2026-04-23 22:00:14
For those of us with an interest in hacking and making, events where we can meet up with like minded folks and check out the projects they’re working on don’t exactly happen every day. Unless you’re able to travel around the country (or even better, the world), you usually have to make do with the handful of annual events that are within a reasonable distance of your home. If you’re lucky that may give you two or three opportunities during the year to look forward to, generally spaced out enough that you’ve got adequate time to prepare ahead of the event and decompress afterwards.
But occasionally, the planets and geekdoms align. Such was the case this past weekend in the Northeastern United States, with Vintage Computer Festival East and the Philadelphia Maker Faire taking place simultaneously. Both are established must-see events for their respective communities and cover roughly the same geographical area, so if you happened to have a foot in each camp, this presented quite a difficult decision.
That is unless you took the third option. As the Philly Maker Faire was on Sunday and VCF took place over the span of the whole weekend, there was a narrow path to attend both events. It wouldn’t be ideal, of course. For one thing it would mean speed running VCF East, and there was a couple hundred miles of travel to contend with. We won’t even talk about the physical toll incurred — while there doesn’t appear to be any official dosage recommendation from the Surgeon General, surely this level of exposure to non-conforming technologists carries with it some risks.
But sometimes such sacrifices must be made, especially if you’re being paid to make them. So I packed up twice the normal number of Wrencher stickers, and hit the road in an effort to deliver a condensed version of my experience at these two fantastic events.
Regular Hackaday readers may know that we’ve been covering VCF East for several years now, and seeing its growth first-hand during that time has been absolutely staggering. The event has gone from taking up a couple rooms in the sprawling InfoAge Science & History Museum complex to being distributed among several different buildings on the campus. This year it seemed like exhibitors were packed into every available space within the former Camp Evans Army research base, and even with the signs dotted around, navigating the show took a bit of effort.
For those looking to add some new toys to their collection, the consignment area has also been expanded considerably. What was once just a few folding tables covered with dusty old hardware has now turned into a major component of the show that takes up nearly as much floor space as the exhibits. But fair warning, in many cases the price tags have grown as well. While there were still deals to be had, some items were sporting labels with four figures on them.
Given the size of InfoAge, I wouldn’t have thought it possible for VCF to outgrow the venue, but part of me thinks they’re getting very close. Although more buildings on the campus are being renovated and opened to the public each year, there’s still a limit to how much the organizers will be able to pack into the available space. Moving some of the exhibits outdoors would help, but of course that introduces its own problems. Renting some tents would be easy enough, but it wouldn’t be much of a computer festival if exhibitors couldn’t power up their machines.
But even in the unlikely event that it stops growing, I can tell you with absolute certainty that one day simply isn’t enough time to see everything VCF East has to offer. Even if you don’t mind skipping all of the talks and don’t want to buy anything, there’s just not enough time to actually give all the exhibits the attention they deserve, especially if it’s your first time.
Although it hasn’t grown to the scale of VCF East, the Philadelphia Maker Faire has also been getting bigger and better with each passing year. The venue was once again the Cherry Street Pier, although this year some of the exhibits had to be moved outside in order to fit them all. The weather wasn’t ideal, but the organizers thought ahead — there were umbrellas available for use, and most of the outdoor activities were at least under some form of cover.
Compared to VCF, the Maker Faire attracts individuals with a wider array of interests. There was no shortage of high-tech hardware on display, including a lively combat robotics competition that ran throughout the day, but it was joined by artistic projects and local food vendors. There were attractions for attendees of all ages, with several activities specifically put together for young children. Where else can you fly a kite, drive a scale model of the Curiosity Mars rover, and sample local honey all under the same roof? Although there were certainly a few children at VCF East, there’s no question that the Maker Faire was the more family-friendly of the two events.
Much of what I saw at the Faire was new, but naturally some of the exhibitors from last year returned. Brett Houser was back with his incredible Wasteworld Toys, and unsurprisingly there was a sizable crowd around the table for most of the day. The ChompSaw area was similarly busy, and representatives from local groups such as Hive76 and Philly Mesh were eager to share their obsessions.
