Tiny Scratch-Built Cyberdeck Is In Mint Condition

[Salim Benbouziyane] shows off his TN Deck, a tiny custom cyberdeck built into an Altoids tin. It’s a skillful build that really makes the most of the available space, and includes not only screen and keyboard but also rechargeable power supply and speaker.

The TN Deck is built around the Raspberry Pi Compute Module Zero, which is essentially the same as a Pi Zero W but in a more compact, castellated PCB form factor intended to be integrated into other designs. [Salim]’s custom PCB also handles power, sound, and puts a custom keyboard at the front running QMK, which is pretty much the best choice for custom keyboards and macropads of all kinds.

A D-pad and some gamepad buttons come in handy. The slot in the center is for the speaker.

The keyboard itself is mostly 3D printed. Each button consists of a dome tactile switch on the PCB, covered with a thin and flexible membrane printed in TPU and topped with 3D-printed keycaps. The markings are courtesy of [Salim]’s desktop IR laser marking machine, because a little trial-and-error with lasers can yield good marks on 3D prints. [Salim] says the keys don’t have much travel and the ergonomics aren’t the best, but what it lacks in comfort it makes up for in small size and economical design.

We also really liked [Salim]’s use of a printed drill guide for putting precise holes in the Altoid tin for things like an audio jack, taking the guesswork out of tool positioning.

Some cyberdecks are made to suit specific needs, and others are made for the love of the game. The TN Deck is one of the latter and [Salim]’s previous CM Deck was a bit of both. We can’t wait to see what he makes next.

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A Computer Terminal The Old Way

Here in 2026 if we need a terminal the chances are we fire one up on our computer and continue on our way without a thought. What we are doing of course is emulating the experience of earlier hardware terminals, ones with a serial port on the back, a keyboard, a screen, or if they are a bit older, a teletype printer. [Sheila Dixon] is recreating that experience for the RC2014 retrocomputer, and she’s using some period-appropriate hardware and techniques.

Perhaps the most obvious thing about her build is her choice of printer. Sir Clive released a notoriously bad thermal printer for the ZX81, and it wasn’t long before a third-party alternative appeared in the form of the Alphacom. This printer connected directly to the ZX’s bus via its expansion port, and like the Sinclair printer, was serviced by ROM routines linked to BASIC commands. This is joined by a keyboard, first an MSX item, and then one she’s made with some retro typewriter keycaps.

She’s interfaced her Alphacom to the RC2014’s Z80 bus in the same way as it would be with the ZX81, and with a few teething troubles created some routines in a ROM to drive it as though it was the RC2014 terminal output. The keyboard is scanned using an 8255 I/O port card, much as it might have been back in the day.

If you’re curious about the Sinclair printer, we used one (without harming it!) for an April Fools’ joke during the pandemic. Meanwhile we have reviewed more than one RC2014 model, the most recent one being in 2019.

New Research Suggests That A Neutrino Laser Is Impossible

As cool as it would have been to wield lasers that produce a beam of neutrinos, recently two papers were published by MIT researchers that seem to dampen the likelihood of such lasers being at all possible. In a review paper by [Ana Maria Rey] et al. these two papers are investigated in more detail.

Although the concept behind a neutrino laser is rather simple, using the same superradiance effect involving a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) that allows for stimulation by photons to result in a synchronized direction of emitted photons, the idea of using a BEC of radioisotopes that naturally emit neutrinos in this fashion has now been effectively shot down.

The problem lies in taking the leap from photons with a BEC and applying this to a BEC of radioisotopes. Whereas photons are relatively slow and low-energy at a mere 1 eV, a neutrino is extremely fast and at 1+ MeV correspondingly has a much greater kinetic effect on the particle that emitted it. Unlike a photon emitted by an atom, this leaves precious little time for the other particles in the BEC to be affected.

This first scenario is covered in the (paywalled) paper by [Yu-Kun Lu] et al. with their calculations showing that superradiance cannot occur with neutrinos in a BEC and thus a laser is impossible. In the (also paywalled) second paper by [Hanzhen Lin] et al. the question is asked whether the assumption that a BEC of a radioisotope will at all enhance radioactive decay, to which the answer is a curt ‘no’.

