Climbing is a cool sport. With that said, like everything, it’s even better if you integrate lots of glowing colorful LEDs. To that end, [Superbender] worked up this fun climbing wall that features interactive lighting built right in.

Structurally, there’s nothing too wild going on here. It’s a wood-framed climbing structure that stands 10 meters long and 2.5 meters high, and can be covered in lots of climbing holds. It’s the electronic side of things where it gets fun. An Arduino Due is installed to run the show, hooked up with a small TFT display and some buttons for control. It’s then hooked up to control a whole bunch of LEDs and some buttons which are scattered all across the wall. It’s also paired with an Arduino Nano which runs sound feedback, and a 433 MHz remote for controlling the system at a distance.

[Superbender] uses the lighting for fun interactive games. One example is called Hot Lava, where after each climbing pass, more holds are forbidden until you can’t make the run anymore. Chase the Blues is another fun game, where you have to climb towards a given hold, at which point it moves and you have to scamper to the next one.

We’ve featured similar projects before from other inventive climbers. Video after the break.

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One of the more promising 3D printing technologies that hasn’t quite yet had its spotlight is volumetric 3D printing. Researchers from the Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, have developed a new method that uses a high-speed periscope instead of rotating the printing volume — resulting in print times of less than one second.

Normal volumetric printing uses a rotating volume of photosensitive resin to print nearly any geometry desired. However, this method presents issues when printing at high speeds. If you rapidly rotate a liquid, it won’t exactly stay still. So why not rotate the projector itself? This change also allows the use of less viscous resins, which is particularly useful if you want to pump fluid around.

Why would you want to pump around liquid? Scalability of course! Printing in seconds while pumping the results into a collection vessel would allow for mass production more flexible than traditional ejection methods. The researchers manage to keep quality high with some fancy algorithmic correction, which allows for accuracy on the scale of μm.

While this technology still doesn’t find a common space among average hobbyists, this may soon change…especially with these mass manufacturing capabilities. For similar volumetric printing capabilities, check out xolography.

hackaday.com/2026/02/25/sub-se…

It’s a blustery January day outside Lakehurst, New Jersey. The East Coast of North America is experiencing its worst weather in decades, and all civilian aircraft have been grounded the past four days, from Florida to Maine. For the past two days, that order has included military aircraft, including those certified “all weather” – with one notable exception. A few miles offshore, rocking and bucking in the gales, a U.S. Navy airship braves the storm. Sleet pelts the plexiglass windscreen and ice sloughs off the gasbag in great sheets as the storm rages on, and churning airscrews keep the airship on station.

If you know history you might be a bit confused: the rigid airship USS Akron was lost off the coast of New Jersey, but in April, not January. Before jumping into the comments with your corrections, note the story I’ve begun is set not in 1933, but in 1957, a full generation later.

The airship caught in the storm is no experimental Zeppelin, but an N-class blimp, the workhorse of the cold-war fleet. Yes, there was a cold war fleet of airships; we’ll get to why further on. The most important distinction is that unlike the last flight of the Akron, this story doesn’t end in tragedy, but in triumph. Tasked to demonstrate their readiness, five blimps from Lakehurst’s Airship Airborne Early-Warning Squadron 1 remained on station with no gaps in coverage for the ten days from January 15th to 24th. The blimps were able to swap places, watch-on-watch, and provide continuous coverage, in spite of weather conditions that included 60 knot winds and grounded literally every other aircraft in existence at that time.

Rigid? Count (Zeppelin) Me Out

Airships come in multiple types: rigid, non-rigid, and semi-rigid. Most people — my past self included — assume that the rigid type is more advanced. Unlike rigid airships, which are stabilized by an aluminum skeleton (or a wooden one, in the case of the Schütte-Lanz ships of the Great War), a blimp’s shape is maintained by gas pressure alone. Just a balloon with motors, if we’re being uncharitable. This limits the maximum speed, as the aerodynamic pressure of moving through the atmosphere increases with the square of the airspeed, and must always be lower than the internal pressure of the gas bag. You can’t even pressurize the gas bag much to compensate, because then the density of the lift gas gets too high to actually, well, lift.
Putting a skeleton inside your airship– like this one in USS Akron– seems like such a good idea, but history suggests otherwise. Image: US Navy
Put a skeleton in there, and your airship can be much, much larger. It can go much faster. It can become a flying aircraft carrier, like the ill-fated USS Arkon, and its ill-fated sister ship, USS Macon. The U.S. Navy has only ever fielded five rigid airships; only one survived long enough to be decommissioned. It is with no disrespect to the brave men and women who served– and lost their lives– aboard those silver giants that we dismiss them from our narrative here. They were a worthy experiment, but a failed one. By contrast, the U.S. Navy fielded 166 blimps in the Second World War, and only a handful were lost, mostly during ground handling, and one to enemy action.

