Battery Repair By Reverse Engineering

August 26, 2025 by Tyler August 28 Comments

Ryobi is not exactly the Cadillac of cordless tools, but one still has certain expectations when buying a product. For most of us “don’t randomly stop working” is on the list. Ryobi 18-volt battery packs don’t always meet that expectation, but fortunately for the rest of us [Badar Jahangir Kayani] took matters into his own hands and reverse-engineered the pack to find all the common faults– and how to fix them.

[Badar]’s work was specifically on the Ryobi PBP005 18-volt battery packs. He’s reproduced the schematic for them and given a fairly comprehensive troubleshooting guide on his blog. The most common issue (65%) with the large number of batteries he tested had nothing to do with the cells or the circuit, but was the result of some sort of firmware lock.

It isn’t totally clear what caused the firmware to lock the batteries in these cases. We agree with [Badar] that it is probably some kind of glitch in a safety routine. Regardless, if you have one of these batteries that won’t charge and exhibits the characteristic flash pattern (flashing once, then again four times when pushing the battery test button), [Badar] has the fix for you. He actually has the written up the fix for a few flash patterns, but the firmware lockout is the one that needed the most work.

[Badar] took the time to find the J-tag pins hidden on the board, and flash the firmware from the NXP micro-controller that runs the show. Having done that, some snooping and comparison between bricked and working batteries found a single byte difference at a specific hex address. Writing the byte to zero, and refreshing the firmware results in batteries as good as new. At least as good as they were before the firmware lock-down kicked in, anyway.

He also discusses how to deal with unbalanced packs, dead diodes, and more. Thanks to the magic of buying a lot of dead packs on e-Bay, [Badar] was able to tally up the various failure modes; the firmware lockout discussed above was by far the majority of them, at 65%. [Badar]’s work is both comprehensive and impressive, and his blog is worth checking out even if you don’t use the green brand’s batteries. We’ve also embedded his video below if you’d rather watch than read and/or want to help out [Badar] get pennies from YouTube monetization. We really do have to give kudos for providing such a good write up along with the video.

This isn’t the first attempt we’ve seen at tearing into Ryobi batteries. When they’re working, the cheap packs are an excellent source of power for everything from CPap machines to electric bicycles.

Thanks to [Badar] for the tip.

Continue reading “Battery Repair By Reverse Engineering” →

The camera, lens off to show the 1" sensor.

There’s Nothing Mini About This Mini Hasselblad-Style Camera’s Sensor

August 25, 2025 by Tyler August 10 Comments

When someone hacks together a digital camera with a Raspberry Pi, the limiting factor for serious photography is usually the sensor. No offense to the fine folks at the foundation, but even the “HQ” camera, while very good, isn’t quite professional grade. That’s why when photographer [Malcolm Wilson] put together this “Mini Hasselblad” style camera, he hacked in a 1″ sensor.

The sensor in question came in the form of a OneInchEye V2, from [Will Whang] on Tindie. The OneInch Eye is a great project in its own right: it takes a Sony IMX283 one-inch CMOS image sensor, and packages it with an IMU and thermal sensor on a board that hooks up to the 4-lane MIPI interface on the Raspberry Pi CM4 and Pi 5.

Sensor in hand, [Malcolm] needed but to figure out power and view-finding. Power is provided by a Geekworm X1200 battery hat. That’s the nice thing about the Pi ecosystem: with so many modules, it’s like LEGO for makers. The viewfinder, too, uses 4″ HDMI screen sold for Pi use, and he’s combined it with a Mamiya C220 TLR viewfinder to give that look-down-and-shoot effect that gives the project the “Mini Hasselblad” moniker.

These are a few images [Malcom] took with the camera. We’re no pros, but at least at this resolution they look good.

The steel-PLA case doesn’t hurt in that regard either, with the styling somewhat reminiscent of vintage film cameras. The “steel” isn’t just a colour in this case, and the metal actually makes the PLA conductive, which our photographer friend learned the hard way. Who hasn’t fried components on a surface they didn’t realize was conductive, though? We bet the added weight of the steel in the PLA makes this camera much nicer to hold than it would be in plain plastic, at least.

The OneInchEye module came set up for C-mount lenses, and [Malcolm] stuck with that, using some Fujinon TV lenses he already had on hand. [Malcolm] has released STL files of his build under a Creative Commons NonCommercial license, but he’s holding the code back for subscribers to his Substack.

This isn’t the first Pi-based camera we’ve seen from [Malcolm], and there’ve been quite a few others on these pages over the years. There was even a Hackaday version, to test out the “official” module [Malcolm] eschewed.

Now That Commodore Is Back, Could Amiga Be Next?

