For its second edition Hardware Freedom Day is happening with over 40 registered teams and one more sponsor in the name of LulzBot offering 8x3D printers for the event, product which has been RYF-certified by our partner the FSF. Canonical, Google and Linode are of course still part of our long term sponsors and we are trying to reward all our supporters as well. You can find more details on that by looking at the HFD website.

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The ASUS Zenbook UX301LA-DH71T is a Haswell-based Intel ultrabook that I have found to be quite interesting and will be carrying out a large number of Linux tests (and Windows 8.1 vs. Linux benchmarks) from this laptop that sports Intel Iris Graphics 5100, dual SSDs, and other impressive features.

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The first Open Ephys projects include components for recording electrical signals in mice brains, and a software interface for collecting data. Unlike something along the lines of the open source brain scanning tool Open BCI, the Open Ephys tools are aimed at neuroscience researchers, not at engineers and game developers. Nonetheless, in building these contraptions, Siegle and Voigts have turned to many of the same tools used by other hardware hackers across the country, including the Arduino open source circuit board “We like Arduinos because lots of people know how to use them, and they’re easy to get your hands on,” Siegle says.

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3D printers may be trendy, but they are hardly new. One of the earliest of all is the RepRap project, which began back in 2005. As its name implies - it's short for "replicating rapid" prototyper - RepRap is designed to be able to produce copies of itself, or at least most of its parts. Not only that, it is completely open source, both in terms of its hardware (which uses Arduino kit) and software.

Because of its open nature it has gone on to form the basis of many other 3D-printing systems, including those from MakerBot.

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Most companies may not realize it, but a huge part of the infrastructure that they run on today is actually built on open source hardware and software. In fact, if you think about Google, Facebook and a lot of the large social media delivery companies, they no longer sell you the software, it is an open source software, because the value proposition is the service on top of those tools, not the value that is on the tool. Beyond that, they see a huge community of individuals who can contribute to moving that technology forward, with the focus on the service delivered, not the technology below it.

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Other changes for today's NVIDIA 334.21 Linux driver update include a NVIDIA kernel module security fix for a userspace pointer dereference, OpenGL bug-fixes, support for GPUs with VDPAU feature set E, improved application profile support, improved performance of OpenGL applications when used in conjunction with the X driver's composition pipeline, NVIDIA Settings control panel updates, and other fixes.

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Digia announced Qt Enterprise Embedded in October as a commercial distribution for enterprises. Like the Qt 5.2 cross-platform framework it’s based on, Qt Enterprise Embedded supports Android, as well as Linux. The platform combines Qt’s drag-and-drop GUI builder with an IDE based on Qt Creator and Ubuntu, as well as a Boot to Qt embedded stack for Android and Linux targets.

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This week during Mobile World Congress 2014, Buffalo Americas launched three high speed AirStation Open Source DD-WRT wireless routers: the AirStation AC 1750 WZR-1750DHPD, the AirStation N600 WZR-600DHP2D, and the AirStation N300 WHR-300HP2D. The AC 1750 model is on sale now, while the other two won't arrive until early March.

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The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 is a great value graphics card for $120 that delivers great mid-range performance while its performance-per-Watt is exceptional. If you don't mind using binary graphics drivers, the GTX 750 based upon NVIDIA's new Maxwell architecture with the GM107 is worth checking out.

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The community of open source mobile developers around the world are a vocal bunch – and here at Broadcom we’ve heard their call.

To date, there’s been a dearth of documentation and vendor-developed open source drivers for the graphics subsystems of mobile systems-on-a-chip (SoC). Binary drivers prevent users from fixing bugs or otherwise improving the graphics stack, and complicate the task of porting new operating systems to a device without vendor assistance.

But that’s changing, and Broadcom is taking up the cause.

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PLDA has launched an SODIMM-like computer-on-module claimed to be the smallest Xilinx Zynq COM yet, supported with a carrier board and Debian Linux BSP

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That "blob" is the closed source driver code that the Pi requires today. "In common with every other mobile graphics core, using the VideoCore IV 3D graphics core on the Pi requires a block of closed-source binary driver code (a 'blob') which talks to the hardware," Upton wrote. "Our existing open-source graphics drivers are a thin shim running on the ARM11, which talks to that blob via a communication driver in the Linux kernel. The lack of true open-source graphics drivers and documentation is widely acknowledged to be a significant problem for Linux on ARM, as it prevents users from fixing driver bugs, adding features and generally understanding what their hardware is doing."

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Newark Element14′s $79, Linux-ready “SAMA5D3 Xplained” SBC showcases Atmel’s SAMA5D3 processor, with features like dual LAN ports and Arduino compatibility.

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The folks at UK-based Cloudsto have added a new device to their range of small, ARM-based Linux computers.

The Rikomagic MK902 LE is a small box with a Rockchip quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, and up to 16GB of storage. It ships with Ubuntu Linux, and it’s available from the Cloudsto shop for £94.99 and up, or about $159.

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Back on Tuesday I delivered a launch-day review of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti on Linux. This first graphics card built on NVIDIA's new Maxwell architecture has been running fantastic under Linux for being a mid-range graphics card. The GM107 GPU core found on the GTX 750 Ti is incredibly power efficient, as was shown in numerous articles on launch-day. For those curious more about the GeForce GTX 750 Ti Linux performance, here are some more OpenCL and OpenGL performance results.

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AS you may know, just few weeks ago OSHWA published the results from 2013 Open Hardware Community survey. You can find original datasheets and everything here. Despite raw data is good, I thought it was good to spend some time looking at the data trying to gather more insights, when possible, still keeping in mind that the survey samples a very limited and polarized (OSHWA centric) chunk of the community. But we need to start from something in a way.

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The first is the Hachiko development board for the Renesas RZ/A microcontroller, which is an ARM Cortex-A9-based MCU. This is positioned as a low end design board for applications such as door entry phones, barcode scanners and data communication modules.

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Users can save captures for offline analysis, share them with other PicoScope for Windows and PicoScope for Linux users, or export them in text, CSV and Mathworks MATLAB 4 formats. The only additional hardware needed is a USB oscilloscope.

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Planet unveiled a Linux-based, 16-channel network video recorder called the NVR-1620, with dual HDD bays, dual displays, and up to 2560 x 1920 resolution.

Taiwan-based Planet has a long track record of making networking and surveillance appliances. Its latest NVR-1620 network video recorder supports 16 IP video channels, and up to 16 devices can be networked for 256 total channels accessible via a central monitoring site. In addition, most mobile platforms, including Android, are supported for remote viewing.

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Usually there are two ways to look forward to buy a Raspberry Pi: first, think about a strange thing to make, and then go to the website; or second, buy the Raspberry Pi board having no idea of what you are going to do with it. Usually, I buy things and only after that I go through the Internet in search of inspiration and creative use cases for my new toys. That was the case with my first Raspberry Pi board: everyone seems to be able to put together his tiny PC with some parts (monitor, mouse and so on), a CPU and a lightweight Linux distribution, but what can we do that is totally crazy, mind-blowing and problem-solving?

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