Screenshot of the email received: Hi there, Upon a thorough review by our Risk Control Team, we are sorry to inform you that, your account access will be permanently disabled on December 13th, 2025 due to compliance policy requirements. Before this date, you may: 1) Complete any existing orders. 2) Pickup components from your parts inventory. 3) Withdraw your remaining account balance (JLC Balance) 4) Back up your historical Gerber Files or any other information. Please note that after December 13th, 2025, your account will be permanently locked and cannot be reopened. Best Regards, The JLCPCB Risk Control Team

JLCPCB Locking Accounts, Mentions “Risky IP Addresses, Activities”

October 19, 2025 by 75 Comments

In the past week, a few forum and Reddit threads have popped up, with people stating that JLCPCB has emailed them with a notice, saying their accounts are set up for terminations after an assessment by JLCPCB’s “Risk Control Team”. Reasons given are vague, the terminations are non-appealable, and if you’re planning a JLCPCB order sometime soon, it can certainly come as a surprise. From the looks of it, the accounts restricted do not appear to be tied to any specific country – and not even from the same “kind” of countries.

As quite a few people have observed, the JLCPCB reasoning resembles a compliance action way more than it resembles any sort of internal policy. A few days ago, JLCPCB has released a statement on their blog, claiming that a “history of risky IP addresses and risky activities” would be grounds for a termination, and mentioning “compliance” in ways that would hint at external legal pressures.

By now, quickly checking around Reddit and some other places, we’ve counted at least ten people affected so far – most of them have received emails about account closures, but at least one person has reported a denial when attempting to place an order, instead of getting an email ahead of time. The latter hints that there’s a number of people not yet notified about their account getting terminated, and the amount of people actually affected might very well be a fair bit larger than we can see.

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A Walk Down PC Video Card Memory Lane

September 28, 2025 by 30 Comments

These days, video cards are virtually supercomputers. When they aren’t driving your screen, they are decoding video, crunching physics models, or processing large-language model algorithms. But it wasn’t always like that. The old video cards were downright simple. Once PCs gained more sophisticated buses, video cards got a little better. But hardware acceleration on an old-fashioned VGA card would be unworthy of the cheapest burner phone at the big box store. Not to mention, the card is probably twice the size of the phone. [Bits and Bolts] has a look at several old cards, including a PCI version of the Tseng ET4000, state-of-the-art of the late 1990s.

You might think that’s a misprint. Most of the older Tseng boards were ISA, but apparently, there were some with the PCI bus or the older VESA local bus. Acceleration here typically meant dedicated hardware for handling BitBlt and, perhaps, a hardware cursor.

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NEC V20: The Original PC Processor Upgrade

September 27, 2025 by 17 Comments

In the early 1980s, there was the IBM PC, with its 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 processor. It was an unexpected hit for the company, and within a few years there were a host of competitors. Every self-respecting technology corporation wanted a piece of the action including processor manufacturers, and among those was NEC with their V20 chip and its V30 sibling. From the outside they were faster pin-compatible 8088 and 8086 clones, but internally they could also run both 8080 and 80186 code. [The Silicon Underground] has a look back at the V20, with some technical details, history, and its place as a PC upgrade.

For such a capable part it’s always been a surprise here that it didn’t take the world by storm, and the article sheds some light on this in the form of an Intel lawsuit that denied it a critical early market access. By the time it was available in quantity the PC world had moved on from the 8088, so we saw it in relatively few machines. It was a popular upgrade for those in the know back in the day though as it remains in 2025, and aside from its immediate speed boost there are a few tricks it lends to a classic PC clone. The version of DOS that underpinned Windows 95 won’t run on an 8086 or 8088 because it contains 8016 instructions, but a V20 can run it resulting in a much faster DOS experience. One to remember, if an early PC or clone cones your way.

Hungry for the good old days of DOS? You don’t need to find 80s hardware for that.

Think You Need A New PC For Windows 11? Think Again

September 18, 2025 by 25 Comments

As the sun sets on Windows 10 support, many venues online decry the tsunami of e-waste Windows 11’s nonsensical hardware requirements are expected to create. Still more will offer advice: which Linux distribution is best for your aging PC? [Sean] from Action Retro has an alternate solution: get a 20 year old Sun Workstation, and run Windows 11 on that. 

The Workstation in question from 2005 is apparently among the first Sun made using AMD’s shiny new 64-bit Opteron processor. Since Windows has no legacy 32-bit support– something it shares with certain Linux distributions– this is amongst the oldest hardware that could conceivably install and run Redmond’s latest.

