A SNES CPU Replacement Via FPGA

March 31, 2025 by 17 Comments

Let’s say you had a SNES with a busted CPU. What would you do? Your SNES would be through! That is, unless, you had a replacement based on an FPGA. [leonllr] has been developing just such a thing.

The project was spawned out of necessity. [leonllr] had purchased a SNES which was struck down with a dead CPU—in particular, a defective S-CPU revision A. A search for replacements only found expensive examples, and ones that were most likely stripped from working machines. A better solution was necessary.

Hence, a project to build a replacement version of the chip using the ICE40HX8K FPGA. Available for less than $20 USD, it’s affordable, available, and has enough logic cells to do the job. It’s not just a theoretical or paper build, either. [leonllr] has developed a practical installation method to hook the ICE40HX8K up to real hardware, which uses two flex PCBs to go from the FPGA mainboard to the SNES motherboard itself. As for the IP on the FPGA, the core of the CPU itself sprung from the SNESTANG project, which previously recreated the Super Nintendo on Sipeed Tang FPGA boards. As it stands, boards are routed, and production is the next step.

It’s nice to see classic hardware resurrected by any means necessary. Even if you can’t get a whole bare metal SNES, you might be able to use half of one with a little help from an FPGA. We’ve seen similar work on other platforms, too. Meanwhile, if you’re working to recreate Nintendo 64 graphics chips in your own basement, or something equally weird, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Leather Keyboard

March 31, 2025 by 13 Comments

Are you eager to get your feet wet in the keyboard surf, but not quite ready to stand up and ride the waves of designing a full-size board? You should paddle out with a macro pad instead, and take on the foam face-first and lying down.

A beautiful purple galaxy-themed macro pad with nine switches and three knobs.
Image by [Robert Feranec] via Hackaday.IO
Luckily, you have a great instructor in [Robert Feranec]. In a series of hour-long videos, [Robert] guides you step by step through each part of the process, from drawing the schematic, to designing a PCB and enclosure, to actually putting the thing together and entering a new world of macros and knobs and enhanced productivity.

Naturally, the fewer keys and things you want, the easier it will be to build. But [Robert] is using the versatile Raspberry Pi 2040, which has plenty of I/O pins if you want to expand on his basic plan. Not ready to watch the videos? You can see the schematic and the 3D files on GitHub.

As [Robert] says, this is a great opportunity to learn many skills at once, while ending up with something terrifically useful that could potentially live on your desk from then on. And who knows where that could lead?

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DIY Linear Tubular Motor Does Precise Slides

March 31, 2025 by 25 Comments

We’ve seen plenty of motor projects, but [Jeremy]’s DIY Tubular Linear Motor is a really neat variety of stepper motor in a format we certainly don’t see every day. It started as a design experiment in making a DIY reduced noise, gearless actuator and you can see the result here.

Here’s how it works: the cylindrical section contains permanent magnets, and it slides back and forth through the center of a row of coils depending on how those coils are energized. In a way, it’s what one would get by unrolling a typical rotary stepper motor. The result is a gearless (and very quiet) linear actuator that controls like a stepper motor.

While a tubular linear motor is at its heart a pretty straightforward concept, [Jeremy] found very little information on how to actually go about making one from scratch. [Jeremy] acknowledges he’s no expert when it comes to motor design or assembly, but he didn’t let that stop him from iterating on the concept (which included figuring out optimal coil design and magnet spacing and orientation) until he was satisfied. We love to see this kind of learning process centered around exploring an idea.

We’ve seen DIY linear motors embedded in PCBs and even seen them pressed into service as model train tracks, but this is the first time we can recall seeing a tubular format.

Watch it in action in the short video embedded below, and dive into the project log that describes how it works for added detail.

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Tiny Bubbles In The Memory

March 31, 2025 by 16 Comments

We are always fascinated by bubble memory. In the late 1970s, this was the “Next Big Thing” that, as you may have guessed, was, in fact, not the next big thing at all. But there were a number of products that used it as non-volatile memory at a time when the alternative was tape or disk. [Smbakeryt] has a cool word processor with an acoustic coupler modem made by Teleram. Inside is — you guessed it — bubble memory.

