Hardware Archive
Pineapple ONE is a functioning (macro) processor, that is based on an open-source architecture RISC-V. This architecture is becoming very popular these days, and it is well, open-source, so we chose to build a cpu only out of discrete, off-the-shelf components. You heard it right, there is no FPGA nor any microcontroller, there are just logic gates and memories. Our goal is to prove that designing a “modern” CPU isn’t that hard, so we have released our schematics and made it open source as well. You can check out our GitHub repository for more information. If there would be enough interest, maybe we could make a DIY kit, so anybody interested with soldering skills would be able to make their own Pineapple ONE! Don’t think you can run Crysis on this though – it runs at 500 kHz, has a 512 kB program memory and 512 kB of RAM, and a black and white graphics card with 200×150 pixels. It’s no speed demon, but who cares – this is quite the feat.
2 years ago, I learned of an open-source project called Graphics Gremlin (GG) by Eric Schlaepfer who runs the website Tubetime.us. It is an 8-bit ISA graphics card that supports display standards like Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) and Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA). CGA and MDA are display standards used by older IBM(-compatible) PCs in the 1980s. The frequencies and connectors used by CGA and MDA are no longer supported by modern monitors hence it is difficult for older PCs of the 1980s era to have modern displays connected to them without external adapters. GG addresses this problem by using techniques like scan doubling (for CGA) and increasing the vertical refresh rate (for MDA) then outputing to a relatively newer but still old VGA port. As neat as this project is, it does have a few limitations that the author tried to address: it doesn’t have modern outputs, which is becoming problematic with monitor makers no longer adding VGA ports, and it can’t display on two outputs at once. This article details his solutions.
In the recent past I have discussed the Book 8088 and the Hand 386, which are newly made vintage computing systems. I concluded that those products, although not uninteresting were rather flawed. The Book 8088 was by far the more disappointing of the two devices. I have also been made aware of a project which tries to fulfill a similar niche, the NuXT motherboard. The NuXT is an 8088-based motherboard you can buy brand new and can really fill that IBM PC-clone hole in your vintage collection. While I do not own one of these, I have read and seen enough about it to give my thoughts on whether this product would be right for you. The NuXT 2.0 looks like an incredible motherboard for fans of the original IBM PC and its clones – especially with the prices of working original machines going through the roof as supply dwindles and demand skyrockets.
As best I can tell, there is no broad consensus on how large a kilobyte is. Some say that a kilobyte is 1000 bytes while others say it’s 1024 bytes. Others are ambiguous. This also means that the industry does not agree on the size of megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, and so on. Not entirely new information to most of us, I would presume, but in my head canon a kilobyte is 1024 bytes, even though that technically doesn’t make any sense from a metric perspective. To make matters worse, as soon as we get into the gigabytes and terabytes, I tend to back to thinking in terms of thousands again since it just makes more sense. The kibibytes and cohorts are a way to properly distance the base 2 system from the base 10 one, but I’ve never heard anyone in day-to-day speech make that distinctions outside of really nerdy circles.
ARM had a slow start on its way to move beyond microcontrollers and enter the high performance market. ARM Ltd made the Cortex A9, their first out-of-order core, in 2007. Throughout the 2010s, they gradually made bigger, higher power, and higher performance cores. Pushing performance boundaries isn’t easy, but today, ARM’s cores can be a viable alternative to Intel and AMD’s offerings in the server market. RISC-V started much later, but has seen faster growth. Berkerly’s BOOM core had grown into a sizeable out-of-order design by 2016. Now, SiFive’s P870 looks a lot like ARM’s Cortex X series in terms of reordering capacity, core width, and execution units. It might not be a match for ARM’s best, since the load/store queues look a bit small and vector execution throughput is a bit weak. But from looking at P870, SiFive’s ambitions are clear. They want a chunk of ARM’s pie. RISC-V is getting better and better at a rapid pace. The software side of the story still has a long way to go, but that, too, is getting better. Exciting.
Floppy disk drives are curious things. We know them as the slots that ingest those small almost-square plastic “floppy disks” and we only really see them now in Computer Museums. But there’s a lot going on in that humble square of plastic and I wanted to write down what I’ve learned so far. Exactly what it says on the tin.
