Hackaday Europe: Last Round Of Speakers, Workshops

April 28, 2026 by No comments

If you don’t already have your tickets to Hackaday Europe, pick them up now. The clock is ticking! Today, we’d like to announce our keynote speaker, the remainder of our featured talks, and two more workshops. (And if you want workshop tickets, which always go fast, get those soon!)

Hackaday Europe is super excited to welcome back Hackaday Superfriend [Sprite_tm] to kick off the event with a keynote talk on how he made a retrogaming PC from bare silicon. Don’t miss it.

Jeroen Domburg

Building a retro-PC…From Components

What if you could build a retro-gaming PC from bare chips? No emulation.  No ancient hardware. Jeroen walks through designing a compact 486 SBC with modern amenities, starting from the silicon up.

 

Edwin Hwu
PlayStation 4 to Psychometer: Skin Nanotexture Biometrics

Turn a PlayStation 4 optical pickup into a high-speed dermal atomic force microscope. Edwin shows how hardware hacking and deep learning combine to assess skin conditions and potentially detect stress non-invasively.

Erin Kennedy
Outdoors with Robots: Adventures and Lessons Learned

Ten years of taking robots into the real outdoors, through sand, mud, and wildfire zones. Erin shares what happens when nature-inspired machines meet nature itself, and what she’s learned building them.

Stephen Coyle
Making physically intuitive electronic instruments

Our physical intuitions about inertia, momentum, and gravity shape how we play instruments. Stephen explores what happens when digital instruments simulate these properties and what new musical possibilities emerge.

Sylvain Huet
Bare metal made easy

As tech grows more opaque, there’s an urgent need to return to simple, hackable systems. Sylvain presents an ambient computing vision; devices that blend into life rather than dominate it.

Alex Ren
Hack Club: How to get 2000 teenagers hacking their own hardware projects

A 3D printer made of Lego. DOOM running in a PDF. These are Hack Club projects built by teenagers. Alex shares the tools, culture, and community behind hardware hacking at scale for young makers.

Michael Wiebusch
Build a Cable Modem for your Arduino. For 2 Euros. But it’s not a Modem.

Electric signals travel in two directions in a coaxial cable, and they don’t mix on the way. Michael explains transmission line theory and demonstrates why it matters for RF and high-speed digital design.

Anders Nielsen
High Performance SDR on the cheap

RF, high-speed USB, analog chaos. Building a 20MHz continuous bandwidth, 3GHz-capable SDR without breaking a $50 BOM, achievable with a single FPGA on a carrier board.

Federico Terraneo
Fluid kernels and how to optimize C++ for microcontrollers

A 20-minute tour of the fluid kernel architecture, the Miosix RTOS as a practical implementation, and 18 years of hard-won tips for writing efficient C++ on microcontrollers.

Benjaminas Sulcas
Fault injection 101

A hands-on workshop covering the basics of hardware fault injection, power glitching, EMFI, and practical comparisons of tools available to hardware security researchers and curious makers.

Davide Gomba
Let’s Mesh!

A practical dive into mesh networking with Meshtastic and Reticulum; installing, configuring, and communicating across decentralized mesh programs. Leave with hands-on experience and a new view of off-grid connectivity.

If you’re joining us and you’re not on the list above, you can still take the stage!  We’ll have time for seven-minute Lightning Talks, hopefully enough for everyone. So bring your hack and bring a story. We want to hear it.

[If you read this far, you probably want tickets. Just sayin’.]

A Tube Amplifier That’s Oven Ready

April 28, 2026 by 4 Comments

The problem with tube based audio is that it has so often been hijacked by people for whom the bragging rights of having a tube amplifier outweigh the benefits, or the sheer fun of building the thing. [Bettina Neumryr] makes a speciality of building projects featured in old electronics magazines, and her latest, a tube amplifier from 1955, is a fantastic antidote to the gold-plated silliness of audiophile tube amplifiers.

Design wise it’s relatively straightforward, with a preamplifier before a two-tube transformerless splitter circuit driving a push-pull output. She dives into the circuit a little, noting its feedback circuit to the cathode of the first splitter tube. There’s an accompanying power supply, a classic tube rectifier design that incorporates a hefty low-pass filter with a giant choke.

We particularly like her choice of chassis — while it’s possible to pay silly money for a tube chassis in 2026 she’s taken a much more down to earth approach with a pair of baking trays. We’re being honest here, they look surprisingly good. Component choices are limited by what’s available so most parts come from the junk box including the output transformer which causes her issues later. There’s a lot of mumbo-jumbo about tube amplifier layout, and she wisely sidesteps some of it.

The result after a few mishaps and a bit of unintended oscillation, is an amp which shows promise, but has distortion due to that transformer. We think she’ll have no problems sourcing a better one, which should bring that distortion figure into the acceptable range. You can watch the whole video below the break, and if that’s got you hooked, you can see one of our own youthful follies.

Continue reading “A Tube Amplifier That’s Oven Ready” →

The GPS III Rollout Is Almost Complete, But What Is It?

April 28, 2026 by 4 Comments

Considering how integral it is to our modern way of life, you could be excused for thinking that the Global Positioning System (GPS) is a product of the smartphone era. But the first satellites actually came online back in 1978, although the system didn’t reach full operational status until April of 1995. While none of the active GPS satellites currently in orbit are quite that old, several of them were launched in the early 2000s — and despite a few tweaks and upgrades, their core technology isn’t far removed from their 1990s era predecessors.

