Comprehensive Test Set Released For The Intel 80286

July 24, 2025 by 23 Comments

Remember the 80286? It was the sequel to the 8086, the chip that started it all, and it powered a great number of machines in the early years of the personal computing revolution. It might not be as relevant today, but regardless, [Daniel Balsom] has now released a comprehensive test suite for the ancient chip. (via The Register)

The complete battery of tests are available on Github, and were produced using a Harris N80C286-12 from 1986. “The real mode test suite contains 326 instruction forms, containing nearly 1.5 million instruction executions with over 32 million cycle states captured,” Daniel explains. “This is fewer tests than the previous 8088 test suite, but test coverage is better overall due to improved instruction generation methods.” For now, the tests focus on the 286 running in real mode. There are no “unreal” or protected mode tests, but [Daniel] aims to deliver the in the future.

[Daniel] uses the tests with the ArduinoX86, a platform that uses the microcontroller to control and test old-school CPUs. The tests aid with development of emulators like [Daniel’s] own MartyPC, by verifying the CPU’s behavior in a cycle-accurate way.

We’ve explored some secrets of the 286 before, too. If you’ve been doing your own digging into Intel’s old processors, or anyone else’s for that matter, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline.

[Thanks to Stephen Walters for the tip!]

The bed of a small CNC machine is shown. A plastic tub is on the bed, and in the tub is a sheet of metal under a pale green solution. In place of the spindle of the CNC, there is a rectangular orange tube extending down into the solution. A red wire runs to this tube, and a black wire runs to the sheet of metal in the tub.

Painting In Metal With Selective Electroplating

July 24, 2025 by 5 Comments

Most research on electroplating tries to find ways to make it plate parts more uniformly. [Ajc150] took the opposite direction, though, with his selective electroplating project, which uses an electrode mounted on a CNC motion system to electrochemically print images onto a metal sheet (GitHub repository).

Normally, selective electroplating would use a mask, but masks don’t allow gradients to be deposited. However, electroplating tends to occur most heavily at the point closest to the anode, and the effect gets stronger the closer the anode is. To take advantage of this effect, [ajc150] replaced the router of an inexpensive 3018 CNC machine with a nickel anode, mounted an electrolyte bath in the workspace, and laid a flat steel cathode in it. When the anode moves close to a certain point on the steel cathode, most of the plating takes place there.

To actually print an image with this setup, [ajc150] wrote a Python program to convert an image into set of G-code instructions for the CNC. The darker a pixel of the image was, the longer the electrode would spend over the corresponding part of the metal sheet. Since darkness wasn’t linearly proportional to plating time, the program used a gamma correction function to adjust times, though this did require [ajc150] to recalibrate the setup after each change. The system works well enough to print recognizable images, but still has room for improvement. In particular, [ajc150] would like to extend this to a faster multi-nozzle system, and have the algorithm take into account spillover between the pixel being plated and its neighbors.

This general technique is reminiscent of a metal 3D printing method we’ve seen before. We more frequently see this process run in reverse to cut metal.

2025 One Hertz Challenge: 555 Timer Gets A Signal From Above

July 24, 2025 by 7 Comments

One of the categories we chose for the One Hertz Challenge is “Could Have Used a 555.” What about when you couldn’t have, but did anyway? The 555 is famously easy to use, but not exactly the most accurate timer out there — one “ticking” at 1 Hz will pulse just about once per second (probably to within a millisecond, depending on the rest of the circuit), but when you need more precise timing, the 555 just won’t cut it. Not on its own, anyway.

An Allan deviation plot
Allan Deviation can be a bit confusing, but generally — lower is more accurate

This entry by [burble] shows us how the humble 555 can hold its own in more demanding systems with some help from a GPS receiver. He used the One Pulse per Second (1PPS) output from a GPS module to discipline the 1 Hz output from a 555 by modulating the control voltage with a microcontroller.

Okay, this sounds a bit like baking a cake by buying a cake, scraping all the icing off, then icing it yourself, but what better way to learn how to ice a cake? The GPS-disciplined 555 is way more accurate than a free running one — just check out that Allan Deviation plot. While the accuracy of the standard 555 begins to decrease as oscillator drift dominates, the GPS-disciplined version just keeps getting better (up to a point — it would also eventually begin to increase, if the data were recorded for long enough). Compared to other high-end oscillators though, [burble] describes the project’s accuracy in one word: “Badly.”

That’s okay though — it really is a fantastic investigation into how GPS-disciplined oscillators work, and does a fantastic job illustrating the accuracy of different types of clocks, and some possible sources of error. This project is a great addition to some of the other precision timekeeping projects we’ve seen here at Hackaday, and a very fitting entry to the competition. Think you can do better? Or much, much worse? You’ve got a few weeks left to enter!

2025 Hackaday One Hertz Challenge

A hand with dark skin holds a black device. The bottom is a small keyboard and touchpad. The upper half is split with a square LCD on the left and a square, pink notepad on the right. A sketch of a woman wearing a puffy jacket is on the notepad and an illustration of a woman looking through an old timey film video camera is on the screen on the left.

