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“you could literally etch a PCB for this project…” Could you connect this Linux system to a larger screen, install KiCAD on this Linux system, then design this board in KiCAD, use software running on this Linux system to convert KiCAD in to gerbers then in to Gcode to route out this board with, and then use another of these Linux boards as the controller for the CNC machine doing the routing?

Like many of you, we’ve been keeping a close eye on the CH32 family of RISC-V microcontrollers from WCH Electronics. You can get the CH32V003, featuring 2 kB RAM and 16 kB of flash for under fifteen cents, and the higher-end models include impressive features like onboard Ethernet. But while the hardware is definitely interesting, the software side of things has been a little rocky compared to wha

Switching inputs between desktops seems like something that should be simple but can prove to be a pain in reality. [Hrvoje Cavrak] decided to take matters into his own hands and build a better keyboard and mouse switch. DeskHop is built from two Raspberry Pi Pico boards connected via UART and separated by an Analog Devices ADuM1201 dual-channel digital isolator. Through the magic of Pico-PIO-USB

Nice, visual simulators of CPUs such as the 6502 are usually made much later and with more modern tooling than what they simulate. But what if that wasn’t the case? What if a simulator runs on the very hardware it’s simulating? This is what [Tea Leaves] stumbled upon when he found a mysterious disk with only “APL6502.SIM” on it. [Tea Leaves] demonstrates the simulator with a basic 6502 assembly pr

Over the past decade or so, smartphones have exploded in popularity and seamlessly integrated themselves into nearly every aspect of most people’s lives. Although that comes with a few downsides as well, with plenty of people feeling that the smart phone makes it a little too easy to waste time and looking to switch to something simpler, like an older-style flip phone. If this style of phone is mo

The original circuit simulation software, called the Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis, or SPICE as it is more commonly known, was originally developed at the University of Califorina Berkeley in the 1970s with an open-source license. That’s the reason for the vast versions of SPICE available now decades after the original was released, not all of which are as open or free as we

If you have ever wanted to implement a RISC-V CPU core in about 600 lines of C, you’re in luck! [mnurzia]’s rv project does exactly that, providing a simple two-function API. Technically, it’s a user-level RV32IMC implementation in ANSI C. There are many different possible flavors of RISC-V, and in this case is a 32-bit base integer instruction set (RV32I), with multiplication and division extensi

While Microsoft and Apple don’t release the source code for their operating systems, a good estimate is that it takes around 50 million lines of code to run these software behemoths. The Linux kernel alone holds around 30 million lines, with systemd containing over one million lines on its own, which doesn’t include estimates for the desktop environment or other parts of a standard installation. B

Since the Raspberry Pi 3B+ release, the Pi boards we all know and love gained one more weakpoint – the PMIC chip, responsible for generating all the power rails a Pi needs. Specifically, the new PMIC was way more vulnerable to shorting 5V and 3.3V power rails together – something that’s trivial to do on a Raspberry Pi, and would leave you with a bricked board. Just replacing the PMIC chip, the MxL

We’re used to running Linux on CPUs where it belongs, and the consensus is that RP2040 just isn’t up for the task – no memory controller, and nowhere near enough RAM, to boot. At least, that’s what you might believe until you see [tvlad1234]’s Linux-on-RP2040 project, reminding us there’s more than one way to boot Linux on a CPU like this! Just like with the “Linux on AVR” project in 2012 that emu

It’s possible quite a few of our older readers will remember the period from the 1960s into the ’70s when an electronic calculator was the cutting edge of consumer-grade digital technology. By the 1980s though, they were old hat and could be bought for only a few dollars, a situation that remains to this day. But does that mean calculator development dead? Perhaps not, as [Li Zexi] writes for CNX

Surface mount components have been a game changer for the electronics hobbyist, but doing reflow soldering right requires some way to evenly heat the board. You might need to buy a commercial reflow oven — you can cobble one together from an old toaster oven, after all — but you still need something, because it’s not like a PCB is going to solder itself. Right? Wrong. At least if you’re [Carl Buge

What’s common between one of the most legendary video game characters of all time and a fume extractor ? They both suck. [Chris Borge] is not an electronics hobbyist and only does some occasional soldering. This made his regular fume extractor bulky and inconvenient to position where needed. What could serve him better would be a small extractor that could be attached to a clip or an arm on his he

It seems every day there’s a new microcontroller announcement for which the manufacturer is keen to secure your eyeballs. Today it’s the turn of Espressif, whose new part is the ESP32-P4, which despite being another confusingly named ESP32, is a high-performance addition to their RISC-V line-up. On board are dual-core 400 MHz and a single-core low power 40 MHz RISC-V processors, and an impressive

Vim is the greatest or the worst text editor of all time, depending on the tribe you’re in. Either way, members of both camps can appreciate this build from [Chris Price], which uses a foot pedal to ease operations for the user. The basic concept was to use a pedal to enable switching between normal and insert modes. In Vim’s predecessor, vi, switching modes was easy, with the ESC key located neat

We’re used to the so-called “Hackintoshes”, non-Apple hardware running MacOS. One we featured recently was even built into the case of a Nintendo Wii. But [Dandu] has gone one better than that, by running MacOS on an unmodified Wii, original Nintendo hardware (French, Google Translate link). How has this seemingly impossible task been achieved? Seasoned Mac enthusiasts will remember the days when

Amid the many wonderful form factors being explored by the makers of cyberdecks, there’s one that’s emerged which harks back to an earlier generation of portable computers: the handheld pad with a keyboard. These units are typically around the size of a hardback book, with the upper half being a screen and the lower a keyboard. The latest to come our way is from [Richard Sutherland], and it’s a ve

“Modular” and “Computer” have historically been on the opposite ends of a rather awkward spectrum. One could argue that a hobbyist grade PC is modular, but only to a point. Re-configuring it on the fly is not readily possible. Modular laptops are slowly happening, but what about handheld devices, where our needs might change on a regular basis? Enter the Pockit: a fully modular IoT/edge computing

It seems as though more and more of the simple command-line tools and small scripts that used to be bash or small c programs are slowly turning into python programs. Of course, we will just have to wait and see if this ultimately turns out to be a good idea. But in the meantime, next time you’re revamping or writing a new tool, why not spice it up with Rich? Rich is a python library written by [Wi