Author: Lewin Day

3355 Articles

Gene Therapy Aims To Slow Huntington’s Disease To A Crawl

November 11, 2025 by 20 Comments

Despite the best efforts of modern medicine, Huntington’s disease is a condition that still comes with a tragic prognosis. Primarily an inherited disease, its main symptoms concern degeneration of the brain, leading to issues with motor control, mood disturbance, with continued degradation eventually proving fatal.

Researchers have recently made progress in finding a potential treatment for the disease. A new study has indicated that an innovative genetic therapy could hold promise for slowing the progression of the disease, greatly improving patient outcomes.

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The Strange Depression Switch Discovered Deep Inside The Brain

November 10, 2025 by 49 Comments

As humans, we tend to consider our emotional states as a direct response to the experiences of our lives. Traffic may make us frustrated, betrayal may make us angry, or the ever-grinding wear of modern life might make us depressed.

Dig into the science of the brain, though, and one must realize that our emotional states are really just electrical signals zinging around our neurons. And as such, they can even be influenced by direct electrical stimulation.

One group of researchers found this out when they inadvertently discovered a “switch” that induced massive depression in a patient in mere seconds. For all the complexities of the human psyche, a little electricity proved more than capable of swaying it in an instant.

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Japan’s Forgotten Analog HDTV Standard Was Well Ahead Of Its Time

November 6, 2025 by 35 Comments

When we talk about HDTV, we’re typically talking about any one of a number of standards from when television made the paradigm switch from analog to digital transmission. At the dawn of the new millenium, high-definition TV was a step-change for the medium, perhaps the biggest leap forward since color transmissions began in the middle of the 20th century.

However, a higher-resolution television format did indeed exist well before the TV world went digital. Over in Japan, television engineers had developed an analog HD format that promised quality far beyond regular old NTSC and PAL transmissions. All this, decades before flat screens and digital TV were ever seen in consumer households!

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Spectravideo Computers Get A Big Upgrade

November 5, 2025 by 2 Comments

Spectravideo is not exactly the most well-known microcomputer company, but they were nevertheless somewhat active in the US market from 1981 to 1988. Their computers still have a fanbase of users and modders. Now, as demonstrated by [electricadventures], you can actually upgrade your ancient Spectravideo machine with some modern hardware.

The upgrade in question is the SVI-3×8 PicoExpander from [fitch]. It’s based on a Raspberry Pi Pico 2W, and is built to work with the Spectravideo 318 and 328 machines. If you’re running a 328, it will offer a full 96kB of additional RAM, while if you’re running a 318, it will add 144 kB more RAM and effectively push the device up to 328 spec. It’s also capable of emulating a pair of disk drives or a cassette drive, with saving and loading images possible over Wi-Fi.

It’s worth noting, though, that the PicoExpander pushes the Pico 2W well beyond design limits, overclocking it to 300 MHz (versus the original 150 MHz clock speed). The makers note it is “bleeding edge” hardware and that it may not last as long as the Spectravideo machines themselves.

Design files are available on Github if you want to spin up your own PicoExpander, or you can just order an assembled version. We’ve seen a lot of other neat retrocomputer upgrades built around modern hardware, too. Video after the break.

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A Paintball Turret Controlled Via Xbox Controller

November 4, 2025 by 7 Comments

Video games, movies, and modern militaries are all full of robotic gun turrets that allow for remotely-controlled carnage. [Paul Junkin] decided to build his own, albeit in a less-destructive paint-hurling fashion.

The turret sits upon a lazy susan bearing mounted atop a aluminium extrusion frame. A large gear is mounted to the bearing allowing the turret to pan when driven by a stepper motor. A pair of pillow block bearings hold a horizontal shaft which mounts the two paint markers, which again is controlled by another stepper motor to move in the tilt axis. An ESP32 microcontroller is responsible for running the show, panning and tilting the platform by commanding the large stepper motors. Firing the paintball markers is achieved with solenoids mounted to the triggers, which cycle fast enough to make the semi-auto markers fire in a way that almost feels like full-auto. Commanding the turret is via an Xbox One controller; communicating with the ESP32 over Bluetooth using the BluePad32 library.

It’s worth noting you shouldn’t shoot paintballs at unsuspecting individuals, since they can do extreme amounts of damage to those not wearing the proper protection. We’ve featured a great many other sentry guns over the years, too, like this impressive Portal-themed build. Video after the break.

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Rocket Roll Control, The Old Fashioned Way

November 4, 2025 by 14 Comments

The vast majority of model rockets go vaguely up and float vaguely downwards without a lot of control. However, [newaysfactory] built a few rockets that were altogether more precise in their flight, thanks to his efforts to master active roll control.

[newaysfactory] started this work a long time ago, well before Arduinos, ESP32s, and other highly capable microcontroller platforms were on the market. In an era when you had to very much roll your own gear from the ground up, he whipped up a rocket control system based around a Microchip PIC18F2553. He paired it with a L3G4200D gyro, an MPXH6115A barometer, and an MMA2202KEG accelerometer, chosen for its ability to provide useful readings under high G acceleration. He then explains how these sensor outputs were knitted together to keep a rocket flying straight and true under active control.

[newaysfactory] didn’t just master roll control for small rockets; he ended up leveraging this work into a real career working on fully-fledged autopilot systems. Sometimes your personal projects can take your career in interesting directions.

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Adding ISA Ports To Modern Motherboards

November 3, 2025 by 23 Comments

Modern motherboards don’t come with ISA slots, and almost everybody is fine with that. If you really want one, though, there are ways to get one. [TheRasteri] explains how in a forum post on the topic.

Believe it or not, some post-2010 PC hardware can still do ISA, it’s just that the slots aren’t broken out or populated on consumer hardware. However, if you know where to look, you can hack in an ISA hookup to get your old hardware going. [TheRasteri] achieves this on motherboards that have the LPC bus accessible, with the use of a custom PCB featuring the Fintek F85226 LPC-to-ISA bridge. This allows installing old ISA cards into a much more modern PC, with [TheRasteri] noting that DMA is fully functional with this setup—important for some applications. Testing thus far has involved a Socket 755 motherboard and a Socket 1155 motherboard, and [TheRasteri] believes this technique could work on newer hardware too as long as legacy BIOS or CSM is available.

It’s edge case stuff, as few of us are trying to run Hercules graphics cards on Windows 11 machines or anything like that. But if you’re a legacy hardware nut, and you want to see what can be done, you might like to check out [TheRasteri’s] work over on Github. Video after the break.

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