October Update Follow-up

Happy Halloween! As promised earlier this month, here is the follow-up to the October community update. Some of the topics I’ll touch upon will be covered in more detail in November.

How "Meet the PinePhone Pro" was made

As PINE64‘s flagship mainline GNU/Linux smartphone, the PinePhone Pro, was about to be announced, a trailer and some nice renderings showcasing the phone and its features had to be produced.

Alibaba’s T-Head Releases Four RISC-V Cores Under a Permissive Licence

Alibaba has released the source code for its XuanTie E902, E906, C906, and C910 RISC-V processor cores, promising to follow their release with additional development tools, software development kits, and customisations in the future.

Designed by Alibaba’s T-Head semiconductor arm, the XuanTie C906 was launched as a low-power in-order core for the Internet of Things, finding a commercial home in Allwinner’s D1 system-on-chip. The C910 is a higher performance out-of-order design, still built with the Internet of Things in mind, which has so far only been announced in a limited-production-run developer’s kit. The two E-family cores, meanwhile, are simpler designs for...

October Update: Introducing the PinePhone Pro

Welcome to what will likely be remembered as the most important community update of 2021. Today we’re introducing the PinePhone Pro and announcing that both PinePhone Pro and PineNote pre-orders are now open to developers.

Harald "LaF0rge" Welte: First steps towards an ITU-T V5.1 / V5.2 implementation

As some of you may know, I've been starting to collect "vintage" telecommunications equipment starting from analog modems to ISDN adapters, but also PBXs and even SDH equipment. The goal is to keep this equipment (and related software) alive for demonstration and practical exploration.

Some [incomplete] information can be found at https://osmocom.org/projects/retro-bbs/wiki/

Working with PBXs to simulate the PSTN (ISDN/POTS) network is fine to some extent, but it's of course not the real deal. You only get S0-buses and no actual Uk0 like actual ISDN lines of the late 80ies and 90ies. You have problems with modems not liking the PBX dialtone, etc.

Hence, I've always wanted to...

First steps towards an ITU-T V5.1 / V5.2 implementation

As some of you may know, I've been starting to collect "vintage" telecommunications equipment starting from analog modems to ISDN adapters, but also PBXs and even SDH equipment. The goal is to keep this equipment (and related software) alive for demonstration and practical exploration.

Some [incomplete] information can be found at https://osmocom.org/projects/retro-bbs/wiki/

Working with PBXs to simulate the PSTN (ISDN/POTS) network is fine to some extent, but it's of course not the real deal. You only get S0-buses and no actual Uk0 like actual ISDN lines of the late 80ies and 90ies. You have problems with modems not liking the PBX dialtone, etc.

Hence, I've always wanted to...

Электролюминесцентные индикаторы из прошлого

Сегодня речь пойдёт об электролюминесцентных индикаторах. Но, не о тех, которые окружают вас повсюду и к которым вы привыкли, а о других — получивших огромную популярность в 60-е годы прошлого века, и так же стремительно канувших в небытие. Заодно запущу свою коллекцию индикаторов, как серийно выпускавшихся, так и уникальных опытных и даже — лабораторных образцов.
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Pmod Host Ports Added to Encased LUNAs

Note: This is a crosspost of a Cynthion update on Crowd Supply: https://www.crowdsupply.com/great-scott-gadgets/luna/updates/pmod-host-ports-added-to-encased-lunas

In one of our updates on CrowdSupply we asked you all for feedback about whether populating the optional Pmod host ports would be a welcome addition to LUNA, and whether they should be added to bare board LUNAs, encased LUNAs, or both. We got many comments through our Discord, direct messages, email, and GitHub. The feedback was overwhelmingly in favour of adding Pmod host ports to encased LUNAs only, so we are going ahead with that change!

Our main goal in adding the Pmod host ports/footprints...

September update: Hurdles and Successes

In this community update we’ll discuss PinePhone keyboard progress (and hurdles), add-on back cases awaiting developers approval, initial PineNote impressions and early development progress, as well as news of InfiniTime 1.

Cluster build log: Moving to temporary cluster

As promised in the last month’s community update Housekeeping section, this is the first part of the cluster’s build log! This mini-series in which I will cover everything about upcoming changes our hosting cluster, and it begins with building a temporary cluster.