My favorite NuttX RTOS [1] that is “Tiny Unix on MCU” has graduated to Apache Top-Level-Project [2], congratulations! :-)

Apache NuttX [1] is a real-time operating system (RTOS) that emphasizes standards compliance and small footprint, usable in all but the tightest micro-controller environments. It runs on 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit microcontrollers across RISC-V, ARM, MIPS, ESP32, AVR, x86, and other architectures with a high degree of standards compliance. NuttX is used to power the Fitbit fitness tracker, as well as satellites, IoT devices, bluetooth headphones, drones, and more.

What I like most in NuttX is the development team / community.. and scalability starting upwards from 8-bit CPU’s. One day I wish porting NuttX to my 8-bit Atari and 16-bit Amiga and Atari ST and push new life to these amazing machines :-)

[1] https://nuttx.apache.org
[2] https://news.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-software-foundation-announces-apache-nuttx-as-a-top-level-project

This wulf7 [1] is a really nice guy that helped me run full featured Synaptics TouchPad with FreeBSD on Panasonic Toughbook CF-MX4 [2][3]. Now it works for moused and libinput with all multitouch gestures like two or three finger scroll, scale, etc! The problem was in detection mechanism as device is connected over multiplexer with both PS/2 and SMBus but multitouch works only over SMBus. Although fix requires change and rebuild of FreeBSD Kernel I hope it gets quickly to the upstream [4]. I had a chance to exercise building whole FreeBSD distribution into the USB memstick image, so I could test driver fix on a target computer without even touching its hard drive contents :-)

/* psm has a special support for GenMouse + SynTouchpad combination */
if (active_ports_count >= 2) {
    for (port = 0; port < KBDC_AUX_MUX_NUM_PORTS; port++) {

That 2 above had to be changed into 1 in /usr/src/sys/dev/atkbdc/psm.c. Nice? That’s what I call a one-bit-fix :-)

In addition, when you work with Synaptics Touchpad in Xorg and you want to use its all features like tap-to-click, natural (swapped) two finger scroll, two and three finger gestures, don’t use moused,xmodmap, or xinput as this will produce inconsistent behavior in applications based on different toolkits (i.e. GTK will scroll up while Qt will scroll down etc), instead use the new way of input based on libinput and modify MatchIsTouchpad section of /usr/local/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/40-libinput.conf like:

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "libinput touchpad catchall"
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"
        MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event5"
        Option "NaturalScrolling" "on"
        Option "Tapping" "on"
        Option "ClickMethod" "clickfinger"
        Driver "libinput"
EndSection

[1] https://github.com/wulf7/iichid
[2] https://github.com/wulf7/iichid/issues/51
[3] https://github.com/wulf7/iichid/issues/53
[4] https://reviews.freebsd.org/D28502

SoundFlower [1] is amazing Free and Open-Source extension to macOS BSD that allows you to create Virtual Audio Device in order to Route and Record Applications Audio. This is especially important for activities like Online Streaming and Presentation/Lectures Recording.

If you need more advanced Audio Routing with a nice GUI and lots of options try Loopback [2] from RogueAmoeba [3].

Thank you for this amazing fork and keeping it Open-Source! :-)

[1] https://github.com/mattingalls/Soundflower
[2] https://rogueamoeba.com
[3] https://rogueamoeba.com/loopback

I just did a self-assembly of JTAGulator. This simple and amazing device indeed works and shortens JTAG pinout search from days to seconds. AMAZING! I have some spare devices to sale cheap in EU, if you want one let me know! :-)

JTAGulator is an open source hardware tool, created by Joe Grand / Grand Idea Studio, that assists in identifying OCD connections from test points, vias, or component pads on a target device. All you need is a target device, bunch of tap wires / cables, USB-Mini cable, and serial terminal to operate JTAGulator.

On-chip debug (OCD) interfaces can provide chip-level control of a target device and are a primary vector used by engineers, researchers, and hackers to extract program code or data, modify memory contents, or affect device operation on-the-fly. Depending on the complexity of the target device, manually locating available OCD connections can be a difficult and time consuming task, sometimes requiring physical destruction or modification of the device.

It is my great pleasure to inform you folks that, almost after four years, I did a new release of LibSWD-0.7 [1], a low-level embedded systems access open framework. Special thanks goes to Andrew Parlane of Carallon Ltd [2] for his much appreciated contributions! Well now I feel like I need to invent some nice small device based on ARM Cortex-M0 CPU :-)

[1] https://github.com/cederom/LibSWD
[2] http://www.carallon.com/

Google have implemented my idea to make Google Books TTS work like an audio player – it can now work in background and being controlled with bluetooth headset – so I can play, pause and rewind paragraphs of the book read by speech synthesizer just as it was music. This is soo fantastic!!

I have been proposing this solution to Amazon to implement in Kindle for Android, but for years they did not listen. I have switched to Kindle application after Amazon bricked my Kindle3 3G reader with a software update (and all other devices worldwide). Now I just wait until Google Books allow to import my Kindle library, and I will never go back to Kindle. Greedy loses twice.