An Open Source Client For World Of Warcraft

February 18, 2026 by 1 Comment

When World of Warcraft was launched in 2004, it became somewhat of a juggernaut in the MMORPG space. Millions of players continue to login every month. [Kelsi Davis] is one such player, but she doesn’t always log in with the regular client anymore. That’s because she put together WoWee—an open-source alternative of her very own.

WoWee is an acronym—World of Warcraft Engine Experiment. Coded in native C++, it’s a homebrewed client that uses a custom OpenGL renderer to display the game world. [Kelsi] notes that it’s strictly an “educational/research” project, built without using any official Blizzard assets, data or code. Instead, it grabs some client data from a legally-obtained install to operate and loads certain assets this way.

It’s currently compatible with the vanilla game as well as The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King expansions. It should be highlighted how much work this project has already involved—with [Kelsi] needing to recreate various functional minutae in the game, from character creation screens to weather systems and skyboxes. There’s still a lot to do, as well, like adding 3D audio support and making it more interoperable with the quest system.

It’s rare that any MMO gets an open-source client, even less so while the original game is still being actively supported by the developers. Still, we do see some creative hacks in this space.

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The Raspberry Pi As A Studio Camera

February 18, 2026 by No comments

The Raspberry Pi has brought digital camera experimentation within the reach of everybody, with its combination of an accessible computing platform and some almost-decent camera sensors. If there’s a flaw in the Pi as a camera though, it lies in the software, which can be slow and frustrating to use. [Martijn Braam] is here with an interesting project that might yield some useful results in this direction, he’s making a Raspberry Pi studio camera.

His camera hardware is very straightforward, a Pi 5 and touchscreen with the HD camera module in a rough but serviceable wooden box. The interesting part comes in the software, in which he’s written a low-latency GUI over an HDMI output camera application. It’s designed to plug into video mixing hardware, and one of the HDMI outputs carries the GUI while the other carries the unadulterated video. We can see this used to great effect with for example OBS Studio. It’s for now a work in progress as you can see in the video below the break, but we expect that it can only get better.

The video below exposes the obvious flaw in many Pi camera setups, that the available lenses don’t match the quality of the sensor, in that good glass ain’t cheap. But we think it’s one to watch, and could provide competition for CinePi.

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6502 based laptop

Retro Rover: LT6502 Laptop Packs 8-Bit Power On The Go

February 17, 2026 by 2 Comments

Making your own laptop can be a challenging project, but a doable one, especially given the large number of options available today for computing. Of course nothing says you need to use a modern component in your build, and in the LT6502 project by [TechPaula] they didn’t go with a modern RPi or the like, nope went right back to about 50 years ago to use a 6502 at the heart of this DIY laptop build.

The 6502 is an 8-bit microprocessor from the 1970s, found in the Commodore 64 and Apple II. This wasn’t their first venture into 8 MHz world of the 6502, prior to this laptop build there was a desktop build the PC6502 bringing this chip of old into a PC/104 form factor. The LT6502 adds in the things you’d expect with a laptop, a 9-inch foldable screen, a 10,000 mAh battery, several external ports for things such as serial console and USB-C charging. A custom keyboard adds in low-profile switches as well as including a HDSP-style 8-character display, a great addition for a modern take on this vintage chip. Onboard there is 46 KB of RAM and with the addition of the CompactFlash for storage the LT6502 runs EhBASIC which we’ve seen before in some other great projects.

The case is mainly 3D-printed safely enclosing the custom PCBs for both the keyboard and motherboard, and providing a satisfying glow with the built-in LEDs within. All of the files are up on the project’s site so be sure to swing by and check out both this and the desktop PC/104 predecessor to it. Great job [TechPaula], looking forward to seeing the future installments on the LT6502 such as implementing the included internal expansion slot.

Bruteforcing Accidental Antenna Designs

February 17, 2026 by 6 Comments

Antenna design is often referred to as a black art or witchcraft, even by those experienced in the space. To that end, [Janne] wondered—could years of honed skill be replaced by bruteforcing the problem with the aid of some GPUs? Iterative experiments ensued.

[Janne]’s experience in antenna design was virtually non-existent prior to starting, having a VNA on hand but no other knowledge of the craft. Formerly, this was worked around by simply copying vendor reference designs when putting antennas on PCBs. However, knowing that sometimes a need for something specific arises, they wanted a tool that could help in these regards.

The root of the project came from a research paper using an FDTD tool running on GPUs to inversely design photonic nanostructures. Since light is just another form of radio frequency energy, [Janne] realized this could be tweaked into service as an RF antenna design tool. The core simulation engine of the FDTD tool, along with its gradient solver, were hammered into working as an antenna simulator, with [Janne] using LLMs to also tack on a validation system using openEMS, an open-source electromagnetic field solver. The aim was to ensure the results had some validity to real-world physics, particularly important given [Janne] left most of the coding up to large language models. A reward function development system was then implemented to create antenna designs, rank them on fitness, and then iterate further.

