Are you currently designing a project for a common single-board computer (SBC), and do you expect other people to build your project, too? We routinely feature projects that do exactly this. Well, turns out SBC availability is a problem now – and I’d like to teach you how to pick SBC alternatives, mostly to the Raspberry Pi boards.
We had SBC shortages before, but 2026 has beat them all, and it doesn’t look like it’ll stop within even a few months. RAM prices have incinerated the supply side of single-board computer availability, and I suspect that consumer SBC use in Russian drones had a noticeable impact, too.
Less-utilized SBCs always brought their own advantages to the table. If you didn’t like that the Pi Zero came with only 512MB of RAM, you could always buy an Orange Pi or a Radxa board with 2GB or 4GB for a meager increase in price. Now, there’s even more of a motivation to explore what’s on offer!
This year, SBC prices and availability have both jumped up tremendously, and even the Zero 2W stocks have evaporated. Me, I had to make a few of my projects way more flexible way quicker. Now, I have some experience to share!
Around these parts, finger joints (or box joints) are usually the product of laser cutting. [bluesyann] shows us a method of using a stationary jigsaw, a custom blade, and 3D-printed jig to create a DIY box joint cutter whose results look impressive. What’s appealing is not just the end result, but the fact that the whole system is made from little more than an inexpensive tool, scrap wood, and common hardware.
A DIY wide blade cuts each notch in a single go.
In [bluesyann]’s system, the jigsaw is fixed in place to make a stationary cutter. The saw itself is nothing special; it’s the wide blade that makes the difference. It cuts a notch in a single go, and it’s made by epoxying together multiple blades to make a single extra-wide one. Jigsaw blades are not expensive, and they’re easy to snap into pieces. By using a total of three blades (snapping two of them into pieces) one can create the wide version shown here.
With a stationary jigsaw sporting an extra-wide blade that cuts the same notch every time, all that remains is a way to get the spacing right. The solution there is a 3D-printed jig that each freshly-cut notch fits onto as the next one is cut.
There are a few other details, but those are the important bits. One does have to do a bit of trial and error to get things dialed in, but once they are, it’s off to the races.
Flash is obsolete and the IBM 5150 is obsolete. Therefore, by the transitive property of algebra, you should be able to run flash games on IBM’s original PC, right? Okay, obviously not — there’s obsolete, and then there’s obsolete — but that didn’t stop [TheRasteri] from trying to bring his favorite scatological humor game to glorious CGA in a slightly not-safe-for-work video.
CGA is really not meant to display the fine details of a 2000s flash game, but [TheRasteri] has some experience with the Amstrad CPC and its demoscene, where they’ve learned to hack the heck out of the same MC6845 CRT controller chip that lives on a CGA card. With a few lines of carefully-crafted assembler, he’s able to swap character height on the fly to create the equivalent of a 160 x 86 pixel window in CGA text mode. That’s probably the most impressive part of this build, but the adventure of vintage-DOS C development on display here is worth watching. He’s using Open Watcom V2 and coding the entire thing as a huge state machine, and tests it on a wide range of DOS machines to catch all the bugs.
While Adobe Flash once enabled a golden age of browser games, we could be on the verge of another thanks to WebAssembly. If you want to hear about programming in C on DOS, we’ve seen a good case made for it.
Back in the day, if one wanted a particular guitar effect one would purchase an effects pedal or “stomp box”, and even a modest collection of them could be an eye-watering investment. A guitar amp chosen for a specific sound could be another huge purchase (and who stops at one?) But if you’ve got a Raspberry Pi kicking around and a bit of free time, PiPedal provides configurable effects, guitar amp emulation, and more.
The audio engine runs on a Raspberry Pi, with configuration and control accessed by mobile device or web browser.
Things have come a long way in terms of audio processing, and PiPedal is no straightforward application of simple digital filters. We indirectly learned about it from a fellow who used it to experiment with a range of equipment he could in no reality actually afford. He shared his experience in a blog post that left him thinking he might as well sell all his pedals and build the stomp box of his dreams around PiPedal.
PiPedal’s impressive audio engine runs on a Raspberry Pi (or comparable single-board Linux computer) with control and configuration accessed from a mobile device or web browser. It’s expressly designed to seamlessly work whether one is at home, on stage, or in a studio.
The GitHub repository has code and documentation, so check it out. And if you use it as the basis of a project of your own, don’t keep it to yourself! Drop us a note on the tips line because we absolutely want to know all about it.
