Modded Server PSU Provides Plenty Of Current

April 19, 2026 by No comments

Most makers find themselves in need of a benchtop power supply at some point or another. Basic models can be had relatively cheaply, but as your current demands go higher, so does the price. [Danilo Larizza] has figured out an alternative solution—repurposing old server hardware to do the job instead.

The build is based around an HP Common Slot (CS) server power supply. They can be readily had for well under $50 if you know where to look. Even better, they can deliver over 50 amps at 12 volts, which happens to be a very useful voltage indeed. All you need to do is some minor mods.

A jumper on a couple of pins will get the power supply running, and with the addition of some terminals for your hook-up leads, you’re ready to go. As a hot-swappable single unit, the power supply is already outfitted with a ventilation fan to keep everything cool. If so desired, you can even make some further mods to bump output voltage a little ways past 13 or 14 volts if you’d like to use them for certain battery charging tasks.

Sure, you’re not getting a variable power supply, but if you need 12 volts and lots of it, this is a great way to go. We’ve featured similar builds before, too, turning ATX PC power supplies into useful benchtop tools.

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Hackaday Links: April 19, 2026

April 19, 2026 by No comments

We’ll start things off this week with a story that’s developing more than 25 billion kilometers from Earth — on Friday, NASA announced that the command had been sent to shut down Voyager 1’s Low-energy Charged Particles (LECP) instrument. As the power produced by the spacecraft’s aging radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) continues to dwindle, engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have been systematically turning off various systems to extend the mission for as long as possible. It’s believed that deactivating LECP should buy them another year, during which engineers hope to implement a more ambitious power-saving routine. If this sounds a bit familiar, you’re probably thinking of Voyager 2. The plug was pulled on its LECP instrument back in March of 2025.

The JPL engineers hope that their new plan may allow them to reactivate previously disabled systems on the twin space probes, but even if everything goes according to plan, there’s no fighting the inevitable. At some point, there simply won’t be enough juice in the RTGs to keep the lights on. Although it’s going to be a sad day when we have to bring you that news, surviving a half-century in space is one hell of a run.

Speaking of ending a run, just a week after Amazon announced that pre-2012 Kindles would no longer be supported, the company is letting users know that the Kindle software for PCs will be discontinued in June. In its current form, at least. As Good e-Reader reports, Amazon is developing a new client for users who want to access the Kindle ecosystem from their computers, but it will only run on Windows 11. Since older software could be used to strip DRM from purchased ebooks, it seems likely this is another attempt to lock the platform down.

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2026 Green Powered Challenge: The Eternal Headphones

April 19, 2026 by 9 Comments

Noise cancelling headphones are a great way to insulate yourself from the bustle of the city, but due to their power requirements, continuous use means frequent recharging. [Alessandro Sgarzi] has an elegant and unique solution — powering the noise cancelling electronics by harvesting energy from the ambient noise of the city via a sheet of piezoelectric film.

This impressive feat is achieved using a LTC3588-1 power harvesting IC and a pair of supercapacitors, while an STM32L011K4T6 microcontroller processes the input from a MEMS microphone and feeds a low-power class D amplifier. This circuit consumes an astounding 1.7 nW, a power that a noisy city is amply able to supply. Audio meanwhile comes via a traditional 3.5 mm connector, which we are told is the cool kids’ choice nowadays anyway.

We like this project, and since it’s part of our 2026 Green Powered Challenge, it’s very much in the spirit of the thing. You’ve just got time to get your own entry in, so get a move on!

2026 Hackaday Greep Powered Challenge

Rack Cage Generator Gets Your Gear Mounted

April 19, 2026 by 1 Comment

Sometimes, as hackers and makers, we can end up with messy lashed-together gear that is neither reliable nor tidy. Rackmounting your stuff can be a great way to improve the robustness and liveability of your setup. If you find this appealing, you might like CageMaker by [WebMaka].

