The Roland SP-404 Mk2 is a popular groovebox that can deliver a great beat if you know how to use it. If you’re seeking greater control than is available out of the box, though, you might like to try a custom pedal built by [Romain Dereu].

The concept is simple enough—[Romain] whipped up a bespoke MIDI device to specifically control various features of the SP-404. It’s based on an Arduino Nano, though it could also be built with an Arduino Uno if so desired. The microcontroller sends the requisite MIDI messages out via its serial UART. The microcontroller is built into a pedal-style enclosure with a big toggle switch and a foot switch. This enables the triggering of various pads on the SP-404, with modes selected via the toggle.

It’s a simple build that opens up new possibilities when playing with the SP-404. If you’ve ever wanted a custom device to spit out some specific MIDI commands to control the synths or drum machines in your performance rig, this project is a great example of how easy this is to achieve. Meanwhile, if you’re whipping your own custom MIDI gear at home, we always love to see it land on our tipsline!

hackaday.com/2026/01/30/compan…

The PiStorm is nothing new; if you’re familiar with the retrocomputer scene, you’ve probably heard of it. By replacing the 68k processor in an old Amiga (or some models of Atari) the PiStorm accelerator gives a multiple order of magnitude speedup. It’s even a reversable mod, plugging in where the original CPU was. What’s not to love? Well, some people would simply prefer to keep their original CPUs in place. [TME Retro] has a video highlighting the solution for those people: the Lazarustorm by [arananet].

It makes perfect sense to us– back in the day, you could plug a whole x86 PC-compatible ‘sidecar’ into your Amiga, so why not a PiStorm? The whole bus is right there for the taking.The Lazarusstorm, as a project, is bog simple compared to the PiStorm itself. A PCB and the connectors to get it plugged into the expansion port on the Amiga side, and the connectors to plug the PiStorm into it on the other. A couple of jumpers and a few passives, and that’s it. [TME Retro] also took the time to come up with a case for it, which sits on felt feet to relieve stress on the PCBs. It’s a nice bit of CAD, but we rather wish he’d done it in beige.

As for the upgraded Amiga, it runs just as fast as it would had the 68k been replaced with a Pi3 and PiStorm internally, which is to say it’s practically a supercomputer by 1980s standards. You get the SD card to serve as a hard drive and can even access the internet via modern WiFi, something Commodore engineers likely never expected an A500 to do. Of course, just connecting to the network is only half the battle when getting these retro machines online. When these accelerators were new, the 68k emulation ran on top of Linux, but now that the EMU68k project has it bare metal and even faster.

This isn’t the first Raspberry-flavoured slice of Amiga sidecar we’ve featured: here’s one running Spotify. If you haven’t got an Amiga, there’s a PiStorm for the FPGA-based MiniMig, too.

youtube.com/embed/-ICquEE3N9c?…

hackaday.com/2026/01/29/lazaru…

Map of the calculated magnetic anisotropy. (Credit: Beeson et al., Adv. Mat., 2025)
Although most of us simultaneously accept the premise that magnets are quite literally everywhere and that few people know how they work, a major problem with magnets today is that they tend to rely on so-called rare-earth elements. Although firmly in the top 5 of misnomers, these abundant elements are hard to mine and isolate, which means that finding alternatives to their use is much desired. Fortunately the field of high entropy alloys (HEAs) offers hope here, with [Beeson] and colleagues recently demonstrating a rare-earth-free material that could be used for magnets.

Although many materials can be magnetic, to make a good magnet you need the material in question to be both magnetically anisotropic and posses a clear easy axis. This basically means a material that has strong preferential magnetic directions, with the easy axis being the orientation which is the most energetically favorable.

Through experimental validation with magnetic coercion it was determined that of the tested boride films, the (FeCoNiMn)₂B variant with a specific deposition order showed the strongest anisotropy. What is interesting in this study is how much the way that the elements are added and in which way determines the final properties of the boride, which is one of the reasons why HEAs are such a hot topic of research currently.

Of course, this is just an early proof-of-concept, but it shows the promise of HEAs when it comes to replacing other types of anisotropic materials, in particular where – as noted in the paper – normally rare-earths are added to gain the properties that these researchers achieved without these elements being required.

hackaday.com/2026/01/29/rare-e…

Most solar lights are cheap garbage that exist just to put more microplastics into the environment as they degrade in short order. [Jeremy Cook] built his own solar light, however, and this one might just last a little longer.