Many of us will have followed the early history of electronic computing, from the urgent necessities of war, to universities, and then on into the wider world. Most of the firsts in that field are now well known, but there’s one that’s a little obscure. LEO was a commercial development of Cambridge University’s EDSAC that was produced at the behest of J. Lyons and Comapny, one of the UK’s largest mid-20th-century food producers. As such it was the first purpose-built electronic business computer, and since its 75th anniversary is upon us, the Centre for Computing History is holding an event to mark the occasion.
There’s a whole cultural essay to be written about the role of Lyons in twentieth-century Britain, but for Hackaday purposes it should suffice to say that there was little in the way of food production that they didn’t touch. The shops were full of Lyons cakes, biscuits, and tea, and a feature of many towns would have been a Lyons Tea Shop, a budget restaurant. The logistics of such a complex business made a computer of great interest to the company, and after some of its executives learned about ENIAC on a trip to the USA they sought out a machine closer to home. They found the EDSAC, a research computer, and commercialised it as Lyons Electronic Office, or LEO. This spawned a series of machines that lasted into the 1970s, the last one being used by the British Post Office.
Laser harps aren’t quite a right of passage, in that not everyone builds them, but it’s likely everyone at least contemplates building one at one time or another. We’re lucky that [Derrick] a.k.a. [DJ Baja Blast] didn’t stop at contemplating, and even luckier that he put together a full write-up for his tricked out laser harp — because this is a fascinating build, with features we’ve never seen in one place before.
First of all, the harp! Lasers, photodiodes, done, right? Not here! [DJ Baja Blast] kept it analog with photoresistors so that he could measure the rise and fall of the voltage as the laser light is occluded by the player’s hands — thus you can moderate the volume via faster, louder and quieter, slower plucks. More unique is the inclusion of an accelerometer. What can you do with an accelerometer in a harp? Well, here it’s being used as a tilt sensor, with the tilt acting as a control to ‘bend’ the note as it sounds, tuning it flat or sharp or altering it any other way you choose to define in software. There’s also an ultrasonic distance sensor so you can do the same thing — or any other thing, there’s no shortage of effects to chose from — theremin-style, and an encoder wheel sits on the side, so that’s five extra inputs beyond selecting a note by blocking a laser diode. Unless you count the optional looper pedal input, or the aux in.
It probably has a teensy learning curve, but looks like a baja blast to play.
All these inputs are driving a Teensy 4.1 microcontroller, which has the grunt for just about any synthesis or sampling, though right now [DJ Baja Blast] is sticking with the Karplus-Strong string synthesis algorithm. The Teensy can drive an onboard speaker but also offers MIDI out. Eventually he does intend to add more. Last but not least, we cannot forget that he’s plumbed this instrument to hook to a fog machine. Which makes for a visually engaging performance, and probably helps a lot when you’re learning where the laser ‘strings’ are.
The whole thing is handsomely put together with cherry and walnut. Does it sound as good as it looks? Listen to it in action in the demo video below, and judge for yourself! If you want to build your own you can grab the files on GitHub.
This is hardly the first laser harp we’ve seen, or even the first to use a Teensy, but it’s certainly got the most options to spice up a performance. It’s got to be a baja blast to play.
Dirt cheap toy cameras have long been a target for the curious camera hacker, and we’ve seen plenty of lens swaps and other hardware hacks. Until now their internals have remained something of a black box though, so it’s very interesting indeed to see [Spode] breaching the firmware on one and making it run DOOM. Yes, it runs the game, but the value is in opening up this platform.
The Achiles’ heel on this particular camera is its easily updatable firmware, allowing new firmware to be placed upon it with ease. The SoC is an HX3302B which [SpriteTM] has done some work on, so he’s not going in entirely blind. A neat hack to dump the camera’s memory into EXIF data on photos completed the puzzle. He was able to benchmark the thing and find it to be surprisingly powerful, certainly enough for a game from 1993. Doomgeneric looked promising, but first there was the matter of the device’s RAM.
In another clever move he was able to keep only the most-used piece of the doom code in memory and the rest in flash, allowing the game to run. A custom synthesizer completed the experience, and on the write-up there’s a chance to travel back to the early ’90s and hear that music again. All that was left were the controls, and with a few quirks, this thing becomes a playable DOOM console. It’s probably better at that than it is at being a camera.
