Open Source

OpenAI releases its first open source models since 2019

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Open Source, openai / Beth Washington / August 5, 2025

OpenAI is releasing new generative AI models today, and no, GPT-5 is not one of them. Depending on how you feel about generative AI, these new models may be even more interesting, though. The company is rolling out gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, its first open weight models since the release of GPT-2 in 2019. You can download and run these models on your own hardware, with support for simulated reasoning, tool use, and deep customization.

When you access the company’s proprietary models in the cloud, they’re running on powerful server infrastructure that cannot be replicated easily, even in enterprise. The new OpenAI models come in two variants (120b and 20b) to be run on less powerful hardware configurations. Both are transformers with configurable chain of thought (CoT), supporting low, medium, and high settings. The lower settings are faster and use fewer compute resources, but the outputs are better with the highest setting. You can set the CoT level with a single line in the system prompt.

The smaller gpt-oss-20b has a total of 21 billion parameters, utilizing mixture-of-experts (MoE) to reduce that to 3.6 billion parameters per token. As for gpt-oss-120b, its 117 billion parameters come down to 5.1 billion per token with MoE. The company says the smaller model can run on a consumer-level machine with 16GB or more of memory. To run gpt-oss-120b, you need 80GB of memory, which is more than you’re likely to find in the average consumer machine. It should fit on a single AI accelerator GPU like the Nvidia H100, though. Both models have a context window of 128,000 tokens.

The team says users of gpt-oss can expect robust performance similar to its leading cloud-based models. The larger one benchmarks between the o3 and o4-mini proprietary models in most tests, with the smaller version running just a little behind. It gets closest in math and coding tasks. In the knowledge-based Humanity’s Last Exam, o3 is far out in front with 24.9 percent (with tools), while gpt-oss-120b only manages 19 percent. For comparison, Google’s leading Gemini Deep Think hits 34.8 percent in that test.

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Blender developers begin work on full-fledged mobile version

3D Modeling, Blender, Creative, ipad, Open Source, Software, tablet, Tech / DJ Henderson / July 29, 2025

To that end, some features developed for the mobile version of Blender will cross-pollinate to desktop, like icon support for sidebar tabs and a helper overlay with curated shortcuts, among other things.

You can see some mockups over at the Blender blog. Development has begun in earnest on a new, separate branch for this tablet application. It will be developed first to target the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, with other platforms and tablets to get tailored support later.

It sounds like the team already has some knowledgable designers and developers on this branch, but the blog post is also an invitation for new contributors. Specifically, it calls for “developers with extensive experience in this area” to contribute to building the application, touch events and gestures support, “File System / iCloud / AirDrop support,” and OpenSubdiv.

It sounds like things are already moving relatively quickly, as a tech demo is planned for SIGGRAPH 2025 in Vancouver next month.

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Supply-chain attacks on open source software are getting out of hand

Biz & IT, Open Source, repositories, Security, supply chain attacks / Beth Washington / July 25, 2025

sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root /

The –no-preserve-root flag is specifically designed to override safety protections that would normally prevent deletion of the root directory.

The postinstall script that includes a Windows-equivalent destructive command was:

rm /s /q

Socket published a separate report Wednesday on yet more supply-chain attacks, one targeting npm users and another targeting users of PyPI. As of Wednesday, the four malicious packages—three published to npm and the fourth on PyPI—collectively had been downloaded more than 56,000 times. Socket said it was working to get them removed.

When installed, the packages “covertly integrate surveillance functionality into the developer’s environment, enabling keylogging, screen capture, fingerprinting, webcam access, and credential theft,” Socket researchers wrote. They added that the malware monitored and captured user activity and transmitted it to attacker-controlled infrastructure. Socket used the term surveillance malware to emphasize the covert observation and data exfiltration tactics “in the context of malicious dependencies.”

Last Friday, Socket reported the third attack. This one compromised an account on npm and used the access to plant malicious code inside three packages available on the site. The compromise occurred after the attackers successfully obtained a credential token that the developer used to authenticate to the site.

