I built a pint-sized Macintosh

To kick off MARCHintosh, I built this tiny pint-sized Macintosh with a Raspberry Pi Pico:

This is not my own doing—I just assembled the parts to run Matt Evans' Pico Micro Mac firmware on a Raspberry Pi Pico (with an RP2040).

The version I built outputs to a 640x480 VGA display at 60 Hz, and allows you to plug in a USB keyboard and mouse.

Since the original Pico's RAM is fairly constrained, you get a maximum of 208 KB of RAM with this setup—which is 63% more RAM than you got on the original '128K' Macintosh!

Expert Beginners and Lone Wolves will dominate this early LLM era

After migrating this blog from a static site generator into Drupal in 2009, I noted:

As a sad side-effect, all the blog comments are gone. Forever. Wiped out. But have no fear, we can start new discussions on many new posts! I archived all the comments from the old 'Thingamablog' version of the blog, but can't repost them here (at least, not with my time constraints... it would just take a nice import script, but I don't have the time for that now).

Simple Screw Counter

[Misc] Laser-cut dispensers of nuts and bolts

Upgrading my Open Source Pi Surveillance Server with Frigate

In 2024 I built a Pi Frigate NVR with Axzez's Interceptor 1U Case, and installed it in my 19" rack. Using a Coral TPU for object detection, it's been dutifully surveilling my property—on my terms (100% local, no cloud integration or account required).

I've wanted to downsize the setup while keeping cheap large hard drives1, and an AI accelerator.

Name that Ware, February 2026

This month’s Ware is shown below:

Do I sense a theme? Welcome to the tour of the various little gadgets I have littered around my desk for test & measurement!

This one is likely to be guessed pretty quickly as well, but a shout-out to Ole for introducing me to this little gem. It’s pretty impressive the amount of features & diagnostics packed into this tiny package. It’s not the cheapest tool, but a good tool – and I have to say I strongly agree with many of the product designer’s technical and aesthetic choices. The build quality is definitely up there.

I...

Winner, Name that Ware January 2026

The Ware for January 2026 is a FNIRSI DPS-150. Tim nailed it almost immediately; congrats, email me for your prize! The DPS-150 is a small, portable DC “benchtop” power supply that converts USB-C into a range of voltages and currents. samchin convinced me to get one of these as an impulse buy in the Shenzhen markets last month. I’ll have to say that overall I’m happy with it, but the UI has been challenging for me to wrap my head around. Definitely keep the user manual for this one – I’m still referring to it to figure out all the...

Первые отечественные электронные лифты. УЛЖ-10

Приветствую всех!

Несмотря на то, что релейные лифты в наших краях массово выпускались и устанавливались вплоть до начала девяностых, а тысячи таких работают до сих пор, ещё в незапамятные времена разрабатывались электронные системы управления.

Так получилось, что мне повезло достать начинку от первой массовой такой станции. Самое время узнать, как оно устроено и работает, а также то, какой оказалась дальнейшая судьба таких устройств. Как водится, будет много интересного.

How to Securely Erase an old Hard Drive on macOS Tahoe

Apparently Apple thinks nobody with a modern Mac uses spinning rust (hard drives with platters) anymore.

I plugged in a hard drive from an old iMac into my Mac Studio using my Sabrent USB to SATA Hard Drive enclosure, and opened up Disk Utility, clicked on the top-level disk in the sidebar, and clicked 'Erase'.

Lo and behold, there's no 'Security Options' button on there, as there had been since—I believe—the very first version of Disk Utility in Mac OS X!

ESP32-P4 Feather Board

This is a Feather-format board based on the new ESP32-P4 high performance processor from Espressif:

The ESP32-P4 Feather board.

The ESP32-P4 is a dual-core RISC-V processor running at up to 400MHz, with 768KB of on-chip SRAM, 32Mbytes of on-chip PSRAM, and up to 32Mbytes of external flash.

After designing the AVR128DA32 Feather Board I read about Espressif's new ESP32-P4 processor, a high-performance processor with a RISC-V core, and decided it would be an interesting challenge to design a Feather-format board based on that. Like other recent ESP32-series chips the ESP32-P4 includes an internal native USB interface, so I decided to design the board...

Play CDs with HomePods: Add AirPlay to a Vintage CD Player

In this project, I’ll show how to convert a bog-standard CD player into a fully self-contained AirPlay CD player that “just works”. No external boxes. No fiddly startup rituals. Put …

The post Play CDs with HomePods: Add AirPlay to a Vintage CD Player appeared first on lo-tech.