Hackaday

While you may not be familiar with the term “busy board”, you’ve almost certainly seen one. It’s the sort of toy with a bunch of buttons, switches, and of course LEDs, that are designed to keep young children entertained. As it so buttons, switches, buttons, and LEDs also keep hardware hackers entertained — doubly so if they are the ones designing said busy board in the first place. That’s where we find [Andy], or should we say, [Uncle Andrew].

Homebrew computers don’t have to be retrocomputers, but [Just4Fun]’s all-through-hole, 68008-based “68k-MBC” certainly qualifies, so it is a worthy entry in our ongoing contest. While there are both “full” and “lite” hardware configurations, the three-IC “lite” configuration is what first caught our eye. Yes, three: the 68008, an SRAM chip, and a PIC microcontroller that acts as the ROM.

Another all-European podcast for you this week, as Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List for an evening looking at the past week in Hackaday. And this week there is a particularly good selection to look at. A while back we showed you a project that put synthetic aperture radar on a drone, generating extremely detailed imaging of the terrain beneath it. This week we had an update, in which an ingenious positioning accuracy fix gave it an astonishing increase in resolution.

Generally making stuff stick to something like a ceiling requires resorting to suction cups, glue or something much more permanent, but [Steve Mould] starts his video featuring a playing card that is clearly defying gravity with no such measures. All that it seems to take is the small vibration motor placed on said playing card, with its vibrations making the card stick like a kind of magic trick.

404 Media reports that the ShinyHunters group who stole multiple terabytes of FBI employee data say they do not plan to release the data. Known for ransomware and extortion of innumerable companies and government agencies, ShinyHunters used a zero-day vulnerability in Oracle PeopleSoft to compromise the employment site of the FBI and pivot into scraping the content of FBI AWS instances, claiming to have the full employment and health data of all FBI agents, employees, and spouses.

The past years we have been seeing screens pop up in many new places, but seeing them in USB-C cables is still a bit of a novel thing. Out of sheer curiosity [Aaron Christophel] recently took apart one of these, to see what’s inside and what else you can do with them beyond fondling its single touch control and watch reported voltages and current. Naturally, these devices aren’t exactly meant to be serviced by anyone, so the biggest challenge is to get into them without too much violence.

Most of the time when you see a repair video of a Game Boy it’ll be demonstrated with a cartridge inserted and booting up into the game, but does this actually mean that the system is truely fully functional? There can still be more intermittent faults, dodgy buttons, or even something like a defective link port — all of which can be much harder to detect than firing up a copy of Tetris. This is where the GB Test Lab cartridge by [Marcel Pflug] of the Game Boy Museum comes into play.

Unless it’s automated or using some other form of high-tech trickery, a vegetable garden isn’t exactly the sort of thing you’d expect to see on Hackaday. Be that as it may, the bountiful crop of peppers [Mihai Oltean] grew on the side of his house was done the old fashioned way, with nary a transistor in sight. So what’s the catch? Well, in this case, it’s more about the journey than the end result.

[Applied Science] has a new demo of an old 1970s patent for a portable generator that is both interesting and terrifying. The generator uses sodium and water, which, if you remember your old chemistry classes, will combust spontaneously. Turns out, though, it won’t if you draw power from it fast enough. Don’t draw enough power? BOOM, apparently. Check it out in the video below. Of course, lithium-ion batteries might catch fire, too, but this looks a lot more likely.

[Michael H Thiesen] had a couple of Elgato Key Lights in his home streaming setup. The only problem was that they would stop responding regularly, requiring a power cycle to get them going again. He never quite pinned down where the problem lay; instead, he set about replacing the light controllers wholesale to provide more reliable functionality. In place of the original controllers, a pair of ESP32-C3 boards were substituted in.