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https://hackaday.com/2025/06/05/leakage-control-for-coupled-coils/
|
Leakage Control For Coupled Coils
|
Heidi Ulrich
|
[
"how-to",
"Parts"
] |
[
"coil",
"coupled",
"inductor",
"leakage",
"magnetic",
"math",
"model"
] |
Think of a circuit model that lets you move magnetic leakage around like sliders on a synth, without changing the external behavior of your coupled inductors. [Sam Ben-Yaakov] walks you through just that in
his video ‘Versatile Coupled Inductor Circuit Model and Examples of Its Use’
.
The core idea is as follows. Coupled inductors can be modeled in dozens of ways, but this one adds a twist: a tunable parameter
𝑥
between k and
1
(where k is the coupling coefficient). This fourth degree of freedom doesn’t change L
₁
, L
₂
or mutual inductance M (they remain invariant) but it lets you shuffle leakage where you want it, giving practical flexibility in designing or simulating
transformers
, converters, or filters with asymmetric behavior.
If you need leakage on one side only, set
𝑥
=k. Prefer symmetrical split? Set
𝑥
=1. It’s like parametric EQ, but magnetic. And: the maths holds up. As [Sam Ben-Yaakov] derives and confirms that for any
𝑥
in the range, external characteristics remain identical.
It’s especially useful when testing edge cases, or explaining inductive quirks that don’t behave quite like ideal transformers should. A good model to stash in your toolbox.
As we’ve seen previously
, [Sam Ben-Yaakov] is at home when it comes to concepts that need tinkering, trial and error, and a dash of visuals to convey.
| 3
| 2
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8135754",
"author": "Ali",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T20:18:26",
"content": "Doing math may take literal weeks. Redesigning a circuit to fix the problem will usually take 1 or 2 hours with a soldering iron and a scope. If it’s not done for a hobby I don’t see it as viable option – that is unless you’re actively looking to get fired for “doing engineering”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135919",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T08:10:48",
"content": "You are right (although weeks is an exaggeration), but if you’re designing something professionally, you should do both. Fix it quickly with the scope to buy time, then do the math to know why it works",
"parent_id": "8135754",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135894",
"author": "SparkyGSX",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T06:23:57",
"content": "A soldering iron is not what you use for designing anything.I’ve designed switchmode converters with a very high power density (for an aircraft). The design takes months before you build anything, only than you build a prototype, measure and probe, and iterate until it’s perfect.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,524.13922
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/05/supercon-2024-from-consultant-to-prototyper-on-a-shoestring-budget/
|
Supercon 2024: From Consultant To Prototyper On A Shoestring Budget
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] |
[
"2024 Hackaday Superconference",
"consultancy",
"prototyping",
"shoes",
"Supercon 2024",
"talk"
] |
Many engineers graduate from their studies and head out into the workforce, seeking a paycheck and a project at some existing company or other. Often, it’s not long before an experienced engineer begins to contemplate striking out on their own, working as a skilled gun-for-hire that makes their own money and their own hours.
It’s a daunting leap, but with the promise of rich rewards for those that stick the landing. That very leap is one that our own Dave Rowntree made. He came to Supercon 2024 to tell us what the journey was like,
and how he wound up working on some very special shoes.
The Journey
Dave’s talk begins right at the start of his career. He graduated from college around the turn of the millenium, and headed right into to the big game. He landed a job at Phillips Semiconductors, and dived into what was then a rapidly-developing field—digital television! He quickly learned a great deal about embedded programming, but found the actual electronics skills he’d picked up during his studies weren’t being put to much use. Sadly, redundancies struck his company, and he was forced to pivot to stick around. A spot opened up in the IC test and manufacturing support group, and he jumped in there, before later decamping to a fabless semiconductor company as a test engineer. He then used his education and experience to leverage a leap into the design side of things, which brought the benefit of allowing him to join the royalty program.
Things were on the up for Dave, right until the redundancy train came around once again. The inconvenience, combined with a lack of jobs in his field in the UK, pushed him to consider a major lifestyle change. He’d strike out on his own.
Early on in his consulting and prototyping career, Dave found himself type cast as “the PCB guy.”
At this time, he explains how he tangled with the many challenges involved in working for one’s self. Not least of which, the difficulty of actually establishing a functional business in the UK, from bureaucratic red tape to handling the necessary marketing and financials.
He found his first jobs by working with so-called “innovation companies”—which provide services to those looking for design help to bring their ideas to life. These companies generally lacked engineering staff, so Dave’s services proved valuable to this specific market. It provided Dave some income, but came with a problem. After several years, he realized he had no public portfolio of work, because everything he’d worked on was under a non-disclosure agreement of some form or other.
He’s currently engaged in research and development of airbag-equipped shoes that could theoretically protect against ankle injuries.
Eventually, he realized he’d ended up in a “box.” He’d become “the PCB guy,” finding his work stagnating despite having such a broad and underexploited skillset. This didn’t sit right, and it was time for change once again. “I’m just thinking I don’t want to be a PCB guy,” Dave explains. “I want to do it all.” Thus was born his push into new fields. He built an arcade machine, art installations, and kept working to push himself out of his comfort zone.
Eventually, something exciting came down the line that really inspired him. “Some guys wanted me to build something, and it was totally oddball,” he says. “They wanted me to put an airbag in a basketball shoe.” The concept was simple enough—the airbag was intended to deploy to protect the wearer if excessive ankle roll was detected. Building the shoe in real life would be the perfect opportunity for him to stretch his abilities.
Despite his initial misgivings around the idea of putting explosives in shoes, the team behind the idea were able to twist Dave’s arm. “If I want to break out of the box of being just a PCB guy, maybe this is it,” he thought. “Why the hell not!”
While Dave’s engineering training didn’t focus a whole lot on feet, he’s been learning a great deal of late as he produces his own custom podiatric force sensors.
The rest of Dave’s talk covers how the project came to break him out of his design funk, and how he’s tackling the difficult engineering problems involved. Even more joyously, he’s able to talk openly about it since there’s no NDA involved. He compares plans to use pyrotechnic devices versus stored gas systems, tears down commercial shoes for research, and even his journey into the world of scanning feet and making his own force sensors. As much as he was leveraging his existing skill base, he’s also been expanding it rapidly to meet the new challenges of a truly wild shoe project.
Dave’s talk is an inspiring walk through how he developed a compelling and satisfying engineering career without just going by the book. It’s also an enjoyable insight into the world of weird airbag shoes that sound too fantastical to exist. If you’ve ever thought about leaving the career world behind and going out on your own, Dave’s story is a great one to study.
| 10
| 3
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8135710",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T17:35:26",
"content": "Boots, stiff?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135726",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T19:08:37",
"content": "This should be a ‘failure analysis’.The failure was going into a marketing (read ‘Bullshit’) space (shoes) with a tech approach.Doomed!You can’t ‘STEM’ successfully in art, ego and bullshit dominated market spaces.e.g. Compete in vodka with a genuinely better product and no marketing budget.I know, I know, pure ethanol and water.Science not art.Solved problem.I digress, but you get the point.You don’t even have to get into all the reasons this is dumb product to decide not to invest time or money in making a new sneaker…Which NBA player’s name is going on it?Got placement in few rap videos?‘Influencers’ bribed to wear them?Engineers know how to look at problems via multiple mental lenses/squints.One of those needs to be ‘business’.Just don’t get carried away.Down that path lies madness, MBAs and lobotomies.Not in that order.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136087",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T22:08:25",
"content": "Also airbags on your shoes is just a silly unmarketable idea.",
"parent_id": "8135726",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136192",
"author": "Dagneld",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T11:04:44",
"content": "Let people have their fun.",
"parent_id": "8135726",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8137078",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-06-09T20:58:46",
"content": "I don’t know, Sigma Aldrich sells vodka for $173 a bottle, and seems to be doing quite well for themselves.",
"parent_id": "8135726",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8136158",
"author": "kake",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T06:31:47",
"content": "Doing something new doesn’t require it to be marketable, intelligent or even a good idea. If the “rocket doesn’t fly”, just change it towards something else, and at some point it will become a success. Just ending something because it wasn’t a success on the first try is a reciepe for disaster. Noone hits the mark in the first try.I speak from 30 years of experience in development. A product can be a total flop if you sell it as one thing, but a success if you sell it as something else. So an engineering success can become a marketing failure, not because of the engineering, but because of marketing.What I can say with certainity is that no-sayers, critics and generally negative people should do something else. It is ok to be critical of something, but be constructive critical – have an idea of how to improve something you see as “unfit” into something that works. If you don’t have anything positive to add, then keep the f..k away from both prototyping and innovation.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136310",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T19:44:58",
"content": "There is a whole industry dedicated to separating ‘inventors’ from their money.That industry includes a significant part of the patent lawyer population.I personally have saved a couple of friends retirement funds from big hits.One of them thought he could compete with proctor and gamble, get space on supermarket shelves, w something he saw in Europe, wanted to patent in the USA.Product was basically: ‘Yeah, Germans are nuts that way. Bet it sells even better in Switzerland.’Even he knew the ‘Inventor support’ people were scams.But he was talking to an ‘inexpensive’ (read bad and unqualified) patent lawyer, and that lawyer was working on extracting a low 5 figure retainer at the time I interfered.Should I have told him ‘Go for it’?I have actual inventions that I don’t patent and employers have patented my work in the past (I’ve seen the process, 1 patent is useless, shotgun over specificity, 10k$+ per small gauge shystershot).I understand that a patent is just a certificate allowing you to spend even more money on lawyers later.If you don’t have a litigation budget to go with it, it’s useless.A patent search just puts you on the hook for extra damages should you be infringing on some deep pocketed scumbag’s ‘I patented using computers’ claim later.None of these people had any engineering chops BTW.No idea how patents work in the real world.My life’s ambition…To invent a new crime.I won’t be satisfied unless more than 50% of the sovereign nations in the world quickly make whatever I eventually do illegal, after it becomes public.I also have to get filthy rich in the process.Not listening to ‘no-sayers, critics and generally negative people’…GD ‘Computer fraud and abuse act’ makes anything a federal judge doesn’t like retroactively illegal.Is complication.PostIpsofacto postSchmisofacto says the federal judge, as he waggles his wig, just so…",
"parent_id": "8136158",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136701",
"author": "TacticalNinja",
"timestamp": "2025-06-09T06:33:37",
"content": "Can’t even tell if this is AI generated.",
"parent_id": "8136310",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8137081",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-06-09T21:01:40",
"content": "I’m gonna invent something that fills the holes in p-type silicon. My transistors keep showing up half-empty; feels like I’m getting ripped off.",
"parent_id": "8136310",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8137717",
"author": "Nick",
"timestamp": "2025-06-11T04:19:59",
"content": "My life’s ambition…To invent a new crime.Bender from Futurama has already invented burgle-larcen-arsony… but taccording to the show that happens in around the year 3000 so you have almost a thousand years to commit lots of prior art.Unfortunately, just like patents, most new crimes are just the same old crimes appended with “…on a computer.”",
"parent_id": "8136310",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,524.431471
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/05/a-steady-vacuum-for-the-fastest-cassette-tape-drive-ever/
|
A Steady Vacuum For The Fastest Cassette Tape Drive Ever
|
Jenny List
|
[
"classic hacks",
"hardware"
] |
[
"cassette tape",
"tape drive",
"vacuum"
] |
If you think of a 1960s mainframe computer, it’s likely that your mental image includes alongside the cabinets with the blinkenlights, a row of reel-to-reel tape drives. These refrigerator-sized units had a superficial resemblance to an audio tape deck, but with the tape hanging down in a loop either side of the head assembly. This loop was held by a vacuum to allow faster random access speeds at the head, and this fascinates [Thorbjörn Jemander].
He’s trying to create a cassette tape drive that can load 64 kilobytes in ten seconds
, so he’s starting by replicating the vacuum columns of old.
The video below is the first of a series on this project, and aside from explaining the tape drive’s operation, it’s really an in-depth exploration of centrifugal fan design. He discovers that it’s speed rather than special impeller design that matters, and in particular a closed impeller delivers the required vacuum. We like his home-made manometer in particular.
What he comes up with is a 3D printed contraption with a big 12 volt motor on the back, and a slot for a cassette on the front. It achieves the right pressure, and pulls the tape neatly down into a pair of loops. We’d be curious to know whether a faster motor such as you might find in a drone would deliver more for less drama, but we can see the genesis of a fascinating project here. Definitely a series to watch.
Meanwhile, if your interest extends to those early machine rooms,
have a wallow in the past
.
| 39
| 15
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8135670",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T15:39:22",
"content": "Youtube has its downs, but it’s great to see a silly project like this one come along every once in a while.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135678",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T16:08:35",
"content": "One thing he seems to be missing, those tape drives of old controlled both spools.However, there were backup tape mechanisms which controlled both spools and used a “standard” audio cassette (with a notch in the middle of the top to identify it to a couple of micro switches), I’m pretty sure they write and read lot faster than a standard audio cassette recorder by using four or more tracks and possibly multi tones as well as running the tape faster.I guess that would be cheating though?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135714",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T18:06:40",
"content": "Usagi has one of those Techtran units. He got it working and is using it to store and retrieve programs for his DG Nova 1200.",
"parent_id": "8135678",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135683",
"author": "Vance",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T16:30:07",
"content": "We used IBM 3420 tape drives in the data center I worked in as an operator in the mid 80s. We had 16 of them.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135688",
"author": "Queseth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T16:41:00",
"content": "Give that a casette tape has around 50 dB SNR and 15 KHz bandwidth (according to random internet searches) the Shannon capacity is around 250 kbps, so it should not be that hard to reach the required 50 kbps speed he is targeting. That is on a single channel, multiple channels of course gives more capacity.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135725",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T19:04:45",
"content": "… as well described not even a quarter way into the video.Way to say you didn’t watch the video without telling us you didn’t watch the video.Do you also comment authoritatively on books you haven’t read?",
"parent_id": "8135688",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135760",
"author": "Megol",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T20:42:47",
"content": "He didn’t comment on the video though, but on the article?",
"parent_id": "8135725",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135776",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T22:10:54",
"content": "you didn’t watch the videoThe point of an article like this is to summarize the essentials of the matter for discussion. If the article itself can be summarized as “here, watch this video”, or, that you demand the reader to go to the source to get the information that should have been provided already, diminishes the article – deserved or not.",
"parent_id": "8135725",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135914",
"author": "Johnu",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T07:53:50",
"content": "Who cares, it’s an interesting detail for those of us who aren’t about watch the full video.",
"parent_id": "8135725",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135689",
"author": "ijkijkijk",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T16:41:05",
"content": "I worked with these tape drive 40 years ago on a Univac mainframe. It was very funny!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135711",
"author": "Egghead Larsen",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T17:37:19",
"content": "My recollection is that the reels were behind glass as well, for better pressure control . CoolProject though ! De-case some HD platters and make your own scale removable drives! The look of 80s Big Iron in the Glass Box with literally sucky tape drives and the Roulette Wheel of Removable Storage!! Clean those heads or have a job crap out! And when the reel hub lock failed — “ticker-tape parade!” We had one operator who was strictly forbidden from touching removable hard drives (0 for 4 @$2200 1982 dollars) ! #Good times",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135715",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T18:09:44",
"content": "The vacuum columns controlled the actual movement of the tape past the heads. The motors would provide coarse motion as the vacuum columns controlled the fine movement of the tape. As I remember, there was a lot of service time involved in keeping the columns clean and well sealed. The motors were VERY large analog servo motors.",
"parent_id": "8135711",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135727",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T19:12:19",
"content": "vacuum columns controlled the actual movement of the tape past the headsUh, no. Capstans did the actual transport. The vacuum columns were just the buffer so the reel motors could keep up with the fast starts and stops.",
"parent_id": "8135715",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135767",
"author": "Egghead Larsen",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T21:24:37",
"content": "Another part the operator had to clean! 4,8,12-trichlorotriflourobenzene (I may have the isomer #s wrong. ) A SuperFund toxin IIRC! Good times!",
"parent_id": "8135727",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135805",
"author": "Aaron M Brandt",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T00:13:51",
"content": "Nice Warren Zevon reference",
"parent_id": "8135767",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8136057",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T20:05:06",
"content": "There were three engineering challenges for high-speed tape drives back in the day:1) Getting the tape from zero to full speed in half the length of the inter-record gap on the tape, and then back down to zero in the same length. This was accomplished mainly with low-inertia coreless motors directly driving the capstans. In many drives, the capstans had the tape wrap around most of the capstan to provide enough static friction (along with the tension provided by the vacuum columns) to operate without pinch rollers, further reducing inertia.2) Supplying the tape under tension to the capstans, which was the job of the vacuum columns. This eased the work on the capstan motors, because they only had to accelerate and decelerate a few feet to tape rather than a whole reel.3) Supplying tape to the vacuum columns as required. In the IBM drives this was done using constantly running motors with bidirectional clutches, since the tape had to be moved in both directions.Seems like the part of the job this project addresses is the least demanding of the three, and no mention was made of producing a specific amount of tension to the tape to get the tape pressure against the head right.",
"parent_id": "8135727",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135712",
"author": "cplamb",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T17:51:25",
"content": "Why the vacuum columns? If his goal is as stated he doesn’t need to stop and start the tape record by record. He could make a streaming tape drive.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135734",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T19:29:31",
"content": "You don’t get a running start. That would be too easy for the point – the original device he’s copying did it to improve seek time on tape, so you could quickly roll backwards and forwards to act more like a random access memory (within a short section of the tape).",
"parent_id": "8135712",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136060",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T20:21:29",
"content": "What point is that? The function of the big tape drives that had vacuum columns was to be able to have random access to any block on the tape. This is because magnetic tape was used to augment the main memory of the computer, allowing processing more data than the main memory could hold. As memory became cheaper and larger amounts became available, the role of tape drives shifted to mass storage, and streaming drives were developed that did this with much less cost, space, and power. You always made sure there was a long enough leader on the tape (after the Beginning Of Tape mark) so that you COULD get a running start. DECtape was an early example of a tape drive being directly driven without vacuum columns. These were the “floppy disks” of their day, and were used for personal data storage and backup. When I started working on computers, part of my work was maintaining streaming drives that used the same 3600 ft. reels of half-inch 9-track tape that the big drives did. These could back up a 35 MB hard drive in just a few minutes. IIRC, I used a 600′ tape as the system backup for my bench Unix machine, which I used often because Unix 4.2 was infamous for corrupting its filesystem (and thus the operating system) on any improper shutdown, meaning any shutdown that resulted from pretty much any hardware failure.Anyway, unless the “point” was to try to make something that looks like ancient computers seen in ancient movies, vacuum columns would not be the best way to do this.",
"parent_id": "8135734",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136063",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T20:30:52",
"content": "Also note that the stated objective was to LOAD 64 kB in 10 seconds. This does not sound like a random-access application. A streaming drive is definitely indicated. Also, there shouldn’t be any concern about how much tape you had to get up to speed, because NOBODY storing programs on cassettes would start anywhere in the first couple minutes of tape, where you had all kinds of dropouts. Ask anybody who actually did this in the 80s.",
"parent_id": "8135734",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135749",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T20:05:27",
"content": "Moreover, the tape buffer allows you to run the tape faster than the cassette reels actually turn, because you’ve got extra tape in the buffer.At normal cassette speed, if you have about 20 cm of tape already spooled out, you can run the tape 40% faster than the reels for ten seconds before you run out of buffer and have to slow down.",
"parent_id": "8135712",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135755",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T20:24:36",
"content": "Maybe true for a cassette tape implementation, but ultimate speed in the reel-reel drives were certainlynotlimited by the reel rotation rate. At least not the motors: The tape itself would have quite a bit of centripetal force acting on it though, which the vacuum would need to act against.",
"parent_id": "8135749",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135766",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T21:06:30",
"content": "For the mechanical point of it, the regular tape mechanism has the pickup reel pulling on the tape with tension against the capstan roller that controls the speed of the tape past the head, and also pulls the other reel behind it. There’s variable friction with both reels, which results in varying tape speed and flutter, which is actually more limiting to the data rate than the theoretical S/N ratio of the tape material itself.By de-coupling the reel winding mechanism from the capstan with a slack tape buffer, you get much better speed control of the tape going past the read head, which lets you get closer to the theoretical data rate limits of the tape.",
"parent_id": "8135755",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135768",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T21:24:41",
"content": "Given the robustness of the coding scheme against jitter, I suspect the more pragmatic reason for the vacuum tape buffer is so the tape doesn’t snap.",
"parent_id": "8135766",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135771",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T21:45:44",
"content": "robustness of the coding scheme against jitterIsn’t jitter just like adding noise to the signal? If a regular good cassette deck has 0.1% flutter, that would be equivalent to raising the noise floor to -30 dB. That would put a hard limit around, dunno, 7-8 kbit/s?Except for us humans of course, because we don’t care about being exactly on-key when it come to music. The computer could deal with it just the same, but the early computer systems weren’t fast enough to do the calculations.",
"parent_id": "8135766",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135772",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T21:47:25",
"content": "7-8 kbit/s?kiloBytes, actually.",
"parent_id": "8135766",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136064",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T20:37:01",
"content": "“.. and also pulls the other reel behind it.” Remember there are vacuum columns on both sides, so each reel motor is only concerned with keeping the height of its vacuum column within its operating limits. The tension on the tape is set by the area of the cross section of the column multiplied by the difference of air pressure on either side of the tape in the column. THAT is what the reel motor has to pull against, and it is independent of what is going on on the other side of the capstan.",
"parent_id": "8135766",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135769",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T21:39:59",
"content": "Also, while the motors and the reels could probably turn quite fast, they didn’t have infiniteacceleration. With the tape in buffer, you can start reading the tape while the big motors are still spinning up, so you don’t have to rewind for a bit of runway to pick up speed.For the task of “read 64 kB off a tape”, this can happen at any time, so the device needs to be in a state to read the data now. If it first has to reverse, pick up speed, and then read the data, that’s going to add more seconds.",
"parent_id": "8135755",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135728",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T19:20:39",
"content": "Way before Snowden, in the days of 9 track tapes, there was a persistent rumor among database professionals that amounted to:‘The NSA (and it’s precursor) has records or every phone number/person you have ever called more than once (now known as metadata). They have a nationwide double linked list of acquaintances/friends. It is the worlds largest relational database.’I expect this rumor, now known fact, was rooted in all the head up their ass local phone companies that were sending a tape or three of call records to Virginia every week.I know, off topic.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135757",
"author": "HackCELL(12!)",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T20:34:43",
"content": "Fun project, looking forward to the followup videos.As for “the fastest” tape: the sinclair ZX microdrive could do 15KiB/s.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135773",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T21:58:27",
"content": "I quite liked the Idea of replicating the way those old tape spools worked with a standard compact audio cassette, but 15 minutes of video just for the vacuum was a bit disappointing. I’m not going to watch part 2.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135780",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T22:29:41",
"content": "That bit was interesting because it detailed how you actually get the vacuum – and that was the point of the video. If you start by assuming you simply have it, where’s the beef?Just the comparison between an axial fan vs. centrifugal fan, and then detailing how the centrifugal fan actually performs in different configurations, has much wider appeal than just this particular application. It gives you a concrete sense of how different fans perform, so even if you’re not interested in building a tape drive yourself, this knowledge has other applications such as for building a fume extractor for soldering or a liquid cooling loop for a PC – and that’s a hallmark for a good informative presentation. It gives you something useful. Viewing this video, you actually understand something.",
"parent_id": "8135773",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136166",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T08:26:47",
"content": "I’m definitely looking forward to part 2 and will not be surprised if there will be a part 3 4 or 5. This fellow has a nice way of approaching a certain problem and finding interesting solutions to solve them. The video about video on the Commodore PET is an excellent example.To be honest I do not care about the problem that he’s trying to solve, nobody wants/needs such a device in the time and age of digital tape replacements and 16 MB REU cartridges. It will be noisy, incompatible with existing games and programs and one of a kind. This project is not about the destination, it’s about the trip to get there. And learning how and why things were done in the past. But, you have to admit (if you are a retro computing enthusiast) that this project is pretty cool it it works. and it would steal the show on any 80’s home computing exhibit.Can’t wait for the follow up videos.Cool project, cool approach.",
"parent_id": "8135773",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135803",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T00:10:37",
"content": "Now they have to look into static build up and X-Ray emission perhaps, as per Sellotape in a vacuum.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135807",
"author": "Null",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T00:20:52",
"content": "Copal made some of these crazy fast DLT tape drive motors #PN12-60119-01 Bet that would spin out fast enough.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135835",
"author": "Charlyarg",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T01:25:40",
"content": "I used those Philips Super Ferro as a kid!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135837",
"author": "Lord Kimbote",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T02:05:15",
"content": "I hate tapes. I was like a busy waiter at a honky tonk running with tapes of electronic CAD designs for updates or changes to feed a VAX serving workstations or another mini in search of old data entry batches.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135961",
"author": "Dave",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T11:55:37",
"content": "I had a Coleco Adam decades ago, the tape drive in it would zoom back and forth, it always reminded me of the older reel units you’d see on the mainframes.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136167",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T08:31:04",
"content": "The coleco adam tape drive is a nice concept and the automatic tape play/stop/fwd/rev is awesome to look at. As a kid it must have felt like having a real spy-movie-like computer center in your own home. I had a C64… with a datasette… I had to press all the buttons myself, it was pretty low-tech but it loaded the games I wanted to play.",
"parent_id": "8135961",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,524.270909
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/05/screens-of-death-from-diagnostic-aids-to-a-sad-emoji/
|
Screens Of Death: From Diagnostic Aids To A Sad Emoji
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Featured",
"History",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Software Development"
] |
[
"bsod"
] |
There comes a moment in the life of any operating system when an unforeseen event will tragically cut its uptime short. Whether it’s a sloppily written driver, a bug in the handling of an edge case or just dumb luck, suddenly there is nothing more that the OS’ kernel can do to salvage the situation. With its last few cycles it can still gather some diagnostic information, attempt to write this to a log or memory dump and then output a supportive message to the screen to let the user know that the kernel really did try its best.
This on-screen message is called many things, from a kernel panic message on Linux to a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) on Windows since Windows 95, to a more contemplative message on AmigaOS and BeOS/Haiku. Over the decades these Screens of Death (SoD) have changed considerably, from the highly informative screens of Windows NT to the simplified BSOD of Windows 8 onwards with its prominent sad emoji that has drawn a modicum of ridicule.
Now it seems that the Windows BSOD
is about to change again
, and may not even be blue any more. So what’s got a user to think about these changes? What were we ever supposed to get out of these special screens?
Meditating On A Fatal Error
AmigaOS fatal Guru Meditation error screen.
More important than the color of a fatal system error screen is what information it displays. After all, this is the sole direct clue the dismayed user gets when things go south, before sighing and hitting the reset button, followed by staring forlorn at the boot screen. After making it back into the OS, one can dig through the system logs for hints, but some information will only end up on the screen, such as when there is a storage drive issue.
The exact format of the information on these SoDs changes per OS and over time, with AmigaOS’
Guru Meditation
screen
being rather well-known. Although the naming was the result of an inside joke related to how the developers dealt with frequent system crashes, it stuck around in the production releases.
Interestingly, both Windows 9x and ME as well as AmigaOS have fatal and non-fatal special screens. In the case of AmigaOS you got a similar screen to the Guru Meditation screen with its error code, except in green and the optimistic notion that it might be possible to continue running after confirming the message. For Windows 9x/ME users this might be a familiar notion as well :
BSOD in Windows 95 after typing “C:\con\con” in the Run dialog.
In this series of OSes you’d get these screens, with mashing a key usually returning you to a slightly miffed but generally still running OS minus the misbehaving application or driver. It could of course happen that you’d get stuck in an endless loop of these screens until you gave up and gave the three-finger salute to put Windows out of its misery. This was an interesting design choice, which Microsoft’s
Raymond Chen readily admits
to being somewhat quaint. What it did do was abandon the current event and return to the event dispatcher to give things another shot.
Mac OS X 10.2 thru 10.2.8 kernel panic message.
A characteristic of these BSODs in Windows 9x/ME was also that they didn’t give you a massive amount of information to work with regarding the reason for the rude interruption. Incidentally, over on the Apple side of the fence things were not much more elaborate in this regard, with OS X’s kernel panic message getting plastered over with a ‘Nothing to see here, please restart’ message. This has been quite a constant ever since the
‘Sad Mac’
days of Apple, with friendly messages rather than any ‘technobabble’.
This quite contrasts with the world of Windows NT, where even the already trimmed BSOD of Windows XP is roughly on the level of the business-focused Windows 2000 in terms of information. Of note is also that a BSOD on Windows NT-based OSes is a true ‘Screen of Death’, from which you absolutely are not returning.
A BSOD in Windows XP. A true game over, with no continues.
These BSODs provide a significant amount of information, including the faulting module, the fault type and some hexadecimal values that can conceivably help with narrowing down the fault. Compared to the absolute information overload in Windows NT 3.1 with a partial on-screen memory dump, the level of detail provided by Windows 2000 through Windows 7 is probably just enough for the average user to get started with.
It’s here interesting that more recent versions of Windows have opted to default to restarting automatically when a BSOD occurs, which renders what is displayed on them rather irrelevant. Maybe that’s why Windows 8 began to just omit that information and opted to instead show a generic ‘collecting information’ progress counter before restarting.
Times Are Changing
People took the new BSOD screen in Windows 8 well.
Although nobody was complaining about the style of BSODs in Windows 7, somehow Windows 8 ended up with the massive sad emoji plastered on the top half of the screen and no hexadecimal values, which would now hopefully be found in the system log. Windows 10 also added a big QR code that leads to some troubleshooting instructions. This overly friendly and non-technical BSOD mostly bemused and annoyed the tech community, which proceeded to brutally make fun of it.
In this context it’s interesting to see these latest BSOD screen mockups from Microsoft that will purportedly make their way to Windows 11 soon.
These new BSOD screens seem to have a black background (perhaps a ‘Black Screen of Death’?), omit the sad emoji and reduce the text to an absolute minimum:
The new Windows 11 BSOD, as it’ll likely appear in upcoming releases.
What’s noticeable here is how it makes the stop code very small on the bottom of the screen, with the faulting module below it in an even smaller font. This remains a big departure from the BSOD formats up till Windows 7 where such information was clearly printed on the screen, along with additional information that anyone could copy over to paper or snap a picture of for a quick diagnosis.
But Why
The BSODs in
ReactOS
keep the Windows 2000-style format.
The crux here is whether Microsoft expects their users to use these SoDs for informative purposes, or whether they would rather that they get quickly forgotten about, as something shameful that users shouldn’t concern themselves with. It’s possible that they expect that the diagnostics get left to paid professionals, who would have to dig into the memory dumps, the system logs, and further information.
Whatever the case may be, it seems that the era of blue SoDs is well and truly over now in Windows. Gone too are any embellishments, general advice, and more in-depth debug information. This means that distinguishing the different causes behind a specific stop code, contained in the hexadecimal numbers, can only be teased out of the system log entry in Event Viewer, assuming it got in fact recorded and you’re not dealing with a boot partition or similar fundamental issue.
Although I’ll readily admit to not having seen many BSODs since probably Windows 2000 or XP — and those were on questionable hardware — the rarity of these events makes it in my view even more pertinent that these screens are as descriptive as possible, which is sadly not a feature that seems to be a priority for mainstream desktop OSes. Nor for niche OSes like Linux and BSD, tragically, where you have to know your way around the Systemd
journalctl
tool or equivalent to figure out where that kernel panic came from.
This is definitely a point where the SoD generated upon a fiery kernel explosion sets the tone for the user’s response.
| 57
| 15
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8135647",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T14:09:28",
"content": "Would be remiss without mentioning linux’s new BSOD, which displays nothing but an incomprehensible QR code, with no indication that there was a problem, what it was (not even an unhelpful “DRIVE IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL”), or what to do about it. It’s significantly more information-dense, while beinglesshelpful than any other BSOD in the history of computing.This is why linux gets a reputation for being user-unfriendly.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135655",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T14:38:24",
"content": "Do you have a screenshot of it? I assume you are referring to systemd-bsod, but for some reason Google only gives mockups from news articles, not real images. Or some youtube videos about how to fully customize your Linux bsod :D",
"parent_id": "8135647",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135662",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T15:24:38",
"content": "No, it has nothing to do with systemd. It’s a facility being implemented in-kernel as part of the Direct Rendering Manager subsystem.See:https://www.heise.de/en/news/Linux-kernel-gets-blue-screens-with-QR-code-9851774.html(Yes, you read that right. Not only will you need to have a phone handy to scan the QR code instead of using your eyes, but you also need to rely on a special web service run by the author to decode it because it’s compressed.)",
"parent_id": "8135655",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135717",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T18:17:12",
"content": "Ah, yeah, I understand your criticism now. Configurable as always, but that doesn’t really help for the average user. I could hope that distributions would default to the classic ‘kmsg’, but time will tell. The kernel default appears to be a “Please reboot your computer” followed by a single line description.The QR code is just uncompressed or zlib compressed kernel log, so doesn’t really need a special web service, any command line QR code decoding tool should suffice ;)I’m not sure what the situation is nowadays, but I think some time in the past I have seen Linux just freeze and the kernel panics not being visible on the screen because Xorg has taken it. This might solve that.",
"parent_id": "8135662",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136180",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T09:59:09",
"content": "I don’t hate this. I do think some thought needs to be put into displaying important log snippets on screen in addition to the qr code, but having a way of transferring the information to another device even while in kernel panic isn’t bad.",
"parent_id": "8135662",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8136183",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T10:42:22",
"content": "This is the prototype mock-up:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_panic#/media/File:Drm_panic_with_qr_code.pngAs you can see it doesn’t have much, but does give an error code. The thing is this isn’t by any means final and nobody has settled on the defaults yet as far as I know.Personally I think it needs a time stamp and partial excerpt of the log. The QR code is fine, it’s just a compressed copy of log data.",
"parent_id": "8135655",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135660",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T15:20:42",
"content": "I’ve never seen it. Maybe because linux doesn’t crash very often?",
"parent_id": "8135647",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135666",
"author": "Observer",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T15:31:43",
"content": "That…The only linux “crashes” I’ve personally witnessed in my 20+ years of use were either tied directly to physical hardware failure (bad RAM or failing drive) or it occurred on a dual-boot system where Windows damaged the Linux partion.The fixes were correspondingly simple: Replace bad RAM with good, replaced bad drive with a new one, and delete Windows and run a Linux-only machine.",
"parent_id": "8135660",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135686",
"author": "Fred",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T16:39:21",
"content": "linux’s new BSOD, which displays nothing but an incomprehensible QR codeHuh, that’s interesting, I never saw anything of the sort despite using and abusing a fleet of virtual and physical Linux servers daily. Mind giving me a tip about when was it deployed to mainline? I can’t find anything beyond some optional features in Fedora, which is one specific distribution of the Linux operating system, and SystemD, which is not universally adopted by all distributions of the Linux operating system.",
"parent_id": "8135647",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135690",
"author": "Fred",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T16:44:42",
"content": "Oops I messed up the formatting",
"parent_id": "8135686",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135707",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T17:09:56",
"content": "Hmmmm… What screen is this????I have lots of Linux computers up and running 24×7 and I’ve never seen it.",
"parent_id": "8135647",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135842",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T02:55:14",
"content": "Failure is rarely friendly.",
"parent_id": "8135647",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136131",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T03:32:37",
"content": "Linux really isn’t supposed to be user-friendly in the way you are implying. Some OS actually needs to be for people who know what they are doing. Did you scan the code?But yes it would be nice for them to at least print a line along with the code that says “linux crashed uwu” so one knows what the qr means before they scan it. If I saw that and I had no idea what it was, I would be a bit hesitant to scan a strange QR code presented without explanation by my computer for simple opsec reasons",
"parent_id": "8135647",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136221",
"author": "Hanns",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T13:38:42",
"content": "As a speaker of a small language I’d like to point out my pet peeve with error messages – translation. Show unique code, or give it in english, so i can find solution online. But helpfully translated message can be worse than useless, just wasting time.",
"parent_id": "8135647",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135648",
"author": "k",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T14:09:33",
"content": "“Something went wrong…” error message drives me up the wall. Whatever happened to meaningful error messages that actually told what is wrong?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135651",
"author": "aki009",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T14:20:02",
"content": "If you still use Windows, it goes with the territory.",
"parent_id": "8135648",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136132",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T03:33:38",
"content": "Some people still have to work the normal jobs",
"parent_id": "8135651",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136185",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T10:46:09",
"content": "Many normal jobs use an entirely web based suite of tools now, Microsoft products are rarely necessary at any level.",
"parent_id": "8136132",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135731",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T19:25:44",
"content": "in my previous job we used to joke hard- and software was “windows-conpatible” when a reboot/restart would clear faults, and “linux-compatible” when it wouldn’t.No need to know what the problem is if rebooting will fix it.",
"parent_id": "8135648",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136140",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T03:41:42",
"content": "The South Park or IT crowd rebooting the linksys modem gag is the peak of non-power-user-friendliness. You can’t create software that is utterly free of bugs and failures once subjected to mass abuse parallel millions of users. If you can debug simply by turning it off and on again, that’s a good thing.But of course Linux is for power users, and it shouldn’t try to water itself down to become a Windows substitute",
"parent_id": "8135731",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136184",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T10:43:46",
"content": "Turning it off and on is not “debugging”. You don’t learn anything about the problem.",
"parent_id": "8136140",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8137245",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-10T04:57:46",
"content": "Washing machine unplugging for a minute then plugging back in resets logic board. What did one learn? That one doesn’t have to call an expensive repair person for every problem.",
"parent_id": "8136184",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135650",
"author": "aki009",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T14:19:01",
"content": "I’ve been working with BSOD analysis on various scales for more than a decade.It’s interesting to see how the vast number of BSOD culprits are limited to certain companies (who shall remain unnamed here). A clear common pattern seems to be hardware drivers written or maintained in India.Microsoft has also turned some BSOD events into “soft BSODs” that the user will barely notice. If the screen on a PC flickers, it could be for all kinds of reasons, including that the video driver had a BSOD, but the OS restarted only the failed video driver. This is a good thing if the issue happens rarely, but not so much when it becomes frequent. Also, making a major failure an apparent non-event enables some less honest manufacturers to keep pushing garbage products without fixing their drivers.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135665",
"author": "J.Cook",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T15:29:59",
"content": "Server 2003 R2 had a memory leak/ pool exhaustion issue on machines running as domain controllers; that was a fun one to diagnose, because the fix for it is a reboot. (to be fair, the machine in question had nearly two solid years of uptime.)I’ve also seen bad memory cause stop errors as well.Then there’s that thing when ESXi throws a panic, resulting in a purple screen of death; the only time I’ve seen one was when one of the processor cores on a multi-core blade server locked up, taking the rest of the guest VMs on the blade with it.",
"parent_id": "8135650",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136159",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T06:39:09",
"content": "The company I used to work for had the dubious honour of producing the most ‘95 BSODs after MS shipped a faulty version of one of our drivers on the install disc…",
"parent_id": "8135650",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135657",
"author": "rumpel",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T15:13:52",
"content": "“Something strange has happened” – ATARI TOS“Something’s terribly wrong” – audio message, asterisk",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135781",
"author": "Jason",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T22:38:35",
"content": "Don’t forget the bombs",
"parent_id": "8135657",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135782",
"author": "Jason",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T22:42:16",
"content": "Classic MacOS had bombs on the system error dialogue box as well",
"parent_id": "8135781",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136138",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T03:39:18",
"content": "Fantastic aesthetic decision, I wish we kept those",
"parent_id": "8135781",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135664",
"author": "Cogidubnus Rex",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T15:29:00",
"content": "Windows 3.x had BSOD, they didn’t start with Win95. As for Windows 2, I think i dabbled with it as a pre-teen but perhaps with a monochrome screen thus making a ‘B’SOD not possible (save your MGA somehow happened to be blue), and then there was probably a magnitude fewer things to lead to a MSOD pre Win 3.x.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135682",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T16:27:55",
"content": "No, it didn’t. You have confused the rudimentary task manager screen from Windows 3.1x with the Blue Screen of Death due to its similarities. The original Blue Screen of Death first appeared in Windows NT 3.1 in 1993.See:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_screen_of_death",
"parent_id": "8135664",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135685",
"author": "X-MarX-THX-SpXt",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T16:39:12",
"content": "You are a true haxxorman if you encountered something like this:https://www.linuxandubuntu.com/content/images/wordpress/2019/07/linux-kernel-panic-error-screenshot.png",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135721",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T18:46:13",
"content": "Yeah, today’s BSODs are true haxxymorons.hadtroublereading “haxxorman” – which leads us here. :-)",
"parent_id": "8135685",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136137",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T03:38:50",
"content": "Either that, or you are simply over 40 or 45",
"parent_id": "8135685",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136187",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T10:49:43",
"content": "Most people outside academia haven’t been running CentOS on Xen, to that’s another limiter.",
"parent_id": "8136137",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8136186",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T10:47:52",
"content": "What old VM did this come from? Haven’t seen one of these in over a decade.",
"parent_id": "8135685",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135713",
"author": "just6979",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T18:05:59",
"content": "What’s up with this weird wikipedia link?https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Macintosh_startup&useskin=vector#Sad_MacOther Wikipedia links right in this article use the modern /wiki/ URLs. Just wondering how one could have gotten to that old URL from normal accessing of Wikipedia. Unless it was just pasted from some collection of links…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135732",
"author": "X-MarX-THX-SpXt",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T19:26:01",
"content": "ORThe writer is a wiki editor as well.Or old bookmark.Or time-travel. Or aliens.",
"parent_id": "8135713",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135742",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T19:40:15",
"content": "That happens when you’re not logged in and force wiki to a skin. /wiki/-style URL’s (the default) can’t do query URL’s.",
"parent_id": "8135713",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135752",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T20:16:31",
"content": "hmm nopehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_We_Know?useskin=vector",
"parent_id": "8135742",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135753",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T20:17:09",
"content": "(at least not necessarily)",
"parent_id": "8135752",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135741",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T19:37:53",
"content": "Where is the microkernel flame war?Even in a pure microkernel architecture, there are devices that can effectively take down the machine.But at least you know which one it was, not just ‘:-( Something in kernel space shit the bed.’We’ve gotten to the point where we’re accepting a 99%+ performance hit so that coders don’t have to learn a second programming language.I think we can accept the microkernel performance hit for everything except gaming…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136013",
"author": "Blue Footed Booby",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T16:59:37",
"content": "The coders aren’t the ones making the decision here. That’s kind of the problem.",
"parent_id": "8135741",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136189",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T10:54:12",
"content": "Nailed it",
"parent_id": "8136013",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8137080",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-09T21:01:19",
"content": "There is some truth to that.But everybody makes their choices.I’d rather make a living going down on Hillary Clinton than code in JS.MBAs didn’t write the steaming piles of JS.But they could have.That’s the problem.",
"parent_id": "8136013",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8136136",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T03:37:33",
"content": "Is there any evidence he’s done that? Or are we talking about his horrible PR decisions in discussing certain topics (which is more a product of being a sperg without social instincts who loves to debate and pick things apart more than any actual proclivity)",
"parent_id": "8135741",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135744",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T19:52:28",
"content": "One of the thing I disliked with BSoD is auto-restart. On my system, the screen comes up for maybe 2 seconds before it restarts. It takes my phone longer to unlock and start camera to capture QR. Auto restart was on by default but fortunately it can be turned off so you can actually read the message or grab the QR with your device.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135764",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T20:49:12",
"content": "i like the traditional linux oops / panic message with a register and stack dump because it is easy for me to translate that into lines of source to inspect. if it wasn’t for the availability of source, i wouldn’t care one way or the other…a frowny face with like a 5-digit number to look up on google would be just as useful as anything else.my least favorite part is hanging onto the information after rebooting the crashed system. i used to grab a piece of paper and write down some of the addresses and symbol names when available. since cameras became ubiquitous, i’ve taken a ton of photos of computer screens, and even some videos for transient error messages (sometimes the dump makes the actual cause of the failure scroll off the top of the screen).but i recently had a nice breakthrough on that front! i got an hdmi-to-usb dongle, so i had my computer-under-test hooked up to my laptop, and i could take actual full res screenshots! that was a real gamechanger, made it really easy to classify an itermittent boot problem.and fwiw i only get linux crashes when i’m doing something weird…so i’ve seen quite a few of them :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135785",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T22:51:50",
"content": "Not one mention of windows having a registery entry that can be used to change the color(u)r of the SoD. You could have a yellow screen of death if you wanted.I never tested, but now I wonder, if you screw up that registery entry badly enough could you cause the SoD to fail. I guess I will never know, not a Microsoft user.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136014",
"author": "Blue Footed Booby",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T17:00:34",
"content": "There’s a Linux version of VirtualBox!",
"parent_id": "8135785",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135902",
"author": "Joe",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T07:08:49",
"content": "lengthy rant alertWhen previews of Windows 8 showed that the OS would turn away from almost anything that had made Windows a success recently, it was no surprise to see that blue screens would lack a lot of information and replace the interesting parts with a 200pt frowney. Just proves they didn’t take their job seriously any longer. This idea must have been the result of sniffing another line, and the consequential rush to do another something crazy.Windows 8 (along with Windows Phone 7, their 3rd failed attempt in the “mobile” market) was the result of a cultural change for the worse in almost any respect imho, away from eye candy towards monochrome, bare, huge oversized text blocks just some years after they had forced you to buy a new PC for Vista due to the requirements of Aero Glass desktop and its introduction of (admittedly nice) 3D and transparency effects. Back then it was the first time a new OS nudged you into buying new hardware. Well you had the choice at least as it was well possible to stay with an XP-like UI if the hardware didn’t cut it. Well, they haven’t learned, with the environmental impact of randomly obsoleting millions of otherwise good computers being of no concern ANOTHER TIME for Windows 11, this time leaving you no choice to stick with what you have if that’s not on their mercy list.But I digress. The BSOD is only one representation of the change of mind. 8 removed a highly effective start menu that just everyone had understood by the time, by ugly Lotus-Notes-style tiles. TILES!!! What were they thinking?! Everyone who knew Notes had learned to hate them. Now everyone else would have to learn that the other way? But wow, the tiles were smoothly animated and finger-operable, wow! What good is that in a Windows Server environment that lacks touchscreens anyway? Not that Windows Server would have been spared the disruptive madness. Away with classic feature-rich control panels towards barebone Metro UI applets that would have little to do with anything you knew about the structure settings in the OS (take network management, for instance). Consequentially, instead of bringing a “power user” mode into these new-fangled applets to make them useful, they gave up and moved a lot of functionality to PowerShell or Registry magic values. While Linux was more and more advancing to become a useful and complete desktop environment, Microsoft would go the opposite direction and force you increasingly often into a text shell for things that could have been done safely guided and coherently in classic control panels just a generation earlier.There was some apprehension about the huge step back that “new start menu” had meant, visible now by all the unoriented changes the start menu constantly undergoes, with all of that not being much better and never reaching the swiftness that Windows 7’s start menu and task bar had to offer. Apparently, more effort goes into preventing Classic Shell and the like than actually improving the native start menu so people would no longer desire to have Classic Shell in the first place.But the start menu was only the loudest protest out of thousands of complaints from the user base. A lot of that was ignored no matter what as they had unlearned to listen. And that’s the point. Feels like it’s no longer about users, much less about power users. No interest in what is needed, what people do to be productive, or what needs to change to get there. They know better than the users anyway. So now it’s a complacent “take it or leave it” attitude – with leaving being no choice for most users, the only reason they are still getting away with it.While I love .NET, Visual Studio, and SQL Server, the downswing of Windows and Office was my final kick in the a** to move to Linux and FOSS instead. It’s a compromise, sometimes a sad one when I’m still missing specific things I used to love about Windows, but these are gone forever.What I don’t miss is updates that brick my computer and are scheduled against my will, the constant feeling of being exposed, be it for malware vulnerabilities or being spied on by the OS itself, random UI changes (every time for the worse), and what I certainly don’t miss are these dreaded BSODs.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136296",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T18:55:36",
"content": "Don’t forget, you can probably run whatever windows utilities you want under wine or a VM just fine. Sandboxing SQL server isn’t a terrible idea either. While I disagree on Visual Studio unless you are referring to VSC, we all have our quirks. .NET and VSC are both native on Linux, though, so there’s that.",
"parent_id": "8135902",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135980",
"author": "Bruce",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T14:11:37",
"content": "Early versions of the Hog OS (https://www.etcconnect.com/Products/Consoles/Hog-4-Consoles/) would pop up a little screen saying “I’ve Croaked!” when it crashed. It made you laugh for a split second as the panic set in wondering why it crashed….because the show must go on….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136297",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T19:01:10",
"content": "That seems appropriate tbh, I’ve been interested in this equipment but never got around to checking them out. Obviously I’m interested in their version of Linux too, and the dmx implementation now that I’ve gotten into playing with that.",
"parent_id": "8135980",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8137231",
"author": "Andy",
"timestamp": "2025-06-10T03:33:31",
"content": "Whole hog ran/runs Linux. Hog3 was PowerPC for good measure but has since moved to x86.Etc’s main console line (eos/ion) runs embedded windows, and is seen in more theatrical applications.MALighting and their grandMA range runs Linux and is generally what you use for large scale tv and rock shows (Eurovision, Taylor swift, halftime show).",
"parent_id": "8136297",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8137233",
"author": "Andy",
"timestamp": "2025-06-10T03:38:00",
"content": "Oh. And grandma series one ran vxworks for good measure.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8137238",
"author": "Yet Another Robert Smith",
"timestamp": "2025-06-10T03:50:05",
"content": "Personally I’d like to see a BSOD along the lines of “OMG! The call is coming from inside the computer!”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,524.788388
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/06/a-network-status-panel-the-way-it-should-be/
|
A Network Status Panel The Way It Should Be
|
Jenny List
|
[
"LED Hacks",
"Network Hacks"
] |
[
"pi pico",
"status panel"
] |
Sometimes a project forms itself around a component rather than an idea, and thus it was that [Maximilien] found himself building
a data rate monitor for the connection between two data centers
. Some MD0657C2-R LED dot matrix displays for not a lot needed a project.
