Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Height-Adjustable Key Caps

February 9, 2026 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

Now, we can’t call these LEGO key caps for obvious reasons, but also because they don’t actually work with standard LEGO. But that’s just fine and dandy, because they’re height-adjustable key caps that use the building block principle.

Height-adjustable keycaps in white, with tops removed to show the LEGO-like middles. — Image by [paper5963] via reddit

Now you could just as easily build wells as the dome shape pictured here, and I’d really like to see that one of these days.

In the caption of the gallery, [paper5963] mentions foam. As far as I’ve studied the pictures, it seems to be all 3D-printed material. If they were foam, they would likely be porous and would attract and hold all kinds of nastiness. Right?

[paper5963] says that there are various parts that add on to these, not just flat tops. There are slopes and curves, too. They are also designing these for narrow pitch, and say they are planning to release the files. Exciting!

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Ask Hackaday: How Do You Detect Hidden Cameras?

February 9, 2026 by Al Williams 49 Comments

The BBC recently published an exposé revealing that some Chinese subscription sites charge for access to their network of hundreds of hidden cameras in hotel rooms. Of course, this is presumably without the consent of the hotel management and probably isn’t specifically a problem in China. After all, cameras can now be very tiny, so it is extremely easy to rent a hotel room or a vacation rental and bug it. This is illegal, China has laws against spy cameras, and hotels are required to check for them, the BBC notes. However, there is a problem: At least one camera found didn’t show up on conventional camera detectors. So we wanted to ask you, Hackaday: How do you detect hidden cameras?

How it Works

Commercial detectors typically use one of two techniques. It is easy to scan for RF signals, and if the camera is emitting WiFi or another frequency you expect cameras to use, that works. But it also misses plenty. A camera might be hardwired, for example. Or store data on an SD card for later. If you have a camera that transmits on a strange frequency, you won’t find it. Or you could hide the camera near something else that transmits. So if your scanner shows a lot of RF around a WiFi router, you won’t be able to figure out that it is actually the router and a small camera.

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I, Integrated Circuit

February 4, 2026 by Jenny List 78 Comments

In 1958, the American free-market economist Leonard E Read published his famous essay I, Pencil, in which he made his point about the interconnected nature of free market economics by following everything, and we mean Everything, that went into the manufacture of the humble writing instrument.

I thought about the essay last week when I wrote a piece about a new Chinese microcontroller with an integrated driver for small motors, because a commenter asked me why I was featuring a non-American part. As a Brit I remarked that it would look a bit silly were I were to only feature parts made in dear old Blighty — yes, we do still make some semiconductors! — and it made more sense to feature cool parts wherever I found them. But it left me musing about the nature of semiconductors, and whether it’s possible for any of them to truly only come from one country. So here follows a much more functional I, Chip than Read’s original, trying to work out just where your integrated circuit really comes from. It almost certainly takes great liberties with the details of the processes involved, but the countries of manufacture and extraction are accurate. Continue reading “I, Integrated Circuit” →

After 30 Years, Virtual Boy Gets Its Chance To Shine

February 3, 2026 by Tom Nardi 18 Comments

When looking back on classic gaming, there’s plenty of room for debate. What was the best Atari game? Which was the superior 16-bit console, the Genesis or the Super NES? Would the N64 have been more commercially successful if it had used CDs over cartridges? It goes on and on. Many of these questions are subjective, and have no definitive answer.

But even with so many opinions swirling around, there’s at least one point that anyone with even a passing knowledge of gaming history will agree with — the Virtual Boy is unquestionably the worst gaming system Nintendo ever produced. Which is what makes its return in 2026 all the more unexpected.

Released in Japan and North America in 1995, the Virtual Boy was touted as a revolution in gaming. It was the first mainstream consumer device capable of showing stereoscopic 3D imagery, powered by a 20 MHz 32-bit RISC CPU and a custom graphics processor developed by Nintendo to meet the unique challenges of rendering gameplay from two different perspectives simultaneously.