Most solar lights rely on the cheapest nickel-cadmium or nickel-metal hydride cells that are available on the market. They don’t tend to have a lot of capacity and they wear out incredibly fast. [Jeremy] went a different route for his build, though, instead relying on a rather tasty supercapacitor to store energy. Unlike a rechargeable battery, that may only last a few thousand cycles, these supercaps are expected to perform over 500,000 charge/discharge cycles without failure. With such longevity, [Jeremy] suggests his build could last a full 1369.8 years, assuming it charged and discharged once a day. Whether the plastic transistor, LEDs, or diode could hold up over such a long period is another question entirely.

Electronically, the build is relatively simple. The solar panel collects light energy and turns it into electricity, charging the supercaps through a diode. The supercaps are only able to discharge through a transistor, which only turns on when the voltage output by the solar panel drops at night time, and the voltage on the base becomes lower than that on the emitter. When current flows through the transistor, it then lights the LED in turn and the device glows in the darkness. As a nice touch, the whole circuit is installed in a glass jug of syrup originally sourced from Costco. Files are on Github for those eager to explore further.

Given the light-in-a-bottle construction, [Jeremy] also playfully imagined that a lamp like this could theoretically be used as a safety device. If lost at sea, you could charge it using the sun and try and use it to signal for help. However, upon casually exploring the concept, he notes that a small solar-powered light will only raise the chance of a far-off ocean rescue from “extremely unlikely” to “still very unlikely.”

You can do all kinds of neat things with free energy from the sun, from mowing your lawn to processing waste products. Video after the break.

youtube.com/embed/RGlVlMCu1PI?…

hackaday.com/2026/01/29/solar-…

For a full-fledged, bells-and-whistles driving simulator a number of unique human interface devices are needed, from pedals and shifters to the steering wheel. These steering wheels often have force feedback, with a small motor inside that can provide resistance to a user’s input that feels the same way that a steering wheel on a real car would. Inexpensive or small joysticks often omit this feature, but [Jason] has figured out a way to bring this to even the smallest game controllers.

The mechanism at the center of his controller is a DC motor out of an inkjet printer. Inkjet printers have a lot of these motors paired with rotary encoders for precision control, which is exactly what is needed here. A rotary encoder can determine the precise position of the controller’s wheel, and the motor can provide an appropriate resistive force depending on what is going on in the game. The motors out of a printer aren’t plug-and-play, though. They also need an H-bridge so they can get driven in either direction, and the entire mechanism is connected to an Arduino in the base of the controller to easily communicate with a computer over USB.

In testing the controller does behave like its larger, more expensive cousins, providing feedback to the driver and showing that it’s ready for one’s racing game of choice. It’s an excellent project for those who are space-constrained or who like to game on the go, but if you have more space available you might also want to check out [Jason]’s larger version built from a power drill instead parts from an inkjet.

youtube.com/embed/MwuTVCoU8YM?…

hackaday.com/2026/01/29/handhe…

Why press many button when few button do trick? That was the thinking of [Bike Cook Robots] when it came time to revamp his desk. To that end, he whipped up a tidy macropad to make daily computing tasks easier.

The build is based around an Adafruit RP2040 Feather ThinkInk devboard, chosen because it plugs straight into a readily-available 4.2 inch e-ink. The display is tasked with showing icons that correspond to the macro assignments for the 3 x 4 array of mechanical keyboard switches. Everything is wrapped up in a 3D printed frame, with an bracket to mount it to the monitor arms on the desk. The macropad is set up to talk to a custom Python app that runs on the host machine, which handles triggering actions and can also talk back to the pad itself.

The combination of e-ink display and button pad is a great way to display the function of each key without excess complexity. We’ve seen some other great builds in this space before, too.

youtube.com/embed/PbdwmN28-So?…

hackaday.com/2026/01/29/an-e-i…

In the 1970s CPUs still had wildly different approaches to basic features, with the Intel 8086 being one of them. Whereas the 6502 used separate circuits for operations, and the Intel 8085 a clump of reconfigurable clump of gates, the 8086 uses microcode that configures the ALU along with two lookup tables. This complexity is one of the reasons why the Intel 8086 is so unique, with [Ken Shirriff] taking an in-depth look at its workings on a functional and die-level.

