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Hackaday Links: August 24, 2025

August 24, 2025 by 9 Comments

“Emergency Law Enforcement Officer Hologram program activated. Please state the nature of your criminal or civil emergency.” Taking a cue from Star Trek: Voyager, the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency is testing a holographic police officer, with surprisingly — dare we say, suspiciously? — positive results. The virtual officer makes an appearance every two minutes in the evening hours in a public park, presumably one with a history of criminal activity. The projection is accompanied by a stern warning that the area is being monitored with cameras, and that should anything untoward transpire, meat-based officers, presumably wearing something other than the dapper but impractical full-dress uniform the hologram sports, will be dispatched to deal with the issue.

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ESP32 bus pirate

ESP32 Sets Sail As A Modern Bus Pirate Powerhouse

August 24, 2025 by 4 Comments

Bus Pirate is nearly a household name in the hardware hacking world. The first version came out way back in 2008, and there have been several revisions since then. You can buy pre-built Bus Pirate devices, but there’s also the option now to build our own. The ESP32 Bus Pirate project has everything you need to turn an ESP32 device into a protocol sniffing/decoding powerhouse—all on a board you may have sitting around from another project.

There are a ton of solutions when it comes to talking to different buses —I2C, UART, JTAG, you name it, there’s a purpose-built device for it. Over a decade ago, Dangerous Prototypes released the Bus Pirate, offering a Swiss Army knife of a tool to interface with this ever-expanding list of communications standards. The ESP32 Bus Pirate project is open-source firmware for ESP32s that gives them the ability to be the multi-tool that lets us communicate with a long list of protocols.

It supports a wide variety of devices, from the straightforward ESP32 S3 Dev Kit available from a long list of suppliers to the more specialized M5 Cardputer equipped with its own keyboard. The original Bus Pirate required plugging the board into a PC to use it; with this being ESP32-based, that’s no longer a limitation. So long as you can supply power to the ESP32, you can connect and control it via WiFi and a web browser. In addition to the Bus Pirate protocols, the project allows us to directly control the pins on the ESP32 board, should you want to do more with it besides interfacing with one of the supported protocols. Be sure to check out some of our other articles about Bus Pirate, as it’s been a fantastic tool for the hacker community over the years.

Wire Photo Fax Teardown

August 24, 2025 by 14 Comments

Fax machines had a moment in the sun, but they are actually much older than you might expect. Before the consumer-grade fax machines arrived, there was a thriving market for “wire photos” used by, for example, news organizations and the weather service. In the United States, the WEFax from Western Electric was fairly common and shows up on the surplus market. [Thomas] has an English unit, a Muirhead K-570B, that is very clearly not a consumer-oriented machine. His unit dates back to 1983, but it reminds us of many older designs. Check out his teardown in the video below.

The phone line connection on this device is a pair of banana jacks! There are even jacks for an external meter. Inside, the device is about what you’d expect for a 1983 build. PCBs with bare tinned conductors and lots of through-hole parts.

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A golden robotic hand is shown in the main picture performing the sign for the letter "g": pointing to the left, with all fingers except for the index finger curled. In the top left of the image, a human hand is shown imitating this position.

Ambidextrous Robot Hand Speaks In Signs

August 24, 2025 by 5 Comments

As difficult as it is for a human to learn ambidexterity, it’s quite easy to program into a humanoid robot. After all, a robot doesn’t need to overcome years of muscle memory. Giving a one-handed robot ambidexterity, however, takes some more creativity. [Kelvin Gonzales Amador] managed to do this with his ambidextrous robot hand, capable of signing in either left- or right-handed American Sign Language (ASL).

The essential ingredient is a separate servo motor for each joint in the hand, which allows each joint to bend equally well backward and forward. Nothing physically marks one side as the palm or the back of the hand. To change between left and right-handedness, a servo in the wrist simply turns the hand 180 degrees, the fingers flex in the other direction, and the transformation is complete. [Kelvin] demonstrates this in the video below by having the hand sign out the full ASL alphabet in both the right and left-handed configurations.

The tradeoff of a fully direct drive is that this takes 23 servo motors in the hand itself, plus a much larger servo for the wrist joint. Twenty small servo motors articulate the fingers, and three larger servos control joints within the hand. An Arduino Mega controls the hand with the aid of two PCA9685 PWM drivers. The physical hand itself is made out of 3D-printed PLA and nylon, painted gold for a more striking appearance.

This isn’t the first language-signing robot hand we’ve seen, though it does forgo the second hand. To make this perhaps one of the least efficient machine-to-machine communication protocols, you could also equip it with a sign language translation glove.

Pong Cloned By Neural Network

August 24, 2025 by 9 Comments

Although not the first video game ever produced, Pong was the first to achieve commercial success and has had a tremendous influence on our culture as a whole. In Pong’s time, its popularity ushered in the arcade era that would last for more than two decades. Today, it retains a similar popularity partially for approachability: gameplay is relatively simple, has hardwired logic, and provides insights about the state of computer science at the time. For these reasons, [Nick Bild] has decided to recreate this arcade classic, but not in a traditional way. He’s trained a neural network to become the game instead.

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The 32 Bit 6502 You Never Had

August 24, 2025 by 43 Comments

In the beginning was the MOS6502, an 8-bit microprocessor that found its way into many famous machines. Some of you will know that a CMOS 6502 was created by the Western Design Center, and in turn, WDC produced the 65C816, a 16-bit version that was used in the Apple IIgs as well as the Super Nintendo. It was news to us that they had a 32-bit version in their sights, but after producing a datasheet, they never brought it to market. Last October, [Mike Kohn] produced a Verilog version of this W65C832 processor, so it can be experienced via an FPGA.

The description dives into the differences between the 32, 16, and 8-bit variants of the 6502, and we can see some of the same hurdles that must have faced designers of other chips in that era as they moved their architectures with the times while maintaining backwards compatibility. From our (admittedly basic) understanding it appears to retain that 6502 simplicity in the way that Intel architectures did not, so it’s tempting to imagine what future might have happened had this chip made it to market. We’re guessing that you would still be reading through an Intel or ARM, but perhaps we might have seen a different path taken by 1990s game consoles.

If you’d like to dive deeper into 6502 history, the chip recently turned 50.

Thanks [Liam Proven] for the tip.

The Oscilloscope From 1943

August 23, 2025 by 5 Comments

[Thomas] comes up with some unusual gear. In his latest teardown and repair video, he has a vintage 1943 Danish oscilloscope,  a Radiometer OSG32 on the bench. It isn’t lightweight, and it certainly looks its age with a vintage cracked finish on the case. You can check out the tubes and high-voltage circuitry in the video below.

If you’ve only seen the inside of a modern scope, you’ll want to check this out with giant condensers (capacitors) and a slew of tubes. We love seeing the workmanship on these old chassis.

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