Years ago, back when every conference had an “IoT track” and nobody was talking about LLMs yet, I bought a Nandland Go Board with the intent of learning FPGAs. The board went into a drawer, life happened, and I never got around to it. A few project ideas have brought FPGAs back to the front of my mind, so I pulled the Go Board out of the drawer and went back to basics using an entirely open-source toolchain on Fedora. ...
My main keyboard for the last six years has been an Atreus62 — a 62-key ergonomic split mechanical keyboard with column-linear, vertically staggered keys. It’s been bulletproof the entire time. Then, last week, it started dropping keystrokes here and there. The flakiness got worse over the next few days. Eventually the entire top row of letters went silent. This is the point where a closed-source peripheral becomes e-waste. Instead, I spent an afternoon at the bench, rebuilt the firmware from source, swapped an inexpensive microcontroller, and got my keyboard back. The only reason that was possible is that every layer of the thing is open. ...