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My Business Card Runs Linux

thirtythreeforty.net

101–110 of 415 posts

Re: My Business Card Runs Linux

#101
post #81

Interested why the author would fuzz out the phone number on their business card?

It's only fuzzed in the pictures. The actual card has the phone number. I just didn't want a ton of people from the internet hitting my phone directly! Email is fine, however, so that's un-blurred.

Re: My Business Card Runs Linux

#102
post #64

Maybe I'm twisted but my first thought if that if I were a pen tester I would want business cards exactly like this. And yes, they would run Linux... and some other things. :-)

Ha someone on Reddit suggested this. See the thing is, they have my contact info printed on them, so I'm really easy for the police to find after everything is hacked!

If I were a pentester, I'd hand them out with your name and readme on it ;)

Re: My Business Card Runs Linux

#103
post #86

The author: did you think about creating a course on embedded hardware and software design and launch a funding campaign on Kickstarter. I would definitely help fund it.

I have thought about it and I am writing one entitled "Mastering Embedded Linux." Its goal is to take you from zero to expert with hacking embedded Linux systems. https://www.thirtythreeforty.net/posts/2019/08/mastering-emb... Hopefully the next installment will come out today. The holidays are letting me catch up on writing.

Both the card and the article look cool, thanks for making this. Do you have a mailing list for article updates?

Re: My Business Card Runs Linux

#105

I wonder what world would we be living in if people like this fellow were actually focusing on automation and not on making business cards that run Linux. Maybe we wouldn't be living in such a lowly automated reality, using concepts from the previous centuries. Robotics might even make sense...

I wonder what the world would we be living in if people like you were actually focusing on automation and not wasting time reading and commenting on HN posts.

Maybe we wouldn't be living in such a lowly automated reality, using concepts from the previous centuries. Robotics might even make sense...

Re: My Business Card Runs Linux

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s if you even have a USB A socket anymore!

I don't see why you were downvoted. I fully get why the blog writer didn't include USB-C with this awesome project. But there's now a growing group of people who simply can't use USB-A anymore with their laptops. Most will have an adapter, but not all.

[deleted]

Re: My Business Card Runs Linux

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s if you even have a USB A socket anymore!

I don't see why you were downvoted. I fully get why the blog writer didn't include USB-C with this awesome project. But there's now a growing group of people who simply can't use USB-A anymore with their laptops. Most will have an adapter, but not all.

I've played around putting USB connectors directly on PCBs, and USB-A is way more lenient than USB-C. With USB-A, you can use basically any PCB thickness between the standard 1.6mm and 2.2mm, and it'll work well enough.

USB-C's midplate is specified at 0.7mm, and all of the cheap chinese PCB manufacturers only offer 0.6mm and 0.8mm. 0.6mm is too thin to make reliable contact with most of the cables I've tried: I haven't gotten around to ordering another batch at 0.8mm, but plugging the corner of a 0.8mm M.2 SSD into a USB-C cable, it's pretty (i.e. probably slightly too) snug. Thin PCBs are also extremely flexible, which isn't great for brittle solder joints, ceramic capacitors, etc.

Re: My Business Card Runs Linux

#108

To me it's truly mind-bogging that a tiny $1.42 chip contains almost everything needed to boot Linux: a 500mhz cpu, 32MB SDRAM, 2D GPU, SD/MMC support, and USB controller, all packaged inside a 10mm x 10mm chip? It makes me really want to get into embedded development.

I mainly work in web-dev, but working in embedded systems is kind of my hobby. It's kind of refreshing working on bare-metal, optimizing up-to single bytes of data, when I'm usually working on layers and layers of abstraction everyday.

I just finished Michael Abrash's Black Book. Lots of assembly. You may like it. Like 30 hours of reading.

Re: My Business Card Runs Linux

#109
post #65

Very cool project! It would be neat to incorporate WiFi into the next version instead of USB. Then you could publish a mobile app to communicate with it. It would be fun to play with at parties. https://www.gridconnect.com/products/esp8266ex-tiny-wireless... .

> instead of USB And how would you power the card?

Use usb for power but also spin up an access point

Re: My Business Card Runs Linux

#110

I really want to learn being able compile and solder an embedded system but I don't know where to start. Assuming I have the parts, tools and materials, how can I learn where to put capacitors/resistors etc in a custom design? What kind of simulators are good at testing these ideas without needing to waste expensive components? What was missing in my Computer Engineering curriculum which paints those circuit parts (e…

Buy an Arduino clone, install the crappy GUI and see where that leads you.

Forget simulators. IME, software devs obsess about simulators. I think they're mostly a waste of time: at the beginner levels we're talking about here, signals are slow (after 30 years in the business, I can't believe I now think a 16MHz signal is "slow" :-) and parts are cheap. Just dive right in and blink a few LEDs or something.

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