NASA is going back to the Moon! We’ll follow the crew of Artemis II every step of the way.
Continue reading “Following Artemis II’s Journey Around The Moon”
Cleaning An IBM 5150, And The Perfect Period PCB Soldermask
Now that early PCs have moved firmly from the realm of e-waste into being collector’s items, it’s worth putting in some effort to restore them if you find one. [Epictronics] has an early IBM 5150, the ancestor of all today’s PCs, and is bringing it back to life. Along the way, he’s building a replica AdLib sound card, making a useful discovery about how to make new parts look authentic.
The video below the break is a gentle journey through an early PC teardown, followed by the construction of the replica sound card. Here’s the interesting nugget of information: these new cards are careful recreations of the originals, but they just don’t look right. It seems modern soldermask is too shiny, and as luck would have it, there’s another option that is much more period-authentic. We hadn’t noticed matte green was available, but it certainly captures the look of those days much better.
As you might expect, such an old machine has a range of dead capacitors and a few chips. There’s a lucky escape with a Varta battery on an expansion card, having very little leakage, and part of one of the floppy drives needs some surgery. It’s gentle hacking that’s engaging to watch, and of course, at the end, we’re rewarded with the thing booting properly.
You might think reproducing a sound card is unusual, but we’ve seen it a number of times.
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Reconstructed SC62015 Opcode Reference For Sharp Pocket Computers
Pocket computers like Sharp’s 8-bit computing marvels were a big part of the 1980s, providing super-portable processing power to anyone who wanted a bit more than what something like a scientific calculator could provide at the time. These days they are mostly just a collector’s item for retrocomputing enthusiasts, which also means that a lot of the knowledge about how to program the CPUs in them is at risk of being lost.
This is why [gikonekos] decided to combine as much knowledge they can glean from official documentation into a reference project on GitHub for the SC62015 equipped Sharp pocket computers like the PC-E550.
Generally you’d program in Sharp’s dialect of BASIC on these computers, such as the ‘PLAY3’ program that [gikonekos] recently unearthed from a November 1993 copy of ‘Pocket Computer Journal’ using which you can create polyphonic tunes. This only unlocks a small part of what the hardware can do, of course, so having a full opcode reference like this is important.
While still a work in progress, it’ll eventually contain the full opcode and register tables, addressing modes, instruction summaries and of course a full accounting of how all of this was reconstructed. As the original Sharp documentation wasn’t released to the public, providing these scans is also not a goal, especially not under any kind of free license.
A cursory search reveals an instruction table for the PC-E500 from 1995 by [Andrew Woods], so documenting this is not a new thing, although at the time these Sharp pocket PCs didn’t count as ‘retro systems’ yet.
Hackaday Links: March 15, 2026
Some days, it feels like we’re getting all the bad parts of cyberpunk and none of the cool stuff. Megacorps and cyber warfare? Check. Flying cars and holograms? Not quite yet. This week, things took a further turn for the dystopian with the news that a woman was hospitalized after an altercation with a humanoid robot in Macau. Police arrived on scene, took the bot into custody, and later told the media they believed this was the first time Chinese authorities had been called to intervene between a robot and a human.
The woman, reportedly in her seventies, was apparently shocked when she realized the robot was standing behind her. After the dust settled, the police determined it was being operated remotely as part of a promotion for a local business. We’ve heard there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but we’re not sure the maxim holds true when you manage to put an old lady into the hospital with your ad campaign.
German Fireball’s 15 Minutes Of Fame
Sunday night, around 7:00 PM local time, a bright fireball streaked across the western German sky, exploded, and rained chunks of space rock down on the region around Koblenz. One of the largest known chunks put a soccer-ball-sized hole in someone’s roof, landing in their bedroom. Fortunately, nobody was hurt. But given the apparent size of the explosion, there must be many more pieces out there for the finding, and a wave of hopeful meteorite hunters has descended upon the region.
But if you wanted a piece of the action, where exactly would you start looking? How do scientists find meteorites anyway? And what should you do if you happen to see a similar fireball in the night sky?
Citizen Science
In the age of always-on dashboard cameras, ubiquitous smartphones, and other video recording devices, it’s hard for a shy meteorite to find a quiet spot out of the public eye. That makes them a lot easier to find than they were in the past. Indeed, the International Meteor Organization, which aggregates amateur meteor observations, received more than 3,200 reports of this one, including several with video documentation. Some are stunning, and others may not even be of the event at all.
By collecting reports from many locations, they can hope to piece together the meteorite’s trajectory. However, if you look at the individual reports, it’s clear that this is a difficult task. Nobody is expecting a bright fireball to streak across the night sky, so many of the reports are reasonably vague on the details and heavy on the awe.
This report from [Sophie Z], for instance, is typical. She records where she was and roughly the location in the night sky where the meteorite passed, along with the comment “I’ve never seen anything so amazing and large before in my life.” Other amateur observers are more precise. [David C] (“I have a Ph.D in physics”) managed to record the start and the end heading of the meteorite to a couple of decimal places. He must have had a camera.
