Author: Zoe Skyforest

3740 Articles

Uninvasive EEG Interface Could Be Used To Play Games

August 14, 2026 by 6 Comments

These days, most of us interface with our computing devices in the same old-fashioned ways—via keyboards, mice, and touchscreens. The idea of a more direct brain-to-machine interface remains appealing to many. [Ildar Rakhmatulin] and [Youssef El Abbass] have been working on just such a device, with an eye to using it for gaming.

The device is referred to as Octopus 16, so named because it combines sixteen EEG electrodes into a single compact package, along with the required common reference and ground. The contacts themselves are pogo pins, assembled into a coin-sized cluster. The device is strapped to the head, pushing the contacts against the scalp, and data from the electrodes is then siphoned off to a host machine via Bluetooth Low Energy. The EEG signals are picked up with a pair of Texas Instruments ADS131M08 ADCs, each with 8 channels, with a resolution of 24-bits to capture fine detail in whatever the brain is doing. An ESP32 microcontroller is responsible for grabbing the ADC output and trucking it out over Bluetooth.

The rig is designed for use with the PiEEG software platform. The team have experimented with the device, showing it off by using the EEG signals to detect an individual’s focus state and using that to feed into simple game environments.

Ultimately, what has been shown so far is not so different from the old Force Trainer toy, but the design might prove useful if you’re looking into doing EEG experiments on a budget. Just do your due diligence to make sure you’re getting more signal than noise out of those lovely 24-bit ADCs. Video after the break.

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Snooping Flume Water Monitor Data On The Wire

August 14, 2026 by 4 Comments

[Stephen] had an interesting piece of hardware at home—namely, a Flume water monitor. It’s a smart device which reports usage data to Flume’s servers, and the water utility in turn. He’d previously determined how the device worked mechanically to monitor water flow, but he had a greater goal—figuring out how to sniff the reported data as it passed through his network on its way to Flume servers.

The Flume rig has a sensor installed in the water line, which communicates to a bridge device that then hooks up to the Internet. [Stephen] had an early win, figuring out how to trick the bridge unit of the Flume water sensor into sending data in plaintext. This was as simple as corrupting the public key in the device’s flash. However, this wasn’t a perfect solution—as the corrupt key stopped the device from authenticating with Flume’s servers. Further diving into the LibHydrogen encryption implementation, however, revealed that the device was apparently authenticating without using session keys, relying only on a static device secret key which can be harvested from the onboard flash. This allowed [Stephen] to build a tool to sit in between the bridge and the Flume servers, forwarding traffic seamlessly while decrypting and saving it locally at the same time.

With this setup, [Stephen] was able to locally log water flow and status data from the sensor. It does come with a caveat, that the man-in-the-middle setup could block the hardware from receiving firmware updates in future. It’s also worth checking out [Stephen’s] earlier work on demystifying the Flume hardware, too. The relay tool is available on GitHub for the curious.

We love seeing hackers figure out how to interface utility meters and similar devices, in legal and appropriate manners, of course. If you’re tinkering in this realm yourself, feel free to let us know on the tipsline!

Rare IBM PC Brought Back To Life

August 13, 2026 by 24 Comments

[Epictronics] happens to have a rather special machine in his possession. It’s a rare IBM PC prototype or concept machine from the late 1980s known as the IBM 7496 Executive Workstation. It’s a striking thing, with a rather enticing case design that has the monitor permanently attached on a nifty swivel mount. Only… the machine wasn’t working, so some repairs were in order!

The video is essentially teardown that gives a wonderful look at the internals of this oddball machine, which differs rather a bit from more mainstream IBM product of the era. The video is also about repairs and upgrades, too. The real work begins with pulling out the 720K double-density floppy drive, which has a number of faults preventing it from working reliably. Running a machine off floppies alone is as frustrating today as it was back then, so [Epictronics] goes further by adding in an XT-IDE card to allow the machine to interface with a hard drive. An AdLib clone soundcard completes the upgrades to make this unique unit as capable as you’d want it to be given those industrially good looks. The machine has the obscure, shortlived MCGA graphics subsystem, which really fits its oddball nature, but it will nevertheless play a fair few games of its era if such is demanded of it.

If you’re a fan of the early days of the IBM PC, or you just like watching retro computers pulled apart and delicately put back together, this is a great video to watch over lunch or dinner. If your tastes are more Commoderian, we’ve got some content more to your tastes as well. Video after the break.

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Troubleshooting Video Delay On The Raspberry Pi

August 13, 2026 by 1 Comment

The Raspberry Pi line of single-board computers are great little devices, and they can do great things with cameras and video. However, there can be a fair bit of latency involved in these tasks depending on the board you’re using and just what you’re doing. You need to have things set up just so to get peak performance. [MattKC] has tangled with this issue in a personal project, and recently had somewhat of a breakthrough.

The issue came up during [MattKC’s] work on cloning the WiiU gamepad. The idea was to receive the video stream from the WiiU console and display it using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W. He had some problems with latency, wherein there was a strange 3 frames of latency in the video pipeline that just wouldn’t go away. Even substituting in some dummy frames into the pipeline and ignoring them at output time didn’t work—the latency stuck around. Eventually, [MattKC] realized the delay wasn’t about a certain number of frames—it was about time. About 50 milliseconds, in fact.

