2026-03-20 04:00:46
Sometimes you really need to know what the weather is doing, but you don’t want to look at your phone. For times like those, this neat weather display from [Jordan] might come in handy with its throwback retro vibe.
The build is based around the ESP32-2432S028—also known as the CYD, or Cheap Yellow Display, for the integrated 320 x 240 LCD screen. [Jordan] took this all-in-one device and wrapped it in an attractive 3D-printed housing in the shape of an old-school CRT monitor, just… teenier. A special lever mechanism was built in to the enclosure to allow front panel controls to activate the tactile buttons on the CYD board. The ESP32 is programmed to check Open-Meteo feeds for forecasts and current weather data, while also querying a webcam feed and satellite and radar JPEGs from available weather services. These are then displayed on screen in a way that largely resembles the Windows 95 UI design language, with pages for current conditions, future forecasts, wind speeds, and the like.
We’ve seen some fun weather displays over the years, from graphing types to the purely beautiful. If you’ve found a fun way to display the weather (or change it) don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline. Particularly in the latter case.
2026-03-20 02:30:02
You have a tiny twenty-year-old hard drive with a weird interface. How do you read it? If you’re [Will Whang], by reverse engineering, and building an interface board.
In many of our portable, mobile, and desktop computers, we’re used to solid-state storage. It’s fast and low power, and current supply-chain price hikes notwithstanding, affordable in the grand scheme of things. It wasn’t always this way though, a couple of decades ago a large flash drive was prohibitively expensive. Hard drive manufacturers did their best to fill the gap with tiny spinning-rust storage devices which led to the smallest of them all: the Toshiba MK4001MTD. It crammed 4 GB onto a 0.85″ platter, and could be found in a few devices such as high-end Nokia phones.
The drive’s connector is a pattern of pads on a flexible PCB, one he couldn’t help noticing had a striking resemblance to an obscure SD card variant. Hooking it up to an SD reader didn’t work unfortunately, so a battered Nokia was called into service. It was found to be using something electrically similar to the SD cards, but with the ATA protocol familiar from the world of full-size hard drives.
The interface uses the PIO capability of the RP2040, and the board makes a tidy peripheral in itself. We’re guessing not many of you have one of these drives, but perhaps if you do, those early 2000s phone pics aren’t lost for good after all.
These drives are rare enough that this is the first time we’ve featured one here at Hackaday, but we’ve certainly ventured into hard drive technology before.
2026-03-20 01:20:35
But sir, it is wafer-thin. That’s how they get you! Just when you couldn’t possibly justify building another keyboard, let alone owning one, along comes the Kambala by [aroum2].
This catch is so flat because of the switches: PG1316S, and 42 of them. These are better known to some as Kailh butterfly switches, and are meant for laptops. But, this is Hackaday.
No matter what you call them, those switches are controlled by a nice!nano V2-compatible controller, which allows for ZMK firmware support. There’s a 110 mAh battery and four status LEDs, and best of all, the charging indicator is in the fish’s eyes.
[aroum2] might share the files later. Here’s hoping!
Palm rests! Depending on the keyboard, they can be built right in. This here Kinesis Advantage comes to mind. That said, you can buy a pair of nice adhesive pads for your Kinesis once the ABS shine starts to bother you, or better yet, before that happens. Don’t make your own out of adhesive foam sheets. Just, trust me on this.
On the slightly more expensive side, many employ a pair of Purple mattress samplers, which have doubled in price since I bought some 2022, but are still worth it.
Depending on your desk, you could do something as simple as cutting a pool noodle in half and shoving it onto the edge. Maybe you’ve done something even more temporary that turned out to be permanent. Tell me in the comments!
Even if you have built-in palm rests, sometimes you need to temporarily insert something like a spiral notebook between your desk edge and keyboard, pushing the thing further away and putting your delicate elbows at risk. This is me right now, and each elbow is on a mouse bag. Simple and effective.
Another consideration is attached versus unattached. I mean, if a travel keyboard is going to have palm rests, they should attach rather than just be placed in front. Maybe that’s just me.
