Linux Devices/Open Hardware/Modding: 3D Printer, Adafruit, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 16, 2026

• Tom's Hardware ☛ Legendary Gravis Ultrasound sound card gets new open-source clone — Beavis Ultrasound remake includes complete KiCad schematics, PCB layout, sample ROM, and more

  There’s a new remake of the legendary Gravis Ultrasound ISA soundcard on the block with the arrival of the open source Beavis Ultrasound project.

• CNX Software ☛ Bigme Hibreak Dual 2 – An Android 16 smartphone with 6.13-inch 80fps E-Ink and 5-inch LCD display (Crowdfunding)

  Bigme has launched the Hibreak Dual 2, an Android 16 smartphone with a 6.13-inch 80fps E-Ink display on the front and a 5-inch LCD on the rear. Built around the MediaTek Dimensity 8300 processor and supports dual 5G connectivity, positioning it as an E-Ink smartphone with flagship-class hardware.

• Radka Janek: My handheld gaming experience in 2026 (Fedora GNU/Linux + Niri)

  I tried several gaming oriented GNU/Linux distributions and found them all to be… well, to be frank, bloated and unstable. I seek the most minimal experience, secure, up to date, with comfy desktop environment for a small screen. Most distributions are full of preinstalled stuff that you will never use, some of which often runs in the background, quietly eating away on your battery life.

• Mere Civilian ☛ Cancelled my Pebble Round 2 Pre-Order

  In January 2026, Pebble Round 2 was announced. I still have the originally Pebble Round which I wear occasionally to this day. It is the the lightest watch in my collection and it is also the most quirky of the lot. It is the only one that has character, as opposed to the Apple Watch and Pixel Watch. Although the use of colours withing Google's wearOS is also a joy to use.

• Linux Gizmos ☛ Clintech Pico Board exposes all 48 RP2354B GPIOs in Pico-compatible form factor

  The RP2354B combines dual 150MHz Arm Cortex-M33 cores with dual Hazard3 RISC-V cores. Two processing cores can operate at a time, allowing developers to use two Arm cores, two RISC-V cores, or a mixed configuration with one of each. The microcontroller also provides 520KB of SRAM, three programmable I/O blocks with 12 PIO state machines, and 2MB of stacked in-package QSPI flash.

• Hackaday ☛ Cut And Fold Your 3D Printer’s Next Cover

  He provides a cutout diagram for pieces that, when assembled, make a sort of hat that is just right to cover the top of the Snapmaker U1 without obstructing the extruders. One can even lift the front panel to access the inside without removing the cover, which is a nice touch. Should one wish to add a viewing window anywhere, just cut out a square and tape a sheet of clear plastic over the hole.

• Hackaday ☛ Putting Some Zig In A Linux-Based 3D Printer

  Having Linux on so many devices is both a blessing and a curse. Sure, it is great that you can hack on things and modify them or even totally repurpose them. But it also means you have a fleet of Linux devices you have to manage and keep track of.

  My current “main” 3D printer is a Flashforge AD5X: a nice, cheap machine that does four colors with the purge/exchange method. It sort of runs Klipper. I say sort of because Flashforge has Klipper running on a Linux host in the box, but it is massively crippled and modified. I’m sure it works for most folks. I’m also sure that if you know nothing about Linux, Klipper, or 3D printing, the experience is probably better thanks to all the cloud point-and-click interfaces. But, of course, I check none of those boxes.

• Adafruit ☛ From Linux to NuttX on the Adafruit Fruit Jam

  I’ve been chasing a real OS for Fruit Jam. Started by forking Mr-Bossman’s Linux port — Fruit Jam’s a great target with its HDMI, USB, NeoPixels, speaker, buttons, IR receiver, and generous PSRAM/Flash. Got a lot of hardware working, plus HTTP, FTP, and Telnet servers, but Linux is a heavy lift for a microcontroller. The more I packed in, the more it crashed. The ESP32 NINA-W102 WiFi firmware didn’t help either — great for CircuitPython/Arduino, but no raw-frame access meant slow sockets and broken network tooling. Swapping in Espressif’s ESP-Hosted-MCU fixed that.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Troy Hunt ☛ Troy Hunt: Weekly Update 512: IoT Lockout Fail

    "Build a smart home", they said. "It'll make life so much better", they said. Well, life wasn't very bloody good at 23:00 the other night after travelling 33 hours from Paris only to find the IoT doorlock batteries dead and the 9V "jump start" procedure completely failing! Eventually, the locksmith arrived and opened an old-school physical lock on another door in an alarmingly short time. So, lessons:

    1. Battery-powered locks suck and will eventually lock you out of your house
    2. Don't trust a fallback mechanism as rudimentary as "hold a 9V battery on some terminals"
    3. Always have an old school manual backup approach, AKA "a key"