Mysterious Files PH

Distraction free writing tools are a reaction to the bells and whistles of the modern desktop computer, allowing the user to simply pick up the device and write. The etyper from [Quackieduckie] is one such example, packing an e-paper screen into a minimalist case.

These devices are most often made using a microcontroller such as an ESP32, so it’s interesting to note that this one uses a full-fat computer — if an Orange Pi Zero 2W can be described as “Full-fat”, anyway. There’s an Armbian image for it with the software pre-configured, and also mention of a Raspberry Pi port. It works with wired USB-C keyboards, and files can be retrieved via Bluetooth. It doesn’t look as though there’s a framebuffer or other more general driver for the display so it’s likely you won’t be using this as a general purpose machine, but maybe that’s not the point. We like it, though maybe it’s not a daily driver.

This hack is part of our 2026 Green Powered Challenge. You’ve just got time to get your own entry in, so get a move on!

There are plenty of electronic components out there, but the one we tend to forget is the most basic: wire. Sure, PC boards have largely replaced wire with copper traces, but most projects still need some kind of wire somewhere. Once you need any wire, there’s a good bet you will need longer wire, and that means splicing one wire to another. Simple, right? Not really. There are a variety of ways to splice wires, and which one you use depends on what you want to do and the type of wire you are using.

If the wires touch, good enough, right? Not necessarily. You need enough contact area for the current you are drawing through the wire to flow. It is also nice if the splice can survive some amount of mechanical strain, vibration, and survive getting hot and cold repeatedly.

Usually, after splicing, you’d like to solder the connection, although depending on the application, you don’t always see that. At the very least, you’d want to wrap it in electrical tape, use heat-shrink tubing, or otherwise insulate the bare wires and maybe provide a little mechanical support or strain relief.

Keep in mind that there are connector options, either mechanical, crimped, or soldered, that allow you to avoid splices. Soldering to a terminal strip, for example, or scewing wires into a barrier strip will get the job done. So will a butt connector, a wire nut, or a WAGO connector. But sometimes, for whatever reason, you just need to attach two wires to each other. It’s been done before.

The Gold Standard

Arguably, the best way to join two similar-sized solid wires is the Western Union splice, or the lineman’s splice, which goes back to at least 1915 when the book Practical Electric Wiring (PDF) described it. It will work with stranded wire, too, if you twist it tightly and, even better, tin the wires first.

You essentially bend each wire around the other and then tightly wrap each wire around the other wire. There are a few options about how to handle the middle part, as you can see in the adjacent figure.

These aren’t hard to make, but it does depend a bit on the skill and patience of the person making the splice. On the other hand, they are mechanically very robust.

NASA’s workmanship document (NASA-STD-8739.3, PDF) urges you to avoid splices and prefer controlled processes like crimps, where a tool produces repeatable connections. However, in testing, soldered Western Union splices were found to be quite strong, usually stronger than the wire around them.

Other Common Splices

Perhaps the most common splice is the rat or pig tail splice. That’s where you just twist two wires together. If you don’t have to survive mechanical tension and you have solid wire, this works ok and is what you often see inside electrical boxes in North America, either made by or topped with a wire nut.

These are fast and simple, but without something like a wire nut, a bit suspect. They tend to loosen over time, especially under vibration.

Another problem is when you have very large solid wires that are not practical to twist. That calls for a Britannia splice. Here, you put two presumably thick wires end-to-end and bind them with a smaller wire. You don’t see these very often, although you may see them in some utility contexts. More often, you’d crimp a butt connector to join two large wires. Note the binding wire wraps around both wires and the common part where the wires touch.

A similar splice is the so-called fixture splice, in which a smaller wire wraps around a larger one. This is another case where you would almost always finish this off with some kind of mechanical connector, like a wire nut.

Sometimes you need a splice that isn’t much larger than the original wire. You can do that with a scarfed splice. This is usually only practical for large, solid wires. You essentially taper each wire to a point (using, for example, a file) and then bond them together much like a scarf joint in carpentry. Of course, you must solder or somehow fix the wires together, as there is no mechanical connection. This takes a lot of work and also takes skill to get right.

