The Raspberry Pi gains yet another OS. This time, it is FreeBSD that has been ported over to the cheap and versatile little board. Expect it to be unstable, but that is part of the fun!
Read more and download your unofficial image from the RaspberryPi site.
The PICnDuino is an open source hardware platform with dual micro controllers. It is compatible with both Arduino and Amicus18 – a PIC based board inspired by the Arduino. This means that you can play with both the Arduino through the usual C-inspired sketch language, and the PIC through the Amicus BASIC language.
To be more specific, the board is carries an Atmel Atmega 238P and a PIC18F25K20. Four user-controllable LEDs, 44 I/O pins sporting digital, analog, SPI, I2C, PWM, IRQs and USART. Just like the original boards, the board is powered and interfaced over USB, so it is easy to bring along and hack with.
The price? Just over 15 EUR (AU$19), including worldwide shipping. And it comes in multiple colours!
via hackaday.
As a short follow-up on the Design for Manufacturing article by Bunnie, here is SparkFun’s take on the topic.
We recently wrote about BORPH, a Linux version that could launch hardware processes on configurable hardware systems, i.e. FPGAs. The question that always pops up is what kind of process you would like to run in hardware. By pure coincidence, Secworks released a great example yesterday.
They have a great article (in Swedish, Google Translated here), describing the problem and the need in detail. But to summarize, the problem is hash functions. Hash functions ideally convert a linear time look-up to a constant time problem. That is, unless you have a hash sum collision, i.e. two key values generating the same hash value.
The bad and the smart guys know this and they can bring down powerful web servers by generating hash collisions for the trivial hashing functions commonly used today. The answer to this threat is more complex hashing functions, but they require more number crunching power from the servers. To improve performance here, Secworks has implemented a SipHash algorithm using Verilog so that you can run it in configurable hardware. They have released the source on Gitorious as siphash_core. The result – a faster way to generate hashes through an algorithm that makes it as hard to cause collisions on purpose as it would be to read an encrypted mail (it is based on similar maths).
The Gitorious page also contains a great summary of what siphash_core does, in English. The license is BSD, so feel free to start tinkering with it and even include it in your own gizmos.
BORPH is an operating system designed for FPGA-based hardwares. It is basically a Linux kernel that is able to spawn what is known as hardware processes, thus executing in hardware.
The develoment is done at Berkley, and the name of the OS, BORPH, reads Berkley Operating System for ReProgrammable Hardware. For more information, either visit the project wiki, or the offical website.
via OsNews.
Bunnie has released part 2 of his series on outsourcing production. This time the topic is Design for Manufacturing.
Do you have a need for speed? Or just a need to run a couple of motors? If you combine that need with a TI LaunchPad, the Motor Driver Booster Pack from Longhorn Engineer might be just for you. It is open hardware, so the full Eagle sources can be downloaded.
What you get is a dual H-bridge motor driver, capable of driving 2A per motor at 2.7-10.8V. The logic voltage is 3.3V, so perfect for common ARM boards, but requires a level conversion to be used with the ever so popular Arduino.
via DangerousPrototypes.
Remember the days spent moving drivers into himem. Not something you’d like to relive? If you want to, then FreeDOS is for you. It is DOS, developed as open source, but also adapted to the future.
There is even the OpenGEM GUI for those brave enough to work with a mouse (which tickles my nostalgia even more, being an old ST-fan).
Boingboing leads us to the first path of the great series of Bunnie Huang (who runs a great blog, by the way). This is the start of a four part series on outsourcing manufacturing. More specifically, to outsource to China, but many rules apply everywhere.
In the first installment, he talks about the BOM. This makes it clear to me, as a hobbyist, that there is a lot of ground to cover in this series. I’m already looking forward to part 3 – Industrial design for upstarts: guerrilla engineering on a shoestring budget. Will be fun to read
Via boingboing.
Do you dream of making the ultimate game controller. Then the Esplora board from Arduino is what you need. Basically it is a Leonardo board, but with a range of integrated sensors. Leonardo means onboard USB HID support, so you can use it directly with your PC games. Sensors means all the fun inputs that you’ve dreamed of but never put on a single board:
