Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The C64 Keyboard

December 9, 2025 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

[Jean] wrote into the tips line (the system works!) to let all of us know about his hacked and hand-wired C64 keyboard, a thing of beauty in its chocolate-brown and 9u space bar-havin’ glory.

A C64 keyboard without the surrounding C64. — Image by [Jean] via GitHub

This Arduino Pro Micro-based brain transplant began as a sketch, and [Jean] reports it now has proper code in QMK. But how is a person supposed to use it in 2025, almost 2026, especially as a programmer or just plain serious computer user?

The big news here is that [Jean] added support for missing characters using the left and right Shift keys, and even added mouse controls and Function keys that are accessed on a layer via the Shift Lock key. You can see the key maps over on GitHub.

I’ll admit, [Jean]’s project has got me eyeing that C64 I picked up for $12 at a thrift store which I doubt still works as intended. But don’t worry, I will test it first.

Fortunately, it looks like [Jean] has thought of everything when it comes to reproducing this hack, including the requisite C64-to-Arduino pinout. So, what are you waiting for?

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Brilliant Labs Has New Smart Glasses, With A New Display

August 4, 2025 by Donald Papp 16 Comments

Brilliant Labs have been making near-eye display platforms for some time now, and they are one of the few manufacturers making a point of focusing on an open and hacker-friendly approach to their devices. Halo is their newest smart glasses platform, currently in pre-order (299 USD) and boasting some nifty features, including a completely new approach to the display.

Development hardware for the Halo display. The actual production display is color, and integrated into the eyeglasses frame.

Halo is an evolution of the concept of a developer-friendly smart glasses platform intended to make experimentation (or modification) as accessible as possible. Compared to previous hardware, it has some additional sensors and an entirely new approach to the display element.

Whereas previous devices used a microdisplay and beam splitter embedded into a thick lens, Halo has a tiny display module that one looks up and into in the eyeglasses frame. The idea appears to be to provide the user with audio (bone-conduction speakers in the arms of the glasses) as well as a color “glanceable” display for visual data.

Some of you may remember Brilliant Labs’ Monocle, a transparent, self-contained, and wireless clip-on display designed with experimentation in mind. The next device was Frame, which put things into a “smart glasses” form factor, with added features and abilities.

Halo, being in pre-release, doesn’t have full SDK or hardware details shared yet. But given Brilliant Labs’ history of fantastic documentation for their hardware and software, we’re pretty confident Halo will get the same treatment. Want to know more but don’t wish to wait? Checking out the tutorials and documentation for the earlier devices should give you a pretty good idea of what to expect.

Supercon 2024: Photonics/Optical Stack For Smart-Glasses

April 30, 2025 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

Smart glasses are a complicated technology to work with. The smart part is usually straightforward enough—microprocessors and software are perfectly well understood and easy to integrate into even very compact packages. It’s the glasses part that often proves challenging—figuring out the right optics to create a workable visual interface that sits mere millimeters from the eye.

Dev Kennedy is no stranger to this world. He came to the 2024 Hackaday Supercon to give a talk and educate us all on photonics, optical stacks, and the technology at play in the world of smart glasses.

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Octet Of ESP32s Lets You See WiFi Like Never Before

February 15, 2025 by Dan Maloney 15 Comments

Most of us see the world in a very narrow band of the EM spectrum. Sure, there are people with a genetic quirk that extends the range a bit into the UV, but it’s a ROYGBIV world for most of us. Unless, of course, you have something like this ESP32 antenna array, which gives you an augmented reality view of the WiFi world.

According to [Jeija], “ESPARGOS” consists of an antenna array board and a controller board. The antenna array has eight ESP32-S2FH4 microcontrollers and eight 2.4 GHz WiFi patch antennas spaced a half-wavelength apart in two dimensions. The ESP32s extract channel state information (CSI) from each packet they receive, sending it on to the controller board where another ESP32 streams them over Ethernet while providing the clock and phase reference signals needed to make the phased array work. This gives you all the information you need to calculate where a signal is coming from and how strong it is, which is used to plot a sort of heat map to overlay on a webcam image of the same scene.

