Command And Conquer Ported To The Pi Pico 2

April 6, 2025 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

A couple of months back, Electronic Arts did something uncharacteristically benevolent and released several of the old Command and Conquer games under the GPLv3. Logically, we knew that opened the doors up to the games being ported to new operating systems and architectures, but we admit that it was still a little surprising to see Command and Conquer: Red Alert running on the Raspberry Pi Pico 2.

[Charlie Birks] documented the process of getting the 1996 game up and running on the microcontroller in a series of Mastodon posts spanning a few days in March. Seeing the incremental progress made each day makes for interesting reading, as he moves from the game just barely starting up to being able to complete missions and eventually even get multiplayer going between two Picos.

As [Charlie] clarifies, he’s technically using the Pimoroni Pico Plus 2 W, which takes the RP2350B from the official Pico 2, adds 8 MB of PSRAM, and bumps the onboard flash to 16 MB. The upgraded specs and an SD card are required to get the game running, as content that would have originally been held in RAM on the computer must instead be pulled from flash.

For an even more streamlined experience, he eventually slaps the Pico Plus 2 W into the Pimoroni Pico VGA Demo Base — which provided not only an integrated SD card slot, but (as the name implies) VGA output.

It’s still early days, but [Charlie] has been pushing all of his code changes into his fork of Red Alert on GitHub for anyone who wants to play along at home. If you get his fork compiled and running on your own Pico, we’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Reverse Engineering The IBM PC110, One PCB At A Time

April 6, 2025 by Tom Nardi 7 Comments

There’s a dedicated group of users out there that aren’t ready to let their beloved IBM PC110 go to that Great Big Data Center in the Sky. Unfortunately, between the limited available technical information and rarity of replacement parts, repairing the diminutive palmtops can be tricky.

Which is why [Ahmad Byagowi] has started a project that aims to not only collect all the available schematics and datasheets that pertain to the machine, but to reverse engineer all of the computer’s original circuit boards. Working from optical and x-ray scans, the project has already recreated the motherboard, power supply, modem, keyboard, and RAM module PCBs in KiCad.

Just last week the project released production-ready Gerbers for all the boards, but considering there have been 45+ commits to the repository since then, we’re going to assume they weren’t quite finalized. Of course, with a project of this magnitude, you’d expect it to take a few revisions to get everything right. (Hell, we’ve managed to screw up board layouts that had fewer than a dozen components on them.)

If you’d like to lend a hand, [Ahmad] says he could use the help. Beyond checking the boards for problems and reporting issues, he’s also on the hunt for any datasheets or other documentation that can be found for the PC110 or its components. It looks like there’s still schematic work that needs to be done as well, so if your idea of zen is figuring out how ~30 year old computers were wired up internally, this might be the perfect summer project for you.

Interestingly, our very own [Arya Voronova] has been working on creating a drop-in replacement motherboard for the Sony Vaio P using KiCad and imported board images. That hobbyists are now able to do this kind of work using free and open source tools is a reminder of just how far things have come in the last few years.

Thanks to [adistuder] for the tip.

A Very Trippy Look At Microsoft’s Beginnings

April 3, 2025 by Tom Nardi 38 Comments

It’s not often you’ll see us singing the praises of Microsoft on these pages, but credit where credit is due, this first-person account of how the software giant got its foot in the proverbial door by Bill Gates himself is pretty slick.

Now it’s not the story that has us excited, mind you. It’s the website itself. As you scroll down the page, the text and images morph around in a very pleasing and retro-inspired way. Running your cursor over the text makes it flip through random ASCII characters, reminding us a bit of the “decryption” effect from Sneakers. Even the static images have dithering applied to them as if they’re being rendered on some ancient piece of hardware. We don’t know who’s doing Billy’s web design, but we’d love to have them come refresh our Retro Edition.

Continue reading “A Very Trippy Look At Microsoft’s Beginnings” →

Handheld 18650 Analyzer Scopes Out Salvaged Cells

April 3, 2025 by Tom Nardi 10 Comments

You can salvage lithium 18650 cells from all sorts of modern gadgets, from disposable vapes to cordless power tools. The tricky part, other than physically liberating them from whatever they are installed in, is figuring out if they’re worth keeping or not. Just because an 18650 cell takes a charge doesn’t necessarily mean it’s any good — it could have vastly reduced capacity, or fail under heavy load.

If you’re going to take salvaging these cells seriously, you should really invest in a charger that is capable of running some capacity tests against the cell. Or if you’re a bit more adventurous, you can build this “Battery Health Monitor” designed by [DIY GUY Chris]. Although the fact that it can only accept a single cell at a time is certainly a limitation if you’ve got a lot of batteries to go though, the fact that it’s portable and only needs a USB-C connection for power means you can take it with you on your salvaging adventures.

The key to this project is a pair of chips from Texas Instruments. The BQ27441 is a “Fuel Gauge” IC, and is able to determine an 18650’s current capacity, which can be compared to the cell’s original design capacity to come up with an estimate of its overall health. The other chip, the BQ24075, keeps an eye on all the charging parameters to make sure the cell is being topped up safely and efficiently.

