Hardware Leftovers
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Open Hardware/Modding
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CNX Software ☛ The One Smart Hey Hi (AI) Pen – A ballpoint pen with Bluetooth and a microphone for translation, LLM integration, note taking (Crowdfunding)
You may have seen the “Sell me that pen. It’s AI-powered” meme if you are a social control media user. It may have started as a joke, but Zakwan Ahmad made the meme become reality with “The One Smart Hey Hi (AI) Pen” which is basically a standard ballpoint pen with a battery, Bluetooth connectivity, a microSD card, and a microphone.
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LWN ☛ Building an open-source battery
FOSDEM 2025 featured the usual talks about open-source software, but, as always, the conference also offered the opportunity to discover some more exotic and less software-centric topics. That's how I learned about the Flow Battery Research Collective (FBRC), which is building what will eventually become an open-source home battery. Daniel Fernández Pinto represented the collective at FOSDEM with his talk "Building an Open-Source Battery for Stationary Storage" in the "Energy: Accelerating the Transition through Open Source" developer room (devroom).
The open-source battery project has a close cooperation with Utrecht University's FAIR-Battery project and is fully financed by NLnet Foundation. The FBRC is a relatively new project that started last year. Fernández, a chemist, had been doing battery research at home and documenting his findings on a blog since 2019. Electrochemical engineer Kirk Smith discovered Fernández's blog and proposed joining forces. That led to the formation of a project to ""build an open-source battery aimed at solar and wind storage in the long term"", while aiming to create kits for academic purposes in the short term.
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Standards/Consortia
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Hackaday ☛ Shortwave Resurrection: A Sticky Switch Fix On A Hallicrafters
Shortwave radio has a charm all its own: part history, part mystery, and a whole lot of tech nostalgia. The Hallicrafters S-53A is a prime example of mid-century engineering, but when you get your hands on one, chances are it won’t be in mint condition. Which was exactly the case for this restoration project by [Ken’s Lab], where the biggest challenge wasn’t fried capacitors or burned-out tubes, but a stubborn band selector switch that refused to budge.
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