New Hardware: A DIY ESP32 Phone, Linux Comes to Snapdragon X2, and a $1 Computer

This week's hardware lands at three very different points on the computing spectrum. CircuitMess has revived its build-it-yourself phone with MAKERphone 2.0, pairing an ESP32-S3 with 4G connectivity and a modular expansion system. Qualcomm is making a far more serious commitment to desktop Linux with official Snapdragon X2 support. And BeagleBoard is heading in the opposite direction with the BeagleConnect Zepto, a tiny board designed to cost around $1.

None of these devices compete with one another, but each takes a different run at the same problem: making hardware more accessible to developers.

Most smartphones aren't very interesting from a hardware hacking perspective. They're powerful, but they're also tightly integrated devices that leave little room to modify the hardware itself.

CircuitMess takes almost the exact opposite approach. MAKERphone 2.0 is a build-it-yourself mobile phone based on Espressif's ESP32-S3, and rather than arriving as a sealed slab of glass and aluminum, it's meant to be assembled by its owner. The kit includes the circuit boards, display, keypad, joystick, battery, speaker, enclosure, and the other components needed to build the phone. CircuitMess estimates assembly at roughly two hours, and no soldering is required.

Once it's together, this is no demonstration model. It's a working cellular device.

At the center of MAKERphone 2.0 is a dual-core ESP32-S3 with 4MB of flash and 4MB of PSRAM. The phone includes a 1.77-inch color display, physical keypad, joystick, speaker, microphone, USB-C, and a removable 1,000mAh battery. Cellular connectivity comes from a separate 4G module, which lets the phone make calls and send SMS messages.

That alone would make it an interesting ESP32 project, but CircuitMess has also built an expansion ecosystem around it. A connector called UMAX lets additional hardware modules attach to the phone. Available modules include a camera, infrared transmitter, environmental sensor, and prototyping board, while a larger Pro Pack adds GPS, LoRa, a gyroscope, and an e-paper display.

The result is something closer to a modular ESP32 development platform that also happens to be a phone.

Software is the other major difference between MAKERphone and a normal smartphone. Users can modify the firmware and write their own applications, and the exposed hardware makes it possible to build accessories and experiments around the device. The ESP32-S3 also brings an enormous existing ecosystem of libraries, tools, sensors, and projects.

You probably won't replace your iPhone or Android device with one, and that isn't the point. MAKERphone 2.0 is what you'd get if an ESP32 development board, a feature phone, and an electronics kit were combined into a single device. At a time when most consumer electronics are getting harder to modify, there's something refreshing about a phone designed specifically to be taken apart.

At the opposite end of the performance spectrum, Qualcomm is making an important move for desktop Linux. The company has announced an Early Developer Preview of Linux for Snapdragon X2 Series processors, starting the work of bringing much more complete official Linux support to its latest PC hardware.

That matters because Snapdragon X processors have already shown that Arm can compete in modern Windows laptops. Linux has been a different story. Developers have made progress getting Linux running on previous Snapdragon X hardware, but graphics acceleration, power management, audio, cameras, and other platform features have required considerable community effort.

With Snapdragon X2, Qualcomm appears to be approaching Linux differently.

Qualcomm's current developer environment uses Debian 13 with a custom Linux kernel, but the bigger story is what the company plans to upstream. It is working on support across several major parts of the platform, including the Adreno GPU and Hexagon NPU.

That distinction matters. Booting Linux on new hardware is one thing. Getting graphics acceleration, AI hardware, power management, and the rest of the platform working well enough for everyday use is considerably harder.

Qualcomm says it is targeting broader Debian support by the end of 2026, and it is working with Canonical toward certified Ubuntu support in the first half of 2027. Hardware manufacturers are getting involved too: HP, ASUS, and HUMAIN are among the companies Qualcomm says are planning Linux support for Snapdragon X2 systems during 2027.

If that roadmap holds, Snapdragon X2 could become one of the most interesting Arm platforms Linux users have had access to.

