news
Hardware: Espressif, 3D Printing, and Firefox Phones
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Devices/Embedded
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Quentin Santos ☛ Reproducing Espressif’s reset circuit
We’ll be using the ESP-Prog, which is a combined UART and JTAG USB adapter. It implements the same reset circuit as the Espressif development boards, but we can more easily peek at EN and IO0.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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CNX Software ☛ AnyShake Explorer – An affordable, open-source hardware seismic monitoring system (Crowdfunding)
AnyShake Explorer is a relatively affordable, open-source hardware seismic monitoring system that offers an alternative to the Raspberry Shake earthquake monitoring solutions. The device supports up to three 3-axis geophones and integrates a 3-axis accelerometer and a 32-bit ADC for measurements. You just need to connect it to a host like a laptop or an SBC such as a Raspberry Pi, an Orange Pi, a Radxa ROCK, or a NanoPi over a USB to RS232 cable to get started.
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Hackaday ☛ BeyBlades Made Ever More Dangerous With 3D Printing
If you’re unfamiliar with Beyblades, they’re a simple toy. They consist of spinning tops, which are designed to “fight” in arenas by knocking each other around. While the off-the-shelf models are deemed safe enough for children to play with, [Jon Bringus] decided to take the danger level up a few notches with some custom launchers of his own design.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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HowTo Geek ☛ Whatever Happened to Firefox OS, Mozilla's Android Alternative?
Firefox is a free and open source web browser—the largest one that isn't tied to a corporation. Yet there was a briefly a time when Firefox was also a smartphone operating system. Firefox OS ultimately didn't take the world by storm, but why?
What Was Firefox OS?
It's almost funny to think about now, but over a decade ago, the Apple and Google smartphone duopoly was already a problem, and various competitors hoped they could compete. Firefox OS was one of them.
Like Android, many of these alternatives were based on Linux. In addition to Mozilla's Firefox OS, there was Ubuntu Phone from Canonical and Sailfish OS from Jolla. Each of these came to market within a few years of each other, with Firefox OS launching in 2013. Each carried the torch for Linux users, as it became increasingly clear that despite having an open foundation, most of the Android software people actually used would be increasingly locked down.
Firefox OS was built around the same web technologies that went into the browser and powered the web itself. The Linux kernel was the base. On top of that sat the Firefox and Gecko browser engines. Apps were to be built using existing open standards and programming languages, such as JavaScript and HTML.
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