But Just What Is This ‘Artificial Intelligence’?

June 3, 2026 by 53 Comments

In the world of buzzwords, the acronym ‘AI’ has absolutely been the buzziest of buzzing buzzwords for at least a few years now. Where previously terms like ‘smart’ and ‘intelligent’ sufficed to promote a product, we are now being told that we are living in an age where this supposedly newfangled ‘artificial intelligence’ is doing literally everything faster and better while also curing cancer on the side. Yet, as a wise man once said: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

The obvious implication of using a term like ‘artificial intelligence’ in this manner is that it brings to mind a modern version of early last century’s ‘electronic brain’ vernacular alongside the rise of digital computers. Yet rather than electrons in vacuum tubes and semiconductors propelling us into a brave new world of super-intelligence, we now just use said devices to doom scroll and to engage in passive-aggressive online communications like the typical primate groups in a virtual jungle defending their turf.

Similarly, the term AI is massively oversold today, least of all in the inherent presupposition that we somehow have finally cracked the mystery of the brain and have created an intelligence that can go toe-to-toe with humans and even our corvid dinosaur friends. Perhaps the worst part is that there is a veritable mountain of fascinating algorithms and other constructs that help us automate many tasks today, making it somewhat rude to just give up and call everything ‘AI’ like we learned nothing from the 1980s AI craze.

So what is exactly being smoothed over by the glossy marketing of ‘everything is AI’?

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Game Dodecahedron Runs AArch64 Assembly

June 3, 2026 by No comments

Operating systems are great things to have for general purpose computing, but sometimes they can just get in the way. There’s RAM overhead and processor cycles required for all that operating, after all. For something like a game system, it seems unnecessary. The NES certainly did well enough without an OS, as did its various successors for several console generations.

[Inkbox] wanted to get back to those heady days by programming bare-metal games for a Rasberry Pi 3 that had sat unused since 2016. Games are on cartridge, running bare metal, in assembly — as God and Masayuki Uemura intended. Also, the console is a dodecahedron, because the name GameCube was already taken.

The GitHub link above doesn’t exactly have documentation, at least as of this writing, so you’ll need to watch the video to get the full details. The dodecahedron form factor might not be ideal for packing away in a bag, but as a handheld we have to admit it does look comfortable to hold. Two faces of the dodecahedron get a half-dozen buttons each, which are wired to a GPIO pin on the Pi via a Schmitt trigger for hardware debounce. Like all good consoles, it uses cartridges, these ones being adapted from SD cards on large PCBs derived from a project we featured before.

That all sounds great, but it’s the assembly programming we’re really interested in — skip to around the seven-minute mark in the video for that. Ultimately it’s a build video, so not the ideal tutorial for ARM assembly programming, but it might not be a bad introduction for some. Unfortunately you don’t get line-by-line of the PacMan game he put together — but he does have it in the repository for you to examine. The repo also has STLs if you want to make a dodecahedron of your own.

Of course he’s got a RetroPi cartridge as well, loaded with emulators, and we suspect that’s mostly how this GameDodecahedron will get used. Still, we’ll always have a soft spot for assembly code and projects that use it — be it on ARM, good old 6502, the open-source RISC V architecture, or even the absolute monster of op codes that is x86.

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A Diffraction Grating Makes This Clock Readable

June 3, 2026 by 7 Comments

We’ve seen just about every possible way to make a clock here at Hackaday over the years. So it’s rare to have a first, but here we are with [Twisted & Tinned], who’s made a novel clock with a diffraction grating.

The display of the clock looks for all the world like a jumble of LEDs, that is, until you place the grating in front of it. Those LEDs are addressable multi-color parts, and each digit is generated at a different color all on top of each other. The grating splits out these colors, resulting in a magical set of floating LED figures.

Behind those LEDs is a Pi Pico, but that’s just one of many microcontrollers that could have powered this project. It’s the use of the diffraction grating in a novel way with those LEDs that makes the difference, and we rather like it. He’s also managed to get the grating pattern in the 3D printed surround for a shimmering look, by printing directly onto a diffraction grating sheet. That in particular is a technique we’ve looked at before in detail.

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Turning An Old 3D Printer Into A Vinyl Cutter For Cheap

June 2, 2026 by 9 Comments

Replacing a 3D printer’s extruder with a cutting blade seems like an easy way to do things like vinyl cutting, but you cannot just put on any blade and expect good results. The right type of blade is called a drag knife and it’s designed so that it follows the direction in which you’re cutting. You can get these in dedicated vinyl cutting machines, as well as in the form of attachments for the likes of CNC machines. How to use them with an old Anycubic Mega S FDM printer is demonstrated by [Cocoanix 3D Printing] in a recent video.

For a bit more background information you can peruse for example this write-up by [Kronos Robotics], who goes through the steps of selecting the right blade, cutting mat and such for use with a CNC machine.

For the 3D printer in the video a Roland vinyl cutter style holder and blades were bought off AliExpress, for which then a custom 3D printed mount was designed, though you can often get a ready-made one off your usual 3D model sources. Following this you get into the hardest part, being the software and making sure you don’t cut too deep into the vinyl through its backing paper.

Fortunately most of the hard work here is done already by the Polycut project, which is precisely designed to help you turn a 3D printer or similar into a vinyl cutter or plotter. This takes in an SVG file and generates the appropriate g-code, after which you better have gotten your Z-offset calibration right if you want that perfect result. With all that in place it’s then actually quite easy to cut your very own vinyl without shelling out big bucks for a dedicated machine.

