Open Hardware: Raspberry Pi, RISC-V, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 05, 2025

• Paul Tagliamonte: Reverse Engineering (another) Restaurant Pager system 🍽️

  Some of you may remember that I recently felt a bit underwhelmed by the last pager I reverse engineered – the Retekess TD-158, mostly due to how intuitive their design decions were. It was pretty easy to jump to conclusions because they had made some pretty good decisions on how to do things.

• It's FOSS ☛ Using On-Screen Keyboard in Raspberry Pi OS

  Here's what you can do to use a virtual keyboard on Raspberry Pi OS.

• Tom's Hardware ☛ Chinese government shifts focus from x86 and Arm CPUs, gov't promoting RISC-V chips heavily

  Chinese government will encourage domestic chip developers to design processors based on the RISC-V ISA.

• Linux Gizmos ☛ Adafruit Metro RP2350 is Available for $24.95 with Arduino Form Factor Compatibility

  As its name suggests, the Metro RP2350 features the RP2350 microcontroller running at 150MHz with dual ARM Cortex-M33 cores. It includes 520KB of on-chip SRAM and 16MB of QSPI flash memory for program storage and file management. The board operates at 3.3V logic and integrates a 5V buck converter, allowing an input range of 6V to 17V DC while providing up to 2A output.

• The Register UK ☛ Apple dares users to fix 'budget' iPhone 16e themselves

  Apple gets kudos for providing a repair manual for charging ports – one of the smartphone components most likely to need repair or replacement during its lifetime. However, iFixit still called the repair "a beast."

• Simon Willison ☛ I built an automaton called Squadron

  I took their class in “Mechanical Sculpture”, which turned out to be exactly a class in how to make automata. I guess the term “automota” isn’t widely enough known to use in the course description!

• Kevin Boone ☛ Construction and layout

  Now, I’m quite concerned about the amount of energy we’re wasting because of appliances we can’t switch off, and I’ve even started constructing USB power supplies with real mains switches. But my NAS runs twenty-four hours a day, so I’ve tined it to use as little power as practicable. I don’t want to add a big, colour display that will use more energy that the NAS itself. I’ve wanted for a while to add one of those monochrome LCDs that fancy scientific calculators have. They’re large enough to display about eight rows of 25-column text, but still only consume a couple of milliwatts.

• Sean Conner ☛ A quirk of the Motorola 6809 assemblers

  I just learned an interesting bit of trivia about 6809 assembly language on a Discord server today. When Motorola designed the 6809 assembler, they made a distinction between the use of n,PC and n,PCR in the indexing mode. Both of those make a reference based off the PC register, but in assembly language they defined, using n,PC means use the literal value of n as the distance, whereas n,PCR means generate the distance between n and the current value of the PC register.

• Arduino ☛ A lightweight file server running entirely on an Arduino Nano ESP32

  An ESP32 is a microcontroller with built-in connectivity (Wi-Fi and Bluetooth). Like all MCUs, it can “boot” and start running its firmware almost instantly. And while it runs, it will consume much less power than a conventional PC or a single-board computer. Zombieschannel’s project proves that the Arduino Nano ESP32 is suitable for a file server — if your expectations are modest.