Open Hardware and GNU/Linux Devices

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 02, 2026

• Tom's Hardware ☛ 'Nozzlegate' erupts as Prusa CORE One 3D printer kits arrive with soft steel nozzles — Bondtech admits machining flaws with no quick fix

  Bondtech, the creator and manufacturer of the INDX toolchanger system used to create the highly anticipated Prusa CORE One+ INDX, admitted to a significant labeling mistake. The nozzles provided with the INDX kit do not meet industry standards for “hardened steel” as advertised.

• Linux Gizmos ☛ Radxa Linkr Brings Remote KVM Access and Tailscale Support to a Thumb-Sized Device

  Radxa has unveiled the Linkr, a compact remote-control device for accessing computers, servers, and development boards through a web browser. The unit combines HDMI video capture with USB keyboard and mouse emulation, allowing users to view and operate a target system without connecting a dedicated monitor, keyboard, or mouse.

• Linux Gizmos ☛ ELM11-Feather Debuts with Native Lua and Reconfigurable FPGA Hardware

  First seen in March, Brisbane Silicon has now launched the ELM11-Feather to Crowd Supply. Priced at $39, the Feather-compatible development board combines native Lua support with the Arvore IDE and a configurable hardware architecture programmable in C, SystemVerilog, and VHDL.

• Wired ☛ The New Defcon Badges Pack a Unique Open Source Chip That Doubles as a Security Key

  Created by legendary hardware hacker Andrew “bunnie” Huang, the badges for this year’s famed security conference aim to push the boundaries of security and transparency.

• Hackaday ☛ Commercialization And Innovation

  Since most of these multi-filament machines are pretty much locked down as far as hardware tinkering goes, our sights were firmly locked on what the end-user would do with the new capability. But we overlooked the third axis of 3D printering: the software hackers. And it’s precisely in this area of slicer and path-planning that we’ve seen some of the coolest developments this year. Why? Because people have the hardware in their hands that they need to test out the algorithms.

• Hackaday ☛ Stewart Platform Walker Gains Feeling In Legs From Resistors

  Well, almost. He’s not actually putting strain gauges or anything like that into the legs; he’s just measuring the voltage drop across a resistor in series with the servos. Since the motors draw more current the more torque they’re putting out, he has a very quick and easy way to sense the current and thus the torque using good old Ohm’s law and an analog input on the microcontroller driving the robot. It’s a simple hack, but the data he’s getting is surprisingly good for how much work it is to add to a robot, as you can see in the video — at least once he slowed down the servos a touch.

• Hackaday ☛ Bike Trainers As Video Game Controllers

  Called Deck de France, it maps the data coming from one of the supported bike trainers to a virtual controller which can then be “plugged in” to a gaming console of choice, in this case a Steam Deck mounted to the trainer’s handlebars. Although a bike trainer doesn’t have the same number of inputs as a modern gaming controller, it does have enough to play games like Rocket League. As you might expect, it’s also perfect for biking titles such as the Tour de France series.

• Ken Shirriff ☛ Energizing a vacuum-tube flip-flop module from a 1948 IBM system

  In 1948, IBM introduced the 604 Electronic Calculating Punch. This machine was a programmable calculator, about the size of a double refrigerator. It was not quite a computer, but was programmed by plugging wires into a plugboard. This machine read numbers from a punch card, performed up to 60 calculations on these numbers, and then recorded the results by punching holes in the card.1 It processed 100 cards per minute—over one card per second—and IBM advertised it as the equivalent of 150 engineers. The machine rented for $550 a month, making it very popular, with over 5600 units produced.2

• Devices/Embedded

  • Hackaday ☛ Open Source Stream Deck Targets Flexibility

    Named Stream32, the build is intended to be simple to understand and adapt to one’s own individual workflow. Putting one together is as easy as buying a display, hooking it up to an ESP32, flashing the firmware, and then adding pages of shortcuts as desired. [Fady] has designed the firmware to be flexible with regards to screen choice — currently, it can be set up for a 4″ Waveshare LCD or a nice roomy 10.1″ display from Elecrow. Since it’s open source, adapting to a wider range of displays is a potential exercise for the builder.

  • Remy Van Elst ☛ But can your calculator run Linux?

    The Prime G2 is comically overpowered for a calculator if you ask me. It has an i.MX 6 Ultralite ARM Cortex A7 CPU, 256 MB DDR3 RAM and 512 MB of internal storage. I mean come on! It's closer to a small embedded Linux machine with a calculator keyboard attached than to a traditional calculator.

    The G1, the previous hardware revision already had a 400MHz ARM CPU with 32MB ram, but the G2 is like an Android phone of a few years back.