Devices, Open Hardware, and Mobile With Linux

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 31, 2026

• Devices

  • Hackaday ☛ Poking Around With JTAG On A Guitar Amp

    You would think a guitar amplifier would be a straightforward piece of analog electronics. But, of course, these days, everything has firmware, including [mforney]’s Yamaha THR10c. The service manual showed both a UART and JTAG header on the schematic, so as many of us would, he took that as a challenge.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Hackaday ☛ Testing Various Ways To Waterproof FDM Printed Parts

    Along with layer lines, FDM printers are notorious for being neither air- nor water-tight due to the countless very small gaps between the layers. This is very unfortunate if you are trying to FDM print something that should keep water either inside or outside. Although a variety of potential solutions exist, it’s hard to easily compare them. Correspondingly [Half-Baked-Research] decided that the best approach here was to just try everything and pit them against each other.

  • Hackaday ☛ The Uncooperative Mirror Will Not Help You

    The value of a mirror is in its clarity. If the reflection is cast by [danicakostic17]’s Uncooperative Mirror though, you’ll find anything but. It’s described as a useless machine, because it appears as a tiled mirror. As you approach it though, the tiles shake around and make it very difficult to follow what’s in front of you. It’s an art piece and a prank all in one, and we like it.

  • Hackaday ☛ It’s Another Pi Handheld. But It’s A Really Good One

    The device is a Compute Module 5 smartphone sized computer with a 3.92″ OLED touch display and the ubiquitous BlackBerry-derived keyboard. It’s drawn together with a PCB that holds all components and peripherals, and this and the 5000 mAH battery fit in a 3D printed shell that gives it the form factor of a chunky smartphone. You can see it at the link above, and also find it in a GitHub repository.

  • Mario Zechner ☛ How to build a shitty robot

    Last Friday I went to the toy store with my boy, and while he was rummaging through the Spider-Man section, my eyes caught sight of a section with very low-cost toy robots.

    As I'm playing with agents, LLMs, speech-to-text, and text-to-speech, I thought: why not buy myself one of these low-cost robots, take it apart, and turn it into a fun little LLM-powered toy for my kid and possibly the other kids in the hood?

  • Tymscar ☛ I Put a Datacenter GPU in My Gaming PC for £200

    I already had an RTX 4080. 16GB of VRAM. Good enough for gaming, not good enough for the models I wanted to run locally. The next step up in GPU land is either spend a fortune on a card with more VRAM, or find another way.

    I found another way.

    I bought a datacenter GPU that doesn’t even have a normal PCIe connector, stuck it in my gaming PC with an adapter, and now I have 32GB of VRAM across two GPUs running a 27 billion parameter model at 32 tokens per second. The whole thing cost me £200.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • HowTo Geek ☛ I figured out how to run my favorite Linux TUI music player on Android, and it's better than any app on the Play Store

    If you spend a lot of time working in the Terminal, you undoubtedly have your favorite CLI (command line interface) and TUI (terminal or text-based user interface) apps. One of mine is a TUI app called cmus.

    Cmus has a text-based user interface with minimal graphics and customization options. It's also one of the best music players I've ever used, with easy organization (in conjunction with another method I use) and simple playback.

    I've been spending considerable time with Termux on both of my Android phones and came up with a bright idea: getting my favorite TUI apps to work on both of my Android phones.