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Putting Some Zig In A Linux-Based 3D Printer

July 15, 2026 by 18 Comments

Having Linux on so many devices is both a blessing and a curse. Sure, it is great that you can hack on things and modify them or even totally repurpose them. But it also means you have a fleet of Linux devices you have to manage and keep track of.

My current “main” 3D printer is a Flashforge AD5X: a nice, cheap machine that does four colors with the purge/exchange method. It sort of runs Klipper. I say sort of because Flashforge has Klipper running on a Linux host in the box, but it is massively crippled and modified. I’m sure it works for most folks. I’m also sure that if you know nothing about Linux, Klipper, or 3D printing, the experience is probably better thanks to all the cloud point-and-click interfaces. But, of course, I check none of those boxes.

I’ve had the printer for probably a year or more. Almost immediately, I put a “mod” on the printer to give it a more true Klipper interface and gave me things like shell access. There are several that I think will do this, but I used Zmod, which doesn’t totally replace the printer’s firmware; it just sort of patches it and extends it. You can easily bypass or even remove it and go back to the stock printer, although I would not want to.

In my case, the issue was a printer, but the same idea might apply to any embedded Linux system, from a router to a thermostat. Sure, it runs Linux, but is it Linux you can change?

The Problem

The AD5X runs Linux… sort of.

The Flashforge firmware and Zmod both will run on the AD5X’s little sister, the AD5M. However, the AD5M has a significantly less capable processor board than the AD5X. That means that Linux on the boxes is very stripped down. From Flashforge’s point of view, no one should be in the Linux OS anyway, and the author of Zmod probably figures every byte used is a byte taken away from the user or other advanced Zmod features.

It may seem like a first-world problem, but there were two things that irked me about the printer’s Linux. There was no less or more command for poking around files. There was also only vi as an editor. I did a few hacks to make myself happy. I wrote a pager in shell script, for example. I would try to remember to use my desktop emacs and tramp to edit files on the box. But it was a shame that there were some very basic tools lacking. Besides that, even the tools that were there like ls lacked help commands in case you want some strange option you can’t remember.

No Install

To save space, the printer doesn’t really have programs like ls, cat, and grep. Instead, it has a single busybox executable. This is common on small systems. You get one copy of the libraries and a single executable that will do all the work you need. You can invoke, for example, grep by running “busybox grep” or, if you make a symlink to busybox named grep, the user may never realize that you don’t really have grep installed.

However, busybox has to be built. You can’t easily install packages to it. So I couldn’t just run some package manager and install less or anything else. My plan was to produce a new busybox package myself to supply at least the missing commands and maybe some of the more basic ones, too. How hard could it be?

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2026 Hackaday Supercon: Call For Proposals

July 13, 2026 by 10 Comments

We are absolutely stoked to announce that the Hackaday Superconference is taking place this year November 6th through 8th in glorious Pasadena California, and we want to see you there!

If you’ve been to any of the previous nine Supercons, you know that it’s a fantastic gathering of the most motivated and interesting hackers around — but it’s also been a relatively small gathering. And while we love the very high signal-to-noise ratio of folks who show up, we’re always a little bit sad when the tickets sell out because it represents hackers who couldn’t be there.

So this year, we’re celebrating Supercon Ten by expanding out of our traditional location at the Design Lab so that we can accommodate 20% more hackers, while still keeping the cozy nature of the event intact. So if you’ve been wanting to come to Supercon, but procrastinated the ticket sales every year, this year is looking 20% better.

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The Death Of Physical Media And The Real Challenges To Software Archiving

July 13, 2026 by 30 Comments

Along with the many displays of outrage, gnashing of teeth and other displays of profound grief at the recent news that Sony will no longer manufacture physical game discs come 2028, we have also heard some voices pipe up with a variety of statements, such as that this decision makes game archiving basically impossible. Of course, the truth of the matter is that software archiving in general has become much harder already over the past decades, while game consoles are just late to the archiving-hostile party.

As an example, one merely has to contrast Sony’s PlayStation with e.g. the Valve Steam store and software by juggernauts like Adobe and Autodesk. Here the former moved after the Creative Suite (CS6) series of Photoshop and other tools fully over to the Creative Cloud (CC) subscription model, where DRM and constant rental software renewals are in order. Unlike that disc copy of CS6 Master Collection that will stay good practically forever, there’s nothing really to archive with Adobe’s CC software.

