The History Of Altec Lansing

May 12, 2026 by 5 Comments

If you bought computer audio hardware a few decades ago, you may remember coming across products from Altec Lansing. That you probably haven’t thought of that name in some time doesn’t surprise us, the company has not fared well in recent years and has changed hands multiple times. [The Last Shift] tells the company’s history in a video you can watch below.

James Lansing started Lansing Manufacturing, offering high-end speakers for the fledgling “talkie” movie industry. It had some success, but the depression put them on shaky footing. Meanwhile, a company named All Technical Service Company, or Altec, was a large organization that serviced Western Electric movie theater equipment. Flush with cash, they merged with Lansing Manufacturing to form Altec Lansing. With a large infrastructure and Lansing’s engineering, they became a significant supplier to the military during World War II.

After the war, the company produced a landmark theater speaker system that became the gold standard in theater audio. However, Lansing didn’t like the big company environment and left to found a company that bore his full name, James B. Lansing, which you may know as JBL.

Altec Lansing continued to grow. However, a series of mergers and sales starting in 1969 caused the Altec Lansing company to decline. By the 1990s, Altec Lansing was making cheap PC speakers. A far cry from the gold-standard massive speakers made by the company during its heyday.

We love the history of technology and the people that drove them. Bing Crosby, for example. Or the lesser-known heroes like Edwin Armstrong.

Continue reading “The History Of Altec Lansing” →

This Random Number Generator Does It With Neon

May 12, 2026 by 10 Comments

The quest for true randomness has roots in cryptography and is a rabbit hole that gets surprisingly deep with alarmingly rapidity. Still, the generation of random-enough numbers is a popular hacker project. Part of the appeal is the way these devices strive to incorporate physical phenomena, and in [Joshua Coleman]’s case, his Neon Entropy (Pseudo) Random Number Generator uses a trio of vintage neon lamps.

Neon lamps discharge at rates that vary unpredictably. They’re also pretty to look at.

[Joshua] chose neon lamps in part because the discharge rate of an energized lamp is a variable, physical process that makes a good source of entropy. They also have an attractive visual appeal that fits the concept [Joshua] had in mind. Unlike random number generators that kick off by measuring radiation or some other imperceptible thing, it’s possible — at least in a sense — to see this one working.

The small variations in the three neon lamps are measured optically by three TEPT4400 ambient light sensors (isolated from the neon lamps themselves) and turned into analog signals. A Raspberry Pi Pico W reads these signals, then uses them in a process that culminates in SHA-256 64-bit values that can be used as random seeds.

There’s also a web dashboard that shows everything live, furthering the “watch it work” concept [Joshua] is aiming for. The video below shows the project in action if you want to see how the sausage gets made.

Earlier we mentioned how random number generators are popular projects among hackers, and here are a few selected ones. Don’t miss the stylish glow and slick enclosure of this Nixie tube RNG, or the lava lamp RNG which is in fact not a gimmick. And while it is commonly understood that meaningful randomness must come from outside a digital chip, uninitialized internal volatile RAM — if accessed correctly — can be a remarkably good source of entropy.

Continue reading “This Random Number Generator Does It With Neon” →

Another Gift To The World From CERN: Their Entire Set Of KiCad Libraries

May 12, 2026 by 34 Comments

As the foremost boffins of Europe toil deep underneath the border between Switzerland and France in their never-ending quest to truly understand the fabric of the Universe, they rely on a vast amount of electronics. The PCB layout team at the particle accelerator thus work with a huge array of parts, for which of course they create KiCad libraries. Now the folks at CERN have made those libraries available as open source, so you can benefit from their work.

The libraries themselves can be found in a GitLab repository, and at the moment are offered only for KiCad version 9.x. We tried installing it in our KiCad 10.0 installation and it refused — complaining of a missing JSON file — but we’re assuming that with more time and effort we could have made it happen. We’re told official 10.x compatibility is on the way.

Browsing the repository shows what a multiplicity of parts are included, so we can see this becoming a standard install for many people and the CERN footprints turning up in many projects featured here.

Thanks [Daniel] for the tip!

Reverse-Engineering And Documenting The Fisher Price Pixter

May 11, 2026 by 5 Comments

Between 2000 and 2002 the Fisher Price Pixter was sold to children as an educational handheld toy with a touch screen that enabled drawing and listening to music in addition to cartridge-based games and more. It was followed up by multiple new iterations of the system, but as an ecosystem didn’t last beyond 2007. This has left much of the system in obscurity, with people like [Dmitry] doing their best to reverse-engineer, dump and document what they can, such as recently for the entire range of Pixter devices and most of the games.

