Author: Zoe Skyforest

3740 Articles

NES Advantage Stick Gets Bluetooth Upgrade

July 31, 2026 by 3 Comments

The NES Advantage was a cool bit of hardware back in 1987, bringing an arcade stick to the home console gaming experience. Naturally they don’t get much use these days, unless of course they’ve been modded to work with modern systems, as [Aaron] has done.

[Aaron]’s goals were straightforward. The stick should work with modern systems over Bluetooth, but the mod should not involve cutting the case or making any new holes. All controls, including Turbo and Slow Motion, still had to work, too, and there would be no adding extra buttons for configuration or control.

To achieve this, [Aaron] whipped up a custom PCB which replaces the original cable attached to the NES Advantage. Power is via a small LiPo cell, charged via a TP4056 and paired with a TPS63900 buck-boost converter. An ESP32-WROOM-32E interfaces all the original controls, reading the stick’s CD4021 shift registers to do so. It then either emulates a Switch Pro Controller over Bluetooth Classic, for use with a modern Nintendo Switch, or it acts as a standard Bluetooth Low Energy gamepad for use with PCs, SteamOS, phones, and other compatible hardware. All that and the stick can still work with an original NES if so desired, when placed in the Switch Pro Controller mode. You merely need to plug in an 8BitDo NES Retro Receiver and you’re up and running.

We’ve seen other fun retro controller builds before, too, like this classic Xbox controller modded to work with the Xbox 360. If you’re cooking up similar projects, we’d love to hear about it on the tipsline.

Building A Reproduction PlayStation Motherboard

July 31, 2026 by 5 Comments

Thanks to things like spilled drinks, leaky batteries, and the general ravages of time, older consoles can be tough to keep going. In particular, excessive damage to a motherboard can make repair difficult or near-impossible to execute even if the rest of the console is in otherwise passable condition. Now, there may be greater hope for those looking to resurrect the worst-treated PlayStations out there, thanks to a new open-source motherboard from [xyzz].

The board is up on GitHub with a CC0-1.0 license. It’s aiming to be a drop-in replacement for the stock motherboard, on to which you would transplant all the necessary proprietary hardware from an existing donor board. The list of transplant parts is quite extensive as you’d expect, including the CPU, GPU, RAM, VRAM, BIOS, sound chips, mechanical control chip, crystals, and all the ports, among others. Some generic parts can still be had off the shelf, but you could also transplant them if so desired. There are some headaches with the current design—namely, it doesn’t fit perfectly with the lid switch connector, and some of the footprints are hard to solder. Still, it’s a great start, and early testing shows that it’s already quite functional.

Fortunately the original PlayStation didn’t have any sort of battery on board to leak all over the place and corrode things, but boards still get damaged in a variety of other un-fun ways. Thus, it’s great to have a potential replacement motherboard on offer to bring badly-damaged machines back to life.

We’ve featured other great restoration projects in this vein before, too, like the efforts to recreate the C64 motherboard from a few years ago. As ever, enthusiasts are doing great work to keep these classic machines alive long into the future.

Thanks to [ToolThatIsTom] for the tip.

A Capable KVM Built With The ESP32

July 30, 2026 by 17 Comments

[Evgenij Spitsyn] spotted a KVM build on these very pages some time ago. That inspired their own build, leveraging the versatility of the ESP32-P4 microcontroller.

The concept is straightforward. Named the ESPKVM, the device is designed to hook up to a computer’s HDMI and USB ports. It captures the video output, while presenting itself as a standard keyboard and mouse device. In this way, it allows remote control of the machine over IP. It achieves this feat with the aid of the Toshiba TC358743 HDMI-to-CSI bridge, which is essentially the video capture hardware of the build.

The video output of the machine is streamed in MJPEG or H.264 format. The device is capable of serving up storage from a micro SD card or the onboard flash, as well as handling things like power/reset control and wake-on-LAN. All in all, it’s a very complete package, and full of useful features. Just don’t use it over the public internet yet — [Evgenij] notes it hasn’t been reviewed for potential security holes yet, even though it has some basic authentication features baked in.

If you’ve got an ESP32-P4 ready to go with a TC358743 HDMI bridge, you can actually head over to the ESPKVM website and flash the code right in your browser to get going. Meanwhile, if you found this build interesting, you might like to scope out the one that inspired it. If you’re cooking up similar utility hacks, be sure to notify the Hackaday tipsline.

