Building A Reproduction PlayStation Motherboard

July 31, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 5 Comments

Thanks to things like spilled drinks, leaky batteries, and the general ravages of time, older consoles can be tough to keep going. In particular, excessive damage to a motherboard can make repair difficult or near-impossible to execute even if the rest of the console is in otherwise passable condition. Now, there may be greater hope for those looking to resurrect the worst-treated PlayStations out there, thanks to a new open-source motherboard from [xyzz].

The board is up on GitHub with a CC0-1.0 license. It’s aiming to be a drop-in replacement for the stock motherboard, on to which you would transplant all the necessary proprietary hardware from an existing donor board. The list of transplant parts is quite extensive as you’d expect, including the CPU, GPU, RAM, VRAM, BIOS, sound chips, mechanical control chip, crystals, and all the ports, among others. Some generic parts can still be had off the shelf, but you could also transplant them if so desired. There are some headaches with the current design—namely, it doesn’t fit perfectly with the lid switch connector, and some of the footprints are hard to solder. Still, it’s a great start, and early testing shows that it’s already quite functional.

Fortunately the original PlayStation didn’t have any sort of battery on board to leak all over the place and corrode things, but boards still get damaged in a variety of other un-fun ways. Thus, it’s great to have a potential replacement motherboard on offer to bring badly-damaged machines back to life.

We’ve featured other great restoration projects in this vein before, too, like the efforts to recreate the C64 motherboard from a few years ago. As ever, enthusiasts are doing great work to keep these classic machines alive long into the future.

Thanks to [ToolThatIsTom] for the tip.

Using Video Glasses As A Camera Viewfinder Is Harder Than It Looks

July 29, 2026 by Donald Papp 9 Comments

[John Dingley] has a Sony ZV-E10 camera that is excellent, but the design lacks a built-in electronic viewfinder. This means it relies entirely on its rear-mounted touchscreen for framing shots. This is troublesome because [John] often films in bright sunlight, and sometimes from a perspective other than normal eye level. His solution? Use a pair of XREAL video glasses as a handsfree viewfinder.

The XREAL glasses look a bit unusual, but they can be worn and used like regular sunglasses. They accept external video and importantly, allow the wearer to see the video feed while still having awareness of their surroundings. Seems like a perfect match for the camera, but as [John] discovered, there are quite a few implementation hurdles involved.

For starters, the camera and glasses do not speak the same format. The camera outputs HDMI via a distressingly fragile micro-HDMI connector, but the glasses accept video over USB-C (aka DisplayPort altmode). Connectors and cables and a converter will be involved, as well as a power bank because the glasses and converter will require a power supply. As any hacker knows, wires and connectors can eat up space very quickly.

To solve all this, [John] carefully selected off-the-shelf components chosen to minimize bulk and designed a custom camera cage to hold things cleanly without obstructing the camera’s microphone port. The end result is very tidy package that presents a single USB-C connection point between the glasses and the camera, requires no hardware modifications or soldering, and even takes the strain off the fragile connector on the ZV-E10.

The finishing touch is putting a neck strap on the XREAL glasses, allowing them to be easily donned and doffed as needed while filming. Check it out the video, embedded just below the page break.

When it comes to filming vehicles it often makes sense to film from a low perspective. The camera has a handle for this purpose, but the process is much better now that the glasses can act as a viewfinder. [John] has a soft spot for vehicles, including self-balancing unicycles or monotracks of his own design.

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Hackaday Links: July 5, 2026

July 5, 2026 by Tom Nardi 8 Comments

Happy belated July 4th to all the readers from the United States — hopefully you aren’t reading this from a hospital bed after losing a hand or burning off your eyebrows. While we suspect amateur firework shows and their related injuries will be around for many years to come, we did note that many major cities switched over to drone shows this year.

At least on paper, the appeal is obvious. Beyond the fact that drones are safer and quieter than pyrotechnics, they’re also capable of far more complex displays. Good luck trying to draw George Washington’s face in the sky with exploding rockets. But even if it’s a little more than nostalgia, there’s still something about the sights and sounds of fireworks that enthrall audiences. For many, the whole “rockets’ red glare” thing is a bit more meaningful than the “drones’ red LEDs.”

Earlier this week, we brought you news that Sony would stop producing physical PlayStation discs in January 2028. Many gamers are understandably concerned about the long-term implications such a move will have for software ownership, and while the negative reactions online haven’t bothered Sony enough to get them to amend their plans, they have clarified the situation with developers by explaining that games published before the cutoff date aren’t impacted. So if a developer has a hit title that drops in the summer of 2027 and they want to keep cranking out discs, additional orders can still be placed. Not much of a reprieve, but it will give the community a little more time to figure out what comes next.

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Hackaday Links: June 21, 2026

June 21, 2026 by Tom Nardi 6 Comments

Today marks the summer solstice, the longest day of the year and the start of astronomical summer in the Northern Hemisphere. This doesn’t really have much to do with hacking hardware or building gadgets other than the fact that from this point on you’ll have progressively less daylight hours to do it in each day. Of course, if you do your best work in the middle of the night this won’t impact things much.

