Author: Tyler August

454 Articles

Make Your Ceiling Disappear With ADS-B And Short-Throw Projector

June 4, 2026 by 8 Comments

If you’re into airplanes, you’ve probably had the experience of hearing an unusual aircraft and rushing outside to try and catch a glimpse of it, all while fumbling with a smartphone to open a flight-tracking app. If your home was equipped with [cpaczek]’s Skylight project, which combines ADS-B data with a short throw projector, that little dance would have been totally unnecessary.

ADS-B or the “Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast”, is the standard by which aircraft broadcast their position and other flight information from onboard transponders. In most of the world, every commercial aircraft has an ADS-B transmitter, and they’re slowly creeping into general aviation as well. The signals aren’t hard to pick up with software-defined radio — like perhaps this RP2040 based unit we featured — or the RTL-SDR v4 this project calls for.

Using data from ADS-B, the Skylight software runs on Raspberry Pi 5 and renders icons of the aircraft exactly where they would appear above you, if that pesky ceiling wasn’t in the way. You get the flight’s code, destination and flightplan with a nice icon representing what type of airplane it is. Thanks to specifying a Pi 5, the projection is a smooth 60 FPS at 1080p. Airplanes aren’t the only things plotted, though — this is also a planetarium, giving you a full view of the stars and any satellites passing overhead. That’s obviously via an API, not SDR, and if you like you can configure it to track aircraft that way to — allowing you to set your Skylight for anywhere in the world, if you aren’t near an interesting airport.

ADS-B isn’t just for pilots and plane nerds — if you’re flying drones, you probably should keep an eye on it, too. In that case, though, you probably won’t be looking at your ceiling.

Thanks to [Thinkerer] for the tip!

DIY Ceramic Circuit Boards Surely Count As Solarpunk

June 3, 2026 by 9 Comments

Solarpunk is all about combining that DIY hacker ethos with sustainability and renewable resources. Our usual PCB manufacturing methods, with their bevy of chemical baths and petrochemical resins aren’t exactly the most sustainable. Digging up some clay and firing it into a circuit board? Very sustainable! And apparently doable, as demonstrated by [Emily Velasco] on Mastadon.

Of course anybody could take a ceramic wafer and call it a circuit board, but that’s only part of what [Emily] did. The ceramic wafer is apparently native clay, which is very cool. Even cooler is that she’s baked the traces into the pottery. While you could conceivably use some sort of conductive glaze for this, what [Emily] did was stamp her desired circuit into the unfired ceramic using a 3D-printed stamp, and then fill the depression with copper powder after the first firing. After that, a second firing is done in a reducing atmosphere to melt/sinter the copper together–it’s not totally clear which is happening here–without burning up.

The results speak for themselves; on the finished demo board, a pair of LEDs blink happily away, driven by the astable oscillator circuit baked right into the clay– and of course the components soldered to it. You’ll have to click through to see it, though.

Given those not-so-sustainable petrochemicals behind our favourite PCBs may be in short supply, this is a timely hack. If it seems familiar, that’s because we featured virtually the same technique last year, but using more-expensive silver powder instead of copper, and a campfire instead of a kiln.

Thanks to [smellsofbikes] for the tip!

Game Dodecahedron Runs AArch64 Assembly

June 3, 2026 by No comments

Operating systems are great things to have for general purpose computing, but sometimes they can just get in the way. There’s RAM overhead and processor cycles required for all that operating, after all. For something like a game system, it seems unnecessary. The NES certainly did well enough without an OS, as did its various successors for several console generations.

[Inkbox] wanted to get back to those heady days by programming bare-metal games for a Rasberry Pi 3 that had sat unused since 2016. Games are on cartridge, running bare metal, in assembly — as God and Masayuki Uemura intended. Also, the console is a dodecahedron, because the name GameCube was already taken.

The GitHub link above doesn’t exactly have documentation, at least as of this writing, so you’ll need to watch the video to get the full details. The dodecahedron form factor might not be ideal for packing away in a bag, but as a handheld we have to admit it does look comfortable to hold. Two faces of the dodecahedron get a half-dozen buttons each, which are wired to a GPIO pin on the Pi via a Schmitt trigger for hardware debounce. Like all good consoles, it uses cartridges, these ones being adapted from SD cards on large PCBs derived from a project we featured before.

That all sounds great, but it’s the assembly programming we’re really interested in — skip to around the seven-minute mark in the video for that. Ultimately it’s a build video, so not the ideal tutorial for ARM assembly programming, but it might not be a bad introduction for some. Unfortunately you don’t get line-by-line of the PacMan game he put together — but he does have it in the repository for you to examine. The repo also has STLs if you want to make a dodecahedron of your own.

Of course he’s got a RetroPi cartridge as well, loaded with emulators, and we suspect that’s mostly how this GameDodecahedron will get used. Still, we’ll always have a soft spot for assembly code and projects that use it — be it on ARM, good old 6502, the open-source RISC V architecture, or even the absolute monster of op codes that is x86.

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Does Your Terminal Speak Morse? This One Does

June 2, 2026 by 6 Comments

There are a lot of single board computers on the market these days, so you can be forgiven if you missed the LuckFox Lyra. Its main claim to fame seems to be that it shares the Pi Pico’s 51 mm x 21 mm footprint while being powerful enough to run a full Linux system– or at least, it was. Now its claim to fame is as a device you can interact with no peripherals, accessing the terminal via Morse code. That’s thanks to [Gabriel Broussard Korr] and his Morstdin project, which should run on just about anything POSIX-compliant, by dint of a being a clever sh script at heart.

