Author: Arya Voronova

518 Articles

Looking For A Cellular Modem?

November 2, 2026 by 1 Comment

Cellular modems come and go, and they can be tricky beasts to tame – yet, in every portable computer project I’ve worked with, “LTE modem” has been a top-three request from the audience. If you’re building a cyberdeck or a general Linux portable, then a cellular modem’s cellular data uplink, SMS support, and even voice calls, can be the killer addition you need to make your deck a true daily machine. These days, I see that the demand for cyberdecks is rising, my own projects could greatly benefit from modems too, and yet it sometimes it feels like informational drought. I think now is a great time to make a listicle, detailing a few modems you should keep in mind.

Testing out prospective modems can be costly and time-intensive – design a board, purchase a few sample modems at inflated prices, only to have your idea completely blocked by elusive firmware issues at the very last step. I’ve given some starting-from-scratch tips before, having shown how to use mPCIe cards for testbench purposes. Today, I’d rather give you a few battle-tested modems that others already use with great success, and describe the features you can get out of one.

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ESP32 As Your Raspberry Pi’s Linux Wireless Co-processor

October 7, 2026 by 13 Comments

A laptop with no wireless connectivity feels like a rarity – but when you shop for powerful Linux single-board computers (SBCs), it is pretty common to see one skimp on WiFi. At the same time, current wireless cards can leave much to be desired. A mess of proprietary firmware, ephemeral or even binary blob drivers, weird glitches never resolved, and sometimes entirely source-less blobs with an expiration date. Maybe the SBC doesn’t have a free USB port for a plug-and-play WiFi chip, or you don’t want to design for an obscure hard-to-source castellated module.

What if I told you there’s a unique solution to the problem, as long as the SBC has an SDIO or SPI to spare? There’s a wireless card we can all try to get behind, and it’s certainly not flawless but gives us way more room to grow – it’s got somewhat open-source firmware, it comes from a respectable company, and it’s nigh-guaranteed to be easy to source. I am, of course, talking about esp-hosted – using ESP32 modules as your WiFi/BT card, over SDIO or SPI.

I’ve recently added an ESP32-C6 into my project, and setting up esp-hosted wasn’t ultra straightforward – so here’s a guide, and a discussion on what makes esp-hosted so cool and so incredibly promising. Spoilers: it works with privacy switches that cut out power, it could be hacked into a coprocessor for mesh protocols, and it could potentially help us build a fully open-source SDIO WiFi card.

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Screenshot of the survey webpage, saying "Invitation to participate in a new fun hardware discussion in the PINE64 Community Pine Store may have stopped production on Linux hardware, but that doesn't mean all production has stopped. Hardware like the Pinecil, PineTime and PineVoice that use MCUs will continue production as normal. This is a great opportunity to come up with new ideas for MCU powered hardware. Now that the PinePhone has stopped production, there is a gap in the hardware lineup for a "fun" device. This definition of "fun" boils down to whether a device can have multiple use cases or purposes. The PineTime, PinePhone and PineNote can be considered "fun" as they can be used for multiple purposes and multiple projects can naturally form around them. An example of the opposite would be devices like the Pinecil and PineBuds which serve a single purpose and build less of a community around them as a result (but both are still great). OKAY, SO! We'd like to share some initial ideas on what a cheap fun tinkerers device could be. 1.What hardware do you prefer?Required Please drag these items from most (1) to least (5) preferred. ?Alarm clock ?PinePhone-esque device but MCU powered (attachments possible?) ?Handy multi-tool with screen, fido hardware key, nfc, etc ?Other (next question) ?MP3 player"

What Should Pine64 Build With Microcontrollers?

September 25, 2026 by 27 Comments

Pine64 is an open-source-community-centered project of mostly-open hardware, known for such hits as the PinePhone, the Pinecil soldering iron, and the PineTime. Now, the Pine64 project wants to know what kind of MCU-powered device you’d want to see built next, and there’s an online form you can fill out to let them know about any fun ideas they could bring to reality, as we all recover from the second round of Hardware Horrors Of 2020s.

In the age of RAM and storage shortage, it’s evident we’re not about to see a new Pine64 Linux SBC – but there’s plenty that can be done with regular microcontrollers, especially seeing how far modern microcontrollers have come in capabilities. On their Discord server and other linked platforms, you can see the announcement post giving you more details, as well as examples of devices that would fit the bill. An MP3 player? An alarm clock? Some sort of electronics multi-tool? PinePhone-esque device but based on an MCU? Digital camera? Whether you have full-on device ideas or specific feature requests for the aforementioned, check out the form and let them know.

