NES Advantage Stick Gets Bluetooth Upgrade

July 31, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 3 Comments

The NES Advantage was a cool bit of hardware back in 1987, bringing an arcade stick to the home console gaming experience. Naturally they don’t get much use these days, unless of course they’ve been modded to work with modern systems, as [Aaron] has done.

[Aaron]’s goals were straightforward. The stick should work with modern systems over Bluetooth, but the mod should not involve cutting the case or making any new holes. All controls, including Turbo and Slow Motion, still had to work, too, and there would be no adding extra buttons for configuration or control.

To achieve this, [Aaron] whipped up a custom PCB which replaces the original cable attached to the NES Advantage. Power is via a small LiPo cell, charged via a TP4056 and paired with a TPS63900 buck-boost converter. An ESP32-WROOM-32E interfaces all the original controls, reading the stick’s CD4021 shift registers to do so. It then either emulates a Switch Pro Controller over Bluetooth Classic, for use with a modern Nintendo Switch, or it acts as a standard Bluetooth Low Energy gamepad for use with PCs, SteamOS, phones, and other compatible hardware. All that and the stick can still work with an original NES if so desired, when placed in the Switch Pro Controller mode. You merely need to plug in an 8BitDo NES Retro Receiver and you’re up and running.

We’ve seen other fun retro controller builds before, too, like this classic Xbox controller modded to work with the Xbox 360. If you’re cooking up similar projects, we’d love to hear about it on the tipsline.

A Capable KVM Built With The ESP32

July 30, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 17 Comments

[Evgenij Spitsyn] spotted a KVM build on these very pages some time ago. That inspired their own build, leveraging the versatility of the ESP32-P4 microcontroller.

The concept is straightforward. Named the ESPKVM, the device is designed to hook up to a computer’s HDMI and USB ports. It captures the video output, while presenting itself as a standard keyboard and mouse device. In this way, it allows remote control of the machine over IP. It achieves this feat with the aid of the Toshiba TC358743 HDMI-to-CSI bridge, which is essentially the video capture hardware of the build.

The video output of the machine is streamed in MJPEG or H.264 format. The device is capable of serving up storage from a micro SD card or the onboard flash, as well as handling things like power/reset control and wake-on-LAN. All in all, it’s a very complete package, and full of useful features. Just don’t use it over the public internet yet — [Evgenij] notes it hasn’t been reviewed for potential security holes yet, even though it has some basic authentication features baked in.

If you’ve got an ESP32-P4 ready to go with a TC358743 HDMI bridge, you can actually head over to the ESPKVM website and flash the code right in your browser to get going. Meanwhile, if you found this build interesting, you might like to scope out the one that inspired it. If you’re cooking up similar utility hacks, be sure to notify the Hackaday tipsline.

Sharkfin Bites Attack Shark

July 28, 2026 by Elliot Williams 12 Comments

The Attack Shark is a modern keyboard with fancy magnetic keyswitches, macros, configurable blinky LEDs, and more. The problem is that the configuration software only works on Windows, so [JR Lanteigne] set out to fix that. Along the way, he completely worked out the configuration protocol that this keyboard needs, and wrote the comfortable sharkfin web-app so that you can flash yours too.

Don’t have an Attack Shark? Well, you might have one of the 522 other boards that are made on the same ROYUAN hardware, but are re-branded under 100 different names. Want to find out if yours is supported? Look it up in the list here, or just plug it in and find out.

[RJ]’s path to reverse engineering the config protocol wasn’t entirely straightforward, but since the “Windows only” application was actually an Electron app under the hood, he patched it to run on Linux and logged a few configuration sessions. Of course there are gotchas like two different firmware generations and the fact that writing to flash too fast put the keyboard into a boot loop, but after these problems were surmounted, it just remained to map all of the bytes out, and wrap it all up in a user-friendly application.

We don’t have one of these fancy-schmancy keyboards, but if we did, we’d certainly be glad to have the configuration protocol documented. Nothing is worse than finding out that the company that made your keyboard has gone belly-up, and you’re left with a backlight setup that doesn’t match your new deskpad. If you’re a keyboard-head and you don’t already follow [Kristina]’s series, well you should.

Regain Some Trust In Unknown USB Drives

July 27, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 23 Comments

For how useful USB thumb drives are for quickly toting around and copying files from one computer to another, they can be a bit of a security headache. Programs can be loaded on them with all kinds of malware; they can be obscured in some ways that are difficult to detect, and they can be set up to execute certain programs when they’re plugged in. The general wisdom is to simply avoid untrusted USB devices completely, but that sort of abstinence-only policy rarely works in the real world. If, for some reason, an untrusted USB device absolutely needs to be used, many of these security issues can be mitigated with this tool.

