One of the nice things about the weather is that even if it’s bad right now, it’ll definitely be changing soon and maybe even for the better. There is one exception to this rule, however, and that comes in the form of heat domes, which are weather systems whereby a region of air becomes isolated from the surrounding systems. This creates effectively a greenhouse, with hot air remaining trapped and moisture unable to get in.

Although until recently not very common, this weather phenomenon poses a major challenge to any flora and fauna that finds itself trapped in a heat dome. With nights being about as hot and stifling as the days with their blue skies unbroken by any cloud cover and no rain for potentially weeks on end, it poses severe hydration, cardiovascular, and other challenges to any affected lifeforms.

Hot Summers Vs Heat Domes

Although it can be easy to mix up hot summer weeks, heatwaves, and heat domes, these terms all have their own specific meaning and implications. Each season has its own typical weather patterns and associated minimum- and maximum temperatures. These exact values have also fluctuated over the centuries and millennia due to a variety of factors, but the important detail is whether this typical maximum temperature is exceeded in a significant manner.

A heat dome is, for instance, not just a heatwave. The exact definition of a heatwave is not universal, but in general it means at least a couple of days of day-time temperature excursions well above this average maximum. In the UK for example at least two days are required before it is officially termed a ‘heatwave’. These heatwaves have become more common as global surface temperatures have increased on account of anthropogenic climate change.

A heat dome requires two factors to form, the first being a period of calm, warm weather, the second being a large area of high pressure that remains in place for an extended period of time. As the hot air rises, the high pressure in the higher atmosphere layers pushes back on this air, compressing it and causing adiabatic heating.

This creates a cycle in which the increasingly warmer and drier soil is exposed to the relentless Sun in the cloudless sky, with even nights bringing barely any change. What keeps this stagnant air from dissipating an “atmospheric block”.

Weather Block

There are two types of blocks: omega and diffluent blocks. The omega block is commonly observed with heat domes, creating the Ω-shaped pattern from which it derives its name.

How long these blocks persist can differ wildly. The UK experienced a very hot Summer in 1976 when such a block persisted for months and thus drove up temperatures. Generally they last on the order of days to weeks.

Because of how heatwaves and heat domes overlap without a clear distinction, once you add a blocking system the UK’s Met Office prefers to call them ‘persistent summer blocking highs’, as this is their most defining feature. This can also be seen pretty well on maps of the 2021 Western North America heat wave.

Pacific Heat 2021

Affecting much of Western North America from late June through early July, this extreme heatwave broke many records, including the highest temperature ever measured in Canada, at 49.6 °C. Eventually classified as a heat dome, by the time it dissipated around 1,400 excess deaths among the human population were recorded, as well as countless more deaths among farm animals, in addition to the highly destructive Lytton wildfire and general damage to agriculture.

In this case a block ensured that this area of static hot air could not dissipate or otherwise experience some cooling air from the Pacific.

The formation of this block was predicted by meteorologists after they observed warm, moist air from torrential rains in China make its way across the Pacific with help from the jet stream. At this time the Southwestern US was already experiencing a drought, setting the stage for the heat wave by providing additional heat to the Pacific Northwest.

As can be seen in the below barometric chart of the time, this led to the air transported by the jet stream to become trapped in between low pressure areas, exerting downwards pressure on the area below that was already enjoying a warm summer.

A similar phenomenon occurred over Europe during the summer of 2026, with multiple heatwaves involving heat domes forming and persisting for weeks on end. Previous summers in Europe had already significantly warmer and drier than previously, creating the conditions for a record-breaking summer.

With the blistering 2025 European summer already causing many wildfires and excess mortality cases, the summer of 2026 was by all metrics more severe. This raises the awkward question of we can expect things to only get worse from here, not just in Europe but worldwide.

Heat In The System

Ultimately the mechanisms that drive the formation of heatwaves and heat domes become more effective when there is more thermal energy in the system. This means more torrential rains, a higher surface temperature, more droughts and so on.

