BeagleV Catches Fire With The BeagleV-Fire

November 4, 2023 by 35 Comments

A new BeagleBoard is on the way, full of FPGA hotness: the BeagleV-Fire has been announced. The new $150 Single-Board Computer (SBC) from the pioneering open source BeagleBoard company is built around a RISC-V chip that has FPGA features built in. The BeagleV-Fire is built around the snappily named Microchip PolarFire MPFS025T FCVG484E, a System on a Chip (SoC) that has five Reduced Instruction Set Coding Version 5 (RISC-V) cores and a big chunk of FPGA fabric built in. That means it combines the speed of RISC-V processors with the flexibility of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), a big pile of logic gates that can be reprogrammed.

The new BeagleV-Fire includes a sizeable chunk of FPGA to work with: the core chip includes 23 K logic elements and 68 Math blocks, plus 4 Serializer/Deserializer (SerDer) lanes that can throw about 12.7 Gbps of data into and out of the fabric. On the BeagleV-Fire, the main chip is supported by 16 GB of eMMC and 2 GB of LPDDR4 RAM, plus a micro SD slot for extra storage. Gigabit Ethernet is also included, plus USB-C power and a few serial connections for debugging. There is no WiFi built in, but there is an M.2 Key E connection were you could plug in an a wireless adapter if you need it.

Like most other BeagleBoards, the BeagleV-Fire has two headers with 92 pins, which offer access to pretty much every signal on the board, plus lots of analog to digital stuff that works with add-on boards (BeagleBoard refers to them as capes). Also present is the usual 22-pin CSI connector for attaching cameras and other devices.

Want one? They are available for immediate order on BeagleBoard.org or from the usual suspects. It looks like they are already in stock for next-day delivery. If this all sounds familiar, it’s probably because we’ve been posting about this particular board for awhile now, covering both the announcement and first tests. Continue reading “BeagleV Catches Fire With The BeagleV-Fire” →

Supercon 2023 Is On: Live

November 4, 2023 by 3 Comments

Supercon is in full swing! If you weren’t able to join us in person, we’re streaming the main stage and you should absolutely check out the talks as they happen.

The full schedule is here, and you’ll find all the streams over on our YouTube channel. Come join in the fun.

For those of you are here with us in Pasadena, we’ve got a signup form for anyone who wants to submit a Lightening Talk for Sunday.

Hint: absolutely don’t miss Cory Doctorow’s keynote speech, taking place at 10:00 AM Pacific.

Saving Apollo By Decoding Core Rope

November 4, 2023 by 7 Comments

One of our favorite retro hardware enthusiasts, [CuriousMarc], is back with the outstanding tale of preserving Apollo Program software, and building a core rope reader from scratch to do it. We’ve talked about [Marc]’s previous efforts to get real Apollo hardware working again, and one of the by-products of this effort was recovering the contents of the read-only core rope memory modules that were part of that hardware.

The time finally came to hand the now-working Apollo guidance computer back to its owner, which left the team without any hardware to read core rope modules. But the archive of software from the program was still incomplete, and there were more modules to try to recover. So, the wizardly [Mike Stewart] just decided to roll up his sleeves and build his own reader. Which didn’t actually work as expected the first time.

And this leads us into one of [Marc]’s elevator music explainers, where he gives a beautiful rundown on how core rope works. And if you are thinking of core memory based on ferrite cores, get ready for a brain stretch, as core rope is quite a bit different, and is even more complicated to read. Which brings us to the bug in [Mike]’s reader, which is actually a bug in the block II design of the core rope modules.

Reading a byte off the module requires setting multiple inhibit wires to select an individual core. An innovation in block II allowed those inhibit wires to run at half current, but it turns out that didn’t actually work as intended, and partially selected multiple cores on the other half of the module. And [Mike] forget to re-implement that bug — the reader needs to literally be bug-for-bug compatible. A quick recompile of the FPGA code makes everything work again. And the conservation effort can continue. Stay tuned for more in the Apollo story!

Continue reading “Saving Apollo By Decoding Core Rope” →

Wooden Game Boy Is A Challenging Intro CNC Project

November 4, 2023 by 12 Comments

[Sebastian] describes himself as “a total noob” when it comes to CNC, so in an attempt to get to know his new CNC router, he chose about the most complex possible project — replicating an original Game Boy case in wood. And spoiler alert: he nailed it.

Of course, he did have a few things going for him. At least from a straight woodworking perspective, it’s hard to go wrong by choosing walnut as your material. Then again, it can be unforgiving at times, and picky about tooling, which is probably why [Sebastian] used nine different tools to get the job done. But where he upped the difficulty level was in reproducing so many of the details of the original injection-molded plastic case. There are top and bottom shells, each of which has to be milled from both sides. This makes registration tricky when the parts are flipped. Specific indexing holes were used for that, along with the old “blue tape and CA glue” fixturing trick, which seemed to work quite well. For our money, though, the best bit is the lettering on the front face, which was milled out with an engraving bit and then filled with a spritz of white spray paint. A surfacing bit then came along to knock the overspray down, leaving labels that contrast beautifully with the dark wood. Gorgeous!

