Open Hardware/Modding: Jailbreaking, Arduino, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 03, 2026

• CNX Software ☛ WCH CH32H417 dual-core RISC-V MCU offers USB 3.0, 500MB/s UHSIF, and Fast Ethernet interfaces

  WCH CH32H417 is a high-performance dual-core RISC-V microcontroller clocked at up to 400 MHz with up to 960 KB flash, 896KB SRAM, and a range of interfaces, including a 5 Gbps USB 3.0 Host/Device SuperSpeed interface. Other notable features include a 500MB/s UHSIF (Universal High Speed Interface), 10/100Mbps Ethernet MAC and PHY, a SerDes high-speed isolated transceiver, a USB 2.0 High-Speed Host/Device, a USB 2.0 OTG Full Speed, USB PD support, and Display and Camera interfaces. The CH32H417 also offers the usual low-speed I/Os (95x GPIO, SPI…) and analog inputs and outputs (ADC/DAC).

• Hackaday ☛ Qron0b: A Minimalist, Low-Power BCD Wristwatch

  Over the decades we have seen many DIY clocks and wrist watches presented, but few are as likely to get you either drawing in the crowds, or quietly snickered at behind your back, as a binary watch of some description does. A wrist watch like [qewer]’s qron0b project which also uses BCD encoding to display the current time is among our more rare project types here, with us having to go all the way back to 2018 for a similar project as well as a BCD desk clock.

• Hackaday ☛ Jailbreaking The Amazon Echo Show

  As locked-down as the Amazon Echo Show line of devices are, they’re still just ARM-based Android devices, which makes repurposing it somewhat straightforward as long as what you want is another Android device.

• Kyle Kingsbury ☛ No, You Can't (Officially) Reconnect Cut Pieces of Hue Strip Lights

  Lightstrip V4 has been out for six years, but at least as far as Hue’s official product line goes, the statement “Cut pieces can be reconnected” is not true. Hue’s support representative told me that Hue might someday release a connector which allows reconnecting cut pieces. However, that product does not exist yet, and they can’t say when it might be released.

• Jeff Geerling ☛ Testing the Mono Gateway, a custom-built 10 Gbps Router

  Last month, the stars aligned for me to bring the Mono Gateway (a 10 Gbps router that YouTuber Tomaž Zaman and his team at Mono built from scratch) on a trip to Phoenix, and test it with one of the most OP network test boxes I've ever seen, at the ServeTheHome HQ.

  In this video, Patrick (from STH) and I put Gateway through a real-world torture test using CyPerf: [...]

• Arduino ☛ AI automatically preps a bottle when the baby cries

  Manivannan designed this project to work with a Tommee Tippee bottle prepping machine, but you should be able to apply the same principles to any machine that starts with a single button or switch. An Arduino Portenta H7 board starts the machine through a DFRobot Gravity relay module. The only hardware modification required is connecting that relay in parallel with the machine’s start button.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Hackaday ☛ Hackaday Podcast Ep 351: Hackaday Goes To Chaos Communication Congress

    Elliot was of at Europe’s largest hacker convention: Chaos Communication Congress. He had an awesome time, saw more projects than you might think humanely possible, and got the flu. But he pulled through and put this audio tourbook for you.