Open Hardware, Gadgets, SBCs, and Mobile

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 18, 2026

• CNX Software ☛ Espressif releases SDK for Aliro smart door locks based on ESP32-C or ESP32-H SoCs

  Espressif Systems has just released the SDK for Aliro, designed for smart Matter door locks and other access control solutions built around ESP32-C (WiFi) or ESP32-H (Thread) microcontroller and third-party NFC chips. We recently wrote about the Aliro vendor-agnostic digital access control standard working over NFC, Bluetooth LE, or BLE+UWB. It’s basically the equivalent of Matter, but for smart locks, instead of the broader Smart Home ecosystem.

• Linux Gizmos ☛ HackRF Pro SDR covers 100kHz to 6GHz with FPGA-based processing

  The HackRF Pro follows the same general architecture as its predecessor but introduces several RF, processing, timing, and connectivity improvements. These include a flatter frequency response, removal of the characteristic center-frequency DC spike, an onboard temperature-compensated crystal oscillator, additional memory, RF shielding, and a USB Type-C connector.

• Raspberry Pi ☛ LoRa radio communication devices for Raspberry Pi

  For (much) higher data rates, there’s 4G cellular. We take a look at a couple of add-on solutions here, along with a separate GPS module for ultra-accurate location- and time-stamping.

• Hackaday ☛ The BornHack 2026 Cyber Ægg Is A Badge With A Life Afterwards

  A problem facing the designers of event badges is this: what happens to the badge after the event? It’s one that designers have tried to solve in many ways with varying levels of success, whether that be by making it a dev board, a games console, a mesh-networked communicator, or as in the case of Electromagnetic Field, a continuing badge for future events. Ar BornHack 2026 they have taken a novel approach, by making it a useful desktop appliance. The BornHack Cyber Ægg is a half-egg-shaped badge with a 3D-printed case, and aside from its on-camp applications it’s both a desktop clock/calendar, and a MeshCore node.

• Dane Kouttron ☛ Camera Chase Vehicle

  You stumble on a weird robot chassis in an industrial warehouse. Its adorable, enormous and will likely be scrapped.

  Time to adopt this curious contraption and turn it into something cinematic.

  I was wandering around an industrial auction warehouse and stumbled on what looked like an enormous RC car with some elaborate scissor jack oddly attached to the top. The moment I spotted it I knew exactly what it should become: A distant off-brand cousin of the Freelfy Tero.

  The Tero can be seen all the way back in the early rocketjump days [Link] where they used the platform to get low to the ground moving shots in their skits.

  The following details all of the intricacies of building a chase camera from the ground up, using a mix of off the shelf items, used hardware and a pile of printed parts to bind them all together. There was a lot of trial-and-error in this build, and those errors are documented in full detail. As a result this writeup is a bit long and media heavy.

• Hackaday ☛ Wireless LCD Streaming For The ANENG AN870 Multimeter

  Having the information shown on the display of a digital multimeter also recorded off-screen can be incredibly useful, but unless the device exposes something like SCPI on a network interface, you will have to get creative. In the case of the budget ANENG AN870 digital multimeter (DMM), [Bits und Bolts] really wanted to show its display clearly as an overlay in OBS instead of just the camera view, but with said DMM not offering an easy way he had to resort to just copying the data sent to its multiplexed LCD.

• CNX Software ☛ reCamera Pro “Open Hey Hi (AI) Camera” supports computer vision, LLM, VLM, STT, and TTS workloads

  Seeed Studio’s reCamera Pro is an Hey Hi (AI) camera powered by a Rockchip RV1126B quad-core Cortex-A53 SoC with a 3 TOPS NPU for on-device Hey Hi (AI) vision, but also large language models (LLMs), vision language models (VLMs), as well as speech-to-text (STT) and text-to-speech (TTS) with built-in audio capabilities. It offers a powerful update to the earlier reCamera modular Hey Hi (AI) camera based on an SG2002 RISC-V Hey Hi (AI) SoC, with up to 4GB RAM, 16GB eMMC flash, an 8MP camera sensor supporting up to 4K @ 30 FPS, an M12 lens mount, a built-in 1W speaker, two microphones, Gigabit Ethernet with PoE, dual-band WiFi 5 connectivity, a USB-C port for power and data, and and expansion through a GPIO and MIPI DSI connectors.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Hackaday ☛ Hackaday Podcast Episode 378: C Coders, Ceramic Printers, And Shadow Archives

    That sounds like a lot of preamble, but we quickly get to a full slate of hacks, a couple of which are pretty retro in retrospect. Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Mike Rockwell ☛ Switching to US Mobile

    The service with AT&T was always quite good, albeit a bit expensive. For a while we stuck with them because we were still on old legacy unlimited plans from back when unlimited wasn’t just a marketing term. We have since switched to their newer unlimited plans in order to save a bit of money, but the amount we pay for cellular service was still too darn high.

    We probably should have switched years ago, but didn’t out of laziness combined with the daunting task of figuring out which provider was best and how to port our phone number to a new carrier.

  • Jan-Lukas Else ☛ rclone on Android to access any remote storage - Jan-Lukas Else

    I have a use case where I need to copy files from Nextcloud to S3 storage using my phone, and I think I finally found the perfect apps for this.