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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.

Digital Roundup – January 2024

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An increasing proportion of my work is now for publication online rather than in print, leading to this: the first in a new monthly round-up series covering all the articles I’ve had published over the past calendar month.

The MagPi, Issue 91

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The MagPi Issue 91Hitting shop shelves just two days before the Raspberry Pi Foundation celebrates its eighth birthday, this month’s MagPi brings a surprise: A permanent reduction in the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 2GB’s price down to that of the original 1GB entry-level model.

In a three-page feature on the move I investigate exactly what doubling the RAM means for the user, demonstrate how to use the Terminal to see exactly how much RAM your particular Raspberry Pi has available – along with how much is being used by programs and cache, and how much is free or can be freed – and interview Raspberry Pi Trading chief executive Eben Upton on how the price has been brought down, the explosive growth in the Raspberry Pi’s specifications over the past eight years, and exactly how 2GB makes for a great desktop in a world where even entry-level smartphones frequently come with 4GB.

“If you look at Windows, or even a traditional Linux desktop distro, there’s been a sort of relaxation,” Upton told me during our interview for the piece.  “As there’s been more memory available, people have loosened their belts a little bit and sort of flumped down and started consuming more memory, when we really haven’t. We’re still using an LXDE-derived desktop environment; you know, we care about every 10MB of memory usage. That’s the reason why the 2GB model is a really, really useful desktop.”

The shift effectively sees the 1GB model retired, though it will still be made available at the original $35 price point for those who have designed precisely that amount of RAM into their projects – but with the 2GB model costing the same, it’s not likely to be selling in any real volume from this point forward.

MagPi Issue 91 is available at all good newsagents and supermarkets now, and can be ordered for global delivery or downloaded as a free Creative Commons-licensed PDF from the official website. The price cut, meanwhile, is live globally today.

Linux User & Developer, Issue 163

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Linux User & Developer Issue 163This month’s Linux User & Developer includes my review of the Arduino-produced and Intel-chip-toting Genuino 101 microcontroller and the final five-page news spread, with publisher Imagine shuffling things around and taking the news coverage in-house after lo these many years.

Kindly supplied as a press sample by Intel, the Genuino 101 is special for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s one of the first commercially-available devices to be sold under the new Genuino brand outside the US – a necessity thanks to some hairy legal wrangling between two competing companies who have a claim to the Arduino trademark. Secondly, it’s the first outing for Intel’s new Curie module, a wearable-centric system-on-chip that combines microcomputer and microcontroller functionality.

Where Intel’s previous efforts at developing boards for the maker market have been somewhat hard to love, it’s definitely doing something right with the Genuino 101. The board is based on the popular Arduino Uno layout, includes 5V-safe pins despite running 3.3V logic, and can run most Arduino sketches unmodified. Better still, the Curie module includes integrated Bluetooth Low Energy support and an accelerometer sensor.

The design of the chip, though, is odd, and it’s something on which I focus during the review: the Curie uses two processors, an x86 Quark based on the old Pentium microarchitecture to run an underlying real-time operating system (RTOS) and an Argonaut RISC Core (ARC) which takes care of being a microcontroller and actually running the Arduino sketch. At the time of writing, the divide was stark: the Quark is entirely locked off from user access, taking over automatically for tasks like Bluetooth communication when requested by the ARC. While Intel has promised to release the source for the RTOS, allowing users to run their own code on the Quark as well as the ARC, this has yet to materialise.

Despite this, I was impressed with the Genuino 101 – but to read my full conclusion, you’ll have to hie thee hence to a supermarket, newsagent, or snag an electronic copy via Zinio or similar digital distribution services.

Linux User & Developer, Issue 161

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Linux User & Developer Issue 161To say this month’s Linux User & Developer is a bumper issue is something of an understatement: in addition to my usual four-page news spread, you’ll find a three-strong group test of Steam Machines and a detailed step-by-step guide to building your own Linux box from a pile of parts.

