Embracing the Future: New Omega2 Beta Firmware and Documentation Site

We’re excited to announce a major milestone in the evolution of the Omega2 platform. After months of development and community collaboration, we’re introducing a new beta firmware based on OpenWRT 23.05 and the modern 5.15 Linux kernel. This firmware provides a clean slate designed to make building your products and applications easier and faster than before.

To complement the new firmware, we’ve also launched a brand-new documentation site. This site is crafted to help you navigate the new features and enhancements with ease, offering comprehensive guides, tutorials, and reference materials.

Together, the new firmware and documentation site represent our commitment to putting...

Oral history transcripts: Pioneers of Taiwans Chip + PC industry

During the preparation of my current brief visit to Taiwan, I've more or less by coincidence stumbled on several transcripts of oral history interviews with pioneers of the Taiwanese Chip and PC industry (click on the individual transcripts in the Related Records section at the bottom). They have been recorded, transcribed and translated in 2011 by the Computer History Museum under funding from the National Science Council, Taiwan, R.O.C..

As some of you know, I've been spending a lot of time in recent years researching (and practically exploring + re-implementing) historical telecommunications with my retronetworking project.

Retrocomputing itself is not my main focus. I...

Back to Taiwan the first time after 5 years

Some of the readers of this blog know that I have a very special relationship with Taiwan. As a teenager, it was the magical far-away country that built most of the PC components in all my PCs since my first 286-16 I got in 1989. Around 2006-2008 I had the very unexpected opportunity to work in Taiwan for some time (mainly for Openmoko, later some consulting for VIA). During that time I have always felt most welcome in and fascinated by the small island nation who managed to turn themselves into a high-tech development and manufacturing site for ever more complex electronics....

Free Stuff - February 2024

The belated February 2024 Free Stuff recipient for the Great Scott Gadgets Free Stuff Program is Adam Drake! Adam, a teacher in Canada, sponsors three clubs at his high school - a competitive robotics club, a model railway club, and a D&D club. All of these clubs are fully funded from either internal school funds, the school PAC (Parental Advisory Council), or the NSHSS. This summer, Adam ran an RF Comms summer school where 18 students gained their amateur radio certification!

Following the success of the RF Comms summer school, Adam is now starting another after-school club: “RF Communications.” This club...

Wealth distribution in the United States

Forbes recently published the Forbes 400 List for 2024, listing the 400 richest people in the United States. This inspired me to make a histogram to show the distribution of wealth in the United States. It turns out that if you put Elon Musk on the graph, almost the entire US population is crammed into a vertical bar, one pixel wide. Each pixel is $500 million wide, illustrating that $500 million essentially rounds to zero from the perspective of the wealthiest Americans.

The histogram above shows the wealth distribution in red. Note that the visible red line is one pixel wide at the left and disappears everywhere else—this is...

Оголяем «данные» и что из этого вышло

Однажды я задался целью создать устройство, которое измеряло бы качество воздуха — не просто как-то, а с высокой точностью. Проект по разработке устройства привел к созданию NeboAir — недорогого датчика, который претендует на высокую точность. В этом материале я расскажу об испытаниях в реальных условиях и о том, что получилось в итоге.

Fritzing 1.0.4 released

Fritzing 1.0.4 is a maintenance release. It has been tested on Windows 10, Windows 11, macOS Ventura, macOS Monterey, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04, and Ubuntu 24.04. What is new UX: QFN support and working with tiny structures in the PCB was vastly improved. We changed the algorithm that decides which element will receive a mouse click. Ratsnest lines now stay the same size when zooming in. The hitbox size of wires and traces now depends on the wire diameter. These two images show a PCB at 3000% zoom. The copper traces are 0.2mm (8mil) wide. Working at this scale was...

September Update: Check Your Notes

A new community update! New hardware to announced and previous hardware to return!

BML FPGA Design Tutorial Part-16ofN : Test Benches

2024.09.29 : I’m BSEE Kevin Hubbard from Seattle, WA. I design digital logic circuits. My journey started more than 40 years ago designing digital circuit boards. My first was a simple 5V TTL logic plug-in expansion board for my 8-bit Apple ][+ computer as a teenager in the 1980’s. In the 1990’s I eventually transitioned ( and got paid! ) to design chips – PALs, CPLDs, early sub-micron (350nm) FPGAs and eventually digital ASICs (250nm, 180nm ) during the LSI Logic heyday years of late 1990’s to early 2000’s.

I have circled back to FPGAs these days, but now deep sub-micron...

Reverse-engineering a three-axis attitude indicator from the F-4 fighter plane

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=uKzj5shVtlo

We recently received an attitude indicator for the F-4 fighter plane, an instrument that uses a rotating ball to show the aircraft's orientation and direction. In a normal aircraft, the artificial horizon shows the orientation in two axes (pitch and roll), but the F-4 indicator uses a rotating ball to show the orientation in three axes, adding azimuth (yaw).1 It wasn't obvious to me how the ball could rotate in three axes: how could it turn in every direction and still remain attached to the instrument?