Render of a simple clockwork orrery

Planetary Poetry With A Tiny Digital Core

Some hacks just tickle the brain in a very particular way. They’re, for a change, not overly engineered; they’re just elegant, anachronistic, and full of mischief. That’s exactly what [Frans] pulls off with A Gentleman’s Orrery, a tiny, simple clockwork solar system. Composed of shiny brass and the poise of 18th-century craftsmanship, it hides a modern secret: there’s barely any clockwork inside. You can build it yourself.

Mechanism of a simple clockwork orreryPeek behind the polished face and you’ll find a mechanical sleight of hand. This isn’t your grandfather’s gear-laden planetarium. Instead of that, it operates on a pared-down system that relies on a stepper motor, driving planetary movement through a 0.8 mm axle nested inside a 1 mm brass tube. That micro-mechanical coupling, aided by a couple of bevel gears, manages to rotate the Moon just right, including its orientation. Most of the movement relies on clever design, not gear cascades. The real wizardry happens under the hood: a 3D-printed chassis cradles an ESP32-C6, a TTP223 capacitive touch module, STSPIN220 driver, and even a reed switch with magnetic charging.

You can even swap out the brass for a stone shell where the full moon acts as the touch control. It’s tactile, it’s poetic, and therefore, a nice hack for a weekend project. To build it yourself, read [Frans]’ Instructable.

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A weather forecast is shown on a blue monochrome cathode ray tube display. It is displaying current conditions, and displays a “The Weather Channel” graphic in the top left corner.

A CRT Display For Retro Weather Forecasting

It would be hard to find any electronics still in production which use CRT displays, but for some inscrutable reason it’s easy to find cheap 4-inch CRTs on AliExpress. Not that we’re complaining, of course. Especially when they get picked up for projects like this Retro CRT Weather Display from [Conrad Farnsworth], which recreates the interface of The Weather Channel’s WeatherStar 4000+ in a suitably 90s-styled format.

The CRT itself takes up most of the space in the enclosure, with the control electronics situated in the base behind the display driver. A Raspberry Pi Zero W provides the necessary processing power, and connects to the CRT through its composite video output.

A custom PCB plugs into the GPIO header on the Raspberry Pi and provides some additional features, such as a rotary encoder for volume and brightness display, a control button, a serial UART interface, and a speaker driver. The design still has one or two caveats: it’s designed to powered by USB, but [Conrad] notes that it draws more current than USB 2.0 can provide, though USB-C should be able to keep up.

On the software side, a Python program displays a cycle of three slides: local weather, regional weather, and a radar display. For the local and regional weather display graphics, [Conrad] created a static background image containing most of the graphics, and the program only generated the dynamic components. For the radar display, the regional map’s outlines come from Natural Earth, and a Python program overlays radar data on them.

We’ve seen other attempts at recreating the unique style of the WeatherStar system, but nothing quite beats the real thing.
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Bubble Displays Make A Neat Retro Clock

In 2025 we are spoiled for choice when it comes to displays, with affordable LCDs, OLEDs, TFTs, and e-ink panels of all sizes only a few clicks away. But in decades past, such exotica were not on the menu for casual construction. Instead there were a range of LED seven segment displays which have now largely passed out of use.

Among them were HP’s bubble displays, assemblies of miniature LEDs on a PCB, topped with plastic bubble lenses. If you had a calculator in the 1970s it probably had one, but in the present, [Joshua Coleman] has incorporated one into a pleasingly retro digital clock.

Inside the 3D printed case is an ESP32 with a pair of 74HC595 shift registers to drive the display, and an 18650 battery with all associated charging and protection circuitry. It’s a surprisingly simple circuit, and the code is provided on the page. He makes an apology to non-Americans for his use of US date formats, but we think few readers will be unable to change it to reflect the only date format which really matters.

If you find a bubble display, hang on to it. They’re certainly something we’ve seen before here a few times.

Two hands soldering components on a purpble PCB

Vintage Intel 8080 Runs On A Modern FPGA

If you’re into retro CPUs and don’t shy away from wiring old-school voltages, [Mark]’s latest Intel 8080 build will surely spark your enthusiasm. [Mark] has built a full system board for the venerable 8080A-1, pushing it to run at a slick 3.125 MHz. Remarkable is that he’s done so using a modern Microchip FPGA, without vendor lock-in or proprietary flashing tools. Every step is open source.