Of all of Earth’s continents, Europe is the one that is warming up the fastest, with already 2.3 °C above preindustrial levels in 2022. Although there are ways to adapt to a drier, hotter climate, including for our thermal power plants, ideally we would reduce the amount of energy in the Earth’s weather systems.

Doing this means effectively reverting as much as possible of anthropogenic climate change by not adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, including SF6 which is still very common in switching gear, including that installed in wind turbines. Even as we build out our grids with more clean power, it’s of course essential to also keep an eye on grid stability.

Ultimately this increase in heatwaves, and worse, is largely a human-made phenomenon which fortunately means that we also have the power to make the planet cool down again. As fascinating of a meteorological phenomenon a heat dome is, it’s definitely one of those things that’s best enjoyed once every generation or less.

Overdone weather graphics from the 2021 Pacific Heat Dome from CBS News.

After previously adopting a big Sony Trinitron CRT TV that had been trying to hitch a ride along the side of a road in Italy for at least six years, [Happychoice] didn’t give up on trying to fix it, with the second part showing the TV being more or less fully fixed up.

In the first part of this mini-series, the TV had been salvaged and had most of the dirt as well as local flora and fauna evicted before an attempt was made to fix it. Unfortunately despite the insides looking remarkably clean and intact considering its use as a road-side ornament, that video ended with the controller refusing to power up due to issues with the power supply.

In this sequel we get to see what six years of weather exposure means in terms of what components to replace in a CRT TV like this. Unsurprisingly this means mostly replacing most of the capacitors, at least on the power supply board, as well as the neck board for the actual CRT. A couple of MOSFETs also tested open, so they were replaced too.

With those fresh new parts the TV fired right up again, and with a Wii console connected it looks pretty spiffy running games like Persona 4. Fortunately modern CRT TVs like these have a built-in service menu that you can access with the remote, so that you can tweak picture alignment and other settings without having to stick a screwdriver into the back of the TV to fiddle with a potentiometer whilst also keeping an eye on the picture.

Although there are undoubtedly more components on the PCBs and of course one grimy speaker to give some TLC, it does show that as long as the tube itself is intact, it’s definitely worth it to give repairing a shot.

Apparently, people hate typing. As every movie and TV show suggests, the future is talking to computers. There was a time when speech recognition was complex and not very good. But these days, even our lowly phones can do a pretty good job of speech recognition. Of course, one problem is that your phone probably isn’t actually doing the speech recognition. It sends it to the big business of your choice to interpret. I’ve been using Handy, a speech recognition system that works well for me. I’ve also looked at some that didn’t.

After all, it is sometimes nice to dictate to your computer, and it would be even nicer if you could keep your data local. On Windows, oddly enough, there is a well-developed speech feature that, as far as I can tell, almost no one talks about or uses. One video estimates that 99% of users don’t use it. Linux, of course, has many options, but historically, these have been difficult to set up or finicky.

Of course, the good news is that many of the Linux tools are open source and the models are quite good. That means other people have had the freedom to fork the tools and make them easier to use, at least in theory. The licensing of the models themselves may be different, but those will be hard to modify, anyway and they generally work well. The biggest problems on Linux isn’t the technology itself, but the tremendous variety of systems and setups.

Suppose you want to write a speech-to-text program. Will it work on ARM? What desktops will it integrate with? Can it use a GPU? What kind? What about specialized instructions in some CPUs? Then there’s the forced input situation; typing into arbitrary programs once you know what the user said. On X11, it is easy, but Wayland needs different handling.

A Shortcut

I’ve thought about using my phone with KDE Connect, which is an excellent program. It can let you use your phone as a keyboard and mouse for your Linux computer. Unfortunately, it is aimed at character-at-a-time input, and I’ve never found a way to make it work with voice.

Besides, the phone is beaming all the data to “the cloud.” You probably type things you’d rather not broadcast to the ether.

I had looked at Speech Note before, but it is sort of a speech recognition notepad. I didn’t find it seamless, and it didn’t work well on my system anyway. Vocalinux looks nice, but a quick test kept complaining that my Intel extensions were not available. Makes sense, since I have an AMD CPU. Even though the documentation said it should work, I was never able to get it to work.

