2026-01-16 20:00:53
One of the joys of writing for Hackaday comes in following the world of new semiconductor devices, spotting interesting ones while they are still just entries on manufacturer websites, and then waiting for commonly-available dev boards. With Chinese parts there’s always a period in which Chinese manufacturers and nobody else has them, and then they quietly appear on AliExpress.
All of which brings us to the WCH CH32M030, a chip that’s been on the radar for a while and has finally broken cover. It’s the CH32 RISC-V microcontroller you may be familiar with, but with a set of four half-bridge drivers on board for running motors. A handy, cheap, and very smart motor controller, if you will.
There’s been at least one Chinese CH32M030 dev board (Chinese language) online for a while now, but the one listed on AliExpress appears to be a different design. At the time of writing the most popular one is still showing fewer than 20 sales, so we’re getting in at the ground floor here.
We think this chip is of interest because it has the potential to be used in low price robotic projects, replacing as it does a couple of parts or modules in one go. If you use it, we’d like to hear from you!
2026-01-16 17:00:00
Sony’s original Playstation wasn’t huge, and they did shrink it for re-release later as the PSOne, but even that wasn’t small enough for [Secret Hobbyist]. You may have seen the teaser video a while back where his palm-size Playstation went viral, but now he’s begun a series of videos on how he redesigned the vintage console.
Luckily for [Secret Hobbyist], the late-revision PSOne he started with is only a two-layer PCB, which made reverse engineering the traces a lot easier. Between probing everything under the microscope and cleaning the board off to follow all the traces in copper, [Hobbyist] was able to reproduce the circuit in KiCAD. (Reverse engineering starts at about 1:18 in the vid.)
With a schematic in hand, drafting a smaller PCB than Sony built is made easier by the availability of multi-layer PCBs. In this case [Hobbyist] was able to get away with a four-layer board. He was also able to ditch one of the ICs from the donor mainboard, which he called a “sub-CPU” as its functionality was recreated on the “PSIO” board that’s replacing the original optical drive. The PSIO is a commercial product that has been around for years now, allowing Playstations to run from SD cards– but it’s not meant for the PSOne so just getting it working here is something of a hack. He’s also added on a new DAC for VGA output, but otherwise the silicon is all original SONY.
This is the first of a series about this build, so if you’re into retro consoles you might want to keep an eye on [Secret Hobbyist] on YouTube to learn all the details as they are released.
2026-01-16 14:00:58
While some may see amateur rocketry as little more than attaching fins to a motor and letting it fly, it is, in fact, rocket science. This fact became very clear to [BPS.space] when a parachute deployed on a rocket traveling at approximately Mach 1.8.
The rocket design is rather simple — essentially just 3D printed fins glued onto a motor with a nose-cone for avionics. A single servo and trim tab provide a modicum of roll control, and a parachute is mounted in the nose along with a homing beacon for faster recovery. Seemingly, the only thing different about this flight is properly validated telemetry and GPS antennae.
After a final ground check of the telemetry and GPS signal quality, everything is ready for what seems like a routine launch. However, somewhere around Mach 1.8, the parachute prematurely deploys, ripping apart the Kevlar rope holding together the three rocket sections. Fortunately, the booster and avionics sections could be recovered from the desert.
But this begs the question, what could possibly have caused a parachute deployment at nearly twice the speed of sound?[BPS.space] had made a quick untested change to the flight control software, in an attempt to get more accurate speed data. By feeding into the flight controller barometric altitude changes during the decent stage, it should be able to more accurately estimate its position. However, direct static pressure readings at supersonic speeds are not an accurate way of measuring altitude. So, during the boost phase, the speed estimation function should only rely on accelerometer data.
However, a simple mistake in boolean logic resulted in the accelerometer velocity being passed into the velocity estimate function during the boost phase. This gave an erroneous velocity value below zero triggering the parachute deployment. Nevertheless, the test was successful in proving antenna choice resulted in poor telemetry and GPS readings on earlier launches.
If you want to see a far more successful [BPS.space] rocket launch, make sure to check out this self landing rocket next!
