Photo of breadboards and bench oscilloscope

Programming The 6581 Sound Interface Device (SID) With The 6502

November 10, 2025 by John Elliot V 4 Comments

Over on YouTube, [Ben Eater] pursues that classic 8-bit sound. In this video, [Ben] integrates the MOS Technology 6581 Sound Interface Device (SID) with his homegrown 6502. The 6581 SID was famously used in the Commodore line of computers, perhaps most notably in the Commodore 64.

The 6581 SID supports three independent voices, each consisting of a tone oscillator/waveform generator, an envelope generator, and an amplitude modulator. These voices are combined into an output filter along with a volume control. [Ben] goes into detail concerning how to configure each of these voices using the available facilities on the available pins, referencing the datasheet for the details.

[Ben]’s video finishes with an 8-bit hit from all the way back in October 1985: Monty on the Run by Rob Hubbard. We first heard about [Ben’s] musical explorations back in June. If you missed it, be sure to check it out. It seems hard to imagine that demand for these chips has been strong for decades and shows little sign of subsiding.

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A 3D Printed 16mm Movie Camera

October 27, 2025 by Jenny List 4 Comments

The basic principles of a motion picture film camera should be well understood by most readers — after all, it’s been well over a hundred years since the Lumière brothers wowed 19th century Paris with their first films. But making one yourself is another matter entirely, as they are surprisingly complex and high-precision devices. This hasn’t stopped [Henry Kidman] from giving it a go though, and what makes his camera more remarkable is that it’s 3D printed.

The problem facing a 16mm movie camera designer lies in precisely advancing the film by one frame at the correct rate while filming, something done in the past with a small metal claw that grabs each successive sprocket. His design eschews that for a sprocket driven by a stepper motor from an Arduino. His rotary shutter is driven by another stepper motor, and he has the basis of a good camera.

The tests show promise, but he encounters a stability problem, because as it turns out, it’s difficult to print a 16mm sprocket in plastic without it warping. He solves this by aligning frames in post-processing. After fixing a range of small problems though, he has a camera that delivers a very good picture quality, and that makes us envious.

Sadly, those of us who ply our film-hacking craft in 8mm don’t have the luxury of enough space for a sprocket to replace the claw.

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Hackaday Links: October 26, 2025

October 26, 2025 by Dan Maloney 11 Comments

There was a bit of a kerfuffle this week with the news that an airliner had been hit by space junk. The plane, a United Airlines 737, was operating at 36,000 feet on a flight between Denver and Los Angeles when the right windscreen was completely shattered by the impact, peppering the arm of one pilot with bits of glass. Luckily, the heavily reinforced laminated glass stayed intact, but the flight immediately diverted to Salt Lake City and landed safely with no further injuries. The “space junk” report apparently got started by the captain, who reported that they saw what hit them and that “it looked like space debris.”

We were a little skeptical of this initial assessment, mainly because the pilots and everyone aboard the flight were still alive, which we’d assume would be spectacularly untrue had the plane been hit by anything beyond the smallest bit of space junk. As it turns out, our suspicions were justified when Silicon Valley startup WindBorne Systems admitted that one of its high-altitude balloons hit the flight. The company, which uses HABs to gather weather data for paying customers, seems to have complied with all the pertinent regulations, like filing a NOTAM, so why the collision happened is a bit of a mystery.

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Making The Tiny Air65 Quadcopter Even Smaller

October 14, 2025 by Maya Posch 15 Comments

First person view (FPV) quadcopter drones have become increasingly more capable over the years, as well as much smaller. The popular 65 mm format, as measured from hub to hub, is often considered to be about the smallest you can make an FPV drone without making serious compromises. Which is exactly why [Hoarder Sam] decided to make a smaller version that can fit inside a Pringles can, based on the electronics used in the popular Air65 quadcopter from BetaFPV.