The Easy Way

Turns out the application that worked readily on my machine was Handy. Keep in mind, Handy is just another tool that uses one of several models out there, along with other open-source tools. You might need to install some tools to deal with your system like xdotool or dotool, but they are probably already installed anyway. That isn’t to minimize the value of Handy. It is — well — Handy. You don’t have to load and configure models, set up a bunch of system-level hooks, or install a bunch of libraries. You install it, and it works.

You can configure it. The best model for you, for example, may depend on your machine and the languages you speak. You can configure the hotkeys and how the app types into your computer. But it does all the work of downloading and configuration.

No Cloud, Unless…

The models do run on your computer and you can make sure it takes advantage of your hardware. However, there is an optional alternate hotkey that takes your speech, processes it to text, and then sends it to your choice of AI engines to clean it up.

Of course, you could be running your own AI engine, but normally you’ll have it sent somewhere else with a prompt. You can tune the prompt or create your own, but the default one starts: “Clean this transcript: 1. Fix spelling, capitalization, and punctuation errors 2. Convert number words to digits (twenty-five → 25, ten percent → 10%, five dollars → $5) 3. Replace spoken punctuation with symbols (period → ., comma → ,, question mark → ?) 4. Remove filler words (um, uh, like as filler)…”

You do need an API key, but there are free options available. For experimenting purposes, I went to OpenRouter, generated a key, and attached it to one of several free models they have. The nice thing is that you can experiment with different models while keeping the same key.

If you search for free in the models box, you will find a few choices including openrouter/free which just picks a free model that isn’t too busy. That can be important because some of the models will introduce long wait times into your transcription.

On the other hand, you can make a new prompt, copy the original one in, delete the part about keeping the language the same, and add instructions to translate the output to French, and that will work, at least most of the time. So there are a lot of possibilities.

Rather than tell you all about it, we’d encourage you to install it and try it or watch the reveiw video below.

Special Mention

Although Handy is my first choice for day-to-day transcription use, there is another open source project that’s worth mentioning. Nerd Dictation is a very lightweight wrapper around the Vosk model. It does take a little bit to set up, and then it provides you with a command line tool that can start and stop dictation. Of course, you can assign those to macro keys. However, there is also a switch that allows you to simply output to stdout. That opens up a lot of possibilities for writing programs or even shell scripts that respond to voice.

To see what’s possible, run nerd-dictation begin --help. This will show you how to output to stdout, set a timeout, and handle other options.

Of course, the obvious project would be a voice typewriter. Many of the tools mentioned here either rely on or can use OpenWhisper and, of course, you can use it too, if you roll your own code.

After saving a £300, 16-port Ubiquiti network switch from getting tossed into the trash, [Buy It Fix It] got the honor of trying to repair it. With four ports and their associated PoE function having some major issues it looked like it might take some debugging, but after taking the lid off, the cause seemed rather obvious.

One of the Broadcom BCM5911 controller chips had a rather suspicious chip of the plastic packaging missing, with additional probing of connected components showing that numerous MOSFETs and a diode having had their proverbial guts blown out and were shorted as well. Whatever happened to some connected Ethernet device would appear to have left a serious trail of damage that nearly wrecked the entire switch.

The biggest challenge here was probably to find a replacement for the Broadcom IC, as this isn’t an IC that stores like Digikey or Mouser stock any more. Fortunately it was still available for sale over at AliExpress for £1.84, with the usual caveat that it could be salvage, fake, a factory reject, etc. In this case it appears that it was a legit Broadcom IC, with the four affected ports springing back to life including powering a PoE camera.

With a total cost of about £5 plus the time invested it wasn’t a bad deal to save a pretty nice PoE switch with 16 Ethernet and 2 SFP ports.

If you spend any time near a gym, you may be familiar with Bluetooth heart rate monitors — a small pack of electronics mounted on a strap round the chest which can relay heart rate data to an external logger or display. We’re pleased to see [Milos Rasic]’s project then, an open-source version of one of those monitors.

