Two diaphragm vacuum pump setups with high-tech jam jar vacuum vessel. (Credit: Maya Posch)

Vacuum Drying And Making Stuff Hot In A Vacuum

October 1, 2026 by 19 Comments

After previously exploring the impact of vapor pressure on the drying of desiccant and more, the conclusion was essentially that in order to drive moisture that’s not directly on a material’s surface out of it, you pretty much have to heat up said material to make the process not take forever. Of course, we’d still want to retain the vacuum while doing said heating, which raises the question of how you best heat something that is inside a vacuum.

Fortunately, this is a solved problem, with commentators to the previous article helpfully pointing to the existence of devices like vacuum ovens. Of course, you can either buy such a device and not worry your pretty little head about the finer details, or you can defy convention and build one yourself because you’re a rebel and really want to know how their internals work.

Thus in this article we’ll be taking a look at the finer details of generating thermal radiation and how to best heat up a sample inside a vacuum chamber without directly picking easy mode with microwaves.

Continue reading “Vacuum Drying And Making Stuff Hot In A Vacuum” →

The Whole Computer Is Vim

October 1, 2026 by 42 Comments

Love it or hate it, Vim, the vi-compatible minimalist editor, is a common denominator between a huge array of operating systems. If you need to edit a file, it’s usually safe to expect it there if your normal editor is absent. Now thanks to [Omwah] it’s moved onto the most meager of platforms, where it becomes the firmware itself rather than a program running on an OS.

ESP-Vim is, as its name suggests, Vim, for some of the ESP32 series of microcontrollers. It boots straight into the familiar editor on an attached screen, and it has filesystem and git access, along with MicroPython. It’s a small computer for working with text files and some basic scripting, and we like the idea.

It needs a board with an ESP32-S3 or P4, with 16 MB of Flash and at least 8 MB of PSRAM. There’s a list of boards that meet this spec, and we can’t help noticing that one of them is the version of the Cheap Yellow Display that comes with an S3. Hook up a Bluetooth keyboard and you’re in.

How easy it will be to use remains to be seen, but bearing in mind that the vi interface followed by Vim was designed for very slow terminals in a much earlier decade, and it could be just right for these platforms. Would you use one?

Vim logo: The Vim project, VIM License.

SDR– Lets You Patch Together Your Setup

October 1, 2026 by 14 Comments

It is often helpful to think of a radio as a series of interconnected functional blocks—hence the use of block diagrams to convey how a given radio operates. [Julian Haag] has brought this ethos to SDR–, a software-defined radio program where you can patch together your setup.

There are many software defined radio tools out there, with various interfaces and methods of configuration. [Julian] wanted to keep things intuitive and simple, and so built SDR– with an interface similar to that of a modular synth. You drop in blocks, like a radio, a demodulator, or a speaker, and then you link them together with patch cables to route the signals where they need to go.

[Julian] has populated the tool with plenty of useful decoders, too, so you can have lots of fun from the get go. You can play with things like ADS-B, POCSAG, SSTV, DAB, and RDS right out of the box. There’s also some fun passive radar and direction finding tools there too if you want to dive in. Files are on GitHub for the curious.

We’ve featured lots of neat SDR hacks over the years, like this neat real-time beamforming setup. Meanwhile, if you’re cooking up your own radio experiments in the homelab, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline.

DIY Game Console Does It With Optical Discs

September 30, 2026 by 14 Comments

Optical media may be dead for video games on the big corporate consoles, but not in [Emmet]’s heart– or on his DIY game console, that he built specifically to use optical media. Not fancy blu-ray or newfangled DVDs, either, but good old fashioned CDs from the Orange Book.

Yeah, he’s not fitting modern AAA flagship games on those disks, but the Intel N150 on the single board computer he’s using isn’t going to power through them, either. That’s fine, though, because there are literally decades of content this machine can handle. That’s why the board is running Batocera, which is a Linux distro tailor-made for retrogaming on x86– and also ARM, but that’s not important here.

He’s using ESP32-S3s to run custom wireless gamepads with BLE, which means he’s got more power in each of them than some of the retro consoles this machine is emulating, but it gets the job done. Unlike some cartridge projects we’ve seen that merely queue up the games, the CDs on this one actually do seem to store the ROM file, along with a shell script to put it in the correct emulator’s library. We might have gone with autorun, but it’s [Emmet]’s console and he’s got it working how he likes.

What really makes this project stand out, in our opinion, is the effort [Emmet] put into custom CD labels and art for the jewel cases. It really makes this feel like an actual game console and not just a PC hooked to a the TV. The 3D printed case doesn’t hurt in that respect, either.