With these two purpose-built chips doing a lot of the heavy lifting, it only takes a relatively simple microcontroller to tie them together and provide user feedback. In this case [DIY GUY Chris] has gone with the ATmega328P, with a pair of addressable WS2812B LED bars to show the battery’s health and charge levels. As an added bonus, if you plug the device into your computer, it will output charging statistics over the serial port.

The whole project is released under the MIT license, and everything from the STL files for the 3D printed enclosure to the MCU’s Arduino-flavored firmware is provided. If you’re looking to build one yourself, you can either follow along with the step-by-step assembly instructions, or watch the build video below. Or really treat yourself and do both — you deserve it.

If your battery salvaging operation is too large for a single-cell tester, perhaps it’s time to upgrade to this 40-slot wall mounted unit.

Continue reading “Handheld 18650 Analyzer Scopes Out Salvaged Cells” →

Programmer’s Macro Pad Bangs Out Whole Functions

April 2, 2025 by Tom Nardi 24 Comments

Macro pads are handy for opening up your favorite programs or executing commonly used keyboard shortcuts. But why stop there?

That’s what [Jeroen Brinkman] must have been thinking while creating the Programmer’s Macro Pad. Based on the Arduino Pro Micro, this hand-wired pad is unique in that a single press of any of its 16 keys can virtually “type” out multiple lines of text. In this case, it’s a capability that’s being used to prevent the user from having to manually enter in commonly used functions, declarations, and conditional statements.

For example, in the current firmware, pressing the “func” key will type out a boilerplate C function:

int () { //
;
return 0;
}; // f

It will also enter in the appropriate commands to put the cursor where it needs to be so you can actually enter in the function name. The other keys such as “array” and “if” work the same way, saving the user from having to enter (and potentially, even remember) the correct syntax.

The firmware is kept as simple as possible, meaning that the functionality of each key is currently hardcoded. Some kind of tool that would let you add or change macros without having to manually edit the source code and flash it back to the Arduino would be nice…but hey, it is a Programmers Macro Pad, after all.

Looking to speed up your own day-to-day computer usage? We’ve covered a lot of macro pads over the years, we’re confident at least a few of them should catch your eye.

The Lowly Wall Wart Laid Bare

April 2, 2025 by Tom Nardi 18 Comments

Getting a look at the internals of a garden variety “wall wart” isn’t the sort of thing that’s likely to excite the average Hackaday reader. You’ve probably cracked one open yourself, and even if you haven’t, you’ve likely got a pretty good idea of what’s inside that sealed up brick of plastic. But sometimes a teardown can be just as much about the journey as it is the end result.

Truth be told, we’re not 100% sure if this teardown from [Brian Dipert] over at EDN was meant as an April Fool’s joke or not. Certainly it was posted on the right day, but the style is close enough to some of his previous work that it’s hard to say. In any event, he’s created a visual feast — never in history has an AC/DC adapter been photographed so completely and tastefully.

[Brian] even goes so far as to include images of the 2.5 lb sledgehammer and paint scraper that he uses to brutally break open the ultrasonic-welded enclosure. The dichotomy between the thoughtful imagery and the savage way [Brian] breaks the device open only adds to the surreal nature of the piece. Truly, the whole thing seems like it should be part of some avant garde installation in SoHo.

After he’s presented more than 20 images of the exterior of the broken wall wart, [Brian] finally gets to looking at the internals. There’s really not much to look at, there’s a few circuit diagrams and an explanation of the theory behind these unregulated power supplies, and then the write-up comes to a close as abruptly as it started.

So does it raise the simple teardown to an art form? We’re not sure, but we know that we’ll never look at a power adapter in quite the same way again.

A Toothbrush Hacked, In Three Parts

April 2, 2025 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

It’s official, we’re living in the future. Certainly that’s the only explanation for how [wrongbaud] was able to write a three-part series of posts on hacking a cheap electric toothbrush off of AliExpress.

As you might have guessed, this isn’t exactly a hack out of necessity. With a flair for explaining hardware hacking, [wrongbaud] has put this together as a practical “brush-up” (get it?) on the tools and concepts involved in reverse engineering. In this case, the Raspberry Pi is used as a sort of hardware hacking multi-tool, which should make it relatively easy to follow along.

Modified image data on the SPI flash chip.

The first post in the series goes over getting the Pi up and running, which includes setting up OpenOCD. From there, [wrongbaud] actually cracks the toothbrush open and starts identifying interesting components, which pretty quickly leads to the discovery of a debug serial port. The next step is harassing the SPI flash chip on the board to extract its contents. As the toothbrush has a high-res color display (of course it does), it turns out this chip holds the images which indicate the various modes of operation. He’s eventually able to determine how the images are stored, inject new graphics data, and write it back to the chip.

Being able to display the Wrencher logo on our toothbrush would already be a win in our book, but [wrongbaud] isn’t done yet. For the last series in the post, he shows how to extract the actual firmware from the microcontroller using OpenOCD. This includes how to analyze the image, modify it, and eventually flash the new version back to the hardware — using that debug port discovered earlier to confirm the patched code is running as expected.

If you like his work with a toothbrush, you’ll love seeing what [wrongbaud] can do with an SSD or even an Xbox controller.