Running Intel TBB On A Raspberry Pi

December 1, 2016 by 17 Comments

The usefulness of Raspberry Pis seems almost limitless, with new applications being introduced daily and with no end in sight. But, as versatile as they are, it’s no secret that Raspberry Pis are still lacking in pure processing power. So, some serious optimization is needed to squeeze as much power out of the Raspberry Pi as possible when you’re working on processor-intensive projects.

This simplest way to accomplish this optimization, of course, is to simply reduce what’s running down to the essentials. For example, there’s no sense in running a GUI if your project doesn’t even use a display. Another strategy, however, is to ensure that you’re actually using all of the available processing power that the Raspberry Pi offers. In [sagiz’s] case, that meant using Intel’s open source Threading Building Blocks to achieve better parallelism in his OpenCV project.

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Lost Moon Found: The Satellite That Came Back To Life

December 1, 2016 by 67 Comments

The late 1950s and early 1960s were a tumultuous time in world history. The Cold War between the East and the West was in full-swing, driving the new fields of nuclear weapons and space exploration and giving the period its dual monikers of “Atomic Age” and “Space Age.”

Changes in these fields often went hand in glove, with developments in one requiring responses in the other. In 1958, the US conducted nuclear tests in the Pacific that effectively destroyed the ionosphere over the test site and shut down high-frequency communications to places like Hawaii and New Zealand. The strategic implications of this were clear, and the US began looking for ways for the military to reduce its reliance on HF communications and ionospheric skip by using space-based assets to communicate at much higher frequencies.

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Craziest Pin-Saving LCD Trick Ever!

December 1, 2016 by 93 Comments

We love squeezing every last bit of silicon goodness out of a tiny chip, or at least we delight in seeing it done. Today’s analog/digital hack is one of the sweetest we’ve seen in a while. And it’s also a little bit of a puzzle, so don’t scroll down to the answer until you’ve given the schematic a good think-over.

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Geohot’s Comma.ai Self-Driving Code On GitHub

December 1, 2016 by 30 Comments

First there was [Geohot]’s lofty goal to build a hacker’s version of the self-driving car. Then came comma.ai and a whole bunch of venture capital. After that, a letter from the Feds and a hasty retreat from the business end of things. The latest development? comma.ai’s openpilot project shows up on GitHub!

If you’ve got either an Acura ILX or Honda Civic 2016 Touring addition, you can start to play around with this technology on your own. Is this a good idea? Are you willing to buy some time on a closed track?

A quick browse through the code gives some clues as to what’s going on here. The board files show just how easy it is to interface with these cars’ driving controls: there’s a bunch of CAN commands and that’s it. There’s some unintentional black comedy, like a (software) crash-handler routine named crash.py.

What’s shocking is that there’s nothing shocking going on. It’s all pretty much straightforward Python with sprinklings of C. Honestly, it looks like something you could get into and start hacking away at pretty quickly. Anyone want to send us an Acura ILX for testing purposes? No promises you’ll get it back in one piece.

If you missed it, read up on our coverage of the rapid rise and faster retreat of comma.ai. But we don’t think the game is over yet: comma.ai is still hiring. Are open source self-driving cars in our future? That would be fantastic!

Via Endagadget. Thanks for the tip, [FaultyWarrior]!

NixieBot Films Your Tweets

December 1, 2016 by 8 Comments

[Robin Bussell]’s NixieBot is a mash up of new age electronics and retro vintage components and he’s got a bunch of hacks crammed in there. It’s a Nixie tube clock which displays tweets, takes pictures of the display when it encounters tweets with a #NixieBotShowMe hash tag, and then posts requested pictures back to twitter. If a word is eight characters, it takes a snapshot. If it’s a longer message, NixieBot takes a series of pictures of each word, converts it to an animated GIF, and then posts the tweet. In between, it displays random tweets every twenty seconds. You can see the camera setup in the image below and you should check out the @nixiebot twitter feed to see some of the action.

nixiebot_05For the display, he’s using eight big vintage Burroughs B7971 Nixie Tubes. These aren’t easy to source, and current prices hover around $100 each if you can find them. The 170V DC needed to run each tube comes from a set of six 12V to 170V converter boards specifically designed to drive these tubes. Each board can drive at least a couple of nixies, so [Robin]’s able to use just four boards for the eight tubes. Each nixie is driven by its own “B7971 SmartSocket“, a dedicated PIC16F690 micro-controller board custom designed for the purpose. A serial protocol makes it easy to daisy-chain the SmartSockets to build multi character displays.

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One Bit, One Instruction Discrete CPU

November 30, 2016 by 26 Comments

There is a certain benefit to being an early adopter. If you were around when Unix or MSDOS had a handful of commands, it wasn’t hard to learn. Then you learn new things as they come along. If you started learning Linux or Windows today, there’s a huge number of details you have to tackle. You have the same problem trying to learn CPU design. Grappling with the design of a 16-bit CPU with a straightforward data path is hard enough. Throw in modern superscalar execution, pipelining, multiple levels of microcode, speculative execution, and all the other features modern processors have and you’ll quickly find yourself lost in the details.

[Michai Ramakers] wanted to build an educational CPU and he took a novel approach. The transistor CPU uses only one instruction and operates on one bit at a time. Naturally, this leads to a small data path, which is a good thing if you’re only using discrete transistors. His website is a ground-up tutorial in building and using the tiny computer.

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Arm Thrusters, For Underwater Super Powers!

November 30, 2016 by 23 Comments

Most of us will have spent the idle hours of our youth while sitting in a room where a teacher was standing at the blackboard explaining iambic pentameter or the Diet of Wurms, daydreaming about the amazing exploits we could have created if only we had an Evil Lair stuffed with all the tools our fertile imaginations demanded. [James Bond] would have had nothing on us, our personal [Q] branch would have ensured we would have had the coolest gadgets on the planet.

As grown-ups we have some of the resources to make this a reality, yet somehow we’ve never made good on the dream. We spend our time creating IoT clocks or novelty electronic Christmas ornaments, and Mr. [Bond] still has a monopoly on the really cool stuff. Fortunately [PeterSripol] has struck a blow on our behalf, because he’s created a pair of arm-mounted underwater thrusters (YouTube, embedded below) that should leave [007] feeling definitely a bit [006.5].

The thrusters themselves came from a Kickstarter purchase that he left on the shelf for a while without an application. Then with only a short time before a trip to Hawaii, he set to work to do something with them, and the arm thrusters were the result.

He makes extensive use of components from the world of radio controlled models, with battery packs and speed controllers mounted in a waterproof food container at his belt, and a pair of handheld microswitch controllers. There is an Arduino which presumably produces the PWM signal, and we are treated to an in-depth look at his waterproofing efforts for the various connectors and switches. After a false start with battery polarity and a cracked impeller housing the device works, and we see it in use on a suitably tropical though not quite sun-kissed beach.

The thrusters appear to work very well, and we’d say they look a lot of fun to use. Sadly the exercise is brought to a halt when a control wire is sucked into a propeller, but we’re sure that’s only a minor setback. We’ve posted the video below the break, take a look.

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