Open Hardware/Modding: Old Devices and Linux Gadgets

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 11, 2026

• Dan Q ☛ I bought a Sony Walkman

  This entire post is amazing. Every step Andreas takes, from selecting and buying an (old) Walkman, to repairing its belt, to using the (known) frequency of the first note of a song to “tune” it by recalibrating the speed control potentiometer while playing into a guitar tuner app… feels like you’re being taken along on the journey with him.

• PC World ☛ Why you shouldn’t buy a water-cooling system for your PC

  PCWorld argues against water-cooling systems for most gaming PCs, explaining that air coolers provide adequate performance while being cheaper, simpler, and more reliable than AIO or custom water-cooling setups.

• Hackaday ☛ SB Mini II Is A Homebrew Apple II Clone

  Unlike the later models, the original Apple II only used commercially available ICs, making it an easy target for recreation. No FPGAs required, just good old-fashioned DIPs. OK, these are modern CMOS versions of the chips, but other than that, the biggest concession to modernity is space on the board for a Raspberry Pi Pico to allow for connecting a USB keyboard.

• Hackaday ☛ Is Now The Time For Volumetric 3D Printing?

  Volumetric additive manufacturing (VAM) is a young technology that has a similar start to many new tech toys, including the original SLA of the first 3D printers. That is expensive and completely stuck in the laboratory… Fortunately, that’s not where 3D printing as a whole stayed, as the RepRap project managed to bring the obscure technology to the hobbyists’ main stage. An entire group of people formed and spent countless hours until the useless pieces of poorly extruded plastic could form parts impossible to make with anything else. A cool quirk of history is that it likes to repeat: examples spur recreation, and this appears to be happening with the technology found within VAM printing.

• Hackaday ☛ Reverse Engineering And Self-Hosting The OBI Smart Energy Tracker

  Sold by German DIY store OBI, the OBI Energy Tracker is a €15 set of two devices, one of which you essentially stick on top of your existing electricity meter. This then allows for electricity usage to be measured and tracked, with the data sent to the second, gateway device. This latter cloud-bound device is linked to an OBI account via the heyOBI app. This correspondingly called for the gateway device to be reverse-engineered and freed from its cloud-based shackles, a task that [Aaron Christophel] happily took upon himself.

• BoingBoing ☛ Framework lowering pricing on a forthcoming laptop

  Major PC manufacturers are raising prices to cope with component shortages caused by big tech's AI mania, but buyers of Framework's modular laptops are getting an unexpected deal instead. The company is upgrading the SSDs of some pre-ordered models and passing on a cost efficiency; Nirav Patel writes that "we finally have some good news for you."