Tux Machines
Posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 15, 2023
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=> ↺ Industrial Robot Gets Open-Source Upgrade
Industrial robots are shockingly expensive when new, typically only affordable for those running factories of some sort. Once they’ve gone through their life cycle building widgets, they can be purchased for little more than scrap value, which is essentially free compared to their original sticker price. [Excessive Overkill] explains all of this in a video where he purchased one at this stage to try to revive, but it also shows us how to get some more life out of these robots if you can spend some time hunting for spare parts, installing open-source firmware, and also have the space for a robot that weighs well over a thousand kilograms.
=> ↺ Connecting an electric typewriter to a modern computer
When we talked about teletype technology at my local university hackerspace, Spline, I remembered the typewriter had a 26-pin connector. After some research, I learned that the machine is basically an Erika S3004, one of the most popular typewriters of the GDR, in a different case. With this new knowledge, I was able to find a table of commands which can be sent and received from the device.
The 26-pin connector is a port used in the GDR, which speaks a faily standard rs232 protocol, with a baud-rate of 1200. In fact, the USB TTL adapter I usually use for routers, worked on it after some creative wiring.
=> ↺ The Group Decode ROM: The 8086 processor's first step of instruction decoding
A key component of any processor is instruction decoding: analyzing a numeric opcode and figuring out what actions need to be taken. The Intel 8086 processor (1978) has a complex instruction set, making instruction decoding a challenge. The first step in decoding an 8086 instruction is something called the Group Decode ROM, which categorizes instructions into about 35 types that control how the instruction is decoded and executed. For instance, the Group Decode ROM determines if an instruction is executed in hardware or in microcode. It also indicates how the instruction is structured: if the instruction has a bit specifying a byte or word operation, if the instruction has a byte that specifies the addressing mode, and so forth.
=> ↺ Pimoroni Inventor HAT Mini Review: Great for Making Robots
This diminutive board features a range of outputs for servos, GPIO, motors, sensors, serial communication and of course there are eight bright RGB LEDs.
=> ↺ SolidRun launches TI Sitara AM64x embedded modules starting at $55.00
SolidRun’s new industrial System-on-Module features the AM64x Sitara family of processors from Texas Instruments. The embedded products provide support for multi-protocol industrial ethernet with TSN and they are compatible with new the HummingBoard-T carrier boards also from SolidRun.
=> ↺ SBC boasts i.MX 8M Plus processor for machine learning
The eDM-SBC-iMX8MP is a Single Board Computer that runs Linux on the NXP i.MX8M Plus quad-processor with an integrated Neural Processing Unit and HiFi4 DSP.
=> ↺ Missing DR-DOS Power Management Source Code Found In Patent
Modern processors come with all kinds of power management features, which you don’t typically notice as a user until you start a heavy program and hear the CPU fan spin up. Back in the early 1990s however, power management was largely unheard of, meaning that a CPU with nothing to do would run through an idle loop that dissipated about as much power as a real computing task. [Michal Necasek] noticed this while experimenting with DR-DOS 6.0 in a virtual machine – his laptop fan would start running on full blast whenever he opened the VM. His search for a solution to this annoyance led him down a fascinating journey into the intricacies of DOS power management.
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