Open Hardware/Modding: Raspberry Pi, RISC-V, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 15, 2026

• CNX Software ☛ Reverse-engineering brings RK3576 NPU support to open-source Rocket driver for mainline Linux

  Back in 2024, we noted that the open-source driver for RK3588’s NPU by Tomeu Vizoso delivered decent performance for object detection. Since then, good progress has been made, and it’s now known as the Rocket driver in mainline Linux. However, the Rockchip RK3576 SoC is not supported by the Rocket driver in mainline yet, despite sharing a similar NPU. The good news is that Ga Hing Woo has been working on mainline GNU/Linux support for the Rockchip RK3576 NPU using the Rocket driver stack and has tested the updates on the Radxa ROCK 4D running GNU/Linux 7.1-rc5.

• CNX Software ☛ Meet Moddo Pinch – The world’s smallest 32-bit Arduino-compatible board (2026 Edition)

  Canada-based Moddo has designed the Pinch board, which it claims is the world’s smallest 32-bit Arduino-compatible board so far, measuring just 10.9 x 10.5 mm. The board is powered by a Microchip SAMD11 Cortex-M0+ microcontroller with 4 KB SRAM and 16KB flash, features an RGB LED, reset/bootloader button, 3.3 V LDO, a USB-C port, and a total of 12 GPIOs.

• CNX Software ☛ IoTLabs wM-Bus gateway – An ESP32 device with Wireless M-Bus connectivity for Home Assistant

  IoTLabs wM-Bus Gateway is an ESP32 device supporting the Wireless M-Bus (wM-Bus) standard for receiving data from compatible meters and sensors, designed for full integration with Home Assistant. Wireless M-Bus (Wireless Meter Bus) is a wireless protocol specifically designed for remote reading of smart meters, generally gas, water, or electricity meters, and typically used by utilities, but the wM-Bus gateway allows you to deploy the standard for your home automation solution, meters, and sensors.

• CNX Software ☛ $50 Forgix board pairs Raspberry Pi RP2354 MCU with Trion T8 FPGA in Teensy form factor

  Adiuvo Engineering’s Forgix is a development board pairing a Raspberry Pi RP2354 microcontroller with 2MB flash and an Efinix Trion T8 FPGA in the Teensy 4.0 form factor. The board also features a 16 Mbit PSRAM chip, a USB-C port, a push-button, an RGB LED, and through and castellated holes routed to either the RP2354 MCU or Trion T8 FPGA for SPI, I2C, UART, ADC, USB 1.1, and custom interfaces.

• Linux Gizmos ☛ Tronlong TLT153-MiniEVM pairs quad-core Cortex-A7 processing with a Xuantie E907 RISC-V core

  The Allwinner T153 is manufactured on a 22nm process and combines four Arm Cortex-A7 cores running at up to 1.608GHz with a 600MHz Xuantie E907 RISC-V core.

• Linux Gizmos ☛ Ka-Ro QS93 and QS95 solder-down modules come with Linux evaluation boards

  The QS93 is based on the NXP i.MX 9352 processor, which includes two Arm Cortex-A55 application cores running at up to 1.7GHz and a 250MHz Cortex-M33 core for real-time processing. The processor also integrates an Arm Ethos-U65 microNPU and NXP’s EdgeLock secure enclave.

• Hackaday ☛ Open Book Touch Makes Crowd Funding Debut

  As the name implies, this latest iteration of the e-reader does away with physical navigation buttons and introduces an intuitive touch-based interface. Those who like to enjoy their open source hardware under the covers will be glad to hear that not only does this new version of the Open Book finally include an illuminated display, but it even allows you to adjust the color temperature and brightness of the LEDs with the swipe of a finger.

• Hackaday ☛ Fibrous Muscles For Humanoid Robotics

  At the current rate of robotics development, you might assume that we’re close to Skynet taking over. However, while we likely wouldn’t do well in a physical fight against a robot, we can at least keep the bragging rights of having the cooler actuators. Or at least, that was the case before a new actuator came into town — introducing “Electrofluidic Fiber Muscles”.

• Hackaday ☛ Full Body VR Tracking Is Just Some Recycled Hardware Away

  A common method of doing body tracking is to strap on some Vive trackers. Those are extremely hacker-friendly pieces of hardware, but [Jaki] observed that older Vive VR controllers can be had for cheap, and already contain everything a tracker needs. Some new firmware and a custom mount is all it takes to turn them into perfectly usable body trackers.

• Hackaday ☛ The Neo Geo Does Run DOOM After All

  Perhaps the most ridiculous statement that anyone can make is that a computer system with clearly enough processing power ‘cannot run DOOM‘. This is why we accept the premise that a PDP-11 cannot run this game, but something on the order of a Neo Geo gaming console with its 68000 processor and for the time impressive GPU definitely ought to be able to.

• Hackaday ☛ Voltmeter-Based Floating Point Calculator Does It In Style

  Calcumator 2000 is a bit of a love letter to a time when display technology hadn’t quite yet produced anything suitable for calculator use. This resulted in calculator designs that are generally unrecognizable compared to the 7-segment display based devices we see today. The Calcumator 2000, in all its electromechanical glory, would have fit right in that era.

• Hackaday ☛ Get Your ESP32 Sunny Side Up With This Solar Dev Board

  There are a lot of ESP32-based development boards out there– and why not? It’s a versatile chip that can be used in all sorts of situations, and people want boards to match them. Not finding one to his liking that was specifically built for solar powered IoT projects, [Narrow Studios] rolled his own. Well, designed it; like most these days, he’s outsourced the manufacturing to PCBWay, which is where you’ll need to go if you want one.

• Hackaday ☛ It’s A Spectrum, With An RP2350 ULA

  The machine is a charming mixture of new and old, with a traditional cassette port alongside VGA, gameport joystick, and Sinclair joystick. The aim is to also have HDMI, though it’s not yet implemented. Sadly there is no Spectrum edge connector for period peripherals though. He admits it’s not cycle accurate to the original, but given that it runs all the games he’s given it this seems not to matter. Meanwhile that keyboard which caught our eye is a true period piece, sitting as it does on a piece of phenolic stripboard, and those decals are the perfect finishing touch.

• Arduino ☛ Arduino® UNO™ Q intranet web server helps this business run

  Michel Willems runs a photography and print shop in Ontario, Canada. Like all business owners, Willems is always keen on improving efficiency because even small changes can have a big effect over time.

• CNX Software ☛ Mercedes-Benz hosts open-source hardware Automotive Rapid DEvelopment Platform (ARDEP)

  ARDEP (Automotive Rapid DEvelopment Platform) is an open-source hardware and software platform hosted on Mercedes-Benz’s Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub account and released under an Apache 2.0 license. The ARDEP V2 main board is based on an STMicroelectronics STM32G474VE Arm Cortex-M4F microcontroller for motor control with CORDIC and FMAC hardware math accelerators, and features CAN-FD and LIN transceivers, while the PowerIO Shield features 6 outputs and 6 inputs supporting up to 48V and 3A per channel.