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Tomu – A family of devices which fit inside your USB port
- matthijs_hofman 4y agoThis seems like an interesting way for hacking whatever has a USB port. It is affordable, easy to use. I think this might interest any kid that wants to be remembered forever by hacking his school or university.
- mithro 4y agohttps://antmicro.com/blog/2022/01/fomu-keystroke-injector/ https://antmicro.com/blog/2022/01/fomu-keystroke-injector/
- brink 4y ago> I think this might interest any kid that wants to be remembered forever by hacking his school or university. To any kids who want to be remembered forever reading this: be careful, the school may vindictively press felony hacking charges if they find out it's you. Source: This happened to me. Thankfully the charges were dropped by the judge.
- aliqot 4y ago>To any kids who want to be remembered forever reading this: be careful, the school may vindictively press felony hacking charges if they find out it's you. Source: This happened to me. Thankfully the charges were dropped by the judge. Which case is yours?
- cparsnipson 4y agoWow! Good to know that you seem to be doing fine. It hasn't always ended well. :(
- hinkley 4y ago"I want my name to be mentioned in the same breath as the Mona Lisa"
- teaearlgraycold 4y agoImagine trying to imprison a child because they made "boobs lol" show up on everyone's screen
- lucideer 4y agoNot quite as affordable, but the o.mg cable is an existing option for this that's likely a lot easier to use.
- bartvk 4y agoI hope to see such devices available for USB-C one day. It doesn't need to sit flush with the outside casing, a PCB with a vertically mounted USB-C connector would already be awesome.
- smoldesu 4y agoI mean, theoretically you could nest one of these in a USB-C adapter and have it that way. But yeah, this project mostly seems to leverage the novelty of USB-B's size.
- crote 4y agoBe the change you want to see in the world! You're looking for a "brick nogging" connector like [0]. It's not a trivial project, but it should be doable by a hobbyist. [0]: https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/USB-Connectors_Jing-Extension-of-the-Electronic-Co-918-118A2021Y40006_C399938.html https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/USB-Connectors_Jing-Exte...
- myself248 4y agoOut of curiosity, do you have any idea how the term "brick nogging" came about? To me that's a vertical PCB mount connector, and I cannot fathom the tortured translation path...
- mithro 4y agoThe Tomu family also has; - The Fomu (FPGA Tomu) - https://fomu.im/ https://fomu.im/ and https://workshop.fomu.im/ https://workshop.fomu.im/ - The Qomu (ARM+eFPGA Tomu) - https://tomu.im/qomu.html https://tomu.im/qomu.html - The Somu (Secure Tomu) - https://www.crowdsupply.com/solokeys/somu https://www.crowdsupply.com/solokeys/somu The Fomu is also a great RISC-V MCU prototyping platform.
- mithro 4y agoI also have a general offer to send people who contribute to the open source FPGA tooling and ecosystem free Fomu boards.
- shannongreen 4y ago> That's funny, a guy made this same offer to me at a conference once oh wait, you're that guy
- Enderboi 4y agoConference Cluedo. "It was mithro, in the hallway track, with the pogo pin programmer."
- nl 4y agoThis is great work. Just FYI the video on https://tomu.im/tomu.html https://tomu.im/tomu.html isn't showing because it is private.
- sally_glance 4y agoI have no affiliation here but whatever this guy is not lying - had a hella fun and got a free FOMU on a previous workshop.
- sanderjd 4y agoWhat kind of contributions would be useful?
- tildef 4y ago
- makeitdouble 4y agoThe wireless/bluetooth ones could be interesting as static appliances sitting inside a USB charger. I’m thinking room beacons for instance, or canary plugs to track which plugs are powered at any time, etc.
- thrwawy74 4y agoI'm silly. So many 'convertible' laptops cannot be used as tablet substitutes because they don't have volume or mute buttons at the edge of the enclosure when in tablet mode. I'd use one of these for volume up/down, mute, blanking the screen, locking the device, and authenticating. A bunch of "press this 3 times", etc. functions
- metadat 4y agoBlanking the screen? The only use I can imagine is as a boss key [0]. A dedicated device stuck in the side of the laptop or keyboard is conspicuous and therefore antithetical to the goal. Might AutoHotKey be a universally superior solution? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_key
- nl 4y ago> Blanking the screen? The only use I can imagine is as a boss key You've never wanted to stop people wanting to read messages over your shoulder? This is so common that most mobile/table operating systems have entire configuration systems about which parts of which messages to show on lock screens.
