Using A Waffle To Check The Health Of Your Wii U’s NAND Flash

October 13, 2026 by Maya Posch 14 Comments

Game consoles tend to have a weak spot or two that will take certain units out sooner than they would due to normal parts aging. In the case of the Wii U it’s the eMMC storage IC with the console’s firmware and any user data that likes to keel over, with the SK Hynix variant reportedly developing faulty cells much sooner than the Samsung and Toshiba chips. If you want to check the health of these eMMC ICs in your Wii U, you can do so easily now with the Wafel Installer project by [zer00p].

This doesn’t take much more than navigating to the wafel.xyz URL on the Wii U to launch the installer on any (unmodified) Wii U, or alternatively starting it from an SD card if you’re running a homebrew-enabled console. This can also install the Stroopwafel CFW, ISFSax and the Aroma homebrew environment, but the NAND testing option in the installer’s menu is what you want to select if you’re not into homebrew or have already cracked open the console for said sweet homebrew action.

All of this is covered in this video by [FunkyScott47], whose Wii U’s Samsung-branded eMMC is fortunately still all fine, but it shows off the variety of tests available. Unless the eMMC is already quite cooked this should take only a minute or two, so it’s pretty good for ease of mind.

With the heavily waffle, syrup and stroopwafel-coded naming scheme for these tools we can not be held responsible for a sudden case of the munchies, of course.

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Counting The PET Bottles Needed To Make 1 Kg Of Printer Filament

October 13, 2026 by Maya Posch 33 Comments

In countries where PET bottles do not get slapped with an additional fee that induces you to return it for recycling and said fee back, the resulting piles of discarded bottles have led many enterprising individuals to consider using them to make their own PETG filament. One big question of course is just how much work it is to create even a single 1 kg spool of PETG, which is a question that [PETCraft] was only too happy to answer in a recent video.

With the channel owner clearly living in a country without a bottle deposit, it’s very easy to see PET bottles strewn about as trash, including multi-liter water bottles. As a very recycling-focused channel, this provides an excellent opportunity to show how they go about recycling these into filament.

The heat-smoothed water bottles, ready for cutting.

The detailed process is covered in previous videos in the channel, but essentially they are first heat-smoothed to make them much easier to cut into thin strips. This is done with a very DIY cutter – also constructed from mostly salvaged and other common parts – before the strips are passed through the heated extruder nozzle of the DIY filament extruder before being wound onto spools.

Ultimately it took thirteen 5 liter bottles, a 10 L, two 8 L and a single 1.5 L bottle to hit the 1 kg target, which is quite an impressive amount of work. The next challenge will be to actually print with it, which will – naturally – be done with a DIY 3D printer made from salvaged parts and an Arduino board.

The good news about recycling bottles like this into filament is that basically all PET bottles will actually be PETG anyway, as the glycol adds the flexibility that’s essential in water bottles so that they do not shatter or rip easily. The real question you have to ask yourself is whether cleaning, cutting and spooling dozens of bottles is worth saving perhaps 10-20 bucks on a commercial spool of 1 kg PETG filament.

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Using Kirigami Techniques To Make Functional Designs

October 12, 2026 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

The variant of origami called kirigami (‘cut paper’ in Japanese) also starts off with a sheet of paper, but it allows for cutting the paper to increase the number of shapes that you can create. It is this technique that [Matthew Lim] used to create a number of three-dimensional designs that can convert between a flat configuration and some kind of functional object without any bolts, glue or similar. These include everything from a phone grip to a pretty sizeable side table.

The video starts with an interesting demonstration of how to fold an origami crane that has a smaller crane on its back. This is documented in a 1797 book on the many ways to fold a crane, with one of the first known instances where cuts are made in the single sheet of paper, which becomes the second, much smaller crane.

The same book extends that idea into making an origami grid that can fold into a grid of cranes after making a series of cuts. Later this form of origami got the name ‘kirigami’, with the video demonstrating how a few strategic cuts in an original flat shape can make it much more functional, based on scientific papers like this 2024 one by [Liu] et al. on cylindrical origami with tunable mechanical behavior.

For these functional mechanisms a laser cutter and FDM printer are used to prototype and test increasingly more advanced versions of the pop-up mechanism, before moving on to make full-sized furniture using plywood panels and 3D printed hinges. The coolest part about the resulting table is that it can be changed into different configurations, with the mechanism locking into its new position to make a relatively stable new shape.

Even if not immediately practical, these mechanisms provide interesting options for robotics and flat-pack furniture alike, as well as in applications like space exploration where every gram and cubic millimeter of space counts.

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The Prusa Core One+ INDX, A Troubled Multi-Extruder Upgrade?

October 12, 2026 by Maya Posch 15 Comments

The Prusa Core One+ INDX is an interesting upgrade to the base FDM printer by Prusa, featuring eight independent extruders – hence the INDX – that in theory should allow for multi-material and multi-color printing with very little purge waste. As [Thomas Sanladerer] found out during his experiences with this printer, there are a lot of issues with this machine, including the ability – or lack thereof – to print with non-Prusa filament.

Although the premise is solid, with a claimed 0.013 grams of purge waste per color or material change along with pretty nice dual-gear Bondtech extruders, the first major hurdle that [Thomas] encountered was that the mandatory calibration sequence on starting a print is designed to only work with Prusa’s own filament and its specific material properties. This resulted in an inability to print with Voxel PLA until [Thomas] removed this sequence manually from the g-code.

This is when [Thomas] found out that the entire print sequence uses the material presets for Prusa’s filament, resulting in a failed print. The results from the manual calibration are also not saved despite the display claiming it does, making this calibration on starting a print absolutely mandatory.

Other issues found are the useless position of the camera as it’s now blocked-off by the INDX hardware, with even manual peeking into the print chamber being heavily obscured by the contraption that holds the extruders. This makes even checking that filament has loaded correctly is borderline impossible, never mind ogling the printing process.

Although there’s a lot to like about this INDX upgrade to the Core One+, the above and other issues discussed in the video make it look somewhat shaky next to competitors like the Bambu Lab H2C and Snapmaker U1, as well as Prusa’s own XL toolchanger printers. During [Thomas]’s print test comparison between the XL and the Core One+ INDX there was no contest that the XL simply works, whereas the INDX even struggles with some Prusa filaments.

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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 7 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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