Although it’s impossible to prove a negative with the scientific method, these two studies have slammed close a couple of doors on the concept of a neutrino laser.

A man in a beige, vintage 90s suit rides a very small go cart with a look of terror and/or elation on his face.

The Mazda Suitcase Car Rides Again

Once you arrive at your destination via plane, it can be a drag waiting for a rental car. Why not bring your own with a replica of the Mazda suitcase car?

The heady days of the 90s brought us many wild vehicles from Japan, and in 1991, Mazda built three prototype go carts built inside Samsonite suitcases as a potential rival to the Honda Motocompo. After some appearances on the talk show circuit, two of the prototypes were destroyed, and the world moved on. [Bucket] felt wistful about the vehicle and decided it was time to build his own since the only remaining example is in collector hands, although they were able to reach out to the owner for more information on how the original prototypes functioned.

Using a very small gas motor from a pocket rocket and a welded aluminum frame inside the suitcase, the builders managed to beat the stated top speed of the original, hitting 33 kph (20 mph) before the driver decided things were getting too frightening. The final build tips the scales at 56.8 lbs, so some further refinement might even get it under the 50 lb airline limit.

Surprisingly, this isn’t the first suitcase-sized go cart we’ve seen. We wonder if a ride-able suitcase hovercraft is next?

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Trying A New Radial Impeller Design For Quadcopters

Even if the world has already settled on plain old propellers as the way to make quadcopter drones fly, this doesn’t mean that you cannot give other designs a shake to see what kind of flying performance they result in. For example impeller designs that depart radically from standard propellers – themselves a sub-category of axial impellers – and go radically radial instead as in this design by [quadmovr] with accompanying demonstration video.

This is itself a remix of a design by [Baba] to make it fit the target 1750KV T-mount motor. As for whether this is a design that you want to slap on your own quadcopter, the obvious disadvantage is that it’s much heavier than regular propellers.

Weighing [quadmovr]’s drone without battery pack and with these 3D-printed PETG impellers shows them to weigh 189 grams. This compares to 141 grams with the standard three-bladed propellers, or a hefty 12.8 gram weight penalty per impeller. Naturally this translates into less flying time, so what are the advantages?

The noise profile of the impeller design is definitely more pleasant, and much like novice quadcopters with the protective ring around the propellers these impellers should be more robust. On the other hand increased mass adds to inertia, and there is a lot more surface area with the air to add drag, so despite the absolutely sick moves that [quadmovr] pulls off with both impeller configurations in the video one has to admit that regular three-blade propellers do have the edge here.

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A blueish grey plastic enclosure sits next to a blue and black servo, silver Li-ion battery, a GPS module board, an LCD, a small metal lever, and ESP32S3 board.

Pedal Harder For Affordability

In the US, among other places, housing costs are skyrocketing. It can sometimes be difficult to get a feel for the scale of the issue and how it hits neighborhoods differently. [Justin Blinder] has designed a device to help people get a more visceral understanding of the problem.

In New York City, Citi Bikes are everywhere in the city’s transportation landscape. [Blinder] used a GPS module plugged into an ESP32S3 to vary the amount of resistance on one of these bikes by actuating the front brake with a servo. As a rider takes the bike through different neighborhoods, the resistance varies in proportion to the rent burden experienced there.

[Blinder] explains, “One of the main technical challenges was calibrating this relationship so that the changes were physically noticeable without feeling abrupt or unsafe.” As rent burden is merely the percentage of income taken up by rent in an area (by the block in this dataset), it is only one indicator of the additional friction a family might feel in an area, but a useful one to at least begin to convey the disparities in the urban environment. We really like how this connects abstract statistics to something more experiential.

If you’re looking for some other bike hacks, how about wireless brakes or a sleeper e-bike with a solenoid display?

via Next City

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The First Floating Nuclear Power Station

Nuclear power really hit its stride in the 1950s. In the post-war period, there was a rush to develop peaceful uses for splitting the atom, beyond its application as a weapon of war. Soon enough, nuclear reactors were hooking up to power grids and helping propel ships and submarines around the globe.

Eventually, this led to an obvious idea—what if a ship with a reactor could serve as a floating nuclear power station? That question would be answered in the mid-1960s, with an American project of some strategic importance.

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