So, how was an N-class blimp, also known as a ZPG-2, in the designation system of the day, or SZ-1A after 1962, able to ride out a storm much worse than the one that sank its rigid-framed predecessors? It’s probably precisely because it lacked that rigid frame. The non-rigid envelope of the blimps could bend, buckle, twist, and alter their shape in response to strains that would break the keel of a Zeppelin. Non-rigid airships can quite literally flex on their rigid cousins when it comes to airworthiness.

The flexing skin of a blimp turns the entire gas-bag into one giant de-icing boot to boot, keeping yet another weather hazard at bay. Icing is a great danger to aircraft: when conditions are just wrong, like during the January storm described above, it’s easy for the weight of ice to build up and bring down any aircraft without an effective de-icing system. De-icing boots are one such system: rubber membranes, typically on the leading edge of the wing and tail surfaces of an airplane, that are inflated to flake off ice. On airplanes, they’re addons, but it’s a built-in bonus to flying a blimp.

Of course another key advantage of non-rigid airships is that they’re just plain cheaper. Being smaller, they require less crew, less ground crew, and smaller hangers, but a small rigid would have the same advantage. More importantly, especially during wartime, is that a Zeppelin requires everything you’d use to build the equivalent blimp, plus all the Duraluminum (or other material) going into its rigid frame. Logistically speaking, blimps were a no-brainer if the US wanted to field a lot of airships, and at one point they certainly did.
This hangar was designed for two Zeppelins, but fit a lot more blimps during the war.
Image: US Navy

But Why?

Unlike a certain (in)famous penguin, the US Navy knew exactly what it was doing when it ordered the N-class airships after World War Two. As stated, they had over a hundred blimps in service during that conflict, and racked up more Lighter-Than-Air (LTA) flight time than any other organization has before or since: 550,000 hours split over 55,900 sorties in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters. While the institutional knowledge is long gone, it’s safe to say that in those days nobody knew airships like the U.S. Navy knew airships.
The one ship escorted by blimp was torpedoed by U-boat. That’s a pretty good record.
Image: US Navy
The vast majority of the wartime fleet — some 135 examples — were of the K-class. These ships were designed with a specific mission in mind: antisubmarine warfare. Blimps vs subs wasn’t a new idea; the Americans had worked with the Royal Navy’s u-boat hunting blimps in the First World War. Though the Royal Navy gave up on the idea after the conflict, interest remained on the other side of the Atlantic, and history shows the Yanks were right to persist with it. Of roughly 89,000 ships in blimp-escorted convoys, only one, the tanker Persephone, was sunk, ironically off the coast of New Jersey, not terribly far from the Lakehurst home of LTA.

The sub-hunting blimps were perhaps making it up as they went along. On paper, though, the airship is ideal for the role: without needing to burn fuel to stay airborne, it can have absurdly long loiter times. Its low speed is of no issue when shadowing convoys that have to move at the speed of the slowest merchant vessel– even the HX series “fast convoys” didn’t exceed 13 knots (24 km/h). Blimps of the K-class could cruise at 50 kn (92 km/h), and dash at up to 68 kn (125 km/h), which proved more than sufficient to keep up.

When the class was designed in 1937, its ability to cruise low and slow was ideal for hunting submarines with the Mk.I eyeball, but by the time the K-class was fielded in numbers in 1942, they were also equipped with first-generation radar, magnetic detection coils, and even primitive sonoboys after 1943. The class proved flexible and continued to be upgraded with the latest equipment until the last “K-ship” was retired from active duty in 1959.
Mocked up in yellow, the sonoboys and bombs are easy to spot on this surviving gondola at the National Museum of Naval Aviation.
Image: “Blimp” by Pedro Vera, CC-BY-2.0
At 251 ft 8 in (76.73 m) long, with a gas-bag diameter of 57 ft 10 in (17.63 m), the K-ships could lift a crew of 9 in relative comfort, with fuel to feed their twin Pratt & Whitney R-1340 radials for 38 hours of normal operation. Idling the engines and making use of air currents could extend that number by quite a lot compared to cruising steadily, of course. As stated above, in wartime the K-ships carried magnetic detectors, sonobouys and radars for U-boat detection, along with four depth bombs and a .50 cal machine gun for weapons.

