Casual Repair And Maintenance On An Amiga 1000

July 31, 2026 by 1 Comment

Recently [Drygol] had an Amiga 1000 system over for some repairs as well as maintenance and general TLC. This is a Motorola 68000-based home computer from 1985 that also has the distinction of being the first Amiga system to be released by Commodore. At a time when the IBM PC was still strutting its monochrome and EGA graphics alongside PC speaker beeps, the Amiga 1000 featured relatively high-res graphics and advanced stereo audio courtesy of special accelerator chips.

Overall the system was in a pretty good condition, even coming with the very nifty modern Parceiro expansion that adds 8 MB of fast RAM, an SD card slot and RTC. This thus meant that they mostly just had to perform the typical maintenance task, such as recapping the PSU and mainboard, as well as recapping and lubing up the floppy drive. The original 230 VAC fan in the PSU also got swapped with a 12V unit that was much quieter.

After disassembling the keyboard for some deep cleaning and retr0brighting, a little glitch in the form of the use of a too long screw by a previous owner was addressed, as well as a broken plastic clip. With how little attention the Amiga 1000 received after its release it’s good to see some of these units still kicking.

Turning Glass Into A Touch-Sensitive Button

July 31, 2026 by 1 Comment

Although generally glass isn’t associated with touch-sensitive surfaces, the addition of an ITO (indium tin oxygen) coating adds the exciting property of not only being transparent to the visible light part of the electromagnetic spectrum, but also of being electrically conductive. The logical result is that fine folk like [Sokol] simply had to use their newly acquired ITO-coated glass to make a button out of.

Here the easy option is of course to just use it as a capacitive sensor where the conductive ITO layer is used for the capacitive charge and the glass provides the insulator, but here we see it demonstrated how to create a pressure-sensitive implementation instead.

The measured conductivity on the ITO-coated glass in the video is pretty good, at just over 20 Ohm. This thus makes said capacitive button very easy to achieve. To make it a touch-sensitive button, two pieces of glass are used, with the ITO sides facing. Paper is used to create a spacer, after which the slight flex of the glass allows for the two ITO surfaces to touch, completing the circuit.

This is somewhat similar to how resistive touch screens work, with the position of the finger or stylus determined by the resistance between the two sides. In a hobbyist setup this would make it fairly easy to create a multi-position touch screen using just two pieces of glass and some firmware.

Continue reading “Turning Glass Into A Touch-Sensitive Button” →

A Complex Way To Push A Button

July 31, 2026 by 6 Comments

We’ve likely all looked at a simple problem in our lives and thought that it would be an easy fix, only to realize that the project is enormously more complicated than we first realized. Whether that’s starting a home improvement project, doing a quick repair to a bicycle or car, or trying to install an obscure piece of software on a Linux machine, the amount of time we budget for these tasks often ends up woefully underestimated. [Oscar]’s night light needs to have its brightness set every night, and it seems easy enough to get a microcontroller to automate that, right?

Well, upon opening the small device, the first issue is that there is no labeling on any of the parts, so simply adding a jumper on to existing microcontroller pins without damaging anything wouldn’t easily be possible. Adding a secondary microcontroller is the next logical step, but the power supply in the night light is extremely underpowered so using even the smallest Raspberry Pi or off-the-shelf Arduino was out of the question too. [Oscar] instead chose an ATtiny85, which solves the power requirement issue, but these are a bit more of a challenge to program without a USB device. From there, it needs a transistor wired in to the circuit to actually push the button for him, plus a few support resistors, so [Oscar] actually had a PCB custom-built to hold all of these components.

Even after all of that, the space within the night light enclosure made installing the PCB a challenge, but in the end he has a device which, when his home automation system powers on the plug for the nightlight, automatically boots up and pushes the switch the required number of times and then puts itself to sleep. We’d call that a success even after the colossal effort getting this inexpensive, small light working the way he wanted. There are some other low-powered solutions for problems like these too, as long as being battery-powered isn’t a dealbreaker.

Tiny Desktop Robot Has Radar

July 31, 2026 by 3 Comments

One thing our futuristic world is largely lacking in is droids and robot companions and the like. [solitary dev] is helping to rectify that problem by building a little robot called TongDou.