The heart rate capture is done by an AD8232, while the Bluetooth part is handled by a Seeed Studio XAIO ESP32 board. Power is provided by a single 3.7 V cell, with a boost converter to push that up to 5 V. The design omits a charge controller to keep things simple, so figuring out how to top off the cell is left as an exercise — no pun intended — for the user. Software is loaded through the Arduino IDE, which raises the possibility that other ESP32 CPUs could be supported with a bit of modification. All in all it’s a surprisingly simple project, and while the manufactured version is cheap enough it’s still very much worth having one that’s open source.

If you’d like to know more about his quest to develop open medical devices, check out the talk [Milos] gave on the intricacies of blood pressure monitoring earlier this year at Hackaday Europe.

[Bas BotBerg] wanted to use a portable Bluetooth thermal printer to run off reports on sensor data collected by an ESP32-C3 microcontroller. But as is so often the case these days, the only official way to interface with the printer was through a proprietary smartphone application provided by the manufacturer. With no documentation on how the thing works, he set out to reverse engineer the printer’s communications protocol so he could control it from the MCU — but the route he took to get there was a bit different than what we usually see, and is an excellent case study for those who might have similar projects in mind.

The standard procedure for something like this, if it can be called that, is to use Android’s built-in debugging capability to log Bluetooth communications while running the manufacturer’s application. The resulting file can be fed into Wireshark, and with patience and some educated guesses, you can usually work out the various commands and values that get passed to the hardware.

But in this case, [Bas BotBerg] ignored the manufacturer’s software and instead used an application that can query a device and list its Bluetooth Low Energy services and characteristics. Specifically, he looks for services that are marked as writable, and starts pushing data into them to see how the printer responds. For this he uses Python with the Bleak library, as it allows him to rapidly iterate and adapt his code. After a bit of poking and experimentation, he finds the proper incantation to get the printer’s motor to kick on an advance the paper — a critical first milestone that tells him he’s on the right path.

Once [Bas BotBerg] mapped out what data needed to be sent to what endpoints to operate the printer in Python, it was a relatively straightforward process to send those same payloads using C++ code on the ESP32. For extra style points he also brought in the Adafruit GFX library so he could produce icons and more easily format the output of the printer.

It doesn’t look like [Bas BotBerg] has released the code in this case (perhaps if we all ask nicely), but we’ve seen similar efforts to bring open source drivers to these cheap Bluetooth printers for the good of the community.

With VHDL being arguably more deterministic and bullet-proof than Verilog, it’s good to see another open source VHDL simulator joining the fray that is not a variation of ghdl. Written by [Óscar Grimal] in C++ with an MIT license, the Pulse project is a still in progress package that provides the entire toolchain, from the compiler to the requisite waveform output.

This waveform output is provided in the form of a text-based user interface (TUI), which at the very least helps a lot with making it cross-platform compatible. As dependencies only a C++20 capable compiler and CMake are indicated.

Of course, with VHDL being a rather hefty language especially once you start piling up the associated standard library, the currently supported language and library features are somewhat limited still so that you’re limited to basic IEEE packages and types, with default values are not supported yet.

Per the roadmap on the GitHub project’s Readme more VHDL language features including generics and additional types will be added, along with an enhanced simulation engine. It’s also said that mixed-language support with Verilog will be added, though SystemVerilog looks to be getting the short end of the stick as usual.

It will definitely be interesting to compare this package to ghdl.

Recently researchers finished mapping the central nervous system (CNS) connectome of not just the female Drosophila melanogaster (i.e. fruit fly) brain, but also that of the male D. melanogaster for a comparative analysis. Here the sexually dimorphic changes turned out to induce specific mating behavior that ensures that there will only be smooching between genetically fit D. melanogaster males and females, while the rest of the connectome remained effectively the same.

Of course, with this connectome in hand it led some people to ask themselves what else one can do with this connectome graph of about 160,000 neurons other than make a fruit fly into a fruit fly. So far we have seen [Nftechie] turn this connectome into a crypto stock trader with the Stonkfly project that uses the connectome’s reward circuits to potentially make profitable trades, though [Nftechie] says that they haven’t verified yet how good a fruit fly is at trading stocks, only that it does said stonks.

