Author: Bryan Cockfield

1852 Articles

Bike Trainers As Video Game Controllers

August 1, 2026 by 7 Comments

While we’ve largely settled on analog sticks and digital buttons for controlling video games, there’s all sorts of projects to create truly esoteric controllers that allow playing games in unique ways. This one from [sukolupo] lets you use data from standard bike trainers to get your virtual character moving.

Called Deck de France, it maps the data coming from one of the supported bike trainers to a virtual controller which can then be “plugged in” to a gaming console of choice, in this case a Steam Deck mounted to the trainer’s handlebars. Although a bike trainer doesn’t have the same number of inputs as a modern gaming controller, it does have enough to play games like Rocket League. As you might expect, it’s also perfect for biking titles such as the Tour de France series.

As far as unique controllers for video games go, this one is surely up in the rankings with a real trombone or a controller purpose-built for riding virtual horses. It’s also a great way for those who are getting a bit bored of riding their trainers to breathe some new life into their exercise routine. We’ve also seen some open-source alternatives for modern bike trainer software as well, which is another great way to get excited about exercise equipment too.

A Complex Way To Push A Button

July 31, 2026 by 17 Comments

We’ve likely all looked at a simple problem in our lives and thought that it would be an easy fix, only to realize that the project is enormously more complicated than we first realized. Whether that’s starting a home improvement project, doing a quick repair to a bicycle or car, or trying to install an obscure piece of software on a Linux machine, the amount of time we budget for these tasks often ends up woefully underestimated. [Oscar]’s night light needs to have its brightness set every night, and it seems easy enough to get a microcontroller to automate that, right?

Well, upon opening the small device, the first issue is that there is no labeling on any of the parts, so simply adding a jumper on to existing microcontroller pins without damaging anything wouldn’t easily be possible. Adding a secondary microcontroller is the next logical step, but the power supply in the night light is extremely underpowered so using even the smallest Raspberry Pi or off-the-shelf Arduino was out of the question too. [Oscar] instead chose an ATtiny85, which solves the power requirement issue, but these are a bit more of a challenge to program without a USB device. From there, it needs a transistor wired in to the circuit to actually push the button for him, plus a few support resistors, so [Oscar] actually had a PCB custom-built to hold all of these components.

Even after all of that, the space within the night light enclosure made installing the PCB a challenge, but in the end he has a device which, when his home automation system powers on the plug for the nightlight, automatically boots up and pushes the switch the required number of times and then puts itself to sleep. We’d call that a success even after the colossal effort getting this inexpensive, small light working the way he wanted. There are some other low-powered solutions for problems like these too, as long as being battery-powered isn’t a dealbreaker.

Custom Beach Robot Handles The Hard Work

July 30, 2026 by 11 Comments

A day at the beach can involve hauling a surprising amount of gear, from coolers, towels, blankets, chairs, and umbrellas, and if children are involved the amount of beach stuff needed seems to go nonlinear very quickly. Some turn to beach carts with large, low-pressure pneumatic tires, but even that seemed like too much work for [John] who built this remote controlled cart for his summertime needs.

The cart is based around an old cargo rack from an e-bike. To mount all of the robotic components, a sheet of plywood was cut and attached to the underside. Two motors are used to drive the rear wheels independently, allowing for differential steering rather than adding the complexity of a steering system. Some safety features are built in to this design as well, including lights for night driving, a start button controlling a relay for the motors and electronics, and a time-of-flight sensor to stop the robot if it encounters an obstacle.

The ESP32 at the center of the build ties all of the electronics together, and a smartphone app lets the user remotely pilot the rover. It’s not autonomous (yet) but a fair alternative to dragging all of one’s beach gear through the sand without any assistance. You could also minimize your excursions through the sand by timing your visits at high tide, but [John] is out on the Great Lakes so this may be of marginal utility here.

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Wrangling Datacenter GPUs Into A Desktop

July 30, 2026 by 20 Comments

As we’ve seen many times before, there’s usually some way wrangle a bit more life out of what would otherwise be considered old and obsolete technology. Perhaps one thing that has been passed over by the masses a bit to early is older datacenter GPUs, which is understandable in one sense because of the rate NVIDIA is pumping out new ones, but these cards have plenty of useful life left in them for the average person, as [Andrew] demonstrates.

The cards [Andrew] is using are Tesla V100s of 2017 vintage. Despite being older hardware they have high-speed memory which allows them to run modern LLMs locally, competitively with online models. In this test, Gemma 4 26B and Qwen3 35B are run, with Gemma being a bit faster because it fits entirely in GPU memory and Qwen3 being a bit more capable but more hungry for resources. [Andrew] built a PCI card that can host two V100s, allowing these larger models to fit completely in memory.

