Top 5 weekly: DIY eInk photo frames, a PDP-11 brought to life, and more

August is almost over, and people are beginning to look forward to everything associated with the fall. However, just like any week of the year, the tech news engine kept working away. If you’ve been too busy looking up if pumpkin spice lattes have returned to check out the tech news this week, here’s everything you missed out on.

Making cost-effective hardware even more cost-effective

The Raspberry Pi has seen a lot of competition from other SBC developers, but one of its main fortes is how affordable the boards can get. However, it turns out that they can get even cheaper than they were before. If you were thinking about grabbing a Raspberry Pi 5, you can now do so at an even lower price than before with its new 2GB model. The new price makes the Raspberry Pi 5 a really affordable way for hobbyists and programmers to get their hands on some good hardware.

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Armed up and ready to go

If you’ve been around XDA for a while, you know that we love our Start menu customization apps. However, not all of them have made the jump over to Windows on Arm devices just yet. Fortunately, this week saw Start11 make the journey over to the Arm architecture, so if you’ve been looking to get a customizable Start menu on your Snapdragon device, now is the perfect time to get started.

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Build your own memories

Static photo frames are kind of plain, especially when all of our media is digital. And while you can purchase digital photo frames that automatically cycle through a collection, why not build your own? This cool project makes use of a color eInk display and a Raspberry Pi to make a fantastic DIY photo frame. Best of all, it’s programmed to fetch all of its photos from a personal Google Photos account – if you want to add something to the rotation, just drop it into the Photos folder and it’ll appear automatically.

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An old partnership may become a bitter rivalry

Arm and Nvidia have worked together in the past, with the two almost finalizing a merger before being blocked by anti-monopoly laws. However, it seems that Arm still wants to chase the dream of making high-end GPUs, as there are rumors that the company is expanding its operations in Israel to produce gaming GPUs. While Arm has been pretty comfortable with low-end GPUs, this expansion would put it in direct competition with Nvidia, which has managed to establish a strong grip on the market after the AI boom. Will Arm GPUs manage to weaken Nvidia’s grasp, or will it be a wasted effort against Team Green?

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Frankenstein’s computer

Every good tinkerer has a spare bits box for parts, but what if you tried to make a functioning device using only components found in that box? This is what Dave sought to do after he went through his box of PDP-11 components and realized that he had enough parts to remake a computer. Each component came from a different system, making this a kind of Frankenstein project; however, Dave still managed to get it running just fine with the parts he had on hand.

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