After 6 Years As Road Ornament A Widescreen Sony Trinitron Lives Again

September 15, 2026 by Maya Posch 19 Comments

After previously adopting a big Sony Trinitron CRT TV that had been trying to hitch a ride along the side of a road in Italy for at least six years, [Happychoice] didn’t give up on trying to fix it, with the second part showing the TV being more or less fully fixed up.

In the first part of this mini-series, the TV had been salvaged and had most of the dirt as well as local flora and fauna evicted before an attempt was made to fix it. Unfortunately despite the insides looking remarkably clean and intact considering its use as a road-side ornament, that video ended with the controller refusing to power up due to issues with the power supply.

In this sequel we get to see what six years of weather exposure means in terms of what components to replace in a CRT TV like this. Unsurprisingly this means mostly replacing most of the capacitors, at least on the power supply board, as well as the neck board for the actual CRT. A couple of MOSFETs also tested open, so they were replaced too.

With those fresh new parts the TV fired right up again, and with a Wii console connected it looks pretty spiffy running games like Persona 4. Fortunately modern CRT TVs like these have a built-in service menu that you can access with the remote, so that you can tweak picture alignment and other settings without having to stick a screwdriver into the back of the TV to fiddle with a potentiometer whilst also keeping an eye on the picture.

Although there are undoubtedly more components on the PCBs and of course one grimy speaker to give some TLC, it does show that as long as the tube itself is intact, it’s definitely worth it to give repairing a shot.

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Sampling The Elephant’s Foot And Chornobyl’s Tedious Corium Clean-up

September 15, 2026 by Maya Posch 26 Comments

The site of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant (ChNPP) remains a unique location, as what’s left of the No. 4 reactor is the only place in the world where you can find significant amounts of what is called corium. An amalgamation of nuclear fuel, fuel rod cladding and whatever materials like concrete that the molten mass came into contact with, Soviet scientists initially struggled to make sense of this material, leading them to even have it shot at to get samples.

In this video documentary by [That Chernobyl Guy] these struggles by scientists both in and outside the USSR to comprehend this wholly new material are detailed. Much like trinitite – created by a US nuclear weapons test – these are amalgamations of material combined under extreme conditions. In the case of the ChNPP accident, the botched turbine spin-up test and disabling of all safeties by the operators allowed the bottom core chain reaction to run unconstrained, producing the massive steam explosion that flipped the biosafety lid of the RBMK reactor, while also fully melting the core material that then melted through the concrete below the reactor.

Although this Elephant’s Foot is only a tiny fraction of the total mass of corium inside the No. 4 reactor, it got rather infamous for supposedly being highly radioactive and lethal. In reality it’s one of the least dangerous parts of the exposed corium, and repeated sampling attempts along with internal degradation due to radioactive decay and weathering before the NSC shelter was installed have led to it mostly turning into slightly radioactive, rusty-looking dust at this point.

Also covered in the video is how the corium in the destroyed reactor is likely to be retrieved for final disposal, with robots cutting into the sides of the reactor building rather than trying to navigate destroyed corridors and staircases. This way it might be possible to remove most of the material without the issues that stymied Soviet engineers in the 1980s during their sampling attempts.

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Running Linux 6.11 On The ESP32-S3 With A Few Tweaks

September 15, 2026 by Maya Posch 16 Comments

With the Xtensa Lx7 twin CPU cores in the ESP32-S3 running at a relatively zippy 240 MHz and accompanying PSRAM of up to 16 MB, you might find yourself wondering whether it could run Linux. As [Paulneja] demonstrates with Linux kernel 6.11, the answer is a ‘yes’, though with the usual caveats.

What complicates matters with the ESP32-S3 is that it lacks certain amenities that spoiled OSes like Linux have come to take for granted, such as a Memory Management Unit (MMU). To deal with this, the NOMMU Linux configuration was used, along with a custom fork() implementation. Although the previous 0.7 version sort-of worked, the current 0.8 release is the first that manages to actually boot reliably and has a usable amount of RAM available after boot.

You can see the comparison between the two versions in the header image, with v0.8 having a blistering 3.7 MB available after booting and with overall resource usage and performance having improved massively. Note that only one core is available to Linux, with the other used by the typical FreeRTOS ESP-IDF stack to provide WiFi and Bluetooth.

This was all run on an ESP32-S3 with the N16R8 configuration, meaning 16 MB Flash that’s also used for writable storage and 8 MB of octal PSRAM. As for practical applications, it’s noted by [Paulneja] that this is a research project, though one could imagine this being an embedded Linux project along the lines of a network router running something like BusyBox.

Fixing A Ubiquiti 16-Port PoE Switch With An Extra Hole

September 15, 2026 by Maya Posch 7 Comments

After saving a £300, 16-port Ubiquiti network switch from getting tossed into the trash, [Buy It Fix It] got the honor of trying to repair it. With four ports and their associated PoE function having some major issues it looked like it might take some debugging, but after taking the lid off, the cause seemed rather obvious.

