Open Hardware: Raspberry Pi, RISC-V, Arduino, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 11, 2026

• CNX Software ☛ OpenCV 5 release – New DNN engine with enhanced ONNX and LLM/VLM support, Intel, Arm, and RISC-V hardware optimizations

  OpenCV 5 open-source computer vision library has recently been released with a brand-new DNN (Deep Neural Network) engine that provides better ONNX coverage and enables LLM/VLM support. The fifth version of the popular CV library also adds support for Intel, Arm, Qualcomm, and RISC-V hardware acceleration, improved 3D vision, and various new core features such as new data types, real N-dimensional and scalar support, and performance improvements. OpenCV 5’s DNN Engine OpenCV 4.x supports about 22% of ONNX operators, and the new DNN engine in OpenCV 5 brings coverage to over 80%.  That means models with dynamic shapes that used to fail on OpenCV 4.x, should now work, as the 5.x engine was rebuilt around a typed operation graph with proper shape inference, constant folding, and operator fusion.

• Adafruit ☛ NEW LEARN GUIDE: Use Blinka in Ubuntu Core on Raspberry Pi #Sensors #AdafruitLearningSystem @Adafruit

  Ubuntu Core is an OS intended for use on devices embedded within commercial products or industrial equipment. It’s very locked down by default. It runs on lots of different hardware, this new guide focuses on Raspberry Pi 3, 4, and 5 devices. It is a very different kind of OS than the traditional Raspberry Pi OS, which is aimed at students, hobbyists, and tinkerers. The locked down nature can make the development iteration cycle slower and more tedious than traditional Pi OS. Ubuntu Cores strengths really shine most after you’ve already got a project functioning how you want under a more traditional OS like Pi OS or Ubuntu Server/Desktop and you are ready to deploy somewhere remote.

• CNX Software ☛ Altera Agilex 9 Direct RF-Series AGRW039 SoC FPGA targets high-performance RF systems

  Altera’s wideband Agilex 9 Direct RF-Series AGRW039 SoC FPGA is designed for high-performance Radio Frequency (RF) systems in aerospace, defense, and advanced communications systems. It is the fourth device in Altera’s Agilex 9 Direct RF-Series, and compared to the previous generation AGRW027, the new AGRW039 delivers about 45% more logic resources, 45% more DSP resources, and 43% more block RAM. It also integrates a 64Gsps wideband RF, a hard quad-core Cortex-A53 processor, and supports DDR5 and LPDDR5 memory.

• Raspberry Pi ☛ Small device, big business: can a Raspberry Pi replace your desktop PC?

  In the latest episode of the Raspberry Pi Podcast, Ken Okolo sits down with Simon Burgess from Raspberry Pi’s commercial team to dig into how Raspberry Pi performs as a desktop PC. From Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 to the all-in-one keyboard computer Raspberry Pi 500+, Simon walks us through the full desktop line-up and explains why organisations like McDonald’s in South America and learning centres across the UK are deploying them at scale.

• Hackaday ☛ Re-Enable All Compute Units On The PS5-like BC-250 Cryptomining Card

  The custom APU at the core of Sony’s PlayStation 5 hasn’t just been quietly powering these game consoles, but also made their way onto cryptomining cards around 2023 which are called the BC-250. The APUs on these boards differ from the one found in the PS5 most notably by having two out of eight CPU cores disabled, along with many compute units (CUs) of the iGPU. Now apparently it seems that you can re-enable these CUs per instructions by [duggasco] if you’re feeling adventurous.

• Hackaday ☛ Giving A Power Mac G4 A USB Upgrade, For Free!

  The hack lies in Apple shipping the machine with an NEC USB 2.0 controller, but only using it for USB 1.1. A PowerPC Linux distro will happily use it for USB 2.0, but Mac OS refused. Replacing the BIOS ROM with an image designed for the same Mac without Firewire 800 cured the problem, but at the expense of being so we’re told irreversible.

