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https://hackaday.com/2025/06/28/behind-the-bally-home-computer-system/ | Behind The Bally Home Computer System | Bryan Cockfield | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"bally",
"basic",
"computer",
"console",
"pc",
"programming",
"retrocomputing",
"video game",
"vintage"
] | Although we might all fundamentally recognize that gaming consoles are just specialized computers, we generally treat them, culturally and physically, differently than we do desktops or laptops. But there was a time in the not-too-distant past where the line between home computer and video game console was a lot more blurred than it is today. Even before Microsoft entered the scene, companies like Atari and Commodore were building both types of computer, often with overlapping hardware and capabilities. But they weren’t the only games in town. This video
takes a look at the Bally Home Computer System
, which was a predecessor of many of the more recognized computers and gaming systems of the 80s.
At the time, Bally as a company was much more widely known in the pinball industry, but they seemed to have a bit of foresight that the computers used in arcades would eventually transition to the home in some way. The premise of this console was to essentially start out as a video game system that could expand into a much more full-featured computer with add-ons. In addition to game cartridges it came with a BASIC interpreter cartridge which could be used for programming. It was also based on the Z80 microprocessor which was used in other popular PCs of the time, so in theory it could have been a commercial success but it was never able to find itself at the top of the PC pack.
Although it maintains a bit of a cult following, it’s a limited system even by the standards of the day, as the video’s creator [Vintage Geek] demonstrates. The controllers are fairly cumbersome, and programming in BASIC is extremely tedious without a full keyboard available. But it did make clever use of the technology at the time even if it was never a commercial success. Its graphics capabilities were ahead of other competing systems and would inspire subsequent designs in later systems.
It’s also not the last time that a video game system that was a commercial failure would develop a following lasting far longer than anyone would have predicted
. | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8142929",
"author": "Clancydaenlightened",
"timestamp": "2025-06-28T12:56:40",
"content": "But does it run CPM?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8142967",
"author": "Pablo J R",
"timestamp": "2025-06-28T19:01:46... | 1,760,371,502.815895 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/27/audio-localization-gear-built-on-the-cheap/ | Audio Localization Gear Built On The Cheap | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"audio",
"audio localization",
"ece4760",
"microphone"
] | Most humans with two ears have a pretty good sense of directional hearing. However, you can build equipment to localize audio sources, too. That’s precisely what [Sam], [Ezra], and [Ari] did for their final project for the ECE4760 class at Cornell this past Spring.
It’s an audio localizer!
The project is a real-time audio localizer built on a Raspberry Pi Pico. The Pico is hooked up to three MEMS microphones which are continuously sampled at a rate of 50 kHz thanks to the Pico’s nifty DMA features. Data from each microphone is streamed into a rolling buffer, with peaks triggering the software on the Pico to run correlations between channels to determine the time differences between the signal hitting each microphone. Based on this, it’s possible to estimate the location of the sound source relative to the three microphones.
The team goes into great deal on the project’s development, and does a grand job of explaining the mathematics and digital signal processing involved in this feat. Particularly nice is the heatmap output from the device which gives a clear visual indication of how the sound is being localized with the three microphones.
We’ve seen similar work before, too,
like this project built to track down fireworks launches.
Video after the break. | 11 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8142727",
"author": "purplepeopleated",
"timestamp": "2025-06-27T16:15:56",
"content": "https://www.techdirt.com/company/shotspotter/but shotspotter was shown to be racist fascist garbage.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8142732... | 1,760,371,502.717033 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/27/this-week-in-security-megaowned-store-danger-and-filefix/ | This Week In Security: MegaOWNed, Store Danger, And FileFix | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"Filefix",
"MegaOWNed",
"This Week in Security"
] | Earlier this year, I was required to move my server to a different datacenter. The tech that helped handle the logistics suggested I assign one of my public IPs to the server’s Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) port, so I could access the controls there if something went sideways. I passed on the offer, and not only because IPv4 addresses are a scarce commodity these days. No, I’ve never trusted a server’s built-in BMC. For reasons like
this MegaOWN of MegaRAC, courtesy of a CVSS 10.0 CVE, under active exploitation in the wild
.
This vulnerability
was discovered by Eclypsium back in March
and it’s a pretty simple authentication bypass, exploited by setting an
X-Server-Addr
header to the device IP address and adding an extra colon symbol to that string. Send this along inside an HTTP request, and it’s automatically allowed without authentication. This was assigned CVE-2024-54085, and for servers with the BMC accessible from the Internet, it scores that scorching 10.0 CVSS.
We’re talking about this now, because CISA has added this CVE to the official list of vulnerabilities known to be exploited in the wild. And it’s hardly surprising, as this is a near-trivial vulnerability to exploit, and it’s not particularly challenging to find web interfaces for the MegaRAC devices using tools like Shodan and others.
There’s a particularly ugly scenario that’s likely to play out here: Embedded malware. This vulnerability could be chained with others, and the OS running on the BMC itself could be permanently modified. It would be very difficult to disinfect and then verify the integrity of one of these embedded systems, short of physically removing and replacing the flash chip. And malware running from this very advantageous position very nearly have the keys to the kingdom, particularly if the architecture connects the BMC controller over the PCIe bus, which includes Direct Memory Access.
This brings us to the really bad news. These devices are everywhere. The list of hardware that ships with the MegaRAC Redfish UI includes select units from “AMD, Ampere Computing, ASRock, ARM, Fujitsu, Gigabyte, Huawei, Nvidia, Supermicro, and Qualcomm”. Some of these vendors have released patches. But at this point, any of the vulnerable devices on the Internet, still unpatched, should probably be considered compromised.
Patching Isn’t Enough
To drive the point home that a compromised embedded device is hard to fully disinfect, we have
the report from [Max van der Horst] at Disclosing.observer
, detailing backdoors discovered in verious devices, even after the patch was applied.
These tend to hide in PHP code with innocent-looking filenames, or in an Nginx config. This report covers a scan of Citrix hosts, where 2,491 backdoors were discovered, which is far more than had been previously identified. Installing the patch doesn’t always mitigate the compromise.
VSCode
Many of us have found VSCode to be an outstanding IDE, and the fact that it’s Open Source and cross-platform makes it perfect for programmers around the world. Except for the telemetry, which is built into the official Microsoft builds. It’s Open Source, so the natural reaction from the community is to rebuild the source, and offer builds that don’t have telemetry included. We have fun names like VSCodium and Cursor for these rebuilds. Kudos to Microsoft for making VSCode Open Source so this is possible.
There is, however, a catch, in the form of the extension marketplace. Only official VSCode builds are allowed to pull extensions from the marketplace. As would be expected, the community has risen to the challenge, and one of the marketplace alternatives is Open VSX. And this week, we have the story of how a bug in the Open VSX publishing code
could have been a really big problem
.
When developers are happy with their work, and are ready to cut a release, how does that actually work? Basically every project uses some degree of automation to make releases happen. For highly automated projects, it’s just a single manual action — a kick-off of a Continuous Integration (CI) run — that builds and publishes the new release. Open VSX supports this sort of approach, and in fact runs a nightly GitHub Action to iterate through the list of extensions, and pull any updates that are advertised.
VS Code extensions are Node.js projects, and are built using npm. So the workflow clones the repository, and runs
npm install
to generate the installable packages. Running
npm install
does carry the danger that arbitrary code runs inside the build scripts. How bad would it be for malicious code to run inside this nightly update action, on the Open VSX GitHub repository?
A super-admin token was available as an environment variable inside this GitHub Action, that if exfiltrated would allow complete takeover of the Open VSX repository and unfettered access to the software contained therein. There’s no evidence that this vulnerability was found or exploited, and OpenVSX and Koi Security worked together to mitigate it, with the patch landing about a month and a half after first disclosure.
FileFix
There’s a new social engineering attack on the web,
FileFix
. It’s a very simple, nearly dumb idea. By that I mean, a reader of this column would almost certainly never fall for it, because FileFix asks the user to do something really unusual. You get an email or land on a bad website, and it appears present a document for you. To access this doc, just follow the steps. Copy this path, open your File Explorer, and paste the path. Easy! The website even gives you a button to click to launch file explorer.
That button actually launches a file upload dialog, but that’s not even the clever part. This attack takes advantage of two quirks. The first is that Javascript can inject arbitrary strings into the paste buffer, and the second is that system commands can be run from the Windows Explorer bar. So yes, copy that string, and paste it into the bar, and it can execute a command. So while it’s a dumb attack, and asks the user to do something very weird, it’s also a very clever intersection between a couple of quirky behaviors, and users will absolutely fall for this.
eMMC Data Extraction
The embedded MultiMediaCard (eMMC) is a popular option for flash storage on embedded devices. And Zero Day Initiative has a fascinating look into
what it takes to pull data from an eMMC chip in-situ
. An 8-leg EEPROM is pretty simple to desolder or probe, but the ball grid array of an eMMC is beyond the reach of mere mortals. If you’re soldering skills aren’t up to the task, there’s still hope to get that data off. The only connections needed are power, reference voltage, clock, a command line, and the data lines. If you can figure out connection points for all of those, you can probably power the chip and talk to it.
One challenge is how to keep the rest of the system from booting up and getting chatty. There’s a clever idea, to look for a reset pin on the MCU, and just hold that active while you work, keeping the MCU in a reset, and quiet, state. Another fun idea is to just remove the system’s oscillator, as the MCU may depend on it to boot and do anything.
Bits and Bytes
What would you do with 40,000 alarm clocks
? That’s the question unintentionally faced by [Ian Kilgore], when he discovered that the loftie wireless alarm clock works over unsecured MQTT. On the plus side, he got Home Automation integration working.
What does it look like, when an attack gets launched against a big cloud vendor? The folks at Cloud-IAM pull the curtain back just a bit, and talk about an issue that
almost allowed an enumeration attack to become an effective DDoS
. They found the attack and patched their code, which is when it turned into a DDoS race, that Cloud-IAM managed to win.
The Wire secure communication platform recently got
a good hard look from the Almond security team
. And while the platform seems to have passed with good grades, there are a few quirks around file sharing that you might want to keep in mind. For instance, when a shared file is deleted, the backing files aren’t deleted, just the encryption keys. And the UUID on those files serves as the authentication mechanism, with no additional authentication needed. None of the issues found rise to the level of vulnerabilities, but it’s good to know.
And finally, the
Centos Webpanel
Control Web Panel has
a pair of vulnerabilities that allowed running arbitrary commands prior to authorization
. The flaws have been fixed in version 0.9.8.1205, but are trivial enough that this cPanel alternative needs to get patched on systems right away. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8142662",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-06-27T12:16:50",
"content": "Hell to the no would Ieverexpose a BMC, DRAC, ILO or any kind of hardware management interface or whatever you want to call it to a public IP, that’s just like setting off flares, sounding a foghorn and wavi... | 1,760,371,502.910961 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/27/meet-cucumber-the-robot-dog/ | Meet Cucumber, The Robot Dog | Lewin Day | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"Raspberry Pi Pico",
"robot dog"
] | Robots can look like all sorts of things, but they’re often more fun if you make them look like some kind of charming animal. That’s precisely what [Ananya], [Laurence] and [Shao] did
when they built Cucumber the Robot Dog for their final project in the ECE 4760 class.
Cucumber is controllable over WiFi, which was simple enough to implement by virtue of the fact that it’s based around the Raspberry Pi Pico W. With its custom 3D-printed dog-like body, it’s able to move around on its four wheels driven by DC gear motors, and it can flex its limbs thanks to servos in its various joints. It’s able to follow someone with some autonomy thanks to its ultrasonic sensors, while it can also be driven around manually if so desired. To give it more animal qualities, it can also be posed, or commanded to bark, howl, or growl, with commands issued remotely via a web interface.
The level of sophistication is largely on the level of the robot dogs that were so popular in the early 2000s. One suspects it could be
pretty decent at playing soccer, too,
with the right hands behind the controls. Video after the break. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8142660",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2025-06-27T12:12:24",
"content": "Cool project. But the bone example is really selling it, nice touch.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8142684",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"tim... | 1,760,371,503.568853 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/27/a-cheap-smart-plug-to-block-distractions/ | A Cheap Smart Plug To Block Distractions | Jenny List | [
"hardware"
] | [
"distraction",
"smart plug"
] | We have all suffered from this; the boss wants you to compile a report on the number of paper clips and you’re crawling up the wall with boredom, so naturally your mind strays to other things. You check social media, or maybe the news, and before you know it a while has been wasted. [Neil Chen] came up with a solution, to
configure a cheap smart plug with a script to block his diversions of choice
.
The idea is simple enough, the plug is in an outlet that requires getting up and walking a distance to access, so to flip that switch you’ve
really
got to want to do it. Behind it lives a Python script
that can be found in a Git Hub repository
, and that’s it! We like it for its simplicity and ingenuity, though we’d implore any of you to avoid using it to block Hackaday. Some sites are simply too important to avoid!
Of course, if distraction at work is your problem, perhaps you should simply
run something without it
. | 19 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8142653",
"author": "ChochoChuck",
"timestamp": "2025-06-27T11:10:08",
"content": "What? Literally what is this, what are you saying?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8142658",
"author": "Shoe",
"timestamp": "20... | 1,760,371,503.153742 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/26/making-gamecube-keyboard-controller-work-with-animal-crossing/ | Making GameCube Keyboard Controller Work With Animal Crossing | John Elliot V | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Games",
"hardware",
"home entertainment hacks",
"Microcontrollers",
"Nintendo Hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi",
"Retrocomputing",
"Reverse Engineering",
"Software Development",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"animal crossing",
"gamecube",
"keyboard controller"
] | [Hunter Irving] is a talented hacker with a wicked sense of humor, and he has written in to let us know about his latest project which is to
make a GameCube keyboard controller work with Animal Crossing
.
This project began simply enough but got very complicated in short order. Initially the goal was to get the GameCube keyboard controller integrated with the game Animal Crossing. The GameCube keyboard controller is a genuine part manufactured and sold by Nintendo but the game Animal Crossing isn’t compatible with this controller. Rather, Animal Crossing has an on-screen keyboard which players can use with a standard controller. [Hunter] found this frustrating to use so he created an adapter which would intercept the keyboard controller protocol and replace it with equivalent “keypresses” from an emulated standard controller.
In this project [Hunter] intercepts the controller protocol and the keyboard protocol with a Raspberry Pi Pico and then forwards them along to an attached GameCube by emulating a standard controller from the Pico. Having got that to work [Hunter] then went on to add a bunch of extra features.
First he designed and 3D-printed a new set of keycaps to match the symbols available in the in-game character set and added support for those. Then he made a keyboard mode for entering musical tunes in the game. Then he integrated a database of cheat codes to unlock most special items available in the game. Then he made it possible to import images (in low-resolution, 32×32 pixels) into the game. Then he made it possible to play (low-resolution) videos in the game. And finally he implemented a game of Snake, in-game! Very cool.
If you already own a GameCube and keyboard controller (or if you wanted to get them) this project would be good fun and doesn’t demand too much extra hardware. Just a Raspberry Pi Pico, two GameCube controller cables, two resistors, and a Schottky diode. And if you’re interested in Animal Crossing you might enjoy
getting it to boot Linux
!
Thanks very much to [Hunter] for writing in to let us know about this project. Have your own project? Let us know on the
tipsline
! | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8142682",
"author": "Justin",
"timestamp": "2025-06-27T13:56:34",
"content": "That’s a great hack. I’d worry about losing synchronization though. But maybe that doesn’t happen enough to be a problem.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"commen... | 1,760,371,502.766599 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/26/pi-networks-the-smith-chart-way/ | Pi Networks The Smith Chart Way | Al Williams | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"impedance matching",
"smith chart"
] | [Ralph] is excited about impedance matching, and why not? It is important to match the source and load impedance to get the most power out of a circuit. He’s got a whole series of videos about it. The latest? Matching using
a PI network and the venerable Smith Chart
.
We like that he makes each video self-contained. It does mean if you watch them all, you get some review, but that’s not a bad thing, really. He also does a great job of outlining simple concepts, such as what a complex conjugate is, that you might have forgotten.
Smith charts almost seem magical, but they are really sort of an analog computer. The color of the line and even the direction of an arrow make a difference, and [Ralph] explains it all very simply.
The example circuit is simple with a 50 MHz signal and a mismatched source and load. Using the steps and watching the examples will make it straightforward, even if you’ve never used a Smith Chart before.
The red lines plot impedance, and the blue lines show conductance and succeptance. Once everything is plotted, you have to find a path between two points on the chart. That Smith was a clever guy.
We looked at part 1 of this series
earlier this year
, so there are five more to watch since then. If your test gear leaves off the sign of your imaginary component, the Smith Chart can
work around that for you
. | 10 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8142572",
"author": "Danjovic",
"timestamp": "2025-06-27T02:38:39",
"content": "Amazing video, amazing channel. Thanks for sharing!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8142578",
"author": "reg",
"timestamp": "2025-06-27T03:2... | 1,760,371,502.861096 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/26/optimizing-dust-separation-for-extreme-efficiency/ | Optimizing Dust Separation For Extreme Efficiency | Aaron Beckendorf | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"centrifugal",
"dust collection",
"dust extractor",
"woodworking"
] | [Ruud], the creator of [Capturing Dust], started his
latest video
with what most of us would consider a solved problem: the dust collection system for his shop already had a three-stage centrifugal dust separator with more than 99.7% efficiency. This wasn’t quite as efficient as it could be, though, so [Ruud]’s latest upgrade shrinks the size of the third stage while increasing efficiency to within a rounding error of 99.9%.
The old separation system had two stages to remove large and medium particles, and a third stage to remove fine particles. The last stage was made out of 100 mm acrylic tubing and 3D-printed parts, but [Ruud] planned to try replacing it with two parallel centrifugal separators made out of 70 mm tubing. Before he could do that, however, he redesigned the filter module to make it easier to weigh, allowing him to determine how much sawdust made it through the extractors. He also attached a U-tube manometer (a somewhat confusing name to hear on YouTube) to measure pressure loss across the extractor.
The new third stage used impellers to induce rotational airflow, then directed it against the circular walls around an air outlet. The first design used a low-profile collection bin, but this wasn’t keeping the dust out of the air stream well enough, so [Ruud] switched to using plastic jars. Initially, this didn’t perform as well as the old system, but a few airflow adjustments brought the efficiency up to 99.879%. In [Ruud]’s case, this meant that of 1.3 kilograms of fine sawdust, only 1.5 grams of dust made it through the separator to the filter, which is certainly impressive in our opinion. The design for this upgraded separator is available
on GitHub
.
[Ruud] based his design off of another
3D-printed dust separator
, but adapted it to European fittings. Of course, the dust extractor is only one part of the problem; you’ll still need a
dust routing system
.
Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip! | 15 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8142542",
"author": "Tea",
"timestamp": "2025-06-26T23:26:01",
"content": "I really enjoyed this, thank you.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8142584",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-06-27T03:55:04",
"content":... | 1,760,371,502.961437 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/26/linear-solar-chargers-for-lithium-capacitors/ | Linear Solar Chargers For Lithium Capacitors | Bryan Cockfield | [
"News"
] | [
"efficiency",
"linear regulator",
"lithium capacitor",
"low dropout",
"solar",
"switch mode",
"voltage regulator"
] | For as versatile and inexpensive as switch-mode power supplies are at all kinds of different tasks, they’re not always the ideal choice for every DC-DC circuit. Although they can do almost any job in this arena, they tend to have high parts counts, higher complexity, and higher cost than some alternatives. [Jasper]
set out to test some alternative linear chargers called low dropout regulators (LDOs) for small-scale charging of lithium ion capacitors
against those more traditional switch-mode options.
The application here is specifically very small solar cells in outdoor applications, which are charging lithium ion capacitors instead of batteries. These capacitors have a number of benefits over batteries including a higher number of discharge-recharge cycles and a greater tolerance of temperature extremes, so they can be better off in outdoor installations like these. [Jasper]’s findings with using these generally hold that it’s a better value to install a slightly larger solar cell and use the LDO regulator rather than using a smaller cell and a more expensive switch-mode regulator. The key, though, is to size the LDO so that the voltage of the input is very close to the voltage of the output, which will minimize losses.
With unlimited time or money, good design can become less of an issue. In this case, however, saving a few percentage points in efficiency may not be worth the added cost and complexity of a slightly more efficient circuit, especially if the application will be scaled up for mass production. If switched mode really is required for some specific application, though,
be sure to design one that’s not terribly noisy
. | 24 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8142519",
"author": "Carl Breen",
"timestamp": "2025-06-26T21:40:03",
"content": "This looks nice and I have a few questions: Most LDO have a current output limit. I Don’t know how an empty supercapacitor can be described/characterized. Would it be safe if one assumes it behaves lik... | 1,760,371,503.211614 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/26/rust-drives-a-linux-usb-device/ | Rust Drives A Linux USB Device | Al Williams | [
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"libusb",
"linux",
"rust",
"usb"
] | In theory, writing a Linux device driver shouldn’t be that hard, but it is harder than it looks. However, using libusb, you can easily deal with USB devices from user space, which, for many purposes, is fine. [Crescentrose] didn’t know anything about writing user-space USB drivers until they
wrote one and documented it
for us. Oh, the code is in Rust, for which there aren’t as many examples.
The device in question was a USB hub with some extra lights and gadgets. So the real issue, it seems to us, wasn’t the code, but figuring out the protocol and the USB stack. The post covers that, too, explaining configurations, interfaces, and endpoints.
There are other ancillary topics, too, like setting up udev. This lets you load things when a USB device (or something else) plugs in.
Of course, you came for the main code. The Rust program is fairly straightforward once you have the preliminaries out of the way. The libusb library helps a lot. By the end, the code kicks off some threads, handles interrupts, and does other device-driver-like things.
So if you like Rust and you ever thought about a user space device driver for a USB device, this is your chance to see it done. It didn’t
take years
. However, you can do
a lot in user space
. | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8142483",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-26T19:04:23",
"content": "Oh, okay. For a sec I thought Linux was ported to run on an USB hub.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8142502",
"author": "Rastersoft",
"timest... | 1,760,371,503.098252 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/26/announcing-the-2025-hackaday-one-hertz-challenge/ | Announcing The 2025 Hackaday One Hertz Challenge | Elliot Williams | [
"contests",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"2025 Hackaday One Hertz Challenge",
"555",
"Clocks",
"standard"
] | It’s about time! Or maybe it’s about time’s reciprocal: frequency. Whichever way you see it, Hackaday is pleased to announce, just this very second, the
2025 One Hertz Challenge
over on Hackaday.io. If you’ve got a device that does
something
once per second, we’ve got the contest for you. And don’t delay, because the top three winners will each receive a $150 gift certificate from this contest’s sponsor: DigiKey.
What will you do once per second? And how will you do it? Therein lies the contest! We brainstormed up a few honorable mention categories to get your creative juices flowing.
Timelords:
How precisely can you get that heartbeat? This category is for those who prefer to see a lot of zeroes after the decimal point.
Ridiculous:
This category is for the least likely thing to do once per second. Accuracy is great, but absurdity is king here. Have Rube Goldberg dreams? Now you get to live them out.
Clockwork:
It’s hard to mention time without thinking of timepieces. This category is for the clockmakers among you. If your clock ticks at a rate of one hertz, and you’re willing to show us the mechanism, you’re in.
Could Have Used a 555:
We knew you were going to say it anyway, so we made it an honorable mention category. If your One Hertz project gets its timing from the venerable triple-five, it belongs here.
We love contests with silly constraints, because you all tend to rise to the challenge. At the same time, the door is wide open to your creativity. To enter, all you have to do is
document your project over on Hackaday.io
and pull down the “Contests” tab to One Hertz to enter. New projects are awesome, but if you’ve got an oldie-but-goodie, you can enter it as well. (Heck, maybe use this contest as your inspiration to spruce it up a bit?)
Time waits for no one, and you have until August 19th at 9:00 AM Pacific time to get your entry in. We can’t wait to see what you come up with. | 56 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8142432",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-06-26T17:04:40",
"content": "I’m going to guess my Cesium atomic clock with its PPS output flashing a LED would be cheating?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8142438",
"aut... | 1,760,371,503.434522 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/26/how-to-make-a-beautiful-floral-keycap-using-resin/ | How To Make A Beautiful Floral Keycap Using Resin | John Elliot V | [
"Art",
"how-to"
] | [
"epoxy resin",
"keycap",
"UV resin"
] | Here’s a fun build. Over on their YouTube channel our hacker [Atasoy] shows us
how to make a custom floral keyboard keycap using resin
.
We begin by using an existing keycap as a pattern to make a mold. We plug the keycap with all-purpose adhesive paste so that we can attach it to a small sheet of Plexiglas, which ensures the floor of our mold is flat. Then a side frame is fashioned from 100 micron thick acetate which is held together by sticky tape. Hot glue is used to secure the acetate side frame to the Plexiglas floor, keeping the keycap centered. RTV2 molding silicone is used to make the keycap mold. After 24 hours the silicone mold is ready.
Then we go through a similar process to make the mold for the back of the keycap. Modeling clay is pushed into the back of the keycap. Then silicone is carefully pushed into the keycap, and 24 hours later the back silicone mold is also ready.
The back mold is then glued to a fresh sheet of Plexiglas and cut to shape with a craft knife. Holes are drilled into the Plexiglas. A mix of artificial grass and UV resin is made to create the floor. Then small dried flowers are cut down to size for placement in the top of the keycap. Throughout the process UV light is used to cure the UV resin as we go along.
Finally we are ready to prepare and pour our epoxy resin, using our two molds. Once the mold sets our new keycap is cut out with a utility knife, then sanded and polished, before being plugged into its keyboard. This was a very labor intensive keycap, but it’s a beautiful result.
If you’re interested in making things with UV resin, we’ve covered that here before. Check out
3D Printering: Print Smoothing Tests With UV Resin
and
UV Resin Perfects 3D Print, But Not How You Think
. Or if you’re interested in epoxy resin, we’ve covered that too! See
Epoxy Resin Night Light Is An Amazing Ocean-Themed Build
and
Degassing Epoxy Resin On The (Very) Cheap
.
Thanks to [George Graves] for sending us this one via the
tipsline
! | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8142414",
"author": "Albert",
"timestamp": "2025-06-26T16:01:12",
"content": "You know what they say, a beekeeper who can avoid the honeybees is called a beekeeper who can avoid the honeybees. Daren’t I use a keyboard made of resin which may negatively impact my health.",
"paren... | 1,760,371,503.366261 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/26/field-guide-to-the-north-american-weigh-station/ | Field Guide To The North American Weigh Station | Dan Maloney | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Slider"
] | [
"axle",
"brake",
"Field Guide",
"flir",
"highway",
"infrastructure",
"inspection",
"ir",
"safety",
"scale",
"tire",
"truck",
"weigh-in-motion"
] | A lot of people complain that driving across the United States is boring. Having done the coast-to-coast trip seven times now, I can’t agree. Sure, the stretches through the Corn Belt get a little monotonous, but for someone like me who wants to know how everything works, even endless agriculture is fascinating; I love me some center-pivot irrigation.
One thing that has always attracted my attention while on these long road trips is the weigh stations that pop up along the way, particularly when you transition from one state to another. Maybe it’s just getting a chance to look at something other than wheat, but weigh stations are interesting in their own right because of everything that’s going on in these massive roadside plazas. Gone are the days of a simple pull-off with a mechanical scale that was closed far more often than it was open. Today’s weigh stations are critical infrastructure installations that are bristling with sensors to provide a multi-modal insight into the state of the trucks — and drivers — plying our increasingly crowded highways.
All About the Axles
Before diving into the nuts and bolts of weigh stations, it might be helpful to discuss the rationale behind infrastructure whose main function, at least to the casual observer, seems to be making the truck driver’s job even more challenging, not to mention less profitable. We’ve all probably sped by long lines of semi trucks queued up for the scales alongside a highway, pitying the poor drivers and wondering if the whole endeavor is worth the diesel being wasted.
The answer to that question boils down to one word: axles. In the United States, the maximum legal gross vehicle weight (GVW) for a fully loaded semi truck is typically 40 tons, although permits are issued for overweight vehicles. The typical “18-wheeler” will distribute that load over five axles, which means each axle transmits 16,000 pounds of force into the pavement, assuming an even distribution of weight across the length of the vehicle.
Studies conducted in the early 1960s
revealed that heavier trucks caused more damage to roadways than lighter passenger vehicles, and that the increase in damage is proportional to the fourth power of axle weight. So, keeping a close eye on truck weights is critical to protecting the highways.
Just how much damage trucks can cause to pavement is pretty alarming. Each axle of a truck creates a compression wave as it rolls along the pavement, as much as a few millimeters deep, depending on road construction and loads. The relentless cycle of compression and expansion results in pavement fatigue and cracks, which let water into the interior of the roadway. In cold weather, freeze-thaw cycles exert tremendous forces on the pavement that can tear it apart in short order. The greater the load on the truck, the more stress it puts on the roadway and the faster it wears out.
The other, perhaps more obvious reason to monitor axles passing over a highway is that they’re critical to truck safety. A truck’s axles have to support huge loads in a dynamic environment, and every component mounted to each axle, including springs, brakes, and wheels, is subject to huge forces that can lead to wear and catastrophic failure. Complete failure of an axle isn’t uncommon, and a driver can be completely unaware that a wheel has detached from a trailer and become an unguided missile bouncing down the highway. Regular inspections of the running gear on trucks and trailers are critical to avoiding these potentially catastrophic occurrences.
Ways to Weigh
The first thing you’ll likely notice when driving past one of the approximately 700 official weigh stations lining the US Interstate highway system is how much space they take up. In contrast to the relatively modest weigh stations of the past, modern weigh stations take up a lot of real estate. Most weigh stations are optimized to get the greatest number of trucks processed as quickly as possible, which means constructing multiple lanes of approach to the scale house, along with lanes that can be used by exempt vehicles to bypass inspection, and turnout lanes and parking areas for closer inspection of select vehicles.
In addition to the physical footprint of the weigh station proper, supporting infrastructure can often be seen miles in advance. Fixed signs are usually the first indication that you’re getting near a weigh station, along with electronic signboards that can be changed remotely to indicate if the weigh station is open or closed. Signs give drivers time to figure out if they need to stop at the weigh station, and to begin the process of getting into the proper lane to negotiate the exit. Most weigh stations also have a net of sensors and cameras mounted to poles and overhead structures well before the weigh station exit. These are monitored by officers in the station to spot any trucks that are trying to avoid inspections.
Overhead view of a median weigh station on I-90 in Haugan, Montana. Traffic from both eastbound and westbound lanes uses left exits to access the scales in the center. There are ample turnouts for parking trucks that fail one test or another. Source:
Google Maps
.
Most weigh stations in the US are located off the right side of the highway, as left-hand exit ramps are generally more dangerous than right exits. Still, a single weigh station located in the median of the highway can serve traffic from both directions, so the extra risk of accidents from exiting the highway to the left is often outweighed by the savings of not having to build two separate facilities. Either way, the main feature of a weigh station is the scale house, a building with large windows that offer a commanding view of the entire plaza as well as an up-close look at the trucks passing over the scales embedded in the pavement directly adjacent to the structure.
Scales at a weigh station are generally of two types: static scales, and weigh-in-motion (WIM) systems. A static scale is a large platform, called a weighbridge, set into a pit in the inspection lane, with the surface flush with the roadway. The platform floats within the pit, supported by a set of cantilevers that transmit the force exerted by the truck to electronic load cells. The signal from the load cells is cleaned up by signal conditioners before going to analog-to-digital converters and being summed and dampened by a scale controller in the scale house.
The weighbridge on a static scale is usually long enough to accommodate an entire semi tractor and trailer, which accurately weighs the entire vehicle in one measurement. The disadvantage is that the entire truck has to come to a complete stop on the weighbridge to take a measurement. Add in the time it takes for the induced motion of the weighbridge to settle, along with the time needed for the driver to make a slow approach to the scale, and each measurement can add up to significant delays for truckers.
Weigh-in-motion sensor. WIM systems measure the force exerted by each axle and calculate a total gross vehicle weight (GVW) for the truck while it passes over the sensor. The spacing between axles is also measured to ensure compliance with state laws. Source:
Central Carolina Scales, Inc.
