Free Stuff, April 2021–June 2021

April 2021

Eric wrote to us on behalf of the Chaffey High School (Ontario, CA) Tech Club, asking for a HackRF One. He’ll be graduating from the University of Tulsa soon and as a past president of the club, he zooms into the club’s meetings to offer help with computer science and cybersecurity topics. Now he’ll be able to help the students use a HackRF One for their own projects. They’ll also be holding workshops on RC Car Hacking, Listening to and Broadcasting AM/FM Radio Signals, and Mapping Planes with ADS-B Signals.

The Free Stuff recipient for May is João Pedro...

Free Stuff, January 2021–March 2021

January 2021

The first Free Stuff recipient of 2021 is Christos Voutichtis, an artist in Gemany who asked for a HackRF One for his project, Order of Sound. He tells us, “This is an arrangement of five complex antenna receivers which make the electromagnetic waves that permanently surround us audible. This data, which we perceive as sound, is processed in a program (VVVV) that I have designed which enables the analysis to translate them into graphical elements, which are then rendered as an abstract architecture in the form of a real-time projection. The viewer enters an immersive megastructure of abstract data...

LUNA Now Uses Amaranth HDL

Note: This is a crosspost of a Cynthion update on Crowd Supply: https://www.crowdsupply.com/great-scott-gadgets/luna/updates/luna-now-uses-amaranth-hdl

Over the next while we will be updating the LUNA project to use “Amaranth HDL”, which is the new name whitequark and other maintainers have chosen for their project. Amaranth is the hardware description language used in LUNA. The Amaranth gateware provided with LUNA enables you to create USB devices in gateware, firmware or both. Amaranth also enables LUNA to customize itself to the task at hand, which gives it access to unique features like user-defined hardware triggering and simultaneous capture of additional external or internal signals. The...

December update: a year in review

Seasonal greetings from the PINE64 community team! In the last community update of 2021 we’ll take a look at progress made this year and discuss potential avenues to explore in 2022.

Testing a HackRF Clone

Like every open source hardware company, we’ve seen clones of our products for sale on the Internet. These clones arguably provide a valuable service to the community, making our designs more widely available and at a price more people can afford. However, they also have negative effects such as an increase on our technical support burden without a corresponding increase in revenue to pay our staff. When the quality of a clone is poor it may also degrade the reputation of our products.

Our most frequently cloned product is HackRF One. While we have every reason to believe that some of the HackRF clones...

A Closer Look at the SiFive RISC-V Rack Cluster

https://player.vimeo.com/video/652473940

SiFive collaborated with AB Open to create a rack-mount RISC-V cluster based around the SiFive HiFive Unmatched developer platform for compute and a SiFive HiFive1 Rev. B development board for control. In this article we take a closer look at the design of the cluster and consider some of the key use cases.

The objective was quite simply to package together a total of four SiFive HiFive Unmatched boards in a rack-mount enclosure, that would serve as a powerful and convenient way to host and use a native RISC-V development platform. From this it was decided that the solution must feature:

Shutting Down GSG Project-Specific Mailing Lists

Thank you to everyone who has been a part of the GSG project mailing lists. We at Great Scott Gadgets appreciate all of the conversations and friendships that have been forged on these lists. Over the last few years we have not given our project-specific mailing lists the attention they deserve; instead we have been focusing our efforts on Discord and GitHub. As such, we will be disabling all the mailing lists except for GSG-announce. Links to the mailing list archives for Ubertooth, YARD Stick One, GreatFET One, and HackRF will all remain available on their individual product pages. Current...

Future Corporation Partners with AB Open for Unique RISC-V PC Project

https://player.vimeo.com/video/644341183

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Custom-built RISC-V personal computer features open-hardware front panel.

Halifax, UK, 30th November 2021—Open hardware consultancy AB Open has built a unique personal computer based on the free and open source RISC-V instruction set architecture, following a partnership with Future Corporation.

Following AB Open’s earlier success in being one of the first in the world to assemble a complete RISC-V PC, Future Corporation partnered with the company to build a more powerful version based around SiFive’s HiFive Unmatched board.

To this, AB Open has added a GNU/Linux-based operating system, dedicated graphics processing card, high-speed solid-state storage, and Wi-Fi connectivity, housed in a...

Программируем микроконтроллеры ESP32 и STM32 на C# (nanoFramework)

.NET nanoFramework — это бесплатная платформа с открытым исходным кодом, основанная на .NET и предназначена для малых встраиваемых устройств, микроконтроллеров. С её помощью можно разрабатывать различные устройства для Интернета вещей, носимые устройства, научные приборы, робототехнические устройства, можно создавать прототипы и даже использовать на промышленном оборудовании. В первой части мы познакомились с платформой .NET nanoFramework, её архитектурой, основными возможностями, посмотрели примеры программного кода. Теперь перейдем к практике, установим nanoFramework на микроконтроллеры серии ESP32 и STM32, напишем первый «Hello World!», поработаем с аппаратными интерфейсами, и оценим переносимость кода с «большого» .NET на платформу nanoFramework.
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November update: first impressions

Is it truly November already? Is it just me, or is this year flying by at warp speed? This month’s update focuses on initial impressions of the PinePhone Pro and production keyboard.