Exploring What’s Left Of Google’s VR Dreams

October 29, 2026 by Tom Nardi 16 Comments

You’re likely familiar with Google’s Cardboard, and the legions of cheap virtual reality headsets it spawned. By sticking a smartphone to the wearer’s head, all these headsets needed were some basic optics to provide a surprisingly effective VR experience. You may even know about Google Daydream initiative that came a few years later, which not only improved the basic Cardboard design but brought with it new software features such as VR-specific improvements to the Android operating system and a version of the Play Store dedicated to 3D games and applications.

But unless you’re a true Google devotee, what you may not know is that the search giant partnered with Lenovo to produce a stand-alone Daydream headset called the Mirage Solo in 2018. A full year before the Oculus Quest hit the market, the $399 device combined the guts of a smartphone with a 2560×1440 display running at 75 Hz, a pair of cameras in the front that let it see the world around the user in three dimensions, and a gyroscopic handheld controller to provide an immersive VR experience without having to be tethered to a computer. In addition to the standard consumer version, there was even a “Business Edition” of the headset specifically marketed to schools, offices, and hospitals as a way to deliver VR content without having to invest in any additional infrastructure.

So why isn’t the Mirage Solo better known? Because in classic fashion, just a few years after it was released, Google decided they were no longer interested in virtual reality and shuttered the entire Daydream program. The software components it introduced were stripped out of Android, the 3D Play Store was taken down, and the back-end mechanisms necessary to register new headsets were turned off. Almost overnight, the Mirage Solo became a stereoscopic paperweight.

Or at least that was the official story, anyway. I recently came across a Lenovo Mirage Solo at a thrift store for $25, and despite my initial Internet searches strongly indicating that it would probably be worthless, it seemed worth the gamble to find out for myself.

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2026 Retrocomputing Challenge: Explore Space With A Credit Card Reader

October 27, 2026 by Tom Nardi 5 Comments

The humble credit card reader — most of us have used hundreds, perhaps even thousands of them over the years. But even for folks like us, it’s not the sort of device we give a lot of thought to. It’s just a keypad, a display, and a magnetic stripe reader. How interesting could it possibly be?

That may be true in some cases, but at least for the 1990s-era TRANZ 330, there’s a bit more to the story than that. As [CharlesD] explains, these particular readers are essentially complete Z80 computers just waiting to do something more exciting than processing PINs. In the case of this particular unit, the addition of a GPS module and some new code has turned it into an interactive guide to the solar system.

Thanks to the UV erasable ROMs used in the TRANZ 330, loading new code on the device is easy enough. With a bit of educated poking around, [CharlesD] was able to map out what did what. Working from the basics of getting the display and keypad working, he moved onto the serial interface, which in turn let him communicate with a modern GPS module and era-appropriate thermal printer. From there it was just a matter of getting the math implemented to compute the azimuth and elevation of a given planet, and he had an offline map of the solar system for use with his telescope.

This is one of those projects which is awesome enough on its own merits, but it’s particularly exciting to see just how easy it is to repurpose one of these card readers, especially since [CharlesD] was kind enough to share his source code. If you end up picking one of these up and getting something running on it, be sure to let us know.

ESP32 Rotary Display Makes Ideal Timer

October 27, 2026 by Tom Nardi 16 Comments

We’re big fans of pushing hardware into situations it wasn’t designed for here at Hackaday, but sometimes you’ve got to appreciate a nicely designed gadget doing more or less exactly what it was intended for — especially when it’s courtesy of code that’s freely available for you to run and hack on however you like.

That’s precisely what [mircemk] has done with their “Universal Timer” project. The 2.1 inch CrowPanel “Rotary Display” at the heart of the build combines an ESP32-S3 with a 480×480 round touch screen display and a rotary encoder.

The all-in-one device — clearly meant to be reminiscent of the Nest thermostat and similar commercial offerings — is technically all you need, but in this case it’s been joined by a PCF8574 I2C I/O expander which in turn is used to drive a buzzer that provides a bit of audio feedback at the end of the countdown.

With the code [mircemk] has provided flashed onto the board, the rotary encoder ring built into the housing makes for an exceptionally intuitive input for setting the desired time. It’s a bit like a high-tech version of the classic kitchen timer, as shown in the video below, you simply twist the ring and the graphics on the display rotate accordingly. Unlike grandma’s clockwork timer of old however, this one can change color as it nears zero, which makes it easier to estimate how much time remains from across the room.

