Extract Fumes In Midcentury Style With Nixie Tubes And Military Surplus

July 5, 2026 by Tyler August 9 Comments

Nobody wants to breathe solder fumes; that’s a given. For most of us, an industrial-looking fan-and-filter made in China and picked up cheap feels like more than enough to keep our lungs clear. Other people, people like [George Conneely], have more refined tastes. Why have a fume extractor when you can have a work of art?

The insides aren’t quite as pretty as the outside, but it’s a clean build.

This is one of those projects where the images really speak for themselves, because the whole point is to be beautiful. Sure, the wooden case is lovingly sculpted by a—wait, it’s 3D-printed!? Yes, with the right stain and care applying it, it seems Wood PLA can fool the eye, or at least the camera. Inside that PLA case there’s a custom PCB with an ATMega microcontroller and some MOSFETS to drive the Nixie tubes. The two digits represent the fan’s set RPM as a percentage of maximum, as is clearly labeled. Using a READY/NOT READY indicator pulled from a Panvia Tornado to show whether the fan has actually spun up to its set speed is an amazing touch.

The only problem with this build is that it is too nice. We’d almost rather see it on Don Draper’s desk than risk dirtying it on a lab bench. Evidently, [George] ascribes to the philosophy that one should surround oneself with beauty whenever possible. Your tastes may differ, but to many, nixie tubes certainly qualify– whether on a desk clock or in a car’s dashboard, there’s just something about that incandescent glow.

Thanks to [George] for the tip.

Disk Polishing Goes Open Source

July 4, 2026 by Tyler August 10 Comments

Optical media is great — it’s pretty high density, relatively durable, and decently long-lasting if

a selection of before-and-after shots — “That’ll buff out” is very often true when it comes to disks.

well cared for. If not well cared for, well, it’s only relatively durable, and we’ve probably all picked up a second-hand disk that’s too scratched to use. The X-Box 360 is notorious for causing circular damage, and while decent disk cleaners were easy to get in the 90s, we’re not sure how far we trust what’s on offer at retailers today. Hence [Dennis], aka [RetroGameRevival]’s RGR ezBuff polishing machine, which does exactly what it says on the tin: buffs disks to a polish, easily.

We’d say the whole thing is 3D printed, but of course you still need a motor and controller — if you had to turn a crank, that would just be a Buff polishing machine, no ez — and we’ve yet to see a printer poop out polishing compound. If you build it, keep in mind that you’re taking the top layer of material off the disk to polish scratches away, so don’t overdo it. It’s entirely possible to ruin a disk beyond repair with too-aggressive buffing; it’s also possible for disks to be scratched too deeply to save. Polishing can’t save genuine disk rot, though in our experience you’re more likely to find scratched disks than rotten ones. Still, [Dennis]’s birthday gift to the community — it was apparently released on his birthday — should keep more than a few disks out of the trash.

With Sony getting out of the disk game, physical media is becoming more precious than ever, so it’s good to see what looks like a quality polishing option for those of us who either never had a polisher or didn’t save theirs. If you really want your disks to last, maybe we should bring back CD caddies.

Thanks to [Dean] for the tip, via timeExtension.com.

This KVM Runs A P4 Instead Of A Pi.

July 3, 2026 by Tyler August 16 Comments

If you asked us to build you a KVM last week, we’d likely have reached for a Raspberry Pi. Now, thanks to [JonathanRowny], we’d seriously consider an ESP32-P4, because his IP KVM seems pretty capable.

He’s using the P4 hardware to its fullest, getting the supported 1080p graphics, and doing so in an interesting way– he’s got a commercial adapter board to try and translate HDMI signals to the camera input on his dev board. Conveniently enough, it’s the same ribbon-cable pinout as the RPi, which is not guaranteed by the CSI standard. Writing a driver to take that signal proved the hardest part– aside from the usual chip revision confusion that plagues this chip– and we can’t help but wonder if the client on the other side of the KVM-IP link might have an easier time doing the image processing that was required for a good image. Regardless, he’s got the code as it is now up on GitHub under the Apache license.

