Category: Tech

Hardware, Gadgets and Geekery

Think small: Raspberry Pi Pico

A low cost (less than £4), high-performance microcontroller board built around Raspberry Pi’s very own chip – the RP2040.

  • Dual-core ARM Cortex M0+ processor, flexible clock running up to 133 MHz
  • 264kB of SRAM, and 2MB of on-board Flash memory
  • Castellated module allows soldering direct to carrier boards
  • USB 1.1 Host and Device support
  • Low-power sleep and dormant modes
  • Drag & drop programming using mass storage over USB
  • 26 multi-function GPIO pins
  • 2×SPI, 2×I2C, 2×UART, 3×12-bit ADC, 16×controllable PWM channels
  • Accurate clock and timer on-chip
  • Temperature sensor
  • Accelerated floating point libraries on-chip
  • 8×Programmable IO (PIO) state machines for custom peripheral support

Source: Raspberry Pi Pico – Pimoroni

VB-Audio VoiceMeeter Banana

VoiceMeeter Banana, the Advanced Virtual Audio Mixer by V.Burel, is a pretty interesting piece of software. It allows you to “rewire” and mix audio streams in Windows, so that you can f.x. take a microphone input, and an aux input, and/or the output of another audio stream and mix those into one channel, which then can be the input to f.x. Skype. Very useful if you are trying to stream your voice together with sounds from another Windows application into the Skype meeting.

Source: VB-Audio VoiceMeeter Banana

Grammarly

My native tongue is Norwegian, so writing English still is a challenge at times, even after years of practice.  Apart from the pure typo part, it is a question about reasonably good grammar. The Its vs the It’s. The a/an conundrum, and the handling of plurals and time-related issues, as well as general sentence structure.

I am testing the free Grammarly edition for Chrome, and it is … well, a bit weird, but also better than no checking at all.

However – unless you write for a living, the available price plans for the premium version are rather stiff.

Source: Grammarly

AR Smart Glasses Go CPU-Free With New DigiLens Crystal

AR Smart Glasses Go CPU-Free With New DigiLens Crystal, frameless and CPU-less smart glasses arriving in 2019 at under $500 (£395).

With no CPU of its own, DigiLens Crystal smart glasses weigh “less than three ounces,” Chris Pickett, CEO of DigiLens told Tom’s Hardware. Instead of saddling the smart glasses with a processor, DigiLens developed a way for the hardware to use a smartphone connected via a USB-C port for power, video and running apps.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/digilens-crystal-ar-smart-glasses-augmented-reality,38300.html

Chinese Nreal shows off 3-ounce mixed reality smart glasses

nreal-light-2VentureBeat: Nreal raises $15 million and shows off its 3-ounce mixed reality smart glasses.

The Nreal Light claims its display has a 52-degree field of view, 1080p resolution for vivid 3D graphics, and low latency, which, when combined with spatial sound, voice interactions, and haptic-feedback controllers with up to 3 degrees of freedom (DoF), offers an immersive mixed reality experience. That’s pretty high-end compared to other augmented reality (AR) glasses on the market, but you do have the inconvenience of having to connect via a USB-C wire to an external computing pack. Most of the computing is done in the pack.

https://venturebeat.com/2019/01/07/nreal-raises-15-million-and-shows-off-its-3-ounce-mixed-reality-smart-glasses/