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Digital Roundup, December 2024

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Another month has come to a close, and with it the whole of 2024. As a result, it’s once again time to take stock of everything I’ve had published digitally this month – a little less than usual, thanks to an early finish for the holidays, but still a hefty crop of articles and reviews.

My personal highlight this month has to be a painstaking project by Kevin Noki which brings the Apple FlatMac, a non-functional design study prototyped by Harmut Esslinger but never launched, to life – complete with custom keyboard and integrated single-board computer more than capable of emulating the Apple Mac machines of the era and beyond. It’s an absolutely incredible piece of work, and a “what-if” for how it could have inspired Apple’s work in portable computing years before the launch of the iPad.

The big launch of the month, meanwhile, was the Raspberry Pi 500 – a Raspberry Pi 5-based single-board computer in a keyboard, mimicking the form factor of popular 1980s and 1990s microcomputers like the Commodore 64 and Amiga, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, and BBC Micro. As always, my coverage includes bespoke benchmarking for performance, power draw, and thermal load and in-house photography – including a full teardown. Nvidia launched a “new” Jetson Orin Nano system-on-module – frequently misreported elsewhere as a new entry in the family, but actually a simple firmware update to existing hardware which unlocks a new higher-power operating mode.

A full list of my last articles for 2024 is available below. and with that it’s on to 2025!

Digital Roundup, October 2024

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Another month has come to a close and it’s time to take stock of everything I’ve had published in digital outlets throughout October.

It’s been a busy month, with a number of high-profile launches – not least of which are new products from Raspberry Pi, which is branching out into microSD Card and SSD storage devices in order to deliver guaranteed performance and compatibility with its single-board computer range. STMicroelectronics has also been looking at storage, announcing “Page EEPROM” chips which, it says, combine the benefits of EEPROM and flash memory for non-volatile storage.

It’s been a good month for makers, too, with some very interesting projects – like Stephen Hawes’ work to have a LumenPnP pick-and-place machine place working components on an active circuit for in-production testing, David Buchanan’s “electromagnetic pulse” attack to gain a shell on a laptop, a staggering array of badge Simple Add-On boards, and my favourite of the month: Luke Mortimer’s Quandoom, which runs a cut-down version of id Software’s 1993 classic Doom on a (simulated and very much future-gazing) quantum computer.

A full list of my articles from October, with links to read each in full, is available below.

Digital Roundup, September 2024

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It’s been a busy September, there’s no doubt about that: the month has seen the publication of 116 news articles, my two regular newsletters – one for the Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation (FOSSi Foundation) and one for the open-source software-defined radio project MyriadRF – and the first stage of a roadmap document to be presented to the European Commission later this year.

On that last topic first, I was approached by the FOSSi Foundation to act as editor for a whitepaper document offering an overview of the state of the open-source electronic design automation (EDA) sector in Europe and a roadmap for how investment could help deliver improved resiliency and technological sovereignty in the region. A collaborative document pulling in contributions from industry, academia, and the community, my first editing pass was completed in September; a second pass is scheduled for October ahead of the document’s presentation to the European Commission via the GoIT project.

The biggest news story, meanwhile, came at the end of the month: the release of the Raspberry Pi AI Camera Module, a MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) accessory for the Raspberry Pi family of single-board computers which uses Sony’s IMX500 “Intelligent Image Sensor” to deliver on-sensor computer vision acceleration. My review was published day-and-date on Hackster.io, just squeaking under the wire for inclusion in the September round-up – and, as usual, includes a wealth of in-house photography.

Other big stories include a project to distribute Commodore VIC-20 software via YouTube video streams, several Espressif ESP32-based development board launches, a virtual joystick library for LVGL, the formal unveiling of the MNT Reform Next open-hardware laptop, a lower-cost MiSTer-compatible FPGA emulation board, the discovery that Play-Doh can be used to deliver ultra-low-cost sensors for human-machine interface systems, and my most popular story of the month: an open-source kit to build a plasma-ring-generating desk toy, inspired by tokamak nuclear reactor technology.

Digital Roundup – August 2024

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Another month draws to a close, and it’s time to take stock of every article I’ve had published digitally over the past month.

The highlight of the month was, of course, the launch of the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and its dual-architecture quad-core RP2350 microcontroller – one of a number of RISC-V design wins in August, as the free and open source instruction set architecture gains serious momentum. While some of the shine has been taken off the RP2350’s launch by the discovery of a hardware flaw, addressed in official erratum RP2350-E9, plenty of third parties have either pledged to adopt the part or have already launched hardware based around it.

Other topics of note this month include a great project from Guy Dupont to have a mouse play a game of Pong entirely in-firmware, relying on persistence of vision to have the cursor appear to be both bats and the ball simultaneously, Tim Alex Jacob’s work to give an existing LED badge design to the ability to be updated via flashing lights Timex DataLink-style, the impressive HaLiTerm Mini handheld, and an exerciser for your tired old floppy drives.

All this, and two newsletters to boot – what a month!

Digital Roundup – July 2024

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July has rolled to a close, so it’s time to take stock of everything I’ve had published in digital outlets over the past calendar month – and, as always, it’s quite the list.