The attackers obtained the credential through a targeted phishing attack Socket had disclosed hours earlier. The email instructed the recipient to log in through a URL on npnjs.com. The site is a typosquatting spoof of the official npmjs.com domain. To make the attack more convincing, the phishing URL contained a token field that mimicked tokens npm uses for authentication. The phishing URL was in the format of https://npnjs.com/login?token=xxxxxx where the xxxxxx represented the token.

A phishing email targeting npm account holders. Credit: Socket

Also compromised was an npm package known as ‘is.’ It receives roughly 2.8 million downloads weekly.

Potential for widespread damage

Supply-chain attacks like the ones Socket has flagged have the potential to cause widespread damage. Many packages available in repositories are dependencies, meaning the dependencies must be incorporated into downstream packages for those packages to work. In many developer flows, new dependency versions are downloaded and incorporated into the downstream packages automatically.

The packages flagged in the three attacks are:

@toptal/picasso-tailwind
@toptal/picasso-charts
@toptal/picasso-shared
@toptal/picasso-provider
@toptal/picasso-select
@toptal/picasso-quote
@toptal/picasso-forms
@xene/core
@toptal/picasso-utils
@toptal/picasso-typography.
is version 3.3.1, 5.0.0
got-fetch version 5.1.11, 5.1.12
Eslint-config-prettier, versions 8.10.1, 9.1.1, 10.1.6, and 10.1.7
Eslint-plugin-prettier, versions 4.2.2 and 4.2.3
Synckit, version 0.11.9
@pkgr/core, version 0.2.8
Napi-postinstall, version 0.3.1

Developers who work with any of the packages targeted should ensure none of the malicious versions have been installed or incorporated into their wares. Developers working with open source packages should:

Monitor repository visibility changes in search of suspicious or unusual publishing of packages
Review package.json lifecycle scripts before installing dependencies
Use automated security scanning in continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines
Regularly rotate authentication tokens
Use multifactor authentication to safeguard repository accounts

Additionally, repositories that haven’t yet made MFA mandatory should do so in the near future.

Supply-chain attacks on open source software are getting out of hand Read More »

White House unveils sweeping plan to “win” global AI race through deregulation

AI, AI and work, AI development tools, AI ethics, AI infrastructure, AI law, AI regulation, AI research, AI security, biosecurity, Biz & IT, china, Chips Act, data centers, David Sacks, Deepfakes, Department of Commerce, Donald Trump, Energy, Export controls, machine learning, Michael Kratsios, national security, NIST, Open Source, Policy, semiconductors, White House / 9u50fv / July 24, 2025

Trump’s plan was not welcomed by everyone. J.B. Branch, Big Tech accountability advocate for Public Citizen, in a statement provided to Ars, criticized Trump as giving “sweetheart deals” to tech companies that would cause “electricity bills to rise to subsidize discounted power for massive AI data centers.”

Infrastructure demands and energy requirements

Trump’s new AI plan tackles infrastructure head-on, stating that “AI is the first digital service in modern life that challenges America to build vastly greater energy generation than we have today.” To meet this demand, it proposes streamlining environmental permitting for data centers through new National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) exemptions, making federal lands available for construction and modernizing the power grid—all while explicitly rejecting “radical climate dogma and bureaucratic red tape.”

The document embraces what it calls a “Build, Baby, Build!” approach—echoing a Trump campaign slogan—and promises to restore semiconductor manufacturing through the CHIPS Program Office, though stripped of “extraneous policy requirements.”

On the technology front, the plan directs Commerce to revise NIST’s AI Risk Management Framework to “eliminate references to misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change.” Federal procurement would favor AI developers whose systems are “objective and free from top-down ideological bias.” The document strongly backs open source AI models and calls for exporting American AI technology to allies while blocking administration-labeled adversaries like China.

