Myst On The Atari 2600

September 22, 2026 by 2 Comments

Although the Atari 2600 was a hugely popular game console in the late 70s, its hardware specs were limited, to say the least. For a dedicated game console of the era this isn’t too surprising, but things like 128 bytes of RAM meant programmers had to work hard to make games that were fun and playable (and they didn’t always succeed). Programming on this system even now is difficult, but nonetheless [Vince] wanted to get a version of Myst running on this system.

Obviously a PC game from the 90s is much to large, in many ways, to fit into an Atari cartridge or play on the 70s-era hardware. For that, there is a “demake” of Myst, a recreation of the game purposely built to run on older hardware it was never meant for. Even so, the game is running on a specialized cartridge built by [Vince] using parts from the real Atari game cartridge BurgerTime which had a bit more memory than normal. It wasn’t quite as straightforward as flashing the new game file to an old EEPROM though; [Vince] came across all kinds of timing issues and other miscellaneous problems that stretched this project out to around a three-year endeavor.

At the end of everything, though, he has a cartridge that will run Myst on the Atari, using the E7 bank switching scheme which afforded this system more memory within the cartridge. For [Vince], who is a fan of the demo scene for consoles like this, this was an interesting experiment to push original hardware to its limits. And, if you want to try this on an Atari 2600 handheld which also uses original hardware, we’d recommend using one of these.

Why Raindrops Make For Pretty Good Antennae

September 22, 2026 by No comments

A good rule of thumb is that everything that can interact with electromagnetic (EM) radiation is an antenna, which includes our mostly-salty-water-containing bodies and also raindrops and moisture in the air. This can be both a benefit or a curse, depending on whether you’re trying to broadcast a signal in rainy weather or operating a weather radar. Here it’s essential to understand what kind of antenna a raindrop really is to optimize for either scenario, which is where a video by [Marshall Bruner] provides a solid primer.

The video focuses on the Rayleigh regime, which may be familiar from atmospheric Rayleigh scattering that also affects EM radiation in the visible spectrum, giving those of us gifted with retinas capable of color vision those nice blue skies.

As the EM radiation passes through these little droplets in the air, their neutral alignment gets disrupted and causes them to turn into dipole antennae, moving along with the incoming frequency. The backscatter part of this event is what returns to the emitter, such as a weather radar. Here the volume and permittivity of the moisture sphere determines the strength of the signal, which is great if you’re actually operating a weather radar and wants to map out the moisture in some clouds, including the presence of snow.

There’s quite a lot of mathematics involved which is covered in the video and expanded upon in a related Python notebook.

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ESP32 Replacement For Lighting Display Controller

September 22, 2026 by 1 Comment

As a company, NanoLeaf has been producing modular lights that can be easily snapped together into various geometric shapes for around a decade. Similar to the addressable LED light strips many of us are familiar with that also became popular around a decade ago, these modular lights are supposed to be easy to configure, customize, and program. But their controllers are notoriously finicky according to [Myrik] who found that a simple ESP32 could be used to replace them when they eventually fail.

Part of the reason [Myrik] found this to be straightforward is that the company publishes their firmware and makes it essentially available to anyone. Whether or not this was purposeful is not clear; but in either case it only requires slight modification to run on the ESP32. When plugged into an existing string of panels, the panels themselves report their positions and orientations over a single data bus which the ESP32 has no problem interpreting. The ESP32 can also communicate its status over the network, meaning that it can in turn be controlled by any other lighting software a user might have.

There’s a separate Reddit post about this build as, with other users offering other potential solutions to the controller issue. But we are always happy to see more open solutions to hardware failures which keep interesting things like these out of the e-waste pile, or simply building NanoLeaf-inspired replicas from the ground up in the first place.

Dumpster-dived Window A/C Becomes Ground-Source Heat Pump

September 22, 2026 by 14 Comments

Heat pumps are great, because they pump heat around, and we often don’t want heat where it is. Need it somewhere else? Pump it! It’s great. It’s also a bit pricey if you’re buying new, but [Craftsman Chris] over on YouTube realized that the window air conditioning unit he found in a dumpster is, in fact, a heat pump. Normally it’s an air-source heat pump, but with a delightful series of hacks, he gets it automated and hooked into a ground loop in his latest YouTube video.

The heat sink is provided by a bunch of PEX tubing [Chris] buried in his back yard. After experimenting with using the water loop for cooling directly, he realized that pumping heat out of his house into the cold ground would go much better with a heat pump. That’s where the window A/C came in. After cleaning and servicing it, it was time to convert it to dump heat into water rather than outside air. To do that, [Chris] welded up a tank made of scrap metal around the existing heat exchanger. It’s designed for air, sure, but water takes its heat just fine. The nice thing about this is that by keeping the internals of the air conditioner mostly stock, he doesn’t let out any of the tasty, tasty CFCs that may be hiding inside.

