FPGAs, ESP32, and Open Hardware

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 12, 2026

• CNX Software ☛ Lua-programmable ELM11-Feather board puts Gowin GW1NR FPGA into Feather form factor (Crowdfunding)

  BrisbaneSilicon ELM11-Feather is a “microcontroller” board based on a Gowin GW1NR FPGA that is natively programmable in Lua, C, SystemVerilog, and VHDL. Compatible with the Adafruit Feather form factor, the board features GPIO headers, a built-in debugger, a USB-C port for power and programming, and a 2-pin header for a LiPo battery. The company calls it a microcontroller board because the FPGA runs a PicoRV32 MCU softcore at up to 75 MHz with 1MB RAM and 8MB flash, programmable with Lua, and the user can also customize hardware layers with RTL code using the remaining FPGA fabric.

• It's FOSS ☛ ELM11-Feather Is a Feather-Compatible Board That Speaks Lua Natively

  It's an FPGA-based board that lets you program the application, driver, and hardware layers in Lua, C, and VHDL/SystemVerilog, and it starts at $29.

• Hackaday ☛ 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.

• Hackaday ☛ 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.

• Hackaday ☛ 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.

• Hackaday ☛ 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.

• Jeff Geerling ☛ 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).

• Hannah Robertson ☛ 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.3 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: [...]

• Linux Gizmos ☛ 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.

• Linux Gizmos ☛ 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.