Using the thing is just as it should be: to copy, you long press the key like a Morse code dash. To paste, you do the short one. This enables [Colin] to paste many times, and quickly. [Colin] started with a Soviet-era telegraph key from the electronic bay, and a Pimoroni Tiny 2040 programmed with Arduino. It may be wildly overpowered for the application, but hey, it fits nicely in the base of the telegraph key.
The default is to make a sound when you do either action. [Colin] used a piezo disk so that it can handle different tones. This was done mostly for the luls, but it also lets him know when something is copied. There’s also a nifty silent mode that moves the mouse cursor in a quick loop-dee-loo when the deed is done.
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!
You might wonder why I choose so many index typewriters for this portion of the program. I suppose it’s because they can be so differently designed, yet serve the same purpose. And that’s just cool to me.
The Crown index typewriter is no exception. Let’s start with the fact its creator, Byron Alden Brooks, was a celebrated inventor of early typewriters. You may have heard of the Brooks; he also had a hand in the People’s, the National, the Travis, and of course, the Crown index typewriter. Perhaps most unforgettable among his accomplishments, Brooks invented the Shift key.
The Crown was produced between 1888 and 1894, though it is thought that Brooks began work on it as early as 1881, evidenced by the date on the typewheel patent. It’s also thought that production really ceased in 1893.
That’s right, the Crown used a typewheel and a linear index from which the user selected each character. The ink came from a felt roller situated between the carriage and typewheel. Every time a character was selected, this roller would swing out of the way so the typewheel could strike the platen.
Originally, the Crown cost $20 (about $700 today), with the wooden case thrown in free. The price dropped to $16 by the middle of 1891. Despite being billed as ‘a machine for the millions’, the Crown was a failure.
If you’re really up on things, you’re of course no stranger to KBD News and the corresponding newsletter. KBD is a great resource for all things keyboard, and now there’s a switch compatibility quiz to help you get started.
Of course, not all switches work with all PCBs, so you can’t begin this journey without knowing which path to head down. Choose MX, and you’ll have a bevvy of beauties to choose from. There are far fewer low-profile and Hall-effect switches out there, so keep that in mind.
Let’s say you go down the MX path. Your next choice is important: how much feedback do you need? None? A little? An audible click? Remember to keep your environment in mind.
If you’re me, you choose clicky. Now it’s time to think about actuation force. There are no light-force clicky switches; it’s just not a thing. So you can choose mid, heavy, or no preference, which takes you directly to RGB choices. Do you want a transparent housing? A light diffuser? Both? If you have no preference here, your final choice concerns factory lubrication. I ended up with 10 different switch recommendations, but of course, YMMV.
It’s important to note that KBD News has a comprehensive guide to choosing keyboard switches, which covers everything from actuation force to travel distance to RGB support, or lack thereof. And don’t miss the mechanical switch FAQ, just below the quiz.
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.
2026-03-19 23:30:09
Until now, if you were seated at your Sega Genesis and wanted to check your stock portfolio, you were out of luck. You had to get a smartphone, or a computer, or maybe even a television to look up stock prices and understand your financial position. Thankfully, though, Sega’s neglect of its hero platform has finally been corrected. [Mike Wolak] has given the 16-bit console the real-time stock ticker it so desperately needed.
The build runs on a MegaWiFi cartridge, which uses an ESP8266 or ESP32 microcontroller to add WiFi communication to the Sega Genesis (or Mega Drive). [Mike] wrote a custom program for the platform that would query the Finnhub HTTPS API and display live stock prices via the Genesis’s Video Display Processor. It does so via a clean console-like interface that would be familiar to users of other 16-bit machines from this era, though seeing so much textual output would have been uncommon.
By default, the stock ticker is set to show prices for major tech stocks, but you can set it up to display any major symbol available in the Finnhub data stream. You can configure up to eight custom stocks and input your holdings, and the software will calculate and display your net worth in real time.
All the files are available for those eager to monitor their portfolios on a Sega, as the financial gods intended. [Mike] notes it took a little work to get this project over the line, particularly as the ESP32-C3 doesn’t support HTTPs with stock firmware. A few other hacks were needed to keep the Genesis updating the screen during HTTP queries, too.
If you have a concentrated portfolio and a spare Sega Genesis, this could be a fun retro way to keep an eye on your holdings. Alternatively, you might prefer to go the classic paper tape route.