If four bombs doesn’t sound like much, well, that’s probably why no U-boats were recorded killed by Navy airships. On the other hand, the main mission of the blimps was to protect convoys, not to sink subs. “Damaged and driven off” was good enough, especially when the blimp could track the wounded u-boat from above and direct other assets like destroyers to make the kill, as often happened. There was a larger M-class designed during the war that was half again the size of the K-ships and could thus carry eight depth charges, but only four were built before the conflict ended.
While it had perhaps not the most dignified post-war career, Puritan’s control car survives at the New England Air Museum.
Image: Akron Beacon Journal, via The Lighter than Air Society.
Post-war, one K-ship by the name Puritan was sold back to Goodyear and equipped with 1,820 incandescent light bulbs to serve as a floating ad ticker, which perhaps shows the versatility of the design. Alas, ad revenues did not cover the cost of keeping the 425,000 ft³ (12,035 m³) envelope filled with precious helium. Civilian blimps since have been of more modest size.

The LTAs that Aren’t

Speaking of precious helium, in order to conserve that lift gas, the Navy actually operated their blimps as Lighter-Than-Air craft as little as they possibly could, both during and after the war. An annoying thing about airships is that they get lighter the longer they fly as they run down their gas tanks. It is possible to run an engine on a hydrocarbon gas with a density similar to air, like the “blau gas” used by the Graf Zeppelin in the 1920s, but this has one major drawback: it’s a major logistical headache to require a special fuel for a relatively small number of units. Though there was one prototype with a blau gas style fuel in the 30s, the US Navy put logistics first. For the war and several years afterwards, everything that the Navy flew would burn AvGas, at least until the jet age made things annoyingly complicated for quartermasters.
Landings– like this one on CVE-120–were a lot easier when you weren’t fighting the full lift potential of that big gas bag.
Image: US Navy
Without special fuel, the issue of excess lift can be mitigated by condensing water from the exhaust, but that doesn’t quite balance out, so the problem still remains on long flights. Eventually one must either vent helium to reduce lift, which is wasteful, or take on ballast to make up for lost mass, which can disrupt operations. The alternative the US Navy preferred was to fly “heavy”.

Yeah, it turns out hybrid airships– craft that combine lift gas with aerodynamic lift–aren’t a new idea. You might not think of the teardrop-shaped gas bag of a classic blimp as an airfoil, but with a little airspeed just a modest nose-up attitude– what a pilot would call ‘angle of attack’–the blimp can get considerable dynamic lift. By accepting the tradeoff of requiring a takeoff run, the blimps could get into the air with enough dynamic lift to account for the expected fuel burn, and come back to base with only so much lift capacity that could be cancelled out by trimming the ship downwards.

The Cold War Era

Even in death, they served. This K-ship proved that 5 miles was too close to 5 kT in the Plumbob-Stokes test.
Photo courtesy of National Nuclear Security Administration / Nevada Field Office
After the war, most of the K-ships were crated-up and decommissioned, and their air and ground crews were amongst the first to be demobilized. “Most” does not mean “all”, and once the thrill of peace turned into the uneasy truce of the Cold War, Uncle Sam was glad to have those airships. The Soviets had submarines, too, after all.

Rather than continue with building more of the M-class, the decision was made to update the existing stocks and produce improved K-class ships for the immediate post-war period. The wartime ships that were not decommissioned were updated with better electronics and a 20% larger gas bag, getting the designation ZPK2 and then a further upgrade to ZPK3 standard. Fifteen new K ships were built by Goodyear after the war and delivered starting in 1953 under the designation ZPK-4. The last revision of that design, ZPK-5, was built with an inverted “Y” tail instead of the standard cruciform to allow for greater nose-up attitude during the ‘heavy’ takeoffs mentioned above. Twelve ZPK-5s were built by Goodyear and delivered from 1955.

