Since Apple switched to Intel chips in the mid 00s, the PowerPC chips from Motorola and the PowerPC Instruction Set Architecture ISA that that they had been using in large part fell by the wayside. While true that niche applications like supercomputing still use the Power ISA on other non Apple hardware, the days of personal computing with PowerPC are largely gone unless you’re still desperately looking to keep your Power Mac G5 out of the landfill or replaying Twilight Princess. Luckily for enthusiasts, though, the Power ISA is now open source and this group has been engaged on an open source laptop based in this architecture. While development is ongoing and there are no end user products available yet, the progress that this group has made shows promise. They have accomplished their PCB designs and schematics and feature a working bill of elements, adding a chassis from Slimbook.
There are also prototypes with a T2080RDB advancement kit and a NXP T2080 processor, though they aren’t working on their intended hardware yet. While still in the infancy, there are promising videos linked below which show the prototypes operating smoothly under the auspices of the Debian distribution this is tailored specifically for the Power ISA. Fast forward 38 years and he discovered that the reply was that yes, it was indeed feasible to port a semblance of the long-established 1982 Software Automatic Mouth or SAM to run absolutely on the Atari 2600, with none additional hardware. To be capable of fit such a probably confusing piece of software into the paltry 128 bytes yes, bytes of RAM, in reality uses an authoring tool so one can pre calculate the allophones, and store only those in the ROM. This way, the 2600 alone can’t convert text to phonemes, but there’s enough room left for the allophones, which are transformed into sound, that about two minutes of speech can fit into one cartridge. As for why he went in the course of the trouble, we quote the author himself: “Because developing digital swears with 1982 speech synthesis generation on a 1977 game console is precisely what we’d like presently.
”If you live anyplace near the tropics, air-con isn’t a luxury but a need. The problem however is that humid climates may cause prevalent air conditioners to draw more power to dehumidify the air than it calls for to only cool it, which raises the ability had to run the unit. Back in 1963, there was a suggestion to create a cooling system that didn’t foster condensation and couple it with alternative strategies of putting off humidity. Researchers in Singapore have now created such a system. It uses a membrane it’s permeable to infrared radiation but prevents condensation across the cooling unit.
At the guts of its hardware is a SAMD21G18A ARM Cortex M0+ microcontroller which is possibly not essentially the most exciting of chips, but the hardware becomes more interesting with the LED drivers. A pair of the IS31FL3731 chips you may also understand from Brian Benchoff’s Mr. Robot badge each drive half of the Charliplexed LED array. These versatile chips take the bother of scanning the LED matrix away from the microcontroller with their own internal frame registers fed from an I2C interface. This choice both makes the good use of the relatively meagre microcontroller in this application, and opens the way for the device choice.
This badge runs Adafruit’s CircuitPython, and may thus be programmed over the USB connection in an identical way as any other CircuitPython board. To test this I set aside my GNU/Linux laptop, and picked up something considerably less flexible to test its ease of use: a Chromebook. CircuitPython devices mount as a disk drive in which are available a Python file that may be edited with the code of your choice. The BornHack badge ships with code to show a BornHack banner text, which serves as a short introduction to the functions of its exhibit. It’s visible that the text scrolling performance leaves anything to be preferred, but this microcontroller is hardly some of the more successful supported by the CircuitPython platform.
The Chromebook was happily capable of edit the code, though viewing the Python serial console necessitated diving into its Linux virtual machine. The BornHack badge then, a ravishing design that fulfils the aim of being able and simple to program via its use of the normal CircuitPython platform, and through its decent sized LED matrix and available GPIOs with the prospect of seeing a use beyond the camp as a usual purpose exhibit/experimentation platform. It might not be probably the most effectual of badges, but it does its job well. In specific it has achieved the feat missed by such a lot of others, of arriving at the camp fully assembled and with working hardware and device. You can see more about it in Thomas’ badge presentation at the camp cut from a stream, talk begins at 5:27 which we’ve placed below the break.
Knocking Benchy off its perch is the idea behind this print in place engine benchmark, as a minimum according to . And we have to say that he’s come up with an impressive model. It’s a cutaway of a three cylinder reciprocating engine, comprehensive with crankshaft, connecting rods, pistons, and engine block. It’s designed to print all in one go, with only a bit cleanup needed after printing before the model is ready to go. The print in place aspect looks the main test of a printer — if you can get this engine to basically spin, you’re probably set up pretty well. shares a few pointers to get your printer dialed in, and shows a few examples of what can happen when things get it wrong.
In addition to the complexities of the print in place mechanism, the model has a few Easter eggs to truly problem your printer, like the tiny oil channel operating the length of the crankshaft.