KeyMo Brings A Pencil To The Cyberdeck Fight

July 24, 2025 by 2 Comments

Computers and cellphones can do so many things, but sometimes if you want to doodle or take a note, pencil and paper is the superior technology. You could carry a device and a pocket notebook, or you could combine the best of analog and digital with the KeyMo.

[NuMellow] wanted a touchpad in addition to a keyboard for his portable terminal since he felt Raspbian wouldn’t be so awesome on a tiny touchscreen. With a wider device than something like Beepy, and a small 4″ LCD already on hand, he realized he had some space to put something else up top. Et voila, a cyberdeck with a small notebook for handwritten/hand drawn information.

The device lives in a 3D printed case, which made some iterations on the keyboard placement simpler, and [NuMellow] even provided us with actual run time estimates in the write-up, which is something we often are left wondering about in cyberdeck builds. If you’re curious, he got up to 7.5 hours on YouTube videos with the brightness down or 3.5 hours with it at maximum. The exposed screen and top-heaviness of the device are areas he’s pinpointed as the primary cons of the system currently. We hope to see an updated version in the future that addresses these.

If you’d like to check out some other rad cyberdecks, how about a schmancy handheld, one driven by punch cards in a child’s toy, or this one with a handle and a giant scroll wheel?

Supersonic Flight May Finally Return To US Skies

July 24, 2025 by 51 Comments

After World War II, as early supersonic military aircraft were pushing the boundaries of flight, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that commercial aircraft would eventually fly faster than sound as the technology became better understood and more affordable. Indeed, by the 1960s the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union all had plans to develop commercial transport aircraft capable flight beyond Mach 1 in various stages of development.

Concorde on its final flight

Yet today, the few examples of supersonic transport (SST) planes that actually ended up being built are in museums, and flight above Mach 1 is essentially the sole domain of the military. There’s an argument to be made that it’s one of the few areas of technological advancement where the state-of-the-art not only stopped moving forward, but actually slid backwards.

But that might finally be changing, at least in the United States. Both NASA and the private sector have been working towards a new generation of supersonic aircraft that address the key issues that plagued their predecessors, and a recent push by the White House aims to undo the regulatory roadblocks that have been on the books for more than fifty years.

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Teufel Introduces An Open Source Bluetooth Speaker

July 24, 2025 by 33 Comments

There are a ton of Bluetooth speakers on the market. Just about none of them have any user-serviceable components or replacement parts available. When they break, they’re dead and gone, and you buy a new one. [Jonathan Mueller-Boruttau] wrote in to tell us about the latest speaker from Teufel Audio, which aims to break this cycle. It’s a commercial product, but the design files have also been open sourced — giving the community the tools to work with and maintain the hardware themselves.

The project is explained by [Jonathan] and [Erik] of Teufel, who were part of the team behind the development of the MYND speaker. The basic idea was to enable end-user maintenance, because the longer something is functioning and usable, the lower its effective environmental footprint is. “That was why it was very important for us that the MYND be very easy to repair,” Erik explains. “Even users without specialist knowledge can replace the battery no problem.” Thus, when a battery dies, the speaker can live on—versus a regular speaker, where the case, speakers, and electronics would all be thrown in the garbage because of a single dead battery. The case was designed to be easy to open with minimal use of adhesives, while electronic components used inside are all readily available commercial parts.

Indeed, you can even make your own MYND if you’re so inclined. Firmware and hardware design files are available on GitHub under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license for those looking to repair their speakers, or replicate them from the ground up. The company developed its own speaker drivers, but there’s nothing stopping you from using off-the-shelf replacements if so desired.

It’s a strategy we expect few other manufacturers to emulate. Overall, as hackers, it’s easy to appreciate a company making a device that’s easy to repair, rather than one that’s designed to frustrate all attempts made. As our own Jenny List proclaimed in 2021—”You own it, you should be able to fix it!” Sage words, then as now!

A photo of the circuitry along with an oscilloscope

Eight Artificial Neurons Control Fully Autonomous Toy Truck

July 24, 2025 by 11 Comments

Recently the [Global Science Network] released a video of using an artificial brain to control an RC truck.

The video shows a neural network comprised of eight artificial neurons assembled on breadboards used to control a fully autonomous toy truck. The truck is equipped with four proximity sensors, one front, one front left, one front right, and one rear. The sensor readings from the truck are transmitted to the artificial brain which determines which way to turn and whether to go forward or backward. The inputs to each neuron, the “synapses”, can be excitatory to increase the firing rate or inhibitory to decrease the firing rate. The output commands are then returned wirelessly to the truck via a hacked remote control.

This particular type of neural network is called a Spiking Neural Network (SNN) which uses discrete events, called “spikes”, instead of continuous real-valued activations. In these types of networks when a neuron fires matters as well as the strength of the signal. There are other videos on this channel which go into more depth on these topics.

The name of this experimental vehicle is the GSN SNN 4-8-24-2 Autonomous Vehicle, which is short for: Global Science Network Spiking Neural Network 4 Inputs 8 Neurons 24 Synapses 2 Degrees of Freedom Output. The circuitry on both the vehicle and the breadboards is littered with LEDs which give some insight into how it all functions.

If you’re interested in how neural networks can control behavior you might like to see a digital squid’s behavior shaped by a neural network.

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