Open Hardware/Modding: Hacking, Repairing, and Customising

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 15, 2026

• Hackster ☛ This Pink Toy Laptop Is Actually a Fully Functional Arch Linux Machine

  Why do kids get to have all the fun? They spend their days playing while we adults waste our lives in an office. Adding insult to injury, kids even get tech devices with more interesting and unique designs. Those laptops from VTech and LeapFrog are way cooler than the cookie-cutter black and silver rectangles adults have to choose from.

  Of course, things don’t look quite so good for kids once you look inside their electronics. If you want to do anything more than run a lemonade stand, these gadgets just aren’t going to cut it. An embedded software engineer named Kati loved the style of the VTech Lern und Musik Laptop so much that she decided to upgrade its hardware so she could use it as a real computer. Score one for the adults!

• Tom's Hardware ☛ Louis Rossmann taunts Bambu Lab by hosting banned 3D Printer firmware fork, dares $1 billion company to sue him — more creators pledge support and boycotts, Snapmaker donates equipment to embattled developer

  Louis Rossmann posted yet another YouTube video taunting the 3D printing juggernaut into taking legal action. In the video, he stated the contentious fork of OrcaSlicer-BambuLab was now hosted on his own FULU (Freedom from Unethical Limitations) Foundation Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub .

• CNX Software ☛ PortaRF single board SDR mixes HackRF One and PortaPack H4M hardware, adds Hey Hi (AI) voice control

  Designed by OpenSourceSDRLab, the PortaRF is an open-source software-defined radio (SDR) that integrates HackRF One and the PortaPack H4M into a single device. It’s a standalone device that supports transmitting and receiving radio signals from 1 MHz to 6 GHz. Traditionally, a portable HackRF setup meant stacking a PortaPack on top of the main board. PortaRF replaces this with a single PCB, making it more compact, easier to use, and with improved signal quality.

• Linux Gizmos ☛ Wireless-Tag previews IDO Claw ARM platform with OpenClaw pre-installed

  Kickstarter recently featured the IDO Claw campaign, a compact ARM-based system from Wireless-Tag designed for local OpenClaw deployment. The fanless platform combines the Rockchip RK3576 processor with LPDDR5 memory, onboard storage, dual Gigabit Ethernet, and hardware video acceleration for always-on AI and edge workloads.

• Hackaday ☛ Controlling A Vibrobot With Only One Motor

  The robot which [Namaskar] built was based on an ESP-01F microcontroller, which let it be remote-controlled over Wi-Fi. It used a DRF8212 motor driver to control a vibrating pager motor, which was housed inside a 3D-printed enclosure. To move in a straight line, the ESP-01F switches the motor’s direction every 250 milliseconds, which still produces a slightly erratic movement. It can, however, approximately follow a traced path.

• Hackaday ☛ RS-485 Sprinkler Control: Scaling Irrigation Across The Farm

  Building your own sprinkler system controller isn’t that difficult on the face of it, but what happens when your system starts to grow, adding more distant areas? To tackle this, [Vinnie] leveraged the tried-and-true RS-485 differential pairs to communicate reliably with ever-more-spread-out valves on his farm’s irrigation system.

• CNX Software ☛ Clawdmeter – A DIY ESP32-S3 desk dashboard for Claude Code token usage monitoring

  Clawdmeter is a DIY ESP32-S3-powered desk dashboard that displays Claude Code token usage on a 2.16-inch AMOLED screen so you know when you’re about to reach the limits in real time. It’s mostly a firmware project since it relies on off-the-shelf hardware (Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-AMOLED-2.16).

• Cobb ☛ Game Boy Pocket Repair Failure

  And here was where I made my first mistake. Instead of taking one apart and working on it until I either fixed it or broke it beyond repair, I opened them both.