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100 Articles

Jonni Bidwell I’d like a robot to write some questions for the recently reprised Answers section. Come to think of it, I’d like another robot to answer those questions too, because I have enough Linux problems of my own. And you know what? I rather miss my DiddyBorg robot. How come I don’t get fun hardware to play with anymore? Sean D Conway A husbandry pibot that could feed the dog. Sounds simple enough in theory. The pibot would have to be a doppelganger of me for it to work, mind. The animal has imprinted on me as her only source of food and refuses to acknowledge anyone else. That’s loyalty for you. Matthew Hanson I’ve been eyeing up one of those robot vacuum cleaners with envy. Anything that can help clean up after my…

Jonni Bidwell I’d like a robot to write some questions for the recently reprised Answers section. Come to think of it, I’d like another robot to answer those questions too, because I have enough Linux problems of my own. And you know what? I rather miss my DiddyBorg robot. How come I don’t get fun hardware to play with anymore? Sean D Conway A husbandry pibot that could feed the dog. Sounds simple enough in theory. The pibot would have to be a doppelganger of me for it to work, mind. The animal has imprinted on me as her only source of food and refuses to acknowledge anyone else. That’s loyalty for you. Matthew Hanson I’ve been eyeing up one of those robot vacuum cleaners with envy. Anything that can…

It’s the Pi-mageddon!

If you’re wondering if things are looking a little different around here, don’t worry, you’re not going mad. After 152 issues and almost 12 years (October 2006) Linux FormatTowers has finally been able to afford a fresh lick of paint, but don’t panic! All your favourite sections remain intact and as they were. They’re hopefully just easier to read for everyone! And the good news keeps on coming, because we have a double whammy of Raspberry Pi content this issue. First there’s the lowdown on the new Raspberry Pi 3 B+. Then there’s our lead feature on building, much like the Pi itself, all-conquering Pi robots! It feels like the Raspberry Pi Foundation has got into the swing of releasing these Pi boards, which is great. We now have a…

It’s the Pi-mageddon!

It’s the Pi-mageddon!

If you’re wondering if things are looking a little different around here, don’t worry, you’re not going mad. After 152 issues and almost 12 years (October 2006) Linux FormatTowers has finally been able to afford a fresh lick of paint, but don’t panic! All your favourite sections remain intact and as they were. They’re hopefully just easier to read for everyone! And the good news keeps on coming, because we have a double whammy of Raspberry Pi content this issue. First there’s the lowdown on the new Raspberry Pi 3 B+. Then there’s our lead feature on building, much like the Pi itself, all-conquering Pi robots! It feels like the Raspberry Pi Foundation has got into the swing of releasing these Pi boards, which is great. We now have a major…

It’s the Pi-mageddon!

Major Vulkan graphics update makes a splash

“NOW PART OF CORE VULKAN 1.1 IS SUPPORT FOR MULTIPLE GRAPHICS CARDS IN A SINGLE SYSTEM” The Khronos Group (www.khronos.org), the open consortium made up of some of the biggest names in hardware and software, recently announced the release of Vulkan 1.1, the latest version of the cross-platform open source graphics/compute API. This is the first major update to the API since Vulkan 1.0 in 2016, and it coincided with the Games Developers’ Conference (GDC 18) held in March. It also follows the news that Vulkan is now available on Apple’s iOS and macOS platforms. While Apple is still to officially support Vulkan, this news, along with the release of Vulkan 1.1, demonstrates how successful the API is becoming. Along with Apple’s platforms it’s now also available on Linux, Android…

Major Vulkan graphics update makes a splash

Major Vulkan graphics update makes a splash

“NOW PART OF CORE VULKAN 1.1 IS SUPPORT FOR MULTIPLE GRAPHICS CARDS IN A SINGLE SYSTEM” The Khronos Group (www.khronos.org), the open consortium made up of some of the biggest names in hardware and software, recently announced the release of Vulkan 1.1, the latest version of the cross-platform open source graphics/compute API. This is the first major update to the API since Vulkan 1.0 in 2016, and it coincided with the Games Developers’ Conference (GDC 18) held in March. It also follows the news that Vulkan is now available on Apple’s iOS and macOS platforms. While Apple is still to officially support Vulkan, this news, along with the release of Vulkan 1.1, demonstrates how successful the API is becoming. Along with Apple’s platforms it’s now also available on Linux, Android and Windows. While…

Major Vulkan graphics update makes a splash

Jolla’s Sailfish OS 3 heading to affordable phones

At this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Jolla announced Sailfish 3, the latest version of its alternative to Android. While Android remains the operating system of choice for smartphones, that hasn’t dissuaded Jolla. On its website announcing the new version (https://jolla.com/sailfish3/), Jolla looks back at the journey so far, beginning with MeeGo, the Linux-based predecessor of Sailfish OS that at one point powered many of the world’s Nokia handsets. Despite not making significant headway in the world of smartphone operating systems, Jolla is positioning Sailfish 3 for cheaper, less-powerful smartphones. Jolla CEO Sami Pienimaki says its main aim is to function with “low-spec hardware configurations and still run selected Android apps.” This makes it a direct rival of Google’s lightweight Android Go operating system. Sailfish 3 is set for a…

Jolla’s Sailfish OS 3 heading to affordable phones

Jolla’s Sailfish OS 3 heading to affordable phones

At this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Jolla announced Sailfish 3, the latest version of its alternative to Android. While Android remains the operating system of choice for smartphones, that hasn’t dissuaded Jolla. On its website announcing the new version (https://jolla.com/sailfish3/), Jolla looks back at the journey so far, beginning with MeeGo, the Linux-based predecessor of Sailfish OS that at one point powered many of the world’s Nokia handsets. Despite not making significant headway in the world of smartphone operating systems, Jolla is positioning Sailfish 3 for cheaper, less-powerful smartphones. Jolla CEO Sami Pienimaki says its main aim is to function with “low-spec hardware configurations and still run selected Android apps.” This makes it a direct rival of Google’s lightweight Android Go operating system. Sailfish 3 is set…

Jolla’s Sailfish OS 3 heading to affordable phones

Linux programs on Chrome OS

Fans of Chromebooks who aren’t too keen on the limitations of Chrome OS will be pleased to hear that Chrome OS may soon get the ability to run Linux applications. While Chrome OS is based on Gentoo Linux, it’s limited to running apps from the Chrome web store. The operating system had a recent boost with the ability to run Android apps, but with full Linux applications apparently coming, our Chromebooks could become even more useful. A new commit on the Chromium Gerrit (a web-based code collaboration tool for the operating system that can be found at https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/q/status:open), has been discovered. It’s called “New device policy to allow Linux VMs on Chrome OS,” which adds a new menu, called Better Together. This looks like it’ll enable Linux containers to be…

Linux programs on Chrome OS

Fans of Chromebooks who aren’t too keen on the limitations of Chrome OS will be pleased to hear that Chrome OS may soon get the ability to run Linux applications. While Chrome OS is based on Gentoo Linux, it’s limited to running apps from the Chrome web store. The operating system had a recent boost with the ability to run Android apps, but with full Linux applications apparently coming, our Chromebooks could become even more useful. A new commit on the Chromium Gerrit (a web-based code collaboration tool for the operating system that can be found at https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/q/status:open), has been discovered. It’s called “New device policy to allow Linux VMs on Chrome OS,” which adds a new menu, called Better Together. This looks like it’ll enable Linux containers to be run in…

FIRMWARE IS THE KEY

“March saw the launch of three new open source projects focused on low-level firmware and subsystems. This reflects a growing trend of people moving towards open source licensed software for these types of solutions. ACRN is a lightweight, safety-oriented hypervisor project. It’ll provide a framework for industry leaders to build an open source embedded hypervisor specifically for the Internet of Things. Sound Open Firmware, includes a digital signal processing firmware and an SDK that provide tools and infrastructure for developers working on audio or signal processing firmware. Finally, the OpenBMC Project can be described as a Linux distro for embedded devices that have a BMC (Baseband Management Controller). A BMC is found in servers, rack switches or RAID appliances. The OpenBMC stack uses technologies such as Yocto, OpenEmbedded, systemd, and…

FIRMWARE IS THE KEY

FIRMWARE IS THE KEY

“March saw the launch of three new open source projects focused on low-level firmware and subsystems. This reflects a growing trend of people moving towards open source licensed software for these types of solutions. ACRN is a lightweight, safety-oriented hypervisor project. It’ll provide a framework for industry leaders to build an open source embedded hypervisor specifically for the Internet of Things. Sound Open Firmware, includes a digital signal processing firmware and an SDK that provide tools and infrastructure for developers working on audio or signal processing firmware. Finally, the OpenBMC Project can be described as a Linux distro for embedded devices that have a BMC (Baseband Management Controller). A BMC is found in servers, rack switches or RAID appliances. The OpenBMC stack uses technologies such as Yocto, OpenEmbedded, systemd, and D-Bus to enable…