First, the group test. Editor Gavin Thomas contacted me with the news that they had an Alienware Steam Machine in, and asked whether I would be able to source and review a rival device for a head-to-head. I went one better, the overachiever that I am, and thanks to the very lovely people at CyberPower and Zotac I was able to pick up a Syber and NEN to be run through their paces alongside the Alienware.

For Linux User & Developer, the Steam Machines were very new territory. The magazine has previously focused largely on professional uses for Linux, but the launch of mainstream-targeted console-beating gaming PCs running Steam OS – Valve’s gaming-centric customisation of Debian Linux – couldn’t be ignored. I started by designing a series of benchmarks which could be run across all three machines in order to provide a performance comparison, which then needed to take into account the price difference between the two entry-level machines from Alienware and CyberPower and the top-end Zotac NEN. The winner? Well, you’ll have to read the review.

A major group test like this would normally be enough, but Gavin also asked me to come up with a cover feature for the issue: building your own Linux machine. As with the group test, this issue marks the first time Linux User & Developer has strayed into the PC-building arena, and Gavin was looking for someone who could lend an expert eye to the hardware side of the feature.

After an initial hiccough with a parts supplier that let me down, the wonderful people at Overclockers UK were kind enough to loan me a shopping cart full of hardware, including an Intel Skylake processor. The specifications of the machine were kept low enough to appeal to buyers on a budget looking for a future-proof bargain, while having enough poke to ensure a pleasant experience. Naturally, the hardware was chosen specifically with Linux compatibility in mind – though the Skylake family of processors does require the Linux 4.4 kernel or newer to run at its full potential, which is covered in the software-centric second half of the feature.

Issue 161 is definitely a personal highlight, containing as it does such a large percentage of contents from my trusty keyboard. You can see the result for yourself with a trip to your local supermarket, newsagent, or through digital distribution services such as Zinio.

Linux User & Developer, Issue 160

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Linux User & Developer Issue 160In this month’s Linux User & Developer, following my regular four-page news spread, you’ll find a review of a device that’s a little out of the ordinary: the NeuG, a true random number generator (TRNG) which costs a remarkably small amount.

When you’re using cryptography, you’re chewing up your system’s supply of randomness – or entropy. Linux, in common with other operating systems, works to fill its entropy pool by sampling a variety of things: traffic coming in on the network port, where you’re pointing the mouse and how fast it’s moving, and even how long it takes you to press particular keys. That’s all well and good for a desktop, but for a headless server it can take a while to fill a depleted entropy pool.

Coupled with the fact that it’s very difficult for a computer to produce truly random output, there’s a market for true random number generators. These devices typically cost a small fortune but use a variety of techniques – ranging from physically breaking down pieces of hardware with high voltages and measuring the resulting changes to pointing a webcam at a lava lamp – to generate a constant stream of high-quality entropy.

Enter the NeuG, which was kindly supplied for test by the Free Software Foundation. While it looks like a flash drive that has lost it’s casing, the device is actually a miniature computer in its own right. Using on-board analogue sensors, the NeuG can generate what is claimed to be a stream of true random numbers – numbers which are then pushed through a conditioning hash and spat out of a virtual serial port. Simply link the NeuG to something like the rngd entropy gathering daemon, and kiss goodbye to entropy exhaustion in even headless or virtualised environments.

I have been extremely impressed with the NeuG, especially given its low $50 cost. While there are cheaper alternatives – such as using a $5 Pi Zero and USB TTL serial adapter to create something similar using the BCM2835’s on-board hardware random number generator module – the NeuG’s free nature, whereby the design and source code are all available for review and modification, make it a great choice where certified security isn’t a requirement.

For the full run-down, including benchmarks, you can pick up the latest issue of Linux User & Developer from your nearest newsagent, supermarket, or electronically via Zinio and similar digital distribution platforms.