2026-03-19 22:00:18
With the launch of Artemis II from Cape Canaveral potentially just weeks away, NASA has been releasing a steady stream of information about the mission through their official site and social media channels to get the public excited about the agency’s long-awaited return to the Moon. While the slickly produced videos and artist renderings might get the most attention, even the most mundane details about a flight that will put humans on the far side of our nearest celestial neighbor for the first time since 1972 can be fascinating.
The Artemis II Moon Mission Daily Agenda is a perfect example. Released earlier this week via the NASA blog, the document seems to have been all but ignored by the mainstream media. But the day-by-day breakdown of the Artemis II mission contains several interesting entries about what the four crew members will be working on during the ten day flight.
Of course, the exact details of the agenda are subject to change once the mission is underway. Some tasks could run longer than anticipated, experiments may not go as planned, and there’s no way to predict technical issues that may arise.
Conversely, the crew could end up breezing through some of the planned activities, freeing up time in the schedule. There’s simply no way of telling until it’s actually happening.
With the understanding that it’s all somewhat tentative, a look through the plan as it stands right now can give us an idea of the sort of highlights we can expect as we follow this historic mission down here on Earth.
The first day of Artemis II will be focused entirely on testing out the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) in the relative safety of low Earth orbit. Should any critical issues be found that would endanger the life of the crew, they can return home in a matter of hours — disappointed surely, but alive.
That might sound dramatic, after all, the Orion already flew on Artemis I back in 2022. But that was a relatively stripped-down version of the spacecraft, which was missing several key systems. Chief among them, the Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS). This system provides breathable air, drinkable water, and manages the temperature, humidity, and pressure inside the capsule to provide the same sort of shirtsleeves working environment that crews have experienced on Apollo, the Space Shuttle, and the International Space Station.
Before performing the trans-lunar injection (TLI) burn that will send them on the way to the Moon, the crew will put the ECLSS through its paces. To stress test the system, the schedule even includes a period on the second day in which the crew will perform aerobic exercise using a flywheel-based device built into the capsule. Exercise is not strictly required on a mission as short as Artemis II, but the fact that the Orion can support such activity could be important for more ambitious flights in the future.
Assuming the ECLSS is operating as expected, the crew will move on to a series of tests that will demonstrate Orion’s ability to navigate and maneuver in close proximity to another spacecraft. This is not a capability that is actually required on Artemis II, but it will be absolutely critical for future missions. In Artemis III and beyond, the Orion will need to rendezvous and dock with a commercially developed lander that will be waiting for it in orbit, not unlike the Command Module and Lunar Module architecture of Apollo.
There won’t be a lander in orbit for Artemis II, and in fact, the Orion that’s flying this mission doesn’t even have a docking hatch. But they can still simulate the act of docking with another vehicle by using the spent upper stage of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, known as the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS), as a stand-in.
With this shakedown of the Orion complete, the crew will finish the day off by testing their connection to the Deep Space Network. This link will be vital as they journey beyond low Earth orbit, and this test must be completed successfully before the crew will be given the go-ahead by ground controllers to initiate the TLI maneuver that will set them on course for the Moon.
With all of the systems tests out of the way, the crew will focus most of their second day on preparing for and ultimately executing the trans-lunar injection burn.
In many ways, this is the most critical element of Artemis II. Up until the point that the TLI is initiated, the Orion can easily return home by simply slowing down and dropping back into the Earth’s atmosphere. But once the engines are fired and the vehicle is accelerated to the velocity necessary to intersect with the Moon’s gravitational sphere of influence, they are fully committed.
Interestingly, the completion of the TLI maneuver on day two marks the final major engine burn of the mission. Because Artemis II will be flying what’s known as a free-return trajectory, the same engine burn that puts them on course for the Moon also enables their return eight days later. That is, the flight path of the vehicle is such that it will go around the Moon and then “fall” back towards the Earth automatically.
This is a fault-tolerant flight path which will bring the spacecraft back to Earth even in the event of a propulsion failure. The same approach was used during the Apollo missions as a contingency should the spacecraft fail to enter into lunar orbit — a plan famously utilized to bring the crippled Apollo 13 home.
