Although not technically the first virtual pet, the Tamagotchi handhelds certainly popularized the idea and made it a worldwide phenomenon. In the late 90s it was hard to go out in public and not see them dangling from backpacks and belt loops. They turned out to be more than a passing fad, too. There have been Tamagotchis in various forms since then, and one of the latest, the Tamagotchi Paradise, is uniquely hackable thanks to this custom UART interface.
The build starts with a simple and inexpensive CH340G UART adapter with a built-in USB interface. A custom 3D printed enclosure is used to house the adapter and also help to expose the interface to the Tamagotchi. This is done by wiring three pins to nickel strips, which are threaded through slits in the case and looped back around to create a pogo-style adapter for the Tamagotchi’s custom dock. Normally this would be used to link to other Tamagotchis, but in this case the USB-to-UART adapter mimics it, allowing for all kinds of in-game shenanigans. The project’s creator [Squalius] shows it off by connecting it directly to a browser tool in Google Chrome.
Not only that, but this can also be used to modify the software running on the handheld entirely, with the video showing demos playing not only Super Mario but also DOOM (of course). This isn’t too surprising given that these games are built with modern 32-bit ARM microcontrollers. For the 90s purists, though, it probably won’t surprise anyone to know that these devices have been the subject of various hacks almost since they came out.
A few years ago, [Smashcat] ported a ZX Spectrum game called Manic Miner to the Arduino Uno. The Arduino has less memory than the original Spectrum did, so doing all this on an 8-bit microcontroller was no easy lift. Since then, parts of this original port have been adapted to produce a game engine, allowing [Smashcat] to port several other games to the Arduino Uno as well.
The engine is able to host a 2D map with the ability to scroll, at a resolution of 256×256, as well as up to nine sprites at the same time. The graphics are locked to 50 FPS, but only with a real Arduino Uno that has a crystal oscillator. Some replica boards do not have a timekeeping chip accurate enough to replicate the video signal, which is done without a framebuffer. That signal, as well as two PWM audio channels, are still generated directly as well, with only a few resistors needed to hook everything up to a monitor and a controller, including the option of using an NES controller.
With all of that running on the Arduino and it hooked up to the daughterboard that provides the controller interface as well as the resistors for the video signal to function and a driver for a speaker, the system now runs the original Manic Miner as well as three other games: Scramble, Space Invaders, and Pac Man.
Microsoft's MAI-DxO AI outperformed generalist doctors on diagnostic benchmarks, but real-world hospital testing is still needed to assess its clinical value.
Microsoft's MAI-DxO AI outperformed generalist doctors on diagnostic benchmarks, but real-world hospital testing is still needed to assess its clinical value.
Meatloaf is an ESP32 device at its core, which plugs in to any of several Commodore computers through their IEC serial port. Many similar systems exist to bridge the gap between the modern world and the now-retro one, but this one connects to a dedicated service which points towards files no matter where they’re stored. There is some local storage, but it can also retrieve files from any active URL, and Meatloaf retrieves the files and then sends them to the Commodore over that serial link.
Part of what makes this unique is that the user doesn’t need to configure Meatloaf in any particular way, everything is done from the Commodore as long as the URL is known to the user. The system can even parse nested files like archive file types and send them along to the computer just like it would if they were on a period-correct floppy drive. There’s a GitHub project page as well for anyone looking to get into the weeds of this serial data interface.
Welcome to Edition 9.16 of the Rocket Report! Lots of SpaceX-related news this week including a couple of Thursday shockers. In one story, the company told the US Space Force thanks, but no thanks after being offered three military launch contracts. Then, on the civil space side of things, SpaceX's Starship may required up to 22 refuelings to support a lunar landing, a NASA safety panel said.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Miura 5 getting closer to launch. PLD Space says its Miura 5 rocket, due to undertake its inaugural launch next year, is nearing final integration, Aviation Week reports. The rocket is one of three Miura 5s the company has already manufactured, with the other two designed to qualify key system elements, CEO Raúl Torres said in an October 19 program update. PLD Space now targets a first flight of the small-lift vehicle before mid-2027.
DOOM. Boil it, mash it, stick it in a stew, it’s the game that runs on anything and everything. Now, the classic shooter is running on a rather unlikely target—a cheap clamp meter of very limited resources, thanks to the work of [Artur Bieniek].
The clamp meter in question is the FNIRSI DMC-100, which can be had for the low price of just $30 or so if you know where to look. It’s a far cry from the many thousands of dollars you’d pay for a heavy old 486-based machine back in 1993. [Artur] got the doomgeneric engine running on the Artery AT32F415 chip that runs the clamp meter.
