Back in the early 1980s when 8-bit home computers became affordable educational toys for children, the traditional paper publishing industry did its best to keep up. For a few brief years, there were children’s books dedicated to the innards of a computer in meticulous detail, and courtesy of [Jason Jacques] we have a chance to look at one of the lesser-known ones.
The British publisher Ladybird made a series of four computer books, and while the first three had content for both the Sinclair Spectrum and the BBC Micro, the last in the series only featured the BBC. [Jason] took that book and re-imagined the missing Sinclair Spectrum version.
The surprise is how deep it dives into the architecture of an 8-bit computer, and it’s refreshing to see something that’s not unduly dumbed-down for kids. We’re guessing that this would have appealed to the 5% of kids who ran with their computers rather than just playing Jet Set Willy back then, and we’re sure a few grown-up 50-somethings may remember it or books like it.
After getting his hands on a rope driver module from the Apollo project era that had a big ‘Scrapped Module’ stamped on it, [Mike Stewart] was naturally left curious as to what exactly had failed in this module. Originally destined for the Apollo Guidance Computer, these Raytheon-manufactured modules were the pinnacle of space-grade high-tech of the 1960s, with requisite acceptance testing so as to not endanger a very expensive space mission.
The cool part here is that the acceptance documents for the module in question (B16-B17) have been scanned in and can be found on the Internet Archive. With the part itself being potted and very much inaccessible, this document helpfully lays out the expected measurements on the module’s pins, as well as schematics and mechanical drawings. Unfortunately the reasons for the rejection were not recorded, so replicating the failing test results is required to understand the reason.
NASA Rope Driver Module with suspicious exploration marks. (Credit: Mike Stewart, YouTube)
A slight complication here is that the testing procedure doesn’t just involve hooking up a multimeter for some voltage and capacitance measurements. There are also temperature and voltage extremes, and vibration tolerance involved, which would be somewhat complex to test, but most of all risk damaging a historical artefact. Thus a somewhat conservative testing procedure was chosen, even if this may not reveal the actual fault.
As noted in the video, sometimes modules were also rejected because someone simply dropped it on the floor along the way. However, generally if a module was found to be faulty they would open it to diagnose said fault, with a closer look at this module indeed revealing suspicious marks in the potting compound where it was apparently opened and conceivably repaired. This also might explain why they also put the ‘For engineering use only’ on it.
With multiple of such locations visible in the potting compound, these locations were mapped to the schematics for the module, to get some idea of what may have been accessed. After this, basic testing was performed on the module, as per the acceptance testing document.
Along the way an error was detected in said document, in the form of the wrong pin number. In table 4-2 the input pin 269 was mistakenly listed as having output pin number 169 when it should have been pin 168. Pin 169 is chassis ground, so this was presumably fixed in a later version of the document.
After all the testing with just stationary, room-temperature conditions, everything appeared to check out. This means that likely this was indeed a repaired module that got subsequently used for engineering purposes rather than installed in flight-ready hardware. The only issue found was that channels were out of calibration, but whether this was an original flaw or due to the module being half a century old is hard to tell in the absence of repair logs.
Overall it’s an exciting opportunity to document another part of history, since so many of the details pertaining to these original modules and related technologies got lost or muddled over the decades.
One of the disadvantages to collecting retro peripherals is that they’re not necessarily easy to use anymore. [eSPee77] changes that by retrofitting a Genius GM-6000 mouse with modern hardware, all while preserving the feel.
To make this mouse without compromising on the feel of the original, means replacing the PCB with a new one while retaining the same buttons and encoders. So [eSPee77] did exactly that. At the heart of the conversion lies an nRF52840 on a custom PCB. It uses new optical sensors to read the existing quadrature encoders, and uses the same type of switch for the mouse buttons as the original.
But from there, it diverges because–powered by the BLE capabilities of the nRF–this is actually a wireless mouse! And the modern features don’t end there, either. To support scrolling on a mouse which did not originally have it, you can press the middle mouse button while moving it forward/backward. Finally, as the cherry on the cake, it features an “air mouse” mode using an inertial measurement unit, handy for use in presentations.
