A Close Look At The Mitxela Precision Clock Mk IV

June 8, 2025 by 14 Comments

Over on his secondary YouTube channel, [Jeff Geerling] recently demoed the new Mitxela Precision Clock Mk IV.

This clock uses GPS to get the current time, but also your location so it can figure out what time zone you’re in and which daylight savings time might apply. On the back a blinking diode announces the arrival of each second. A temperature-compensated crystal oscillator (TCXO) is employed for accurate time-keeping.

The clock can be folded in half, thereby doubling as a clapperboard for movie makers. The dimming system is analog, not pulse width modulation (PWM), which means no visible flashing artifacts when recording. It is highly configurable and has USB connectivity. And it has not one but two ARM microcontrollers, an ARM STM32L476, and an ARM STM32L010. If you’re interested, you can pick one up for yourself from [Mitxela]’s shop.

Toward the end of his video [Jeff] does some navel gazing, thinking about what might be required if future versions of the clock wanted to get down into precision at the nanosecond level. Do you arrange it so the light arrives at the viewer’s eyeball at the right time? Or do you update it on the clock at the right time and let the viewer know about it after a minuscule delay? Philosophical preponderances for another day!

We should add that we’ve seen plenty of cool stuff from [Mitxela] before, including the Euroknob and these soldering tweezers.

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Wave Drive Made With 3D Printed Parts

June 8, 2025 by 10 Comments

You can get just about any gear reduction you want using conventional gears. But when you need to get a certain reduction in a very small space with minimal to no backlash, you might find a wave drive very useful. [Mishin Machine] shows us how to build one with (mostly) 3D printed components.

The video does a great job of explaining the basics of the design. Right off the bat, we’ll say this one isn’t fully printed—it relies on off-the-shelf steel ball bearings. It’s easy to understand why. When you need strong, smooth-rolling parts, it’s hard to print competitive spheres in plastic at home. Plastic BBs will work too, though, as will various off-the-shelf cylindrical rollers. The rest is mostly 3D printed, so with the right design, you can whip up a wave drive to suit whatever packaging requirements you might have.

Combined with a stepper motor and the right off-the-shelf parts, you can build a high-reduction gearbox that can withstand high torque and should have reasonable longevity despite being assembled with many  printed components.

We’ve seen other interesting gear reductions before, too.

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Scratch-built Electric Boat Shows Off Surprising Speed

June 7, 2025 by 10 Comments

Electric cars are everywhere these days, but what about boats? Looking to go green on the water, [NASAT] put together this impressively nimble boat propelled by a pair of brushless motors.

The boat itself has a completely custom-built hull, using plywood as a mold for the ultimate fiberglass body. It’s a catamaran-like shape that seems to allow it to get on plane fairly easily, increasing its ultimate speed compared to a displacement hull. It gets up to that speed with two electric motors totaling 4 kW, mated to a belt-driven drivetrain spinning a fairly standard prop. Power is provided by a large battery, and the solar panel at the top can provide not only shade for the operator, but 300 W to charge the battery when the motors are not being used.

With the finishing touches put on, the small single-seat boat effortlessly powers around the water with many of the same benefits of an electric car: low noise, low pollution, a quiet ride, and a surprisingly quick feel. Electrification has come for other boats as well, like this sailing catamaran converted to electric-only. Even some commercial boats have begun to take the plunge.

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Building A Cyberpunk Modular Keyboard

June 7, 2025 by 9 Comments

Perhaps you have a tilt towards glowing cyberpunk peripherals. Perhaps you’ve been hunting for a keyboard that you can position perfectly to suit both your left and right hands. In that case, you might just like this nifty design from [Modern Hobbyist].

The first thing you’ll note is the split design, which allows each half of the keyboard to be placed optimally for each arm’s comfort. They’re linked with a cable, which allows the STM32 microcontroller to read the keys on both sides and then spit out the right stuff upstream over its USB-C connection. The microcontroller is also in charge of running the per-key LED lighting and the LCD screens on each half.

The board owes its sleek and slim design at least in part to using Kailh Choc low-profile switches. They plug in to hotswap compatible sockets so the switches can easily be changed if desired. Keycaps are blank off-the-shelf parts because this is a keyboard for those who aren’t afraid to spend the time establishing the right muscle memory. It might take some adaptation if you’re not used to the staggered columnar layout. However, the LCD screens can display a keymap if you need a little help now and then.