The results are pretty cool. Walking through the field of view of the array, [Jeija]’s smartphone shines like a lantern, with very little perceptible lag between the WiFi and the visible light images. He’s also able to demonstrate reflection off metallic surfaces, penetration through the wall from the next room, and even outdoor scenes where the array shows how different surfaces reflect the signal. There’s also a demonstration of using multiple arrays to determine angle and time delay of arrival of a signal to precisely locate a moving WiFi source. It’s a little like a reverse LORAN system, albeit indoors and at a much shorter wavelength.

There’s a lot in this video and the accompanying documentation to unpack. We haven’t even gotten to the really cool stuff like using machine learning to see around corners by measuring reflected WiFi signals. ESPARGOS looks like it could be a really valuable tool across a lot of domains, and a heck of a lot of fun to play with too.

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FPV Flying In Mixed Reality Is Easier Than You’d Think

January 3, 2025 by Tom Nardi 12 Comments

Flying a first-person view (FPV) remote controlled aircraft with goggles is an immersive experience that makes you feel as if you’re really sitting in the cockpit of the plane or quadcopter. Unfortunately, while your wearing the goggles, you’re also completely blind to the world around you. That’s why you’re supposed to have a spotter nearby to keep watch on the local meatspace while you’re looping through the air.

But what if you could have the best of both worlds? What if your goggles not only allowed you to see the video stream from your craft’s FPV camera, but you could also see the world around you. That’s precisely the idea behind mixed reality goggles such as Apple Vision Pro and Meta’s Quest, you just need to put all the pieces together. In a recent video [Hoarder Sam] shows you exactly how to pull it off, and we have to say, the results look quite compelling.

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[miko_tarik] wearing diy AR goggles in futuristic setting

Pi Zero To AR: Building DIY Augmented Reality Glasses

November 4, 2024 by Heidi Ulrich 36 Comments

If you’re into pushing tech boundaries from home, this one’s for you. Redditor [mi_kotalik] has crafted ‘Zero’, a custom pair of DIY augmented reality (AR) glasses using a Raspberry Pi Zero. Designed as an affordable, self-contained device for displaying simple AR functions, Zero allows him to experiment without breaking the bank. With features like video playback, Bluetooth audio, a teleprompter, and an image viewer, Zero is a testament to what can be done with determination and creativity on a budget. The original Reddit thread includes videos, a build log, and links to documentation on X, giving you an in-depth look into [mi_kotalik]’s journey. Take a sneak peek through the lens here.

Creating Zero wasn’t simple. From designing the frame in Tinkercad to experimenting with transparent PETG to print lenses (ultimately switching to resin-cast lenses), [mi_kotalik] faced plenty of challenges. By customizing SPI displays and optimizing them to 60 FPS, he achieved an impressive level of real-time responsiveness, allowing him to explore AR interactions like never before. While the Raspberry Pi Zero’s power is limited, [mi_kotalik] is already planning a V2 with a Compute Module 4 to enable 3D rendering, GPS, and spatial tracking.

Zero is an inspiring example for tinkerers hoping to make AR tech more accessible, especially after the fresh news of both Meta and Apple cancelling their attempts to venture in the world of AR. If you are into AR and eager to learn from an original project like this one, check out the full Reddit thread and explore Hackaday’s past coverage on augmented reality experiments.

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Meta Cancels Augmented Reality Headset After Apple Vision Pro Falls Flat

August 24, 2024 by Maya Posch 50 Comments

The history of consumer technology is littered with things that came and went. For whatever reason, consumers never really adopted the tech, and it eventually dies. Some of those concepts seem to persistently hang on, however, such as augmented reality (AR). Most recently, Apple launched its Vision Pro ‘mixed reality’ headset at an absolutely astounding price to a largely negative response and disappointing sale numbers. This impending market flop seems to now have made Meta (née Facebook) reconsider bringing a similar AR device to market.

To most, this news will come as little of a surprise, considering that Microsoft’s AR product (HoloLens) explicitly seeks out (government) niches with substantial budgets, and Google’s smart glasses have crashed and burned despite multiple market attempts. In a consumer market where virtual reality products are already desperately trying not to become another 3D display debacle, it would seem clear that amidst a lot of this sci-fi adjacent ‘cool technology,’ there are a lot of executives and marketing critters who seem to forego the basic question: ‘why would anyone use this?’

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