Driving A DAC Real Fast With A Microcontroller

Normally, if you want to blast out samples to a DAC in a hurry, you’d rely on an FPGA, what with their penchant for doing things very quicky and in parallel. However, [Anabit] figured out a way to do the same thing with a microcontroller, thanks to the magic of the Raspberry Pi Pico 2.

The design in question is referred to as the PiWave 150 MS/s Bipolar DAC, and as the name suggests, it’s capable of delivering a full 150 million samples per second with 10, 12, or 14 bits of resolution. Achieving that with a microcontroller would normally be pretty difficult. In regular linear operation, it’s hard to clock bits out to GPIO pins at that sort of speed. However, the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 serves as a special case in this regard, thanks to its Programmable I/O (PIO) subsystem. It’s a state machine, able to be programmed to handle certain tasks entirely independently from the microcontroller’s main core itself, and can do simple parallel tasks very quickly. Since it can grab data from RAM and truck it out to a bank of GPIO pins in a single clock cycle, it’s perfect for trucking out data to a DAC in parallel at great speed. The Pi Pico 2’s clock rate tops out at 150 MHz, which delivers the impressive 150 MS/s sample rate.

The explainer video is a great primer on how this commodity microcontroller is set up to perform this feat in detail. If you’re trying for accuracy over speed, we’ve explored solutions for that as well. Video after the break.

youtube.com/embed/UaaveknkjBM?…

hackaday.com/2026/01/21/drivin…

Repair and Reverse-Engineering of Nespresso Vertuo Next Coffee Machines

Well there’s your problem. (Credit: Mark Funeaux, YouTube)
Akin to the razor-and-blades model, capsule-based coffee machines are an endless grind of overpriced pods and cheaply made machines that you’re supposed to throw out and buy a new one of, just so that you don’t waste all the proprietary pods you still have at home. What this also means is a seemingly endless supply of free broken capsule coffee makers that might be repairable. This is roughly how [Mark Furneaux] got into the habit of obtaining various Nespresso VertuoLine machine for attempted repairs.

The VirtuoLine machines feature the capsule with a bar code printed on the bottom of the lip, requiring the capsule to be spun around so that it can be read by the optical reader. Upon successful reading, the code is passed to the MCU after which the brewing process is either commenced or cruelly halted if the code fails. Two of the Vertuo Next machines that [Mark] got had such capsule reading errors, leading to a full teardown of the first after the scanner board turned out to work fine.

Long story short and many hours of scrubbed footage later, one machine was apparently missing the lens assembly on top of the photo diode and IR LED, while the other simply had these lenses gunked up with spilled coffee. Of course, getting to this lens assembly still required a full machine teardown, making cleaning it an arduous task.

Unfortunately the machine that had the missing lens assembly turned out to have another fault which even after hours of debugging remained elusive, but at least there was one working coffee machine afterwards to make a cup of joe to make [Mark] feel slightly better about his life choices. As for why the lens assembly was missing, it’s quite possible that someone else tried to repair the original fault, didn’t find it, and reassembled the machine without the lens before passing the problem on to the next victim.

youtube.com/embed/v424-YxSAbM?…

hackaday.com/2026/01/21/repair…

Російський винищувач знову скинув авіабомбу на Бєлгород

У Бєлгороді знову надзвичайна ситуація: вулицю перекрито, район оточено, мешканців евакуюють.

Трамп заявив, що погодив з НАТО угоду щодо Гренландії. Мита проти країн ЄС скасовуються

США відклали нові тарифи проти ЄС після попередніх домовленостей із НАТО щодо Гренландії та Арктики. Йдеться також про можливе розміщення системи ППО «Золотий купол».

путін відповів на запрошення Трампа увійти до Ради миру.

Він заявив, що готовий направити в Раду $1 млрд із заморожених активів рф.

FLOSS Weekly Episode 861: Big Databases with OpenRiak

This week Jonathan chats with Nicholas Adams about OpenRiak! Why is there a Riak and an OpenRiak, which side of the CAP theorem does OpenRiak land on, and why is it so blazingly fast for some operations? Listen to find out!

• linkedin.com/groups/14551410/
• github.com/openriak/
• join.slack.com/t/postriak/shar…
• files.tiot.jp/riak/
• tiot.jp/riak-docs/
• meetup.com/tokyo-openriak-meet…

youtube.com/embed/SOFBTvvtqLg?…

Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on our YouTube Channel? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or have the guest contact us! Take a look at the schedule here.

play.libsyn.com/embed/episode/…

Direct Download in DRM-free MP3.

If you’d rather read along, here’s the transcript for this week’s episode.

Places to follow the FLOSS Weekly Podcast:

• Spotify
• RSS

Theme music: “Newer Wave” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

hackaday.com/2026/01/21/floss-…

Retrotechtacular: RCA Loses Fight to IBM

If you follow electronics history, few names were as ubiquitous as RCA, the Radio Corporation of America. Yet in modern times, the company is virtually forgotten for making large computers. [Computer History Archive Project] has a rare film from the 1970s (embedded below) explaining how RCA planned to become the number two supplier of business computers, presumably behind behemoth IBM. They had produced other large computers in the 1950s and 1960s, like the BIZMAC, the RCA 510, and the Spectra. But these new machines were their bid to eat away at IBM’s dominance in the field.

RCA had innovative ideas and arguably one of the first demand paging, virtual memory operating systems for mainframes. You can hope they were better at designing computers than they were at making commercials.