Over at [PC Gamer] they summarized a number of things that people have also done, including trying to make the connectome control a game of DOOM and Beat Saber. Each game frame stimulates sensory neurons, with the generated outputs then mapped to game controls, with dopamine-producing reward circuits wired in for reinforcement learning.

Although the D. melanogaster brain is only the merest fraction of the size of the human brain, it does provide us with a glimpse of what actual artificial intelligence research may lead to, as we unravel how even a 160,000 neuron connectome is enough to make these terrors of rotting plant matter do their wonderful things.

It would not be at all original to declare that Python is the new BASIC. Like BASIC, it has been the first programming language for a whole generation of coders, and its main advantage is that it’s quick and easy to write in. Like BASIC it is an interpreted language, and thus rather slow to execute.

Thus while CircuitPython can be very useful for beginners and quick projects, it hits the limitations of the hardware far sooner than it needs to — unless you can pre-compile critical parts of the code, which you now can, thanks to CircuitPython Turbo by [Mikey Sklar] with some help from Anthropic’s Claude LLM.

Now if that sounds a lot like MicroPython’s ‘Viper’ and machine-code compiler, that’s because it is. CircuitPython is a fork of MicroPython with some handy extras on Adafruit boards, but Viper wasn’t one of them until now. Before the Turbo version, CircuitPython only ran in interpreted mode.

Like MicroPython, using CircuitPython Turbo you can flag sections to run as ‘native’, where instructions are compiled but values stay as python objects, which gets you about a 3X speedup. A little more rewriting to declare your variables and pointers and you can use ‘viper’ mode, which can — depending on what you’re up to — result in a 20x to 70x speedup. In Adafruit’s documentation, they demonstrate a Metro RP2040 calculating the Mandelbrot set 3x faster in Native and 19.7 times faster with Viper than normal Python bytecode.

The one thing that we miss from BASIC that CircuitPython Turbo doesn’t give is inline assembly– though interestingly enough, that is in the upstream MicroPython implementation, so perhaps its day will come here too. Not every job is suited to the use of Python on microcontrollers, but we’ve seen it used for everything from e-bikes to a Winamp-inspired music player.

It is a classic Hackaday situation. You have an Egret GT E-scooter. It has a screen that shows the usual dash stats, but that led to an annoyance. You could accidentally enter firmware update mode and, from there, enter operational mode without the security PIN. [Ben] couldn’t let that stand, so he reverse-engineered the protocol and rewrote the firmware in Rust. As he put it, “… because I have to break… everything I own…” We get it.

The mobile app was useful for some basic info, since sniffing Bluetooth is fairly easy and analyzing mobile code is, more or less, straightforward. Analysis revealed some data that doesn’t show on the display and that several things are sent back to home base tagged with the scooter’s unique ID — another reason to gut the existing firmware.

Internally, the scooter uses the CAN Bus, so out came the oscilloscope and a homebrew CAN decoder.  Surprisingly, the CAN bus is accessible on the USB-C port’s data pins. Officially, the port is only for charging phones, so you have to wonder what your phone makes of the alien signals on the data pins when it is charging.

Firmware updates actually come in at least three flavors: display, input panel, and main controller. Reverse engineering the firmware update process was crucial to installing the new firmware.

If you own a similar scooter, this post is a goldmine. If you don’t, it is still a very detailed breakdown of a reverse-engineering workflow, and you can apply many of the tools and techniques to your next project.

Of course, another option is to just keep the scooter and replace the brains. If you want to learn more about reverse engineering, there are literally dozens of Hackaday posts to help you get started.

You want Retro? We did, when we started our retrocomputing challenge. [Peter] decided that transistors weren’t retro enough, and sent us this lovely homebrew relay computer, complete with 16- bit CPU, which is rather more bits than one normally associates with clicky clacky contacts.