These lookup tables are used for the ALU configuration – as in the above schematic – making for a very flexible but also complex system, where the same microcode can be used by multiple instructions. This is effectively the very definition of a CISC-style processor, a legacy that the x86 ISA would carry with it even if the x86 CPUs today are internally more RISC-like. Decoding a single instruction and having it cascade into any of a variety of microcodes and control signals is very powerful, but comes with many trade-offs.

Of course, as semiconductor technology improved, along with design technologies, many of these trade-offs and disadvantages became less relevant. [Ken] also raises the interesting point that much of this ALU control technology is similar to that used in modern-day FPGAs, with their own reconfigurable logic using LUTs that allow for on-the-fly reconfiguration.

hackaday.com/2026/01/29/the-in…

Perché un lettore crede a racconti palesemente falsi? Vuole evitare notizie scomode? Come fanno i fedeli religiosi a credere nella scienza e contemporaneamente affidarsi al mito? Si tratta di scelte razionali, strategie collettive oppure difesa privata e personale di un nucleo emotivo che altrimenti finirebbe in pezzi? Sono queste le domande che affiorano, con risposta annessa, nel libro del politologo Mark Lilla che per Luiss University Press ha pubblicato «L’estasi dell’ignoranza. La tradizione occidentale della non conoscenza».

A dispetto della moderna logica mediatica che obbliga tutti alla trasparenza, alla conoscenza, alla condivisione di informazioni e intimità sui social, Mark Lilla elabora una ricostruzione storica e filosofica del volto contrario di questa modernità, cioè dell’ignoranza intesa come volontà di non sapere. Strategia adattativa piuttosto che euristica vitale, l’ignoranza descritta da Lilla viene dissezionata nei miti antichi, come quello di Edipo, che non voleva sapere di essere giaciuto con la madre; passa per le Confessioni di Sant’Agostino che dubita della sua fede; arriva da Nietzsche il pazzo fino a Freud e alla sua teoria della rimozione, per ricostruire i tabù della verità, la delusione della curiosità quando si osa strappare il velo di Iside, fino alle cedevoli illusioni di innocenza personale, colte nelle loro forme quotidiane e talvolta penose.

La fuga dalla realtà è la chiave di questo viaggio intellettuale nella volontà di ignoranza. Certo, sull’ignoranza e sull’errore molto è stato detto, da Gianrico Carofiglio in Elogio dell’ignoranza e dell’errore, a Umberto Galimberti con Le contraddizioni della Verità e l’attitudine tutta binaria a pensare semplice senza troppo complicarsi la vita, come pure in L’età dell’ignoranza di Fabrizio Tonello, ma questo testo si misura sulla volontà di non conoscere quale strategia di sopravvivenza intima, nascosta e personale, per rendere la vita odierna più accettabile. Una scelta che è alla base di questioni tremendamente attuali, dagli effetti della disinformazione al cospirazionismo politico, dal pensiero magico alle semplificazioni scientifiche. In fondo, in fondo, il trionfo dell’ignorante è l’estasi del potere.

dicorinto.it/articoli/recensio…

On January 20, a supply chain attack has occurred, with the infected software being the eScan antivirus developed by an Indian company MicroWorld Technologies. The previously unknown malware was distributed through the eScan update server. The same day, our security solutions detected and prevented cyberattacks involving this malware. On January 21, having been informed by Morphisec, the developers of eScan contained the security incident related to the attack.

Malicious software used in the attack

Users of the eScan security product received a malicious Reload.exe file, which initiated a multi-stage infection chain. According to colleagues at Morphisec who were the first to investigate the attack, Reload.exe prevented further antivirus product updates by modifying the HOSTS file, thereby blocking the ability of security solution developers to automatically fix the problem, which, among other things, led to the update service error.

The malware also ensured its persistence in the system, communicated with control servers, and downloaded additional malicious payloads. Persistence was achieved by creating scheduled tasks; one example of such a malicious task is named CorelDefrag. Additionally, the consctlx.exe malicious file was written to the disk during the infection.

How the attackers managed to pull off this attack

At the request of the BleepingComputer information portal, eScan developers explained that the attackers managed to gain access to one of the regional update servers and deploy a malicious file, which was automatically delivered to customers. They emphasize that this is not a vulnerability — the incident is classified as unauthorized access to infrastructure. The malicious file was distributed with a fake invalid digital signature.

