Free Stuff - November 2025

The belated November 2025 recipient for the Great Scott Gadgets Free Stuff Program is Srajan Sonkesriya from India! Srajan is currently working on an open source project where he is turning an Android device (Realme 5 Pro, RMX1971) into a portable RF experimentation and learning platform. His goal is to show that a smartphone, when paired with a properly customized kernel and open-source tools, can function as a compact RF workstation for students and beginners who cannot afford other common equipment. He says that so far, he has successfully built a custom kernel for Android 16 and added multiple patches...

Frigate with Hailo for object detection on a Raspberry Pi

I run Frigate to record security cameras and detect people, cars, and animals when in view. My current Frigate server runs on a Raspberry Pi CM4 and a Coral TPU plugged in via USB.

Raspberry Pi offers multiple AI HAT+'s for the Raspberry Pi 5 with built-in Hailo-8 or Hailo-8L AI coprocessors, and they're useful for low-power inference (like for image object detection) on the Pi. Hailo coprocessors can be used with other SBCs and computers too, if you buy an M.2 version.

OpenTitan’s Transition to Side-Channel Resilient Post-Quantum Cryptography

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ESP32-P4-PC Open Source Hardware Board – the most comprehensive and feature-rich ESP32-P4 board on the market

Introducing the ESP32-P4-PC Open Source Hardware Board – the most comprehensive and feature-rich ESP32-P4 board on the market. Built around the powerful dual-core ESP32-P4 RISC-V SoC, this board delivers serious performance and unmatched peripheral integration for advanced embedded and IoT development. From HMI systems and industrial controllers to edge AI and vision applications — the […]

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.

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 […]

Домашняя лаборатория-мастерская. Реорганизация стеклодувного рабочего места

Теория говорит, а практика подтверждает: разогреть некрупные стеклянные заготовки для формовки и соединения, можно целым рядом способов, однако, стоит стремиться к варианту огневого оснащения классическому — сетевой метан или баллонный пропан + воздушное дутьё с добавкой кислорода из баллона, или, современный «дамский» вариант — медицинского кислородного концентратора. Такая конфигурация позволяет регулировать факел в широких пределах и перекрывает все основные задачи: коптящее мягкое пламя для отжига, широкое горячее, жёсткий узкий факел, паяльная игла. Факел при этом может быть окислительным (работа со свинцовыми стёклами) или восстановительным (металлические впаи). При культурном выполнении газовых трактов и уважительном обращении с баллонами, такая система и наименее...

Знакомство с ретро-ПК. Оживляем раритетный Pentium-200

Приветствую всех!

Бывало ли у вас такое, что какой-то артефакт долгое время лежал у вас в надежде, что когда-нибудь пригодится, и наконец-таки получал своё применение? Именно такой и оказалась судьба данного компьютера.

Когда-то давно именно с этого ПК у меня и началось знакомство со старым компьютерным железом. И вот сейчас мне наконец захотелось показать этот девайс и то, на что он вообще способен.