A deep tech startup has come out of stealth, brandishing a prototype of what it claims to be “the world’s first fluid circuit board.” In an email to Tom’s Hardware, Itera explains that it “uses electrowetting to precisely control liquid metal alloys on a glass substrate using electric fields.” This new PCB design tech means engineers can physically rewire a circuit “in less than a minute,” according to a company press release. Thus, hardware iteration cycles can be 1,000x faster while using actual electronic components with real electrical behavior.

“Software developers have been able to write code, test, and iterate in real time for decades. Itera makes real-time design and iteration possible for hardware too,” said AJ Cooper, CEO and co-founder of Itera. “Hardware has always been hard because it is permanent. Changing it requires time and money. Itera is making hardware easy. For the first time ever, an engineer can change a circuit and test it again before their coffee gets cold.”

So, it is clear that Itera is pitching its patented architecture of glass and liquid metal as a super-fast hardware solution for PCB engineers. It also touts significant cost savings. Traditional PCB prototyping cycles can take considerable time between design iterations, and they can form a significant part of the electronics development budget, too. However, with Itera's tech, moving from one prototype to the next can be achieved “in less than a minute,” according to the startup.

These are big and exciting claims by the fledgling company, but it has some serious backing. For example, as it exits stealth, Itera has also announced $12M in seed funding from Upfront Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, and Colle Capital to launch its first product and bring it to market. Moreover, its first glass and liquid metal PCB production run has already been reserved by “a top 5 global automotive OEM and defense neoprimes.” Itera also highlights interest in its tech from “a leading hyperscaler and multiple chipset manufacturers.”

Itera’s business will operate as an Electronics-as-a-Service model where customer designs will be assembled using their actual components on Itera’s multilayer substrates at secure, U.S.-based testing centers. We were told that “when an engineer modifies their design, Itera reconfigures the liquid metal traces to match the new routing, and real components are assembled on the reprogrammable substrate.” This is how Itera hopes to bring software-speed iteration to hardware development via its patented tech.

A maker bored with the staid, regimented, and inartistic designs of traditional/modern factory-produced PCBs has perfected their own hand-inking and home-etching process. Elliot Andal of the ALTco channel on YouTube began their video by lamenting how mass-produced PCBs are dominated by straight lines and angles due to the dominance of electronics CAD apps. Andal narrowed down the best photo resist and etching substances and then prepared an artistic-looking PCB that will be used for a fan controller. This 3D-printed filtered fume extractor design is destined to be used in ALTco’s soldering workshop.

Andal knew what PCB traces they wanted to draw, and had a few materials ready for testing the process. Key source materials would be a blank copper-clad circuit board, which was cut to scale, a number of paints and markers to test for photoresist properties, and several etching chemical choices.

The electronics buff experimented with various combinations of the above materials, as well as different ways to prepare the circuit board surface ahead of drawing out the PCBs. You can check out the various failures and learning process with Andal in the video, but the refined hobbyist technique for making PCBs relied on the following key choices.

• A blank copper-clad circuit board, no particular brand was mentioned, and you can find this stuff in lots of shapes and sizes online
• The Pentel N850 permanent marker bullet tip for photoresist drawing
• And reliable old Ferric Chloride for etching away unprotected copper

So, in the end, the ‘standard’ ingredient of the blank copper circuit board remained. From the multitude of pens and paints, the Pentel stood out for even coverage and flawless ‘resist’ behavior. Finally, etching agents such as hydrogen peroxide, vinegar, and salt were seen to be unsuccessful alternatives to ferric chloride.

With the materials and technique now set, Andal carefully drew their final PCB design, complete with arcs, curves, and the ALTco logo. It etched very cleanly in the proven ferric chloride bath and was subsequently cleaned to gleaming copper in all the right places. With that result, Andal soldered all the necessary ICs and wires. For a finishing touch, they ended up tinning the whole set of traces with solder so it looks even nicer.

At the end of the video, you can see the finished filtered soldering fume extractor in action, with its PCB on proud display, not hidden within. The ALTco voiceover humbly says that it works “surprisingly well.”

The last homebrew PCBs project we looked at used rustic hexagonal clay substrates and a prehistoric-inspired firing method before traces were painted with silver ink.

There comes a time for many electronics enthusiasts and tinkerers when they wish they had a custom-made PCB for a project. If you enjoy a bit of crafting, the netizens over at Feminist Hacking might have a compelling solution for PCB-needy DIYers, using real clay to produce working PCBs, as shared in a blog post headed “MaKING Printed Circuit Boards with Wild Clay.”

The hacktivists behind this project didn’t just want a craft project as a source of artistic satisfaction. This is made clear in the intro to the blog, where they ponder the “open secret that the hardware in our smart devices contains not only plastics but also conflict minerals.” However, it didn’t take long to narrow down the options to come up with the idea of clay PCBs.

Porcelain “already plays an important role in electronic components such as capacitors, piezo, resistors, and so on,” note the hacktivists. But they didn’t want to buy commercial china clay or use expensive, unsustainable, resource-draining firing techniques.

'Prehistoric techniques of firing clay'

After some research, they learned from a pottery artisan that you can use “prehistoric techniques of firing clay in an open wood fire” to do the job. After spending two days with this craftsperson, the hacktivists learned to locally source clay, work it, and fire it to make these “natural clay PCB boards.”

The blog gives tips for collecting and mixing clay, ready for working into rounds, with all air and impurities minimized. That’s important for uniform, consistent, well-behaved clay PCBs.

A hexagon shape was chosen as this cookie cutter “can be bought in most ceramic shops,” but only rough dimensions of approx 10x10cm (~4x4 inches) are required, not any particular shape. Originally, the hexagon was chosen to make the PCBs easy to connect, but that idea has been shelved as the fired tablet edges aren’t that precise.

Remember, we are working with less elastic and more fragile clay than you may get in a craft store. The hacktivists note it might be rough or split at the edges. As long as the inner cutter area removes this, it isn’t a problem.

Stamp PCB traces with a 3D-printed template, and paint traces in silver

Pressing the 3D-printed stamp into the clay needs some experience. It is important to balance pressure to get the optimal impression depth of roughly 1.5mm without deforming the surrounding areas. The pressed hexagon PCB tablets are dried naturally for a day before metal traces are hand-painted in the impressions.

The hacktivists avoided using a conductive gold paint they initially found, as it wasn’t really suitable for solder bonding, and came from a supply chain that wasn’t verified. Silver was the answer, specifically “a silver paint, commercialized by a German company, that is made with waste silver powder collected by jewelry makers.” More paint was applied to areas where you may expect to solder connections, later.

After the paint had dried, the clay PCBs were ready to fire. The blog wraps up with a detailed set of instructions regarding the prehistoric firing process. One aspect of the process that needed refinement from the hacktivists was the effects of clay shrinkage in the firing kiln. Clay can shrink 5% in firing, so there was a little trial and error in getting the stamp size and groove depth correct in finished PCBs.

Finally, this project is “totally open sourced,” so feel free to copy and share the details in the hacktivist blog. There’s even a PDF available, should you require one. The team also has a GitHub page with programming code, soldering instructions, and 3D printing files available.

Motherboards, who needs them? Not Breadboarding Labs, which recently outlined plans to build a retro Intel 80386 (i386) PC using solderless breadboards. Don’t worry, this project isn’t pie-in-the-sky. Breadboarding Labs has two prior similar and successful feats behind them – two breadboard-based PC-XT and PC-AT (Intel 8088) computers. However, this new project, aiming to replicate the functionality of Compaq’s milestone DeskPro 386 system, will be a tougher challenge.

A new breadboard PC project based on the 386 CPU is a more advanced electronics maker task due to the generations newer, relatively complex hardware involved. The maker will be spared making everything from scratch, though, as some breadboard modules from previous 8088 projects will be able to be reused.

The 386 Breadboard PC will be able to reuse the following prior works:

• Clock and bus controller
• MDA video controller
• CGA video controller
• Timer
• Parallel port
• Speaker
• Real-time clock
• Serial port
• Dual interrupt controller
• Power on self test port
• IDE hard disk and controller

Above you can see an annotated image showing the maker’s immediately previous project, the Breadboard PC 8088 Version 2. It is clear some of those assemblies will be taken forward for the 386 Breadboard PC project.

There remains a lot of extra work that needs addressing to complete the 386 project, such as:

• 80386 CPU interface
• 32-bit RAM, DMA, 16-bit ISA bus
• 16-bit DMA
• Timer 2 and variable speed control
• DMA-free DRAM refresh logic
• 16/8 MHz (reduced clocks)
• PS/2 mouse and keyboard
• VGA video
• 3.5-inch floppy drive and controller

Work will begin with the breadboard adapter for the 386 CPU. This will be a significant challenge compared to the prior 8088 processor-based systems the enthusiast has made. Not least because a 386 chip has 136 pins that need wiring up, compared with just 40 for the 8088.

If you are interested in following the progress of the freshly started 386 Breadboard PC project, then it will be worth staying tuned to the YouTube channel. We also hope to keep up to date with this and check out the finished remake. Some performance tests and comparisons of the functioning PC system would be very interesting to see. Overall, it is a far more complex grade of PC DIY than we are accustomed to.

If you have a spare, old, unwanted PC power supply unit (PSU) just gathering dust, perhaps it could enjoy a new life as a bench power supply. This is probably the exact thought that fired across man-cave hobby channel Handmax Workshop’s neurons, which recently published a 5-minute video entitled ‘Don’t throw away your old PC PSU – do this instead!’

The video starts with a brief explanation of why a bench power supply is a useful piece of equipment for DIYers and tinkerers who sometimes have to or wish to work with electronics.

Probably the most useful feature of such a device is to deliver an accurate, stable DC voltage for testing things if you have run out of batteries or you suspect the device is broken due to a battery compartment issue (e.g., corrosion). Of particular attraction is the outputs that deliver a voltage you dial in, typically by turning a knob on the unit.

Handmax Workshop shows the ‘donor’ PC PSU is a very old one from the Pentium 4 era, which is rated at 350W. Its fan was also extremely dusty, but that was remedied, and we guess it was previously tested to be fully functioning.

Next up, the DIYer strips down the PSU, snipping the wires (wire length requirements will be much reduced in this project). With this era of PSU cables being color-coded, which is no longer a trend, the TechTuber flashes up a handy colorized guide to an ATX PSU’s main connector pinout (roughly 1 minute into the video).

The new bench power supply will need a chassis with a panel to mount the usual outputs, dials, and so on. So, Handmax Workshop turns to their Bambu Labs A1 to 3D print a nice two-art two-tone frame and panel. The design incorporates enough room beneath the front panel for the new wiring routes, etc. Handmax Workshop kindly makes the 3D printer files available via a link in the video description.

In addition to the old PC PSU and the 3D printer output, it is necessary to add some key components to make a working and useful bench power supply. The most important additions are as follows, and they aren’t very expensive:

• A 120W voltage regulator with LCD display, active cooling, and serviceable quality – adjusts output voltage between 0 and 36V
• An XT60 connector, where you will tap into your finely adjusted voltage output
• Below that are two banana sockets, which will also tap into the adjustable voltage (using splitters inside the build chassis) out
• Sockets for ground, 12V, 5V, and 3V – these are wired direct from the original PSU rails
• An on/off switch for the bench power supply
• A red LED to indicate whether the unit is on or off

As there was extra space on the panel, the DIYer decided to add a USB port on the front panel, complete with a fast charging circuit. We see in the finished build that it was a Type-A port chosen. This port can run from any input between 10 and 30V, so it was simply connected to the 12V line.

I noticed in this project that there are potential polarity hurdles to navigate when doing your wiring. It is a nice brief video, but due to this and the lack of accompanying written instructions, etc., it doesn’t look like a foolproof plan for a novice. Also, this is mainly a fun e-waste saving project as a new bench power supply isn't prohibitively expensive, with many available for around the $50 mark.

Losing all the data stored on a 14TB HDD in an instant — especially if it's data from over the past 14+ years — must be a very painful experience. This recently happened to Redditor HellBlade64, who told fellow members of the PC building community that they were “not angry, just disappointed with myself.”

Why? Because, despite knowing about the dangers of non-standardized cabling between modular PSUs, they “threw caution to the wind” and ended up frying their 14TB Seagate Exos X16. The drive died with an unceremonious “click," and is now completely unresponsive, with many un-backed-up videos lost.

HellBlade64 described this tragic data loss event as the “biggest mistake I’ve ever made.” But it's an easy mistake to make, even in 2026.

The underlying issue is the lack of standardization between PSU makers — and even between PSU models from the same brand. In this particular case, HellBlade64 seems to have plugged a modular SATA power cable into their Seasonic Focus, only to discover that the modular cable wasn’t one of the bundled cables that came with that specific PSU.

The risk with SATA drives is that 12V (drive motor) and 5V (logic) lines live on the same cable, and they might be the wrong way round if you use a modular cable that didn't come with your PSU. As the drive electronics don’t have any protection against such mishaps, the HDD controller electronics were probably fried (by 12V) in a millisecond. The click HellBlade64 heard was likely the PSU tripping to protect itself from the shorted SATA drive electronics. (It would then prevent reboots until the SATA drive was unplugged.)

PSA: Don’t mix modular cables between modular PSUs — even from the same brand — unless the manufacturer specs assure compatibility.

What to do if you fry your drive

Fellow Redditors reckoned the terabytes of lost data could be recovered with a drive electronics swap. I’m no data recovery expert, but since the electronics were fried — not the data on the platters — this seems likely, if the lost data warrants it. (You don't have to do it yourself — there are plenty of reputable data recovery outfits around.) But to keep yourself from having to scramble to recover your data, we highly suggest implementing and maintaining a backup plan.

There’s something extremely alluring about vector displays for tech enthusiasts beyond a certain age. Recently, legendary Windows developer Dave W Plummer got hold of a prime example of this type of monitor, the HP1345a, and set about making it usable with a PC via USB serial connection. Plummer has been busy, already showcasing a vector demo andan Asteroids clone on the HP monitor, best known for its starring role in the classic 1983 movie War Games.

Above, you can see that Plummer managed to crack this nut successfully, then showcase the display in action with a vector-tastic animated computer graphics demo. But look at the wiring spaghetti that is required to connect the HP1345a to the ESP32‑S3 microcontroller, and then to the PC.

The ancient HP ‘War Games’ monitor “uses a completely proprietary, unbuffered, and unterminated interface: D0-D15 data lines and then two handshake lines: ReadyForData and DataValid,” explains the developer. “I decided to use an ESP32 to interface with it. I wired up the 16 data lines and the two handshake lines to free GPIOs, then set about writing code to ‘bridge’ data from the serial port to the HP.”

A Python app is then used to drive the display, which renders a binary stream at 921,600 baud. All this code, and further details of the HP1345a, plus Plummer’s DIY interface, are available on GitHub. Potential DIYers are warned that, should they be lucky enough to source one of these ‘War Games’ monitors, they should be careful of opening or servicing the display due to the high voltages inside the display cabinet.

