The New Pebble: Now 100% Open Source

December 1, 2025 by Jenny List 18 Comments

The Pebble was the smartwatch darling of the early 2010s, a glimpse of the future in the form of a microcontroller and screen strapped to your wrist. It was snapped up by Fitbit and canned, which might have been the end of it all were it not for the dedication of the Pebble community.

Google open-sourced the OS back in January this year, and since then a new set of Pebble products have appeared under the guidance of Pebble creator [Eric Migicovsky]. Now he’s announced the full open-sourcing of the current Pebble hardware and software stack. As he puts it, “Yesterday, Pebble watch software was ~95% open source. Today, it’s 100% open source”.

If you’re curious it can all be found in repositories under the Core Devices GitHub account. Building your own Pebble clone sounds cool, but perhaps the real value lies instead in giving the new Pebbles something the original never had, an assured future. If you buy one of the new watches then you’ll know that it will remain fixable, and since you have the full set of files you can create new parts for it, or update its software. We think that’s the right way to keep a personal electronic device relevant.

If you want a new Pebble they have a store, meanwhile read some of our previous coverage of its launch.

All Handheld Antennas Are Not Born The Same

November 30, 2025 by Jenny List 15 Comments

If you own a handheld transceiver of any type then the chances are it will come with a “rubber duck” style antenna. These flexible rubber-coated antennas are a compromise in performance, being significantly smaller than a wavelength at their frequency of operation. [OM40ET] has an interesting video in which he investigates this by tearing down a cheap rubber duck antenna and an even cheaper fake.

These antennas usually have a flexible upper section and a bulge at the bottom over the connector. The fake one has nothing in the bulge except the antenna wire and thus has a very high SWR, while the “real” one has a loading coil. This coil is an interesting design, because it’s designed such that the antenna has two resonant points at the 2 metre and 70 centimetre amateur bands. On paper it’s a tapped coil fed at the tap through a capacitor for matching, but a more detailed appraisal will tell you that the two halves of the coil are designed to return those two resonances. It’s still a not-very-good antenna, but the fact that it works at all is something.

If you want something better at VHF and haven’t got much space, all is not lost. We recently featured a VHF magnetic loop.

Continue reading “All Handheld Antennas Are Not Born The Same” →

Has Steampunk Delivered The Hoverboard?

November 29, 2025 by Jenny List 21 Comments

The hoverboard, one of the teen crazes of the last decade, is both a marvel of technology and a source of hacker parts that have appeared in so many projects on these pages. It contains an accelerometer or similar, along with a microcontroller and a pair of motor controllers to drive its in-wheel motors. That recipe is open to interpretation of course and we’ve seen a few in our time, but perhaps not quite like this steampunk design from [Skrubis]. It claims a hoverboard design with no modern electronics, only relays, mercury switches, and neon bulbs.

The idea is that it’s a hoverboard from 1884 using parts available in that era, hence there’s talk of telegraph relays and galvanomic piles. The write-up is presented in steampunk-style language which if we’re honest makes our brain hurt, but the premise is intriguing enough to persevere. As far as we can see it uses a pair of relays and a transformer to make an oscillator, from which can be derived the drive for a 3-phase motor. This drive is sent to the motors by further relays operating under the influence of mercury tilt switches.

There are a full set of hardware designs once you wade past the language, but as yet it has no evidence of a prototype. We admit we kinda want it to work because the idea is preposterous enough to be cool if it ran, but we’d be lying if we said we didn’t harbor some doubts. Perhaps you our readers can deliver a verdict, after all presenting you with entertainment is what it’s all about. If a working prototype surfaces we’ll definitely be featuring it, after all it would be cool as heck.

Oddly this isn’t the first non-computerized balance transport we’ve seen.

Featured image: Simakovarik, CC BY-SA 4.0.

A Flexible Light Inspired By IKEA

November 29, 2025 by Jenny List 15 Comments

The IKEA SMÅSNÖRE is a flexible silicone rod with an embedded LED strip, attached at each end to a base. It’s eye-catching enough, and it has the useful property of providing a diffuse light from multiple angles that makes it a promising candidate for a work lamp. That’s enough for [Daniel James] to create his own lamp on a similar vein.

