Supercon 2026: Streaming Live

November 7, 2026 by No comments

While we’d love to have you all join us in Pasadena for Supercon 2026, the next best thing is to connect up to the festivities remotely through the magic of the Internet. The main stage talks (Lamarr) will be streamed live to our YouTube channel, while the talks taking place on the second stage (Hopper) will be recorded and posted afterwards.

Though it’s not quite as immersive as being there,  you can also join the #supercon-chat channel in the official Hackaday Discord server if you want to virtually rub shoulders with some of our favorite people in the world.

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Custom Game Boy Cart Speeds Up Development

November 8, 2026 by 2 Comments

These days, it is easy enough to get a flash cart for your Game Boy that makes it easy to run code — yours or otherwise — on it, but they aren’t necessarily ideal for actual development. The process of shuttling new code over to the cart via an SD card isn’t bad if you’re doing it once, but it gets very annoying if you’re trying to make rapid incremental changes.

Which is specifically what [MrFrenchLame] was looking to improve on with his development cart. Rather than using a SD card to move over ROMs, the cart features a small bootloader that establishes communication with the computer over the Game Boy’s link port. The new code goes right into the cart’s RAM, where it can be immediately executed without having to write it out to flash. When you want to load new code, just press a button on the cart, and the whole thing starts over fresh. The upload routine can even be worked into your IDE to streamline the process.

This lack of permanence makes the cart a poor choice for actually playing games since everything goes poof when the power goes out. Plus, it only has 32K of RAM to work with, and can’t really do anything without being tethered to a computer. But it’s a fantastic solution if you’re looking to test things out quickly.

That said, there is one pretty major problem with this project: it requires your development computer to have a physical parallel port, which is a tall order in 2026. [MrFrenchLame] mentions this could likely be addressed by pulling in knowledge from some of the modern DIY flash carts we’ve seen recently, but hasn’t had time to tackle it yet. Maybe you could lend a hand?

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An FPGA Version Of The AT&T UNIX PC For MiSTer

November 8, 2026 by 2 Comments

We all have our childhood heroes, which in the case of [Hrvoje Cavrak] was the 1985 AT&T UNIX PC. This 18 kg behemoth of a workstation computer boasted a 10 MHz Motorola 68010 CPU, up to 4 MB of RAM and dozens of megabytes of storage in addition to endless expansion options, making it a powerhouse of a personal computer for the discerning professional. Now, many decades later [Hrvoje] has an FPGA-based version to tinker with.

This project targets the MiSTer project, meaning that this softcore with SystemVerilog, Verilog and VHDL components should synthesize and run on any MiSTer-compatible FPGA system, such as the DE10 Nano. For that board the SDRAM add-on board is required due to the DE10 Nano Cyclone V SoC’s FPGA side only having access to a fraction of the 4 MB required by the softcore.

Obviously the boot ROM and disk images for AT&T UNIX are still under copyright, so although you can download both you should be wary of provoking the current copyright holder. With that in place, however, you now have got access to a very complete UNIX PC experience, as can be seen in the demonstration video.

Some aspects of the code were written and validated by LLM coding chatbots, so this is still a ‘works on my MiSTer board’ project. In lieu of getting access to the real hardware – meanwhile priced at unobtanium levels – this seems like a fair enough trade-off if old workstations like these are your thing.

The UNIX PC obviously didn’t make it into mainstream computer as we covered previously, with the IBM PC with MS-DOS, CP/M and Apple’s systems quickly cornering the home market along with Commodore, Atari, etc. This possibly makes these AT&T UNIX PCs even more rare than 1990s SGI and Sun systems.

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Making A Dog Car Wash Without (very) Fancy Tools

November 7, 2026 by 16 Comments

[Stuff Made Here] got fed up with the hassle of washing their dog, and in traditional engineer fashion, decided that automating the process would solve the problem. However, as science fiction writers love to warn us, automation and living things don’t always mix.

The concept, much like a car wash, is to have an arch-like structure spray the dog with oscillating nozzles. A secondary nozzle provides a simple air drying function on each of the pods. An “undercarriage” nozzle of similar design runs in a channel below the dog to ensure all mud has been removed. The nozzles move along linear rails, driven by a DC motor. All the electronics are water proofed with the AC power source a distance away to provide additional electrical protection.

Unlike other projects of the past, [Stuff Made Here] set out to make this project without fancy metal working tools. Fortunately, it’s a project well suited to SLA 3D printing. While probably printable on an FDM printer, the parts need to withstand water back pressure. While there are better ways of doing this, the nozzles are mounted on an arch made of two bent conduits with legs welded on. The nozzles are mechanically connected with linkages to control the spraying direction.

However, [Stuff Made Here] couldn’t resist the urge to use a new CNC lathe when it arrived, so the quest to avoid fancy tools was lost to the desire to play with new fancy tools. Also, a grate under the under-carriage nozzle would have taken too long to source, so instead a plasma cutter made short work of some sheet metal. Granted, the parts could easily be 3D printed and/or sourced online.

Besides the fact that the dog is terrified of the machine and won’t use it, it works brilliantly! Sound off in the comments if you think [Stuff Made Here]’s attempt at making a project without fancy tools was successful.

