Building A Reproduction PlayStation Motherboard

July 31, 2026 by 1 Comment

Thanks to things like spilled drinks, leaky batteries, and the general ravages of time, older consoles can be tough to keep going. In particular, excessive damage to a motherboard can make repair difficult or near-impossible to execute even if the rest of the console is in otherwise passable condition. Now, there may be greater hope for those looking to resurrect the worst-treated PlayStations out there, thanks to a new open-source motherboard from [xyzz].

The board is up on GitHub with a CC0-1.0 license. It’s aiming to be a drop-in replacement for the stock motherboard, on to which you would transplant all the necessary proprietary hardware from an existing donor board. The list of transplant parts is quite extensive as you’d expect, including the CPU, GPU, RAM, VRAM, BIOS, sound chips, mechanical control chip, crystals, and all the ports, among others. Some generic parts can still be had off the shelf, but you could also transplant them if so desired. There are some headaches with the current design—namely, it doesn’t fit perfectly with the lid switch connector, and some of the footprints are hard to solder. Still, it’s a great start, and early testing shows that it’s already quite functional.

Fortunately the original PlayStation didn’t have any sort of battery on board to leak all over the place and corrode things, but boards still get damaged in a variety of other un-fun ways. Thus, it’s great to have a potential replacement motherboard on offer to bring badly-damaged machines back to life.

We’ve featured other great restoration projects in this vein before, too, like the efforts to recreate the C64 motherboard from a few years ago. As ever, enthusiasts are doing great work to keep these classic machines alive long into the future.

Thanks to [ToolThatIsTom] for the tip.

Using The Chimney Effect To Drop Passively Cooled PC Temperatures

July 31, 2026 by 7 Comments

The stack effect — also known as the chimney effect — is the basic principle that hot air not only rises, but if guided through a tube, the rising hot air will create more pressure that will effectively draw air more effectively into the tube. This is not only great for a chimney, but also a useful principle if you seek to cool something like a PC in a more passive manner. The main question is of course how much of a ‘chimney’ you need to see real effects for something like a typical water-cooled CPU’s radiator, as demonstrated by [der8auer] in a recent video.

Although there’s a lot of fun physics behind the stack effect that you can run the numbers on, the more practical demonstration here using 3D printed funnel segments for the radiator and various thermometers provides a very hands-on feeling for what you can expect from this approach.

With just a single segment stacked there is already a clearly noticeable temperature change, with the second segment creating a draft as visualized by the smoke machine. After this he goes for broke with the full stack and a resulting 19°C temperature drop on the CPU. While impressive, at this point the required funnel gets a bit silly, though the same principle has been applied to computer cases before, including the passively-cooled Power Mac G4 Cube and the 90-degrees-rotated SilverStone Raven series of cases, like the RV02.

The basic idea of making use of the fact that hot air rises, and maybe also banking on the stack effect for some free passive cooling, clearly isn’t so crazy.

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Custom Beach Robot Handles The Hard Work

July 30, 2026 by 4 Comments

A day at the beach can involve hauling a surprising amount of gear, from coolers, towels, blankets, chairs, and umbrellas, and if children are involved the amount of beach stuff needed seems to go nonlinear very quickly. Some turn to beach carts with large, low-pressure pneumatic tires, but even that seemed like too much work for [John] who built this remote controlled cart for his summertime needs.

The cart is based around an old cargo rack from an e-bike. To mount all of the robotic components, a sheet of plywood was cut and attached to the underside. Two motors are used to drive the rear wheels independently, allowing for differential steering rather than adding the complexity of a steering system. Some safety features are built in to this design as well, including lights for night driving, a start button controlling a relay for the motors and electronics, and a time-of-flight sensor to stop the robot if it encounters an obstacle.

The ESP32 at the center of the build ties all of the electronics together, and a smartphone app lets the user remotely pilot the rover. It’s not autonomous (yet) but a fair alternative to dragging all of one’s beach gear through the sand without any assistance. You could also minimize your excursions through the sand by timing your visits at high tide, but [John] is out on the Great Lakes so this may be of marginal utility here.

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Best-Ever Brainstem Map Created By Indian Scientists

July 30, 2026 by No comments

The elusive brainstem is a small, yet critical part of our brain: the slightest damage to it could prove fatal. But how it works is not fully understood today. Indian Scientists at SGBC (Sudha Gopalakrishnan Brain Centre) work to change that by producing the most detailed map of it ever seen.

Instead of more costly methods, this map was created with a high-resolution microscope. Starting with three samples, (45W fetus, 9Y and 54Y) the brain stems were imaged using MRI and BFI (Block Face Imaging), then sliced into 20/40µm pieces, imaged, annotated using in-house software and added to the dataset. From a combination of these images, MRI and BFI scans, they created a 3D model of the brainstem that you can explore in your browser.

