Snake On A Seven-Segment Display Is Gloriously Bad

October 30, 2026 by 5 Comments

You’ve no doubt heard the saying, “If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well.” But there’s actually a counter-perspective to this particular philosophy that says it’s also worth doing things badly, with the general idea being that even a semi-successful attempt at something is better than no attempt at all.

We’re not sure if that’s the principle [José Luis Monteiro] and his father had in mind while working on a way to play the classic Snake on a seven-segment LED display salvaged from an old DVD player, but surely the end result is the same. It’s not so much that the display isn’t a good fit for the eponymous snake, in fact, it actually makes a strange amount of sense. Each of the segments can stand in for a piece of the ever-growing serpent, and they’re already arranged in a roughly rectangular grid that makes moving around straightforward enough.

The issue is that the resolution — such as it is — of the display it pretty unforgiving for anything else. Namely, the “food” that your sake is after is naturally identical to one of its own segments, so it doesn’t take long before it’s all rather confusing visually. But in those brief opening moments, it actually works pretty well.

Even if you’re not interested in Snake, between the documentation, source code, and the video below, this project is a great primer on reverse engineering these types of displays. With a microcontroller, a datasheet, and a bit of patience, you could put together an unattractive and frustrating gameplay experience of your very own! If that’s not the dream, what is?

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Is This The Only Instrument You Need?

October 29, 2026 by 30 Comments

When working on an electronic project it’s likely you will find yourself working with a variety of different instruments, be they logic analysers, oscilloscopes, or whatever. These can take up a lot of space, not to mention cost a bundle of cash. [Max.K] came up with PicoLab as a solution, it’s an all-in-one box containing a four-channel oscilloscope, eight-channel logic analyser, GPIOs, a data logger, and serial, SPI, and i2C interfaces. There’s even an adjustable power supply!

Behind it all is an RP2350, in its larger package with more pins, coupled to some custom interface and protection circuitry. Perhaps the cleverest part is its interface, which it serves as a web site on the network card it exposes through the USB port. Any OS that supports a web browser and USB networking can thus use this thing. You can find all the code in a GitHub repository, should you wish to have a go at building one yourself. We like this idea.

Putting A MiSTer Marquee On A Better Display

October 29, 2026 by 3 Comments

Some MiSTer users put a small secondary “marquee” display on the FPGA board that can show information about the system such as the currently loaded core and what game it happens to be running. Generally these take the form of a small monochrome OLED display, likely the one most of us have sitting in a parts bin somewhere.

But [Erico Mendonca] wanted a something with a bit more style, so he’s come up with a firmware for the ESP32-C3 that connects to MiSTer’s existing secondary display protocol but works with slightly more visually impressive panels such as the round GC9A01 that so many hackers have been playing with as of late. If the whole circular display thing isn’t your…thing, you can even run the firmware on the Cheap Yellow Display for a turn-key rectangular experience.

Because [Erico] didn’t want to fiddle with anything on the MiSTer side of the equation, his firmware has to do the heavy lifting when it comes to the art that shows on the display. So there’s a web-based editor that lets you put together your own artwork to show on the marquee based on what command the MiSTer has actually sent out. Flashing the firmware on the ESP32 can be done through the browser as well, as is becoming increasingly common these days, making it relatively easy to get this project up and running.

With this project it’s also possible to control multiple client displays over WiFi from one system, just in case you wanted to show off what console you were booting up in multiple places.

We’re fans of the round display here at Hackaday, so it’s been great to see more folks putting them to use as of late.

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Replicating The Color-Changing Effect Of The Lycurgus Cup

October 29, 2026 by 11 Comments

Although most archaeological finds from ancient civilizations aren’t quite as exciting as what you might expect from the movies, occasionally you come across something that’s truly special. The Lycurgus Cup is one of those, with the 3rd or 4th century CE glass cup and its incredible detail surviving likely because it ended up in church treasuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Now its almost magical dichroic glass effect has been recreated in a modern take by researchers at the University of Sheffield.

