NVIDIA Unleashes The First Jetson AGX Orin Module

August 3, 2022 by Tom Nardi 15 Comments

Back in March, NVIDIA introduced Jetson Orin, the next-generation of their ARM single-board computers intended for edge computing applications. The new platform promised to deliver “server-class AI performance” on a board small enough to install in a robot or IoT device, with even the lowest tier of Orin modules offering roughly double the performance of the previous Jetson Xavier modules. Unfortunately, there was a bit of a catch — at the time, Orin was only available in development kit form.

But today, NVIDIA has announced the immediate availability of the Jetson AGX Orin 32GB production module for $999 USD. This is essentially the mid-range offering of the Orin line, which makes releasing it first a logical enough choice. Users who need the top-end performance of the 64GB variant will have to wait until November, but there’s still no hard release date for the smaller NX Orin SO-DIMM modules.

That’s a bit of a letdown for folks like us, since the two SO-DIMM modules are probably the most appealing for hackers and makers. At $399 and $599, their pricing makes them far more palatable for the individual experimenter, while their smaller size and more familiar interface should make them easier to implement into DIY builds. While the Jetson Nano is still an unbeatable bargain for those looking to dip their toes into the CUDA waters, we could certainly see folks investing in the far more powerful NX Orin boards for more complex projects.

While the AGX Orin modules might be a bit steep for the average tinkerer, their availability is still something to be excited about. Thanks to the common JetPack SDK framework shared by the Jetson family of boards, applications developed for these higher-end modules will largely remain compatible across the whole product line. Sure, the cheaper and older Jetson boards will run them slower, but as far as machine learning and AI applications go, they’ll still run circles around something like the Raspberry Pi.

Combat Gets A Computer Controlled Opponent

August 1, 2022 by Tom Nardi 11 Comments

If you ever spent some time playing on the Atari 2600, there’s an excellent chance you went through a few rounds of Combat. The two-player warfare game not only came with the console but was actually one of the more technically impressive titles for the system, offering nearly 30 variations of the core head-to-head gameplay formula.

But unfortunately, none of those modes included single player. That is, until [Nick Bild] got on the case. While some concessions had to be made, he has succeeded where the original developers failed, and added a computer-controlled enemy to Combat. What’s more, the game still runs on the stock 2600 hardware — no emulator tricks required. The true aficionados can marvel at the snippets of source code he’s provided, but the rest of us can just watch the video below the break and marvel at the accomplishment.

If you’ve never worked on such a constrained system, this might not seem like a big deal. But [Nick] does a great job of explaining not just what he did, but why it was so hard to pull off in the first place. For example, the console has no video buffer, so everything needs to be done during the VBLANK period where the game doesn’t need to be drawing to the screen. Unfortunately that didn’t give him enough free cycles, so he had to split his code up to run across three frames instead of just one. That mean’s the original game logic is now only running 27 frames out of the 30 per second, but he says you can’t really tell in practice.

That said, some cuts had to be made. He needed to remove the surprisingly complex engine sounds to free up some resources, and had to bump the 2 KB cartridge up to 4 KB to hold the new code and data. Turns out the 2600 could handle far larger cartridges via bank switching though, so this wasn’t actually a problem.

Given its age and limited capabilities compared to more modern consoles, you might think the Atari 2600 would be little more than a footnote in gaming history. But there’s a devoted group of folks who enjoy squeezing everything they can out of the system’s 45-year-old hardware which leads to labors of love like this one.

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Why Fedora Decided To Give CC0 Licensed Code The Boot

July 29, 2022 by Tom Nardi 57 Comments

The term “open source” can be tricky. For many people, it’s taken to mean that a particular piece of software is free and that they can do whatever they wish with it. But the reality is far more complex, and the actual rights you’re afforded as the user depend entirely on which license the developers chose to release their code under. Open source code can cost money, open source code can place limits on how you use it, and in some cases, open source code can even get you into trouble down the line.

Which is precisely what the Fedora Project is looking to avoid with their recent decision to reject all code licensed under the Creative Common’s “Public Domain Dedication” CC0 license. It will still be allowed for content such as artwork, and there may even be exceptions made for existing packages on a case-by-case basis, but CC0 will soon be stricken from the list of accepted code licenses for all new submissions.

Fedora turning their nose up at a software license wouldn’t normally be newsworthy. In fact, there’s a fairly long list of licenses that the project deems unacceptable for inclusion. The surprising part here is that CC0 was once an accepted license, and is just now being reclassified due to an evolving mindset within the larger free and open source (FOSS) community.

So what’s the problem with CC0 that’s convinced Fedora to distance themselves from it, and does this mean you shouldn’t be using the license for your own projects?

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A New Way To Produce PCBs With Your 3D Printer

July 26, 2022 by Tom Nardi 50 Comments

With the low-cost PCB fabrication services available to hackers and makers these days, we’ll admit that making your own boards at home doesn’t hold quite the appeal that it did in the past. But even if getting your boards professionally made is cheaper and easier than it ever has been before, at-home production still can’t be beat when you absolutely must have a usable board before the end of the day.