Security proposals include high-security military data centers and warnings that advanced AI systems “may pose novel national security risks” in cyberattacks and weapons development.

Critics respond with “People’s AI Action Plan”

Before the White House unveiled its plan, more than 90 organizations launched a competing “People’s AI Action Plan” on Tuesday, characterizing the Trump administration’s approach as “a massive handout to the tech industry” that prioritizes corporate interests over public welfare. The coalition includes labor unions, environmental justice groups, and consumer protection nonprofits.

White House unveils sweeping plan to “win” global AI race through deregulation Read More »

Scientists once hoarded pre-nuclear steel; now we’re hoarding pre-AI content

AI, AI criticism, AI writing, Biz & IT, chatbots, cultural singularity, data science, generative ai, large language models, machine learning, Open Source / 9u50fv / June 18, 2025

A time capsule of human expression

Graham-Cumming is no stranger to tech preservation efforts. He’s a British software engineer and writer best known for creating POPFile, an open source email spam filtering program, and for successfully petitioning the UK government to apologize for its persecution of codebreaker Alan Turing—an apology that Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued in 2009.

As it turns out, his pre-AI website isn’t new, but it has languished unannounced until now. “I created it back in March 2023 as a clearinghouse for online resources that hadn’t been contaminated with AI-generated content,” he wrote on his blog.

The website points to several major archives of pre-AI content, including a Wikipedia dump from August 2022 (before ChatGPT’s November 2022 release), Project Gutenberg’s collection of public domain books, the Library of Congress photo archive, and GitHub’s Arctic Code Vault—a snapshot of open source code buried in a former coal mine near the North Pole in February 2020. The wordfreq project appears on the list as well, flash-frozen from a time before AI contamination made its methodology untenable.

The site accepts submissions of other pre-AI content sources through its Tumblr page. Graham-Cumming emphasizes that the project aims to document human creativity from before the AI era, not to make a statement against AI itself. As atmospheric nuclear testing ended and background radiation returned to natural levels, low-background steel eventually became unnecessary for most uses. Whether pre-AI content will follow a similar trajectory remains a question.

Still, it feels reasonable to protect sources of human creativity now, including archival ones, because these repositories may become useful in ways that few appreciate at the moment. For example, in 2020, I proposed creating a so-called “cryptographic ark”—a timestamped archive of pre-AI media that future historians could verify as authentic, collected before my then-arbitrary cutoff date of January 1, 2022. AI slop pollutes more than the current discourse—it could cloud the historical record as well.

For now, lowbackgroundsteel.ai stands as a modest catalog of human expression from what may someday be seen as the last pre-AI era. It’s a digital archaeology project marking the boundary between human-generated and hybrid human-AI cultures. In an age where distinguishing between human and machine output grows increasingly difficult, these archives may prove valuable for understanding how human communication evolved before AI entered the chat.

Scientists once hoarded pre-nuclear steel; now we’re hoarding pre-AI content Read More »

Engineer creates first custom motherboard for 1990s PlayStation console

classic gaming, Crowdfunding, electronics engineering, Game consoles, gaming, Gaming History, hardware hacking, hardware preservation, Open Source, PCB design, PlayStation, retrocomputing, retrogaming, retrotech, Reverse-engineering, Sony, Vintage computing / Beth Washington / June 13, 2025

The nsOne project joins a growing community of homebrew PlayStation 1 hardware developments. Other recent projects include Picostation, a Raspberry Pi Pico-based optical disc emulator (ODE) that allows PlayStation 1 consoles to load games from SD cards instead of physical discs. Other ODEs like MODE and PSIO have also become popular solutions for retrogaming collectors who play games on original hardware as optical drives age and fail.

From repair job to reverse-engineering project

To understand the classic console’s physical architecture, Brodesco physically sanded down an original motherboard to expose its internal layers, then cross-referenced the exposed traces with component datasheets and service manuals.

