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Open Hardware/Modding: Raspberry Pi, ESP32, and More
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CNX Software ☛ Year 2025 in Review, CNX Software stats, and looking ahead to 2026
Time for the last post of 2025, as the year is almost over. I’ll look back at key developments and notable products launched in 2025, share some CNX Software website traffic statistics, and look ahead to 2026. Year 2025 in Review After 22 product releases in 2024, Raspberry Pi calmed down a little bit in 2025, and the highlights of the year included the Raspberry Pi 500+ mechanical keyboard, the 5-inch variant of the Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2, and a Raspberry Pi 5 1GB RAM. What didn’t quite stop were the accessories from third parties for Raspberry Pi SBC and Raspberry Pi Pico boards.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ New York's Mayoral Inauguration bans Raspberry Pi and Flipper Zero — devices join explosives, guns, drones, and beach balls on prohibited items list
The invitation to Mayor-elect Mamdani's inauguration lists Raspberry Pi and Flipper Zero as prohibited items but does not provide a reason.
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John Calhoun ☛ Balsa M2-F3 Lifting Body
In a previous post I talked about a laser-cut balsa model I built of a fictional spaceship from the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Around the same time (early 2025) I was also motivated to try my hand at designing the parts, laser-cutting and building a scale replica of the real (not fictional) M2-F3 lifting body.
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Daniël de Kok ☛ IKEA ALPSTUGA
The sensing platform used is a Sensirion SEN63C, which uses a STCC4 for CO₂ measurements. Unfortunately, this is not an NDIR sensor. Instead it uses less accurate thermal conductivity sensing. This allows building smaller/cheaper sensors, but it depends on the input of the temperature/humidity sensor, because e.g. humidity influences measurements. Also, the sensor relies on the air mixture being 78% N₂, 21% O₂, 0.93% Ar, 400 ppm CO₂ and will stop giving accurate readings when this composition changes (modulo CO₂). The operating conditions are also more limited than most other CO₂ sensors (10–40 °C, 20–80% RH).
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Daniël de Kok ☛ ESPHome Senseair S88
The Senseair S88 is a pretty great CO₂ sensor for it’s price. I can source it locally for ~22 Euro and it has a stated accuracy of ±40 ppm and ±3% of reading.
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Thomas Jensen ☛ New keypad for my RPi DIY security alarm
The keypad, or alarm panel, is an important part of a security alarm system. When I first got started building mine — I settled for a cheap and simple Zigbee keypad.
I’ve since replaced it with a better, and more advanced device. Let’s have a look…
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Rui Carmo ☛ ESP8266 (and ESP32)
These little modules have taken hobby electronics by storm, so of course I grabbed a few of them and have been hacking away quietly on both the ESP8266 and the ESP32.
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Quentin Santos ☛ The RP2350-USB-A cannot see devices disconnect
What’s better for New Year’s Eve than debugging some USB hardware issues?
In my previous article, I explained how the design of Waveshare’s RP2350-USB-A can make the USB-A host connector incapable of detecting certain USB devices, and of any hot-plugging. The solution was to desolder R13, a pull-up resistor on D+: [...]