On The Wisdom Of Replacing A NiMH Module In A Prius Battery Pack

June 1, 2026 by Maya Posch 75 Comments

Old versus new Prius NiMH module. (Credit: HubNut, YouTube)

It’s possible to get a pretty good deal on used Toyota Prius cars, but as with all hybrid cars that also means a used battery pack and resulting issues. In the case of the Gen 2 Prius that [HubNut] recently acquired it was clear that its battery was effectively toast, with the engine running constantly and the car often giving up due to detected issues with the pack. After getting to an EV-focused garage for repairs, a spare NiMH module was used to replace a problematic module to bring it back to good health, while raising the question of how sensible such a repair is.

Certainly, compared to the average BEV where a much larger battery is generally integrated well into the frame, a Prius makes things very easy, with the compact battery readily accessible and removable from the trunk. It is also a very modular battery, with some elbow grease and bolt-twisting enough to disassemble it.

Even with that it still a high-voltage battery with all the associated risks, and as raised in the comments there’s a big question about putting a new(er) cell into a pack with more worn-out NiMH cells as generally the cells wear out fairly evenly. While this fix can give the pack some more life, the new cell won’t match the internal resistance and other parameters of the pack, leading to issues like voltage drift. Then there’s the issue that if one cell failed, others probably aren’t far behind, so this hack would soon become a regular ritual.

Much like swapping one bad 18650 Li-ion cell in a bigger battery, it’s probably a more sustainable solution to simply replace the entire battery at once, or at least replace all modules or cells to properly refurbish it. For [HubNut] this fix suffices because he suspects that this pack was already assembled from random modules, it’s an important consideration to make if you don’t enjoy ending up stranded during a trip.

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Revisiting Making Your Own Internet Router In 2026

June 1, 2026 by Maya Posch 46 Comments

After my recent misadventures setting up an OpenWrt installation on a scruffy e-waste-level x86 PC, quite a few people chimed in with feedback, criticism and friendly hostility regarding things like a presumed ‘x86 bias’. There were also some system-related things that simply didn’t seem to want to work, such as booting from an SD card with a USB adapter, which cut short a lot of the actual OpenWrt testing that I had intended. This made it mostly an enlightening look at what issues you can run into when ‘quickly’ throwing an OpenWrt router together with some junk parts these days.

In this second article I’ll try to address as many of these points as possible, as well as attempt to show off an actual working OpenWrt installation in action. In addition, since just using random junk x86 PC parts was the way to go back in the late 90s/early 2000s doesn’t mean that this is still the way in 2026, so I’ll be taking a look at alternatives that exist today. This includes everything from mini PCs, to ancient business PCs being sold for peanuts, as well as more dedicated (ARM-based) hardware solutions.

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Making A Zippy FDM Printer Out Of Wood

May 31, 2026 by Maya Posch 25 Comments

Generally, the frame and other structural parts of an FDM printer use steel or similar, but could you use wood instead for that truly artisan look? As [Mitsu Makes] demonstrates after half a year of work, you absolutely can, and it looks about as amazing as you might imagine.

Naturally, you cannot make everything out of wood – such as the linear rails and lead screws – and there is a fair bit of FDM-printed black PLA in there too, but the wood is both structural and decorative. The stained look does really add something. For the FDM-specific parts, the Voron 0 was taken as the base, including the bed. The motion system isn’t CoreXY but Cartesian for ease of construction and driving the axes, while also providing more torque due to the additional motors.

Since it’s more or less a Voron FDM printer and even has automatic bed leveling, it works basically perfectly after assembly and input shaping. Even if it’s not the most practical way to make your own FDM printer from parts, it definitely makes it look unique and would be the focal point of any printing farm.

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Loading Sega Genesis Games Off A Vinyl Record

May 31, 2026 by Maya Posch 15 Comments

Recently [Throaty Mumbo] took a poke at another daft idea, in the form of loading Sega Genesis games off vinyl records. Although a whacky idea, it’s made possible through the use of a Mega Everdrive Pro and its ability to load games via its USB port, a feature mostly intended for on-the-fly game development without swapping SD cards.

For a few decades in home computing, the loading of software from cassette tapes and similar media was very common. This was due to the low-cost nature of this ubiquitous technology compared to alternatives like cartridges and floppy disks. Even if it was famously unreliable and slow, this accessibility made it a very popular choice. This is where home game consoles were different, as they generally used very fast cartridges, but what if you merge these two worlds?

As demonstrated, a Pico 2 board with its RP2350 MCU is used to convert the audio signal containing the binary data into data for transmission via USB to the Everdrive cartridge. After confirming that it works with a tape drive, he drags in a plastic-y PO-80 5″ record cutter and player, where the mono audio limitation is not a problem.