Of course, any suggestions will ultimately have to be considered for viability by the Pine Store, the Pine64 hemisphere that actually decides on what to manufacture, so no promises can be made, but we consider this more than promising enough that you ought to have a say. Pine64 has come incredibly far in the 10 years it’s been around, and despite the troubles, we hope they’re here to stay, doing their thing releasing hardware that so often runs circles around the competition, and dropping by hacker cons all over the globe.

Raspberry Pi RAM Restrictions No Big Deal, Frankly

September 22, 2026 by 167 Comments

Hacking on Raspberry Pi board internals is one of my favourite topics. I know a bunch of obscure things about these cute little boards. Three years ago, I covered a Raspberry Pi 4 RAM upgrade story. Getting a BGA RAM chip and swapping it in seemed like a no-brainer to me – apart from all the numerous uncertain parts about it, you know. It was a joy to see hackers pull it off, and for it to function as well as it did!

Things changed. You can’t really get RAM chips anymore. You also can’t get RAM sticks. You can’t get even SSDs with RAM chips on them. Even getting Raspberry Pi boards can be hard unless you know where to look. This is where a recent three-minute video by [Jeff Geerling] finds us.

Turns out, Raspberry Pi Foundation pushed binary-blob bootloader changes that limit your ability to upgrade RAM. I’ve known about it since last year through the grapevine, and somehow, as I read about it, this didn’t bother me at all. Not enough to write a Hackaday article about it, even, much less talk about it more widely. Why didn’t it bother me? Today, I sat down and pondered this for a bit.

Here’s my conclusion: I don’t think it’s a big deal at all, even if it seems that many people would disagree. Come in, as you are, and I hope you find my thoughts on the situation entertaining.

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Mentra Brings Open Smart Glasses OS With Cross-Compat

December 13, 2025 by 7 Comments

There are a few very different pathways to building a product, and we gotta applaud the developers taking care to take the open-source path. Today’s highlight is [Mentra], who is releasing an open-source smart glasses OS for their own and others’ devices, letting you develop your smart glasses ideas just once, a single codebase applicable for multiple models.

Currently, the compatibility list covers four models, two of them Mentra’s (Live and Mach 1), one from Vuzix (Z100), and one from Even Realities (G1) — some display-only, and some recording-only. The app store already has a few apps that cover the basics, the repository looks lively, and if the openness is anything to go by, our guess is that we’re sure to see more.

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PJON, Open Single-Wire Bus Protocol, Goes Verilog

December 13, 2025 by 13 Comments

Did OneWire of DS18B20 sensor fame ever fascinate you in its single-data-line simplicity? If so, then you’ll like PJON (Padded Jittering Operative Network) – a single-wire-compatible protocol for up to 255 devices. One disadvantage is that you need to check up on the bus pretty often, trading hardware complexity for software complexity. Now, this is no longer something for the gate wielders of us to worry about – [Giovanni] tells us that there’s a hardware implementation of PJDL (Padded Jittering Data Link), a PJON-based bus.

This implementation is written in Verilog, and allows you to offload a lot of your low-level PJDL tasks, essentially, giving you a PJDL peripheral for all your inter-processor communication needs. Oh, and as [Giovanni] says, this module has recently been taped out as part of the CROC chip project, an educational SoC project. What’s not to love?

PJON is a fun protocol, soon to be a decade old. We’ve previously covered [Giovanni] use PJON to establish a data link through a pair of LEDs, and it’s nice to see this nifty small-footprint protocol gain that much more of a foothold, now, in our hardware-level projects.

We thank [Giovanni Blu Mitolo] for sharing this with us!

Consider This Pocket Machine For Your IPhone Backups

December 12, 2025 by 25 Comments

What if you find yourself as an iPhone owner, desiring a local backup solution — no wireless tech involved, no sending off data to someone else’s server, just an automatic device-to-device file sync? Check out [Giovanni]’s ios-backup-machine project, a small Linux-powered device with an e-ink screen that backs up your iPhone whenever you plug the two together with a USB cable.

The system relies on libimobiledevice, and is written to make simple no-interaction automatic backups work seamlessly. The backup status is displayed on the e-ink screen, and at boot, it shows up owner’s information of your choice, say, a phone number — helpful if the device is ever lost. For preventing data loss, [Giovanni] recommends a small uninterruptible power supply, and the GitHub-described system is married to a PiSugar board, though you could go without or add a different one, for sure. Backups are encrypted through iPhone internal mechanisms, so while it appears you might not be able to dig into one, they are perfectly usable for restoring your device should it get corrupted or should you need to provision a new phone to replace the one you just lost.

Easy to set up, fully open, and straightforward to use — what’s not to like? Just put a few off-the-shelf boards together, print the case, and run the setup instructions, you’ll have a pocket backup machine ready to go. Now, if you’re considering this as a way to decrease your iTunes dependency, you might as well check out this nifty tool that helps you get out the metadata for the music you’ve bought on iTunes.