Hackaday Links Column Banner

Hackaday Links: June 7, 2026

June 7, 2026 by 4 Comments

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey isn’t hitting theaters for another month or so, but if you’re already planning your trip to the cineplex, you may want to check out this page on the movie’s website which lets you view the trailer in the six (!) different formats it’s being released in.

We don’t really have an opinion on the big-screen adaptation of the epic tale as a piece of media, but from a technical standpoint, it’s interesting to see how the viewing experience changes between the 70mm IMAX version with an aspect ratio of 1.43:1 and the 35mm cut at 2.39:1. Unfortunately, the website offers no way to approximate what the movie will look like once compressed, streamed over the Internet, and displayed on a cheap TCL TV, to say nothing of how the viewing experience will be impacted should you watch the movie on your phone by way of a series of short YouTube clips while going to the bathroom. Maybe Nolan is saving that for his next film.

If you head over to the movies in one of Waymo’s vehicles, you can feel a little better about the long-term ecological impact of your trip thanks to a recently announced partnership between the autonomous car maker and B2U Storage Solutions. Under the agreement, old batteries pulled from Waymo’s fleet of self-driving electric cars will get a second life as localized grid storage.

The idea is that batteries which no longer hold enough charge to power a robo-taxi should still have enough capacity to store the energy produced by renewable sources so it can be doled out later when the demand goes up. By installing these batteries in the cities that Waymo actually operates their vehicles in, they don’t have to worry about shipping them around either — they can just yank them out of the car, and wire them right into the grid. Of course, eventually the batteries will be too cooked to adequately perform in this role as well, but this should give them a few more productive years before they get torn down and scrapped.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: June 7, 2026” →

Bluetooth Gramophone Has Surprisingly Contemporary Roots

June 7, 2026 by 14 Comments

So you happen to have a gramaphone– maybe a big old Victrola/HMV, perhaps a Columbia– regardless of brand, it’s a big, beautiful conversation peice for your living room. It might not be the most practical listening device, since isnomuch as there is a vinyl renessance, it’s restricted to vinyl, not the old shellac 78s the these all-mechanical beasts were born for. [JGJMatt] decided to bring his gramophone into the 21st century, turning it into a bluetooth speaker without altering any of its original internals.

What’s really interesting is that this hack was once a commercial product– sort of. Back in the 1920s when everyone was listening to Jazz, the problem of ‘ what do I do with this massive gramophone cabinet when I’m not cutting a rug?’ was equally valid, and a solution was found: the Dulce-Tone Radio Speaker. A very weak speaker sits under the needle, turning the gramaphone mechanism into an amplifier for the radio. The very same concept, [JGJMatt] would work equally well in the 2020s with a bluetooth signal as in the 1920s with an AM one. There’s no demo video for this project, but you can hear how its 1920s inspiration sounded in the video below.

The driver for this device is made using a neodymium magnet and the voice coil from a 3W speaker. A 3D-printed needle-holder captures the gramophone’s needle– a much thicker and sturdier thing than the tiny diamond-tip you’d find on a modern turntable, we should note– and holds the magnet to it. The voice coil gets driven via a MH-M38 bluetooth module, and everything is held in a nice 3D-printed case along with the battery.

The hack is, of course, totally reversible: at any moment, you can remove the needle from this device and drop it on a 78 for some Jazz-era fun, or swap back for 21st century brainrot. If you happen to have some of those old shellac records and a modern turntable, note it takes more than the right RPM to get good sound. Continue reading “Bluetooth Gramophone Has Surprisingly Contemporary Roots” →

How Small Can You Make A C Executable?

June 7, 2026 by 41 Comments

It’s well known that the difference in executable size between a compiled binary and one hand-written in optimized assembler will be significant. The compiler brings in all manner of boilerplate whether it needs all of it or not, which is responsible for the extra space. [Weineng] has fallen down the rabbit hole of trying to make the smallest possible gcc-compiled C executable, and the resulting write-up is a fascinating read.

Surprisingly the smallest C program isn’t “Hello World”, but one which simply does nothing but return 0. This results in a binary weighing in at a surprisingly large 15,816 bytes — something which surely could be improved. There follows a set of clever compiler flags and bits of code manipulation to remove some debugging information, and strip out unnecessary stuff executed before void main().

At 13,632 bytes it’s still a little on the chunky side, so it’s time to examine what libraries it brings in. More compiler flags get it down to 8,704 bytes. Removing a code comment section and error handling with more flags takes it to 4,320 bytes. Then there’s code which dictates how memory is allocated, which brings it down to 400 bytes. That’s an impressive reduction!

Reading this as hardware people we maybe don’t have the elite knowledge of compiler flags it takes to manage something like this. But we’ve all at times had to reduce the size of a bit of software, so we’re sure some of the techniques used are going to be interesting to quite a few readers.

After all, even hardware people need to trim the fat at times.

LIPS Is An Open Source Sip-And-Puff Interface

June 7, 2026 by 4 Comments

Lots of us have– thanks to repetative stress injuries– developed mobility issues that we have to work around when using computers. Maybe it’s a trackball instead of a mouse, or a split keyboard, or mechanical keys with very specific force requirements– but those are small potatoes compared to people with such severe movement issues such as quadriplegia who need to fall back on things like a sip-and-puff device to control the computer with their mouths. Commercial options of course come with absurd price tags, but a DIY option is a different story. [DanielYordanov]’s L.I.P.S project can be built for only a couple percent of what the big boys want, and it’s fully-open source.

