January Update: Thinking Out Of The Vox

Happy New Year! This month we discuss the current state of the PineVox, seeing what the community have been up to with their PineNotes, announcing InfiniTime 1.15 and announcing the end of production of the Pinebook Pro.

Pi in the Pentium: reverse-engineering the constants in its floating-point unit

Intel released the powerful Pentium processor in 1993, establishing a long-running brand of high-performance processors.1 The Pentium includes a floating-point unit that can rapidly compute functions such as sines, cosines, logarithms, and exponentials. But how does the Pentium compute these functions? Earlier Intel chips used binary algorithms called CORDIC, but the Pentium switched to polynomials to approximate these transcendental functions much faster. The polynomials have carefully-optimized coefficients that are stored in a special ROM inside the chip's floating-point unit. Even though the Pentium is a complex chip with 3.1 million transistors, it is possible to see these transistors under a microscope and read out these constants. The...

Please refrain from installing WASP-OS on new PineTimes for the moment

In July 2024, PineStore notified the community that a small hardware change was needed on the PineTime: the current flash chip was end of life (EoL) and needed to be replaced by a new one. From the software point of view, the new chip behaves exactly like the old on so very few code changes were required to support it.

Intel's $475 million error: the silicon behind the Pentium division bug

In 1993, Intel released the high-performance Pentium processor, the start of the long-running Pentium line. The Pentium had many improvements over the previous processor, the Intel 486, including a faster floating-point division algorithm. A year later, Professor Nicely, a number theory professor, was researching reciprocals of twin prime numbers when he noticed a problem: his Pentium sometimes generated the wrong result when performing floating-point division. Intel considered this "an extremely minor technical problem", but much to Intel's surprise, the bug became a large media story. After weeks of criticism, mockery, and bad publicity, Intel agreed to replace everyone's faulty Pentium chips, costing the company $475 million.

In this...

Free Stuff - September 2024

The belated September 2024 recipient for the Great Scott Gadgets Free Stuff Program is Allen Paschel of Orlando, Florida in the United States. Allen is the president of The Maker Effect Foundation which exists to inspire everyone to create! The Maker Effect Foundation is a non-profit organization that runs a maker space and teaches classes at schools, libraries, and events. The maker space has CNC machines, laser etcher/cutters, 3D Printers, vacuum forming equipment, welding tools, electronic tools, and other arts tools. Soon they will be able to add software-defined radio to that list of tools as we are sending them...

Free Stuff - August 2024

The belated August 2024 recipient for the Great Scott Gadgets Free Stuff Program is Murat Sever! Murat teaches a Communication Systems Laboratory course at TOBB ETU University, Ankara, Turkey. In his labs, Murat uses two HackRFs to transmit signals of interest, which students receive via RTL-SDRs. Murat has requested an Opera Cake so his students can study Pseudo Doppler direction finding and to teach students about antenna switching and spectrum monitoring. For more information about Murat’s course, his and his students’ research projects, and their outreach programs, please check out their website (https://ele361l.github.io/).

This application for the Free Stuff program stood...

Free Stuff - July 2024

The belated July 2024 recipient for the Great Scott Gadgets Free Stuff Program is Scott Carter from Ontario, Canada! Scott operates a SETI station that uses a radio telescope he built using software defined radio. He says the radio telescope has been in operation for six and a half years, and it needs a receiver upgrade to allow scanning of frequencies above 2 GHz. We are sending Scott a HackRF One so he can make his radio telescope upgrade! Scott’s long-term goal is to make his SETI station accessible remotely for educational purposes so more folks can learn about radio...

Free Stuff - June 2024

The belated June 2024 recipient for the Great Scott Gadgets Free Stuff Program is Evan Metzinger. Evan is the president of the Cybersecurity club at Mt. San Antonio college in Walnut, California in the US. We will be sending Evan a HackRF One so he and his club can get some hands on experience with signals processing and participate in wireless capture the flag competitions.

Free Stuff - May 2024

The belated May 2024 Free Stuff recipient for the Great Scott Gadgets Free Stuff Program is Anik Mahanta from India! Anik is a student who is part of the CyRaksha Cybersecurity Club of Kolkata. CyRaksha is a free-to-join club that hosts their meetups both in-person and online. They will be using the HackRF One we are sending them to create CTF challenges, host informal meetups about RF technologies, and to create open access materials on how to use HackRF One safely while respecting Indian law.

Может ли Orange PI 5 Plus с 32 ГБ памяти заменить домашний/офисный ПК?

Производительность ARM процессоров каждый год увеличивается и все ближе к x86 процессорам. Компания Apple давно отказалась от процессоров Intel в пользу процессоров собственной разработки на ARM архитектуре. Но домашний/офисный ПК это не только процессор, но и софт, драйвера, и подключение любых устройств из коробки. Компания Shenzhen Xunlong Software вначале 2023 г. выпустила одноплатный компьютер Orange PI 5 Plus на базе высокопроизводительного процессора Rockchip RK3588 с 32 ГБ ОЗУ и возможностью подключения NVMe SSD дисков. По техническим характеристикам такой одноплатный компьютер сопоставим с домашним/офисным ПК. Проверим на сколько комфортно работать за таким одноплатником, смотреть YouTube, видео, и конечно же поиграем, установим...