A Status Screen For Bambu Labs Printers

May 17, 2026 by 9 Comments

If you’ve got a Bambu Labs printer, it’s usually pretty straightforward to keep an eye on it via the onboard display or the various apps the company has released. However, if you want a dedicated display somewhere remote from your printer, you might like this build from [Keralots].

The project is based on an ESP32-S3 Super Mini, paired with a 1.54″ TFT display with a 240 x 240 resolution. It’s set up to talk to Bambu Labs printers over MQTT with TLS. It harvests status data and uses it to display a real-time dashboard with critical printer parameters display on arc gauges. There’s also plenty of live stats to pore over, as well as buzzer notifications if you want auditory alerts about what is going on. It’s possible to use with just about any Bambu Labs printer with a Bambu Cloud access token; otherwise, you can tinker with LAN Direct connections on certain models, but you might need to enable Developer Mode depending on your rig.

If you want to monitor your printer’s vital statistics at a glance, this project is a great way to do it. It breaks out the fundamental numbers in a clear and obvious fashion that’s a little easier to parse quickly compared to the interface of the official software. We’ve featured similar builds before, too. If you’re also paranoid about prints and using that to motivate you towards creating useful hardware, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline. 

Turning A Junk Laptop Screen Into A Portable Monitor

May 17, 2026 by 18 Comments

Sure, you can buy a portable monitor off your favorite e-tailer, but with perfectly fine displays in devices like laptops being tossed out every single day, why not repurpose those instead? That’s what [ScuffedBits] recently did with the panels  pulled from some old laptops.

A good question with any such salvaged panel is just how practical it is to still use them, with disqualifying features being things like passive-matrix TFTs as well as the use of CCFL backlighting as with one of the three panels demonstrated in the video.

Looking up the model number of a panel on a site like panelook.com will tell you the display technology, resolution and other important details before you decide to commit to using it. If it’s using a LED backlight and at least Low-Voltage Differential Signaling (LVDS) but ideally eDP you can likely find a cheap driver board for it that has all the requisite inputs like HDMI and power.

The hardest part is probably the case for the panel, as they’re rather thin and fragile. Here [ScuffedBits] opted to 3D print two different types of cases, with the second variant probably being the best version as it protects most of the panel. Installing these is quite easy: slide the panel into the first half, then add the second half of the case to close it up. Permanently keeping the case in place was left as an exercise to a future [ScuffedBits], while demonstrating why it’s definitely the hardest part of repurposing an old laptop display.

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Hackaday Links: May 17, 2026

May 17, 2026 by 3 Comments

To start things off, we’d like to extend a special thanks to everyone who joined us for Hackaday Europe this weekend in Lecco, Italy. It was 48 hours of fascinating talks, incredible badge hacks, and some of the greatest company you could hope for. For those who couldn’t make it in person, we didn’t forget you — expect to hear more about what went down once we get a chance to catch our collective breath.

That’s not the only thing to keep an eye out for in the coming days. This is your reminder that Amazon will be officially ending support for older Kindles in a few days. After May 20th, any of the megacorp’s e-readers that were introduced before 2012 will be persona non grata, so you should plan accordingly.

The biggest change is that these older devices won’t be able to buy digital books from Amazon, but you can still use them offline, and the fantastic Calibre makes it a breeze to load up content from other sources. To be perfectly honest, we’d advise any Kindle user to decouple their device from the Amazon mothership by using Calibre or even jailbreaking it and installing KOReader, so the end of official support is fine by us. In fact, if a surge of unsupported Kindles brings more attention and users to those projects, that suits us just fine.

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NFC Record Player Promotes Intentional Listening

May 17, 2026 by 9 Comments

Streaming services have enabled many of us to have easy access to the world’s media library at the touch of a screen, but [Coconauts] thinks we’ve lost something along the way. To bring some intentionality back to the listening experience, they built an NFC record player called Minilos.

