Backup Tapes Come Back To The Homelab

October 12, 2026 by Tyler August 29 Comments

It’s one of the great mysteries of computing, how somehow in the Year Of OLlama 2026, tape remains the god of cheap storage. A while back [Ben Pettis] recounted his experience setting up an LTO-5 tape drive in his homelab, an experience which only becomes more relevant as hard drive prices stay high.

LTO-5 is already well out of date in the professional world, after all– a new server install would be debating the merits of LTO-9 versus LTO-10, but for the homelab it’s a matter of what’s affordable on the used market with decently-sized cartridges. If you can live with 1.5 TB of uncompressed data on a roughly palm-sized Linear Tape, Open cartridge then LTO-5 could be good enough. Yes, the tapes are advertized as 3TB, but that’s assuming a 2:1 compression ratio on the data, which you’re not likely to get on the photos and video that make up much of a data horder’s storage. That’s one thing [Ben] was quick to clear up for us. He also detailed his adventures with the cheaper-to-buy fiber channel model of drive.

The label would have you believe this box stores 30 TB.

Tape drives usually come with an SAS or fiber channel interface– fiber channel being, you guessed it, an optical solution unlike the SCSI-like SAS connection you may be familiar with for block storage devices. With a PCIe adapter it’s not hard to set up, provided you get the cables the right way around! That’s another detail we’re glad [Ben] shared so we can find it again if we have the same problem: with no switch in the circuit, you need a crossover cable to bring TX to RX. Which is obvious in retrospect, but obscure to those of us just learning about the standard.

The advantage, as [Ben] makes clear and everyone has always known is simply price. As of this writing, diskprices.com has 16$/TB as the lowest cost, while [Ben] was able to pick up lightly-used tapes on eBay for only 2$/TB. If you have a lot of data, those savings amortize the drive costs relatively quickly, since a used drive like [Ben]’s can be had for a few hundred bucks.

Is it the ultimate solution for our data storage woes? That depends on your needs, but perhaps not considering we get as many tips on storing data on reel-to-reel as we do on LTO. We even saw a tape-loading robot repurposed to serve bar one time.

Failing To Make A Fanless PC

October 5, 2026 by Fenix Guthrie 31 Comments

The discerning modern gamer’s quest is to find a quieter computer without sacrificing performance. That proves challenging when modern components are highly efficient at producing monumental quantities of thermal energy. So the typical solution ends up moving enough air through the computer to create a rather tumultuous racket. So why have fans at all? Well, as [Billet Labs] demonstrates, that’s not necessarily a good idea.

The build begins with a block of aluminum which, with a bit of hand-metal work, may become the base of the PC “case.” A dry-fit of the aesthetically modified parts taken from a previous attempt at a fanless PC reveals the steampunk aesthetic that defines the build. On final assembly, a large amount of thermal paste under the flex ATX power supply and 6mm of thermal pads under the motherboard provide passive cooling to the block of aluminum they are attached to

The cooling loop begins with three radiators: a big one, a small one, and a slightly smaller one. But raw metal PC radiators are difficult and expensive to come by these days. Some paint stripping and polishing will fix that problem. A few hand-made mounting brackets complete the aesthetic. All three radiators are stacked above the motherboard, and on top of each other, positioned horizontally to encourage passive airflow through them.

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Coreboot Hikes The Bay Trail To DRAM Initialization

September 19, 2026 by Tyler August 18 Comments

This article is written on an open-source operating system, but not an open-source machine — the BIOS isn’t open-source, and even if it were supported by the coreboot project (formerly LinuxBIOS), there would still be a whole host of binary blobs required to get it to boot. On one vintage architecture, there’s one less blob, as coreboot can now initialize DRAM on Intel Bay Trail SOCs, as [Mate Kukri] presented in a talk at the recent Open Source Firmware Conference.

Bay Trail isn’t exactly cutting-edge hardware, to be sure — the SoCs are over a decade old at this point, and were only used in low-performance mobile applications like Chromebooks. On the other hand, coreboot has been on Chromebooks for at least as long. Getting DRAM set up is difficult because, well, you don’t have any memory to work with until you do. Traditionally, the way you did that was to call on one of the many proprietary ‘binary blobs’ provided with next to no documentation by the manufacturer. Reverse engineering that requires some serious bus-sluthing, which was done in software with the SerialICE debugger and the Unicorn Engine CPU emulator. The talk focused on that technique and how it might be applied more widely, rather than getting into the weeds of how to do DRAM init on one obsolete SOC. At some point the whole thing should be archived on the OFSC website so those of us not lucky enough to attend in person can hear what [Mate] — and all the other speakers — had to say.

