Hasta La Gadget!

Although we’ve seen a deluge of tinker-friendly boards, many of them share a dirty secret: they’re borrowing someone else’s OS. The creator of the new CoAction Hero board, Tyler Gilbert, doesn’t think that’s good enough for those who want both control and ease of use. His stackable ARM Cortex-M3 design runs its own real-time platform, CoActionOS, that supports Raspberry Pi-style features like file systems and multitasking while abstracting the hardware enough to remove some of the usual headaches. Coding for the CoAction Hero is much like writing a desktop app, and a Qt-based developer kit helps owners write their own interface without knowing the circuitry inside-out. The board is being crowdfunded and won’t ship until July if all goes according to plan, but a relatively low $10,000 target and $29 minimum pledge for a device should get the Hero into the hands of intrepid project builders.

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Source: Kickstarter

Giving a Raspberry Pi extra voltage is a quick way to squeeze out additional processing power and void its warranty, but the folks behind the tinker-friendly board have devised a turbo mode that boosts performance by roughly 50 percent while keeping warranties intact. After studying the effects of temperature and voltage on the hardware’s lifespan, the team found that dynamic overclocking and overvolting doesn’t affect the Pi’s health appreciably. As a result, speeds can be pushed from 700MHz to 1GHz only when additional horsepower is needed, and things are reined back in when the CPU grazes 185 degrees Fahrenheit (85 degrees Celsius). Benchmarks show the extra computing oomph makes the Pi 52 percent faster on integer, 64 percent speedier on floating point and 55 percent snappier on memory tasks. The new mode is available in the latest firmware update, which also includes temperature and frequency widgets, better analog audio, improved USB performance and support for WiFi dongles out of the box. For the technical nitty-gritty and more details on the upgrade, hit the source link below.

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Raspberry Pi’s new turbo mode boosts performance by roughly 50 percent, doesn’t void warranties originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 Sep 2012 05:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Making the Raspberry Pi affordable involved some tough calls, including the omission of MPEG-2 decoding. Licensing fees alone for the video software would have boosted the board’s price by approximately 10 percent. Now, after many have made media centers with the hardware, the foundation behind the project has whipped up a solution to add the missing codec. For $3.16, users can purchase an individual MPEG-2 license for each of their boards on the organization’s online store. Partial to Microsoft’s VC-1 standard? Rights to using Redmond’s codec can be purchased for $1.58. H.264 encoding is also in the cards since OpenMax components needed to develop applications with the functionality are now enabled by default in the device’s latest firmware. With CEC support thrown into the Raspbmc, XBian and OpenELEC operating systems, a single IR remote can control a Raspberry Pi, a TV and other connected gadgets. If you’re ready to load up your Pi with its newfound abilities, hit the source link below.

Update: The Raspberry Pi Foundation let us know that US customers won’t have to pay sales tax, which means patrons will only be set back $3.16 for MPEG-2 and $1.58 for VC-1 support, not $3.79 and $1.90 for the respective licenses. We’ve updated the post accordingly.

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Raspberry Pi lands MPEG-2 and VC-1 decoding through personal licenses, H.264 encoding and CEC tag along originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 26 Aug 2012 07:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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My sisters and I used to draw on any and every surface we found, much to the dismay of our parents. Some of our walls still bear evidence of our creativity, since no amount of soap or scrubbing could completely erase the marks we made.

One thing that will save your walls and keep the creativity flowing is IdeaPaint. It’s available as an opaque or clear coating that will add dry erase functionality to any surface. Paint it on your walls, on your desks, on chairs, and any other surface where you want to write, doodle, or draw to your heart’s content.

It’s virtually odorless, too, so you don’t have to worry about airing rooms out after painting over your stuff.

A basic IdeaPaint CLEAR kit retails for $225(USD) and contains everything you need to start transforming up to 50 square feet of stuff into dry-erase surfaces, including a roller, stir stick, can opener, and wet paint sign.

[via BLTD]