Philco Bet The Farm On The Predicta… And Lost

February 27, 2026 by Al Williams 30 Comments

Philco was a common household brand for many years. The company started in 1892, making street lights. Then they pivoted to batteries. This was big business when early radios were all battery-operated. But in the 1920s, line-powered radios threatened to shrink their customer base, so they pivoted again. This time, they started making radios. So what happened? [The Last Shift] has the story, and you can see the video below.

Philco used advanced manufacturing techniques to make radios more affordable. By 1930, they were the number one radio maker in the world. After World War II, they moved into everything electric: mostly appliances, but also the new king of the electronics market, the television.

Continue reading “Philco Bet The Farm On The Predicta… And Lost” →

HD On A VHS Tape? How Did They Do It?

February 20, 2026 by Jenny List 10 Comments

There was a period from the 1970s to the mid-2000s or so when a fixture underneath the family TV set was a VHS videocassette recorder. These were a masterpiece of cramming a color video signal into the restricted bandwidth of an affordable 1970s helical-scan tape deck, which was achieved by clever use of frequency shifting and FM carrier modulation. Very few of us will have had the ultimate iteration of the VHS format though, W-VHS, which managed the same trick but with HD video. But how? [Superchromat] is here with the answer.

W-VHS used a frequency modulated carrier, but instead of splitting luminance and chrominance in the frequency domain like its VHS ancestor, it did so in the time domain in the same way as some 1980s satellite TV standards did. Each line first contained the color information, then the brightness. Thus it sacrificed some color resolution and a little horizontal image resolution, but kept a much higher vertical image resolution. In the video below the break we go into significant detail about the compromises required to pull this off, and if you watch it through you’ll learn something about magnetic tape recording as well as FM.

The W-VHS standard is largely forgotten now as a last hurrah for the format, but it’s still in the sights of the VHS Decode project. The work in this video is helping them retrieve the highest quality images from these tapes, by capturing the raw RF from the heads and using DSP techniques to decode them.

Continue reading “HD On A VHS Tape? How Did They Do It?” →

Wooden Case Makes A 2026 TV Stylish

February 8, 2026 by Jenny List 17 Comments

The middle of the 20th century produced a revolution in understated stylish consumer design, some of which lives on today. The reality of living in a 1950s or ’60s house was probably to be surrounded by the usual mess of possessions from many past decades, but the promise was of a beautiful sleek and futuristic living space. Central to this in most homes would have been the TV set, and manufacturers followed the trends of the age with cases that are now iconic. Here in 2026 we put up with black rectangles, but fortunately there’s Cordova Woodworking with a modern take on a retro TV cabinet.

We’ve put the build video below, and it’s a wonderfully watchable piece of workshop titillation in a fully-equipped modern shop. While we appreciate they’ve put the design up for sale, we think many Hackaday readers could come up with their own having already been inspired. One thing we notice over the originals is that they use “proper” wood for their case, when we know the ’60s version would have had veneer-faced ply or chipboard.

The result is a piece of furniture which nicely contains the modern TV and accessories, but doesn’t weigh a ton or dominate the room in the way one of the originals would have, much less emit that evocative phenolic hot-electronics smell. We’d have one in our living room right now. Meanwhile if you’d like a wallow in mid-century TV, we have you covered.

Continue reading “Wooden Case Makes A 2026 TV Stylish” →

A New Life For An Old Amplifier

January 14, 2026 by Jenny List 23 Comments

An audio amplifier was once a fairly simple analogue device, but in recent decades a typical home entertainment amplifier will have expanded to include many digital functions. When these break they are often proprietary and not easy to repair, as was the case with a broken Pioneer surround-sound device given to [Boz]. It sat on the shelf for a few years until he had the idea of a jukebox for his ripped CDs, and his returning it to life with a new main board is something to behold.

