Drum Machina Go! As A New Music Tool For The Game Boy

October 1, 2026 by 7 Comments

The Nintendo Game Boy is quite possibly the most popular console in the international chiptune community. You might have seen musicians cranking out tunes with LSDJ or Nanoloop, but now there’s a new option for writing bangers on the DMG. It’s Drum Machina Go!, put together by [audiowanderer].

The original Game Boy has a four-bit audio engine with two pulse channels, one waveform channel, and a noise channel. To that end, DMGo! gives you those four channels to play with, each with a 16-step sequencer. There’s also an FX section, ADSR controls, and various filtering options to make your sound juicier, richer, or grainier, depending on your taste.

There are also helpful sync options via the link port, such as for use with other Game Boys, or you can use PULSE OUT sync to hook up to your Teenage Engineering Pocket Operators or KORG Volcas if you have them. There are also fun features like the MANGLING FX which lets you decay and destroy your musical creations live by playing with the D-pad and buttons.

If you’re eager to try a new way to compose on the Game Boy, you can throw it on a flash cart or in an emulator and start tinkering away.  We’ve featured other fun Game Boy music hacks before, too, like this nifty project that turns it into a MIDI sequencer.

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Archiving The World’s Oldest Webcam Feed

October 1, 2026 by 12 Comments

FogCam is the oldest webcam feed that’s still up and running. Installed at San Francisco State University, it’s been slowly uploading a new image to the web every 20 to 60 seconds or so since September 30, 1994. Very few of those images have ever been saved, but [Justin Earl] has come along to fix that with Fog-Bank.

[Justin] was eager to have top-notch coverage of the FogCam, so set up four separate catchers across three separate networks to scrape images from the feed. He runs one on his own server, one on his home machine, and two small programs running on Cloudflare. Each catcher reports the time it grabbed a fresh image from the site. FogCam has never replaced an image within 19 seconds, so as long as one of the catchers grabs an image at least every 18 seconds, [Justin]’s system should be archiving everything that’s being captured.

Currently the archive hosts over 169,000 images across 377 days, though the majority of that content is from a 2019 archive effort when it was believed the camera would soon be shut down. More stats are available, too.

It’s not the most interesting view in the world, but it’s neat to see such a project continue running long enough to celebrate its 32nd birthday this week. We’ve featured other neat webcam-related content before, too. Meanwhile, you can go check out the live feed if you want to peer through FogCam yourself. Continue reading “Archiving The World’s Oldest Webcam Feed” →

Two diaphragm vacuum pump setups with high-tech jam jar vacuum vessel. (Credit: Maya Posch)

Vacuum Drying And Making Stuff Hot In A Vacuum

October 1, 2026 by 19 Comments

After previously exploring the impact of vapor pressure on the drying of desiccant and more, the conclusion was essentially that in order to drive moisture that’s not directly on a material’s surface out of it, you pretty much have to heat up said material to make the process not take forever. Of course, we’d still want to retain the vacuum while doing said heating, which raises the question of how you best heat something that is inside a vacuum.

Fortunately, this is a solved problem, with commentators to the previous article helpfully pointing to the existence of devices like vacuum ovens. Of course, you can either buy such a device and not worry your pretty little head about the finer details, or you can defy convention and build one yourself because you’re a rebel and really want to know how their internals work.

Thus in this article we’ll be taking a look at the finer details of generating thermal radiation and how to best heat up a sample inside a vacuum chamber without directly picking easy mode with microwaves.

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The Whole Computer Is Vim

October 1, 2026 by 41 Comments

Love it or hate it, Vim, the vi-compatible minimalist editor, is a common denominator between a huge array of operating systems. If you need to edit a file, it’s usually safe to expect it there if your normal editor is absent. Now thanks to [Omwah] it’s moved onto the most meager of platforms, where it becomes the firmware itself rather than a program running on an OS.

ESP-Vim is, as its name suggests, Vim, for some of the ESP32 series of microcontrollers. It boots straight into the familiar editor on an attached screen, and it has filesystem and git access, along with MicroPython. It’s a small computer for working with text files and some basic scripting, and we like the idea.

It needs a board with an ESP32-S3 or P4, with 16 MB of Flash and at least 8 MB of PSRAM. There’s a list of boards that meet this spec, and we can’t help noticing that one of them is the version of the Cheap Yellow Display that comes with an S3. Hook up a Bluetooth keyboard and you’re in.

