Using A Toothbrush’s NFC Chip To Unlock A Computer

November 13, 2026 by 1 Comment

Depending on which type of electric toothbrush you are using, the replaceable brushes may contain an NFC chip that the handle and possibly base station uses to track various details, such as time spent brushing and when to replace the brush. The Philips Sonicare of [Circuit Helper] is one such unit, with its NFC chip tracking aspects like runtime and pressure.

Unsurprisingly it’s easy enough to read and write this same NFC chip with a PN532 NFC reader and ESP32-S3 MCU. This reveals data fields for everything from brush type, to total runtime and expected lifetime, inviting a bit of experimentation on how certain usage patterns affects these data fields.

This much is perhaps not too shocking, but the fun part is what you can do with the chip after you have figured out how to write to its memory. How to unlock these units and their NXP NTAG213 IC has been figured out a few years ago already, so the hardest part was to figure out what to do with this information.

The demonstrated use case in the video is to unlock an Apple Macbook, which is maybe a bit too niche. Also demonstrated is taking the chip and its antenna out of the brush, which turns out to be quite easy. Perhaps salvaging just this one part of the brush is the more practical and hygienic option, as who doesn’t like building up a strategic supply of ‘free’ NFC chips?

Continue reading “Using A Toothbrush’s NFC Chip To Unlock A Computer” →

Drop-in Vintage CPU Replacements With The TranZPUter Project

November 13, 2026 by 6 Comments

One of the struggles with vintage computer systems is that many of the ICs in them have no modern-day version that you can just purchase and drop-in. Creating replacements that use modern-day ICs inside has consequently become a popular direction, with [Philip Smart]’s TranZPUter being one such example.

Standing for ‘transformable ZPU Computer’, the tranZPUter is transformable in the sense that it features an FPGA or MCU and the initial iteration targeting the ZPU Evo CPU design. This has led to a number of variants of this concept, including a version targeting the Z80, the 6502 and 6809. These are based around the RP2350B MCU, using its PIO peripheral to great effect.

Of these the Motorola 6809 is probably the lesser known MPU, having been launched in 1978 as an 8-bit MPU with some 16-bit features that could beat the 6502 in many metrics courtesy of its more advanced hardware. It being more expensive led to it only being used in systems like the TRS-80 Color, Dragon 32/64, SuperPET and a whole range of arcade systems.

If you have any of those 6809-based systems and the MPU gave up the ghost, you can drop in the Pico6809 board featuring said RP2350B MCU as well as an ESP32 co-processor. Currently it targets the Dragon 32/64 systems, adding not just a fresh MPU, but also adds virtual floppy and cassette devices as well as network support as options.

Overall it seems like a pretty extensive project that might already have found purchase within the retrocomputing community.

Hackaday Podcast Episode 394: Linux In Weird Places, Yet More Hidden SDRs, And A Supercon Wrapup

November 13, 2026 by No comments

Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi are back from Supercon, and they’ve got plenty of thoughts to share about it. But before they discuss this weekend’s higlights, they’ll cover the recent scuttling of the legendary SS United States, the discovery of even more hidden software-defined radios in everyday gadgets, Linux running on Kindles and microcontrollers, and a Game Boy flash cart that’s not designed for playing games. You’ll also hear about LEGO 3D printers, finding out where a video was recorded by the sound of the airplanes in the background, and a website that lets you listen in on the satellites flying over your house.

Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download, DRM-free MP3.

Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast Episode 394: Linux In Weird Places, Yet More Hidden SDRs, And A Supercon Wrapup” →

This Week In Security: Four-Digit Patch Tuesday, SSH Exploited, GitBook Breach, Android GhostMap

November 13, 2026 by 3 Comments

It’s the second Tuesday of the month, and that means another Microsoft Patch Tuesday. The new normal is that the numbers are hard to believe. Brian Krebs reports that this month’s release fixes nearly 1,100 vulnerabilities, 63 of them rated critical, and over 500 that let an attacker elevate their privileges. Only one is reported as actively exploited: CVE-2026-124194, a spoofing bug in Outlook. Microsoft has now shipped more than 5,100 security fixes this year, after more than 1,400 last month, compared to an average of around 100 a month last year. Obviously AI tools get the credit for the volume of bugs fixed, but also of course for the volume of bugs found.

Everyone else is busy too. Apple pushed out-of-cycle updates for at least nine vulnerabilities across its operating systems, including an iMessage flaw which could let a remote attacker join a group chat and read its messages, and backported the fixes to iOS 18. Chrome 157 fixes CVE-2026-125350, another Chrome zero-day, a week after a Chrome release which fixed more than 200 bugs, Firefox 160 fixes almost 100 CVEs, and Adobe fixed more than 110.

Also since last week, zlib 1.4 shipped with more than a dozen security fixes, eight more vulnerabilities were disclosed in the X.Org server and XWayland, and Microsoft’s own Azure Linux update lists more than 470 CVEs fixed across the open source packages it ships. And for a perfect encapsulation of 2026, last month’s Patch Tuesday included a remote code execution bug in Windows Paint (CVE-2026-83844), though its description admits the code runs locally. So now I guess you can pop Calc through Paint? Does this count as a win?

Despite the absolute firehose of vulnerabilities, the Krebs article notices that of the roughly 95,000 CVEs assigned this year, only around 200 made it into the CISA list of known expoited vulnerabilities (KEV). If you have to pick and choose which updates are the most critical, start there.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: Four-Digit Patch Tuesday, SSH Exploited, GitBook Breach, Android GhostMap” →

Fixing A Dead Socket LGA 1851 Mainboard With A Resistor

November 13, 2026 by 3 Comments

Doing board level diagnosis on a PCB is hardly black magic, but some PCBs are definitely more daunting than others. The Socket LGA 1851 mainboard that [Fix the Pixel] got in for repair being one of the harder cases due to the sheer size and complexity. Adding to the excitement was having to purchase a used CPU for it off eBay to even test the board and work through the boot-up sequence to find the culprit.

A basic understanding of how these mainboards power up and verify that they can move on to the next phase is essential here, starting with the power rails. Although the culprit turned out to be a single missing 5.1 Ohm resistor on an SPI clock line, you still have to reason your way through the diagnosis. For this mainboard the boardview was fortunately available, but that still doesn’t make it easy to spot components that have quietly left the chat.

With the CPU and RAM installed the board doesn’t bother to boot up, with the VRM controller for the CPU’s power phases showing its enable pin to stay low. Going down the list of conditions for this pin to be pulled high the culprit was eventually found, when the PCH – the board’s chipset – never reading the BIOS chip.

Checking the SPI lines on the mainboard near the BIOS chip quickly showed the knocked-off resistor on the SPI clock line. Soldering a fresh resistor in place resulted in the board happily booting up once more. Although having a boardview here available helps a lot, checking such basics like the SPI line resistors around the BIOS can be a quick checklist item before dragging out the big diagnostics guns or shelling out money for a boardview file.

Continue reading “Fixing A Dead Socket LGA 1851 Mainboard With A Resistor” →

Hacked Nixie Clock Waits For The Bus

November 13, 2026 by 2 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 51 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.