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.
2026-04-23 04:00:45
[Térence Grover] had a very special coin—a €1,000 commemorative piece only available to Monégasque nationals. If you want to flip one, normally you’d have to go snatch one up from somebody in Monaco—or you could just do it online!
Yes, he built an automated online coin flipper to flip this very special piece of coinage. A 12-volt solenoid is fired to flip the coin into the air. It then lands on its 3D-printed tray, where a Raspberry Pi-based computer vision system built with OpenCV and a TFLite model classifies whether the result is heads or tails via a machine learning algorithm. An iris mechanism operated by servo motor then centers the coin on the tray, so it sits back over the solenoid, ready to flip once again. [Térence] was eventually able to refine this simple homemade build to the point that it ran autonomously for a full 50,000 flips on a livestream without issue.
The mechanism in this build is not dissimilar to a coin flipper we’ve seen before. We’ve also explored the statistics involved, too. Video after the break.
2026-04-23 02:30:50
This week Jonathan chats with Johannes Millan about Super Productivity and Parallel Code! Those are two very different projects, but both aiming for helping us get our work done. Super Productivity is a scheduling and time tracking suite, while Parallel Code is an almost-IDE for managing and isolating AI coding agents. This episode has something for everybody, so check it 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