While the K-class was being modernized with better sensors and weapons, the US Navy’s LTA program recognized that it could not simply coast on legacy wartime engineering.They therefore commissioned Goodyear for a clean-sheet design that would be another 50% larger than even the four M-ships, which were kept in service until 1956. These new airships would become the N-class whose all-weather adventures this article opened with.
Diagram of a ZPG-2W N-class blimp. The antisubmarine ZPG-2 lacked the height-finding radar on top of the gas bag, but had the same dimensions otherwise. Image: US Navy
While the ZPG-2W whose triumph we described above were built to serve the airborne early warning role, most– twelve out of seventeen–of the “Nan ships”, as the class was called, were initially designed as bigger, badder sub-killers in case war broke out with the Soviets.

They had better down-looking radars– the AN-20, the best available at the time–much improved sonobouys, more sensitive magnetic anomaly sensors, and homing torpedoes. In war games against US and allied diesel-electric subs, like the GUPPY class, they proved very effective indeed, as did the improved K-ships. Against the new, nuclear-powered USS Nautilus, they were much less successful, but so were fixed-wing and helicopter assets. Doctrine that relied on spotting subs while recharging at snorkel or on surface was ill-suited to deal with a ship that could run submerged for months.

Improving on the control arrangement of the ZPK-5s, the Nan ships were built with an X-shaped tail to allow for even greater pitch angles during takeoff without tailstrikes. The ruddervators on the X-tail could also be controlled by one pilot, compared to earlier blimps which needed separate operators for elevator and rudder. The largest difference in design was perhaps the buried engines: unlike previous Navy blimps, which used radial engines hung from the gondola, the ZPG-2 Nan ships kept their two 800 HP Wright Cyclones indoors. This was supposed to allow for maintenance during flight, and it allowed the engines to be coupled together via a clutch, allowing single-engine cruising. As the air-early-warning blimps proved in 1957, these were all-weather craft.

The Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) squadrons gave a similar demonstration in 1960 with “Operation Whole Gale” during which the Nan ships provided 24/7 coverage for two full months, again in the teeth of winter’s worst weather. In spite of their best efforts to make use of wind and storms, no submarine got past the blimps during the operation.
ZPG-2 “Snow Bird”, departing NAS South Weymouth, Mass. on its record-setting flight in March 1957. Image: US Navy
The post-war record of the US Navy’s blimps is full of such impressive moments. The service was very much looking to prove itself, and so jumped at opportunities to demonstrate the blimps’ capabilities. Arctic expeditions? A Nan-ship proved its worth on 24-hour patrols between Churchill, Manitoba and Resolute, Baffin Island– the last airship to cross the Arctic Circle. Another stunt in 1957 set a record for unrefueled flight: a circumnavigation of the Atlantic basin from Massachusetts to Portugual, North Africa, and finally ending in Florida that took 264 hours and spanned 9,448 nautical miles (17,500 km). Guinness will tell you that Graf Zepplin’s 71-hour 6,384.5 km trip from Fedrickshaven to Lakehurst holds the record for airship flight, but that’s seriously out-of-date. For a rigid, sure, that’s the record, but for any LTA? Blimps win. Blimps actually win all the airship records save for speed and size, and none of those records stand from the “golden age” of the 1930s.

Takeways

That’s maybe the lesson here. Blimps win. I consider myself something of an aviation geek, and have multiple books on airships. All of them tell the same story: blimps were a sideshow, Zeppelins were the pinnacle of airship engineering, and it all ended with the Hindenburg. That’s the story everyone knows, just like everyone knows that airships are useless in any kind of bad weather.

What everyone knows is wrong. The problem with the story we all know is that it ends 24 years early, and leaves out more flights than it includes. Add in those 24 extra years of innovation, and the blimps come off looking a lot better in comparison.

