Open Hardware/Modding: Hacking and Raspberry Pi in Education
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Diziet ☛ Hacking my filter coffee machine
I hacked my coffee machine to let me turn it on from upstairs in bed :-). Read on for explanation, circuit diagrams, 3D models, firmware source code, and pictures.
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Doug Brown ☛ How Apple’s developers reflashed Mac ROMs in the ’90s
After I wrote about the possibility of programmable Mac ROM SIMMs in Quadras a couple of months ago, I suspected that there had been a way for developers at Apple in the 68k Mac era to reflash the ROM in their Macs during development, just like BIOS updates on PCs. The reason I believed this is because the ROM SIMM socket in the Quadras brought out pins for 12V (VPP) and write enable (/WE). I had verified that the write enable pin was going into the memory controller chip in several Mac models, so I was pretty confident that in-system programming was possible.
As luck would have it, multiple people pointed out to me that an Apple internal utility used for ROM flashing had been uploaded to the Macintosh Garden. It was recovered from a prototype PowerBook 520 purchased in 2020. Of course, I had to download this utility and figure out how it works.
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Raspberry Pi ☛ Spotlight on teaching programming with and without AI in our 2024 seminar series
How to best teach programming in school is the focus of our free online seminars in 2024, for teachers, researchers, and everyone interested in computing education.