hardware

1822 Articles

Raspberry Pi Might Not Be Vaporware

August 26, 2011 by 73 Comments

When we first covered the Raspberry Pi, we secretly wondered if the project might become vaporware. It looks like the tiny, full-fledged computer might actually be produced with the announcement of alpha boards in the Raspberry Pi HQ.

In the announcement of the Raspberry Pi last May, the board was about the size of a USB thumb drive and would cost $25. It looks like the board will be a little larger in the final revision – about the size of a business card – and production of the alpha boards were a bit over cost. That being said, these boards seem a lot more capable than what we’ve seen before. The Raspberry Pi now has 10/100 ethernet, and analog audio and video while keeping the HDMI, USB, and SD card support we saw in the original.

The Raspberry Pi team already has Debian running on these boards, so right now we’re wondering when gumstix boards will come down in price. Of course, this project is intended for use in education, but we can’t wait to see what can be done with this hardware. If you already know what you would do with this, tell us in the comments.

We Don’t Need To Brainstorm Projects; Xkcd Does That For Us

August 23, 2011 by 52 Comments

[Randall Munroe], the guy behind our favorite web comic xkcd, gave us yet another great project idea that falls on the heels of securing our valuables and silencing loud car stereos. The xkcd forum has been talking about how to implement this, and we’d like to hear what Hack A Day readers think about this idea.

The project isn’t much different from 3D photography. [Carl Pisaturo] has done a lot of art and experimentation based on this idea that basically amounted to largish binoculars. A poster on the xkcd forum has already built this using mirrors, but we’re wondering how much the parallax can be increased with this method. Two cameras and a smart phone would also allow automatic pan and tilt that corresponds to head movement.

We’re not quite sure if this idea can be applied to astronomy. The angular resolution of the human eye is around one arc minute, every star except for the Sun has an annual parallax less than one arc second. If anyone wants to try this out with a longer baseline (From Earth to Pluto for example), we would suggest simulating this in Stellarium. Seeing the moon as a sphere would be possible with a few hundred miles between cameras, though.

Tell us how you would build this in the comments, and be sure to send in your write-up if you manage to build it. We’ll put it up right away.

Thanks to [Theon144] for sending this in.

EDIT: Because the comments are actually bearing fruit, check out the thread on the Hack A Day forums for this post: link.

FPGA Bitcoin Miner Is Probably The Most Power Efficient.

August 22, 2011 by 62 Comments

[fpgaminer], [li_gangyi], and [newMeat1] have been working together for the last few months to build an FPGA bitcoin miner that blows GPU mining rigs out of the water in terms of power efficiency. The board requires only 6.8 watts for 100 Mhashes/second, but [li_gangyi]’s blog says the team expects to hit 150-200 Mhashes with some improvements. That’s efficiency GPUs can’t touch.

Bitcoins are a digital currency that are ‘mined’ by calculating hashes that verify bitcoin transactions. While mining operations can be performed on a CPU, graphics cards and FPGAs beat CPUs by several orders of magnitude in terms of how many hashes can be performed per second.

The heart of the board is a Spartan-6 LX150 FPGA – a pricey bit of kit – and the team is selling each board for $440 USD. For that amount of money, you could buy two ATI 6770s at half the price and crunch four times as many hashes a second. At less than 7 watts, though, we wouldn’t worry too much about cooling the rig and the electricity costs will be very low.

Easy To Build Z80 Single Board Computer

August 16, 2011 by 27 Comments

[Alexis] sent in a single board computer he’s been working on. The project goal of his build was making it easily reproducible. From looking at the schematics, it’s one of the simplest fully-functional computers we’ve seen. The build runs CP/M 2.2 off of two 3.5 inch floppies. This opens up a lot of options as to what software is already available. Although it operates over a serial terminal, [Alexis] pretty much duplicated an Osborne I, only at double the speed.

[Alexis] got a little e-fame from his earlier 8088 homebrew computer built from very early 8088’s rescued from an electronics junk shop. These 8088 computers made the blog rounds by playing Still Alive with a SID chip from a Commodore 64 and a YM2151 FM synth chip.

For now, I guess we’ll have to settle for a video of [Alexis]’ Z80 computer running CP/M. Check out a video after the break of his computer running the greatest Infocom adventure, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

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God’s Own Keyboard, Now With Bluetooth

August 9, 2011 by 49 Comments

For decades a thunderous roar rose from the bowels of IBM keyboards like the animus of angry and forgotten gods. These keyboards have fallen silent of late, due only to incompatibility with newer hardware. Now, Model Ms have been given a reprieve from landfills or recycling centers because of the work of [wulax] of geekhack and his Model M Bluetooth controller board.

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1 Chip USB AVR Development

August 7, 2011 by 30 Comments

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was an AVR microcontroller with USB device support built in so you would not need a separate programmer or serial link? Well in fact there are quite a few of them, and this awesome tutorial (google translate) is a quick and easy crash course in using the ATMega 16/32U4 micro controllers.

These 8 bit AVR’s (16k and 32k) have the usual list of features you would expect in a Mega AVR. 26 GPIO pins and a pretty easy to solder 44 pin surface mount package, the micro controller also has a USB 2.0 Full-speed/Low Speed Device Module and allows programming though a standard bootloader.

Once you have a pretty standard board assembled you need Atmel’s FLIP RS232, USB, or CAN device programming software (Windows or Linux) and your favorite AVR IDE setup, you’re good to go!

Join us after the break for a quick video.

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