2026-04-08 10:00:29
Although everyone’s favorite Linux overlord [Linus Torvalds] has been musing on dropping Intel 486 support for a while now, it would seem that this time now has finally come. In a Linux patch submitted by [Ingo Molnar] the first concrete step is taken by removing support for i486 in the build system. With this patch now accepted into the ‘tip’ branch, this means that no i486-compatible image can be built any more as it works its way into the release branches, starting with kernel 7.1.
No mainstream Linux distribution currently supports the 486 CPU, so the impact should be minimal, and there has been plenty of warning. We covered the topic back in 2022 when [Linus] first floated the idea, as well as in 2025 when more mutterings from the side of [Linus] were heard, but no exact date was offered until now.
It remains to be seen whether 2026 is really the year when Linux says farewell to the Intel 486 after doing so for the Intel 386 back in 2012. We cannot really imagine that there’s a lot of interest in running modern Linux kernels on CPUs that are probably older than the average Hackaday reader, but we could be mistaken.
Meanwhile, we got people modding Windows XP to be able to run on the Intel 486, opening the prospect that modern Windows might make it onto these systems instead of Linux in the ultimate twist of irony.
2026-04-08 07:00:45
When LG left the smartphone market, quite a number of strange devices were left behind. While some, like the Wing, made it to consumers, others did not. The strangest of these would have to be their rollable phone concept; a device which would expand by unrolling a portion of the screen like a scroll. This never made it to market, but one managed to make its way to [JerryRigEverything’s] workbench, and we are fortunate enough to see the insides of this strange device.
There are a few interesting tidbits about the device before even entering the device. Very clearly this phone was ready to be sold, with a tidy user interface for expanding the display, and even animated wallpapers which which expand with it. The display, when rolled onto the back of the device, sits behind a glass cover to keep it protected from debris, and can be used to take selfies with the larger sensors of the rear facing cameras. You can also see a bit of the track that the screen rolls on, hinting at what lies inside.
One doesn’t have to get far into a teardown of this phone to find more. A tiny brush hides in the curved corner of the screen rolling mechanism, to keep debris out of the pocket the screen sits inside. This also gives a better look at the aforementioned track system, which guides the display around the corner and keeps it stable and secure.
Further inside, you can see the mechanism which allow the phone to unfurl. Two rather small, but powerful DC motors resting a rack and pinion move the surprisingly strong phone to its full sized state. A number of spring loaded arms provide stability to the mechanism, preventing racking. The mechanism is surprisingly strong, able to push a number of books out of its way. However, if its movement is resisted, it will display a warning that you might damage the phone.
Tearing down a phone that doesn’t exist is not terribly useful, so the focus was very much on the mechanism, with no detours or destructive disassembly. However, if destructive reverse engineering is what your here for, make sure to check out this teardown of a smart LEGO brick next!
2026-04-08 04:00:26
When you’re programming microcontrollers, you’re likely to think in C if you’re old-school, Rust if you’re trendy, or Python if you want it done quick and have resources to spare. What about Go? The programming language, not the game. That’s an option, too, with TinyGo now supporting over 100 different dev boards, along with webASM.
We covered TinyGo back in 2019, but they were just getting started at that point, targeting the Arduino and BBC:micro boards. They’ve grown that list to include everything from most of Adafruit’s fruitful suite of offerings, ESP32s, and even the Nintendo Game Boy Advance. So now you can go program go in Go so you can play go on the go.
The biggest drawback–which is going to be an absolute dealkiller for a lot of applications–is a lack of wireless connectivity support. Claiming to support the ESP8266 while not allowing one to use wifi is a bit of a stretch, considering that’s the whole raison d’être of that particular chip, but it’s usable as a regular microcontroller at least.
They’ve now implemented garbage collection, a selling point for those who like Go, but admit it’s slower in TinyGo compared to its larger cousin and won’t work on AVR chips or in WebAssembly. It’s still not complete Go, however, so just as we reported in 2019, you won’t be able to compile all the standard library packages you might be used to. There are more of them than there were, so progress has been made!
Still, knowing how people get about programming languages, this will please the Go fanatics out there. Others might prefer to go FORTH and program their Arduinos, or to wear out their parentheses keys with LISP. The more the merrier, we say!
2026-04-08 02:30:26
Adding another item on the list of things you probably shouldn’t be trying at home, we got [Brainiac75] giving magnetic levitation a shot using an unmodified induction cooktop and aluminium foil. Although not ferromagnetic, it turns out that aluminium can be made to do interesting things in the magnetic field created by the powerful electromagnet that underlies the induction principle.
Interestingly, although there’s a detection circuit in these units that should detect the presence of an appropriate (ferromagnetic) object, it appears that even a thin sheet of aluminium foil can completely deceive it. The effect is that of a force pushing the foil away from the cooktop’s surface, with foil areas that remain close enough to the ferrite bars on the electromagnet even heating up enough to begin melting the aluminium.
