2026-02-20 14:00:02
As anyone who’s made a thing knows, a lot of work goes into bringing something from idea to completion. But there’s also considerable satisfaction in the process. [Willian] recently did exactly that, and shares the joyful experience of creating a homebrew handheld game gadget from scratch. It runs a homebrewed Tetris clone (as well as Snake), and we love the results.
The game gadget uses an ATmega328P programmed via the Arduino IDE, and a 1.8″ TFT color LCD screen. It’s self-contained in a box with a few buttons as controls and runs off three AAA cells. [Willian] made the smart design choice to run the microcontroller at 8 MHz instead of the more common 16 MHz, because doing so meant the board can run at 3.3 V instead of 5 V. Why does this matter? The LCD display runs off 3.3 V as well, and if all components can run off the same supply and logic levels, it simplifies things considerably.
Also, creating a 3.3 V supply is a simple matter of three alkaline cells in series with an LDO (low drop-out) regulator, which is great for a handheld device. We do note that AA cells have a considerably higher energy density and capacity than AAA cells and are usually the better choice, but one works with what one has, and sometimes the space and weight saved by AAA is just too good to pass up.
The software has some notable approaches to keep things responsive and optimal. Instead of defining each of the Tetris pieces as a 2D shape, [Willian] instead pre-defines each piece (and their rotations) so that rotating a piece is just an index change in an array, instead of a transform implementing a rotation. Also, full-screen redraws are comparatively slow over SPI and caused flickering, so only cells that have changed are redrawn to the screen to keep things responsive. The code is all on GitHub, and it’s a great peek at how things get implemented under the hood.
The enclosure is just cardboard, and it does the job in [Willian]’s case. But we’ll point out that cardboard is actually a highly adaptable material from which to prototype. With just a few tips and a little care, paper products can be your new best friend when it comes to one-offs and prototypes.
2026-02-20 11:00:15
It’s becoming somewhat of a theme that machine-generated content – whether it’s code, text or graphics – keeps pushing people to their limits, mostly by how such ‘AI slop’ is generally of outrageously poor quality, but as in the case of [Vincent Driessen] there’s also a clear copyright infringement angle involved. Recently he found that Microsoft had bastardized a Git explainer graphic which he had in 2010 painstakingly made by hand, with someone at Microsoft slapping it on a Microsoft Learn explainer article pertaining to GitHub.
As noted in a PC Gamer article on this clear faux pas, Microsoft has since quietly removed the graphic and replaced it with something possibly less AI slop, but with zero comment, and so far no response to a request for comment by PC Gamer. Of course, The Internet Archive always remembers.
What’s probably most vexing is that the ripped-off diagram isn’t even particularly good, as it has all the hallmarks of AI slop graphics: from the nonsensical arrows that got added or modified, to heavily mutilated text including changing ‘Time’ to ‘Tim’ and ‘continuously merged’ into ‘continvuocly morged’. This makes it obvious that whoever put the graphic on the Microsoft Learn page either didn’t bother to check, or that no human was involved in generating said page.
It definitely gives a dystopian ‘Dead Internet’ vibe where the fruits of past labor are being cynically regurgitated and spat out in the form of AI slop that bears little resemblance to the original, and should send real humans either running off in abject terror or fall over in uncontrollable laughter.
Even if this output was the result of [Vincent]’s original graphic getting scraped and shoved struggling and screaming into a diffusion model’s training dataset, there are so many dead giveaways that it was based on this original: from the text blurbs, to the use of the label ‘feature branches’ that’s retained in the reproduction even though the second feature branch has been trimmed.
All of this raises many uncomfortable questions about copyright in the context of both large language models and diffusion models, with cases like these making it clear that sometimes substantial elements of copyrighted works are being reproduced nearly verbatim. Depending on the associated copyright license, this can result in very expensive copyright infringement lawsuits, with some of these already working, or having worked their way through various courts pertaining to primarily stock images and books.
And to think that all that Microsoft would have had to do here was to check with [Vincent] for the license on the graphic if they had wanted to use it. As [Vincent] indicates, he would have been more than happy to do so if a backlink and credit was provided. This obviously is the human way to do things, where a human contacts a fellow human being to inquire about their thoughts on a topic, or peruses the works by fellow humans to find something to their liking prior to contacting said human with a usage question.
In this era of ‘just ask the machine’ by mashing in a query on a prompt, it would seem that this particular case will be far from the last one. The cynical take here is that the value of human output has been reduced to mere training data for the content machines, but maybe Microsoft will surprise us here with a tearful apology and real actions to prevent such events from ever happening again.
2026-02-20 08:00:45
With the ESP32-P4 not having any wireless functionality and instead focusing on being a small SoC, it makes sense to combine it with a second chip that handles features like WiFi and Bluetooth. This makes the Guition ESP32-P4-M3 module both a pretty good example of how the P4 will be used, and an excellent opportunity to tear into, decap and shoot photos of the dies of both the P4 and the ESP32-C6 in this particular module, courtesy of [electronupdate]. There also the blog post for those who just want to ogle the shinies.
