Hacking or Open Hardware: Raspberry Pi, Commodore, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 02, 2024

• Tom's Hardware ☛ Raspberry Pi Pico drives StoRPer modular DIY robot rover

  According to Hinchliffe, the kit is mainly a chassis with a custom-designed PCB. You can add or remove components as desired to customize the robot rover. It includes 3D-printed mounting components, but you can order them if you don't have a 3D printer to print them at home.

• Sean Conner ☛ Converting IEEE-754 floating point to Color BASIC floating point

  I'm still playing around with floating point on the 6809—specifically, support for floating point for the Color Computer. The format for floating point for Color BASIC (written by Microsoft) predates the IEEE-754 Floating Point Standard by a few years and thus, isn't quite compatible. It's close, though. It's defined as an 8-bit exponent, biased by 129, a single sign bit (after the exponent) and 31 bits for the mantissa (the leading one assumed). It also does not support ±∞ nor NaN. This differs from the IEEE-754 single precision that uses a single sign bit, an 8-bit exponent biased by 127 and 23 bits for the mantissa (which also assumes a leafing one) and support for infinities and NaN. The IEEE-754 double precision uses a single sign bit, an 11-bit exponent biased by 1023 and 52 bit for the mantissa (leading one assumed) plus support for infinities and NaN.

• Ruben Schade ☛ Buying a literal scrap of Commodore PC history

  Last May I wrote a post about Commodore’s PC line. The famed C64 and Amiga manufacturer also hedged their bets in Europe with a line of PC clones that had some interesting quirks, including a PET startup jingle, some unique graphics hardware, and an unusual level of motherboard IO integration for the time.

• Mike Rockwell ☛ Emulation on iPhone

  Last year I wrote an about retro gaming on iOS. I’ve had a lot of fun playing games on the platform, especially through emulation. Much of what I wrote last year is still applicable today, but I thought I’d revisit the topic with a focus on the state of emulation on iOS and all of the software and accessories you’ll need to get started.

• Jeff Geerling ☛ Getting files to and from a PowerBook 3400c with hfsutils

  There are about a dozen ways to get files to and from an older Mac like my PowerBook 3400c, but right now (at least until I figure out a good way to get my NAS -> an AppleTalk server -> 3400c working), my preferred method is via a CF card—I pop the CF card into a CF-to-PCMCIA adapter, then insert that into one of my PowerBook 3400's PC card slots, and bingo: removable flash storage on a 1990s laptop!

  I still have a few CF cards kicking around (I used them with my old Nikon D700 camera), and you can buy a 4GB SanDisk Ultra CF card new from Amazon still—albeit for the price of $35... Sometimes the smaller/older cards work better with old Macs, and most of the files I deal with are well under a few MB anyways.

• Pi My Life Up ☛ Running Plant-it on the Raspberry Pi

  The Plant-it software even has support for the Trefle API, allowing you to get a wealth of information about a plant without manually typing in all their details yourself.

  Best of all, Plant-it is a relatively low-resource program, meaning you can run it on the Raspberry Pi without any issues.

  It is also super easy to get Plant-it up and running on the Raspberry Pi as it is distributed as an ARM-compatible Docker container.

• Jasper Tandy ☛ Jasper is blogging Gadgets

  I've wanted to build a computer inside a Pelican case for a while now, and it's getting closer. I grabbed all the Raspberry Pi 5 stuff I needed to get started measuring etc. The plan is to learn a bit of CAD and get some mounts printed that I can screw into place in the case.

• The Register UK ☛ Report shows Kubernetes users overprovisioning in cloud

  Cloud optimization biz CAST AI says that companies are still overprovisioning resources and paying too much as a consequence. It claims that in Kubernetes clusters of 50 or more CPUs, only 13 percent of provisioned CPUs and 20 percent of memory is typically utilized.

  CAST develops a platform to monitor use of Kubernetes resources and compare them with what it calculates the workload actually requires. The figures in its latest study are based on an analysis of more than 4,000 clusters operated by customers prior to optimization.

• Wladislav Artsimovich ☛ Thermal Camera LUTs and colormaps for DaVinci Resolve

  When writing my previous article about LUTs in video games, I noticed that there is no straight forward way to colormap grayscale footage in DaVinci Resolve, a popular video editing and color grading suite for Windows, Linux and MacOS. On the internet you can find LUTs which attempt to color RGB video in the style of thermal camera footage, but I didn’t find standard colormaps.