According to the developers, the infrastructure affected by the incident was quickly isolated, and all access credentials were reset.

How to stay safe?

To detect infection, it is recommended to review scheduled tasks for traces of malware, check the %WinDir%\System32\drivers\etc\hosts file for blocked eScan domains, and review the eScan update logs for January 20.

The developers of eScan have created a utility for their users that removes the malware, rolls back the modifications it has made, and restores the normal functionality of the antivirus. The utility is sent to customers upon request to technical support.

Users of the solution are also advised to block known malware control server addresses.

Kaspersky’s security solutions, such as Kaspersky Next, successfully detect all malware used by attackers with its Behavior Detection component.

Indicators of compromise

Several malicious domain names and links were listed in the Morphisec blog:

• vhs.delrosal[.]net/i
• tumama.hns[.]to
• blackice.sol-domain[.]org
• https://codegiant[.]io/dd/dd/dd.git/download/main/middleware.ts

Our experts have discovered additional network IoCs related to this attack:

• airanks.hns[.]to
• csc.biologii[.]net/sooc

Right now we are analyzing the malware used in this incident, and will post more details as soon as possible.

securelist.com/escan-supply-ch…

Over the past years there have appeared in the media increasingly more alarming reports about micro- and nanoplastics (MNPs) and the harm that they are causing not only in the environment, but also inside our bodies. If some of the published studies were to be believed, then MNPs are everywhere inside our bodies, from our blood and reproductive organs to having deeply embedded themselves inside our brains with potentially catastrophic health implications.

Early last year we covered what we thought we knew about the harm from MNPs in our bodies, but since then more and more scientists have pushed back against these studies, calling them ‘flawed’ and questioning the used methodology and conclusions. Despite claims of health damage in mice, institutions like the German federal risk assessment institute also do not acknowledge evidence of harm to human health from MNPs.

All of which raises the question whether flawed studies have pushed us into our own Chicken Little moment, and whether it’s now time to breathe a sigh of relief that the sky isn’t falling after all.

Measuring Many Tiny Things

One of the problems with making statements about the amount of MNPs in the body pertains to the way that this is measured. Rather than sliding samples under a microscope and doing manual counting, the typical method involves a method like pyrolysis-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (Py-GC-MS). For biological samples you first want to remove the organic components before pyrolysis, lest the subsequent mass spectrometry step produces false positives rather than an objective polymer analysis.
A ThermoQuest Trace 200 gas chromatograph–mass spectrometer (GCMS) with open door. (credit: Polimerek, Wikimedia)
Py-GC-MS involves rapidly heating the sample in an inert atmosphere or vacuum. This cleaves large molecules into smaller fragments which can then be separated using a gas chromatography column and classified in combination with a mass spectrometer. With both results combined, the likely original materials in the sample can thus be deduced. This means that you are not literally counting MNP particles in the sample or measuring them, but quite literally vaporizing said sample and analyzing the debris cloud. Obviously this comes with some major asterisks.

A 2024 paper by Marthinus Brits et al. as published in Microplastics and Nanoplastics explored the use of Py-GC-MS for determining the amount of MNPs in human blood. Using whole blood samples they found mostly polyethylene (PE) polymer, with a mean of 268 ng/mL of MNPs across all 68 samples, with a call to investigate the health impact of this finding.

In response to this paper a correspondence by Bianca Wilhelmus et al. was submitted to the journal, in which one of the complaints was a lack of detail on the Py-GC-MS fingerprints using which the polymers were purportedly detected. It was also noted that with sub-micrometer MNP particles you’d need millions of them in a sample to really register, which is far above what had typically been found in human body fluids.

To this Brits et al. replied with among other things the admission that the quantitative analysis of MNPs using Py-GC-MS is still in early stages of development. To the issue of quantity it was noted that most of the MNPs are significantly larger than a micrometer, so they were still fairly confident of their findings.

It’s important to note more recent studies here, such as the 2025 study by Cassandra Rauert et al. in Environmental Science & Technology, in which also a study on using Py-GC-MS for detecting MNPs in blood was performed. Its conclusion was that this detection method has trouble detecting PE and PVC polymers, and the estimated exposure concentrations are testing the detection limits of this technique.

