Hardware
The Valve Index. On Linux. On A Min Spec Machine.
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Sunday 27th of December 2020 07:07:16 PM Filed under

What follows isn’t fully a review or guide, but a mixture of my initial experiences and criticisms as a completely new to VR owner of the Valve Index. And this being Boiling Steam, and since I only use Linux, I’ll be relaying what it is like to set up and use the Index on Linux today. Oh, and I just barely have the minimum specs Valve lists. This will be interesting…
(A much more complete history, guide, and everything VR coming soon from our new writer Patola. Be on the look out!)
Before getting into the details, let’s appreciate the clean (and secure!) packing Valve has done, with wonderful presentation of all the components in the full kit. (For $1,000 it is the least they could do.) You lift up the top layer, like a box of holiday chocolates, to reveal more underneath. And you know I am a sucker for boxes.
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Compared: Raspberry Pi OS vs. Armbian vs. Debian GNU/Linux
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Sunday 27th of December 2020 06:49:37 AM Filed under
Many programmers may have the same question: Is Armbian just another flavor of Debian GNU/Linux, or is it something completely different? What are the differences between Raspberry Pi OS, Armbian, and Debian? In this article, we will discuss the Armbian, Debian, and Raspberry Pi operating systems in detail, including a comparison between these different systems.
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It's 2020: Linux Kernel Sees New Port To The Nintendo 64
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 25th of December 2020 09:22:32 PM Filed under


It's been a turbulent year and 2020 is certainly ending interesting in the Linux/open-source space... If it wasn't odd enough seeing Sony providing a new official Linux driver for their PlayStation 5 DualSense controller for ending out the year, there is also a new Linux port to the Nintendo 64 game console... Yes, a brand new port to the game console that launched more than two decades ago.
Open-source developer Lauri Kasanen who has contributed to Mesa and the Linux graphics stack took to developing a new Nintendo 64 port and announced it this Christmas day. This isn't the first time Linux has been ported to the N64 but prior attempts weren't aimed at potentially upstreaming it into the mainline Linux kernel.
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Hands-On: Kali Linux on the Raspberry Pi 4
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Thursday 24th of December 2020 01:49:39 PM Filed under

Over the past few weeks, I have tried out Ubuntu, Manjaro, openSUSE and the latest Raspberry Pi OS release on the Raspberry Pi 4. I am going to complete this series with a look at Kali Linux, one of my favorite specialist Linux distributions. Kali is specifically made for security analysis and penetration testing, and is preloaded and configured for that purpose. The combination of the inexpensive and portable Raspberry Pi hardware and the Kali Linux distribution has seemed extremely promising to me for several years now, but so far it hasn't really fulfilled my expectations. Hopefully the more powerful Raspberry Pi 4 and the more mature Kali Linux 2020.4 will remedy that.
Kali Linux for the Raspberry Pi can be downloaded from the Offensive Security ARM Images web page (not the main Kali Downloads page, although there is a link to the correct page there). There are four download images there:
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Open Hardware: Raspberry Pi and Arduino, Among Others
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 24th of December 2020 06:41:35 AM Filed under


