Mysterious Files PH

We’re less than a week away from the 2026 Hackaday Supercon, and things are getting a little… intense. So we trust you’ll forgive us if this week’s post weighs in a bit less than usual and reaches you a little later in the day. Especially since we’ll start it off with the official schedule for this year’s festivities.

Earlier this week we announced the more than 30 speakers who will be gracing the stage at this year’s Supercon, and before that we told you about the dozen deep dive workshops designed for attendees who want to get their hands dirty. Now those of us joining you in Pasadena can finally start plotting our course through the weekend to make sure we maximize our hacking journey.

Speaking of planning ahead, NASA is once again looking for proposals on how to save the Hubble Space Telescope. The iconic observatory has no propulsive capabilities of its own, and with the Space Shuttle long since retired, no vehicles can provide the occasional kick in the pants it needs to maintain a stable orbit. As it stands, Hubble has only until 2034 or so before it reenters Earth’s atmosphere and burns up.

That gives a commercial company the better part of a decade to design, build, and launch a vehicle that can grab onto Hubble and take it to a higher orbit. That would have been an impossible timeline in the past, but commercial competition has greatly increased the pace at which missions can be put together. While it was ultimately unsuccessful, the $30 million commercial mission designed to reboost the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory was launched just nine months after the ink dried on the contract. If NASA decides to go ahead with a Hubble rescue mission, the timeline — and undoubtedly the paycheck — will be considerably expanded for whatever company takes on the challenge.

On the subject of endangered pieces of expensive hardware, it looks like Apple’s foray into folding displays has met with some difficulty. Some users are reporting unusually tight hinges in their iPhone Duo, which in some cases is followed by a crunching sound and eventually a busted display. The company says that only a “small number” of devices have been impacted, but Internet sleuths believe that still may put the total in the thousands.

In their phenomenal teardown, iFixit took a look at some potential causes for the screen failures and theorized that the mechanism which cradles the display as it folds may be getting jammed up and not providing adequate mechanical support. Though there’s not enough data yet to say exactly what’s happening, it does seem clear that it’s not a user issue.

Finally, if you have fond memories of uploading your wardriving data to WiGLE, check out Radiaverse. It’s sort of the same concept, except instead of reporting on the location of WiFi access points, users upload radiation data pulled from their RadiaCode detectors. We sincerely hope you don’t find anything too spicy while exploring the interactive globe, but if you do, we’d like to hear about it.

See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear about it.

The Tang Nano 9K is a cheap FPGA development board that can usually be acquired for around $15 or so. [ThePartsBin] has been experimenting with this hardware and figured out how to set it up as a retro-style computer.

The board is based around the Gowin GW1NR-9C FPGA which only has 8,640 LUTs. However, that’s enough to spin up a 36 MHz RISC-V CPU, and there’s 8 MB of RAM on tap, along with HDMI, 48 kHz stereo audio output, two USB ports, and an SD card reader. Combine all that together, and you’ve got a machine capable of playing a whole raft of classic 1990s games.

[ThePartsBin] ported Doom, Tyrian, System Shock and Ultima VII, all of which run at a playable speed at a tasty 720 x 480 resolution. The writeup does a great job of explaining what it took to actually implement these classic games on the platform. Tons of compromises were made along the way, but that’s the engineering challenge, isn’t it?

If you’re looking to play retro games, this is not really the fastest or cheapest way to do it. You could probably just emulate them on the machine you’re using to read this very website. If you’re trying to get to grips with a new FPGA board for the first time, though, projects like this can be a very useful learning experience indeed.

If you wanted to make a game that ran on a commodity microcontroller, you could be forgiven for not knowing where to start. Never fear, for [Fedyfausto] has just the setup to help you in your quest. (Assisted by whatever LLM helped him write all that code, that is.)

It’s called Jet Studio, and it’s an open-source game editor that looks and works like Godot. In reality, it’s a Godot app with a C++ GDExtension, and it’s for making games that run on an Arduino Nano ESP32 or an STM32F746. Specifically, it’s intended for use with the commonly-available ILI9341 SPI LCD display.

The engine can be used for both 2D and 3D games with a handy level of performance. [Fedyfausto] notes that a 2D shooter runs at 62 FPS on the Nano ESP32 and 83 FPS on the STM32. Other fun demos include a partially-3D Outrun-style game, and a 3D physics simulation. They show just what the engine can do, and from there, it’s really up to your creativity for what you choose to make with it.

We see all kinds of games ported to the microcontroller world these days; you can even run Metal Gear Solid on an ESP32 if you really feel like it. What a world we live in. Video after the break.

Candles are pretty to look at, but they tend to be rather a fire risk and a negative influence on air quality, too. If you want the vibe without the hassle, you might enjoy this skeuomorphic electronic candle from [Marek.]

