Secluso is a private, open-source, DIY home security camera system built around the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, featuring true end-to-end encryption (E2EE) and on-device AI for human, pet, and vehicle detection. It was designed as an alternative to commercial smart home cameras that require sending raw video feeds to a proprietary cloud, a practice that often raises significant privacy concerns. Developed by Secluso, Inc., co-founded by UC Irvine professor Ardalan Amiri Sani and John Kaczman, the project utilizes Messaging Layer Security (MLS, RFC 9420) to ensure end-to-end encryption between the camera and the user’s smartphone. Because the system uses an untrusted relay (either self-hosted on a VPS or via Secluso’s free beta relay), the server routing the footage only sees encrypted files and cannot decrypt the video or thumbnails. Secluso hardware requirements: SBC – Raspberry Pi Zero 2W Camera – Raspberry Pi Camera Module V1 (OV5647) or V2 (IMX219) […]
Modos Flow – An FPGA-based 13.3-inch USB-C touchscreen e-paper monitor (Crowdfunding)
Modos Flow is a paper-like, 13.3-inch USB Type-C touchscreen monochrome or color monitor that builds upon the Modos Paper devkit introduced last year with an AMD/Xilinx Spartan-6 LX16 FPGA and STMicro STM32H750 Arm Cortex-M7 microcontroller. The main difference is that the Modos Flow is more like a consumer product with a full enclosure, a touchscreen, and optional stylus support, 4096-color e-paper display, and frontlight. Modos Flow specifications: FPGA – AMD Xilinx Spartan-6 LX16 FPGA running Caster gateware like the earlier devkit MCU – STMicro STM32H750 Arm Cortex-M7 microcontroller for USB communication, firmware upgrades, and standalone applications. Display 13.3-inch e-paper display with 3200 x 2400 resolution Refresh rate – 60 Hz with additional power, 40 Hz via a single USB-C cable Monochrome or 4096 colors/16 levels of grayscale Touchscreen support Optimized display modes for reading, browsing, watching, and writing Amber-tinted frontlight (color model only) Video Input – USB Type-C DisplayPort Alt-Mode with […]
Study compares Rust and C languages for embedded firmware development
There’s a lot of hype around the Rust programming language, and I’m seeing it being adopted by various projects, not least the Linux kernel. However, so far it was unclear to me whether it was suitable for embedded firmware development since the hardware resources are limited on microcontrollers. A low memory and storage footprint is required, and optimal performance may also be important, for example, to lower the power consumption of battery-powered devices. A research paper by STMicroelectronics, Inria, and the Freie Universität Berlin, entitled “Lessons from an Industrial Microcontroller Use Case with Ariel OS” published on ArXiv hosted by Cornell University, attempts to answer this question using embedded C and Rust, and the conclusion is that Rust is a viable option: As Rust gains traction for developing safer systems software, a reality check for the microcontroller hardware segment becomes necessary. How ready is the Rust ecosystem for this segment? Can […]
LeafKVM open-source hardware IP KVM offers WiFi 5, PoE, USB-C serial console, and 2.4-inch touchscreen display (Crowdfunding)
LeafKVM is a wireless and PoE open-source hardware IP KVM based on Rockchip RV1126B SoC with 512MB RAM and a microSD card slot for storage. Like other IP KVMs, it enables remote access to computers and servers, even at the BIOS level or when the machine is unresponsive, by emulating keyboard, mouse, and video through HDMI/VGA and USB ports. Other features include a 2.4-inch touchscreen display for configuration and guest video mirroring, a USB-C port for serial debug, a USB Type-A port for expansion (e.g., power control), and an ultra-low latency of less than 100ms. LeafKVM specifications: SoC – Rockchip RV1126B CPU – Quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 up to 1.6 GHz GPU – 2D Graphics Engine VPU Video Decoder – H.265/H.264 up to 3840×2160 @ 30fps Video Encoder – H.265, H.264, JPEG up to 12Mbps @ 30fps JPEG Decoder AI accelerator – Rockchip NPU engine up to 3 TOPS (INT8); likely not […]
Linux 7.0 Release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures
Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 7.0 on LKML: The last week of the release continued the same “lots of small fixes” trend, but it all really does seem pretty benign, so I’ve tagged the final 7.0 and pushed it out. I suspect it’s a lot of AI tool use that will keep finding corner cases for us for a while, so this may be the “new normal” at least for a while. Only time will tell. Anyway, this last week was a little bit of everything: networking (core and drivers), arch fixes, tooling and selftests, and various random fixes all over the place. Let’s keep testing, and obviously tomorrow the merge window for 7.1 opens. I already have four dozen pull requests pending – thank you to all the early people. Linus This follows the Linux 6.19 release about two months ago, which brought us PCIe link encryption and […]
RuView project leverages ESP32 nodes for WiFi-based presence detection, pose estimation, and breathing/heart rate monitoring
RuView is an open-source “WiFi DensePose” implementation leveraging multiple ESP32 nodes to turn WiFi signals into real-time human pose estimation, vital sign monitoring, and presence detection without relying on video cameras. WiFi DensePose is a sensing technique, first explored in academic research, that leverages WiFi signals to reconstruct human pose. RuView implements this technique in Rust or Python, and relies on your WiFi router and several ESP32 nodes to track body pose, detect breathing rate, and measure heart rate even through walls. As we’ll discuss below, this project has its own controversy, as some claim it’s fake. The solution relies on Channel State Information (CSI) disturbances caused by human movement to reconstruct body position, breathing rate, heart rate, and presence in real time using “physics-based signal processing and machine learning”. That obviously means you need CSI-capable hardware, and not all consumer WiFi nodes implement it. The project description lists various […]
Dabao board features open-source hardware Baochip-1x RISC-V MCU (Crowdfunding)
An open-source hardware board usually features a closed-source microcontroller or processors, but the Dabao evaluation board goes further with the open-source Boachip-1x MCU, whose RTL files are available. It’s also manufactured in such a way that it is inspectable with the Infra-Red, In Situ (IRIS) technique, so users can look at the silicon and confirm they’ve got the right chip in a non-destructive way. Baochip-1x is a “general-purpose” microcontroller with a 350 MHz Vexriscv RV32-IMAC CPU core, a BIO accelerator for I/Os with four 700MHz PicoRV RV32-EMC CPU cores, 4MB of ReRAM, 2MB SRAM, a USB interface, various other I/Os, and hardware secure elements such as cryptography accelerators, key stores, one-way counters, true random number generation, and hardware attack countermeasures such as glitch sensors and a security mesh. The Dabao board itself is pretty basic with the microcontroller, two 16-pin headers for I/Os, a USB-C port for power and programming, […]
Ariel OS – A Rust RTOS for IoT microcontrollers
Ariel OS is a new RTOS for microcontrollers written in Rust with support for popular hardware architectures (Arm Cortex-M, ESP32, RISC-V) and boards from Espressif, Nordic Semi, Raspberry Pi, and STMicroelectronics. Ariel OS is built on top of Embassy Rust framework and embedded-hal Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) for embedded systems, and adds several OS functionalities and a multi-core capable scheduler. It is mainly designed for secure, memory-safe, networked applications on microcontrollers. The developers further describe Ariel OS as follows on the project’s website: Ariel OS follows an approach whereby it simultaneously integrates a curated ecosystem of libraries (available via crates.io), and adds missing operating system functionalities as depicted below. Such functionalities include a preemptive multicore scheduler, portable peripheral APIs, additional network security facilities, as well as a meta-build system to bind it all together. As a result, a low-power IoT developer can focus on business logic sitting on top of […]

