Hands On: The Hacker Pager

July 31, 2025 by Tom Nardi 20 Comments

It should come as no surprise that the hacker community has embraced the Meshtastic project. It’s got a little bit of everything we hold dear: high quality open source software, fantastic documentation, a roll-your-own hardware ethos, and just a dash of counterculture. An off-grid communications network cobbled together from cheap parts, some of which being strategically hidden within the urban sprawl by rogue operators, certainly sounds like the sort of thing you’d read about it in a William Gibson novel.

But while the DIY nature of Meshtastic is one of its most endearing features for folks like us, it can also be seen as one of its weak spots. Right now, the guidance for those looking to get started is to pick a compatible microcontroller development board, 3D print a case for it, screw on an antenna from AliExpress, flash your creation with the latest firmware, and then spend some quality time with the documentation and configuration tools to actually get it on the air. No great challenge for the average Hackaday reader, but a big ask for the weekend adventurer that’s just looking for a way to keep in touch with their friends while camping.

Quality hardware that offers a turn-key experience will be critical to elevating Meshtastic from a hobbyist’s pastime to something that could actually be fielded for applications such as search and rescue. Plus, let’s be honest, even those of us who like to put together our own gadgets can appreciate a more consumer-oriented piece of hardware from time to time. Especially if that hardware happens to be open source and designed to empower the user rather than hold them back.

Enter the Hacker Pager from exploitee.rs. As the name implies, it’s still very much a device intended for hackers — a piece of hardware designed for the halls of DEF CON rather than trekking through the wilderness. But it’s also an important step towards a new generation of Meshtastic hardware that meets the high standard of quality set by the software itself.

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ATtiny-Powered Business Card Plays Cracktro Hits

July 29, 2025 by Matt Varian 11 Comments

PCB business cards are a creative way to show your tech skills while getting your name out there. This take on a PCB business card, sent in by [VCC], tackles one of the big challenges with them: making them in such a way that they are cheap enough to not feel bad about handing them out.

These cards plug into a USB port for power and have over a dozen small LEDs that light up the stars on the front, and a small buzzer that can play over ten minutes of cracktro music. To keep the cost down, [VCC] went with an ATtiny1616 microcontroller costing under 50 cents and still having plenty of outputs to drive the buzzer and LEDs. The final per-unit cost prior to shipping came out to only 1.5 euros, enabling them to be handed out without worrying about breaking the bank.

To aid in the assembly of the cards, [VCC] 3D printed a jig to apply material to the back of the USB connector, building up its thickness to securely fit in the USB port. He also wrote a small script for assembly-line programming the cards, getting the programming process down to around ten seconds per card and letting him turn through prepping the cards. Thanks, [VCC], for sending in your project—it’s a great addition to other PCB business cards we’ve featured.

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A Very Tidy Handheld Pi Terminal Indeed

July 27, 2025 by Jenny List 25 Comments

As single board computers have become ever smaller and more powerful, so have those experimenting with them tried to push the boundaries of the machines they can be used in. First we had cyberdecks, and now we have handheld terminals. Of this latter class we have a particularly nice example from [Random Alley Cat]. It takes a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W and a handful of other parts, and makes them with a 3D printed case into something very professional indeed.

One of the problems with these designs has always been tidily packing away all the parts with their cables, and it’s one she solves by making a chassis to hold all the parts, and a case which fits around that. In a stroke the case no longer has to provide a dual function, allowing for a much easier internal layout. Her screen is a Pimoroni Hyperpixel, the keyboard is an Xbox 360 accessory, and the power supply is an off the shelf Pi UPS board and battery.

We particularly like the accesses on the underside of this machine to access the Pi ports, and the ventilation holes and external case details. It’s not perfect, as she says in the video below it’s not the best Linux keyboard. but we could really see ourselves using this.

If you follow handheld cyberdecks, we have a few treats for you on these pages. Not all of them run Linux, for example.

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Video Tape Hides Video Player

July 22, 2025 by Tyler August 16 Comments

While it might not be accurate to say VHS is dead, it’s certainly not a lively format. It continues on in undeath thanks to dedicated collectors and hobbyists, some of whom may be tempted to lynch Reddit user [CommonKingfisher] for embedding a video player inside a VHS tape.

Miniaturization in action. The video player probably cost about the same as the original VHS when you account for inflation.

