From Cop Car Data Terminal, To Retro Computer

March 17, 2018 by Jenny List 41 Comments

It is possible that you will have lived your life without ever coming into contact with a Motorola MDT9100-T. The data terminal of choice for use in police cars across the globe was a computer with a full-sized QWERTY keyboard, a small CRT display, a mainboard sporting an Intel 386SX processor, and a custom version of Windows 3.1. [Trammell Hudson] and some friends from NYC Resistor scored some MDT9100s in an online auction and found them to be just too good an opportunity not to crack them open and see what could be done.

The custom Windows install could be bypassed with a DOS prompt for some period demoscene action, but [Trammell] wanted more. The 386SX wasn’t even quick when it was new, and this computer deserved the power of a BeagleBone! A custom cape was created on a prototyping cape to interface with the MDT9100 header carrying both keyboard and video. A bit of detective work revealed the display to be a 640×480 pixel mono VGA. The ‘Bone’s LVDS output can drive VGA through a resistor ladder DAC with the aid of an appropriate device tree overlay. The keyboard was then taken care of with a Teensy working as a USB device, resulting in a working Linux computer in the shell of an MDT9100.

It’s always good to see old technology brought up to date. Amusingly a couple of years ago we reported on the death of VGA, but retro projects like this one mean it’ll be a long time before we’ve heard the last of it.

Programming Linux Devices With Arduino And The Cloud

March 15, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 28 Comments

Back in the olden days, when the Wire library still sucked, the Arduino was just a microcontroller. Now, we have single board computers and cheap microcontrollers with WiFi built in. As always, there’s a need to make programming and embedded development more accessible and more widely supported among the hundreds of devices available today.

At the Embedded Linux Conference this week, [Massimo Banzi] announced the beginning of what will be Arduino’s answer to the cloud, online IDEs, and a vast ecosystem of connected devices. It’s Arduino Create, an online IDE that allows anyone to develop embedded projects and manage them remotely.

As demonstrated in [Massimo]’s keynote, the core idea of Arduino Create is to put a connected device on the Internet and allow over-the-air updates and development. As this is Arduino, the volumes of libraries available for hundreds of different platforms are leveraged to make this possible. Right now, a wide variety of boards are supported, including the Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, and several Intel IoT boards.

The focus of this development is platform-agnostic and focuses nearly entirely on ease of use and interoperability. This is a marked change from the Arduino of five years ago; there was a time when the Arduino was an ATmega328p, and that’s about it. A few years later, you could put Arduino sketches on an ATtiny85. A lot has changed since then. We got the Raspberry Pi, we got Intel stepping into the waters of IoT devices, we got a million boards based on smartphone SoCs, and Intel got out of the IoT market.

While others companies and organizations have already made inroads into an online IDE for Raspberry Pis and other single board computers, namely the Adafruit webIDE and Codebender, this is a welcome change that already has the support of the Arduino organization.

You can check out [Massimo]’s keynote below.

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Introduce Yourself To A PocketBeagle With BaconBits

March 14, 2018 by Roger Cheng 6 Comments

The PocketBeagle single-board computer is now a few months old, and growing fast like its biological namesake. An affordable and available offering in the field of embedded Linux computing, many of us picked one up as an impulse buy. For some, the sheer breadth of possibilities can be paralyzing. (“What do I do first?”) Perhaps a development board can serve as a starting point for training this young puppy? Enter the BaconBits cape.

When paired with a PocketBeagle, everything necessary to start learning embedded computing is on hand. It covers the simple basics of buttons for digital input, potentiometer for analog input, LEDs for visible output. Then grow beyond the basics with an accelerometer for I²C communication and 7-segment displays accessible via SPI. Those digging into system internals will appreciate the USB-to-serial bridge that connects to PocketBeagle’s serial console. This low-level communication will be required if any experimentation manages to (accidentally or deliberately) stop PocketBeagle’s standard USB network communication channels.

BaconBits were introduced in conjunction with the E-ALE (embedded apprentice Linux engineer) training program for use in hands-on modules. The inaugural E-ALE session at SCaLE 16X this past weekend had to deal with some last-minute hiccups, but the course material is informative and we’re confident it’ll be refined into a smooth operation in the near future. While paying for the class will receive built hardware and in-person tutorials to use it, all information – from instructor slides to the BaconBits design – is available on Github. Some of us will choose to learn by reading the slides, others will want their own BaconBits for independent experimentation. And of course E-ALE is not the only way to learn more about PocketBeagle. Whichever way people choose to go, the embedded Linux ecosystem will grow, and we like the sound of that!

Caped Beagle Is FPGA Superhero

March 3, 2018 by Al Williams 14 Comments

We miss the days when everything had daughterboards. Now, Arduinos have shields and Raspberry Pis have hats. The BeagleBone has capes. Whatever. However, regardless of the name, the open source BeagleWire cape/shield/hat/daughterboard connects to a BeagleBone and provides a Lattice iCE40HX FPGA, some support hardware, and common I/O connectors like Pmod and Grove. You can see a video about the board below.