To avoid these issues, weigh-in-motion systems are often used. WIM systems use much the same equipment as the weighbridge on a static scale, although they tend to use piezoelectric sensors rather than traditional strain-gauge load cells, and usually have a platform that’s only big enough to have one axle bear on it at a time. A truck using a WIM scale remains in motion while the force exerted by each axle is measured, allowing the controller to come up with a final GVW as well as weights for each axle. While some WIM systems can measure the weight of a vehicle at highway speed, most weigh stations require trucks to keep their speed pretty slow, under five miles per hour. This is obviously for everyone’s safety, and even though the somewhat stately procession of trucks through a WIM can still plug traffic up, keeping trucks from having to come to a complete stop and set their brakes greatly increases weigh station throughput.
Another advantage of WIM systems is that the spacing between axles can be measured. The speed of the truck through the scale can be measured, usually using a pair of inductive loops embedded in the roadway around the WIM sensors. Knowing the vehicle’s speed through the scale allows the scale controller to calculate the distance between axles. Some states strictly regulate the distance between a trailer’s kingpin, which is where it attaches to the tractor, and the trailer’s first axle. Trailers that are not in compliance can be flagged and directed to a parking area to await a service truck to come by to adjust the spacing of the trailer bogie.
Keep It Moving, Buddy
A PrePass transponder reader and antenna over Interstate 10 near Pearlington, Mississippi. Trucks can bypass a weigh station if their in-cab transponder identifies them as certified. Source:
Tony Webster
, CC BY-SA 2.0.
Despite the increased throughput of WIM scales, there are often too many trucks trying to use a weigh station at peak times. To reduce congestion further, some states participate in automatic bypass systems. These systems, generically known as PrePass for the specific brand with the greatest market penetration, use in-cab transponders that are interrogated by transmitters mounted over the roadway well in advance of the weigh station. The transponder code is sent to PrePass for authentication, and if the truck ID comes back to a company that has gone through the PrePass certification process, a signal is sent to the transponder telling the driver to bypass the weigh station. The transponder lights a green LED in this case, which stays lit for about 15 minutes, just in case the driver gets stopped by an overzealous trooper who mistakes the truck for a scofflaw.
PrePass transponders are just one aspect of an entire suite of automatic vehicle identification (AVI) systems used in the typical modern weigh station. Most weigh stations are positively bristling with cameras, some of which are dedicated to automatic license plate recognition. These are integrated into the scale controller system and serve to associate WIM data with a specific truck, so violations can be flagged. They also help with the enforcement of traffic laws, as well as locating human traffickers, an increasingly common problem. Weigh stations also often have laser scanners mounted on bridges over the approach lanes to detect unpermitted oversized loads. Image analysis systems are also used to verify the presence and proper operation of required equipment, such a mirrors, lights, and mudflaps. Some weigh stations also have systems that can interrogate the electronic logging device inside the cab to verify that the driver isn’t in violation of hours of service laws, which dictate how long a driver can be on the road before taking breaks.
Sensors Galore
IR cameras watch for heat issues on trucks at a Kentucky weigh station. Heat signatures can be used to detect bad tires, stuck brakes, exhaust problems, and even illicit cargo. Source:
Trucking Life with Shawn
Another set of sensors often found in the outer reaches of the weigh station plaza is related to the mechanical status of the truck. Infrared cameras are often used to scan for excessive heat being emitted by an axle, often a sign of worn or damaged brakes. The status of a truck’s tires can also be monitored thanks to Tire Anomaly and Classification Systems (TACS), which use in-road sensors that can analyze the contact patch of each tire while the vehicle is in motion. TACS can detect flat tires, over- and under-inflated tires, tires that are completely missing from an axle, or even mismatched tires. Any of these anomalies can cause a tire to quickly wear out and potentially self-destruct at highway speeds, resulting in catastrophic damage to surrounding traffic.
Trucks with problems are diverted by overhead signboards and direction arrows to inspection lanes. There, trained truck inspectors will closely examine the flagged problem and verify the violation. If the problem is relatively minor, like a tire inflation problem, the driver might be able to fix the issue and get back on the road quickly. Trucks that can’t be made safe immediately might have to wait for mobile service units to come fix the problem, or possibly even be taken off the road completely. Only after the vehicle is rendered road-worthy again can you keep on trucking.
Featured image: “
WeighStationSign
” by [Wasted Time R] | 39 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "8142387",
"author": "Rxvt",
"timestamp": "2025-06-26T14:35:33",
"content": "Is that a common distance between signs in the US?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8142392",
"author": "Beowulf Shaeffer",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,371,503.527574 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/26/pla-with-petg-core-filament-put-to-the-test/ | PLA With PETG Core Filament Put To The Test | Maya Posch | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"FDM",
"PETG",
"PLA"
] | The Stronghero 3D hybrid PLA PETG filament, with visible PETG core. (Credit: My Tech Fun, YouTube)
Sometimes you see an FDM filament pop up that makes you do a triple-take because it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. This is the case with a hybrid PLA/PETG filament by Stronghero 3D that features a PETG core. This filament also intrigued [Dr. Igor Gaspar] who
imported a spool from the US to have a poke at it
to see why you’d want to combine these two filament materials.
According to the manufacturer, the PLA outside makes up 60% of the filament, with the rest being the PETG core. The PLA is supposed to shield the PETG from moisture, while adding more strength and weather resistance to the PLA after printing. Another interesting aspect is the multi-color look that this creates, and which [Igor]’s prints totally show. Finding the right temperatures for the bed and extruder was a challenge and took multiple tries with the Bambu Lab P1P including bed adhesion troubles.
As for the actual properties of this filament, the layer adhesion test showed it to be significantly worse than plain PLA or PETG when printed at extruder temperatures from 225 °C to 245 °C. When the shear stress is put on the material instead of the layer adhesion, the results are much better, while torque resistance is better than plain PETG. This is a pattern that repeats across impact and other tests, with PETG more brittle. Thermal deformation temperature is, unsurprisingly, between both materials, making this filament mostly a curiosity unless its properties work much better for your use case than a non-hybrid filament. | 27 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8142348",
"author": "H Hack",
"timestamp": "2025-06-26T11:17:56",
"content": "Very thorough and informative video. I really like his test setup. It would be wonderful if the community could agree on a set of standardized tests which reputable manufacturers could perform and publish.... | 1,760,371,503.691629 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/26/revealing-the-last-mac-easter-egg/ | Revealing The Last Mac Easter Egg | Jenny List | [
"Mac Hacks"
] | [
"apple",
"easter egg",
"power mac g3"
] | A favourite thing for the developers behind a complex software project is to embed an Easter egg: something unexpected that can be revealed only by those in the know. Apple certainly had their share of them in their early days, a practice brought to a close by Steve Jobs on his return to the company. One of the last Macs to contain one was the late 1990s beige G3, and while its existence has been know for years, until now nobody has decoded the means to display it on the Mac.
Now [Doug Brown] has taken on the challenge
.
The Easter egg is a JPEG file embedded in the ROM with portraits of the team, and it can’t be summoned with the keypress combinations used on earlier Macs. We’re taken on a whirlwind tour of ROM disassembly as he finds an unexpected string in the SCSI driver code. Eventually it’s found that formatting the RAM disk with the string as a volume name causes the JPEG to be saved into the disk, and any Mac user can come face to face with the dev team. It’s a joy reserved now for only a few collectors of vintage hardware, but still over a quarter century later, it’s fascinating to learn about. Meanwhile,
this isn’t the first Mac easter egg
to find its way here. | 34 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8142338",
"author": "Tim Andersson",
"timestamp": "2025-06-26T10:31:16",
"content": "The bitter irony is that most people today have no concept of using the computer and would not be able to extract this file even if they had the step-by-step instruction. Smartphones and tablets sho... | 1,760,371,503.764043 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/25/static-electricity-remembers/ | Static Electricity Remembers | Bryan Cockfield | [
"News"
] | [
"electricity",
"memory",
"STATIC",
"triboelectric",
"triboelectric series"
] | As humans we often think we have a pretty good handle on the basics of the way the world works, from an intuition about gravity good enough to let us walk around, play baseball, and land spacecraft on the moon, or an understanding of electricity good enough to build everything from indoor lighting to supercomputers. But zeroing in on any one phenomenon often shows a world full of mystery and surprise in an area we might think we would have fully understood by now. One such area is static electricity,
and the way that it forms within certain materials shows that it can impart a kind of memory to them
.
The video demonstrates a number of common ways of generating static electricity that most of us have experimented with in the past, whether on purpose or accidentally, from rubbing a balloon on one’s head and sticking it to the wall or accidentally shocking ourselves on a polyester blanket. It turns out that certain materials like these tend to charge themselves positively or negatively depending on what material they were rubbed against, but some researchers wondered what would happen if an object were rubbed against itself. It turns out that in this situation, small imperfections in the materials cause them to eventually self-order into a kind of hierarchy, and repeated charging of these otherwise identical objects only deepen this hierarchy over time essentially imparting a static electricity memory to them.
The effect of materials to gain or lose electrons in this way is known as the
triboelectric effect
, and there is an ordering of materials known as the triboelectric series that describes which materials are more likely to gain or lose electrons when brought into contact with other materials. The ability of some materials, like quartz in this experiment, to develop this memory is certainly an interesting consequence of an otherwise well-understood phenomenon,
much like generating power for free from static electricity that’s always present within the atmosphere
might surprise some as well. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8142304",
"author": "Nath",
"timestamp": "2025-06-26T06:55:31",
"content": "So they developped a memory cell. I wonder whether it could be made into a logical element with the goald of a static electricity computer in mind",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,371,503.62331 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/25/simulating-empires-with-procedurally-generated-history/ | Simulating Empires With Procedurally Generated History | Tyler August | [
"computer hacks",
"Games"
] | [
"history",
"procedurally generated",
"simulation"
] | Procedural generation is a big part of game design these days. Usually you generate your map, and [Fractal Philosophy] has decided to go one step further: using a procedurally-generated world from an older video, he is procedurally generating history by
simulating the rise and fall of empires on that map
in a video embedded below.
Now, lacking a proper theory of Psychohistory, [Fractal Philosophy] has chosen to go with what he admits is the simplest model he could find, one centered on the concept of “solidarity” and based on the work of [Peter Turchin], a Russian-American thinker. “Solidarity” in the population holds the Empire together; external pressures increase it, and internal pressures decrease it. This leads to an obvious cellular automation type system (like Conway’s Game of Life), where cells are evaluated based on their nearest neighbors: the number of nearest neighbors in the empire goes into a function that gives the probability of increasing or decreasing the solidarity score each “turn”. (Probability, in order to preserve some randomness.) The “strength” of the Empire is given by the sum of the solidarity scores in every cell.
Each turn, Empires clash, with the the local solidarity, sum strength, and distance from Imperial center going into determining who gains or loses territory. It is a simple model; you can judge from the video how well it captures the ebb and flow of history, but we think it did surprisingly well all things considered. The extra
40-minute video of the model running
is oddly hypnotic, too.
In v2 of the model, one of these fluffy creatures will betray you.
After a dive into more academic support for the main idea, and a segue into game theory and economics, a slight complication is introduced later in the video, dividing each cell into two populations: “cooperators” or “selfish” individuals.
This allows for modeling of internal conflicts between the two groups. This hitch gives a very similar looking map at the end of its run, although has an odd quirk that it automatically starts with a space-filling empire across the whole map that quickly disintegrates.
Unfortunately, the model not open-source, but the ideas are discussed in enough detail that one could probably produce a very similar algorithm in an afternoon. For those really interested, [Fractal Philosophy] does offer a
one-time purchase through his Patreon.
It also includes the
map-generating model from his last video.
We’re much more likely to talk about
simulating circuits
, or feature projects that
use fluid simulations
here at Hackaday, but this hack of a history model | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8142310",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-06-26T07:30:14",
"content": "Way way cool! I haven’t watched the full video yet, but I can see the work that went into it.As a teenager/child one of my to-do projects was to make a global commodity trading simulator with thousands ... | 1,760,371,503.814604 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/25/ceramic-printing-techniques-for-plastic/ | Ceramic Printing Techniques For Plastic | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"blender",
"textured meshes"
] | [Claywoven] mostly prints with ceramics, although he does produce plastic inserts for functional parts in his designs. The ceramic parts have an interesting texture, and he wondered if the same techniques could work with plastics, too. It turns out
it can
, as you can see in the video below.
Ceramic printing, of course, doesn’t get solid right away, so the plastic can actually take more dramatic patterns than the ceramic. The workflow starts with Blender and winds up with a standard printer.
The example prints are lamps, although you could probably do a lot with this technique. You can select where the texturing occurs, which is important in this case to allow working threads to avoid having texture.
You will need a Blender plugin to get similar results. The target printer was a Bambu, but there’s no reason this wouldn’t work with any FDM printer.
We admire this kind of artistic print. We’ve talked before about how you can use any texture to get
interesting results
. If you need help getting started with Blender,
our tutorial is one place to start
. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,503.852038 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/25/homebrew-pockels-cell-is-worth-the-wait/ | Homebrew Pockels Cell Is Worth The Wait | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"high voltage",
"indium tin oxide",
"ITO",
"KDP",
"laser",
"non-linear optics",
"polarization"
] | We haven’t seen any projects from serial experimenter [Les Wright] for quite a while, and honestly, we were getting a little worried about that. Turns out we needn’t have fretted, as [Les] was deep into
this exploration of the Pockels Effect
, with pretty cool results.
If you’ll recall, [Les]’s last appearance on these pages concerned
the automated creation of huge, perfect crystals of KDP
, or potassium dihydrogen phosphate. KDP crystals have many interesting properties, but the focus here is on their ability to modulate light when an electrical charge is applied to the crystal. That’s the Pockels Effect, and while there are commercially available Pockels cells available for use mainly as optical switches, where’s the sport in buying when you can build?
As with most of [Les]’s projects, there are hacks galore here, but the hackiest is probably the homemade diamond wire saw. The fragile KDP crystals need to be cut before use, and rather than risk his beauties to a bandsaw or angle grinder, [Les] threw together a rig using a stepper motor and some cheap diamond-encrusted wire. The motor moves the diamond wire up and down while a weight forces the crystal against it on a moving sled. Brilliant!
The cut crystals are then polished before being mounted between conductive ITO glass and connected to a high-voltage supply. The video below shows the beautiful polarization changes induced by the electric field, as well as demonstrating how well the Pockels cell acts as an optical switch. It’s kind of neat to see a clear crystal completely block a laser just by flipping a switch.
Nice work, [Les], and great to have you back. | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8142227",
"author": "PWalsh",
"timestamp": "2025-06-25T21:30:13",
"content": "Suppose you wanted to make a neuron measuring device, you pass polarized light through a fiber optic strand, through a tiny crystal, and then back. Will the electric field in the medium near the neuron cau... | 1,760,371,503.91787 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/25/floss-weekly-episode-838-atomvm-and-the-full-stack-elixir-developer/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 838: AtomVM And The Full Stack Elixir Developer | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"FLOSS Weekly",
"kde",
"linux"
] | This week
Jonathan
chats with
Davide Bettio
and
Paul Guyot
about AtomVM! Why Elixir on embedded? And how!? And what is a full stack Elixir developer, anyways? Watch to find out!
https://atomvm.org/
https://github.com/atomvm/AtomVM
https://popcorn.swmansion.com/
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/multiplie/la-machine
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on
our YouTube Channel
? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or contact the guest and have them contact us!
Take a look at the schedule here
.
Direct Download
in DRM-free MP3.
If you’d rather read along,
here’s the transcript for this week’s episode
.
Places to follow the FLOSS Weekly Podcast:
Spotify
RSS
Theme music: “Newer Wave” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under
Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,504.019798 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/25/the-tao-of-bespoke-electronics/ | The Tao Of Bespoke Electronics | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"commercial",
"homebrew",
"kits"
] | If you ever look at projects in an old magazine and compare them to today’s electronic projects, there’s at least one thing that will stand out. Most projects in “the old days” looked like something you built in your garage. Today, if you want to make something that rivals a commercial product, it isn’t nearly as big of a problem.
Dynamic diode tester from Popular Electronics (July 1970)
For example, consider the picture of this project from Popular Electronics in 1970. It actually looks pretty nice for a hobby project, but you’d never expect to see it on a store shelf.
Even worse, the amount of effort required to make it look even this good was probably more than you’d expect. The box was a standard case, and drilling holes in a panel would be about the same as it is today, but you were probably less likely to have a drill press in 1970.
But check out the lettering! This is a time before inkjet and laser printers. I’d guess these are probably “rub on” letters, although there are other options. Most projects that didn’t show up in magazines probably had
Dymo embossed lettering tape
or handwritten labels.
Another project from the same issue of Popular Electronics. Nice lettering, but the aluminum box is a dead giveaway
Of course, even as now, sometimes you just make a junky looking project, but to make a showpiece, you had to spend way more time back then to get a far less professional result.
You notice the boxes are all “stock,” so that was part of it. If you were very handy, you might make your own metal case or, more likely, a wooden case. But that usually gave away its homemade nature, too. Very few commercial items come in a wooden box, and those that do are in fine furniture, not some slap-together box with a coat of paint.
The Inside Story
A Dymo label gun you could buy at Radio Shack
The insides were also a giveaway. While PC boards were not unknown, they were very expensive to have produced commercially. Sure, you could make your own, but it wasn’t as easy as it is now. You probably hand-drew your pattern on a copper board or maybe on a transparency if you were photo etching. Remember, no nice computer printers yet, at least not in your home.
So, most home projects were handwired or maybe wirewrapped. Not that there isn’t a certain aesthetic to that. Beautiful handwiring can be almost an art form. But it hardly looks like a commercial product.
Kits
The best way to get something that looked more or less professional was to get a kit from
Heathkit
, Allied, or any of the other kit makers. They usually had nice cases with lettering. But building a kit doesn’t feel the same as making something totally from scratch.
Sure, you could modify the kit, and many did. But still not quite the same thing. Besides,
not all kits looked any better
than your own projects.
The Tao
Of course, maybe we shouldn’t emulate commercial products. Some of the appeal of a homemade product is that it looks homemade. It is like the
Tao of Programming
notes about software development:
3.3 There was once a programmer who was attached to the court of the warlord of Wu. The warlord asked the programmer: “Which is easier to design: an accounting package or an operating system?”
“An operating system,” replied the programmer.
The warlord uttered an exclamation of disbelief. “Surely an accounting package is trivial next to the complexity of an operating system,” he said.
“Not so,” said the programmer, “When designing an accounting package, the programmer operates as a mediator between people having different ideas: how it must operate, how its reports must appear, and how it must conform to the tax laws. By contrast, an operating system is not limited by outside appearances. When designing an operating system, the programmer seeks the simplest harmony between machine and ideas. This is why an operating system is easier to design.”
Commercial gear has to conform to standards and interface with generic things. Bespoke projects can “seek the simplest harmony between machine and ideas.”
Then again, if you are trying to make something to sell on Tindie, or as a prototype, maybe commercial appeal is a good thing. But if you are just building for yourself, maybe leaning into the homebrew look is a better choice. Who would want to mess with
a beautiful wooden arcade cabinet
, for example? Or
this unique turntable
?
Let us know how you feel about it in the comments. | 60 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "8142170",
"author": "miharix",
"timestamp": "2025-06-25T17:50:43",
"content": "Are those from “Popular Electronics” photos or are they drawings ? Or photos and hand retouched in darkroom ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "81421... | 1,760,371,504.370474 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/25/mechanical-7-segment-display-combines-servos-and-lego/ | Mechanical 7-Segment Display Combines Servos And Lego | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"lego",
"servo",
"seven segment display"
] | If you need a seven-segment display for a project, you could just grab some LED units off the shelf. Or you could build something big and electromechanical out of Lego. That’s precisely what [upir] did,
with attractive results.
The build relies on Lego Technic parts, with numbers displayed by pushing small black axles through a large yellow faceplate. This creates a clear and easy to read display thanks to the high contrast. Each segment is made up of seven axles that move as a single unit, driven by a gear rack to extend and retract as needed. By extending and retracting the various segments in turn, it’s possible to display all the usual figures you’d expect of a seven-segment design.
It’s worth noting, though, that not everything in this build is Lego. The motors that drive the segments back and forth are third-party components. They’re Geekservo motors, which basically act as Lego-mountable servos you can drive with the electronics of your choice. They’re paired with an eight-channel servo driver board which controls each segment individually. Ideally, though, we’d see this display paired with a microcontroller for more flexibility. [upir] leaves that as an exercise for the viewer for now, with future plans to drive it with an Arduino Uno.
Design files are on Github for the curious.
We’ve featured
some similar work before
, too, because you really can
build anything out of Lego
. Video after the break. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8142184",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-25T18:49:41",
"content": "Would it be “mechanical” if the segments were tubes, filling and emptying with a liquid?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8142190",
"author... | 1,760,371,504.122218 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/25/the-rise-and-the-fall-of-the-mail-chute/ | The Rise And The Fall Of The Mail Chute | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Interest",
"Misc Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"mail",
"mail chute",
"us post office"
] | As the Industrial Age took the world by storm, city centers became burgeoning hubs of commerce and activity. New offices and apartments were built higher and higher as density increased and skylines grew ever upwards. One could live and work at height, but this created a simple inconvenience—if you wanted to send any mail, you had to go all the way down to ground level.
In true American fashion, this minor inconvenience would not be allowed to stand. A simple invention would solve the problem, only to later fall out of vogue as technology and safety standards moved on. Today, we explore the rise and fall of the humble mail chute.
Going Down
Born in 1848 in Albany, New York, James Goold Cutler would come to build his life in the state. He lived and worked in the growing state, and as an architect, he soon came to identify an obvious problem. For those occupying higher floors in taller buildings, the simple act of sending a piece of mail could quickly become a tedious exercise. One would have to make their way all the way to a street level post box, which grew increasingly tiresome as buildings grew ever taller.
Cutler’s original patent for the mail chute. Note element G – a hand guard that prevented people from reaching into the chute to grab mail falling from above. Security of the mail was a key part of the design. Credit: US Patent, public domain
Cutler saw that there was an obvious solution—install a vertical chute running through the building’s core, add mail slots on each floor, and let gravity do the work. It then became as simple as dropping a letter in, and down it would go to a collection box at the bottom, where postal workers could retrieve it during their regular rounds. Cutler filed a patent for this simple design in 1883. He was sure to include a critical security feature—a hand guard behind each floor’s mail chute. This was intended to stop those on lower levels reaching into the chute to steal the mail passing by from above. Installations in taller buildings were also to be fitted with an “elastic cushion” in the bottom to “prevent injury to the mail” from higher drop heights.
A Cutler Receiving Box that was built in 1920. This box would have lived at the bottom of a long mail chute, with the large door for access by postal workers. The brass design is typical of the era. Credit: National Postal Museum,
CC0
One year later, the first installation went live in the Elwood Building, built in Rochester, New York to Cutler’s own design. The chute proved fit for purpose in the seven-story building, but there was a problem. The collection box at the bottom of Cutler’s chute was seen by the postal authorities as a mailbox. Federal mail laws were taken quite seriously, then as now, and they stated that mailboxes could only be installed in public buildings such as hotels, railway stations, or government facilities. The Elwood was a private building, and thus postal carriers refused to service the collection box.
It consists of a chute running down through each story to a mail box on the ground floor, where the postman can come and take up the entire mail of the tenants of the building. A patent was easily secured, for nobody else had before thought of nailing four boards together and calling it a great thing.
Letters could be dropped in the apertures on the fourth and fifth floors and they always fell down to the ground floor all right, but there they stated. The postman would not touch them. The trouble with the mail chute was the law which says that mail boxes shall be put only in Government and public buildings.
–
The Sun
, New York, 20 Dec 1886
Cutler’s brilliantly simple invention seemed dashed at the first hurdle. However, rationality soon prevailed. Postal laws were revised in 1893, and mail chutes were placed under the authority of the US Post Office Department. This had important security implications. Only post-office approved technicians would be allowed to clear mail clogs and repair and maintain the chutes, to ensure the safety and integrity of the mail.
The Cutler Mail chutes are easy to spot at the Empire State Building. Credit:
Teknorat
, CC BY-SA 2.0
With the legal issues solved, the mail chute soared in popularity. As skyscrapers became ever more popular at the dawn of the 20th century, so did the mail chute, with over 1,600 installed by 1905. The Cutler Manufacturing Company had been the sole manufacturer reaping the benefits of this boom up until 1904, when the US Post Office looked to permit competition in the market. However, Cutler’s patent held fast, with his company merging with some rivals and suing others to dominate the market. The company also began selling around the world, with London’s famous Savoy Hotel installing a Cutler chute in 1904. By 1961, the company held 70 percent of the mail chute market, despite Cutler’s passing and the expiry of the patent many years prior.
The value of the mail chute was obvious, but its success was not to last. Many companies began implementing dedicated mail rooms, which provided both delivery and pickup services across the floors of larger buildings. This required more manual handling, but avoided issues with clogs and lost mail and better suited bigger operations. As postal volumes increased, the chutes became seen
as a liability more than a convenience
when it came to important correspondence. Larger oversized envelopes proved a particular problem, with most chutes only designed to handle smaller envelopes. A particularly famous event in 1986 saw 40,000 pieces of mail stuck in a monster jam
at the McGraw-Hill building
, which took 23 mailbags to clear. It wasn’t unusual for a piece of mail to get lost in a chute, only to turn up many decades later,
undelivered
.
An active mail chute in the Law Building in Akron, Ohio. The chute is still regularly visited by postal workers for pickup. Credit:
Cards84664
, CC BY SA 4.0
Mail chutes were often given fine, detailed designs befitting the building they were installed in. This example is from the Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Colorado. Credit:
Mikepascoe
, CC BY SA 4.0
The final death knell for the mail chute, though, was a safety matter. Come 1997, the National Fire Protection Association outright banned the installation of new mail chutes in new and existing buildings. The reasoning was simple. A mail chute was a single continuous cavity between many floors of a building, which could easily spread smoke and even flames, just like a chimney.
Despite falling out of favor, however, some functional mail chutes do persist to this day. Real examples can still be spotted in places like the Empire State Building and New York’s Grand Central station. Whether in use or deactivated, many still remain in older buildings as a visible piece of mail history.
Better building design standards and the unstoppable rise of email mean that the mail chute is ultimately a piece of history rather than a convenience of our modern age. Still, it’s neat to think that once upon a time, you could climb to the very highest floors of an office building and drop your important letters all the way to the bottom without having to use the elevator or stairs.
Collage of mail chutes from
Wikimedia Commons
,
Mark Turnauckas
, and
Britta Gustafson
. | 17 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8142128",
"author": "Jiminey",
"timestamp": "2025-06-25T14:33:31",
"content": "Good read. Thank you.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8142155",
"author": "robomonkey",
"timestamp": "2025-06-25T16:23:58",
"content": "T... | 1,760,371,504.184098 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/25/careful-design-lets-3d-print-emulate-kumiko/ | Careful Design Lets 3D Print Emulate Kumiko | Tyler August | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d print",
"kumiko"
] | Kumiko is a form of Japanese woodworking that uses small cuts of wood (probably offcuts) to produce artful designs. It’s the kind of thing that takes zen-like patience to assemble, and years to master– and who has time for that? [Paper View] likes the style of kumiko, but when all you have is a
3D printer, everything is extruded plastic.
His video, embedded below, focuses mostly on the large tiled piece and the clever design required to avoid more than the unavoidable unsightly seams without excessive post processing. (Who has time for that?) The key is a series of top pieces to hide the edges where the seams come together. The link above, however, gives something more interesting, even if it is on Makerworld.
[Paper View] has created a kumiko-style (out of respect for the craftspeople who make the real thing, we won’t call this “kumiko”) panel generator, that allows one to create custom-sized frames to print either in one piece, or to assemble as in the video. We haven’t looked at MakerWorld’s Parametric Model Maker before, but this tool seems to make full use of its capabilities (to the point of occasionally timing out). It looks like this is a wrapper for OpenScad (just like Thingiverse used to do with Customizer) so there might be a chance if enough of us comment on the video [Paper View] can be convinced to release the scad files on a more open platform.
We’ve featured kumiko before, like
this wood-epoxy guitar,
but for ultimate irony points, you need to see this
metal kumiko pattern made out of nails
. (True kumiko cannot use nails, you see.)
Thanks to [Hari Wiguna] for the tip, and
please keep them coming
! | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8142094",
"author": "RunnerPack",
"timestamp": "2025-06-25T11:41:54",
"content": "“…if enough of us comment on the video [Paper View] can be convinced to release the scad files…”I wonder if an LLM could be trained on the input parameters and the resulting model, and generate equival... | 1,760,371,504.419728 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/25/minecraft-clone-manages-with-nothing-but-html-css/ | Minecraft Clone Manages With Nothing But HTML + CSS | Donald Papp | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"css",
"html",
"minecraft"
] | Can a 3D Minecraft implementation be done entirely in CSS and HTML, without a single line of JavaScript in sight?
The answer is yes
!
True, this small clone is limited to playing with blocks in a world that measures only 9x9x9, but the fact that [Benjamin Aster] managed it at all using only CSS and pure HTML is a fantastic achievement. As far as proofs of concept go, it’s a pretty clever one.
The project consists of roughly 40,000 lines of HTML radio buttons and labels, combined with fewer than 500 lines of CSS where the real work is done. In
a short thread on X
[Benjamin] explains that each block in the 9x9x9 world is defined with the help of tens of thousands of
<label>
and
<input type="radio">
elements to track block types and faces, and CSS uses that as a type of display filter. Clicking a block is clicking a label, and changing a block type (“air” or no block is considered a type of block) switches which labels are visible to the user.
Viewing in 3D is implemented via CSS animations which apply transforms to what is displayed. Clicking a control starts and stops the animation, resulting in a view change. It’s a lot of atypical functionality for plain HTML and CSS, showing what is possible with a bit of out-of-the-box thinking.
[Simon Willison] has a
more in-depth analysis of CSS-Minecraft
and how it works, and the
code is on GitHub
if you want a closer look.
Once you’re done checking that out and hungry for more cleverness, don’t miss
Minecraft in COBOL
and
Minecraft Running in… Minecraft
. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8142125",
"author": "freedomunit",
"timestamp": "2025-06-25T13:58:46",
"content": "That’s very impressive, bravo!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8142136",
"author": "Cad the Mad",
"timestamp": "2025-06-25T15:0... | 1,760,371,504.644678 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/24/hack-turns-nissan-leaf-into-giant-rc-car/ | Hack Turns Nissan Leaf Into Giant RC Car | Navarre Bartz | [
"car hacks"
] | [
"canbus",
"car net",
"electric vehicle",
"evs",
"infotainment",
"nissan",
"Nissan Leaf"
] | As cars increasingly become computers on wheels, the attack surface for digital malfeasance increases. The [PCAutomotive] group shared their exploit for turning the 2020 Nissan Leaf into
1600 kg RC car
at Black Hat Asia 2025.
Starting with some scavenged infotainment systems and wiring harnesses, the group built test benches able to tear into vulnerabilities in the system. An exploit was found in the infotainment system’s Bluetooth implementation, and they used this to gain access to the rest of the system. By jamming the 2.4 GHz spectrum, the attacker can nudge the driver to open the Bluetooth connection menu on the vehicle to see why their phone isn’t connecting. If this menu is open, pairing can be completed without further user interaction.
Once the attacker gains access, they can control many vehicle functions, such as steering, braking, windshield wipers, and mirrors. It also allows remote monitoring of the vehicle through GPS and recording audio in the cabin. The vulnerabilities were all disclosed to Nissan before public release, so be sure to keep your infotainment system up-to-date!
