Category Archives: beaglebone

Reverse Engineering the Smart ForTwo CAN Bus

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The CAN bus has become a defacto standard in modern cars. Just about everything electronic in a car these days talks over this bus, which makes it fertile ground for aspiring hackers. [Daniel Velazquez] is striking out in this area, attempting to decode the messages on the CAN bus of his Smart ForTwo.

[Daniel] has had some pitfalls – first attempts with a Beaglebone Black were somewhat successful in reading messages, but led to strange activity of the car and indicators. This is par for the course in any hack that wires into an existing system – there’s a high …read more

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Hackaday Links: February 19, 2017

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The ESP-32 is the Next Big Chip. This tiny microcontroller with WiFi and Bluetooth is the brains of the GameBoy on your keychain, emulates an NES, and does Arduino. There are ESP32 modules that are somewhat easy to acquire, but so far the bare chips have been unobtanium. Now you can buy them. One supplier has them for $3.60 USD/piece. That’s a lot of computational power, WiFi, and Bluetooth for not much money. What are you going to build?

What is the power of artisanal product videos? The argument for this trend cites [Claude C. Hopkins] and how he told …read more

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Hackaday Links: The 2017 One

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You screwed everything up last night. The end of 2016 had a leap second, so instead of the seconds going up from 57, 58, 59… 00, there was a 61st second in the last minute of the year. Yeah, 2016 just wouldn’t quit. [Michel] built a device to keep track of 2016’s leap second using GPS, and everything worked beautifully.

Remember MechWarrior? There’s a reason those mid-90s games used mechs instead of more organic characters. Computers couldn’t draw that many polygons, making MechWarrior a stylistic choice driven by the limitations of technology. Here’s a real MechWarrior that could rip your …read more

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New Part Day: Wireless BeagleBones On A Chip

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The BeagleBone is a very popular single board computer, best applied to real-time applications where you need to blink LEDs really, really fast. Over the years, the BeagleBone has been used for stand-alone CNC controllers, the brains behind very large LED installations, and on rare occasions has been used to drive CRTs. If you just want a small Linux board, get a Pi. If you want to do something interesting with hardware, get a BeagleBone.

The BeagleBone ecosystem has grown a lot in the last year, from the wireless and Grove connector equipped BeagleBone Green, the robotics-focused BeagleBone Blue, …read more

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New Part Day: Wireless BeagleBones On A Chip

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The BeagleBone is a very popular single board computer, best applied to real-time applications where you need to blink LEDs really, really fast. Over the years, the BeagleBone has been used for stand-alone CNC controllers, the brains behind very large LED installations, and on rare occasions has been used to drive CRTs. If you just want a small Linux board, get a Pi. If you want to do something interesting with hardware, get a BeagleBone.

The BeagleBone ecosystem has grown a lot in the last year, from the wireless and Grove connector equipped BeagleBone Green, the robotics-focused BeagleBone Blue, …read more

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Single Board Revolution: Preventing Flash Memory Corruption

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An SD card is surely not an enterprise grade storage solution, but single board computers also aren’t just toys anymore. You find them in applications far beyond the educational purpose they have emerged from, and the line between non-critical and critical applications keeps getting blurred.

Laundry notification hacks and arcade machines fail without causing harm. But how about electronic access control, or an automatic pet feeder? Would you rely on the data integrity of a plain micro SD card stuffed into a single board computer to keep your pet fed when you’re on vacation and you back in afterward? After …read more

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Blindingly Fast ADC for Your BeagleBone

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[Jason Holt] wrote in to tell about of the release of his PRUDAQ project. It’s a dual-channel 10-bit ADC cape that ties into the BeagleBone’s Programmable Realtime Units (PRUs) to shuttle through up to as much as 20 megasamples per second for each channel. That’s a lot of bandwidth!

The trick is reading the ADC out with the PRUs, which are essentially a little bit of programmable logic that’s built on to the board. With a bit of PRU code, the data can be shuttled out of the ADC and into the BeagleBone’s memory about as fast as you could …read more

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New Part Day: A BeagleBone On A Chip

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The current crop of ARM single board computers have a lot in common. Everything from the Odroid to the Raspberry Pi are built around Systems on a Chip, a piece of silicon that has just about everything you need to build a bare minimum board. You won’t find many hardware hackers playing around with these chips, though. That would require putting some RAM on the board, and some other high-speed connectors. Until now, the only people building these ARM boards were Real Engineers™, with a salary commensurate of their skills.

This is now about to change. Octavo Systems has launched …read more

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BeagleBone Pin-Toggling Torture Test

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Benchmarks often get criticized for their inability to perfectly model the real-world situations that we’d like them to. So take what follows in the limited scope that it’s intended, and don’t read too much into it. [Joonas Pihlajamaa]’s experiments with toggling a hardware pin as fast as possible on different single-board computers can still show us something.

The take-home result won’t surprise anyone who’s worked with a single-board computer: the higher-level interfaces are simply slow compared to direct memory-mapped GPIO access. But really slow. We’re talking around 5 kHz from Python or any of the file-based interfaces to the pins …read more

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BlinkenBone Meets The PiDP8

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Years ago when the old mainframes made their way out of labs and into the waiting arms of storage closets and surplus stores, a lot got lost. The interesting bits – core memory boards and the like – were cool enough to be saved. Some iconic parts – blinkenlight panels – were stashed away by techs with a respect for our computing history.

For the last few years, [Jörg] has been making these blinkenlight panels work again with his BlinkenBone project. His work turns a BeagleBone into a control box for old console computers, simulating the old CPUs and circuits, …read more

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