The electronics of his lamp are straightforward enough: a 12 volt LED strip whose brightness is controlled by a Pi Pico in response to a potentiometer as a brightness control. It’s not quite stiff enough to form the arch itself, so he’s created a 3D printed chain that forms the structure of the lamp. Similar to a bicycle chain in the way it’s constructed, it has individual links that slot together and pivot. The electronics are in the printed base at one end.

We like this lamp a lot, for the light it gives on the bench and for the ingenuity of the printed chain. We might even make one for ourselves.

So Long Firefox, Hello Vivaldi

November 25, 2025 by Jenny List 114 Comments

It’s been twenty-three years since the day Phoenix was released, the web browser that eventually became Firefox. I downloaded it on the first day and installed it on my trusty HP Omnibook 800 laptop, and until this year I’ve used it ever since. Yet after all this time, I’m ready to abandon it for another browser. In the previous article in this series I went into my concerns over the direction being taken by Mozilla with respect to their inclusion of AI features and my worries about privacy in Firefox, and I explained why a plurality of browser engines is important for the Web. Now it’s time to follow me on my search for a replacement, and you may be surprised by one aspect of my eventual choice.

Where Do I Go From Here?

Hackaday in the Ladybird browser — It’s Hackaday, in Ladybird! (Ooof, that font.)

Happily for my own purposes, there are a range of Firefox alternatives which fulfill my browser needs without AI cruft and while allowing me to be a little more at peace with my data security and privacy. There’s Chromium of course even if it’s still way too close to Google for my liking, and there are a host of open-source WebKit and Blink based browsers too numerous to name here.

In the Gecko world that should be an easier jump for a Firefox escapee there are also several choices, for example LibreWolf, and Waterfox. In terms of other browser engines there’s the extremely promising but still early in development Ladybird, and the more mature Servo, which though it is available as a no-frills browser, bills itself as an embedded browser engine. I have not considered some other projects that are either lightweight browser engines, or ones not under significant active development. Continue reading “So Long Firefox, Hello Vivaldi” →

A Couple Of New DOS PCs Appear

November 23, 2025 by Jenny List 97 Comments

An interesting trend over the last year or two has been the emergence of modern retrocomputer PCs, recreations of classic PC hardware from back in the day taking advantage of modern parts alongside the venerable processors. These machines are usually very well specified for a PC from the 1980s, and represent a credible way to run your DOS or early Windows software on something close to the original. [CNX Software] has news of a couple of new ones from the same manufacturer in China, one sporting a 386sx and the other claiming it can take either an 8088 or an 8086.

Both machines use the same see-through plastic case, screen, and keyboard, and there are plenty of pictures to examine the motherboard. There are even downloadable design files, which is an interesting development. They come with a removable though proprietary looking VGA card bearing a Tseng Labs ET4000, a CF card interface, a USB port which claims to support disk drives, a sound card, the usual array of ports, and an ISA expansion for which a dock is sold separately. The battery appears to be a LiPo pouch cell of some kind.

If you would like one they can be found through the usual channels for a not-outrageous price compared to similar machines. We can see the attraction, though maybe we’ll stick with an emulator for now. If you’d like to check out alternatives we’ve reported in the past on similar 8088 and 386sx computers.

It’s Hard To Make A (Good) Oscillator

November 22, 2025 by Jenny List 28 Comments

There’s more to making an oscillator than meets the eye, and [lcamtuf] is here with a good primer on the subject. It starts with the old joke that if you need an oscillator it’s best to try to make an amplifier instead, but of course the real point here is to learn how to make not just a mere oscillator, but a good oscillator.

He does this by taking the oscillator back to first principles and explaining positive feedback on an amplifier, before introducing the Schmitt trigger, an RC circuit to induce a delay, and then phase shift. These oscillators are not complex circuits by any means, so understanding their principles should allow you to unlock the secrets of oscillation in a less haphazard way than just plugging in values and hoping.

Oscillation is a subject we’ve taken a deep dive into ourselves here at Hackaday, should you wish to learn any more. Meanshile [lcamtuf] is someone we’ve heard from here before, with a comparative review of inexpensive printed circuit board manufacturers.