Although the two events were very different, there was undeniably some overlap in the attendees. On Sunday I actually saw a number of individuals at the Maker Faire that I recognized from VCF a day earlier. While everyone I spoke to was happy they could swing the back-to-back shows, they also were a bit disappointed that it meant cutting their time at VCF short.
Of course, neither group intended to step on each other’s toes. It was a simple matter of discovery — by the time the organizers of the two events realized there was going to be a date conflict, things were already set in motion and there was no time to make adjustments. Now that the lines of communication are open between the two groups, they should be able to avoid similar problems going forward.
Moreover, there’s a desire by those involved to expand the cooperation between such events in the tri-state area. Representatives from JawnCon, a growing Philadelphia hacker con that we’ve had the opportunity to follow these last few years, were in attendance at the Faire to raise awareness about their own event in October. The hacker and maker communities are stronger when they work together, and I’d love to see more of these crossovers in the future.
2026-04-23 19:00:35
If you were to point to a single device responsible for much of Hackaday’s early success, it might be the Arduino Uno. The little board from an Italian university with its easy to use dev environment changed microcontroller hacking forever, and while it’s now very much old hat, its shadow lies long across single board computing.
Just in case you thought there wasn’t much more life in that old AVR in 2026, along comes [Arc1011], with KernelUNO, describing itself a “A lightweight RAM-based shell for Arduino UNO with filesystem simulation, hardware control, and interactive shell“. It’s an OS for your Arduino, of sorts.
For flashing it to your Uno, you get a shell with some familiar looking filesystem and system commands, the ability to write to files though no editor, and a set of commands to control pins. It’s extremely basic, but you can see the potential.
If we were to speculate as to how this might become more useful then perhaps it might involve a more permanent filesystem perhaps on a flash chip. If possible, the ability to run script files containing a list of commands would also be very nice. Though we are guessing that maybe the reason these features are not in place lies in the meager specifications of an ATmega328, for which we can’t blame the developer at all. Even if it can’t be extended in this way though, it’s still a cool project.
We have to go back quite a while, but this isn’t the first time something like this has appeared on these pages.
2026-04-23 16:00:49
If you wanted to record yourself playing on a GameCube, you could use a VCR to capture the video output on tape. But there is a more interesting way to do it—which is precisely what [jiinurppa] built GameCube bot for.
The concept is simple—GameCube bot is a small device that captures controller inputs and records them to an SD card. It can then play them back on command, allowing it to recreate gameplay as it happened the first time right on the console. A Raspberry Pi Pico is the brains of the operation, which is able to intercept signals from a standard GameCube controller. It’s paired with the aforementioned SD storage as well as an ST7735 display for showing status information. The device records in the DTM (Dolphin TAS Movie) format, which can be played back on the device when hooked up to a GameCube console, or in emulators like Dolphin itself.
[jiinurppa] notes that the device isn’t accurate enough to use for tool-assisted speed runs. Most notably, small errors in optical drive reads can lead to desyncs compared to the original machine state that make frame-accurate replays impossible. Still, it’s a neat build that can be useful for capturing game play and later analysis.
We’ve explored the world of Tool Assisted Speedruns before, though this device isn’t directly applicable to that world. Video after the break.
2026-04-23 13:00:04
There’s little point in setting up your own shed-based clean room for semiconductor purposes if you don’t try to do something practical with it. Something like responding to the RAMpocalypse by trying to make your own RAM, for example.
After all, what could be so hard about etching the same repeating structures over and over? In a recent video, [Dr. Semiconductor]’s experience doing exactly this are detailed, with actual DRAM resulting at the end.
We covered the construction of the clean room shed previously, which should provide at least the basic conditions to produce semiconductors without worrying about contaminating dies. From here the process is reminiscent of etching PCBs, with a prepared surface coated with photoresist. Using UV exposure through a mask, the pattern is etched into the photoresist and from there the pattern is subsequently etched into the wafer’s surface.