Even though these don’t perform at the same level as the latest top-tier online models, they’re surprisingly capable and also have the benefit of running completely locally. This might be concerning for those looking at the global economy being propped up by companies that essentially have no moat for motivated users, especially as more and more datacenter hardware becomes available on the secondhand market. While this build by [Andrew] goes into detail on getting the software stack up and running, we recently featured another build using the same GPUs that focuses a bit more on hardware for those looking to get started with local hosting.

Use Your Head While Trimming Trees

July 29, 2026 by 42 Comments

[Attoparsec] occasionally rides a bicycle for transportation, but with the major downside of doing this in North America, a place where bicycle infrastructure is generally neglected. From snow removal, maintenance, separation from cars, or even existing in the first place, the places bicyclists use are generally last to be cared for. One of these deficiencies is landscaping maintenance, with plant growth routinely extending into travel ways. Rather than continue to get hit in the face by tree branches, [Attoparsec] took matters into his own hands, or in this case, head.

Since he’s riding down the bike path anyway, the original thought was to add a trimmer to the front of the bicycle. This has a notable downside of being dangerous to others, so instead he added a string trimmer to his helmet. The electric trimmer was scavenged from an old handheld landscaping tool, with a 3D printed mount designed in CAD to cleanly mount to his bicycle helmet. It’s wired to a control on the handlebar, so when a branch is coming up it can be activated by hand and then pruned without much thought other than properly aiming one’s head.

By most measures this eccentric contraption seems to work quite well. There’s not enough torque to affect the rider’s head in any negative way, the strings are long enough to reach far enough to trim the leaves and branches before they can impact the rider’s face, and it’s safe for other users of the bike path. [Attoparsec] calls this “guerrilla urban landscaping”, a bit different from other forms of guerrilla gardening we have seen before.

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Regain Some Trust In Unknown USB Drives

July 27, 2026 by 23 Comments

For how useful USB thumb drives are for quickly toting around and copying files from one computer to another, they can be a bit of a security headache. Programs can be loaded on them with all kinds of malware; they can be obscured in some ways that are difficult to detect, and they can be set up to execute certain programs when they’re plugged in. The general wisdom is to simply avoid untrusted USB devices completely, but that sort of abstinence-only policy rarely works in the real world. If, for some reason, an untrusted USB device absolutely needs to be used, many of these security issues can be mitigated with this tool.

Built by [Novamostra], the device is simple on the surface: it’s a Raspberry Pi Pico mated to a 2-in-1 USB splitter cable. But with the USB Neutralizer software they have written loaded onto the Pico, it automatically destroys the ability of any connected USB thumb drive to load files. The program works by deleting the first and last 34 Logical Block Addressing (LBA) sectors on the drive immediately when it’s plugged in, without doing anything else. This effectively corrupts the drive bad enough to prevent malicious software in the partitions from doing anything, allowing the user to (relatively) safely put the USB drive into their computer and format it for re-use. The code for this tool is also open-source and reviewable on the project’s GitHub page.

Of course, this isn’t a perfect security solution for all USB attacks. It doesn’t erase or replace the firmware on the drive itself, and although firmware-level attacks are rare they’re not out of the question for all users, all the time. It also won’t prevent a malicious physical attack like this high-voltage one, and it may also not stop hidden or obscured partitions or devices programmed for storage and some other nefarious purpose simultaneously, like a USB HID. But still, this solves a great many of the problems associated with getting new drives from semi-untrustworthy sources, like retailers or friends whose computer skills we don’t fully trust.

Neighborhood Bulletin Boards, Circa 1982

July 27, 2026 by 8 Comments

When the Internet first started gaining mainstream popularity in the late 90s, many optimists claimed that it would bring people together by reducing barriers to communication. That ideal hasn’t exactly come to pass yet, as anyone who has been on the Nextdoor neighborhood social network can likely attest to. Before social media, neighbors weren’t completely in the dark about their local communities, though. Besides word-of-mouth communication, there were also local access channels on cable TV, which had none of the downsides of modern social media. And [Hans] is bringing this style channel back.

[Hans]’s project is called CABLE 82, a bulletin board channel that matches the style of these channels from the 1980s. There’s better technology available for these types of systems now, though, so instead of relying on something like a character generator he’s using a Raspberry Pi running custom software to produce the video feed. The Pi hosts a web server so the 4:3 video feed can be reserved for the bulletin board display, but users who have older Pis with the yellow composite video output can skip using something like an HDMI to RF converter on their period-appropriate CRT displays. The software also adds sound functionality, as these channels always had some sort of elevator music playing while they were scrolling through local community news.

For those looking to recreate some of the nostalgia of 1980s community and technology, [Hans] has made this project open source, with all of the files on a GitHub page. Part of the reason [Hans] got interested in building something like this is that he had been trying to source a CRT television for retro gaming, and wanted to reproduce more of that era than just a few video games. A channel like this would be a great addition to a complete cable TV recreation build like this one, which even includes a preview channel of everything playing.

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