The designs produced by this arcane system are… a little odd, and perhaps not what a human might have created. They also didn’t particularly impress in the performance stakes when [Janne] produced a few on real PCBs. However, they do more-or-less line up with their predicted modelled performance, which was promising. Code is on Github if you want to dive into experimenting yourself. Experienced hands may like to explore the nitty gritty details to see if the LLMs got the basics right.

We’ve featured similar “evolutionary” techniques before, including one project that aimed to develop a radio. If you’ve found ways to creatively generate functional hardware from boatloads of mathematics, be sure to let us know on the tipsline!

Custom VR Headset Uses Unconventional Displays

February 17, 2026 by 8 Comments

Cathode ray tubes (CRTs) are a fascinating display technology that has been largely abandoned outside of retro gaming and a few other niche uses. They use magnets to steer a beam of electrons rapidly across a screen, and while a marvel of engineering for their time, their expense, complexity, and weight all led to them being largely replaced by other displays like LCDs and LEDs. They were also difficult to miniaturize, but there were a few companies who tried. [dooglehead] located a few of the smallest CRT displays he could find and got to work putting them in the most unlikely of situations: a virtual reality headset.

The two displays for his headset come from Sony Watchmans, compact over-the-air black-and-white handheld televisions from the late 1900s. [dooglehead] had to create a method for sending video to these units which originally had no input connections, and then also used an FPGA to split a video signal into two parts, with one for each display. The two displays are placed side by side and attached to a Google Cardboard headset, with an off-the-shelf location tracker attached at the top. An IMU tracks head rotation while this location tracker tracks the motion of the unit through 3D space.

With everything assembled and ready to go, the CRT VR headset only weighs in a few grams heavier than [dooglehead]’s modern HTC headset, although it’s lacking a case (which is sorely needed to cover up the exposed high voltage of the CRTs). He reports surprisingly good performance, with notable interlacing and focus issues. He doesn’t plan to use it to replace any of his modern VR displays anytime soon, but it was an interesting project nonetheless. There are some rumors that CRTs are experiencing a bit of a revival, so we’d advise anyone looking to toss out an old CRT to at least put it on an online market place before sending it to a landfill.

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3D Printed Jack Mixes Two Filaments For Great Performance

February 17, 2026 by 6 Comments

If you’re looking to jack up your car and you don’t have anything on hand, your 3D printer might not be the first tool you look towards. With that said, [Alan Reiner] had great success with a simple idea to create a surprisingly capable scissor jack with a multi-material print.

The design will look familiar if you’ve ever pulled the standard jack out of the back of your car. However, this one isn’t made fully out of steel. It relies on an M6 bolt and a rivet nut, but everything else is pure plastic. In this scissor jack design, rigid PETG arms are held in a scissor jack shape with a flexible TPU outer layer. Combined with the screw mechanism, it’s capable of delivering up to 400 pounds of force without failing. It’s an impressive figure for something made out of 80 grams of plastic. The idea came about because of [Alan’s] recent build of a RatRig VCore4 printer, which has independent dual extruders. This allowed the creation of single prints with both rigid and flexible filaments included.

[Alan] did test the jack by lifting up his vehicle, which it kind of achieved. The biggest problem was the short stroke length, which meant it could only raise the back of the car by a couple inches. Printing a larger version could make it a lot more practical for actual use… if you’re willing to trust a 3D-printed device in such use.

Files are on Printables if you wish to make your own. It’s worth paying attention to the warning upfront that [Alan] provides—”THIS CAN CREATE A LOT OF FORCE (400+ lbs!), WHICH MEANS IT CAN STORE A LOT OF ENERGY THAT MIGHT BE RELEASED SUDDENLY.  Please be cautious using 3d-printed objects for high loads and wear appropriate safety equipment!”

Funnily enough, we’ve featured 3D printed jacks before, all the way back in 2015! Video after the break.

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LEGO Orrery Gets A Real-Time Drive Upgrade

February 17, 2026 by 3 Comments

An orrery is a beautiful type of mechanical contrivance, built to demonstrate the motion of heavenly objects. LEGO happens to offer just such a device, built using its Technic line of blocks, shafts, and gears. Only, it has a serious limitation—it has to be cranked manually to make it spin the Earth around the sun. [Görkem] set out to fix this glaring oversight with some good old-fashioned hardware.

The setup removes just five LEGO pieces from the original design, eliminating the hand crank from the mechanism. In its place, [Görkem] installed a NEMA 17 stepper motor, paired with a custom PCB mounted on the back. That carries an ESP32 microcontroller and a TMC2208 stepper motor driver set up for silent drive. Rigged up like so, the orrery can simulate the motion of the Earth and Moon around the Sun in real time. There’s also a knob to track back and forth in time, and a button to reset the system to the correct real-time position.

The final build looks great, combining the LEGO Technic parts with some chunky electronics and 7-segment displays that make it a wonderful techy desk decoration. Down the line, [Görkem] hopes to offer a plug-and-play kit to others who wish to duly animate their own LEGO orrery sets (set #42179).

We love a good LEGO build around these parts. We’ve featured everything from parts sorters to functional typewriters in the past.

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