Conveyor Belt GBoard Brings The Keys To You

October 5, 2026 by 1 Comment

It must be April in October again, because Google Japan has a new, hilariously impractical reimagining of the keyboard: a conveyor belt. This time it’s on GitHub with firmware, STLs, and a full build guide if you, too, want to wait a full cycle to get the ‘backspace’ key whenever you make a typo, or to write such fun words as “ooid” or “princesship”.

You can watch it in action in the video embedded below, but just the photo probably gives you the idea: the four staggered rows of keys are each 3D-printed chains holding mechanical key switches, driven from a motor in the base. Each row also has a flexible PCB to keep everything wired together, though it’s unclear how those electrical impulses from the key presses get off the conveyor belt and into your computer. That part of the build guide is “TBD” and the source code doesn’t appear to be complete.

Those details may be forthcoming, or it might never be revealed because this is obviously a joke, but now that they’ve gone to the effort of providing STLs, we’re now invested in figuring out how to actually make it work. A BLE-equipped microcontroller in each belt? RFID tags on each key, with readers in the base? SMD LEDs on the flex PCB that flash out the ASCII code of each pressed key as they whiz past a sensor? In theory, any of those should work, but which should we use? You decide!

We like Google Japan and their weird keyboards, and we have to say that compared to the hat from a few years ago, this one is almost practical, though the rotary-phone one wins on style points. In some ways, it occurs to us that this is the exact inverse of the chain printers of yesteryear.

Thanks to [CityZen] for the tip! If October for you is more “spooky” than “silly”, we still want to know about it. Or if you build any of the Gboards. Either way, let us know on the tips line what you’re up to.

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It’s GW-BASIC, Jim, But Not As We Know It

October 4, 2026 by 1 Comment

Back in the old days the IBM-PC, like most of its contemporary computers, shipped with BASIC in ROM. Even after it stopped living in ROM, IBM-Compatibles shipped with GW-BASIC, and now we have a project that asks: what if they still did? Thoreau BASIC is GW-BASIC, but updated for the 21st century.

It’s meant to be code-compatible with all old GW-BASIC code — which means, yes, line numbers and GOTOs abound — but it can boot from a modern x86 PC’s UEFI or run under Windows and take full advantage of modern hardware with 64-bit memory and multithreading support. Graphics are 24-bit at any resolution your monitor can handle, and there are a number of handy built-in commands to handle file management, graphics — including sprites — mouse and keyboard input, 32-channel sound, and more. It is also not strictly an interpreted language. Programs can be compiled to run under Windows or bare-metal on UEFI x86 machines.

It’s not open source, but the project is “pay what you want” over on Itch.io, where you can also see a number of examples.

We’ve seen other attempts to revive BASIC over the years, like MoonBASIC or BASIC-256, but we have to admit it’s never going to be the dominant force it once was, regardless of how nostalgic we might get. That’s probably for the best, but it’s still nice to know you can boot to BASIC if you really, really want to. Do you think it would work with our preprocessor?

A dark optical bench is shown, with a lens in the right-hand part of the image. In front of the image, a bright blue spark appears in the air, with no equipment near it.

Upgrading A Benchtop Laser For Megawatt Power

October 4, 2026 by 3 Comments

One fascinating thing about a pulsed laser is that, though the average power may be measured in watts or milliwatts, the peak power can easily reach millions of times that. This happens even in normal operation, but as [Les’ Lab] demonstrated, adding a Q-Switch can considerably enhance the peak power.

A Q-switch is an optical attenuator; when placed in the laser cavity, it keeps the cavity from reaching resonance. This greatly limits stimulated emission, allowing energy to build up in the chamber as the gain medium becomes increasingly saturated. Eventually, at some energy level, the Q-switch suddenly stops blocking light, and the cavity lases in a very short, powerful pulse. The Q-switch doesn’t increase the energy in a laser shot, but it does release it much more quickly. In this case, [Les] used chromium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet crystals as the Q-switch and compared performance across several different crystals.

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Hackaday Links: October 3, 2026

October 4, 2026 by 2 Comments

If you’re interested in aerospace, there’s an excellent chance you’ve heard the rumor that NASA is trying to get its SR-71 flying again. Or at the very least, they are interested in what exactly it would take to bring the iconic Mach 3+ spy plane back online.

The story started a couple of weeks ago when NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced the agency would be reinvesting in their famed “X-Plane” experimental aircraft program in an effort to get “back in the business of flying high and fast again.” Not long after, keen-eyed observers noted that the SR-71 that had been sitting on the tarmac at the Armstrong Flight Research Center in California had been moved to an unknown location. Several individuals who worked on the plane while it was operational have since claimed NASA representatives contacted them about potentially refurbishing it.

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Tearing Down A Heavy Oscilloscope

October 4, 2026 by 12 Comments

When [Thomas] showed his 1960s-era Tektronix 545A oscilloscope in a recent video, it made us both nostalgic and happy. Nostalgic because we miss the days when our oscilloscopes were “mainframes” that could take plug-in modules. Happy because we noticed the two handles on top to manage hauling the almost 70 pounds of tubes, transformers, and glass around if you didn’t have the requisite cart.

Not only did old scopes have plugins so you could reconfigure them, but there were also handy plugins and racks that could power them so you could build different test setups easily. This scope was an early version of that idea, but it only accepted a vertical section plugin. The mainframe part of the scope has 75 tubes, and the plugin, a type D, has six tubes, too. The power consumption was about 500 watts!

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AVR Laptop Pushes The Limits Of 8-Bit

October 4, 2026 by 25 Comments

If you saw a device that had a laptop form factor playing sound and video, alt-tabbing over to play a game or take some notes, then back to the video — well, that’s normal; that’s what laptops do. If you learned the heart of this machine was an Arduino-compatible AVR microcontroller board, you’d probably do the same spit-take we did. Well, put down your coffee, because [Vladimir]’s AVR Laptop project really is that impressive.

The micro at the heart of this amazing laptop is an ATmega2560. That’s a pretty powerful chip by 8-bit microcontroller standards, but it’s still an 8-bit microcontroller, so getting the FreeRTOS-based system and all of the functions he wants onboard took some careful coding. The ST7920 128×64 monochrome LCD isn’t being driven by any standard library, for example — [Vladimir] built his own driver that does only what he wants. Even in 1-bit color, getting 24 fps video playback was a challenge, especially with sound, and the write-up gets into how that was accomplished.

The code is pending review before release, but we do look forward to seeing how he pulled it all off. In the meantime, we can at least watch it in action in the demo video embedded below.

The vibe of making an 8-bit machine do things you don’t expect to fit in 8 bits reminds us of SymbOS for the Z80. For the sysadmins out there, we’ve also seen an AVR web server.

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Motion Control Via Belt

October 4, 2026 by No comments

[Tolko] wanted to encourage kids to have some physical activity, but noted that they only wanted to play games. That led to BlobJump, a Raspberry Pi-based game sort of like the famous dinosaur runner game. The difference? Your body — or more precisely, a belt worn on your body — is the controller. Your jumping and ducking make your on-screen avatar do the same thing. Watch the video below to see the game in action.

Each belt contains an ESP32-C3, an MPU-6050, and enough rechargeable battery to make it all work. Everything is wireless, of course. We didn’t see any video of the actual kids, so we don’t know how active they were or whether they figured out they could just have a seat and move the belts in their hands. Even so, it looks like a fun game.

We couldn’t help but think that, beyond encouraging activity, this might be a great project to get a kid excited about building hardware and software. You could certainly do worse in that department.

This isn’t a totally new idea, but we liked the execution. If you are truly lazy, you can skip playing the game completely.

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