The Concertina Goes Electronic

September 18, 2026 by No comments

The concertina is an instrument that features heavily in European folk music, of which there are a variety of types. [Xcott Craver] has built one, an anglo concertina of the type you may recognise accompanying sea shanties, but this is no ordinary squeezebox. Instead it’s an electronic concertina, and it’s a project with a significant attention to detail.

Perhaps the most obvious thing most of us know about a concertina is that it’s an instrument with two ends separated by a set of bellows, and manipulation of the bellows lends a lot to the music it produces. This instrument doesn’t have bellows, but its innovation is to simulate them through means of a load cell. The two sides of the wooden chassis are fixed, but the force exerted on them is measured.

The keys are Cherry MX switches with custom keycaps, mounted on a pair of PCBs. Driving the whole thing is a Teensy 4.0, and to avoid unfortunate accidents with ripped-out connectors there’s a USB extension lead as a bit of strain relief. You can hear the result in the video below.

This is like no other instrument we’ve seen here, though we’ve had a few electronically enhanced conventional concertinas and accordions. We like it for its interesting design.

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On Chip Debug For (Some) MicroPython

September 18, 2026 by 1 Comment

If you’ve used MicroPython much, you know that debugging usually amounts to printing a few things out, trying your code out, and then repeating. But [ghi-electronics] wants you to have full on-chip source-code debugging in Visual Studio. You don’t need anything special to use it — just a supported MicroPython host and the same USB cable you program with now.

The downside is that you either have to build a custom MicroPython image and flash it or use one that they include. They support several Raspberry Pi Pico versions and ESP32 chips, as well. However, at least one “odd” Pico we had lying around wouldn’t take the firmware. A stock one did, and it worked as you would expect. A little more investigation showed the odd Pico (an RP2040 GEEK) probably did take the firmware; it just produced an error during setup. There is a known problem with Linux and the ESP32-S3 having similar behavior.

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Sony’s First Computer

September 18, 2026 by 3 Comments

In 1982, desktop computers were coming into their own, and no clear leaders had emerged. But everyone knew they wanted a piece of the action. This led to, among other things, Sony’s SMC-70, which, frankly, for 1982, was a good-looking, if not oddball, machine. [Tech Tangents] shows the machine off in a recent video.

From the front, the computer looks more-or-less like everything else. But as you move backward, you can see this computer wasn’t another typical entry into the market. One of the things that was the hallmark of successful business computers of the day was expandability. The earlier Altair had the later-titled S100 bus. The IBM PC had the ISA bus. But in both cases, you had to open the box to plug and unplug cards.

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Making A Digital Music Player For Cassette Decks

September 18, 2026 by 17 Comments

In the cross-over between the era of tapes into that of MP3s, you’d see quite a few of those special cassette tapes that were actually digital music players inside. Some simply provided a 3.5 mm input, while others were complete MP3 players or Bluetooth receivers that just happened to also output to the magnetic read head of a cassette player. Recently [Jonathan Rowny] decided to make his own version of the latter.

Although getting the actual audio signal into the read head is easy enough – requiring little more than its equivalent being used as a write head on the cassette side – actually interfacing with the player’s mechanisms like auto-stop, reverse and so on requires the use of some gearing that detect motion on what would be the tape spools, as well as transfer the motion from the take-up spool to the other spool so that features like the auto-stop mechanism don’t get triggered.

A lot of inspiration here can be found in e.g. the videos made by [Clint] of [Lazy Game Reviews] who looked at a number of examples – including their internals – over the years, with various levels of functionality. For this particular implementation an ESP32-S3 module is used for the brains, along with a microSD card reader for music and a PCM5102 I2S audio codec to create the analog audio signal.

The gears were printed using an SLA printer and seem to work all right. Unfortunately he didn’t realize the importance of the capstan as the mechanism that actually transports the tape, so its motion was not measured as is done in the better cassette adapters. This will likely be corrected in a future iteration, however.

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Reconstructing A Pin On A Pin Grid Array Package

September 18, 2026 by 9 Comments

Before moving to land grid array (LGA) packaging whereby each pin on the substrate is just a copper pad, processors commonly used pin grid array (PGA) packaging, including the still highly relevant AMD AM4 socket. With PGA you get a pin soldered onto the copper pad which inserts into the ZIF socket, rather than a fragile pin on the mainboard side. Repairing a damaged PGA pin can be easy if just the pin broke off at the solder joint, or rough if the pad was destroyed, as in the case of this Pentium III CPU that [Bits und Bolts] recently tried to fix.

In the case of something like a ground pin or similarly unimportant pin you can ignore the damage, but in this case it concerned an important pin for this 1.2 GHz Tualatin PIII core, with the damage consisting of a well and truly destroyed pad. The first step to repair the damage is thus to try and rebuild the pad, which was done using solder mask and solder.

Although a PIII-era Celeron CPU is definitely not a high-value CPU, since they have so few and such large pins they do make for useful test subjects when it comes to PGA repair practicing. In this case the affected data pad and pin appears to have been repaired successfully, with it running overclocked to 1.6 GHz and crushing similarly or higher clocked Pentium 4 and AMD Athlon CPUs of the era.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 387: Superhuman Clocks, CAN In USB-C, And The Joys Of Bare Metal

September 18, 2026 by No comments

This week, Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start the episode off by discussing the latest CircuitPython developments before covering some impressive reverse engineering efforts, the benefits of modeling your projects in 3D, and some of the most incredible timepieces that have ever graced the pages of Hackaday.

You’ll also hear about the fascinating potential of combing 3D and UV printing, Linux on the ESP32, and a virtual TV station that pulls from the Internet Archive. The episode wraps up with a Hackaday Europe double-feature: one talk extols the virtues of keeping things simple through bare metal development, while the other covers off-world hacks and fixes that will make you want to sign up for Space Camp.

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

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Brain Control Your Appliance, Sort Of

September 18, 2026 by 3 Comments

We aren’t sure we subscribe to [Upside Down Labs] description that their Neuro PlayGround Lite (NPG Lite) actually constitutes brain control in the science fiction sense. However, the package can sense biopotentials, and that lets you do things like change TV channels with a blink of the eye or a muscle gesture. That’s the gist of their project example on Instructables.

Since the NPG has an ESP32 onboard, it isn’t hard to see that coupling it to an IR transceiver would be all you need to control anything with an IR remote. The real problem is reading things like eye blinks.

The simplest way to think of the Neuro PlayGround Lite is as a 3-channel instrumentation amplifier + ADC + ESP32-C6 radio, packaged for measuring very small biological voltages. The same hardware can be used for EEG, EMG, ECG, or EOG, depending mainly on where you put the electrodes and how you filter/process the resulting signal.

It is true that you can measure EEG, so maybe it is brain control if you can learn to control your EEG output. EMC for muscles or EOG for blinking is probably somewhat more practical.

The instrumentation amplifier is where the main value is. You probably can’t just hook biosensors up to an ESP-32 analog input. The software, too, does a lot of heavy lifting for signal processing. Once you have reliable indicators that an eye or muscle moved, the rest is pretty simple.

For us, we don’t want to glue sensors to our body every time we want to watch a cat video. But we know there are legitimate reasons you might want this type of interaction, and this is as good a way to dip your toe into user interfaces that use biosignals.

We’ve seen this type of tech — strangely — used to order drinks. Not to mention games.