The last flight of a US Navy dirigible with a US Navy crew was in August 1961. The ZPG-2 Nan ships were followed by a larger ZPG-3: bigger again, with a larger, more capable AN-70 radar hiding in the gasbag, the ZPG-3 was the largest blimp ever fielded. Its capability didn’t matter– there was no money for blimps. Imagine a line of Admirals standing before the US Congress, hats in hand, and one asks for money for nuclear-powered submarines to smite the enemies of Uncle Sam with Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles wielding atomic fire, and the next man in line wants money for blimps. Airships seemed positively old-fashioned in comparison, and money was tight. The blimps were cut.
A giant ZPG-3W sits at its mooring mast, while a ZPG-2W takes off and a K-ship hovers in the background. Only two ZPG-3s were ever built. Image: US Navy
Yes, they provided an all-weather ASW and AEW capability nothing else could match… but other assets, ships and airplanes and helicopters, could do 90% of the job without requiring the expensive, dedicated infrastructure the blimps did. Airships were cut from the U.S. Navy the same year as seaplanes and the Regulus cruise missile program. You might say they’re the only things ever destroyed by the Polaris missile subs, but that’s arguably a good thing.

All the hot venture capital money is being sucked up by the AI bubble right now, and even if it wasn’t, the trendy thing in aviation is electric vertical takeoff and landing. That doesn’t mean there isn’t an airship renaissance just around the corner– there is always an airship renaissance just around the corner. That it never results in anything but prototypes is irrelevant. LTA is just too enticing a technology to ever give up. If we ever are to get that renaissance to bear fruit, though, we’re going to have to have better stories.

If you’re focused on the Hindenburg going down in flames, or the Akron and Macon breaking up over water, airships seem like a bad bet. If you remember the Nan ships bouncing and wiggling their way through January snowstorms, manned by Navy “squids” with the one-winged dirigible badge on their breasts, then LTA starts to sound more reasonable.

hackaday.com/2026/02/25/what-o…

As neural implant technology and A.I. advance at breakneck speeds, do we need a new set of rights to protect our most intimate data — our minds?

By Linda KinstlerPublished Nov. 14, 2025Updated Nov. 18, 2025

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The Yamaha DX7 is one of the most iconic synthesizers that emerged in the early 1980s, and is still very popular today. That said, with even the newest of these having left the factory back in 1989, the average DX7 can use a bit of tender love and care. In particular the battered DX7 that [Drygol] recently got handed to ‘just fix the PSU voltage switch’. As it turned out, this poor DX7 had a few more issues than just a busted voltage selector.
Just a hint of cosmetic damage on this Yamaha DX7.
In addition to missing slider caps and a vanished key, the paint of the case also had clearly lost a fight with various hard surfaces in addition to a thick coating of unidentifiable dust and grime inside the synthesizer. Feeling a pang of sympathy, [Drygol] thus decided to give the old girl a complete restoration.

After taking the synthesizer apart for a good scrub-down, the parts were assessed for further damage. This turned out to include the plastic stubs on some keys to hold a spring for which a replacement was modelled and 3D printed, along with replacements for the missing slider caps.

Next the case was painted, with a brand new Yamaha DX7 vinyl logo rather than trying to fix up the old paint and logo. With the outside fixed up, the broken and dodgy controls, audio jacks and potentiometers were addressed, followed by the busted onboard battery, leaving just the original voltage selector. This one got replaced by an IEC 60320 C13 jack, with the transformer hardwired for 230 VAC input, out of convenience grounds.

We’re always excited when [Drygol] sends in another restoration project — from a glowing Amiga 500 to vacuum-formed keycap covers, they’re always remarkable displays of ingenuity.

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There are some clocks, mostly in or around international airports, which have multiple faces to show the time at various cities around the world. Taking more a forward-looking approach is [Chronova Engineering], who built a clock to display the time on four different planets: Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

The clock doesn’t have any hands, but it uses rotating dials to represent a top-down view of each planet from it’s north pole. The dials have degree markings to represent rotation relative to each planet’s prime meridian; for the gas giants, rotation is measured by the rotation of the planet’s core. Each dial’s center is made out of a circular stone tile with patterns similar to those seen on the planet; Earth, for example, is represented with sodalite. Three pointers mounted around the dial indicate the longitudes which are currently experiencing sunrise, noon, and sunset. The mechanism can be turned with a handle or a knob, and a mechanical counter keeps track of the number of Earth days that have passed.

[Chronova] machined most of the mechanism out of brass, with a few steel parts. It required only nine gears, including the two idler gears which were used to space out the dials and keep them rotating in the right direction. The gears were machined on a jeweler’s lathe, with the cutouts in the idler gears being made with a pantograph milling machine and a 3D printed pattern. This isn’t technically a clock, since there’s no timekeeping mechanism, but it does accurately represent relative motion.

