Another month has come to a close, and with it the whole of 2024. As a result, it’s once again time to take stock of everything I’ve had published digitally this month – a little less than usual, thanks to an early finish for the holidays, but still a hefty crop of articles and reviews.

My personal highlight this month has to be a painstaking project by Kevin Noki which brings the Apple FlatMac, a non-functional design study prototyped by Harmut Esslinger but never launched, to life – complete with custom keyboard and integrated single-board computer more than capable of emulating the Apple Mac machines of the era and beyond. It’s an absolutely incredible piece of work, and a “what-if” for how it could have inspired Apple’s work in portable computing years before the launch of the iPad.

The big launch of the month, meanwhile, was the Raspberry Pi 500 – a Raspberry Pi 5-based single-board computer in a keyboard, mimicking the form factor of popular 1980s and 1990s microcomputers like the Commodore 64 and Amiga, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, and BBC Micro. As always, my coverage includes bespoke benchmarking for performance, power draw, and thermal load and in-house photography – including a full teardown. Nvidia launched a “new” Jetson Orin Nano system-on-module – frequently misreported elsewhere as a new entry in the family, but actually a simple firmware update to existing hardware which unlocks a new higher-power operating mode.

A full list of my last articles for 2024 is available below. and with that it’s on to 2025!

• The Orange Pi 5 Ultra Packs Four Lanes of PCIe Gen. 3, Eight Cores, a Six-TOPS NPU, and More
• M5Stack’s Atomic Display Base Gives Atom Boards an HDMI Output — Through Clever SPI LCD Emulation
• Software Freedom Conservancy, Banana Pi Launch the World’s First OpenWrt-Specific Router
• Marcin Chwedczuk Gives an Arduino Mega a VGA Output — By Hooking Up a Vintage Trident Video Card
• This Fully-3D-Printed Laptop Lets You Take Your Raspberry Pi 5 Wherever You Go
• Koshiro Robot Creator’s STMicro STM32-Powered Board Turns Hobby Servos Into Smart Servos
• Ashen Chathuranga’s GitHub Action Delivers Version-Numbering Automation for Arduino Library Devs
• NVIDIA Triples LLM Inference Performance with TensorRT-LLM’s “Speculative Decoding” Trick
• Qt for MCUs 2.9 Brings a Zephyr Backend, Linux Support, Functional Safety Features
• Canonical Partners with Qualcomm to Deliver an Ubuntu Image for the Edge AI RB3 Gen 2 Vision Kit
• Cifer’s TamaFi Is an Espressif ESP32-U4-Powered Homage to the Tamagotchi — and Eats Wi-Fi
• Mark Washeim’s Midi Billow Is a Raspberry Pi RP2040-Powered Python-Programmable Pocket Mellotron
• Arduino’s Silicon Labs MGM240S-Powered Arduino Nano Matter Launches as a Fully-Fledged Dev Board
• John Anderson’s Upcycled Microchip AVR Programming Deck Boasts a Kaypro Keyboard and Atari Styling
• Silicon Labs Targets Low-Power Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth Low Energy IoT with Its New SiWx917Y Modules
• Renesas’ RZ/T2H Is a Six-Core All-in-One Microprocessor for Industrial Robotics and More
• This Arduino-Powered Headband Delivers Time-of-Flight Distance Sensing as a Vibrating “Sixth Sense”
• Per-Simon Saal Releases the “Smallest I2C Isolator with Power” for Qwiic/STEMMA QT Projects
• Kevin Noki Brings Harmut Esslinger’s Never-Launched Apple “FlatMac” Tablet to Life
• Arduino Releases Its First Zephyr Cores, as It Makes the Move Away From Arm’s Discontinued Mbed
• This Crow-Inspired Energy-Efficient Robo-Bird Drone Design Has Legs — Literally
• MLCommons Launches a “First-of-its-Kind” Benchmark to Measure and Monitor LLM AI Safety
• Researchers Look to the Stars to Provide Drone Navigation When GPS Is Unavailable
• Povilas Dumcius’ Axiometa Genesis Kit Delivers a Modular Approach to Rapid Prototyping
• Filippo Valsorda’s “frood” Is a Hoopy Immutable NAS Running Entirely From an Initial RAM Filesystem
• EIM Technology’s MEGO 2.0 Is a Raspberry Pi RP2040-Powered Rechargeable Breadboard Power Supply
• This Soft Lithium-Ion Battery Can Stretch to Over Twice Its Length — and Heal When Cut
• Marb’s Lab Cooks Up a Chemical “Brain” for a Robotic Hand
