4:3 screenshot? Either period-appropriate hardware or a VM.

Meshcore And Haiku: A Match Apparently Made In Italy

June 10, 2026 by Tyler August 12 Comments

No, we’re not talking about cultural appropriation of Japan’s most famous form of short poem–this is the other Haiku, the open-source descendant of BeOS, which now has a fully-native meshcore chat client called Sestriere, thanks to the efforts of one [Atomozero]. Of course you’ll need a LoRa radio to act as a modem, but anything that speaks USB serial– which is any of the ESP32-based offerings on the market–should work.

This is interesting in that we don’t see many desktop applications leveraging LoRa networks– meshtastic or meshcore– so for one to appear for the relatively-obscure BeOS derivative is just neat. It’s also a nice peice of work: the chat window is full featured, organizing your contacts, and communicating not just with text but emojis and reaction GIFs. GIFs seem a bit extravagant for LoRa bandwith, but apparently it works. There are also Codec2-based voice messages, another thing that we didn’t expect to see over LoRa, since most ‘chat’ projects restrict themselves to text messaging.

The chat window. One nice thing about Haiku APIs is that look-and-feel isn’t in question.

The software will also map all the nodes with which you are in contact, both diagrammatically and geographically, overlaid on OpenStreetMap tiles. The network map conveniently colour-codes your contacts by the link quality, but what’s even more interesting is the WireShark-inspired packet sniffer built into the software to let you keep a really close eye on traffic on the mesh network.

Neither Haiku or MeshCore are to everyone’s tastes, but as an OS it is a worthy daily driver, even if you have to jump through some hoops to install it if you have a UEFI-only system.

If you need more range, try a Yagi.

DIY CO2 Scrubber In DIY Sub By A Hacker Braver Than Most

June 10, 2026 by Tyler August 34 Comments

If you look around your environment, you can probably pick off quite a few things that you’ve made, at least if you’ve been at this a while. You probably aren’t reading this from the bottom of a body of water though, which means you lack the incredible confidence of submarine builder [Hank Pronk]. Not only is he building himself a capable-looking diesel-electric submarine over on YouTube, he’s even DIYing CO2 scrubbers for it! Yeah, that’s a man who believes in himself.

Luckily [Hank] is not anywhere near the Caribbean, so needn’t worry about being misidentified as a narco-sub, but he still has to be concerned about his oxygen supply when tooling around beneath the local lakes. Perhaps more important than the oxygen supply in a sub is the build up of CO2. It doesn’t matter how many oxygen tanks you bring down with you if you can’t scrub CO2 out of the air to make room for it. Just like the Apollo missions, he’s using a chemical adsorbent to take carbon dioxide out of the air — and just like Apollo 13, he’s switching from square to round.

Or, rather, from a rather rectangular commercial model to a DIY little round unit. That’s because he doesn’t need the big scrubber in this sub: being diesel-powered, he expects to spend a lot of time at snorkel depth, where both the pilot and the engines can get clean air through the tube. Dives are expected to be short, and in that use case, too big of a CO2 scrubber is really a waste. If for some reason he gets stuck on the bottom, well, the lake isn’t that deep. He can swim to surface, and has a detailed bailout plan. If he wants to stay under overnight to avoid bailing at night, he’s carrying enough extra adsorbent for that.

There’s a reason almost every submarine we’ve featured on this site over the years is an ROV. It’s not that a homemade submarine is automatically a death trap, but you sure do have to be confident in your design.

Continue reading “DIY CO2 Scrubber In DIY Sub By A Hacker Braver Than Most” →

Pi Media Player With VCR Vibe Is Perfect For CRTs

June 10, 2026 by Tyler August 15 Comments

If you have a TV and a Pi, you have the workings of a media center, and you’re not exactly short on options for software. But options are good, so here’s one more by [Anthony Caccese] — a player called 240-MP that explicitly targets CRTs with its retro stylings, released under the GPLv3 license.

Don’t let the name fool you, though. While the blue-and-white styling is very evocative of 90s VCRs, the output isn’t limited to 240p. If you’re running it into a vintage CRT over composite, as [Anthony] does, sure, it’ll do that. If you want to use HDMI on a modern TV, however, that’s an option too, in 4K if that’s your jam. Higher resolution video will need a beefier Pi, of course, but MPV can handle the files, and ultimately this is a wrapper for MPV. You still get the vintage styling, which can do green-and-black as easily as white-and-blue, as well as whatever custom color scheme you want to define. It might not look quite as good if it’s not on a display tube, but we could see this as a good fit for a plasma TV, too.