Though they represent different things, this project is reminiscent of an orrery, which [Chronova Engineering] has previously built. For more detail about the difficulties of synchronizing time between celestial bodies, check out this article about establishing a lunar time standard.

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While you may have never heard of TAT-8, there is a good chance you sent some data through it. TAT-8 was the 8th transatlantic communications cable and the first transatlantic fiber-optic cable, carrying 560 Mbit/s on two fibers between Tuckerton, New Jersey, and, thanks to an underwater splitting device, Widemouth Bay, England, and Penmarch, France. Construction of the cable began in 1998. Later that year, the first call, made by [Issac Asimov] took place. The cable was retired in 2002. Now, Subsea Environmental Services is recovering the cable for recycling.

The 6,000 km cable was built by a consortium of companies including AT&T, France Télécom, and British Telecom. The 1.3 micron fiber used special optical repeaters about 40 km apart and cost about $335 million (just shy of a billion dollars today). Designers were optimistic, with some claiming the cable would end the need for future cables or, at least, that the cable would not reach capacity for ten years or more. In reality, the cable was saturated within 18 months. Turns out, the equivalent of 40,000 phone lines wasn’t enough.

In all fairness, the saturation might have been difficult to predict, but it may also have been hastened by the cable itself. In 1989, IBM funded a dedicated T1 link between CERN and Cornell University. Ten months later, [Tim Berners Lee] would use this link to demonstrate his new development: The World Wide Web.

According to Subsea Environmental Services, the cable still looked new after lying on the seabed for four decades. We’ve looked at the tech behind these undersea cables before. Not to mention the history behind the TAT cables.

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BMX bikes are a unique frame geometry, essentially forgoing all travel efficiency for maneuverability and sturdiness. For how much abuse these bikes are designed to take, these are all good tradeoffs. But it turns out that these bikes also have an exceptionally low center of gravity, which could make them useful for drag racing, provided they’re given a suitably large electric motor and a few minor frame modifications.

The project began as a fun weekend project for friends [Sam Barker] and [Tom Stanton]. They had a 20″ BMX wheel with a massive integrated hub motor that seemed to be begging to be put onto a BMX bike that they had on hand. After hooking up a 72V, 20Ah battery to it they were quickly zipping around the driveway, but the short wheelbase on the bike was bottlenecking its maximum performace because the bike would wheelie under high throttle. To solve that, they broke out the welder and extended frame, which kept the wheelies to a minimum and allowed them to take it out and drag race.

Another benefit to the extended frame is that the bike has room to store its battery now as well; before the frame extension it was strapped to the side of the frame under the rider in a non-ergonomic fashion. The duo also had to figure out a braking solution since the BMX didn’t come with its own brakes, but a loaner caliper from a penny farthing was found for some basic stopping abilities. We might assume this bike is not street legal on many public roads, but not every ebike operates in the same legal jurisdictions you might be the most familiar with.

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If you know about Peltier modules, a solid-state fridge seems like an easy project. Pump 12V into the module, include a heat sink and a fan. Then you are done, right? According to [Peltier Power], this is not the way to design things, but it is common enough to give these units a reputation for failing quickly.

The problem is that while it makes sense that an inefficient Peltier module needs more power to get more cooling. But the reality is in practical applications, many designs push the current up when it should be moving it down. The curve describes a parabola, and you can be on the high side or low side and still get the same result. But obviously, you don’t want to put in more current and get the same cooling that you could get with lower currents.

According to the video, the mistake people make is pushing to a stable point to reach a cool point, then increasing the current until the chamber cools further. However, maintaining the cool doesn’t have to require a higher current. Once cold, you can reduce the current to maintain temperature, so to get colder, you can just lower the current less instead of increasing it. Of course, that’s somewhat of a simplification. You have to account for other thermal design factors, but that’s the general idea.

He has noted this behavior in commercial units, but did find one brand that had the correct logic. He also has some tips on using these types of coolers.

Our favorite use for these modules has to be a cloud chamber. Naturally, we’ve seen a fair number of homebrew fridges.

