Raspberry Pi RP2350 A4 Stepping Addresses E9 Current Leakage Bug

July 31, 2025 by Maya Posch 25 Comments

When Raspberry Pi’s new RP2350 MCU was released in 2024, it had a slight issue in that its GPIO pins would leak a significant amount of current when a pin is configured as input with the input buffer enabled. Known as erratum 9 (E9), it has now been addressed per the July 29 Product Change Note from Raspberry Pi for the A4 stepping along with a host of other hardware and software issues.

Although the PCN is for stepping A4, it covers both steppings A3 and A4, with the hardware fixes in A3 and only software (bootrom) fixes present in A4, as confirmed by the updated RP2350 datasheet. It tells us that A3 was an internal development stepping, ergo we should only be seeing the A4 stepping in the wild alongside the original defective A2 stepping.

When we first reported on the E9 bug it was still quite unclear what this issue was about, but nearly a month later it was officially defined as an input mode current leakage issue due to an internal pull-up that was too weak. This silicon-level issue has now finally been addressed in the A3 and thus new public A4 stepping.

Although we still have to see whether this is the end of the E9 saga, this should at least offer a way forward to those who wish to use the RP2350 MCU, but who were balking at the workarounds required for E9 such as external pull-downs.

A Dual-Screen Cyberdeck To Rule Them All

July 30, 2025 by Jenny List 13 Comments

We like cyberdecks here at Hackaday, and in our time we’ve brought you some pretty amazing builds. But perhaps now we’ve seen the ultimate of the genre, a cyberdeck so perfect in its execution that this will be the machine of choice in the dystopian future, leaving all the others as mere contenders. It comes courtesy of [Sector 07], and it’s a machine to be proud of.

As with many cyberdecks, it uses the Raspberry Pi as its powerhouse. There are a couple of nice touchscreens and a decent keyboard, plus the usual ports and some nice programmable controls. These are none of them out of the ordinary for a cyberdeck, but what really shines with this one is the attention to detail in the mechanical design. Those touchscreens rotate on ball bearings, the hinges are just right, the connections to the Pi have quick release mechanisms, and custom PCBs and ribbon cables make distributing those GPIOs a snap.

On top of all that the aesthetics are on point; this is the machine you want to take into the abandoned mining base with you. Best of all it’s all available from the linked GitHub repository, and you can marvel as we did at the video below the break.

If you hunger for more cyberdecks, this one has some very stiff competition.

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Game Boy Camera In Wedding Photo Booth

July 27, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 11 Comments

For those of a certain age the first digital camera many of us experienced was the Game Boy Camera, an add-on for the original Game Boy console. Although it only took pictures with the limited 4-tone monochrome graphics of this system, its capability of being able to take a picture, edit it, create drawings, and then print them out on the Game Boy Printer was revolutionary for the time. Of course the people who grew up with this hardware are about the age to be getting married now (or well beyond), so [Sebastian] capitalized on the nostalgia for it with this wedding photo booth that takes pictures with the Game Boy Camera.

The photo booth features the eponymous Game Boy Camera front-and-center, with a pair of large buttons to allow the wedding guests to start the photography process. The system takes video and then isolates a few still images from it to be printed with the Game Boy Printer. The original Game Boy hardware, as well as a Flask-based web app with a GUI, is all controlled with a Raspberry Pi 4. There’s also a piece of Game Boy hardware called the GB Interceptor that sits between the Game Boy console and the camera cartridge itself which allows the Pi to capture the video feed directly.

The booth doesn’t stop with Game Boy hardware, though. There’s also a modern mirrorless digital camera set up in the booth alongside the Game Boy Camera which allows for higher resolution, full color images to be taken as well. This is also controlled with the same hardware and provides a more modern photo booth experience next to the nostalgic one provided by the Game Boy. There have been many projects which attempt to modernize this hardware, though, like this build which adds color to the original monochrome photos or this one which adds Wi-Fi capability.

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A hand with dark skin holds a black device. The bottom is a small keyboard and touchpad. The upper half is split with a square LCD on the left and a square, pink notepad on the right. A sketch of a woman wearing a puffy jacket is on the notepad and an illustration of a woman looking through an old timey film video camera is on the screen on the left.

KeyMo Brings A Pencil To The Cyberdeck Fight

July 24, 2025 by Navarre Bartz 2 Comments

Computers and cellphones can do so many things, but sometimes if you want to doodle or take a note, pencil and paper is the superior technology. You could carry a device and a pocket notebook, or you could combine the best of analog and digital with the KeyMo.

