We try to steer clear of politics and societal issues here at Hackaday, so a protest is not usually the sort of thing we’d cover. But we figure it’s safe enough to bend the rules a bit when the ones doing the protesting happen to be robots.

About 30 bots gathered — or at least were commanded to gather by the event organizers — in Warsaw to spur discussion about the impact AI and robots will have on the labor market. Beyond getting public and media attention, the demonstration was also designed to raise awareness of what modern humanoid robots can do. While we appreciate the idea of showing robots taking the “jobs” of the protesters, it does seem somewhat ironic that marching around and chanting for hours is exactly the sort of repetitive work that most people would be happy to see taken over by machines.

Although we hope these protests remain peaceful, there’s always a chance things can turn violent when tensions are high. Should things go south, take comfort in the knowledge that a company in Japan has introduced a robot ambulance service. It’s probably more accurate to compare it with roadside assistance, as the goal is to repair the robot on-site. That said, if the fault is more serious, they can bring the damaged bot back to HQ. Of course, the major difference between this program and a traditional ambulance service is that they’ll be able to bring along a spare robot that can take over the patient’s job while repairs are being made. Should anyone start doing that for humans, expect a few more protests.

Speaking of repairs, [Boone Ashworth] at WIRED recently wrote up an interesting hands-on experience he had with John Deere’s AI-driven DIY repair service at the company’s corporate headquarters. Armed with a laptop and tasked with fixing the error message showing on a ~$120,000 USD tractor, he was able to follow the instructions provided by the software to identify a sensor that had been unplugged. Reconnecting the sensor fixed the error message and elicited applause from the Deere reps who presumably had carefully unplugged the sensor in the first place for the purposes of the demonstration.

If that doesn’t strike you as a particularly impressive display for a subscription service which starts at $195 a year for each individual machine, you aren’t alone. When Boone reported his experience to critics of Deere’s repairability track record, it was met with literal laughter. You don’t have to have worked in the fields to know that a sensor becoming unplugged ranks pretty low on the list of potential problems you might face in the middle of a harvest.

We can certainly understand why Deere wouldn’t ask journalists to fix a blown clutch or a leaky hydraulic cylinder for the purposes of a media demo. Even so, they could surely have come up with something a bit more challenging if their goal was to convince customers to log into their repair service — something the company claims only about a thousand users do each day.

Finally, this one leans more heavily into the “arts and crafts” than we’d usually cover here on Hackaday, but [Terence Eden]’s Collection of Imaginary Software is too cool not to get a mention.

The idea is simple enough: make up fake disk labels for a bunch of fictional pieces of software (think the games David Lightman was trying to get his hands on in WarGames), stick them on some of the old 3.5 floppies we know you have hiding in a box somewhere, and put them in a frame.

As we’ve talked about in the past, many of us in the hacker and maker community were inspired by nerds in the media. This project strikes us as a fantastic way to show off just which examples you resonated with personally, and if any readers come up with something similar to adorn the walls of their basement, we’d love to see 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 introduction of optical media in the form of CDs meant a revolution in the world of gaming consoles, escaping the restrictions of a few dozen MB of storage and instead offering a theoretically infinite amount of storage through the miracle and tedium of swapping discs. After the SNES narrowly escaped getting a CD add-on and the N64 doubled down on cartridges, we can now at least get an impression of what it’d be like if the Nintendo Entertainment System had been gifted a CD add-on back in the 1980s, courtesy of a project by [Throaty Mumbo].

There’s also an accompanying video containing typical hijinks and a demonstration of this system. Initially [Throaty Mumbo] was going to make a SNES CD add-on to match that console’s initial prototype, but doing it for the NES seemed more fun. Obviously, since the NES is quite limited hardware-wise it was always going to be a struggle, even if the original front-loading NES conveniently has a mostly unused expansion slot.

On the custom PCB there is an RP2350B microcontroller that mediates between an Everdrive N8 Pro cartridge and an IDE CD drive, along with a PCM5102 audio DAC. The expansion port is hereby used to receive the audio samples on its audio mix input pin, along with power. After boot the game ROM is read off the CD by the MCU and streamed over USB to the Everdrive.

Combined with the previous work [Throaty Mumbo] did to revive the long-defunct Japanese online service for the NES, it’s an exciting time for fans of the iconic console.

All but a few of our very youngest readers are surely familiar with music formats that rely on optical disks. When we say [RobDevBuilds] made a MOD tracker that uses an optical disk, then, you might be forgiven for thinking he stuck a bunch of MOD files onto a CD– MOD files being a format of electronic music that was conceived of on the Commodore Amiga that is still used to this day. A dedicated MOD-CD player might be a fun project, but it’s not what [Rob] did; his project is far more impressive and impractical, as he’s come up with a way to encode the MOD files on paper for optical playback. This way the Amiga’s legacy can be preserved longer than the paltry thousand years promised by the optical M-disk format.

Zooming way, way in on the disk reveals that he’s actually printing the patterns of the MOD file row by row, just like you’d see playing it in a ‘tracker’ program. A MOD file, you see, does not encode music like a WAV or MP3; rather, like with MIDI, it lists the notes the software reading the file– traditionally called a tracker–is to recreate. Unlike a MIDI file, though, you don’t have to store the same notes more than once: repeating sections are stored in patterns. So most of the disk is just a long list of hexadecimal numbers: several columns worth, one for each ‘voice’ or instrument playing in the song. Another difference with MIDI is that MOD files are self-contained in that they are supposed to contain the samples, which isn’t in evidence until you flip over the disk.

There’s no B-side to [Rob]’s album; instead a QR-code like series of barcodes is used to encode the samples used in each track on the disk, as well as other information needed to recreate the MOD file, including metadata like title and artist, and the sequencing of the patterns on the front. Of course this means he needs two cameras on his physical mod player, one on each side, and steppers to slide them across the disk like a linear tracking turntable. The front is read via OCR of his modified Amiga “Topaz” font, while the rear holds the first 1084 bytes of the MOD file in a QR-inspired format [Rob] produced specifically for this project.

Unlike the last time we saw someone store music in QR codes, the more modest size requirements of modfiles– something that led to their use in keygens— means this player can store the music’s 8-bit sound samples without the OPUS compression [Rob] is using affecting fidelity. He’s working on another video to give the details of the player– as he works out the bugs, right now it can’t jump betwixt patterns on the disk as fast as some modfiles need–but we’re willing to hazard a guess he’s got a Raspberry Pi in there, and that it’s probably not running the Amiga-inspired AROS operating system.