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January 7, 2021January 7, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Maypole MicroSD card reader comes with ESP32 for WiFi, smart storage (Crowdfunding)

Several years ago, we covered Zsun WiFi card reader a tiny USB card reader with WiFi and a battery that allowed users to access files via USB or WiFi from any device. People managed to hack the device and run OpenWrt on the little MicroSD card reader, but this required either to open the hardware and do some soldering, or use another method that could potentially brick the hardware, so not an ideal solution. But now Akshar Vastarpara has come with a similar device. Maypole is an open-source hardware MicroSD card reader powered by Espressif ESP32 processor providing both WiFi and the resources for smarter storage. It comes with an optional battery too to access files even without having to connect it to a USB port. Maypole hardware specifications: Storage – Swappable MicroSD cards up to 32GB Wireless Connectivity WiFi 2.4 GHz WiFi 4 via ESP32 WiSoC, Up to 4 […]

January 6, 2021January 6, 2021 by Abhishek Jadhav - 3 Comments

Open-source VSCP IoT/M2M automation framework supports Arduino, Raspberry Pi

VSCP (Very Simple Control Protocol) is an open-source IoT framework that works on development boards like Arduino or Raspberry Pi, and lets you control IoT home automation tasks. The framework is highly scalable, has a very low footprint, and as such is specially designed for resource-limited devices. VSCP is an open-source standard protocol for m2m, IoT and other remote control and measurement applications. It enables simple, low-cost devices to be networked together with high-end computers and/or to work as an autonomous system, whatever the communication media is. The VSCP Protocol has two levels: Level 1 and Level 2. The protocol was primarily used in CAN networks (that is Level 1 for tiny microcontrollers) because CAN is cheap and reliable with high efficiency. However, VSCP can be used for faster transport layers such as TCP/IP, so here comes Level 2 which achieves better performance. We have already seen Souliss, an open-source […]

December 30, 2020December 30, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 38 Comments

Dragonbox Pyra open source hardware handheld Linux PC is finally shipping

We first covered the Dragonbox Pyra in 2014 when it was described as an open-source handheld game console powered by Texas Instruments OMAP5432 SoC, or maybe AllWinner A80, Intel Bay Trail, or Qualcomm Snapdragon processors since the exact specifications were still in the works for the Pandora successor. Michael Mrozek (EvilDragon) finally decided to keep going with the OMAP5 processor due to the good documentation and software support, and pre-orders started in 2016 with a 330 to 400 Euros downpayment and no clear timeline about shipping. It eventually took over four more years, but the Dragonbox Pyra is finally getting assembled and shipping to backers has started. Since so many years have passed, you’d be forgiven if you completely forgot or did not know at all about the specifications: SoC – Texas Instruments OMAP 5432 SoC with 2x Arm Cortex-A15 @ 1.5 GHz with NEON SIMD, 2x ARM Cortex-M4, Imagination […]

December 23, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments

Glasgow Interface Explorer is an iCE40 FPGA based hardware debugging tool (crowdfunding)

We’ve seen some pretty interesting boards for hardware hackers and reverse engineers in recent months with the likes of Ollie and Tigard USB debug boards that allow interfacing various hardware interfaces and/or flashing firmware to different types of target boards. Here’s another one: Glasgow Interface Explorer. Based on Lattice Semi iCE40 FPGA, the board is described as being “designed for hardware designers, reverse engineers, digital archivists, electronics hobbyists, and anyone else who wants to communicate with a wide selection of digital devices with minimum hassle”. Glasgow Interface Explorer specifications: FPGA – Lattice Semiconductor iCE40HX8K FPGA USB – 1x USB-C port connected to FX2 high-speed USB interface capable of 480 Mbps throughput I/O headers 2x 8-channel I/O banks with 16 highly flexible I/O Each I/O bank comes with A dedicated programmable linear voltage regulator, configurable from 1.8 V to 5 V and providing up to 150 mA of power A dedicated […]

December 14, 2020December 14, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 16 Comments

Bootterm – a developer-friendly serial terminal program

There are plenty of terminal programs to access the serial console from minicom or screen to Putty. But Willy Tarreau was not quite happy with those tools, so he decided to write his own: Bootterm. I was terribly fed up with the current state of serial terminals, which either don’t cope well with errors, or take ages to start, making you lose the first characters, or don’t support non-standard speeds etc. I finally wrote mine to address all that at once, plus support for automatic port detection (the last registered one is the good one by default), waiting for the port to be ready, and also support fixed or timed captures. And a few environment variables make it possible not to type any argument at all yet have the expected behavior. If that’s something of interest to you, you can check it there: https://github.com/wtarreau/bootterm It’s still young (no support for […]

December 9, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 19 Comments

Google’s Fuchsia OS is now open to public contributions, gets a “roadmap”

We were first made aware of Fuchsia OS, an open-source operating system developed by Google, in 2016. At the time, nobody clearly knew what was the goal of the project, although some speculated it could be a Linux replacement. We first wrote about it in 2018, as Fuchsia OS added support for several Amlogic processors hinting that it may be used in TV boxes and media streamers. Google also launched a developer website in 2019 to provide more information and resources to people outside the company interested in trying it out. But while the OS development was always made in the open with the source code publicly available, Google did not accept contributions from the community so far. This has now changed, as the company just announced the expansion of Fuchsia’s open-source model to make it easier for the developer community to contribute to the project. Specifically, Google has set […]

December 4, 2020December 5, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Mesa 20.3 released with Raspberry Pi 4 V3DV driver, Panfrost Bifrost support

We’ve previously reported that the Vulkan 1.0 conformant V3DV driver for Raspberry Pi 4 and other Broadcom BCM2711 based platforms was part of Mesa 20.3 open-source graphics framework. But at the time, it was still under development. The good news is that Mesa 20.3 has now been released, and there’s much more than Raspberry Pi 4 support, as Collabora informed us the release also included Arm Mali Bifrost GPU support via the open-source Panfrost driver. The latter was made possible thanks to the work by Alyssa Rosenzweig and Boris Brezillon, with Alyssa going into details in a recent blog post on Collabora. More work is still needed with better performance and OpenGL 3.1 being the focus in the months ahead. But there were also many other changes in Mesa 20.3 as reported by Phoronix: OpenGL 4.6 and Vulkan 1.2 APIs support Initial support for Intel Gen12 Alder Lake graphics and […]

December 1, 2020 by Abhishek Jadhav - 3 Comments

DIY Pi KVM: An easy and cheap KVM over IP for Raspberry Pi

Traditional IP-KVM systems may cost you hundreds of dollars. DIY Pi KVM over IP is a very simple and fully functional Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP that you can make yourself. If you do not know what IP-KVM is, it stands for keyboard, video, and mouse. It allows you to connect to a computer or a server remotely. With this, you can fix problems such as configuring the BIOS or reinstalling the OS using a virtual CD-ROM or flash drive. You can see the v2 example implementation in the above image. Pi-KVM v0 and v2 are ready-made images available for download for Raspberry Pi. You will find all the required hardware in the “Getting Started” section for the v0 and v2 platform for Raspberry Pi. In the figure below you can see the B101 HDMI-to-CSI bridge connected to the Raspberry Pi. The team is working to launch the v3 board […]