The chip is pretty capable, with its 150 MHz clock speed, though the 32 KB of RAM posed rather a big limitation to the project. It may be one of the lowest RAM DOOM ports out there. Even with this limit, [Artur] was able to get Episode 1 of Freedoom: Phase 1 loaded on to the thing, including E1M1 to E1M9 along with the title screen, intermissions, the finale, the menu, and four save slots. Color graphics are displayed on the meter’s 320 x 240 screen, and there are even sound effects on the built-in buzzer. Controls are mapped to the rather curious choice of a DJI RC-N1 drone controller.
We’ve seen DOOM running on everything from desk phones to completely custom CPUs. These days you have to try pretty hard to find something it hasn’t already been ported to.
The first viable powered aircraft predated the first proper runway by two decades. While it’s entirely possible to launch some planes from austere dirt or grass strips, the aviation world eventually realized that aircraft would be better off launching from a flat, paved surface.
Over the years, paving technology has gradually improved in the aviation world as it has for roads and highways. Now, there’s a project being built in Charlotte with new digital features that hopes to push the state of the art of runways even further.
Twinsies
Charlotte Douglas International Airport (CLT) serves the city of Charlotte, North Carolina. It’s by no means the most famous airport in the United States; it wouldn’t make the top 10 in notoriety despite being the 11th busiest in the country).. Still, it serves as a major hub for American Airlines, and has three operating runways that are interesting for the fact that they are all laid out parallel to each other.
Much of the work will involve embedding strain gauges in the runway to monitor how loads affect the structure when the runway is in use. Credit: CLT press release
The airport’s major grand project of late has been the installation of its fourth parallel runway, with the official ground breaking taking place in June 2023. The hope is that the new 10,000 foot runway will add significant capacity for both arrivals and departures to keep the airport competitive while also adding resilience in difficult operational conditions. As the new runway is built, the existing runways have been renamed to 19R/1L, 19L/1R, and 18/36 respectively. The fourth runway will wear the designation 19C/1C.
The new Fourth Parallel Runway, as it is otherwise currently known, will be unique for its “smart runway” features. Unlike a smart fridge, smart oven, or smart bulb, it doesn’t just mean that the runway will have a pointless and annoying WiFi connection and dodgy smartphone app. Instead, it’s all about sensing and telemetry, which is intended to create a better understanding of the runway and its performance and state over time.
The strain gauges, seen here assembled on rebar, are to be embedded in the concrete itself, where they will provide the most useful readings. However, this does mean that the sensors will not be practical to maintain or repair over time. Their expected lifetime is approximately ten years. Credit: CLT press release
During construction, over 2,000 sensors will be installed in the 18-inch deep concrete being poured to lay out the Fourth Parallel Runway. The sensors in question will be used to measure everything from engineering basics like stress and strain, as well as tracking factors like moisture ingress, settlement, friction, and the presence of snow and ice.
The sensors are no different from those that have been deployed on highway bridges and interstates previously for similar purposes. However, this will mark the first time that a US runway has been similarly instrumented in such a way, such that the airport can create a “digital twin” of the runway.
Jointmeters will also be installed in the runway to measure the behaviour of expansion joints in the runway. Credit: CLT press release
This is effectively a digital model that is fed by the sensor data and helps authorities determine the condition of the runway, both from an engineering and operational standpoint. Moisture, snow, and ice sensors can be used to guide the employment of deicing resources and what measures to take on the ground, while monitoring the stress and strain on the runway will guide maintenance decisions over the runway’s lifetime. The latter in particular will provide a very clear idea of how aircraft operations are impacting the very structure of the runway itself. The hope is that this data will be a boon for implementing predictive maintenance. In a busy airport, preventing a time-consuming runway shutdown with a little well-placed maintenance could save huge amounts of money by preventing or limiting the number of flight cancellations, to say nothing of the reduced frustrations for travellers passing through.
Of course, the problem with embedding sensors in 18 inches of concrete is that it’s not particularly easy to get at them for service or replacement purposes. The runway’s sensor system is slated for an expected life of 10 years, during which time data will be collected to better understand the runway and its performance and robustness over time. The hope is that by learning exactly what’s going on in the concrete itself, engineering lessons could be learned on how better to build runways in future. It could lead to new guidelines on concrete mixes, thickness, density, or other factors that influence how long the runway holds up under heavy use by commercial airlines. Despite the limited sensor lifetime, though, the runway itself is expected to last much longer, with the pavement itself slated for 30 to 40 years of use.
Embedding sensors into runways won’t always be a seen as a necessity. It’s perfectly possible to build a runway that doesn’t have telemetry, and just exists as a big old slab of concrete that takes a pounding from air traffic on the regular. However, where a greater understanding of the pavement is desirable, instrumentation can help. Time will tell if the lessons learned from the new CLT runway prove useful enough to justify the investment—but it’s easy to imagine that it would only take a couple of runway shutdowns to be avoided to pay for the $6.5 million project cost. Time will tell!
