Open Hardware, Linux, and Mobile

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 18, 2026

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • CNX Software ☛ M5Stack PaperDIY Kits pair an ESP32-S3 MCU with a 4.7-inch e-Paper display

    M5Stack has released the PaperDIY series, an updated version of its 2020 M5Paper ESP32 development kit, featuring an ESP32-S3 MCU and a 4.7-inch e-paper display with 16 levels of gray. It comes in two versions: the PaperDIY Complete Kit, which ships factory-assembled in a 3D-printed enclosure, and the PaperDIY Assembly Kit, which is designed to be integrated into custom projects. Both boards also include a microSD card slot for extended storage, a built-in 140mAh battery, and a custom M5PM1 low-power management chip.

  • Linux Gizmos ☛ Adafruit Floppsy Rev D Revives Floppy Disk Archiving with RP2350

    Adafruit has previewed Floppsy Rev D, an RP2350-based floppy disk archiver and emulator designed to preserve and access legacy computer storage media. The standalone device supports floppy drives used with PCs and Apple Disk II systems, offering disk imaging, flux-level data capture, and emulation capabilities alongside a touchscreen interface and removable storage.

  • Linux Gizmos ☛ LILYGO T5 e-Paper Basic Adopts 4.7-Inch Display for Embedded Projects

    LILYGO’s latest e-paper development board pairs an ESP32-S3 with a 4.7-inch display offering 960 × 540 resolution and 16-level grayscale. The board also includes battery monitoring, removable storage, and Wi-Fi and BLE connectivity for portable information displays and wireless embedded projects.

  • openExpress brings Garmin updates, maps and apps to Linux

    Plug a Garmin watch into a Linux PC and the file manager can browse its storage, but official desktop support stops there. Garmin Express, the desktop app for software updates, maps and wired sync, runs only on Windows and macOS, so Linux users run it through Wine or boot into Windows.

    openExpress is a free, open-source alternative built by Tomasz Bojanowski, a fēnix 8 owner. It handles those jobs natively on Linux. It also installs Connect IQ apps over USB on watches such as the fēnix 8, which do not expose their app folder through normal file access, something Garmin offers no Linux tool for.

  • Hackaday ☛ Making One Fender From Another

    The chopping board isn’t made of great material, instead it’s a set of strips of wood, we’re guessing probably bamboo or rubberwood, glued together. It’s robust, but noticeably thinner than the guitar whose shape it takes, and with a not-great finish. The build is not too different from any other electric guitar build we’ve seen, with the main challenge being that the bridge and pickups need spacers underneath them to compensate for the reduced thickness of the wood.

  • Hackaday ☛ Discovering SDRs Everywhere

    At this point, folks have already started to use the capabilities for broadcasting digital TV signals, voice signals, FM Hell, and other hijinks. This reminds us of the early days of the RTL-SDR project, when a competent, if receive-only, SDR functionality was found in a bunch of USB TV-tuner dongles. Once the hardware capabilities were sussed out, people started writing all sorts of useful software, and it gave rise to all manner of radio projects, from simply poking at domestic wireless devices to tracking all the airplanes in the world as they fly by.

  • Hackaday ☛ 2026 Retrocomputing Challenge: Oldputer Gives Old Eyes Relief With E-ink Display

    [Andrzej Górski]’s inspiration came from one component, and the main component of the project, an old e-ink display. When life gives you one of the slowest versions of a display, there really isn’t too much else to do other than pair it with slow old computers of the past. From that inspiration, there isn’t entirely a whole lot to do other than throw in an ESP32 and some LEDs for indicator lights. Put all this into a fun case, and you get one pretty desk ornament for whatever information you wanna display.

  • Hackaday ☛ Building A Flying Drone With A Single Propeller

    In the final prototype of the drone such details had to be measured directly, with super-fast adjustments to the motor’s speed only possible with custom controller code and a lot of trial and error. Even then the drone would often lose track of its position and crash once more. The solution there was to add an infrared beacon in the room and a sensor on the drone, to give it a fixed reference point.

  • Hackaday ☛ 2026 Retrocomputing Challenge: Dollhouse Arcade Cabinet Runs Remote DOS Games

    Classic DOS games never ran from within stand-up arcade cabinets in dollhouses, but [Juha Lilja] imagines a world in which they did. His Micro DOS arcade cabinet is described as a device that “runs nothing” because the tiny unit is actually streaming the games over Wi-Fi from a nearby PC. That doesn’t mean it’s just a glorified movie player, though — the cabinet is playable, if a bit awkward to do so.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • [Repeat] Ubuntu ☛ How to lower Android™ development costs by removing hardware from the critical path

    When building Android, testing an application, reproducing a bug, or even running regression tests, there’s absolutely no need for any physical device. So instead of asking yourself if a specific target device is available, the question you should ask is whether you need a device at all.

    The distinction is important here, because hardware labs are obviously much harder to scale than software.