Radio Shack Toy Returns To Life

August 15, 2026 by 4 Comments

[The Modern Rouge] found an old childhood friend in a closet: a Radio Shack 200-in-1 electronic kit. Along with [Josh Nass], he put it through its paces and made a few repairs along the way. As you might expect, the batteries had long ago leaked out their magic juice.

If you missed these, they were a host of real electronic components with springs connected to the leads. To make a circuit, you bend the spring over, insert a wire, and let go of the spring. By changing the wiring, you could make radios, alarms, computer circuits, and more

There were dozens of these kits, some more capable than others. This was a particularly nice one with a loaded front panel and several exotic components. In the end, they made a code practice oscillator, and it worked.

While you can’t find kits exactly like these anymore, you can make your own. Or try Snap Circuits and print your own modules. You take solderless breadboards for granted today, but they haven’t always been around or affordable.

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Fully Characterized Systems

August 15, 2026 by 6 Comments

A friend from my old hackerspace was in grad school for electrical engineering. He had a professor who would ask, when something went wrong with a student project, “Have you fully characterized the system?” It’s a good, if lofty, goal, but it also became an inside joke around the hackerspace because YOLO was our MO about 95% of the time. Head crashes on the 3D printer – “not fully characterized”. Forgot to take out the trash last weekend? Was the system fully characterized?

It’s maybe also the difference between theory and practice: In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice, and all systems can be fully characterized. But in practice, it’s hard to fully characterize a system that you don’t yet fully understand.

Case in point: we have nine small saplings growing in our front yard, and I have to water them. It’s boring moving the hose from tree to tree, so I thought I’d take a length of hose, stopper it at one end, and drill enough holes in it so that it could irrigate all of the trees at once. I kinda characterized the system: I figured out how much water flows per minute through our hose, and divided that up into a reasonable outflow in my mind, and drilled holes that ended up being way too large.

Why? Because a length of hose has a resistance to flow, and the water came pouring out of the first few holes, while the last few were dry. It wasn’t a constant pressure system like I thought it would be. I hadn’t even thought that the drag in the hose would matter, so there was no way I would have tried to measure it. But how would I characterize this resistance anyway? You could make a hose with too-large holes and measure the falloff. (Oops, that’s exactly what I did.)

In retrospect, professional drip irrigation systems always have holes that are tiny relative to the pipe diameter, which avoids this pressure-drop phenomenon, which means that they don’t have to worry about characterizing the hose resistance. So that’s what I ended up doing. I cut the hole size in half, and later widened up some of the downstream holes until it looked about right. Not even close to fully characterized, but it works.

So now, in addition to the engineer’s “have you fully characterized the system?”, I have the hacker’s “can you avoid characterizing parts of the system?” in my mind. And a holey chunk of hose in the trashcan.

Supercon News

Just briefly, in case you missed it: Tickets are on sale now for Supercon Ten, and we’ve extended the call for participation by another two weeks. If you’re a Hackaday fan, you owe it to yourself to join us at our annual gathering.

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ESP32 Music Sequencer Is Clearly Nailing The Y2K Aesthetic

August 15, 2026 by No comments

Do you remember back when electronics came in clear cases? Back around the turn of the millennium, when translucency was chic. [3DSage] sure does, which is why he went to great lengths to make a clear case for his Clear Retro Music Sequencer.

The sequencer itself is based around an ESP32-S3 module with a built-in display, and a rotary encoder that handles most of the input. Most, because there’s a second button and a stylophone-like array of brass rods on one edge of the custom PCB he made with his fiber laser that can also handle note input. Other notable features include a phono jack with built-in switching so the tunes come out automatically from headphones or the internal speaker, and a AAA battery-lookalike. It’s a small detail, but that 666 mWh 3.7 V lithium cell is the demon’s meow for this project, seeing as it gives the convenience of a modern battery without compromising that Y2K look — remember you can see the battery through the translucent case.

About that translucent case: it’s 3D printed out of PETG, with settings similar to those we’ve reported on before: hot, slow, and don’t cross the streams! Which is to say every layer must line up with the one above. Oh, use filament fresh out of the drier of you live somewhere as humid as [3DSage]. The result is not totally see-through, but an application of clear enamel fills in the surface well enough to read through, giving the vintage look [3DSage] was after. To complete that Y2K feel, he turns the device into a slap bracelet, because why not? For those of you who missed due to the aforementioned federal prison arc, slap-on wristbands were all the rage amongst the kids back in those days.

The wristband is a length of measuring tape at its core, the springy steel having been cold-worked to hold the radius of [3DSage]’s wrist in its relaxed state, encapsulated in clear gorilla tape for comfort. We probably don’t have to tell you that getting slapped with a raw tape measure isn’t the nicest. For the actual operation of the sequencer, check out the video embedded below — the first 9 minutes cover the build, while the rest shows off the product.

