Author: Zoe Skyforest

3803 Articles

Meta Portal Given New Life As Extended Display

September 18, 2026 by 5 Comments

The Meta Portal and associated devices are effectively defunct, having been abandoned by the company in 2022. If you’ve still got one at home, you might be wondering what to do with it. That’s where Wormhole Display from [pgodlews] comes in handy.

The thing about the Meta Portal, and much of the rest of the related lineup, is that they were effectively just heavily branded Android tablets. The screens and speakers were good, and the basic functionality was all there — albeit locked down somewhat to prevent users from easily repurposing them at will. However, it’s possible to enable Android Debug Bridge (ADB) and turn the device to doing your own bidding.

To that end, [pgodlews] built Wormhole Display as an APK that can be dropped on to the Meta Portal to make it an extendable display for Apple devices. It shows up via AirPlay, letting you use it as a wireless display for your Mac, iPhone, or iPad. You can do screen mirroring or use it as an extended display, as desired, including use of the Portal’s speakers if needed. Under the hood, it’s an Android port of UxPlay, a Unix AirPlay server which uses Android’s MediaCodec and AudioTrack in place of GStreamer to take advantage of the Meta Portal’s onboard H.264 decoder.

Extended displays can be incredibly useful, so if you’ve got an old Meta Portal laying around, consider putting it back to work. We’ve seen it done with e-readers, too. If you’ve got your own hacks to repurpose old, forgotten hardware, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline!

Building A DIY Centrifuge For Blood Processing

September 17, 2026 by 19 Comments

If you want to do certain types of lab work with blood, you’ll need a centrifuge. It’s often possible to find serviceable units on the used market, but they may not meet your requirements if you’re doing something quite specific. For that reason, [Thomas Nguyen] decided to build his own centrifuge from scratch.

His goal was to separate T cells from blood for further lab analysis, and he needed to be able to work with blood in 15 mL conical tubes. Capable centrifuges weren’t affordable, but he figured he could build his own quite easily. To that end, he enlisted a Raspberry Pi Pico, a 3D printer, and an A2212 brushless motor with a 30 amp electronic speed controller.

Soon enough, he had a design for a fixed-angle centrifuge design that could spin up blood products to the required speed for separation. It has useful safety features, like an MPU-6050 for vibration detection to shut down in case of dangerous imbalance, and an IR sensor for monitoring and controlling rotational speed. For now, the project is still in development, with the first version built and spinning. [Thomas] aims to check that the build operates safely and can separate fluids like dyed water and glycerol successfully before running it with real blood products.

We’ve seen other successful DIY centrifuge builds before, too. Sometimes, the lab hardware you need is the lab hardware you build yourself. If it works and does the job safely, it can be all that you need to get your science goals coming to fruition.

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Eye-D Badge Catches Your Attention

September 17, 2026 by 5 Comments

Head out to your next corporate conference, and you’ll probably be handed a little paper badge in a plastic holder so people can learn what to call you (or whether they should talk to you at all). It serves a function, but it’s a little soulless. [Aahan Sharma]’s Eye-D badge is a touch more interesting.

At the heart of the build is an ESP32-C6 microcontroller. It’s a capable part, with clock speed configurable up to 160 MHz, and wireless connectivity baked in. It’s hooked up to an 8 x 16 matrix of WS2812B addressable RGB LEDs, creating a color 128-pixel display. [Aahan] took advantage of the onboard Bluetooth Low Energy connection of the ESP32 to enable the display to be readily controlled by a smartphone, tablet, or laptop.

It can be configured to display a name, social handle, or custom message as desired. Beyond that, it can display animations, like an eye scanning around the room, Nyan Cat, or fire or Matrix-like effects just for the fun of it. There’s also a Draw Mode that lets one create their own pixel art on the display, too. [Aahan] wanted the build to feel like a serious conference badge, rather than a random electronic trinket, so whipped up a custom enclosure. The LEDs, microcontroller, and a battery, are all wrapped up in a tidy 3D printed housing with a ring for easily hanging the badge from clothes, lanyard, bag, or similar.

If you’re running your own little conference and have the budget for something cool, you might like to build a run of these. Or, you could explore some of the more advanced badge designs that are out there.

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An Enhanced Game Boy Advance

September 17, 2026 by 14 Comments

[Bucket Mouse] has long been a fan of the various iterations of the Nintendo Game Boy. Now, he’s turned his eye to the Game Boy Advance, building an enhanced version for the console’s 25th anniversary.

There are plenty of ways to mod an existing GBA to be better than the original, but this build recreates the console from the ground up. It’s basically a brand new motherboard that replaces the original entirely, requiring only the CPU and RAM to be harvested from the original board.

It’s perfect for when you find a badly-damaged handheld that needs heavy repair, because every other part on the board can be purchased new. You can buy a nice shiny screen kit online, and even upgrade to LiPo power if so desired. The new motherboard also eliminates sound issues that are common when upgrading the screen in a classic GBA, and there’s stereo audio available on the headphone jack as standard. Battery life is also improved compared to the original.