Specialty Splices

Sometimes, you want a splice into an existing wire to form like a “T” or a tap. It is possible to create a tap joint by removing insulation from the main conductor and then wrapping wire around the bare metal. Often, you’ll tie a knot it the tap wire before wrapping to try to improve the mechanical hold a bit.

However, these are not especially strong, and you have to be careful removing the insulation so as not to nick the main conductor and weaken it or reduce its current capacity.

If the main wire is stranded, another variation is to carefully split the main conductor into two segments and then pass the tap wire through the center before wrapping it as before. While this might be slightly more mechanically advantageous, it is still not a good replacement for a crimp-on tap or a connector to hold three wires.

Splicing multiconductor wire can also pose a challenge. Sure, for a lamp cord, it is just as simple as making two splices. But in cables where the pair is balanced, it is often impractical to maintain the spacing and twisting of the wire. Better to get a cable of the proper length.

Probably Others

There are probably as many ways to make a splice as there are people making splices. Some are clever, others are terrible, and a few — like the Western Union splice — have stood the test of time.

Most of the time, you want to avoid splices where you can. Try a terminal block, a solder sleeve, or a crimp connector. Even a wire nut, while technically a splice, will give you some mechanical advantage over just twisting wire together.

We favor the Western Union splice with a good coat of solder. In the end, the “right” splice is the one that matches the electrical load, mechanical demands, and environment you expect it to live in. A quick twist might work today, but a properly executed splice will still be working years down the line.

What’s your go-to method? Let us know in the comments.

Once the microcomputer era got going in earnest, the floppy disk quickly supplanted the tape as the portable storage method of choice. They were never particularly large, but they were fine for the average user to get by.

At the same time, it wasn’t long before heavier-duty removable storage solutions hit the market for power users who needed to move many megabytes at a time. In the 1980s, these were primarily the preserve of big print shops, corporate users, and governments. By the 1990s, even the mildly savvy computerist was starting to chafe against the tyrannical 1.44 MB limit of the regular 3.5″ diskette. Against this backdrop launched the SuperDisk—the product which hoped to take the floppy format to the next level, yet faltered all the same.

More Is Better

The SuperDisk was yet another innovation spawned by 3M, or more specifically, by the company’s storage group, Imation.  Landing on the market in 1996, it was intended to be a higher-capacity successor to the regular floppy disk. In this era, the default removable storage was was the 3.5″ floppy, capable of storing 1.44 MB on a high-density double-sided disk in the dominant IBM format. The SuperDisk would easily eclipse that with its 120 MB capacity, nearly ten times what users were used to getting from a compact floppy disk. Back in the mid-1990s, when hard drives were just starting to flirt with gigabyte capacities in the single digits, this was a huge chunk of storage to be carrying around in your pocket.

The format relied on so-called “floptical” technology. The idea was to use optical guidance to more precisely position the magnetic heads that read and write the floppy magnetic platter. This would allow a disk to pack more tracks in per given area of disk, massively increasing the storage density. Where a regular 3.5″ floppy disk had 135 tracks per inch, an LS-120 disk would expand that to 2,490 tracks per inch. The LS-120 disks were physically unique, due to the need to have optical alignment tracks on the magnetic surface that could be read via a laser and sensor. Hence the LS designation, for “laser servo.”

A variety of drives were made available in the marketplace, both in internal and external versions. The latter typically used parallel, USB, or SCSI interfaces, while internal drives were accessed via SCSI or ATAPI. Despite the special technology inside SuperDisks, they were otherwise very close in size to regular floppies, albeit with a rather unique shutter design. This allowed the SuperDisk drive to also read regular 1.44 MB and 720 KB diskettes. Notably, though, this was really only a thing in the PC world—the drives could not read 800 KB or 400 KB Macintosh format disks.