Keyboard Lights As An Airgap Attack Vector

July 29, 2026 by 22 Comments

What do you do when you need to get data into an airgapped machine? Well, you might find yourself limited to basic input devices to interact with the computer in question. As [Nikolay Valentinovich Repnitskiy] demonstrates, though, you can do some fun stuff amidst such limitations.

[Nikolay] created what he calls a “unidirectional network” connection via a keyboard. Specifically, he took two Dell SK-8115 keyboards, and stripped them down to their controller PCBs. On one, he soldered photoresistors to a couple of the keyboard matrix pins, such that they’d fire a keypress when lit up. He then placed the other keyboard PCB such that the Num Lock and Caps Lock LEDs are lined up with the photoresistors. This made it possible to have one PC flash the keyboard LEDs in order to “type” on the other machine. This can be used to move data on to it, such as a little program which [Nikolay] prepared which can be made executable and used to further break into the machine and make it easier to pull data across more efficiently in future.

We looked at an earlier version of this hack some time ago. If you’ve been imagining creative ways to talk to airgapped computers, be sure to let us know on the tipsline!

Scrap Pinball Parts Become Beautiful Wall Art

July 29, 2026 by 2 Comments

[Hans Scharler] came into a neat find recently—the playfield from a 1970s Atari Superman game. It’s the sort of thing that’s too nice to throw away, but isn’t really enough to reassemble into a viable full machine without a great deal of effort. Thus, [Hans] went a different route—turning it into a beautiful piece of wall art. 

The first step of the build was to collect missing parts; in particular, all the plastic inserts for the playfield that had been lost at some point. Everything was cleaned up and mounted, along with some modified flippers to complete the look. Custom pop bumpers were 3D printed to act as LED-lit light guides rather than as functional pinball components. [Hans] then set about dotting the board with plenty of WS2811 addressable LEDs in a bullet form factor. Everything was placed under the command of a WLED controller, and it’s synced up to [Hans’s] CheerLights MQTT server to boot. More build details are available on the Pinside post for those eager for a deeper dive.

If you come into some old-school pinball hardware that you’d like to turn into decoration, this project is a great one to study. We’ve featured a few other great pinball builds over the years, too.

Continue reading “Scrap Pinball Parts Become Beautiful Wall Art” →

Building A Portable Weather Radar

July 29, 2026 by 19 Comments

If you run a large meteorology bureau, then you probably have access to a wonderful weather radar for scrying the heavens. The rest of us aren’t so lucky. If you find yourself bereft of such hardware, though, you could build your own, taking your lead from [Koakno]’s fine example.

The build uses a satellite dome salvaged from an old RV that [Koakno] scored for just $5. Specifically, a Winegard Carryout Anser GM-5000. The motorized parabolic dish was designed to track TV satellites, but here it’s been repurposed into a scanning radar antenna for X-band signals. It’s paired with a cheap SDR—you can use several on the market—which injects an 850 MHz signal, which is up-converted to 10.4 GHz by the low-noise block (LNB) in the GM-5000 and sprayed out towards the weather.

Echoes come back from rain, hail, and debris, and get down-converted by the LNB back into an 850 MHz signal that the SDR can capture. The echoes are then plotted on a Plan Position Indicator (PPI) display, showing what’s going on in the atmosphere around the dome. [Koakno] reckons detection ranges span out to 40 km for things like heavy rain, while a supercell hail core could be spotted at up to 60 km in the right conditions.

It’s worth noting something important, though. [Koakno] explains that this system is currently in violation of FCC regulations, and shouldn’t be used without the proper licenses to access given spectrum. It’s a useful study of how to build a weather radar, but perhaps not something you can just wire together and fire up without getting in a spot of bother.

If you’re a die-hard tornado chaser or you’ve just always longed to stare meaningfully at a PPI display, this could be the build for you. We’ve featured other DIY radars before, too. We’d also like to see yours, so when it’s done and written up, fire us a note on the tipsline!

Hackaday Europe 2026: High Performance SDR On The Cheap

July 27, 2026 by 10 Comments

Radios were once big complicated appliances, full of warm valves and paper-wrapped capacitors, all humming and glowing to capture signals from the aether and spit them out of a speaker. Every component was chosen to build the radio to suit a particular purpose.

These days, we have altogether fancier technology that lets us build radios that can be reconfigured on the fly; software-defined radios, if you will. [Anders Nielsen] has been exploring how to build a high-performance SDR recently, and came to Hackaday Europe 2026 to tell us all about it.

Continue reading “Hackaday Europe 2026: High Performance SDR On The Cheap” →