FIRMWARE IS THE KEY

THE RIGHT SUPPORT

“There’s a world of difference between supporting a Linux desktop in a business environment, and maintaining a server in that environment. Some desktop users favour being on the edge, having the latest software and favouring rolling release distros. In contrast, servers benefit from stability, and perhaps you install Long Term Support (LTS) distros, such as the even-year April releases of Ubuntu. I don’t think either extreme is ideal. The rolling releases are hard to support: anything can change at any time, and things do break. Maybe the person using the workstation is capable of sorting out the odd glitch themselves, but even if that’s the case there are better things for them to do with their working day. Only a subset of the distribution’s packages are supported under LTS. For example, with…

THE RIGHT SUPPORT

THE RIGHT SUPPORT

“There’s a world of difference between supporting a Linux desktop in a business environment, and maintaining a server in that environment. Some desktop users favour being on the edge, having the latest software and favouring rolling release distros. In contrast, servers benefit from stability, and perhaps you install Long Term Support (LTS) distros, such as the even-year April releases of Ubuntu. I don’t think either extreme is ideal. The rolling releases are hard to support: anything can change at any time, and things do break. Maybe the person using the workstation is capable of sorting out the odd glitch themselves, but even if that’s the case there are better things for them to do with their working day. Only a subset of the distribution’s packages are supported under LTS. For…

THE RIGHT SUPPORT

Online office suite rivals Google Docs

The project that’s bringing LibreOffice to the web has just received a big update. Collabora Online (www.collaboraoffice.com) is an exciting project that offers a LibreOffice-powered online office suite to rival Google Docs, and it recently received a major update that makes it even more competitive. The three major programs of LibreOffice – the Writer word processor, Calc spreadsheet application and Impress slideshow editor – have all been given new features in line with the project’s road map. These are geared at making the online office suite as functional and easy to use as the standard version. Users of Collabora Online 3.0 can view and edit documents through a web browser, and all data can be stored either on-premise or in the cloud. Michael Meeks, general manager of Collabora Productivity is quoted…

Online office suite rivals Google Docs

Online office suite rivals Google Docs

The project that’s bringing LibreOffice to the web has just received a big update. Collabora Online (www.collaboraoffice.com) is an exciting project that offers a LibreOffice-powered online office suite to rival Google Docs, and it recently received a major update that makes it even more competitive. The three major programs of LibreOffice – the Writer word processor, Calc spreadsheet application and Impress slideshow editor – have all been given new features in line with the project’s road map. These are geared at making the online office suite as functional and easy to use as the standard version. Users of Collabora Online 3.0 can view and edit documents through a web browser, and all data can be stored either on-premise or in the cloud. Michael Meeks, general manager of Collabora Productivity is…

Online office suite rivals Google Docs

KDE Slimbook II

The KDE Slimbook II has been released, and this update to the original Slimbook has improved components and a thinner design than its predecessor. The Slimbook II features seventh-generation CPUs from Intel, with a choice of Core i5 and Core i7 configurations, which means it also supports DDR4 RAM, granting it a performance boost over the previous model. Wi-Fi performance has been improved with a new antenna, and there’s an option with a 1TB SSD. It’s also an ounce lighter and a 10th of an inch thinner than the Slimbook. The KDE neon Ubuntu-based distro is preinstalled, and you can find out more at http://kde.slimbook.es. Prices start at £612.…

KDE Slimbook II

KDE Slimbook II

The KDE Slimbook II has been released, and this update to the original Slimbook has improved components and a thinner design than its predecessor. The Slimbook II features seventh-generation CPUs from Intel, with a choice of Core i5 and Core i7 configurations, which means it also supports DDR4 RAM, granting it a performance boost over the previous model. Wi-Fi performance has been improved with a new antenna, and there’s an option with a 1TB SSD. It’s also an ounce lighter and a 10th of an inch thinner than the Slimbook. The KDE neon Ubuntu-based distro is preinstalled, and you can find out more at http://kde.slimbook.es. Prices start at £612.…

KDE Slimbook II

Keep it secret…

The open source Signal app (https://signal.org ) has become a popular alternative to WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, enabling people to communicate freely without privacy concerns, and it’s now launched the Signal Foundation, a non-profit organisation that will help continue Signal’s work. This has come about thanks in part to the help of WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, who has personally donated $50 million to help create the foundation. In the press release (which can be read at https://signal.org/blog/signal-foundation), the team explains how this will help the Signal project. “We can now increase the size of our team, our capacity, and our ambitions. This means reduced uncertainty on the path to sustainability, and the strengthening of our longterm goals and values. The addition of Brian brings an incredibly talented engineer and visionary…

Keep it secret…

The open source Signal app (https://signal.org ) has become a popular alternative to WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, enabling people to communicate freely without privacy concerns, and it’s now launched the Signal Foundation, a non-profit organisation that will help continue Signal’s work. This has come about thanks in part to the help of WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, who has personally donated $50 million to help create the foundation. In the press release (which can be read at https://signal.org/blog/signal-foundation), the team explains how this will help the Signal project. “We can now increase the size of our team, our capacity, and our ambitions. This means reduced uncertainty on the path to sustainability, and the strengthening of our longterm goals and values. The addition of Brian brings an incredibly talented engineer and visionary with…

FIREFOX 59.0 The popular open source web browser received a brand new engine – Quantum – last year. Yet development work hasn’t slowed down, with the latest release continuing to focus on performance gains as well as adding more features. So, we’re getting improved page load times, improved graphics rendering, new tools for annotating and editing screenshots, and improvements to how Top Sites is arranged on the Home page. For more information on what’s new, head over to www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/59.0/releasenotes. ZORIN OS 12.3 This Ubuntu-based distro aimed at beginners has recently been updated, and it now comes with Wine 3.0, which enables Windows programs to run on the distribution. This is an excellent addition for helping new users make the switch from Microsoft’s OS to Linux, and Wine 3.0 not only makes Windows applications…

FIREFOX 59.0 The popular open source web browser received a brand new engine – Quantum – last year. Yet development work hasn’t slowed down, with the latest release continuing to focus on performance gains as well as adding more features. So, we’re getting improved page load times, improved graphics rendering, new tools for annotating and editing screenshots, and improvements to how Top Sites is arranged on the Home page. For more information on what’s new, head over to www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/59.0/releasenotes. ZORIN OS 12.3 This Ubuntu-based distro aimed at beginners has recently been updated, and it now comes with Wine 3.0, which enables Windows programs to run on the distribution. This is an excellent addition for helping new users make the switch from Microsoft’s OS to Linux, and Wine 3.0 not only…

LINUX GOES ATOMIC

“Linux’s low-level graphics infrastructure has undergone a quiet revolution, since experimental support for ‘atomic mode-setting’ landed a few years ago. Atomic has two key features: better display control enabling you to change display modes; and userspace use of overlay planes in the display controller for composition, bypassing the GPU. A third, less-heralded, feature is that the core standardises user-visible behaviour. Before atomic, drivers could implement whatever behaviour they liked. The rewrite of the core and a comprehensive test suite means we no longer need hardware-specific drivers to take full advantage of its features. Weston’s DRM backend has now been reworked to take advantage of these. Using atomic gives us a smoother user experience: better performance, lower power use, and is still hardware-agnostic. This has made mainline Linux much more attractive:…

LINUX GOES ATOMIC

LINUX GOES ATOMIC

“Linux’s low-level graphics infrastructure has undergone a quiet revolution, since experimental support for ‘atomic mode-setting’ landed a few years ago. Atomic has two key features: better display control enabling you to change display modes; and userspace use of overlay planes in the display controller for composition, bypassing the GPU. A third, less-heralded, feature is that the core standardises user-visible behaviour. Before atomic, drivers could implement whatever behaviour they liked. The rewrite of the core and a comprehensive test suite means we no longer need hardware-specific drivers to take full advantage of its features. Weston’s DRM backend has now been reworked to take advantage of these. Using atomic gives us a smoother user experience: better performance, lower power use, and is still hardware-agnostic. This has made mainline Linux much more attractive: the same generic codebases…

