All right. Good afternoon. Welcome back to the Open Hardware and CAD-CAM Devroom.
Part of Fossdom, 2026. Our next presentation here is how Open Hardware Projects
is created by Lina and Aria. Hello. It's a joy to see so many of you.
And yeah, we hope you can give you a fun story about how one project led to another, led to another, led to another.
And we see a lot of that in the software world, but today you will also get a glimpse of how it can happen in the hardware world,
despite that, you know, our deploy pipelines run longer and cost a whole bunch more.
But despite that, we can manage and pull off, you know, some sizable feeds, not just ours, but also,
not specifically talking about what we made, but also like the history of everything that came before us.
And we are a hacker collective. I am, I do hardware, I do typos, apparently in my own description.
And I also sometimes write for a hack a day and you.
Yeah, I am Lina, I'm a student engineer, I mainly do stuff of Linux containers and DevOps.
So this whole journey was very new to me. It was like the first hardware project I've worked on.
Yeah, it was very interesting.
And we would like you to tell you about how this device came to be and about the history of devices before it.
And it all started like 14, 15 years ago when Blackberry decided that they need to release yet another keyword phone.
We allowed them, loved them for it. And that phone was the Q10, which was basically this kind of keyboard but without the like the upper touchpad layer.
And a year later they released obviously like it was in the works for like years by then by then, but they released a keyboard that also had this very nifty optical touchpad.
So it's not like capacitive but it has like optical sensors and then it detects like which direction you scroll your finger over it and it's quite precise. So it basically works as a mouse.
And people like Hubertic Keyboards, even still while we have been having them excised from our phones, but people still love them.
Because the detectivity is just well, it's unparalleled. There's so many things you cannot do with a touch screen still that you can do with physical buttons if you know the modern cars or anything to go by.
And when was it actually? Right, yes, 2015 only the blog somebody took that keyboard and made an adapter.
You know the Q10, the touchpad less one, made an adapter. And basically share the results like here. These are keyboards you can get to know like express for like three euros and you can put the connector into your project.
And why are it into any sort of microcontroller? And have you have a like keyboard input interface? And that's beautiful.
Then there were a couple things missing like backlight. So like a year or two later, woodworker made also like a small PDA for like making notes and finished reverse engineering the backlight.
Right, you did tell me to disable the sorry. I guess we're going to have to wiggle the mouse a little bit.
And just a year later, you might have heard of Arturo. One, a two, he made an entire P-mod with the Q10 keyboard.
And later on he also made a self-sufficient USB board that had the Q20 keyboard and it had the touchpad support.
And then basically was like a tiny pocketable keyboard and mouse combo that you could just carry with you in the pocket and whenever you like you would need to bring up a server or maybe you wanted to like type type a lot of messages on your smartphone.
You could just plug it in and have a keyboard to interface using keyboards that were like still like at that point.
Five dollars is a spare part on Alex pressing quantity 1,000 which is kind of a gold mine as a hardware hacker when you find like such a powerful part for like a as a spare part.
On Alexpress and there's like a thousand of them you just know you have to build something about it.
And so he built like little green boards and they're still around and they're still being requested.
And from there Arturo has moved on to making even like keyboard to the probably so on devices this year.
On the Y badge for instance we had one of Arturo's keyboards basically that keyboard has a for him kickstarted an entire like production line so to say.
And that alone would be a great story to tell but it didn't end there because then there was the beeping which was originally beeping but and also as you can see there's a blackberry logo.
If you go to the beep website what you will see is that the blackberry logo is blurred out and it's no longer beberry because they received a nice letter from blackberry saying that this is very nice but could you please pick a different name.
But yeah this was originally beeping sorry beberry then it's beeping and it was made by Eric big coffee who I if I'm not mistaken is a pebble co founder or founder one of those two I don't remember please forgive me.
And also ask you if am I who is I think one person but maybe also like a small collective I keep forgetting but they made a small watch and also I think a game console using the sharp memory LCD screens which are these very nice very lovely screens.
That are high contrast and they are sunlight readable unlike what are like you know the TFTs and of course like you they still benefit from backlight but unlike these screens they like are not completely invisible when you're outside.
And from there.
From there from there one thing they had is like some people are going to maybe bulk at me saying this but they had a discord server and.
The discord server was like accessible enough regular people who just like got a beeping which what at this point basically just the hardware there was a little bit of Arturo's firmware.
That worked over ice receiver was the pie zero amounted on to the board and there was the shardl CD that had like a proof of concept script to write to it I believe but that was about it.
