2026-02-25 03:30:32
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.
2026-02-25 02:00:41
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
2026-02-25 00:30:15
[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.
2026-02-24 23:00:35
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Much of this comes down to efficiency as you scale up a basic railgun design. The two main factors are basic ohmic resistance (ER) and system inductance (ES). These two factors limit the kinetic energy (EK) and set the losses (EL) 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.
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.
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.
2026-02-24 20:00:02
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.
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.
2026-02-24 17:00:18
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!