The architecture is very simple– it just uses an accumulator register, ACCU, and goes from there. All mathematics and save/load operations go through ACCU. There whole instruction set is only 19 commands, and he’s used that set to program such lovely things as calculating 3 digits of Pi– which only took 8 minutes of glorious clicking. There’s a demo video of that embedded below. [Peter] has even implemented a display by hooking his computer to a 32×32 LED matrix, but don’t expect it to relay updates really quickly.

If this computer looks familiar, it’s because its earlier incarnation was one of the more “extra” entries in last year’s one-hertz challenge, where it was used to blink an indicator lamp. Yes, even relay computers apparently get started with the “blinky” sketch.

If you want in on the fun, our retrocomputer challenge runs until October 27th, so there’s lots of time left to turn back the clock.

[Andy Huot] has a fantastic-looking infinity mirror digital clock that really raises the bar. It uses high quality components, smart use of RGB LED animations, and a clever “stacked diffuser” vertical design to the 7-segment display elements that really enhances the infinity mirror effect. It needs to be seen in action, so check it out.

The end result is expressly portal-like, with the smooth animations of the LEDs really playing into the effect. The size helps, too. It’s 24 inches in diameter, giving it considerable presence.

A basic infinity mirror design consists of lit elements sandwiched between a reflective back surface and a partially-reflective, partially-transmissive top cover. That same basic principle is used here, but with great care given to ensure nothing so much as a fingerprint spoils the illusion. For example, the top cover is a disk of acrylic with a 90% reflective film affixed to the inside surface. That’s easy enough to DIY with some car tint, but [Andy] found that for the very best results it was worth having high-quality film professionally applied.

We like the use of 3D-printed custom jigs for soldering the segments of RGB LED strips, and holding the pre-measured wires in place with some putty is a great way to keep them in place while working. In case you’re wondering, the mirrored acrylic making up the back wall has holes in it for mounting each segment’s LED strip in a holder, and running the wires to the rear.

The video (embedded below) documents every step of the assembly, and it’s a serious build. While the design files for the 3D-printed parts are not free, there’s certainly enough detail for an enterprising hacker to replicate the design in their own way.

The 2026 Hackaday Superconference is just around the corner in November. It’s hard to believe that we’ve been having an annual gathering for so long, but this is number ten. Every year, it’s a great time to refresh your pool of new ideas, hang out with fellow hackers, put your soldering skills to the test, eat some phenomenal tacos, and catch some of the two tracks of talks.

What’s got me stoked right now is that we just finished up talk selection, and this year is going to be a banger! We had more talks submitted than ever, and all of high quality. Frankly, if this keeps up for next year, we might have to figure out a third stage.

This year also marks the move to a bigger venue, with more space for hacking in the courtyard, more space for talks in two halls, and more room for you to all settle down and share your work, or create something new. Even the badge is going to be bigger this year – but that’s all we can say at this time.

If you don’t have your tickets yet, go ahead and get them. Flights are still relatively cheap, and hotels not booked up yet. See you all soon!

Among all the machines of the 8-bit home computer era which booted straight to a BASIC prompt, there were a very few that went their own way with another language. The Jupiter Ace springs immediately to mind, a diminutive Z80-based machine similar to Sinclair’s ZX81, which booted to FORTH.

The Ace wasn’t a commercial success, but what would have happened had it booted to a more accessible language? It’s a question [jordanhubbard] appears to be trying to answer, with an OS that boots to a Python interpreter.. The OS is Python, and everything on top of it uses the interpreter. Better still, it has a GUI mode.

The OS boots on an x86-64 platform or in QEMU, and appears to have been created using an LLM. There are two build options for the GUI version or the interpreter version. It provides a set of UNIX-like commands for interacting with the OS and disk, something which brings back memories of disk-based systems back in the BASIC days. We’re surprised to see no screenshots of the GUI in action though, an omission he’d do well to correct, we think.

It’s fair to say that in 2026 this is more a bit of fun than a serious OS contender, but maybe someone will run with it. It has competition too, not so long ago we featured a similar OS that runs a BASIC interpreter.