The build is deceptively simple for what it achieves. There is just one transistor, one thermistor, an LED, and a couple of resistors. You can “light” the candle just like a real one by heating the NTC thermistor. That’s because it makes the thermistor’s resistance drop such that the gate voltage on the MOSFET goes high enough to turn on the LED. There’s a resistor in series with the LED, which gets warm enough to keep the thermistor conductive enough to keep the MOSFET conducting in turn. However, if you blow on the assembly, you’ll cool the thermistor enough that the MOSFET stops conducting and the LED turns off.

[Marek] notes that the design is finnicky and quite subject to the vagaries of heat transfer between components; it took some fine tuning to get it working as well as it does. There’s an advanced version with a voltage regulator that helps the circuit run more reliably across a range of battery voltages if you so desire. Funnily enough, it’s also available in an SAO version as well, if you fancy an ersatz candle on your Hackaday conference badge. Neat, huh?

The only thing about [Marek’s] candle is that it doesn’t flicker like a real candle. One wonders if one of those integrated flickering LEDs could add that functionality without drastically changing the circuit, though. We’ve featured such flickery circuits before, too. Video after the break.

[Evan Monsma], the prolific experimenter with cameras, found himself with an issue: he had a small Sony action camera with good performance in every respect but battery life, which was as low as twenty minutes. This was too short for practical everyday use, so [Evan] built an external adapter to add a larger battery and a few other features.

In fairness to the camera’s designers, it wasn’t really meant for consumer use; it was meant as more of a stunt camera, where endurance is less of a concern than size and weight. [Evan] wanted to use it for more general situations, hence the new battery. He first attached a small CNC-machined aluminium half-cage, which provided mounting points for additional hardware, including a screw-mount for a neutral-density filter.

[Evan] next designed, 3D-printed, and attached a mount and battery clip for a larger Sony camera battery; the mount also held a voltage converter to step the battery’s 7.2 V down to the original battery’s 3.7 V. A USB power adapter slotted into the battery compartment and broke out the power leads to the converter. Unfortunately, short battery life isn’t the camera’s only issue; it also eventually overheats with continuous use, which kept [Evan] from running a real battery-life test. He is, however, confident that it will last long enough for practical use.

We’ve seen a similar action camera mod before, as well as a mod to allow the use of third-party batteries in a vendor-locked camera. For larger cameras, we’ve even seen a hot-swappable battery pack.

Thanks to [Luis Mercado] for the tip!

The Amazon Echo Dot is one of Amazon’s so-called ‘smart speaker’ offerings that tie into their larger Alexa-fueled ecosystem, designed to be a pretty minimalistic device that gives you access to this voice assistant and also the Amazon AWS cloud access to your home. If that latter part isn’t really your jam, you can always try to unshackle the device from the Amazonian cloud by rooting the device, as [Andy] recently did with a 2018 Echo Dot 3.

In addition to the video there is also a blog post in which the steps required to root the device are covered. This is then used to turn the device into a Home Assistant voice satellite, using a Claude-vibecoded project created by [Julian Imhof]. As [Andy] notes, this code seems to work, but it’s completely unaudited so YMMV. Device support is also limited to only certain Echo Dot and Echo Show devices as listed on the project page.

The first step is to gain USB access to the board inside the device, which for USB-less devices like the Dot in question requires opening the device to solder a USB connector onto the test pads that are available on the PCB. For other Echo devices you can just use the existing USB port, which makes this first step slightly easier.

These devices run Fire OS, so basically Android, which means a fairly standard process of unlocking the bootloader and installing the hassmic application that replaces Alexa. During testing [Andy] noticed that voice processing was rather slow, requiring switching from Whisper to Speech-to-Phrase to make simple things like turning a light on not take a minute.

Overall it seems like a pretty decent way to repurpose these devices as ESPHome devices, with a few gotchas when it comes to the resources required for local voice processing.

It’s no big secret at this point that we are looking at the final years of the two venerable Voyager spacecraft. With their power supplies diminishing and their 1970s-era electronics still giving it all they got, their teams are working miracles to stretch out the time to the final goodbye for as long as possible. Despite these efforts Voyager 1 went silent for more than 24 hours on October 18 and 19, with the team still trying to figure out what happened.

The most recent change to Voyager 1 was the same ‘big bang’ switching of multiple instruments to lower-power versions, while keeping an eye on keeping the electronics and fuel at reasonable temperatures. This should give both spacecraft a few more years before power reserves fall below usable levels. Whether this switch is related to this communication blackout is currently unknown.

From the diagnostic data that the team obtained after communications were restored it’s clear that a group of thrusters went offline with backup units kicking in, indicating that the onboard computer detected some kind anomaly with the former. Whether this is a recurrence of the clogged fuel lines that has been observed before will have to be investigated.

We still fervently hope that both Voyagers can make it into the 2030s before both of them will fall silent forever. Final goodbyes are never easy, but we are most grateful to the Voyager teams over the decades for going above and beyond to make sure that literally everything has been attempted before those fateful days arrive.

Thanks to [Mark Stevens] for the tip.