The displays are mounted in groups of four on small PCBs, driven by a MAX6952, which are then controlled by a Pi Pico. There are several display panels in the project, each of which is a pained and laser-etched acrylic sheet with a pair of the LED boards mounted behind it. These in turn go on the front of a wooden enclosure, with a set of LED ring lights behind to illuminate the etched parts of the panels. Each display panel has its own Pico, daisy chained together and driven by a Pico W that supplies network connectivity.
As you might expect,
this isn’t the first status panel we’ve brought you over the years
.
| 16
| 10
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8136048",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T19:32:22",
"content": "Gives me a WarGames vibe, it’s a real WOPR.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136052",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T19:44:01",
"content": "Looks like some alt-history Soviet style. Like.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136071",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T21:05:25",
"content": "Yeah, it’s nice and all but definitely not “The Way It Should Be”.I mean just ~10% are actively used – the rest is wasted real estate.A) very small labels/namesB) the arrows are not very distinct(? dunno if that’s the right term)And weren’t there some analog-style meters? Those are much closer to “The Way It Should Be”.Numbers must be read.An analog meter’s deflection can just be “seen”.",
"parent_id": "8136052",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8136127",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T03:13:50",
"content": "cute attempt at an idea, marginally constructed, a lot of effort but if it is not dedicated to you (which I doubt you have 2 private datacenters to monitor) expect it to be discontinued after you are asked to leave providing a golden trophy to the managers",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136197",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T11:13:02",
"content": "I like the look of those displays, but maxim chips are pure madness. MAX6952 costs around USD 25 both at Mouser and Digikey. And the whole thing can easily be replaced by a 50ct uC a hand full of resistors and maybe some extra transistors for the higher current common lines.MAX7219 is also popular on chinese multiplexed displays, but it’s “fake” but affordable and “works”. It has two mayor pitfalls. It needs a pullup / pull down resistor on one of it’s pins, or it may start up in a defective state, lights the whole display, and a power cycle is the only way out (which does not help without the resistor). The other mayor limitation is due to Maxim design stupidity. Brightness control is extremely limited. You can not use it to adjust the brightness depending on the light level around you. It’s barely sufficient to adjust for LED efficiency. With even a small 50ct uC, you can easily get 12 bit PWM, which gives you fine control over around 70dB.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136223",
"author": "dremu",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T13:44:39",
"content": "“This is just fashion over function”.It’s a hack, Jim, not a Horta. One, be nice, and two, maybe the OP wanted something fanciful over useful. Sheesh.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136354",
"author": "K",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T22:50:58",
"content": "In my opinion hacks are supposed to unlock function we were originally denied, we’re supposed to make the very most of what we already have. This isn’t a hack! What is it hacking?! Hacking implies that we operate on something already existing, not add to the mountain high junk pile. I’ve been nice enough – any more will doom us all!",
"parent_id": "8136223",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8136248",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T15:41:55",
"content": "What’s with the negativiity? Does everyone have to have the same values as you?I think it’s a nice looking display that can be seen and understood clearly.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136356",
"author": "K",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T22:53:53",
"content": "You’re suggesting I abandon my own values because I challenge something? Not negativity – more like the voice screaming stop killing our children’s future for your own wasteful attempt at being the past back. Yes it looks nice, but where would humanity be if we if that’s all we considered.",
"parent_id": "8136248",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8136284",
"author": "Helena",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T17:49:32",
"content": "I have some projects on the go that have no purpose other than to entertain/educate me while I’m building them and then look cool on my shelf when they’re done. Let me know when we can set up a call so I can get your stamp of approval/denial – I imagine you’ll soon be very busy, what with refereeing all the projects here and on the wider internet, so I want to make my appointment before you’re booked solid.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136360",
"author": "K",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T23:05:33",
"content": "Maybe you should re-evaluate your priorities then and realise that you are just trying to impress others with something that “looks cool” rather selfishly. To think of the minds being wasted on entertaining one’s self’s rather than contributing meaningfully. I’m so frustrated that we STILL live in a totally unjust world and technological solutions that can fix it all are just being ignored for (personal gain) something cool to show off to friends. I’m sorry, I’m drunk, peerless, and abandoned by this society, I’m venting but not without cause,",
"parent_id": "8136284",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136365",
"author": "K",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T23:29:19",
"content": "I’d delete all my comments if I could – come on lackaday! What is the comment section functionality so retarded..",
"parent_id": "8136360",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8136317",
"author": "MacAttack",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T20:14:54",
"content": "It pains me to point out that each pane is painted. ;)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136342",
"author": "Warphammer",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T21:57:32",
"content": "I’m a little surprised how much vitriol is being thrown the maker’s way for what is, really, just a nice little project and is fairly nice looking. Quibbles about uC choice aside, maybe. Gets too close to religion for me. :)And latency monitoring is always important for good service. I have tales…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136350",
"author": "dremu",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T22:39:10",
"content": "uC choice, OS choice, OS flavor choice (if Un*x, do you mean BSD or Linux? which one? Which fork? etc.)Religion doesn’t even begin to cover it.",
"parent_id": "8136342",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8137449",
"author": "Gwyn",
"timestamp": "2025-06-10T15:05:16",
"content": "This is so cool! Love the display – and, like another commenter said, am struggling to understand the negative comments. Great work.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,524.320794
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/06/hackaday-podcast-episode-324-ribbon-microphone-from-a-gumstick-texture-from-a-virtual-log-and-a-robot-arm-from-pvc/
|
Hackaday Podcast Episode 324: Ribbon Microphone From A Gumstick, Texture From A Virtual Log, And A Robot Arm From PVC
|
Kristina Panos
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] |
[
"Hackaday Podcast"
] |
This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos joined forces to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous week.
In Hackaday news,
the 2025 Pet Hacks Contest
rolls on, but only for a short time longer. You have until Tuesday, June 10th to show us what you’ve got, so head over to Hackaday.IO and get started now! In other news, check out what adaptive optics can do when it comes to capturing pictures of the Sun. In other, other news,
there won’t be a Podcast next week as Elliot is on vacation
.
On What’s That Sound, Kristina failed once again, but four of you guessed correctly. Congratulations to [ToyoKogyo12aTurbo] who fared better and wins a limited edition Hackaday Podcast t-shirt!
After that, it’s on to the hacks and such, beginning with a largely-printed 6-DOF robot arm. We take a look at a bunch of awesome 3D prints like guitars and skateboards, take a look at some pet hacks, and discuss brick layers in orcaslicer. Finally, we talk a lot about keyboards, especially the quickly-evaporating Blackberry keyboards and why they’re disappearing.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Download in
DRM-free MP3
and savor at your leisure.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
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Episode 324 Show Notes:
News:
Adaptive Optics Take Clearest Pictures Of The Sun Yet
2025 Pet Hacks Contest
What’s that Sound?
Congratulations to [ToyoKogyo12aTurbo] for knowing it was the ping of modern active sonar!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Simulation And Motion Planning For 6DOF Robotic Arm
Robotic Arm EB310
2025 Pet Hacks Contest: Keep The Prey At Bay With The Cat Valve
Testing Brick Layers In OrcaSlicer With Staggered Perimeters
You Can Make Your Own Ribbon Mic With A Gum Wrapper
Blue Ribbon Microphone
DIY Ribbon Element Upgrades A Studio Microphone
Add Wood Grain Texture To 3D Prints – With A Model Of A Log
Adding Texture To 3D Prints
Fuzzy Skin Finish For 3D Prints, Now On Top Layers
Texturing 3D prints in IdeaMaker for Strength — CNC Kitchen
You Wouldn’t Download A Skateboard?
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Ender 3 Pro Gets A Second Job As A Stator Winder
Open Source Watch Movement Really Ticks All The Boxes
Passive Saturation Box Is A Cheap Way To Distort Your Sound
A Brief Hobbyist Primer On Clipping Diodes
Can We Replace A Program Counter With A Linear-Feedback Shift Register? Yes We Can!
Kristina’s Picks:
2025 Pet Hacks Contest: Weigh Your Dog The Easy Way
3D Printing A Modular Guitar Means It Can Look Like Whatever You Want
A CRT Display For Retro Weather Forecasting
Can’t-Miss Articles:
The Blackberry Keyboard: How An Open-Source Ecosystem Sprouts
Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The H.R. Giger Keyboard
Old book typewriter Underwood Elliott-Fisher (1930), how to type on books, and why – YouTube
| 5
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8136051",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T19:39:34",
"content": "For a second there I thought I must have forgotten that I came in here and posted this. :-)So now I’ll just post: me too.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136114",
"author": "David P",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T02:05:40",
"content": "Me three",
"parent_id": "8136051",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8136066",
"author": "highflux7",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T20:44:35",
"content": "Me too. Doesn’t appear in the rss feed.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136160",
"author": "kakemoms",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T06:42:41",
"content": "We came from the Nuclear age, went into the AI age at tremendous speed and now we are suddenly in the MacGyver age. Yay!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136318",
"author": "dtwprojects",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T20:28:14",
"content": "Commencing fretting…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,524.378753
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/06/solder-stencil-done-three-ways/
|
Solder Stencil Done Three Ways
|
Matt Varian
|
[
"PCB Hacks"
] |
[
"fiber laser",
"laser cutter",
"solder stencil",
"vinyl cutter"
] |
This project, sent in by [Henk], goes through a few
different ways to make a solder stencil
using a vinyl cutter, a CO2 laser, and a fiber laser.
The project starts with identifying a method to convert the board’s Gerber files to a PNG, which is ultimately used to create a vector file for use with the laser. The first stencil, made with the CO2 laser, was cut out of masking tape. This worked fine for larger cutouts and is certainly a cheap option if you don’t have too many small components. A slightly better approach with the CO2 laser was using vinyl sheet release paper, which seemed to hold together better than the tape.
Laser-cut masking tape works, but not for long.
A vinyl cutter was also used as an experiment, but it didn’t perform as well as the CO2 laser, as expected, since the cutter uses a knife rather than light, leading to some tearing issues.
The final method utilized a fiber laser and an
empty drink can
to create a metal stencil. First, the can had to be cut open, heated, and flattened. The fiber laser was able to cut clean footprints in the aluminum, creating a stencil that would hold up to more use than the paper variations.
The finale of this exploration into laser stencil making was using the fiber laser to solder the board together. The stencil was used to spread paste on the pads, parts were placed on the board, and then the fiber laser heated the solder paste to solder them to the board. The board looked a bit toasty afterwards, but we imagine the process could be fine-tuned to reduce the collateral damage a bit.
Once you’ve got your stencil ready to go, you can combine it with a
3D printed jig to hold the PCB
while you apply the solder paste.
| 29
| 11
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8136001",
"author": "Cyna",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T15:45:26",
"content": "Or just have JLC make it as well for $7 extra…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136002",
"author": "Matt",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T15:51:27",
"content": "Or YoU cOuLD jUsT bUy iTHot take homie.",
"parent_id": "8136001",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136005",
"author": "Jan-Willem Markus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T16:06:45",
"content": "You are correct in the statement the stencils are quite inexpensive, there is a lot of value in making something yourself. If it isn’t for the skill, you may do so for your own satisfaction. Being able to do something yourself is of huge value, and creating a functional circuit board in literal hours is a huge asset in rapid prototyping. The OP uses both factory and self milled/etched boards.I would be quite reluctant to outsource my hobbies, especially the parts which I enjoy. It is difficult to convey why I wouldn’t want everything automatic. Even very useful tools like 3D printers take away a from of the satisfaction of building something with your own hands.",
"parent_id": "8136001",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136398",
"author": "Andy Colborn",
"timestamp": "2025-06-08T02:47:36",
"content": "Sure. But as someone who’s tried laser cutting a stencil at home (CO2), I don’t think it’s really worth it most of the time.If you’re doing anything with 0402 or 0603 components or smaller, it’s near impossible to get a cut clean enough on a CO2 laser to make a decent stencil. Sounds like a vinyl cutter was even worse.Having to spend a bunch of extra time reworking a board because I used a crappy homemade stencil (instead of just getting one made along with my PCB) doesn’t sound like the sort of joy you can usually expect from prototyping.",
"parent_id": "8136005",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8136008",
"author": "Fablab-user",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T16:23:15",
"content": "This work is done in a Fablab, which goal is to do it yourself. And to document so others can learn from your work.Of course you can order cheap and have it shipped, but where’s the fun in that?",
"parent_id": "8136001",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136024",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T17:58:41",
"content": "No matter how fast JLC is, they won’t be able to get it to me today, which is when I need it.",
"parent_id": "8136001",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136033",
"author": "RetepV",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T18:12:36",
"content": "That might be due to subpar planning…I know for myself that that’s the reason. :)Basically electronics is a hobby for me and it should give me fun and satisfaction, and not stress. So I vibe my way through. Planning is for my job, where I get payed for stress and efficiency.",
"parent_id": "8136024",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136081",
"author": "SparkyGSX",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T21:41:11",
"content": "It’s not subpar planning if you did the design this morning, and fabricated the board using the same laser, by engraving a mask on the copper and etching it, or engraving the copper directly with the fiber laser.I’m planning to do some experiments to create vias with the fiber laser, and engraving or selectively curing solder resist. The final step would be the ability to make solder stencils.I’ve had some good results with regular printer paper for single-use solder stencils.",
"parent_id": "8136033",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8136010",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T16:27:32",
"content": "I’ve cut stencils on K40 CO2 laser out of sticker backing paper (slippery on one side, I assume silicone coated). It works great for one-offs down to 0.8 mm pitch chips.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136034",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T18:16:10",
"content": "I have done it with the vinyl cutter and super thin plastic, it helps to make the paste layer not have sharp corners, and dont use anything with fibers or you get the result showm (which is really bad in the article even for paper, maybe the bearing on your blade is clogged)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136080",
"author": "QBFreak",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T21:41:03",
"content": "I shall have to remember this. I have a project where I need a stencil for an IC to fit in a rather tight space (rework). I lack a laser cutter, but I’ve got a vinyl cutter.",
"parent_id": "8136034",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136088",
"author": "Sasquatch",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T22:08:36",
"content": "Unless it’s bga there is no benefit to using stencil/reflow oven.Just learn how to solder vqfn chips are very solderable by hand. By the time you mess with stencil, paste and removing anything that will melt from hot air/infrared/reflow oven I will have that vqfn100 chip soldered",
"parent_id": "8136080",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136092",
"author": "Samioio",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T23:12:07",
"content": "If you are making five boards with twenty components each, a stencil and hot plate is great. You can do it a fine tipped iron and a steady hand, but it will take longer.",
"parent_id": "8136088",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136115",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T02:09:18",
"content": "I somewhat agree, for one off’s its fine, when your doing a few hundreds of units its a huge time save",
"parent_id": "8136088",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8136041",
"author": "Torsten Martinsen",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T19:04:03",
"content": "The workflow seems overly complicated – he converts the Gerber files to PNG, and then traces the PNG in Inkscape to get an SVG. It is much simpler to export the solder mask layer as SVG in e.g. KiCad.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136055",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T20:01:12",
"content": "This! The Gerber file is already a vector file!",
"parent_id": "8136041",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136082",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T21:41:54",
"content": "It’s not only overly complicated. It also introduces needless conversion errors. So it’s more work to create a worse end result. But with all due respect. About half the people have an IQ that is below average.I quite often point out (obvious to me) errors, and get a lot of flak for it. But my intentions are good. I’m hoping that people pick it up an learn something from it.",
"parent_id": "8136041",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136124",
"author": "JonDoe",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T02:50:44",
"content": "That’s just mean, I think the word you are looking for is median.",
"parent_id": "8136082",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136254",
"author": "Brian",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T15:51:53",
"content": "If you believe the current psycho-babble, human mental capacity has a normal distribution; hence mean and median will be the same.Based on my experience, I am inclined to believe that the distribution is multi-modal. I suspect there are peaks about a sigma to the left, and about a half sigma to the right. Of course, I have no data to support my wild-ass suppositions (I should have been a politician).",
"parent_id": "8136124",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8136059",
"author": "Peter",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T20:14:55",
"content": "I have used laser printable OHP transparency film and a CO2 laser cutter to achieve very good results.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136065",
"author": "Akkedude",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T20:38:05",
"content": "Would maybe 3d printing a stencil work since you can print it quite thin",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136085",
"author": "Sasquatchv",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T22:01:57",
"content": "Or just solder it by hand, anything but bga and 50+ PCBs 20+ components each you will solder faster than you make the stencil. By time you mess with perfecting paste application method and fine tune owev settings you can make solder 40+ pcb’s by hand.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136089",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T22:24:53",
"content": "Do beer cans work better then soda cans?https://hackaday.com/2013/06/14/machining-beer-can-solder-stencils/https://hackaday.com/2013/02/04/diy-solder-stencils-from-soda-cans/(And there are quite a lot more ways on hackaday to make solder stencils).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136094",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T23:15:18",
"content": "Uh, has anyone tried round pads? That might be a lot easier to produce. I suppose the pads might need to be a little bigger than rectangles, but that should be fine for a lot of projects that aren’t trying to be as small as possible.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136116",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T02:13:09",
"content": "as stated above if I use a vinyl cutter I go in the paste layers and round the corners. Least in Altium you can do a select similar objects, select options in PCB navigator (IE Layers and whatnot) and turn them all into rounded rectangles with a few clicks",
"parent_id": "8136094",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136117",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T02:22:10",
"content": "Rounded corners is also an IPC recommendation. In engineering, square inner corners do not exist. there will always be some radius, such as from the thickness of the laser beam. Rounded corners also result in better paste release, and thus a more uniform amount of paste deposited on the pads.KiCad is also transitioning to pads with rounded corners, and a lot of KiCad’s default footprint libraries already have rounded corners.",
"parent_id": "8136094",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8136154",
"author": "uxorious4ever",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T06:00:30",
"content": "I have made numerous stencils the past ~10 years on a 2012 Epilog Legend 75 watt laser. I use 3, 4, and 5 mil kapton film from Amazon and raster etch the paste layer directly to the laser from a gerber viewer. (GC-Prevue and Viewmate both work well) The advantage of the Epilog is that the laser driver works just like a printer driver, so no need for any middleman NG/SVG/etc. I can etch from ANY program that can print in Windows. (I etched my resume onto a piece of acrylic directly from Word to show a colleague)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8137284",
"author": "Rakky",
"timestamp": "2025-06-10T07:09:08",
"content": "Kapton Tape works great from my experience.",
"parent_id": "8136154",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8136478",
"author": "PolyVinalDistillate",
"timestamp": "2025-06-08T11:29:38",
"content": "I’ve managed to make some pretty detailed stencils (0603 and some fine pitched ICs) with alumninium drinks can using toner transfer. Reckon I could get down to 0402 fine. Cleaning the can first is the worst part. But cooking them on full in a pressure cooker for 10-20 minutes softens the print enough to wipe off with acetone. The laquer on the inside of the can can be a bit more of a challenge though.Anyway – in case anyone wants to try –1) clean cans2) cut open and flatten3) print negative toner print of component pads4) iron onto clean(est) side of can5) cover the other side with kapton tape6) bathe in a 50/50 salt/copper sulphate bath (dissolved in water – exact amount of water I’d need to look into).7) Regularly brush with a paintbrush during etching to remove the copper that’s deposited when the aluminium displaces it in the solution8) rinse and peel of the kapton tape.It’s easy to over-etch – need to keep a close eye.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,524.687709
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/06/this-week-in-security-roundcube-unified-threat-naming-and-ai-chat-logs/
|
This Week In Security: Roundcube, Unified Threat Naming, And AI Chat Logs
|
Jonathan Bennett
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] |
[
"ai",
"CVEs",
"This Week in Security"
] |
Up first, if you’re running a Roundcube install prior to 1.5.10 or 1.6.11,
it’s time to update
. We have
an authenticated Remote Code Execution (RCE) in the Roundcube Webmail client
. And while that’s not quite the level of chaos that an unauthenticated RCE would cause, it’s still to be taken seriously. Mainly because for the majority of the 53 million Roundcube installs out there, the users aren’t entirely trusted.
The magic at play in this vulnerability is the Roundcube user session code, and specifically the session deserialization scheme. There’s a weird code snippet in the unserialize function:
if ($str[$p] == '!') {
$p++;
$has_value = false;
The exclamation mark makes the code skip a character, and then assume that what comes next has no value. But if it does actually have a value, well then you’ve got a slightly corrupted deserialization, resulting in a slightly corrupted session. This really comes into force when combined with the file upload function, as the uploaded filename serves as a payload delivery mechanism. Use the errant exclamation mark handling to throw off deserialization, and the filename can contain arbitrary session key/value pairs. A GPG class from the PEAR library allows running an arbitrary command, and this can be hijacked with the session manipulation.
NetMRI Tackled By Rhino
The folks at
Rhino security labs took on NetMRI
, a network automation suite from Infoblox. The results are entertaining, like
https:///webui/application/get_saml_request?saml_id=1%26http://$(whoami)
in a browser or via curl being enough to demonstrate unauthorized code execution. It’s not terribly difficult to understand what’s happening there.
%26
is the HTTP encoding for the ampersand symbol,
&
. On a Linux terminal, that runs a command in the background, and most importantly, allows a second command to be run in the same string of text. The SAML request is used to generate a terminal command, and isn’t properly sanitized for special characters like the ampersand.
There are also a couple of hard coded credentials that made appearances in the released image, and a SQL injection attack right inside a URL GET parameter. One more particularly interesting problem was the arbitrary file read by an authenticated user. A Java servlet that is normally used for creating reports can be manipulated to return files. Interestingly, these files are fetched with root permissions, indicating the Java code is probably running as root as well. The vulnerabilities were reported September of last year, and Infoblox responded right away, though the actual fixes took several months to roll out.
Credit Card Terminal Shell
The Worldline Yomani XR credit card terminal is an interesting device. The hardware design has extensive anti-tamper protections, enough that
[Stefan Gloor] tripped them when disassembling and reassembling the device
. After this, he opted to desolder the flash chip and dump the firmware. The hardware was well built, but the software leaves much to be desired. It’s Linux 3.6 built with a 2010 release of buildroot, but apparently built in 2023. That’s a bit scary, and there are likely plenty of vulnerabilities to choose from due to the firmware age.
But as with essentially all of these embedded Linux devices, there is a serial debug port available. And to log in as root, there is no password required. It’s a good thing the device has all that tamper protection, right? The serial port is accessible via a removable panel, that does not trigger tamper protection. So it’s game over for this device, right? That’s where things get a bit murky. The secure side of the device is not running under the Linux system. It seems like it is working as a bootloader and network co-processor for the secure chip. That’s as far as [Stefan] got with this project, but it’s an interesting look into the security boundaries of this sort of device. [Stefan] is a Siemens employee, which is the parent company of Hackaday.
Midnight Blizzard, or Cozy Bear
CrowdStrike
and
Microsoft
have announced a new cooperative effort, to unify their threat actor naming schemes. You may remember, that Microsoft’s scheme results in some delightful monikers like Cinnamon Tempest. Though on the other hand, CrowdStrike has produced winners like Gothic Panda and Remix Kitten. This new effort isn’t bringing an end to either naming scheme, but indicates that the two companies will cooperate to keep their list of threat actors synced together.
Tnok vs Fwknop
There’s new security tool,
Tnok
, and hits rather close to home. Tnok is a port knocking solution based on the Time-based One Time Password (TOTP) algorithm, that aims at allowing non-root users to send secure port knocking requests using either UDP or TCP. One of the stated goals is to allow for TCP knocking without requiring the full 3-way TCP handshake. The solution [Sean] discovered was to send a couple characters of that TOTP code as the Max Segment Size of the TCP SYN packet.
I spent a couple years working on the Open Source
Fwknop
codebase, that also implements a port knocking scheme with real cryptography. While I’m thrilled that more research is being done into modern port knocking, I do worry that this approach will have a Denial of Service issue. Because the token space of TOTP is small, Tnok includes a built-in temporary IP blocking feature. Try to authenticate too many times without a valid TOTP token, and your IP is blocked. Normally it’s essentially impossible to make spoofed TCP connections over the Internet, but eliminating the need for the 3-way handshake may make it all to easy to spoof a victim IP, triggering that IP block.
Court-ordered Privacy Violations
There are times that legal systems are a bit out of sync with the realities of modern technology. The court order that
OpenAI must preserve all ChatGPT logs
seems to be a great example of this. The background is that news organizations are suing OpenAI for copyright violations, and requested the extra log retention to try to demonstrate that users are using ChatGPT to defeat paywalls.
The real problem here is that refusing to delete user logs upon request is a crime itself under California and European privacy laws. This order puts OpenAI in a very difficult position, and users are understandably concerned. OpenAI is fighting the order through their own legal filings. This one should be interesting to watch.
Bits and Bytes
Google has
delisted a pair of certificate authorities in Chrome
. Chunghwa and Netlock were both removed as a result of “a pattern of compliance failures, unmet improvement commitments, and the absence of tangible, measurable progress in response to publicly disclosed incident reports.” The offending actions seem to be things like issuing bad certificates and then failing to quickly revocation certificates with problems.
The GitHub Security Blog has the story of
DNS Rebind attacks
. This style of attack is particularly useful to defeat Same Origin Policy on a service hosted on a machine’s localhost. Manipulate a domain name to point to one IP upon first load, and then a different IP, and those two IPs are unintentionally both accessible from scripts using that DNS name.
The WooCommerce WordPress plugin had an arbitrary file upload issue, where a PHP factory was unintentionally disabling the the upload validation features in WordPress. This problem was announced while there was still silence from WooCommerce, but before the normal 90 day time period had passed. Version 4.1.8 is now available fixing the issue.
| 4
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8136016",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T17:02:55",
"content": "Sounds like they need better paywalls. Unify under one SSO, and send all paying customers a cheap security key. Double bonus if it doubles as adult verification for those kinds of sites.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136083",
"author": "QBFreak",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T21:49:06",
"content": "This new effort isn’t bringing an end to either naming scheme…https://xkcd.com/927/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136084",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T21:49:28",
"content": "I’m a bit confused by the last item… WooCommerce is currently on v9.8.5.Version 4.8.1 was released back in 2021.Wrong version or wrong plugin?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136112",
"author": "Lord Kimbote",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T01:45:30",
"content": "Google not wanting your CA is like McDonalds not wanting your potatoes any more. Yikes.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,524.620211
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/06/in-film-whats-old-may-still-be-new-again/
|
In Film, What’s Old May Still Be New Again
|
Jenny List
|
[
"classic hacks"
] |
[
"edwin land",
"instant film",
"kodachrome",
"land camera",
"polaroid"
] |
We recently published an affectionate look at a Polaroid Land camera, whose peel-apart instant film is long out of production except for a very few single exposure packs form a boutique manufacturer. All that was left was a discussion of modifying it for conventional roll film, or perhaps hacking a modern back-to-front Polaroid sheet into it.
Never say never though, because along come the Chinese company Light Lens Lab with a short announcement at the end of
a post talking about grain structures and anti-halation layer materials for their black and white film
.
Lastly, with our future development plan, we are currently developing and researching instant peel-apart film, with plans on producing and making available black and white peel-apart film by 2025 in various format. We aim to have an update on our packaging and test shot for the next development/research progress installment. We are also researching, developing and producing colour reversal films that consist of a dye-incorporating development process, commonly known as K-14, for 135 and 120 formats in 2026.
So there you go, no sooner has Hackaday declared a format unavailable, than it shows every sign of reappearing. At this point we’d like to take the opportunity to report that McDonalds Szechuan Chicken McNugget sauce will never ever be available again.
So what does this mean? First of all, assuming that the stuff doesn’t need the GDP of a small country to buy in Europe, the Hackaday Polaroid 104 will be able to shoot in its native format again. But perhaps more interestingly, it opens up a new option for the camera hacker. Pack film is much easier than modern instant film to deal with; it requires only rollers and someone to tug on that paper tab, no gears or motors involved. We’re here for this.
The observant will also have noted at the end of the announcement, mention of a dye-incorporating development process. This refers to the colour chemistry seen in Kodachrome, a long-extinct single-layer film that offered legendarily sharp and vibrant-coloured pictures at the expense of a very complex development path. We’d love to see it, but we’ll take the instant pack film and run.
The Hackaday Land camera is here
.
| 15
| 7
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8135962",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T12:01:02",
"content": "Oh come on! Now you’re just baiting us with the still visible bitting of your car key. ;-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136023",
"author": "concerned citizen",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T17:50:34",
"content": "What?",
"parent_id": "8135962",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136049",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T19:32:31",
"content": "https://hackaday.com/2025/05/15/falling-down-the-land-camera-rabbit-hole/#comment-8128696Look closely at the article’s image – there’s a car key under the camera propping it up and the beard/bitting is visible.",
"parent_id": "8136023",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8137842",
"author": "Jenny List",
"timestamp": "2025-06-11T13:55:59",
"content": "I live to troll",
"parent_id": "8135962",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8137845",
"author": "ford",
"timestamp": "2025-06-11T14:02:09",
"content": "Shame that you are so ugly. You could make a career in prostitution like your mother.",
"parent_id": "8137842",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135981",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T14:20:25",
"content": "Well, if the Polaroid chemistry is coming back (with all its nasty chemicals), China would be the one to do it…considering that environmental concerns don’t appear to be a priority there.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136214",
"author": "Aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T13:21:06",
"content": "People like you make me puke.Yeah, I know I just made your day because you live to be a POS.",
"parent_id": "8135981",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135991",
"author": "Bill",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T15:09:49",
"content": "The other significant part of the announcement is that they are bringing back Kodachrome! (mentioned as K14 reversal film to avoid using a trademarked name, probably)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135992",
"author": "Bill",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T15:11:00",
"content": "Oops, read it again. The article explains it.",
"parent_id": "8135991",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135995",
"author": "Michael Shawaluk",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T15:21:38",
"content": "The closing comments about Kodachrome left me with a haunting melody lurking through my mind. Thoughts of nice bright colors, greens of summer, making all the world a sunny day. Oh yeah.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135998",
"author": "Nemesio Bettencourt",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T15:28:38",
"content": "I have 4 Polaroid cameras, including the sx70 and the 250 . Please don’t mess with my feelings. I have been waiting for years for a decent Polaroid film.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136018",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T17:06:14",
"content": "In a world where everything is suspect film may indeed provide some protection. Just like vinyl protects from “you’ll own nothing, and like it”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136021",
"author": "dk",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T17:24:20",
"content": "At this point we’d like to take the opportunity to reportthat McDonalds Szechuan Chicken McNugget sauce willnever ever be available again.Oh, look what I found :)https://www.ebay.de/itm/255199436626",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136069",
"author": "asheets",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T20:50:26",
"content": "USD$10 a packet, plus SH&H, for 8 year old sauce? Of course, I now realize that this is a bargain compared to some other ‘bay sellers.",
"parent_id": "8136021",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136246",
"author": "Aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T15:33:21",
"content": "Does that include sales tax though, and what about tariffs if you are non-US? And shipping?",
"parent_id": "8136069",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,524.57682
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/06/soviet-calculator-teardown-reveals-similarities-and-differences/
|
Soviet Calculator Teardown Reveals Similarities And Differences
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"Teardown"
] |
[
"calculator",
"soviet",
"teardown",
"vfd"
] |
Tearing down hardware from different parts of the world can be revealing, showing unique parts, techniques, and tricks employed by engineers living in a very different world from our own. To that end, [msylvain59] has been kind enough to give us a look inside
the Elektronika MK-26—a calculator built in the former Soviet Union.
There’s lots of interesting stuff to see from the get-go. The oddball button pad is covered in Cyrillic symbols, quite alien to those of us more accustomed to the Latin character set. It’s also constructed somewhat unlike more familiar models from Western-aligned companies like Casio or Commodore. It also rattles when shaken, which doesn’t inspire confidence. Inside, it’s got old-school brown PCBs without the usual green solder mask, a chunky IC in a weird package, and display is via a power-hungry VFD.
It doesn’t look so totally alien inside; much of the construction is pretty typical of the mid-1970s, wherever you went around the world. The most striking differences are more in the graphics and visual design than anything else.
Ultimately, there are reasons why manufacturers around the world tend to converge on similar techniques. Generally, it’s because it’s more economical or easier to do things a certain way. And yet, we still see regional variances because conditions, technologies, and parts availability varies around the world. This teardown highlights that quite clearly.
If you’re just getting a taste for Soviet hardware teardowns, you’ll love this video diving inside
a real Soyuz clock.
| 12
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8135933",
"author": "Nikolai",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T08:54:00",
"content": "Back then it was great and expensive. My first calculator was Electronica MK-85. It was great and made very well. It did cost my mom her monthly salary.https://elektronika.su/en/calculators/elektronika-mk-85/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135970",
"author": "Steven-X",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T13:01:26",
"content": "That was pretty cool. I really wanted the Casio version, but ended up with purchasing the Radio Shack book on programming them, and translating those programs to Sinclair BASIC.",
"parent_id": "8135933",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135982",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T14:21:45",
"content": "Casio calculators/they really can’t be beat!/they’ve got big green numbers/and little rubber feet!",
"parent_id": "8135970",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136011",
"author": "Stanson",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T16:36:31",
"content": "Casio FX-700P was 8-bit with very poor performance and limited to on-board BASIC.MK-85 was 16-bit with full PDP-11 architecture. Basically it was PDP-11 in the pocket that could run serious PDP-11 stuff, not only BASIC programs.If you are a fan of vintage DEC computers, then MK-85 is what you definitely want in your collection – it’ is unique thing and smallest PDP-11 variant ever.Interesting, that Soviet equivalent of Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum was BK0010 which was also 16-bit and with PDP-11 architecture.There are also Soviet 16-bit PDP-11 compatibe single-chip CPUs in DIP-40 (and DIP-48 IIRC) package, that are perfect for homebrew PDP-11 DIY devices.",
"parent_id": "8135970",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135937",
"author": "Dennis",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T09:30:05",
"content": "I am irritated by the phrase “weird IC package”. It’s an unneccessary judgement, especially for a generic Quad In-Line (QIL) Package.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136037",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T18:35:55",
"content": "For real. We don’t usually engage in package-shaming here. Flip-chip, ball-grid, heck even SIP. Aren’t they all silicon inside?!",
"parent_id": "8135937",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136047",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T19:31:24",
"content": "Unusual, unique, alien? I’m not judging here, just saying it’s outside my norms. Still nice to see how the other half do things.",
"parent_id": "8135937",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136216",
"author": "Aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T13:25:20",
"content": "What do you mean with “how the other half do things”? What ‘other half’?",
"parent_id": "8136047",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136535",
"author": "Aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-06-08T15:26:05",
"content": "I mean if you had used past tense I would get it.",
"parent_id": "8136216",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135993",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T15:19:24",
"content": "Ah, I miss those VFDs. Main thing batteries or wall-wart all the way.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136090",
"author": "Gus Mueller",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T22:45:11",
"content": "best HackADay subject ever! A perfect mix of nostalgia and alternative history!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136482",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-06-08T11:50:54",
"content": "Ultimately, there are reasons why manufacturers around the world tend to converge on similar techniques. Generally, it’s because it’s more economical or easier to do things a certain way.Or because you’re copying technology from the west – which kinda does hit the points of “more economical or easier” – at least until the point of reaching the limits of your own manufacturing technology.See for example how the DDR copied basically everything that IBM made.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,524.193116
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/05/spacedeck-is-half-cyberdeck-half-phone-case-all-style/
|
SPACEdeck Is Half Cyberdeck, Half Phone Case, All Style
|
Tyler August
|
[
"Android Hacks",
"Cyberdecks"
] |
[
"3d print",
"android",
"cyberdeck"
] |
It’s been at least a few hours since Hackaday last featured a cyberdeck, so to avoid the specter of withdrawal, we present you with [Sp4m]’s
SPACEdeck, a stylish phone-based cyberdeck
!
The SPACEdeck takes a Samsung Galaxy S24 and puts it into a handsome clamshell case with a wireless keyboard, turning the phone into a tiny-screened laptop that urges you not to panic. Is The Hitchiker’s Guide to The Galaxy available on the Playstore? Well, the e-book of the novel surely is, and having access to Wikipedia comes close. The design is building off (or out from, as the case may be) a
3D-printed phone case for the S24 by Digital Proto.
Given that the Galaxy S24 has more horsepower than the ancient Macbook we’re writing this on, this setup is probably going to be more useful than you might think, especially when paired with
Termux to give you the full power of Linux.
Like some modern laptops, the screen can rotate 180 degrees for when the keyboard isn’t needed. The case will also allow for Nintendo Switch2 joycon integration, but that’s a work in progress for now. The connection points will also be modular so other accessories can be used. All files will be released once [Sp4m] is happy with how the Joycons are holding on, hopefully with a license that will allow us to remix this for other phones.
Given the supercomputers in our pockets, it’s really a wonder we don’t see more android-based cyberdecks,
but most seem to stick to SBCs
. Lately it seems the
slabtop form-factor has been equally popular
for cyberdecks, but it’s
hard to beat a clamshell for practicality
.
| 17
| 7
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8135906",
"author": "Ian",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T07:41:16",
"content": "There have been exactly 3 actual cyberdecks since January 2023 posted on HaD, and 2 of them were steamdecks.Pick a new word.That one is taken and doesn’t mean what you keep using it for.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135915",
"author": "frenchone",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T07:57:06",
"content": "And what is your definition ?",
"parent_id": "8135906",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135932",
"author": "X-MarX-THX-SpXt",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T08:48:25",
"content": "Wet ironing boards?:S",
"parent_id": "8135915",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135977",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T13:55:30",
"content": "Oh? Which 3 of the 30 postings tagged “cyberdeck” do you consider “actual”?Do we have to go back to thrashing out what constitutes an real cyberdeck? Because that was a dumb series of comments the first time ’round.Even Gibson wasn’t terribly clear on the definition, so let it rest.",
"parent_id": "8135906",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135988",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T14:44:43",
"content": "OK, I’ll bite: what is your definition of cyberdeck?If you want to cite Neuromancer, I’d say exactly zero of the cyberdecks ever posted to Hackaday qualify as Cyberspace Decks, since you can’t use them to jack into the matrix via neural interface.",
"parent_id": "8135906",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135916",
"author": "frenchone",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T07:59:55",
"content": "What is the model of keyboard ?I search one < 24cm (but larger than blackberry)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135975",
"author": "Jack",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T13:37:23",
"content": "There’s a couple of links to buy them on the printables page for the project the SPACEdeck was inspired by:https://www.printables.com/model/1265137-case-for-wireless-keyboard-and-xiaomi-poco-x3-xiao",
"parent_id": "8135916",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136007",
"author": "frenchone",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T16:16:25",
"content": "Thank you.As usual for non branded products, dimensions are not precised.",
"parent_id": "8135975",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135923",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T08:29:30",
"content": "A keyboard case for a smartphone is a ‘deck now? We are REALLY stretching the definition a bit nowProps to the creator still, they created whatever they wanted. Who cares what we call it",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135964",
"author": "nomansland",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T12:15:58",
"content": "“Not a deck”",
"parent_id": "8135923",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135940",
"author": "Lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T09:51:34",
"content": "I like the idea. It’s smart using a phone for a computer and screen combinationIt makes me wish we had more options for mobile os’s. Android, as flexible as it is, is so locked down compared to a desktop OS. I’d love to see mobile Ubuntu garner wide compatibility, and phones become more easily jailbroken.Until then we will have tons of e-waste and less cyber decks.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135972",
"author": "Tom",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T13:13:09",
"content": "Termux",
"parent_id": "8135940",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135986",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T14:34:24",
"content": "I have a Fold2 with a broken touchscreen, it would be nice if Samsung Dex would work on the screen, although I here if you root and change the build.prop to “tablet” DeX may run on the internal screen.",
"parent_id": "8135940",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135973",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T13:17:53",
"content": "Almost perfect. Does it also have a towel?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135974",
"author": "Maave",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T13:17:56",
"content": "Sweet aesthetics. I like the “slide up” Joycon rails, that will be more secure than “slide down” and relying on the lock notch.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135994",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T15:20:39",
"content": "It only just occurred to me that the hitchhiker’s guide was Douglas Adams forecasting Wikipedia. I know other people had already come up with similar predictions of an internet-like system. (Pynchon, in Vineland, and numerous real-world attempts to put together compendia of all known facts in a searchable form.) But Adams and his idea of individual people adding, editing, and revising a compendium of information, seems to more directly predict Wikipedia itself.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136054",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T19:57:49",
"content": "Bush’s Memex predated HHGTTG.As We May Think1945",
"parent_id": "8135994",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,524.89025
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/05/piko-your-esp32-powered-fitness-buddy/
|
Piko, Your ESP32 Powered Fitness Buddy
|
John Elliot V
|
[
"hardware",
"Wearable Hacks"
] |
[
"accelerometer",
"ESP32",
"exercise",
"fitness",
"smartwatch",
"step counter",
"tamagotchi"
] |
Over on Hackaday.io there’s a fun and playful write-up for a fun and playful project — the Piko, an
ESP32 powered smartwatch
.
Our hackers [Iloke Alusala], [Lulama Lingela], and [Rafael Cardoso] teamed up to design and manufacture this wrist-worn fitness wearable. Made from an ESP32 Beetle C6 and using an attached accelerometer with simple thresholds the Piko can detect if you’re idle, walking, jogging, or sprinting; and at the same time count your steps.
The team 3D printed the requisite parts in PLA using the printer in their university makerspace. In addition to the ESP32 and printed parts, the bill of materials includes a 240×240 IPS TFT LCD display, a LIS331HH triple-axis accelerometer, a 200 mAh battery, and of course, a watch strap.
Demonstrating splendid attention to detail, and inspired by the aesthetic of the Tamagotchi and pixel art, the Piko mimics your current activity with a delightful array of hand-drawn animations on its display. Should you want to bring a similar charm to your own projects, all the
source is available under the MIT license
.
If you’re interested in smartwatch technology be sure to check out our recent articles:
Smartwatches Could Flatten The Curve Of The Next Pandemic
and
Custom Smartwatch Makes Diabetes Monitoring Easier For Kids
.
| 3
| 3
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8135576",
"author": "Maria",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T11:51:29",
"content": "If paired with a powerfull enough servomotor, I could see this being used as hands-free gesture control for toilet flushing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135615",
"author": "ThoriumBR",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T13:17:19",
"content": "Keeping the screen on during exercises looks nice on a presentation video but fails on real world. You will not keep looking at your watch while you run (hopefully) and it will drain battery quickly.You could have the animations when you finished the exercise and it would show you a cute animation and a summary of your session, otherwise it’s useless and wasteful. Priority during exercise must be precise sensor reading and data processing, not cute animations that nobody will see.Other than that, it’s a nice device, only a little too big for me. My kids would love it! And in the current state, they would hit a lamppost head on (or a wall) looking at the animations…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136616",
"author": "James",
"timestamp": "2025-06-08T23:07:45",
"content": "That video had beautiful people wearing it… Not much else",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,524.831039
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/05/running-freedos-and-8086tiny-on-the-game-boy-advance-because-you-can/
|
Running FreeDOS And 8086tiny On The Game Boy Advance Because You Can
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"handhelds hacks",
"Nintendo Game Boy Hacks"
] |
[
"8086",
"freedos",
"game boy advance"
] |
How many people haven’t looked at their Game Boy Advance (GBA) handheld gaming device and wondered how much better it might be if it could run FreeDOS. Inside an 8086 emulator. If you’re like [ZZAZZ] and similarly suffer intrusive project-related thoughts, then
this might be a moment of clear recognition
, somewhat like sharing one’s story at a Programmers Anonymous meeting, but we digress.
In the video, the basic premise of making even the
8086tiny
emulator work on the GBA seemed improbable on the outset – courtesy of the rather limited memory environment provided by the GBA – before even daring to look at things like disk access.
However, letting silly things like segmented memory and mismatched memory addresses deter us from pleasing said intrusive thoughts would be beyond the pale. Ergo we get a shining example of how days of rewriting code, stripping code, debugging code, fixing alignment issues in code and writing work-arounds for newly discovered issues in code can ultimately lead to the proud moment where FreeDOS boots on the GBA.
Granted it takes over an hour to do so, and has to be started from a butchered
Pokémon Emerald
save file, courtesy of a well-known exploit in that game, thankfully preserved in counterfeit cartridges.
Admittedly we’re not sure what practical applications there are for FreeDOS on the GBA, but that’s never stopped hackers from taking on impossible projects before, so there’s no sense letting it get in the way now.