Built by [Novamostra], the device is simple on the surface: it’s a Raspberry Pi Pico mated to a 2-in-1 USB splitter cable. But with the USB Neutralizer software they have written loaded onto the Pico, it automatically destroys the ability of any connected USB thumb drive to load files. The program works by deleting the first and last 34 Logical Block Addressing (LBA) sectors on the drive immediately when it’s plugged in, without doing anything else. This effectively corrupts the drive bad enough to prevent malicious software in the partitions from doing anything, allowing the user to (relatively) safely put the USB drive into their computer and format it for re-use. The code for this tool is also open-source and reviewable on the project’s GitHub page.

Of course, this isn’t a perfect security solution for all USB attacks. It doesn’t erase or replace the firmware on the drive itself, and although firmware-level attacks are rare they’re not out of the question for all users, all the time. It also won’t prevent a malicious physical attack like this high-voltage one, and it may also not stop hidden or obscured partitions or devices programmed for storage and some other nefarious purpose simultaneously, like a USB HID. But still, this solves a great many of the problems associated with getting new drives from semi-untrustworthy sources, like retailers or friends whose computer skills we don’t fully trust.

Hands-Free Mouse Uses Eyes And Muscles Instead

July 24, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 3 Comments

The standard computer mouse is a perfectly useful peripheral if your hands work. If you’ve got some trouble in that area, you might appreciate an alternative input solution. To that end, [Varun Adinath Patil] created a neat hands-free solution for moving a cursor around a screen.

The build is based on the Neuro PlayGround Lite, a board built for physiological signal acquisition in the Feather form factor. It’s hooked up to an IMU sensor—both a MPU6050 or BMI270 work—which tracks head movements to allow the cursor to be panned around the screen. Other biological signals are then used to activate other standard mouse functions. Clenching the jaw fires off a left click, while a triple blink fires a right click. Clicking and dragging is achieved by a double-blink. The jaw muscles are sensed via EMG signals picked up with gel electrodes on the skin, while the blinks are detected via EOG signals via the same contact points.

Commercial solutions in this realm exist, but it’s great to see how such a device can be built from the ground up. We’ve looked at other neat applications of head-tracking before, too. If you’re working on your own innovative accessibility tools, don’t hesitate to let us know via the tipsline.

DIY Steam Controller Puck Offers Xbox, Switch, PlayStation Emulation Modes

July 13, 2026 by Donald Papp 12 Comments

Valve recently released a new version of the Steam Controller, which features a wired USB puck that serves both as charger and dedicated, low-latency wireless receiver. The downside is they aren’t currently available for purchase separately, but that’s not a worry because you can now make your own thanks to [safijari]’s OpenPuck project.

OpenPuck uses the highly affordable Pro Micro NRF52840 board, programmed to emulate the wireless receiver portion of the puck, meaning one can pair their Steam Controller to it just like they would with the factory puck. A major part of the project was naturally documenting the wireless protocol, but there’s also an array of extra features offered by OpenPuck.

OpenPuck offers features over and above the factory offering. [image: 3d printed case by jaki-gh]

Hitting button combos lets one conveniently emulate Xbox, Nintendo Switch, or Sony PlayStation controllers. Meaning OpenPuck can for example be plugged into a Nintendo Switch and it will see OpenPuck as an official wired controller, complete with motion sensor and haptic feedback.

Why is it necessary for this emulation to be done from OpenPuck? Because while the Steam Controller has tight integration with Steam Input — a sort of highly useful translation layer for controller inputs — that integration also means the controller’s best features only work while Steam is running. OpenPuck’s ability to emulate other console controllers makes it flexible in a way the factory puck isn’t, and a user can make the most of a single controller this way.

It’s worth noting that while the real puck has the ability to charge the controller (whether or not the user makes it walk itself), the OpenPuck doesn’t have this ability. Does that mean one must still use the factory puck for charging? Not at all, as the Steam Controller charges just fine over a USB-C connection.

There’s a short video below that demonstrates the flashing and setup, so check it out if you think it might be useful to you.

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The Persistent Display We Never Got

July 4, 2026 by Jenny List 17 Comments

We all know the e-ink persistent displays, as they’re cheap and plentiful enough to have become ubiquitous in applications such as supermarket price labels. But we don’t often see some of the other technologies that almost did the same thing. The BBC Archive has a report from 1986 showing one of them, a prototype display from STC.

E-ink relies on flipping the arrangement of black and white particles in its pixels, while this one has a fluid in which the molecules are aligned to let light through, or dispersed randomly, at which point they block light. Frustratingly, we aren’t told what the liquid is, but we are given what might be the reason that we’ve never seen one. The activation voltage is rather high at 200 volts. It’s still a fascinating glimpse of something we might have had, with some tasty early-PC-era portables along the way.

The BBC archive has served up quite a bit of retro goodness over time, and we’ve certainly featured one or two of them over time. A recent one was this demonstration of email via a flight to Amsterdam, from the same year as today’s display.

Continue reading “The Persistent Display We Never Got” →