Asteroids ahoy

Hot on the heels of his first HP1345a interfacing success, Plummer has completed a “quick and dirty port of some Python Asteroids code” to the USB-HP bridge he created. This looks like a great way to enjoy a vector gaming classic. Of course, this announcement was followed by requests for other vector game ports – Star Wars, Battle Zone, Tempest, et al.

Incidentally, we have covered the news of the Vectrex Mini console in recent months. This crowdfunding project lacks an actual CRT vector display, as they aren't manufactured anymore. Though we haven’t had a hands-on with the Kickstarter product, its display will almost certainly underwhelm, being based on OLED tech and measuring a mere 5 inches diagonally.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum has added some beautiful printed circuit board (PCB) style bookmarks to its souvenir store. Available with red, white, green, and black PCBs, the bookmarks appear to be populated with the usual miasma of copper traces and tiny surface-mount components that only an electronics wizard could make any sense of. However, look a little closer and each PCB bookmark is actually a Tokyo Metro map - stretching from Ofuna Station in the west to Narita Airport in the east.

According to the museum’s official webstore (machine translated), the bookmarks were designed using “PCB‑specific CAD software.” It shows surprising dedication that a fine art or graphic designer would learn an electronics design tool for this job. Perhaps the museum found an artist & electronics engineer, a rare individual with talents that cross over these distinct realms. “Each trace is drawn by hand with a mouse, resulting in a meticulously crafted piece that blends electronic engineering with art,” explains the souvenir store blurb.

These PCB bookmarks also differentiate themselves from the more typical offerings with their unique texture. They aren’t too textured, though. A real, fully populated PCB could make a mess of your precious books, with variable-sized and shaped surface components, and their spiky reverse, where through-hole components are fixed.

“The materials, processes, and manufacturing methods are exactly the same as those used for real circuit boards,” says the museum. “To prevent damage to books, planners, or your hands, 0.15mm of copper foil has been removed from the board’s edges.” Moreover, close inspection of the PCBs shows that they are cleverly created but don’t have any actual components on them.

So good, so sold out

Despite spotting this announcement on Sunday, January 25, when we visited the museum’s online store the next day, all these PCB-a-like bookmarks had been sold. Hopefully, by the time you read this, the Museum will have restocked.

A PCB bookmark representation of The Great Wave off Kanagawa, by Katsushika Hokusai, is another outstanding bookmark advertised by the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum store. It is also sold out, sadly, but it shows that these PCB fabrication method bookmarks don’t have to look like PCBs.

All the bookmarks we have highlighted measure 140 x 32 x 0.45mm. That’s about 6 inches long, about an inch and a quarter wide, and as slim as a circuit board.

A programming, electronics, and retro enthusiast has showcased an open-source Intel 486 motherboard that they claim was “made from scratch” in under six months. The M8SBC-486 isn’t based on existing designs, but on previous experimental work by the maker, Maniek86. This real Intel 486 CPU packing project originally began with the goal of creating a system that could run Linux and Doom. However, Maniek86 excelled themselves and noted that the system also runs various flavors of DOS, Windows 3.1 (kinda), various programs, and games like Prince of Persia and Wolfenstein 3D.

It is quite astonishing how quickly Maniek86 put together this working 486 system. Research on the project started in April last year, even though actual work is said to have begun in August, which adds a little more time to the achievement clock.

Another thing that helped Maniek86 was a relaxed attitude to compatibility. The target was ‘simply’ to be able to run Linux and Doom on the assembled machine. Providing a speedier route to this goal, the dev’s chipset (Codename Hamster 1) was implemented in an FPGA, as were some other essentials like input device controllers, CMOS RTC, and storage. PCB prototyping and manufacturing outfit PCBWay was also praised for its help and support.

Maniek86 also didn’t care too much about functions that weren’t essential to the original goal. Thus, “the secondary PIC and DMA” are missing. Check out the list below for the full specs of M8SBC-486, as of January 14, 2026.

• 150 x 150mm 4 layer PCB. Custom hole placement! (a bit smaller than the 170mm square Mini-ITX standard).
• PGA-168 socket for 5V 486 CPUs. FSB currently runs at 24 MHz, meaning that DX2 CPUs work at 48 MHz
• Currently operating at 24 MHz FSB
• Xilinx Spartan II XC2S100 FPGA as the chipset. Codename "Hamster 1"
• 4MB of SRAM
• 256KB (224KB accessible) ROM for BIOS
• 8254 Programmable Interval Timer (PIT)
• 8259 Programmable Interrupt Controller (PIC)
• Two 16-bit ISA slots
• PS/2 keyboard port. Controller is implemented in the FPGA
• Simple CMOS RTC and CMOS storage. Implemented in the FPGA too
• ATMega128 as reset circuit handler, nonvolatile CMOS storage and bitstream loader.

Since this project is open source, it might be interesting for like-minded readers to tinker with the source files and even build their own M8SBC-486 derivative design. Maniek86 admits that “There are still many issues,” but is gratified that the capabilities of this motherboard exceeded the initial goals already.

Meanwhile, the open source nature of the project beckons contributions. “I am pretty sure that this work could be used to build something more robust and stable or even to develop fully custom-made boards for other x86 CPUs,” says the maker. We’d also like to see the ISA slots become more useful, as graphics cards have poor or glitchy performance, sound cards are almost 100% incompatible, and a swathe of other cards are untested and not likely to work without ISA PnP feature support and DMA.

A few weeks ago, we covered Russian enthusiasts' proposition of assembling their own DDR5 RAM using procured modules and PCBs to cut costs. At the time, it was just an idea put forth by a local modder, but now he's back with a finished build that successfully runs at 6400 MT/s. A single 32GB stick of desktop DDR5 memory with proper XMP support — one that doesn't even look homemade.

Modder VIK-on acquired the actual RAM chips from a couple of SK Hynix-branded 16GB laptop SO-DIMM sticks, priced at 8,000 Rubles (~$100) each, a bit cheaper than their desktop counterparts at the moment. The PCB was sourced from China for around 600 Rubles (~$7.50), while an aftermarket heatsink cost 415 Rubles (~$5.23) from AliExpress. From there, the process was as easy as just putting together the parts like Lego.

This is where we should probably interject and inform that soldering ICs is not a piece of cake, especially if reballing is involved. You need proper BGA reworking stations and a lot of skill to not mess this up. It might seem simple, but it's one of those delicate maneuvers that require ample experience, which VIK-on is brimming with.

After the new stick was ready, it was flashed with custom firmware from an Adata retail kit, allowing the memory to gain 6400 MT/s XMP support that any motherboard will be able to detect in BIOS. The entire project cost 17,015 Rubles, or about $218. That's quite a bit cheaper than a retail 32GB offering currently, which we found listed for at least $350 on Newegg right now. Prices are even rougher in Russia.

In the States, even if we don't take the 6400 MT/s speed into account, the cheapest 32GB stick goes for about $278, and that's an ugly, CL46 Dell OEM SKU. The RAM modules VIK-on used can be swapped with lower-cost parts, which the modder says he's exploring. For instance, instead of targeting 16GB laptop memory, 8GB sticks should be even cheaper.

At that point, one might even consider just using the SO-DIMM sticks as is with a desktop adapter that would add noticeable latency, but offer more convenience. This mod maintains signal integrity and also represents resilience. It's all about ingenuity in these trying times, and hacks like these will only increase in frequency (no pun intended) till markets normalize.

The humble Raspberry Pi, the perennial leader of the low-power, single-board computing (SBC) world, has hit a price parity with its rival, the Intel N100-based mini PCs. An investigation by Jeff Geerling, which we’ve independently confirmed, shows that pricing for Pi’s is now within just a few cents with a similarly configured board from brands like GMKTec. Why does this matter? Hobbyists and homelab builders had a great 2024 / 2025 which saw low prices for their DIY setups.

If you’ve been keeping a close eye on the PC hardware market of late, you’ll have noticed prices only going one way: upward. Flash memory costs, along with tariff uncertainties last year, have forced mini PC manufacturers and retailers to raise prices across the board. As Geerling explains, an explosion in homelab builds using $100-150 mini PCs made those same PCs a better, or certainly cheaper, alternative to current-gen Raspberry Pi 5s which when bundled up with NVMe HATs, NVMe drives, cases etc, retailed for over $200 last year.

Now, the tables have turned. Geerling, who compared the prices of a GMKTec mini PC versus a Raspberry Pi 5 kit in March 2025, found in his updated investigation that the GMKTec machine he considered in his first investigation is now more expensive (albeit by only a few cents). Both systems feature 16GB RAM and a 512GB NVMe SSD, but given current market conditions, systems like these aren't be sold as cheaply as they were last year.

Our own comparison of rival mini PCs, based on Amazon’s current pricing whilst compared with Camelcamelcamel’s historical data, shows that this isn’t just a brand-specific issue. For instance, the Beelink S13 with the refreshed Intel N150 CPU, 16GB RAM, and a 512GB SSD is on sale for $269, from as low as $168.99 in August 2025.

Meanwhile the Acemagic V1, with similar specs, is available for $217.54, up from $158 in August 2025, or $180 in January 2025. Geekom does offer an N100 mini PC costing $199.99 that hasn't seen a price change on Amazon in the last year, but with only 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD.
The Raspberry Pi is also not immune to the upward pricing trend. The cost of a Raspberry Pi has changed in recent months, and Raspberry Pi introduced a 1GB Pi 5 in order to keep a low $45 price point. A Raspberry Pi 5 with 16GB of RAM is now $145, $25 more expensive than in early 2025.
The cost of additional components, such as the SSD, have all added to the cost of creating your own DIY homelab.

Source: Raspberry Pi blog.

This now leaves prospective homelab builders with three variables to consider: overall cost, power usage, and performance. Intel mini PCs are more powerful than the Raspberry Pi, even if the Pi 5 did offer a significant speed boost over the Pi 4, as our Pi 5 review explains. However, the Raspberry Pi continues to be the superior option if you're looking for the lowest power draw, even compared to the otherwise power-efficient Intel N100 and refreshed N150 mini PCs on sale.

Geerling believes that, as a result of these price rises, repurposing old hardware will be the “theme” for this new year, and one that will save you far more money, given the alternatives. This might be the status quo for some time, too. There’s no end in sight for the price shocks affecting the market, with memory manufacturers warning that the crisis has only just started, and could roll on for years to come.

The Commodore History channel on YouTube has confirmed that the Commodore 1541 floppy disk drives electronics are powerful and capable enough to work as a standalone computer. This 1982 vintage peripheral, designed to add a 5.25-inch floppy disc to the equally ancient Commodore 64, actually has its own processor, RAM, ROM and I/O.

There’s a 1 MHz MOS 6502 in the floppy drive electronics, which is closely related to the C64’s MOS 6510, and exactly the same processor as in the VIC-20. However, Dave from the Commodore History channel did his work with minimal hardware modding, so the resulting ‘1541 computer’ ended up being rather limited.

The video starts with Dave explaining that a channel subscriber had asked about whether the Commodore 1541 floppy disk could work as a general purpose computer – as it was known to pack a MOS 6502 chip, its own RAM, its own I/O chips, alongside the ROMs which help it carry out its day job as a storage device. The CPU is very similar to the C64’s MOS 6510, which is just “a customized upgrade for the Commodore 64” based on the 6502. But the VIC-20 is actually a much closer match, and you can see a comparison in the infographic, below.

Turning the 1541 into a VIC-20-a-like was still too much of a stretch for this investigation, as Dave wanted to keep hardware modding off the menu. The VIC-20 owes a lot of its general purpose computing ability to its additional 6560 VIC chip – a custom IC for graphics and sound. It also offers lot more I/O for general purpose computing appeal.

Thus, Dave had to wind-back the Commodore clock even further for inspiration. And he decided the first way to demonstrate that the Commodore 1541 floppy disk could work as a general purpose computer was to look at the Commodore KIM-1, the firm’s first, and most simple computer, which would be described as a Single Board Computer (SBC) today.

The KIM-1 was programmed using an onboard keypad, punching in values in 6502 machine language, byte-by-byte. Its only display was a set of 6 segmented LCDs. This computer could also be used via Teletype (TTY) over serial connection, and this method was adopted as the way to interface and work with the Commodore 1541.

So, the KIM-1 became the new target of the Commodore 1541 as a computer project. Dave found the KIM-1 kernel had already been published, so set about modifying it with code to initialize the 1541, and tweak I/O routines so serial teletype would work. This code was burned onto an EEPROM, and is now available on GitHub.

To teletype interface with the pair of 1541 serial connectors, an adaptor / dongle was required. Dave brewed up a USB to RS232 to TTL dongle. The finished MacBook USB to 1541 serial adaptor looks a bit messy, but did the job.

Next up, Dave communicated with the 1541, with its freshly baked KIM-1 ROMs, and dongle, via a Minicom terminal on his Mac. His hand typed assembly Hello World code worked first time (as far as we saw in the video).

Before signing off, Dave wanted to get a bit nearer to making the 1541 into a VIC-20 by adding a BASIC interpreter. He ported Tiny Basic to the KIM-1 and burned it to a ROM to insert on the 1541's PCB. Again, this worked, making it much quicker to code a Hello World program.

The TechTuber made it clear that this 1541 ‘general purpose computer’ remained very limited without major hardware mods due to its lack of I/O – limiting it to serial terminal use. But we don’t blame him for not wanting to mess with this precious retro hardware too much.

This project makes us wonder about the general purpose computing abilities of modern drive controller electronics.

An electronics technician stars in a video showing an intricate repair of a Razer gaming laptop motherboard by hand. This is one of the most challenging PCB repair tasks we have seen come to a successful conclusion. The repair fixes damage that appears to be the result of the same underlying issue outlined by another repair tech, who asserts that Razer’s Blade 14 mobo has “a fatal design flaw.”

It is definitely worth spending two minutes and 48 seconds watching this, even if you watch it at 2x speed, but you then need to remember to pick up your jaw from the floor.

Being adept at electronics repair is an enviable skill. Moreover, as components are continuously miniaturized, such highly skilled work pushes the bounds of human-level ability. In the above video, we see an unnamed technician work on a severely damaged Razer laptop motherboard.

The video begins with a close-up of the laptop motherboard, showing a chunk of its structure around a screw hole that is obviously missing. We'll discuss the potential causes of this damage later...

As a first step, the technician uses a grinding pen and takes away material at an angle. This work provides improved access to the multiple conductive layers of the PCB, enabling them to be addressed separately during upcoming soldering repairs. Think of this task a little like how ancient rice farmers would terrace the side of a mountain to provide workable paddy fields.

Pausing the video, we can see the deft grinding pen work makes more than 10 PCB layers distinguishable. Once they are happy with the layer exposure, the technician moves to the intricate cleaning of circuit traces at the chosen level to prepare them for reconnecting using hair-thin enameled wiring.