Unfortunately for Imation, the SuperDisk had a major hurdle to overcome from the outset. Iomega had already launched the Zip drive in 1995 to rapturous applause, racking up huge orders from the drop. The drives were not compatible with regular floppies in any way, and initial versions stored just 100 MB per disk. However, the first mover advantage had launched Iomega’s market share and stock into the stratosphere. There was little market interest in the upstart competitor when purple drives were already sitting on desks in business and universities around the world. Nevertheless, the SuperDisk drive still found some traction with big OEMs, showing up as an option in Dell, Compaq, and Gateway computers way back when. Panasonic even launched a line of digital cameras that used the supersized disks, not unlike Sony’s floppy disk cameras but with far more storage that made them more practical. Sadly, though, uptake was never high enough to make the SuperDisk a normalized replacement for a regular floppy drive, nor even a viable or well-known competitor to the all-domineering Zip.

Nevertheless, Matsushita persevered with the SuperDisk concept for some time. In 2001, the company launched LS-240 drives, which doubled capacity to 240 MB per disk. They also came with a fun party trick that allowed regular 3.5″ floppies to be formatted to hold 32MB. This feat was achieved in part due to the use of shingled magnetic recording (SMR), a technique wherein magnetic tracks on the platter are allowed to overlap to increase storage density. “FD32MB” formatted disks could only be read in LS-240 drives.

By this point, however, the CD burner had already taken over the world. With a CD-R or CD-RW retailing for less than a dollar in quantity, and capable of storing 700MB-plus, the value proposition of the SuperDisk faltered, along with most other magnetic storage solutions of the era. The drives would eventually go out of production in 2003, by which point the venerable USB drive was rising to prominence as the go-to standard for removable media.

Other than being a little late to market, there wasn’t a lot the SuperDisk got wrong. There were no major scandals with the reliability of the drives or media, and they had the nice feature that they were backwards compatible with existing floppy disks to boot. Sometimes, though, it’s impossible to overcome showing up late to the party. Between Iomega’s dominance in the 90s, and the widespread abandonment of magnetic removable media in the early 2000s, there was never really a good time for the SuperDisk to shine. Like so many other technologies out there, it was perfectly capable at what it was supposed to do, it just didn’t find the right audience. A solution without a problem, perhaps, given that others had already solved the issue before the SuperDisk saw the light of day.

Featured image: “SuperDisk” by [Miguel Durán]

Throughout the centuries the art of lock-making and lock-picking have been trapped in a constant struggle, with basic lock designs being replaced by ever more complex ones that seek to thwart any lockpicking attempts, as well as less gentle approaches. When it comes to the very common pin-and-tumbler lock design, the main issue here is that the keyway also provides direct access to the lock’s mechanism. This led [Works By Design] to brainstorm a lock design in which the keyway is hidden.

The ingenious part here is that because the actual key is rotated away after insertion, there is no clear path to the pins. This did require some creative thinking to have a somewhat traditional style key as well as a way to turn the internal mechanism so that the key would be pressed against the pins. Here inspiration was drawn from the switchable magnet mechanism as seen with e.g. magnetic bases. This ensures the key and key handle can be detached and attached quite firmly.

After many 3D printed prototypes, a metal version was CNCed and subjected to some early testing by a locksmith, who even with having seen the CAD model of the lock was stumped. With this initial result and some user feedback in the bag, it was time for large-scale testing with more lockpick enthusiasts, as there are many more ways to open a lock beyond pushing pins. That said, a mechanism was also added to the lock to prevent bumping attacks.

The next testers were found in the Lock Pickers United community, one of whom raised the issue of an impressioning attack. With a couple of test locks on their way to said lockpicking enthusiasts it’ll be exciting to see whether this new lock design will set the standard for future locks or not.

Perhaps at this point, getting NetBSD running on an obscure piece of hardware is a dog-bites-man story, and not worth reporting– their motto, after all, is “Of course it runs NetBSD”. So, the fact that [RetroComputingRanch] has got NetBSD running on a vintage Chyron Maxine broadcast computer is perhaps remarkable only for the fact that few people have even heard of Chyron before.