Of course, with most POSIX-compliant systems, you’ll need to alter the script to account for some kind of periferal to do the Morse I/O– not so on the LuckFox Lyra, which has a built-in LED and a single usable button. It actually has two buttons, but one of them is RESET and you can’t use that for anything but its intended purpose. The BOOT button, on the other hand, becomes user input after the system has started. One button, one LED? It’s almost like LuckFox designed this SBC for Morse! Admittedly we’d prefer an audible output, but adding a buzzer would detract from the purity of this implementation.

He’s had to extend the code, of course, since Samuel Morse did not expect all of the special characters you’re likely to encounter on the terminal. The resultant Programmer’s Morse, or PMorse is a straightforward extension, but [Gabriel] didn’t stop there: he’s also added a set of commands he describes as “vim-like” make using this headless device easier by doing things like deleting whole words or flash the line you’re working on so you can make sure you haven’t made any errors.

If that wasn’t enough, he’s also put an LLM on it. Because in the Year of Our Lord 2026, you apparently cannot escape the frakkin’ toasters by jumping your rag-tag fleet into the 128 MB of RAM on this tiny SBC. Still, his inclusion of Llamma.cpp does add one thing to the project: it can now claim to be the world’s smallest stand-alone chatbot. It’s also the only one that speaks Morse. That’s got to be worth some bragging rights.

[Gabriel] may have a thing for physically tiny Linux devices– his last project, which we featured, was about using Linux on old smartphones with Termux.

Thanks to [Gabriel] for the tip!

Header image credit Luckfox.

 

STM32 Handheld Has OpenGL And All The Classics

June 2, 2026 by 20 Comments

We do sometimes go on about how absurdly powerful microcontrollers are these days, but this time it’s technically a microprocessor, not a microcontroller, at the heart of the build — specifically, an STM32MP2. Still, you know you’re living in the future when an STM32 of any sort can not only run [John Cronin]’s gk handheld game console, but provide 3D acceleration to boot.

Full disclosure: you’ve seen this handheld here before — sorta. That was version 3, which was an STM32-based handheld.  V3 used the much less powerful STM32H7S7L8, with a single Cortex-M7 clocked at 600 MHz and a 2D NeoChrom GPU. The STM32MP2, by contrast, has dual Cortex-A35 cores running 1.5 GHz and a bonus Cortex-M33. It’s running a custom OS called gkos, which is mostly POSIX-compliant and boasts nigh-instantaneous boot times.

As with the last version, you can run a bevy of emulators from the 8-bit to the 32-bit era, but the added power and OpenGL support mean this handheld also runs N64 games via a fork of mupen64. There are also emulators for ‘real’ computers, namely Atari ST and XL, and a little-known thing known as a “PC”. DOSBox gets the equivalent performance of a 50 MHz 486, which means you can run all the classics, including DOOM, though that will be more performant running the native-running port of sdl-DOOM.

You also get extra inputs to play with and a bigger screen compared to the last version. Oh, and WiFi. There are accelerometers for tilt control, and did we mention the screen’s touch input is supported? If it weren’t for the form-factor, we’d call this a capable little computer. The GK handheld looks like an awesome handheld console, check it out in the demo video below.

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Classically-named Argus Robot Is Terminator Meets Tumbleweed

June 1, 2026 by 43 Comments

If you were making a multi-limbed symmetric nightmare of a robot, where else would you look for a name but Greek Mythology? The team at Duke University that came up with this particular multi-limbed creature had two obvious choices: name it for one of the Hundred-Handed giants, the Hecatoncheires, or lean on the fact that each limb has its own sensor and go for many-eyed Argus. Argus sounds better to a funding committee, so Argus it is.

Hecatoncheries would be a bit of a reach anyway, considering Argus only has 20 limbs in its current incarnation. It uses what the researchers are calling its ‘dynamic symmetry’ to get around– extending and retracting its many limbs to exert forces in any direction, it can bounce about like a beach ball on a windy day.

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Breaking Enigma With An FPGA, Just Like At Bletchley Park

May 30, 2026 by 14 Comments

The pioneering work done by Alan Turing and others at Bletchley Park in England was perhaps as important in the history of technology as it was the history of the war. Given the last 80-odd years of technological development, their revolutionary work should be within the realms of a student project — which it was, specifically in ECE 5760 at Cornell University. The work was done by [Erica Jiang], [Kelvin Resch], and [Isabella Frank].

Nowadays if someone told you there was a code to be broken, you wouldn’t be reaching for electromechanical devices, but you just might think of trying an FPGA. After all, the programmable gate arrays allow for much faster execution of fixed logic than software running on a traditional CPU. That won’t help much with modern RSA schemes, and for Enigma, it’s massively overkill, but doing it that way was a great learning opportunity for the students.

Their project emulates the whole Bletchley Park cryptography apparatus, not just the Bombe Machine, and if you’re interested in learning about this piece of history you could absolutely do worse than to examine their documentation. If you’re into video, you can check out the final presentation and demo video below. Meanwhile if you’re wondering what the opposition was up to, we have good explainer of the enigma machine here.

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