2026-02-05 11:00:41
Helium is inert, which makes it useful in a lot of different industries. But helium’s colorless and odorless non-reactivity also means traditional gas sensing methods don’t work. Specialized detectors exist, but are expensive and fussy. Thankfully, researcher [Li Fan] and colleagues found a physics-based method of detecting helium that seems as elegant as it is simple.
The new sensor relies on a topological kagome structure, and doesn’t depend on any chemical reaction or process whatsoever. The cylinders in the structure are interconnected; air can flow in and speakers at the three corners inject sound.
Sound waves propagate through the air within the structure at a fixed rate, and as helium enters the sensor it changes how fast the sound waves travel. This measurable shift in vibration frequency indicates the concentration of helium. It’s stable, calibration-free, doesn’t care much about temperature, and resets quickly. Even better, the three corners act as separate sensors, making it directional. It’s even quite rugged. Just as a basket weaved in a kagome pattern is stable and resistant to damage or imperfections in the individual strips that make up the pattern, so too is this sensor only marginally affected by physical defects.
The sensor design has been tested and shown to work with helium, but could possibly be applied to other gases. More detail is available at ResearchGate, with some information about the math behind it all in a supplemental paper.
2026-02-05 08:00:12
While Apple weren’t the first to invent high-DPI displays or to put them into consumer electronics, they did popularize them fairly effectively with the Retina displays in the early 2010s and made a huge number of them in the following years. The computers they’re attached to are getting up there in age, though, and although these displays are still functional it isn’t quite as straightforward to use them outside of their Apple-approved use. [David] demonstrates one way of getting this done by turning a 5k iMac into an external monitor.
The first attempt at getting a usable monitor from the old iMac was something called a Luna Display, but this didn’t have a satisfying latency. Instead, [David] turned to replacing the LCD driver board with a model called the R1811. This one had a number of problems including uneven backlighting, so he tried a second, less expensive board called the T18. This one only has 8-bit color instead of the 10-bit supported by the R1811 but [David] couldn’t personally tell the difference, and since it solved the other issues with the R1811 he went with this one. After mounting the new driver board and routing all of the wires, he also replaced the webcam with an external Logitech model and upgraded the speakers as well.
Even when counting the costs for both driver boards, the bill for this conversion comes in well under the cost of a new monitor of comparable quality from Apple, a company less concerned about innovation these days than overcharging their (admittedly willing) customers. For just a bit of effort, though, these older iMacs and other similar Apple machines with 5k displays can be repurposed to something relatively modern and still usable. Others have done similar projects and funded the upgrades by selling off the old parts.
2026-02-05 05:00:37
Kei trucks are very versatile vehicles, but their stock powerplant can leave a bit to be desired. If you need more power, why not try an electric conversion?
[Ron “Mr. G” Grosinger] is a high school auto shop and welding teacher who worked with his students to replace the 40 hp gas motor in this Daihatsu Hijet with the 127 hp of a Hyper 9 electric motor. The motor sits in the original engine bay under the cab and is mated to the stock transmission with a custom adapter plate made from plate steel for less than $150. We really appreciate how they left all the electronics exposed to see what makes the conversion tick.
The faux battery was made by a foam sculptor friend out of urethane foam shaped with a carving knife and then painted. It slides on a set of unistrut trolleys and reveals the 5 salvaged Tesla battery modules that power the vehicle. The fold down sides of the truck bed allow easy access to anything not already exposed if any tweaking is necessary.
We’ve seen a kei truck become a camper as well or an ebike powered with actual power tool batteries. If you’re thinking of your own electric conversion, which battery is best?
2026-02-05 03:30:31
This week Jonathan chats with Olaf Andreas Schulte and Lars Kiesow about Opencast, the video management system for education. What does Opencast let a school or university accomplish, how has that changed over the last decade, and what exciting new things are coming? Watch to find out!
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on our YouTube Channel? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or have the guest contact us! Take a look at the schedule here.
Direct Download in DRM-free MP3.
If you’d rather read along, here’s the transcript for this week’s episode.
