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Open Hardware/Modding: ESP32, Armbian, and More
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CNX Software ☛ XIAO ePaper DIY Kit – EE02 – An ESP32-S3 board designed for 13.3-inch Spectra 6 color E-Ink display
Seeed Studio’s XIAO ePaper DIY Kit EE02 is an ESP32-S3 WiFi and Bluetooth board designed specifically for the 13.3-inch Spectra 6 color E-Ink display provided by the company. It’s based on a similar design as the XIAO ePaper DIY Kit-EE04 (ESP32-S3) and XIAO ePaper DIY Kit-EN04 (nRF52480) introduced last December, which are suitable for smaller 1.54 to 7.15-inch ePaper displays. Like the previous models, the new EE02 model also includes a battery connector with a power switch, a built-in charging IC, and comes with one reset and three user buttons.
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CNX Software ☛ Home Assistant-compatible Makerfabs ESP32-S3-based energy meter features BL0942 energy metering IC
The Energy Meter for Home Assistant is an ESP32-S3-based single-phase energy monitoring and control module designed to work with Home Assistant via ESPHome. It measures real-time power and energy consumption and also has a remote on/off control. The device is built around the BL0942 calibration-free energy metering IC, which supports voltage, current, power, and energy measurements with less than 1% error. It operates directly from AC 100–240V, includes an onboard 15A relay for switching loads, and provides electrical isolation for safety. Connectivity is done through USB and Wi-Fi using ESPHome for easy firmware flashing, API encryption, and automatic discovery in Home Assistant.
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Hackaday ☛ A UI-Focused Display Library For The ESP32
If you’re building a project on your ESP32, you might want to give it a fancy graphical interface. If so, you might find a display library from [dejwk] to be particularly useful.
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Linux Gizmos ☛ ASUS UGen300 USB Hey Hi (AI) Accelerator targets edge inference with Hailo-10H
ASUS has announced the UGen300 USB Hey Hi (AI) Accelerator, a compact external device designed to add hardware-accelerated machine learning and generative inference capabilities to existing systems over a USB connection. The UGen300 is built around the Hailo Hailo-10H processor, which ASUS rates at up to 40 TOPS (INT4) of inference performance.
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Linux Gizmos ☛ Linux Box Dev Edition brings Armbian GNU/Linux with Home Assistant support
THIRDREALITY’s GNU/Linux Box Dev Edition is a compact smart home gateway aimed at developers, educators, and system integrators working with open-source automation platforms and standard smart home protocols.
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Raspberry Pi Weekly Issue #519 - The first Raspberry Pi Weekly of 2026 is a good 'un
Also featuring possibly *the* coolest Amstrad retrofit we’ve ever seen. Howdy, Welcome to 2026. How's it going so far? I've managed to stick to my resolution to not make any resolutions, so there's that. And without further ado... We blinked and, before we knew it, hundreds of products had been granted Powered by Raspberry Pi status.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Apple-1 ‘Prototype Board #0’ system is expected to fetch $500,000+ at a 50th Anniversary auction — and the firm’s first ever check is valued at the same amount
Boston’s Rare and Remarkable Auctions has begun a blockbuster sale of 191 lots of historic Apple Computer artifacts. The Steve Jobs & the Computer Revolution: The Apple 50th Anniversary Auction sale has kicked off, and will end on January 30. Among the star attractions under the hammer are an Apple-1 ‘Prototype Board #0,’ Apple’s first check, an Apple Computer registered 1989 Jaguar XJS V12 convertible, and several of Steve Jobs personally-owned treasures.
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CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: bunnie’s piggyback hack
The background for this talk is bunnie's obsession with building a trustworthy computer. For decades, bunnie has been chasing the dream of a computer whose every component – operating system, drivers, firmware, and hardware designs – are open to inspection. Bunnie's reasoning here is that anything that can't be inspected (and, by extension, modified) by its users is a spot where bad guys can hide bad stuff, and where lurking bugs can fester until they are exploited by bad guys. Remember the spectacular (and still mysterious) claims that Apple's servers had all been compromised with minuscule hardware bugs? The single best explanation of that you will find comes from bunnie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqQhWitJ1As
Bunnie was doing all this before there was an "open source hardware" movement, and he remains at its vanguard. His "Precursor" project is a reference hardware platform where every component is open to inspection and modification, from the chassis to the random number generator: [...]