open source News - Page 35 of 103 - CNX Software

January 11, 2022January 12, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Microchip SAM L22 board makes Casio F-91W watch more customizable (Crowdfunding)

Casio F-91W is a popular watch that was first released in 1989, and it is still sold today for around $15. The team at “Oddly Specific Objects” decided to create the “Sensor Watch” open-source hardware board based on Microchip SAM L22 Cortex-M0+ microcontroller that can replace the electronics inside the watch. They still keep the display and enclosure and wristband from the original Casion F-91W watch, but the new board connects to a temperature sensor board, and more importantly, provides the ability to hack/program the watch with your own code, besides the few samples provided, or even design your own sensor board. Sensor Watch board specifications: MCU – Microchip SAM L22 Arm Cortex M0+ microcontroller @ 32 MHz with 32KB RAM, 256 KB of Flash with up to 16 KB EEPROM emulation area Display – Controller for 10-digit segment LCD, plus five indicator segments USB – 1x Micro USB PCB […]

December 31, 2021December 31, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Mico – A USB microphone based on Raspberry Pi RP2040 MCU

Raspberry Pi RP2040 dual-core Cortex-M0+ microcontroller has found its way into Mico, a compact USB microphone with a PDM microphone providing better quality than cheap USB microphones going for one or two dollars or even 5 cents shipped for new Aliexpress users. The project started when Mahesh Venkitachalam (Elecronut Labs) was doing audio experiments with Machine Learning on the Raspberry Pi, and found out USB microphone dongles were extremely noisy with poor (distance) sensitivity, so he completed the project with a high-quality I2S microphone instead. He then had the idea of making his own USB microphone and found out Sandeep Mistry had already developed a Microphone Library for Pico, so he mostly had to work on the hardware that’s how Mico Raspberry Pi RP2040 USB microphone came to be. Mico specifications: MCU – Raspberry Pi RP2040 dual-core Cortex-M0+ microcontroller @ up to 133 MHz with 264KB SRAM Storage – 128Mbit […]

December 28, 2021December 28, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Phased out Raspberry PI CM4 quad SATA carrier board becomes open-source hardware

Wiretrustee carrier board for Raspberry Pi CM4 was unveiled about one year ago with four SATA connectors to help people build their own 4-bay NAS. Unfortunately, the company decided to discontinue the project due to the semiconductors market situation. The good news is the board is now open-source hardware with all resources shared publicly including the Allegro schematics and PCB layout, Gerber files, 3D models for the heatsink, and case designs for 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch drives. All files are available under “CERN Open Hardware Licence Version 2 – Permissive”. Here’s a quick reminder about the Wiretrustee board specifications: Supported SoM – Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and 4 Lite Storage 4x SATA 2.0 via Marvell 88SE9215 (PCIe 2.0 x1 to 4 6Gb/s SATA ports, no HW RAID) MicroSD card slot Video Output – HDMI 2.0 up to 4Kp60 Networking – 1x Gigabit Ethernet port USB – 2x USB 2.0 ports […]

December 27, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

KiCad 6.0.0 released with revamped user interface, thousands of changes

It took around 3.5 years of development to release KiCad 6.0.0 open-source EDA suite, as the previous major release, KiCad 5.0.0, was introduced in July 2018. KiCad 6.0.0 comes with a refreshed user interface that’s supposed to reduce the barriers of entry for new users and users switching from other design software with notably the schematic and PCB editors now feeling like being from the same program instead of completely different tools. As noted by the developers, it’s difficult to summarize all the changes because of the thousands of updates made between KiCad 5 and KiCad 6, but here are some highlights: Revamped schematic editing with the object selection and manipulation paradigm as the PCB editor, and several new features such as net classes, one-click wire start, intersheet references Brand-new schematic and symbol library file format allowing embedded symbols Redesign of the PCB design tool with new options such as […]

December 14, 2021December 14, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Unsurv offline – An ESP32 GNSS receiver board with NFC, accelerometer (Crowdfunding)

Unsurv offline is a compact and lightweight board with ESP32 WiSoC, a GNSS receiver, an accelerometer, and NFC capabilities to help developers/users collect and analyze location data in a privacy-friendly way. Unsurv Technologies initially developed the board to better understand offline video surveillance with OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. It does so by using a database of camera locations from the OSM on the SD card, “counts” surveillance cameras as you walk past them, and you can then transmit data via NFC and visualize it on your smartphone. The accelerometer is used to wake up the board from deep sleep upon detection of motion. The company has now made the board open-source and other applications are also possible. Unsurv offline specifications: Wireless modules TTGO T-micro32 WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 4.2 module based on ESP32-PICO-D4 SiP with dual-core ESP32 processor, 4MB FLASH, ceramic antenna U-blox CAM-M8C (aka u-blox M8) module with concurrent reception […]

December 9, 2021December 5, 2021 by Sponsored Post - 12 Comments

StarFive VisionFive single board computer officially for sale, accelerating RISC-V ecosystem development (Sponsored)

San Francisco, U.S. – Dec. 8, 2021- at RISC-V Summit 2021, StarFive Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter “StarFive”), the leader of RISC-V software and hardware ecosystem in China, announced that “VisionFive” single-board computer is officially for sale. The availability of VisionFive signifies a breakthrough in RISC-V hardware for high-end applications to help accelerate the innovations of the global RISC-V industry and promote the improvement and development of the open-source software ecosystem to drive the realization of more innovative top-layer RISC-V applications. VisionFive open-source hardware enables a new level of innovation for the RISC-V ecosystem VisionFive, the first generation of cost-effective RISC-V single-board computer is designed to run Linux, with StarFive’s JH7100 vision processing SoC. The JH7100 SoC is equipped with a 64-bit high-performance RISC-V dual-core processor with a 2MB L2 cache, running at 1.5GHz, which is excellent for high-performance computing. The JH7100 SoC is further equipped with the deep learning processing […]

November 28, 2021November 29, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 21 Comments

Toit open-source language claims to be 30x faster than MicroPython on ESP32

Developed by a team of former Google employees, Toit is a complete IoT platform with remote management, firmware updates for fleets of devices with features similar to the one offered by solutions such as balena, Microsoft Azure, or Particle edge-to-cloud platform. Toit currently works on ESP32 microcontrollers using lightweight containers, and after seeing existing high-level languages MicroPython and Javascript were not fast enough on low-end microcontrollers platforms, the team at Toit started to develop the Toit language in 2018, and has just made it open-source with the release of the compiler, virtual machine, and standard libraries on Github under an LGPL-2.1 license. One of the main reasons to switch from MicroPython to the Toit language is if your application is limited by performance or you operate ESP32 from a battery, as Toit claims up to 30x faster performance with Toit on ESP32: We went into crunch mode and some months […]

November 22, 2021November 22, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments

Renesas introduces sub 50 cents FPGA family with free Yosys-based development tools

Renesas has just unveiled the ForgeFPGA family of low-cost low-power FPGA’s to go for under 50 cents in (large) volumes following their acquisition of Dialog Semiconductors last August, who previously designed the GreenPAK programmable mixed-signal matrix. The company says its FPGAs consume half the power of competing FPGAs with a standby current of under 20uA, the price point will enable the use of FPGA in new markets and IoT products, and the tools will be free, at least as in beer, without any license to acquire or install. The full specifications are not available yet, but the ForgeFPGA Family will come with a maximum of 5,000 gates of logic, and the first devices ship with 1K and 2K Look Up Tables (LUTs), and as just mentioned, will operate at ultra-low power as low as 20 microamps in standby. ForgeFPGA is expected to target the same market as GreenPAK notably embedded […]