The technician deftly solders the first target PCB layer with their iron and ultra-thin connecting wires. With the first of several layers now considered fixed, solder mask is applied to insulate and add structure where it is currently missing. This meticulous work was repeated across several layers, restoring the damaged PCB both electrically and structurally.

Finally, the job is complete: the laptop cooling assembly is reattached, and the machine is reassembled. As ‘proof’ of a successful job, the video ends with a brief clip of the purported same laptop running FurMark – the (in)famously punishing benchmark and PC stress test. At this stage, we see Simplified Chinese text in the Windows UI, hinting that this repair was done in China.

Is this Razer laptop design prone to cooler screw-induced damage?

This particular issue with the Razer Blade seems to be more common than it should be. There is a screw hole in the PCB near one of the cooling fans. Our research indicates that this particular hole is a little bit too close to a high-power voltage trace. Thus, maintenance, where this screw is removed/inserted, can cause electrical arcing and result in difficult-to-repair damage. This video covers what seems to be the same underlying issue, and asserts that Razer’s Blade 14 mobo has “a fatal design flaw.”

Researchers at Northeastern University have found that common materials used in biodegradable electronics can decompose into microplastics, posing a threat to the environment even after disposal. According to a study published in npj Flexible Electronics, PEDOT:PSS, used in medical research, can take up to eight years to dissolve and may break down into microplastics, potentially causing health issues. On the other hand, materials such as cellulose and silk fibroin degrade rapidly and do not release harmful byproducts.

The two team members, Electrical and Computer Engineering Prof. Ravinder Dahiya and researcher Sofia Sandhu, used a partially degradable pressure sensor and a fully degradable photodetector to study the effects of the materials employed.

“You have to look at these materials carefully,” Prof. Dahiya told TechXplore. “Normally at the end of their life, electronics are dumped into the soil. When you put an electronic board in soil, we need to understand if the electronic board, during the degradation process, in enriching the soil or if the soil is unaffected. In some cases, degradation might damage the soil permanently, and that is a big environmental and health issue.”

Biodegradable electronics are rising in popularity, especially as the world consumes more and more semiconductors, chips, and other devices. This burgeoning demand is putting a strain on resources, especially as TSMC and other fabs race to supply the massive demand from AI, consumer electronics, and more. While many studies focus on the production side, which requires billions of liters of water and is mixed with harmful chemicals to satisfy the needs of the market, the end-of-life of these items is often ignored.

Aside from the byproducts and chemicals that electronics break down into after they’re discarded, another study examines the carbon dioxide they emit. Monika Swami, another doctoral student in Prof. Dahiya’s lab, is studying how much CO2 is generated as the organic compounds in transient electronics decompose. While the CO2 output of these items might be minuscule for just one electric board, the massive amount of e-waste humanity has accumulated, which is estimated to be around 60 million metric tons today, will have an outsized impact on our health and environment.

Tragic images showing 50 mangled M.2 SSDs have been shared on social media. Sticks of speedy NVMe flash storage, like these Samsung PM991a models, are currently in high demand. However, it would be a hard sell to shift these particular samples, with their newfound non-factory-standard banana-curved profiles. The culprit? A ten-year-old boy, oblivious to the world's global NAND crisis, according to 'the most miserable dad in the world.'

Vietnamese ‘Build a PC is easy’ Facebook post, machine translation:

“The most miserable dad in the world.
Right when RAM, graphics cards, SSDs, CPUs… are all going up in price—rising even faster than gold— the son decides to ‘test durability’ and snaps an entire box of his dad’s SSDs.
NVMe SSD 512GB – about 2 million VND each × 50 units.
Honestly, scolding him feels too mild for this.”

Our machine translation of the original Vietnamese post on the ‘Build a PC is easy’ group on Facebook (h/t r/PCMR) seems to suggest that just one young boy was responsible for the NAND storage carnage you see laid out in our main photo.

The images appear to show that a whole case of Samsung M.2 NVMe drives has been damaged. According to the Vietnamese source post, the value of each unit is approx $76 at today’s exchange rates. Multiply that by 50, and you have $3,800.

Closer inspection of the photos reveals that the drives all appear to be Samsung PM991a models with 512GB of capacity, in the M.2 2280 form factor. These are OEM drives which aren’t readily purchasable from the big name etailers in the U.S. Thus, we scoured eBay for samples and saw they could be grabbed for $60, sold as new, from various resellers. That would reduce the total damage to $3,000 if all the bent drives were just scrapped and possessed no monetary value.

Will some of these bent M.2 2280 drives still be functional?

We’d love to see a follow-up of the original post with the Vietnamese computer shop testing these bent/broken drives one by one in an external caddy.

With the electronics in these Samsung PM991a 2280 form factor drives all concentrated to one side, they look a lot like the PM991 2230 or 2242 models we have seen ‘strapped to a plank.’

There’s therefore a chance that some of the broken devices have survived with no ruptures to the populated PCB segment, and no physical breaks to underlying PCB traces (if they are present/used) in the extended section of these 2280 form factor drives.

If the bent drives can't be reused or easily repaired, we hope the NAND chips can be recycled.

LA-based startup Quilter has outlined Project Speedrun, which marks a milestone in computer design by AI. The headlining claims are that Quilter’s AI facilitated the design of a new Linux SBC, using 843 parts and dual-PCBs, taking just one week to finish, then successfully booting Debian the first time it was powered up. The Quilter team reckon that the AI-enhanced process it demonstrated could unlock a new generation of computer hardware makers.

Tenfold time saver

The great attraction of AI-enhanced PCB design is that it offers the promise of removing a consistent bottleneck from computer system design. With just one week of AI-powered processing, augmented by 38.5 hours of human expert assistance, the Project Speedrun computer was completed. Normally, this kind of project would require approximately three months for a skilled human engineer (approximately 430 hours of work).

Quilter claims that prior expert human-based workflows would face a serious bottleneck to iterate a three-step process of setup, execution, and cleanup.

Before and after Quilter AI

Previously, humans would shepherd a design through all three of these key stages. However, with Quilter's AI on hand, they can instead focus on the creative setup and refinement at the cleanup stage, leaving the donkey work of the execution to AI. The Quilter team indicates its AI can handle all three stages, if you wish, though.

Streamlining the time-consuming execution stage using AI is very canny, for the reasons mentioned above – thus unlocking creativity, allowing engineers to try more designs, and/or get faster to market. Moreover, human execution of the design/setup can often have errors, meaning even more time needs to be focused on this middle step, holding up the entire project.

How this AI was trained

Venture Beat’s coverage contrasts Quilter AI against LLMs like GPT-5 and Claude. Indeed, circuit board design isn’t a language task or problem. Thus, the AI behind this tool is basically trained by playing an optimization game against the laws of physics.

Surprisingly, there were no earlier stages where Quilter AI was trained on human-designed sample boards. This decision was made because humans frequently make mistakes in board design, and to make sure Quilter AI’s capabilities weren’t somehow capped at human-level.

With Project Speedrun's success, if it wasn’t a fluke, this philosophy seems to have paid off, with one engineer obviously surprised at the first-boot success, exclaiming, “Holy crap, it’s working.”

As we have hinted at above, the longer-term goal of Quilter's AI is to end up with a PCB design system that doesn’t just match humans but can “come up with better designs for circuit boards than humans have ever tried to do,” Sergiy Nesterenko, Quilter’s CEO and former SpaceX engineer, said.

Importantly, the abilities of Quilter are not only touted as time, iteration, effort, and human creativity savers. The startup heralds its project's potential to unlock a new generation of hardware startups, as it removes a significant barrier to entry.

A PhD engineering student at UC Berkeley seemed to be extremely unfortunate, with computer after computer failing, racking up repair bills into the thousands of dollars. Their professor “smelled a rat,” reports The Mercury News, so they set up a laptop to record anything that might happen to the unlucky student’s hardware when it was left unattended. According to a cited police report, another PhD student was subsequently caught on video using an implement to vandalize their rival’s device, causing "sparks to fly out of the laptop," to the tune of nearly $50,000 in damage.

Cumulative $46,855 in suspicious computer damage over recent years

The above drama unfolded at UC Berkeley’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department. At this hallowed seat of learning, an unnamed professor was more than suspicious of a cumulative $46,855 damage bill that had occurred to computers in the department over recent years. Moreover, “nearly all of it seemed to affect one particular Ph.D. candidate,” it was observed.

The professor’s savvy subterfuge

With their sense of skulduggery inflamed, the professor asked the permission of the building manager to video monitor the hapless PhD student’s laptop using another laptop/camera.

The professor’s savvy subterfuge “captured another Ph.D. candidate, the 26-year-old Jiarui Zou, damaging his fellow student’s computer,” notes the source. Zou’s physical interference with the laptop was so forceful that sparks were seen in the recording.

Zou was arrested on Nov 12, at his Berkeley residence, but according to court records refused to talk to the police. Nevertheless, there was enough evidence to charge the suspected laptop labotomizer with “three felony counts of vandalism, related to the destruction of three computers on Nov. 9-10,” says the source.

Zou in a stew

These three cases amounted to >$400 of damage per time. Though they might be just the tip of the iceberg. The professor reportedly reckons Zou has been following a similar modus operandi for years, hence the estimated bill of nearly $50,000. However, it is just these three cases that will be tried in court.

Currently, reports indicate that Zou isn’t in custody. However, there are just a few days left before the first court session regarding this case, scheduled for December 15.

The original PlayStation wasn’t built to be particularly compact, but later revisions like the PS One managed to get pretty small, while retaining CD media compatibility. However, console hacker Thedrew has managed to condense that already dinky PS One revision motherboard down to less than a quarter of its prior size. This custom PlayStation motherboard is the smallest ever made, according to Hackster, and perfectly timed to celebrate today's 31st anniversary of the console's release.

Thedrew’s creation is an “Original hardware for the win” design. Sure, it could have gone much smaller if the project had been propped up by an FPGA, a modern SoC with an emulator, or some similar electronic/software concoction. This is the real deal, though, with original PS One rev PM-41 chip packages onboard. In other words, it uses Sony’s original CPU, GPU, SPU, RAM, and BIOS chips.

With these components in hand, Thedrew designed the most compact supporting motherboard his skills and resources would allow. The current working model is a quarter size of the PS One mobo, says the console hacker in the above video. Actually, Rev.1 of the compacted mobo measured just 73 x 59mm. That gives us the following rough comparison:

• Original PlayStation motherboard – about 10 x 7-inches
• PS One motherboard – about 7.5 x 5.5-inches
• Thedrew’s PS One redesign – less than 3 x 2.5-inches

Now that the custom PlayStation motherboard is ready and working, we eagerly await the next steps from Thedrew. Towards the end of the video, he says, “now we have a working prototype, let’s make it even better.” This work should find its way into a range of projects under the umbrella term of “The PS One Redesign Series.”

The original PlayStation's anniversary

31 years ago today, Sony released its first blockbuster games console to the unsuspecting public. Commonly abbreviated as the PS, PSX, or PS1, this affordable box of wonders sparked the immersive 3D gaming home console revolution. The PS One (year 2000) was a significantly smaller footprint console that played the same first-gen games.

In 1994. Sony's $299 TV-connected gaming system clearly outshone most contemporary PCs in 3D prowess. Remember, it wasn’t until late 1996 that the legendary 3dfx Voodoo appeared on the scene to bring new levels of 3D realism to PC gaming. Coincidentally, the Voodoo would also cost $299 at launch. You'll have to pay a lot more to buy the best PC gaming graphics card in 2025.

A retro computing aficionado, electronics enthusiast, and maker has demonstrated a freshly created perforated tape reader, dubbed the Putapre. Skyriver says they designed this highly compact device from scratch (machine translation) using minimal parts. The maker’s device is said to be much faster than punched tapes or cards of old which used contact-based sensing technology, as this device uses an optical sensor and modern microcontroller to read the data. We roughly estimate the data transfer speed at approximately 50 bytes per second, but expect the device could perform faster over a longer data feed.

Click ‘See more’ to watch the perforated tape demo video

Skyriver explains that they were inspired to create this reader from their retro-tech-stuffed social media feeds. Perforated tapes and punch cards are deeply rooted in the history of computing and were used to store and recall machine data even before the era of computing. So, it is easy to understand the lure of such a project. Moreover, images of these tapes certainly have a visual appeal.

On the linked tape reader project page, you can gain a deeper understanding of Skyriver’s goals, project build, and hardware/software decisions.

A single, simple USB-enabled 8‑bit microcontroller from Microchip’s PIC18 family was used as the brain behind the project. As for other major components, we’d highlight the phototransistor and infrared LED behind the ‘mechanics’ of the reader, providing light to shine through perforations and a way to check where holes are situated.

Skyriver’s blog delves into the technical details of adjusting LED strength and sensor configuration. They kindly share some of the testing results and sweet spot specifications, which they say “took a lot of time to adjust.” Other adjustments required to make the system work well involved measures against crosstalk, and even the choice of paper tape material. Finally, a 3D printed tape guide and some practice got things working well on the hardware side.

The maker doesn’t talk much about the software, but you can see it does the job in the demo video. Nevertheless, Skyriver indicates this is an area for attention, to add polish to the project.

The punched card computer era ended in 1984, when IBM discontinued such systems, but was largely superseded by magnetic tape starting from the 1950s.

On the topic of ‘what’s next,’ Skyriver says they hope to make a matching compact device to create punched tapes for this system. Currently, the enthusiast has to create vector files (apparently DXF) and output them using a laser cutter and engraver. That sounds like a laborious way to create the tapes. Though this project is hardly about efficiency… It is for fun, of course.

The 3Dfx Voodoo 2 and the Nvidia Riva TNT were the pinnacles of the early era of 3D graphics. Both were released in 1998, and while I owned the latter, the Voodoo 2 was the faster of the two, despite the inconvenience of requiring an existing 2D graphics card. The Voodoo 2 is naturally memorable, and it's a regular presence in retro PC builds. As the YouTube channel Bits und Bolts (Bits) found out, the cards' capacitors can and will fail in time due to the rarely discussed pyroelectric effect.

In a lengthy video, Bits diagnoses why one of his Voodoo 2 cards is intermittently failing with graphical corruption, with no apparent pattern other than the issues appearing after a short time of use. After much digging, he figures out that the problem seems related to the card's power-delivery circuitry by inspecting how resistance changed at the component that converts 5 V to 3.3 V.

That led him on to figuring out that one or more of the capacitors in the power circuitry was a bit off. The parts in question are the small rectangular capacitors that you see scattered by the hundreds in any modern PCB, and they are usually a pain in the neck to diagnose. After a quick inspection with a thermal camera, Bits spotted a few that lit up and replaced them.

Unfortunately, they were not the only ones, and having to measure the circuit and each potential (pun intended) capacitor got old really quickly. So, after some research, he came up with a much faster method: point a heat gun at each capacitor along the path and see how the circuit reacts.