2026-01-16 11:00:11
There’s an adage coined by [Ian Betteridge] that any headline ending in a question mark can be answered by the word “No”. However, Lorentz invariance – the theory that the same rules of physics apply in the same way in all frames of reference, and an essential component of special relativity – has been questioned for some time by researchers trying to unify general relativity and quantum field theory into a theory of quantum gravity. Many theories of quantum gravity break Lorentz invariance by giving photons with different energy levels very slightly different speeds of light – a prediction which now looks less likely since researchers recently analyzed gamma ray data from pulsed astronomical sources, and found no evidence of speed variation (open-access paper).
The researchers specifically looked for the invariance violations predicted by the Standard-Model Extension (SME), an effective field theory that unifies special relativity with the Standard Model. The variations in light speed which it predicts are too small to measure directly, so instead, the researchers analyzed gamma ray flare data collected from pulsars, active galactic nuclei, and gamma-ray bursts (only sources that emitted gamma rays in simultaneous pulses could be used). Over such great distances as these photons had traveled, even slight differences in speed between photons with different energy levels should have added up to a detectable delay between photons, but none was found.
This work doesn’t disprove the SME, but it does place stricter bounds on the Lorentz invariance violations it allows, about one and a half orders of magnitude stricter than those previously found. This study also provides a method for new experimental data to be more easily integrated into the SME. Fair warning to anyone reading the paper: the authors call their work “straightforward,” from which we can only conclude that the word takes on a new meaning after a few years studying mathematics.
If you want to catch up on relativity and Lorentz invariance, check out this quick refresher, or this somewhat mind-bending explanation. For an amateur, it’s easier to prove general relativity than special relativity.
Top image: Crab Pulsar, one of the gamma ray sources analysed. (Credit: J. Hester et al., NASA/HST/ASU/J)
2026-01-16 08:00:49
Whenever you buy used computers there is a risk that they come with unpleasant surprises that are not of the insect variant. From Apple hardware that is iCloud-locked with the original owner MIA to PCs that have BIOS passwords, some of these are more severe than others. In the case of BIOS passwords, these tend to be more of an annoyance that’s easily fixed by clearing the CMOS memory, but this isn’t always the case as [Casey Bralla] found with a former student-issued HP ProBook laptop purchased off Facebook Marketplace.
Maybe it’s because HP figured that locking down access to the BIOS is essential on systems that find their way into the hands of bored and enterprising students, but these laptops write the encrypted password and associated settings to a separate Flash memory. Although a master key purportedly exists, HP’s policy here is to replace the system board. Further, while there are some recovery options that do not involve reflashing this Flash memory, they require answers to recovery questions.
This led [Casey] to try brute-force cracking, starting with a Rust-based project on GitHub that promised much but failed to even build. Undeterred, he tasked the Claude AI to write a Python script to do the brute-forcing via the Windows-based HP BIOS utility. The chatbot was also asked to generate multiple lists of unique passwords to try that might be candidates based on some human guesses.
Six months later of near-continuous attempts at nine seconds per try, this method failed to produce a hit, but at least the laptop can still be used, just without BIOS access. This may require [Casey] to work up the courage to do some hardware hacking and erase that pesky UEFI BIOS administrator password, proving at least that apparently it’s fairly good BIOS security.
2026-01-16 05:00:16
Here’s something fun from [Chad Kapper] over on HackMakeMod: Escape Room Lockbox with the Cheap Yellow Display.
You may have heard of the “cheap yellow display” (CYD), so-called due to the board’s typical color. It’s a dodgy cheapo board with, among other things, TFT display, touchscreen, and ESP32 built-in. You can learn more about the CYD over here: Getting Started with ESP32 Cheap Yellow Display Board – CYD (ESP32-2432S028R).
In this build eight AA batteries are used to deliver 12 volts to operate a solenoid controlling a latch and 5 volts for the microcontroller. The encasing is clear in order to entice players in an escape-room style sitting. The custom software is included down the bottom of the project page and it is also available from arduino.cc, if that’s your bag.
Of course we’ve done plenty of other ESP32 TFT projects before, such as Piko – Your ESP32 Powered Fitness Buddy and ESP32 Brings New Features To Classic Geiger Circuit.
