Reverse-Engineering An Amazon Blink Gen 3 Camera

April 13, 2026 by 9 Comments

After some water intrusion apparently killed one of [electronupdate]’s Amazon Blink Gen 3 cameras he took this opportunity to do a full teardown and analysis of all the major components. Spread across its three PCBs there are no fewer than two wireless ICs and a custom ASIC for all the major processing. There’s also a blog post with easy-to-ogle pictures.

The most basic PCB is effectively just a PCB antenna for the Silicon Labs EZR32 IC on the main PCB, using which the ~915 MHz connection with the central hub is maintained. The other smaller PCB is a bit surprising in that it contains a Cypress CYW43438 W-Fi b/g/n and BT 5.1 chip. This would seem to be used for the setup process, but considering that it also uses a central hub it is a bit of a mystery as to what it is used for exactly.

Finally, the main PCB contains all the major parts, with the custom Amazon Immedia ASIC that’s an integral part of this very low-power camera. Given that two AA cells being enough to run the camera for about two years, using off-the-shelf parts probably wasn’t good enough without some serious customization.

As for why this outdoors-rated camera failed after a few years in the outdoors, the reason appears to be water intrusion via the speaker opening. As for why a camera needs a speaker and not just the microphone is left as an exercise to the reader, but maybe it could be useful for yelling at the local kids to get off your darn lawn?

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A model submarine is shown on a dock. The body of the submarine is made out of a series of acrylic tubes, with other parts made out of grey plastic.

3D-Printed Parts Nearly Sink RC Submarine

April 13, 2026 by 16 Comments

Of all the remote-control vehicles one can build, a submarine is possibly the hardest: if something goes wrong with almost any other vehicle, it’s easy to recover and repair, but a submarine is a very different affair. This nearly lost [James] of [ProjectAir] his latest project, a 2.7-meter long RC submarine, but it survived to make a few test sails.

Before building the full version, [James] made a test prototype. These submarines use large syringes as ballast tanks, pulling water in and out of the submarine body. The plungers are driven by a lead screw, and have a linear potentiometer for feedback. This can be wired in the same way as a servo motor, making it compatible with the RC controller. The controller receives its signal from an antenna in a buoy tethered to the submarine. Since initial tests worked well, [James] moved on to the full-scale model.

This was made out of radially-arranged acrylic tubes, with all but the top tube left open to the water. At the back of the submarine there were servo-actuated fins and a propeller, which would allow it to steer, ascend, and descend underwater. To waterproof the servo motors, [James] sealed them as much as possible, then filled them with oil. The other water-exposed electronics were either potted in epoxy or coated with a waterproofing compound. During testing, the submarine descended without issue, but was reluctant to resurface. Most of the external components had been 3D printed, and water infiltrated the infill below a certain depth. [James], however, managed to recover it before it was permanently lost, and managed to make a few other dives at a very limited depth.

On the other end of the spectrum from an RC submarine, we’ve also seen a rubber band-powered submarine. We’ve also seen a smaller, but more dive-ready RC submarine. Continue reading “3D-Printed Parts Nearly Sink RC Submarine” →

We’re All Abuzz About The Bee Write Back Writerdeck

April 12, 2026 by 8 Comments

Friends, there will likely come a time in your life when you have trouble sleeping. When this happens, it may behoove you to do some writing, any kind of writing. But consider that a physical journal will force you to turn past pages you’ve already filled, which may leave you deflated if you happen to read them.

So the answer lies in a sort of journalistic deposit box. That’s basically what we have here. [Simon Shimel]’s Bee Write Back writerdeck was inspired by sleepless nights, so you know it’s effective. The form factor is so great for [Simon], in fact, that he has developed more apps and functions for it, including a Claude client.

Inside is a Raspberry Pi Zero 2w, and input comes from an Air40 keyboard with quite awesome low-profile key caps. The display is a 5.5″ AMOLED, which leaves just enough room for a pair of the cutest bees ever. Be sure to check out the short video below for the build guide to accompany the build guide (PDF), and head over to GitHub for the full details.

Want to go even smaller and BYOK? Here’s a cheap writerdeck with an e-ink display.

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Trying To Install Haiku On A 2009 Mac Mini

April 12, 2026 by 10 Comments

Although the number of uses for a 2009-era Mac Mini aren’t very long, using them to run new-and-upcoming operating systems like Haiku on would seem to be an interesting use case. This is what [The Phintage Collector] recently took a swing at, using both the 2024 Beta 5 release and a current nightly build. The focus was mostly on the 32-bit build, as this has binary compatibility with BeOS applications, but the 64-bit version of Haiku was of course also installed.

One of the main issues with these Mac systems is that they use EFI for the BIOS, so you’re condemned to either take your chances with the always glitchy CSM ‘classical BIOS’ mode, or to make Haiku and EFI get along. While for the 64-bit version of Haiku this wasn’t too much of a struggle, the 32-bit version ran into the problem that the 64-bit EFI BIOS really doesn’t like 32-bit software. After a while the 32-bit version of Haiku was thus abandoned for a later revisit.

