Open Hardware: Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Fairphone, and More
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Linux Gizmos ☛ Pilet: A Portable Cyber-Deck Powered by Raspberry Pi 5 and Dual 8000mAh Batteries
Pilet is an upcoming open-source portable mini-computer powered by Raspberry Pi 5, offering both versatility and portability. Initially named Consolo, it will be available in two models: a 5-inch and a 7-inch, to suit different needs.
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Bootlin ☛ Upgrading Snagboot to a fully-fledged factory flashing tool
Snagboot is a fully open-source and vendor-agnostic recovery and flashing tool released by Bootlin in 2023. It is composed of snagrecover and snagflash, which respectively run U-Boot on a target platform using USB recovery mode and flash non-volatile storage devices using USB gadgets exposed by U-Boot.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ This Raspberry Pi portable arcade cyberdeck sports a Pi 5 and is wearable
Maker and developer _Kniives has created two Raspberry Pi 5 cyberdecks that double as wearable portable arcades.
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Hackaday ☛ A Laser With Mirrors Makes A CRT-like Display
[bitluni]’s laser-based display pretending to be a an old-school vector CRT.Phosphor-based displays like CRTs rely on the phosphor to emit light for a set amount of time after being activated, allowing them to display a seemingly persistent image with one drawing beam per color. Translated to UV-sensitive PLA filament, this means that you can totally use a printed sheet of this material in combination with a 405 nm laser diode to create a display that doesn’t look dissimilar to an early CRT. This is exactly what [bitluni] did in a recent video, meshing together said laser diode, UV-sensitive PLA, stepper motors and two mirrors with an Arduino-based controller to create a rather interesting vector display.
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Kev Quirk ☛ I’ve Been Thinking About a Switch to the Fairphone 5
I've recently been thinking about a switch to the Fairphone 5, but after some research, I'm not sure it's worth it?
I ditched Android around 6 years ago now, and since then I've been very happy with iOS, but over the last couple of months, I've been thinking about a move back to Android, specifically the Fairphone 5.
The rationale here is that phones are extremely expensive, they don't last very long, and most importantly, they're not easily repairable.
I've had my current phone, an iPhone 13 Mini, for around 3 years and I'm still happy with it. It performs pretty well for the mediocre requirements I have for it (mostly web and email), but I know it's going to need some repairs soon.
For example, the battery settings show that the battery is operating at 87%, so that will need replacing soon, and the thunderbolt port used for charging is very temperamental. To get around that I've switched to wireless charging, but it will need replacing, I think.
If I were using a Fairphone, I could replace both the battery and the charging port myself, for a relatively small amount of money.