news
Open Hardware/Modding: Raspberry Pi, Arduino, GNU/Linux Phones
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Open Hardware/Modding
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HowTo Geek ☛ DietPi just made it easy to host your own Google Photos on a Raspberry Pi
DietPi is a popular operating system for Raspberry Pi boards and other low-power systems, offering improved performance and pre-made configurations for common applications and self-hosted services. DietPi v10.2 has now arrived with Immich as an optional package, along with other changes.
If you’re not familiar with DietPi, it’s an “extremely lightweight Debian-based OS,” comprised of a minimal base system and a ‘diet pi-software’ library for quickly installing and configuring additional components. The big v10 update was released in January, which added more optional packages and dropped support for Debian 11 Bullseye.
DietPi v10.2 introduces Immich, the open-source and self-hosted Google Photos alternative, as a new package in the software library. The machine learning server for Immich, which provides facial recognition and smart search, is also available. Importantly, Immich and the machine learning server don’t have to be installed on the same device—you could offload that to another Raspberry Pi or other board to free up resources on your main Immich server. Both packages are only available for 64-bit x86 and ARMv8 platforms.
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Linus Åkesson ☛ Sum Ergo Demonstro
I made another demo for the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 microcontroller and got 3rd place in the Revision 2026 wild compo.
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XDA ☛ Self-hosting freed me from the OS lock-in trap (and made my devices clutter-free)
If you’ve read my recent articles on XDA, you’ve probably seen me fawn over free and open-source tools that I can host on my local servers. After all, self-hosted services not only helped me escape from the clutches of enshittified cloud platforms, but they also don’t shove premium subscriptions down my throat. Plus, setting up (and more importantly, troubleshooting) FOSS services has taught me a lot about containerization and the Linux CLI. But the most underrated feature of self-hosting is that it got rid of the OS problem entirely for my media management, automation, and productivity tasks.
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Hackaday ☛ Simulating The AVR8 For A Browser-based Arduino Emulator
It’s always nice to simulate a project before soldering a board together. Tools like QUCS run locally and work quite well for analog circuits, but can fall short with programmable logic. Tools like Wokwi handle the programmable side quite well but may have license issues or require the cloud. The Velxio project by [David Montero Crespo] is quite an excellent example of an (online) circuit simulator with programmable logic and local execution!
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Hobbyist builds a homebrew Intel 8086 ISA accelerator card — maker’s project improves integer multiplication on these retro systems by 250%
50-year-old hardware is slow, but rest assured, there are hobbyists out there trying to speed things up by building new era-appropriate accelerator cards. A prime example is @bradthx (Brad) on X, a computer scientist and lover of boating who has recently showcased their hardware multiplication ISA card accelerator for Intel 8086 and Intel 8088 PC systems.
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Hackaday ☛ Playing DVDs On The Sega Dreamcast
On the DVD side of things there’s a Raspberry Pi 5 that connects to an external USB DVD drive and which encodes the video for transmission via USB to the Pico 2 board. Although somewhat sketchy, it totally serves to get DVDs playing on the Dreamcast. If only Sega had not skimped on those license fees, perhaps.
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Arduino ☛ Glitchy goodness from an open-source granular synthesizer
A granular synthesizer — or more appropriately, a granular audio processor — is a device that chops audio samples into small “grains” that are just a few milliseconds long. It then manipulates them and rearranges them, before outputting the result. The auditory effect is interesting and appealing to experimental artists, but even low-end granular synthesizers are pricey. So, Sid Rockett used an Arduino Nano R4 to build his own open-source granular synthesizer called Arena Digitalis.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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XDA ☛ Ubuntu Phone failed, but running full Linux on your phone is actually possible now
Remember back when Ubuntu Phone was a thing? XDA remembers, because we collaborated on a phone that could run Ubuntu Touch OS way back in 2020. It never really took off, with only a few commercial devices and a small list of community-supported phones that could have their preinstalled Android version swapped for Ubuntu Touch OS.
Well, even if you can't fully replace your OS with Linux, that doesn't mean it's the only way you can run it. Phones are powerful these days and can happily run Linux VMs that you can access via terminal apps. There are a bunch of ways, and not all of them require rooting your phone.
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