Want Driving Simulator Feedback? Make The Robot Do It

May 11, 2026 by Donald Papp 24 Comments

Humanoid robots are a thing now, and here’s an interesting research project that explores using one as a form of haptic media. Specifically, using a humanoid robot to move a chair while one plays a VR driving simulator.

Here’s how it works: a Unitree G1 robot sits behind a player’s chair and grasps it with its hands. Spherical markers on the chair help the robot’s depth camera know the chair’s position, and real-time G-force signals fed from the simulator (Assetto Corsa, running on PC) tell the robot how much and in what direction to shift the chair to match in-simulator events.

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The Vacuum Tube’s Last Stand(s)

May 11, 2026 by Al Williams 53 Comments

When most people think about vacuum tubes, they picture big glass bottles glowing inside antique radios or early computers. History often treats tubes as a dead-end technology that was suddenly swept away by the transistor in the 1950s. But the reality is much more interesting. Vacuum tube technology did not simply stop evolving when the transistor appeared. In fact, some of the most sophisticated and technically impressive tube designs emerged after the transistor had already been invented.

During the final decades of mainstream tube development, manufacturers pushed the technology in remarkable directions. Tubes became smaller, faster, quieter, more rugged, and more specialized. Designers experimented with exotic geometries, ceramic construction, metal envelopes, ultra-high-frequency operation, and even hybrid tube-semiconductor systems. Devices such as acorn tubes, lighthouse tubes, compactrons, and nuvistors represented a last gasp of thermionic electronics.

Ironically, many of these innovations arrived just as solid-state electronics were becoming commercially practical. Vacuum tubes were improving rapidly right up until the market abandoned them.

The Pressure to Improve

By the 1930s and 1940s, vacuum tubes dominated electronics. Radios, radar systems, military communications, industrial controls, and the first digital computers all depended on them. But everyone was painfully aware of their problems.

Traditional tubes were fragile, generated heat, consumed significant power, and suffered from limitations at high frequencies. Internal lead lengths created parasitic inductance and capacitance. At radio frequencies and especially microwave frequencies, those unwanted effects made design difficult.

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Making Big Dry Ice Blocks With Low Pressure CO2

May 11, 2026 by Maya Posch 8 Comments

Although the term ‘dry ice’ is generally used for solid CO₂, it’s much more accurate to call this ‘dry snow’, as, rather than being actual solid blocks, they are effectively snow that’s been compressed really tightly. While not really necessary for most applications of dry ice, it is possible to make blocks of actual CO₂ ice, and thus [Hyperspace Pirate], as someone with a healthy obsession with cold things had to make some of his own.

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The clutch-purse cyberdeck, complete with pearls for the chain.

Mermaid Clutch-Purse Cyberdeck Is Unappologetically Girly

May 11, 2026 by Tyler August 13 Comments

We feature a lot of DIY portable computers — rehash the “is that a cyberdeck” in the comments to your heart’s content — but how many of them are explicitly girly? Certainly, none of the ones that come to mind oozed the distilled femme energy of [cc] AKA [bossbratox]’s project, playfully titled “Mermaid in the Shell”.

The build started with a frame clutch purse, which, given that it comes with nice hinges and latches, is really a brilliant starting point for a project case. The fact that you can find them shaped like pink seashells really seals the deal for this particular project. A ZitaoTech BB Q10 keyboard — in white, naturally — pairs with a 3.5″ touchscreen as the interface for a Raspberry Pi 3A+. You might be thinking, “great, another toy with an old Pi inside. What can you really do with a Pi3 in 2026?” Well, admittedly, for full-fat desktop Linux, the 3A+ is looking a bit long in the tooth and short in the RAM.

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Hacked Video File Holds Multiple Films On YouTube

May 10, 2026 by Tyler August 20 Comments

We notice there are a lot of hacks on YouTube lately, but we don’t share enough hacks about YouTube. That’s why [PortalRunner]’s latest oeuvre is interesting: it’s a video that gives you a different picture depending on the selected bitrate.

Watch it at 1080p, you get one thing; at 360p, the image is completely different. The hack relies on understanding precisely how YouTube cuts down videos — because if you haven’t uploaded a video there before, you might not know the creator doesn’t have to encode all of those options; they’re invited to upload in the highest possible definition, and YouTube reencodes the rest.

1080p and 720p films are shown at 60FPS, while 360p and below are 30FPS– so that’s one way to hide the difference. Since YouTube drops every second frame when encoding the lower-quality video, images you want in the HD version can be kept only in even-numbered frames that YouTube will remove. That seems easy enough, but how does [PortalRunner] avoid the low-quality image flickering in at 30 FPS when watching in higher definition?

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Binaural Microphone On A Budget

May 10, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 25 Comments

For as many speakers as someone can cram into a surround sound system, humans still (generally) only have two ears to listen to those sounds with. This means that, for recording purposes, it’s possible to create incredibly vivid three-dimensional sounds with just two microphones, provided that there’s an actual physical replica of a human ear attached to each microphone. This helps ensure that all the qualities of the sounds are preserved in a way a real human would experience them, and as [David Green] demonstrates, these systems don’t need to be very expensive.

This build doesn’t just use models of human ears for recording sounds through. The silicone ears are mounted on a styrofoam mannequin head as well, which provides some sound isolation between the two microphones, much like a real human head. The ears are mounted in appropriate locations with the microphones installed inside, and the entire microphone apparatus is positioned on a PVC rig with a camera so that binaural audio will be recorded for anything [David] points it at.

Although he had some issues interfacing two microphones using 19th-century technology instead of soldering everything together, the build still eventually came together, and only for around $70 USD. However, this build is a bit dated now, so prices may have changed by now. It’s still a great way to produce realistic stereo sound without breaking the bank, but it’s not the only way of getting this job done.

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Hackaday Links: May 10, 2026

May 10, 2026 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

While Artemis II was primarily a demonstration flight of the architecture NASA plans to use for future lunar missions, it was also an excellent excuse for the crew to snap some photos of the Moon and Earth with the benefit of modern camera technology. If you’ve been looking forward to seeing more of the crew’s images, you’re in luck, as thousands of new images have recently been released.

Now we don’t mean to beat up on the folks at NASA, but browsing through these images, we couldn’t help but be reminded of an article we saw on PetaPixel that discussed the space agency’s haphazard approach to sharing images online.

It’s really more like an unsorted file dump than anything, made worse by the fact that you have to access it through a government website that looks and performs like it was designed in the early 2000s. There’s even a prominent button that attempts to load a gallery feature that relies on the long-deprecated Adobe Flash. It would be nice to see the situation improved by the time astronauts actually touch down on the lunar surface, but we wouldn’t count on it.

Speaking of old tech, we’ve been following the resurgence of keyboard-equipped smartphones with great interest, as we imagine many of you have been. A recent CNBC article addresses the trend, although it didn’t quite take the nerd contingent into account. We want physical keys so we can work in the terminal and write code without fighting an on-screen keyboard, but of course, that’s not exactly what your average consumer is looking for.

It’s quite the opposite, in fact. A 20-something user referenced in the article explained how the younger generations see the physical keyboard as a way to be less connected to their phones, describing it as “an extra barrier of inconvenience that adds more steps into the thinking process.” If you need us, we’ll be collecting dust in the corner.

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