Tux Machines

Open Hardware/Modding: Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update, Jolla, Arduino, and More

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 10, 2025

Linux On Mobile ☛ 2025-12-07 [Older] Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (49/2025): Modal boats

2025-12-07 [Older] New Jolla Phone Now Available for Pre-Order as an Independent Linux Phone

Raspberry Pi ☛ Sustainable solutions: Our environmental, social, and governance metrics

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics are non-financial information used by stakeholders — particularly investors — to assess a company’s sustainability and ethical impact. They cover a firm’s interaction with the planet, its relationship with people and the community, and its corporate leadership. As a publicly listed company, transparency on these issues is critical for Raspberry Pi; investors increasingly use these data points to evaluate businesses’ long-term value, risk, and social license to operate. The absence of ESG reporting is often considered more concerning than poor metrics, as the lack of visibility makes companies seem riskier and less accountable.

Tom's Hardware ☛ Arduino Uno Q Review: The board with two brains

An interesting, if flawed, first entry from the Qualcomm / Arduino stable. The Arduino Uno Q is a little quirky to use, but once you get used to the workflow, you’ll soon be creating AI and microcontroller projects.

Federal News Network ☛ Congress quietly strips right-to-repair provisions from 2026 NDAA despite wide support

Despite its popularity and broad bipartisan support, right-to-repair provisions that would have given service members the ability to fix their own equipment in the field were stripped from the compromise version of the 2026 defense policy bill after industry pushback.

The House’s Data-as-a-Service Solutions for Weapon System Contracts provision, which would have required DoD to negotiate access to technical data and necessary software before signing a contract, was removed from the final text of the annual legislation released over the weekend. The Senate’s provision requiring contractors to provide the military with detailed repair and maintenance instructions was dropped from the bill as well.

The Register UK ☛ Congress strips right-to-repair from military spending bill

The House and Senate versions of the NDAA passed earlier both included provisions that would have extended common right-to-repair rules to US military branches, requiring defense contractors to provide access to technical data, information, and components that enabled military customers to quickly repair essential equipment. Both of those provisions were stripped from the final joint-chamber reconciled version of the bill, published Monday, right-to-repair advocates at the US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) pointed out in a press release.

Support for the military's right to repair is so broad, and it's one of the few issues where liberal Democrats in Congress are aligned with President Trump. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Tim Sheehy (R-MT) even introduced a bill over the summer that would have legislated "fair and reasonable access" to necessary parts and information that would enable the US military to fix gear faster than farmers with broken John Deere tractors. That bill, referred to the Senate Armed Services Committee in July, hasn't budged since.

PIRG ☛ STATEMENT: Congress strips bipartisan military Right to Repair provisions from defense bill

By stripping the right to repair language, Congress has left the military in its current position: overly dependent on defense contractors’ “authorized technicians” for repairs.

“The military should be able to repair its own equipment,” said U.S. PIRG Legislative Associate Charlie Schuyler. “Despite support from Republicans, Democrats, the White House and key military leaders, troops will keep waiting for repairs they could perform themselves. Taxpayers will keep paying inflated costs. And in some cases, soldiers might not get the equipment they need when they need it most.”

Michael Tsai ☛ Pebble Index

This sounds good, but I don’t want another device. I try to do this with my Apple Watch, but it doesn’t work as well as I’d like. Apps, of course, can’t repurpose any of the hardware buttons. I don’t know of a complication that lets you just press a button to record audio to be transcribed as text. The Reminders complication takes 4 taps (complication, Add Reminder, microphone button, Done) to add a reminder via voice. Siri works without any taps but often screws it up by trying to interpret what I said. If I mention anything that sounds like a meal, a time, or a location, I might end up with that text removed and instead have the time and location fields set on the reminder for when I arrive at that place, which is never what I want. This also seems to confuse OmniFocus and prevent it from importing the reminder.

Ken Shirriff ☛ The stack circuitry of the Intel 8087 floating point chip, reverse-engineered

Early microprocessors were very slow when operating with floating-point numbers. But in 1980, Intel introduced the 8087 floating-point coprocessor, performing floating-point operations up to 100 times faster. This was a huge benefit for IBM PC applications such as AutoCAD, spreadsheets, and flight simulators. The 8087 was so effective that today's computers still use a floating-point system based on the 8087.1

The 8087 was an extremely complex chip for its time, containing somewhere between 40,000 and 75,000 transistors, depending on the source.2 To explore how the 8087 works, I opened up a chip and took numerous photos of the silicon die with a microscope. Around the edges of the die, you can see the hair-thin bond wires that connect the chip to its 40 external pins. The complex patterns on the die are formed by its metal wiring, as well as the polysilicon and silicon underneath. The bottom half of the chip is the "datapath", the circuitry that performs calculations on 80-bit floating point values. At the left of the datapath, a constant ROM holds important constants such as π. At the right are the eight registers that form the stack, along with the stack control circuitry.

Jarrod Blundy ☛ I’m not a ring guy, but…

All that being said, I’m as surprised as anyone that the Index 01, Pebble’s latest gadget, caught my interest.

It’s a ring, but instead of packing in more features than its competition, the Index is designed to do less. Its primary role is to be an ever-present way to record short notes-to-self. It’s got a tiny LED and a little microphone that’s activated by pressing a physical button. That’s it.

Arduino ☛ Fixing the garage fridge with an Arduino controller

In this case, Fryar decided to forego the Sanyo’s control electronics altogether. He replaced those with an Arduino UNO R4 WiFi board, a DHT11 temperature sensor, and a Kasa smart plug. When the Arduino detects that the refrigerator’s temperature is too high, it updates a PHP webpage that tells the Kasa smart plug to switch on power the condenser. When the temperature is too low, it tells the smart plug to switch off power.

Arduino ☛ University of Padua students celebrate Arduino’s 20th anniversary with innovative projects

To mark Arduino’s 20th anniversary, the IEEE Student Branch at the University of Padua organized a special competition that challenged students to push the boundaries of what’s possible. The summer-long contest culminated in a presentation on November 19th at the Department of Information Engineering, where three teams showcased projects ranging from gesture-controlled vehicles to environmental monitoring stations and smart swimming sensors.

Tom's Hardware ☛ This scratch-built, period-correct Portable Commodore 64 is a love letter to an alternate Commodore history — Noki's cleverly designed homage to the era merges Commodore, Apple, and Raspberry Pi

The above video shows Noki’s journey from concept to working prototype. In the intro, he sums up the idea behind this work as a plan to create a “fully functional custom design C64 laptop, built like it could have existed in the 1980s, but powered by modern hardware.”