So the hardware was tested but it wasn't really a complete project but what really mattered is that the hardware got into hands of people and that's how it really kicked off.
People brought I think multiple different either there was there are now multiple different drivers for the screen including also nowadays a cardinal driver that's mainline.
And they significantly improved on the.
But they brought the driver for the R20 for the server so it in acts in Linux as a native keyboard and everything else that it does there is like a also like a nice edge BLD.
And the people started hacking a lot there was there were game emulators there were like small SSH clients people figured out the best team ox configs to have on such a small screen fonts.
All all that like made the bp a perfect small pocket console for a c-sadmin or I believe nowadays we say DevOps something like that.
But you know it was a perfect real pocket device. Oh my god.
Yes perfect and from there well I'm.
Yes.
And from there well people looked at this and went okay so these are pretty respectable capabilities and but also it was minimal which is personally I cannot make minimal things I kind of adore this.
And this was good but maybe not enough.
And so what did people do the first one I think or one of the first ones was color barrier which is exact same footprint but they had the color display.
Also a memory technology like there's a specific lineup of displays that's made by JDI and their color so you have color pixels instead of this monochrome experience.
And that alone is great but they also had the backlight and so the color barrier was a fork by of the bp except somehow it became close source.
And that was a bother but still you could buy a color screen bp because the original bp was open source then there was the carbon computers board that you can also like buy a bp alternative but it was easier to assemble and a little bit cheaper and it had a different display.
Then there is the hack barrier pie I forgot to bring one but the first revision was also with the pi zero had the same context it was basically heavily inspired.
And nowadays it's it's like this size device with the compute module and the 720 by 720 color screen that that's attached screen and also a cute 20 keyboard and now the hack barrier guy is also making his own keyboard.
A little go t-deck surprising was also by everything I could find I didn't interview a little go but apparently they were also inspired by the same like arturo lineup and by the bp to make the t-deck that was originally using also the q10 keyboard.
And I think there might have been a cute 20 variant but I'm not sure sure but yeah still it also turned out very conveniently was released like a year after the bp using basically all the same technology and the same concept just with an ESP start to do.
Nowadays there is another offshoot that is called the pi brick and that is an open source device and like the hack barrier pie and the color barrier is inspired by the hack barrier which is inspired by the bp which in turn was inspired by the arturo device you get the idea.
And the pi brick is the more open one it's personally what I would go like if you want like a.
Pivot the keyboard like this and then the 70 to 720 by 720 screen it's just a perfect device if you need like a compute module in a portable form factor.
And I believe this is very you coming right.
So the idea was a little thing let's do it like on the fun kinds of lessons during school and going to give you the boards to pass around.
So the idea was to make our own pda so that we have like a portable in a computer because smartphones are cool but they are limiting and they don't always do what you want.
Personally for me the notifications are worse than ever and only getting worse and even writing your own filtering up.
Forget about and so we wanted something that we could use with our software that we use normally and could just then integrate it in a way that we can use it.
And share the software with you.
We also got in to lower a little bit and it would be really cool if we can at lower to the device so that we can use it for communication.
For example at you like for them sadly we haven't managed yet to fully make it working but we are very close we have like.
For example in statistics we have to figure out like some minor box maybe we can make mishkore working but I hope for.
And also we can use it as like little batches that then display for example your name or like little animations.
Yeah so one of the biggest problems of the original bp is it doesn't beep and it also has some other features that I would like the.
And missing for example if it if you don't want it to be maybe vibration is not so inclusive.
So yeah and that basically started our journey of upgrading and putting more and more stuff on it.
Feature creep is a feature in this case.
So we did something that we called this core driven development because we were spaced out across the Europe so on the day or evening.
Some of us or mainly me would be working on the PCB design and kayak cat.
Maybe looks a bit overwhelming at first so this was my first project but if you have some people that are more knowledgeable with you they are also very good youtube tutorials and documentation that you can find online and you will get used to it and it.
It's pretty cool I think also that it enables you to do all these kind of things and I'm very happy about it.
So then in the evening I would do a call with area for example and we would screenshot the kayak and then talk about the changes I made and also she would then give me tips about how to change stuff and so we can then iterate on it.
So basically every evening we had like more or less a new feature if I didn't get stuck in something like I have a data sheet and I read it and I didn't understand it.
Sometimes that's how it happens.
We all worked over to do list in the next cloud it's very nice because we could just edit at the same time and well we didn't have a problem that if someone added a new feature that it would go away suddenly because we had to extend the files otherwise.
