The Uncooperative Mirror Will Not Help You

May 30, 2026 by 7 Comments

The value of a mirror is in its clarity. If the reflection is cast by [danicakostic17]’s Uncooperative Mirror though, you’ll find anything but. It’s described as a useless machine, because it appears as a tiled mirror. As you approach it though, the tiles shake around and make it very difficult to follow what’s in front of you. It’s an art piece and a prank all in one, and we like it.

Behind the mirror is a 3D printed frame and a set of small servos with what look like some belts to hitch them up. There’s an ultrasonic sensor and an Arduino Uno, that sets those servos going as soon as the ultrasonic sensor sees anything. We can see this thing would be fun at a party.

Everything you’ll need is on the Instructables page linked above should you be foolhardy enough to want your own, and there’s even a YouTube video which we’ve placed below.

Continue reading “The Uncooperative Mirror Will Not Help You” →

Testing Various Ways To Waterproof FDM Printed Parts

May 30, 2026 by 10 Comments

Along with layer lines, FDM printers are notorious for being neither air- nor water-tight due to the countless very small gaps between the layers. This is very unfortunate if you are trying to FDM print something that should keep water either inside or outside. Although a variety of potential solutions exist, it’s hard to easily compare them. Correspondingly [Half-Baked-Research] decided that the best approach here was to just try everything and pit them against each other.

These solutions include various coatings either in- or outside the part, as well as the foam solution that he tried previously joined by a number of community-suggested alternatives that should not get waterlogged. To properly test them, the water pressure at a depth of about 10 meters would be good enough, but rather than find a really deep swimming pool or try his luck at nearby bodies of water, compressed air was used to ramp up the pressure of a what is basically a big bucket of water.

For the pressure chamber a Vevor vacuum chamber was modified to contain the 1 bar (103 kPa) of pressure, which was a fair bit of work and required a CNCed metal top plate. Among the printed and treated samples were also a couple of wild cards: a PETG cube with a TPU printed cover, a PU molded part and PETG with thicker walls.

Along with the long soak, percussive testing was also performed to see how it’d affect the water intrusion resistance. After all that, there were three winners: internal epoxy coating and two types of internal PU coating, though epoxy held up the best after repeated abuse. PU rubber also got a thumbs-up if you don’t need as high a pressure resistance but are more concerned with resisting physical abuse.

Continue reading “Testing Various Ways To Waterproof FDM Printed Parts” →

Cheap Yellow Display With Boosted PSRAM Turned Snazzy Emulator Station

May 30, 2026 by 11 Comments

The ‘Cheap Yellow Display’, or CYD, is becoming a staple in these circles, and with good reason: just like the name says, it’s cheap, it has a display, and of course an ESP32 microcontroller to give it lots of brainpower. What it doesn’t come with is a lot of RAM, which was a problem for [DynaMite]’s project. What was there to do but solder on more PSRAM so the CYD could become a mini TV for retrogaming?

Depending what you want to play, you might not need the extra memory. In [DynaMite]’s case, he wanted to run Retro-Go, which opens up a lot more than just the standard NES emulator you can run on an unmodified CYD — including 16-bit systems like the SNES and Sega Genesis/MegaDrive or even DOOM. Adding the PSRAM is just a matter of getting the little chip onto an unpopulated footprint on the board, cutting some traces, and adding a bodge wire. It’s not nothing, but it’s not impossible.

Continue reading “Cheap Yellow Display With Boosted PSRAM Turned Snazzy Emulator Station” →

It’s Another Pi Handheld. But It’s A Really Good One

May 30, 2026 by 26 Comments

Ever since the first Linux capable single-board computers came out, there have been projects turning them into handhelds. The Raspberry Pi Zero and in particular the Compute Modules are ideally suited to this. While there are more common projects that find their way into our feed we’ve certainly seen a few of them in our time, enough now that a new one has to be special to really catch our eye. Which brings us to the PiBrick from [Ahmad Amarullah], which sets the bar pretty high.

The device is a Compute Module 5 smartphone sized computer with a 3.92″ OLED touch display and the ubiquitous BlackBerry-derived keyboard. It’s drawn together with a PCB that holds all components and peripherals, and this and the 5000 mAH battery fit in a 3D printed shell that gives it the form factor of a chunky smartphone. You can see it at the link above, and also find it in a GitHub repository.

Handheld computers always represent something of a compromise as they can only ever offer relatively small screens and keyboards. But they live or die on their versatility and robustness, both of which this one has in spades. We like it, a lot.

Thanks [Nick] for the tip.

Take The Reins Of This Unique Controller

May 29, 2026 by 6 Comments

Many simulator-style games have their own dedicated controllers, from racing sims with pedals, steering wheels, and shifters to flight sims which have their own joysticks and sometimes entire cockpits. But for how prevalent riding horses is in a wide array of video games from Red Dead Redemption to Zelda to The Witcher we’re not sure we’ve ever seen a controller built specifically for riding virtual horses, at least not until [Squalius] built this horse riding controller.