“I realized that detailed documentation on the original motherboard was either incomplete or entirely unavailable,” Brodesco explained in his Kickstarter campaign. This discovery launched what would become a comprehensive documentation effort, including tracing every connection on the board and creating multi-layer graphic representations of the circuitry.

A photo of the nsOne PlayStation motherboard. Credit: Lorentio Brodesco

Using optical scanning and manual net-by-net reverse-engineering, Brodesco recreated the PlayStation 1’s schematic in modern PCB design software. This process involved creating component symbols with accurate pin mappings and identifying—or in some cases creating—the correct footprints for each proprietary component that Sony had never publicly documented.

Brodesco also identified what he calls the “minimum architecture” required to boot the console without BIOS modifications, streamlining the design process while maintaining full compatibility.

The mock-up board shown in photos validates the footprints of chips and connectors, all redrawn from scratch. According to Brodesco, a fully routed version with complete multilayer routing and final layout is already in development.

As Brodesco noted on Kickstarter, his project’s goal is to “create comprehensive documentation, design files, and production-ready blueprints for manufacturing fully functional motherboards.”

Beyond repairs, the documentation and design files Brodesco is creating would preserve the PlayStation 1’s hardware architecture for future generations: “It’s a tribute to the PS1, to retro hardware, and to the belief that one person really can build the impossible.”

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Hugging Face clones OpenAI’s Deep Research in 24 hours

agentic AI, agents, AI, AI agents, Aymeric Roucher, chatgpt, chatgtp, code agents, Deep Research, DeepResearch, Google, Google Gemini, GPT-4o, Hugging Face, machine learning, Magnetic-One, microsoft, Open Source, open weights, Open weights AI, openai, smolagents / Shannon Garcia / February 6, 2025

On Tuesday, Hugging Face researchers released an open source AI research agent called “Open Deep Research,” created by an in-house team as a challenge 24 hours after the launch of OpenAI’s Deep Research feature, which can autonomously browse the web and create research reports. The project seeks to match Deep Research’s performance while making the technology freely available to developers.

“While powerful LLMs are now freely available in open-source, OpenAI didn’t disclose much about the agentic framework underlying Deep Research,” writes Hugging Face on its announcement page. “So we decided to embark on a 24-hour mission to reproduce their results and open-source the needed framework along the way!”

Similar to both OpenAI’s Deep Research and Google’s implementation of its own “Deep Research” using Gemini (first introduced in December—before OpenAI), Hugging Face’s solution adds an “agent” framework to an existing AI model to allow it to perform multi-step tasks, such as collecting information and building the report as it goes along that it presents to the user at the end.

The open source clone is already racking up comparable benchmark results. After only a day’s work, Hugging Face’s Open Deep Research has reached 55.15 percent accuracy on the General AI Assistants (GAIA) benchmark, which tests an AI model’s ability to gather and synthesize information from multiple sources. OpenAI’s Deep Research scored 67.36 percent accuracy on the same benchmark.

As Hugging Face points out in its post, GAIA includes complex multi-step questions such as this one:

Which of the fruits shown in the 2008 painting “Embroidery from Uzbekistan” were served as part of the October 1949 breakfast menu for the ocean liner that was later used as a floating prop for the film “The Last Voyage”? Give the items as a comma-separated list, ordering them in clockwise order based on their arrangement in the painting starting from the 12 o’clock position. Use the plural form of each fruit.

To correctly answer that type of question, the AI agent must seek out multiple disparate sources and assemble them into a coherent answer. Many of the questions in GAIA represent no easy task, even for a human, so they test agentic AI’s mettle quite well.

Hugging Face clones OpenAI’s Deep Research in 24 hours Read More »

German router maker is latest company to inadvertently clarify the LGPL license

avm, Cisco, free and open source, Free Software Foundation, FSF, GPL, LGPL, Linksys, Open Source, open source licenses, SFLC, Tech / DJ Henderson / January 10, 2025

The GNU General Public License (GPL) and its “Lesser” version (LGPL) are widely known and used. Still, every so often, a networking hardware maker has to get sued to make sure everyone knows how it works.