And it can! Not in unaltered form, of course– the real hack here is courtesy of [ntdevlabs], whose “Tiny11” project strips all the cruft from Windows 11, including its hardware compatibility checker. [ntdevlabs] has produced a Tiny11Builder script that is available on GitHub, but the specific version [Sean] used is available on Archive.org.

[Sean] needed the archived version of Tiny11 because Windows 11 builds newer than 22H2 use the POPCNT operation, which was not present in AMD’s first revision of the x86_64 instruction set. POPCNT is part of Intel’s SSE4 extension from 2007, a couple years after this workstation shipped.

If you’re sick of being told to switch to Linux, but can’t stomach staying with Windows either, maybe check out Haiku, which we reported as ready for daily driving early last year.

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PCBs The Prehistoric Way

September 18, 2025 by 46 Comments

When we see an extremely DIY project, you always get someone who jokes “well, you didn’t collect sand and grow your own silicon”. [Patrícia J. Reis] and [Stefanie Wuschitz] did the next best thing: they collected local soil, sieved it down, and fired their own clay PCB substrates over a campfire. They even built up a portable lab-in-a-backpack so they could go from dirt to blinky in the woods with just what they carried on their back.

This project is half art, half extreme DIY practice, and half environmental consciousness.  (There’s overlap.)  And the clay PCB is just part of the equation. In an effort to approach zero-impact electronics, they pulled ATmega328s out of broken Arduino boards, and otherwise “urban mined” everything else they could: desoldering components from the junk bin along the way.

The traces themselves turned out to be the tricky bit. They are embossed with a 3D print into the clay and then filled with silver before firing. The pair experimented with a variety of the obvious metals, and silver was the only candidate that was both conductive and could be soldered to after firing. Where did they get the silver dust? They bought silver paint from a local supplier who makes it out of waste dust from a jewelry factory. We suppose they could have sat around the campfire with some old silver spoons and a file, but you have to draw the line somewhere. These are clay PCBs, people!

Is this practical? Nope! It’s an experiment to see how far they can take the idea of the pre-industrial, or maybe post-apocalyptic, Arduino. [Patrícia] mentions that the firing is particularly unreliable, and variations in thickness and firing temperature lead to many cracks. It’s an art that takes experience to master.

We actually got to see the working demos in the flesh, and can confirm that they did indeed blink! Plus, they look super cool. The video from their talk is heavy on theory, but we love the practice.

DIY clay PCBs make our own toner transfer techniques look like something out of the Jetsons.

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Old Phone Upcycled Into Pico Projector, ASMR

September 11, 2025 by 30 Comments

To update an old saying for the modern day, one man’s e-waste is another man’s bill of materials. Upcycling has always been in the hacker’s toolkit, and cellphones provide a wealth of resources for those bold enough to seize them. [Huy Vector] was bold enough, and transformed an old smartphone into a portable pico projector and an ASMR-style video. That’s what we call efficiency!

Kidding aside, the speech-free video embedded below absolutely gives enough info to copy along with [Huy Vector] even though he doesn’t say a word the whole time. You’ll need deft hands and a phone you really don’t care about, because one of the early steps is pulling the LCD apart to remove the back layers to shine an LED through. You’ll absolutely need an old phone for that, since that trick doesn’t apply to the OLED displays that most flagships have been rocking the past few years.

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NFC Hidden In Floppy Disk For Retro-Themed PC

August 29, 2025 by 13 Comments

As we all look across a sea of lifeless, nearly identically-styled consumer goods, a few of us have become nostalgic for a time when products like stereo equipment, phones, appliances, homes, cars, and furniture didn’t all look indistinguishable. Computers suffered a similar fate, with nearly everything designed to be flat and minimalist with very little character. To be sure there are plenty of retro computing projects to recapture nostalgia, but to get useful modern hardware in a fun retro-themed case check out this desktop build from [Mar] that hides a few unique extras.

The PC itself is a modern build with an up-to-date operating system, but hidden in a 386-era case with early-90s styling. The real gem of this build though is the floppy disk drive, which looks unaltered on the surface. But its core functionality has been removed and in its place an Arduino sits, looking for NFC devices. The floppy disks similarly had NFC tags installed so that when they interact with the Arduino, it can send a command to the computer to launch a corresponding game. To the user it looks as though the game loads from a floppy disk, much like it would have in the 90s albeit with much more speed and much less noise.

Modern industrial design is something that we’ve generally bemoaned as of late, and it’s great to see some of us rebelling by building unique machines like this, not to mention repurposing hardware like floppy drives for fun new uses (which [Mar] has also open-sourced on a GitHub page). It’s not the first build to toss modern hardware in a cool PC case from days of yore, either. This Hot Wheels desktop is one of our favorites.