If you’re as likely to find a controller in your hand as a soldering iron in the evenings, you might be interested in a recent filing against Sony. Lawyers representing a group of four gamers allege that the entertainment giant is violating a California law that says digital storefronts need to make it clear that buyers don’t technically own the games in question but are merely licensing them — a license which, as we’ve seen in the past, can be revoked or modified at any time with no restitution made to the purchaser.

Now while we agree conceptually that selling gamers a license rather than an actual copy of the game is clearly a one-sided deal, we’re still not sure this case has a lot of merit. As far as we can tell, Sony does make it clear in the fine print that you’re not really going to own anything once they take your money. Or, at the very least, they make it equally as clear as any other company that’s selling digital downloads these days. Should the court actually find that said fine print is a little too fine, it could conceivably have ramifications throughout the entertainment industry. This is certainly a case to keep an eye on.

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Custom Mainboard For PS2 Portable

May 13, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 7 Comments

As time marches on, the retro gaming community gets more and more access to older systems. This is partially a product of modern computing having much more power to emulate more demanding systems, but also because many in the community have spent more time with their favorite systems. Such is the case for [tschicki] who has spent considerable time and effort reverse engineering the Playstation 2 to come up with this custom mainboard for a handheld version that still uses some of the original chips from the console.

This Playstation 2 handheld console is designed almost completely from the ground up, not just including the impressive main board but also its modernized features, including USB power delivery handled by an RP2040, digital video output, support for modern storage media like SD cards, a customized boot ROM, and upgraded audio. The DualShock 2 controller is also implemented within the handheld, and the case itself is designed to be 3D printed. It’s an impressive effort which preserves the original feel of the console without relying too much on ancient hardware for everything.

Before jumping in to building one yourself, though, [tschicki] cautions that this project is not for the faint of heart, as it requires some specilized tools and a high degree of skill, but for those still wishing to attempt this build all of the instructions are available on the project site. For such a popular console it’s no surprise we’ve seen plenty of other handheld PS2s before, from this one which uses an original PS2 mainboard to this one we featured way back in 2010.

Thanks to [raz] for the tip!

Adapting A 100-Year-Old Lens To A Modern Camera

May 1, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 5 Comments

You can get all kinds of fancy lenses for modern cameras, with all sorts of mechanical and electronic wizardly to make them shoot better images. But what if you paired a vintage lens with a modern camera? It would take some work, as [Mathieu] found out, but you’d also get some interesting results.

The optic in question is a 100-year old lens—a Foth 50 mm f2.5 to be precise, originally used with a folding film camera. It was sourced from a market for just 3 euros. Notably, the lens was not designed for modern cameras, and so lacks an aperture and focusing mechanism. [Mathieu] thus had to fabricate something to fit the lens to a Sony FX3. A first attempt used an aperture adapter from Amazon and an elcoid adapter, but there were vignetting problems due to the lens placement in this case. Ultimately, [Mathieu] went with a special macro adapter that allowed him to control focus and tuck in an ND filter behind the lens, which made up for the lack of an aperture.

The vintage glass isn’t the sharpest lens out there, but that’s kind of what’s fantastic about it. The center of the frame is certainly focused, but it fades out softly towards the edges of the image, giving a cinematic, dreamlike effect. The bokeh in the background are particularly charming, too. As far as 3 euro lenses go, this one was a hit.

You can slap just about any lens on anything if you get creative with how you do it. Video after the break.

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Converting A 1980s Broadcast Camera To HDMI

December 1, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 14 Comments

Although it might seem like there was a sudden step change from analog to digital sometime in the late 1900s, it was actually a slow, gradual change from things like record players to iPods or from magnetic tape to hard disk drives. Some of these changes happened slowly within the same piece of hardware, too. Take the Sony DXC-3000A, a broadcast camera from the 1980s. Although it outputs an analog signal, this actually has a discrete pixel CCD sensor capturing video. [Colby] decided to finish the digitization of this camera and converted it to output HDMI instead of the analog signal it was built for.

The analog signals it outputs are those that many of us are familiar with, though: composite video. This was an analog standard that only recently vanished from consumer electronics, and has a bit of a bad reputation that [Colby] thinks is mostly undeserved. But since so many semi-modern things had analog video outputs like these, inspiration was taken from a Wii mod chip that converts these consoles to HDMI. Unfortunately his first trials with one of these had confused colors, but it led him to a related chip which more easily outputted the correct colors. With a new PCB in hand with this chip, a Feather RP2040, and an HDMI port the camera is readily outputting digital video that any modern hardware can receive.

Besides being an interesting build, the project highlights a few other things. First of all, this Sony camera has a complete set of schematics, a manual meant for the end user, and almost complete user serviceability built in by design. In our modern world of planned obsolescence, religious devotion to proprietary software and hardware, and general user-unfriendliness this 1980s design is a breath of fresh air, and perhaps one of the reasons that so many people are converting old analog cameras to digital instead of buying modern equipment.