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.

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hackaday.com/2026/02/24/real-t…

In science fiction, the use of gunpowder-based weapons is generally portrayed as something from a savage past, with technology having long since moved on to more civilized types of destructive weaponry, involving lasers, microwaves, and electromagnetism. Instead of messy detonating powder, energy-weapons are used to near-instantly deposit significant amounts of energy into the target, and railguns enable the delivery of projectiles at many times the speed of sound using nothing but the raw power of electricity and some creative physics.

Of course, the reason that we don’t see sci-fi weapons deployed everywhere has arguably less to do with today’s levels of savagery in geopolitics and more with the fact that physical reality is a very harsh mistress, who strongly frowns upon such flights of fancy.

Similarly, the Lorentz force that underlies railguns is extremely simple and effective, but scaled up to weapons-grade dimensions results in highly destructive forces that demolish the metal rails and other components of the railgun after only a few firings. Will we ever be able to fix these problems, or are railguns and similar sci-fi weapons forever beyond our grasp?

The Lorentz Force

A very simple homopolar motor. Here the neodymium magnet and screw spin whenever the wire conducts current. (Credit: Windell H. Oskay, Wikimedia)
The simplest way to think about a railgun is as a linear motor. At its core it consists of two parallel conductors — the rails — with an armature that slides across these rails as it conducts the power between the two rails. This also makes it the equivalent of a homopolar motor, which was the first type of electric motor to be demonstrated.

In the photo on the right you can see a basic example of such a motor, with the neodymium magnet providing the magnetic field and the singular wire the current that interacts with the magnetic field. Using the right-hand rule that was hammered into our heads during high school physics classes we can thus deduce that we get a net force.

With this hand-held demonstration the screw will rotate when current is passed through the wire. For stand-alone homopolar motors with the magnet on the battery’s negative terminal and a conductor loosely placed on the positive terminal while touching the magnet, the Lorentz force will cause the wire to rotate around the battery.
Right-hand rule. (Credit: Jfmelero, Wikimedia)
We can visualize this interaction between the current-carrying wire (I), the magnetic field (B) and resulting force vector (F) in such a homopolar motor fairly easy, but how does this work with a railgun?
Railgun forces. (Source: Wikimedia)
Rather than a permanent magnet or a complex electromagnet on each rail using many windings, a single current loop is used in a railgun. This means that massive amounts of currents are pumped through one rail, which induces a sufficient strong magnetic field.hackaday.com/wp-content/upload…The projectile, playing the role of the armature, is located inside the generated magnetic field B, with the current I coursing through the armature, resulting in a net force F that will push it along the rails at a velocity that’s proportional to the strength of B.

Crudely put, the effective speed of a project launched by a railgun is thus determined by the applied current, so unlike it’s close cousin, the coilgun, there is no tricky timing requirement in energizing coils in a sequence.

This also provides some hints as to what major obstacles with railguns are, starting with the immense currents that have to be immediately available for a railgun shot of any significant size. If this is somehow engineered around using massive capacitor banks, then you run into the much more significant issues that have so far prevented railguns from being widely deployed.

Most of this comes down to wear and tear, because going fast comes with certain tradeoffs.

Making Big Stuff Go Fast

Electromagnetic railgun (EMRG) at the Dahlgren testing grounds in 2017. (Credit: US Office of Naval Research)
Theoretically you can just scale everything up: creating railguns with larger rails and larger armatures that can launch larger projectiles with increasingly faster speeds. This has been the impetus behind various railgun projects across the world, with notable examples being the railguns developed and tested by the US and Japan.

Railguns were invented all the way back in 1917 by French inventor André Louis Octave Fauchon-Villeplée, when the issue of the massive electricity consumption kept further research on a fairly low level. Even the tantalizing prospect of a weapon system capable of firing at velocities of more than 2,000 m/s couldn’t get into deployment during the time that Nazi Germany was working on their own version.

Ultimately it would take until the 1980s for railgun designs to become practical enough to start testing them for potential deployment at some point in the future, seeing a surge of R&D investment for it and other new weapon systems that could provide an edge during the Cold War and beyond.

Yet despite decades of research by the US military, no viable design has so far appeared, and research has wound down over the past years. Although both China and India are testing their own railgun designs, there are no signs at this point that they haven’t run into the same issues that caused the US to mostly cease research on this topic.

Only Japan’s railgun research seems to so far offer a viable design for deployment, but their focus is purely defensive, for countering ballistic and hypersonic missiles in a close-in role. The size is also limited to the current 40 mm prototype by Japan’s Ministry of Defense ATLA agency.