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Raspberry Pi Imager update
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Piunora has the guts of a Raspberry Pi 4 with Arduino form factor, M.2 PCIe socket
The Raspberry Pi 4 is a pretty cool board, but if you wished it was just a bit smaller, and you could use the PCIe interface exposed by the Broadcom BCM2711 processor more easily, Timon has designed Piunora carrier board for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. The solution provides a board with the guts of Raspberry Pi 4 SBC but using the Arduino form factor including access to the six ADC pins, and an M.2 socket with the PCIe signal from the Broadcom SoC.
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Arduino Blog » Mesmerize your holiday guests with these motor-driven rheoscopic fluid ornaments
We’ve all see Christmas ornaments shaped like a ball – interesting, but a bit passive. Will Donaldson, however, has created an amazing enhancement for these “orbaments,” adding a rheoscopic fluid inside that shows turbulent swirling patterns as it moves.
The fluid is simply tap water and food coloring, plus the special rheoscopic concentrate that contains an array of light reflecting particles. To maintain a state or turbulence, Donaldson affixed a small drone-style motor to the hanger assembly on top of each orb using hot glue.
Motors were inserted with propellers attached, which were bent to fit inside. To vary the speed of the turbulence, Donaldson included an Arduino Nano, along with an L293 driver, using the analogWrite() function for PWM control.
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Notecard LTE Cat-M / NB-IoT M.2 modem sells for $49+ with 10 years of connectivity
The company also offers a range of carrier boards for people not wanting to design their own custom baseboards for Notecard M.2 module that include support for LiPo or AA battery, Raspberry Pi HAT, a minimal board with micro USB, and one model designed for “embedded design”, meaning integration into end products.
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Himax WE-I Plus EVB AI development board supports TFLite for microcontrollers
The low power consumption technology of the development board reduces the current requirements. This significantly improves the design by eliminating the heat factor. The ASIC optimized for DSP intensive deep learning applications makes it multifunctional to perform voice, vision, and vibration detection and recognition. The all-in-one EVB contains many inbuilt devices that make it a good option over other “high profile boards such as the Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense and ESP32” The support for the Tensorflow Lite Microcontrollers adds an additional feature of easy deployment. In terms of performance, the latency time for the 250KB TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers “Person detection” example is only 40ms, while the latency time of the 20KB TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers “Micro speech” example is only 6ms.
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Open Automation Software Platform now runs on Raspberry Pi
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 24th of December 2020 05:36:49 AM Filed under
Open Automation Software OAS has announced that its OAS Platform supports the Raspberry Pi 4, enabling low-cost, remote Pi-based data logging devices on multiplatform OAS automation networks.
Open Automation Software (OAS) announced that its Full OAS Platform supports the Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB or 8GB of RAM. The addition of the Pi enables customers with OAS Platform software to deploy Pi-based devices for “on-site data logging in remote locations with limited power or connectivity.”
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Devices: Raspberry Pi, Open Hardware and More
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 23rd of December 2020 10:25:18 AM Filed under


