Open Hardware/Modding: STM32U575, PCIe Over Fiber, and Orange Pi 6 Plus

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 12, 2026

• CNX Software ☛ $15 STM32U575 development board features FPC display connector, microSD card slot, two 48-pin GPIO headers

  A few days ago, we looked at the WeAct Studio STM32U585CIU6 development board, which features an ultra-low-power STM32U5 Cortex-M33 MCU and was added to MicroPython v1.28.

• Hackaday ☛ What’s Your Favorite Kind Of Hack?

  And that got me thinking about “kinds of hacks” in general. Do we have a classification scheme for the hacks that we see here on Hackaday? For instance, the obvious precursor to many of Tom’s favorite hacks is the breaking-into-the-locked-firmware hack, where a device that didn’t want you loading your own firmware on it is convinced to let you do so. Junk-hacking is probably also a category of its own, where instead of finding your prey on AliExpress, you find it on eBay, or in the alleyway. And the save-it-from-the-landfill repair and renovation hacks are close relatives.

• Hackaday ☛ A Suction-Driven Seven-Segment Display

  Each segment in the display is made of a cavity behind a silicone sheet; when a vacuum is applied, the front sheet is pulled into the cavity. A vacuum-controlled switch (much like a transistor, as we’ve covered before) connects to the cavity, so that each segment can be latched open or closed. Each segment has two control lines: one to pressurize or depressurize the cavity, and one to control the switch. The overall display has four seven-segment digits, with seven common data lines and four control lines, one for each digit.

• Hackaday ☛ Implementing PCIe Over Fiber Using SFP Modules

  The test setup involves a Raspberry Pi 5 on a PCIe breakout board and a PCIe card connected to the whole QSFP intermediate link with custom SFP module PCBs for muxing between PCIe edge connector or USB 3.0 connectors to use those cheap crypto miner adapter boards. The fiber is just simple single-mode fiber. Using this a Gen 2 x1 link can be created without too much fuss, demonstrating the basic principle.

• [Old] Eli Billauer ☛ PCIe over fiber optics notes (using SFP+)

  When a general-purpose host computer is used, at least one PCIe switch is required in order to ensure that the optical link is based upon a steady, non-spread spectrum clock. If an FPGA is used as a single endpoint at the other side of the link, it can be connected directly to the SFP+ adapter, with the condition that the FPGA’s PCIe block is set to asynchronous clock mode.

  Since my project involved more than one endpoint on the far end (an FPGA and USB 3.0 chip), I went for the solution of one PCIe switch on each end. Avago’s PEX 8606, to be specific.

• Rui Carmo ☛ The Orange Pi 6 Plus

  This was a long one–I spent a fair bit of time with the Orange Pi 6 Plus over the past few months, and what I expected to be a quick look at another fast ARM board turned into one of those test runs where the hardware looks promising on paper, the software is wonky in exactly the wrong places, and you end up diving far more into boot chains, vendor GPU blobs and inference runtimes than you ever intended.

• Argon 40 Technologies Ltd ☛ Argon ONE UP CM5 Laptop Core System – Argon 40 Designs

  It’s not just a dev board in a case — it’s a full-featured laptop engineered from the ground up to offer a true third option in a world dominated by Intel and Apple.