How easy it will be to use remains to be seen, but bearing in mind that the vi interface followed by Vim was designed for very slow terminals in a much earlier decade, and it could be just right for these platforms. Would you use one?

Vim logo: The Vim project, VIM License.

SDR– Lets You Patch Together Your Setup

October 1, 2026 by 14 Comments

It is often helpful to think of a radio as a series of interconnected functional blocks—hence the use of block diagrams to convey how a given radio operates. [Julian Haag] has brought this ethos to SDR–, a software-defined radio program where you can patch together your setup.

There are many software defined radio tools out there, with various interfaces and methods of configuration. [Julian] wanted to keep things intuitive and simple, and so built SDR– with an interface similar to that of a modular synth. You drop in blocks, like a radio, a demodulator, or a speaker, and then you link them together with patch cables to route the signals where they need to go.

[Julian] has populated the tool with plenty of useful decoders, too, so you can have lots of fun from the get go. You can play with things like ADS-B, POCSAG, SSTV, DAB, and RDS right out of the box. There’s also some fun passive radar and direction finding tools there too if you want to dive in. Files are on GitHub for the curious.

We’ve featured lots of neat SDR hacks over the years, like this neat real-time beamforming setup. Meanwhile, if you’re cooking up your own radio experiments in the homelab, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline.

DIY Game Console Does It With Optical Discs

September 30, 2026 by 14 Comments

Optical media may be dead for video games on the big corporate consoles, but not in [Emmet]’s heart– or on his DIY game console, that he built specifically to use optical media. Not fancy blu-ray or newfangled DVDs, either, but good old fashioned CDs from the Orange Book.

Yeah, he’s not fitting modern AAA flagship games on those disks, but the Intel N150 on the single board computer he’s using isn’t going to power through them, either. That’s fine, though, because there are literally decades of content this machine can handle. That’s why the board is running Batocera, which is a Linux distro tailor-made for retrogaming on x86– and also ARM, but that’s not important here.

He’s using ESP32-S3s to run custom wireless gamepads with BLE, which means he’s got more power in each of them than some of the retro consoles this machine is emulating, but it gets the job done. Unlike some cartridge projects we’ve seen that merely queue up the games, the CDs on this one actually do seem to store the ROM file, along with a shell script to put it in the correct emulator’s library. We might have gone with autorun, but it’s [Emmet]’s console and he’s got it working how he likes.

What really makes this project stand out, in our opinion, is the effort [Emmet] put into custom CD labels and art for the jewel cases. It really makes this feel like an actual game console and not just a PC hooked to a the TV. The 3D printed case doesn’t hurt in that respect, either.

Be it from a nostalgia, as in this project, a need for cheap storage, or the perverse desire to hook it to an NES, optical media seems to be having a bit of a moment. Speaking of moment, we’re going to have to take a moment to come to grips with the fact that CDs have become nostalgic. Didn’t they just replace vinyl?

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Quantum computer

Will Superconducting Transistors Help Quantum Computers?

September 30, 2026 by 25 Comments

Despite all the glamorous promises made about quantum computing, it’s hard to make the argument that today’s quantum computers hold a candle to the sheer practicality of classical computers, especially when qubits need to be cuddled at cryogenic temperatures inside a cryostat. This is worsened by the problem that regular semiconductor transistors do not really appreciate these same cryogenic temperatures, creating an awkward interfacing problem for the controlling electronics.

Now a new pitch here is to create superconducting transistors that will happily work at temperatures near absolute zero. In an article in IEEE Spectrum this start-up – called S-Transistors – and their concept are covered.

By being able to have the control circuits inside the same cryostat, one can forego the absolute mess of wiring that has to penetrate it, and with it one major failure point. Their proposed solution uses the same Josephson junctions (JJs) that are also used for qubits, using a high enough current to briefly make it non-superconducting, inducing a voltage pulse that can be detected.

In addition, JJ-based field effect transistors (JJFETs) are used, with this 2025 paper by [Yusheng Xiong] et al. detailing these structures. Here S–Transistors claims that they are now able to manufacture JJFETs at scale, which would be another major breakthrough that could bring quantum computing just a little bit closer.

They’d be competing with cryogenic CMOS (Cry-CMOS), which can use standard semiconductor production lines to create circuits that can withstand cryogenic temperatures, albeit not quite a the near-zero K level that these superconducting transistors and JJFETs would be capable of.