Littelfuse Announces Retirement Of The EZ80

October 11, 2026 by Maya Posch 36 Comments

Although the demise of the Zilog Z80 processor has long been predicted, it would seem that this moment has finally arrived. The owner of the Zilog name – Littelfuse – recently sent out PCN ZAC26-0074, notifying customers that they will be taking final orders for the eZ80 and all other microcontroller lines that they currently own.

Over at Mouser, eZ80 parts have correspondingly all been marked as “End of Life”. This comes a few years after the original Z80 and its peripherals were discontinued, with the eZ80 still being an alternative until now.

Any potential sellers will have to put in their orders today, with orders still accepted until December 21 2026, with final deliveries taking place throughout 2027 as Littelfuse winds down its MCU manufacturing. This means that for commercial customers are least this is pretty much the end of the road for any circuit that still uses the eZ80 or similar.

Many of us have fondness for the Z80, which also has led to a potential way that the Z80 can live on. This includes both the many open source cores that are compatible with the Z80, as well as real silicon courtesy of the TinyTapeout project.

Thanks to [Techokami] for the tip.

Inside A Mystery 1980s Filter IC Featuring Switched Capacitors

October 11, 2026 by Maya Posch 7 Comments

Recently [Ken Shirriff] got handed a mystery IC by [CuriousMarc] who had found said IC in a box of various old chips. Labelled only with a date code of the 47th week of 1985 and a mysterious F1-10-5 alongside a logo that didn’t lead to any hits in the typical IC databases, it was up to [Ken] to figure out what lurks inside this CDIP chip.

As it turns out, it’s actually a pretty interesting IC with an easy to identify die once the ceramic package had been cracked open with a surgical hammer-and-chisel strike.

With the die under a microscope it was identified as a Harris HF10, itself a variant of the National Semiconductor MF10. This is a dual switched capacitor filter, with the modern version being e.g. the TI MF10-N in both PDIP and SOIC, but sadly no CDIP any more. Availability seems scarce, so the MF10 may not be long for this world.

These filter ICs can tune their capacitors to act as a low-, band- or high-pass filter. How this works is explained by [Ken], with switched capacitors replacing the resistors of a typical filter circuit. The main reasons for doing this over just using a resistor include how large resistors can get compared to the relatively small capacitor, not to mention their fixed value versus the adjustable resistance from the switchable capacitor.

The remainder of the circuit is mostly there to enable the switching and overall operation, providing a fascinating glimpse at a chip that would have been incredibly useful in the 1980s, including in synthesizers where this adjustable filter feature was most convenient.

Unique Archeological Discovery Sheds Light On Neanderthal Wooden Tool Usage

October 10, 2026 by Maya Posch 6 Comments

The Abric Romaní site in Spain is rather unique in archeology for one simple reason: the caves in its limestone-rich cliff have seen humanoid occupation for thousands of years. A thick layer of calcium carbonate-based travertine deposit has, over time, covered and largely preserved tools and other implements, including those made of wood. Over many decades of archeological exploration, 597 wooden imprints have been uncovered, with a recent research article by [Palmira Saladié] et al. detailing these findings.

Wood is one of those archaeological artefacts that are very elusive due to their fragility, even though we know that wood has been used pretty much everywhere from the first day that a humanoid critter discovered that branches make great clubs and spears, and can also easily be shaped to make them even more useful.

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Poking At The Radxa Dragon Q8B Raspberry Pi 5 Killer

October 10, 2026 by Maya Posch 24 Comments

Although the asking price of $209 plus shipping seems high for the Radxa Dragon Q8B, featuring the Qualcomm SC8280XP and 8 GB of LPDDR4X, this is 2026, and amid the RAMpocalypse, even the 8 GB LPDDR4X-equipped Raspberry Pi 5 now costs $175. This, to [Jeff Geerling], makes it fair to directly compare the two to see whether you may want to consider this board for more intense computing purposes.

There’s also a written summary of the results and details in a GitHub issue, though the direct comparison with the Raspberry Pi 5 is in the video.

Although this Qualcomm SoC isn’t new, its primary use is for Windows laptops, which gives somewhat of a hint as to what its performance may be like, tempered by the fact that it was announced in 2021.