Welcome to Edition 9.15 of the Rocket Report! The launch I'm most looking forward to in the next few weeks is that of Japan's Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission. MMX is one of the marquee space science missions launching this year, and it's set to leave Earth as soon as Monday (US time) aboard a Japanese H3 rocket. The spacecraft will visit Phobos and Deimos, the two asteroid-like moons of Mars, deploying a rover and collecting specimens for return to Earth in 2031. Exploration at its finest.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Reflect Orbital looks to India for launch capacity. California-based Reflect Orbital, the startup attempting to offer sunlight on-demand with in-space mirrors, announced the purchase of two launches Wednesday from Indian launcher Skyroot Aerospace, Payload Space reports. One of the launches will use Skyroot's Vikram-1 rocket, which became the first privately developed Indian rocket to reach orbit in July. The other will fly on an upgraded rocket called the Vikram-1U.
The trade secrets case between Flexport and Freightmate centered on the use of shipping documents. (Unsplash Photo / Rinson Chory)
Freightmate AI has settled a trade secrets lawsuit filed by San Francisco-based freight forwarder Flexport on terms that will keep the Bellevue, Wash.-based logistics software startup’s products on the market.
“We’re glad to have this resolved,” said Bryan Lacaillade, Freightmate’s CEO and co-founder, in a statement. “I’m incredibly grateful to our team, customers, and partners for their support throughout this journey, and we’re excited about what’s ahead for Freightmate.”
The case raised a question that could become more common as employees leave big companies to start AI ventures: whether everyday business documents count as valuable trade secrets when they can be fed into AI models.
Lacaillade and fellow co-founder Jason Zhao, both former Flexport employees, acknowledged in a stipulated court judgment that they and the company acquired approximately 2,000 confidential Flexport shipping documents and used some portion of them. But they denied Flexport’s claim that Freightmate’s product was built on them, and the court ultimately made no finding of liability.
The documents included bills of lading, arrival notices and other paperwork from about 70 Flexport shipments. Court filings show that Lacaillade and another co-founder, Rishab Gadroo, each ran five to 10 of the documents through OpenAI’s GPT-4o model in 2024 to test how well it could pull out standard information.
Flexport argued in court filings that the use went further, saying the documents helped shape the prompts Freightmate wrote for its AI system, giving the startup a head start.
Freightmate responded in its own filings that it built its product independently, and that the documents weren’t trade secrets in the first place.
The companies notified the court of the settlement Oct. 5. The case had been set for a jury trial starting Oct. 19 in U.S. District Court in San Francisco before Judge Rita Lin.
Financial terms of the settlement weren’t disclosed. The judgment says Flexport’s claims for monetary damages were resolved in a confidential agreement, and each side will cover its own legal fees as part of the resolution. Flexport had sought a court order that could have barred Freightmate from selling its main product for a period of time.
“We’re satisfied with this result,” said Courtney Heger, Flexport’s vice president and head of marketing and communications, responding to GeekWire’s email inquiry. She said the judgment includes key admissions that were backed up by a detailed forensic review conducted during the case. That review’s findings weren’t made public.
Lacaillade and Zhao joined Flexport from Amazon in 2021 and left in 2024 to start Freightmate, which came out of stealth that June with a $650,000 pre-seed round from Wischoff Ventures. It raised a $5 million seed round led by Fuse in January 2025.
Freightmate has 17 employees, Lacaillade said in a follow-up email. The company sells AI-powered freight forwarding software, along with add-on tools that pull data from shipping documents and handle customs paperwork and invoices. Its customers include some of the world’s largest freight forwarding and logistics companies.
Flexport sued in March 2025, alleging that the founders secretly planned the startup while still at the company, as GeekWire reported at the time.
As part of the stipulated judgment, Zhao acknowledged that he acquired Flexport confidential information, including trade secrets, and both founders agreed that they knew or should have known that acquiring the shipping documents violated their agreements with Flexport.
They didn’t admit Flexport’s other allegations. Lacaillade said in an email that the stipulated facts “were agreed to as part of resolving the case” and only for purposes of the lawsuit.
He underscored that Freightmate and its founders deny liability, that nothing else in the judgment is an admission, and that it preserves Freightmate’s right to compete and to independently develop and sell its software.
Going forward, the judgment calls for a neutral forensic examiner to search Freightmate’s systems and cloud storage for Flexport documents. If any exist, the examiner will oversee their deletion, along with any product changes needed to remove Flexport data. Lacaillade said Freightmate is cooperating fully with the review, which is due to be completed by Jan. 30, 2027.
The startup’s focus, Lacaillade said, is on its customers and on building the company.
A FlyDubai flight to Israel made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia on September 30, following what eyewitnesses described as an attempted hijacking.
On 30 September, an Israel-bound Flydubai flight nearly became the kind of weaponized airliner that has haunted aviation-security planning since September 11. The danger did not come from a hijacker who forced his way through the cockpit door. It came from an authorized member of the flight crew.
PwC’s survey found that only 22% of leaders would use fully autonomous AI for cyber defense, while just 21% are implementing quantum-resistant security measures.
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