Arming With An OS

April 13, 2022 by Al Williams 28 Comments

We see tons of projects with the infamous “Blue Pill” STM32 boards. They are cheap and plentiful and have a lot of great features, or at least they were before the chip shortage. I recently picked up a “Black Pill”, which is very similar but has an even more powerful processor. For a few bucks, you get an ARM CPU that can run at 100 MHz (but with USB, probably 96 MHz). There’s 512 kB of flash and 128 kB of RAM. There’s a USB type C port, and even a button and an LED onboard. The thing fits on a breadboard and you can program it with a cheap STLink dongle which costs about $10.

Of course, you then have to consider the software. The STM32Cube stuff is a lot to set up and learn but it does let you do just about anything you can imagine. Then there is the STM32Duino plug-in that lets you use it as a beefy Arduino. That works and is easy enough to set up. However, there’s also Mbed. The only problem is that Mbed doesn’t work right out of the box. Turns out, though, it isn’t that hard to set up. I’ll show you how easy it is to get things going and, next time, I’ll show you a practical example of a USB peripheral that uses the mBed RTOS features.

First Steps

Obviously, you are going to need a Black Pill. There are at least two choices but for as cheap as they are there is little reason not to get the STM32F411 version that has more memory. The DIP form factor will fit in whatever breadboard you happen to have and a USB C cable will power the board so unless you are driving a lot of external circuitry, you probably don’t need an external supply.

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Ask Hackaday: Is It Time For Waste Heat And Cold Area Heating To Shine?

April 12, 2022 by Jenny List 82 Comments

It’s difficult to escape the topic of energy supply at the moment, with the geopolitical situation surrounding the invasion of Ukraine leaving the natural gas supply to an entire continent in jeopardy. Fortunately we’re watching the green shoots of an early spring here in the Northern hemisphere so the worst of the winter weather is behind us, but industrial customers can take no such solace from the season and will have to weather whatever price hikes are to come. Every alternative idea for energy supply is on the table, and with the parallel imperative of decarbonising the economy this goes beyond the short term into a future without so much need to rely on gas.

The Future is Cloudy

A district heating plant in Vienna, Austria. Joadl, CC BY-SA 3.0 AT

A collaboration between a Finnish district heating network and Microsoft caught our eye because the location of a new data centre for the tech giant was chosen specifically to supply waste heat to the network, rather than releasing it to the environment. It’s not uncommon at all for European cities to use district heating networks but they are normally supplied by waste incinerators, boilers, or combined heat and power stations. The use of data centre waste heat is a novelty, as is in particular the siting of the data centre being dictated by the network.
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Scientists Are Now Declaring New Species Via Photos And Video

April 12, 2022 by Zoe Skyforest 22 Comments

Identifying new species is key to the work of zoologists around the world. It’s an exciting part of research into the natural world, and being the first to discover a new species often grants a scientists naming rights that can create a legacy of one’s work that lasts long into the future.

Traditionally, the work of taxonomy involved capturing and preserving an example of the new species. This is such that it could be classified properly and studied in detail by scientists working now and in the future. However, times are changing, and scientists are beginning to identify new species on the basis of videos and photos instead.

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Review: Vizy Linux-Powered AI Camera

April 11, 2022 by Donald Papp 14 Comments

Vizy is a Linux-based “AI camera” based on the Raspberry Pi 4 that uses machine learning and machine vision to pull off some neat tricks, and has a design centered around hackability. I found it ridiculously simple to get up and running, and it was just as easy to make changes of my own, and start getting ideas.

Person and cat with machine-generated tags identifying them — Out of the box, Vizy is only a couple lines of Python away from being a functional Cat Detector project.

I was running pre-installed examples written in Python within minutes, and editing that very same code in about 30 seconds more. Even better, I did it all without installing a development environment, or even leaving my web browser, for that matter. I have to say, it made for a very hacker-friendly experience.

