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Retrotechtacular: Mr. Wizard Jams with IBM

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You may not remember [Mr. Wizard], but he was a staple of nerd kids over a few decades, teaching science to kids via the magic of television. The Computer History Archives Project has a partially restored film of [Mr. Wizard] showing off sounds and noise on a state-of-the-art (for 1963) Tektronix 504 oscilloscope. He talks about noise and also shows the famous IBM mainframe rendition of the song “Daisy Bell.” You can see the video along with some extras below. You might recall that the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” paid homage to the IBM computer’s singing debut by having HAL 9000 sing the same song as it is being deactivated. The idea that HAL was IBM “minus one” has been repeatedly denied, but we still remain convinced. Can you imagine a TV show these days that would teach kids about signal-to-noise ratio or even show them an actual oscilloscope? We suppose that’s what YouTube is for. At about the 17-minute mark, you can see some enormous walkie-talkies. A far cry from today’s ...
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Keebin’ with Kristina: the One With the NEO With the Typewriter Shell

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Isn’t this glorious? If you don’t recognize what this is right away (or from the post title), it’s an AlphaSmart NEO word processor , repackaged in a 3D-printed typewriter-esque shell, meticulously designed by the renowned [Un Kyu Lee] of Micro Journal fame. Image by [Un Kyu Lee] via GitHub If you don’t want to spend roughly 40 hours printing ~1 kg of filament in order to make your own, you can join the wait-list on Tindie like I did. Go here to figure out which color you want, and email [Un Kyu Lee] when you order. In the meantime, you can watch the assembly video and then check out this playlist that shows the available colors . Assembly looks easy enough; there’s no soldering, but you do have to disconnect and reconnect the fiddly ribbon cables. After that, it’s just screws. This design happened by accident. A friend named [Hook] who happens to manage the AlphaSmart Flickr community had given [Un Kyu Lee] a NEO2 to try out, but before he could, it fell from a shelf and the...
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Microfluidic Display Teaches The Basics

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We’ve always been interested in fluidic logic and, based on [soiboi’s] videos, he is too. His latest shows how to use silicone and a vacuum to build a multiplexed dot matrix display . This is a fascinating look at how you design with air instead of electrons. Just like a regular display, it isn’t efficient to control each element separately. Usually, it’s better to multiplex such that 16 “pixels” need only row and column air valves. Just as you might use transistors, the project uses “air transistors” to build logic gates. Each pixel is a bit of silicone that can be sucked down only when a row and column are drawing a vacuum simultaneously. The air transistor is a similar membrane that a control input can suck down. In its relaxed position, two air channels are blocked by the membrane. When the membrane moves away, the two channels connect. This is analogous to a Field Effect Transistor (FET), where the channel conducts electricity when the gate is active and does not conduct when ...
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Removing the BIOS Administrator Password on a ThinkPad Takes Timing

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This would be a bad time to slip. (Credit: onionboots, YouTube) In the olden days, an administrator password on a BIOS was a mere annoyance, one quickly remedied by powering off the system and pulling its CMOS battery or moving a jumper around. These days, you’re more likely to find a separate EEPROM on the mainboard that preserves the password. This, too, is mostly just another annoyance, as [onionboots] knew. All it takes is shorting out this EEPROM at the right time to knock it offline, with the ‘right time’ turning out to be rather crucial. While refurbishing this laptop for a customer, he thought it’d be easy: the guide he found said he just had to disassemble the laptop to gain access to this chip, then short out its reset pin at the right time to make it drop offline and keep it shorted. Important here is that you do not short it when you are still booting the system, or it won’t boot. This makes for some interesting prodding of tiny pins with a metal tool. What baffled ...
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Hackaday Links: February 15, 2026

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It probably won’t come as much of a surprise to find that most of the Hackaday staff aren’t exactly what you’d call sports fanatics, so we won’t judge if you didn’t tune in for the Super Bowl last week. But if you did, perhaps you noticed Ring’s Orwellian “Search Party” spot — the company was hoping to get customers excited about a new feature that allows them to upload a picture of their missing pet and have Ring cameras all over the neighborhood search for a visual match. Unfortunately for Ring, the response on social media wasn’t quite what they expected . Nope, don’t like that. One commenter on YouTube summed it up nicely: “This is like the commercial they show at the beginning of a dystopian sci-fi film to quickly show people how bad things have gotten.” You don’t have to be some privacy expert to see how this sort of mass surveillance is a slippery slope. Many were left wondering just who or what the new system would be searching for when it wasn’t busy sniffing out lost pup...
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Software Development on the Nintendo Famicom in Family BASIC

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Back in the 1980s, your options for writing your own code and games were rather more limited than today. This also mostly depended on what home computer you could get your hands on, which was a market that — at least in Japan — Nintendo was very happy to slide into with their ‘Nintendo Family Computer’, or ‘Famicom’ for short. With the available peripherals, including a tape deck and keyboard, you could actually create a fairly decent home computer, as demonstrated by [Throaty Mumbo] in a recent video . After a lengthy unboxing of the new-in-box components, we move on to the highlight of the show, the HVC-007 Family BASIC package, which includes a cartridge and the keyboard . The latter of these connects to the Famicom’s expansion port. Inside the package, you also find a big Family BASIC manual that includes sprites and code to copy. Of course, everything is in Japanese, so [Throaty] had to wrestle his way through the translations. The cassette tape is used to save applications, ...
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Real-Time 3D Room Mapping with ESP32, VL53L5CX Sensor and IMU

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ST’s VL53L5CX is a very small 8×8 grid ranging sensor that can perform distance measurements at a distance of up to 4 meters. In a recent video,[Henrique Ferrolho] demonstrated that this little sensor can also be used to perform a 3D scan of a room. The sensor data can be combined with an IMU to add orientation information to the scan data. These data streams are then combined by an ESP32 MCU that streams the data as JSON to a connected computer. Of course, that’s just the heavily abbreviated version, with the video covering the many implementation details that crop up when implementing the system, including noise filtering, orientation tracking using the IMU and a variety of plane fitting algorithms to consider. Note that ST produces a range of these Time-of-Flight sensors that are more basic, such as the VL53VL0X , which is a simple distance meter limited to 2 meters. The VL53L5CX features the multizone array, 4-meter distance range, and 60 Hz sampling speed features that make i...
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