Amiibo Emulator Becomes Pocket 2.4 GHz Spectrum Analyzer

December 11, 2025 by 2 Comments

As technology marches on, gear that once required expensive lab equipment is now showing up in devices you can buy for less than a nice dinner. A case in point: those tiny displays originally sold as Nintendo amiibo emulators. Thanks to [ATC1441], one of these pocket-sized gadgets has been transformed into 2.4 GHz spectrum analyzer.

These emulators are built around the Nordic nRF52832 SoC, the same chip found in tons of low-power Bluetooth devices, and most versions come with either a small LCD or OLED screen plus a coin cell or rechargeable LiPo. Because they all share the same core silicon, [ATC1441]’s hack works across a wide range of models. Don’t expect lab-grade performance; the analyzer only covers the range the Bluetooth chip inside supports. But that’s exactly where Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, and a dozen other protocols fight for bandwidth, so it’s perfect for spotting crowded channels and picking the least congested one.

Flashing the custom firmware is dead simple: put the device into DFU mode, drag over the .zip file, and you’re done. All the files, instructions, and source are up on [ATC1441]’s PixlAnlyzer GitHub repo. Check out some of the other amiibo hacks we’ve featured as well.

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PCB Design Review: TinySparrow, A Module For CAN Hacking, V2

December 9, 2025 by 11 Comments

A year ago, I’ve design reviewed an MCU module for CAN hacking, called TinySparrow. Modules are plenty cool, and even more so when they’re intended for remaking car ECUs. For a while now, every car has heavily depended on a computer to control the operation of everything inside it – the engine and its infrastructure, the lights, and  Sadly, ECUs are quite non-hackable, so building your own ECUs only makes sense – which is why it’s heartwarming to see modules intended to make this easier on the budding ECU designer!

Last time we saw this module, it was quite a bit simpler. We talked about fixing a number of things – the linear regulator, the unprotected CAN transceiver, and the pinout; we also made the board cheaper to produce by reducing the layer count and instead pushing the clearance/track width limits. This time, we’re seeing TinySparrow v2 , redesigned accounting for the feedback and upgraded with a new MCU – it’s quite a bit more powerful!

For a start, it’s got ESD diodes, a switching-linear regulator chain for clean but efficient power supply, and most importantly, an upgraded MCU, now with USB and one more CAN channel for a total of two! There’s a lot more GPIOs to go around, too, so the PCB now uses all four of its sides for breakout out power, programming, and GPIO pads. Only a tiny bit bigger than its v1, this module packs a fair bit of punch.

Let’s revisit the design, and try to find anything still left to improve – there’s a few noteworthy things I found.

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RP2350 Done Framework Style

December 8, 2025 by 23 Comments

Ever want a microcontroller addon for your laptops? You could do worse than match one of the new and powerful microcontrollers on the block to one of the most addon-friendly laptops, in the way the Framework RP2350 laptop card does it. Plug it in, and you get a heap of USB-connected IO coming out of the side of your laptop – what’s not to love?

The card utilizes the Framework module board space to the fullest extent possible, leaving IO expansion on SMD pads you could marry to a male or female header, your choice. With about seventeen GPIOs, power, and ground, there’s really no limit on what you could add to the side connector – maybe it’d be a logic analyzer buffer, or a breadboard cable, or a flash chip reader, maybe, even an addon to turn it into a pirate version of a Bus Pirate? There’s a fair few RP2350 peripherals available on the side header GPIOs, so sky’s the limit.

Naturally, the card is fully open-source, and even has two versions with two different USB-C plug connectors, we guess, depending on which one is better liked by your PCBA process. Want one? Just send off the files! Last time we saw an addon adding GPIOs to your laptop, it was a Pi Zero put into the optical bay of a Thinkpad, also with an expansion header available on the side – pairing yet another legendary board with a legendary laptop.

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Hackaday Links: December 7, 2025

December 7, 2025 by 17 Comments

We stumbled upon a story this week that really raised our eyebrows and made us wonder if we were missing something. The gist of the story is that U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, who has degrees in both electrical and mechanical engineering, has floated the idea of using the nation’s fleet of emergency backup generators to reduce the need to build the dozens of new power plants needed to fuel the AI data center building binge. The full story looks to be a Bloomberg exclusive and thus behind a paywall — hey, you don’t get to be a centibillionaire by giving stuff away, you know — so we might be missing some vital details, but this sounds pretty stupid to us.

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Emulate ROMs At 12MHz With Pico2 PIO

December 6, 2025 by 10 Comments

Nothing lasts forever, and that includes the ROMs required to make a retrocomputer run. Even worse, what if you’re rolling your own firmware? Period-appropriate EPROMs and their programmers aren’t always cheap or easy to get a hold of these days. [Kyo-ta04] had that problem, and thanks to them, we now all have a solution: Pico2ROMEmu, a ROM emulator based on, you guessed it, the Raspberry Pi Pico2.

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Using A Level 2 Charger To Work Around Slow 120 VAC Kettles

December 1, 2025 by 73 Comments

To those of us who live in the civilized lands where ~230 VAC mains is the norm and we can shove a cool 3.5 kW into an electric kettle without so much as a second thought, the mere idea of trying to boil water with 120 VAC and a tepid 1.5 kW brings back traumatic memories of trying to boil water with a 12 VDC kettle while out camping. Naturally, in a fit of nationalistic pride this leads certain North American people like that bloke over at the [Technology Connections] YouTube to insist that this is fine, as he tries to demonstrate how ridiculous 240 VAC kettles are by abusing a North American Level 2 car charger to power a UK-sourced kettle.

Ignoring for a moment that in Europe a ‘Level 1’ charger is already 230 VAC (±10%) and many of us charge EVs at home with three-phase ~440 VAC, this video is an interesting demonstration, both of how to abuse an EV car charger for other applications and how great having hot water for tea that much faster is.

Friendly tea-related transatlantic jabs aside, the socket adapter required to go from the car charger to the UK-style plug is a sight to behold. All which we starts as we learn that Leviton makes a UK-style outlet for US-style junction boxes, due to Gulf States using this combination. This is subsequently wired to the pins of the EV charger connector, after which the tests can commence.

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[Piers] explains his code

A Deep Dive Into Using PIO And DMA On The RP2350

November 30, 2025 by 7 Comments

Here’s a fun rabbit hole to run down if you don’t already have the RP2040/RP2350 PIO feather in your cap: how to serve data without CPU intervention using PIO and DMA on the RP2350.

If you don’t know much about the RP2040 or RP2350 here’s the basic run down: the original Raspberry Pi Pico was released in 2021 with the RP2040 at its heart, with the RP2350 making its debut in 2024 with the Pico 2. Both microcontrollers include a feature known as Programmed I/O (PIO), which lets you configure tiny state machines and other facilities (shift registers, scratch registers, FIFO buffers, etc) to process simple I/O logic, freeing up the CPU to do other tasks.

The bottom line is that you can write very simple programs to do very fast and efficient I/O and these programs can run separately to the other code running on your micro. In the video below, [piers] explains how it works and how he’s used it in his One ROM project.

This is the latest installment from [piers rocks] whose One ROM project we’ve been tracking since July this year when we first heard about it. Since then we’ve been watching this project grow up and we were there when it was only implemented on the STM32F4, when it was renamed to One ROM, and when it got its USB stack. Along the way [piers rocks] was on FLOSS Weekly Episode 850: One ROM To Rule Them All too.

Have you seen PIO being put to good use in other projects? Let us know in the comments, or on the tips line!

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