When you see a listing for an Ethernet switch whose specification list is in effect ‘yes’, with a four-digit price tag when new, and with the seller asking for less than 10% of said $3,000 asking price in an ‘untested’ condition, the only rational thing to do is of course to mash that ‘buy’ button. This is what [This Does Not Compute] did, and created a video about to show what a great investment decision this was.

Naturally this Juniper EX4100-F-12P switch came without power supply brick for its 48VDC input. Figuring out its pin-out and probing said input showed that the voltage rails had been shorted, giving a first clue as to why this switch had been on sale for so very cheap. Bravely hoping that it would be a straightforward fix, the unit was disassembled.

With a 280 Watt power brick, it’s little wonder that the top of the unit is a one massive aluminium heatsink, including a large heatpipe. Also visible on the lid near the power input was a very-bad-news black skid mark.

From that first discovery the news just got worse and worse, with clear signs of water ingression, rust and corrosion, along with the aftermath of a powered circuit meeting such bad corrosion. After some clean-up it’s clear that some components had violently exploded, ripping apart layers of the PCB and likely parts of traces in those inner sections too.

With no schematics available and no other good repair options via Juniper or anywhere else, it seems that unfortunately this gamble turned out to be merely a pile of e-waste and a few bucks worth of scrap metal. Caveat emptor, once more.

For a little while vacuum tubes and semiconductors were fighting a heated battle for dominance, with bipolar junction transistors and 1959’s RCA Nuvistor both allowing you to build a compact circuit with relatively low power usage and no high voltages. Although we now know that semiconductor technology won out overwhelmingly, that doesn’t mean that you cannot build a brand new Nuvistor board in 2026, as [Eric Schlaepfer] AKA [TubeTimeUS] recently did.

Nuvistors saw their most use in small-signal radio frequency applications, like VHF and UHF, with excellent low-noise characteristics that saw them used until the early 1970s in television sets, radios and oscilloscopes, as well as in space probes like the 1960s US Ranger Moon missions, so by that metric they had a good run.

Nothing so exciting is built in this video, sadly, but alongside a breakdown on how nuvistors work, we do see a discrete 555-style timer built using a gaggle of tetrode nuvistors, giving a pretty good idea of what using them in a project is like. Being a vacuum tube at its core, nuvistors still have the heater element, which is what gives vacuum tubes their reputation for being slow to start working and large current draw.

Despite their drawbacks, nuvistors still have a range of benefits compared to modern-day transistors, including being practically immune to electrostatic discharge (ESD) and electromagnetic interference (EMI) all the way up an EMP that will destroy most semiconductor electronics.

That said, the somewhat limited 8-nuvistor implementation of the 555 had to get a few extra pins for the heater supply, which burns up about 7.5 Watt just to allow the circuit to function. Terming it the ‘hollow-state 555 timer’, it works effectively just like any semiconductor 555, just with that extra power cost and of course no significant prospect of making it smaller, barring a semiconductor evolution as with the pixels-sized CRTs in the SED and FED type displays.

We covered the nuvistor before, including a great reference on this device, and its history that was much longer than people often assume today, as well as the vacuum tubes we use every day in for example our microwaves.

The revival in film photography has brought a range of specialist films to tempt the experimenter, as well as increased the popularity of loading your own cartridges. But perforating the film from blank stock has always been beyond the reach of home gamers. Now [Jon Schiereck] has done it, but not quite with film. He’s made a perforator for photographic paper, producing a strip which can be shot in a camera. It’s film, but it’s not exactly film.

The machine takes the form of a 3D printed mechanism which feeds a strip of photographic paper through a pair of punches to make the sprocket holes. In this case those holes are circular, being made by a pair of drill bits ground for the purpose, and they’re moved up and down by a crank driven by a set of gears from a hand crank or even a cordless drill. A rubber roller pulls the film forward.

It seems to be a well-thought-out machine, and you can try it yourself for free via a slightly unusual distribution medium, his Ko-Fi page. In case you’re worried about finding a slitter to make those 35mm paper strips, it seems he’s also working on a 3D printable one of those. So you can shoot on paper, and develop it just as you would a print.

