When your GPU fan goes rogue with an unholy screech, you either shell out for a new one or you go full hacker mode. Well, [ashafq] did the latter. The result is a delightfully nerdy fan controller powered by an ATTiny85 and governed by a DS18B20 temperature sensor. We all know a silent workstation is golden, and there’s no fun in throwing money at an off-the-shelf solution. [ashafq]’s custom build transforms a whiny Radeon RX 550 into a cool, quiet operator. Best of all: it’s built from bits likely already in your junk drawer.
To challenge himself a bit, [ashafq] rolled his own temperature-triggered PWM logic using 1-wire protocol on an ATtiny85, all without libraries or bloated firmware. The fan’s speed only ramps up when the GPU gets toasty, just like it should. It’s efficient and clever, and that makes it a fine hack. The entire system runs off a scavenged 12V fan. He could have used a 3D printer, but decided to stick onto the card with double-sided tape. McGyver would approve.
The results don’t lie: idle temps at 40 °C, load peaking at 60 °C. Quieter than stock, smarter than stock, and way cheaper too. The double-sided tape may not last, but that leaves room for improvement. In case you want to start on it yourself, read the full write-up and feel inspired to build your own. Hackaday.io is ready for the documentation of your take on it.
When Raspberry Pi’s new RP2350 MCU was released in 2024, it had a slight issue in that its GPIO pins would leak a significant amount of current when a pin is configured as input with the input buffer enabled. Known as erratum 9 (E9), it has now been addressed per the July 29 Product Change Note from Raspberry Pi for the A4 stepping along with a host of other hardware and software issues.
Although the PCN is for stepping A4, it covers both steppings A3 and A4, with the hardware fixes in A3 and only software (bootrom) fixes present in A4, as confirmed by the updated RP2350 datasheet. It tells us that A3 was an internal development stepping, ergo we should only be seeing the A4 stepping in the wild alongside the original defective A2 stepping.
When we first reported on the E9 bug it was still quite unclear what this issue was about, but nearly a month later it was officially defined as an input mode current leakage issue due to an internal pull-up that was too weak. This silicon-level issue has now finally been addressed in the A3 and thus new public A4 stepping.
Although we still have to see whether this is the end of the E9 saga, this should at least offer a way forward to those who wish to use the RP2350 MCU, but who were balking at the workarounds required for E9 such as external pull-downs.
In the formative experiences of most Hackaday readers there will almost certainly be a number of common threads, for example the ownership of a particular game console, or being inspired into engineering curiosity by the same TV shows. A home computer of a TV show may mark you as coming from a particular generation, but there are some touchstones which cross the decades.
In today’s high-speed information overload environment, we often find ourselves with too much data to take in at once, causing us to occasionally miss out on opportunities otherwise drowned out in noise. None of this is more evident in the realm of high-speed trading, whether it’s for stocks, commodities, or even crypto. Most of us won’t be able to build dedicated high speed connections directly to stock exchanges for that extra bit of edge over the other traders, but what we can do is build a system that keys us in to our cryptocurrency price of choice so we know exactly when to pull the trigger on a purchase or sale.
[rishab]’s project for doing this is based on an ESP32 paired with a 10″ touchscreen display. It gathers live data from Binance, a large cryptocurrency exchange that maintains various pieces of information about many digital currencies. [rishab]’s tool offers a quick, in-depth look at a custom array of coins, with data such as percentage change over a certain time and high and low values for that coin as well. The chart updates in real time, and [rishab] also built a feature in which scales coins up if they have been seeing large movements in price over short timeframes.
Although it’s not a direct fiber link into an exchange, it certainly has its advantages over keeping this information in a browser window on a computer where it could get missed, and since it’s dedicated hardware running custom firmware it can show you exactly what you need to see if you’re day trading crypto. Certainly projects like this are in the DIY spirit that crypto enthusiasts tout as ideals of the currency, and as people move away from mining and more into speculative trading we’d expect to see more projects like this.
If you are looking for the perfect instrument to start a biological horror show in our age of AI, you have come to the right place. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have successfully used AI-guided robotics to perform surgical procedures. So maybe a bit less dystopian, but the possibilities are endless.
Pig parts are used as surrogate human gallbladders to demonstrate cholecystectomies. The skilled surgeon is replaced with a Da Vinci research kit, similarly used in human controlled surgeries.
Researchers used an architecture that uses live imaging and human corrections to input into a high-level language model, which feeds into the controlling low-level model. While there is the option to intervene with human input, the model is trained to and has demonstrated the ability to self-correct. This appears to work fairly well with nothing but minor errors, as shown in an age-restricted YouTube video. (Surgical imagery, don’t watch if that bothers you.)