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Analog TV may have shuffled off its mortal coil years ago, but there are still plenty of old CRT TV sets around that could receive it. [Kris Slyka] has just such a device, and decided to feed it something from an STM32 microcontroller. An STM32G431, to be precise, and he’s doing it using the on-chip hardware rather than in software.

This unexpected feat is made possible by clever use of the internal oscillators and analog multiplexer. The video itself is generated using the MCU’s DAC, and fed into the on-board op-amp multiplexer which is switched at the VHF transmission frequency. This creates the required VHF TV transmission, but without audio. This component comes by abusing another peripheral, the internal RC oscillator for the USB. This is frequency modulated, and set to the required 5.5 MHz spacing from the vision carrier for the TV in question. It doesn’t (yet) generate the PAL color sub-carrier so for now it’s black and white only, but maybe someone will figure out a way.

We like unexpected out-of-spec uses of parts like these microcontrollers, and we especially like analog TV hereabouts. We marked its very final moments, back in 2021.

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Personally, I love a monoblock or uni-body split. You’ll pry this Kinesis Advantage from under my cold, dead hands. But on the go, I really like the Glove 80, a true split that can be completely wireless in case you want to put the halves really far apart.

Image by [thehaikuza] via reddit[thehaikuza] is the opposite, preferring a full split at the desk, but finding it troublesome when using it on the couch or at a cafe or co-working space, and so created dǎ bāo (打包) — a uni-body split that can also be a distant split. And this best-of-both worlds creation is remarkably [thehaikuza]’s first keyboard.

The name means to take out food, and if you click the picture you can see a cute little take-out container on the silkscreen of the right half. Directly below it, there’s a track point nubbin to be used with the thumb.

It does its split-in-half trick via a magnetic four-pin connector for when you want the halves stuck together. When the halves are separated, they can instead talk over a USB-C cable. One half has the microcontroller, and the other has a GPIO expander.

Image by [thehaikuza] via redditThe connection to the computer is wireless, and since there’s only the one microcontroller, the costs are lower, and [thehaikuza] doesn’t have to worry about the halves discharging at different rates. The build guide is coming soon, so watch the GitHub for that.

Personally, I like to push my Kinesis out of the way all the time to write by hand in a spiral notebook, and I fully appreciate that the halves stay the same distance apart. And when I’m using the Glove80 at the library, I tend to set it and forget it because I’m not there that long. But I can totally see the opposite view in both cases.

Caught Between the Scylla and Calidris

Just, wow. The gentle curve, the thumb cluster, the batarang-esque visual appeal. This is Calidris, the latest from [scytile], who brought us Cygnus a while back. I evidently didn’t cover it; shame on me.

Image by [scytile] via redditCygnus was [scytile]’s first keyboard, and many have made their own builds of it. But people are people, so [scytile] did variations on the original per request, expanding the layout and what have you.

And while some begged for Choc support for Cygnus, [scytile] decided to keep it MX-based, and so here we are with a new build that explores low-profile switches.

Calidris is columnar, hot-swappable, 36-key wireless split with a whisper of concavity. If it’s not obvious, this baby is designed for Chocs. I absolutely love the way this looks, though sadly there aren’t enough keys for me personally.

The case is so, so tiny, yet [scytile] fit a 380 mAh battery in there. Files are pending some experimentation with switch spacing, and [scytile] welcomes your (constructive) thoughts.

The Centerfold: Candy Apple Is Among the Best Reds

Image by [Flaky_Ad_7038] via redditSo this here is a ZMK port for a TBK mini, with a Xiao BLE microcontroller inside. Here’s the repo. If you’re in Peru, Nuty L.A.B.S. will build it for you — just DM them through Instagram, I surmise.

I must tell you that I absolutely dislike most shades of red — the color usually just makes me angry, hungry, or both. And though I prefer caramel apples, there’s something deliciously candy-apple about this red, coupled with the curves, that I just adore. I especially like the shape of it beneath Control, Z, and X. It’s like something you’d find at a futon store in the 80s.

Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad? Send me a picture along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!

Historical Clackers: the Buckner Lino-Typewriter

The astute among you will notice that this typewriter clearly says Smith-Premier. But you see, not all Smith-Premiers were created alike. Buckner Lino-Typewriters were simply modified Smith-Premiers. They had keyboards with the separate upper and lower case keyboards, and they were separated vertically instead of horizontally.
Image via The Antikey Chop
There was an additional Space bar on the left side of the keyboard, and the whole idea was to mimic the layout of a Linotype press, and ease the transition to typewriters for Linotype operators, so they didn’t necessarily need to learn QWERTY.

