Open Hardware and Other Hardware

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 28, 2024

• Martijn Braam ☛ Building a DSMR reading board

  Quite a while back I designed a small PCB for hooking up sensors to an ESP8266 module to gather data and have a nice Grafana dashboard with temperature readings. While building this setup I grabbed one of my spare ESP8266 dev boards and soldered that to the P1 port on my smart energy meter to log the power usage of the whole house.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Hackaday ☛ The Long Road Towards Reverse Engineering The ESP32 Wi-Fi Driver

    Although much of the software that runs on the ESP32 microcontroller is open source, the Wi-Fi driver is not. Instead, it uses a proprietary binary blob. This was no problem for [Jasper Devreker]’s reverse-engineering of the ESP32’s Wi-Fi stack so far until he came face to face with reverse-engineering the initialization of the Wi-Fi peripheral. As it turns out, there is a lot of work involved after you call esp_phy_enable in the Espressif binary blob, with the team logging 53,286 peripheral accesses during the initialization phase. In comparison, sending a Wi-Fi packet takes about ten calls.

  • Olimex ☛ Open Source Hardware iMX8MPlus System On Module and EVB for Industrial applications, Machine learning and Machine vision with 2.3 TOPS NPU are running mainline Linux and operate in industrial grade temperature range

    iMX8MP-SOM-4GB-IND is an industrial grade system on module with: [...]

  • Ubuntu Pit ☛ 20 Best Arduino Books Available for Developers

    Based on the easy-to-use hardware and software, Arduino has made itself a strong electronic platform in the open-source world. It has earned enormous popularity in the field of projects that are built based on electronics.

• Less Open Hardware

  • CNX Software ☛ Nordic nRF52840-based True Wireless Valve is a USB or battery powered valve for home water management (Crowdfunding)

    True Wireless Valve from Uhome Systems is a battery-powered, smart valve that is easy to install and integrate into your smart home setup. It is based on the Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840, a multiprotocol Bluetooth 5.4 SoC with support for Bluetooth Low Energy, Bluetooth mesh, Thread, NFC, and Zigbee.

  • CNX Software ☛ SECO SBC-3.5-RK3568 – A Rockchip RK3568 3.5-inch SBC with dual gigabit Ethernet

    SECO SBC-3.5-RK3568 is a feature-rich 3.5-inch SBC powered by a Rockchip RK3568 quad-core Cortex-A55 Hey Hi (AI) SoC which includes up to 4GB DDR4-3200 memory, 64GB eMMC 5.1 flash, three display interfaces (HDMI, LVDS, eDP), dual gigabit Ethernet, and various expansion headers for industrial applications. Additionally, it also features, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 5.0, and LTE support via M.2.

  • Hackaday ☛ Reinventing Rotary Switches With Stepper Motors

    When you need to make very tiny measurements, even noise in closed relays can throw you off. [Marco] was able to observe this effect and wanted to build a switch that didn’t have this problem. He found a technical paper that used rotary switches operated by stepper motors instead of relays. So he decided to try making his own version. The video below shows how it turned out.

  • Hackaday ☛ A System Board For The 8008

    Intel processors, at least for PCs, are ubiquitous and have been for decades. Even beyond the chips specifically built by Intel, other companies have used their instruction set to build chips, including AMD and VIA, for nearly as long. They’re so common the shorthand “x86” is used for most of these processors, after Intel’s convention of naming their processors with an “-86” suffix since the 1970s. Not all of their processors share this convention, though, but you’ll have to go even further back in time to find one. [Mark] has brought one into the modern age and is showing off his system board for this 8008 processor.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ ASRock Z790I Lightning Wi-Fi Review: Lightning in a (Little) Bottle

    ASRock’s Z790I Lightning is a decently-quipped and reasonably priced Mini-ITX option. If you’re into memory overclocking, you’ve found one of the better for Intel’s current platform. So long as you don’t need a lot of USB ports or PCIe 5.0-capable M.2, it’s a solid SFF option.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Report: China sets up $47.5B fund to boost its semiconductor sector

    China has reportedly set up a fund with 344 billion yuan, or $47.5 billion, in capital to boost its domestic semiconductor sector. Citing a regulatory filing, Reuters reported today that the fund was established last Friday. It’s the third and largest in a series of three state-backed investment vehicles created to support local semiconductor companies.

  • Hackaday ☛ The Emperor’s New Computer

    You walk into a home office and see an attractive standing desk that appears bare. Where’s the computer? Well, if it is [DIY Perk]’s office, the desk is the computer. Like a transformer robot, the desk transforms into a good-looking PC.

  • Hackaday ☛ Connecting (And Using) High-Capacity Batteries In Parallel

    For those willing to put some elbow grease into it, there is an almost unlimited supply of 18650 lithium ion batteries around for cheap (or free) just waiting to be put into a battery pack of some sort. Old laptop and power tool batteries are prime sources, as these often fail because of one bad cell while the others are still perfectly usable. [limpkin] built a few of these battery packs and now that he’s built a few, he’s back with a new project that allows him to use four custom packs simultaneously.

  • Hackaday ☛ Recycling Of Portland Cement And Steel In Electric Arc Furnaces

    The use of concrete and steel have both become the bedrock of modern-day construction, which of course also means that there is a lot of both which ends up as waste once said construction gets demolished again. While steel is readily recyclable, the Portland cement that forms the basis of concrete so far is not. Although the aggregate from crushed concrete can be reclaimed, the remainder tends to end up in a landfill, requiring fresh input of limestone to create more cement. Now a team of researchers from the University of Cambridge claim to have found a way to recycle hydrated Portland cement by using it as flux during steel production in electric arc furnaces (EAFs).

  • CNX Software ☛ Simply NUC extremeEDGE fanless edge computing servers are powered by defective chip maker Intel Celeron N5105 up to AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 8840U CPUs

    Simply NUC has unveiled the extremeEDGE fanless servers designed with edge computing with a wide range of processors starting with an defective chip maker Intel Celeron N5105 and going up to an AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 8840U SoCs with options for defective chip maker Intel Processor N100 and AMD Ryzen Embedded CPUs.