Open Hardware/Modding: RISC-V, ESP32, postmarketOS, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 08, 2025

• Tom's Hardware ☛ Startup claims its Zeus GPU is 10X faster than Nvidia's RTX 5090: Bolt's first GPU coming in 2026

  Bolt Graphics's RISC-V-based Zeus GPU features upgradeable memory, breakthrough performance, and enhanced energy efficiency.

• CNX Software ☛ ESP32-C6 is the first RISC-V microcontroller to achieve PSA Level 2 security compliance

  Arm introduced the Platform Security Architecture (PSA) back in 2017 to make Internet of Things (IoT) chips more secure. Since then we’ve seen many PSA certified products such as Silicon Labs’  EFR32FG23 (FG23) and EFR32ZG23 (ZG23) Cortex-M33 microcontrollers with PSA Level 3 certification.

• Hackaday ☛ Open Source Hardware, How Open Do You Want It To Be?

  In our wider community we are all familiar with the idea of open source software. Many of us run it as our everyday tools, a lot of us release our work under an open source licence, and we have a pretty good idea of the merits of one such document over another. A piece of open source software has all of its code released under a permissive licence that explicitly allows it to be freely reproduced and modified, and though some people with longer beards take it a little too seriously at times and different flavours of open source work under slightly different rules, by and large we’re all happy with that.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Sam Thursfield: Media playback tablet running GNOME and postmarketOS

    A couple of years ago I set up a simple and independent media streaming server for my Bandcamp music collection using a Raspberry Pi 4, Fedora IoT and Jellyfin. It works nicely and I don’t have to play any cloud rent to Spotify to listen to music at home.

    But it’s annoying having the music playback controls buried in my phone or laptop. How many times do you go to play a song and get distracted by a WhatsApp message instead?

    So I started thinking about a tablet that would just control media playback. A tablet running a non-corporate operating system, because music is too important to allow Surveillance Giant Google to stick Hey Hi (AI) and adverts in the middle of it. Last month Pablo told me that postmarketOS had pretty decent support for a specific mainstream tablet and so I couldn’t reset buying one second-hand and trying to set up GNOME there for media playback.

    Read on and I will tell you how the setup procedure went, what is working nicely and what we could still improve.