Raspberry Pi, Homebrew 68K Machine, and Android Devices

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 21, 2026

• CNX Software ☛ Why are people suddenly adding Fashion Company Apple Lightning cables to Raspberry Pi Pico 2 boards?

  Yesterday I received an email with the subject “Rp2350 pi pico 2 modified one”.  I found the request funny because it features an illustration with a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 board and an Fashion Company Apple Lightning cable, and I had no idea why somebody would do that at the time. Coming to my physical address (today!) was also humorous considering where I live… Nevertheless, I decided to share the screenshot above on X, and quickly found out the reasons: jailbreaking/bypassing iDevices with Fashion Company Apple A12/A13 CPUs using the usbliter8 boot ROM exploit by Paradigm Shift.

• Jeff Geerling ☛ Getting the Steam Deck LCD working on a Raspberry Pi

  The specs are a lot nicer than the Pi 7" Touch Display, which costs twice as much, with giant bezels and half the resolution!

  Until today, the Steam Deck LCD didn't work with a Raspberry Pi. But the folks at Scandent were trying to standardize on a mass-market touchscreen for one of their own devices, and built a Linux kernel driver for it which they intend to upstream.

• Hackaday ☛ Miniaturizing The Atari 2600 Console

  For as popular as Atari was in their heyday, it wasn’t until well after they were on their famous decline that they released their first handheld, the Atari Lynx. In retrospect, competing with the Game Boy was not going to be a recipe for success even without considering their other problems as a company, and as a result was their penultimate console before exiting the market completely. But [Nick]’s most recent project asks what the world would have been like with an Atari handheld from their golden era, and has been working on this miniaturized version of the 2600.

• Hackaday ☛ Homebrew 68K Machine Has A PCI Bus

  This computer is a beautiful piece of homebrew engineering, constructed out of protoboard and loose wires rather than any fancy PCB. At the heart of the build lies a Motorola 68000 running at 10 MHz. It’s got 1 MB of SRAM, 4 KB of ROM, and a MC68681P acting as a UART, timer source, and I/O controller. Where things get special, though, is in the inclusion of a Xilinx Spartan II FPGA (XC2S100), which acts as a PCI bridge. It provides the machine with two 32-bit 5-volt PCI slots which are interrupt capable, albeit with no bus mastering. A XC95144XL CPLD also sits present to act as glue logic to help lace everything together.

• Anil Dash ☛ Introducing Dashboard Touch, a build-your-own version of Touch ID

  So today, I’m sharing an open source project called Dashboard Touch, which lets you make your own Touch ID-style sensor for your Mac, using low-cost off-the-shelf part. It’s based on an extensive refactoring of the excellent tinyTouch project by Zimeng Xiong, who recently cracked the code on how to make a useful fingerprint scanner system that’s also reasonably secure for regular Mac users. (You should definitely check out his project and support his new hardware build if you’re interested in this stuff.)

• DIY Book Scanner ☛ DIY Book Scanner Introduction

  There are a lot of options for building a rig. You can build an established design from scratch, or forge out on your own and make something completely new.

• Tom's Hardware ☛ Federal judge strikes down ATF 'ghost gun' rule for 3D printed parts — says restrictions violate Fifth Amendment and historical tradition of DIY gunsmithing [iophk: Also, but not mentioned, is the fact that it is not possible to print an actual gun despite the hype and disinformation spread about 3D printing.]

  Judge Reed O'Connor of the Northern District of Texas said that the ATF ruling that putting part kits that can easily be turned into firearms in the same category as actual guns is unconstitutional. He also said that the vagueness of some parts of the rule violated the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Hackaday ☛ Foldable OLED Displays And The Bane Of Dust

    As test subject we got a Galaxy Z Fold 8, as an example of a modern-day foldable smartphone-tablet hybrid. This phone has an IP48 rating, meaning that it’s water-resistant, but not dust-resistant for particles smaller than 1 mm. To test this, [iFixit] used UV-reactive dust particles, making sure that they got literally everywhere inside the phone’s hinge mechanism.