Stadia Controller Reborn As Bluetooth Gamepad Adapter

March 25, 2026 by Ian Bos 5 Comments

Tech has a problem, an e-waste problem. Google is a common offender when it comes to this, creating a product just to end support a couple of years later. Thankfully, there are some lasting capabilities left in their defunct Stadia controllers. After hearing about these capabilities, [Bringus Studios] managed to turn this future e-waste into something new: a Bluetooth adapter for game controllers.

To give some credit to Google, once they announced the Stadia program was winding down, they released an updated firmware that let you use the controller as a generic Bluetooth gamepad. But there was also a rather unusual feature added — if another controller is connected to it via USB, its output will be passed along over Bluetooth as if it was coming from the Stadia controller itself.

This would allow you to wirelessly connect an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 controller to your computer, for example. But while a neat trick, having the two controllers plugged into each other is a bit awkward. So [Bringus Studios] decided to take the Stadia controller apart and turn it into a dedicated Bluetooth interface.

Continue reading “Stadia Controller Reborn As Bluetooth Gamepad Adapter” →

DIY Reflow Plate Runs On USB Power Delivery

March 18, 2026 by Lewin Day 18 Comments

If you’re working with surface mount components, you’re likely going to want a reflow plate at some point. [Vitaly] was in need of just such a tool, and thus whipped up a compact reflow plate that is conveniently powered via USB-C.

This reflow rig is designed for smaller work, with a working area of 80 mm x 70 mm. There are two options for the heating element—either a metal core PCB-based heater, or a metal ceramic heater. The former is good for working with Sn42Bi58 solder paste at 138 C, according to [Vitaly], while the latter will happily handle Sn63Pb37 at 183 C if the dirty stuff is more your jam.

Running the show is an ESP32-C3-WROOM, which serves up a web-based control panel over Bluetooth for setting the heating profiles. Using Bluetooth over WiFi might seem like an odd choice at first, but it means you don’t have to add the hot plate to the local wireless network to access it, handy if you’re on the move. It’s also worth noting that you can’t run this off any old USB charger—you’ll need one compatible with USB Power Delivery (PD) that can deliver at least 100 watts.

If you’re needing to whip up small boards with regularity, a hotplate like this one can really come in handy. Files are on GitHub for those eager to build their own.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen USB-C powering a small reflow plate. Of course, if you make your PCBs self heating, you can sidestep all that entirely.

Ask Hackaday: Wired Or Wireless Headphones?

March 16, 2026 by Al Williams 71 Comments

They say you should never throw out old clothes because they will come back in style one day. Maybe they are right. We noted in a recent BBC post that, apparently, wired headphones are making a comeback. Like many people, we were dismayed when Apple took the headphone jack out of the iPhone and, as [Thomas Germain] notes, even Google eventually ejected the normal headphone jack. (Although, in fairness, most of the Pixel phones we’ve seen come with a pair of USB-C earbuds.)

On the face of it, though, wireless seems to be a good idea. You can get cheap Bluetooth earbuds now, although maybe still not as cheap as wired buds. Sure, they sound terrible, but so do cheap buds. It is a pain to charge them, of course, but not having to untangle wires is a benefit. On the other hand, you never have to charge your wired headphones.

Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: Wired Or Wireless Headphones?” →

Building A Rad Bluetooth Speaker That Didn’t Really Exist

March 15, 2026 by Lewin Day 13 Comments

[Nick] came across an awesome Bluetooth speaker online, only, there was a problem. It didn’t really exist—it was just a render of a device that would be nice to have. Of course, there was an obvious solution—[Nick] just had to build the device for real!

The key to the aesthetic of the build is the external case. [Nick] was able to recreate the rough design of the rendered device in SolidWorks, before having the components produced on a resin 3D printer which provided excellent surface finish. Internally, the Bluetooth audio receiver was cribbed from an old pair of wireless headphones. However, a little more oomph was needed to make the speaker really usable, so [Nick] hooked the audio output up to a small MAX98306 amplifier board and a pair of 3 W speakers. The tiny tactile buttons from the headphone PCB wouldn’t do, either. For a nicer feel, [Nick] hacked in a set of four hall effect keyboard switches to control the basic functions.

The result is a Bluetooth speaker that looks as rad as the rendered unit, only you can actually take it outside and bump some tunes! It recalls us of some fine up-cycling work we’ve seen done to vintage 80s radios in a similar vibe.