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Hackaday Europe 2026: Bare Metal Made Easy

September 15, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 27 Comments

When we talk about programming in “bare metal,” it basically means writing software that runs right on the hardware with no operating system or abstraction layers in between. This gives the program the most direct possible access to peripherals and memory, with the tradeoff being that you don’t get the protection and ancillary features that come with an OS.

Sylvain Huet came down to Hackaday Europe 2026 to talk about making bare metal easy. Not just by ignoring operating systems and ever-bloating dependencies, but by rethinking the way we approach software development and by building a transparent platform from the ground up.

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If It’s Electronic Paper, Why Not Print To It?

September 10, 2026 by Tyler August 42 Comments

E-ink is supposed to be the electronic version of dead-tree paper, but there’s one enormous difference: how you get your images and text onto it. For paper, you print on it. E-ink? Well, it depends on what it’s hooked up to. If it’s an ESP32C3-based Xteink X4 and X3, then you can just print to that, too, thanks to [Nishant Joshi]’s fork of the popular CrossPoint firmware.

The fork implements the Internet Printer Protocol, IPP, on the ESP32-C3. It makes loading documents a breeze: select the printer in your operating system, and press print. To the computer, the reader advertises itself as a printer that provides monochrome, single-sided output at 300 DPI on A5 paper, and accepts Apple raster and PWG raster formats. Of course these raster images are enormous compared to the paltry RAM available on the microcontroller, so pixels are received and written row-by-row — both to the screen directly, and to the SD card for later perusal. That makes a folder on the SD card the equivalent of a printer’s output tray.

This interface is amazing in its simplicity, and we’d love to see it in other E-ink devices. It reminds us somehow of AlphaSmart word processors — which are still relevant today in large part because their ‘file transfer’ mechanism is to pretend to be a USB keyboard and type the document onto your computer. As long as IPP is available, so too will you be able to get documents onto this e-reader.

Old IPad Keyboard Makes For A Modern Netbook

September 8, 2026 by Jenny List 26 Comments

Netbooks were a class of tiny laptops which hit their peak over a decade ago, with the idea being that you could use the Internet and do your computing on the move with ease. Unfortunately manufacturers were scared of them eating their profits from bigger computers, and they were invariably built to a very disappointing spec. That doesn’t lessen the appeal of small form factor laptops though, and [bob-foss] is here with a simple hack to make one.

He’s taken a hinged keyboard case made for one of the previous generations of iPad Mini, and paired it with a high-end Lenovo gaming tablet by way of a 3D printed replacement for the original Apple-grabber. We said it was a simple hack and it is, but it’s no less elegant for that as the detail is what matters. This isn’t a mess-of-wires cyberdeck, instead it’s a machine you could pull out on a train and get some work done.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to take a wallow in what that netbook thing was all about, we took a look at the phenomenon back in 2020.

Repairing Traces On A Delidded Pentium III CPU Gone Wrong

September 4, 2026 by Maya Posch 13 Comments

Delidding a CPU involves removing the integrated heat spreader (IHS) that’s put over the bare die and the substrate that it is mounted on. The reason for this is usually to improve cooling performance, as the IHS is effectively a small heatsink between the die and the large heatsink, adding more problematic thermal interfaces. If delidding is done improperly it can cause severe damage to the substrate, as in the case of a very nice 1.3 GHz Tualatin Pentium III CPU that [Bits und Bolts] got in an eBay lot with nasty delidding damage.

With the delidding enthusiast presumably having used brute force and ignorance combined with a prying implement, around a dozen of tiny traces on the substrate got severed, requiring tedious trace repair to fix. After confirming that with the severed traces the CPU is indeed busted, enough of the soldermask is removed to make a repair.

Any traces that were still good got covered with soldermask, while for the remainders the thinnest available copper wire was used to create new traces. Although very much doable with a good microscope and a steady hand, this is definitely one of those things that’s much easier to prevent than to fix.

With IHSes having become standard on CPUs, delidding continues to this day, with increasing risks of severed traces and ripped-off capacitors should it go wrong. Although those newer CPU substrates are probably not repairable, repairing these older CPUs instead of tossing them as e-waste seems plausible at least.

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