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Open Hardware/Modding: RISC-V, Raspberry Pi, and More
CNX Software ☛ RVA23-compliant K3 Pico-ITX SBC and K3-CoM260 SoM feature SpacemiT K3 octa-core RISC-V Hey Hi (AI) SoC, up to 32GB RAM, 256GB UFS
SpacemiT has now officially launched the K3 Pico-ITX SBC and K3-CoM260 system-on-module with the RVA23-compliant, SpacemiT K3 octa-core X100 CPU with up to 60 TOPS of Hey Hi (AI) performance, up to 32GB LPDDR5, 256GB UFS, and PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe SSD support. The board also features an eDP connector, a 10GbE SFP+ cage, a Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 port, built-in WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 wireless connectivity, two USB Type-C connectors, four USB 2.0 ports, an M.2 Key-B socket coupled with a NanoSIM card slot for 4G LTE or 5G cellular connectivity, and more.
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CNX Software ☛ Pi Slate – A Raspberry Pi 5 handheld GNU/Linux cyberdeck with a 5-inch 1920×720 touchscreen display
We previously wrote about Carbon’s CyberT, a Blackberry-style Raspberry Pi CM4 handheld GNU/Linux cyberdeck designed for Kali GNU/Linux and penetration testing. The company, now operating under the CyberArch/Carbon Computers brand, has introduced the Pi Slate, a more powerful handheld cyberdeck designed for portable computing and security-focused applications. Built around the Raspberry Pi 5, the Pi Slate integrates a 5-inch 1920×720 touchscreen, a backlit RGB keyboard with an integrated cursor, and a 10,000 mAh battery for 3–5 hours of portable use in a compact enclosure.
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Raspberry Pi ☛ Maker Monday: Some of the best RP2350-based boards
The RP2350 microcontroller is the brains of Raspberry Pi Pico 2, along with a host of third-party boards. RP2350 features dual Arm Cortex-M33 processors running at 150MHz, 520KB of on-chip SRAM, and twelve PIO state machines. So, compared with the RP2040 microcontroller from the original Raspberry Pi Pico, it offers a major performance boost for handling more complex computational tasks. It’s no wonder it’s been used in such a wide range of third-party boards and devices — you can check out the full selection in the Powered by Raspberry Pi product catalogue.
We’ll be taking a look at a few of the most interesting ones here, equipped with a variety of special features such as battery power inputs, extra GPIO pins and connectors, motor/servo controllers, Ethernet ports, IMUs, and even mini LCD touchscreens.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Tiny credit card computer includes eInk screen and is just 1mm thick — Muxcard is powered by the ESP32-C3 microcontroller
The maker admits the Muxcard prototype is 1mm thick as it now stands. The official ISO/IEC 7810 ID‑1 is for a card of 0.76mm thickness, “but many real-world cards slightly exceed this in practice,” writes krauseler on the GitHub project page. Underlining the adherence to the credit card size, krauseler even uses an old plastic NFC card with most of its volume cut away as the Muxcard chassis.
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Hackaday ☛ It’s A Water Clock, Jim, But Not As We Know It — It Has Digits
It wasn’t the original idea– well, the bottles were the original concept, but flipping them was not. Dumping the bottles has the advantage of not needing oodles of pumps or taking five minutes to sequentially fill and drain the bottles at each digit. The linkage to get the servo to flip all nine bottles in one go took some troubleshooting– we can relate, since the physical half of such projects usually is the hard part– but after many modifications the 3D printed mechanism worked, and we think the results are worth it.
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Bernd “beko” Kosmahl ☛ Got myself a little downtime here. No…
Got myself a little downtime here. Not sure what’s going on but the system SSD threw IO errors and the LVM switched to read-only as a result. I’m kinda amazed that the system kept chugging along like that at all. Anyway, a long SMART self-test came back clean and the system reboots fine. Just to end up in read-only again after a few hours. Sadly disks are really very expensive currently so I grabbed an older SSD 840 EVO from the pile and set the system up again this morning. That’s also not a disk designed for 24/7 but that doesn’t really matter for my use-case here. Biggest headache was Debian renaming network interfaces *yet again* so I had to figure out what was going on when no link could be detected.
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Arduino ☛ This futuristic-looking dustbin features a motion-activated iris mechanism
That iris magic happens thanks to a pretty simple gear ring mechanism actuated by a small hobby servo motor. That servo motor operates under the control of an Arduino Nano board, which tells the servo to spin when it sees motion through an ultrasonic sensor. To avoid external wires, power comes from an 18650 lithium battery with a voltage booster to get clean 5V to the Arduino and servo motor. A custom PCB designed by Singh ties those components together in a compact package.