2026 Hackaday Supercon: Announcing Our First Round Of Speakers

September 23, 2026 by No comments

Supercon is the Ultimate Hardware Conference™ and you need to be there November 6-8 in Pasadena, California! Below is just the tip of the speakers’ iceberg, but if that’s not enough to convince you to attend, well, stay tuned and we’ll reveal more speakers early next week.

Speakers, workshops, food, drink, music, badge hacking, and general merriment? That’s what we do every year at our annual gathering. This year is even bigger, as we’re moving a few blocks south to the Art Center campus, so be sure to come join us. Get your tickets now.

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A JavaScript OS For The ESP32

September 23, 2026 by 8 Comments

Given the incredible power of modern microcontrollers, we’ve seen quite a few attempts to turn them into more general purpose computers over the years. KryonOS from [Haris] is the latest, and it takes a slightly different path from the norm in that it’s a JavaScript based operating system for the ESP32.

It takes the form of an OS with a simple GUI and graphics library, and a built-in JavaScript runtime interpreter. It runs on a wide variety of ESP32 boards with screens, including the ubiquitous Cheap Yellow Display. It has full access to the SD card filesystem, and an API for using the hardware. Perhaps most interestingly it has an app store for downloadable software, which immediately reminds us of Europe’s Badge.Team. Their SHA2017 badge spawned a succession of devices that continues to this day, and offered a similar experience using Python.

We like this project, and think it has potential due to the ease of JavaScript development for so many people used to working with the web. There was a time when Python running on microcontrollers sounded pretty far fetched, and look where we are now.

Myst On The Atari 2600

September 22, 2026 by 15 Comments

Although the Atari 2600 was a hugely popular game console in the late 70s, its hardware specs were limited, to say the least. For a dedicated game console of the era this isn’t too surprising, but things like 128 bytes of RAM meant programmers had to work hard to make games that were fun and playable (and they didn’t always succeed). Programming on this system even now is difficult, but nonetheless [Vince] wanted to get a version of Myst running on this system.

Obviously a PC game from the 90s is much to large, in many ways, to fit into an Atari cartridge or play on the 70s-era hardware. For that, there is a “demake” of Myst, a recreation of the game purposely built to run on older hardware it was never meant for. Even so, the game is running on a specialized cartridge built by [Vince] using parts from the real Atari game cartridge BurgerTime which had a bit more memory than normal. It wasn’t quite as straightforward as flashing the new game file to an old EEPROM though; [Vince] came across all kinds of timing issues and other miscellaneous problems that stretched this project out to around a three-year endeavor.

At the end of everything, though, he has a cartridge that will run Myst on the Atari, using the E7 bank switching scheme which afforded this system more memory within the cartridge. For [Vince], who is a fan of the demo scene for consoles like this, this was an interesting experiment to push original hardware to its limits. And, if you want to try this on an Atari 2600 handheld which also uses original hardware, we’d recommend using one of these.

ESP32 Replacement For Lighting Display Controller

September 22, 2026 by 1 Comment

As a company, NanoLeaf has been producing modular lights that can be easily snapped together into various geometric shapes for around a decade. Similar to the addressable LED light strips many of us are familiar with that also became popular around a decade ago, these modular lights are supposed to be easy to configure, customize, and program. But their controllers are notoriously finicky according to [Myrik] who found that a simple ESP32 could be used to replace them when they eventually fail.

Part of the reason [Myrik] found this to be straightforward is that the company publishes their firmware and makes it essentially available to anyone. Whether or not this was purposeful is not clear; but in either case it only requires slight modification to run on the ESP32. When plugged into an existing string of panels, the panels themselves report their positions and orientations over a single data bus which the ESP32 has no problem interpreting. The ESP32 can also communicate its status over the network, meaning that it can in turn be controlled by any other lighting software a user might have.

There’s a separate Reddit post about this build as, with other users offering other potential solutions to the controller issue. But we are always happy to see more open solutions to hardware failures which keep interesting things like these out of the e-waste pile, or simply building NanoLeaf-inspired replicas from the ground up in the first place.