LINUX GOES ATOMIC

Controversial! Can I be first to start the controversy? I’ve loaded Linux Ubuntu 17.10 on to a spare hard drive and don’t like what I see! It’s the Unity desktop that separates Ubuntu from other distros. With Gnome in its place it looks and feels like many other distributions to those of us that just do simple things on computers. In the absence of Unity my next preference would be Mint’s Cinnamon desktop. Please would you run an article on how to replace Gnome with Unity 7 on Ubuntu 17.10 and 18.04 LTS (when released). Without this, Ubuntu and myself will be parting company. John Bourne, via email Jonni says I daresay you won’t be alone in your dislike of Gnome. That’s why LXF231’s main feature revealed all the things…

Controversial! Can I be first to start the controversy? I’ve loaded Linux Ubuntu 17.10 on to a spare hard drive and don’t like what I see! It’s the Unity desktop that separates Ubuntu from other distros. With Gnome in its place it looks and feels like many other distributions to those of us that just do simple things on computers. In the absence of Unity my next preference would be Mint’s Cinnamon desktop. Please would you run an article on how to replace Gnome with Unity 7 on Ubuntu 17.10 and 18.04 LTS (when released). Without this, Ubuntu and myself will be parting company. John Bourne, via email Jonni says I daresay you won’t be alone in your dislike of Gnome. That’s why LXF231’s main feature revealed all the things you can do to make…

LETTER_OF_THE_MONTH

FedoraEDU I’ve been reading about the “Endless” OS, a Linux-based OS that requires no or limited internet access. It’s designed for the educational market and home use. It has offline Wikipedia access, a library of e-textbooks, and all the apps you’ll ever need. I think it should have competition. I propose that there should be a “spin” of Fedora, that requires to be of a longer term than the typical Fedora life cycle. Why not include offline Wikipedia access, and why not offer a library of e-textbooks on computer-related subjects to the English language? FedoraEDU, as I call it, would help schools and universities offer an alternative to Windows or Mac-based OSes. It has the potential to be an incredible tool for poor students striving toward higher academic goals. Markus McLaughlin, via email Neil says A…

LETTER_OF_THE_MONTH

FedoraEDU I’ve been reading about the “Endless” OS, a Linux-based OS that requires no or limited internet access. It’s designed for the educational market and home use. It has offline Wikipedia access, a library of e-textbooks, and all the apps you’ll ever need. I think it should have competition. I propose that there should be a “spin” of Fedora, that requires to be of a longer term than the typical Fedora life cycle. Why not include offline Wikipedia access, and why not offer a library of e-textbooks on computer-related subjects to the English language? FedoraEDU, as I call it, would help schools and universities offer an alternative to Windows or Mac-based OSes. It has the potential to be an incredible tool for poor students striving toward higher academic goals. Markus…

LINUX USER GROUPS

MAIN 300 Guild of Makers launches! With a tagline of “The Maker movement is growing up – the Maker industry is here” you can see that the Guild of Makers is more than just a club. It was created by Dr Lucy Rogers, professional maker, engineer and judge on BBC’s Robot Wars, and fills a void that Lucy herself identified. The identified gap was a membership to a professional organisation that serves the needs of makers from this diverse community. The initial launch of the project took place in late 2017 via a weekly Twitter chat called #makershour and this chat quickly garnered interest from makers, crafters, hackers and tinkerers. The Guild is much more than just a group to support what we traditionally perceive as makers. It aims to aid those who…

LINUX USER GROUPS

LINUX USER GROUPS

MAIN 300 Guild of Makers launches! With a tagline of “The Maker movement is growing up – the Maker industry is here” you can see that the Guild of Makers is more than just a club. It was created by Dr Lucy Rogers, professional maker, engineer and judge on BBC’s Robot Wars, and fills a void that Lucy herself identified. The identified gap was a membership to a professional organisation that serves the needs of makers from this diverse community. The initial launch of the project took place in late 2017 via a weekly Twitter chat called #makershour and this chat quickly garnered interest from makers, crafters, hackers and tinkerers. The Guild is much more than just a group to support what we traditionally perceive as makers. It aims to…

LINUX USER GROUPS

Have I got news for you? Q It’s hard to find a good RSS reader nowadays. Liferea works, but looks a little dated. It seems like every other client has its own quirks and niggles. There are lots of hosted services, many of which are inferior to the once ever-so-popular, now shuttered Google Reader service. Feedly is popular, but if I’m going to use a hosted service I’d rather it’d be one that I hosted myself. I’ve recently upgraded my Nextcloud instance to 13.0 and thought I’d try its News app. It works very well, I can use the Android app to check feeds on my phone, and I can use Feedreader on my desktop. However, I’m seeing this strange error in the News app itself: Non UTF-8 charset for MySQL/MariaDB database detected!…

Have I got news for you? Q It’s hard to find a good RSS reader nowadays. Liferea works, but looks a little dated. It seems like every other client has its own quirks and niggles. There are lots of hosted services, many of which are inferior to the once ever-so-popular, now shuttered Google Reader service. Feedly is popular, but if I’m going to use a hosted service I’d rather it’d be one that I hosted myself. I’ve recently upgraded my Nextcloud instance to 13.0 and thought I’d try its News app. It works very well, I can use the Android app to check feeds on my phone, and I can use Feedreader on my desktop. However, I’m seeing this strange error in the News app itself: Non UTF-8 charset for…

Seagate IronWolf 12TB

Who’s afraid of the big, bad IronWolf in this age of super-sized, super-fast SSDs, Jeremy Laird asks? These days, performance storage is all about solid state. SSDs provide not only by far the fastest performance, they now also offer the largest capacities hitting 30TB – for a price. Yet there’s one metric that remains dominated by old-school magnetic hard drives: storage bang for buck. If you want maximum storage density for the minimum possible price then you’ll need some spinning magnetic platters. With that in mind, it’s no surprise to find that conventional hard drive technology marches on despite its relegation to a mere commodity product. A little over a year ago, the biggest mainstream hard drives weighed in at 10TB. Now we’re reviewing our first 12TB drive, the Seagate IronWolf. Double the…

Seagate IronWolf 12TB

Seagate IronWolf 12TB

Who’s afraid of the big, bad IronWolf in this age of super-sized, super-fast SSDs, Jeremy Laird asks? These days, performance storage is all about solid state. SSDs provide not only by far the fastest performance, they now also offer the largest capacities hitting 30TB – for a price. Yet there’s one metric that remains dominated by old-school magnetic hard drives: storage bang for buck. If you want maximum storage density for the minimum possible price then you’ll need some spinning magnetic platters. With that in mind, it’s no surprise to find that conventional hard drive technology marches on despite its relegation to a mere commodity product. A little over a year ago, the biggest mainstream hard drives weighed in at 10TB. Now we’re reviewing our first 12TB drive, the Seagate…

Seagate IronWolf 12TB

AMD Ryzen 5 2400G

After the tour de force of the Ryzen processor rollout over 2017, many had high hopes for the future Ryzen APUs (that’s with integrated graphics) and finally AMD has released its first models. The eternal problem with integrated graphics is trying to combine a good CPU with a decent GPU while keeping price, power, and other aspects in check. This is the best APU AMD has ever released, and it effectively kills off the Ryzen 5 1500X and lower CPUs. On the CPU side of things, the first batch of Ryzen processors all used the same dual CCX (CPU Complex) design, with Threadripper going so far as to include two of those chips on a single package. The Ryzen CCX consists of four CPU cores, each with 512K of L2 cache,…

AMD Ryzen 5 2400G

AMD Ryzen 5 2400G

After the tour de force of the Ryzen processor rollout over 2017, many had high hopes for the future Ryzen APUs (that’s with integrated graphics) and finally AMD has released its first models. The eternal problem with integrated graphics is trying to combine a good CPU with a decent GPU while keeping price, power, and other aspects in check. This is the best APU AMD has ever released, and it effectively kills off the Ryzen 5 1500X and lower CPUs. On the CPU side of things, the first batch of Ryzen processors all used the same dual CCX (CPU Complex) design, with Threadripper going so far as to include two of those chips on a single package. The Ryzen CCX consists of four CPU cores, each with 512K of L2…

AMD Ryzen 5 2400G

Univention Server 4.3

As with most of its peers, Univention Corporate Server is aimed at SMBs and enterprises. While its does enable users to install the KDE desktop environment, it’s far too specialised to ever appeal to casual or home users. The distribution boasts of a rather uncomplicated installation process. Its choice of Debian as the base makes Univention incredibly safe and secure, and you can easily install additional components such as an anti-virus and a firewall. In addition to a 1.3 GB installable ISO image, the project also provides an online demo. If you wish to skip the installation and get straight to using Univention, the project also provides the choice of pre-installed images for both VMWare and VirtualBox. The installation makes it possible to configure the partitioning scheme and even choose the packages you…

