seemed like a good place to start.

  My usual method of learning involves sketching out a rough plan for demonstrating mastery of core concepts, so my first few projects were about getting the ESP-IDF and arduino environments working with simple programs. I also ported CircuitPython to it for some of my early projects. I focused on the WiFi stack and designing user interfaces at first, then using UART, SPI and I2C via the GPIO pins.

• Maciej Lasyk: Iteration 2 of homelab Kubernetes

  A few years passed, since I've initially setup my homelab. I've learnt a lot during this journey - starting from bare-metal planning, network topology (which is completely different, than a cloud-one or even, an office one), through storage solutions, emergency power supplies, uplink redundancy, Kubernetes management and performance tuning, various cluster services and finishing on writing own Kubernetes controllers.

  So, recently I decided, that I will upgrade this whole cluster, from an old 1.21.x to some recent one, 1.27. However, upgrading k8s is not an easy task, especially, when there're many services already running there. I decided, that the quickest, most reliable and least risky way would be to simply, create a new cluster, and simply, migrate all required services there.