TechyMagThings

We’ve been following Canadian startup Edison Motors for some time now, but their latest offering caught us a bit off guard– their BDE-sieries truck will be offered first without the electric hybrid drive that first peaked our interest. They make a good case for why in the video embedded below, in which the production prototype tows around a junked Nikola semi as a sort of momento mori of what Edison does not want to end up as.

Now, make no mistake: Edison Motors is going to be selling the series-hybrid version of these big rigs eventually. That truck will have a Scania diesel rated at 500kW driving electric motors rated at a combined 1800 kW peak power– that’s 2400 ponies. Along with the diesel generator, those ponies will be driven by a big o’le battery– but none of that is in the truck in the video. It’s the same cab, and the same frame, but in order to get some revenue in while jumping regulatory hurdles and working the kinks out of the hybrid drive, they put a conventional Cummins diesel and 16-speed transmission in the “Big D” as the truck is known.

The business case makes sense: they don’t want to have their single new product hit a snag, possibly require a recall, and fall into bankruptcy the way the electric truck company Nikola did. The conventional drivetrain also lets them prove their engineering prowess to companies that might like the idea of a Made-in-Canada truck, but be nervous about new technology from a new company.

If you want to know more about the whole diesel-electric scheme, we covered that last year. Edison also has plans to offer its hybrid drive technology for smaller trucks in kit form, which is perhaps the most exciting part from a hacker perceptive.

Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip!

Perfection is an inherently subjective measure, in that one must choose the criteria against which to measure. A perfect circle is an absolutely rubbish octagon, for example. So when you see that [RetroBuiltGames] declares that he has built “the perfect multi-input display for retro gaming and vintage computing” — dubbed the “PixelVision AV1000 MKII”— keep in mind that he means the perfect display for his use case. That’s who he’s building it for, after all! The degree to which you find his product perfect is going to depend by-and-large how similar his use case is to yours. In that sense detailed explanations in the design/build video embedded below may be more valuable than the STEP files and PCBs in the GitHub link above– that way if your use case isn’t identical, you can perhaps learn something on the journey to build your own perfect monitor.

For [RetroBuiltGames] the aesthetic was obviously a big part of it– he’s inspired by the Amiga 1000’s monitor, and a tiny tilting Sony CRT TV.  He was obviously looking for many inputs, as given by the title, and he has an unusually high interest in pixel density for a retro enthusiast. Hence a 9.7″ 2K iPad display forms the basis of the project. The multi-input aspect is provided by a retrotink clone whose PCB lives in a bulge on the back of the unit that could easily house an SBC if you wanted an all-in-one emulation station– it already has a couple of decent speakers mounted in the sides.

Another big piece of the puzzle we don’t see enough of in such projects is Design For Manufacturing– the manufacturing method of choice being FDM 3D printing. The whole assembly was designed in chunks that can be easily printed  with the most visible surface flat on the bed – and if assembly proved difficult, than the parts were redesigned. His explanations aren’t a full DFM course by any means, but it’s good to see these things considered. If you need more detail on that front, we’ve featured plenty of such guides before.

We’re particularly taken by the conceit of creating his own packaging for the unit, and going to the effort of filming an unboxing video for a product he made himself. It’s just a bit of silly fun. We’ve seen boxes before, but generally speaking that sort of thing is saved for when a project becomes a product.

OLED displays solve many of the problems suffered by LC displays, including color fidelity, dynamic range and power usage. That said, especially in the early days OLED gained a reputation for dim screens, short lifespans and burn-in. Over time better organic dyes were developed, along with burn-in prevention methods that have made OLEDs much closer to LCDs in terms of longevity. In a recent comparison between OLED TVs by RTings it’s however clear that between 2017 and 2023 there haven’t been any major advances beyond bumps in brightness.

The relatively dim screens were a major problem, as they prevented OLEDs from displaying HDR content. This issue has been well and truly addressed, as confirmed by RTings’ testing, but after an over 10,000 hours stress test that simulates about 10 years of regular use at maximum SDR brightness, especially static elements like the CNN TV banner happily burned in even on the newest models with all burn-in prevention measures enabled.

