The Repair Nightmare That Are Smart Rings

June 20, 2026 by 1 Comment

In the quest to make every wearable device ‘smart’, a lot of electronics along have to be crammed in very small spaces, along with ways to make them resistant to environments that our bodies do not mind, like getting hit by a rainstorm or simply washing our hands. These two factors combined make especially devices like smart rings an interesting case study for repairability, with [iFixit] recently taking apart a modern Oura smart ring to assess its e-waste factor after the built-in battery dies.

The tiny 10.5 mAh Lipo cell in the Oura Ring 5. (Credit: iFixit)
The tiny 10.5 mAh Lipo cell in the Oura Ring 5. (Credit: iFixit)

The subject of the teardown video is the Oura Ring 5, a $400 smart ring that’s designed to track your vitals much like a wrist-worn fitness tracker — just in a much smaller package. This metal-and-epoxy sandwich can definitely survive a good rain shower and washing of hands, but to get to the internals rather forceful methods were needed, unlike previous Oura and Samsung smart rings where some applied heat was enough.

In the Ring 5’s case even more heat was needed to make the inner ring start to slide out, but by that point the Li-ion battery inside had already popped from the heat. The inner ring then got stuck and more violence was required to continue the disassembly and get to the super-tiny, 10.5 mAh battery. Of course, at this point the smart ring really won’t be getting back together, never mind still work or be waterproof, which is a central issue with these smart rings.

With the EU’s February 2027 deadline for user-replaceable batteries looming on the horizon, it’ll be interesting to see whether devices like this can squeeze into an exception category, or whether manufacturers will have to massively redesign or stop selling these devices to this rather large market. So far this particular regulation has already forced Nintendo to make a special Switch 2 console for the EU.

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A General Purpose Pi Zero Device For IoT

June 20, 2026 by 4 Comments

By now we’re all used to single board computers such as the Raspberry Pi Zero, but it’s likely we’ve all been frustrated at times by the number of support components required to use one. This becomes ever more annoying out in the field away from a handy HDMI, USB desktop, and power supply.

The Edgeberry Zero is an attempt to tackle this by mating a Raspberry Pi Zero with a PCB holding a robust power supply and interface connector, all together in a case. better still it comes with Edgeberry Hub, a software management interface.

It appears to be a commercially available product, but it’s Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) certified and everything is available in a GitHub repository. Looking at it from a Hackaday perspective it’s hardly the first power supply support board we’ve seen for a Pi, but its approach of making its own expansion module format is an interesting choice. To us they are reminiscent of Game Boy cartridges in the way they slide into a slot in the case.

We like the general idea behind the Edgeberry Zero, but whether it offers enough differentiation from packaging up a Zero with cables and duct tape is up to you.

Making Old Computers Count To A Million

June 19, 2026 by 5 Comments

How fast can you count to a million? It would probably take you a while. A computer could certainly do it faster. Indeed, the The National Museum of Computing figured it could actually prove to be a simple but useful benchmark for comparing computers over many eras and architectures. Thus was born the Million Measure.

The intention was to develop a benchmark that could run on just about anything considered a “computer.” As explained in a recent talk, the Million Measure can be run quite simply on anything from an ancient World War II computer like Colossus, to a modern Raspberry Pi. There are no complicated algorithms that need optimization, nor architecture-specific code required to do the job. The museum also found it to be a useful way to figure out which computers in their collection were actually working at any given time. Early computers from the mid-20th century reported benchmark times in minutes, while a 1995 BeBox is the fastest machine tested so far at 0.004 seconds.

It’s not a particularly useful measure for modern machines, which are so fast as to make the test difficult to parse in an intuitive way. But if you’re working with today’s hardware, there are other techniques you can use. Video after the break.

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How LLMs Can Be Assisted To Do Arithmetic Correctly

June 19, 2026 by 13 Comments

One of the most hilarious things you can do with an LLM-based chatbot is to ask it to do calculations. If it’s a well-written chatbot frontend, it can detect requests for arithmetic – like summing 1 and 1 – and pass it on to a dedicated calculator application, even if still cannot correctly count the ‘r’s in ‘strawberry’. This is where [Alvaro Videla] asks the question whether it is at all possible to perform arithmetic with a language model.