Continue reading “Building A Rad Bluetooth Speaker That Didn’t Really Exist” →

Reverse-Engineering The Bluetooth Fichero Thermal Label Printer Protocol

March 9, 2026 by Maya Posch 20 Comments

It’s hard to deny that label printers have become more accessible than ever, but an annoying aspect of many of these cheap units is that their only user interface is a proprietary smartphone app connected via Bluetooth. The Fichero-branded label printer that [0xMH] obtained for a mere 10 Euro at a store in the Netherlands was much the same, with an associated app that doesn’t just bind it to smartphones, but also requires no fewer than 26 permissions. Obviously this required some reverse-engineering of the BLE protocol.

The fruits of this reverse-engineering effort can be found in the GitHub repository, with the most interesting part probably being that this Fichero is just one of many relabeling of generic label printers, this one being an AiYin D11, by Xiamen Printer Future Technology. This means that other iterations of this D11 will work exactly the same, as they all use the same ‘LuckPrinter’ SDK.

[0xMH] provides a Web GUI to talk with a local D11 printer, though you can also use the Python scripts, or of course implement the protocol using your favorite language and frameworks, so that you can finally control a cheap label printer from a PC or even BLE-equipped MCU like the software gods intended.

Thanks to [T-ice] for the tip.

Hackaday Links: January 18, 2026

January 18, 2026 by Tom Nardi 7 Comments

Looking for a unique vacation spot? Have at least $10 million USD burning a hole in your pocket? If so, then you’re just the sort of customer the rather suspiciously named “GRU Space” is looking for. They’re currently taking non-refundable $1,000 deposits from individuals looking to stay at their currently non-existent hotel on the lunar surface. They don’t expect you’ll be able to check in until at least the early 2030s, and the $1K doesn’t actually guarantee you’ll be selected as one of the guests who will be required to cough up the final eight-figure ticket price before liftoff, but at least admission into the history books is free with your stay.

Mars One living units under regolith — This never happened.

The whole idea reminds us of Mars One, which promised to send the first group of colonists to the Red Planet by 2024. They went bankrupt in 2019 after collecting ~$100 deposits from more than 4,000 applicants, and we probably don’t have to tell you that they never actually shot anyone into space. Admittedly, the Moon is a far more attainable goal, and the commercial space industry has made enormous strides in the decade since Mars One started taking applications. But we’re still not holding our breath that GRU Space will be leaving any mints on pillows at one-sixth gravity.

Speaking of something which actually does have a chance of reaching the Moon on time — on Saturday, NASA rolled out the massive Space Launch System (SLS) rocket that will carry a crew of four towards our nearest celestial neighbor during the Artemis II mission. There’s still plenty of prep work to do, including a dress rehearsal that’s set to take place in the next couple of weeks, but we’re getting very close. Artemis II won’t actually land on the Moon, instead performing a lunar flyby, but it will still be the first time we’ve sent humans beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) since Apollo 17 in 1972. We can’t wait for some 4K Earthrise video.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: January 18, 2026” →

39C3: Liberating ESP32 Bluetooth

December 30, 2025 by Elliot Williams 6 Comments

Bluetooth is everywhere, but it’s hard to inspect. Most of the magic is done inside a Bluetooth controller chip, accessed only through a controller-specific Host-Controller Interface (HCI) protocol, and almost everything your code does with Bluetooth passes through a binary library that speaks the right HCI dialect. Reverse engineering these libraries can get us a lot more control of and information about what’s going on over the radio link.

That’s [Anton]’s motivation and goal in this reversing and documentation project, which he describes for us in this great talk at this year’s Chaos Communication Congress. In the end, [Anton] gets enough transparency about the internal workings of the Bluetooth binaries to transmit and receive data. He stops short of writing his own BT stack, but suggests that it would be possible, but maybe more work than one person should undertake.

So what does this get us? Low-level control of the BT controller in a popular platform like the ESP32 that can do both classic and low-energy Bluetooth should help a lot with security research into Bluetooth in general. He figured out how to send arbitrary packets, for instance, which should allow someone to write a BT fuzzing tool. Unfortunately, there is a sequence ID that prevents his work from turning the controller into a fully promiscuous BT monitor, but still there’s a lot of new ground exposed here.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, you’ll find his write-up, register descriptions, and more in the GitHub repository. This isn’t a plug-and-play Bluetooth tool yet, but this is the kind of groundwork on a popular chip that we expect will enable future hacking, and we salute [Anton] for shining some light into one of the most ubiquitous and yet intransparent corners of everyday tech.