Open Hardware: Hackable Devices, RISC-V and 3-D Printing
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freeDSP-aurora open source DSP offers 8 inputs and outputs
Developers at Auverdion based in Verden, Germany have created the new open source DSP offering users eight inputs and eight outputs with USB Audio Class 2 and wireless control via Wifi and Bluetooth. The aptly named freeDSP-aurora DSP has this week been launched via Kickstarter.
The new hardware supports macOS, Linux or Windows 10 operating systems and a XMOS XE216-512-TQ128 MCU is used to expose an USB Audio Class 2 compliant interface. The ESP32 MCU controls the operation of the DSP and support for both WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity can support peripherals such as a rotary encoder, display, temperature sensor, PWM controlled fan and IR sensor.
“The freeDSP-aurora is a cost-effective real-time audio signal processing solution for audio enthusiasts, researchers, and the do-it-yourself community. It is a bare circuit board that can be incorporated into your own projects. It comes with no housing. Easy assembling and simple programmability are the main focus. It is based on Analog Devices’ ADAU1452 DSP chip.”
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The Future Of Fritzing Is Murky At Best
Fritzing is a very nice Open Source design tool for PCBs, electrical sketches, and schematics for designers and artists to move from a prototype to real hardware. Over the years, we’ve seen fantastic projects built with Fritzing. Fritzing has been the subject of books, lectures, and educational courses, and the impact of Fritzing has been huge. Open up a book on electronics from O’Reilly, and you’ll probably see a schematic or drawing created in Fritzing.
However, and there’s always a however, Fritzing is in trouble. The project is giving every appearance of having died. You can’t register on the site, you can’t update parts, the official site lacks HTTPS, the Twitter account has been inactive for 1,200 days, there have been no blog posts for a year, and the last commit to GitHub was on March 13th. There are problems, but there is hope: [Patrick Franken], one of the developers of Fritzing and the president of the PCB firm Aisler which runs the Fritzing Fab, recently gave a talk at FOSDEM concerning the future of Fritzing. (That’s a direct FTP download, so have fun).
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Slic3r vs Cura – 3D Printer Slicer Software Shootout
A slicer is a software application that takes in 3D model files, like STL and OBJ, as input and, based on the user’s preferences and settings, creates g-code files as output.
G-code is a set of commands that control the movement of a 3D printer along the X, Y, and Z axes for the entire model. They also contain instructions for heaters and other connected devices, such as servos or leveling sensors.
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Can MIPS Leapfrog RISC-V?
When Wave Computing acquired MIPS, “going open source” was the plan Wave’s CEO Derek Meyer had in mind. But Meyer, a long-time MIPS veteran, couldn’t casually mention his plan then. Wave was hardly ready with the solid infrastructure it needed to support a legion of hardware developers interested in coming to the MIPS open-source community.
To say “go open source” is easy. Pulling it off has meant a huge shift from MIPS, long accustomed to the traditional IP licensing business.
Wave’s first step was hiring Art Swift as president of its MIPS licensing business. Swift fit the bill as someone who knows the best of both worlds — old (traditional IP for licensing) and new (open source). Swift had served as vice-chair of the RISC-V Foundation’s Marketing Committee and was vice president of marketing and business development at MIPS Technologies from 2008 to 2011.
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Building A RISC-V Desktop
The core of this build is the HiFive Unleashed, a Linux-capable board from SiFive, makers of the first (production) RISC-V microcontroller. This board uses the Freedom U540 SOC built with a 28nm process, has 8GB of DDR4, and 32MB of Flash. For a board built on an Open archetecuture this is impressive, but it comes at a cost: the HiFive Unleashed ran for $1000 during its crowdfunding campaign.
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Can Arm Survive RISC-V Challenge?
We hear stories about new licensing practices at Arm since it was acquired by Japan’s SoftBank. Arm’s rivals tell us that they are engaged in many more talks with current Arm licensees who are looking for alternatives.
Product developers no longer have the luxury of two-year product development cycles. And many don’t have the big budgets for licensing fees, often quoted as the huge barrier to entry for system-on-chip (SoC) design.
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Open Source Hardware Benefits Procurement Practices
“Open source does two things for you: it rationalizes price and motivates adoption and investment,” explained Keith Witek, senior vice president, Corporate Development, Strategy, and General Counsel at SiFive, a provider of commercial RISC-V processor IP. “If I charge you too much, you can leave and go to different vendor. I can’t lock you up with proprietary architecture or tools. And you feel like you can invest, because no one can take it away from you. RISC-V takes a big part in democratizing silicon.”
The basics of RISC-V
The RISC-V ISA is based on established reduced instruction set computer (RISC) principles. Anyone can use it for all types of implementation, including development and commercial and open source implementations, without cost. That means that anyone who wants to can design, manufacture and sell RISC-V chips and software.
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The next generation open-source, 3D-printable Niskin bottle has arrived!
The Niskin bottle, a seemingly simple device designed to take water samples at discrete depths, is one of the most important tools of oceanography. These precision instruments allow us to bring ocean water back to the surface to study its chemical composition, quality, and biologic constituency. If you want to know how much plastic is circulating in the deep sea, you need a Niskin bottle. If you need to measure chemical-rich plumes in minute detail, you need a Niskin bottle. If you want to use environmental DNA analyses to identify the organisms living in a region of the big blue sea, you need a Niskin bottle.
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Arduino IoT Cloud Public Beta
One of the reassuring things about the Arduino, and something that contributed to making it a success, was its open source nature. Of course, this caused Arduino - the company - problems. How to make money and keep control of an open source product is a headache. One solution is to move things online.
Once upon a time the Arduino was programmed exclusively using an open source desktop IDE. Using it gave the security of open source.
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Hack My House: Garage Door Cryptography Meets Raspberry Pi
The garage door is controlled by a button hung on the garage wall. There is only a pair of wires, so a simple relay should be all that is needed to simulate the button press from a Raspberry Pi. I wired a relay module to a GPIO on the Pi mounted in the garage ceiling, and wrote a quick and dirty test program in Python. Sure enough, the little relay was clicking happily– but the garage door wasn’t budging. Time to troubleshoot. Does the push button still work? *raises the garage door* yep. How about the relay now? *click…click* nope.
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How 3D Printers Work – Simply Explained
Many of us will be familiar with the Star Trek scene where Captain Picard steps up to the food synthesizer and says, “Tea, Earl Grey, hot,” and the drink miraculously appears. When you mention 3D printing to the uninitiated, this is sometimes what they expect.
The reality is that 3D printing is a lot more down to earth and certainly easier to understand than matter scrambling.
In this article, we’ll look at how this approach to manufacturing has become a mainstay among hobbyists and engineers alike.
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