Since an LLM at its core is nothing but a vector space of probabilities that a matrix-based inference process uses to create a probabilistic output of tokens you’d not expect a lot of deterministic behavior. How can you do arithmetic without grounding it in some kind of deterministic process?

This is where [Alvaro]’s Rune project comes into play, which is ‘a mechanism-aware JIT compilation project for language-model arithmetic’. Although it is statistically impossible for an LLM to ever correctly perform any random series of arithmetic calculations, you can monitor the internal state of the model and interfere once the parameters of an arithmetic calculation have been identified. By putting the correct result back into the inference process and letting it continue you did not need to rely on external tools.

Ultimately this attempt sort-of worked, but was deemed a failure. It would seem that a language model is the wrong tool after all for replacing the humble calculator.

Epson HX-20 Gets A Drive Upgrade

June 19, 2026 by 5 Comments

The Epson HX-20 is sometimes referred to as an early laptop computer. It’s a little odd in its form factor, and in its storage, relying on a microcassette drive to store data. It can be problematic to keep these tapes and drives going after so many decades, so [Andrew Menadue] has been tinkering with a more modern solution.

The replacement drive uses a Raspberry Pi Pico to emulate the original tape drive. The Pico uses a microSD card to store data instead of the magnetic media of old. The device has a small screen for showing status information and four buttons for navigation, allowing the faux drive to be controlled as to what “tape” it’s pretending to be. It’s also possible to use the device to emulate ROM cartridges that could be used with the HX-20 in place of its original tape deck storage solution.

We’ve seen some other old hardware get similar drive upgrades before, too. No surprise, because mechanical drives and media simply don’t last forever. Sometimes you need to build a replacement that’s viable today. Video after the break.

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PCBs Straight From The Magazine

June 19, 2026 by 20 Comments

It’s never been easier to get a printed circuit board made. In fact, almost every electronics video out on the internet will incessantly remind you of this fact now. But making a custom PCB wasn’t always as straightforward as sending a KiCad file to a board house. Many DIY methods involve harsh chemicals and tedious processes, but did have the potential benefit of taking much less time than waiting on boards to arrive in the mail. [Bettina Neumryr] is demonstrating one of these older methods, called the toner transfer method, using a circuit that was printed directly in an old magazine.

The first part of the toner transfer method is to create an image that can be printed. Since this circuit came from a magazine, it is first scanned in to a computer and imported into GIMP, where it can be scaled to match the size of the components and then sharpened to make a crisp print. With the image ready, it’s time to print the image onto some toner transfer paper, ensuring that the printer in question is a laser printer which actually uses toner. From there, a sheet of blank copper PCB is prepared and then the toner is transferred by heating, in this case using a laminator. After that its etched, removing all of the copper not protected by the toner, and then the toner itself can be removed which leaves behind the copper traces.

For those of you who were around when toner transfer was in vogue, this video might not have much value. But for anyone who can’t use a board manufacturer for whatever reason or is looking for alternatives, a modern video showing the method could be much more useful and have better context for beginners than videos made a decade or more ago now. Some of those older methods include similar processes using inkjet printers instead, but there are more modern DIY methods as well using lasers or CNC machines too.

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Making An Ultra Minimal Cyberdeck

June 19, 2026 by 4 Comments

The cool thing about cyberdecks is that you get to design them to suit your personal tastes. [NickZero] wanted an ultra-minimal build, and set about putting together just that.

The build is based around a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, which has a lighter power draw than the full-fat models at the trade-off of some processing power. Since it’s a W model, it has the benefit of wireless connectivity baked in from the factory. The Pi is paired with a Gherkin 30% layout keyboard kit, which neatly matches the 7″ Waveshare touch display in width. Power is courtesy of a juicy 4000 mAh lithium-ion cell, which is taken care of by an Adafruit Powerboost 1000 charger module. Everything is then laced up together inside a nifty 3D printed case.

It’s a simple cyberdeck, and one that’s probably quite satisfying to use when you get used to the fact that there are no number or modifier keys on the ultra-cut-down keyboard. It’s also a great example of how a bunch of off-the-shelf gear can nonetheless be assembled into quite a cohesive whole. In much the opposite way, we’ve seen some maximalist cyberdeck builds lately, too.

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