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Open Hardware/Modding: Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and More
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Arduino ☛ Build your own handheld retro console with the Arduino® UNO™ Q board
Arduino® Project Hub has featured a lot of DIY handheld consoles on this blog over the years. Most of them are impressive, and most of them require at least some custom hardware – a purpose-designed PCB, a specialized connector, a part you can only get from one supplier.
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CNX Software ☛ PICOTTY project enables multi-target serial remote management through Raspberry Pi Pico boards and Pi Zero 2 W SBC
PICOTTY is an open-source project enabling serial-based remote management using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W as a hub running a web server for the dashboard, and several Raspberry Pi Pico or Pico 2 boards with an Ethernet add-on to control and monitor the targets over serial. In some ways, it’s a multi-target IP KVM, but without video or mouse, so let’s call it an IP keyboard, since each Pico board acts as an Ethernet-connected USB keyboard, while the Pi Zero 2 W SBC manages all nodes attached to it over Ethernet.
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Hackaday ☛ Reading A Thermocouple With Mercury And A Potentiometer
The potentiometer (instrument) has a galvanometer at its heart. One side of the galvanometer is connected to the center lead of a potentiometer (component) which spans a voltage source; the other side is connected to a reference voltage. The potentiometer can be adjusted until no current flows through the galvanometer, at which point both sides match the reference voltage. The reference voltage source can then be replaced with some other source, which can then be measured relative to the reference by adjusting the potentiometer until both the voltages match. The reference voltage source is a Weston cell, which uses two mercury electrodes, one amalgamated with cadmium, to produce a stable 1.018 volt reference; despite being 74 years old, this particular cell still measured at 1.017 volts.
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Hackaday ☛ Addressable LEDs Make Giant 16×2 Character Display
“LCD” is in scare quotes there, because while the original display is a character LCD, [Uncle Stem]’s embigginated recreation is not. Liquid crystal displays are beyond all but the most dedicated DIYers, so [Stem] recreated the whole thing with addressable LEDs instead — over a thousand of them. Each character got its own PCB, and rather than pay for assembly [Stem] used a 3D printed stencil to help apply solder paste, an idea we’ve seen before. His choice of long lengths of nickel strip — the stuff you spot weld to Li-ion batteries — to join the LED-holding PCBs is also worth noting.
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Hackaday ☛ Full Teardown Of A 2026 Amazon Fire Stick HD
After the release of Google’s Chromecast so-called ‘streaming sticks’ have remained a popular form factor, even though such technology is these days part of ‘smart’ TVs. Being curious as to what kind of hardware they put into these sticks or dongles these days, [electronupdate] decided to do his typical full teardown of a 2026 model Fire Stick HD from Amazon, including the typical nekkid die shots.
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Make Use Of ☛ I got a free Mini PC, and TurnKey Linux made it a cloud-backed NAS
A free Intel NUC with a 1TB mechanical hard drive was just too hard to pass up. Between my media server and random SMB shares across multiple servers, my important documents were scattered across my network.
Putting them on yet another server with a shared folder wouldn’t solve the issue. Cloud-only might allow me to consolidate the storage, but then my files would become access-dependent.
What I needed was a blend of local file share hosting and an encrypted copy safely outside my home. Instead of spinning up a new server and messing around with Samba, I installed a TurnKey Linux File Server. The old NUC then became a secure Samba server with Windows file sharing, browser access, and Amazon S3 backups.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Hackaday ☛ Cell Broadcast: The Modern Emergency Alert System
Once upon a time, telephones were primarily point-to-point communications systems. There were options for three-way and conference calls out there, but by and large the plain old telephone system was about connecting one handset to another for a direct conversation. For this reason, the telephone was seldom used for mass emergency communications, because it was simply not fit for broadcasting a message to a wide number of people.
However, technology has since changed. Our modern phones are all connected to a big digital over-the-air network, and large swathes of them can be addressed all at once if so needed. This has led to the development of emergency warning systems that use the cellular network, with Cell Broadcast being the most notable iteration.
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