This method arose from the pyroelectric effect, a property of materials that causes their electrical properties to change as they heat up and cool down. Broadly speaking, a component within spec will have limited to no reaction, but capacitors do age. In the case of the Voodoo 2, they'll result in intermittent, hard-to-reproduce failures.

Bits goes on to point out that if you own a Voodoo 2 card, it's a good idea to do some preventive maintenance on it and replace capacitors along the power circuitry beforehand to avoid hours of diagnostics later — it's not a matter of if the capacitors will fail, simply when. It can be argued that this could also be done for most vintage electronics.

An LED testing ‘device’ which largely consists of a hot dog, two forks and a power supply has been entered into an electronics competition. Luckily, this is the 2025 Hackaday Component Abuse Challenge, where being zany is a winning strategy.

But don’t try this at home.

Ian Dunn’s 100% "Safe" 120VAC LED tester looks glorious, with its LED sprinkles. Bonus: if you test your LEDs in a hot dog connected to a 120V AC mains power source, your savory meat comfort food will be fully cooked and ready to eat in about two minutes.

We repeat, don’t try this at home.

Dunn helpfully includes all the instructions you need to replicate this (hot dog) maker project. “All you need is a power cord, two forks, and two bolts to hold the hot and neutral wires on the forks,” explains the electronics and hot dog abuser. “Stick the LED's that you want to test in the hot dog before you plug it in. They must be oriented with the leads facing the two ends of the hot dog. If they are oriented opposite the hot dog, then no current will flow through the LEDs.”

It is also noted that you can test as many LEDs this way, as long as there is room on the back of the dog. “It takes about 2 minutes for the hot dog to be fully cooked at 120 volts,” advises Dunn.

We can’t be sure what the cooking speed differences might be in parts of the world where 220V or 240V AC mains is the norm, because we don’t want to try this at home. However, we note that TechTuber Big Clive tested a commercial 120V electric hot dog maker on 240V a few years ago, if you want to see something sizzle.

A warning from the maker

Dunn ends his crazy hot dog LED testing device project post with a word of warning, as he should. “Don't touch the hot dog, the LEDs, the forks or the bun while the hot dog tester is plugged in,” advises the electronics expert. “It's wise to set something heavy on the cord so you won't trip on it and pull the hot forks on the floor.”

As well as the electrical safety concerns, we wonder what chemicals might be introduced to the hot dog using this cooking method. The LED ‘legs’ may be coated in some kind of factory residue, and be made of a metal that could taint the food.

The ‘tiniest GPU’ has gotten a big update. Amateur FPGA designer and retro PC enthusiast Pongsagon Vichit has just gone public with the TinyGPU v2.0. This GPU is described as a standalone processor that is capable of rasterization, plus transformation & lighting (hello GeForce 256). 0Vichit, AKA @MattDIYgraphics on X, also says that this GPU has been submitted to the upcoming Tiny Tapeout shuttle, where it will be hewn from ~200,000 transistors across the max permissible 4x4 tile project size. In contrast, the market-leading Nvidia RTX 5090 has 92.2 billion transistors, but naturally, it comes with exponential amounts of performance as a result of its heftier transistor budget.

In the video above you can see the tech enthusiast load up various 3D models from the flash built into the Tiny GPU v 2.0 design, and manipulate them in real time using a vintage Super Nintendo controller. The gamepad is being used to both transform the model and rotate the light source. While this is a significant upgrade from the same designer’s Tiniest GPU, from nearly a year earlier, its specs aren’t going to set the world alight.

In terms of performance, the v2.0 at 25 MHz only manages frame rates between 7.5 and 15 fps. Moreover, this is for rather low-polygon 3D models, at render resolutions of 320 x 240 pixels (or below) and using 4-bit color (max 16 simultaneous colors). The Tiny Tapeout silicon won’t run any faster than this Basys3 FPGA-hosted demo, the designer says. So, the TinyGPU v2.0 definitely isn't going to be added to our best GPUs for gaming roundup.

While graphics of such resolution and color depth might belong firmly in the early 1980s home computer era, there are some much more advanced processes going on here. Namely, Vichit explains that the TinyGPU v2.0 performs interactive 3D vector-to-raster conversion, and it uses GPU transformation & lighting technology that first hit consumer-land with Nvidia’s milestone GeForce 256 in October 1999.

Other tech niceties of the TinyGPU v2.0 include its “4-bit double buffer, 8-bit depth buffer store on QSPI RAM, max 1K triangles, backface culling, 1 dynamic directional light, [and] flat shading.”

The TinyGPU v2.0 has been submitted to Tiny Tapeout for the next production run. Its max permissible 16 tiles design will cost Vichit roughly $1,500. You can read more about it, dive into Verilog source files, and poke through other resources via the top-linked GitHub repository.

Don’t get your Tiny GPUs mixed up

Back in April 2024 we covered the news of a different Tiny GPU, which was designed “from scratch with no prior experience,” by Adam Majmudar. It was made ready for its silicon debut via Tiny Tapeout 7 (TT7).

However, Vichit also took part in TT7 with what was dubbed the Tiniest GPU. It was interesting to compare this enthusiast’s original and newest Tiny GPU projects, but they are quite different beasts, with the first model extremely lean, with its support for a maximum of two polygons (much less than the 1,000 of v2). Its simplicity meant the Tiniest GPU, at 50 MHz, could real-time render 640 x 480 pixel imagery with 6-bit color depth at up to 60fps. On screen render output was manipulated using keyboard cursor controls.

A three-decade-old “Amiga mystery” has been solved by an intrepid electronics-focused TechTuber. Rob Smith originally tried to make a DIY sampler for his Amiga computer back in 1993. Despite his best efforts — carefully following a magazine-printed guide and reaching out to geeks at his local Maplin (Radio Shack) — he could never get the finished sampler to work. Now, 32 years later, with extensive experience on his side, he has returned to the project. Spoiler alert: he eventually found and quashed the mistakes in the CU Amiga Issue 039 step-by-step guide.

Smith explains that he was saving up for a pre-built sound-sampler expansion when he spotted the above-linked CU Amiga issue and the step-by-step guide to making your own ‘generic’ model. Typically, Amigans would use these to grab audio samples for developing games, demos, slideshows, and ProTracker (.MOD) compositions. The project appeals as it fused his computer and DIY electronics interests.

It must have been frustrating to work on this money-saving project and, after his best efforts, have it flop. Eventually, Smith threw the stuff away, as far as he remembers, but kept a hold of the key analog to digital converter (ADC) chip, as it was one of the most expensive components.

With this same component in hand, Smith decided to have another crack at the DIY Amiga sampler, this time with experience, and the huge resources of the internet behind him.

Following the magazine’s instructions precisely, in 2025, ended up with the same result as in 1993. An unresponsive device, which actually crashed the Amiga when it was summoned to do its business.

Tracking down the DIY tutorial errors

Having followed the CU Amiga Issue 039 printed tutorial with the utmost care, Smith found at least one glaring error quite quickly. He looked up CU Amiga Issue 040, and found that the Build Your Own Sampler Part 2 tutorial (for a stereo sampler) included a correction for the mono sampler in Issue 039!

Blaming a typo, CU Amiga 040 stated that “C1 should have been a 47uF capacitor.” The magazine printed a month prior has listed this component as “7uF.” Oops. A quick few pokes with the soldering iron and swapping the correct component into place rectified this error.

However, correcting this component mismatch didn’t do the trick, so Smith had to investigate and tinker some more. Eventually, he discovered that the device clock signal, which should be ~30 KHz, was actually just 287 Hz.

Consulting with the ADC data sheet and making an educated extrapolated guess, Smith decided to swap out the clock-regulating capacitor from 470nF to 20pF. That’s a drastic reduction, but it did the trick. The capacitor change boosted the device clock to 1.6 MHz, and the DIY sampler started to work with classic Amiga sampler-aware tools like Audition 4 and ProTracker.

Sampler add-ons were popular with Amiga and ST computer owners

I, too, enjoyed sampling on one of my 16-bit era computer. However, I used the commercial Stereo Master cartridge and software package from Microdeal with an Atari STe (it was also available for Amiga). I think it was a £39 deal. Taking on a project like a DIY sampler would have meant quite a lot of expense on components, and electronics / soldering was not one of my hobbies at the time.

More from Rob Smith

Electronics enthusiast Rob Smith has starred in the pages of Tom’s Hardware before. Last time we shared his work, it was because of an Alien: Earth-inspired “fully working M314 Motion Tracker” he had developed.

The GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition is Nvidia’s own-brand flagship GPU for consumers, but one repair technician says it comes with a hidden flaw that makes it “one of the worst designs in the history of… GPUs,” he’s seen. In a teardown uploaded to the Northridge Fix YouTube channel, the card was declared unrepairable after damage to an internal connector — one that, the technician claims, cannot be replaced or sourced.

The card in question was sent in after it stopped outputting video following the installation of a third-party water block. While one of the customer’s two cards was successfully repaired, the Founders Edition model wasn’t so lucky. “I checked all contacts,” Alex explains in the teardown. “I inspected the voltage rails; everything is within range, but we do not have an image on the screen.” Eventually, the fault was traced to a board-to-board connector inside the FE’s modular two-part construction.

The GPU repair expert goes on to explain that the Founders Edition is built in two sections — the main card and the PCIe connector assembly — joined by what he calls “a very fragile FPC connector.” Comparing it to plumbing, he argues that every extra joint adds a new potential failure point: “The more connections you have, the more likely you’re going to have a failing point… the same goes with the 5090.”

After inspecting “every single pin”, Alex points to what he calls a damaged connector. “He installed a water block, the card stopped working, and that’s because of the damage that we see here,” he says. “No other damage was found on the board, and that’s the only physical damage I see.”

Northridge Fix's expert host, who has previously covered melting RTX 4090s, adds that the connector, which carries signals between the GPU and the PCIe interface, cannot be sourced as a replacement. “I went online to look for this connector, and I was not able to get my hands on this connector,” he says. “You cannot even get your hands on this if it broke for whatever reason… So what’s the use of having this made in two pieces if you cannot buy a replacement?”

He concludes by warning owners against attempting to open the Founders Edition at all. “If it’s not broken, do not fix it,” he says. “I would stay as far away from the Founders Edition 5090 as I possibly can.”

Edit 10/27/2025 5am PT: Corrected title.

A PC enthusiast reports successfully shunt modding his Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Mobile GPU for a ~15% performance uplift. An uplift of this scale would bring the RTX 2070 Mobile roughly to performance parity with its desktop counterpart. PC Games Hardware forum member HerrBolsch says he pushed the mobile GPU through its power-limited ceiling of 115W, all the way to 175W (h/t PCGH.de News, machine translated). The electrical tinkering was part of a larger conversion project to re-house and water-cool a Zotac Mini PC.

GPU overclockers find shunt mods hard to resist

Shunt mods are a relatively common PCIe graphics card hardware modification. In brief, the modder will swap out a shunt resistor on the graphics card PCB for one with a lower resistance value. This change allows more current to get to the GPU without fiddling with the vBIOS. However, the procedure and the results of the resistor change can easily cause damage to your precious GPU hardware.

Getting more power to the GPU can make a significant difference to its performance, especially if you see system tools reporting that your graphics performance is typically power-limited. With a re-housed mini PC and water-cooling plans, it is easy to understand why HerrBolsch was attracted to the idea of implementing a GPU shunt mod here. According to the sources, this particular mod required several resistor changes – five changed in various areas of the PCB, by our count.

Post-op assessment

To verify the hardware surgery had been successful, HerrBolsch checked a physical Watt meter, as with this kind of mod, software tools like HWInfo and GPU-Z will still report the pre-mod values.

Next, the modder sought to confirm that thermals would remain under control, despite the extra wattage, and that there was a worthwhile performance dividend. HerrBolsch shared some thermal camera images, which suggest there is nothing to worry about in the aftermath of the shunt mod, with top component temperatures around 80 °C under load.

In an attempt to squeeze more performance out of their GPU, a user on Reddit has successfully flashed the BIOS of a Radeon RX 9070 XT onto their non-XT variant. As per a post by u/noVa_realiZe on the r/Radeon subreddit, they were pretty satisfied with the results, as their PowerColor RX 9070 Reaper gained an uplift of 25% in synthetic benchmarks, and around 8-12% while gaming.

The user notes that they performed the vBIOS flash using an open-source tool published on Overclock.net by user Benik3. If you’re interested in the full flashing process, you can follow the post here. Keep in mind, however, that flashing a GPU with the BIOS of another model may void your warranty and can potentially brick your card.

According to testing done by u/noVa_realiZe, the performance gains from flashing the BIOS were immediately noticeable in synthetic benchmarks. In 3DMark Steel Nomad, the stock non-XT card managed a score of around 5,821, while the same card with the XT BIOS went up to 6,461. After some more tinkering with the voltages and memory clock speeds, the card peaked at 7,277, which is a notable improvement over stock performance.

The performance uplift is reduced when it comes to actual gaming, though. In Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p with a mix of ray-tracing settings, the undervolted stock card averaged 70 FPS. After flashing and tuning the card, the same setup pushed averages closer to 78 FPS, with noticeable improvements to 1% and 0.1% lows.

The increase in performance is primarily due to the ability to feed more power to the GPU after flashing the XT BIOS.

Not the first example

Back in April, a similar attempt was made, where a community member at leading German website PCGH (PC Games Hardware) took an Asus Prime RX 9070 and flashed it with the Asus Prime RX 9070 XT vBIOS.

After successfully flashing the BIOS, they were able to raise its power draw to 317W (up from the stock 220W) and increase the boost clock frequencies to 3.1 GHz. This translated into a consistent 15-20% performance uplift in synthetic benchmark tests, while additional tuning and overclocking resulted in scores that outperformed the stock RX 9070 XT.

It is interesting to know that the Radeon RX 9070 has a modicum of headroom to deliver more performance, but at the same time, these gains come with trade‐offs. This includes higher power consumption, increased heat, and a real risk of instability or damage, especially if the cooling solution and power delivery system are not adequate.

It's no secret that we're a fan of eccentric repair stories here at Tom's Hardware; we've already had classics like a dead RTX 5090 with a cracked PCB being revived, and an RX 7800 XT that was saved after a spoiled reflow attempt. Today's tale is no different — in fact, if anything, this is perhaps the most we've seen one of our persistent GPU repair wizards struggle with a job. Spoiler alert, it works out at the end, but this RTX 4080 Super almost never posted, despite everything being thrown at it.

Tony from Northwest Repair got his hands on an RTX 4080 Super that he couldn't repair — not for lack of trying though (as you'll see), it was simply broken beyond saving. Our intrepid repairer, therefore, salvaged the working core and VRAM from the 4080 Super and brought in a donor PCB... which is actually a core and memory-less RTX 4080 non-Super. The discrepancy doesn't matter for a master like Tony. "Board looks identical, so should work," he says, and continues with the repair that will involve taking a 4080 Super core and mounting it on a standard 4080 board. A new VBIOS will be needed for the GPU to accept its identity, so the BIOS chip will need to be swapped as well.