The latest such router company to face legal repercussions is AVM, the Berlin-based maker of the most popular home networking products in Germany. Sebastian Steck, a German software developer, bought an AVM Fritz!Box 4020 (PDF) and, being a certain type, requested the source code that had been used to generate certain versions of the firmware on it.

According to Steck’s complaint (translated to English and provided in PDF by the Software Freedom Conservancy, or SFC), he needed this code to recompile a networking library and add some logging to “determine which programs on the Fritz!Box establish connections to servers on the Internet and which data they send.” But Steck was also concerned about AVM’s adherence to GPL 2.0 and LGPL 2.1 licenses, under which its FRITZ!OS and various libraries were licensed. The SFC states that it provided a grant to Steck to pursue the matter.

AVM provided source code, but it was incomplete, as “the scripts for compilation and installation were missing,” according to Steck’s complaint. This included makefiles and details on environment variables, like “KERNEL_LAYOUT,” necessary for compilation. Steck notified AVM, AVM did not respond, and Steck sought legal assistance, ultimately including the SFC.

Months later, according to the SFC, AVM provided all the relevant source code and scripts, but the suit continued. AVM ultimately paid Steck’s attorney fee. The case proved, once again, that not only are source code requirements real, but the LGPL also demands freedom, despite its “Lesser” name, and that source code needs to be useful in making real changes to firmware—in German courts, at least.

“The favorable result of this lawsuit exemplifies the power of copyleft—granting users the freedom to modify, repair, and secure the software on their own devices,” the SFC said in a press release. “Companies like AVM receive these immense benefits themselves. This lawsuit reminded AVM that downstream users must receive those very same rights under copyleft.”

As noted by the SFC, the case was brought in July 2023, but as is typical with German law, no updates on the case could be provided until after its conclusion. SFC posted its complaint, documents, and the source code ultimately provided by AVM and encouraged the company to publish its own documents since those are not automatically public in Germany.

German router maker is latest company to inadvertently clarify the LGPL license Read More »

Startup set to brick $800 kids robot is trying to open source it first

Open Source, Robots, Smart Home, Tech / Beth Washington / December 20, 2024

Earlier this month, startup Embodied announced that it is going out of business and taking its Moxie robot with it. The $800 robots, aimed at providing emotional support for kids ages 5 to 10, would soon be bricked, the company said, because they can’t perform their core features without the cloud. Following customer backlash, Embodied is trying to create a way for the robots to live an open sourced second life.

Embodied CEO Paolo Pirjanian shared a document via a LinkedIn blog post today saying that people who used to be part of Embodied’s technical team are developing a “potential” and open source way to keep Moxies running. The document reads:

This initiative involves developing a local server application (‘OpenMoxie’) that you can run on your own computer. Once available, this community-driven option will enable you (or technically inclined individuals) to maintain Moxie’s basic functionality, develop new features, and modify her capabilities to better suit your needs—without reliance on Embodied’s cloud servers.

The notice says that after releasing OpenMoxie, Embodied plans to release “all necessary code and documentation” for developers and users.

Pirjanian said that an over-the-air (OTA) update is now available for download that will allow previously purchased Moxies to support OpenMoxie. The executive noted that Embodied is still “seeking long-term answers” but claimed that the update is a “vital first step” to “keep the door open” for the robot’s continued functionality.

At this time, OpenMoxie isn’t available and doesn’t have a release date. Embodied’s wording also seems careful to leave an opening for OpenMoxie to not actually release; although, the company seems optimistic.

However, there’s also a risk of users failing to update their robots in time and properly. Embodied noted that it won’t be able to support users who have trouble with the update or with OpenMoxie post-release. Updating the robot includes connecting to Wi-Fi and leaving it on for at least an hour.

