Robot Picks Up Othello

October 29, 2026 by No comments

Experience is a great teacher. Ask [Jeneus], who, in high school, tried to make a program that played Othello. It didn’t go well. But years later, the idea produced an impressive Othello robot. At first glance, the robot looks a bit like a 3D printer with an aluminum extrusion XYZ motion system. But there’s a lot more to it, not to mention the software to play the game. Check it out in the video below.

The Z-axis has a vacuum system that can pick up clear tokens and place them on the board. If you know the game, you might remember that on a real board, players have to flip the tokens as they “capture” pieces. The robot has a smarter way to go. The tokens are clear because they are lit with one of two colors. So flipping the token is a simple LED color change. The LEDs also flash a different color to show you where you can move.

The device uses laser-cut components and 3D printed parts in PLA and TPU. Of course, there is a camera for the computer — a Raspberry Pi — to see the board. Overall, a very nicely done project. We’ve seen several checker and chess robots. We wonder if some of them could also play Othello?

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Exploring What’s Left Of Google’s VR Dreams

October 29, 2026 by 1 Comment

You’re likely familiar with Google’s Cardboard, and the legions of cheap virtual reality headsets it spawned. By sticking a smartphone to the wearer’s head, all these headsets needed were some basic optics to provide a surprisingly effective VR experience. You may even know about Google Daydream initiative that came a few years later, which not only improved the basic Cardboard design but brought with it new software features such as VR-specific improvements to the Android operating system and a version of the Play Store dedicated to 3D games and applications.

But unless you’re a true Google devotee, what you may not know is that the search giant partnered with Lenovo to produce a stand-alone Daydream headset called the Mirage Solo in 2018. A full year before the Oculus Quest hit the market, the $399 device combined the guts of a smartphone with a 2560×1440 display running at 75 Hz, a pair of cameras in the front that let it see the world around the user in three dimensions, and a gyroscopic handheld controller to provide an immersive VR experience without having to be tethered to a computer. In addition to the standard consumer version, there was even a “Business Edition” of the headset specifically marketed to schools, offices, and hospitals as a way to deliver VR content without having to invest in any additional infrastructure.

So why isn’t the Mirage Solo better known? Because in classic fashion, just a few years after it was released, Google decided they were no longer interested in virtual reality and shuttered the entire Daydream program. The software components it introduced were stripped out of Android, the 3D Play Store was taken down, and the back-end mechanisms necessary to register new headsets were turned off. Almost overnight, the Mirage Solo became a stereoscopic paperweight.

Or at least that was the official story, anyway. I recently came across a Lenovo Mirage Solo at a thrift store for $25, and despite my initial Internet searches strongly indicating that it would probably be worthless, it seemed worth the gamble to find out for myself.

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An AI Chatbot For The Apocalypse

October 29, 2026 by 18 Comments

You don’t have to be a full-on “prepper” to at least occasionally wonder what would happen if civilization collapsed. One thing you probably couldn’t do is go on the Internet and ask your favorite AI how to purify water, repel zombies, or treat a burn, all of which may be highly relevant depending on your situation. Now, with Survival LLM, you have a chance.

The  LLM is pretty much the stock chatbot, but it is trained on survival topics, and it runs locally. Naturally, you need the Internet to set it up, so you’d want to do that now before everything hits the fan. The training set uses medical references, survival manuals, FEMA and CDC documents, and nearly a million Wikipedia articles. It includes the survival references in a library and links to them when answering, too.

The installer is small, but it assesses your system and loads a model based on what you have. If you have less than 32 GB of RAM, you’ll get the IBM Granite 4.2 8B model, which was able to correctly answer 14 of 22 test questions. Other models do better, including the NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Super model, which got 21 correct, but requires at least 128 GB of memory.

Now, somehow you have to power your computer, but that’s a separate problem. At least there will be plenty of GPUs to scavenge from abandoned data centers. We’ve seen prepper digital libraries before. More than one, in fact.

Magnetic Lock Opens By Magic

October 29, 2026 by 15 Comments

Over on IEEE Spectrum, [Stephen Cass] has a project that would probably have seemed like a magic a few centuries ago. Imagine a box that uses a magnetic device to holds a locking bolt, requiring a magnet to disengage it. The only problem is that any strong magnet can open the box. [Stephen], instead, used an array of 64 Hall-effect sensors developed by [Peter Jansen] to look for a specific magnetic gesture.

Inside is a Teensy that can read the 8×8 grid of sensors. A magnetic stylus allows you to draw an unlock pattern. The system lets you train the gesture you want. There are a few problems. The sensor covers a small area, so it is hard to reliably produce the gesture. Putting an obvious mark on the box is a dead giveaway, so [Stephen] put a Celtic knotwork pattern on the box and uses part of it as a reference.