The hack started with a promotional video card via Ali Express, which is a cheap enough way to get a tiny LCD player MP4 playing micro. As you can see, there was plenty of room in the tape for the guts of this. The tape path is obviously blocked, so the tape is not playable in this format. [CommonKingfisher] claims the hack is “reversible” but since he cut a window for the LCD out of the casing of the cassette, that’s going to be pretty hard to undo. On the other hand, the ultrasonic cutter he used did make a very clean cut, and that would help with reversibility.

The fact that the thing is activated by a magnetic sensor makes us worry for the data on that tape, too, whether or not the speaker is a peizo. Ultimately it doesn’t really matter; in no universe was this tape the last surviving copy of “The Matrix”, and it’s a lot more likely this self-playing “tape” gets watched than the VHS was going to be. You can watch it yourself in the demo video embedded below.

VHS nostalgia around here usually involves replicating the tape experience, rather than repurposing the tape. We’re grateful to [George Graves] for the tip. Tips of all sorts are welcome on our friendly neighborhood tips line.

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An image of a light grey graphing calculator with a dark grey screen and key surround. The text on the monochrome LCD screen shows "Input: ENEB Result 1: BEEN Confidence 1: 14% [##] Result 2: Good Confidence 2: 12% [#] Press ENTER key..."

A Neural Net For A Graphing Calculator?

July 17, 2025 by Navarre Bartz 3 Comments

Machine learning and neural nets can be pretty handy, and people continue to push the envelope of what they can do both in high end server farms as well as slower systems. At the extreme end of the spectrum is [ExploratoryStudios]’s Hermes Optimus Neural Net for a TI-84 Plus Silver Edition.

This neural net is setup as an autocorrect system that can take four character inputs and match them to a library of twelve words. That’s not a lot, but we’re talking about a device with 24 kB of RAM, so the little machine is doing its best. Perhaps more interesting than any practical output is the puzzle solving involved in getting this to work within the memory constraints.

The neural net “employs a feedforward neural network with a precisely calibrated 4-60-12 architecture and sigmoid activation functions.” This leads to an approximate 85% accuracy being able to identify and correct the given target words. We appreciate the readout of the net’s confidence as well which is something that seems to have gone out the window with many newer “AI” systems.

We’ve seen another TI-84 neural net for handwriting recognition, but is the current crop of AI still headed in the wrong direction?

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Game Boy? NES? Why Not Both!

June 19, 2025 by Jenny List 4 Comments

If you’re a retro Nintendo fan you can of course carry a NES and a Game Boy around with you, but the former isn’t very portable. Never fear though, because here’s [Chad Burrow], who’s created a neat handheld console that emulates both.

It’s called the Acolyte Handheld, and it sports the slightly unusual choice for these parts of a PIC32 as its main processor. Unexpectedly it can use Sega Genesis controllers, but it has the usual buttons on board for portable use. It can drive either its own LCD or an external VGA monitor, and in a particularly nice touch, it switches between the two seamlessly. The NES emulator is his own work, while Game Boy support comes courtesy of Peanut-GB.

We like the design of the case, and particularly that of the buttons. Could it have been made smaller by forgoing some of the through-hole parts in favour of SMD ones? Quite likely, but though it’s chunky it’s certainly not outsized.

Portable Nintendo-inspired hardware is popular around here, as you can see with this previous handheld NES

Attack Of The Beepy Clones

June 13, 2025 by Arya Voronova 22 Comments

In the Blackberry-keyboard-based project lineage story last week, I covered how a series of open-source projects turned into Beepy, a cool Linux PDA with a lively community. To me, it’s yet another demonstration of power that open-source holds, and more importantly, it shows how even a small pet project of yours could cause big moves in the hardware world, provided you publish it – just ask [JoeN], [WoodWorkeR] and [arturo182].

The journey didn’t end there. For all its benefits, Beepy had some flaws to take care of, some board-killing flaws, even. The 5 V boost regulator was never intended for 4.7 V input it gets when charger is connected, and would occasionally cook itself. A charging current resistor was undersized, leading people to either bodge resistors onto their Beepy boards, or have their battery charge for 30 hours until full. A power path diode was undersized, too, and has burned out on more than a few devices. Also, Beepy’s feature package left things to be desired.

Beepy never made it beyond v1. If I had to guess, partially because of BB Q20 keyboard sourcing troubles, but also definitely some sort of loss of interest. Which is a shame, as the plans v1.5 of the hardware were pretty exciting. In the meantime, other players decided to take up the mantle – here’s a tale of three projects.

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