Contamination

One of the problems with trying to measure MNPs in a sample is that of environmental MNP contamination, as MNPs are being shed and distributed all around us, whether it’s from e.g. polyester clothing, plastic surfaces and tools, or carried in from outside. This makes it a real chore to make sure that in a laboratory setting such contamination does not ruin the findings, as with a recent study on MNPs in bottled water by Qian et al. in PNAS.

Rather than Py-GC-MS, this used stimulated Raman scattering, but also led to accusations of contamination due to improper procedures, with the finding that the ultra-pure filtered Milli-Q water that was used for a blank (i.e. control) contained as many MNPs as the bottled water. This and other issues were suggested as invalidating the findings. While Qian et al. acknowledged that using the Milli-Q water as a blank was resultingly improper, they disagreed with the premise that this invalidated the study’s findings.

Another type of contamination can come from the aforementioned biological tissue, such as in the early 2025 study on MNPs in the human brain and other organs by Nihart et al. as published in Nature Medicine. This analyzed tissue samples from human cadavers using, among other methods, Py-GC-MS, leading them to conclude that especially our brains are full of PE polymers, with major implications for Alzheimer’s and dementia research, for instance.

This assessment subsequently got challenged (full article) by Monikh et al. in a November 2025 published commentary, with the authors noting that Nihart et al.’s samples from the human liver, kidney and brain all have in common that they contain significant amounts of fatty tissue (lipids), which when subjected to pyrolysis produce fragments that are easily mistaken for PE polymer fragments.

When it comes to detecting polymers in such biological samples, it is absolutely essential to strip away the biological material, without affecting the sample that will ultimately be analyzed. In this case the processing method appears to have been flawed, leading to subsequent contamination. This was acknowledged by the team, in a reply by some of the study authors.

Empirical Correlation

Although it seems like we can at least conclude that our brains aren’t overflowing with PE polymer fragments, but that they are just filled with phospholipids in particular, this doesn’t necessarily take away all our concerns. After all, didn’t some studies find real, empirical evidence for MNPs causing actual damage? Especially since it seems harmful in mice, according to a 2025 study using starch-based plastics.

As highlighted by Baroni et al. in a September 2025 review paper on MNPs in the brain as published in Nanomaterials, the enduring problem that we are dealing with right now is one of a lack of information, a scarcity of standard detection methods and a total lack of longitudinal studies in humans.

Although we have health databases that span decades in countries with strong public healthcare systems, trying to figure out whether certain health trends are due to MNPs using their data is borderline lunacy, as you cannot realistically account for all confounding factors. Thus we are mostly stuck at this point trying to figure out how to actually effectively measure the presence of MNPs.

Methodology

The aforementioned Py-GC-MS and SRS methods are two tools available to us here, but clearly moving from measuring MNPs in water to measuring them in biological tissues is still a challenging topic. When we look at the established science of MNPs in water, we got a range of options, as illustrated by this application note by ThermoFisher Scientific:

In order to measure not just the relatively large microplastic particles, but also the much smaller nanoplastics which are more likely to interact with biological systems, you are pretty limited here already. With only Raman spectroscopes applicable for such fine analysis, it’s little wonder that Py-GC-MS is being applied to biological samples.

Maybe once we have figured out the right methodology for Py-GC-MS and potentially other approaches will we be able to tell with some certainty how many of these polymer fragments are in our bodies right now, and how much of it will simply pass through rather than take up permanent residence. On the bright side, there’s no clear epidemiological evidence of MNPs being actively harmful to us, yet.

Although the sky hasn’t been confirmed to be falling, it is still looking somewhat unsteady. For that reason alone it is probably in our own best interest to use the precautionary principle here, as it’s better to have begun today to find ways to reduce and prevent the spread of MNPs, rather than to regret not having done so tomorrow.

hackaday.com/2026/01/29/did-we…

Like many of you, I have a hard time getting rid of stuff. I’ve got boxes and boxes of weirdo bits and bobs, and piles of devices that I’ll eventually get around to stripping down into even more bits and bobs. Despite regular purges — I try to bring a car-load of crap treasure to local hackerspaces and meetups at least a couple times a year — the pile only continues to grow.

But the problem isn’t limited to hardware components. There’s all sorts of things that the logical part of me understands I’ll almost certainly never need, and yet I can’t bring myself to dispose of. One of those things just so happens to be documents. Anything printed is fair game. Could be the notes from my last appointment with the doctor, or fliers for events I attended years ago. Doesn’t matter, the stacks keep building up until I end up cramming it all into a box and start the whole process starts over again.