With the 64-bit version a lot of things just work, though audio couldn’t be made to work even with a USB dongle, and there’s no hardware acceleration for graphics, so gaming isn’t really going to happen either. The positive thing here is probably that as a test system for 64-bit Haiku such a Mac Mini isn’t too crazy, it being just an Intel system with an Apple-flavor EFI BIOS.

If you’re into giving it a shot yourself, the video description page contains a lot of resources to consult.

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Hackaday Links: April 12, 2026

April 12, 2026 by 4 Comments

At this point, we’ll assume you already know that four humans took a sightseeing trip around the Moon and made their triumphant return to Earth on Friday. Even if you somehow avoided hearing about it through mainstream channels, we kept a running account of the mission’s highlights stuck to the front page of the site for the ten days that the crew was in space.

On the assumption that you might be a bit burned out with space news at this point, we won’t bring up it up in this post… other than to point out that excitement for the lunar flyby has driven the number of simultaneous players of Kerbal Space Program to its highest count ever — nearly 20,000 armchair astronauts spent this weekend trying to cobble together their own rocket in honor of the Artemis II mission.

With so many folks focused on the Moon it would be the perfect time for a company to sneak out some bad news, which is perhaps why Amazon picked this week to announce they would be dropping support for Kindles released before 2012. Presumably there aren’t too many first and second generation Kindles still out there in the wild, but the 2012 cutoff does mean the first iteration of the Paperwhite will be one of the devices being put out to pasture come May 20th.

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Who Had “New OS For The Z80” On Their 2026 Bingo Card?

April 12, 2026 by 6 Comments

Some might say the venerable Z80 doesn’t need another operating system, but [Scott Baker] obviously disagrees. He has come up with a brand new, from scratch OS called NostOS for the Z80-based RC2014 homebrew retrocomputer. [Scott] describes it as CP/M-like, but it’s not CP/M– in fact, it’s totally incompatible with CP/M–and has a few tricks of its own up its sleeve.

As you might expect of an operating system for this vintage of hardware, it is “rommable” — that is, designed to run from read-only-memory, and fit inside 64kB. It of course supports banking memory to go higher than that 16 bit limit, and natively supports common serial devices, along with the good old WD37C65 floppy controller to get some spinning rust into the game. Of course if you don’t have floppies you can plug in a compact flash card– try that with CP/M– or, interestingly Intel Bubble Memory. [Scott] has a soft-spot for bubble memory, which at one point seemed poised to replace both hard drives and RAM at the same time. We also appreciate that he included drivers for vacuum fluorescent displays, another forgotten but very cool technology. Back in the day, this operating system would have enabled a very cool little computer, especially when you take his implementation of text-to-speech with the SP0256A-AL2 chip. Fancy a game of talking Zork? Yes, he ported Zork, and yes, it talks.

The whole thing is, of course, open-source, and available on [Scott]’s GitHub. Unlike too many open-source projects, the documentation is top-notch, to the point that we could picture getting it in a three-ring binder with a 5 1/4 floppy on the inside cover. If you like video, we’ve embedded [Scott]’s walkthrough but his blog and the docs on GitHub have everything there and more if you’re not into rapidly-flickering-pixels as an information exchange medium.

[Scott] isn’t wedded to Zilog, for the record; this OS should run on an Intel 8080, perhaps like the one in the Prompt 80 he restored last year. 

Thanks to [Scott Baker] for the tip!

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The Complex Transformations Underlying MC Escher’s Works

April 12, 2026 by 9 Comments

Self-similar images are rather common, which are images in which the same image is repeated on a smaller scale somewhere within the image that one is looking at, something which is also referred to as the Droste effect. Yet in [MC Escher]’s 1956 Prentententoonstelling (‘picture gallery’) drawing, this self-similar image is somehow also the foreground image, from where it just keeps looping around in an endless dance. How this effect is accomplished and what the mathematical transformations behind it are and how they work is explained in a recent video by [3Blue1Brown].

The video uses previous work by [B. de Smit] and [H. W. Lenstra Jr] whose 2003 paper detailed the underlying transformations, as well as the mystery of the center of the work.

Although [MC Escher] created a transformation grid with square rectangles into which a non-transformed image could be copied verbatim, he left the center as a void with just his signature in it, leaving many to guess how one might be able to fill in this area with something that made sense. In the work by [Smit] et al. it was postulated that by treating the work as having been drawn on an elliptic curve over a field of complex numbers this might be possible.

While the transformation is simple enough at first, with just four rectangles at different zoom levels to make up the corners, the trick is to connect these rectangles. Using the demonstrated complex method this can be automated, with the central void now filled in and creating its own Droste effect. This once again demonstrates the beautifully complex mathematics in [Escher]’s works, despite him never having had any formal mathematical education.

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