With how much time many of us spend in our cars, it makes perfect sense to consider them a second home. Yet even if that’s not the case, there are still good reasons to connect a car to one’s smart home solution like Home Assistant, such as to keep track of certain parameters for easy monitoring and reminders. This is what [The Stock Pot] channel recently demonstrated using a widget that connects to the OBD-II port inside the car, as not every car comes with its own app yet.

The used dongle is the ESP32-S3-based WiCAN from Australian company MeatPi. This device runs the open source WiCAN firmware. After plugging the dongle into the OBD-II port of the car, the device powers on and can be configured via Wi-Fi like any other smart device these days. After that it’s just another Wi-Fi device on the network.

Since each car’s ECU will represent data differently, you need a car-specific configuration, which can take some tweaking. The idea of integrating with Home Assistant is directly supported by MeatPi, with a handy documentation page. Of course [The Stock Pot] shared their configuration if you want to feel inspired. Among the parameters monitored you get things like fuel level, days to service and coolant temperature.

Although you could make the argument that it mostly saves you from having to waddle over to the car to check the data there, being able to remotely access the OBD-II port of a car does seem rather practical even outside of home automation concepts, such as gathering performance statistics and early failure warnings, especially for aspects like tire pressure and unhappy engine or BEV battery conditions that can quickly go from an inconvenience to very expensive.

youtube.com/embed/3JW3J4_Ukrs?…

hackaday.com/2026/06/04/connec…

While it might seem that your computer malfunctions every few minutes, the reality is that modern computers are usually quite robust. Not so much for quantum computers, where qubit life is often measured in milliseconds. Now, the company claims to have qubits that last for about 20 seconds.

For example, Microsoft’s Majorana 1 quantum chip, which, incidentally, was mired in controversy, provided 8 qubits that were stable very briefly. This second-generation chip provides 12 qubits that average 20-second lifespans.

Microsoft claims to use topological superconductors based on Majorana modes. However, despite claims, some researchers think the technology is using Andreev modes and does not contain any Majorana modes, although this is apparently debatable. Despite retracting an earlier paper, the company appears to stand by its claim that it is producing Majorana fermions.

The biggest problem, of course, is that to be practical, you will need millions of qubits instead of 8 or 12. That’s in addition to better fault tolerance, error correction, and other operational details. So raw qubit count can be misleading, but Fujitsu has a 256-qubit system and is on track to install one with 1,000 qubits this year, although redundancy probably cuts the number of logical qubits quite a bit. Microsoft claims it will have a commercially viable machine by 2029.

Until you can get your hands on a real quantum computer, there’s always simulation.

hackaday.com/2026/06/04/micros…

Some security hacks require someone to have physical access to your computer. In many cases, that’s easy to mitigate. Other attack vectors can put you at risk from anywhere via the network. That’s what firewalls are for. But there is an in-between risk where an attacker just has to be “around” your computer. [Rasmus Moorats] found out that a Creative Sound Blaster sound bar could open up just such an attack.

[Rasmus] was poking around the firmware just to write custom software to control it. The possibility of an attack was just an accidental find.

The soundbar connects to USB, but it also has Bluetooth, which, for some reason, is always on. There’s an app that can communicate with the speaker using BLE, and Creative has a special protocol to control it. The same protocol works on USB or Bluetooth, but with an important difference.

On USB, you have to authenticate to send commands. However, you can easily decompile the provided apps and learn the authentication key. But on BLE, it doesn’t require authentication at all for some reason. You can simply send commands via BLE, and the speaker obeys. No pairing. No physical access. Just be close enough for a Bluetooth connection.

The worst of the commands lets you reflash the device firmware. So, if you were a bad actor, you could flash firmware to act as a USB keyboard and then inject lots of bad commands into the host system.

BLE seems to be a common vector in consumer electronics. Maybe now you have to air-gap your speakers, too.

hackaday.com/2026/06/04/if-you…

Adding magnets to a 3D print can be very useful in a design, but there are some things that can trip you up if you’re not away of them. In a recent video by [Lost in Tech] some of the essentials are covered, including why you shouldn’t get magnets near most extruder nozzles or the printing bed.

The easiest method is of course to add magnets in after printing, using friction fit with or without ribs, or with a dab of glue. Here making sure that the magnet stays in place is the trick, as you do not want the magnet to get lost or end up in the tummy of a curious pet or toddler.
The magnetic pattern on an FDM printer’s magnetic bed.
Things get spicy when you’re talking about adding magnets during the printing process, as some extruders are made of a ferromagnetic material and thus a magnet will happily stick to said nozzle if it’s not pure brass or similar. As seen in the video even some purported ‘brass’ nozzles aren’t pure enough to not be significantly ferromagnetic.

