Open Hardware/Modding: Arduino, Adafruit, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 11, 2026

• CNX Software ☛ Renesas RZ/T2N Cortex-A55/R52 industrial MPU supports four-axis motor control, TSN Ethernet, EtherCAT…

  Renesas RZ/T2N industrial MPU supports up to four-axis motor control and includes PWM timers, encoder interfaces, and trigonometric accelerators. It’s designed for industrial robots, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), motion controllers, and multi-axis servo drives. The MPU features up to two 1.2 GHz Arm Cortex-A55 cores for application processing and two 800 MHz Cortex-R52 cores for real-time control. It also integrates a three-port Gigabit Ethernet switch with TSN support and industrial Ethernet protocols such as EtherCAT, PROFINET RT/IRT, and EtherNet/IP.

• CNX Software ☛ LabWired allows engineers to test compiled firmware on simulated MCU boards (CPU and peripherals)

  Andrii Shylenko’s LabWired is an MIT-licensed MCU firmware simulation core that runs compiled firmware against modeled CPUs and peripherals, captures UART and bus output, register state, and supports repeatable checks in CI. The simulator works on Arm Cortex-M0+, Cortex-M3, Cortex-M4, Cortex-M7, Cortex-M33 cores, RISC-V architecutre, and Xtensa LX6 and LX7 (some ESP32 parts). The main benefit of the project is speeding up firmware testing since doing some on real boards is slow. The hardware must be ready, then the firmware must be flashed to the board each time you want to test it, and if something breaks, developers get a dark LED and no trace. If a firmware project needs to support multiple boards, this quickly adds up.

• CNX Software ☛ LocalDot – Open-source PCB for 3rd-gen Amazon Echo Dot enables Home Assistant support (Crowdfunding)

  AAElectronics’ LocalDot is an open-source replacement mainboard that converts a 3rd-generation Amazon Echo Dot into a local voice assistant compatible with Home Assistant. The board replaces one of the two original PCBs while reusing the existing microphones, speaker, buttons, LEDs, and enclosure, so the device works without relying on Amazon’s cloud services. The board combines an ESP32-S3 for WiFi connectivity and device control with an ESP32-P4 for audio processing. It supports the original four-microphone array with beamforming, on-device wake-word detection, and local voice commands through Home Assistant. Installation requires no soldering or enclosure modifications, and the device still uses the original Echo Dot power adapter.

• Hackaday ☛ Gesture Controls With Only A Camera

  The original system worked by attempting to automatically identify the user’s fingers and head. The team had focused on user inputs for standard PCs, drawing characters in the air and allowing the software to interpret them and pass them to a computer. In the modern iteration the scope is slimmed down a bit. The system instead detects an open or closed hand, and can recognize when it leaves the camera’s view. For the game built around this concept, the player controls a dragon who whips his tail around a map. Closing and opening a hand generates a click in the game, and moving a hand off-screen pauses the game.

• Hackaday ☛ Hacking The Sidekick In 2026

  The early 2000s saw a Cambrian Explosion of form factors for mobile devices, and one of the most feature-rich phones of the time was the Danger Hiptop, better known as the T-Mobile Sidekick. [ashe] wanted to get the phone going again, which took some sleuthing.

• Kevin Boone ☛ Using a Raspberry Pi Pico to control a large-scale model locomotive – part 2

  In an earlier article I described how to use a Raspberry Pi Pico as the controller for a G (“garden”) -scale model train. The Pico provides realistic acceleration and deceleration of the train, while playing sampled locomotive noises. Of course, because these locomotives have comparatively high current requirements – perhaps up to ten amps – we need more than just a Pico and a loudspeaker. The earlier article described the electronic design, and outlined the software. I was reluctant to give many details of the actual construction, because I’m not an expert modeller, and I’m all too aware that a person who had that kind of expertise would make a better job of it. Still, since a couple of people have written to me for more details, I’ll describe the construction in this article. I’m not going to elaborate on the electronics or the software, since these haven’t changed since the previous article.

• Arduino ☛ Atmosis provides a digestible report, rather than raw environmental data

  As part of the Arduino UNO Q Dream Lab Challenge hosted in partnership with DigiKey, makers and innovators were challenged to push the boundaries of what is possible with the dual-brain Arduino® UNO™ Q board and Arduino App Lab.

• Arduino ☛ Just announced at electronica: the Arduino® Nano™ family is now XL!

  The Nano is one of the most recognizable Arduino boards in the world. Compact, accessible, and endlessly versatile, it has powered millions of projects across a variety of domains.

• Adafruit ☛ Sudopi Zer0: the open source Linux handheld built on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

  Open Electronics covered the Sudopi Zer0, an open source project from Signals Circuits that turns a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W into a handheld Linux terminal. The keyboard, display, audio and battery are all inside a custom case, so it works without external accessories. The Pi’s quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 runs at up to 1 GHz with 512 MB of SDRAM.

  A Zero 2 W only has a camera connector and a 40-pin header, so a carrier board brings back the ports. A USB hub provides two USB ports, and a STEMMA QT/Qwiic port allows sensors and modules to be added without soldering. The keyboard has an ortholinear layout, which means the keys are on a regular grid instead of being staggered, and there’s room inside for a thumbstick that takes the place of a mouse. Audio includes an amplifier, a speaker and a headphone jack. A custom power board runs the computer and the display, and the internal battery charges over USB-C.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Lesley Carhart ☛ Let’s Talk About Why all This OT Stuff is Connected

    This is just one example, and I’m genuinely not trying to bash the OP. I’m certain they’re a very competent, experienced IT person, and I understand their frustration. But the situation is far more complicated than it looks, and calling the people who support and purchase these systems incompetent won’t fix it. So let me try to explain why so much OT, ICS, and IIoT is exposed, and which systems are in the worst state.