As the popularity of smartwatches has brought the cost of these circular displays down, we’ve started to see some very slick projects utilizing them. The various efforts to turn them into desktop “radar” displays for nearby flights are a particular favorite.

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Hackaday Links: October 25, 2026

October 25, 2026 by Tom Nardi 8 Comments

Some disappointing, but perhaps not entirely unsurprising news this week out of Denmark — after announcing last year that they would transition away from Microsoft’s proprietary software, the realities of making it work seem to have caught the government off guard. The word is that a trial program immediately ran into problems when government employees that had been given Collabora tried to collaborate with their peers running Office, and has since been quietly abandoned.

Although there’s probably a joke to be made about different parts of the government not knowing what the other ones are talking about, the reality is that if one group of staffers can’t reliably access the data being produced by another, that’s a pretty big problem. Of course, had they simply asked us nerds, we could have advised them that these sort of issues are inevitable if you don’t fully commit to the effort.

Had the entire government moved to the Open Document Format (ODF) at once they would have avoided the issue, at least when it came to newly created documents, but obviously that’s a considerably larger undertaking than installing Collabora or OpenOffice on a few dozen machines and calling it a day. There’s no word yet on how this stumble will impact Denmark’s larger effort to free themselves of proprietary software, but we’d hazard a guess it’s not a great sign. Hopefully things go better for the Dutch.

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Japan Launches Mission To Study Martian Moon

October 22, 2026 by Tom Nardi 22 Comments

Humanity has been sending robotic explorers to Mars since the 1970s, and for our efforts we’ve been rewarded with not only incredible imagery of the Red Planet’s magnificent desolation, but a wealth of information about the alien world and how it’s changed over the last several billion years. But comparatively, we know almost nothing about the planet’s two moons, Phobos and Deimos. In fact, as recently as the 1960s, there were some scientists that believed the unusual shape, mass, and orbit of Phobos hinted at the possibility that it was no moon at all, and was in actuality a derelict spacecraft of some type.

Once the first Viking probes arrived at Mars, we had the photographic evidence and up-close measurements to prove that Phobos wasn’t artificial. But even today, we still don’t know exactly what it is. The data suggests that it’s not solid rock, and that large voids may be hiding under its surface. While we can be fairly sure there won’t be any mummified remains of Martian astronauts to be found within Phobos, vast deposits of ice are a tantalizing possibility.

With the launch of the Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission earlier this week, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) hopes to bring us one step closer to understanding the formation and structure of Phobos. Should everything go to plan, MMX will deploy a small rover to its tenuous surface in 2029, and by 2031, a sample return capsule will bring pieces of the mysterious moon back to Earth for further study.

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Hackaday Links: October 17, 2026

October 18, 2026 by Tom Nardi 23 Comments

While Hackaday doesn’t maintain a crime blotter, we couldn’t help but start this week’s post off with a bit of civil disobedience — a retired professor from the University of Pennsylvania was arrested earlier this week for standing in front of a delivery robot.

Granted, she was standing there for long enough that the police were eventually called, but still. Previous reporting indicates that Carolyn Marvin has a history of blocking delivery robots as a form of protest, but this is the first time law enforcement got involved. We’re not lawyers here at Hackaday, so we can’t say for sure whether or not blocking the progress of a robot engaged in commercial operation actually violates any laws. But we do know that refusing a lawful request from a police officer will get you in trouble, and that seems to be what Marvin was actually charged with when she refused to move.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 391: Tuned In To ESP32 SDR, New Old Pagers, And Bugs On Mars

October 16, 2026 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start this episode off with a discussion about Philadelphia’s budding hacker conference and the imminent retirement of the EZ80. After considering the parallels between the wide world of aviation headsets and our personal projects, talk moves on to the exciting developments in the world of software-defined radio on the ESP32, a Meshtastic pager from a bygone era, and how all the wild flying machines entered into DARPA’s Lift Challenge ended up losing to a simple helicopter.

You’ll also hear about turning plastic bottles into printer filament, pushing e-ink screens to their limits, and browsing the web on the PSP in 2026. To wrap things up they’ll marvel at all the modern abstraction sitting between software and the memory it’s running on, and revisit some RF concepts that might be particularly useful now that everyone is playing with a new SDR device.

Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

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