Hack My House: Running Raspberry Pi Without An SD Card

October 8, 2018 by Jonathan Bennett 62 Comments

Many of us have experienced the pain that is a Raspberry Pi with a corrupted SD card. I suspect the erase-on-write nature of flash memory is responsible for much of the problem. Regardless of the cause, one solution is to use PXE booting with the Raspberry Pi 3. That’s a fancy way to say we’ll be booting the Raspberry Pi over the network, instead of from an SD card.

What does this have to do with Hacking My House? As I discussed last time, I’m using Raspberry Pi as Infrastructure by building them into the walls of every room in my house. You don’t want to drag out a ladder and screwdriver to swap out a misbehaving SD card, so booting over the network is a really good solution. I know I promised we’d discuss cabling and cameras. Think of this as a parenthetical article — we’ll talk about Ethernet and ZoneMinder next time.

So let’s dive in and see what the Preboot Execution Environment (PXE) is all about and how to use PXE with Raspberry Pi.

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New Part Day: The RISC-V Chip With Built-In Neural Networks

October 8, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 87 Comments

After exploring a few random online shops one day, [David] (thanks for sending this in, by the way) ran across a very interesting chip. It’s a dual-core, RISC-V chip running at 400MHz. There’s 6 MB of SRAM on the CPU, and there’s 2MB for convolutional neural network acceleration. There is, apparently, WiFi on some versions. There are already SDKs available on GitHub, and a bare chip costs a dollar or two. Interested? Log in to Taobao, realize Taobao does pre-orders, and all this can be yours.

This is a preorder — because apparently you can do that as a seller on TaoBao, but the Sipeed M1 K210 is available as a ‘core’ board with 72 pins in a one-inch square package, a version with WiFi, or as a complete development board with an OV2640 camera, 2.4 inch LCD, microphone, and onboard USB. There are videos of this chip running a face detection routine. It found Obama.

A bit of googling tells us this chip comes from a company named Kendryte, and here the specs are repeated: this is a dual-core RISC-V with an FPU, a bunch of RAM, and can run TensorFlow. Documentation is available, although the datasheet will need to be translated, and as of this writing there’s a GitHub filled with SDKs and examples, with some of the repos updated in the last hour.

Over the years we’ve seen a few RISC-V chips given development boards, and you can buy them right now. The HiFive 1 is an exceptionally powerful microcontroller with processing power that puts it right up against the Teensy (which is built around a Freescale chip), but it’s also fairly expensive. We’re not sure the Arduino Cinque (also RISC-V) ever made it to production, but again, expensive. The idea that a RISC-V microcontroller could be available for just a few dollars is very interesting, it even comes with SDKs and utilities to make the chip useful.

Hackaday Links: October 7, 2018

October 7, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

Ah, crap. We lost a good one, people. [Samm Sheperd] passed away last month. We’ve seen his stuff before, from a plane with a squirrel cage fan, to completely owning a bunch of engineering students by auditing a class. The obit is available as a Google Doc, and there’s a Samm Sheperd Memorial Fund for the Big Lake Youth Camp in Gladstone, Oregon.

FranLab is closing down! Fran is one of the hardware greats, and she’s being evicted. If you’ve got 2000sqft of workshop space in Philly you’d like to spare, you know who to talk to. There will, probably, be a crowdfunding thing going up shortly, and we’ll post a link when it’s up.

The Parallax Propeller is probably one of the most architecturally interesting microcontrollers out there. It’s somewhat famous for being a multi-core chip, and is commonly used in VGA generation, reading keyboards, and other tasks where you need to do multiple real-time operations simultaneously. The Parallax Propeller 2, the next version of this chip, is in the works, and now there’s real silicon. Everything is working as expected, and we might see this out in the wild real soon.