Physical Reality

In a perfect world with zero friction and spherical cows, railguns would be very simple and straightforward, but as we live in messy reality we have to deal with the implications of sending immense amounts of currents through a railgun barrel. A good primer here can be found in a June 1983 report (archived) by O. Fitch and M. F. Rose at the Dahlgren Naval Surface Weapons Center in Virginia.
Mass driver efficiency formula. (From: O. Fitch et al., 1983)
Much of this comes down to efficiency as you scale up a basic railgun design. The two main factors are basic ohmic resistance (E_R) and system inductance (E_S). These two factors limit the kinetic energy (E_K) and set the losses (E_L) of the system, with the losses being in the form of thermal and other energies.

Reducing these losses is one of the primary points of research, and factors like the rail design and alloys as well as the switching of the current pulses play a role in affecting final efficiency, and with it durability of the railgun’s ‘barrel’.

Naturally, that was all the way back in 1983, and since then a few decades of technical and material science progress having occurred. Or so one might be led to believe, if it wasn’t for current research papers striking a rather similar tone. For example Hong-bin Xie et al. in a 2021 paper as published in Defence Technology.
Solid vs arc contact in a railgun. (From: Hong-bin Xie, et al., 2021)
This review article covers the common issues of rail gouging, grooving, arc ablation, and other problems, as well as the current rail materials in use today and their performance characteristics.

Many of these issues are somewhat related, as the moving armature rarely maintains a perfect contact with the rails. This results in arcing, localized heating, ablation, and grooving due to thermal softening. All of these effects result in a rapidly degrading rail surface, and higher currents result in more rapid degradation and even worse contact with subsequent shots.

Various rail metal alloys have been or are being tested, including Cu-Cr, Cu-Cr-Zr and Cu/Al₂O₃, replacing the pure copper rails of the past. None of these alloys can resist the pitting and other wear effects from repeated railgun firings, however. This has pivoted research towards various coatings that could limit wear instead, such as molybdenum (Mo) or tungsten (W).

Fields of research involve electroplating, cold spraying, supersonic plasma spraying and laser cladding, using a wide variety of coatings. The authors note however that these rail coatings have only begun to be investigated, with success anything but assured.

Defensive Benefits

USS Iowa (BB-61) Fires a full broadside of nine 16/50 and six 5/38 guns during a target exercise near Vieques Island, Puerto Rico, 1 July 1984. (Source: US Navy)
Quite recently railguns have surged to the forefront in the news cycle courtesy of certain ill-informed fantasies that also involve destroyers which identify as battleships. In these feverish battleship dreams, railguns would act as a kind of super-charged version of the 16″ main guns of the Iowa-class, the last active battleships in history.

Instead of 16″ shells that ponderously arc towards their decidedly doomed target, these railguns would instead send a projectile at a zippy 2-3 km/s towards a target. As tempting as this seems, the big issue is as we have seen of repeatability. The Iowas originally had a barrel life of a few hundred shots before their liner had to be replaced, but this got bumped up to basically ‘infinite’ shots after some changes to their chemical propellant.

A single Mark 7 16″ naval gun fires twice per minute, and this is multiplied by nine if all three turrets are used. The range of projectiles launched included high-explosive, armor-penetrating, and even nuclear shell options, with a range of 39 km (21 nmi) at a leisurely ~800 m/s. To compete with this, a naval railgun would need to be able to keep up a similar firing rate, feature a similar barrel or at least acceptable barrel life, and have a longer range for a similar payload effect.

At this point railguns score pretty poorly on all these counts. Although range of a projectile falls between that of a missile and a Mark 7 naval gun’s projectile, barrel life is still poor, power usage remains very high and the available projectiles at this point in time are basically just relying on their kinetic energy to cause harm, limiting their functionality.

Taking all of this into account, it would seem that the Japanese approach using railguns as a very responsive, close-in weapon is extremely sensible. By keeping the design as small-caliber as possible, reducing rail current, and not caring about range as long as you can hit that hypersonic anti-ship missile, they seem to be keeping rail erosion to a minimum.

Since the average missile tends to perform rather poorly after a 40 mm hole appears through it, courtesy of it briefly sharing the same physical space with a tungsten projectile, this might just be the defensive weapon niche that rail guns can fill.

hackaday.com/2026/02/24/railgu…

It’s quite the understatement to say that at this point in time we don’t quite understand how even the tiniest brain works exactly. Much of this is due to the sheer complexity and scale of these little biological marvels: with the human brain packing billions of neurons and their associated supportive scaffolding into a few kilograms of gooey pink-white mass, the sheer connectivity density is more than we can reasonably hope to measure in-situ. Ergo attempts to recreate digital simulations of small sections of such brains, a process that’s making gradual progress.