Thanks to [Jinxy] for the tip.
| 21
| 3
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8135562",
"author": "Albert",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T10:36:21",
"content": "Actually, Z80 GameBoy CPU is a distant cousin of early X86 so it should be possible to binary translate MS-DOS on the fly and get it to run at full speed.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135590",
"author": "luccamakesthings",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T12:47:00",
"content": "Isn’t the main CPU in the GBA an ARM? IIRC the Z80 is there for backwards compatibility with older Gameboy games.",
"parent_id": "8135562",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135639",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T13:44:07",
"content": "I think so, but classic GBC games like Zelda DX hat the ability to detect if they ran on a GBA.Maybe it’s possible to have both CPUs running same time somehow?In either mode doesn’t matter, maybe. If a GB game can access ARM chip or GBA game can access DMG CPU, I mean.",
"parent_id": "8135590",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135979",
"author": "TDT",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T14:03:55",
"content": "Nay.If I recall correctly, the CPU starts off as GBA, and check the cartridge switch (so no read/write to the cartridge yet).If the cartridge switch is set to GB, the CPU switches to compatibility mode, but also switch the cartridge data bus to GB, meaning 16bits address and 8bit data “5Volts”.If not, the cartridge bus is left as it, with hybrid address/data mode, 16bits, 3.3V.The GBA/GB detection was done very easily. Nintendo initialized one specific register at a different value on purpose. The only real usage was to correct your color palettes to work better with the GBA screen. Some game used it to offer bonuses too (like Zelda Oracle of Season and the “Advanced ring”).But as far as I know, you can’t access anything of the “real” GBA hardware, as opposed to the Super Game Boy Mode (that would have been so dope!)",
"parent_id": "8135639",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135611",
"author": "Bill",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T13:12:12",
"content": "The 8086 being 16 bit and the Z80 8 bit would make this pretty much an emulator not a translator.Now, running CP/M would be easier, since it was written for the 8080/Z80",
"parent_id": "8135562",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135638",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T13:39:49",
"content": "Albert’s idea wasn’t so wrong in principle, I think.The NEC V20/V30 provide i8080 emulation through register-renaming.So they map 8080 intructions onto 8086 counterparts.That’s why NEC V20/V30 lack Z80 compatibility, also.The 8086 didn’t feature anything comparable to begin with.That being said, the problem I see is segmentation.The Z80/i8080 has 64KB address range, which matches the 64KB segment size of 8086 (and the COM file).So in order to gain more than 64KB of memory, bank-switching is needed.Or, someone has to write a “tiny DOS” that fits into less than 64KB.It’s certainly possible! The EXE loader and internal commands of DOS are the biggest.Writing a simple DOS that can run COM files only is not much more work than writing a CP/M clone, which there had been many.",
"parent_id": "8135611",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135641",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T13:49:45",
"content": "“Now, running CP/M would be easier, since it was written for the 8080/Z80”Or MSX-DOS, which shared some things with MS-DOS. FAT12 filesystem, for example.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX-DOSWriting a 8086+DOS emulator for CP/M or MSX-DOS might be a possibility.Like an Z80 emulator in reverse (NICE22, Z80MU etc), basically.It would allow running text adventures, maybe. Or playing Alleycat, if CGA emulation was added.It’s just an idea, though. Actual implementation is different from theory, of course. Easier said than done.",
"parent_id": "8135611",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135784",
"author": "James",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T22:50:30",
"content": "what gameboy had a Z80? the nintendo gameboy has an SM83 core which is a relative, but isn’t a Z80.also technically they are relatives of the 8080, not the 8086. early CP/M (8080 only) might run. Any CP/M targeting the Z80 though is off the table without heavy patching. given how closely DOS relies on 86 features, it would still have to emulate a lot of CPU state.",
"parent_id": "8135562",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135888",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T06:04:19",
"content": "“what gameboy had a Z80? the nintendo gameboy has an SM83 core which is a relative, but isn’t a Z80.”Yes, the DMG CPU was an Z80-ish CPU and not a true Z80.But that’s nitpicking and known since the 90s.In the press, the Gameboy was always being treated as a Z80 handheld, so users are not to blame to call it a Z80 platform.There had been data loggers and other accessories to use the GB as a productive tools.In great parts because Z80 tool chain could be used here.Traditionally, emulators also use a modified Z80 core to emulate the 8-Bit Gameboys. :)",
"parent_id": "8135784",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136168",
"author": "Bastet",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T08:36:26",
"content": "Yeah, thats something the author of the old (1996) Yars Revenge remake for the Gameboy felt for, the ROM only works on certain older emulators and not on real hardware.",
"parent_id": "8135784",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135570",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T11:24:44",
"content": "Hi, I think there’s room for improvement.An 10 MHz 286 PC from 1988 can boot MS-DOS 6.2 via 8088 PC emulator in roughly same amount of time as this modern ARM handheld.https://tinyurl.com/muu6vnhf",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135571",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T11:32:54",
"content": "Correction. The 286 is faster, actually? 😲ca. 20 min for POST (memory test)ca. 12 min booting DOSca. 2,5 min for executing “VER” command",
"parent_id": "8135570",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135599",
"author": "wm",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T12:59:03",
"content": "286 is older, sure, but a GBA is not a modern device. It’s 25 years old and runs on AA batteries.",
"parent_id": "8135571",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135608",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T13:08:32",
"content": "Yes, but the 80286 has 134k transistors, is from 1982 and that 8088 emulator was written in QuickBasic 4.5 and uses full CPU emulation (no JIT).Normally, an Acorn Archimedes from 1987 with the first ARM chip should run circles around it, even.Or so I think. I’m just a layman.",
"parent_id": "8135599",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135626",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T13:27:08",
"content": "Just for clarification, the 80286 isn’t booting DOS natively but runs an PC emulator:An unoptimized IBM PC emulator (written in Basic) running itself on a “slow” PC/AT from the 80s.So it’s comparable to an 80s era IBM PC/AT 5170 emulating an 80s era IBM PC/XT 5160 entirely in software, essentially.And still being faster than a handheld with a modern ARM7TDMI processor at 18 MHz.For comparison, in 1987-1989, the Acorn Archimedes with ARM1 at 8 MHz ran PC emulators, too. At usable speeds.It’s been listed here:https://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/AcornOS.htmlThe very first ARM computer already was a power house, so to say.There was no slow ARM processor ever, in that sense.Even the old GBA processor was quite powerful, given enough RAM.This video from the 80s gives an impression how powerful it was.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VK5AZrg3ZD8That being said, I don’t mean to provide any criticism here.Making a GBA run DOS or ELKs is a very tricky task to do!The author who did it was very good, my compliments! 😃👍I just meant to give an idea how powerful hardware from the 80s could be.Both 80286 and ARM in this case.Because nowadays, it’s too easy to think that old technology was primitive, which it wasn’t.Even the simple 6502 was notable, in its own ways. ;)",
"parent_id": "8135599",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135646",
"author": "OH3MVV",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T14:09:18",
"content": "18 MHz ARM7TDMI is not exactly a modern CPU… :)",
"parent_id": "8135626",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135693",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T16:50:16",
"content": "The ARM7TDMI rev3 has 0,8 MIPS per MHz. At 18 MHz, that’s about 16 MIPS.The 80286 at 10 MHz has merely 1,5 MIPS, by comparison.Sources/references:https://developer.arm.com/documentation/dvi0027/b/applications-and-benefitshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80286#History_and_performance",
"parent_id": "8135626",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135841",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T02:41:59",
"content": "Indeed. I ran a PC emulator (PC Conqueror) on my Sinclair QL back in the day. Emulating an 8088 on a 7.5 MHz m68008 was slow, but I could boot MS-DOS, even with drivers and stuff, within a minute or two. I could even play some games.Granted, PC Conqueror was written in optimized m68k assembly, but a 16 MHz Arm chip with 16 bit RAM and significantly fewer cycles per instruction shouldn’t be THAT much slower.",
"parent_id": "8135570",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8140663",
"author": "Sykobee",
"timestamp": "2025-06-20T16:17:58",
"content": "The GBA uses a 16MHz ARM7.Emulation is usually at least 10 machine instructions per emulated instruction (i don’t know how efficient 8086tiny is).However the ARM will have a higher IPC (as well as the 2x clock speed) compared to an 8086.",
"parent_id": "8135570",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135746",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T19:54:44",
"content": "Can GBA run the original DOS version of DOOM?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135976",
"author": "TDT",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T13:53:01",
"content": "Very unlikely.The GBA port was already quite optimized at the time.Now, today, it has even been optimized a bit more, but still, the memory constrains are the biggest barrier.Now, you can without too much problems repack the original game and run it in modern GBA DooM engine.But the original code? I don’t think so, no.",
"parent_id": "8135746",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,525.413194
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/04/passive-saturation-box-is-a-cheap-way-to-distort-your-sound/
|
Passive Saturation Box Is A Cheap Way To Distort Your Sound
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"Musical Hacks"
] |
[
"audio",
"diodes",
"saturation"
] |
Distortion pedals and overdrive effects usually have a bunch of lovely transistors or op-amps inside and lots of knobs and dials to tweak the sound to your personal taste. However, it’s possible to get some crunchiness in your audio signal without all that fuss,
as [Simon Hutchinson] demonstrates with his $2 “analog saturation box”.
The effect is achieved quite simply by installing a pair of diodes in opposite orientations, connected from the signal path to ground. This configuration is also known as wiring diodes in “anti-parallel.” When the signal increases in amplitude beyond the diode’s forward voltage, the diode conducts and the signal’s peak is clipped off, which creates a distorted tone. Since there are two diodes, one in each orientation, both the tops and bottoms of the AC audio signal are clipped in this manner.
The amount of clipping is highly dependent on the diodes chosen and the strength of the signal you’re working with. Silicon diodes clip around 0.7 V, while germanium diodes clip at about 0.3 V, but that doesn’t give you much flexibility. You can work with this to some degree, though. You can up the minimum clipping level by stacking more diodes in series in each direction, or you can put in a potentiometer to vary your signal’s level before it hits the diodes. Really, though, this hard voltage limit is why more commonly, we use active distortion or overdrive effects that have more options for gain and level and such.
[Simon Hutchinson] does an able job of explaining the effect and demonstrates its use with some simple beats. As a passive device, it’s pretty one note—there’s no EQs to mess with the frequency response, and no ability to change anything else about the sound, either. Still, it’s interesting to hear the effect it does have on a signal, and you might just find this is all the distortion you need. If you’d rather go into full-fat distortion though,
we’ve covered that too
.
| 10
| 8
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8135519",
"author": "exponential component",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T06:53:37",
"content": "Diodes are passive since they don’t require functioning energy, but yes they’re not linear",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135540",
"author": "wmwragg",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T08:43:45",
"content": "Passive in the audio scene means that no power is required to be plugged in i.e. all the power is derived from the audio signal itself. There are passive mixers, and unbalanced to balanced converters etc.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135557",
"author": "Pheebe",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T10:07:47",
"content": "When considering signal dynamics, hard clippers (often utilizing anti-parallel diodes as in this example) can significantly limit the dynamic range. It might be wise to incorporate a low-frequency filter beforehand to help preserve higher-frequency content, ensuring that the nuances of your audio remain intact. The hard clipping can erase high frequency content that’s riding on the back of lower frequency content.Mixing in the hard clipper with the original signal can help to reduce both of those too – It’s about finding what sounds most appealing for your art.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135580",
"author": "Izhar Ashdot",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T12:12:29",
"content": "My video showing the difference in guitar sound between different diodeshttps://youtu.be/jlSrWHdPxg0",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135718",
"author": "PPJ",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T18:35:55",
"content": "Thanks!",
"parent_id": "8135580",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135584",
"author": "Craven",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T12:37:52",
"content": "You can also use different kinds of leds in place of diodes to change your flavor of distortion.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8138694",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2025-06-14T06:46:28",
"content": "It might be possible to make the circuit adjustable using LEDs or photodiodes and shining light into them at different levels",
"parent_id": "8135584",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135667",
"author": "Cory",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T15:35:26",
"content": "By the “needs external power to operate” definition, diodes are passives. What definition are you using?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135669",
"author": "cory",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T15:37:20",
"content": "If you just want to see two diodes you can stop the video at 0:29",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135748",
"author": "Cad the Mad",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T19:59:40",
"content": "I built a synth module around this once. I had an adjustable pre-amp and post-amp so I could adjust the clipping level, pots in series with the diodes so I could add more skew, a DC-blocking cap on the output to un-bias the output if the pots were unbalanced, and lastly it fed through an adjustable low-pass filter so I could optionally round off the corners of the clipping.It was really nice effect for sampled sounds and vocals.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,525.272322
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/04/slide-rule-by-helix/
|
Slide Rule By Helix
|
Al Williams
|
[
"3d Printer hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] |
[
"calculation",
"slide rule"
] |
It is no secret that we like slide rules around the Hackaday bunker, and among our favorites are the cylindrical slide rules. [Chris Staecker] likes them, too, and recently even 3D printed a version. But spurred by comments on his video, he decided to try something that might be unique:
a helical slide rule
. You can see how it works in the video below.
With a conventional slide rule, the scale is rotated around a cylinder so that it is the same length as a much longer linear scale. However, this new slide rule bends the entire rule around a cylinder and allows the slide to move, just like a conventional slide rule. If you have a 3D printer, you can make your own.
Is it better? That depends on your definition of better. It isn’t as accurate as a normal cylindrical rule. But it is novel and smaller than an equivalent conventional rule, so that’s better in some way.
If you want to make your own conventional cylindrical rule, [Chris]
did the work for you already
. Don’t know about slide rules at all? Maybe
start here
.
| 0
| 0
|
[] | 1,760,371,525.347049
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/04/making-solder-wick-less-painful/
|
Making Solder Wick Less Painful
|
Aaron Beckendorf
|
[
"how-to"
] |
[
"desoldering",
"desoldering braid",
"wick"
] |
For some people (e.g. this author) solder wick is a tool of last resort. Unfortunately, solder suckers and vacuum pumps lose most of their utility when you move from through-hole to SMD components, forcing us to use the dreaded wick. For those of us in this mindset, [nanofix]’s
recent video
which we’ve placed below the break on tips for solder wick could make desoldering a much less annoying experience.
Most of the tips have to do with maintaining proper control of heat flow and distribution. [nanofix]’s first recommendation is to cut off short segments of wick, rather than using it straight from the roll, which reduces the amount of heat lost to conduction along the rest of the length. It’s also important to maintain a certain amount of solder on the soldering iron’s tip to improve conduction between the tip and the wick, and to periodically re-tin the tip to replace absorbed solder. Counterintuitively, [nanofix] explains that a low temperature on the soldering iron is more likely to damage the board than a high temperature, since solder wick getting stuck to a pad risks tearing the traces.
[nanofix] also notes that most boards come from the factory with lead-free solder, which has a higher melting point than tin-lead solder, and thus makes it harder to wick. He recommends first adding eutectic lead-based solder to the pads, then wicking away the new, lower melting-point mixture. Other miscellaneous tips include cutting a more precise tip into pieces of wick, always using flux, avoiding small soldering iron tips, and preheating the board with hot air.
We’ve seen a
couple of guides
to
desoldering
before. If you’re looking for more exotic methods for easing the task, you can always
use bismuth
.
| 28
| 12
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8135362",
"author": "RetepV",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T20:10:33",
"content": "I’ve been hesitating to replace my solder-sucker with a real vacuum pump for so long, that now I don’t need either of them anymore because everything is SMD. :DNaaa, not really true. I like to work on vintage computers. But I became so proficient with my solder-sucker that I just can’t warrant the purchase of a vacuum pump.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135368",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T20:26:35",
"content": "Yeah, been using my favourite type of solder sucker for a long time, for thru hole and SMD cleanup as well as chemtronics wick.The only vacuum pump desoldering gun I’ve ever got in with was an OK Industries one, they are not cheap and I doubt my employer would have been happy if I’d taken it when I left.",
"parent_id": "8135362",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135470",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T03:26:09",
"content": "I have an OKi solder station from when they were merged / bought out whatever with metcal so metcal tips fit it fineso we were in a merger and some equipment, mostly broken got transferred to us, and I was going though it and found this thing, its a iron with metcal tips, a sucker gun that transforms from pistol grip to pencil grip and a set of tweezers, it was broken.So I say “hey boss man there’s this kit, its valued at whatever was on the spreadsheet, but its totally dead”. He says I don’t want you wasting your time fixing old junk just toss it out (neglected to say where)I take it home and pull it apart, put less than 50 bucks worth of effort and parts into it and a little bit of glue (if you pressed in a tip too hard the cable boot would pop out) and its been in nearly daily service for almost 8 years now.On that same mentality of “its old junk don’t waste your time with it ” I’m also running a TDK-Lambada UP20-10 power supply connected to a surplus GPIB remote control while sitting at my Kewaunee 3 tier ESD safe bench with a full stack Kennedy tool box next to itThe toolbox was especially funny cause when that got kicked out of house the maintenance manager scoffed and said if you can fit that in your KIA (2006 rio) you can have it for free … he didn’t know it was 3 boxes stood on top of each other, though with the back seat down and passenger seat full I still drove 40 min with my knees against the dashboard",
"parent_id": "8135368",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135473",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T03:31:41",
"content": "this is an older picture but stillhttps://forums.atariage.com/topic/277693-show-us-your-bench-and-i-got-a-new-toy/#findComment-5671450",
"parent_id": "8135470",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135563",
"author": "Jan Prägert",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T10:39:10",
"content": "Looks like it never sees someone working there…. :-)",
"parent_id": "8135473",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136123",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T02:48:49",
"content": "yea it never really looks like that, that was the day I cleaned it",
"parent_id": "8135473",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135374",
"author": "aot",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T20:40:27",
"content": "For multi-pin smd parts I use tin-bismuth solder to remove them. Melts at around 140 C, put an excess on all the pins and keep it molten. Much less likely to strip traces off the board. Then use a vacuum solder station to clean off the excess.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135377",
"author": "Ccecil",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T20:41:21",
"content": "I’m gonna throw out the best piece of solder wick advice I have ever learned.Press the tip on the wick…then pull the wick up and back over the top of the tip. The heat above the joint will cause the solder to flow upwards…so it is wicking instead of dabbing the solder off.Credit goes to the late John Dunn. My electronics instructor.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135412",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T22:28:58",
"content": "Yeah, if you have a LOT of solder to remove, you can put the wick down with a bunch hanging out the other side, put the soldering iron tip on it, and then pull the wick through, drawing solder out along the wick length. But be really careful doing this. It’s an easy way to rip off a pad/trace.Same thing holds for particularly terrible through-hole cleanup. Strip 10cm of stranded copper wire, twist it together tightly with your fingers, and see if you can get it through the hole when it has some extra solder on it to increase heat transfer, then push it all the way through, soaking out solder as it travels. As long as you don’t end up sticking the wire in the board and manage to get it free, you can extract a lot of solder from even the crabbiest of ground planes.",
"parent_id": "8135377",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135396",
"author": "fonz",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T21:21:14",
"content": "if you have problems with solder wick, you probably bought something “solder wick shaped” on alibaba",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135446",
"author": "Cody",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T00:56:38",
"content": "It works fine if you use plenty of rosin flux.",
"parent_id": "8135396",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135623",
"author": "LookAtDaShinyShiny",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T13:24:26",
"content": "Flux is 100% key to good wicking, dip the wick in flux if you can or smother it with it depending on your flux type and it wick like a dream",
"parent_id": "8135446",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135663",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T15:27:07",
"content": "Flux is 100% the secret sauce they don’t tell you about when you’re taught to solder, except as an offhand comment. With a tube of tack flux, anyone can solder good (not that using tons of flux makes you ‘good’ at soldering).",
"parent_id": "8135623",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136266",
"author": "Henry",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T16:37:17",
"content": "Seriously. When I think back to using a way-too-hot Radio Shack firestarter with no flux, it’s no WONDER I thought I couldn’t solder back in High School. Variable temperature iron + a syringe of rosin feels like a cheat code.",
"parent_id": "8135663",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135447",
"author": "sebastian",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T01:05:24",
"content": "When I first started soldering I bought on aliexpress, like 50 meters of solder wick for $10, many times cheaper than those “premium” ones, and I got frustrated because it didn’t suck ANYTHING.BUT now I know there is not a single reason to buy expensive ones, all you need is the cheapest wick you can get, and the bottle of liquid flux, might be cheap as well. You just do a quick dip and use it, it works better than any of those premium wicks out there.",
"parent_id": "8135396",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135475",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T03:36:53",
"content": "let me look at my wick, ah yea Chemtronics 50-4-100, yea that’s 85 bucks on digikeyHas always sucked, will alway suck, have to add about a half gallon of flux most of the time and by its nature is very abrasive, even on brand new boards if you press too hardgranted that 85 bucks has lasted me about decade but even cheap crap doesnt really work all that much worse, its wick … flux and practice is key vs quality",
"parent_id": "8135396",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135631",
"author": "Mojo",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T13:32:05",
"content": "I have purchased great wick from Aliexpress that works as well as the name brands. The key is don’t buy no clean, lead free fluxed or heaven forbid unfluxed wick. Get wick with activated rosin flux.The other “tricks” I learned long before SMD was popular, but they still apply. Double the end of the wick over before wicking. Gives more heated mass and more surface area to wick. Also, Don’t use a tiny tip on SMD. Soldering and desoldering works because you transfer heat from your iron the the connection. A tiny tip doesn’t have enough mass and the tip and connection cools instead of melting the solder. Finally, as mentioned prevously, use a little 60/40 RA flux solder to wet and melt the connection before wicking. Do these things and wick will be your friend.",
"parent_id": "8135396",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135399",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T21:25:53",
"content": "Looking forward to Chapter 5.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135428",
"author": "QBFreak",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T23:24:04",
"content": "When I didn’t have flux (stuck in the “use what I’ve got” mindset for too long) I found that sometimes spreading the braid out helped a lot. Grab two points on it, near each other, and push them together gently. The weave should open up a bit.Now that I have a decent iron, and flux, I haven’t had to do that very often. I’ve been using a fluxed braid, but I find that I don’t use it fast enough to keep it from drying out, and it works just as well as the non-flux stuff I’ve got left over from when Radio Shack was still around. Now when I want flux, I just use a bottle with a blunt needle to apply some in liquid form.If you use the braid straight off the roll, keeping a small bit of solder on the end of the braid when you cut off the used portion is quite help too.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135468",
"author": "Scott Calvin",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T03:17:06",
"content": "Best solder wick I’ve found was the shield from old RG59 coax and a bit of rosin flux. Salvaged a ton of coax from office network upgrades years ago and I’m still using it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135491",
"author": "Andy",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T05:11:22",
"content": "Now that’s a good and proper hack. I love it. Coax shield.Now speaking of cheap wick, is there any reason that wick made of CCA wouldn’t work well? Or even the dreaded and scandalous copper coated steel wire that was showing up in alligator clip jumpers? That would reduce the excessive conductive losses when wicking “straight off the roll”",
"parent_id": "8135468",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135511",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T06:23:14",
"content": "Lead free solder “eats” the copper off of copper clad aluminum (CCA) really fast. That leaves you with aluminum, which doesn’t stick to solder.CCA sounds like a really bad substitute for solder wick.",
"parent_id": "8135491",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135543",
"author": "Yusuf Ben Al-Aziz",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T08:59:31",
"content": "I get my solder wick from old stp cat5 network cable. The older, the best shielding mesh. Soaked in rosin it works like a charm for what it is: a recycling habit.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135564",
"author": "jonarmitage Tim the Enchanter",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T10:40:10",
"content": "Pro Tip: pay for the good stuff, buy Gootwick. You can thank me later.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135618",
"author": "RPM",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T13:20:03",
"content": "This is all just wrong… keep the wick in a spool and use its tail. Pu the tail on top of solder (pis or pads). Press it into the solder with the iron, and pull both the iron and wick away. It wicks the solder quick… how could you over heat a pad? I use wick to clean used pcb to like-new. I use wick to mount tiny qqfp pins (just melt solder all over them, wick it all off, then check for shorts and use more wick if you have any shorts). It is very easy to use… I don’t see the problem.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135719",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T18:38:19",
"content": "Yes to flux anywhere and everywhere, especially on seldom used braid. I still work on vintage musical gear. As for suckers I’ve never liked the single shot ones, cock and fire over and over. A heated hollow tip with a baby enema bulb is often encountered but with poor results, shake whilst holding still and lift to squeeze as well with little suction on release. Player pianos with their vacuum tech had me make a foot bellows to make a short but powerful burst with no pad lifting kickback, hands only hold the tool. Hose goes from the floor to the former enema bulb. Desoldering that isn’t a pain in the butt. Cheaper than any vacuum electric powered tool.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135738",
"author": "cheater",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T19:35:05",
"content": "I need to see that bellows system. Got a link!",
"parent_id": "8135719",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135891",
"author": "anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T06:06:38",
"content": "You must pull the stranded braid exceptionally tight to start and tack a drop of solder near the frayed end. Trim off the fray. Now, that the braid is exceptionally tight, it’ll wick as well as a professional vacuum desoldering iron without needing any flux.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,525.473364
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/04/adding-assistive-technology-to-a-doorbell/
|
Adding Assistive Technology To A Doorbell
|
Bryan Cockfield
|
[
"ATtiny Hacks",
"home hacks"
] |
[
"adaptive technology",
"attiny412",
"doorbell",
"logic analyser",
"microcontroller"
] |
The advent of affordable computing over the last few decades has certainly been a boon for many people with disabilities, making it easier to access things like text-to-speech technology, automation, or mobility devices, and even going as far as making it easier to work in general by making remote work possible. Some things still lag behind, though, like user interfaces that don’t take the colorblind into account, or appliances that only use an audio cue to signal to their users. This doorbell, for example, is one such device and [ydiaeresis]
is adding features to it to help their mother with some hearing issues
.
The first thing up for this off-the-shelf remote doorbell is a “brain transplant” since the built-in microcontroller couldn’t be identified. There are only a few signals on this board though so an ATtiny412 made for a suitable replacement. A logic analyzer was able to decode the signals being fed to the original microcontroller, and with that the push of the doorbell can be programmed to do whatever one likes, including integrating it with home automation systems or other assistive technology. In [ydiaeresis]’s case there’s an existing LED lighting system that illuminates whenever the phone rings.
Although it would be nice if these inexpensive electronics came with the adaptive features everyone might need from them, it’s often not too hard to add it in as was the case with
this set of digital calipers
. To go even further, some other common technology can be used to help those with disabilities like
this hoverboard modified to help those with mobility issues
.
Thanks to [buttim] for the tip!
| 4
| 2
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8135394",
"author": "Oliver",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T21:11:56",
"content": "Started going down that rabbithole witch resulted in https:://gitlab.com//olliver/ochime which close to getting finished. Keep on having space-claim issues though :(",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135395",
"author": "Oliver",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T21:16:41",
"content": "https://gitlab.com//olliver/ochimeForgive me",
"parent_id": "8135394",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135956",
"author": "Collie147",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T11:43:29",
"content": "I went down this route too. Specifically for integration with my home and to have a second ringer as the range was terrible. I took apart the ringer and found that the ones I had (I bought a second make for comparison) all used 433mhz receivers. Got myself a 433mhz receiver (one of those dirt cheap ones and one transceiver) and did the whole sound card recording trick and mapped out the sent signal. Replayed it with the transceiver and instead of the same ring noise the bell barked at me (literally played a dog barking noise). After some playing around I got it to work and stop barking, but I figure the bell had different ringers which you could select with a button, for some reason it was set up to play the barking noise with this particular signal, I reckon for some other device as the barking was not available with the ringer selection. Anyway I replaced the original bell with an Arduino and a speaker with a slow flashing led (for night mode when the kids were in bed) and the transceiver to repeat the signal to the original bell which was moved to the shed (out of range of the button on the front door).Both of the bells even with different makes played the same “header” or first few signals and changed the last few so I reckon I could have gotten it to work for any bell but wasn’t sure without buying more and wasn’t that bothered.",
"parent_id": "8135395",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135480",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T04:17:20",
"content": "other than being homebrew my camera doorbell is obnoxiously loud + wifi connected, and had a RGB lightshow behind it, while its 16 years old …and just to egg on my previous dumbell, I wired in a 555 timer so its crappy bulb would pulse in and out once being pressed for a good 8 seconds, letting the user know that yes they pressed it, and yes they totally ignored the “no soliciting” sign, in which I point to the sign, and say “there’s a sign right there” and slam the door in their face.Might seem a little harsh but if you have a baby who is sleeping at random thoughout the night, while never agreeing to be on call for 3 shifts, 6 days a week …the last thing you want to see at 9AM is some douche in a polo shirt, trying to sell you new windows while carrying an IPad in a mitten",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,525.227945
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/04/floss-weekly-episode-835-board-member-b/
|
FLOSS Weekly Episode 835: Board Member B
|
Jonathan Bennett
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] |
[
"FLOSS Weekly",
"kde",
"linux"
] |
This week
Jonathan
and
Rob
chat with Nate Graham about KDE! Why did Nate walk away from Apple, and how did he find Linux and KDE? And what does he see coming next? Watch to find out!
https://invent.kde.org/ngraham
https://pointieststick.com
https://techpaladinsoftware.com
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
| 2
| 2
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8135391",
"author": "Eliot",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T21:08:10",
"content": "Explaining to my children that the header image is a reference to a 20 year old Apple marketing campaign.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135529",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T07:30:46",
"content": "Gnome nearly drove me back to Windows – having to install extensions, obsure gsettings, just to configure it how I want – felt just like poking around with regedit.Then I tried kubuntu and haven’t looked back – full-featured, configurable, beautiful, and these days efficient.Because of snaps being more or less forced on me with their auto-updating (the primary issue that made me dump Windows (I have slow and iffy intetnet access in a remote workshop)) I now run KDE on Debian and love using my computer more than ever.Thank you Nate and the whole of the KDE team.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,525.3147
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/03/building-an-eight-channel-active-mixer/
|
Building An Eight Channel Active Mixer
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"Musical Hacks"
] |
[
"audio mixer",
"mixer",
"op-amp"
] |
There are plenty of audio mixers on the market, and the vast majority all look the same. If you wanted something different, or just a nice learning experience, you could craft your own instead.
That’s precisely what [Something Physical] did.
The build was inspired by
an earlier 3-channel mixer designed by [Moritz Klein].
This project stretches to eight channels, which is nice, because somehow it feels right that a mixer’s total channels always land on a multiple of four. As you might expect, the internals are fairly straightforward—it’s just about lacing together all the separate op-amp gain stages, pots, and jacks, as well as a power LED so you can tell when it’s switched on. It’s all wrapped up in a slant-faced wooden box with an aluminum face plate and Dymo labels. Old-school, functional, and fit for purpose.
It’s a simple build, but a satisfying one; there’s something beautiful about recording on audio gear you’ve hewn yourself. Once you’ve built your mixer, you might like to experiment
in the weird world of no-input mixing
. Video after the break.
| 29
| 9
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8135000",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T00:36:41",
"content": "This is a fun project! The enclosure is beautiful. Meters would be nice; maybe on the next iteration. But if I’m not bitchin’ I’m not breathin’.Again, maybe on a later iteration: sliders provide an unpowered graphical presentation of quantitative information (hat tip Mr. Tufte).All-caps Dymo? You say retro, I say cheezy. and this native English reader finds them barely legible, they need to be flipped around so the “P” in “PIANO” is at the top where the “O” is in the photo. The industry standard is that English reads right to left, top to bottom. Custom refrigerator magnets would be one solution; for cheap use existing refrigerator magnets, a *grown-up” label maker and an X-Acto knife.That said, two thumbs up! If I had stuff to mix and didn’t already have an 8 track digital recorder this would fit my low level of expertise and be a doable project.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135002",
"author": "Then",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T00:41:49",
"content": "Magnets on alu?",
"parent_id": "8135000",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135028",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T02:15:14",
"content": "I wasn’t consulted on the materials list. If alumibum is absolutely necessary for looks, thin sheet appluminOS over steel. Wow, I’m exhausted after coming up with that hack. Oh wait! Here comes another one: in-case neodymium magnets. So strenuous, must power down.",
"parent_id": "8135002",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135003",
"author": "karl303",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T00:42:16",
"content": "Don’t you mean left to right? I think that’s what you meant.I agree that all-caps makes reading harder, but that’s a minor point and maybe comes down to personal preference. For a setup like this, having color-coded tape on the cables, matching dot or donut stickers on the enclosure could be a good visual approach to keep track of things.",
"parent_id": "8135000",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135031",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T02:23:10",
"content": "Yes dammit! I screwed the pooch on that one, thank you. Forget reading, all-caps just looks crappier (personal taste); the hard-to-read part comes from the orientation. “color-coded tape on the cables”? What is this hatred (hat red) for color blind people? How about word-coded tape on the cables? A cable label if you will, and you will.",
"parent_id": "8135003",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135081",
"author": "karl303",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T05:27:11",
"content": "Ok, how about we negotiate for a middle ground and go with word-coded labels on color-coded tape? That way anyone can see them from close range and the color-differentiating folks can see that everything is right from across the room.Funny story, as a gift in middle school I received a ream of neon paper, I think 100 sheets each of five different colors. For years I had no idea what to do with it, but held onto it since it was a gift from relatives. Around my first year of engineering school, I started printing cover sheets for homework problem sets onto sheets of neon paper. On occasions when the professor would return the graded homework by setting it on a table at the corner of the lecture hall, looking for the neon cover sheet among the sea of white papers saved me a lot of time.Back to the mixer project, a meaningful improvement (in my opinion) would be to put the audio cable receptacles on the front face rather than the top. Assembly becomes more challenging but the user experience could be so much better.",
"parent_id": "8135031",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135090",
"author": "I Alone Possess the Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T06:11:54",
"content": "If you’re “across the room” you have no reason to be looking at the board. Like what you say about audio cables and where they get jammed in but I suspect the industry standard is for good reasons to jam your male plug into the rear. Keep the cables out of way: don’t accidently disconnect none with your foot or bong, won’t be none. The potentiometer knobs/spindles are perhaps the least well executed part of the project: if you insist on knobs/spindles at least throw some some Telecaster knobs or numbered knobs (Tufte again on that thang!Interesting, I always thought neon was inert, never heard of it in the paper industry. In my 4th ill-spent year in college I handed in my final Islamic Theology paper with no name or other indices of identification other than the subject I chose. Got me one of them A’s you hear tell of.",
"parent_id": "8135081",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135010",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T01:05:29",
"content": "Better not walk into a French library (or German, or Spanish…). Your head will explode.",
"parent_id": "8135000",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135033",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T02:27:55",
"content": "As Fiddler said to Kunta Kinte “You in America now bwoy!” Of course you may not be but you get the point. I’m not the one who chose English for the labels, just playing the hand I was dealt. Note the ON-OFF label. Jarring to this viewer.",
"parent_id": "8135010",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135358",
"author": "J. Samson",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T20:07:50",
"content": "Wow, so you feel like you most closely align with the idea that slaves (and voluntary immigrants) should give up their identity. (Also, I’m sure you’ve been waiting YEARS to use “boy” on someone). Nobody cares bro",
"parent_id": "8135033",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135416",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T22:39:34",
"content": "Oh dude, you a raciss! It’s a well known quote from a world famous TV show, Alex Haley’sRoots.“Kunta Kinte: What’s snow, Fiddler?Fiddler: Never you mind, boy, never you mind. Let’s get on back to home. I got enough trouble teaching you the difference between manure and massa. ‘Course there ain’t all that much difference when you gets right down to it.”If you so raciss that you don’ knowRootsI can’t help you (and this time I’m spelling it right) m’bwoy.“Also, I’m sure you’ve been waiting YEARS to use “boy” on someone” Godfrey Daniels you are full of hate! What the hash browns is wrong with you? Is this a new derangement or ongoing?Louis Gossett Jr. fromOfficer and a GentlemanandIron Eagleand Lavar Burton fromStar Trek TNGandReading Rainbowplayed the scene. Take your mental problem up with those two colored fellas.On my personal scale for ranking people you tested out as SFI level. I’m being civil so what that means is left as an exercise. Okay, in the spirit of good fellowship I’m going full remedial: “exercise” is when someone tries do stuff. Surely you’ve seen it? Thanks for the input but no thanks, not even after last call at The White Swallow. Massa.",
"parent_id": "8135358",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135013",
"author": "jenningsthecat",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T01:07:37",
"content": "I would argue that it’s not an active mixer, but rather a passive mixer with a buffer on the output. And as far as I can tell, adjusting the level of one input will also change the levels on all the other channels. That’s generally considered to be a bad thing in an audio mixer.I think that adding eight op-amps – one on the wiper of each channel pot – would result in a better design. It would increase the noise a little bit, but quieter amps would mitigate that.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135046",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T03:06:11",
"content": "Correct in principle, but here the summing point is at ground potential, held there by the first opamp. Adjusting any input won’t change that voltage, so won’t propagate to other channels.But buffering lets you do other things more easily, like panning and equalization and adding a preamp.",
"parent_id": "8135013",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135149",
"author": "Joe W",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T09:54:11",
"content": "It also reduces cross talk between channels. Slapping a non-inverting buffer on each channel however quadruples the number of needed op-amps (or just use a quad op-amp, that’s only two additional chips to mount). Digikey tells me the used op-amp less than 2€ a piece, so another 8€ for the op-amps plus a few cents for the filter caps. Simple enough. Years spent in a lab told me to always buffer inputs and outputs…The mixer should also limit the resulting signal to maximum line level, shouldn’t it? At +/-9V symmetric supply this is waaay high, isn’t it? (I think it should be about +/-1.5V for line?).",
"parent_id": "8135046",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135308",
"author": "jenningsthecat",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T18:17:23",
"content": "I like buffering everything too – but you have to be careful about noise. Even with decently quiet op-amps like the NE553x series, the hiss can get objectionable fairly quickly if you don’t keep on top of it. That’s not too hard if you’re designing at the system level, but if you’re doing it piecemeal it can be a problem.",
"parent_id": "8135149",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135302",
"author": "jenningsthecat",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T18:11:35",
"content": "Thanks for the correction. I thought of the summing-point-as-ground point when I was writing my comment; but I had a brain fart and convinced myself that it was a high-impedance point. I just looked at the schematic again now and suddenly it was obvious. Perils of an aging brain I guess…",
"parent_id": "8135046",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135016",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T01:15:05",
"content": "“Nice that the number of channels land on a multiple of four?” Not a power of two? I know eight is both, but since I don’t come from much of an audio recording world I was wondering why the multiple of four is important rather than power of two, sounds like an interesting story",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135037",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T02:38:42",
"content": "There are no non-negative multiples of or powers of four that are not multiples of or powers of two. But having seen you raise the question I have the same qualm. Perhaps the writer started out on a four-track as many people such as myself but not the Beatles do/did? Beware: I probably got something wrong here too.https://www.beatlesbible.com/forum/recording-and-musicology/recording-with-two-track/",
"parent_id": "8135016",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135716",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T18:13:06",
"content": "Permit me to give the writer full marks for saying “multiples of four” rather than “powers of four” because 24 track recorders/mixers/boards are not uncommon.Good props, Author!",
"parent_id": "8135037",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135017",
"author": "Hannah Fox",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T01:27:11",
"content": "Drill pilot holesDon’t cut the anti-rotation tabs off the pots",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135051",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T03:29:42",
"content": "Nothing wrong with learning. If this was tipped up to sit on the rear it would make more sense. Jacks at the top, cables out of the way just like pro mixers. The way it is the pots without knobs are hidden behind a forest of adapted to tall plugs, and too close for sizable pointer knobs. It should be from front to rear, knob, label, then jacks. Your fingers shouldn’t cover the labels whilst lingering with perhaps both hands on knobs.Of course the pointers should go from 7 o’clock minimum to 5 o’clock max (12 hour face), which is standard. I’ve a Yamaha board with gear rack and pinion “sliders” on rotary pots (highest quality sealed), but all the EQ and monitor pots labels go from 11 o’clock max to 1 o’clock minimum! At least they are clockwise increase. Weird! I guess they wanted to see the center setting and pointer than be hidden behind the knob.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135230",
"author": "Castriff",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T14:48:10",
"content": "The project by Moritz isn’t showing up. It’s a duplicate link of rhe Something Physical video.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135278",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T17:10:14",
"content": "For those few actually stumped by that error:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8tmUgaXrEQ",
"parent_id": "8135230",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135274",
"author": "Zoot",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T16:56:46",
"content": "Nice build, though it lacks some creature comforts like meters and faders. I am currently building a 16 channel unit with 3 band parametric EQ, meters and faders. I hope to put it into a nice case and have it in my recording setup. Yeah, I could buy a cheap mixer at the music store, but this is a hell of a lot more fun, and will probably have better quality than the cheap ones I could buy, and cost about the same.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135419",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T22:50:21",
"content": "Q: Will each channel have its own EQ? Otherwise why build it in? Are “faders” the same as slide potentiometers?",
"parent_id": "8135274",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136004",
"author": "Zoot",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T15:56:22",
"content": "Yes. Each channel has a parametric EQ, and the “faders” are slide potentiometers.",
"parent_id": "8135419",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135453",
"author": "No Way",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T01:39:27",
"content": "My brother built a mixing console for a studio he and a couple of friends started back in the late 60’s.You can see what it looked liked here:https://buckeyebeat.com/landenrec.htmlHe also worked for legendary mixing console maker Flickinger, and installed them in several studios in the states, one for Johnny Cash’s home studio. He also worked as Cinderella Sound in Tennessee, and had recently restored the Flickinger there, as the owner was retiring and sold the unit to a studio in Germany.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135653",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T14:28:44",
"content": "“He also worked as Cinderella Sound in Tennessee” That was your brother? Now I feel kind of weird but say “Hi!” for me.",
"parent_id": "8135453",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135460",
"author": "forty-2",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T02:06:34",
"content": "Sounds cool, but seeing as it’s just yet another YouTube link, I’ll never know.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,525.538957
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/03/open-source-watch-movement-really-ticks-all-the-boxes/
|
Open Source Watch Movement Really Ticks All The Boxes
|
Tyler August
|
[
"clock hacks"
] |
[
"clockwork",
"mechanical clock",
"open source hardware",
"watch"
] |
When you think of open-source hardware, you probably think of electronics and maker tools– RepRap, Arduino, Adafruit, et cetera. Yet open source is an ethos and license, and is in no way limited to electronics. The openmovement foundation is a case in point– a watch case, to be specific.
The “movement” in Openmovement is a fully open-source and fully mechanical watch movement.
Openmovement has already released STEP files of OM10 the first movement developed by the group. (You do need to sign up to download, however.) They say the design is meant to be highly serviceable and modular, with a robust construction suited for schools and new watchmakers. The movement uses a “Swiss pallets escapement” that runs at 3.5 Hz / 25,200 vph. (We think that’s an odd translation of lever escapement, but if you’re a watchmaker let us know in the comments.) An OM20 is apparently in the works, as well, but it looks like only OM10 has been built from what we can see.
If you don’t have the equipment to finely machine brass from the STEP files, Openmovement is running a
crowdfunding campaign to produce kits of the OM10
, which you can still get in on until the seventh of June.
If you’re wondering what it takes to make a mechanical watch from scratch,
we covered that last year
. Spoiler: it doesn’t look easy. Just assembling the tiny parts of an OM10 kit would seem daunting to most of us. That might be why
most of the watches
we’ve covered over the years
weren’t mechanical,
but at least they
tend to be open source, too
.
| 32
| 17
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134915",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:06:53",
"content": "It is neither “escarpent” or “escarpment”.Also “movment”.Apart from that it’s a fine article.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134935",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:50:57",
"content": "Fixed, thank you.",
"parent_id": "8134915",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135245",
"author": "Aaron",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T15:27:24",
"content": "I’ll have you know that my wartch has both and escarpment and a movment, you insensitive clod! /s",
"parent_id": "8134915",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135565",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T10:42:01",
"content": "There is also a missing “(“, presumably before “we think that’s an odd…”",
"parent_id": "8134915",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134916",
"author": "Bob Hartwell",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:07:21",
"content": "What does a steep slope or long cliff have to do with a watch movement? Perhaps you’re referring to an escapement rather than escarpment?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134934",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:50:06",
"content": "The Swiss have no shortage of either!(fixed. I blame the frailties of the human condition, and also autocorrect.)",
"parent_id": "8134916",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134945",
"author": "Bobtato",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T21:11:54",
"content": "An escarpment being a sort of land dune, it’s something I’d normally picture in hilly areas, whereas Switzerland’s vibe is more whole-ass mountains, so I wonder if it actually does have any? I don’t see how this thread can continue until geographers resolve the crisis.AnywayI’d never considered watchmaking, but I suddenly realise that I do have a fairly precise CNC machine, plus a bunch of tiny endmills from back when I thought that might be a good way to mill PCBs, so perhaps I should give this a look. Although I’m guessing I still need to make or buy a bunch of jigs and stuff to put it together, and buy jewels and springs and what not.",
"parent_id": "8134934",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134982",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T23:10:14",
"content": "In case you haven’t, I’d suggest watching the clickspring youtube channel for relevant content. You may get addicted to watchmaking, intimidated by the exhibited skill level, or maybe both.🙂",
"parent_id": "8134945",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135188",
"author": "Vinny",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T12:48:33",
"content": "I also recommend some channels on YouTube dedicated to clock repairs. There are a number of them out there, but my favorite is Wristwatch Revival.The level of precision required for a mechanical clock movement is insane, the pieces are tiny and you have to step up your machining game for that (I believe I saw a video talking about sub-micron precision, but I may be misremembering it).",
"parent_id": "8134945",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134940",
"author": "Dave Z.",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:58:28",
"content": "Unfortunately, they are not actually crowdfunding kits. They are asking for donations to create tooling so that sometime in the future, they can make kits. But your $$ now does not actually get you a kit. Quite different…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134967",
"author": "Andy",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T22:07:25",
"content": "The correct name is “swiss lever escapement.” The swiss lever has two pallet stones on the pallet fork that are what catch the teeth on the escape wheel and provide controlled impulses of power to the balance wheel to make the thing tick.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134978",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T23:02:17",
"content": "Because analog is cool. Why do people collect watches? Why do we fix them? Digital watches just become landfill garbage when they break or a segment starts to fade, or … and also they take a battery. Digital has no class so to speak. No tick-tock… Analog clocks will usually end up in a collection, or passed to the next generation that appreciates analog devices! Never need a battery (well the spring is a ‘battery’ that utilizes human energy to recharge). Of course like a lot of things, some people will never ‘get it’. One man’s junk, is another man’s treasure. YMMV.BTW, my ‘digital wrist watch’ has to be set every week. It is not a precise time piece. My vehicle(s) clock needs updating every so often… Where is the 1000000x more precise ;) ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134997",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T00:31:25",
"content": "Very. I use to look through those expensive watch catalogs, the movements a thing to behold. Illustrates perfectly that engineering can be beautiful and functional.",
"parent_id": "8134978",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134980",
"author": "y",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T23:06:05",
"content": "Yeah, instead of doing a cool thing I’m not into, they should do a boring thing I consider superior.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134983",
"author": "TSW",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T23:14:35",
"content": "Seems like for some folks, nothing’s more fun than yucking someone else’s yum.",
"parent_id": "8134980",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135001",
"author": "Mark Topham",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T00:39:42",
"content": "If they had a manufacturer lined up, I’d seriously go for it. But buying the tools to start manufacturing? That seems too much of a stretch.(Love the idea though…)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135005",
"author": "none ra",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T00:57:06",
"content": "just wait a few years and that precision goes from 1000000x to 0x when the screen goes out, the battery goes out and/or the SOC manufacturer stops making the board the system relies on. Yea the firmware maybe open source, the API, and maybe the PCB design. But unlikely you’re making the actual chips, displays, or sensors or have the facility to do so.Analog watches even built to an 1800s standard are ‘good enough’ for basic time keeping and will continue being so essentially forever. And they can be built with hand tools (and a lot of skill).and its fun.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135007",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T00:59:41",
"content": "For funsies.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135018",
"author": "DJNZ",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T01:29:02",
"content": "I have half a dozen digital and analogue quartz movement watches. My most favourite watches are well over 20 years old, not working, and no longer repairable (no one makes or maintains the electronic guts for digital watches). I’ve left the digital/quartz movement analogue watch behind, and now proudly own a fully analogue automatic winding watch. From what I can see, you can get such watches maintained and repaired now (even the “ancient” watches from the 1930s), while the “digital” or near digital watches gather dust in a drawer.As for accuracy, think of this: what matter that your watch keeps time to 1 second per century, if you keep mis-setting it. Your watch, while accurate, may be 5 to 10 minutes off from /my/ watch, or /her/ watch, or WWV or CHU or the time displayed on your smartphone. So long as the watch is accurate enough, it doesn’t matter whether it uses digital or analogue technology, spring powered or battery and quartz crystal.PS:A_do_Z:Take a look at some of the wrist watch repair hobby videos onyoutube. While Clickspring is great (especially for his recreation of the Antikythera device, his “watchmaking” videos are sparser. The watch repair hobby channels give you a better idea of what, how, and why.https://www.youtube.com/@WristwatchRevival/videoshttps://www.youtube.com/@rescuingwatches/videoshttps://www.youtube.com/@WeekendWatchRepair/videoshttps://www.youtube.com/@watchrepairtutorials/videos",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135057",
"author": "Christian",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T03:55:05",
"content": "Amuses me to wear a mechanical watch. All the code, for all the products, I’ve written, is obsolete or will be obsolete, while that mechanical clunker will still be ticking.Electronics based things have perishable components: capacitors, PCBs, plastics, code, frameworks, specifications. That “1000000x more accurate” GPS receiver module (right?) might only work for 10 years.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135091",
"author": "easy",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T06:13:34",
"content": "My analog self winding watch has been running since the 60s with no maintenance (yet) no batteries and no charging. Hard to beat that.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135093",
"author": "I Alone Possess the Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T06:23:42",
"content": "Because every day can’t be Summer’s Eve day?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135111",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T07:27:34",
"content": "… analog junk.Really not true that analogue is junk – its often superior to digital really, digital just get used for everything because its simpler to have only on and off states, and now we have many cheap faster oscillators to fake analogue well enough the fact it is faking rarely matters in the real world…In the case of timekeeping for humans the maximum accuracy that people can really deal with is measured in whole minute probably, maybe seconds for a few things, anything less than that and it really isn’t relevant to people, so there is no great need to be more precise than that. As by the time any communication of time that matters can be delivered more than a few seconds have passed, even if you where trying to navigate by the stars and time your human limits in measurement precision and the quality of your lookup table…So what a human timepiece needs is to be reliable, long lasting, good to a few seconds a week or so (which is something analogue watches usually best by being accurate to a few seconds in a year) and visually appealing as humans really are magpie like… And for that an analogue watch is actually superior to digital as a general trend, with watches that are a few hundred years old still keeping good time with a little maintenance, the self winders never running out of power without any effort if you wear ’em. So analogue are actually more precise on average than the digital watch that only lasts maybe a handful of years keeping good time on the one battery but dies without warning to ruin its average, and way way better than the modern smart watch that lasts maybe a whole day keeping superb GPS/Network time before it needs manual intervention – making it actually worse than most manually wound watches as most of those last more than a day..).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135163",
"author": "Sammie Gee",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T11:01:37",
"content": "IMHO, interesting how the mechanical watch making regularly makes full circle and comes back to the point they left more than 100 years ago – precise-making each part in such a way that they’ll all fit together well in one unit.It was the US watch makers (some were UK watch makers who decided to seek better opportunities, btw) who figured out that it is easier/cheaper to make a lot of spares en mass, each with its own specific irregularity, then match the parts that would work more-or-less-well together during the assembly, so that exact/precise tuning can be simplified to the point, where unskilled/cheap labor can be used during the assembly. UK watch makers stubbornly insisted on exact piece making thus making fewer and better quality watches, but eventually the influx of the US-made cheaper watches won. There is fascinating book that describes this and many other things in excellent details, out of print, obviously, but worthy reading, “Revolution in Time” by David Landes.BTW, I still think the Bulova’s Accutron was the best hybrid between the two, electrical watch, so to speak, since it eschews the need for the entire enchilada, escapement, etc. One large wheel that’s being spun by a quartz-activated tuning fork. No need for the extensive escapement solution that compensates for the differences in the released force of the wind up spring.If one is to seriously go the rabbit hole of purely mechanical watch making, tourbillon would be the next logical step.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135924",
"author": "mclien",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T08:30:07",
"content": "To the accutron: There is no quartz in that one. It is a metall fork plus driven by a set of coils (2 for the swinging, one for regulating the amplitude. And it was far from easy to make. There is a ratchet wheel 2.6mm in diameter with 360 tooth (still a mystery how that is made) and a ratchat stone hold in place by a spring 1/4 of the thickness of a human hair.",
"parent_id": "8135163",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135212",
"author": "rtjryj",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T14:11:45",
"content": "I no need watch, but NEED gasoline engine!ideal, for small device with, certificate etc. Ideal!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135270",
"author": "George",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T16:31:53",
"content": "Wait a while, and somebody, somewhere, will build a watch powered by one if those great, but tiny, V8 engines.",
"parent_id": "8135212",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135466",
"author": "ezy",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T03:12:54",
"content": "Wow, what a wealth of valuable and interesting comments deleted because someone at HAD disliked that one poster thought digital was better and so deleted all the replies as well. Shame HAD, shame on you.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135559",
"author": "ramzi",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T10:29:47",
"content": "Don’t you remember the clownshowhttps://hackaday.com/2024/10/12/if-you-cant-say-anything-nice/",
"parent_id": "8135466",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135603",
"author": "ezy",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T13:01:57",
"content": "It wasn’t a clownshow though. One person commented on digital vs analog and precision and numerous people weighed in with valuable perspectives including on what precision means and industry insider knowledge that you really can’t find outside of comment sections like this.What happens when you start deleting a lot of comments i.e. to enforce a mood rather than a TOS is that people with valuable knowledge stop posting and we are left with the above useful comments like “it’s a fine article” which add nothing.",
"parent_id": "8135559",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135722",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T18:52:32",
"content": "Indeed, though usually those comments will come back, eventually once somebody reviews them. Not that unusual for comments to disappear around here for a while before they get put back, and I’d far rather there was some moderation even if its flawed and seems to be somewhat automatic. Perhaps simply because somebody hit ‘report comment’ by accident when they meant reply… As still plenty of dissenting opinions and debate in the comment sections here, so its a healthy and useful place to read more than the article.Seen what happens in some other forum when the moderation is allowed to slide for a while and you can’t get the rational, insightful debate filled folks to come back to the hateful swamp having moved on to pastures greener. So as long as its not burning out the team doing the moderation…",
"parent_id": "8135603",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135735",
"author": "Jan-Willem Markus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T19:29:38",
"content": "I’ve observed the comments for a while as well, and see this as a quick of the comment system. Not just that comments are a chain, and it seems the root comment gets deleted, the rest goes as well. However, I also see comments deleted, reappearing, and disappearing again. So it may be a quirk of some automated system.On topic:I’ve registered and downloaded the step, and it’s a rather interesting one. I don’t have the programs to manipulate the file, but in my slicer I disabled some of the large bits to observe the other bits. I don’t entirely understand where they keep their source, as it’s open-source, after all. The 3D files aren’t open according to the agreement. As I’m a lock guy — not a clock guy — I have difficulty assessing the mechanisms.",
"parent_id": "8135466",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,525.604553
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/03/3d-printed-tank-has-a-cannon-to-boot/
|
3D Printed Tank Has A Cannon To Boot
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"Toy Hacks"
] |
[
"3D printed parts",
"ESP32",
"radio control",
"rc",
"tank"
] |
Few of us will ever find ourselves piloting a full-sized military tank. Instead, you might like to make do with the RC variety. [TRDB] has whipped up one of their own design
which features a small little pellet cannon to boot.