If this feels familiar, we featured a similar hack on
Tesla infotainment systems
. If you’d like to hack your Leaf for the better, we’ve also covered how to
fix some of the vehicle’s charging flaws
, but we can’t help you with the
loss of app support for early models
. | 29 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8142041",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-06-25T05:31:28",
"content": "Infotainment and CANBUS should be air-gapped. That Slate truck is looking better all the time. (No infotainment as standard, can add an Android Auto screen from $20-40 on Amazon)",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,371,504.484434 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/24/nrel-maps-out-us-data-infrastructure/ | NREL Maps Out US Data Infrastructure | Navarre Bartz | [
"computer hacks",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"cartography",
"data infrastructure",
"fiber optic",
"maps"
] | Spending time as wee hackers perusing the family atlas taught us an appreciation for a good map, and [Billy Roberts], a cartographer at NREL, has served up a doozy with a
map of the data center infrastructure
in the United States. [via
LinkedIn
]
Fiber optic lines, electrical transmission capacity, and the data centers themselves are all here. Each data center is a dot with its size indicating how power hungry it is and its approximate location relative to nearby metropolitan areas. Color coding of these dots also helps us understand if the data center is already in operation (yellow), under construction (orange), or proposed (white).
Also of interest to renewable energy nerds would be the presence of some high voltage DC transmission lines on the map which may be the future of electrical transmission. As the exact location of fiber optic lines and other data making up the map are either proprietary, sensitive, or both, the map is only available as a static image.
If you’re itching to learn more about maps, how about exploring
why they don’t quite match reality
, how to
bring OpenStreetMap data into Minecraft
, or see how the
live map in a 1960s airliner worked
. | 13 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8142023",
"author": "topham",
"timestamp": "2025-06-25T02:46:35",
"content": "Individually this type of data has a low, but not insignificant value.As a collection of data the value is exponentially more valuable.As a target. By your enemies.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,... | 1,760,371,504.532419 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/24/digitally-converted-leica-gets-a-64-megapixel-upgrade/ | Digitally-Converted Leica Gets A 64-Megapixel Upgrade | Lewin Day | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"arducam",
"arducam owlsight",
"camera",
"owlsight",
"raspberry pi"
] | Leica’s film cameras were hugely popular in the 20th century, and remain so with collectors to this day. [Michael Suguitan] has previously had great success converting his classic Leica into a digital one,
and now he’s taken the project even further.
[Michael’s] previous work
saw him create a so-called “digital back” for the Leica M2. He fitted the classic camera with a Raspberry Pi Zero and a small imaging sensor to effectively turn it into a digital camera, creating what he called the LeicaMPi. Since then, [Michael] has made a range of upgrades to create what he calls the LeicaM2Pi.
The upgrades start with the image sensor. This time around, instead of using a generic Raspberry Pi camera, he’s gone with the fancier ArduCam OwlSight sensor. Boasting a mighty 64 megapixels, it’s still largely compatible with all the same software tools as the first-party cameras, making it both capable and easy to use. With a crop factor of 3.7x, the camera’s Voigtlander 12mm lens has a much more useful field of view.
Unlike [Michael’s] previous setup, there was also no need to remove the camera’s IR filter to clear the shutter mechanism. This means the new camera is capable of taking natural color photos during the day. [Michael] also added a flash this time around, controlled by the GPIOs of the Raspberry Pi Zero. The camera also features a much tidier onboard battery via the PiSugar module, which can be easily recharged with a USB-C cable.
If you’ve ever thought about converting an old-school film camera into a digital shooter, [Michael’s] work might serve as a great jumping off point.
We’ve seen it done with DSLRs, before, too
! Video after the break.
[Thanks to Stephen Walters for the tip!] | 26 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8141988",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-25T00:01:21",
"content": "12 mm strikes me as short. Is that a factor in or caused by/relevant/necessary to the build?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "814... | 1,760,371,504.598294 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/24/pong-in-discrete-components/ | Pong In Discrete Components | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Games"
] | [
"discrete components",
"hardware",
"integrated circuits",
"pong",
"recreation",
"video game"
] | The choice between hardware and software for electronics projects is generally a straighforward one. For simple tasks we might build dedicated hardware circuits out of discrete components for reliability and low cost, but for more complex tasks it could be easier and cheaper to program a general purpose microcontroller than to build the equivalent circuit in hardware. Every now and then we’ll see a project that blurs the lines between these two choices
like this Pong game built entirely out of discrete components
.
The project begins with a somewhat low-quality image of the original Pong circuit found online, which [atkelar] used to model the circuit in KiCad. Because the image wasn’t the highest resolution some guesses needed to be made, but it was enough to eventually produce a PCB and bill of material. From there [atkelar] could start piecing the circuit together, starting with the clock and eventually working through all the other components of the game, troubleshooting as he went. There were of course a few bugs to work out, as with any hardware project of this complexity, but in the end the bugs in the first PCB were found and used to create a second PCB with the issues solved.
With a wood, and metal case rounding out the build to showcase the circuit, nothing is left but to plug this in to a monitor and start playing this recreation of the first mass-produced video game ever made. Pong is a fairly popular build since, at least compared to modern games, it’s simple enough to build completely in hardware.
This version from a few years ago
goes even beyond [atkelar]’s integrated circuit design and instead built a recreation out of transistors and diodes directly.
Thanks to [irdc] for the tip! | 25 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "8141945",
"author": "J. Peterson",
"timestamp": "2025-06-24T20:14:59",
"content": "Google “original pong schematic” and it comes right up.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8141950",
"author": "Hugo Oran",
"times... | 1,760,371,504.765004 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/24/do-you-need-a-bench-meter/ | Do You Need A Bench Meter? | Al Williams | [
"Reviews",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"bench meter",
"bench multimeter",
"multimeter",
"owon"
] | If you do anything with electronics or electricity, it is a good bet you have a multimeter. Even the cheapest meter today would have been an incredible piece of lab gear not long ago and, often, meters today are lighter and have more features than the old Radio Shack meters we grew up with. But then there are bench meters. [Learn Electronics Repair] reviews
an OWON XDM1241
meter, and you have to wonder if it is better than just a decent handheld device. Check out the video below and see what you think.
Some of the advantage of a bench meter is just convenience. They stay in one place and often have a bigger display than a handheld. Of course, these days, the bench meter isn’t much better than a handheld anyway. In fact, one version of this meter even has a battery, if you want to carry it around.
Traditionally, bench meters had more digits and counts, although that’s not always true anymore. This meter has 55,000 counts with four and a half digits. It has a large LCD, can connect to a PC, and measures frequency, temperature, and capacitance.
Our bench meters usually have four-wire resistance measurement, but that does not seem to be the case for these meters. It does, however, take frequent measurements, which is a plus when ringing out continuity, for example.
The meter isn’t perfect, but if you just want a bench meter, it works well enough. If we had the space, we might opt for a bigger old surplus Fluke or similar. But if you want something new or you are short on space, this might be fine.
If you want to know what you are missing by not having
four-wire measurements
, we can help you with that. If you get any of these cheaper meters, we urge you to
upgrade your probes immediately
. | 14 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8141928",
"author": "ted yapo",
"timestamp": "2025-06-24T19:11:46",
"content": "i have two of these. i bought them for the USB interface. it’s pretty trivial to automate measurements with your favorite programming language (python). they’re useful for automated measurements of thing... | 1,760,371,504.697739 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/24/announcing-the-2025-pet-hacks-winners/ | Announcing The 2025 Pet Hacks Winners | Elliot Williams | [
"contests",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"2025 Pet Hacks Contest",
"challenge"
] | When you really love your pawed, feathered, or scaled friends, you build projects for them. (Well, anyway, that’s what’s happened to us.) For the
2025 Pet Hacks Challenge
, we asked you to share your favorite pet-related hacks, and you all delivered. So without further ado, here are our favorites, as well as the picks-of-the-litter that qualified for three $150 DigiKey gift certificates. Spoiler alert: it was a clean sweep for team cat.
The Top Three
[Andrea Favero]’s
CAT AT THE DOOR
project (his caps, not ours) packs more tech than strictly necessary, and our judges loved it. When the cat approaches, a radar detects it, a BLE collar identifies the particular cat, and a LoRA radio notifies the human on a beautiful e-ink display with a sufficiently loud beeper. Your job, then, is to open the door. This project has standout build instructions, and even if you’re a dog person, you’ll want to read them if you’re using any of these technologies in a build of your own.
Foxy and Layla are two cats on two different diets. One has prescription food that unfortunately isn’t as tasty as the regular stuff, but that doesn’t mean she can just mompf up the other cat’s chow. The solution? Computer vision! [Joe Mattioni]’s
Cat Bowl Monitor
hacks a commercial cat feeder to operate via an Android app running on an old cell phone. [Joe] trained the image recognition algorithm specifically on his two cats, which helps reliability greatly. Like the previous winner, the documentation is great, and it’s a sweet application of real-time image classification and a nice reuse of an oldish cellphone. Kudos!
And finally, [rkramer]’s
Cat Valve
is a one-way cat airlock. Since “Bad Kitty” likes to go out hunting at night, and [rkramer] doesn’t like having live trophies continually brought back into the house, a sliding door lets the cat out, but then closes behind. A webcam and a Raspberry Pi lets the human decide if the cat gets to come back in or not, relying on HI (Human Intelligence) for the image processing. This isn’t inhumane: the cat isn’t stuck outside, but merely in the cellar. No mention of how [rkramer] gets the traumatized rats out of his cellar, but we imagine there’ll be a hack for that as well.
Congrats to you three! We’ll be getting in touch with you soon to get your $150 DigiKey spending spree.
Honorable Mentions
The “Pet Safety” honorable mention category was created to honor those hacks that help promote pet health and safety. Nothing fit that bill as well as [donutsorelse]’s
Chicken Guardian
, which uses computer vision to detect various predators and scare them away with a loud voice recording. (We’re not sure if that’s entertaining or effective.) [Saren Tasciyan]’s
Dog bed is also a dog scale
that does just what it says, and we imagine that it’s a huge quality of life improvement for both the Bernese and her owners. And finally, [methodicalmaker_]’s
IoT Cat Treat Dispenser + Treadmill for Weight Loss
is a paradox: rewarding a cat with food for getting on a treadmill to lose weight. Time will tell if the dosages can be calibrated
just right
.
In the “Home Alone” category, we wanted to see remote pet-care ideas. Of course, there was a vacation fish feeder, in the form of [Coders Cafe]’s
Aquassist
, which we really liked for the phone app – it’s a simple build that looks great. Further from the beaten path, [kasik]’s
TinyML meets dog training
is a cool experiment in machine learning that also feeds and distracts the dog from barking at the door, even when [kasik] is out.
Phyto
[gallery type="rectangular" size="medium" ids="788432,788433,788435,788436,788437,788438"]
TinyML meets dog training
Aquassist
Dog bed is also a dog scale
IoT Cat Treat Dispenser + Treadmill
“Playful Pets” was for the goofy, fun, pet hacks, and the hamsters have won it. [Giulio Pons] brought us
Ruby’s Connected Hamster Wheel
, which tracked his hamster’s mileage on the wheel at night for two years running, and [Roni Bandini]’s
Wall Street hamster
project lets Milstein buy and sell stonks. Hilarious, and hopefully not too financially painful.
And finally, the “Cyborg Pets” category just has to go to
Fytó
, which basically gamifies taking care of a plant. There was intense debate about whether a plant could be a pet, but what’s more cyborg than a living Tamagotchi?
Thanks!
Thanks to everyone who entered! It was awesome to see your efforts on behalf of our animal friends. And if you didn’t get to enter because you just don’t have a pet, check back in with us on Thursday, when our next challenge begins. | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8141909",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-06-24T17:37:05",
"content": "Somebody missed a trick by not letting their pet Gecko buy stocks…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8141925",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
... | 1,760,371,504.823735 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/24/why-trijets-lost-against-twinjets/ | Why Trijets Lost Against Twinjets | Maya Posch | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [] | If you’re designing a new jet-powered airplane, one of the design considerations is the number of jet engines you will put on it. Over the course of history we have seen everywhere from a single engine, all the way up to four and beyond, with today airliners usually having two engines aside from the Boeing 747 and Airbus A380 has been largely phased out. Yet for a long time airliners featured three engines, which raises the question of why this configuration has mostly vanished now. This is the
topic of a recent YouTube video
by [Plane Curious], embedded below.
The Boeing 727, DC-10 and L-1011 TriStar are probably among the most well-known
trijets
, all being unveiled around the same time. The main reason for this was actually regulatory, as twin-engine designs were thought to be too unsafe for long flights across oceans, while quad-jet designs were too fuel-hungry. This remained the situation until newer jet engine designs that were more reliable and powerful, leading to new safety standards (
ETOPS
) that allowed twinjets to fly these longer routes as well. Consequently, the last passenger trijet – an MD-11 KLM flight – touched down in 2014.
Along with the engineering and maintenance challenges that come with having a tail-mounted jet engine, the era of trijets seem to have firmly come to an end, at least for commercial airliners. | 35 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8141871",
"author": "moeb",
"timestamp": "2025-06-24T15:36:13",
"content": "ETOPS – Engines Turn Or Passengers Swim",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8142049",
"author": "Thijzert",
"timestamp": "2025-06-25T06:23... | 1,760,371,504.896213 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/24/mining-and-refining-drilling-and-blasting/ | Mining And Refining: Drilling And Blasting | Dan Maloney | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"News",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [] | It’s an inconvenient fact that most of Earth’s largesse of useful minerals is locked up in, under, and around a lot of rock. Our little world condensed out of the remnants of stars whose death throes cooked up almost every element in the periodic table, and in the intervening billions of years, those elements have sorted themselves out into deposits that range from the easily accessed, lying-about-on-the-ground types to those buried deep in the crust, or worse yet, those that are distributed so sparsely within a mineral matrix that it takes harvesting megatonnes of material to find just a few kilos of the stuff.
Whatever the substance of our desires, and no matter how it is associated with the rocks and minerals below our feet, almost every mining and refining effort starts with wresting vast quantities of rock from the Earth’s crust. And the easiest, cheapest, and fastest way to do that most often involves blasting. In a very real way, explosives make the world work, for without them, the minerals we need to do almost anything would be prohibitively expensive to produce, if it were possible at all. And understanding the chemistry, physics, and engineering behind blasting operations is key to understanding almost everything about Mining and Refining.
First, We Drill
For almost all of the time that we’ve been mining minerals, making big rocks into smaller rocks has been the work of strong backs and arms supplemented by the mechanical advantage of tools like picks, pry bars, and shovels. The historical record shows that early miners tried to reduce this effort with clever applications of low-energy physics, such as jamming wooden plugs into holes in the rocks and soaking them with liquid to swell the wood and exert enough force to fracture the rock, or by heating the rock with bonfires and then flooding with cold water to create thermal stress fractures. These methods, while effective, only traded effort for time, and only worked for certain types of rock.
Mining productivity got a much-needed boost in 1627 with the first recorded use of gunpowder for blasting at a gold mine in what is now Slovakia. Boreholes were stuffed with powder that was ignited by a fuse made from a powder-filled reed. The result was a pile of rubble that would have taken weeks to produce by hand, and while the speed with which the explosion achieved that result was probably much welcomed by the miners, in reality, it only shifted their efforts to drilling the boreholes, which generally took a five-man crew using sledgehammers and striker bars to pound deep holes into the rock. Replacing that manual effort with mechanical drilling was the next big advance, but it would have to wait until the Industrial Revolution harnessed the power of steam to run drills capable of boring deep holes in rock quickly and with much smaller crews.
The basic principles of rock drilling developed in the 19th century, such as rapidly spinning a hardened steel bit while exerting tremendous down-pressure and high-impulse percussion, remain applicable today, although with advancements like synthetic diamond tooling and better methods of power transmission. Modern drills for open-cast mining fall into two broad categories: overburden drills, which typically drill straight down or at a slight angle to vertical and can drill large-diameter holes over 100 meters deep, and quarry drills, which are smaller and more maneuverable rigs that can drill at any angle, even horizontally. Most drill rigs are track-driven for greater mobility over rubble-strewn surfaces, and are equipped with soundproofed, air-conditioned cabs with safety cages to protect the operator. Automation is a big part of modern rigs, with automatic leveling systems, tool changers that can select the proper bit for the rock type, and fully automated drill chain handling, including addition of drill rod to push the bit deeper into the rock. Many drill rigs even have semi-autonomous operation, where a single operator can control a fleet of rigs from a single remote control console.
Proper Prior Planning
While the use of explosives seems brutally chaotic and indiscriminate, it’s really the exact opposite. Each of the so-called “shots” in a blasting operation is a carefully controlled, highly engineered event designed to move material in a specific direction with the desired degree of fracturing, all while ensuring the safety of the miners and the facility.
To accomplish this, a blasting plan is put together by a mining engineer. The blasting plan takes into account the mechanical characteristics of the rock, the location and direction of any pre-existing fractures or faults, and proximity to any structures or hazards. Engineers also need to account for the equipment used for mucking, which is the process of removing blasted material for further processing. For instance, a wheeled loader operating on the same level, or bench, that the blasting took place on needs a different size and shape of rubble pile than an excavator or dragline operating from the bench above. The capabilities of the rock crushing machinery that’s going to be used to process the rubble also have to be accounted for in the blasting plan.
Most blasting plans define a matrix of drill holes with very specific spacing, generally with long rows and short columns. The drill plan specifies the diameter of each hole along with its depth, which usually goes a little beyond the distance to the next bench down. The mining engineer also specifies a stem height for the hole, which leaves room on top of the explosives to backfill the hole with drill tailings or gravel.
Prills and Oil
Once the drill holes are complete and inspected, charging the holes with explosives can begin. The type of blasting agents to be used is determined by the blasting plan, but in most cases, the agent of choice is ANFO, or ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. The ammonium nitrate, which contains 60% oxygen by weight, serves as an oxidizer for the combustion of the long-chain alkanes in the fuel oil. The ideal mix is 94% ammonium nitrate to 6% fuel oil.
Filling holes with ammonium nitrate at a blasting site. Hopper trucks like this are often used to carry prilled ammonium nitrate. Some trucks also have a tank for the fuel oil that’s added to the ammonium nitrate to make ANFO. Credit: Old Bear Photo, via Adobe Stock.
How the ANFO is added to the hole depends on conditions. For holes where groundwater is not a problem, ammonium nitrate in the form of small porous beads or prills, is poured down the hole and lightly tamped to remove any voids or air spaces before the correct amount of fuel oil is added. For wet conditions, an ammonium nitrate emulsion will be used instead. This is just a solution of ammonium nitrate in water with emulsifiers added to allow the fuel oil to mix with the oxidizer.
ANFO is classified as a tertiary explosive, meaning it is insensitive to shock and requires a booster to detonate. The booster charge is generally a secondary explosive such as PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, a powerful explosive that’s chemically similar to nitroglycerine but is much more stable. PETN comes in a number of forms, with cardboard cylinders like oversized fireworks or a PETN-laced gel stuffed into a plastic tube that looks like a sausage being the most common.
Electrically operated blasting caps marked with their built-in 425 ms delay. These will easily blow your hand clean off. Source:
Timo Halén
, CC BY-SA 2.5.
Being a secondary explosive, the booster charge needs a fairly strong shock to detonate. This shock is provided by a blasting cap or detonator, which is a small, multi-stage pyrotechnic device. These are generally in the form of a small brass or copper tube filled with a layer of primary explosive such as lead azide or fulminate of mercury, along with a small amount of secondary explosive such as PETN. The primary charge is in physical contact with an initiator of some sort, either a bridge wire in the case of electrically initiated detonators, or more commonly, a shock tube. Shock tubes are thin-walled plastic tubing with a layer of reactive explosive powder on the inner wall. The explosive powder is engineered to detonate down the tube at around 2,000 m/s, carrying a shock wave into the detonator at a known rate, which makes propagation delays easy to calculate.
Timing is critical to the blasting plan. If the explosives in each hole were to all detonate at the same time, there wouldn’t be anywhere for the displaced material to go. To prevent that, mining engineers build delays into the blasting plan so that some charges, typically the ones closest to the free face of the bench, go off a fraction of a second before the charges behind them, freeing up space for the displaced material to move into. Delays are either built into the initiator as a layer of pyrotechnic material that burns at a known rate between the initiator and the primary charge, or by using surface delays, which are devices with fixed delays that connect the initiator down the hole to the rest of the charges that will make up the shot. Lately, electronic detonators have been introduced, which have microcontrollers built in. These detonators are addressable and can have a specific delay programmed in the field, making it easier to program the delays needed for the entire shot. Electronic detonators also require a specific code to be transmitted to detonate, which reduces the chance of injury or misuse that lost or stolen electrical blasting caps present. This was enough of a problem that a series of public service films on the dangers of playing with blasting caps appeared regularly from the 1950s through the 1970s.
“Fire in the Hole!”
When all the holes are charged and properly stemmed, the blasting crew makes the final connections on the surface. Connections can be made with wires for electrical and electronic detonators, or with shock tubes for non-electric detonators. Sometimes, detonating cord is used to make the surface connections between holes. Det cord is similar to shock tube but generally looks like woven nylon cord. It also detonates at a much faster rate (6,500 m/s) than shock tube thanks to being filled with PETN or a similar high-velocity explosive.
Once the final connections to the blasting controller are made and tested, the area is secured with all personnel and equipment removed. A series of increasingly urgent warnings are sounded on sirens or horns as the blast approaches, to alert personnel to the danger. The blaster initiates the shot at the controller, which sends the signal down trunklines and into any surface delays before being transmitted to the detonators via their downlines. The relatively weak shock wave from the detonator propagates into the booster charge, which imparts enough energy into the ANFO to start detonation of the main charge.
The ANFO rapidly decomposes into a mixture of hot gases, including carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water vapor. The shock wave pulverizes the rock surrounding the borehole and rapidly propagates into the surrounding rock, exerting tremendous compressive force. The shock wave continues to propagate until it meets a natural crack or the interface between rock and air at the free face of the shot. These impedance discontinuities reflect the compressive wave and turn it into a tensile wave, and since rock is generally much weaker in tension than compression, this is where the real destruction begins.
The reflected tensile forces break the rock along natural or newly formed cracks, creating voids that are filled with the rapidly expanding gases from the burning ANFO. The gases force these cracks apart, providing the heave needed to move rock fragments into the voids created by the initial shock wave. The shot progresses at the set delay intervals between holes, with the initial shock from new explosions creating more fractures deeper into the rock face and more expanding gas to move the fragments into the space created by earlier explosions. Depending on how many holes are in the shot and how long the delays are, the entire thing can be over in just a few seconds, or it could go on for quite some time, as it does in this world-record blast at a coal mine in Queensland in 2019, which used 3,899 boreholes packed with 2,194 tonnes of ANFO to move 4.7 million cubic meters of material in just 16 seconds.
There’s still much for the blasting crew to do once the shot is done. As the dust settles, safety crews use monitoring equipment to ensure any hazardous blasting gases have dispersed before sending in crews to look for any misfires. Misfires can result in a reshoot, where crews hook up a fresh initiator and try to detonate the booster charge again. If the charge won’t fire, it can be carefully extracted from the rubble pile with non-sparking tools and soaked in water to inactivate it. | 22 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8141863",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-24T14:32:32",
"content": "A good article on “drill, baby, drill”. Followed by “blast, baby, blast” and “scoop, baby, scoop”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8141866",
"au... | 1,760,371,504.989053 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/24/is-box-turtle-the-open-source-ams-weve-been-waiting-for/ | Is Box Turtle The Open Source AMS We’ve Been Waiting For? | Tyler August | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"Box Turtle",
"klipper",
"MMU",
"Multi material extrusion",
"multimaterial"
] | Multimaterial printing was not invented by BambuLabs, but love them or hate them the AMS has become the gold standard for a modern multi-material unit. [Daniel]’s
latest Mod Bot video on the Box Turtle MMU
(embedded below) highlights an open source project that aims to bring the power and ease of AMS to Voron printers, and everyone else using Klipper willing to put in the work.
This isn’t a torture test, but it’s very clean and very cute.
The system itself is a mostly 3D printed unit that sits atop [Daniel]’s Voron printer looking just like an AMS atop a BambuLab. It has space for four spools, with motorized rollers and feeders in the front that have handy-dandy indicator LEDs to tell you which filament is loaded or printing. Each spool gets its own extruder, whose tension can be adjusted manually via thumbscrew. A buffer unit sits between the spool box and your toolhead.
Aside from the box, you need to spec a toolhead that meets requirements. It needs a PTFE connector with a (reverse) boden tube to guide the filament, and it also needs to have a toolhead filament runout sensor. The sensor is to provide feedback to Klipper that the filament is loaded or unloaded. Finally you will probably want to add a filament cutter, because that happens at the toolhead with this unit. Sure, you could try the whole tip-forming thing, but anyone who had a Prusa MMU back in the day can tell you that is easier said than done. The cutter apparently makes this system much more reliable.
In operation, it looks just like a BambuLabs printer with an AMS installed. The big difference, again, is that this project by [Armored Turtle] is fully open source, with
everything on GitHub
under a GPL-3.0 license. Several vendors are already producing kits; [Daniel] is using the LDO version in his video.
It looks like the project is well documented–and [Mod Bot] agrees, and he reports that the build process is not terribly difficult (well, if you’re the kind of person who builds a Voron, anyway), and adding the
AFC Klipper Addon
(also by [Armored Turtle]) was easy as pie. After that, well. It needs calibration. Calibration and lots of tuning, which is an ongoing process for [Daniel]. If you want to see that, watch the video below, but we’ll spoil it for you and let you know it really pays off. (Except for lane 4, where he probably needs to clean up the print.)We’ve featured open-source MMUs before, like the
Enraged Rabbit Carrot Feeder,
but it’s great to see more in this scene, especially something that looks like it can take on the AMS. It’s not the only way to get multimaterial– there’s always
tool-changers
, or you could just put in a
second motion system and gantry. | 26 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8141836",
"author": "easy",
"timestamp": "2025-06-24T12:48:04",
"content": "It would be nice if you told us what AMS stands for and also why it is the gold standard / how does it compare to other standards?I bought a dual filament in single nozzle out hotend for my ender 3 for 40 bu... | 1,760,371,505.194868 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/24/theres-a-new-reusable-rocket-and-its-a-honda/ | There’s A New Reusable Rocket, And It’s A Honda | Jenny List | [
"Space"
] | [
"Honda",
"reusable",
"rocket"
] | As we watched the latest SpaceX Starship rocket test end in a spectacular explosion, we might have missed the news from Japan of a different rocket passing a successful test. We all know Honda as a car company but it seems they are in the rocket business too, and
they successfully tested a reusable rocket
. It’s an experimental 900 kg model that flew to a height of 300 m before returning itself to the pad, but it serves as a valuable test platform for Honda’s take on the technology.
It’s a research project as it stands, but it’s being developed with an eye towards future low-cost satellite launches rather than as a crew launch platform.As a news story though it’s of interest beyond its technology, because it’s too easy to miss news from the other side of the world when all eyes are looking at Texas. It’s the latest in a long line of interesting research projects from the company, and we hope that this time they resist the temptation
to kill their creation
rather than bring it to market. | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8141800",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-06-24T10:07:51",
"content": "Cars, motorbikes, robots, rockets, plenty of other stuff too.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8141813",
"author": "SpillsDirt",
"timestam... | 1,760,371,505.426131 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/23/building-a-custom-paper-tape-punch-machine/ | Building A Custom Paper Tape Punch Machine | Maya Posch | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"paper tape",
"punched tape"
] | The solenoid and punch side of the machine. {Credit: Simon Boak)
Although [Simon Boak] had no use for an automatic paper tape punch, this was one of those intrusive project thoughts that
had to be put to rest
. With not a lot of DIY projects to look at, the first step was to prototype a punch mechanism that would work reliably. This involved the machining of a block of aluminium with holes at the right locations for the punch (HSS rods) to push through and create holes into the paper without distortions. Next was to automate this process.
To drive the punches, 12V solenoids were selected, but using leverage to not require the solenoids to provide all the force directly. On the electronics side this then left designing a PCB with the solenoid drivers and an Arduino Nano-style board as the brains, all of which including the Arduino source can be
found on GitHub
. Much like with commercial tape punch machines, this unit receives the data stream via the serial port (and optional parallel port), with the pattern punched into the 1″ paper tape.
One issue was finding blank paper tape, for which [Simon] cut up rolls of thermal paper using a 3D-printed rig with appropriately installed sharp blades. This paper tape seems to work quite well so far, albeit with the compromise that due to the current drawn by each solenoid (~1.7A) only one solenoid gets activated at any time. This makes it slower than commercial punch machines.
Thanks to [Tim] for the tip. | 14 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8141815",
"author": "Michael Gardi",
"timestamp": "2025-06-24T11:04:43",
"content": "The retro computer community needed something like this. While DIY paper tape readers are pretty common, punches being a much harder problem are not. Well done.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth":... | 1,760,371,505.106263 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/23/add-touchtone-typing-to-your-next-project/ | Add TouchTone Typing To Your Next Project | Al Williams | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"keyboard",
"phone keyboard",
"T9"
] | The Blackberry made phones with real keyboards popular, and smartphones with touch keyboards made that input method the default. However, the old flip phone crowd had just a few telephone keys to work with. If you have a key-limited project, maybe check out the
libt9
library from [FoxMoss].
There were two methods for using these limited keyboards, both of which relied on the letters above a phone key’s number. For example, the number 2 should have “ABC” above it, or, sometimes, below it.
In one scheme, you’d press the two key multiple times quickly to get the letter you wanted. One press was ‘2’ while two rapid presses made up ‘A.’ If you waited too long, you were entering the next letter (so pressing two, pausing, and pressing it again would give you ’22’ instead of ‘A’).
That’s a pain, as you might imagine. The T9 system was a bit better. It “knows” about words. So if you press, for example, ‘843’ it knows you probably meant ‘the,’ a common word. That’s better than ‘884444333’ or, if the digit is last in the rotation, ‘844433.’ Of course, that assumes you are using one of the 75,000 or so words the library knows about.
If you just want to try it,
there’s a website
. Now imagine writing an entire text message or e-mail like that.
Of course, there’s the
Blueberry
, if you really want physicality. We love that old
Blackberry keyboard
. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8141810",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-06-24T10:42:29",
"content": "Now that we have computing power to spare everywhere, a really good T9 like system (maybe with context awareness?) should totally be possible.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies... | 1,760,371,505.245472 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/23/modern-tech-meets-retro-7-segment/ | Modern Tech Meets Retro 7-Segment | Matt Varian | [
"hardware"
] | [
"7-segment display",
"ESP32",
"open source",
"PCB coil"
] | At one point in time mechanical seven segment displays were ubiquitous, over time many places have replaced them with other types of displays. [Sebastian] has a soft spot for these old mechanically actuated displays and has built an open-source
7-segment display
with some very nice features.
We’ve seen a good number of DIY 7-segment displays on this site before, the way [Sebastian] went about it resulted in a beautiful well thought out result. The case is 3D printed, and although there are two colors used it doesn’t require a multicolor 3d printer to make your own. The real magic in this build revolves around the custom PCB he designed. Instead of using a separate electromagnets to move each flap, the PCB has coil traces used to toggle the flaps. The smart placement of a few small screws allows the small magnets in each flap to hold the flap in that position even when the coils are off, greatly cutting down the power needed for this display. He also used a modular design where one block has the ESP32 and RTC, but for the additional blocks those components can remain unpopulated.
The work he put into this project didn’t stop at the hardware, the software also has a great number of thoughtful features. The ESP32 running the display hosts a website which allows you to configure some of the many features: the real-time clock, MQTT support, timer, custom API functions, firmware updates. The end result is a highly customizable, display that sounds awesome every time it updates. Be sure to check out the video below as well as his site to see this awesome display in action. Also check out some of the other
7-segment displays
we’ve featured before. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8141814",
"author": "Niklas",
"timestamp": "2025-06-24T10:54:38",
"content": "That’s a neat design and the daisy-chaining is awesome.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8141983",
"author": "m1ke",
"timestamp": "20... | 1,760,371,505.948571 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/23/casting-time-exploded-watch-in-resin/ | Casting Time: Exploded Watch In Resin | Matt Varian | [
"Art"
] | [
"epoxy resin",
"mechanical watch"
] | We’ve all seen the exploded view of complex things, which CAD makes possible, but it’s much harder to levitate parts in their relative positions in the real world. That, however, is exactly what [fellerts] has done with this
wristwatch
, frozen in time and place.
