Welcome to our maker news where we wrap up some fun and interesting stories in the maker world from the last few weeks. The video will come out on Fridays, but we are posting a topic here on Wednesdays to post the video’s sources and to collect any news from the community to potentially include in next week’s as well as just open up general discussion.
This week we looked at:
Recently you might have seen slightly sensationalist headlines along the lines of a “fatal ESP32 backdoor that allows anonymous hackers known to access your person data through Bluetooth.” As it turns out though, this may be a little sensationalist. Security firm Tarlogic did find a Bluetooth backdoor, but to exploit it, one would need to have physical access to the device and be able to run code on it, which at that point, you may have bigger issues. A similar exploit is also known in pretty much every Bluetooth chip on earth, the news seemed to just pick this up and blow it out of proportion.
Home assistant finally matters (and we stole the line from their press release), as this week it received certification from the CSA to be compatible with Matter - alongside the likes of Google, Apple and Amazon. If you haven’t heard of matter, it’s the new smart home connectivity standard on the block and is designed to be unifying in that any device from any manufacturer can work together seamlessly. Home assistant is the first open project to receive this certification, which is a huge win for the open source movement showing that they can compete with, maybe even out-compete big tech.
And Argon40 has teased a fully featured laptop that runs off the Raspberry Pi compute module 5 to be released later this year. With a 14-inch 1080p IPS screen, a choice to run off an SSD or Micro SD, and what looks like a great focus on right to repair and upgradability, it’s looking pretty alright. It also still has the 40-pin GPIO out with this funky dual USB c to GPIO adapter, pretty neat.
If you have any news from the maker world, feel free to post it below and we may include it in next week’s video, until then we will see you next week!
Right to Repair & Modify – Upgrade storage, replace components, and tweak it your way.”