The tank is assembled from 3D printed components — with PETG filament being used for most of the body and moving parts, while the grippy parts of the treads are printed in TPU. The tank’s gearboxes consist of printed herringbone gears, and are driven by a pair of powerful 775 brushed DC motors, which are cooled by small 40 mm PC case fans. A rather unique touch are the custom linear actuators, used to adjust the tank’s ride height and angle relative to the ground. The small cannon on top is a flywheel blaster that fires small plastic pellets loaded from a simple drum magazine. Running the show is an ESP32, which responds to commands from [TRDB]’s own custom RC controller built using the same microcontroller.
As far as DIY RC tanks go, this is a very complete build. We’ve seen some other great work in this space,
like this giant human-sized version that’s big enough to ride in
.
| 7
| 3
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134893",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T19:13:21",
"content": "The tank toy I wanted all my childhood!!!Beautiful",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135008",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T01:01:34",
"content": "Yeah this would be really fun for a kid, 100%",
"parent_id": "8134893",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135122",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T08:04:59",
"content": "I can imagine using a few of them in a POV paintball competition being quite good fun.Perhaps let loose autonomously with a waterpistol to deter cats or birds from a fish pond or similar.",
"parent_id": "8135008",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135135",
"author": "X-MarX-THX-SpXt",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T08:55:29",
"content": "Perhaps let loose autonomously with a waterpistolAnd then the water-nation attacked…",
"parent_id": "8135122",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134987",
"author": "Zoltan",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T23:48:36",
"content": "Looks like it is using the same gun-laying approach like thehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stridsvagn_103– and with great accuracy too! Bravo!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135096",
"author": "Ewald",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T06:30:28",
"content": "Funny, stridsvagn reads as “strijd wagen” in Dutch, so combat wagon like the wikipedia article says. Also from the wikipedia article i now understand that the linear actuators are needed to aim the cannon vertically.",
"parent_id": "8134987",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135246",
"author": "Thomas Anderson",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T15:28:37",
"content": "it’s such a mad over the top build, crazy",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,525.650146
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/03/supercon-2024-how-to-track-down-radio-transmissions/
|
Supercon 2024: How To Track Down Radio Transmissions
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider",
"Wireless Hacks"
] |
[
"2024 Hackaday Superconference",
"radio",
"radio transmitter",
"transmitter"
] |
You turn the dial on your radio, and hear a powerful source of interference crackle in over the baseline noise. You’re interested as to where it might be coming from. You’re receiving it well, and the signal strength is strong, but is that because it’s close or just particularly powerful? What could it be? How would you even go about tracking it down?
When it comes to hunting down radio transmissions, Justin McAllister and Nick Foster have a great deal of experience in this regard. They came down to the 2024 Hackaday Superconference
to show us how it’s done.
Transmissions From Where?
Nick Foster opens the talk by discussing how the first job is often to figure out what you’re seeing when you pick up a radio transmission. “The moral of this talk is that your hardware is always lying to you,” says Nick. “In this talk, we’re going to show you how your radio lies to you, what you can do about it, and if your hardware is not lying to you, what is that real station that you’re looking at?” It can be difficult to tease out the truth of what the radio might seem to be picking up. “How do we determine what a signal actually is?” he asks. “Is it a real signal that we’re looking at which is being transmitted deliberately from somebody else, or is it interference from a bad power supply, or is it a birdie—a signal that’s created entirely within my own radio that doesn’t exist at all?”
There are common tools used to perform this work of identifying just what the radio is actually picking up and where it’s coming from. Justin goes over some of the typical hardware, noting that the RX-888 is a popular choice for software-defined radio that can be tuned across HF, VHF, and UHF bands. It’s highly flexible, and it’s affordable to boot, as is the Web-888 which can be accessed conveniently over a web browser. Other common SDRs are useful, too, as are a variety of filters that can aid with more precise investigations.
Justin demonstrates an errant radio emission from the brushed motor in his furnace, noting how it varies in bandwidth—a surefire tell versus intentional radio transmissions.
Establishing a grounding in reality is key, Justin steps up to explain. “We turn our SDR on, we stick [on] the little antenna that comes with it, and we start looking at something,” says Justin. “Are the signals that we see there actually real?” He notes that there are some basics to consider right off the bat. “One key point to make is that nobody makes money or has good communication using an unmodulated carrier,” he points out. “If you just see a tone somewhere, it might be real, but there’s a good chance that it’s not.”
It’s perhaps more likely unintentional radiation, noise, or something generated inside the hardware itself on your end. It’s also worth looking at whether you’re looking at a fixed frequency or a changing frequency to pin things down further. Gesturing to a spectrogram, he notes that the long, persistent lines on the spectrogram are usually clues to more intentional transmissions. Intermittent squiggles are more often unintentional. Justin points at some that he puts down to the emissions from arc welders, sparking away as they do, and gives an example of what emissions from typical switching power supplies look like.
There are other hints to look out for, too. Real human-made signals tend to have some logic to them. Justin notes that real signals usually make “efficient” use of spectrum without big gaps or pointless repetition. It’s also possible to make judgement calls as to whether a given signal makes sense for the band it appears to be transmitted in. Schedule can be a tell, too—if a signal always pops up when your neighbor gets home at 6 PM, it might just be coming from their garage door remote. Justin notes a useful technique for hunting down possible nearby emitters—”Flipping on and off switches is a real good way of figuring out—is it close to me or not?”
SDRs are hugely flexible, but they also have very open front-ends that can lead to some confusing output.
Nick follows up by discussing the tendency of sampling radios to show up unique bizarre transmissions that aren’t apparent on an analog receiver. “One of the curses of the RTL-SDR is actually one of its strengths… it has a completely wide open front end,” notes Nick. “Its ADC which is sampling and capturing the RF has basically nothing except an amplifier in between it and whatever crud you’re putting into it.” This provides great sensitivity and frequency agility, but there’s a catch—”It will happily eat up and spit out lots of horrible stuff,” says Nick. He goes on to explain various ways such an SDR might lie to the user. A single signal might start popping up all over the frequency band, or interfere with other signals coming in from the antenna. He also highlights a great sanity check for hunting down birdies—”If it’s always there, if it’s unchanging, if you unplug your antenna and you still hear it—it’s probably generated in your radio!”
The rest of the talk covers locating transmissions—are they in your house, in the local community, or from even farther afield? It explores the technique of multilateration, where synchronized receivers and maths are used to measure the time differences seen in the signal at each point to determine exactly where a transmission is coming from. The talk also goes over common sources of noise in residential settings—cheap PWM LED lights, or knock-off laptop chargers being a prime example in Nick’s experience. There’s also a discussion of how the noise floor has shifted up a long way compared to 50 years ago, now that the world is full of so many more noise-emitting appliances.
Ultimately, the duo of Justin and Nick brought us a great pun-filled talk on sleuthing for the true source of radio transmissions. If you’ve ever wondered about how to track down some mystery transmitter, you would do well to watch and learn from the techniques explored within!
| 10
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134913",
"author": "Gösta",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:04:49",
"content": "Great article!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135009",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T01:03:18",
"content": "Do they not call it “foxhunting” anymore? Or was that regional",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135556",
"author": "Stajp",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T10:06:29",
"content": "It is called foxhunting when you don’t make a video of a conference talk where only the speaker is filmed, and none of the slides..",
"parent_id": "8135009",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135070",
"author": "sbrk",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T04:39:10",
"content": "Whole books on this, from the 90’s.http://homingin.com",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135126",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T08:18:03",
"content": "I remember, years ago now, I had a strange repeating signal locally, after being certain I hadn’t left any of my own projects on, on a whim, I walked around the neighborhood with a shortwave receiver until I found the edges and triangulated the position. A good 300m in all directions. The culprit, as it turns out, Christmas lights, being used as garden decorations, in July.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135297",
"author": "Aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T18:00:02",
"content": "I wonder how often all the wireless stuff causes interference, I mean the 433MHz kind, RF modules, like thermostats and weather stations and sensors and all that kind of thing.Especially since they have to transmit over that well-known LED lights and power supply noise to be received so I imagine they don’t hold back on signal strength in some or maybe many cases.Like they discovered about birds, seems birds in cities are louder because they adapted to overcoming city noise.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135426",
"author": "Mark Topham",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T23:05:24",
"content": "There’s emission limits for everything. It’s not free rein to do whatever is desired. Even in bands with less regulation.",
"parent_id": "8135297",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135793",
"author": "Aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T23:25:44",
"content": "Perhaps you are being a bit naive? I mean theoretically sure but in practice not even the western made stuff cares too much about rules, and the imported cheap stuff.. well.. you know.And I remind you that even Apple was found out to transmit too strong on their phones at one point, showing even the biggest names fail to comply with RF limits sometimes.",
"parent_id": "8135426",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135500",
"author": "Björn Hellgren",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T05:33:02",
"content": "@Writer of article.As it is you who have recorded and uploaded to YouTube. Could you share the slides as well?As they are not possible to see in the video.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8137681",
"author": "Brett",
"timestamp": "2025-06-11T02:10:14",
"content": "+1",
"parent_id": "8135500",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,525.795755
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/03/simulation-and-motion-planning-for-6dof-robotic-arm/
|
Simulation And Motion Planning For 6DOF Robotic Arm
|
John Elliot V
|
[
"hardware",
"Robots Hacks"
] |
[
"6dof",
"python",
"raspberry pi",
"robotic arm"
] |
[Leo Goldstien] recently got in touch to
let us know about a fascinating update he posted
on the
Hackaday.io page for ManiPylator
— his 3D printed Six degrees of freedom, or 6DOF robotic arm.
This latest installment gives us a glimpse at what’s involved for command and control of such a device, as what goes into simulation and testing. Much of the requisite mathematics is introduced, along with a long list of links to further reading. The whole solution is based entirely on free and open source (FOSS) software, in fact a giant stack of such software including planning and simulation software on top of glue like MQTT message queues.
The practical exercise for this installment was to have the arm trace out the shape of a heart, given as a mathematical equation expressed in Python code, and it fared quite well. Measurements were taken! Science was done!
We last brought you word
about this project in October of 2024. Since then, the project name has changed from “ManiPilator” to “ManiPylator”. Originally the name was a reference to the Raspberry Pi, but now the focus is on the Python programming language. But all the bot’s best friends just call him “Manny”.
If you want to get started with your own 6DOF robotic arm, [Leo] has traced out a path for you to follow. We’d love to hear about
what you come up with!
| 11
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134828",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T16:09:31",
"content": "…must not make fleshlight joke…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134865",
"author": "X-MarX-THX-SpXt",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T17:34:22",
"content": "Or “goth robo GF who cooks me tendies” joke.",
"parent_id": "8134828",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134835",
"author": "alnwlsn",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T16:20:25",
"content": "Nice! This is just what I’ve been looking for for a long time. Anyone can hook a few steppers to a GRBL board or maybe write a PID loop or two, but the real math where I try to remember the rest of the stuff from that one controls class I took is usually when the project goes back on the shelf.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134841",
"author": "Stefan",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T16:28:16",
"content": "I found this University of Queensland robotics lecture a very good refresher to all things robotics.https://robotacademy.net.au/",
"parent_id": "8134835",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134920",
"author": "James",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:09:30",
"content": "Used to love doing kinematics calc exam questions with DH matrices, like 8 pages of calcs super satisfying when they fall out at the end. I wrote an RTAI kernel space driver for a PUMA560, which worked nicely but took a bit of working to nail down join acceleration limits without tripping over-torque limits or overflows punching a hole through the nearby wall.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135024",
"author": "Desmond Elliott",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T01:55:14",
"content": "Can this robotic arm link to a 3D print controller (Klipper)?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135088",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T06:06:49",
"content": "I guess it could? But that would come with a bunch of mechanical engineering and programming challenges… you would have 3 + 6 = 9 degrees of freedom and the weight of the robotic arm to support.",
"parent_id": "8135024",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135182",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T12:20:58",
"content": "Uhm, maybe [Leo] can weigh in, but the subtitle of the post literally is“3D printed 6DOF robot arm controlled with Klipper “",
"parent_id": "8135024",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136143",
"author": "Leo Goldstien",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T04:13:34",
"content": "It quite literally is a 3D print controller forced into the shape of a robot arm. In part 1 I cover how to adapt the klipper manual_stepper gcode command for controlling a 6dof arm.",
"parent_id": "8135024",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135777",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T22:14:41",
"content": "Next step is putting the pen in the end effector. (That is not supposed to be a fleshlight joke).I have made a CNC engraving mill and made a pen holder from an old HDD magnet, a thin piece of aluminimum angle, some wood strips and a pen all put together with hot glue. It’s quick to set up, just stick the magnet to the metal surface. The alumimimum has about 2mm of flex in Z direction so you can put a bit of pressure on the pen. And when something goes wrong, the magnet just shifts or releases, but there is no damage. Magnets don’t stick very well to plastic, but some contraption with rubber bands can also work.I am curious to see more of this robotic arm. Usually 3D printed robot arms with plastic gears are quite wobbly and have a lot of backlash.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136144",
"author": "Leo Goldstien",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T04:18:28",
"content": "That’s a great approach. I went with a laser pointer exactly because I didn’t want to get too close to the table at this point. I’ll definitely keep this approach in mind when I’m ready for something more challenging.As to wobbly, that was my expectation too. It’s quite surprising to me how reproducible movements can be. As a test I ran repeating movements for a dozen cycles and to the degree my camera can discern, the arm always came back to the exact same starting position.",
"parent_id": "8135777",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,525.930173
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/03/my-winter-of-99-the-year-of-the-linux-desktop-is-always-next-year/
|
My Winter Of ’99: The Year Of The Linux Desktop Is Always Next Year
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Featured",
"Linux Hacks",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] |
[
"desktop os",
"linux",
"operating system",
"windows"
] |
Growing up as a kid in the 1990s was an almost magical time. We had the best game consoles, increasingly faster computers at a pace not seen before, the rise of the Internet and World Wide Web, as well the best fashion and styles possible between neon and pastel colors, translucent plastic and also this little thing called Windows 95 that’d take the world by storm.
Yet as great as Windows 95 and its successor Windows 98 were, you had to be one of the lucky folks who ended up with a stable Windows 9x installation. The prebuilt (Daewoo) Intel Celeron 400 rig with 64 MB SDRAM that I had splurged on with money earned from summer jobs was not one of those lucky systems, resulting in regular Windows reinstalls.
As a relatively nerdy individual, I was aware of this little community-built operating system called ‘Linux’, with the online forums and the Dutch PC magazine that I read convincing me that it would be a superior alternative to this unstable ‘M$’ Windows 98 SE mess that I was dealing with. Thus it was in the Year of the Linux Desktop (1999) that I went into a computer store and bought a boxed disc set of SuSE 6.3 with included manual.
Fast-forward to 2025, and Windows is installed on all my primary desktop systems, raising the question of what went wrong in ’99. Wasn’t Linux the future of desktop operating systems?
Focus Groups
Boxed SuSE Linux 6.3 software. (Source:
Archive.org
)
Generally when companies gear up to produce something new, they will determine and investigate the target market, to make sure that the product is well-received. This way, when the customer purchases the item, it should meet their expectations and be easy to use for them.
This is where SuSE Linux 6.3 was an interesting experience for me. I’d definitely have classified myself in 1999 as your typical computer nerd who was all about the Pentiums and the MHz, so at the very least I should have had some overlap with the nerds who wrote this Linux OS thing.
The comforting marketing blurbs on the box promised an easy installation, bundled applications for everything, while suggesting that office and home users alike would be more than happy to use this operating system. Despite the warnings and notes in the installation section of the included manual, installation was fairly painless, with YAST (Yet Another Setup Tool) handling a lot of the tedium.
However, after logging into the new operating system and prodding and poking at it a bit over the course of a few days, reality began to set in. There was the rather rough-looking graphical interface, with what I am pretty sure was the
FVWM
window manager for XFree86, no font aliasing and very crude widgets. I would try the IceWM window manager and a few others as well, but to say that I felt disappointed was an understatement. Although it generally worked, the whole experience felt unfinished and much closer to using CDE on Solaris than the relatively pleasant Windows 98 or the very glossy
BeOS Personal Edition 5
that I would be playing with around that time as well.
That’s when a friend of my older brother slipped me a completely legit copy of Windows 2000 plus license key. To my pleasant surprise, Windows 2000 ran smoothly, worked great and was stable as a rock even on my old Celeron 400 rig that Windows 98 SE had struggled with. I had found my new forever home, or so I thought.
Focus Shift
Start-up screen of FreeSCO. (Credit: Lewis “Lightning” Baughman,
Wikimedia
)
With Windows 2000, and later XP, being my primary desktop systems, my focus with Linux would shift away from the desktop experience and more towards other applications, such as the
FreeSCO
(
en français
) single-floppy router project, and the similar
Smoothwall
project. After upgrading to a self-built AMD Duron 600 rig, I’d use the Celeron 400 system to install various Linux distributions on, to keep tinkering with them. This led me down the path of trying out Wine to try out Windows applications on Linux in the 2000s, along with some Windows games ported by
Loki Entertainment
, with mostly disappointing results. This also got me to compile kernel modules, to make the onboard sound work in Linux.
Over the subsequent years, my hobbies and professional career would take me down into the bowels of Linux and similar with mostly embedded (
Yocto
) development, so that by now I’m more familiar with Linux from the perspective of the command line and architectural level. Although I have many Linux installations kicking around with a perfectly fine X/Wayland installation on both real hardware and in virtual machines, generally the first thing I do after logging in is pop open a Bash terminal or two or switching to a different TTY.
Yet now that the rainbows-and-sunshine era of Windows 2000 through Windows 7 has come to a fiery end amidst the dystopian landscape of Windows 10 and with Windows 11 looming over the horizon, it’s time to ask whether I would make the jump to the Linux desktop now.
Linux Non-Standard Base
Bringing things back to the ‘focus group’ aspect, perhaps one of the most off-putting elements of the Linux ecosystem is the completely bewildering explosion of distributions, desktop environments, window managers, package managers and ways of handling even basic tasks. All the skills that you learned while using Arch Linux or SuSE/Red Hat can be mostly tossed out the moment you are on a Debian system, never mind something like Alpine Linux. The differences can be as profound as when
using Haiku, for instance
.
Rather than Linux distributions focusing on a specific group of users, they seem to be primarily about doing what the people in charge want. This is illustrated by the demise of the Linux Standard Base (
LSB
) project, which was set up in 2001 by large Linux distributions in order to standardize various fundamentals between these distributions. The goals included a standard filesystem hierarchy, the use of the RPM package format and binary compatibility between distributions to help third-party developers.
By 2015 the project was effectively abandoned, and since then distributing software across Linux distributions has become if possible even more convoluted, with controversial ‘solutions’ like Canonical’s
Snap
,
Flatpak
,
AppImage
,
Nix
and others cluttering the landscape and sending developers scurrying back in a panic to compiling from source like it’s the 90s all over again.
Within an embedded development context this lack of standardization is also very noticeable, between differences in default compiler search paths, broken backwards compatibility — like the removal of
ifconfig
— and a host of minor and larger frustrations even before hitting big ticket items like service management flittering between SysV, Upstart, Systemd or having invented their own, even if possibly superior, alternatives like OpenRC in Alpine Linux.
Of note here is also that these system service managers generally do not work well with GUI-based applications, as CLI Linux and GUI Linux are still effectively two entirely different universes.
Wrong Security Model
For some inconceivable reason, Linux – despite not having UNIX roots like BSD – has opted to adopt the UNIX filesystem hierarchy and security model. While this is of no concern when you look at Linux as a wannabe-UNIX that will happily do the same multi-user server tasks, it’s an absolutely awful choice for a desktop OS. Without knowledge of the permission levels on folders, basic things like SSH keys will not work, and accessing network interfaces with Wireshark requires root-level access and some parts of the filesystem, like devices, require the user to be in a specific group.
When the expectation of a user is that the OS behaves pretty much like Windows, then the continued fight against an overly restrictive security model is just one more item that is not necessarily a deal breaker, but definitely grates every time that you run into it. Having the user experience streamlined into a desktop-friendly experience would help a lot here.
Unstable Interfaces
Another really annoying thing with Linux is that there is no stable kernel driver API. This means that with every update to the kernel, each of the kernel drivers have to be recompiled to work. This tripped me up in the past with Realtek chipset drivers for WiFi and Bluetooth. Since these were too new to be included in the Realtek driver package, I had to find an online source version on GitHub, run through the whole string of commands to compile the kernel driver and finally load it.
After running a system update a few days later and doing a restart, the system was no longer to be found on the LAN. This was because the WiFi driver could no longer be loaded, so I had to plug in Ethernet to regain remote access. With this experience in mind I switched to using Wireless-N WiFi dongles, as these are directly supported.
Experiences like this fortunately happen on non-primary systems, where a momentary glitch is of no real concern, especially since I made backups of configurations and such.
Convoluted Mess
This, in a nutshell, is why moving to Linux is something that I’m not seriously considering. Although I would be perfectly capable of using Linux as my desktop OS, I’m much happier on Windows — if you ignore Windows 11. I’d feel more at home
on FreeBSD
as well as it is a far more coherent experience, not to mention BeOS’ successor
Haiku
which is becoming tantalizingly usable.
Secretly my favorite operating system to switch to after Windows 10 would be ReactOS, however. It would bring the best of Windows 2000 through Windows 7, be open-source like Linux, yet completely standardized and consistent, and come with all the creature comforts that one would expect from a desktop user experience.
One definitely can dream.
| 231
| 44
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134785",
"author": "Dave Boyer",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T14:16:27",
"content": "I had a stable branch Ubuntu installed on a second SSD, kept almost unused but ready for those tasks where MSYS2 or VirtualBox would not be enough. One day, aftersudo apt dist-upgradeit refused to boot. Why? For some reason kernel didn’t like wireless receiver of Logitech G502 mouse 🤡Since then it’s never been booted again and I’m too lazy to format this tiny 256 GB SSD.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135101",
"author": "Andrea Campanella",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T06:38:07",
"content": "I call it BS.The kernel doesn’t crash for that, there must be a further problem.",
"parent_id": "8134785",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135134",
"author": "RetepV",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T08:51:48",
"content": "This one post already makes clear what the problem is with Linux. It’s always “there must be a further problem”. I.e. it’s hardly ever directly clear what the problem is, it needs hours of investigation to find out, and when you find out, it’s not clear how to fix it.There’s a lot of documentation out there. But it’s in the form of MAN pages, which are simply archaic and unreadable. Often written in ‘telegram style’ with lots of assumptions about what the user already knows.Fortunately there are superuser.com and stackexchange.com.We live in 2025. Why is the documentation still using ‘man’, why not as Wikipedia pages that link to each other and are searchable?Well, there is no central authority that would make that happen. Competing standards, whatever, name your excuse. There is nobody driving a focused innovation. It’s kind of funny that Linux is now suffering from the thing that prompted its existence: the law of the handicap of a head start.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_handicap_of_a_head_startOne good thing of this handicap maybe, is that it might be real easy to feed all those man pages into an LLM. Instead of reading 20 different man pages to hopefully be able to connect the dots and come up with a solution, you could ask the LLM to do that for you and produce one or more possible solutions for you.Couple the LLM with an agent, and it can actually try things for you, do the hard work of editing one of the hundreds of configuration files with hundreds of insufficiently documented options each.I mean: the situation with those config files is much, much worse than the situation within the Microsoft Registry. At least the registry has all settings and options in one (huge, I give you that) place, grouped logically and searchable.",
"parent_id": "8135101",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135215",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T14:22:25",
"content": "“We live in 2025. Why is the documentation still using ‘man’, why not as Wikipedia pages that link to each other and are searchable?”MS-DOS 6 on-line help was fine, too, I think.Linus could have learnt so much from MS-DOS about user friendliness.. 😮💨",
"parent_id": "8135134",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135535",
"author": "Andrea Campanella",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T08:02:09",
"content": "You are talking out of your arse of things you have no idea about.man it’s not widely used anymore, also, man it’s searchable, man it’s local and avaiable, therearewebsites that host it.Windows tried to be userfriendly and it’s now dying, Mac os it’s basically an appliance. We don’t want that.",
"parent_id": "8135134",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135423",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T22:56:25",
"content": "What the Helen Keller are you talking about? You’re not a kidnap victim passing a note, please re-ask with more information and quotes and stuff.",
"parent_id": "8135101",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135987",
"author": "Dave Boyer",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T14:35:18",
"content": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djOxl-Gl4ukLogitech Dongles Are Crashing Linux KernelsWhere is your BS now?",
"parent_id": "8135101",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8136884",
"author": "Joshy",
"timestamp": "2025-06-09T14:16:35",
"content": "@Maya, First and foremost I have to say I have felt your pain…What I can say is Windows is still geared towards plug n play for USERS whereas Linux is more of a programmer/ ADMIN focus. I have found that Parrot OS has been a more plug n play out of the box reliable platform than any of the other Linux flavors and I’ve tried mostly all of the flavors. I run 2 Parrot OS laptops and a Windows. I can honestly say that I can pick up any of the 3 and equally depend on them… The utilization of which laptop really just depends on the task for me. Personally I prefer the parrot laptops. I get longer battery life, faster task juggling, and an overall smoother experience with them. I only break out the Windows laptop when something just absolutely has to be windows.",
"parent_id": "8134785",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134787",
"author": "h3nk",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T14:18:28",
"content": "My biggest issue with the Linux Desktop(/Daily Driver Laptop) is its lack of boot chain security. While it offers Full Disk Encryption, it is trivial to infect the kernel to keylog the passphrase of the LUKS2 container as there is no Measured Boot on the kernel being done with the TPM PCRs. While it requires in a lot of instances a physical presence, I refuse to use an OS that offers less physical-digital security than Windows with Bitlocker. See this article from Lennart Poettering which explains it in detail:https://0pointer.net/blog/authenticated-boot-and-disk-encryption-on-linux.html. While improvements have been made these last 2-3 years since that article, it’s not secured in any out-of-the-box experience. Maybe when Fedora finally finds a way and develops a kind of blueprint, other OS’es may work on the basis of that. Btw, Fedora has been yelling for years that they’ll roll it out “next year” but it never happens. Until it is fixed, I will not use Linux for my personal desktop/laptop computing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134802",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T15:13:05",
"content": "OMG, are you trolling?Are you actually that worried about hacks that require a physical presence in your own home that you would subject yourself to all those extra hoops to jump through? This isn’t entirely a troll response… I have long wondered who the hell all that crap is actually being marketed to. The only people I can think of that should actually need it are still sending bombing plans via Signal!!!I mean, who do you live with? Are you in a frathouse full of computer science majors with no lives and a mean streak or something?I just want all that stuff to get the hell out of my way and let me install my OS or retrieve my files. Old school BIOS and no extra TP was just fine!I do appreciate the fact that the TPM socket, if I REALLY want to can be bent to let me plug in an old ISA card if I got feeling really nostalgic though.",
"parent_id": "8134787",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134820",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T15:53:39",
"content": "Hard agree, don’t want the extra BS of TPM and (flawed) bit locker encryption and I live in a corporate windows world.",
"parent_id": "8134802",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134868",
"author": "Bryan",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T17:49:01",
"content": "Some academic sees someone on YouTube go on about it and all the sudden they think they’re cybersecurity experts.You know someone hasn’t actually gotten their hands dirty with this kind of stuff when there’s zero consideration for or knowledge of the practical application if it.",
"parent_id": "8134802",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134931",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:38:20",
"content": "Or you have a laptop, or work on something commercial which has basic security requirements. Encryption at rest is a pretty basic requirement for any kind of personal data, and full disk encryption is the standard solution.",
"parent_id": "8134802",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135247",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T15:30:34",
"content": "Sure, if my employer required it then I would have a work laptop with an encrypted drive. Honestly, I don’t really store any work stuff on my devices except the passwords to remote in and that is in an encrypted file that unlocks with a very long password..At home.. I am pretty sure the probability of me losing access to my own stuff because I cannot unlock the drive is almost infinitely higher than that of someone else getting it. Every time I start to contemplate encrypting a drive I consider what future me is going to thing of present me if I do this when he loses years of personal projects, photos, videos, correspondence and etc… Then I do the right thing and don’t.",
"parent_id": "8134931",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135347",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T19:45:53",
"content": "…and that’s where regular backups come in, not just for security threats but because I’ve read too many lost-it-all SSD failure stories (and most of those were from people using Windows; but I’m addressing the threat that’s outside the matter of what OS they’re using).",
"parent_id": "8135247",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135610",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T13:11:17",
"content": "@Garth Wilson – Oh, I do have backups. But… encrypted backups? What makes you think if I lost the key to one drive I wouldn’t lose the key to all of them?",
"parent_id": "8135247",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135747",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T19:56:13",
"content": "@Panondorf, I can’t think of any reason to have the backups encrypted too if they’re offline.",
"parent_id": "8135247",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135743",
"author": "Dohnakun_re",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T19:45:39",
"content": "Full disk (&system) encryption is actually the worst solution. Way too many moving parts. Right click > zip & encrypt or a encrypt-to-cloud solution is the way to go.",
"parent_id": "8134931",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134944",
"author": "David H",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T21:09:31",
"content": "Agreed.Plus, call me petty if you will, but any “appeal to authority” that invokes Lennart Poettering – earns an immediate hard NO from me and is dismissed out of hand.",
"parent_id": "8134802",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135249",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T15:31:46",
"content": "Yah, that too.",
"parent_id": "8134944",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135027",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T02:06:50",
"content": "haha i agree with you entirely butold school bios?? are you for real?? you would give up the UEFI-grub experience and go back to the staged bootloader hassle? you would give up built-in PXE????",
"parent_id": "8134802",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135244",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T15:22:28",
"content": "Absolutely! Maybe it’s just that I have yet to find the well-written manpage. Every guide to setting it up I have followed either seems to assume that I have a graduate degree in modern motherboard firmware or that I want to earn one. Maybe with a step by step, here’s just what you need to know guide to getting it booting…Don’t get me wrong. I have successfully installed Linux with UEFI. My Desktop is set up that way now! But it’s always been muddling through confusing and contradictory examples and trying things until something works then being afraid to touch it.And I don’t think any two setups ever worked out being identical for me. Format the EFI or whatchamacallit partition as ext, vfat, vfat16, dosfs… or whatever. I think they all have been what finally worked for me on one install or another. And what grub command to install to it.. oh, there are images to select from.. well which image do I use.. Hey, these directions give the name of the image I’ll do that… Oh, but grub-install says that one isn’t found… WTF!?! Why is this so hard?!?Where is the hassle with BIOS?Just use grub-install to stick grub on the mbr. Then use grub-mkconfig to spit out a config file that includes all your kernel versions plus any other OSs it can find in case you are multi-booting. Done!Well… if you want to get fancy and display a custom image or change the timeout on the kernel/OS picker screen or whatever there might be some file editing to do but meh.. so what?I had been trying to “be good” and use UEFI for a while but the last install I did I really didn’t feel like all that hastle. I set it to “Legacy” mode and just install grub like I would on any old BIOS machine. So smooth. So easy. Just works! What’s not to love?Built in PXE? Well.. I am aware there were options for PXE before UEFI. But… why would I want that? If I were running a lab of identical workstations sure. There aren’t two devices in my whole house!",
"parent_id": "8135027",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135373",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T20:40:07",
"content": "heh i guess someone has to have that experience…i’ve had the grub two-stage bootloader go wrong in a lot of different ways. grub-install has to have an idea of the relationship between the physical drives it will see at boot-up and the logical drives it can see at install time. it can be screwed up by things like LBA in the BIOS, or by having a bunch of disks on different controllers, or by of course physically moving a disk from one IDE connector to another during maintenance. i’ve had no end of trouble with the old way.or, rather, it met its end when i met UEFI. i’ve never met that contradictory documentation you cite because it’s always ‘just worked’ for me. i imagine it must be fairly easy to work with if you have to but i’ve never had to. i typically just use the efi partition that came with the laptop though :) grub seems to know what to do with it.",
"parent_id": "8135244",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8186610",
"author": "Hfuy",
"timestamp": "2025-10-02T13:07:32",
"content": "It’s more about a stealable laptop, I think.",
"parent_id": "8134802",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134840",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T16:26:30",
"content": "I’ve never enabled disk encryption and probably never will. Poettering works for Microsoft, and he’s seeing things from their viewpoint. I’m not entirely sure he has Linux’s best interests at heart.",
"parent_id": "8134787",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134914",
"author": "Oliver",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:06:35",
"content": "Alas, almoat all nvme drives have full disk encryption built in (and luks/bitlocker//etc)canmake use of it. The easiest and most common way to work with it is simply enabeling a bios drive password. Sexure erase on this drives also works as simpke as rotating the internal crypto key.",
"parent_id": "8134840",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134956",
"author": "NerdWorld",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T21:46:05",
"content": "Two years ago on DevilTeam forum there was program posted to crack SSD encryption of all SSD drives currently available on market. Turns out they have hardcoded backdoor keys left for govt pigs like Police or ABW. I tried it on 9 of SSDs I have (4 sata and 5 nvme) and only 1 could not be cracked. So much for your “encryption” 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂",
"parent_id": "8134914",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135098",
"author": "Oliver",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T06:36:10",
"content": "Roflmao, bot supprising, leave it to vendors and gov to screw people. A ‘trust’ propriatery firmware they say!Fact remains he’s using encryption :)",
"parent_id": "8134956",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134969",
"author": "Denis",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T22:17:49",
"content": "The one time I enabled disk encryption, I had some degradation or such and the os wouldn’t boot , the fight to get back into my own partition made me a realise it just wasn’t worth it. if you have physical access to my machines, you finding my porn stash or pictures of my family and cars are the least of my concerns. I save no autofill data on any machine.",
"parent_id": "8134840",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134926",
"author": "Dragan",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:25:51",
"content": "Some practical considerations: All I need is a rubber hose and I will get your password.",
"parent_id": "8134787",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134941",
"author": "FiveEyesNoPrize",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:58:45",
"content": "Further practical considerations: If you plan to come to my house to strong-arm me into relinquishing my passwords, you’re going to need a LOT more than a rubber hose.",
"parent_id": "8134926",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135138",
"author": "RetepV",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T08:57:50",
"content": "All that is needed is 1 moment of being distracted.For instance, I assume that you are still being amazed by magicians. As long as magicians are able to amaze you, even while knowing that it’s not magic at all, you can be fooled by a criminal.I hope that this thought is somewhat humbling for you. :)",
"parent_id": "8134941",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134962",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T21:54:57",
"content": "Provided you have me. If you stole the laptop in an untargetted attack (which is far more likely for most of us) then disk encryption will keep my data – and everyone else’s data I might have on there if like most businesses I’m processing customer data – safe.",
"parent_id": "8134926",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135481",
"author": "NL",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T04:29:16",
"content": "I find it amusing how many people sing all praises for one OS, while demonizing the other, and it doesn’t really matter which is which. I’ve used various linuxes and windowses over the years, and my conclusion is that they all suck. Windows gives you one option, and its the way they choose. And printing sucks bad. Teaching average employees how to troubleshoot and reinstall print drivers in windows is near impossible. Then you have the ten thousand linux distros, and all the people that will die on a hill for their chosen distro. What I see from my vantage point, as a developer of tools and apps geared toward basic users, is that many of the hardcore linux people appear to suffer from devbrain. This mindset that “I understand this convoluted mess, and if you don’t that means you’re an idiot.” Linux isn’t your friend. Neither is windows, android, ios or macos. They are merely tools to complete a set of purposes, and in my endless tinkering I have never found a single solution that satisfies all my requirements, so I maintain flexibility. I also don’t assume people that know less about these things than I do are lesser humans. Most people don’t want to fight their devices for hours on end just trying to get netflix to work, and that doesn’t make them bad people. Windows, android, macos and ios are successful in marketshare because the people that make them understand their customers, and that’s not a bad thing. The year of linux mass adoption won’t ever happen until it can do point and click everything, better than all the others, without disembowelling the os just to get a simple thing to work. That’s my two cents, as a fan and daily driver of windows AND linux, and y’all are free to disagree with me entirely, it’s your right to do so if you wish. : )",
"parent_id": "8134962",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135102",
"author": "Andrea Campanella",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T06:41:13",
"content": "Android does it.Skill issue.",
"parent_id": "8134787",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135298",
"author": "Antti",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T18:01:28",
"content": "Running bitlocker on a home rig is Rube Goldberging it -Darwin award style.",
"parent_id": "8134787",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134790",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T14:41:57",
"content": "It’s always about expectations.. I’m always disappointed with Mac and Windows when they don’t act like Linux :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134852",
"author": "anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T16:59:52",
"content": "Agreed!If windows didn’t come pre-installed on nearly all PCs for the last few decades (and MS illegally preventing hardware vendors from offering any other pre-installed OS, for most of that time), I doubt it would have caught on. Now, a critical mass of folks have been brain-damaged from early exposure, and think the Windows way is the correct way and we get articles like TFA.",
"parent_id": "8134790",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134984",
"author": "Linux Users are all Virgins",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T23:26:34",
"content": "PC vendors have tried selling PCs with Linux instead. They were all market disasters. Cope harder, loser.",
"parent_id": "8134852",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135127",
"author": "ikode",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T08:20:38",
"content": "Are you sure no major company produces Linux laptops? Take a look at Dell XPS Developer Edition, the HP Dev One and many more. These laptops sure weren’t a disaster.",
"parent_id": "8134984",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135299",
"author": "Antti",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T18:03:00",
"content": "While a laptop is all nice and dandy, when i want my gaming, i do it on a desktop, windows style. I doubt linux even reckognises an Intel arc b580",
"parent_id": "8135127",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135353",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T20:00:19",
"content": "In the early 2000’s I was desperate to get away from the Windows disaster. I knew Linux existed, but didn’t really know anything about it. Then around 2006 I saw that I could buy a desktop PC at the local Fry’s with Linspire Linux pre-installed, and no Windows, and since they didn’t have to pay Windows royalties to Uncle Bill, it was very inexpensive, two hundred and something dollars. I got it. It was a breath of fresh air. Everything just worked, and the user interface was a pleasure. Linspire had some sort of software center—it might have been called “Click-n-Run,” but I don’t remember for sure—where I downloaded, for free, several more applications, super easily, and they installed and ran with no problems. Unfortunately soon after that Linspire was bought out by Xandros, and Xandros dropped support for Linspire. About that time, Ubuntu seemed to be emerging as the leader in desktop Linux, so I went to that. It was fine, except that every subsequent version update became harder to use, not easier.",
"parent_id": "8134984",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8138647",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-13T23:28:18",
"content": "Here in Germany some of us had some hopes for Zeta becoming an alternative in early 2000s.Because both Windows and Linux were far from ideal.Unfortunately, it didn’t last. Mac OS remained as another alternative, though. Tiger for x86, for example.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZETA_(operating_system)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-u-oOUxXM4w",
"parent_id": "8135353",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134855",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T17:04:56",
"content": "Mac OS X (now macOS) has a real Unix kernel.It’s more Unix than Linux ever will be, kid.",
"parent_id": "8134790",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134873",
"author": "g",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T18:01:10",
"content": "You do know what XNU stand for, right?",
"parent_id": "8134855",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135217",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T14:26:38",
"content": "Cross ‘n’ you? A Christian movement, maybe? 🤔",
"parent_id": "8134873",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134879",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T18:26:44",
"content": "Yeah, but it’s not like Linux :) I never said I wanted Unix.",
"parent_id": "8134855",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135219",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T14:27:46",
"content": "No problem, with Linux you’ll never come close to it, anyway.",
"parent_id": "8134879",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135142",
"author": "RetepV",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T09:14:54",
"content": "@jpa: “It’s always about expectations.. I’m always disappointed with Mac and Windows when they don’t act like Linux :)”In the same way, I’m always disappointed by Linux and Windows when they don’t act like UNIX. :)It’s actually quite interesting how much Linux software actually compiles and runs on Mac. And if it somehow doesn’t work to compile and run directly on Macos, you can put it in a Docker image and it will run that way (there are still limitations of course).Actually, I have a Macbook with an M2 MAX processor, and am able to run WINE on top of Rosetta 2. And it can run a really surprising lot of Windows applications.But as everyone who is on the Macos platform, I also have an older Macbook that still works great, but is not supported by the latest Macos anymore (being 12 years old). It’s a Quad-Core i7 with 16GB memory, still a quite capable machine. I have set it up with an external drive so that I can boot into Macos, Ubuntu or Windows 10.",
"parent_id": "8134790",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134794",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T14:48:49",
"content": "YMMV, always. For me, the Year of the Linux Desktop was 2005 and I haven’t looked back. I’ve used Windows and MacOS at work, but I always come back to Linux, warts and all.For all that, I can agree you are 100% right: Linux’s UNIX file-system and permissions are a pointless PITA for desktop applications and I’d burn it all down in a heartbeat for a CP\\M style tree that actually respects physical drives and stores settings and applications in a way mere mortals can comprehend. I just don’t want that badly enough to put up with Microsoft. ¯_(ツ)_/¯",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134815",
"author": "Observer",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T15:46:38",
"content": "I started eliminating Windows from my personal life 20 years ago. About 10 years ago, my household finally became Windows-free. I have NEVER missed uSoft.I have a Windows laptop at work (not by choice) and a linux workstation. 90% of anything useful/productive I do at work is accomplished on the linux box.The laptop takes 20 minutes to boot and breaks every time corporate IT pushes a patch on it.",
"parent_id": "8134794",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135174",
"author": "TDT",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T11:59:20",
"content": "What kind of toaster do you run your windows on?I also have both for work, and the windows laptop is snappy af, despite being encrypted from boot.Don’t get me wrong, I hate windows11 (more precisely, the OS itself is okayish, but the Damokles sword that Microsoft hangs over every user is untolerable for me) but saying it’s slow is just lying or running it in 10 years old hardware.",
"parent_id": "8134815",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135300",
"author": "Antti",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T18:07:36",
"content": "Ditto, have a w11 laptop for work, which feels glacial at booting, but when timing it, it dont take more than 3 minutes from power on to logon, this being a thinkpad x1. Having a rig that takes 20 minutes to boot is just borken to hell.",
"parent_id": "8135174",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136485",
"author": "G",
"timestamp": "2025-06-08T12:01:38",
"content": "THREE MINUTES boot time?! Are you booting from floppy disk or what?",
"parent_id": "8135300",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134829",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T16:11:52",
"content": "Dabbled with linux since 93-94. From then on always had a computer running Linux. Wasn’t until around Fedora Core was introduced that we started using Linux as our general desktop (2003). Still had a Windows box around all that time (wife liked Print shop, kids liked their games and I did some work from home (Turbo C/Pascal, Delphi) ). Wasn’t until Ryzen 1600 came out (2017?) that we went Windows free as the Win 7 box was decommissioned and powered down. Did put Win 7 in a VM as my wife was still stuck on Print Shop. Now the Windoze VM rarely gets exercised, so really and truly Windows free now. Win 7 was last Win OS I ever bought. Same with virus checkers and all the other software that bled the pocketbook.So I guess my year of the Linux Desktop was around 2003 when it became the ‘desktop’ mostly used, and 2017 was the break away from a bare-metal Windows box completely. Never looked back. All good!",
"parent_id": "8134794",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135301",
"author": "Antti",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T18:09:11",
"content": "Lets face it though, if you like gaming, linux aint never gonna do it, too many driver incompatibilities and downright non support by vendors.",
"parent_id": "8134829",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135338",
"author": "X-MarX-THX-SpXt",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T19:29:02",
"content": "But… LordGod Gaben prefers “Not-windows”!",
"parent_id": "8135301",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135931",
"author": "CC",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T08:42:11",
"content": "Emmmm I’m a living counterexample to that thesis. Since like 5 years gaming on Linux and I love it. Proton is a “gamechanger” and in 80% Windows stuff runs out of the box (my personal experience tho – didn’t do survey). And finally Alt+Tab is smooth! :PQuestion what you play… Some tools like BattleEye didn’t mature yet to be Linux friendly but overall ecosystem gets better and better every year.",
"parent_id": "8135301",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134831",
"author": "James Kissel",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T16:12:48",
"content": "Yes to 2005. AMD’s 939 pin processor and Ubuntu 5-06 Long Term release. I never looked back.",
"parent_id": "8134794",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134795",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T14:56:01",
"content": "I guess we all have different experiences. All my Linux systems are ‘very’ stable. Have been for ‘years’ now. The old days of kernel breaking the system seem to be gone. I dabbled with Linux since Slack was downloaded to a stack of floppies. Even got my company to use Linux for a data server on Red Hat 5 (as I recall). Was a solid system. From then on, we had a Linux server in the company, later on Cent OS and Scientific Linux. Yes back then, somethings would break on Kernel updates and would have to revert back… Anyway, now, whether laptops, desktops, servers, or SBCs, Linux just runs. With the last few laptops I bought, KUbuntu LTS found all the hardware. Wifi just ‘worked’ for example. I prefer hard-wire ethernet, but the last laptop didn’t have that port :( . So had to buy a USB-C to ethernet cable… So it goes. As for printers (I have Brother Color and B/W lasers), the OS found them and were available immediately. No drivers to find or load. Security is good out of the box, multi-user out of the box. Pick a DE that fits your workflow. Reboot when you feel like it. Do updates when you get the notion. So many many things to like about Linux.From my point of view there is no reason to run Windows and jump thru those hoops of registering, forced reboots, virus software, only one DE choice to pick from, etc. No thanks. I am Windows free here and loving it. Linux Desktop is here to stay!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134922",
"author": "Oliver",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:14:37",
"content": "Similarly here, have had my family members on Linux since forever too. Faaaar leas complaints.As for the ‘wrong permission model’, thats just naieve. Security is hard and restricts you. So if you want a windows experience, run as root, which quickly makes you realize how wrong that is. As with everything, its a balance. I refuse to work (or support family) with windows and have been happier for it. Using it in embedded products has been a blessing.One fair issue, which cannot be blamed to Linux or FOSS in itself is indeed kernel rebuilds and vroken drivers.. but thats “your fault” for buying crappy hardware (its not yours or ours, sometimes we take a leap, sometimes we get lucky, seldomly we get proper support), but whos fault is that? Something to do with that nega coorporation you love and (financially) support to keep us (and vendors) in their grip.(This sounds far too harsh, which is not what my message intends but I hope I made a point)",
"parent_id": "8134795",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134937",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:52:56",
