If you have a TV and a Pi, you have the workings of a media center, and you’re not exactly short on options for software. But options are good, so here’s one more by [Anthony Caccese] — a player called 240-MP that explicitly targets CRTs with its retro stylings, released under the GPLv3 license.

Don’t let the name fool you, though. While the blue-and-white styling is very evocative of 90s VCRs, the output isn’t limited to 240p. If you’re running it into a vintage CRT over composite, as [Anthony] does, sure, it’ll do that. If you want to use HDMI on a modern TV, however, that’s an option too, in 4K if that’s your jam. Higher resolution video will need a beefier Pi, of course, but MPV can handle the files, and ultimately this is a wrapper for MPV. You still get the vintage styling, which can do green-and-black as easily as white-and-blue, as well as whatever custom color scheme you want to define. It might not look quite as good if it’s not on a display tube, but we could see this as a good fit for a plasma TV, too.

As you can see in the demo video embedded below, the player is equally happy listing and playing local files — including playlists — or streaming via a PLEX server. Other add-ons, for example to launch emulators, may be forthcoming. Of course, if you’re not willing to wait you could always code them yourself.

Given the roots of this project in old VHS interfaces, we’re somewhat surprised there doesn’t seem to be an option for control via physical tokens. We’ve already seen projects that try and replicate that portion of the VCR magic, though. If it’s not the tapes you miss from back in the day, you can also simulate cable TV.

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hackaday.com/2026/06/10/pi-med…

At various times in the history of desktop computing, the market has stubbornly refused to follow the path dictated for it by a dominant manufacturer. IBM’s move to MCA in their PS/2 line is one of many examples. Another is Apple’s take on USB a couple of decades ago, when their view of the future lay with Firewire 800. [Pierre Dandumont] has revisited a Power Mac G4 from that era and unleashed what Apple never did back in the day: a USB 2.0 port. (French language, Google Translate).

The hack lies in Apple shipping the machine with an NEC USB 2.0 controller, but only using it for USB 1.1. A PowerPC Linux distro will happily use it for USB 2.0, but Mac OS refused. Replacing the BIOS ROM with an image designed for the same Mac without Firewire 800 cured the problem, but at the expense of being so we’re told irreversible.

An obscure set of Macs from the early 2000s with an odd combination of hardware and OS may not count for much in 2026, but back in the day having USB 2.0 was a big deal and this would really have mattered. We like it that he put this together, even if the chances of having a G4 on the Hackaday desktop probably isn’t too high.

This isn’t the first USB hack we’ve seen for a PowerMac G4.

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The custom APU at the core of Sony’s PlayStation 5 hasn’t just been quietly powering these game consoles, but also made their way onto cryptomining cards around 2023 which are called the BC-250. The APUs on these boards differ from the one found in the PS5 most notably by having two out of eight CPU cores disabled, along with many compute units (CUs) of the iGPU. Now apparently it seems that you can re-enable these CUs per instructions by [duggasco] if you’re feeling adventurous.
The BC-250’s AMD APU in all its glory. (Credit: Lowest Logan, YouTube)
As stated in the project’s README, BC-250 boards come with only 24 out of 40 CUs enabled, but this is not a permanent (e-fuse) thing. Instead you can write to two hardware registers during the GPU driver initialization, something which can be added to for example the Linux kernel module parameters.

Since many of these APUs likely had cores and CUs disabled due to them failing QA during PS5 APU manufacturing, there’s a good chance that some of the CUs truly are bad. Yet as we saw with the AMD Phenom II X3 with a supposedly bad fourth core back in the day, sometimes demand for the ‘defective’ part is high enough that good parts get mixed in as well.

Thus people like [Lowest Logan] decided to give it a shot, demonstrating the use of the patch with Bazzite Linux on a BC-250 system. After a reboot the system does indeed list 40 CUs as being enabled, and running Furmark shows a big boost in performance without any glitches or fire. There is of course thermal throttling, but that is due to the default cooling solution not being designed for running it at full blast.

Incidentally the real PS5 has only 36 active CUs, so this technically makes these unlocked APUs more powerful. With the water cooling solution demonstrated by [Lowest Logan] the thermal throttling is also resolved, showing that you can get a pretty nice gaming system out of these old cryptomining boards if you happen to win the silicon lottery.

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If you are an American of a certain age, you know the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik, beating the United States to orbit. You might even remember ham radio operators tuning into the satellites beeping. But you probably haven’t heard much about the team that built the vehicle, the problems they had, or the clever design choices they made. [Hoog] has a video that details the birth of Sputnik. You can see the video below.

The original plan was to launch a massive space lab, but it proved too ambitious. Keep in mind that in the late 1950s, you didn’t have tiny computers, high-density power sources, or advanced materials, and no one really knew what to expect in the Earth orbit environment. Even the viability of radio from the ground to orbit wasn’t a given. But Sputnik’s 1-watt transmitter did the job.

The event was part of the International Geophysical Year, but despite the agreement of international cooperation, the backdrop of the Cold War made politicians in the United States incite fear among Americans that the “Reds” were able to fly something over the United States both undetected and unopposed. Secretly, the US was pleased, as it wanted to fly spy satellites over the USSR, and this paved the way, since it could hardly complain if the US did the same thing the Soviets had already done.

The whole thing started the space race, which eventually led to the moon landings. It seems impossible that Sputnik was only 69 years ago. That means 70 years ago, there were no manmade satellites orbiting the Earth.

