CHERI-Mocha memory-safe compute subsystem is now open

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3D Print Becomes Cast Iron Wrench Via Microwave

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=FyhaeVi05io

Consumer-grade 3D printing is good for prototyping and making relatively soft plastic stuff. If you wanna make tough things, though, it’s really hard to beat the strength of metal. [Shake the Future] has produced a guide on using 3D printing in a process to produce solid parts out of actual cast iron.

The concept is simple. [Shake the Future] uses silicon carbide crucibles, which can heat up by absorbing microwave energy. Put one in an insulated container, dump some metal in, and throw it in a microwave, and soon enough you have a pot of molten metal you can use to...

Modern Smartphone vs. 80s Supercomputer

One of the most common ways of comparing the processing power of some microcontroller or older smartphone in a fantastical way was to say that they had more processing power than the Apollo Guidance Computer. While this sounds impressive on the surface, the AGC was the first integrated circuit computer ever built and is predictably under-powered by almost all modern standards. A more apt comparison would be to compare a smartphone to a supercomputer from some bygone era, and someone has recently done just that.

The linked article looks at a modern iPhone 17 compared to the Cray 2 supercomputer....

3D Printed Wire Stripper Uses PLA Blades

One might think that [Da_Rius]’s mostly 3D printed wire stripper would count its insulation-shearing blades among the small number of metal parts required, but that turns out to not be the case. The blades are actually printed in PLA, seem to work just fine for this purpose. (We imagine they need somewhat frequent replacement, but still.)

Proper wire strippers are one of the most useful tools for a budding electronics enthusiast, because stripping hookup wire is a common task and purpose-built strippers make for quick and consistent results.

As far as tools go they are neither particularly expensive nor difficult to source,...

Testing Severely Neglected VHS Tapes and CDs

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=lh-a8bTkGtQ

Check your tape for spider nests before rewinding. (Credit: Brady Brandwood, YouTube)

Physical media has a certain amount of durability associated with it, a quality which is naturally determined by the way that they’re stored. Generally this does not involve being abandoned on the porch of a dilapidated, abandoned house where the elements and any passing critter can have their way with it.

Exactly how playable would these VHS tapes and CDs still be? Whether it was out of a sense of burning curiosity, or for a similar reason that [Brady Brandwood] has a habit of adopting former seafood critters like lobsters...

Pine64 FOSDEM 2026 Update Details PineNote and PineTab2 Progress

Pine64 has published a community update following FOSDEM 2026, outlining recent development activity, hardware demonstrations, and production challenges affecting its device lineup. The update highlights progress on PineNote and PineTab2 software, early work on PineTime Pro, and the impact of the ongoing DRAM shortage on several products. The FOSDEM 2026 event provided an opportunity for […]

Demonstrating Gray Codes With Industrial Display

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=Z9X3dH5LjrM

Many people base huge swaths of their lives on foundational philosophical texts, yet few have read them in their entirety. The one that springs to the forefront of many of our minds is The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth. Full of many clever and outright revolutionary algorithms and new ways of thinking about how computers work, [Attoparsec] has been attempting to read this tome from cover to cover, and has found some interesting tidbits. One of those is the various algorithms around Gray Codes, and he built this device as a visual aid.

Gray Codes, otherwise known as reflected...

VGA Output From A PIC18

In the maker world, it’s the Arduino and ESP32 lines that get the lion’s share of attention. However, you can do fantastic things with PIC chips, too, if you put the dev time in—it’s just perhaps less likely another maker has done so before you. A great example is this VGA output project from [grecotron].

A PIC18F47K42 is perhaps not the first part you would reach for to pursue any sort of video-based project. However, with the right techniques, you can get the 8-bit microcontroller pumping out the pixels surprisingly well. [grecotron] was able to get the chip outputting to a...

The Most Intricate Of Freeform Digital Clocks

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=w20A85zaaos

Digital clock projects have been with us since the 1970s, when affordable LEDs and integrated circuits became available. In 2026 most of them use a microcontroller, but for the AliExpress fans there’s one that goes straight back to the ’70s with a pile of logic chips. You can make it on the supplied PCBs, but that wasn’t for [ALTco]. Instead, he made the circuit in free form, using six metres of brass wire.

The construction is anchored together by a set of busbars that carry sockets for a set of seven-segment and driver modules. The circuit is typical for the day,...

Alibaba XuanTie C950 – A powerful, RVA23-complaint 64-bit RISC-V core for Edge AI computing

Alibaba has introduced the XuanTie C950 high-performance, 64-bit multi-core CPU IP with an out-of-order superscalar microarchitecture, RVA23 profile compliant, and support for “all optional extensions” such as Vector Crypto, Zacas, and Zama16. The company also says the XuanTie C950 supports the proprietary XuanTie AME (Attached Matrix Extension) ISA and supports integration with the company’s XuanTie TPE (Tensor Processing Engine) IP. The new 64-bit RISC-V core will be found in SoCs with up to eight cores per cluster, targeting high-performance applications, such as cloud computing, edge computing, and AI computing. XuanTie C950 specifications: Architecture – RVA23 Profile Up to 8x cores...