The RP2350 Does 1080p

September 21, 2026 by 15 Comments

Coaxing a DVI signal out of a microcontroller to drive a DVI or HDMI screen has been possible for a while now, but limitations in what the devices can do has, in turn, placed a limit on the resolution that can be delivered. Now [Aaron Gayle] has broken through a barrier by generating 1080p video from an RP2350. The previous best from Raspberry Pi Pico-class microcontrollers was 720p, which an RP2040 could deliver. The 2350 is faster and has faster peripherals, but even then, to reach this resolution he had to overclock it to 372 MHz. For all the impressive achievement, there’s still a limitation. Lacking space for a framebuffer, he generates scanline by scanline, a technique we associate more with 8-bit computers from the 1980s.

The 1080p video code is part of a package called TVtop, a board game in which the game board is displayed on the TV and whose players interact from their phones via Wi-Fi. For that reason, there’s an ESP32 in the project too, though it has nothing to do with the video hack.

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DIY Router On X86 E-Waste: OpenWrt And OPNsense

September 21, 2026 by 22 Comments

In previous installments of this series we looked at how creating a DIY router using an e-waste-level PC has changed over the years, before attempting to boot OpenWrt for x86 on it. After an initial SD card booting failure on one system, another system with a newer mainboard – an Intel Board D2500CC – was used which happily booted OpenWrt from an SD card inserted into a USB card reader.

Unfortunately, OpenWrt didn’t see any usable Ethernet interfaces despite having no less than four Intel Ethernet controllers and two hooked up to active networks. After recently getting back to the project, I found out why both onboard Intel 82574L Ethernet controllers didn’t show up in OpenWrt: the drivers for the Intel 82574L controllers are in the e1000e driver package, while only the e1000 package is present in the provided x86 image. This issue persists in the ‘generic’ image profile to this day.

Yet rather than diving head-first into building my own image that includes the kmod-e1000e package, I decided to give OPNsense a shake first.

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Searching For Dark Matter With A Levitating Magnet

September 21, 2026 by 31 Comments

Much of science is performed through inference, with the readings on instruments, a flash of light in heavy water, or the results of parsing through terabytes of sensor data after a particle accelerator collision either backing up a proposed scenario or weakening its foundations.

In the case of so-called dark matter, this is even more relevant, as we are talking about a proposed form of matter whose most pertinent feature is that it doesn’t interact with anything else except through gravity. This is where the wiggling of a levitating magnet may be the key to detecting it.

In this experimental setup by Rice University and Dutch researchers at the Leiden Institute, a tiny permanent magnet the size of a grain of sand is levitated above a superconductor, surrounded by highly sensitive detectors that should be able to spot even minuscule movements. So far, they have collected a month’s worth of data, with no conclusive results yet.

Even if they don’t detect any ‘knocks’ on this tiny levitating magnet, it will still help refine existing models of what dark matter’s properties might be. For the next phase of this research, they’ll add more of these sensors, which will also make it easier to distinguish background noise from any unusual readings.

We’ve previously talked about [Vera Ruben]’s contributions to the hunt for dark matter and the mysteries that prompted the idea that it might exist.

The Sinclair Spectrum Gets A Desktop GUI

September 21, 2026 by 19 Comments

Of the popular 1980s 8-bit computers, it’s fair to say that Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum punched above its weight. Sir Clive’s love of squeezing more functionality out of less hardware meant the compromises he made left it less powerful than competitors from Apple, Commodore, or Acorn. Still, the brightest programmers of the age took the little machine to heart and made it do some very impressive things. A desktop GUI, though, surely that would be pushing things too far. Never say never because now [mindbox77] has done it.

ZXdesk is an assembly language program for the 48k Spectrum that gives you something that looks a lot like GEM. It’s got all the things you’d expect from a desktop GUI, with menus, windows, and applications, and we find ourselves suitably impressed.

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Making A Copper-Oxide Photodetector From Scratch

September 20, 2026 by 5 Comments

Photodetectors come in a wide variety of constructions and materials, with the Cu2O-based photodetector that [Mad Scientist Creations] demonstrates in a recent video being a good example of a photodetector that can be created at home using nothing but some copper and a heat source.

