Day: June 7, 2025

Scratch-built Electric Boat Shows Off Surprising Speed

June 7, 2025 by 10 Comments

Electric cars are everywhere these days, but what about boats? Looking to go green on the water, [NASAT] put together this impressively nimble boat propelled by a pair of brushless motors.

The boat itself has a completely custom-built hull, using plywood as a mold for the ultimate fiberglass body. It’s a catamaran-like shape that seems to allow it to get on plane fairly easily, increasing its ultimate speed compared to a displacement hull. It gets up to that speed with two electric motors totaling 4 kW, mated to a belt-driven drivetrain spinning a fairly standard prop. Power is provided by a large battery, and the solar panel at the top can provide not only shade for the operator, but 300 W to charge the battery when the motors are not being used.

With the finishing touches put on, the small single-seat boat effortlessly powers around the water with many of the same benefits of an electric car: low noise, low pollution, a quiet ride, and a surprisingly quick feel. Electrification has come for other boats as well, like this sailing catamaran converted to electric-only. Even some commercial boats have begun to take the plunge.

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Building A Cyberpunk Modular Keyboard

June 7, 2025 by 9 Comments

Perhaps you have a tilt towards glowing cyberpunk peripherals. Perhaps you’ve been hunting for a keyboard that you can position perfectly to suit both your left and right hands. In that case, you might just like this nifty design from [Modern Hobbyist].

The first thing you’ll note is the split design, which allows each half of the keyboard to be placed optimally for each arm’s comfort. They’re linked with a cable, which allows the STM32 microcontroller to read the keys on both sides and then spit out the right stuff upstream over its USB-C connection. The microcontroller is also in charge of running the per-key LED lighting and the LCD screens on each half.

The board owes its sleek and slim design at least in part to using Kailh Choc low-profile switches. They plug in to hotswap compatible sockets so the switches can easily be changed if desired. Keycaps are blank off-the-shelf parts because this is a keyboard for those who aren’t afraid to spend the time establishing the right muscle memory. It might take some adaptation if you’re not used to the staggered columnar layout. However, the LCD screens can display a keymap if you need a little help now and then.

We’ve seen a lot of great split keyboards over the years, including one amusing design made by hacking an existing keyboard in half with a saw.

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The one-tube radio setup, in front of a PC monitor

Single Tube SDR Is A Delightful Mix Of Old And New

June 7, 2025 by 14 Comments

Software Defined Radio (SDR) is the big thing these days, and why not? A single computer can get rid of a room full of boat anchors, and give you better signal discrimination than all but the best kit. Any SDR project needs an RF receiver, and in this project [mircemk] used a single 6J1 vaccum tube to produce an SSB SDR that combines the best of old and new. 

Single-tube radios are a classic hack, and where a lot of hams got started back in the day, but there is a reason more complicated circuits tend to be used. On the other hand, if you can throw a PC worth of signal processing at the output, it looks like you can get a very sensitive and selective single-sideband (SSB) receiver. 

The 6J1 tube is convenient, since it can run on only 6 V (or down to 3.7 as [mircemk] demonstrates). Here it is used as a mixer, with the oscillator signal injected via the screen grid. Aside from that, the simple circuit consists of a receiving coil, a few resistors and a variable capacitor. How well does it work? Quite well, when paired with a PC; you can judge for yourself in the video embedded below.

We’ve featured a lot of [mircemk]’s projects over the years, like this handsome OLED VU meter, or this frequency analyzer with a VFD  and even a virtual pinball cabinet made from scraps, among many others.

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Let’s Buy Commodore! Well, Somebody Is.

June 7, 2025 by 61 Comments

When a man wearing an Atari T-shirt tells you he’s buying Commodore it sounds like the plot for an improbable 1980s movie in which Nolan Bushnell and Jack Tramiel do battle before a neon synthwave sunset to a pulsating chiptune soundtrack. But here on the screen there’s that guy doing just that, It’s [Retro Recipes], and in the video below he’s assembling a licensing deal for the Commodore brand portfolio from the distant descendant of the Commodore of old.

It’s a fascinating story and we commend him for tracing a path through the mess that unfolded for Commodore in the 1990s. We tried the same research path with a friend a few years ago and ended up with an anonymous Dutch paper company that wouldn’t answer our calls, so we’re impressed. In conjunction with several other players in the Commodore retrocomputing world he’s trying to assemble a favourable percentage deal for manufacturers of new parts, computers, and other goodies, and we’re pleased to see that it’s for the smaller player as much as for the industry giant.