Inspired by another great project
explaining the workings
of a mechanical watch, [fellerts] set out to turn it into reality. First, he had to pick the right watch movement to suspend. He settled on a movement from the early 1900s—complex enough to impress but not too intricate to be impractical. The initial approach was to cast multiple layers that stacked up. However, after several failed attempts, this was ruled out. He found that fishing line was nearly invisible in the resin. With a bit of heat, he could turn it into the straight, transparent standoffs he needed.
Even after figuring out the approach of using fishing line to hold the pieces at the right distance and orientation, there were still four prototypes before mastering all the variables and creating the mesmerizing final product. Be sure to head over to his site and read about his process, discoveries, and techniques. Also, check out some of the other great things we’ve seen done with
epoxy
in the past. | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8141668",
"author": "Garr",
"timestamp": "2025-06-23T20:45:11",
"content": "Surely there is a better photo of the piece?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8141747",
"author": "Brian",
"timestamp": "2025-06-24T01:... | 1,760,371,505.291807 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/23/keep-track-of-the-compost-with-lorawan/ | Keep Track Of The Compost With LoRaWAN | Tyler August | [
"classic hacks",
"home hacks"
] | [
"compost",
"CubeCell AB01",
"DS18B20",
"LoRaWAN",
"solar panel",
"temperature sensor"
] | Composting doesn’t seem difficult: pile up organic matter, let it rot. In practice, however, it’s a bit more complicated– if you want that sweet, sweet soil amendment in a reasonable amount of time, and to make sure any food-born pathogens and weed seeds don’t come through, you need a “hot” compost pile. How to tell if the pile is hot? Well, you could go out there and stick your arm in like a schmuck, or you could use [Dirk-WIllem van Gulik]’s “
LORAWAN Compostheap solarpowered temperaturesensor
” (sic).
The project is exactly what it sounds like, once you add some spaces: a solar-powered temperature sensor that uses LoRaWAN to track temperatures inside (and outside, for comparison) the compost heap year round. Electronically it is pretty simple: a Helltech CubeCell AB01 LoraWAN module is wired up with three DS18B20 temperature sensors, a LiPo battery and a solar panel. (The AB01 has the required circuitry to charge the battery via solar power.)
The three temperature sensors are spread out: within a handmade of a metal spike to measure the core of the heap, one partway up the metal tube holding said spike, to measure the edge of the pile, and one in the handsome 3D printed case to measure the ambient temperature. These three measurements, and the difference between them, should give a very good picture of the metabolism of the pile, and cue an observant gardener when it is time to turn it, water it, or declare it done.
Given it only wakes every hour or so for measurements (compost piles aren’t a fast moving system
like an RMBK
) and has a decent-sized panel, the LiPo battery isn’t going to see much stress and will likely last many years, especially in the benevolent Dutch climate. [Dirk] is also counting on that climate to keep the printed PLA enclosure intact. If one was to recreate this project for Southern California or North Australia, a different filament would certainly be needed, but the sun doesn’t beat down nearly as hard in Northern Europe and PLA will probably last at least as long as the battery.
Of course with this device it’s still up to the gardener to decide what to do with the temperature data and get out to do the hard work. For those who prefer more automation and less exercise,
this composter might be of interest.
Our thanks to [Peter de Bruin] for the tip about this finely-turned temperature sensing tip. If you, too, want to bask in the immortal fame brought by a sentence of thanks at the end of a Hackaday article (or perhaps a whole article dedicated to your works?)
submit a tip
and your dreams may come true. | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8141643",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-23T18:37:40",
"content": "Use a smart nose to tell if it’s earthy or sweet.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8141665",
"author": "Tony M",
"timestamp": "2025-06-23T20:... | 1,760,371,505.470298 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/23/video-game-preservation-through-decompilation/ | Video Game Preservation Through Decompilation | Tom Nardi | [
"Games",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Reverse Engineering",
"Slider",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"classic games",
"decompilation",
"decompile",
"emulation",
"reverse engineering"
] | Unlike computer games, which smoothly and continuously evolved along with the hardware that powered them, console games have up until very recently been constrained by a generational style of development. Sure there were games that appeared on multiple platforms, and eventually newer consoles would feature backwards compatibility that allowed them to play select titles from previous generations of hardware. But in many cases, some of the best games ever made were stuck on the console they were designed for.
Now, for those following along as this happened, it wasn’t such a big deal. For gamers, it was simply a given that their favorite games from the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) wouldn’t play on the Nintendo 64, any more than their Genesis games could run on their Sony PlayStation. As such, it wasn’t uncommon to see several game consoles clustered under the family TV. If you wanted to go back and play those older titles, all you had to do was switch video inputs.
But gaming, and indeed the entertainment world in general, has changed vastly over the last couple of decades. Telling somebody today that the only way they can experience
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
is by dragging out some yellowed thirty-odd year old console from the attic is like telling them the only way they can see a movie is by going to the theater.
These days, the expectation is that entertainment comes to you, not the other way around — and it’s an assumption that’s unlikely to change as technology marches on. Just like our TV shows and movies now appear on whatever device is convenient to us at the time, modern gamers don’t want to be limited to their consoles, they also want to play games on their phones and VR headsets.
But that leaves us with a bit of a problem. There are some games which are too significant, either technically or culturally, to just leave in the digital dust. Like any other form of art, there are pieces that deserve to be preserved for future generations to see and experience.
For the select few games that are deemed worth the effort, decompilation promises to offer a sort of digital immortality. As several recent projects have shown, breaking a game down to its original source code can allow it to adapt to new systems and technologies for as long as the community wishes to keep them updated.
Emulation For Most, But Not All
Before we get into the subject of decompilation, we must first address a concept that many readers are likely familiar with already: emulation.
Using a console emulator to play an old game is not entirely unlike running an operating system through a virtual machine, except in the case of the console emulator, there’s the added complication of having to replicate the unique hardware environment that a given game was designed to run on. Given a modern computer, this usually isn’t a problem when it comes to the early consoles. But as you work your way through the console generations, the computational power required to emulate their unique hardware architectures rapidly increases.
Nintendo put emulation to work with their “Mini” consoles.
The situation is often complicated by the fact that some games were painstakingly optimized for their respective console, often making use of little-documented quirks of the hardware. Emulators often employ title-specific routines to try and make these games playable, but they aren’t always 100% successful. Even on games that aren’t particularly taxing, the general rule of emulation is to put performance ahead of accuracy.
Therein lies the key problem with emulation when it comes to preserving games as an artistic medium. While the need for ever-more powerful hardware is a concern, Moore’s Law will keep that largely in check. The bigger issue is
accuracy
. Simply running a game is one thing, but to run it exactly how it was meant to run when the developers released it is another story entirely.
It’s fairly common for games to look, sound, and even play slightly differently when under emulation than they did when running on real hardware. In many cases, these issues are barely noticeable for the average player. The occasional sound effect playing out of sync, or a slightly shifted color palette isn’t enough to ruin the experience. Other issues, like missing textures or malfunctioning game logic can be bad enough that the game can’t be completed. There are even games, few as they may be, that simply don’t run at all under emulation.
Make no mistake, emulation is usually good enough for most games. Indeed, both Nintendo and Sony have used emulation in various capacities to help bring their extensive back catalog of games to newer generations. But the fact remains that there are some games which deserve, and sometimes even require, a more nuanced approach.
Chasing Perfection
In comparison, when a game is decompiled to the point that the community has the original C code that it was built from, it’s possible to avoid many of the issues that come with emulation. The game can be compiled as a native executable for modern platforms, and it can take advantage of all the hardware and software improvements that come with it. It’s even possible to fix long-standing bugs, and generally present the game in its best form.
For those who’ve dabbled in reverse engineering, you’ll know that decompiling a program back into usable C code isn’t exactly a walk in the park. While there are automated tools that can help get through a lot of the work, there’s still plenty of human intervention required. Even then, the original code for the game would have been written to take advantage of the original console’s unique hardware, so you’ll need to either patch your way around that or develop some kind of compatibility layer to map various calls over to something more modern and platform-agnostic. It’s a process that can easily take years to complete.
Because of this, decompilation efforts tend to be limited to the most critically acclaimed titles. For example, in 2021 we saw the first
efforts to fully reverse
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
. Released in 1998 on the N64, it’s often hailed as one of the greatest video games ever made. Although the effort started with
Ocarina
, by 2024, the lessons learned during that project led to the development of
tools which can help decompile and reconstruct other N64 games
.
Games as Living Documents
For the most part, an emulated game works the same way it did when it was first released. Of course, the emulator has full control over the virtual environment that the game is running in, so there are a few tricks it can pull. As such, additional features such as cheats and save states are common in most emulators. It’s even possible to swap out the original graphical assets for higher resolution versions, which can greatly improve the look of some early 3D games.
But what if you wanted to take things further? That’s where having the source code makes all the difference. Once you’ve gotten the game running perfectly, you can create a fork that starts adding in new features and quality of life improvements. As an example, the
decompilation for
Animal Crossing
on the GameCube
will allow developers to expand the in-game calendar beyond the year 2030 — but it’s a change that will be
implemented in a “deluxe” fork of the code
so as to preserve how the original game functioned.
At this point you’re beyond preservation, and you’ve turned the game into something that doesn’t just live on, but can actually grow with new generations of players. | 18 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8141673",
"author": "WTF Detector",
"timestamp": "2025-06-23T20:57:36",
"content": "It’s fairly common for games to look, sound, and even play slightly differently when under emulation than they did when running on real hardware.Citation very much needed.Foreword: I’ve worked in the... | 1,760,371,505.588674 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/23/head-to-print-head-cnc-vs-fdm/ | Head To Print Head: CNC Vs FDM | Tyler August | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"3d print",
"CNC machine",
"comparisons"
] | It’s a question new makers often ask: “Should I start with a CNC machine or a 3D Printer?”– or, once you have both, every project gets the question “Should I use my CNC or 3D printer?” — and the answer is to both is, of course, “it depends”. In the video embedded below by [NeedItMakeIt] you can see a head-to-head comparison for one specific product he makes,
CRATER, a magnetic, click-together stacking tray for tabletop gaming
. (He says tabletop gaming, but we think these would be very handy in the shop, too.)
[NeedItMakeIt] takes us through the process for both FDM 3D Printing in PLA, and CNC Machining the same part in walnut. Which part is nicer is absolutely a matter of taste; we can’t imagine many wouldn’t chose the wood, but
de gustibus non disputandum est–
there is no accounting for taste. What there
is
accounting for is the materials and energy costs, which are both surprising– that walnut is cheaper than PLA for this part is actually shocking, but the amount of power needed for dust collection is something that caught us off guard, too.
Of course the process is the real key, and given that most of the video follows [NeedItMakeIt] crafting the CNC’d version of his invention, the video gives a good rundown to any newbie just how much more work is involved in getting a machined part ready for sale compared to “take it off the printer and glue in the magnets.” (It’s about 40 extra minutes, if you want to skip to the answer.) As you might expect, labour is by far the greatest cost in producing these items if you value your time, which [NeedItMakeIt] does in the spreadsheet he presents at the end.
What he does not do is provide an answer, because in the case of this part, neither CNC or 3D Printing is “better”. It’s a matter of taste– which is the great thing about DIY. We can decide for ourselves which process and which end product we prefer. “There is no accounting for taste”,
de gustibus non disputandum est,
is true enough that it’s been repeated since Latin was a thing. Which would you rather, in this case? CNC or 3D print? Perhaps you would rather
3D Print a CNC
? Or
have one machine to do it all?
Let us know in the comments for that sweet, sweet engagement.
While you’re engaging, maybe
drop us a tip
, while we offer our thanks to [Al] for this one. | 18 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8141609",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-06-23T16:19:47",
"content": "In my shop, the fact that FDM has basically zero set-up is why my 3D printer gets used more. Wood can be pretty cheap, but you’ll need to store it somewhere, cut it up into router or laser cutter sized pi... | 1,760,371,505.525973 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/23/eulogy-for-the-satellite-phone/ | Eulogy For The Satellite Phone | Al Williams | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Phone Hacks",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"inmarsat",
"iridium",
"satcom",
"satellite phone"
] | We take it for granted that we almost always have cell service, no matter where you go around town. But there are places — the desert, the forest, or the ocean — where you might not have cell service. In addition, there are certain jobs where you must be able to make a call even if the cell towers are down, for example, after a hurricane. Recently, a combination of technological advancements has made it possible for your ordinary cell phone to connect to a satellite for at least some kind of service. But before that, you needed a satellite phone.
On TV and in movies, these are simple. You pull out your cell phone that has a bulkier-than-usual antenna, and you make a call. But the real-life version is quite different. While some satellite phones were connected to something like a ship, I’m going to consider a satellite phone, for the purpose of this post, to be a handheld device that can make calls.
History
Satellites have been relaying phone calls for a very long time. Early satellites carried voice transmissions in the late 1950s. But it would be 1979 before Inmarsat would provide MARISAT for phone calls from sea. It was clear that the cost of operating a truly global satellite phone system would be too high for any single country, but it would be a boon for ships at sea.
Inmarsat, started as a UN organization to create a satellite network for naval operations. It would grow to operate 15 satellites and become a private British-based company in 1998. However, by the late 1990s, there were competing companies like Thuraya, Iridium, and GlobalStar.
An IsatPhone-Pro (
CC-BY-SA-3.0
by [Klaus Därr])
The first commercial satellite phone call was in 1976. The oil platform “Deep Sea Explorer” had a call with Phillips Petroleum in Oklahoma from the coast of Madagascar. Keep in mind that these early systems were not what we think of as mobile phones. They were more like portable ground stations, often with large antennas.
For example, here was part of a press release for a 1989 satellite terminal:
…small enough to fit into a standard suitcase. The TCS-9200 satellite terminal weighs 70lb and can be used to send voice, facsimile and still photographs… The TCS-9200 starts at $53,000, while Inmarsat charges are $7 to $10 per minute.
Keep in mind, too, that in addition to the briefcase, you needed an antenna. If you were lucky, your antenna folded up and, when deployed, looked a lot like an upside-down umbrella.
However, Iridium launched specifically to bring a handheld satellite phone service to the market. The first call? In late 1998, U.S. Vice President Al Gore dialed Gilbert Grosvenor, the great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell. The phones looked like very big “brick” phones with a very large antenna that swung out.
Of course, all of this was during the Cold War, so the USSR also had its own satellite systems: Volna and Morya, in addition to military satellites.
Location, Location, Location
The earliest satellites made one orbit of the Earth each day, which means they orbit at a very specific height. Higher orbits would cause the Earth to appear to move under the satellite, while lower orbits would have the satellite racing around the Earth.
That means that, from the ground, it looks like they never move. This gives reasonable coverage as long as you can “see” the satellite in the sky. However, it means you need better transmitters, receivers, and antennas.
Iridium satellites are always on the move
, but blanket the earth.
This is how Inmarsat and Thuraya worked. Unless there is some special arrangement, a geosynchronous satellite only covers about 40% of the Earth.
Getting a satellite into a high orbit is challenging, and there are only so many “slots” at the exact orbit required to be geosynchronous available. That’s why other companies like Iridium and Globalstar wanted an alternative.
That alternative is to have satellites in lower orbits. It is easier to talk to them, and you can blanket the Earth. However, for full coverage of the globe, you need at least 40 or 50 satellites.
The system is also more complex. Each satellite is only overhead for a few minutes, so you have to switch between orbiting “cell towers” all the time. If there are enough satellites, it can be an advantage because you might get blocked from one satellite by, say, a mountain, and just pick up a different one instead.
Globalstar used 48 satellites, but couldn’t cover the poles. They eventually switched to a constellation of 24 satellites. Iridium, on the other hand, operates 66 satellites and claims to cover the entire globe. The satellites can beam signals to the Earth or each other.
The Problems
There are a variety of issues with most, if not all, satellite phones. First, geosynchronous satellites won’t work if you are too far North or South since the satellite will be so low, you’ll bump into things like trees and mountains. Of course, they don’t work if you are on the wrong side of the world, either, unless there is a network of them.
Getting a signal indoors is tricky. Sometimes, it is tricky outdoors, too. And this isn’t cheap. Prices vary, but soon after the release, phones started at around $1,300, and then you paid $7 a minute to talk. The geosynchronous satellites, in particular, are subject to getting blocked momentarily by just about anything. The same can happen if you have too few satellites in the sky above you.
Modern pricing is a bit harder to figure out because of all the different plans. However, expect to pay between $50 and $150 a month, plus per-minute charges ranging from $0.25 to $1.50 per minute. In general, networks with less coverage are cheaper than those that work everywhere. Text messages are extra. So, of course, is data.
If you want to see what it really looked like to use a 1990-era Iridium phone, check out [saveitforparts] video below.
If you prefer to see an older non-phone system, check him out with an even older Inmarsat station in this video:
So it is no wonder these never caught on with the mass market. We expect that if providers can
link normal cell phones to a satellite network
, these older systems will fall by the wayside, at least for voice communications. Or, maybe
hacker use will get cheaper
. We can hope, right? | 54 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8141571",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-06-23T14:20:48",
"content": "Pretty sure a lot of new phones are getting satellite-based texting now.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8141589",
"author": "Allen",
"ti... | 1,760,371,505.683296 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/22/giving-a-drum-midi-input-with-lots-of-solenoids/ | Giving A Drum MIDI Input With Lots Of Solenoids | Aaron Beckendorf | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"arduino drummer",
"Ardunio",
"drum",
"drum controller",
"solenoids"
] | As far as giving mechanical instruments electronic control goes, drums are probably the best candidate for conversion; learning to play them is challenging and loud for a human, but they’re a straightforward matter for a microcontroller. [Jeremy Cook]’s
latest project
takes this approach by using an Arduino Opta to play a tongue drum.
[Jeremy]’s design far the drum controller was inspired by the ring-shaped arrangement of the Cray 2 supercomputer. A laser-cut MDF frame forms a C-shape around the tongue drum, and holds eight camera mount friction arms. Each friction arm holds a solenoid above a different point on the drum head, making it easy to position them. A few supports were 3D-printed, and some sections of PVC tubing form pivots to close the ring frame. [Jeremy] found that the the bare metal tips of the solenoids made a harsh sound against the drum, so he covered the tips of six solenoids with plastic caps, while the other two uncoated tips provide an auditory contrast.
The Arduino Opta is an open-source programmable logic controller normally intended for industrial automation. Here, its silent solid-state relays drive the solenoids, as [Jeremy]’s done before in an
earlier experiment
. The Opta is programmed to accept MIDI input, which [Jeremy] provided from two of the
MIDI controllers
which we’ve seen him
build previously
. He was able to get it working in time for the 2024 Orlando Maker Faire, which was the major time constraint.
Of course, for a project like this you need a MIDI controller, and we’ve previously seen [Jeremy]
convert a kalimba
into such a controller. We’ve seen this kind of drum machine at least
once before
, but it’s
more common
to see a purely
electronic implementation
. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8141309",
"author": "ian 42",
"timestamp": "2025-06-22T22:19:39",
"content": "all that building, then no proper demo of it working…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8141332",
"author": "Jeremy Cook",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,371,505.732191 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/22/repairing-an-old-tektronix-tds8000-scope/ | Repairing An Old Tektronix TDS8000 Scope | John Elliot V | [
"classic hacks",
"computer hacks",
"hardware",
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"oscilloscope",
"repair",
"Tektronix CSA8000",
"Tektronix TDS8000",
"time-domain reflectometry"
] | Over on his YouTube channel our hacker [CircuitValley]
repairs an old TDS8000 scope
.
The TDS8000 was manufactured by Tektronix circa 2001 and was also marketed as the CSA8000 Communications Signal Analyzer as well as the TDS8000 Digital Sampling Oscilloscope. Tektronix is no longer manufacturing and selling these scopes but the documentation is still available from their website, including the
User Manual
(268 page PDF), the
Service Manual
(198 page PDF), and
some basic specs
(in HTML).
You can do a lot of things with a TDS8000 scope but particularly its use case was
Time-Domain Reflectometry
(TDR). A TDR scope is the time-domain equivalent of a
Vector Network Analyzer
(VNA) which operates in the frequency-domain.
The TDS8000 needs sampling heads attached and it has two large slots on the front for optical sampling heads and four smaller slots for electrical sampling heads. In this video we don’t see any sampling heads actually used, the only thing we see in this video is troubleshooting and repair of the TDS8000 itself. The effective bandwidth of the scope is limited by the capabilities of the sampling heads but according to its datasheet can extend up to 50 GHz, which is seriously large, especially by the standards of 2001!
[CircuitValley] cleans, replaces, upgrades, and fixes a bunch of things during the service of this TDS8000 and documents the process in this YouTube video. In the end he seems to have fixed the problem the scope had in the beginning, where it would hang while loading its main application. We’d love to hear from [CircuitValley] again some time to see a complete system operating with sampling heads attached.
If you’re interested in old scope repair too, then how far back in time did you want to go? Maybe you could start at
Recovering An Agilent 2000a/3000a Oscilloscope With Corrupt Firmware NAND Flash
and then work your way back to
Repairing An Old Heathkit ‘Scope
. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8141709",
"author": "Splud",
"timestamp": "2025-06-23T22:08:44",
"content": "What, No 555?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8141722",
"author": "Chris",
"timestamp": "2025-06-23T22:37:23",
"content": "Yea, all my rpi... | 1,760,371,505.772191 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/22/an-adaptive-soundtrack-for-bike-tricks/ | An Adaptive Soundtrack For Bike Tricks | Aaron Beckendorf | [
"Musical Hacks",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"bicycle",
"bike",
"ESP32-S3",
"hall effect sensor",
"inertial measurement unit",
"music"
] | If you’ve put in all the necessary practice to learn bike tricks, you’d probably like an appropriately dramatic soundtrack to accompany your stunts. A team of students working on a capstone project at the University of Washington took this natural desire a step further with the
Music Bike
, a system that generates adaptive music in response to the bike’s motion.
The Music Bike has a set of sensors controlled by an ESP32-S3 mounted beneath the bike seat. The ESP32 transmits the data it collects over BLE to an Android app, which in turn uses the FMOD Studio adaptive sound engine to generate the music played. An MPU9250 IMU collects most position and motion data, supplemented by a hall effect sensor which tracks wheel speed and direction of rotation.
When the Android app receives sensor data, it performs some processing to detect the bike’s actions, then uses these to control FMOD’s output. The students tried using machine learning to detect bike tricks, but had trouble with latency and accuracy, so they switched to a threshold classifier. They were eventually able to detect jumps, 180-degree spins, forward and reverse motion, and wheelies. FMOD uses this information to modify music pitch, alter instrument layering, and change the track. The students gave an impressive in-class demonstration of the system in the video below (the demonstration begins at 4:30).
Surprisingly enough, this isn’t the first
music-producing bike
we’ve featured here. We’ve also seen a
music-reactive bike lighting system
.
Thanks to [Blake Hannaford] for the tip! | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8141129",
"author": "zamorano",
"timestamp": "2025-06-22T09:02:16",
"content": "This is groundbreaking in many ways, at least for me. Just the idea of having an interactive soundtrack that reacts to what you’re currently doing could be a whole new thing – and, of course, an excuse t... | 1,760,371,505.823653 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/21/tamagotchi-torture-chamber-is-equal-parts-nostalgia-and-sadism/ | Tamagotchi Torture Chamber Is Equal Parts Nostalgia And Sadism | Tyler August | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"accelerometer",
"ece 4760",
"pi pico",
"soft physics",
"tamagotchi",
"TFT LCD"
] | Coming in hot from Cornell University, students [Amanda Huang], [Caroline Hohner], and [Rhea Goswami] bring a project that is guaranteed to tickle the funny bone of anyone in the under-40 set, and sadists of all ages: The
Tamagochi Torture Chamber.
He’s dead, Jim.
In case you somehow missed it, Bandai’s Tamagochi is a genre-defining digital pet that was
the
fad toy at the turn of the millennium, and has had periodic revivals since. Like the original digital pet, there are three pushbuttons to allow you to feed, play with, and clean your digital pet. These affect the basic stats of happiness, health, food and weight in ways that will be familiar to anyone who played with the original Tamagochi. Just as with the original, mistreatment or neglect causes the Tamagochi to “die” and display a tombstone on the TFT display.
Where the “Torture Chamber” part comes in is the presence of an accelerometer and soft physics simulation– the soft physics gets an entire core of the Pi Pico at the heart of this build dedicated to it, while the other core handles all inputs, display and game logic. What this enables is the ability to bounce the digital pet off the walls of its digital home with an adorable squish (and drop in health stat) by tilting the unit. You can check that out in the demo video blow.
Is it overkill for a kids toy to have a full soft body simulation, rather than just a squish-bounce animation? Probably, but for an ECE project, it lets the students show off their chops… and possibly work out some frustrations.
We won’t judge. We will point you to other
Tamagotchi-inspired projects
, though: like this
adorable fitness buddy
, or this
depressingly realistic human version
.
If you’ve got an innovative way to torture video game characters, or a project less likely to get you on Skynet’s hitlist,
don’t forget to send in a tip
! | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8141076",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2025-06-22T05:29:13",
"content": "i usually just break out people playground when im feeling psychopathic.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8141206",
"author": "Cogidubnu... | 1,760,371,506.002699 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/21/replacing-crude-oil-fractional-distillation-with-microporous-polyimine-membranes/ | Replacing Crude Oil Fractional Distillation With Microporous Polyimine Membranes | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"crude oil",
"distillation",
"fractional",
"reverse osmosis"
] | Currently the typical way that crude oil is processed involves a fractional distillation column, in which heated crude oil is separated into the various hydrocarbon compounds using distinct boiling points. This requires the addition of significant thermal energy and is thus fairly energy intensive. A possible alternative
has been proposed
by [Tae Hoon Lee] et al. with
a research article in
Science
. They adapted membranes used with reverse-osmosis filtration to instead filter crude oil into its constituents, which could enable skipping the heating step and thus save a lot of energy.
The main change that had to be made was to replace the typical polyamide films with polyimine ones, as the former have the tendency to swell up – and thus becomes less effective – when exposed to organic solvents, which includes hydrocarbons. During testing, including with a mixture of naphtha, kerosene and diesel, the polyimine membrane was able to separate these by their molecular size.
It should be noted of course that this is still just small scale lab-testing and the real proof will be in whether it can scale up to the flow rates and endurance required from a replacement for a distillation column. Since this research is funded in part by the fossil fuel industry, one can at least expect that some trial installations will be set up before long, with hopefully positive results. | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8141034",
"author": "eriklscott",
"timestamp": "2025-06-22T03:09:01",
"content": "Fractional distillation is rarely used anymore. Almost all fuel “refining” is done with Catalytic Crackers. Not unlike the catalytic converter in a car breaking down unburned gasoline, crackers take cr... | 1,760,371,506.815467 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/21/eu-ecodesign-for-smartphones-including-right-to-repair-now-in-effect/ | EU Ecodesign For Smartphones Including Right To Repair Now In Effect | Maya Posch | [
"News",
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"European Union",
"ewaste",
"right to repair"
] | Starting June 20th
, any cordless phone, smartphone, or feature phone, as well as tablets (7 – 17.4″ screens) have to meet Ecodesign requirements. In addition there is now mandatory registration with the European Product Registry for Energy Labelling (EPREL). The only exception are phones and tablets with a flexible (rollable) main display, and tablets that do not use a mobile OS, i.e. not Android, iPadOS, etc. These requirements include resistance to drops, scratches and water, as well as batteries that last at least 800 cycles.
What is perhaps most exciting are the requirements that operating system updates must be made available for at least five years from when the product is last on the market, along with spare parts being made available within 5-10 working days for seven years after the product stops being sold. The only big niggle here is that this access only applies to ‘professional repairers’, but at least this should provide independent repair shops with full access to parts and any software tools required.
On the ENERGY label that is generated with the registration, customers can see the rating for each category, including energy efficiency, battery endurance, repairability and IP (water/dust ingress) rating, making comparing devices much easier than before. All of this comes before smartphones and many other devices sold in the EU will have to feature easily removable batteries by 2027, something which may make manufacturers unhappy, but should be a boon to us consumers and tinkerers. | 83 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140970",
"author": "Agammamon",
"timestamp": "2025-06-21T23:18:08",
"content": "In other words – there goes innovation because everything will have to be decided by EU bureaucrats while you still won’t get repairability.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,371,506.504331 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/21/converting-an-e-paper-photo-frame-into-weather-map/ | Converting An E-Paper Photo Frame Into Weather Map | John Elliot V | [
"Art",
"hardware",
"Microcontrollers",
"Raspberry Pi",
"Software Hacks",
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"e-ink",
"e-paper",
"Raspberry Pi Pico",
"weather map"
] | Here’s a great hack sent in to us from [Simon]. He uses an e-paper photo frame
as a weather map
!
By now you are probably aware of e-paper technology, which is very low power tech for displaying images. E-paper only uses energy when it changes its display, it doesn’t draw power to maintain a picture it has already rendered. The particular e-paper used in this example is fairly large (as e-paper goes) and supports color (not just black and white) which is why it’s expensive. For about US$100 you can get a 5.7″ 7-color EPD display with 600 x 448 pixels.
Beyond the Inky Frame 5.7″ hardware this particular hack is mostly a software job. The first program, written in python, collects weather data from the
UK Met Office
. Once that image data is available a BASH script is run to process the image files with imagemagick. Finally a Micro Python script runs on the Pico to download the correct file based on the setting of the real-time clock, and update the e-paper display with the weather map.
Thanks to [Simon] for sending this one in via the
tipsline
. If you have your own tips, please do let us know! If you’re interested in e-paper tech we have certainly covered that here in the past, check out
E-Paper Anniversary Counter Is A Charming Gift With Minimal Power Draw
and
A Neat E-Paper Digit Clock (or Four)
.
The video below the break is a notice from the UK Met Office regarding their data services. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140978",
"author": "alialiali",
"timestamp": "2025-06-22T00:00:42",
"content": "This would be perfect to display updated WEFAX images!I’ve never gotten decent automation for it (poorly synced transmissions just delete images), even when I’ve carefully tuned it (usually for the Germ... | 1,760,371,506.059476 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/23/earths-oxygen-levels-and-magnetic-field-strength-show-strong-correlation/ | Earth’s Oxygen Levels And Magnetic Field Strength Show Strong Correlation | Maya Posch | [
"Science",
"Space"
] | [
"earth",
"geomagnetic",
"oxygen"
] | Time series of O2 (blue) and VGADM (red). (Credit:
Weijia Kuang
, Science Advances, 2025)
In an Earth-sized take on the age-old ‘correlation or causality’ question, researchers have
come across a fascinating match
between Earth’s magnetic field and its oxygen levels since the Cambrian explosion, about 500 million years ago. The full results by [Weijia Kuang] et al.
were published
in
Science Advances
, where the authors speculate that this high correlation between the geomagnetic dipole and oxygen levels as recorded in the Earth’s geological mineral record may be indicative of the Earth’s geological processes affecting the evolution of lifeforms in its biosphere.
As with any such correlation, one has to entertain the notion that said correlation might be spurious or indirectly related before assuming a strong causal link. Here it is for example known already that the solar winds affect the Earth’s atmosphere and with it the geomagnetic field, as more intense solar winds increase the loss of oxygen into space, but this does not affect the strength of the geomagnetic field, just its shape. The question is thus whether there is a mechanism that would affect this field strength and consequently cause the loss of oxygen to the solar winds to spike.
Here the authors suggest that the Earth’s core dynamics – critical to the geomagnetic field – may play a major role, with conceivably the core-mantle interactions over the course of millions of years affecting it. As supercontinents like Pangea formed, broke up and partially reformed again, the impact of this material solidifying and melting could have been the underlying cause of these fluctuations in oxygen and magnetic field strength levels.