Having used a wide range of field device communications busses from simple 4-20mA, classic serial busses like UART and Modbus, and more modern CAN bus, native USB, and Ethernet options I’m always playing with different transports and protocols to see what solutions make sense in my grab-bag of designs for hardware projects. I first became aware of Single Pair Ethernet when I was mindlessly browsing Sparkfun’s new products announcements a while ago, but didn’t jump in because I felt the real utility was the ability to power devices over the same cable. More than a year later, Sparkfun’s Single Pair Ethernet Design Challenge gave me the excuse to create the hardware I originally wanted, offering a power budget that can handle non-trivial hardware with data rates to match. Some light reading for the weekend.
The computer on Keegan McNamara’s desk is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The machine sits on a light wood table, bathed in the sunlight coming into the second floor of McNamara’s Los Angeles house. McNamara, tall and blonde in jeans and a light khaki Carhartt jacket, walks over to the desk, sits down, and reaches over to hit the power button. Then he pauses. He forgot something. He digs into his pants pocket, pulls out his keys, picks a silver one, sticks it into a cylinder just to the right of the computer’s 8-inch screen, and turns. A light on the left side of the device turns red. Then McNamara reaches up and flips a silver switch just above the keyhole, the lights on the left turn to yellow and then green, and his computer comes to life. Like I said, this is not your average computer. This sure is interesting.
ARM Ltd has been dominating the Android world for the better part of the last decade, with their 7-series cores at the forefront of their success. Throughout the late 2010s, the Cortex A73, A75, and A76 steadily iterated on performance while maintaining excellent energy efficiency. Qualcomm, and then Samsung decided licensing ARM’s cores would be easier than trying to outdo them. Apple remained a notable rival, but their core designs were not available outside a closed-off ecosystem. By the time Cortex A78 came around, ARM had no real competition. ARM’s Cortex A710 continues that dominance. It takes A78’s successful formula and tweaks it to improve performance and efficiency. Efficiency is especially prioritized, with the core seeing cuts in some areas as ARM tries to get more done with less power. A710 claims to provide a 30% uplift in power efficiency or a 10% performance increase within a fixed power envelope when compared to a A78 core with half as much L3 cache. Alongside these improvements, A710 gains Armv9-A and SVE support. A deep dive into ARM’s latest core.
It’s 2023, and those who have Framework’s first generation of laptops, containing Intel’s 11th-generation Core processor) might be itching to upgrade, especially with an AMD model around the corner. Or maybe, like me, they find that system’s middling battery life and tricky-to-tame sleep draining (since improved, but not entirely fixed) make for a laptop that doesn’t feel all that portable. Or they’re just ready for something new. What can you do with these old internal organs? You can always list them for sale. Or, like me, you could buy a custom-printed Cooler Master case (or 3D-print your own), transfer your laptop’s mainboard, memory, and storage over, and create a desktop that easily fits on top of your actual desk. I can’t recommend it enough as a small weekend project, as a way to get more value out of your purchase, and as a thought experiment in what kind of job you can give to a thin little slab of Framework. Framework is one of the good ones. For now.
The DisplayPort altmode is semi-proprietary, but it can absolutely be picked apart if we try. Last time, we found a cool appnote describing the DisplayPort altmode in detail, switched the FUSB302 into packet sniffing mode and got packet captures, learned about PD VDMs (vendor-defined messages), and successfully replayed the captured messages to switch a USB-C port into the DisplayPort altmode. Today, we will go through the seven messages that summon the DisplayPort altmode, implement them, and tie them all into a library – then, figure out the hardware we need to have DisplayPort work in the wild. USB-C might have its problems, but it’s also incredibly cool and versatile.
Arm is facing down its biggest competition ever, with the up-and-coming RISC-V architecture threatening to unseat it as the CPU at the center of almost every portable device. Now, one of Arm’s biggest customers is trying out RISC-V, as Qualcomm is getting involved in a joint venture dedicated to the architecture. The joint venture doesn’t have a name yet, but Qualcomm, NXP, Nordic Semiconductor, Bosch, and memory giant Infineon are all teaming up to form a new company that Qualcomm’s press release says is “aimed at advancing the adoption of RISC-V globally by enabling next-generation hardware development.” At first, the group will be focused on automotive uses, with an “eventual expansion” to IoT and mobile, Qualcomm’s biggest market. Statements of intent are easily written, so let’s hope this is more than a fart in the wind.
A chrultrabook is a modified Chromebook designed to run Windows, Linux, or even macOS by utilizing MrChromebox coreboot firmware. The purpose of this site is to provide comprehensive and user-friendly documentation on hardware, firmware, and operating systems. This is a cool project to make it easy to run Windows, regular desktop Linux, or even macOS on your Chromebook. Excellent documentation, too.