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Artemis II Rocket Was Powerful Enough To Disrupt GPS

November 7, 2026 by 13 Comments

Rockets certainly have a substantial impact if you ever see a launch in person. The noise, shock waves, and even heat can be awe-inspiring. What is less obvious are the impacts a launch has on our upper atmosphere, or “anthropogenic space weather” as the fancy scientists call it. A pre-print from a recent study on Artemis II’s impact on our atmosphere shows a shockingly wide range of effects.

As a whole, the impact on Artemis comes in waves. Each stage of the Space Launch System performs burns in different parts of the atmosphere, creating increasing ripples as the rocket moves through various layers. The first stage is the largest in terms of thrust, but has limited impact on the ionosphere because of how low it occurred. The 2nd and 3rd stages’ impact, however, was so large that it could’ve sustainably disrupted GPS signals at the time. Waves even traveled through the atmosphere across the entirety of North America in the form of gravity waves. These ionosphere “holes” might not be a major problem now, but it’s something to think about as we ramp up rocket production.

While this research relied on thousands of sensors across the globe, that doesn’t mean you need the same budget to analyze the state of the ionosphere at home.

A landscape-oriented e-paper display in a clear enclosure. A blue-ish LED glows on the right below the black rotary encoder knob.

Play Text Adventures On An E-Paper Handheld

November 7, 2026 by 5 Comments

Choose your own adventure books were one of the first media to become gamified in the computer era, and [Jeremy Ngai] wanted to bridge the experience further with an e-paper handheld adventure game.

With a 2.9″ e-paper screen, rotary encoder, and RGB LED that can provide mood lighting for the story, it can provide an estimated 20 hours of entertainment per charge, which is a lot better than the Game Gear this author had as a child. As with many projects we see these days, a custom PCB and 3D printed enclosure give the build a professional polish.

Upon the first boot, you setup the WiFi like on other ESP32 devices through a captive portal. Once connected to the internet, the device contacts Gemini for a generated choose-your-own-adventure story. We think it would be interesting to modify the code to connect to a library of human-written stories, perhaps a port of Zork? Everything you’d need to build your own is on GitHub.

If you want to play games that are easy on the eyes, how about an EInk Gameboy or another one with a separate screen and controller.

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Proper Linux, On An ESP32

November 7, 2026 by 21 Comments

The ESP32 series of microcontrollers feature a lot on these pages, offering as they do a significantly powerful processor and in most cases, wireless connectivity. One recent member of the bewilderingly large family is the ESP32-S31, It’s a dual-core RISC-V unit with WiFi 6, and if that’s not interesting enough there’s the news that it runs Linux. Not -nommu Linux, but the full-fat version, as it has a memory management unit.

Before you imagine a superlative experience, it’s worth the reminder that the available resources will not give it much when it comes to computing power. But there’s an Espressif GitHub repository, and work on a port of a 6.x kernel, so you should be able to do something with it. A quick look on AliExpress finds dev boards at a range of prices, so the cost of experimenting shouldn’t be too high.

This moment at which the paths of microcontroller and full-fat SoC start to cross has been on the horizon for quite a while, and it’s exciting to see it finally arrive. Expect more similar chips in competition with this one, and more power too. Meanwhile see our noting the launch of the S31.

Two 3D-printed enclosures, one blue and one red, sit on a workmat. In front of the blue enclosure, a soldering iron sits in a blue-and-yellow soldering iron stand.

Building A Homemade Induction Soldering Iron

November 7, 2026 by 2 Comments

Despite not being inherently any better at converting electricity into heat, induction-heated soldering irons often considerably outperform conventional irons with an identical power rating. They manage this by directly heating the iron tip with an internal induction coil, rather than conducting heat from a heater cartridge farther back — a design which makes induction irons very responsive, stable, and, unfortunately, expensive. [Frank Zhao], though, managed to design and build two induction soldering irons of his own.

In some ways, the handpiece of an induction-heated soldering iron is simpler than a resistive iron. Induction-powered soldering irons don’t have temperature sensors or any kind of electronic temperature control. Instead, the tip’s temperature is set by the cartridge material’s Curie point; once the cartridge reaches this temperature, the heating efficiency drops off sharply. This self-regulation means that most of the project’s complexity is contained in the power supply, which supplies an RF signal to the induction coil.

Here, [Frank] had two previous projects to work off of, and he based one design on each. The first was the work of [SergeyMax], who’d reverse-engineered a Metcal soldering iron and built his own induction iron based on it. This relied, however, on components hard to find outside of Russia, so [Frank] updated it to use parts available in America. It uses a frequency of 13.56 MHz and an F-type connector, making it compatible with the handpiece assemblies from a number of commercial manufacturers, including Hakko and Metcal. For a measure of portability, it can be powered through an XT30 connector or USB-PD and fits in a compact case.

[Frank]’s second, more inexpensive design was based on the open-source RadioThermal project, but adds the same XT30 and USB-PD power options, allows power level selection with external jumpers, and protects the circuit with a fuse. This design operates at 470 kHz, and uses a custom-built handpiece designed around a commercial soldering iron tip.

We’ve seen induction irons here before, albeit in a considerably less polished form. Alternatively, if you’re interested in seeing what’s inside a normal soldering iron tip, check out this teardown of a T12 tip.