The calendar has flipped over once more, meaning it’s time to take stock of everything I’ve covered over the past month – and what a month it’s been.

April has seen my interview with Matt Venn on the Tiny Tapeout project and related topics land on the Make: website, fresh newsletters for the MyriadRF project and the Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation (FOSSi Foundation), the launch of new Raspberry Pi Compute Module boards – though, sadly, not the ones for which everyone’s waiting – Espressif’s acquisition of M5Stack right before it launches a device powered by competitor STMicro’s silicon, a tiny ZX Spectrum-inspired games console, a major hardware upgrade for the MNT Reform laptop, and the promise from Syntiant that its latest “Neural Decision Processor” can deliver 30 giga-operations per second (GOPS) of compute in a microwatt power envelope.

The biggest news, however, was Zilog’s decision to discontinue the venerable eight-bit Z80 microprocessor family – just short of it reaching its 50th anniversary. The move does, at least, finally put to rest many a 1980s playground argument over whether the Zilog Z80 or the MOS 6502 is the superior chip – the 6502 having been selected to prove a foundry model for the production of fully-flexible semiconductors, a paper on which was published this month.

Special thanks to Professor Hamish Cunningham who, following my covering the project on Hackster.io, kindly sent me an unPhone to try – expect to see a hands-on review of that clever little gadget in the near future.

Now to see what May brings!

