handhelds hacks

384 Articles

Arduboy Cassette Award Explores New Features

October 16, 2024 by 9 Comments

When [Press Play on Tape] entered their game Prince of Arabia into the Arduboy FX Game Jam, we bet they had no idea that they’d be taking home a prize quite like this — designed by Arduboy creator [Kevin Bates], this gorgeous new variant of the handheld system brings some exciting new capabilities to the platform. Plus, it looks awesome.

The system, which is made up of a stacked pair of PCBs, has been designed to resemble an audio cassette. Thanks to the full-color silkscreen service offered by PCBway, it certainly looks the part. But it’s also a fully functional Arduboy, which means it has access to all the games already written for the 8-bit system.

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MikroPhone – Open, Secure, Simple Smartphone

October 2, 2024 by 27 Comments

Modern smartphones try and provide a number of useful features to their users, and yet, they’re not exactly designed with human needs in mind. A store-bought smartphone will force a number of paradigms and features onto you no matter whether you want them, and, to top it off, it will encroach on your privacy and sell your data. It’s why self-built and hacker-friendly smartphone projects keep popping up, and the MikroPhone project fills a new niche for sure, with its LTE connectivity making it a promising option for all hackers frustrated with the utter state of smartphones today.

MikroPhone is open-source in every single aspect possible, and it’s designed to be privacy-friendly and easy to understand. At its core is a SiFive Freedom E310, a powerful RISC-V microcontroller – allowing for a feature phone-like OS that is easy to audit and hard to get bogged down by. You’re not limited to a feature phone OS, however – on the PCB, you will find a slot for an NXP i.MX8M-based module that can run a Linux-based mobile OS of your choice. MikroPhone’s display and touchscreen are shared between the Linux module and the onboard MCU, a trick that reminds us of the MCH2022 badge – you get as much “smartphone” as you currently need, no more, no less.

The cool features at MikroPhone’s core don’t end here. The MikroPhone has support for end-to-end encrypted communications, kept to its feature-phone layer, making for a high bar of privacy protection – even when the higher-power module might run an OS that you don’t necessarily fully trust. Currently, MikroPhone is a development platform, resembling the PinePhone’s Project Don’t Be Evil board back when PinePhone was just starting out, and just like with PinePhone, it wouldn’t be hard to minify this platform into a pocket-friendly form-factor, either. The PinePhone has famously become a decent smartphone replacement option in the hacker world, even helping kick off a few mobile OS projects and resulting in a trove of hacks to grace our pages.

ROG Ally Community Rebuilds The Proprietary Asus EGPU

October 1, 2024 by 15 Comments

As far as impressive hacks go, this one is more than enough for your daily quota. You might remember the ROG Ally, a Steam Deck-like x86 gaming console that’s graced our pages a couple lf times. Now, this is a big one – from the ROG Ally community, we get a fully open-source eGPU adapter for the ROG Ally, built by reverse-engineering the proprietary and overpriced eGPU sold by Asus.

We’ve seen this journey unfold over a year’s time, and the result is glorious – two different PCBs, one of them an upgraded drop-in replacement board for the original eGPU, and another designed to fit a common eGPU form-factor adapter. The connector on the ROG Ally is semi-proprietary, but its cable could be obtained as a repair part. From there, it was a matter of scrupulous pinout reverse-engineering, logic analyzer protocol captures, ACPI and BIOS decompiling, multiple PCB revisions and months of work – what we got is a masterpiece of community effort.

Do you want to learn how the reverse-engineering process has unfolded? Check out the Diary.md – it’s certainly got something for you to learn, especially if you plan to walk a similar path; then, make sure to read up all the other resources on the GitHub, too! This achievement follows a trend from the ROG Ally community, with us having featured dual-screen mods and battery replacements before – if it continues the same way, who knows, maybe next time we will see a BGA replacement or laser fault injection.

CL-32: The Minimum Possible For A Useful Handheld Computer

September 1, 2024 by 19 Comments

For almost as long as there have been microcomputers, there have been attempts with varying success to make tiny handheld microcomputers. Sometimes these have been very good, and other times they’ve missed the mark in some way. Latest to find its way to us is the CL-32 from [Moosepr], it’s a handheld computer with an ESP32 as brains, an electronic paper display, and a QWERTY keyboard in its smart printed case.