• IoT Specialist inx Launches a Crowdfunding Campaign for the Multi-Format, Highly-Flexible WAN-4-ALL
• Everything You Need: A Hands-On Review of the Raspberry Pi 500 and Raspberry Pi Monitor
• Seeed Studio Simplifies Home Assistant Mains Control with a XIAO ESP32C3 Two-Channel Wi-Fi Relay
• Sipeed Updates Its MaixCAM Edge AI Camera System, Unveils the MaixCAM-Pro
• Raspberry Pi Pico-Powered DaMAgeCard Attacks System Memory — Through the SD Card Reader
• Ken Shirriff Tracks Down Intel’s Infamous Pentium FDIV Bug — in the Silicon Itself
• Piffpaffpoltrie Gives an Old Amp a New Look with a Smart LED Backlighting Upgrade
• Google Quantum AI Unveils Willow, a Quantum Processor That Proves the Bigger the Better
• STMicroelectronics’ STM32N6 Brings Its In-House Neural-ART NPU to Bear on TinyML, Computer Vision
• This CircuitPython-Powered Smart Lamp Uses TinyML to Spot Faces, Match Colors
• A New Approach to “Super-TinyML” Packs Bigger Machine Learning Models Into Printed Electronics
• Tom Stanton 3D Prints an eBike Conversion Kit — “Without Any Electronics”
• Edge Impulse Partners with STMicroelectronics for STM32N6 Support in Edge Impulse Studio
• Spencer Owen Simplifies RC2014 RomWBW Updates with a Low-Cost, Standalone ROM Blower
• A Shape-Shifting Gadget Gives the Visually Impared High-Performance Haptic Location Powers
• Pervasive Displays Teams Up with Arduino, Silicon Labs to Launch a Matter ePaper Development Kit
• Lattice Semiconductor Launches the Certus-N2 Small FPGA Family, Built Around the Nexus 2 Platform
• A Third Class of Magnetism Could Give Future Digital Devices a Thousandfold Performance Boost
• STMicroelectronics’ Qualcomm Partnership Bears Fruit: The Triple-Threat ST67W611M1 IoT Module
• Olimex Launches the RP2040pc, a Low-Cost Raspberry Pi RP2040 Board for Eight-Bit Emulation
• Fab Lab Barcelona, Seeed Studio Launch the Next-Generation Smart Citizen Kit 2.3
• SiFive Slashes $200 Off Its HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V Board Price, Launches a New 32GB Version Too
• The Thought Emporium’s XJ-9 Is a 3D-Printable “Wi-Fi Camera” Based on Radio Telescope Technology
• Onion Brings Its Omega2, Omega2S SOMs Back — in Single-Board Computer Form
• Researchers Boast of “Breakthrough” in Flexible Thermoelectric Generators for Self-Powered Wearables
• Shae Erisson’s Adafruit MagTag FlowLight Tracks Programming Flow in Emacs to Dodge Disturbances
• This 3D-Printed Case Keeps a Raspberry Pi 5 as Cool as Can Be — with a Custom Watercooling Loop
• MYIR’s Latest SOM Packs an Allwinner T536 with Four Arm Cores, a RISC-V MCU, and Optional NPU
• AMD Teases the Versal RF FPGA SoC Family, for High-Performance Digital Signal Processing Work
• Ropet Is a Cute, Cuddly, ChatGPT-Backed “AI” Companion Robot for Your Desk or Coffee Table
• Samuel Hedrick Does What Raspberry Pi Didn’t: Fits a Working PCIe M.2 Slot to the Raspberry Pi 500
• Elecrow Launches the Pico W5, a Dual-Band Alternative to the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W
• The Fusion USB PD Power Box Snags Up to 100W for Five Handy, Fully-Monitored Outputs
• The MNT Reform Next, a Next-Generation Fully-Open Laptop, Opens for Crowdfunding “Very Soon”
• Olimex Launches Its Open-Hardware ESP32-P4 Dev Board — But Limits Sales to One Per Customer
• Axelera AI Partners with Arduino to Deliver On-Device Local LLMs Running at the Edge
• A New “Dropsonde” Sensor System Needs No Parachute to Brave a Typhoon
• NVIDIA Unveils the Jetson Orin Nano Super, Delivers a 1.7× Gen AI Speed Boost for All
• A Classic Acer Pocket PC Lives Again, Thanks to a RISC-V Emulation of Its Battery Controller
• Signalens’ SignalSDR Pro Is a Raspberry Pi-Like High-Performance Software-Defined Radio
• Tiny Punchcard-Like “Dent” Encoding on a Clever Polymer Could Quadruple Data Storage Densities
• Google’s DeepMind Aims to Fix LLMs’ Lying Ways — with the FACTS Grounding Benchmark
• Framework Delivers a New Module for the Framework Laptop 16’s Expansion Bay: A Dual-M.2 Adapter
• Orange Pi Wants to Put Its CM5 System-on-Module Into Your Next Tablet Build
• FOSSi Foundation Newsletter El Correo Libre, Issue 81
• MyriadRF Newsletter Over The Air: LimeNET Micro 2.0 Gets a Raspberry Pi CM5 Upgrade, Microcontrollers as SDRs, Ancient Satellites, and More