Theme music: “Newer Wave” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
2026-02-05 02:00:55
I just love it when y’all send in your projects, so thanks, [Kai]! But were do I even begin with this one? Okay, so, first of all, you need to know that [Kai Ruhl] built an amazing split keyboard with plenty of keys for even someone like me. Be sure to check it out, because the build log is great reading.
Essentially, this is an ortholinear split with a built-in roller bar mouse, which basically acts like a cylindrical trackball. There’s an outer pipe that slides left/right and rolls up and down, and this sits on a stationary inner rod. The actual mouse bit is from a Logitech M-BJ69 optical number.
[Kai] found it unpleasant to work the roller bar using thumbs, so mousing is done via the palm rests. You may find it somewhat unpolished with all that exposed wiring in the middle. But I don’t. I just worry about dust is all. And like, wires getting ripped out accidentally.
As I write this, a terrible snowpocalypse is snuggling up to the southern and mid-western states. What a time to watch The Shining and check out the dullboy prototype by [Blind_Heim].
Rev 1 shown here has a nice!nano and supports v1 chocs only. Rev 2 will support v1 and v2, and will have a 40 mm Cirque trackpad in that middle space there. Rev 2 will also be open-source and entirely free of copyright, so watch out for that.
Regarding those thumb keys, [Blind_Heim] says that they wanted something ergonomic and monoblock at first, and so the angles were just for looks. But after using it, he realized they were actually quite useful when it comes to determining which key is which without having to look.
As for the keyboard, that’s a Norbauer Heavy Grail Ghost of Christmas Future edition, which was of course a limited release that’s long sold out. I’m sure there are other transparent bodies out there, but good luck finding a bug-eyed, duck-faced keycap.
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 Virtual Typewriter Museum calls the 1899 Saturn “one of the most impractical machines ever, built with proverbial precision in Switzerland”.
The operation of this blind writer is pretty interesting, and that’s putting it politely. There are nine U-shaped type bars: four on each side beneath the carriage, and one in the middle that swings up from behind.
Each of these type bars holds eight characters, and these are selected by moving a wire up and down the index card using that giant round selector button the left side. The you would strike one of the nine keys corresponding to the column your character appears in.
Evidently the lower case characters were laid out differently than the upper case, which made it even more difficult to use. But hey, Swiss precision.
There is not a lot of information out there about the Saturn, but the Virtual Typewriter Museum does have more shots of various angles.
Apparently there was a Kickstarter near the end of 2025 for this thing. Well, this is the first I’ve heard of it. This here is the Keychron Q16 HE 8K ceramic and marble keyboard, which debuted at CES.
This is a luxury keyboard for sure, right down to the pre-lubed Keychron ultra-fast Lime magnetic switches which features Tunnel Magnetoresistance (TMR) and per-key adjustable actuation.
They say it’s built for gaming, but I don’t know. I think it’s built for whatever you want to use it for. It will be available in April. I sincerely hope that it’s like typing on little coffee cups, and it probably sounds amazingly thocky.
Now Tweak Town doesn’t have a whole lot to say about this keyboard, so I found a review to go with it. [YouallareToxic] has quite a bit to say about the keyboard. I think the biggest takeaway from this review is that this keyboard sounds like no other. [YouallareToxic] likens it to a frog guiro. A what? Check out the video below.
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.
2026-02-05 00:30:19
There are many solutions for remote control keyboards, be they Bluetooth, infrared, or whatever else. Often they leave much to be desired, and come with distinctly underwhelming physical buttons. [konkop] has a solution to these woes we’ve not seen before, turning an ESP32-S3 into a USB HID keyboard with a web interface for typing and some physical keyboard macro buttons. Instead of typing on the thing, you connect to it via WiFi using your phone, tablet, or computer, and type into a web browser. Your typing is then relayed to the USB HID interface.
The full hardware and software for the design is in the GitHub repository. The macro buttons use Cherry MX keys, and are mapped by default to the common control sequences that most of us would find useful. The software uses Visual Studio Code, and PlatformIO.
We like this project, because it solves something we’ve all encountered at one time or another, and it does so in a novel way. Yes, typing on a smartphone screen can be just as annoying as doing so with a fiddly rubber keyboard, but at least many of us already have our smartphones to hand. Previous plug-in keyboard dongles haven’t reached this ease of use.