The BIZMAC was much earlier and used tubes (public domain).
In 1964, [David Sarnoff] famously said: “The computer will become the hub of a vast network of remote data stations and information banks feeding into the machine at a transmission rate of a billion or more bits of information a second … Eventually, a global communications network handling voice, data and facsimile will instantly link man to machine — or machine to machine — by land, air, underwater, and space circuits. [The computer] will affect man’s ways of thinking, his means of education, his relationship to his physical and social environment, and it will alter his ways of living. … [Before the end of this century, these forces] will coalesce into what unquestionably will become the greatest adventure of the human mind.”

He was, of course, right. Just a little early.
The machines in the video were to replace the Spectra 70 computers, seen here from an RCA brochure.
The machines were somewhat compatible with IBM computers, touted virtual memory, and had flexible options, including a lease that let you own your hardware in six years. They mention, by the way, IBM customers who were paying up to $60,000 / month to IBM. They mentioned that an IBM 360/30 with 65K was about $13,200 / month. You could upgrade with a 360/30 for an extra $3,000 / month, which would double your memory but not double your computing power. (If you watch around the 18-minute mark, you’ll find the computing power was extremely slow by today’s standards.)

RCA, of course, had a better deal. The RCA 2 had double the memory and reportedly triple the performance for only $2,000 extra per month. We don’t know what the basis for that performance number was. For $3,500 a month extra, you could have an RCA 3 with the miracle of virtual memory, providing an apparent 2 megabytes per running job.

There are more comparisons, and keep in mind, these are 1970 dollars. In 1970, a computer programmer probably made $10,000 to $20,000 a year while working on a computer that cost $158,000 in lease payments (not to count electricity and consumables). How much cloud computing could you buy in a year for $158,000 today? Want to buy one? They started at $700,000 up to over $1.6 million.

By their release, the systems were named after their Spectra 70 cousins. So, officially, they were Spectra 70/2, 70/3, 70/5, and 70/6.

Despite all the forward-looking statements, RCA had less than 10% market share and faced increasing costs to stay competitive. They decided to sell the computer business to Sperry. Sperry rebranded several RCA computers and continued to sell and support them, at least for a while.

Now, RCA is a barely remembered blip on the computer landscape. You are more likely to find someone who remembers the RCA 1800 family of CPUs than an actual RCA mainframe. Maybe they should have throw in the cat with the deal.

Want to see the IBM machines these competed with? Here you go. We doubt there were any RCA computers in this data center, but they’d have been right at home.

youtube.com/embed/GygR1Nbrhfc?…

hackaday.com/2026/01/21/retrot…

Fiber Optic Lamp Modified To Be Scarily Bright

[Brainiac75] is a fan of fiber optic lamps, except for one thing—they’re often remarkably dim. Thus, they set out to hack the technology to deliver terrifying amounts of light while still retaining their quirky charm.

Older fiber optic lamps use a dim filament lamp or halogen lamp to light them up. They also often feature a spinning color disk to vary the light patterns, which does have the side effect of absorbing some of the already-limited light output.

When it came to upgrading his own decades-old lamp, [Braniac75] decided to initially stick within the specs of the original halogen lamp. The fixture was rated for 12 volts at 5 watts, with a GU4/GZ4 compatible base, and white light was desired so the color wheel could still do its thing. Swapping out the original 5 W halogen for a 2.5 W LED unit brought a big upgrade in brightness, since the latter is roughly equivalent to a 20 W halogen in light output. Upgrading to a 4.2 W LED pushed things even further, greatly improving the look of the lamp.

The video also explores modding a modern fiber optic lamp, too. It was incredibly cheap, running off batteries and using a single color-changing LED to illuminate the fibers. [Braniac75] decided to try illuminating the plastic fibers with an RGB stage lighting laser rig—namely, the LaserCube Ultra 7.5 W from Wicked Lasers. With this kind of juice, the fiber lamp is eye-searingly bright, quite literally, and difficult to film. However, with the laser output dialed way down, the lamp looks amazing—with rich saturated colors dancing across the fiber bundle as the lasers do their thing.

If you’ve ever wanted to build a fiber lamp that doesn’t look like a cheap gimmick, now you know how. We’ve looked at weird applications for these lamps before, too.

youtube.com/embed/5uoKlGzmDgg?…

hackaday.com/2026/01/21/fiber-…

✨ L'abbraccio nel 2026...

Cos'è un abbraccio?
Affetto, stima, rispetto, un gesto d'amore, di amicizia, un grande dono che regala emozioni!
L'abbraccio non ha età, sesso, appartenenza, tutti lo vogliono, lo cercano o ne hanno bisogno, grandi e piccoli, nonni e bambini, ma in pochi hanno il coraggio di chiederlo e di donarlo! Eppure l' abbraccio è spontaneo, sincero, non si può fingere o farlo su commissione, perché nasce nei cuori di un amore, di un' amicizia, di chi ama, di chi soffre...
L' abbraccio è un dono incondizionato di una madre per il proprio bimbo, al quale dà protezione e amore.
L'abbraccio non ha prezzo, ma può valere molto, può raccogliere e poi raccontare ciò che le parole
non hanno il coraggio di rivelare,
può trasmettere emozioni, amore , passione, speranze, sogni e delusioni! In questi tristi anni, durante la pandemia, gli abbracci si sono persi, così anche i sogni e le speranze...Eppure un abbraccio può farci rinascere, regalare emozioni e sensazioni spesso irripetibili!
E in esso ci si può perdere e ritrovare al tempo stesso, si può soffrire e anche guarire e curare dolori o nostalgia!
L'abbraccio è come il vento, vola, si diffonde, annulla vuoti e distanze,
soffoca rancori, cresce e si moltiplica
vicino ai nostri cuori...

Ed io ci credo alla sua forza,
credo ancora che oggi sia un bene prezioso, in un mondo sempre più virtuale e digitale, dove il contatto, l'emozione, la sensazione e il benessere che sa regalare un abbraccio stanno diventando parte di un passato ormai dimenticato!