The other problem is that if you run out of battery, the box is locked forever. Well, at least until you apply mechanical force and break the box open. Wireless charging would be an option, but we might favor a small jack that would allow you to plug in an external battery.

This is a clever use of the sensor. However, we might have preferred a mechanical solution that didn’t require batteries. Or, perhaps, you could use a few normally open and normally closed reed switches to make a kind of magnetic combination lock. It would still need a battery, but it wouldn’t draw current until you connected the switches. Both methods also have drawbacks, of course. Like most things, you just get to pick the drawbacks you can live with.

You can see a video of the magnetic imaging tile from [Peter] below. We really want a setup like this for our secret door. We also wonder whether switchable magnets could provide a battery-free solution.

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2026 Retrocomputing Challenge: Custom RISC-V Processor For Retro System

October 28, 2026 by 3 Comments

Although once little more than an academic endeavor, the RISC-V architecture is slowly supplanting applications that would have normally gone to ARM. Even a few microcontrollers have chips running this open-source instruction set now, and we expect it to grow in the future since it doesn’t require the licensing of an ARM or x86 chip. [M_Jagadeesh97] is getting ahead of the curve with this retro gaming system built on a custom-designed RISC-V system.

Most of us, presumably including [M_Jagadeesh97], don’t have access to chip fabrication tools, but what we can get is any of various FPGAs. This RISC-V CPU is built on a Terasic DE0-Nano board with 32 MB of RAM available to it, and boots to a launcher with 32 games available. There are a few limitations with this low-power system which was largely solved by limiting the display to 64×32, which lets it maintain the same aspect ratio as the original DOOM as well as the same aspect ratio for many of the older games, while still maintaining 45 FPS.

The project writeup goes deep into the design of a system like this, from the bare metal, the CPU design, the timing of the video signals, and how to implement a Wolfenstein-like raycaster. After adding a small display it looks to be fairly portable as well and is an excellent demonstration of how powerful inexpensive boards like this  FPGA can be with the proper amount of effort.

2026 Hackaday Retrocomputing Contest

Battery Prototype Uses Superextensive Quantum Effects To Charge Faster

October 28, 2026 by 11 Comments

Although the term ‘quantum battery’ is a bit of a vague term, the cell that [Kieran Hymas] et al. demonstrate in a recent paper does seem to suggest that it uses quantum effects to charge faster than would otherwise be possible, with this rate increasing faster than its volume, meaning at a superextensive rate.

The general idea behind a quantum battery is that these somehow use a quantum effect to store and release energy faster than would be possible using classical physics. First proposed in 2013, the initial Dicke model saw its theoretical quantum advantage shot down by 2020, leading to the search for alternative models.

We have previously seen claims of a quantum advantage in batteries based on the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model, such as by [Davide Rossini] et al., but this new paper may be the first prototype cell demonstrating a reproducible effect.

In the here demonstrated cell a microcavity is created with strong light-matter coupling, allowing for both energy storage and discharging, with the illuminated particles super-absorbing the light with what the researchers claim to be due to these particles cooperating using a quantum mechanism. Effectively scaling up the cell would thus scale up the charge- and discharge rate faster than in a conventional chemical cell.

Whether this demonstration can be replicated and expanded upon remains to be seen, naturally. The stored energy in this experiment was very small and the storage time only very brief, so for now it serves primarily as an interesting experimental result for researchers to dig through.

Hacking The Modern Tamagotchi With UART

October 28, 2026 by 7 Comments

Although not technically the first virtual pet, the Tamagotchi handhelds certainly popularized the idea and made it a worldwide phenomenon. In the late 90s it was hard to go out in public and not see them dangling from backpacks and belt loops. They turned out to be more than a passing fad, too. There have been Tamagotchis in various forms since then, and one of the latest, the Tamagotchi Paradise, is uniquely hackable thanks to this custom UART interface.

The build starts with a simple and inexpensive CH340G UART adapter with a built-in USB interface. A custom 3D printed enclosure is used to house the adapter and also help to expose the interface to the Tamagotchi. This is done by wiring three pins to nickel strips, which are threaded through slits in the case and looped back around to create a pogo-style adapter for the Tamagotchi’s custom dock. Normally this would be used to link to other Tamagotchis, but in this case the USB-to-UART adapter mimics it, allowing for all kinds of in-game shenanigans. The project’s creator [Squalius] shows it off by connecting it directly to a browser tool in Google Chrome.

Not only that, but this can also be used to modify the software running on the handheld entirely, with the video showing demos playing not only Super Mario but also DOOM (of course). This isn’t too surprising given that these games are built with modern 32-bit ARM microcontrollers. For the 90s purists, though, it probably won’t surprise anyone to know that these devices have been the subject of various hacks almost since they came out.

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