Author: Bryan Cockfield

1855 Articles

Miniaturizing The Atari 2600 Console

August 20, 2026 by 9 Comments

For as popular as Atari was in their heyday, it wasn’t until well after they were on their famous decline that they released their first handheld, the Atari Lynx. In retrospect, competing with the Game Boy was not going to be a recipe for success even without considering their other problems as a company, and as a result was their penultimate console before exiting the market completely. But [Nick]’s most recent project asks what the world would have been like with an Atari handheld from their golden era, and has been working on this miniaturized version of the 2600.

Unlike any modern emulators which can easily handle Atari 2600 games in almost any form factor today, this console is doing it all with as much original hardware as possible. It uses much smaller switches and buttons compared to the original, and omits some other unnecessary hardware for today’s world like the RF modulator. [Nick] has also designed a custom PCB that reduces the overall footprint considerably as well, and has relocated the cartridge port in preparation for its eventual handheld shape. The result is a console using original hardware that’s less than half the footprint of the original.

Although there were around 30 million Atari 2600 consoles sold and the system is unlikely to be a real collector’s item anytime soon, [Nick] makes sure to note that no real 2600 hardware was harmed in this build. And, as far as its handheld nature, this is a stepping stone on the path to that eventual goal. We’ll look forward to an eventual system that integrates a screen and controller as well as a port for the original cartridges. In the meantime, here’s another handheld 2600 that fits completely inside one of those cartridges.

Continue reading “Miniaturizing The Atari 2600 Console” →

A Keyboard With No Keys

August 10, 2026 by 12 Comments

For as capable as smartphone hardware is, the software running on them can be especially restrictive and cumbersome. Unlike a single-board computer with GPIO running a standard Linux operating system and some intuitive programming language like Python, smartphones are generally walled gardens where programming major overhead, and if a custom program can be run on them at all the user still has to figure out how to interface hardware with a USB-C port. To skip past all of this, [nicolas.ma] built an audio modem that can send keyboard input to a computer with nothing more than a browser.

The “keyboard” starts off in a browser running on a standard smartphone. A user can input text into the browser, which then gets converted into a series of audible audio pulses that can be sent to the keyboard. The keyboard itself listens to those pulses, decodes them, and then sends the text through to the computer as a standard USB device thanks to an Arduino Micro at the center. Arduino Micros are excellent choices for keyboard controllers because they have a built-in USB chip.

The protocol used here is designed and built by [nicolas.ma] as well. The words allow for variable length, with the device determining message length, and a word-ending scheme that automatically sends the message to memory when it’s detected that the message is finished. There’s also integrity checking and the ability to check on the link’s state. From hardware to software it’s an impressive build, and for anyone wondering what this might be used for [nicolas.ma] has already built a password manager from it.  Continue reading “A Keyboard With No Keys” →

3D Printing A Usable Airless Tire

August 5, 2026 by 20 Comments

For decades now, companies like Michelin have been teasing us with futuristic-looking automobile tires that don’t use air. Instead, they use a polymer mesh of sorts which maintains the same pressure on the travel surface that a pneumatic tire does, with much less maintenance than their pneumatic counterparts. At least, in theory. There’s a reason that these tires live in the same mythical realm that Half Life 3 and the modern affordable Volkswagen do, and [Berm Peak] decided to discover those reasons for himself.

Of course, [Berm Peak] isn’t building these for his daily driver, an electric pickup truck featured in previous videos of his. He’s putting these on his mountain bike instead, a challenging environment for a tire like this in its own right. When mountain biking at the level he does, punctures and flats can become a real nuisance on the trail, so he set about experimenting with these designs with the 3D printer to see if he could make something rivaling pneumatic technology. After a few design iterations he settled on a TPU-based version with a compliant S-shaped spacing between the tread and wheel. The tire printed in sections that are installed by joining them together on the bike rim with a separate 3D printed rim interface.

At the end of this process [Berm Peak] ends up with a surprisingly capable tire that mostly holds up to his extreme off-road testing, an impressive feat for something 3D printed in his shop. Presumably a company specializing in bicycle tires could build something even more capable, but it turns out that a different technology has already solved all of the problems that airless tires solve. Mountain bikers today almost exclusively ride on tires with sealant, so punctures and flats are essentially a solved problem. But the neon-green airless tires were still a fun project for [Berm Peak] and quite the head-turner out on the bike trails.

Continue reading “3D Printing A Usable Airless Tire” →

Bike Trainers As Video Game Controllers

August 1, 2026 by 10 Comments

While we’ve largely settled on analog sticks and digital buttons for controlling video games, there’s all sorts of projects to create truly esoteric controllers that allow playing games in unique ways. This one from [sukolupo] lets you use data from standard bike trainers to get your virtual character moving.

