Retro Open Source Camera Straight From The ’90s

March 30, 2026 by Ian Bos 6 Comments

In our modern society, we have started to take the humble camera for granted. Perhaps because of this, trendy standalone cameras have started to take off. Unfortunately, most of the time these cameras are expensive and not any better than those in our everyday smartphones. If only there were some open-source solution where you could build and customize your own standalone device? [Yutani] has done just that with the SATURNIX.

Simple microcontrollers and cameras meant for Raspberry Pis are a dime a dozen these days. Because of this, it’s no surprise to hear that the SATURNIX is based on recognizable hardware, a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W and an Arducam 16MP sensor. The Pi Zero powers both the sensors’ capture abilities and the interactive LCD display.

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Playful ‘Space Dice’ Kit Shows Off Clever Design

March 28, 2026 by Donald Papp 4 Comments

[Tommy] at Oskitone has been making hardware synth kits for years, and his designs are always worth checking out. His newest offering Space Dice is an educational kit that is a combination vintage sci-fi space laser sound generator, and six-sided die roller. What’s more, as a kit it represents an effort to be genuinely educational, rather than just using it as a meaningless marketing term.

There are several elements we find pretty interesting in Space Dice. One is the fact that, like most of [Tommy]’s designs, there isn’t a microcontroller in sight. Synthesizers based mostly on CMOS logic chips have been a mainstay of DIY electronics for years, as have “electronic dice” circuits. This device mashes both together in an accessible way that uses a minimum of components.

There are only three chips inside: a CD4093 quad NAND with Schmitt-trigger inputs used as a relaxation oscillator, a CD4040 binary counter used as a prescaler, and a CD4017 decade counter responsible for spinning a signal around six LEDs while sound is generated, to represent an electronic die. Sound emerges from a speaker on the backside of the PCB, which we’re delighted to see is driven not by a separate amplifier chip, but by unused gates on the CD4093 acting as a simple but effective square wave booster.

In addition, [Tommy] puts effort into minimizing part count and complexity, ensuring that physical assembly does not depend on separate fasteners or adhesives. We also like the way he uses a lever assembly to make the big activation button — mounted squarely above the 9 V battery — interface with a button on the PCB that is physically off to the side. The result is an enclosure that is compact and tidy.

We recommend checking out [Tommy]’s concise writeup on the design details of Space Dice for some great design insights, and take a look at the assembly guide to see for yourself the attention paid to making the process an educational one. We love the concept of presenting an evolving schematic diagram, which changes and fills out as each assembly step is performed and tested.

Watch it in action in a demo video, embedded just below. Space Dice is available for purchase but if you prefer to roll your own, all the design files and documentation are available online from the project’s GitHub repository.

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Slug Algorithm For On-GPU Rendering Of Fonts With Bézier Curves Now In Public Domain

March 20, 2026 by Maya Posch 16 Comments

The Slug Algorithm has been around for a decade now, mostly quietly rendering fonts and later entire GUIs using Bézier curves directly on the GPU for games and other types of software, but due to its proprietary nature it didn’t see much adoption outside of commercial settings. This has now changed with its author, [Eric Lengyel], releasing it to the public domain without any limitations.

Originally [Eric] had received a software patent in 2019 for the algorithm that would have prevented anyone else from implementing it until the patent’s expiration in 2038. Since 2016 [Eric] and his business have however had in his eyes sufficient benefit from the patent, making it unnecessary to hold on to it any longer and retain such exclusivity.

To help anyone with implementing their own version of the algorithm, there is a GitHub repository containing reference shader implementations with plenty of inline comments that should help anyone with some shader experience get started.

Although pretty niche in the eyes of the average person, the benefits of using on-GPU rendering of elements like fonts are obvious in terms of rendering optimization. With this change open source rendering engines for games and more can finally also use it as well.

Thanks to [Footleg] for the tip.

One Sailing Pulley To Rule Them All

March 6, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 25 Comments

When thinking of humanity’s ability to harness wind energy, many people will conjure images of windmills from places like The Netherlands or Persia. But people have been using wind energy for far longer than that in the form of sailing ships. Using the wind for transportation goes back another four thousand years or so, but despite our vast experience navigating the seas with wind alone there is still some room for improvement. Many modern sailboats use a number of different pulleys to manage all of the rigging, but this new, open-source pulley can replace many of them.

The pulley, or “block” as they are sometimes called, is built with a polymer roller made out of a type of nylon, which has the benefit of being extremely durable and self-lubricating but is a bit expensive. Durability and lack of squeakiness is important in sailing applications, though. The body is made from CNC-machined aluminum and is composed of two parts, which pivot around the pulley’s axis to allow various ropes (or “lines”) to be inserted without freeing one end of the rope. In testing, this design outperformed some proprietary stainless steel pulleys of similar size.