Most recently we have been doing mapping of neurons and their connections in the brain of the humble fruitfly, D. melanogaster. Despite their brains being minuscule, with only about 140,000 neurons and 50 million connections, we’re not quite at the level where we can have a simulated fruitfly brain spark to life. This should probably give us some hints as to the sheer complexity of mapping the human brain, never mind simulating even a small part like a cubic millimeter of the temporal cortex with about 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses.

Even once you have all the connectome data of such a bit of brain, it’s not like you can just toss it onto a supercomputer and expect a meaningful simulation. All supercomputers today are massively parallel, meaning thousands of networked computers that require the computing task to be split up and all communication between nodes restricted as much as possible to not starve nodes.

(Credit: Bruno Golosio et al., 2025)
In the paper, these challenges are addressed and a model suggested that should provide the best possible optimization for such a simulation. Both point-to-point and collective communication are investigated on the NVIDIA A100 GPU-equipped supercomputer.

Based on their findings they conclude that the entire 6 MW-rated Leonardo Booster supercomputer with its 3,456 nodes could simulate a model with about 3.5 · 10¹³ connections, roughly 10% of that of the human cortex if assuming random connectivity. A more realistic model would feature more directed mapping that could be more efficient.

Regardless of this, their conclusion that an optimal design would be a hybrid, with both point-to-point communication for local spikes and collective communication for long-range communication, seems valid. For now it would seem that simulating an entire human brain is still far beyond the realm of possibilities, but we might actually have a shot at simulating the fruitfly brain on a modern supercomputer in the near future.

hackaday.com/2026/02/24/the-ch…

If you’ve been to a wedding or a downtown coffee shop in the last 10 years, you’ve probably seen those little lightboxes that are so popular these days. They consist of letters placed on a plastic frame in front of a dim white light, and they became twee about five minutes after your hipster friend first got one. However, they can also make a neat basis for an LED display, as [Folkert van Heusden] demonstrates.

The build is straightforward enough, using daisy chains of 32×8 LED matrix modules, two each for the three rows of the lightbox. This provides for a 24 character textual display, or a total display resolution of 64 x 24 pixels. An ESP8266 is used to command the matrixes, which are run by MAX7219 display controllers. Thanks to the microcontroller’s onboard wireless hardware, the display can be addressed in a number of ways, such as using the LedFX DDP protocol or [Folkert’s] Pixel Yeeter python library. Files are on GitHub for the curious.

Quite a few of these exist out in the wild — [Folkert] has built a variety of modded lightboxes over the years with varying internals. The benefit of the lightbox is that it effectively acts as a handy housing for LED matrixes and supporting electronics, while also providing a neat diffuser effect. The lightboxes are also readily wall mountable and generally look more like an intentional piece of signage than most things we might homebrew in the lab.

We’ve featured similar-looking builds before, like this public transit display that was hacked for custom use. If you’re building your own public information boards or other nifty LED displays, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline!

hackaday.com/2026/02/24/modded…

The demoscene is still alive and well, and the proof is in this truly awe-inspiring game demo by [daivuk] : a Quake-like “boomer shooter” squeezed into a Windows executable of only 64 kB he calls “QUOD”. We’ve included the full explanation video below, but before you check out all the technical details, consider playing the game. It’ll make his explanations even more impressive.

OK, what’s so impressive? Well, aside from the fact that this is a playable 3D shooter in 64kB, with multiple enemies, multiple levels, oodles of textures, running, jumping et cetera–it’s so Quake-like he’s using TrenchBroom to make the levels. Of course he’s reprocessing them into a more space-efficient, optimized format. Yeah, unlike the famous .kkrieger and a lot of other demos in the 64kB space, this isn’t all procedurally generated. [daivuk] did make his own image editing program for procedurally generated textures, though. Which makes sense: as a PNG, the QUOD logo is probably half the size of the (compressed) executable.

The low-poly models are created in Blender, and all created to be symmetric–having the engine mirror the meshes saves 50% of the vertex data. . Blender is just exporting half of a low-poly mesh; just as he wrote his own image editor, he has his own bespoke model tool. This allows tiling model elements, as well as handling bones and poses to keyframe the model’s animation.

Audio is treated similarly to textures and meshes: built up at runtime from stored data and a layered series of effects. When you realize all the sounds were put together in his sound tool from square and sine waves, it makes it very impressive. He’s also got an old-style tracker to create the music. All of these tools output byte arrays that get embedded directly in the game code.