Another issue is that of heat, which is something that magnets generally do not like much. Using magnets like you’d use heat inserts for bolts is a recipe for disaster, as the heat from a soldering iron will demagnetize the magnet, which for the typical magnet is less than 200°C. At least this should mean that the magnet stuck to your extruder nozzle will eventually fall off by itself after it demagnetizes.

With the bed of the typical FDM printer these days you’re talking about magnetically attached plates, with the underlying heated bed using a Halbach array configuration as is typical of flat magnets, yet with the gotcha that these aren’t typically real Halbach arrays, but knock-offs with simply alternating north-south pole magnets. As it turns out, these types of magnetic arrays can be disturbed by another magnet, such as a powerful neodymium magnet near said printing bed, flipping polarity in a way that cannot be easily undone.

You can still install magnets during printing, but it’s recommended to use something like side-insertion, where the extruder nozzle cannot pull out a magnet. Regardless of your approach, it’s good to know of the risks with ferromagnetic nozzles, the magnetic bed and treating magnets like they’re just heat inserts. While you can get higher-temperature magnets, many of the same issues still remain here.

youtube.com/embed/xTfytJBLEn4?…

hackaday.com/2026/06/04/ways-t…

The most recent Hackaday event badge has been the Communicator, a handheld wireless terminal with a rather nice QWERTY keyboard. It’s good enough as delivered, but [makeTVee] has gone one better and made his Communicator keyboard into a fully RGB light-up experience.

The feat is achieved with the help of a new front panel holding some very thin side-emitting addressable LEDs. The keys are custom-printed, and there’s a TPU mat to hold them all together. The LEDs are driven from one of the device’s GPIOs.

We saw this badge in real life at the recent Hackaday Europe conference in Lecco, Italy. It really is as good as it looks in the video below, the care and attention which has gone into the build is extremely impressive.The original badge used a silicone cast set of keys, and we’d say if you are making a device with a keyboard then these might make a very good option.

If you’re not familiar with the Communicator, it’s worth having a look at the launch announcement.

youtube.com/embed/h4FR6Jb-wLk?…

hackaday.com/2026/06/04/an-rgb…

The GRiD Compass is a legendary portable computer — a taste of an early-80s future with bubble memory, tough enough for NASA to take them into space, and one of the machines which defined the beginnings of the form factor we know today as a laptop. They’re not easy to come by, but [Scott M. Baker] got his hands on one. As well as nursing it back to health, he’s made an unusual peripheral, a GPIB speech synthesizer.

The GRiD arrived in one piece despite sketchy packaging, and after a little confusion over its line voltage it ran as well as the day it was made. It was designed to use GPIB as its interface for large peripherals such as printers or disk drives, so it was that interface picked for the speech synthesizer. It emulates a GPIB printer, and bytes are sent to the synthesizer chip by printing to LPT1, making driving it an easy process.

The synth itself is a clever design that allows the use of all the various speech chips of the day. It achieves this using a GPIB carrier board holding the interfacing, and a set of plug-in modules, one for each different chip. It’s certainly an unusual peripheral.

You can see more details in the video below the break, meanwhile if you can’t get the real thing there’s a cyberdeck tribute you can make.

youtube.com/embed/RETMtshGCro?…

Restoring a GRiD Compass and Building the World’s First GPIB Speech Synthesizer

smbaker.com/restoring-a-grid-c…

hackaday.com/2026/06/04/the-wo…

Unless you’ve spent the last few years locked indoors and had all of your goods delivered to you — a not entirely implausible situation, given our audience — you’ve likely noticed the growing popularity of electronic shelf labels (ESLs). They’ve been a common sight in grocery stores like Aldi for some time, and major retailers such as Walmart and Home Depot have been expanding their use of the technology.

On the surface, it makes perfect sense. With electronic ink displays, you can create a price tag that looks enough like a paper label that the customer’s experience isn’t really any different, but the retailer doesn’t have to send somebody out to update the prices. Sure, the upfront cost is higher than a roll of sticky paper, but theoretically, the ESLs should pay for themselves thanks to the reduced labor costs.

It’s the sort of high-tech solution to a common problem that one of us would have come up with. If this were a decade ago, we wouldn’t have been surprised to see something like this get entered into the Hackaday Prize. It might have even won.

Now that the technology is becoming commonplace, there’s even more reason for hardware hackers to be interested in it. Since most of these tags will show whatever image you beam over to them via radio or infrared, we’ve seen a number of projects that repurpose second-hand tags as convenient data displays.

