Open Hardware/Modding: Arduino, RP2350B, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 23, 2025

• The Register UK ☛ Emulator developer releases expansive Intel 286 test suite

  "The real-mode test suite contains 326 instruction forms," developer and vintage computing enthusiast Daniel Balsom explains of his latest open source release, "containing nearly 1.5 million instruction executions with over 32 million cycle states captured. Each test provides initial and final CPU states including registers and memory. Each test also includes cycle activity for each instruction, including the values of the address and data buses, bus controller signals, miscellaneous pin status, and processor T-state [individual cycle states]."

  In short, it's a wealth of data the likes of which the world hasn't seen outside of an Intel lab in the early 1980s, painstakingly gathered through exhaustive effort and more than a little ingenuity.

• Arduino ☛ This robot picks locks using brains instead of brawn

  In this case, “smarter” meant deducing the pin lengths instead of trying all of the combinations in sequence. The technique used by the robot to perform that deduction is what makes this project so interesting.

• SparkFun Electronics ☛ It's a DE9, Not a DB9. (But We Know What You Mean)

  With the release of our new DE9 Connector Breakouts, we wanted to address a common misconception and explain why we named our boards as we did.

• Marcin Juszkiewicz ☛ Arm desktop: emulation

  This post is part 5 of the "Let me try to use an AArch64 system as a desktop" series: [...]

• Ken Shirriff ☛ Reverse engineering the mysterious Up-Data Link Test Set from Apollo

  Back in 2021, a collector friend of ours was visiting a dusty warehouse in search of Apollo-era communications equipment. A box with NASA-style lights caught his eye—the "AGC Confirm" light suggested a connection with the Apollo Guidance Computer. Disappointingly, the box was just an empty chassis and the circuit boards were all missing. He continued to poke around the warehouse when, to his surprise, he found a bag on the other side of the warehouse that contained the missing boards! After reuniting the box with its wayward circuit cards, he brought it to us: could we make this undocumented unit work?

• Celso Martinho ☛ Assembling a Retro Chip Tester Pro - Celso Martinho

  I’ve been considering adding a chip tester to my lab for some time now, but I’ve never quite taken the plunge. BackBit, whom I know well because I have a BackBit Pro cartridge that I use to load software onto my 8-bit computers, has the Chip Tester Pro V2. I was close to buying one, but I found it somewhat expensive, and importing it from the US didn’t help, so I waited.

• Olimex ☛ RP2350pc now have Plastic Box

  RP2350pc is all in one computer with RP2350B microcontroller from Raspberry pi. It have 4 USB hosts, USB-C for programming, USB-C for power supply, ON/OFF switch, Two UEXT connectors, DVI/HDMI output and Audio input and output including Audio amplifier. The board have internal LiPo charger and step up converter and can work on Lipo battery when power supply is removed.

• Marcin Juszkiewicz ☛ Marcin 'hrw' Juszkiewicz: Arm desktop: emulation

  Whenever people use a non-x86 system, sooner or later someone asks: “But can it run [name of x86-64 only binary]?”. So, let’s check how to make it possible.

  Software stack

  When you look for ‘how to run x86-64 apps on Fedora/Arm’, you usually end up with Asahi’s documentation about it.

  It is a good thing to read to understand the stack. But if your Arm system runs a 4K page size kernel, then most of that documentation can be skipped. You would not need muvm nor binfmt-dispatcher packages.

• Kali Linux ☛ The Raspberry Pi's Wi-Fi Glow-Up

  Thanks to Nexmon and fresh Kali packages, onboard wireless is ready for monitor mode and injection (again!).

  Kali GNU/Linux users on Raspberry Pi now have an improved and more integrated way to use the onboard Wi-Fi interface for wireless assessments. While the Nexmon project has long made this technically possible, our support in Kali has recently been refined.

  In Kali 2025.1, with the move to a newer Raspberry Pi kernel and a chance to revisit our packaging, we have cleaned up and formalized support for Nexmon through new packages. This not only improves the setup experience and adds support for more devices, including the Raspberry Pi 5, but also makes it easier to enable other hardware supported by Nexmon within Kali.

• David Bremner: Hibernate on the pocket reform 9/n