"content": "How does a normal type user know which hardware to buy? Does it say Linux:YourDistroChoice:YourDesktopChoice on the box? Or is there a solid, reliable source I can reference before buying hardware? Or do I just buy the most expensive hardware? Or the most common hardware?I think Windows makes those decisions somewhat easier because the Windows version compatibility is generally printed on the hardware box. I’m afraid the fractured nature of Linux will probably keep most of the non-IT people I know in the Windows world for the foreseeable future. As painful as the experience can be, Windows (at least by the perception of many) seems (distantly) close to the “kitchen appliance” level of usability. It feels like I have to know the OS more in depth to be running Linux.I’ve been using Mint Cinnamon casually for a while and find that it supports the pile of various ThinkPads (5-6 years old I’d guess) pretty well. (The Yoga’s are a bit more of a challenge, but do function in a general sense.) Unfortunately, I think there almost needs to be a de facto “standard Linux” before it can become a viable consumer alternative OS to Windows. The Mint experience makes me think that might actually be possible at some point.Having used Raspberry Pi for developing a few tools for work, and now running Mint, I think I could make the jump to Linux if I had a good reason.I don’t know that the average user (not knowing any better) really wants to manage their own updates. I’m quite sure that my spouse would want no such thing. Ever.My year of the Linux desktop might turn out to be my first year of retirement.",
"parent_id": "8134922",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134954",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T21:44:22",
"content": "“I think there almost needs to be a de facto “standard Linux” before it can become a viable consumer alternative OS to Windows.” That would be (in my mind) Mint or (K)Ubuntu for the desktop. About as close as you are going to get as by the very nature of Linux there is going to be a ‘lot’ of different distros always out there. Pick the one’s that have lot of ‘support’ behind them … and work well.",
"parent_id": "8134937",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135305",
"author": "Antti",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T18:13:51",
"content": "Given the various foil hats disliking eachother intensely in the linux world, there will never be an agreement on what a standard linux rig should be. As long as windows is faster in gaming, a not insignificant share of the users wont change over anyways. The best linux can hope for is catering for grumpy old men that dont game, the rest of us prefers no fuss installations in the windows world.",
"parent_id": "8134954",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135465",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T02:51:28",
"content": "The last few years it has been ‘no fuss’ in the Linux world. As I had said. Linux just runs… and runs… and runs… No drivers to install (other than Nvidia if you own those cards). No registration, no auto-updates …",
"parent_id": "8134954",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135365",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T20:19:46",
"content": "I started using Linux in about 2006, with a PC I bought brand new from Fry’s that had Linspire Linux pre-installed. Since computers have a limited lifetime, I’ve had a few more since then, all the others being hand-me-downs, mostly from schools and offices that were updating. I’ve had Ubuntu Linux on all of them, with no problem.",
"parent_id": "8134937",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134939",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:57:16",
"content": "Yep. With my 84 year old dad on KUbuntu now for several years, my maintenance has went to practically zero on his laptop. Win for me. And he is happy with it too, so win and win.Agree on the permission model. A necessary evil. We all would ‘like’ to just turn our computer on and start working and be able to do ‘everything’ without hoops to jump through. But we know, because of foreign and domestic bad actors (or states) that isn’t possible in a ‘connected’ world. So it goes. Don’t like it, but it is reality.",
"parent_id": "8134922",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135066",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T04:30:37",
"content": "I have an 4th gen I5 HP laptop which includes a realtek wifi card that disagrees, it almost works but yet … doesnt",
"parent_id": "8134795",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135260",
"author": "Marty",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T16:09:45",
"content": "Realtek WiFi is crap even in Windows. One of my clients has a Yoga 530 with a Realtek WiFi card, and it wouldn’t reliably connect to 5GHz access points. Even when it did, it maxed out at 100 Mbps. Swapped in an AX210 and speed more than tripled.",
"parent_id": "8135066",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135363",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T20:15:45",
"content": "I mostly use my old desktop computer with an i5 processor; but my laptop which I take to work is a 15-year-old HP Compaq 6530b. Ubuntu Linux runs without problems on both. The desktop has a wired internet connection; but I use the WiFi on the laptop. No problems.",
"parent_id": "8135066",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134796",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T14:59:31",
"content": "sooooo much +1 on pretty much all points.I’ve used desktop Linux pretty much only once and I don’t remember how long (~15 years ago, ASUS Laptop, included recompiling the kernel to get power management + Wifi working (not the driver but the enable toggle thingy))but I’ve used Sun Solaris(?) on Sun Ray thin clients and some rolled out Ubuntu installation in university and played around with– OpenWRT.– IPFire (firewall; including one commit to the source code transporting an IPCop functionality).– Debian running the Sun Ray server so I could connect some Sun Rays to it (worked fine but I didn’t have a usecase).So I kinda know my way around bash, compiling stuff, a little MAKE etc. but what annoys me the most is this:… generally do not work well with GUI-based applications, as CLI Linux and GUI Linux are still effectively two entirely different universes.What’s the best “taskmanager” on Linux? Probably “htop”?Where’s the GUI alternative to Process Explorer / Process Hacker? (does htop have an optional GUI?)Want to inspect some hardware details – like connected USB devices – there’s probably a “ls*” command for that (or you cat /proc/? ?)Where are the Linux equivalents of eg. HwInfo and USBTreeView?Are there any GNU/Linux tools like Everything or UltraSearch? They basically read the whole FAT or NTFS MFT and you can instantly find any file anywhere on any local drive with just a few characters (anything in the whole path+filename; regex optional)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134798",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T15:01:10",
"content": "(just some examples – which may not hold anything anymore)",
"parent_id": "8134796",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134900",
"author": "Chris Maple",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T19:39:39",
"content": "“locate” finds files instantly, even with partial filenames. It relies on a database assembled by “updatedb”. If that produces too many results, refine the search by piping locate through grep or writing locate’s output to a file. “find” is more powerful but is finicky and slower.lsusb finds USB devices, although the results are occasionally not helpful.In KDE, kinfocenter provides hardware information and more.Discovering things in Linux can be very difficult. Often the first resort is an internet search to find the appropriate command, occasionally followed by installing a new program to do what you want.",
"parent_id": "8134796",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134936",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:51:12",
"content": "Discovering things in Linux can be very difficult.Then you have to keep re-discovering them when you need it the next time, because you can’t actually remember some multi-step command line procedure you copy/pasted from a forum two years ago, and you can’t find the same source anymore due to link rot even if you bookmarked it, and the same procedure won’t work any longer anyhow because they changed something.So it’s the same experience over and over and over…",
"parent_id": "8134900",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135069",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T04:36:49",
"content": "agreed, a good hack a day example is the rasberry pi, go look at how many billion methods there are to do a safe shutdown from a simple button.",
"parent_id": "8134936",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135454",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T01:46:36",
"content": "raspberry pi is still the best linux experience i ever had. i have to credit the fact that the distro it uses was designed for the pi, and the pi designed for linux. thats probibly half of it, the other half is the community and knowledge base. i want that experience but on performant hardware.",
"parent_id": "8135069",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134907",
"author": "Jon Mayo",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T19:58:28",
"content": "Where’s the GUI alternative to Process Explorer / Process Hacker? (does htop have an optional GUI?)GNOME: System Monitor. there are lots of ways to get there, it’s often in the task bar widgets, but you can just search for the app in the activity “type to search” box. Or walk through the menus for system utilities. It’s a core component for GNOME so you have it if you have GNOME.KDE: Plasma System Monitor. basically same story as above. Completely different app that suits the KDE environment but conceptually the same thing.top/htop are for people who like ANSI/VT220 style terminals, handy if you’re doing remote access over SSH/TELNET/RSH/mosh. But not very user friendly, hard to cut and paste from.",
"parent_id": "8134796",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134923",
"author": "Oliver",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:20:32",
"content": "Resources is a new gnome alternative thats also quiet popular.As to locate, eaons ago (win2k era) my friend was jealous of how we had ‘find’ and ‘locate’ on linux. Luckily for him, some one ported it with a tray icon!!Nowadays we have built-in search in gnone, which is still database based.. just type stuff in the overview search bar.As for parsing the disk table, what is a file-system if not a database of your files. so in that sense, i get the technoligy hack to just poke in the database. From a securitt and privacy point, no utility, especially third party, should have that kind of acces. But then we can talk about my earlier post again, about secuirty being hard/a balance.",
"parent_id": "8134907",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134964",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T22:03:22",
"content": "thanks for all the answers (too lazy to answer all individually).Nowadays we have built-in search in gnone, which is still database based..so an additional db with regular indexing of the file systems / storage devices?From a securitt and privacy point, no utility, especially third party, should have that kind of acces.Hmm yeah – I do have to agree mostly. Personally I’m running “Everything” in portable mode, thus with elevated/admin rights, but if installed it runs a background system service the GUI just accesses (and this access can be granted over LAN so I could search every drive on every computer in my LAN… doesn’t mean I could access what I’d find).Ideally the OS/kernel would offer such read only access out of the box for CUIs/GUIs to use (or course with appropriate access controls & limitations).",
"parent_id": "8134923",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134797",
"author": "G-man",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T15:00:24",
"content": "I played with Mint 3, Puppy, Fatdog. Xandros, Kali, Mint 22. I just can’t on with the messing around. The programs I use the most don’t run on them and as much as I didn’t enjoy the messing around in the registry of W10/11 to get it to do what I want, all the programs I use work fine on Windows. Not moving. Oh, had a couple of Macs and never again.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134800",
"author": "sgsax",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T15:02:50",
"content": "Have to say I disagree with pretty much every main point of this article. I’ve been using exclusively Linux on my desktops and laptops, both work and home, since at least 2002. I use Windows in a VM for things that absolutely have to be done there, but that list is very short. Never had any completely showstopper problems. There have been pain points, but nothing worse than any other OS, proprietary or otherwise (printing sucks everywhere). I guess YMMV, TANSTAAFL, IANAL, etc.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134850",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T16:56:10",
"content": "Not me. I can relate to the flaws of Linux, they were real.For example, the missing journaling of EXT/EXT2 filesystem.Linux lived in an imaginary fantasy world in which resets and blackouts not exist.So unless you had an UPS like in a server room, you had a broken filesystem during reboot. Missing i-nodes etc.Heck, even Windows 98SE on FAT32 was more robust, since it was designed with worst case situations in mind.In my opinion, Windows NT4 and OS/2 Warp 4 were much more mature than Linux in the 90s.NTFS and HPFS did support journaling, too, unlike Linux the infant.Especially NT 3.51 with GDI still in user-space was rock solid.Add NEWSHELL and it looked like NT4. It also had decent OpenGL and lots of networking protocols.",
"parent_id": "8134800",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134882",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T18:38:56",
"content": "You ramble on about the the flaws of Linux and praise Windows as though it were handed down on high from the gods.Here’s a hot news flash:Windows sucks. It has sucked since day one. It sucks harder now than it did back then.Windows is full of advertisements. Microsoft is forcing usable PCs to be scrapped dropping support and forcing the update to Windows 11 – which will not run on older machines due to a lack of specific TPM hardware.Are you happy that millions of PCs will suddenly go obsolete when Microsoft pulls the plug on Windows 10?",
"parent_id": "8134850",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134897",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T19:31:21",
"content": "Same thing will happen last time “obsolete” was uttered.",
"parent_id": "8134882",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134925",
"author": "Oliver",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:24:36",
"content": "In addition too, while bashing linux in the article, comparing it then to a (if purchased quiet expensive) server OS is unfair. Users at that time where banished to WinME and XP which both where a far cry from the perfection it is pitted against (though admittedly XP was quite a lot better).So GUI Linux wasn’t great at that time, but neither was windows. Reinstalls and registry bullshit also existed back then. (Or was there any one that sidnt have to reinstall at least every 6 months?)",
"parent_id": "8134882",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134942",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:59:42",
"content": "A lot of the windows bashing at the time came from bad hardware though, with badly designed chipsets running hot, corrupting memory (Ali Allading comes to mind), capacitor plague, etc.People didn’t realize their actual hardware was on the fritz from the factory and simply kept re-installing windows and complaining about it. Then they installed Linux and because it wouldn’t actually do much with the hardware – for the lack of driver support and otherwise low demands – it would just keep on “working” despite unstable hardware.",
"parent_id": "8134925",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134943",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T21:02:13",
"content": ".. compared to QNX or BeOS, Linux wasn’t a great user experience, either.Linux wasn’t cheap/affordable in price, even, considering the full price retail distributions that contained ~10 CDs and a 10 pound manual with over 1000 pages.Downloading all required Linux files via dial-up was expensive, too.Nerds at university with access to T1 line might have liked to disagree, of course.Writing images on ~50 floppy disks for installation, wasn’t cheap either.That’s 5 packs of 1,44 MB floppies! Just buying a retail distribution on CD(s) wasn’t a bad idea, thus.",
"parent_id": "8134882",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134957",
"author": "Joseph Shaw",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T21:49:18",
"content": "I’m kind of happy since it is about time for me to pick up some new used laptops. The forced W11 update should make better hardware available for cheap.",
"parent_id": "8134882",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135148",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T09:47:33",
"content": "As ifmodernLinux runs “great” on old hardware.. 🙄In reality, it’s just as much of a hardware hog as modern Windows.On the desktop, at least, where it needs gigabytes of RAM just to not stutter.In text mode, it may still run fine on older hardware.But then you could better use BSD anyway. It’s a real Unix.And random hardware, which laptop hardware really is,is bad for alternative OSes that assume industry standards.Such as AC97 audio, HDA, VBE 3.0, USB 2.0 compatible ports, IDE/SATA, BIOS (CSM) and such.On such bad hardware (laptop hardware), Haiku, ReactOS, AROS, Minix 3, SerenityOS or an older MacOS X distro might not run correctly.A real vintage laptop from 2000 with an intel 440BX or PIIX3 or ICH6 chipset is way more compatible.Because that’s the kind of what emulators and VM software (Virtual PC, VBOX) are using, still, as reference hardware.Which in turn are used for developing these alternative OSes.",
"parent_id": "8134957",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134906",
"author": "Jon Mayo",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T19:53:30",
"content": "FAT32 is definitely not more robust than EXT2 (which is architecturally similar to UFS). What is true is that CHKDSK was better at automatically recovering your lost clusters and backup file allocation table. With EXT2, UFS, and FFS you has to massage fsck a bit if your file system was in a really rotten state. You could recover a LOT even with severe corruption if you kept digging into inodes even if the spare superblocks were toast too (rare!)But ultimately the best advice with any file system or disk drive was to run backups periodically. Onto floppies if you were poor like me, although I eventually got my hands on a DAT/DDS drive and a SCSI card for it (used from a local trade show / swap meet). Backing up on CD-Rs was viable eventually, but by then EXT3 was starting to make headway and home directories were getting to big to fit on a CD-R.",
"parent_id": "8134850",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134854",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T17:01:01",
"content": "Btw, this parody is spot on!That used to be the Linux experience for the average uset, especially the printer support. :)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVO8RU9h88k",
"parent_id": "8134800",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135307",
"author": "Antti",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T18:16:06",
"content": "If you work in IT- windows is a must. Everything is centered around MS office/outlook.",
"parent_id": "8134800",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135371",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T20:31:27",
"content": "Why can’t you use LibreOffice and Thunderbird? I haven’t used Office or Outlook in nearly 20 years, and I have zero compatibility problems writing compatible files for, or exchanging files with, others at work who’re using Windows.",
"parent_id": "8135307",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135852",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T03:57:56",
"content": "Cause it’s 20 years out of date and no one tolerates windows 98 software",
"parent_id": "8135371",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135857",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T04:16:02",
"content": "So you’re saying you have to work with 20-years-outdated MS office/outlook? (LibreOffice and Thunderbird are not at all outdated).",
"parent_id": "8135852",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8136009",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T16:26:04",
"content": "I don’t use LibreOffice because it sucks at, i.e. can’t do, one simple task: export of a spreadsheet using Chinese characters in .csv format. So don’t go all pompous ass, it’s not the tool for my job. Please don’t try to teach your grandmother to suck eggs, I work very well thank you with Chinese all the time. The software fails.",
"parent_id": "8135371",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8137865",
"author": "Jon Mayo",
"timestamp": "2025-06-11T14:36:20",
"content": "All us Linux users are on office365 at work. Not a big deal. We still make documents and slides too, but people at my job are putting docs on the wiki/confluence more these days for better collaboration. For slides there are some slick LaTeX packages that are less frustrating than trying to line stuff up in PowerPoint, but a very very steep learning curve!",
"parent_id": "8135307",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134804",
"author": "Jim Brooks",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T15:21:10",
"content": "I worked in Hong Kong for a while and was surprised at the non standard electrical wall outlets. There were several. Linux is like that but in spades. This was the strength of windows till the win 11 buy a new computer era. The effort wasted on many different versions of Linux let alone the confusion this leaves new users with is disappointing. Don’t get me wrong the Linux community is amazing. Witness ndiswrapper, an amazing workaround for lack of support by wifi card manufacturers focused on that single windows target. This should be the era of Linux. Microsoft has pulled a major boner with win11 upgrade demands. And yet the fragmentation of Linux acts as a major barrier to users departing windows. Do I use Ubuntu, mint, … how much effort is wasted in development and support of all these distros?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134819",
"author": "g",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T15:50:37",
"content": "What “non-standard electrical wall outlets”?",
"parent_id": "8134804",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134851",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T16:57:28",
"content": "US outlets? ;)",
"parent_id": "8134819",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134858",
"author": "Jim Brooks",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T17:15:30",
"content": "There were multiple outlets with incompatible pins. Wherever you were, you had to make sure the product you bought had à power cord that fit your outlet. This as opposed to the standard wall outlet we see in North America. It’s ironic the Linux as in the os vs the ui is a single entity. This is like having many different incompatible gasolines that only work with certain car brands, or even better different filler receptacles for each brand of car. Diversity can be a blessing or a curse depending on how it is implemented.",
"parent_id": "8134819",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134877",
"author": "g",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T18:15:17",
"content": "Thestandard wall outlet? Whose standard, exactly? You are aware the world stretches beyond North America and that NEMA is the autority for only a not very big chunk of its electrics standards? (All things considered, thank $deity as well, we all could have been screwed with that crap.)",
"parent_id": "8134858",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134917",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:07:34",
"content": "What he’s saying, and I’m not vouching for it, simply trying to help you with comprehension isthe island of Hong Konghas “multiple outlets with incompatible pins. Wherever you were, you had to make sure the product you bought had à power cord that fit your outlet. This as opposed to the standard wall outlet we see in North America.”Perhaps it’s as simple as new construction using the Chinese standard(s) and old construction using the British standard(s) which may well have changed over 99 years. Don’t know, don’t care.That said, infinite thumbs up and pats on the back to the article’s writer for taking time out of her busy day to actuallytype the whole word“distribution*. I have a rule that anyone who insists on saying “distro” may be disrogarded.",
"parent_id": "8134877",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134830",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T16:11:57",
"content": "Have been using Linux (currently Mint MATE) for (at least 20) years as the OS on my home PC. I’ve been very happy with it. Microsoft at work, and in a VM for stuff that won’t run on Linux, but that’s 2 or 3 programs only (Lightroom, Garmin updater, 35mm film scanner control). After using Win7, 10 and (only briefly) 11 at work, I have decided that the additional hassle of Windows is not worth my effort.What hassle, you ask? Updates always require a reboot, often as you’re bringing the system up or down. Updates are black boxes, defined by Microsoft, and sometimes, mandatory. No update on my Linux system is mandatory. And they occur only when I tell them to. Microsoft is long past the point where the updates they push are of any use to me. They exist only to force feature changes and “secure” a system, which, by it’s massive footprint, is a giant target for malware.I’d rather run Linux. Mostly, because I like to be in charge of my own computer and the one who decides what it does and how it does it.",
"parent_id": "8134804",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134928",
"author": "Oliver",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:29:07",
"content": "The thing everybody always seems to forget, usoft is a big coorp with a mission and cision. Linux is just a bunch of devs naking cool shit.Yes theres sone coorps that want to do more (and earn money) like ubunut, which if pick that as your target is not bad at all.But this fragmentation conparission is ib that sense unfair, no billions to do stuff. also, you could say ‘the propriatery market is a mess, i have a mac and no wibdows software runs on it, and all these UIs all look so confusingly different) But this is all accepted.As soon as you find the ‘leader of the linux’ (not torvalds) it becomes a more fair conparission.",
"parent_id": "8134804",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134809",
"author": "excognita",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T15:30:11",
"content": "Honestly, SteamOS was the best linux desktop experience I’ve had. My steam deck just worked on that front. Most of the linux-y issues (like wifi supplicant failures or driver issues) were not present, and I only had issues when trying to work around modded games.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134813",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T15:42:11",
"content": "Wrong distro.Yah, I know… value choice, don’t knock other’s preferences, etc etc etcReally though. In the late 90s? It sounds like you wanted something with a similar feel and ease of use to Win9x but more stable.In that time period that was Mandrake. Someone is going to hate me for saying this but I don’t know what purpose Suse has had since the very very early days when it’s purpose was to provide a distro to use while waiting for more modern ones to exist. I’m talking before I started and that was 1997.If your hardware had decent Linux support I would have argued Mandrake was an easier install than Windows. And I did know both Mandrake and Window’s installers very well. The only place Mandrake could be more complicated was if you didn’t go with the automatic partitioning. Such as if you wanted to dual boot.And the default UI was KDE (before it got bloated). So… pretty much like Win98 but with a few bells and whistles added. It was nothing like FVWM. (Although you could install and switch to that or about 100 others if you wanted to)SUSE was still using FVWM?!? I mean.. that’s a valid preference (for that time) to someone who is an experienced user and is trying to keep bloat down to an absolute minimum. I wouldn’t have foisted it on a newbie in 1999 unless I was secretly getting a commission from Microsoft!An yes, I did use that too. On RedHat. For… about a year until I met Mandrake and no longer had any use for FVWM or RedHat. Still don’t have any use for RedHat!The first thing that killed the Linux desktop… It wasn’t the lack of an easy and familiar interface. There were choices for that!It was Flash!G0d D4mn3d web developers of the era were doing EVERYTHING, even the stuff that was day 1 of HTML101 class using Flash instead of HTML. They couldn’t have a even a font or a hyperlink without it!And then Adobe bought out Macromedia. I don’t think they exactly officially killed the Linux version of Flash. They just stopped developing it. And made changes so that things written for newer versions wouldn’t work with it. All the while still offering an ancient crusty Flash that wasn’t good enough to let a person use 90% of the web on Linux and stringing Linux users along that there might one day be an update.Eventually there were ways around this. Thank you Codeweavers for Crossover Desktop!!! It let you use the Windows Flash client on Linux. But that was an extra cost and it always seemed a bit slower and less stable than running Flash on Windows.The one good thing Steve Jobs ever did… kill Flash. I hope someone left a brick in Flash’s mouth so it can’t rise again.But by that time the world was hooked on Photoshop and still… Adobe sticks it to Linux users.Side-track… I remember trying a very early version of Photoshop on a then not-new but not-yet-obsolete Pentium 1. It had this really weird gimmicky interface. It was so inefficient it was practically unusable on that machine. Maybe it worked better for if you had MMX extensions?At the same time I had a shareware program that I forgot the name of years ago but it was way better. If you told me then Photoshop would even still exist let alone be so dominant today I would have thought you needed committed!Today, for those not shackled by Photoshop it’s probably gaming.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134949",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T21:34:50",
"content": "Speaking of flash, of the other sort – I remember buying my first ever flash thumbdrive, the year was 2004.So I had an extra computer and I installed Cobind on it, which was supposed to be “Linux for the average user” fresh out of development. I took my thumb drive, put it in… and nothing happened. You still had to mount and unmount it manually, and jump through some other hoops to have it show up in the file manager with both read and write permissions. Every. Single. Time.This system was offline, no network, no modem, so the only way to get software and files in was going to be either floppies or a flash drive. CD-Rs cost money. With that level of usability – if this was going to be the user experience – I concluded that I was not going to be using this system.It doesn’t have to be a big fault when it hits you right in the basics.",
"parent_id": "8134813",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135252",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T15:41:49",
"content": "Yah. That was weird that it went that way. One of the reasons I said Mandrake was that at that sweet spot of 1999 that the article talked about it used a thing called Supermount which took care of that for you. Not all distros did this by default although you could add it to any distro if you were up to the task. (or at least that was the case somewhere in the vicinity of 1999, that is a long time back)Then the Linux devs decided Supermount was too much of a hack and had to go. No doubt there were totally valid technical reasons for this. But it was a step backwards for the user interface resulting in exactly the experience you just described in the 2000s. Which really should never have been considered acceptable.Eventually most of the big destkop managers built similar functionality into their own code. But then you still have to mount crap manually if you prefer to use something lightweight instead.I totally think back on this experience as Wayland pushes remote access to the desktop manager to implement!",
"parent_id": "8134949",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134965",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T22:04:50",
"content": "a shareware program that I forgot the name of years ago but it was way betterI doubt it. It might have been nicer to use, and photoshop was hard, but photoshopdid things right. The brushes, selections, transformations, layers, algorithms, color matching/proofing… was done correctly and with actual professional use in mind, while the alternatives – especially the single developer shareware jobs – just looked nice with amateur appeal while the math behind them was simplified or wrong and it showed in the results. You could tell when someone was using something like Paint Shop Pro because their work resembled children playing with crayons. Perfectly useful in its own right, but it was just… sloppy.Today you have very good Photoshop alternatives like Affinity, but again, no native Linux support because supporting Linux across the board, with things like color profiling or pen input, is such a big mess that developers simply refuse to.But who would even want to use Photoshop or Affinity on Linux where simply telling your printer to use a paper type and printing profile other than the factory default is likely to be impossible? All that time editing your photos is futile when you can’t even tell the printer that you’re using photo paper.",
"parent_id": "8134813",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135253",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T15:44:08",
"content": "I was talking about 1996 or maybe 1997 there. Are you telling me Photoshop did things right back then? If they did.. well.. ok. It was still a weird-ass UI and it bogged down a couple-year-old PC at the time brutally. And new PCs were expensive in those days!",
"parent_id": "8134965",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135254",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T15:44:54",
"content": "Not the same UI Photoshop has today BTW. This looked more like something the people behind Bonsai Buddy would make.",
"parent_id": "8135253",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135313",
"author": "Antti",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T18:32:38",
"content": "TBH in late 90´s, the easiest to install OS would have been win-98. Insert cd and install. Easy as that.",
"parent_id": "8134813",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134814",
"author": "Jarion",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T15:43:38",
"content": "My year of Linux was 2000. I had dabbled with it earlier and had all of the frustrations. Since then Linux has been my primary operating system at home and at the office. Now, I manage many Linux systems at work ranging from the phone system to the web server. The different “flavors” of the OS and GUIs are fun to play with and provide a niche for whatever your particular needs may be. Do I have to use Windows from time to time? Of course, some software doesn’t come any other way. So I have a dual boot system for that. Besides, my Linux based Anbernic can emulate all of the old consoles for when I want to take that trip down memory lane.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134817",
"author": "olaf",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T15:49:28",
"content": "Sorry, but I moved to Linux in 1992. Had someone ever seen what a competitor had a bullshit OS at this time? I think it was called DOS33. So crappy, I changed immediatly and stayed forever with linux. Only in the last 10-15 years it becomes bader because every freshman at universitiy had to made there own distribution and they can not program themself anymore and use tons of libarys with different version level, different makes, different whatever. So it becomes more and more harder to exchange software between different linux installations. In the last years we have even linux users that can not compile there kernel themself anymore! [spit out]",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134838",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T16:21:45",
"content": "I took serious note of Linux’s capabilities in 1994. I had a new job, and they were running Viewlogic (EE CAD) on Windows 3.1 on 486 machines. This worked about as well as you might suspect, which is to say that if you were foolish enough to open more than a couple of schematic pages, you would cause Quarterdec Extended Memory Manager (QEMM) to throw up its hands and crash Viewlogic and the Windows system.What to do? Well, I noticed they had a Unix system in the lab, which also had a Viewlogic license, and did not crash when you opened more than a couple of pages. I understood Unix, knew about Linux and read up on the X Window system. I knew about running X terminals off a host system, so decided to see if I could run my 486 as a Linux-based Xterm, because while the Unix system was faster, working in the noisy lab was not so much fun.Turns out, after buying a second HDD, installing Linux on it, and converting my work PC to dual boot Linux, I could do exactly that, and thereby run Viewlogic on the lab Unix system, using my desktop PC as a remote Xterminal. Much productivity was gained. And when I sat and thought about it for a bit, I realised that the same 486 hardware was running a much more sophisticated and reliable OS, and that OS was Linux.",
"parent_id": "8134817",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134847",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T16:42:18",
"content": "You know that this switch was kinda pointless, right?WABI was available on Linux/Unix and ran the 386 Protected-Mode Windows kernal very well, without any DOS foundation.You could have been running any professional Windows software with it, without resorting to imperfect *nix ports of the time. :)",
"parent_id": "8134838",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135140",
"author": "elmesito",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T09:08:33",
"content": "Oh my, Viewlogic. That brings back some nightmares.",
"parent_id": "8134838",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135023",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T01:54:54",
"content": "1992! all these years later i’m still jealous. i remember at least a year or two where i really wanted linux and was highly motivated towards it, but i only had authority over a 286! if i’d had a little spare hdd space i would have given minix a good try",
"parent_id": "8134817",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135226",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T14:38:52",
"content": "The 286 was great, it spared me from both Windows 95 and Linux.And v86 mode, MemMaker and Doom! Especially dreadful Doom!At a friend’s house I’ve played Sega Genesis/MD. I’m so glad I lived in the 16-Bit world. Windows 3.1, GeoWorks Ensemble etc. were all available, too. And so relaxing to use!",
"parent_id": "8135023",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135318",
"author": "Antti",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T18:37:11",
"content": "Back in -92 one would have used Amiga OS. or Mac OS. Why transfer to something that is so user hostile with constant need for command prompts and logons.",
"parent_id": "8134817",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8137879",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-11T15:20:55",
"content": "Speaking of Macs in 1992..There used to be A/UX which was an Unix with a graphical GUI that looked like System 7.Given enough RAM it was very well performing, especially network i/o.It could run well behaved System 7 applications, as well.In my opinion, this is the kind of Unix experience we home users missed out upon.A neat, tidy Unix with a friendly GUI. Instead, we got freaky Linux.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX",
"parent_id": "8135318",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134822",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T15:58:48",
"content": "2025 is the year of Linux on my desktop, when W10 drops out of support I’ll archive the SSD it’s installed on and my daily drive will be Mint with XP and Win 7 boxes for my old device programmers.I used to advocate for Windows, I reckon 7 was the pinnacle and it was pretty damn good but I’m fed up with the ever more intrusive garbage and security issues of Windows, I fight with it enough at work to be bothered with it at home as well",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134843",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T16:32:13",
"content": "Windows 10 = SpydowsWindows 11 = SuperSpydows",
"parent_id": "8134822",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135456",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T02:00:57",
"content": "then you start using a pirated ltsc because you trust the piracy crowd more than ms.",
"parent_id": "8134843",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134869",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T17:52:35",
"content": "More like 2050, I think. It needs time to mature, like old cheese.When it smells unpleasently the most and looks ugly, it’s ready. :)Btw, Windows 7 was “best” (after XP SP2 and 2k), but Vista was far more pretty/majestic, like a Queen.Years after Win 7 was out, Vista got SPs and Platform Updates that made it as good as 7 (got backports from 7). It even got DirectX 11.Except for the WDDM driver model, here Vista remained at 1.0 rather than 1.1.",
"parent_id": "8134822",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134876",
"author": "X-MarX-THX-SpXt",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T18:10:07",
"content": "R U Pewdiepie?7 was good sure, but it had some serious issues (at start at least… but nowadays what doesn’t ¯_(ツ)_/¯ ). Hint: ever since 98 there are ways to get rid of nearly all of the winbloat and spydows stuff from the start. Nearly because some g0dforsaken programs need those d4mn extensions!TL;DR: Linux NOW (and possibly in the future) is just the same headache as windows. Just from a different direction. And without big brother.",
"parent_id": "8134822",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134823",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T15:59:29",
"content": "Ease of use in the 90s…I remember the brief period when Linux had two things co-existing…a kernel module that allowed one to mount a CDR/CDRW in rw mode and write to it just like any other part of the filesystem.and SuperMount. Which allowed you to just stick in removable media and use it, remove it, swap it at will. No extra step of becoming root and mounting it.But… by the time that CDR/RW kernel module existed SuperMount was already going out of fashion. So I am not talking about ease of installation, with any distro I knew at this time one had to rebuild the kernel to get that module and probably had to install SuperMount.. despite warnings it was deprecated and not to.But the result…Just pop in a CDRW and use it. None of that opening a separate CDRW burner program, choosing the particular files you want on it and then burning it in a session. It was just like a floppy was back then in Windows or like a USB stick is now. Stick it in and go.Of course none of that matters now, who is using CDs still? But yah, if you were up to the initial task of setting it up that made for an ease of use that Windows couldn’t match until just about the time CDs started going out of style anyway.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134826",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T16:04:30",
"content": "My “year of the Linux desktop” was about 1998.We used Windows at work, and I got sick and damn tired of fixing Windows everytime I turned around. The secretary’s computer (Win95) would constantly lose all its network settings, getting me a call to come over and fix it (again and again and again and …) I don’t even want to think about the boot tricks you had to play to get enough memory for Windows and programs to play nice with one another.The PC I bought had Windows on it, and it was a pain the the backside. We had dialup internet, and Windows made you jump hoops to make it work.I bought a copy of SuSE Linux 5.3 and installed it on the PC. It supported a good scanner (that I still use today.) It had StarOffice (which later morphed into OpenOffice, then LibreOffice.) It had GIMP for graphics editing. It had a couple of email programs, one of which could read the existing emails from Eudora. It had KDE 1.0, which worked better for me than Gnome, which came out about the same time. Most importantly, I could setup the dialup network such that it would reliably connect to the internet at need – silently. No screeching modem noises when I called up my emails while the baby was sleeping – and the internet connection always worked when needed, which it didn’t do with Windows.I still use OpenSuse to this day. Currently version 15.6.I do all of the things I need to do privately on a computer with Linux. Email, internet, drawings (plans for wood working projects and sewing projects,) developing software, editing photos and writing blog posts, word processing, etc. with Linux. My wife and I made a photo album of our daughter’s wedding to have professionally printed using Linux.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134848",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T16:43:28",
"content": "Your experience with KDE was mine also… Until 4.0 came along. Then I moved away. Now back on KDE as it has matured nicely since then. Choices. Love it.“I do all of the things I need to do privately on a computer with Linux.”Same here. With LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, the foundation apps are covered for what most is used. A lot of people just use the browser for mail, so email client may not be needed… But clients are available. For advanced photo stuff there is gimp and other apps. We mostly use Gwinview (default image viewer in KDE) for simple sizing/cropping needs. Spectacle used for screen snapshots. And of course, for me, every compiler under the sun is available for development purposes. Oh and with FreeCad, I recently designed a small part for 3D printing. So covered there as well.",
"parent_id": "8134826",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134849",
"author": "Greg Mathews",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T16:55:30",
"content": "every compiler under the sun is available for development purposesNot true, there’s no CCS C compiler used with PIC18 microcontrollers.",
"parent_id": "8134848",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134880",
"author": "Valerio",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T18:30:35",
"content": "CCS compiler for pic18 seems to support Linux just fine:https://www.ccsinfo.com/product_info.php?products_id=PCH_full",
"parent_id": "8134849",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135401",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T21:49:33",
"content": "MPLAB-X is available for Linux also. I have it installed here.",
"parent_id": "8134880",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8137912",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-11T16:08:11",
"content": "KDE – “Kolorful Diskfilling Environment. ” -U. Schwarz",
"parent_id": "8134848",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134871",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T17:58:44",
"content": "KDE 3.x was best, I think. KDE 1.0 was like Calmira for Windows 3.11! 😆But maybe that wouldn’t be fair to say. To Calmira, I mean.KDE 3.2 had a default theme that was original and not just a lame clone of XP’s Luna.",
"parent_id": "8134826",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134832",
"author": "Mordae",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T16:13:09",
"content": "I just love how it’s always the stupid driver for some idiotic vendor who cobbles up pile of shit driver, publishes it for people to compile themselves and calls it a day. “Oh, why don’t the high and mighty Linux devs port and clean it up?” But then you boot to Windows, install the Windows driver from the same vendor and everything works. For a day! Then you realize it BSODs your desktop, because guess what? The vendor can’t write even the Windows driver. Whose fault is that? And you know what? You got what you paid for. Cheapest motherboard means cheapest ralink LAN IC bought on sale.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134862",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T17:30:24",
"content": "Well.. about drivers.The article was talking about 1999. How were Linux vs Windows drivers then?I remember Windows itself came with very few drivers and there was no “Windows Update” or other automated online installer. Instead… if you had something new in the box it came with a disk with drivers on it. Hopefully it had drivers for your version of Windows. If not.. maybe one of the drivers for the closer Windows version on the disk might work. And if you lost the disk… you are going hunting now!If you were really lucky (and this peripheral was not necessary for connecting to the internet) the manufacturer might have the driver you need on their website.It was all a PITA because you had to find the driver that matched the same make and model card you were installing. It didn’t matter that if there was one there was probably 1,000 different cards out there that were all basically just reference implementations based on the same chip. The drivers had some way of identifying that it was the wrong card and would not work.With Linux OTOH… Lots of drivers were just built into the distro. There was a good chance (if a device worked on Linux at all) that you would just plug it in and it woudl work.If not, just find the biggest chip on the device. Look up it’s model number and go find the generic Linux driver for that.For example, in my workplace at the time we had about 100 network cards of several different makes, models and versions all based on the RTL-8139 chip. Stick one in a Windows computer… you had better have the right disk for that exact card! Stick it in a Linux computer. And it just works.",
"parent_id": "8134832",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134970",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T22:28:50",
"content": "But then that would create the problem of “all hardware is generic”, where you could only access the very basic functions of whatever the thing you had.Getting the actual driver AND the user software to access extra functions and configurations was 99% not possible. Your fancy photo printer? Only prints on plain copy paper in black and white. Your scanner? Defaults to the factory setting of compressing to JPEG in-device to transfer files faster. Your sound card? No access to built-in equalizer, no multi-channel sound. Your GPU? No acceleration…",
"parent_id": "8134862",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134972",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T22:36:34",
"content": "I mean, I distinctly remember having spent two weeks getting the scroll wheel of my Logitech mouse working, and the final configuration had to be done in a file where making a single typo would fail the video configuration and cause the GUI to load up to a black screen, and that was well into the Ubuntu era.",
"parent_id": "8134970",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135264",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T16:16:42",
"content": "I don’t know.I suppose experiences will vary.I had this thing.. the Genius NetMouse. It had up and down scroll buttons instead of a wheel. I think it came first… at least I had never seen a scrollwheel until a few years after that came out.The buttons were non-functional in Windows without installing the driver.In Linux they just worked!",
"parent_id": "8134972",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135259",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T16:05:38",
"content": "By 1999? Sure. If you had an office full of Windows hardware you wanted to convert. Or if you just bought the shiny at the store and did no research. then yah, you were probably going to be making some compromises.Not yet having the internet on my cellphone I remember going to Linuxprinting.org or something close to that on the display model PCs and walking back and forth between there and the printer isle. Pick one with great Linux support ratings and everything went a lot smoother.I also avoided combo devices like Printer/Scanner combos. I thought and still think those are dumb anyway because you know a printer isn’t going to last forever but a scanner will come close to it. Why throw that extra hardware out every time?The same went with pretty much every piece of hardware. Research then buy.Some would say that was a big drawback. It was but I think Widows had another drawback that was worse.I was a college kid at the time without a ton of money to spend. I remember Windows users heading out to the store or ordering their next printer/scanner combo from Dell every time Windows came out with a new version because there wouldn’t be driver support for the old, but still perfectly good one.Until recently Linux held onto drivers pretty much forever! Sadly.. this seems to be changing but not so bad it has obsoleted anything I still care about… yet.Soundcard? That was the one area I splurged in. My PC was also my stereo for sure. Awe64 for the win! And it worked great in Linux. Hell, I’d probably use that card today if I had an ISA port. I say as the TPM header ducks and hides in fear…. Or at least I would love to plug it in and do a comparison test between it and the cheap-stock-builtin but nearly 30 years newer built-in chip I am using now.GPU I never did get working in those days. But… that just meant I played fewer games, probably a good thing while in school. There certainly are ones that work now though.. just that is one area you do still have to do the research before you buy.",
"parent_id": "8134970",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135144",
"author": "elmesito",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T09:21:29",
"content": "Ironically my recent experience was that I had a PC without WIFI card, so I bought an expensive Intel so that it would just work in Linux. It didn’t even acknowledge the hardware’s existence. I then bought a cheap Chinese usb WIFI dongle and it worked immediately.",
"parent_id": "8134862",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135154",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T10:14:28",
"content": "Sure, because of HID device class for USB devices and the fact that these cheap chips are generally about 20 years old.It would be a surprise even for Linux if the responsible programmers hadn’t managed to write a driver in that large time frame.",
"parent_id": "8135144",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135153",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T10:11:34",
"content": "That comparison is like cheating, I think, because Linux as such is a walking network-stack.It even uses TCP/IP to talk to programs and Linux programs use it to communicate with each others.*nix platforms are generally being known for their intrnet protocol fetish, also.As a counter example, in the 90s, Linux had deep issues with NE2000 clone cards.It also had trouble with ISA bus based hardware, which were like 90% here.By comparison, Windows for Workgroups 3.11 had very good network card support for 90s hardware.It even featured auto-detection of network hardware, so that non-name hardware could be detected.About USB.. Linux had poor USB support in the 90s.It didn’t even had guaranteed USB keyboard/mouse support to begin with, which Win 95B had, for example.Thd PS/2 emulation provided by BIOS would normally solve this issue, but Linux didn’t support BIOS like normal operating systems do.",
"parent_id": "8134862",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135269",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T16:31:52",
"content": "Hmm… Both myself and my workplace at that time were slow adopters of USB. I’m not sure we had much USB hardware to deal with until the naughts.I’m a little surprised to hear you had NE2000 problems since that was usually considered the default.. but with Win3.11 I think you might be going a little farther back into the 90s than me. Oh the hours I spent nervously watching Win95 and Win98 try to autodetect the hardware though… will it find it… will it not….The local shop we went to had generic RTL-8139 cards always stocked on the shelf at about a tenth the price of everything else. So once we discovered those… fiddling with anything else wasn’t really a thing. They would change slightly every couple months though so we had to keep track of which disk went with which card for Windows. Linux did not care.I also did not experience that problem with ISA hardware you mentioned. Maybe that was before my time? The only thing I did experience about that was the period when ISA and PCI were mixed. That could be troublesome. Not so much because of the busses or the OS though but because PCI usually meant PnP and ISA was more likely to be manual or semi-PnP. Depending on the quality of the BIOS… that could get sticky. Not really an OS issue though.",
"parent_id": "8135153",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135321",
"author": "Antti",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T18:44:04",
"content": "If you ran a k6-2 socket 7 rig in 1999 getting the sound card to work was mission impossible. Same could be said for an isa based internal modem. Yeah, didnt get the 3d acceleration to work either on the voodo1 card i still had at that time. In a nut shell, getting linux to work was a PITA, and put me off linux forever. I can use linux, but those ugly little compability issues still raise their heads, especially with anything usb based. Windows is far from perfect, but at least most stuff is supported in that environment.",
"parent_id": "8134862",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135633",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T13:33:39",
"content": "I ran AMD back then too. I don’t remember if 1999 was K6-2 or K6-3. But anyway… as I remember it offbrand soundcards were a crap shoot back then. Anything Soundblaster… pretty much just worked. I had two soundcards in mine so I could play with amateur radio audio modes and still have sound at the same time.These days… I can’t remember the last time recognizing the sound “card/chip” was an issue.Modems… I bet you had a “win modem”. Those were common then. They were really just a sound chip with a telephone interface but didn’t identify to the OS as a soundcard. All the modulation happened in a proprietary driver. Eventually someone managed to reverse engineer that and make a driver that worked with many of them but by then dialup was losing popularity anyway.The opposite of a “win modem”, sometimes called a “hardware modem” was a piece of cake to install. It’s what all modems were before someone invented the cheaper to manufacture winmodem.A hardware modem was either an external modem that just plugged into a serial port which was probably already built into your motherboard by then and “just worked”. Or it was an ISA card that was actually just an ISA serial port plus the same chips as your external modem all on one PCB. It was no more difficult to set up than say a serial expansion board would be, just move the jumpers to deal with any IRQ or memory conflicts (not an OS specific task) and Linux would just find it and just work.Yah, those hardware modems were more expensive… So not being able to use a winmodem (or at least not as easily) was a disadvantage. But… winmodems did so much in their driver, they used the CPU to do that. And CPUs were a lot less powerful back then. Besides being easier to make work everything just ran better with a hardware modem regardless the OS.Yep… getting 3d accel to work was rare and difficult. If 3d gaming was your goal this was a real problem.",
"parent_id": "8135321",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135854",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T04:05:34",
"content": "It was mostly windows sound system cards that were the devilEven with windows 3x and 9x they sucked performance while little gainsOnce 98 came out and dos games were old they did better",
"parent_id": "8135633",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8138732",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-14T11:49:38",
"content": "Another problem with Linux drivers and Linux distros in general was that information of all age was all over the place.If you finally found what you had been looking for, it might been an instruction from years or decades ago.The obsolence of documentation is also something that made printed literature of Linux an impossible task.Linux distros made (unnecessary) changes over night, so that books became obsolete almost instantly.If you had managed to buy a book for Fancy Linux v1.5 but v2.0 was what you’ve ended up,then the whole OS might have looked different, have a different package manager, a differen X11 server (X11.org vs XFree86) and so on.That was bad for Linux beginners who tried to learn about Linux by buying a book.Why printed media? Because it was (is) most natural way of learning to those who’re already struggling with Linux (and Windows).Also, if you’re stuck at the CLI, err console, you can’t just use a browser to look up information.At least not way back in the 90s or early 2000s, when your main PC had been the internet “terminal”.",
"parent_id": "8134862",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134839",
"author": "Zeddy",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T16:26:23",
