Rooting An Amazon Echo Dot

October 31, 2026 by Maya Posch 12 Comments

The Amazon Echo Dot is one of Amazon’s so-called ‘smart speaker’ offerings that tie into their larger Alexa-fueled ecosystem, designed to be a pretty minimalistic device that gives you access to this voice assistant and also the Amazon AWS cloud access to your home. If that latter part isn’t really your jam, you can always try to unshackle the device from the Amazonian cloud by rooting the device, as [Andy] recently did with a 2018 Echo Dot 3.

In addition to the video there is also a blog post in which the steps required to root the device are covered. This is then used to turn the device into a Home Assistant voice satellite, using a Claude-vibecoded project created by [Julian Imhof]. As [Andy] notes, this code seems to work, but it’s completely unaudited so YMMV. Device support is also limited to only certain Echo Dot and Echo Show devices as listed on the project page.

The first step is to gain USB access to the board inside the device, which for USB-less devices like the Dot in question requires opening the device to solder a USB connector onto the test pads that are available on the PCB. For other Echo devices you can just use the existing USB port, which makes this first step slightly easier.

These devices run Fire OS, so basically Android, which means a fairly standard process of unlocking the bootloader and installing the hassmic application that replaces Alexa. During testing [Andy] noticed that voice processing was rather slow, requiring switching from Whisper to Speech-to-Phrase to make simple things like turning a light on not take a minute.

Overall it seems like a pretty decent way to repurpose these devices as ESPHome devices, with a few gotchas when it comes to the resources required for local voice processing.

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Voyager 1 Briefly Goes Silent, Scaring Everyone

October 31, 2026 by Maya Posch 32 Comments

It’s no big secret at this point that we are looking at the final years of the two venerable Voyager spacecraft. With their power supplies diminishing and their 1970s-era electronics still giving it all they got, their teams are working miracles to stretch out the time to the final goodbye for as long as possible. Despite these efforts Voyager 1 went silent for more than 24 hours on October 18 and 19, with the team still trying to figure out what happened.

The most recent change to Voyager 1 was the same ‘big bang’ switching of multiple instruments to lower-power versions, while keeping an eye on keeping the electronics and fuel at reasonable temperatures. This should give both spacecraft a few more years before power reserves fall below usable levels. Whether this switch is related to this communication blackout is currently unknown.

From the diagnostic data that the team obtained after communications were restored it’s clear that a group of thrusters went offline with backup units kicking in, indicating that the onboard computer detected some kind anomaly with the former. Whether this is a recurrence of the clogged fuel lines that has been observed before will have to be investigated.

We still fervently hope that both Voyagers can make it into the 2030s before both of them will fall silent forever. Final goodbyes are never easy, but we are most grateful to the Voyager teams over the decades for going above and beyond to make sure that literally everything has been attempted before those fateful days arrive.

Thanks to [Mark Stevens] for the tip.

Making Internal Combustion Engines Better With More Valves

October 30, 2026 by Maya Posch 36 Comments

When it comes to internal combustion engines (ICEs), it’s generally accepted that each cylinder doesn’t have more valves to let in a fresh fuel mixture and to exhaust the aftermath than absolutely necessary. You could argue in favor of this also because it reduces the amount of valve seat surface and thus the potential for leaks, but there is historical precedent for higher valve counts. Hence [Alexander’s Laboratory] had to give a ten-valve engine a shake, just to see what effect adding more valves has.

A cited historical example is the Yamaha FX750, which features a four-cylinder engine that has three inlet and two outlet valves per cylinder, making for a 20-valve design that is claimed to improve performance, also because each valve can be smaller and lighter than with a single valve per side. Other motorbike manufacturers would also try such configurations, with some fascinating examples shown in the video.

What [Alexander] tries here is to create a 10-valve version, for a symmetric five valves intake and five for exhaust. Rather than building an entire engine from scratch, the largely 3D-printed ICE that was featured in previous videos will be modified with a new cylinder head, replacing the current four-valve one.

