[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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The common narrative around device design is that you can have repairability or a low price, but that they are inversely proportional to each other. Apple’s new budget MacBook Neo seems to attempt a bit of both.

Brittle snap-fit enclosures or glue can make a device pop together quickly during manufacture, but are a headache when it comes time to repair or hack it. Our friends at iFixit tore down the Neo and found it to be the most repairable MacBook since the 2012 unibody model. A screwed in battery, and modules for many of the individual components including the USB ports and headphone jack make it fairly simple to replace individual components. Most of those components are even accessible as soon as you pop the bottom cover instead of requiring major surgery.

As someone who has done a keyboard replacement on a 2010 MacBook, the 41 screws holding the keyboard in brought back (bad) memories. While this is a great improvement over Apple’s notoriously painful repair processes, we’re still only looking at an overall 6/10 score from iFixit versus a 10/10 from Framework or Lenovo.

The real story here is that these improvements from Apple were spurred by Right-to-Repair developments, particularly in the EU, that were the result of pressure from hackers like you.

If you want to push a Neo even further, how about water cooling it? If you’d rather have user-upgradeable RAM and storage too in a Mac, you’ve got to go a bit older.

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Like many high-tech companies Tesla runs a bug bounty program. But in the case of a car manufacturer, this means that you either already have one of their cars, are interested in buying one, or can gain access to its software-bits in another legal manner. Being a Tesla-less individual, yet with an interest in hunting bugs [David Schütz] thus decided to pursue the option of obtaining the required parts from crashed Tesla cars.

Specifically [David] was interested in the Tesla Model 3 and its combined Media Control Unit (MCU) and Autopilot computer (AAP) assembly. In addition to the main unit, it also requires – obviously – a power supply, and the proprietary display. These were all obtained fairly easily, but unfortunately the devices all had their cables cut off, leaving just a sad little stump of wiring with the still plugged-in connectors.

After trying his luck with an incompatible BMW LVDS cable from one of their headunit infotainment systems, he then proceeded to try and use the cable stumps with some creative patching. This briefly worked, but some debris fell onto the MCU board and blew a power rail IC.

Ultimately this IC got swapped after [David] had already purchased a whole new Model 3 computer, leaving him with two units and the easy way out of buying the Dashboard Wiring Harness cable loom that contained the Rosenberger connectors he needed to connect the display to the main unit.

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Hackers can be a strange folk. Our idea of beauty, for instance, can be rather odd. This week, Hackaday saw a few projects that were not just functional – the aesthetics were the goal. I don’t think we’ll be taking over the fine art world any time soon, but I’m absolutely convinced that the same muse that guides the hand that holds the paintbrush sometimes also guides the hand holding the soldering iron.

Take “circuit sculpture”, for instance. Heck, we even give it an art-inspired name that classifies it correctly. This week’s project that got me thinking about the aesthetics of hand-bent wire circuits was this marvelous clock build, but the works of Mohit Bhoite or Kelly Heaton are also absolute must-sees in this category.

Outside of the Hackaday orbit, one of my all-time favorite artists in this genre was Peter Vogel, who made complex audience-reactive sound sculptures that looked as good as they sound.

Is a wireframe animated moving jellyfish art? It was certainly intended to be beautiful, and I personally find it so. Watch some of the video clips attached to the project to get a better sense of it.

In the sculpture world, there is a sub-genre of kinetic art pieces where the work itself is secondary to the beauty of the motions that the pieces pull off. Think ballet, but mechanical. Perhaps my absolute favorite of these artists is Arthur Ganson. If you haven’t seen his work before, check out “Thinking Chair” for the beauty of movement, but don’t miss “Machine with Concrete” if you’re feeling more conceptual.

If you’re willing to buy an insane geartrain as art, what about these 3D printed wire strippers? Is this “art”? It’s clear that they were designed with real intent and attention to the aesthetics of the final form, and am I wrong for finding the way they move literally beautiful?

What’s your favorite offbeat hacker artform?

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There’s an old saying that goes: when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. [lds133] must have heard that saying, because when life took the magic liquid out of his Magic 8 Ball, [lds133] made not eight-ball-aide, but an electronic replacement with a Raspberry Pi Pico and a round TFT display.

In case the Magic 8 Ball is unknown in some corners of the globe, it is a toy that consists of a twenty-sided die with a set of oracular messages engraved on it, enclosed in a magical blue liquid — and by magical, we mean isopropyl alcohol and dye. The traditional use is to ask a question, shake the eight-ball, and then ignore its advice and do whatever you wanted to do anyway.

[lds133]’s version replicates the original behavior exactly by using the accelerometer to detect the shaking, the round display to show an icon of the die, and a Raspberry Pi Pico to do the hard work. There’s also the obligatory lithium pouch cell for power, which is managed by one of the usual TP4056 breakout boards. One very nice detail is that instead of a distracting battery indicator, the virtual die changes color as the battery wears out.

We’ve seen digital 8 Balls before, like this one that used an STM32, or another that used a Raspberry Pi to display reaction GIFs. Some projects are just perennial.

