Hackaday Links: October 17, 2026

October 18, 2026 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

While Hackaday doesn’t maintain a crime blotter, we couldn’t help but start this week’s post off with a bit of civil disobedience — a retired professor from the University of Pennsylvania was arrested earlier this week for standing in front of a delivery robot.

Granted, she was standing there for long enough that the police were eventually called, but still. Previous reporting indicates that Carolyn Marvin has a history of blocking delivery robots as a form of protest, but this is the first time law enforcement got involved. We’re not lawyers here at Hackaday, so we can’t say for sure whether or not blocking the progress of a robot engaged in commercial operation actually violates any laws. But we do know that refusing a lawful request from a police officer will get you in trouble, and that seems to be what Marvin was actually charged with when she refused to move.

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2026 Retrocomputing Challenge: Dollhouse Arcade Cabinet Runs Remote DOS Games

October 17, 2026 by Donald Papp 3 Comments

Classic DOS games never ran from within stand-up arcade cabinets in dollhouses, but [Juha Lilja] imagines a world in which they did. His Micro DOS arcade cabinet is described as a device that “runs nothing” because the tiny unit is actually streaming the games over Wi-Fi from a nearby PC. That doesn’t mean it’s just a glorified movie player, though — the cabinet is playable, if a bit awkward to do so.

An economical development board and a 3D-printed enclosure is all it takes to put classic DOS games into dollhouse-sized arcade cabinet.

The core of the micro arcade cabinet is a M5Stack AtomS3R running as an embedded remote terminal. One tilts the whole cabinet as if it were a virtual joystick to send up, down, left, and right. Button presses are done by pushing on the physical screen; it supports single, double, and long-clicks. While in theory one could install a micro joystick and buttons instead, [Juha] aimed to keep everything self-contained and use only what was already built into the AtomS3R. In this case, that’s a motion sensor and the single button which is activated by pressing the screen.

The games themselves run on a PC, with screen contents being streamed wirelessly to the little display and inputs being sent back. The firmware on the AtomS3R doesn’t know or care what game is being played; all it does is display what it’s told, and send back input events. The back end does the rest. This makes it pretty flexible, and a tiny arcade cabinet is a handy way to demonstrate the whole system. It’s a pretty slick addition to his daughter’s dollhouse, too.

If streaming DOS games (or whatever else) to economical endpoints is giving you some ideas, the GitHub repository holds code and a fuller explanation of how it works. There’s a deeper discussion on some of the finer technical points, as well. Watch it in action in the video embedded just below the page break.

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2026 Retrocomputing Challenge: Oldputer Gives Old Eyes Relief With E-ink Display

October 17, 2026 by Ian Bos 3 Comments

Modern computers are towers of glass and metal with very few large deviations from one to another. Monitor A will go against B, except you can’t tell them apart unless they’re on. At least, that is, compared to how different the old bulky monitors look compared to the new. [Andrzej Górski] seems to agree with this sentiment with his Oldputer, a blast from the past.

[Andrzej Górski]’s inspiration came from one component, and the main component of the project, an old e-ink display. When life gives you one of the slowest versions of a display, there really isn’t too much else to do other than pair it with slow old computers of the past. From that inspiration, there isn’t entirely a whole lot to do other than throw in an ESP32 and some LEDs for indicator lights. Put all this into a fun case, and you get one pretty desk ornament for whatever information you wanna display.

If you want to replicate the past again, you might want to look for the project GitHub here. If you’re looking for something even older, check out the replica of the MCM/70!

Fairbuds 2 Teardown Shows Little Glue, Easy Battery Swap

October 16, 2026 by Maya Posch 12 Comments

In a world where wireless earbuds are increasingly seen as devices that you toss into the e-waste bin as soon as they stop working, it’s heartening to see companies take the opposite approach with their designs. In a recent teardown of the new Fairbuds 2 by [iFixit] we get a blow-by-blow report of disassembling one of these devices, getting to its rechargeable LIR1054 coin cell, as well as the very accessible PCB should you have to replace a shorted capacitor or similar issue.

Much like with the first version, the 3.6 V lithium-ion coin cell can be extracted simply by pulling on the battery door, which leverages it out of the enclosure. Despite this easy access method and no glue these earbuds are still IP54 rated, so they’re safe to wear when you’re dashing for shelter in a sudden downpour.