Of the two copper elements in a salt water cell, one element is heated to the point where a copper oxide layer forms, specifically Cu2O, which acts as a semiconductor and provides the photosensitive layer. Even a fairly crude sensor created with a regular gas stove produces enough of a current that it can be used in a simple light detection circuit.

Although copper-oxide photodetectors may seem quaint, they are getting a lot of interest as they feature a very narrow bandgap at 1.2 eV. In a 2019 study by [Hyeon-Joo Song] et al. as published in Scientific Reports such a sensor is enhanced with an optimized grain structure that improves its performance, with much higher sensitivity and faster response times.

As demonstrated by [Andrzej Kwiatkowski] et al. in a 2024 paper in Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells these copper-oxide sensors can also be used for gas detectors, though they used advanced gas deposition to produce the thin films instead of sticking a bit of copper tape into a natural gas flame.

Even if DIY copper-oxide sensors aren’t quite as exciting as what one can do with access to a well-equipped (semiconductor) lab, it’s still a pretty accessible material that lends itself for easy experimentation.

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Hackaday Links: September 20, 2026

September 20, 2026 by 21 Comments

Some sad news to start this week off — after 52 years in business, Sherline has announced they are winding down their manufacturing operations. By the end of October they estimate they’ll have produced their last tool, and although they will no longer be making new products, they plan on supporting their existing customers for as long as possible. Although from the sound of the press release, that may mean simply keeping the website up and selling through their inventory of spare parts.

The company offered a range of American-made miniature lathes and mills, and while their manual machines may have been better known in our community, they did eventually branch out into CNC. The press release doesn’t go into a lot of detail about the chain of events that led up to this decision, but it does mention the challenges of modern manufacturing and the lingering aftereffects of the COVID pandemic.

At first blush, it might seem strange that the company would falter just as desktop CNCs appear to finally be gaining momentum, but of course that doesn’t change their ability to compete with overseas manufacturing in terms of price.

Of course, keeping competitive is only a concern when you actually have competitors in the first place. That’s the situation that NASA and Boeing may find themselves in should SpaceX decide to retire the Crew Dragon after 2030. While the International Space Station will (probably) be out of the equation by that point, the US space agency will still need the capability to fly humans to… somewhere, and that means there will be lucrative government contracts up for grabs.

The chances of any other American company developing and launching a human-rated spacecraft between now and the end of the decade are pretty much zero, which means Boeing will have to pick up the slack with their Starliner capsule. Or at least, try to, as Starliner hasn’t exactly had the best track record so far. Although by the 2030s SpaceX plans to have transitioned most, if not all, of its operations to Starship, one does wonder if a big enough check from Uncle Sam could change its mind.

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A laptop is shown set up on a desk next to a spectrum analyser, an SDR, and two antennas. The antennas are aimed toward assorted electronics, including headphones and a phone handset.

Reviving TEMPEST Attacks With An Injected Signal

September 20, 2026 by 2 Comments

TEMPEST attacks are often the most effective way to break air-gapped security: rather than directly accessing a computer, the attacker records the system’s unintended radio emissions and uses them to reconstruct its internal operations. This kind of attack was much more effective in the days of noisy, high-voltage CRT displays, and has gradually become less effective as electronics migrate to quieter, less powerful components. A group of researchers, however, has found that even modern electronics can become effective TEMPEST transmitters when irradiated with an RF signal.

The RF a device emits depends on the unintentional antennas in its internal structure. These are difficult to eliminate, and it’s usually not worth the effort; they’re usually small enough that they only effectively radiate at much higher frequencies than the electronics carry. The researchers’ technique, called InjectEave, radiated these electronics with a radio frequency tuned to their internal antennas, injecting that frequency into the circuit. Nonlinear electronic components, such as amplifiers, then mix the injected frequency with the internal signal, creating RF sidebands. This mixed signal then radiates out of the device and can be picked up and demodulated to recover the device’s internal signal.

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