Here the biggest take-away is probably that even if the expected panel lifespan at full brightness is still the same, this higher brightness budget means that you can gain some lifespan by cranking the brightness way down. It’s also essential to keep features like pixel refresh cycles enabled, as demonstrated by [Hardware Unboxed] and their abuse of a QD-OLED monitor where a worst-case 6,000 hour stress-test managed to create some impressive levels of burn-in from uneven subpixel wear.

Aside from global access to cat videos, the presence of thousands of Starlink broadband internet access satellites in LEO has a very pleasant side effect for atmospheric researchers. Starlink publicly publishes near-real-time ephemeris data on its individual satellites. From this data you can deduce many details about the atmosphere at that altitude, including its density at specific altitudes at specific times, information which otherwise would be very hard to gather. Recently, this allowed [Mamoru Yamamoto] to determine the density of the thermosphere using tomography.

In a similar 2025 paper by [Zhuoliang Ou] et al. as published in Remote Sensing, this same data source was used to investigate details of the thermosphere. With Starlink publishing this data since 2021, this provides an invaluable dataset for studying this outermost part of the atmosphere.

Commencing just before the generally recognized transition into ‘space’ at 100 km altitude and below the Earth’s exosphere, the thermosphere‘s thickness fluctuates due to factors like solar irradiation and, with it, the exact altitude at which the exosphere begins. Generally, though, it is well above 600 km altitude. This places Starlink satellites as well as both active space stations (ISS and Tiangong) in the thermosphere.

[Zuholiang Ou] et al. established that the Starlink data matches well with that from a dedicated research satellite like SWARM-B, thus making it a useful source of scientific data.

The innovation in [Yamamoto-san]’s paper is that instead of using the typical two-line element (TLE) set, a more comprehensive tomographic approach was used, which essentially uses more data for a larger reconstruction, with the resolution claimed to be about on par with that of the SWARM satellites. This implies that although these Starlink satellites were never designed to be more than data relays, they may have accidentally become the biggest development in thermospheric research in a long time.

Of course, you can’t please everyone.

We’ve heard of wave overhangs before. It is a new technique for printing horizontal overhangs with no supports. Building on some other techniques like arc overhangs. The idea is to teach the slicer not to try to draw overhangs in the middle of free space. Instead, when the slicer realizes there is a horizontal overhang, it tries to “grow” the overhang from the main part. You can see an overview in the video below.

For example, imagine printing a letter ‘T’ vertically. The stem of the T is no problem, but when you try to print the arms it will normally need support. But if you could just print the arms starting at the stem with slight overlapping, the arms could grow as they hang onto either the stem or the last overhang line.

That makes sense, but it only works for very simple cases. Arc overhangs can fill more complex cases, but suffer from little dimples at the center of each arc. The realization for wave overhangs is to replace the arcs with waves as you would see in a pond. The waves diffract around holes and corners.

Perfect? Not quite. They are still experimenting with settings, but there seems to be some increase in warping. If you want to experiment, you can download a fork of Orca and contribute your results to the community.

We looked at this technique earlier, but we haven’t seen much about it in practice yet. Let us know in the comments if you’ve tried it and how it worked for you. There are more details in the paper on the subject, or you can jump right to the software.

Usually, the name ‘Famicom’ and the associated Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) don’t exactly bring to mind downloadable content and online services. However, at least in Japan, a modem add-on for the Famicom offered those features. Released in 1988, the Family Computer Network System (FCNS) offered all that using its modem to dial into Nintendo’s servers. Recently, [Throaty Mumbo] got his mitts on one of these units to try and see what you can still do with it in 2026.

Although only mildly successful in the Japanese market, Nintendo still sold 130,000 of these modem add-ons, with tens of thousands of users for the stock brokering, banking, and Super Mario Club services offered. The experiences with the FCNS would form the foundation for Nintendo’s Satellaview for the Super Famicom and from there into today’s Nintendo Online offerings.

Of course, the main challenge with reviving the FCNS in 2026 is that the remote servers were turned off decades ago, along with the minor detail that to do anything with it you need to insert a special card. This was missing in the used version that [Throaty Mumbo] bought, but fortunately he got a workable Super Mario Club card. The next struggle? He doesn’t speak Japanese, so it took a while to eke out the details.

With a phone line simulator, it’s at least possible to try to have the FCNS try to dial, but that only throws another error. Ultimately it turned out that the FCNS uses NTT’s proprietary DDX-TP (in Japanese) protocol, which isn’t really documented outside of some Japanese sources. This is where the NES Dev site and its forum thread full of FCNS enthusiasts proved essential, as they had already done all the reverse-engineering.