- metadat 4y agoI don't do much computing in public, and am confident in the assumption my digital life is truly that unremarkable to 99% or more of humanity. ^^
- wildzzz 4y agoIf you can't install anything, having a small MCU board that can mimic a USB keyboard could be good enough. You could load up a bunch of different keyboard macros based on number and duration of button presses. A more dedicated keypad would be a lot more functional but this thing fits inside a USB port so it would be good for on the go.
- aendruk 4y agoFor years I’ve kept a dedicated key mapped to `xset dpms force off` and tap it habitually when temporarily taking my attention away from the screen e.g. during lectures or when conversing with someone, as a small gesture of respect to the other party and a gentle guide for myself.
- dheera 4y agoCan we PLEASE have one with an IMU (accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer) in it? Even better if it can include a ambient temperature and barometer sensor as well. Just have it constantly output data at max rate over a /dev/ttyACMx device in some specified format, no fancy drivers needed.
- sweetjuly 4y agoI'm curious what your use case is for such a specific combo of sensors. Most of these devices are meant for use on standard consumer laptops (as in most other situations a regular mini microcontroller dev board is more than suitable), but I can't imagine wanting to shake my laptop and know the temperature ;)
- dheera 4y agoFor one, it makes their sensor suite equal to what mobile phones have. The IMU can be used alongside the camera for visual-inertial mapping and navigation, the barometer could be used for localization across floors of a building (yes the barometers in a phone are good enough to pick up on a couple meters' pressure difference), the IMU can also be used for shake-related gestures e.g. ignoring sporadic mouse movements when you're using a laptop in a car, they can be used for gestures e.g. slapping the laptop left and right to switch virtual workspaces, ...
- blacksmith_tb 4y agoIf you were willing to have a chain or giant sandwich hanging off your laptop you could probably cobble that together with an Adafruit Trinkey and the sensors along the lines of this: https://learn.adafruit.com/diy-trinkey-no-solder-air-quality-monitor https://learn.adafruit.com/diy-trinkey-no-solder-air-quality... (might not be too terrible velcro'ed to the lid...)
- VectorLock 4y agoFor devices like the Somu I could see it be useful for locking the device if a certain shock occurred. For example, someone snatched my laptop at the coffee shop. Something Ross Ulbricht probably wishes he would have had.
- Orangeair 4y agoI looked pretty thoroughly through the site and the product pages, but I still cannot find any discussion of use cases for the Fomu. Is it just education, ie. learning how to program an FPGA? I'm having trouble telling if it even has any dedicated I/O or if you can exclusively interact with it through USB.
- MrOwnPut 4y ago> I looked pretty thoroughly through the site and the product pages > trouble telling if it even has any dedicated I/O or if you can exclusively interact with it through USB. All the product pages say: "I have four contact pads that can easily be used to make two buttons. And I have an RGB LED, because everyone loves blinky things!"
- Orangeair 4y agoHuh, honestly I think the first person threw me off there, I read that but didn't realize it was talking about the device.
- ant6n 4y agoI’m liking the chip tune music in their kickstarter video https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/tomu/ https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/tomu/
- dang 4y agoRelated: Tomu – An ARM microprocessor which fits in your USB port - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28395169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28395169 - Sept 2021 (53 comments) Tomu, a tiny ARM microprocessor which fits in your USB port - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17719848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17719848 - Aug 2018 (86 comments) Tomu: An ARM board which fits inside your USB connector - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16114778 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16114778 - Jan 2018 (4 comments)
- tildef 4y agoThank you Dang, as always! However, I wonder if it's worth keeping the "family of devices" title from the website still. I'm personally not that interested in the ARM part of Tomu, and the reason I submitted the link was for non-ARM reasons (specifically because I think the Fomu is really cool). It seems like Tomu/Fomu is more of a series of microcomputers fitting into the USB form-factor at this point. I'm sure a Tomu expert can correct me if it's still primarily an ARM project.
- dang 4y agoOk, I've put that bit back.
- titzer 4y agoRelatedly, I would really like to have the opposite: a tiny x86 board that fits in a USB port (for my M1 Mac). It turns out that despite Rosetta 2, full-system emulation of x86 on M1 is still quite crappy, and it'd be great to have a full-blown Linux machine at hand. I experimented with an x86-based ZenPhone...works OK, but that particular CPU was missing some SSE features that I need for my testing. Anyone know of a something in this vein for x86?