Although hard to say at this point in time, it may very well be that this correlation is causal, albeit as symptoms of activity of the Earth’s core and liquid mantle. | 19 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8141491",
"author": "Harvie.CZ",
"timestamp": "2025-06-23T11:13:06",
"content": "Both magnetic field and oxygen leves can be affected by changes in earth core (eg. temperature?), maybe that is the original cause…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,371,508.699625 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/23/visual-code-generator-to-end-all-generators/ | Visual Code Generator To End All Generators | Ian Bos | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"barcode hacking",
"barcode scanner",
"organization",
"QR codes",
"web app"
] | QR codes are something that we all take for granted in this day and age. There are even a million apps to create your own QR codes, but what if you want to make a barcode? How about making a specific kind of barcode that follows UPC-E, CODE 39, or even the infamous… CODABAR? Well, it might be more difficult to find a single app that can handle all those different standards. Using “yet-another-web-app”,
Barcode Tool – Generator & Scanner
, you can rid these worries, created by [Ricardo de Azambuja].
When going to [Ricardo]’s simple application, you will find a straightforward interface that allows you to make far more different strips and square patterns than you’ve ever imagined. Of course, starting with the common QR code, you can create custom overlaid codes like many
other QR generators
. More uniquely, there are options for any barcode under the sun to help organize your hacker workspace. If you don’t want to download an app to scan the codes, you can even use the included scanner function.
If you want to use the web app, you can find it
here
! In-depth solutions to rather simple problems are something we strive to provide here at Hackaday, and this project is no exception. However, if you want something more physical, check out this specialized
outdoor city cooking station
. | 20 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8141444",
"author": "Carl Breen",
"timestamp": "2025-06-23T09:43:33",
"content": "In SVG or PNG mode either the icon or the QR is blurred. Naturally in PNG mode neither should be blurred since it is lossless. Other than that, thanks for an amazing tool!",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,371,508.49645 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/22/ai-piano-teacher-to-criticize-your-every-move/ | AI Piano Teacher To Criticize Your Every Move | Ian Bos | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"AI model",
"instructable",
"machine vision",
"piano hack",
"rasberry pi"
] | Learning new instruments is never a simple task on your own; nothing can beat the instant feedback of a teacher. In our new age of AI, why not have an AI companion complain when you’re off note? This is exactly what [Ada López] put together with their
AI-Powered Piano Trainer
.
The basics of the piano rely on rather simple boolean actions, either you press a key or not. Obviously, this sets up the piano for many fun projects, such as
creative doorbells
or helpful AI models. [Ada López] started their AI model with a custom dataset with images of playing specific notes on the piano. These images then get fed into Roboflow and trained using the YOLOv8 model.
Using the piano training has the model run on a laptop and only has a Raspberry Pi for video, and gives instant feedback to the pianist due to the demands of the model. Placing the Pi and an LCD screen for feedback into a simple enclosure allows the easy viewing of how good an AI model thinks you play piano. [Ada López] demos their device by playing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star but there is no reason why other songs couldn’t be added!
While there are simpler piano trainers out there relying on audio cues, this project presents a great opportunity for a fun project for anyone else wanting to take up the baton. If you want to get a little more from having to do less in the physical space, then this
invisible piano
is perfect for you! | 15 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8141397",
"author": "Gible Fog",
"timestamp": "2025-06-23T06:11:27",
"content": "Bet it can’t crush your fingers the way my piano teacher used to though.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8141404",
"author": "Harvie.CZ",
"... | 1,760,371,508.808644 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/22/3d-print-glass-using-accessible-techniques/ | 3D Print Glass, Using Accessible Techniques | Jenny List | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printed glass",
"glass",
"sodium silicate",
"waterglass"
] | When seeing a story from MIT’s Lincoln Labs that promises 3D printing glass, our first reaction was that it might use some rare or novel chemicals, and certainly a super-high-tech printer. Perhaps it was some form of high-temperature laser sintering, unlikely to be within the reach of mere mortals. How wrong we were, because these boffins have developed
a way to 3D print a glass-like material using easy-to-source materials and commonly available equipment
.
The print medium is sodium silicate solution, commonly known as waterglass, mixed with silica and other inorganic nanoparticles. It’s referred to as an ink, and it appears to be printed using a technique very similar to the FDM printers we all know. The real magic comes in the curing process, though, because instead of being fired in a special furnace, these models are heated to 200 Celsius in an oil bath. They can then be solvent cleaned and are ready for use. The result may not be the fine crystal glass you may be expecting, but we can certainly see plenty of uses for it should it be turned into a commercial product. Certainly more convenient than
sintering with a laser cutter
. | 21 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8141362",
"author": "ganzuul",
"timestamp": "2025-06-23T04:28:34",
"content": "Deep eutectics are wild. Would love to see if these can be used as molds for casting metal with household microwave ovens.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_... | 1,760,371,508.981663 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/22/hackaday-links-june-22-2025/ | Hackaday Links: June 22, 2025 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"asciimation",
"automaton",
"chatbot",
"ChatGPT",
"ecu",
"education",
"firmware",
"hackaday links",
"LLM",
"mtrek 1701",
"retrotechtacular",
"reverse engineering",
"robot",
"telnet"
] | Hold onto your hats, everyone — there’s stunning news afoot. It’s hard to believe, but it looks like
over-reliance on chatbots to do your homework can turn your brain into pudding
. At least that seems to be the conclusion of
a preprint paper
out of the MIT Media Lab, which looked at 54 adults between the ages of 18 and 39, who were tasked with writing a series of essays. They divided participants into three groups — one that used ChatGPT to help write the essays, one that was limited to using only Google search, and one that had to do everything the old-fashioned way. They recorded the brain activity of writers using EEG, in order to get an idea of brain engagement with the task. The brain-only group had the greatest engagement, which stayed consistently high throughout the series, while the ChatGPT group had the least. More alarmingly, the engagement for the chatbot group went down even further with each essay written. The ChatGPT group produced essays that were very similar between writers and were judged “soulless” by two English teachers. Go figure.
The most interesting finding, though, was when 18 participants from the chatbot and brain-only groups were asked to rewrite one of their earlier essays, with the added twist that the chatbot group had to do it all by themselves, while the brainiacs got to use ChatGPT. The EEGs showed that the first group struggled with the task, presumably because they failed to form any deep memory of their previous work thanks to over-reliance on ChatGPT. The brain-only folks, however, did well at the task and showed signs of activity across all EEG bands. That fits well with our experience with chatbots, which we use to help retrieve specific facts and figures while writing articles, especially ones we know we’ve seen during our initial scan of the literature but can’t find later.
Does anyone remember
Elektro
? We sure do, although not from personal experience, since the seven-foot-tall automaton built by Westinghouse for the World’s Fair in New York City in 1939 significantly predates our appearance on the planet. But still, the golden-skinned robot that made its living by walking around, smoking, and cracking wise at the audience thanks to a 78-rpm record player in its capacious chest, really made an impression, enough that it toured the country for the better part of 30 years and made the unforgettable
Sex Kittens Go to College
in 1960 before fading into obscurity. At some point, the one-of-a-kind robot was rescued from a scrap heap and restored to its former glory, and now resides in the
North Central Ohio Industrial Museum
in Mansfield, very close to the Westinghouse facility that built it. If you need an excuse to visit North Central Ohio, you could do worse than a visit to see Elektro.
It was with some alarm that we learned this week from Al Williams that
mtrek.com 1701
appeared to be down. For those not in the know,
mtrek
is a Telnet space combat game inspired by the
Star Trek
franchise, which explains why Al was in such a tizzy about not being able to connect; huge
Trek
nerd, our Al. Anyway, it appears Al’s worst fears were unfounded, as we were able to connect to mtrek just fine. But in the process of doing so, we stumbled across
this collection of Telnet games and demos
that’s worth checking out. The mtrek, of course, as well as Telnet versions of chess and backgammon, and an interactive world map that always blows our mind. The site also lists the Telnet GOAT, the
Star Wars Asciimation
; sadly, that one does seem to be down, at least for us. Sure, you can see it in
a web browser
, but it’s not the same as watching it in a terminal over Telnet, is it?
And finally, if you’ve got 90 minutes or so to spare, you could do worse than to spend it with our friend Hash as he
reverse engineers an automotive ECU
. We have to admit that we haven’t indulged yet — it’s on our playlist for this weekend, because we know how to party. But from what Hash tells us, this is the tortured tale of a job that took far, far longer to complete than expected. We have to admit that while we’ll gladly undertake almost any mechanical repair on most vehicles, automotive ECUs and other electronic modules are almost a bridge too far for us, at least in terms of cracking them open to make even simple repairs. Getting access to them for firmware extraction and parameter fiddling sounds like a lot of fun, and we’re looking forward to hearing what Hash has to say about the subject. | 16 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8141319",
"author": "Colin",
"timestamp": "2025-06-22T23:45:11",
"content": "I did a double-take at Elektro who was the thumbnail image for this post in my RSS reader. “Is that Thinko the robot from Beauty and the Robot (better known as Sex Kittens Go to College)?” Indeed it was. I’... | 1,760,371,509.032027 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/22/has-a-nuke-gone-off-indicator/ | Has A Nuke Gone Off? Indicator | Ian Bos | [
"Current Events",
"hardware",
"Weapons Hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"global thermonuclear war",
"micropython",
"neon bulb",
"nuclear blast",
"nuke"
] | Look out of a window, ask yourself the question, “Has a nuke gone off?”. Maybe, maybe not, and all of us here at Hackaday need to know the answer to these important questions! Introducing the
hasanukegoneoff.com Indicator
from [bigcrimping] to answer our cries.
An ESP32 running a MicroPython script handles the critical checks from
hasanukegoneoff.com
for any notification of nuclear mayhem. This will either power the INS-1 neon bulb, indicating “no” or “yes” in the unfortunate case of a blast. Of course, there is also the button required for testing the notification lights; no chance of failure can be left. All of this is fitted onto a custom dual-sided PCB and placed inside a custom 3D-printed enclosure.
Hasanukegoneoff.com’s detection system, covered before
here
, relies on an HSN-1000L Nuclear Event Detector to check for neutrons coming from the blast zone. [bigcrimping] also provides the project plans for your
own blast detector
to answer the critical question of “has a nuke gone off” from anywhere other than the website’s Chippenham, England location.
This entire project is open sourced, so keep sure to check out [bigcrimping]’s GitHub for both portions of this project on the
detector
and
receiver
. While this project provides some needed dark humor, nukes are still scary and especially so when disarming them with
nothing but a hacksaw and testing equipment
.
Thanks to [Daniel Gooch] for the tip. | 23 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "8141299",
"author": "JT",
"timestamp": "2025-06-22T20:31:11",
"content": "Wasn’t this already covered this past week?https://hackaday.com/2025/06/18/bhangmeterv2-answers-the-question-has-a-nuke-gone-off/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comm... | 1,760,371,508.922455 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/22/photogrammetry-takes-to-the-skies/ | Photogrammetry Takes To The Skies | Seth Mabbott | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"drone hacks"
] | [
"3d printed house",
"Photogrammetry"
] | Maybe your goal is to preserve the heyday of rail travel with a precise scale replica of a particular railroad station. Maybe you’re making a hyper-local edition of Monopoly in which the houses and hotels are the actual houses and hotels in your hometown.
Whatever the reason, if you have need for shrinkifying a building or other reasonably large object, there is (at least) one sure-fire way to do it, and [ nastideplasy ] is your guide with this tutorial on
drone photogrammetry
.
The process is essentially the same as any other photogrammetry you may have seen before—take lots of overlapping photos of an object from many different angles around it, stitch those photos together, make a 3D mesh by triangulating corresponding points from multiple photos—but this time the photos are captured by drone, allowing for much larger subjects, so long as you can safely and legally fly a drone around it.
The challenge, of course, is capturing a sufficient number of overlapping photos such that your reconstruction software can process them into a clean 3D mesh. Where
purpose-built 3D scanners
,
automatic turntables
, or a steady hand and lots of patience worked well at a smaller scale, skill with a pair of control sticks is the key to getting a good scan of a house.
[ nastideplasy ] also points out the importance of lighting. Direct sunlight and deep shadows can cause issues when processing the images, and doing this at night is almost certainly out of the question. Overcast days are your best bet for a clean scan.
The tutorial calls for software from Autodesk to stitch photos and clean up 3D meshes. We’ve also seen some excellent results with open source options like
Meshroom
as well. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8141253",
"author": "Leszek Pawlowicz",
"timestamp": "2025-06-22T18:11:47",
"content": "AutoDesk Recap only offers full features for a month-long trial, then defaults to a limited free version; full version is super expensive. Better to use Reality Scan (https://www.realityscan.com/... | 1,760,371,508.545111 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/21/retrotechtacular-1970s-radio/ | Retrotechtacular: 1970s Radio | Al Williams | [
"Retrotechtacular"
] | [
"radio",
"retrotechtacular",
"training film"
] | Before YouTube, you had to watch your educational videos on film. In the 1970s, if you studied radio, you might have seen the video from Universal Education and Visual Arts, titled
Understanding
Electronics Basic Radio Circuitry
. The video’s been restored, and it appears on the [CHAP] YouTube channel.
The video starts with a good history lesson that even covers Fessenden, which you rarely hear about. The video is full of old components that you may or may not remember, depending on your age. There’s a classic crystal radio at the start and it quickly moves to active receivers. There’s probably nothing in here you don’t already know. On the other hand, radios work about the same today as they did in the 1970s, unless you count software-defined varieties.
We expect this was produced for the “trade school” market or, maybe, a super advanced high school shop class. There were more in the series, apparently, including ones on vacuum tubes, the transistor, and the principles of television.
We were sad that the credits don’t mention the narrator. He sounded familiar. Maybe Robert Vaughn? Maybe not. A little research indicates the company was a division of Universal Studios, although the Library of Congress says it was actually produced by Moreland-Latchford Productions in Toronto.
Maybe these videos were the next step in becoming a
child radio engineer
. If you like old radio videos,
this one is even older
. | 10 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140897",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2025-06-21T17:34:40",
"content": "Sounds like Alex Trebek, who was Canadian, so…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8140937",
"author": "fabo",
"timestamp": "2025-06-21T20:31:08",
... | 1,760,371,508.855809 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/21/measurement-is-science/ | Measurement Is Science | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants",
"Science"
] | [
"magnets",
"measurement",
"quantification",
"science"
] | I was watching Ben Krasnow
making iron nitride permanent magnets
and was struck by the fact that about half of the video was about making a magnetometer – a device for measuring and characterizing the magnet that he’d just made. This is really the difference between doing science and just messing around: if you want to test or improve on a procedure, you have to be able to measure how well it works.
When he puts his home-made magnet into the device, Ben finds out that he’s made a basically mediocre magnet, compared with samples out of his amply stocked magnet drawer. But that’s a great first data point, and more importantly, the magnetometer build gives him a way of gauging future improvements.
Of course there’s a time and a place for “good enough is good enough”, and you can easily spend more time building the measurement apparatus for a particular project than simply running the experiment, but that’s not science. Have you ever gone down the measurement rabbit hole, spending more time validating or characterizing the effect than you do on producing it in the first place?
This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on
the web version of the newsletter
.
Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning?
You should sign up
! | 22 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140870",
"author": "baltar",
"timestamp": "2025-06-21T15:10:23",
"content": "And…?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8140908",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-21T18:09:50",
"content": "They reall... | 1,760,371,508.758937 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/21/tiny-tellurium-orbits-atop-a-pencil/ | Tiny Tellurium Orbits Atop A Pencil | Tyler August | [
"classic hacks",
"Space"
] | [
"brass",
"clockwork",
"CNC machined",
"tellurium"
] | We like scale models here, but how small can you shrink the very large? If you’re [Frans], it’s pretty small indeed: his
Micro Tellurium fits the orbit of the Earth on top of an ordinary pencil
. While you’ll often see models of Earth, Moon and Sun’s orbital relationship called “Orrery”, that’s word should technically be reserved for models of the solar system, inclusive of at least the classical planets, like [Frans]’s Gentleman’s Orrery that
recently graced these pages.
When it’s just the Earth, Moon and Sun, it’s a Tellurium.
The whole thing is made out of brass, save for the ball-bearings for the Earth and Moon. Construction was done by a combination of manual milling and CNC machining, as you can see in the video below. It is a very elegant device, and almost functional: the Earth-Moon system rotates, simulating the orbit of the moon when you turn the ring to make the Earth orbit the sun. This is accomplished by carefully-constructed rods and a rubber O-ring.
Unfortunately, it seems [Franz] had to switch to a thicker axle than originally planned, so the tiny moon does not orbit Earth at the correct speed compared to the solar orbit: it’s about half what it ought to be. That’s unfortunate, but perhaps that’s the cost one pays when chasing smallness. It might be possible to fix in a future iteration, but right now [Franz] is happy with how the project turned out, and we can’t blame him; it’s a beautiful piece of machining.
It should be noted that there is likely no tellurium in this tellurium — the metal and the model share the same root, but are otherwise unrelated. We have
featured hacks with that element, though.
Thanks to [Franz] for submitting this hack. Don’t forget:
the tips line is always open
, and we’re more than happy to hear you toot your own horn, or sing the praises of someone else’s work. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140867",
"author": "thestoneburner",
"timestamp": "2025-06-21T15:08:26",
"content": "I think the name is wrong, at least according to the wikipedia, tellurium is a element, the astronomical device is called a tellurion:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tellurion",
"parent_id": null... | 1,760,371,508.375496 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/21/if-your-kernel-development-is-a-little-rusty/ | If Your Kernel Development Is A Little Rusty | Al Williams | [
"Linux Hacks",
"Software Development"
] | [
"kernel",
"linux",
"rust"
] | To paraphrase an old joke: How do you know if someone is a Rust developer? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you. There is a move to put Rust everywhere, even in the Linux kernel. Not going fast enough for you? Then check out
Asterinas
— an effort to create a Linux-compatible kernel totally in Rust.
The goal is to improve memory safety and, to that end, the project describes what they call a “framekernel.” Historically kernels have been either monolithic, all in one piece, or employ a microkernel architecture where only bits and pieces load.
A framekernel is similar to a microkernel, but some services are not allowed to use “unsafe” Rust. This minimizes the amount of code that — in theory — could crash memory safety. If you want to know more, there is
impressive documentation
. You can find the code on
GitHub
.
Will it work? It is certainly possible. Is it worth it? Time will tell. Our experience is that no matter how many safeguards you put on code, there’s no cure-all that prevents bad programming. Of course, to take the contrary argument, seat belts don’t stop all traffic fatalities, but you could just choose not to have accidents. So we do have seat belts. If Rust can prevent some mistakes or malicious intent, maybe it’s worth it even if it isn’t perfect.
Want to understand Rust?
Got ten minutes? | 40 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140806",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-06-21T09:20:28",
"content": "This is what Rust programmers should have done from the beginning. Rewrite it in Rust!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8140858",
"author"... | 1,760,371,509.1097 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/20/the-most-satisfying-way-to-commit/ | The Most Satisfying Way To Commit | Tyler August | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"classic hacks"
] | [
"front panel",
"Git",
"macro pad",
"silicone"
] | Have you ever finished up a bit of code and thought that typing “git push” in a terminal is just not a satisfying finish? So did [penumbriel], so he built
a big red button he could smash instead
.
This is a very simple hack: an Arduino sits inside a 3D-printed case that holds a big, red button. The case itself is very sturdily made to withstand a good satisfying smack: it has thick walls, brass insets, and rubber feet to protect the de The code for the Arduino is very, very simple: it spoofs a USB HID using the standard keyboard library, and automatically types out “git push” whenever the button is pressed. Or smashed, because you know you’re going to want to slam that thing. So far, so good– very innovative for 2006, right?
The detail that made this project stand out in 2025 was the technique [penumbriel] used for lettering– we’re always looking
With a simple soap-and-water mask, the cured silicone peels right off, leaving a clean label.
for
new ways to make a good front panel
. In this case, the letters were printed as a valley and filled with silicone adhesive. To protect the top surface of the print, soapy water was used as a mask. The silicone would not adhere to the wet plastic, so all [penumbriel] had to do was peel it off after it had cured, leaving solid white inside. It’s a neat trick, and a great way to use up an old tube of silicone before it goes hard. You could also use it
for injection molding
, but this is a great use for the dregs.
This might go well next to the
programmer’s macro pad
we featured a while back, but it really needs to stay as a big red button for maximum satisfaction. | 8 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140783",
"author": "Randlin",
"timestamp": "2025-06-21T05:40:33",
"content": "I love this",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8140785",
"author": "MinorHavoc",
"timestamp": "2025-06-21T05:56:08",
"content": "Nice, but t... | 1,760,371,509.198994 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/20/eliza-reanimated/ | ELIZA Reanimated | Al Williams | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"chatbot",
"eliza"
] | The last time we checked in with the ELIZA archeology project, they had unearthed the earliest known copy of the code for the infamous computer psychiatrist written in MAD-SLIP. After a lot of work, that version is now
running again
, and there were a number of interesting surprises.
While chatbots are all the modern rage, [Joseph Weizenbaum] created what could be the first one, ELIZA, in the mid-1960s. Of course, it wasn’t as capable as what we have today, but it is a good example of how simple it is to ape human behavior.
The original host was an IBM 7094, and MAD-SLIP fell out of favor. Most versions known previously were in Lisp or even Basic. But once the original code was found, it wasn’t enough to simply understand it. They wanted to run it.
Fortunately, there is an emulator for the IBM 7094. MAD-SLIP is around, too, but for whatever reason, didn’t support all the functions that [Weizenbaum] had used. The 2,600 lines of code are mostly undocumented, and the only copy was on fanfold printer paper, so the first step was getting the text in digital form.
Once it was manually transcribed, they found some functions were missing in their MAD-SLIP version. Rewriting the functions and correcting a typo made everything work.
The original version had a learning mode that did not carry over to the later clones. There’s an example of how to teach new rules in the paper. You can also see a video (below) of the original code duplicating (nearly) the original published conversations from the 1966 paper.
We have been
following the team
for some time and they’ve made their work available if
you want to try it
. We have
thought a lot about Eliza
since the chatbots have started taking over. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140796",
"author": "Jeff Shrager",
"timestamp": "2025-06-21T07:40:16",
"content": "Thanks for highlighting this. FYI, we’re next working on reanimating Simon, Newell, and Shaw’s Logic Theory Machine and other of the earliest true AIs, written at RAND and CMU in IPL-V in the 1950s. ... | 1,760,371,509.152706 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/20/pva-filament-not-always-what-it-seems/ | PVA Filament: Not Always What It Seems | Maya Posch | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"PVA",
"PVA glue"
] | PVA filament with a core. (Credit: Lost In Tech)
PVA filament is an interesting filament type, for the reason that while it can be printed with any FDM printer, it supposedly readily dissolves in water, which is also the reason why PVA glue sticks are so popular when doing crafts and arts with young children. This property would make PVA filament ideal for printing supports if your printer can handle two different materials at the same time. So surely you can just pick any old PVA filament spool and get to printing, right? As [Lost in Tech] found out,
this is not quite the case
.
As an aside, watching PVA supports dissolve in water set to classical music (Bach’s
Air
from Orchestral Suite No. 3) is quite a pleasant vibe. After thus watching the various PVA prints dissolve for a while, we are left to analyze the results. The first interesting finding was that not every PVA filament dissolved the same way, or even fully.
The first gotcha is that PVA can stand for
polyvinyl acetate
(the glue stick) or
polyvinyl alcohol
(a thickener and stabilizer) , with the ‘PVA’ filament datasheets for each respective filament showing various combinations of both types of PVA. This results in wildly different properties per filament, both in terms of Shore hardness, their printability, as well as their ability to dissolve in water. Some of the filament types (Yousu, Reprapper) also have an outer layer and inner core for some reason.
Ultimately the message appears to be that ‘PVA’ filament requires a fair bit of research to have any chance of having a relatively trouble-free printing experience. | 6 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140769",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-06-21T02:00:18",
"content": "This is a neat video, but man is it confusing what filament you’re talking about at different times. Really could have benefited from a summery of what brand had what pros/cons/properties/whatever. Which one to... | 1,760,371,509.60277 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/20/building-diode-and-diode-transistor-logic-gates/ | Building Diode And Diode-Transistor Logic Gates | Maya Posch | [
"how-to"
] | [
"diode-transistor logic",
"DTL",
"logic gates"
] | AND gate implemented as diode-resistor logic. (Credit: Anthony Francis-Jones)
The fun part about logic gates is that there are so many ways to make them, with each approach having its own advantages and disadvantages. Although these days transistor-transistor logic (TTL) is the most common, diode-transistor logic (DTL) once was a regular sight, as well as diode-resistor logic (DRL). These logic gates are the topic of a
recent video by [Anthony Francis-Jones]
, covering a range of logic gates implemented using mostly diodes and resistors.
Of note is that there’s another class of logic gates: this uses resistors and transistors (
RTL
) and preceded DTL. While
DRL
can be used to implement AND and OR logic gates, some types of logic gates (e.g. NOT) require an active (transistor) element, which is where
DTL
comes into play.
In addition to the construction of a rather nifty demonstration system and explanation of individual logic gates, [Anthony] also shows off a range of DTL cards used in the Bendix G-15 and various DEC systems. Over time TTL would come to dominate as this didn’t have the diode voltage drop and other issues that prevented significant scaling. Although the rise of VLSI has rendered DRL and DTL firmly obsolete, they still make for a fascinating teaching moment and remind us of the effort over the decades to make the computing device on which you’re reading this possible. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140737",
"author": "willaim",
"timestamp": "2025-06-20T21:50:17",
"content": "A rather demonstration system?Rather advanced, enemic, ingenious?Also what is VLSIYou did well with defining the others..",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment... | 1,760,371,509.555163 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/20/all-you-need-to-know-about-photographic-lenses/ | All You Need To Know About Photographic Lenses | Jenny List | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"camera design",
"lens",
"lens design"
] | If you have ever played around with lenses, you’ll know that a convex lens can focus an image onto a target. It can be as simple as focusing the sun with a magnifying glass to burn a hole in a piece of paper, but to achieve the highest quality images in a camera there is a huge amount of optical engineering and physics at play to counteract the imperfections of those simple lenses.
Many of us in the hardware world aren’t optical specialists but our work frequently involves camera modules, so
[Matt Williams]’ piece for
PetaPixel
laying out a primer on lens design should be essential reading
well beyond its target audience of photographers.
In it we learn how a photographic lens is assembled from a series of individual lenses referred to as elements, combined together in groups to lend the required properties to the final assembly. We are introduced to the characteristics of different types of glass, and to the use of lens coatings to control reflections. Then we see examples of real lens systems, from some famous designs with their roots in the 19th century, to the lenses of today.
Sometimes a piece written for an entirely different audience can bring really useful insights into our field, and this is one of those times. We learned something, and we think you will too.
Header image: 4300streetcar,
CC BY 4.0
. | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140722",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-20T19:25:35",
"content": "You guys must be reading my mind:“The ideas behind analog gravity systems, especially those that manipulate wave propagation through media, could indeed inspire new types of lenses or wave-guiding materi... | 1,760,371,509.461181 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/20/hackaday-podcast-episode-325-the-laugh-track-machine-diy-usb-c-power-cables-and-plastic-punches/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 325: The Laugh Track Machine, DIY USB-C Power Cables, And Plastic Punches | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | 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 below and catch up. As always, drop a comment and tell us what you think about the week in Hackaday.
Download in
DRM-free MP3
unencrypted and oxygen-free.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 325 Show Notes:
News:
2025 Pet Hacks Contest
NOAA Polar Satellites
What’s that Sound?
Know what the sound was? [Elliot] got close!
Let’s see if you can do better
.
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Iron Nitride Permanent Magnets Made With DIY Ball Mill
This Thermochromic Clock Is A Ray Of Sunshine
What Happened To Duracell PowerCheck?
The Most Trustworthy USB-C Cable Is DIY
All About USB-C: Cable Types
A Concentric Clock With Multiple Modes
Compound Press Bends, Punches And Cuts Using 3D Printed Plastic
History Of Forgotten Moon Bases
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Expanding Racks In The Spirit Of The Hoberman Sphere
The Switch 2 Pro Controller: Prepare For Glue And Fragile Parts
Watkin’s Tower: London’s Failed Eiffel Tower
BhangmeterV2 Answers The Question “Has A Nuke Gone Off?”
Al’s Picks:
Building A Cyberpunk Modular Keyboard
Split Keyboard Uses No PCB
LED Probe: A Smart, Simple Solution For Testing LEDs
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Just For Laughs: Charlie Douglass And The Laugh Track
Crowdsourcing SIGINT: Ham Radio at War
High-Stakes Fox Hunting: The FCC’s Radio Intelligence Division In World War II | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140728",
"author": "A European not grown up on laughtracks",
"timestamp": "2025-06-20T20:38:49",
"content": "Haven’t listened to this yet, I will probably do that during the coming work week, but I read the article about the canned laughter, and got a worrying thought:How much has ... | 1,760,371,509.504067 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/20/pi-pico-powers-parts-bin-audio-interface/ | Pi Pico Powers Parts-Bin Audio Interface | Tyler August | [
"digital audio hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"adc",
"Paspberry Pi Pico",
"usb audio"
] | USB audio is great, but what if you needed to use it and had no budget? Well, depending on the contents of your parts bin, you might be able to use
[Veyniac]’s Pico-Audio-Interface
as a free (and libre! It’s GPL3.0) sound capture device.
In the
project’s Reddit thread,
[Veyniac] describes needing audio input for his homemade synth, but having no budget. Necessity being the mother of invention, rather than beg borrow or steal a device with a working sound card, he hacked together this lovely device. It shows up as a USB Audio Class 2.0 device so should work with just about anything, and offers 12-bit resolution and 4x oversampling to try and deal with USB noise with its 2-channel, 44.1 kHz sample rate.
Aside from the Pico, all you need is an LM324 op-amp IC and a handful of resistors and capacitors — [Veyniac] estimates about $10 to purchase the whole BOM. He claims that the captured audio sounds okay in his use, but can’t guarantee it will be for anyone else, noise being the fickle beast that it is. We figure that sounding “Okay” has got to be pretty good, given that you usually get what you pay for — and again, [Veyniac] did build this in a cave with a box of scraps. Well, except for the cave part. Probably.
While the goal here was not to rival a commercial
USB sound card,
we have
seen projects to do tha
t.
We’re quite grateful to [Omadeira] for the tip, because this really is a hack. If you, too, want a share of our undying gratitude (which is still worth its weight in gold, despite fluctuations in the spot price of precious metals),
send in a tip of your own. | 10 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140659",
"author": "Clara Hobbs",
"timestamp": "2025-06-20T16:03:28",
"content": "I’m not sure what kind of “USB noise” the original poster is talking about. Power noise, perhaps? If that’s it, that would likely be better dealt with by power filtering.Amusing too that the OP built ... | 1,760,371,509.69986 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/20/this-week-in-security-that-time-i-caused-a-9-5-cve-ios-spyware-and-the-day-the-internet-went-down/ | This Week In Security: That Time I Caused A 9.5 CVE, IOS Spyware, And The Day The Internet Went Down | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"Meshtastic",
"spyware",
"This Week in Security"
] | Meshtastic just released
an eye-watering 9.5 CVSS CVE
, warning about public/private keys being re-used among devices. And I’m the one that wrote the code. Not to mention, I triaged and fixed it. And I’m part of Meshtastic Solutions, the company associated with the project. This is is the story of how we got here, and a bit of perspective.
First things first, what kind of keys are we talking about, and what does Meshtastic use them for? These are
X25519
keys, used specifically for encrypting and authenticating Direct Messages (DMs), as well as optionally for authorizing remote administration actions. It is, by the way, this remote administration scenario using a compromised key, that leads to such a high CVSS rating. Before version 2.5 of Meshtastic, the only cryptography in place was simple AES-CTR encryption using shared symmetric keys, still in use for multi-user channels. The problem was that DMs were also encrypted with this channel key, and just sent with the “to” field populated. Anyone with the channel key could read the DM.
