Off-Axis Rotation For Amiga-Themed Levitating Lamp

December 8, 2025 by Tyler August 5 Comments

Do you remember those levitating lamps that were all the rage some years ago? Floating light bulbs, globes, you name it. After the initial craze of expensive desk toys, a wave of cheap kits became available from the usual suspects. [RobSmithDev] wanted to make a commemorative lamp for the Amiga’s 40th anniversary, but… it was missing something. Sure, the levitating red-and-white “boing” ball looked good, but in the famous demo, the ball is spinning at a jaunty angle. You can’t do that with mag-lev… not without a hack, anyway.

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Emulate ROMs At 12MHz With Pico2 PIO

December 6, 2025 by Tyler August 10 Comments

Nothing lasts forever, and that includes the ROMs required to make a retrocomputer run. Even worse, what if you’re rolling your own firmware? Period-appropriate EPROMs and their programmers aren’t always cheap or easy to get a hold of these days. [Kyo-ta04] had that problem, and thanks to them, we now all have a solution: Pico2ROMEmu, a ROM emulator based on, you guessed it, the Raspberry Pi Pico2.

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Blue Hedgehog, Meet Boing Ball: Can Sonic Run On Amiga?

December 5, 2025 by Tyler August 10 Comments

The Amiga was a great game system in its day, but there were some titles it was just never going to get. Sonic the Hedgehog was one of them– SEGA would never in a million years been willing to port its flagship platformer to another system. Well, SEGA might not in a million years, but [reassembler] has started that process after only thirty four.

Both the SEGA Mega Drive (that’s the Genesis for North Americans) and Amiga have Motorola 68k processors, but that doesn’t mean you can run code from one on the other: the memory maps don’t match, and the way graphics are handled is completely different. The SEGA console uses so-called “chunky” graphics, which is how we do it today. Amiga, on the other hand, is all about the bitplanes; that’s why it didn’t get a DOOM port back in the day, which may-or-may not be what killed the platform.

In this first video of what promises to be a series, [reassembler] takes us through his process of migrating code from the Mega Drive to Amiga, starting specifically with the SEGA loading screen animation, with a preview of the rest of the work to come. While watching someone wrestle with 68k assembler is always interesting, the automation he’s building up to do it with python is the real star here. Once this port is done, that toolkit should really grease the wheels of bringing other Mega Drive titles over.

It should be noted that since the Mega Drive was a 64 colour machine, [reassembler] is targeting the A1200 for his Sonic port, at least to start. He plans to reprocess the graphics for a smaller-palette A500 version once that’s done. That’s good, because it would be a bit odd to have a DOOM-clone for the A500 while being told a platformer like Sonic is too much to ask. If anyone can be trusted to pull this project off, it’s [reassembler], whose OutRun: Amiga Edition is legendary in the retro world, even if we seem to have missed covering it.

If only someone had given us a tip off, hint hint.

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Ore Formation: A Surface Level Look

December 4, 2025 by Tyler August 9 Comments

The past few months, we’ve been giving you a quick rundown of the various ways ores form underground; now the time has come to bring that surface-level understanding to surface-level processes.

Strictly speaking, we’ve already seen one: sulfide melt deposits are associated with flood basalts and meteorite impacts, which absolutely are happening on-surface. They’re totally an igneous process, though, and so were presented in the article on magmatic ore processes.

For the most part, you can think of the various hydrothermal ore formation processes as being metamorphic in nature. That is, the fluids are causing alteration to existing rock formations; this is especially true of skarns.

There’s a third leg to that rock tripod, though: igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary. Are there sedimentary rocks that happen to be ores? You betcha! In fact, one sedimentary process holds the most valuable ores on Earth– and as usual, it’s not likely to be restricted to this planet alone. Continue reading “Ore Formation: A Surface Level Look” →

Two four-cylinder engines mechanically linked and exhausting into a trombone.

Franken-engine Plays Its Own Swan Song At 15k RPM

December 3, 2025 by Tyler August 16 Comments

Back during WWII, Chrysler bodged five inline-6 engines together to create the powerful A57 multibank tank engine. [Maisteer] has some high-revving inline-4 motorcycle engines he’s trying to put together too, but unlike 1940s Chrysler, he also has a trombone… and a lot more RPMs to deal with.