When looking at a story like this though, it’s important not to let your view become clouded by those rose tinted glasses. While it’s great that we’re likely to see a bunch of new Commodore-branded Commodore 64s and parts, there are many pitfalls in taking it beyond that. We’ve seen the Commodore logo on too many regrettable licensed products in the past, and we fear it might be too tempting for it to end up on yet another disappointing all-in-one video game or just another budget PC. If something new comes out under the Commodore brand we’d like it to be really special, exploiting new ground in the way the Amiga did back in the day. We can hope, because the alternative has dragged other famous brands through the mud in recent years.

If you want an insight into the roots of the original Commodore’s demise, have a read of our Hackaday colleague [Bil Herd]’s autobiography.

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ChatGPT Patched A BIOS Binary, And It Worked

June 7, 2025 by 107 Comments

[devicemodder] wrote in to let us know they managed to install Linux Mint on their FRP-locked Panasonic Toughpad FZ-A2.

Android devices such as the FZ-A2 can be locked with Factory Reset Protection (FRP). The FRP limits what you can do with a device, tying it to a user account. On the surface that’s a good thing for consumers as it disincentivizes stealing. Unfortunately, when combined with SecureBoot, it also means you can’t just install whatever software you want on your hardware. [devicemodder] managed to get Linux Mint running on their FZ-A2, which is a notable achievement by itself, but even more remarkable is how it was done.

So how did [devicemodder] get around this limitation? The first step was to dump the BIOS using a CH341A-based programmer. From there, the image was uploaded to ChatGPT along with a request to disable SecureBoot. The resulting file was flashed back onto the FZ-A2, and all available fingers were crossed.

And… it worked! ChatGPT modified the BIOS enough that the Linux Mint installer could be booted from a flash drive. There are a bunch of bugs and issues to work through but in principle we have just seen AI capable enough to successfully patch a binary dump of BIOS code, which, for the record, is kind of hard to do. We’re not sure what all of this might portend.

So is uploading binaries to ChatGPT with requests for mods vibe coding? Or should we invent a new term for this type of hack?

Microsoft Looking To Enforce USB-C Features Through WHCP

June 7, 2025 by 36 Comments

As much as people love USB-C, there’s one massive flaw that becomes very obvious the moment you look at the ports on any computer. This being that there’s no (standardized) way to tell what any of those ports do. Some may do display out (Alt-Mode), some may allow for charging, but it remains mostly a matter of praying to the hardware gods. According to a recent blog post, this is where Microsoft will seek to enforce a USB-C feature set on all (mobile) computers compliant with its Windows Hardware Compatibility Program (WHCP).

This also comes after years of the USB Implementers Forum, re-branding the USB specifications, with the most recent iteration thankfully using the bandwidth (in Gbps) as specifier (meaning no ‘USB PlaidSpeed’, sadly). Claiming to follow this end-user friendly spirit, the Microsoft blog post goes on to a minimum set of features that USB-C ports should have, as detailed in the above table.

Most notable is probably that PC charging support is required, as is support for at least one external display. As for the negatives, this seems to only apply to laptops, and no actual charging requirements are set (USB-PD voltages, wattage, etc.), so what the actual impact of this will be remains to be seen.

One thing remains certain, however, and that is that by trying to make USB-C the One True Connector for literally everything, there will always remain cases where end-user expectations remain unfulfilled.

When Wireless MIDI Has Latency, A Hardwired Solution Saves The Day

June 7, 2025 by 14 Comments

[Moby Pixel] wanted to build a fun MIDI controller. In the end, he didn’t build it just once, but twice—with the aim of finding out which microcontroller was most fit for this musical purpose. Pitted against each other? The ESP32 and Raspberry Pi Pico.

The MIDI controller itself is quite fetching. It’s built with a 4 x 4 array of arcade buttons to act as triggers for MIDI notes or events. They’re assembled in a nice wooden case with a lovely graphic wrap on it. The buttons themselves are wired to a microcontroller, which is then responsible for sending MIDI data to other devices.

At this point, the project diverges. Originally, [Moby Pixel] set the device up to work with an ESP32 using wireless MIDI over Bluetooth. However, he soon found a problem. Musical performance is all about timing, and the ESP32 setup was struggling with intermittent latency spikes that would ruin the performance. Enter the Raspberry Pi Pico using MIDI over USB. The hardwired solution eliminated the latency problems and made the controller far more satisfying to use.

There may be solutions to the latency issue with the wireless ESP32 setup, be they in code, hardware configuration, or otherwise. But if you want to play with the most accuracy and the minimum fuss, you’ll probably prefer the hardwired setup.

Latency is a vibe killer in music as we’ve explored previously.

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