To get further into the device, you have to overcome the plastic clips that hold the enclosure together, along with what appears to be a few dabs of glue. Inside it you find the PCB containing the guts, including the Airoha AB1577S, Cortex-M4F-based IC that provides the Bluetooth Low Energy capabilities as well as enabling the touch control and other features.

Below the PCB is the coin cell holder, followed by the only part that saw real glue usage, namely the driver section. Presumably this is the compromise to keep things like sweat out of the device. Even so, after disassembly [iFixit] managed to reassemble the device and the earbud remained in working condition.

The case for the earbuds is even easier to disassemble, using just some bolts to unfasten. The USB-C port is soldered to the PCB which [iFixit] dinged them on, but still gave it a 10/10 on their repairability score.

Compared to Apple’s AirPods this is obviously a whole different world, although recently [iFixit] was somewhat pleased with the most recent AirPods generation being slightly more repairable, with non-destructive entry for a battery swap at least somewhat feasible.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 391: Tuned In To ESP32 SDR, New Old Pagers, And Bugs On Mars

October 16, 2026 by Tom Nardi No comments

Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start this episode off with a discussion about Philadelphia’s budding hacker conference and the imminent retirement of the EZ80. After considering the parallels between the wide world of aviation headsets and our personal projects, talk moves on to the exciting developments in the world of software-defined radio on the ESP32, a Meshtastic pager from a bygone era, and how all the wild flying machines entered into DARPA’s Lift Challenge ended up losing to a simple helicopter.

You’ll also hear about turning plastic bottles into printer filament, pushing e-ink screens to their limits, and browsing the web on the PSP in 2026. To wrap things up they’ll marvel at all the modern abstraction sitting between software and the memory it’s running on, and revisit some RF concepts that might be particularly useful now that everyone is playing with a new SDR device.

Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download in DRM-free MP3.

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AI Controls IPhone Via ESP32

October 14, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 16 Comments

Do you want to get an AI agent to do something to an iPhone? You could try and jailbreak the device and do some heavy software hacking, or… you could grab a microcontroller off the shelf and have it do the hard work. [Henry Yuan] explains how to achieve this with an ESP32.

The first step is getting an AI agent access to the current state of the phone screen—which [Henry] achieves with AirPlay screen mirroring and UxPlay. A Gstreamer pipeline is then used to feed the screen as a JPEG stream to the AI agent of your choice. Then comes control, which is achieved by an ESP32-S3 acting as a USB-HID device, emulating both USB mouse and keyboard. With iOS AssistiveTouch enabled, this gives the agent control over inputs to the device. From there, it’s up to the AI agent to figure out the actions to make to achieve the desired behavior, which is obviously very use-case specific.

It might sound a little convoluted, but this approach has benefits. There’s no requirement to have an Apple Developer Account, or XCode, or a Macintosh at all. You can just get your agent tinkering away on the phone without any of that fussy overhead. We’ve featured some other great iPhone hacks of late, as well. Video after the break.

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Using An ESP32-C3’s RF Hardware For DVB-S2 Video Transmission

October 14, 2026 by Maya Posch 12 Comments

Generally the DVB-S and -S2 standards require a satellite somewhere in Earth orbit to provide a signal to receive, but you can also transmit your own DVB-S2 stream with any RF transmitter if you’re so inclined. Courtesy of recent breakthroughs in using the RF hardware of the ESP32 on a raw level, [SP8ESA] has created the ESP32-DATV project using which you can broadcast a DVB-S2 signal using an ESP32-C3.

While a host PC side application handles the heavy lifting of turning the input video signal into a DVB-S(2) compliant signal, it is the ESP32-C3 that prepares the samples for transmission before sending them off to its RF block, with no external hardware needed.

If this brings to mind the idea of using an off-the-shelf DVB-S2 receiver to play back the signal, the frequency range for DVB-S2 is 10.7 – 12.7 GHz, while the ESP32-C3 is limited to roughly 2.4 GHz courtesy of it targeting only 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals.

Using the ESP32 to transmit is already heating up.

Thanks to [ftg] for the tip.