news
Linux Embedded and Devices With Linux or Open Systems
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CNX Software ☛ SparkFun Air Quality PM1/PM2.5/PM10 Sensor features Bosch’s BMV080, the world’s smallest particulate matter sensor
SparkFun’s “Air Quality PM1/PM2.5/PM10 Sensor – BMV080 (Qwiic)” is breakout board for the Bosch Sensortec BMV080 particulate matter sensor which the German company claims is the world’s smallest and 450 times smaller in volume than any comparable device on the market.
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Hackaday ☛ Zink Is Zero Ink — Sort Of
When you think of printing on paper, you probably think of an ink jet or a laser printer. If you happen to think of a thermal printer, we bet you think of something like a receipt printer: fast and monochrome. But in the last few decades, there’s been a family of niche printers designed to print snapshots in color using thermal technology. Some of them are built into cameras and some are about the size of a chunky cell phone battery, but they all rely on a Polaroid-developed technology for doing high-definition color printing known as Zink — a portmanteau of zero ink.
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Hackaday ☛ A SNES CPU Replacement Via FPGA
Let’s say you had a SNES with a busted CPU. What would you do? Your SNES would be through! That is, unless, you had a replacement based on an FPGA. [leonllr] has been developing just such a thing.
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Hackaday ☛ Building A Sliding Tile Clock
Hackers like making clocks, and we like reporting on them around these parts. Particularly if they’ve got a creative mechanism that we haven’t seen before. This fine timepiece from [gooikerjh] fits the bill precisely—it’s a sliding tile clock!
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Hackaday ☛ Golang On The PS2
A great many PlayStation 2 games were coded in C++, and there are homebrew SDKs that let you work in C. However, precious little software for the platform was ever created in Golang. [Ricardo] decided this wouldn’t do, and set about making the language work with Sony’s best-selling console of all time.
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[Old] Tom's Hardware ☛ Raspberry Pi Pico's RP2040 Gains Long-Range Radio
With a range of 15 miles, if you have line-of-sight, the RFM95W radio transceiver module from Hope RF gives it a touch more communication distance than Wi-Fi when in LoRa mode, which also gets you data transmission at 37.5kbps. It’s connected to the RP2040 SoC via the GPIO's SPI channel, with an antenna connected by a U.FL connector. Should you wish to step up the power, bandwidth rises to 250kbps in FSK mode.
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CNX Software ☛ Geniatech APC680 Edge Hey Hi (AI) and TV Box is powered by Synaptics VS680 Hey Hi (AI) SoC with 7.9 TOPS NPU
Geniatech APC680 is described as an “AI-powered TV box” powered by Synaptics VS680 quad-core Cortex-A73 SoC with a built-in 7.9 TOPS NPU and designed for smart entertainment and edge computing. The system comes with 4GB RAM and 16GB eMMC flash by default, 4K capable HDMI output and input ports, gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0, a few USB ports, and a range of wireless options including 4G LTE, Zigbee, Z-Wave, and LoRa.
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CNX Software ☛ ESP32-S3 Smart Audio devkit integrates 1.8-inch round touch LCD, microphone, optional battery and speaker box
Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-LCD-1.85C is an ESP32-S3 development kit with a 1.85-inch round touchscreen display with 360×360 resolution, support for Wi-Fi & Bluetooth BLE 5, and a built-in microphone.
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CNX Software ☛ ESP LowCode Matter splits system and application firmware for simpler ESP32 device development
Espressif released the ESP ZeroCode web application in the summer of 2023 to create custom Matter-certifiable firmware for ESP32 targets. However, if your application requires some more customization, but you don’t have the budget or need for a software engineering team, the company has now launched ESP LowCode Matter. It retains most of the simplicity of ESP ZeroCode, but also provides the ability to further customize the application without having to use the ESP Matter SDK, which requires more advanced coding skills to build your own firmware.
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Bunnie Huang ☛ Winner, Name that Ware February 2025
The Ware from last month is the main board from a Lego Duplo Steam Train. As predicted, this was a much easier one to guess.
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Linux Gizmos ☛ Efinix Titanium Ti180 FPGA Delivers Embedded LPDDR4x Memory and Expanded I/O
Efinix has introduced the Titanium Ti180J484D1 FPGA, which includes 2 Gb of embedded LPDDR4x memory. By integrating memory directly within the FPGA package, the number of pins required for external memory interfaces is reduced, simplifying PCB design and lowering system complexity.
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Bunnie Huang ☛ Name that Ware, March 2025
This is a technique a friend of mine told me about where you put a polarizer on the light source, and then put another polarizer 90 degrees from the light source in front of your imaging lens. As you can see from the comparison above, the contrast on the part numbers is greatly enhanced — at the expense of losing most of your light. What isn’t obvious from the two images is the one on the left required a much longer exposure because 90+% of the light is not reaching the camera due to the cross-polarization.
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Ruben Schade ☛ I n-now have a Commodore 116!
Here she is at a local coffee shop after picking her up. Technically a hardware store that people in Sydney might recognise, but I thought the coffee break area had surprisingly good lighting: [...]
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Fors Sala, free shimmer reverb plugin for macOS, Linux, and Windows
Fors Sala is a new free shimmer “Ceremonial” reverb plugin for macOS, Linux, and Windows that can create instant ambient textures.
In recent years, the Swedish developers at Fors have spoiled us with beautiful, top-notch Max For Live devices. Some of them are very inspired by Elektron devices. No wonder, considering one of the developers was also part of the Digitone I development team.