Like a normal record player, Minilos requires the user to select an album to play on the machine. These were originally decorative coasters with records printed on them, so they are much smaller than even a 45. Each one features an NFC tag that instructs ESP32 microcontroller hidden in the device to play the requested song. Once placed on the record player, it will then play through that album and come to a stop.

In [Coconauts]’s current setup, the ESP32 is connected to a Home Assistant server which then instructs a Google Speaker to play the requested song via Spotify, although we could easily imagine this being used to play music directly from an SD card or other digital storage device instead.

If you want complete control over your music listening while still keeping that authentic vinyl experience, you could always look into cutting your own records with a laser.

CGA As You Have Never Seen It Before

May 17, 2026 by 10 Comments

An old-style graphics system as found on many 8-bit computers and on early PC graphics cards drew its characters by retrieving their bitmaps from a ROM. With a little sideways thinking, [GloriousCow] has exploited this process to make a CGA card perform graphical tricks it was never designed to do.

The CGA card clocks its character ROM continuously across the whole screen, even at the edges where nothing would normally be displayed. By placing the ROM in tandem with a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 they were able to use this ROM clocking as a synchronization signal, and inject whatever pixel data they chose.

The result is a CGA card that can display 60 Hz high-res graphics in text mode, albeit with a very retro one bit color depth. It can overlay the text and the graphics too, because the ROM is still present. One fun result of this is a bouncing DVD logo screensaver, on a DOS PC.

There’s a PCB and a promise of more, meanwhile we suggest you take a look at an impossible feat using a similar technique: NES Doom.

Qualcomm’s New QCC74x Appears To Target The ESP32 MCUs

May 17, 2026 by 36 Comments

These days wireless microcontrollers featuring built-in WiFi and Bluetooth are all the rage, with Espressif’s range of ESP32 MCUs being the default option for commercial and hobbyist projects alike. This makes Qualcomm’s recently released QCC74x MCU rather interesting, as specification-wise it would seem to be placed firmly in ESP32 territory.

On the radio side you get 1×1 WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.4, and IEEE 802.15.4 (e.g. Thread and Zigbee), coupled with a single-core 352 MHz RISC-V CPU with FPU and DSP features and 484 kB of SRAM. The SDK for this MCU is hosted on Codelinaro, featuring the typical FreeRTOS-based stack, though confusingly Bluetooth and Zigbee support are currently marked as ‘not supported’. This might still be in progress.

Where the competition with Espressif feels clear is in the pricing, with the highest-performance evaluation board (QCC748M EVK, pictured above) listed for $13 (before taxes/tariffs). This gets you 8 MB of PSRAM built-in with unspecified link speed, but likely the same QSPI as used for the NOR Flash. USB support is available on this higher-end tier, while absent on the QCC743. Development documentation is also available, and looks fairly complete based on first glance.

Overall the QCC74x looks to be an upgrade to the older and significantly less powerful QCC730 MCU. Depending on software support and final pricing it could make for an interesting competitor to some of Espressif’s modules like its ESP32-C series or ESP32-S2, though the upcoming ESP32-S31 would seem to have it matched or beat on all metrics.

Extract 3D Video Game Content By Firing Up Photo Mode

May 17, 2026 by 10 Comments

Here’s a pretty clever method [Dung3onlord] used to capture 3D scenes from a PlayStation 5 without needing any specialized software. All that’s needed is a series of high-resolution screenshots, and a few software tools.

The process is essentially photogrammetry, it just uses screenshots as the input instead of photographs.

Instead of sneakily yanking 3D assets from the runtime, he fires up the game’s photo mode on his PS5. By capturing an orbiting video of a static scene (making sure to hide the game’s user interface, something photo mode in games is good for) he ends up with a video file whose content — essentially a series of screenshots — can be used to reconstruct the original 3D scene. The workflow [Dung3onlord] uses has rather more steps, but conceptually that’s all there is to it.

The whole process is remarkably similar to photogrammetry, a method of turning a bunch of photographs from different angles into a 3D point cloud. We’ve seen photogrammetry used to digitize objects because point clouds can be turned into 3D models, essentially allowing one to 3D scan an object using little more than a digital camera.

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