Startup set to brick $800 kids robot is trying to open source it first Read More »

Company claims 1,000 percent price hike drove it from VMware to open source rival

Biz & IT, Broadcom, Open Source, vmware / Kelly Newman / December 2, 2024

Companies have been discussing migrating off of VMware since Broadcom’s takeover a year ago led to higher costs and other controversial changes. Now we have an inside look at one of the larger customers that recently made the move.

According to a report from The Register today, Beeks Group, a cloud operator headquartered in the United Kingdom, has moved most of its 20,000-plus virtual machines (VMs) off VMware and to OpenNebula, an open source cloud and edge computing platform. Beeks Group sells virtual private servers and bare metal servers to financial service providers. It still has some VMware VMs, but “the majority” of its machines are currently on OpenNebula, The Register reported.

Beeks’ head of production management, Matthew Cretney, said that one of the reasons for Beeks’ migration was a VMware bill for “10 times the sum it previously paid for software licenses,” per The Register.

According to Beeks, OpenNebula has enabled the company to dedicate more of its 3,000 bare metal server fleet to client loads instead of to VM management, as it had to with VMware. With OpenNebula purportedly requiring less management overhead, Beeks is reporting a 200 percent increase in VM efficiency since it now has more VMs on each server.

Beeks also pointed to customers viewing VMware as non-essential and a decline in VMware support services and innovation as drivers for it migrating from VMware.

Broadcom didn’t respond to Ars Technica’s request for comment.

Broadcom loses VMware customers

Broadcom will likely continue seeing some of VMware’s older customers decrease or abandon reliance on VMware offerings. But Broadcom has emphasized the financial success it has seen (PDF) from its VMware acquisition, suggesting that it will continue with its strategy even at the risk of losing some business.

Company claims 1,000 percent price hike drove it from VMware to open source rival Read More »

I, too, installed an open source garage door opener, and I’m loving it

APIs, apple home, Cars, esp32, Features, garage door, Garage Door Opener, GENIE, home assistant, home automation, homekit, ifttt, mqtt, Open Source, opengarage, Smart Home, Tech / 9u50fv / November 15, 2024

Open source closed garage

OpenGarage restored my home automations and gave me a whole bunch of new ideas.

Hark! The top portion of a garage door has entered my view, and I shall alert my owner to it. Credit: Kevin Purdy

Like Ars Senior Technology Editor Lee Hutchinson, I have a garage. The door on that garage is opened and closed by a device made by a company that, as with Lee’s, offers you a way to open and close it with a smartphone app. But that app doesn’t work with my preferred home automation system, Home Assistant, and also looks and works like an app made by a garage door company.

I had looked into the ratgdo Lee installed, and raved about, but hooking it up to my particular Genie/Aladdin system would have required installing limit switches. So I instead installed an OpenGarage unit ($50 plus shipping). My garage opener now works with Home Assistant (and thereby pretty much anything else), it’s not subject to the whims of API access, and I’ve got a few ideas how to make it even better. Allow me to walk you through what I did, why I did it, and what I might do next.

Thanks, I’ll take it from here, Genie

Genie, maker of my Wi-Fi-capable garage door opener (sold as an “Aladdin Connect” system), is not in the same boat as the Chamberlain/myQ setup that inspired Lee’s project. There was a working Aladdin Connect integration in Home Assistant, until the company changed its API in January 2024. Genie said it would release its own official Home Assistant integration in June, and it did, but then it was quickly pulled back, seemingly for licensing issues. Since then, no updates on the matter. (I have emailed Genie for comment and will update this post if I receive reply.)

This is not egregious behavior, at least on the scale of garage door opener firms. And Aladdin’s app works with Google Home and Amazon Alexa, but not with Home Assistant or my secondary/lazy option, HomeKit/Apple Home. It also logs me out “for security” more often than I’d like and tells me this only after an iPhone shortcut refuses to fire. It has some decent features, but without deeper integrations, I can’t do things like have the brighter ceiling lights turn on when the door opens or flash indoor lights if the garage door stays open too long. At least not without Google or Amazon.

