From the Adafruit Learning System Archives: Larson Scanner Shades (Trinket-Powered NeoPixel LED Strip Glasses)

Use this guide to make a simple cyberpunk/Tronpunk fashion project!

The Larson scanner is named after Glen Larson, producer of Knight Rider and the original Battlestar Galactica television series, both of which prominently featured the effect as the “eyes” of KITT, his nemesis KARR, and the Cylon Centurions.

Larson scanners were traditionally red (or yellow in KARR’s case), but thanks to the magic of NeoPixels you can change the software to use any colors you like.

This is a soldering project, albeit a small one. You will need the common soldering paraphernalia of a soldering iron, solder, wire (20 to 26 gauge, either stranded or solid) and tools for cutting and stripping wire.

You’ll need some method of securing the electronics inside the glasses. Hot-melt glue (with a glue gun) works well for this. Watch your fingers! Packing tape could also be used.

Check out the full guide in the Adafruit Learn system!

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The History of ThinkPad

 

J.D. Hodges runs through the history of the ThinkPad. At one point, the ThinkPad was ubiquitous in office settings. The rugged laptop doesn’t get as much love as it used to, but it’s still going strong! Hodges makes great use of graphs, tables, and infographics!

 

ThinkPad has shipped continuously since October 1992 under two corporate owners (IBM 1992 to 2005, Lenovo 2005 to present), making it among the longest-running commercial laptop families on the market and unusually visually continuous from the 1992 700C to the 2026 P14s Gen 6. The 2005 IBM-to-Lenovo handoff did not rupture the brand the way skeptics expected: IBM’s ThinkPad engineering and design carried over largely intact, and Lenovo crossed 60 million ThinkPad units sold by 2010. The formula still has reasons to exist in 2026, when a 14-inch P14s Gen 6 AMD with 96 GB of DDR5 SODIMMs runs local 70-billion-parameter LLM workloads on a business chassis with a Copilot+ NPU and dedicated TrackPoint buttons.

Check it out!

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A Curiously Minty Cyberdeck

Exercising Ingenuity built a cyberdeck in an Altoids tin using a Raspberry Pi Zero and shared the process in this video on YouTube.

Ugh, now we’re feeling nostalgic for Minty Boost and MENTA. Chris Young made Printy Boost to scratch that itch.

As far as cyberdecks go, we’ve also got our CYBERDECK Bonnet and CYBERDECK HAT for Raspberry Pi 400 & 500.

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World Telecommunication & Information Society Day, May 17, 2026 #WTISD #DigitalLifeLines

The United Nations has designated May 17th  World Telecommunication & Information Society Day:

World Telecommunication and Information Society Day (WTISD) 2026 calls on governments, industry, and communities to strengthen the digital lifelines that keep the world running. Join us in designing the networks and systems that can withstand shocks and recover quickly, ensuring that no one is cut off and left offline when it matters most.

Celebrated every year on 17 May, World Telecommunication and Information Society Day (WTISD) highlights the growing role of digital technologies in our lives and commemorates the founding of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) – the United Nations Agency for Digital Technologies.

The theme for 2026 is Digital Lifelines – Strengthening resilience in a connected world:

Resilience needs to be designed and included in every element of connectivity: submarine cables linking continents, terrestrial networks carrying data across cities, satellites supporting communication and navigation, and data centers powering digital services. When any part of this chain fails, essential systems, from finance and healthcare to transport and disaster response, are at risk.

Learn more!

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From the Archives: MACROPAD Hotkeys

 

Learn how to turn your MACROPAD into the Hotkey wizard it was born to be; with Phillip Burgess on the Adafruit Learning System!

Press one of MACROPAD’s 12 keys to send a shortcut, function key or whole sequence of keystrokes to a connected computer. The OLED display provides a map, while LEDs under each key offer color-coded groups or themes. Turn the dial to select among different application sets.

This is one of those projects that you can simply find everyday use for as-is, or peer inside the code to see how CircuitPython makes this all pretty simple. Additionally, hotkey configuration files for different desktop applications are easily created, modified and shared.

See the full guide!

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Visualizing Northern Lights Over Kirkjufell with NeoPixels

image via Emmett Walter, Hackster.io

 

Hackster.io user Emmett Walter published a detailed showcase of their beautiful northern lights build.

Finding an API to pull data for this project from was extremely straightforward, the NOAA has a database that stores the values of the visibility of the northern lights at each set of latitude and longitude coordinates. The data given from this API was formatted as follows: [longitude, latitude, Probability of Visibility (out of 100%)].

Check out their code, query and more over on Hackster.io.

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CircuitPython 10.3.0-alpha.2 Released!