I re-worked an old pull request that generated X25519 keys on boot, using the
rweather/crypto
library. This sentence highlights two separate problems, that both can lead to unintentional key re-use. First, the keys are generated at first boot. I was made painfully aware that this was a weakness, when a user sent an email to the project warning us that he had purchased two devices, and they had matching keys out of the box. When the vendor had manufactured this device, they flashed Meshtastic on one device, let it boot up once, and then use a debugger to copy off a “golden image” of the flash. Then every other device in that particular manufacturing run was flashed with this golden image — containing same private key.
sigh
There’s a second possible cause for duplicated keys, discovered while triaging the golden image issue. On the Arduino platform, it’s reasonably common to use the
random()
function to generate a pseudo-random value, and the Meshtastic firmware is careful to manage the random seed and the
random()
function so it produces properly unpredictable values. The
crypto
library is solid code, but it doesn’t call
random()
. On ESP32 targets, it does call the
esp_random()
function, but on a target like the NRF52, there isn’t a call to any hardware randomness sources. This puts such a device in the precarious position of relying on a call to
micros()
for its randomness source. While non-ideal, this is made disastrous by the fact that the randomness pool is being called automatically on first boot, leading to significantly lower entropy in the generated keys.
Release 2.6.11 of the Meshtastic firmware fixes both of these issues. First, by delaying key generation until the user selects the LoRa region. This makes it much harder for vendors to accidentally ship devices with duplicated keys. It gives users an easy way to check, just make sure the private key is blank when you receive the device. And since the device is waiting for the user to set the region, the
micros()
clock is a much better source of randomness. And second, by mixing in the results of
random()
and the burnt-in hardware ID, we ensure that the crypto library’s randomness pool is seeded with some unique, unpredictable values.
The reality is that IoT devices without dedicated cryptography chips will always struggle to produce high quality randomness. If you really need secure Meshtastic keys, you should generate them on a platform with better randomness guarantees. The openssl binary on a modern Linux or Mac machine would be a decent choice, and the Meshtastic private key can be generated using
openssl genpkey -algorithm x25519 -outform DER | tail -c32 | base64
.
What’s Up with SVGs?
You may have tried to share a Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) on a platform like Discord, and been surprised to see an obtuse text document rather than your snazzy logo. Browsers can display SVGs, so why do many web platforms refuse to render them? I’ve quipped that it’s because SVGs are Turing complete, which is almost literally true. But in reality it’s because
SVGs can include inline HTML and JavaScript
. IBM’s X-Force has
the inside scoop on the use of SVG files in fishing campaigns
. The key here is that JavaScript and data inside an SVG can often go undetected by security solutions.
The attack chain that X-Force highlights is convoluted, with the SVG containing a link offering a PDF download. Clicking this actually downloads a ZIP containing a JS file, which when run, downloads and attempts to execute a JAR file. This may seem ridiculous, but it’s all intended to defeat a somewhat sophisticated corporate security system, so an inattentive user will click through all the files in order to get the day’s work done. And apparently this tactic works.
*OS Spyware
Apple published
updates to its entire line
back in February, fixing a pair of vulnerabilities that were being used in sophisticated targeted attacks.
CVE-2025-43200
was “a logic issue” that could be exploited by malicious images or videos sent in iCloud links.
CVE-2025-24200
was a flaw in USB Restricted Mode, that allowed that mode to be disabled with physical access to a device.
What’s newsworthy about these vulnerabilities is that Citizen Lab has published a report that CVE-2025-43200 was used in a 0-day exploitation of journalists by the Paragon Graphite spyware. It is slightly odd that Apple credits the other fixed vulnerability, CVE-2025-24200, to Bill Marczak, a Citizen Lab researcher and co-author of this report. Perhaps there is another shoe yet to drop.
Regardless, iOS infections have been found on the phones of two separate European Journalists, with a third confirmed targeted. It’s unclear what customer contracted Paragon to spy on these journalists, and what the impetus was for doing so. Companies like Paragon, NSO Group, and others operate within a legal grey area, taking actions that would normally be criminal, but under the authority of governments.
A for Anonymous, B for Backdoor
WatchTowr has a less-snarky-than-usual treatment of
a chain of problems in the Sitecore Experience
that take an unauthenticated attacker all the way to Remote Code Execution (RCE). The initial issue here is the pre-configured user accounts, like
default\Anonymous
, used to represent unauthenticated users, and
sitecore\ServicesAPI
, used for internal actions. Those special accounts do have password hashes. Surely there isn’t some insanely weak password set for one of those users, right? Right? The password for
ServicesAPI
is
b
.
ServicesAPI
is interesting, but trying the easy approach of just logging in with that user on the web interface fails with a unique error message, that this user does not have access to the system. Someone knew this could be a problem, and added logic to prevent this user from being used for general system access, by checking which database the current handler is attached to. Is there an endpoint that connects to a different database? Naturally. Here it’s the administrative web login, that has no database attached. The
ServicesAPI
user can log in here! Good news is that it can’t do anything, as this user isn’t an admin. But the login does work, and does result in a valid session cookie, which does allow for other actions.
There are several approaches the WatchTowr researchers tried, in order to get RCE from the user account. They narrowed in on a file upload action that was available to them, noting that they could upload a zip file, and it would be automatically extracted. There were no checks for path traversal, so it seems like an easy win. Except Sitecore doesn’t necessarily have a standard install location, so this approach has to guess at the right path traversal steps to use. The key is that there is just a little bit of filename mangling that can be induced, where a backslash gets replaced with an underscore. This allows a
/\/
in the path traversal path to become
/_/
, a special sequence that represents the webroot directory. And we have RCE. These vulnerabilities have been patched, but there were more discovered in this research, that are still to be revealed.
The Day the Internet Went Down
OK, that may be overselling it just a little bit. But
Google Cloud had an eight hour event on the 12th
, and the repercussions were wide, including
taking down parts of Cloudflare for part of that time on the same day
.
Google’s downtime was caused by bad code that was pushed to production with insufficient testing, and that lacked error handling. It was intended to be a quota policy check. A separate policy change was rolled out globally, that had unintentional blank fields. These blank fields hit the new code, and triggered null pointer de-references all around the globe all at once. An emergency fix was deployed within an hour, but the problem was large enough to have quite a long tail.
Cloudflare’s issue was connected to their Workers KV service, a Key-Value store that is used in many of Cloudflare’s other products. Workers KV is intended to be “coreless”, meaning a cascading failure should be impossible. The reality is that Workers KV still uses a third-party service as the bootstrap for that live data, and Google Cloud is part of that core. When Google’s cloud starting having problems, so did Cloudflare, and much of the rest of the Internet.
I can’t help but worry just a bit about the possible scenario, where Google relies on an outside service, that itself relies on Cloudflare. In the realm of the power grid, we sometimes hear about the cold start scenario, where everything is powered down. It seems like there is a real danger of a cold start scenario for the Internet, where multiple giant interdependent cloud vendors are all down at the same time.
Bits and Bytes
Fault injection is still an interesting research topic, particularly for embedded targets. [Maurizio Agazzini] from HN Security is doing work on
voltage injection against an ESP32 V3 target
, with the aim of coercing the processor to jump over an instruction and interpret a CRC32 code as an instruction pointer. It’s not easy, but he managed 1.5% success rate at bypassing secure boot with the voltage injection approach.
Intentional jitter is used in many exploitation tools, as a way to disguise what might otherwise be tell-tale traffic patterns. But
Varonis Threat Labs has produced Jitter-Trap
, a tool that looks for the Jitter, and attempts to identify the exploitation framework in use from the timing information.
We’ve talked a few times about vibe researching, but
[Craig Young] is only tipping his toes in here
. He used an LLM to find a published vulnerability, and then analyzed it himself. Turns out that the GIMP despeckle plugin doesn’t do bounds checking for very large images. Back again to an LLM, to get a Python script to generate such a file. It does indeed crash GIMP when trying to despeckle, confirming the vulnerability report, and demonstrating that there really are good ways to use LLMs while doing security research. | 18 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140631",
"author": "Otis Rowell",
"timestamp": "2025-06-20T14:20:22",
"content": "Just wanted to leave a comment saying how much I enjoy reading this series weekly. While I’m not a hardcore security researcher, it’s really nice knowing some of the larger attacks floating around, es... | 1,760,371,510.020321 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/20/spiral-connector-makes-fastener-free-assemblies/ | Spiral Connector Makes Fastener-Free Assemblies | Donald Papp | [
"Art",
"classic hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"golden ratio",
"golden spiral",
"sculpture",
"spiral"
] | [Anton Gaia]’s SPIRAL sculpture resembles an organizer or modern shelving unit, but what’s really interesting is how it goes together. It’s made entirely from assembling copies of a single component (two, if you count the short ‘end pieces’ as separate) without a fastener in sight.
[Anton] made the 3D model available
, so check it out for yourself!
The self-similar design of the joint, based on the golden spiral, makes a self-supporting joint that requires neither glue nor fasteners.
The ends of each part form a tight, spiral-shaped joint when assembled with its neighbors. Parts connect solely to themselves without any need of fasteners or adhesives.
The end result is secure, scalable, and with a harmonious structure that is very pleasing to look at. Small wonder [Anton] used it as the basis for artistic work. You can
see more pictures here
.
The design of the joint is based on the
golden spiral
(which it turns out is also a pretty useful
chicken coop architecture
.)
The parts lend themselves quite well to 3D printing, and we’d like to take a moment to appreciate that [Anton] shared the
.step
file instead of just an STL. STEP (or STP) files can be imported meaningfully into CAD programs, making it much easier to incorporate the design into one’s own work. STEP is also
supported natively in many 3D printer slicers
, so there’s no need to convert formats just to print them.
A brief video describing SPIRAL is embedded just below, with a closer look at how the pieces fit together. | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140612",
"author": "Andy",
"timestamp": "2025-06-20T13:10:05",
"content": "I wonder if you could use this for creating mazes for robots / small critters to explore?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8140625",
"author": "Brain... | 1,760,371,509.652592 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/20/bento-is-an-all-in-one-computer-designed-to-be-useful/ | Bento Is An All-In-One Computer Designed To Be Useful | Jenny List | [
"computer hacks",
"Cyberdecks"
] | [
"all-in-one",
"cyberdeck",
"steam deck"
] | All-in-one computers in which the mainboard lurked beneath a keyboard were once the default in home computing, but more recently they have been relegated to interesting niche devices such as the Raspberry Pi 400 and 500.
The Bento is another take on the idea
, coming at it not with the aim of replacing a desktop machine, instead as a computer for use with wearable display glasses. The thinking goes that when your display is head mounted, why carry around a screen with your laptop.
On top it’s a keyboard, but underneath it’s a compartmentalized space similar to the Japanese lunchboxes which lend the project its name. The computing power comes courtesy of a Steam Deck so it has a USB-C-for-everything approach to plugging in a desktop, though there’s a stated goal to produce versions for other boards such as the Raspberry Pi. There’s even an empty compartment for storage of peripherals.
We like this computer, both for being a cyberdeck and for being without a screen so not quite like the other cyberdecks. It’s polished enough that we could almost imagine it as a commercial product. It’s certainly
not the first Steam Deck based cyberdeck
we’ve seen. | 23 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140555",
"author": "Mrroland",
"timestamp": "2025-06-20T08:10:52",
"content": "Same article?https://hackaday.com/2025/06/15/bento-vr-xr-from-a-keyboard/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8140587",
"author": "iAmNotADog.... | 1,760,371,509.847064 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/19/mac-se-restomod-has-a-floppy-surprise/ | Mac SE Restomod Has A Floppy Surprise | Tyler August | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"Macintosh SE",
"restomod",
"retrocomputer"
] | If he’s anything like us [Duncan Hall] was probably equal parts excited and disgusted when he found a 1987 Macintosh SE case at a garage sale. Excited, because not every day do vintage computers show up at these things. Disgusted, because it had been gutted and coated in house paint; the previous owner apparently wanted to make an aquarium. [Duncan] wanted to make a computer, and after 15 years, he finally did,
calling it the PhoeNIX SE.
Note the small hole in the top floppy bay for the laptop webcam.
The NIX part of the name might make you suspect he’s running Linux on it, which yes, he absolutely is. The guts of this restomod were donated from a Dell XPS laptop, whose Core i7 CPU and motherboard power the project. A 9.7″ LCD serves in place of the original monochrome CRT, held in place by 3D printed hardware. While a purist might complain, it’s not like anyone makes replacement CRTs anymore, and once that’s gone? You might as well go full modern. (The
analog board, on the other hand
, is available.
So is the logic board,
if you were wondering. Lacking a CRT,
some might have chosen e-ink instead,
but the LCD looks good here.)
All ports are on the rear, as Steve would have wanted. That original sticker survived under latex paint is a spot of luck.
Having gone full modern, well, there’s no need for the M5011’s dual floppies, so one of them holds a webcam and monitor for a modern experience. A zoom call from that case would be a bit surreal, but we really appreciate the use of the empty floppy bay to keep the clean lines of the Macintosh SE unaltered. The other floppy bay (this is a dual-floppy unit) appears empty; we might have put an SD-card reader or something in there, but we absolutely agree with [Duncan]’s choice to 3D Print a new back panel and keep all I/O on the rear of the case, as God and Steve Jobs intended.
However you feel about restomodding retrocomputers (and we’re aware it’s a controversial practice), I think we can all agree this is a much better fate for the old Mac than
becoming an aquarium
. Thanks to [Loddington] for the tip.
If you’re on the side of the aisle that prefers to see restorations than restomods,
the tips line
is waiting for some
quality restorations
. | 20 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140537",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-20T05:19:58",
"content": "Floppy surprise? C’mon you can’t set people up like that",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8140541",
"author": "flipperpi",
"timestamp": "2025-06-20... | 1,760,371,509.959817 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/19/ben-eater-makes-computer-noises/ | Ben Eater Makes Computer Noises | John Elliot V | [
"digital audio hacks",
"hardware",
"Microcontrollers",
"Retrocomputing",
"Software Development",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"6502 microprocessor",
"Ben Eater",
"computer noises",
"W65C22 Versatile Interface Adapter"
] | When [Ben Eater] talks, hackers everywhere listen. In his latest video [Ben] shows us
how to make computer noises using square waves and a 6502 microprocessor
.
[Ben] uses the timer in the
W65C22 Versatile Interface Adapter
to generate the square waves which generate a tone. He then adds support for a new
BEEP
command into his MS BASIC interpreter. We covered
[Ben Eater]’s MS BASIC
here at Hackaday back in April, so definitely check that out if you missed it.
After checking the frequency of oscillation using his Keysight oscilloscope he then wires in an 8Ω 2W speaker via a LM386 audio amplifier. We can’t use the W65C22 output pin directly because that can only output a few milliwatts of power. [Ben] implements the typical circuit application from the LM386 datasheet to drive the speaker. To complete his video [Ben] writes a program for his BASIC interpreter which plays a tune.
Thanks to [Mark Stevens] for writing in to let us know about this one. If you’re planning to play along at home a good place to start is to
build your own 6502, like [Ben] did
! | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140529",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-06-20T03:47:13",
"content": "I’m disappointed that he didn’t actually make the computer noises. I wanted some beatboxing.This guy gets it!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "814062... | 1,760,371,509.896003 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/19/build-your-own-telescope-the-modern-way/ | Build Your Own Telescope The Modern Way | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Science",
"Space"
] | [
"3d printed telescope",
"telescope"
] | When we were kids, it was a rite of passage to read the newly arrived Edmund catalog and dream of building our own telescope. One of our friends lived near a University, and they even had a summer program that would help you measure your mirrors and ensure you had a successful build. But most of us never ground mirrors from glass blanks and did all the other arcane steps required to make a working telescope. However, [La3emedimension] wants to tempt us again with a
3D-printable telescope kit
.
Before you fire up the 3D printer, be aware that PLA is not recommended, and, of course, you are going to need some extra parts. There is supposed to be a README with a bill of parts, but we didn’t see it. However, there is a
support page in French
and a Discord server, so we have no doubt it can be found.
It is possible to steal the optics from another telescope or, of course, buy new. You probably don’t want to grind your own mirrors, although good on you if you do! You can even buy the entire kit if you don’t want to print it and gather all the parts yourself.
The scope is made to be ultra-portable, and it looks like it would be a great travel scope. Let us know if you build one or a derivative.
This telescope looks much different than other
builds we’ve seen
. If you want to do it all old school, we’ve seen a great
guide
. | 37 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140492",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-19T23:05:23",
"content": "…So not PLA, what’s the suggested material? ABS? PETG? Some stupid exotic filament?Looked through a couple linked pages, one translated from French, and no real mention of what WAS used to print this.What’s th... | 1,760,371,510.094528 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/19/fission-simulator-melts-down-rp2040/ | Fission Simulator Melts Down RP2040 | Tyler August | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"ece 4760",
"nuclear fusion",
"Paspberry Pi Pico",
"physics demonstrations"
] | We’ve seen a lot of projects based on the Pi Pico, but a nuclear reactor simulation is a new one. This project was created by [Andrew Shim], [Tyler Wisniewski] and another group member for Cornell’s ECE 4760 class on embedded design (which should silence naysayers who think the Pi Pico can’t be a “serious” microcontroller), and
simulates the infamous soviet RMBK reactor of Chernobyl fame.
The simulation uses a 4-bit color VGA model. The fission model includes uranium fuel, water, graphite moderator, control rods and neutrons. To simplify the math, all decayed materials are treated identically as non-fissile, so no xenon poisoning is going to show up, for example. You can, however, take manual control to both scram the reactor and set it up to melt down with the hardware controller.
The RP2040’s dual-core nature comes in handy here: one core runs the main simulation loop, and the main graphic on the top of the VGA output; the other core generates the plots on the bottom half of the screen, and the Geiger-counter sound effect, and polls the buttons and encoders for user input. This is an interesting spread compared to the more usual GPU/CPU split we see on projects that use
the RP2040 with VGA output
.
An interesting wrinkle that has been declared a feature, not a bug, by the students behind this project, is that the framebuffer cannot keep up with all the neutrons in a meltdown simulation. Apparently the flickering and stuttering of frame-rate issues is “befitting of the meltdown scenario”. The idea that ones microcontroller melts down along with the simulated reactor is rather fitting, we agree. Check it out in a full walkthrough in the video below, or enjoy the student’s full writeup at the link above.
This project comes to us via Cornell University’s ECE 4760 course,
which we’ve mentioned before
. Thanks to [Hunter Adams] for the tipoff. You may see more student projects in the coming weeks. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140465",
"author": "Anonymus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-19T20:56:07",
"content": "This reminds me of Chernobyl: The Legacy Continues on Windows 95",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8140467",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,371,510.139574 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/19/dual-rgb-cameras-get-depth-sensing-powerup/ | Dual RGB Cameras Get Depth Sensing Powerup | Donald Papp | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"Machine Learning"
] | [
"depth camera",
"depth sensor",
"dual RGB",
"point cloud"
] | It’s sometimes useful for a system to not just have a flat 2D camera view of things, but to have an understanding of the
depth
of a scene. Dual RGB cameras can be used to sense depth by contrasting the two slightly different views, in much the same way that our own eyes work. It’s considered an economical but limited method of depth sensing, or at least it was before
FoundationStereo
came along and blew previous results out of the water. That link has a load of interactive comparisons to play with and see for yourself, so check it out.
A box of disordered tools at close range is understood very well, and these results are typical for the system.
The FoundationStereo
paper
explains how researchers leveraged machine learning to create a system that can not only outperform existing dual RGB camera setups, but even active depth-sensing cameras such as the Intel RealSense.
FoundationStereo is specifically designed for strong zero-shot performance, meaning it delivers useful general results with no additional training needed to handle any particular scene or environment. The framework and models are available from the project’s
GitHub repository
.
While products like
Microsoft’s Kinect have struggled to keep the consumer’s attention
, depth sensing remains an enabling technology that opens possibilities and gives rise to interesting projects, like a
headset that allows one to see the world through the eyes of a depth sensor
.
The ability to easily and quickly gain an understanding of the physical layout of a space is a powerful tool, and if a system like this one can deliver such fantastic results with nothing more than two RGB cameras, that’s a great sign. Watch it in action in the video below. | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140441",
"author": "RetepV",
"timestamp": "2025-06-19T19:45:02",
"content": "Oh Deities, an AI voice…I’ll let it slide this time, but don’t do it again, nVidia. You have money enough to hire someone with actual educational skills to narrate the text.",
"parent_id": null,
"d... | 1,760,371,510.27237 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/19/hacker-tactic-esd-diodes/ | Hacker Tactic: ESD Diodes | Arya Voronova | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Parts"
] | [
"electrostatic discharge",
"esd",
"esd diode",
"tvs"
] | A hacker’s view on ESD protection can tell you a lot about them. I’ve seen a good few categories of hackers neglecting ESD protection – there’s the yet-inexperienced ones, ones with a devil-may-care attitude, or simply those of us lucky to live in a reasonably humid climate. But until we’re able to control the global weather, your best bet is to befriend some ESD diodes before you get stuck having to replace a microcontroller board firmly soldered into your PCB with help of 40 through-hole pin headers.
Humans are pretty good at generating electric shocks, and oftentimes, you’ll shock your hardware without even feeling the shock yourself. Your GPIOs will feel it, though, and it can propagate beyond just the input/output pins inside your chip. ESD events can be a cause of “weird malfunctions”, sudden hardware latchups, chips dying out of nowhere mid-work – nothing to wish for.
Worry not, though. Want to build hardware that survives? Take a look at ESD diodes, where and how to add them, where to avoid them, and the parameters you want to keep in mind. Oh and, I’ll also talk about all the fancy ways you can mis-use ESD diodes, for good and bad alike!
How It’s Made
The simplest ESD diode is just two diodes in series, with the protected signal connected at midpoint. The wiring is easy to remember – wire the diodes in a way that they don’t conduct from 3.3 V to GND, so, in reverse, same way you’d wire up a diode to shunt a relay coil. It’s only meant to conduct in unprecedented circumstances, not normally.
Say, you use a diode with 0.7 V forward voltage drop. Then, such a configuration will shunt voltages above – into your power rails and ground, both low-impedance with plenty of capacitance and inductance, enough to dissipate the shock energy. Lower than GND – 0.7 V, and higher than VCC + 0.7 V – ever seen that mentioned in datasheets, by the way?
The overwhelming majority of ICs come with ESD diodes built-in. CMOS logic, overwhelmingly prevalent these days, basically requires them – FETs are overwhelmingly sensitive to ESD events, especially their gates. Don’t believe me? Here’s
a highly persuasive video
we’ve covered, that shows a FET easily dying from an ESD event!
So, is your job done here? Can you just rely on IC-internal ESD diodes? No, sadly. IC-internal ESD diodes are nice and a must have, but not sufficient for a large portion of shock. Effectively, they’re there for lower-grade GPIO protection. If your GPIOs go, or could easily go, to the outside world, or maybe they’re near high-power rails, maybe you’re driving a speaker or some motors with part of your circuit, or if maybe you want to touch your board with your fingers sometimes – you will want to add your own ESD diodes into the mix.
Let’s Protect Some GPIOs
You can use two diodes in a pinch – two 1N4148’s are a valid form of ESD protection. Better yet, you can buy a two-diode component ready to go. Here’s a part number – BAV99; it’s two diodes in series, in SOT23, with midpoint being on pin 3. Top pin to VCC, bottom pin to GND, middle pin goes to your signal – what could be easier to route? BAV99 isn’t quite intended to be an ESD diode, but it will perform wonderfully. This is the most basic protection you can give a GPIO – throw in a low-value series resistor too, if you’re generous. If you’re doing, say, a RP2040 circuit, you will already have some 27R resistors in series – just sprinkle some more of those on your board, and you’re golden.
But Wait, There’s More
Is that all you can do with these? No, there’s more! Remember how you have to put a diode across a relay coil or a motor that you’re driving with a transistor? Here’s a fun relay for you –
Omron G6SK-2
. It’s a tiny relay for switching signals (think analog audio switching), and what’s cool about it, it’s latching. You know how you need to reverse the voltage polarity on a DC motor in order to reverse the direction it spins? This relay uses polarity reversal to switch, instead of a coil that requires constant power draw to keep one set of contacts connected.
So, a tiny relay for signals, that requires zero power to stay on. Now, how do you drive it? With motors, you drive them with a H-bridge – one transistor from VCC, one from GND, for each pole, and these four transistors are typically put inside a single IC. However, using a whole H-bridge IC on a tiny relay that barely needs any power to begin with? Feels quite wasteful!
A GPIO set to output is electrically equivalent to a H-bridge. Put the relay’s coil between two GPIOs instead, and you can effortlessly switch it. What about a back EMF protection diode? Can’t put it across the coil anymore, then you couldn’t switch polarity. Instead, just put a pair of ESD diodes on the GPIOs, and you’re good.
You can drive a fair bit of stuff this way – not just cool low-power relays, but also linear actuators like iPhone’s Taptic Engines, vibromotors, and tiny electromagnets. So, if you needed to stock up on BAV, this is your extra reason to do so.
Where would you commonly put these kinds of diodes? On external GPIOs, yes, but also buttons – even if they’re behind a thin layer of plastic!, – and keypads, user-touchable pogo pins, off-board connectors, headphone jacks, iButton pads, and so on. These are not the only diodes you’ll ever want, of course. Let’s talk about ESD diode capacitance and where it starts to matter.
High Speed, High Demands
Imagine a Pi Pico. On it, there are GPIOs worth protecting. What else? The USB port, for sure – and if you’re daring enough to wire Ethernet to a Pico, also those pins. However, if you do use BAV, you might experience signal degradation, or other unexpected side effects. Why? One major reason is ESD diode capacitance.
High-capacitance diodes will mess with high-speed signals. That’s why we have lower-capacitance ESD diodes, though. SRV-05 is one of these – it’s an old and trusty part, with many pin-compatible successors and clones alike. Four diodes inside, one pin for VCC, one for GND – it just works, whether you do USB2, Ethernet 100 or 1000 – or even capacitive touch pads! Captouch benefits a whole lot from ESD protection, as you might guess, and low-capacitance diodes are a must – just remember to also check the docs of the captouch chip you’re using and see what it says about the matter.
Using a SOT23-6 pack like this to protect USB lines? Watch out for how you’re supposed to wire it up. Some diode packs have internal connections and expect you to interrupt the signal under them, and other ones require you to pull wires under the package; some of them include inductors. Check the datasheet for an example schematic and compare with yours.
Another pitfall to mind. Remember how there’s one path to GND and one to VCC? Well… What if your GPIO is powered, but your VCC isn’t? Power will flow from the GPIO into VCC – you might remember this one from the cut-down ATTiny we’ve featured. This is also a problem you can stumble upon if you put chips with multiple power inputs and don’t think about it.
Where else could this situation appear? Why, USB-C. If you’re connecting ADC channels to CC pins, like you would if you want to check that you do get 3A at 5V, you’ll want to protect that. Or maybe you have a PD controller on your board – you’ll want to protect its CC pins, for sure. Now, remember how CC negotiation works? A PSU has a resistor from its VBUS to the CC pin(s), and it measures the CC voltages, expecting a 5.1K resistor. What if your VBUS isn’t powered and you use a VBUS-connected ESD diode on CC? Part of the CC pullup current flows into VBUS, voltage sags, CC voltage is lower than expected, and the PSU never ends up supplying VBUS.
No VBUS, No Problems
Bad? Bad. I’ve stumbled upon this one recently, in my own project, was quite a headscratcher. Thankfully, you don’t actually need a VBUS connection – really, all you need is to shunt voltage if it exceeds a certain threshold. We have diodes for that, too! They’re called TVS – it’s kind of like a Zener, but better. In fact, since SOT23-6 ESD diodes tend to contain a TVS, you might be able to disconnect VBUS from your SOT23-6 altogether. However, you should still know about yet another breed of ESD diodes – for a start, they’re probably the flattest ESD diodes you’ll work with.
In VBUS-less ESD diodes, instead of a VBUS connection, the top point goes to a TVS diode to ground. When the top point voltage raises above the TVS diode’s threshold voltage, the diode starts conducting. The TVS diode has to dissipate the ESD shock energy now, but they’re big boy TVS diodes, they can handle it.
DFN25-10 format diodes. Where have you seen them? A Raspberry Pi, for one – there, they’re right next to the HDMI connector(s), three of them at the very least! These diodes are great for general purpose protecting whatever you want, too – you can put them on USB, Ethernet, USB CC pins, keyboard matrix pins. My fave part number is TPAZ1043, but don’t hold onto that – just look up DFN2510 and you’ll find alternatives aplenty.
Any catches with these? The threshold voltage, for one. If you’re doing 3.3V GPIOs, you want to make sure your diode won’t start shunting them – and if you buy a diode aimed at protecting modern-day interfaces like USB3, its threshold might very well be 3.3V or a little below – borderline if not outright disqualifying if you want your GPIO (or a USB2 connection) to stay unaffected. It’s a wonderful diode, of course, just, the wrong application.
They’re the nicest to route, too. Put them inline with signals, put a via down to your GND (0.5/0.3 via will do wonders), and you’re set. The catch with that? You might relax a little too much when using them, gotta remember to keep on your toes.
A Key Element
Think we’re done? Not yet. Remember that they’re very flat? Now, where could you use some very flat diodes? How about… a handheld keyboard with NKRO? NKRO needs diodes on every key, but if you’re doing a even 50-key handheld keeb, you might not necessarily want to use 50 separate diodes. Not to worry – the to-ground diodes inside the DFN2510 ESD diode pack are still good to go. Able to connect four keys per diode pack, these are way easier to handle and pick-and-place than regular tiny-package SMD diodes, and they make sure your keyboard can do all sorts of key combos. You know, to compensate for the lower amount of keys.
The hacks are cool, of course, but above all, ESD diodes are meant to make sure that your hardware lasts. Whether you’re building a devboard, a captouch arts installation, a trusty pocket electronics multitool, a custom clock to gift to your kid, or the tiniest keyboard ever, ESD diodes are your friends. You should sprinkle them on your circuits, keep them in your stock, spread the word, and they will protect you in turn.
Liked this article? Check out one of the
previous Hacker Tactic installments
, where I’ve shown you how to detect internal ESD diodes with a multimeter, specifically, to probe wiring continuity and reverse-engineer circuits! You should know about it, too. | 24 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140409",
"author": "Dylan",
"timestamp": "2025-06-19T17:14:36",
"content": "ESD was invented by big diode to sell more diodes",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8140562",
"author": "Harvie.CZ",
"timestamp": "2025... | 1,760,371,510.207849 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/19/game-boy-nes-why-not-both/ | Game Boy? NES? Why Not Both! | Jenny List | [
"handhelds hacks",
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"emulator",
"gba",
"handheld",
"nes",
"pic32"
] | If you’re a retro Nintendo fan you can of course carry a NES and a Game Boy around with you, but the former isn’t very portable. Never fear though, because here’s [Chad Burrow], who’s created
a neat handheld console that emulates both
.
It’s called the Acolyte Handheld, and it sports the slightly unusual choice for these parts of a PIC32 as its main processor. Unexpectedly it can use Sega Genesis controllers, but it has the usual buttons on board for portable use. It can drive either its own LCD or an external VGA monitor, and in a particularly nice touch, it switches between the two seamlessly. The NES emulator is his own work, while Game Boy support comes courtesy of Peanut-GB.
We like the design of the case, and particularly that of the buttons. Could it have been made smaller by forgoing some of the through-hole parts in favour of SMD ones? Quite likely, but though it’s chunky it’s certainly not outsized.
Portable Nintendo-inspired hardware is popular around here, as you can see with
this previous handheld NES | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140475",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2025-06-19T21:32:18",
"content": "NES BOY, NEGS, GES, GESB, GEBS, NEGBS …So many potential acronyms and none are in the article?Too low hanging fruit? I’m kinda disappointed anyway. ;-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies... | 1,760,371,510.316255 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/18/split-keyboard-uses-no-pcb/ | Split Keyboard Uses No PCB | Al Williams | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"keyboard",
"nRF52840",
"split keyboard"
] | When [daniely101] wanted a split keyboard,
he decided to build his own
. It wound up costing $25 to create a wireless board with no custom PCB required. Each half has its own microcontroller, and the whole thing connects via Bluetooth. While we don’t mind making a PCB, we can appreciate that you could change your mind easily with this wiring scheme.