The repair starts with flattening the donor PCB since it came from China, where it became severely warped in the process of stripping it off its core — something very common in the region. It was put on a custom heating plate with weights on top that should help straighten it some degree (no pun intended). After that, the soldering job begins. Tony casually solders the 4080 Super core onto the 4080 board in a beautiful montage, along with the memory modules and the BIOS chip, all while the PCB is sitting onto the heat plate, slowly leveling itself.

One sponsored thermal camera segment later, the GPU fails to post despite showing positive signs of life when its data lines were checked prior. Tony ran a memory test, and it pinged two chips as the point of failure, but just to be sure he took off the core again to check whether it's sitting flat first. Sure enough, one of the solder balls on the core was much larger than the others surrounding it. Our repair guru wasn't interested in the why-s or how-s, so he just went ahead and reballed it. Unfortunately, it still didn't work, though the culprit identified itself right away: two data lines weren't connected to the core.

Upon closer inspection, the solder balls under the core appeared as if they weren't soldered, which would explain the missing data lines. Taking off the core once again confirmed this notion, as the bottom left and right corners of the solder pads were not in contact with the core. These corners were at a lower elevation compared to the middle of the core, which is sitting higher due to the PCB being warped from the start; the weights didn't work. In comes new weights directly on the core itself, but they change nothing. Still, no post — even after thoroughly cleaning the interconnect to rule out the riser cable.

Tony goes back to the flagged memory chips from earlier, which are known to be fully functional, and now wonders whether that area of the board is also uneven. The weights make a return and after some tedious back and forth — and a Ron Swanson throwing his TV in the dumpster clip classic later — the card finally comes back to life. Usually the repeated heat cycles can warp a PCB but since this was one was already warped to begin with, it perhaps had the opposite effect.

Imagine if Commodore had shrunk the 1530 (C2N) Datasette, the standard data storage device for the legendary Commodore 64, using microcassette technology. Thanks to TechTuber Bitluni, you don't have to just imagine such a device, he's designed it, built it, and successfully tested it. The intrepid electronics wizard even has plans to make it into "an entire C64 emulator with games," but that would be another episode.

This retro C64 project wasn’t the TechTuber’s original intention. After buying the Olympus Pearlcorder L400, the world’s smallest Dictaphone at the time of launch in 1993, in order to build "another ridiculous M.2 device," his brain was diverted by C64 gaming nostalgia. This would become a bigger than expected project, taking months of Bitluni's time.

On the technology that mates audio and data streams, Bitluni interestingly compared the relationship between someone playing piano and the sheet music which they read. “Beethoven himself achieved a decent data rate this way,” is a quote I never expected to transcribe today.

With the aim to get the best practical result from the Olympus microcassette hardware, Bitluni decided to design his own custom PCB with:

• A 16-bit DAC (or optionally two 8-bit ones)
• Op-amps as buffers for the ADC and DAC
• Voltage dividers for controls
• Plus, a small prototyping breadboard area for future add-ons

With the finished PCB received back from the manufacturer, we next see Bitluni populate it with a USB-C port, and a range of other key ICs he’d selected. The board powered up and worked first time (as far as we can see) but the electronics wizard quickly swapped out the op-amps previously selected for being “garbage.” The replacement op-amp ICs (LM258s) fixed all issues.

Making the miniaturized reimagined Datasette

Now it was time to make a 3D printed housing for the C64 microcassette system, one that did justice to the original design. The print, produced using a Bambu Lab 3D printer, certainly does the job. However, Bitluni reveals that the multiple trial fitting and refitting of the components led to issues before the project was complete. Probably the worst issue was when the delicate Olympus flex PCB connector broke.

Repairing such tiny and fragile components is tricky, so Bitluni hedged his bets by buying another used replacement unit from eBay while taking on the fix. However, the damaged flex cable was eventually patched up by soldering 34 hair-thin wires.

With the hardware all working again, Bitluni switched his attention to the task of getting data to and from the cassette. For simplicity and efficiency, it was eventually decided to pivot to frequency shift keying and from using sine wave to square waves. Tuning this coaxed the system into working in real-time on the chosen microcontroller with the signal at 1,000 Hz.

Pac-Man says yes

Now for testing, and Bitluni’s first attempt to store then load an 8KB Pac-Man game succeeded. Bigger games didn’t always work though, so the TechTuber decided to chunk the data into 512 byte pieces, and then write all chunks twice, “and it finally worked flawlessly.”

We've seen our fair share of repair jobs recently, but this one takes the cake for being the most botched attempt—before it hit the legendary desk of Northwest Repairs. They brought back a dead 5090 to life not too long ago, and this time it's an AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT, one that survived being baked in an oven. Instead of the intended reflow that would've otherwise fixed it, the card just died. Fret not, though, as it reached the hands of a master chef.

Let's walk back a bit and add some context. The owner bought this XFX Speedster 7800 XT Merc 319 from Facebook Marketplace, and it never worked, so it was sent to Northwest Repairs for assessment. Once on the bench, our host Tony opened it up and was greeted with flux residue all over the board, indicating a reflow was (poorly) attempted previously. Upon further inspection, the GPU core looked intact, but its retention frame came undone the moment it was touched. This drove down the chances of a successful repair to "0.1%," according to Tony, but since the core wasn't cracked, all hope was not lost yet.

The right way to reflow a PCB is by putting in on a BGA rework station and heating momentarily while regulating temperatures. This ensures the flux melts properly, allowing the solder to reflow in a natural, calculated way. Baking the board in the oven can cause a sudden thermal shock which can warp it or—worst case scenario, crack the on-board components, including the GPU core itself. That's an irreversible fate but, fortunately, the 7800 XT had not slipped that far.

The fix, then, was simple... by expert standards. Put the PCB under a thermal camera to detect any anomalies and address them one by one. Right off the bat, the GPU core was seen exhibiting short bursts of heat that looked like mini explosions. Moreover, running a memory test showed that three memory chips were faulty. This confirms why the reflow attempt from before did not work; the VRAM likely has ripped pads underneath that need to be reballed now. As such, Tony got to work on not just taking out the memory chips, but also the core itself.

A beautiful montage follows... which ends up in failure. The GPU, despite having a reballed core and memory, still doesn't boot. A memory test is run again and one of the VRAM chips turns out to be the culprit. Our repair guy wasn't sure at this point whether he did a bad job repairing the pads, or whether the chip was simply a goner. Nonetheless, he replaced the last suspect memory chip with a new one known to work and, voilà, the card finally posted. As a final measure, Tony replaced the thermal pads before reassembling the card since the original ones were "all junk to begin with."

An electronics enthusiast has designed and prototyped what they say is the “first custom PlayStation 1 motherboard created in 30 years.” Moreover, it wasn’t created by a team of Sony engineers but an individual with access only to an original PS1 motherboard, a scanner, some sandpaper, old service manuals, and a passion for reverse engineering. With the project now at an advanced stage, creator Lorentio Brodesco has shown off a manufactured sample of the nsOne, and recently set up a Kickstarter page.

On social media, Brodesco explained that the creation of the nsOne has been a reverse engineering labor of love spanning many months. The PCB shown is said to be fully PS1 compatible. “This isn’t an emulator. It’s not an FPGA. It’s not a modern replica,” asserted the Italian engineer. Rather, it was emphasized that the project is a new drop-in motherboard, which is compatible with all the original chips Sony will have mounted to it (e.g. CPU, GPU, SPU, RAM, oscillators, regulators, etc.).

PlayStation console aficionados might also be interested to hear that the design of the nsOne offers some other unique appeal. It is fully compatible with the original console’s case, of course, but it also improves on the PU-23 series (from the SCPH-900X compact models) by reintroducing the parallel port. Thus, Brodesco explains, the nsOne is effectively a desirable “hybrid that never existed.”

With the advent of the Kickstarter campaign, Brodesco is promising various levels of rewards to backers, deliverable in January 2026. The lowest level of funding which promises a hardware reward is just €35 ($40.50). For this, a project backer can expect an exclusive nsOne 4-layer motherboard, which is compatible with the original PlayStation 1 case. Such buyers will have to bring along their own SMD components and ICs to create a fully functioning motherboard.

Another potentially attractive option for backers is at the €80 ($92.50) level. For this, backers are told that they will get the same motherboard, as above, but populated with all the required chips and ICs from original PS1 consoles. Moreover, all passive SMD components are brand new, “ensuring greater durability and reliability compared to the original parts,” says the campaign page.

In addition to the hardware, Brodesco hopes to share “comprehensive documentation, design files, and production-ready blueprints for manufacturing fully functional motherboards,” to the community.

MIT researchers have revealed nanoscale transistors that could potentially reshape the future of efficient electronics. Built using a unique 3D nanowire structure, these transistors surpass traditional silicon-based models by operating on a far smaller scale. As silicon-based transistors face critical limitations in miniaturization, MIT’s design paves the way for faster, cooler, and more compact electronic components.

The design utilizes vertical nanowire field-effect transistors (VNFETs), which manage electron flow by orienting the structure vertically rather than the conventional horizontal layout. This approach sidesteps several limitations associated with horizontal transistors, which face physical barriers to further scaling.

By taking advantage of the 3D structure, MIT’s VNFETs minimize heat production and power leakage, common challenges in densely packed circuits where silicon transistors typically struggle. The potential for stacking layers of these 3D transistors also allows for greater computing density, supporting the demands of modern high-performance computing and data-driven technologies.

According to Yanjie Shao, an MIT postdoc and lead author of a paper on the new transistors, “This is a technology with the potential to replace silicon, so you could use it with all the functions that silicon currently has, but with much better energy efficiency.”

One of the main benefits of MIT’s approach lies in the adaptability of these VNFETs, which use alternative semiconductor materials rather than silicon. This choice allows higher conductivity at smaller scales, maintaining efficiency and reducing energy consumption. The switch from silicon addresses issues like quantum tunneling—where electrons unintentionally leak through barriers in silicon transistors at nanoscale sizes—allowing for more reliable, stable operations.

These nanoscale transistors come when the semiconductor industry is pushing to overcome the limitations of Moore’s Law. This suggests that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years. With silicon transistors nearing their theoretical limits, new materials and designs like VNFETs represent a promising direction for sustaining technological progress. If successfully commercialized, these transistors could influence various industries, from smartphones and computers to large-scale data centers and artificial intelligence applications requiring high processing power.

Currently, the VNFETs remain in the experimental phase, but MIT’s work shows clear potential for reshaping the electronics landscape by enabling smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient devices.

Those familiar with the restricted, soldered storage design of standard Apple silicon-built MacBooks have reason to rejoice. Mac Logic Board Enthusiast iBoff RCC has shown this restrictive storage design can be circumvented with specialized breakout PCBs that allow for full storage drive swapping over the NVMe M.2 interface.

One major notable restriction of MacBook storage has been overcome here — and it bodes particularly well for the long-term future of devices that follow this modding route, since a corrupted SSD can outright prevent a MacBook from booting... and is, of course, near-impossible to deal with for most end users. This is noted as a fundamental concern for long-term MacBook repairs and maintenance and not something Apple should be forcing its users to deal with by soldering storage to the board, to begin with.

Unfortunately, there are some major caveats here worth discussing. The biggest issue for Joe Public is the requirement for a second MacBook to help you reboot your original MacBook after replacing the original SSD storage. Beyond that, the high-difficulty, high-risk mod process involving the removal of the original SSD chips may also raise some eyebrows. However, the final results indicate that modding the M.2 slot does not negatively impact SSD performance.

While some may question the practicality of even considering an upgrade like this, it's important to remember that such steps wouldn't be necessary if Apple weren't insistent on setting arbitrary limits on users of its hardware. These arbitrary limits, especially soldering SSD storage instead of allowing it to be freely swapped, speak to a desire to nickel-and-dime consumers instead of leaving the tools and processes for easy DIY repairs and upgrades in place. Those stuck with a low-capacity MacBook model aren't going to have recourse besides slower external storage or solutions like this.

In terms of saving physical footprint, it seems obvious that soldering SSD drives and RAM offers virtually no benefit when compared to simply supporting the smallest swappable version of these existing standards. What Apple might be saving in millimeters within the build is easily being lost by consumers when issues that would otherwise warrant a quick hardware swap become nigh unsolvable.

Earlier this month, YouTuber ChromaLock uploaded a video showcasing his "ultimate cheating device," which is almost indistinguishable from a TI-84 calculator. However, there are hardware modifications and an open-source suite of software modified for the TI-84 that he made, allowing the user to run ChatGPT. The software for the mod is shared on GitHub under the TI-32 repository, which is described as "A mod for the TI-84 Plus Silver Edition and TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition calculators to give them Internet access and add other features, like test mode breakout and camera support". And yes, these features include ChatGPT functionality.

Besides software modification, the hardware needed to truly complete this "ultimate cheating device" was a microcontroller small enough to fit inside the TI-84 shell with its original components. This is because all the best TI-84 software features require you to use the link port to connect to bulky external devices, and thus would be too conspicuous otherwise. A correctly selected Wi-Fi-enabled microcontroller, in this case, the Seeed Studio XIAO-ESP32-C3, modded into the calculator with the TI-32 PCB and suite of software installed is all you really need to get up and running.

In the full video, ChromaLock demonstrates exactly that functionality after tweaking voltages and adding his own 1K resistors between the microcontroller and link port appropriately. He designs a PCB for the TI-32 project which also makes the microcontroller able to impersonate another TI-84 for more easily sending communications and data to the real TI-84 calculator in your hands.

Before the video is complete, ChromaLock demonstrates the invisible nature of the modification and its varied functionality. This includes a chat function, a monochrome image viewer, and a ChatGPT input window. These all seem to work perfectly — and may not be the end of the project. A long list of "Features to be Added" on the GitHub page includes various improvements to GPT functionality, the addition of web browsing, email functionality, video playing, and even Discord access. If you want to get audacious with a TI-84 hacked in this manner, it seems the sky is the limit — though of course, none of those experiences are going to be better run on a calculator than a smartphone or actual PC.

To all the dads out there, Jon Skagmo has just raised the bar exponentially to qualify for Father of the Year. He took an electric kids’ car with a dead battery and gave it new life. He also packed it with a Raspberry Pi and touchscreen, a music player system, better motor control, working headlights, and more.

Skagmo’s first thought was to build the car for his daughter from scratch. Instead, he focused his energy on what he enjoyed: the electronics. He bought an off-the-shelf electric kids’ car with a dead battery to start, then dug in his heels to modernize it.

This is over-engineering at its finest, folks. Skagmo took a very straightforward that could drive forward and backward and turned it into something much closer to modern automobiles. He built a dashboard for the kids’ car that includes working switches, buttons, a selfie camera, and a touchscreen display and speaker.

