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Retro/Open Hardware/Modding: RISC-V, Arduino, and More
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This is how Fairphone is supporting KLABU Sports Clubhouses in refugee communities around the world
In case you missed it, Fairphone has teamed up with the non-profit KLABU, who are driving positive impact through the power of sport. KLABU builds clubhouses in refugee camps around the world, creating a space to connect, play and find friends for community members.
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Ruben Schade ☛ The COMIX-35, a reimagined COMX-35
How am I only just realising this kit exists!?
The COMIX-35 is an open-source clone of the 1980s COMX-35 8-bit home computer. It uses the RCA 1802 microprocessor which is strange and slow but holds the distinction of being the first CMOS microprocessor. The “35” is because the original computer has 32K of main memory + 3K of video RAM.
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CNX Software ☛ Telink ML9118A – A 32-bit RISC-V IoT module with Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.4, and 802.15.4 connectivity
Telink ML9118A is a wireless IoT module with Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.4, and 802.15.4 (Zigbee/Thread/Matter) connectivity designed for smart home, smart lighting, and smart remote control applications. The module also features a 32-bit RISC-V microcontroller clocked at 160 MHz with 576KB SRAM, 4MB flash, and various peripheral interfaces such as SDIO 3.0, 19x GPIOs, I2C, SPI, UART, as well as I2S for audio.
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Arduino ☛ This musical payphone rings on rainy days
We are not robots operating on pure logic and rationality. We’re emotional animals with moods affected by everything from scents to the weather. Estefannie feels down on dreary days, so she built this musical payphone that calls her with a tune to provide a little emotional boost when there is rain.
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Arduino ☛ The new Arduino® Matter Discovery Bundle™ is everything you need to learn, experiment, and build with Matter!
After a sneak peek for visitors at BETT 2026, we are happy to announce the new Arduino® Matter Discovery Bundle™ is out, and available from the Arduino Store today!
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Lyra ☛ x86CSS
x86CSS is a working CSS-only x86 CPU/emulator/computer. Yes, the Cascading Style Sheets CSS. No JavaScript required.
What you're seeing above is a C program that was compiled using GCC into native 8086 machine code being executed fully within CSS.
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Hackaday ☛ Stop Ironing 3D Prints
If you want smooth top surfaces on your 3D printed parts, a common technique is to turn on ironing in your slicer. This causes the head to drag through the top of the part, emitting a small amount of plastic to smooth the surface. [Make Wonderful Things] asserts that you don’t need to do this time-consuming step. Instead, he proposes using statistical analysis to identify the optimal settings to place the top layer correctly the first time, as shown in the video below.
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Hackaday ☛ Control Your Smart Home With Trek-Inspired Comm Badge
It seems worth pointing out that the computer in Star Trek: TNG did have a wake word: “computer”. On the other hand it seemed the badges were used to interface with it just as much as the wake word on screen, so this use case is still show accurate. You can watch it in the demo video below, but alas, at no point does his Home Assistant talk back. We can only hope he’s trained a text-to-speech model to sound like Majel Barrett-Roddenberry. At least it gives the proper “beep” when receiving a command.
This would pair very nicely with the LCARS dashboard we featured in January.
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Hackaday ☛ Building An Interactive Climbing Wall
Structurally, there’s nothing too wild going on here. It’s a wood-framed climbing structure that stands 10 meters long and 2.5 meters high, and can be covered in lots of climbing holds. It’s the electronic side of things where it gets fun. An Arduino Due is installed to run the show, hooked up with a small TFT display and some buttons for control. It’s then hooked up to control a whole bunch of LEDs and some buttons which are scattered all across the wall. It’s also paired with an Arduino Nano which runs sound feedback, and a 433 MHz remote for controlling the system at a distance.
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Ruben Schade ☛ Testing the Gigabyte GA-H170-HD3 motherboard
Last weekend Clara and I found an NZXT tower by the side of the road for bulk council rubbish collection. I took it home, was attacked by a spider, then pulled the case apart for parts I can use on other projects. But one question remained: does the computer itself work? Let’s find out.