Getting this vintage setup to work required more than logical tinkering. Mark’s board supplies the ±5 V and +12 V rails the 8080 demands, plus clock and memory interfacing via the M2GL005-TQG144I FPGA. The design is lean: two-layer PCB, basic level-shifters, and a CM32 micro as USB-to-UART fallback. Not everything went smoothly: incorrect footprints, misrouted gate drivers, thermal runaway in the clock section; but he managed to tackle it.

What sets this project apart is the resurrection of a nearly 50-year-old CPU. It’s also, how thoroughly thought-out the modern bridge is—from bitstream loading via OpenOCD to clever debugging of crystal oscillator drift using a scope. [Mark]’s love of the architecture and attention to low-level detail makes this more than a show-off build.
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C64 on desk with NFC TeensyROM and game token

TeensyROM NFC Game Loading On The C64

When retro computing nostalgia meets modern wireless wizardry, you get a near-magical tap-to-load experience. It’ll turn your Commodore 64 into a console-like system, complete with physical game cards. Inspired by TapTo for MiSTer, this latest hack brings NFC magic to real hardware using the TeensyROM. It’s been out there for a while, but it might not have caught your attention as of yet. Developed by [Sensorium] and showcased by YouTuber [StatMat], this project is a tactile, techie love letter to the past.

At the heart of it is the TeensyROM cartridge, which – thanks to some clever firmware modding – now supports reading NFC tags. These are writable NTag215 cards storing the path to game files on the Teensy’s SD card. Tap a tag to the NFC reader, and the TeensyROM boots your game. No need to fumble with LOAD “*”,8,1. That’s not only cool, it’s convenient – especially for retro demo setups.

What truly sets this apart is the reintroduction of physical tokens. Each game lives on its own custom-designed card, styled after PC Engine HuCards or printed with holographic vinyl. It’s a tangible, collectible gimmick that echoes the golden days of floppies and cartridges – but with 2020s tech underneath. Watch it here.

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Crookes Tube

Foil Leyden Jar Helps Bring Crookes Tube To Life

It might be too soon to consider the innards of the old CRT monitor at the back of your closet to be something worth putting on display in your home or workshop. For that curio cabinet-worthy appeal, you need to look a bit further back. Say, about 150 years. Yes, that’ll do. A Crookes tube, the original electron beam-forming vacuum tube of glass, invented by Sir William Crookes et al. in the late 19th century, is what you need.

And a Crookes tube is what [Markus Bindhammer] found on AliExpress one day. He felt that piece of historic lab equipment was asking to be put on display in proper fashion. So he set to work crafting a wooden stand for it out of a repurposed candlestick, a nice piece of scrap oak, and some brass feet giving it that antique mad-scientist feel.

After connecting a high voltage generator and switch, the Crookes tube should have been all set, but nothing happened when it was powered up. It turned out that a capacitance issue was preventing the tube from springing to life. Wrapping the cathode end of the tube in aluminum foil, [Markus] formed what is effectively a Leyden jar, and that was the trick that kicked things into action.

As of this writing, there are no longer any Crookes tubes that we could find on AliExpress, so you’ll have to look elsewhere if you’re interested in showing off your own 19th century electron-streaming experiment. Check out the Crookes Radiometer for some more of Sir Williams Crookes’s science inside blown glass.

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Atari ST desktop with Doom shortcut

Running DOOM On An Atari ST

If you grew up with a beige Atari ST on your desk and a faint feeling of being left out once Doom dropped in 1993, brace yourself — the ST strikes back. Thanks to [indyjonas]’s incredible hack, the world now has a working port of DOOM for the Atari STe, and yes — it runs. It’s called STDOOM, and even though it needs a bit of acceleration or emulation to perform, it’s still an astonishing feat of retro-software necromancy.

[indyjonas] did more than just recompile and run: he stripped out chunks of PC-centric code, bent GCC to his will (cheers to Thorsten Otto’s port), and shoehorned Doom into a machine never meant to handle it. That brings us a version that runs on a stock machine with 4MB RAM, in native ST graphics modes, including a dithered 16-colour mode that looks way cooler than it should. The emotional punch? This is a love letter to the 13-year-old Jonas who watched Doom from the sidelines while his ST chugged along faithfully. A lot of us were that kid.

Sound is still missing, and original 8MHz hardware won’t give you fluid gameplay just yet — but hey, it’s a start. Want to dive in deeper? Read [indyjonas]’ thread on X.