As of this this writing, there’s no audio, and ironically for an ESP32 project networking is wired-only– but much more importantly, there is no security. So it’s a work in progress, but great to see the P4 in the wild doing something other than emulation. Not that we haven’t seen the P4 at work before–the Tanmatsu handheld also makes use of Expressif’s most powerful chip for a handy little terminal. Between the KVM and the handhelds, we cannot help but wonder how many of the projects that were once the provenance of a Pi will get squeezed into these overpowered microcontrollers. Sure, they can’t even match the original Pi in horsepower, never mind a modern Pi5, but how many times have you seen a Linux SBC seriously under-taxed in a project like this?

If you’re swapping Pi for P4– or doing anything else interesting– please let us know on the tips line.

Continue reading “This KVM Runs A P4 Instead Of A Pi.” →

An EInk, ESP32-based Game Boy

July 2, 2026 by Tyler August 7 Comments

This is one of those projects that was both inspired and made possible by the absolute embarrassment of dev boards available to the modern hacker. In this case, the dev board was the M5Stack PaperS3, which as the name implies combines an ESP32-S3 with an e-ink panel. [Wenting Zhang] picked one up and was immediately inspired to try and make an e-ink Game Boy.

The M5Stack PaperS3 made this project possible by exposing the display with row/column control — parallel, some would call it, as opposed to the usual serial interface of SPI. That allowed [Wenting] to work some of the same e-ink magic he perfected on his Modos monitors to allow partial refresh at up to 60 Hz. That the ESP32-S3 is capable of emulating a Game Boy while driving the screen should surprise no one, since it can emulate an MSX while outputting VGA or even Windows 95 on a 386. In this case, he’s basing the actual Game Boy emulation on Crank Boy.

Of course the e-ink screen on the M5Stack is far larger and has a much higher resolution than what the Game Boy shipped with, which lets him implement touch controls and scale the image up 3X so he can fake a couple of shades of grayscale while actually outputting black and white. Even better, if he was actually playing this thing on the regular, once the high-refresh portion of the screen starts to wear out, he can flip the orientation and keep gaming on the virtually-unrefreshed control portion of the screen — doubling the lifetime of the system, something many of you raised as a concern when we last looked at a his e-ink monitor project.

The only real shortcoming of this hack is the sound. With one-bit beeps coming out of the M5Stack buzzer, it’s got nothing on Nintendo’s hardware. Of course, that’s partially down to using the hardware as-is. With the addition of an I2S sound chip like the one used in the MOD player project we featured recently, you’d just need to squeeze out enough processor cycles to make this sound as good as it looks.

Continue reading “An EInk, ESP32-based Game Boy” →

Terminus Is A Text Only Phone Because Telephony Is Dead Anyway

July 1, 2026 by Tyler August 17 Comments

This may say more about us than the current state of the telephone network, but unless your Grandma is still kicking, how many phone calls do you take that are actually worth picking up? Around here it’s one variety of scam or another, with the odd cold-calling salesperson to round it out.

So when we saw [Bolan Xu]’s texting-only TERMINUS cell phone project, it took but a minute to decide that, yeah, we wouldn’t miss the telephone part of the phone very much either.

The trade-offs are immense when compared to your smartphone; there’s no voice, no web browser, no social media, and no camera. But on the flip side there’s also no spyware and no annoying spam calls. Besides, he’s built a QWERTY keyboard onto this thing, and that does seem to be what most of us miss in this era of black rectangles.

In terms of electronics, its rocking a tiny OLED display for you to read your messages on, driven by an ESP8266. When WiFi is available the plan was to bridge over the internet in an SMS version of VOIP, but [Bolan Xu] ended up installing a cellular modem in it anyway.

As you can tell from the skeletal case, this is very much a prototype, but it is a promising project. We’ve seen ESP-based phones before, but they tend to be a bit smarter, and run on ESP32 instead of the more modest ESP8266.