After popping the metal shield on the module, you can see the contents as in the above photo. The P4 inside is a variant with 32 MB of PSRAM integrated along with the SoC die. This results in a die shot both of this PSRAM and the P4 die, though enough of the top metal seems to remain to clearly see the latter.
The Boya brand Flash chip is quite standard inside, and along with a glance at the inside of one of the crystal oscillators we get to glance at the inside of the C6 MCU. This is a much more simple chip than the P4, with the RF section quite obvious. The total die sizes are 2.7 x 2.7 mm for the C6 and 4.29 x 3.66 mm for the P4.
2026-02-20 05:00:54
When you’re livestreaming, it can be tempting to fire off all kinds of wacky sound effects like you’re a morning radio DJ back in the heady days of 1995. If that’s who you want to be, you might like this soundboard project from [Biker Glen].
The build is based around an RP2040 microcontroller. It’s paired with an I2S digital-to-analog converter for sound output, which in turn feeds a small amplifier hooked up to a speaker or a line output. The RP2040 is programmed to respond to MIDI commands by playing various sounds in response, which are loaded off a microSD card. It’s able to act as a USB MIDI host, which allows it to work seamlessly with all sorts of off-the-shelf MIDI controllers like the MIDI Fighter or the Novation Launchpad.
It’s an interesting hardware solution to a problem that you could probably also solve with software on your streaming machine, especially if you’ve already got a USB MIDI controller. However, there’s something to be said for lightening the load when your streaming computer is already doing lots of hard work to truck video up to the cloud already. Files are on Github if you’re eager to replicate the build.
Soundboards are just fun, which is why we’ve featured them before. Meanwhile, if you’re whipping up your own streaming accessories at home, be sure to let us know on the tipsline!
2026-02-20 03:30:28
As common as the Xbox 360 was, the development kits (XDKs) for these consoles are significantly less so. This makes it even more tragic when someone performs a botched surgery on one of these rare machines, leaving it in dire straits. Fortunately [Josh Davidson] was able to repair the XDK in question for a customer, although it entailed replacing the GPU, CPU and fixing many traces.
The Xbox 360 Development Kit is effectively a special version of the consumer console — with extra RAM and features that make debugging software on the unit much easier, such as through direct access to RAM contents. They come in a variety of hardware specifications that developed along with the game console during its lifecycle, with this particular XDK getting an upgrade to being a Super Devkit with fewer hardware restrictions.
Replacing the dead GPU was a new old stock Kronos 1 chip. Fortunately the pads were fine underneath the old GPU, making it easy to replace. After that various ripped-off pads and traces were discovered underneath the PCB, all of which had to be painstakingly repaired. Following this the CPU had apparently suffered heat damage and was replaced with a better CPU, putting this XDK back into service.
2026-02-20 02:00:43
We are going to bet that as a kid, you had a View-Master. This toy has been around for decades and is, more or less, a handheld stereoscope. We never thought much about the device’s invention until we saw a recent video from [View Master Travels and Peter Dibble]. It turns out that the principle of the whole thing was created by the well-known [Charles Wheatstone]. However, it was piano repairman [William Gruber] who invented what we think of as the View-Master.
[Gruber] didn’t just work on normal pianos, but complex player pianos and, in particular, the pianos used to record player piano rolls. He was also, as you might expect, a stereo photography enthusiast. Many of the ideas used in automating pianos would show up in the View-Master and the machines that made the reels, too. In the 1930s, stereoscopes were not particularly popular and were cumbersome to use. Color film was also a new technology.
[Gruber] realized that a disk-like format would be easy to use and, more importantly, easy to mass produce. The reels had a few features to simplify their use. For example, if you show each image in sequence, you’d eventually see pictures upside down. [Gruber’s] solution? Use an odd number of pairs and advance the reel two positions for each jump forward. That way, you never show an image to the wrong eye.
The model “A” didn’t look much like the View-Master you probably remember. By 1940, the toy was a hit. But initially, it wasn’t really a toy so much as a way for adults to view distant sites. Of course, World War II could have stopped the enterprise dead, but instead, they shifted to producing training aids for the military. The War Department would buy 100,000 viewers and about 6 million reels to help train soldiers to identify aircraft and ships, as well as to estimate range.
Training was always a key use of the View-Master technology, but the company eventually bought a competitor with rights to Disney films and exploded into a must-have toy. When the company was bought by GAF, the focus on the toy market grew. Despite some efforts to keep the company relevant in an era with virtual reality and other 3D technologies, View-Master is, sadly, a bit of nostalgia now, even though you can still buy them. But it is impressive that despite many changes to the viewer and the production methods, the View-Master reel remained virtually unchanged despite the production of about 1.5 billion of them. Sure, there were fancy viewers that had audio tracks, too, but the basic idea of an odd number of film frames mounted in a circle in a notched disk remained the same.
These days, a phone can be your View-Master, at least, if you can cross your eyes. Want to preserve your View-Master reels for posterity? So did [W. Jason Altice].
