CHIP 8: The Pong Game’s Afoot!

November 11, 2026 by 8 Comments

Writing a computer game has always been hard. It is only the nature of the difficulty that changes. A modern game is as much about graphics, sound, and storytelling as it is about programming. But in the early days of computers, writing a game was a challenge because of limited graphics, slow CPUs, and tiny memory capacity. If you wanted to write a game for an early microcomputer, you generally wrote it in assembly language. BASIC was available on many machines, but it was usually too slow for anything requiring fast animation. Assembly language was fast, but it was also difficult to write, debug, and port to another machine.

RCA — in particular [Joseph Weisbecker], the architect of the 1802 — introduced the COSMAC VIP into the primordial 1977 home video game market. In addition to using ready-made games, the idea was that you could create your own. But writing games in 1802 assembly language would be beyond most of RCA’s customers. [Weisbecker] devised CHIP-8, a tiny virtual machine. It wasn’t quite a programming language. Instead, it was a simple instruction set implemented by an interpreter running on a real computer. You wrote programs for the imaginary CHIP-8 processor, and the interpreter made them run on the actual hardware. CHIP-8 is perfect for the kind of games you’d see in those days and still has a following among those who love retro games. Continue reading “CHIP 8: The Pong Game’s Afoot!” →

The Drawer Every Standing Desk Needs

November 11, 2026 by 10 Comments

Adjustable standing desks have had some ergonomic and health benefits for many people who would otherwise be sitting down all day, but those benefits come at a cost of a bit of usability. They can be more expensive, they make cable management and lighting a bit more difficult, and of course they take up more space than a normal desk. Related to that, they may have limited or no drawer space. [Super Valid Designs] decided to tackle all of these problems, while at the same time addressing the larger problem of a very disorganized workspace.

The idea seems simple on its face. The desk surface would be removed from the legs and a full-sized drawer built that matches the footprint of the desk and attaches to the same points, then the surface can be put back on top of that. But this is where feature creep started to set in, although in this case it was all a net positive for the build. [Super Valid Designs] wanted a front for the drawer but, since this is where his keyboard and mouse would go, wanted it to automatically move aside so it’s not in the way. He built a clever mechanism that pivots the front down when the drawer slides out. Not only that, but the drawer locks into place when it’s halfway out in “keyboard mode” and by lifting the front and pulling the drawer further out he can access a deeper storage space further to the back of the drawer.

Although adding these features in took him longer than he originally thought, the new desk is much more usable than the old while helping him eliminate some of the clutter around his workspace. Like any prototype, though, there were a few issues such as cable management (which is a problem with most standing desks) and the fact that he forgot that some of his peripherals were attached to the desk with clamps, which can’t be used with the drawer cabinet in the way. Overall though it’s a major improvement which we think could only be further improved by making it not just a standing desk, but a walking desk.

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EV Batteries Are Proving Hardier Than Expected

November 11, 2026 by 60 Comments

Batteries have a habit of quietly getting worse. Anyone who has nursed an old smartphone through its final years knows the routine—it leaves the house at 100% and is begging for a charger by lunchtime. It’s no surprise, then, that one of the most common worries about electric cars is what happens to the pack after a few years and a lot of kilometres. Nobody wants to buy a used EV only to discover it can barely make it across town. Fears around battery degradation and high replacement costs were the catch cry of many EV doomers over the years.

The good news is that we now have a pretty big pile of data on the question. Austrian battery diagnostics company Aviloo has crunched the results of more than 500,000 tests on used EVs  covering 20 popular models from the likes of Tesla, Volkswagen, Hyundai and Nissan. The data thus far tells us that EV batteries are holding up far better than the naysayers would have you believe.

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Why Engineers Are Forced To Create Junk Designs

November 11, 2026 by 74 Comments

It’s become a bit of a platitude to state that products were manufactured better in ‘the olden days’, but as [The Meandrous Engineer] covers in a recent video essay, the truth is a lot more greyscale and nuanced than something so trite.

The very short version is that it is the dominant culture of a nation in which products are manufactured that determines how many shortcuts and potential product life-shortening decisions are made. This same culture works its way down into company culture, including the engagement of the so-called C-suite with the engineers and folk who keep the now mostly automated manufacturing lines running, as well as vice-versa.

Old-school die-cast models and incandescent light bulbs saw their own series of manufacturing shortcuts, including a pre-World War 2 scandal about the artificial limiting of the lifespan of lightbulbs so that customers would buy more of them. This foreshadows what happened as soon as plastics and computer-aided design and manufacturing came on the scene.

