Kodak MC3: Everything But A Phone In 2001

February 8, 2026 by No comments

One of the constants in consumer electronics is that designers will try to put as many features into a single device as possible, whether it’s a Walkman with a radio tuner or a new class of devices that crams a photo and video camera in the same enclosure as a music player. At the time that the Kodak MC3 was released this made it a rather unique device, with it in hindsight being basically a smartphone without the phone, as [Tech Tangents] aptly notes in his recent video on the device.

Six years before Apple’s iPhone would be announced, and eight years before the first iPod with a video camera, the Kodak MC3 was in many respects bleeding edge technology targeted straight at tech enthusiasts. For less than $300 you got VGA-quality images, CompactFlash storage, and MP3 playback capability. The videos it produced were 320×240 resolution, h.263 encoded MOVs with a maximum length of 4 seconds at 20 FPS, or 4 minutes with a 64 MB CF card.

The unit that [Tech Tangents] got used came with a 128 MB CF card, but couldn’t use a 2 GB CF card, which is a shame. The screen on it got a lot of flak for not not having a backlight, but this was common for the era, as were the poor viewing angles. Ditto for the poor video quality, as anyone who invested in consumer digital cameras in the early 2000s can attest to. In that respect this Kodak device was probably a bit too ambitious with its features for the era, maybe to compensate for it completely missing the boat on the rise of digital camera technology around the time.

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Hackaday Links: February 8, 2026

February 8, 2026 by 1 Comment

We start this week with a bit of a good news/bad news situation. On February 6th, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) was shut down after 25 years of operation. Located at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, the RHIC was the only operating particle collider in the United States, and along with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), was one of only two heavy-ion colliders in existence.

So that’s the bad news. The good news is that the RHIC is going dark so that the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) can take its place. Planned for activation in the mid-2030s, the EIC will occupy the same tunnel as the RHIC and reuse much of the same hardware. As the name implies, it will be used to collide electrons.

Switching gears (no pun intended) to the world of self-driving cars, Waymo’s chief safety officer, Dr. Mauricio Peña, made a surprising admission this week during a U.S. Senate hearing. When asked what his company’s vehicles do when they are presented with a situation that their on-board systems can’t resolve, Dr. Peña explained that they would contact a human “remote assistance operator.” He further clarified that these individuals, located both in the US and the Philippines, don’t literally drive the car remotely. Still, Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts questioned not only the company’s transparency on the issue of remote assistance, but the idea that individuals overseas could be making decisions on how vehicles should operate on US roadways.

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Wooden Case Makes A 2026 TV Stylish

February 8, 2026 by 6 Comments

The middle of the 20th century produced a revolution in understated stylish consumer design, some of which lives on today. The reality of living in a 1950s or ’60s house was probably to be surrounded by the usual mess of possessions from many past decades, but the promise was of a beautiful sleek and futuristic living space. Central to this in most homes would have been the TV set, and manufacturers followed the trends of the age with cases that are now iconic. Here in 2026 we put up with black rectangles, but fortunately there’s Cordova Woodworking with a modern take on a retro TV cabinet.

We’ve put the build video below, and it’s a wonderfully watchable piece of workshop titillation in a fully-equipped modern shop. While we appreciate they’ve put the design up for sale, we think many Hackaday readers could come up with their own having already been inspired. One thing we notice over the originals is that they use “proper” wood for their case, when we know the ’60s version would have had veneer-faced ply or chipboard.

The result is a piece of furniture which nicely contains the modern TV and accessories, but doesn’t weigh a ton or dominate the room in the way one of the originals would have, much less emit that evocative phenolic hot-electronics smell. We’d have one in our living room right now. Meanwhile if you’d like a wallow in mid-century TV, we have you covered.

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Upgrading The E-mu Audity 20 Years After Factory Support Ended

February 8, 2026 by 9 Comments

If you purchased an E-mu Audity 2000 ROMpler back in 1998, you almost certainly got a rig with the 1.00 firmware. It was fine, if a little limited, particularly where upgradability was concerned. E-mu would later offer firmware upgrades over MIDI with the 2.00 firmware, but to get the 2.00 firmware, you needed to ship the box back to E-mu. Or you did… until now.