Of course, it’ll likely never be as fast as those machines, requires more calibration and have a more limited cutting space, but as it’s not a permanent modification and probably less crazy than putting a laser engraver module on a commercial FDM printer like the Bambu Lab H2D.

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A black plastic box is shown, with a green circuit board inside. The circuit board is wired to an RS-232 connector and an RJ-45 connector.

A High-Vacuum Controller For An Eventual Electron Microscope

June 2, 2026 by 7 Comments

[Chris Doble] has high ambitions: he’s making his own scanning-electron microscope, and as the first step he’s built a high-vacuum system. This required its own controller to manage the various electronics involved in the system, which he’s documented and open-sourced.

The vacuum system itself starts with a rotary-vane roughing pump, which can bring a chamber down from atmospheric pressure to about 10-3 millibar. This is still too high a pressure, so the second stage is a turbomolecular high-vacuum pump, which can operate from 18 millibar down to 10-7 millibar. To protect the turbomolecular pump in case the roughing pump suddenly stops, it includes an anti-suckback valve. Connected to these pumps is a pressure gauge which uses a pair of sensors to sense the entire pressure range. All this setup worked well, but the turbomolecular pump and the pressure sensor each used their own interfaces, while [Chris] wanted a single interface for the eventual microscope.

[Chris] therefore designed his own controller based on the Raspberry Pi Pico 2, with firmware written in Rust. The pressure gauge uses an RS-232 interface, which he connected to the Pico’s UART pins using an RS-232 level shifter, with a null modem to swap over the transmitting and receiving pins. The turbomolecular pump used an RS-485 interface, which required a converter circuit and some level-shifting resistors. A custom PCB and 3D-printed case hold the final circuit, which provides a host computer with a single USB interface. When [Chris] tested the controller, the vacuum chamber reached a pressure of 10-6 millibar, and was still slowly falling when he ended the test.

This isn’t the first vacuum chamber controller we’ve seen. Of course, this assumes that the pressure gauge already has a controller; if not, we’ve also covered one of those. To see the inspiration for [Chris]’s project, check out [Ben Krasnow]’s scanning-electron microscope.

Does Your Terminal Speak Morse? This One Does

June 2, 2026 by 6 Comments

There are a lot of single board computers on the market these days, so you can be forgiven if you missed the LuckFox Lyra. Its main claim to fame seems to be that it shares the Pi Pico’s 51 mm x 21 mm footprint while being powerful enough to run a full Linux system– or at least, it was. Now its claim to fame is as a device you can interact with no peripherals, accessing the terminal via Morse code. That’s thanks to [Gabriel Broussard Korr] and his Morstdin project, which should run on just about anything POSIX-compliant, by dint of a being a clever sh script at heart.

Of course, with most POSIX-compliant systems, you’ll need to alter the script to account for some kind of periferal to do the Morse I/O– not so on the LuckFox Lyra, which has a built-in LED and a single usable button. It actually has two buttons, but one of them is RESET and you can’t use that for anything but its intended purpose. The BOOT button, on the other hand, becomes user input after the system has started. One button, one LED? It’s almost like LuckFox designed this SBC for Morse! Admittedly we’d prefer an audible output, but adding a buzzer would detract from the purity of this implementation.

He’s had to extend the code, of course, since Samuel Morse did not expect all of the special characters you’re likely to encounter on the terminal. The resultant Programmer’s Morse, or PMorse is a straightforward extension, but [Gabriel] didn’t stop there: he’s also added a set of commands he describes as “vim-like” make using this headless device easier by doing things like deleting whole words or flash the line you’re working on so you can make sure you haven’t made any errors.

If that wasn’t enough, he’s also put an LLM on it. Because in the Year of Our Lord 2026, you apparently cannot escape the frakkin’ toasters by jumping your rag-tag fleet into the 128 MB of RAM on this tiny SBC. Still, his inclusion of Llamma.cpp does add one thing to the project: it can now claim to be the world’s smallest stand-alone chatbot. It’s also the only one that speaks Morse. That’s got to be worth some bragging rights.

[Gabriel] may have a thing for physically tiny Linux devices– his last project, which we featured, was about using Linux on old smartphones with Termux.

Thanks to [Gabriel] for the tip!

Header image credit Luckfox.

 

From Scrappy Pallet Wood To Fancy Tea Tray

June 2, 2026 by 16 Comments

Pallets are a wonderful way to package goods and move them around, but especially the wooden ones have a very finite lifespan. This means that many of them are discarded every day, even though there is still good wood on them. Even if it’s not the highest quality wood, you can still use it for some nice wooden items, like the tea tray that [GR Woodworking] recently put together.

The reclaimed wood is the typical fast-growing, soft type, with the suspicion of it being paulownia here. Of course, wooden pallets use a wide variety of wood varieties, so not all reclaimed wood is equally suitable for applications like this, and identifying the type can be a challenge in itself.

In the video it’s shown how the wood is planed to make it smooth and straight, before the joints are created and it is married to the poplar or aspen base plate. Of note is that absolutely no power tools or bulky things like router tables are used here, just basic hand tools that should make this kind of woodworking accessible to people even without that kitted-out woodworking shop.

After assembly it’s finished with Vararhana oil-based stain to give it a darker look and really bring out the grain. Naturally, since it’s a tea tray it has to be commissioned with a proper tea ceremony, which it passes with flying colors.

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