Day: January 16, 2026

Hackaday Podcast Episode 353: Fantastic Peripherals, Fake Or Not Fake Picos, And Everything On The Steam Deck

January 16, 2026 by No comments

Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they swap their favorite hacks and stories from the week. In this episode, they’ll start off by marveling over the evolution of the “smart knob” and other open hardware input devices, then discuss a futuristic propulsion technology you can demo in your own kitchen sink, and a cheap handheld game system that get’s a new lease on life thanks to the latest version of the ESP32 microcontroller.

From there they’ll cover spinning CRTs, creating custom GUIs on Android, and yet another thing you can build of out that old Ender 3 collecting dust in the basement. The episode wraps up with a discussion about putting Valve’s Steam Deck to work and a look at the history-making medical evacuation of the International Space Station.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

As always, this episode is available in DRM-free MP3.

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Trying Out The Allwinner-Based Walnut Pi SBC

January 16, 2026 by 13 Comments

When it comes to the term ‘Raspberry Pi clones’, the most that they really clone is the form factor, as nobody is creating clones of Broadcom VideoCore-based SoCs. At least not if they want to stay safe from Broadcom’s vicious legal team. That said, the Walnut Pi 1B single-board computer (SBC) that [Silly Workshop] recently took a gander at seems to be taking a fairly typical approach to a Raspberry Pi 4 form factor compatible board.

Part of Walnut Pi’s line-up, the Allwinner H616/H168-equipped 1B feels like it takes hints from both the RPi 4B and the Asus Tinkerboard, especially with its nicely colored GPIO pins. There’s also a beefier Walnut Pi 2B with an Allwinner T527 SoC that’s not being reviewed here. Translating the Chinese-language documentation for the board suggests that either the H616 or H618 may be installed, with both featuring a quad-core Cortex-A53, so in the ballpark of the Raspberry Pi 3.

There are also multiple RAM configurations, ranging from 1 GB of DDR3 to 4 GB of LPDDR4, with the 1 GB version being fun to try and run benchmarks like GeekBench on. Ultimately the impression was that it’s just another Allwinner SoC-based board, with a half-hearted ‘custom’ Linux image, no hardware acceleration due to missing (proprietary) Allwinner IP block drivers, etc.

While cheaper than a Raspberry Pi SBC, if you need anything more than the basic Allwinner H61* support and Ethernet/WiFi, there clearly are better options, some of which may even involve repurposing an e-waste Android TV box.

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Optimizing Software With Zero-Copy And Other Techniques

January 16, 2026 by 5 Comments

An important aspect in software engineering is the ability to distinguish between premature, unnecessary, and necessary optimizations. A strong case can be made that the initial design benefits massively from optimizations that prevent well-known issues later on, while unnecessary optimizations are those simply do not make any significant difference either way. Meanwhile ‘premature’ optimizations are harder to define, with Knuth’s often quoted-out-of-context statement about these being ‘the root of all evil’ causing significant confusion.

We can find Donald Knuth’s full quote deep in the 1974 article Structured Programming with go to Statements, which at the time was a contentious optimization topic. On page 268, along with the cited quote, we see that it’s a reference to making presumed optimizations without understanding their effect, and without a clear picture of which parts of the program really take up most processing time. Definitely sound advice.

And unlike back in the 1970s we have today many easy ways to analyze application performance and to quantize bottlenecks. This makes it rather inexcusable to spend more time today vilifying the goto statement than to optimize one’s code with simple techniques like zero-copy and binary message formats.

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WCH CH32M030: Another Microcontroller To Watch Out For

January 16, 2026 by 24 Comments

One of the joys of writing for Hackaday comes in following the world of new semiconductor devices, spotting interesting ones while they are still just entries on manufacturer websites, and then waiting for commonly-available dev boards. With Chinese parts there’s always a period in which Chinese manufacturers and nobody else has them, and then they quietly appear on AliExpress.

All of which brings us to the WCH CH32M030, a chip that’s been on the radar for a while and has finally broken cover. It’s the CH32 RISC-V microcontroller you may be familiar with, but with a set of four half-bridge drivers on board for running motors. A handy, cheap, and very smart motor controller, if you will.

There’s been at  least one Chinese CH32M030 dev board (Chinese language) online for a while now, but the one listed on AliExpress appears to be a different design. At the time of writing the most popular one is still showing fewer than 20 sales, so we’re getting in at the ground floor here.

We think this chip is of interest because it has the potential to be used in low price robotic projects, replacing as it does a couple of parts or modules in one go. If you use it, we’d like to hear from you!

A PSOne In The Palm Of Your Hand

January 16, 2026 by 7 Comments

Sony’s original Playstation wasn’t huge, and they did shrink it for re-release later as the PSOne, but even that wasn’t small enough for [Secret Hobbyist]. You may have seen the teaser video a while back where his palm-size Playstation went viral, but now he’s begun a series of videos on how he redesigned the vintage console.

Luckily for [Secret Hobbyist], the late-revision PSOne he started with is only a two-layer PCB, which made reverse engineering the traces a lot easier. Between probing everything under the microscope and cleaning the board off to follow all the traces in copper, [Hobbyist] was able to reproduce the circuit in KiCAD. (Reverse engineering starts at about 1:18 in the vid.)

With a schematic in hand, drafting a smaller PCB than Sony built is made easier by the availability of multi-layer PCBs. In this case [Hobbyist] was able to get away with a four-layer board. He was also able to ditch one of the ICs from the donor mainboard, which he called a “sub-CPU” as its functionality was recreated on the “PSIO” board that’s replacing the original optical drive. The PSIO is a commercial product that has been around for years now, allowing Playstations to run from SD cards– but it’s not meant for the PSOne so just getting it working here is something of a hack. He’s also added on a new DAC for VGA output, but otherwise the silicon is all original SONY.

This is the first of a series about this build, so if you’re into retro consoles you might want to keep an eye on [Secret Hobbyist] on YouTube to learn all the details as they are released.

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