2026 Hackaday Supercon: Announcing Our First Round Of Speakers

September 23, 2026 by No comments

Supercon is the Ultimate Hardware Conference™ and you need to be there November 6-8 in Pasadena, California! Below is just the tip of the speakers’ iceberg, but if that’s not enough to convince you to attend, well, stay tuned and we’ll reveal more speakers early next week.

Speakers, workshops, food, drink, music, badge hacking, and general merriment? That’s what we do every year at our annual gathering. This year is even bigger, as we’re moving a few blocks south to the Art Center campus, so be sure to come join us. Get your tickets now.

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How Pixar Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love Linux

September 23, 2026 by 64 Comments

If you weren’t already aware, it will probably come as no surprise to hear that the pioneering computer-animation studio Pixar built its early workflow on Silicon Graphics SGI workstations. These were beefy Unix machines that, as the name implied, were developed for graphical work. When the age of the RISC workstation came to a close, many Unix users were pushed onto Windows NT — but not at Pixar. At Pixar, they learned to love the penguin.

It comes down to hardware rather than software. You know the story: PCs got faster and cheaper with different vendors competing for a giant market, while the world of RISC workstations couldn’t keep its lead. Pixar would have been happy staying on Unix workstations, even SGIs if that had been a practical option — but with every project increasing the load on the render farms, it wasn’t. Yet Pixar’s entire workflow was predicated on a Unix environment. They had written a couple million lines of code for their internal use, and really didn’t want to port it over to Windows, even after a mistaken rm command nearly cost the world Toy Story 2.

The path of least resistance would be to port to something more similar to IRIX’s Unix environment, something POSIX compliant. That path led Linux, and by 2001, the port was done. By 2003, a new render farm using Xeon processors brought the whole studio to Linux and x86, which has since become an industry standard.

We’re left with only two questions: one, why didn’t more industries — like the CAD/CAM world — that were also reliant on Unix Workstations follow Pixar and Hollywood onto Linux, and two, why did Pixar go with Linux instead of some variety of BSD? [Crierlon] doesn’t address either question, but we’re betting some of you might have an idea. Let us know in the comments if you have the inside scoop; inquiring minds want to know!

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A JavaScript OS For The ESP32

September 23, 2026 by 19 Comments

Given the incredible power of modern microcontrollers, we’ve seen quite a few attempts to turn them into more general purpose computers over the years. KryonOS from [Haris] is the latest, and it takes a slightly different path from the norm in that it’s a JavaScript based operating system for the ESP32.

It takes the form of an OS with a simple GUI and graphics library, and a built-in JavaScript runtime interpreter. It runs on a wide variety of ESP32 boards with screens, including the ubiquitous Cheap Yellow Display. It has full access to the SD card filesystem, and an API for using the hardware. Perhaps most interestingly it has an app store for downloadable software, which immediately reminds us of Europe’s Badge.Team. Their SHA2017 badge spawned a succession of devices that continues to this day, and offered a similar experience using Python.

We like this project, and think it has potential due to the ease of JavaScript development for so many people used to working with the web. There was a time when Python running on microcontrollers sounded pretty far fetched, and look where we are now.

Myst On The Atari 2600

September 22, 2026 by 16 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 9 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 21 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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