Author: Jenny List

3525 Articles

At Last, A Gameboy Advance With Decent Audio

August 24, 2026 by 2 Comments

Many pieces of consumer electronics are build down to a price, and the corners cut show up in their performance. The Gameboy Advance from Nintendo is no exception: its audio is a PWM stream that sounds awful through the included amplifier. [Cajun Panda] has a fix though, in the form of a replacement audio chain.

It takes the form of a PCB that hooks into the pads of the removed GBA audio chip, and provides a much cleaner audio path with filtering and EQ and a class D audio amplifier. In addition there’s an audio codec and an ESP32 for Bluetooth connectivity, enabled by a long press of a GBA button and configured via a web interface on the ESP. Best of all there is no case modification, this is designed to remain as stock as possible.

Everything can be found in a GitHub repository should you wish to make your own, so if you want to bring your GBA audio up to scratch you know where to go. If you want to make it even better don’t forget, you can always upgrade the screen.

The Casio F-91W As A Contactless Payment Device.

August 24, 2026 by 8 Comments

The Casio F-91W digital watch is perhaps one of the most successful pieces of consumer electronics ever made, having quietly supplied the essential function of an inexpensive and accurate LCD digital timepiece for many decades. As a result it has a huge following, and we’ve seen plenty of projects based upon it. [Matteo P] has one that we think you’ll like, he’s turned his Casio into a contactless payment device. We missed it when it came out, but sometimes a good project needs sharing.

If you’re a long-time Hackaday reader you may remember our investigation of 13.56 MHz NFC cards in which we showed you a disassembled card in which he antenna was a tuned circuit covering most of the card, with a small coupling coil for the chip. It’s this kind of card he uses, and ends up with an SLA printed front face for the watch that places the chip above the display and puts a pick-up coil around the outside. The most interesting part of the write-up though isn’t in the build, instead it’s the deep-dive into designing the RF parts and ensuring a good coupling at something close to resonance. Read it, if you fancy trying NFC-enabling any other random items.

Meanwhile, if this NFC bug has caught you, don’t forget our rather silly one transistor 125kHz NFC reader challenge.

Thanks to Hackaday alum [John Elliot V] for the tip!

So, You Found A Foden Steam Lorry In A Field. What Next?

August 23, 2026 by 41 Comments

It’s quite likely that many readers will have harbored dreams of owning, or at least driving, a steam engine of some kind. [James Hervey-Bathurst] was lucky enough to do so in a time when it was still possible to find scrap steam-powered machinery for restoration, and at the recent Electromagnetic Field event in the UK he took the time to describe his journey from finding an abandoned steam lorry in a Buckinghamshire field in 1975, to a few years later, taking it to the road.

The talk starts with the story of its retrieval, then the long process of rebuilding, and finally its first run. He’s the owner of Eastnor Castle, the ancestral pile that serves as venue for EMF Camp, so we’re guessing that having somewhere spacious for such a project must have helped. Along the way, we get a comprehensive run through the workings of a 1920s steam vehicle, from its double-expansion compound engine to its three-speed gearbox, stopping for small details like its injectors, and a curious exhaust steam heater designed to reduce the clouds of visible steam.

Most of us will never get the chance to take the wheel of a Foden such as this one, but at least we’ve had a chance for a closer look thanks to EMF. The full video is below the break, meanwhile if you’d like more on steam injectors we have you covered.

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An Atari Desktop On A Sega

August 22, 2026 by 17 Comments

Over recent years there have been a range of classic 16-bit consoles coaxed into running familiar operating systems, with -nommu Linux being a favourite. But the 16-bit era had its own operating systems of note, and [1d4r3k] has brought one of them to a console that fit very much into a different 16-bit camp. It’s Atari’s TOS, on a Sega Mega CD.

We should in all fairness start by saying it’s not “real” TOS, but EmuTOS, an open-source drop-in replacement. So far it supports a serial keyboard device, a printer, and sound, and it mounts the CD or cartridge it booted from, a RAMdisk, internal backup RAM, and cartridge save RAM. We’re told in the tip email that there’s also been some work porting GEOS to the platform, and thus the GEOS software suite may be ported to it.

Sadly there are no images, so we can’t see it working, but trying it looks to be as straightforward as burning aan ISO or flashing a cartridge if you have the original hardware. We have no idea as to whether it would be any use given the specs of the Sega, but given that TOS ran on Ataris without a lot of RAM we suspect it might be. Meanwhile, here’s a Megadrive/Genesis running Linux.

Header: 軍事用懐中電灯, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Shutter Makes This 3D Printed Camera Special

August 22, 2026 by 9 Comments

Making a film camera is a project within the reach of almost anyone, from the experimenter with cardboard and sticky tape, to the machinist with an aluminium billet. But 3D printing has opened up the world of cameras to whole new set of experimenters, and we’ve seen some very impressive builds here as a result. For all that, there’s always been a particularly tricky aspect to a home made camera: the shutter. In particular, making one with variable speed has proved almost impossible. Now [Camera Things] has given it a very good shot, with a sliding 3D printed design.

To cock it, both the strips are pulled across, before the blind strip is pushed back, and the shutter operates by sliding back under the influence of a rubber band. The clever part in this case is that the blind strip can be partially pushed back to affect the size of the shutter opening. The effect is then of a variable width strip of light passing over the film, which is equivalent to varying the speed of a conventional shutter.

Due to space constraints he’s only able to make it a half frame shutter, so he’s abandoning this design in favour of a more complicated set of vertical leaves. Sadly he’s not made the files available, but we thing proficient CAD users should be able to make their own version. The video is below the break.

It’s not the first printable shutter we’ve seen, but it remains the first variable one.

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So, You Want To Fix An Old Camera

August 18, 2026 by 15 Comments

Old cameras are a fantastic way to experiment with photography, and outside a few brands, they can be an inexpensive way too. It’s easy to find older cameras in a broken condition for  a lot less money, but if you’re tempted to fix one then [enthdegree] has some advice for you.

It’s ostensibly a set of notes on the disassembly and repair of a Nikon F100 35mm film SLR, but along the way it’s full of useful tips and tricks for camera disassembly. he materials you’ll need, advice on not losing screws is one, and warnings against disassembling too much is another. It’s all the stuff he wished he’d known before starting, and now you can know it too.

Fixing up old cameras in this way is rewarding, and something we’ve certainly been known to do ourselves. But it’s worth bearing in mind that it’s not for the faint-hearted, and with decades of old film cameras sitting unused, often a working example might make more sense.

A Tape Deck Gets A Service

August 15, 2026 by 7 Comments

If there’s an engineer’s equivalent to those YouTube ASMR videos, then perhaps it comes in a good repair or servicing journey filmed without edits at the bench. Relaxing to watch, has an interesting outcome. So it is with [Ken’s Shop], as he performs a full service on a Realistic cassette deck from we are guessing, the late 1970s or early 1980s.

These decks are nothing particularly special and can be found wherever second-hand consumer electronics go to die, but compared to may newer electronic devices they are surprisingly well-built. Their decades-old mechanicals usually only need a good clean and lubricate, their belts may need replacing, and perhaps the azimuth needs a tweak, but returning them to their former glory is rarely more than a bench session away.

So this is what we get, a relaxing twenty minutes or do of watching a guy fix a tape deck. A chuckle came here at Hackaday from our colleague Al passing this on, we agree with his not missing working on this type of deck as they could be fiddly. But still, if you find one of these and want it, they’re fixable with relative ease.

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