Thought artistic PCBs were just a con thing? Not anymore, I guess. There has been a lot of activity on Tindie with the Shitty Add-Ons with [TwinkleTwinkie] and [Potato Nightmare] releasing a host of very cool badges for your badges. Most of these are Shitty Add-Ons, and there will be an update to the Shitty Add-On spec shortly. It’s going to be backwards-comparable, so don’t worry.

Unnecessary drama!?! In my 3D printing community?!? Yes, it’s true, there was a small tiff over the Midwest RepRap Festival this week. Here’s what went down. You got three guys. John, Sonny, and Steve. Steve owns SeeMeCNC, based in Goshen, Indiana. John worked for SeeMeCNC until this year, and has been the ‘community manager’ for MRRF along with Sonny. Seeing as how the RepRap Festival is the only thing that ever happens in Goshen, Steve wanted to get the ball rolling for next year’s MRRF, so he sent out an email, sending the community into chaos. No, there’s not some gigantic fracture in the 3D printing community, John and Sonny, ‘were just slacking’ (it’s five months out, dudes. plenty of time.), and Steve wanted to get everything rolling. No problem here, just a bunch of unnecessary drama in the 3D printing community. As usual.

Supercon Talks That Inspire You To Take On Something New

October 5, 2018 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

There’s wealth of activities at the Hackaday Superconference but we’ve saved a few for today’s announcement that will inspire you to take on something new and different. Check out the eight talks below that will push you to try the unexpected, to look at old things in a new way, and to propel your hardware adventures for another year.

This is the Ultimate Hardware Conference and you need to be there! We’ll continue to announce speakers and workshops as final confirmations come in. Supercon will sell out so grab your ticket now before it’s too late.

Samy Kamkar
Ultra Low Cost, Low Power, Low Weight, Light-up Mesh Networkings

How to “float” a mesh network with light-up balloons in the air without re-powering.

Carl Bugeja
Building Motors from PCBs

Ongoing design and prototyping experiments that use Printed Circuit Boards (either rigid or flexible) as a coil in conjunction with rare earth magnets to create interesting motors and actuators.

Joan Horvath and Rich Cameron
Hacker Calculus

Travel back to Isaac Newton’s work to rethink calculus and make it intuitive using 3D printed open-source designs.

Rob Ryan-Silva
Making it Matter for Developing Countries

Building hardware in support of foreign aid projects. Learn what considerations really matter when designing for developing country contexts.

Dominic Spill
Ridiculous Radios

RF engineers put great effort into crafting high quality radio systems. I am not one of those engineers. Experimenting with radio protocols using SDR.

Michael Rigsby
Connect the Dots; Choices Make a Life

How does life unfold if you create things? Nothing created is wasted — following your dreams will lead you somewhere (maybe not where you planned), but to a good place. How I quit my engineering job and built interesting things as a career.

Hunter Scott
Why Phased Arrays Are Cool and How to Build One

At the intersection of the two black arts of RF engineering and antenna design is the phased array. But don’t worry, they’re not as hard to understand as you might think.

Charles Alexanian
Small Scale Vacuum Tube Construction

Showing the process for the construction of vacuum tubes. Tubes will be built and tested on site using glass working torches and other specialized tools

We Want You at Supercon!

The Hackaday Superconference is a can’t-miss event for hardware hackers everywhere. Join in on three amazing days of talks and workshops focusing on hardware creation. This is your community of hardware hackers who congregate to hack on the official hardware badge and on a slew of other projects that show up for the fun. Get your ticket right away!

Easy FPGA CPU With MAX1000

October 5, 2018 by Al Williams 8 Comments

Ok, we’ll admit it. We like FPGAs because it reminds us of wiring up a 100-in-1 kit when we were kids. But the truth is, many projects are just as well off to have a CPU. But there’s a real sweet spot when you have a CPU and an FPGA together. Intel (or Altera, if you prefer) has the NIOS II CPU core, but that’s hard to configure, right? Maybe not, thanks to a project by [jefflieu] over on GitHub. He’s assembled some basic definitions and libraries to easily — relatively speaking — use NIOS II on the MAX1000 as well as a few other boards. The MAX1000 is a pretty nice board for about $30, so this is a very inexpensive way to get into “System on Chip” (SOC) development.

