Hackaday Podcast: Recent Episodes
Hackaday
Hackaday Editors take a look at all of the interesting uses of technology that pop up on the internet each week. Topics cover a wide range like bending consumer electronics to your will, designing circuit boards, building robots, writing software, 3D printing interesting objects, and using machine tools. Get your fix of geeky goodness from new episodes every Friday morning.
This week's Hackaday podcast is a European affair again, as Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List on a summer evening to review the week. And we have a feast of hacks for your delectation.
As the title above says, one of the stand-out hacks this week was a set of airless mountain bike tyres 3D printed in glorious fluorescent TPU. They look as though they shouldn't work but in fact they showed real promise, and we discuss the process behind their design. Then we take a look at a hybrid of a UV printer and an SLA 3D printer, capable of making high-resolution and robust 3D prints. The prospect of new Amigas intrigues us for a while, then carbon-fibre fabric in 3D prints.
Finally we're in awe of the tech behind the Las Vegas Sphere, and we're there for some radio at the Danish BornHack hacker camp. Follow that one up and you'll find a bonus, an unofficial extra Hackaday podcast.
All the usual links are on Hackaday, but before you head on down to have a listen, don't forget we've got a mailbag for the podcast and we'd love to hear from you!
Elliot Williams and Al Williams got together to compare notes on the most interesting posts this week on the site. As usual, there are just too many choices, so you'll have to settle for just the few that can fit in a podcast. The guys were excited about 3D printing -- both FDM and SLA -- as well as a few camera projects. Ever wanted your own starship? They do, too, and you'll hear about it along with portable radar and more.
Want to make flexible PCBs? Fill up a carbon dioxide tank? Or play Doom via regular expressions? Tune in, and you'll find out about those stories and more.
Follow along with the links, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments! Better still, drop us a note in the mailbag, and you might hear your question on a future episode. You can record audio or send us a message, and one of the hosts will read it on your behalf.
On this episode, Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi discuss their love of electronic paper, clunky cartridges, and keeping old games alive by any means possible. You'll also hear about getting the most out of the sensors in our 3D printers, playing with X-rays at home, a ring that runs Java, and a roulette wheel that outgrew its 555 timer. Stick around to the end to learn about a different sort of IRC that's even more niche than the one you're probably familiar with, as well as the logistical challenges and potential benefits of catching rockets with a giant net.
Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
It's a hot one at both microphones, as Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos wilt in the heat with ice lollies and freezer packs. But still, we persevered long enough to make a podcast.
In Hackaday news, Supercon is on! It's going down in Pasadena, California, but the talks will be somewhere slightly larger, with a courtyard instead of an alley. Get your talk proposals in now! In other Hackaday news, we still have our Frikkin' Lasers Contest going on until Thursday, July 23rd.
Interestingly enough, we got a comment on an older article from none other than [Michael J. Van de Graaff], whose grandfather invented the Van de Graff generator and was "quite upset" when plans for a DIY version appeared in Scientific American. And finally, Google Earth's desktop client is being discontinued, but you can still travel the globe on your phone, or in your PC's browser.
Not only do we have another triple mailbag this week, we have another failed attempt at guessing the Sound by Kristina. However, [Alexander] knew that it was CD-ROM drive a-spinnin'. Speaking of What's That Sound, be sure to let us know your ideas for the new prize.
That sounds like a lot of preamble, but we quickly get to a full slate of hacks, a couple of which are pretty retro in retrospect. Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week's podcast sees Elliot joined by Jenny List, as both suffer silently in the European summer heat as the sound of a desk fan would come over on the recording.
The stand-out hack of the week comes from [Bitluni], whose GPU made from thousands of cheap microcontrollers is on a scale we've never seen before. It's an amazing project in itself, but the manufacturing and power consumption issues of so many processors running at the same time make for a discussion of their own.
Otherwise, we have diecasting on the bench, an impressive achievement by any measure, a Raman spectrometer, and an open source take on something like a Kei truck. In quick hacks there's a dicussion of soldering versus crimping for high current connectors, and neon tubes used as digital logic in an organ. The recording finishes with a discussion of 7-segment display history, and whether an engineering education teaches design for manufacture.
Drop us a comment and check out the links over at Hackaday.
Hackadya's Elliot Williams and Al Williams were in a retro mood this week. There was a new '486 computer, a new mechanical TV, and a USB stick with a magnetic personality. Can you watch YouTube on a Game Boy? Maybe.
For the can't miss articles, this week, Elliot and Al reflected on the awkward phase of 3D printers when they transformed from being expensive commercial machines, to where they are now. Meanwhile, Al was interested in how airplanes know how fast they are going. Along the way, there were musical hacks, precision machine tools, and a quantum 8 ball.
Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments! Or write or record something for our mailbag segment.
In this episode, Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start off by taking a trip down the Raspberry Pi memory lane and then tackle a fresh pile of listener mail. The discussion moves on to hacking bike counter, homebrew upgrades to the Nintendo Entertainment System, and building RAM from whats in the parts bin. You'll hear about the latest drop-in upgrade for a classic Casio watch, hosting light bulbs that host subversive literature, and loading Wii U games from a weird disk drive from the 1980s. They'll wrap things up with a dive into the evolving portrayals of brilliant rebels in media, and all the things you can do with a cheap router.
Check out the links over on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Things are back to normal around the Podcast studio, and this week you'll hear the dulcet tones of Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos.
In Hackaday news, we still have a Frikkin' Lasers Challenge going on, and now you can even enter your project into it! Join the ranks, won't you?
Not only do we have a triple mailbag this week, we have another failed attempt at guessing the sound by Kristina. However, [Baron Maximilian von Knuthausen] knew that it was a train, a British one, even. Then it's on to the hacks, of course, which ought to go far in explaining the show title.
Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Last week, Elliot got his foot stepped on by a 1.5 metric ton draft horse, and boy is he glad to be back to the relative safety of podcasting! Joining him today is Jenny List, no stranger to farm life, who has been trodden by a cow. It's going to be one of those podcasts, folks.
Another thing the two hosts have in common is a love for the mystery of the numbers station. But did you know that GPS satellites, for the last 20 years, have broadcast literally millions of secret messages to everyone on the earth with a receiver? After that bombshell, we have an ATtiny85 emulating an 8080, a primer on how to embed magnets in 3D prints, definitive proof that more than one cassette mechanism is still being manufactured, and a look at what makes home automation enthusiasts tick.
Check out the links over at Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, we're shaking things up a little, with Tom Nardi still in the host seat, and someone besides Al Williams in the other, namely Kristina Panos.
In Hackaday news, we have a new Frikkin' Lasers Challenge going on now, although we acknowledge that no one can actually enter their project into it at the moment. We hope to have that fixed in short order. Procrastinators, disregard.
You'll have to wait another week for the triumphant return of What's That Sound, but we do have an audio mailbag for you this week. Thanks, Dillon!
We look at loading SEGA games from a vinyl record, discuss a really cool project that puts live plane data on your ceiling, and debate the name 'Pop Tuber'. We also discuss DIY routers, and stress over the future of electronic shelf labels.
Elliot Williams is out where the deer and the antelope play for the next week, so it's up to Tom Nardi and Al Williams to wrangle this episode of the Hackaday Podcast. They'll start off by reading some listener messages before talking about the slow extinction of time broadcasts, Linux on cheap smartphones, microcontroller VPNs, and the computers of Spacelab.
You'll also hear about using a video game's "Photo Mode" to capture 3D imagery, strange red lights in deep space, and ASCII fish that you don't need to feed. The episode wraps up with a discussion of WWII spy tech and the revelation that modern smartphones and powerful magnets don't always mix.
Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
With Elliot back from Hackaday Europe, he and Al Williams had a lot to talk about with two weeks of Hackaday posts to catch up on. Not to mention the mailbag was overflowing.
This week, the guys look at girlie cyberdecks, a 3D printed circuit board, and talk electric motorcycles. Is 3D printing safe? Want an accurate moon on your desk? How about modern punch cards? All of that and much more were on the menu this week.
For the can't miss articles, Zoe Skyforest weighs in on file sharing on the LAN while Al Williams talks about the surprising state-of-the-art in vacuum tube tech right before the end.
In this episode, Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start things off by discussing the latest reason that cheap PCB fabrication isn't quite as cheap as it once was. The conversation will then move on to hacking electronic shelf labels, stylish e-ink status displays, cutting metal at home with high current and a bit of water, a solarpunk message board hiding in a IKEA-style lantern, and pushing NFC out of its comfort zone.
From there you'll hear about a matching transistors, taking pictures of the International Space Station, and Linux on the PS5. They'll wrap up this week's episode by going over the surprisingly simple concept behind flow batteries, and learn who's still using leaded gasoline and why.
Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!]
This week, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over the international tubes to bring you the latest news, mystery sound results show, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous seven days or so.
Regarding Hackaday Europe, we announced the last round of speakers and opened up the workshop ticket sales. In other news, the Green-Powered Challenge has wrapped, and judging will begin quite soon.
On What's That Sound, we can score another one for Kristina, which brings her record to approximately four wins and sixty-eight losses. She knew without a doubt that this was a guillotine paper cutter, probably because she recorded the sound herself. Hey, don't take this away from her.
After that, it's on to the hacks, beginning with a really cool laser-powered mist-and-mirrors multi-view display, a robotic drawing assistant of questionable utility, and a new slicer that enables horizontal overhangs without supports.
We also look at a trackball 3D controller, a 3D-printed pinball machine, and a good way to kill humidity sensors with humidity. Finally, we're both shocked to learn that we've been on GPS mk. II for some time now. But then once we get over that, we talk tablets and their usefulness, or lack thereof.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
When Elliot Williams and Al Williams compare their notes on the week in Hackaday, you know you'll get at least one or two bad puns. How bad? Tune in and find out.
This week, Tom Nardi visits several in-person events, and Elliot and Al talk about smart buttons, Itanium, ejecting things from a rocket, and the infinite pickle. Will Elliot build the coin flipper? Will Al use plasma at his next cookout? Hard to say.
For the can't miss articles, this week, Al swept the category with a post on splices and another on what human junk is still sitting on the moon.
What do you think? Leave us a comment or record something and send it to our mailbag.
It's the evening before publication, and a pair of Hackaday writers convene to record the week's podcast. This week Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List, and it's a bumper episode!
Of course, a bit of Hackaday news makes the cut, as it's time to make an entry in the Green Powered Challenge. Then we make the first of a couple of sojourns into AI, as we talk about the Linux kernel stance on AI code. In short: if you submit AI code you're responsible for its bugs. Meanwhile out of this world, we look forward to a time when astronauts breathe oxygen from moon dust.
There are hacks aplenty for your enjoyment, starting with far more than you ever thought it was possible to know about sound-reactive LED strips. Then we have among others a Mac on an ESP32 forming the UI for a weather monitor, Doom on a toaster, and a fascinating look at screw threads for plastic.
In the longer reads we have our colleague [Tom Nardi] finding Chinese people's personal data on hard drives he bought in an electronics store, and an attempt to look at what an LLM can do that might be useful. Grab your headphones, and join us!
Humans flew around the Moon this week, but Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi were stuck on Earth -- luckily, there was no shortage of stories and hacks to keep them occupied. From the news that Linux might be putting the i486 out to pasture, to the fascinating potential of the threadless ball screw and connecting Bluetooth calipers up to FreeCAD. You'll hear about the latest in Internet via high-altitude balloon, the zen of organizing your parts bins, all the problems with Markdown files, and a deep-dive into making a convincing LED fire effect. The episode wraps up with some polarizing opinions on long term data storage, and a freewheeling discussion about the importance of literal moonshots.
Check out the links on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over assorted beverages to bring you the latest news, mystery sound results show, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous seven days or so.
In the news, there's quite a bit to talk about. Regarding Hackaday Europe, you can rest assured that the talks will be announced soon. The Green-Powered Challenge is still underway, and we need your entry to truly make it a contest. You have until April 24th to enter, so show us what you can do with power you scrounge up from the environment!
As usual, we published a handful of April Fool's posts, which you may or may not find amusing. And finally -- no fooling -- our own Tom Nardi wrote up the Artemis moon launch, and is going to update the post every day until the mission ends.
On What's That Sound, we can score one for Kristina, which brings her record to approximately three wins and sixty-eight losses. She knew without a doubt that the dialogue was from the Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Oh, what? There was a remake in 2008? Kristina should get bonus points, then.
After that, it's on to the hacks, beginning with the basics of making clean enclosures that are decidedly not 3D-printed, a couple of sweet lo-fi cameras, and a nice way to tame the tape when it comes to SMT parts. We also discuss a clock that marks time in a mathematical way, watch an electro-permanent magnet in action, and improving soda by turning it into mead. Finally, we discuss the solar balconies taking Europe by storm, and Copilot's terrifying terms of service.
Check out the links over on Hackaday to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over assorted beverages to bring you the latest news, mystery sound results show, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous seven days or so.
In the news, there's quite a bit to talk about. Regarding Hackaday Europe, you can rest assured that the talks will be announced soon. The Green-Powered Challenge is still underway, and we need your entry to truly make it a contest. You have until April 24th to enter, so show us what you can do with power you scrounge up from the environment!
As usual, we published a handful of April Fool's posts, which you may or may not find amusing. And finally -- no fooling -- our own Tom Nardi wrote up the Artemis moon launch, and is going to update the post every day until the mission ends.
On What's That Sound, we can score one for Kristina, which brings her record to approximately three wins and sixty-eight losses. She knew without a doubt that the dialogue was from the Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Oh, what? There was a remake in 2008? Kristina should get bonus points, then.
After that, it's on to the hacks, beginning with the basics of making clean enclosures that are decidedly not 3D-printed, a couple of sweet lo-fi cameras, and a nice way to tame the tape when it comes to SMT parts. We also discuss a clock that marks time in a mathematical way, watch an electro-permanent magnet in action, and improving soda by turning it into mead. Finally, we discuss the solar balconies taking Europe by storm, and Copilot's terrifying terms of service.
Check out the links over on Hackaday to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over assorted beverages to bring you the latest news, mystery sound results show, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous seven days or so.
In the news, there's quite a bit to talk about. Regarding Hackaday Europe, you can rest assured that the talks will be announced soon. The Green-Powered Challenge is still underway, and we need your entry to truly make it a contest. You have until April 24th to enter, so show us what you can do with power you scrounge up from the environment!
As usual, we published a handful of April Fool's posts, which you may or may not find amusing. And finally -- no fooling -- our own Tom Nardi wrote up the Artemis moon launch, and is going to update the post every day until the mission ends.
On What's That Sound, we can score one for Kristina, which brings her record to approximately three wins and sixty-eight losses. She knew without a doubt that the dialogue was from the Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Oh, what? There was a remake in 2008? Kristina should get bonus points, then.
After that, it's on to the hacks, beginning with the basics of making clean enclosures that are decidedly not 3D-printed, a couple of sweet lo-fi cameras, and a nice way to tame the tape when it comes to SMT parts. We also discuss a clock that marks time in a mathematical way, watch an electro-permanent magnet in action, and improving soda by turning it into mead. Finally, we discuss the solar balconies taking Europe by storm, and Copilot's terrifying terms of service.
Check out the links over on Hackaday to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
What did Elliot Williams and Al Williams read on Hackaday last week? Tune in and find out. After a bit of news, [Vik Oliver] chimes in with some deep PLA knowledge. Then the topic changed to pressure advance measurements, SDRs, making super-resolution PCBs with a fiber laser, and more.
Want to 3D print wire strippers? A robot arm? Or just make your own Z-80? Those hacks are in there, too.
For the long articles, we talked about old tech, including the :CueCat and the Iomega Zip Drive. Let us know if you had either one in the comments.
What do you think? Leave us a comment or record something and send it to our mailbag.
As the sun goes down on a glorious spring evening on the western edge of Europe, Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List for a look at the week in all things Hackaday.
First up: Hackaday Europe tickets are on sale! Bad luck folks, the early bird tickets disappeared in an instant, but regular ones are still available for now. We're really looking forward to making our way to Lecco for a weekend of hacks, and it would be great to see you there too.
Then we have a new feature for the podcast, the Hackaday Mailbag. This week's contribution comes from [Kenny], a longtime friend of Hackaday and probably our most regular conference attendee.
To the hacks, and we have some good ones. An air hockey robot might not seem like a challenge, but the engineering which went into [BasementBuilds'] one proves it's not a job for the faint hearted. Then we look at compression molding of recycled plastic using 3D-printed molds, something that seems surprisingly accessible and we'd like to try, too. We've got a new DOS, a 3D-printed zipper repair, the IPv4 replacement we didn't get, and the mind-bending logic of ternary computing. It's one of those weeks where the quick hacks could all deserve their own in-depth look, but perhaps the stand-outs are and Arduino style compiler that includes the source code compressed within the binary, and a beautifully-done revival of a 1980s brick cellphone as a modern 5G unit.
Finally in the longer reads we've got an examination of wired versus Bluetooth headphones -- we're both in the wired camp -- and a look back at the age of free dialup. As is so often the case, the experience there differed between Brits and Americans. Anyway, enjoy the episode, and we have another week to look forward to.
Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they cover their favorite hacks and stories from the week. The episode kicks off with some updates about Hackaday Europe and the recently announced Green Power contest, as well as the proposal of a new feature of the podcast where listeners are invited to send in their questions and comments. After the housekeeping is out of the way, the discussion will go from spoofing traffic light control signals and the line between desktop computers and smartphones, all the way to homebrew e-readers and writing code with chocolate candies. You'll hear about molding replacement transparent parts, a collection of fantastic tutorials on hardware hacking and reverse engineering, and the recent fireball that lit up the skies over Germany. The episode wraps up with a fascinating look at how the developer of Pokemon Go is monetizing the in-game efforts of millions of players.
Check out the links over on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments! Or send us a clip for the mailbag to editor@hackaday.com.
This week, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over assorted beverages to bring you the latest news, mystery sound results show, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous seven days or so.
In the news, we've launched a brand-new contest! Yes, the Green-Powered Challenge is underway, and we need your entry to truly make it a contest. You have until April 24th to enter, so show us what you can do with power you scrounge up from the environment around you!
On What's That Sound, Kristina was leaning toward some kind of distant typing sounds, but [Conrad] knew it was our own Tom Nardi's steam heat radiator pinging away.
After that, it's on to the hacks and such, beginning with an exploration of all the gross security vulnerabilities in a cheap WiFi extender, and we take a look inside a little black and white pay television like you'd find in a Greyhound station in the 80s and 90s.
We also discuss the idea of mixing custom spray paint colors on the fly, a pen clip that never bends out of shape, and running video through a guitar effects pedal. Finally, we discuss climate engineering with disintegrating satellites, and the curse of everything device.
Check out the links on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams met up to trade their favorite posts of the week. Tune in and see if your favorites made the list. From crazy intricate automata to surprising problems in Peltier cooler designs, there's a little bit of everything.
Should bikes have chains? What's the hardest thing about Star Trek computers to duplicate? Can you make a TV station from a single microcontroller? The podcast this week answers these questions and more. Plus, weigh in on the What's That Sound contest and you might just score a Hackaday Podcast T-shirt.
For the Can't Miss segment, Elliot had airships on his mind, while Al's sick of passwords. But is he sick enough to take electronic pills that transmit his password?
For today's podcast Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List, and we're pushing the limits of mobile connectivity as Jenny's coming to us from a North Sea ferry. We start by looking forward to the upcoming Hackaday Europe, with a new location in Lecco, Italy. We hope you can join us there!
There's a bumper collection of hacks to talk about, with a novel soft pneumatic display, a CRT-based VR headset, an LCD photographic aperture, and a novel time-of-flight sensor array in the line-up.Then there are 3D printed PCBs, Scotch tape for a lens, and a project to map farts. We kid you not. Finally we wrap up with mind controlled toys, and a a treatise on requirements and specifications in an age of AI.
Check out all the links over on Hackaday!
In the latest episode of the Hackaday Podcast, editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start things off by discussing the game of lunar hide-and-seek that has researchers searching for the lost Luna 9 probe, and drop a few hints about the upcoming Hackaday Europe conference. From there they'll marvel over a miniature operating system for the ESP32, examine the re-use of iPad displays, and find out about homebrew software development for an obscure Nintendo handheld. You'll also hear about a gorgeous RGB 14-segment display, a robot that plays chess, and a custom 3D printed turntable for all your rotational needs. The episode wraps up with a sobering look at the dangers of industrial robotics, and some fascinating experiments to determine if a decade-old roll of PLA filament is worth keeping or not.
Check out the links over on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over coffee to bring you the latest news, mystery sound results show, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous seven days or so.
We found no news to speak of, except that Kristina has ditched Windows after roughly 38 years. What is she running now? What does she miss about Windows? Tune in to find out.
On What's That Sound, Kristina thought it was a jackhammer, but [Statistically Unlikely] knew it was ground-tamper thingy, and won a Hackaday Podcast t-shirt! Congratulations!
After that, it's on to the hacks and such, beginning with 3D printing on the nano scale, and a couple of typewriter-based hacks. Then we take a look at the beauty of the math behind graph theory, especially when it comes to circuit sculptures and neckties.
We also talk display hacking, macro pads with haptic feedback knobs, and writing code in Welsh. Finally, we discuss the Virtual Boy, and ponder whether vibe coding is killing open source.
Check out the links on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Another chilly evening in Western Europe, as Elliot Williams is joined this week by Jenny List to chew the fat over the week's hacks.
It's been an auspicious week for anniversaries, with the hundredth since the first demonstration of a working television system in a room above a London coffee shop. John Logie Baird's mechanically-scanned TV may have ultimately been a dead-end superseded by the all-electronic systems we all know, but the importance of television for the later half of the 20th century and further is beyond question.
The standout hacks of the week include a very clever use of the ESP32's WiFi API to detect people moving through a WiFi field, a promising open-source smartphone, another ESP32 project in a comms system for cyclists, more cycling on tensegrity spokes, a clever way to smooth plaster casts, and a light sculpture reflecting Wi-Fi traffic. Then there are a slew of hacks including 3D printed PCBs and gem-cut dichroic prisms, before we move to the can't-miss articles. There we're looking at document preservation, and a wallow in internet history with a look at the Netscape brand.
As usual all the links you need can be found over on Hackaday, so listen, and enjoy!
Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams took a break to talk about their favorite hacks last week. You can drop in to hear about articulated mirrors, triacs, and even continuous 3D-printing modifications.
Flying on an airplane this weekend? Maybe wait until you get back to read about how the air traffic control works. Back home, you can order a pizza on a Wii or run classic Basic games on a calculator.
For the can't miss articles, the guys talked about very low Earth orbit satellites and talked about readers who dumpster dive.
Check out the links over on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and don't be shy. Tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they swap their favorite hacks and stories from the week. In this episode, they'll start off by marveling over the evolution of the "smart knob" and other open hardware input devices, then discuss a futuristic propulsion technology you can demo in your own kitchen sink, and a cheap handheld game system that get's a new lease on life thanks to the latest version of the ESP32 microcontroller.
From there they'll cover spinning CRTs, creating custom GUIs on Android, and yet another thing you can build of out that old Ender 3 collecting dust in the basement. The episode wraps up with a discussion about putting Valve's Steam Deck to work and a look at the history-making medical evacuation of the International Space Station.
Check out the links over on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over coffee to bring you the latest news, mystery sound results show, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous seven days or so.
On What's That Sound, Kristina had no idea what was going on, but [Flippin' Heck] knew it was a flip dot display, and won a Hackaday Podcast t-shirt! Congratulations!
After that, it's on to the hacks and such, with not one but two ways of seeing sound. We also take a look at benchmarking various Windows releases against each other on 12-year-old hardware.
We also talk about painting on floppies and glitching out jpegs in a binary text editor. Finally, we discuss the history and safety of autopilot, and take a look at the humble time clock.
Check out the links on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Elliot was of at Europe's largest hacker convention: Chaos Communication Congress. He had an awesome time, saw more projects than you might think humanely possible, and got the flu. But he pulled through and put this audio tourbook for you.
So if you've never been to CCC, give it a listen!
The entire Hackaday crew wishes you happy holidays and a fantastic 2026. You'll hear back from us then, so stay tuned.
This week's Hackaday Podcast sees Elliot Williams joined by Jenny List for an all-European take on the week, and have we got some hacks for you!
In the news this week is NASA's Maven Mars Orbiter, which may sadly have been lost. A sad day for study of the red planet, but at the same time a chance to look back at what has been a long and successful mission.
In the hacks of the week, we have a lo-fi camera, a very refined Commodore 64 laptop, and a MIDI slapophone to entertain you, as well as taking a detailed look at neutrino detectors. Then CYMK printing with laser cut stencils draws our attention, as well as the arrival of stable GPIB support for Linux. Finally both staffers let loose; Elliot with an epic rant about spreadsheets, and Jenny enthusiastically describing the Haiku operating system.
Check out the links over on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams met up to cover the best of Hackaday this week, and they want you to listen in. There were a hodgepodge of hacks this week, ranging from home automation with RF, volumetric displays in glass, and some crazy clocks, too.
Ever see a typewriter that uses an ink pen? Elliot and Al hadn't either. Want time on a supercomputer? It isn't free, but it is pretty cheap these days. Finally, the guys discussed how to focus on a project like Dan Maloney, who finally got a 3D printer, and talked about Maya Posch's take on LLM intelligence.
Check out the links over on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they go over their picks for the best stories and hacks from the previous week. Things start off with a warning about the long-term viability of SSD backups, after which the discussion moves onto the limits of 3D printed PLA, the return of the Pebble smart watch, some unconventional aircraft, and an online KiCad schematic repository that has plenty of potential. You'll also hear about a remarkable conference badge made from e-waste electronic shelf labels, filling 3D prints with foam, and a tiny TV powered by the ESP32. The episode wraps up with our wish for hacker-friendly repair manuals, and an interesting tale of underwater engineering from D-Day.
Check out the links over on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over coffee to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous seven days or so.
On What's That Sound, Kristina got sort of close, but of course failed spectacularly. Will you fare better and perhaps win a Hackaday Podcast t-shirt? Mayhap you will.
After that, it's on to the hacks and such, beginning with an interesting tack to take with a flat-Earther that involves two gyroscopes. And we take a look at the design requirements when it comes to building synths for three-year-olds.
Then we discuss several awesome hacks such as a vehicle retrofit to add physical heated seat controls, an assistive radio that speaks the frequencies, and an acoustic radiometer build. Finally, we look at the joys of hacking an old Kindle, and get a handle on disappearing door handles.
Check out the links over at Hackaday to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Wait, what? Is it time for the podcast again? Seems like only yesterday that Dan joined Elliot for the weekly rundown of the choicest hacks for the last 1/52 of a year. but here we are.
We had quite a bit of news to talk about, including the winners of the Component Abuse Challenge -- warning, some components were actually abused for this challenge. They're also a trillion pages deep over at the Internet Archive, a milestone that seems worth celebrating.
As for projects, both of us kicked things off with "Right to repair"-adjacent topics, first with a washing machine that gave up its secrets with IR and then with a car that refused to let its owner fix the brakes. We heated things up with a microwave foundry capable of melting cast iron -- watch your toes! -- and looked at a tiny ESP32 dev board with ludicrously small components.
We saw surveyors go to war, watched a Lego sorting machine go through its paces, and learned about radar by spinning up a sonar set from first principles.
Finally, we wrapped things up with another Al Williams signature "Can't Miss Articles" section, with his deep dive into the fun hackers can have with the now-deprecated US penny, and his nostalgic look at pneumatic tube systems.
It's a wet November evening across Western Europe, the steel-grey clouds have obscured a rare low-latitude aurora this week, and Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List for this week's podcast. And we've got a fine selection for your listening pleasure!
The 2025 Component Abuse Challenge has come to an end, so this week you'll be hearing about a few of the entries. We've received an impressive number, and as always we're bowled over by the ingenuity of Hackaday readers in pushing parts beyond their limits.
In the news is the potential discovery of a lost UNIX version in a dusty store room at the University of Utah, Version 4 of the OS, which appeared in 1973. Check out your own stores, for hidden nuggets of gold. In the hacks, we have two cameras at the opposite end of the resolution spectrum, but sharing some impressive reverse engineering. Mouse cameras and scanner cameras were both a thing a couple of decades ago, and it's great to see people still pushing the boundaries. Then we look at the challenge of encoding Chinese text as Morse code, an online-upgraded multimeter, the art of making lenses for an LED lighting effect, and what must be the best recreation of a Star Wars light sabre we have ever seen. In quick hacks we have a bevvy of Component Abuse Challenge projects, a Minecraft server on a smart light bulb, and a long term test of smartphone battery charging techniques.
We round off with a couple of our long-form pieces, first the uncertainties about iRobot's future and what it might mean for their ecosystem -- think: cheap hackable robotics platform! -- and then a look at FreeBSD as an alternative upgrade path for Windows users. It's a path not without challenges, but the venerable OS still has plenty to give.
As always, check out the links to all the articles over on Hackaday.
Hackaday Editors Tom Nardi and Al Williams spent the weekend at Supercon and had to catch up on all the great hacks. Listen in as they talk about their favorites. Plus, stick around to the end to hear about some of the highlights from their time in Pasadena.
If you're still thinking about entering the Component Abuse Contest, you're just about out of time. Need some inspiration? Tom and Al talk about a few choice entries, and discuss how pushing parts out of their comfort zone can come in handy. Do you make your own PCBs? With vias? If you have a good enough laser, you could. Or maybe you'd rather have a $10 Linux server? Just manage your expectations. The guys both admit they aren't mechanical geniuses and, unlike [4St4r], aren't very good at guessing sounds either. They round up with some 3D printing projects and a collection of quick hacks.
This week, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up across the universe to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous seven days or so.
In Hackaday news, OMG Supercon is almost here! And we just revealed the badge! In other news, we've still got a contest running. Read all about the 2025 Component Abuse Challenge, sponsored by DigiKey, and check out the contest page for all the details.
On What's That Sound, Kristina failed spectacularly. Will you fare better and perhaps win a Hackaday Podcast t-shirt? Mayhap you will.
After that, it's on to the hacks and such, beginning with a really cool entry into the Component Abuse Challenge wherein a simple transmission line is used to multiply a voltage. We watch as a POV globe takes to the skies, once it has enough motors.
Then we discuss several awesome hacks such as an incredible desk that simulates beehive activity, a really great handheld PC build, and a Tinkercad twofer. Finally, we discuss the future of removable batteries, and the history of movable type.