Watching the video, we’d hoped for more details about the internals but there just wasn’t time. However, we’ve covered that before (the main link is dead, but the detail links are still very interesting). The IGY was, for the most part, a great international cooperation, although few of its accomplishments are as memorable as Sputnik.

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When it comes to robots, few are as iconic as Robby. [Ogrinz Labs] has wanted to build one and even examined a real one up for auction to get high-res photos of it. He also combined his designs with some other open-source designs, and it looks good. He’s released his design as a Creative Commons-licensed set of STL files that you, in theory, could print. There are more details and instructions in the video below.

If you are looking for something quick to print for the weekend, this isn’t it. As you might expect, this is a lot to print. The creator admits, too, that it isn’t totally accurate. It has bigger feet, for example, so his feet can fit inside. There are a few other modifications made for different reasons, but only a hard-core Robby enthusiast would notice any of them.

In theory, you can wear the robot as a costume, but at the current height, it doesn’t look like that will work for the creator. Also, the joints that would make things rotate are still forward work, but he’s promised to provide updates.

Robby started out on Forbidden Planet and went on to appear in many other movies and TV shows. Much of the original body was vacuum-formed plastic (an early form of ABS known as Royalite).

Thanks to modern slicers, you can easily print the parts on your printer for later assembly, and the video shows you how. You can select what connectors are used, and while we like the dovetail mode for most of what we do, Robby’s clean surfaces need dowel connectors. We would be really excited to see someone take these files and make a working robot based on the design.

We’ve been watching this project for a while. If you are sorry you missed the auction of the original, you aren’t alone. But we couldn’t have afforded the $5,375,000 price tag anyway.

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For those of us old enough to remember the harrowing days of the early 2020s, alongside another major kerfuffle there was a complete breakdown in global supply chains that led to the 2020-2023 global chip shortage. Unsurprisingly, this pushed many hardware manufacturers into less orthodox approaches, massive BOM changes, and hurried redesigns. One of the results of this era found its way into the hands of the bloke over at the [Playduino] YouTube channel, who was mystified to find two bodge wires in his fancy Saleae logic analyzer.

The reason for popping open the LA was crosstalk between two channels, which was bad enough that it made the unit quite unusable for the intended task. After seeing the cut traces and bodge wires he initially assumed that since he bought it used that the previous owner had modified it, but said person denied having opened it since purchasing it from an official retailer.

This was when he emailed Saleae support to see whether they knew anything. Initially they denied knowing anything about such a modification, but then the CTO emailed back with a long and very detailed confession. As explained in the video, during the aforementioned chip crisis Saleae was forced to rapidly redesign their LAs to use whatever FPGAs and other parts they could still get their hands on.

An initial prototype unit passed their internal tests, so they had a first batch manufactured using PCBs from a different supplier. Despite sending the same Gerber files, the resulting PCBs had ground fill issues that necessitated the observed rework, but due to insufficient testing for crosstalk a total of 406 units made it into the wild.

Sadly he had to return the defective unit for a replacement, making it somewhat hard to let go of such a piece of history. That said, if you want to know whether you’re also one of the lucky remaining 405 LA owners, the CTO provided the affected serial number range: 00200026245 to 00200026675 are affected.

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After recently reviewing a Wattcycle LFP battery sent over by the manufacturer, [Will Prowse] was made aware of some disturbing changes to the internals of batteries received by regular customers. Rather than the nice protected cables, thick solid metal busbars, braided wire and excellent build quality, the units that a regular customer – got as well as the one that [Will] bought off Amazon – all feature something more akin to what you’d find in a budget LFP battery, including a wide variety of LFP cells.

With these LFP batteries generally coming in fully opaque plastic cases, it’s really hard to tell what the internals look like without either going medieval on them or using less intrusive methods such as an X-ray machine. In this case less capable braided cables were replaced with regular cables that in a test showed a much higher voltage drop compared to the braided type.

Along with all the other changes between these batteries, this makes it impossible to rely on any reviews as a customer. [Will] notes that Wattcycle isn’t alone in doing this, and makes the case for more transparent cases for LFP batteries. After all, if you can see at a glance through the transparent case what the cables and wiring looks like, what BMS is installed and even what any LEDs on said BMS PCB are doing.

There are some LFP batteries with such a transparent case already, and with some smaller LFP batteries you can even pop the top off without having to resort to very permanent levels of violence, so this is not a problem without solutions. From a consumer perspective it definitely would be nice to see the internals as literal transparency from the manufacturer’s side, as well as an increased ability to monitor the battery for any thermal, leakage or other issues.

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[Trwmato] wanted to spend more time listening to a normal radio to cut back on phone use. But the programming wasn’t quite right so, of course, the solution was to spin up a custom radio station!

The station in question uses a Pi Zero to poll podcasts and news from RSS feeds and automatically mixes them with local content and sends it out via Bluetooth. An FM transmitter allows it to still work on the FM radio, too. Grabbing podcasts isn’t very difficult, thanks to podget. The real logic is in how long to retain things and creating a playlist that both prioritizes fresh content while not repeating things too often. Did we forget to mention the whole thing is a collection of shell scripts?

We could see this as the start of a cool project to have a “radio station” for a school, organization, or company. It is easy to understand and modify.

We often argue that the much-maligned bash script is sometimes the right tool for the job. You can even do things like critical sections in them.

hackaday.com/2026/06/09/custom…