So yeah and this is how we got all those features also a friend of us and I'm about to help us with the bring up for the firmware on the app in 2014.
Using just the pickle and yeah that was very helpful for.
So yeah and as I said feature creep is it's a feature.
As you can see so like if we start from the like top left we remodeled the GPIO extension header because like I think the original hasn't has like five or something.
We added like bit more we have I script see SPI and you are on there so you can.
Do some fun stuff with that then timekeeping is kind of important you want to turn it off and don't consume all of your battery while.
You're not using it during the day even though the batteries are pretty capable of getting through the day.
Yeah it works with the battery with as a backup but you can just connect an RTC battery.
We added the viral motors so that you can have.
The vibrations if you want to have notifications that shouldn't be too in truth of yeah.
The keyboard is cool but it's all GPIO lines and it's used up all of the GPIO lines basically on the RP2040 so we had to add.
And GPIO expand also that we can add the weeper the on all the other cool features and also the enabling of the.
Power supply for the Raspberry Pi so the device can theoretically run only in film remote without the Raspberry Pi so that it keeps.
Better track of what's happening and sensor inputs.
So you also added like I used to see on the sides from the Raspberry Pi and the Pi Pico and the most important feature in my opinion is the usv part that's angled on the on the right side.
You can just plug in uspc to 3.5 millimeter jack adapter in there and then can listen to music or use some software on your.
For example, he looks device there's a very good streaming tool called our C then you can just stream your all your from the computer to your laptop and have basically the best wireless headphones you can have as long as you have Wi-Fi.
In in the area but it's very better than Bluetooth in my opinion and I'm using it regularly.
Also of course when we want to listen to all you we might maybe want another storage device so that we don't have to put all that onto our system image in the Raspberry Pi.
That's why we added the microupite microupite microupite microupite stick slot.
Also we improved the power supply that was a little problem with the original beeping.
So we needed also a case area work on that she did a really nice job on that there was the case already but.
We have two batteries inside of here they are quite thick and then the protection shouldn't run against each other we have some images of that I will show you.
What exactly we did to protect the batteries.
Yeah, the firmware death was a little tedious but we got it running at the end even with all the stuff that we have connected to the RB2014.
And we are basically using the original firmware it was very nicely built and easy to modify.
So that we could die with the expender stuff in the opixel and also the display reset.
So then we had the parts arrive it took quite a while and we decided to do manual assembly that's the pipeline that's taking a bit longer.
So we basically assembled a working line from the far side of the room in that image to the new side and everyone had the part for example to start we would paste.
We see these then each of us had like a task of pricing capacity towards regulators or other chips.
Yes, here we have some of the work stations to say you have the incoming beeping on the left to you working on all the three and then the outgoing ones to the next person on the right.
Always still be very careful because don't touch them too much because.
The parts are very small and they like to move around if you're unlucky.
Yeah, that's why also it sticks upon.
But if you're getting started, this is how you apply your paste.
You have the stencil on the right side and you build yourself a little framework for applying the paste properly.
You don't want to do it like.
You want to make good in the first try that is basically the hardest part.
But the third BPU will have it figured out.
So yeah, then it starts with the population and you have to place them all very carefully.
I think we started with the easiest stuff like the capacitors and the resistors and then we went over to the stuff that.
It's easier to knock around like the USB ports if you touch the board wrong then you move it and if you have really bad luck you have to replace them because you smash up the paste too much.
We hadn't hadn't have many such cases luckily.
And then it goes to the fun part cooking the boards.
I don't think you can over cook them.
But we careful when touching them. They are surprisingly hot.
Maybe also I wouldn't recommend that you do assembly on the new on this one or even the new ones.
But definitely we have bigger hot plate maybe.
Also having two I don't know why we use there in this picture only one.
One because we are maybe under time pressure or something like that.
If it falls down you have to wipe the complete board.
And basically if you don't have the capabilities of sorting out what is the capacitor was the resistor you have to put them away and just use you once.
Sorry, I mean thank you for your time to this point but we accidentally put them slide in the middle.
But also thank you so much.
Yeah, so the problem is after all this only half of the work we also had to find out that we had some problems even if we do daily we used to say there was still some minor fixes to apply.
For example, we assumed SPI ports on the SPI are the same. They are not on the SPI one you cannot do this place.
So we had to magnet via all the traces again that was I think the hardest part of the whole process.
But yeah, so I don't know what to say about that re documentation I guess.
Yeah, you have a mess to clean up after that sadly.
It's manageable don't let it sit for like days.
We had it sit for days because also we didn't want to do it all at one.