The keyboard was nonfunctional, but fixable. Although we wouldn’t have guessed the problem. Bubble memory was quite high tech. It used magnetic domains circulating on a thin film of magnetic material. Under the influence of a driving field, the bubbles would march past a read-write head that could create, destroy, or read the state of the bubble.

Why didn’t it succeed? Well, hard drives got cheap and fairly rugged. The technology couldn’t compete with the high-density hard drives that could be reached with improved heads and recording strategies. Bubble memory did find use in high-vibration items, but also wound up in things like this terminal, at least one oscilloscope, and a video game.

Bubble memory evolved from twistor memory, one of several pre-disk technologies. While they are hard to come by today, you can find the occasional project that either uses some surplus or steals a part off of a device like this one.

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A Prototyping Board With Every Connector

March 30, 2025 by 32 Comments

Prototyping is a personal affair, with approaches ranging from dead-bug parts on tinplate through stripboard and protoboard, to solderless breadboards and more. Whichever you prefer, a common problem is that they don’t offer much in the way of solid connections to the outside world. You could use break-out boards, or you could do like [Pakequis] and make a prototyping board with every connector you can think of ready to go.

The board features the expected prototyping space in the middle, and we weren’t joking when we said every connector. There are analogue, serial, USB, headers aplenty, footprints for microcontroller boards, an Arduino shield, a Raspberry Pi header, and much more. There will doubtless be ones that readers will spot as missing, but it’s a pretty good selection.

We can imagine that with a solderless breadboard stuck in the middle it could be a very useful aid for teaching electronics, and we think it would give more than a few commercial boards a run for their money. It’s not the first we’ve featured, either.

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Reconfigurable FPGA For Single Photon Measurements

March 30, 2025 by 6 Comments

Detecting single photons can be seen as the backbone of cutting-edge applications like LiDAR, medical imaging, and secure optical communication. Miss one, and critical information could be lost forever. That’s where FPGA-based instrumentation comes in, delivering picosecond-level precision with zero dead time. If you are intrigued, consider sitting in on the 1-hour webinar that [Dr. Jason Ball], engineer at Liquid Instruments, will host on April 15th. You can read the announcement here.

Before you sign up and move on, we’ll peek into a bit of the matter upfront. The power lies in the hardware’s flexibility and speed. It has the ability to timestamp every photon event with a staggering 10 ps resolution. That’s comparable to measuring the time it takes light to travel just a few millimeters. Unlike traditional photon counters that choke on high event rates, this FPGA-based setup is reconfigurable, tracking up to four events in parallel without missing a beat. From Hanbury-Brown-Twiss experiments to decoding pulse-position modulated (PPM) data, it’s an all-in-one toolkit for photon wranglers. [Jason] will go deeper into the subject and do a few live experiments.

Measuring single photons can be achieved with photomultipliers as well. If exploring the possibilities of FPGA’s is more your thing, consider reading this article.

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Hackaday Links: March 30, 2025

March 30, 2025 by 12 Comments

The hits just keep coming for the International Space Station (ISS), literally in the case of a resupply mission scheduled for June that is now scrubbed thanks to a heavy equipment incident that damaged the cargo spacecraft. The shipping container for the Cygnus automated cargo ship NG-22 apparently picked up some damage in transit from Northrop Grumman’s Redondo Beach plant in Los Angeles to Florida. Engineers inspected the Cygnus and found that whatever had damaged the container had also damaged the spacecraft, leading to the June mission’s scrub.

Mission controllers are hopeful that NG-22 can be patched up enough for a future resupply mission, but that doesn’t help the ISS right now, which is said to be running low on consumables. To fix that, the next scheduled resupply mission, a SpaceX Cargo Dragon slated for an April launch, will be modified to include more food and consumables for the ISS crew. That’s great, but it might raise another problem: garbage. Unlike the reusable Cargo Dragons, the Cygnus cargo modules are expendable, which makes them a great way to dispose of the trash produced by the ISS crew since everything just burns up on reentry. The earliest a Cygnus is scheduled to dock at the ISS again is sometime in this autumn, meaning it might be a long, stinky summer for the crew.

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