Rather than showing the price of milk, they can show the current price of Bitcoin. Or maybe you’d like to stick them up all over the house to display the weather forecast and your family calendar. They’ve been repurposed as badges at hacker cons, and at least one industrious hacker has used a discarded ESL to show an alert whenever a new episode of the Hackaday Podcast drops.

But not everyone is happy about ESLs. Recently, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) International Union released the results of a poll showing that most American consumers are opposed to ESLs, citing concerns that the technology would ultimately lead to higher prices.

With Great Power Comes…

The rejection of electronic shelf labels isn’t just about automation taking over a job that humans used to do, although that’s likely part of it. What’s got most consumers worried is what happens in the future once ESLs are the norm. There’s growing concern that the ability to rapidly and remotely update an item’s price will enable retailers to implement aggressive dynamic pricing schemes that were previously impractical. When you don’t have to send out a teenager with a price gun for each change, there’s nothing stopping stores from updating item prices every hour.

Things get really worrying when you consider the possibilities should the ESL system get tied into other data sources, and artificial intelligence be given free rein to virtually put its thumb on the scale. It’s not hard to imagine the price of umbrellas going up when it rains, or a premium being put on a particular team’s merchandise after they win a big game.

Such practices are referred to as “surveillance pricing”, and according to the UFCW poll, as many as 75% of respondents believe that one day stores might even attempt to tailor the price of an item to the individual. Like something out of Minority Report, the price tag could jump up when it detects a more affluent shopper passing by — or at least, one with a higher credit limit.

To those who may say this all sounds a bit far-fetched, the reality is that surveillance pricing is already here for many goods and services. Anyone who’s ever booked a hotel room can tell you that the price goes up and down based on demand, and rideshare services like Uber and Lyft have never hidden the fact that they adjust fare prices in real-time. Online retailers such as Amazon also routinely offer personalized “deals” based on your shopping habits or search activity, although whether or not you actually save any money in these scenarios is up for debate.

Electronic shelf labels don’t make surveillance pricing possible, since it’s already happening every day online. Rather, it enables retailers to use those same techniques in their brick-and-mortar stores in ways that weren’t possible before.

A Double-Edged Label

As hardware hackers, we love electronic shelf labels, if for no other reason than all those e-ink displays eventually trickling down to us. But the ability to change prices on a whim and without the need for human interaction is troubling, especially when considering the pricing schemes that are already so prevalent online. For better or for worse, we’ve become accustomed to dynamic pricing when we buy things on the Internet, but that doesn’t mean we have to accept as an eventuality that the same practices will eventually come to the grocery aisle.

So, Dear Reader, where do you fall on the subject? Are you excited about the technological implications of turning each price tag into a tiny remotely-controlled computing device, or does the potential for misuse outweigh the benefits? If so, do you think there’s a path forward that allows stores to take advantage of electronic shelf labels while protecting the consumer? Let us know in the comments.

hackaday.com/2026/06/04/ask-ha…

If you’re into airplanes, you’ve probably had the experience of hearing an unusual aircraft and rushing outside to try and catch a glimpse of it, all while fumbling with a smartphone to open a flight-tracking app. If your home was equipped with [cpaczek]’s Skylight project, which combines ADS-B data with a short throw projector, that little dance would have been totally unnecessary.

ADS-B or the “Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast”, is the standard by which aircraft broadcast their position and other flight information from onboard transponders. In most of the world, every commercial aircraft has an ADS-B transmitter, and they’re slowly creeping into general aviation as well. The signals aren’t hard to pick up with software-defined radio — like perhaps this RP2040 based unit we featured — or the RTL-SDR v4 this project calls for.

Using data from ADS-B, the Skylight software runs on Raspberry Pi 5 and renders icons of the aircraft exactly where they would appear above you, if that pesky ceiling wasn’t in the way. You get the flight’s code, destination and flightplan with a nice icon representing what type of airplane it is. Thanks to specifying a Pi 5, the projection is a smooth 60 FPS at 1080p. Airplanes aren’t the only things plotted, though — this is also a planetarium, giving you a full view of the stars and any satellites passing overhead. That’s obviously via an API, not SDR, and if you like you can configure it to track aircraft that way to — allowing you to set your Skylight for anywhere in the world, if you aren’t near an interesting airport.

ADS-B isn’t just for pilots and plane nerds — if you’re flying drones, you probably should keep an eye on it, too. In that case, though, you probably won’t be looking at your ceiling.

Thanks to [Thinkerer] for the tip!

hackaday.com/2026/06/04/make-y…