Author: Arya Voronova

495 Articles

A plugged-in 12VHPWR cable, with two thermistors inserted into the connector shell, monitoring for heat

12VHPWR Watchdog Protects You From Nvidia Fires

March 3, 2025 by 72 Comments

The 12VHPWR connector is a hot topic once again – Nvidia has really let us down on this one. New 5080 and 500 GPUs come with this connector, and they’re once again fire-prone. Well, what if you’re stuck with a newly-built 5080, unwilling to give it up, still hoping to play the newest games or run LLMs locally? [Timo Birnschein] has a simple watchdog solution for you, and it’s super easy to build.

All it takes is an Arduino, three resistors, and three thermistors. Place the thermistors onto the connector’s problematic spots, download the companion software from GitHub, and plug the Arduino into your PC. If a temperature anomaly is detected, like one of the thermistors approaching 100C, the Arduino will simply shut down your PC. The software also includes a tray icon, temperature graphing, and stability features.  All is open-source — breadboard it, flash it. You can even add more thermistors to the mix if you’d like!

This hack certainly doesn’t just help protect you from Nvidia’s latest creation – it can help you watch over any sort of potentially hot mod, and it’s very easy to build. Want to watch over connectors on your 3D printer? Build one of these! We’ve seen 12VHPWR have plenty of problems in the past on Nvidia’s cards – it looks like there are quite a few lessons Nvidia is yet to learn.

FOSDEM 2025, A Hardware Hacker’s Haven

March 3, 2025 by 5 Comments

Have you been to FOSDEM? It’s a yearly two-day megaconference in Brussels, every first weekend of February. Thousands of software and hardware hackers from all across Europe come here each year, make friends, talk software and hardware alike, hold project-specific meetups to drink beer and talk shop, and just have a fun weekend surrounded by like-minded people.

In particular, FOSDEM has free admission – drop by for the weekend, no need to buy entry tickets, just sort out your accomodation, food, travel, and visit for a day or two. I’ve covered FOSDEM quite extensively in 2023, so if you want to know more about how it works, I invite you to check out that article – plenty of stories, cool facts about FOSDEM, showcases, and so on. This year, I’ve also been to FOSDEM, it’s been pretty great, and I’d like to tell you about cool things I’ve seen happen during FOSDEM 2025.

FOSDEM is often described as an open software conference, and you might’ve had been fooled by this if you simply have checked the Wikipedia page. However, let me assure you – there’s always plenty of hardware, large amounts of it! This year, I feel like hardware has taken the spotlight in particular – let me show you at least some of it, so that you know what kinds of cool stuff you can expect and plan for in 2026.

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Screenshot of the REPL running on the Flipper, importing the flipper API library and calling infrared receive function out of it with help of autocomplete

A MicroPython Interpreter For Flipper Zero

March 3, 2025 by 13 Comments

Got a Flipper Zero? Ever wanted to use a high-level but powerful scripting language on it? Thanks to [Oliver] we now have a MicroPython application for the Flipper, complete with a library for hardware and software feature support. Load it up, start it up, connect over USB, and you’ve got the ever-so-convenient REPL at your disposal. Or, upload a Python script to your Flipper and run them directly from Flipper’s UI at your convenience!

In the API docs, we’re seeing support for every single primitive you could want – GPIO (including the headers at the top, of course), a healthy library for LCD and LCD backlight control, button handling, SD card support, speaker library for producing tones, ADC and PWM, vibromotor, logging, and even infrared transmit/receive support. Hopefully, we get support for Flipper’s wireless capabilities at some point, too!

Check out the code examples, get the latest release from the Flipper app portal or GitHub, load it up, and play! Mp-flipper has existed for the better half of a year now, so it’s a pretty mature application, and it adds quite a bit to Flipper’s use cases in our world of hardware hacking. Want to develop an app for the Flipper in Python or otherwise? Check out this small-screen UI design toolkit or this editor we’ve featured recently!

A picture of the Alarmo running a tweaked firmware, showing a theme with (Debug) added to its name, obviously a firmware modification

Making The Alarmo Customizable, By Any Means Necessary

March 2, 2025 by 7 Comments

Last year, Nintendo has released the Alarmo, a bedside-style alarm clock with a colourful display. Do you own one? You deserve full control over your device, of course. [KernelEquinox] has been reverse-engineering an Alarmo ever since getting one, and there’s no shortage of cool stuff you’ll be able to do with an Alarmo thanks to this work.

