2025: As The Hardware World Turns

January 5, 2026 by 28 Comments

If you’re reading this, that means you’ve successfully made it through 2025! Allow us to be the first to congratulate you — that’s another twelve months of skills learned, projects started, and hacks….hacked. The average Hackaday reader has a thirst for knowledge and an insatiable appetite for new challenges, so we know you’re already eager to take on everything 2026 has to offer.

But before we step too far into the unknown, we’ve found that it helps to take a moment and reflect on where we’ve been. You know how the saying goes: those that don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. That whole impending doom bit obviously has a negative connotation, but we like to think the axiom applies for both the lows and highs in life. Sure you should avoid making the same mistake twice, but why not have another go at the stuff that worked? In fact, why not try to make it even better this time?

As such, it’s become a Hackaday tradition to rewind the clock and take a look at some of the most noteworthy stories and trends of the previous year, as seen from our rather unique viewpoint in the maker and hacker world. With a little luck, reviewing the lessons of 2025 can help us prosper in 2026 and beyond.

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GitHub Disables Rockchip’s Linux MPP Repository After DMCA Request

January 5, 2026 by 64 Comments

Recently GitHub disabled the Rockchip Linux MPP repository, following a DMCA takedown request from the FFmpeg team. As of writing the affected repository remains unavailable. At the core of this issue is the Rockchip MPP framework, which provides hardware-accelerated video operations on Rockchip SoCs. Much of the code for this was lifted verbatim from FFmpeg, with the allegation being that this occurred with the removal of the original copyright notices and authors. The Rockchip MPP framework was further re-licensed from LGPL 2.1 to the Apache license.

Most egregious of all is perhaps that the FFmpeg team privately contacted Rockchip about this nearly two years ago, with clearly no action taken since. Thus FFmpeg demands that Rockchip either undoes these actions that violate the LGPL, or remove all infringing files.

This news and further context is also covered by [Brodie Robertson] in a video. What’s interesting is that Rockchip in public communications and in GitHub issues are clearly aware of this license issue, but seem to defer dealing with it until some undefined point in the future. Clearly that was the wrong choice by Rockchip, though it remains a major question what will happen next. [Brodie] speculates that Rockchip will keep ignoring the issue, but is hopeful that he’ll be proven wrong.

Unfortunately, these sort of long-standing license violations aren’t uncommon in the open source world.

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The clock and the rebuilt calculator from which its VFD was donated.

An RPN Calculator And A Bonus VFD Clock From Casio Revival

January 5, 2026 by 15 Comments

Have you heard the saying “the problem is the solution”? It seems to originate in the permaculture movement, but it can apply equally well to electronics. Take the problem [shiura] had: a Casio Mini CM-602 that had let out the magic smoke. The solution was a twofer: rebuild the Casio into a modern number cruncher with Reverse Polish Notation (RPN), and save the Vacuum Fluorescent Display (VFD) for a gorgeous WiFi clock.

[shiura]’s write-up includes a helpful guide for reverse engineering the pins on this sort of VFD, if you don’t happen to have the same model calculator (or VFD tube) they’re working with. If you’ve done this sort of thing, you know what to expect: power it up and kill power to the pins, one by one, to map out which segments or characters go out, thereby identifying the anodes and grid electrodes. The cathodes had already been ID’d from looking at the PCB. After that it’s just a matter of wiring the VFD to an ESP32 via a transistor array to get the voltages right, and voila! Clock. The code and case design files for this clock — including an editable .blend — are available via GitHub.

The calculator half of the project is an incredibly elegant hack that relies on the fact that the Casio’s CPU has the same pin pitch as modern micros: 2.54 mm, or 0.1″, so an RP2040 zero can sit in the footprint of the original CPU, scanning the keypads with its GPIO. Then an I2C display is separately wired up to replace the clockified VFD. Perhaps some driver circuitry for the VFD died, or [shiura] salvaged the display before deciding to save the calculator, because otherwise we see no reason why this brain transplant couldn’t be done while keeping the original display. Admittedly having two lines on the display instead of one make the “new” calculator a tad more usable. The code for that is also available on GitHub, and while the readme is in Japanese, machine translations have gotten pretty good and the code is quite readable on its own.

Longtime readers will likely be familiar with [shiura]’s work, with a number of finely crafted clocks having been featured from the Japanese maker, along with vintage pocket computer repairs. Bringing both together makes this twin hack particularly on-brand.

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[Mark] shows off footage from a D1 master on the repaired deck

Reviving ReBoot With A Tape Deck Repair

January 4, 2026 by 19 Comments

Do you remember ReBoot? If you were into early CGI, the name probably rings a bell, since when it premiered in 1994 it was the first fully computer-animated show on TV. Some time ago, a group found a pile of tapes from Mainframe Studios in Canada, the people behind ReBoot, and the computer historians amongst us were very excited… until they turned out to be digital broadcast master tapes. Exciting for fans of lost media, sure, but not quite the LTO backups of Mainframe’s SGI workstations some of us had hoped would turn up. Still, [Mark Westhaver], [Bryan Baker] and others at the “ReBoot Rewind” project have made great strides, to the point that in their latest update video they declare “We Saved ReBoot”

What does it take to revive a 30-year-old television project? Well, as stated, they started with the tapes. These aren’t ordinary VHS tapes: the Sony D-1 tapes, which were also known by the moniker “4:2:2”, are a format that most people who didn’t work in the TV or film industry will have never seen, and the tape decks are rare as hen’s teeth these days. Just getting a working one, and keeping it working, was one of the biggest challenges [Mark] and Reboot Rewind faced. In the end it took three somewhat-dodgy machines long past their service lives and a miraculously located spare read/write head to get a stable scanning rate.

