Category Archives: News

Source: Ars Technica

Getting the hang of through-hole soldering is tricky for those of us tinkering at home with our irons, spools, flux, and, sometimes, braids. It's almost reassuring, then, to learn that through-hole soldering was also a pain for a firm that has made more than 60 million products with it.

Raspberry Pi boards have a combination of surface-mount devices (SMDs) and through-hole bits. SMDs allow for far more tiny chips, resistors, and other bits to be attached to boards by their tiny pins, flat contacts, solder balls, or other connections. For those things that are bigger, or subject to rough forces like clumsy human hands, through-hole soldering is still required, with leads poked through a connective hole and solder applied to connect and join them securely.

The Raspberry Pi board has a 40-pin GPIO header on it that needs through-hole soldering, along with bits like the Ethernet and USB ports. These require robust solder joints, which can't be done the same way as with SMT (surface-mount technology) tools. "In the early days of Raspberry Pi, these parts were inserted by hand, and later by robotic placement," writes Roger Thornton, director of applications for Raspberry Pi, in a blog post. The boards then had to go through a follow-up wave soldering step.

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Source: Hack a Day

Most of us learned to design circuits with schematics. But if you get to a certain level of complexity, schematics are a pain. Modern designers — especially for digital circuits — prefer to use some kind of hardware description language.

There are a few options to do similar things with PCB layout, including tscircuit. There’s a walk-through for using it to create an LED matrix and you can even try it out online, if you like. If you’re more of a visual learner, there’s also an introductory video you can watch below.

The example project imports a Pico microcontroller and some smart LEDs. They do appear graphically, but you don’t have to deal with them graphically. You write “code” to manage the connections. For example:

<trace from={".LED1 .GND"} to="net.GND" />

If that looks like HTML to you, you aren’t wrong. Once you have the schematic, you can do the same kind of thing to lay out the PCB using footprints. If you want to play with the actual design, you can load it in your browser and make changes. You’ll note that at the top right, there are buttons that let you view the schematic, the board, a 3D render of the board, a BOM, an assembly drawing, and several other types of output.

Will we use this? We don’t know. Years ago, designers resisted using HDLs for FPGAs, but the bigger FPGAs get, the fewer people want to deal with page after page of schematics. Maybe a better question is: Will you use this? Let us know in the comments.

This isn’t a new idea, of course. Time will tell which HDLs will survive and which will whither.

Source: Published articles

This is _absolutely delightful_.

Source: Hacker News

Source: OSNews

The Wii homebrew community has been dealt a pretty serious blow, as developers of The Homebrew Channel for the Wii have discovered that not only does an important library most Wii homebrew software rely on use code stolen straight from Nintendo, that same library also uses code taken from an open source real-time operating system without giving proper attribution.

Most Wii homebrew software is built atop a library called libogc. This library apparently contains code stolen from Nintendo’s SDK as well as from games using this SDK, decompiled and cleaned. This has been known for a while, but it was believed that large, important parts of libogc were at least original, but that, too, turns out to be untrue. Recently it has been discovered that libogc’s threading/OS implementation has been stolen from RTEMS, an open source real-time operating system.

The developers of libogc have indicated that they do not care, intend to do nothing about it, and deleted any issues reporting the stolen code. What’s wild about the code stolen from RTEMS is that it’s an open source operating system with a nice, permissive license; there was no need to steal the code at all, and all it would take to address it is proper attribution.

As such, the fail0verflow group, which develops The Homebrew Channel for the Wii, has ceased all development on The Homebrew Channel, and archived the code repository.

The Wii homebrew community was all built on top of a pile of lies and copyright infringement, and it’s all thanks to shagkur (who did the stealing) and the rest of the team (who enabled it and did nothing when it was discovered). Together, the developers deceived everyone into believing their work was original.

Please demand that the leaders and major contributors to console or other proprietary device SDKs and toolkits that you use and work with do things legally, and do not tolerate this kind of behavior.

↫ The Homebrew Channel GitHub page

Considering Nintendo is on a crusade to shutdown emulators, stuff like this is really not helping anyone trying to argue that consoles should be open devices, that emulators play an important role in preservation, and that people have a right to play the games they own on a device other than the console it’s intended for.

I’m sure this isn’t the last we’ll hear about this development.

Source: Hacker News

Source: Hacker News

Source: Hacker News

Source: Engadget

Google has been paying Samsung tons of cash every month to pre-install the AI app Gemini on its smartphones, according to a report by Bloomberg. This information comes to us as part of a pre-existing antitrust case against Google.

Peter Fitzgerald, Google’s VP of platforms and device partnerships, testified in federal court that it began paying Samsung for this service back in January. The pair of companies have a contract that’s set to run at least two years.

Fitzgerald told Judge Amit Metha, who is overseeing the case, that Google provides Samsung with both fixed monthly payments and a percentage of revenue earned from advertisers within the Gemini app. The monetary figures are unknown, but DOJ lawyer David Dahlquist called it an "enormous sum of money in a fixed monthly payment."

This antitrust case started with an accusation that Google had been illegally abusing a monopoly over the search engine industry. Part of the testimony surrounding that case involved Google paying Apple, Samsung and other companies to ensure it was the default search engine on its devices.

Judge Mehta agreed and found that this practice constitutes a violation of antitrust law. He’s currently hearing additional testimony to decide what measures Google must take to remedy the illegal behavior, which is where this Gemini reveal comes from.

Testimony from another case involving Epic Games indicated that Google handed over $8 billion from 2020 to 2023 to ensure that Google Search, the Play Store and Google Assistant were used by default on Samsung mobile devices. A California federal judge later ruled that the company must lift restrictions that prevent rival marketplaces and billing systems. Google is in the process of appealing that ruling.

As an aside, if Google is hellbent on handing out Scrooge McDuck-sized bags of money to increase adoption rates of its generative AI app, why not give the regular people who have to actually use the bloatware some of that cash? Just saying.

Source: Engadget

Anbernic, a popular retro handheld maker, has announced that its suspending shipments of its devices from China to the US because of tariffs. The company, which makes a variety of emulation-focused consoles and has appeared in Engadget's "Best gaming handhelds" list, is still selling devices it's already shipped to the US while supplies last.

"Due to changes in U.S. tariff policies, we will be suspending all orders shipping from China to the United States starting today," Anbernic writes. "We strongly recommend prioritizing products shipped from our U.S. warehouse, which are currently not affected by import duties and can be purchased with confidence." 

Anbernic has long offered the option to choose which warehouse your device is shipped from as a way to avoid additional customs fees or a model being out of stock in specific region. Because of this policy change, though, US customers will no longer be able to order directly from China and could miss out on the company's future hardware launches.

The decision to stop shipping to the US is understandable given the current chaos around tariffs. President Donald Trump announced a 90-day pause on most tariffs on April 9, but increased the tariffs companies would pay to import goods from China. Specific exemptions were carved out for certain electronics, but then the Trump administration later clarified that electronics would get their own separate semiconductor tariffs at some point, too. 

All of this flip-flopping over trade policies was also paired with the removal of the "de minimis exemption" which allows packages shipped to the US under $800 to be duty-free, a key ingredient in cheap Amazon-alternatives like Temu and the budget products Anbernic sells. Given how messy the current approach to trade is, it's possible Anbernic might be able to ship to the US again in the future. For now, though, not everyone is able to eat the costs of tariffs like Nintendo is.