Devices/Embedded: Arduino and More

   

• Arduino Blog » Driving a mini RC bumper car with a Nintendo Wii Balance Board

  Taking inspiration from Colin Furze’s 600cc bumper car constructed a few years ago, Henry Forsyth decided to build his own RC miniature version. His device features a 3D-printed and nicely-painted body, along with a laser-cut chassis that holds the electrical components. The vehicle is driven by a single gearmotor and a pair of 3D-printed wheels, with another caster-style wheel that’s turned left and right by a servo steering. An Arduino Uno and Bluetooth shield are used for overall control with a motor driver. The Bluetooth functionality allows for user interface via a PS4 controller, or even (after a bit of programming) a Wii Balance Board. In the end, the PS4 remote seems to be the better control option, but who knows where else this type of balance technique could be employed?

• Intel Elkhart Lake COM’s offer up to 3x 2.5GbE, SIL2 functional safety

• E3K all-in-one wireless bio-sensing platform supports EMG, ECG, and EEG sensors (Crowdfunding)

  Over the year, The maker community has designed several platforms to monitor vital signs with boards like Healthy Pi v4 or HeartyPatch both of which are powered by an ESP32 WiFi & Bluetooth wireless SoC. WallySci has designed another all-in-one wireless bio-sensing platform, called E3K, that also happens to be powered by Espressif Systems ESP32 chip, and can be connected to an electromyography (EMG) sensor to capture muscle movements, an electrocardiography (ECG) sensor to measure heart activity, and/or an electroencephalography (EEG) sensor to capture brain activity. The board also has an extra connector to connect a 9-axis IMU to capture motion.

• Coffee Lake system can expand via M.2, mini-PCIe, PCIe, and Xpansion

  MiTac’s fanless, rugged “MX1-10FEP” embedded computer has an 8th or 9th Gen Coffee Lake Core or Xeon CPU plus 3x SATA bays, 4x USB 3.1 Gen 2, 2x M.2, 2x mini-PCIe, and optional PCIe x16 and x1. MiTac recently introduced a Coffee Lake based MX1-10FEP computer that is also being distributed by ICP Germany. This month, ICP announced that the MX1-10FEP-D model with PCIe x16 and PCIe x1 slots has been tested and classified by Nvidia as “NGC Ready” for Nvidia GPU Cloud graphics boards such as the Nvidia T4 and Tesla P4. [...] The MX1-10FEP has an Intel C246 chipset and defaults to Windows 10 with Linux on request.

Wine 5.20 Released

The Wine development release 5.20 is now available.

What's new in this release (see below for details):
  - More work on the DSS cryptographic provider.
  - A number of fixes for windowless RichEdit.
  - Support for FLS callbacks.
  - Window resizing in the new console host.
  - Various bug fixes.

The source is available from the following locations:

  https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/5.x/wine-5.20.tar.xz
  http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/5.x/wine-5.20.tar.xz

Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:

  https://www.winehq.org/download

You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation

You can also get the current source directly from the git
repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.

Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file
AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.

PostmarketOS update brings HDMI support for the PinePhone and PineTab

When the PinePhone postmarketOS Community Edition smartphone began shipping to customers in September it came with a version of the operating system with one important feature missing: HDMI output. So when my phone arrived a few weeks ago I was able to spend some time familiarizing myself with the operating system and I could plug in the included Convergence Dock to use USB accessories including a keyboard, mouse, and storage. But I wasn’t able to connect an external display. Now I can.

today's howtos

• How To Install Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla

  This tutorial explains Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla computer installation. You will prepare at least two disk partitions, finishing it all in about twenty minutes, and enjoy! Let's start right now.

• How to install Ubuntu 20.10 - YouTube

  In this video, I am going to show how to install Ubuntu 20.10.

• How To Install Webmin on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS - idroot

  In this tutorial we will show you how to install Webmin on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, as well as some extra required packages by Webmin control panel

• Running Ironic Standalone on RHEL | Adam Young’s Web Log

  This is only going to work if you have access to the OpenStack code. If you are not an OpenStack customer, you are going to need an evaluation entitlement. That is beyond the scope of this article.