But in the coming years, that’s finally going to change. Just last week, the tenth GPS III satellite was placed in orbit by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Once it’s properly configured and operational, it will join its peers to form the first complete “block” of third-generation GPS satellites. Over the next decade, as many as 22 revised GPS III satellites are slated to take their position over the Earth, eventually replacing all of the aging satellites that billions of people currently rely on.

So what new capabilities do these third-generation GPS satellites offer, and why has it taken so long to implement needed upgrades in such a critical system?

Continue reading “The GPS III Rollout Is Almost Complete, But What Is It?” →

New Slicer Enables Horizontal Overhangs Without Support

April 28, 2026 by 10 Comments

There’s a rule of thumb when it comes to FDM printing that overhangs are really only possible to an angle of around 45 degrees or so. If you try to squirt out plastic with nothing supporting it, it just goes everywhere. However, a new slicer hopes to enable printing up to 90-degree overhangs with some creative techniques.

The software that enables this is called WaveOverhangs, and currently exists as a fork of OrcaSlicer. The idea is straightforward enough — using unique toolpathing to create rings of deposited material that fasten to those laid down before them in the same layer. Thus as the printer lays down a layer into bare space, the deposited plastic is, ideally, able to fix on to the supported edge. As the next ring is laid down, it grabs on to the cooled ring laid down before it, and so on. The idea is inspired by wave propagation, hence the name. You can see a demonstration of the software in the video below by [Cocoanix 3D Printing].

It’s still a very new technique. The slicer has a whole bunch of knobs to turn and two different algorithms. Get the settings just right and you can print horizontal overhangs successfully. There aren’t exactly presets yet, this is something to explore with trial and error. If you test it out, don’t forget to upload your results to the Community Gallery so the developers can see what works and what doesn’t.

We’ve explored how smart slicers can do amazing things before, too, particularly when it comes to things like bridging.

Continue reading “New Slicer Enables Horizontal Overhangs Without Support” →

A Guide To CubeSat Mission And Bus Design

April 28, 2026 by 7 Comments

If you mention the word bus, you might think of public transportation or, more likely for us, a way to connect things together. But in the satellite world, the bus is the part of a vehicle that supports the payload but isn’t itself the payload. Typically, that means the electric power system, propulsion, radios, and thermal control, among other systems. If you are designing a CubeSat, you will want to read A Guide to CubeSat Mission and Bus Design by [Frances Zhu].

The Creative Commons-licensed book has twelve chapters, ranging from systems engineering — that is, defining what you want to do — to analyzing structures, handling power, setting up communications, and more. Of particular interest to us was the chapter on command and data handling. The final chapters cover software, system integration, and there’s even a chapter on Ethics.

If you want to build a CubeSat or just want to learn more about how satellites actually work, this is a great read. There are videos and other features, too. If you don’t like reading in your browser, you can download an EPUB, PDF, or MOBI near the top of the page.

There are many resources for the want-to-be CubeSat builder. You can even start with an open source design.

Sega Master System Controllers, Now With USB C

April 27, 2026 by 8 Comments

USB wasn’t even a gleam in an engineer’s eye when the Sega Master System hit the market in 1985. Today, we’re up to USB 4 or something, and the USB C connector is becoming a defacto standard for just about everything except desktop computers. [Retrostalgia] is embracing this by mating the control pad from Sega’s first international console with the connector of today.

Naturally, the Sega Master System did not use the Universal Serial Bus to talk to its controllers, so some conversion was in order. That’s achieved with the use of a RP2040 microcontroller, which reads the D-pad and action buttons via its GPIO pins. It then acts as a HID device when plugged into a computer or other USB host, showing up as a simple game controller. This is a particularly easy hack as the Master System controller is so simple, there’s no need to decipher any protocols or anything like that. It’s just about wiring up a few simple buttons. Beyond that, it’s just a matter of hot-gluing the RP2040 into the Master System controller housing, and making some room for the USB C port to sneak out the top. We’d have loved to seen a little extra hackery on this one, perhaps adding some rumble to a controller that was never, ever supposed to have it.

If you want to adapt authentic old controllers to work with modern computers and emulators, this project is a great place to start. It doesn’t get much simpler than the Master System, after all. You can always work your way up to more advanced feats later, like working with the beloved Wavebird. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Sega Master System Controllers, Now With USB C” →

Why Solid State Batteries Short

April 27, 2026 by 7 Comments

Solid state batteries, we are told, are the new hot battery technology that will replace lithium-ion batteries. Soon. Not that we haven’t heard that before. One reason it isn’t dominating the market today is that it’s prone to short circuits during charging. [Dr. Yuwei Zhang and others have published a paper detailing why the shorts happen, which could lead to strategies to improve the technology.

Solid state batteries employ a solid electrolyte and a lithium anode. It is known that, sometimes, lithium metal from the anode forms dendrites that penetrate the ceramic electrolyte and cause it to crack. This is somewhat of a mystery as the lithium is a soft metal: to quote [Zhang], “like a gummy bear”.

There were two leading hypotheses for the observations. [Zhang’s] team showed that hydrostatic stress made the lithium dendrites act like a water jet, enabling them to penetrate the hard ceramic.

There is still work to figure out what to do about it, but understanding the root cause is certainly a step in the right direction. We’ve looked at these batteries before. We’ve also seen how changing the anode construction might help with the problem.