Documenting The IR Protocol Of The PumpSaver Plus Device

July 10, 2026 by No comments

Having a pump in a remote location where you aren’t constantly monitoring it is a common scenario, which can be unfortunate when said pump runs into problems like a dry well, jammed impeller or power issues. This is where pump monitors like the older SymCom (now Littelfuse) PumpSaver Plus 233P will protect the pump if such conditions are detected. Of course, the infrared communication port on it uses an undocumented protocol that was meant to be used with a long-since discontinued handheld device. Ergo [Elizabeth Camporeale] saw fit to reverse-engineer this protocol.

In the installation manual for this device this Informer unit is briefly mentioned along with the information it will display on its screen, making it clear that it’s quite literally just there to act as a display for the information that’s constantly generated on this interface. Naturally, this is incredibly useful if you wish to tie the system into a wider monitoring and automation system.

Somewhat unusual, this IR interface on the used 233P-1.5 unit turned out to be use a 5,000 baud NRZ, MSB-first protocol, with the juicy details fully documented and a Python-based decoder implementation provided.

Naturally [Elizabeth] didn’t just reverse-engineer this for the fun of it, but also for ESPHome integration. This uses a setup as can be seen in the top image, with an ESP32-C6 module providing the processing power and Wi-Fi, with a standard phototransistor recording the data pumped out by the pump monitor.

How To Use Those Cute But Slightly Odd 7-Segment LCDs

July 10, 2026 by 11 Comments

If you’re not aware, there is such a thing as adorable little three digit LCD 7-segment displays. They come in a ten-pin DIP package and are just begging to be integrated into a project. The catch is they are just a tiny bit weird. Luckily for us all, [Nagy Krisztián] spells out exactly how to use them.

The first odd thing about these ten-pin LCD displays is that they have a footprint that doesn’t quite mesh with standard 0.1 inch spacing, meaning they will not cleanly fit into a breadboard. Luckily, one can solve this with a bit of force. It’s a small part, and the pins don’t seem to mind.

These little LCDs are adorable, but a bit unusual to interface with.

The second odd thing is wrapping one’s head around the pin mapping. Figuring out the table of which pins activate which segments in the digits is easier if one keeps in mind that each segment of each digit is the product of two different pins. For example, “2A” is digit two, segment A, and is the product of pins 3 and COM4.

That’s not all. Electrically speaking, driving this LCD isn’t nearly as straightforward as an LED.

With an LED display, the COM pins are either common anode or common cathode, which tells one whether lighting up a segment means holding the COM pin at GND with voltage applied to the segment pin, or the other way around. But in the case of this LCD display, the polarity applied is swapped every cycle. Oh, and inactive COM pins need to held at half-voltage. Neat!

[Nagy] drives the whole thing with little more than an ATtiny84 microcontroller and a few resistors. A switchable half-voltage signal is cleverly created by combining a simple voltage divider and taking advantage of the fact that the ATtiny84’s pins can be in one of three different states depending on how they are configured: high, low, or high-impedance (pin configured as an input). Each COM pin on the display gets connected to both an ATtiny84 pin, and to the supply voltage via two resistors forming a voltage divider. When the ATtiny drives the pin high, the LCD pin sees about 3 V. When the pin is driven LOW, the LCD pin sees 0 V. When the ATtiny configures the pin as an input, the LCD pin receives about 1.5 V.

The bulk of the software is defining which pins and states equal which digits, and cycling the LCD at a rate of vaguely 60 Hz which delivers flicker-free results.

We appreciate the clever combination of voltage divider with pin configuration to create three switchable voltage levels. If you liked that and want to see more serious leveraging of pin configuration on a microcontroller, check out how to drive seven LEDs with only two pins.

Robot Dog In Browser

July 10, 2026 by 1 Comment

You’ve doubtlessly seen the current crop of robot dogs and, if you are like us, thought about getting one to play with. The problem is that the cheap ones are toys, and the serious ones cost serious money. But now you can experiment with a mid-range cost one for free in your browser. The sponsor will be happy to sell you a robot in kit or assembled form, although it is the OpenCat robot (we’ve covered it before), so you could simply build a real one yourself if you wanted to.

The code is all in a Web-based IDE, and the main file is deceptively simple. However, the real work is in read_serial (in the src/moduleManager.h file, for some reason) and reaction in the aptly-named src/reaction.h file. If you just want to play, you can use the buttons in the simulator or enter serial commands (documented elsewhere). For example, ksit will make the dog sit down.

Continue reading “Robot Dog In Browser” →

Hackaday Podcast Episode Ep 377: Parallel Pixels, Wiggly Consoles, And Seven Segments

July 10, 2026 by 1 Comment

This week’s podcast sees Elliot joined by Jenny List, as both suffer silently in the European summer heat because the sound of a desk fan would come over on the recording.

A stand-out hack of the week comes from [Bitluni], whose GPU made from thousands of cheap microcontrollers is on a scale we’ve never seen before. It’s an amazing project in itself, but the manufacturing and power consumption issues of so many processors running at the same time make for a discussion of their own.

Otherwise, we have diecasting on the bench, an impressive achievement by any measure, a Raman spectrometer, and an open source take on something like a Kei truck. In quick hacks there’s a dicussion of soldering versus crimping for high current connectors, and neon tubes used as digital logic in an organ. The recording finishes with a discussion of 7-segment display history, and whether an engineering education teaches design for manufacture.