[Squalius] has been working through a few prototypes of his OpenRidingController and has a fairly complete riding setup now, complete with reins and stirrups for controlling one’s in-game companions. The reins are attached to infrared distance sensors which can send analog signals to the game for controlling steering, and are attached to each other through an elastic band to provide a more realistic feeling when both are pulled to ask the horse to stop. The stirrups can be pulled to tell the horse to move at various speeds, and although a horse doesn’t need to be commanded to jump in real life, this controller provides a method for jumping an in-game horse as well.

Although we’ve mentioned a few games famous for using horses already, [Squalius] also added a handheld joystick to enable his controller to be used in less-conventional games like Minecraft where the player can use a mod to add a horse, and has also used his controller to play DOOM as well. As its name suggests it’s also open source and the code for it is all available on the project’s GitHub page. It’s a type of controller we didn’t realize we were missing until now, and perhaps we would have expected to see one before something like a controller meant for a virtual trombone.

Thanks to [Keith] for the tip!

Continue reading “Take The Reins Of This Unique Controller” →

Be Your Own Oil Company With Desktop Fischer-Tropsch Process

May 29, 2026 by 23 Comments

Plastics, oil, petrol– the modern world is entirely dependent on hydrocarbons. The good sources are slowly running low and supply is increasingly complicated by geopolitical factors we really don’t want to get into, but hey! It’s just hydrogen and carbon, right like it says in the name. How hard could it be to roll your own at home. Well, if you’ve got a lab like [Marb]’s Lab on YouTube, it might just be doable, as he demonstrates in his latest video.

The Fischer-Tropsch reaction was discovered back in 1925 in Germany by a couple of gents named Fischer and Tropsch. In the unpleasantness that followed later, Germany made good use of their process on an industrial scale, since they had ample coal and no oil on hand. Coal-rich South Africa has also made us of it, particularly during the Apartheid-era trade restrictions. Every so often the idea of industrializing the process comes up in the USA, but there’s still enough oil there it doesn’t make sense economically.

Those nations all have something in common: they’re all coal-rich countries, and that makes sense because coal is easily converted to carbon monoxide and hydrogen– a combo known as syngas– and it just so happens that those are the feedstock for this reaction. The actual chemistry going on inside is quite complex, but conceptually it is pretty simple: hydrogen and carbon monoxide mix over a hot metal catalyst, and combine to form various hydrocarbons.

In [Marb]’s glassware-based demonstration, the catalyst is Cobalt (III) Oxide on silica gel– a lovely, cancer-causing substance that must be prepared for each use, as it lasts but 24 hours before further oxidization ruins it. That’s in spite of purging the system with argon– a necessary step if one does not wish to explode. The yield isn’t amazing, and [Marb] isn’t sure exactly what mix of hydrocarbons he has created– although they smell like gasoline and burn like the dickens, so mission accomplished.

This might seem like the furthest thing from green, but if you use solar power to run the process and something like woodgas– which is syngas by any other name– as a feed-stock, then you’ve got a carbon neutral energy storage medium.

Thanks to [Markus Bindhammer] for the tip!

Continue reading “Be Your Own Oil Company With Desktop Fischer-Tropsch Process” →

ESP-Osito Eschews Retrocomputing For Modern Code On Modern, Equivalent Hardware

May 29, 2026 by 11 Comments

If you’re of a certain vintage, you have probably looked at some of the microcomputers on the market these days and thought “that would have been a decent workstation back in the day!”. We certianly have, and so did [Roberto Alsina]. Rather than allow himself to contemplate his age and threfore rapidly approaching mortailty, [Roberto] wrote a useful operating system called ESP-Osito for the Cheap Yellow Display, which he refers to as “the cheapest computer”. He’s not wrong, and it’s certainly a better use of time than an existential crisis.

He explains some of his reasoning behind the project in an accompanying blog post, but on the project page he compares it to a Palm Pilot– it’s on quick, apps load quick, and the API is simple enough for easy app creation in a few hundred lines of C, unlike certain pocket computers we won’t name. Sure, there’s no multitasking, but when apps jump from SD card to run in memory in microseconds, who cares? Saving the current state of the app back to SD means the experience is virtually identical from a user perspective anyway.

DOS knew what time it was, but how many of us wasted phone time for weather reports?

As this is a one-man show for now, the app store won’t quite rival your smart phone– but there’s everything you’d expect on the 90s-era computer this has the horsepower of: a serial terminal, a text editor, a file explorer, a calculator, a clock, but also some things that aren’t so retro. The clock app gives weather info via futuristic wireless networking, the reader app takes Markdown text, and the chat app connects to an LLM somewhere instead of your friends on IRC. The blackberry keyboard option gives it a feel of a slightly different vintage. You can also play snake, because no computer is complete without games. The OS and all its applications are released under the MIT license on GitHub, and [Roberto] is actively looking for collaborators.

If you doubt the workstation comparison at the start of this article, this CYD runs Macintosh System 3 via a 68k emulator. That’s got old-school cred, but there’s something great about having retro constraints with modern code on modern hardware. In that way, ESP-Osito is similar to the 3D graphics engine behind this Wipeout clone.