Univention Server 4.3

Univention Server 4.3

As with most of its peers, Univention Corporate Server is aimed at SMBs and enterprises. While its does enable users to install the KDE desktop environment, it’s far too specialised to ever appeal to casual or home users. The distribution boasts of a rather uncomplicated installation process. Its choice of Debian as the base makes Univention incredibly safe and secure, and you can easily install additional components such as an anti-virus and a firewall. In addition to a 1.3 GB installable ISO image, the project also provides an online demo. If you wish to skip the installation and get straight to using Univention, the project also provides the choice of pre-installed images for both VMWare and VirtualBox. The installation makes it possible to configure the partitioning scheme and even choose…

Univention Server 4.3

Endless OS 3.3.11

With its highly customised Gnome desktop, Endless OS is unlike any other popular desktop distribution. Although based on Debian, Endless OS has a significantly different approach to software management and system updates. In fact, the use of apt, or any other package management system, is deprecated as the distribution uses Flatpak to provide applications to users. Surprisingly, unlike all other Linux distributions, Endless OS can’t be dual-boot with another instance of Linux, but can co-exist with Windows. This and other departures from common Linux practices make the distro an easy-to-use alternative for non-technical and new users. Originally available only on Endless’s budget machines, the distribution now ships two variants. If you want easy offline access to Wikipedia, as well as the thousands of tutorials and how-tos hosted on Wikihow, and a lot…

Endless OS 3.3.11

Endless OS 3.3.11

With its highly customised Gnome desktop, Endless OS is unlike any other popular desktop distribution. Although based on Debian, Endless OS has a significantly different approach to software management and system updates. In fact, the use of apt, or any other package management system, is deprecated as the distribution uses Flatpak to provide applications to users. Surprisingly, unlike all other Linux distributions, Endless OS can’t be dual-boot with another instance of Linux, but can co-exist with Windows. This and other departures from common Linux practices make the distro an easy-to-use alternative for non-technical and new users. Originally available only on Endless’s budget machines, the distribution now ships two variants. If you want easy offline access to Wikipedia, as well as the thousands of tutorials and how-tos hosted on Wikihow, and…

Endless OS 3.3.11

August 1867 saw a band of Cheyennes in Nebraska try to thwart the railroads that were porting unwanted change through their homelands. Tying a “big stick” to the tracks, they cheered as it derailed a handcar, prompting them to slaughter all but one of the passengers. There’s none of that in Railway Empire, even though the campaign’s opening chapter also kicks off on the flat, tutorial-friendly expanses of the Great Plains in the 1860s. The map itself is geographically accurate, with the gentle ripples of the plains erupting into the crests of the Rocky Mountains, but much like this history, it’s only the broad strokes of the real thing. This gives direction in both the campaign and the scenario mode – which tasks you with projects like rebuilding the South’s railroad…

NAS distributions

HOW WE TESTED… Unlike desktop distributions that require extensive RAM and graphic cards for optimum performance, a NAS box requires little more than ample storage space. The off-the-shelf solutions sold by manufacturers typically feature a two- or four-disk setup and we’ve got the same for our distributions, with 4GB RAM. The distributions are all fairly simple to install, but it’s the post-install configuration that’s the real test, coupled with the ability to provide additional functionality through addons. Most NAS distributions provide an easy-to-navigate web-based administration interface, but we still want it to be intuitive. Because a NAS system is primarily concerned with data, we’ll keep an eye out for associated capabilities such as data encryption. Since the idea is to share disks across different devices, we want our NAS solution to support multiple…

NAS distributions

August 1867 saw a band of Cheyennes in Nebraska try to thwart the railroads that were porting unwanted change through their homelands. Tying a “big stick” to the tracks, they cheered as it derailed a handcar, prompting them to slaughter all but one of the passengers. There’s none of that in Railway Empire, even though the campaign’s opening chapter also kicks off on the flat, tutorial-friendly expanses of the Great Plains in the 1860s. The map itself is geographically accurate, with the gentle ripples of the plains erupting into the crests of the Rocky Mountains, but much like this history, it’s only the broad strokes of the real thing. This gives direction in both the campaign and the scenario mode – which tasks you with projects like rebuilding the South’s…

Volume management

Files stored in a central location and easily accessible by multiple machines is the primary function of a NAS. Because most of the distributions in our list take over an entire installation disk, it’s best if you start with at least a two-disk NAS setup. While it’s possible to carve your existing disk into different partitions, then installing NAS to one and using the spare partitions for storage, this isn’t recommended. What’s more, some distributions, such as FreeNAS and Rockstor, only work with whole drives and not partitions. When choosing the installation target for your NAS distribution, remember that the NAS distributions provide a web-based administrative interface that can be accessed from any machine on the network, and thus don’t feature a graphical environment of their own. This means that these…

Volume management

A centralised data storage system will be of little use if you can’t access the data from across different devices. All of the distributions support the popular network protocols such as Samba/CIFS, Apple Filing Protocol (AFP), Network File System (NFS) and Secure File Transport Protocol (SFTP). Although little official documentation is offered on the subject, it’s also possible to configure Samba/SSH to enable remote access to your data over the internet. You can also configure WebDAV shares on FreeNAS, enabling authenticated users to browse the contents of the specified volume or directory from the comfort of a web browser. Both FreeNAS and Rockstor support creating shares. The type of share you create will depend on various factors, such as your security requirement and the operating system being used by the machines…

Documentation and support

Unlike desktop distributions where you can find your way around the system through simple trial and error, a NAS setup doesn’t take kindly to such cavalier poking about. Unless you know what you’re doing, you’re very likely to break your NAS setup and render it useless. FreeNAS, one of the most beloved NAS projects, is a behemoth of information. It’s safe to say that when it comes to documentation, FreeNAS is to NAS distributions what Arch and Gentoo are to Linux. Apart from the community forums and IRC channel that you can use to find answers to specific problems, the projects hosts extensive documentation on its website. In addition to a public forum board, the EasyNAS project provides some basic information and quick introduction to important concepts and technologies such as RAID…

Documentation and support

NAS distributions

HOW WE TESTED… Unlike desktop distributions that require extensive RAM and graphic cards for optimum performance, a NAS box requires little more than ample storage space. The off-the-shelf solutions sold by manufacturers typically feature a two- or four-disk setup and we’ve got the same for our distributions, with 4GB RAM. The distributions are all fairly simple to install, but it’s the post-install configuration that’s the real test, coupled with the ability to provide additional functionality through addons. Most NAS distributions provide an easy-to-navigate web-based administration interface, but we still want it to be intuitive. Because a NAS system is primarily concerned with data, we’ll keep an eye out for associated capabilities such as data encryption. Since the idea is to share disks across different devices, we want our NAS solution…

NAS distributions

Volume management

Files stored in a central location and easily accessible by multiple machines is the primary function of a NAS. Because most of the distributions in our list take over an entire installation disk, it’s best if you start with at least a two-disk NAS setup. While it’s possible to carve your existing disk into different partitions, then installing NAS to one and using the spare partitions for storage, this isn’t recommended. What’s more, some distributions, such as FreeNAS and Rockstor, only work with whole drives and not partitions. When choosing the installation target for your NAS distribution, remember that the NAS distributions provide a web-based administrative interface that can be accessed from any machine on the network, and thus don’t feature a graphical environment of their own. This means that…

Volume management

Deploying and management

While NAS is traditionally used for creating a central storage repository, our chosen NAS distributions can be tweaked to take on much greater responsibility. You can turn them into a media streaming system for instance, or add an anti-virus to test the integrity of the stored data. Because these distributions don’t feature a graphical desktop environment, your only choices are to either configure everything by hand from the shell, or use the web-based administrative interface. As important as all the other features are, we also don’t want a distribution that’s impossible to work with because of its unintuitive interface. We also don’t want the interface to be so simplistic that it doesn’t make it possible for you to adjust any settings. EasyNAS 4/10 Once installed, you’re dropped into a shell from where you…

Deploying and management

Security features

The upside to a central repository of files is that you can access all your data from virtually any device or machine on the network. The natural downside is that your data is at risk. Security is a key feature for any NAS setup. Apart from using encryption where possible, you must configure robust firewall rules and access control lists to ensure your data isn’t accessible by all and sundry. You must also adopt the strictest security practices such as using HTTPS and using secure data transfer protocols to keep your data safe during transit. It’s good advice to also brush up on SSH best practices if you plan on using that protocol for accessing your data. FreeNAS and NAS4Free are based on FreeBSD. While FreeNAS doesn’t provide many security features…

