Bring Back The BIOS! (To UEFI Systems, That Is)

May 29, 2025 by Jenny List 22 Comments

At the dawn of the PC, IBM provided the Basic Input Output System (BIOS). It took care of bringing the machine up, and exposed a series of software hooks for the hardware. Over the years the BIOS and its updated descendants served us well, but as we entered a 64-bit world its limitations began to show.

The replacement was the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface or UEFI, and the chances are you’re viewing this on a machine which uses it in some capacity. But what if you only have UEFI and need BIOS to run a piece of older software? Never fear, because here’s CSMWrap, which brings it back, just for you.

Under the hood it’s a wrapper for the SeaBIOS compatibility support module, doing the work of setting up the memory mapping such that it will load, and ensuring that other services such as the VGA BIOS are loaded. As it stands it can boot FreeDOS and some older Windows versions under UEFI in QEMU, and it’s claimed also run on real hardware. We don’t often need to run DOS on our 2025 machine, but it’s neat to know we can.

Meanwhile if the BIOS interests you, know that there’s also an open source BIOS for the earliest of PCs.

BIOS header image: Thomas Schanz, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Cost Of A Cheap UPS Is 10 Hours And A Replacement PCB

May 29, 2025 by Maya Posch 27 Comments

Recently [Florin] was in the market for a basic uninterruptible power supply (UPS) to provide some peace of mind for the smart home equipment he had stashed around. Unfortunately, the cheap Serioux LD600LI unit he picked up left a bit to be desired, and required a bit of retrofitting.

To be fair, the issues that [Florin] ended up dealing with were less about the UPS’ capability to deal with these power issues, and more with the USB interface on the UPS. Initially the UPS seemed to communicate happily with HomeAssistant (HA) via Network UPS Tools over a generic USB protocol, after figuring out what device profile matched this re-branded generic UPS. That’s when HA began to constantly lose the connection with the UPS, risking its integration in the smart home setup.

The old and new USB-serial boards side by side. (Credit: VoltLog, YouTube)

After tearing down the UPS to see what was going on, [Florin] found that it used a fairly generic USB-serial adapter featuring the common Cypress CY7C63310 family of low-speed USB controller. Apparently the firmware on this controller was simply not up to the task or poorly implemented, so a replacement was needed.

The process and implementation is covered in detail in the video. It’s quite straightforward, taking the 9600 baud serial link from the UPS’ main board and using a Silabs CP2102N USB-to-UART controller to create a virtual serial port on the USB side. These conversion boards have to be fully isolated, of course, which is where the HopeRF CMT8120 dual-channel digital isolator comes into play.

After assembly it almost fully worked, except that a Sonoff Zigbee controller in the smart home setup used the same Silabs controller, with thus the same USB PID/VID combo. Fortunately in Silabs AN721 it’s described how you can use an alternate PID (0xEA63) which fixed this issue until the next device with a CP2102N is installed

As it turns out, the cost of a $40 UPS is actually 10 hours of work and $61 in parts, although one cannot put a value on all the lessons learned here.

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Tool Turns SVGs Into Multicolor 3D Prints

May 28, 2025 by Donald Papp 3 Comments

Want to turn a scaled vector graphic into a multicolor 3D print, like a sign? You’ll want to check out [erkannt]’s svg2solid, a web-based tool that reads an SVG and breaks the shapes up by color into individual STL files. Drag those into your slicer (treating them as a single object with multiple parts) and you’re off to the races.

This sign was printed face-down on a textured build plate. The colors only need to be a few layers deep.

This is especially handy for making 3D printed versions of things like signs, and shown here is an example of exactly that.

It’s true that most 3D printer software supports the .svg format natively nowadays, but that doesn’t mean a tool like this is obsolete. SVG is a 2D format with no depth information, so upon import the slicer assigns a arbitrary height to all imported elements and the user must make any desired adjustments manually. For example, a handy tip for making signs is to make the “background” as thick as desired but limit colored elements to just a few layers deep. Doing so minimizes filament switching while having no impact on final visual appearance.

Being able to drag SVGs directly into the slicer is very handy, but working with 3D models has a certain “what you see is what you get” element to it that can make experimentation or alternate applications a little easier. Since svg2solid turns an SVG into discrete 3D models (separated by color) and each with user-defined heights, if you find yourself needing that then this straightforward tool is worth having in your bookmarks. Or just go straight to the GitHub repository and grab your own copy.

