Comparing 12 VDC Air Fryers With Regular 240 VAC Ones

April 16, 2026 by Maya Posch 18 Comments

That boiling water is a contentious topic of discussion is clear, but what about hot air? When you take a 12 VDC, 280 Watt-rated air fryer and pit it against a bog-standard 240 VAC, 1400 Watt unit, which one would you want to use when you’re doing some camping or other exciting off-the-grid opportunities? Unlike with boiling water the physics aren’t as clear-cut here, so [Cahn] did some testing to figure out exactly what the efficiency numbers look like

Since air fryers rely on the transfer of thermal energy from the resistive heating element into the food, any thermal energy that’s not immediately transferred is effectively wasted. This, combined with the relatively low power rating and thus much higher time demand of the low-voltage air fryer is enough to set one’s expectations pretty low.

As scientific test samples chicken nuggets were used with the test, following a preheating period for the 12 VDC unit. Both units managed to hit a safe temperature inside the nuggets after 20 minutes, thus successfully staving off food poisoning, but the browning with the 240 VAC air fryer was much better.

As for the efficiency, the 12 VDC unit required 150 Wh for 20 minutes plus the 10 minutes of preheating, with 45 minutes total at 225 Watt to get proper browning. Meanwhile the 240 VAC unit burned through 250 Wh in 20 minutes, with no pre-heating, though only 230 Wh with no inverter losses included. As a final test, the 12 VDC unit was run at 400 Watt using 14.6 VDC input, which did indeed get it up to temperature much faster.

Thus both are equivalent, just with the caveat that the low-voltage unit will take considerably more time to get the same result. This mirrors the results with boiling water, where most options mostly vary in how much time they require to get water up to a boiling temperature.

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Do We Really Need Another Development Board?

April 16, 2026 by Maya Posch 34 Comments

It’s fair to say that there are a lot of development board form factors for MCUs, with [Tech Dregs] over on yonder YouTube on the verge of adding another one to the pile, but not before he was having some serious thoughts on the implications of such a decision. Does this world really need another devboard with the ubiquitous 2.54 mm (0.1″) pitch pin headers, all so that it can perhaps be used in the same traditional 2.54 mm pitch breadboards?

The thought that [Tech Dregs] is playing with is to go for something more akin to the system-on-module (SoM) approach that’s reminiscent of the Raspberry Pi compute module form factor. This means using a 1 mm pitch for the headers and castellated edges in case you want use it as an SMT part, while breaking out many more pins of the onboard ESP32 module in far less space.

Obviously, the main advantage of this approach is that much like with compute modules you can leave most of the tedious cheap stuff on a carrier board, while the expensive to manufacture components are on a self-contained module. Meanwhile with the much finer pitch on the SoM contacts it’d straddle the divide between a 2.54 mm breadboard-capable devboard and a fully custom PCB, while making any mistakes on the carrier board much cheaper to redo.

The counterpoint here is of course that something like an ESP32 module is already a module with a finer pitch, but if you need more than just what it offers, or you want to use an STM32 or RP MCU across boards it could make a lot of sense.

Having 1 mm pitch breadboards would honestly also be rather nifty, natch. That said, what are your thoughts on this matter?

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Trying To Build Your Own Consumer-Grade Router In 2026

April 16, 2026 by Maya Posch 42 Comments

Although we have many types of networking equipment with many unique names, at their core they can usually be reduced to just a computer with some specific peripherals. This is especially the case for something like a router, a device found in just about any home these days. Certain consumer-grade routers may contain something special like a VDSL modem, but most of them just have a WAN Ethernet jack on one end and one or more LAN-facing Ethernet ports.

All further functionality is implemented in software, including any firewall, routing and DHCP features. What this means is that any old PC with at least two Ethernet ports or equivalent can be a router as long as you install the appropriate software.

In this article we’ll be taking a look at what consumer-level options there exist here today, ideally something so simple that the average home user could set it up with a bit of coaching.

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Cooking A Raspberry Pi FireWire HAT With Backfeeding

April 15, 2026 by Maya Posch 7 Comments

Recently [Jeff Geerling] has been tinkering with FireWire in order to use some older gear, which includes the use of a Raspberry Pi HAT called the Firehat. This provides a 6-pin FireWire port courtesy of the VIA VT6315N PCIe-to-FireWire chipset. As is typical with USB gear today as well, some FireWire gear requires more power than a port can provide, requiring the use of a powered hub. Unfortunately the use of a powered FireWire hub caused a bit of a conflagration event on [Jeff]’s desk.