As you can see in the demo video embedded below, the player is equally happy listing and playing local files — including playlists — or streaming via a PLEX server. Other add-ons, for example to launch emulators, may be forthcoming. Of course, if you’re not willing to wait you could always code them yourself.

Given the roots of this project in old VHS interfaces, we’re somewhat surprised there doesn’t seem to be an option for control via physical tokens. We’ve already seen projects that try and replicate that portion of the VCR magic, though. If it’s not the tapes you miss from back in the day, you can also simulate cable TV.

Continue reading “Pi Media Player With VCR Vibe Is Perfect For CRTs” →

Automatic Tutorial Generator Is Perhaps The Best-Case For Vibe Coding

June 9, 2026 by Tyler August 35 Comments

Quick question: how did you learn to code? It probably wasn’t bribing someone a year or two ahead of you in CS to finish all your homework, but that’s exactly what ‘vibe coders’ are doing — even in class. Odds are, you learned by working through exercises, following tutorials, and doing it yourself. Finding good tutorials isn’t getting any easier in the age of LLMs, and that’s where [Deven Jarvis]’s Lathe comes in: it’s a project to get an LLM to make the tutorial for you. Instead of doing the work for you, it gets the clanker to show you how to do it yourself.

Everyone’s different, so this may not apply to you, but it’s a journey/destination sort of problem. Some people just want a piece of software, and they can vibe code until the oceans dry up and will have no interest in this project. Other people take great joy in learning how to do things; [Deven] is one of those. A good tutorial is a great way to learn, since it artificially softens the learning curve compared to just jumping into a project with a man page or a datasheet.

Of course you’re still faced with the hallucination problem, something [Deven] admits in his excellent write-up. As he points out, the advantage is that you can call whatever model you plug into Lathe on its BS, and try and get a correct answer. Try that on Reddit, or most other places online. Sure, the tutorials aren’t going to match the best human-generated content, and [Deven] admits that. He’s using it for topics (like slicer design) that don’t have easy tutorials online — and sadly, his prediction that nobody is going to bother making good learning resources like they used to when they’ll just be scraped by LLMs is very likely true. It’s not that your options are vibe code or vibe-generated tutorial, but if that’s the direction the world is going, we’ll take the tutorial, thanks.

Getting the LLM to hold your hand through a tutorial might not appeal to the most Butlerian among us, but it’s a big step from that to the full cognitive surrender some people worry about.

Pico-Driven Ultrasound Enables Scaled Acoustic Model Of Home Stereo

June 8, 2026 by Tyler August 2 Comments

There are plenty of ways to get sound into your house: good old fashioned headphones, the Dolby surround setup we all lusted after back in the day, or the 21st century’s ubiquitous soundbar, with its ‘spatial audio’ magic. Which will work in your space? If you were an audio engineer, you’d set up listening area and use a microphone to map the space– but that would be thousands of points and sounds like tedium. [PlasmatronX] had a better idea: use Schlieren imaging to see the sound waves as the travel through the space. Schlieren imaging has trouble with audio frequencies, though, and imaging the entire living room was going to be difficult. So he scaled it all down– including the sound waves, by shifting to ultrasonic frequencies.

He’s using the usual mirror-and-razor Schlieren setup with an 8″ telescope mirror– and if you don’t know what that is, we did a deep dive on this kind of optical flow visualizer a while back. Inside the circular imaging area where that lets him see density changes, he’s set up what he calls a CAT– Computer Acoustic Tomography– array. It’s a rig on a turntable he can set up ultrasonic transducers on, to match the various speaker setups he wants to test, and turn so he can see from all angles what the scaled-down waves are doing. To capture those waves, which aren’t going to be standing still, he adds a stroboscope. All the ultrasound signals are being generated by a Pi Pico, and are scaled 4:1 in the frequency domain– that is, a high 10kHz whine becomes inaudible 40kHz. Those signals are fed through a DIY 8-channel amp into both ultrasonic transducers and larger ‘cat-repellent speakers’ from AliExpress.

The microcontroller is actually a Pico 2W, which is using its “W” to communicate via Bluetooth with a Pi 4. That SBC is running the camera, the stepper for the turntable, and image processing, along with the timing for the audio signals. After that it’s a matter of setting up a scaled down 7.1 surround setup and itty-bity soundbar, and test it on a (stuffed) guinea pig. Obviously you can see a big difference between the steered beams from the tiny soundbar and the true surround, but how that translates to listening pleasure will be at least somewhat subjective.