Called Deck de France, it maps the data coming from one of the supported bike trainers to a virtual controller which can then be “plugged in” to a Linux system, in this case a Steam Deck mounted to the trainer’s handlebars. Although a bike trainer doesn’t have the same number of inputs as a modern gaming controller, it does have enough to play games like Rocket League. As you might expect, it’s also perfect for biking titles such as the Tour de France series.

As far as unique controllers for video games go, this one is surely up in the rankings with a real trombone or a controller purpose-built for riding virtual horses. It’s also a great way for those who are getting a bit bored of riding their trainers to breathe some new life into their exercise routine. We’ve also seen some open-source alternatives for modern bike trainer software as well, which is another great way to get excited about exercise equipment too.

A Complex Way To Push A Button

July 31, 2026 by 17 Comments

We’ve likely all looked at a simple problem in our lives and thought that it would be an easy fix, only to realize that the project is enormously more complicated than we first realized. Whether that’s starting a home improvement project, doing a quick repair to a bicycle or car, or trying to install an obscure piece of software on a Linux machine, the amount of time we budget for these tasks often ends up woefully underestimated. [Oscar]’s night light needs to have its brightness set every night, and it seems easy enough to get a microcontroller to automate that, right?

Well, upon opening the small device, the first issue is that there is no labeling on any of the parts, so simply adding a jumper on to existing microcontroller pins without damaging anything wouldn’t easily be possible. Adding a secondary microcontroller is the next logical step, but the power supply in the night light is extremely underpowered so using even the smallest Raspberry Pi or off-the-shelf Arduino was out of the question too. [Oscar] instead chose an ATtiny85, which solves the power requirement issue, but these are a bit more of a challenge to program without a USB device. From there, it needs a transistor wired in to the circuit to actually push the button for him, plus a few support resistors, so [Oscar] actually had a PCB custom-built to hold all of these components.

Even after all of that, the space within the night light enclosure made installing the PCB a challenge, but in the end he has a device which, when his home automation system powers on the plug for the nightlight, automatically boots up and pushes the switch the required number of times and then puts itself to sleep. We’d call that a success even after the colossal effort getting this inexpensive, small light working the way he wanted. There are some other low-powered solutions for problems like these too, as long as being battery-powered isn’t a dealbreaker.

Custom Beach Robot Handles The Hard Work

July 30, 2026 by 12 Comments

A day at the beach can involve hauling a surprising amount of gear, from coolers, towels, blankets, chairs, and umbrellas, and if children are involved the amount of beach stuff needed seems to go nonlinear very quickly. Some turn to beach carts with large, low-pressure pneumatic tires, but even that seemed like too much work for [John] who built this remote controlled cart for his summertime needs.

The cart is based around an old cargo rack from an e-bike. To mount all of the robotic components, a sheet of plywood was cut and attached to the underside. Two motors are used to drive the rear wheels independently, allowing for differential steering rather than adding the complexity of a steering system. Some safety features are built in to this design as well, including lights for night driving, a start button controlling a relay for the motors and electronics, and a time-of-flight sensor to stop the robot if it encounters an obstacle.

The ESP32 at the center of the build ties all of the electronics together, and a smartphone app lets the user remotely pilot the rover. It’s not autonomous (yet) but a fair alternative to dragging all of one’s beach gear through the sand without any assistance. You could also minimize your excursions through the sand by timing your visits at high tide, but [John] is out on the Great Lakes so this may be of marginal utility here.

Continue reading “Custom Beach Robot Handles The Hard Work” →

Wrangling Datacenter GPUs Into A Desktop

July 30, 2026 by 20 Comments

As we’ve seen many times before, there’s usually some way wrangle a bit more life out of what would otherwise be considered old and obsolete technology. Perhaps one thing that has been passed over by the masses a bit to early is older datacenter GPUs, which is understandable in one sense because of the rate NVIDIA is pumping out new ones, but these cards have plenty of useful life left in them for the average person, as [Andrew] demonstrates.

The cards [Andrew] is using are Tesla V100s of 2017 vintage. Despite being older hardware they have high-speed memory which allows them to run modern LLMs locally, competitively with online models. In this test, Gemma 4 26B and Qwen3 35B are run, with Gemma being a bit faster because it fits entirely in GPU memory and Qwen3 being a bit more capable but more hungry for resources. [Andrew] built a PCI card that can host two V100s, allowing these larger models to fit completely in memory.

Even though these don’t perform at the same level as the latest top-tier online models, they’re surprisingly capable and also have the benefit of running completely locally. This might be concerning for those looking at the global economy being propped up by companies that essentially have no moat for motivated users, especially as more and more datacenter hardware becomes available on the secondhand market. While this build by [Andrew] goes into detail on getting the software stack up and running, we recently featured another build using the same GPUs that focuses a bit more on hardware for those looking to get started with local hosting.