Author: Jenny List

3267 Articles

A Proper Computer For A Dollar?

August 1, 2025 by 49 Comments

When a tipster came to us with the line “One dollar BASIC computer”, it intrigued us enough to have a good look at [Stan6314]’s TinyBasRV computer. It’s a small PCB that forms a computer running BASIC. Not simply a microcontroller with a serial header, this machine is a fully functioning BASIC desktop computer that takes a PS/2 keyboard and a VGA monitor. Would that cheap price stand up?

The board uses a CH32 microcontroller, a RISC-V part that’s certainly very cheap indeed and pretty powerful, paired with an I2C memory chip for storage. The software is TinyBASIC. There’s some GPIO expandability and an I2C bus, and it’s claimed it can run in headless mode for a BASIC program to control things.

We haven’t added up all the parts in the BoM to check, but even if it’s not a one dollar computer it must come pretty close. We can see it could make a fun project for anyone. It’s certainly not the only small BASIC board out there, it’s got some competition.

Thanks [Metan] for the tip.

When Online Safety Means Surrendering Your ID, What Can You Do?

July 31, 2025 by 108 Comments

A universal feature of traveling Europe as a Hackaday scribe is that when you sit in a hackerspace in another country and proclaim how nice a place it all is, the denizens will respond pessimistically with how dreadful their country really is. My stock response is to say “Hold my beer” and recount the antics of British politicians, but the truth is, the grass is always greener on the other side.

There’s one thing here in dear old Blighty that has me especially concerned at the moment though, and perhaps it’s time to talk about it here. The Online Safety Act has just come into force and is the UK government’s attempt to deal with what they perceive as the nasties on the Internet, and while some of its aspirations may be honourable, its effects are turning out to be a little chilling.

As might be expected, the Act requires providers to ensure their services are free of illegal material, and it creates some new offences surrounding sharing images without consent, and online stalking. Where the concern lies for me is in the requirement for age verification to ensure kids don’t see anything the government things they shouldn’t, which is being enforced through online ID verification. There are many reasons why this is of concern, but I’ll name the three at the top of my list.
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Farewell Shunsaku Tamiya: The Man Who Gave Us The Best Things To Build

July 31, 2025 by 36 Comments

In the formative experiences of most Hackaday readers there will almost certainly be a number of common threads, for example the ownership of a particular game console, or being inspired into engineering curiosity by the same TV shows. A home computer of a TV show may mark you as coming from a particular generation, but there are some touchstones which cross the decades.

Of those, we are guessing that few readers will not at some point have either built, owned, or lusted after a Tamiya model kit at some point over the last many decades, so it’s with some sadness that we note the passing of Mr. Tamiya himself, Shunsaku Tamiya, who has died at the age of 90.

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A Dual-Screen Cyberdeck To Rule Them All

July 30, 2025 by 13 Comments

We like cyberdecks here at Hackaday, and in our time we’ve brought you some pretty amazing builds. But perhaps now we’ve seen the ultimate of the genre, a cyberdeck so perfect in its execution that this will be the machine of choice in the dystopian future, leaving all the others as mere contenders. It comes courtesy of [Sector 07], and it’s a machine to be proud of.

As with many cyberdecks, it uses the Raspberry Pi as its powerhouse. There are a couple of nice touchscreens and a decent keyboard, plus the usual ports and some nice programmable controls. These are none of them out of the ordinary for a cyberdeck, but what really shines with this one is the attention to detail in the mechanical design. Those touchscreens rotate on ball bearings, the hinges are just right, the connections to the Pi have quick release mechanisms, and custom PCBs and ribbon cables make distributing those GPIOs a snap.

On top of all that the aesthetics are on point; this is the machine you want to take into the abandoned mining base with you. Best of all it’s all available from the linked GitHub repository, and you can marvel as we did at the video below the break.

If you hunger for more cyberdecks, this one has some very stiff competition.

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The Power-Free Tag Emulator

July 27, 2025 by 22 Comments

Most of you know how an NFC tag works. The reader creates an RF field that has enough energy to power the electronics in the tag; when the tag wakes up, two-way communication ensues. We’re accustomed to blank tags that can be reprogrammed, and devices like the Flipper Zero that can emulate a tag. In between those two is [MCUer]’s power-free tag emulator, a board which uses NFC receiver hardware to power a small microcontroller that can run emulation code.

The microcontroller in question is the low-power CW32L010 from Wuhan Xinyuan Semiconductor, a Chinese part with an ARM Cortex M0+ on board. Unfortunately, that’s where the interesting news ends, because all we can glean from the GitHub repository is a PCB layout. Not even a circuit diagram, which we hope is an unintended omission rather than deliberate. It does, however, lend itself to the fostering of ideas, because if this designer can’t furnish a schematic, then perhaps you can. It’s not difficult to make an NFC receiver, so perhaps you can hook one up to a microcontroller and be the one who shares the circuit.

A Very Tidy Handheld Pi Terminal Indeed

July 27, 2025 by 30 Comments

As single board computers have become ever smaller and more powerful, so have those experimenting with them tried to push the boundaries of the machines they can be used in. First we had cyberdecks, and now we have handheld terminals. Of this latter class we have a particularly nice example from [Random Alley Cat]. It takes a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W and a handful of other parts, and makes them with a 3D printed case into something very professional indeed.

One of the problems with these designs has always been tidily packing away all the parts with their cables, and it’s one she solves by making a chassis to hold all the parts, and a case which fits around that. In a stroke the case no longer has to provide a dual function, allowing for a much easier internal layout. Her screen is a Pimoroni Hyperpixel, the keyboard is an Xbox 360 accessory, and the power supply is an off the shelf Pi UPS board and battery.

We particularly like the accesses on the underside of this machine to access the Pi ports, and the ventilation holes and external case details. It’s not perfect, as she says in the video below it’s not the best Linux keyboard. but we could really see ourselves using this.

If you follow handheld cyberdecks, we have a few treats for you on these pages. Not all of them run Linux, for example.

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A Cable Modem, The Way All Network Gear Should Be Mounted

July 27, 2025 by 25 Comments

Home routers and cable modems are now extremely powerful devices, but they all suffer from the attention of their manufacturers’ design and marketing departments. Instead of neatly packaging them in functional cases, they impose aesthetics and corporate identity on them, usually resulting in a curvy plastic case that’s difficult to integrate with other network infrastructure. [The Eccentric Workshop] did something about this with their new Arris modem, by creating a new 19″ rack mount for it.

Unusually for such a device, the plastic case was easy to dismantle. There’s a PCB inside, and a light guide for its LEDs. A new lower-half case and light guide were designed and 3D printed, and the whole was then mounted in a 1U rack case. The special part of this hack perhaps lies in the front panel, a very professionally cut and laser etched affair complete with an Arris logo as though it were meant to be this way.

We also like having our infrastructure and other things in a rack here at Hackaday, and fondly remember the days when some surprisingly affordable boxes came with metal wings for rack mounting. It’s always possible to use a rack tray, but something like this is so much more attractive.