Thunderbolt Strikes Windows98

October 18, 2026 by 2 Comments

If there’s one thing everyone hated about Windows 98, was the lack of USB4.0 support. We remember vividly the cries of anguish at the launch party when we found out that 21 years in the future, the operating system wouldn’t support the then-undreamt of speeds of the thunderbolt-based fastest USB protocol. After two decades of living with this crushing disappointment, [Yeo Kheng Meng] has delivered the goods: the most modern of USB interfaces on some very much not modern versions of windows.

This builds on [Yeo Kheng Meng]’s work on xHCI drivers for USB2.0 support, which we covered at the time. Like that hack, this one applies to Windows 98 through 7, and has a similar level of LLM-wrangling involved. There are actually a few parts to it– one is a USB3.0 driver, which replaces the old xHCI98 driver and is available on GitHub. On Windows98, USB3.0 speed caps out around 200 MB/s, likely restricted by Windows98’s maximum request limit of 64kB on USB transfers. Even with the faster bus in action, it can only gobble those tiny blocks of data so fast.

There’s also experimental USB4.0/Thunderbolt support, as stated above. While not as stable as the USB3.0 portion, we’re kind of impressed it runs at all. Thunderbolt is more than just a faster data bus, after all– you have to support multiple protocols. To handle all that you can install xhcicm.sys and have the surreal experience of accessing an docked NVMe drive from the last century’s best Windows via his Stor98 driver. That’s based largely on [SweetLow]’s NVMe9x project, which he forked but is going to be bundled into the main repo.

What might be more helpful to the community than these drivers is [Yeo Kheng Meng]’s fork of QEMU11 that emulates USB4/Thunderbolt hosts and devices. Having a working emulator seems like it would be a huge boon for this sort of semi-automated development. That’s available in its own repo.

Aside from the already-linked USB2.0 drivers, [Yao Kheng Meng] has an impressive retro-computing record, that includes Swift on the Apple II and turning DOS into llama.c habitat. It should be noted that that llama.c’s TinyStories is not the LLM that assisted with this project.

Thanks to [Yeo Kheng Meng] for the tip!

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Hackaday Links: October 17, 2026

October 18, 2026 by 8 Comments

While Hackaday doesn’t maintain a crime blotter, we couldn’t help but start this week’s post off with a bit of civil disobedience — a retired professor from the University of Pennsylvania was arrested earlier this week for standing in front of a delivery robot.

Granted, she was standing there for long enough that the police were eventually called, but still. Previous reporting indicates that Carolyn Marvin has a history of blocking delivery robots as a form of protest, but this is the first time law enforcement got involved. We’re not lawyers here at Hackaday, so we can’t say for sure whether or not blocking the progress of a robot engaged in commercial operation actually violates any laws. But we do know that refusing a lawful request from a police officer will get you in trouble, and that seems to be what Marvin was actually charged with when she refused to move.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: October 17, 2026” →

Off-Grid Refrigeration Using Fire And Salt

October 18, 2026 by 4 Comments

Refrigeration has been a challenge for humanity since the start. Ancient civilizations in dry climates like Persia and Egypt could use evaporative cooling on a large scale with specialized architecture, and with easy access to electricity modern civilization can cool down almost anything it wants. But whether in a refrigerator or heat pump, the electricity demands can get out of hand quickly, and heat-driven systems often require dangerous or hard-to-get chemicals. But [Greenhill Forge] has crafted a system that creates effective refrigeration with only fire and salt… and a bit of electricity.

Heat-driven systems are called absorption coolers. In this design, water is used as a refrigerant and forced to a very low pressure so that it can boil at a low temperature. When it boils it absorbs heat from the surrounding environment, and then that water vapor can be moved and condensed where it gives off that heat. The build has a few distinct loops to make all of this happen. The generator loop holds the heat source and a tank of water mixed with road salt. Boiled water travels up a tube to a condenser. A valve here is opened slightly to allow the water to drip into the absorber section, where it is under low pressure and boils rapidly. The vapor is carried away by the third system, which uses a shower of the salt solution to quickly suck up the vapor and move it away from the cooled area.

There is a small amount of electricity needed to run pumps and fans, but to keep this off-grid this requirement is easily met by a small solar panel or battery. The bulk of the energy is from the fire which boils the saltwater solution. [Greenhill Forge] added a number of temperature and pressure sensors to monitor and control the system as well, and in his firsts tests the refrigeration system was able to get to about 5° C with an ambient temperature around 16° C. That’s not quite the temperature needed for a refrigerator, but not bad for only salt and fire. [Greenhill Forge] has a number of other ingenious off-grid builds like this sawdust stove and a magnetic induction water heater.

