Open Hardware, Linux Devices, and LineageOS

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 11, 2026

• • Radio-Gaga Is A Toddler Friendly Remote In A Radio

    Interestingly enough the radio is now just a remote control– the speaker has been removed along with the rest of the radio hardware. The buttons and dials are still there, though, letting the toddler control what tunes are on offer and at what volume via couple of potentiometers hooked to an ESP32. The sound itself is being served up from the homelab to a USB speaker. There’s one notable flaw with this architecture: if the batteries die on the remote, “Let it Go” does not until an adult intervenes manually or recharges the remote.

  • Overpowered RC Car + Gimbal Cam = The Greatest Chase Vehicle We’ve Ever Seen

    Modern cinema relies very heavily on quadrotor drones, because they make for very smooth, very easy to position platforms. From slow pans to chase shots, drones are great– if your shots can be taken at a high enough altitude. Close to the ground, things get a bit dodgier. That’s where [Transistor Man]’s camera chase vehicle comes in— it’s a rover, so it excels close to the ground. In fact, it can’t go anywhere else, except perhaps if provided with a jump. It’s got a hefty gimbal to hold the camera steady on any terrain, a decade-old surplus radio to provide full HD FPV to the remote driver, and a powerful 1/5th scale radio control rally chassis to make it all go. Plus googly eyes, because everything is better with googly eyes.

  • Get A Handle On This Compact Pi Portable

    In it’s baseline configuration, the Don’t Panic uses a Raspberry Pi 3A+, a Pimoroni HyperPixel 4.0 Square LCD (touch optional), and a Rii 518BT keyboard. Those core components would be enough to get you up and running, but if you want battery power you’ll also need to add a LX-2BUPS UPS board and a pair of 18650 cells. Audio might be nice as well, and for that [Paul] recommends a PAM8403 breakout board. He’s even got a printable volume knob that slips over the board’s potentiometer and peeks outside the case.

  • Fixing A Dodgy Cheap Audio DAC

    The HDMI to VGA chip has an onboard audio digital-to-analog converter (DAC), and it’s a delta-sigma design. This type of DAC is frequently used in audio applications because it works by shifting its switching frequency many times higher than the input sample rate, thus reducing considerably the distortion. This one wasn’t performing as advertised though, and the problem turned out to be that switching frequency being all over the output. Clearly the filter wasn’t working, which led to the design of a new filter. The write-up is therefore an extensive dive into filter design, and in part also a discovery of the effect of impedance on them.

  • How to build a circular LCD clock

    So I recently built a wall clock from a circular LCD screen! It’s really great because it can display any clock face you want, even ones you code yourself!

  • LILYGO showcases new IoT devices with ESP32-C5 and Nordic nRF52840 MCUs

    LILYGO has listed two compact development boards for wireless IoT applications: the T-Display C5, a small ESP32-C5-based board with a color LCD and dual-band Wi-Fi 6, and the T-Echo Card, a rugged LoRa-enabled device with GNSS, Bluetooth, NFC, solar charging, and an IP66-rated enclosure.

  • WINSYSTEMS SBC-477 PowerTier Series delivers Raptor Lake performance in a rugged SBC design

    WINSYSTEMS’ SBC-477 PowerTier Series is a family of compact rugged single board computers for industrial and MIL/COTS applications, combining 13th Gen Intel Core Raptor Lake processors with DDR5 memory, dual Ethernet, Mini PCIe expansion, TPM 2.0 security, and extended-temperature operation.

  • PQC Encryptor Video Demonstration

    Full length video demonstration of the Purism Librem PQC Encryptor: [...]

  • An exciting future with the Librem 16

    With the recent launch of the Librem 16, I’m excited.  Clearly I’m excited to share this product with you, but that’s just the beginning.  I’m excited for the future of technology.  In a world where technology is increasingly designed to squeeze value out of users, it’s exciting to release a product that empowers us instead.

  • Pi 5 Becomes ALSA-Compatible TOSLINK Sound Card

    For the first one: the old TOSLink standard is very simple, and all you need to do is blink an LED quickly enough. Considering the clock frequency of the Pi 5 is in the GHz range and the TOSLINK is the same 3.1 Mbit/s S/PDIF signal you could pull off your CD-ROM drive to your Sound Blaster, there’s no problem there. Except, wouldn’t the operating system get in the way? Well, not when you have enough clock cycles to throw at the problem. Using a Pi 5 doesn’t hurt: the RP1 I/O chip included on the board is keeping things smooth with its included PIO while Linux mucks about in the background. There’s a reason we called it the most important product Raspberry Pi ever made.

