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Flipper Zero’s $49 Video Game Module turns the hacker toy into game console

The Flipper Zero is a pocket-sized multi-tool designed for hardware and software hackers, security researchers, and folks looking to tinker with RFID, NFC, Bluetooth, and IR wireless protocols, among other things. It’s been in the news this week as the Canadian government considers banning the Flipper Zero which some folks say can be used to […]

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Lilbits: Raspberry Pi CM5, Samsung’s mobile browser comes to Windows, and Huawei’s satellite-enabled tablet

First Apple added emergency satellite communication to the iPhone. Then Qualcomm tried (and failed) to get its own satellite platform for smartphones off the ground. Now Chinese device maker Huawei has made the jump to satellite-enabled… tablets. The new Huawei MatePad Pro 11 (2024) is the first consumer tablet to support 2-way satellite communications… but […]

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Picopad is an open source game console with a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller

The Picopad is a tiny game console with a 2 inch, 320 x 240 pixel IPS LCD display, 8 buttons (including four that function as a pseudo-direction pad), and a Raspberry Pi Pico with an RP2040 microcontroller for brains. It’s available for purchase in the Czech Republic for about $40, but the Picopad is also […]

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The $6 Raspberry Pi Pico W now supports Bluetooth (via a software update)

The Raspberry Pi Pico W is a $6 microcontroller board with an RP2040 chip, a micro USB port, GPIO pins, and support for 802.11/b/g/n WiFi. When it first launched a year ago there was one thing that was missing though: Bluetooth support. While the Pico W had Bluetooth hardware, it didn’t have the software to […]

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Lilbits: A Raspberry Pi RP2040-powered game console-on-a-stick and a single-board PC with NVMe support and 2 Ethernet ports

Raspberry Pi’s RP2040 chip is designed for dirt cheap microcontroller boards like the Raspberry Pi Pico, which sells for as little as $4. With a 133 MHz dual-core ARM Cortex-M0+ processor and 264KB of memory, it’s clearly not designed to be a general-purpose computer. But folks have managed to build things like game consoles, pocket […]

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Raspberry Pi Pico W SDK update brings initial Bluetooth support

The Raspberry Pi Pico W is a tiny $6 single-board computer with low-power RP2040 microcontroller and a wireless chip that supports WiFi 4 (802.11n) and Bluetooth 5.2. But when the Pico W launched last summer, only the WiFi was actually usable, since there was no software support for Bluetooth functionality. Now Raspberry Pi has released […]

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Lilbits: LastPass customer data stolen (included encrypted password vaults) and what you can do about it

You probably know that you should have a unique, secure password for every site you visit (unless you’re already living in the post-password world of passkeys). You also probably know that there’s no way you’re going to remember all of those unique passwords, which is why we have password managers like 1Password, LastPass, Dashlane, Bitwarden, […]

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Lilbits: Raspberry Pi Zero-like mini PCs compared, RP2040 microcontroller overclocked, and reducing the wait time for Purism’s Librem 5 Linux smartphones

The Raspberry Pi Zero and Raspberry Pi Zero 2 are incredibly small, cheap, and versatile single-board computers… but in a time of global supply chain shortages, they’re also kind of hard to get your hands on these days. But there are also a growing number of other tiny PCs competing in this space. And Bret Weber […]

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The Poly Keyboard uses tiny OLED displays as keys (DIY, work in progress)

The Poly Keyboard is a DIY project to create a keyboard with tiny OLED displays beneath each key, allowing you to switch languages, layouts, or other functions via software. It’s been under development for a few years, but this month the creator of the project assembled the first functional prototype of the keyboard… or at […]

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Roundy is a slick, low-cost way for makers to experiment with round displays (crowdfunding)

If you’ve been looking for a simple inexpensive way to prototype a project that utilizes a circular display, a new Kickstarter thing may offer the solution. Roundy is a 1.28 inch round LCD display connected to a small board powered by a low-power microcontroller. A Kickstarter campaign for Roundy just went live, and you can […]