Similarly, with digital game downloads and their constant patches now put inside a heavily encrypted environment that relies on a special launcher, preserving video games has been turned into into a virtual nightmare for many years now.

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A Brief History Of The Crazy Old 7-Segment Display

July 9, 2026 by 17 Comments

How old is the seven-segment display? Surely it is a product of the 1970s. After all, calculators started showing up, and the height of junior high humor was plugging 7734 into your calculator and showing it to someone upside down. Of course, for it to go mainstream, maybe they really originated in the 1960s, but no earlier than that, right? Actually, no. Sure, the LED seven-segment display had to wait for LEDs. But the actual idea is much older than that.

The concept of building numbers from a small set of reusable segments predates LED displays by decades. In fact, the basic idea appears in patents from the early 1900s and may have roots in even older mechanical signs and printing techniques.

The history isn’t entirely straightforward. Unlike vacuum tubes or transistors, segmented displays evolved gradually through a series of practical ideas rather than one defining invention.

Blacking out the Eight

While looking into the history of segmented displays, I was reminded of something I’d seen years ago in retail stores: reusable price tags printed with rows of eights.

Rather than printing every possible price, the clerk simply used a marker to black out portions of each figure, transforming an 8 into whatever digit was needed. Cover a few strokes, and the eight becomes a three. Remove a different set, and it becomes a zero or a five. It was, in essence, a manual segmented display.

Finding the exact origin of these price tags is akin to finding out where Romans bought sponges. They were inexpensive commercial supplies, not the sort of products that historians carefully documented. My recollection is from the middle of the twentieth century, but the underlying concept is almost certainly older.

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Linux Fu: The Local Phonebook

July 8, 2026 by 31 Comments

I’ll admit it: I miss the simplicity of /etc/hosts. There was something elegant about it. You wanted laserprinter to mean 192.168.1.40, so you opened a text file and wrote:

192.168.1.40 laserprinter

Done. No cloud account, no discovery daemon, no dashboard with material-themed icons. Just a name and an address. The trouble, of course, is that /etc/hosts is only simple when you have one machine. The moment you have a desktop, a laptop, a Raspberry Pi, a NAS, a test box, and a phone or two, every little network change becomes a tiny distributed-database problem. Which copy of /etc/hosts is authoritative? Did you update the laptop? What about the machine you only boot once a month?

One Solution

Modern LANs solved this with mDNS, using Avahi on Linux. It resolves addresses that end in .local. Instead of asking a central DNS server “who is thing.local?”, a machine sends a multicast query on the local network: “who has thing.local?” The device that owns the name answers. This is why your Linux box named spock and usually be reached as spock.local on your LAN.

There are limits. mDNS is link-local; it is meant for the local LAN, not the whole Internet and shouldn’t route across subnets. Each device is supposed to publish its own name. That works fine when the device cooperates. But what about devices that do not publish mDNS? Or little embedded things that barely even have an IP address?

That is where I wanted the best of both worlds: keep a small authoritative /etc/hosts file on one Linux box, but publish selected entries onto the LAN using mDNS.

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When An Engineering Education Doesn’t Teach You How To Really Make Anything

July 7, 2026 by 112 Comments

In the sweltering temperatures of an unusually hot European heatwave, I found myself having a chat with  a friend of mine from my university days. After discussing the health of his cat who had solved the problem of a fur coat on a hot day by flattening himself out on the concrete floor in the coolest place in the house, we moved on to tech matters. We’ve known each other for not far short of four decades, so this is familiar territory for us. The problems that come with taking a prototype to manufacturing, a process which even the most seasoned of engineers can slip up on.

The Difference Between Making, And Making For Manufacture

If you’ve ever taken a project and replicated it, you will know the progression. If you’re making five or ten widgets, you can debug and rework as needed, tweak things, and get things going. If you’re making more then this, the process consumes a greater proportion of your time, until a point at which manufacture becomes impractical. Maybe that’s around fifty boards, sometimes more or less. Continue reading “When An Engineering Education Doesn’t Teach You How To Really Make Anything” →