  • An Analog Synth For The Modern World

    The integrated circuit in question is the AS3397, which when coupled on a PCB with a Raspberry Pi Pico makes for a self-contained single-voice analog synth. It’s controlled via I2C from a conductor board for which frustratingly the README doesn’t give a processor, but we think may be powered by another Pi Pico. This board does the job of taking MIDI and other controls, and farming them out tot he individual voices. The prototype has ten, but it can support many more.

  • Hacking Amazon Echo Show 8 3rd Gen Via UART And EMMC

    Even with Amazon’s Echo Show devices running Linux in the form of the Android-derived FireOS, using them for non-Amazon approved purposes can be a chore at best. In the case of the Echo Show 8 even simple workarounds using ADB and the bootloader have been locked-down, requiring more drastic measures. Here [Vowed] over at the XDA forums shows off one such hack, involving directly tapping into the device’s eMMC.

  • ESP32 Keeps Tabs On Your Local Airspace

    As you probably guessed from the lack of a radio in the parts list, the code [Mateusz] provides doesn’t actually sniff ADS-B out of the air. It connects to the local network over WiFi, and then hits adsb.fi to pull in crowdsourced flight data. Since the device has to connect to the network anyway, the code also offers up a web-based configuration interface which puts a little more polish on what’s already an impressive presentation.

  • The Special Value Pi 4 was extremely short-lived

    What makes them a 'value'? They're only certified to run at 1.25 GHz (retail Pi 4s run at 1.8 GHz, and can usually be overclocked).

  • Yesterday’s static, today: A Bluetooth speaker for the vintage listener

    I used this Adafruit tutorial by the Ruiz Brothers and Liz Clark as a starting point for the component selection and software approach. As in that tutorial, my build uses an Adafruit ESP32 Feather microcontroller, with a couple of rotary potentiometers and a speaker.

    Here it is all wired up and connected to the front-plate: [...]

  • 3D Printed Scooter Fits In Your Luggage, Some Assembly Required

    Aside from a whole lot of filament, he’s got a couple of tool batteries for hot-swappable energy that Airport security shouldn’t mind too much — provided you carry them with you, anyway — plus the usual e-bike motor and electronic speed control you might expect, and lawnmower tires which you might not. The narrow 3D printed rims round over the normally-flat tires to make them usable for this application. He seems particularly taken with the bi-stable mechanism he built for the kickstand, and we can’t blame him as we love seeing that kind of thing ourselves. The TPU seat is also a nice touch to keep with ‘everything printed’ vibe.

  • How To Use Those Cute But Slightly Odd 7-Segment LCDs

    The first odd thing about these ten-pin LCD displays is that they have a footprint that doesn’t quite mesh with standard 0.1 inch spacing, meaning they will not cleanly fit into a breadboard. Luckily, one can solve this with a bit of force. It’s a small part, and the pins don’t seem to mind.

  • Documenting The IR Protocol Of The PumpSaver Plus Device

    Having a pump in a remote location where you aren’t constantly monitoring it is a common scenario, which can be unfortunate when said pump runs into problems like a dry well, jammed impeller or power issues. This is where pump monitors like the older SymCom (now Littelfuse) PumpSaver Plus 233P will protect the pump if such conditions are detected. Of course, the infrared communication port on it uses an undocumented protocol that was meant to be used with a long-since discontinued handheld device. Ergo [Elizabeth Camporeale] saw fit to reverse-engineer this protocol.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Using my phone wrong in a heatwave made it totally useless — here's how I saved it

    Android phones can have overheating problems at the best of times, but usually changing background settings can resolve this, or sometimes Android updates mitigate the offending problems.

  • LineageOS now has a web installer

    LineageOS now has a web installer. The project warns, however, that it doesn’t handle the entire process, and that you’ll still need to follow the instructions on your device’s wiki. Even so, it should make things considerably easier during those major yearly updates. In the same announcement, they report that work on LineageOS 24 — based on Android 17 — is “progressing nicely”.