• DIY Silicon: Design Your Own Chips
• This Energy-Harvesting Keychain Accessory Takes Temperatures at the Tap of a Smartphone
• Nerdiy’s 3D-Printed Framework Turns an IKEA RIBBA Into a Seeed XIAO ESP32C3-Powered ePaper Dashboard
• Andrew “bunnie” Huang’s IRIS Boasts a “Nanometer Resolution” Focus Stage
• M5Stack’s BugC2 Converts an M5StickC Microcontroller Into a Compact, Omnidirectional Robot
• YuzukiHD’s Eight-Core Avaota-A1 Includes a 2 TOPS NPU, RISC-V “Remote CPU,” and Connectivity Aplenty
• Frank Bernhardt’s 3D-Printable Housing Turns a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 Into a Slick Passively-Cooled NAS
• Apple’s ReALM Aims to Deliver Context-Aware LLM-Powered On-Device Edge AI Assistants
• Murata’s Type 2GT Module Offers a Tightly-Integrated Route to Tri-Band LoRa for the IoT
• US, UK Pledge AI Safety Collaboration in a Newly-Signed Memorandum of Understanding
• Peter Fairlie’s Meshtastic High-Altitude Relay Station Aims to Extend the Reach of His Home Node
• Arduino Targets Industrial Automation Education with Its New Opta-Based PLC Starter Kit
• NVIDIA Demonstrates Better LLM AI Through LoRA-Tuned Models Optimized in TensorRT-LLM
• Tim Alex Jacobs’ Orchestrion Puts Four Slide Whistles Under MIDI Control
• LLM Guardrails Fall to a Simple “Many-Shot Jailbreaking” Attack, Anthropic Warns
• Variscite Unveils the High-Performance Pin2Pin-Compatible DART-MX95 System-on-Module
• This 3D-Printed Electrospray Source Could Deliver Low-Cost At-Home Sample Analysis
• Hailo’s Latest Accelerator, the Hailo-10H, Promises On-Device Gen AI in a Sub-5W Power Envelope
• This Is the World’s Largest Astronomy Camera, a 3,200 Megapixel Beast to See Through Space and Time
• AMD Aims to Drive On-Device Gen AI with Its New Ryzen Embedded 8000 Series Processors
• Semidynamics Targets Easier, More Efficient Artificial Intelligence with Its RISC-V All-In-One AI IP
• Toradex Targets Edge AI with Its 32 TOPS-Capable Aquila AM69 System-on-Module
• ANAVI’s Dev Mic Is a Raspberry Pi RP2040-Powered Customizable Microphone for Machine Learning Work
• n°Garage’s FlexiBall Is an Icosidodecahedral Surface-Mount Soldering Challenge
• Digi’s ConnectCore MP25 System-on-Module Aims at “Next-Gen Computer Vision” and Edge AI
• u-blox Unveils New Matter-Capable Bluetooth Low Energy Modules, the ALMA-B1 and NORA-B2
• NXP’s MCX W Series Offers Thread, Zigbee, and BLE Support — with New Bluetooth Channel Sounding
• Espressif’s Guide Offers Easier Risk-Free ESP32-C3 Security Experimentation via the QEMU Emulator
• The unPhone Puts a Hackable, Educational, ESP32-S3-Powered LoRaWAN Gadget in Everyone’s Hands
• Kiu’s KHA Is an “Over-Engineered” Subrack System for RS-485 Smart Home Control
• This Plug-and-Play “Exceptional Point” Tuning Platform Can Boost Optical Sensors’ Sensitivity
• Arm Targets the AIoT with High-Performance Ethos-U85 NPU and Corstone-320 Platform
• Quectel’s BG95-S5 Is a Drop-In Satellite Communications Upgrade for Your IoT Projects
• Syntiant’s Third-Gen “Neural Decision” Chip, the NDP250, Packs 30 GOPS in a Microwatt Envelope
• Seeed Studio’s SenseCAP Watcher Combines Local TinyML with Cloud LLMs to Deliver Smart Monitoring
• SiFive Unveils the High-Performance, AI-Accelerating HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V Development Board
• Alif’s Balletto Microcontrollers Combine BLE and Matter Capabilities with AI Acceleration
• Qualcomm Announces the Edge AI RB3 Gen 2 Chip for IoT and Robotics and a “Micro-Power” Wi-Fi SoC
• Blues Unveils the $19 Notecard XP for Cellular IoT, New “Minimalist” Notecarrier X Series
• The Arm-and-RISC-V RVAM16 Aims to Make It Easier to Move From One Embedded Architecture to Another
• Canonical Extends Long-Term Support and Compliance to the IoT with Ubuntu Pro for Devices
• Embedded World Attendees Spot Unannounced Raspberry Pi Monitor, AI Camera Products
• Silicon Labs’ Latest xG26 Chips Boast the “Highest Combination of Flash, RAM, and GPIO” for Matter
• Intel Goes Gunning for NVIDIA’s Gen AI Crown with Its Gaudi 3 Accelerator
• SparkFun Taps Renesas for Its New, High-Performance Bluetooth Low Energy Thing Plus RA6M5 Board
• Imagination Goes After Linux and Android Smart Devices with Its New Catapult APXM-6200 RISC-V CPU
• Oak Development Technologies Revamps the IcyBlue Feather FPGA Board, Launches a V2 Variant
• Lixie Labs’ Emotiscope Is a “Powerful Bridge Between Sight and Sound”
• The LattePanda Mu Packs an Intel N100 Processor Into a Compact Computer-on-Module
• Tod Kurt’s “picoslidertoy” Delivers 25 Capacitive Touch Inputs to a Raspberry Pi Pico — with Sliders
• The BitByte Is a Teensy 4.1-Powered Handheld Console with a Beginner-Friendly “Micro VM” Environment
• Meta’s OpenEQA Benchmark for Embodied AI Finds Current Vision and Language Models Are “Nearly Blind”
• The 8BitFlux “Poor Man’s Keyboard” Gives Your Apple I or Apple II Flip-Switch ASCII Powers
• This Shrunken ZX Spectrum+ Emulator Boasts a Fully-Working, Albeit Minimalist, Keyboard
• Jay Doscher Revisits the Raspberry Pi Recovery Kit with a Simplified Build, Faster Raspberry Pi 5
• Espressif’s ESP32-H4 Offers Dual-Core Low-Power Bluetooth 5.3 Low Energy, IEEE 802.15.4 Capabilities
• Shade Reogen’s PicoNtrol Brings Modern Bluetooth Pads to the Atari 2600
• MNT’s Highly-Open Reform Laptop Gets a Major Speed Boost From New RCORE SOM Upgrade
• GigaDevice Embraces Arm Again with Its Performance-Centric Cortex-M33 GD32F5 Microcontrollers
• James Lewis Puts a Nordic nRF7002 Design Kit to Work Making a Dehumidifier Smart
• OptiGap Turns 3D Printer Filament Into a Bend Sensing and Localization System for Soft Robots
