Yesterday’s Technology, Re-engineered Today

July 4, 2026 by Elliot Williams 12 Comments

Watching [sprite_tm]’s build of a handheld 486-based gaming computer, we got to thinking about retro computers and the eternal questions of how much of the computer needs to be actually “old” for it it be retro. Where is the soul of a retro computer? The CPU? The old yellowing plastic case? Maybe it depends on what you’re trying to get out of the hobby.

There is of course a spectrum of people playing around with old computers. For some people, let’s call them “vintage computer enthusiasts”, half of the fun is in keeping the actual old hardware running. This group tends to know what teletype lubricant smells like, and how to tell which capacitors need replacing.

For others, “team retro”, the joy is in using the machine itself, whether that be teaching the old dogs new tricks, or simply loading up nostalgic video games. Team retro is more content with emulations or emulations that are wrapped up neatly in hardware workalikes. They know which registers need POKEing, and whether or not Commander Keen is running at the right framerate.

I think [sprite_tm]’s project falls in with yet another camp, the retro-reengineers. Here, the idea is to step through the engineering lessons of the past by re-designing something from a bygone era. So when [sprite_tm] went with a period 486 CPU backed up by a modern FPGA, perhaps ironically borrowing code from the modern MiSTer project, it makes sense for his goals. Retro-reengineers know the bus architecture and the memory timings, and they are reinventing the wheel as a learning experience. Or in the case of [Voja Antonic]’s imaginary four-bit machine, it’s a teaching experience.

How you work often reflects what you’d like to get out of the project, and at Hackaday, of course, we love all of the above! We’ve identified at least three broad schools of fooling around with old computers. Are we missing any?

Hacking Routers Like It’s 2008

June 27, 2026 by Elliot Williams 19 Comments

How long have we been hacking routers? To some of you who’ve been in the Hackaday audience for a while, the answer is “nearly forever”. In the early 2000s, they were one of the few consumer gadgets that had the trifecta of hackability: WiFi and networking built in, a user-friendly Linux operating system, and a few spare GPIOs that could control from the OS. Back when the Linksys WRT54GL was the king of the hill, we saw some pretty absurd hacks.

Take this example robot from October 2008. Link-rot hasn’t been kind to the original project, but from what we can tell, it used the GPIOs to drive servo motors hacked for continuous rotation, and features the equally anachronistic CD-ROM wheels. Where would you even get those today?

But the OS that this 18-year-old hack uses is still around: OpenWRT Linux. Although it still takes its name from the lovable purple router of old, it hasn’t supported that particular model in over a decade because of growing memory requirements. But it’s still the go-to distro for any modern router hacks, and it provides a lot more general-purpose Linux than you might expect on otherwise constrained platforms. As Tom pointed out in the podcast, if you see a used router for cheap, see if it’s supported by OpenWRT, and if it is, buy it.

While the project that got us thinking about routers again, Al’s recent networking hack, basically uses the router as a souped-up router, that’s by no means a given. OpenWRT is a real Linux OS, and can make use of most peripherals that your router find has available. Networking? Of course. USB? No problem. If you find a serial port and some GPIOs, you’re most of the way to a Linux SBC, although very likely a headless one.

There are a lot of hacks we see go in and out of style, and we see software projects come and go. But here we tip our hat to the router hacks, and to the plucky Linux OS that’s been ported to them all. Long may it keep old devices out of the landfill!

Featured image: My old baby, about a year or so before something in the radio modem finally gave up the ghost.

Peripherals Hacks

May 2, 2026 by Elliot Williams 10 Comments

Custom peripheral projects are among the most rewarding. Especially if you’re like me and you sit at the computer eight hours per day, anything that you can use on a daily basis is super satisfying. This topic of DIY peripherals came up on the podcast while chatting with Kristina, who is no stranger to odd inputs herself.

We were talking about a trackball that had been modified to read twisting gestures, by a clever hijacking of the twin mouse sensors inside. If you do a lot of 3D modeling, you can absolutely get by with just a mouse and shift-ctrl-alt as modifiers, but it’s so much more immediate to use a dedicated 3D input device. (I’ve got an ancient serial Space Mouse just under my left hand as I type this.)

My old favorite, which I haven’t used in ages, is the guts of a 5” hard-drive platter stack that I turned into a scroll wheel. Unfortunately, I don’t have space for it on my desk anymore, but it was just so pleasing to scroll through a document with something that had some real chonky momentum to it.

And it’s easier than ever to make your own. The classic blocky macropad is a great introduction, but as long as you’re doing the design yourself, why not extend it, or at least make it fit your hand? Or take your flights of fancy even further away from the mainstream. Consider the Bluetooth mouse ring, for instance.

Point is, the software side of almost any peripheral device you can imagine is sorted out already, and interfacing with the hardware is equally simple. Peripheral hacks have such a low barrier to entry, but afford so many creative hardware possibilities. And nothing says “Jedi” like building your own lightsaber.

Tool Embodiment And The Dead Trackball

April 18, 2026 by Elliot Williams 42 Comments

There is a currently ongoing debate in the neuropsychology world about how we relate to the tools that we use. The theory of “tool embodiment” says that when we use some tools frequently enough, our brain recognizes them similarly to how it recognizes our own hands, for instance. There is evidence and counter-evidence from experiments with prosthetics, trash-grabber arms, and rubber dummy arms, just to name a few. It’s fair to say the jury is still out.

All I know is that today my trackball broke, and using a normal gaming mouse to edit the podcast was torture. It would be an exaggeration to say that I felt like I’d lost a hand, but I have so much motor memory apparently built up in my use of the trackball that switching over to another tool to undertake the exact same series of hundreds of small audio edits – mostly compensating for the audio delay across continents, but also silencing coughs and background noises – took an extra hour.