After a bit of fun with various shapes and types of aluminium objects, the video moves on to a scientific explanation of what’s going on. The surface resistivity of the foil is similar enough to ferromagnetic cookware that it fools the sensor, after which the skin effect of aluminium induces a current. This then does the typical Lorentz force things.
2026-04-08 01:15:27
Hackaday Europe is the continental version of the Ultimate Hardware Conference, taking place May 16th and 17th, and you need to be there! We’ll continue to announce speakers and workshops over the next couple weeks, because we got so many more great talks than we had anticipated that we’re negotiating for extra time.
This year, we’re moving to a new venue in Lecco, Italy, and it’s sure to be fantastic. Get your tickets now before it’s too late. And stay tuned for another round of talk reveals next week!
Every drone builder hits the same wall: limited flight time, no good way to bench-test drones without actually flying it, and worrying about a single crash causing catastrophe. This talk is about tearing down all three of those problems.
I’ll discuss Open Gimbal, a hybrid balloon-drone platform, and Janus — a morphing blimp-drone that detects its own balloon failure mid-flight and transitions to quadrotor mode in under half a second. Come find out what it takes to build aerial robots that go beyond the lab.
Troubleshooting is part of a maker’s DNA. Software encounters bugs, circuits short, and parts break — it is an expected part of the process when building something new. But what happens when your project is hundreds of millions of miles away—where you can’t see it, can’t touch it, and can’t press Ctrl-Z? This is the high-stakes world of anomaly resolution in space. This talk will explore how strong ingenuity, creativity, and strong problem solving skills have saved missions from a pre-mature end.
Besides the humble thermometer, a blood pressure monitor is the most common house hold medical device. I will go into an open-source project I developed that measures blood pressure, ECG, SpO2 and auscultations where I go step by step explaining how those signals are analyzed. This would include showing the electronics and signals analysis of pressure waveforms as well as the Pan Tompkins algorithm and how it works for the ECG signal.
Mapping caves presents multiple challenges: there’s no GPS, it can be muddy, wet, cold and tight – not a friendly environment for electronic tools. Cave surveying used to be done using analog tools – handheld compasses and inclinometers and tape measures! In this talk Phil presents the work he has done over the last 20 years to develop electronic cave surveying tools – called the Shetland Attack Pony.
What if a PCB wasn’t just a circuit, but a story prop? Most PCBs are designed for function, efficiency, and cost. But what happens if you start with a story instead? In this talk we’ll see how hardware and firmware decisions can be used to create narrative experiences for tabletop role-playing games. We’ll walk through the design process from concept to KiCad layout to fabrication. And show how electrical behavior can become part of the narrative rather than just a technical implementation detail.
The presentation details the in-depth process of reverse engineering the sensor protocol of the 12-line CCD, how to find out information about proprietary non-public components and implementing it in a portable camera using a Raspberry Pi 5, PIOLib, custom hardware and software capable of capturing extremely high resolution images. In total the process took around one year from the scanner to a functional camera.
In 1977, a 16-pin chip with no RAM, no stack, and a minimalist instruction set replaced racks of relays in industrial control systems. The Motorola MC14500B is a 1-bit CPU built to evaluate ladder logic directly in hardware, with a single-bit result register and discrete input/output lines.
A hands-on dive into industrial computing history and what minimalism can teach us about designing predictable, efficient logic systems.
You will get the opportunity to design and manufacture your own design on an ASIC! You will learn the basics of digital logic, the basics of how semiconductors are designed and made, how to use an online digital design tool to build and simulate a simple design, how to create the GDS files for manufacture on an open-source PDK.
Participants will have the option to submit their designs to be manufactured on the next shuttle as part of the Tiny Tapeout project. Participants will need a laptop. Mouse and headphones are strongly advised. Nothing needs to be downloaded, but good internet is required.
[If you read this far, you probably want tickets. Go get ’em!]
2026-04-07 23:30:51
It is a running gag around here that whenever a project posts, someone will inevitably point out that it could have been done with a 555 timer IC. [Stephen Woodward] went the opposite way and built a simple thermostat using the ubiquitous chip.
To be fair, this isn’t some sophisticated PID controller — it’s basically a bang-bang controller. Since the device has a comparator and the circuits use a thermistor, it seems like a clever but simple idea on the surface. However, there are some neat tricks. For example, if you tie the 555 threshold pin to Vdd, then the trigger pin acts as an inverting analog comparator. Another nice feature: the setpoint depends on a resistance ratio, so there is no need for a precise input voltage reference.
A simple circuit change can switch the circuit to power a heater or a cooler. The chip can handle a surprising amount of power, but for some applications, you may need some output drive circuitry. The simple circuit even has hysteresis, which you can set with a different resistor. Pretty impressive for a cheap chip, two resistors, a thermistor, and a battery.
We’ve seen a lot of strange 555 circuits in our contests. We even had a 555 Timer Contest.