If you’re further into extending what you can film through the use of a 3D printer, how about 8 mm movie film?

Expressif might not have intended the ESP32-S3 to become an emulation powerhouse, but that’s certainly what has happened. The little microcontroller seems perfect for recreating the Game Boys or Game Gears of years past, and there are a lot of software options to that end. Having grabbed firmware off a github repo, you still need a physical build to hold, and that’s where this one by [HVT Lab and Huy Vector] stands out.

As you can see, they’re letting everything hang out — not even in a 90s-inspired clear case, but with an open frame of soldered brass, with just a small strip of 2 mm clear acrylic to help stabilize the buttons. That appears to be held with cyanoacrylate glue, but it’s brass and solder doing the majority of the structural work here. We might be a little more confident tossing this lovely device in a bag or pocket if the whole device was boxed in with that acrylic — shorting the exposed power bus on your keys sounds like a bummer — but we can’t argue with the aesthetic vision here. It’s a lovely build on the physical end.

From the video it looks like the software is based on Retro-Go, which we’ve seen in use before. In any case, there are plenty of open source projects you could load onto the ESP32-S3 powering this circuit sculpture, though, from NES to IBM PC.

Once upon a time, you had to carefully budget your microcontroller’s resources if you wanted to do something as simple as flash a bunch of LEDs. These days, they’re powerful enough to humiliate the game consoles of yesteryear. [alexkid77] demonstrates this well, having the ESP32-P4 run Tomb Raider.

Now, [alexkid77] hasn’t gone so far as to create a PlayStation emulator on the ESP32 or anything quite like that. Instead, this is a port—and not of the original Tomb Raider release, either. [alexkid77] started with OpenLara—the classic game running in an open-source engine. With the ESP32-P4 having two cores running at 400 MHz each, there was plenty of processing power on tap to run the engine with a software renderer at 320×240, which is hardware scaled up to 1024×600 via the Pixel Processing Accelerator (PPA) built into the chip. There’s also stereo audio with an ES8311 codec hooked up, while input is via a USB HID keyboard.

It’s funny to think that it could actually be cheaper and quicker to get Tomb Raider running on an ESP32 and a cheap LCD display versus actually going out to buy a PlayStation and an original game disc. But that’s the way the cookie crumbles in 2026. At least you don’t have to play it on an S3 Verge.

Nifty little AMOLED screens are easy to get nowadays, and [Sophie D] demonstrates they are both thin and light enough to be worn with OpenChoker, a design for a choker necklace that was a hit at DEF CON.

The choker consists of an AMOLED touchscreen flanked by short RGB LED strips. Behind the display is the PCB which contains an RP2350 and micro SD card slot for external storage, and at the rear of the choker is an 18650 cell to power it all. The display plays an eye-catching animation that gets generated on the fly while the LEDs sparkle away.

[Sophie] shares a number of interesting takeaways from designing and building this device. One is that the bulk of the PCB design work was interfacing to the display, since no existing footprint or reference design could be found. So if you find yourself with a Hello Lighting HL020E21-02 2.14″ touchscreen display you’re hankering to use in your own project, do yourself a favor and check out [Sophie]’s board design instead of starting from scratch.

Battery life was more than enough for a device like this. A single 18650 cell powered the choker effortlessly for a 16-hour stretch and still the cell measured a robust 3.7 V. While a light-up choker used indoors isn’t a great candidate for wearable solar power, it’s encouraging that there’s no need for a tethered battery pack.

Another tip to consider relates to the screen’s touch sensitivity. In short, the capacitive touch screen responded perfectly when plugged into a development computer, but when mounted and isolated on the choker it responded so poorly as to be useless. It didn’t keep the rest of the choker from doing its job, but it might be worth keeping in mind as something to watch out for with a device like this.

There’s one final mystery [Sophie] ran into: with only one day to spare, glue used to affix some wires ended up melting away the wire insulation, revealing bare copper. We’re not sure what happened there, but if nothing else it’s a reminder that Murphy’s Law is always ready to strike when one is on a deadline.