Check out the links over at Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
It was Elliot and Dan on the podcast today, taking a look at the best the week had to offer in terms of your hacks. We started with surprising news about the rapidly approaching Supercon keynote; no spoilers, but Star Trek fans such as we who don't have tickets will be greatly disappointed.
Elliot waxed on about taking the poop out of your prints, Dan got into a camera that adds a dimension to its images, and we both delighted in the inner workings of an air-powered squishy robot.
Questions? We've got plenty. Is it possible to take an X-ray without an X-ray tube? Or X-rays, for that matter? Did Lucille Ball crack a spy ring with her fillings? Is Algol set to take over the world? What's inside a germanium transistor? How does a flipping fish say Happy Birthday? And how far down the Meshtastic rabbit hole did our own Tom Nardi fall? Tune in to find out the answers.
The nights are drawing in for Europeans, and Elliot Williams is joined this week by Jenny List for an evening podcast looking at the past week in all things Hackaday. After reminding listeners of the upcoming Hackaday Supercon and Jawncon events, we take a moment to mark the sad passing of the prolific YouTuber, Robert Murray-Smith.
Before diving into the real hacks, there are a couple of more general news stories with an effect on our community. First, the takeover of Arduino by Qualcomm, and what its effect is likely to be. We try to speculate as to where the Arduino platform might go from here, and even whether it remains the player it once was, in 2025. Then there's the decision by Google to restrict Android sideloading to only approved-developer APKs unless over ADB. It's an assault on a user's rights over their own hardware, as well as something of a blow to the open-source Android ecosystem. What will be our community's response?
On more familiar territory we have custom LCDs, algorithmic art, and a discussion of non-stepper motors in 3D printing. Even the MakerBot Cupcake makes an appearance. Then there's a tiny RV, new creative use of an ESP32 peripheral, and the DVD logo screensaver, in hardware. We end the show with a look at why logic circuits use the voltages they do. It's a smorgasbord of hacks for your listening enjoyment.
Elliot Williams and Al Williams got together to share their favorite hacks of the week with you. If you listen in, you'll hear exciting news about the upcoming SuperCon and the rare occurrence of Al winning the What's That Sound game.
For hacks, the guys talk about the IEEE's take on the "best" programming languages of 2025 and how they think AI is going to fundamentally transform the job of a programmer. On a lighter note, there's an industrial robot who retired to bartending, a minimal drum machine, a high-powered laser, and a Fortran flight simulator reborn with Unity 3D.
In the "can't miss" category, you'll learn how not to switch Linux distributions and what to expect when you need surgery while on your next mission to outer space.
There's lots more. Want to follow along? Check out the links below. As always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start this week's episode off with an update on the rapidly approaching 2025 Supercon in Pasadena, California. From there they'll talk about the surprisingly high-tech world of vapes, a flying DeLorean several years in the making, non-contact pulse monitoring, and the potential of backyard radio telescopes to do real astronomy. You'll hear about a dodecahedron speaker, a page turning peripheral, and 3D printed tools for unfolding boxes. They'll wrap things up by taking a look at the latest generation of wearable smart glasses, and wonder if putting a bank of batteries in your home is really with the hassle.
Check out the links over at Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over the tubes to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous seven days or so.
In Hackaday news, we've got a new contest running! Read all about the 2025 Component Abuse Challenge, sponsored by DigiKey, and check out the contest page for all the details. In sad news, American Science & Surplus are shuttering online sales, leaving just the brick and mortar stores in Wisconsin and Illinois.
On What's That Sound, it's a results show, which means Kristina gets to take a stab at it. She missed the mark, but that's okay, because [Montana Mike] knew that it was the theme music for the show Beakman's World, which was described by one contestant as "Bill Nye on crack".
After that, it's on to the hacks and such, beginning with a really cool way to smooth your 3D prints in situ. JWe take a much closer look at that talking robot's typewriter-inspired mouth from about a month ago. Then we discuss several awesome technological feats such as running code on a PAX credit card payment machine, using the alphabet as joinery, and the invention of UTF-8 in general. Finally, we discuss the detection of spicy shrimp, and marvel at the history of email.
Check out the links over on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Fresh hacks here! Get your fresh hot hacks right here! Elliot and Dan teamed up this week to go through every story published on our pages to find the best of the best, the cream of the crop, and serve them up hot and fresh for you. The news this week was all from space, with the ISS getting its latest (and last?) push from Dragon, plus <
But even if we are, plenty is still going on down here to keep you interested. Like homebrewing? Good, because we looked at DIY inductors, wire nuts, and even a dope -- but nope -- ultralight helicopter. Into retro? We've got you covered with a loving look at IRC, a 60s bedside computer guaranteed to end your marriage, and a look at the best 8-bit language you never heard of.
We looked at a rescued fume hood, sensors galore on your phone, a rug that should have -- and did, kind of -- use a 555, and raytracing for the rest of your natural life. As for "Can't Miss Articles," Elliot could barely contain himself with the bounty of projects written up by our Hackaday writers, not to mention Arya's deep dive into putting GPS modules to work in your builds.
Thunderstorms were raging across southern Germany as Elliot Williams was joined by Jenny List for this week's podcast. The deluge outside didn't stop the hacks coming though, and we've got a healthy smorgasbord for you to snack from. There's the cutest ever data cassette recorder taking a tiny Olympus dictation machine and re-engineering it with a beautiful case for the Commodore 64, a vastly overcomplex machine for perfectly cracking an egg, the best lightning talk timer Hackaday has ever seen, and a demoscene challenge that eschews a CPU. Then in Quick Hacks we've got a QWERTY slider phone, and a self-rowing canoe that comes straight out of Disney's The Sorcerer's Apprentice sequence.
For a long time we've had a Field guide series covering tech in infrastructure and other public plain sight, and this week's one dealt with pivot irrigation. A new subject for Jenny who grew up on a farm in a wet country. Then both editors are for once in agreement, over using self-tapping screws to assemble 3D-printed structures. Sit back and enjoy the show!
What happens when you listen in on Elliot Williams and Al Williams? You get a round up of the best of last week's Hackaday posts, of course. The topics this week range from beer brewing to lightning protection, with a little bit of everything in between.
This week, many problems find solutions. Power drill battery dead? Your car doesn't have a tire pressure monitor? Does your butter tear up your toast? You can find the answer to these problems, and more, on the Hackaday podcast.
For the can't miss section, the guys are annoyed that Google wants to lock down their phones, and also talk about measuring liquid levels in outer space.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
In this episode of the Hackaday Podcast, editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start out with a warning about potentially radioactive shrimp entering the American food supply via Walmart, and things only get weirder from there.
The extra spicy shrimp discussion makes a perfect segue into an overview of a pair of atomic One Hertz Challenge entries, after which they'll go over the latest generation of 3D printer filament, using an old Android smartphone as a low-power Linux server, some tips for creating better schematics, and Lorde's specification-bending transparent CD.
Finally, you'll hear about how the nature of digital ownership influences the hardware we use, and on the other side of the coin, how open source firmware like QMK lets you build input devices on your terms.
Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over the tubes to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous week.
In Hackaday news, get your Supercon 2025 tickets while they're hot! Also, the One Hertz Challenge ticks on, but time is running out. You have until Tuesday, August 19th to show us what you've got, so head over to Hackaday.IO and get started now. Finally, its the end of eternal September as AOL discontinues dial-up service after all these years.
On What's That Sound, Kristina got sort of close, but this is neither horseshoes nor hand grenades. Can you get it? If so, you could win a limited edition Hackaday Podcast t-shirt!
After that, it's on to the hacks and such, beginning with a talking robot that uses typewriter tech to move its mouth. We take a look at hacking printed circuit boards to create casing and instrument panels for a PDP-1 replica. Then we explore a fluid simulation business card, witness a caliper shootout, and marvel at one file in six formats. Finally, it's a telephone twofer as we discuss the non-hack-ability of the average smart phone, and learn about what was arguably the first podcast.
Check out the links over on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Elliot and Dan got together this week for a review of the week's hacking literature, and there was plenty to discuss. We addressed several burning questions, such as why digital microscopes are so terrible, why computer systems seem to have so much trouble with names, and if a thermal receipt printer can cure ADHD.
We looked at a really slick 5-axis printer that COVID created, a temperature-controlled fermentation setup, and a pseudo-Mellotron powered by a very odd tape recorder. We also learned little about designing 3D printed parts with tight tolerances, stepping a PC power supply up to ludicrous level, and explored a trio of unique entries for the One Hertz Challenge.
And for the Can't Miss section, we looked at what happens to planes when they get hit by lightning (and how they avoid it), and say goodbye to the man who launched a lot of careers by making model kits.
It was also exciting to learn that the first day of Supercon is Halloween, which means a Friday night sci-fi cosplay party. It's gonna be lit.
Another week, another Hackaday podcast, and for this one Elliot is joined by Jenny List, fresh from the BornHack hacker camp in Denmark.
There's a definite metal working flavour to this week's picks, with new and exciting CNC techniques and a selective electroplater that can transfer bitmaps to metal. But worry not, there's plenty more to tease the ear, with one of the nicest cyberdecks we've ever seen, and a bird that can store images in its song.
Standout quick hacks are a synth that makes sounds from Ethernet packets, and the revelation that the original PlayStation is now old enough to need replacement motherboards. Finally we take a closer look at the huge effort that goes in to monitoring America's high voltage power infrastructure, and some concerning privacy news from the UK. Have a listen!
What did you miss on Hackaday last week? Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Al Williams are ready to catch you up on this week's podcast. First, though, the guys go off on vibe coding and talk about a daring space repair around Jupiter.
Then it is off to the hacks, including paste extruding egg shells, bespoke multimeters, and an 8-bit mechanical computer made from a construction toy set.
For can't miss articles, you'll hear about boring industrial design in modern cell phones and a deep dive into how fresh fruit makes it to your table in the middle of the winter.
Check out the links over on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they talk about their favorite hacks and stories from the previous week. They'll start things off with a small Supercon update, and go right into fusion reactors, AI surgeons, planned obsolescence, and robotic cats and dogs. They'll also go over several entries from the ongoing 2025 One Hertz Challenge, an ambitious flight simulator restoration project, old school lightning detectors, and how Blu-ray won the battle against HD DVD but lost the war against streaming. Stick around to the end to hear an incredible story about a clandestine machine shop in a WWII prisoner of war camp, and the valiant fight to restore communications with the Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft.
Check out the links over on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos joined forces to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous week.
In Hackaday news, the One Hertz Challenge ticks on. You have until Tuesday, August 19th to show us what you've got, so head over to Hackaday.IO and get started now! In other news, we've just wrapped the call for Supercon proposals, so you can probably expect to see tickets for sale fairly soon.
On What's That Sound, Kristina actually got this one with some prodding. Congratulations to [$HACKER] who knew exactly what it was and wins a limited edition Hackaday Podcast t-shirt!
After that, it's on to the hacks and such, beginning with a ridiculously fast Benchy. We take a look at a bunch of awesome 3D prints a PEZ blaster and a cowbell that rings true. Then we explore chisanbop, which is not actually K-Pop for toddlers, as well as a couple of clocks. Finally, we talk a bit about dithering before taking a look at the top tech of 1985 as shown in Back to the Future (1985).
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
It's Independence Day here in the USA, but if you're not a fan of fireworks and hot dogs, Elliot and Dan's rundown of the best hacks of the week is certainly something to celebrate. Rest easy, because nothing exploded, not even the pneumatic standing desk that [Matthias] tore into, nor the electroplated 3D prints that [H3NDRIK] took a blowtorch to.
We both really loved the Ploopiest knob you've ever seen, which would be even Ploopier in anodized aluminum, as well as an automatic book scanner that takes its job very seriously. We looked into the mysteries of the Smith chart, another couple of fantastic student projects out of Cornell, the pros and cons of service loops, and what happened when the lights went out in Spain last Spring. And what does Janet Jackson have against laptops anyway?
Time for another European flavoured Hackaday Podcast this week, as Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List, two writers sweltering in the humidity of a Central European summer. Both of our fans and air conditioners made enough noise to be picked up on the microphone when they were turned on, so we're suffering for your entertainment.
The big Hackaday news stories of the week are twofold, firstly a cat-themed set of winners for the 2025 Pet Hacks contest, and then the announcement of a fresh competition: the 2025 Hackaday One Hertz Challenge. Get your once-a-second projects ready!
This week gave us a nice pile of interesting hacks, including some next-level work growing and machining the crystal for a home-made Pockels cell light valve, an pcoming technique for glass 3D prints, and enough vulnerabilities to make any Nissan Leaf owner nervous. We note that mechanical 7-segment displays are an arena showing excellent hacks, and we're here for it. Meanwhile among the quick hacks a filament made of PLA with a PETG core caught Elliot's eye, while Jenny was impressed with a beautifully-made paper tape punch. Finally in the can't miss section, The latest in Dan Maloney's Mining and Refining series looks at drilling and blasting. Such an explosive piece should come last, but wait! There's more! Al Williams gives us a potted history of satellite phones, and explains why you don't carry an Iridium in your pocket.
This week, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Al Williams caught up after a week-long hiatus. There was a lot to talk about, including clocks, DIY USB cables, and more.
In Hackaday news, the 2025 Pet Hacks Contest is a wrap. Winners will be announced soon, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, how'd you like a free ticket to attend Supercon? Well, free if you submit a talk and get accepted. November is right around the corner, so get those talks ready.
Hackaday is a big fan of the NOAA Polar sats, and it looks like they are on their last figurative legs. The agency has left them up for now, but won't be keeping them in shape, and if they misbehave, they may be neutralized for safety.
Since Elliot was off, Al supplied the sound, and in a bout of karma, Elliot had to do the guessing this week. How'd he do? Not bad, but there's room to do better. If you do better, there could be a coveted Hackaday Podcast T-shirt in your future.
Moving on the hacks, the guys were interested in magnets, clocks, cables, 3D printed machine tools, and even old moonbase proposals. For the can't miss articles, Al took the bifecta, since Elliot picked a piece on the machine that generated laugh tracks in the latter part of the 20th century and Al shamelessly picked his own article about the role of British ham radio operators during WWII.
Miss anything? Check out the links and catch up. As always, drop a comment and tell us what you think about the week in Hackaday.
This week, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos joined forces to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous week.
In Hackaday news, the 2025 Pet Hacks Contest rolls on, but only for a short time longer. You have until Tuesday, June 10th to show us what you've got, so head over to Hackaday.IO and get started now! In other news, check out what adaptive optics can do when it comes to capturing pictures of the Sun. In other, other news, there won't be a Podcast next week as Elliot is on vacation.
On What's That Sound, Kristina failed once again, but four of you guessed correctly. Congratulations to [ToyoKogyo12aTurbo] who fared better and wins a limited edition Hackaday Podcast t-shirt!
After that, it's on to the hacks and such, beginning with a largely-printed 6-DOF robot arm. We take a look at a bunch of awesome 3D prints like guitars and skateboards, take a look at some pet hacks, and discuss brick layers in orcaslicer. Finally, we talk a lot about keyboards, especially the quickly-evaporating Blackberry keyboards and why they're disappearing.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Our choice of hacks included a fond look at embedded systems and the classic fashion sense of Cornell's Bruce Land, risky open CRT surgery, a very strange but very cool way to make music, and the ultimate backyard astronomer's observatory. We talked about Stamp collecting for SMD prototyping, crushing aluminum with a boatload of current, a PC that heats your seat, and bringing HDMI to the Commodore 64.
We also took a look at flight tracking IRL, a Flipper-based POV, the ultimate internet toaster, and printing SVGs for fun and profit. Finally, we wrapped things up with a look at the tech behind real-time river flow tracking and a peek inside the surprisingly energetic world of fuel cells.
Check out all the links over at Hackaday!
Our choice of hacks included a fond look at embedded systems and the classic fashion sense of Cornell's Bruce Land, risky open CRT surgery, a very strange but very cool way to make music, and the ultimate backyard astronomer's observatory. We talked about Stamp collecting for SMD prototyping, crushing aluminum with a boatload of current, a PC that heats your seat, and bringing HDMI to the Commodore 64.
We also took a look at flight tracking IRL, a Flipper-based POV, the ultimate internet toaster, and printing SVGs for fun and profit. Finally, we wrapped things up with a look at the tech behind real-time river flow tracking and a peek inside the surprisingly energetic world of fuel cells.
Check out all the links over at Hackaday!
We're back in Europe for this week's Hackaday podcast, as Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List. In the news this week is the passing of Ed Smylie, the engineer who devised the famous improvised carbon dioxide filter that saved the Apollo 13 astronauts with duct tape.
Closer to home is the announcement of the call for participation for this year's Hackaday Supercon; we know you will have some ideas and projects you'd like to share.
Interesting hacks this week include a new Mac Plus motherboard and Doom (just) running on an Atari ST, while a LoRa secure messenger and an astounding open-source Ethernet switch captivated us on the hardware front. We also take a dive into the Mouse programming language, a minimalist stack-based environment from the 1970s. Among the quick hacks are a semiconductor dopant you can safely make at home, and a beautiful Mac Mini based cyberdeck.
Finally, we wrap up with our colleague [Maya Posch] making the case for a graceful degradation of web standards, something which is now sadly missing from so much of the online world, and then with the discovery that ChatGPT can make a passable show of emulating a Hackaday scribe. Don't worry folks, we're still reassuringly meat-based.
Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they take a whirlwind tour of the best and brightest hacks of the last week. This episode starts off with an update about that Soviet Venus lander that's been buzzing the planet, then moves on to best practices for designing 3D printed parts, giving Chrome OS devices a new lease on life, and a unique display technology that brings a Star Wars prop to life.
You'll also hear about designing new motherboards for beloved old computers, why you might want to put your calipers on a flatbed scanner, and a NASA science satellite that's putting in double duty as a wartime reporter. Finally, they'll cover the interesting physics of meteor burst communications, and the latest developments in the ongoing libogc license carfuffle.
Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up across the universe to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous week.
In Hackaday news, the 2025 Pet Hacks Contest rolls on. You have until June 10th to show us what you've got, so head over to Hackaday.IO and get started today!
On What's That Sound, Kristina actually got it this time, although she couldn't quite muster the correct name for it, however at Hackaday we'll be calling it the "glassophone" from now on. Congratulations to [disaster_recovered] who fared better and wins a limited edition Hackaday Podcast t-shirt!
After that, it's on to the hacks and such, beginning with a complete and completely-documented wireless USB autopsy. We take a look at a lovely 3D-printed downspout, some DIY penicillin, and a jellybean iMac that's hiding a modern PC. Finally, we explore a really cool 3D printing technology, and ask what happened to typing 'www.'.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
It's the podcast so nice we recorded it twice! Despite some technical difficulties (note to self: press the record button significantly before recording the outro), Elliot and Dan were able to soldier through our rundown of the week's top hacks.
We kicked things off with a roundup of virtual keyboards for the alternate reality crowd, which begged the question of why you'd even need such a thing. We also looked at a couple of cool demoscene-adjacent projects, such as the ultimate in oscilloscope music and a hybrid knob/jack for eurorack synth modules.
We also dialed the Wayback Machine into antiquity to take a look at Clickspring's take on the origins of precision machining; spoiler alert -- you can make gas-tight concentric brass tubing using a bow-driven lathe.
There's a squishy pneumatic robot gripper, an MQTT-enabled random number generator, a feline-friendly digital stethoscope, and a typewriter that'll make you Dymo label maker jealous. We'll also mourn the demise of electronics magazines and ponder how your favorite website fills that gap, and learn why it's really hard to keep open-source software lean and clean. Short answer: because it's made by people.
This week Elliot Williams was joined by fellow Europe-based Hackaday staffer Jenny List, to record the Hackaday Podcast as the dusk settled on a damp spring evening.
On the agenda first was robotic sport, as a set of bipedal robots competed in a Chinese half-marathon. Our new Robot overlords may have to wait a while before they are fast enough chase us meatbags away, but it demonstrated for us how such competitions can be used to advance the state of the art.
The week's stand-out hacks included work on non-planar slicing to improve strength of 3D prints. It's safe to say that the Cartesian 3D printer has matured as a device, but this work proves there's plenty more in the world of 3D printing to be developed. Then there was a beautiful record cutting lathe project, far more than a toy and capable of producing good quality stereo recordings. Meanwhile it's always good to see the price of parts come down, and this time it's the turn of LIDAR sensors. There's a Raspberry Pi project capable of astounding resolution, for a price that wouldn't have been imaginable only recently. Finally we retrned to 3D printing, with an entirely printable machine, including the motors and the hot end. It's a triumph of printed engineering, and though it's fair to say that you won't be using it to print anything for yourself, we expect some of the very clever techniques in use to feature in many other projects.
The week's cant-miss articles came from Maya Posch with a reality check for lovers of physical media, and Dan Maloney with a history of x-ray detection.
You'll find all the links over at Hackaday!
When Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams need a break from writing posts, they hop on the podcast and talk about their favorite stories of the past week. Want to know what they were talking about? Listen in below and find out!
In an unusual twist, a listener sent in the sound for this week's What's This Sound competition, so it turns out Elliot and Al were both stumped for a change. See if you can do better, and you might just score a Hackaday Podcast T-shirt.
On the hacking front, the guys talked about what they hope to see as entries in the pet hacking contest, quantum diamonds (no kidding), spectrometers, and several science projects.
There was talk of a tiny robot, a space mouse—the computer kind, not a flying rodent—and even an old-fashioned photophone that let Alexander Graham Bell use the sun like a string on a paper cup telephone.
Things really heat up at the end, when there is talk about computer programming ranging from COBOL to Vibe programming. In case you've missed it, Vibe programming is basically delegating your work to the AI, but do you really want to? Maybe, if your job is to convert all that old COBOL code.
Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they talk about the best stories and hacks of the week. This episode starts off with a discussion of the Vintage Computer Festival East and Philadelphia Maker Faire -- two incredible events that just so happened to be scheduled for the same weekend. From there the discussion moves on to the latest developments in DIY soft robotics, the challenge of running Linux on 8-pin ICs, hardware mods to improve WiFi reception on cheap ESP32 development boards, and what's keeping old smartphones from being reused as general purpose computers.
You'll also hear about Command and Conquer: Red Alert running on the Pi Pico 2, highly suspect USB-C splitters, and producing professional looking PCBs at home with a fiber laser. Stick around to the end to hear about the current state of non-Google web browsers, and a unique new machine that can engrave circuit boards with remarkable accuracy.
Check out the links over on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up across the (stupid, lousy) time zones to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous week.
Again, no news is good news. On What's That Sound, Kristina didn't get close at all, but at least had a guess this time. If you think you can identify the sound amid all the talking, you could win a Hackaday Podcast t-shirt!
After that, it's on to the hacks and such, beginning with a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation when it comes to a pair of formerly-cloud music players. We take a look at a crazy keyboard hack, some even crazier conductive string, and a perfectly cromulent list of 70 DIY synths on one wild webpage. Finally, we rethink body art with LEDs, and take a look at a couple of printing techniques that are a hundred years or so apart in their invention.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
It might not be Pi Day anymore, but Elliot and Dan got together for the approximately 100*Pi-th episode of the Podcast to run through the week's coolest hacks. Ultrasound seemed to be one of the themes, with a deep dive into finding bugs with sonar as well as using sound to cut the cheese -- and cakes and pies, too. The aesthetics of PCBs were much on our minds, too, from full-color graphics on demand to glow-in-the-dark silkscreens. Is automation really needed to embed fiber optics in concrete? Absolutely!
How do you put plasma in a bottle? Apparently, with kombucha, Nichrome, and silicone. If you need to manage your M:TG cards, scribble on the walls, or build a mechanical chase light, we've got the details. And what exactly is a supercomputer? We can't define it, but we know one when we see it.
Check out all the links over at Hackday!
We're firmly in Europe this week on the Hackaday podcast, as Elliot Williams and Jenny List are freshly returned from Berlin and Hackaday Europe. A few days of mingling with the Hackaday community, going through mild panic over badges and SAOs, and enjoying the unique atmosphere of that city.
After discussing the weekend's festivities we dive right into the hacks, touching on the coolest of thermal cameras, wildly inefficient but very entertaining wireless power transfer, and a restrospective on the capacitor plague from the early 2000s. Was it industrial espionage gone wrong, or something else? We also take a moment to consider spring PCB cnnectors, as used by both one of the Hackaday Europe SAOs, and a rather neat PCB resistance decade box, before looking at a tryly astounding PCB blinky that sets a new miniaturisation standard.
In our quick roundup the standouts are a 1970s British kit synthesiser and an emulated 6502 system written in shell script, and in the can't-miss section we look at a new contender fro the smallest microcontroller, and the posibility that a century of waste coal ash may conceal a fortune in rare earth elements.
Follow the links over at Hackaday.
We're firmly in Europe this week on the Hackaday podcast, as Elliot Williams and Jenny List are freshly returned from Berlin and Hackaday Europe. A few days of mingling with the Hackaday community, going through mild panic over badges and SAOs, and enjoying the unique atmosphere of that city.
After discussing the weekend's festivities we dive right into the hacks, touching on the coolest of thermal cameras, wildly inefficient but very entertaining wireless power transfer, and a restrospective on the capacitor plague from the early 2000s. Was it industrial espionage gone wrong, or something else? We also take a moment to consider spring PCB cnnectors, as used by both one of the Hackaday Europe SAOs, and a rather neat PCB resistance decade box, before looking at a tryly astounding PCB blinky that sets a new miniaturisation standard.
In our quick roundup the standouts are a 1970s British kit synthesiser and an emulated 6502 system written in shell script, and in the can't-miss section we look at a new contender fro the smallest microcontroller, and the posibility that a century of waste coal ash may conceal a fortune in rare earth elements.
Follow the links over at Hackaday.
We're firmly in Europe this week on the Hackaday podcast, as Elliot Williams and Jenny List are freshly returned from Berlin and Hackaday Europe. A few days of mingling with the Hackaday community, going through mild panic over badges and SAOs, and enjoying the unique atmosphere of that city.
After discussing the weekend's festivities we dive right into the hacks, touching on the coolest of thermal cameras, wildly inefficient but very entertaining wireless power transfer, and a restrospective on the capacitor plague from the early 2000s. Was it industrial espionage gone wrong, or something else? We also take a moment to consider spring PCB cnnectors, as used by both one of the Hackaday Europe SAOs, and a rather neat PCB resistance decade box, before looking at a tryly astounding PCB blinky that sets a new miniaturisation standard.
In our quick roundup the standouts are a 1970s British kit synthesiser and an emulated 6502 system written in shell script, and in the can't-miss section we look at a new contender fro the smallest microcontroller, and the posibility that a century of waste coal ash may conceal a fortune in rare earth elements.
Follow the links over at Hackaday.
Elliot does the podcast on the road to Supercon Europe, and Al is in the mood for math and nostalgia this week. Listen in and find out what they were reading on Hackaday this week.
The guys talked about the ESP-32 non-backdoor and battery fires. Then it was on to the hacks.
Self-balancing robots and satellite imaging were the appetizers, but soon they moved on to Kinect cameras in the modern day. Think you can't travel at the speed of light? Turns out that maybe you already are.
Did you know there was a chatbot in 1957? Well, sort of. For the can't miss stories: watches monitor your heart and what does the number e really mean?
Check out the links on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start off the episode by announcing Arduino co-founder David Cuartielles will be taking the stage as the keynote speaker at Hackaday Europe. In his talk, we'll hear about a vision of the future where consumer electronics can be tossed in the garden and turned into compost instead of sitting in a landfill for the next 1,000 years or so.
You'll also hear about a particularly clever manipulation of Apple's AirTag infrastructure, how a classic kid's toy was turned into a unique display with the help of computer vision, and the workarounds required to keep older Global Positioning System (GPS) hardware up and running. They'll also cover DIY toasters, extracting your data from a smart ring before the manufacturer can sell it, a LEGO interferometer, and a new feature added to the Bus Pirate 5's already impressive list of capabilities.
Capping off the episode there's a discussion about the surprising (or depending on how you think about it, unsurprising) amount of hardware that was on display at FOSDEM this year, and the history of one of man's most infernal creations, the shopping cart wheel lock.
Check out the links over at Hackaday, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up in a secret location with snacks to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous week.
First up in the news, and there's a lot of it: we announced the Hackaday Europe 2025 workshops and a few more speakers, though the big keynote announcement is still to come. In case you missed it, KiCad 9 moved up into the pro league, and finally, we're hiring, so come join us in the dungeon.
On What's That Sound, Kristina didn't get close at all, but at least had a guess this time. That's okay, though, because nobody got it right! We're still giving a t-shirt away to [AlwaysTheWrongAnswer], though, probably because Elliot has a thing for using random number generators.
Then it's on to the hacks and such beginning with a beautiful handheld compass CNC and cyanotype prints made with resin printer's UV light. After that, we take a look at open-source random numbers, a 3D-printed instant camera, and a couple of really cool cyberdecks. Finally, we discuss whether DOOM is doomed as the port of choice in this day and age, and kvetch about keyboards.
This week Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start things off with updates on the rapidly approaching Hackaday Europe and the saga of everyone's favorite 3D printed boat.
From there they'll cover an impressive method of seeing the world via WiFi, Amazon's latest changes to the Kindle ecosystem, and an alternate reality in which USB didn't take over the peripheral world. You'll also hear about a multi-level hack that brings the joys of Linux into the world of Animal Crossing, 3D printed circuit components, and the imminent release of KiCAD 9.
Stick around until the end to learn about a unique hardened glass from East Germany and the disappointing reality of modern voice control systems.
It's Valentine's Day today, and what better way to capture your beloved's heart than by settling down together and listening to the Hackaday Podcast! Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List for this week's roundup of what's cool in the world of hardware. We start by reminding listeners that Hackaday Europe is but a month away, and that a weekend immersed in both hardware hacking and the unique culture offered by the city of Berlin can be yours.
The stand-out hack of the week is introduced by Elliot, Henrik Forstén's synthetic aperture radar system mounted on a cheap quadcopter, pushing the limits of construction, design, and computation to create landscape imagery of astounding detail. Most of us will never create our own SAR system, but we can all learn a lot about this field from his work. Meanwhile Jenny brings us Sylvain Munaut's software defined radio made using different projects that are part of Tiny Tapeout ASICs. The SDR isn't the best one ever, but for us it represents a major milestone in which Tiny Tapeout makes the jump from proof of concept to component. We look forward to more of this at more reasonable prices in the future. Beyond that we looked at the porting of Google Find My to the ESP32, how to repair broken zippers, and tuning in to ultrasonic sounds. Have fun listening, and come back next week for episode 309!
