Diamond Age-Inspired Pocket Watch Has ESP32 Inside

February 18, 2026 by Tyler August 1 Comment

A lot of hacks get inspired by science fiction. When that inspiration is taken from the boob tube or the silver screen, the visual design is largely taken care of by the prop department. If, on the other hand, one seeks inspiration from the written word– like [Math Campbell] did for his smart pocket watch inspired by The Diamond Age— the visuals are much more up to the individual hacker. Though no nanotechnology was involved in its creation, we think [Math] nailed the Victorian High-Tech vibe of [Neil Stephenson]’s cult classic.

The build itself is fairly simple: [Math] started with a Waveshare dev board that got him the 1.75″ round touch display, along with an ESP32-S3 and niceties such as a six-axis IMU, an RTC, microphone, speaker, and micro SD card reader. That’s quite the pocket watch! The current firmware, which is available on GitHub, focuses on the obvious use case of a very stylish watch, as well as weather and tidal display. Aside from the dev board, [Math] needed only to supply a battery and a case.

[Math] designed the case for the watch himself in Fusion360 before sending it off to be 3D printed in stainless steel. That might not be molecular-scale manufacturing like in the book, but it’s still amazing you can just do that. Ironically, [Math] is a silversmith and will be recreating the final version of the watch case in sterling silver by hand. We’d be tempted to include a door–making it a “hunter’s case” in pocket watch lingo–to protect that amoled display, but far be it for us to tell an artist how to do his work. If you’re not a silversmith, [Math] has stated his intent to add STLs to the GitHub repo, though they aren’t yet present at time of writing.

We’ve featured smart pocket watches before, some with more modern aesthetics. Of course a watch doesn’t have to be smart to grace these pages.

Thanks to [Math Campbell] for the tip! If you’ve got time on your hands after ticking done on a project, send us a tip and watch for it to appear here.

2026 Hackaday Europe Call For Participation: We Want You!

February 18, 2026 by Elliot Williams 3 Comments

Here’s the Hackaday Europe 2026 announcement that you’ve all been waiting for. But wait! This year there’s a twist, or rather two. What absolutely hasn’t changed, though, is that we’d love to see you there, and we’d love to hear about what you’ve been up to, so get your talk or workshop proposal in before March 18th.

New Place, New Time

Hackaday Europe is moving in all four dimensions! We’ll be meeting up in the absolutely lovely Lecco, Italy — just about equidistant from Milan and Bergamot, and taking place May 16th and 17th, with the traditional pre-event meetup on the night of the 15th for those who are already in town. The location is the Politecnico Milano campus, a hub of engineering nestled in the mountains.

Who is going to be speaking at Hackaday Europe? You could be! We’re opening up the Call for Participation right now, both for talks and for workshops. Whether you’ve presented your work live before or not, you’re not likely to find a more appreciative audience for epic hacks, creative constructions, or you own tales of hardware, firmware, or software derring-do.

Workshop space is limited, but if you want to teach a group of ten or so people your favorite techniques, we’d love to hear from you.

All presenters get in free, of course, so firm up what you’d like to share, and get your proposal submitted ASAP.

The Badge

We’ll be bringing the 2025 Hackaday Supercon Communicator Badge with us to Europe, so this is also your chance to get your hands on the retro-styled super sexy keyboard, LoRa module, and fantastically oblong screen. At Supercon, we ran our own custom mesh network, and it worked flawlessly, even on microwatts. We’ll be continuing the experiment in Italy, on different frequencies of course, but maybe pushing some of the transmission parameters to see how far we can go.

The user side of the badge is very accessible as well, being programmed in Micropython and supported with a sweet plug-in architecture that makes adding your own apps a breeze, or at least reasonably straightforward. And when Hackaday Europe comes to a close, you can simply reflash the badge with new firmware, and you’ve got the sweetest Meshtastic device out there.

And it wouldn’t be a Hackaday badge if it weren’t meant to be modified.

The People

The real reason to come to Hackaday Europe, though, is the other folks who come to Hackaday Europe. You’ve never seen a more interested group of hardware hackers, and that’s coincidentally also why you’d like to give a presentation. You get to tell everyone what you’re up to — it’s the ultimate ice-breaker.

At the risk of saying it again: Get your proposal in before March 18th, and we look forward to seeing you on the shore of Lake Como. (Info on tickets and more pre-conference hype coming soon.)

Retro Rover: LT6502 Laptop Packs 8-Bit Power On The Go

February 17, 2026 by Matt Varian 8 Comments

Making your own laptop can be a challenging project, but a doable one, especially given the large number of options available today for computing. Of course nothing says you need to use a modern component in your build, and in the LT6502 project by [TechPaula] they didn’t go with a modern RPi or the like, nope went right back to about 50 years ago to use a 6502 at the heart of this DIY laptop build.

