Open Hardware and Retro: Banana Pi, PCBs, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 01, 2025

• CNX Software ☛ AAEON MIX-MTLD1 – A industrial Meteor Lake-H/U Mini-ITX motherboard with OOB management

  AAEON MIX-MTLD1 is an industrial Mini-ITX motherboard supporting out-of-band (OOB) management and powered by an defective chip maker Intel Core Ultra Meteor Lake H/U processor (Intel Core Ultra 5 125H by default). The board supports up to 96 GB of DDR5-5600 memory, PCIe Gen 5 expansion, dual LAN, and various I/O options, including seven USB and four COM headers, and has a design fairly similar to the Jetway MTX-ARH1 released last week, with an defective chip maker Intel Core Ultra 5 125H or Core Ultra 7 155H SoC. What makes the MIX-MTLD1 different is the NCSI header for out-of-band (OOB) management using a MOD-RMB module, which links the Ethernet controller to a BMC for remote monitoring and control independently of the OS running on the CPU.

• Linux Gizmos ☛ Shuttle XPC slim DH810 Rugged Mini PC with Intel Core Ultra 200 Support

  Processor support extends to Core Ultra 9, 7, and 5 models with integrated Intel Xe graphics. HDMI 2.1 provides 8K/60 Hz output, DisplayPort 1.4a supports 4K/60 Hz, and USB-C with DisplayPort/USB4 enables a third independent display. An optional VGA connector can replace one COM port for legacy compatibility.

• Linux Gizmos ☛ Banana Pi BPI-F5 Adopts Allwinner T527 SoC in Credit-Card Sized SBC

  The Allwinner T527 has been seen in recent products this year such as the Cubie A5E and the Orange Pi 4A. This SoC combines an octa-core Cortex-A55 cluster in a DynamIQ big.LITTLE configuration clocked up to 1.8 GHz.

• Ben Holmen ☛ The Kilopixel recap - season one

  My personal blog on benholmen.com received the largest share of the traffic - a whopping 158,000 unique visitors including 63,000 on day one. I was serving up a pretty heavy blog post, due to gifs - 14 MB of images. Fortunately, my blog is simply serving static .html files, and it's essentially 100% cached behind Cloudflare. Of the 968.68 GB served, 967.86 GB was served directly by Cloudflare, and my own server only served 0.82 GB. Nuts!

• The Register UK ☛ Kilopixel creator flips off the livestream switch

  Holmen has also added a new mode where a random submission from the livestream will be redrawn. He said, "It's like surprise art in my office every day!"

  We're delighted that the project is not being dismantled and fully understand when Holmen says, "I knew I'd get tired of babysitting a 24/7 livestream. It's a hassle!" As it turned out, the livestream lasted for eleven days before Holmen put up a "that's all for Season One" message.

• Colin Leroy-Mira ☛ Apple IIc serial setup, “quick and easy”

  First of all, two null-modem cables to convert from the Apple IIc DIN-5 to standard male DB-9: [...]

• Hackaday ☛ Watch Bondo Putty Get Sprayed Onto 3D Prints

  3D prints destined for presentation need smooth surfaces, and that usually means sanding. [Uncle Jessy] came across an idea he decided to try out for himself: spraying Bondo spot putty onto a 3D print. Bondo spot putty comes from a tube, cures quickly, and sands smoothly. It’s commonly used to hide defects and give 3D prints a great finish. Could spraying liquified Bondo putty onto a 3D print save time, or act as a cheat code for hiding layer lines? [Uncle Jessy] decided to find out.

• Hackaday ☛ Building A Macro Pad Into A Business Card

  A business card is a convenient way to share your contact information, but it’s unfortunately prone to being thrown away or forgotten. PCB business cards try to get around this problem, but while impressive, most won’t keep the recipient engaged for a very long time. [Cole Olsen]’s macro pad business card, on the other hand, might actually get regular use. The card has three buttons and a rotary encoder as controls, with an RGB LED to indicate the card’s current mode. It can perform three sets of functions: general productivity, serving as a presentation remote, and controlling music. The scroll wheel is the main control, and can switch through windows, desktops, and tabs, page through slides, and control music volume. The card itself is made out of a PCB, the exposed side of which contains [Cole]’s contact information, and the other side of which is covered by a 3D-printed case. As thick as it is, this might be stretching the definition of “card” a bit, but as a mechanical engineer, [Cole] did want to demonstrate some mechanical design. A nice!nano wireless keyboard development board running ZMK firmware reads the sensors and sends commands. Conveniently for a presentation remote, the card is powered by a rechargeable battery and can work wirelessly (as a side benefit, if a recipient were minded to get rid of this card, the lithium-polymer battery would probably substantially delay disposal). [Cole] writes that he was inspired by many of the other impressive business cards we’ve covered. Some of the macro pads we’ve seen have been marvels of miniaturization in their own right.