Under the hood, he installed a Raspberry Pi 3 with a custom daughterboard. The daughterboard includes a GPS/GNSS chip originally meant for geofencing. Skagmo said he quickly disabled the geofence function because he “realized it was a little naive to keep her inside that small confined geofence.” He can still use it to keep tabs on where she’s driving since the setup connects via Wi-Fi to a Home Assistant server.

He also wired in a sound system, including an audio amplifier. This connects to a small subwoofer under the seat and a speaker in the dashboard. Other components transform the accelerator pedal to a proportional pedal—the further down the child presses the pedal, the faster the car goes.

Back behind the wheel, Skagmo made the dashboard based on a 3U sub-rack form factor. The sides are plywood, but the panels are machined from 2.5mm aluminum sheets. Skagmo said the dashboard includes a wide-angle selfie camera, which was primarily for “recording fun videos but also useful for two-way video communication with the driver.”

Skagmo also includes a 4-inch 480x800 touchscreen that displays the music playing, essential information like battery life remaining, and the percentage the accelerator pedal is depressed. There’s also a moving map. This was all done using a custom PyQT GUI application Skagmo wrote for the Raspberry Pi.

Next, a 2 x 5 array of physical buttons with LED indicators connect over I2C to an MCP23018 microcontroller. These include switching between forward and reverse travel buttons, turning on the headlights and siren, and controlling the music player. Oh, and just because, why not? There’s even a button using MQTT under the hood to control the garage door.

The car initially just had stickers for headlights, which caused Lightning McQueen a lot of grief. Skagmo found LED “angel eye” lights that fit perfectly into the recessed well for those stickers. Those, too, are wired into the dashboard so Skagmo’s daughter can turn them on and off with a button.

Overall, it’s a terrific project, and it makes me glad my children are grown. I would be hard-pressed to improve on something this cool.

A vintage computing enthusiast and fan of retro Apple computers has built the first new Apple Macintosh Plus compatible clone in 34 years. The electrical engineer adds it to their previous work cloning the Apple Lisa but says the job’s not done yet. 

Posting on Mastodon as DosFox, the enthusiast said they had been trying to bring this project to fruition for years. “Theoretically this project is even older than the Lisa project — I only built the Lisa as I couldn’t build a Macintosh,” they wrote. Apparently, building the Lisa was the necessary jump-start since they successfully booted the Macintosh Plus clone almost precisely a year after first booting up the Lisa.

The project required a fair bit of trial and error, and there’s still work to do. One of the integrated circuits on the original Macintosh Plus board was mislabeled as a 74LS257 when it was a 74F253 IC. They’re also still trying to resurrect the Plus’s Sony SND IC, which handles audio amplification and power-on reset.

More importantly, DosFox discovered that even though their Raspberry Pi Pico scan converter was reported to work with the Macintosh Plus, they could not get any video from it. To boot up and see if the clone was functional, DosFox used AppleTalk remote control software Timbuktu to access the vintage clone.

DosFox still considers the project a success, producing a clone fully compatible with any software or hardware designed initially for a genuine Macintosh Plus. The original Macintosh Plus was launched in 1986 to follow the Lisa. It is widely recognized as the first PC to feature a graphical user interface and be targeted at a mass-market audience.

The original Macintosh Plus came with 1MB of RAM, which could be upgraded to 4MB using SIMM modules. It shipped as an all-in-one design, which placed the computer inside a housing with a compact CRT display. Although all of the original designs have been long discontinued, other enthusiasts have poked and prodded at their components for years.

As a result, the internal components of the Macintosh Plus are understood well enough for DosFox to reverse engineer the design and create the clone, just as they did with the Apple Lisa. Once all the wrinkles are ironed out, DosFox will likely release schematics and instructions for other enthusiasts to duplicate their efforts.

Samsung is currently in a negotiation deadlock with the Nationwide Samsung Electronics Union (NSEU) — the union representing more than 28,000 Samsung workers — and the union has scheduled a one-day strike on June 7. While it may not feel like a major disruption, especially as strikes in other companies could last several weeks or months, chip production is a totally different story.

That’s because semiconductor factories take a substantial amount of time to start up. For example, Samsung lost over $36 million when a Korean factory lost power for just 28 minutes, killing 3.5% of global flash production for March 2018. Another Samsung factory experienced a one-minute outage in 2019, and it took three days to resume production. The company also lost almost $290 million in 2021 when it had to shut down its Austin, Texas plant for a month due to the cold snap affecting the power grid. This exacerbated chip shortages at that time, as the company had trouble restarting production.

These events show how fragile semiconductor production is, and some media outlets are asking if this strike will impact the global chip supply. However, TrendForce, a semiconductor industry market research firm, says, “This strike will not impact DRAM and NAND Flash production, nor will it cause any shipment shortages. Additionally, the spot prices for DRAM and NAND Flash had been declining prior to the strike announcement, and there has been no change in this downtrend since the announcement.” (via The KoreaTimes)

The NSEU announced the strike on May 29, 2024, nine days before the planned date, and since the spot prices haven’t increased the consensus seems to be that this one-day strike will not materially affect the global chip supply situation. However, Samsung will definitely be hit by massive losses if we reference the company’s prior experience with disruptions.

We just hope that Samsung and the NSEU settle this labor dispute sooner rather than later, especially as AMD ordered its 3nm chips from the South Korean firm recently. It’s also reportedly struggling with its HBM3E chip production, which could push Nvidia towards Micron and SK Hynix. If the company doesn’t find a good middle ground between its workers' demands and its income targets, then further disruptions could come later to the third-largest chip maker in the world (after TSMC and Intel), which could affect our fragile global chip supply.

Humanity may be in the throes of another breakthrough that's every bit as impactful as the invention of the transistor and the advent (and eventual vindication) of quantum computing. LK-99, as it's been named, is a new compound that researchers believe will enable the fabrication of room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductors. Initially published by a Korean team last Friday, frantic work is underway throughout the research world to validate the paper's claims. For now, two separate sources have already provided preliminary confirmations that this might actually be the real thing — Chinese researchers have even posted video proof. Strap in, this is a maglev-powered, superconducting ride.

Superconductors, a wild category of compounds that can conduct electricity without any losses, have been a metaphorical goose chase for years now, with multiple research teams claiming (and then retracting) papers and announcements of its achievement. The reason is simple: Few things come close to the potential of an actual superconductor discovery in terms of what it can do for humanity's current and future technology. Imagine if your 16-core mainstream CPU (which likely requires a competent watercooling solution to avoid incinerating itself) operated without power losses — no current leakage, no electricity waste in the form of heat. Superconductors mean almost perfectly efficient computing.

Scale that to the world's supercomputers, and you begin to get an idea of the performance impact when trillions of transistors based on superconducting materials work in tandem across GPU and CPU tiles to accelerate things like Artificial Intelligence (AI) workloads. Or scale it in the realm of consumer electronics, quantum computing (where superconductors are important for Josephson junctions), and magnets in general (maglev trains, tokamak fusion reactors, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), electric motors and generators...)

If you can dream it and it features an electrical current or magnetism, it's likely a superconducting material would improve most aspects of it while leaving a surplus of previously-wasted energy within humanity's batteries. Environmental sustainability, then, is also a factor.

There might be more to LK-99 than skeptics expected, as two research teams claim to have informally confirmed certain aspects of the superconductivity claims — albeit in preliminary testing.  Researcher Sinéad Griffin from the U.S.'s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab pored over the original paper, taking advantage of the supercomputing capabilities within the Department of Energy to simulate the LK-99 material. This complex-yet-simple concoction results from combining the minerals lanarkite (Pb₂SO₅) and copper phosphide (Cu₃P), which are then baked within a 4-day, multi-step, small batch, solid-state synthesis process.

As a result of the simulations, the researcher published an analysis letter in pre-print form to Arxiv, where she confirmed that the resulting material should manifest the superconduction pathways for electrons to travel through unimpeded and without any resistance. Interestingly, she noticed that these superconducting pathways only form in very specific areas of the compound, namely the highest-energy areas of the resulting crystal lattice.

Because physics dictates that systems tend to remain stable at their lowest-possible energy states, this means that the amount of superconducting material produced with each "shake-and-bake" manufacturing attempt will result in relatively low quantities of the material. The hope, then, is that further refinements to the fabrication process will yield higher quantities of the material that can then be harvested and put toward building the superconductors themselves.

But in what's perhaps the most definite sign of a verification, Chinese researchers with the Huazhong University of Science and Technology have claimed to have successfully replicated the superconductor's manufacturing process, posting a video on Bilibili as proof.

The above video showcases the Meissner effect as being definite proof of the material's superconducting capabilities. The Meissner effect refers to the expulsion of a magnetic field due to the superconducting process. It is the reason why the video showcases levitating materials — they are interacting with LK-99's Meissner-induced magnetic field.

The entire story surrounding this discovery is a scientific rollercoaster ride, with rogue scientists, updated papers, plus cloudy definitions and process descriptions within the paper that make replication efforts more difficult, and even a Russian soil scientist (and anime catgirl) deconstructing the original Korean paper to unveil the trademark levitation of the Meissner effect over her own kitchen counter.

We've seen movies with much less complex plots than this already. It's eerily appropriate that such a monumental discovery would be rife with drama. And we're still waiting for a definite announcement that yes, humanity has finally produced room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductors. After that, there are plenty more physics barriers to crash through, as always.

Edit 8/2/2023 1:40 pm ET: Embedded BiliBili video from the Chinese researchers. 

Quantum computing specialist EeroQ recently announced the successful tape-out of its Quantum Processing Unit (QPU) chip. Codenamed “Wonder Lake” (which makes it sound like someone’s been paying attention to Intel’s codenames), Eeroq’s QPU was taped-out at a US semiconductor manufacturing foundry. Due to using a CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor) manufacturing approach that drinks deeply from standard chip manufacturing knowledge, the company expects its helium-based qubits to turn out far more scalable (and thus sustainable) than other qubit manufacturing approaches.

Qubits are units of computation in the quantum realm which are expected to unlock orders of magnitude more processing power in specific tasks, such as optimization problems, material physics, chemistry, and others.

“This scaling architecture has passed the rigorous design checks required for compatibility with today’s standard chip manufacturing process (CMOS),” said Nick Farina, EeroQ CEO, in a blog post.

Crucially, Wonder Lake’s qubit count is within the higher range we’ve seen yet; at 2,432 helium-electron qubits, it’s one of the most densely populated QPU designs. Initially proposed in 1999, EeroQ’s quantum technology is based on quantizing isolated electron spins suspended above pools of liquid helium (eHe).

Quantizing here refers to "turning into qubits," - meaning that a particle or pre-existing material has been harnessed and has become an available computation unit. In this case, the technology takes advantage of an effect known as "Rydberg states," which translate the motion of the suspended electron (a property known as spin in physics) into computable representations of the 0s, 1s, and everything in between that's allowed by quantum computing.

The way EeroQ's Quantum Processing Unit (QPU) is fabricated is promising as well: it taps into the decades of expertise the semiconductor industry has had with CMOS technology. In the vein of what Intel is trying to do with its Tunnel Falls QPU, this approach allows the company to tap into a well-understood technology that serves as the basis for its technology. The fabrication process also sounds deceptively simple: wafers etched to EeroQ's specifications pass through the company's labs, where a layer of liquid helium is applied, and electrons are deposited onto purpose-etched reservoirs. With a small magnetic bump, the electrons floating above the helium layer (held in place by the CMOS reservoirs) can initialize their spin states. After that, it's just a matter of firing up whatever quantum workload can fit within the chip's circuits. According to EeroQ, using CMOS technology will eventually lead to fabrication-related quantum gate errors to a mere 0,01%. Let's call it quantum yield.

Of course, not all qubits are the same, so these can’t be compared to IBM and others’ superconducting qubits. For its part, Eeroq says its helium-electron qubits provide an extremely high 10+ second qubit coherence timeout with a high order of qubit connectivity - meaning that more complex qubit circuits can be built to accelerate pre-existing workloads or process new ones. Further, EeroQ says its qubits’ mobility across the helium layer gives them a 50% reduction in overhead for error correction mechanisms to be applied.

Error correction is considered the holy grail of quantum computing at the moment, and serious work is being done in the field of error mitigation that we hope leads towards error correction - that EeroQ uses this specific wording is relevant. That said, the company is still looking to extract actual utility from its CMOS-based QPUs; at the moment, they still haven’t demonstrated their two-qubit gate design, a necessary stepping-stone for a post-NISQ (Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum) future.

As we’re still in quantum computing’s infancy, it’s not a discussion on the quality of qubits and which technology is best; it’s instead a recognition that there are vast differences between qubit approaches. But it seems Wonder Lake’s call to fame doesn’t just sit there; the company called attention to how efficient their chip is: a design choice carved in stone as early as qubit choice and engineering design.

“There are two particularly challenging parts to making a useful quantum computer: high-quality quantum gates and a path to scale,” Farina writes in EeroQ’s blog. “With our latest work, we are proud to join the leadership ranks on scalability. Together with recent advances in error mitigation and more efficient algorithms, we can see the commercial quantum future coming together sooner than expected – led by the ability to leverage our architectural advantage to scale rapidly.”

As EeroQ puts it, their main advantage is that they thought about their quantum computing tech in reverse, focusing on achieving a many-qubit interaction before attempting to extract utility from the limited computing resources (usually one or two-qubit gates) they could physically explore. That focus on scaling allowed the company to build a quantum solution that requires only 30 control lines per chip - a marked reduction in the control complexity needed, for instance, on superconducting qubit systems. That, in turn, will allow for cost savings in computing area cost and how expensive the control system is.

Today, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has added 802.11bb as a standard for light-based wireless communications. The publishing of the standard has been welcomed by global Li-Fi businesses, as it will help speed the rollout and adoption of the  data-transmission technology standard.

Advantages of using light rather than radio frequencies (RF) are highlighted by Li-Fi proponents including pureLiFi, Fraunhofer HHI, and the Light Communications 802.11bb Task Group. Li-Fi is said to deliver “faster, more reliable wireless communications with unparalleled security compared to conventional technologies such as Wi-Fi and 5G.” Now that the IEEE 802.11bb Li-Fi standard has been released, it is hoped that interoperability between Li-Fi systems with the successful Wi-Fi will be fully addressed.

Of course, Li-Fi isn’t going to sweep away Wi-Fi and 5G alternatives (nor wired networks). Radio waves still have a distinct advantage with regard to transmission through the atmosphere at great distance, and though opaque objects. Instead, work must concentrate on using horses for courses – with Li-Fi advantages being harvested where possible.

In the Fraunhofer HHI video above you can see a Li-Fi system re-using a building’s lighting infrastructure for data. Don’t worry, the lights don’t visibly blink or flash, as the data transmission uses part of the infrared spectrum.

Where Li-Fi shines (pun intended) is not just in its purported speeds as fast as 224 GB/s. Fraunhofer’s Dominic Schulz points out that as it works in an exclusive optical spectrum, this ensures higher reliability and lower latency and jitter. Moreover “Light’s line-of-sight propagation enhances security by preventing wall penetration, reducing jamming and eavesdropping risks, and enabling centimetre-precision indoor navigation,” says Shultz.