I’ve largely convinced myself that the perennial accumulation of electronic bric-à-brac is an occupational hazard, and have come to terms with it. But I think there’s a good chance of moving the needle on the document situation, and if that involves a bit of high-tech overengineering, even better. As such, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks investigating digitizing the documents that have information worth retaining so that the originals can be sent along to Valhalla in my fire pit.

The following represents some of my observations thus far, in the hopes that others going down a similar path may find them useful. But what I’m really interested in is hearing from the Hackaday community. Surely I’m not the only one trying to save some storage space by turn piles of papers into ones and zeros.

Take a Picture, It’ll Last Longer

Obviously, the first step in digitizing physical documents is image capture. The most obvious way to accomplish this is to simply use a flatbed scanner, and in some cases, there’s a solid argument to be made that it’s the best approach. Indeed, many of the documents that I’ve already filed away digitally were created this way. But it’s a tedious enough process that you may want to consider alternative methods.

If you’ve got a decent camera, you can get a couple of lights and put together a nice overhead photography rig without spending too much money. Put your document down under the camera, snap a picture, and keep it moving.

Imaging doesn’t get any faster than taking a picture, and so long as you’re not using some point and shoot from the early 2000s, the resolution should be more than sufficient. This method is particularly appealing if you’re planning on digitizing books or anything else that can’t be laid perfectly flat on a scanner.

The major downside with this approach is the setup itself. It’s one thing if you’re digitizing documents and books on a daily basis, but for occasional use, putting something like this together is a big ask. A flatbed scanner certainly takes up a lot less room, and you don’t have to worry about getting the lighting right, mounting the camera, and so on.

Casting Some Magick

Whether you used a scanner or a camera, once you have the image of your document, you’ve technically digitized it. Congratulations, you’re now an amateur archivist.

If you’re looking to keep things simple, you could stop here. Stash the files someplace and be done with it. But depending on the type of content you’re working with and what your goals are, there’s a good chance you’ll want to touch up the images a bit. Luckily for us, the incredible ImageMagick project has many of the functions we need built-in, from cropping and resizing, all the way to image enhancement.

Consider the image below. It’s clear enough to read, but the text is rotated and the lighting isn’t consistent across the entire page.

We can fix both issues with a simple ImageMagick command via the convert tool:
convert input.png -deskew 30% -threshold 25% output.png
We won’t get too bogged down in the details, the ImageMagick documentation can break it all down better than I can. The short version is that we’re telling it to straighten out the image and convert it into pure black and white. The result looks like this:

The values can be tweaked a bit to refine the result, and as you might imagine there are many other ImageMagick functions that could potentially be brought in to clean up the result. Things do get more complicated if you’re working with something more complex than plain text, but you get the general idea.

This sort of post-processing is especially important if you plan on running the images through any sort of optical character recognition (OCR) to capture the actual text of the document. That first image might be perfectly legible to our human eyeballs. You might even prefer it over the stark look of the processed image, but tools like tesseract have a hell of a time picking the text out when the background isn’t uniform.

There’s an App For That

The process described here certainly isn’t for everyone, and that’s fine. If you’re not looking to invest the sort of time and effort it would take to make this work, there’s fortunately a far more approachable solution available. In fact, it might already be in your pocket.

The Google Drive mobile application offers a very impressive document scanning mode that essentially automates everything above. If you give it access to your device’s camera, it will automagically detect documents in the field of view, find their edges, compensate for angle and rotation to straighten out the image, and even run it through filters to make the text pop. It’s fast, works reasonably well, and is exceptionally handy for cranking out multi-page PDFs.

The downside is that you’ve got relatively little control over the process, and being a product of Google, there’s the usual concerns over what they may be doing with the information that’s passing through the system. For these reasons it’s not something I would personally recommend for any private information, and its automatic nature the lack of fine-grained control means it may not be a great choice if your needs venture too far from the beaten path.

Still, the speed and ease of use it offers is admittedly very attractive.

Open to Suggestions

I’d love to hear the community’s thoughts on digitization, whether it’s hardware or software related. There’s surely some slick projects out there that aid in creating bespoke digital libraries, and there’s plenty of areas where real-world experience can help streamline and improve the overall process. For example, what’s your file naming convention look like?

