How The 2020s Chip Crisis Led To A Buggy Saleae Analyzer In 2026

June 9, 2026 by Maya Posch 14 Comments

For those of us old enough to remember the harrowing days of the early 2020s, alongside another major kerfuffle there was a complete breakdown in global supply chains that led to the 2020-2023 global chip shortage. Unsurprisingly, this pushed many hardware manufacturers into less orthodox approaches, massive BOM changes, and hurried redesigns. One of the results of this era found its way into the hands of the bloke over at the [Playduino] YouTube channel, who was mystified to find two bodge wires in his fancy Saleae logic analyzer.

The reason for popping open the LA was crosstalk between two channels, which was bad enough that it made the unit quite unusable for the intended task. After seeing the cut traces and bodge wires he initially assumed that since he bought it used that the previous owner had modified it, but said person denied having opened it since purchasing it from an official retailer.

This was when he emailed Saleae support to see whether they knew anything. Initially they denied knowing anything about such a modification, but then the CTO emailed back with a long and very detailed confession. As explained in the video, during the aforementioned chip crisis Saleae was forced to rapidly redesign their LAs to use whatever FPGAs and other parts they could still get their hands on.

An initial prototype unit passed their internal tests, so they had a first batch manufactured using PCBs from a different supplier. Despite sending the same Gerber files, the resulting PCBs had ground fill issues that necessitated the observed rework, but due to insufficient testing for crosstalk a total of 406 units made it into the wild.

Sadly he had to return the defective unit for a replacement, making it somewhat hard to let go of such a piece of history. That said, if you want to know whether you’re also one of the lucky remaining 405 LA owners, the CTO provided the affected serial number range: 00200026245 to 00200026675 are affected.

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Powering Up A Pluggable Module From The 1948 IBM 604 Electronic Calculator

June 8, 2026 by Maya Posch 3 Comments

In that awkward transition phase between electromechanical accounting systems used in the 1940s and the introduction of fully digital computers we find systems such as the IBM 604 Electronic Calculator, advertised for accounting, calculating and engineering tasks. While not capable of complex instructions, loops and other advanced features, it did use an interesting modular architecture with easily swappable modules containing a vacuum tube and associated components. Recently [Ken Shirriff] took a poke at one of these and even powered it up.

This kind of pluggable system would become a staple of computer systems, as they enabled the use of modules or cards with specific functions that could be swapped and combined at will to increase system flexibility, lower costs and make repairs a snap. For the IBM 604 a total of about 1250 vacuum tubes were used, apparently all of which were found on these pluggable modules.

The module that [Ken] got his hands on has a thyratron tube, which is effectively a high current switch and rectifier. In the short demonstration video you can see it being used to switch a lamp on and off, with further details explained in the article.

Despite being rather limited in its functionality and limited by the punch card input and output speed, the IBM 604 was still a smashing commercial success with over 5600 units produced. A transistorized prototype version with 2200 transistors and 95% less power usage was created in 1954 that formed the basis for the IBM 608, the world’s first commercial all-transistorized calculator.

The 608 didn’t last too long, however, as at that point the breakneck pace of semiconductor technology meant that any newly released product was already obsolete by the time it hit the market. Despite this, fundamentals like pluggable modules would keep showing up over and over, ranging from the 1950s Bendix G-15 to even modern day systems, including PCs with pluggable RAM and expansion cards as well as mainframes where hot swapping of even entire CPU modules is just another feature.

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Hackaday Links: June 7, 2026

June 7, 2026 by Tom Nardi 7 Comments

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey isn’t hitting theaters for another month or so, but if you’re already planning your trip to the cineplex, you may want to check out this page on the movie’s website which lets you view the trailer in the six (!) different formats it’s being released in.

We don’t really have an opinion on the big-screen adaptation of the epic tale as a piece of media, but from a technical standpoint, it’s interesting to see how the viewing experience changes between the 70mm IMAX version with an aspect ratio of 1.43:1 and the 35mm cut at 2.39:1. Unfortunately, the website offers no way to approximate what the movie will look like once compressed, streamed over the Internet, and displayed on a cheap TCL TV, to say nothing of how the viewing experience will be impacted should you watch the movie on your phone by way of a series of short YouTube clips while going to the bathroom. Maybe Nolan is saving that for his next film.

If you head over to the movies in one of Waymo’s vehicles, you can feel a little better about the long-term ecological impact of your trip thanks to a recently announced partnership between the autonomous car maker and B2U Storage Solutions. Under the agreement, old batteries pulled from Waymo’s fleet of self-driving electric cars will get a second life as localized grid storage.

The idea is that batteries which no longer hold enough charge to power a robo-taxi should still have enough capacity to store the energy produced by renewable sources so it can be doled out later when the demand goes up. By installing these batteries in the cities that Waymo actually operates their vehicles in, they don’t have to worry about shipping them around either — they can just yank them out of the car, and wire them right into the grid. Of course, eventually the batteries will be too cooked to adequately perform in this role as well, but this should give them a few more productive years before they get torn down and scrapped.

