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Unveiling The Grid: PCBs made in America, twice as fast as Shenzhen
CircuitHub unveils The Grid, the factory-scale robot in Massachusetts it has run for five years: levitating movers carry each board between paste, placement, reflow and inspection machines, scheduled by learned models and agents, so high-mix PCB assembly needs no changeovers. An example motor-controller order arrives in 4 days for $630 versus 9 days from Shenzhen.
3 min · 639 words
Keyless Entry: Hacking SwitchBot Smart Locks
Neodyme's security team reverse-engineered the SwitchBot Lock Pro and found several vulnerabilities, the worst a misuse of AES-CTR in its Bluetooth protocol that lets anyone nearby silently unlock the door in a software-only attack. The write-up walks through the firmware analysis, the attacks, disclosure, and the fixed firmware and app versions.
10 min · 2,293 words
SIMD-accelerated computer vision on a $2 microcontroller
shranav describes writing a FAST corner feature detector for the ESP32-S3 using its little-known 128-bit SIMD instructions, working around misaligned reads and signed-only saturating arithmetic, and roughly doubling throughput to about 11.2 megapixels per second, around 6ms per QVGA frame.
4 min · 994 words
A build log for the slurptop, a home-built cyberpunk luggable computer using a Ryzen 7 mini PC, a custom 82-key mechanical keyboard, an integrated trackball and a UPS that runs on swappable 24V Kobalt power tool batteries, covering design, power delivery, bill of materials, filaments and battery life.
10 min · 2,252 words
Zero-Shot to New Robots: Introducing Dream-1
Dream Labs comes out of stealth with $90M in seed funding and releases Dream-1, a World Action Model offered through a public API that controls bimanual parallel-gripper robots it was never trained on, zero-shot, from $3/hour, with fine-tuning-as-a-service for robots further from its training data and a candid look at its limits.
15 min · 3,417 words
Ben Hardill describes his Lenovo X1 Carbon developing crashing tabs and BTRFS checksum errors, confirming faulty soldered RAM with memtest86+, and working around the bad addresses with the Linux memmap kernel parameter instead of replacing a module, arguing soldered RAM is especially painful amid today's shortage-driven memory prices.
5 min · 1,068 words
Memory is slow, Disk is fast - Part 3
Jared Hulbert benchmarks an on-disk sorted-set structure (DiskArray on 8 NVMe drives, 264 MiB RAM) against an in-RAM AVL tree at 2 billion keys and finds the disk-based design faster at search, rank, insert and delete, arguing Big O misleads and that memory must be treated like a parallel, pipelined block device.
19 min · 4,345 words
Neural chip decodes interactions between brain regions
EPFL researchers led by Mahsa Shoaran built LogSync, a low-power implantable neural chip that measures synchrony across brain regions and classifies cognitive and emotional states in real time, a step toward closed-loop deep brain stimulation for psychiatric illness. Distributed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
4 min · 837 words
Recreate the Apollo Guidance Computer
Raspberry Pi Official Magazine profiles avionics engineer Michael Newton's open source Recreate Apollo project, a 1:1 3D-printed Apollo DSKY replica driven by a Raspberry Pi running the Virtual AGC emulator with the Apollo 13 Command Module software.
6 min · 1,372 words
Reverse engineering a Beyblade launch tracker
Simone Marzulli describes getting hooked on Beyblade X, then reverse engineering the Beybattle Pass launch tracker: sniffing its Bluetooth traffic, decoding the payloads that record each launch's RPM, and building DiZZi 0.2, an AI companion app inspired by the anime with a spinning 3D bey and voice callouts.
17 min · 3,852 words
Novastart: laptops and smart whiteboards that ship with an infinite-canvas OS
Novastart OS is The Infinite Canvas Whiteboard OS, an infinite canvas for apps, shared canvases, and AI agents, with a free plan. Novastart also sells six computers with it pre-installed: 14", 15", and 17" laptops from $350 and 75", 90", and 100" smart whiteboards from $1,200, with a minimum order of 1 unit.
2 min · 386 wordsagent-assisted
John Gruber's week-long review of Apple's folding iPhone Duo: how the cover and inner screens, thickness, weight, hardware buttons and software feel in daily use, and why it feels like an extraordinarily polished prototype rather than a finished product.
38 min · 8,767 words
Superhuman Hardware Design Is The Easy Part
a16z partner Christian Keil argues frontier AI models will soon become superhuman at hardware design, but that the lossy interface between digital designs and physical atoms means building, testing, measuring and iterating real hardware will lag, shifting the frontier to manufacturing, procurement, data capture and process knowledge held by technicians.
12 min · 2,770 words
cakehonolulu digs into why older Samsung TVs can't mute their built-in speakers while using Q-Symphony with a Q990D soundbar, walks through the configuration issues and the TV's service menu, and finds a workaround by setting the service menu's Max Volume to 0, which mutes the TV speakers while Q-Symphony keeps working.
9 min · 2,037 words
Putting Linux on my RTX Spark laptop because I don't have a Microsoft account
Josephine Pfeiffer gets Arch Linux ARM running on the Windows-only ASUS ProArt P16 with NVIDIA's N1X chip, publishing a bootable installer and patches, comparing CPU performance against Windows in 7-Zip, explaining the 116 GiB unified memory split, and benchmarking local Qwen inference.
6 min · 1,453 words
Inside the Intel 8087 chip: floating-point addition and subtraction
Ken Shirriff reverse-engineers the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor's microcode and circuitry to explain exactly how it performs addition and subtraction, including exponent alignment, normalization, rounding and the many special cases for infinities, denormals, unnormals and pseudo-zeros.
25 min · 5,808 words
Classic 68000 Macintosh programs from the 1980s and '90s reverse-engineered and rebuilt for modern macOS, with notes on how AI-assisted reverse engineering made the ports practical.
2 min · 380 words
One Parser, Two Bugs, Many Routers: Exploiting Broadcom WiFi Across eCos and Linux
Long-form version of Quentin Kaiser's Hexacon 2026 talk: a WPS EAP reassembly overflow in Broadcom's proprietary 802.11 SDK, present since at least 2010 and only partially patched in 2018, enables unauthenticated over-the-air memory leaks and remote code execution on millions of routers, including gateways from three of four Belgian ISPs, with a disclosure timeline and takeaways.
5 min · 1,108 words
ThinkPad I9990303 Error Catch-22
Michal Necasek of the OS/2 Museum digs into why a circa-1994 IBM ThinkPad 750C refuses to boot or enter BIOS setup with error I9990303, traces it to corrupted BIOS flash contents, and shows how the very error blocks reflashing until a hacked UPDTFLSH.EXE bypasses the check and fixes it.
5 min · 1,257 words
I designed a nose guard for my dog and gave it away. Now 500 dogs wear one
Omri Hillel recounts designing a nose guard for his pitbull Billie after a sunburn scare, open-sourcing the pattern, and watching SnoutCover grow to about 500 dogs in a year—with lessons on giving product away and iterating with owners.
11 min · 2,493 words