If you find yourself in such a situation, this new method of DIY PCB production detailed by [Adalbert] might be just what you need. This unique approach uses a desktop fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printer throughout all of its phases, from creating a stencil based on the exported board design, to warming the UV soldermask to accelerate the curing process. It may not be an ideal choice for densely packed boards with fine-pitch components, but could definitely see it being useful for many prototypes.

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Up Close And Personal With An 8x Floppy Controller

July 25, 2022 by Tom Nardi 44 Comments

In need of a floppy controller for a 286 he was working on, [Gadget Reboot] took to GitHub to see what was available in the open hardware space. There he found an ISA board capable of controlling up to eight drives from [Sergey Kiselev] called the Monster Floppy Disk Controller (FDC) — arguably overkill for the task, but too impressive to pass up. Luckily for us, he decided to document the build process in a video that covers everything from ordering the boards to configuring the BIOS.

The video starts with a high-level overview of the schematic, which as you might have guessed, essentially puts two identical floppy controllers on the same board. You can tell this design was put together during the current chip shortage, as [Sergey] was careful to include some wiggle room if certain parts became unavailable and had to be swapped out for the alternatives listed in the BOM. It’s a decision that already paid off for [Gadget Reboot], as in some cases he had to go with the second-choice ICs.

[Gadget Reboot] was in for something of a surprise when he submitted the board for fabrication, as selecting the option for gold contacts on the edge connector made the production cost jump from $5 to nearly $300. He details how he was able to bring that cost back down a bit, but it still ended up being more than 10 times as expensive as the base price.

The second half of the video is dedicated to configuring the Monster FDC, which will certainly be a helpful resource for anyone looking to put this board to work in their own system. [Gadget Reboot] demonstrates using the board with “only” four floppy drives, and everything looks to work quite well.

Of course if your needs aren’t quite so grandiose, we’ve seen some more expedient floppy controllers which might be closer to what you’re looking for.

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How Does The James Webb Telescope Phone Home?

July 25, 2022 by Tom Nardi 31 Comments

When it comes to an engineering marvel like the James Webb Space Telescope, the technology involved is so specialized that there’s precious little the average person can truly relate to. We’re talking about an infrared observatory that cost $10 billion to build and operates at a temperature of 50 K (−223 °C; −370 °F), 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 mi) from Earth — you wouldn’t exactly expect it to share any parts with your run-of-the-mill laptop.

But it would be a lot easier for the public to understand if it did. So it’s really no surprise that this week we saw several tech sites running headlines about the “tiny solid state drive” inside the James Webb Space Telescope. They marveled at the observatory’s ability to deliver such incredible images with only 68 gigabytes of onboard storage, a figure below what you’d expect to see on a mid-tier smartphone these days. Focusing on the solid state drive (SSD) and its relatively meager capacity gave these articles a touchstone that was easy to grasp by a mainstream audience. Even if it was a flawed comparison, readers came away with a fun fact for the water cooler — “My computer’s got a bigger drive than the James Webb.”

Of course, we know that NASA didn’t hit up eBay for an outdated Samsung EVO SSD to slap into their next-generation space observatory. The reality is that the solid state drive, known officially as the Solid State Recorder (SSR), was custom built to meet the exact requirements of the JWST’s mission; just like every other component on the spacecraft. Likewise, its somewhat unusual 68 GB capacity isn’t just some arbitrary number, it was precisely calculated given the needs of the scientific instruments onboard.

With so much buzz about the James Webb Space Telescope’s storage capacity, or lack thereof, in the news, it seemed like an excellent time to dive a bit deeper into this particular subsystem of the observatory. How is the SSR utilized, how did engineers land on that specific capacity, and how does its design compare to previous space telescopes such as the Hubble?

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Hackaday Podcast 178: The Return Of Supercon, Victory For Open Source, Exquisite Timepieces, And Documentation To Die For

July 22, 2022 by Tom Nardi 2 Comments

Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi start this week’s podcast off with an announcement the community has been waiting years for: the return of the Hackaday Supercon! While there’s still some logistical details to hammer out, we’re all extremely excited to return to a live con and can’t wait to share more as we get closer to November. Of course you can’t have Supercon without the Hackaday Prize, which just so happens to be wrapping up its Hack it Back challenge this weekend.

In other news, we’ll talk about the developing situation regarding the GPLv3 firmware running on Ortur’s laser engravers (don’t worry, it’s good news for a change), and a particularly impressive fix that kept a high-end industrial 3D printer out of the scrapheap. We’ll also fawn over a pair of fantastically documented projects, learn about the fascinating origins of the lowly fire hydrant, and speculate wildly about the tidal wave of dead solar panels looming menacingly in the distance.

Or download the fresh bitstream yourself.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!