Anyone who has switched from one keyboard to another, or heck even from emacs to vim, knows what I experienced. My body just knows how to flick my wrist to make the cursor on the screen move over to the beginning of that “umm”. It’s not like I don’t conceptually know how to use a mouse either, and it does exactly the same job. But the mouse wasn’t my tool for this application. And saying that out loud makes it almost sound like I’m bordering on embodying my trackball.

I probably should have taken the trackball apart and replaced the bad tact switch on the left-click – that would have taken maybe twenty minutes – but I completely underestimated how integral the tool had become to the work. Anyway, as I write this, tomorrow is Saturday and I’ll have time to fix it. But today, I learned something pretty neat about myself in the process, even if I don’t think my single datapoint is going to rock the academic psych world.

What’s Your Favorite Kind Of Hack?

April 11, 2026 by Elliot Williams 32 Comments

Talking with [Tom Nardi] on the podcast this week, he mentioned his favorite kind of hack: the community-developed open-source firmware that can be flashed into a commercial product that has crappy firmware, thus saving it. The example, just for the record, is the CrossPoint open e-book reader firmware that turns a mediocre cheap e-book into something that you can do anything you want with. Very nice!

And that got me thinking about “kinds of hacks” in general. Do we have a classification scheme for the hacks that we see here on Hackaday? For instance, the obvious precursor to many of Tom’s favorite hacks is the breaking-into-the-locked-firmware hack, where a device that didn’t want you loading your own firmware on it is convinced to let you do so. Junk-hacking is probably also a category of its own, where instead of finding your prey on AliExpress, you find it on eBay, or in the alleyway. And the save-it-from-the-landfill repair and renovation hacks are close relatives.

The doing-too-much-with-too-little hacks are maybe my personal favorite. I just love to see when someone manages to get DOOM running in Linux on a computer made with only 8-pin microcontrollers. Because of the nature of the game, these often also include a handful of abusing-a-component-to-do-something-it’s-not-meant-to-do hacks. Heck, we even had a challenge for just exactly those kind of hacks.

Then there are fine-art-hacks, where the aesthetic outcome is as important as the technical, or games-hacks where fun is the end result.

What other broad categories of hacks are we missing? And which are your favorite?

Re-Learning How To Run

April 5, 2026 by Elliot Williams 48 Comments

As I write this, four astronauts are on their way around the moon for the first time in 50 years. A lot us have asked ourselves just exactly why you’d send people out that far when the environment is so hostile and we have increasingly competent robots that could do the jobs in their place. If anything, that’s even more true now than it was back in the day of the Apollo program, when the remote operations capability was a lot more constrained. But having people, potentially in the near future, on the lunar surface remains qualitatively different.

I was recently re-watching some of the footage from Apollo 16 when the astronauts were driving around in the Lunar Roving Vehicle, and the discussions that they’re having about the lunar geology that they can see for the first time with their own eyes is very convincing. Having people in situ tightens the loop of “hey, that’s interesting”, “let’s take a closer look”, and “I wonder what that means” in a way that minutes or hours of transmission time, and sterile observation of photos on a computer monitor just break. In comparison, our Mars rovers move excruciatingly slowly, the data comes back through a very thin pipe, and it takes months or years to analyze.

Of course, there is danger to human life; it’s a lot more expensive to get people safely to, and importantly back from, the moon than it would be with a disposable robot. Comparison with the Mars rovers is also unfair because travel to Mars is another scale entirely. Even if it does make sense to send humans for exploration on the moon, it may not make sense to do the same on the red planet, in the near future or ever. Given all that, I’m stoked that we can see through the robots eyes, but if all else were equal, I’m sure that we’d learn more from human explorers.

While in a lot of ways the Artemis I and now the Artemis II missions are underwhelming in comparison to the many “firsts” of Apollo, I absolutely appreciate them for what they are: a shakedown trial of a set of technologies and practices that we used to grasp, but which have atrophied over the last five decades. If a new generation of scientists is to put feet onto regolith, we need to learn to walk before they can run, or rover. In that spirit, I’ll be crossing my fingers for the future of manned spaceflight over the next week and a half.

Choice, Control, And Interruption

March 7, 2026 by Elliot Williams 47 Comments

We were talking about [Maya Posch]’s rant on smartphones, “The Curse of the Everything Device”. Maya’s main point is that because the smartphone, or computer, can do everything, it’s hard for a person to focus down and do one thing without getting distracted, checking their whatever feed, or getting an important push notification about the Oscars. She was suggesting tying your hands to the mast by using a device that can only accommodate the one function, like a dedicated writing tool or word processor.

[Kristina Panos] compared the all-singing, all-dancing black rectangle to an everything-device of old: the all-in-one stereo receiver with built-in tape player, record player, and not just FM, but also AM radio receiver. The point being, the hi-fi device also does a whole lot of things but isn’t similarly cursed. The tape player never interrupts your listening to the AM radio station. When the record is over, it doesn’t swap over to FM. Your agency is required.

Similarly, it’s probably not intrinsically problematic that the smartphone has a camera, a web browser, text messages, and heck even a telephone built in. It’s how they interact with each other and the user, each vying for user attention, and interrupting with popups and alarms. It’s maybe a simple matter of software! (Says the hardware guy.)

Where would a distraction-free, but fully featured, phone begin? With the operating system? It would be perverse to limit you to one app at a time, or to make switching between them more cumbersome. How about turning off notifications, and relying on changing context only when you think about it? Maybe that’s a middle ground. How do you cope with the endless distractions offered to you by your smartphone? By your main computer?