Now, just how can you improve upon the Alarmo? Looking through the Alarmo dev community site and threads on the subreddit, there are plenty of ideas, from themes to a ton of possible behaviour tweaks! In particular, Nintendo has already changed Alarmo’s behaviour in a way that is jarring to some users – a third-party development community will help us all make sure our Alarmos work exactly like we expect them to. Want to replace the sound files,  tie your Alarmo into your smart home setup, write your apps, tweak the UI or default behaviour, fix a bug that irks you real bad, or access a debug menu? Or, ensure that Alarmo doesn’t contribute to light pollution in your room? All appears to be doable.

Like the Alarmo, but don’t own one yet? They’re limited-release for now, but it will be more widely available this March; we thank [KernelEquinox] for the work in making Alarmo hacker-friendly. If you’ve forgotten, this project started off thanks to the efforts of [Gary] last year. We covered it back then — cat pictures included!

On Sensory Weaver Building

March 2, 2025 by 23 Comments

What is a sensory weaver? [Curiosiate] tells us: “A device which takes sensory data feeds in and converts it in various ways on the body as information streams as though a native sensory input.” As an example, they’ve built one.

This one, called “MK2 Lockpick” is a wrist-mounted array of linear actuators, with a lengthy design/build log to peek into. We don’t get PCB files (blame EasyEDA’s sharing), but we do at least get a schematic and more than enough pictures for anyone interested to reproduce the concept – the levels of bespoke-ness here warrant a new PCB for any newcomers to sensory weaver building, anyway. We also get a story of a proof-of-concept thermal input sensory weaver.  The team even includes a lessons learned da, and plenty of inspiration throughout the posts on the blog.

This kind of tech is getting more and more popular, and we are sure there will be more to come — especially as we keep getting cool new gadgets like linear actuators in form of replacement parts. For instance, the actuators in this sensory weaver are harvested from Samsung S23 smartphones, and you could probably find suitable ones as iPhone replacement parts, too. Looking to start out in this area but want a quick build? Look no further than the venerable compass belt.

A CaptionCall Phone Succumbs To Doom, Again

March 2, 2025 by 13 Comments

Pour one out for yet another device conquered. This one’s a desk phone for conferences and whatnot, a colour display, a numpad, and a bog standard handset with a speaker and mic. Naturally, also running Linux. You know what to expect – [Parker Reed] has brought Doom to it, and you’d be surprised how playable it looks!

This is the second time a CaptionCall device has graced our pages running Doom — CaptionCall patched out the previous route, but with some firmware dumping and hashcat, root has been acquired once again. [Parker] has upgraded this impromptu gaming setup, too – now, all the buttons are mapped into Doom-compatible keyboard events coming from a single input device, thanks to a C program and an Xorg config snippet. Feel free to yoink for your own Doom adventures or just general CaptionCall hacking!

If you’re interested in the hacking journey, get into the exploitee.rs Discord server and follow the hack timeline from password recovery, start to finish, to Doom, to the state of affairs shown in the video. Now, as the CPU speeds have risen, should the hackerdom switch away from Doom as the go-to? Our community remains divided.

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This Gesture Sensor Is Precise, Cheap, Well-Hidden

March 1, 2025 by 22 Comments

In today’s “futuristic tech you can get for $5”, [RealCorebb] shows us a gesture sensor, one of the sci-fi kind. He was doing a desktop clock build, and wanted to add gesture control to it – without any holes that a typical optical sensor needs. After some searching, he’s found Microchip’s MGC3130, a gesture sensing chip that works with “E-fields”, more precise than the usual ones, almost as cheap, and with a lovely twist.

The coolest part about this chip is that it needs no case openings. The 3130 can work even behind obstructions like a 3D-printed case. You do need a PCB the size of a laptop touchpad, however — unlike the optical sensors easy to find from the usual online marketplaces. Still, if you have a spot, this is a perfect gesture-sensing solution. [RealCorebb] shows it off to us in the demo video.

This PCB design is available as gerbers+bom+schematic PDF. You can still order one from the files in the repo.  Also, you need to use Microchip’s tools to program your preferred gestures into the chip. Still, it pays off, thanks to the chip’s reasonably low price and on-chip gesture processing. And, [RealCorebb] provides all the explanations you could need, has Arduino examples for us, links all the software, and even provides some Python scripts! Touch-sensitive technology has been getting more and more steam in hacker circles – for instance, check out this open-source 3D-printed trackpad.

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