Of course you don’t need an ESP32 for this kind of music maker– you can do it with a C64, or even discrete parts and rope-core memory. 

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A Tape Deck Gets A Service

August 15, 2026 by 1 Comment

If there’s an engineer’s equivalent to those YouTube ASMR videos, then perhaps it comes in a good repair or servicing journey filmed without edits at the bench. Relaxing to watch, has an interesting outcome. So it is with [Ken’s Shop], as he performs a full service on a Realistic cassette deck from we are guessing, the late 1970s or early 1980s.

These decks are nothing particularly special and can be found wherever second-hand consumer electronics go to die, but compared to may newer electronic devices they are surprisingly well-built. Their decades-old mechanicals usually only need a good clean and lubricate, their belts may need replacing, and perhaps the azimuth needs a tweak, but returning them to their former glory is rarely more than a bench session away.

So this is what we get, a relaxing twenty minutes or do of watching a guy fix a tape deck. A chuckle came here at Hackaday from our colleague Al passing this on, we agree with his not missing working on this type of deck as they could be fiddly. But still, if you find one of these and want it, they’re fixable with relative ease.

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A guitar stands magically on it's end in the foreground of a snowy sunrise. A large 3D-printed robot is attached to the fretboard, and a smaller robot sits over the sound hole.

Twin Guitar-Playing Robots Will Work For Tab

August 14, 2026 by 9 Comments

Remember Animusic? They were these incredible animated music videos with original tunes being played by computer-generated robots. Well, the MegCell Pulse might be the coolest robots-playing-music thing we’ve seen since Animusic.

Built by [Bruce] over six years’ time, this futuristic wonder features two robots working in concert to play acoustic guitar, just like a pair of human hands would. You just feed them digital tablature, and off go the fraternal twins, with one doing the fretting, and the other doing the plucking via six individual plectrum. It’s digital music producing analog sound from a physical instrument.

How does MegCell Pulse work? It’s essentially a system of gears, magnetic actuators, and arms, contained in a 3D-printed structure. The only real limitations are that it can’t traverse the entire fretboard, nor can it slide between frets. That said, you can absolutely buy one for your own guitar via [Bruce]’s modestly-goaled Kickstarter.

The kicker here is that you can’t buy an assembled MegCell Pulse; you must print and build it yourself. Back on the upside, the most expensive supporting tier is a mere $100. For that price, you get the complete digital plans. That includes 3D print files, an assembly guide, the control software, and a parts list. Be sure to check out the demo videos embedded after the break.

We have certainly seen robots playing guitars before, although admittedly, it’s been a minute.

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Large-Scale Pokémon Eviction Looms With Pokémon Bank Server Shutdown

August 14, 2026 by 6 Comments

After the Nintendo 3DS handheld console saw most its online services including the online store (eShop) taken offline not too long ago, it was only a matter of time before the demise of even the remaining paid services, such as the Pokémon Bank which Nintendo has now announced will be shutting down on February 25 of 2027.

The ability to transfer the digital pocket monsters, or Pokémon, between physical systems has been a staple of the series since the early Gameboy days when a link cable would be all you needed to trade and catch’em’all, as they say in the trade. Naturally over time this Cloud-based aspect wormed its way into this series as well, starting with the 3DS and this continuing on the Nintendo Switch in the form of the Pokémon HOME app.

With this paid service an avid Pokémon fan could collect up to 3,000 of these digital critters, move them between various Pokémon games and generally allow players to keep the same Pokémon with them across games. As noted by [Kevdog Plays] in an informative video on what to do before the shutdown, the service is free during these final months.

What’s interesting is that certain Pokémon can only be obtained from 3DS Pokémon games, which means that without either an alternative to this transfer mechanism or these games becoming available on newer Nintendo consoles, there will forever be that gaping hole in one’s Pokedex. Naturally this raises the usual questions about software archiving and preservation when an online service is required for the full game experience.

Submersible Drone Analyzes Ice

August 14, 2026 by 9 Comments

Doing anything on a frozen lake can carries some amount of risk. Nevertheless, every year events ranging from car racing to ice skating are held on them. As such, proper safety precautions are needed, the most important of which is ensuring the ice is thick enough to withstand the weight of whatever may be on it. This is done by cutting holes into the ice and measuring its depth in several locations. But this is a dangerous and imperfect process only giving a rough picture of actual thickness. So to solves these problems, a team of students at ETH Zurich made an ice measuring submersible drone. 

The concept of ice measurement employed is, on paper, reasonably simple. When a sonar pulse is sent out, some of the energy will return off the bottom of the ice sheet, but some of it will pass through creating a second return. By measuring the difference in these two returns, the thickness can be calculate with a high degree of precision. Attach the sonar to a submersible and give it a positioning system and you can simply get a thickness map, right? Well, employing theory in practice is a far more complicated prospect as the students soon found out.
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