If you’ve got a haggard old GBA in need of repair, or you just want to build the best classic handheld you can, it’s worth taking a look at this build. You might also appreciate previous works from [Bucket Mouse], like his efforts to improve the original Game Boy.

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Recreating Unobtainable Diagnostic Tools For The Jaguar XJ220

September 16, 2026 by 22 Comments

If you own a Jaguar XJ220 or the rarer XJR-15, you’re probably not short on money or real estate. You may, however, be finding it hard to lay your hands on a diagnostic tool that is compatible with the ancient Zytek ECU. Thankfully, [Tom Radom], is working to change that. 

As the owner of XJ220 chassis #50, [Tom] was unlucky enough to see the dreaded check engine light come on last year. He was lucky enough to get his hands on an SPD-1039 interface, built to talk to the Zytek ECU that runs the car. However, he was painfully aware that these devices are now incredibly rare and hard to come by, even given the tiny limited market of owners of 1990s Jaguar supercars. Thus, he set about building a replacement.

An initial effort to open up and reverse engineer the Zytek interface failed, mostly because it had been potted rather successfully in silicone. Thus, [Tom] took a new tack. He hooked up a logic analyser between the interface and the car, recording the traffic between the two. This captured data allowed [Tom] to recreate the interface using a FT232RNL bridge to chat to the Zytek engine control unit. There was no attempt to rebuild the software—the original DOS-based diagnostic still runs perfectly fine in an emulator. It was just the hardware interface from a serial port to the car that needed to be recreated.

[Tom] has been building the modules and supplying them to owners of XJ220, XJ220S, and XJR-15 models at no charge. He believes simply having a viable diagnostic tool available will increase the value of these classic cars by more than the costs he incurred to develop the interface. Interested parties can submit their details via webform on Port220.com.

For a modern vehicle, the ECU is everything. Without it, the car doesn’t run. That’s why we’ve seen some heroic fixes to rescue cars and get them back on the road. If you’re doing your own wizardry to talk to cars of the past, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline.

A 3D Rasterizer For Embedded Devices

September 16, 2026 by 22 Comments

Once upon a time, doing graphics on a microcontroller was challenging, to say nothing of the concept of going into three dimensions. But modern microcontrollers are far more powerful, and you might find yourself wanting to do all sorts of graphical wizardry with one. To that end, you might find Jet useful.

Created by [CubeCoders], Jet is a compact 3D rasterizer built for modern chips like the ESP32 and STM32. It’s dependency free, relatively tiny, and is written in C++17 with an eye towards working well on memory-limited platforms. It runs entirely in software, uses only integer arithmetic, and is built around 16-bit RGB565 color — intended to make it easy to use with parts like the ST7796, ILI9488, and other similar displays interfaced via SPI.

As a point of reference, on a ESP32-S3 Jet can render around 650 on-screen triangles (post-culling) at 60 frames per second on a 480×320 display, or 1300 triangles at 30 FPS. The developers note that 3D performance lands somewhere between the Sega 32X and Sega Saturn — not bad for a microcontroller you can buy for under $20. The Wipeout-like demo shows off the capabilities of Jet rather fantastically, we think.

You’d be foolish to expect your next microcontroller project to render Crysis. However, if you want some retro 3D graphics for your next ESP32-based build, you might just consider exploring what Jet can do for you.

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A Cheap And Easy Control Screen For Home Assistant

September 16, 2026 by 17 Comments

Home Assistant is a great way to rig up and manage your smart home and its many and varied devices. You can of course control the system from your smartphone or a computer, but you might like to have a dedicated interface too. In that regard, [Max Gramser]’s project may come in handy.

At heart, it’s a Home Assistant control screen that you can lay out yourself. It’s intended to run on ESP32 hardware. Most specifically, it’s built to run on the Cheap Yellow Display which combines an ILI9341 display with an XPT2046 resistive touchscreen, or a Guition ESP32-S3-4848S040, which has a ST7701S RGB display combined with a capacitive GT911 touchscreen. You merely need to load the firmware on to one of these units, and you’ll have a configurable and customizable touchscreen interface for your own Home Assistant setup.

The GUI used is clean, attractive, and flexible. You can have it display weather, time, and date widgets, populate the screen with buttons for activating lights and appliances, or even command a compatible robot vacuum. Whatever you might want to do with Home Assistant, you can almost certainly create a quick control for it on the display so it’s always on the wall, ready to go when you need it.

If you’ve always dreamed of your house having a futuristic control panel like we used to dream of in the 1980s, well… now it’s a reality. You just need to drop a few bucks on a touchscreen ESP32 rig and you’re ready to go. There’s plenty more you can do with a Cheap Yellow Display, too, so don’t hesitate to check out some of the previous builds we’ve featured with it!