Devices: Robotics, Raspberry Pi, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 25, 2025

• ROS Industrial ☛ Scan-N-Plan Workshop Documentation Refresh

  Scan-N-Plan technologies provide tools for real-time robot trajectory planning based on 3D scan data, addressing the limitations of traditional industrial robot programming methods like teach-pendant programming or offline simulation. This approach is ideal for applications where: [...]

• Igalia ☛ Juan A. Suarez: Major Upgrades to the Raspberry Pi GPU Driver Stack (XDC 2025 Recap)

  XDC 2025 happened at the end of September, beginning of October this year, in Kuppelsaal, the historic TU Wien building in Vienna. XDC, The X.Org Developer’s Conference, is truly the premier gathering for open-source graphics development. The atmosphere was, as always, highly collaborative and packed with experts across the entire stack.

• Hackaday ☛ Build Yourself A Medium-Format Camera

  Medium format cameras have always been a step up from those built in the 35 mm format. By virtue of using a much larger film, they offer improved resolution and performance. If you want a medium format film camera, you can always hunt for some nice vintage gear. Or, you could build one from scratch — like the MRF2 from [IDENTIDEM.design.]

• CNX Software ☛ Taradov’s open-source hardware pocket USB sniffer works with Wireshark

  Alex Taradov has designed a low-cost, open-source hardware USB sniffer compatible with the popular Wireshark packet capture utility, and also controllable from the command line, capturing data in the standard PcapNG format in either case. Wireshark has had built-in USB capture capability for many years, and I used it myself to reverse-engineer the software for a USB video capture card around 2007, but it’s not perfect since it does not capture low-level packets. For that, you need extra hardware, and last year we covered the tinysniffer USB sniffer based on a WiFi-connected GNU/Linux SBC.

• Hackaday ☛ Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Elegant Macro Pad

  Some people are not merely satisfied with functionality, or even just good looks. These persnickety snoots (I am one of them) seek something elegant, a true marriage of form and function.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Kevin Boone ☛ Kevin Boone: De-bloating and de-Googling an Android device using Canta

    Canta is an interesting, open-source Android app for disabling unwanted apps and services, when there’s no easy way to do this using the standard user interface. While Canta, and its supporting infrastructure, will work on a rooted handset, and there are certain advantages to using it this way, in this article I’m assuming that you can’t root, or don’t want to. I’m also assuming that you can’t, or don’t want to, install a custom firmware like LineageOS or GrapheneOS. Canta can’t (so far as I can see) do anything that you can’t do using the adb utility, but it’s potentially more convenient.

    Canta is the work, more-or-less single-handed, of Samo Hribar. The app and the website do solicit donations but, so far as I can tell, there is no sponsorship or advertising. So, while Canta isn’t perfect, it’s still an impressive achievement, and a public service.