Now the IEEE 802.11bb standard is published, manufacturers can have greater confidence in the ecosystem and start integrating the tech, where suitable. One of the big wheels of Li-Fi, pureLiFi, has already prepared the Light Antenna ONE module for integration into connected devices. This 14.5mm long component (pictured above and top) is currently being provided to OEMs for evaluation. In its promotional materials the firm suggests that Li-Fi is preferable over Wi-Fi for: more connections without congestion, greater security and privacy, and doing the heavy lifting for the highest bandwidth tasks.

We expect to see a far fuller gamut of Li-Fi network devices, and user devices which support the standard, emerge between now and MWC next February.

Intel Foundry Services has introduced a broad range of tools for customers of its new 16nm-class process technology called Intel 16 that addresses mobile, RF, IoT, consumer, storage, military, aerospace, and government applications. The new technology complements Intel's 22nm FFL process and is said to be an inexpensive FinFET-based node.

According to press releases from Synopsys, Cadence Digital, Siemens, and Ansys, the companies now have a range of tools for IFS's Intel 16, which is specifically designed to address a wide variety of customers' applications RF and analog capability (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth), mmWave, consumer electronics, storage, military, aerospace, and government applications. The 16nm-class technology promises to offer higher transistor density, higher performance, lower power, fewer masks, and simpler back-end design rules compared to planar production nodes used for these applications today.

There are hundreds of widely used applications with long lifecycles that rely on mature process technologies, particularly in fields like application processors, controllers, analog, consumer electronics, and radio. Many of them use planar transistors-based process technologies due to costs, design simplicity, and high yields. While industry experts at large tend to admire massively powerful processors like AMD's Instinct MI300 or Nvidia's H100, there are plenty of chips — even in industries like artificial intelligence and high-performance computing — that are considerably smaller and consume only a fraction of power.

In many cases, these mature and emerging applications can still benefit from newer FinFET-based production technologies, which is why TSMC offers its N12e node, whereas IFS is now rolling out its Intel 16 process technology.

All four leading providers of electronic design automation (EDA) and IP — Ansys, Cadence, Siemens, and Synopsys — already support Intel 16 process technology with their certified software flows and IP. For example, Cadence has ported a variety of its IP blocks to Intel 16, including PCIe 5.0; 25G-KR Ethernet multi-protocol PHY; multi-protocol PHY for consumer applications supporting standards such as PCIe 3.0 and USB 3.2; multi-standard PHY for LPDDR5/4/4X memory; andMIPI D-PHY v1.2 for cameras and displays. Meanwhile, Synopsys offers its AI-enabled Synopsys.ai set of tools for faster chip implementation.

Fabless chip developers can start using design, verification, and simulation tools to produce their designs.

Samsung says it has reaffirmed its DRAM leadership by kicking off mass production of 16-gigabit (Gb) DDR5 DRAM at 12nm. The South Korean electronics giant asserts that the memory ICs resulting from this new process reduce power consumption by about a quarter vs. the previous generation and will enhance wafer productivity by as much as a fifth. Moreover, these leading-edge memory chips will boast a maximum pin speed of 7.2 Gbps.

Discussing the manufacturing milestone, Jooyoung Lee, Executive Vice President of DRAM Products & Technology at Samsung Electronics, said that "Using differentiated process technology, Samsung’s industry-leading 12nm-class DDR5 DRAM delivers outstanding performance and power efficiency." However, PC users will have to wait for the trickle-down, as the first use of these 12nm DDR5 ICs will be in applications like data centers, artificial intelligence, and next-generation computing.

Samsung says that the development of 12nm-class DRAM was enabled by "the use of a new high-K material." In further detail, it explains that the transistor gate material used in these ICs has a higher capacitance, making its state easier to accurately distinguish. Furthermore, Samsung's efforts to lower operating voltage and reduce noise have also helped deliver this optimized solution.

These are still 16 Gb ICs, so Samsung hasn't traveled further along its density roadmap with these DRAM chips. Instead, the heralded benefits concern power efficiency, speeds, and wafer economy. If you want some numbers, Samsung specified that the 12nm DDR5 ICs reduce power consumption by 23% compared to the previous gen, and enhance wafer productivity by up to 20%.

Will This Mean Faster DDR5 Modules?

We already mentioned the new DRAM ICs offer a pin speed of 7.2 Gbps. Samsung says that, in theory, this means that a DRAM-to-DRAM transfer of two 30GB UHD movies could take place in about a second. However, it neglects to highlight that this is the same pin speed as that touted for the previous gen 14nm DRAM ICs. This doesn't rule out the potential of the newer DDR5 DRAM to perhaps overclock better; for this information, we will have to wait and see.

Samsung says it has already confirmed the new (12nm) 16Gb DDR5 ICs have been through compatibility testing for use with AMD systems. It is also working closely with other unnamed companies.

The humble electronics breadboard is where projects are born, and sometimes we need more than one to realise our dreams. For times like this the Overboard Electronics Reference Breadboard, a crowd-funded project by Ian Dunn at Bolt Industries could be the solution.

The Overboard Electronics Reference Breadboard and Power Supply has space for four full-size breadboards, interlocked in the center of the FR4-PCB. With this number of breadboards, we can build incredibly complex projects using our favorite microcontroller, the Raspberry Pi Pico W, or we can solder up another Z80-based microcomputer. But, this isn't just a large PCB with lots of breadboards, it has a couple of cool features.

At the top of the PCB is a variable DC power supply which when fed between 6 and 24 Volts, can step-down to the exact required voltage thanks to a potentiometer. A built-in 500mA self-resetting fuse will take the hit should you encounter a power issue. The power supply connects to the rails of a breadboard, and from there, it can be connected to other rails using jumper wires.

Around the perimeter of the board are a series of electronics reference tables and pinouts for popular boards such as the Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi Pico and the Arduino Nano. There is even a schematic for the venerable 555 timer, resistor color codes, and Ohms Law.

This level of quick reference is sublime. We've lost count of the number of times that we've forgotten the pinout of a 555 and mistaken a 1K resistor for a 10K.

Ian Dunn and Bolt Industries are no strangers to these pages. Previously, Dunn created Pico 87, an 87-key mechanical keyboard that uses a Raspberry Pi Pico as its controller.

Starting from $25 for the basic pledge (no breadboard), there is also an option for a $45 pledge for the full kit. Remember that crowdfunding a project is not a guarantee of receiving a finished product. Backing a crowdfunded project is akin to an investment; you believe in the project and want it to succeed. You are not purchasing a retail product.

AMD's upcoming Ryzen 7040-series Phoenix processors for laptops based on the Zen 4 microarchitecture will come in three different packages aimed at different types of laptops. Chinese technology review channel Golden Pig Upgrade has published a review of the Ryzen 7 7840HS processor that, among other things, compares AMD's FP8 and FP7/FP7r2 form factors (via VideoCardz).

AMD's Ryzen 7040-series CPUs will be available in all-new FP8 as well as in FP7r2 and proven FP7 packages. The newer FP8 is noticeably larger than FP7/FP7r2. In addition, the FP8 package is designed to support higher-performance interfaces, including, among other things, AMD's MIPI CSI, a high-speed interface protocol for transmitting video and images from camera to host. This package is more suitable for devices requiring higher data throughput and advanced camera capabilities. 

By contrast, the FP7 package is smaller and lighter. It has the same advanced features or performance as the FP8 package but offers a more compact solution for manufacturers looking to build slimmer devices without compromising processing power. In general, FP7/FP7r2 is a better fit for lightweight and portable devices. Also, some FP7 CPUs will be compatible with Ryzen 6000-series PCB designs. Regarding PCBs, AMD will advise its partners to use different printed circuit boards with Zen 4-based products with FP8 and FP7/FP7r2 packages. For example, some next-generation AMD Ryzen 7040-series laptops will rely on Type3 10-layer PTH (plated through-hole) PCBs, whereas others will use Type 4 HDI (high-density interconnect) PCBs. PTH PCBs use through-hole mounting, have lower component density, and are more cost-effective, making them suitable for less complex designs. 

By contrast, HDI PCBs have higher component density and provide better electrical performance due to advanced fabrication techniques. As a result, they are ideal for miniaturized, high-performance electronic devices but tend to be more expensive to manufacture. In the case of AMD's notebooks, Type 3 PCBs will support up to LPDDR5X-6400 memory, whereas Type 4 PCBs will enable LPDDR5X-7500.

Another interesting aspect of AMD's 7040-series CPUs is the Ryzen 7040HS and 7040H specs. On paper, they appear to be identical in terms of TDP. However, AMD's Ryzen 6000H processors are rated for up to 45W, whereas Ryzen 6000HS is rated for up to 35W. Unfortunately, neither the Golden Pig Upgrade review nor AMD's website clarifies the differences between the 7000HS and 7000H series, leaving us puzzled.

The review compares the Ryzen 7 7840H, featuring the Radeon 780M-badged RDNA3 integrated GPU, to the Ryzen 7735H (based on the Rembrandt silicon with Zen 3 and RDNA 2) and two Intel Raptor Lake CPUs (13700H and 13500H). Although the latest Ryzen CPU boasts superior GPU performance, the upgrade from the previous-gen RDNA2 iGPU is not substantial. Ultimately, the iGPU outperforms the GeForce MX550 discrete GPU and approaches the performance of the GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q designs.

The idea of silicon transistor and processors is so . . . 2022. Researchers in Sweden have designed and tested the first wooden transistors. Teams at Linköping University in Norrköping, and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, have published a paper titled Electrical current modulation in wood electrochemical transistors, which discusses the creation, capabilities, and potential of the wood electrochemical transistor (WECT) they have recently developed. 

This WECT could pave the way for wood-based electronics that are more sustainable and biodegradable. Moreover, wood electronics could deliver the electronic control of living plants.

Not Nanometers, But Centimeters

Regular readers will be very familiar with the latest advances in silicon transistor technology. Almost daily our headlines relay advances from Intel, Samsung and TSMC, battling to create leading edge processes, with transistors measured in nanometers, and running at multi-gigahertz speeds. Brace yourself now though, as the WECT designed and tested by the Swedish researchers measured 3cm across and had a switching frequency of under one hertz.

Not every electronic device needs the fastest speeds and smallest transistors. Certainly, the WECT as described is rather big and doesn’t like to be hurried. “We've come up with an unprecedented principle,” Isak Engquist, senior associate professor at the Laboratory for Organic Electronics at Linköping University stated in a university press release. “Yes, the wood transistor is slow and bulky, but it does work, and has huge development potential.”

How Wood Turned Into a Transistor

To describe how wood can be used to make a transistor, let us start by looking at conventional transistors that are widely used in electronic devices. Field effect transistors are a key building block of modern electronics and most commonly fabricated from semiconductors like silicon or germanium. 

The inherent nature of these elements allow a transistor to act as an amplifier or switch when a voltage or current is applied to its terminals. Since the first FETs were produced in the mid-20th Century, R&D has been continuous in miniaturizing them and coaxing them to run at extraordinary frequencies.

To create the WECT, the researchers required conductive wood (CW). This is made by removing the lignin from wood via a chemical solvent process. Subsequently the channels where lignin were present are replaced with a mixed electron-ion conducting polymer. In this project the chosen wood was Balsa (for its desirable inner channel structure) and conductive polymer PEDOT:PSS. To construct the WECT, three pieces of CW were used: one piece as the central transistor channel, and one each as top and bottom gate.

The WECT transistor is remarkable, even though it doesn’t have the kinds of specs we usually discuss on Tom’s Hardware. Rather than being an end in itself, the researchers say they provided evidence of the wood transistor’s possibilities, and hope that they will inspire future work and applications.

Advanced chips made using leading-edge process technologies often need high-quality multi-layer motherboards. To ensure that such printed circuit boards (PCBs) can be produced in the U.S., President Joe Biden this week signed a presidential determination authorizing the use of Defense Production Act (DPA) to support domestic PCB and advanced chip packaging industries with $50 million. 

Gradual migration of high-tech industry from the United States to Asia in the recent decades affected not only sophisticated semiconductor production and high-volume assembly of consumer electronics, but also things like chip packaging and production of PCBs. Meanwhile, all electronics devices — from a humble mouse all the way to a mission critical server or a piece of military equipment — use some kind of a motherboard, so the ability to produce sophisticated PCBs in the U.S. is also a matter of national security.

The presidential determination lets the Department of Defense use $50 million to provide DPA Title III incentives — including purchases and purchase commitments — to support the PCB and Advanced Packaging industries in the U.S.

While the U.S. government is interested in production of PCBs for use in national defense, energy, healthcare, and other crucial sectors in America, companies that receive subsidies from DoD will gain the technological capability and knowhow necessary to produce advanced boards in general, and will be able to serve other sectors as a result. We can only speculate whether this could eventually bring production of things such as graphics cards or PC motherboards back to the U.S. — it's definitely a possibility.

In fact, companies such as AMD, Apple, Google, Intel, Nvidia, and many others produce a variety of motherboards for their devices in the U.S. for test purposes, before initiating volume production in Asia. At least some American companies could expand their PCB and packaging operations in the U.S. to serve clients here — if they receive the right financial incentives.

"Without Presidential action under section 303 of the Act, United States industry cannot reasonably be expected to provide the capability for the needed industrial resource, material, or critical technology item in a timely manner," Biden wrote in a memo. "I find that action to expand the domestic production capability for printed circuit boards and advanced packaging is necessary to avert an industrial resource or critical technology item shortfall that would severely impair national defense capability."

Are your USB ports boring? Do they need some RGB? Well, this $6 USB 2.0 Type-A port from Tensility International Corporation, listed via Digi-Key aims to light up your dark and dreary USB ports. Hat tip to Arturo182 for bringing this to our attention.

Rated for up to 30V at 3A (90W via USB A?), this RGB USB port uses an RGB LED with a common anode connected to the power pin. The colors can then be mixed by controlling the state of each color's cathode pin. Controlling those pins would be the job of a microcontroller, perhaps the Raspberry Pi Pico's RP2040 on a custom PCB. In the datasheet, we can see that there are two rows of pins. Those nearer the front of the USB port handle the standard USB 2 duties. The rear four pins are for the LEDs in a Blue, Green, Voltage, and Red configuration. The additional LED pins mean we can't just drop this part into an existing board. Instead, they must be installed into a custom board with traces routed to send signals to the RGB LED. It also looks like a typical USB A port, ready for soldering into a 1.6mm or less thick PCB. 

As we have already noted, this port is capable of up to 90W of power delivery, so an interesting use case would be to set the RGBs to denote a set voltage. Using a buck converter or voltage regulator, we could set the appropriate voltage and trigger the microcontroller to illuminate a color to indicate. Say red for 30V, green for 12V and blue for 5V? A simple flick of a switch would set the voltage and trigger the color change. Or we could use PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) to mix a specific color for voltages in between. While this won't be as clear as using a NeoPixel of APA102 RGB LED, it will get the job done.