For how useful USB thumb drives are for quickly toting around and copying files from one computer to another, they can be a bit of a security headache. Programs can be loaded on them with all kinds of malware; they can be obscured in some ways that are difficult to detect, and they can be set up to execute certain programs when they’re plugged in. The general wisdom is to simply avoid untrusted USB devices completely, but that sort of abstinence-only policy rarely works in the real world. If, for some reason, an untrusted USB device absolutely needs to be used, many of these security issues can be mitigated with this tool.
Built by [Novamostra], the device is simple on the surface: it’s a Raspberry Pi Pico mated to a 2-in-1 USB splitter cable. But with the USB Neutralizer software they have written loaded onto the Pico, it automatically destroys the ability of any connected USB thumb drive to load files. The program works by deleting the first and last 34 Logical Block Addressing (LBA) sectors on the drive immediately when it’s plugged in, without doing anything else. This effectively corrupts the drive bad enough to prevent malicious software in the partitions from doing anything, allowing the user to (relatively) safely put the USB drive into their computer and format it for re-use. The code for this tool is also open-source and reviewable on the project’s GitHub page.
Of course, this isn’t a perfect security solution for all USB attacks. It doesn’t erase or replace the firmware on the drive itself, and although firmware-level attacks are rare they’re not out of the question for all users, all the time. It also won’t prevent a malicious physical attack like this high-voltage one, and it may also not stop hidden or obscured partitions or devices programmed for storage and some other nefarious purpose simultaneously, like a USB HID. But still, this solves a great many of the problems associated with getting new drives from semi-untrustworthy sources, like retailers or friends whose computer skills we don’t fully trust.
Flexible printed circuit boards are a fascinating technique for making electronics venture beyond the two-dimensional, but surprisingly they’re not something many of us have worked with. [Jessica Stanley] gave a talk at the recent Electromagnetic Field event in the UK, exploring the different ways to make your electronics bend.
She starts with an overview of flexible electronics, detailing the techniques used with conventional polyimide substrates and etched copper. We’re particularly enamoured of a stretchable PCB made by coiling a flexible circuit round a piece of elastic. Since she’s looking for techniques accessible to everyone that don’t either cost a fortune or require dangerous chemicals we look at conductive paint and electrolysis, before arriving at using a vinyl cutter to create adhesive traces.
We’ve no doubt all noticed that flexible PCBs can be ordered from the usual fabrication houses at a price, but the value in this talk lies in reminding the viewer that this is not the only path. She demonstrates well that simple flexible PCBs can be within the reach of almost anyone, which is perhaps the encouragement needed for people to try this medium. The full talk is below the break.
To know why putting a cyberdeck in a lunchbox is exactly the kind of thing you would see in the show, [RadioactiveArtist] briefly explains what both are (but we’ll skip the former): M.A.S.K. is a cartoon running from ’85 to ’86 where ordinary objects transform to reveal a hidden purpose–and this cyberdeck does just that by hiding in M.A.S.K. merchandise: the lunch box.
Like any cyberdeck build, it starts as a pile of components on a desk. It’s made from a Raspberry Pi 5, a cute little 75% keyboard, stereo speakers, a card reader with some USB 3 ports and of course a battery made with four 18650 cells. After testing the electronics on the bench, [RadioactiveArtist] test-fits them in the lunch box before revealing the plan: keyboard and speakers on the bottom, thinner half, the rest on top, and the screen on a second hinge so it can flip up when opened. Continue reading “M.A.S.K.-Inspired Cyberdeck For All Your Portable Computing Needs”→
Radios were once big complicated appliances, full of warm valves and paper-wrapped capacitors, all humming and glowing to capture signals from the aether and spit them out of a speaker. Every component was chosen to build the radio to suit a particular purpose.
These days, we have altogether fancier technology that lets us build radios that can be reconfigured on the fly; software-defined radios, if you will. [Anders Nielsen] has been exploring how to build a high-performance SDR recently, and came to Hackaday Europe 2026 to tell us all about it.