• Introduction to Ironic

  The sheer number of projects and problem domains covered by OpenStack was overwhelming. I never learned several of the other projects under the big tent. One project that is getting relevant to my day job is Ironic, the bare metal provisioning service. Here are my notes from spelunking the code.

• Adding Nodes to Ironic

  TheJulia was kind enough to update the docs for Ironic to show me how to include IPMI information when creating nodes.

• Secure NTP with NTS

  Many computers use the Network Time Protocol (NTP) to synchronize their system clocks over the internet. NTP is one of the few unsecured internet protocols still in common use. An attacker that can observe network traffic between a client and server can feed the client with bogus data and, depending on the client’s implementation and configuration, force it to set its system clock to any time and date. Some programs and services might not work if the client’s system clock is not accurate. For example, a web browser will not work correctly if the web servers’ certificates appear to be expired according to the client’s system clock. Use Network Time Security (NTS) to secure NTP. Fedora 331 is the first Fedora release to support NTS. NTS is a new authentication mechanism for NTP. It enables clients to verify that the packets they receive from the server have not been modified while in transit. The only thing an attacker can do when NTS is enabled is drop or delay packets. See RFC8915 for further details about NTS. NTP can be secured well with symmetric keys. Unfortunately, the server has to have a different key for each client and the keys have to be securely distributed. That might be practical with a private server on a local network, but it does not scale to a public server with millions of clients. NTS includes a Key Establishment (NTS-KE) protocol that automatically creates the encryption keys used between the server and its clients. It uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) on TCP port 4460. It is designed to scale to very large numbers of clients with a minimal impact on accuracy. The server does not need to keep any client-specific state. It provides clients with cookies, which are encrypted and contain the keys needed to authenticate the NTP packets. Privacy is one of the goals of NTS. The client gets a new cookie with each server response, so it doesn’t have to reuse cookies. This prevents passive observers from tracking clients migrating between networks.

• Comfortable Motion: Absolutely Cursed Vim Scrolling - YouTube

  Have you ever felt like Vim was too useful and thought hey let's change that, well that's what this dev thought and now we have a plugin called comfortable motion that's adds physics based scrolling into vim, what's physics based scrolling you ask. Well it's scrolling that occurs based on how long you hold down the scroll key.

• Running Cassandra on Fedora 32 | Adam Young’s Web Log

  This is not a tutorial. These are my running notes from getting Cassandra to run on Fedora 32. The debugging steps are interesting in their own right. I’ll provide a summary at the end for any sane enough not to read through the rest.

• Recovering Audio off an Old Tape Using Audacity | Adam Young’s Web Log

  One of my fiorends wrote a bunch of music back in high school. The only remainig recordings are on a casette tape that he produced. Time has not been kind to the recordings, but they are audible…barely. He has a device that produces MP3s from the tape. My job has been to try and get them so that we can understand them well enough to recover the original songs. I have the combined recording on a single MP3. I’ve gone through and noted the times where each song starts and stops. I am going to go through the steps I’ve been using to go from that single long MP3 to an individual recording.

• Role of Training and Certification at the Linux Foundation

  Open source allows anyone to dip their toes in the code, read up on the documentation, and learn everything on their own. That’s how most of us did it, but that’s just the first step. Those who want to have successful careers in building, maintaining, and managing IT infrastructures of companies need more structured hands-on learning with real-life experience. That’s where Linux Foundation’s Training and Certification unit enters the picture. It helps not only greenhorn developers but also members of the ecosystem who seek highly trained and certified engineers to manage their infrastructure. Swapnil Bhartiya sat down with Clyde Seepersad, SVP and GM of Training and Certification at the Linux Foundation, to learn more about the Foundation’s efforts to create a generation of qualified professionals.

• Hetzner build machine

  This is part of a series of posts on compiling a custom version of Qt5 in order to develop for both amd64 and a Raspberry Pi. Building Qt5 takes a long time. The build server I was using had CPUs and RAM, but was very slow on I/O. I was very frustrated by that, and I started evaluating alternatives. I ended up setting up scripts to automatically provision a throwaway cloud server at Hetzner.