This through-hole component is available via "cut tape" and "reel." The former enables small amounts to be purchased for short runs / individual projects. The latter is favored by manufacturers who will load the reel ready for a pick and place machine to place the components on a run of boards.

If you are designing your own product or have the skills to retrofit the port into an existing build (not something we recommend), then $6 isn't a lot to ask for a little bling.

The United States government plans to stop granting export licenses to companies dealing with China-based Huawei and its subsidiaries. This will essentially leave the telecommunication giant without American technologies, reports the Financial Times. 

The U.S. Department of Commerce added Huawei and virtually all of its subsidiaries to the entity list in 2019 – 2020, to curtail its ability to build new products featuring U.S. technologies, and started to require companies exporting such technologies to Huawei to obtain an export license. But those licenses were actually granted, which is how Huawei and its affiliates got products involving technologies originating in the U.S. 

Huawei and its subsidiaries could not get the truly advanced technologies required for things like 5G networks. But the company could get chips required for various consumer electronics (including smartphones and PCs), plus telecommunication equipment, which kept the company afloat. 

But this is going to change soon, as the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) recently notified those companies that it would no longer grant licenses to export American technology to Huawei, according to Financial Times. Alan Estevez, the head of the BIS, is currently reviewing China-related export granting policies in a bid to figure out the next steps that the U.S. has to take. 

Back in October, the U.S. imposed sweeping sanctions against China's semiconductor and supercomputer sectors, in a bid to curtail the development of China's military capabilities, but this will also restrict the country's technological and economical advances. Imposing additional curbs against Huawei will certainly impact the Chinese economy more than it would impact the country's military capabilities, such as nuclear weapons or hypersonic missiles.  

Other recent actions of the U.S. government include imposing more restrictions on exports of wafer fab equipment (WFE) to China. To ensure that companies like SMIC do not have access to advanced fab tools, the U.S. reached a pact with Japan and the Netherlands to put curbs on exports by companies like ASML, Canon, Nikon, and Tokyo Electron. Some believe this will speed up the development of China's own wafer fabrication tech, but it will be particularly hard to do that without tech developed in the USA.

There are times when even the best soldering irons won't speed up your soldering pace. So what if the board soldered itself? This is the goal of Carl Bugeja, and this PCB that can solder itself and then other boards!

Bugeja's approach is described using a pizza analogy: The PCB is the dough, the solder paste is the sauce, and the toppings are the circuit components. Put all of this into the oven, and you have a  ̶t̶a̶s̶t̶y̶ ̶p̶i̶z̶z̶a̶  PCB ready to go!

For those not familiar with surface mount electronics, large stencils are placed over pre-fabricated PCBs. Next, a layer of solder paste (think toothpaste, not typical solder) is applied through the stencils. A pick-and-place machine is then used to drop the components onto the solder paste, and then the whole board goes into a reflow oven where the components are baked into place. If you need to make thousands of boards, then this is the way.

Bugeja uses one of the many layers in the PCB as a means to transmit heat. Rather than one massive copper ground plane, Bugeja has reconfigured that layer into a track that provides some resistance and heats up the board. This heat causes the solder paste to reflow and the components to be soldered into place.

Bugeja kept the resistor values low on purpose. This enabled the boards to self-solder at 165 degrees Celsius (328 degrees Fahrenheit) using just 9 Volts. The magic 165°C is the temperature needed to melt the low-temperature solder paste (Chip Quik TS391LT50 for those in the know). Bugeja chose a PCB construction that was good up to 170°C, and since this is a one-shot, five-minute solder, it offered a robust medium for the board.

The downside of the process is that this is a one-shot process, but Bugeja is prepared for this and will use this layer as a ground (GND) plane by soldering a zero ohm resistor from the track to the GND connection. An elegant solution, if we say so ourselves.

The circuit was designed using Altium Designer, and Bugeja used this as an advantage, routing the wavy self-soldering track around many vias that work between layers of the circuit. The input for the soldering power is via two extensions to the PCB. These extensions take the power around the track and can be easily broken off when the job is done. How is that possible? Using "Mouse bite vias," in other words, tiny nibbles are fabricated directly into the structure of the PCB. They can be easily broken off and sanded down, leaving little or no trace of their existence.

The first test went well. Sure it wasn't perfect, with a few soldering blobs that needed a little rework, but the board came out with no damage; all it needed was a bootloader, a few component changes, and a custom Arduino sketch to control the next part of the project.

Initially, Bugeja manually controlled the temperature by steadily increasing the voltage, but Bugeja felt that a computer could do it better! What technology could accurately self-solder another circuit using the exact temperature profile of the solder paste? Well, that would be the PCB that Bugeja had just self-soldered. Yes, the freshly created board has an Atmel MEGA32U4 (well-used in the Arduino world) and a temperature sensor (thermocouple). All the user has to do is connect their compatible board to the PCB, press a button, and a PID controller will precisely cook your ̶p̶i̶z̶z̶a̶ PCB to order.

The second version (Bugeja called this a "daughter")of the board was connected to the original (mother) using two machine screws. The thermocouple was then taped to the underside of the board. Pressing the button started the Arduino sketch to run, controlling the temperature profile to 165°C where the components settled into their final positions. The daughter board was a success, and Bugeja celebrated by creating another board, the granddaughter of the original.

Bugeja's project is an excellent approach to surface mount soldering and one that we can see catching the eye of many electronics experts keen to push the boundaries of what is possible in the subject. Right now, we either purchase expensive equipment to reflow our surface mount builds, build small projects using MHP30 hot plates, or go DIY with your own reflow toaster oven.

You can read more about Bugeja's project and download the PCB files from the GitHub repository.

Although developers and makers of chips are yet to receive grants enabled by the CHIPS and Science act, its announcement and subsequent enactment have already attracted some $200 billion of private investments in the U.S. semiconductor sector, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association, a lobbying group for the industry. The new projects will impact both chip production and electronics manufacturing in the USA. 

The CHIPS act was first introduced in the Spring of 2020 and aroused immediate attention among the semiconductor industry's leaders. TSMC was first to announce a major new fab project in Arizona in mid-May 2020 and since then over 40 new semiconductor ecosystem projects were announced all across the U.S. Eventually, these fabs and other production facilities will enable some 40,000 direct well-paid jobs.  

When it comes to actual semiconductor fabrication plants, 13 new fabs are being built in the U.S. and nine are expanding, not only reviving American semiconductor industry but also impacting the production of electronics in the USA. Ten more new fab phases have been announced by various makers like Intel, TSMC and Texas Instruments. 

The new fabs will produce everything from simple power management ICs (PMICs) and audio amplifiers to innovative memory to advanced CPUs, GPUs and SoCs for a variety of applications. 

In addition, 20 equipment and materials supplier projects that will source gas, chemicals, tools, and wafers for chip fabs are being built in the USA with 12 of them set to be located in Arizona, where Intel and TSMC are setting up their new production facilities. 

Producing chips in the U.S. is important from national security, supply chain reliability and economic points of view. But U.S. made chips will also inspire more electronics production in the country. While we hardly expect companies like Apple, Dell or HPE to transfer manufacturing of their PCs and smartphones to the U.S., some other makers can do just that. Of course, because modern production is heavily automated, production facilities still employ people. 

The SIA claims that for each U.S. worker directly employed by the semiconductor industry, an additional 5.7 jobs are created in the wider U.S. economy. 

"SIA looks forward to working with the Commerce Department to ensure the CHIPS Act is implemented in an effective, efficient, and timely manner," a statement by the association reads. "Doing so will help reinvigorate U.S. chip production and innovation and deliver major benefits for America’s economy, job creation, national security, supply chain resilience, and technology leadership."

Soldering irons are an essential part of the maker toolkit and without one, we cannot create anything. Your television, computer, even your Raspberry Pi are all made using various forms of soldering irons / systems. 

Soldering is about more than just fusing metal and components. It gives you an understanding of electronics, enabling you to see how components work together in a larger circuit. Seasoned makers will know the benefit of the best soldering irons. Heck, they will probably already own multiple soldering irons and stations. But what is a good soldering iron for beginners and for makers short on bench space? For that, a smart soldering iron – one with a screen and digital temperature menus on device (rather than on a station) – is a plus.

Miniware is well known in the smart soldering iron world. Its TS100 introduced smart soldering irons to the mainstream. Over the years, Miniware has released the TS80, which replaced the DC5525 power jack of the TS100 with USB-C. But now we have the TS101, a $50 smart soldering iron that offers temperature control and dual power options.

Is the Miniware TS101 ready to take the best all rounder title from the TS100? Can it beat the Pinecil V2? For that we need to grab some soldering kits and start building!

Miniware TS101 Hardware Specifications

Look and Feel of the Miniware TS101

The plastic body of the TS101 has a slight texture to it. This lends itself rather well to a firm grip of the iron. The two buttons are comfortably placed, and the 128 x 32-pixel OLED screen is easy to read under bench lights. A “collar” is between the iron’s body and the soldering tip that prevents the iron from rolling around the bench, and provides a natural rest for our grip. The omission of a stand is somewhat troublesome. Sure the iron won’t roll around, but beginners will need to buy a third-party stand so there’s a safe place for the iron to rest. The included USB-C cable claims to be silicone, and it certainly feels like silicone. While we can’t safely test the heat resistance of the cable (silicone is much better than PVC) we can confirm that despite its short length, it never got in the way when soldering.

Soldering with Miniware TS101

Heating up in 15 seconds, the TS101 is just as fast as the TS100 and TS80. The only smart soldering iron to beat it is Pinecil V2 (10 seconds). Waiting 15 seconds to heat up is nothing as larger soldering stations can take minutes. The short start time means we can get down to soldering in moments. The included TS-B2 conical tip is a good mix of precision and large thermal mass. This means we can make neat work of soldering up a circuit, or dump a load heat into a joint.

 We soldered up the Arduino Make Your Uno kit with the TS101 and we had no issues. Small and large components were soldered with ease, and the only issues during our soldering were more human error than the TS101. The soldering action felt neat and it matched our pace of soldering, especially when soldering a long line of DIP pins.

If you need a little boost, the TS101 can boost up to 400 degrees Celsius. Just press and hold button A for as long as you need it. In our tests, we found that our USB-C bench supply could only muster enough power to reach 380 degrees Celsius.We have noted that there is a firmware update for compatible USB-C power supplies which can bring 28V at 5A, but we had no compatible power source to test this.

This leads us nicely to button placement. On the TS101, we have both buttons within easy reach of our index finger. We can’t accidentally turn off the soldering iron by pressing the buttons; at worst we can boost the temperature. 

The placement repeats the design choice of the TS100, and it feels right, unlike with the TS80 which was a little too near the center mass of the iron to feel right. We really like the TS101 button placement, which is much better than the Pinecil V2 which has them on either side of the OLED display.

Miniware TS101 Software

The “smart” part of the TS101 is the software and with just two buttons it could be seen as tricky to use. Thankfully it is not. 

The button nearest the soldering tip “A”, will start heating the iron up to your preferred temperature. Button B, nearest to the power, is where we can access a menu of features that includes setting custom soldering temperatures, sleep timers and tweaking the power settings. 

We needed to tweak our TS101 to remove a low current warning which caused the iron to “reboot” mid-solder. This has happened with other smart soldering irons and is not specifically a TS101 issue. The fact that we could easily tweak this is a credit to the firmware. The interface is easy to use, but it will take you a little while to get used to.

Flashing Firmware to Miniware TS101

Flashing firmware is a simple task. All it requires is a DFU file from the Miniware website. Plug the TS101 into your PC via the USB C connector and it will appear as a drive. Copy the DFU file across and in a few moments your soldering iron is running the latest firmware. It is advisable to keep your soldering iron firmware updated as it can provide new features and upgrades, including adding additional power options.

We can also alter the configuration of the TS101 directly from a configuration file stored in the root of the TS101_APP drive. All of the options found in the TS101 configuration menu can be easily tweaked using any text editor. Save the change, connect the TS101 to a power source and you have a custom soldering profile for your needs.

Powering the Miniware TS101

Miniware’s previous soldering irons, the TS100 and TS80 used just a single power connector, respectively DC 5525 and USB-C. With the TS101 we see both as available power sources. But which one is better? 

For most soldering tasks, it all depends on what you are soldering and what the nearest power source is. Heating up to a stable 350 degrees Celsius was identical in our tests, with both power sources hitting the magic temperature in 15 seconds. We tested this with a USB-C bench power supply (Pine’s Pine Power) that provided 20V at 2.6A (52W) and a DC PSU which provided 19V at 2.1A (39.9W). 

The TS101’s two power inputs give us between 45W (USB) and 65W (DC) of possible output. The higher output is only achievable with a 24V PSU. We would only need that power for large solder joints and multi-layer boards which can soak a lot of heat before soldering.

According to the product page, the TS101 can support up to 28V via USB-C. This requires a firmware upgrade and a power supply that supports PD3.1 28V at 5A. We were unable to verify this claim as we did not have a compatible power supply.

For portable use, the TS101 can be powered by a compatible USB-C PD battery pack or via a LiPo battery, such as those used in radio controlled cars, using the DC jack. All of these choices make the TS101 a versatile soldering iron for the field.

Miniware TS101 Soldering Tips

The TS101 comes with a TS-B2 10mm conical tip and can use the same soldering tips as the venerable TS100 (but not the TS80) and both versions of Pinecil. This means that we have access to a plethora of soldering tips you can buy. From fine needlepoint tips (TS-ILS) to flat tip cones (TS-BC2, TS-C1, TS-C4) and more akin to flat blades (TS-D24, TS-K, TS-KU), there is a tip for every type of soldering scenario.

Changing a tip is an easy task. Use a flat blade screwdriver to loosen the screw, then slide the soldering tip. Reverse the process to insert a new soldering tip. Obviously do this when the iron is cold!

Bottom Line

The TS100’s reign as Best All-Rounder is coming to an end. The TS101 continues the greatness of the TS100 but provides a greater choice of power supply options. The iron is precise, quick to heat and easy to use. Compatibility with TS100 soldering tips is a great feature, and opens up a world of choice. 

The $50 price tag is double that of Pinecil V2 and there isn’t much difference between them. They both support the same power options and soldering iron tips. What does separate them is comfort. 

The grip on the Pinecil is good – the rubberized plastic shroud prevents slip – but the TS101’s textured grip and button placement just feels better. The Miniware TS101 is a great iron and we enjoyed using it and it will do 99% of the tasks that a maker requires.

If price is no barrier, then Miniware’s TS101 is a great smart soldering iron and well worth your money. The choice of tips, the comfortable button placement and multiple power options elevate it over its predecessors. That said, Pinecil V2 is half the price and our only issue is the button placement. For $25 in your pocket you could easily adapt.