Drilling down further revealed that there was a problem in the way frames were being fed into and received from the decoder. The first frame would take about 50 ms to decode, while later frames would take far less—as little as 5ms. However, [MattKC’s] code wasn’t set up to grab frames as soon as they were done, so the lag carried forward. The video explains it in greater detail, and how polling the decoder regularly helped solve the issue. The final result was a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W that could process and display the WiiU video feed as quickly as the original Nintendo WiiU gamepad.

If you dug this, it’s worth going back and checking out where the WiiU gamepad project started, too. Video after the break.

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Tearing Down A Cheap Digital Caliper

August 13, 2026 by 62 Comments

Most hackers and makers end up with a cheap pair of calipers in the toolbox at some point or another. [DiodeGoneWild] decided to take a particularly cheap plastic pair and tear them down to see what makes them tick measure.

The electronics is, unsurprisingly, all contained inside the carriage which slides along the ruler. The ruler itself has an etched copper strip inside, underneath the scale sticker, with repetitive T-shaped sections. Meanwhile, the PCB in the carriage has a series of plates for capactive sensing. As the carriage slides along the copper strip inside the ruler, the capacitive sensing plates pick up varying capacitances which are directly proportional to how far the carriage has moved, allowing for precise measurement of relative position. Zeroing is a job for the user, via the ZERO button. We get to see how this works on the bare hardware level, and [DiodeGoneWild] even breaks out the oscilloscope to help show us what’s going on.

[DiodeGoneWild] also notes that these calipers are particularly frustrating for how quickly they discharge batteries while in storage. This may be down to the convenience feature, wherein moving the caliper switches the display on. There’s no hard off switch here—so the caliper is always drawing some juice even when it’s just in the cupboard. This is why these things are forever turning up dead when you need them.

If you’ve never pulled apart one of these cheap tools, this is a great way to see what’s actually going on under the hood. We’ve seen some other great teardowns lately, like this deep dive into a cheap pair of smartglasses. Video after the break.

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Bridging Older Tasmota Hardware Into Apple Home

August 13, 2026 by 3 Comments

The Tasmota firmware is a popular choice for flashing to a range of Espressif microcontrollers to turn them into smart home devices. If you have such devices in your house, you might wish they were easier to integrate with the Apple Home platform. As it turns out, though, there’s a convenient app for that.

[Christof Müller] built an app called Tasmoshelf for just this purpose. Its primary claim to fame is that it can easily help port a Tasmota-based setup into the Apple Home universe. It can achieve this without requiring a Home Assistant server or MQTT broker or any other workarounds. This is thanks to the fact that Apple Home is compatible with Matter technology, as are ESP32 devices running Tasmota 13 firmware or newer. They can natively jump on an Apple Home setup, and even act as a bridge for older ESP8266 devices that can’t speak Matter themselves. The device is able to run network scans to automatically discover devices and advise whether they can hook up directly to Apple Home, or whether a bridge is needed.

If you’re running Tasmota devices and want to easily integrate them, you might find Tasmoshelf a useful addition to your smart home setup. Just note that it does require a one-off purchase if you intend to use it beyond three devices, a limit which some might find somewhat restrictive.

We’ve looked at Tasmota in detail before; it’s a great way to whip up a smart home to suit your own desires. Meanwhile, if you’re whipping up your own nifty integrations, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline.

Hacking Fiber To The Home

August 13, 2026 by 43 Comments

When we think about security threats, we generally imagine them coming from far away across the wider internet. But what if the connection between you and your ISP was the target? [Rithwik Jayasimha] and [Rithvik Vibhu] have explored how fiber to the home connections may not be as secure as you would hope.

The hack centers around fiber-to-the-home connections, of which many deployments rely on Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) standards. The key there is the “passive” part—these networks don’t rely on active components to switch signals. ISPs run central trunk lines out to optical line terminals (OLT), with passive splitters installed in neighborhoods to serve a number of downstream subscribers. Each subscriber then has something called an Optical Network Unit (ONU) in their home, which filters out the traffic intended for that specific subscriber.

Therein lies the flaw, though. Light (and thus, data) for many subscribers flows into the home, and it’s only the ONU that is filtering that out. Hack the ONU, or replace it… and you have access to downstream traffic from your neighbors that you shouldn’t be able to access.

The duo were able to hack an ONU to forward every single frame it receives, revealing downstream data intended for other homes in their immediate neighborhood. A great deal of traffic is encrypted these days, which provides a layer of safety, but it is by no means an ideal situation that such a hack is possible at all. They also explored other threats, such as installing splitters in publicly-accessible infrastructure, and compromising an upstream OLT and using it to flash firmware to other subscriber’s ONUs on the network. All this was presented in a talk at DEF CON, too, which can be viewed online.

It’s a concerning look at an often unconsidered link in the network chain. Few of us expect our data to be snooped upon in between us and the ISP, after all.

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