Another perk of this design is that it can be set up to work in many different applications on a sailboat, whether that’s for hoisting a mainsail or pulling in a jib or any other task a pulley could be used for. It can also be stacked with others in many different configurations to build custom pulleys of almost any type, and can support up to 14 mm lines. For a sailor this could be extremely valuable, because as it stands each pulley on a ship tends to be used in only certain applications, and might also be proprietary from a specific company. This pulley is being released into the open-source world, allowing anyone to create them who wants one.

Thanks to [Keith] for the tip!

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A grim reaper knocking on a door labelled "open source"

What About The Droid Attack On The Repos?

February 22, 2026 by Tyler August 36 Comments

You might not have noticed, but we here at Hackaday are pretty big fans of Open Source — software, hardware, you name it. We’ve also spilled our fair share of electronic ink on things people are doing with AI. So naturally when [Jeff Geerling] declares on his blog (and in a video embedded below) that AI is destroying open source, well, we had to take a look.

[Jeff]’s article highlights a problem he and many others who manage open source projects have noticed: they’re getting flooded with agenetic slop pull requests (PRs). It’s now to the point that GitHub will let you turn off PRs completely, at which point you’ve given up a key piece of the ‘hub’s functionality. That ability to share openly with everyone seemed like a big source of strength for open source projects, but [Jeff] here is joining his voice with others like [Daniel Stenberg] of curl fame, who has dropped bug bounties over a flood of spurious AI-generated PRs.

It’s a problem for maintainers, to be sure, but it’s as much a human problem as an AI one. After all, someone set up that AI agent and pointed at your PRs. While changing the incentive structure– like removing bug bounties– might discourage such actions, [Jeff] has no bounties and the same problem. Ultimately it may be necessary for open source projects to become a little less open, only allowing invited collaborators to submit PRs, which is also now an option on GitHub.

Combine invitation-only access with a strong policy against agenetic AI and LLM code, and you can still run a quality project. The cost of such actions is that the random user with no connection to the project can no longer find and squash bugs. As unlikely as that sounds, it happens! Rather, it did. If the random user is just going to throw their AI agent at the problem, it’s not doing anybody any good.

First they came for our RAM, now they’re here for our repos. If it wasn’t for getting distracted by the cute cat pictures we might just start to think vibe coding could kill open source. Extra bugs was bad enough, but now we can’t even trust the PRs to help us squash them!

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Three Decades Of ReactOS

February 5, 2026 by Jenny List 13 Comments

Over the past couple of years with the Jenny’s Daily Drivers series, we’ve looked at a number of unusual or noteworthy operating systems. Among them has been ReactOS, an open source clone of a millennium-era Windows OS, which we tried back in November. It’s one of those slow-burn projects we know has been around for a long time, but still it’s a surprise to find we’ve reached the 30th anniversary of the first ReactOS code commit.

The post is a run through the project’s history, and having followed it for a long time we recognize some of the milestones from the various ISOs we downloaded and tried back in the day. At the end it looks into the future with plans to support more up-to-date hardware as well as UEFI, which we hope will keep it relevant.

When we tried it, we found an OS which could indeed be a Daily Driver on which a Hackaday article could be written — even if it wasn’t the slickest experience on the block. It doesn’t matter that it’s taken a while, if you’re used to Windows XP this has become a usable replacement. We came to the conclusion that like FreeDOS it could find a niche in places where people need a modern version of the old OS to run older software, but perhaps as it now moves towards its mature phase it will move beyond that. We salute the ReactOS developers for bringing it this far, and for not giving up.

You can read our Daily Drivers review of a recent ReactOS build here.

Ride On With FOSS And GoldenCheetah

December 3, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 4 Comments

If you exclude certain companies like Peloton, the world of cycling technology is surprisingly open. It’s not perfect by any means, but there are enough open or open-ish standards for many different pieces of technology from different brands to interoperate with each other, from sensors and bike computers and even indoor trainers to some extent. This has also made it possible for open source software to exist in this realm as well, and the GoldenCheetah project has jumped in for all of us who value FOSS and also like to ride various bicycles from time to time.

GoldenCheetah focuses on gathering data from power meters, allowing cyclists to record their rides and save them in order to keep track of their training performance over time. It works well with sensors that use the ANT+ protocol, and once it has that data it can provide advanced analytics such as power curves, critical power modeling, and detailed charts for power, heart rate, and cadence. It can display and record live indoor-training data, and in some situations it can even run interval workouts, although not every indoor trainer is supported. There are no social features, subscriptions, or cloud requirements which can be refreshing in the modern world, but is a bit of a downside if you’re used to riding with your friends in something like Zwift.

All in all, though, it’s an impressive bit of software that encourages at least one realm of consumer electronics to stay more open, especially if those using bike sensors, computers, and trainers pick ones that are more open and avoid those that are proprietary, even if they don’t plan to use GoldenCheetah exclusively. And if you were wondering about the ANT+ protocol mentioned earlier, it’s actually used for many more things that just intra-bike wireless communications.