• Sebastian Harnisch’s Slick Programmable Power Resistor Handles Up to 400W
• Radxa’s AICore SG2300x Module Brings 32 TOPS to Bear on Edge AI, On-Device Generative AI
• The RaceBox Micro Is a Teeny-Tiny 25Hz Bluetooth GNSS Data Logger for RC Racing and More
• Hardkernel Unveils the ODROID-H4 Family, Boasting of a 36-83 Percent Performance Boost
• 3D-Printed Document Scanner Captures Sharp Scans with a Raspberry Pi and Camera Module
• Adafruit’s Latest QT Py BFF Offers CAN Bus Connectivity in a Compact Form Factor
• Steve Chamberlin’s VGA Mac Sync-inator Gets Vintage Apple Hardware Playing with Modern Monitors
• MLCommons Releases a Proof-of-Concept Benchmark for Classifying the Safety of Generative AI Models
• Dmitry Dmitriev’s Arduino-Powered Control Unit Gets Vintage Flip-Dot Displays Ticking Once Again
• Atlas Is Dead, Long Live Atlas: Boston Dynamics Drops Hydraulics as It Targets Commercialization
• Intel Aims for Efficient Brain-Scale Neuromorphic AI Research with the Loihi 2-Powered Hala Point
• These 3D-Printed TPU “Soft Skin” Pads Give Robots a Low-Cost, Highly-Sensitive Sense of Touch
• Arm’s Rene Haas Coughs to AI’s “Insatiable Energy Needs,” But Says His Company Can Help
• MLCommons Releases Latest MLPerf Tiny Benchmark Results for On-Device TinyML
• Probabilistic Computers Driven by Stochastic Nanomagnets Hint at Major AI Efficiency Gains to Come
• Sim-Trained Zero-Shot Reinforcement Learning Gets This Humanoid Robot Walking Smoothly
• CRTypist Mimics How Humans Use Touchscreen Keyboards to Improve Future Autocorrect Systems
• Zilog Calls Time on the Venerable Z80, Discontinues the Standalone Z84C00 CPU Family
• This 3D Printer DNGE “Ink” Delivers Flexible Devices Without Mechanical Joints
• STMicroelectronics’ Latest Six-Axis IMU, the LSM6DSV32X, Packs a Machine Learning Core for TinyML
• Kingham Xu’s FryPi Aims to Deliver a Compact Open Source STM32F4 Platform for TinyML Projects
• Eric Benson Emerges From the Vault with This Fallout-Inspired Vault-Tec Cyberdeck Build
• Turn Any HDMI or DVI Display into an Adafruit IO Dashboard with the Ruiz Brothers’ Latest Guide
• This Carbon Dioxide-Guzzling Nanogenerator Hints at Carbon Negative Power for Future Devices
• Tomeu Vizoso’s Open Source NPU Driver Project Does Away with the Rockchip RK3588’s Binary Blob
• Home Assistant Is Now an Open Home Foundation Project — As Its Creators Cast a Wider Net
• Grubby Brings Sonic the Hedgehog 2 to the TI-84+ CE Calculator — Thanks to the Zilog eZ80 CPU
• Blagojche “Bill” Kolichoski’s Soil Moisture Sensor Delivers Wireless Data for Smarter Irrigation
• Chris Combs’ Take on The Great Wave Is a Splash of Electronic Artwork That Watches You Back
• Espressif Snaps Up a “Majority Stake” in Internet of Things Specialist M5Stack
• Researchers Turn to Game Theory to Boost Throughput in Shared Wi-Fi Access Points
• Silicon Labs Targets the “Ambient IoT” with Its Ultra-Efficient xG22E Wireless SoC Family
• Daniel Theurich’s Sleek 3D-Printed Phone Stand Hides an Integrated Qi Standard Wireless Charger
• Arduboy’s Kevin Bates Is Back with an ESP32-S3-Powered All-in-One: The Singleboard Alpha
• Prusa’s Firmware 6.0.0 Brings Easier Object Cancellation and a Surprise Touch Interface
• Alon Borenshtein’s Arduino-Powered BotGammon Robot Plays a Mean Game of Backgammon
• This 3D-Printed Desk Toy Serves as a Tutorial in Servos and Flex Sensors
• Elehobica’s Digital Audio Recorder Captures S/PDIF Sound with a Raspberry Pi Pico
• OctoPrint 1.10.0 Brings Big Performance Gains, a Security Fix — and Earnable Achievements
• Raspberry Pi Expands Its Backwards-Compatible Compute Module 4S Family, Adds More RAM
• Oleg Tarasov Smartens Up a Basic Gas Boiler with an ESPHome-Driven OpenTherm Thermostat System
• These Rubber-Like Micro-Supercapacitors Keep on Ticking Even When Stretched, Folded, or Wrinkled
• Researchers Turn to the Humble MOS 6502 to Prove a Multi-Project Foundry Model for Flexible Chips
• Glen Akins’ Bike Rack Gets Smart Yet Accessible Lighting, Thanks to Zigbee, MQTT, and Python
• Marco Romboli’s Arduino Nano ESP32-Powered Environmental Monitor Celebrates Earth Day in Style
• Arducam’s Pivistation 5 Pairs Hawkeye, Darksee, or Klarity Image Sensors with the Raspberry Pi 5
• Microsoft Announces the Surprise Release, Under a Permissive License, of the MS-DOS 4.00 Sources
• A Single-Photon Lidar System Promises Lighter, Lower-Power 3D Scanning for Drones and More
• Eivind Holt’s Portenta H7-Powered TinyML Camera Tracks Dangerous Icicle Formations
• Nuvoton’s New Dual-Core NuMicro MA35D0 Chips Aim for the Industrial Edge
• Renaldas Zioma Aims to Do What Zilog Won’t: Keep the Vintage Z80 in Production with the FOSS Z80
• Chad Kapper’s Outlet Checkers Tap Into Espressif’s ESP-NOW for Peer-to-Peer Circuit Breaker Tracking
• M5Stack Launches the STMicro STM32MP135-Powered CoreMP135 Module for the Industrial IoT
• Espressif Hits Some Major Milestones with Its Newly-Expanded ESP ZeroCode Development Platform
• Okuboheavyindustries’ “Stellar Proximity Detector” Warns of Solar Radiation Through Blinking Lights
• Edward Kisiel’s SBC Case Builder Will Generate Customizable Designs for Over 100 SBCs and More
• James Fowkes’ Raspberry Pi Mains Power HAT Aims to Reduce the Board’s Total Footprint
• Bantam Tools, Fresh From Its Evil Mad Scientist Acquisition, Launches the New NextDraw Plotter Range
• Google Removes RISC-V Support From the Android Common Kernel — But Denies Abandoning the ISA
• El Correo Libre Issue 73
• MyriadRF OTA: A LimeSDR DMR Tier III Trunked Base Station, EM Eye Eavesdropping, Software-Defined GPS, and More