The new research gives vital data needed for neurological research, and could help advance research on a wide range neurological diseases from Parkinson’s to Alzheimer’s.
You can find the paper here, which has not yet been peer reviewed at time of writing.

Via BBC.

Rebuilding An Obsolete IC To Save A Betacam SP Tapedeck

July 30, 2026 by 3 Comments

Betacam is not the Betamax you may have had at home– it was a professional format that lived on into the 21st century, in the “SP” form. In many places, it would have been the last tape format in use. So it is perhaps understandable that [ldursw] decided to recreate an obsolete and unobtainable IC to save a Sony broadcast-grade editing Video Tape Recorder (VTR). Still mad, perhaps, but in a way we very much appreciate.

The Sony BVW-75 VTR had an odd flaw where the output lacked colour, unless paused with dynamic tracking off. Then colour would appear, but only in odd stripes. Clearly the chroma circuit was at fault. Some sluthing found that a sync separator IC– that separates the sync pulses that keep everything moving together, if the name didn’t give it away– wasn’t behaving correctly. More sluthing found that the chip in question was no longer available. Luckily, the concept of a sync separator hasn’t quite given up the ghost, and another part was available. It just didn’t fit, used a different voltage, and had an inverted output. No biggie! [ldursw] added a voltage regulator, an inverter, and a video amplifier chip, then after breadboard testing put them on a PCB with pins that match the original IC’s form-factor, making it a plug-in replacement.

That’s a GitHub link at the start of this article, by the way, so he’s open sourced the solution for anyone who needs a Toshiba TA7357P video sync separator. We don’t know who else needs this, but we’re willing to bet that whoever does, really needs it. On behalf of whoever that might be, we offer sincere thanks to [ldursw] for the hack, and for submitting it to our tips line.

This reminds us a little bit of a tape deck repair we featured previously, reviving another Sony format– D-1 tapes–to archive old media.

Fixing A JMicron-Based M.2 USB Enclosure That Stopped Working

July 30, 2026 by 8 Comments

As useful as USB-to-M.2 SSD adapters are, sometimes you come across a bit of a dud. A case in point is the Orico-branded TCM2-C3 that features both an attractive clear case and in its earlier revisions a JMicron controller-based circuit that apparently degrades over time, causing erratic boot behavior. After implementing a fix a few years ago, [Mark Furneaux] can happily report that the thus fixed enclosures are still working.

These faulty board revisions feature the JMicron JMS583 controller IC, which has a 1.0V core voltage input pin. Apparently to save power, Orico designed the board to target the minimum ~0.95V core voltage per the datasheet. Apparently due to component drift or degradation, this lower core voltage is after a while often not enough any more to start the controller, which thus translates into an unresponsive USB device and presumably some panic about lost data.

Although [Mark] doesn’t describe the fix in detail, it entails bumping up this core voltage to something closer to the nominal 1.0V, which restores functionality at the cost of presumably a measurable amount of extra heat production by said controller.

Later versions of the Orico TCM2-C3 enclosure switched from this JMicron controller to a Realtek one, which so far appears to be noticeably more reliable. Although Orico kept the same model name, the transparent enclosure makes it at least a snap to see which revision you are dealing with.

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The newly surgerized internals

Pizza Eye Surgery Saves Hemispherical Projector

July 30, 2026 by 13 Comments

If you ever make it to DNA Pizza in San Francisco, you may feel as though you’re being watched. The Eye of the Pizza is Upon You. Or, it was, until the out-of-production and now very expensive spherical projector gave up the ghost during a power outage. It’s back, though! Thanks to proprietor [Jamie Zawinski] and some cheap, absolutely-not-supposed-to-be-in-there replacement parts.

The saga started long ago, back in 2017, when [Jamie] got ahold of a Gekkin WorldEye hemispherical projector. It looks like those were meant for the educational market, to show planets and the like, but [Jamie] instead put a big eye on it, thanks in part to work by [PaintYourDragon]. It looked great, as you can see from the demo video embedded below. There it sat, staring down patrons for nine long years, until the power company did what is known in the business as “an oopsie” and turned the WorldEye into an expensive paperweight.

Not to be deterred, [Jamie] got the cheapest projector he could find and an equally-bargain-bin fisheye lens originally meant for macro photography, and mashed them into the Gekkin case without a care for such fripperies as focal length. A little surgery later, and as [Jamie] puts it, “The Eye of Pizza is, Once Again, Upon You”. In spite of the projector being 16:9, thus not quite projecting across the whole surface of the dome and the image fuzzing a touch at the edges, the result works far better than it should for the amount of engineering that went into it. [Jamie] expects further improvements can come from tweaking the image on the software side, but it looks like the current iteration is good enough for pizza parlor decor.

We’ve featured another of [Jamie]’s hacks before, when he built a Linux payphone. Weirdly enough, this isn’t the first time the WorldEye has received a projector transplant around here.

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