The Chrysler flatheads were revving at a few thousand RPM– their redline was almost certainly in the three-thousand range. [Maisteer] is working at 15,000 RPM, which is where the real challenge of this build lies: the trombone in the image is just for fun. He wanted to use a heavy chain to link the crankshafts, but at that rotational speed, a heavy chain becomes really heavy— or at least, it feels a force many times its weight due to centrifugal force. The lietmotief of this video is a quote by an automotive engineer to the effect that chains don’t work over 10,000 RPM.

That leads to a few problems for the intrepid “not an engineer” that take most of the video to deal with and ultimately doom the engine linkage– for now. Not before he gets an iconic 8-cylinder sound out (plus some fire) out of a trombone, though. Of particular note is the maker-type workflow Hackaday readers will appreciate: he 3D scans the engines, CADs up parts he needs and sends away to have them CNC’d and SLS printed.

Hacking motorcycle engines into cars is nothing new. Hacking them together into franken-engines is something we see less often.

Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip! Remember, if you want to toot your own horn– or toot about someone else’s project, for that matter–the tips line is always open.

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Get To The Games On Time With This Ancient-Style Waterclock

December 3, 2025 by Tyler August 2 Comments

One easy way to make a very accurate clock is with a WiFi-enabled microcontroller like an ESP32 and a display: set up NTP, and you’ll never be off by more than a minute. This water clock project by [Liebregts] is not like that — there are no electronics to speak of, and if the clock is ever in sync to within a single minute, well, we’d be surprised.

We’re impressed to see it working regardless. Sure, it’s not exactly high-tech; the floating siphon mechanism [Liebregts] is using to get a steady flow out of the main reservoir dates back to 250 BC. On the other hand, since this style of time keeper has been out of fashion since the fall of Rome, [Liebregts] couldn’t just grab something off GitHub or ask ChatGPT to design it for them. This is real human engineering. The reservoir is even scaled to the four-hour timing of [Liebregts] workday — it gets refilled at lunch along with its maker.

The water clock in all its glory, plus diagrammatic labels.

In a clever build detail, the floating siphon tube also holds a pointer to an hour indicator. For minutes, his mechanism seems unique, though it’s related to another ancient trick, the Pythagorean cup. Pythagoras’s devious cup had a hidden siphon that spilled its contents if you filled it beyond a set level, and so does the secondary reservoir of [Liebregts] water clock.

Since the secondary reservoir is linked to a counterweight with a pivot, it goes up and down over the course of approximately 5 minutes — but rather than linking that to another linear indicator, [Liebregts] is using that mechanism to advance a saw-toothed gear that is marked with 5-12 in analog-clock fashion for a touch of modernity. See it in action in the demo video below.

That last part might confuse a time traveler from Ancient Rome or Greece, but they’d instantly recognize this creation as a clock, which many modern observers might not. Still, once they learn to read it you can be sure that [Liebergts]’s friends will never be late to a gladiator fight again — and not just because Constantine banned them in 325 AD. Apparently nobody listened to that ban anyway.

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Retro Style VFO Has Single-Digit Parts Count

December 2, 2025 by Tyler August 9 Comments

Not every project has to be complicated– reinventing the wheel has its place, but sometimes you find a module or two that does exactly what you want, and the project is more than halfway done. That the kind of project [mircemk]’s Simple Retro Style VFO is — it’s a variable frequency oscillator for HAM and other use, built with just a couple of modules.

Strictly speaking, this is all you need for the project.

The modules in question are the SI5351 Clock Generator module, which is a handy bit of kit with its own crystal reference and PLL to generate frequencies up to 150 MHz, and the Elecrow CrowPanel 1.28inch-HMI ESP32 Rotary Display. The ESP32 in the CrowPanel controls the SI5351 module via I2C; control is via the rest of the CrowPanel module. This Rotary Display is a circular touchscreen surrounded by a rotary display, so [mircmk] has all the inputs he needs to control the VFO.

To round out the parts count, he adds an appropriate connector, plus a power switch, red LED and a lithium battery. One could include a battery charger module as well, but [mircmk] didn’t have one on hand. Even if he had, that still keeps the parts count well inside the single digits. If you like video, we’ve embedded his about the project below; if not the write up on Hackaday.io is upto [mircmk]’s typical standard.

People have been using the SI5351 to make VFOs for years now, but the addition of the round display makes for a delightfully retro presentation.

Thanks to [mircmk] for the tip.

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