Giving A Power Mac G4 A USB Upgrade, For Free!

June 10, 2026 by 1 Comment

At various times in the history of desktop computing, the market has stubbornly refused to follow the path dictated for it by a dominant manufacturer. IBM’s move to MCA in their PS/2 line is one of many examples. Another is Apple’s take on USB a couple of decades ago, when their view of the future lay with Firewire 800. [Pierre Dandumont] has revisited a Power Mac G4 from that era and unleashed what Apple never did back in the day: a USB 2.0 port. (French language, Google Translate).

The hack lies in Apple shipping the machine with an NEC USB 2.0 controller, but only using it for USB 1.1. A PowerPC Linux distro will happily use it for USB 2.0, but Mac OS refused. Replacing the BIOS ROM with an image designed for the same Mac without Firewire 800 cured the problem, but at the expense of being so we’re told irreversible.

An obscure set of Macs from the early 2000s with an odd combination of hardware and OS may not count for much in 2026, but back in the day having USB 2.0 was a big deal and this would really have mattered. We like it that he put this together, even if the chances of having a G4 on the Hackaday desktop probably isn’t too high.

This isn’t the first USB hack we’ve seen for a PowerMac G4.

Re-Enable All Compute Units On The PS5-like BC-250 Cryptomining Card

June 9, 2026 by No comments

The custom APU at the core of Sony’s PlayStation 5 hasn’t just been quietly powering these game consoles, but also made their way onto cryptomining cards around 2023 which are called the BC-250. The APUs on these boards differ from the one found in the PS5 most notably by having two out of eight CPU cores disabled, along with many compute units (CUs) of the iGPU. Now apparently it seems that you can re-enable these CUs per instructions by [duggasco] if you’re feeling adventurous.

The BC-250's AMD APU in all its glory. (Credit: Lowest Logan, YouTube)
The BC-250’s AMD APU in all its glory. (Credit: Lowest Logan, YouTube)

As stated in the project’s README, BC-250 boards come with only 24 out of 40 CUs enabled, but this is not a permanent (e-fuse) thing. Instead you can write to two hardware registers during the GPU driver initialization, something which can be added to for example the Linux kernel module parameters.

Since many of these APUs likely had cores and CUs disabled due to them failing QA during PS5 APU manufacturing, there’s a good chance that some of the CUs truly are bad. Yet as we saw with the AMD Phenom II X3 with a supposedly bad fourth core back in the day, sometimes demand for the ‘defective’ part is high enough that good parts get mixed in as well.

Thus people like [Lowest Logan] decided to give it a shot, demonstrating the use of the patch with Bazzite Linux on a BC-250 system. After a reboot the system does indeed list 40 CUs as being enabled, and running Furmark shows a big boost in performance without any glitches or fire. There is of course thermal throttling, but that is due to the default cooling solution not being designed for running it at full blast.

Incidentally the real PS5 has only 36 active CUs, so this technically makes these unlocked APUs more powerful. With the water cooling solution demonstrated by [Lowest Logan] the thermal throttling is also resolved, showing that you can get a pretty nice gaming system out of these old cryptomining boards if you happen to win the silicon lottery.

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Deep Dive Into Sputnik

June 9, 2026 by 4 Comments

If you are an American of a certain age, you know the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik, beating the United States to orbit. You might even remember ham radio operators tuning into the satellites beeping. But you probably haven’t heard much about the team that built the vehicle, the problems they had, or the clever design choices they made. [Hoog] has a video that details the birth of Sputnik. You can see the video below.

The original plan was to launch a massive space lab, but it proved too ambitious. Keep in mind that in the late 1950s, you didn’t have tiny computers, high-density power sources, or advanced materials, and no one really knew what to expect in the Earth orbit environment. Even the viability of radio from the ground to orbit wasn’t a given. But Sputnik’s 1-watt transmitter did the job.

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Print Your Own Robby The Robot

June 9, 2026 by No comments

When it comes to robots, few are as iconic as Robby. [Ogrinz Labs] has wanted to build one and even examined a real one up for auction to get high-res photos of it. He also combined his designs with some other open-source designs, and it looks good. He’s released his design as a Creative Commons-licensed set of STL files that you, in theory, could print. There are more details and instructions in the video below.