"content": "in 1999 I had an iMac and saw a LinuxPPC CD in Microcenter and was attracted to an alternative to Mac OS 9 (this was before the beta of OS X, but I was there along for the ride as well. I cannot tell you how many times I reformatted my drive and tried over and over again. I managed to get 8 bit color, things were messy, but I kept trudging along. Puppy Linux, Suse, Debian and eventually managed to learn to build with Gentoo. I mostly just tinkered and went until I ruined some config file and had to start over. Linux has come a long way. Now I pretty much have arch running well and that’s my tinkering machine, though I try much more to fix things before wiping. Plus having internet/AI to assist troubleshooting is a lot better now than IRC and forums with cantankerous RTFM users.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134845",
"author": "Lacey",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T16:39:43",
"content": "That was the same verison of SuSE that I bought! Loved it, but remember being very happey when I later upgraded to a 2.4 kernel that came with drivers enabling a smoother mouse cursor in X11. Bought BeOS R5 Pro around the time too, still have that, but not the copy of SuSE. Do have a later SuSE in the cupboard now after seeing it in a charity shop for next to nothing about ten years ago.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134860",
"author": "Noah",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T17:27:24",
"content": "The biggest problem with Linux is the Linux Community.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134866",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T17:42:12",
"content": "An its creator.",
"parent_id": "8134860",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134902",
"author": "Jon Mayo",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T19:45:46",
"content": "Windows gamers aren’t so great to deal with either. Especially if they are teen to twenty-something and male. (but isn’t that demographic often problematic, I know I was)",
"parent_id": "8134860",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135322",
"author": "Antti",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T18:44:29",
"content": "Amen to that.",
"parent_id": "8134860",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134863",
"author": "X-MarX-THX-SpXt",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T17:30:55",
"content": "So the typical normie stuff:“windows sucks, mac is for elitist schmucks, i’ll try linux, even if my brain has to blow up”“oh this is really neato, aside from this and that… but i can live with that annoying thingy. How often will it come up?”“i’ve been using Linux for 7 decades. I mean 3 months but it feels like 70 years have been lost from my lifetime. Nothing works, i have to bork everything, i barely know what is happening and worst of all, the shiny new program that i would need JUST came out on windows!”“Yeah, i’m on windows again…”This is how they get ya, dog, i’m tellin’ ya.Also: Yeah. Niche groups writing niche distros for niche scenarios is why we have 200 gazillion of them (which is not bad, just confusing). If there would be just ONE “NormIX” or “Kiddux” so that that my boomer mom or my genAlpha nephew could surf on facebook without calling mah a$$ over to give a 3 hour long tutorial for how to even open a f***ing browser in the OS (that they most definetly WILL forget within 5 minutes) because “it’s not like on my phone” or “I can’t see the windows thingy at the buttom, I think the system is broken :(“, that would be a present sent from heaven.Bonus points if it written in Rust, so all the nerds will glaze it even more.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134910",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:00:22",
"content": "Well, if my 84 year old dad (who is computer illiterate really) can get around KUbuntu and start the browser by clicking on an icon on the task bar … so can your mom. Just saying.",
"parent_id": "8134863",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135022",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T01:48:56",
"content": "haha you think an 84 year old is an unlikely candidate…i’ll raise you my 13 year old! it’s probably about the only desktop pc he’s ever seen and it runs some absolutely bare fvwm / X11 configuration. nothing to click on but i wrote down username, password, cd Minecraft, ./minecraft on a piece of paper and he self-taught himself how to launch firefox from the commandline too. he is absolutely allergic to learning anything more than he has to but he uses it fine. he would do anything for minecraft java edition",
"parent_id": "8134910",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136073",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T21:30:58",
"content": "Wait, you guys aren’t in your 80s? 😮Now my whole imaginary picture of you guys is obsolete.",
"parent_id": "8135022",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134924",
"author": "Chris Maple",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:22:46",
"content": "Put the linked browser icon on the desktop. Done.",
"parent_id": "8134863",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135271",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T16:34:08",
"content": "Why wouldn’t you just leave a shortcut to the browser on the Desktop? Whatever Desktop that might be. And if that still isn’t good enough how can any other OS help?",
"parent_id": "8134863",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136078",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T21:39:44",
"content": "Those nicknames for Linux distros are funny!Back in the day some people gave bad Linux distros nicknames such as “Kaputtus” and “Gehtnix” (doesn’twork-ix). Lol. Good times! Back then we could still laugh..",
"parent_id": "8134863",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134888",
"author": "r k",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T18:54:56",
"content": "I quit Microsoft in 2018, life’s too short to spend it neutering their latest updates and patches. I use Mint because its Debian and apt, with emphasis on users. You do have to make adjustments, but you laugh when remembering crash Tuesdays. Windows is just broken and does not work any more.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134981",
"author": "Denis",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T23:07:08",
"content": "Mints been the daily at home and work for aprx 12 years now.does absolutely everything I need it too, and feel nothing but frustration when I have to use a windows pc. Bonus points if it’s not been powered up in a few months so have to sit thro the updates before I can use it for the time sensitive job I’ve powered it up for.",
"parent_id": "8134888",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136072",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T21:27:41",
"content": "In my neighborhood it’s the old Windows users (boomers) who love Linux Mint.It’s the grandpa’s Linux, it seems. It attracts those who want to switch to Linux without wanting to use Linux.",
"parent_id": "8134981",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134895",
"author": "Matt",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T19:24:01",
"content": "You said 1999! If you’re talking about Desktop experience, you need to compare it to MacOS8.5/9 not Windows 95/98. MacOS beat the pants off Windows back then for desktop experience. Stability wise, I spent the first 2 hours of every Warcraft/StarCraft/Quake game night fixing my Windows Friend’s NIC/soundcard or reinstalling windows while someone else played on my Mac that just-worked. I am not saying you couldn’t crash it if you got crazy installing too many mods/extensions/extras. But if you were the typical computer nerd audience of Hackaday, then you certainly understood Mac OS extensions and had a rock solid system more stable than Windows/Apps which were architecturally superior and yet a mess on diverse hardware. Also back then, BeOS was cool, command line was the DOS way. To be even more contrary, I tried Redhat but I couldn’t get netatalk to install or work. Then I bought FreeBSD disc set, and loved how I could just choose it from the package manager and it worked. Sure some command line guys were nerdier than me, but this is about Desktop linux.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134901",
"author": "Jon Mayo",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T19:43:49",
"content": "I jumped from DOS to Linux, and avoided Windows 95 and 98. This was around late 1995 or early 1996, I still have my Slackware’96 CD set (I was downloading the floppy images from a BBS a few a day with my D/L quota).I eventually had to use NT and Win2K a bit for work, as that is the environment for the embedded toolchain we used.The year of the Linux desktop has been every year for me since about 11th grade in High School.With some dabbling in FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD at times (all great experiences).With a small exception that I was using MacOS 9 and MacOS X as my main laptop for travel for a number of years. And about a 50/50 split between OSX and Linux for me when it comes to graphical and gaming systems, but for access has always been one of the main servers I ran at home or in a data center. (much simpler for me to concurrently access data from multiple machines, run an always-connected IRC client on, etc)This, in a nutshell, is why moving away from Linux is something that I’m not seriously considering.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135286",
"author": "Dexter Meira",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T17:23:20",
"content": "Linux definitely isn’t for the lazy ones.After Windows messed with me for so long with all this updates that progressively makes it worse, I decided to go with Linux, and I must say, was a lot of work to get adapted, but now my main laptop, my desktop, my server and all the computers in my company runs on Debian for the last 8 years.The learning curve was radical (specially since I decided to abandon Windows for all), but now our drawings are all made in Inkscape or FreeCAD, our PCBs on KiCAD, instead of Office we use Libre office and so on… And guess what, after you get used to it, they work just as good (or better) as any software developed to Windows only.We make donations to the opensource developers instead of buying licenses now, and I feel proud that I managed to get what I aimed at the beginning.I can’t say we are totally free from Windows, as we must eventually program some PLCs or load parameters in some drives using manufacturer’s software that are Windows only… But for those I’ve Windows in a Virtualbox doing just fine.But that’s as I said, not for the lazy ones to give up being abused by a company that does everything possible to pinch another dollar from the pockets of it’s users in exchange for a crappy product.",
"parent_id": "8134901",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135723",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T19:03:40",
"content": "“Linux definitely isn’t for the lazy ones.”Neither for users with standards, either. :)",
"parent_id": "8135286",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134927",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:26:49",
"content": "i don’t happen to agree with any of the criticisms in this article, and i see eye-to-eye with many of the comments here. it really depends what you’re trying to accomplish. if you don’t like what linux offers, i don’t undertsand wanting to use it.but i have recently shuffled a few computers around and so i’ve installed linux on a bunch of oddball hardware lately and i just wanted to say how awesome everything is now! and how easy, particularly, it is to get to the bottom of any problem! and it’s mostly the same old tools, but now they’re fast! for example, if i am having a problem with some program, i do ‘apt-get source xxx’ at the drop of a hat these days, and all of my layers of network are so fast that it generally takes only a handful of seconds. i do ‘find . type f | xargs grep xxx’ just as eagerly, and i can search roughly a gigabyte of source per second. i can ‘make -j 8’ large projects in only a few minutes…i was recently iterating linux kernel version 2.4 builds, and even without -j, it only takes 3 minutes to build! wow!so yeah every new computer i set up, i run into problems. just like the first time i installed linux in december 1995, i still have to patch the kernel sometimes. but every problem is so shallow now it’s great.of course there’s massive bloated / layered systems out there that are still byzantine to work with, but for the kinds of things i’ve been doing every day for 30 years, it really feels like a panacea these days",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135157",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T10:29:20",
"content": "“i don’t happen to agree with any of the criticisms in this article”And I don’t happen to agree on any of the criticisms of the criticisms in this article.“if you don’t like what linux offers, i don’t undertsand wanting to use it.”Sounds like: If you aren’t okay with air pollution then just stop breathing.IMHO, it’s not a matter of liking Linux or not, but the lack of good remaining alternatives.Linux literally ended professional operating system market in the 90s.That “just use Linux” or “there’s Linux!” mentality caused other OSes to vanish.The Unix workstations died because of Linux, in great parts.Solaris, UnixWare, HPUX etc all got phased out because Linux being at zero cost and having millions of free volunteers.Seriously, have a look. Most of the alternative OSes that remain are from the times before Linux.Hobbyists keep them alive because of emotional bonds.Linux might be the savior to you, but in some ways it caused mass-extiction.And because of this, it and its authors have a certain responsibility to society now.Caring for the orphans of its former competitors, so to say.",
"parent_id": "8134927",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135221",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T14:32:20",
"content": "haha i appreciate a truly wild take!and really, you’re right in every count. but it’s an improvement in every way. linux is better in every single way than slowaris. wider hardware support, more development, more diversity of function, easier to debug, etc.the fact of the matter is that the closed model of OS kernel development was a dead end. it was always moribund. it relied on an unattainable market dominance in order to finance itself. every kernel’s life was tied to whatever fad in GUI frontend that the vendor ruined its reputation with. like there was a moment in time where sparc hardware was decently prolific and Sun responded by pushing CDE-Solaris on everyone, so all of that hardware overnight became unbearably slow. theybarelyoffered an upgrade at all, and what they did offer was enormously expensive compared to the blossoming of the early aughts. their whole boutique environment needed overwhelming market dominance orno single component of it could survive. sparc CPUs, sunos kernel, sunos userland, CDE, none of it survived the failure to offer a competitive product for a couple years.free as in beer is a necessary footnote but what really makes Linux win is the liberty to do what you want. so Maemo came and went, without costing Linux anything. KDE and Gnome and Android and ChromeOS allbenefit from eachother, something simply not possible if they all used closed kernels. it means each one of them can succeed without the weight of supporting a kernel on their own. if KDE had the burden of maintaining a custom kernel and a custom CPU, it would have gone the way of CDE.the most beautiful thing about it is that the authors don’t owe anything to anyone. anyone can pick up Linux and add / change whatever they want.i’ve got concerns about the future but the death of closed kernels is not one of them.",
"parent_id": "8135157",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135240",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T15:11:18",
"content": "Hi there, I’m glad it caused some amusement. 😄“i’ve got concerns about the future but the death of closed kernels is not one of them.”Neither me, but in general speaking..The problem I see here is the extreme here, always.It’s like democracy vs republik vs monarchy, for example.Or capitalism vs communism vs socialism.If one side totally “wins”, then there’s no competition anymore, no comparison happening anymore.Here in Germany we used to be split between West and East, always seeing the other political system.It was a conflict, sort of, but it also made people on both sides questioningtheir own system, because flaws became visible.Now that one side is gone, there’s no comparison happening anymore.Same thing could ve said about open source vs closed source.If open source is the lone winner, then what does that mean to the individual?If society assumed that software has to be free anytime, then what’s left for the individual?The independent work of a single author nolonger might be respected by others, others might make claims to it.Thus mistreading the “brain child” of an author.That’s the end of intellectual property, the end of valuing the mind of the individuality.Which in turn might de-value the individual as such.Just assume someone wrote a piece of software with a custom license that prohibits use in military applications.Such clauses were real in PD or Freeware of the 80s/90s!If GPL becomes lone standard, then an author no longer can make this clause.He or she might even be so depressed that he/she ends the own life if it was found out that the software (or its derivative) caused harm to living beings.If Open Source, OSF and GNU, GPL become anrequirementinstead of an option or recommendation, then religious sects and Fascism aren’t far away, either.That’s why I’m a bit critical torwalds Linux, also.It has a cult following, the community has members that could be compared to Christian missionars of 19th century.They promote Linux as the “only OS” (only god) there is.I mean, let’s think about it for a moment.How differs Linus from Steve, the “iGod” from Apple?He seem to be a good guy, maybe even means good, but could be become corrupted in the future, eventually? Like M?sk?I don’t know. Though either way the really bad guys never tell you they’re the bad ones.They do tell you contrary, that they’re one of you, that they help the poor and make everything great again.“Uncle Dolfie” did same in the 1930s.History is repeating itself, if people aren’t a bit cautious.An balance or tolerance is always good or healthy, thus.That’s why in a democracy even the bad guys must have rights.If they hadn’t, then the rights have no value to anyone.",
"parent_id": "8135221",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135335",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T19:23:15",
"content": "Or let’s put it this way:The market dominance and low price of Linux got rid of any competition.In economics, it’s as if a commercial competitor gives away its goods for a ridiculous low price (almost for free).This causes a big shift in the whole market, because it forces all other commercial competitors into banruptcy.In many countries, such a move is illegal and the goverment must intercept.Because it’s seen as an market manipulation with the lone goal to undercut the competition,rather than making regular business/trade.Because in reality, the lone surviving competitor would then hold a monopoly and make full use of it (raising prices to max).Please don’t get me wrong, I don’t like capitalism games.But this example gives an idea how things go wrong.In case of Linux, Linux doesn’t make money, but it’s gaining power.It defines things like microkernal vs monolith kernel.It defines which programming language rules the world (C++, now pushes Rust).Why could that possibly be bad? Because it might hinder progress.Developers, researchers of other OSes or design philosophies might not gain funding, because they can’t justify it anymore.Because “just use Linux!” ideology is everywhere.If Linux had been made 10 years earlier, then excellent OSes like QNX never had been written.Which raises the question what all could be possible now if Linux never had existed.Maybe BeOS would have gained more users?Or a modern AmigaOS with super efficient code and smooth-scrolling text consoles?I don’t know. But we’re at a turning point, maybe.Linux might becoming the new MS Windows, WSL is just the start.Linux as a behemoth of an OS, a new monopoly that rules anything.In short, it might become the “enemy” itself which it always tried to fight.Remember “you can choose any color as long as it’s black” ?It’s now “you are free to run any OS you wish, as long as it’s Linux”.",
"parent_id": "8135221",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135380",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T20:53:43",
"content": "i think there’s some merit to your social and political comparisons.the thing is, for every battle front, for every X vs Y, there’s an enormous field of commonality that everyone agrees on, supports, and assumes. but the contradiction between the two isn’t eliminated by the vast agreement. if anything, it seems heightened.like just one example, two companies that are competing fairly with eachother have already agreed on a common marketplace where they can sell their goods. so if they do a good job, they’ll have destroyed all of the alternatives to that marketplace, and yet within that marketplace you will still have two choices.a lot of times companies even agree to go further than using the same marketplace, they work with eachother to actively enrich that marketplace. for example, companies voluntarily joined USB-IF and now as a result we have one set of standard interfaces that almost everyone agrees on. and that does cause us to lose other interfaces, but there’s still enormous competition and diversity in USB-compatible devices.so i think the linux situation is like that. people agree on some common ground so that they can compete where their actual strengths are.when describing low-pricing, you posited that the intent to undercut the market is an important part of the effect. i agree that intent can have a big effect, but then we look at the real intent of linux. kernel developers mostly don’t have a dream of world domination. most of the bigger contributors are being paid by someone who has a plan to make money selling some product that either relies on linux or needs to sell to linux users. they don’t care about OS domination, they just want to sell that product. most of the drive-by contributors such as myself, people with bug fixes and patches for new variations on old hardware, are simply interested in being able to use linux.the kernel doesn’t force C on us at all. it’s intentionally designed to be a least common denominator that is easy to build whatever runtime you want on top of. people who work on or with other languages use linux too, and contribute to it.",
"parent_id": "8135335",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134930",
"author": "Dragan",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:31:48",
"content": "I see no realistic reason that stopped the author from using Linux as a desktop. As plenty of others have pointed out: we have been using Linux for 20+ years. As for Linux dominating as a desktop OS: who cares? We already have plenty of ignorant people jumping on the Ubuntu bandwagon and polluting the pool.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134953",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T21:43:50",
"content": "i can’t find in myself that uncharitable feeling about the newcomers…i don’t like ubuntu so i don’t use it. i do use debian, and i think to some extent debian and ubuntu benefit from eachother. i hate that debian has chosen systemd. perhaps i could blame that on the noobs. but instead i rejoice that it’s still perfectly easy to install sysvinit. i use devuan but even when i’m using some pidgin debian like dietpi or raspberry pi os, it hasn’t really been too difficult. i love how even if my patterns represent an ever shrinking minority by percentage, the absolute number of like-minded developers still seems to be huge enough to support an ecosystem i want to use",
"parent_id": "8134930",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134966",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T22:06:44",
"content": "Ubuntu is based on Debian. I use KUbuntu because it just works. I try not to get political about what distro I use (systemd vs scripts, etc. ). If I don’t like how a distro ‘works’ or becomes unstable, etc. I just move to another. Linux is Linux after all. Right now KUbuntu LTS does a marvelous job of keeping my systems stable, so I just use it. PI OS (Debian) works just fine on the RPIs too.",
"parent_id": "8134953",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135019",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T01:37:16",
"content": "man isn’t it great when something just works. i’m addicted to the ability to get to the bottom of problems but not having problems is a treat :)",
"parent_id": "8134966",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136093",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T23:12:12",
"content": "It is interesting you bring that up. See I am in the Energy Management System department in a power company. Available 24×7. So we have to jump in to solve problems in real-time — any time. Problem is… We have made the system so robust (because no one wants called out in middle of the night) that when a problem really does occur we are almost at a loss of how to fix it now! Catch-22.",
"parent_id": "8135019",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134932",
"author": "defdefred",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:41:46",
"content": "Not the same multivers here…Debian everywhere on all family computer for so long I can remember another timeline…And I like my Debian booting/auto-updating in text mode before starting anything else…Linux is home sweet home, stable, old computer friendly, etc…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134952",
"author": "Midnight Salmon",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T21:41:45",
"content": "Why do we need yet another article from a Windows user about how they’ll never switch to Linux because they tried it in the 90s and it wasn’t like Windows?Not being like Windows is part of the attraction. My main PC is a late-model laptop with hybrid graphics, all the flashy new stuff. I run Void on it with, yes, FVWM… and everything just works. It’s fast, it’s simple, and I understand every part of the system. If I find a part I don’t understand I read the manpage and then I understand it.Basically, skill issue.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135168",
"author": "elmesito",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T11:34:07",
"content": "Looks like you didn’t bother even reading the article. Sitting there with your finger in the ears and shouting la la la la whenever someone points out the flaws of linux doesn’t really help.People like you are what stops linux from being a true contender for the default desktop OS.",
"parent_id": "8134952",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135326",
"author": "Antti",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T18:51:39",
"content": "I have to disagree here, what stops linux being a true contender, in the desktop/laptop area is the small user base, when global user numbers are just 5%, thats a minute share of the pie and will never compete with win or mac OS´s unless something absolutely fantastic is created that absolutely needs linux to run on.",
"parent_id": "8135168",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8138736",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-14T12:12:49",
"content": "To be fair, I think that macOS isn’t really rivaling Linux. It’s another niche OS, in terms of numbers.macOS (aka Mac OS X) is a real Unix systemat heart, with a fancy GUI and its own design choices.It’s also attracting a different kind of users, I think.macOS users simply want something that doesn’t need servicing all the time and “just works” when needed.At least at home or at work. They may use other OSes for their hobbies, too.Windows and Linux users rather want to tinker with the system, upgrade and install extra hardware.That being said, there are technically inclined users, too.Radio amateurs who use Macs in the shack or those building Hackintoshs.Back in early 2000s, some users ranTiger for x86on ordinary PCs, for example.Thst being said, I think that diversity is good.Not having Windows desktops everywhere is surely good in terms of malware.But replacing that with Linux completely? Is that really good from a cyber security point of view?I mean, let’s think about it. The majority of web servers runs on Linux.Making the clients vulvernable to same malware that attacks the servers, is that good?Or wouldn’t it rather be good to have Windows desktops being replaced by different systems, such as Haiku, macOS or AROS?Or BSD (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD etc), Minix etc?I’m all open for alternative OSes, personally, as long as it’s not ending in a Linux monoculture.Installing Linux on the desktop as the “one and only” OS might be a bigger treat that Windows NT ever was.Because it unifies the platforms for the attackers.Writing malware for Linux might skyrock once it has a notiecable marketshare.That’s something to consider.Because until now, Linux had been used in protected environments most of time.In server farms, protected by hardware firewalls and uninterruptable power supplies (UPS).",
"parent_id": "8135326",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135004",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T00:49:44",
"content": "Just stop worrying about all that and install Mint.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135077",
"author": "joe",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T05:17:26",
"content": "Sad that the command line always seemed so daunting to so many. I remember learning about Linux when I was on Windows 3, Dos 6.?. I also remember then I finally formatted my hard drive removing any vestige of microsoft and installed slackware. I never looked back. I despised work forcing me to use windows and I hate my wife’s windows laptop that she needs for her work and play.I still enjoy linux to the fullest!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135323",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T18:49:27",
"content": "Because the command line on CP/M, DOS, MSX-DOS, TOS, AmigaDOS, Minix and OS/2+NT was more friendly, I think.It was humble, direct, with simple syntax.Linux uses super crude commands, many root folders and files and is case-sensitive.Even by Unix/POSIX standards it’s not very friendly.A commercial Unix like Solaris from early 90s wasn’t as convoluted yet.Many responses weren’t as cryptic, either. Certain error messages were written out etc.Also, there’s another difference.DOS world is about Assembler, Basic, Pascal and direct access (low level) to hardware (parallel port, AdLib FM port etc).About using disk editors and hex editors, about using software interrupts and BIOS.Linux world is about C++ (or Rust), open source and servers.About using protocols, permissions and high-level stuff..Raspberry Pi with Raspbian as a hardware-hacking platform really is an exception here, I think.Both platforms do attract two different kind of people, in short.Someone who grew up with, say, a C64 might like using DOS, but not Linux.Because the latter has a different philosophy.Both C64 and DOS do allow direct hardware hacking, lots of customization on binary level.Not sure how to put into words, sorry. 😅",
"parent_id": "8135077",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135327",
"author": "Antti",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T18:52:28",
"content": "Some of us went to GUI based OS after the c-64 and never looked back.",
"parent_id": "8135077",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135406",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T22:11:51",
"content": "GEOS from Berkeley Softworks on C64 was very impressive considering the hardware limitations. I understand it was much, much faster if you had the REU with a half megabyte of RAM so you didn’t have to keep going back to the floppy discs over that super slow interface.",
"parent_id": "8135327",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135730",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T19:25:31",
"content": "C64 critic here! Agreed, GEOS was indeed interesting.Also the C128 version with higher resolution.GEOS was ported to Apple II and C16/Plus4, too, I think.GEOS supported REUs (mapping capable) as well as GeoRAM modules and the “real” mouse with SID’s XY pins.There even was commercial software, such as fax software.Here’s and ad:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlftgJE7ns4On PC, there was PC GEOS in the 90s (not to be confused with GEM).GeoWorks Ensemble 1.2 was good for low-specced XTs,whereas GeoWorks Ensemble 2 and up were rewritten and good for Turbo XTs with EMS memory and normal ATs.The inclusion of DTP and word processing software made it a fine office bundle.Here, it was more complete than Windows 3.0 which it competed with.Sadly, it didn’t have third-party support.Windows 3.x had great development tools like Visual Basic, Pascal 7, Delphi, QuickC, Visual C++ etc.Today, PC GEOS still has fans. Especially in German speaking society.Templates and freeware software is available.The source code got GPLed, too.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(16-bit_operating_system)",
"parent_id": "8135406",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135078",
"author": "joe",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T05:18:58",
"content": "I forgot to mention, I run opensuse now. SuSE made admin duties at least as easy windows ever did.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135079",
"author": "Rob",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T05:20:53",
"content": "Ever since I worked on writing operating systems for mainframes with major vendors, I’ve been unimpressed by desktop operating systems. In the early days, desktops were secured by their physical location, and didn’t need to be multi-user, but then poor networking implementations and useful apps spoiled all that, and hacking became a threat rather than a sometimes necessary hobby.I wanted a system, with a base for secure networking built in at a kernel level, and secured by trusting physical hardware IDs, and a filesystem that allowed me to find and view data via any kinds of attributes, built-in or user-defined (think tags) without worrying about hierarchical structures that have no flexibility in the choice of importance of different attributes. Think relational database, or a pivoting multidimensional spreadsheet.Systems didn’t have the functionality I wanted, so I started to write my own desktop OS, using ideas inspired by parallel computing systems, and object oriented systems. But after getting a kernel that worked to a provable state with demo apps, I realised that hardware manufacturers weren’t as keen on standards as software writers, and to continue I would need to start a company to keep up, so instead I shelved my project.DOS and it’s successor Windows were always a horror to me. Unix and Linux and a whole host of other OS’s were too. They were all based solidly on backward compatibility with a load of cobbled together rubbish. Some universities (and companies) have produced OS’s that are much better conceptually, but have failed to commercialise them, due mainly to bad faith actions by larger companies.So I’m still waiting, and cursing the forced development choices of people earning money from large companies that aren’t interested in standards, or user requirements, but only in profits and the pursuit of monopolies.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135089",
"author": "Beavis Christ",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T06:06:55",
"content": "You haven’t HATED Windows enough to switch (or you are forced to use Windows for some reason).I hate-quit Windows about 5 years ago. It was either the laptop gets thrown through the window or me. I inherited an old laptop, installed Zorin OS. Used it in enough ways to break it and understand its faults (or maybe mine). Tried other distros, eventually settling on Solus.Look, ALL OS suck for general use/users (think, home use). Yes, all of them. If you dig deep and wide enough, you will understand this. I could write a book on this but, in broad strokes and in a nutshell (so spare me your pedantic keyboard FLAMES), the three “big ones” that most people think of for using as an OS – a Microsoft product, an Apple product, a Linux product – NONE were designed for what people are using them for in their daily lives. They are cobbled together, Rube Goldbergesque, turds; a result of decades of a dirty snowball rushing down a mountain at the speed of Moore’s Law and with the promises of a forked- tongued timeshare salesman.They are awful. All of them. (From a general use/users point of view). If they were cars, there would be riots, lawsuits, people with pitchforks, tar, feathers, etc. outside various places in Silicon Valley.Do I use Windows? As a last straw, yes. Maybe once a year. I may start booting up an old XP machine, air-gapped of course, to use an old app (“abandonware”), but that’s it.As far as the legendary “Year of Linux” ever coming… well, this comment is going to get political in just a few words from now (so don’t read any further if your feathers get ruffled easily):Government. There, I wrote it. Licensing, NDAs, corporations, intellectual property laws, copyright, lobbyists, etc…. the TECH STOCKS politicians are trading to make themselves filthy rich (it’s all public information). There won’t be a “Year of Linux” with those factors/influences. You’re up against a stacked deck with diabolical players and dealing from the bottom of the deck. Climbing backwards up Mt. Everest as a quad amputee would be easier. Wish I was joking.The Boomer Test: How to Know If Linux Is Ready for the MassesCan a smart, non-technical Boomer install it, use it, and never open a terminal? If they run into problems…No compiling.No forums full of contradictory advice.No permissions dance.No broken printers.No cryptic mount issues.No command-line arcana.If Linux can pass that test—with zero hand-holding—then maybe, just maybe, it’s finally ready for mainstream adoption.So, that’s my two cents. Keep up the Sisyphean task of cobbling together the crap that makes the software work, Linux developers of all sorts. It’s the OS that sucks the least, for me.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135206",
"author": "elmesito",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T14:01:23",
"content": "The Boomer test, those are wise words, that test does however cover a much larger audience.Those are things that other operating systems have done for decades now, apart from printers, those are still broken on any OS.Don’t get me started on printers, but you would think that in 2025 printing would be as straight forward as pushing a button and what you want comes out the printer, but that is still hit or miss.On another point there are governments (Yes, there are governments outside the US) that have migrated to Linux to lower their expenses. Germany and South Korea just to name a couple, but there are a few other.",
"parent_id": "8135089",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135223",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T14:36:21",
"content": "eh, no computer passes that test. grandson still has to set up windows for grandma, and then come back to fix it. if we didn’t have that experience we wouldn’t feel the way that we do.the computers that come closest are products that wrap unix kernels — apple and android and chromeos.",
"parent_id": "8135089",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135120",
"author": "Bob the builder",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T07:58:29",
"content": "I don’t know exactly how long I’ve been using Linux on the desktop but it was before the “y2k bug”.My workstation at work, my desktops at home, my gaming rig, all use Linux. This is why I don’t really understand the article.“one of the most off-putting elements of the Linux ecosystem is the completely bewildering explosion of distributions, desktop environments, window managers, package managers and ways of handling even basic tasks.”That’s one of the biggest reasons to stay on Linux. My biggest complaint about Windows is that it doesn’t have that. I really don’t like the Windows 8/10/11 interface, nor do I like the Gnome interface. I can survive on KDE but I prefer the i3 window manager. I have the choice and that’s great. Professionally I’ve used SuSe, RedHat, Debian, Ubuntu Server, Mageia, Mandrake, Mandriva, Alpine and many others, nevermind the Unix versions I used. In my personal life I prefer Arch or Gentoo. I have no problems switching between distributions as the basic system is still the same. The biggest difference is the package manager. And as long as it’s not RPM based, I’m happy. I don’t get why Windows after all these years doesn’t have a package manager that can install packages and keep your system up to date.“Rather than Linux distributions focusing on a specific group of users, they seem to be primarily about doing what the people in charge want.”Who makes the distributions? Right, the users who contribute. That’s why there are different ones for different people. For the curious there is Gentoo, for the lazy there is Arch, for the new users there is mint, etc.“and a host of minor and larger frustrations even before hitting big ticket items like service management flittering between SysV, Upstart, Systemd or having invented their own, even if possibly superior, alternatives like OpenRC in Alpine Linux.”I got to admit, I still like SysV over the rest. OpenRC (Gentoo) is also nice. SystemD is a bit of an annoyance but you can avoid it. You don’t have to use it. You have a choiceMy gaming PC used to run Windows (10) and it was a constant mess of problems. Rebooting my computer while playing an oline game, then when it reboots you have to find out if the computer still works. I’ve had to reinstall the computer several times. Keep in mind, this was a gaming only computer. No browsers, no whatever. Just Steam and games. Drivers kept removing itself because of updates, one update removed all files in my documents. Another update removed a bunch of things, including Steam, from my computer. Another update made me reinstall as the graphics driver broke my system. I do have a Windows (11) laptop at work, next to a Linux workstation. And oh boy do I hate it. It’s so frustrating. It’s a Core Ultra 7 laptop (165U) with 32GB DDR5 and a 2TB PCIe SSD, with Windows 11. It’s such an incredibly slow piece of junk. Everything takes forever, even booting up the laptop. It’s horrible.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135128",
"author": "Beavis Christ",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T08:26:25",
"content": "You haven’t HATED Windows enough to switch (or you are forced to use Windows for some reason).I hate-quit Windows about 5 years ago. It was either the laptop gets thrown through the window or me. I inherited an old laptop, installed Zorin OS. Used it in enough ways to break it and understand its faults (or maybe mine). Tried other distros, eventually settling on Solus.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136079",
"author": "J.W. Noord",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T21:40:44",
"content": "same here my friend! Been using Linux before it was Linux!! HAH! Actually had Sun Solaris running on a PC in the mid 90s. That said, I a few years ago, I had a windows update that literally blue screened permanently my computer. I said “SCREW it” and LINUX-ed as a Daily driver for almost 2 years, until I finally updated computers and got one that came with windows 11, so I used that now. When I get ticked off again, I’ll go back to Ubuntu.",
"parent_id": "8135128",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135132",
"author": "Davicious",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T08:40:07",
"content": "I would say that this article is out of place here, in Hackaday, where a lot of the matter is programming, use compilers, command line, microcontrollers and a lot of “difficult” items, “just for fun”.Irrelevant, but I’ve using Linux since 1996 (kernel 2.0.34, if I remember correctly) and, except for configuring X11 and the graphic card all those eons ago, I’ve never experienced important difficulties. Linux is my daily driver.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135158",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T10:37:04",
"content": "That’s an interesting point of view, because many PC repair technicans or admins do use a different OS at home than they do at work.When they come home, they don’t want to “be at work” again but relax and having something that just works.So it’s not too strange that if someone has to work Windows at work then uses BSD at home or Linux at work/macOS at home..",
"parent_id": "8135132",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136077",
"author": "J.W. Noord",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T21:37:07",
"content": "yeah right?? its way faster to install than windows, has more available free and free-ish software, runs faster, and has nearly everything windows has (and doens’t even have to reboot to do updates most of the time). PLUS you don’t have to fear Tuesdays updates.",
"parent_id": "8135132",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8137871",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-11T14:54:23",
"content": "Plus no binary compatibility, no common standard (ELF vs PE vs ?).Good luck running one of the few commercial, shrink-wrapped Linux games of the 2000s.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Game_PublishingTo run them, it needs a VM or emulator running a 25 year old Linux distribution.Which brings back all the joys of using Linux I’ve mentioned.Same goes for application written in Kylix.Kylix used to be a great Linux port of Borland Delphi.It failed, also in parts because no common binary compatibility between the distributions had emerged.The trouble with all the library dependencies added up to it.",
"parent_id": "8136077",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135196",
"author": "Joe G",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T13:24:32",
"content": "Dunno maybe I’m the outlier here, but when ubuntu came out in 2004 it was so polished compared to any Linux I’ve used before, I never went back to Windows. Paid off too because of the garbage state that Windows is in right now with TPM nonsense and subscription everything.I have both of my parents on Linux for years, they’re now in their 70s/80s. The software suite is flat out incredible. Libreoffice family is remarkable, web browsing, plenty of video editing options, KiCAD, FreeCAD, Liftoff FPV sim, countless others work with minimal issues.So grateful for all of the work developers have put into FOSS over the years.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8137874",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-11T15:00:34",
"content": "This is because a company took care of developing a Linux distribution.There had been other viable commercial Linux distributions before, such as Caldera OpenLinux.But they had to face criticism from open source fana, err, fans.If it was them, commercial software would have had never reached the Linux ecosystem.",
"parent_id": "8135196",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8137875",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-11T15:02:38",
"content": "Libre Office came from Open Office, which in turn originated from commercial Star Office.That once was a fine, small office suite in the 90s.",
"parent_id": "8135196",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135467",
"author": "Miroslav",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T03:13:40",
"content": "Year of Linux desktop since about 2008 for me.With all the spyware, AI slurping your data, weird background processes, stupidification of search functionality, idiotic GUI changes with every new version of Windows, I really can’t see how anyone is still not only using Windows, but being enthusiastic about it.Especially technical people. Incredible.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135547",
"author": "Tom",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T09:21:06",
"content": "” Joshua says:”Dude—- Have you even used Linux in the last 5 years????I am yet to find any hardware where it does not “just work”(and I buy refurb. junk)It must be a heavy burden to know everything about everything.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135740",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T19:37:31",
"content": "Lol. Most of my comments were about Linux experience in the 90s.I think I’ve mentioned the 90s reference most of time, too.Linux users back then were the socalled “basement-dwellers”, I think.The type of nerds/computer freaks who weren’t very socialized and who had plenty of time to loose (required to build/install/use Linux).That’s why Lunatics, err, Linux had gained traction, I think. ;)Ordinary users and professional users had better choices to choose from.BSD, Solaris and Unix System V, for example. Or DESQView/X, OS/2, DR-DOS 7. Or a Macintosh.The ones that “needed” Linux desperately were rather the types of users on the lower scale.But then, in the 2000s, being poor got socially being accepted and cool.That’s when Linux use skyrocketed, too. The long development time of Vista also allowed Linux to gain more ground, I think.",
"parent_id": "8135547",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136705",
"author": "Davicious",
"timestamp": "2025-06-09T06:39:16",
"content": "I believe your rant shows us who is the real “lunatic”, “basement-dweller”, “not very socialized” and “not very socially accepted” here: four ad hominem insults directed to its users in a technical site. Wow! That’s time well spent!As for your linux’ technical obsolecence, “flaws” and “design troubles” in the rest of your commetns, simply remember that linux runs your phone, your tv, a a lot of gadgets in your home -but not your computers, it seems-. If that’s is a failure…Now you can return to your Plan-9 cave trying to read and comment on Hackaday web using it…",
"parent_id": "8135740",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8137866",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-11T14:40:12",
"content": "It’s Android that runs on most mobile devices and appliances.And Android is a framework, comparable to Java VM or .NET framework.Linux is just used as a free set of cheap, badly written drivers and is interchangeable with any other OS.Minix 3 runs on most chipsets and is perhaps world’s most used Unix system ever.In embedded and automobile sector, QNX used to be a thing.Linux holds a big market share in web servers and super computers, though.",
"parent_id": "8136705",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8137881",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2025-06-11T15:26:24",
"content": "Android is based on a Linux kernel. Always has been.https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/kernel?hl=de",
"parent_id": "8137866",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8137867",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-11T14:43:19",
"content": "About the insults..That was the society of the day, these terms were in use.Please don’t shoot the messenger. Thank you.",
"parent_id": "8136705",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8137880",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2025-06-11T15:24:58",
"content": "I had a wife and kids in the late 1990s. I had no time for dicking around with Windows and its miriad problems. Installed Linux at home, used it, had no problems.Had Windows at work, and spent as much time whacking it with a clue-by-four as I did working with it – which is why I used Linux at home. No cluebat needed.",
"parent_id": "8135740",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8138015",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-11T21:19:28",
"content": "Windows NT 4 was quite stable at the time and far from being a kids’ toy.It was running at the reception in hotels, for example.It is what developers and AutoCAD users had used, too.Windows NT 4 was the predecessor of Windows 2000, which often is considered the best Windows NT release.OS/2 Warp 4 was also comparable capable.It had native applications such as StarOffice, I think.Both had OpenGL support and an ebhanced 2D API (Dive, DDraw).About being busy: There also were Macintoshs and clones at the time.Many Microsoft applications were also available on Mac OS of the time.Those who weren’t could be run via SoftWindows 98 or Virtual PC 4, 5 at the time.The experience wasn’t too shaby. Web browsing and work could be done on Mac OS side, which was less crashy than Windows 98.",
"parent_id": "8137880",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135745",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T19:53:54",
"content": "Seriously, though, as much as I enjoy making little fun of Linux there’s some truth in it.Linux has certain flaws that are apparent to users of “real” operating systems but not Linux fanboys.The monolithic kernel, for example. Or the use of systemd.Or inefficient memory-managment (memory leaks), lack of real-time capability, lack of internal NTFS support, use of unix time (IMHO).Lack of a proper audio system (has a mess of OSS, ALSA, PulseAudio, Pipewire, JACK).Or a real help system (man pages are a joke, MS-DOS help was better).Just some random stuff that comes to mind.In the past, Linux distros had horrible printer support and graphics cards ran in VESA VBE 3 mode (common in early 2000s).",
"parent_id": "8135547",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135796",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T23:36:44",
"content": "I forgot, modern concepts are found in Plan-9 and L4, for example.Linux by contrast had adopted among the worst aspects of Unix.It has (is) a fat monolithic kernel and has overhead issues with Task State Segments (TSS).The “everything is a file” mantra is somewhat outdated, too.It would be more intelligent to use memory-mapped “device names” by now instead, maybe.",
"parent_id": "8135745",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136076",
"author": "J.W. Noord",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T21:35:31",
"content": "WOW, when did you use Linux again?? maybe it was a old distro (like from the early 2000s??)",
"parent_id": "8135745",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8137862",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-11T14:34:04",
"content": "My replies are about the Linux “experience ” of old, mostly.Underlying design flaws are still there, of course. It would need a major rewrite to fix them.Anyway, I think it’s important to share these stories, so current generation won’t forget how, uh, “humble” the beginnings of Linux truely were.It wouldn’t be fair if the Linux story would end up being a rose-colored Disney fairy tale of a lone genius who wrote the greatest OS ever in an instant.A little bit of the Grimm Brothers’ flair wouldn’t hurt here, thus.Telling about the darker sides of Linux history, so to say.",
"parent_id": "8136076",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135957",
"author": "Tom",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T11:44:12",
"content": "“basement-dwellers”“users on the lower scale”Wow……Just wow.Sorry I didn’t have that silver spoon like you did.(and still don’t)And I “know” Linux from the 90’s, I was there. I started on a Apple2+ in 1980/81.I have been doing this “sh!t” for 45 years. Made a good living at it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136056",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T20:02:39",
"content": "Sorry about “basement-dwellers”!Online dictionaries provided this result when looking for “Kellerkinder” (German for cellar children).These are light skinned nerds with glasses, who have broken out in spots.They live down in the basement, below the basement stairs.They’re a bit like Gollum from Lord of the Rings, maybe.Strange creatures that won’t see the light of day, in short.Seriously, though. “Kellerkinder” and “Frickler” (fiddler/tinkerer, in neg. sense being a quack) were terms being associated with Linux freaks in late 90s/early 2000s.That’s when computer “freak” was a common term used throughout society. Even in the TV news.https://www.sprachnudel.de/woerterbuch/Kellerkind",
"parent_id": "8135957",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136809",
"author": "Pedro",
"timestamp": "2025-06-09T11:35:45",
"content": "Germany (actually Austria but whatever) and “cellar children” brings something much, much darker to mind than some nerds living the life of watching lolicon and playing video games.",
"parent_id": "8136056",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135960",
"author": "Tom",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T11:49:27",
"content": "If Linux is crap, why has M$ spent sooooo much money and time trying to kill it?????",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136075",
"author": "J.W. Noord",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T21:33:36",
"content": "yep. and they do. the windows 11 LINUX BS feature is a joke as is the app emulator.",
"parent_id": "8135960",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8137622",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-06-10T21:38:57",
"content": "Kill it? But, they also ‘use it’ … Even go as far as developing WSL for Windows and also use on their backend servers if I recall correctly (Azure?). My thought was the ‘hope’ of them ‘moving’ to Linux eventually with Windows becoming just a compatibility layer. They could still charge $$ to those that want support and for those that are used to paying them for the use of their OS as a yearly subscription.. You know give the Windows people the warm and fuzzies.",
"parent_id": "8135960",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8137856",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-11T14:20:52",
"content": "Good question, but perhaps more important is the question of why MS changed its mind.While MS originally called Linux a “cancer,” which is an apt analogy for uncontrolled growth and mutations, etc., MS now “endorses” Linux.There’s now WSL, which should more correctly be called LSW (there were OS/2 and Posix subsystemsforWindows NT).Another source on the internet described Linux as “the Windows 98 of Unixes.”That’s a pretty apt description, in my opinion.Linux is as user-friendly today as Windows 98 was in the late 90s.In short, it’s caught up with Windows 98. It’s almost a compliment.It’s also what Linux had to compete with in the late 90s, seriously.When I first used SuSe Linux, it had to beat Windows 98SE and failed.Windows 98SE was not only more user-friendly, but also more powerful and offered better software support.It ran smoothly on a Pentium 75, 24 MB of RAM, a Cirrus SVGA card, an SB16 sound card, and a 1.5 GB SCSI hard drive.Linux, on the other hand, was sluggish and unstable.It crashed violently when playing music through a WinAmp clone.",
"parent_id": "8135960",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8137884",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2025-06-11T15:29:58",
"content": "Exactly the opposite of my experience with Windows 98 and Linux.Windows was the one constantly crashing while Linux just kept right on trucking.",
"parent_id": "8137856",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8138018",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-11T21:32:39",
"content": "Possible. I’ve had used a similar Linux distri as shown in the article’s picture.And hardware support wasn’t great.At least not for the typical Windows 9x computer (Dell, Compaq, HP etc).If you had a server hardware with 64 or more MB and no USB, no or stable ACPI/APIC then the situation might have been different.Especially ACPI support in Linux was poor in practice.Why “in practice”? Because Windows 98SE had workarounds for early/buggy ACPI implementations (ACPI table?) that were around in the wild. It also supported APM BIOS.Linux by comparison wasn’t very flexible. It demanded for standards that did exist on paper only.I remember that “noapic” and “noacpi” kernel options had to be used often, to get Linux going.",
"parent_id": "8137884",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8136074",
"author": "J.W. Noord",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T21:32:52",
"content": "I used LINUX (Ubuntu 24) on my desktop for almost 2 years. Only switched back as my “new” computer has Windows 11! I made the switch as Windows literally locked up (during the windows update) after I had left the machine shut off for a couple weeks (literally) one summer when we were working a lot outside. The thing literally would not recover. I told my wife that “normal people” woudl have to take the thing to a computer shop to fix, or sometimes get another one. I said “screw it” and switched to Linux. I had a dual boot for a while. Only (THE ONLY) thing I couldn’t do was Visual Studio that was it, and I did need it for my job (I teach college). All my other things were fine, and I did my visual studio via dual boot or in a virtual box.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136942",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2025-06-09T16:08:23",
"content": "I thoroughly enjoyed the article and comments section.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8174789",
"author": "sanakhan7",
"timestamp": "2025-09-04T16:37:24",
"content": "This brought back so many memories! The ’90s really did feel magical with all the new tech, fun styles, and the Internet changing everything. Such a nostalgic and special time to grow up.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,527.058688
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/03/add-wood-grain-texture-to-3d-prints-with-a-model-of-a-log/
|
Add Wood Grain Texture To 3D Prints – With A Model Of A Log
|
Donald Papp
|
[
"3d Printer hacks",
"how-to"
] |
[
"3d printed",
"texture",
"wood grain"
] |
Adding textures is a great way to experiment with giving 3D prints a different look, and [PandaN] shows off
a method of adding a wood grain effect
in a way that’s easy to play around with. It involves using a 3D model of a log (complete with concentric tree rings) as a print modifier. The good news is that [PandaN] has already done the work of creating one, as well as showing how to use it.