The answer is: Elliot Williams, Al Williams, and a dozen or so great hacks. The question? What do you get this week on the Hackaday podcast? This week's hacks ran from smart ring hacking, to computerized tattoos. Keyboards, PCBs, and bicycles all make appearances, too.
Be sure to try to guess the "What's that sound?" You could score a cool Hackaday Podcast T.
For the can't miss this week, Hackaday talks about how to dispose of the body in outer space and when setting your ship's clock involved watching a ball drop.
It was Dan and Elliot behind the microphones today for a transatlantic look at the week in hacks. There was a bucket of news about AI, kicked off by Deepseek suddenly coming into the zeitgeist and scaring the pants off investors for... reasons?
No matter, we're more interested in the tech anyway, such as a deep dive into deep space communications from a backyard antenna farm that's carefully calibrated to give the HOA fits. We got down and dirty with capacitors, twice even, and looked at a clever way to stuff two websites into one QR code. It's all Taylor, all the time on every channel of the FM band, which we don't recommend you do (for multiple reasons) but it's nice to know you can.
Plus, great kinetic art project, but that tooling deserves a chef's kiss. Finally, we wrap up with our Can't Miss articles where Jenny roots for the right to repair, and Al gives us the finger(1).
This week, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos joined forces and Wonder-Twin rings to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous week.
First up in the news: Big boo to Bambu Labs, who have tried to clarify their new authentication scheme and probably only dug themselves in deeper with their customers.
On What's That Sound, Kristina didn't get close at all, but at least had a guess this time. Do know what it is? Let us know, and if you're right and your number comes up, you can keep warm in a limited edition Hackaday Podcast t-shirt.
Then it's on to the hacks and such beginning with a rather nice reverse-engineering of the Yamaha PRS-E433 keyboard, which led to a slice of Bad Apple playing on the tiny screen.
After that, we take a look at an NES musical instrument, how to make wires explode with energy, and a really cool space mouse that uses flexures. Finally, we talk about a piece of forgotten Internet history, and a whole bunch of keyboards.
Check out the links over at Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
It's podcast time again, and this week Dan sat down with Elliot for a look back at all the cool hacks we've written about. We started off talking about Hackaday Europe, which is coming up in March -- seems unlikely that it's just around the corner, but there it is. There's also good news: the Hack Chat is back, and we started things off with a bang as Eben Upton stopped by to talk all things Pi. Separately, we talked about fault injection attacks, including how to find the hidden cup of 0xC0FFEE in an RP2350.
We saw a very cool piece of LED jewelry that does a fluid simulation, a direct conversion radio that's all laid out in front of you, and the scrunchiest mechanical digital clock you'll ever see. We saw blinkenlights for blinkenlights' sake, all the ways to put threads in your prints, and how to ditch to coax and wire up your antennas with Cat 6 cable. Plus, it's an Al Williams twofer in the Can't-Miss Articles, with a look back at life before GPS and how you can tune into digital ham radio, no radio required.
As the holiday party season fades away into memory and we get into the swing of the new year, Elliot Williams is joined on the Hackaday Podcast by Jenny List for a roundup of what's cool in the world of Hackaday. In the news this week, who read the small print and noticed that Benchy has a non-commercial licence? As the takedown notices for Benchy derivatives fly around, we muse about the different interpretations of open source, and remind listeners to pay attention when they choose how to release their work.
The week gave us enough hacks to get our teeth into, with Elliot descending into the rabbit hole of switch debouncing, and Jenny waxing lyrical over a crystal oscillator. Adding self-driving capability to a 30-year-old Volvo caught our attention too, as did the intriguing Cheap Yellow Display, an ESP32 module that has (almost) everything. Meanwhile in the quick hacks, a chess engine written for a processor architecture implemented entirely in regular expressions impressed us a lot, as did the feat of sending TOSLINK across London over commercial fibre networks. Enjoy the episode, and see you again next week!
And check out the links over at Hackaday.
After a bit too much eggnog, Elliot Williams and Al Williams got together to see what Hackaday had been up to over the holiday. Turns out, quite a bit. There was a lot to cover, but the big surprise was the "What's that Sound" competition. Do you know who had the correct answer from the last show? No one! So they guys did the right thing and drew from all the entrants for a coveted Hackaday Podcast T-shirt.
Back to the hacks, you'll hear about USB-C and the EU, what to do when the Kickstarter product you had your heart set on doesn't deliver, and a very strange way to hack some power grids wirelessly.
If you are interested in physics cameras, modifying off-the-shelf gear, or a fresh approach to color 3D printing, they'll talk about that, too. Finally, you can find out what Tom Nardi thought of Hackaday in the year past, and if your next ocean voyage will have to stop for a charge.
Hackaday is having a happy holiday, and we hope you are too! We'll be back next Friday, so stay tuned.
Twas the week before Christmas when Elliot and Dan sat down to unwrap a pre-holiday bundle of hacks. We kicked things off in a seasonally appropriate way with a PCB Christmas card that harvests power from your microwave or WiFi router, plus has the potential to be a spy tool. We learned how to grow big, beautiful crystals quickly, just in case you need some baubles for the tree or a nice pair of earrings.
Speaking of last-minute gifts, perhaps you could build a packable dipole antenna, a very durable PCB motor, or a ridiculously bright Fibonacci simple add-on for your latest conference badge.
We also looked into taking a shortcut to homebrew semiconductors via scanning electron microscopes, solved the mystery of early CD caddies, and discussed the sad state of table saw safety and the lamentable loss of fingers, or fractions thereof.
This week on the big 300th episode, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos teamed up to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous week. So basically, business as usual.
First up in the news: it's time for the Hackaday Europe 2025 call for proposals! Do you have a tale of hardware, firmware, or software that must be shared with the Hackaday crowd? Then this is your chance to regale us with a 20- or 40-minute talk. You know we love to hear new voices, so be sure to consider proposing a talk.
On What's That Sound, it's a results show week. Congratulations to [Kelvin] who was one of many that correctly identified it as the Wii startup sound. Kristina will just be over here with her Pikachu64 with the light-up cheeks.
Then it's on to the hacks and such beginning with a rather nice reverse-engineering of the PS1, which surprisingly did it with a two-sided board. Then it's on to a smartphone home server, magic eye images in a spreadsheet, and the math behind the music of 80s. Finally, we talk about disc cameras, the hovercraft revolution, and a whole mess of keyboards.
Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
On this episode of the Hackaday Podcast, Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi talk about the optical witchcraft behind holograms, the finer points of designing 3D printable threads, and the challenges of switching your local network over to IPv6. They'll also cover how a clever software patch improves the graphics in a flight simulator from the 1990s, and why spacecraft flying into orbit powered by the SABRE engine is going to remain a dream for now.
From there you'll hear about a reproduction VW gas gauge that works better than the real thing, custom ball screws, and the latest and greatest in homebrew battery charging. Finally, they'll cap the episode off by exploring the conundrum that's heating up London's Underground, and diving into the (mostly) fictional history of teleportation.
Check out the links on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week's Hackaday podcast has a European feel, as Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List for a look at the week's happenings in the world of cool hardware hacks. Starting with the week's news, those Redbox vending machines continue to capture the attention of hackers everywhere, and in the race to snag one before they're carted off for recycling someone has provided the missing hardware manual in the form of a wiki. Europeans can only look on wistfully. Then there's the curious case of life on the asteroid sample, despite the best efforts of modern science those pesky earth bacteria managed to breach all their anti-contamination measures. Anyone who's had a batch of homebrew go bad feels their pain.
The week provided plenty of hacks, with the team being wowed by [Bitluni]'s CRT-like laser projector, then the many ingenious ways to 3D-print a hinge, and perhaps one of the most unforgiving environments in the home for a piece of robotics. Meanwhile our appetite for cool stuff was sated by an entire family of Japanese games consoles we'd never heard of, and the little voltage reference whose data sheet also had an audio amplifier circuit. Finishing up, our colleague Arya has many unorthodox uses for a USB-C cable, and we have a frank exchange of views about Linux audio.
Check out all the links, and by all means, give us a roasting in the comments!
This week on the Podcast, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos joined forces to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous week.
First up in the news: Elliot was at Electronica and spotted a wild Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5. And just as excitingly, FreeCAD has finally reached version 1.0, which means it's stable and ready for real work.
Kristina is getting tired of losing at What's That Sound, so she'll have to come up with some to stump you all. Can you get this week's sound? If you can, and your number comes up, you get a special Hackaday Podcast t-shirt.
Then it's on to the hacks and such, but first, there's even more news and opinion to be had in Tom's review of Prusa's new printer, which happens to be closed-source. Then we'll discuss another printer that prints upside-down, an elegant cyberdeck, and a cyberpunk pocket watch. Finally, we talk about the Great Redbox Cleanup, and take a look at man-made stalactites.
In this episode you'll get to hear not one, not two, but three Hackaday Editors! Now that the dust has mostly settled from the 2024 Hackaday Supercon, Al Williams joins Elliot and Tom to compare notes and pick out a few highlights from the event. But before that, the week's discussion will cover the questionable patents holding back a promising feature for desktop 3D printers, a new digital book from NODE, and the surprisingly limited history of welding in space. You'll also hear about the challenge of commercializing free and open source software, the finicky optics of the James Web Space Telescope, and the once exciting prospect of distributing software via pages of printed barcodes.
With Superconference 2024 in the books, Dan joined Elliot, fresh off his flight back from Pasadena, to look through the week (or two) in hacks. It was a pretty good crop, too, despite all the distractions and diversions. We checked out the cutest little quadruped, a wireless antenna for wireless communications, a price-tag stand-in for paper calendars, and a neat way to test hardware and software together.
We take the closest look yet at why Arecibo collapsed, talk about Voyager's recent channel-switching glitch, and find out how to put old Android phones back in action. There's smear-free solder paste application, a Mims-worthy lap counter, and a PCB engraver that you've just got to see. We wrap things up with a look at Gentoo and pay homage to the TV tubes of years gone by -- the ones in the camera, for the TV sets.
With the 2024 Hackaday Supercon looming large on the horizon, Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start this episode off by talking about this year's badge and its focus on modular add-ons. From there they'll go over the results of a particularly challenging installment of What's that Sound?, discuss a promising DIY lathe that utilizes 3D printed parts filled with concrete, and ponder what the implosion of Redbox means for all of their disc-dispensing machines that are still out in the wild.
You'll also hear about custom macropads, lifting SMD pins, and how one hacker is making music with vintage electronics learning kits. Finally, they'll reassure listeners that the shifting geopolitical landscape probably won't mean the end of Hackaday.io anytime soon, and how some strategically placed pin headers can completely change how you approach designing your own PCBs.
Check out the links over at Hackaday, and tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week on the Podcast, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos joined forces to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous week.
First up in the news: we've extended the 2024 Supercon Add-On contest by a week! That's right, whether you were held up by Chinese fall holidays or not, here's your chance to get in on this action.
We love to see the add-ons people make for the badge every year, so this time around we're really embracing the standard. The best SAOs will get a production run and they'll be in the swag bag at Hackaday Europe 2025.
What's That Sound pretty much totally stumped Kristina once again, although she kind of earned a half shirt. Can you get it? Can you figure it out? Can you guess what's making that sound? If you can, and your number comes up, you get a special Hackaday Podcast t-shirt.
Then it's on to the hacks, beginning with what actually causes warping in 3D prints, and a really cool display we'd never heard of. Then we'll discuss the power of POKE when it comes to live coding music on the Commodore64, and the allure of CRTs when it comes to vintage gaming. Finally, we talk Hackaday comments and take a look at a couple of keyboards.
Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Here we are in October, improbably enough, and while the leaves start to fall as the goblins begin to gather, Elliot and Dan took a break from the madness to talk about all the wonderful hacks that graced our pages this week. If there was a theme this week, it was long-term projects, like the multiple years one hacker spent going down dead ends in the quest for DIY metal 3D printing. Not to be outdone, another hacker spent seven years building a mirrorless digital camera that looks like a commercial product. And getting a solderless PCB to do the blinkenlight thing took a long time too.
Looking to eliminate stringing in your 3D prints? Then you'll want to avoid the "pause and attach" approach, which intentionally creates strings in your prints. Wondering if you can 3D print bearings? You can, but you probably shouldn't unless you have a particular use in mind. And what happens when you have an infinitely large supply of Lego? Why, you build a Turing machine on steroids, of course.
Finally, we take a look at this week's "Can't-Miss" articles with a look into plastic recycling and why we can't have nice things yet, and we take a trip out into orbit and examine the ins and outs of Lagrange points.
And a little mea culpa from the editing desk: Sorry the podcast is coming out late this week. Audacity ate my files. If you're ever in a similar circumstance, you can probably halfway save your bacon with audacity-project-tools. Ask me how I know.
Check out the links over at Hackaday.
What have you missed on Hackaday this week? Elliot Williams and Al Williams compare notes on their favorites from the week, and you are invited. The guys may have said too much about the Supercon badge this year -- listen in for a few hints about what it will be about.
For hacks, you'll hear about scanning tunneling microscopes, power management for small Linux systems, and lots of inertial measurement units. The guys talked about a few impossible hacks for consumer electronics, from hacking a laptop, to custom cell phones.
Of course, there are plenty more long-form articles of the week, including a brief history of what can go wrong on a spacewalk and how to get the lead out (of the ground). Don't forget to take a stab at the What's That Sound competition and maybe score a sweet Hackaday Podcast T-shirt.
Check out the links over on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start things off by acknowledging an incredible milestone: 20 years of Hackaday! Well, probably. When a website gets to be this old, it's a little hard to nail down when exactly things kicked off, but it seems like September of 2004 is about right. They'll also go over the latest updates for the fast-approaching Hackaday Supercon, and announce the winner of another tough What's That Sound challenge.
From there, the conversation makes its way from the fascinating electrically-activated adhesive holding the latest iPhone together to pulsed-power lasers and a high flying autonomous glider designed and built by a teenager. You'll also hear about 3D printing on acrylic, home biohacking, and the Tiny Tool Kit Manifesto. Stick around to the end to hear the duo discuss the fine art of good documentation, and an incredible bodge job from Arya Voronova.
Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week on the Podcast, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos joined forces to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous week.
First up in the news: we've announced the 2024 Tiny Games Contest winners! We asked you to show us your best tiny game, whether that means tiny hardware, tiny code, or a tiny BOM, and you did so in spades. Congratulations to all the winners and Honorable Mentions, and thanks to DigiKey, Supplyframe, and all who entered!
We also announced the first round of Supercon speakers, so if you haven't gotten your ticket yet, now's the second best time.
But wait, there's more! We're already a few weeks into the next contest, where we want you to show us your best Simple Supercon Add-On. We love to see the add-ons people make for the badge every year, so this time around we're really embracing the standard. The best SAOs will get a production run and they'll be in the swag bag at Hackaday Europe 2025.
Then it's on to What's That Sound, which completely stumped Kristina once again. Can you get it? Can you figure it out? Can you guess what's making that sound? If you can, and your number comes up, you get a special Hackaday Podcast t-shirt.
Now it's on to the hacks, beginning with non-planar ironing for smooth prints, and a really neat business card that also plays tiny games. Then we'll discuss USB modems, cool casts for broken wrists, and archiving data on paper. Finally, we ask two big questions -- where do you connect the shield, and what's the Next Big Thing gonna be? Inquiring minds want to know.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
It's Friday the 13th, and despite having to dodge black cats and poorly located ladders, Elliot and Dan were able to get together and run down the best hacks of the first week of September.
Our luck was pretty good, too, seeing how we stumbled upon a coffee table that walks your drink over to you on Strandbeest legs, a potato that takes passable photographs, and a cool LED display three times better than a boring old seven-segment.
If you've never heard of the Voynich manuscript, you're in luck too, because we got a chance to look inside this medieval comic book literally, with multispectral analysis. Is your cruise ship too short? No worries, just lop it in two and add a section. Speaking of cutting things up, that's what you need to do to see how your plus-size DIY rocket engine performed after test firing.
And finally, it was a sweep for Jenny this week with our "Can't Miss" articles, where she both pines for a simpler, smaller web experience and wonders what the future holds for biomass fuels.
Elliot Williams is back from vacation, and he and Al Williams got together to talk about the best Hackaday posts from the last week. Of course, the Raspberry Pi RP2350 problem generated a bit of discussion.
On a lighter note, they saw laser lawn care, rooting WiFi devices, and some very black material made from wood. Need more current-sinking capability from a 555? They talked about that, too, along with a keyboard you use with your feet.
The guys had a lot to say about Klipper, why you might want to move your 3D printer to it, and the FCC's stance on ham radio antennas in restricted neighborhoods. Oh, and don't forget to play "What's that Sound?"
Even when the boss is away, the show must go on, so Dan slid back behind the guest mic and teamed up with Tom to hunt down the freshest of this week's hacks. It was a bit of a chore, with a couple of computer crashes and some side-quests down a few weird rabbit holes, but we managed to get things together in the end.
Tune in and you'll hear us bemoan HOAs and celebrate one ham's endless battle to outwit them, no matter what the golf cart people say about his antennas. Are you ready to say goodbye to the magnetic stripe on your credit card? We sure are, but we're not holding our breath yet. Would you 3D print a 55-gallon drum? Probably not, but you almost can with a unique Cartesian-polar hybrid printer. And, if you think running MS-DOS on a modern laptop is hard, guess again -- or, maybe you just have to get really lucky.
We also took a look at a digital watch with a beautiful display, a hacked multimeter, modern wardriving tools, switchable magnets, and debate the eternal question of v-slot wheels versus linear bearings. And finally, you won't want to miss our look at what's new with 3D scanning, and the first installment of Kristina's new "Boss Byproducts" series, which delves into the beauty of Fordite.
This week on the Podcast, we have something a little different for you. Elliot is on vacation, so Tom was in charge of running the show and he had Kristina in the hot seat.
First up in the news: the 2024 Tiny Games Challenge is still underway and has drawn an impressive 44 entries as of this writing. You have until 9AM PDT on September 10th to show us your best tiny game, whether that means tiny hardware, tiny code, or a tiny BOM.
Then it's on to What's That Sound, which Tom and Kristina came up with together, so there will be no pageantry about guessing. But can you get it? Can you figure it out? Can you guess what's making that sound? If you can, and your number comes up, you get a special Hackaday Podcast t-shirt.
Now it's on to the hacks, beginning with an open-source liquid-fueled rocket and a really cool retro trackball laptop. Then we'll discuss screwdriver mange, the Wow! signal, and whether you're using you're calipers incorrectly. Finally, we look at a laptop that that isn't really a laptop, and one simple trick to keep things aligned on your laser engraver.
The summer doldrums are here, but that doesn't mean that Elliot and Dan couldn't sift through the week's hack and find the real gems. It was an audio-rich week, with a nifty microsynth, music bounced off the moon, and everything you always wanted to know about Raspberry Pi audio but were afraid to ask. We looked into the mysteries of waveguides and found a math-free way to understand how they work, and looked at the way Mecanum wheels work in the most soothing way possible.
We also each locked in on more classic hacks, Elliot with a look at a buffer overflow in Tony Hawks Pro Skater and Dan with fault injection user a low-(ish) cost laser setup. From Proxxon upgrades to an RC submarine to Arya's portable router build, we've got plenty of material for your late summer listening pleasure.
Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams reflect on the fact that, as humans, we have--at most--two eyes and no warp drives. While hacking might not be the world's most dangerous hobby, you do get to work with dangerous voltages, temperatures, and frickin' lasers. Light features prominently, as the guys talk about LED data interfaces, and detecting faster-than-light travel.
There's also a USB sniffer, abusing hot glue, and some nostalgia topics ranging from CRT graphics to Apollo workstations (which have nothing directly to do with NASA). The can't miss articles this week cover hacking you and how you make the red phone ring in the middle of a nuclear war.
Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
In this episode, the CrowdStrike fiasco has Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi pondering the fragility of our modern infrastructure. From there the discussion moves on to robotic sailboats, the evolving state of bespoke computers, and the unique capabilities of the Super Nintendo cartridge. You'll also hear about cleaning paintings with lasers, the advantages of electronic word processors, stacking 3D printed parts, and the joys of a nice data visualization. They'll wrap the episode up by marveling at the techniques required to repair undersea fiber optic cables, and the possibilities (and frustrations) of PCB panelization using multiple designs.
Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week on the Podcast, it's Kristina's turn to bloviate alongside Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams. First up in the news: our fresh new contest has drawn three entries already! That's right, the 2024 Tiny Games Challenge is underway. You have until September 10th to show us your best tiny game, whether that means tiny hardware, tiny code, or a tiny BOM.
Then it's on to What's That Sound, which sounded familiar to Kristina, but she couldn't place it. Can you get it? Can you figure it out? Can you guess what's making that sound? If you can, and your number comes up, you get a special Hackaday Podcast t-shirt.
Then it's on to the hacks, beginning with a hack to print metal and a way to weld wood, along with a photo-resistor-based, single-pixel camera. We'll talk desiccants carbon fiber, and Baron Harkonnen. Finally, we discuss the troubles of keeping hygroscopic materials from degrading, and have a klatch about Keebin' with Kristina.
Check out the links over on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Despite the summer doldrums, it was another big week in the hacking world, and Elliot sat down with Dan for a rundown. Come along for the ride as Dan betrays his total ignorance of soccer/football, much to Elliot's amusement. But it's all about keeping the human factor in sports, so we suppose it was worth it.
Less controversially, we ogled over a display of PCB repair heroics, analyzed a reverse engineering effort that got really lucky, and took a look at an adorable one-transistor ham transceiver. We also talked about ants doing surgery, picking locks with nitric acid, a damn cute dam, and how to build one of the world's largest machines from scratch in under a century. Plus, we answered the burning question: can a CRT be used as an audio amplifier? Yes, kind of, but please don't let the audiophiles know or we'll never hear the end of it.
Get your weekly fix of great hacks with your guides, Elliot Williams and Al Williams. This week, the guys talk about hacking airline WiFi, vanishing cloud services, and hobbies adjacent to hacking, such as general aviation. Things go into the weird and wonderful when the topic turns to cavity filters, driving LEDs with a candle, and thermite.
Quick hacks? Everything from vintage automated telescopes to home fusion reactors and ham radio mobile from a bicycle. Then there's the can't miss articles about the Solar Dynamics Observatory and an explainer about flash memory technology.
Check out the links over on Hackaday and leave your favorite hack of the week in the comments!
In this episode, Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi kick things off with a reminder about the impending deadline for Supercon talk and workshop proposals. From there discussion moves on to the absolutely incredible tale of two brothers who solved a pair of missing person cases with their homebrew underwater vehicle, false data sneaking into OctoPrint's usage statics, and an organic input device that could give the classic mouse a run for its money.
You'll also hear about cheap radar modules, open source Xbox mod chips, and lawnmowers from the grocery store. The episode wraps up with a look at the enduring mystique of perpetual motion devices, and the story of a legendary ship that might soon end up being turned into paper clips.
Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week on the Podcast, it's Kristina's turn to ramble on alongside Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams. First up in the news: Paul Allen's Living Computers Museum + Labs is being liquidated at auction after just 12 years of being open to the public. In Hackaday news, the 2024 Business Card Challenge ends next Tuesday, July 2nd, so this is your weekend to shine! Also, you've got about two weeks to get your talk proposals in for this year's Supercon. (Can you believe it's only four months away?)
Then it's on to What's That Sound, at which Kristina made a couple of close-but-no-cigar guesses. Can you get it? Can you figure it out? Can you guess what's making that sound? If you can, and your number comes up, you get a special Hackaday Podcast t-shirt.
Then it's on to the hacks, beginning with a $3 smartwatch that can run Python, and a completely DIY analog tape recording solution. We'll talk about making your wireless keyboard truly low power, all the steps you can take to produce perfect PCBs at home, and AI in a font. Finally, we talk about the dangers of a curious childhood, and talk about a dotcom hardware solution that could have gone far, given the right business model.
Check out the links and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
The week gone by was rich with fun hacks, and Elliot and Dan teamed up this time around to run them down for everyone. The focus this week seemed to trend to old hardware, from the recently revived Voyager 1 to a 1940s car radio, a homebrew instrument from 1979, a paper tape reader, and a 128k Mac emulator built from an RP2040.
Newer hacks include a 3D-printed bottle labeler, a very hackable smart ring, and lessons learned about programming robots. We also took a look at turning old cell phones into Linux machines, making sure climbing ropes don't let you down, and snooping on orbital junk with a cool new satellite.
We wrapped things up with a discussion of just how weird our solar system is, and Dan getting really jealous about Tom Nardi's recent trip to see the battleship New Jersey from an up close and personal perspective.
Head on over to Hackaday to check out the links and leave your thoughts!
Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi for a review of the best stories to grace the front page of Hackaday this week. Things kick off with the news about Raspberry Pi going public, and what that might mean for everyone's favorite single-board computer. From there they'll cover the technology behind communicating through mud, DIY pressure vessels, pushing the 1983 TRS-80 Model 100 to its limits, and the reality of 3D printing how that the hype has subsided. You'll also hear about modifying Nissan's electric vehicles, bringing new life to one of the GameCube's oddest peripherals, and an unusually intelligent kayak.
The episode wraps up with some interesting (or depressing) numbers that put into perspective just how much copper is hiding in our increasingly unused telephone network, and a look at how hardware hackers can bend the display technology that's used in almost all modern consumer electronics to our advantage.
Check out the links on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
What do capstans, direct conversion receivers, and fracking have in common? They were all topics Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams found fascinating this week. If you wonder what makes an electrical ground a ground, or what a theodolite is, you should check it out.
Al struck on on the What's That Sound, but [Ferric Bueler] didn't so he scores a highly-coveted Hackaday Podcast T-Shirt. Want one? Tune in next week for your chance.
This week, the hacks came fast and furious. Capstans, instead of gears, work well for 3D-printed mechanisms, a PI Pico can directly receive radio signals, and the guys saw a number of teardowns and reverse engineering triumphs. You'll also find solid-state heat pumps, flying wings, spectroscopy, and more.
The can't miss articles this week? Learn about theodolites, a surveying feat from ancient Greece, and how fracking works.
Head on over to Hackaday for the full links!
This week, it was Kristina's turn in the hot seat with Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams. First up in the news: Germany's solar expansion and a lot of wind have resulted in excess energy, which some people think is bad. In Hackaday news, the entries in the 2024 Business Card Challenge are really stacking up.
Then it's on to What's That Sound, which Kristina provided this week and managed to stump Elliot. Can you get it? Can you figure it out? Can you guess what's making that sound? If you can, and your number comes up, you get a special Hackaday Podcast t-shirt.
Then it's on to the hacks, beginning with an improved spectrometer that wasn't easy, and a rotary phone kitchen timer that kind of was. We'll talk about badges turned invitations, reinventing rotary switches, and dynamic button blobs. Finally, we get the lowdown on the state of nuclear fusion, and posit why chatting online isn't what it used to be.
Check out the links at Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
With Elliot off on vacation, Tom and Dan made a valiant effort to avoid the dreaded "clip show" and provide you with the tastiest hacker treats of the week. Did they succeed? That's not for us to say, but if you're interested in things like non-emulated N64 games and unnecessarily cool filament sensors, this just might be one to check out.
We also came across a noise suppressor for a leaf blower, giant antennae dangling from government helicopters, and a desktop-friendly wire EDM setup that just might change the face of machining. We waxed on about the difference between AI-generated code and just pulling routines from StackExchange, came to the conclusion that single-stage-to-orbit is basically just science fiction, and took a look at the latest eclipse from 80,000 feet, albeit a month after the fact.
What did Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams find interesting on Hackaday this week? Well, honestly, all the posts, but they had to pick some to share with you in the podcast below. There's news about SuperCon 2024, and failing insulin pumps. After a mystery sound, the guys jump into reverbing garden hoses, Z80s, and even ribbon cable repair.
Adaptive tech was big this week, with a braille reader for smartphones and an assistive knife handle. The quick hacks ranged from a typewriter that writes on toast to a professional-looking but homemade ham radio transceiver.
Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they get excited over the pocket-sized possibilities of the recently announced 2024 Business Card Challenge, and once again discuss their picks for the most interesting stories and hacks from the last week. There's cheap microcontrollers in highly parallel applications, a library that can easily unlock the world of Bluetooth input devices in your next project, some gorgeous custom flight simulator buttons that would class up any front panel, and an incredible behind the scenes look at how a New Space company designs a rocket engine from the ground up.
Stick around to hear about the latest 3D printed gadget that all the cool kids are fidgeting around with, a brain-computer interface development board for the Arduino, and a WWII-era lesson on how NOT to use hand tools. Finally, learn how veteran Hackaday writer Dan Maloney might have inadvertently kicked off a community effort to digitize rare documentation for NASA's Voyager spacecraft.
Check out the links on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, it was Kristina's turn in the hot seat with Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams. First up in the news -- the results are in for the 2024 Home Sweet Home Automation contest! First and second place went to some really gnarly, well-documented hacks, and third went to the cutest pill-dispensing robot you'll probably see before you hit the retirement home. Which was your favorite? Let us know in the comments.
Then it's on to What's That Sound. Kristina failed once again, but you will probably fare differently. Can you get it? Can you figure it out? Can you guess what's making that sound? If you can, and your number comes up, you get a special Hackaday Podcast t-shirt.
Then it's on to the hacks, beginning with a DIY cell phone sniffer and a pen that changed the world. Then we talk bullet time on a budget, the beautiful marriage of 3D printing and LEGO, and, oh yes, flexure whegs. Finally, we get the lowdown on extender probes, and posit why it's hard to set up time zones on the Moon, relatively speaking.
Check out the links over at Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Elliot and Dan got together to enshrine the week's hacks in podcast form, and to commiserate about their respective moms, each of whom recently fell victim to phishing attacks. It's not easy being ad hoc tech support sometimes, and as Elliot says, when someone is on the phone telling you that you've been hacked, he's the hacker. Moving on to the hacks, we took a look at a hacking roadmap for a cheap ham radio, felt the burn of AM broadcasts, and learned how to program old-school EPROMs on the cheap.
We talked about why having a smart TV in your house might not be so smart, especially for Windows users, and were properly shocked by just how bad wireless charging really is. Also, cheap wind turbines turn out to be terrible, barnacles might give a clue to the whereabouts of MH370, and infosec can really make use of cheap microcontrollers.
Head on over to Hackaday to check out the links or leave us comments!
What were some of the best posts on Hackaday last week? Elliot Williams and Al Williams decided there were too many to choose from, but they did take a sampling of the ones that caught their attention. This week's picks were an eclectic mix of everything from metal casting and plasma cutters to radio astronomy and space telescope budgets. In between? Some basic circuit design, 3D printing, games, dogs, and software tools. Sound confusing? It won't be after you listen to this week's podcast.