So you might think a sip-and-puff device is a two-bit interface, only slightly more advanced than the morse terminal we featured earlier. While Morse code might be an option, these devices also act as pointers, as the lips and chin can be used to point the mouthpiece. Thus there are a few sensors needed: a hall-effect joystick for pointing info, and one or more pressure sensors to detect the breathing interface for ‘clicks’. [Daniel] has single and dual-sensor versions, creating at minimum a four-button mouse. In reality this hardware can distinguish long and short pulses, or combinations of breath to run some nice macros. With operating-system features like an on-screen keyboard, L.I.P.S. can provide someone with digital freedom– and at a tiny fraction of the cost of a ‘real’ medical device.

Despite the DIY nature, for the end-user control and config is easy enough thanks to a webserial portal run on the CH552 that you can preview on the official website. Code, ki-cad and STL files are all on his GitHub repository. If you’re interested in the design process, we’ve embedded his video about that below.

Thanks to [Daniel] for the tip! Do you know of a hack to make life better for someone, disabled or otherwise? Send us a tip!

From one-handed typing to open-source prosthesis, this sort quality-of-life hack may be the best thing about our community. Continue reading “LIPS Is An Open Source Sip-And-Puff Interface” →

A New Life For A Rare Console

June 7, 2026 by 6 Comments

One of the delights of our tips line is that from time to time it brings us retrocomputing hardware that, despite years of reporting, we were not aware existed. [Hitmanmcc] has just such a machine, an NEC PC Engine LT. It’s a PC engine in a laptop form factor, and like many of this super-rare console, it has succumbed to capacitor failure. We’re treated to the process of bringing it back to life.

Replacing capacitors was only part of the story for this repair, as the electrolyte had caused damage elsewhere on the board. In particular there is a small transformer that forms part of an inverter to generate an LCD bias voltage, and this had been destroyed. Fortunately the art of switching power conversion has advanced in the decades since the console was produced, and a small module was procured to do the same job.

The result of all this surgery is another rare console rescued from e-waste, and an opportunity for the rest of us to take a look too. The PC engine is a relative rarity here, but we’ve had a few hacks over the years. This converter for its American cousin is one.

Apparently what a fusion power plant should look like

Less Than 10 Years? Commonwealth Fusion Systems Applies To Plug Into Grid In 2030s

June 7, 2026 by 44 Comments

Whenever the topic of fusion power comes up, someone will say it’s only 10 years away from commercialization in an excited tone, and someone older or more cynical will point out that it’s been 10 years away since Eisenhower was president. So it’s with a certain-sized crystal of sodium chloride that we share the news here that the US-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems is applying to feed 400MWe into the grid there by the early 2030s.

The early 2030s is, notably, less than ten years from now.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems isn’t a bunch of nobodies out to suck up venture capital; they’re a talented group of researchers from MIT’s well-known plasma laboratory out to suck up lots of venture capital and hopefully build reactors along the way. So far, the second part is going better than the first: they’ve raised a couple billion dollars, which has let them make great strides in building their SPARC reactor– like crafting the big magnet we told you about in 2021. As that article describes, SPARC is the precursor to the later, larger ARC reactor they hope to hook to the grid in slightly under a decade. Alas, SPARC remains under construction as of this writing. ARC is evidently in the final planning stages, with a physical location determined and grid-tie applied for at the “Fall Line Fusion Power Station” in Virginia.

CFS’s reactors are of the Tokamak type that has been favoured at universities since the 1970s. From China to Europe’s ITER who are also planning to produce power before another decade passes— though not, notably, into a power grid. While promising, Tokamaks aren’t the only game in town, either– steampunk startup General Fusion started making plasma last year, though while if it works it has some big advantages, that one is probably the traditional “ten years away” still.

What do you think? Will fusion power be in the grid before humans make it back to the moon? Add the flying-car potential of eVTOL and we might finally get close to the future we were promised.

A RayCast FPS In COBOL

June 6, 2026 by 4 Comments

COBOL is not the first language anyone would ever think of when writing a First Person Shooter– after all , it’s the Common Business Oriented Language, not the Common Game Oriented Language. For Youtube-based hacker [icitry] though, that’s the point. The only way to determine if COBOL would be enough to write an FPS game was to do it.

Sure, you could rest on your laurels knowing that the language is Turing complete and therefore capable by definition, but what’s the fun in that? Now the pipeline for this game is as hacky as anything– COBOL doesn’t exactly have a robust graphics stack or a lot of libraries for pushing pixles, so he’s outputting each frame of the game as raw bitmap to STDOUT, and letting ffplay assemble the images. Control enters the same way, with the terminal set to raw input and the COBOL program reading STDIN.

As for what the images consist of, he’s going for a standard Wolfenstien-inspired raycasting shooter. [icitr] provides a decent explanation of the raycasting algorithm, along with why implementing in COBOL is a silly thing to try. That’s a theme here; he’s able to implement sprites and the logic to move and attack enemies, while constantly complaining about COBOL. If that wasn’t enough, he adds variable-height sectors to bring this much closer to a true DOOM clone. By the end, there’s a full game. It’s all up on GitHub on an Apache license.

While this video is not the most gentle introduction to COBOL, it does show you can hack the business-specific language to do whatever you’d like.