- lostmsu 4y agoIs there no hardware-assisted virtualization software on M1 capable of running Linux? O-o
- coupdejarnac 4y agoThere are mini stick PCs that are complete computers that go into a USB port for around $150.
- okaram 4y agoCan you point to one? Usually the stick PCs will connect to an HDMI monitor, and may get power from USB, but this seems a different use case.
- coupdejarnac 4y agoYou're correct in that they only get power from USB. The HDMI sticks could display on the laptop with a HDMI-USB adapter. A slightly clunky but viable way to have a small, portable x86 computer.
- bigiain 4y agoHeh. Everything that goes around comes around… I used to have a Mac6100 DOS Compatible, which was a regular PowerPC Mac, with a daughter board that had a complete 486DX2/66 system on it capable of running DOS/Win3.1/Win95. (These days, I have an Intel NUC on my network to run everything that works better on x86 or Docker…)
- 4y ago
- shrubble 4y agoThere is the Adafruit Trinkey, Raspberry Pi Pico based; but not quite as small: https://www.adafruit.com/product/5056 https://www.adafruit.com/product/5056 $7.95 (I bought one at MicroCenter); edit to add: "much more powerful CPU than the Tomu"
- ajsnigrutin 4y agoWhat is the usecase of this? I get it.. they're tiny, but why? They're too small to handle properly (how do you pull it out if you have fat fingers?), they're too small to properly solder on wires to connect whatever else, and when there are 4 wires soldered on, they're not tiny anymore,... The only way I'd use them is for some kind of "hacking" situation, when an emulated keyboard is needed, and one of these can be installed and stay hidden in someone elses computer. Otherwise, i'd use something like this (not afiliated): https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003668483454.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003668483454.html Enough pins are accessible, led is visible, headers can be soldered on and development can be done with dupont wires, the led is visible, and they're not that large still. If you need more (and wifi), you even have stuff like this: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004860003638.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004860003638.html (again, not afiliated)
- chadaustin 4y agoI wanted to make a permanent wake-from-sleep capacitive touch button for a PC that doesn't always have a keyboard attached. I tried to use the Tomu for that. Unfortunately, I never was able to wrangle its built-in USB functionality to stay awake when the PC slept. They're not that hard to pull out. I did find it hard to find good examples for how to program the micro's capabilities, however.
- causi 4y agoInteresting. My laptop doesn't have auto-brightness adjustment. Could I use one of these and an SMD light sensor to add that functionality?
- squokko 4y agoWhat is the... purpose of something so small? I can't imagine getting any real I/O onto the edge of this board.
- pbalau 4y agoI think is time to get a different class of this kind of devices. In the software world we have packages/libraries for pretty much everything. In the hardware world, in the hobby prototyping part, we have these "monstrosities" that can do everything, but not that great. I want a barebone arduino: a connector for power (let me deal with providing clean 5v), a connector for programming the mcu, a connector for external clock and a built in resonator/quartz. Make this in a easily breadbord-able package and off I go. Obviously I could "build" the barebone arduino on a breadboard, but that means I have to redo the same thing every time I need to add a new mcu to my prototype. Or I could design and build the thing myself. I did this in the past, I've spent quite a few evening designing the thing, then ordered parts from China, then spent even more time soldering the things together. Just to piss off my cat that took a very long wee in the box I was storing the boards.
- rollcat 4y agoI think the success of Arduino in the hardware world can be explained in a similar way, as the relative success of "command line app frameworks" like Click[1], or even much lighter-weight libraries like argparse[2]. You absolutely can get away with using just getopt[3] (and people experienced with it will likely strongly prefer it). However certain factors such as a more declarative API, a nice logo, the existence of an ecosystem (even if you're not actively drawing from it), an official "branded" forum, etc can all play into picking a more complex solution, with more baggage you don't need, certain oddities that may throw users off, etc. [1]: https://click.palletsprojects.com/ https://click.palletsprojects.com/ [2]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/argparse.html https://docs.python.org/3/library/argparse.html [3]: https://man.openbsd.org/getopt.3 https://man.openbsd.org/getopt.3, https://linux.die.net/man/3/getopt https://linux.die.net/man/3/getopt