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The New Phobos Martian Moon Rover That Weighs In At Only 15 Grams

October 18, 2026 by 11 Comments

Although for many decades the planet Mars has been prodded, poked, driven upon, flown over and especially orbited by various spacecraft, landers and rovers sent over by a certain humanoid species on Earth, the two moons that orbit Mars have featured significantly more in science-fiction and video games than in scientific literature. This is now about to change when the Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission launches on October 19th, which will include a sample return from Phobos.

So far these two moons of Mars – Phobos and Deimos – have only received a few cursory glances by passing spacecraft, leaving many fundamental questions surrounding their formation and composition very much open. With the MMX mission this should change dramatically, with this spacecraft intended to perform detailed measurements of both moons.

In addition a rover – called Idefix – will perform a landing on Phobos for observations of its surface. This will be quite a feat as despite this lander coming in at 25 kg, on Phobos’ surface it will weigh only 15 grams due to the low gravity, or even less than the diminutive dog companion of Obelix, with potential bouncing as we have seen with previous landing attempts on such small bodies.

After launch, the MMX mission will take a year to arrive at Mars, in August of 2027, with Idefix being released in early 2029 for its hopefully soft paws-down on the surface of Phobos where it can scurry about for a while until the main MMX spacecraft lands later for its sample retrieval and return part of the mission. If everything goes well, this would mean that a sample of Phobos should be landing in Australia in 2031.

 

A man's hand is seen adjusting a lever connected to a lens, which is pointing down towards the windings of a small motor. A screen behind this shows an image of the windings, taken from an angle slightly to the side.

Building A Microscope With A 3D View

October 18, 2026 by 5 Comments

As electronic components grow ever smaller, a microscope has become an increasingly indispensable tool for any fine work; when inspecting electronics, though, especially solder joints, [Corebb] found a top-down view too limiting, so he built his own microscope with a rotating side-angle view.

The microscope itself is made of a commercial C-mount microscope lens assembly and a USB camera; the lens has a variable magnification factor up to 200x, which is plenty for electronics work, and is mounted on an adjustable stand to move the focal point. This is paired with an LED ring for illumination and two polarizing filters, one mounted on the lens and one one the lighting ring; when adjusted to 90 degrees from each other, these eliminate glare from reflective surfaces.

To view subjects from the side, [Corebb] built a snap-on adapter. This uses a pair of mirrors to capture a view from the side of the object and direct this through the main microscope lens. An additional concave lens compensates for the increased length of the optical path, and ball bearings let the whole adapter rotate around the microscope and capture the subject from any angle. [Corebb] tried 3D-printing the adapter, but found that flexing caused too much jitter; in addition to being sturdier, a machined aluminium part reduced shadows by allowing for thinner supports. The adapter snaps onto the microscope with small magnets, which keep the optical path consistently aligned.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a soldering microscope with a view from the side, but this does look much more affordable. If you’d like to try the polarized light source with your microscope, we’ve covered that before.

A Plasma Donut

October 18, 2026 by 7 Comments

We know [The Action Lab] always has something hands-on. This time, the video shows a toroidal plasma demo and how it relates to nuclear fusion. Plasma has a high temperature, and if you use physical electrodes to excite the plasma, this high temperature tends to destroy the electrodes. But thanks to the relationship between electricity and magnetism, you can create plasma with an alternating magnetic field instead of physical electrodes.

The actual practical device is a 10 MHz source with a coil and a low-pressure globe full of xenon gas. It looks pretty cool. Of course, the little tabletop demo isn’t strong enough to drive a fusion reaction. But if you scale it up and make some modifications, including using hydrogen, you get a tokamak reactor.

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Evolving RC Circuits

October 18, 2026 by 8 Comments

We are surrounded by evolving algorithms and AI models, and it feels like we have to evolve to them as well. Of course, the world itself is always evolving, and when we have to implement filtering circuits based on current environments it might not last all that long. [Saikarthik Ramakrishnan] realized that this phenomenon can easily apply to simple RC circuits, so why not make them adapt to the changing world itself? This is exactly what the Darwin Board is meant to do: act like an evolving simple RC circuit for whatever environment or signal you want gone.

RC circuits are normally considered to be relatively simple in the world of circuits; however, the real world isn’t always all that simple. This simple evolutionary algorithm implemented by [Saikarthik Ramakrishnan] attempts to apply similar principles used in other evolving models to the humble RC circuit. Based on an ESP32, the Darwin Board is a fairly simple model of 2040 possible combinations of genomes. Yes, each possible RC circuit is its own genome, which allows simple evolution from one to another based on current requirements.

You should certainly consider checking out the project’s GitHub repository here to try out the mutating circuit itself. While this project might complicate what is normally fairly simple, there is sometimes beauty in simplicity. So why not use a comically simple circuit for a smart home feature?