My OpenHardware post about an entropy source got loads of high quality comments, huge thanks to all who chimed in. There look to be a few existing projects producing OpenHardware, and the various comments have links to the better ones. I’ll put this idea back on the shelf for another holiday-hacking session. I’ve still not given up on the SD card interface, although it looks like emulating a storage device might be the easiest and quickest route for any future project.

So, on to the next idea. An OpenHardware USB ambient light sensor. A lot of hardware doesn’t have a way of testing the ambient light level. Webcams don’t count, they use up waaaay too much power and the auto-white balence is normally hardcoded in hardware. So I was thinking of producing a very low cost mini-dongle to measure the ambient light level so that lower-spec laptops could be saving tons of power. With smartphones people are now acutely aware than up to 60% of their battery power is just making the screen light up and I’m sure we could be smarter about what we do in GNOME. The problem traditionally, has been the lack of hardware with this support.

Anyone interested?