This parametric OpenSCAD script can generate mounts for all kinds of stuff. Maybe you have a little network switch that’s just a tangle of wires on your desk, or a few pieces of audio gear that are loosely stacked on top of each other and looking rather unkempt. It would be trivial with this tool to create some 3D printed adapters to get all that stuff laced up nice and neat in a rack instead.

If you’re eager to get tinkering, you can try out the browser-based version quite easily. We’ve featured similar work before, too—many a maker has trod the path of rackmounting, as it turns out.

A hexagonal brass enclosure surrounds an aluminium fan with three blades. The fan has an integrated outer rim with a series of small holes around the rim.

Building A Rim-Driven Jet Engine

April 19, 2026 by 13 Comments

Rim-driven thrusters turn the normal propeller-motor arrangement inside out; rather than mounting the motor at the center of the propeller, they use a large hollow motor, with the blades attached to the inside of the rotor. They’re mostly used in ship propellers, though there have been some suggestions to use them in electric aircraft. [Integza], always looking for new and unusual ways to create propulsion, took this idea and made it into a jet engine.

Rather than using an electric motor, the fan in this design is propelled by miniature rocket nozzles along the edge. The fan levitates on a layer of high-pressure gas between the fan rim and the housing. To prevent too much pressurized gas from escaping, the fan and housing needed to fit together closely, but with minimal friction. A prototype made out of acrylic and resin and powered by compressed air proved that the idea worked, but [Integza] wanted to make to this a combustion-powered engine.

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DIY UPS Keeps Home Assistant Running

April 19, 2026 by 1 Comment

If you put a bunch of computers in charge of your house, it’s generally desirable to ensure their up-time is as close to 100% as possible. An uninterruptible power supply can help in this regard. To that end, that’s why [Bill Collis] whipped one up for his Home Assistant setup.

[Bill]’s UPS is charged with one job—keeping the Home Assistant Green hub and an Xfinity XB7 cable modem online when the grid goes dark. The construction is relatively straightforward. When the grid is up, everything is powered via a Mean Well AC-DC 12 V power supply, while the power is also used to charge a 12.8 V 10 Ah lithium iron phosphate battery pack. When the grid goes out, the system switches over to running the attached hardware on pure battery power. A Victron BatteryProtect is used to automatically disconnect the load if the battery voltage drops too low. Meanwhile, a Shelly Plus Uni module is used to monitor battery voltage and system status, integrated right into Home Assistant itself.

If you want to keep the basics of your smart home going at all times, something like this is a pretty simple way to go.  We’ve featured some other great UPS builds in the past, too. If you’re whipping up your own hardware to keep your home or lab alive in the dark of night, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline.

Can Claude Write Z80 Assembly Code?

April 19, 2026 by 18 Comments

Betteridge’s law applies, but with help and guidance by a human who knows his stuff, [Ready Z80] was able to get a functioning game of Wordle out of the French-named LLM, which is more than we expected. It’s not like the folks at Anthropic spent much time making sure 40-year-old opcodes were well represented in their training data, after all.

For hardware, [Ready Z80] is working with the TEC-1G single-board-computer, which is a retrocomputer inspired by the TEC-1 whose design was published by Australian hobbyist magazine “Talking Electronics” back in the 1980s. Claude actually seemed to know what that was, and that it only had a hex keypad — though when [Ready Z80] was quick to correct it and let the LLM know he’s using a QWERTY keyboard add-on, Claude declared it was confident in its ability to write the code.

As usual for a LLM, Claude was overconfident and tossed out some nonexistent instructions. Though admittedly, it didn’t persist in that after being corrected. It’s notable that [Ready Z80] doesn’t prompt it with “Give me an implementation of Wordle in Z80 assembly for the TEC-1G” but goes through step-by-step, explaining exactly what he wants each section of the code to do. As [Dan Maloney] reported three years ago, it’s a bit like working with a summer intern.

In the end, they get a working game, but that was never in question. [Ready Z80] reveals over the course of the video he has the chops to have written it himself. Did using Claude make that go faster? Based on studies we’ve seen, it probably felt like it, even if it may have actually slowed him down.

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