The 22 mm FPV drone with camera installed and looking all cute. (Credit: Hoarder Sam)

The basic concept for this design is actually based on an older compact FPV drone design called the ‘bone drone’, so called for having two overlapping propellers on each end of the frame, thus creating a bone-like shape. The total hub-to-hub size of the converted Air65 drone ends up at a cool 22 mm, merely requiring a lot of fiddly assembly before the first test flights can commence. Which raises the question of just how cursed this design is when you actually try to fly with it.

Obviously the standard BetaFPV firmware wasn’t going to fly, so the next step was to modify many parameters using the Betaflight Configurator software, which unsurprisingly took a few tries. After this, the fully loaded drone with camera and battery pack, coming in at a whopping 25 grams, turns out to actually be very capable. Surprisingly, it flies not unlike an Air65 and has a similar flight time, losing only about 30 seconds of the typical three minutes.

With propellers sticking out at the top and bottom – with no propeller guards – it’s obviously a bit of a pain to launch and land. But considering what the donor Air65 went through to get to this stage, it’s honestly quite impressive that this extreme modification mostly seems to have altered its dimensions.

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The Great Northeast Blackout Of 1965

October 14, 2025 by Dan Maloney 31 Comments

At 5:20 PM on November 9, 1965, the Tuesday rush hour was in full bloom outside the studios of WABC in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The drive-time DJ was Big Dan Ingram, who had just dropped the needle on Jonathan King’s “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon.” To Dan’s trained ear, something was off about the sound, like the turntable speed was off — sometimes running at the usual speed, sometimes running slow. But being a pro, he carried on with his show, injecting practiced patter between ad reads and Top 40 songs, cracking a few jokes about the sound quality along the way.

Within a few minutes, with the studio cart machines now suffering a similar fate and the lights in the studio flickering, it became obvious that something was wrong. Big Dan and the rest of New York City were about to learn that they were on the tail end of a cascading wave of power outages that started minutes before at Niagara Falls before sweeping south and east. The warbling turntable and cartridge machines were just a leading indicator of what was to come, their synchronous motors keeping time with the ever-widening gyrations in power line frequency as grid operators scattered across six states and one Canadian province fought to keep the lights on.

They would fail, of course, with the result being 30 million people over 80,000 square miles (207,000 km²) plunged into darkness. The Great Northeast Blackout of 1965 was underway, and when it wrapped up a mere thirteen hours later, it left plenty of lessons about how to engineer a safe and reliable grid, lessons that still echo through the power engineering community 60 years later.

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Making A 2-Transistor AM Radio With A Philips Electronic Engineer EE8 Kit From 1966

October 12, 2025 by John Elliot V 42 Comments

Back in 1966, a suitable toy for a geeky kid was a radio kit. You could find simple crystal radio sets or some more advanced ones. But some lucky kids got the Philips Electronic Engineer EE8 Kit on Christmas morning. [Anthony Francis-Jones] shows us how to build a 2-transistor AM radio from a Philips Electronic Engineer EE8 Kit.

According to [The Radar Room], the kit wasn’t just an AM radio. It had multiple circuits to make (one at a time, of course), ranging from a code oscillator to a “wetness detector.”

The kit came with a breadboard and some overlays for the various circuits, along with the required components. It relied on springs, friction, and gravity to hold most of the components to the breadboard. A little wire is used, but mostly the components are connected to each other with their leads and spring terminals.

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Programming Space Game For X86 In Assembly Without An Operating System

October 10, 2025 by John Elliot V 39 Comments

In this video our hacker [Inkbox] shows us how to create a computer game that runs directly on computer hardware, without an operating system!

[Inkbox] briefly explains what BIOS is, then covers how UEFI replaces it. He talks about the genesis of UEFI from Intel in the late 90s. After Intel’s implementation of UEFI was made open source it got picked up by the TianoCore community who make tools such as the TianoCore EDK II.

[Inkbox] explains that the UEFI implementation provides boot services and runtime services. Boot services include things such as loading memory management facilities or running other UEFI applications, and runtime services include things like system clock access and system reset. In addition to these services there are many more UEFI protocols that are available.

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