Highlights this month include a look at a calculator aimed at the microcontroller developer, booting Linux from a Google Drive filesystem, ensmartening a cheap off-the-shelf robot mower, a pocket-size DECStation emulator powered by the popular Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller, the impressive Zeal 8-Bit Computer, a 3D-printed “Faux TRS-80,” and a magnetic exoskeleton for your hand – capable, its creators claim, of boosting your performance in games.

Not all news covered was good, though: Shapeways, a pioneer in 3D printing as a service and just-in-time manufacturing marketplaces, announced its bankruptcy this month.

Links for all my articles for July are available below, and there’s plenty more to come this August!

Digital Roundup – June 2024

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Another month flips over on the calendar, and it’s time to take stock of my digital work in June. The month saw my pile of to-review hardware drop a little, thanks to the publication of my hands-on reviews of the Jumperless breadboard and the Arduino PLC Starter Kit over on Hackster.io.

Reviews are always a lot of work, but fun with it. As always, I handle the product photography myself in-house – and June’s shots have come out splendidly. The Jumperless was a little more of a challenge than usual, thanks to the presence of hard-to-capture RGB LEDs viewable only from a very precise top-down angle, but I’d like to think the results speak for themselves.

The to-review pile isn’t exhausted yet, though, so expect to see more reviews in July, along with my usual newsletters and news articles.

Digital Roundup – May 2024

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Another month has passed, and it was a shorter one for me thanks to a week’s break with the family – and the kids’ first trip abroad, if you don’t count crossing the northern border into Scotland.

Despite this, I’ve had a bumper crop of articles published online in May. Highlights include the launch of the Raspberry Pi AI Kit, in partnership with Hailo, and the Raspberry Pi Connect browser-based remote access platform, Lex Bailey’s incredible Sinclair ZX Spectrum-powered laptop, Pineberry Pi’s relaunching as Pineboards as it looks to branch out from Raspberry Pi accessories, neuromorphic computing in space, a one-Euro RISC-V personal computer, and a project to encode sound as serial data and play it back with nothing more than a resistor and a capacitor.

My hands-on review on the unPhone, an educational tool which combines the core features of a smartphone bar the actual “phone” parts and lives at the heart of an Internet of Things course at the University of Sheffield, was published on Hackster.io too – and will be followed by additional reviews this June.

Digital Roundup – April 2024

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The calendar has flipped over once more, meaning it’s time to take stock of everything I’ve covered over the past month – and what a month it’s been.

April has seen my interview with Matt Venn on the Tiny Tapeout project and related topics land on the Make: website, fresh newsletters for the MyriadRF project and the Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation (FOSSi Foundation), the launch of new Raspberry Pi Compute Module boards – though, sadly, not the ones for which everyone’s waiting – Espressif’s acquisition of M5Stack right before it launches a device powered by competitor STMicro’s silicon, a tiny ZX Spectrum-inspired games console, a major hardware upgrade for the MNT Reform laptop, and the promise from Syntiant that its latest “Neural Decision Processor” can deliver 30 giga-operations per second (GOPS) of compute in a microwatt power envelope.

The biggest news, however, was Zilog’s decision to discontinue the venerable eight-bit Z80 microprocessor family – just short of it reaching its 50th anniversary. The move does, at least, finally put to rest many a 1980s playground argument over whether the Zilog Z80 or the MOS 6502 is the superior chip – the 6502 having been selected to prove a foundry model for the production of fully-flexible semiconductors, a paper on which was published this month.

Special thanks to Professor Hamish Cunningham who, following my covering the project on Hackster.io, kindly sent me an unPhone to try – expect to see a hands-on review of that clever little gadget in the near future.

Now to see what May brings!

Digital Roundup – March 2024

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March has been another busy month for digital work, with plenty of news coverage – everything from stealing a car with a Flipper Zero to the launch of the first 64-bit STMicro STM32 microcontrollers (which, confusingly, retain the “32” moniker) and Renesas’ first to feature its in-house proprietary RISC-V core design.

I’ve covered Andrew “bunnie” Huang’s continued work on the Infrared In-Situ (IRIS) silicon inspection project, a vacuum-tube PDP-8 clone, the third-generation “wafer scale” chip from Cerebras, and a 30-cubit quantum computer for your desk – in simulation, at least — along with an “invisible drone,” the KingKong edge AI camera system, and an “inception” attack against virtual reality users.

In chronological order:

Digital Roundup – February 2024

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Another month has gone by, so it’s time to gather together everything I’ve written for digital publication over the past four-or-so-weeks.

It’s been a busy February, and a day longer than usual to boot, but if I had to pick some personal highlights they’d include this dual-display sunlight-readable PDA build, a tiny $5 mechanical keyboard, Paul Krizak’s amazing Wire Wrap Odyssey microcomputer, an anonymously-published 6,000 PPI boardview of the Nintendo Switch Lite, Wojciech Graj’s audio-only Doom port, and Tankgrrl’s Commodore 1541-style housing for a USB floppy drive.