He’s already done a series of videos in which they explore this odd, old computer, which is powered by a Motorola 68040 on a VME bus and was once used to generate digital overlays– text and the like– on broadcast TV. NetBSD does have a port for the Motorolla VME SBCs, so he was able to vibe it onto the specific vme168 board that the Chyron is based on. It happens off screen, but apparently it was AI agent work that went into condensing the documentation for this machine as well as getting the NetBSD port set up. That’s a bit ironic, since NetBSD would never allow that in its commits. 

Again, the Chyron Maxine was never intended to be a general-purpose-computer, and certainly never intended to run UNIX– it was meant to overlay text onto TV signals. With 4 MB of RAM, NetBSD leaves very little free once booted in single-user mode, but he realized that with a few extra chips the proprietary RAM board could become an 8 MB module. It seems like a pittance nowadays, but anyone who’s played with classic UNIX knows you can do a lot in 8 MB– even if only about 3MB is ‘free’ according to TOP.

There’s work still to be done– right now, it boots, but he wants to use NetBSD to really own this machine, so that’ll mean getting the vintage video hardware set up. Last time we saw a NetBSD user, they were doing game dev on a G4 Macbook, but nothing will ever match the legendary NetBSD toaster– not even toaster-shaped callbacks.

One of the more interesting categories of our ongoing Green Power Challenge is “anything but PV” — and since the radiated power of Near Field Communication is decidedly not photovoltaic, this hack by [caspar] to control a Pi Pico W from his phone using a tuned antenna absolutely counts.

Now, of course you’re not going to power the whole microcontroller that way, but [caspar] figures you don’t need to: the MCU is hooked to a battery, but through a transistor. That means it’s not asleep, but fully un-powered: only the leakage current of the transistor is draining that battery, so it can last a very long time. The waking is handled with a tuned NFC antenna hooked to a ST25DV04KC NFC chip. This chip is designed to be powered via NFC, and of course to accept commands. The ST25 then wakes the Pico — one GIPO on the MCU is used to latch that power transistor ON — and passes on the command via I2C.

Our favorite part might be the script he put on the Pico to live-tune the antenna coil, which you can see demoed in a video below, along with simplest possible demonstration of starting blinky on the Pico from the phone.

You aren’t limited to just a Pico and a blinky LED as in his proof-of-concept demo: [caspar] also uses the same technique with an e-ink display, which is pretty similar to the e-ink price tags you’ve likely seen at the grocery store, without the joy of reverse engineering.

Also without batteries, which is pretty neat, and arguably pretty green. If you’ve been hacking away at something that uses alternative energy, this challenge is still open — just get your project onto Hackaday.io and submitted by April 27.

You’re probably not going to hang out around Chernobyl any time soon. Still, knowing the conditions there can both satisfy your curiosity and provide scientific value. To that end, [Yury Ilyin] has spent the last couple decades installing homebrew weather stations across the Exclusion Zone for his own interest. 

The remote weather stations that [Yury] builds all follow a similar design. Each runs on three 18650 lithium cells, charged via a small solar panel. Most of these cells were salvaged from old laptop battery packs. These cells are used to power a GPRS or WiFi communications module, along with a temperature, humidity, and pressure sensor, and a Geiger counter, because, well… it’s Chernobyl.

He has been lucky enough to keep costs down by finding an old generation GPRS SIM card that could be cloned and used across multiple devices, and thus far has had no trouble receiving signals from his many distributed stations. He’s been able to use his sensor network to track the gradual decline of radioactive emissions in the area from Cs-137, as well as keep an eye on the local weather conditions in an area few ever tread.

[Yury] has built over two dozen of these devices, and several have passed the test of time—with the lithium cells and cellular hardware surviving both high and freezing temperatures as well as the ravages of rain and time. He’s continued to refine the design over the years, starting out with an ATmega644 running the show, and later upgrading to STM32 microcontrollers.

We’ve explored distributed radiation sensor networks before, too, as well as many a remote weather station.

Thanks to [Luc Van Braekel] and [Paulo Ramos] for the tip!