Open Hardware: Raspberry Pi, Arduino, RISC-V, and More
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Raspberry Pi ☛ PiDP-10 | #MagPiMonday
The original PDP-10, of which this is a two-thirds scale reproduction, found a place in the legend and folklore of early computing, mainly to the MIT AI lab, who’s residents found the computer to be perfect for hacking about and creating things, amongst which was the first computer game, SpaceWar!
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Arduino ☛ A stroopwafel doneness detection device
Magd inferred that there are three factors that, together, might help him determine when a stroopwafel becomes ready for consumption: heat, time, and movement. That last one might seem strange, but stroopwafels tend to curl up after they reach a certain point — probably a result of the sandwich style construction and a differential in temperature/moisture. So, by looking for movement, Magd thought he could detect the beginning of that process.
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Arduino ☛ Coolest controllers ever? Icy gamepads melt in users’ hands
Nintendo’s Joy-Con controller system is very innovative and generally well-regarded, with one major exception: stick drift. That’s a reliability issue that eventually affects a large percentage of Joy-Cons, to the frustration of gamers. But what if that was intentional and gamepads were designed to deteriorate in short order? That’s the idea behind ICY Interfaces.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Tiny $10 Raspberry Pi 5 PCie board brings low-cost, high-speed storage – the end of micro SD is nigh
The Raspberry Pi 5's PCIe connection is proving to be the inspiration for a plethora of Pi products and super-fast storage is leading the charge. Pineboard's (formerly known as Pineberry Pi) latest PCIe-powered add-on is the HatDrive! Nano, a smaller footprint board for NVMe storage and other PCIe boards. The board goes on sale today for €9 (approximately $10) plus taxes.
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Herman Õunapuu ☛ No HDMI port on the ThinkPad T430? No problem!
The mini DisplayPort port has annoyed me for as long as I’ve had this machine.
Most places where I’ve had to present something only offer an HDMI cable, which means that I always have to carry a dongle around, and I keep forgetting to bring one everywhere I happen to go.
Until now.
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Noam Zeise ☛ A Mini Monitor for a Pi
My overall goal is to have a sort of handheld “console” that I can connect a keyboard to and use as a normal computer. This post implements the display functionality needed to fulfill part of the goal.
I lay out the steps needed for interacting with the display over spi and the issues I encountered trying to use it like a monitor. The end result is a system service that runs on startup, consuming 2.5 mb of ram and ~2% of the CPU. It also respects the X display power management system (dpms) to save on battery life by going to sleep and turning the backlight off.
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CNX Software ☛ $20+ NanoKVM is a tiny low-power RISC-V KVM over IP solution
Sipeed NanoKVM is a tiny KVM over IP solution based on the Lichee RVNano RISC-V microcontroller board that offers most of the features provided by the popular Raspberry Pi 4-based PiKVM solution allowing users to fully remote control a host such as a computer, server, or SBC down to the BIOS level and power on/off. Two variants are available, namely the NanoKVM Lite and NanoKVM Full.
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Linux Gizmos ☛ HatDrive! Nano: Affordable €9.00 M.2 HAT for Raspberry Pi 5
The Pineboards HatDrive! Nano is a compact 2230/2242 M-Key M.2 HAT for the Raspberry Pi, measuring 55 x 34mm. It offers an affordable upgrade from a microSD card to M.2 storage, supporting NVMe SSDs, AI accelerators, and other M-Key devices. It is compatible with the official Raspberry Pi case lid and the Active Cooler.
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Hackaday ☛ Open Source High Speed SiGe IC Production For Free!
We’ve covered the Tiny Tapeout project a few times on these pages, and while getting your digital IC design out there onto actual silicon for a low cost is super cool, it is still somewhat limited. Now, along comes the German FMD QNC project funding MPW (multi-project wafer) runs not in bog standard Silicon CMOS but Silicon-Germanium bipolar technology. And this is accessible to you and me, of course, provided you have the skills to design in this high-speed analog technology.
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CNX Software ☛ Renesas SLG7EVBFORGE FPGA dev board is built around ForgeFPGA SLG47910V low-density FPGA
Renesas SLG7EVBFORGE FPGA dev board, built around SLG47910V is Renesas’ first low-density FPGA in the ForgeFPGA family. The FPGA includes 1120 LUTs, 1120 flip-flops, 5kb of distributed memory, 32kb of block RAM, and a 50 MHz on-chip oscillator with a phase-locked loop (PLL). With robust features, low power consumption, and affordable pricing this FPGA can be used in applications in sensor data aggregation, consumer electronics, and portable computing devices.
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Hackaday ☛ Keyboard Contains Entire Mini PC, Just BYOD
When we talk about keyboards that do it all, we usually mean either big ones with lots of keys and doodads like rotary encoders and displays, or small ones with lots of layers (and usually a few doodads, too). But this — this is something else entirely. Chinese PC maker Linglong have crammed an entire mini PC into a keyboard that’s small enough to fit in your back pocket. Oh, and it folds, too. All you need is a display.
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Hackaday ☛ Hack All The Things, Get All The Schematics
When I was growing up, about 4 or 5 years old, I had an unorthodox favourite type of reading material: service manuals for my dad’s audio equipment. This got to the point that I kept asking my parents for more service manuals, and it became a running joke in our family for a bit. Since then, I’ve spent time repairing tech and laptops in particular as a way of earning money, hanging out at a flea market in the tech section, then spending tons of time at our hackerspace. Nowadays, I’m active in online hacker groups, and I have built series of projects closely interlinked with modern-day consumer-facing tech.