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Cynus Chess Robot: a Chess Board With a Robotic Arm

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Downward-facing camera and microphone in the arm. (Credit: Techmoan, YouTube) There are many chess robots, most of which require the human player to move the opposing pieces themselves, or have a built-in mechanism that can slide the opposing pieces around to their new location. Ideally, such a chess robot would move the pieces just like how a human would, of course. That’s pretty much the promise behind the Manya Cynus chess robot, which [Matt] over at the Techmoan YouTube channel bought from the Kickstarter campaign. Advertising itself as a ‘Portable AI Chess Robot’, the Manya Cynus chess robot comes in the form of a case that unfolds into a chess board and also contains the robotic arm that contains the guts of the operation. Powered by the open source Stockfish chess engine, it can play games against a human opponent at a few difficulty levels without requiring any online connectivity or a companion app. It moves its own pieces by picking up the metal-cored chess pieces with...
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Making a 286 Think It’s Alive Again

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[Nagy Krisztián] had an Intel 286 CPU, only… There was no motherboard to install it in. Perhaps not wanting the processor to be lonely, [Nagy] built a simulated system to bring the chip back to life. Okay, 68 pins does look like a lot when you arrange them like that. The concept is simple enough. [Nagy] merely intended to wire the 286 up to a Raspberry Pi Pico that could emulate other parts of a computer that it would normally expect to talk to. This isn’t so hard with an ancient CPU like the 286, which has just 68 pins compared to the 1000+ pins on modern CPUs. All it took was a PLCC-68 socket, an adapter PCB, a breadboard, and some MCP23s17 logic expanders to give the diminutive microcontroller enough I/O. With a bit of work, [Nagy] was able to get the Pi Pico running the 286, allowing it to execute a simple program that retrieves numbers from “memory” and writes them back in turn. Notably, this setup won’t run the 286 at its full clock speed of 12 MHz, and it’s a long way off ...
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Hackaday Links: March 1, 2026

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We’ll start this week off with a bit of controversy from Linux Land. Anyone who’s ever used the sudo command knows that you don’t see any kind of visual feedback while entering your password. This was intended as a security feature, as it was believed that an on-screen indicator of how many characters had been entered would allow somebody snooping over your shoulder to figure out the length of your password. But in Ubuntu 26.04, that’s no longer the case. The traditional sudo binary has been replaced with a one written in Rust, which Canonical has recently patched to follow the modern convention of showing asterisks on the password prompt. As you might expect, this prompted an immediate reaction from Linux greybeards. A bug report was filed just a few days ago demanding that the change be reverted, arguing that breaking a decades-old expectation with no warning could be confusing for users. The official response from a Canonical dev was that they see it the other way around, and ...
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Turning a Cast-Iron Radiator into a Water-Cooled PC

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Bottom of the cast-iron radiator gaming PC during plumbing. (Credit: Billet Labs, YouTube) Water-cooled PCs generally have in common that there’s a radiator somewhere in the loop, yet nobody said that you can’t build the PCB into the radiator. Something like a genuine Victorian-era cast-iron radiator, for example. For the folk over at [Billet Labs], this is just your typical project, of course, even if it took a solid three months to make it all work . Their previous project was also a water-cooled PC, but in the form of a steampunk-esque wall-mounted installation. What differentiates this new build is that it’s trying to be more of a sleeper PC, as long as you ignore some copper tubing and the like running around the outside of this vintage radiator. Of course, by using a vintage cast-iron radiator like this, you’re also dealing with all the disadvantages of cast-iron, such as the countless impurities in the metal and the immense weight. With water in the loop, the entire build...
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Fish Drives Tank

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Fish are popular animals to keep as pets, and for good reason. They’re relatively low maintenance, relaxing to watch, and have a high aesthetic appeal. But for all their upsides, they aren’t quite as companionable as a dog or a cat. Although some fish can do limited walking or flying, these aren’t generally kept as pets and would still need considerable help navigating the terrestrial world. To that end, [Everything is Hacked] built a fish tank that allows his fish to move around on their own. We presume he’s heard the old joke about two fish in a tank. One says, “Do you know how to drive this thing?” The first prototype of this “fish tank” is actually built on a tracked vehicle with differential steering, on which the fish tank would sit. But after building a basic, driveable machine, the realities of fish ownership set in. The fish with the smallest tank needs is a betta fish, but even that sort of fish needs much more space than would easily fit on a robotics platform. So [Everyt...
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Vend-o-Vision: Trading Quarters for Watching TV in Public

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The timer mechanism of the Vend-o-Vision. (Credit: SpaceTime Junction, YouTube) There was a time before portable TVs and personal media players when the idea of putting coin-operated TVs everywhere, from restaurants to airports and laundromats, would have seemed like a solid business model. Thus was born the Vend-o-Vision by Mini-TV USA, which presented itself as a cash earner for businesses and a way to make their customers even happier. One of these new-in-box units recently made its way over to [Mark] of the  SpaceTime Junction YouTube channel. This unit is very simple, with what appears to be an off-the-shelf Panasonic black-and-white TV with UHF and VHF reception capability, inside a metal box that contains the timer mechanism, which is linked to the coin mechanism. Depending on a physical slider with three positions, you get anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes per quarter, with the customer having to tune into the station themselves using the TV’s controls. A counter m...
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This LED Strip Clock Aims to Make Your Next One Easier, Too

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At first glance, it may look like [Rybitski]’s 7-segment RGB LED clock is something that’s been done before, but look past the beautiful mounting. It’s not just stylishly framed; the back end is just as attentively executed. It’s got a built-in web UI, MQTT automation, so Home Assistant integration is a snap, and allows remote OTA updates, so software changes don’t require taking the thing down and plugging in a cable. A slick web interface allows configuring which LEDs belong to which segments without code changes. Pixel Clock is code for the Wemos D1 Mini microcontroller board and WS2812/WS2812B RGB LED strips, but it’s made to be flexible enough to support different implementations. For example, altering which LEDs in the strip belong to which segments on which digits can be configured entirely from the web interface. Naturally, one could build an LED strip clock using the same layout [Rybitski] did and require no changes at all — but it’s very nice to see that different wir...
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