It wasn’t all easy sailing, though. There are just some things plastic can do that wood can’t, like holding screw threads in small studs without splitting. So, the case had to be glued shut once the mix of salvaged and new components went in. Still, it looks fabulous, and [Sebastian] says what we see in the video below is the one and only piece. Pretty sweet for the first try. Surprisingly, it doesn’t seem as if we’ve seen a wooden Game Boy before — a wooden NES, sure, but not a Game Boy.

Continue reading “Wooden Game Boy Is A Challenging Intro CNC Project” →

2023 Halloween Hackfest: Meet Creepsy, The Robotic People-Seeking Ghost

November 4, 2023 by No comments

The 2023 Halloween Contest might be over, but we saw some great entries and clever modifications bringing projects into the Halloween spirit. One of them is Creepsy by [Hazal Mestci], a Raspberry Pi-based robotic ghost able to autonomously pick people out of a crowd and glide towards them, emitting eerie sounds as it does so.

The tech behind Creepsy (GitHub repository) originally led the somewhat less spooky existence of a mobile drink serving platform. But with a little bit of modification and the addition of a bedsheet with cutouts for sensors, the transformation into an obstacle-avoiding people-seeking spooker was complete. Key to this transformation was the Viam Python SDK, a software Swiss army knife used by robot builders everywhere. Creepsy itself was built using handy aluminum extrusion, and 3D printed parts along with the requisite suite of motors, cameras, and ultrasonic sensors.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the 2023 Halloween Contest. Got an idea for next year? It’s never too early to get started because ideas are great, but nothing beats “done on time”!

2023 Halloween Hackfest

Learn Forth On The Commodore VIC-20

November 3, 2023 by 14 Comments

Although BASIC was most commonly used on home computers like the Commodore VIC-20, it was possible to write programs in other languages, such as Forth. Conveniently, all it took to set up a Forth development system was inserting the cartridge into the VIC-20 and powering it on, with the VIC-FORTH cartridge by [Tom Zimmer] being a popular choice for the Commodore VIC-20. In a recent video, the [My Developer Thoughts] YouTube channel covers Forth development using this cartridge.

In addition to the video tutorial, the original VIC-FORTH Instruction Manual is also available, together with the 1541 disk image. In an upcoming video, the Commodore 64 version of the cartridge will also be covered, which is called 64Forth, and which is also readily available to tinker with. For those interested in learning more about [Tom Zimmer] and his Forth-related work, a 2010 interview could be interesting. This covers the other platforms which he developed an implementation for.

As for why Forth might be interesting to developers and users, this comes mostly down to the much lower overhead of Forth compared to BASIC, while avoiding the pitfalls of ASM and resource-intensive nature of developing in C, as the entire Forth development system (compiler, editor, etc.) comfortably fits in the limited memory of the average 8-bit home computer.

(Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip)

Continue reading “Learn Forth On The Commodore VIC-20” →

Most AI Content Is Trash, Just Like Everything Else

November 3, 2023 by 31 Comments

[Max Woolf] has been working in the AI space since 2015, and among other work has created numerous useful open-source tools. He also recently wrote a thoughtful blog post that attempts to put into words his feelings on the state of things in the wake of experiencing a bit of an AI backlash-related burnout. Essentially, people effortlessly creating vast amounts of bad AI content has caused a bigger problem than we may realize.

How so? Well, Sturgeon’s law (summarized as “ninety percent of everything is crud”) applies to AI as much as it does to anything else. Theodore Sturgeon was a science fiction author and critic (and writer of multiple Star Trek episodes) who observed in the 1950s that while Science Fiction — the hot new popular thing at the time — was often derided by critics as being little more than low quality pap, so was everything else. It was true that most Science Fiction was garbage. But most work in other fields was of similarly low quality, and thus Science Fiction was really no different. It’s all trash, except for the parts one likes. Just like anything else.

What makes this observation particularly applicable to the current AI landscape is that, according to [Max], the incredible ease of use makes AI’s “ninety percent crud” very large indeed, and the attached backlash is similarly big. The remaining ten percent of AI that is absolutely fantastic and full of possibilities? It’s practically invisible due to how quickly the industry is moving, the speed with which the big players are vying to control it, and how unfashionable it has become to admit one is using AI tools at all.

[Max] knows the scene better than most. One of his projects is simpleaichat, a tool aimed not just at enabling people to integrate AI into projects easier, but piercing the hype around AI to more easily reveal just how these tools actually work. Sadly, a general AI backlash has made developing these tools feel rather less rewarding than it once did.