2026 Frikkin Lasers Challenge: Super-Simple Laser Precision For Your Stargazing

June 29, 2026 by Tyler August 11 Comments

Perhaps the hardest thing for amateur astronomers just starting out is finding the things you want to look at. Prolific maker [mircemk] has submitted a quick-and-easy star-hopper device that will help guide your binoculars with laser-like precision using things you likely already have on hand: a smartphone, a mounting plate, and a green laser pointer.

The smartphone is running AstroHopper, an astronomy app that uses GPS and inertial navigation to know exactly where your phone is pointing, and offer an image of the sky on the screen. There are many others of this ilk, and there’s no reason [mircemk]’s trick won’t work with your favorite. The trick is decidedly simple: the smartphone is mounted to a flat plate, in line with a green laser pointer. Careful placement aligns the axis of the phone and the laser, and the mounting plate is set up to fit a tripod.

Using it is simple: with a labelled view of the sky displayed on the screen, one lines up the phone/laser combo with the desired object, and activates the laser pointer. [micremk] has wired in an on-off switch for this purpose and a large external battery, rather than relying on the stock pushbutton. Since the axis of the laser pointer and the phone are aligned, a green line launches out into the heavens for you to follow with your binoculars. Once you locate that green dot, you can turn off the laser. Yes, the computer has helped you find the object, but your muscles are doing the slewing and that will make it much more likely you start to learn the sky yourself rather than relying on electronic magic.

This is probably the simplest hack we’ve yet seen in the Frikkin’ Lasers Challenge, and yet also one of the most practical. If you enjoy playing with radiation that’s spontaneously emitted, there’s still time to get your entry together — the contest runs until July 23, 2026.

Continue reading “2026 Frikkin Lasers Challenge: Super-Simple Laser Precision For Your Stargazing” →

NVIDIA’s New AI Servers Run On Hotub Coolant And Don’t Need Evaporators

June 26, 2026 by Tyler August 85 Comments

When people start ranting about AI, you can be sure a few things are going to come up during the two-minutes hate: job loss, higher power bills, the neverending tide of low-effort slop, and wasting precious freshwater. Well, NVIDIA wants to take away that last one, beacause the all-water cooled Ruben architecture won’t need any evaporative cooling— coolant can stay in a closed loop, and never needs to be cooled below 45 C, or 113 F.

This sort of coolant loop should be familiar to anyone who has ever built a water-cooled PC or PlayStation: there’s a glycol-water mix, water blocks, and a radiator to reject heat to the environment. NVIDIA doesn’t mention if their new servers come with RGB lighting, but we’d like to imagine it’s an option. The big difference — aside from the rainbow LEDs– between a Ruben server and your old gaming rig is that in these racks, everything is on a waterblock. If there’s a chip on the motherboard generating heat, it’s getting rid of it into the same cooling water. Cooling water, that we have to emphasize, needs only be cooler than the chips themselves: in this case, they’re talking 45 C on the cold side, and 55 C headed out of the racks. (That’s 113 F to 131 F for all the bald eagles reading this.)

Given the required temperature drop is so modest, there’s no need for the evaporative chillers that have given AI data centers such a bad name in water conservation circles. Just like in a water-cooled PC, ambient-temperature air running over dry heat exchangers– also known as big honkin’ radiators–is able to handle the cooling, so no water is lost. Since everything is on waterblocks, there’s no need for cooling air, either, and the server farms need only be air conditioned to the degree required to make them comfortable to work in.

If you think NVIDIA is making this change because they suddenly care about water conservation, think again. The press release makes their motivations very clear: cooling costs money, and running this hot saves a lot of it. We’re talking four mil US a year for a 50 MW hyperscaler. One might suspect that this sort of thermal regime could limit the lifetime of the hard-working NPUs, but since they’ll be obsolete in a few years anyway, that’s not likely a big concern, especially not for NVIDIA.

We’ve actually seen hotter fluids used to cool computers before– coffee, for one. Water cooling also isn’t new in the data center world; we took a look at it a few years back. Things are clearly heating up now, though.