Open Hardware: SparkFun, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Fairphone, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 15, 2023

• Finding Balance and the Road Ahead

  It's hard to believe that SparkFun turned twenty this year. It’s even harder to believe that I’ve been part of this ride for six of those years.

  If you have grown up with SparkFun you know our story. For those not familiar with it, SparkFun was started by a college student (Nathan Seidle) in his dorm room - completely bootstrapped - and it all started because he fried an electronic component and had a bit of a challenge getting a replacement. College courses are fine (text books, lectures, etc.), but Nate had this itch to get his hands dirty on the tech he was learning about in class. Here is a great read from Nate on how it all got started when we hit our 15-year anniversary.

• Yodeck bakes Raspberry Pi into digital signage all over the world

  Speaking of affordable, small computers, it made perfect sense when we started seeing Raspberry Pis popping up inside checkout screens at supermarkets, and in dynamic directional signage directing customers around large Swedish furniture shops. Athens-based company Yodeck jumped on the trend at just the right time a decade ago, before the scene exploded, and built their offering around our hardware. Now their Raspberry Pi-powered digital signage is in 135 countries all over the world.

• How to build your own Raspberry Pi watch

  The watch Toby and Alasdair purchased comes in two parts: a board with the screen, and a RP2040 main board. The watch came with a strap but not a battery, so they used this inexpensive rechargeable lithium polymer battery, although since the JST battery connector on the main board was an unusual size they both opted to pull it off and solder their batteries directly the contacts on the board rather than try and source the odd connector.

• Building an experimental magnetic loop antenna with a stepper motor and an Arduino

  TekMakerUK was inspired by Kevin Loughin’s YouTube video on the design and decided to make his own experimental version capable of 5W transmissions, which he could tune via an Android phone. The variable capacitor is from an old valve radio and has a central shaft that rotates to adjust the distance between the dielectric plates. In order to turn the coupling, a 5V stepper motor was added to the base along with a ULN2003 stepper motor driver. The driver was then connected to an Arduino Uno, although the board was replaced by a Nano Every for soldered connections.

• Challenger RP2040 board gets DWM3000 UWB module for indoor positioning, up to 10 Mbps data transfers

  The Challenger RP2040 UWB board features a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller combined with a DWM300 UWB (Ultra-Wide Band) module in the Adafruit Feather form factor and is designed for indoor positioning and ranging applications with an up to 10-centimeter accuracy, and data transfers up to 10 Mbps. The first Challenger RP2040 board was introduced in 2021 with an ESP8285 WiFi chip, iLabs (Invector Labs) shortly followed up with the Challenger RP2040 LoRa with an RFM95W LoRa module, and they also

• Embedded Open Source Summit 2023 schedule – Zephyr OS, Security, IoT, Embedded Linux, and more

  The Linux Foundation has just announced the full schedule for the Embedded Open Source Summit, which will take place on June 27-30, 2023 in Prague, Czech Republic, as well as virtually starting on June 26.

• Fairphone is the first company to pilot Fairmined Gold credits

  Through our Fairmined gold credits pilot with Alliance for Responsible Mining (ARM) we celebrate multiple wins alongside contributing to the social and environmental progress of the Fairmined certified mining cooperative La Gabriela in Colombia.