Open Hardware/Modding: Raspberry Pi, RISC-V, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 30, 2025

• Hackaday ☛ Fully-Local AI Agent Runs On Raspberry Pi, With A Little Patience

  [Simone]’s AI assistant, dubbed Max Headbox, is a wakeword-triggered local AI agent capable of following instructions and doing simple tasks. It’s an experiment in many ways, but also a great demonstration not only of what is possible with the kinds of open tools and hardware available to a modern hobbyist, but also a reminder of just how far some of these software tools have come in only a few short years.

• Tom's Hardware ☛ Legendary Sound Blaster 2.0 ISA card revived by hardware enthusiast — 1994 relic restored to former glory

  The quick history (more below) is that the Sound Blaster 2.0 was the second iteration of the eponymous card, combining AdLib-compatible FM synth music capability with real, sampled sound output, for arguably the first coherent aural experience in games and multimedia in the era, seeing as it was effectively two cards in one — or three, even with the optional Creative Music System compatibility expansion chips.

• Interesting Engineering ☛ Spider-like robot can 3D print homes in a day to fight housing crunch

  Reportedly, the large hexapod robot can 3D print a 200-square-metre house in 24 hours.

  Charlotte combines robotics and 3D printing to transform raw materials directly into structural walls.

• Colin Leroy-Mira ☛ Optimizing a 6502 image decoder, from 70 minutes to 1 minute

  When I set out to write a program that would allow me to do basic digital photography on the Apple II, I decided I would do it with the Quicktake cameras. It seemed the obvious choice as they were Apple cameras, and their interface to the computer is via serial port.

• Arduino ☛ This chest contains the beating heart of Davy Jones

  The chest built by Grendel Studios isn’t an exact replica of what we see in the movie, but it is similar in all of the important ways and would be instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with the film. When you get close to the chest, you’ll hear the steady beating of a heart. If you have the key, you can insert it into the lock and turn it. When you do, bolts all around the lid will disengage and you’re free to open the chest. Do that and you’ll see a realistic heart thumping away.

• Corsix ☛ RISC-V Conditional Moves

  I'm a big fan of aarch64's csel family of instructions. A single instruction can evaluate rd = cond ? rs1 : f(rs2), where cond is any condition code and f is any of f0(x) = x or f1(x) = x+1 or f2(x) = ~x or or f3(x) = -x. Want to convert a condition to a boolean? Use f1 with rs1 == rs2 == x0. Want to convert a condition to a mask? Use f2 with rs1 == rs2 == x0. Want to compute an absolute value? Use f3 with rs1 == rs2. It is pleasing that the composition of f1 and f2 is f3. I could continue espousing, but hopefully you get the idea.