The Lycurgus cup with light shining through it. (Credit: Chappsnet, Wikimedia)
The Lycurgus cup with light shining through it. (Credit: Chappsnet, Wikimedia)

Dichroic glass takes on a different color depending on the lighting conditions, with the Lycurgus cup appearing to be green glass when lit from the front and red when light passes through it from behind. This serves to give the portrayed scene – of the demise of King Lycurgus from Greek mythology – an extra boost with the right lighting.

The cause of this dichroic effect in this ancient marvel of glass work was unknown for the longest time, but research on a fragment of the glass revealed that it contains nanoparticles of both gold and silver. Since then a number of researchers have recreated this dichroic glass, with [Lars Kool] et al. using FDM 3D printing to create objects embedded with the same nanoparticles that also display this effect.

Where this work by the University of Sheffield differs is in that it creates the effect not only in glass, but also creating a piece of art in the form of a modified Atlas statue to use it. The resulting dichroic effect is rather similar, which isn’t too shocking since unlike over 1,600 years ago we can now literally see and measure nanoparticles in glass, while adding exact amounts of each to pure glass.

Here’s to raising a dichroic glass cup to bridging the millennia with recreated luxury glass recipes.

An Attempt At A Useful Desktop OS For Microcontrollers

October 29, 2026 by 55 Comments

We’re living at an interesting time here in 2026, when microcontrollers are becoming powerful enough to surpass the capabilities of “real” computers from a time when those real computers were starting to become useful. We’ve seen plenty of microcontrollers emulating machines from the 1990s, but what if instead they were giving all their power to the OS? It’s a question [Thomas] is trying to answer with SylphideOS, a general purpose GUI operating system aimed at multiple microcontroller platforms.

On the surface it has a GUI that appears to owe a lot to the early Macintosh machines, but underneath it has the FreeRTOS kernel, something that has been around for quite a while. You can argue among yourselves as to whether this make it an OS in its own right or a FreeRTOS distro. Aside from driving a screen through a framebuffer it also has the hardware interfaces you’d expect, for keyboard and storage. There’s support for RP2350 and selected ESP32 platforms so far, as well as an emulator.

We have already seen a few operating systems for microcontrollers that provide a user interface for a binary bootloader rather than persisting under whatever programs are running, so this marks an interesting departure. Only time will tell if it becomes a success, but perhaps it’s one to watch.

2026 Hackaday Supercon: All The Speakers!

October 29, 2026 by 4 Comments

We announced our first round of speakers, and then the workshops, and we were going to dribble out updates on the rest of the speakers as they came in, but then time slipped away from us. So we are left here announcing a veritable cornucopia of twenty wonderful talks that you absolutely won’t want to miss.

Supercon is just about a week away, and there are still a few tickets left, so grab them now before it’s too late.

And the talks are just half the fun. Between food, merriment, a killer badge with the biggest e-paper display that you’ve ever seen, and all the assorted shenanigans, it’s the highlight of our hacking year. Come join us!

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Robot Picks Up Othello

October 29, 2026 by 5 Comments

Experience is a great teacher. Ask [Jeneus], who, in high school, tried to make a program that played Othello. It didn’t go well. But years later, the idea produced an impressive Othello robot. At first glance, the robot looks a bit like a 3D printer with an aluminum extrusion XYZ motion system. But there’s a lot more to it, not to mention the software to play the game. Check it out in the video below.

The Z-axis has a vacuum system that can pick up clear tokens and place them on the board. If you know the game, you might remember that on a real board, players have to flip the tokens as they “capture” pieces. The robot has a smarter way to go. The tokens are clear because they are lit with one of two colors. So flipping the token is a simple LED color change. The LEDs also flash a different color to show you where you can move.

The device uses laser-cut components and 3D printed parts in PLA and TPU. Of course, there is a camera for the computer — a Raspberry Pi — to see the board. Overall, a very nicely done project. We’ve seen several checker and chess robots. We wonder if some of them could also play Othello?

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