Hack Improves Cheap Speed Controllers

June 28, 2026 by 4 Comments

[Tony Goacher] has worked with a lot of cheap brushless DC motor controllers built in China. They can be very cost-effective, but sometimes limited in performance or capability, particularly when it comes to low-speed operation. Thus, he’s been working on a project to make cheap controllers more capable.

The prime problems [Tony] has faced are jerkiness, throttle deadspots, and inconsistent torque delivery at low speeds. This is especially the case when running brushless motors on heavier vehicles, where the greater inertia can compound any minor problems to the point things become undriveable. [Tony]’s solution has been to create a signal interceptor that lives in between a throttle and the cheap motor controller to change their overall behavior.

The demo vehicle for this build is TrakTrike, a sort of bicycle-half-track hybrid that [Tony] built for EMF Camp 2022. After blowing up some nicer controllers, [Tony] specced some cheaper parts from AliExpress. Only, the low-speed control was terrible, and the dual motor controllers didn’t respond identically to throttle and would cause the vehicle to steer or crab, making driving difficult. This was fixed by dropping in an Arduino Nano after the throttle, and before the two motor controllers. It allows calibrating the throttle output from the Arduino to eliminate dead spots, while also tuning the throttle output to left and right motors individually so they respond more similarly. There are also custom acceleration and deceleration curves that make the controllers respond more smoothly, and a precise crawling speed for consistent low-speed maneuvering.

Just by doing some fancy throttle smoothing and control, [Tony] was able to greatly improve the usability of these cheap controllers, for the price of an Arduino Nano and little more. Files are on GitHub for those eager to attempt the hack themselves. There are other ways to go about this of course, like diving into field-oriented control, if you’re so inclined. Alternatively, speculate on how you’d tackle this engineering challenge down in the comments.

Make Your Own Loudspeaker From Scratch

June 28, 2026 by 1 Comment

A loudspeaker is a vital component of every device that plays sound, but while its operation is simple, it’s a surprisingly difficult device to build. [Rvanderouderaa] has made an Instructables post showing a speaker design that it’s claimed, had an impedance that varies by volume (Dutch language, Google Translate link).

In all moving-coil speakers, a coil of wire is held in a radial magnetic field. To this is attached a cone, and when a current is passed through the coil the whole thing moves to create the sound. The tricky part of making one comes in making the cone itself, and in particular the suspension system that holds it in place while allowing it to move backwards and forwards. It’s normal for these components to be moulded from thick paper.

This design uses a 3D printed frame and cone, with the 3D printing providing excellent rigidity. The suspension system is a circular corrugated sheet, and it’s made in this case using papier-maché made from wet toilet paper, and a 3D printed mould. We particularly like this technique.

This is an impressive build, simply for having made a recognizable and working speaker in the first place. There’s no demo video so we have no idea how it sounds, but for us the point is more in the construction than the reproduction.

If speakers interest you, we’ve taken an in-depth look at them in the past.

A man standing next to an RC model of an Airbus A380 aircraft. The fuselage is at elbow height and the tailfin appears to be over his head.

World’s Biggest RC A380 Is A Big Deal

June 27, 2026 by 4 Comments

RC planes are a lot of fun, and the bigger the better! [Ramy RC] has built the world’s biggest RC A380.

At 29 ft (8.83 m) long, with a 32 foot (9.75 m) wingspan, and weighing 800 lb (362 kg), this 1/8 scale jumbo jet is not your typical model. The fuselage is built from CNC cut EPS foam layed up with fiberglass on the outside and carbon fiber inside. The wings have a combination of carbon, aluminum, foam, and wood components to handle the aerodynamic loads.

The attention to detail is wild. Instead of painting the windows, each one is an actual hole in the plane with a 3D printed window frame and acrylic window. You can actually see one falling out of the plane in the video below. An Airbus mechanic in the comments even notes the landing gear door order of operations are identical to the real thing.

If [Ramy] looks familiar, perhaps you remember his previous A380 build? Much like the 747, the full size A380 is no longer in production, but they can run on cooking oil while they’re still flying.

Continue reading “World’s Biggest RC A380 Is A Big Deal” →

A Standalone YouTube Streaming Rig

June 27, 2026 by 1 Comment

YouTube streaming typically involves a camera with an HDMI output, a USB3 HDMI digitiser, and a suitably beefy PC to run it all. It’s quite a process, and for [Coreymillia], more complex than it needs to be. He’s come up with something simpler, a dedicated self-contained streaming rig using a Raspberry Pi 4.

As you might expect it uses the Raspberry Pi HQ camera at the optical end, but it’s the software surrounding it that transforms it from a mere camera into a streaming rig. There’s a web based user interface, but perhaps more interesting are the companion dashboard peripherals. A Raspberry Pi or an ESP32 Cheap Yellow Display can both serve as a small in-view dashboard and controller.

We know from experience that a stream can be a difficult thing to get right even with high-end hardware, and we’re interested to see this standalone device allowing , we hope, an easier way to do it. If you’re a streamer we’re guessing you’ll be taking a closer look. Even so, this is surprisingly, not the simplest Raspberry Pi based streaming device we’ve seen.