In many ways it’s the forebear of modern virtual reality (VR) headsets, but its high cost, small library of games, and the technical limitations of its unique display technology ultimately lead to it being pulled from shelves after less than a year on the market.

Now, 30 years after its disappointing debut, this groundbreaking system is getting a second chance. Later this month, Nintendo will be releasing a replica of the Virtual Boy into which players can insert their Switch or Switch 2 console. The device essentially works like Google Cardboard, and with the release of an official emulator, users will be able to play Virtual Boy games complete with the 3D effect the system was known for.

This is an exciting opportunity for those with an interest in classic gaming, as the relative rarity of the Virtual Boy has made it difficult to experience these games in the way they were meant to be played. It’s also reviving interest in this unique piece of hardware, and although we can’t turn back the clock on the financial failure of the Virtual Boy, perhaps a new generation can at least appreciate the engineering that made it possible.

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Ask Hackaday: How Do You Digitize Your Documents?

January 29, 2026 by Tom Nardi 89 Comments

Like many of you, I have a hard time getting rid of stuff. I’ve got boxes and boxes of weirdo bits and bobs, and piles of devices that I’ll eventually get around to stripping down into even more bits and bobs. Despite regular purges — I try to bring a car-load of ~~crap~~ treasure to local hackerspaces and meetups at least a couple times a year — the pile only continues to grow.

But the problem isn’t limited to hardware components. There’s all sorts of things that the logical part of me understands I’ll almost certainly never need, and yet I can’t bring myself to dispose of. One of those things just so happens to be documents. Anything printed is fair game. Could be the notes from my last appointment with the doctor, or fliers for events I attended years ago. Doesn’t matter, the stacks keep building up until I end up cramming it all into a box and start the whole process starts over again.

I’ve largely convinced myself that the perennial accumulation of electronic bric-à-brac is an occupational hazard, and have come to terms with it. But I think there’s a good chance of moving the needle on the document situation, and if that involves a bit of high-tech overengineering, even better. As such, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks investigating digitizing the documents that have information worth retaining so that the originals can be sent along to Valhalla in my fire pit.

The following represents some of my observations thus far, in the hopes that others going down a similar path may find them useful. But what I’m really interested in is hearing from the Hackaday community. Surely I’m not the only one trying to save some storage space by turn piles of papers into ones and zeros.

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The Fancy Payment Cards Of Taiwan

January 28, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 26 Comments

If you’re an old-schooler, you might still go to the local bar and pay for a beer with cash. You could even try and pay with a cheque, though the pen-and-paper method has mostly fallen out of favor these days. But if you’re a little more modern, you might use a tap-to-pay feature on a credit or debit card.

In Taiwan, though, there’s another unique way to pay. The island nation has a whole ecosystem of bespoke payment cards, and you can even get one that looks like a floppy disk!

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The Amazing Maser

January 28, 2026 by Al Williams 47 Comments

While it has become a word, laser used to be an acronym: “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”. But there is an even older technology called a maser, which is the same acronym but with light switched out for microwaves. If you’ve never heard of masers, you might be tempted to dismiss them as early proto-lasers that are obsolete. But you’d be wrong! Masers keep showing up in places you’d never expect: radio telescopes, atomic clocks, deep-space tracking, and even some bleeding-edge quantum experiments. And depending on how a few materials and microwave engineering problems shake out, masers might be headed for a second golden age.

Simplistically, the maser is — in one sense — a “lower frequency laser.” Just like a laser, stimulated emission is what makes it work. You prepare a bunch of atoms or molecules in an excited energy state (a population inversion), and then a passing photon of the right frequency triggers them to drop to a lower state while emitting a second photon that matches the first with the same frequency, phase, and direction. Do that in a resonant cavity and you’ve got gain, coherence, and a remarkably clean signal.

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