Mercury Audio Cables, So Nobody Else Has To Do It

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=zgHnmy0zKWw

We’ve seen our fair share of audiophile tomfoolery here at Hackaday, and we’ve even poked fun at a few of them over the years. Perhaps one of the most outrageously over the top that we’ve so far seen comes from [Pierogi Engineering] who, we’ll grant you not in a spirit of audiophile expectation, has made a set of speaker interconnects using liquid mercury.

In terms of construction they’re transparent tubes filled with mercury and capped off with 4 mm plugs as you might expect. We hear them compared with copper cables and from where we’re sitting we can’t tell any difference,...

Ask Hackaday: Using CoPilot? Are You Entertained?

There’s a great debate these days about what the current crop of AI chatbots should and shouldn’t do for you. We aren’t wise enough to know the answer, but we were interested in hearing what is, apparently, Microsoft’s take on it. Looking at their terms of service for Copilot, we read in the original bold:

Copilot is for entertainment purposes only. It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended. Don’t rely on Copilot for important advice. Use Copilot at your own risk.

While that’s good advice, we are pretty sure we’ve seen people use LLMs, including Copilot, for decidedly...

A Better Jogging Stroller

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=440xIHqaa6g

Although the jogging stroller is a fixture of suburban life, allowing parents the opportunity to get some exercise while letting their young children a chance for some fresh air, it would seem like the designers of these strollers have never actually gone for a jog. Requiring a runner to hold their hands at fixed positions can be incredibly uncomfortable and disrupts most people’s strides and cadence — so [John] attempted to solve the problem after finding one of these strollers on the secondhand market.

While there are some purpose-built strollers that attempt to address these issues, they can be pricey. Rather...

WheatForce: Learning From CPU Architecture Mistakes

Nothing ever made is truly perfect and indeed, CPU architectures like x86, RISC-V, ARM, and PowerPC all have their own upsides and downsides. Today, I aim to make an architecture that learns from all these mistakes and improves architecture design for everyone.

I’ve consulted with many people opinionated on the matter, both from a software perspective, and from a hardware perspective. I have taken all their feedback in mind while creating this initial draft of the WheatForce architecture (PDF). It is inspired by pieces from many architectures: segmentation inspired by x86, hash table-like paging from PowerPC, dynamic endianness control from RISC-V...

Drawing Tablet Controls Laser In Real-Time

Some projects need no complicated use case to justify their development, and so it was with [Janne]’s BeamInk, which mashes a Wacom pen tablet with an xTool F1 laser engraver with the help of a little digital glue. For what purpose? So one can use a digital pen to draw with a laser in real time, of course!

Here’s how it works: a Python script grabs events from a USB drawing tablet via evdev (the Linux kernel’s event device, which allows user programs...

A Novel 555 Circuit In 2026

The humble NE555 has been around for over five decades now, and while during that time we’ve seen a succession of better and faster versions of the original, the circuits which surround it are pretty well known. There can’t be anything new in the world of 555s, can there? [Stephen Woodward] claims he’s made a novel 555 circuit, with his 1 MHz linear voltage to frequency converter. Since he’s been in love with the 555 since 1974, we’re inclined to trust him on this part.

It’s visibly the 555 astable oscillator we’re all familiar with, given the addition of a current source...

Running a Game on a PC with no System RAM

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

As a clear sign of how desperate these RAMpocalypse times are becoming, we have [PortalRunner] over on YouTube contemplating how to run modern-day software on a PC that has no sticks of that most precious PC-related commodity that is not printer ink. What fallbacks do we have when purchasing some sticks of DDR5 is inconceivable due to budgetary limitations or chronic sticker shock symptoms? As it turns out, quite a few.

Of course, it should be noted up front that none of these options are particularly good or desirable. The video starts with simply trying to push Linux to see how...

Toradex OSM and Lino SoMs – 30×30mm NXP i.MX 93/i.MX 91 modules with solder-down or B2B connector designs

Toradex has launched two new ultra-compact (30x30mm) System-on-Module (SoM) families: OSM and Lino, powered by NXP i.MX 91 or i.MX 93 Arm Cortex-A55 SoC for Edge industrial and IoT applications. The OSM iMX91 and OSM iMX93 variants comply with the OSM Size-S standard, featuring a 332-ball contact grid designed to be soldered to the carrier board. The Lino is a proprietary format that keeps the OSM Size-S dimensions but features two board-to-board (B2B) connectors offering more flexibility for potential replacement or future upgrades. Toradex Lino iMX91/iMX93 system-on-module Toradex Lino specifications: SoC (one or the other) NXP i.MX 93 CPU 2x...

Name that Ware, March 2026

The Ware for March 2026 is below:

This ware malfunctioned, so I took it apart to see what’s going on and now it’s this month’s Name that Ware. As it would be far too easy to guess if I showed the whole circuit board, this is just a portion of the whole ware. I suspect the nature of the ware will be easy to figure out, but would be impressed if anyone can determine the exact make & model, since these are likely OEM’d by a handful of factories and the same core design is shared among a wide family of...

Winner, Name that Ware February 2026

The Ware for February 2026 is a WITRN C5. Congrats to Tim for guessing it, email me for your prize!