Devices, gadgets, and the physical layer — where most of the fun bugs live.
15 dispatches · 1 still on the board · latest 17 SEP 2026
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Full archive →The physical layer: SBCs, routers, appliances, embedded systems and chips — and what the hardware people actually buy means for their security.
The next Orange Pi 'Zero' puts the Allwinner A733 (dual A76, hexa A55, RISC-V RT core, 3 TOPS NPU) into a postage-stamp board with Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi 6, and a PCIe Gen3 x1 slot that finally gives the Zero line real storage. From $26.50; the 4GB tier is the one to buy.
Announced yesterday: a compact 9-bay hybrid NAS with five 3.5-inch SATA bays, four U.2 NVMe slots, dual Thunderbolt 4 for direct-to-workstation editing, 10GbE + 2.5GbE, and QuTS hero (ZFS) under the hood — price TBA.
ArmSoM's Sige6 pre-orders for $119 with the Allwinner A733, up to 128GB soldered eMMC plus an M.2 PCIe 3.0 x2 slot, PoE, and a RISC-V coprocessor that lets the main CPU sleep while sensors keep talking.
$699 for a 1U switch with ten PoE+++ 10GBASE-T ports, two SFP+ uplinks, a 400 W budget, and L3 routing. ServeTheHome tore it down — inside is a Realtek RTL9313 you've seen in $250 switches, which is exactly why this price works.
Four QSFP56-DD 400G ports, redundant power, and RouterOS management in a half-width box that street-prices around $1,100 — STH just ran it as an AI-cluster RDMA backend.
The QSW-M2130 puts 24x 2.5GbE ports and a real 10GbE backhaul in a 1U box for $549 — no new cabling required, in stock at the QNAP store right now.
A CNC-milled, fanless 0.96L open-hardware computer around MNT's Reform Mainboard 3.0 — buy the case for $299 or with a mainboard from $429, then drop in an RK3588, NXP LS1028A, Pi CM4, even a Kintex-7 FPGA module.
Haiku R1/beta6 lands with official Mozilla Firefox branding on x86_64, QEMU hardware virtualization via NetBSD's NVMM, a Go compiler port, and a performance pass that cut full-WebKit rebuild times nearly in half. Free ISOs, MIT-licensed core, minimum Pentium II / 256 MB.
Pre-orders are open on Arduino's dual-brain edge-AI board: a Qualcomm Dragonwing IQ8 (40 dense TOPS NPU) for perception and inference, plus an STM32H5F5 real-time MCU for deterministic I/O, bridged by RPC. One box for the whole robotics stack.
Panther Lake Core Ultra 9 386H, 2x Intel X710 SFP+ plus a Realtek 10GbE base-T, U.2 storage, a real PCIe slot, vPro, and a measured 13.3 W idle. $999 barebone, available to order with a late-August ship window, and Proxmox sees all four network ports out of the box.
bunnie Huang's Baochip-1x made its first major production run as ~27,000 DEF CON 34 badges: a removable, physically-inspectable RISC-V module with an OLED, a QR camera, and a FIDO2 token mode. Within two weeks, someone extracted the shared light-game key.
Pine64 says DRAM and eMMC prices have made its Linux devices unviable — no new production until at least mid-2027, and current stock runs out in about three months. If you wanted a PineNote or PineTab2, the window is visibly closing.
An ongoing attack is exploiting a key-generation flaw in Coldcard hardware wallets — a reminder that 'air-gapped' is a promise, not a guarantee.
A homebrew Apple II built from modern DIPs, a Pi Pico tape-drive emulator, and a 286 'brain in a jar' — the Pico has quietly become the heart of the retro-computing renaissance.
Flipper Devices announced it's shifting firmware development to a leaner team and heavier community contributions — the device that started a million desk-toys has changed shape.