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Building a Laser-Driven Photoacoustic Speaker

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An MRI scan is never a pleasant occasion – even if you aren’t worried about the outcome, lying still in a confined, noisy space for long periods of time is at best an irksome experience. For hearing protection and to ameliorate boredom or claustrophobia, the patient wears headphones. Since magnets and wires can’t be used inside an MRI machine, the headphones have to literally pipe the sound in through tubes, which gives them poor sound quality and reduces the amount of noise they can block. [SomethingAboutScience], however, thinks that photoacoustic speakers could improve on these, and built some to demonstrate. These speakers use the photoacoustic effect, which is mostly caused by surface heating when exposed to an intense light, then transferring the heat to the surrounding air, which expands. If the surface can transfer heat to the air quickly enough, and if the light source is modulated quickly, the rapid expansions and contractions in the surrounding air create sound waves. As...
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The 3DFX Voodoo Lives Again In An FPGA

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The 3DFX Voodoo was not the first dedicated 3D graphics chipset by any means, but it became the favourite for gamers among the early mass-market GPUs. It would be found on a 3D-processing-only PCI card that sat on the feature connector of your SVGA card. The Voodoo took any game that supported its Glide API into the world of (for the time) smooth and beautiful 3D. They’re worth a bit now, but if you don’t fancy forking out for mid-’90s silicon in 2026, there’s another option. [Francisco Ayala Le Brun] has implemented the 3DFX Voodoo 1 in SpinalHDL for FPGAs . The write-up goes into the Voodoo’s architecture. Where the parts of a modern GPU are programmable for the various functions it can do, in this part they are dedicated hardware functions for the various graphics tricks the chip can perform. Implementing such an architecture on an FPGA led to bugs and timing problems, and the write-up deals with that in detail. The whole thing can be found in a GitHub repository if you’re curi...
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Hackaday Links: March 22, 2026

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On Friday, Reuters reported that Amazon is going to try to get into the smartphone game …again. The Fire Phone was perhaps Amazon’s biggest commercial misstep, and was only on the market for about a year before it was discontinued in the summer of 2015. But now industry sources are saying that a new phone code-named “Transformer” is in the works from the e-commerce giant. At this point, there’s no word on how much the phone would cost or when it would hit the market. The only information Reuters was able to squeeze out of their contacts was that the device would feature AI heavily. Real shocker there — anyone with an Echo device in their kitchen could tell you that Amazon is desperate to get you talking to their gadgets, presumably so they can convince you to buy something. While a smartphone with even more AI features we didn’t ask for certainly won’t be on our Wish List, if history is any indicator, we might be able to pick these things up cheap on the second-hand market. On the...
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IDing Counterfeit Drugs Might Be Easier Than You Think

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Odds are, you’ve taken pills before; it’s a statistical certainty that some of you reading this took several this morning. Whenever you do, you’re at the mercy of the manufacturer: you’re trusting that they’ve put in the specific active ingredients in the dosage listed on the package. Alas, given the world we live in, that doesn’t always happen. Double-checking actual concentrations requires expensive lab equipment like gas chromatography. It turns out checking for counterfeit pills is easier than you’d think, thanks to a technique called Disintegration Fingerprinting . The raw voltage signal from the sensor is stored as a “disintegration fingerprint” of particles detected per minute. It’s delightfully simple: all you need is a clear plastic cup, a stir plate, and a handful of electronic components — namely, a microcontroller, a servo, and an IR line-following sensor. You’ve probably played with just such a sensor: the cheap ones that are a matched pair of LED and photodetector. ...
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An Electric Jellyfish For Androids

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We have to admit, we didn’t know that we wanted a desktop electric jellyfish until seeing [likeablob]’s Denki-Kurage , but it’s one of those projects that just fills a need so perfectly. The need being, of course, to have a Bladerunner-inspired electric animal on your desk, as well as having a great simple application for that Cheap Yellow Display (CYD) that you impulse purchased two years ago. Maybe we’re projecting a little bit, but you should absolutely check this project out if you’re interested in doing anything with one of the CYDs . They are a perfect little experimentation platform, with a touchscreen, an ESP32, USB, and an SD card socket: everything you need to build a fun desktop control panel project that speaks either Bluetooth or WiFi. We love [likeablob]’s aesthetic here. The wireframe graphics, the retro-cyber fonts in the configuration mode, and even the ability to change the strength of the current that the electric jellyfish is swimming against make this look so co...
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Analog Video From an 8-Bit Microcontroller

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Although the CRT has largely disappeared from our everyday lives, there was a decades-long timeframe when this was effectively the only display available. It’s an analog display for an analog world, and now that almost everything electronic is digital, these amazing pieces of technology are largely relegated to retro gaming and a few other niche uses. [Maurycy] has a unique CRT that’s small enough to fit in a handheld television, but since there aren’t analog TV stations anymore, he decided to build his own with nothing but an 8-bit microcontroller and a few other small parts . The microcontroller in question is a fairly standard 8-bit AVR. These microcontrollers have one major limitation when generating the VHF and UHF radio signals needed for analog TV: their natural clock speed is much too low. The maximum output frequency of a pin on this microcontroller is only 6 MHz, and [Maurycy] needs something about two orders of magnitude faster. To solve this problem, [Maurycy] uses a qui...
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Reviving a Cursed Sun SPARCstation IPX

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SPARCstation IPX running Solaris 2.6. (Credit: This Does Not Compute, YouTube) The best part about retro computing is the idea that you’ll save some poor system from being scrapped and revive it to a working state, at which point you can bask in the glory of a job well done. That’s when reality often strikes hard, and you find yourself troubleshooting a maddening list of issues as you question everything about your life choices. Such was the case with [This Does Not Compute] over at YouTube with a Sun SPARCstation IPX that decided to put up a big fight. This is the second video of a series. In the first installment, the PSU was repaired, and a boot failure was diagnosed. The system’s onboard diagnostic led to the assumption that one of the 8 kB SRAM ICs was defective.  You can readily get SRAM replacements, so it seemed to be an easy fix. Unfortunately, the fun was only beginning as the system reported the exact same error after the SRAM was replaced. After flipping a virtua...
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