The video also gets into some of his optimization techniques; we like his use of a map file and analyzing it with a python tool to find the exact size of game elements and test his optimizations thereby. One thing he notes is that his optmizations are all for space, not for speed. Except, perhaps, for one thing: [daivuk] created a new language and virtual machine for the game, which seems downright extravagant. It actually makes sense, though, as the virtual machine can be optimized for the limits of the game, as he explains starting at about 20 minutes into the video. Apparently it saved a whole 2kB, which seems like nothing these days but actually let [daivuk] fit an extra level into his 64kB limit. Sure, it’s still bigger than Quake13k–and how did we never cover that?–but you get a lot more game, too.

So, to recap: [daivuk] didn’t just make a game with an impressively tiny size on disk, he made the entire toolchain, and a language for it to boot. If you think this is overoptimized, check out Wolfenstien in 600 lines of AWK. Of course in spite of the 1980s file size, this needs modern hardware to run. You can get surprising graphics performance from a fraction of that, like this ATtiny sprite engine.

Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip, which probably took up more than 64kB on our tips line.

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hackaday.com/2026/02/23/quod-i…

The Industrial Revolution was powered by steam, with boilers being a crucial part of each steam engine, yet also one of the most dangerous elements due to the high pressures involved. The five Lancashire boilers at the Claymills Pumping Station are relatively benign in this regard, as they operate at a mere 80 PSI unlike e.g. high-pressure steam locomotives that can push 200 – 300 PSI. This doesn’t mean that refurbishing one of these boilers is an easy task and doesn’t involve plugging a lot of leaks, as the volunteers at this pumping station found out.

At this Victorian-era pumping station there are a total of five of these twin-flue Lancashire boilers, all about 90 years old after a 1930s-era replacement, with them all gradually being brought back into service. The subject of the video is boiler 1, which was last used in 1971 before the pumping station was decommissioned. Boilers 2 and 3 were known to be in a pretty bad condition, and they needed a replacement for boiler 5 as it was about to go down for maintenance soon.

Although the basic idea behind a Lancashire boiler is still to boil water to create steam, it’s engineered to do this as efficiently as possible to save fuel. This is why it has two flues where the burning coal deposits its thermal energy, which then goes on to heat the surrounding water. The resulting pressure from the steam also means that there are a lot of safeties to ensure that things do not get too spicy.

Thus after removing lots of scale, grime and general detritus from decades of neglect, these safeties were all inspected and repaired or replaced as needed. Following this it was time for the hydraulic pressure test, which simulates the pressure from steam, but without all the fuss and lethal dangers. This took a few tries and a number of leaks, issues with old piping and ominous creaking, but eventually the boiler hit the 1.5x safety margin of 120 PSI and stayed there for the required thirty minutes without further issues.

This clears boiler 1 for its official inspection by a boiler inspector who will sign off on it being taken back into use, and allowing this boiler to resume what it was doing up till that day in 1971 when the pump station was decommissioned.

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If you want to reverse engineer a PC board, you could do worse than X-ray it. But thanks to [Philip Giacalone], you could just take a photo, load it into PCB Tracer, and annotate the images. You can see a few of a series of videos about the system below.

The tracer runs in your browser. It can let you mark traces, vias, components, and pads. You can annotate everything as you document it, and it can even call an AI model to help generate a schematic from the net list.

This is one of those things that you could do without. Any photo editor could do the same thing. But having the tool aware of what the photo is showing makes life easier. The built-in features are free, but if you use the AI tool, he says it will cost you about a half-dollar per schematic (paid to the AI company).

Even if you don’t think you need to reverse-engineer anything, you may still find this useful if you are trying to understand a board for repair. We’ve had a good Supercon/Remoticon talk about PCB reverse engineering you can watch. If you want to see what a real X-ray of a board looks like, here you go.

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You wake up in the middle of the night. Is it time to get up? Well, you can look at the nightstand clock. Unless your partner is in the way. Whoops. Even then, without your glasses, the time is just a fuzzball of light. You could ask Alexa, but that’s sure to wake your partner, too. The answer is a projection clock. In its modern form, it shoots a digital time display on a wall or ceiling with digits so large that you don’t need your glasses. If you can see the ceiling, you can tell what time it is.

New Tech

A modern invention, of course. No, not really. According to [Roger Russel], a UK patent in 1909 used an analog clock face and lightbulbs to project the clock face and hands on the ceiling. Unfortunately, [Roger’s] website is no more, but the Wayback Machine is on the job. You can see a device of the same type at the British Museum.
A modern projection clock on the ceiling.
In 1938, [Leendert Prins] filed for a patent on a similar projection clock. Sometimes known as “ceiling clocks” or “night clocks,” these devices often have a regular clock visible as well as a way to project the time. In the old days, this was often an image of a translucent analog clock lit up by light bulbs. In the modern era, it is almost always either LEDs or an LCD with a halogen backlight. Of course, there are many variations. A clock might use numbers on a rotating drum with a lamp behind it, for example.