The model of the stump — complete with concentric tree rings — acts as a modifier for the much-smaller printed object (in this case, a small plate).
In the slicer software one simply uses the log as a modifier for an object to be printed. When a 3D model is used as a modifier in this way, it means different print settings get applied everywhere the object to be printed and the modifier intersect one another.
In the case of this project, the modifier shifts the angle of the fill pattern wherever the models intersect. A fuzzy skin modifier is used as well, and the result is enough to give a wood grain appearance to the printed object. When printed with a wood filament (which is PLA mixed with wood particles), the result looks especially good.
We’ve seen a few different ways to add textures to 3D prints, including
using Blender to modify model surfaces
. Textures can enhance the look of a model, and are also
a good way to hide layer lines
.
In addition to the 3D models, [PandaN] provides a ready-to-go project for Bambu slicer with all the necessary settings already configured, so experimenting can be as simple as swapping the object to be printed with a new 3D model. Want to see that in action? Here’s
a separate video demonstrating exactly that
step-by-step, embedded below.
| 34
| 11
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134748",
"author": "Luddita",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T11:51:24",
"content": "I grew up in a Socialist country with terrible laminated furnitures with fake woodgrain. It will always look cheap, fake and sad for me.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134757",
"author": "JMGK",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T12:34:16",
"content": "I grew up in a Tropical country with real wood furnitures with real woodgrain. It will always look cheap, fake and sai for me, too.",
"parent_id": "8134748",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134763",
"author": "matt",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T12:47:32",
"content": "I grew up in a mining colony on Titan. I don’t know the difference.",
"parent_id": "8134757",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134764",
"author": "Mack",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T12:52:31",
"content": "I grew down, because I am a mole person. with my tiny eyes I don’t know the difference either.",
"parent_id": "8134763",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134772",
"author": "X-MarX-THX-SpXt",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T13:45:46",
"content": "Time progresses backwards to my eternal ass, so every entity rearranges itself from entropy and vanishes in the end, so i don’t CARE about the difference.",
"parent_id": "8134764",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135303",
"author": "Vince",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T18:13:04",
"content": "I grew up with real wood and cheap laminated, but I hot a 3D printer a year ago. I think this is cool as hell.",
"parent_id": "8134757",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134768",
"author": "macsimki",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T13:23:17",
"content": "“House! You were lucky to live in a house! We used to live in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, half the floor was missing, and we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of falling.”",
"parent_id": "8134748",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134788",
"author": "Bob the builder",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T14:19:37",
"content": "Eh, you were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in the corridor!",
"parent_id": "8134768",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135063",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T04:21:29",
"content": "What I would have given for a corridor! Where I grew up we couldn’t afford existence so we just floated in the void of non-reality.",
"parent_id": "8134788",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134769",
"author": "ItWasAllBrown",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T13:26:39",
"content": "I grew up in a Capitalist country with terrible laminated furnitures, plastic electronics, and even cars with fake woodgrain. It will always look cheap, fake and sad for me as well.",
"parent_id": "8134748",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134750",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T11:55:42",
"content": "Combine that with wood filament and use higher temperature for darker color, matching the print modifier patterns.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134874",
"author": "D",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T18:03:06",
"content": "At least on consumer printers, it takes a few seconds for the temperature of the hotend to change. This makes it kind of impractical to adjust it multiple times in one layer.This comes up occasionally because people repeatedly invent the idea of reducing hotend temperature for bridges, to reduce droop. But parking the hotend for 10 seconds before each bridge isn’t super practical.But if you have one of the rarae printer with dual hotends, it could be interesting to run them at 2 different temperatures for these purposes.",
"parent_id": "8134750",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135032",
"author": "walmart_newton",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T02:23:43",
"content": "Upcoming hotends with induction heating have very low thermal mass and fast temperature control",
"parent_id": "8134874",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135064",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T04:24:38",
"content": "You need active cooling. A quick blast of liquid nitrogen will drop the temp in a fraction of a second.",
"parent_id": "8134874",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134951",
"author": "rokhead",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T21:40:51",
"content": "That’s been around since 2012:https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:49276It is a good idea that many have built upon with varying degrees of success, but I think that the “roasted filament” method remains still firmly in the proof-of-concept arena.",
"parent_id": "8134750",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135087",
"author": "LR",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T06:00:42",
"content": "The mass of the hotend means it takes time to change temperature. Additionally, the toolpath of solid layers usually alternates print direction. Both of which will give you some weird recent history print artefacts.Introducing some mains hum onto the stepper driver power rails or relaying the controller PCB to add some ground loops will give you a realistic woodgrain effect that is generated randomly on the fly. Ask me how I know!",
"parent_id": "8134750",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134770",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T13:35:22",
"content": "It’s big! It’s heavy! It’s wood!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135059",
"author": "Mr Hoek",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T03:55:54",
"content": "Nice!",
"parent_id": "8134770",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134771",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T13:38:02",
"content": "for bonus points it doesnt even look all that good!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134773",
"author": "X-MarX-THX-SpXt",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T13:48:29",
"content": "Not even using “wood PLA”?Shame.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134776",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T13:58:57",
"content": "Why all the derision here?It’s a good idea and interesting implementation.Don’t be asses.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134807",
"author": "therafman",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T15:23:57",
"content": "+1 👍",
"parent_id": "8134776",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135014",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T01:10:28",
"content": "It looks great, it’s cleverly done, and they provide the source so you can do it too. What’s not to like?",
"parent_id": "8134776",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135280",
"author": "Cad the Mad",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T17:17:17",
"content": "This is Hack-A-Day, and comments come in three flavors:Should have used a 555/Arduino/ESP32/NAND gate/C/AssemblyAsian people bad, anything made by Asian people garbage, general racism against anyone east of Germany and west of Hawaii, excluding RussiansFinding vacuous criticisms to cover the fact that they’ve never built anything half as interesting in their lives, but definitely could if they wanted to and it’d be so much better trust me bro",
"parent_id": "8134776",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134777",
"author": "Sammie Gee",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T13:59:34",
"content": "… so how much would it take to learn basic carpentry and woodworking … compared to time spent figuring this out … somehow I suspect it is about the same … though, like with any hobby craft, woodworking in general is one of those skills you learn while doing, in a sense, you are thinking with your hands … reason being, if you never done woodworking at mildly complicated level, it does look impossible to figure out … you never know until you try.funny has it, woodworking is one of those nearly 100% sustainable things, not only because wood is grown everywhere, discarded wood chips/dust can be recombined into particle boards … I am not exactly sure which kind of discarded plastic can be recombined into more plastic, but I stand corrected if it does similarly to wood chips/dust.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134786",
"author": "HylianHerald",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T14:16:39",
"content": "If you mean less-than-middle-school-shop-class proficiency in woodworking, maybe the time investment is comparable. I think you’re severely overestimating the amount of work this took to figure out given the vast amount work that had already been done with the tools used. As someone lucky enough to do woodturning for my own projects for a living, that took way longer to get proficient at than it took to learn how to tweak modern 3D printer settings to get the effects I wanted. In both cases, the machine does most of the hard work.",
"parent_id": "8134777",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135021",
"author": "Sammie Gee",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T01:46:15",
"content": "After sine thinking through I agree with you – it is easier to model a fake plastic wood that at the end will turn out the pattern one wants AND the “pre-thinker” (the software that figures out STL out of a model) does most of the grunt work.",
"parent_id": "8134786",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134853",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T17:00:43",
"content": "Well, now that it’s been done once, you and I don’t need to take any time figuring this out.Not to mention that real wood could never hope to simulate fake plastic wood in the same way (this part of the comment is a troll).",
"parent_id": "8134777",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135287",
"author": "Cad the Mad",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T17:23:48",
"content": "I mean, PrusaSlicer is free and I already have a 3D printer I use daily and at all hours of the day because it is pretty close to silent.Doing things out of wood means buying wood, buying tools to work with said wood, and then having the space to use those tools and during a time of day when the noise of those tools would be tolerated.I had the good fortune of having a scrap of plywood out of the trash JUST the right size for my current project, and a router I got on sale from Harbor Freight, and a garage where I can use it. The reason it has been a week to go from CAD to two simple pieces of carved wood is because I first had to design and 3D print the guard plate because I can’t afford the brass ones, and I can only work on the project during a tiny portion of the day between when I work and when it is too late at night to run power tools around the neighbors.If I’d 3D printed those parts I would have had them done a week ago. I wanted wood grain to achieve a certain look so it has added a lot of extra time and effort to the project.",
"parent_id": "8134777",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134783",
"author": "garlicbready",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T14:07:29",
"content": "One idea might be to try wood pla filament, sand it down, then try applying wood stain afterwards to see what it looks like",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134842",
"author": "Loudifier",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T16:30:42",
"content": "In my experience the direction of the sanding has a much greater effect than the direction of the printing. Maybe the printed grain would show through if you used fine grit sandpaper and sand in the same direction as the grain, but sanding deep enough to eliminate layer lines and voids would take a lot of work",
"parent_id": "8134783",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134960",
"author": "Daniel Matthews",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T21:53:54",
"content": "Use a displacement map, bake it into the model, export to STL. Achieve any any fake surface you like.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134963",
"author": "Bryan",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T21:56:41",
"content": "Maker’s Muse did a video on how to use Voxelizer and IdeaMaker software to turn bitmaps into 3D textures. I used this to make some models on Printables, search for “HardiePanel”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135011",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T01:06:49",
"content": "Honestly a very interesting and elegant way to implement such a thing. Sampling a virtual bough of wood to cross-section and get the grain pattern. Why would it be any other way?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,526.122801
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/04/the-blackberry-keyboard-how-an-open-source-ecosystem-sprouts/
|
The Blackberry Keyboard: How An Open-Source Ecosystem Sprouts
|
Arya Voronova
|
[
"blackberry hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"handhelds hacks",
"Slider"
] |
[
"Beepy. BeepBerry",
"blackberry",
"community",
"hackers",
"keyboard",
"open hardware",
"q10",
"q20",
"Sharp Memory LCD",
"SQFMI"
] |
What could happen when you open-source a hardware project?
No, seriously. I hold a fair few radical opinions – one is that projects should be open-source to the highest extent possible. I’ve seen this make miracles happen, make hackerdom stronger, and nourish our communities. I think we should be publishing all the projects, even if incomplete, as much as your opsec allows. I would make ritual sacrifices if they resulted in more KiCad projects getting published, and some days I even believe that gently bullying people into open-sourcing their projects can be justified. My ideal universe is one where companies are unable to restrict schematics from people getting their hardware, no human should ever hold an electronics black box, by force if necessary.
Why such a strong bias? I’ve seen this world change for the better with each open-source project, and worse with closed-source ones, it’s pretty simple for me. Trust me here – let me tell you a story of how a couple reverse-engineering efforts and a series of open-source PCBs have grown a tree of an ecosystem.
A Chain Of Blackberry Hackers
A big part of this story has been
dutifully documented by [Michael]
on his
BBKB community website
– it’s a meticulous summary of devices in the BBKB ecosystem. You should click on it and check it out, it’s a labor of love, aimed at introducing newcomers to the Blackberry keyboard-adorned device ecosystem, with a degree of care for fellow hackers that’s worth appreciating. In this article, I am relying on [Michael]’s research and interviews, but also on my own experience and research of Blackberry keyboard device community.
As [Michael]
has found out,
it all started in 2015, with a reverse-engineered replacement part keyboard for a Blackberry Q10. [JoeN] on Eevblog forums reverse-engineered the pinout, then posted the pinout and code to Arduino forums – for sufficiently devoted hackers to create with. Three years later, [
WooDWorkeR
] on our own Hackaday.io picked up the work, reverse-engineered the backlight, and made an Arduino Nano proof-of-concept. Things heated up when Hackaday superfriend [arturo182] picked up the mantle in 2018 – starting off with a Q10 keyboard PMOD, then eventually reverse-engineering the touchpad-equipped Q20 keyboard, and as a culmination, building a standalone Q20 keyboard with a USB-C connection and a RP2040 controller.
If you’ve seen a few QWERTY handhelds, you’ve likely seen one that’s downstream of [arturo182]’s work. Recently, he’s been big on creating castellated stamps – his RP2350 stamps make for great prototyping devices, can heavily recommend. He’s got a hardware company thing going on, called SolderParty, with a good few innovative products like the
FlexyPins
I’ve covered before – I adore castellated modules, and I feel like he’s mastered the craft of doing them.
Also, have you seen
the Tanmatsu
, and in particular, its custom QWERTY keyboard? That keyboard is one of his design – as of recent, he’s got a side project of hacker-friendly keyboards going on, partly to replace the Q20s as they become more and more scarce on the new-old-stock market.
But back to the Blackberry: the Q20 keyboard really hit the news, going beyond the hacker world, if I were to guess, relying upon a fair bit of nostalgy for QWERTY handhelds. My personal belief is “the more screen, the less soul”, and when reading articles like the ones written about the Q20 keyboard, I can feel that in the air. I wasn’t the only one, for sure – looks like Eric Migicovsky, founder of Pebble,
felt it too.
My favourite theory of Blackberry keyboard device popularity. By
[masklayer]
Seen
the Playdate?
It’s a handheld games console with a cult following, equipped with a widely beloved Sharp Memory LCD. It’s reasonably easy to buy, with a decent 2.7″ diagonal, and it’s got whole 400×240 worth of resolution – nothing to write home about, but it very much is enough for a Linux terminal, and it can be comfortably driven a Pi Zero’s SPI interface, what’s with the whole “1 bit per pixel” thing keeping it reasonably low-bandwidth. You’re picking up what I’m putting down so far?
Beep Beep (Watch Out For Trademarks)
A few prototypes later, the SQFMI group
released
the Beepberry project, later known as
Beepy
. It had the essentials of a pocket computer – a Pi Zero, a Sharp LCD, a Q20 keyboard, an RP2040 tying its all together, a 2000 mAh cell and onboard battery management, plus, a few extra niceties like a side button and an RGB LED for notifications. What else? An integration with
the Beeper project,
a platform putting all your messaging service under a single roof. All files fully published on GitHub, including the KiCad files for the PCB. A Discord server with
open invites.
Minimum amount of software support. A rubberband and two pieces of double-sided tape keeping the battery, screen, and keyboard attached to the board. I think that was it?
First batch was merely 50 pieces. The pricing did raise my eyebrow – $80 for a PCBA ($10), Pi Zero 2 W ($10-15), Sharp screen ($20), a Blackberry keyboard ($10), and a 2000mAh cell, for a BOM total of around $50-60, all put together and presumably tested? That sure flies in the face of all “multiply BOM by three” advice. Nevertheless, more and more people started receiving their Beepberries, sharing pictures online, coming together on the Discord and other social media, and playing around with their new cool hardware. It got a good few reviews, too, including
a must-read review from our own [Tom Nardi]!
The project’s journey wasn’t seamless, of course, but the problems were few and far between. For instance, the Beepberry project became Beepy – because of Blackberry, legally speaking, raising an eyebrow at the naming decision; it’s the kind of legal situation we’ve seen happen with projects like
Notkia.
If you ever get such a letter, please don’t hold any hard feelings towards the company – after all, trademarks can legally be lost if the company doesn’t take action to defend them. From what I gather, BlackBerry’s demands were low, as it goes with such claims – the project was renamed to Beepy going forward, and that’s about it.
Unity Through Discord
People deride Discord servers as means of community building, and by now, I’ve heard it all. I get it. Sadly, these days, you’re going to either get on Discord, or be detached from a large chunk of the hacker community – and such a detachment is bad if you want to stay up to date with things. Dislike Discord as much as you want, and I can assure you that all the bad things about it are true, but that’s how the game is played. So, if you’re not on the Beepy Discord server and you like what Beepy stands for, you’re missing out – thankfully, there is a Matrix integration, too.
Beepy owners and fans alike joined the crowd. Each had something to contribute, with varying degrees of hardware and software competence, modulated by varying degrees of executive function, as it goes. Some people received their own Beepies, a few people got the KiCad project and ordered the files, and an unexpected amount of people breadboarded a Beepy! The barebones software support might’ve had deterred people, but at the same time, it became a community obstacle to overcome.
Starting from [arturo182]’s Linux driver work and someone else’s Linux drivers for the Sharp screen, a Linux experience started to grow. Initially, just the keyboard and touchpad were supported, but the support grew – both the RP2040 firmware and the Linux driver grew in functionality, changed names, picked up by one developer after another. Different people picked fonts to fit the screen’s low resolution, mapped extra keycodes to layers built upon the 40-something buttons of the Q20 keyboard and designed on-screen hints, worked on “sleep” modes (mostly implemented within the RP2040 by powering down the Pi Zero in particular), wrote like a dozen different helper scripts for the GPIO-exposed side button, and the apps, oh were there apps!
People Found Purposes
Beepy is no X server-carrying device, and you won’t be running even LXDE on the Pi Zero and the 400×240 mono screen. Under the sheets of a virtual terminal, however, there’s heaps to work with. Of course, Linux has plenty of commandline apps – most of them aimed at a 80×24 text screen resolution and not a character less, but many worked outright. SSH and email clients? Weather alert UIs? Beeper-compatible messengers? Music players? Games? ChatGPT interfaces? Pico8 and other game emulators? Doom? Of course people ran Doom. There were multiple attempts at lightweight GUIs with apps, too, not to foreshadow too much too early.
This and following pictures are by [TheMediocritist] on Beepy discord server
Beepy became a hacker’s pocket friend. Maybe not everything was great all the time. The hardware had its sometimes-board-killing flaws, the GPIOs were quite tricky to hack on because of their layout, and the hardware features were pretty barebones. Software achievements and releases were somewhat uncoordinated, too – Discord just isn’t great for discoverability; I can only tell you about all this because I went through two years worth of Discord server logs, and found a lot of cool stuff that people published only to be forgotten in the chat logs. If you ask me, this period of the community would’ve been turbocharged by a monthly Beepy newsletter, also published on on a blog so that outsiders could be linked to it, too.
The Beepy community has truly made Beepy grow into a veritable pocket device, pushing the limits of the Pi Zero, the screen, and the keyboard alike. By now, there’s assortments of software you can run, documentation websites, Debian repositories running on GitHub infrastructure, a few lightweight Buildroot-based distros, dozens of 3D printed cases, and never a shortage of people coming into the Discord server asking when Beepy will be available for sale again.
Just The Beep-ginning
It genuinely fascinates me how a chain of, spanning years, has come from “keyboard pinout” to “a mass-manufactured open-source board with a big community” – Q10 keyboard reverse-engineering on Eevblog forums led to wider adoption, which eventually led to Arturo’s Q20 board and its splash, and that in led to Beepy and its Discord server. Did it end here? Of course it didn’t – I did say ecosystem
s
, plural. Next week, you’re getting a continuation article about the Beepy derivatives, because the story is just starting here.
Enough about open-source – next article, you will hear about the phenomenon of closed-open-source, clones of high and low effort alike, and a pretty cool open-source Beepy successor. (Spoilers: I’m biased because I’m involved.) But for a start, we’ll talk about a mis-used Texas Instruments boost regulator, a mis-calculated resistor, and a few overlooked datasheet parameters.
| 43
| 8
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8135284",
"author": "dan farmer",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T17:23:03",
"content": "” I even believe bullying people into open-sourcing their projects can be justified”Anything can be justified, but that doesn’t make it right.According to the first hit on google (quoted from wikipedia) – “Bullying is the use of force, coercion, hurtful teasing, comments, or threats, in order to abuse, aggressively dominate, or intimidate one or more others. The behavior is often repeated and habitual.”It may be that you don’t mean the word in such a form, but it’s certainly a polarizing word, and others don’t necessarily share your zeal towards open source or your methods to accomplish your ends.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135320",
"author": "Arya Voronova",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T18:41:18",
"content": "I am definitely using “bullying” in its softer form here, which I admit might not be the best word for the situation – it’s not impossible that one’d have to be in similar social circles to vibe with the meaning =D I will see to changing it – I wouldn’t want a single word choice to be distracting. Think I’ll go with “lightly bullying”.",
"parent_id": "8135284",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135331",
"author": "sjm4306",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T19:03:04",
"content": "Given the context I think it was obvious you didn’t literally mean bully, but rather “strongly advocate/convince”. Anyway the important point is that more open source means more good in the world!",
"parent_id": "8135320",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135348",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T19:49:34",
"content": "watches Ukrainian drone fly by.",
"parent_id": "8135331",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135370",
"author": "Arya Voronova",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T20:28:48",
"content": "Well, no, not that kind of bullying. I’m not jaded enough about my persuasive capacity, not yet.",
"parent_id": "8135348",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135367",
"author": "Arya Voronova",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T20:26:25",
"content": "And the inverse is strongly true too – less open source means more bad in the world! We can see that quite clearly in areas like repair, medical device ownership, e-waste from all the proprietary tech like smartphones, outright spyware in things like modern TVs, and all the proprietary factors that thwart otherwise promising projects from becoming real. Plus, I’m not here to play with counterfactuals too much, but a hypothetical world where the Beepy was harder to design, to the point of even maybe never getting there, I do strongly believe that’s a less happy world on average.",
"parent_id": "8135331",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135424",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T22:59:36",
"content": "There is something to be said in favor of being able to sell and profit off the thing you’re making, such as software, so you can hire and pay people to make it according to your vision of it and not someone else’s.This contrasts with having to hope that other people would voluntarily share your ideas and commit to them, because you have no capacity to pull off any great work by yourself and no power to command others to do your bidding.It’s almost the same thing as how the accumulation of wealth in private hands is somewhat necessary, so the state/government wouldn’t be the only entity in the society that has enough resources to build and maintain anything bigger than a garden shed. The bigger the system, the more invisible and inconsequential your opinions and needs become.",
"parent_id": "8135367",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135431",
"author": "Arya Voronova",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T23:54:08",
"content": "Dude: you can absolutely sell and profit from open-source hardware, I don’t know who you’re even arguing against here, because it ain’t me. I’ve sold open-source hardware for years, so has arturo, so has SQFMI with Beepy and other products, Adafruit/Sparkfun/Pimoroni/etc, it’s what a giant chunk of the hardware scene does already. I’m not arguing for a “fed by air and high hopes” approach, open-source hardware doesn’t mean you can’t pull off great work or hold no power (how even?), and I’m struggling to see how the third paragraph applies to this article at all – got hints?In this article, I’m arguing in favor of a strongly emphasized and nigh-universally applied culture of giving back to the open-source hardware community that made basically everyone’s designs possible in the first place, if not as first-order then as second-order effect. In particular, I’m using the Beepy ecosystem as a case study – with every step of the way being open-source, and both Arturo and SQFMI boards being sold to the point of going out of stock forever due to factors mostly outside of their control. They aren’t exactly short of people willing to give them money.",
"parent_id": "8135367",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135510",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T06:14:35",
"content": "you can absolutely sell and profit from open-source hardwareNot really. I mean, you’re right in the sense that someone can sell it – but it’s going to be some copycat manufacturer who can sell below your price because they didn’t have to pay the R&D costs which you did, and you just gave them the design for free.See for example how Amazon is stealing popular products. If it’s not patented, copyrighted, or otherwise hard to copy without some special sauce only you have, someone’s going to make a knock-off and steal your sales.https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/amazon-copied-products-rigged-search-results-promote-its-own-brands-documents-2021-10-13/",
"parent_id": "8135367",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135514",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T06:36:17",
"content": "open-source hardware doesn’t mean you can’t pull off great work or hold no power (how even?)I didn’t mean great in quality, but quantity or scale, ambition. Your power extends to what you can personally manage, maybe a loyal friend or two, and beyond that it’s going to have to be money and legal control of your IP or else you’ll lose the product to other opinions and other people who will inevitably take your ball and run with it in other directions.That effect makes open source products both software and hardware – beyond a certain level – always “designs by committee” because they have to involve a community with no clear leadership, that actively resists such leadership and splits the moment anyone tries to assert their vision. They’re not going to be great products if they get off the ground at all, let alone survive the market.",
"parent_id": "8135367",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135527",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T07:20:22",
"content": "Adafruit/Sparkfun/Pimoroni/etc, it’s what a giant chunk of the hardware scene does already.What does Adafruit actually sell? They’re selling components and modules they’ve contract manufactured elsewhere or simply bought off the market and added a premium on top for the branding. The stuff they sell are largely copies of designs by other people. I mean, how much personal input do you need to put a datasheet reference circuit on a breakout board and send it off to a fab in China?Do those original designers who open-sourced their designs get a penny out of it?Doubtful. That’s the model: someone works for free and you do the business with it – just like how Amazon copies products from its own sellers – except when it’s open source that’s kinda the whole point.If you as a designer have a vision and a target demographic in mind, and then wish to make yourself a living out of your product and work, how do you pull that off with open source, if the point is that you design it and then other people make the money because you are voluntarily relinquishing control of the product?",
"parent_id": "8135367",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135794",
"author": "Arya Voronova",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T23:30:14",
"content": "Dude:??? Your first message is straight up contradicted just by the example outlined in the article alone, as well as examples I provided in the post above – try to avoid that, please, for your own sake, all this typing went to waste. Amazon’s copying example is also very unrelated. I know well about it, and if you read the article, you can clearly see that the copying wasn’t related to any sort of open-source hardware questions – only by the product’s popularity.Your second message is, uhhh, what? What kind of situation are you even talking about here? Again, the examples in the article contradict the overwhelming majority of the assertions you make, half of them very explicitly so, and your lengthy description of “this is how things go” reads like a pretty wild story I can’t even begin to recall any real-world resemblances to. Do you actually have any cases that match your description, or? Did you read the article? Why not engage with what I wrote – instead of laying out a wholly unsupported opposite viewpoint and for some reason expecting it to be engaged with, disregarding everything written before?Third message is also fun, in a sense that it’s wildly off-base to the point of being deeply puzzling. You’re asking “what does Adafruit sell”, and then you’re describing what you think they sell, and even if that description were true, it wouldn’t actually back the point you’re making. Is it against open hardware principles to subcontract a design from someone then open-source it? Or publish a board that is based on the datasheet schematic? That does not follow in the slightest. Not to mention that Adafruit does in-house design, too, and that from my experience. their circuits are visibly different from both datasheet implementation and alternative products developed before/after, they’re pretty well known for choosing their own path when it comes to the design direction and details. Next paragraph – did those original designers intend to manufacture and sell the product? If so, literally nothing is stopping them, quite evidently from the article’s examples, and supported by my own experiences, as I’ve already stated. If there was no intention to sell in the first place – is the hacker community better off because someone is selling a design that wouldn’t otherwise get sold? Yes, most certainly. What are you even talking about? Did you think these examples through? “how do you pull that off with open source” literally in the way I describe in the article and have also described in the post you’re replying to?Are you asking an LLM for these examples and points? That’d track. Either way, even if you wrote it all yourself (quite an achievement), this text is LLM grade in terms of both coherence and veracity of the claims you make (with zero support whatsoever? what?). Please avoid that in the future, that’s honestly just sad, and also wasteful for everyone involved.",
"parent_id": "8135367",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135487",
"author": "brutek",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T04:55:59",
"content": "I believe the proper word to use here is “cajoling.” English words are vanishing in use.",
"parent_id": "8135284",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135968",
"author": "internet points for that commenter!",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T12:55:55",
"content": "+1. Very neat answer. Solves all the problems. Probably most accurately reflects the author’s sentiment.",
"parent_id": "8135487",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135290",
"author": "Cad the Mad",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T17:31:19",
"content": "Every project I build I dream of it having a story like this. I can’t imagine a higher goal to aspire to for any technology project than to have a community crystalize around it.More to the point, I want one in a Gameboy Advance SP shell.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135350",
"author": "Lthr",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T19:51:47",
"content": "I planned to learn kicad for this reason (and to improve my diy spaghetti looking projects).",
"parent_id": "8135290",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135414",
"author": "Arya Voronova",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T22:32:07",
"content": "100% worth it! Can recommend you go through “Getting to Blinky” on YouTube – it’s a pretty fast hands-on tutorial video, and it does prepare you well for KiCad basics.",
"parent_id": "8135350",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135541",
"author": "Alphatek",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T08:50:33",
"content": "KiCad is the easy bit. FreeCad, on the other hand…",
"parent_id": "8135350",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135597",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T12:56:18",
"content": "I don’t know about FreeCAD, but I’ve spent some time with OpenSCAD and that has turned out to be very useable (as someone who naturally resonates with computer programming).",
"parent_id": "8135541",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135798",
"author": "Arya Voronova",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T23:40:26",
"content": "OpenSCAD is wonderful too! Afaict they have different niches – OpenSCAD is good for things you can +- straightforwardly describe in math terms, and FreeCAD is good for, well, everything else plus much of what people sometimes use OpenSCAD for. I’d design a gear in OpenSCAD (had to do that, it’s been a good experience), but a for a 3D printed project case, I’d reach for FreeCAD for sure.",
"parent_id": "8135597",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135770",
"author": "Garrut",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T21:41:03",
"content": "Have you give it a shot recently? I’ve miss the latest version, and gave it a shot few month ago, and had been surprised. It’s now able to have some work done in a acceptable time ( traduction : to me and what I do with cad software, It’s enough good to replace solidworks ) .. first benefic aspect : goodbye windows …. I think i have to invest all the time wasted fighting windows in learning freecad for a period, but it’s seems a good deal",
"parent_id": "8135541",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135795",
"author": "Arya Voronova",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T23:36:21",
"content": "Yeah FreeCAD has become more and more of a joy to work with, over the last year-two, but especially so since v1.0! I’ve been meaning to write an article about that one, hopefully, can do that soon. Got quite a few FreeCAD designs going on now, some of them quite complex, and by now, pretty sure I found the open-source CAD I’ve been looking for. I also started off with Solidworks, and honestly, these days I can’t imagine myself ever opening it ever again.",
"parent_id": "8135770",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135955",
"author": "Garrut",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T11:25:18",
"content": "Freecad gave back “v1.0” the real signification of v1.0 : a useable software with all basics functions needed and expected (and some more).Not perfect but seems to me a good “v1.0” release",
"parent_id": "8135770",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135969",
"author": "No low-ball offers: I know what I have.",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T12:59:46",
"content": "Please forgive me, this mention of gameboy and spaghetti reminded me of the apophrycal GameBoy Advance, Full of Beans meme:https://imageproxy.ifunny.co/crop:x-20,resize:640x,quality:90×75/images/1811277d652ac6968c67028fa6d5e7239ef7786155c4a57c091e7d17ed9315b4_1.jpg",
"parent_id": "8135350",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135413",
"author": "Arya Voronova",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T22:30:24",
"content": "Build enough cool stuff, and you’re basically bound to end up with a story or two like this! Every one of us stands on shoulders of giants in that way, and you too could be one of the giants one day. Also, the Beepy could very well fit into a SP case like that! I’ve worked with the design extensively, and it’d be very doable – especially if you extend the lower part of the case to get higher battery capacity. (also, it feels like there’s other Pi Zero-based designs I’ve seen in a foldable form-factor?)",
"parent_id": "8135290",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135295",
"author": "arturo182",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T17:45:40",
"content": "Thanks for the mention! I’m definitely not done with small keyboards just yet, I just need a bit more time 😁",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135410",
"author": "Arya Voronova",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T22:20:28",
"content": "hell yeah can’t wait! and hope we can contribute soon enough, too ^^",
"parent_id": "8135295",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135600",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T12:59:28",
"content": "Thanks for the boards! I have a keyboard featherwing on my desk next to me right now with a cobbled together pico adapter.",
"parent_id": "8135295",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135310",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T18:24:31",
"content": "Nice article. Interesting read.I would make ritual sacrifices if they resulted in more KiCad projects getting published,“Science by Hubert J. Farnsworth”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tVuxZCwXosMore like “scionce”.:-)I think we should be publishing all the projects, even if incomplete, as much as your OPSEC(!) allows. …. My ideal universe is one where companies are unable to restrict schematics from people getting their hardware, no human should ever hold an electronics black box, by force if necessary.VS.People deride Discord servers as means of community building, and by now, I’ve heard it all. I get it. Sadly, these days, you’re going to either get on Discord, or be detached from a large chunk of the hacker community – and such a detachment is bad if you want to stay up to date with things. Dislike Discord as much as you want, and I can assure you that all the bad things about it are true, but that’s how the game is played. So, if you’re not on the Beepy Discord server and you like what Beepy stands for, you’re missing outHave you heard the phrase “DOES NOT COMPUTE!”How can you be so far open source to even contemplate bullying people but kinda defend Discord in the same article?Yes, from a technical standpoint Discord is great but they seem to be in some kind of inter-quantum state where one part says they are GDPR compliant while blatantly violating some of the GDPR’s core principles.(They are collecting and storing far more data than required to run the service and basically give themselves the rights to do whatever they want with it (at any (later) point in time)).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135405",
"author": "Arya Voronova",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T22:11:41",
"content": "Thank you! That’s a fun video, yet another reminder I ought to watch Futurama ^_^I address your concerns by “I can assure you that all the bad things about it are true”. This one is also true. Also, off the top of my head, Discord has banned people, in particular, disabled people, for using alternative clients – despite their client not being sufficiently accessible, not being sufficiently equipped to protect vulnerable users against stalking, and a service that people rely a lot on. They have big problems with rampant child abuse and scam proliferation, they look down on network bridges despite being “pro-community”, an accidental channel deletion isn’t reversible in the slightest, and if you lose access to your 2FA, your account is gone, as in, GONE-GONE. Do NOT lose your 2FA with Discord. I could go on for longer. Discord isn’t even that great from a technical standpoint! It sucks a whole lot!If I may, I ask you to compare using Discord to using a cellular data service. Those also suck in a myriad of ways – commercialization of infrastructure resulting in an actively hostile experience, obsolescence caused by events like the switch to VoLTE, bad/compromised encryption and easy deanonymization, strong lack of open-source modems, and hackers’ inability to build cool derivative tech as a result. At the same time, cellular data services are indispensable for what it provides. Of course, you could rely on a volunteer-run mesh network for your data-on-the-go needs… but you will indeed quickly hit the same problem, network effects, and with the side effect of the technology being inferior.",
"parent_id": "8135310",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135542",
"author": "Alphatek",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T08:53:39",
"content": "Sigh. Magic words. Needed to be reverse engineered and ‘more and more scarce’. Off to Ali we go…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135799",
"author": "Arya Voronova",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T23:48:26",
"content": "There’s some on Ali still, just, nowhere near as much and nowhere near as cheap as they used to be. Hoping that Arturo’s new keyboard designs are to come very very soon, though!",
"parent_id": "8135542",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135582",
"author": "Josephus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T12:18:13",
"content": "I reject the notion that there is legitimate application of coercion beyond correcting theft and murder (with injuries to property and person as subcategories thereof), as proposed by the ‘by force if necessary’ statement. If it can’t be done voluntarily, is it worth doing?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135614",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T13:16:43",
"content": "Well that seems naive. We force people and companies to do things either for the greater good, or at least for a reduction of harm, all the time. We’re verging on a corporate dystopia now, and that’s already with significant restrictions on what they can do. Companies are now broadly weaselling their way into retaining ownership of the things they’re selling, that’s so against the interests of people in general that force must be brought in this matter.I don’t want to live in the Dough Based Sate of Papa John.",
"parent_id": "8135582",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135720",
"author": "Arya Voronova",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T18:42:24",
"content": "That’s quite a bold move, relinquishing one of your strongest powers as an individual, and in an age of unprecedented concentrations of power at the top, no less! Ig it’s fine, you do you? Individual freedoms and all. As long as nobody depends on you for their well-being, of course.",
"parent_id": "8135582",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135922",
"author": "Josephus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T08:28:06",
"content": "What legitimises coercion then? And how do we correct evil without spawning an endless chain of further evils? Better to strip back the systems of law that cause endless coercion in service of things which are not matters of justice",
"parent_id": "8135720",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136042",
"author": "Arya Voronova",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T19:07:27",
"content": "Sorry, but I’m not interested in this discussion, I genuinely didn’t wake up today hoping to argue with a libertarian online",
"parent_id": "8135922",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136212",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T13:03:04",
"content": "This is the modern age. Sick an AI agent onto them. You sleep in, while the agent argues on your behalf (bringing a library, to a dictionary fight). Every moderators best dream. Double if it can make breakfast.",
"parent_id": "8136042",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136674",
"author": "Arya Voronova",
"timestamp": "2025-06-09T04:58:46",
"content": "tbqh I wouldn’t subject an AI agent to suffering of that degree, either",
"parent_id": "8136042",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8136208",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T12:45:59",
"content": "I’m with you that I’d love to see more Open Hardware projects.I’ve really been craving a group to come together and make a full system of modular setups that could be slapped into other projects to make it quicker, easier and get better quality boards out.For example, it’d be nice to see a set of power supplies (as in the ones that go on the board to feed components from the main power), with them all set up routed out and optimal components picked. Then the modules could either be copied onto the board and used directly or they could make pre-fab castellated and through-hole boards that could be slapped onto a board as a separate module.Extend that out for I/O, like little USB boards that can handle all the USB-C things you need while letting you feed data or video out easily, etc, etc.It’d be nice to see a point where a newer creator can come in with a project idea, take a few easy to pick out modules to give their board access to all the features they want then slap them on a board and get to work.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136580",
"author": "RoganDawes",
"timestamp": "2025-06-08T18:44:46",
"content": "Talking about Blackberry’s, I bought the shell of a Q5 (including display, touch screen, casing, antennas, and the “buttons” of a keyboard, but not the electrical parts) for a ludicrously low price, in the hope of making a replacement PCB to drive it all.The thought is to use an ESP32-P4 due to the MIPI-DSI hardware, which should be able to drive the screen, SPI to talk to an SX1262 chip, the low power CPU to extend teh battery life as long as possible, etc, etc. I’ve just seen a P4 “developers” board on CNX-Software which should be perfect as a prototyping board. Probably the hardest part will be getting the screen initialised, I fear!Since this is a very tentative step in learning how to Kicad, etc, I’d welcome anyone who wants to make this journey with me :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136676",
"author": "Arya Voronova",
"timestamp": "2025-06-09T05:00:38",
"content": "Oh that’s a wonderful idea! Want to pop intoHaD Discordand show off your plans to people? The screen could very well be just sniffable enough if it’s MIPI – we’ve shown some MIPI sniffing primers before.",
"parent_id": "8136580",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8139611",
"author": "RoganDawes",
"timestamp": "2025-06-17T14:18:51",
"content": "Hey Arya, seems like I missed this message, and the invitation is now expired. I am also unable to find any other links to the secret HaD Discord server :-( Any chance of an updated link, please? If possible to my email address :-) Thank you.",
"parent_id": "8136676",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,525.878302
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/04/a-vintage-scope-comes-back-to-life/
|
A Vintage ‘Scope Comes Back To Life
|
Jenny List
|
[
"classic hacks",
"Teardown"
] |
[
"aeg",
"oscilloscope",
"tubes"
] |
We’re suckers for a vintage electronic teardown here at Hackaday, and thus it’s pleasing to see
[Thomas Scherrer OZ2CPU] with a 1962 AEG oscilloscope on his bench
. It’s definitely seen better days, and is a single-trace 10 MHz unit of the type you might have seen in a typical general purpose electronics lab back in the day.
Pulling the cover off, and as expected there’s a row of tubes each side of the centrally mounted CRT. No printed circuits in sight, and no transistors either, though the rectifiers are selenium parts. After a clean-up it’s time to look at the tubes, and they show the metallic deposits characteristic of long operation. We’re more used to that from older televisions than test equipment,
Gently bringing the power up it looks promising, but there’s a purple glow from one of the PCL82 triode-pentodes. Replacing that and a double-triode results in a ‘scope that surprisingly, is working. It was evidently a high quality device in the first place, with components capable of lasting for over six decades.
We’ve seen more from his bench involving tubes, including this device
using a magic-eye tube as the heavy lifter
.
| 3
| 2
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8135477",
"author": "Isaac Wingfield",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T03:46:04",
"content": "“metallic deposits characteristic of long operation” – more likely the barium “getter”that was vaporized as part of the manufacturing process.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136470",
"author": "Thomas Scherrer Tangen",
"timestamp": "2025-06-08T10:38:33",
"content": "you can see both at the same time, in very old much used tubes, also the location is different, The Getter is on the top, in the tubes i show, and shine is different too, i got a bit over 1000 tubes stocked for my repairs, and nos tubes dont have the metalic deposit from long opperation. Thanks a lot for watching, and thanks for comment, and also a big thank to Hackaday",
"parent_id": "8135477",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8136666",
"author": "n3hat",
"timestamp": "2025-06-09T04:39:55",
"content": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getter",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,526.047077
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/04/high-stakes-fox-hunting-the-fccs-radio-intelligence-division-in-world-war-ii/
|
High-Stakes Fox Hunting: The FCC’s Radio Intelligence Division In World War II
|
Dan Maloney
|
[
"Featured",
"History",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Wireless Hacks"
] |
[
"counterespionage",
"espionage",
"goniometer",
"history",
"radio intelligence division",
"RDF",
"RID",
"spy",
"spy radio",
"wwii"
] |
With few exceptions, amateur radio is a notably sedentary pursuit. Yes, some hams will set up in a national or state park for a “Parks on the Air” activation, and particularly energetic operators may climb a mountain for “Summits on the Air,” but most hams spend a lot of time firmly planted in a comfortable chair, spinning the dials in search of distant signals or familiar callsigns to add to their logbook.
There’s another exception to the band-surfing tendencies of hams: fox hunting. Generally undertaken at a field day event, fox hunts pit hams against each other in a search for a small hidden transmitter, using directional antennas and portable receivers to zero in on often faint signals. It’s all in good fun, but fox hunts serve a more serious purpose: they train hams in the finer points of radio direction finding, a skill that can be used to track down everything from manmade noise sources to unlicensed operators. Or, as was done in the 1940s, to ferret out foreign agents using shortwave radio to transmit intelligence overseas.
That was the primary mission of the Radio Intelligence Division, a rapidly assembled organization tasked with protecting the United States by monitoring the airwaves and searching for spies. The RID proved to be remarkably effective during the war years, in part because it drew heavily from the amateur radio community to populate its many field stations, but also because it brought an engineering mindset to the problem of finding needles in a radio haystack.
Winds of War
America’s involvement in World War II was similar to Hemingway’s description of the process of going bankrupt: Gradually, then suddenly. Reeling from the effects of the Great Depression, the United States had little interest in European affairs and no appetite for intervention in what increasingly appeared to be a brewing military conflict. This isolationist attitude persisted through the 1930s, surviving even the recognized start of hostilities with Hitler’s sweep into Poland in 1939, at least for the general public.
But behind the scenes, long before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, precipitous changes were afoot. War in Europe was clearly destined from the outset to engulf the world, and in the 1940s there was only one technology with a truly global reach: radio. The ether would soon be abuzz with signals directing troop movements, coordinating maritime activities, or, most concerningly, agents using
spy radios
to transmit vital intelligence to foreign governments. To be deaf to such signals would be an unacceptable risk to any nation that fancied itself a world power, even if it hadn’t yet taken a side in the conflict.
It was in that context that US President Franklin Roosevelt approved an emergency request from the Federal Communications Commission in 1940 for $1.6 million to fund a National Defense Operations section. The group would be part of the engineering department within the FCC and was tasked with detecting and eliminating any illegal transmissions originating from within the country. This was aided by an order in June of that year which prohibited the 51,000 US amateur radio operators from making any international contacts, and an order four months later for hams to submit to fingerprinting and proof of citizenship.
A Ham’s Ham
George Sterling (W1AE/W3DF). FCC commissioner in 1940, he organized and guided RID during the war. Source:
National Assoc. of Broadcasters
, 1948
The man behind the formation of the NDO was George Sterling. To call Sterling an early adopter of amateur radio would be an understatement. He plunged into radio as a hobby in 1908 at the tender age of 14, just a few years after Marconi and others demonstrated the potential of radio. He was licensed immediately after the passage of the Radio Act of 1927, callsign 1AE (later W1AE), and continued to experiment with spark gap stations. When the United States entered World War I, Sterling served for 19 months in France as an instructor in the Signal Corps, later organizing and operating the Corps’ first radio intelligence unit to locate enemy positions based on their radio transmissions.
After a brief post-war stint as a wireless operator in the Merchant Marine, Sterling returned to the US to begin a career in the federal government with a series of radio engineering and regulatory jobs. He rose through the ranks over the 1920s and 1930s, eventually becoming Assistant Chief of the FCC Field Division in 1937, in charge of radio engineering for the entire nation. It was on the strength of his performance in that role that he was tapped to be the first — and as it would turn out, only — chief of the NDO, which was quickly raised to the level of a new division within the FCC and renamed the Radio Intelligence Division.
To adequately protect the homeland, the RID needed a truly national footprint. Detecting shortwave transmissions is simple enough; any single location with enough radio equipment and a suitable antenna could catch most transmissions originating from within the US or its territories. But Sterling’s experience in France taught him that a network of listening stations would be needed to accurately triangulate on a source and provide a physical location for follow-up investigation.
The network that Sterling built would eventually comprise twelve primary stations scattered around the US and its territories, including Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. Each primary station reported directly to RID headquarters in Washington, DC, by telephone, telegraph, or teletype. Each primary station supported up to a few dozen secondary stations, with further coastal monitoring stations set up as the war ground on and German U-boats became an increasingly common threat. The network would eventually comprise over 100 stations stretched from coast to coast and beyond, staffed by almost 900 agents.
Searching the Ether
The job of staffing these stations with skilled radio operators wasn’t easy, but Sterling knew he had a ready and willing pool to pull from: his fellow hams. Recently silenced and eager to put their skills to the test, hams signed up in droves for the RID. About 80% of the RID staff were composed of current or former amateur radio operators, including the enforcement branch of sworn officers who carried badges and guns. They were the sharp end of the spear, tasked with the “last mile” search for illicit transmitters and possible confrontation with foreign agents.
But before the fedora-sporting, Tommy-gun toting G-men could swoop in to make their arrest came the tedious process of detecting and classifying potentially illicit signals. This task was made easier by an emergency order issued on December 8, 1941, the day after the Pearl Harbor attack, forbidding all amateur radio transmissions below 56 MHz. This reduced the number of targets the RID listening stations had to sort through, but the high-frequency bands cover a lot of turf, and listening to all that spectrum at the same time required a little in-house innovation.
Today, monitoring wide swaths of the spectrum is relatively easy, but in the 1940s, it was another story. Providing this capability fell to RID engineers James Veatch and William Hoffert, who invented an aperiodic receiver that covered everything from 50 kHz to 60 MHz. Called the
SSR-201
, this radio used a grid-leak detector to rectify and amplify all signals picked up by the antenna. A bridge circuit connected the output of the detector to an audio amplifier, with the option to switch an audio oscillator into the circuit so that continuous wave transmissions — the spy’s operating mode of choice — could be monitored. There was also an audio-triggered relay that could start and stop an external recorder, allowing for unattended operation.
SSR-201 aperiodic receiver, used by the RID to track down clandestine transmitters. Note the “Magic Eye” indicator. Source:
Steve Ellington (N4LQ)
The SSR-201 and a later variant, the K-series, were built by Kann Manufacturing, a somewhat grand name for a modest enterprise operating out of the Baltimore, Maryland, basement of Manuel Kann (W3ZK), a ham enlisted by the RID to mass produce the receiver. Working with a small team of radio hobbyists and broadcast engineers mainly working after hours, Kann Manufacturing managed to make about 200 of the all-band receivers by the end of the war, mainly for the RID but also for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, as well as the intelligence services of other allied nations.