We’ve seen a lot of great split keyboards over the years, including one amusing design made by hacking an existing keyboard in half with a saw.

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The one-tube radio setup, in front of a PC monitor

Single Tube SDR Is A Delightful Mix Of Old And New

June 7, 2025 by 14 Comments

Software Defined Radio (SDR) is the big thing these days, and why not? A single computer can get rid of a room full of boat anchors, and give you better signal discrimination than all but the best kit. Any SDR project needs an RF receiver, and in this project [mircemk] used a single 6J1 vaccum tube to produce an SSB SDR that combines the best of old and new. 

Single-tube radios are a classic hack, and where a lot of hams got started back in the day, but there is a reason more complicated circuits tend to be used. On the other hand, if you can throw a PC worth of signal processing at the output, it looks like you can get a very sensitive and selective single-sideband (SSB) receiver. 

The 6J1 tube is convenient, since it can run on only 6 V (or down to 3.7 as [mircemk] demonstrates). Here it is used as a mixer, with the oscillator signal injected via the screen grid. Aside from that, the simple circuit consists of a receiving coil, a few resistors and a variable capacitor. How well does it work? Quite well, when paired with a PC; you can judge for yourself in the video embedded below.

We’ve featured a lot of [mircemk]’s projects over the years, like this handsome OLED VU meter, or this frequency analyzer with a VFD  and even a virtual pinball cabinet made from scraps, among many others.

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Let’s Buy Commodore! Well, Somebody Is.

June 7, 2025 by 54 Comments

When a man wearing an Atari T-shirt tells you he’s buying Commodore it sounds like the plot for an improbable 1980s movie in which Nolan Bushnell and Jack Tramiel do battle before a neon synthwave sunset to a pulsating chiptune soundtrack. But here on the screen there’s that guy doing just that, It’s [Retro Recipes], and in the video below he’s assembling a licensing deal for the Commodore brand portfolio from the distant descendant of the Commodore of old.

It’s a fascinating story and we commend him for tracing a path through the mess that unfolded for Commodore in the 1990s. We tried the same research path with a friend a few years ago and ended up with an anonymous Dutch paper company that wouldn’t answer our calls, so we’re impressed. In conjunction with several other players in the Commodore retrocomputing world he’s trying to assemble a favourable percentage deal for manufacturers of new parts, computers, and other goodies, and we’re pleased to see that it’s for the smaller player as much as for the industry giant.

When looking at a story like this though, it’s important not to let your view become clouded by those rose tinted glasses. While it’s great that we’re likely to see a bunch of new Commodore-branded Commodore 64s and parts, there are many pitfalls in taking it beyond that. We’ve seen the Commodore logo on too many regrettable licensed products in the past, and we fear it might be too tempting for it to end up on yet another disappointing all-in-one video game or just another budget PC. If something new comes out under the Commodore brand we’d like it to be really special, exploiting new ground in the way the Amiga did back in the day. We can hope, because the alternative has dragged other famous brands through the mud in recent years.

If you want an insight into the roots of the original Commodore’s demise, have a read of our Hackaday colleague [Bil Herd]’s autobiography.

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ChatGPT Patched A BIOS Binary, And It Worked

June 7, 2025 by 107 Comments

[devicemodder] wrote in to let us know they managed to install Linux Mint on their FRP-locked Panasonic Toughpad FZ-A2.

Android devices such as the FZ-A2 can be locked with Factory Reset Protection (FRP). The FRP limits what you can do with a device, tying it to a user account. On the surface that’s a good thing for consumers as it disincentivizes stealing. Unfortunately, when combined with SecureBoot, it also means you can’t just install whatever software you want on your hardware. [devicemodder] managed to get Linux Mint running on their FZ-A2, which is a notable achievement by itself, but even more remarkable is how it was done.

So how did [devicemodder] get around this limitation? The first step was to dump the BIOS using a CH341A-based programmer. From there, the image was uploaded to ChatGPT along with a request to disable SecureBoot. The resulting file was flashed back onto the FZ-A2, and all available fingers were crossed.

And… it worked! ChatGPT modified the BIOS enough that the Linux Mint installer could be booted from a flash drive. There are a bunch of bugs and issues to work through but in principle we have just seen AI capable enough to successfully patch a binary dump of BIOS code, which, for the record, is kind of hard to do. We’re not sure what all of this might portend.

So is uploading binaries to ChatGPT with requests for mods vibe coding? Or should we invent a new term for this type of hack?