Diagnosing A Mysterious Fault With A Commodore 1541 Disk Drive
Recently [TheRetroChannel] came across an interesting failure mode on a Commodore 1541 5.25″ floppy disk drive, in the form of the activity LED blinking just once after power-up with the drive motor continuously spinning. Since the Flash Codes that Commodore implemented and bothered to document start at 2 flashes (for RAM-related Zero Page), this raised the question of what fault this drive had, and whether a single flash is some kind of undocumented error code.
A cursory check showed that the heads were okay and not shorted, ruling out a common fault with the used floppy mechanism. Cleaning up the corrosion on IC sockets and similar basic operations were performed next, without making a change, nor did removing the ICs to induce it to produce the documented error codes, but this helped narrow down the potential causes. Especially after swapping in known-good ICs failed to make a difference. One possibility was that the drive was boot looping, as the activity LED is lit up once on boot.
Some probing around with an oscilloscope between the faulty and a working drive seemed to point to a faulty RAM IC, but while probing the faulty drive suddenly initialized successfully. After some more poking around it appeared that the drive was fine after it had a chance to warm up, which just deepened the mystery.
The drive did talk to a C64 with diagnostic cartridge at this point, but would often glitch out. Ultimately it appears that a dodgy IC socket and a few bad traces were to blame for the behavior, making it an ‘obvious in hindsight’ repair. The bottom of the PCB had some clear corrosion on it, but the affected traces were apparently still hanging on for dear life with the drive still initializing once warmed up.
Continue reading “Diagnosing A Mysterious Fault With A Commodore 1541 Disk Drive”
Performing An Autopsy On 15 Dead Battle Born LFP Batteries
Because size matters when it comes to statistics, [Will Prowse] decided to not just bank on his handful of failed Battle Born LFP batteries when it came to documenting their failure modes. Instead he got a whole gaggle of them from a viewer who had experienced failures with their Battle Born LFP batteries for an autopsy, adding a total of 15 samples to the data set.
Interestingly, the symptoms of these dead batteries are all over the place, from a refusal to charge, some have the overheating terminal, some do not show any sign of life, others have charged cells but a non-responsive BMS, etc. As [Will] notes, it’s important to test batteries with a load and a charger to determine whether they are functional not just whether you can measure a charge.
Although some of the batteries still showed enough signs of life to be put aside for some load testing, the remaining ones were cut open to check their insides. This revealed the typical molten plastic at the terminals, but also a lot of very loose connections for the internal wiring. Another battery showed signs of corrosion inside, which could be due to either moisture intrusion or a cell having leaked its electrolyte.
While the full results will hopefully be released soon, the worrying thing about this latest batch of Battle Born LFP batteries is that they span quite a few years, with one being from 2018. Although it’s comforting that not every one of these batteries is necessarily going to catch on fire within its approximate 8-year lifespan, a lot seems to depend on exactly how you load and charge them, as [Will] is trying to figure out with the upcoming load testing. With the unit that he recently purchased for testing it turned out that lower currents actually made the melting problem much worse.
Between this video and the much awaited follow-up, [Will] actually got his hands on a troubled 300A-rated industrial Battle Born battery. During testing that one actually failed violently with a cell venting and the loose BMS rattling around in the case.
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Hackaday Links: February 15, 2026
It probably won’t come as much of a surprise to find that most of the Hackaday staff aren’t exactly what you’d call sports fanatics, so we won’t judge if you didn’t tune in for the Super Bowl last week. But if you did, perhaps you noticed Ring’s Orwellian “Search Party” spot — the company was hoping to get customers excited about a new feature that allows them to upload a picture of their missing pet and have Ring cameras all over the neighborhood search for a visual match. Unfortunately for Ring, the response on social media wasn’t quite what they expected.
One commenter on YouTube summed it up nicely: “This is like the commercial they show at the beginning of a dystopian sci-fi film to quickly show people how bad things have gotten.” You don’t have to be some privacy expert to see how this sort of mass surveillance is a slippery slope. Many were left wondering just who or what the new system would be searching for when it wasn’t busy sniffing out lost pups.
The folks at Wyze were quick to capitalize on the misstep, releasing their own parody ad a few days later that showed various three-letter agencies leaving rave reviews for the new feature. By Thursday, Ring announced they would be canceling a planned expansion that would have given the divisive Flock Safety access to their network of cameras. We’re sure it was just a coincidence.
Speaking of three-letter agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced this week that they will no longer incentivize the inclusion of stop-start systems on new automobiles. The feature, which shuts off the engine when the vehicle comes to a stop, was never actually required by federal law; rather, the EPA previously awarded credits to automakers that added the feature, which would help them meet overall emission standards. Manufacturers are free to continue offering stop-start systems on their cars if they wish, but without the EPA credits, there’s little benefit in doing so. Especially since, as Car and Driver notes, it seems like most manufacturers are happy to be rid of it. The feature has long been controversial with drivers as well, to the point that we’ve seen DIY methods to shut it off.
