Day: November 10, 2025

“AI, Make Me A Degree Certificate”

November 10, 2025 by 139 Comments

One of the fun things about writing for Hackaday is that it takes you to the places where our community hang out. I was in a hackerspace in a university town the other evening, busily chasing my end of month deadline as no doubt were my colleagues at the time too. In there were a couple of others, a member who’s an electronic engineering student at one of the local universities, and one of their friends from the same course. They were working on the hardware side of a group project, a web-connected device which with a team of several other students, and they were creating from sensor to server to screen.

I have a lot of respect for my friend’s engineering abilities, I won’t name them but they’ve done a bunch of really accomplished projects, and some of them have even been featured here by my colleagues. They are already a very competent engineer indeed, and when in time they receive the bit of paper to prove it, they will go far. The other student was immediately apparent as being cut from the same cloth, as people say in hackerspaces, “one of us”.

They were making great progress with the hardware and low-level software while they were there, but I was saddened at their lament over their colleagues. In particular it seemed they had a real problem with vibe coding: they estimated that only a small percentage of their classmates could code by hand as they did, and the result was a lot of impenetrable code that looked good, but often simply didn’t work.

I came away wondering not how AI could be used to generate such poor quality work, but how on earth this could be viewed as acceptable in a university.
Continue reading ““AI, Make Me A Degree Certificate”” →

Switch Switch 2 To CRT

November 10, 2025 by 9 Comments

Have you ever imagined what the Nintendo Switch would look like if Nintendo had produced it in the mid-1990s? [Joel Creates] evidently did, because that’s exactly what this retro CRT-toting Switch 2 dock looks like.

Yes, it is portable, thanks to a 100W power bank torn apart and built into the 3D printed case. The full-color CRT comes from a portable TV, so it’s got portability in its heritage. Fitting all that chunky CRT goodness into a hand-held was, of course, a challenge. [Joel] credits AI slop with inspiring the 45-degree angle he eventually settled on. However, the idea of recessing handles inside the case so it could be thick enough but still comfortable to hold was all base-model H.Sap brainpower. There are shoulder controls hidden in those recesses, too, for the games that can use them.

We particularly like the cartridge-like way the Switch 2 slides into place with a satisfying click as its USB-C port connects. It’s plugging into an extension cable that leads to the guts of an official Nintendo dock, buried deeply (and conveniently) inside the 3D-printed box, stacked neatly with the HDMI-to-VGA and VGA-to-Composite converters [Joel] needed to get a nice 4:3 image on the CRT. No word on if he blows on the Switch 2 before plugging it in, but we certainly would.

We’ve featured plenty of portable game systems over the years, and some have been very well done, like this exquisitely done PS2 conversion — but very few have brought CRTs to the party. This retrofitted Game Boy is about the only exception, and [Joel] calls it out in his video as inspiration.

It looks like this is the first Switch 2 hack we’ve featured (with the exception of a teardown or two), so if you know of more, please let us know.

Continue reading “Switch Switch 2 To CRT” →

An Unnecessary (But Cool) Processor

November 10, 2025 by 18 Comments

[Bob] calls his custom 16-bit computer “Bob’s Unnecessary Retro Processor” or BURP for short. While we suppose it is technically unnecessary, we love the look of it, and we hope he just used it to get the quirky acronym.

When we build custom CPUs they look suspiciously like FPGA development boards, but not BURP. We immediately thought of the IMSAI and the H8 when we saw it, but [Bob] points out it also borrows from the PDP-11.

Continue reading “An Unnecessary (But Cool) Processor” →