Author: Lewin Day

3428 Articles

Micro:Bit Gets Pseudo-Polyphonic Sound With Neat Hack

November 18, 2025 by 4 Comments

The Micro:bit is a fun microcontroller development platform, designed specifically for educational use. Out of the box, it’s got a pretty basic sound output feature that can play a single note at a time. However, if you’re willing to get a bit tricky, you can do some pseudo-polyphonic stuff as [microbit-noob] explains.

The trick to polyphony in a monophonic world? Rapidly alternating between the different notes you want to be playing at the same time. Do this fast enough and it feels like they’re playing together rather than seperately. [microbit-noob] demonstrates how to implement this with a simple function coded for the Micro:bit. Otherwise, it uses the completely stock sound hardware. However, the IR receiver is added to the device in order to allow a simple remote control to be used to command the notes desired, along with some extra tactile buttons to add further control.

Is it chiptune? Well, it’s a chip, playing a tune, so yes. Even if it is through a tiny speaker stuck to the PCB. In any case, if you’re trying to get some better bleeps and bloops out of the Micro:bit, this is a great place to start. If you’ve got other hacks for Britain’s educational little board, let us know on the tipsline!

Binary Clock Also Monitors Weather

November 17, 2025 by 5 Comments

There are two things most of us want to know on a daily basis—the weather, and what time it is. [Guitarman9119] built a single device that can provide both pieces of information with a pleasingly nerdy aesthetic.

The heart of the build is a Raspberry Pi Pico W, which is proudly displayed on the front panel of the device. It’s responsible for driving the array of LEDs that display the time in hours, minutes, and seconds in binary format. The Pi Pico W uses its wireless connection to query the WorldTime API and an IP geolocation server. This provides the local date and time, and the location is then used to query the OpenWeather service for current weather information. The weather information is thankfully not displayed in binary format, because that would be straining to read. Instead, it’s displayed in human-readable format on a small OLED display.

There’s something about the way this is built—the discrete LEDs, that weird blue color that seemed to disappear by 1984—that gives this a wonderfully old school charm. You could imagine it turning up in a college lab full of old blinkenlights gear. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Binary Clock Also Monitors Weather” →

Building A Smart Speaker Outside The Corporate Cloud

November 17, 2025 by 15 Comments

If you’re not worried about corporate surveillance bots scraping your shopping list and manipulating you through marketing, you can buy any number of off-the-shelf smart speakers for your home. Alternatively, you can roll your own like [arpy8] did, and keep your life a little more private.

The build is based around an ESP32 microcontroller. It connects to the ‘net via its inbuilt Wi-Fi connection, and listens out for your voice with an INMP441 omnidirectional microphone module. The audio data is trucked off to a backend server running a Whisper speech-to-text model. The text is then passed to Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash large language model. The response generated is passed to the Piper Neural Voice text-to-speech engine, sent back to the ESP32, and spat out via the device’s DAC output and a speaker attached to an LM386 amplifier. Basically, anything you could ask Gemini, you can do with this device.

By virtue of using a commercial large language model, it’s not perfectly private by any means. Still, it’s at least a little farther removed than using a smart speaker that’s directly logged in to your Amazon/Google/Hulu/Beanstikk account. Files are on Github for those eager to dive into the code. We’ve seen some other fun builds along these lines before, too. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Building A Smart Speaker Outside The Corporate Cloud” →

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

November 11, 2025 by 22 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.

Continue reading “Gene Therapy Aims To Slow Huntington’s Disease To A Crawl” →

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.

Continue reading “The Strange Depression Switch Discovered Deep Inside The Brain” →

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

November 6, 2025 by 36 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!

Continue reading “Japan’s Forgotten Analog HDTV Standard Was Well Ahead Of Its Time” →

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.

Continue reading “Spectravideo Computers Get A Big Upgrade” →