Check out the links on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Before Elliot Williams jumps on a train for Hackaday Europe, there was just enough time to meet up virtually with Tom Nardi to discuss their favorite hacks and stories from the previous week. This episode's topics include the potential benefits of having a dual-gantry 3D printer, using microcontrollers to build bespoke note taking gadgets, the exciting world of rock tumbling, and the proper care and maintenance required to keep your World War II battleship in shape.
They'll also go over some old school keyboard technologies, DIP chip repairs, and documenting celestial events with your home solar array. By the end you'll hear about the real-world challenges of putting artificial intelligence to work, and how you can safely put high-power lithium batteries to work in your projects without setting your house on fire.
Check out the links over on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think in the comments!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos convened once again to give the lowdown on this week's best hacks. First up in the news -- it's giga-sunset time for Gigaset IoT devices, which simultaneously became paperweights on March 29th. And all that Flipper Zero panic? It has spread to Australia, but still remains exactly that: panic.
Then it's on to What's That Sound. Kristina failed again, although she was in the right neighborhood. Can you get it? Can you figure it out? Can you guess what's making that sound? If you can, and your number comes up, you get a special Hackaday Podcast t-shirt.
Then it's on to the hacks, beginning with the terrifying news of an xz backdoor. From there, we marvel at a 1980s 'butler in a box' -- a voice-activated home automation system -- and at the idea of LoRa transmissions without a radio. Finally, we discuss why you don't want to piss off Trekkies, and whether AI has any place in tech support.
Check out the links on Hackaday to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
It was Dan's turn behind the mic with Elliot this time as we uncovered the latest from the world of hacking, and what an eclectic mix it was. It was slightly heavy on machining, with a look at mini-mills that are better than nothing, and a DIY DRO that's A-OK. We also kicked the nostalgia bucket over -- whatever that means -- and got a new twist on the old "65-in-1" concept, found hidden code in 80s music, and looked at color TV in the US and how it got that way. We've got ample alliteration about grep, thoughts about telling time on the Moon, and what does Canada have against the poor Flipper Zero, anyway?
Head on over to Hackaday for all the linky-links.
No need to wonder what stories Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams were reading this week. They'll tell you about them in this week's podcast. The guys revisit the McDonald's ice cream machine issue to start. This week, DIY voice assistants and home automation took center stage. But you'll also hear about AI chat models implemented as a spreadsheet, an old-school RC controller, and more.
How many parts does it take to make a radio? Not a crystal radio, a software-defined one. Less than you might think. Of course, you'll also need an antenna, and you can make one from lawn chair webbing.
In the can't miss articles, you'll hear about the problems with the x86 architecture and how they tried to find Martian radio broadcasts in the 1920s.
Miss any this week? Check out the links to follow along, and as always, leave you comments!
Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they go over their favorite hacks and stories from the past week. This episode starts off with an update on Hackaday Europe 2024, which is now less than a month away, and from there dives into wheelchairs with subscription plans, using classic woodworking techniques to improve your 3D printer’s slicer, and a compendium of building systems. You’ll hear about tools for finding patterns in hex dumps, a lusciously documented gadget for sniffing utility meters, a rare connector that works with both HDMI and DisplayPort, and a low-stress shortwave radio kit with an eye-watering price tag. Finally, they’ll take a close look at a pair of articles that promise to up your KiCAD game.
Check out the links on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up in a new disposable location to give the lowdown on this week's best hacks. First up in the news -- the Home Sweet Home Automation contest is still going strong. You've still got plenty of time, so get on over to Hackaday.IO and start your entry today. In the news, the UK is asking how powerful an electric bike should be (more than 250 Watts, certainly), and legal pressure from Nintendo has shut down two emulators.
Then it's on to What's That Sound. Kristina failed again, although she was pretty confident about her answer. Can you get it? Can you figure it out? Can you guess what's making that sound this week? If you can, and your number comes up, you get a special Hackaday Podcast t-shirt.
But then it's on to the hacks, beginning with a Wi-Fi toothbrush hack from [Aaron Christophel]. This can only mean the beginning of some epic toothbrush firmware, right? From there, we marvel at moving cat food, the ultimate bulk material, and the idea of spoofing a whole cloud of drones. Finally, we examine one of Jenny's Daily Drivers in the form of Damn Small Linux (the other DSL), and reminisce about dial-up (speaking of DSL).
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
It's a leap year, so Elliot and Dan put the extra day to good use tracking down all the hottest hacks from the past week and dorking out about them. There's big news in the KiCad community, and we talked about all the new features along with some old woes. Great minds think alike, apparently, since two different e-ink weather stations made the cut this week, as did a floating oscilloscope, an automated film-developing tank, and some DIY solar panels. We talked about a hacker who figured out that water makes a pretty good solar storage medium, and it's cheaper than lithium, another who knows that a crappy lathe is better than no lathe, and what every hacker should know about Ethernet. Is there a future for room-temperature superconductors? Maybe it just depends on how cold the room is.
Check out the links over on Hackaday.
Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams sat down to compare notes on their favorite Hackaday posts of the week. You can listen in on this week's podcast. The guys talked about the latest Hackaday contest and plans for Hackaday Europe. Plus, there's a what's that sound to try. Your guess can't be worse than Al's, so take a shot. You could win a limited-edition T-shirt.
In technical articles, Elliot spent the week reading about brushless motor design, twin-t oscillators, and a truly wondrous hack to reverse map a Nintendo Switch PCB. Al was more nostalgic, looking at the 555 and an old Radio Shack kit renewed. He also talked about a method to use SQL to retrieve information from Web APIs.
Quick hacks were a decided mix with everything from homemade potentiometers to waterproof 3D printing. Finally, the guys talked about Hackaday originals. Why don't we teach teens to drive with simulators? And why would you want to run CP/M -- the decades-old operating system -- under Linux?
Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi discuss all the week's best and most interesting hacks and stories, starting with Canada's misguided ban on the Flipper Zero for being too spooky. From there they'll look at the state-of-the-art in the sub-$100 3D printer category, Apple's latest "Right to Repair" loophole, running UNIX on the NES (and how it's different from Japan's Famicom), and the latency of various wireless protocols.
After singing the praises of the new Bus Pirate 5, discussion moves on to embedded Linux on spacecraft, artfully lifting IC pins, and the saga of the blue LED. Finally you'll hear the how and why behind electrical steel, and marvel at a Mach 10 missile that (luckily) never needed to be used.
Head on over to Hackaday and check out the links!
Last week, we held an Episode 256 celebration round-table, but Kristina and I also met afterwards to talk about all the week's hacks. That part didn't fit, but we didn't want to deprive you of your weekly hack fix either, so here they are!
For this week's episode, we did something super special -- we all convened to answer your burning questions about your hosts, both as hackers and as humans. We kick things off with a segment featuring a hearty round-table discussion between Elliot, Al, Dan, Kristina, and Tom. What's on our benches? What do we type on? Go find out!
None of us figured out What's That Sound though a few of us had some creative guesses. Can you guess the sound? There could be a t-shirt in it for ya.
Kristina and Elliot went on to have a normal podcast too, but since the round table section went so long, we'll process up that section and put it out early next week. Stay tuned!
This week, Dan joined Elliot for a review of the best and brightest hacks of the week in Episode 0xFF, which both of us found unreasonably exciting; it's a little like the base-2 equivalent of watching the odometer flip over to 99,999. If you know, you know. We had quite a bumper crop of coolness this week, which strangely included two artifacts from ancient Rome: a nanotech goblet of colloidal gold and silver, and a perplexing dodecahedron that ends up having a very prosaic explanation -- probably. We talked about a weird antenna that also defies easy description, saw a mouse turned into the world's worst camera, and learned how 3D-printed signs are a whole lot easier than neon, and not half bad looking either. As always, we found time to talk about space, like the legacy of Ingenuity and whatever became of inflatable space habitats. Back on Earth, there's DIY flux, shorts that walk you up the mountain, and more about USB-C than you could ever want to know.
And don't forget that to celebrate Episode 256 next week, we'll be doing a special AMA segment where we'll get all the regular podcast crew together to answer your questions about life, the universe, and everything. If you've got a burning question for Elliot, Tom, Kristina, Al, or Dan, put it down in the comment section and we'll do our best to extinguish it.
This week Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams chew the fat about the Haier IOT problem, and all other top Hackaday stories of the week. Want to prove your prowess at C programming? Take a quiz! Or marvel at some hairy display reverse engineering or 3D-printed compressor screws. On the lighter side, there's an immense water rocket.
After Al waxes nostalgic about the world of DOS Extenders and extended memory, the guys talk about detective work: First detecting AI-written material, and finally, a great detective story about using science to finally (maybe) crack the infamous DB Cooper hijacking case.
Follow along with the links over at Hackaday. Don't forget to tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start things off with a traffic report from the Moon, which has suddenly become a popular destination for wayward robots.
[caption id="attachment_657278" align="alignright" width="300"] Anonymizing an ATtiny85 via laser[/caption]
From there, they'll go over a fire-tending contraption that's equal parts madness and brilliance, two decades of routers being liberated by OpenWRT, impressive feats of chip decapping, and USB-C's glorious rise to power.
You'll also hear about the latest developments in laptop RAM, exploits against the flash encryption used on the ESP32, and Android powered oscilloscopes. The duo will wrap things up with horror stories from the self-checkout aisle, and a look at the fantastical rolling power station that Dan Maloney has been building in his driveway.
Check out the links over at Hackaday, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up to discuss the best hacks of the previous week. It's CES time once again in Las Vegas, and you know what that means -- some wacky technologies like this AI pet door that rejects dead mice.
Then it's on to What's That Sound, which Kristina managed to nail for once. Can you get it? Can you figure it out? Can you guess what's making that sound this week? If you can, and your number comes up, you get a special Hackaday Podcast t-shirt.
But then it's on to the hacks, beginning with a new keyboard from [Joe Scotto] and an exploration of all you can do with an LED strip, like 1D fireworks and roller coasters without any moving parts. From there, we marvel at the ability of sound waves to extinguish flames, and the tech behind life as a quadriplegic. Finally, we examine not one, but two of Jenny List's finely-crafted rants, one about web browsers, and the other about the responsible use of new technology.
Check out the links over at Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Welcome to 2024! This time around, Elliot and Dan ring in a new year of awesome hacks with quite an eclectic mix. We kick things off with a Pluto pity party and find out why the tiny ex-planet deserved what it got. What do you do if you need to rename a bunch of image files? You rope a local large-language model in for the job, of course. We'll take a look at how pinball machines did their thing before computers came along, take a fractal dive into video feedback, and localize fireworks with a fleet of Raspberry Pi listening stations.
Ever wonder what makes a GPS receiver tick? The best way to find out might be to build one from scratch. Looking for some adventure? A ride on an electroluminescent surfboard might do, or perhaps a DIY "Vomit Comet" trip would be more your style. And make sure you stick around for our discussion on attempts to optimize surgery efficiency, and our look back at 2023's top trends in the hardware world.
Check out all the links over at Hackaday!
This week in the Podcast, Elliot Williams is off at Chaos Communication Congress, hearing tales of incredible reverse engineering that got locomotives back up and running, while Al Williams is thinking over what happened in 2023. There’s a lot of “how things work” in this show, from data buoys to sewing machines to the simulated aging of ICs.
Whether you’re into stacking bricks, stacking Pi Picos, or stacking your 3D prints to make better use of precious bed space, this episode is for you. Enjoy.
And as always, check out the links over at Hackaday, and let us know what you think in the comments!
'Twas the podcast before Christmas, and all through the house, the best hacks of the week are dancing around Elliot and Tom's heads like sugar-plums. Whatever that means.
Before settling their brains in for a long winter's nap, they'll talk about the open source software podcast that now calls Hackaday home, the latest firmware developments for Google's Stadia controller, high-definition cat videos from space, and upgrades for the surprisingly old-school battery tech that powers the Toyota Prius.
Out on the lawn, expect a clatter about the the state-of-the-art in DIY camera technology, the acoustic properties of hot chocolate, and a storage media from the 1990s that even Al Williams had never heard of.
Finally, after tearing open the shutters and throwing up the sash, the episode wraps up with a discussion about wiring techniques that let you leave the soldering iron at home, and the newest chapter in the long history of transferring data via parachute. Miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer sold separately.
Check out the links over on Hackaday.
This week, Elliot sat down with Dan for the penultimate podcast of 2023, and what a week it was. We started with news about Voyager; at T+46 years from launch, any news tends to be bad, and the latest glitch has everyone worried. We also took a look at how close the OSIRIS-REx mission came to ending in disaster, all for want of consistent labels. Elliot was charmed by a Cthulhu-like musical instrument, while Dan took a shine to a spark gap transmitter that's probably on the FCC's naughty list.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishably from magic, and we looked at the laser made possible by the magician-in-chief himself, C.V. Raman. Why would you stuff a PSU full of iron filings? Probably for the same reason you'd print fake markings on a 6502 chip. We also took a look at the chemistry and history of superglue, a paper tape reader that could lop off your arm, and rocket gas stations in space.
How about checking out the links over at Hackaday? That's what we'd do.
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up to discuss the best hacks of the previous week. We have no nerdy news this week, but is that necessarily a bad thing?
Speaking of nothingness, we have no winner for What's That Sound? because all six people who responded were wrong. Was the sound of Clippy too obscure?
But then it's on to the hacks, beginning with an awesome autonomous excavator that, among other things, lays boulders algorithmically to build load-bearing walls without any mortar or cement. From there, it's old school meets new school in the form of a laser-cut fox-wedged mortise and tenon joint. We take a look at a couple of simple cameras, making dry ice from seashells, and a really tiny POV display where everything spins. Finally, we talk about how small that proposed Italian lunar outpost is, and discuss whether rating airlines would help stop the spread of diseases.
Check out the links, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
It's the week after Thanksgiving (for some of us) and if you're sick of leftovers, you're in luck as Elliot and Dan get together to discuss the freshest and best inter-holiday hacks. We'll cue up the "Mission: Impossible" theme for a self-destructing flash drive with a surprising sense of self-preservation, listen in on ET only to find out it's just a meteor, and look for interesting things to do with an old 3D printer. We'll do a poking around a little in the basement at Tektronix, see how easy it is to spoof biometric security, and get into a love-hate relationship with both binary G-code and bowling balls with strings attached. What do you do with a box full of 18650s? Easy -- make a huge PCB to balance them the slow way. Is your cell phone causing a population crisis? Is art real or AI? And what the heck is a cannibal CME? Tune in as we dive into all this and more.
Check out the links over at Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi link up through the magic of the Internet to go over some of their favorite stories from the last week. After revealing the bone-chilling winners of this year's Halloween contest, the discussion switches over to old-timey automatons, receiving deep space transmissions with a homebrew antenna that would make E.T. proud, and the treasures that can be found while poking around in a modern car's CAN bus.
They'll also go over how NASA saved the taxpayers a bunch of money by hacking a remote controlled WWII tank, CNC controlled microscopes, and a cinema-quality camera you can probably build from what you've already got in the parts bin. Finally, they'll detail an ambitious effort to recreate an old computer's motherboard with a new feature in KiCad, and muse over all the interesting things that become possible once your test equipment can talk to your computer.
Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up to discuss the best hacks of the previous week, at least in our opinions.
After chasing the angry bird away from Kristina's office, we go to the news and learn that we're in the middle of a solar conjunction Essentially, the Sun has come between Earth and Mars, making communication impossible for about another week. Did you know that this happens every two years?
Then it's time for a new What's That Sound, and although Kristina had an interesting albeit somewhat prompted guess, she was, of course, wrong.
And then it's on to the hacks, beginning with a really cool digital pen that packs all the sensors. We learned about the world's largest musical instrument, and compared it to the Zadar Sea Organ in Croatia, which if you'll recall was once a What's That Sound.
From there we take a look at fake buck converters, radioactive water as a health fad, and a garage door company that has decided to take their ball and go home. Finally we talk about how slippery neutrinos are, and discuss Tom's time at JawnCon.
Check out the links over on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
With solder fumes from Supercon badge hacking still in the air, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Al Williams met to compare notes about the conference talks, badge hacking, and more. Tom Nardi dropped by, too.
Did you miss Supercon? It isn't quite the whole experience, but most of the talks are on our YouTube channel, with more coming in the weeks ahead. Check out the live tab for most of the ones up now. You can even watch the badge hacking celebration.
Al nailed What's That Sound, as did many other people, including this week's winner. [Jacx] gets a T-shirt, and you get a chance to play again next week.
The hacks this week range from a pair of posts pertaining to poop -- multi-color 3D printer poop, that is. We wondered if you could print rainbow filament instead of a purge tower. The Raspberry Pi 5 draws a lot of excess power when in standby. Turns out, thanks to the Internet, the easy fix for that is already in. Other hacks range from EMI test gear to portable antennas with excursions into AI, biomedical sensors, and retrocomputing.
In the Can't Miss category, we discussed Maya Posch's post, which could just as easily be titled: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about CAT Cable (But Were Afraid to Ask). Last, but not least, you'll hear about Lewin Day's round up of exotic gyroscope technology, including some very cool laser pictures.
Check out the links over at Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up from their separate but equally pin drop-quiet offices to discuss the best hacks of the previous week. Well, we liked these one, anyway.
First up in the news, it's finally time for Supercon! So we'll see you there? If not, be sure to check out the talks as we live-stream them on our YouTube channel!
Don't forget -- this is your last weekend to enter the 2023 Halloween Hackfest contest, which runs until 9 AM PDT on October 31st. Arduino are joining the fun this year and are offering some spooky treats in addition to the $150 DigiKey gift cards for the top three entrants.
It's time for a new What's That Sound, and Kristina was able to stump Elliot with this one. She'll have to think of some more weirdo sounds, it seems.
Then it's on to the hacks, beginning with an insanely complex mechanical central air data computer super-teardown from [Ken Shirriff]. We also learned that you can 3D-print springs and things by using a rod as your bed, and we learned whole lot about rolling your own electrolytic capacitors from someone who got to visit a factory.
From there we take a look at a Commodore Datassette drive that sings barbershop, customizing printf, and a really cool dress made of Polymer-dispersed Liquid Crystal (PDLC) panels. Finally we talk about racing the beam when it comes to game graphics, and say goodbye to Kristina's series on USPS technology.
Check out the links, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi meet up virtually to talk about the week's top stories and hacks, such as the fine art of resistor trimming and lessons learned from doing overseas injection molding. They'll go over circuit bending, self-driving cars, and a solar camera that started as a pandemic project and turned into an obsession. You'll also hear about Linux on the Arduino, classic ICs etched into slate, and an incredible restoration of one of the most interesting Thinkpads ever made. Stay tuned until the end to hear about a custom USB-C power supply and the long-awaited Hackaday Supercon 2023 Vectorscope badge.
Check out the links and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments over at Hackaday!
Date notwithstanding, it's your lucky day as Elliot and Dan get together to review the best hacks of the week. For some reason, film photography was much on our writers' minds this week, as we talked about ways to digitalize an old SLR, and how potatoes can be used to develop film (is there a Monty Python joke in there?)
We looked at a 3D printer design that really pulls our strings, the custom insides of the Raspberry Pi 5, and the ins and outs of both ferroresonant transformers and ham radio antennas. Learn about the SMD capacitor menagerie, build a hydrogen generator that probably won't blow up, and listen to the differences between a mess of microphones. And that's not all; the KIM-1 rides again, this time with disk drive support, Jenny tests out Serenity but with ulterior motives, and Kristina goes postal with a deep dive into ZIP codes.
Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Elliot Williams and Al Williams got together again to discuss the best of Hackaday for a week, and you're invited. This week, the guys were into the Raspberry Pi 5, CNC soldering, signal processing, and plasma cutting. There are dangerous power supplies and a custom 11-bit CPU.
Of course, there are a few Halloween projects that would fit in perfectly with the upcoming Halloween contest (the deadline is the end of this month; you still have time).
OpenSCAD is about to get a lot faster, and a $20 oscilloscope might not be a toy after all. They wrap up by talking about Tom Nardi's latest hardware conversion of DIP parts to SMD and how TVs were made behind the Iron Curtain.
Did you miss a story? Check out the links and/or tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start this week's episode off with some deep space news, as NASA's OSIRIS-REx returns home with a sample it snapped up from asteroid Bennu back in 2020. From there, discussion moves on to magical part sorting, open source (eventually...) plastic recycling, and the preposterously complex method newer Apple laptops use to determine if their lid is closed. They'll also talk about the changing perceptions of 3D printed parts, a new battery tech that probably won't change the world, and a clock that can make it seem like your nights are getting longer and longer. Stick around until the end to hear about the glory days of children's architecture books, and the origins of the humble microwave oven.
Check out the links over on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos gathered over the Internet and a couple cups of coffee to bring you the best hacks of the previous week. Well, the ones we liked best, anyhow.
First up in the news, we've got a brand-spankin' new Halloween Hackfest contest running now until 9AM PDT on October 31st! Arduino are joining the fun this year and are offering some spooky treats in addition to the $150 DigiKey gift cards for the top three entrants.
It's a What's That Sound Results Show this week, and although Kristina actually got into the neighborhood of this one, she alas did not figure out that it was an MRI machine (even though she spent a week in an MRI one day).
Then it's on to the hacks, which had a bit of a gastronomical bent this week. We wondered why normies don't want to code on their Macs, both now and historically. We also examined the majesty of dancing raisins, and appreciated the intuitiveness of a salad spinner-based game controller.
From there we take a look at nitinol and its fun properties, admire some large, beautiful Nixie tubes, and contemplate a paper punching machine that spits out nonsensical binary. Finally we talk about rocker bogie suspensions and the ponder the death of cursive.
Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Elliot and Dan got together this time around to recap the week in hacks, and it looks like the Hackaday writing crew very much had cars on their minds. We both took the bait, with tales of privacy-violating cars and taillights that can both cripple a pickup and financially cripple its owner. We went medieval -- OK, more like renaissance -- on a sawmill, pulled a popular YouTuber out of the toilet, and pondered what an animal-free circus would be like. Is RadioShack coming back? Can an ESP32 board get much smaller than this? And where are all the retro(computer)virus writers? We delve into these questions and more, while still saving a little time to wax on about personal projects.
And although the show is peppered with GSM interference (Elliot says sorry!) it's not actually a clue for the What's That Sound.
Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Name one other podcast where you can hear about heavy 3D-printed drones, DIY semiconductors, and using licorice to block laser beams. Throw in homebrew relays, a better mouse trap, and logic analyzers, and you'll certainly be talking about Elliot Williams and Al Williams on Hackaday Podcast 235.
There's also contest news, thermoforming, and something that looks a little like 3D-printed Velcro. Elliot and Al also have their semi-annual argument about Vi vs. Emacs. Spoiler alert: they decided they both suck.
Missed any of their picks? Check out the links on Hackaday, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
It might sound like a joke, but this week, Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start things off by asking how you keep a Polish train from running. Like always, the answer appears to be a properly modulated radio signal. After a fiery tale about Elliot's burned beans, the discussion moves over to the adventure that is home CNC ownership, the final chapter in the saga of the Arecibo Telescope, and the unexpected longevity of Microsoft's Kinect. Then it's on to the proper way to cook a PCB, FFmpeg in the browser, and a wooden cyberdeck that's worth carrying around. Finally, they'll go over the next generation of diode laser engravers, and take a look back at the origins of the lowly breadboard.
Check out the links over at Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos experimented with the old adage that brevity is the soul of wit. That's right; this week, they're all Quick Hacks, and that's to make room for a special series of interviews that Elliot recorded at CCCamp with the pillars of US hackerspace creation. This one's really special, do have a listen.
We still made room for the news this week: India launched Chandrayaan-3, which combines an orbiter, lander, and rover all in one. Then it's on to the What's That Sound results show, and while Kristina did not get it right, she did correctly identify it as being used in Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody", as did one of the guessers who identified it as the cowbell sound from a Roland 808.
Then it's on to the (quick) hacks, where we alternated for once just to keep things interesting. This week, Elliot is into 3D printing a clay extruder and then printing pottery with that, z-direction conductive tape, and the humble dipole antenna. Kristina is more into cyberdecks for the young and old, a reusable plant monitor, and 3D printing some cool coasters.
Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Elliot is off at Chaos Communications Camp, and Tom is on vacation, leaving us with no podcast this week.
But don't fret, Elliot is picking up a ton of interview material for next week's show. It's gonna be a good one!
Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Al Williams don't always agree on the best text editor to use, but they do -- usually -- agree on what makes a great hack. This week, they found plenty of Hackaday posts to discuss, ranging from exotic eavesdropping on keyboards, oscilloscopes, and several posts of interest to anyone who wants to build good-looking prototypes. If you are like mechanics, you'll hear about an escapement-like mechanism and a Hobson's coupler. If you crave more traditional hacks, you can learn more about maximizing battery life and etching PCBs.
In addition to a flurry of hacks, Elliot and Al also share their picks for the best original posts from Hackaday's staff. This week, we find out how Arya Voronova documents projects and hear what Tom Nardi thinks of his Beepy -- a ready-made display and Blackberry keyboard waiting for a Raspberry Pi.
Did you miss anything? Check out the links.
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi start things off by tackling a pair of science stories, one that may or may not change the world, and the other that hopes to help us understand the very fabric of the universe. Afterwards they get to the important stuff: the evolution of Game Boy Camera hacking, the finer points of 3D print orientation, and mixing up electrically conductive concrete at home. From there the conversation shifts to a couple of 486 Turbo buttons, a quick yoke recipe, and a very handsome open source vacuum pickup tool. Stick around until the end to hear about the folly of humanoid robots, and the latest operating system to get the Jenny List treatment.
Check out the links on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos braved the slight cold and the high heat respectively to bring you the best hacks of the previous seven days. In the news this week: you've got a second and final chance to get your Supercon talk proposals in! So get on that, because we need YOU to help make Supercon awesome.
We can chalk up a win for Kristina on What's That Sound this week (finally!). Will you get it right? Will you get it exactly right? Time and Elliot's fancy dice will tell.
Then it's on to the hacks, where we check out a cool RFID emulator e-paper badge, discuss whether a certain type of record player is better off as a cyberdeck, and look through the eye of a Gameboy-style camera for the Playdate console.
From there we take a look at gutting and rooting voice assistants, a solenoid keyboard, and a beautifully rebuilt VR headset that now does AR as well. Finally we talk autonomous solar boats, lambast ChatGPT as the worst summer intern ever, and ponder what makes a thing count as Linux or not.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Summer's in full swing, and this week both Elliot and Dan had to sweat things out to get the podcast recorded. But the hacks were cool -- see what I did there? -- and provided much-needed relief. Join us as we listen in on the world of bats, look at a laser fit for a hackerspace, and learn how to make an array of magnets greater than -- or less than -- the sum of its parts. There'll be flying eggs, keyboards connected to cell phones, and everything good about 80s and 90s cable TV, as well as some of the bad stuff. And you won't want to miss Elliot putting Dan to shame with the super-size Quick Hacks, either, nor should you skip the Can't Miss sweep with a pair of great articles by Al Williams.
Check out the show notes on Hackaday for the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start this week's episode by addressing the ongoing Red Hat drama and the trend towards "renting" software. The discussion then shifts to homebrew VR gear, a particularly impressive solar-powered speaker, and some promising developments in the world of low-cost thermal cameras. Stay tuned to hear about color-changing breadboards, an unofficial logo for repairable hardware, and five lines of Bash that aim to unseat the entrenched power of Slack. Finally, we'll take the first steps in an epic deep-dive into the world of DisplayPort, and take a journey of the imagination aboard an experimental nuclear ocean liner.
Check out the complete show notes over on Hackaday!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Al Williams shoot the breeze about all things Hackaday. We start off with some fond remembrances of Don Lancaster, a legendary hardware hacker who passed away last month. There's also news about the Hackaday Prize (the tool competition) and a rant about fast computers and slow software, a topic that drew many comments this week.
In the What's That Sound event, Al proves he's more of a Star Trek fan than a videogamer. But there were plenty of correct answers, but only one winner: []. There's always next week, so keep playing!
Elliot may be dreaming of cooler weather since he talks about ice sculptures, snow measurements, and a paint that can make things cooler. We don't know what Al is dreaming about, but he is worried about his fuses, and the ins and out of open source licensing.
Along the way, you'll hear about personal vehicles, sky cameras, and zapping weeds with extreme solar power. As usual, there is an eclectic mix of other posts. What has the Hackaday crew been up to? Field trips! Hear about Dan Maloney's visit to the SNOTEL network to measure snowfall and a report from Al and Bil Herd's trip to the Vintage Computer Festival Southwest.
What to read along? The links are over at Hackaday. Don't forget to tell us what you think in the comments!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos don't have a whole lot in the way of news, but we do know this: the Green Hacks Challenge of the 2023 Hackaday Prize ends precisely at 7AM PDT on July 4th. Show us what you can do in the realm of hacking for the planet, be it solar-based, wind-powered, recycled-trash-powered -- you get the idea.
Kristina is now completely down for the count on What's That Sound, although this week, she was sort of in the neighborhood. But no matter, because we know several of you will nail it. Then it's on to the hacks, where we have quite a bit to say this week when it comes to cars.
From there we take a look at a really fun gumball run, ponder the uses of leafy meats, and fawn over an Amiga-inspired build. Finally we talk PCB earring art, hacking the IKEA Kvart, and discuss the potential uses for wind-to-heat power.
Check out the links over on Hackaday to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Elliot and Al got together to discuss this week's projects, and you're invited! You'll hear news about replaceable batteries in the EU, along with some news about the Hacakday Op Amp Challenge winners and the start of a new contest. This week's choice hacks ranged from a Star Wars-style volumetric display, navigation using cosmic rays, measuring car speed with microphones, and a crazy 3D printing technique that will blow you away.
There's plenty more where that came from. Ever tried to land a model rocket vertically? How about building a punched card reader? The can't miss articles this week cover a thermal camera review and the unintended consequences if AM radio bites the dust.
If you want to read along, head on over to Hackaday. Be sure to leave us your thoughts in the comments.
Elliot's back from vacation, and Dan stepped into the virtual podcast studio with him to uncover all the hacks he missed while hiking in Italy. There was a lot to miss, what with a smart meter getting snuffed by a Flipper Zero -- or was it? How about a half-gigapixel camera built out of an old scanner, or a sonar-aimed turret gun? We also looked at a couple of projects that did things the hard way, like a TV test pattern generator that was clearly a labor of love, and an all-transistor HP frequency counter. More plastic welding? Hey, a fix is a fix! Plus, we'll dive into why all those Alexas are just gathering dust, and look at the really, REALLY hard problems involved in restoring shredded documents.