Digital Upgrade Brings Medium Format Camera Into The 21st Century

September 22, 2026 by 10 Comments

Large format cameras can produce amazing shots, but are a bit too bulky to be practical. Medium format is a different story, as [Wenting] demonstrates with his Sitina B220M — an open-source digital back for the Mamiya Super 23 camera using a full-frame Kodak CCD.

“Digital back” just means he’s replacing the rear of an existing film camera in order to put a sensor where said film used to live. The sensor is a 22 Megapixel Kodak KAF-22000CE, which measures in at a very respectable 38.8 mm by 50 mm. That’s only a touch smaller than the rolls of 120 the camera was designed for, whose large dimension was 56 mm. How much was exposed at a time was determined by the back you put on the camera, but would never have been below 41.5 mm. Again, the CCD is pretty close.

With Mamiya covering the optics, [Wenting] could focus on the digital end. He’s got a Xilinx Zynq 7010 running the show, making use of both that SoC’s Cortex-A9 cores and its built-in FPGA. There’s some decent info on how that works in the build video embedded below, if you don’t want to dig into the code at the GitLab repository above. The photos look great, and start at 8:25.

[Wenting] has been around the bush with FPGAs before. Not least in his e-ink monitor project, but also with the last iteration of his mirror-less digital camera. This version is perhaps less ambitious, being merely a digital back and not the whole enchilada, but it solves some design issues he had on the “camera” part while he focuses on the “digital” for now.

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The RP2350 Does 1080p

September 21, 2026 by 15 Comments

Coaxing a DVI signal out of a microcontroller to drive a DVI or HDMI screen has been possible for a while now, but limitations in what the devices can do has, in turn, placed a limit on the resolution that can be delivered. Now [Aaron Gayle] has broken through a barrier by generating 1080p video from an RP2350. The previous best from Raspberry Pi Pico-class microcontrollers was 720p, which an RP2040 could deliver. The 2350 is faster and has faster peripherals, but even then, to reach this resolution he had to overclock it to 372 MHz. For all the impressive achievement, there’s still a limitation. Lacking space for a framebuffer, he generates scanline by scanline, a technique we associate more with 8-bit computers from the 1980s.

The 1080p video code is part of a package called TVtop, a board game in which the game board is displayed on the TV and whose players interact from their phones via Wi-Fi. For that reason, there’s an ESP32 in the project too, though it has nothing to do with the video hack.

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Hackaday Links: September 20, 2026

September 20, 2026 by 21 Comments

Some sad news to start this week off — after 52 years in business, Sherline has announced they are winding down their manufacturing operations. By the end of October they estimate they’ll have produced their last tool, and although they will no longer be making new products, they plan on supporting their existing customers for as long as possible. Although from the sound of the press release, that may mean simply keeping the website up and selling through their inventory of spare parts.

The company offered a range of American-made miniature lathes and mills, and while their manual machines may have been better known in our community, they did eventually branch out into CNC. The press release doesn’t go into a lot of detail about the chain of events that led up to this decision, but it does mention the challenges of modern manufacturing and the lingering aftereffects of the COVID pandemic.

At first blush, it might seem strange that the company would falter just as desktop CNCs appear to finally be gaining momentum, but of course that doesn’t change their ability to compete with overseas manufacturing in terms of price.

Of course, keeping competitive is only a concern when you actually have competitors in the first place. That’s the situation that NASA and Boeing may find themselves in should SpaceX decide to retire the Crew Dragon after 2030. While the International Space Station will (probably) be out of the equation by that point, the US space agency will still need the capability to fly humans to… somewhere, and that means there will be lucrative government contracts up for grabs.

The chances of any other American company developing and launching a human-rated spacecraft between now and the end of the decade are pretty much zero, which means Boeing will have to pick up the slack with their Starliner capsule. Or at least, try to, as Starliner hasn’t exactly had the best track record so far. Although by the 2030s SpaceX plans to have transitioned most, if not all, of its operations to Starship, one does wonder if a big enough check from Uncle Sam could change its mind.

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