Security features

A centralised data storage system will be of little use if you can’t access the data from across different devices. All of the distributions support the popular network protocols such as Samba/CIFS, Apple Filing Protocol (AFP), Network File System (NFS) and Secure File Transport Protocol (SFTP). Although little official documentation is offered on the subject, it’s also possible to configure Samba/SSH to enable remote access to your data over the internet. You can also configure WebDAV shares on FreeNAS, enabling authenticated users to browse the contents of the specified volume or directory from the comfort of a web browser. Both FreeNAS and Rockstor support creating shares. The type of share you create will depend on various factors, such as your security requirement and the operating system being used by the…

Dissatisfied with the default features on offer with the distributions on our list? Then worry no more. With the exception of EasyNAS, all the NAS distributions offer extensive choice of plugins. Best of all, you can use the web interface to easily install these plugins, but beware. Unlike other software installers on desktop distributions, the web interface won’t inform you of the pertinent details such as the total download size for any plugin. So, if you decide to turn your NAS installation into a media streaming server, don’t be surprised if the installation of Emby server takes a long time. FreeNAS supports a number of third-party plugins, such as Transmission for bittorrent, btsync to sync with a wide variety of devices without exposing your data to others, and OwnCloud to host…

Deploying and management

While NAS is traditionally used for creating a central storage repository, our chosen NAS distributions can be tweaked to take on much greater responsibility. You can turn them into a media streaming system for instance, or add an anti-virus to test the integrity of the stored data. Because these distributions don’t feature a graphical desktop environment, your only choices are to either configure everything by hand from the shell, or use the web-based administrative interface. As important as all the other features are, we also don’t want a distribution that’s impossible to work with because of its unintuitive interface. We also don’t want the interface to be so simplistic that it doesn’t make it possible for you to adjust any settings. EasyNAS 4/10 Once installed, you’re dropped into a shell…

Deploying and management

Useful features

Hosting your own NAS requires more than mere installation of the underlying distribution and tweaking a few settings. You also have to consider other factors such as the update policy for the distribution. This is especially important because NAS distributions don’t feature a graphical desktop environment. With EasyNAS, you can easily schedule automated backups of added volumes. Unfortunately, it lacks some of the more advanced features and can’t hook up with a directory server, for instance. And while the distribution supports many different protocols and services, you’re unable to configure any of them. However, users are able to run a simple web server, making it possible to look at and download files from a web browser. The oldest and most beloved of the NAS distributions, FreeNAS can be easily extended with plugins.…

Useful features

Documentation and support

Unlike desktop distributions where you can find your way around the system through simple trial and error, a NAS setup doesn’t take kindly to such cavalier poking about. Unless you know what you’re doing, you’re very likely to break your NAS setup and render it useless. FreeNAS, one of the most beloved NAS projects, is a behemoth of information. It’s safe to say that when it comes to documentation, FreeNAS is to NAS distributions what Arch and Gentoo are to Linux. Apart from the community forums and IRC channel that you can use to find answers to specific problems, the projects hosts extensive documentation on its website. In addition to a public forum board, the EasyNAS project provides some basic information and quick introduction to important concepts and technologies such…

Documentation and support

NAS Distributions The Verdict

The common consensus among users is that it may take up to a week – certainly several days – for you to properly tweak the NAS configuration, depending on your requirements. Our chosen distributions offer all the features and flexibility of a commercial NAS, but without the additional cost of proprietary software. EasyNAS, despite its easy-to-use interface leaves a lot to be desired. When you click NFS in the sidebar, you can enable/ disable the service in the main panel and create new NFS shares. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to edit any NFS settings, despite there being a Settings tab. Clicking it reveals an empty box and there’s no way to open a settings file, or write one of your own. The search bar is also unreliable and doesn’t reveal results…

NAS Distributions The Verdict

Security features

The upside to a central repository of files is that you can access all your data from virtually any device or machine on the network. The natural downside is that your data is at risk. Security is a key feature for any NAS setup. Apart from using encryption where possible, you must configure robust firewall rules and access control lists to ensure your data isn’t accessible by all and sundry. You must also adopt the strictest security practices such as using HTTPS and using secure data transfer protocols to keep your data safe during transit. It’s good advice to also brush up on SSH best practices if you plan on using that protocol for accessing your data. FreeNAS and NAS4Free are based on FreeBSD. While FreeNAS doesn’t provide many security…

Security features

We’ve covered the top NAS solutions in this Roundup. There’s a long list of dormant NAS solutions that we can’t recommend because they haven’t been updated in quite a while. Besides the open source solutions, there are some commercial ones as well. Most charge for their enterprise-specific features, while some charge for support and other conveniences. There’s the unRAID Server, which is available as a USB image. You can try it for free for 30 days after which you’ll have to purchase a license that start with $59 (about £43) and allow attaching up to six storage devices. Open-E DSS V7, which is replete with Enterprise-specific features, also offers a 60-day free trial. Then there’s Server Elements that has three NAS products that run entirely from RAM. NASLite-2 is a general-purpose…

Dissatisfied with the default features on offer with the distributions on our list? Then worry no more. With the exception of EasyNAS, all the NAS distributions offer extensive choice of plugins. Best of all, you can use the web interface to easily install these plugins, but beware. Unlike other software installers on desktop distributions, the web interface won’t inform you of the pertinent details such as the total download size for any plugin. So, if you decide to turn your NAS installation into a media streaming server, don’t be surprised if the installation of Emby server takes a long time. FreeNAS supports a number of third-party plugins, such as Transmission for bittorrent, btsync to sync with a wide variety of devices without exposing your data to others, and OwnCloud to…

Useful features

Hosting your own NAS requires more than mere installation of the underlying distribution and tweaking a few settings. You also have to consider other factors such as the update policy for the distribution. This is especially important because NAS distributions don’t feature a graphical desktop environment. With EasyNAS, you can easily schedule automated backups of added volumes. Unfortunately, it lacks some of the more advanced features and can’t hook up with a directory server, for instance. And while the distribution supports many different protocols and services, you’re unable to configure any of them. However, users are able to run a simple web server, making it possible to look at and download files from a web browser. The oldest and most beloved of the NAS distributions, FreeNAS can be easily extended…

Useful features

RASPBERRY Pi ROBOTS!

Robotics needn’t be about building intimidating humanoid automatons. We can build machines that can perform all kinds of other useful, instructive or fun functions. Even better, you can power them with Linux. You won’t need costly electronics to build these devices. A Raspberry Pi will do just fine. It doesn’t need to be any more advanced than constructing a LEGO set, either. There are plenty of off-the-shelf kits suitable for any budding electronics enthusiast. We’ll reveal how to put together your own roving robot, and show you a couple of neat Python programs to get you started. And if you’re feeling more adventurous, then why not build your own robotic helpers from scratch? All the components are easy to get hold of, thanks to the growing maker community. If you want to take…

RASPBERRY Pi ROBOTS!

A Pi bot’s potential

KEEPING YOUR ROBOT OCCUPIED “A Pi-powered robot might take pictures, zoom around your house quoting Shakespeare or even take to the skies” The Raspberry Pi was launched six years ago, and since then has grown into something amazing. We’ve seen four different major versions (Zero, 1, 2 and 3), and a couple of minor versions, most recently the powerful 3 B+ which launched in March 2018. Pi retailer ModMyPi.com was there at the beginning, and was good enough to lend us some treats for this feature. Founder Jacob Marsh offers his take on the Pi’s remarkable success. “I didn’t realise that the Raspberry Pi would grow to what it is now, I don’t think even the Pi Foundation did. ModMyPi was conceived in a university bedroom. Now we have a global e-shop with…

A Pi bot’s potential

NAS Distributions The Verdict

The common consensus among users is that it may take up to a week – certainly several days – for you to properly tweak the NAS configuration, depending on your requirements. Our chosen distributions offer all the features and flexibility of a commercial NAS, but without the additional cost of proprietary software. EasyNAS, despite its easy-to-use interface leaves a lot to be desired. When you click NFS in the sidebar, you can enable/ disable the service in the main panel and create new NFS shares. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to edit any NFS settings, despite there being a Settings tab. Clicking it reveals an empty box and there’s no way to open a settings file, or write one of your own. The search bar is also unreliable and doesn’t reveal…