The 3D printed case holds the keys, and then it is just a matter of carefully soldering the keys to the microcontrollers. Of course, each side also has to have its own battery. The ZMK firmware is split in half, one part for each side of the keyboard. The nRF52840 CPUs have plenty of wireless connectivity. The keys are set in rows and columns, so the amount of soldering back to the controller is manageable.
While we applaud the wireless design, it does seem odd that you have to charge both halves and turn them on and off separately. But that’s the nice thing about a design like this — you could modify the design to not have a split. Or, you could allow one flexible wire pair to run across for power. Of course, you could modify the layout, including adding or deleting keys.
You might consider adding
a pointing device
. At least you don’t have to
pull out a saw
. | 18 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140084",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-18T18:40:43",
"content": "For a lot of these projects, the PCB is created just because people like making them. I get it, sometimes it’s fun and it feels a lot nicer. But usually if you do a one-off you just bend some solid-core wires ... | 1,760,371,510.371754 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/18/zpui-could-be-your-tiny-embedded-gui/ | ZPUI Could Be Your Tiny Embedded GUI | Arya Voronova | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Software Development"
] | [
"embedded",
"gui",
"raspberry pi"
] | One of the most frustrating things to me is looking at a freshly-flashed and just powered up single board computer. My goal with them is always getting to a shell – installing packages, driving GPIOs, testing my proof of concept code, adjusting the device tree to load peripheral drivers. Before I can do any of that, I need shell access, and getting there can be a real hassle.
Time after time, I’ve struggled trying to get to a shell on an SBC. For best results, you’d want to get yourself a keyboard, monitor, and an Ethernet cable. Don’t have those, or there’s no space to place them? Maybe a UART connection will work for you – unless it’s broken or misconfigured. Check your pinouts twice. Sure, nowadays you can put WiFi credentials into a text file in
/boot/
– but good luck figuring out the IP address, or debugging any mistakes you might make formatting the file. Nowadays, Pi 4 and 5 expose a USB gadget connection on the USB-C port, and that helps… unless you’re already powering the Pi from that port. There’s really no shortage of failure modes here.
If you put a Pi on your network and it goes offline, you generally just don’t know what happened unless you reboot it, which can make debugging into a living hell. I’ve dealt with single-board computers mounted above fiberglass lifted ceilings, fleets of Pi boards at workshops I organized, pocket-carried Pi boards, and at some point, I got tired of it all. A hacker-aimed computer is meant to be accessible, not painful.
Server-Grade Interfaces For All
That’s why, for years now, I’ve been working on a cheap and accessible embedded UI, called
ZPUI
(Zippy UI) – with its help, a cheap I2C screen and a few buttons is all it takes to keep track of your Pi or other Linux device.
A separate lightweight control interface isn’t a new concept. Back in the glorious era of character LCDs and non-standard mounting boxy cute servers, you could get a 16×2 display and five arrow keys on a Sun machine, and with help of a little bespoke software, you could do basic management actions on your server without having to break out a KVM.
It started as a character display UI,
grew into 128×64 screens,
and then adapted to 400/320×240 screens
One of my first semi-serious projects, way back in 2014, was a HD44780 library for Raspberry Pi use, universal and lightweight, supporting both direct GPIO access and I2C backpacks with ease. People have had used those for IP address display for a while by then, but it wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to easily power off my boards to avoid SD card corruption (which was way worse back in the day), figure out my boards’ IP addresses without Nmap scans, and connect to WiFi networks without SD card machinations. All throughout, it felt like a piece of software someone should’ve had written years ago. It’s a simple concept – if I have physical access to my SBC, I should be able to take control of it.
So, with a HD44780, a USB numpad, and a heap of Python code, I’ve built the first version of the software I called
pyLCI
– for Linux Control Interface. I gave it app loading support, then wrote code to parse commands like
ip addr
,
wpa_cli
for WiFi connection management,
tvservice
for HDMI monitor connection debug,
reboot
and
poweroff
, as well as an ability to run arbitrary pre-defined scripts from a menu. I made sure it’d only require 5 buttons at all times – up, down, left, right, and enter, and that it’d work with character LCDs from as small as 16×2 to as big as 20×4.
pyLCI quickly became a useful tool in my SBC forays, and I’ve built it into a number of my portable devices, most of them Pi-powered. I’ve added it to a portable hardware hacking workbench I built for SPI flash and general hardware tinkering, home automation Pi boards I’d run, and even a desktop/pocket Pi 2 that served as only computer for almost half a year. When I ran Raspberry Pi workshops in our hackerspace, I bought a few character-LCD-and-button HATs and used them to determine IP addresses of student-issued Pi boards, so that I wouldn’t need to drag a monitor around or do USB-UART interventions.
The move from character displays wasn’t quick,
but I did get it to a way better place
Entering WiFi passwords with arrow keys wasn’t ideal, but it was miles ahead of the frustration I used to routinely experience before it, every time I brought a Pi somewhere for a project – only to get effectively locked out of a computer I own.
Bigger Screens, Bigger Ambitions
When I worked on ZeroPhone, an open-source Raspberry Pi Zero-based numpad phone, naturally, I forked pyLCI into a base for the UI, called it ZPUI (for ZeroPhone UI), and decided to target the super common 128×64 screens. Initially, I made the color screen imitate a character screen – it worked kind of well as a stopgap but resulted in tiny text. It took a good while to make the screen readable, make apps work passably well and write new better-working ones, implement numpad input in addition to arrow keys input, and I’ve ended up learning a ton from building an UI framework where none was intended to be.
Recently, I’ve reignited my portable platform building ambitions, and as part of a hacker collective, I’ve been working on a Beepy derivative device – a QWERTY PDA-like Pi Zero-based pocket Linux terminal. Just like many portable Linux devices in this form-factor, it’s badly missing a low-frills graphical UI, with three or four people having attempted to write one, and one in particular getting pretty far. I ported ZPUI to a larger screen, borrowed a UI layout mockup from
one of the more successful Beepy UI projects
, and I’m now porting ZPUI to larger screens. My goal with ZPUI is making your Linux devices accessible and friendly, and the Beepy community could definitely benefit from a software boost like that.
My goal is creating a UI that you can use to make any of your Linux devices accessible – no matter if you’re building a home automation panel with a Pi at its heart, or an OpenWRT-powered pocket router, putting together an overpowered Meshtastic node you want to adjust on the fly, or a PWN4Pi device that you want to manually pick RubberDucky scripts for, designing failsafes for a robot with computer vision, or simply organizing workshops where seeing your Pi’s IP address is important, in circumstances of twenty students who all want your attention during setup. This year, I’ve started working on ZPUI again, bringing it up to speed with modern software realities, and I invite you to try it out in your projects.
How ZPUI Can Help You
Cheap enough to order a dozen, for $5, only needs an OLED and buttons, and it’s very JLC-compatible
At minimum, you only need a small 128×64 OLED screen and give buttons – for instance, if you have a Waveshare Pi Zero hat, it will do just fine. In case you’re ordering PCBs anytime soon, I’ve also
designed a businesscard form-factor Pi shield,
which fits on any Pi and even works over QWIIC if you want – throw the board into your next JLC order, solder an OLED and a few jellybean buttons to it, follow
the install instructions
, and enjoy the extra point of control over your Linux install.
As-is, ZPUI can do most of the basic tasks for you – show network info, connect to WiFi networks (and even display known network passwords), manage system services with help of a systemctl API,
poweroff
/
reboot
, unmount partitions so you don’t have to SSH in to unplug that one flash drive, list USB devices so you know if your favourite device fell off the bus, and do a number of other things (there’s even an AVRDUDE app!). It will even let you input console commands through arrow keys in a pinch.
Example ZPUI apps, complete with instructions, coming soon!
Currently, apart from UI improvements, I’m working on a heap of mechanisms to make third-party app designs easier. You already can develop ZPUI apps, and you can even distribute ZPUI apps as Python packages, but there’s still work to do. If you want to help contribute and tackle goals like, say, a
raspi-config
app or a Bluetooth config interface, you’re most welcome to join in and help – there’s even
a ZPUI emulator
for app development purposes!
ZPUI is a project aimed to make your other projects easier. I invite you to try it out, especially if you’ve faced the kind of problems I’ve told about in the article intro. If it were up to me, SBCs like Raspberry Pi would come with these kinds of interfaces out of the box, simply because of the insanely large amount of problems I’ve had it solve and figure out.
Unexpectedly Cyberpunk
Here’s a cool demo! I’ve assembled a ZPUI businesscard into a palm-sized shield, with a QWIIC cable connected to it. On my SBCs, I have QWIIC sockets exposed, with ZPUI installed and configured to expect such a shield. When I plug it in, ZPUI detects it on the I2C bus and shows up on the screen. This palm-sized shield feels surprisingly cyberpunk to use, akin to having a cable in your wrist that lets you tap into any device of your choice. For a while now, all my devices come with QWIIC connectors, because of just how much ZPUI helps me in bringup and development.
Kitchen computer UI froze up? The reboot option is right there.
The device is (mostly) pocket-friendly,
and this is how it feels to use it.
If you have any questions, ask away, and I hope ZPUI can help you. If not – let me know! This year, I’m aiming to seriously upgrade it, building it into a fully-featured UI it is meant to be, and if there’s a feature you’re looking for, it could very well get implemented alongside. | 17 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140070",
"author": "spiritplumberspiritplumber@gmail.com",
"timestamp": "2025-06-18T17:47:37",
"content": "Fun fact, internally cyberpunk uses another three-letter preposition instead of “out” 😂Because of i18n package (whatever language you pick) it’s not visible to player.",
... | 1,760,371,510.713256 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/18/esp32-dashboard-is-a-great-way-to-stay-informed/ | ESP32 Dashboard Is A Great Way To Stay Informed | Jenny List | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"epaper",
"ESP32",
"micropython"
] | The original ESP32 may be a little long in the tooth by now, but it remains a potent tool for connected devices. We were drawn to [Max Pflaum]’s
ESP32 Dashboard
as a great example, it’s an ESP32 hooked up to an e-paper display. The hardware is simple enough, but the software is what makes it interesting.
This is deigned as a configurable notification tool, so to make it bend to the user’s will a series of widgets can be loaded onto it. The device runs MicroPython, making it easy enough to write more than the ones already on place. The screen is divided into four zones, allowing for a range of widgets to be used at once. All the details
can be found in a GitHub repository
.
We like it for its configurability and ease of programming, and because it delivers well on the promise of a useful device. An ESP32 and e-ink combination with MicroPython apps is
something we’ve seen before in the world of badges
. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140051",
"author": "Ken de AC3DH",
"timestamp": "2025-06-18T16:53:21",
"content": "I love the wood work! I made something very similar many years ago using an ESP8266 and an e-ink display. 4 AA batteries would last about a month. I had a weather feed and my simple calendar with t... | 1,760,371,510.58927 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/18/just-for-laughs-charlie-douglass-and-the-laugh-track/ | Just For Laughs: Charlie Douglass And The Laugh Track | Al Williams | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"canned laughter",
"laff box",
"laugh track"
] | I ran into an old episode of
Hogan’s Heroes
the other day that stuck me as odd. It didn’t have a laugh track. Ironically, the show was one where two pilots were shown, one with and one without a laugh track. The resulting data ensured future shows would have fake laughter. This wasn’t the pilot, though, so I think it was just an error on the part of the streaming service.
However, it was very odd. Many of the jokes didn’t come off as funny without the laugh track. Many of them came off as cruel. That got me to thinking about how they had to put laughter in these shows to begin with. I had my suspicions, but was I way off!
Well, to be honest, my suspicions were well-founded if you go back far enough. Bing Crosby was tired of running two live broadcasts, one for each coast, so he invested in tape recording, using
German recorders Jack Mullin had brought back after World War II
. Apparently, one week, Crosby’s guest was a comic named Bob Burns. He told some off-color stories, and the audience was howling. Of course, none of that would make it on the air in those days. But they saved the recording.
A few weeks later, either a bit of the show wasn’t as funny or the audience was in a bad mood. So they spliced in some of the laughs from the Burns performance. You could guess that would happen, and that’s the apparent birth of the laugh track. But that method didn’t last long before someone — Charley Douglass — came up with something better.
Sweetening
The problem with a studio audience is that they might not laugh at the right times. Or at all. Or they might laugh too much, too loudly, or too long. Charley Douglass developed techniques for sweetening an audio track — adding laughter, or desweetening by muting or cutting live laughter. At first, this was laborious, but Douglass had a plan.
He built a prototype machine that was a 28-inch wooden wheel with tape glued to its perimeter. The tape had laughter recordings and a mechanical detent system to control how much it played back.
Douglass decided to leave CBS, but the prototype belonged to them. However, the machine didn’t last very long without his attention. In 1953, he built his own derivative version and populated it with laughter from the Red Skelton Show, where Red did pantomime, and, thus, there was no audio but the laughter and applause.
Do You Really Need It?
There is a lot of debate regarding fake laughter. On the one hand, it does seem to help. On the other hand, shouldn’t people just — you know — laugh when something’s funny?
There was concern, for example, that the Munsters would be scary without a laugh track. Like I mentioned earlier, some of the gags on Hogan’s Heroes are fine with laughter, but seem mean-spirited without.
Consider the Big Bang theory. If you watch a clip (below) with no laugh track, you’ll notice two things. First, it does seem a bit mean (as a commenter said: “…like a bunch of people who really hate each other…” The other thing you’ll notice is that they pause for the laugh track insertion, which, when there is no laughter, comes off as really weird.
Laugh Monopoly
Laugh tracks became very common with most single-camera shows. These were hard to do in front of an audience because they weren’t filmed in sequence. Even so, some directors didn’t approve of “mechanical tricks” and refused to use fake laughter.
Even multiple-camera shows would sometimes want to augment a weak audience reaction or even just replace laughter to make editing less noticeable. Soon, producers realized that they could do away with the audience and just use canned laughter. Douglass was essentially the only game in town, at least in the United States.
The Douglass device was used on all the shows from the 1950s through the 1970s. Andy Griffith? Yep. Betwitched? Sure. The Brady Bunch? Of course. Even the Munster had Douglass or one of his family members creating their laugh tracks.
One reason he stayed a monopoly is that he was extremely secretive about how he did his work. In 1960, he formed Northridge Electronics out of a garage. When called upon, he’d wheel his invention into a studio’s editing room and add laughs for them. No one was allowed to watch.
You can see the original “laff box” in the videos below.
The device was securely locked, but inside, we now know that the machine had 32 tape loops, each with ten laugh tracks. Typewriter-like keys allowed you to select various laughs and control their duration and intensity,
In the background, there was always a titter track of people mildly laughing that could be made more or less prominent. There were also some other sound effects like clapping or people moving in seats.
Building a laugh track involved mixing samples from different tracks and modulating their amplitude. You can imagine it was like playing a musical instrument that emits laughter.
Before you tell us, yes, there seems to be some kind of modern interface board on the top in the second video. No, we don’t know what it is for, but we’re sure it isn’t part of the original machine.
The original laff box wound up appearing on
Antiques Roadshow
where someone had bought it at a storage locker auction.
End of an Era
Of course, all things end. As technology got better and tastes changed, some companies — notably animation companies — made their own laugh tracks. One of Douglass’ protégés started a company,
Sound One
, that used better technology to create laughter, including stereo recordings and cassette tapes.
Today, laugh tracks are not everywhere, but you can still find them and, of course, they are prevalent in reruns. The next time you hear one, you’ll know the history behind that giggle.
If you want to build
a more modern version of the laff box
, [smogdog] has just the video for you, below. | 40 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140003",
"author": "strawberrymortallyb0bcea48e7",
"timestamp": "2025-06-18T14:13:38",
"content": "Sitcoms are worthless without forced laughter injected.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8140167",
"author": "Anonymous... | 1,760,371,510.791803 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/18/keeping-snap-and-crackle-under-control-with-prunt-printer-firmware/ | Keeping Snap And Crackle Under Control With Prunt Printer Firmware | Aaron Beckendorf | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3D Printer Controller",
"3D printer controller board",
"motion control",
"open-source firmware"
] | For quite some time now, Marlin has been the firmware of choice for any kind of custom 3D printer, with only Klipper offering some serious competition in the open-source world. [Liam Powell] aims to introduce some more variety with the development of
Prunt
, a 3D printer control board and firmware stack.
Smooth motion control is Prunt’s biggest advantage: Klipper and Marlin use trapezoidal (three-phase) motion profiles, which aim for acceleration changes with physically impossible rapidity, leading to vibrations and ringing on prints. By contrast, Prunt uses a more physically realistic 31-phase motion profile. This lets the user independently adjust velocity, acceleration, jerk, snap, and crackle (the increasingly higher-order derivatives of position with respect to time) to reduce vibration and create smoother prints. To avoid sharp accelerations, Prunt can also turn corners into 15-degree Bézier curves.
The focus on smooth motion isn’t just a software feature; the Prunt control board uses hardware timers to control step generation, rather than the CPU. This avoids the timing issues which Klipper sometimes faces, and avoids slowing other parts of the program down. The board also seems to have a particular focus on avoiding electrical damage. It can detect short circuits in the heaters, thermistors, fans, and endstops, and can cut power and give the user a warning when one occurs. If the board somehow experiences a serious electrical fault, the USB port is isolated to prevent damage to the host computer. The firmware’s source is available
on GitHub
.
If you’re more interested in well-established programs, we’ve given a quick
introduction to Klipper
in the past. We’ve also seen people develop their own firmware for the
Bambu Lab X1
. | 27 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8139957",
"author": "strawberrymortallyb0bcea48e7",
"timestamp": "2025-06-18T11:17:05",
"content": "Klipper = possible SD card/linux corruptionMarlin = simply works",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8140145",
"author": "... | 1,760,371,510.649117 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/18/weighing-an-airplane-as-it-flies-overhead/ | Weighing An Airplane As It Flies Overhead | John Elliot V | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"airplane",
"conservation of momentum",
"scales",
"weight"
] | Recently,
[AlphaPhoenix] weighed an airplane
. Normally, that wouldn’t be much of an accomplishment. Except in this case, the airplane happened to be in flight at the time. In fact we’re not sure what is more remarkable, as he not only weighed real actual airplanes but a paper airplane too!
The sealed box essentially acts as a pressure sensor.
To test the concept, a large scale is made from foamcore and four load cells which feed into an Arduino which in turn is connected to a laptop for a visualization. After a brief test with a toy car, [AlphaPhoenix] goes on to weigh a paper airplane as it flies over the scale. What we learn from the demonstration is that any weight from a flying object is eventually transferred to the ground via the air.
In the second part of the video a new, smaller, type of scale is created and taken to the airport where airplanes flying overhead are weighed over the course of three days. This new apparatus is basically a pressure sensor enclosed in a nominally air-tight box, essentially a fancy type of barometer. Measurements are taken, assumptions are made, and figures are arrived at. Unfortunately the calculated results are off by more than one order of magnitude, but that doesn’t stop this experiment from having been very cool!
If you’re interested in weighing things for fun or profit be sure to check out
Hackaday Prize 2022: Arduino-Powered Weighing Scale Has A Real Analog Display
or
Reverse Engineering A Bathroom Scale For Automated Weight Tracking
. | 54 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "8139912",
"author": "Harvie.CZ",
"timestamp": "2025-06-18T08:29:42",
"content": "Isn’t random gust of wind gonna change the air pressure more than any airplane flying by possibly could?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8140399"... | 1,760,371,511.023621 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/17/capturing-screenshots-using-a-fake-printer/ | Capturing Screenshots Using A Fake Printer | Jenny List | [
"classic hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"gpib",
"oscilloscope",
"screenshot",
"test equipment"
] | If you have very old pieces of analogue test equipment with CRTs on your bench, the chances are they will all have surprisingly similar surrounds to their screens. Back when they were made it was common to record oscilloscope screens with a Polaroid camera, that would have a front fitting for just this purpose.
More recent instruments are computerized so taking a screen shot should be easier, but that’s still not easy if the machine can’t save to a handy disk.
Along comes [Tom] with a solution
, to hook up a fake printer, and grab the screen from a print.
Old instruments come with a variety of ports, serial, IEE-488, or parallel, but they should usually have the ability to print a screen. Then capturing that is a case of capturing an interpreting the print data, be it ESC/P, PCL5, Postscript, or whatever. The linked page takes us through a variety of techniques, and should be of help to anyone who’s picked up a bargain in the flea market.
This isn’t the only time we’ve touched on the subject of bringing older computerized equipment into the present, we’ve also shown you
a disk drive emulator
.
Thanks [JohnU] for the tip. | 16 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8139893",
"author": "Thijzer",
"timestamp": "2025-06-18T06:58:55",
"content": "Wasn’t the GPIB port meant for taking the sampling data out and re-visualize it on a computer? I mean, it’s not a screenshot per se but you can also zoom in and out and display some more information than ... | 1,760,371,510.844853 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/19/space-based-datacenters-take-the-cloud-into-orbit/ | Space-Based Datacenters Take The Cloud Into Orbit | Tyler August | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"News",
"Space"
] | [] | Where’s the best place for a datacenter? It’s an increasing problem as the AI buildup continues seemingly without pause. It’s not just a problem of NIMBYism; earthly power grids are having trouble coping, to say nothing of the demand for cooling water. Regulators and environmental groups alike are raising alarms about the impact that powering and cooling these massive AI datacenters will have on our planet.
While Sam Altman fantasizes about fusion power, one obvious response to those who say “think about the planet!” is to ask, “Well, what if we don’t put them on the planet?” Just as
Gerard O’Neill asked over 50 years ago
when our technology was merely industrial, the question remains:
“Is the surface of a planet really the right place for expanding technological civilization?”
O’Neill’s answer was a resounding “No.” The answer has not changed, even though our technology has. Generative AI is the latest and greatest technology on offer, but it turns out it may be the first one to make the productive jump to Earth Orbit. Indeed, it already has, but more on that later, because you’re probably scoffing at such a pie-in-the-sky idea.
There are three things needed for a datacenter: power, cooling, and connectivity. The people at companies like Starcloud, Inc, formally Lumen Orbit,
make a good, solid case
that all of these can be more easily met in orbit– one that includes hard numbers.
Sure, there’s also more radiation on orbit than here on earth, but our electronics turn out to be a lot more resilient than was once thought, as all the cell-phone cubesats have proven. Starcloud budgets only 1 kg of sheilding per kW of compute power in
their whitepaper, as an example.
If we can provide power, cooling, and connectivity, the radiation environment won’t be a showstopper.
Power
There’s a great big honkin’ fusion reactor already available for anyone to use to power their GPUs: the sun. Of course on Earth we have tricky things like weather, and the planet has an annoying habit of occluding the sun for half the day but there are no clouds in LEO. Depending on your choice of orbit, you do have that annoying 45 minutes of darkness– but a battery to run things for 45 minutes is not a big UPS, by professional standards. Besides, the sun-synchronous orbits are
right there
, just waiting for us to soak up that delicious, non-stop solar power.
Sun Synchronous Orbit, because nights are for squats. Image by Brandir via Wikimedia.
Sun-synchronous orbits (SSOs) are polar orbits that precess around the Earth once every sidereal year, so that they always maintain the same angle to the sun. For example, you might have an SSO that crosses the equator 12 times a day, each time at local 15:00, or 10:43, any other time set by the orbital parameters. With SSOs, you don’t have to worry about ever losing solar power to some silly, primitive, planet-bound concept like
nighttime
.
Without the atmosphere in the way, solar panels are also considerably more effective per unit area, something the Space Solar Power people have been pointing out since O’Neill’s day. The problem with Space Solar Power has always been the efficiencies and regulatory hurdles of beaming the power back to Earth– but if you use the power to train an AI model, and send the data down, that’s no longer an issue. Given that the 120 kW array on ISS has been trouble-free for decades now, we can consider it a solved problem. Sure, solar panels degrade, but the rate is in fractions of a percent per year, and it happens on Earth too. By the time solar panel replacement is likely to be the rest of the hardware is likely to be totally obsolete.
Cooling
This is where skepticism creeps in. After all, cooling is the greatest challenge with high performance computing hardware here on earth, and heat rejection is the great constraint of space operations. The “icy blackness of space” you see in popular culture is as realistic as warp drive; space is a thermos, and shedding heat is no trivial issue. It is also, from an engineering perspective, not a
complex
issue. We’ve been cooling spacecraft and satellites using radiators to shed heat via infrared emission for decades now. It’s pretty easy to calculate that if you have
X
watts of heat to reject at
Y
degrees, you will need a radiator of area
Z.
The Stephan-Boltzmann Law isn’t exactly rocket science.
Photons go out, liquid cools down. It might be rocket science, but it’s a fairly mature technology. (Image: EEATCS radiator deployment during ISS Flight 5A, NASA)
Even better, unlike on Earth where you have changeable things like seasons and heat waves, in a SSO you need only account for throttling– and if your data center is profitable, you won’t be doing much of that. So while you need a cooling system, it won’t be difficult to design. Liquid or two-phase cooling on server hardware? Not new. Plumbing cooling a loop to a radiator in the vacuum of space? That’s been part of satellite busses for years.
Aside from providing you with a stable thermal environment, the other advantage of an SSO is that if one chooses the dawn/dusk orbit along the terminator, while the solar panels always face the sun, the radiators can always face black space, letting them work to their optimal potential. This would also simplify the satellite bus, as no motion system would be required to keep the solar panels and radiators aligned into/out of the sun. Conceivably the whole thing could be stabilized by gravity gradient, minimizing the need to use reaction wheels.
Connectivity
One word: Starlink. That’s not to say that future data centers will necessarily be hooking into the Starlink network, but high-bandwidth operations on orbit are already proven, as long as you consider 100 gigabytes per second sufficient bandwidth. An advantage not often thought of for this sort of space-based communications is that the speed of light in a vacuum is about 31% faster than glass fibers, while the circumference of a low Earth orbit is much less than 31% greater than the circumference of the planet. That reduces ping times between elements of free-flying clusters or clusters and whatever communications satellite is overhead of the user. It is conceivable, but by no means a sure thing, that a user in the EU might have faster access to orbital data than they would to a data center in the US.
The Race
This hypothetical European might want to use European-owned servers. Well, the European Commission is on it; in the ASCEND study (
Advanced Space Cloud for European Net zero Emission and Data sovereignty
) you can tell from the title they put as much emphasis on keeping European data European as they do on the environmental aspects mentioned in the introduction. ASCEND imagines a 32-tonne, 800 kW data center lofted by a single super-heavy booster (sadly not Ariane 6), and proposes it could be ready by the 2030s. There’s no hint in this proposal that the ASCEND Consortium or the EC would be willing to stop at
one
, either. European efforts have already put AI in orbit, with missions like
PhiSat2 using on-board AI image processing for Earth observation
.
You know Italians were involved because it’s so stylish. No other proposal has that honeycomb aesthetic for their busy AI bees. Image ASCEND.
AWS Snowcone after ISS delivery. The future is here and it’s wrapped in Kapton. (Image NASA)
The Americans, of course, are leaving things to private enterprise. Axiom Space has leveraged their existing relationship with
NASA to put hardware on ISS
for testing purposes, staring with an
AWS snowcone in 2022
, which they claimed was the first flight-test of cloud computing. Axiom has also purchased space on the
Kepler Relay Network satellites set to launch late 2025.
Aside from the 2.5 Gb/s optical link from Kepler, exactly how much compute power is going into these is not clear. A
standalone data center is expected to follow in 2027
, but again, what hardware will be flying is not stated.
There are other American companies chasing venture capital for this purpose, like Google-founder-backed Relativity Space or the wonderfully-named Starcloud mentioned above. Starcloud’s whitepaper is incredibly ambitious, talking about building an up to 5 GW cluster whose double-sided solar/radiator array would be by far the largest object ever built in orbit at 4 km by 4 km. (Only a few orders of magnitude bigger than ISS. Not big deal.) At least it is a modular plan, that could be built up over time, and they are planning to start with a
smaller standalone proof-of-concept, Starcloud-2, in 2026.
You can’t accuse Starcloud of thinking small. (Image Starcloud via Youtube.)
A closeup of one of the twelve “Stars” in the Three Body Computing Constellation. This times 2,800. Image ADA Space.
Once they get up there, the American and European AIs are are going to find someone else has already claimed the high ground, and that that someone else speaks Chinese. A startup called
ADA Space launched 12 satellites in May 2025
to begin building out the world’s first orbital supercomputer, called the Three Body Computing Constellation. (You can’t help but love the poetry of Chinese naming conventions.)
Unlike the American startups, they aren’t shy about its capabilities: 100 Gb/s optical datalinks, with the most powerful satellite in the constellation capable of 744 trillion operations per second. (TOPS,
not
FLOPS. FLOPS specifically refers to
floating point
operations, whereas TOPS could be any operation but usually refers to operations on 8-bit integers.)
For comparison, Microsoft requires an “AI PC” like the copilot laptops to have 40 TOPS of AI-crunching capacity. The 12 satellites must not be identical, as the constellation together has a quoted capability of 5 POPS (peta-operations per second), and a storage capacity of 30 TB. That’s seems pretty reasonable for a proof-of-concept. You don’t get a sense of the ambition behind it until you hear that these 12 are just the first wave of a planned
2,800 satellites.
Now that’s what I’d call a supercluster!
A man can dream, can’t he? Image NASA.
High-performance computing in space? It’s no AI hallucination, it’s already here. There is a network forming in the sky. A sky-net, if you will, and I for one welcome our future AI overlords. They already have the high ground, so there’s no point fighting now. Hopefully this datacenter build-out will just be the first step on the road Gerry O’Neill and his students envisioned all those years ago: a road that ends with Earth’s surface as parkland, and civilization growing onwards and upwards.
Ad astra per AI
? There are worse futures. | 41 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140357",
"author": "strawberrymortallyb0bcea48e7",
"timestamp": "2025-06-19T14:06:48",
"content": "NOT profitable, AI chips go obsolete in months.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8140380",
"author": "lwheelerc5e3f6416... | 1,760,371,511.165122 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/19/flopped-humane-ai-pin-gets-an-experimental-sdk/ | Flopped Humane “AI Pin” Gets An Experimental SDK | Donald Papp | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Reverse Engineering",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"ai",
"Assistant",
"humane",
"reverse engineering"
] | The Humane AI Pin was ambitious, expensive, and failed to captivate people between its launch and shutdown shortly after. While the units do contain some interesting elements like the embedded projector, it’s all locked down tight, and the cloud services that tie it all together no longer exist. The devices technically still work, they just can’t do much of anything.
The Humane AI Pin had some bold ideas, like an embedded projector. (Image credit: Humane)
Since then, developers like [Adam Gastineau] have been hard at work turning the device into an experimental development platform:
PenumbraOS
, which provides a means to allow “untrusted” applications to perform privileged operations.
As
announced earlier this month
on social media, the experimental SDK lets developers treat the pin as a mostly normal Android device, with the addition of a modular, user-facing assistant app called MABL. [Adam] stresses that this is all highly experimental and has a way to go before it is useful in a user-facing sort of way, but there is absolutely a workable architecture.
When the Humane AI Pin launched,
it aimed to compete with smartphones
but failed to impress much of anyone. As a result, things folded in record time. Humane’s founders took jobs at HP and buyers were
left with expensive paperweights
due to the highly restrictive design.
Thankfully, a load of reverse engineering has laid the path to getting some new life out of these ambitious devices. The project could sure use help from anyone willing to pitch in, so if that’s up your alley be sure to join the project; you’ll be in good company. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140333",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-06-19T12:15:47",
"content": "I’d for sure have a sour taste in my mouth if I’d wasted $700 on an almost immediately defunct brick, but [Adam] said he’s put ~400 hours into this project…I certainly appreciate the hack and the project ... | 1,760,371,511.221154 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/19/iron-nitride-permanent-magnets-made-with-diy-ball-mill/ | Iron Nitride Permanent Magnets Made With DIY Ball Mill | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"iron nitride magnet",
"magnets"
] | Creating strong permanent magnets without using so-called rare earth elements is an ongoing topic of research. An interesting contestant here are iron nitride magnets (α”-Fe
16
N
2
), which have the potential to create permanents magnets on-par with with neodymium (Nd
2
Fe
14
B) magnets. The challenging aspect with Fe-N magnets is their manufacturing, with recently
[Ben Krasnow] giving it a shot
over at the [Applied Science] YouTube channel following the method in a
2016 scientific paper
by [Yanfeng Jiang] et al. in
Advanced Engineering Materials
.