Be it from a nostalgia, as in this project, a need for cheap storage, or the perverse desire to hook it to an NES, optical media seems to be having a bit of a moment. Speaking of moment, we’re going to have to take a moment to come to grips with the fact that CDs have become nostalgic. Didn’t they just replace vinyl?

Continue reading “DIY Game Console Does It With Optical Discs” →

Quantum computer

Will Superconducting Transistors Help Quantum Computers?

September 30, 2026 by 25 Comments

Despite all the glamorous promises made about quantum computing, it’s hard to make the argument that today’s quantum computers hold a candle to the sheer practicality of classical computers, especially when qubits need to be cuddled at cryogenic temperatures inside a cryostat. This is worsened by the problem that regular semiconductor transistors do not really appreciate these same cryogenic temperatures, creating an awkward interfacing problem for the controlling electronics.

Now a new pitch here is to create superconducting transistors that will happily work at temperatures near absolute zero. In an article in IEEE Spectrum this start-up – called S-Transistors – and their concept are covered.

By being able to have the control circuits inside the same cryostat, one can forego the absolute mess of wiring that has to penetrate it, and with it one major failure point. Their proposed solution uses the same Josephson junctions (JJs) that are also used for qubits, using a high enough current to briefly make it non-superconducting, inducing a voltage pulse that can be detected.

In addition, JJ-based field effect transistors (JJFETs) are used, with this 2025 paper by [Yusheng Xiong] et al. detailing these structures. Here S–Transistors claims that they are now able to manufacture JJFETs at scale, which would be another major breakthrough that could bring quantum computing just a little bit closer.

They’d be competing with cryogenic CMOS (Cry-CMOS), which can use standard semiconductor production lines to create circuits that can withstand cryogenic temperatures, albeit not quite a the near-zero K level that these superconducting transistors and JJFETs would be capable of.

The pogo-quadcopter on ice

Pogo-Bot Goes All Terrain With Compliant Foot

September 30, 2026 by 18 Comments

What do you get when you combine a pogo stick, a quadcopter, and engineering students from the University of Toronto? This thing, apparently– a “monopedal hopping robot” that uses a spikey, pivoting foot pad tensioned by what look like elastic bands to keep it upright on all terrain from soft sand to hard ice.

It’s an interesting concept. The thrust from the four propellers is what gives the energy to get the robot moving, but its pogo-like hopping is entirely down to the spring-loaded single legged “landing gear”. Early iterations just used a spike on the end of that leg, but that failed in ways that some might find humorous, which you will see if you watch the video embedded below. Giving the monopod an actual foot with some traction and the ability to pivot and match the terrain works much better– now not only can this robot leap tall fences in a single bound, an errant ice patch won’t send it skittering away.

This isn’t the first one-legged robot we’ve seen; some only use their leg while others have wings, but this odd quadcopter is the first we’ve seen to brave Canadian winter. Continue reading “Pogo-Bot Goes All Terrain With Compliant Foot” →

Open Source Tricorder Is In It For The Science

September 30, 2026 by 10 Comments

If you’re reading Hackaday there’s pretty good odds you’re at least somewhat fond of Star Trek. We’d bet good money most of you would quit your jobs today if a Starfleet recruiter showed up. That’s something you’d have in common with [PeterAJansen], who has been working for over a decade now to create something worthy of being called a tricorder. If his latest iteration, the Open Source Science Tricorder Cyberdeck, isn’t there yet, it’s pretty darn close.

Frankly, it looks more usable than Roddenberry’s version.

The “tri” in tricorder means three, but this device has more than three instruments– so did the ones on the show, come to think of it. You won’t be scanning for veteron radiation with this, but you do get a scintillation crystal to get a spectroscopic analysis of beta- or gamma-ray sources; there’s also a visible light spectrometer, thermal camera, and magnetic field camera along with a standard magnetometer and the usual environmental sensors to give you temperature, pressure, and humidity, plus particulate, VOC and CO2 concentration. Enough to explore an alien planet? That’s hard to say, but it seems like enough to explore this one.

The device is based around a Clockwork Pi uConsole, which takes care of the form-factor: a slabtop with a QWERTY keyboard and an IPS display in a nice screen, and a Compute Module 5 to crunch all that data. It might not be quite as stylish as the folding units seen on-screen in Star Trek, but it seems like an eminently practical form factor. There are videos of it in operation as well as being assembled on the GitHub repository,  where you can get all the details needed to make your own. It is the Open Source Science Tricorder, after all.

This isn’t the first project we’ve seen chasing tricorder glory, but many of the others were more interested in screen accuracy than science. [Peter]’s earlier “arducorder” was a very notable exception to that trend.

Thanks to [MarcCote] for the tip! If your scanners pick up something interesting in cyberspace, remember our hailing frequencies are always open.