NAS Distributions The Verdict

We’ve covered the top NAS solutions in this Roundup. There’s a long list of dormant NAS solutions that we can’t recommend because they haven’t been updated in quite a while. Besides the open source solutions, there are some commercial ones as well. Most charge for their enterprise-specific features, while some charge for support and other conveniences. There’s the unRAID Server, which is available as a USB image. You can try it for free for 30 days after which you’ll have to purchase a license that start with $59 (about £43) and allow attaching up to six storage devices. Open-E DSS V7, which is replete with Enterprise-specific features, also offers a 60-day free trial. Then there’s Server Elements that has three NAS products that run entirely from RAM. NASLite-2 is a…

ROBOT PLATFORMS

We’ll concentrate on bread-and-butter software, namely Raspbian and Python, but there are a number of interesting platforms than can be run on top of, alongside or instead of these. One such platform is Robot OS (ROS, see www.ros.org) which isn’t really an operating system at all, but more of a middleware. ROS is a BSD-licensed project with thousands of contributors worldwide. It can be built from source for Raspbian, but since it provides packages for the Pi edition of Ubuntu MATE, that’s the preferred base. ROS aims to be truly general-purpose robot software that works on many platforms and encourages collaboration. We’re also impressed with the work of Dexter Industries (www.dexterindustries.com), which makes the GoPiGo robot car. The GoPiGo is a kit designed for the classroom, and is programmed using Bloxter, a…

RASPBERRY Pi ROBOTS!

Robotics needn’t be about building intimidating humanoid automatons. We can build machines that can perform all kinds of other useful, instructive or fun functions. Even better, you can power them with Linux. You won’t need costly electronics to build these devices. A Raspberry Pi will do just fine. It doesn’t need to be any more advanced than constructing a LEGO set, either. There are plenty of off-the-shelf kits suitable for any budding electronics enthusiast. We’ll reveal how to put together your own roving robot, and show you a couple of neat Python programs to get you started. And if you’re feeling more adventurous, then why not build your own robotic helpers from scratch? All the components are easy to get hold of, thanks to the growing maker community. If you…

RASPBERRY Pi ROBOTS!

Building the DiddyBorg

The good people at ModMyPi were kind enough to send us a DiddyBorg v2 to play with. We’re eternally grateful for this and we thoroughly recommend you check out their store next time you need anything Pi-related. The Borg series was designed by PiBorg, brainchild of Timothy Freeburn, who explains “The DiddyBorg is a six-wheel drive robot and is a homage to the Sojourner Mars Rover”. PiBorg teamed up with ModMyPi back in October 2017. Jacob explains this collaboration: “Tim and I were both around during the genesis of the original Raspberry Pi B. Where I was off making cases, Tim was designing motor-controllers and LED thingies (www.piborg.org/ledborg/), so when ModMyPi developed into wider reselling, Tim’s products were some of the first that we picked up. “As the market has progressed over…

Building the DiddyBorg

A Pi bot’s potential

KEEPING YOUR ROBOT OCCUPIED “A Pi-powered robot might take pictures, zoom around your house quoting Shakespeare or even take to the skies” The Raspberry Pi was launched six years ago, and since then has grown into something amazing. We’ve seen four different major versions (Zero, 1, 2 and 3), and a couple of minor versions, most recently the powerful 3 B+ which launched in March 2018. Pi retailer ModMyPi.com was there at the beginning, and was good enough to lend us some treats for this feature. Founder Jacob Marsh offers his take on the Pi’s remarkable success. “I didn’t realise that the Raspberry Pi would grow to what it is now, I don’t think even the Pi Foundation did. ModMyPi was conceived in a university bedroom. Now we have a…

A Pi bot’s potential

BUILDING A Pi ROBOT

1 Organise your workspace We know how tempting it is to just dive right in and spill the contents of all the bags over your already messy desk. Don’t do this. Instead, clear a nice workspace, read the instructions carefully and place all the tools you’ll need to one side. If you have to solder anything then make sure this happens in a well-ventilated area, and have some desoldering wick to hand. 2 Fix the mounts The motors will usually attach to the underside of the chassis by way of some angled brackets. Find the right holes and attach these brackets with the appropriate nuts and bolts. The DiddyBorg uses metal posts to secure the brackets. Don’t forget to add washers if your chassis needs them. These help to distribute force and will…

BUILDING A Pi ROBOT

THE BORG SERIES

Resistance is futile. PiBorg’s Borg series consists of three robots: the DiddyBorg (£210), the MonsterBorg (£210) and the YetiBorg (£160). The DiddyBorg’s distinctive flat top makes it possible for all kinds of things to be mounted atop it. A terrifying robot claw, for example. It can be reconfigured with the Multifunction Top to fit an additional Pi, or with the Touch Top to fit the official Raspberry Pi touchscreen. It can also be kitted out with front and rear Pi Cameras, as well as ultrasonic sensors for obstacle avoidance. Then there’s the MonsterBorg, a machine not to be trifled with. Its chunky four-inch wheels enable it to chew up off-road terrain. As you may have read in the News section, PiBorg organises the Formula Pi racing event, and racing is what…

THE BORG SERIES

ROBOT PLATFORMS

We’ll concentrate on bread-and-butter software, namely Raspbian and Python, but there are a number of interesting platforms than can be run on top of, alongside or instead of these. One such platform is Robot OS (ROS, see www.ros.org) which isn’t really an operating system at all, but more of a middleware. ROS is a BSD-licensed project with thousands of contributors worldwide. It can be built from source for Raspbian, but since it provides packages for the Pi edition of Ubuntu MATE, that’s the preferred base. ROS aims to be truly general-purpose robot software that works on many platforms and encourages collaboration. We’re also impressed with the work of Dexter Industries (www.dexterindustries.com), which makes the GoPiGo robot car. The GoPiGo is a kit designed for the classroom, and is programmed using…

Building the DiddyBorg

The good people at ModMyPi were kind enough to send us a DiddyBorg v2 to play with. We’re eternally grateful for this and we thoroughly recommend you check out their store next time you need anything Pi-related. The Borg series was designed by PiBorg, brainchild of Timothy Freeburn, who explains “The DiddyBorg is a six-wheel drive robot and is a homage to the Sojourner Mars Rover”. PiBorg teamed up with ModMyPi back in October 2017. Jacob explains this collaboration: “Tim and I were both around during the genesis of the original Raspberry Pi B. Where I was off making cases, Tim was designing motor-controllers and LED thingies (www.piborg.org/ledborg/), so when ModMyPi developed into wider reselling, Tim’s products were some of the first that we picked up. “As the market has…

Building the DiddyBorg

Keep your robot busy

Having constructed our Diddy, we wanted to know more about what it could do. Not content with making glorious hardware, PiBorg also provides some great code examples to get you started. These will need some tweaking to work on other hardware, but should give you some idea of how to talk to the hardware in Python. Robot kits will provide scripts to deal with all the low-level communication. In our case this is all done through the ThunderBorg.py file (see www.piborg.org/blog/build/thunderborg-build/thunderborg-examples).This handles all the raw I2C coding, so you don’t need to worry about that, and provides much more human-friendly functions such as SetMotor1() , which sets the speed of the left hand wheels. Web control Assuming your Pi is connected to a wireless network, then one slightly roundabout way to control it…

Keep your robot busy

BUILDING A Pi ROBOT

1 Organise your workspace We know how tempting it is to just dive right in and spill the contents of all the bags over your already messy desk. Don’t do this. Instead, clear a nice workspace, read the instructions carefully and place all the tools you’ll need to one side. If you have to solder anything then make sure this happens in a well-ventilated area, and have some desoldering wick to hand. 2 Fix the mounts The motors will usually attach to the underside of the chassis by way of some angled brackets. Find the right holes and attach these brackets with the appropriate nuts and bolts. The DiddyBorg uses metal posts to secure the brackets. Don’t forget to add washers if your chassis needs them. These help to distribute…

BUILDING A Pi ROBOT

Kit out your robot

GIVE YOUR ROBOT SIGHT “If camera flexibility is required then a variety of pan-tilt kits are available for pitching, rolling and yawing to the ideal angle” A simple Pi robot needs little more than a chassis, power source and wheels. But things are more fun when you kit the base construction out with some additional peripherals. We can use well-known Pi peripherals, such as the camera and the touchscreen, in new and innovative ways, or we can use other items – sensors, speakers, servos and more – to really ramp up the excitement levels. Grab yourself a controller Controlling a robot via a web interface is all well and good, but even on a fast network you’ll experience some degree of latency, which will make driving a little haphazard. A wired controller will work…

