Hardware: Raspberry Pi, Other SBCs, and non-Apple, non-Google 'Smartphones'

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 02, 2026

• Raspberry Pi Weekly Issue #532 - Take back your cloud

  There’s still time to get a bundle of books worth as much as £149.55 ($222) by paying as little as you like from £0.74 Howdy, A shiny new issue of Raspberry Pi Official Magazine landed yesterday, complete with a smashing front cover and a main feature showing you how to "take back your cloud" with private online file sharing, an office suite, music streaming, and more.

• CNX Software ☛ ESP-FLY DIY Kit is a tiny ESP32-S3-based DIY micro drone kit

  ESP-FLY DIY kit is a miniature DIY drone kit based on Seeed Studio’s XIAO ESP32-S3 board that was initially introduced as a DIY project on Instructables by Max Imagination, but is now available as a complete kit for $59.99 on Seeed Studio. It’s certainly not the first ESP32 drone, but the ESP-FLY drone must be the smallest, as the miniature (67 x 67 x 31mm) quadcopter design allows users to store into any pocket or small boxes.

• Raspberry Pi ☛ Typeframe PS-85 cyberdeck

  Scrapping the idea, he turned his attention to a new build, which he named the Typeframe PX-88. Inspired by the Epson PX-4 computer from 1985 and built around a Raspberry Pi 4, it featured a 65 percent mechanical keyboard and a touchscreen. It worked so well that Jeff decided he wanted to develop more projects with Raspberry Pi. “I had not worked with any single-board computers before (or Linux in years), but found Raspberry Pi’s large and established ecosystem made figuring things out easier,” he tells us.

• Digital Camera World ☛ This YouTuber has "created a Ricoh GR IV clone for $200"

  "With this camera and lens combination, we now have a small mirrorless camera much like the Ricoh GR IV with the same 28mm full-frame field of view as the Ricoh GR IV's fixed lens. However, these cameras are far from equal in every way."

• Hackaday ☛ Adapting A 100-Year-Old Lens To A Modern Camera

  The optic in question is a 100-year old lens—a Foth 50 mm f2.5 to be precise, originally used with a folding film camera. It was sourced from a market for just 3 euros. Notably, the lens was not designed for modern cameras, and so lacks an aperture and focusing mechanism. [Mathieu] thus had to fabricate something to fit the lens to a Sony FX3. A first attempt used an aperture adapter from Amazon and an elcoid adapter, but there were vignetting problems due to the lens placement in this case. Ultimately, [Mathieu] went with a special macro adapter that allowed him to control focus and tuck in an ND filter behind the lens, which made up for the lack of an aperture.

• Ruben Schade ☛ Testing the Commodore 64 250466 board

  Before testing though, a few of you asked for a better comparison between the longboard and newer shortboard variants of the Commodore 64 motherboard. Here’s a (slighly!) better top-down view with my “new” longboard above, and the newer 252311 below: [...]

• Jeff Geerling ☛ SBC Clusters are a terrible value, but they're fun anyway

  I decided to populate the Super4C DeskPi sent me to test with four 16GB CM5s I got last year, back when they were $125 each. They're about $300 today, after the latest round of price increases.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • The Register UK ☛ Where to buy a non-Apple, non-Google smartphone

    As both Apple and Google introduce unwelcome changes in their phone OSes, here's a quick reminder that you do have alternatives to the Gruesome Twosome.

    The Keep Android Open campaign is gathering attention and support as the big red numbers on its page count down. The good news is that you do already have alternatives, and The Register has been reporting on them. But if you are not the sort of person who reads phone reviews, or writeups of alternative phone OSes, and just wants to buy a new handset and retain control of it and its contents, we thought it might be a good time to remind you of where to go and who to talk to.

    At the time of writing, the campaign says it's 123 days until Google's new measures preventing you from side-loading your own software will kick in.