Development

It isn’t hard to imagine someone putting a pocket watch in a magic lantern as a prototype. In general, some bright light source has to pass through a condenser lens. The light then travels through the LCD or translucent clock face. Finally, a projector lens expands the image.

We couldn’t find much about the actual history of old projection clocks outside of [Roger’s] defunct website. But if you can project an image and build a clock, all you need is the idea to combine them.

Teardowns

Want to get one and tear it open to see how it works? You don’t have to since [Soudnmisen] and [svetnovinek.cz] already did that for you, as you can see in the videos below.

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Of course, what you project doesn’t have to be just the time. We’ve seen clocks that can project the weather, for example. But, usually, all you need in the middle of the night is the time.

DIY

Clocks are always a fun project, and a projection clock is certainly in the realm of a homebrew project. You could use a lot of methods to form the clock face, or, like [OSO POLAR MOVIES] did in the video below, just shine a light on your analog clock. Sure, that’s cheating, but it is certainly a hack.

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If you prefer, try an LCD. Or a VFD. If you want to go analog and can’t put together a translucent clock face, try making a clock face from a mirror. You can remove the marks and numbers so they don’t reflect, and then use normal clock hands, which will block light just fine. You’ll just have to reverse the clock movement to run backwards, but that’s easy, too.

How about you? What strange method would you use to draw the time on the ceiling? A laser and a galvo come to mind. A tiny CRT? Then again, you could just mount a giant display on your ceiling. That’s how they did it at a Kentucky library. Let us know your plans in the comments, and when you have it done, send us a tip.

hackaday.com/2026/02/23/tech-i…

IT'S MONDAY, AND THIS IS DIGITAL POLITICS. I'm Mark Scott, and you find me in the Geneva airport after a weekend spent in the extremely snowy French alps. For those of you in Brussels, I'm in town until Thursday. Let's grab coffee.

— Europe's online safety community gathered in the Dutch city last week. The two-day meeting showed what was, and what was not, working with Europe's digital rulebook.

— India's AI Impact summit is now over. The international meeting was more trade show and lobbying fest than anything meaningful on AI governance.

— One-third of American teenagers use some form of AI chatbot at least once a day.

Let's get started:

digitalpolitics.co/newsletter0…

You can get an IDE to USB bridge from all the usual sources, but you may find those fail on the older drives in your collection– apparently they require drives using logical block addressing, which did not become standard until the mid-1990s. Some while some older drives got in on the LBA game early, you were more likely to see Cylinder-Head-Sector (CHS) addressing. That’s why [JJ Dasher], a.k.a [redruM0381] created ATABoy, an open-source IDE bridge that can handle the oldest drives that fit on the bus.

The heart of the build is an RP2350, which serves as both IDE and USB host controller. To computer, after a little bit of setup, the drive attached to ATABoy shows up as a regular USB mass storage device. A little bit of setup is to be expected with drives of this vintage, you may remember. Luckily [JJ] included a handy BIOS-themed configuration utility that can be accessed through any serial console. He says you’ll usually be able to get away with “Auto Detect & Set Geometry,” but if you need to plug in the CHS values yourself, well, it’ll feel just like old times. Seeing is believing, so check it out in the demo video embedded below.

Though the custom PCB has a USB-C connector, and the USB-C standard could provide enough power for ye olde spinning rust drives, [JJ] didn’t include any power delivery with ATABoy. If you’re using it with a desktop, you can use the PSU in the box; MOLEX hasn’t changed. If you’re on a laptop, you’ll need another power supply– perhaps this USB-C powered benchtop unit.

If you’re using a Raspberry Pi or similar SBC, go ahead and skip USB entirely–the GIPO can do PATA IDE.

youtube.com/embed/XUmxxTCaCM4?…

hackaday.com/2026/02/23/ataboy…

You wake up in the middle of the night. Is it time to get up? Well, you can look at the nightstand clock. Unless your partner is in the way. Whoops. Even then, without your glasses, the time is just a fuzzball of light. You could ask Alexa, but that’s sure to wake your partner, too. The answer is a projection clock. In its modern form, it shoots a digital time display on a wall or ceiling with digits so large that you don’t need your glasses. If you can see the ceiling, you can tell what time it is.

New Tech

A modern invention, of course. No, not really. According to [Roger Russel], a UK patent in 1909 used an analog clock face and lightbulbs to project the clock face and hands on the ceiling. Unfortunately, [Roger’s] website is no more, but the Wayback Machine is on the job. You can see a device of the same type at the British Museum.
A modern projection clock on the ceiling.
In 1938, [Leendert Prins] filed for a patent on a similar projection clock. Sometimes known as “ceiling clocks” or “night clocks,” these devices often have a regular clock visible as well as a way to project the time. In the old days, this was often an image of a translucent analog clock lit up by light bulbs. In the modern era, it is almost always either LEDs or an LCD with a halogen backlight. Of course, there are many variations. A clock might use numbers on a rotating drum with a lamp behind it, for example.