The hardware is relatively standard, save for the keyboard which is a dome-switch design in which the membrane carrying the domes is hand-made. We like this, and don’t think we’ve seen anyone else doing that. Expansion is taken care of by a novel socket arrangement in which boards nestle in a recess in the surface. Some experimentation was required as always to drive the display, but the result is a functional computer.

Sadly there’s little detail in terms of what the software will be, and no hardware files as yet. But what we can see is promising enough to make this one to watch, so we’ll look forward to what they come up with. If an ESP32 OS is a problem, there’s always badge.team, who have been continuously improving theirs since 2017.

The UMPC powered up, case-less showing the black PCB, with the display standing upwards and showing a blue colour scheme desktop with a CLI terminal open. To the right of it is one of the UMPCs that served as an inspiration for this project.

Bringing The UMPCs Back With A Pi Zero

August 3, 2024 by 12 Comments

Miss PDAs and UMPCs? You wouldn’t be the only one, and it’s a joy to see someone take the future into their own hands. [Icepat]’s dream is reviving UMPCs as a concept, and he’s bringing forth a pretty convincing hardware-backed argument in form of the Pocket Z project. For the hardware design, he’s hired two engineers, [Adam Nowak] and [Marcin Turek], and the 7-inch Pocket Z7 version is coming up quite nicely!

The Hackaday.io project shows an impressive gallery of inspiration devices front and center, and with these in mind, the first version of the 7-inch UMPC sets the bar high. With a 1024×600 parallel RGB (DPI) touchscreen display, an ATMega32U4-controlled keyboard, battery-ready power circuitry, and a socketed Pi Zero for brains, this device shows a promising future for the project, and we can’t wait to see how it progresses.

While it’s not a finished project just yet, this effort brings enough inspiration all around, from past device highlights to technical choices, and it’s worth visiting it just for the sentiment alone. Looking at our own posts, UMPCs are indeed resurfacing, after a decade-long hiatus – here’s a Sidekick-like UMPC with a Raspberry Pi, that even got an impressive upgrade a year later! As for PDAs, the Sharp memory LCD and Blackberry keyboard combination has birthed a good few projects recently, and, who can forget about the last decade’s introductions to the scene.

Steamdeck motherboard standing upright propped onto a USB-C dock it's wired up to, showing just how little you need to make the steamdeck board work.

Steam Deck, Or Single Board Computer?

August 3, 2024 by 8 Comments

With a number of repair-friendly companies entering the scene, we have gained motivation to dig deeper into devices they build, repurpose them in ways yet unseen, and uncover their secrets. One such secret was recently discovered by [Ayeitsyaboii] on Reddit – turns out, you can use the Steam Deck mainboard as a standalone CPU board for your device, no other parts required aside from cooling.

All you need is a USB-C dock with charging input and USB/video outputs, and you’re set – it doesn’t even need a battery plugged in. In essence, a Steam Deck motherboard is a small computer module with a Ryzen CPU and a hefty GPU! Add a battery if you want it to work in UPS mode, put an SSD or even an external GPU into the M.2 port, attach WiFi antennas for wireless connectivity – there’s a wide range of projects you can build.

Each such finding brings us closer to the future of purple neon lights, where hackers spend their evenings rearranging off-the-shelf devices into gadgets yet unseen. Of course, there’s companies that explicitly want us to hack their devices in such a manner – it’s a bet that Framework made to gain a strong foothold in the hacker community, for instance. This degree of openness is becoming a welcome trend, and it feels like we’re only starting to explore everything we can build – for now, if your Framework’s or SteamDeck’s screen breaks, you always have the option to build something cool with it.

[Via Dexerto]

Go Forth With This Portable Programmer

June 29, 2024 by 14 Comments

When choosing a low-level language, it’s hard to beat the efficiency of Forth while also maintaining some amount of readability. There are open source options for the language which makes it accessible, and it maintains its prevalence in astronomical and other embedded systems for its direct hardware control and streamlined use of limited resources even though the language started over 50 years ago. Unlike 50 years ago, though, you can now take your own self-contained Forth programmer on the go with you.

The small computer is built on a design that [Dennis] built a while back called my4TH which has its own dedicated 8-bit CPU and can store data in a 256 kB EEPROM chip. Everything else needed for the computer is built in as well but that original design didn’t include a few features that this one adds, most notably a small 40×4 character LCD and a keyboard. The build also adds a case to tie everything together, with ports on the back for I2C and power plus an RS232 port. An optional battery circuit lets the computer power up without an external power supply as well.

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