Modded Server PSU Provides Plenty Of Current

April 19, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 20 Comments

Most makers find themselves in need of a benchtop power supply at some point or another. Basic models can be had relatively cheaply, but as your current demands go higher, so does the price. [Danilo Larizza] has figured out an alternative solution—repurposing old server hardware to do the job instead.

The build is based around an HP Common Slot (CS) server power supply. They can be readily had for well under $50 if you know where to look. Even better, they can deliver over 50 amps at 12 volts, which happens to be a very useful voltage indeed. All you need to do is some minor mods.

A jumper on a couple of pins will get the power supply running, and with the addition of some terminals for your hook-up leads, you’re ready to go. As a hot-swappable single unit, the power supply is already outfitted with a ventilation fan to keep everything cool. If so desired, you can even make some further mods to bump output voltage a little ways past 13 or 14 volts if you’d like to use them for certain battery charging tasks.

Sure, you’re not getting a variable power supply, but if you need 12 volts and lots of it, this is a great way to go. We’ve featured similar builds before, too, turning ATX PC power supplies into useful benchtop tools.

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Rack Cage Generator Gets Your Gear Mounted

April 19, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 29 Comments

Sometimes, as hackers and makers, we can end up with messy lashed-together gear that is neither reliable nor tidy. Rackmounting your stuff can be a great way to improve the robustness and liveability of your setup. If you find this appealing, you might like CageMaker by [WebMaka].

This parametric OpenSCAD script can generate mounts for all kinds of stuff. Maybe you have a little network switch that’s just a tangle of wires on your desk, or a few pieces of audio gear that are loosely stacked on top of each other and looking rather unkempt. It would be trivial with this tool to create some 3D printed adapters to get all that stuff laced up nice and neat in a rack instead.

If you’re eager to get tinkering, you can try out the browser-based version quite easily. We’ve featured similar work before, too—many a maker has trod the path of rackmounting, as it turns out.

DIY UPS Keeps Home Assistant Running

April 19, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 26 Comments

If you put a bunch of computers in charge of your house, it’s generally desirable to ensure their up-time is as close to 100% as possible. An uninterruptible power supply can help in this regard. To that end, that’s why [Bill Collis] whipped one up for his Home Assistant setup.

[Bill]’s UPS is charged with one job—keeping the Home Assistant Green hub and an Xfinity XB7 cable modem online when the grid goes dark. The construction is relatively straightforward. When the grid is up, everything is powered via a Mean Well AC-DC 12 V power supply, while the power is also used to charge a 12.8 V 10 Ah lithium iron phosphate battery pack. When the grid goes out, the system switches over to running the attached hardware on pure battery power. A Victron BatteryProtect is used to automatically disconnect the load if the battery voltage drops too low. Meanwhile, a Shelly Plus Uni module is used to monitor battery voltage and system status, integrated right into Home Assistant itself.

If you want to keep the basics of your smart home going at all times, something like this is a pretty simple way to go. We’ve featured some other great UPS builds in the past, too. If you’re whipping up your own hardware to keep your home or lab alive in the dark of night, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline.

PSX Development With Unity And LUA

April 18, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 9 Comments

The Unity game development platform was first released in 2005, long after the PlayStation had ceased to be a relevant part of the console market. And yet, you could use Unity to develop for the platform, if you so desire, thanks to the efforts of [Bandwidth] and the team behind psxsplash.

Yes, it really is possible to design games for the original PlayStation using Unity and Lua. Using a tool called SplashEdit, you can whip up scenes, handle scripting, loading screens, create UIs, and do all the other little bits required to lash a game together. You can then run your creation via the psxsplash engine, deploying to emulator or even real hardware with a single click. Currently, development requires a Windows or Linux machine and Unity 6000.0+, but other than that, it’s pretty straightforward to start making games with a modern toolset for one of the most popular consoles of all time. Just remember, you’ve only got 33 MHz and 2MB of RAM to play with.

We still love to see the legendary grey machine get used and hacked in new and inventive ways, so many decades after release.

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Three-Monitor Ridge Racer Machine Emulated In MAME

April 18, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 12 Comments

When Ridge Racer hit the arcades in the early 1990s, it came in a few different versions. The last variant used three large CRTs to create a wraparound display for the player. Incredibly rare, it’s believed that only a single-digit number of machines remain in existence. [beaumotplage] has secured a remaining example, and been working to preserve this historical artifact.

The first mission when it comes to this machine was to dump the ROMs, which have thus far not been preserved in any major archive. With that done, [beaumotplage] worked to hack a version of MAME that could emulate the Three Monitor Version’s unique mode of operation. As it turns out, each screen is driven by its own arcade board, with the three boards linked via C139 serial links. To emulate this, the trick was simply to write some C139 linkup code and run three versions of MAME all at once, letting them communicate with each other as the original boards would have. It’s a little janky in operation right now, but it does work!

You can download the hacked version of MAME for three-monitor operation here, though note that this does not include the ROM dumps from the machine itself. We look forward to seeing if the hardware ends up getting a full restoration back to operational standard, too.

Overall, this work goes to show that arcade preservation and archival work sometimes requires getting deep into the nitty-gritty technical stuff.

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DJ Controller Modded For Better Scratching

April 18, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 4 Comments

[Jeremy Bell] loves scratching, but he had a problem. His Hercules DJ controller wasn’t really doing a great job at emulating the kind of action one would get with a real turntable. The solution was both mechanical and electronic in nature!

As stock, the Hercules MIDI rig lets you scratch in a relatively simplistic way. When it detects a finger touching the rotary control, it lets you scratch back and forth with great motion tracking. However, when you let go, playback resumes at regular speed instantaneously, which creates a somewhat inorganic sound.

The fix was to make some mechanical mods to the MIDI controller. [Jeremy] tried out a variety of different methods of using a motor to spin the rotary control continuously, from geared rigs to belt-driven setups. It was then possible to scratch on the controller, and then let it return to normal rotational speed, creating much smoother auditory transitions. However, this was imperfect, as for whatever reason, the Hercules rig would stop tracking the rotary control accurately unless it detected a finger was touching it. [Jeremy] worked around this by whipping up a slip-ring-like setup to keep his body permanently in contact with the rotary control even while spinning.

The results are pretty great—they’re both mechanically janky and fantastically satisfying to listen to. We’ve featured some other great DJ controller hacks over the years, like this sweet Pioneer UI upgrade.

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Microsoft Finally Ups FAT32 Size Limit

April 17, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 39 Comments

You probably don’t spend a lot of time using the FAT32 file system anymore, since it’s thoroughly been superseded many times over. Even so, Microsoft has seen fit to deliver an upgrade for FAT32 for the latest Windows 11 Insider Preview build. Finally, the stock Windows tools will let you format a FAT32 drive up to 2 TB instead of locking you to a 32 GB maximum!

The size limit was never baked into the FAT32 spec itself. With a 32-bit field for counting sectors, the file system supports up to 2 TB volumes with 512-byte sectors. However, as explained by former Microsoft developer [Dave Plummer], it just so happened that the 32 GB limit came about because of a random decision made when slapping together the Format dialogue box over 30 years ago.

The pending change was first announced in 2024, affecting the command line format tool as well. It’s actually been possible to create larger FAT32 volumes for some time, you just couldn’t easily do it with Microsoft’s standard formatting tools.

FAT32 is still a terrible file system to use in 2026, mostly because it has a hard limit on file size that tops out at 4 GB. It’ll ruin your life if you’re shooting HD or 4K video. We often don’t spend a lot of time musing over file systems in detail, but they’re right at the heart of everything we do on our computers on a daily basis. Sometimes, it bears thinking about!