Free Stuff, April 2020–June 2020

April 2020

Dave Ferguson of the Woodinville (WA) Emergency Communications Team asked us for a HackRF One in April. This volunteer ARES group is turning a donated fire department aid truck into a mobile communications center that will service local public events (runs, bike rides, etc.) as well as provide essential communications via ham radio during emergencies. Their new HackRF One will allow them to watch communications across the entire spectrum and to potentially automate their systems.

We sent a couple of YARD Stick Ones to the MCH2021 Badge Team. We can’t say any more than that, other than they are...

Pine Store Community Pricing & Online Retail Stores

In 2021 you’ll see online retail Pine stores open in Europe, North America and possibly also worldwide at a later stage. Let me start by making one thing clear - the current Pine Store isn’t going away and the pricing in the Pine Store will remain unchanged.

KDE Community Edition is now available

We are pleased to announce that the KDE Community Edition (CE) PinePhone is now available for pre-order. This edition of the PinePhone ships with a tailored build of Plasma Mobile built upon Manjaro Linux, and it is the culmination of ongoing efforts to bring the popular Plasma desktop environment to the smartphone.

November Update: KDE PinePhone CE And A Peek Into The Future

Welcome to this month’s community update! We’ve got exciting news to share, but before I proceed in doing so I’d like to thank Gamiee, JF, and PizzaLovingNerd for contributing to this blog entry and Clover for the final edits and proof-reading.

Wemos D1 mini reconnecting all the time to Arduino IDE

 Lately I've acquired some Wemos D1 mini from Amazon and I've noticed an annoying behavior.

Every 2,3 seconds a disconnect and a reconnect sound was produced making impossible any software development on them along with any debugging. 

The problem was a the 3V3 on the CH340C (USB to serial).

After I've added a 100uF capacitor on the 3V3 and not everything is fine again.

Michael "mickeyl" Lauer: SPM-ifying YapDatabase

Converting an existing Objective-C/Swift framework to Swift Package Manager I'm a big fan of the database library YapDatabase, which is a collection/key/value store for macOS, iOS, tvOS & watchOS. It comes with many high level features and is built atop sqlite. In the last 5 years, I have used this successfully for many of my projects. It is written in Objective-C and comes with a bunch of Swift files for more Swifty use. Since I recently announced to go all-in with Swift, I want to convert all my dependencies to the Swift Package Management system. I have never been a...

Update: new hacktober gear

Let me begin this month’s community update by teasing the November update, in which I’ll talk about the next generation of SoCs and our plans for the future. If you haven’t done so yet, then now is the right time to subscribe to our blog and follow the news on the PINE64 Telegram news channel.

Talpadk: An early unfair first comparison of the Radiona ULX3S and the Olimex iCE40HX8K-EVB

Why unfair?

Well when I obtained the iCE40HX8K-EVB it had already existed for quite some time the ULX3S I had just received the unit from the Crowd Supply campaign.
And Olimex therefore had lots of time to “perfect” the documentation Radiona on the other hand has not yet had the luxury of time yet.

Well I’m not really going to… The FPGA on the ULX3S is quite powerful and the board itself has more features as well, lets just call them different classes of products.

Well both FPGAs are supported by the open source command line friendly toolchains.
Xilinx years ago sort of cured...

Michael "mickeyl" Lauer: Programming Languages

While I never got much into natural languages (beyond my native tounge, a halfway solid english, and some bits and pieces of french), I have always been fascinated by (some) programming languages – I even wrote books about some of them. I (literally) grew up with BASIC and 6502/6510 ASSEMBLER – on the VC20 and the C64. Later on, learned to hate C and love 680x0 ASSEMBLER – on the AMIGA. During the 90s, I enjoyed PASCAL and MODULA II, and then found a preliminary home in Python. The 2000s were largely affected by C++ (which I always found much...

Free Stuff, January 2020–March 2020

January 2020

The Free Stuff recipient for January was Gabriel Sheeley, who runs an electrical engineering/embedded software meetup in Columbus, Ohio. They do do everything from soldering workshops, to tearing apart smart TVs, to automating chicken coops to keep out raccoons. Gabriel asked for a YARD Stick One to use in a talk about RF hacking, and now that the meetup is remote, the group will have to take turns with their new gadget.

We sent a HackRF One to the CU Boulder Sounding Rocket Lab Avionics Team for their ground station. They told us that they are “building an 18-foot-tall...