The Dragon QXB offers about 2x everything over the RPi5, plus Windows and UEFI support. For Linux, it appears that you still need customized images, which seems perplexing in light of the UEFI aspect. You also have to pick between different Linux images from Radxa and use their Rsetup update tool, making it a less than newbie-friendly offering.

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Embedded 3D Printing With Liquids On A Bricked Prusa FDM Printer

October 9, 2026 by Maya Posch 6 Comments

Recently [Riley] got his paws on an old Prusa i3 FDM printer that had clearly seen better days, with a hot-end that had suffered an explosive blow-out. For the project he had in mind this was of course perfect, as his intention was to replace the hot-end with a syringe system for embedded 3D printing (E3DP), which uses a supportive medium to allow for the printing of materials and structures that would be impossible with just air.

Generally in additive manufacturing (AM) methods like fused deposition modelling (FDM) the material is extruded onto a build plate or a previous layer where it solidifies. This works great for materials like thermoplastics, but for other materials having only the surrounding air as support is just a recipe for a big mess. With E3DP the liquid is instead extruded into a supportive material at a selectable depth and volume, opening up a whole range of possibilities.

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Introducing The Garlic-Powered Door And Window Sensor

October 8, 2026 by Maya Posch 13 Comments

Most home security sensors require a chemical battery or external power source to operate, which can be a point of weakness. If the battery in a window or door sensor dies overnight and nobody is there to swap it, it might miss that one intruder or mess up your carefully curated home automation system. In that sense self-powered sensors are rather interesting, such as this one by [Manas Tiwari] and [Deepak Bharti] that is based around the triboelectric effect.

The research article is sadly paywalled, but the IEEE Spectrum article covers all the salient details. The sensor uses ground up garlic peel for the positive side of this triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) as they call it, with a sheet of polyethylene (PE) forming the negative side. Once installed on a door frame, opening said door generates about 210 VAC with a 45 µA short circuit current. A dual-side layer of garlic peel bumps this up to 400 VAC and 65 µA.

As installed, the researchers used this generated current to detect changes using a separate MCU running off a powerbank, which obviously does not really solve the ‘running out of charge’ issue. The generated power could conceivably be used to send a brief wireless packet to a receiver elsewhere in the room, somewhat like the Bluetooth link in the example, but more low-power.

The researchers also reported that this sensor was still functional after half a year in storage, and survived 200 stress cycles, which seems like a good start for what appears to be a very cheap sensor to construct.

Turning A Run-Over Samsung Galaxy S23 Into A Gaming PC

October 8, 2026 by Maya Posch 27 Comments

Repurposing old smartphones for more general purpose computing isn’t a new thing, but the project by [LastComputer] ups the ante by going from a Samsung Galaxy S23 that looks like it got run over by at least a few cars to a very serviceable gaming computer, courtesy of its Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC.

The somehow still working but definitely worse for wear phone was purchased for 1,700 Ukrainian Hryvnia (~$40). It being SIM locked also helped reduce the price, even if someone had somehow wanted to use it again as a phone. Since the SoC inside is also used in quite capable gaming handhelds, but with good cooling, that would be a real waste.

Converting it into proper gaming system requires some careful disassembly, some gentle whacking with a hammer to straighten out the frame and a new battery as the mainboard won’t work without one installed.

A 3D-printed phone case glued to an SSD cage for the 512 GB SSD serves as the enclosure, along with two USB hubs, one of which also provides HDMI output. For the active cooling system a heatsink was hot-glued to the vapor chamber with a properly sized fan mounted to it. Here we could definitely see some zip ties being added to prevent it from falling off.

Compared to running the phone in its stock cooling configuration this shaves off about seven degrees C, with thermal throttling noticeably reduced. This consequently provides a much better desktop experience in Samsung’s DeX (Desktop eXperience) desktop mode, which is what’s used for running applications and games.

Running God of War as an emulated PS2 game works pretty well, as does running games with the Dolphin emulator and the GameHub app using which PC games on Steam, GoG and others can be run. Although you can also install other OSes on the phone hardware, Samsung DeX doesn’t appear to be a bad option if you happen to repurpose a high-end Samsung phone that supports this mode.

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