From the GitHub release page:

This is CircuitPython 10.3.0-alpha.2, an alpha release for 10.3.0. Further features, changes, and bug fixes will be added before the final release of 10.3.0.

Highlights of this release

• Fix crashes on certain boards with integral displays.
• Adafruit MagTag 2025: improve display quality and support new display variant.
• Add CIRCUITPY_SDCARD_USB to settings.toml to control visibility of a mounted SD card on USB.
• Support float values in settings.toml.
• Report USB MSC drives as removable media to the host.
• Update ESP-IDF to v6.0.1.
• Fix audiomixer.Mixer regressions on SAMx5x.
• STM: support audio.AudioOut, using DAC.

Download from circuitpython.org

Firmware downloads are available from the downloads page on circuitpython.org. The site makes it easy to select the correct file and language for your board.

Installation

To install follow the instructions in the Welcome to CircuitPython! guide. To install the latest libraries, see this page in that guide.

Try code.circuitpython.org or the latest version of the Mu editor for creating and editing your CircuitPython programs and for easy access to the CircuitPython serial connection (the REPL).

Documentation

Documentation is available in readthedocs.io.

Port status

CircuitPython has a number of “ports” that are the core implementations for different microcontroller families. Stability varies on a per-port basis. As of this release, these ports are consider stable (but see Known Issues below):

• atmel-samd: Microchip SAMD21, SAMx5x
• cxd56: Sony Spresense
• espressif: Espressif ESP32, ESP32-C2, ESP32-C3, ESP32-C6, ESP32-C61, ESP32-H2, ESP32-S2, ESP32-S3
• nordic: Nordic nRF52840, nRF52833
• raspberrypi: Raspberry Pi RP2040, RP2350
• stm: ST STM32F4 chip family

These ports are considered alpha and will have bugs and missing functionality:

• analog: Analog Devices MAX32690
• broadcom: Raspberry Pi boards such as RPi 4, RPi Zero 2W
• espressif: , ESP32-P4
• litex: fomu
• mimxrt10xx: NXP i.MX RT10xxx
• renode: hardware simulator
• silabs: Silicon Labs MG24 family
• stm: ST non-STM32F4 chip families
• zephyr: multiplatform RTOS, running on multiple chip families

Changes since 10.3.0-alpha.1

Fixes and enhancements

• Adafruit MagTag 2025: improve display quality. #11003, #11001. Thanks @mikeysklar.
• Update frozen libraries. #10998. Thanks @dhalbert.
• Fix crashes on boards with FourWire displays with no reset pin. #10997, #10995. Thanks @dhalbert.
• Add CIRCUITPY_SDCARD_USB to settings.toml to control SD card USB presentation. #10996. Thanks @dhalbert.
• Add support for float values in settings.toml. #10975. Thanks @dhalbert.
• Report USB MSC drives as removable media to the host. #10967. Thanks @mikeysklar.

Port and board-specific changes

Analog Devices

Broadcom

Espressif

• Fix WiFi/BLE crashes after ESP-IDF v6.0.1 upgrade. #11004. Thanks @tannewt.
• Preserve alarm.sleep_memory across software resets. #10989, #10899. Thanks @lzr
• Support ESP32-P4 V1. #10986. Thanks @tannewt.
• Update ESP-IDF to v6.0.1. #10922. Thanks @tannewt.

i.MX

Nordic

renode

RP2

SAMx

• Fix audiomixer.Mixer regressions on SAMx5x. #10906. Thanks @relic-se.

SiLabs

Spresense

STM

• Support audio.AudioOut, using DAC. #10976. Thanks @ChrisNourse.

Zephyr

Individual boards

• Adafruit MagTag 2025: improve display quality, support new display variant. #11003, #10992, #10987. Thanks @mikeysklar.
• Unexpected Maker S3 D series: add board.ANTENNA_SWITCH (board.IO41). #10984. Thanks @JonNelson.

Documentation changes

Build and infrastructure changes

Translation additions and improvements

• Thanks for translations:
  • @cyphra (Spanish)

New boards

• Adafruit P4GPIO. #10986. Thanks @tannewt.
• Espressif ESP32-P4X-Function-EV. #11004. Thanks @tannewt.
• NHB Systems JL401-S3. #10997, #10977. Thanks @NHBSystems.

Known issues

• The CIRCUITPY drive is not working on at least some STM32 boards.
• Native-code .mpy files are not working. This capability is currently enabled only on the winterbloom_sol board.
• See https://ift.tt/24nxILq for other issues, including issues still to be addressed for:
  • 10.2.x
  • 10.x.x
  • 11.0.0
  • long term

Thanks

Thank you to all who used, tested, and contributed toward this release, including the contributors above, and many others on GitHub and Discord. Join us on the Discord chat to collaborate.

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