open source

317 Articles

Open Laptop Soon To Be Open For Business

January 21, 2020 by 74 Comments

How better to work on Open Source projects than to use a Libre computing device? But that’s a hard goal to accomplish. If you’re using a desktop computer, Libre software is easily achievable, though keeping your entire software stack free of closed source binary blobs might require a little extra work. But if you want a laptop, your options are few indeed. Lucky for us, there may be another device in the mix soon, because [Lukas Hartmann] has just about finalized the MNT Reform.

Since we started eagerly watching the Reform a couple years ago the hardware world has kept turning, and the Reform has improved accordingly. The i.MX6 series CPU is looking a little peaky now that it’s approaching end of life, and the device has switched to a considerably more capable – but no less free – i.MX8M paired with 4 GB of DDR4 on a SODIMM-shaped System-On-Module. This particular SOM is notable because the manufacturer freely provides the module schematics, making it easy to upgrade or replace in the future. The screen has been bumped up to a 12.5″ 1080p panel and steps have been taken to make sure it can be driven without blobs in the graphics pipeline.

If you’re worried that the chassis of the laptop may have been left to wither while the goodies inside got all the attention, there’s no reason for concern. Both have seen substantial improvement. The keyboard now uses the Kailh Choc ultra low profile mechanical switches for great feel in a small package, while the body itself is milled out of aluminum in five pieces. It’s printable as well, if you want to go that route. All in all, the Reform represents a heroic amount of work and we’re extremely impressed with how far the design has come.

Of course if any of the above piqued your interest full electrical, mechanical and software sources (spread across a few repos) are available for your perusal; follow the links in the blog post for pointers to follow. We’re thrilled to see how production ready the Reform is looking and can’t wait to hear user reports as they make their way into to the wild!

Via [Brad Linder] at Liliputing.

All You’ve Ever Wanted To Know About Compilers

January 5, 2020 by 21 Comments

They say that in order to understand recursion, you must first understand recursion. Once you master that concept, you might decide that it’s time to write your own compiler that can compile itself as a fun side project. According to [Warren] aka [DoctorWkt], who documented every step of writing this C compiler from scratch, a true compiler will be able to do that.

Some of the goals for the project included self-compiling, focusing on a real hardware platform, practicality, and simplicity. [Warren] outlines a lot of the theory of compilers as well, including all the lexical, grammar, and semantic analysis and then the final translation into assembly language, but really focuses on making this compiler one for practical use rather than just a theoretical implementation. He focuses on Intel x86-64 and 32-bit ARM platforms too, which are widely available.

This project is a long read and very thoroughly documented at around 100,000 words, so if you’ve ever been interested in compilers this is a great place to start. There are a lot of other great compiler tools floating around too, like the Compiler Explorer which shows you generated code as you write in a higher level language.

[via Hackaday.io]

36C3: Open Source Is Insufficient To Solve Trust Problems In Hardware

December 29, 2019 by 29 Comments

With open source software, we’ve grown accustomed to a certain level of trust that whatever we are running on our computers is what we expect it to actually be. Thanks to hashing and public key signatures in various parts in the development and deployment cycle, it’s hard for a third party to modify source code or executables without us being easily able to spot it, even if it travels through untrustworthy channels.

Unfortunately, when it comes to open source hardware, the number of steps and parties involved that are out of our control until we have a final product — production, logistics, distribution, even the customer — makes it substantially more difficult to achieve the same peace of mind. To make things worse, to actually validate the hardware on chip level, you’d ultimately have to destroy it.

On his talk this year at the 36C3, [bunnie] showed a detailed insight of several attack vectors we could face during manufacturing. Skipping the obvious ones like adding or substituting components, he’s focusing on highly ambitious and hard to detect modifications inside an IC’s package with wirebonded or through-silicon via (TSV) implants, down to modifying the netlist or mask of the integrated circuit itself. And these aren’t any theoretical or “what if” scenarios, but actual possible options — of course, some of them come with a certain price tag, but in the end, with the right motivation, money is only a detail.

