Espressif’s New ESP32-S31: Dual-Core RISC-V With WiFi 6 And GBit Ethernet

April 8, 2026 by Maya Posch 34 Comments

In a move that’s no doubt going to upset and confuse many, Espressif has released its newest microcontroller — the ESP32-S31. The confusing part here is that the ESP32-S series was always the one based on Tensilica Xtensa LX7 cores, while the ESP32-C series was the one using RISC-V cores.

That said, if one looks at it as a beefier -S3 MCU it does have some appealing upgrades. The most obvious improvements are with the use of WiFi 6, as well as Bluetooth Classic and LE 5.4, including LE Audio. There is also Thread and Zigbee support for those who are into such things.

The Ethernet MAC got a bump from the 100 Mbit RMII MAC in previous MCUs and is now gigabit-rated, while the number of GPIO is significantly higher at 60 instead of 45 on the -S3. On the RAM side, things are mostly the same, except for DDR PSRAM support, with octal SPI offering up to 250 MHz compared to 80 MHz on the -S3.

On the CPU side the up-to-320 MHz RISC-V cores are likely to be about as powerful as the 240 MHz LX7 cores in the -S3, based on the ESP32-C series performance in terms of IPC. Overall it does seem like a pretty nice MCU, it’s just confusing that it doesn’t use LX7 cores with the series it was put into. When this MCU will be available for sale doesn’t seem to be known yet, with only samples available to select customers.

Intel 486 Support Likely To Be Removed In Linux 7.1

April 7, 2026 by Maya Posch 43 Comments

Although everyone’s favorite Linux overlord [Linus Torvalds] has been musing on dropping Intel 486 support for a while now, it would seem that this time now has finally come. In a Linux patch submitted by [Ingo Molnar] the first concrete step is taken by removing support for i486 in the build system. With this patch now accepted into the ‘tip’ branch, this means that no i486-compatible image can be built any more as it works its way into the release branches, starting with kernel 7.1.

No mainstream Linux distribution currently supports the 486 CPU, so the impact should be minimal, and there has been plenty of warning. We covered the topic back in 2022 when [Linus] first floated the idea, as well as in 2025 when more mutterings from the side of [Linus] were heard, but no exact date was offered until now.

It remains to be seen whether 2026 is really the year when Linux says farewell to the Intel 486 after doing so for the Intel 386 back in 2012. We cannot really imagine that there’s a lot of interest in running modern Linux kernels on CPUs that are probably older than the average Hackaday reader, but we could be mistaken.

Meanwhile, we got people modding Windows XP to be able to run on the Intel 486, opening the prospect that modern Windows might make it onto these systems instead of Linux in the ultimate twist of irony.

Magnetic Levitation Using An Induction Cooktop

April 7, 2026 by Maya Posch 7 Comments

Adding another item on the list of things you probably shouldn’t be trying at home, we got [Brainiac75] giving magnetic levitation a shot using an unmodified induction cooktop and aluminium foil. Although not ferromagnetic, it turns out that aluminium can be made to do interesting things in the magnetic field created by the powerful electromagnet that underlies the induction principle.

Interestingly, although there’s a detection circuit in these units that should detect the presence of an appropriate (ferromagnetic) object, it appears that even a thin sheet of aluminium foil can completely deceive it. The effect is that of a force pushing the foil away from the cooktop’s surface, with foil areas that remain close enough to the ferrite bars on the electromagnet even heating up enough to begin melting the aluminium.

After a bit of fun with various shapes and types of aluminium objects, the video moves on to a scientific explanation of what’s going on. The surface resistivity of the foil is similar enough to ferromagnetic cookware that it fools the sensor, after which the skin effect of aluminium induces a current. This then does the typical Lorentz force things.

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Rescuing A Pokémon Off A Pokéwalker After Losing The Game Cartridge

April 6, 2026 by Maya Posch No comments

The Pokéwalker is a gadget that was sold alongside the Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver games for the Nintendo DS which players could use to take a Pokémon out on a walk in the real world. Not only would you earn points while walking, but you’d be able to find items, battle wild enemies, etc. The Pokémon inside the device is however linked to the game cartridge. This fact turned into tragedy when [Etchy] found his old Pokéwalker with a treasured Pokémon still on it, but was forced to erase the device as he had lost the cartridge over the years.

Although he had been told repeatedly by then that it was impossible to transfer such a digital pet to a new save file, this never felt right. Although it made some sense that a specific critter would be linked to a specific save file as a level of security, there’s also the question of whether all data of the Pokémon in question would be erased from said save file.

Cloning a Snickers. {Credit: Etchy, YouTube)

Fortunately, [Dmitry] has reverse-engineered the Pokéwalker already, including the infrared protocol that uses the IR transceiver in the cartridge itself. As it turns out, only some basic information is sent over to the device, while the Pokémon is simply hidden in the save file, including the data that isn’t sent to the device. Case closed, right?

