Hackaday Links: July 7, 2019

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Like modular synths? Sure you do, and you need another hole to throw money into! For the last few months, Supplyframe has been hosting synthesizer and electronic music meetups in San Francisco. This week, the HDDG/Piqued meetup will have a great talk with the creator of VCV Rack. VCV Rack is an Open Source, virtual, modular synthesizer — basically a bunch of Eurorack modules inside a computer and it costs a whole lot less. The talk is this Thursday evening in SF. You should come!

The W600 is a new module (you can get it from Seeed, although it’s produced by Winner Micro in various formats) that is basically an ESP32, except it uses an ARM Cortex-M3 instead of a Tensilica core. [ultratechie] recently got their hands on one of these modules and got started with MicroPython. This seems like a capable module and it’s only three dollars, but will that be enough to catch up to the ESP32?

Purple gorilla enters art gallery. At the Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam there is a new exhibit featuring the, ‘destructive beauty of the computer virus’. The curators are detailing the historical progress of the computer virus from innocent DOS viruses to Melissa to Stuxnet and ransomware.

USB C has been around for a while, but 2019 is the year everything started to become USB C. Case in point: the Raspberry Pi 4. The only problem is that the Raspberry Pi Foundation messed up their implementation of USB C. Not a problem, because here’s how you design a USB C power sink. Basically, you give each CC line its own resistor. Don’t even think about it, just copy the USB C spec. You don’t know more about USB C than the people who designed it, and you’re not really saving a ton of money by deleting one resistor. Just copy the spec.

7 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: July 7, 2019

  1. It’s not the first time RPi has problems with usb. AFAIK they didn’t yet release a board with fully working usb. Previous boards had problems with usb silicon being botched (latency problems with sound cards), now they even botched a connector.

      1. Nah, you are too harsh. They release bleeding edge super cheap products, but always with some small annoying errors. They extensively tested many features, but their projects are used so extensively that there always will be something they forgot/botched. I would say their products are 99% designed.

        1. No. And why do you thing that this board “bleeding edge”? Many other products in this category are also poorly engineered. You get what you pay for.

          An exception seems to the the PJRC stuff. They will not put a product on the market until both hardware and software has been tested. Methinks that the RPi4 big problems will be reliable program start-up and backward compatibility in both code and hardware.

  2. “Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam there is a new exhibit featuring the, ‘destructive beauty of the computer virus’. ”
    What next, a retrospective of boner pill spam!?

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