Open Hardware/Modding: Homelab, Raspberry Pi, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 20, 2025

• It's FOSS ☛ What Surveillance Giant Google Photos? Self-Hosting Photo Storage with PhotoPrism Using Docker in My Homelab

  PhotoPrism offers one path toward that goal of data ownership. With PhotoPrism, your vacation photos don’t become training data for someone else’s business model. They remain what they actually are, your memories, under your control.

• Tom's Hardware ☛ Prusa Research introduces the Open Community License to protect open source 3D Printing hardware — new rules aimed at addressing industry abuses

  Full STEP and Fusion CAD files for the CORE One+ and CORE One L are now available on Printables under the new OCL license.

• CNX Software ☛ ESP32-P4 learning and prototyping kit features 7-inch touchscreen, comes with 16 modules and Hey Hi (AI) lessons

  Elecrow’s “All-in-One Starter Kit for ESP32-P4” is an open-source learning and prototyping platform based on the ESP32-P4 processor, offering AI, multimedia, and embedded features in a single, self-contained kit designed for students, educational institutions, and developers for rapid prototyping. The open hardware kit integrates a 7-inch touchscreen display, a 2MP camera, and sixteen built-in electronic modules, supported by over 20 structured lessons that progressively cover I/Os, audio, LVGL GUI development, and basic Hey Hi (AI) use cases.

• CNX Software ☛ Raspberry Pi RP2350 devkit features 1.85-inch round touch display, microphone, optional speaker and battery box

  Waveshare RP2350-Touch-LCD-1.85C is a Raspberry Pi RP2350 devkit with a 1.85-inch round touchscreen display with 360×360 resolution, a built-in microphone, a 28-pin GPIO header, and a USB-C port. The RP2350-Touch-LCD-1.85C-BOX model builds on the platform to add a box with a speaker and a 3.7V battery. Both models also come with 16MB SPI flash, a microSD card slot, a 6-axis IMU, a few buttons and LEDs, and UART and I2C expansion connectors. They can be used for HMI solutions using touch, button, and voice recognition inputs, as well as display and audio outputs.

• Hackaday ☛ Attach A Full Size Lens To A Tiny Camera

  The Kodak Charmera is a tiny keychain camera produced by licencing out the name of the famous film manufacturer, and it’s the current must-have cool trinket among photo nerds. Inside is a tiny sensor and a fixed-focus M7 lens, and unlike many toy cameras it has better quality than its tiny package might lead you to expect. There will always be those who wish to push the envelope though, and [微攝 Macrodeon] is here to fit a lens mount for full-size lenses (Chinese language, subtitle translation available).

• CNX Software ☛ Do you need 14 USB ports on your Raspberry Pi 5?

  If you do, then you’re in luck, thanks to the Suptronics X1013 expansion board for the Raspberry Pi 5, which adds ten USB ports for a total of fourteen USB ports! The board connects to the 16-pin FFC PCIe connector of the Raspberry Pi 5 and adds four USB 3.0 ports and four USB 2.0 ports on the right of the Ethernet+USB side of the Pi 5, plus two extra USB 2.0 ports on the opposite side.

• Hackaday ☛ 915 MHz Forecast: Rolling Your Own Offline Weather Station

  There are a lot of options for local weather stations; most of them, however, are sensors tied to a base station, often requiring an internet connection to access all features. [Vinnie] over at vinthewrench has published his exploration into an off-grid weather station revolving around a Raspberry Pi and an RTL-SDR for communications.

• Hackaday ☛ Decapsulating A PIC12F683 To Examine Its CMOS Implementation

  In a recent video, [Andrew Zonenberg] takes us through the process of decapsulating a PIC12F683 to take a peak at its CMOS implementation.

• Hackaday ☛ Cheap 3D Printer Becomes CNC Wood Engraver

  3D printers are built for additive manufacturing. However, at heart, they are really just simple CNC motion platforms, and can be readily repurposed to other tasks. As [Arseniy] demonstrates, it’s not that hard to take a cheap 3D printer and turn it into a viable wood engraver.

• Hackaday ☛ Improving The Cloud Chamber

  Want to visualize radioactive particles? You don’t need a boatload of lab equipment. Just a cloud chamber. And [Curious Scientist] is showing off an improved miniature cloud chamber that is easy to replicate using a 3D printer and common components.

• CNX Software ☛ LILYGO T-Echo Plus off-grid LoRa communicator features a climbing hook for hiking, cycling, and remote communication

  The LILYGO T-Echo Plus is another off-grid LoRa communicator, similar to Blackout Comms, ThinkNode M2, and Wio Tracker L1 Pro, but it features a metal attachment loop (designed like a climbing hook) for use in hiking, cycling, and off-grid environments.

• Liliputing ☛ Radxa Dragon Q6A is an Arm-based single-board PC with Windows and Linux support

  The Radxa Dragon Q6A is a credit card-sized computer that looks a lot like a Raspberry Pi. But it’s an interesting little device for a few reasons. One is that it has an m.2 slot with support for PCIe 3.0 x2 2230 SSDs. And another is that this little computer is powered by a Qualcomm DragonWing QCS6490 processor.