Head on over to Hackaday for the links. You really want them this episode!
Editor in Chief Elliot Williams is spending the week communing with nature, which under normal circumstances would mean no podcast -- after all, he's the one who puts each episode together. But since your weekend would obviously be ruined without a dose of lo-fi Hackaday beats to kick things off, Managing Editor Tom Nardi made a valiant attempt to go it alone and produce...something.
This shortened episode will briefly go over the news, including updates about Hackaday's various ongoing contests and the recent unearthly conditions in the US Northeast due to the Canadian wildfires, before diving into the results of last week's What's that Sound challenge. Listeners will then be treated to a special Quick Hacks segment from Jenny List, before settling in for the main event: a pair of fascinating interviews recorded during the Vintage Computer Festival East in Wall, NJ.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
ditors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi are back in the (virtual) podcast studio to talk the latest phase of the 2023 Hackaday Prize, the past, present, and future of single-board computers, and a modern reincarnation of the Blackberry designed by hardware hackers. They'll also cover the current state of toothbrush NFC hacking, the possibilities of electric farm equipment, and a privately funded satellite designed to sniff out methane. Stick around till the end to find out if there really is such a thing as having too many tools.
Check out the links and tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
You can join Elliot and Al as they get together to talk about their favorite hacks of the week. There's news about current contests, fake alien messages, flexible breadboards, hoverboards, low-tech home automation, and even radioactive batteries that could be a device's best friend.
We have a winner in the What's that Sound competition last week, which was, apparently, a tough one. You'll also hear about IC fabrication, FPGAs, and core memory. Lots to talk about, including core memory, hoverboards, and vacuum tubes.
Check out the links and tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Elliot and Dan teamed up for the podcast this week, bringing you the week's sweetest hacks. And news too, as the ESA performed a little percussive maintenance on a Jupiter-bound space probe, and we learned about how to get an Orwellian free TV that exacts quite a price. We talked about Bitcoin mining two ways, including a way to put all that waste heat to good use -- just don't expect it to make good financial sense. Why would you stuff zip ties into a hot glue gun? It might just help with plastic repair. Lugging a tube transmitter up a mountain doesn't sound like a good idea, but with the right design, it's a lot of fun -- and maybe you'll be better able to tap into Schumann resonances while you're up there.
Check out the links and tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos have much in the way of Hackaday news -- the Op Amp Challenge is about halfway over, and there are roughly three weeks left in the Assistive Tech challenge of the 2023 Hackaday Prize. Show us what you've got on the analog front, and then see what you can do to help people with disabilities to live better lives!
Kristina is still striking out on What's That Sound, which this week honestly sounded much more horrendous and mechanical than the thing it actually is. Then it's on to the hacks, beginning with the we-told-you-so that even Google believes that open source AI will out-compete both Google's own AI and the questionably-named OpenAI.
From there we take a look at a light-up breadboard, listen to some magnetite music, and look inside a pair of smart sunglasses. Finally, we talk cars, beginning with the bleeding edge of driver-less. Then we go back in time to discuss in-vehicle record players of the late 1950s.
Check out the links over on Hackaday to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi definitely didn't plan on devoting most of this episode to 3D printing and space stories, but let's be honest, it was bound to happen sooner or later. After an update on the Hackaday Prize, the discussion moves on to a pair of troubled spacecraft and the challenges of exploring the final frontier.
From there you'll hear about a chocolate 3D printer we've had our eyes on for years, the tools you should have next to your own (non-chocolate) 3D printer, and a bit of contemplation of what it really means to design for 3D printing versus traditional manufacturing methods. But it's not all plastic fantastic -- by the end of the episode you'll also hear about some particularly bold high-altitude aviators and the surprisingly short time we have left with the humble barcode.
Check out the show notes to follow along with the links!
Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi definitely didn't plan on devoting most of this episode to 3D printing and space stories, but let's be honest, it was bound to happen sooner or later. After an update on the Hackaday Prize, the discussion moves on to a pair of troubled spacecraft and the challenges of exploring the final frontier.
From there you'll hear about a chocolate 3D printer we've had our eyes on for years, the tools you should have next to your own (non-chocolate) 3D printer, and a bit of contemplation of what it really means to design for 3D printing versus traditional manufacturing methods. But it's not all plastic fantastic -- by the end of the episode you'll also hear about some particularly bold high-altitude aviators and the surprisingly short time we have left with the humble barcode.
Check out the show notes to follow along with the links!
In this week's podcast, non-brothers Elliot Williams and Al Williams talk about our favorite hacks of the week. Elliot's got analog on the brain, courtesy of the ongoing Op Amp Contest, and Al is all about the retrocomputers, from a thrift-store treasure to an old, but still incredibly serviceable, voice synthesizer. Both agree that they love clever uses of mechanical parts and that nobody should fear the FET.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
It's podcast time again, and this time around Elliot and Dan took a grand tour through the week's best and brightest hacks. We checked out an old-school analog cell phone that went digital with style, dug into a washing machine's API, and figured out how to melt metal in the microwave -- the right way. Does coffee taste better when it's made by a robot? Of course it does! Can you get a chatbot to spill its guts? You can, if you know how to sweet talk it. Let's play Asteroids on an analog oscilloscope, spoof facial recognition with knitting, and feel the need for speed with an AI-controlled model race car. And was VCF East worth the wait? According to Tom Nardi, that's a resounding "Yes!"
Check out the links over on Hackaday and tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Contributor Emeritus Kristina Panos gushed about all the best hacks of the previous week. But first, a contest! That's right -- hot on the heels of the Low Power Challenge comes the Op Amp Challenge, sponsored by Digi-Key. You have between now and June 6th to dip your toes into the warm waters of analog and show us what you've got. Will it be a musical hack? Will you seek high analog precision? We can't wait to see.
Kristina definitely did not get What's That Sound this week, which honestly reminded her of a cartoon character getting a piano dropped on them, except the sounds were in reverse order. Then it's on to the hacks, beginning with a way to make an IBM Selectric typewriter use Comic Sans, a project that's sure to make you a believer in graphene, and a miniature MNT for every (cargo) pocket.
From there we take a look at a really cool indicator from a 1960s RAF aeroplane and investigate why your multimeter might be lying to you. Finally, we discuss the gargantuan task of building an AR system to rival Google Glass, and the merits of taking a lot of pictures as you go about your hacks.
Head on over to Hackaday to check out the links!
Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they review some of their favorite hacks and projects of the past week. The episode starts with a discussion about the recently announced Artemis II crew, and how their mission compares to the Apollo program of the 1960s and 70s.
From there, the pair theorize as to why Amazon's family of Echo devices have managed to evade eager hardware hackers, take a look at a very impressive SMD soldering jig created with some fascinating OpenSCAD code, marvel at the intersection of art and electronic design, and wonder aloud where all the cheap motorized satellite dishes are hiding. Stick around for some questionable PCB design ideas, a Raspberry Pi expansion that can read your mind, and the first flight of a (semi) hydrogen-powered aircraft.
Check out the links over at Hackaday.
It was quite the cornucopia of goodness this week as Elliot and Dan sat down to hash over the week in hardware hacking. We started with the exciting news that the Hackaday Prize is back -- already? -- for the tenth year running! The first round, Re-Engineering Education, is underway now, and we're already seeing some cool entries come in. The Prize was announced at Hackday Berlin, about which Elliot waxed a bit too. Speaking of wax, if you're looking to waterproof your circuits, that's just one of many coatings you might try. If you're diagnosing a problem with a chip, a cheap camera can give your microscope IR vision. Then again, you might just use your Mark I peepers to decode a ROM. Is your FDM filament on the wrong spool? We've got an all-mechanical solution for that. We'll talk about tools of the camera operator's trade, the right to repair in Europe, Korean-style toasty toes, BGA basics, and learn just what the heck a Bloom filter is.
Head on over to the show notes for links and more!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Contributor Emeritus Kristina Panos chewed the fat about the coolest hacks of the previous week. But first, a bit of news -- our Low Power Challenge fizzled out this week, and boy did we have a lot of entries at the last minute. We love to see it though, and we're going to get judging done ASAP.
Don't forget, this weekend is Hackaday Berlin! Livestreaming for this one may be iffy, but we'll have the talks up for you eventually, so don't fret too much if you can't make it in the flesh this time.
Kristina definitely got What's That Sound this week, but her answer will of course be bleeped out. Then it's on to the hacks, beginning with a 6DoF controller that does everything in interesting ways and a printed shredder that eats like a goat. From there they cover bolt dispensers, coffee grinders with Bluetooth weighing, camera calibration, and a 50-pen plotter that's definitely a hack. Finally, we discuss the virtues of physicality when it comes to SIM cards and recorded music.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams is joined this week by newly minted Development Editor (and definitely not brother) Al Williams to bring you the weekly highlights from our little corner of the Internet.
Between the rapidly approaching deadline for the Low-Power Challenge to Samsung creating a fake Moon with artificial intelligence, there's plenty in the news to get this episode started. From there, the Williams plural discuss using a webcam for cheap virtual reality thrills, an impressive expansion for the Flipper Zero, and whether or not finding a bug in the Nintendo DSi browser counts as retrocomputing.
Stick around to hear about the fascinating work Joshua Vasquez has been doing with DIY light guide plates, and Arya Voronova's deep-dive into PCI-Express.
You want links? You got links in the show notes!
It was one of those weeks, where Elliot and Dan found a bounty of interesting hacks to choose from for the podcast, making it hard to pick. But pick we did, and we found so many deep and important questions. What good is a leaky HCMI cable? Good for falling down a TEMPEST-like rabbit hole, that's what. Why would you use a ton of clay to make a car? Because it's cool, that's why. What does an electron look like? A little like a wiggling wire, but mostly it looks like a standing wave... of waves.
Is artificial intelligence going to take over all the code and start suing us for copyright violations? Maybe yes, maybe no, but we're definitely in a strange, new world. And when all our media is on demand, what is the spectrum that broadcasters currently use going to be good for?
It's not all heavy questions, of course; we found a lot of fun hacks, like an extreme drill press makeover, a couple of low-power cyberdecks, the return of Norm Abram in glorious AI-generated HD, getting up close and personal with flip dot displays, and a sled that lets you go uphill as easily as going downhill.
For links and more, head on over to Hackaday.
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and (former Assignments Editor) Kristina Panos stood around talking about the greatest hacks of the previous week. But first, we've got a contest running now through March 21st -- the Low Power Challenge!
Kristina almost got What's That Sound this week, but could only describe it as some sort of underwater organ, so still no t-shirt for her. But [BalkanBoy] knew exactly what it was -- the Zadar Sea Organ in Croatia. Then it's on to the hacks, beginning with the most beautiful sea of 7-segments you'll likely ever see. We gush over a tiny PC in a floppy drive that uses custom cartridges, dish about an expressive synth that uses a flexure mechanism, and enjoy a loving ode to the vacuum fluorescent display.
Join Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi as they explore the best and most interesting stories from the last week. The top story if of course the possibility that at least some of the unidentified flying objects the US Air Force valiantly shot down were in fact the work of amateur radio enthusiasts, but a quantitative comparison of NASA's SLS mega-rocket to that of popular breakfast cereals is certainly worth a mention as well.
Afterwards the discussion will range from modular home furnishings to the possibility of using YouTube (or maybe VHS tapes) to backup your data and AI-generated Pong. Also up for debate are cheap CO2 monitors which may or may not be CO2 monitors, prosthetic limbs made from locally recycled plastic, and an answer to Jenny's Linux audio challenge from earlier this month.
Check out the show notes for the links and discussion!
Under the weather though they both were, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney got together to take a look under the covers of this week's best and brightest hacks. It was a banner week, with a look at the changes that KiCad has in store, teaching a CNN how to play "Rock, Paper, Scissors," and going deep into the weeds on JPEG.
We dipped a toe into history, too, with a look at one of the sexiest early hobbyist computers, seeing how citizen scientists are finding ancient burial mounds, and looking at the cryptography that cost a queen her head. Rather look to the future? We get it -- which is why we talked about a greener, cleaner way of making hydrogen from methane, as well as a generatively designed five-axis 3D printer. From laser-precise knife sharpening to circuit simulation with Python to clear plastic TVs of the 1930s, there's something for everyone!
Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi start this week's episode off with the announcement of Hackaday Berlin on March 25th. It's been quite some time since we've been on the other side of the pond, because we had to cancel 2020's Hackaday Belgrade due to COVID-19, so excitement is high for all three days of this "one-day" event.
After a new What's that Sound, discussion moves on to an impressive collection of DIY sundials, the impact filament color has on the strength of 3D printed parts, the incredible retrocomputer replicas of Michael Gardi, and the Arduino FPGA that you've probably never heard of. We'll wrap things up with the unexpected difficulties of mixing multiple cheap audio sources in Linux, and try to figure out why our kitchen appliances need to be connected to the Internet.
Check out the links and tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos met up over thousands of miles to discuss the hottest hacks of the past seven days. There's a whole lot of news this week, and the really good part is the the small radioactive source that went missing in Australia has been found. Phew!
Kristina is still striking out on What's That Sound, but we're sure you'll fare better. If you think you know what it is, fill out the form and you'll be entered to win a coveted Hackaday Podcast t-shirt!
Finally, we get on to the hacks with an atomic pendulum clock that's accurate enough for CERN, safecracking the rough-and-ready way, and plenty of hacks that are non-destructive to nice, old things. We'll gush over a tiny DIY adjustable wrench, drool over CNC pizza, and rock out to the sounds of a LEGO guitar/synthesizer thing.
Check out the links and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi meet up virtually to talk about all the hacks that are fit to print. This week's episode starts off with a discussion about the recently unveiled 2023 Hackaday.io Low-Power Challenge, and how hackers more often than not thrive when forced to work within these sort of narrow parameters. Discussion then continues to adding a virtual core to the RP2040, crowd-sourced device reliability information, and mechanical Soviet space computers. We'll wrap things up by wondering what could have been had Mattel's ill-fated ThingMaker 3D printer actually hit the market, and then engage in some wild speculation about the issues plaguing NASA's latest Moon mission.
Check out the links over at Hackaday!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos stood around and marveled at machinery in its many forms, from a stone-cutting CNC to an acrobatic robot to an AI-controlled Twitch v-tuber. But before all of that, we took a look at the winners of our FPV Vehicle Contest, poured one out for Google Stadia, and Elliot managed to stump Kristina once again with this week's What's That Sound. Will you fare better?
Later, we drooled over an open-source smart watch, argued screen printing versus stenciling when it comes to bootleg Hackaday merch, and got into the finer points of punycodes.
Check out the links and join in the conversation over at Hackaday.
Even for those with paraskevidekatriaphobia, today is your lucky day as Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney sit under ladders with umbrellas while holding black cats to talk about the week in awesome hacks. And what a week it was, with a Scooby Doo code review, mushrooms in your PCBs, and the clickiest automatic transmission that never was. Have you ever flashed the firmware on a $4 wireless sensor? Maybe you should try. Wondering how to make a rotary Hall sensor detect linear motion? We'll answer that too. Will AI muscle the dungeon master out of your D&D group? That's a hard no. We'll talk about a new RISC-V ESP32, making old video new again, nuclear reactor kibble, and you're least satisfying repair jobs. And yes, everyone can relax -- I'm buying her a new stove.
Check out the links in the show notes over on Hackaday.
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi ring in the New Year with...well, pretty much the same stuff they do every other week. After taking some time to talk about the nuts and bolts of the podcast in honor of Episode 200, discussion moves on to favorite stories of the week including an impeccably cloned Dyson lamp, one hacker's years-long quest to build the ultimate Game Boy, developing hardware in Python, building a breadboard computer with the 6502's simplified sibling, and the latest developments surrounding the NABU set-top box turned retrocomputer. The episode wraps up with a review of some of the biggest themes we saw in 2022, and how they're likely to shape the tech world in the coming years.
Check out the links over on Hackaday.
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos decided against using one of Kristina's tin can microphones to record the podcast, though that might be a cool optional thing to do once (and then probably never again).
After a brief foray into the news that the Chaos Communications Congress will be decentralized once again this year, as COVID restrictions make planning this huge event a complete headache (among other notable symptoms), we discuss the news that the EU is demanding replaceable batteries in phones going forward.
After that, it's time for another What's That Sound results show, and despite repeated listens, Kristina fails to guess the thing. Even if she'd had an inkling as to what it was, she probably would have said 'split-flap display' instead of the proper answer, which is 'flip-dot display', as a few people responded.
Finally, it's on to the hacks, where we talk about uses for ferrofluid and decide that it's one of those things that's just for fun and should not be applied to the world as some sort of all-purpose whacking device.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
As we slide into the Christmas, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney look at the best and brightest of this week's hacks. It wasn't an easy task -- so much good stuff to choose from! But they figured it out, and talked about everything from impossible (and semi-fractal) 3D printing overhangs and the unfortunate fishies of Berlin's ex-aquarium, to rolling your own FM radio station and how a spinning Dorito of doom is a confusing way to make an electric vehicle better.
Think it's no fun when your friend forgets to pick you up at the airport? Wait until you hear about what it's like to get stuck on the ISS, and the incredibly risky way you might have to get home. Interested in the anatomy and physiology of a cloned robo-dog? Then let the master do a teardown and give you his insight. We'll make some time for tea, cross our eyes for stereo photos, and dive into the mechanics of the USB-C.
Check out the links over on Hackaday!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos delighted in the aural qualities of Kristina's brand new, real (read: XLR) microphone before embarking on creating a podcast highlighting the best of the previous week's hacks.
This week in the news, NASA returned to the Moon with Artemis I, and this time, there are CubeSats involved. After that, it's on to the What's That Sound results show, marred by Kristina's cheating scandal (listening ahead of time) and Elliot's reading the filename aloud before we started recording. Finally, we move on to the hacks -- they start with a trip to the 90s both sonically and visually, and end with a really nice alarm clock that's decidedly 70s, and definitely Hackaday.
Check out the links over on Hackaday!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi start the Hackaday Podcast by talking about another podcast that's talking about...Hackaday. Or more accurately, the recent Hackaday Supercon. After confirming the public's adoration, conversation moves on to designing flexible PCBs with code, adding a rotary dial to your mechanical keyboard, and a simulator that lets you visualize an extinction-level event. We'll wrap things up by playing the world's smallest violin for mildly inconvenienced closed source software developers, and wonder how the world might have been different if the lady of the house had learned to read binary back in 1969.
Check out the links and comment over on Hackaday!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi find themselves in the middle of a slow news week, so they dispense with the usual timely chit-chat and dive right into the results of a particularly tricky "What's that Sound" challenge.
From there they'll cover the new breed of ATtiny microcontollers (and why you probably won't be buying them), a recently unearthed Z-80 consumer gadget that's begging to be reverse engineered, the fine art of electrifying watercraft, and a particularly impressive speech recognition engine. Stick around till the end to hear about the potential dangers of unsecured EV chargers, and take a walk down memory lane to a time when soldering irons and paper schematics ruled the world.
Check out the links over on Hackaday, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos fumbled through setting up Mumble on Kristina's new-ish computer box before hitting record and talking turkey. First off, we've got a fresh new contest going on, and this time it's all about the FPVs. Then we see if Kristina can stump Elliot once again with a sound from her vast trove of ancient technologies.
Then there's much ado about coffee roasters of all stripes, and you know we're both coffee enthusiasts. We have many words to say about the subject, but none of them are any of the 7+ dirty ones that the FCC would probably rather we didn't. Finally, we take a look at a bike frame that's totally nuts, a clock that seemingly works via magic, and a drone made of rice cakes. So find something to nibble on, and check out this week's episode!
And be sure to visit all the links and leave a comment over on Hackaday.
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney review the literature on a hack-packed week of action. We'll find a Linux machine inside just about anything, including curb-side TVs and surprisingly secure EV chargers. No Internet? No problem -- just tunnel IP through WhatsApp! We'll see that 3D printers can be repurposed for lab automation of the cheap, build the worst -- but coolest -- 2FA dongle of all time, and see how a teetering tower of cards can make your old motherboard think any ISA card is plugged into it. Worried that driving an EV is going to be a boring experience? Don't be -- maybe you'll still get to jam through the gears. But if you do, rest assured there'll be plenty of careful engineering done to see if it's safe. Err, at least we hope so...
Check out the links!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi are still flying high on their post-Supercon buzz (and are a bit jet lagged) this week. We'll start with some of the highlights from our long-awaited Pasadena meetup, and talk a bit about the winner of this year's Hackaday Prize. Talk will then shift over to shaved down NES chips, radioactive Dungeons and Dragons gameplay, an impressive 3D printed telescope being developed by the community, and the end of the Slingbox. Stick around for a double dose of Dan Maloney, as we go over his twin treatises on dosimetry and the search for extraterrestrial life.
Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney get together for a look at everything cool under the hardware-hacking sun.
Think you need to learn how to read nerve impulses to run a prosthetic hand? Think again -- try spring-loaded plungers and some Hall effect sensors. What's Starlink saying? We're not sure, but if you're clever enough you can use the radio link for ad hoc global positioning. Historically awful keyboards, pan-and-scan cable weather stations, invisibility cloaks, plumbing fittings for electrical controls -- we'll talk about it all. And if you've never heard two Commodore 64s and a stack of old floppies turned into an electronic accordion, you really don't know what you're missing.
We've go sooo many links. You must click on them all!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney get together for a look at everything cool under the hardware-hacking sun.
Think you need to learn how to read nerve impulses to run a prosthetic hand? Think again -- try spring-loaded plungers and some Hall effect sensors. What's Starlink saying? We're not sure, but if you're clever enough you can use the radio link for ad hoc global positioning. Historically awful keyboards, pan-and-scan cable weather stations, invisibility cloaks, plumbing fittings for electrical controls -- we'll talk about it all. And if you've never heard two Commodore 64s and a stack of old floppies turned into an electronic accordion, you really don't know what you're missing.
We've go sooo many links. You must click on them all!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos rendezvoused in yet another secret, throwaway location to rap about the hottest hacks from the previous week. We start off by gushing about the winners of the Cyberdeck Contest, and go wild over the Wildcard round winners from the Hackaday Prize.
It's the What's That Sound? results show, and Kristina was ultimately stumped by the sound of the Kansas City Standard, though she should have at least ventured a guess after shooting down both modem and fax machine noises. Then it's on to the hacks, which feature an analog tank-driving simulator from the 1970s, much ado about resin printing, and one cool thing you can do with the serial output from your digital calipers, (assuming you're not a purist). And of course, stay tuned for the Can't-Miss Article discussion, because we both picked one of resident philosopher Al Williams' pieces.
You can check out all the links in the show notes right here, on the Internet!
This week Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi will discuss the return of the East Coast RepRap Festival, the scientific application of slices of baloney, and the state of the art in homebrew e-readers. The discussion weaves its way through various reimaginings of the seven (or more) segment display, an impressive illuminated headboard that comes with its own science-fiction film, and the surprising difficulty of getting a blinking LED to actually look like a flame. Stick around to the end to find out why iPhones are freaking out on amusement park rides, and to hear all the details about this year's Supercon badge.
Check out all the links and join the discussion over on Hackaday!
It's déjà vu all over again as Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams gets together with Staff Writer Dan Maloney to look over the best hacks from the past week. If you've got a fear of giant cockroaches, don't worry; we'll only mention the regular ones when we talk about zapping them with lasers. What do you need to shrinkify an NES? Just a little sandpaper and a lot of finesse.
Did you know that 3D scanning is (sort of) over a century old? Or that the first real microcomputer dates all the way back to 1972 -- and isn't one of those blinkenlight deals? And watch out for what you tell GPT-3 to ignore -- it might just take you very seriously. We'll touch on solar-powered cameras, a compressor of compressors, and talk about all the unusual places to find lithium batteries for your projects. It's an episode so good you might just want to listen to it twice!
(In case you're wondering about all this "twice" stuff -- Elliot forgot to hit record on the first take and we had to do the entire podcast over again. Oh, the humanity!)
Feast on the spicy show notes!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos gushed about NASA's live obliteration of minor planet Dimorphos using a probe outfitted with a camera. Spoiler alert: the probe reaches its rock-dappled rocky target just fine, and the final transmitted image has a decidedly human tinge.
Kristina brought the mystery sound again this week, much to Elliot's sonic delight. Did he get it? Did he figure it out? Well, maybe. The important thing is one of you is bound to get it, so budding Neos need only enter their guess and their email address on the extremely official What's That Sound? entry form.
We kick off the hacks with a really neat 3D printed linkage that acts as an elevator for a marble run, and then we discuss a mid-century hack that helps you decide whether it's time to emerge from the fallout shelter using the contents of your typical 1950s pockets. We spent a few minutes comparing our recent radiation exposure levels -- Kristina wins with about a dozen x-rays so far this year, but no full-body CT scans. Then we talk guitars for a bit, remember a forgotten CPU from TI, and spend a few cycles talking about a tone-wheel organ that sounds like a chorus of gleeful gerbils.
Finally, we talk toner transfer for 3D prints, argue in defense of small teams versus large committees, and get all tangled up in cursive.
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos gushed about NASA's live obliteration of minor planet Dimorphos using a probe outfitted with a camera. Spoiler alert: the probe reaches its rock-dappled rocky target just fine, and the final transmitted image has a decidedly human tinge.
Kristina brought the mystery sound again this week, much to Elliot's sonic delight. Did he get it? Did he figure it out? Well, maybe. The important thing is one of you is bound to get it, so budding Neos need only enter their guess and their email address on the extremely official What's That Sound? entry form.
We kick off the hacks with a really neat 3D printed linkage that acts as an elevator for a marble run, and then we discuss a mid-century hack that helps you decide whether it's time to emerge from the fallout shelter using the contents of your typical 1950s pockets. We spent a few minutes comparing our recent radiation exposure levels -- Kristina wins with about a dozen x-rays so far this year, but no full-body CT scans. Then we talk guitars for a bit, remember a forgotten CPU from TI, and spend a few cycles talking about a tone-wheel organ that sounds like a chorus of gleeful gerbils.
Finally, we talk toner transfer for 3D prints, argue in defense of small teams versus large committees, and get all tangled up in cursive.
Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams took time out from Supercon planning to join Staff Writer Dan Maloney for a look through the hacking week that was. We always try to keep things light, but it's hard sometimes, especially when we have to talk about wars past and present and the ordnance they leave behind. It's also not a lot of fun to talk about a continent-wide radio outage thanks to our angry Sun, nor is learning that a wafer-thin card skimmer could be lurking in your ATM machine. But then again, we did manage to have some fun by weighing cats to make sure they're properly fed, and making music by pegging VU meters. We also saw how to use PCBs to make a beautiful yet functional circuit sculpture, clean up indoor air on a budget, and move microns with hardware store parts. And we also got to celebrate a ray of international hope by looking back on the year that taught us much of what we know about the Earth.
Check out all the links (and the hoopla) in the show notes!
Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams took time out from Supercon planning to join Staff Writer Dan Maloney for a look through the hacking week that was. We always try to keep things light, but it's hard sometimes, especially when we have to talk about wars past and present and the ordnance they leave behind. It's also not a lot of fun to talk about a continent-wide radio outage thanks to our angry Sun, nor is learning that a wafer-thin card skimmer could be lurking in your ATM machine. But then again, we did manage to have some fun by weighing cats to make sure they're properly fed, and making music by pegging VU meters. We also saw how to use PCBs to make a beautiful yet functional circuit sculpture, clean up indoor air on a budget, and move microns with hardware store parts. And we also got to celebrate a ray of international hope by looking back on the year that taught us much of what we know about the Earth.
Check out all the links (and the hoopla) in the show notes!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi start off by talking about the chip shortage...but not how you think. With a list that supposedly breaks down all of the electronic components that the Russian military are desperate to get their hands on, we can see hackers aren't the only ones scrounging for parts. If you thought getting components was tricky already, imagine if most of the world decided to put sanctions on you.
We'll also talk about kid-friendly DIY stereoscopic displays, the return of the rotary cellphone, and using heat to seal up 3D printed parts for vacuum applications. Join us as we marvel over the use of rubbery swag wristbands as tank treads, and ponder an array of AI-created nightmares that are supposed to represent the Hackaday writing crew. Finally we'll talk about two iconic legacies: that of the 3.5 inch floppy disk, and astrophysicist Frank Drake.
Check out the links in the show notes!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi start off by talking about the chip shortage...but not how you think. With a list that supposedly breaks down all of the electronic components that the Russian military are desperate to get their hands on, we can see hackers aren't the only ones scrounging for parts. If you thought getting components was tricky already, imagine if most of the world decided to put sanctions on you.
We'll also talk about kid-friendly DIY stereoscopic displays, the return of the rotary cellphone, and using heat to seal up 3D printed parts for vacuum applications. Join us as we marvel over the use of rubbery swag wristbands as tank treads, and ponder an array of AI-created nightmares that are supposed to represent the Hackaday writing crew. Finally we'll talk about two iconic legacies: that of the 3.5 inch floppy disk, and astrophysicist Frank Drake.
Check out the links in the show notes!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos had a lot of fun discussing the best of the previous week's hacks in spite of Elliot's microphone connectivity troubles. News-wise, we busted out the wine and cheese to briefly debate whether a Colorado man should have won an art competition by entering an image created by AI. Afterward, we went around a bit about floppies, which are being outlawed in Japan.
Then it's on to the What's That Sound Results Show, but since Elliot can't find a 14-sided die, he pulled on the the Internet for our random number needs. Congratulations to our big winner [D Rex], who will receive one our coveted Hackaday Podcast t-shirts.
Is the food-safety-of-3D-printing debate over once and for all? It is as far as Elliot's concerned. You know what else is over? The era of distributed, independent email servers. Bah! We're not kidding about that last one -- and we discuss a lie-detecting app that may or may not prove our innocence.
Finally, we talk active foot cooling, heat barriers for hot shops, and big, strong magnets. What are they for? Fixing floppies, fool!
Check out the links in the show notes!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos had a lot of fun discussing the best of the previous week's hacks in spite of Elliot's microphone connectivity troubles. News-wise, we busted out the wine and cheese to briefly debate whether a Colorado man should have won an art competition by entering an image created by AI. Afterward, we went around a bit about floppies, which are being outlawed in Japan.
Then it's on to the What's That Sound Results Show, but since Elliot can't find a 14-sided die, he pulled on the the Internet for our random number needs. Congratulations to our big winner [D Rex], who will receive one our coveted Hackaday Podcast t-shirts.