Post-WW2, people like W. Edwards Deming were welcome guests in Japan and other rebuilding nations, introducing the Lean method of manufacturing which was at the time not deemed desirable in a post-war USA. For Japan, South Korea and other nations in the region this meant a boom in manufacturing, with a quality level that would ultimately trounce that of their Western equivalents.

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The Coffee Machine Mainboard, with the all-important debug port being probed

This Coffee Machine Is DOOMed

November 10, 2026 by 13 Comments

Somehow, seeing DOOM on things that were never meant to run DOOM never gets old. It’s probably hard to get further into the “never meant to run DOOM” weeds than a coffee maker, but [Robin M.] has done it, and tells you exactly how in his excellent write-up. It adds a new dimension to hard mode — try and play while you’re waiting for your morning coffee.

Of course [Robin] doesn’t start with just any coffee machine; most sensible percolators won’t have any silicon capable of executing code, much less gaming on. The Spengler PSL50 machine [Robin] is hacking is a smart device with a Linux computer inside, although in this case there’s a point to having the smarts, as it’s meant to be a self-serve, pay-to-drink coffee kiosk. Handling payments and the touchscreen menus seems like justification enough for a microprocessor.

As you might expect, all the ‘smarts’ of this coffee maker are on the touchscreen module which aside from the brains of the operation — i.MX 6 ARM Cortex A9 processor — happens to have a handy a debug port. With just a little probing to find the right pins, he gets a console connection via that debug port to the 2013-era Linux build that runs the device, and then it’s off to the races. To make life even easier for [Robin], there was no uboot password set, nor any protections. So a simple setnv gets him into an sh prompt, and then he’s set. As for DOOM, he’s using fbDOOM, a version that renders directly to the framebuffer, and compiles it as a self-contained binary so he doesn’t have to care that everything on the Linux system is 13 years out of date.

Spengler made hacking this device relatively easy with their almost complete lack of security, and the resulting project is well documented, well executed, and tickles our funny bones the same way seeing DOOM on a toaster did. We haven’t covered DOOM on a refrigerator but it’s only a matter of time before the whole kitchen is killing demons, including the thermostat in the hall.

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Print & Place: Add Embedded Electronics While FDM Printing

November 10, 2026 by 9 Comments

Although combining electronics and 3D-printed structures is fairly common, this usually entails some level of manual assembly. This contrasts strongly with the Print & Place approach demonstrated by [Oliver Child] et al. in their research article titled Print & Place: Using a 3D printer for Continuous Assembly of Electronic Devices.

An accompanying video is also provided which covers all the basics and showing a few ways in which a regular FDM printer can be used without modifications to embed these components. Rather than requiring a custom tool head the thermoplastic is used as a temporary adhesive to pick up parts that are placed in a printed tray elsewhere on the build plate.

This parts tray is created parametrically before being printed. Following this an operator has to populate this tray with the requisite parts so that the print head can pick them up when they are needed. This is done during the printing of the actual parts, with regular G-code added to move the head over to the needed part before using a bit of extruded plastic to adhere to it and lift it to its new home.

Subsequently these parts can be printed over to fully embed them, with this method supporting a range of parts. In the three demonstrations everything from small pre-populated PCBs to strips of conductive wire and braid were used together with rivets to provide paths between conductive traces.

Of course, with this being an open loop system you can expect many of the typical issues here, ranging from pick failures, placement misalignment and contact inconsistencies, as the authors encountered during their experiments. Here one could conceivably pitch adding a camera system as on typical pick & place machines to add a feedback loop that the firmware could then use for adjustments and to signal the human operator to assist.

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Watching The Watchers

November 10, 2026 by 5 Comments

Although it used to be a much more rare event, now almost any time at dawn or dusk, provided clear weather, a human observer can walk outside, look up, and spot an artificial satellite passing overhead. This has caused some consternation among astronomers who have another source of pollution to deal with in their data, but has benefited society in other ways such as more reliable internet and better weather predictions. To keep an eye on what exactly is passing overhead, take a look at this tool built by [Armaan].

The browser-based satellite tracker uses simplified perturbations models (SGP4) to model the passes of every satellite that has passed a given location on Earth in the past seven days. The modeling is all done locally within the user’s browser, and can even be self-hosted through a fairly simple method that involves forking the project with a tool called Vercel. Not only does this tool find the satellite passes for that given location, though, but it also automatically downloads any imagery that those satellites sent back down to Earth.

The project itself is open source, so users can engage with the code without using Vercel if they choose. Beyond just checking out what happened to fly overhead in the last few days and checking out weather data without needing your own satellite dish to download the data yourself, this could also be useful for radio operators looking to make contacts with satellite repeaters or those wanting to keep tabs on crewed satellites like the International Space Station while it still remains in orbit.