Teardown Of Dangerous Fake Wago Connectors

March 1, 2026 by Maya Posch No comments

Everyone loves Wago connectors for how versatile and effective they are for quickly and securely connecting conductors, but it can be tempting to buy a bag of the significantly cheaper knock-offs. The reason why this can be a terrible idea is explained by [Big Clive] who tore down a few bags of them to ogle at their internals.

The main problem with some of these knock-offs is the way that they use the plastic molding as part of the structure that holds the conductors in place. Over time this plastic will develop larger tolerances, with heat developed from passing large currents speeding up the process. As the examined type of connector relies on metal clamps that securely push the conductor onto the busbar, having the plastic weaken, and the clamp correspondingly loosen up, is clearly not a desirable scenario.

As [Clive] says in the video, you’re probably okay using these cheapo knock-offs for a quick test on the bench, but you should never put them in a permanent installation. Not just due to potential fiery scenarios, but also for insurance claims should the worst come to pass, and the insurance company finds dodgy connectors everywhere in the electrical wiring. This isn’t the first we’ve heard of knock-off Wago problems.

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Making A 286 Think It’s Alive Again

March 1, 2026 by Lewin Day 4 Comments

[Nagy Krisztián] had an Intel 286 CPU, only… There was no motherboard to install it in. Perhaps not wanting the processor to be lonely, [Nagy] built a simulated system to bring the chip back to life.

Okay, 68 pins does look like a lot when you arrange them like that.

The concept is simple enough. [Nagy] merely intended to wire the 286 up to a Raspberry Pi Pico that could emulate other parts of a computer that it would normally expect to talk to. This isn’t so hard with an ancient CPU like the 286, which has just 68 pins compared to the 1000+ pins on modern CPUs. All it took was a PLCC-68 socket, an adapter PCB, a breadboard, and some MCP23s17 logic expanders to give the diminutive microcontroller enough I/O. With a bit of work, [Nagy] was able to get the Pi Pico running the 286, allowing it to execute a simple program that retrieves numbers from “memory” and writes them back in turn.

Notably, this setup won’t run the 286 at its full clock speed of 12 MHz, and it’s a long way off from doing anything complex like talking to peripherals or booting an OS. Still, it’s neat to see the old metal live again, even if it’s just rattling through a few simple machine instructions that don’t mean a whole lot. [Nagy] equates this project to The Matrix; you might also think of it as a brain in a jar. The 286 is not in a real computer; it’s just hooked up to a microcontroller stimulating its various pins in a way that is indistinguishable from its own perspective. Continue reading “Making A 286 Think It’s Alive Again” →

Hackaday Links: March 1, 2026

March 1, 2026 by Tom Nardi 2 Comments

We’ll start this week off with a bit of controversy from Linux Land. Anyone who’s ever used the sudo command knows that you don’t see any kind of visual feedback while entering your password. This was intended as a security feature, as it was believed that an on-screen indicator of how many characters had been entered would allow somebody snooping over your shoulder to figure out the length of your password. But in Ubuntu 26.04, that’s no longer the case. The traditional sudo binary has been replaced with a one written in Rust, which Canonical has recently patched to follow the modern convention of showing asterisks on the password prompt.

As you might expect, this prompted an immediate reaction from Linux greybeards. A bug report was filed just a few days ago demanding that the change be reverted, arguing that breaking a decades-old expectation with no warning could be confusing for users. The official response from a Canonical dev was that they see it the other way around, and that the change was made to improve the user experience. It was also pointed out that those who want to revert to the old style of prompt can do so with a config change. The issue was immediately marked as “Won’t Fix”, but the discussion is ongoing.

Speaking of unexpected changes, multiple reports are coming in that the February security update for Samsung Galaxy devices, which is currently rolling out, removes several functions from the Android recovery menu. After the update is applied to phones such as the S25 and Fold 7, long-standing features, such as the ability to wipe the device’s cache partition or install updates via Android Debug Bridge (ADB), disappear.

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Turning A Cast-Iron Radiator Into A Water-Cooled PC

March 1, 2026 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

Bottom of the cast-iron radiator gaming PC during plumbing. (Credit: Billet Labs, YouTube)

Water-cooled PCs generally have in common that there’s a radiator somewhere in the loop, yet nobody said that you can’t build the PCB into the radiator. Something like a genuine Victorian-era cast-iron radiator, for example. For the folk over at [Billet Labs], this is just your typical project, of course, even if it took a solid three months to make it all work.

