60W Pocket Cloud is a microSD card reader with USB PD passthrough for your smartphone (Crowdfunding)

60W Pocket Cloud is a microSD card reader with 60W USB PD passthrough for your smartphone that works with Android (USB-C) and iOS (USB-C or Lightning) mobile devices, as well as other hosts with a spare USB port. Once upon a time, smartphone manufacturers would include a microSD card socket in their devices, but those have now become harder to find. If your device’s spare storage is getting dangerously low, you’d need to either purchase cloud storage or connect a microSD card reader to the USB-C port of your phone. The latter works, except you can’t charge your phone when...

DShanPi-A1 AI Education Rockchip RK3576 SBC features HDMI input and output ports, dual GbE

DshanPi-A1 AI Education is a single board computer (SBC) powered by a Rockchip RK3576 octa-core Cortex-A72/A53 SoC, and paired with up to 8GB RAM and 64GB eMMC flash, which I first discovered in the Linux 6.19 changelog. The board features HDMI 2.1 video output, a mini HDMI video input port, a MIPI DSI display interface, two MIPI CSI connectors for up to four cameras, dual GbE, an M.2 Key-E socket for WiFi and Bluetooth, a few USB ports, and a 40-pin GPIO header compatible with some Raspberry Pi HAT boards. DShanPi-A1 specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3576 CPU – Octa-core  CPU...

AI is destroying Open Source, and it's not even good yet

Over the weekend Ars Technica retracted an article because the AI a writer used hallucinated quotes from an open source library maintainer.

The irony here is the maintainer in question, Scott Shambaugh, was harassed by someone's AI agent over not merging its AI slop code.

It's likely the bot was running through someone's local 'agentic AI' instance (likely using OpenClaw). The guy who built OpenClaw was just hired by OpenAI to "work on bringing agents to everyone." You'll have to forgive me if I'm not enthusastic about that.

BPI-R4 Pro Router Board Delivers MT7988A SoC with Tri-Band Wi-Fi 7 Capability

The Banana Pi BPI-R4 Pro router board is now available following its earlier preview. Built around the MediaTek MT7988A (Filogic 880) quad-core Arm Cortex-A73 processor at 1.8GHz, it targets Wi-Fi 7 access points and multi-gigabit gateway applications. The BPI-R4 Pro was first introduced in May 2025 and is offered in two variants. The “8X” model […]

Low-Cost BeaglePlay SBC Gains Fully Upstream PowerVR Graphics with Vulkan 1.2

The $99 BeaglePlay single board computer has reached a notable milestone: its integrated PowerVR Rogue GPU is now supported by a fully upstream open-source graphics stack in the mainline Linux kernel and Mesa. BeaglePlay, introduced in 2023, is built around the Texas Instruments AM625, a quad-core Cortex-A53 SoC that integrates a PowerVR Rogue AXE-1-16M GPU. […]

Ezurio Carbon AM62 Targets Industrial Linux with TI Sitara AM62x

Ezurio has introduced the Carbon AM62, a 45 x 30mm OSM-MF v1.2 system-on-module based on TI’s Sitara AM623 and AM625 processors. The solder-down module integrates a TPS65219 PMIC, LPDDR4 memory, eMMC storage, and optional Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth LE via Ezurio’s Sona wireless modules. Carbon AM62 integrates up to a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor clocked […]

Bit-Brick K1 Pro Adds 6 TOPS NPU and Dual NVMe to Compact SBC

Bit-Brick’s K1 Pro is a single-board computer based on the Rockchip RK3576 application processor, targeting low-power embedded deployments that still require substantial CPU, GPU, and on-device acceleration. The board integrates LPDDR4X memory, onboard eMMC storage, and high-speed I/O including PCIe expansion for NVMe SSDs. On the compute side, RK3576 combines quad Cortex-A72 cores clocked up […]

Instruction decoding in the Intel 8087 floating-point chip

In the 1980s, if you wanted your IBM PC to run faster, you could buy the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor chip. With this chip, CAD software, spreadsheets, flight simulators, and other programs were much speedier. The 8087 chip could add, subtract, multiply, and divide, of course, but it could also compute transcendental functions such as tangent and logarithms, as well as provide constants such as π. In total, the 8087 added 62 new instructions to the computer.

But how does a PC decide if an instruction was a floating-point instruction for the 8087 or a regular instruction for the 8086 or 8088 CPU? And how does the 8087 chip interpret instructions...

Testing Reachy Mini - Hugging Face's Pi powered robot

When I saw Jensen Huang introduce the Reachy Mini at CES, I thought it was a gimmick. His keynote showed this little robot responding to human input, turning its head to look at a TODO list on the wall, sending emails, and turning drawings into architectural renderings with motion.

HuggingFace and Pollen robotics sent me a Reachy Mini to test, and, well, at least if you're looking to replicate that setup in the keynote, it's not, as Jensen put it, "utterly trivial now."

SMT components are getting smaller — but your precision doesn’t have to

We now offer a professional range of magnifying tools designed specifically for PCB inspection and electronics work MAG-GLASSES magnifying Glasses – High magnification. Hands-free operation. Perfect for precise PCB assembly and repair. MAG-GLASS-10, MAG-GLASS-20, MAG-GLASS-30 Mini Magnifiers (×10 / ×20 / ×30). Compact, powerful, and ideal for spotting even the smallest solder joints and micro […]