If you are looking for something quick to print for the weekend, this isn’t it. As you might expect, this is a lot to print. The creator admits, too, that it isn’t totally accurate. It has bigger feet, for example, so his feet can fit inside. There are a few other modifications made for different reasons, but only a hard-core Robby enthusiast would notice any of them.

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How The 2020s Chip Crisis Led To A Buggy Saleae Analyzer In 2026

June 9, 2026 by 14 Comments

For those of us old enough to remember the harrowing days of the early 2020s, alongside another major kerfuffle there was a complete breakdown in global supply chains that led to the 2020-2023 global chip shortage. Unsurprisingly, this pushed many hardware manufacturers into less orthodox approaches, massive BOM changes, and hurried redesigns. One of the results of this era found its way into the hands of the bloke over at the [Playduino] YouTube channel, who was mystified to find two bodge wires in his fancy Saleae logic analyzer.

The reason for popping open the LA was crosstalk between two channels, which was bad enough that it made the unit quite unusable for the intended task. After seeing the cut traces and bodge wires he initially assumed that since he bought it used that the previous owner had modified it, but said person denied having opened it since purchasing it from an official retailer.

This was when he emailed Saleae support to see whether they knew anything. Initially they denied knowing anything about such a modification, but then the CTO emailed back with a long and very detailed confession. As explained in the video, during the aforementioned chip crisis Saleae was forced to rapidly redesign their LAs to use whatever FPGAs and other parts they could still get their hands on.

An initial prototype unit passed their internal tests, so they had a first batch manufactured using PCBs from a different supplier. Despite sending the same Gerber files, the resulting PCBs had ground fill issues that necessitated the observed rework, but due to insufficient testing for crosstalk a total of 406 units made it into the wild.

Sadly he had to return the defective unit for a replacement, making it somewhat hard to let go of such a piece of history. That said, if you want to know whether you’re also one of the lucky remaining 405 LA owners, the CTO provided the affected serial number range: 00200026245 to 00200026675 are affected.

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The Secret Wattcycle LFP Battery Downgrade

June 9, 2026 by 6 Comments

After recently reviewing a Wattcycle LFP battery sent over by the manufacturer, [Will Prowse] was made aware of some disturbing changes to the internals of batteries received by regular customers. Rather than the nice protected cables, thick solid metal busbars, braided wire and excellent build quality, the units that a regular customer – got as well as the one that [Will] bought off Amazon – all feature something more akin to what you’d find in a budget LFP battery, including a wide variety of LFP cells.

With these LFP batteries generally coming in fully opaque plastic cases, it’s really hard to tell what the internals look like without either going medieval on them or using less intrusive methods such as an X-ray machine. In this case more capable braided cables were replaced with regular cables that in a test showed a much higher voltage drop compared to the braided type.

Along with all the other changes between these batteries, this makes it impossible to rely on any reviews as a customer. [Will] notes that Wattcycle isn’t alone in doing this, and makes the case for more transparent cases for LFP batteries. After all, if you can see at a glance through the transparent case what the cables and wiring looks like, what BMS is installed and even what any LEDs on said BMS PCB are doing.

There are some LFP batteries with such a transparent case already, and with some smaller LFP batteries you can even pop the top off without having to resort to very permanent levels of violence, so this is not a problem without solutions. From a consumer perspective it definitely would be nice to see the internals as literal transparency from the manufacturer’s side, as well as an increased ability to monitor the battery for any thermal, leakage or other issues.

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Custom FM Radio Station Powered By Shell Scripts

June 9, 2026 by 18 Comments

[Trwmato] wanted to spend more time listening to a normal radio to cut back on phone use. But the programming wasn’t quite right so, of course, the solution was to spin up a custom radio station!

The station in question uses a Pi Zero to poll podcasts and news from RSS feeds and automatically mixes them with local content and sends it out via Bluetooth. An FM transmitter allows it to still work on the FM radio, too. Grabbing podcasts isn’t very difficult, thanks to podget. The real logic is in how long to retain things and creating a playlist that both prioritizes fresh content while not repeating things too often. Did we forget to mention the whole thing is a collection of shell scripts?

We could see this as the start of a cool project to have a “radio station” for a school, organization, or company. It is easy to understand and modify.

We often argue that the much-maligned bash script is sometimes the right tool for the job. You can even do things like critical sections in them.