It would be a sad ending for those who have lost Pokémon on these devices if it was that simple, fortunately. After some digging, [Etchy] found out that the device only checks for three pieces of information to ensure that it is being accessed from a valid game session: the version (HeartGold or SoulSilver), the region (NA, JP, etc.), and the training and secret IDs.

This thus means that if you try long enough, or use an RNG manipulation hack as demonstrated, you can get a new save file created that has the exact same IDs. As long as you make sure that your local critter’s details in terms of species and form are the same as on the device, there’s nothing really stopping the device from happily handing over the critter’s details.

Of course, the real thing that defines a single Pokémon is its ID (PID) that defines its properties, and this is only saved in the save file. The final answer is thus that there’s no way to rescue a trapped Pokémon, as it only really exists on the cartridge that may or may not still exist in some physical form.

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Playing DVDs On The Sega Dreamcast

April 6, 2026 by Maya Posch 10 Comments

Although the Sega Dreamcast had many good qualities that made it beloved by the thousands of people who bought the console, one glaring omission was the lack of DVD video capabilities. Despite its optical drive being theoretically capable of such a feat, Sega had opted to use the GD-ROM disc format to not have to cough up DVD licensing fees, while the PlayStation 2 could play DVD movies. Fortunately it’s possible to hack DVD capability into the Dreamcast if you aren’t too fussy about the details, as [Throaty Mumbo] recently demonstrated.

For the Tl;dw folk among us, there’s a GitHub repository that contains the basic summary and all needed files. Suffice it to say that it is a bit of a kludge, but on the bright side it does not require one to modify the Dreamcast. Instead it uses a Pico 2 board that emulates a Sega DreamEye camera on the Dreamcast’s Maple bus via the controller port. The Dreamcast then requests image data as if from said camera.

On the DVD side of things there’s a Raspberry Pi 5 that connects to an external USB DVD drive and which encodes the video for transmission via USB to the Pico 2 board. Although somewhat sketchy, it totally serves to get DVDs playing on the Dreamcast. If only Sega had not skimped on those license fees, perhaps.

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Lab Gloves May Be Skewing Microplastics Data

April 6, 2026 by Maya Posch 16 Comments

The topic of micro- and nanoplastics (MNPs) has become increasingly prevalent over the past years, as amidst dismissal and panic, researchers attempt to distinguish just how much of a problem MNPs truly are. The most essential problem here is that we are still developing the tools to accurately measure the levels of MNP contamination. Recently, [Madeline E. Clough] et al. demonstrated in an article published in Analytical Methods how gloves worn in laboratory settings can create false positive MNP signals.

As we covered previously, detecting MNPs is tough due to the detection methods used, many of which rely on interpreting signals from methods like pyrolysis-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (Py-GC-MS), with protocols for this and other methods still being worked on, particularly on how to filter out false positives.

The article by [Clough] demonstrates how dry contact of lab gloves on samples can deposit stearate salts – left over from their production, which are subsequently misidentified as being MNPs, specifically polyethylene (PE). These false positives occur with µ-Fourier transform infrared (µ-FTIR) spectroscopy and µ-Raman spectroscopy, but can occur with Py-GC-MS as well, as has been determined previously. Substances like the fatty lipids that are commonly found in the human body, and in particular the brain, will closely match the PE signature.

With these very common stearate salts now also a likely source of contamination with MNP measurements, it just becomes more obvious that it’s incredibly hard to make accurate assessments about any hazards of MNPs until we can determine their presence with any level of reliability.

With Affordable Storage Options Dwindling, Where To Store Our Data?

April 6, 2026 by Maya Posch 62 Comments

These days our appetite for more data storage is larger than ever, with video files larger, photo resolutions higher, and project files easily zipping past a few hundred MB. At the same time our options for data storage are becoming more and more limited. For the longest time we could count on there always being a newer, roomier, faster, and cheaper form of storage to come along, but those days would seem to be over.

We can look back and laugh at low capacity USB Flash drives of the early 2000s, yet the first storage drive to hit 1 TB capacity did so in 2007, with a Hitachi Deskstar 7k100, only for that level of capacity in PCs to not really be exceeded nineteen years later.

We also had Blu-ray discs (BD) promise to cram the equivalent of dozens of DVDs onto a single BD, with two- and even four-layer BDs storing up to a one-hundred-and-twenty-eight GB. Yet today optical media is dying a slow death as the sole remaining cheap storage option. NAND Flash storage has only increased in price, and the options for those of us who have large cold storage requirements would seem to be decreasing every day.

So what is the economical solution here? Invest in LTO tapes using commercial left-overs, or give up and sign up for Cloud Storage™ for the low-low price of a monthly recurring fee?

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