Realizing that E-mu is long gone and they weren’t going to handle any further firmware upgrades, [Ray Bellis] set about finding another way to help aggrieved operators with gear stuck on v1.00. [Ray] had managed to lay hands on a Audity 2000 service manual as well as the official 2.00 upgrade kit in an estate sale, and set about reverse engineering it to help the community. It turned out that upgrading from 1.00 to 2.00 required the use of a special boot ROM and a flash device containing the upgraded firmware image. Booting from the special ROM required the use of a jumper, and when engaged, the ROM would copy the updated image to the device itself.

[Ray] didn’t want to duplicate the standard upgrade device, as that seemed a little difficult what with parts availability in 2026. Instead, he crafted his own ROM that, with compression, contained the necessary firmware upgrade image and could all be stuffed inside a single 512 KB chip. All you need to do is flash the custom upgrade ROM to an AM29F040B PLCC32 NOR flash chip, pop it in the empty PLCC32 socket on the mainboard, and away you go. This will get you a machine upgraded to the final v2.01 firmware delivered by E-mu before its demise.

It’s a finicky bit of work, but it’s a great way to get new functionality out of an old Audity 2000. We’ve featured similar work before regarding aging Yamaha synths, too. If you’ve got your own backdoor methods for giving older music hardware a new lease on life, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline.

BreezyBox: A BusyBox-Like Shell And Virtual Terminal For ESP32

February 6, 2026 by 18 Comments

Much like how BusyBox crams many standard Unix commands and a shell into a single executable, so too does BreezyBox provide a similar experience for the ESP32 platform. A demo implementation is also provided, which uses the ESP32-S3 platform as part of the Waveshare 7″ display development board.

Although it invokes the BusyBox name, it’s not meant to be as stand-alone as it uses the standard features provided by the FreeRTOS-based ESP-IDF SDK. In addition to the features provided by ESP-IDF it adds things like a basic virtual terminal, current working directory (CWD) tracking and a gaggle of Unix-style commands, as well as an app installer.

The existing ELF binary loader for the ESP32 is used to run executables either from a local path or a remote one, a local HTTP server is provided and you even get ANSI color support. Some BreezyBox apps can be found here, with them often running on a POSIX-compatible system as well. This includes the xcc700 self-hosted C compiler.

You can get the MIT-licensed code either from the above GitHub project link or install it from the Espressif Component Registry if that’s more your thing.

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Getting The VIC-20 To Speak Again

February 5, 2026 by 9 Comments

The Commodore Amiga was famous for its characteristic Say voice, with its robotic enunciation being somewhat emblematic of the 16-bit era. The Commodore VIC-20 had no such capability out of the box, but [Mike] was able to get one talking with a little bit of work.

The project centers around the Adventureland cartridge, created by Scott Adams (but not the one you’re thinking of). It was a simple game that was able to deliver speech with the aid of the Votrax Type and Talk speech synthesizer box. Those aren’t exactly easy to come by, so [Mike] set about creating a modern equivalent. The concept was simple enough. An Arduino would be used to act as a go between the VIC-20’s slow serial port operating at 300 bps and the Speakjet and TTS256 chips which both preferred to talk at 9600 bps. The audio output of the Speakjet is then passed to an LM386 op-amp, set up as an amplifier to drive a small speaker. The lashed-together TTS system basically just reads out the text from the Adventureland game in an incredibly robotic voice. It’s relatively hard to understand and has poor cadence, but it does work – in much the same way as the original Type and Talk setup would have back in the day!

Text to speech tools have come a long way since the 1980s, particularly when it comes to sounding more natural. Video after the break.

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Comparing A Clone Raspberry Pi Pico 2 With An Original One

February 4, 2026 by 36 Comments

Although [Thomas] really likes the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and the RP2350 MCU, he absolutely, totally, really doesn’t like the micro-USB connector on it. Hence he jumped on the opportunity to source a Pico 2 clone board with the same MCU but with a USB-C connector from AliExpress. After receiving the new board, he set about comparing the two to see whether the clone board was worth it after all. In the accompanying video you can get even more details on why you should avoid this particular clone board.

In the video the respective components of both boards are analyzed and compared to see how they stack up. The worst issues with the clone Pico 2 board are an improper USB trace impedance at 130 Ω with also a cut ground plane below it that won’t do signal integrity any favors.

There is also an issue with the buck converter routing for the RP2350 with an unconnected pin (VREG_FB) despite the recommended layout in the RP2350 datasheet. Power supply issues continue with the used LN3440 DC-DC converter which can source 800 mA instead of the 1A of the Pico 2 version and performed rather poorly during load tests, with one board dying at 800 mA load.

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