Is the food-safety-of-3D-printing debate over once and for all? It is as far as Elliot's concerned. You know what else is over? The era of distributed, independent email servers. Bah! We're not kidding about that last one -- and we discuss a lie-detecting app that may or may not prove our innocence.
Finally, we talk active foot cooling, heat barriers for hot shops, and big, strong magnets. What are they for? Fixing floppies, fool!
Check out the links in the show notes!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos met up on a secret server to discuss the cream of this week's crop of hacks. After gushing about the first-ever Kansas City Keyboard Meetup coming up tomorrow -- Saturday the 27th, we start off by considering the considerable engineering challenge of building a knife-throwing machine, the logistics of live-streaming on the go, and the thermodynamics of split-level homes.
This week, Kristina came up with the What's-That-Sound and managed to stump Elliot for a while, though he did eventually guess correctly after the tape stopped rolling. Think you know what it is? Then fill out the form and you'll earn the chance to win a genuine Hackaday Podcast t-shirt!
Later in the show, we look at a macro pad that breaks the mold, an ASCII terminal like it's 1974, and a Z80 that never was (but definitely could have been). Stick around as we root for the CubeSats hitching a ride aboard Artemis I, and at last call on the 'cast, it's lagers vs. ales (vs. ciders).
Head on over to the show notes for links and oh, so much more!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos met up on a secret server to discuss the cream of this week's crop of hacks. After gushing about the first-ever Kansas City Keyboard Meetup coming up tomorrow -- Saturday the 27th, we start off by considering the considerable engineering challenge of building a knife-throwing machine, the logistics of live-streaming on the go, and the thermodynamics of split-level homes.
This week, Kristina came up with the What's-That-Sound and managed to stump Elliot for a while, though he did eventually guess correctly after the tape stopped rolling. Think you know what it is? Then fill out the form and you'll earn the chance to win a genuine Hackaday Podcast t-shirt!
Later in the show, we look at a macro pad that breaks the mold, an ASCII terminal like it's 1974, and a Z80 that never was (but definitely could have been). Stick around as we root for the CubeSats hitching a ride aboard Artemis I, and at last call on the 'cast, it's lagers vs. ales (vs. ciders).
Head on over to the show notes for links and oh, so much more!
Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi are here to bring you the best stories and hacks from the previous week (and maybe a little older). Things kick off with news that the Early Bird tickets for the 2022 Hackaday Supercon tickets sold out in only two hours -- a good sign that the community is just as excited as we are about the November event. But don't worry, regular admission tickets are now available for those who couldn't grab one out of the first batch.
This week there's plenty of vehicular hacks to talk about, from John Deere tractors running DOOM to a particularly troublesome vulnerability found in many key fobs. We'll also lament about the state of 3D CAD file formats, marvel at some retro-futuristic photography equipment, and look at the latest in home PCB production techniques. Wrapping things up there's a whole lot of cyberdeck talk, and a trip down silicon memory lane courtesy of Al Williams.
Check out the links in the show notes!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos convened in a secret location to say what we will about the choicest hacks of the past week. We kick things off by discussing the brand new Cyberdeck contest, which is the first of it's type, but certainly won't be the last. In other contest news, we recently announced the winners of the Hack it Back Challenge of the Hackaday Prize, which ran the gamut from bodysnatching builds to rad resto-mods and resto-recreations.
Taking top honors in wow factor this week is [Stuff Made Here]'s jigsaw puzzle-solving robot. This monster can currently tackle small laser-cut puzzles, but is destined to solve an all-white 5000-piece nightmare once all the engineering pieces have come together.
Then we took a field trip to Zip Tie City, where the plastic's green  and the wiring's pretty, admired volcano nuts from afar, and briefly considered the idea of a 3D printer with a heating zone of programmable length.
Finally, we take a look at a creatively destructive robot that's akin to a useless machine, bloviate about books you should read, and dance around the topic of learning by playing.
You want to click the links in the show notes, no?
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos traded sweat for silence, recording from their respective attic-level offices in the August heat unaided by fans (too noisy). We decided there's no real news this week that lacks a political bent, except maybe that Winamp is back with a new version that's four years in the making. (Is Winamp divisive?) Does it still whip the llama's ass? You be the judge.
After Elliot gives Kristina a brief math lesson in increasing area with regard to 3D printer nozzle sizes, we talk a bit about 3D pens, drool over a truly customizable macropad that uses a microcontroller for each keyswitch, and discuss dendrometers and tree health. Then it's back to keyboards for one incredible modular build with an e-ink display and haptic feedback knob which is soon to go open source.
Finally, we talk tiny CRTs, a USB drive that must have the ultimate in security through obscurity, discuss the merits of retrograde clocks, and wonder aloud about the utility of jumping PCBs. Don't bounce on us just yet -- not until you hear about our first electronics wins and learn the one thing Kristina doesn't do when she's spending all day in the heat.
Check out Hackaday for all the links!
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney for their take on the hottest hacks in a hot, hot week. We found a bunch of unusual mechanisms this week, like an omnidirectional robot that's not quite wheeled but not quite a walker either. Or, if you'd rather fly, there's a UAV that's basically a flying propeller. There's danger afoot too, with news of a chess-playing robot with a nasty streak, a laser engraver that'll probably blind you, and a high-voltage corona motor that actually does useful work. We'll use our X-ray vision to take a deep dive into a 60-GHz phased array antenna, let a baby teach a machine what it means to be hungry, and build a couple of toy cameras just for funsies. Ballons as a UI? Maybe someday, thanks to ultrasonic levitation. And we'll wrap things up by snooping in on the Webb telescope's communications, as we find out how many people it takes to make wire harnesses. Spoiler alert: it's a lot.
Check out the links in the show notes!
Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi start this week's podcast off with an announcement the community has been waiting years for: the return of the Hackaday Supercon! While there's still some logistical details to hammer out, we're all extremely excited to return to a live con and can't wait to share more as we get closer to November. Of course you can't have Supercon without the Hackaday Prize, which just so happens to be wrapping up its Hack it Back challenge this weekend.
In other news, we'll talk about the developing situation regarding the GPLv3 firmware running on Ortur's laser engravers (don't worry, it's good news for a change), and a particularly impressive fix that kept a high-end industrial 3D printer out of the scrapheap. We'll also fawn over a pair of fantastically documented projects, learn about the fascinating origins of the lowly fire hydrant, and speculate wildly about the tidal wave of dead solar panels looming menacingly in the distance.
Check out the show notes!
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos stood around talking like they weren't thousands of miles apart. And we mean that literally: Kristina just got an up/down desk, and it turns out that Elliot's had the exact same one for years.
In between the hammerings on Kristina's house (she's getting new siding), we kick things off by drooling over the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope, and compare a few of them to the same shots from Hubble.
We managed to save a bit of saliva for all the seriously swell keyboards and not-keyboards we saw throughout the Odd Inputs and Peculiar Peripherals contest, all of which are winners in our book.
This week, we ask the tough questions, like why would someone who has never played guitar want to build one from scratch? We can only guess that the answer is simply, 'because l can'. As lazy as that reasoning may sound, this build is anything but.
Later on, we'll ogle an ocean of PS/2 keyboards and their new owner's portable testing rig, complain about ASMR, and laugh about a giant nose that sneezes out sanitizer.
It's podcast time again, and this week Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams sat down with Staff Writer Dan Maloney to review the best hacks on the planet, and a few from off. We'll find out how best to capture lightning, debate the merits of freezing water -- or ice cream -- when it's warm, and see if we can find out what R2D2 was really talking about with all those bleeps and bloops. Once we decode that, it'll be time to find out what Tom Nardi was up to while the boss was away with his hidden message in episode 174, and how analog-encoded digital data survives the podcast production and publication chain. But surely you can't watch a YouTube video on a Commodore PET, can you? As it turns out, that's not a problem, and neither apparently is 3D printing a new ear.
Check out the show notes!
Join Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos as we cuss and discuss all the gnarliest hacks from the past week. We kick off this episode with a gentle reminder that the Odd Inputs and Peculiar Peripherals Contest ends this Monday, July 4th, at 8:30 AM PDT. We've seen a ton of cool entries so far, including a new version of [Peter Lyons]' Squeezebox keyboard that we're itching to write up for the blog.
In other contest news, the Round 2 winners of the Reuse, Recycle, Revamp challenge of the 2022 Hackaday Prize have been announced. Elliot is super stoked about [Jason Knight]'s open-source recycled skateboard deck-making apparatus, and Kristina wishes she had the time and money to build some of the fundamental Precious Plastic machines.
Elliot managed to stump Kristina with this week's What's That Sound, though she probably should have reached further into the annals of her memory and made a semi-educated guess. From there, it's on to missing moon rocks and the word of the day before we get into a handful of contest entries, including a mechanical keyboard to end all mechanical keyboards.
This really just scratches the surface of this week's show, which includes some new hardware stuffed into old, as well as modern implementations of old technology. And in case you didn't get enough of Kristina's childhood memoirs, she goes a bit deeper into the teddy bears and telephones rooms of her memory palace.
Check out the links over at Hackaday.
Fresh from vacation, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams makes his triumphant return to the Hackaday Podcast! He's joined this week by Managing Editor Tom Nardi, who's just happy he didn't have to do the whole thing by himself again. In this episode we'll talk about tackling BGA components in your custom PCBs, a particularly well executed hack against Google's Nest Hub, and why you probably don't really want the world's cheapest 3D printer. We'll also take a look at an incredible project to turn the Nokia 1680 into a Linux-powered handheld computer, a first of its kind HDMI firewall, and a robot that's pretty good at making tacos. Listeners who are into artificial intelligence will be in for quite a treat as well, as is anyone who dreams of elevating the lowly automotive alternator to a more prominent position in the hacker world.
By the way, it seems nobody has figured out the hidden message in last week's podcast yet. What are you waiting for? One of you out there has to be bored enough to give it a shot.
Check out the links, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
With Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams enjoying some time off, Managing Editor Tom Nardi is flying solo for this special edition of the Hackaday Podcast.
Thanks to our roving reporter Jenny List, we'll be treated to several interviews conducted live from EMF Camp -- a European outdoor hacker camp the likes of which those of us in the United States can only dream of. After this special segment, Hackaday contributors Al Williams and Ryan Flowers will stop by to talk about their favorite stories from the week during what may be the longest Quick Hacks on record.
There's a few extra surprises hidden in this week's program...but if we told you everything, it would ruin the surprise. Listen closely, you never know what (or who) you might hear.
Show notes and links available on Hackday.
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos for a free-as-in-beer showcase of the week's most gnarly but palatable hacks. But first, a reminder! Round 2 of the 2022 Hackaday Prize comes to an end in the early hours of Sunday, June 12th, so there's still enough time to put a project together and get it entered.
This week, we discuss the utility of those squishy foam balls in projects and issue the PSA that it is in fact pool noodle season, so go get 'em. We drool over if-you-have-to-ask-you-can't-afford-it 3D printers with staircases and such, and wonder why breadboard game controls didn't already exist. Later on we laugh about lasers, shake the bottle of LTSpice tips from [fesz], and ponder under-door attacks. Finally, we're back to frickin' laser beams again, and we discover that there's a fruity demoscene in Kristina's backyard.
Check out the show notes for all the sweet, sweet links.
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney for a tour of the week's best and brightest hacks. We begin with a call for point-of-sale diversity, because who wants to carry cash? We move on to discussing glass as a building material, which isn't really easy, but at least it can be sintered with a DIY-grade laser. Want to make a call on a pay phone in New York City? Too late -- the last one is gone, and we offer a qualified "good riddance." We look at socially engineering birds to get them away from what they should be really afraid of, discuss Apple's potential malicious compliance with right-to-repair, and get the skinny on an absolute unit of a CNC machine. Watching TV? That's so 2000s, but streaming doesn't feel quite right either. Then again, anything you watch on a mechanical color TV is pretty cool by definition.
Check out all the hot, hot links over at Hackaday.
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi for a recap of all the best tips, hacks, and stories of the past week. We start things off with an update on Hackaday's current slate of contests, followed by an exploration of the cutting edge in 3D printing and printables. Next up we'll look at two achievements in detection, as commercial off-the-shelf hardware is pushed into service by unusually dedicated hackers to identify both dog poop and deep space pulsars (but not at the same time).
We'll also talk about fancy Samsung cables, homebrew soundcards, the surprising vulnerability of GPS, and the development of ratholes in your cat food.
Check out all the sweet, sweet links over on Hackaday.
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos as we take a tour of our top hacks from the past week. Elliot brought some fairly nerdy fare to the table this time, and Kristina pines for physical media as we discuss the demise of the iPod Touch, the last fruit-flavored mp3-playing soldier to fall.
But first, we talk about a why-didn't-I-think-of-that 3D printing hack that leverages vase mode into something structural. We'll take a look inside a see-through cyberdeck made from laptop parts, marvel over the minuscule voltages that can be picked up with a bit of meticulous meter design, and chew the fat about old rotary phones.
We also put in some overtime discussing a cheap fix for an expensive time card clock part, and rock out to a guitar that can use various things for its resonant cavity. Finally, Elliot questions the difference between software and firmware when it comes to hiding your dirty secrets, and Kristina bloviates about see-through electronics and music appreciation using whatever format you can afford.
Head on over to Hackaday for all the links!
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney as they review the top hacks for the week. It was a real retro-fest this time, with a C64 built from (mostly) new parts, an Altoids Altair, and learning FPGAs via classic video games. We also looked at LCD sniffing to capture data from old devices, reimagined the resistor color code, revisited the magic of Polaroid instant cameras, and took a trip down television's memory lane. But it wasn't all old stuff -- there's flat-packing a sphere with math, spraying a fine finish on 3D printed parts, a DRM-free label printer, and a look at what's inside that smartphone in your pocket -- including some really weird optics.
Check out the show notes over on Hackaday for all the sweet, sweet links.
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi for a review of all the tech that's fit to print. Things kick off with an update about the Hackaday Prize and a brief account of the 2022 Vintage Computer Festival East. Then we'll talk about an exceptionally dangerous art project that's been making the rounds on social media, a smart tea kettle that gave its life so that others can hack their device's firmware, some suspiciously effective plant grow lights, and the slippery slope of remote manufacturer kill switches. We'll wrap things up with some thought provoking discussion about personal liability as it pertains to community repair groups, and a close look at what makes synthetic oil worth spending extra on.
Check out the links over on Hackaday.
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney as they dive into the last week of Hackaday articles. If you love things that go boom, you won't want to miss the discussion about explosive welding. Ever use the sun to burn something with a magnifying glass? Now you can CNC that, if you dare.
We'll take a quick trip through the darkroom and look at analog-digital photography as well as a tactical enlarger you can build, watch someone do terrible things to Wago and Wago-adjacent connectors, and talk about how suborbital chainsaws can be leveraged into a mass storage medium. Not enough for you? Then don't miss our bafflement at one corporation's attitude toward 3D printing, the secret sauce of resin casting, and our rundown of the 2022 Sci-Fi Contest winners.
Check out the show notes for links!
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos as we gab about the most interesting hacks and stories of the previous week. This time, we start off by marveling over everything happening this weekend. Most urgently, it's your last chance to enter the 2022 Sci-Fi contest, which closes Monday, April 25th at 8:30 AM Pacific Time sharp. Already got your hat in the ring? If you're anywhere in the neighborhood of New Jersey, don't miss the VCF's Vintage Computer Festival East. Don't want to leave the house? Then check out all the talks that start approximately right now, assuming you get your Hackaday Podcasts hot off the server.
In this episode, we'll fawn over a KiCAD plug-in that gives your PCBs that old-timey look, discuss ancient telephone exchanges and the finest in 70s-era custom telephones, and dream about building a wall of sound out of Raspberry Pis. Then we'll talk about awesome old printers and the elegance of RSS feeds, developing your own digital film, and a really cool line follower robot that works without a brain. Stay with us to find out where Kristina likes her taskbar, and we'll tell you the cool-kid name for the the Commodore key.
Check out the links and more over at Hackaday!
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi as they review the most interesting hacks and stories of the previous week. This time we'll start things off by talking about the return of in-person events, and go over several major conventions and festivals that you should add to your calendar now. Then we'll look at a NASA training film from the Space Race, an interesting radio-controlled quirk that Tesla has built into their cars for some reason, a very promising autonomous boat platform, and some high performance visuals generated by an ATtiny85. Stick around to find out what happens with an interplanetary probe looses its ride to space, and why the best new enclosure for your Raspberry Pi 4 might be a surveillance camera.
For all the good links, or to enter the What's That Sound contest, head on over to Hackaday.
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos as we spend an hour or so dissecting some of the more righteous hacks and projects from the previous week. We'll discuss a DIY TPM module that satisfies Windows 11, argue whether modern guts belong in retrocomputer builds even if it makes them more practical, and marvel at the various ways that sound has been encoded on film.
We'll also rock out to the idea of a 3D-printed guitar neck, map out some paths to defeating DYMO DRM, and admire a smart watch that has every sensor imaginable and lasts 36+ hours on a charge. Finally, we'll sing the praises of RS-485 and talk about our tool collections that rival our own Dan Maloney's catalogue of crimpers.
Check out the links!
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi for your weekly review of the best projects, hacks, and bits of news that we can cram into 45 minutes or so. We'll look at the latest developments in DIY air-powered engines, discuss the whimsical combination of GitHub's API and a cheap thermal printer, and marvel at impressive pieces of homebrew biology equipment.
We've also got an exceptionally polished folding cyberdeck, a bevy of high-tech cloud chambers, and some soda bottles that are more than meets the eye. Finally we'll go over the pros and cons of today's super-smart cameras, and speculate wildly about what a new EU law means for our battery powered gadgets.
Check out links at the show notes!
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney for an audio tour of the week's top stories and best hacks. We'll look at squeezing the most out of a coin cell, taking the first steps towards DIY MEMS fabrication, and seeing if there's any chance that an 80's-vintage minicomputer might ride again. How small is too small when it comes to chip packages? We'll find out, and discover the new spectator sport of microsoldering while we're at it. Find out what's involved in getting a real dead-tree book published, and watch a hacker take revenge on a proprietary memory format -- and a continuous glucose monitor, too.
Head over to Hackaday for links in the show notes!
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi as they tackle all the hacks that were fit to print this last week. Things start off with some troubling news from Shenzhen (spoilers: those parts you ordered are going to be late), and lead into a What's That Sound challenge that's sure to split the community right down the center. From there we'll talk about human powered machines, bringing OpenSCAD to as many devices as humanly possible, and the finer points of installing your own hardware into a Pelican case. There's a quick detour to muse on laser-powered interstellar probes, a Pi-calculating Arduino, and a surprisingly relevant advertisement from Sony Pictures. Finally, stay tuned to hear the latest developments in de-extinction technology, and a seriously deep dive into the lowly nail.
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi as they look back on the best hacks and stories of the previous week. There's plenty in the news to talk about, though between faulty altimeters and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, it isn't exactly of the positive variety. But things brighten up quickly as discussion moves on to 3D printed car wheels, a fantastically complex drum machine from 1958, a unique take on the seven-segment flip display, and a meticulously designed (and documented) coffee machine upgrade.
Somewhere in there a guy also recreates a rare German anti-air rocket launcher from WWII, but it's all in the name of history. We'll also tackle two very different forms of electric propulsion, from the massive wheeled batteries popping up in garages and driveways all over the world to high-efficiency thrusters for deep space missions.
Check out the show notes for links!
Join Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney as they take a look at the week's top stories, taken straight off the pages of Hackaday. What happens when you stuff modern parts into a 90's novelty PC case? Nothing good, but everything awesome! Is there any way to prevent PCB soil moisture sensors from being destroyed by, you know, soil moisture? How small is too small for a microcontroller, and who needs documentation anyway? We also cast a jaundiced eye -- err, ear -- at an electronic cheating scandal, and if you've ever wondered how phased arrays and beam steering work, gazing into a pan of water might just answer your questions. We also share all our soldering war stories, and hey -- what's with all these CRT projects anyway?
Links in the show notes!
This week Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi look at the week's most interesting stories and projects, starting with the dystopian news that several people have had their bionic eye implants turn off without warning. We then pivot into an only slightly less depressing discussion about the poor security of Apple's AirTags network and how it can be used to track individuals without their knowledge. But it's not all doom and gloom. We'll look at new projects designed to push the envelope of desktop 3D printing, and marvel at a DIY robotic arm build so accurate that it can put stitches in the skin of a grape. You'll also hear about the surprisingly low cost of homebrew hydrophones, the uncomfortable chemistry behind wintergreen, and an early portable computer that looks like it came from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Check out the show notes for all the links!
This week, Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos fawn over a beautiful Italian split-flap clock that doesn't come cheap, and another clock made of floppies that could be re-created for next to nothing. We'll also sing the praises of solderless circuitry for prototyping and marvel over a filament dry box with enough sensors to control an entire house. The finer points of the ooh, sparkly-ness of diffraction gratings will be discussed, and by the end of the show, you'll know what we each like in a microscope.
Check out the show notes for links!
This week Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi take a close look at two pairs of projects that demonstrate the wildly different approaches that hackers can take while still arriving at the same conclusion. We'll also examine the brilliant mechanism that the James Webb Space Telescope uses to adjust its mirrors, and marvel over a particularly well-developed bot that can do your handwriting for you. The finer points of living off home-grown algae will be discussed, and by the end of the show, you'll learn the one weird trick to stopping chip fabs in their tracks.
Check out all the links, and Tom's Algae, on Hackaday!
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney for this week's podcast as we talk about Elliot's "defection" to another podcast, the pros and cons of CNC builds, and making Nixie clocks better with more clicking. We'll explore how citizen scientists are keeping a finger on the pulse of planet Earth, watch a 2D stepper go through its paces, and figure out how a minimalist addressable LED strip works. From solving a Rubik's cube to answering the age-old question, "Does a watched pot boil?" -- spoiler alert: if it's well designed, yes -- this episode has something for everyone.
Check out the show notes for links and more!
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi on another whirlwind tour of the week's top stories, hacks, and projects. We start off with some breaking Linux security news, and then marvel over impeccably designed pieces of hardware ranging from a thrifty Z table for the K40 laser cutter to a powerful homebrew injection molding rig. The finer technical points of a USB device that only stores 4 bytes at a time will be discussed, and after taking an interactive tour through the internals of the 555 timer, we come away even more impressed by the iconic 50 year old chip.
We'll wrap things up by speculating wildly about all the bad things that can happen to floating solar panels, and then recite some poetry that you can compile into a functional computer program should you feel so inclined.
Check out the show notes for links and more!
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi as they bring you up to speed on the best stories and projects from the week. There's some pretty unfortunate news for the physical media aficionados in the audience, but if you're particularly keen on 50 year old integrated circuits, you'll love hearing about the winners of the 555 Timer Contest. We'll take a look at a singing circuit sculpture powered by the ESP32, extol the virtues of 3D printed switches, follow one hacker's dream of building the ultimate Star Trek tricorder prop, and try to wrap our heads around how electronic devices can be jolted into submission. Stick around to the end as we take a close look at some extraordinary claims about sniffing out computer viruses, and wrap things up by wondering why everyone is trying to drive so far.
Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi are back again to talk about all the weird and wonderful stores from our corner of the tech world. Canon having to temporarily give up on chipping their toner cartridges due to part shortages is just too perfect to ignore, and there's some good news for the International Space Station as the White House signals they're ready to support the orbiting outpost until 2030. We'll also look at an extremely promising project looking to deliver haptic feedback for VR, programming retrocomputers with the Arduino IDE, and the incredible reverse engineering involved in adding a DIY autonomous driving system to a 2010 Volkswagen Golf. Finally we'll find out why most of the human life on this planet depends on a process many people have never heard of, and learn about the long history of making cars heavier than they need to be.
Check out all the links over on Hackaday!
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi as they ring in the New Year with the first podcast episode of 2022. We get the bad news out early for those still thumbing away at their Blackberries, then pivot into some of the highlights from over the holidays such as the release of NODE's The Pinouts Book and the discovery of a few expectation-defying OpenSCAD libraries. We'll look at modifying a water cooler with Ghidra, and the incredible technology that let's historians uncover the hidden history of paintings. Oh, and we'll also talk about all the best and most important stories of the last 12 months. There's a lot of ground to cover, so get comfortable.
The Hackaday Podcast is in its second, and final, week of winter hibernation. So join me and special guest Tom Nardi in the first week of 2022 as we discuss the best of 2021 and the holiday season.
The Podcast is in Holiday Mode this week, so keep on hacking (and reading Hackaday!) until we catch up again in 2022.
Newly ordained Hackaday editor-in-chief Elliot Williams and staff writer Dan Maloney jump behind the podcast mic to catch you up on all this week's essential hacks. We'll have a Bob Ross moment with an iPad, go to ridiculous lengths to avoid ordering a 555, and cook up a Wii in toaster. Need to make a VGA adapter from logic chips? Or perhaps you want to quantify the inner depths of human consciousness? Either way, we've got you covered.
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys get caught up on the week that was. People go to great lengths for video game saves, but this Pokemon hack that does hardware-based trade conversion between the Game Boy's Pokemon 2 and Pokemon 3 is something else. Why do we still use batteries when super capacitors exist? They're different components, silly, and work best at different things. Turns out you can study the atmosphere by sending radio waves through it, and that's exactly what the ESA is doing... around Mars! And will machined parts become as easy to custom order as PCBs have become? This week we take a closer look at prototyping as a service.
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams get caught up on the week that was. You probably know a ton of people who have a solar array at their home, but how many do you know that have built their own hydroelectric generation on property? Retrocomputing software gurus take note, there's an impressive cross-compiler in town that can spit out working binaries for everything from C64 to Game Boy to ZX Spectrum. Tom took a hard look at the Prusa XL, and Matthew takes us back to school on what UEFI is all about.
Won't somebody please think of the show notes?!?
Postpone your holiday shopping and spend some quality time with editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams as they sift through the week in Hackaday. Which programming language is the greenest? How many trackballs can a mouse possibly have? And can a Bluetooth dongle run DOOM? Join us to find out!
You don't need a pencil to jot down the links. Just check out the podcast page!
With literally just hours to go before the 2021 Hackaday Remoticon kicks off, editors Tom Nardi and Elliot Williams still managed to find time to talk about some of the must-see stories from the last week. There's fairly heavyweight topics on the docket this time around, from alternate methods of multiplying large numbers to the incredible engineering that goes into producing high purity silicon. But we'll also talk about the movie making magic of Stan Winston and some Pokemon-themed environmental sensors, so it should all balance out nicely. So long as the Russian's haven't kicked off the Kessler effect by the time you tune in, we should be good.
Check out the show notes for links and more!
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys get caught up on the week that was. Two builds are turning some heads this week; one uses 60 Nixie tube bar graphs to make a clock that looks like the sun's rays, the other is a 4096 RGB LED Cube (that's 12,288 total diodes for those counting at home) that leverages a ton of engineering to achieve perfection. Speaking of perfection, there's a high-end microphone built on a budget but you'd never know from the look and the performance -- no wonder the world is now sold out of the microphone elements used in the design. After perusing a CNC build, printer filament dryer, and cardboard pulp molds, we wrap the episode talking about electronic miniaturization, radionic analyzers, and Weird Al's computer.
Check out the show notes for links!
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams catch up on a week's worth of hacks. Get a grip on robot hands: there's an eerily human one on offer this week. If you're doing buck/boost converter design, the real learning is in high-frequency design patterns that avoid turning your circuits into unintentional radiators. Those looking for new hobbies might want to take up autonomous boat racing. We saw a design that's easy enough to print on the average 3D printer -- and who doesn't want to build their own jet boat? We'll wrap up the episode by digging into magnesium sources, and by admiring the number of outfits who are rolling their own silicon these days.
Check out the show notes for links galore!
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys flap their gums about all the great hacks of the week. Something as simple as a wheel can be totally revolutionary, as we saw with a white cane mod for the visually impaired which adds an omniwheel that knows where it's going. We enjoyed the collection of great hacks from all over the community that went into a multi-two-liter water rocket build. You'll hear Elliot and Mike's great debate about the origin of comments in computer code. And we spend plenty of time joking around about the worlds longest airplane flight (it was in a tiny Cessna and lasted over two months!)
You really want to check out this week's show notes.
Hackaday editors Mike and Elliot Williams catch up on a week's worth of hacks. It turns out there are several strange radio bands that don't require a license, and we discuss this weekend's broadcast where you can listen in. It's unlikely you've ever seen the website check-box abused quite like this: it's the display for playing Doom! Just when you thought you'd seen all the ESP32's tricks it gets turned into a clock styled after Out Run. Mike geeks out over how pianos work, we're both excited to have Jeremy Fielding giving a Keynote talk at Remoticon, and we wrap things up with a chat about traffic rules in space.
Give the show notes a gander, won't you?
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys chew the fat over the coolest of hacks. It's hard to beat two fascinating old-tech demonstraters; one is a mechanical computer for accurate cheese apportionment, the other an ADC built from logic chips. We gawk two very different uses of propeller-based vehicles; one a flying-walker, the other a ground-effect coaster. Big news shared at the top of the show is that Keith Thorne of LIGO is going to present a keynote at Hackaday Remoticon. And we wrap the episode talking about brighter skies from a glut of satellites and what the world would look like if one charging cable truly ruled all smartphones.
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Hackaday editors Tom Nardi and Elliot Williams bring you up to speed on the most interesting stories of the week. Hackaday's Remoticon and Germany's Chaos Communication Congress are virtual again this year, but the Vintage Computer Festival will be live. We'll also talk about ocean-going drones, the recreation of an old-school light bulb with a potato peeler, cheap smart watches with hidden potential, and sanding down shady modules to figure out just how you've been scammed. Stick around for some thoughts on turning real-estate signs into a handy prototyping material, and to find out why some very impressive Soviet tech is getting the boot from America's space program.
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Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys peruse the great hardware hacks of the past week. There's a robot walker platform that wirelessly offloads motor control planning to a computer. We take a look at automating your fishing boat with a trolling motor upgrade, building the hoover dam in your back yard, and playing Holst's Planets on an army of Arduini. Make sure you stick around until the end as we stroll through distant memories of Gopher, and peek inside the parking garages of the sea.
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Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams marvel at a week packed full of great hardware hacks. Do you think the engineers who built the earliest home computers knew that their work would be dissected decades later for conference talks full of people hungry to learn the secret sauce? The only thing better than the actual engineering of the Commodore hard drive is the care with which the ultimate hardware talk unpacks it all! We look upon a couple of EV hacks -- one that replaces the inverter in a Leaf and the other details the design improvements to Telsa's self-hiding door handles. Before we get to midieval surgery and USB-C power delivery, we stop for a look at a way to take snapshots of Game Boy gameplay and an electric plane engine that looks radial but is all gears.
