UEFI On ARM? More Likely Than You Think

December 4, 2025 by 2 Comments

Now, Rock 5 ITX+ is no x86 board, sporting an ARM Rockship RK3588 on its ITX form-factor PCB, but reading this blog post’s headline might as well give you the impression. [Venn] from the [interfacinglinux.com] blog tells us about their journey bringing up UEFI on this board, thanks to the [EDK2-RK3588] project. Why? UEFI is genuinely nice for things like OS switching or system reconfiguration on the fly, and in many aspects, having a system management/configuration interface for your SBC sure beats the “flash microSD card and pray” traditional approach.

In theory, a UEFI binary runs like any other firmware. In theory. For [Venn], the journey wasn’t as smooth, which made it very well worth documenting. There’s maybe not a mountain, but at least a small hill of caveats: having to use a specific HDMI port to see the configuration output, somehow having to flash it onto SPI flash chip specifically (and managing to do that through Gnome file manager of all things), requiring a new enough kernel for GPU hardware acceleration… Yet, it works, it really does.

Worth it? From the looks of it, absolutely. One thing [Venn] points out is, the RK3588 is getting a lot of its features upstreamed, so it’s aiming to become a healthy chip for many a Linux goal. From the blog post comments, we’ve also learned that there’s a RPi UEFI port, even if for a specific CPU revision of the Model 5B, it’s still a nifty thing to know. Want to learn more about UEFI? You can start here or here, and if you want a fun hands-on example, you could very well start by running DOOM.

New Browser-based CAD System Is Best Friends With Triangle Meshes

December 4, 2025 by 8 Comments

Who’s interested in a brand new, from-scratch boundary representation (BREP) kernel? How about one that has no topological naming problem, a web-native parametric CAD front end to play with, and has CAD-type operations making friends with triangle meshes? If you’re intrigued, check out [mmiscool]’s BREP project.

Functioning (let alone feature-filled, or efficient) CAD systems are not a software project we see a whole lot of. Ones that represent models as genuine BREP structures but cleverly use mesh-based operations where it makes sense? Even less so.

In theory, CAD programs are simple: allow a user to define features, keep track of what they are and how they relate to one another, and perform operations on them as requested. In practice, it’s significant work. Chains of operations and dependencies easily become complex, volatile things and there is really no room for error.

Read [Arya Voronova]’s best practices for using FreeCAD to get a few hints as to what goes on behind the scenes in a modern CAD program, and the kinds of challenges the back end has to deal with, like the topological naming problem (TNP). A problem [mmiscool]’s implementation completely avoids, by the way.

There is a live demo at BREP.io which acts as a playground for the state of the project. You can get started by clicking the + button towards the top on the left panel to add features and operations to the history (like add a cube, then add chamfers or fillets, or extrude a face, and so on).

[mmiscool] points out that all computation is done client-side; even complex operations like fillets, lofts, and multi-body booleans execute directly in the browser with no need to be offloaded to a back end. BREP’s development is being documented on Hackaday.io and there is a video embedded below that gives an overview. Why don’t you give it a spin?

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A photo of tye blub glowing in the workshop

What Happens When You Pump 30,000 Watts Into A Tungsten Incandescent Light Bulb?

December 3, 2025 by 7 Comments

Over on YouTube [Drake] from the [styropyro] channel investigates what happens when you take an enormous tungsten incandescent light bulb and pump 30,000 watts through it.

The answer: it burns bright enough to light up the forest at night, and hot enough to cook food and melt metal. And why on Earth would anybody do such a thing? Well [Drake] said it was because he wanted to outdo [Photonicinduction] who had already put 20,000 watts through a light bulb. Nothing like a little friendly competition to drive… progress?

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The Database Powering America’s Hospitals May Not Be What You Expect

December 3, 2025 by 8 Comments

Ever heard of MUMPS? Both programming language and database, it was developed in the 1960s for the Massachusetts General Hospital. The goal was to streamline the increasingly enormous timesink that information and records management had become, a problem that was certain to grow unless something was done. Far from being some historical footnote, MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System) grew to be used by a wide variety of healthcare facilities and still runs today. If you’ve never heard of it, you’re in luck because [Asianometry] has a documentary video that’ll tell you everything.

