Linux Devices, Open Hardware, and Android

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 07, 2026

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • CNX Software ☛ XIAO SAMD21 Plus and RP2350 Plus USB-C boards get additional GPIO pins, integrated Li-ion battery management

    Seeed Studio has expanded its XIAO Plus Series introduced in 2025, with the XIAO SAMD21 Plus and XIAO RP2350 Plus USB-C boards adding several GPIOs and integrated Li-ion battery management to the XIAO (SAMD21) and XIAO RP2040, launched in 2020 and 2021, respectively, while keeping the same form factor.

  • Hackaday ☛ Printing Micron-Scale Benchies With Resin And Turmeric

    Resin 3D printing has opened up a whole new scale of resolution for hackers, but the technology can go still finer; commercial micro-SLA and two-photon polymerization printers can print items with sub-micron feature sizes, but the machines are well out of reach for hackers. There’s more than one way to get such high resolution, though, as [Diffraction Limited] demonstrated with his micron-scale resin printer.

  • Hackaday ☛ This Clavichord Is A Well-Tempered Project

    The Clavichord needs no introduction to fans of Early Music, and a lengthy one to literally everyone else. Even classical music buffs who have heard of Bach’s works for the “Well-Tempered Clavier” — another word for clavichord — will mostly have heard them performed on Piano. That is perhaps fitting, as the clavichord is a distant ancestor of the modern piano. It has keys — though fewer of them than a piano — whose action strikes strings — though much, much fewer of those than a piano, as each string is required to generate multiple notes. [Ian Summers] has an excellent guide on how he built his, though be warned that that link goes to a PDF and the SSL certificate was having problems as of this writing. If you aren’t comfortable grabbing a PDF over old-style HTTP, we’ve embedded the demo/build video below so you can give a listen to what this pre-piano instrument sounds like.

  • [Old] Bunnie Huang ☛ Safecast Geiger Counter Reference Design

    I decided my tiny contribution to the effort would be to design a radiation monitor suitable for everyday civilian use. This is a preventative/preparedness measure, addressing the long-term issue of empowering a civilian population with few available options for power generation to self-monitor their environment. The problem with the current crop of radiation monitors is that they are basically laboratory instruments: accurate & reliable, but bulky, expensive, and difficult to use, requiring a degree in nuclear physics to understand exactly what the readings meant. Another problem with crises like these is that while radiation monitoring is important, it’s something that is typically neglected by the civilian population until it is too late.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Russell Coker ☛ Russell Coker: CoMaps

    I have just tried CoMaps, a free mapping program released under the Apache license [1]. I have tried it on Android on a Pixel 6a but it also runs on GNU/Linux so I’ll try it on a PinePhone or similar at some convenient time. On Android it is in the F-Droid repository among others and for GNU/Linux there’s a Flatpak package.

  • New York Times ☛ The Generation That’s Never Had to Say ‘Hello?’

    Now that there’s rarely any mystery to who’s calling, Gen Z has adopted a range of custom phone greetings — including no greeting at all.

  • Aman Mittal ☛ How to render a Material 3 bottom tab bar with NativeTabs in Expo Router

    Expo Router’s submodule NativeTabs renders a real Material 3 navigation bar on Android and its native counterpart on iOS from one component tree.