2026-03-13 19:00:23
ArcaOS is an operating system you might not have heard of, but you will recognize it when we tell you that it’s the direct descendant of IBM’s OS/2. It’s just received a major update, and delivers this persuasive argument for its uptake:
“How about a commercial operating system which doesn’t spy on you, does not report your online activity to anyone, and gives you complete freedom to choose the applications you want to use, however you want to use them?”
We’re guessing that a higher-than-average number of Hackaday readers use open-source operating systems, but in a world in which the commercial OS everyone loves to hate is ever more turning the Play button into the Pay button, we have to admit that’s attractive if you pay for your software.
This update, version 5.1.2, brings support for the very latest UEFI systems to the table, keeping the platform alive in a manner we’d never have guessed would happen back in the 1990s. It’s true it’s a 32-bit system rather than 64-bit, and you’d be unlikely to buy it for your high-end gaming machine, but we remember OS/2 Warp back in the day as being very nice indeed and particularly stable. We’re interested enough to have put in a cheeky request for a review ISO, so should that come off we’d love to give it the Jenny’s Daily Drivers treatment.
ArcaOS has been mentioned here before. Do any of our readers encounter it in your daily lives? We’d love to hear in the comments.
2026-03-13 16:00:59
Fruit bowls have an unavoidable annoyance– not flies and rotten fruit, those would be avoidable if your diet was better. No, it’s that the bowl is never the right size. Either your fruit is sad and lonely in a too-large bowl, or it’s falling out. It’s the kind of existential nightmare that can only be properly illustrated by a late-night infomercial. [Simone Giertz] has a solution to the problem: a shape-changing fruit bowl.
See, it was one thing to make a bowl that could change shape. That was easy, [Simone] had multiple working prototypes. There are probably many ways to do it, but we like [Simone]’s use of an iris mechanism in a flat base to allow radial expansion of the walls. The problem was that [Simone] has that whole designer thing going on, and needs the bowl to be not only functional, but aesthetically pleasing. Oh, and it would be nice if expanding the bowl didn’t create escape routes for smaller fruits, but that got solved many prototypes before it got pretty.
It’s neat to see her design process. Using 3D printing and CNC machining for prototyping is very familiar to Hackaday, but lets be honest — for our own projects, it’s pretty common to stop at “functional”. Watching [Simone] struggle to balance aesthetics with design-for-manufacturing makes for an interesting 15 minutes, if nothing else. Plus she gives us our inspirational quote of the day: “As much as I feel like I’m walking in circles, I know that product development is a spiral”. Something to keep in mind next time it seems like you’re going around the drain in your own projects. Just be warned, she does have a bit of a potty mouth.
We’ve featured [Simone]’s design decisions here, if you’re interested in seeing how she goes the rest of the way from project to product. We’re pretty sure her face-slapping-alarm clock never made it into the SkyMall catalog, though.
2026-03-13 13:00:47
America knew it as the Nintendo Entertainment System, but in Japan, it was the Family Computer (Famicom). It was more than just a home console—it was intended to actually do a whole lot more. All you had to do was plug in the keyboard and chuck in the right Family BASIC cartridge, and you had a computer hooked up to your TV! [Lucas Leadbetter] came across an old Family BASIC keyboard recently, and set about making it more useful in our modern age with a simple USB upgrade.
[Lucas] started with research, and soon found plenty of schematics and details on the keyboard on the NESdev wiki page. Hunting further turned up a video from [Circuit Rewind], who demonstrated how to hook up the keyboard to a Raspberry Pi Pico, including how to interface with the onboard chips to scan the keys. These resources told [Lucas] enough to get going—and that it should be as simple as wiring some custom hardware up to the internal keyboard matrix connector to get it speaking to USB.
[Lucas] went a slightly different path to [Circuit Rewind], implementing the popular QMK firmware to suit the Family Basic keyboard on an Adafruit KB2040. The Adafruit part is basically an RP2040 microcontroller slapped onto a tiny PCB in a form factor that’s ideal for making custom keyboards. [Lucas] was able to reimplement the scanning logic that [Circuit Rewind] had reverse engineered previously, and had the keyboard up and running in short order with all the usability benefits of the QMK firmware. Files are on Github for those eager to recreate the work.
As far as usability goes, [Lucas] notes that the Family BASIC keyboard is more of a conversation piece than a daily driver, thanks to its rather poor feel. Duly noted. We’ve explored how software development is done in Family BASIC before, too. Video after the break.
