Open Hardware/Modding: Raspberry Pi, Bootlin, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 11, 2025

• CNX Software ☛ GEEKOM Mini IT12 2025 Edition Review – Part 3: Ubuntu 24.04 on an defective chip maker Intel Core i7-1280P mini PC

  We’ve already checked out GEEKOM Mini IT12 2025 Edition mini PC’s hardware with an unboxing and a teardown, and tested the defective chip maker Intel Core i7-1280P mini PC with backdoored Windows 11 Pro in detail in the second part of the review. We’ve now had time to test the Mini IT12 2025 Edition mini PC with Ubuntu 24.04, so we’ll report our experience with GNU/Linux in the third part of the review.

• Hackaday ☛ Embedded USB Debug For Snapdragon

  According to [Casey Connolly], Qualcomm’s release of how to interact with their embedded USB debugging (EUD) is a big deal. If you haven’t heard of it, nearly all Qualcomm SoCs made since 2018 have a built-in debugger that connects to the onboard USB port. The details vary by chip, but you write to some registers and start up the USB phy. This gives you an oddball USB interface that looks like a seven-port hub with a single device “EUD control interface.”

• Linux Gizmos ☛ Arduino and Red Pitaya Learning Lab Connects Makers with Real-World Engineering

  Arduino and Red Pitaya have partnered on a hardware bundle and structured curriculum that helps students, educators, and hobbyists advance from basic electronics projects to practical signal analysis and system prototyping. Combining the Arduino Uno R4 WiFi with the Red Pitaya STEMlab 125-14, the kit supports hands-on experiments that link simple interfacing with engineering-grade measurement.

• Raspberry Pi ☛ New Hello World podcast series: Bringing computer science into every classroom

  Explore the Hello World podcast miniseries on integrating computing education across the curriculum - new episodes weekly.

• Bootlin ☛ Step-by-Step Guide to Adding SoC and Board Support to Zephyr with CH32V303

  This post is the sixth in our series about Zephyr.

• David Bremner: Hibernate on the pocket reform 4/n

  After some fun I got the serial console working and re-ran the platform test.

  After a bit of reading the serial console, I realized that rmmod dwc3 was causing more problems than it solved, in particularly reliable hard lockup on one of the CPUs.

• The Atlantic ☛ How the Grateful Dead Nearly Solved the Problem With Live Music

  The wall, the journalist Brian Anderson writes in his new book, Loud and Clear, “weighed as much as a dozen full-grown elephants” and “stretched the length of a regulation basketball court.” At each tour stop, roadies would assemble the nearly 600 speakers that, when operable, stood at about the height of a small apartment building and sounded “as loud as a jet engine at close range.” During outdoor shows, fans could be up to a quarter mile from the stage and still hear Jerry Garcia’s guitar runs with depth and clarity. But a relatively short time after its creation, the complexity and expense of maintaining the wall catalyzed the band’s first serious brush with burnout—and, Anderson argues, played a factor in its hiatus.

• Robotic Systems LLC ☛ Automatic selection of voltage mode control7

  For some time now, moteus has supported operating in what is called “voltage mode control”. In that mode of operation, the current control loop of the Field Oriented Control process is short circuited. Instead of modulating the output voltage to achieve a desired current, instead it is assumed that there is no inductance and the desired voltage can be selected purely using the phase resistance and back EMF. This is a useful mode of operation anytime the output current range is small relative to moteus’s ability to sense it, often but not always with gimbal motors. The drawback of the mode was that: [...]