As [solitary dev] tells it, TongDou is a “tiny open-source desktop gremlin.” An ESP32-S3 serves as TongDou’s brain, buried inside a tasteful brass chassis. An OLED display is TongDou’s face, and he uses a pair of wheels driven by gearmotors for locomotion. A speaker plays back pre-recorded voice lines, while a 24 GHz radar and an IMU enables TongDou to keep track of the space it’s moving through. They are publishing the design files on GitHub so other makers can build their own if so desired.

[solitary dev] hopes to develop TongDou into something to make a “workspace feel less dead.” It’s not dissimilar from the way studios used to use robots to liven up otherwise hackneyed movies and TV shows, and we could absolutely use some of that whimsy in the real world. We’ve featured other fun desktop companions before, too.

Continue reading “Tiny Desktop Robot Has Radar” →

NES Advantage Stick Gets Bluetooth Upgrade

July 31, 2026 by 1 Comment

The NES Advantage was a cool bit of hardware back in 1987, bringing an arcade stick to the home console gaming experience. Naturally they don’t get much use these days, unless of course they’ve been modded to work with modern systems, as [Aaron] has done.

[Aaron]’s goals were straightforward. The stick should work with modern systems over Bluetooth, but the mod should not involve cutting the case or making any new holes. All controls, including Turbo and Slow Motion, still had to work, too, and there would be no adding extra buttons for configuration or control.

To achieve this, [Aaron] whipped up a custom PCB which replaces the original cable attached to the NES Advantage. Power is via a small LiPo cell, charged via a TP4056 and paired with a TPS63900 buck-boost converter. An ESP32-WROOM-32E interfaces all the original controls, reading the stick’s CD4021 shift registers to do so. It then either emulates a Switch Pro Controller over Bluetooth Classic, for use with a modern Nintendo Switch, or it acts as a standard Bluetooth Low Energy gamepad for use with PCs, SteamOS, phones, and other compatible hardware. All that and the stick can still work with an original NES if so desired, when placed in the Switch Pro Controller mode. You merely need to plug in an 8BitDo NES Retro Receiver and you’re up and running.

We’ve seen other fun retro controller builds before, too, like this classic Xbox controller modded to work with the Xbox 360. If you’re cooking up similar projects, we’d love to hear about it on the tipsline.

Hackaday Podcast Episode 380: 3D Printing The Rainbow, IR And IP Camera Hacks, And Americium 241 On The Loose

July 31, 2026 by No comments

Elliot Williams and Al Williams got together to compare notes on the most interesting posts this week on the site. As usual, there are just too many choices, so you’ll have to settle for just the few that can fit in a podcast. The guys were excited about 3D printing — both FDM and SLA — as well as a few camera projects. Ever wanted your own starship? They do, too, and you’ll hear about it along with portable radar and more.

Want to make flexible PCBs? Fill up a carbon dioxide tank? Or play Doom via regular expressions? Tune in, and you’ll find out about those stories and more.

Follow along with the links, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments! Better still, drop us a note in the mailbag, and you might hear your question on a future episode. You can record audio or send us a message, and one of the hosts will read it on your behalf.

Direct download in IR color-corrected DRM-free MP3.

Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast Episode 380: 3D Printing The Rainbow, IR And IP Camera Hacks, And Americium 241 On The Loose” →

Hacking A Commercial Colorimeter To Add RAL Color Code Support

July 31, 2026 by 2 Comments

When you need to match paint colors, one of the tools you’ll reach for is a deck of reference colors. Another might be a colorimeter. But what if you want both? [hallko1234] created just that by reverse-engineering and then patching a CR4501 colorimeter.

It starts with a problem: every time [hallko1234] needed to check a color, he had to take a reading, write it down, run to the office, match it with a table, and then walk all the way back. That sounds like too much effort. The natural solution, of course, is to automate the process.

So he did. The CR4501 will happily give you its entire firmware over the debug port, after which it was time for analysis in Ghidra. Some hiccups, brickings and accidental erasure of calibration data later, he finally had a working version. The end result is a simple screen that, after every time you measure, displays the closest RAL color code and how close it is.

On the off chance someone else has the same colorimeter, he even made an online tool to install it for you.