Hackaday Links: March 15, 2026

Some days, it feels like we’re getting all the bad parts of cyberpunk and none of the cool stuff. Megacorps and cyber warfare? Check. Flying cars and holograms? Not quite yet. This week, things took a further turn for the dystopian with the news that a woman was hospitalized after an altercation with a humanoid robot in Macau. Police arrived on scene, took the bot into custody, and later told the media they believed this was the first time Chinese authorities had been called to intervene between a robot and a human.

The woman, reportedly in her seventies, was apparently shocked...

AMYboard ESP32-S3 Synth Board Supports MIDI, CV, and Eurorack Integration

AMYboard is a compact DIY music synthesizer board designed for integration into custom music projects or installation as a Eurorack-compatible 10HP module. The board is powered by an ESP32-S3 module and runs the open-source AMY synthesizer engine, which supports multiple synthesis techniques including virtual analog, FM, wavetable, and sample playback. The system is built around […]

AERIS-10 open-source hardware radar can track multiple objects up to 20km away

AERIS-10 is an open-source hardware, “low-cost” (more on that later) 10.5 GHz phased array radar system featuring Pulse Linear Frequency Modulated (LFM) modulation and based on an AMD Artix-7 FPGA. Two versions are available: the AERIS-10N (Nexus), providing up to 3km range with an 8×16 patch antenna array, and the AERIS-10X (Extended), offering up to 20km range thanks to a 32×16 dielectric-filled slotted waveguide array. ARIES-10 key components and features: Main board FPGA – AMD Artix-7 XC7A100T for: PLFM Chirps generation via the DAC Raw ADC data read Automatic Gain Control (AGC) I/Q Baseband Down-Conversion Decimation Filtering Forward FFT Pulse...

Esparagus Audio Brick ESP32-based DIN-rail 65W Hi-Fi amplifier supports Home Assistant and Squeezelite (Crowdfunding)

Sonocotta (Andriy Malyshenko), the developer of Esparagus “Media Center”, HiFi-Amped, Louder Raspberry Pi, and Louder Raspberry Hat Plus, has returned to Crowd Supply with the Esparagus Audio Brick, a compact ESP32 or ESP32-S3-powered Hi-Fi Class-D amplifier with Home Assistant support. With support for Music Assistant, Snapcast, and Logitech Media Server (LMS), the module can be used to build whole-home audio setups, retrofit vintage speakers with modern streaming features, or power custom speaker configurations such as subwoofers or bi-amp systems. The board is built around an ESP32 or ESP32-S3 dual-core microcontroller with 16 MB flash and 8 MB PSRAM, and features...

Restoring an Xserve G5: When Apple built real servers

Recently I came into posession of a few Apple Xserves. The one in question today is an Xserve G5, RackMac3,1, which was built when Apple at the top—and bottom—of it's PowerPC era.

This isn't the first Xserve—that honor belongs to the G41. And it wasn't the last—there were a few generations of Intel Xeon-powered RackMacs that followed. But in my opinion, it was the most interesting.

Unfortunately, being manufactured in 2004, this Mac's Delta power supply suffers from the Capacitor Plague. The PSU tends to run hot, and some of the capacitors weren't even 105°C-rated, so they tend to wear out, especially...

Microscope Light

[Hardware] Illumination improvements

Rockchip RK3538 TV Box SoC and RK3572 mid-range HMI processor are coming soon

While we are eagerly waiting for the RK3668 and RK3688 high-end processors, Rockchip is planning to launch two mid-range SoCs with the RK3538 quad-core Cortex-A55 processor designed for TV boxes, and the RK3572 hexa-core Cortex-A73/A53 SoC for HMI (Human Machine Interface) applications. Rockchip RK3538 TV box SoC Rockchip RK3538 specifications: CPU – Quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 processor with NEON, FPU, ARMv8 Crypto… Cache 32KB L1 instruction cache 32KB L1 data cache and 64KB L2 data cache 512KB unified system L3 cache GPU Arm Mali-G310 3D GPU with support for OpenCL 3.0, OpenGL ES1.1/2.0/3.2, Vulkan 1.2 2D Graphics Engine VPU Decoder H.265,...

Фамипия. Оживляем раритетный домофон с тремя ручками

Приветствую всех!

Не так давно я уже рассказывал про раритетный венгерский домофон «Фамипия». И вот очередь дошла до другой панели этой же серии. По виду экземпляр очень похож на домофон «Сезам», отчего зачастую его путают именно с ним. Тем не менее, ничего общего с «тем» сезамом у него нет. «Питерский сезам», «сезам с оптическим ключом», «сезам с кнопкой освещения» — это всё он.

Самое время узнать, как он устроен, и попробовать его запустить. Именно этим мы сейчас и займёмся...

Discovery Drive – An ESP32-S3-based azimuth/elevation rotator for satellite dishes and SDR antennas (Crowdfunding)

KrakenRF, the team behind the KrakenSDR, has designed the Discovery Drive ESP32-S3-based, low-cost, fully weatherproof, automatic azimuth/elevation (Az/El) antenna rotator for their Discovery Dish or other directional antennas, such as Yagis and Wi-Fi grids, weighing up to 5kg. Compared to DIY projects like SatNOGS (which require 3D printing and hardware sourcing), the Discovery Drive is designed as a plug-and-play solution. You can simply mount it to a mast, attach the dish, connect to 12V power and Wi-Fi, and use its web UI to start tracking polar-orbiting weather satellites (like METEOR-M2 or FENGYUN), CubeSats, or amateur radio satellites. KrakenRF Discovery Drive...

Forlinx Showcases i.MX95-Based FET-MX95xx-C SoM at Embedded World 2026

Forlinx has introduced the FET-MX95xx-C SoM built around NXP’s i.MX95 applications processor family and demonstrated a multimodal industrial security solution at Embedded World 2026. The demo combines the i.MX95 processor with an Ara240 AI computing card to accelerate edge inference workloads. The module integrates the NXP i.MX9596 processor, which combines six Arm Cortex-A55 cores running […]