Kit out your robot

Keep your robot busy

Having constructed our Diddy, we wanted to know more about what it could do. Not content with making glorious hardware, PiBorg also provides some great code examples to get you started. These will need some tweaking to work on other hardware, but should give you some idea of how to talk to the hardware in Python. Robot kits will provide scripts to deal with all the low-level communication. In our case this is all done through the ThunderBorg.py file (see www.piborg.org/blog/build/thunderborg-build/thunderborg-examples).This handles all the raw I2C coding, so you don’t need to worry about that, and provides much more human-friendly functions such as SetMotor1() , which sets the speed of the left hand wheels. Web control Assuming your Pi is connected to a wireless network, then one slightly roundabout way…

Keep your robot busy

Watch the skies

So far we’ve managed to keep our feet/wheels/ caterpillar tracks on the ground, but we think we should finish our robotic journey with a brief foray into the world of drones. Keeping a drone in the air is a complicated business. Each motor has to be able to respond as close to instantly to changes in orientation. These are detected by a three-axis accelerometer. Other instrumentation is required, too: gyroscopes, servos, and of course motors to keep the propellers turning and generate lift. A vanilla Linux Kernel isn’t built to respond within such operational deadlines as this, so it’s common for drones to run a real-time OS (RTOS) such as NuttX, or indeed a proprietary OS. The Linux kernel can be tweaked to get closer to such response times though. The…

Watch the skies

THE BORG SERIES

Resistance is futile. PiBorg’s Borg series consists of three robots: the DiddyBorg (£210), the MonsterBorg (£210) and the YetiBorg (£160). The DiddyBorg’s distinctive flat top makes it possible for all kinds of things to be mounted atop it. A terrifying robot claw, for example. It can be reconfigured with the Multifunction Top to fit an additional Pi, or with the Touch Top to fit the official Raspberry Pi touchscreen. It can also be kitted out with front and rear Pi Cameras, as well as ultrasonic sensors for obstacle avoidance. Then there’s the MonsterBorg, a machine not to be trifled with. Its chunky four-inch wheels enable it to chew up off-road terrain. As you may have read in the News section, PiBorg organises the Formula Pi racing event, and racing is…

THE BORG SERIES

AERIAL FLORA PHOTOGRAPHY

The Pi NoIR camera has no infrared filter, which enables it to ‘see’ in the dark, making it useful for CCTV applications. The retail package also includes a slightly quizzical blue gel square. When that blue square (Roscolux #2007 Storaro Blue to give it its full designation) is placed in front of the lens, red and green light are filtered out, and the sensor shifts infrared light to the red spectrum, enabling hyperspectral images of plants to be captured. The actual photo taken is an NGB (Near infrared Green Blue) image, which doesn’t reveal very much. But with a bit of post-processing magic, a composite NDVI (near difference vegetative index) image can be generated, which shows how well the plant is photosynthesising, or more crudely, how healthy it is. This technique…

AERIAL FLORA PHOTOGRAPHY

Kit out your robot

GIVE YOUR ROBOT SIGHT “If camera flexibility is required then a variety of pan-tilt kits are available for pitching, rolling and yawing to the ideal angle” A simple Pi robot needs little more than a chassis, power source and wheels. But things are more fun when you kit the base construction out with some additional peripherals. We can use well-known Pi peripherals, such as the camera and the touchscreen, in new and innovative ways, or we can use other items – sensors, speakers, servos and more – to really ramp up the excitement levels. Grab yourself a controller Controlling a robot via a web interface is all well and good, but even on a fast network you’ll experience some degree of latency, which will make driving a little haphazard. A…

Kit out your robot

BECOMING ACCOUNTABLE

ON WHY BUDGIT BECAME A SUCCESS “Everyone wanted us to scale really fast and to move into different places, because there’s such a big need for this kind of accountability project everywhere” When Bill Gates was invited to South Africa to deliver the 14th Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture at the University of Pretoria in 2016, he spoke long and eloquently about the potential of technology to address pan-continental challenges around energy, job creation, financial inclusion, agriculture and health. He spoke, naturally, about the work funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) across Africa, and some of the projects he’s seen in his travels. He also name-checked a handful individuals: Mandela and his widow, Graça Machel, his hosts from the university, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. And one social entrepreneur who has…

BECOMING ACCOUNTABLE

Watch the skies

So far we’ve managed to keep our feet/wheels/ caterpillar tracks on the ground, but we think we should finish our robotic journey with a brief foray into the world of drones. Keeping a drone in the air is a complicated business. Each motor has to be able to respond as close to instantly to changes in orientation. These are detected by a three-axis accelerometer. Other instrumentation is required, too: gyroscopes, servos, and of course motors to keep the propellers turning and generate lift. A vanilla Linux Kernel isn’t built to respond within such operational deadlines as this, so it’s common for drones to run a real-time OS (RTOS) such as NuttX, or indeed a proprietary OS. The Linux kernel can be tweaked to get closer to such response times though.…

Watch the skies

AERIAL FLORA PHOTOGRAPHY

The Pi NoIR camera has no infrared filter, which enables it to ‘see’ in the dark, making it useful for CCTV applications. The retail package also includes a slightly quizzical blue gel square. When that blue square (Roscolux #2007 Storaro Blue to give it its full designation) is placed in front of the lens, red and green light are filtered out, and the sensor shifts infrared light to the red spectrum, enabling hyperspectral images of plants to be captured. The actual photo taken is an NGB (Near infrared Green Blue) image, which doesn’t reveal very much. But with a bit of post-processing magic, a composite NDVI (near difference vegetative index) image can be generated, which shows how well the plant is photosynthesising, or more crudely, how healthy it is. This…

AERIAL FLORA PHOTOGRAPHY

The Nigerian tech scene is centred on Lagos, a vast and chaotic place that – with 12 million inhabitants in the greater metro area – is the largest city in the country. More specifically, the epicentre of startup activity is in the Yaba district, which is also home to Co-creation Hub. Interest in the region has skyrocketed. Last year it was visited by 500Startups and Y Combinator, and the organisation VC4Africa believes that Nigerian entrepreneurs attracted more overseas investment than anyone else on the continent. Part of that is thanks to the software firm Andela, which received a massive $24 million investment from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in 2016, and a further $40 million in a Series C round of funding last year. Andela both trains developers locally, and provides outsourcing services…

OPEN-SOURCE AFRICA

Spend much time around tech companies and initiatives in Africa and it’s hard not to be infected by the constant upbeat enthusiasm for the potential of tech on the continent. Whether the challenge is government accountability, the rule of law, business practices or education, the vision expressed by activists, corporate workers and politicians alike is that digital technologies will leapfrog centuries of under investment in infrastructure, just like mobile phones did for the communications network. Some of this is typical Silicon Valley techno-evangelism, and cynics can rightly point out that many of the solutions being offered to help solve social issues across the continent are also handy ways for US-based megacorporations to find new customers and profit streams. It’s a stance summed up in the title of Noam Cohen’s new book,…

MACHINE LEARNING

Most people will have heard of machine learning (ML). If you’ve been anywhere near the internet in that time you’ll almost certainly have been fed data that was combobulated using machine-learning algorithms, and your usage will have fed into training models to advance other such algorithms. In 1958, when the Mark 1 Perceptron (an early neural network for image recognition) was built, pundits declared it “the embryo of an electronic computer that [the Navy] expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence.” The field has advanced a long way since then, and though we haven’t yet seen conscious machines (or a Skynet-esque robot uprising), there have been some amazing results. ML has contributed to drug discovery, finding exoplanets and better Netflix recommendations…

MACHINE LEARNING

BECOMING ACCOUNTABLE

ON WHY BUDGIT BECAME A SUCCESS “Everyone wanted us to scale really fast and to move into different places, because there’s such a big need for this kind of accountability project everywhere” When Bill Gates was invited to South Africa to deliver the 14th Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture at the University of Pretoria in 2016, he spoke long and eloquently about the potential of technology to address pan-continental challenges around energy, job creation, financial inclusion, agriculture and health. He spoke, naturally, about the work funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) across Africa, and some of the projects he’s seen in his travels. He also name-checked a handful individuals: Mandela and his widow, Graça Machel, his hosts from the university, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. And one social…