This approach uses a ball mill (like [Ben]’s
planetary version
) with ammonium nitrate (NH
4
NO
3
) as the nitrogen source along with iron. After many hours of milling a significant part of the material is expected to have taken on the α”-Fe
16
N
2
phase, after which shock compaction is applied to create a bulk magnet. After the ball mill grinding, [Ben] used a kiln at 200°C for a day to fix the desired phase. Instead of shock compaction, casting in epoxy was used as alternative.
We
have covered
Fe-N magnets before, along with the promises they hold. As one can see in [Ben]’s video, oxidation is a big problem, with the typical sintering as with other magnet types not possible either. Ultimately this led to the resulting magnet being fairly weak, with a DIY magnetometer used to determine the strength of the created magnet.
Interestingly, there’s a
much newer paper
by [Tetsuji Saito] et al. from 2024 in
Metals
that does use sintering, specifically spark plasma sintering with dynamic compression (SPS-DC). SPS-DC can be done at fairly low temperatures (373 – 573 K, or 99.85 – 299.85 °C), producing much stronger magnets than [Ben] accomplished.
Although Fe-N magnets hold
a lot of promise
, they have lower coercivity. This means that they demagnetize easier, which is another aspect that weighs against them. For now it would seem that we aren’t quite ready to say farewell to Nd-Fe-B magnets. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140330",
"author": "prfesser",
"timestamp": "2025-06-19T12:01:26",
"content": "When using a rock tumbler to mill ingredients, there are optimum amounts of milling media and charge (the material being milled). Roughly, the jar is about half-full of media. Just enough charge is added... | 1,760,371,511.080597 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/18/gas-burner-reuses-printer-nozzle-for-metalwork/ | Gas Burner Reuses Printer Nozzle For Metalwork | Tyler August | [
"News"
] | [
"3D printer nozzle",
"forge",
"foundry",
"gas burner"
] | Even if you don’t cast or forge metal yourself, you’re probably aware that you need to get the material very, very hot to make that happen. While some smiths might still stoke coal fires, that’s a minority taste these days; most, like [mikeandmertle] use gas burners to generate the heat. Tired of expensive burners or finicky DIY options [mikeandmertle] built their
own Better Burner out of easily-available parts.
Everything you need to make this burner comes from the hardware store: threaded iron pipes of various sizes, hoses and adapters– except for one key piece: a 3D printer nozzle. The nozzle is used here as the all-important gas jet that introduces flammable gas into the burner’s mixing chamber. A demo video below shows it running with a 0.3mm nozzle, which looks like it is putting out some serious heat, but [mikeandmertle] found that could go out if the breather was opened too wide (allowing too much air in the mixture). Eventually he settled on a 0.4mm nozzle, at least for the LPG that is common down under. If one was to try this with propane, their mileage would differ.
That’s the great thing about using printer nozzles, though: with a tapped M6 hole on the cap of the gas pipe serving as intake, one can quickly and easily swap jets without worrying about re-boring. Printer nozzles are machined to reasonable accuracy and you can get a variety pack with all available sizes (including ones so small
you’re probably better off using resin
) very cheaply.
These sorts of use-what-you-have-on-hand hacks seem to be [mikeandmertle]’s specialty– we’ve seen their
PVC thumb nut
and their very simple
mostly-wooden wood lathe here before. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140230",
"author": "Jeff NME",
"timestamp": "2025-06-19T05:29:36",
"content": "Binzel or Tweko style screw-in MIG contact tips are also useful in this application.They range in orifice size from 0.8mm to 1.6mm, so there should be one suitable for whatever fuel-gas you decide to use... | 1,760,371,511.269895 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/18/a-number-of-microphones-er-inductors-rather/ | A Number Of Microphones… Er, Inductors, Rather | Al Williams | [
"hardware"
] | [
"coil",
"inductor",
"mutual inductance",
"toroid"
] | There’s a famous old story about [Charles Steinmetz] fixing a generator for [Henry Ford]. He charged a lot of money for putting a chalk X in the spot that needed repair. When [Ford] asked for an itemization, the bill read $1 for the chalk, and the balance for knowing where to draw the X. With today’s PCB layout tools, it seems easy to put components down on a board. But, as [Kasyan TV] points out in the video below, you
still have to know where to put them
.
The subject components are inductors, which are particularly picky about placement, especially if you have multiple inductors. After all, inductors affect one another — that’s how transformers work. So there are definite rules about good and bad ways to put a few inductors on a board.
However, in the video, air-core coils go through several orientations to see which configuration has the most and least interference. Using a ferrite core showed similar results. The final examples use toroids and shielded inductors.
One reason ferrite toroids are popular in radio designs is that coils made this way are largely self-shielding. This makes placement easier and means you don’t need metal “cans” to shield the inductors. How much do they shield? The orientation makes a little difference, but not by much. It is more important to give them a little space between the coils. Shields work, too, but note that they also change the inductance value.
While we like the idea of grabbing a breadboard and a scope to measure things, we want to point out that you can also
simulate
. If you didn’t understand the title, you probably don’t listen to
Propellerheads
. | 5 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140222",
"author": "JSL",
"timestamp": "2025-06-19T04:39:56",
"content": "This reminded me of the Heathkit SW717 receiver I built when I was 16. It had a persistent hum no matter how many capacitors I added to the (unregulated) power supply. I sold it cheap to a Polish immigrant ... | 1,760,371,511.313866 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/18/floss-weekly-episode-837-worlds-best-beta-tester/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 837: World’s Best Beta Tester | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"FLOSS Weekly"
] | This week
Jonathan
chats with Geekwife! What does a normal user really think of Linux on the desktop and Open Source options? And what is it really like, putting up with Jonathan’s shenanigans? Watch to find out!
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on
our YouTube Channel
? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or contact the guest and have them contact us!
Take a look at the schedule here
.
Direct Download
in DRM-free MP3.
If you’d rather read along,
here’s the transcript for this week’s episode
.
Places to follow the FLOSS Weekly Podcast:
Spotify
RSS
Theme music: “Newer Wave” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under
Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,511.353505 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/18/bhangmeterv2-answers-the-question-has-a-nuke-gone-off/ | BhangmeterV2 Answers The Question “Has A Nuke Gone Off?” | Tyler August | [
"internet hacks"
] | [
"gamma ray detector",
"global thermonuclear war",
"IoT",
"nuclear event detector",
"Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W"
] | You might think that a nuclear explosion is not something you need a detector for, but clearly not everyone agrees. [Bigcrimping] has not only built one,
the BhangmeterV2
, but he has its output publicly posted at
hasanukegoneoff.com,
in case you can’t go through your day without checking if someone has nuked Wiltshire.
The Bhangmeter is based on an off-the-shelf “nuclear event detector”, the HSN-1000L by Power Device Corporation.
The HSN 1000 Nuclear Event Detector at the heart of the build. We didn’t know this thing existed, never mind that it was still available.
Interfacing to the HSN-1000L is very easy: you give it power, and it gives you a pin that stays HIGH unless it detects the characteristic gamma ray pulse of a nuclear event. The gamma ray pulse occurs at the beginning of a “nuclear event” precedes the EMP by some microseconds, and the blast wave by perhaps many seconds, so the HSN-1000 series seems be aimed at triggering an automatic shutdown that might help preserve electronics in the event of a nuclear exchange.
[Bigcrimping] has wired the HSN-1000L to a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W to create the BhangmeterV2. In the event of a nuclear explosion, it will log the time the nuclear event detector’s pin goes low, and the JSON log is pushed to the cloud, hopefully to a remote server that won’t be vaporized or bricked-by-EMP along with the BhangmeterV2. Since it is only detecting the gamma ray pulse, the BhangmeterV2 is only sensitive to nuclear events within line-of-sight, which is really not where you want to be relative to a nuclear event. Perhaps V3 will include other detection methods– maybe even a
3D-printed neutrino detector?
If you survive the blast this project is designed to detect, you might need a
radiation detector to deal with the fallout.
For identifying exactly what radionuclide contamination is present, you might
want a gamma-ray spectrometer.
It’s a sad comment on the modern world that this hack feels both cold-war vintage and relevant again today. Thanks to [Tom] for the tip; if you have any projects you want to share,
we’d love to hear from you
whether they’d help us survive nuclear war or not. | 47 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "8140103",
"author": "topham",
"timestamp": "2025-06-18T20:12:56",
"content": "Mock testing is good, but when you’re testing for Disaster Recovery purposes it really is worth while running the best test you can do.Now, where do you get a small nuke…",
"parent_id": null,
"dept... | 1,760,371,511.466034 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/17/statusnotifieritem-how-standard-non-standards-tear-linux-desktops-apart/ | StatusNotifierItem: How Standard Non-Standards Tear Linux Desktops Apart | Maya Posch | [
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"linux desktop"
] | Theoretically when you write a GUI-based application for Linux there are standards to follow, with these all neatly documented over at the Freedesktop website. However, in reality, Freedesktop is more of a loose collection of specifications, some of which are third-party specifications that have somehow become the de facto standard. One example of this is the StatusNotifierItem spec that provides a way for applications to create and manage a ‘system tray’ icon.
This feature is incredibly useful for providing a consistent way to users for quickly accessing functionality and to see application status. Unfortunately, as [Brodie Robertson]
notes in a recent video
, not everyone agrees with this notion. Despite that Windows since 95 as well as MacOS/OS X and others provide similar functionality, Gnome and other Linux desktop environments oppose such system tray icons (despite a
popular extension
), with an inevitable
discussion on Reddit
as a result.
Although the StatusNotifierItem specification
is listed
on the Freedesktop website, it’s under ‘Draft specifications’ along with another, apparently internal-but-unfinished System tray proposal. Meanwhile DEs like KDE have integrated first-party support (
KStatusNotifierItem
) for the specification. There’s currently an active Freedesktop
Gitlab discussion
on the topic, whether StatusNotifierItem should even be in the list, or become an approved specification.
With the specification mired in bureaucracy and multiple camps pushing their own idea of what ‘the Linux desktop’ should look like, it
feels like a real shame
that the Linux Standard Base effort died a decade ago. Users and developers just want their desktop environment to come with zero surprises, after all. | 65 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "8139836",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-06-18T02:38:47",
"content": "Ya why I hate Linux its standards are not standard",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8139839",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-06-18T02:45... | 1,760,371,511.565791 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/17/making-a-brushless-dc-motor-winding-machine/ | Making A Brushless DC Motor Winding Machine | John Elliot V | [
"hardware",
"Microcontrollers",
"Robots Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"BLDC",
"brushless DC motor",
"wire winding"
] | Over on his YouTube channel our hacker [Yuchi] is building an
STM32 BLDC motor winding machine
.
This machine is for winding brushless motors because manual winding is highly labor intensive. The machine in turn is made from four brushless motors. He is using the
SimpleFOC
library to implement closed-loop angle control. Closed-loop torque control is also used to maintain correct wire tension.
The system is controlled by an STM32G431 microcontroller. The motor driver used is the DRV8313. There are three GBM5208 75T Gimbal motors for close-loop angle control, and one BE4108 60T Gimbal motor for torque control. The torque control motor was built with this machine! [Yuchi] says that the Gimbal motors used are designed to be smooth, precise, and powerful at low speeds.
The components of the machine communicate with each other over a CAN bus. This simplifies wiring as components (such as motor controller boards) only require four connections.
Thanks to [Ben] for writing in to let us know about this project. If you’re interested in automated wire winding we have certainly covered that before here at Hackaday. You might like to check out
Tips For Winding Durable Coils With Nice, Flat Sides
or
Coil Winding Machine Makes It Easy
. | 35 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8139788",
"author": "Sven Hapsbjorg",
"timestamp": "2025-06-17T23:10:41",
"content": "Why fixate on STM32 when literally the same task can be acomplished by any MCU made in the last 40 years. You could even build this using NES or Amiga.My spidey senses tell me it’s mostly marketing... | 1,760,371,511.712108 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/17/the-most-trustworthy-usb-c-cable-is-diy/ | The Most Trustworthy USB-C Cable Is DIY | Tyler August | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"diy or buy",
"USB cable",
"USB-C PD"
] | We like USB-C here at Hackaday, but like all specifications it is up to manufacturers to follow it and sometimes… they don’t. Sick of commercial cables either don’t label their safe wattage, or straight up lie about it, [GreatScott!] decided to
DIY his own ultimate USB-C-PD cable for faster charging
in his latest video, which is embedded below.
It’s a very quick project that uses off-the-shelf parts from Aliexpress: the silicone-insulated cable, the USB-C plugs (one with the all-important identifier chip), and the end shells. The end result is a bit more expensive than a cable from Aliexpress, but it is a lot more trustworthy. Unlike the random cable from Aliexpress, [GreatScott!] can be sure his has enough copper in it to handle the 240W it is designed for. It should also work nicely with USB PPS,
which he clued us into a while back
. While [GreatScott!] was focusing here on making a power cable, he did hook up the low-speed data lines, giving him a trustworthy USB2.0 connection.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen someone test
USB gear and find it wanting
, though the problem may have improved in the last few years. Nowadays it’s the
data cables you cannot trust
, so maybe rolling your own data cables will make a comeback. (Which would at least be less tedious than than DB-25 was back in the day. Anyone else remember doing that?) USB-C can get pretty complicated when it comes to all its data modes, but we have an
explainer to get you started on that. | 41 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8139767",
"author": "electrobob",
"timestamp": "2025-06-17T21:37:20",
"content": "TBH, i am amazed about how many loose ends the USB C and USB-PD leave out.There is just too much freedom and combinations that your average person cannot make any sense of it.Couldn’t they just fix a f... | 1,760,371,511.641167 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/17/dead-amstrad-becomes-something-new/ | Dead Amstrad Becomes Something New | Tyler August | [
"classic hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"Amstrad",
"casemod",
"mini pc",
"pc case",
"retro computer",
"sleeper pc"
] | When you run into old hardware you cannot restore, what do you do? Toss it? Sell it for parts? If you’re [TME Retro],
you hide a high-end mini PC inside an Amstrad-shaped sleeper build
.
The donor laptop is an Amstrad ALT-286 with glorious 80s styling that
[TME Retro] tried to save in a previous video
. Even with help from the community there was no saving this unit, so we can put away the pitchforks and torches. This restomod is perhaps the best afterlife the old Amstrad could have hoped for.
At first [TME Retro] was going to try and fit an iPad Pro screen, but it turned out those don’t have the driver-board ecosystem the smaller iPads do, so he went with a non-retina LCD panel from Amazon instead. Shoving an LCD where an LCD used to live and sticking an expensive mini-PC inside a bulky 80s case is not the most inspiring of hacks, but that’s not all [TME Retro] did.
Clever dongles keep the original ports intact while allowing modern connectivity.
First, they were able to save the original keyboard, thanks to the longevity of the PC/AT standard and a PS/2 dongle — after all, PS/2 is essentially AT with a different connector. Then they produced what has to be the world’s highest-bandwidth parallel-port dongle by routing the two gigabit network ports through the original 25-pin connector. USB is a serial bus, so breaking out two USB ports via the pins one of the old serial ports makes thematic sense. The second serial port is set up to take a PS/2 mouse instead of the serial mouse you might have used in the 80s. USB-C is still available via an adapter that went into the original expansion slot.
We’ve seen this sort of modding before, of course, on everything from 1980s vintage
Mac Classics
and
LCD-386 portable PC
s to 1990s
Jellybean iMac G3s,
to the
internet-famous Hotwheels PC
. It’s always sad to see old hardware fail, but arguably these casemods are a lot more usable to their owners than the original hardware could ever be in 2025. | 7 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8139804",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-06-18T00:05:21",
"content": "Gigabit network ports |= Gigabyte network ports",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8139995",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "202... | 1,760,371,511.931228 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/17/keebin-with-kristina-the-one-with-the-gaming-typewriter/ | Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Gaming Typewriter | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"banzai",
"bonsai",
"columbia index typewriter",
"gaming typewriter",
"index typewriter",
"Parkinson's disease",
"spelling bee"
] | Can you teach an old typewriter new tricks?
You can, at least if you’re [maniek-86]
. And a word to all you typewriter fanatics out there — this Optima SP 26 was beyond repair, lacking several internal parts.
Image by [maniek-86] via
reddit
But the fully available keyboard was a great start for a gaming typewriter. So [maniek-86] crammed in some parts that were just laying around unused, starting with a micro-ATX motherboard.
But let’s talk about the keyboard. It has a standard matrix, which [maniek-86] hooked up to an Arduino Lenoardo. Although the keyboard has a Polish layout, [maniek-86] remapped it to English-US layout.
As you’ll see in the
photos of the internals
, this whole operation required careful Tetris-ing of the components to avoid overheating and ensure the cover could go back on.
The graphics were a bit of a challenge, since the motherboard had no PCI-E x16 slot. To address this, [maniek-86] used a riser cable, probably connected to a PCI-E x1 slot with an adapter, in order to use an NVIDIA GT 635 GPU. It can’t run AAA games at 4k, but you can bet that it’ll play Minecraft, Fortnite, or Dota 2 just fine.
Parkinson’s Keyboard Design Starts With the Human Body
This is
OnCue
, designed by [Alessandra Galli]. For Andrea, design is a “vehicle for care, inclusion, and meaningful social impact,” and these values are evident in her creation.
Image by [Alessandra Galli] via
Design Wanted
What makes OnCue different? Lots of things. For one, there’s a pair of wearable cuffs which use haptic feedback and visual cues to help alleviate symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. The keycaps are like little trays for your fingers, so it’s much harder to accidentally hit neighboring keys while typing.
The keys themselves have haptic feedback as well as the cuffs. AI-driven visual cues light up the most likely next letters, which is interesting. And everybody deserves a split layout.
Although wrist-based haptic feedback was the most well-received feature based on user feedback, it’s interesting to note that no single feature stood out as preferred by all. Users found the haptic feedback calming and relaxing, which is a huge win compared to the usual keyboard experience faced by users with Parkinson’s disease. Because the overall Parkinson’s experience is different for everyone, [Alessandra] took a modular approach to designing the customization software. Users can adjust the settings based on routines, preferences, and intensity of symptoms. And plus it looks to me like there’s a haptic feedback slider right there on the keyboard.
The Centerfold: Bonsai? Banzai!
Image by [mugichanman] via
reddit
Again, isn’t this just
nice
?
The overall look, of course. I wouldn’t be able to use that keyboard or probably that mouse, but maybe that keyboard hiding on the right would work.
Regarding the real bonsai on the right shelf, [mugichanman] keeps it outside for the most part. It only comes indoors for a little while — three days at the absolute most. If you’re interested in the care and feeding of these tiny trees,
check out this bonsai master class in a book
.
Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad?
Send me a picture
along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!
Historical Clackers: the Columbia Index Typewriter
Remember
the Caligraph
? Probably not, so I’ll wait. Well, apparently inventor Charles Spiro was hellbent on building a better Caligraph after he saw one being used. But he couldn’t raise enough capital to create such a large machine, so instead he went down to the basement and came up with
the Columbia Index Typewriter
.
Image via
The Antikey Chop
If you’ll recall, index typewriters are like label makers — you must choose each character using an index of some kind. Operating this machine was no different.
One simply turned the straight handle on the right side to choose the character, which was highlighted by a small hand. Then the user would just press down on the handle to print it, and this action locked the typewheel so it wouldn’t slip and print something different.
Interestingly, the Columbia was the first typewriter with proportional spacing. That means that the carriage advanced based on the width of individual characters.
Columbia typewriters were only made for three years, from 1884-87. Three models were produced — Nos. 1 and 2, followed by an improved No. 2. The Columbia shown here is a No. 1, which typed in uppercase only. The 2 came out in March 1885 and could do upper and lowercase. The improved No. 2 was more robust and better mechanically, as well as being easier on the eyes. By 1887, Spiro was working on
the Bar-Lock typewriter
.
Finally, One-Handed Keyboard Does It Flat Out
The journey toward
the keyboard you see here
began with an email to [HTX Studio]. It came from a father who wanted to see his daughter be digitally independent again after an accident took the use of her right hand.
Image by [HTX Studio] via
Yanko Design
He asked the company to build a one-handed keyboard with a built-in trackball mouse, and even included a drawing of what he envisioned.
After several iterations, each tested by the daughter, the result is a compact, 61-key affair in a fanned-out arrangement for ease of use. Everything is within close reach, with special consideration given to the location of Space and Delete.
One of the early iterations had the user moving the entire keyboard around to mouse. While that’s definitely an interesting solution, I’m glad that everyone settled on the nicely exposed trackball with left and right click buttons above Space and Delete.
Another thing I’m happy about is that [HTX Studio] not only built 50 more of these in both left- and right-handed models and gave them away to people who need them,
they went ahead and open-sourced it
(Chinese,
translated
). Be sure to check out their fantastic video below.
Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards?
Help me out by sending in a link or two
. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to
email me directly
. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8139878",
"author": "Ewald",
"timestamp": "2025-06-18T05:18:03",
"content": "I love the story about the one handed keyboard and the fact that they choose to make it open source. It’s also a great video about the design proces, thanks for sharing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth"... | 1,760,371,511.802106 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/17/a-diy-version-of-the-franck-hertz-experiment/ | A DIY Version Of The Franck-Hertz Experiment | John Elliot V | [
"hardware",
"Science"
] | [
"Franck-Hertz Experiment",
"quantum physics"
] | The Franck–Hertz experiment was a pioneering physics observation announced in 1914 which explained that energy came in “packets” which we call “quanta”, marking the beginning of quantum physics. Recently, [Markus Bindhammer] wrote in to let us know he had
redone the experiment for himself.
In the original experiment a mercury vacuum tube was used, but in his recreation of the experiment [Markus] uses a cheaper argon tube. He still gets the result he is looking for though, which is quite remarkable. If you watch the video you will see the current readings clump around specific voltage levels. These voltage levels indicate that energy is quantized, which was a revolutionary idea at the time. If you’re interested in how contemporary physics regards, particles, waves, and quanta, check out this excellent presentation:
But What Actually Is a Particle? How Quantum Fields Shape Reality
.
Before closing we have to say that the quality of [Markus]’s build was exceptional. He made a permanent enclosure for his power supplies, made custom PCBs, used ferrule crimps for all his wire interconnects, included multiple power switches and dials, professionally labeled and insulated everything, and even went to the trouble of painting the box! Truly a first class build. One thing that surprised us though was his use of rivets where we would almost certainly have used bolts or screws… talk about confidence in your workmanship!
If you’re interested in quantum physics it is certainly a topic we have covered here at Hackaday. Check out
Quantum Mechanics And Negative Time With Photon-Atom Interactions
or
Shedding Light On Quantum Measurement With Calcite
. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8139669",
"author": "Markus Bindhammer",
"timestamp": "2025-06-17T16:36:53",
"content": "The “Physics explained” channel ist one of my favorite theoretical physics channel. For most of the videos, high school math is enough to follow.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"re... | 1,760,371,511.86681 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/17/a-gentle-introduction-to-ncurses-for-the-terminally-impatient/ | A Gentle Introduction To Ncurses For The Terminally Impatient | Maya Posch | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Slider",
"Software Development",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"cli",
"command line",
"ncurses",
"terminal"
] | Considered by many to be just a dull output for sequential text, the command-line terminal is a veritable canvas to the creative software developer. With the cursor as the brush, entire graphical user interfaces can be constructed, or even a basic text-based dashboard on which values can be updated without redrawing the entire screen over and over, or opting for a much heavier solution like a GUI.
Ncurses is one of the most well-known and rather portable Terminal User Interface (TUI) libraries using that such cursor control, and more, can be achieved in a fairly painless manner. That said, for anyone coming from a graphical user interface framework, the concepts and terminology with ncurses and similar can be confusingly different yet overlapping, so that getting started can be somewhat harrowing.
In this article we’ll take a look at ncurses’ history, how to set it up and how to use it with C and C++, and many more languages supported via bindings.
Tools And Curses
The acronym
TUI
is actually a so-called retronym, as TUIs were simply the way of life before the advent of bitmapped, videocard-accelerated graphics. In order to enable more than just basic, sequential character output, the terminal had to support commands that would move the cursor around the screen, along with commands that affect the way text is displayed. This basic sequence of moving the cursor and updating active attributes is what underlies TUIs, with the system’s supported character sets determining the scope of displayed characters.
Ncurses,
short for “new
curses
“, is an evolution of the
curses
library by Ken Arnold as originally released in 1978 for BSD UNIX, where it saw use with a number of games like
Rogue
. Originally it was a freely distributable clone of System V Release 4.0 (SVr4)
curses
by the time of its release in 1993,
based on
the existing
pcurses
package. Later, ncurses adopted a range of new features over the course of its subsequent development by multiple authors that distinguished it from
curses
, and would result in it becoming the new de-facto default across a wide range of platforms.
The current version is maintained by Thomas Dickey, and the ncurses library and development files are readily available from your local package manager, or downloadable from the
ncurses website
. Compiling and running ncurses-based application is straightforward on Linux, BSD, and MacOS courtesy of the
libncurses
and related files being readily available and often already installed. On Windows you can use the MinGW port, with
MSYS2
providing an appropriate terminal emulator, as well as the
pacman
package manager and access to the same ncurses functionality as on the other platforms.
Hello Curses
The core ncurses functionality can be accessed after including the
ncurses.h
header. There are two standard extensions in the
panel.h
and
menu.h
headers for panel stack management and menus, respectively. Panels are effectively wrappers around an ncurses window that automate a lot of the tedious juggling of multiple potentially overlapping windows. The menu extension is basically what it says on the tin, and makes creating and using menus easier.
For a ‘hello world’ ncurses application we’d write the following:
This application initializes ncurses before writing the
Hello World!
string to both the top left, at (2, 2) and the center of the terminal window, with the terminal window size being determined dynamically with
getmaxyx()
. The
mvprintw()
and
mvwprintw()
work like
printf()
, with both taking the coordinates to move the cursor to the indicated position in row (y), column (x) order. The extra ‘w’ after ‘mv’ in the function name indicates that it targets a specific window, which here is
stdscr
, but could be a custom window. Do note that ncurses works with y/x instead of the customary x/y order.
Next, we use attributes in this example to add some color. We initialize a pair, on index 1, using
predefined
colors and enable this attribute with
attron()
and the
COLOR_PAIR
macro before printing the text.
Attributes
can also be used to render text as bold, italic, blinking, dimmed, reversed and many more styles.
Finally, we turn the color attribute back off and wait for a keypress with
getch()
before cleaning up with
endwin()
. This code is also available along with a Makefile to build it in
this GitHub repository
as
hello_ncurses.cpp
. Note that on Windows (MSYS2) the include path for the ncurses header is different, and you have to compile with the
-DNCURSES_STATIC
define to be able to link.
Here the background, known as the standard screen (
stdscr
) is used to write to, but we can also segment this surface into windows, which are effectively overlays on top of this background.
Multi-Window Application
The Usagi Electric 1 (UE1) emulator with ncurses front-end.
There’s more to an ncurses application than just showing pretty text on the screen. There is also handling keyboard input and continuously updating on-screen values. These features are demonstrated in e.g. the
emulator which I wrote recently
for David Lovett’s Usagi Electric 1 (UE1) vacuum tube-based 1-bit computer. This was my first ever ncurses project, and rather educational as a result.
Using David’s QuickBasic-based version as the basis, I wrote a C++ port that differs from the QB version in that there’s no single large loop, but rather a separate CPU (
processor.cpp
) thread that processes the instructions, while the front-end (
ue1_emu.cpp
) contains the user input processing loop as well as the ncurses-specific functionality. This helps to keep the processor core’s code as generic as possible. Handling command line flags and arguments is taken care of by another project of mine:
Sarge
.
This UE1 front-end creates two
ncurses windows
with a specific size, draws a box using the default characters and refreshes the windows to make them appear. The default text is drawn with a slight offset into the window area, except for the ‘title’ on the border, which is simply text printed with leading and trailing spaces with a column offset but on row zero.
Handling user input with
getch()
wouldn’t work here, as that function is specific to
stdscr
and would foreground that ‘window’. Ergo we need to use the following:
int key = wgetch(desc)
. This keeps the ‘desc’ window in focus and obtains the key input from there.
During each CPU cycle the
update_display()
function is called, in which successive
mvwprintw()
calls are made to update on-screen values, making sure to blank out previous data to prevent ghosting, with
clrtoeol()
and kin as the nuclear option. The only use of attributes is with color and bold around the processor state, indicating a running state in bold green and halted with bold red.
Finally, an interesting and crucial part of ncurses is the
beep()
function, which does what it says on the tin. For UE1 it’s used to indicate success by ringing the bell of the system (inspired by the Bendix G-15), which here provides a more subtle beep but can be used to e.g. indicate a successful test run. There’s also the
flash()
function that unsurprisingly flashes the terminal to get the operator’s attention.
A Much Deeper Rabbit Hole
By the time that you find yourself writing an ncurses-based application on the level of, say, Vim, you will need a bit more help just keeping track of all the separate windows that you will be creating. This is where the
Panel library
comes into play, which are basically wrappers for windows that automate a lot of the tedious stuff such as refreshing windows and keeping track of the window stack.
Applications also love to have menus, which can either be painstakingly created and managed using core ncurses features, or simplified with the
Menu library
. For everyone’s favorite data-entry widget, there is the
Forms library
, which provides not only the widgets, but also provides field validation features. If none of this is enough for your purposes, then there’s the Curses Development Kit (
CDK
). For less intensive purposes, such as just popping up a dialog from a shell script, there is the
dialog
utility that comes standard on Linux and many other platforms and provides easy access to ncurses functionality with very little fuss.
All of which serves to state that the ground covered in this article merely scratches the surface, even if it should be enough to get one at least part-way down the ncurses rabbit hole and hopefully appreciative of the usefulness of TUIs even in today’s bitmapped GUI world.
Header image:
ncurses-tetris
by [Won Yong Jang]. | 23 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8139634",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-06-17T15:09:05",
"content": "Cool. I like NCurses and it was on my “to learn” list for quite a while.But have you seen NotCurses???I want to learn that! The documentation though is mostly for C which I haven’t really done much with... | 1,760,371,512.080743 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/17/how-discord-was-ported-to-windows-95-and-nt-3-1/ | How Discord Was Ported To Windows 95 And NT 3.1 | Maya Posch | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"Discord",
"msn messenger",
"windows 95"
] | On the desktop, most people use the official HTML and JavaScript-based client for Discord in either a browser or a still-smells-like-a-browser Electron package. Yet what if there was a way to use a third-party client and even run it on Windows XP, Windows 95, and NT 3.1? This is exactly what
[iDontProgramInCpp] did with their Discord Messenger project
.
Fortunately, as a web ‘app’ the Discord API is readily accessible and they don’t seem to be in a rush to ban third-party clients. But it did require a bit of work to add newer versions of TLS encryption to Windows XP and older. Fortunately OpenSSL still supports these older platforms, so this was not a major hurdle and Windows XP happily ran this new Discord client. That left porting to older Windows versions.
Most of the challenge lies in writing shims for API calls that do not exist on these older platforms when backporting software from Windows XP to older Windows versions, and GCC (MinGW) had to be used instead of MSVC, but this also was a relatively minor detail. Finally, Windows NT 3.1 was picked as the last challenge for Discord Messenger, which ran into MSVCRT runtime issues and required backporting features to the NT 3.1 version that was still part of the OS back then.
[MattKC] covers the project in a recent video
, as well as the
AeroChat
client which targets Windows Live Messenger fans. Hopefully the API that allows these projects to operate doesn’t get locked down, as third-party clients like these bring their own unique advantages to the Discord ecosystem. | 27 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8139580",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2025-06-17T11:20:38",
"content": "Now do win32s.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8139585",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-17T11:48:33",
"content": ... | 1,760,371,512.14608 |
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