What’s less subjective is the obvious effect soft furnishings add to the simulation. Now he doesn’t take the time to find a material that will scale the frequency response of a set of curtains, but we’re not sure how much that matters. At 5kHz or 20kHz, they’re going to deaden sound, and you can see that here, and you can see it’s a much bigger deal for the shaped beams of the soundbar than it is for surround sound. In the end, [PlasmatronX] decides to stick to headphones, but the whole video is very much worth watching, so we’ve embeddded it below. If you want to try it yourself he’s put his code on GitHub.

Thanks to [PlasmatronX] for the tip!

Continue reading “Pico-Driven Ultrasound Enables Scaled Acoustic Model Of Home Stereo” →

Bluetooth Gramophone Has Surprisingly Contemporary Roots

June 7, 2026 by Tyler August 17 Comments

So you happen to have a gramaphone– maybe a big old Victrola/HMV, perhaps a Columbia– regardless of brand, it’s a big, beautiful conversation peice for your living room. It might not be the most practical listening device, since isnomuch as there is a vinyl renessance, it’s restricted to vinyl, not the old shellac 78s the these all-mechanical beasts were born for. [JGJMatt] decided to bring his gramophone into the 21st century, turning it into a bluetooth speaker without altering any of its original internals.

What’s really interesting is that this hack was once a commercial product– sort of. Back in the 1920s when everyone was listening to Jazz, the problem of ‘ what do I do with this massive gramophone cabinet when I’m not cutting a rug?’ was equally valid, and a solution was found: the Dulce-Tone Radio Speaker. A very weak speaker sits under the needle, turning the gramaphone mechanism into an amplifier for the radio. The very same concept, [JGJMatt] would work equally well in the 2020s with a bluetooth signal as in the 1920s with an AM one. There’s no demo video for this project, but you can hear how its 1920s inspiration sounded in the video below.

The driver for this device is made using a neodymium magnet and the voice coil from a 3W speaker. A 3D-printed needle-holder captures the gramophone’s needle– a much thicker and sturdier thing than the tiny diamond-tip you’d find on a modern turntable, we should note– and holds the magnet to it. The voice coil gets driven via a MH-M38 bluetooth module, and everything is held in a nice 3D-printed case along with the battery.

The hack is, of course, totally reversible: at any moment, you can remove the needle from this device and drop it on a 78 for some Jazz-era fun, or swap back for 21st century brainrot. If you happen to have some of those old shellac records and a modern turntable, note it takes more than the right RPM to get good sound. Continue reading “Bluetooth Gramophone Has Surprisingly Contemporary Roots” →

LIPS Is An Open Source Sip-And-Puff Interface

June 7, 2026 by Tyler August 5 Comments

Lots of us have– thanks to repetative stress injuries– developed mobility issues that we have to work around when using computers. Maybe it’s a trackball instead of a mouse, or a split keyboard, or mechanical keys with very specific force requirements– but those are small potatoes compared to people with such severe movement issues such as quadriplegia who need to fall back on things like a sip-and-puff device to control the computer with their mouths. Commercial options of course come with absurd price tags, but a DIY option is a different story. [DanielYordanov]’s L.I.P.S project can be built for only a couple percent of what the big boys want, and it’s fully-open source.

So you might think a sip-and-puff device is a two-bit interface, only slightly more advanced than the morse terminal we featured earlier. While Morse code might be an option, these devices also act as pointers, as the lips and chin can be used to point the mouthpiece. Thus there are a few sensors needed: a hall-effect joystick for pointing info, and one or more pressure sensors to detect the breathing interface for ‘clicks’. [Daniel] has single and dual-sensor versions, creating at minimum a four-button mouse. In reality this hardware can distinguish long and short pulses, or combinations of breath to run some nice macros. With operating-system features like an on-screen keyboard, L.I.P.S. can provide someone with digital freedom– and at a tiny fraction of the cost of a ‘real’ medical device.

Despite the DIY nature, for the end-user control and config is easy enough thanks to a webserial portal run on the CH552 that you can preview on the official website. Code, ki-cad and STL files are all on his GitHub repository. If you’re interested in the design process, we’ve embedded his video about that below.

Thanks to [Daniel] for the tip! Do you know of a hack to make life better for someone, disabled or otherwise? Send us a tip!

From one-handed typing to open-source prosthesis, this sort quality-of-life hack may be the best thing about our community. Continue reading “LIPS Is An Open Source Sip-And-Puff Interface” →