One of the Broadcom BCM5911 controller chips had a rather suspicious chip of the plastic packaging missing, with additional probing of connected components showing that numerous MOSFETs and a diode having had their proverbial guts blown out and were shorted as well. Whatever happened to some connected Ethernet device would appear to have left a serious trail of damage that nearly wrecked the entire switch.

The biggest challenge here was probably to find a replacement for the Broadcom IC, as this isn’t an IC that stores like Digikey or Mouser stock any more. Fortunately it was still available for sale over at AliExpress for £1.84, with the usual caveat that it could be salvage, fake, a factory reject, etc. In this case it appears that it was a legit Broadcom IC, with the four affected ports springing back to life including powering a PoE camera.

With a total cost of about £5 plus the time invested it wasn’t a bad deal to save a pretty nice PoE switch with 16 Ethernet and 2 SFP ports.

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How High-Voltage Current Transformers Monitor The Grid

September 14, 2026 by Maya Posch 7 Comments

Being able to monitor voltages and currents is essential for many applications, with the national electrical grid being no exception. The obvious complication here is that the voltages and currents are massively higher than for those other applications, making safely monitoring these somewhat of an engineering challenge. The used systems for current monitoring are detailed by [Jordan Taylor], also known as [The Electric Brit], in an explainer of grid-level current transformers (CTs) and associated elements that help to provide galvanic isolation for safe current measurements.

Even if the basic principles remain the same, when you’re dealing with currents of 5 kA and more, the associated clearances and penalties for getting a detail wrong increasing correspondingly. The CTs help to implement over-current protection (OCP), over-voltage protection (OVP) as well as differential protection, which is useful to detect leakage and shorts, which could also happen inside the CT if the windings become damaged.

Any such failure condition can trigger a circuit breaker to be tripped, or other corrective measures to be taken. Incidentally this is also how it can be detected when someone is tapping off power in an illicit manner. As with all transformers they’re never perfect due to issues like core saturation, and thus performing accurate measurements and picking the right type of transformer is an art in itself, as explained in the video.

Ultimately CTs and the associated equipment are what makes an AC power grid responsive to any changes and with it into the reliable foundation of modern-day society.

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Pulse: A New VHDL Simulator

September 14, 2026 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

With VHDL being arguably more deterministic and bullet-proof than Verilog, it’s good to see another open source VHDL simulator joining the fray that is not a variation of ghdl. Written by [Óscar Grimal] in C++ with an MIT license, the Pulse project is a still in progress package that provides the entire toolchain, from the compiler to the requisite waveform output.

This waveform output is provided in the form of a text-based user interface (TUI), which at the very least helps a lot with making it cross-platform compatible. As dependencies only a C++20 capable compiler and CMake are indicated.

Of course, with VHDL being a rather hefty language especially once you start piling up the associated standard library, the currently supported language and library features are somewhat limited still so that you’re limited to basic IEEE packages and types, with default values are not supported yet.

Per the roadmap on the GitHub project’s Readme more VHDL language features including generics and additional types will be added, along with an enhanced simulation engine. It’s also said that mixed-language support with Verilog will be added, though SystemVerilog looks to be getting the short end of the stick as usual.

It will definitely be interesting to compare this package to ghdl.

Fly Brain Connectome Used To Trade Stocks And Play Games

September 14, 2026 by Maya Posch 24 Comments

Recently researchers finished mapping the central nervous system (CNS) connectome of not just the female Drosophila melanogaster (i.e. fruit fly) brain, but also that of the male D. melanogaster for a comparative analysis. Here the sexually dimorphic changes turned out to induce specific mating behavior that ensures that there will only be smooching between genetically fit D. melanogaster males and females, while the rest of the connectome remained effectively the same.

Of course, with this connectome in hand it led some people to ask themselves what else one can do with this connectome graph of about 160,000 neurons other than make a fruit fly into a fruit fly. So far we have seen [Nftechie] turn this connectome into a crypto stock trader with the Stonkfly project that uses the connectome’s reward circuits to potentially make profitable trades, though [Nftechie] says that they haven’t verified yet how good a fruit fly is at trading stocks, only that it does said stonks.

Over at [PC Gamer] they summarized a number of things that people have also done, including trying to make the connectome control a game of DOOM and Beat Saber. Each game frame stimulates sensory neurons, with the generated outputs then mapped to game controls, with dopamine-producing reward circuits wired in for reinforcement learning.

Although the D. melanogaster brain is only the merest fraction of the size of the human brain, it does provide us with a glimpse of what actual artificial intelligence research may lead to, as we unravel how even a 160,000 neuron connectome is enough to make these terrors of rotting plant matter do their wonderful things.