2026-03-13 10:00:17
Last year, we brought you a story about the BhangmeterV2, an internet-of-things nuclear war monitor. With a cold-war-era HSN-1000 nuclear event detector at its heart, it had one job: announce to everything else on the network than an EMP was inbound, hopefully with enough time to shut down electronics. We were shocked to find out that the HSN-1000 detector was still available at the time, but that time has now passed. Fortunately [Bigcrimping] has stepped up to replicate the now-unobtainable component at the heart of his build with his BHG-2000 Nuclear Event Detector — but he needs your help to finish the job.
The HSN-1000, as reported previously, worked by listening for the characteristic prompt gamma ray pulse that is the first sign of a nuclear blast. The Vela Satellites that discovered Gamma Ray Bursts were watching for the same thing, though almost certainly not with that specific component. With the HSN-1000 unavailable, [Bigcrimping] decided he might as well make his own gamma ray detector, using four BPW34S PIN diodes coated with black paint. The paint blocks all visible light that might trigger photocurrent inside diode, but not Gamma Rays, while using four acts increases the area and may inadvertently act as a sort of coincident detector. You wouldn’t want your homemade Dead Hand to be triggered by a cosmic ray, would you?
That tiny photocurrent is then amplified by a transimpedance amplifier based on the LTC6244 op-amp, which then goes into a second-stage based on a LT1797 op amp that drives a LOW pulse to indicate an event has occurred. [Bigcrimping] fit all of this onto a four-layer PCB that is a pin-compatible replacement for the HSN-1000L event detector called for in his BhangmeterV2.
There’s only one problem: without exposing this thing to gamma rays, we really don’t know if it will work. [Bigcrimping] is looking for anyone in Europe with a Cs-137 or Co-60 source willing to help out with that. His contact info is on the GitHub page where the entire project is open sourced. Presumably a nuclear detonation would work for calibration, too, but we at Hackaday are taking the bold and perhaps controversial editorial stance that nuclear explosions are best avoided. If the Bhangmeter– which we wrote up here, if you missed it–or some equivalent does warn you of a blast, do you know where to duck and cover?
2026-03-13 07:00:05
Air hockey is one of those sports that’s both incredibly fun, but also incredibly frustrating as playing it by yourself is a rather lonely and unfulfilling experience. This is where an air hockey playing robot like the one by [Basement Builds] could come in handy. After all, after you finished building an air hockey table from scratch, how hard could it be to make a robot that merely moves the paddle around to hit the puck with?
An air hockey table is indeed not extremely complicated, being mostly just a chamber that has lots of small holes on the top through which the air is pushed. This creates the air layer on which the puck appears to float, and allows for super-fast movement. For this part countless chamfered holes were drilled to get smooth airflow, with an inline 12VDC duct fan providing up to 270 CFM (~7.6 m3/minute).
Initially the robot used a CoreXY gantry configuration, which proved to be unreliable and rather cumbersome, so instead two motors were used, each connected to its own gearbox. These manipulate the paddle position by changing the geometry of the arms. Interestingly, the gearbox uses TPU for its gears to absorb any impacts and increase endurance as pure PLA ended up falling apart.
The position of the puck is recorded by an overhead camera, from where a Python script – using the OpenCV library running on a PC – determines how to adjust the arms, which is executed by Arduino C++ code running on a board attached to the robot. All of this is available on GitHub, which as the video makes clear is basically cheating as you don’t get to enjoy doing all the trigonometry and physics-related calculating and debugging fun.
2026-03-13 04:00:27
Sound! It’s a thing you hear, moreso than something you see with your eyes. And yet, it is possible to visualize sound with various techniques. [PlasmatronX] demonstrates this well, using a special scanning technique to visually capture the sound field inside an acoustic levitation device.
If you’re unfamiliar, acoustic levitation devices like this use ultrasound to create standing waves that can hold small, lightweight particles in mid-air. The various nodes of the standing wave are where particles will end up hovering. [PlasmatronX] was trying to calibrate such a device, but it proved difficult without being able to see what was going on with the sound field. Hence, the desire to image it!
Imaging the sound field was achieved with a Schlieren optical setup, which can capture variations in air density as changes in brightness in an image. Normally, Schlieren imaging only works in a two-dimensional slice. However, [PlasmatronX] was able to lean on computed tomography techniques to create a volumetric representation of the sound field in 3D. He refers to this as “computerized acoustical tomography.” Images were captured of the acoustic levitation rig from different angles using the Schlieren optics rig, and then the images were processed in Python to recreate a 3D image of the sound field.
We’ve seen some other entertaining applications of computed tomography techniques before, like inspecting packets of Pokemon cards. Video after the break.