Unfortunately, this PO-80 turns out to be exactly the kind of toy it looks like, with [Throaty Mumbo] unable to cut and play back a record that gets a clean enough signal to the Pico 2 board, though with a better player and likely record cutter it should work fine. After all, some magazines back in the day came with plastic ‘vinyl’ records that contained programs you could load from your record player.

Although technically a failure, it does demonstrate that if you are very patient, you can totally load Sega Genesis ROMs off a tape or record at a blistering couple of kB/s, tops.

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Keychain GameCube Controller Made Functional

May 30, 2026 by Maya Posch 1 Comment

Mini game controllers with buttons and joysticks that move like the real deal are a pretty cool keychain and fidget toy, but at least for some of us there’s this intrusive thought that tells us that it would be so much cooler if it actually was a functional game controller. Enter [Brux] tearing into a miniature GameCube controller and adding the required guts.

The keychain/fidget toy is made by Backpack Buddies and is one of a range of similar toys that feature buttons you can press and joysticks that move, giving a pretty good start on the externals of the controller. Once cracked open at the seam, some interior redecorating had to be performed to clear space and add something to mount switches onto. Here [Brux] opted to glue SMD switches to custom 3D components in lieu of a PCB. These were subsequently wired up with thin enameled wire, before attaching the original buttons to them following some more plastic surgery.

Some tiny joystick innards were then installed before gluing on the final buttons and joystick caps. As for how it all connects to a real GameCube, here an RP2040 was used to handle the translation of control inputs to the GameCube controller protocol. Then a GameCube controller was sacrificed for its cable and controller connector, but as can be seen in the video it does all work and creates the perfect controller for guests.

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Testing Various Ways To Waterproof FDM Printed Parts

May 30, 2026 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

Along with layer lines, FDM printers are notorious for being neither air- nor water-tight due to the countless very small gaps between the layers. This is very unfortunate if you are trying to FDM print something that should keep water either inside or outside. Although a variety of potential solutions exist, it’s hard to easily compare them. Correspondingly [Half-Baked-Research] decided that the best approach here was to just try everything and pit them against each other.

These solutions include various coatings either in- or outside the part, as well as the foam solution that he tried previously joined by a number of community-suggested alternatives that should not get waterlogged. To properly test them, the water pressure at a depth of about 10 meters would be good enough, but rather than find a really deep swimming pool or try his luck at nearby bodies of water, compressed air was used to ramp up the pressure of a what is basically a big bucket of water.

For the pressure chamber a Vevor vacuum chamber was modified to contain the 1 bar (103 kPa) of pressure, which was a fair bit of work and required a CNCed metal top plate. Among the printed and treated samples were also a couple of wild cards: a PETG cube with a TPU printed cover, a PU molded part and PETG with thicker walls.

Along with the long soak, percussive testing was also performed to see how it’d affect the water intrusion resistance. After all that, there were three winners: internal epoxy coating and two types of internal PU coating, though epoxy held up the best after repeated abuse. PU rubber also got a thumbs-up if you don’t need as high a pressure resistance but are more concerned with resisting physical abuse.

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Recycling Two XBox One Consoles Into A 10 GB USB Flash Drive

May 28, 2026 by Maya Posch 12 Comments

Amidst the ongoing RAM & storage apocalypses, Mad Max-esque scenes are unsurprisingly developing, with the eMMC recycling project by [Chase Fournier] from a pair of XBox One S (‘XBone’) mainboards being just one more example. These mainboards come equipped with a 5 GB eMMC chip installed, alongside 8 GB of DDR3.

Removing the eMMC chips isn’t that complicated and after some reballing fun the chips were both installed on a carrier board with a Norelsys NS1081 controller IC. This provides a USB 3.0 interface and can connect to up to four SD or eMMC memories, with here just two channels used.

Although the eMMC testing device didn’t seem too happy with either chip, after mounting them on the PCB the controller could be programmed and saw both eMMC packages for a grand total of 10 GB storage.

Sequential read performance in CrystalDiskMark was about 140 MB/s while write performance was about 64 MB/s, which is zippy enough for smaller files. Not that you can store more than 10 GB on this USB drive anyway.

Turning the DDR3 ICs on the mainboard into proper DIMM or SODIMM sticks would also be an idea, as even such older memory tech keeps ramping up in demand. As for the XBone X variant with its 12 of GDDR5, that’s probably a harder proposition to repurpose, but recycling old consoles suddenly has become a lot more exciting.

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