Development

It isn’t hard to imagine someone putting a pocket watch in a magic lantern as a prototype. In general, some bright light source has to pass through a condenser lens. The light then travels through the LCD or translucent clock face. Finally, a projector lens expands the image.

We couldn’t find much about the actual history of old projection clocks outside of [Roger’s] defunct website. But if you can project an image and build a clock, all you need is the idea to combine them.

Teardowns

Want to get one and tear it open to see how it works? You don’t have to since [Soudnmisen] and [svetnovinek.cz] already did that for you, as you can see in the videos below.

youtube.com/embed/Qx1g9rg_VtM?…

youtube.com/embed/67e5qZqoaPw?…

Of course, what you project doesn’t have to be just the time. We’ve seen clocks that can project the weather, for example. But, usually, all you need in the middle of the night is the time.

DIY

Clocks are always a fun project, and a projection clock is certainly in the realm of a homebrew project. You could use a lot of methods to form the clock face, or, like [OSO POLAR MOVIES] did in the video below, just shine a light on your analog clock. Sure, that’s cheating, but it is certainly a hack.

youtube.com/embed/wxgGuD5Fpr8?…

If you prefer, try an LCD. Or a VFD. If you want to go analog and can’t put together a translucent clock face, try making a clock face from a mirror. You can remove the marks and numbers so they don’t reflect, and then use normal clock hands, which will block light just fine. You’ll just have to reverse the clock movement to run backwards, but that’s easy, too.

How about you? What strange method would you use to draw the time on the ceiling? A laser and a galvo come to mind. A tiny CRT? Then again, you could just mount a giant display on your ceiling. That’s how they did it at a Kentucky library. Let us know your plans in the comments, and when you have it done, send us a tip.

hackaday.com/2026/02/23/tech-i…

One of the issues with nuclear power plants is that they produce long-lived radioactive waste. Storing spent nuclear fuel is a real problem. However, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility have made strides not only to produce more electricity from spent fuel but also to break it down into shorter-lived nuclear waste. [Aman Tripathi] shares the details about NEWTON, a program to fire high-energy protons at a target to produce a flood of neutrons that can interact with nuclear waste. You can read the original press release, too.

Short-lived, of course, is a relative term. Unprocessed spent fuel may be dangerous for about 100,000 years. After the proposed processing, the danger period is down to “only” 300 years. On the plus side, the process generates a lot of heat, which you can convert to electricity in the usual way.

While 300 years is a long time, it isn’t difficult to imagine storing waste for that period of time. So why isn’t this a no-brainer? The process is not efficient. You need cryogenic cooling for superconducting, although there is work to make higher-temperature alternatives.

The other hurdle is power usage. You probably have a microwave oven with a magnetron. The magnetron in this project needs 10 megawatts of power. Researchers hope to process all of the US nuclear waste within the next 30 years.

If you haven’t heard of Jefferson Labs, don’t feel bad. But their YouTube channel is full of fun physics demos that would work well in a science class or with any group of kids. For example, check out “Can it Roll” below.

If you think locking up waste for 100,000 years is easy, keep in mind the oldest Egyptian pyramid is about 5,000 years old. Another alternative is to find a way to use the waste, but that can be challenging as well.

youtube.com/embed/absubDqxQLk?…

hackaday.com/2026/02/23/nuclea…

Automotive airbags are key safety devices that aim to reduce injuries and mortality in the event of motor vehicle accidents. These rapidly-inflating cushions act to soften the blow of an impact, catching occupants of the vehicle and preventing them from hitting hard parts of the vehicle’s interior.

Airbags are rigorously tested to perform as faultlessly as possible under all conditions. However, no system is perfect, and every automotive component has an expected service life. The question is—how old is too old when it comes to airbags? The answer is not exactly straightforward.

What’s My Age Again?

Airbags first hit the market in the 1970s, but it was in the 1980s that the technology became more widely available on mass market models. Ford was a trailblazer in the US market, fitting airbags to select models like the Tempo from 1985 onwards. Credit: Ford Heritage Archive
Every given component of a car has a lifespan. A set of quality spark plugs might last 100,000 km in service, while an air filter might be rated for a year or two before replacement is due. In some cases, automakers might deem a given component to last the life of the car. A great example is “lifetime” rated transmission fluid, where the automaker doesn’t expect it to ever need to be changed. That’s not because the fluid lasts forever, but because they expect the car to be scrapped before the fluid is no longer serviceable. Oftentimes, automakers have gotten this guess wrong, and owners find themselves struggling to change the fluid on transmissions that were never designed to allow such replacement. Generally, this attitude is because automakers aren’t incentivised to consider how their vehicles run in the years after the factory warranty has run out.

