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Open Hardware/Modding: Raspberry Pi 5, Arduino, and More
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Raspberry Pi ☛ Empowering India’s digital future: Our computing curriculum’s impact
Our evaluations show that teachers are well-equipped to deliver the curriculum and provide high-quality and accessible learning experiences.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Open-source tool designed to throttle PC and server performance based on electricity pricing — lightweight CLI will automatically limit clocks during peak hours
A robotics and machine learning engineer has developed a command-line interface tool that monitors power use from a smart plug and then tunes system performance based on electricity pricing. The simple program, called WattWise, came about when Naveen built a dual-socket EPYC workstation with plans to add four GPUs. It's a power-intensive setup, so he wanted a way to monitor its power consumption using a Kasa smart plug. The enthusiast has released the monitoring portion of the project to the public now, but the portion that manages clocks and power will be released later.
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Jeff Geerling ☛ Running the LAMP Stack in a Lamp Rack
Each of the three Raspberry Pi 5s has a HackerGadgets PoE+ NVMe HAT, with 2242-sized NVMe SSDs installed running Pi OS.
These are currently the most compact and robust HATs that combine PoE and an M.2 NVMe slot, and they just barely fit within the LabStack mini system if you stack two on top of each other. I could go more dense, cramming in eight Pi 5s this way, but (a) I don't have that many Pi 5s, and (b) I only have a 5-port network switch to use for this build!
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Ruben Schade ☛ My own Ship of Theseus post
By contrast, the Commodore 116 is entirely stock. It has had no modifications done, no upgrades, no replacements, and yet is fully functional in 2025 (a shocking achievement when you consider most computers aren’t designed to outlive a two-year warranty). I do admit it makes me feel great knowing this is the same physical basket of components that would have been assembled, bought, and used in 1984. Had there been a C116 that underwent significant rework, and a stock C116, I would likely choose the latter if I could afford it.
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The Register UK ☛ RISC OS Open plots great escape from 32-bit purgatory
On Friday, RISC OS Open Limited (ROOL), the organization maintaining the FOSS version of the original Acorn RISC Machine OS, announced its Moonshots initiative. ROOL is looking for money, developers, and community support to fund porting RISC OS to Arm64 – because the 64-bit instruction set is the only one that most modern Arm cores support, from the kernel level up, at least.
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Arduino ☛ Forgot your safe combination? This Arduino-controlled autodialer can crack it for you
The Arduino spins the dial using a stepper motor and there is an OLED screen for status information, with buttons for control. The device attaches to the safe using magnetic mounts and it grabs the dial with a 3D-printed chuck. There is also a magnetic clutch, which is important because it slips when the lock mechanism falls into place on a successful combination entry. That prevents the autodialer from continuing on after it finds the correct combination.
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Ken Shirriff ☛ Notes on the Pentium's microcode circuitry
Most people think of machine instructions as the fundamental steps that a computer performs. However, many processors have another layer of software underneath: microcode. With microcode, instead of building the processor's control circuitry from complex logic gates, the control logic is implemented with code known as microcode, stored in the microcode ROM. To execute a machine instruction, the computer internally executes several simpler micro-instructions, specified by the microcode. In this post, I examine the microcode ROM in the original Pentium, looking at the low-level circuitry.