Once the TLI burn is completed, Orion is essentially “on rails” for the rest of the flight. A few minor course correction burns are expected over the next several days to fine-tune the spacecraft’s closest approach to the lunar surface, but later, its ultimate splashdown point back on Earth. Obviously you can’t correct a deviation in your course until you actually know how far off the mark you are, so the exact timing and frequency of these adjustments will need to be determined on the fly as the vehicle is in transit.
With the Orion sailing through its predetermined trajectory for the next few days, the crew will have time to perform various experiments and prepare themselves for the later elements of the mission. A number of medical tests are scheduled for this period to see how the crew is performing, and they will perform drills to determine how quickly they can get into their Orion Crew Survival System (OCSS) spacesuits in the event of a emergency.
The crew will also be given time to study the areas of the lunar surface they will be asked to photograph once the spacecraft makes its closest approach. Since the exact position of Orion relative to the Moon won’t be known until the vehicle is on its way, the crew can’t really prepare ahead of time. Once the Orion is on course, ground controllers will be able to calculate what parts of the lunar surface will be visible through the windows, and can inform the crew as to the points of interest that they would like close-up imagery of.
If everything goes according to plan, day six of the mission should see the Orion capsule swing around the far side of the Moon at a distance of less than 10,000 kilometers. The only thing officially on the schedule for this period is, as you might expect, lunar study.
As Artemis II won’t be entering into lunar orbit, this is the only chance the astronauts will get to gather video and images of the surface. They’ll document all of their observations, some of which will need to be recorded and transmitted back to Earth later as mission control will lose contact with the crew for about an hour while the Moon itself is between Earth and Orion.
Soon after the spacecraft emerges from this communications blackout, its expected that scientists on the ground will get a chance to interview the crew about what they saw while the memory is still fresh in their minds.
Given the flurry of activity expected in this relatively brief period, the crew will remain largely off-duty for day seven so they can rest up for the final leg of the mission.
With the Moon officially behind them, the final three days of the mission will be largely focused on the splashdown and recovery procedures. It’s expected that several course correction burns will be performed during this period to fine-tune the spacecraft’s course and bring it down safely in the Pacific Ocean. In between these maneuvers, the crew is also scheduled to demonstrate manual attitude control of the Orion.
There are a few more experiments to perform and a bit of housekeeping to do, but it’s safe to say that — save for the fiery reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere — the most exciting aspects of the mission are all completed by this point. There is however one experiment that stands out: on day eight the crew will perform a radiation drill meant to simulate a solar flare, and will use supplies stored in the capsule to quickly erect a radiation shelter. A suite of radiation sensors will be used to determine the effectiveness of the makeshift shielding.
Most of the people reading this weren’t alive to follow along with the Apollo missions as they happened, and have only experienced them in a historical context. We’ve seen the photos, watched the recordings, and read first-hand accounts from the astronauts. But there has always been a certain detachment — we know that humanity visited the Moon in the same way we know of Marco Polo’s travels through Asia or Edmund Hillary’s trek up Mount Everest. It’s something that happened in a bygone era, the accomplishments of another generation.
But Artemis II and the missions that follow it represent a new generation; an adventure that we’ll all get the chance to experience together in real-time. NASA will be bringing the full capabilities of the Internet and social media to bear, and the world will get to watch every moment unfold in high-definition. If the weather holds and there are no technical issues, we should be seeing the crew work their way though this ambitious agenda in just a few weeks.
2026-03-19 19:00:17
Building a battery pack from 18650 cells traditionally requires patience, a spot welder, and a supply of nickel strip. But what if there was another way? [Ben] is here with Cell-Lock, a modular battery assembly system.
At the system’s heart are a set of interlocking end caps and connection pieces that function as locking cams as well as the electrical connections where needed. They were inspired by the cam systems used for furniture assembly, and are activated by rotation with a screwdriver. The result is a mechanically stable battery system in which different configurations can easily be assembled.
We like that it doesn’t involve any heat near those cells; in part because we’ve seen our share of dodgy connections overheating. But we do have a few concerns. These include how reliable a connection those cams would make, as well as how much current they could safely take without overheating. If both of those could be addressed, we can see that this is an idea with a future.
You can see plenty of examples on the linked project, including an e-bike pack which seems to return no problems. Meanwhile this is by no means the first modular battery pack system we’ve seen.
