The turntable in question, or at least the same model.

Vintage Turntable Gets Brain Transplant And Home Assistant Integration

June 5, 2026 by 10 Comments

When [Marsupial] picked up a vintage Sansusi P-L45 turntable, he figured it would be an easy fix: a few capacitors, a belt or two, and maybe a new cartridge, the usual. But it turned out the electronics were fried, which set the stage for an upgrade that turned it into what may be the world’s only ESP32-driven, Home Assistant integrated, linear tracking turntable.

That last bit, the linear tracking, is why the turntable originally had a microprocessor in the first place: rather than an arm that pivots along the groove naturally, fancy turntables towards the end of the golden era of vinyl slid the needle along a linear track at a variable speed to follow the spiral groove on the record. You can see that in action in the demo video below, though it’s of a working version owned by [BFinks].

The fancy linear mechanism required electronic control to match the speed to the RPM, and in the example of Sansusi’s P-L45, that was provided by an NEC microcontroller on a daughter-board labelled “F4992 CPU”. CPU is a grandiose title, perhaps, but that’s irrelevant since the chip on the board was deader than disco.

That meant [Marsupial] had some reverse engineering to do — figuring out exactly what that chip did to drive this board, in order to replicate its behavior on an ESP32-S3. Luckily the golden era of vinyl correlated with the golden era of service manuals, and the manuals are still available, so [Marsupial] had a big leg up on that. After making the turntable work like stock, what else to do with the extra capability of the ESP32 than plug it into HA and make it really automatic?

Of course it wasn’t quite that easy: a new daughter-board was created that needed to do level shifting to the ESP32’s modern 3.3 V logic as well as hardware debounce on some inputs. The whole saga is very well documented on [Marsupial]’s blog WeAreAllGeeks. The link here takes you to the overview, but he’s got a lot more info on other pages — and of course links to the firmware and PCB design if you happen to have a Sansusi turntable in need of a brain transplant.

Vinyl lovers will appreciate this project much more than the last ESP32 “turntable” we featured, which was anything but. If you want to get into records but don’t have a turntable, you can always make your own.

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Connecting Your Car To Home Assistant

June 4, 2026 by 26 Comments

With how much time many of us spend in our cars, it makes perfect sense to consider them a second home. Yet even if that’s not the case, there are still good reasons to connect a car to one’s smart home solution like Home Assistant, such as to keep track of certain parameters for easy monitoring and reminders. This is what [The Stock Pot] channel recently demonstrated using a widget that connects to the OBD-II port inside the car, as not every car comes with its own app yet.

The used dongle is the ESP32-S3-based WiCAN from Australian company MeatPi. This device runs the open source WiCAN firmware. After plugging the dongle into the OBD-II port of the car, the device powers on and can be configured via Wi-Fi like any other smart device these days. After that it’s just another Wi-Fi device on the network.

Since each car’s ECU will represent data differently, you need a car-specific configuration, which can take some tweaking. The idea of integrating with Home Assistant is directly supported by MeatPi, with a handy documentation page. Of course [The Stock Pot] shared their configuration if you want to feel inspired. Among the parameters monitored you get things like fuel level, days to service and coolant temperature.

Although you could make the argument that it mostly saves you from having to waddle over to the car to check the data there, being able to remotely access the OBD-II port of a car does seem rather practical even outside of home automation concepts, such as gathering performance statistics and early failure warnings, especially for aspects like tire pressure and unhappy engine or BEV battery conditions that can quickly go from an inconvenience to very expensive.

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Microsoft Claims 20 Second Qubits

June 4, 2026 by 19 Comments

While it might seem that your computer malfunctions every few minutes, the reality is that modern computers are usually quite robust. Not so much for quantum computers, where qubit life is often measured in milliseconds. Now, the company claims to have qubits that last for about 20 seconds.

For example, Microsoft’s Majorana 1 quantum chip, which, incidentally, was mired in controversy, provided 8 qubits that were stable very briefly. This second-generation chip provides 12 qubits that average 20-second lifespans.

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If You Want To Hack Me, Come In Through The Speaker

June 4, 2026 by 13 Comments

Some security hacks require someone to have physical access to your computer. In many cases, that’s easy to mitigate. Other attack vectors can put you at risk from anywhere via the network. That’s what firewalls are for. But there is an in-between risk where an attacker just has to be “around” your computer. [Rasmus Moorats] found out that a Creative Sound Blaster sound bar could open up just such an attack.

[Rasmus] was poking around the firmware just to write custom software to control it. The possibility of an attack was just an accidental find.