As far as airbags are concerned, they’ve generally been treated as a component that is expected to last the life of the vehicle. If the engine is running and the doors are still on, the airbags should be fine, goes the thinking. Barring exceptional cases like Takata’s deadly malfunctioning airbags, of course. The problem is that what an automaker considers a vehicle’s useful lifetime is often not the same as the owner’s own opinion. A luxury automaker doesn’t think you’ll still be driving today’s newest model in ten year’s time, while a vintage car enthusiast might still be happily driving a 30-year-old car in 2026.

We know, just from observation, that airbags in ten-year-old cars are still perfectly functional in the vast majority of cases. However, we’re now getting to the point where there are cars with airbags that are hitting their 30th and 40th birthdays, and they’re still on the road. Owners of these vehicles are starting to wonder if they can trust the somewhat explosive devices that are, in many cases, aimed directly at the face.
A steering wheel from an airbag-equipped model of the NA Mazda Miata. The popular sports car is notable for being equipped with airbags in some territories, like California, while featuring no airbags in areas where they were not yet required in the early 1990s. Credit: @toasty.cx, provided
Airbags were first developed in the 1960s, and reached production cars in the mid-1970s. They would grow in prominence in the 1980s, before eventually becoming mandatory in major markets like the US in the mid-1990s. Take any automaker producing a car with airbags in 1985, for example. It probably wasn’t particularly concerned with how that car would perform in 2026. A fair call, perhaps, given the vast majority of vehicles built in that year have since left the roads, but it’s an active concern for those who do own the dwindling members of the class of 1985.

The problem we have in this regard is that, for most vehicles, we just don’t know how the airbags hold up over those sort of timeframes. This sort of testing is a difficult thing to do. There are accelerated aging techniques that can be used to test some types of equipment, but they’re not always applicable and are an estimation at best. If you’re building a car in 1985, you can make some assumptions do some calculations that suggest your airbag will last for a given timespan after manufacture, and that’s about as good as it gets.

We do have some data on hand. It’s limited, but it gives us a guide as to how airbags are performing in the wild. In the mid-1990s, IIHS tested a couple of 1973 Chevrolet Impalas in and found that these ancient, early airbags performed okay in a simple crash test. Technology has only improved since then, so one would assume many of our more modern airbags would perform well over even longer time periods. Meanwhile, queries made to manufacturers by Edmunds indicated that the industry widely believes older airbags to be still functional over extended time periods. Hence the lack of service intervals or mandated regular inspections for these devices.
A Mercedes-Benz steering wheel from 1992, cut away to show the airbag assembly. Note the folded airbag material sitting in front of the propellant charges. Mercedes-Benz has stated that prior to January 1992, its airbags had a 15-year service life. Newer airbags in vehicles manufactured after this date are not required to be replaced, according to the manufacturer. Credit: Mercedes-Benz archives
Notably, Mercedes-Benz is one automaker that spells out airbag lifetimes quite clearly—and not every example from the German automaker gets a “good forever” rating. Speaking to Hagerty, the automaker noted that the company’s earlier airbags in vehicles sold prior to January 1992 are rated for a service life of just 15 years. Those vehicles would have been due for airbag replacements in 2007 at the latest. Replacement dates were listed on stickers placed on the vehicle on these models. However, Mercedes-Benz vehicles produced after this date have airbags with no service life limit, and are “not required to be replaced.” This, of course, does not count the limited number of models built with Takata airbags, which were subject to recall just as were models from many other automakers.

The industry line is that old airbags are fine. We also don’t have a lot of evidence to suggest that airbags in popular 1980s and 1990s models are hurting anyone just yet. For those reasons, if you do have an older car, a wise gambler would probably say you’re better off leaving it alone rather than being all paranoid and ripping the airbag out.

Can We Learn More?

Modern airbag systems are expected to last the lifetime of the vehicle, which is, unfortunately, a poorly defined amount of time. Regardless, airbags in older vehicles are yet to prove dangerous en masse, outside of outlier events like the Takata scandal. Credit: BMW
Vague assertions that airbags are mostly okay forever may not assuage your fears when you’re sitting behind the window of your kinda-junky 1999 Honda Prelude on a sunny day in 2041. Sure, the NHTSA isn’t ringing alarm bells about 90s cars maiming people in highway accidents just yet, but who knows what another decade or two will bring. Is there anything more to be done?