For the custom valves large wood screws are used, after making sure that they can take the heat of the combustion. Making even ten of these small valves fit was a challenge, but ultimately got squeezed into a CNCed aluminium and nylon-printed hybrid cylinder head. The existing camshaft was reused by using an adapter that simply drives five valves at the same time.

After some troubleshooting and tuning the engine actually runs pretty well, though sadly no comparison metrics were provided versus the four-valve version of the cylinder head. Hopefully we’ll see this in an upcoming video.

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How Britain Narrowly Escaped A Grid Blackout In June 2026

October 30, 2026 by Maya Posch 16 Comments

Amidst one of the worst heatwaves in European history, Britain’s national grid saw itself faced with a quiet crisis this summer. On June 23rd, the grid frequency dropped to 49.657 Hz, down from the nominal 50 Hz — getting very close to the lower bound before safeties would start disconnecting parts of the grid. In a video by [The Electric Brit] this event is investigated, including its causes and how France’s spare capacity managed to save the day.

Under normal operating conditions the UK grid is kept above 49.8 Hz, with the statutory lower limit being 49.5. Meaning that another drop of 0.157 Hz would have set in motion a series of quite extreme grid protection mechanisms including the possibility of local blackouts.

Fortunately the cessation of energy exports and the importing of French power from hydro and nuclear power stations managed to nip this issue in the bud before it could get any worse. Although an example of correct grid management, it also shows how poorly planned maintenance and events like a heatwave can line up quite a few holes in the cheese slices that invite disaster.

The problems here began weeks prior to the event, with 21.2 GW of generating capacity offline. Of this, 12.6 GW was planned maintenance, another 8.6 GW was unexpectedly offline, while another 2.6 GW of gas generation was mostly unavailable due to the heatwave curtailing production. A couple of interconnections with Ireland and other nations were also down for maintenance, leaving the grid control room with precious few options.

Although the UK’s transmission system operator (TSO) NESO had its predicted capacities for variable renewable sources (VRE) like solar, it could not see local demand and production from e.g. rooftop solar in the control room. This became rather exciting when the evening neared and rooftop solar output dropped. Here NESO turned out to be lucky, but such hidden factors form a major risk factor when such consumers return to grid power.

As VRE sources fell quiet across Europe that evening, this put the onus on remaining generating sources and brought the slowly developing crisis to its apex. Fortunately importing energy from France saved the day here, but there are many lessons to be learned here, many grounded in how complex AC grid management is once you consider all aspects that affect not just generators but also transmission lines.

This event is different from the frequency oscillations that triggered the blackout on the Iberian peninsula in 2025. In that case a problem existed with reactive power management, with oscillations amplified by grid-following converters from solar farms and insufficient capacity on the grid to absorb this surge in reactive power, ultimately leading to the cascading blackout.

Amidst these lessons on grid-management the discussions on whether baseload power generating is truly dead among other tropes, as well as the calls by European TSOs to make grid-forming converters mandatory on VRE generators will no doubt intensify.

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Replicating The Color-Changing Effect Of The Lycurgus Cup

October 29, 2026 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

Although most archaeological finds from ancient civilizations aren’t quite as exciting as what you might expect from the movies, occasionally you come across something that’s truly special. The Lycurgus Cup is one of those, with the 3rd or 4th century CE glass cup and its incredible detail surviving likely because it ended up in church treasuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Now its almost magical dichroic glass effect has been recreated in a modern take by researchers at the University of Sheffield.

The Lycurgus cup with light shining through it. (Credit: Chappsnet, Wikimedia)

Dichroic glass takes on a different color depending on the lighting conditions, with the Lycurgus cup appearing to be green glass when lit from the front and red when light passes through it from behind. This serves to give the portrayed scene – of the demise of King Lycurgus from Greek mythology – an extra boost with the right lighting.