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ESP32-C3 WiFi & BLE RISC-V processor to launch at ESP8266 price
When we reported about ESP32-S2-MINI modules last September, we also noted Espressif teased us with ESP32-S3 and ESP32-C3 with close to no details. ESP32-S3 is expected to be a multi-core WiFI & Bluetooth processor with AI instructions/accelerator, but there were no details about ESP32-C3 at all, and we only found out it would be a RISC-V processor several weeks ago. But Twitter user Johnny Wu posted a screenshot in Chinese and its translation claiming ESP32-C3 was finally released by Espressif Systems.
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Glasgow Interface Explorer is an iCE40 FPGA based hardware debugging tool (crowdfunding)
We’ve seen some pretty interesting boards for hardware hackers and reverse engineers in recent months with the likes of Ollie and Tigard USB debug boards that allow interfacing various hardware interfaces and/or flashing firmware to different types of target boards.
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10 Raspberry Pi project ideas from 2020
The Raspberry Pi is the small, low-cost, single-board PC that took the world by storm when it was released in 2012. Since then, educators, students, makers, and tinkerers have used the various Raspberry Pi models for many, many unique and interesting projects. The possibilities are nearly endless.
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New Part Day: Hackboard 2, An X86 Single-Board Computer
From the old Gumstix boards to everyone’s favorite Raspberry Pi, common single-board computers (SBCs) have traditionally had at least one thing in common: an ARM processor. But that’s not to say hackers and makers haven’t been interested in an SBC with a proper x86 processor. Which is why the $99 Hackboard 2 is so exciting. With a modern x86 chip at the core it’s akin to a small footprint desktop motherboard, but with all the extra features that we’ve come to expect in a hacker-friendly SBC.
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That Celeron processor also means the Hackboard 2 can run Windows, if you’re into that sort of thing. While hacker types are usually more than happy with running Linux or potentially BSD on their ARM boards, there’s unquestionably a subset of the community that feels more comfortable with Clippy looking over their shoulder. Or maybe they’ve got some project that requires a piece of Windows software that doesn’t play well with WINE. Either way, getting a proprietary OS preinstalled on your SBC is going to cost you: it’s an extra $40 to get your Hackboard 2 with a copy of Windows 10 Pro on its 64 GB eMMC.
While we can’t complain about the CPU and GPU given what the competition is packing, the fact that there’s only 4 GB of RAM onboard is something of a disappointment. Especially when the cheaper Raspberry Pi 4 includes up to 8 GB. It’s certainly enough for most Linux distributions, but pretty skimpy for a Windows box. Depending on what software you’re hoping to install, it might even be a non-starter. If you’re looking for a cheap machine to run Photoshop on, you’ll want to look elsewhere.
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Use AutoTVM and uTVM to optimize ML workloads on embedded devices & microcontrollers
We are seeing a massive increase in resource-constraints for embedded devices due to a lack of mature software stacks. With the increase in open-source hardware, the available software support takes a considerable amount of time to develop AI/ML/DL applications. Some of the challenges faced today are that bare-metal devices do not have on-device memory management, and they do not have LLVM support.
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Devices: Feather Board, Raspberry Pi and More
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 23rd of December 2020 05:36:44 AM Filed under
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The Reclaimer Labs STM32WB Feather board #Feather #Bluetooth
Reclaimer Labs has released their STM32WB Feather board. It has a STM32WBCGU6 Bluetooth SoC at its core and has been designed for low power.
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STM32WB Feather board features STM32WB55 Bluetooth 5.0 SoC
The board can be programmed with STM32CubeProgrammer, and the company provides an example project using the STM32CubeIDE which presents a Bluetooth device named “WB-Feather” with GATT Characteristics for ADC readings of the analog inputs, internal temperature, reference voltage, and several GPIOs. The link to the code sample together with the schematics can be found on the product page.
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Industrial 5G/4G Base Shield supports Raspberry Pi, Jetson Nano, other SBC’s (Crowdfunding)
Akari, a start-up based in Japan, has designed an industrial base shield for Raspberry Pi 4/3/Zero, Jetson Nano, Rock Pi 4, and other compatible single board computers.
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Add face recognition with Raspberry Pi | Hackspace 38
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Ubuntu On The Raspberry PI 4
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Monday 21st of December 2020 10:43:09 AM Filed under

When Ubuntu first appeared on the scene, around 2004, I remember trying it out and thinking that this was going to be a game changer because it worked almost instantly without hardly any tweaks and command line hacks.
Anybody who has used Linux since then has probably heard of Ubuntu and whether you love it or hate it there is no doubting that it in now a fairly polished desktop operating system.
Raspberry PI User is about using the Raspberry PI as a desktop computer and therefore it seemed an obvious choice to try out Ubuntu as in theory they should be a match made in heaven.
This article is a review of Ubuntu on a Raspberry PI 4 with 4 gigabytes RAM. The reasons for testing Ubuntu on the 4 gigabyte version is as follows:
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Raspberry Pi 400: Big Bang for Little Bucks
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Monday 21st of December 2020 10:18:19 AM Filed under
The latest and greatest Raspberry Pi 400 no longer looks like a hacker board for the DIY crowd, but like a full-fledged desktop. We take it through it’s paces to see if it lives up to its promise.
Are you looking for a great stocking stuffer this Holiday season? I recommend you consider the new Raspberry Pi 400. Mine came in the mail last week.
I got my first Raspberry Pi about seven years ago, and what a difference between that model and this one. In 2013 the Raspberry Pi had a couple of USB ports, 512 MB RAM, an Ethernet port, and no wireless. In the seven years hence, with three newer models in between, much has changed.
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