Hackaday readers are rarely shy about sharing their opinions, so let’s hear them.

hackaday.com/2026/01/29/ask-ha…

Walkie-talkies are great fun, and [RealCorebb]’s bbTalkie project takes the concept a step further by adding some extremely cool features to make a highly refined, self-contained ESP32-based communicator. bbTalkie completely does away with a push-to-talk button by implementing robust voice detection that works reliably even in noisy environments. It was all designed with cycling in mind, so hands-free operation that stands up to noise is a big plus.
Hands-free, wireless, self-contained digital walkie-talkies that can connect in a group. What’s not to like?
The core of communication is done over ESP-NOW, which is Espressif’s own protocol for direct device-to-device broadcasting. This removes the need to involve any sort of external service like SIM cards or internet access to transmit voice. Performance is best with an external antenna, naturally, but ESP-NOW doesn’t actually require anything other than the existing on-board hardware.

We’ve seen ESP-NOW used to make digital walkie-talkies before, but bbTalkie is a really evolved take on the concept, not least of which due to its hands-free operation.

Because volume-based automatic triggers are highly susceptible to noise, voice detection is done with the help of VADNet, a neural network-based model implemented locally on the device. This system can reliably detect human speech, even in noisy environments. This lets bbTalkie switch between transmit and listen modes automatically and hands-free, without false triggers.

Even when doing all that, there’s still spare capability to play with. Further to the goal of making bbTalkie useful for cyclists in a group, [RealCorebb] added a system that can recognize specific voice commands (like “turn left” for example, or “wait for me!”) which trigger synchronized animations to play on the displays of all connected units. There’s even some experimental support for controlling a camera over Bluetooth, though currently it only supports hardware from Sony.

Watch a tour of it in the video below (Chinese language, English captions available). The OLED screens and animations are adorable, and are great visual feedback of what the unit is doing at any given moment.

youtube.com/embed/v0QcsWsoYbw?…

hackaday.com/2026/01/29/these-…

When it comes to electromagnetic waves, humans can really only directly perceive a very small part of the overall spectrum, which we call “visible light.” [rootkid] recently built an art piece that has perception far outside this range, turning invisible waves into a visible light sculpture.

The core of the device is the HackRF One. It’s a software defined radio (SDR) which can tune signals over a wide range, from 10 MHz all the way up to 6 GHz. [rootkid] decided to use the HackRF to listen in on transmissions on the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. This frequency range was chosen as this is where a lot of devices in the home tend to communicate—whether over WiFi, Bluetooth, or various other short-range radio standards.

The SDR is hooked up to a Raspberry Pi Zero, which is responsible for parsing the radio data and using it to drive the light show. As for the lights themselves, they consist of 64 filament LEDs bent into U-shapes over a custom machined metal backing plate. They’re controlled over I2C with custom driver PCBs designed by [rootkid]. The result is something that looks like a prop from some high-budget Hollywood sci-fi. It looks even better when the radio waves are popping and the lights are in action.

It’s easy to forget about the rich soup of radio waves that we swim through every day.

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hackaday.com/2026/01/29/buildl…

[Make Something] boasts he has made probably the fanciest picture frame you’ll ever see. He started with an original sign purchased on eBay and then made it to be bigger, brighter, and better. The frame is of solid walnut with back-lighting for the imagery all chasing that classic mid-century modern style. The backlit photo was taken the “hard way”, with an actual film camera and a road-trip to the picturesque site at Yellowstone. [Make Something] then developed the film himself in his home studio.

For the chimney [Make Something] used a new trick he learned in Autodesk Fusion: you take a photo of an object, convert to black and white, and then use the light/dark values to emboss or deboss a surface. To do this he took photos of the brick wall outside his shop and used that as the basis of the textured chimney he made with his 3D printer.

If you’re interested in other projects made from solid walnut, check out 3D Printed Spirograph Makes Art Out Of Walnut and Walnut Case Sets This Custom Arduino-Powered RPN Calculator Apart From The Crowd.

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hackaday.com/2026/01/28/ultima…

Quando un uomo dell'establishment come Mark Carne, PM del Canada, va a Davos a dire cose che sentivi al massimo in qualche facoltà di Scienze Politiche, vuol dire che l'era post-americana è cominciata. Sarà un viaggio.

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