A final call for votes in this year’s awards poll

Along with an updated look at the alternative votes The 2020 RISC OS Awards poll has now underway for more than a couple of months, which means it’s about time a final deadline for votes was issued so that the hundreds hundred or so votes that have been cast can be counted up and the results published. That deadline, therefore, is the end of this month – 30th June. If you haven’t yet voted, please ensure you do so by then. If you’ve looked at the options and decided one…

Read More

Access an ESP32 camera module from the desktop

If you have a Raspberry Pi and wish to attach a camera to it there are a number of options available to you – including from the Raspberry Pi Foundation themselves – but if you wish to use one with RISC OS, your options are considerably more limited. So limited, in fact, that until very recently I don’t think there was a working option. As of mid-May, however, that changed thanks to Rick Murray.

Read More

QrCode rewritten, becomes version 2.00

Kevin Wells has released a new version of his application for turning small amounts of textual information into two dimensional bar codes, aka ‘Quick Response’ codes. These can provide a quick way for people to transfer information into devices that can read them – for example smart phones using a bar code scanner application – such as URLs, contact details, WiFi keys, and so on.

Read More

Simon Wilson plans to provide Mesa 3D GPU support for the RockChip RK3399

Back in 2005, Simon Wilson – already well known for releasing driver software for a PCI TV card for use on the Iyonix, and responsible for Soundblaster drivers – released a 3D graphics driver for the computer, called IyonixMesa. With this installed, it became possible to make use of the 3D facilities provided by the graphics card used in the Iyonix, providing an OpenGL API. Stefan Fröhling has been in touch to say that Simon has agreed to work with RISC OS Cloverleaf (whose Kickstarter has now reached £7,421 or…

Read More

RISCOSbits squeezes out some Linuxbits

And pumps out a PiAno, and a Pi 4 upgrade scheme. A number of systems on which RISC OS can be run also have Linux distros available for them, which means it’s very easy for RISC OS users to have a hardware platform for running our operating system natively, and a hardware platform for running a more widely supported OS – while only having a single hardware platform on the desk. With the Raspberry Pi, for example, it’s just a matter of changing the SD card to the OS you…

Read More

News nybble: Another BBC BASIC graphics video

Richard Ashbery has been at it again – ‘it’ being converting graphics programs from other sources (or writing some inspired by them) to run on a Raspberry Pi in BBC BASIC, and chaining them together to produce a video of the output, which he’s uploaded to YouTube. This is part 2 of a selection, and some of the original versions were written in BBC BASIC for Windows, some from the Creative Retro Coding site (aka a gallery of programs that were posted on Twitter to be run by the BBC…

Read More