The 6502 is an 8-bit microprocessor from the 1970s, found in the Commodore 64 and Apple II. This wasn’t their first venture into 8 MHz world of the 6502, prior to this laptop build there was a desktop build the PC6502 bringing this chip of old into a PC/104 form factor. The LT6502 adds in the things you’d expect with a laptop, a 9-inch foldable screen, a 10,000 mAh battery, several external ports for things such as serial console and USB-C charging. A custom keyboard adds in low-profile switches as well as including a HDSP-style 8-character display, a great addition for a modern take on this vintage chip. Onboard there is 46 KB of RAM and with the addition of the CompactFlash for storage the LT6502 runs EhBASIC which we’ve seen before in some other great projects.

The case is mainly 3D-printed safely enclosing the custom PCBs for both the keyboard and motherboard, and providing a satisfying glow with the built-in LEDs within. All of the files are up on the project’s site so be sure to swing by and check out both this and the desktop PC/104 predecessor to it. Great job [TechPaula], looking forward to seeing the future installments on the LT6502 such as implementing the included internal expansion slot.

What The FDA’s 2026 Wellness Device Update Means For Wearables

February 16, 2026 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

With more and more sensors being crammed into the consumer devices that many of us wear every day, the question of where medical devices begin and end, and how they should be regulated become ever more pertinent. When a ‘watch’ no longer just shows the time, but can keep track of a dozen vital measurements, and the line between ‘earbud’ and ‘hearing aid’ is a rather fuzzy one, this necessitates that institutions like the US FDA update their medical device rules, as was done recently in its 2026 update.

This determines how exactly these devices are regulated, and in how far their data can be used for medical purposes. An important clarification made in the 2026 update is the distinction between ‘medical information’ and ‘signals/patterns’. Meaning that while a non-calibrated fitness tracker or smart watch does not provide medically valid information, it can be used to detect patterns and events that warrant a closer look, such as indications of arrhythmia or low blood oxygen saturation.

As detailed in the IEEE Spectrum article, these consumer devices are thus ‘general wellness’ devices, and should be marketed as such, without embellished claims. Least of all should they be sold as devices that can provide medical information.

Continue reading “What The FDA’s 2026 Wellness Device Update Means For Wearables” →

Hackaday Links: February 15, 2026

February 15, 2026 by Tom Nardi 18 Comments

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.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: February 15, 2026” →

Real-Time 3D Room Mapping With ESP32, VL53L5CX Sensor And IMU

February 14, 2026 by Maya Posch 12 Comments

ST’s VL53L5CX is a very small 8×8 grid ranging sensor that can perform distance measurements at a distance of up to 4 meters. In a recent video,[Henrique Ferrolho] demonstrated that this little sensor can also be used to perform a 3D scan of a room. The sensor data can be combined with an IMU to add orientation information to the scan data. These data streams are then combined by an ESP32 MCU that streams the data as JSON to a connected computer.

Continue reading “Real-Time 3D Room Mapping With ESP32, VL53L5CX Sensor And IMU” →

Windows 98 On A 2020 ThinkPad P14s Gen 1 Laptop

February 14, 2026 by Maya Posch 18 Comments

The lovely thing about the x86 architecture is its decades of backwards compatibility, which makes it possible to run 1990s operating systems on modern-day hardware, with relatively few obstacles in the way. Recently [Yeo Kheng Meng] did just that with Windows 98 SE on a 2020 ThinkPad P12s Gen 1, booting it alongside Windows 11 and Linux from the same NVMe drive.

Naturally, after previously getting MS-DOS 6.22 from 1994 running on a 2020 ThinkPad X13, the step to doing the same with Windows 98 SE wasn’t that large. The main obstacles that you face come in the form of UEFI and hardware driver support.

Both ThinkPad laptops have in common that they support UEFI-CSM mode, also known as ‘classical BIOS’, as UEFI boot wasn’t even a glimmer yet in some drunk engineer’s eye when Win98 was released. After this everything is about getting as many hardware drivers scrounged together as possible.

[Yeo] ended up having to bodge on a USB 2.0 expansion card via a Thunderbolt dock as Win98 doesn’t have xHCI (USB 3.0) support. With that issue successfully bodged around using a veritable tower of adapters, installing Windows 98 was as easy as nuking Secure Boot in the BIOS, enabling UEFI-CSM along with Thunderbolt BIOS assist mode and disable Kernel DMA protection.

Because UEFI-CSM implementations tend to be buggy, the CREGFIX DOS driver was used to smooth things over. Another issue is the same that we chuckled about back in the day, as Windows 98 cannot address more than 512 MB of RAM by default. Fortunately patches by [Rudolph Loew] helped to fix this and some other smaller issues.

Unfortunately neither Intel nor NVIDIA have released Win98 drivers for quite some time, so there’s no graphics acceleration beyond basic VESA support and the SoftGPU driver. Disk access goes via the BIOS too rather than using an NVMe driver, so it’s not as zippy as it could be, but for Win9x it’s quite usable.

Finally ACPI wasn’t recognized by Win98, but it’s only fair to blame that on the complete flaming train wreck that is ACPI rather than anything to do with Windows. This particular issue was worked around by configuring the BIOS to support S3 power state and with that making Win98 happy again.

It’s honestly quite a shame that UEFI-CSM is largely ignored by new systems, as it makes installing even Windows 7 basically impossible, and thus creating probably the largest split within the x86 ecosystem since the arrival of AMD64/x86_64.