Part of the issue appears to be that this Firehat board was designed as a companion to the Equip-1 DV capture device, with no attention paid to the idea that someone might be backfeeding power from an attached hub. As a result the VIA chip cried uncle and let out the magic smoke.

With this Firehat board taking its name clearly a bit too literal, [Jeff] will be reporting his findings to the developers, in the hope that perhaps some diodes or another solution against backfeeding can be added to the final design. Fortunately he was sent this board for testing prior to public release, so this definitely shows a clear flaw that can now be corrected.

We hope that [Jeff] has a good HEPA air filtration setup in his office to get rid of the acrid magic smoke, as it’s not meant to be enjoyed for long periods.

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DOOM On A Fancy Smart Toaster

April 15, 2026 by Maya Posch 13 Comments

Although toasters should be among the most boring appliances in a household – with perhaps just a focus on making their toasting more deterministic rather than somewhere between ‘still frozen’ and ‘charcoal’ – somehow companies keep churning out toasters that just add very confusing ‘smart’ features. Of course, if a toaster adds a big touch screen and significant processing power, you may as well run DOOM on it, as was [Aaron Christophel]’s reflexive response.

While unboxing the Aeco Toastlab Elite toaster, [Aaron] is positively dumbfounded that they didn’t also add WiFi to the thing. Although on the bright side, that should mean no firmware updates being pushed via the internet. During the disassembly it can be seen that there’s an unpopulated pad for a WiFi chip and an antenna connection, making it clear that the PCB is a general purpose PCB that will see use in other appliances.

The SoC is marked up as a K660L with an external flash chip. Dumping the firmware is very easy, with highly accessible UART that spits out a ‘Welcome to ArtInChip Luban-Lite’ message. After some reverse-engineering the SoC turned out to be a rebranded RISC-V-based ArtInChip D133CxS, with a very usable SDK by the manufacturer. From there it was easy enough to get DOOM to run, with the bonus feature of needing to complete a level before the toaster will give the slice back.

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Flattening The Exhaust Of A Laser Cutter To Save Space

April 14, 2026 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

From laser cutters to 3D printers, having an exhaust duct at the back of a machine is a very common sight. However, these tend to be rather bulky, claiming many centimeters of precious space behind a machine even if you’d want to push it right up against a wall. This issue annoyed [TheNeedleStacker] over on YouTube so much that he had a poke at solving this problem with angled exhaust ducts, all hopefully without impairing its basic function.

Smoke machine and laser for some air ducting rave vibes. (Credit: TheNeedleStacker, YouTube) — Smoke machine and laser for some air ducting rave vibes.

Although there are some online offerings for angled exhaust port extenders, these do not quite fit the required 6″ diameter. Reducing the problem to just a matter of cross section area for simplicity’s sake, that means a 19″ wide duct at a depth of 1.5″. Making sure the transition from the tube to the flat duct doesn’t become an impediment is the tricky part, so the approach here was to mostly ignore it and just make a functional prototype to get an idea of how a direct approach worked.

Installing the contraption worked out fine, and subsequent testing showed that although it seems to slightly reduce the effective airflow compared to the flex tubing, it is absolutely rad to look at with the transparent cover and some laser light to illuminate all that’s happening inside.

While some optimization work on the duct transitions can undoubtedly eke out more performance, it’s certainly not bad for a quick project.

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New Linux Kernel Rules Put The Onus On Humans For AI Tool Usage

April 14, 2026 by Maya Posch 17 Comments

It’s fair to say that the topic of so-called ‘AI coding assistants’ is somewhat controversial. With arguments against them ranging from code quality to copyright issues, there are many valid reasons to be at least hesitant about accepting their output in a project, especially one as massive as the Linux kernel. With a recent update to the Linux kernel documentation the use of these tools has now been formalized.

The upshot of the use of such Large Language Models (LLM) tools is that any commit that uses generated code has to be signed off by a human developer, and this human will ultimately bear responsibility for the code quality as well as any issues that the code may cause, including legal ones. The use of AI tools also has to be declared with the Assisted-by: tag in contributions so that their use can be tracked.

When it comes to other open source projects the approach varies, with NetBSD having banished anything tainted by ‘AI’, cURL shuttering its bug bounty program due to AI code slop, and Mesa’s developers demanding that you understand generated code which you submit, following a tragic slop-cident.

Meanwhile there are also rising concerns that these LLM-based tools may be killing open source through ‘vibe-coding’, along with legal concerns whether LLM-generated code respects the original license of the code that was ingested into the training model. Clearly we haven’t seen the end of these issues yet.