Or download it yourself, in glorious 192-bit MP3.

Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast Episode Ep 377: Parallel Pixels, Wiggly Consoles, And Seven Segments” →

3D Printed Scooter Fits In Your Luggage, Some Assembly Required

July 10, 2026 by 13 Comments

Though [Ivan Miranda] calls the 3D printed vehicle in his recent video a motorbike, what he ultimately pulls out of his suitcase is clearly a scooter. Linguistic confusion aside, the “Mirandetta” looks like an awesome build and pulling a scooter out of your suitcase and whizzing past everyone in the taxi line just sounds amazing, especially knowing you made it yourself.

Aside from a whole lot of filament, he’s got a couple of tool batteries for hot-swappable energy that Airport security shouldn’t mind too much — provided you carry them with you, anyway — plus the usual e-bike motor and electronic speed control you might expect, and lawnmower tires which you might not. The narrow 3D printed rims round over the normally-flat tires to make them usable for this application. He seems particularly taken with the bi-stable mechanism he built for the kickstand, and we can’t blame him as we love seeing that kind of thing ourselves. The TPU seat is also a nice touch to keep with ‘everything printed’ vibe.

Now while the finished product does indeed fit into his suitcase, it needs to be completely disassembled. Well, unless you have an over-sized suitcase, perhaps. So our dreams of zooming away from the luggage line from the first paragraph were perhaps a bit premature. Still, from the footage at Prague Maker Faire at the end of the video, it looks like it was a fun enough ride that we can forgive [Ivan] for our overactive imaginations.

If you want an open-source e-bike, we’ve seen those too — but that won’t fit in any kind of suitcase.

Continue reading “3D Printed Scooter Fits In Your Luggage, Some Assembly Required” →

This Week In Security: Escaping Linux VMs, Vulnerable Solar, Confusing AI (Again), And Confusing NPM Malware

July 10, 2026 by 2 Comments

The Januscape vulnerability allows a user in a guest VM managed by the Linux Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) to corrupt memory in the host system and break out of isolation.

KVM virtualization is used by major hosting platforms like Amazon AWS, Google GCP, Digital Ocean, and many more. All of the shared hosting platforms count on virtualization to isolate untrusted guest systems from the physical hardware and each other; being able to corrupt memory for all guests or break isolation presents a major threat.

The bug report says the error has been present for 16 years, which is nearly the entire lifetime of the KVM subsystem in Linux. Fixes are available in mainline, and major hosting providers who count on KVM are likely already updating.

Vulnerabilities In Balcony Solar

Micro solar, or “balcony solar”, installs have been gaining traction in Europe as a way to offset rising electrical costs by connecting solar and battery systems to a house or apartment power system.

Vulnerabilities have been found in the popular Hoymiles micro-inverter, which uses a proprietary RF radio protocol to manage the devices. Unfortunately, it looks like this protocol has no encryption or authentication beyond validating the serial number, and the serial number is also available over a wireless probe command.

Armed with a Nordic nRF radio researchers were able to discover nearby inverters in the wild and collect the serial numbers, though of course they stopped short of issuing commands to random users.

The wireless management control allows controlling the device power and output levels, as well as setting a lockout PIN, which the researchers suspect could be used to disable devices and lock the legitimate owners out completely.

There are an estimated 500,000 units in use, and currently the only known mitigation is to unplug the device entirely and disconnect the solar panels, though the team suggests that setting an anti-theft PIN may also help – or at least prevent an unknown PIN being set.

Be sure to check out the link for an in-depth analysis of the protocol and the surprising lack of protection.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: Escaping Linux VMs, Vulnerable Solar, Confusing AI (Again), And Confusing NPM Malware” →

Browser-Based Image Inpainting Runs Locally, If One Doesn’t Mind A Big Download

July 10, 2026 by 14 Comments

[Simon Willison] ported the Moebuis 0.2B image inpainting model to run locally in a web browser.  The web tool simply requires a user to provide an image, mark a section of it to be removed, and the model will do it’s best to patch up the missing area. The project was handled by Claude Code as an experiment in how things in the AI coding world have evolved, but more on that in a moment.

The existence of this tool shows that it’s possible for this kind of image editing to be done on the client side, running entirely locally with no reliance on remote services or server-side GPU resources. The online demo (GitHub repository here) is available if you want to try it out, but be warned it triggers a 1.27 gigabyte download of the required model on the first run.

What’s also interesting is [Simon]’s write-up, because he used the project as an opportunity to learn what has changed in the realm of AI coding agents. [Simon] is a software developer but in this project he didn’t personally write any of the code. One may think that means he didn’t learn anything other than how to use the tools, but that’s not quite true.

He learned it’s possible to convert a PyTorch-based model to ONXX, that the converted model can run in supported browsers using local WebGPU acceleration, and that the CacheStorage API will work on large files. Last but not least, he learned Claude Opus 4.8 is capable of handling such a project pretty much autonomously, and even created an informative document explaining the underlying architecture.

One may consider AI coding agents to be disasters waiting to happen, but it’s also true that the landscape is changing quickly, and write-ups like [Simon]’s give a helpful peek at those developments.