Their previous project was also a water-cooled PC, but in the form of a steampunk-esque wall-mounted installation. What differentiates this new build is that it’s trying to be more of a sleeper PC, as long as you ignore some copper tubing and the like running around the outside of this vintage radiator.

Of course, by using a vintage cast-iron radiator like this, you’re also dealing with all the disadvantages of cast-iron, such as the countless impurities in the metal and the immense weight. With water in the loop, the entire build comes in at about 99 kilograms, and cleaning the radiator of particulates released inside it — including rust — was a challenge.

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Fish Drives Tank

March 1, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 12 Comments

Fish are popular animals to keep as pets, and for good reason. They’re relatively low maintenance, relaxing to watch, and have a high aesthetic appeal. But for all their upsides, they aren’t quite as companionable as a dog or a cat. Although some fish can do limited walking or flying, these aren’t generally kept as pets and would still need considerable help navigating the terrestrial world. To that end, [Everything is Hacked] built a fish tank that allows his fish to move around on their own. We presume he’s heard the old joke about two fish in a tank. One says, “Do you know how to drive this thing?”

The first prototype of this “fish tank” is actually built on a tracked vehicle with differential steering, on which the fish tank would sit. But after building a basic, driveable machine, the realities of fish ownership set in. The fish with the smallest tank needs is a betta fish, but even that sort of fish needs much more space than would easily fit on a robotics platform. So [Everything is Hacked] set up a complete ecosystem for his new pet, making the passenger vehicle a secondary tank.

The new fish’s name is [Carrot], named after the carrots that [Everything is Hacked] used to test the computer vision system that would track the fish’s movements and use them to control the mobile fish tank. There was some configuration needed to ensure that when this feisty fish swam in circles, the tank didn’t spin around uncontrollably, but eventually he was able to get it working in an “arena” where [Carrot] could drive towards some favorite items he might like to interact with. Mostly, though, he drove his tank to investigate the other fish in the area.

The ultimate goal was for [Everything is Hacked] to take his fish on a walk, though, so he set about training [Carrot] to respond to visual cues and swim towards them. In theory, this would have allowed him to be followed by his fish tank, but a test at a local grocery did not go as smoothly as hoped. Still, it’s an interesting project that pushes the boundaries of pet ownership much like other fish-driving projects we’ve seen.

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The Long Afterlife Of The Console Modchip

March 1, 2026 by Jenny List 3 Comments

For a late-1990s engineer with good soldering skills, many a free pint of beer could be earned by installing modchips on the game consoles of the day. Modchips were usually a small microcontroller connected with a few wires to selected pins on the chips or pads on the board that masked or overrode the copy protection and region locking. This scene was brought back for us by a recent [Modern vintage gamer] video looking at the history of console hardware mods, and it’s worth a watch (see the video, below).

The story starts in 1996 with the original PlayStation, largely the source of those free pints for a nascent Hackaday scribe back in the day. Along the way, as he expands the story, we find other memories, for example, the LPC bus-based hijacks of the first XBox console, and the huge modding scenes on both that machine and Sony’s PS2. The conclusion is that this community left its mark on today’s consoles even though the easy hardware hacks may be a thing of the past on the latest hardware, and as past Hackaday articles can attest, jailbreaking older consoles still has a way to go.

In the early days, our recollection is that the PlayStation modchips were driven by the region locking rather than piracy, for the simple reason that Sony used 80-minute ISOs which wouldn’t fit on the then-available consumer 74-minute CD-R. We also remember them being used by people who couldn’t afford a blue debuugging PlayStation,. or the rare black developer model.

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Color Mixing Spray Paint On The Fly

March 1, 2026 by Lewin Day 25 Comments

One of the problems with being a graffiti artist is that you have to carry around a different spray can for each color you intend to use. [Sandesh Manik] decided to solve this problem by building a rig that can produce a wider range of colors by mixing the paint from several cans at once. Check it out in the video below.

The project is called Spectrum. It uses four off-the-shelf spray paint cans—colored red, blue, yellow, and white—and mixes them to create a wider range of colors. All four cans are hooked up to a single output nozzle via a nest of tubing and a four-to-one tube manifold. Key to controlling the flow of paint is a custom device which [Sandesh] calls the “rotary pinch valve,” with one fitted to the feed line coming from each spray can. These valves use a motor-driven lever to pinch a plastic tube shut, allowing them to control the paint flow. This design keeps the mechanism and paint completely separate, which was important to stop paint from fouling the valves in short order. It also prevents backflow, which keeps the paint going towards the outlet and prevents ugly messes. By quickly actuating the valve, the paint flow from each can is modulated to mix various colors as desired.

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