[jeff] goes into more detail in a blog post, but the idea is pretty simple. We tried it, and it works very well, although we found a few things hard to follow so read on to see how we managed.

The idea behind SoC development is you define your CPU configuration and then your hardware devices. Then you write software to talk to those custom hardware devices and — of course — write your actual application code. So you don’t just write a program, you also define the CPU the program will run on and the hardware that it will talk to.

There are several ready-to-go I/O devices included in the project, but the real fun will be writing your own. The Intel tools have the C compiler and everything else you need. You could also do everything from scratch, but these tools make it much easier to get started.

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Supercon: How Many Hardware Talks Can Be Packed Into One Conference?

October 4, 2018 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

How can we fit so many impressive talks onto two stages at the Hackaday Superconference? We’ll be bursting at the seams in November as the hardware world gathers in Pasadena for this annual pilgrimage. This year’s Supercon will have more talks and workshops than ever before!

Ken Shirriff
Studying Silicon: Reverse Engineering Integrated Circuits

From the outside, integrated circuits are mysterious black boxes. Here’s how to open up some famous analog and digital chips including 8008 microprocessor, 555 timer, the first FPGA chip, Intel’s first RAM, the 76477 sound effects chip, and a counterfeit RAM chip.

Jennifer Wang
Building IMU-based Gesture Recognition

If you combine IMUs with machine learning (ML), you can detect gestures! Experimenting with these devices that sense both motion and orientation is a great way to get ML into your hacker toolkit.

Michael Schuldt
Adventures in Manufacturing Automation

A software engineer explores manufacturing automation, featuring complex software solutions and redemption in the form of reusable hardware components.

Adam McCombs
A Hacker’s Guide to Electron Microscopy

Working on electron microscopes means learning about everything from analog and digital circuit repairs, to how to rig and transport scopes, servicing 120KV+ high voltage tanks, and working on complex high vacuum systems.

Justin McAllister
Simple Antennas to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse

From $10 USB software defined radios to cheap imported transceivers, it’s easier than ever to have a multi-purpose radio in your lab. Low cost antennas can be built by beginners easily to send and receive radio signals from frequencies covering worldwide HF to local VHF, UHF, and microwave.

Alex Glow
What Went Wrong with Archimedes (the Robot Owl)?

Building a wearable, AI-powered robotic owl, is both easier and harder than it looks. Explore the challenges of 3D printing, coding, and how to confront them with creativity.

Kerry Scharfglass
The Economics of Conference Badges at Medium Scale

Discover manufacturing processes and make decisions with an eye towards economics. Buying 30,000 RGB LEDs, using big red arrows to communicate through a translator, and more!

Jeremy Hong
Electronic Warfare: A Brief Overview of Weaponized RF Designs

Whether you are trying to avoid having a multi-million dollar fighter jet from being shot down or avoid a speeding ticket from law enforcement , the same radar and electronic warfare equations and concepts apply.

We Want You at Supercon!

Linux Fu: Keep An Eye On That File

October 4, 2018 by Al Williams 38 Comments

One of the things that’s nice about Linux or Unix compared to many other operating systems is there’s a good chance a Linux program will spew out informational messages to a log somewhere. Many commands even have a way to turn on more logs. I know that Windows has the event viewer, but many programs don’t have much to say which makes it difficult to know what’s happening when things go wrong.

The problem is, sometimes programs tell you too much information. How do you find what you want to know? It looks cool on a movie where the hacker is in front of a terminal scrolling 500 lines a second of some log file, but in real life, it is hard to read a moving screen, although with some practice you can sometimes — unreliably — pick out a keyword as it whizzes by.

Like most Unix things, there’s a tool for that. In fact, unsurprisingly, there are many tools for that. If you are using the tail command, that’s certainly one of them. But there are others you should consider.

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