Everything all you can do that but also you don't you need breaks.
Maybe clean up between the breaks and here we have like one of the first assembled one and he also used the case.
For example, in the bottom case you can sort of the case the lower case and the picture is the backside of the BP and we have we had like a bigger separator for the battery so that they don't.
Move around so much this one was big we went very small luckily it's like 0.4 millimeters or something by now.
Your printer can do that and you need to add a form on the sides because you can't just have them in there because the batteries will not like you for that.
So yeah, if you want works we tested it at the airport security you can get through it they sometimes ask questions sometimes they don't.
You can drop them they don't like to be dropped but if it happens they will not be angry at you.
So problem with the two is do we just do bug fixes or do we add features we did add more features.
Yeah, so it's basically it's not the same slide as before this is all new stuff feature creep is feature.
For example we added like TPM chip because I think it's kind of cool to me around a bit but it's fully optional and yeah we also now have.
More GPIO expander because we decided we want to for example deactivate the status early if it's.
To annoying for example at night or something.
Also we have some more fine control over the charging behavior with that addition which certainly need and lead to the whole river of the lower bottom part.
But sometimes it's just better to redo it.
So yeah the baby is fully open source there are links there is an OS still in the works.
So that we get all the display overlay and stuff is everything configured you might just need to say I have display whatever sharp or the touch display that looks especially like one from a DSI.
And now we are waiting for the V3.
Yeah we are going to make the V3 this is the like the V2 it's almost perfect but there is like just a few bugs that are annoying and in particular we don't have a picture but there is two resistors here that are.
Chris Cross stacked on top of each other because we accidentally flipped the USB-C port polarity and there is also like some resistors and the LEDs that need to be moved basically just annoying stuff.
And we are going to have more of that taking care of the fact sure of course fix the bugs fix more bugs maybe add a few features maybe also today.
But I found my blip is fully discharged because the USB-C port broke off during the night when it fell on the USB-C cable.
And so we are also going to ask to put some glue under the USB-C ports and whatever else might be sensitive mostly ports there are the most important part I think important.
And then we want to produce more of them it's already pretty nice to just produce the ports and we can send the ports and people.
Our model is currently that like we send the boards out and people put the displays on it find the keyboard put the pi0 onto it at the batteries print the case and you have a blip is so easy is that.
And from here we can just basically manufacture boards add some latest addition so to say like some nice to have like tape on the display so that people could tape it down securely and so on support but with every like little change that we figure out.
It's getting to be more straightforward to just pump out a lot of these and get them to everybody who might want to device like this.
And from here we can also be also want to figure out so this there is like enough battery to run for 60 hours and then at night we charge it for eight and it's perfect so it runs for days like this until you accidentally reboot it or flip the power switch.
Without any sort of like power management that we also like on the power management front we there is a lot we still can do and we're going to like tackle that pretty soon and then we're probably going to get even more battery life.
That's pretty exciting to think about but also we can get SBC is that can actually do suspend and like the pi0 and so with like suspend to RAM we can theoretically lower the battery size quite a bit more and get like hackable small PDA that still can do like days and days of up time with just like waking up every now and then checking for messages and so on.
And yeah, we also want add-ons so there is a lot of add-on blip is going around. Thank you so much and we are also currently there is an LTE board in the works as we speak. One of our hackmots members is currently at home designing it. She couldn't come here but yeah next time.
And yeah, I believe we somehow got from some but some you then if blog reverse engineering post to a small device that anybody can manufacture because we have the GLC PCB ride files from Kaikad because the free cut case and you can just basically order everything together put together in it works.
And if it can be for a friend group or just for individuals who want like a pocket terminal for DevOps duties and or let's say harbour tinkering because there is a lot of SPSC SDIO you are concerned on the header alone and also quite a bit of power from the battery.
And for us most of the goals are reached we already can like develop small things. This is going to be even more better once we finally figure out the lower add-on than we can run around the fosdom congress whatever else event premises and talk to each other and maybe like share location also and like figure out who is where.
And also it's a great conversation starter like Lena made animation that you may be see on the blepis being passed around but maybe not but yeah.
It's also like people come up to us and ask what's this device and then you can like show and it's pretty cool it's like those scrolling name badges but like a little bit more custom and a little bit more us.
Yeah LTE is also going to be pretty interesting we cannot get voice calls just yet because we need to find a modern with decent audio interface but once we do well there is really quite a bit to look forward to for instance somebody was talking about.
Recreating all the zip it's it to and we could probably take this board and turn it into a clamshell form factor or we could do like a small wristward device or we could do a small handheld basically because.