I’ve seen OpenGarage passed around the Home Assistant forums and subreddits over the years. It is, as the name implies, fully open source: hardware design, firmware, and app code, API, everything. It is a tiny ESP board that has an ultrasonic distance sensor and circuit relay attached. You can control and monitor it from a web browser, mobile or desktop, from IFTTT, MQTT, and with the latest firmware, you can get email alerts. I decided to pull out the 6-foot ladder and give it a go.

Prototypes of the OpenGarage unit. To me, they look like little USB-powered owls, just with very stubby wings. Credit: OpenGarage

Installing the little watching owl

You generally mount the OpenGarage unit to the roof of your garage, so the distance sensor can detect if your garage door has rolled up in front of it. There are options for mounting with magnetic contact sensors or a side view of a roll-up door, or you can figure out some other way in which two different sensor depth distances would indicate an open or closed door. If you’ve got a Security+ 2.0 door (the kind with the yellow antenna, generally), you’ll need an adapter, too.

The toughest part of an overhead install is finding a spot that gives the unit a view of your garage door, not too close to rails or other obstructing objects, but then close enough for the contact wires and USB micro cable to reach. Ideally, too, it has a view of your car when the door is closed and the car is inside, so it can report its presence. I’ve yet to find the right thing to do with the “car is inside or not” data, but the seed is planted.

OpenGarage’s introduction and explanation video.

My garage setup, like most of them, is pretty simple. There’s a big red glowing button on the wall near the door, and there are two very thin wires running from it to the opener. On the opener, there are four ports that you can open up with a screwdriver press. Most of the wires are headed to the safety sensor at the door bottom, while two come in from the opener button. After stripping a bit of wire to expose more cable, I pressed the contact wires from the OpenGarage into those same opener ports.

Wires running from terminal points in the back of a garage door opener, with one set of wires coming in from the bottom and pressed into the same press-fit holes. — The wire terminal on my Genie garage opener. The green and pink wires lead to the OpenGarage unit. Credit: Kevin Purdy

After that, I connected the wires to the OpenGarage unit’s screw terminals, then did some pencil work on the garage ceiling to figure out how far I could run the contact and micro-USB power cable, getting the proper door view while maintaining some right-angle sense of order up there. When I had reached a decent compromise between cable tension and placement, I screwed the sensor into an overhead stud and used a staple gun to secure the wires. It doesn’t look like a pro installed it, but it’s not half bad.

A garage ceiling, with drywall stud paint running across, a small device with wires running at right angles to the opener, and an opener rail beneath. — Where I ended up installing my OpenGarage unit. Key points: Above the garage door when open, view of the car below, not too close to rails, able to reach power and opener contact. Credit: Kevin Purdy

A very versatile board

If you’ve got everything placed and wired up correctly, opening the OpenGarage access point or IP address should give you an interface that shows you the status of your garage, your car (optional), and its Wi-Fi and external connections.

Image of OpenGarage web interface, showing a — The landing screen for the OpenGarage. You can only open the door or change settings if you know the device key (which you should change immediately). Credit: Kevin Purdy

It’s a handy webpage and a basic opener (provided you know the secret device key you set), but OpenGarage is more powerful in how it uses that data. OpenGarage’s device can keep a cloud connection open to Blynk or the maker’s own OpenThings.io cloud server. You can hook it up to MQTT or an IFTTT channel. It can send you alerts when your garage has been open a certain amount of time or if it’s open after a certain time of day.

Screenshot showing 5 sensors: garage, distance, restart, vehicle, and signal strength. — You’re telling me you can just… see the state of these things, at all times, on your own network? Credit: Kevin Purdy

You really don’t need a corporate garage coder

For me, the greatest benefit is in hooking OpenGarage up to Home Assistant. I’ve added an opener button to my standard dashboard (one that requires a long-press or two actions to open). I’ve restored the automation that turns on the overhead bulbs for five minutes when the garage door opens. And I can dig in if I want, like alerting me that it’s Monday night at 10 pm and I’ve yet to open the garage door, indicating I forgot to put the trash out. Or maybe some kind of NFC tag to allow for easy opening while on a bike, if that’s not a security nightmare (it might be).

