Samwise Makers' News
Monday, October 12, 2026
Littelfuse Announces Retirement of the eZ80 and Its Other Microcontroller Lines
Littelfuse, the owner of the Zilog name, has sent customers product change notice PCN ZAC26-0074, saying it will take final orders for the eZ80 and all other microcontroller lines it currently owns. Mouser has marked eZ80 parts as “End of Life.” The eZ80 had remained an alternative after the original Z80 and its peripherals were discontinued a few years ago. Orders are accepted until December 21, 2026, with final deliveries taking place throughout 2027 as Littelfuse winds down its MCU manufacturing. Hackaday notes that open source Z80-compatible cores exist, along with real silicon from the TinyTapeout project, as ways the architecture could live on.
Meta Releases Muse Gadgets SDK for ESP32 and Raspberry Pi Devices
Meta has released the open-source Muse Gadgets SDK on GitHub, mostly under an Apache 2.0 license, to connect ESP32 boards and Linux-based SBCs such as the Raspberry Pi with its Muse personal AI agent. The ESP32 Device SDK can show images, supports audio input and output, and can interface with sensors, actuators, and buttons. Meta recommends a Raspberry Pi 5, the Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-AMOLED-1.75C devkit, or the Seeed reTerminal E1002 to get started. Meta also manufactured 5000 ESP32-C5-based Muse Home Link devices, free to US Muse subscribers while stock lasts. Pairing a gadget requires a Muse SDK token and developer mode in the Muse app.
Sources: CNX Software
Wireless-Tag Pairs ESP32-P4 and ESP32-C5 on a 4.3-Inch Touch Display Devkit
Wireless-Tag’s WT32P4C5-43S is a fully integrated 4.3-inch touch display development board combining an ESP32-P4 MCU with an ESP32-C5 wireless module. The ESP32-P4 has a dual-core 32-bit RISC-V CPU running at up to 400 MHz with an AI instructions extension and single-precision FPU, plus a 40 MHz low-power core. The ESP32-C5 module supports dual-band WiFi 6, Bluetooth LE, and 802.15.4. The board adds a 15-pin MIPI CSI camera interface, a microSD slot, two USB Type-C ports, and a 14-pin GPIO header. CNX Software says it targets industrial automation, smart control panels, and edge AI vision terminals.
Sources: CNX Software
Spanish Museum Unveils Cray-1 Replica Built From 30 Vintage Mac Minis
Spain’s Museo de Historia de la Computación has unveiled an 18-month project marking the 50th anniversary of both the Cray-1’s first operational use at Los Alamos and Apple’s founding. The replica uses 30 Mac Minis from 2012 to 2014: 25 dual-core i5 units and five quad-core i7 units, totaling 70 cores. Peak performance is 1.5 TeraFLOPS, a theoretical 9,375 times the original Cray-1’s 160 MegaFLOPS. After one quad-core machine went offline, the reported peak sits at 1.3 TeraFLOPS. Tom’s Hardware describes the Cray-1 as the first commercially successful supercomputer, with 80 systems sold.
Sources: Tom’s Hardware
Nokia 3310 Game Jam Entry Gets a Custom Raspberry Pi Pico Board
Hoani entered a game jam that required games to fit the Nokia 3310’s user interface: a 94 by 48 pixel grey LCD, a buzzer, and a keypad. The entry, Trick Shot II, is a ball-bouncing game running on his own engine, which is written in Go and has graphics and sound APIs. He then designed a custom PCB to fit inside a real Nokia 3310 case, which was gutted to make room. The board carries a Raspberry Pi Pico, the Nokia LCD, and a Nokia keypad layout. The first prototype was not a perfect fit because it used a 1.6 mm board rather than a 1 mm one.
Maker Tours a 1994 DEC AlphaServer 2100 Picked Up at VCF Midwest
derelictelectronics picked up a DEC AlphaServer 2100 at this year’s Vintage Computer Festival Midwest and recorded a video tour of the machine. DEC sold these units with multiple CPUs from the start, but this example has a single CPU board carrying a 64-bit Alpha RISC processor. The machine dates to 1994. It could host up to 2GB of RAM, though this one has 256 MB. He powers it on around the 20-minute mark of the video but does not reach an operating system, and the problems he is having appear to be power-related. Hackaday says he has promised to get it running with OpenVMS.
Used LTO-5 Tapes Offer Homelab Storage at About $2 Per TB
Ben Pettis recounted setting up an LTO-5 tape drive in his homelab, and Hackaday revisits the experience as hard drive prices stay high. An LTO-5 cartridge holds 1.5 TB uncompressed; the advertised figure assumes 2:1 compression, which photos and video are unlikely to reach. He also tried the cheaper-to-buy fiber channel drive: with no switch in the circuit, a crossover cable is needed to bring TX to RX. Price is the draw. Hackaday cites diskprices.com at $16/TB as the lowest cost, while Pettis found lightly used tapes on eBay for only $2/TB, and a used drive can be had for a few hundred dollars.
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