One of the reasons why [Dmitri] got interested in the second-generation Pixter Color originally was as a potential PalmOS porting target, which gives somewhat of an idea of how these devices were meant to be used.

With absolutely no remaining known official documentation on how to develop software for the hardware reverse-engineering posed somewhat of a challenge. Fortunately this was made somewhat easier by the Pixter Color using the ARM-based LH7541, but worse by just how much of a minimal ARM7 implementation the SoC is. This was meant to go into a cheap-ish kid’s toy after all.

Where things got wild was that the firmware implements a 16-bit stack-based virtual machine, possibly due to initially having selected a completely different SoC. From here things get even crazier with how audio output is implemented, with [Dmitry] descending into a long-winded rant on this and all the weird things encountered during reverse-engineering.

After the Color Pixter its Multimedia sibling with slightly better SoC was also reverse-engineered, as well as the Classic device that started it all. This particular device uses an 8-bit VM, but a black-blob 6502 processor, which is rather astounding for a 2000-era device, but then again it was meant to be a toy.

In addition to getting a lot of reverse-engineering woes off his chest, [Dmitri] also details how he reverse-engineered and dumped the cartridges, as well as writing emulators to ensure that the Pixter legacy will endure, for better or worse.

Top image: Pixter with opened case. (Credit: Raimond Spekking, Wikimedia)

The Walls Don’t Have Ears, But Fiber Optic Does

May 11, 2026 by 8 Comments

You normally think of fiber optic as something used in network cables. However, scientists employ dedicated fibers to detect earthquakes. In simple terms, they fire a laser down the fiber and watch reflections caused by imperfections. When vibrations hit the cable, it changes the defects, which show up in the return pattern. However, with the right techniques, those vibrations could just as easily be from people speaking near the cable.

If you are alarmed, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that the technique seems to be limited to coils of fiber that are not buried, and you have to be within about 5 meters of the fiber. The bad news is that there is plenty of dark cable all over the place. Besides, if researchers can do this successfully, you would imagine three-letter agencies around the world could do it even better.

Continue reading “The Walls Don’t Have Ears, But Fiber Optic Does” →

Honda Wants To Complicate Your E-Motorcycle

May 11, 2026 by 41 Comments

If you ride a motorcycle, you know it is a bit of an art to manage the transmission on a typical bike. Electric motorcycles lose some of that. You usually just have a throttle and a brake. No transmission and, crucially, no clutch. Honda just patented a simulated clutch for those who want the old-school experience, according to [Ben Purvis], writing for Australian Motorcycle News.

This isn’t just a do-nothing lever on the handlebar. There’s haptic feedback to feel when the clutch engages. The motor responds to your actions on the lever. If you pull the clutch in part of the way, the motor loses power up to the point where there is no engine power with the clutch fully in.

Continue reading “Honda Wants To Complicate Your E-Motorcycle” →

It’s A Water Clock, Jim, But Not As We Know It — It Has Digits

May 11, 2026 by 12 Comments

Guess what time it is– that’s right, clock time! It’s always clock time, and when it’s clock time at Hackaday the weirder the better. So, how about a water clock that’s not actually a water clock? The water here has nothing to do with timekeeping, but is what’s driving the display. Fair to say that [Strange Inventions] is living up to the name of his YouTube channel.

You can get the idea from the header image: each digit is formed by a fifteen-segment display made up of glass bottles. A stepper-driven peristaltic pump and some membrane-pump boosters fills the bottles as needed with dyed water, while emptying is accomplished simply by having a servo dump the water into a trough. It’s an interesting, albeit messy, way to generate a display.

It wasn’t the original idea– well, the bottles were the original concept, but flipping them was not. Dumping the bottles has the advantage of not needing oodles of pumps or taking five minutes to sequentially fill and drain the bottles at each digit. The linkage to get the servo to flip all nine bottles in one go took some troubleshooting– we can relate, since the physical half of such projects usually is the hard part– but after many modifications the 3D printed mechanism worked, and we think the results are worth it.

If you’re looking for the other kind of water clock, we featured one of those before, too. This one is also of ancient style, but makes use of modern electronics. It occurs to us that if one was really, really ambitious, they could expand this [Strange] project into a very damp flip-dot style display. Continue reading “It’s A Water Clock, Jim, But Not As We Know It — It Has Digits” →