• Hackaday ☛ Pi Media Player With VCR Vibe Is Perfect For CRTs

  Don’t let the name fool you, though. While the blue-and-white styling is very evocative of 90s VCRs, the output isn’t limited to 240p. If you’re running it into a vintage CRT over composite, as [Anthony] does, sure, it’ll do that. If you want to use HDMI on a modern TV, however, that’s an option too, in 4K if that’s your jam. Higher resolution video will need a beefier Pi, of course, but MPV can handle the files, and ultimately this is a wrapper for MPV. You still get the vintage styling, which can do green-and-black as easily as white-and-blue, as well as whatever custom color scheme you want to define. It might not look quite as good if it’s not on a display tube, but we could see this as a good fit for a plasma TV, too.

• Hackaday ☛ DIY CO2 Scrubber In DIY Sub By A Hacker Braver Than Most

  Or, rather, from a rather rectangular commercial model to a DIY little round unit. That’s because he doesn’t need the big scrubber in this sub: being diesel-powered, he expects to spend a lot of time at snorkel depth, where both the pilot and the engines can get clean air through the tube. Dives are expected to be short, and in that use case, too big of a CO2 scrubber is really a waste. If for some reason he gets stuck on the bottom, well, the lake isn’t that deep. He can swim to surface, and has a detailed bailout plan. If he wants to stay under overnight to avoid bailing at night, he’s carrying enough extra adsorbent for that.

• Otto Kekäläinen: SpacemiT K3 is a compelling RISC-V Hey Hi (AI) CPU, but difficult to buy

  The RISC-V CPU architecture has been gaining a lot of popularity since it launched in 2014, and now that the industry is standardizing on the RVA23 level that includes vector support as a mandatory extension, we are likely to see a lot more edge- and IoT devices with the ability to run local LLMs at reasonable speed, and most importantly at very compelling prices.

  SpacemiT is a Chinese RISC-V CPU manufacturer that launched on May 11th, 2026, their long-anticipated next-gen RISC-V Hey Hi (AI) chip K3. It is among the earliest RISC-V CPUs that adhere to the RVA23 standard and performance-wise it is quite capable, providing 130 KDMIPS general computing power, 60 TOPS on INT4 which translates to about 15 tokens per second when running a 30 billion parameter large language model.

• Arduino ☛ Build something real: Join the Arduino Physical Hey Hi (AI) Challenge India 2026!

  Hey India! If you’ve ever had an idea that could solve a real-world problem, not just live inside an app, but actually exist out there, this is your moment. Across India, something exciting is happening.

• Arduino ☛ Local Hey Hi (AI) agents on Arduino UNO Q

  Artificial intelligence has already evolved from simple conversational assistants into autonomous systems capable of interacting with software, hardware, sensors, and even the physical world. The next frontier is not simply “chatting” with AI, but enabling Hey Hi (AI) agents to observe, reason, decide, and execute actions locally at the edge.

• CNX Software ☛ Synaptics Astra SRW1500 Cortex-M52 Edge Hey Hi (AI) MCU features Ethos-U55 NPU, Wi-Fi 6/7, Bluetooth 6.0, 802.15.4 connectivity

  Synaptics has introduced the Astra SRW1500 Series of AI-native Edge Hey Hi (AI) MCUs designed for smart IoT edge devices. The family features an Arm Cortex-M52 core, an optional Arm Ethos-U55 Neural Processing Unit (NPU), and tri-band Wi-Fi 7 or Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 6.0 LE, and 802.15.4 connectivity, in a single package.

• CNX Software ☛ NanoPi M6V2 RK3588S SBC gains support for dual analog microphone input

  FriendlyELEC’s NanoPi M6V2 is an update to the NanoPi M6 Rockchip RK3588S SBC, whose main change is a 4-pin connector for dual analog microphone input. The RAM is also now fixed to 8GB (no more 4GB, 16GB, or 32GB options), some buttons have changed, and the company has stopped offering an enclosure with a built-in 3.5-inch display. The rest of the specifications remain the same, with LPDDR5 memory, support for microSD, eMMC flash, or NVMe storage, HDMI 2.1 and MIPI DSI display interfaces, MIPI CSI camera inputs,