The Buckner was loosely invented, as Antikey Chop puts it, by former Linotype press operator Homer Guy Hays Buckner. He lived in Oakland, California and started the Buckner Lino-Writer Company out of his house, which now has a freeway running through the yard.

The assumption is that Buckner basically ran a mail-order business, and just had Smith-Premier produce modified machines whenever he got an order. That’s actually kind of genius. Maybe making such connections was simpler back then.

The Antikey Chop believes that Smith-Premier Nos. 1, 2, 4, and 10 were all modified to be Buckner Lino-Typewriters, and says there may have been others. Interestingly, some No.1 models were made with their Space bars removed, and replaced with an attractive, do-nothing strip of wood. So you were forced to use the floating Space bar on left, which was admittedly a little less floaty on the wood-strip model.

But that’s not the only way Smith-Premiers were disguised as other machines. Homer Buckner sold half of his mail order business in late 1919, and by 1921, a company out of Buffalo, New York started advertising its Linowriter, which by all accounts seems to be a successor to the Buckner. The main difference was the lack of side Space bar. The Antikey Chop says that all Linowriters were modified Smith-Premier No. 10s no matter what label they bore: Smith-Premier, Linowriter, or even Remington. Good for Smith, I say.

Finally, Someone’s Made a Concrete Keyboard

And that someone is Keychron. This thing’s not going anywhere on your desk. There’s also a resin version of the same keyboard, which is called the K2HE Special Edition.

It looks so… plain? Which isn’t a bad thing. The nice, cuppy key caps do stand out to me. Of course, I chose the non-color picture because of the concrete blocks, but you’re not missing much. In fact, this picture shows off the cuppiness of those key caps much better than the color one, which you can see at the first link up there.
Image by Keychron via PC Gamer
Keychron says it is smooth and marble-like, which I’m on the fence about unless it’s also polished. I don’t abide chalky textures, and I’m worried that this is very much that.

Keychron goes on to say that “each keystroke carries industrial rhythm”, which sounds like collab between Al Jourgensen and Bernard “Pretty” Purdie, or perhaps Trent Reznor and Jeff Porcaro. In other words, it sounds intriguing to say the least.

It should be noted that the chassis isn’t entirely concrete. There’s a metal panel visible in the side view where the connections are, and the back plate is sadly, plastic, at least according to PC Gamer’s inspection. But the chalkiness would not extend to the key caps, which are double-shot PBT — arguably the finest type of key caps money can buy. They are of course sitting on hot-swappable switches. You can connect via 2.4 GHz or Bluetooth, so it’ll be yet another thing to charge, but hey, concrete keyboard.

Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards? Help me out by sending in a link or two. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to email me directly.

hackaday.com/2026/02/24/keebin…

[Danny Spencer] has a brilliant graphical demo that, like all great demos, flexes a deep understanding of the underlying system: a real-time 3D shader on the Game Boy Color.

If you’re not familiar with shaders, they were originally mathematical lighting models (hence the name) and are an integral part of the modern 3D graphics pipeline. One no longer draws pixels directly to a screen to represent objects. Instead, 3D object data is sent to the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) which handles the drawing. Shaders are what control things like an object’s lighting, textures, and more.

Implementing even a basic real-time shader in software on a Game Boy Color is pretty wild. Not only is it a pixels-and-sprites (and not 3D graphics) kind of system, but the Game Boy’s SM83 CPU doesn’t even have a multiply instruction, nor does it support floats. As [Danny] puts it: given that the entire mathematical foundation of his shader rests on multiplying non-integer numbers, he had to get creative. That makes his demo a very round peg in an extremely square hole.

In the case of [Danny]’s demo, the user can manipulate the position of, and lighting around, a classic Utah teapot in real time. He explains the workflow and shows how the process can be applied to other objects. The ROM is available on GitHub and there’s a video, embedded below.

[Danny] is no stranger to performing feats of technical prowess that are as creative as they are playful, like implementing a working adding machine in a DOOM level.

youtube.com/embed/SAQXEW3ePwo?…

hackaday.com/2026/02/24/real-t…