Open Hardware Projects and Proprietary "Smart" "Phones"

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 19, 2026

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • CNX Software ☛ WisMesh Station Review – Telemetry, MQTT, and Grafana tested on a Raspberry Pi 4-based Meshtastic gateway

    RAKwireless has sent us a sample of the WisMesh Station, a Meshtastic gateway and base station based on a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, a WisMesh Pi HAT RAK6421 expansion board, a LoRa module, a GNSS module, all housed in a compact metal enclosure. It comes with meshtasticd preinstalled, making it ready to use right out of the box. Just unbox it, plug it in, and start using Meshtastic immediately.

  • Hackaday ☛ ESP32-driven Roulette Wheel Could Have Used A 555, But That Didn’t Have WiFi

    The roulette wheel circuit is retained from the 555 version, with the ESP32 providing clock pulses instead of the venerable oscillator chip — it uses a pair of decade counters to create the chase effect of the LED around the wheel. With a handsome printed enclosure, [Hulk] could have stopped there, but then he’d have to keep track of scoring and the like manually like some kind of dark age peasant. It’s the 21st century, we have computers to to that for us!

  • Thomas Buck ☛ Dry Filament Storage

    For years the filament roll for my 3D printer has just been hanging from the front of my Lack tower. As I also often have long stretches of time where I don't use much filament, it tends to draw moisture from the air. This reduces print quality, so it's recommended to keep the filament dry.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Kevin Boone ☛ The crisis in refurbished, top-tier smartphones

    If, like me, you’re one of those rare people who doesn’t feel obliged to own the very latest consumer electronics, you’ll probably have been well served by the refurbished market for smartphones. Manufacturers push out new handset models at such a pace, that it’s been possible to buy very sophisticated devices at a fraction of the original price after they’ve been on the market a relatively short time. In my experience, two to three years after release, refurbished premium devices sold for about one quarter to one third the original price. A device that originally sold for £1000 when new, could be had for £250-300 a few years later, in excellent refurbished condition.

    What a lot of people didn’t realize – at least until recently – was that a three year old, refurbished flagship smartphone would be a hugely superior product to a brand-new, budget or mid-priced model from the same manufacturer, while costing no more.