From Gareth Halfacree on Hackster:

Alvaro Prieto Walks Through a Year of Chaac Weather Station Designs, Upgrades, and Enhancements

Alvaro Prieto has published a write-up of his latest weather station board, the Chaac v4.0, which adds Bluetooth connectivity to his existing XBee-based design.

The Chaac project has been ongoing for some time: Prieto documented his original efforts to build a weather station a year ago, walking through a range of improvements that went from an nRF52-based Bluetooth Low Energy prototype through to a breakout board for the Nucleo development board, and the integrated Chaac board versions 1.0 through 1.2 — the latter adding in solar panel voltage monitoring.

In the year since, Prieto has been working on upgrading the Chaac design — and has gathered all the improvements into a single write-up, beginning with the Chaac v2.0 which combined the existing XBee-based communication system with an nRF52811 for Bluetooth connectivity.

The goal of Printed It is to showcase creations that truly embrace the possibilities offered by desktop 3D printing. The most obvious examples are designs that can be printed quickly and cheaply enough that they’re a valid alternative to commercially available products. But as previous entries into the series have shown, there are also technical considerations. […]

Printed It: Print-in-Place PCB Gripper

Gareth Halfacree writes on Hackster about Olimex’s new project:

Olimex’s Tukhla, Built Around the i.MX8QuadMax, Targets Open-Hardware Linux Power Users

Bulgarian open-hardware specialist Olimex has revealed details of what it describes as its “most complex OSHW board yet:” an NXP iMX8QuadMax-based single-board computer dubbed the Tukhla.

“[A] company from EU which values the OSHW [Open Source Hardware] recognized the absence of high-end open source Linux board and asked us to design one,” Olimex’s Tsvetan Usunov explains. “They offered to cover all associated design costs. They specially requested this to be not yet another [Rockchip] RK3399 board, but based on SoC with proper documentation and software support. NXP’s high end iMX8QuadMax matched their requirements perfectly.”

“Currently all powerful Cortex-A72 comes from Chinese or Korean origin and are always closed projects, the only published info in best case is PDF schematic which can’t be verified i.e. the final product may or may not match what they publish. The popular Raspberry Pi goes even further and their ‘schematics’ are just connector diagrams.”

The Tukhla, by contrast, will be a fully open design, Usunov promises — built in the open source KiCad electronic design automation (EDA) package. Aside from the iMX8 SoC itself — which includes two Arm Cortex-A72 cores, four Cortex-A53 cores, two Cortex-M4F cores, and a quad-core graphics processor with 32 OpenGL ES 3.2 and Vulkan compatible compute units — the board will include up to 16GB of LPDDR4 memory, microSD support, eMMC and QSPI flash storage, a SATA connector, two single-lane PCI Express connectors with NVMe support, HDMI input and output, USB 2.0 OTG and USB 3.0 Host support, two gigabit Ethernet ports, and two MIPI CSI camera connectors.