Connecting this unit to his thermostat is equally hacky– he takes an old Programmable Logic Controller that looks fit to run a small factory, and hooks it to a single linear actuator to poke the A/C unit’s stock power button. Is it elegant? No. Does it work? Yes. Is it a hack? Indubitably!

We’ve seen window units pressed into whole-house A/C service before, but adding the water loop is a great hack. We saw a window A/C used as a ground-source pump before, too, but that was a Canadian project and so sensibly turned the machine around to provide heating for the maple mansion.

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Determining The Body Temperature Of Tyrannosaurus Rex

September 22, 2026 by 4 Comments

One of the most fun challenges in paleontology is determining characteristics of long-dead species like their behavior and body temperature based on nothing but some fossils and traces that are usually millions of years old. Something that has long vexed the paleontological community for example has been the question whether non-avian dinosaurs like the well-known Tyrannosaurus rex was cold- or warm-blooded, and if the latter, what temperature this was. Cue a recent study by [Randon J. Flores] et al. in Science Advances in which they seek to answer this question.

Although modern-day dinosaurs in the form of birds are all warm-blooded – meaning capable of regulating their body temperature – species like crocodiles, who also lived alongside non-avian dinosaurs, are cold-blooded and have to cycle between sun-basking and a cool dip in a nearby river to maintain their body temperature.

By looking at the temperature-dependent formation of carbonate clumped isotopes in three T. rex teeth from the Late Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation, they were able to deduce that these dinosaurs had a body temperature of 36.3 ± 2.5°C, comparable to modern-day endotherms. This was also much higher than that of contemporary crocodilian teeth found in the same area.

When popular dinosaur movies like Jurassic Park showed T. rex and other non-avian dinosaurs as being active, warm-blooded hunters, this was pretty much based on cutting-edge science at the time. Fortunately for its creators, later paleontological findings have largely confirmed that portrayal, although these days non-avian dinosaurs have often gained more feathers and other details – even outside of feathered theropods that became birds – that were absent in these early 90s reconstructions.

Raspberry Pi RAM Restrictions No Big Deal, Frankly

September 22, 2026 by 41 Comments

Hacking on Raspberry Pi board internals is one of my favourite topics. I know a bunch of obscure things about these cute little boards. Three years ago, I covered a Raspberry Pi 4 RAM upgrade story. Getting a BGA RAM chip and swapping it in seemed like a no-brainer to me – apart from all the numerous uncertain parts about it, you know. It was a joy to see hackers pull it off, and for it to function as well as it did!

Things changed. You can’t really get RAM chips anymore. You also can’t get RAM sticks. You can’t get even SSDs with RAM chips on them. Even getting Raspberry Pi boards can be hard unless you know where to look. This is where a recent three-minute video by [Jeff Geerling] finds us.

Turns out, Raspberry Pi Foundation pushed binary-blob bootloader changes that limit your ability to upgrade RAM. I’ve known about it since last year through the grapevine, and somehow, as I read about it, this didn’t bother me at all. Not enough to write a Hackaday article about it, even, much less talk about it more widely. Why didn’t it bother me? Today, I sat down and pondered this for a bit.

Here’s my conclusion: I don’t think it’s a big deal at all, even if it seems that many people would disagree. Come in, as you are, and I hope you find my thoughts on the situation entertaining.

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Digital Upgrade Brings Medium Format Camera Into The 21st Century

September 22, 2026 by 9 Comments

Large format cameras can produce amazing shots, but are a bit too bulky to be practical. Medium format is a different story, as [Wenting] demonstrates with his Sitina B220M — an open-source digital back for the Mamiya Super 23 camera using a full-frame Kodak CCD.

“Digital back” just means he’s replacing the rear of an existing film camera in order to put a sensor where said film used to live. The sensor is a 22 Megapixel Kodak KAF-22000CE, which measures in at a very respectable 38.8 mm by 50 mm. That’s only a touch smaller than the rolls of 120 the camera was designed for, whose large dimension was 56 mm. How much was exposed at a time was determined by the back you put on the camera, but would never have been below 41.5 mm. Again, the CCD is pretty close.

With Mamiya covering the optics, [Wenting] could focus on the digital end. He’s got a Xilinx Zynq 7010 running the show, making use of both that SoC’s Cortex-A9 cores and its built-in FPGA. There’s some decent info on how that works in the build video embedded below, if you don’t want to dig into the code at the GitLab repository above. The photos look great, and start at 8:25.

[Wenting] has been around the bush with FPGAs before. Not least in his e-ink monitor project, but also with the last iteration of his mirror-less digital camera. This version is perhaps less ambitious, being merely a digital back and not the whole enchilada, but it solves some design issues he had on the “camera” part while he focuses on the “digital” for now.

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