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Using Your Own RBMK Reactor Control Center At Home

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To give people the most intimate RBMK experience, the [Chornobyl Family] has been working tirelessly at not only replicating the original RBMK reactor control room and its SKALA industrial control system’s controls, but also to create a version that you could tinker with at home if you ever fancied getting your own RBMK operator license. This starts with the operator console, with its use demonstrated in a recent video including a range of common commands. In this video the entering of codes on the console to interact with the system is detailed, including the logic behind it. In the absence of large displays to display many parameters and such, this way the operator could ‘talk’ with the control system, including obtaining current sensors readings and the setting and changing of setpoints. From the same console you can also select and run programs, which is useful for automating tasks, like monitoring coolant flows. In the second video not only the construction of...

It’s A Spectrum, With An RP2350 ULA

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There was a time in the early 1980s when it was common to see home made keyboards for 8-bit machines that came with membrane or rubber keyboards. Though we’ve seen any numbers of home made modern ‘boards, it’s been decades since we saw one for an 8-bit micro. Until today, that is, when we saw [Vlad]’s Sinclair Spectrum . It’s a Spectrum with all that Sinclair glue logic that was in the ULA replaced in software by an RP2050, and that keyboard with the Spectrum decals. The machine is a charming mixture of new and old, with a traditional cassette port alongside VGA, gameport joystick, and Sinclair joystick. The aim is to also have HDMI, though it’s not yet implemented. Sadly there is no Spectrum edge connector for period peripherals though. He admits it’s not cycle accurate to the original, but given that it runs all the games he’s given it this seems not to matter. Meanwhile that keyboard which caught our eye is a true period piece, sittin...

CGI Motion Capture with only a Camera

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Computer-generated imagery (CGI) has largely replaced physical models in major film productions these days, but the transition didn’t exactly happen overnight. For a time there was an effort to blend the physical and digital, which allowed animators on productions such as Jurassic Park to work with newer technology in a way they were familiar with. [Corridor Crew] took this concept a step further by manipulating digital models with nothing but a webcam . Early in the production of CGI, animators found a purely digital workflow to be less intuitive than the use of physical elements such as puppets. Feeling the weight and touch of a miniature with joints and limbs made for a more natural animation, so they created the dinosaur input device to map movements of a physical model into a digital recreation. Puppeteered humanoid input device for the film Species Unfortunately for the future of dinosaurs made of motion sensors, none of these devices really caught on and the technology...

Musing on AI from 1964

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[Irving John Good] was at Trinity College, Oxford back in 1964. His paper, “ Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine ” could have been a topic for today, as we deal with machines that aren’t really ultraintelligent, but appear smart and think they are even smarter. He starts off with a bold thesis: “The survival of man depends on the early construction of an ultraintelligent machine.” He also admits that we’ll need to understand more about the human brain and human thought to make a breakthrough. This is still true today. However, we still don’t fully understand how our brains work, but it seems unlikely that we are just super-large LLMs. Not that [Good] anticipated the modern chatbot. Perhaps his comments will apply more to a future AI software that actually thinks like a human, if there will ever be such a thing. Then again, there are many parallels. One theme in the paper is that a smart machine will design a smarter mach...

Hackaday Links: July 12, 2026

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Although we’d rather bring you news of clever modifications and repairs down on the farm, more often than not, the name “John Deere” has appeared on the pages of Hackaday because of their opposition to farmers actually being able to work on the machines their livelihoods depend on. But thanks to a settlement reached between the company and the Federal Trade Commission this week, farmers seem to have been handed a much-needed win in the Right to Repair battle. When a lawsuit against a company ends in a settlement, it usually means spending money they would rather pay than go to court. Indeed, earlier cases against John Deere have resulted in plenty of checks being written. But this time around, the FTC agreement requires Deere to make its diagnostic and repair software available to owners and independent shops. It also has a clause that prevents them from retaliating against owners who want to handle their own repairs rather than going through the company’s offi...

Porting the Nvidia GPU Driver to Haiku for 3D Acceleration

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As good as a desktop OS may be, at some point it has to feature accelerated 3D graphics. This has been a bit of a sticking point for Haiku OS, as none of the big names in GPU cards are likely to start putting out drivers for this OS any time soon. Fortunately there is the Linux open source driver code from Nvidia that can be used as a jumping-off point for a port, which is what [X512] and the community did over at the Haiku forums did over the course of more than a year. In a recent video [Action Retro] takes a poke at the fruits of these efforts, trying out the driver with an RTX2070 Super GPU. Of note is that this driver requires the GSP (GPU System Processor) controller that got added by Nvidia with the Turing series of GPUs, meaning that you need at least a GTX16 or RTX20 series card. You can get an installation package from the GitHub repository , such as for the v0.0.2 pre-release that was created in January of 2026. In this pre-release state quite a few things are working, ...

Porting DOOM to the Casio Loopy

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Targeted towards refined female gamers unlike the savagery of the mainstream game consoles of the era, 1995’s Casio Loopy was a bit of an oddity of a game console. Despite being standard enough in its design and backed by the might of Casio, it saw only one year of active software development and hardware manufacturing ceased by the end of 1998. With only eleven titles released for the system, with none of them being  Doom , this obviously terribly upset [Throaty Mumbo], who set out to right this egregious wrong . For the two dozen people or so who have one of these systems, you can experience the fruits of his labor yourself via the GitHub repository and something like the FloopyDrive cartridge .. Despite the quite capable Hitachi SH-1 16 MHz CPU and 1 MB of RAM, the main limitation is probably the original 2 MB of ROM space that does not leave a lot of space for DOOM WADs, even after doubling it on the FloopyDrive. Correspondingly you only get a handful of levels out of it. ...