MUMPS had rough beginnings but ultimately found widespread support and use that continues to this day. As a programming language, MUMPS (also known simply as “M”) has the unusual feature of very tight integration with the database end of things. That makes sense in light of the fact that it was created to streamline the gathering, processing, and updating of medical data in a busy, multi-user healthcare environment that churned along twenty-four hours per day.

It may show its age (the term “archaic” — among others — gets used when it’s brought up) but it is extremely good at what it does and has a proven track record in the health care industry. This, combined with the fact that efforts to move to newer electronic record systems always seem to find the job harder than expected, have helped keep it relevant. Have you ever used MUMPS? Let us know in the comments!

And hey, if vintage programming languages just aren’t unusual enough for you, we have some truly strange ones for you to check out.

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Ride On With FOSS And GoldenCheetah

December 3, 2025 by 3 Comments

If you exclude certain companies like Peloton, the world of cycling technology is surprisingly open. It’s not perfect by any means, but there are enough open or open-ish standards for many different pieces of technology from different brands to interoperate with each other, from sensors and bike computers and even indoor trainers to some extent. This has also made it possible for open source software to exist in this realm as well, and the GoldenCheetah project has jumped in for all of us who value FOSS and also like to ride various bicycles from time to time.

GoldenCheetah focuses on gathering data from power meters, allowing cyclists to record their rides and save them in order to keep track of their training performance over time. It works well with sensors that use the ANT+ protocol, and once it has that data it can provide advanced analytics such as power curves, critical power modeling, and detailed charts for power, heart rate, and cadence. It can display and record live indoor-training data, and in some situations it can even run interval workouts, although not every indoor trainer is supported. There are no social features, subscriptions, or cloud requirements which can be refreshing in the modern world, but is a bit of a downside if you’re used to riding with your friends in something like Zwift.

All in all, though, it’s an impressive bit of software that encourages at least one realm of consumer electronics to stay more open, especially if those using bike sensors, computers, and trainers pick ones that are more open and avoid those that are proprietary, even if they don’t plan to use GoldenCheetah exclusively. And if you were wondering about the ANT+ protocol mentioned earlier, it’s actually used for many more things that just intra-bike wireless communications.

Two four-cylinder engines mechanically linked and exhausting into a trombone.

Franken-engine Plays Its Own Swan Song At 15k RPM

December 3, 2025 by 10 Comments

Back during WWII, Chrysler bodged five inline-6 engines together to create the powerful A57 multibank tank engine. [Maisteer] has some high-revving inline-4 motorcycle engines he’s trying to put together too, but unlike 1940s Chrysler, he also has a trombone… and a lot more RPMs to deal with.

The Chrysler flatheads were revving at a few thousand RPM– their redline was almost certainly in the three-thousand range. [Maisteer] is working at 15,000 RPM, which is where the real challenge of this build lies: the trombone in the image is just for fun. He wanted to use a heavy chain to link the crankshafts, but at that rotational speed, a heavy chain becomes really heavy— or at least, it feels a force many times its weight due to centrifugal force. The lietmotief of this video is a quote by an automotive engineer to the effect that chains don’t work over 10,000 RPM.

That leads to a few problems for the intrepid “not an engineer” that take most of the video to deal with and ultimately doom the engine linkage– for now. Not before he gets an iconic 8-cylinder sound out (plus some fire) out of a trombone, though. Of particular note is the maker-type workflow Hackaday readers will appreciate: he 3D scans the engines, CADs up parts he needs and sends away to have them CNC’d and SLS printed.

Hacking motorcycle engines into cars is nothing new. Hacking them together into franken-engines is something we see less often.

Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip! Remember, if you want to toot your own horn– or toot about someone else’s project, for that matter–the tips line is always open.

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 857: SOCification

December 3, 2025 by No comments

This week Jonathan chats with Konstantinos Margaritis about SIMD programming. Why do these wide data instructions matter? What’s the state of Hyperscan, the project from Intel to power regex with SIMD? And what is Konstantinos’ connection to ARM’s SIMD approach? Watch to find out!

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