Open-Source Hardware Digest — Week 38, 2026
Chips, Boards, and Bare Metal
This week’s low-level hardware news spans everything from better documentation for WCH’s RISC-V chips to a fresh pair of Cortex-M55 AI/ML starter kits. There’s also a neat progress report on squeezing Linux 6.11 onto an ESP32-S3 — a reminder that “embedded” is a very flexible word — plus a Hackaday Europe talk about making bare-metal development more approachable.
- wch-protocols helps document the use of WCH chips – Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers!
- Hackaday Europe 2026: Bare Metal Made Easy – Hackaday
- Running Linux 6.11 on the ESP32-S3 with a Few Tweaks – Hackaday
- Alif Semi Balletto B1 and Ensemble E1C StartKits feature Cortex-M55 + Ethos-U55 MCU for IoT and Edge AI – CNX Software – Embedded Systems News
Robots, Puppets, and Hardware Projects
The maker world showed off a wonderfully eclectic range of builds. There’s a cyberdeck disguised as a puppet, a robot party fresh from Maker Faire, an accessible robotic pet called Quaddle, and a vision for teaching robots through one-shot demonstration. Also in the mix is Hackaday’s deeper look at the painstaking work of sampling Chornobyl’s Elephant’s Foot — a sobering reminder of why remote handling and custom tools matter.
- This cyberdeck is a… puppet? – Arduino Blog
- A (Maker Faire) Robot Party In The Foundry – Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers
- Petoi Quaddle, a Robotic Pet for Everyone – Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers
- MYWAI™ VILMA™ is designed to bring human-like learning to robots via one-shot demonstration – Arduino Blog
- Sampling the Elephant’s Foot and Chornobyl’s Tedious Corium Clean-up – Hackaday
Ecosystem Tools and Software Updates
Finally, a few updates from the broader open-hardware ecosystem. A new PCB design experiment uses Fable 5 to turn a plain-English description into an RP2350 board, while the Raspberry Pi Desktop gets an optional refresh. And if you maintain or depend on open-source hardware platforms, the latest batch of seven stable Linux kernels brings a serious pile of patches.
- This PCB is brought to you by Fable 5 — A6M-Zero – Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers!
- An updated look for the Raspberry Pi Desktop – News - Raspberry Pi
- More than 9,000 patches total in the seven stable kernels for Monday – Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers!