Making A Retro(ish) Game Console From Scratch

August 2, 2026 by Maya Posch 10 Comments

As easy as it is to make a late 1980s-style game console using a modern microcontroller, there’s arguably more fun in doing things the traditional way. This is the challenge that [Throaty Mumbo] took upon himself when he embarked on his retro game console project, called simply the Game Console V2.

In the accompanying video the development process and other details are covered and demonstrated. Most notable perhaps are the proper cartridges with ROMs on a parallel bus rather than something like SD cards, and the absence of any modern ports including even VGA. This means only composite AV output like in the good old days of RF splitters and other assorted fun.

The NTSC output signal is generated by an RP2350 MCU in the form of the PGA-shaped PGA2350 breakout board that’s wired into a 6-bit R-2R network for RGB332 output via the RCA jack, while audio is fed into a PCM5102A I2S DAC. For controllers you get 4-pin Bulgin SA2367 connectors and an N64-compatible protocol.

It’s noted that the use of an RP2350B MCU is temporary, as the goal with the V3 version of the project is to take it into a proper 8- or 16-bit CPU direction. We’re certainly looking forward to seeing this next revision of what looks to be a pretty interesting game console.

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Turning Fruits Into Ethylene And Ethane Refrigerant

August 2, 2026 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

One of the best parts about DIY chemistry and physics projects is that you get to decide how early in the supply chain you want to begin, such as with [Hyperspace Pirate]’s adventures in ethanol production from sugar fermentation. Although you can certainly just buy packs of sugar and yeast from the store and pretend that this will be helpful once the world embraces its Mad Max era, you may as well start with the stuff that actually grows on trees, like fruit.

While you could use the ethanol produced this way as ethanol fuel in combustion engines and the like, you can also turn the ethanol into ethylene and ethane. That way you can fill up your refrigerator, freezer, and air conditioner to keep your perishable foods and yourself fresh as the outside world descends into highly questionable fashion choices.

Even outside such a scenario it makes sense to generate your own ethane and ethylene, due to how much these refrigerants cost. Once you have the ethanol, some aluminium oxide catalyst at 350°C is enough to produce ethylene and water. Producing ethane is admittedly a bit more involved, requiring acetobacter bacteria to produce acetic acid, along with baking soda, a platinum anode and a few more odds and ends.

Producing butene and even longer chains from ethylene is also possible as a next step, but this gets even hairier than producing ethane from ethanol, so we’re likely to see this in a future update after all the low-hanging fruit has been harvested.

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The Seven Sensors And Breakout Boards To Avoid In A Product

August 2, 2026 by Maya Posch 57 Comments

We’ve all seen these sensors and modules kicking around, as part of beginner kits, strapped into prototypes and potentially even in products deployed in the field. Yet as [John Teel] rightfully points out in a recent video, most of these have no business ever being used in a real product, and might not even be suitable for prototyping.

First up is a combination of the related DHT11 and DHT22 temperature-humidity sensors. As common as these are, they’re also pretty sketchy with their proprietary one-wire protocol and at most questionable accuracy, worsened by not having a good supply chain. The replacements are plentiful: the SHT40 and SHT41, the Bosch Sensortec BME280 or BMP180, as well as TI’s HDC3020. These get you standard I2C communication and a supply chain plus a datasheet you can trust.

Second is the HC-SR04 ultrasonic distance sensor. Although fine for prototyping, it’s a 5 V module, lacks temperature compensation and other features that’d be needed outside a temperature-controlled room. Here ST’s VL53 Time-of-Flight sensors are a good alternative, containing a range of sensors of which we covered the fancier VL53L5CX previously for 3D scanning a room. Of course, you can also use reflective IR as a good cheap alternative.

Third is the HC-SR501 passive infrared (PIR) motion module. This one is also fine for PIR and motion sensing prototyping, but is too inconsistent and power-hungry for production. Instead you can get much better and much smaller PIR modules, like the Panasonic EKMC and EKMB, or the ST STHS34 IR motion and presence sensor.

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Testing A 3D Printed Cycloidal Gearbox Design

August 1, 2026 by Maya Posch 3 Comments

Cycloidal gearboxes are a recurring theme in the hobbyist space due to the performance they promise in a compact package. They are capable of taking in a high-speed input and reducing it down to a set ratio with very low backlash, which theoretically makes them perfect for a wide range of projects where size and weight matter. Correspondingly, [Advanced Hobby Lab] has been tinkering with a 3D printed design to fit on NEMA 17 stepper motors.

For [Advanced Hobby Lab] the primary goal was to check that his cycloidal gearbox design was a real improvement over the planetary gearbox alternative. Although the 3D printed cycloidal drive worked well enough, some testing put real numbers to it, including a 92% efficiency. The gearbox also adds some noise over the stepper motor, but less so than the 3D printed planetary gearbox.

Of course, all of this is within the limits of FDM 3D printing and with a few metal parts, so there’s always room for improvement, but in the world of hobbyist 3D printed gearboxes it’s not a bad showing. The print and project files are available for anyone who is also feeling the itch. Of course, you can also opt for the dual-nested cycloidal design that we recently featured, as it promises to be even more compact, have even fewer parts and smoother action.

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Casual Repair And Maintenance On An Amiga 1000

July 31, 2026 by Maya Posch 16 Comments

Recently [Drygol] had an Amiga 1000 system over for some repairs as well as maintenance and general TLC. This is a Motorola 68000-based home computer from 1985 that also has the distinction of being the first Amiga system to be released by Commodore. At a time when the IBM PC was still strutting its monochrome and EGA graphics alongside PC speaker beeps, the Amiga 1000 featured relatively high-res graphics and advanced stereo audio courtesy of special accelerator chips.

Overall the system was in a pretty good condition, even coming with the very nifty modern Parceiro expansion that adds 8 MB of fast RAM, an SD card slot and RTC. This thus meant that they mostly just had to perform the typical maintenance task, such as recapping the PSU and mainboard, as well as recapping and lubing up the floppy drive. The original 230 VAC fan in the PSU also got swapped with a 12V unit that was much quieter.

After disassembling the keyboard for some deep cleaning and retr0brighting, a little glitch in the form of the use of a too long screw by a previous owner was addressed, as well as a broken plastic clip. With how little attention the Amiga 1000 received after its release it’s good to see some of these units still kicking.

Turning Glass Into A Touch-Sensitive Button

July 31, 2026 by Maya Posch 4 Comments

Although generally glass isn’t associated with touch-sensitive surfaces, the addition of an ITO (indium tin oxygen) coating adds the exciting property of not only being transparent to the visible light part of the electromagnetic spectrum, but also of being electrically conductive. The logical result is that fine folk like [Sokol] simply had to use their newly acquired ITO-coated glass to make a button out of.

Here the easy option is of course to just use it as a capacitive sensor where the conductive ITO layer is used for the capacitive charge and the glass provides the insulator, but here we see it demonstrated how to create a pressure-sensitive implementation instead.

The measured conductivity on the ITO-coated glass in the video is pretty good, at just over 20 Ohm. This thus makes said capacitive button very easy to achieve. To make it a touch-sensitive button, two pieces of glass are used, with the ITO sides facing. Paper is used to create a spacer, after which the slight flex of the glass allows for the two ITO surfaces to touch, completing the circuit.

This is somewhat similar to how resistive touch screens work, with the position of the finger or stylus determined by the resistance between the two sides. In a hobbyist setup this would make it fairly easy to create a multi-position touch screen using just two pieces of glass and some firmware.

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Using The Chimney Effect To Drop Passively Cooled PC Temperatures

July 31, 2026 by Maya Posch 33 Comments

The stack effect — also known as the chimney effect — is the basic principle that hot air not only rises, but if guided through a tube, the rising hot air will create more pressure that will effectively draw air more effectively into the tube. This is not only great for a chimney, but also a useful principle if you seek to cool something like a PC in a more passive manner. The main question is of course how much of a ‘chimney’ you need to see real effects for something like a typical water-cooled CPU’s radiator, as demonstrated by [der8auer] in a recent video.

Although there’s a lot of fun physics behind the stack effect that you can run the numbers on, the more practical demonstration here using 3D printed funnel segments for the radiator and various thermometers provides a very hands-on feeling for what you can expect from this approach.

With just a single segment stacked there is already a clearly noticeable temperature change, with the second segment creating a draft as visualized by the smoke machine. After this he goes for broke with the full stack and a resulting 19°C temperature drop on the CPU. While impressive, at this point the required funnel gets a bit silly, though the same principle has been applied to computer cases before, including the passively-cooled Power Mac G4 Cube and the 90-degrees-rotated SilverStone Raven series of cases, like the RV02.

The basic idea of making use of the fact that hot air rises, and maybe also banking on the stack effect for some free passive cooling, clearly isn’t so crazy.

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