The uncompressed digital output of these tapes isn’t something you can just burn to a DVD, either. The 720 × 576 resolution video stream is captured raw, but there are minor editing tweaks that need to be made in addition to tape errors that have cropped up over the years, and those need to be dealt with before the video and audio data gets encoded into a modern format. The video briefly glosses [Bryan Baker]’s workflow to do just that. At least they aren’t stuck with terrible USB video capture dongles VHS lovers have to deal with. Even if you don’t care about ReBoot, this isn’t the only show that was archived on D1 tapes so that workflow might be of interest to media fans.

We covered ReBoot Rewind when they were first searching for tape decks, so it’s great to have an update. Alas, the rights holders haven’t yet decided how exactly they’re going to release this fine footage, so if like this author you have fond memories of ReBoot, you may have to wait a bit longer for a reWatch.

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Bicycle Tows 15,000 Pounds

January 4, 2026 by 13 Comments

An old joke in physics is that of the “spherical cow”, poking fun at some of the assumptions physicists make when tackling a new problem. Making the problem simple like this can help make its fundamentals easier to understand, but when applying these assumptions to real-world problems these assumptions are quickly challenged. Which is what happened when [Seth] from Berm Peak attempted to tow a huge trailer with a bicycle — while in theory the bike just needs a big enough gear ratio he quickly found other problems with this setup that had to be solved.

[Seth] decided on a tandem bike for this build. Not only does the second rider add power, but the longer wheelbase makes it less likely that the tongue weight of the trailer will lift the front wheel off the ground. It was modified with a Class 3 trailer hitch, as well as a battery to activate the electric trailer brakes in case of an emergency. But after hooking the trailer up the first time the problems started cropping up. At such a high gear ratio the bike is very slow and hard to keep on a straight line. Some large, custom training wheels were added between the riders to keep it stable, but even then the huge weight still caused problems with the chain and even damaged the bike’s freehub at one point.

Eventually, though, [Berm Peak] was able to flat tow a Ford F-150 Lightning pulling a trailer a few yards up a hill, at least demonstrating this proof of concept. It might be the absolute most a bicycle can tow without help from an electric motor, although real-world applications for something like this are likely a bit limited. He’s been doing some other bicycle-based projects with more utility lately, including a few where he brings abandoned rental e-bikes back to life by removing proprietary components.

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Print Pixel Art To A Floppy Disk

January 4, 2026 by 2 Comments

Here at Hackaday we love floppy disks. While they are by no means a practical or useful means of storing data in the age of solid state storage, there is something special about the little floppy disc of magnetic film inside that iconic plastic case. That’s why we were so excited to see the tool [dbalsom] developed for printing pixel art in a floppy’s track timing diagrams!

Floppy timing diagrams are usually used to analyze the quality of an individual disk. It represents flux transitions within a single floppy tack as a 2D graph. But it’s also perfectly possible to “paint” images on a floppy this way. Granted, you can’t see these images without printing out a timing diagram, but if you’re painting images onto a floppy, that’s probably the point.

This is where pbm2track comes in handy! It takes bitmap images and encodes them onto floppy emulators, or actual floppies. The results are quite excellent, with near-perfect recreation in floppy graphical views. The results on real floppies are also recognizable as the original image. The concept is similar to a previous tool [dbalsom] created, PNG2disk

If you, too, love the nearly forgotten physical likeness of the save button, make sure to check out this modern Linux on a floppy hack next!

Thanks [gloriouscow] for the tip!

Modifying A QingPing Air Quality Monitor For Local MQTT Access

January 4, 2026 by 7 Comments

The QingPing Air Quality Monitor 2 is an Android-based device that not only features a touch screen with the current air quality statistics of the room, but also includes an MQTT interface that normally is used in combination with the QingPing mobile app and the Xiaomi IoT ecosystem. Changing it to report to a local MQTT server instead for integration with e.g. Home Assistant can be done in an official way that still requires creating a cloud account, or you can just do it yourself via an ADB shell and some file modifications as [ea] has done.

By default these devices do not enumerate when you connect a computer to their USB-C port, but that’s easily resolved by enabling Android’s developer mode. This involves seven taps on the Device Name line in the About section of settings. After this you can enter Developer Options to toggle on Debug Mode and Adbd Debugging, which creates the option to connect to the device via USB with ADB and open up a shell with adb shell.

From there you can shoot off the QingSnow2 app and the watchdog.sh that’s running in the background, disable IPv6 and edit /etc/host to redirect all the standard cloud server calls to a local server. Apparently there is even SSH access at this point, with root access and password rockchip. The MQTT configuration is found under /data/etc/ in settings.ini, which is used by the QingPing app, so editing redirects all that.

Of course, the device also queries a remote server for weather data for your location, so if you modify this you have to provide a proxy, which [ea] did with a simple MQTT server that’s found along with other files on the GitHub project page.