Simon Willison’s Weblog

Game Boy Color on My Conference Badge. I'm at GitHub Universe this week and, similar to last year, the conference badge is a full-blown color screen computer.

I've been hacking around with it again, and then I ran into with Steve Francia... who worked with Gemini to get a full NES emulator working on it, and then went a step further and deployed an emulator for both the Game Boy and the Game Boy Color.

Which means, if you can obtain the ROM, you can run The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening on your conference badge!

A neat feature of the badge is that you can turn it upside down and then use game controller touch buttons that are built into the badge body.

# 27th October 2026, 7:34 pm / games, github, hardware-hacking, ai, generative-ai, llms, gemini, steve-francia

Bop Spotter (via) Riley Walz: "I installed a box high up on a pole somewhere in the Mission of San Francisco. Inside is a crappy Android phone, set to Shazam constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It's solar powered, and the mic is pointed down at the street below."

Some details on how it works from Riley on Twitter:

The phone has a Tasker script running on loop (even if the battery dies, it’ll restart when it boots again)

Script records 10 min of audio in airplane mode, then comes out of airplane mode and connects to nearby free WiFi.

Then uploads the audio file to my server, which splits it into 15 sec chunks that slightly overlap. Passes each to Shazam’s API (not public, but someone reverse engineered it and made a great Python package). Phone only uses 2% of power every hour when it’s not charging!

# 30th September 2024, 7:03 pm / android, hardware-hacking, music

A Turing Machine. Someone finally built a real turing machine—and it’s beautiful. All calculations are carried out on a tape, which has 1s and 0s written on it by a robotic dry-erase marker. Hypnotic.

# 29th March 2010, 2:28 pm / hardware, hardware-hacking, turingmachine

Johnny Chung Lee: Projects Wii. Awe-inspiring hardware hacks built on top of the Wiimote, including a dirt cheap interactive whiteboard and a head tracking system that turns a normal display in to a 3D VR environment.

# 23rd December 2007, 9:23 am / 3d, hardware, hardware-hacking, johnny-chung-lee, make, vr, wii, wiimote

TechShop: Geek Heaven. Like a fitness club for people who make stuff: a ridiculous amount of exciting hardware (including laser etchers, robotic milling machines and a 3D printer) and trainers on hand to show you how to use it all. Sadly it’s in Menlo Park which is a bit of a trek from Brighton.

# 14th September 2007, 9:55 am / hardware, hardware-hacking, menlopark, techshop

Arduino. Open source hardware hacking. It’s way easier than you would think.

# 17th May 2007, 6:30 pm / arduino, hardware, hardware-hacking, open-source

hackdiary: ApacheCon Europe 2007 keynote. Matt Biddulph’s ApacheCon keynote, which is basically about having fun with cheap hardware prototyping and starting to build spimes in both physical and virtual worlds.

# 7th May 2007, 9:33 pm / apachecon, hardware-hacking, matt-biddulph, slidecast, spimes

From Pixels to Plastic. Awesome talk given by Matt Webb at ETech, on the emerging culture of Generation C, cheap hardware prototyping and physical extensions to the online world.

# 30th March 2007, 11:09 am / etech, generationc, hardware, hardware-hacking, matt-webb