In addition to the FPGA, the board contains a EEPROM, RAM, flash memory, an oscillator, and a few buttons, switches and LEDs. The buttons even feature hardware debouncing. The parts list and design files are all available and — depending on a successful crowdfunding campaign — you might be able to buy one for $75 in the future.

The board is configured to communicate over the 100 MHz 16-bit GPMC port. Linux software and example drivers are available so it should be fairly simple to get the FPGA and CPU talking to each other for your own purposes.

If you decide to build your own, there’s a one-click button that will populate a DigiKey cart for you with most of the components. Although the DigiKey site complained about an error, it did seem to order 24 of the 26 components and the total came to just over $50. Of course, you’d still need to source the missing parts and the board.

We’ve talked about the Lattice iCE FPGAs quite a bit in the past. Not only do you have our tutorial videos, but there are plenty of others, too.

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Hands On With PocketBeagle

December 7, 2017 by Al Williams 31 Comments

[Ken Shirriff] is no stranger to the pages of Hackaday. His blog posts are always interesting, and the recent one talking about the PocketBeagle is no exception. If you are old enough to remember the days when a Unix workstation set you back tens of thousands of dollars, you won’t be able to help yourself marveling at a Linux computer with 45 I/O pins, 8 analog inputs, 512M of RAM, and a 1 GHz clock, that fits in your pocket and costs $25. What’s more the board’s CPU has two 200 MHz auxiliary CPUs onboard to handle I/O without having to worry about Linux overhead.

These last parts are significant, and although the Beagles have had this feature for years ([Ken] talked about it earlier), the access and communication methods for using these slave processors has become easier. [Ken] shows a small snippet of C code that outputs a 40 MHz square wave no matter what the Linux OS is doing. In this way you can use Linux for the parts of your application that are not that critical, and use the slave processors to handle real time processing.

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Friday Hack Chat: High Speed Data Acquisition

November 15, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 1 Comment

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking all about High-Speed Data Acquisition. If you’ve ever needed to shove voltages, currents, logic signals, temperature, pressure, or sound into a computer, you’ve used a DAQ. If you’ve ever needed to acquire a signal at a very high speed, you’ve probably paid a lot of money for that piece of equipment.

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat will be [Kumar Abhishek], engineering student, Hackaday Prize finalist, and creator of the very, very cool Beaglelogic, a logic analyzer for the BeagleBone. The interesting bit about the Beaglelogic is its utilization of the Programmable Real-Time Units (PRUs) found in every BeagleBone.

These PRUs are basically DMA machines, shuttling bits back and forth between memory and GPIOs. This year, [Kumar] turned the Beaglelogic cape into the Beaglelogic Standalone, a device based on the Octavo Systems OSD3358 (the ‘BeagleBone On A Chip‘) that gives those Saleae logic analyzers a run for their money.

In this Hack Chat, we’ll be discussing the PRUs found in various iterations of the BeagleBoard, how the Beaglelogic performs its data acquisition, and how programming the PRUs is actually accomplished. If you have a question for [Kumar], leave a comment on the Hack Chat page

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. Usually, our Hack Chats go down at noon, PDT, Friday. This one is different. Because [Kumar] is in India, we’ll be running this Hack Chat at 9:30a PST, Friday, November 17th. What time is that in India, and what time is that where you live? Who cares! Here’s a time zone converter!

Click that speech bubble to the left, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io.

You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

We’re also looking for new Hack Chat guests! If you’ve built something cool, you’re working on an interesting project, or you’re about to introduce a really cool product, hit us up! Email our wonderful community managers, and we’ll see if we can slot you in.

Friday Hack Chat: The Incredible BeagleBoard

October 11, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

Over the last year or so, the BeagleBoard community has seen some incredible pieces of hardware. The BeagleBone on a Chip — the Octavo OSD335x — is a complete computing system with DDR3, tons of GPIOs, Gigabit Ethernet, and those all-important PRUs stuffed into a single piece of epoxy studded with solder balls. This chip made it into tiny DIY PocketBones and now the official PocketBeagle is in stock in massive quantities at the usual electronic component distributors.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re talking about the BeagleBoard, BeagleBone, PocketBeagle, and PocketBone. [Jason Kridner], the co-founder of BeagleBoard and beagle wrangler, will be on hand to answer all your questions about the relevance of the Beagle platform today, the direction BeagleBoard is going, and the inner workings of what is probably the best way to blink LEDs in a Linux environment.

Topics for this Hack Chat will include the direction BeagleBoard is going, the communities involved with BeagleBoard, and how to get the most out of those precious programmable real-time units. As always, we’re taking questions from the community, submit them here.

As an extra special bonus, this week we’re giving away some hardware. Digi-Key has offered up a few PocketBeagle boards. If you have an idea for a project, put it on the discussion sheet and we’ll pick the coolest project and send someone a PocketBeagle.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This Hack Chat will be going down noon, Pacific time on Friday, October 13th. Wondering why the Brits were the first to settle on a single time zone when the US had a more extensive rail network and the longitude so time zones made sense? Here’s a time zone converter! Use that to ponder the mysteries of the universe.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io.

You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.