August 21, 2025 by Tyler August 55 Comments

Now that Commodore has arisen from the depths of obscurity like Cthulhu awoken from R’lyeh, the question on every shoggoth’s squamose lips is this: “Will there be a new Commodore Amiga?” The New Commodore is reportedly interested, but as [The Retro Shack] reports in the video embedded below, it might be some time before the stars align.

He follows the tortured history of the Amiga brand from its origins with Hi-Toro, the Commodore acquisition and subsequent Atari lawsuit, and the post-Commodore afterlife of the Amiga trademark. Yes, Amiga had a life after Commodore, and that’s the tl;dr here: Commodore might be back, but it does not own the Amiga IP.

If you’re wondering who does, you’re not the only one. Cloanto now claims the name and most of Amiga’s IP, though it remains at loggerheads with Hyperion, the distributors of AmigaOS 4. If you haven’t heard of them, Cloanto is not an elder god, but in fact the group behind Amiga Forever. They have been great stewards of the Amiga heritage over the decades. Any “new” Amiga is going to need the people at Cloanto on board, one way or another. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible– the new Commodore might be able to seduce Cloanto into a merger, or even just a licensing agreement to use the name on reproduction or new hardware.

While a replica C=64 was a no-brainer for the revived Commodore brand, it’s not quite so clear what they should do with the Amiga name. An FPGA reproduction of the popular A500 or A1200? Would anyone want newly-made 68000-based machines, or to follow Hyperion and MorphOS to now-outdated generations of PowerPC? All of these have been proposed and argued over for years.

We’d love to see something fully new that captures the spirit of the bouncing ball, but it’s hard to imagine bottling magic like that in the twenty-first century. For now, Amiga lies dreaming– but that is not dead which can eternally lie, and we hold out hope this Great Old One can return when the stars are right.

Continue reading “Now That Commodore Is Back, Could Amiga Be Next?” →

Replicating The World’s Oldest Stringed Instrument

August 21, 2025 by Tyler August 10 Comments

Posts on Hackaday sometimes trend a little bit retro, but rarely do we cover hacks that reach back into the Bronze Age. Still, when musician [Peter Pringle] put out a video detailing how he replicated an ancient Sumerian instrument, we couldn’t wait to dig in.

The instrument in question is the “Golden Lyre of Ur”, and it was buried at the Royal Cemetery of Ur with a passel of other grave goods (including a Silver Lyre) something around 4400 to 4500 years ago. For those not in the know, Ur was an early Sumerian city in the part of Mesopotamia became modern-day Iraq. A lyre is a type of plucked stringed instrument, similar to a harp.

That anything of the instrument remains after literal millennia buried under the Mesopotamian sand is thanks to the

This representation was unearthed in the same dig as the remains of the Golden Lyre and its silver sister.

extensive ornamentation on the original lyre– the gut strings and wooden body might have rotted away, but the precious stones and metals adorning the lyre preserved the outline of the instrument until it was excavated in 1922. Reconstruction was also greatly aided by contemporary mosaics and pottery showing similar lyres.

For particular interest are the tuning pegs, which required that artistic inspiration to recreate– the original archeological dig did not find any evidence of the tuning mechanism. [Peter] spends some time justifying his reconstruction, using both practical engineering concerns (the need for tension to get good sound) and the pictographic evidence. The wide “buzzing” bridge matches the pictographic evidence as well, and gives the lyre a distinct, almost otherworldly sound to Western ears. [Peter]’s reconstruction sounds good, though we have no way of knowing if it matches what you’d have heard in the royal halls of Ur all those dusty centuries ago. (Skip to 17:38 in the video below if you just want to hear it in action.)

The closest thing to this ancient, man-sized lyre we’ve seen on Hackaday before might be one of the various laser harp projects we’ve featured over the years. If you squint a little, you can see the distant echo of the Golden Lyre of Ur in at least some of them. We also can’t help but note that the buzzing bridge gives the Sumerian lyre a certain droning quality not entirely unlike a hurdy-gurdy, because we apparently can’t have a musical post without mentioning the hurdy-gurdy.

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CAL 3D Printing Spins Resin Right Round, Baby

August 21, 2025 by Tyler August 8 Comments

Computed Axial Lithography (CAL) is a lighting-fast form of volumetric 3D printing that holds incredible promise for the future, and [The Action Lab] filmed it in action at a Berkeley team’s booth at the “Open Sauce” convention.

The basic principle works like this: an extra-viscous photopolymer resin sits inside a rotating, transparent cylinder. As the cylinder rotates, UV light is projected into the resin in patterns carefully calculated to reproduce the object being printed. There are no layers, no FEP, and no stop-and-start; it’s just one long exposure from what is effectively an object-generating video, and it does not take long at all. You can probably guess that the photo above shows a Benchy being created, though unfortunately, we’re not told how long it took to produce.