Linux already runs extremely well on Arm. The architecture dominates everything from Raspberry Pis to cloud servers. Desktop PCs have been more complicated, and much of the problem isn't the Arm instruction set. It's hardware support. A desktop operating system needs reliable GPU drivers, suspend and resume, networking, audio, USB, external displays, power management, and dozens of other pieces working together.

Apple demonstrated how capable high-performance Arm processors can be in personal computers, but Apple Silicon isn't an open, general-purpose PC platform. Snapdragon X2 could offer another route.

Qualcomm's latest PC processors combine high-performance Arm CPU cores with integrated Adreno graphics and powerful Hexagon NPUs intended for local AI workloads. Official Linux enablement means developers could eventually get access to all three. The NPU could prove especially important: if that support matures under Linux, Snapdragon systems could become interesting low-power machines for running local AI models and other accelerated workloads without leaning entirely on a discrete GPU.

We're not there yet. This is still an early developer preview, and Qualcomm's own roadmap stretches well into 2027. But official support changes the situation considerably. Instead of Linux developers reverse-engineering their way toward a usable Snapdragon laptop, Qualcomm itself is helping build the foundation.

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While Qualcomm works on high-performance Arm PCs, BeagleBoard is asking a very different question: how cheap can useful development hardware become?

The answer might be about one dollar.

The BeagleConnect Zepto is a tiny development board built around Texas Instruments' MSPM0L1117 microcontroller. Calling it a “$1 computer” makes it sound considerably more powerful than it is. This is not a Raspberry Pi competitor. The MSPM0L1117 contains a 32MHz Arm Cortex-M0+ processor with just 128KB of flash and 16KB of SRAM, which won't run Linux, host an AI model, or replace a conventional SBC.

Performance isn't what makes Zepto interesting, though. The price and the expansion system are.

With many development boards, the board itself ends up being one of the most expensive components in the project. A $20, $40, or $80 board is great for prototyping, but eventually you either have to recover it or design a cheaper custom board around the same hardware.

At around $1, Zepto changes that equation. It's inexpensive enough that the development board can simply become part of the finished project.

BeagleBoard has also designed Zepto around the mikroBUS ecosystem. In place of conventional soldered headers, the board uses friction-fit connections compatible with mikroBUS Click expansion boards. That opens up a huge catalog of existing modules covering sensors, displays, motor control, communications, positioning, and countless other functions.

The more unusual feature is what happens when Zepto is connected to Linux.

BeagleConnect Zepto uses Greybus, a protocol originally developed as part of Google's Project Ara modular smartphone effort. Greybus allows hardware connected through another device to appear to a Linux system as though it were locally attached.

For Zepto, that means peripherals connected through mikroBUS can potentially be exposed to a Linux host without developers building an entirely new software stack for every combination of hardware. BeagleBoard says Linux already contains support for more than 200 mikroBUS-compatible Click boards through this approach.

Zepto is also intended to work with familiar embedded software environments, including Zephyr, Arduino Core, and MicroPython.

That combination is what makes the board more interesting than its specifications suggest. A 32MHz Cortex-M0+ with 16KB of RAM isn't particularly exciting in 2026. A roughly $1 board that can tap into hundreds of existing hardware modules and integrate them with Linux is a different story.

MAKERphone 2.0, Snapdragon X2 Linux support, and BeagleConnect Zepto could hardly be further apart in raw performance. One is an ESP32-based phone you're expected to assemble yourself. Another is Qualcomm's attempt to turn its latest high-performance Arm processors into serious Linux PC platforms. The third has a 32MHz microcontroller and costs about as much as a candy bar.

All three make hardware more accessible, each in its own way. MAKERphone gives users control over a device category that has largely become impossible to modify. Qualcomm is opening another high-performance processor platform to Linux developers. And BeagleBoard is pushing the cost of development hardware low enough that the board itself becomes almost disposable.

For makers and developers, the most interesting hardware isn't always the device with the fastest processor. Sometimes it's the hardware that gives you more freedom to decide what to do with it.