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Although not really a cost-effective or a required skill unless you have some very specific needs not met by off-the-shelf power resistor options, making your own own wirewound power resistor is definitely educational, as well as a fascinating look at a common part that few people spare a thought on. Cue [TheElectronBench]’s video tutorial on how to make one of these components from scratch.

The resistance value is determined by the length of nichrome wire, which is an alloy of nickel and chromium (NiCr) with a resistivity of around 1.12 µΩ/m. It’s also extremely durable when heated, as it forms a protective outer layer of chromium oxide. This makes it suitable for very high power levels, but also requires the rest of the power resistor assembly to be able to take a similar punishment.

For the inner tube of this DIY power resistor a tube of alumina ceramic was used, around which the nichrome wire is wound. This resistor targets 15 Ohm at a maximum load of 50 Watt, this means a current of about 1.83 A is expected at 27.4 V. The used nichrome wire has a measured resistance of 10.4 Ohm, ergo 1.44 meter has to be cut and wound.

This entire assembly is then embedded in refractory cement (fireproof cement), as this will keep the wire in place, while also able to take the intense temperature cycling during operation. As a bonus this will prevent toasting the surrounding environment too much, never mind lighting things on fire as the nichrome wire heats up.

As explained in the video, this is hardly the only way to create such a power resistor, with multiple types of alternative alloys available, different cores to wind around and various options to embed the assembly. The demonstrated method is however one that should give solid results and be well within the capabilities and budget of a hobbyist.

An important point with nichrome is that you cannot really solder to it, so you’ll need something along the lines of a mechanical (crimping) connection. There are also different winding methods that can affect the inductance of the resistor, since this type of resistor is by its design also a coil. This is however not covered in the video as for most applications it’s not an issue.

Overall, this video tutorial would seem to be a solid introduction to nichrome power resistors, including coverage of many issues you may encounter along the way. Feel free to sound off in the comment section with your own experiences with power resistors, especially if you made them as well.

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One thing SEGA’s MegaDrive/Genisis and the Commodore Amiga had in common was–aside from the Motorola 68000 processor– being known for excellent music in games. As [reassembler] continues his quest to de-assemble Sonic: The Hedgehog and re-assemble the code to run on Amiga, getting the music right is a key challenge. Rather than pull MIDI info or recreate the sound by ear, [reassembler] has written a program called Sonic2MOD to automatically take the assembly file music from the MegaDrive catridge and turn it into an Amiga-style MODfile. He’s also made a video about it that you’ll find embedded below.

Of course how music gets made differs widly on the two systems. Amiga, famously has Paula, a custom ASIC designed for sampling, allowing you to play four eight-bit voices. The Sega, of course, has that glorious FM-synthesis chip from Yamaha synthesizing five channels of CD-quality sound and one channel of sample. It’s not as well known, but the Sega also has a bonus TI-compatible programmable sound chip (PSG) that can handle 3 square-wave tone channels and one noise channel. That’s ten total channels to the Amiga’s four, and CD-quality to 8-bit voices. Knowing all that, we were very curious how close to SEGA’s original music [reassembler] could get on the Amiga.

Before he could show us, [reassembler] needed to decode the SMPS files used on Sonic: The Hedgehog and many other MegaDrive games. Presumably he could have gotten a MIDI file online somewhere– there are oodles– but the goal was to reverse engineer Sonic from its cartridge for the Amiga, not download a lot of resources from the web. SMPS is a sort of programing language for sound, telling the Yamaha and PSG chips what to do.

In some ways, it’s not unlike the Amiga’s MOD format, which programmatically specifies how to play the sampled voices also stored in the file. Translating from one to another is a matter of reading the SMPS files, extracting the timing, volume, vibrato, et cetera, and translate that into a form the MOD file can use. Then [reassembler] needed to generate samples, which was an added hiccup because the Amiga can only handle 3 octaves vs the seven of the SEGA’s FM synthesizer. He’s able to solve this simply by generating multiple samples to span the Yamaha chip’s range, though, again, at only 8-bit fidelity. It doesn’t sound half bad.

What about the four-channel limit? That’s where a bit of artistry comes in; the automated tool produces MOD files with more voices, which MOD trackers can handle at increased computational load. Computational load you don’t need when trying to play a game. Scaling down the soundtrack to the Amiga’s limits is something [reassembler] already has practice with from his famous OutRun port, though, so we’re sure he’ll get it done.

All of this effort just to match the Mega Drive makes us appreciate what a capable little computer the Sega console was; why, you can even check your stocks with it! We’ve already featured [reassembler]’s Sonic port once before, but this music tool was interesting enough we couldn’t help ourselves coming back to it. The ability to play MOD files were pretty impressive when the Amiga came out, but nowadays all you need is a ten-cent microcontroller.

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Once the premium option for data transfers and remote control for high-end audiovisual and other devices, FireWire (IEEE 1394) has been dying a slow death ever since Apple and Sony switched over to USB. Recently Apple correspondingly dropped support for it in MacOS 26, and Linux will follow in 2029. The bright side of this when you’re someone like [Jeff Geerling] is that this means three more years of Linux support for one’s FireWire gear, including on the Raspberry Pi with prosumer gear from 1999.

