Linux and Hardware Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 05, 2025

• CNX Software ☛ PocketCloud – Battery-powered, portable NAS takes up to 16TB of storage (Crowdfunding)

  Firefly’s PocketCloud is a battery-powered, portable NAS powered by a Rockchip RK3568B2 quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 SoC with 4GB LPDDR5 of RAM and a 32GB eMMC flash for the OS, and supports up to 16TB of NVMe SSD storage. It’s comprised of the battery-powered PocketCloud itself with WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 connectivity, and an optional dock with 2.5GbE networking and an additional M.2 NVMe socket.

• Tom's Hardware ☛ China’s push for chip independence continues with its first RISC-V server CPU

  China accelerates its shift from x86 and ARM with RiVAI’s high-performance RISC-V chip.

• CNX Software ☛ WattWise – A command line tool for smart power plugs with energy monitoring

  Smart Power plugs help users monitor their appliances’ power consumption, and they’d usually check measurements in a mobile app or a web dashboard. Naveen was not satisfied with this workflow while using a TP-link Kasa EP25 Smart Plug to monitor his LLM workstation’s power consumption. So he wrote the WattWise command-line interface (CLI) for power monitoring smart plugs to allow him to throttle his power-hungry, dual AMD Ryzen EPYC 7C13 workstation following his utility’s Time of Use (ToU) pricing in order to lower his electric bill. The Python tool pulls power usage data from smart plugs directly or through Home Assistant and presents it in a neat terminal-based UI.

• CNX Software ☛ Seeed Studio XIAO 7.5″ ePaper panel supports ESPHome firmware, Arduino programming

  Seeed Studio XIAO 7.5″ ePaper Panel interfaces an XIAO ESP32-C3 USB-C board and mainly targets the Smart Home market with support for ESPHome, but the monochrome ePaper display is also programmable with the Arduino IDE for a wider range of applications. The display offers a resolution of 800×400 and includes a 2,000mAh battery good for three months per charge with updates every 6 hours. Seeed Studio says the display can operate in the -40°C to 85°C temperature range, so it would be suitable for outdoor use as long as it’s not exposed to rain or dust.

• Events

  • Bootlin ☛ Call for papers for OSS Europe, ELC Europe, Zephyr Developer Summit: until April 14

    Aside from the upcoming Embedded Recipes conference in Nice on May 14-16, one of the most significant events for the open-source embedded community in Europe will be the Open Source Summit Europe. In particular, its key sub-conferences—the Embedded GNU/Linux Conference (ELC) and the Zephyr Developer Summit—will bring together experts, developers, and enthusiasts.