Devices and Modder-Friendly Hardware: Pimoroni, Arduino, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 03, 2026

• Devices

  • Hackaday ☛ The 2026 EMF Badge Arrives, With An Add-On. As Expected, It’s Familiar

    If you’re going to EMF you should be able to order yourself a Spaceagon, or an upgrade kit if you already own a Tildagon. Meanwhile we covered the 2024 version back when it arrived, and surprisingly this isn’t the first keyboard add-on for it either.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Hackaday ☛ A High-Vacuum Controller For An Eventual Electron Microscope

    The vacuum system itself starts with a rotary-vane roughing pump, which can bring a chamber down from atmospheric pressure to about 10-3 millibar. This is still too high a pressure, so the second stage is a turbomolecular high-vacuum pump, which can operate from 18 millibar down to 10-7 millibar. To protect the turbomolecular pump in case the roughing pump suddenly stops, it includes an anti-suckback valve. Connected to these pumps is a pressure gauge which uses a pair of sensors to sense the entire pressure range. All this setup worked well, but the turbomolecular pump and the pressure sensor each used their own interfaces, while [Chris] wanted a single interface for the eventual microscope.

  • Hackaday ☛ Does Your Terminal Speak Morse? This One Does

    Of course, with most POSIX-compliant systems, you’ll need to alter the script to account for some kind of periferal to do the Morse I/O– not so on the LuckFox Lyra, which has a built-in LED and a single usable button. It actually has two buttons, but one of them is RESET and you can’t use that for anything but its intended purpose. The BOOT button, on the other hand, becomes user input after the system has started. One button, one LED? It’s almost like LuckFox designed this SBC for Morse! Admittedly we’d prefer an audible output, but adding a buzzer would detract from the purity of this implementation.

  • Hackaday ☛ STM32 Handheld Has OpenGL And All The Classics

    Full disclosure: you’ve seen this handheld here before — sorta. That was version 3, which was an STM32-based handheld. V3 used the much less powerful STM32H7S7L8, with a single Cortex-M7 clocked at 600 MHz and a 2D NeoChrom GPU. The STM32MP2, by contrast, has dual Cortex-A35 cores running 1.5 GHz and a bonus Cortex-M33. It’s running a custom OS called gkos, which is mostly POSIX-compliant and boasts nigh-instantaneous boot times.

  • Pimoroni ☛ Tony's "Big I2C Project"

    Tony's I2C project started with a Wireless Plasma Kit and infrared remote kit. He then added four potentiometers, an IO expansion board and an SSD1306 OLED screen. He was keen to have everything controlled by a single, menu driven application and this 128x64 pixel, monochrome screen provides a simple means to do so.

  • Arduino ☛ The Pinecone DAISY-1 is a fantasy 8-bit computer that exists in reality

    This is reminiscent of fantasy video games consoles, such as the PICO-8. More than anything else, it is about recreating the feeling and experience of using an 8-bit personal computer. But unlike the PICO-8, which is really just software that can run on a wide range of hardware, the Pinecone DAISY-1 isn’t separable from its hardware.

    That hardware consists of three different development boards: an Arduino Due (runs the OS and BASIC interpreter), an Arduino Mega 2560 Rev3 (acts as a video processor), and an Arduino UNO Rev3 (does audio processing). The Due communicates with the Mega and the Uno via UART. There is also a separate ESP8266 board pretending to be a modem, giving the DAISY-1 access to Wi-Fi.