BECOMING ACCOUNTABLE

MACHINES-LEARNING GAMES

Computers have been winning against meatbag chess players ever since Deep Blue beat Kasparov in the 90s. But at the end of 2017 we saw headlines about Google’s deep learning engine AlphaZero ‘teaching itself to play chess’ in four hours, and then beating Stockfish, the world’s best chess engine (see www.chess.com/news/view/google-s-alphazero-destroys-stockfish-in-100-game-match). This training took place on some of the most advanced hardware in the world, and probably equates to many years on commodity hardware. So we shouldn’t read too much into that four hours. What’s interesting is the style of play demonstrated by AlphaZero. In the ten games made public (https://deepmind.com/research/alphago/alphazero-resources) it seemed to show no concern for sacrificing material, if there was a possibility of a trade-off, and in some cases played moves that appeared to make no sense. This…

MACHINES-LEARNING GAMES

The Nigerian tech scene is centred on Lagos, a vast and chaotic place that – with 12 million inhabitants in the greater metro area – is the largest city in the country. More specifically, the epicentre of startup activity is in the Yaba district, which is also home to Co-creation Hub. Interest in the region has skyrocketed. Last year it was visited by 500Startups and Y Combinator, and the organisation VC4Africa believes that Nigerian entrepreneurs attracted more overseas investment than anyone else on the continent. Part of that is thanks to the software firm Andela, which received a massive $24 million investment from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in 2016, and a further $40 million in a Series C round of funding last year. Andela both trains developers locally, and provides…

The key to machine learning is lots of data. Getting hold of big data and being able to process it used to be a challenge, but today’s commonplace fat connections and gargantuan hard drives make this much easier. Besides the MNIST numerals there are a number of other useful datasets that are available for free. The 14GB wikipedia text makes a fine corpus for natural language-processing projects. The DBpedia project goes even further, providing a Java-powered framework for extracting more structured information from Wikipedia and related projects. They provide a pre-extracted knowledge base comprising 4.58 million things, most of which are classified using a carefully crafted and consistent ontology. This makes it easy to process relationships between things, or to restrict to a particular category of interest, be it people, places…

OPEN-SOURCE AFRICA

Spend much time around tech companies and initiatives in Africa and it’s hard not to be infected by the constant upbeat enthusiasm for the potential of tech on the continent. Whether the challenge is government accountability, the rule of law, business practices or education, the vision expressed by activists, corporate workers and politicians alike is that digital technologies will leapfrog centuries of under investment in infrastructure, just like mobile phones did for the communications network. Some of this is typical Silicon Valley techno-evangelism, and cynics can rightly point out that many of the solutions being offered to help solve social issues across the continent are also handy ways for US-based megacorporations to find new customers and profit streams. It’s a stance summed up in the title of Noam Cohen’s new…

Formula Pi shifts into the fast lane Prepare to start your Pi-engines, as the 2018 season opens with exciting classes and new race rules. It’s your last chance to take part in the Formula Pi 2018 season! Racing is due to blast off in June, and sign-ups for entry close on 30 April. Formula Pi started life as a Kickstarter project back in July 2016 and it smashed its funding target by 300 per cent. A successful winter 2016 season was followed by a summer 2017 and winter 2017 series, and now 2018’s season is being lined up. The original Grand Pi class has been superseded by the Monster class, a new high-speed limited-entry Raptor class is due to start testing. Find out more and get involved at www.formulapi.com. Pipecam Take underwater snaps. Diver Fred Fourie…

MACHINE LEARNING

Most people will have heard of machine learning (ML). If you’ve been anywhere near the internet in that time you’ll almost certainly have been fed data that was combobulated using machine-learning algorithms, and your usage will have fed into training models to advance other such algorithms. In 1958, when the Mark 1 Perceptron (an early neural network for image recognition) was built, pundits declared it “the embryo of an electronic computer that [the Navy] expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence.” The field has advanced a long way since then, and though we haven’t yet seen conscious machines (or a Skynet-esque robot uprising), there have been some amazing results. ML has contributed to drug discovery, finding exoplanets and better Netflix…

MACHINE LEARNING

HAPPY BERRYDAY!

As I write this I’m sat at the start of a weekend of celebrations for the Raspberry Pi’s sixth birthday. This weekend Preston Raspberry Jam along with many others around the world will be celebrating the success that started back in 2012. The Raspberry Pi may be from Cambridge, but the Jam community started in England’s north west – some say Preston, some Manchester, but they both started from humble roots. At the start there were very few Raspberry Pis and not much information was out there to help users. The Jams gave enthusiasts the time and access to the kit, enough for them to develop projects, blogs and documents that have gone on to become de facto standards. I was present at both of the first Jams. Preston was led by…

HAPPY BERRYDAY!

MACHINES-LEARNING GAMES

Computers have been winning against meatbag chess players ever since Deep Blue beat Kasparov in the 90s. But at the end of 2017 we saw headlines about Google’s deep learning engine AlphaZero ‘teaching itself to play chess’ in four hours, and then beating Stockfish, the world’s best chess engine (see www.chess.com/news/view/google-s-alphazero-destroys-stockfish-in-100-game-match). This training took place on some of the most advanced hardware in the world, and probably equates to many years on commodity hardware. So we shouldn’t read too much into that four hours. What’s interesting is the style of play demonstrated by AlphaZero. In the ten games made public (https://deepmind.com/research/alphago/alphazero-resources) it seemed to show no concern for sacrificing material, if there was a possibility of a trade-off, and in some cases played moves that appeared to make no sense.…

MACHINES-LEARNING GAMES

FAMILY RESEMBLANCE

When the Raspberry Pi first appeared on the scene in 2012, it came with a unique form factor that had one complaint: poor placement of screw holes. In fact the first version of the board had no screw holes. But why are screw holes important? Well, add-on boards for the Raspberry Pi came in all sorts of shapes and sizes and this caused a few issues for users. For example, the Pibrella board was designed for a 26-pin GPIO and it had a rubber foot to stop it shorting out on the HDMI port when pressed. What was needed was a standard connection, so with the Raspberry Pi B+ in 2014 we saw a 40-pin GPIO and screw holes added to the corners of the board. This offered a consistent mechanical…

Raspberry Pi 3 B+

Another Raspberry Pi! Will this be the fabled Raspberry Pi 4 offering USB3.0, SATA, GTX 1080 GPU, Octa Core CPU and 16GB of RAM? So let’s first address the obvious questions. No, this isn’t the Raspberry Pi 4 and no, it has none of those features. Rather, the Raspberry Pi 3+ is an incremental improvement of the Pi 3 B that gives us a little more power, and much better connectivity. This is not the first B+ board – that was the original B+ released in 2014 and saw the first board design morph into what has become the de facto standard board layout, often emulated, but so far unbeaten by its competitors. Incremental update Let’s start with System on a Chip (SOC), which is a BCM2837B0 containing the CPU. Just like the…

Raspberry Pi 3 B+

The key to machine learning is lots of data. Getting hold of big data and being able to process it used to be a challenge, but today’s commonplace fat connections and gargantuan hard drives make this much easier. Besides the MNIST numerals there are a number of other useful datasets that are available for free. The 14GB wikipedia text makes a fine corpus for natural language-processing projects. The DBpedia project goes even further, providing a Java-powered framework for extracting more structured information from Wikipedia and related projects. They provide a pre-extracted knowledge base comprising 4.58 million things, most of which are classified using a carefully crafted and consistent ontology. This makes it easy to process relationships between things, or to restrict to a particular category of interest, be it people,…

Set up a compact file server and ad blocker

OUR EXPERT Les Pounder is a freelance maker who works with organisations such as the Raspberry Pi Foundation to promote maker skills. He blogs at www.bigl.es. YOU NEED A Raspberry Pi 3 or 3 B+ An Internet connection A USB flash drive or USB hard drive Keyboard, Mouse and Screen for your Pi A 2.5A official power supply Another computer running Linux or Windows To celebrate the release of the new Raspberry Pi 3 B+ we’ll use it to create our own Samba server to store files and media for access across our home network. We’ll then use the same Pi to block ads and create a better browsing experience. Samba file server Let’s make sure that we have the latest version of Raspbian. Download this from the Raspberry Pi website and then using your favourite tool flash the image to a…

Set up a compact file server and ad blocker

Formula Pi shifts into the fast lane Prepare to start your Pi-engines, as the 2018 season opens with exciting classes and new race rules. It’s your last chance to take part in the Formula Pi 2018 season! Racing is due to blast off in June, and sign-ups for entry close on 30 April. Formula Pi started life as a Kickstarter project back in July 2016 and it smashed its funding target by 300 per cent. A successful winter 2016 season was followed by a summer 2017 and winter 2017 series, and now 2018’s season is being lined up. The original Grand Pi class has been superseded by the Monster class, a new high-speed limited-entry Raptor class is due to start testing. Find out more and get involved at www.formulapi.com. Pipecam…

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