Hardware is open source and it's just even on the board it's reasonably modular you could basically repackage it into like quite a few different form factors.
And also the like let's say there is one thing that I'm looking forward to and it's seeing the things that we cannot have in predict because that's what also happened with bp when the bp came to life I don't think people predicted that there's going to be.
Not just an entire tree of things that like different devices that got created from it and that are now all around the world in different people's hands but also like the different like small emulators software like.
Doomport for monochrome frame buffer because of course you have to run dominant and just all the beautiful things that have happened as a result just getting hardware into people's hands.
I personally am developing a small interface for like small screens so you can have a system management interface and also an interface for a portable computer that's.
My thing because that's a niche that the battery anything exists in and that's my own like playground so to say so.
Yeah I have found a little bit of hacker respite in this kind of portable device building something for others to make use of and also now some people in the bp community use this UI.
The one thing is that this was also the tiles itself like the thing on the screen that we always also like something that somebody in the bp community developed and then put on GitHub and so the beautiful parts are not mine but everything else is.
And the one thing I've noticed while working for hack a day while talking about like describing all the different devices and like research and the scene is that people are looking for something novel and something new.
Up we had the keyboard phones that was like 25 years ago I was growing up with the old knockies and the seamences and even Samsung said that point.
They were also getting in there and nowadays I'm seeing that people are longing for the old days when things were better in many important ways.
And I think we are forgetting all the suboptimal things that like these kinds of devices solved but they also brought.
For a few problems I think for instance this is this kind of form factors are basically like a content consumption machine in many ways and quite a few people want to escape that reality.
And then people are basically using the by for hundreds to make internet disconnected writing machines and the three players and filling all the small niches that when you have 8 billion people you basically have 8 billion small purposes that you can't always fulfill with like factory line device.
And for me personally you can see the notification LED blinking that's my own small application that I don't think I could make this smartphone and that's a tracker.
I usually use this blip is device for me on my waist always clip on on to me or on land yard as wireless headphones but it's also a reminder about let's say I want to wash my hair more often and only use shampoo like on certain days and then the dots like the different dots can light up at different points and then it serves a reminder.
Now I need to dedicate some time and wash my hair with shampoo or not and also it reminds me about eating drinking, refilling my water bottles.
I can also like keep track of how often I drink coffee because I'm kind of reading myself of it and I'm collecting all sorts of like small data there is quite a few dots.
I'm also like tracking some forms of exercise and quite a few more things like medications that I'm not showing in this screenshot but for me it was quite respite because like programming for this.
I couldn't do it as easily and especially like there is no notification LED to take care of.
So for me it's a platform that like fills the specific like ADHD hell per niche that I couldn't find anywhere else.
And with ecosystems like this like this journey has and like so many others that I have seen have shown that you can basically feed into each other's desires and needs and once by and then you publish them on TikTok Instagram.
Okay, maybe not for this kind of audience on GitHub for you and like screenshots and metrics and inspired people in small ways showing them that maybe like you don't need computer for your own writing and you can have instead a small device that puts you into entirely different headspace and is not associated with like you also watching YouTube videos and all the distractions that exist.
And for us it's a friend group device it a little bit maybe puts us closer together and also production is nowadays great let's see how geopolitics move forward but for now the GLC PCBA another PCBA pipelines are just wonderful for building something novel and building something that makes the world better in just a little bit for a group of people who.
People who feel like you and think like you.
Then there's the fancy slide so in a way my own funny theory is that well observation or more like is that nowadays we talk about like oh.
Let's say a company that we depend a lot on in specifically let's say software will right now Germany is moving away from Microsoft a lot.
And in many ways yes you can hire programmers but a lot of this spirit of building something new and rebuilding things and reinventing them in a different way matters a lot for.
In the lens that well we all feed into each other and create different things with open hardware platforms what's cool for instance for us is that recently.
There were there are hello models which it's kind of like a new Wi-Fi standards and there used be models but we are not about to see them on the on the phones for instance not anytime soon.
But with this kind of platform there's just a USB on the side and we can plug in an ad on quickly develop a board and already start experimenting.
We don't need to create a bespoke platform we don't need to create a bespoke like bluetooth connected thing and I think that's quite beautiful.
So thank you for indulging the last putting things together I think in hardware it's quite reassuring for me personally to see how things can feed into each other for for us to have them culminate into small field devices.
Alright thanks everyone thank you all we are out of time for questions so if you have questions for area and Lena I'm sure that they will be happy to speak with you outside the room there.