If you’ve ever heard someone refer to a TV remote as a “clicker,” it’s because of Robert Adler’s 1956 creation. The elegant Star Trek-esque gadget pioneered a durable, clicky action for controlling gadgets and a simplicity of form that has since been naively abandoned. When Zenith first started experimenting with wireless remote controls, it used beams of light that the television could receive to communicate a command, eventually debuting the Flash-Matic in 1955. It only took a year in the market for this idea to be abandoned due to its sensitivity to full-spectrum light from the sun and lightbulbs. So Zenith’s engineers tried an even simpler approach that didn’t require batteries at all, using sound instead of light. This is from well before my time – and I have no idea if devices like this even ever made it to The Netherlands, where I’m originally from – but this is such a cool solution to the technical problem they were facing. I had no idea early remote controls were sound-based.
A lot of the cost of a video terminal was the screen. Yet nearly everyone had a TV, and used TVs have always been fairly cheap, too. That’s where Don Lancaster came in. His TV Typewriter Cookbook was the bible for homebrew video displays. The design influenced the Apple 1 computer and spawned a successful kit for a company known as Southwest Technical Products. For around $300 or so, you could have a terminal that uses your TV for output. The wild West days of home computing must’ve been an absolutely fascinating time to live through. I know we have quite a few old-timers in the audience here, so there’s bound to be folks here who used this. Amazing
Turns out Intel’s NUC line is not going to die after all. Today, Intel announced it has agreed to a term sheet with ASUS, a global technology solution provider, for an agreement to manufacture, sell and support the Next Unit of Compute (NUC) 10th to 13th generations systems product line, and to develop future NUC systems designs. If you’re into Intel NUCs, Asus is the way to go now.
The Framework Laptop 16, available for preorder today starting at $1,699 prebuilt, is one of the most exciting notebooks we’ve ever seen. When it ships in Q4, the modular computer company’s first gaming laptop will let you swap practically every component — not just memory and storage, but each and every individual port, the motherboard, the battery, the speakers, you name it. Framework seems to be making it, despite the ridicule. There’s more and more companies taking repairability seriously, and the EU, too, is flexing its legal muscle in this area. We’re getting there. Slowly.
Onyx Boox has just done something exciting; they have taken a page from the Hisense playbook and released a dedicated e-reader with the familiar candy bar shape as a smartphone, except it is a dedicated e-reader. You can do phone calls with this unit and talk to people on Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp or WeChat with dual microphones. However, it does not support SIM cards or eSim, and you must be on a WIFI connection to do anything useful. The most significant advantage of the Onyx Boox Palma is carrying an e-reader around with you in your pocket; you can’t do this with the vast majority of e-readers on the market. The Palma is available as a pre-order for $249; when it launches, the price will go up to $279.99.Only a small batch of units are available as a first come, first serve basis and will ship out sometime in August 2023. I don’t really have a use for something like this, but the price is interesting, and if it can indeed do smooth scrolling as they claim, I might actually be interested out of sheer curiosity. It’s kind of like if Apple released an iPod Touch, but with an e-ink display.
A few weeks ago we reported that the European Union wanted to force device makers to make batteries user-replaceable, and today it’s been confirmed and made official. The regulation provides that by 2027 portable batteries incorporated into appliances should be removable and replaceable by the end-user, leaving sufficient time for operators to adapt the design of their products to this requirement. This is an important provision for consumers. Light means of transport batteries will need to be replaceable by an independent professional. Excellent.
You could put it this way – DisplayPort has all the capabilities of interfaces like HDMI, but implemented in a better way, without legacy cruft, and with a number of features that take advantage of the DisplayPort’s sturdier architecture. As a result of this, DisplayPort isn’t just in external monitors, but also laptop internal displays, USB-C port display support, docking stations, and Thunderbolt of all flavors. If you own a display-capable docking station for your laptop, be it classic style multi-pin dock or USB-C, DisplayPort is highly likely to be involved, and even your smartphone might just support DisplayPort over USB-C these days. Back when I bought my current 144Hz 1440p monitor with G-Sync for my gaming PC, DisplayPort was the only way to hook it all up, since HDMI wasn’t yet supported. Ever since, out of a baseless sense of caution, I’ve always preferred DisplayPort for all my PC video connection needs, and as it turns out – yes, DisplayPort is definitely better than HDMI, and this article will tell you why.