Internally it’s a surprisingly modular design, meaning that the front panel with its VFD display and driver were intact and working, as were the class AB amplifier and its power supply. He had the service manual so reverse engineering was straightforward, thus out came the main board in favor of a replacement. He took the original connectors and a few other components, then designed a PCB to take them and a Raspberry Pi Pico and DAC. With appropriate MMBASIC firmware it looks as though it was originally made this way, a sense heightened by a look at the motherboard inside (ignoring a couple of bodges).

We like seeing projects like this one which revive broken devices, and this one is particularly special quality wise. We’re more used to seeing it with gaming hardware though.

Bose SoundTouch Smart Speakers Get An Open Source Lifeline

January 9, 2026 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

After initially announcing that Bose will completely turn off all ‘smart’ features in its SoundTouch series of speaker products, the company has seemingly responded to the wave of unhappy feedback with a compromise solution. Rather than the complete shutdown and cut-off that we reported on previously, Bose will now remove cloud support as its servers shut down, but the SoundTouch mobile app will get an update that gets truncated to just the local support functions. Bose also made the SoundTouch Web API documentation available as a PDF document.

The shutdown date has also been extended from the original February 18 to May 6th of this year. Although these changes mean that the mobile app can no longer use music services, features like grouping speakers and controlling playback will keep working. Features such as presets which were cloud-based will naturally stop working.

With the web API documentation made public it remains to be seen how helpful this will be. From a quick glance at the PDF documentation it appears to be a typical REST API, using HTTP on port 8090 on the SoundTouch device, with an SGML-style tag system to format messages. In so far as the community hasn’t already reverse-engineered this API it’s at least nice to have official documentation.

How Do PAL And NTSC Really Work?

January 7, 2026 by Jenny List 38 Comments

Many projects on these pages do clever things with video. Whether it’s digital or analogue, it’s certain our community can push a humble microcontroller to the limit of its capability. But sometimes the terminology is a little casually applied, and in particular with video there’s an obvious example. We say “PAL”, or “NTSC” to refer to any composite video signal, and perhaps it’s time to delve beyond that into the colour systems those letters convey.

Know Your Sub-carriers From Your Sync Pulses

A close-up on a single line of composite video from a Raspberry Pi.

A video system of the type we’re used to is dot-sequential. It splits an image into pixels and transmits them sequentially, pixel by pixel and line by line. This is the same for an analogue video system as it is for many digital bitmap formats. In the case of a fully analogue TV system there is no individual pixel counting, instead the camera scans across each line in a continuous movement to generate an analogue waveform representing the intensity of light. If you add in a synchronisation pulse at the end of each line and another at the end of each frame you have a video signal.

But crucially it’s not a composite video signal, because it contains only luminance information. It’s a black-and-white image. The first broadcast TV systems as for example the British 405 line and American 525 line systems worked in exactly this way, with the addition of a separate carrier for their accompanying sound. Continue reading “How Do PAL And NTSC Really Work?” →

Know Audio: Microphone Basics

December 30, 2025 by Jenny List 32 Comments

A friend of mine is producing a series of HOWTO videos for an open source project, and discovered that he needed a better microphone than the one built into his laptop. Upon searching, he was faced with a bewildering array of peripherals aimed at would-be podcasters, influencers, and content creators, many of which appeared to be well-packaged versions of very cheap genericised items such as you can find on AliExpress.

If an experienced electronic engineer finds himself baffled when buying a microphone, what chance does a less-informed member of the public have! It’s time to shed some light on the matter, and to move for the first time in this series from the playback into the recording half of the audio world. Let’s consider the microphone.

Background, History, and Principles

A microphone is simply a device for converting the pressure variations in the air created by sounds, into electrical impulses that can be recorded. They will always be accompanied by some kind of signal conditioning preamplifier, but in this instance we’re considering the physical microphone itself. There are a variety of different types of microphone in use, and after a short look at microphone history and a discussion of what makes a good microphone, we’ll consider a few of them in detail. Continue reading “Know Audio: Microphone Basics” →