February update: chat with the machine

As the Chinese New Year comes to an end and people return to work, production and shipping return to normal. More units of the PinePhone Explorer Edition, the PinePhone (Pro) keyboard case, the PinePhone Beta Edition and all the other popular products will be dispatching in the coming days.

HyperRAM controller for USB analysis

Note: This is a crosspost of a Cynthion update on Crowd Supply: https://www.crowdsupply.com/great-scott-gadgets/luna/updates/hyperram-controller-for-usb-analysis.

One of LUNA’s core features is the ability to perform protcol analysis of USB 2.0 low-speed, full-speed, and high-speed. For most target devices, LUNA can endlessly stream the capture directly to a host PC over its own high-speed port. However, for high-bandwidth target devices that can’t be streamed in real-time, LUNA has 8 MiB of memory on board to buffer captured data before sending it upstream.

On LUNA we’re using HyperRAM, a type of pseudo-static RAM, which is capable of achieving relatively high speeds while being much simpler to...

Присматриваемся к одноплатникам на RISC-V, обзор модуля Sipeed Lichee RV на процессоре Allwinner D1

Одноплатные компьютеры на RISC-V процессоре сравнительно новое веяние. Поднебесная активно работает над снижением зависимости от западных информационных систем и технологий, именно поэтому новая открытая архитектура RISC-V одна из ключевых ставок Китая. Для продвижения в массы китайский чипмейкер Allwinner на базе ядра Alibaba/T-Head Xuantie C906 RISC-V разработал процессор Allwinner D1 и упрощенную модификацию Allwinner D1s. На сегодня разработано несколько одноплатников на RISC-V процессоре, и в первенство по массовости вырвалась компания Sipeed с модульным компьютером Система-на-Модуле Lichee RV с 512 Мб ОЗУ всего за $16.90, работающим на Linux. Разработчик может спроектировать несущую плату для данного модуля, добавив необходимые периферийные устройства и разъемы. В...

PinePhone community poll results

Throughout January we ran a poll asking people about how they use their PinePhones. Some poll results are quite predictable while others yielded unexpected results. Before we start, let me put on my academic hat for just one minute.

Analyzing a Copper String Light with unusual Phosphor Converted LEDs

After being amazed about finding a really clever implementation of powerline controlled LEDs in a low cost RGB “copper string light”, I bought a few other products in hope to find more LEDs with integrated ICs. At less than $4.00 including shipping, this was by far the cheapest LED string I bought. This one did not have any ICs inside, but I was still surprised about finding rather unusual phosphor converted LED technology in it.

The delivery contained an LED string with attached USB controller and a remote control including battery, as seen in the lower part of the...

Free Stuff - January 2022

The January recipient for the Great Scott Gadgets Free Stuff Program is Rüzgar Erik and the Sivas Science High School Science and Tech Club! The club has about 35 students who meet weekly to learn about various topics and develop their own projects. We will be sending this club their very own HackRF One so they can upgrade from their current SDR which they made from an old tv tuner SDR and Rüzgar Erik’s Baofeng radio.

Once they have received their HackRF One, the club will try to receive images from NOAA, find number stations, and dive into the world of...

Controlling RGB LEDs With Only the Powerlines: Anatomy of a Christmas Light String

The RGB curtain predictably turns into a mess of wires when not used according to instructions.

As should be obvious from this blog, I am somewhat drawn to clever and minimalistic implementations of consumer electronics. Sometimes quite a bit of ingeniosity is going into making something “cheap”. The festive season is a boon to that, as we are bestowed with the latest innovation in animated RGB Christmas lights. I was obviously intrigued, when I learned from a comment on GitHub about a new type of RGB light chain that was controlled using only the power lines. I managed to score...

Google Research Releases Circuit Training, an Open-Source Framework for Automated Chip Floorplanning

Google Research has released the source code for a chip floor-plan generate based on deep reinforcement learning – after publishing a paper demonstrating how effective the approach could be in April last year.

“Chip floorplanning is the engineering task of designing the physical layout of a computer chip,” the research team explained in the abstract to their paper. “Despite five decades of research, chip floorplanning has defied automation, requiring months of intense effort by physical design engineers to produce manufacturable layouts.

“Here we present a deep reinforcement learning approach to chip floorplanning. In under six hours, our method automatically generates chip floorplans...

January Update: More News

Welcome to the first update of the year. The year just began but much has already happened. These past 2 weeks saw the release of the highly anticipated PinePhone keyboard case and the PinePhone Pro Explorer Edition.

Free Stuff Program Refresh

Free Stuff is a program where we at Great Scott Gadgets give free hardware to a person or group once per month. We’ve been running this program since February 2015 by having interested parties email us their free stuff requests.

Starting now, Great Scott Gadgets has a new Free Stuff Program application process where, instead of emailing us, anyone interested in getting free hardware from Great Scott Gadgets can apply using our new application link. The application link and extra details on the Free Stuff Program are available on our Free Stuff page.

Free Stuff recipients are chosen once per month out...