Scanning Table For The Professional Maker

February 10, 2026 by Ian Bos 11 Comments

Sometimes the simplest objects need some overthinking. This is exactly what [Chris Borge] realized when using his 3D scanner and finding that the included rotation table left quite a bit to be desired — providing him the perfect excuse to build a new one.

One of the main features of a rotation stage is the, well, rotation. This was done in [Chris]’s case with a NEMA 17 stepper motor, perfect for precise rotation of scanning. Hooking up the motor to a basic perf board with an Arduino Nano allows for on the fly adjustments to rotation speed. To really solidify the over-engineering, [Chris] applies his obligatory concrete mix to add some heft to the stage.

While the previous features could be removed/downgraded without much loss, the adjustable grid built into the top adds significant functionality. The grid is based on [Chris]’s past projects, which allows cross compatibility.

We love over-engineering here at Hackaday, especially when adding something new. For more prime overthought design, check out this over engineered egg cracker!

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Gaming On An Arduino Uno Q In Linux

February 10, 2026 by Maya Posch 25 Comments

After Qualcomm’s purchase of Arduino it has left many wondering what market its new Uno Q board is trying to target. Taking the ongoing RAM-pocalypse as inspiration, [Bringus Studios] made a tongue-in-cheek video about using one of these SoC/MCU hybrid Arduino boards for running Linux and gaming on it. Naturally, with the lack of ARM-native Steam games, this meant using the FEX x86-to-ARM translator in addition to Steam’s Proton translation layer where no native Linux game exists, making for an excellent stress test of the SoC side of this board.

Technically, this is a heatsink. (Credit: Bringus Studios, YouTube)

We covered this new ‘Arduino’ board previously, which features both a quad-core Cortex-A53 SoC and a Cortex-M33 MCU. Since it uses the Uno form factor, all SoC I/O goes via the single USB-C connector, meaning that a USB-C docking station is pretty much required to use the SoC, though there’s at least 16 GB of eMMC to install the OS on. A Debian-based OS image even comes preinstalled, which is convenient.

With a mere 2 GB of LPDDR4 it’s not the ideal board to run desktop Linux on, but if you’re persistent and patient enough it will work, and you can even play 3D video games as though it’s Qualcomm’s take on Raspberry Pi SBCs. After some intense gaming the SoC package gets really quite toasty, so adding a heatsink is probably needed if you want to peg its cores and GPU to 100% for extended periods of time.

As for dodging the RAM-pocalypse with one of these $44 boards, it’s about the same price as the 1 GB Raspberry Pi 5, but the 2 GB RPi 5 – even with the recent second price bump – is probably a better deal for this purpose. Especially since you can skip the whole docking station, but losing the eMMC is a rawer deal, and the dedicated MCU could be arguably nice for more dedicated purposes. Still, desktop performance is a hard ‘meh’ on the Uno Q, even if you’re very generous.

Despite FEX being a pain to set up, it seems to work well, which is promising for Valve’s upcoming Steam Frame VR glasses, which are incidentally Qualcomm Snapdragon-based.

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Driving Sim Handbrake Based On Load Cell

February 6, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 2 Comments

Simulator-style video games are designed to scale in complexity, allowing players to engage at anything from a casual level to highly detailed, realistic simulation. Microsoft Flight Simulator, for example, can be played with a keyboard and mouse, a controller, or a huge, expensive simulator designed to replicate a specific airplane in every detail. Driving simulators are similar, and [CNCDan] has been hard at work on his DIY immersive driving sim rig, with this hand brake as his latest addition.

For this build, [CNCDan] is going with a lever-style handbrake which is common in motorsports like drifting and rallying. He has already built a set of custom pedals, so this design borrows heavily from them. That means that the sensor is a load cell, which takes input force from a lever connected to it with a spring mechanism. The signal is sent to an Arduino for processing, which is set up to send data over USB like any joystick or controller. In this case, he’s using an Arduino that was already handling inputs from his custom shifter, so he only needed to use another input and add some code to get his handbrake added into his sim.

[CNCDan] built a version of this out of laser-cut metal parts, but also has a fully 3D printable one available as well. Plenty of his other videos about his driving rig are available as well, from the pedal assembly we mentioned earlier to the force-feedback steering wheel. It’s an impressive set of hardware with a feel that replicates racing about as faithfully as a simulator could. Interestingly, we’ve also seen this process in reverse as well where a real car was used instead as a video game controller.

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Handheld Steering Wheel Controller Gets Force-Feedback

January 29, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 4 Comments

For a full-fledged, bells-and-whistles driving simulator a number of unique human interface devices are needed, from pedals and shifters to the steering wheel. These steering wheels often have force feedback, with a small motor inside that can provide resistance to a user’s input that feels the same way that a steering wheel on a real car would. Inexpensive or small joysticks often omit this feature, but [Jason] has figured out a way to bring this to even the smallest game controllers.

