Flight sims are wonderful to play around with to get immersed in the position of a pilot. Racing sims can give you a thrill that can only be beaten by the real thing. However, most of this tech is on the more expensive side, so it would be great if you could use some of the hardware already found in your house. Many Sony headphones already have rotation and movement data built in for spatial audio, so why not start there?
[Nicholas Slattery] had this very idea and has produced an open-source application to connect your headphones straight to your sim. There’s a surprising amount of support built into many headsets that use a known protocol called the Android Head Tracker HID protocol. This allowed [Nicholas] to connect a family of Sony headphones straight into OpenTrack, which is often used with flight sims. The best part is you can still use the headphones as normal with a Bluetooth connection.
If you want to give this a try with your own rig, check out [Nicholas]’s GitHub here. While flight and driving sims might be expensive to put together, it’s never too hard to hack together something to lower that barrier! Whether it’s a flight sim force-feedback joystick or driving sim hand-breaks we got you!


The 19th century was an absolutely electrifying era, including in a literal sense. Although the phenomenon of electricity had been known by that time for centuries, actually making it do useful work was a much taller order. Aside from big, coal-powered generators, there also was a need for a more compact electrochemical solution, such as in the form of a wet or dry cell. One of the first major commercial successes here came in the form of the Leclanché cell, such as the genuine version that [Big Clive] found in an old UK building’s attic and 




What do you get when you take 8,192 CH570 MCUs, put them on custom PCBs, and write firmware for this interconnected gaggle of cores? In the case of [bitluni]’s project, you get