Open Hardware: Home Assistant, Fairphone, PCBs
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CNX Software ☛ Home Assistant 2025.3 released with dashboard view headers, tile card improvements, better SmartThings integration
The popular Home Assistant has gotten an update with version 2025.3 that brings dashboard view headers, several tile card improvements, better map clustering, streamed responses from LLMs, and improved SmartThings integrations.
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CNX Software ☛ STMicro STM32WBA6 2.4 GHz wireless MCU gets up to 2MB flash, 512KB SRAM, USB OTG, and more
STMicro had two announcements yesterday. I’ve already covered the launch of the ultra-low-power STM32U3 microcontroller family, so today, I’ll check the new 100 MHz STM32WBA6 Cortex-M33 wireless MCU family with 2.4GHz radios for Bluetooth LE 6.0, Zigbee, Thread, and Matter designed for wearables, smart home devices, remote weather sensors, and more.
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This is how cobalt credits are helping mines become fairer
In August 2023, the Fair Cobalt Alliance (FCA) introduced a new financial instrument for the artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) sector called cobalt credits. The newly launched system was designed to reduce risks in cobalt supply chains and help speed up continuous improvements towards responsibly produced ASM copper-cobalt.
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Hackaday ☛ Custom Touchpad PCBs Without The Pain
Many of us use touch pads daily on our laptops, but rarely do we give much thought about what they really do. In fact they are a PCB matrix of conductive pads, with a controller chip addressing it and sensing the area of contact. Such a complex and repetitive pattern can be annoying to create by hand in an EDA package, so [Timonsku] has written a script to take away the work.