[NuMellow] wanted a touchpad in addition to a keyboard for his portable terminal since he felt Raspbian wouldn’t be so awesome on a tiny touchscreen. With a wider device than something like Beepy, and a small 4″ LCD already on hand, he realized he had some space to put something else up top. Et voila, a cyberdeck with a small notebook for handwritten/hand drawn information.

The device lives in a 3D printed case, which made some iterations on the keyboard placement simpler, and [NuMellow] even provided us with actual run time estimates in the write-up, which is something we often are left wondering about in cyberdeck builds. If you’re curious, he got up to 7.5 hours on YouTube videos with the brightness down or 3.5 hours with it at maximum. The exposed screen and top-heaviness of the device are areas he’s pinpointed as the primary cons of the system currently. We hope to see an updated version in the future that addresses these.

If you’d like to check out some other rad cyberdecks, how about a schmancy handheld, one driven by punch cards in a child’s toy, or this one with a handle and a giant scroll wheel?

Engine Data Displayed Live On Dash

July 20, 2025 by Lewin Day 12 Comments

In the auto world, there are lots of overarching standards that all automakers comply with. There are also lots of proprietary technologies that each automaker creates and uses for its own benefit. [Shehriyar Qureshi] has recently been diving into Suzuki’s Serial Data Line standard, and has created a digital dash using the data gained.

The project started with Python-based scanner code designed to decode Suzuki’s SDL protocol. Armed with the ability to read the protocol, [Shehriyar] wanted to be able to do so without having to haul a laptop around in the car. Thus, the project was ported to Rust, or “oxidized” if you will.

More after the break…

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Unlocking The Potential Of A No-Name Handheld Game

July 18, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 9 Comments

The rise of inexpensive yet relatively powerful electronics has enabled a huge array of computing options that would have been unheard of even two decades ago. A handheld gaming PC with hours of battery life, for example, would have been impossible or extremely expensive until recently. But this revolution has also enabled a swath of inexpensive but low-quality knockoff consoles, often running unlicensed games, that might not even reach the low bar of quality set by their sellers. [Jorisclayton] was able to modify one of these to live up to its original promises.

This Ultimate Brick Game, as it is called, originally didn’t even boast the number of games, unlicensed or otherwise, that it claimed to. [Jorisclayton] removed almost all of the internals from this small handheld to help it live up to this original claim. It boasts a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W now as well as a TFT screen and has a number of other improvements including Bluetooth support for external controllers and upgraded audio. A second console was used for donor parts, and some case mods were made as well to accommodate a few extra buttons missing on the original console.

Right now the project is in a prototype phase, as [Jorisclayton] is hoping to use the donor case to build a more refined version of this handheld console in the future. Until then, this first edition upgrade of the original console can run RetroPie, which means it can run most games up through the Nintendo 64 era. RetroPie enables a ton of emulation for old video games including arcade games of the past. This small arcade cabinet uses that software to bring back a bit of nostalgia for the arcade era.

Quasi-Quantifying Qubits For 100 Quid

July 14, 2025 by Adam Zeloof 3 Comments

As part of his multi-year project to build a quantum computer, hacakday.io poster [skywo1f] has shared with us his most recent accomplishment — a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrometer, which he built for less than $100.

The NMR spectrometer is designed to disturb protons, which naturally line up according to the Earth’s magnetic field, using an electric coil. Once disturbed, the protons nutate (a fancy physics word for wobble), and flip quantum spin states. [skywo1f]’s NMR device can detect these spin state changes, as he demonstrates with a series of control experiments designed to eliminate sources of false positives (which can be annoyingly prevalent in experimental physics). His newest experimental device includes a number of improvements over previous iterations, including proper shielding, quieter power topology, and better coil winding in the core of the device. Everything was assembled with cost in mind, while remaining sensitive enough to conduct experiments — the whole thing is even driven by a Raspberry Pi Pico.

Here at Hackaday, we love to see experiments that should be happening in million-dollar laboratories chugging along on kitchen tables, like this magnetohydrodynamic drive system or some good old-fashioned PCB etching. [skywo1f] doesn’t seem to be running any quantum calculations yet, but the NMR device is an important building block in one flavor of quantum computer, so we’re excited to see where he takes his work next.