Hacked Nixie Clock Waits For The Bus

November 13, 2026 by Tom Nardi No comments

Nixie clocks have become popular enough that these days there’s no shortage of turn-key options that let you experience that warm glow with a minimum of fuss. Many still come as little more than a bare PCB, giving the purchaser some freedom to come up with their own enclosure, but at least the electronics are handled.

But for [Justin Scott], putting his new two-digit Nixie clock board into a handsome box was only half the battle. He also wanted to do something a bit more interesting than just tell the time. To convert the board from a simple clock to a device that could show how many minutes until the next bus showed up at his local stop, he had to hack the firmware and establish a communication link to a Raspberry Pi to do the heavy lifting.

The first step was to get a modified firmware on the clock PCB, and that required a ST-LINK V2 programmer and some time tracing out the pins on the STM8 microcontroller to determine how they controlled the various elements of the Nixie tubes. Fortunately, there were just I/O pins left over to stand up a serial link to a Raspberry Pi Zero through a level converter.

On the Pi side, a Python script hits the bus API to figure out what’s coming and when. There’s some creative blinking of the decimal points to indicate what’s happening behind the scenes, but primarily the display simply shows how many minutes are left before [Justin] should be out waiting for his ride.

It would be nice if all those commercial Nixie boards would talk I2C, but at least projects like this show it’s possible to get more out of them than just the time.

A Desktop OS For The ESP32-P4

November 12, 2026 by Jenny List 10 Comments

The ESP32-P4 is Espressif’s high-end application processor, with two blistering fast RISC-V cores for a surprisingly reasonable price. As it’s a very capable computer in its own right, there have been a range of operating systems made for it. Latest among them is [Jthwho]’s BMDS, for Bare Metal Do Stuff, which targets an Olimex board.

At its heart is the FreeRTOS kernel we’ve seen in so many other similar projects, but on top is an OS which is described as being like DOS in its one-user minimally intrusive operation. It runs ELF binaries, and has some POSIX compliance, with BusyBox being a port. Perhaps most noticeable is its GUI, which provides a very slick desktop straight out of the late 1990s.

We can see that had this appeared as a contemporary of Amigas, 68k Macs, and Windows 3.x, it would have immediately been a real contender. But the question is, does such an OS have a niche here in 2026? We think it might, as this processor is slowly establishing itself in a new genre of powerful machines aimed at hackers and tinkerers. Either way it’s an impressive achievement, and we look forward to seeing it develop over time.

Hacking Meta’s Smart Glasses

November 12, 2026 by Jenny List No comments

Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses have attracted plenty of controversy in the relatively short time they have been available, given their potential for covert and unvanted surveillance. But given the chance to examine one it would be churlish to pass up on the opportunity to test its defences. Which is what [p0pcycle] did when the opportunity came her way.

Given that hardware-probing was not an option, she followed the course of intercepting a software update. A little app decompilation led her to the full firmware, and she was able to probe its secrets. There’s a developer mode allowing applications to be written for the glasses, and it takes the form of an APK that loads the application code. An early firmware version would trust self-signed apps, so she could get arbitrary code on the device. From there after some trial and error she was able to expose a network listener, and there she had it.

The write-up is an interesting walkthrough of the process, and ends with her reporting it through their bug bounty program. So sadly the steps outlined above won’t work on newer firmwares, but we’re guessing that won’t stop others probing this device further.

Watch That Sound: Your Own Chladni Plate

November 12, 2026 by Al Williams 6 Comments

What if you could see sound? A Chladni plate uses a speaker and small particles, like sand, to give you a visual representation of sound, and [CrazyScience] shows you how to make one. The plate dates back to 1787, created by the eponymous physicist. Of course, back then, there were no speakers, so the original plate was metal with a violin bow raked across the edges.

The modern version uses an ESP32, a speaker, and salt. The patterns depend on the resonance points of the plate. The device has a rotary encoder to tune different frequencies. Check it out in the video below.

Continue reading “Watch That Sound: Your Own Chladni Plate” →

Upgrade Your CoCo The Modern Way

November 12, 2026 by Jenny List 4 Comments

The Radio Shack TRS-80 Colour Computer may never have achieved the sales volume of its competitors from Commodore or Apple, but it offered a surprisingly capable set of hardware. There were three versions, with the final one being a significant upgrade in many ways. There was no upgrade path for owners of version 1 and 2 machines to have a version 3 back in the day, but now thanks to [Felipe Antoniosi] such an upgrade is possible. How? With a Tang Nano 20K FPGA board, of course!

The CoCo 3 had a paged memory system for expansion up to 512k, as well as a significantly more capable graphics chip which while compatible with the original Motorola part offered enhanced graphics. The upgrade emulates these, and connects to the CoCo via a set of daughter boards that connect to where the various motherboard chips sat. it offers an HDMI output as well as analog video and enhanced sound capability, bringing the machine firmly into the 21st century.

As mods go to classic hardware, this is quite an invasive one. Whether or not you’d prefer to do this to your CoCo is up to you, but ask yourself this, would you have done this had this board been available in the 1980s? Of course you would.

Meanwhile should you become bored with the CoCo, it can also be persuaded to emulate an Apple ][.

Baochip-1x: A Mostly-Open, 22nm SoC For High Assurance Applications

November 12, 2026 by Maya Posch 6 Comments

For most people, just getting any old microcontroller or system on chip (SoC) from our favorite – or cheapest – vendor is more than good enough. But if you’re really into high assurance computing where every transistor has to be accounted for, you got a bit of a problem. This is basically why [Andrew “Bunnie” Huang] pitched in and had the Baochip-1x produced.

This SoC’s design is based heavily on the FPGA-based CPU in the Precursor device, which itself is claimed to be a fully verifiable communicator design. Since it does have an MMU, you can run any software on it that supports the RV32IMAC RISC-V instruction set, with a Coder’s Guide available for those who might feel interested in this SoC, along with the SystemVerilog and Verilog-based sources.

In addition to the DIY assembly process, you can even get a physical hardware version, including the ‘Dabao’ evaluation board with a very Raspberry Pi Pico-shaped form factor. Inside this SoC is a single-core, 350 MHz VexRISC-V core, 4 MB resistive RAM (RRAM) and 2 MB of SRAM, along with a whole heap of security-related features.

An INA219 board with a QWIIC connector and "female barrel jack to male barrel jack" cable soldered on. the qwiic end is plugged into the side of the Blepis PDA, with the screen showing a device found on the 0x40 address

Just Use QWIIC Already

November 12, 2026 by Arya Voronova 13 Comments

Years ago, I wrote an article describing different I2C-on-a-connector ecosystems, explaining their strengths, weaknesses, and implementation details, as well as piling on a heap of fun stories. Looking back at it, it’s a great reference article, if I do say so myself. In particular, I highlighted QWIIC, which is a Sparkfun-borne standard for putting 3.3 V I2C on a JST-SH (or compatible) 4-pin connector.

I’ve since implemented a fair bit of QWIIC, and grew to like it so much more. I’m here to explain to you why you ought to be putting those JST-SH connectors in everything you design that touches I2C, all the cool things they let you do, where to buy a lot of cheap cables at once, and all the references you could need. I will also tell you about my USB pinout for QWIIC, something you should definitely know about.