On the other hand, if you prefer your 3D-printed signs to be lit up in a faux-neon style then here’s how to do that in no time at all. Maybe there’s a way to mix the two approaches? If you do, be sure to use our tips line to let us know!

Banner for article: A Love Letter to Embedded Systems.

A Love Letter To Embedded Systems By V. Hunter Adams

May 28, 2025 by John Elliot V 7 Comments

Today we’re going to make a little digression from things that we do to look at perhaps why we do the things that we do. This one is philosophical folks, so strap yourselves in. We’ve had an interesting item arrive on the tips line from [Bunchabits] who wanted to let us know about a video, Love Letter to Embedded Systems, from [V. Hunter Adams].

[V. Hunter Adams] is Lecturer of Electrical Engineering at Cornell University and is on the web over here: vanhunteradams.com

In this forty three minute video [Hunter] makes an attempt to explain why he loves engineering, generally, and why he loves embedded systems engineering, specifically. He tries to answer why you should love engineering projects, what makes such projects special, and how you can get started on projects of your own. He discusses his particular interest in other unrelated subjects such as birds and birdsong, and talks a little about the genius of polymath Leonardo da Vinci.

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Invisible PC Doubles As Heated Seat

May 28, 2025 by Tyler August 20 Comments

Some people really want a minimalist setup for their computing. In spite of his potentially worrisome housing situation, this was a priority for the man behind [Basically Homeless]: clean lines on the desk. Where does the PC go? You could get an all-in-one, sure, but those use laptop hardware and he wanted the good stuff. So he decided to hide the PC in the one place no one would ever think to look: inside his chair. (Youtube video, embedded below.)

This chair has very respectable specs: a Ryzen 7 9800XD, 64GB of ram and a RTX 4060 GPU, but you’d never know it. The secret is using 50 mm aluminum standoffs between the wooden base of the seat and the chair hardware to create room for low-profile everything. (The GPU is obviously lying sideways and connected with a PCIe riser cable, but even still, it needed a low-profile GPU.) This assemblage is further hidden 3D printed case that makes the fancy chair donated from [Basically Homeless]’s sponsor look basically stock, except for the cables coming out of it. It’s a very niche project, but if you happen to have the right chair, he does provide STLs on the free tier of his Patreon.

This is the first time we’ve seen a chair PC, but desk PCs are something we’ve covered more than once, so there’s obviously a demand to hide the electronics. It remains to be seen if hiding a PC in a chair will catch on, but if nothing else [Basically Homeless] will have a nice heated seat for winter. To bring this project to the next level of minimalism, we might suggest chording keyboards in the armrests, and perhaps a VR headset instead of a monitor.

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From Burnt To Brilliant: A Toaster’s Makeover

May 28, 2025 by Matt Varian 26 Comments

Appliances fail, but that doesn’t mean it’s the end for them. This impressive hack from [solopilot] shows the results possible when not just fixing but also improving upon its original form. The toaster’s failed function selector switch presented an opportunity to add smart features to the function selection and refine control over its various settings.

Before upgrading the toaster, [solopilot] first had to access its components, which is no trivial task with many modern appliances. Photos document his process of diving into the toaster, exposing all the internals to enable the upgrade. Once everything was accessible, some reverse engineering was required to understand how the failed function selector controlled the half-dozen devices it was wired to.

Next came the plan for the upgrades—a long list that included precise temperature control and the ability to send an SMS showing the state of your meal. A Raspberry Pi Zero, a solid-state relay, a relay control board, and a thermocouple were added to the toaster, unlocking far more capability and control than it had originally. Some tuning is required to fully enable these new features and to dial in the precision this once run-of-the-mill toaster is now capable of.

The work wasn’t limited to the toaster itself. [solopilot] also seized the opportunity to create an Android app with speech recognition to control his now one-of-a-kind Cuisinart. It’s probably safe to say his TOA-60 is currently the smartest toaster in the world. If you check out his documentation, you’ll find all the pinouts, circuits, code, and logic explanations needed to add serious improvements to your own toaster. We’ve featured several other toaster oven projects over the years, most of which have focused on turning them into reflow ovens, so it’s exciting to see one aimed at improving upon its original design.

FLOSS Weekly Episode 834: It Was Cool In 2006

May 28, 2025 by Jonathan Bennett 2 Comments

This week Jonathan chats with Ben Meadors and Rob Campbell about the boatload of software Microsoft just released as Open Source! What’s the motivation, why is the new Edit interesting, and what’s up with Copilot? Watch to find out!

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