Don’t expect to grab a bottle of SLA resin to get started: not only do you need higher viscosity, but also higher UV transmission than you get from an SLA resin to make this trick work. Like regular resin prints, the resolution can be astounding, and this technique even allows you to embed objects into the print.

This handle was printed directly onto the shaft of the screwdriver.

It’s not a new idea. Not only have we covered CAL before, we even covered it being tested in zero-G. Floating in viscous resin means the part couldn’t care less about the local gravity field. What’s interesting here is that this hardware is at tabletop scale, and looks very much like something an enterprising hacker might put together.

Indeed, the team at Berkeley have announced their intention to open-source this machine, and are seeking to collaborate with the community on their Discord server. Hopefully we’ll see something more formally “open” in the future, as it’s something we’d love to dig deeper into — and maybe even build for ourselves.

Thanks to [Beowulf Shaeffer] for the tip. If you are doing something interesting with photopolymer ooze (or anything else) don’t hesitate to let us know! Continue reading “CAL 3D Printing Spins Resin Right Round, Baby” →

Carry Your Grayscale Memories With This Tiny Game Boy Photo Frame

August 20, 2025 by Tyler August 2 Comments

While we cannot be certain this is the world’s smallest digital photo frame, [Raphaël Boichot]’s Pico Slide Show is probably in the running. Since the 0.85″ TFT display would be wasted on multi-megapixel images, [Raphael] has dedicated this project to images from the Game Boy Camera.

It’s a good fit: the tiny square display has a resolution of 128 pixels per side, while the Game Boy Camera produces files measuring 128 x 112. That allows for pixel-perfect rendering of the grainy images from everyone’s favorite early digicam with just a little letter boxing.

The brains of the operation are an RP2040, provided via the RP2040-zero breakout from Waveshare. Since everything is through-hole or on breakouts, this wouldn’t be a bad project for a beginner solderer.

Since it would make no sense not to have this tiny unit to be portable, power is provided with a 503035 LiPo pouch on the back. It’s only 500 mAh, but this device isn’t going to be chugging power, so we’d expect a reasonable runtime.

Alas, no link cable functionality is currently included, and files must be transferred via PC. Images are saved to the Pico’s flash memory, and [Raphaël] says any format from any Game Boy Printer emulator will work, provided it has a four-color palette. The flash memory on the chip has room for 540 images, which seems like more than enough. Regardless of the novelty of the tiny screen and retro format, nobody wants to see that many holiday snaps in one go.

The Game Boy Camera has been popular with hackers literally for decades now, and we’ve seen it everywhere from wedding photo booths to the heart of a custom DSLR, and even on Zoom calls.

Front and back of the replacement OLED module by Sir68k

Reviving A Piece Of Yesterday’s Tomorrow

August 20, 2025 by Tyler August 13 Comments

To anyone who remembers Y2K, Sony’s MiniDisc format will probably always feel futuristic. That goes double for Sony’s MZ-RH1, the last MiniDisk recorder ever released, back in 2006. It’s barely larger than the diminutive disks, and its styling is impeccable. There’s a reason they’ve become highly collectible and sell for insane sums on e-Bay.

Unfortunately, they come with a ticking time-bomb of an Achilles heel: the first-generation OLED screens. Failure is not a question of if, but when, and many units have already succumbed. Fortunately enterprising hacker [Sir68k] has come up with replacement screen to keep these two-decade old bits of the future alive.

Replacement screens glowing brightly, and the custom firmware showing track info, something you’d never see on a stock RH1.

Previous revisions required some light surgery to get the twin OLED replacement screens to fit, but as of the latest incarnation (revision F+), it’s now a 100% drop-in replacement for the original Sony part. While it is a drop-in, don’t expect it to be easy. The internals are very densely packed, and fairly delicate — both in the name of miniaturization. You’ll need to break out the micro-screwdrivers for this one, and maybe some magnifiers if your eyes are as old as ours. At least Sony wasn’t gluing cases together back in 2006, and [Sir68k] does provide a very comprehensive repair guide.

He’s even working on new firmware, to make what many considered best MD recorder better than ever. It’s not ready yet, but when it is [Sir68k] promises to open-source the upgrade. The replacement screens are sadly not open source hardware, but they’re a fine hack nonetheless.

We may see more MiniDisc hacks as the format’s apparent revival continues. Things like adding Bluetooth to the famously-cramped internals, or allowing full data transfer — something Sony was unwilling to allow until the RH1, which is one of the reasons these units are so desirable.