If you’re not concerned about running the latest and greatest – and supported – software, then using an old or modern Mac or PC is of course an option, but with Linux support still available [Jeff] really wanted to get it working on Linux. Particularly on a Raspberry Pi in order to stay on brand.

Adding a FireWire port to a Raspberry Pi SBC is easy enough with an RPi 5 board as you can put a Mini PCIe HAT on it into which you slot a mini PCIe to Firewire adapter. At this point lspci shows the new device, but to use it you need to recompile the Linux kernel with Firewire support. On the Raspberry Pi you then also need to enable it in the device tree overlay, as shown in the article.

With this you now have FireWire 400 support right off the bat, but to use the FireWire 800 port you need to also connect external power to the adapter, which [Jeff]’s Canon GL1 video camera with its FW400 port does not require, so he didn’t bother with that.

Capturing the video from the GL1 via FW400 was done using the DVgrab utility, with a subsequent capture attempt successful. This means that at least until 2029 [Jeff] will be happily using his GL1 camera this way.

Meanwhile over on the Dark Side, you can still happily install FireWire drivers made for older Windows versions on Windows 10 and 11, which is great news for e.g. people who have expensive DAW gear kicking around. Perhaps the demise of FireWire is still a long while off as long as you’re not too picky about the OS you’re running.

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Recently [ETA Prime] felt a bit underwhelmed by the raw performance of his MacBook Neo when it came to running for extended periods under full load, such as when gaming. Thus the obvious solution is to mildly over-engineer a cooling solution that takes care of issues like thermal throttling.

The Apple MacBook Neo with its repurposed iPhone 16 SoC seems to have leaned hard into answering the question whether a smartphone can be a good general purpose personal computer. Ignoring the lack of I/O, it’s overall not a bad SoC for a laptop, but like when you try to push the CPU and GPU on a smartphone, they do get pretty toasty. Due to the minimalistic cooling solution in the MacBook Neo it’ll easily hit the 105°C thermal throttle limit.

Technically the ‘heatsink’ for this laptop is the aluminium case, as the SoC is coupled via a thermal pad to the case. This doesn’t leave a lot of space and the case will heat soak pretty fast, while also making retrofitting a cooling solution a challenge.

Amusingly, replacing the existing thermal pad with a thin copper plate already massively reduced the thermal throttling of the A18 Pro SoC by about 20 degrees. In Geekbench 6 this bumped multi-core scores up by 9.7% and single-core by 15.2%. Definitely a promising glimpse at how much performance could still be extracted from this SoC.

For the next step a thermo-electric cooler (TEC) with built-in water cooling loop was used, which happened to be one of those overkill smartphone cooling systems that you’d stick to the back of the phone. Here the cooler was attached similarly, directly to the bottom aluminium of the case.

With this solution in place Geekbench 6 results mostly showed a solid bump for single-core results, while multi-core results showed diminishing returns. For Cinebench results this gave a 19% increase over stock cooling in multi-core and 23.5% for single-core.

Perhaps most interesting of all was that playing a video game for a while without thermal throttling meant framerates of over 80 FPS instead of hitting that thermal wall with 30 FPS. This shows just how much performance is left on the table due to the cooling choices for the system, even with this still rather inefficient cooling solution.

That said, this probably isn’t some kind of nefarious scheme by Apple, but rather the result of designing the thermal solution to not heat the case up to temperatures that are deemed to be unsafe or uncomfortable for the user. After all, if the case if the heatsink, then you don’t want to feel like you’re literally handling one. This is sadly the compromise when venting out hot air is deemed to be an unacceptable solution.

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Laser Welding is apparently the new hotness, in part because these sci-fi rayguns masquerading as tools are really cool. They cut! They weld! They Julienne Fry! Well, maybe not that last one. In any case, perhaps feeling the need to cancel out that coolness as quickly as he possibly could, YouTuber [Wesley Treat] decided to make a giant version of his own head.

[Wesely] had previously been 3D scanned as part of the maker scans project, which you can find over on Printables. Those of you who really hate YouTubers, take note: finally you have something to take your frustrations out on. [Wesely] takes that model into Blender to decimate and decapitate– fans of the band Tyr may wonder if the model questioned his sword–before feeding that head through an online papercraft tool called PaperMaker to generate cut files for his CNC. There are also a lot of welding montages interspersed there as he practices with the new tool. [Wesely] did first try out his new raygun on steel in a previous video, but even knowing that, he makes the learning curve on these lasers look quite scalable.

While we’re not likely to follow in [Wesely]’s footsteps and create our own low-poly Zardoz– Zardozes? Zardii?– using a papercraft toolchain and CNC equipment with sheet aluminum is absolutely a great idea worth stealing. It’s very similar to what another hacker did with PCBs— though that project was perhaps more reasonable in scale and ego.

We are no strangers to papercrafts that use actual paper here, either, having featured everything from model retrocomputers to fully-mobile strandbeasts.

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