The cause of this dichroic effect in this ancient marvel of glass work was unknown for the longest time, but research on a fragment of the glass revealed that it contains nanoparticles of both gold and silver. Since then a number of researchers have recreated this dichroic glass, with [Lars Kool] et al. using FDM 3D printing to create objects embedded with the same nanoparticles that also display this effect.

Where this work by the University of Sheffield differs is in that it creates the effect not only in glass, but also creating a piece of art in the form of a modified Atlas statue to use it. The resulting dichroic effect is rather similar, which isn’t too shocking since unlike over 1,600 years ago we can now literally see and measure nanoparticles in glass, while adding exact amounts of each to pure glass.

Here’s to raising a dichroic glass cup to bridging the millennia with recreated luxury glass recipes.

Battery Prototype Uses Superextensive Quantum Effects To Charge Faster

October 28, 2026 by Maya Posch 18 Comments

Although the term ‘quantum battery’ is a bit of a vague term, the cell that [Kieran Hymas] et al. demonstrate in a recent paper does seem to suggest that it uses quantum effects to charge faster than would otherwise be possible, with this rate increasing faster than its volume, meaning at a superextensive rate.

The general idea behind a quantum battery is that these somehow use a quantum effect to store and release energy faster than would be possible using classical physics. First proposed in 2013, the initial Dicke model saw its theoretical quantum advantage shot down by 2020, leading to the search for alternative models.

We have previously seen claims of a quantum advantage in batteries based on the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model, such as by [Davide Rossini] et al., but this new paper may be the first prototype cell demonstrating a reproducible effect.

In the here demonstrated cell a microcavity is created with strong light-matter coupling, allowing for both energy storage and discharging, with the illuminated particles super-absorbing the light with what the researchers claim to be due to these particles cooperating using a quantum mechanism. Effectively scaling up the cell would thus scale up the charge- and discharge rate faster than in a conventional chemical cell.

Whether this demonstration can be replicated and expanded upon remains to be seen, naturally. The stored energy in this experiment was very small and the storage time only very brief, so for now it serves primarily as an interesting experimental result for researchers to dig through.

Does Running An E-Paper Display At 30 FPS Destroy It?

October 28, 2026 by Maya Posch 22 Comments

Although e-paper displays are famous for being low-power and lasting essentially forever if not damaged physically, the recent push to drive even cheaper e-paper displays at a framerate like 30 FPS for a decent monochrome gaming experience does raise a few questions. The first being what this does to the power usage of these displays, and the second whether this will wear out the display in short order. To investigate this, [Bo Made It] set up a few experiments.

Subject of this test was a Waveshare ESP32-S3-ePaper board, which had previously been demonstrated running a Game Boy emulator at 30 FPS. With this software running, the board consumed on average about 115 mA, which would run down the device’s 400 mAh battery in about 3.5 hours. From here key was to isolate the power consumption of the display itself, with the system minus the display updates consuming about 90 mA.

Running the frame calculations for the greyscale mode without rendering to the screen pushed that up to 107.6 mA, with even in the 30 FPS greyscale mode the display thus only consuming about 7.4 mA, which is vanishingly small. Clearly the low-power claims of e-paper remain intact even at higher framerates.

As for lifespan, one datasheet gives the typical lifespan as one million updates. This would translate to about 9.3 hours at 30 FPS, though that assumes a full display refresh. Since a smart driver only updates changed pixels, obviously this will be longer, but the question is how much longer, and what will degradation look like?

After running 2.16 million frames of a custom endurance test featuring repeating patterns, some ghosting was apparent, but repeated refreshing made this go away again. This means that so far no permanent damage has been detected within the no doubt conservative limit provided by e-paper manufacturers.

It should be noted that Waveshare itself also recommends against running such high-FPS applications on their device, meaning that this is definitely one big longevity experiment. If actual damage occurs, this means that obviously this won’t be covered under any warranty.

Check out our original coverage of this fast-e-paper hack.

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