Continue reading “36C3: Open Source Is Insufficient To Solve Trust Problems In Hardware” →

An Open Assistive Robotic Arm To Help People Feed Themselves

December 12, 2019 by 7 Comments

Despite being otherwise capable, not everyone is able to feed themselves. [Julien]’s robot arm project aims to bring this crucial independence back to those people. Assistive devices in this space do exist, but as always they’re prohibitively expensive and the approval process is a nightmare. The development of the arm started by working closely with people who needed it at a local hospital. We note with approval, quite a few cardboard mock-ups to get the size and shape right before more formal work was done in CAD.

The robot arm only has to support a very light payload so its construction can be quite light. A frame of steel rods or plywood is all that’s required. We like how the motion is transferred from stepper motors to the joints of the arm by generously sized timing belts allowing the weight of the arm to remain towards the base. The team behind the project has gotten it to a point, but they’re hoping it will inspire community involvement as they move forward with it.

It’s worth noting, this is not the first assistive eating aid we’ve covered.

File Systems For Tiny Devices

December 7, 2019 by 11 Comments

Sometimes you build a computer and use it every day. Sometimes you build a different type of computer and it sits alone on a mountaintop for years. The design considerations for these two setups are remarkably different, right down to the type of file system used. For small computers like [Jo] is using, and for the amount of time they sit alone in remote locations, he decided to build his own file system for them.

Known as JesFs ([Jo]’s embedded serial File system), the file system is for SPI Flash and intended for use in scientific data logging. It can be used on the chip-scale processors found in many development boards, and is robust enough to use in applications where remoteness is a concern. It has a small RAM footprint, is completely open source, includes wear leveling, and has a number of security features built-in as well.

Some of the benefits of using a file system on such a tiny chip aren’t immediately obvious unless you’re doing a lot of data logging, but it does allow you to change virtually any aspect of the firmware much more easily if everything is accessible as a file, and not something you would have to change by reflashing the whole chip, for example. There are also a number of traps that you can easily fall into when working with file systems for tiny devices.

Robot Vs. Superbug

November 30, 2019 by 6 Comments

Working in a university or research laboratory on interesting, complicated problems in the sciences has a romanticized, glorified position in our culture. While the end results are certainly worth celebrating, often the process of new scientific discovery is underwhelming, if not outright tedious. That’s especially true in biology and chemistry, where scaling up sample sizes isn’t easy without a lot of human labor. A research group from Reading University was able to modify a 3D printer to take some of that labor out of the equation, though.

This 3D printer was used essentially as a base, with the printing head removed and replaced with a Raspberry Pi camera. The printer X/Y axes move the camera around to all of the different sample stored in the print bed, which allows the computer attached to the printer to do most of the work that a normal human would have had to do. This allows them to scale up massively and cheaply, presumably with less tedious inputs from a large number of graduate students.

While the group hopes that this method will have wide applicability for any research group handling large samples, their specific area of interest involves researching “superbugs” or microbes which have developed antibiotic resistance. Their recently-published paper states that any field which involves bacterial motility, colony growth, microtitre plates or microfluidic devices could benefit from this 3D printer modification.

Simplified AI On Microcontrollers

November 29, 2019 by 6 Comments

Artificial intelligence is taking the world by storm. Rather than a Terminator-style apocalypse, though, it seems to be more of a useful tool for getting computers to solve problems on their own. This isn’t just for supercomputers, either. You can load AI onto some of the smallest microcontrollers as well. Tensorflow Lite is a popular tool for this, but getting it to work on your particular microcontroller can be a pain, unless you’re using an Espruino.

This project adds support for Tensorflow to this class of microcontrollers without having to fuss around with obtuse build tools. Basically adding a single line of code creates an instance, all without having to compile anything or even reboot. Tensorflow is a powerful software tool for microcontrollers, and having it this accessible now is a great leap forward.

So, what can you do with this tool? The team behind this build is using Tensorflow on an open smart watch that can be used to detect hand gestures and many other things. They also opened up these tools for use in a browser, which allows use of the AI software and emulates an Espruino without needing a physical device. There’s a lot going on with this one, and it’s a bonus that it’s open source and ready to be turned into anything you might need, like turning yourself into a Street Fighter.