The soundbar connects to USB, but it also has Bluetooth, which, for some reason, is always on. There’s an app that can communicate with the speaker using BLE, and Creative has a special protocol to control it. The same protocol works on USB or Bluetooth, but with an important difference.

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Ways To Embed Magnets In 3D Prints And Not Ruin Printers

June 4, 2026 by 21 Comments

Adding magnets to a 3D print can be very useful in a design, but there are some things that can trip you up if you’re not aware of them. In a recent video by [Lost in Tech] some of the essentials are covered, including why you shouldn’t get magnets near most extruder nozzles or the printing bed.

The easiest method is of course to add magnets in after printing, using friction fit with or without ribs, or with a dab of glue. Here making sure that the magnet stays in place is the trick, as you do not want the magnet to get lost or end up in the tummy of a curious pet or toddler.

The magnetic pattern on an FDM printer's magnetic bed. (Credit: Lost in Tech, YouTube)
The magnetic pattern on an FDM printer’s magnetic bed.

Things get spicy when you’re talking about adding magnets during the printing process, as some extruders are made of a ferromagnetic material and thus a magnet will happily stick to said nozzle if it’s not pure brass or similar. As seen in the video even some purported ‘brass’ nozzles aren’t pure enough to not be significantly ferromagnetic.

Another issue is that of heat, which is something that magnets generally do not like much. Using magnets like you’d use heat inserts for bolts is a recipe for disaster, as the heat from a soldering iron will demagnetize the magnet, which for the typical magnet is less than 200°C. At least this should mean that the magnet stuck to your extruder nozzle will eventually fall off by itself after it demagnetizes.

With the bed of the typical FDM printer these days you’re talking about magnetically attached plates, with the underlying heated bed using a Halbach array configuration as is typical of flat magnets, yet with the gotcha that these aren’t typically real Halbach arrays, but knock-offs with simply alternating north-south pole magnets. As it turns out, these types of magnetic arrays can be disturbed by another magnet, such as a powerful neodymium magnet near said printing bed, flipping polarity in a way that cannot be easily undone.

You can still install magnets during printing, but it’s recommended to use something like side-insertion, where the extruder nozzle cannot pull out a magnet. Regardless of your approach, it’s good to know of the risks with ferromagnetic nozzles, the magnetic bed and treating magnets like they’re just heat inserts. While you can get higher-temperature magnets, many of the same issues still remain here.

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An RGB Keyboard For Your Hackaday Communicator Badge

June 4, 2026 by 1 Comment

The most recent Hackaday event badge has been the Communicator, a handheld wireless terminal with a rather nice QWERTY keyboard. It’s good enough as delivered, but [makeTVee] has gone one better and made his Communicator keyboard into a fully RGB light-up experience.

The feat is achieved with the help of a new front panel holding some very thin side-emitting addressable LEDs. The keys are custom-printed, and there’s a TPU mat to hold them all together. The LEDs are driven from one of the device’s GPIOs.

We saw this badge in real life at the recent Hackaday Europe conference in Lecco, Italy. It really is as good as it looks in the video below, the care and attention which has gone into the build is extremely impressive.The original badge used a silicone cast set of keys, and we’d say if you are making a device with a keyboard then these might make a very good option.

If you’re not familiar with the Communicator, it’s worth having a look at the launch announcement.

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The World’s First GPIB Speech Synthesizer, And It’s For A GRiD Compass

June 4, 2026 by 2 Comments

The GRiD Compass is a legendary portable computer — a taste of an early-80s future with bubble memory, tough enough for NASA to take them into space, and one of the machines which defined the beginnings of the form factor we know today as a laptop. They’re not easy to come by, but [Scott M. Baker] got his hands on one. As well as nursing it back to health, he’s made an unusual peripheral, a GPIB speech synthesizer.

The GRiD arrived in one piece despite sketchy packaging, and after a little confusion over its line voltage it ran as well as the day it was made. It was designed to use GPIB as its interface for large peripherals such as printers or disk drives, so it was that interface picked for the speech synthesizer. It emulates a GPIB printer, and bytes are sent to the synthesizer chip by printing to LPT1, making driving it an easy process.

The synth itself is a clever design that allows the use of all the various speech chips of the day. It achieves this using a GPIB carrier board holding the interfacing, and a set of plug-in modules, one for each different chip. It’s certainly an unusual peripheral.

You can see more details in the video below the break, meanwhile if you can’t get the real thing there’s a cyberdeck tribute you can make.

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