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Game Dodecahedron Runs AArch64 Assembly

June 3, 2026 by Tyler August No comments

Operating systems are great things to have for general purpose computing, but sometimes they can just get in the way. There’s RAM overhead and processor cycles required for all that operating, after all. For something like a game system, it seems unnecessary. The NES certainly did well enough without an OS, as did its various successors for several console generations.

[Inkbox] wanted to get back to those heady days by programming bare-metal games for a Rasberry Pi 3 that had sat unused since 2016. Games are on cartridge, running bare metal, in assembly — as God and Masayuki Uemura intended. Also, the console is a dodecahedron, because the name GameCube was already taken.

The GitHub link above doesn’t exactly have documentation, at least as of this writing, so you’ll need to watch the video to get the full details. The dodecahedron form factor might not be ideal for packing away in a bag, but as a handheld we have to admit it does look comfortable to hold. Two faces of the dodecahedron get a half-dozen buttons each, which are wired to a GPIO pin on the Pi via a Schmitt trigger for hardware debounce. Like all good consoles, it uses cartridges, these ones being adapted from SD cards on large PCBs derived from a project we featured before.

That all sounds great, but it’s the assembly programming we’re really interested in — skip to around the seven-minute mark in the video for that. Ultimately it’s a build video, so not the ideal tutorial for ARM assembly programming, but it might not be a bad introduction for some. Unfortunately you don’t get line-by-line of the PacMan game he put together — but he does have it in the repository for you to examine. The repo also has STLs if you want to make a dodecahedron of your own.

Of course he’s got a RetroPi cartridge as well, loaded with emulators, and we suspect that’s mostly how this GameDodecahedron will get used. Still, we’ll always have a soft spot for assembly code and projects that use it — be it on ARM, good old 6502, the open-source RISC V architecture, or even the absolute monster of op codes that is x86.

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The 2026 EMF Badge Arrives, With An Add-On. As Expected, It’s Familiar

June 2, 2026 by Jenny List 7 Comments

Two years ago the EMF hacker camp in the UK released a new kind of event badge. The Tildagon was designed to be a recurring event badge, useful for the next EMF rather than destined to be e-waste. With the 2026 event coming up there’s a new Tildagon called the Spaceagon, and as you might expect it’s very familiar indeed.

Tildagon owners can update their badge with the Spaceagon front panel (Update — The EMF badge team would like us to inform you that the final badge art will differ from the prototype badge shown), while those without one can buy the new badge. It has a few minor updates from its predecessor, including better buttons, LEDs, and display mounting, and there’s a compass, a joystick, and touch sensitive areas.

The Tildagon introduced its own add-on format, the Hexpansion. This year there’s the first official Hexpansion, a keyboard, using the same rubber moulding we see on quite a few maker projects. We like the Hexpansion idea because it uses an edge connector rather than a set of pins on the device, but at the cost of more expensive badge parts.

If you’re going to EMF you should be able to order yourself a Spaceagon, or an upgrade kit if you already own a Tildagon. Meanwhile we covered the 2024 version back when it arrived, and surprisingly this isn’t the first keyboard add-on for it either.

Revisiting Making Your Own Internet Router In 2026

June 1, 2026 by Maya Posch 61 Comments

After my recent misadventures setting up an OpenWrt installation on a scruffy e-waste-level x86 PC, quite a few people chimed in with feedback, criticism and friendly hostility regarding things like a presumed ‘x86 bias’. There were also some system-related things that simply didn’t seem to want to work, such as booting from an SD card with a USB adapter, which cut short a lot of the actual OpenWrt testing that I had intended. This made it mostly an enlightening look at what issues you can run into when ‘quickly’ throwing an OpenWrt router together with some junk parts these days.

In this second article I’ll try to address as many of these points as possible, as well as attempt to show off an actual working OpenWrt installation in action. In addition, since just using random junk x86 PC parts was the way to go back in the late 90s/early 2000s doesn’t mean that this is still the way in 2026, so I’ll be taking a look at alternatives that exist today. This includes everything from mini PCs, to ancient business PCs being sold for peanuts, as well as more dedicated (ARM-based) hardware solutions.

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Hackaday Links: May 31, 2026

May 31, 2026 by Tom Nardi 14 Comments

If you’re located in the Northeast United States and thought you heard an explosion yesterday afternoon, it wasn’t just your imagination — multiple sources have now confirmed that a 1 meter (3 foot) meteor entered the Earth’s atmosphere and broke up in the air off the coast of Massachusetts, releasing the energy equivalent of 300 tons of TNT.

Well, maybe. The latest update from NASA says it might actually qualify as a meteorite, with radar data indicating that debris from the space rock may have fallen into Cape Cod Bay. For those unfamiliar, the difference between a meteor and a meteorite is whether or not any of the object survived its encounter with the atmosphere and made it down to the surface.

There’s an argument to be made that a larger asteroid would have likely set off some alarm bells as it approached the planet, but the fact that this deep space interloper showed up unannounced is a sobering reminder that our ability to detect incoming threats isn’t nearly as robust as we’d like. Fortunately, it looks like the event didn’t result in any serious damage or injury.

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