The mechanism at the center of his controller is a DC motor out of an inkjet printer. Inkjet printers have a lot of these motors paired with rotary encoders for precision control, which is exactly what is needed here. A rotary encoder can determine the precise position of the controller’s wheel, and the motor can provide an appropriate resistive force depending on what is going on in the game. The motors out of a printer aren’t plug-and-play, though. They also need an H-bridge so they can get driven in either direction, and the entire mechanism is connected to an Arduino in the base of the controller to easily communicate with a computer over USB.

In testing the controller does behave like its larger, more expensive cousins, providing feedback to the driver and showing that it’s ready for one’s racing game of choice. It’s an excellent project for those who are space-constrained or who like to game on the go, but if you have more space available you might also want to check out [Jason]’s larger version built from a power drill instead parts from an inkjet.

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TV Remote Uses Floppy Disks

January 19, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 9 Comments

Famously, the save icon on most computer user interfaces references a fairly obsolete piece of technology: the venerable floppy disk. It’s likely that most people below the age of about 30 have never interacted with one of these once-ubiquitous storage devices, so much so that many don’t recognize the object within the save icon itself anymore. [Mads Chr. Olesen]’s kids might be an exception here, though, as he’s built a remote control for them that uses real floppy disks to select the programming on the TV.

This project partially began as a way to keep the children from turning into zombies as a result of the modern auto-play brainrot-based economies common in modern media. He wanted his kids to be able to make meaningful choices and then not get sucked into these types of systems. The floppy disk presents a perfect solution here. They’re tangible media and can actually store data, so he got to work interfacing a real floppy disk drive with a microcontroller. When a disk is inserted the microcontroller wakes up, reads the data, and then sends out a command to stream the relevant media to the Chromecast on the TV. When the disk is removed, the microcontroller stops play.

Like any remote, this one is battery powered as well, but running a microcontroller and floppy disk drive came with a few challenges. This one is powered by 18650 lithium cells to help with current peaks from the drive, and after working out a few kinks it works perfectly for [Mads] children. We’ve seen a few other floppy disk-based remote controls like this one which replaces the data stored on the magnetic disc with an RFID tag instead.

2025: As The Hardware World Turns

January 5, 2026 by Tom Nardi 30 Comments

If you’re reading this, that means you’ve successfully made it through 2025! Allow us to be the first to congratulate you — that’s another twelve months of skills learned, projects started, and hacks….hacked. The average Hackaday reader has a thirst for knowledge and an insatiable appetite for new challenges, so we know you’re already eager to take on everything 2026 has to offer.

But before we step too far into the unknown, we’ve found that it helps to take a moment and reflect on where we’ve been. You know how the saying goes: those that don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. That whole impending doom bit obviously has a negative connotation, but we like to think the axiom applies for both the lows and highs in life. Sure you should avoid making the same mistake twice, but why not have another go at the stuff that worked? In fact, why not try to make it even better this time?

As such, it’s become a Hackaday tradition to rewind the clock and take a look at some of the most noteworthy stories and trends of the previous year, as seen from our rather unique viewpoint in the maker and hacker world. With a little luck, reviewing the lessons of 2025 can help us prosper in 2026 and beyond.

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Twelve Days Of Christmas As Performed By 1980s Speech Chip

December 25, 2025 by Tyler August 5 Comments

In a curious historical twist, the “Twelve days of Christmas” are actually the days of revelry that followed the 25th. The preceding period, Advent, was traditionally a fast, not unlike Lent. When and why a fast became an excuse for chocolate calendars we cannot say, but this historical information is presented to explain that this great hack by [Kevin], making a vintage speech synthesizer chip sing the classic carol will remain relevant at least until January 5th — or perhaps even the 19th, for the Orthodox amongst us.

The chip in question is an SP0256A-AL2, which you may remember from various speech projects for 8-bit computers back in the day. It can talk, after a fashion, by reproducing 56 “allophones” — the sounds that make up English speech — from ROM. Singing, though? We cannot recall much of that back in the day, but then, a talking computer was impressive enough.

As it turns out this is building on an earlier hack [Kevin] did in which he used an Arduino to make the venerable speech chip MIDI controllable. In that project’s write-up it is revealed that a Si5351 programmable clock module is used to give a variable pitch signal to the speech synthesizer. In this way he’s able to get about an octave an a half, which is good enough when the carol in question only spans one octave.

Of course the pitch signal needs to be varied by something and for that the venerable Arduino once again takes the place of an 8-bit computer. In this case it’s pre-programmed, but can also be set up for MIDI control.Of course nothing says you can’t use true retro hardware or a more-capable RP2040 instead of the Amtel chip.

It’s sad to think how much compute power has been wasted this year on AI-generated novelty carols when a little bit of 1980s silicon and some ingenuity can do nearly as good — or better, depending on your tastes. Continue reading “Twelve Days Of Christmas As Performed By 1980s Speech Chip” →