Linux Devices and Open Hardware

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 20, 2024

• Hackaday ☛ Using A Framework Mainboard For A Custom Gaming Handheld [Ed: Sadly, based on the video, he seems to be using Windows here]

  Building your own handheld gaming console has been a popular project for many years, but recently it has become significantly easier to get a lot of power into a small package. Like many others, [TommyB] made his own Raspberry Pi SBC-based handheld in the past, which results in a rather bulky and underpowered package. A more performant solution would be to stuff laptop guts into a handheld case, but until Framework came onto the scene this wasn’t easy and would get you a sloppy one-off solution. With [TommyB]’s current handheld project he uses a standard Framework laptop mainboard, along with the official battery to get a very capable gaming system.

• Olimex ☛ Open Source Hardware VGA to HDMI converter board make all retro computers and game consoles modern and allow them to be connected to modern HDMI monitors and TVs

  VGA2HDMI is small open source hardware board with VGA input and HDMI output.

• Raspberry Pi ☛ This retro desktop PC Raspberry Pi case is a nod at nostalgia for your desk

  This case is compatible with Raspberry Pi 3B, 3B+, and 2B, and it is designed to integrate seamlessly with your existing setup, so you’ll have a fully functional desktop computer in just a few simple steps. The case allows for easy access to all ports and connectors on the Raspberry Pi, and the power and reset buttons are fully functional. You’ll have to squint a bit to make use of the 3.5-inch HDMI display, but that’s all part of the fun.

• Raspberry Pi ☛ Celebrating the community: Micah

  Meet Micah, a young space enthusiast whose confidence has soared since he started attending a Code Club at his local library in Leeds, UK.

• Hackaday ☛ PCB Design Review: ESP32-S3 Round LCD Board

  For our next installment, I have a lovely and daring PCB submitted by one of our readers, [Vas]. This is an ESP32-S3 board that also has an onboard round TFT display, very similar to the one we used on the Vectorscope badge. The badge is self-sufficient – it has an ESP32, it has a display, a programming connector, two different QWIIC ports you could surely use as GPIOs – what’s not to love?

• Hackaday ☛ Arduino Gear Shift Indicator Finds ‘Em So You Won’t Grind ‘Em

  Now, it’s been a shamefully long time since we’ve driven a car with a manual transmission, but as we recall it was pretty straightforward. It certainly didn’t require a lot of help with the shifting pattern, at least not enough to require a technical solution to know what gear you’re in. But then again, we suspect that’s not really the point of [upir]’s latest build.

• Education and More

  • Arduino ☛ Arduino Days: Full schedule is online!

    This year we have so many talks, presentations, and announcements we had to spread out over three days! Arduino Days 2024 will be held from March 21st to 23rd – giving us more time to celebrate our community with our yearly event: 100% online, free, and open to all.

    The full schedule is now available on the dedicated Arduino Days website: explore the program to find the topics that are the most inspiring or interesting to you, and turn on notifications for the three YouTube lives linked below.

  • Arduino ☛ High school student builds his dream racing wheel

    Racing “video games” can be incredibly realistic these days, with every facet of the car’s physics and their interaction with the asphalt programmed in. Those racing sims could provide a completely immersive experience — if the player wasn’t sitting on a motionless couch using a controller that doesn’t resemble a car’s steering wheel in the slightest. To rectify that issue, high school student Pranshu Agnihotri built his dream racing wheel.

    Agnihotri tackled this project for a senior project in his Principles of Engineering class at Irvington High School. Its purpose is to provide a more realistic interface for racing games and sims. It doesn’t have any force feedback capabilities, but it will work with any PC game thanks to the Arduino that lets the user easily rebind controls. Those can even emulate keyboard and mouse inputs for games that weren’t designed for use with steering wheels.

  • Chris Fenner ☛ Attesting to the TPM’s Firmware

    Murphy’s Law says: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Unfortunately, TPMs fall into the category of “anything.”

    You can usually tell embedded security people apart from not-embedded security people, because the not-embedded security people will say things like “this is secure because the hardware does it for us” and the embedded security people will adopt this vacant, dead expression in their eyes when the not-embedded security people say things like that. Don’t get me wrong: the isolation of “doing it in hardware” is great, but it doesn’t change the fact that a person had to implement it in the hardware, and people occasionally make mistakes (just like they do when they implement things in software). Hardware security vendors work very very hard to avoid these mistakes, but “don’t ever make any mistakes” is not a very good strategy for the same reason that people buy fire alarms even though they typically don’t plan on burning down their houses.

  • Linux Gizmos ☛ NEXCOM’s 1U Rackmount Powered by Marvell OCTEON 10 Technology and up to 25GbE ports

    NEXCOM has released the TCA 6710, a 1U rackmount appliance designed for edge and cloud computing, powered by the Marvell OCTEON 10 COM-HPC module. This latest offering marks an evolution from traditional COM-E technology, focusing on scalable computing solutions with enhanced server-class bandwidth, power, and performance.