Vizy comes from the folks at Charmed Labs; this isn’t their first stab at smart cameras, and it shows. They also created the Pixy and Pixy 2 cameras, of which I happen to own several. I have always devoured anything that makes machine vision more accessible and easier to integrate into projects, so when Charmed Labs kindly offered to send me one of their newest devices, I was eager to see what was new.

I found Vizy to be a highly-polished platform with a number of truly useful hardware and software features, and a focus on accessibility and ease of use that I really hope to see more of in future embedded products. Let’s take a closer look.

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Mothballing Rosalind: How To Put A Space Mission In Storage

April 11, 2022 by Dan Maloney 13 Comments

In planetary exploration circles, Mars has quite a bad reputation. The Red Planet has a habit of eating spacecraft sent there to explore it, to the degree that nearly half of the missions we’ve thrown at it have failed in one way or another. The “Mars Curse” manifests itself most spectacularly when landers fail to negotiate the terminal descent and new billion-dollar craters appear on the Martian regolith, while some missions meet their doom en route to the planet, and an unlucky few have even blown up on the launchpad.

But the latest example of the Mars Curse, the recent cancellation of the second half of the ExoMars mission, represents a new and depressing failure mode: war — specifically the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The international outrage over the aggression resulted in economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation of Russia, which retaliated by ending its partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA), depriving the mission of its launch vehicle and dooming the mission that would have landed the rover Rosalind Franklin on Oxia Planum near the Martian Equator in 2023.

While there’s still a chance that administrators and diplomats will work things out, chances are slim that it will be in time for the narrow launch window that the mission was shooting for in September of 2022. That means the Rosalind Franklin, along with all the other flight hardware that was nearly ready to launch, will have to be put in storage at least until the next launch window opens in 2024. That begs the question: how does one put a complex spacecraft into storage? And could such mothballing have unintended consequences for the mission when it eventually does fly?

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Hackaday Links: April 10, 2022

April 10, 2022 by Dan Maloney 19 Comments

A funny thing happened on the way to the delta. The one on Jezero crater on Mars, that is, as the Perseverance rover may have captured a glimpse of the parachute that helped deliver it to the Red Planet a little over a year ago. Getting the rover safely onto the Martian surface was an incredibly complex undertaking, made all the more impressive by the fact that it was completely autonomous. The parachute, which slowed the descent vehicle holding the rover, was jettisoned well before the “Sky Crane” deployed to lower the rover to the surface. The parachute wafted to the surface a bit over a kilometer from the landing zone. NASA hasn’t confirmed that what’s seen in the raw images is the chute; in fact, they haven’t even acknowledged the big white thing that’s obviously not a rock in the picture at all. Perhaps they’re reserving final judgment until they get an overflight by the Ingenuity helicopter, which is currently landed not too far from where the descent stage crashed. We’d love to see pictures of that wreckage.

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The Virtue Of Wires In The Age Of Wireless

April 9, 2022 by Elliot Williams 47 Comments

We ran an article this week about RS-485, a noise resistant differential serial multidrop bus architecture. (Tell me where else you’re going to read articles like that!) I’ve had my fun with RS-485 in the past, and reading this piece reminded me of those days.

You see, RS-485 lets you connect a whole slew of devices up to a single bundle of Cat5 cable, and if you combine it with the Modbus protocol, you can have them work together in a network. Dedicate a couple of those Cat5 lines to power, and it’s the perfect recipe for a home, or hackerspace, small-device network — the kind of things that you, and I, would do with WiFi and an ESP8266 today.

Wired is more reliable, has fewer moving parts, and can solve the “how do I get power to these things” problem. It’s intrinsically simpler: no radios, just serial data running as voltage over wires. But nobody likes running cable, and there’s just so much more demo code out there for an ESP solution. There’s an undeniable ease of development and cross-device compatibility with WiFi. Your devices can speak directly to a computer, or to the whole Internet. And that’s been the death of wired.

Still, some part of me admires the purpose-built simplicity and the bombproof nature of the wired bus. It feels somehow retro, but maybe I’ll break out some old Cat5 and run it around the office just for old times’ sake.