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Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys look back on a great week of hardware hacking. What a time to be alive when you can use open source tools to decode signals from a probe that has long since left our solar system! We admire two dirt-cheap builds, one to measure current draw in mains power, another to mill small parts with great precision for only a few bucks. A display built from a few hundred 7-segment modules begs the question: who says pixels need to be the same size? We jaw on the concept of autonomous electric cargo ships, and marvel at the challenges of hitting an asteroid with a space probe. All that and we didn't even mention using GLaDOS as a personal assistant robot, but that's on the docket too!
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Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Tom Nardi go over the best stories and hacks from the previous week, covering everything from sidestepping rockets to homebrew OLED displays. We'll cover an incredible attempt to really emulate the Nintendo Game Boy, low-cost injection molding of rubbery parts, a tube full of hypersonic shockwaves, and how a hacked depth finder and a rowboat can help chart those local rivers and lakes that usually don't get any bathymetric love. Plus, even though he's on vacation this week, Elliot has left us with a ruddy mysterious song to try and identify.
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Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys are joined by contributing editor Jenny List to talk about her adventure at Born Hack last week. We also discuss the many capacitor values that go into regen receivers, the quest for a Raspberry Pi handheld that includes a slide-out keyboard, and how capacitive touch might make mice (mouses?) and touchpads better. There's a deep dive into 3D-printer bed-leveling, a junk-box metal detector build, and an ambisonic microphone which can listen any-which-way.
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Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams wade into a week of wonderful hacks. There's an acrylic lens that hides images in the network of caustics: the light rays that shine through it. Boston Dynamics is finally showing the good stuff; people wrenching on 'bots, and all kinds of high-end equipment failure, along with some epic successes. Can you grow better plants by inferring what they need by accurately weighing them? In more turbulent news, a police drone slammed into a Cessna mid-flight, the ISS went for an unexpected spin, and McDonald's not-ice-cream machines have a whole new layer of drama around them.
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Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys debate the great mysteries of the hacking universe. On tap this week is news that Sam Zeloof has refined his home lab chip fabrication process and it's incredible! We see a clever seismometer built from plastic pipe, a laser, and a computer mouse. There's a 3D printed fabric that turns into a hard shell using the same principles as jamming grippers. And we love the idea of high-powered lasers being able to safely direct lighting to where you want it.
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Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams recount the past week in hardware hacking. There's a new Tamagochi hack that runs the original ROM on plain old microcontrollers like the STM32. Did you know you can blast the Bayer filter off a camera sensor using a powerful laser and the sensor will still work? We didn't. There was a lot of debate this week about a commercial jet design alteration that would remove windows -- but it's for the good cause of making the plane more efficient. We marvel at what it takes to pump blood with an artificial heart, and go down the troubleshooting rabbit hole after the magic smoke was let out of a radio.
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Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys get charged up on the best hacks the week had to offer. The 3D printer design gods were good to us, delivering an upside-down FDM printer and a hack that can automatically swap out heated beds for continuous printing. We look at a drone design that builds vertical wings into the frame of a quadcopter -- now when it tips on its side it's a fixed-wing aircraft! We chew the artificially-intelligent fat about GitHub CoPilot's ability (or inability?) to generate working code, and talk about the firm future awaiting solid state batteries.
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Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams have found a critical mass of projects this week that wouldn't be possible without 3D printers. There's an absolutely astounding model roller coaster that is true to the mechanisms and physics of the original (and beholden to hours of sanding and painting). Adding sheet material to the printing process is a novel way to build durable hinges and foldable mechanisms. Elliot picks out not one, but two quadruped robot projects that leverage 3D-printed parts in interesting ways. And for the electronics geeks there's a server rack stuffed with Raspberry Pi, and analog electronic wizardry to improve the resolution of the WS2811 LED controller. We wrap it all up with discussions of flying boats, and adding Bluetooth audio to old car head units.
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Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys bubble sort the best hardware hacks so you don't miss 'em. This week we're smitten by the perfection of a telephone tape loop message announcer. We enjoyed seeing Blender's ray tracing to design mirrors, and a webcam and computer monitor to stand in for triple-projector-based fractal fun. There's a bit of injection molding, some Nintendo Switch disassembling, and the Internet on a calculator. We close the show with a pair of Space stories, including the happy news this week that Wally Funk finally made it there!
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Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams help you get caught up on a week of wonder hacks. We don't remember seeing a floppy drive headline the demoscene, but sure enough, there's a C64 demo that performs after the computer is disconnected. What causes bench tools to have unreliable measurements? Sometimes a poor crystal choice lets AC ruin the party. We dive into the ongoing saga of the Audacity open source project's change of ownership, and talk about generator exciter circuits -- specifically their role in starting grid-scale generators from shutdown.
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Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys dive into a week of exceptional hacks. Tip-top of the list has to be the precision measuring instrument that uses a cable spooling mechanism. There's news that the Starlink base station firmware has been dumped and includes interesting things like geofencing for the developer modes. We saw a garage robot that will plug in your electric vehicle if you're the forgetful sort. And we close up by talking about heavier-than-air helium airships and China's Mars rover.
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Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams look through the most interesting hacks of the week. We spent ample time in adulation of the automatons built by François Junod; wizard-level watchmaking wrapped in endless levels of artistic detail. A couple projects stuffed into old cellphones turned Elliot's head. We got to see what happens if you spin a gear's teeth on two axes to make a universal spherical gear. And we conclude the episode with a look at how Windows 11 may send a lot of good hardware to recycle center, and at how toothpaste tubes sometimes miss the recycling center completely.
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Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys marvel at the dangerous projects on display this week, including glass etching with hydrofluoric acid and pumping 200,000 A into a 5,000 A fuse. A new board that turns the Raspberry Pi into an SDR shows off the power of the secondary memory interface (SMI) present in those Broadcom chips. We also discuss the potential for graphene in hard drives, and finish up with a teardown of a very early electronic metronome.
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Hackaday Editor in Chief Mike Szczys is taking a bit of vacation this week, so Managing Editor Elliot Williams is joined by Staff Writer Dan Maloney to talk about all the cool hacks and great articles that turned up this week. Things were busy, so there was plenty to choose from, but how would we not pick one that centers around strapping a jet engine to your back to rollerskate without all that pesky exercise? And what about a light bulb that plays Doom - with a little help, of course. We'll check out decals you can make yourself and why the custom keyboard crowd might want to learn that skill, learn about the other "first computer", and learn how a little radiation might be just what it takes to save an endangered species.
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Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys marvel at the awesome hacks from the past week. We had way too much fun debated whether a wind-powered car can travel faster than the wind, and whether or not you can call that sailing. Low-temperature desoldering was demystified (it's the bismuth!) while a camera gimbal solves the problem of hand tremor during soldering. Ford just wants to become your PowerWall. And the results are in from NASA's mission to spin mice up in a centrifuge on the ISS.
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Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams discuss a great week of hardware hacks. Two delightful mechanical hacks focus on bicycles: one that puts a differential on the front fork, and the other a flywheel between the knees. Elliot was finally impressed by something involving AI -- a machine-learning guitar pedal.
You've heard of a delta bot? The tripteron is similar but with a single rail for the three arms. After a look at flip dots, tiny robots, and solar air planes we close the show geeking out about racing electric vehicles up a hill and stories of the hardware that has made closed captions possible.
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Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys recount a week of awesome hacks. One you might have missed involves a Roku-based smart TV that was rooted and all secrets laid bare for the sole purpose of making an Ambilight setup work with it. We take a look at a creative blade-tracking system for a scrollsaw CNC project, and a robot arm that brings non-flat layers to 3D printing and envisions composite material printing. There's a great template for video glitching using inexpensive VGA to CGA converter boards, cleanly squeezed into a nice enclosure. We are a bit giddy for the omniwheel robot designs [James Bruton] has been showing off. And we finish out the show with a great conversation happening this week on Hackaday: people from throughout the community share how the chip shortage is affecting their projects.
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Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams pick up on the neatest hacks you may have missed. We start off with another "What's that Sound?" so put your geeky-ears to the test and win a Hackaday Podcast T-shirt. Here are a couple of classic hacks to bring you joy: music based on Markov chains, and a squiggly take on the classic Nokia game of snake. For the more hardcore science geeks we dive into the B Meson news coming out of CERN's physics experiments. And after taking a detour in bristle-bot-based pen plotting, we unpack the hidden system of pipes that carry oil, gas, diesel, and more from the refinery to your region.
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Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys gather to ooh and aah over a week of interesting hacks. This week we're delighted to welcome special guest Kristina Panos to talk about the Inputs of Interest series she has been working on over the last couple of years. In the news is the effort to pwn the new Apple AirTags, with much success over the past week. We look at turning a screenless Wacom tablet into something more using a donor iPad, stare right into the heart of a dozen 555 die shots, and watch what happens when you only 3D print the infill and leave the perimeters out.
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Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams discuss the latest hacks from around the Internet. 3D-Printed linear rails don't sound like a recipe for a functional CNC machine but there was one this week that really surprised us. We were delighted by the procedurally generated music from a $0.03 microcontroller inside of an RCA plug (the clever flexible PCB may be the coolest part of that one). There's an interesting trick to reverse engineering Bluetooth comms of Android apps by running in a VM and echoing to WireShark. And we look at what the buzz is all about with genetically engineered mosquito experiments taking place down in the Florida Keys.
New this week is a game of "What's that sound?". Use the form link on the show notes below to send in your answer, one winner will receive a podcast T-shirt.
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Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys select our favorite hardware hacks of the past week. This episode is packed with DIY lab instruments, including a laser microscope, a Raspberry Pi spectrometer, and a stepper motor tester that can tell you what's going on all the way down to the microsteps. We wax poetic about what modular hardware really means, fall in love with a couple of stock-ticker robots, and chat with special guest Tom Nardi about his experience at the VCF Swap Meet.
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Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams pull back the curtain on a week of excellent hacks. We saw an awesome use of RGB LEDs as a data channel on a drone, and the secrets of an IP camera's OS laid bare with some neat reverse engineering tools. There's an AI project for the Linux terminal that guesses at the commands you actually want to run. And after considering how far autopilot has come in the aerospace industry, we jump into a look at the gotchas you'll find when working with models of 3D scanned objects.
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys marvel at the hacks that surfaced over the past week. An eye-popping webcam hack comes in the form of an animatronic that gives that camera above your screen an eyeball to look around, an eyelid to blink with, and the skin, eyelashes, and eyebrow to complete the illusion (and make us shudder at the same time).
Dan did a deep dive on Zinc Flu -- something to avoid when welding parts that contain zinc, like galvanized metals. A robot arm was given a chainsaw, leading to many hijinks; among them the headache of path planning such a machine. And we got to hear a really awesome story about resurrecting a computer game lost to obscurity, by using one of the main tools of the copyright office.
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Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams recap a week of great hacks. You won't want to miss the dynamometer Leo Fernekes built to measure the power output of his sterling motor (also DIY). In this age of lithium-powered multirotors, it's nice to step back and appreciate a hand-built rubberband-powered ornithopter.
We have a surprising amount to say about Python's addition of the match statement (not be be confused with switch statements). And when it comes to electromechanical synth gear, it's hard to beat a spinning tape-head sequencer.
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Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys celebrate the cleverest projects from the week that was. We tried to catch a few fools on Thursday with our Lightmode™ and NFT articles -- make sure you go back and read those for a good chuckle if you haven't already.
While those fall under not a hack, many other features this week are world-class hacks, such as the 555 timer built from 1.5-dozen vacuum tubes, and the mechanical word-clock that's 64 magnetic actuators built around PCB coils by Hackaday's own [Mortiz v. Sivers]. A treat for the ears, [Linus Akesson] aka [lft] shows off a Commodore64 that seriously sounds a good as a cathedral organ. And a masterpiece of OpenCV and Blender, you can't miss the project by [Matthew Earl] that overlays video of the Mars landing on still satellite photos... perfection!
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Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams curate a week of great hacks. Physical displays created in 3D space are a holy grail, and you can make one with 200 ultrasonic transducers, four FPGAs, and a lot math. Smart speakers have one heck of a microphone array in them, it's yours for the hacking if you just roll your own firmware. Hobby servos can be awful, but this week we saw they can be made really great by cracking open the DC motor to add a simple DIY position sensor. And lasers are making their way into car headlights; we illuminate the situation in this episode.
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Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys cover a great week of hardware hacking. We saw a fault-injection attack that used an electric flyswatter and hand-wound coil to twiddle bits inside of an AVR micro. Focus-stacking is what you want when using a microscope to image circuit boards and there's a hack for the Eakins cameras that makes it automatic. In our "can't miss articles" we riff on how to cool off cities in a warming climate, and then gaze with quiet admiration at what the Unicode standard has accomplished. But when it comes to head-spinning hacks, you can't beat the reverse-engineering efforts being shown off with the rack-mount box that made the Weather Channel awesome back in the 80's and 90's.
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams riff on the week's most interesting hacks. It's hard to imagine a more perfect piece of art than an original Pong circuit board mounted in a shadow box and playable along with some tasty FPGA tricks to capture the original look of the screen. You could make a synth with a 555 timer, but what about using 20 of them for perfect polyphony? We ogle an old video showing off a clever toothed-disc CNC machine for cutting pastry with a water jet. And the episode wouldn't be complete without looking at the strange tech that goes into making a fan car.
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys travel through the greatest hacks the week had on offer. Charge up your ice skates (literally) by adding spiked electric motors to push you across the frozen pond. If that's too cold for early March, snuggle up with a good book under the warm light of a clever lamp made from a rotary-dial telephone. We discuss CAD and CAM in your browser, and a software tool to merge images with PCB gerber files. The episode wraps up with a discussion the balance of quality versus speed when prototyping, and digesting the environmental impact of the Bitcoin network.
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams gab about all of the geeky things. We had a delightful time watching NASA bring Perseverance down to the Red planet. In Kristina's words, we pour one out for Fry's Electronics. And then we jump into a parade of excellent hacks with a magnetic bearing for crooked ball screws, a science-based poop-burning experiment, and the music hack only microcontroller enthusiasts could love as an FTDI cable is plugged directly into a speaker. Smart circuit design is used to hack a dimmer into non-dimmable LED fixtures, and an octet of living clams are the early warning sensors for water pollution.
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys recount the coolest hacks from the past week. Most clocks keep time with a quartz crystal, but we discuss one that uses a tuning fork... like the kind you use to tune a piano. Ghidra is a powerful reverse engineering tool developed by the NSA that was recently put to good use changing an embedded thermometer display from Celsius to Fahrenheit. We talk turkey on the Texas power grid problems and Tesla's eMMC failures. And of course there's some room for nostalgia as we walk down memory lane with the BASIC programming language.
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams unpack great hacks of the past week. We loves seeing the TIL311 -- a retro display in a DIP package -- exquisitely recreated with SMD electronics and resin casting. You might never need to continuously measure the diameter of your 3D printer filament, but just in case there's a clever hall-effect sensor mechanism for that. Both of us admire the work being done in the FPGA realm and this week we saw a RISC-V core plumbed into quite the FPGA stack to run a version of Doom originally played on 486 computers. And we're getting excited for the three ring circus of engineering acrobatics that will land NASA's Perseverance rover on the surface of Mars next week.
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys spin the wheel of hardware hacking brilliance. We're enamored with the quest for a root shell on a Nissan Xterra infotainment system, and smitten with a scanning microscope that uses a laser beam and precision positioning from DVD drives. We speculate on the future of artificial intelligence in the culinary arts. And this week turned up a clever way to monitor utility usage while only changing the battery on your sensor once per year.
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams discuss the greatest hacks of the week that was. Antennas aren't rocket science, so this week we really enjoyed a video that demystifies antenna designs and a project that tunes up the antennas on cheap wireless modules in the simplest of ways. Google's in the news this week with the end to project Loon, and a dust-up with the volunteer package maintainers who have spent years making sure Chromium browser is in the Linux repos. Elliot is gaga for magic eye tubes and crazy musical instruments, while Mike is over the moon for a chain-based clock display. We close up the episode talking about the Concorde, and the math behind cable mechanisms.
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys sift through a week of excellent hacks. Big news is of course the Raspberry Pi microcontroller which Elliot had a few weeks to play around with on the bench before the announcement -- it has some fascinating programmable modules (PIO) built in! Philips designed an LED light bulb that under-drives the LEDs for efficiency and long life. And Amazon added a nice little hardware disable circuit for the microphone in the Echo Flex -- a rather extreme teardown shows how they did it. Plus we talk about an open source long-range RC protocol, wall-sized pen plotter art, and a 3D printer that angles the nozzle to avoid needing support.
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams discuss our favorite hacks of the past week. We accidentally chose a theme, as most of the projects use lasers and are about machining work. We lead off with a really powerful laser that can directly etch circuit boards, only to be later outdone by an even more powerful laser using a chemistry trick to etch glass. We look at how to mix up your own rocket motors, bootstrap your own laser tag, and go down the rabbit hole of building tools for embedded development. The episode wraps up as we discuss what exactly NVMe is and where hardware hacking might take it.
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys kick off the first episode of the new year with the best hacks the internet has to offer. There's a deep dive into water-level sensing using a Christmas tree as an excuse. We ooh and ah over turning a CD-ROM drive into a CD player (miraculous tech of the previous century?). Do you have any use cases for ATtiny oscillator calibration registers? We look in on a hack that makes it dead simple to measure and set their values. The episode finishes up with a discussion of the constantly moving goal posts of virtual reality.
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams celebrate the 100th episode! It's been a pleasure to marvel each week at the achievements of awesome people and this is no different. This week there's a spinning POV display that solves pixel density and clock speed in very interesting ways. A macro keyboard made of OLED screens gives us a "do want" moment. And you can run a Raspberry Pi photo frame by sipping power from ambient light if you use the right power-tending setup. We wrap up the last episode of 2020 with a dive into ballpoint pens and solar racers.
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Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi contemplate a few of the most interesting stories that made their way through the tubes this week. We'll learn how old VHS tapes can be turned into a unique filament for your 3D printer, and realize that the best way to learn about a 2,000 year old computer is to break out the hand drill and make one yourself. Hobby grade RC gear and a some foam board stand in for SpaceX's next-generation Mars spacecraft, and a manufacturer of cheap 3D printers attempts to undercut a popular open source project with hilarious results. Finally, we'll take a close look at some hidden aluminum boogers and discuss how China's history making trek to the Moon might be a prelude to the country making a giant leap of their own.
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Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams round up the latest hardware hacks. This week we check out the latest dead-simple automation -- a wire cutting stripping robot that uses standard bypass strippers. Put on your rocket scientist hat and watch what happens in a 3D-printed rocket combustion chamber. Really small robots are so easy to love, this micromouse is the size of a coin. And whatever happened to those drone sightings at airports? We talk about all that, and round up the episode with Hyperloop, and Xiaomi thermometers.
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Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys discuss the latest and greatest in geeky goodness. This week we saw a Soviet time capsule come to light with the discovery of a computer lab from a building abandoned in the 1990's. A two-cycle compressed air engine shatters our expectations of what is involved in RC aircraft design. There's a new toolkit for wireless hacking on the scene in the form of a revitalized HackRF PortaPack firmware fork. And what goes into dishwasher design? Find out in this exciting episode.
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In this short Thanksgiving episode, Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams are talking turkey about the world of hardware hacking. We've still got news updates about the Nintendo Game and Watch hacking progress, the sad farewell to Areceibo, the new chip from Espressif, and the awesome circuit sculptures from our recent contest. We wrap up the show with a lightning round of quick hacks.
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys traverse the hackerscape looking for the best the internet had to offer last week. Nintendo has released the new Game & Watch handheld and it's already been hacked to run custom code. Heading into the darkness of winter, this artificial sun build is one not to miss... and a great way to reuse a junk satellite dish. We've found a pair of smartglasses that are just our level of dumb. And Tom Nardi cracks open some consumer electronics to find a familiar single-board computer doing "network security".
https://hackaday.com/2020/11/20/hackaday-podcast…ers-cant-do-that/
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams wrangle the epic hacks that crossed our screens this week. Elliot ran deep on overclocking all three flavors of the Raspberry Pi 4 this week and discovered that heat sinks rule the day. Mike exposes his deep love of candy-coated chocolates while drooling over a machine that can detect when the legume is missing from a peanut M&M. Core memory is so much more fun when LEDs come to play, one tiny wheel is the power-saving secret for a very strange multirotor drone, and there's more value in audio cassette data transfer than you might think -- let this FPGA show you how it's done.
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys catch the best hacks you may have missed. This week we look at the new Raspberry Pi 400, use computer vision to get ready for geeky Christmas, and decypher a negative-space calendar. We get an answer to the question of what happens if you scale up a styrofoam airplane to human-size. Facebook is locking down VR headset, will hackers break them free? And take an excellent stroll down memory lane to find out what it was like to be a space-obsessed ham at the dawn of personal computers.
https://hackaday.com/2020/11/06/hackaday-podcast…-shades-of-e-ink/
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams dig through the greatest hacks that ought not be missed this week. There's a wild one that flexes engineering skills instead of muscles to beat the homerun distance record with an explosively charged bat. A more elegant use of those engineering chops is shown in a CNC software tool that produces intricate wood joinery without needing an overly fancy machine to fabricate it. If your flesh and blood pets aren't keeping up with your interests, there's a new robot dog on the scene that far outperforms its constituent parts which are 3D-printed and of the Pi and Arduino varieties. And just when you thought you'd seen all the craziest retrocomputers, here's an electromechanical relay based machine that took six years to build (although there's so much going on here that it should have taken sixteen).