It’s noted that the robot performed slower than a traditional surgeon, trading time for precision. As always, when talking about anything medical, it’s not likely we will be seeing it on our own gallbladders anytime soon, but maybe within the next decade. If you want to read more on the specific advancements, check out the paper here.
Medical hacking isn’t always the most appealing for anyone with a weak stomach. For those of us with iron guts make sure to check out this precision tendon tester!
Do you ever look at the news, and wonder about the process behind the news cycle? I did, and for the last couple of decades it’s been the subject of one of my projects. The Raspberry Pi on my shelf runs my word trend analysis tool for news content, and since my journey from curious geek to having my own large corpus analysis system has taken twenty years it’s worth a second look.
How Career Turmoil Led To A Two Decade Project
This is very much a minority spelling. Colin Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0.
In the middle of the 2000s I had come out of the dotcom crash mostly intact, and was working for a small web shop. When they went bust I was casting around as one does, and spent a while as a Google quality rater while I looked for a new permie job. These teams are employed by the search giant through temporary employment agencies, and in loose terms their job is to be the trained monkeys against whom the algorithm is tested. The algorithm chose X, and if the humans also chose X, the algorithm is probably getting it right. Being a quality rater is not in any way a high-profile job, but with the big shiny G on my CV I soon found myself in demand from web companies seeking some white-hat search engine marketing expertise. What I learned mirrored my lesson from a decade earlier in the CD-ROM business, that on the web as in any other electronic publishing medium, good content well presented has priority over any black-hat tricks.
But what makes good content? Forget an obsession with stuffing bogus keywords in the text, and instead talk about the right things, and do it authoritatively. What are the right things in this context? If you are covering a subject, you need to do so using the right language; that which the majority uses rather than language only you use. I can think of a bunch of examples which I probably shouldn’t talk about, but an example close to home for me comes in cider. In the UK, cider is a fermented alcoholic drink made from apples, and as a craft cidermaker of many years standing I have a good grasp of its vocabulary. The accepted spelling is “Cider”, but there’s an alternate spelling of “Cyder” used by some commercial producers of the drink. It doesn’t take long to realise that online, hardly anyone uses cyder with a Y, and thus pages concentrating on that word will do less well than those talking about cider.
We Brits rarely use the word “soccer” unless there’s a story about the Club World Cup in America.
I started to build software to analyse language around a given topic, with the aim of discerning the metaphorical cider from the cyder. It was a great surprise a few years later to discover that I had invented for myself the already-existing field of computational linguistics, something that would have saved me a lot of time had I known about it when I began. I was taking a corpus of text and computing the frequencies and collocates (words that appear alongside each other) of the words within it, and from that I could quickly see which wording mattered around a subject, and which didn’t. This led seamlessly to an interest in what the same process would look like for news data with a time axis added, so I created a version which harvested its corpus from RSS feeds. Thus began my decades-long project.
Photography is great, but sometimes it can get boring just reusing the same wavelengths over and over again. There are other options, though and when [Malcolm Wilson] decided he wanted to explore them, he decided to build a (near) IR camera.
The IR images are almost ethereal. Image : Malcom Wilson.
The housing is an old Yashica Electro 35 — apparently this model was prone to electrical issues, and there are a lot of broken camera bodies floating around– which hides a Pi NoIR Camera v3. That camera module, paired with an IR pass filter, makes for infrared photography like the old Yashica used to do with special film. The camera module is plugged into a Pi Zero 2 W, and it’s powered by a PiSugar battery. There’s a tiny (0.91″) OLED display, but it’s only for status messages. The viewfinder is 100% optical, as the designers of this camera intended. Point, shoot, shoot again.
There’s something pure in that experience; we sometimes find stopping to look at previews pulls one out of the creative zone of actually taking pictures. This camera won’t let you do that, though of course you do get to skip on developing photos. [Malcom] has the Pi set up to connect to his Wifi when he gets home, and he grabs the RAW (he is a photographer, after all) image files via SSH. Follow the link above to [Malcom]’s substack, and you’ll get some design details and his python code.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation’s NoIR camera shows up on these pages from time to time, though rarely so artistically. We’re more likely to see it spying on reptiles, or make magic wands work. So we are quite grateful to [Malcom] for the tip, via Petapixel. Yes, photographers and artists of all stripes are welcome to use the tips line to tell us about their work.
Follow the links in this article for more images like this. Image: Malcom Wilson