Not for nothing, but OpenGarage is also a deeply likable bit of indie kit. It’s a two-person operation, with Ray Wang building on his work with the open and handy OpenSprinkler project, trading Arduino for ESP8266, and doing some 3D printing to fit the sensors and switches, and Samer Albahra providing mobile app, documentation, and other help. Their enthusiasm for DIY home control has likely brought out the same in others and certainly in me.

Kevin is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering open-source software, PC gaming, home automation, repairability, e-bikes, and tech history. He has previously worked at Lifehacker, Wirecutter, iFixit, and Carbon Switch.

I, too, installed an open source garage door opener, and I’m loving it Read More »

“MNT Reform Next” combines open source hardware and usable performance

FOSS, mnt reform, Open Source, Tech / Kelly Newman / September 10, 2024

mnt reformed —

New design has sleeker profile, uses more RAM and better CPU than the original.

Andrew Cunningham – Sep 10, 2024 6: 08 pm UTC

More streamlined (but still user-replaceable) battery packs are responsible for some of the Reform Next's space savings. — Enlarge / More streamlined (but still user-replaceable) battery packs are responsible for some of the Reform Next’s space savings.

MNT Research

The current booting prototype of the MNT Reform Next.

MNT Research
The casing prototype is still being prototyped with 3D prints, but the final version will be anodized aluminum.

MNT Research
One of three “port boards” that handle internal and external connectivity.

MNT Research
More streamlined (but still user-replaceable) battery packs are responsible for some of the Reform Next’s space savings.

MNT Research

The original MNT Reform laptop was an interesting experiment, an earnest stab at the idea of a laptop that used entirely open source, moddable hardware as well as open source software. But as a modern Internet-connected laptop, its chunky design and (especially) its super-slow processor let it down.

MNT Research has been upgrading the Reform laptop and its smaller counterpart, the Pocket Reform, continuously since we took a look at it two-and-a-half years ago. The most significant upgrade is probably the Rockchip RK3588 processor upgrade, which offers four ARM Cortex-A76 CPU cores (the same ones used in the Raspberry Pi 5’s Broadcom SoC) and four ARM Cortex-A55 cores, plus either 16GB or 32GB of RAM. While still not a high-end speed demon, these specs are enough to make it a competent workhorse laptop for browsing and productivity apps.

Now, MNT is revisiting the Reform with a more significant design update. The MNT Reform Next is smaller and thinner, defaults to a more traditional glass trackpad instead of a trackball, and is starting with the Rockchip RK3588 instead of the poky NXP/Freescale processor that the original laptop was saddled with.

MNT says that the new Reform’s thinner profile is enabled by splitting the motherboard into multiple, smaller boards that are easier to replace and by designing “completely custom battery packs that tightly integrated electronics into the mechanical structure.” MNT details a motherboard with a CPU module connected to it and three different “port boards” to add internal and external connectivity.

The batteries themselves are still user-replaceable LiFePO4 batteries, though there are switches on the motherboard for people who want to use Li-ion batteries instead. “This optional user choice trades longer runtime for less safety and environmental friendliness,” according to MNT’s blog post.

The new Reform adds additional ports, including HDMI and USB-C, and it retains the mechanical keyboard that we liked from the original. It charges over USB-C. It also features four PCIe lanes internally for connecting M.2 storage.

Per usual, MNT is announcing this product many months or years before it will be available. The company says the Reform Next is in the “prototype stage,” and to get the first batches, you’ll need to support the project via the Crowd Supply crowdfunding site first. Pricing and more detailed availability information haven’t been announced, but if the idea of an entirely open laptop still appeals to you, the company says it will have more to share “later this week.”

“MNT Reform Next” combines open source hardware and usable performance Read More »