Arduino Intro and Homebrew Hakko 907

• What Are the Differences Between Raspberry Pi and Arduino?

  Arduino hails from Italy, and it’s said that it was named after a bar where the developers usually meet to discuss the board. The first Arduino was developed in 2005 and aimed to provide students at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy with an inexpensive microcontroller board. Its cost and simplicity also piqued the interests of hobbyists and professionals; it wasn’t long until it reached a wider community of makers. Many other varieties of Arduino boards have been created since then. In 2013, around 700,000 Arduino boards were already sold [1]. Raspberry Pi was born seven years after Arduino when Eben Upton invented a low-cost, modular, the single-board computer that will help improve the programming skills of his students. Like Arduino, it soon reached a wider audience due to its cost and versatility. The first Raspberry Pi board cost only $35, far less expensive than the existing computer boards that usually cost five times higher. The small board got even smaller and cheaper after the Raspberry Pi Foundation created the Raspberry Pi Zero, the smallest Raspberry Pi board to date, which costs only $5. Raspberry Pi progressed rapidly that millions of boards were already created from the initial target of just 10,000 boards years after its first release.

• Arduino Blog » Homebrew Hakko 907 digital soldering station

  If you want to upgrade your soldering setup without spending a lot of money, then be sure to check out Angelo AKA TechBuilder’s DIY Hakko 907 station. This low-cost device features an Arduino Nano to read the iron temperature via an LM358 op-amp, and regulates power to the handle and tip under PWM control using an IRFZ44N MOSFET. A potentiometer is implemented as a variable temperature knob, with the actual and preset temperature displayed on a 16×2 LCD screen, while an LED indicates whether the heating element is active.

First Linux Kernel 5.12 Release Candidate Is Now Available for Public Testing

The merge window that opened with the launch of the Linux 5.11 kernel series two weeks ago is now closed and Linus Torvalds published the first Release Candindate in the upcoming Linux kernel 5.12 series, giving us an early taste of the new features and improvements. The final release of Linux kernel 5.12 is expected to hit Linux distros sometime this Spring in late April 2021, either on the 18th or the 25th, which depends on how many Release Candidate milestones will be published during the entire development cycle.

Review: LibreELEC 9.2 and Kodi

I recently got into a discussion with someone who had purchased a second television for their house and, knowing that I have a fondness for open source and do-it-yourself projects, they asked if there was a suitable alternative to Fire TV. For those not familiar with the device, a Fire TV stick is a small device which looks like a large USB thumb drive and attaches to the HDMI port of a television. The device connects wirelessly to local networks and can be used to stream shows and movies from a variety of services like Netflix and Disney+. The device is operated by a small, dedicated remote control. I was pretty sure a minimal Linux distribution running on a spare, minimal personal computer or a single-board device like a Raspberry Pi would probably be a suitable replacement. I figured a distribution that ran Kodi could probably do the work, connecting to the TV through an HDMI cable. The user could likely use the Kodi mobile app in place of a dedicated remote control. For the sake of comparison, I looked up information on the Fire TV stick which was $55 USD if i wanted it in two weeks or $60 if I wanted it in one week. The person I was talking with already had one and knew it was a "plug and play" type device, so the total set up time would be under ten minutes. I did some on-line shopping in my area and the closest open source style equivalent I could come up with was a Raspberry Pi 3B. The Pi was $47 USD. The Pi included a Wi-Fi option, but no microSD card, no HDMI cable, and no power supply. Adding these items to my tally brought my total up to $78, including tax. In other words, even with a free software solution, it looked like the open source route was going to be slightly more expensive with parts available in my region.