Bringing Swift To The Apple II

June 27, 2026 by 1 Comment

Swift is a relatively modern program language, appearing in 2014 as a replacement for Objective-C. Since then, it’s become a popular solution for programming apps across Apple platforms. That led [Yeo Kheng Meng] to a simple yet fun idea—porting Swift to the oldest Apple platform of all.

Yes, [Yeo] managed to build a development environment for Swift that targets the Apple II platform. Not just one machine, either—everything from the original Apple II up to the IIe and a little beyond. Now, the Apple II is very different from modern Macs and iPhones and the like, having debuted in 1977 with a 1 MHz 6502 CPU and a minuscule 4 KB of RAM. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use a modern language to develop for it!

[Yeo] does a great job of explaining how it all works, and how Claude Code and GPT 5.5 Codex were used to help piece things together. The compiler is set up to spit out bytecode that’s executed by a virtual machine running on the 6502. The target was to allow the setup to work on a standard 1977 Apple II from the factory, which would allow it to then run on subsequent models without issue. However, there is a small note— [Yeo]’s implementation requires the RAM to have been upgraded to 48 KB.

We love seeing modern stuff ported to the Apple II. This Portal port was a particular highlight.

Continue reading “Bringing Swift To The Apple II” →

Cramming A Mini-ITX Gaming PC Into A 3D Printed Steam Machine Sized Case

June 27, 2026 by 14 Comments

The recently released Valve Steam Machine is somewhat awkward in that it uses a custom, non-standard PCB and non-standard power supply. This fact apparently has irked some people who decided that it makes perfect sense to try and cram a Mini-ITX board, Small Form Factor (SFF) PSU and full-sized discrete GPU into an enclosure of the same size. Cue the SFF Mini-ITX Steam Machine Case project by [3DCatt] over at Printables.

This is apparently a project done in cooperation with AMD’s [Jacob Terkelsen], who showed off the 3D printed case stuffed full with the aforementioned parts, which includes a GeForce RTX 5060 GPU. Of note is that the Valve Steam Machine uses a different cooling configuration as it has both the CPU and GPU on the same PCB. These share the same massive heatsink, as can be seen in e.g. the [Gamers Nexus] teardown video.

For this angular imitation machine it would have been nice to use a blower-style GPU, to exhaust the hot air rather than dump it all into the case. This is also an issue that was raised by [Jacob], with more ventilation added to mitigate the issue. What the overall performance will be compared to regular compact Mini-ITX cases remains to be seen, but if you really want to live the Steam Machine life and have some parts kicking around along with a 3D printer, it might be worth a shot.

Requiem For Long Wave, As The BBC Goes Silent

June 27, 2026 by 23 Comments

Something happened this morning which will have been unnoticed by many, but which for a certain breed of radio enthusiast marks the end of an era. The BBC stopped broadcasting Radio 4 on their 198 kHz Long Wave frequency, ending over a century of transmission in the band. For now the transmitter carries a recorded message telling listeners that the service has ended, but it’s expected that this will soon be turned off.

A pair of very large transmitting masts against a cloudy grey sky.
The main 198kHz BBC transmitter, at Droitwich. Bob Nienhuis, Public domain.

American readers may be unfamiliar with Long Wave as it’s a band not allocated in their region. Covering 153 to 279 kHz, it’s a relic from the earliest days of high-power broadcasting in the 1920s, used because of the enormous distances that could be covered with its lower frequencies. The main long wave transmitter for the BBC is at Droitwich, and its demise comes because there are no more spares for its high-power transmitter tubes. It joins many Medium Wave, or AM, as it is commonly known, stations in leaving the airwaves, as increased interference from switch mode electronics and the availability of higher quality alternatives took away their listeners. It’s fair to say that there will be few whose lives are inconvenienced by the switch-off in 2026, but it’s worth taking a moment to remember.

The first BBC Long Wave transmissions in the mid-1920s were on a 1600 metre wavelength, or 187.5 kHz. A series of international agreements saw them move to 193 kHz, and then 200 KHz or 1500 metres in 1934. They stayed on that frequency until another shift down 2 KHz to 198 kHz in 1988. They were atomic-controlled, and thus usable as a frequency standard. The programming started with station names redolent of their era, first the BBC National Service, then the Light Programme you’ll see on the dial in the header image, and finally the more modern-sounding Radio 4. A famous BBC programme tied to Long Wave is the Shipping Forecast, a weather bulletin for deep-sea fishermen which became cult listening on land and now features on FM and digital services too, and there’s even a probably-apocryphal tale that British nuclear submarine captains would once use its presence or absence to judge whether nuclear war had occurred.

In an Oxfordshire farmhouse not far short of fifty years ago, a young child who would later become a Hackaday writer heard a radio show like nothing before, which made an impression that continues to this day. The show was one of the earliest airings of the original Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy radio series, through a 1970s ITT radio tuned to BBC Radio 4 on (then) 200 kHz Long Wave. So long, Droitwich, and thanks for all the fish.