#hardwarehacks

There’s a sickness in the feeds: plastic tourist cyberdecks. Raspberry Pi bricks with tiny keyboards, bolted into 3D-printed cases, paraded on Instagram like trophies from a war they never fought. They’re not tools. They’re cosplay.

Let’s be clear: a real cockpit doesn’t start with aesthetics. It starts with pain. Problem → solution → function.

No media keys? You build a pause bar.

Net keeps cutting? You wire in a pulse and watch your LEDs blink the truth.

Need signals streaming in real time? You spin up a ticker.

Every fragment is earned. Every organ of the cockpit exists because without it, the pilot bleeds time.

Now look at the tourist decks.

Four-inch LCDs that scorch your eyes.

Chiclet keyboards designed for toddlers, not operators.

Tethered to a smartphone that could do every task better, faster, cleaner. It’s all form before function. Fake nostalgia. A cargo cult of movie props.

And the irony? Those movies — Hackers, The Net, every 90s cyber-thriller — got tech wrong in the first place. Neon GUIs, floppy disks with nuclear payloads, hackers typing like pianists on meth. Pure fantasy. The tourist deck isn’t just pretending to be a tool — it’s pretending to be a prop that pretended to be a tool. A Xerox of a Xerox. Dead on arrival.

Meanwhile, the cockpit grows like coral. Black boxes stitched together over years. Hardware knobs, kill switches, LED ghosts, fragments of code that live on because they work. It looks rough because it is rough. It looks alive because it is alive.

The tourist deck is a selfie. The cockpit is a survival rig. One is a weekend project for clout. The other is a control panel for your life.

Stop building props. Start building cockpits.

Testing Dark Castle with audio on the RP2350 Fruit Jam 🕹️🏰

Jepler spent a bunch of time this week working on getting audio working on the pico-umac port https://github.com/jepler/pico-mac/tree/rp2350-fruitjam to Fruit Jam

. Audio on the hardware we're emulating is pretty straightforward: every scanline of the video generator also pops out one byte of PWM data. We have 370 horizontal lines—352 visible and 18 during the vsync—and a 60.15 Hz refresh rate for 22.255 KHz audio approximately. That data is written to $1FD00 http://www.mac.linux-m68k.org/devel/plushw.php . That data is being piped over I2S to the MAX98357

and to a speaker for now.

So, of course, the first thing we have to try out is Dark Castle

Your desk has stopped being a desk. It’s a cockpit now — a patchwork command deck built from scripts, dongles, and hardware hacks. Forget minimalism. This is maximal utility, welded into style.

The Knob Every cockpit needs a control dial, and nothing beats a physical rotary knob for volume. Twist left and the noise dies. Twist right and the walls shake. It’s tactile, primal, and feels like it belongs on a submarine console. Forget virtual sliders — the knob is king.

The Pause Bar Sitting top-right of the screen is a tiny black strip of buttons: pause, play, stop, next, previous. No title bar, no borders, no fluff. A resurrection of the media keys your 90s keyboard never had. Always visible, always on top, it gives you total control over sound with one click.

The Signal Ticker RSS feeds crawl across your desktop like a pirate radio transmission. News, notes, or fragments of lore — whatever you drop into the list rolls by in real time. It’s half stock ticker, half underground broadcast. A constant reminder that information is the bloodstream of the cockpit... and The Internet.

The LED Truth Dongle Sometimes hardware reveals its secrets by accident. A humble USB media controller flashes its LED when the internet drops. Suddenly, a simple forward/back button becomes a network status monitor. When your cockpit blinks at you, you know the connection is gone before the OS even notices.

The Ghost Net Pulse Software complements hardware with a tiny widget that glows green when the internet is alive and red when it isn’t. Always on top, always visible, it’s the heart monitor of your connection. One glance tells you if the outside world is still there — or if you’ve been cut off.

The Scratchpad Ghost Imagine a frameless text box hovering on your screen. Anything you type into it is instantly saved to a plain .txt file. It’s perfect for fragments of thought, half-formed ideas, or quick notes. Point it at a synced folder and it becomes cloud-ready too. Unlike sticky notes, it’s pure text — editable, searchable, and eternal. Bonus points of you create a local html file which is designed to load and search such files then display keyword matches on a page.

Hardware Additions: The Cockpit Meatspace Rig

The Knob → As mentioned, the physical volume dial. Simple, fast, irreplaceable.

The Dongle → Forward/back media control, with LEDs that double as connection status indicators.

The Big Red NOPE → A hardware killswitch for your cat5/6 cable. One satisfying slap and you’re offline. It looks like a missile silo abort button and feels just as final.

mini Sparkle Motion prototype - a tiny, fully-featured WLED board ✨🔌📏💡🌈

We're doing a lot of serious testing with our WLED mega-board, code-name Sparkle Motion .

While doing some holiday lighting projects, we also wanted something slim enough to slip into any design. It still uses an ESP32 for the best support, with USB-serial programming, 5A fuse, 5V level shifting + 100 ohm series resistors for pixel drivers, user/reset buttons, a user LED and onboard neopixel, JST SH analog/digital connector, QT I2C connector, 4 GPIO plus power/ground breakouts, and USB type C power/data input.

However, this version is made simpler and less expensive by dropping the DC jack and USB PD support: it's only for 5V strips if you want to power them directly (you could still drive 12V or 24V pixels, but you'll need separate power for them). Instead of a full set of terminal blocks for 3 signals, we only have two outputs, and they have to share the power and ground pins. It could also be used for a single two-pin dotstar LED setup. We kept the built-in I2S mic but dropped the on-board IR sensor - if you want an IR sensor, you'll be able to plug it into the JST SH port with a simple cable or solder it into the breakout pads.

Espressif programmer test success! 💻✨🔧

While developing boards, there are oftentimes we want to program ESP chips without going through the onboard USB port; this adapter will help us (and others) do that! It has a CP2102N USB-serial chip

https://www.digikey.com/short/bm7n3p5z

...with RX/TX signal LEDs and two transistors wired up to the DTR/RTS line for the 'esptool standard' reset procedure technique. The output IO, plus a 3.3V 500mA regulated output, is available on a socket header, so you can plug wires in for quick programming and debugging. You can use this for everything from an ESP8266 up to the ESP32-P4! Here, we are testing it with a HUZZAH ESP8266 breakout board

Wooo, this one is for all of our fans of fans.

TARIFF TALK! WITH LADYADA 🌍🚢 - Join Ladyada as she breaks down how recent tariff shifts impact electronic component availability and pricing, reshoring trends, and what may happen to engineering/BOM and DIY project costs. Get the inside scoop on navigating supply chain challenges while keeping your builds affordable and excellent! All this week on ASK AN ENGINEER WEDS 8PM ET on all the socials.