2026-11-02 14:00:00
When Stranger Things came out all those years ago, one image left an indelible mark on pop culture. A set of Christmas lights, lined up with letters of the alphabet, such that the kid who was barely in the show could blink out messages at Winona Rider from Topsy Turvy Town. [MyEmbeddedStuff] has recreated this cross-dimensional communication system for a fun Halloween project.
The build is basically a Xiao ESP32-S3 microcontroller board and a string of WS2812B addressable RGB LEDs. To keep the Christmas-lights aesthetic, they were actually assembled in place of non-addressable LEDs in a set of existing string lights, with two LEDs per letter of the alphabet for greater brightness adding up to 52 LEDs in total. Because the letters are only lit up one at a time, total current stays low, and power is easily drawn from the power input pin of the ESP32-S3. To control the display, there’s a web server running on the ESP32 which serves up a user interface for typing in messages and having them flash out in sequence, as they did in the show.
Most of the work was in cutting the letters out of EVA foam, but there’s nothing wrong with a quick Halloween arts and crafts project with the kids. It’s a fun decoration that can add a little vibe and curiosity to a Halloween party, so you might consider building something similar yourself next year.
2026-11-02 11:00:09
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.
2026-11-02 08:00:00
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.
2026-11-02 05:00:00
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.
2026-11-02 02:00:00
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.
2026-11-01 23:00:36
If you’re a big retro tech fan, you might still have a floppy drive on hand, or even some sort of high-end disk imaging solution. If you’re a little less committed, you may still have plenty of disk images on your hard drive for various reasons. Either way, you might find [0ldStaph]’s latest project to be useful for examining any disk images you have on hand.
FloppoScope is a browser-based tool for analyzing floppy disk images. Despite being browser-based, everything runs locally, so you’re not actually risking any sensitive data by using the tool—though we can’t imagine you’ve got too much Top Secret intel stored as floppy disk images, anyway.
The tool will draw you a nicely color-coded map of the disk layout and shows all the pertinent data for the filesystem of the image. It will even let you preview common file types if you need. The tool can also convert images between various formats, and spit out reports on things like bad sectors or corrupted files that have been detected. FloppoScope can handle everything from PC and Apple format disks, to Amiga, Atari DOS, and BBC Micro stuff. Oddities like various Sharp MZ machines and the NeXTSTEP format are included too. It works with both image and flux files, as well, so whichever way you captured your disks, it should work here.
We’ve looked at the importance of imaging remaining floppy disks quite recently. If you’ve got unpreserved disks sitting in your bedroom, shed, or study, consider getting on that as a matter of priority at this point!