NES Dev user [Ben Boldt], for example, made a DIY version of the FCNS access (tsuushin) card that lets you configure its details. For development, the PLCC-based CPLD was a bit of an annoyance, so the FCNS got somewhat modified along the way for more direct access.

After five months of work, he was finally able to connect the Famicom via the FCNS and a telephone line simulator for some Super Mario Club action. This connects to the SMC Server simulator on the PC, with the detailed manual that comes with the access card helping a lot.

After all this, the Super Mario Brothers game was graced with a game patch that allows for network-based SMB two-player action. This adds a ‘dial’ and ‘answer’ option so that the two Famicoms can connect and commence the two-player session. Although one can question the latency this would entail without a direct POTS connection as here, it is definitely a nifty demonstration of what ultimately would become the multiplayer gaming on Nintendo consoles today.

You can still do Famicom programming. There were even clones.

We’re no strangers to unusual hardware failures around these parts, but even so, a swarm of jellyfish clogging up the works is a new one to us. That’s exactly what happened to the cooling system at the Gravelines nuclear power plant in France earlier this week, resulting in three reactors having to be shut down. This isn’t even an isolated incident, as POLITICO points out that the same thing actually happened last year around this same time.

So why are jellyfish staging an annual protest against nuclear power? A warming of the North Sea has extended breeding seasons and produced larger populations of the plankton that the jellyfish feed on. This is great for the gelatinous sea creatures, but not exactly ideal if you’re trying to pump the water they live in through a complex cooling system. The French installed filter screens and monitoring systems after this happened in 2025, but clearly they’re going to need to keep working on the problem.

From a new problem to a very old one, a BBC investigation has revealed that the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) Blood and Transplant department was inadvertently leaking private patient data by sending it in the clear over the pager network. Sniffing pager messages was fairly trivial decades ago, and is even easier these days thanks to the proliferation of cheap software-defined radios and open source decoding software. Given the fragility of the underlying communication network they use, the NHS announced they were going to stop using pagers by 2021, but clearly not everyone got the memo.

As an aside, we were amused to see that the BBC had to devote a section of the article to explaining what a pager is and why they became popular in the medical field. Of course, it makes perfect sense. Many — perhaps even most — of the people reading the article would never have seen one of the devices in the real world, let alone actually used one. Just a sign of the times, and a great reminder of how old some of us are getting.

Speaking of getting old technology, we came across this web-based emulator for the Flight Data Subsystem used by the Voyager spacecraft. The website lets you write your own assembly code or load up some example programs and watch it execute at a blistering 806.4 kHz. The site also features a real-time display of how far Voyager 1 is from Earth, the current communications delay, and a trove of original Jet Propulsion Laboratory documentation, so even if you’re not interested in writing assembly code for a 1970s computer, it’s worth checking out.

On the subject of running old code in the modern web, you can now play DONKEY.BAS in the browser. The game, now 45 years old, was written by Bill Gates and Neil Konzen to demonstrate the graphics and sound capabilities of BASIC on DOS. For the uninitiated, despite what you might think from the name, the game actually tasks the player with controlling a race car. The donkeys are standing in the road for some reason, and you need to avoid them by switching lanes. With the way the industry is now, we wouldn’t be surprised to hear somebody is working on a gritty origin story film to expand the lore.

Finally, turning our attention to slightly more recent history, [Marcin Wichary] has written a fascinating retrospective on Apple’s Touch Bar. The thin touch screen was introduced in 2016 as a replacement for the top row of the keyboard on the MacBook Pro, and was the subject of some impressive reverse engineering efforts by hackers that wanted to use the unique high-resolution display in their own projects. Apple quietly abandoned the feature in 2023, and [Marcin] makes the case that the problem was never the hardware itself but rather how the feature was implemented in software.

The article includes numerous examples of the redundant and at times downright bizarre user interface elements that would pop up on the Touch Bar, made all the more perplexing given Apple’s usual panache for such things. Although we’re not necessarily convinced the feature ever made a whole lot of sense, given the examples [Marcin] has collected here, it certainly seems like the poorly implemented software side of the equation wasn’t doing it any favors.

See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line; we’d love to hear about it.