Search the text in historical maps #ArtTuesday

On its own the David Rumsey Map Collection is an awesome resource. Over 125,000 Maps and images collected and organized for easy browsing. Now, with the power of AI, you can search all the maps in the gallery for specific words of phrase. Via FlowingData:

The David Rumsey Map Collection has been home to tens of thousands of historical maps, and now you can search the collection by the text in the maps instead of just through metadata

Check it out here!

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Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!

PCI Express: the bus that’s not a bus & the joys of hacking it #PCIe @Hackaday

Everyone is excited over the Raspberry Pi 5 getting explicit PCI Express (PCIe) bus capability (some Raspberry Pi 4 boards were hacked to get to internal PCIe lanes).  PCIe has been in modern desktop computers for the last 20 years or so, replacing the older, incompatible PCI standard. It has undergone 7 standards revisions since introduction and also has several variants:

• PCI Express Mini Card
• Mini-SATA (mSATA)
• PCI Express M.2

A couple years ago, Maya Posch at Hackaday wrote an excellent article on PCIe and hacking it.

PCIe offers the ability to add switches which allows more than one PCIe end point (a device or part of a device) to share a PCIe link (called a ‘lane’).

This change from a parallel bus to serial links simplifies the topology a lot compared to ISA or PCI where communication time had to be shared with other PCI devices on the bus and only half-duplex operation was possible. The ability to bundle multiple lanes to provide less or more bandwidth to specific ports or devices has meant that there was no need for a specialized graphics card slot, using e.g. an x16 PCIe slot with 16 lanes. It does however mean we’re using serial links that run at many GHz and must be implemented as differential pairs to protect signal integrity.

This flexibility of PCIe has also led to PCIe lanes being routed out to strange and wonderful new places. Specifications like Intel’s Thunderbolt (now USB 4) include room for multiple lanes of PCIe 3.0, which enables fast external storage solutions as well as external video cards that work as well as internal ones.

Solid-state storage has moved over from the SATA protocol to NVMe, which essentially defines a storage device that is directly attached to the PCIe controller. This change has allowed NVMe storage devices to be installed or even directly integrated on the main logic board.

Read more in the hackaday article here and also on Wikipedia.

The MaplePad Dreamcast controller #Gaming @YveltalGriffin

MaplePad is an all-in-one Dreamcast controller, VMU, and Purupuru (rumble pack) emulator for Dreamcast portables and custom Dreamcast controllers. It runs on RP2040 and is usable with the Raspberry Pi Pico as well as custom MaplePad PCBs.

With MaplePad you can cycle through 8 200-block internal VMUs with custom icons and colors, use an I2C or SPI OLED display to see the VMU screen in color and at 2x integer scale, and enjoy rumble that is 1:1 with the Performance TremorPak in most retail software.

Check the details in the GitHub repo here.

Building a String Art Machine

Maker Paul MH shows us how he built his own string art machine (and the hurdles he encournters along the way!). Full video and more details here on YouTube. He redesigns his initial working machine to make it lighter and faster by using a V-Slot design and changing the ways the machine loads nails.

Raspberry Pi Tracks Unseen Drones Using Sound #drone #droneday

Certain scenarios might call for the need to track a drone. For some of the same reasons drones great, they are also pretty hard to track. DroneChase is a Raspberry Pi powered system that uses AI to track a drones flight, even when the view is obstructed. Picked up by Tom’s Hardware:

The Pi is programmed to draw a red box around the drone when it’s detected. Of course, it’s easy enough for it to track the drone using image recognition with a camera. Where it gets really interesting is how it detects the drone when hidden from view. The team decided to hone in on the drone’s location by using audio. The red box will appear based on the estimated location even if it’s not visible.

According to the paper put together by the team, the project is designed to be mounted to a vehicle. The AI is trained using a model that helps it locate the drone if it’s in the visual scope of the camera. This is used in tandem with a custom system designed by the researchers that uses multiple microphones to help triangulate the drone’s location.

Read more from Tom’s Hardware and the paper DroneChase: A Mobile and Automated Cross-Modality System for Continuous Drone Tracking

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Welcome to drone day on the Adafruit blog. Every Monday we deliver the latest news, products and more from the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), quadcopter and drone communities. Drones can be used for video & photography (dronies), civil applications, policing, farming, firefighting, military and non-military security work, such as surveillance of pipelines. Previous posts can be found via the #drone tag and our drone / UAV categories.

Making a SUMP protocol logic analyzer with Raspberry Pi Pico

The Raspberry Pi folks developed Picoprobe, where one Raspberry Pi Pico can be used to reprogram and debug another, using the picoprobe firmware, which transforms a Pico into a USB → SWD and UART bridge. This makes it easy to use a Raspberry Pi Pico on non-Raspberry Pi platforms such as Windows, Mac, and Linux computers where you don’t have GPIOs to connect directly to UART or SWD, but you do have a USB port.

Jaroslav Kysela has forked the code allowing Picoprobe use with a logic analyzer implementation based on the SUMP protocol.

Supported features:

• up to 16 probes (gpio 6-21 by default)
• 200kB RAM for samples
• RLE encoding
• test mode (external pattern)
  • probe 0 and 1 – 10Mhz PWM
  • probe 1 and 2 – 1Mhz PWM
  • probe 3 and 4 – 1kHz PWM
  • probe 8 and 9 – 1kHz PWM (swapped levels)
• test pin (gpio 22) – 5Mhz 50%/50% PWM for probe tests (activated only when sampling)

Overclocking the Pico can give up to a 50 MHz sampling rate.

See more on GitHub.

 

The Great Search – PCI express x1 connector #PCIe #TheGreatSearch #DigiKey#Adafruit @Adafruit @DigiKey

This week on the Great Search (video), we’ve had our eyes on the new Pi 5 announcement – they’re not shipping yet but we did get some tantalizing new images including a new PCIe connector on board. PCIe is a high speed bus that will make it a lot easier to add hardware to a Pi computer, including storage cards, cell modules, radios, and co-processors  that can use 1 lane of data.

A PCIe HAT is expected from Raspberry Pi at some point, and there’s a few folks trying to make adapters for M.2, which we covered on The Great Search earlier. So this time around let’s look for PCIe sockets. We’ll try to find one that is SMT and vertical, so a wide variety of cards can be inserted.

See the chosen part on DigiKey

See episodes of The Desk of Ladyada in the playlist here and other Great Searches in the playlist here.