Solar Supercapacitor Lamp Probably Won’t Get You Saved At Sea

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=RGlVlMCu1PI

Most solar lights are cheap garbage that exist just to put more microplastics into the environment as they degrade in short order. [Jeremy Cook] built his own solar light, however, and this one might just last a little longer.

Most solar lights rely on the cheapest nickel-cadmium or nickel-metal hydride cells that are available on the market. They don’t tend to have a lot of capacity and they wear out incredibly fast. [Jeremy] went a different route for his build, though, instead relying on a rather tasty supercapacitor to store energy. Unlike a rechargeable battery, that may only last a few...

Handheld Steering Wheel Controller Gets Force-Feedback

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=MwuTVCoU8YM

For a full-fledged, bells-and-whistles driving simulator a number of unique human interface devices are needed, from pedals and shifters to the steering wheel. These steering wheels often have force feedback, with a small motor inside that can provide resistance to a user’s input that feels the same way that a steering wheel on a real car would. Inexpensive or small joysticks often omit this feature, but [Jason] has figured out a way to bring this to even the smallest game controllers.

The mechanism at the center of his controller is a DC motor out of an inkjet printer. Inkjet printers have...

The Inner Workings of the Intel 8086’s Arithmetic Logic Unit

In the 1970s CPUs still had wildly different approaches to basic features, with the Intel 8086 being one of them. Whereas the 6502 used separate circuits for operations, and the Intel 8085 a clump of reconfigurable gates, the 8086 uses microcode that configures the ALU along with two lookup tables. This complexity is one of the reasons why the Intel 8086 is so unique, with [Ken Shirriff] taking an in-depth look at its workings on a functional and die-level.

These lookup tables are used for the ALU configuration – as in the above schematic – making for a very flexible but...

Ode to the AA Battery

Recently this post from @Merocle caught my eye:

I'm fixing my iFixit soldering station. I haven't used it for a long time and the battery has gone overdischarge. I hope it will come back to life. Unfortunately, there are no replacements available for sale at the moment.

Devices with built-in rechargeable batteries have been bugging me a lot lately. It's convenient to have a device you can take with you and use anywhere. And with modern Li-ion cells, battery life is remarkable.

Electronic components price and lead time increases announced across the board, and not only because of RAM

Most people already know about rapidly rising RAM prices, but I’m receiving more and more emails about price increases for a range of devices, in a way that’s reminiscent of the impact the Coronavirus/COVID-19 had in 2020 to 2022. We’ve already covered the Raspberry Pi Compute Modules price increase in October 2025, followed by the Raspberry Pi 4/5 price adjustment last December. Unsurprisingly, it’s going to spread to other companies as well. A few days ago, I received an email from SolidRun entitled “Customer Notification: Industry‑Wide Component Shortages and Price Increases”: The global semiconductor, and electronic components industry is currently...

MicroPythonOS graphical operating system delivers Android-like user experience on microcontrollers

Yesterday, I wrote about Ariel OS RTOS for microcontrollers written in Rust, but there’s another interesting open-source operating system for microcontrollers that will be covered at FOSDEM 2026: MicroPythonOS. While Ariel OS is designed for secure, memory-safe, networked IoT applications on microcontrollers, MicroPythonOS targets applications with graphical user interfaces and is heavily inspired by Android and iOS, with an appstore, an LVGL-based touchscreen and button UI with plenty of widgets, gestures and theme support, and a wifi manager, as well as over-the-air (OTA) firmware updates. You’ll probably be astonished to learn that MicroPythonOS is written in… MicroPython. It’s comprised of...

UP Xtreme PTL Edge – Intel Core Ultra X5 338H/X7 358H Panther Lake AI mini PC features 40-pin GPIO header, RS232/RS485 COM ports

AAEON UP Xtreme PTL Edge is an upcoming Panther Lake AI Mini PC powered by either an Intel Core Ultra 5 338H or Core Ultra X7 358H with up to 180 TOPS of AI performance, and offering industrial features such as a 40-pin GPIO header, two RS-232/422/485 COM ports, and a wide 19 to 36V DC input range. Other highlights include support for up to 128GB DDR5 SO-DIMM memory, up to four 8K displays through two HDMI 2.1 ports and two DisplayPort 2.1 video outputs, two USB4  Type-C ports, two USB 3.2 Type-A ports, dual 2.5GbE, optional WiFi and Bluetooth,...

Avalue EMS-ARH – A fanless, modular industrial “Arrow Lake-H” PC featuring IET interface with DDI, PCIe, USB 3.0…

Avalue EMS-ARH is a fanless industrial PC that supports “Arrow Lake-H” Core Ultra 7 and Core Ultra 5 processors with wide temperature tolerance, and various I/O options. This compact PC is suitable for industrial, medical, and transportation environments that require silent operation. The system supports up to 64GB of DDR5-6400 memory via two SO-DIMM slots, NVMe SSD using an M.2 Key-M socket, and wireless or cellular via M.2 Key-E and Key-B slots with SIM support. Additionally, it features two 2.5GbE ports, multiple USB 3.2 and USB 2.0 ports, two RS-232/422/485 serial interfaces, 8-bit GPIO, and triple 4K display output via...

Streaming a Turntable or CD to AirPlay Speakers

This article explains how to stream audio from a turntable or CD player to AirPlay and AirPlay 2 speakers using a Raspberry Pi. Hi-Fi was simple; a literal one-step process. …

Ariel OS – A Rust RTOS for IoT microcontrollers

Ariel OS is a new RTOS for microcontrollers written in Rust with support for popular hardware architectures (Arm Cortex-M, ESP32, RISC-V) and boards from Espressif, Nordic Semi, Raspberry Pi, and STMicroelectronics. Ariel OS is built on top of Embassy Rust framework and embedded-hal Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) for embedded systems, and adds several OS functionalities and a multi-core capable scheduler. It is mainly designed for secure, memory-safe, networked applications on microcontrollers. The developers further describe Ariel OS as follows on the project’s website: Ariel OS follows an approach whereby it simultaneously integrates a curated ecosystem of libraries (available via crates.io),...