Show notes:
https://hackaday.com/?p=444464
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys chat about our favorite hacks from the past week. We start off with a bit of news of the Bennu asteroid and the new Raspberry Pi Compute Module. We drive ourselves crazy trying to understand how bobbin holders on sewing machines work, all while drooling over the mechanical brilliance of a bobbin-winding build. SCARA is the belt and pully champion of robot arms and this week's example cleverly uses redundant bearings for better precision. And we wrap up the show looking in on longform articles about the peppering of microcontrollers found on the Bluepill and wondering what breakthroughs are left to be found for internal combustion. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=443437
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams weigh the hacking gold found across the internet this week. We can't get over the epic adventure that went into making a battery from 100 pounds of potatoes. It turns out you don't need Internet for video conferencing as long as you're within a coupe of kilometers of everyone else. And move over toner transer method, resin printers want a shot at at-home PCB etching. We'll take a look at what the Tesla selfie cam is doing under the hood, and lose our marbles over a ball-bearing segment clock that's defying gravity. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=442391
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys riff on the hardware hacks that took the Internet by storm this week. Machining siege weapons out of aluminum? If they can throw a tennis ball at 180 mph, yes please! Welding aficionados will love to see the Hero Engine come together. We dive into the high-efficiency game of hypermiling, and spin up the polarizing topic of the Sun Cycle. The episode wouldn't be complete without hearing what the game of Go sounds like as a loop sequencer, and how a variable speed cassette player can be abused for the benefit of MIDI lovers the world over. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=435715
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams dish up a hot slice of the week's hardware hacks. We feature a lot of clocks on Hackaday, but few can compare to the mechanical engineering elegance of the band-saw-blade-based ratcheting clock we swoon over on this week's show. We've found a superb use of a six-pin microcontroller, peek in on tire (or is that tyre) wear particles, and hear the sounds of 500 mph RC gliders. Turns out 3D printers are the primordial ooze for both pumping water and positioning cameras. This episode comes to a close by getting stressed out over concrete. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=434942
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams take Mike Szczys peruse the world of hacks. There was so much news this week that we lead off the show with a rundown to catch you up. Yet there is still no shortage of hardware hacks, with prosthetic legs for your rubber ducky, a RC cart that channels the spirit of Formula 1, and a project that brings 80's video conferencing hardware to Zoom. There's phosphine gas on Venus and unlimited hacking projects inside your guitar. The week wouldn't be complete without the joy of riffing on the most useless machine concept. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=433621
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams take a look at all the hacks from the week that was. We think we've found the perfect tentacle robot, and the controller for it is fittingly also a tentacle. An unrelated project uses the same bowden cable trick as the tentacle controller to measure deflection. If you're more of a material-science geek, refining black sand to make your own inductors is a fascinating hack. And we wrap up the episode talking SSH keys and buses that go off road, but not in the way you might think. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=432406
With Editor in Chief Mike Szczys off this week, Managing Editor Elliot Williams is joined by Staff Writer Dan Maloney to look over the hacks from the last week. If you've ever wondered how the Beatles sound on a floppy disk, wonder no more. Do you fear the coming robopocalypse? This noisy wall-climbing robot will put those fears to rest. We'll take a look at an undersea lab worthy of the Cousteau name, and finally we'll look inside a digital pregnancy test and wonder at its unusual power switch. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=431146
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams ogle the greatest hacks from the past 168 hours. Did you know that Mars Rover didn't get launched into space all alone? Nestled in it's underbelly is a two-prop helicopter that's a fascinating study in engineering for a different world. Fingerprinting audio files isn't a special trick reserved for Shazam, you can do it just as easily with an ESP32. A flaw in the way Bluetooth COVID tracing frameworks chirp out their anonymized hashes means they're not as perfectly anonymized as planned. And you're going to love these cool ways to misuse items from those massive parts catalogs. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=430419
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys check in on the best hacks from the past week. All the buzz is the algorithm that can reverse engineer your house keys from the way they sound going into the lock. Cardboard construction goes extreme with an RC car build that's beyond wizard-level. Speaking of junk builds, there's a CNC mill tipped on its side grinding out results worlds better than you expect from salvaged CD-ROM drives. And a starburst character display is a clever combination of laser cutting and alternative using UV-cured resin as a diffuser. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=429459
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Tom Nardi chew the beef tallow as they take a tour through some of the best and most interesting articles from the past week, from kicking off another round of the popular Circuit Sculpture contest to building artisan coffee makers. We'll look at the engineering behind the post-apocalyptic face mask launcher of our nightmares, and stand in awe at the intersection of orbiting spacecraft and lawn emojis. Several tiny remote controlled vehicles will be discussed, and we'll take an unexpected look at how extruding plastic and aluminum might not be so different after all. Make sure to stick around until the end to learn why a little-known locomotive technology of the 1840s really sucked. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=428104
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys flip through the index of great hacks. This week we learn of a co-existence attack on WiFi and Bluetooth radios called Spectra. The craftsmanship in a pneumatic drone is so awesome we don't care that it doesn't fly. Building a powerful TEA laser is partly a lesson in capacitor design. And join us in geeking out at the prospect of big rigs getting their juice from miles of overhead wires. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=426831
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams gaze upon the most eye-popping projects from the past week. Who would have known that springy doorstops could be so artistic? Speaking of, what happens if you give everyone on the network the chance to collectively paint using pixels? There as better way to catch a rat, and a dubious way to lure mosquitoes. We scratch our heads at sending code to the arctic, and Elliot takes a deep look at the contact tracing apps developed and in use throughout Europe. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=425629
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys go down the rabbit hole of hacky hacks. A talented group of radio amateurs have been recording and decoding the messages from Tianwen-1, the Mars probe launched by the Chinese National Space Administration on July 23rd. We don't know exactly how magnets work, but know they do a great job of protecting your plasma cutter. You can't beat the retro-chic look of a Commodore 64's menu system, even if it's tasked with something mundane like running a meat smoker. And take a walk with us down MP3's memory lane. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=424793
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams are deep in the hacks this week. What if making your own display matrix meant a microcontroller board for every pixel? That's the gist of this incredible neon display. There's a lot of dark art poured into the slivers of microSD cards and this week saw multiple hacks digging into the hidden test pads of these devices. You've heard of Folding@Home, but what about Minecraft@Home, the effort to find world seeds from screenshots. And when USB chargers have exposed and rewritable firmware, what could possibly go wrong? Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=423655
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys are enamored by this week's fabrication hacks. There's a PCB mill that isolates traces by scratching rather than cutting. You won't believe how awesome this angle-cutter jig is at creating tapered augers for injection molding/extruding plastic. And you may not need an interactive way to cut foam, but the art from the cut pieces is more than a mere shadow of excellence. Plus we gab about a clever rotary encoder circuit, which IDE is the least frustrating, and the go-to tools for hard drive recovery. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=422534
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams scoop up a basket of great hacks from the past week. Be amazed by the use of traditional Japanese joinery in a 3D-printed design -- you're going to want to print one of these Shoji lamps. We behold the beautiful sound of a noise generator, and the freaky sound from the Golden Gate. There's a hack for Android app development using Javascript on an IDE hosted from the phone as a webpage on your LAN. And you'll like the KiCAD trick that makes enclosure design for existing boards a lot easier. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=421428
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys recap a week of hacks. A telescope mirror that can change shape, and a helicopter without a swashplate lead the charge for fascinating engineering. These are closely followed by a vibratory wind generator that has no blades to spin. The Open Source Hardware Association announced a new spec this week to remove "Master" and "Slave" terminology from SPI pin names. The Segway is no more. And a bit of bravery and rock solid soldering skills can resurrect that Macbook that has one dead GPU. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=420628
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams review a great week in the hacking world. There's an incredible 4k projector build that started from a broken cellphone, a hand-cranked player (MIDI) piano, and a woeful story of clipboard vulnerabilities found in numerous browsers and browser-based apps. Plus you'll love the field-ready solder splice that works like a strike-on box match (reminiscent of using thermite to weld railroad rail) and we spend some time marveling at the problem of finding power cuts on massive grid systems. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=419165
With Editor-in-Chief Mike Szczys on a well-earned vacation, Staff Writer Dan Maloney sits in with Managing Editor Elliot Williams to run us through the week's most amazing hacks and answer your burning questions. What do you do when you can't hit a golf ball to save your life? Build a better club, of course, preferably one that does the thinking for you. Why would you overclock a graphing calculator? Why wouldn't you! Will an origami boat actually float? If you use the right material, it just might. And what's the fastest way to the hearts of millions of kids? With a Super Soaker and a side-trip through NASA. https://hackaday.com/?post=417108
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams fan through a fantastic week of hacking. Most laser cutters try to go bigger, but there's a minuscule one that shows off a raft of exotic components you'll want in your bag of tricks. Speaking of tricks, this CNC scroll saw has kinematics the likes of which we've never seen before -- worth a look just for the dance of polar v. Cartesian elements. We've been abusing printf() for decades, but it's possible to run arbitrary operations just by calling this turing-complete function. We wrap the week up with odes to low-cost laptops and precision measuring. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=417098
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys bubble sort a sample set of amazing hacks from the past week. Who has every used the smart chip from an old credit card in as a functional component in their own circuit? This guy. There's something scientifically devious about the way solder smoke heat-seeks to your nostrils. There's more than one way to strip 16-bit audio down to five. And those nuclear tests from the 40s, 50s, and 60s? Those are still affecting how science takes measurements of all sorts of things in the world. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=415952
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams march to the beat of the hardware hacking drum as they recount the greatest hacks to hit the 'net this week. First up: Casio stepped in it with a spurious DMCA takedown notice. There's a finite matrix of resistors that form a glorious clock now on display at CERN. Will a patio paver solve your 3D printer noise problems? And if you ever build with copper clad, you can't miss this speedrun of priceless prototyping protips. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=415029
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys ride the rails of hackerdom, exploring the sweetest hacks of the past week. There's a dead simple component feeder for a pick and place (or any bench that hand-stuffs SMD), batteries for any accomplished mixologist, and a droid build that's every bit as cool as its Star Wars origins. Plus we gab about obsolescence in the auto industry, fawn over a frugal microcontroller, and ogle some old iron. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=413924
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams explore the coolest hacks of the past 168 hours. The big news this week: will Wink customers pony up $5 a month to turn their lights on and off? There's a new open source design for a pick and place machine. You may not have a Vectrex gaming console, but there's a scratch-built board that can turn you oscilloscope into one. And you just can't miss this LED sign technology that programs every pixel using projection mapping. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=412985
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys stomp through a forest full of highly evolved hardware hacks. This week seems particularly plump with audio-related projects, like the thwack-tackular soldenoid typewriter simulator. But it's the tape-loop scratcher that steals our hearts; an instrument that's kind of two-turntables-and-a-microphone meets melloman. We hear the clicks of 10-bit numbers falling into place in a delightful adder, and follow it up with the beeps and sweeps of a smartphone-based metal detector. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=411904
Ep065: Game Boy Hacks Galore, Cable Robo Elbow, Pi Cam Solargraphy, and the Deepest Sub is Crushing It Check out the show's writeup so that you don't have to take notes on your own: https://hackaday.com/?p=410890
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys pan for gold in a week packed with technological treasure. The big news is Apple/Google are working on contact tracing using BTLE. From adoption, to privacy, to efficacy, there's a lot to unpack here and many of the details have yet to take shape. Of course the episode also overflows with great hacks like broken-inductor bike chain sensors, parabolic basketball backboards, bizarre hose clamp tools, iron-on eTextile trials, and hot AM radio towers. We finish up discussing the greatest typing device that wasn't, and the coming and going of the COBOL crisis. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=409497
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams sift for hacking gold from the past week. In this episode, we remember John Horton Conway's Game of Life and its effect on novice programmers. We geek out adding screens to your car with an OBD-II hack, automating a Sharpie clicker as part of a plasma cutter, and 3D printing an incredible RC car that drives every wheel from a single motor. Plus we look at machine-learning for custom backgrounds in your video chats (Linux makes it easy!), take a gander at the coming generation of ePaper displays, and we get cultured about yeast. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=408510
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys check out the week's awesome hacks. From the mundane of RC controlled TP to a deep dive into JTAG for Hackers, there's something for everyone. We discuss a great guide on the smelly business of resin printing, and look at the misuse of lithium battery protection circuits. There's a trainable servo, star-tracking space probes, and a deep dive into why bootstrapped ventilator designs are hard Show Notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=407547
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams sort through the hardware hacking gems of the week. There was a kerfuffle about whether a ventilator data dump from Medtronics was open source or not, and cool hacks from machine-learning soldering iron controllers to 3D-printing your own solder paste stencils. A motion light teardown shows it's not being done with passive-infrared, we ask what's the deal with Tim Berners-Lee's decentralized internet, and we geek out about keyboards that aren't QWERTY. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=406399
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys recount the past week in hardware hacking. There's a new king of supercomputing and it's everyone! Have you ever tried to count bees? Precision is just a cleverly threaded bolt away. And we dig into some of the technical details of the coronavirus response with a close look at PCR testing for the virus, and why ventilators are so difficult to build. Show Notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=405212
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams undertake a journey through the week of fantastic hacks. Add a new level of complexity to model rockets by launching them from a silo via pneumatic ram before the combustibles even get involved. The eyes of that sculpture are actually following you -- and with laser focus! The Game Boy is a pillar of pop culture for a reason, there's a superb talk that outlines all of the interesting choices that made the electronics so special. We round out the show with a rousing discussion of a space tow truck and a scholarly look at the sporadic wake patter of Alexa et al. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=404008
Hackaday editor Elliot Williams and contributor Jonathan Bennett discuss the past week of Hackaday. Freeman Dyson, who wanted to send us to space on the back of nuclear explosions, passed away. Only slightly less dangerous, we looked at self-balancing vehicles, 3D printed press brakes, and making rubies in the home lab. All the usual suspects make cameo appearances: robots, FPGAs, and open-source software. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=402113
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams are onto an LCD and motors kick this week. Two different LCD screen teardowns caught our eye as one lets you stare into the void while using your iMac and the other tries to convince us to be not afraid of de-laminating the LCD stackup. On the motors front, it's all about using magnets and coils in slightly different ways; there's a bike generator that uses a planar alternator design, a dynamometer for testing motor power that itself is built from a motor, and a flex-PCB persistence of vision display that's a motor/display hybrid. We round out the episode with talk of the newly revealed espionage saga that was Crypto AG, and riveting discussion of calculators, both real and virtual. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=402111
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys gab on great hacks of the past week. Did you hear that there's a new rev of the Pi 4 out there? We just heard... but apparently it's release into the wild was months ago. Fans of the ESP8266 are going to love this tool that flashes and configures the board, especially for Sonoff devices. Bitluni's Supercon talk was published this week and it's a great roadmap of all the things you should try to do with an ESP32. Plus we take on the Sonos IoT speaker debacle and the wacky suspension system James Bruton's been building into his humanoid robot. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=401004
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams discuss the many great hacks of the past week. Just in case you missed the fact that we're living in the cyberpunk future, you can now pop off your prosthetic hand and jack directly into a synthesizer. The robot headed for Mars has a flying drone in its belly. Now they're putting foaming agent in filament to make it light and flexible. And did you ever wonder why those pinouts were so jumbled? Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=400085
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys reflect on great hacks of the past few days. Strain relief is something every electronics geek encounters and there's a spiffy way to make your hot-glue look like a factory connector. There's something in the air and it seems to be recreating early computers. Did you know astronauts are baking cookies they're forbidden to eat? And did you hear about the 3D printer that's being fed oil from the deep fryer? Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=399039
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams navigate the crowded streets of the hackersphere for the most interesting hardware projects seen in the past week. Forget flip-dot displays, you need to build yourself a sequin display that uses a robot finger and sequin-covered fabric to send a message. You can do a lot (and learn a lot) with a 1-bit computer called the WDR-1. It's never been easier to turn a USB port into an embedded systems dev kit by using these FTDI and Bluepill tricks. And there's a Soyuz hardware teardown you don't want to miss. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=398056
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys recap a great week in hardware hacking. There's perfection in the air as clever 3D-printing turns a button and LED matrix into an aesthetically awesome home automation display. Take a crash course in RF modulation types to use on your next project. Did you know the DB-9 connector is actually a DE-9? Building your own underwater ROV tether isn't as simple as it sounds. And Elliot found a treasure trove of zero-ohm jumpers in chip packages -- what the heck are these things for? Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=397112
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams sort through the hacks you might have missed over the past seven days. In FPGA hacking news, there's a ton of work being done on a newly discovered FPGA dev board. Kristina has a new column on input devices, kicking it off with tongue-actuated controllers. We wax philosophical about what data you need to backup and what you should let go. Plus Audacity is helping tune up CNC machines, copper tape is the prototyper's friend, and fans of Open should take note of this laptop project. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=395991
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys work their way through a dizzying maze of great hacks this week, bringing you along for the ride. We take a look at simplifying home automation with Node-RED and marvel at the misuse of the SED -- Linux's stream editor for filtering and transforming text -- to find your way through a maze. Have the hippest portable; grab your really old Apple laptop and stuff a not-so-old Apple desktop inside. We bring it on home with our love (or hate?) for the resistor color code. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=394913
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams sort through all of the hacks to find the most interesting hardware projects you may have missed this week. Did you know you can use machine learning without a neural network? Here's a project that does that on an ATtiny85. We also wrap our minds around a 3D-printed press brake, look at power-saving features of the ESP32 that make it better on a battery, and discuss the IoT coffee maker hack that's so good it could be a stock feature. Plus we dive into naturally occurring nuclear reactors and admire the common, yet marvelous, bar code. Show Notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=393832
Hackaday editors Elliot WIlliams and Mike Szczys kick off the first podcast of the new year. Elliot just got home from Chaos Communications Congress (36c3) with a ton of great stories, and he showed off his electric cargo carrier build while he was there. We recount some of the most interesting hacks of the past few weeks, like 3D-printed molds for making your own paper-pulp objects, a rudimentary digital camera sensor built by hand, a tattoo-removal laser turned welder, and desktop-artillery that's delivered in greeting-card format. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=392955
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot get to gether for the 47th and final Hackaday Podcast of 2019. We dive into the removable appendix on Prusa's new "Buddy" control board, get excited over the world's largest grid-backup battery, and commiserate about the folly of designing enclosures as an afterthought. There's some great research into which threaded-inserts perform best for 3D-printed parts, how LEDs everywhere should be broadcasting data, and an acoustic organ that's one-ups the traditional jug band. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=390751
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys highlight the most delightful hacks of the past week. Need a random-number showpiece for your office? Look no further than that fish tank. Maybe the showpiece you actually need is to complete your band's stage act? You want one of Tristan Shone's many industrial-chic audio controllers or maybe just a hacked turntable sitting between your guitar and amp. Plus citizen science is alive and well in the astronomy realm, and piezo elements are just never going to charge your electric vehicle. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=389910
Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams talk over the last three weeks full of hacks. Our first "back to normal" podcast after Supercon turns out to still have a lot of Supercon references in it. We discuss Raspberry Pi 4's HDMI interfering with its WiFi, learn the differences between CoreXY/Delta/Cartesian printers, sip on Whiskey aged in an ultrasonic jewelry cleaner, and set up cloud printing that's already scheduled for the chopping block. Along the way, you'll hear hints of what happened at Supercon, from the definitive guide to designing LEDs for iron-clad performance to the projects people hauled along with them. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=388880
In this special Superconference edition of the podcast, Kerry Scharfglass and Elliot Williams pick up their microphones and try to capture the spirit of the Supercon. Read More: https://wp.me/paBn4l-1CIw
Before you even ask, it's an open source trackball and you're gonna like it. Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams get down to brass tacks on this week's hacks. From laying down fatter 3D printer extrusion and tricking your stick welder, to recursive Nintendos and cubic Castlevania, this week's episode is packed with hacks you ought not miss. Show Notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=385216
Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys talk turkey on the latest hacks. Random numbers, art, and electronic geekery combine into an entropic masterpiece. We saw Bart Dring bring new life to a cool little multi-pen plotter from the Atari age. Researchers at UCSD built a very very very slow soft robot, and a broken retrocomptuer got a good dose of the space age. A 555 is sensing earthquakes, there's an electric motor that wants to drop into any vehicle, and did you know someone used to have to read the current time into the telephone ad nauseam? Show Notes: hackaday.com/?p=384177
Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams shed some light on a true week of hacks. It seems like all kinds of projects are doing this the "wrong" way this week and its delightful to see what they learn along the way. Hovercrafts can work using the coanda effect which uses the blowers on the outside. You can dump your Linux logs to soldered-on eMMC memory, and chain sprockets can be cut from construction brackets. If you really want to build your own rebreather you can. All of these hacks work, and seeing how to do something differently is an inspiring tribute to the art of hardware hacking... you can learn a lot by asking yourself why these particular techniques are not the most commonly used. Plus, Mike caught up with Alessandro Ranellucci at Maker Faire Rome last weekend. In addition to being the original author of slic3r, Alessandro has been Italy's Open Source lead for the last several years. He talks about the legislation that was passed earlier this year mandating that software commissioned by the government must now be Open Source and released with an open license. Show Notes: hackaday.com/?p=382636
Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams opine on the coolest hacks we saw this week. This episode is heavy with 3D printing as Prusa released a new, smaller printer, printed gearboxes continue to impress us with their power and design, hoverboards are turned into tanks, and researchers suggest you pour used coffee grounds into your prints. Don't throw out those "toy" computers, they may be hiding vintage processors. And we have a pair of fantastic articles that cover the rise and fall of forest fire watchtowers, and raise the question of where all those wind turbine blades will go when we're done with them. Show Notes: hackaday.com/?p=381838
Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys recap a week full of hacks from the solar sailing RC plane that has zero power storage to geeking out about lightning detectors and hacking Ikea LED controllers to unlock real dimming to building backyard wind turbines. We look up an IoT egg tray with appreciation not for the concept but certainly for the engineering, and scratch our heads on why one-hacker-smartwatch-to-rule-them-all seems like something that should happen but so far has only been a fleeting concept. Show Notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=380750
Hackaday Editors Tom Nardi and Mike Szczys comb through their favorite hacks from the past week. We loved Donald Papp's article on considerations before making the leap from FDM 3D Printers to a resin-based process, and we solidify our thoughts on curing cement in low-gravity. Tom's working on a Cyberdeck build, and he also found an ancient episode of an earlier and much different version of the Hackaday podcast. We're impressed with a mostly 3D-printed useless machine, a thermal-insert press that's also 3D-printed, and the Raspberry-Pi based Sidekick clone that popped up this week. A DIY wire-bending robot is an incredible build, as is the gorgeous wire-routing in a mechanical keyboard, and the filigree work on this playing card press. Plus you need to spend some time getting lost in this one hydrogen-line telescope project. Show Notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=379616
Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams take a look at the latest hacks from the past week. We keep seeing awesome stuff and find ourselves wanting to buy cheap welders, thermal camera sensors, and CNC parts. There was a meeting of the dog-shaped robots at ICRA and at least one of them has super-fluid movements. We dish on 3D printed meat, locking up the smartphones, asynchronous C routines, and synchronized clocks. Show Notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=378386
Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys work their way through a fantastic week of hacks. From a rideable tank tread to spoofing radio time servers and from tune-playing vacuum cleaners to an epic camera motion control system, there's a lot to get caught up on. Plus, Elliot describes frequency counting while Mike's head spins, and we geek out on satellite optics, transistor-based Pong, and Jonathan Bennett's weekly security articles. Show Notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=377268
Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams get caught up on the most interesting hacks of the past week. On this episode we take a deep dive into radiation monitoring projects, both Geiger tube and scintillator based, as well as LED cube projects. In the 3D printing world we want non-planar printing to be the next big thing. Padauk microcontrollers are small, cheap, and do things in really interesting ways if you don't mind embracing the ecosystem. And what's the best way to read a water meter with a microcontroller? Show Notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=376058
Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys wish Hackaday a happy fifteenth birthday! We also jump into a few vulns found (and fixed... ish) in the WiFi stack of ESP32/ESP8266 chips, try to get to the bottom of improved search for 3D printable CAD models, and drool over some really cool RC cars that add realism to head-to-head online racing. We look at the machining masterpiece that is a really huge SCARA arm drawbot, ask why Hydrogen cars haven't been seeing the kind of sunlight that fully electric vehicles do, and give a big nod of approval to a guide on building your own custom USB cables. Show Notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=375267
Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams recorded this week's podcast live from Chaos Communication Camp, discussing the most interesting hacks on offer over the past week. I novel locomotion news, there's a quadcopter built around the coanda effect and an autonomous boat built into a plastic storage bin. The radiation spikes in Russia point to a nuclear-powered ramjet but the idea is far from new. Stardust (well... space rock dust) is falling from the sky and it's surprisingly easy to collect. And 3D-printed gear boxes and hobby brushless DC motors have reached the critical threshold necessary to mangle 20/20 aluminum extrusion. Show Notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=374187
Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams recorded this week's podcast live from Chaos Communication Camp, discussing the most interesting hacks on offer over the past week. I novel locomotion news, there's a quadcopter built around the coanda effect and an autonomous boat built into a plastic storage bin. The radiation spikes in Russia point to a nuclear-powered ramjet but the idea is far from new. Stardust (well... space rock dust) is falling from the sky and it's surprisingly easy to collect. And 3D-printed gear boxes and hobby brushless DC motors have reached the critical threshold necessary to mangle 20/20 aluminum extrusion. https://wp.me/paBn4l-1z3a
Mike Szczys and Kerry Scharfglass recorded this week's podcast live from DEF CON. Among the many topics of discussion, we explore some of the more interesting ways to move a robot. From BB-8 to Holonomic Drives, Kerry's hoping to have a proof of concept in time for Supercon. Are you using On-Chip Debugging with your projects? Neither are we, but maybe we should. The same goes for dynamic memory allocation; but when you have overpowered micros like the chip on the Teensy 4.0, why do you need to? We close this week's show with a few interviews with badge makers who rolled out a few hundred of their design and encountered manufacturing problems along the way. It wouldn't be engineering without problems to solve. Show Notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=372073
Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams curate the awesome hacks from the past week. On this episode, we marvel about the legacy RTL-SDR has had on the software-defined radio scene, turn a critical ear to 16-bit console audio hardware, watch generative algorithms make 3D prints beautiful, and discover why printer paper is so very, very bright white. Show Notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=370890
Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys geek out over the latest hacks. This week we saw a couple of clever CNC builds that leverage a great ESP32 port of GRBL. The lemonade-pitcher-based submarine project is everything you thought couldn't work in an underwater ROV. Amazon's newest Dot has its warranty voided to show off what 22 pounds gets you these days. And there's a great tutorial on debugging circuits that grew out of a Fail of the Week. Plus, we get the wind knocked out of us with an ambitious launch schedule for airless automotive tires, and commiserate over the confusing world of USB-C. Show Notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=370038
Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams cover the most interesting hacks over the past week. So much talk of putting computers in touch with our brains has us skeptical on both tech and timeline. We celebrated the 40th Anniversary of the Walkman, but the headphones are the real star. Plus, Verilog isn't just for FPGAs, you can synthesize 7400 circuits too! Elliot is enamored by a subtractive printing process that uses particle board, and we discuss a couple of takes on hybrid-powered drones. Show Notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=368984
Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys dive into the most interesting hacks of the week. Confused by USB-C? So are we, and so is the Raspberry Pi 4. Learning VGA is a lot easier when abstract concepts are unpacked onto a huge breadboard using logic chips and an EEPROM. Adding vision to a prosthetic hand makes a lot of sense when you start to dig into possibilities of this Hackaday Prize entry. And Elliot gets nostalgic about Counter-Strike, the game that is a hack of Half-Life, grew to eclipse a lot of other shooters, and is now 20 years old. Show Notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=366837
Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams are back after last week's holiday break to track down all of the hacks you missed. There are some doozies; a selfie-drone controlled by your body position, a Theremin that sings better than you can, how about a BGA hand-soldering project whose creator can't even believe he pulled it off. Kristina wrote a spectacular article on the life and career of Mary Sherman Morgan, and Tom tears down a payment terminal he picked up in an abandoned Toys R Us, plus much more! Show Notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=366837
Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams dish their favorite hacks from the past week. Seems like everyone is trying to mill their own Mac Pro grille and we love seeing how they go about it. Elliot is gaga over a quintet of power latching circuits, Mike goes crazy for a dough sheeter project, and we dig through the news behind methane on Mars, the Raspberry Pi 4 release, and spoofing Presidential text alerts with SDR. If you like mini-keyboards you need to see the Fauxberry, Artificial Intelligence became an art critic this week, and poorly-lit rooms have been solved with a massive mirror system. Show Notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=364870
Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys wade through the fun hacks of the week. Looks like Google got caught ripping off song lyrics (how they got caught is the hack) and electric cars are getting artificially noisier. We look at 3D Printing directly from used plastic, and building a loom with many hundreds of 3D printed parts. The Sound Blaster 1.0 lives again thanks to some (well-explained) reverse engineered circuitry. Your smartphone is about to get a lot more buttons that work without any extra electronics, and we'll finish things up with brass etching and downloadable nuclear reactor plans. Show Notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=363817
Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams talk news and great hacks from the past seven days. Sad word this week as Maker Media, the company behind Make Magazine and Maker Faire, have closed their doors. There seems to be a lot of news about broken hardware to discuss with ADS-B problems grounding hundreds of flights in the US, Hackaday itself had a site outage, Raspberry Pi 3 B+ can be bricked with a really easy mistake, and Lewin wrote a great overview of the Takata airbag debacle. Don't worry there are still plenty of hacks as we look at old computers that sing, microcontrollers that chiptune, beat boxes that are actually boxes, and some very neat cartridge hacks for NES and Arduboy. Show Notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=362871
Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys dig through the most interesting hacks from the past week. On this episode we take a look at a portable power bank build that defies belief. We discuss an all-in-one SDR portable, messing with restaurant pagers, and the software that's common to both of these pursuits. There's a hopping robot that is one heck of a PID challenge, and another robot that does nothing but stare you down. We bring it on home with great articles on pianos with floppy disks, and that satellite cluster you should be watching for in the night sky. Show Notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=361762
Mike Szcycz is on a well-deserved vacation this week, so staff writer Dan Maloney joins managing editor Elliot Williams for a look at all the great hacks of the week. On this episode we're talking about licensing fees for MIDI 2.0, a two-way fail while snooping on employees, and the potential for diagnosing Alzheimer's with virtual reality. We also dive into the well-engineered innards of a robotic cheetah, a personal assistant safe enough for kids to use, and how listening to your monitor reveals more about you than you'd think. You don't want to miss a space nerd's quest for fire or a hacker's guide to solder and soldering. And you've got to catch the story of a hapless hacker's contact high from a vintage synthesizer. It's quite a trip. Show Notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=360003
Join editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys as they unpack all the great hacks we've seen this week. On this episode we're talking about laser Internet delivered from space, unwrapping the complexity of Charlieplexed circuits, and decapping ICs both to learn more about them and to do it safely at home. We have some fun with backyard siege weapons (for learning about physics, we swear!), gambling on FPGAs, and a line-scanning camera that's making selfies fun again. And nobody thought manufacturing electroluminescent displays was easy, but who knew it was this hard? Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=360002
Join Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams as they riff on the coolest hacks from the past week. Clocks and 3D printing seem to keep coming up this week as we look at using an FPGA plus GPS receiver for better accuracy than we're used to, and we haggle over what to call the robot arms that nudge the hands on a shelf-clock. There's a wicked 3D-printed planetary gear design, and brackets that turn flat cardboard into boxes (more useful than you might think). We close out with great reads on the Supermicro fallout of the last 7 months, and a pretty big oops moment as a hacker knocks out keyfobs for an entire neighborhood. Show Notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=358729
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys gather round the microphone to spin tales from a week of hacks. All the rage are fax-machine-based malware, a hydrogen fuel cell drone, and bringing color to the monochrome world of the original Super Mario Land. There are at least three really cool LED hacks this week, plus Tom's been exploring space advertising, Maya's debunking solder myths, and Elliot goes ga-ga for a deep Ikea electronics hack. Closing out the show is an interview with Bart Dring about his exquisitely-engineered string art robot. Show Notes: hackaday.com/?p=358043
Join editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams as they recount a week of fascinating hacks. We take a good look at the PMS150C, a microcontroller that literally costs pennies but can only be flashed once. SNES emulators have a new trick up their sleeves to make low-def a lot less low, and you retro enthusiasts will either hate or love the NES zapper chandelier. Elliot's enamored by a bike computer running Android core, and both Mike and Elliot delve into the food hacking scene, be it meat, chocolate, coffee, or of course frosting!
This episode looks at microfluidics using Shrinky Dinks, expanding foam to build airplane wings, the insidious effect of time on component solder points, and Airsoft BBs used in 3D printing. Finishing out the episode we have an interview with two brothers who started up a successful business in the Shenzhen electronics markets.
Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams discuss the highlights of the great hacks from the past week. On this episode we discuss wireless charging from scratch, Etch-A-Sketch selfies, the robot arm you really should build yourself, bicycle tires and steel nuts for anti-slip footwear, and bending the piezo-electric effect to act as a VLF antenna. Plus we delve into articles you can't miss about 5G and robot firefighting. https://hackaday.com/?p=355057
Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys take a look at advances in photogrammetry (building 3D models out of many photographs from a regular camera), a delay pedal that's both aesthetically and aurally pleasing, and the power of AI to identify garden slugs. Mike interviews Scotty Allen while walking the streets and stores of the Shenzhen Electronics markets. We delve into SD card problems with Raspberry Pi, putting industrial controls on your desk, building a Geiger counter for WiFi, and the sad truth about metal 3D printing.Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments! https://wp.me/paBn4l-1u53
Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams geek out about all things hackerdom. Did you catch all of our April Fools nods this week? Get the inside scoop on those, and also the inside scoop on parts that have been cut in half for our viewing pleasure. And don't miss Mike's interview with a chip broker in the Shenzhen Electronics markets.
Editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys catch up on the past week in hackerdom. It seems as if we're in a golden age of machine building as an incredible rocker-bogie rover is built to transport a child and mechanical simplicity automates the wet cat food dispensing process. We marvel at the ability to use G-code to decorate eggs (them being curvy in more than one direction and all). The we contemplate the ability to build and start a motor which will continue to run long after your own life ends. And perhaps it's time to add more layers to your PCB design playbook. Show notes: http://hackaday.com/?p=351780
With our intrepid Editor in Chief Mike Szczys off being kind of a big deal in China, Managing Editor Elliot Williams is joined by Staff Writer Tom Nardi to talk about all the hacks that were fit to print over the past week. Join us as we talk about the wide world of custom mechanical keyboards, reviving a woefully antiquated display technology, building your own RC transmitter out of stuff you have laying around the lab, and the unexpected parallels between Pepto Bismol and rocket fuel. Show notes at hackaday.com/?p=349631
Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys walk through the past week in hackerdom. There's a new jargon quiz! Do you know what astrictive robotic prehension means? We look at the $50 Ham series, omni-wheeled pen plotting robots, a spectrum of LED hacks, LEGO CNC for chocolate rework, and grinding lenses with a CNC mill. In the "can't miss" category are fingerprinting 3D Printers, and how NASA designs far beyond the stated life of an engineering project. Show notes at hackaday.com/?p=349624
Catch up on the past week of hacks with Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys. "AI on the Edge" is the buzzword of choice lately, with hardware offerings from BeagleBone and Google to satiate your thirst. We take on spotty data from Tesla, driving around on four bouncy-houses, reverse engineering a keytar, unearthing a gem of a dinosaur computer, and MIPI DSI display hacking. There are tips for getting better at commenting code, and making your computer do your algebra homework. Show notes at https://hackaday.com/?p=348778
We know you love the original art on Hackaday. Those fantastic illustrations are the work of Joe Kim, and he joins us as a guest on this week’s episode to talk about his background, what inspires him, and how he pulls it all off. This episode is still packed with hacks. Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams somehow stumble into two projects that end up generating hydrogen (despite that not being their purpose). But that art angle this week goes beyond Joe’s guest appearance as we look at a hack to add green curve tracing goodness on a black and white CRT, and an incredible take on a string art building machine. We get a look at interesting hardware that landed on the clearance rack, ultralight robots that move with flex PCB actuators, a throwback to mechanical computing, and giving up control of your home heating and cooling to a Raspberry Pi. https://hackaday.com/?p=347900
Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys look at all that's happening in hackerdom. This week we dive deep into super-accurate clock chips, SPI and microcontroller trickery, a new (and cheap) part on the microcontroller block, touch-sensitive cloth, and taking a home X-ray to the third dimension. We're saying our goodbyes to the magnificent A380, looking with skepticism on the V2V tech known as DSRC, and also trying to predict weather with automotive data. And finally, what's the deal with that growing problem of electronic waste? Show notes at: https://hackaday.com?p=346585
What's the buzz in the hackersphere this week? Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys recap their favorite hacks and articles from the past seven days. Check out the show notes at https://hackaday.com/?p=345656
Catch up on interesting hacks from the past week with Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams. This week we discuss the story behind falling lifetime ratings for LED bulbs, look at finite element analysis to strengthen 3D printed parts, ogle the beauty of blacksmithing, and marvel at open source Lidar development. We delve into great reader suggestions for Blue Pill projects sparked by last week’s podcast, discuss some history of the V2 rocket, and cover Chromecast control hardware, glowing home chemistry, K40 laser cutter add-ons, and more. Show notes at https://hackaday.com/?p=344796
Catch up on your Hackaday with this week’s podcast. Mike and Elliot riff on the "blue pill" (ST32F103 boards), blackest of black paints, hand-crafted sorting machines, a 3D printer bed leveling system that abuses some 2512 resistors, how cyborgs are going mainstream, and the need for more evidence around airport drone sightings. Show notes: http://hackaday.com/2019/02/01/hackaday-podcast-ep004-taking-the-blue-pill-abusing-resistors-and-not-finding-drones/
Highlights include a dip into audio processing with sox and FFMPEG, scripting for Gmail, weaving your own carbon fiber tubes, staring into the void of the sharpest color CRT ever, and unlocking the secrets of cheap 433 MHz devices. Plus Elliot talks about his follies in building an igloo while Mike marvels at what's coming out of passive RFID sensor research. Show notes: http://hackaday.com/?p=342443
Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams talk about the Circuit Sculpture Contest and their favorite hacks of the week. Elliot interviews the OpenFPGA crew at 35C3 See the show notes for this episode: https://hackaday.com/?p=341528
Editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys look back on the most interesting hacks and can't-miss articles from the past week (or so). Highlights include abusing IPv6 addresses, underclocking WiFi, taking Wii out of the livingroom, scratch built microphones, computer prophecy coming true, and the end of an Automotive Era. This week, Hackaday Contributor Bob Baddeley came on the show to discuss developments in facial recognition technology and its use in the wild. See the show notes for this episode: http://hackaday.com/?p=340484
Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams discuss trends seen in 2018, and try to narrow down their favorite hacks and favorite articles from the year. See the show notes for this episode: https://hackaday.com/2018/12/18/hackaday-podcast-2018-year-in-review/