Sitting here in 2026, we could try and collect data today on how old airbags are holding up. However, there are some logistical hurdles that would make this relatively difficult. You could purchase a bunch of airbags from scrapped cars that are 30 or 40 years old, test fire them in an instrumented laboratory, and determine if they operated safely. Or you could simply run crash tests with old cars. However, such an effort would be hugely expensive and time-intensive. Beyond the engineering staff required and the cost of purchasing old vehicles, to get useful data, you’d have to test lots of cars. If you test a single 1984 Ford Tempo and find the airbags are bad after 40 years, you don’t really know if it’s one bad example or if the airbags in all the cars are bad. You’d really need to test a bunch of Ford Tempos to get a better idea, perhaps 10 or even 100 cars. Even then, the data would still be very limited in application. You’d have found that Ford Tempo airbags from 1984 were okay, but what about when Ford switched to a new inflator design in 1989? What about the larger Ford models, or any of the thousands of other airbags in other models from other manufacturers? Each design could perform differently over time, based on conditions of manufacture, how well the airbags are sealed, and the type of propellant used.
The airbag inflators are not the only components that must remain stable and functional over decades. Similarly, the control modules responsible for firing the airbags must also work otherwise the airbags themselves are useless. Credit: BMW
The issue doesn’t even stop with the airbags themselves. They must be triggered by a dedicated electronic module which detects a vehicle impact and determines when and how to fire the airbags in the vehicle. One thing we do know is that a lot of 40-year-old electronics start to fail when their capacitors leak or dry out, to say nothing of other age-related failure modes due to vibration or heat cycles. For an airbag to work, both the inflator and the control system need to be fully functional.

Ultimately, you’ll never quite know if your airbags are going to work until they do… or don’t. But the best indications we have are that the majority of automotive airbags are proving functional and reliable over long periods of time. There may be a day sometime soon when we learn that those old airbags from the 1980s and 1990s are no longer to be trusted, and that will be the time to start dealing more carefully with vehicles of that vintage. For now, though, it seems the safest move is to leave well enough alone, and trust that even a decades-old airbag will still do the job safely and effectively.

hackaday.com/2026/02/23/how-sa…

Even entry-level oscilloscopes today have simple math functions such as adding or subtracting two channels. But as [Arthur Pini] notes, more advanced scopes can now even do integration and differentiation. He writes about using these tools to make measurements on capacitors and inductors. The post in EDN is worth a read, even if your scope doesn’t offer this sort of math yet.

It makes sense that capacitors and inductors would benefit from this feature. After all, the current through a capacitor, for example, is proportional to the rate of change in the voltage across it. That’s a derivative. Since the scope can measure voltages, it can also differentiate to find the current.

The same idea applies to inductors, where the current through an inductor is related to the integral of the voltage across it. It is a simple matter to measure the voltages and perform an integration to determine the current.

All of this, of course, relates to differential equations and calculus. While calculus has a reputation for being hard, it actually makes sense if you want to work with quantities that change over time. Once you realize that a sine wave is just a fixed spot on a rotating wheel, everything comes together nicely. You could, of course, grab discrete samples from any scope and use numerical methods to get the same results. But it is much easier if your scope can do it for you.

hackaday.com/2026/02/23/calcul…

For a little over two thousand years, the primary light sources after the sun had set were oil lamps and candles. This was well before the age of fossil fuels, so these oil lamps were often fueled with a labor-intensive agricultural product like olive oil. Candles were similarly difficult to make, made from tallow, beeswax, or even butter. Labor and materials costs aside, though, there’s a surprising amount of energy in these fuels and [Maciej Nowak Projects] has a generator that help these ancient light sources generate some electricity on the side.

The generator is based around a piece of technology called a thermoelectric generator (TEG), which produces a voltage potential when placed in a temperature gradient. These aren’t new technologies, but their typically low efficiencies limit where they can be effectively used. In this case, however, [Maciej Nowak] has gone to great effort to boost this efficiency as high as possible by using a huge radiator on the cool side of the TEG and another one on the hot side, which in this case is heated by a small tea candle. The electricity produced is sent to a tiny DC converter which regulates the voltage to 3.3V, which then powers two custom-built pedestal lamps on either side of the TEG, each with a high-efficiency LED mounted to a custom-made circuit board.

Although this is certainly not the first time a TEG has been set up to run a small lighting system, we do appreciate this one for its polish, design, and high efficiency. It would make a fitting addition to anyone’s emergency power outage kit as it really increases the amount of available light produced from any given candle. When taken to the extreme, though, thermoelectric generators can be made to produce a surprising amount of energy, provided they are placed in the right environment.

youtube.com/embed/otO8N4E_zgc?…

hackaday.com/2026/02/23/a-cand…