With the patterns formed, the next step is doping of the silicon in order to create the active structures, i.e. the transistors and capacitors. Doping can be done in a variety of ways, with ion implantation being the industry standard method, but a bit too expensive and bulky for a shed fab. Instead a spin-on-glass method was used. After this the remaining functional structures can be built up.
If anyone was expecting to see a DDR5 DRAM die pop out at the end, they’re bound to be disappointed. The target here was to create a 5×4 array of DRAM cells, for a dizzying 20 bits. Still, the fact that it’s possible to DIY DRAM like this at home is already pretty awesome, with clearly plenty of room to push it towards and past fabrication nodes of the 1990s and beyond.
Although the produced DRAM cells have fairly leaky capacitors, they’re good enough for their purpose, and the plan is to scale up to a large DRAM array from here. Whether the DRAM control logic will also be implemented in hardware like this remains to be seen, but the video’s ending makes it clear that the goal is to attach it to a PC somehow.
2026-04-23 10:00:40
In the ongoing development of cancer immunotherapy, as well as our still developing understanding of the human immune system, there’s always been a bit of massive elephant in the room. The thing about human bodies is that they’re not just human cells, but also consist of trillions of bacteria that mostly live in the intestines. What effect these bacteria have on the immune system’s functioning and from there on immunotherapies was recently investigated by [Tariq A. Najar] et al., with an article published in Nature.
The relevant topic here is that of antigenic mimicry, involving microbial antigens that resemble self-antigens. Since these self-antigens are a crucial aspect of both autoimmune diseases and cancer immunotherapy there is considerable room for interaction with their microbial mimics. Correspondingly these mimics can have considerable negative as well as positive implications, ranging from potentially triggering an autoimmune condition to hindering or boosting cancer immunotherapy.
In this study mice were used to investigate the effect of such microbial interference, in particular focusing on immune checkpoint blockade (ICB), which refers to negative feedback responses within the immune system that some cancers use to protect themselves. In some immunotherapy patients ICB inhibiting using e.g. anti programmed cell death protein (anti-PD-1) treatment does not provoke a response for some reason.
For the study mice had tumors implanted and the effect of a particular microbe (segmented filamentous bacteria, SFB) on it studied, with the presence of it markedly improving the response to anti-PD-1 treatment due to anti-gens expressed by SFB despite the large gut-skin distance. Whether in humans similar mechanisms play a similarly strong role remains to be investigated, but it offers renewed hope that cancer immunotherapies like CAR T-cell immunotherapy will one day make cancer an easily curable condition.
2026-04-23 07:00:53
For those who haven’t been following along, [BPS.space] aka [Joe] is on a journey to launch a home-built rocket past the line where it will officially reach outer space. But one does not simply launch a rocket to outer space on the first try. The process is long and involves not only building a series of rockets, but designing and building propellant mixtures, solving aerodynamic problems, gaining several model rocket certifications along the way, and a whole host of other steps. He’s also documenting the entire process on video as well, which involves some custom camera work like this rocket selfie camera which will take an image of his rockets at apogee.
Like most problems in high-power rocketry, extremely tiny problems have a way of causing catastrophic failure, so every detail needs to be considered and planned for in the final design. For a camera that needs to jettison itself from the rocket at a precise moment after experiencing an incredible amount of forces, this is a complicated problem to solve. The initial design involves building a sled for a small deconstructed GoPro which uses springs and a servo to launch itself out of the rocket. The major problem with the design is that even the smallest torque on the sled will cause the camera to point in a random direction by the time it’s far enough from the rocket to take a picture. [Joe] tried a number of design iterations but could not get these torques to vanish.
One of the design limitations with this camera is that it won’t have any sort of parachute or tether itself to the rocket, so it will hit the ground at its terminal velocity. To keep that velocity down and improve survivability chances of the footage, the mass has to stay low. Eventually he settled on a semi-active control system by mounting a brass weight on a small motor, giving the camera module enough stability to stay pointed at the rocket long enough to take the video. Even though it hasn’t flown yet, admitting his first design wasn’t working at compromising on this solution which adds a bit of mass seems to be a good design change. We’ve been following along with his entire process so be sure to check out his actual rocket motor builds and teardowns as well.