These aperiodic receivers were fairly limited in terms of sensitivity and lacked directional capability, and so were good only for a first pass scan of a specific area for the presence of a signal. Consequently, they were often used in places where enemy transmitters were likely to operate, such as major cities near foreign embassies. This application relied on the built-in relay in the receiver to trigger a remote alarm or turn on a recorder, giving the radio its nickname: “The Watchdog.” The receivers were also often mounted in mobile patrol vehicles that would prowl likely locations for espionage, such as Army bases and seaports. Much later in the war, RID mobile units would drive through remote locations such as the woods around Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and an arid plateau in the high desert near Los Alamos, New Mexico, for reasons that would soon become all too obvious.
Radio G-Men
Adcock-type goniometer radio direction finder. The dipole array could be rotated 360 degrees from inside the shack to pinpoint a bearing to the transmitter. Source:
Radio Boulevard
Once a candidate signal was detected and headquarters alerted to its frequency, characteristics, and perhaps even its contents, orders went out to the primary stations to begin triangulation. Primary stations were equipped with radio direction finding (RDF) equipment, including the Adcock-type goniometer. These were generally wooden structures elevated above the ground with a distinctive Adcock antenna on the roof of the shack. The antenna was a variation on the Adcock array using two vertical dipoles on a steerable mount. The dipoles were connected to the receiving gear in the shack 180 degrees out of phase. This produced a radiation pattern with very strong nulls broadside to the antenna, making it possible for operators to determine the precise angle to the source by rotating the antenna array until the signal is minimized. Multiple stations would report the angle to the target to headquarters, where it would be mapped out and a rough location determined by where the lines intersected.
With a rough location determined, RID mobile teams would hit the streets. RID had a fleet of mobile units based on commercial Ford and Hudson models, custom-built for undercover work. Radio gear partially filled the back seat area, power supplies filled the trunk, and a small steerable loop antenna could be deployed through the roof for radio direction finding on the go. Mobile units were also equipped with special radio sets for communicating back to their primary station, using the VHF band to avoid creating unwanted targets for the other stations to monitor.
Mobile units were generally capable of narrowing the source of a transmission down to a city block or so, but locating the people behind the transmission required legwork. Armed RID enforcement agents would set out in search of the transmitter, often aided by a device dubbed “The Snifter.” This was a field-strength meter specially built for covert operations; small enough to be pocketed and monitored through headphones styled to look like a hearing aid, the agents could use the Snifter to ferret out the spy, hopefully catching them in the act and sealing their fate.
A Job (Too) Well Done
For a hastily assembled organization, the RID was remarkably effective. Originally tasked with monitoring the entire United States and its territories, that scope very quickly expanded to include almost every country in South America, where the Nazi regime found support and encouragement. Between 1940 and 1944, the RID investigated tens of thousands, resulting in 400 unlicensed stations being silenced. Not all of these were nefarious; one unlucky teenager in Portland, Oregon, ran afoul of the RID by hooking an antenna up to a record player so he could play DJ to his girlfriend down the street. But other operations led to the capture of 200 spies, including a shipping executive who used his ships to refuel Nazi U-boats operating in the Gulf of Mexico, and the famous
Dusquense Spy Ring
operating on Long Island.
Thanks in large part to the technical prowess of the hams populating its ranks, the RID’s success contained the seeds of its downfall. Normally, such an important self-defense task as preventing radio espionage would fall to the Army or Navy, but neither organization had the technical expertise in 1940, nor did they have the time to learn given how woefully unprepared they were for the coming war. Both branches eventually caught up, though, and neither appreciated a bunch of civilians mucking around on their turf. Turf battles ensued, politics came into it, and by 1944, budget cuts effectively ended the RID as a standalone agency.
| 32
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8135214",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T14:20:32",
"content": "Gulf of where?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135222",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T14:34:47",
"content": "The Gulf of Mexico, the body of water east of Mexico, south of Texas, Lousiana, Missisippi, and Alabama and to the south and west of Florida.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_MexicoThe Guld of Mexico was known by that name since 1850. It was only recently unilaterally changed by a politician who could give no good reason for renaming it. The rest of the world still uses the name it has been known by for 400 years.Any further questions?",
"parent_id": "8135214",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135225",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T14:38:42",
"content": "Since 1550. Damned typos.",
"parent_id": "8135222",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135239",
"author": "Gen-Ofc",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T15:08:22",
"content": "Gulf*",
"parent_id": "8135225",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135265",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T16:22:09",
"content": "+1",
"parent_id": "8135222",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135304",
"author": "RunnerPack",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T18:13:42",
"content": "So, you’re okay with someone in 1550 changing the name, but not now? That’s not deranged at all… 🤪👈",
"parent_id": "8135222",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135314",
"author": "AZdave",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T18:33:11",
"content": "We’re not in 1550 anymore. And most of the world doesn’t want to go back to 1950 like the guy who changed the name does.",
"parent_id": "8135304",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135398",
"author": "Cap",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T21:23:41",
"content": "But some guy in about 2012 changed the Name of a Mountain in Alaska!.. and that was OK?Cap",
"parent_id": "8135314",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135316",
"author": "AZdave",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T18:34:29",
"content": "Rec’d.",
"parent_id": "8135222",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135234",
"author": "Gösta",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T14:58:52",
"content": "Love these radio articles!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135288",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T17:24:32",
"content": "Me too, but it’s a bitter aftertaste that amateur radio had been exploited here.One of no 1 rules is that hams aren’t political and into propaganda.What the US did here was sort of a crime by taking advantage of hams, I think.The whole patriotism thing is at fault here, I think.It’s an excuse to go against the values of amateur radio, the international friendship.The use of amateurs as spies or anti-spies does cause mistrust.",
"parent_id": "8135234",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135311",
"author": "cmholm",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T18:24:39",
"content": "That’s a POV, but not the only relevant POV for all contexts. It harkens to John Perry Barlow’s naive “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”, a legal fiction which requires national government intervention to either maintain, squash, or arbitrate.",
"parent_id": "8135288",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135319",
"author": "AZdave",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T18:41:00",
"content": "It’s a complete fallacy that ham radio as an entity is (or even should be) immune to politics. What IS valid is that transmissions on the air should be non-political, and that isn’t the case here.And it’s utterly laughable to pretend that “international friendship” exists in times of war when the other side is trying to kill you, enslave you, or conquer all your territory. What alternative reality do you live in, anyway?",
"parent_id": "8135288",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135355",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T20:07:05",
"content": "So stupid. That’s as if we’re saying that using dolphins to carry bombs is totally fine, because the enemy is so bad.The consequence that people thus now are hysterically afraid of any dolphins they may encounter isn’t Import, apparently.(The involvement of hams into any sorts of espionage hurts any kind of trust.The function of building bridges of freendship between enemies/former enemies, too.Remember: A foreign spy can also be seen as a hero in his/her home country.And hams being involved in his/her death doesn’t help at making new friends over there. It can cause hate, rather.)",
"parent_id": "8135319",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135366",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T20:25:30",
"content": "The other side isn’t “civilians”, though, you silly! Civilians, ordinary citizens, don’t do that.Many radio amateurs in the “enemy” country don’t share the bad politics of their country. They’re not “the enemy”.Being more on the educated and social side (introverts included), hams usually don’t fall for propagandaand rather try to help saving lifes or try to build bridges of diplomacy. Civilians to civillians, so to say.Well, most do. Except the Americans with their black/white point-of-view, not sure.They’re always being at war since WW2 and rascism still leads their daily lifes.International friendship is needed the most in bad times, in short.",
"parent_id": "8135319",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135645",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T14:08:31",
"content": "I’m not sure if I had explained myself properly here.Firstly, I didn’t mean to insult you. The “you silly” was meant in a friendly, funny way.Secondly, what I think was wrong was “dragging hams into it”.Radio amateurs used to be respected, considered trustworty.But stories like this did hurt the reputation (does the ham monitor what we say in privacy?!)If hams are seen as being involved in espionage, then ham clubs at work place are at risk and support in society in general will drop.We had similar story in East Germany with the Stasi, which recruted citizens as spies. When nice old grandma was a spy, writing down everything she had heard in family.Such mistrust does hurt a society. Let professionals do such jobs, don’t abuse hams/civilians for it.",
"parent_id": "8135319",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135652",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T14:25:03",
"content": "Or let me put it this way:Hams used to know how to build radio bugs.It was an open secret, more or less.Some hams did build them “just for fun” in the 1960s/70s/80s also, the skill set was there.That’s when micro electronics got popular and making miniatures was fun. :)But the general consensus was that hams know what’s right and wrong and that they care about the amateur’s code.Thus, they didn’t actuallyusethe DIY bugs to spy on family/friends.War time stories like this do raise questions about the truth of this, however.It spreads mistrust, makes people feel uneasy about hams. Even today.I’m not against telling the stories of old, but the whole fact they were true is saddening, shameful.It simply wasn’t right to use back then, I think.Professionals with ham radio background – that’s okay.But using ordinary hams for it? That’s questionable, at least.",
"parent_id": "8135319",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8137961",
"author": "teh stig",
"timestamp": "2025-06-11T17:38:08",
"content": "Bud… you need a hobby or something.",
"parent_id": "8135652",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135579",
"author": "Josephus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T12:03:52",
"content": "It’s another example of how the war against fascism ended up reducing the great features of the societies that warred against it, by abridging freedoms in service of the ‘greater good’. One would think that if this ‘greater good’ was so great, coercion would not need to be employed to such a vast extent in service of it. Alas, mankind is a depraved creature.",
"parent_id": "8135288",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135644",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T13:59:33",
"content": "You do know that they stopped the “hunt” for spy transmitters after the war, right?Manno. Eine Deutscher der sich beschwert das die Nazis bekämpft wurden. Möchte meinen, jede Deutsche wurde sich freuen das die damals gestoppt wurden.",
"parent_id": "8135579",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135654",
"author": "Josephus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T14:38:18",
"content": "Hunting spy transmitters isn’t so much of a problem (although it is certainly a problem due to the fact that it is curtailing speech) as bringing vast portions of a society into the service of the state, and the unfortunate homogenising effects thereof (which unfortunately every modern government does to some extent).",
"parent_id": "8135644",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135656",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T14:40:28",
"content": "Especially we Germans should know better about right/wrong because of our history and our ancestors.It’s our legacy to try to make sure history won’t repeat itself.Well, of the young ones among us, at least. Boomers with their Nazi parents may seem to disagree, not sure.Also, German radio amateurs were considered the enemy in 3rd Reich.They were treated with death penalty more than often.They weren’t allowed to transmit during war time.Receivers with tube amps were illegal, too.The tubes were merely allowed for demodulation purposes.Not obeying did cost lifes of hams (and SWLs).They lost their life, were shot/hung/sent into gas chambers etc.PS: Doesn’t matter if “we” were the bad guys at the time.Fighting the Nazis wasn’t even the problem here.It’s about abusing the good guys to do dirty jobs, which is even more tragic.",
"parent_id": "8135644",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135661",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T15:22:52",
"content": "@Joseph Or let me put it this way:How does recruting hams differ from recruting nurses, red cross members and church members?What if church was found out to be officially being involved in fighting the Nazis?Or if red cross members had been found out working as agents?These groups would have been declared official target/enemy by the Nazis and neither would have been allowed to care for the wounded in the battlefield or the enemy territory anymore.In response, the Nazis in their paranoia would have arrested/executed all priests, nuns, nurses and red cross members in Nazi Germany, open fire on unscheduled ambulance cars and so on.Same ways, hams could have become targets internationally by various agents in foreign country, too.Or radio amateurs in Nazi Germany, too, if such things had become public.As a result to their co-operation on large scale, as being described in the story.The possible dimension of such stunts performaned by US gov probably beyond their comprehension. So shortsighted. Sigh.Gratefully, these stories got only public after war..",
"parent_id": "8135644",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135671",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T15:43:02",
"content": "It’s also important to view it from a 1940s point of view, maybe.Radio technology was cutting-edge, it was hi-tech. Like rocket-science.Radio amateurs of early 20th century weren’t grumpy old men as we see them now, but more like researchers.Amateur radio was all about experimental technology,the amateurs did exchange schematics and formulas of latest tech.Radio amateurs, being fully independent and internationally active were an not to underestimated power.In fact, their radio equipment was better than average military equipment of the time.That’s exactly why Nazi goverment prohibited transmission during war.They were afraid of loosing control about flow of information.If they had found out that amateurs (anywhere on earth) had joined forces to fight them or their spies.. What would have happened? Involving hams was so wrong on so many ways, I think!",
"parent_id": "8135644",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135676",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T15:57:47",
"content": "I hope what I wrote was readable.My point simply was that using “radio amateurs” as a group was wrong.If the US goverment had hired people with a ham background and joined them into some sort of special force then it’s an entirely different matter!Then it wouldn’t been “radio amateurs” but “special unit XYZ” who had fought for justice, simply said.But recruting ordinary hams was not okay, because it stigmatizes an otherwise innocent and peaceful part of society.It’s like sending civilians onto battlefield.",
"parent_id": "8135644",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135679",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T16:13:51",
"content": "By the way, I grew up in an amateur radio household, so to speak.Maybe that’s why I see it more critically.Of course I can’t speak for my compatriots either. I have to say that.The others are probably not as strange as me. However, I hope they share the basic principles. Vy55/73",
"parent_id": "8135644",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135267",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T16:26:13",
"content": "Note to self: If I’m ever talking on a radio and don’t want to be tracked, keep the transmissions very short and move randomly and a long distance between each transmission.That said, moving a WWII-era HF station around without attracting attention probably isn’t easy.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135281",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T17:18:56",
"content": "If you’re operating a Trio/Kenwood TR-2200 2m portable transceiver from the 1960s, everyone will think you’re a James Bond villain. ;)",
"parent_id": "8135267",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135339",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T19:29:09",
"content": "Moon bounce for hemisphere reach and a difficult trackability problem for the TLAs (Three Letter Agencies).Bonus:The audience.This aren’t [Fox/CNN/MSNBC/ABC/NBC/CBS/NPR] derping twits.Lag encourages thinking before talking, you would think.It is a good place to expand your conspiracy theory collection.But I’m known to humor loonies, for the entertainment value and to keep HR off my back.",
"parent_id": "8135267",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135640",
"author": "albertron9000",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T13:49:29",
"content": "It was very far sighted of the founding fathers to word the first amendment to allow the government to prohibit free speech if transmitted above 56 Mhz.Oh wait, they didn’t…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135709",
"author": "llama-kin",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T17:27:19",
"content": "funny, now do the right to bear arms…",
"parent_id": "8135640",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8141308",
"author": "Joseph C Hopfield",
"timestamp": "2025-06-22T21:46:15",
"content": "On the podcast it was implied that the american’s weren’t code-breaking…Actually thousands of american’s were, including 11,000 women.https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/12/11/code-girls-liza-mundy/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,526.263045
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/04/tune-in-to-higher-lower-the-minimal-handheld-electronic-game/
|
Tune In To “Higher Lower”, The Minimal Handheld Electronic Game
|
Donald Papp
|
[
"Arduino Hacks",
"Games"
] |
[
"3d printed",
"Arduboy",
"arduino",
"diy",
"handheld",
"kit"
] |
[Tommy] has a great write-up about designing and building a minimalistic handheld electronic game called
“Higher Lower”
. It’s an audio-driven game in which the unit plays two tones and asks the player to choose whether the second tone was higher in pitch, or lower. The game relies on 3D printed components and minimal electronics, limiting player input to two buttons and output to whatever a speaker stuck to an output pin from an ATtiny85 can generate.
Fastener-free enclosure means fewer parts, and on the inside are pots for volume and difficulty. We love the thoughtful little tabs that hold the rocker switch in place during assembly.
Gameplay may be straightforward, but working with so little raises a number of design challenges. How does one best communicate game state (and things like scoring) with audio tones only? What’s the optimal way to generate a random seed when the best source of meaningful, zero-extra-components entropy (timing of player input) happens
after
the game has already started? What’s the most efficient way to turn a clear glue stick into a bunch of identical little light pipes? [Tommy] goes into great detail for each of these, and more.
In addition to the hardware and enclosure design, [Tommy] has tried new things on the software end of things. He found that using tools intended to develop for the
Arduboy DIY handheld console
along with a hardware emulator made for a
very
tight feedback loop during development. Being able to work on the software side without actually needing the hardware and chip programmer at hand was also flexible and convenient.
We’ve seen [Tommy]’s work before
about his synth kits, and as usual his observations and shared insights about bringing an idea from concept to kit-worthy product are absolutely worth a read.
You can find all the design files on
the GitHub repository
, but Higher Lower is also available as a reasonably-priced
kit with great documentation
suitable for anyone with an interest. Watch it in action in the video below.
| 8
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8135166",
"author": "ford",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T11:19:44",
"content": "Why not use something like ESP32 and show highscores on a simple webpage?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135191",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T12:59:23",
"content": "The linked project write up says:The impetus for this project was Hackaday’s “Tiny Games Challenge”",
"parent_id": "8135166",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135192",
"author": "TDT",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T13:01:22",
"content": "We don’t have the same inde of “simple”.Heck, this build don’t even have rechargeable LiPo or such.But feel free to make your own variation.If I had to, I would add multiple waveforms (some are harsher, and thus it’s more difficult to hear pitch difference), blinky leds (because, leds!) and probably either a form of display (maybe a 16×2 ? These crusty ones are neat for low fi vibe games).But I digress. I will talk when I have something to show.",
"parent_id": "8135166",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135176",
"author": "Harvie.CZ",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T12:07:15",
"content": "It would be nice to have graphs of success rates across frequencies and intervals. (i suppose people will have trouble distinguishing tones that are too close together and tones that are too high or too low)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135228",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T14:41:56",
"content": "i made a ‘game’ that asks you to name the interval between two tones, for ear training. i imagine this was motivated by a similar desire??the number one thing i wanted was to be able to keep changing it as my ear training developed. to iterate over user interface details.i just don’t understand throwing custom hardware at this problem.woulda been better as an app.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135251",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T15:36:38",
"content": "Have you published your game in any way?",
"parent_id": "8135228",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135409",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T22:17:14",
"content": "haha touche! yeah but not in a straightforward fashion. it’s just a mode in my soft synth i’ve been hacking on for 20 years nowhttp://galexander.org/ggb/i keep these huge diaries for projects but i never ‘publish’ per se, except for the rare project that becomes an android app",
"parent_id": "8135251",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135411",
"author": "jbx",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T22:21:36",
"content": "Can it play Doom (the music score) ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,526.313861
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/04/3d-printing-a-modular-guitar-means-it-can-look-like-whatever-you-want/
|
3D Printing A Modular Guitar Means It Can Look Like Whatever You Want
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"Musical Hacks"
] |
[
"3D printed parts",
"guitar"
] |
Got some spare filament and looking to build a guitar you can truly call your own?
[The 3D Print Zone] has created a modular 3D printable guitar system
that lets you easily mix and match different components for the ultimate in customization.
The build is based around a central core, which combines the pickups, bridge, and neck into one solid unit. This is really the heart of the guitar, containing all the pieces that need to be in precise alignment to get those strings vibrating precisely in tune. The core then mounts to a printed outer body via mating slots and rails, which in the main demo is made to look like a Les Paul-style design. This outer body also hosts the volume, tone, and pickup controls. Output from the pickups travels to the controls in the outer body via a set of metallic contacts.
What’s cool about this build is that the sky really is the limit for your creativity. As the video below demonstrates, the main build looks like a Les Paul. But, armed with the right CAD software, you can really make a guitar that looks like whatever you want, while the 3D printer does all the hard work of making it a reality. The files to print the guitar, along with the pickups and other components, are available as kits—but there’s also nothing stopping you from working up your own printed guitar design from scratch, either.
We’ve seen
some other great 3D printed guitars before, too
.
| 25
| 7
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8135139",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T09:00:05",
"content": "I want one! But.In no universe is this either a Les Paul, Telecaster or any other style guitar. Because, and here’s the kicker Danno, the neck doesn’t change. The pickups are too close together so the bridge pickup and the actual bridge need to move tailward, i.e. away from the neck and neck pickup.One common thread is all the illustrations show a Telecaster style pickup selector, volume and tone plate. And a crap neck, more on that later. HaD always says “after the break” but there is no break! Show me break! So still not a Les Paul, more a Less Paul, amirite? I really have trouble getting past the pickup disaster.Where is the sustain? Show me sustain! Might as well build the body out of styrofoam(spelling?). But wait what’s this? The kit includesA DOWELandSuper Glue? Heck, African American! That’s all you had to say!Narrator flaunts like it’s modular but once Super Glue enters the chat ain’ nothin’ modula’ no mo’. I’d sooner buy an aftermarket neck, pickups, wiring harness and hardware and handcarve the various handcarved bodies out of hobos. Oh, don’t fret, we call driftwood “hobos” in these parts. Auto parts are another good resource.The concept is good, the body material and just about everything else is less so.As I rarely do, I watched the video. It did not demonstrate the guitar’s sound but we got a good introduction to the pedals. Why not just modify a Selectric II? You could wear it like a accordion.Not my scene but if you enjoy it, a chacusn son goust.Challenge: No body at all, just neck, pickups, bridge and wiring harness stuff. Perhaps a metal block or something for sustain. Does anybody remember laughter? I mean, uh, sustain?p.s. When you care enough to send the very best you…do…not…use…anything… “SQUIRE”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135181",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T12:16:47",
"content": "Les Paul would like a word:https://guitar.com/features/opinion-analysis/how-les-pauls-log-guitar-changed-everything/The log (Les Paul’s first electric guitar) was made pretty much like this 3D printed version.",
"parent_id": "8135139",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135404",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T22:11:06",
"content": "Sounds like someone needs to go to remedial school to learn the difference between trees and 3d filament. Sad.",
"parent_id": "8135181",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135202",
"author": "Rick",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T13:37:14",
"content": "Ok is a printing exercise. Like the Prusacaster. I printed it and after few months started bowing so I bough an unfinished wood poplar body on AliExpress for something like $10 (£7) and now I have practice Tele for less then £100 complete",
"parent_id": "8135139",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135147",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T09:41:50",
"content": "You wouldn’t download a car!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135150",
"author": "Ken C",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T09:55:29",
"content": "You wouldn’t flush XXL-size styrofoam cup.",
"parent_id": "8135147",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135151",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T10:00:38",
"content": "I thought the body of the guitar was supposed to be one piece with the pickups and the neck for it to have any acoustic purpose. Otherwise you basically have an air gap between the parts, which kills any resonances.If it doesn’t change the acoustic qualities, how the guitar plays, then there’s no functional point in having different interchangeable bodies. If it’s just cosmetics, then it’s just a plastic toy guitar.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135155",
"author": "fiveseven",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T10:21:41",
"content": "You thought wrong, the body is for ergonomics (and looks), not acoustic purposes. See Les Paul’s Log guitar.",
"parent_id": "8135151",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135408",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T22:15:55",
"content": "Dude is right, you are GDMFCSing wrong. It was called “The Log” for a reason, and that reason is why Dude is right, you are GDMFCSing wrong. The reason, since apparently you did not “See Les Paul’s Log guitar” and why Dude is right, you are GDMFCSing wrong is a BIG HONKING BLOCK OF PINE INTEGRAL TO THE GUITAR’S CONSTRUCTION. M’kay?",
"parent_id": "8135155",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135551",
"author": "Hassi",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T09:50:05",
"content": "GPT2, calm down.",
"parent_id": "8135408",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135868",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T05:07:45",
"content": "Two words: Alembic, aluminum. Actually four words and the fourth word is “you”.",
"parent_id": "8135551",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8176928",
"author": "Mwva9",
"timestamp": "2025-09-08T16:35:50",
"content": "I love how you’re trying to be the end all be all on guitar knowledge like bodiless guitars don’t exist. The lead guitarist for Judas Priest played one for a long time. In an acoustic guitar just the body does matter in an electric it does not. What matters is the pickup placement, the bridge height and that the action is set properly. That’s it. For Christ sake shovel guitars work just fine. This man put in some work designing a modular guitar that works and you’re bitching that he didn’t get it perfect to your standard. If you weren’t such a dick you probably could’ve messaged him and asked if he could adjust the pickup pockets a few millimeters even though if you have ever actually built a guitar you’d know that not every single blank is the same a metal file and some shims are almost always needed. Not to mention if you printed this the material you used could’ve warped or one of your settings could’ve been off",
"parent_id": "8135408",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135583",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T12:34:19",
"content": "You certainly can build a guitar without a body at all, but whether that is going to be a good sounding guitar is another matter entirely.",
"parent_id": "8135155",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135162",
"author": "Ed",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T10:57:10",
"content": "Well, I do hope it’s made from tone plastic",
"parent_id": "8135151",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135397",
"author": "wjp",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T21:22:45",
"content": "Everyone knows that you have to use pure tone PET-G filament from the Amazon river basin….",
"parent_id": "8135162",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135658",
"author": "Zamorano",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T15:14:06",
"content": "Some say there’s no such thing as toneplastic but this proves the opposite.On a more serious note, a wooden guitar with a 3D printed top (or veneer or something) could be cool.",
"parent_id": "8135162",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135235",
"author": "Dylan",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T14:59:33",
"content": "This is true on acoustic guitars, but on electric guitars, it is only the pickups, their placement, strings, and how the neck tensions the strings that matters really.And the reason is you don’t need much resonance on an electric guitar as the electromagnets (pickups) just need to sense the vibration of the string itself.There’s a cool YouTube video where a guy actually compared a normal electric guitar with one made over open air to show there is no such thing as “tone wood” for electric guitars.",
"parent_id": "8135151",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135315",
"author": "Observer",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T18:33:41",
"content": "“… it is only the pickups, their placement, strings, and how the neck tensions the strings that matters really.”I beg to differ.Materials and geometry does matter… maybe not as much as in an acoustic guitar, but they matter just the same. Moving strat pickups into a 335 doesn’t turn the 335 into a strat (or vice versa).Source: Me, longtime guitar player and owner of many different guitars over several decades.",
"parent_id": "8135235",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135585",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T12:40:09",
"content": "I don’t see a way in which the body wouldnotaffect the sound – because it’s a coupled resonator with the strings – that is unless you de-couple it by having it loosely bound to the neck so the vibrations are damped by the impedance mismatch at the interface.Of course if you’re going to put your guitar through distortion pedals and flangers and whatever effects, then the original sound hardly matters at all. It all sounds the same.",
"parent_id": "8135235",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135205",
"author": "metalman",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T13:59:42",
"content": "not a guitar.it will not stay in tune and be playable.worse, much much worse, is that an infinite number of vastly better looking embelishments, can be accomplished, with paint, partscaster,partspaul, bodys are availble cheap, and free used, snd the simplest to tools will reshape the wood.save the 3d priniting for things a cave man cant do, right.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135231",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T14:49:09",
"content": "you can change anything about it except what you actually want to change??i feel like almost every music-adjacent hack here is made by someone who is doing the hackinstead oflearning the music. it rubs me the wrong way, of course, because that’s something i’ve outgrown. i learned it’s kind of a dead end. yes, i have a 2×4 gathering dust with tuners and pickups mounted to it. and a couple guitars i actually play.real musicians hack their instruments, of course, but i don’t think a single one of the music hacks i’ve seen on here has any similarity to what a real musician does. i don’t mean to gatekeep but there’s simply no substitute for actually learning how to play the instrument, and when someone hasn’t done that, itreallyshows",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135352",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T19:58:23",
"content": "Ha like all the rad aero mods on a boyracer car around town that maybe look cool but just add drag, catch on speed bumps or drag when pulling out of the driveway. Probably a good number of them track the car but I’m guessing most don’t. Source: me who wanted hood quick release pins on my car and my dad who (rightly) laughed and said no way.",
"parent_id": "8135231",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135588",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T12:43:44",
"content": "made by someone who is doing the hack instead of learning the music.The hack being more interesting than the job it does is how you get most open source software as well.",
"parent_id": "8135231",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135783",
"author": "Jim Demello",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T22:42:58",
"content": "Everyone here seems to hate it, so it must have something going for it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8137322",
"author": "Ben",
"timestamp": "2025-06-10T09:39:16",
"content": "Luthier here. Innovation is more often than not received bad by the guitar community. This clearly is an innovative way to produce guitar shapes.Seymour Duncan (one of the biggest pickup manufacturing companies) said that the string vibrating is pure in itself. But adding things around it, like magnet strength, material density, size etc all create a filter for this pure sound.In my own experience you can put 5 seasoned guitar players in a store with 40 identical production run guitars and they will all pick a different one as their favorite. The way they connect to the guitar is personal preference.I can build you two guitars with exactly the same specs. One made of ash, one made of mahogany and they will sound different. It’s audible. Not that one sounds better than the other, but it’s again down to personal preference.The most important factor of a guitar to sound good is the player. EVH’s rig was played by some well known guitarists. Guess what? They still didn’t sound like him.TL;DR: you don’t like it? Don’t buy it. Hate it? Leave it for someone else to love. You don’t like the sound? Don’t blame the instrument.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,526.503261
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/03/making-a-lego-vehicle-which-can-cross-large-gaps/
|
Making A LEGO Vehicle Which Can Cross Large Gaps
|
John Elliot V
|
[
"hardware",
"Robots Hacks",
"Toy Hacks"
] |
[
"gap crosser",
"lego",
"Lego engineering"
] |
Here is a hacker showing off their engineering chops. This video shows successive design iterations for a LEGO vehicle
which can cross increasingly large gaps
.
At the time of writing this video from [
Brick Experiment Channel
] has been seen more than 110,000,000 times, which is… rather a lot. We guess with a view count like that there is a fairly good chance that many of our readers have already seen this video, but this is the sort of video one could happily watch twice.
This video sports a bunch of engineering tricks and approaches. We particularly enjoy watching the clever use of center of gravity. They hack gravity to make some of their larger designs work.
It is a little surprising that we haven’t already covered this video over here on Hackaday as it has been on YouTube for over three years now. But we have heard from [Brick Experiment Channel] before with videos such as
Testing Various Properties Of LEGO-Compatible Axles
and
LEGO Guitar Is Really An Ultrasonically-Controlled Synth
.
And of course we’ve covered heaps of LEGO stuff in the past too, such as
Building An Interferometer With LEGO
and
Stepping On LEGO For Science
.
Thanks to [Keith Olson] for writing in to remind us about the [Brick Experiment Channel].
| 6
| 3
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8135109",
"author": "Richard",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T07:15:47",
"content": "Catch up guys, there are many channels dedicated to completing lego engineering challenges. And what is great, they are available for youtube kids too. Lego must be responsible for creating many engineers. :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135114",
"author": "X-MarX-THX-SpXt",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T07:41:54",
"content": "When you realize Lego switched to plastic in the first place so they can promote their building blocks to engineers, later started an off-shoot that made possible to architects to build ACCURATE models using their cheap parts…No wonder why you see a lot of Lego sets on the management’s office desk…PS: Lego should bring back Mindstorm.",
"parent_id": "8135109",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135125",
"author": "baltar",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T08:12:54",
"content": "Lego should bring back Mindstorm.No way. They’re too expensive to produce and they’re actually useful for something.Why waste manufacturing resources on such things when instead they can sell way more of absurdly expensive Star Wars, Lamborghini or some other pop-culture plastic dust gatherers to 40y old corporate manchildren on antidepressants who were told by their therapists to “find a hobby”.",
"parent_id": "8135114",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135180",
"author": "dahud",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T12:14:42",
"content": "Their new robotics platform is something called “SPIKE”. I actually like it a bit better than the old EV3 stuff. The programming model is much more conventional than the funky data flow stuff they’d been using.",
"parent_id": "8135114",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135137",
"author": "Rusty Cans",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T08:57:49",
"content": "There is a distinct lack of “sick jumps” in this video.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135282",
"author": "captnmike",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T17:22:02",
"content": "China uses something similar to this for setting road sections on bridges, there have been several models made – seems to me some have shown up here – it’s all about weights and balances and lever arms",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,526.442056
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/03/building-an-automatic-wire-stripper-and-cutter/
|
Building An Automatic Wire Stripper And Cutter
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"Tool Hacks"
] |
[
"3d printer",
"wire cutter",
"wire stripper"
] |
Stripping and cutting wires can be a tedious and repetitive part of your project. To save time in this regard,
[Red] built an automatic stripper and cutter to do the tiring work for him.
An ESP32 runs the show in this build. Via a set of A4988 stepper motor drivers, it controls two NEMA 17 stepper motors which control the motion of the cutting and stripping blades via threaded rods. A third stepper controls a 3D printer extruder to move wires through the device. There’s a rotary encoder with a button for controlling the device, with cutting and stripping settings shown on a small OLED display. It graphically represents the wire for stripping, so you can select the length of the wire and how much insulation you want stripped off each end. You merely need select the measurements on the display, press a button, and the machine strips and cuts the wire for you. The wires end up in a tidy little 3D-printed bin for collection.
The build should be a big time saver for [Red], who will no longer have to manually cut and strip wires for future builds. We’ve featured
some other neat wire stripper builds before, too
. Video after the break.
| 25
| 14
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8135029",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T02:19:16",
"content": "Should use the ESP32 to do a little simple math: it adds up how much time it would take to manually strip all the wires you process with it, and then compare that with how many hours were spent on the project… Just to see how long it takes to break even ;)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135038",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T02:48:25",
"content": "ObXKCD:https://xkcd.com/1205/",
"parent_id": "8135029",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135279",
"author": "Moistifarius",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T17:12:39",
"content": "This is one of my favorite XKCD infographics. I actually have that in a frame on the wall in my office.",
"parent_id": "8135038",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135193",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T13:04:58",
"content": "If you like breadboarding 8-bit computers, this project has already paid for itself.",
"parent_id": "8135029",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135042",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T02:56:26",
"content": "I’ve seen these in production facilities, and was really hoping that was a thermal stripper there that they’d conjured inexpensively somehow. Alas.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135060",
"author": "Ject",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T03:55:56",
"content": "I’ve always wanted to build one of these. I think this is one of the best designs yet. It has an elegant simplicity to it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135073",
"author": "Ccecil",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T05:03:59",
"content": "Nice…Although, builds like this end up being more about the build than the time savings typically. The learning experience is more valuable.It may take quite a few wires to save the time, but also the strippers tend to be able to be calibrated to not cut into the metal of the wire which is something more difficult to do repeatedly with hand tools.The automated wire stripper in my shop has saved me a lot of time but I don’t think it would be worth the money (to me) for the cost, it came with a larger package of used equipment.Here is a video of an industrial offering doing similar wires (in my shop).https://youtu.be/j32YuDlap5c?si=5zisjMV8XCKK3wPA",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135106",
"author": "kpc",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T07:09:43",
"content": "Maybe slightly raise the blades and to a pullback. This will at least on one side already remove the isolation.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135108",
"author": "kpc",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T07:13:39",
"content": "For the smaller lengths, you could even do the other side. Strip it at 2 cm. Then make the indent on the other side and slide the isolation 1 cm with a pullback.",
"parent_id": "8135106",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135110",
"author": "Tobias",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T07:16:54",
"content": "Love this! Some comments here have said that the time saved might be less than the time invested to build an automated tool like this, and maybe they’re right…But I know the way my brain works – stripping a a bunch of wires is boring, plus the perfectionist in me worries that the wires are never the right length. That might not be a big deal, but then there’s the stress of trying to strip everything to the right length for crimp connectors. Sure all of that’s irrational, but it’s real to my brain, and sometimes it’s enough to make me put off part of a project. So while this might not save time if it saves some mental load for someone that’s an excellent outcomeAlso, using a cheap off-the-shelf 3d printer extruder is an awesome idea",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135204",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T13:47:17",
"content": "Awesome project. One improvement that can be made is to use 1 motor instead of 2. Another improvement is to make the entire thing portable so it fits in a toolbox.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135210",
"author": "Hi",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T14:07:48",
"content": "Don’t use solid core wires in projects! They wiggle, stress-harden, and snap. Breadboarding and structural elements sure, but projects move and movement will cause them to break. Sometimes invisibly inside the insulation too.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135296",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T17:58:33",
"content": "There are millions of consumer grade, military, space and avionics products out there using solid core wire, in fact wirewrap with solid core is actually specified where vibration is so intense it might break soldered components off boards.If you loom it correctly it’s incredibly robust.",
"parent_id": "8135210",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135236",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T15:00:23",
"content": "I think almost the same result could be had by hand with 2 different tools by using EG a pill cutter and a movable stop to cut the wires to length. Then use a similar setup for the stripping.Bench mounting it and using a stop will take many skill based parts out of the equation, also picking up and setting down tools. (although he neglects in the video to show doing the same step multiple times per tool, which you could absolutely do say 5 or 10 times without setting down the tool, that’s how modern factories usually work, each station performs one step.)What this post entirely neglected to mention is this is specifically made for solid core wire for prototyping boards and I’m not sure how this would translate to other less stiff wires. The only projects I do with many wires is make custom PC power supply cables, and the fiddly part is crimping those, not cutting them to length.Crazy project, looking forward to a MK2 version. Ideally you would want to see a single stepper for the cutter, I am sure you could put the other end on a pivot and it would work.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135518",
"author": "Neil",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T06:45:11",
"content": "Could you use nichrome wire instead of blades to cut? Would that be better for stranded wire?",
"parent_id": "8135236",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135283",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T17:22:06",
"content": "This subject takes me back to the 70’s making wiring harness for a sub contractor for Ford in the US before they closed it up and sent it to Mexico, a sore subject nowadays. I maintained strippers and crimpers. They had just one tool with a display and settings of some sort, wow digital electronics of the future! All rest were pneumatic with allen screw adjustments and a dangerous setup for wires the length of a car.Hearing protection was suggested for workers but no one bothered. A chorus of hisses and clanks went in a 4 syllable word, extend, clamp 2 “V” blades on wire, pull, retract blades. Ca-pump-ca-cimp. Over and over from many machines at the same times. There was a strand count tolerance for missing strands, yet skid sized tubs of tiny strippings like confetti were sent off for copper recovery.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135309",
"author": "DougM",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T18:19:51",
"content": "anyone have a source for the blades he used?I’ve been noodling on building one of these as well, some of my projects become production and strippingso manywires is definitely a bore.His design is better and simpler than what I had in mind which makes it considerably more feasible.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135332",
"author": "Ccecil",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T19:04:24",
"content": "Could probably hack it with blades from an industrial machine. They are often sold as spares. Looks very similar to the blades for the Eubanks machine I have…but they are spendyhttps://www.amazon.com/Eubanks-9800-Universal-Stripping-Blades/dp/B0CB9227L7But I was looking at Xacto #16 blades and I bet you could use 2 of them and make a pretty nice adjustable width…assuming you don’t mind the slight offset. Which is similar to the Schleuniger 2100 Unistriphttps://youtu.be/OJwZQ0eJh2U",
"parent_id": "8135309",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135359",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T20:08:11",
"content": "search for “Knipex 12 69 21”",
"parent_id": "8135309",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135418",
"author": "DougM",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T22:48:39",
"content": "Thank you!!",
"parent_id": "8135359",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135433",
"author": "QBFreak",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T00:04:23",
"content": "I just did a quick search on AliExpress for “Wire Stripper Blades” and found some similar, so doing the same might give you some keywords for your favorite parts shopping platform (one I can remember was V Blades, but searching for that wasn’t so helpful, I got all sorts of other less useful things instead).",
"parent_id": "8135309",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135434",
"author": "QBFreak",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T00:06:09",
"content": "Looks like you got a real reply while I was composing mine :)",
"parent_id": "8135433",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135432",
"author": "Grawp",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T00:03:58",
"content": "Cutting and stripping wires is certainly more than half of build time in my projects. Quarter is crimping and the rest is photoetching and SMT soldering and other stuff.Problem is that I use 26AWG tinned multistrand Cu MPPE isolated wires (and JST-GH connectors) for data which are really thin and those gazillion strands silicon wires for power which even at 20 AWG are flabby af and I need to keep both types of wire under tension when measuring them (with the same method as is shown at the beginning of the video – metal rules and sharpie).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135436",
"author": "QBFreak",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T00:16:12",
"content": "I like the idea of this, and for some gauges I suspect stranded would be fine, since there’s a tube coming out of the extruder. Anything that saves me physical exertion in the long run is measurable pain saved (health–). Plus it looks fun.I solved part of his complaint of “too many tools” by adhering the ruler to the bench top, and using a wire stripper that can be set for a specific length. I measure, hold my thumbnail on the new end location, cut it, strip both ends, done. I only needed to get out two tools (but where’s the views in that? >_>).I tend to make the same lengths of wires for prototyping, so pre-cutting a bunch sounds really appealing. Lowering the barrier to accomplishing future projects means more get done. I bet I have the stuff on-hand to make a wire-cutter…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135724",
"author": "Wrong Way Rick",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T19:04:07",
"content": "Brilliant! Very impressed with your design. Elegant and simple, with a design that will result in a machine that works straight away without a lot of fiddling. Cutting and stripping wires has always been an agonizing chore for me. Sadly, I don’t have a 3D printer, so making one of these is off the table for now, but hopefully I’ll get a printer sometime soon, or maybe farm it out to a friend that has one. Thank you for making your design public so we can both build the project, as well as learn from your great design. Kudos to you, Sir!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,526.684379
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/03/spin-casting-this-telescope-mirror-in-resin-didnt-go-to-plan/
|
Spin-Casting This Telescope Mirror In Resin Didn’t Go To Plan
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"classic hacks",
"Parts"
] |
[
"mirror",
"resin",
"silicone"
] |
For most of us, mirrors are something we buy instead of build. However, [Unnecessary Automation] wanted to craft mirrors of his own for a custom telescope build. As it turns out,
producing optically-useful mirrors is not exactly easy.
For the telescope build in question, [Unnecessary Automation] needed a concave mirror. Trying to get that sort of shape with glass can be difficult. However, there’s such a thing as a “
liquid mirror
” where spinning fluid forms into a parabolic-like shape. Thus came the idea to spin liquid resin during curing to try and create a mirror with the right shape.
That didn’t quite work, but it inspired a more advanced setup where a spinning bowl and dense glycerine fluid was used to craft a silicone mold with a convex shape. This could then be used to produce a resin-based mirror in a relatively stationary fashion. From there, it was just necessary to plate a shiny metal layer on to the final part to create the mirror effect. Unfortunately, the end result was too messy to use as a viable telescope mirror, but we learn a lot about what didn’t work along the way.
The video is a great journey of trial and error. Sometimes, figuring out how to do something is the fun part of a project, even if you don’t always succeed. If you’ve got ideas on how to successfully spin cast a quality mirror, drop them in the comments below. We’ve seen others
explore mirror making techniques before, too
.
| 29
| 12
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134714",
"author": "Lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T09:35:09",
"content": "This is one of the alchemical projects for home telescope makers. I’ve seen and heard from people who have tried this over the years. From internet strangers to professors and a friend. Even had a scheme to do it myself once.I’m glad people are still trying. I hope more people try because if someone figured out a way it would be so completely worth it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134724",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T10:07:23",
"content": "I wonder if hydroforming a round metal disk might be a better way to go for a large mirror.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134740",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T11:15:12",
"content": "I was thinking of directly making the mirror 100% metal. But I am sure the reason it is not done is the thermal coefficient of expansion of most metals is huge. And then you start to think about heating/cooling the whole mirror to a constant temperature with a closed control feedback loop (thermocouple, a peltier device and a basic PID controller).",
"parent_id": "8134724",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134752",
"author": "lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T12:00:02",
"content": "The problem boils down to surface roughness/precision. You cant take some sheet metal and bend it and voila mirror. This may give you a rough shape, accurate even to the millimeter or something in the 100’s of microns. But the bends will form buckles on the already very rough surface.So the next logical step is polish. Polishing a sheet of metal down to the 10s of nanometers (or less some measures go to the Angstrom) of smoothness on a gently curved surface is mostly not feasible. Maybe with some very serious machine tools, like 100’s of thousands of dollars, but for the average person this pursuit is about hopeless.It’s one of those things where you can see a shiny piece of metal, maybe polish a candle stick and go “wow that’s reflective”. But when you compare it too a commercial grade front surface mirror the cloudiness/diffusivity of the image is unremarkable.I hope this isn’t discouraging. It is the devil in the details. Glass has been used for a long time for a good reason. It’s really really hard to find a material that can be shaped to this degree of smoothness.",
"parent_id": "8134724",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134805",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T15:21:29",
"content": "Indeed, what’s regularly called a “mirror finish” usually is just a “shiny surface”. while telescope mirrors require absolute accuracy. I once read about telescope mirrors from a spinning disc of mercury and it was quite difficult. First you start with a bowl that is already quite accurate, then you pour in a lot of mercury and spin it to cover the whole surface, and then you suck out as much mercury as possible. This is a necessary step to reduce the effect of vibrations. There are always vibrations, and a thinner layer of mercury dampens these better.",
"parent_id": "8134752",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134896",
"author": "Jelle",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T19:29:07",
"content": "you could take that idea of using a thin layer to avoid vibrations and apply it to the resin idea: 3D print the correct shape first (so instead of a printed dish without shape, pre-shape it to the required form. Then apply the thin layer of resin (it’s cheaper too!) apply the ubiquitous flame to pop bubbles and let it harden.",
"parent_id": "8134805",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134816",
"author": "LookAtDaShinyShiny",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T15:47:38",
"content": "https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/403093-what-does-110-wave-mean/?p=5166379they need to be really ‘flat’ as such, it would probably be better to mould a blank of about the right shape and then use a jig to ‘figure’ the mirror into the correct shape, it’s a lot of work but it’s the traditional method for making your own glass mirrors/lens",
"parent_id": "8134752",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134911",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:01:21",
"content": "While I agree I don’t think you’d actually have any real problem applying the usual glass mirror grinding type methods to that metal blank to get the surface finish and shape you want if you really wanted to use metal for some reason (assuming your formed blank is remotely stiff enough to actually be a useful mirror that doesn’t warp under its own weight etc).I can’t think why you would try to use metal like that right now when any old glass is likely much more dimensionally stable under external forces and temperature changes, likely much more resistant to the environment, and likely quicker to work with too. But no doubt there are some good reasons out there, weight perhaps?",
"parent_id": "8134752",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135905",
"author": "Painty Ways",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T07:37:38",
"content": "What about using a magnetic field to manipulate a ferrofluid? Or use ferrous particles in a resin to hold the form as it dries?",
"parent_id": "8134724",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134741",
"author": "alanrcam",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T11:20:56",
"content": "For high density fluids, I thought of: motor oil, and tar.Both are quite viscous, which may reduce the impact of variations in spinning speed.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134890",
"author": "helge",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T19:00:23",
"content": "Pitch drop experiment, but observed in Zernike aberrationsWith a thermal expansion coefficient of a ballpark 150 ppm/K, I wouldn’t expect the result to be usable. Unless you manage to iron out the distortions again with adaptive optics :D",
"parent_id": "8134741",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134746",
"author": "Maria",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T11:43:50",
"content": "Why not just buy some PMMA stock and machine it on a lathe? Looking on ebay I see relatively cheap precise metalworking lathes available at $400.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134749",
"author": "Lindsay Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T11:53:32",
"content": "Cheap != precise. Besides, how in the world do you intend machining a large radius-of-curvature part on a manual lathe?!?",
"parent_id": "8134746",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134899",
"author": "Jelle",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T19:34:02",
"content": "with a printed shape to grind/polish the blank into shape? Or have a profile lasercut and let that do the primary cutting.",
"parent_id": "8134749",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134753",
"author": "Lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T12:08:56",
"content": "A lathe will not get to the level of accuracy required. It would unfortunately be many orders of magnitude away from being formidable.The allure behind spin casting or twirling buckets of liquid metals is, maybe just maybe some material can get surface roughness down to an acceptable level. Mercury bucket mirrors work, but getting something to stay solid in the right shape is a serious challenge.",
"parent_id": "8134746",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134766",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T12:57:02",
"content": "Another interesting idea, perhaps styrofoam could be used. A large block of styrofoam, then cover with a sheet of something like cling film, then heating it to melt the foam to conform with the deformation of the sheet. Perhaps filling the sheet with a hot relatively dense liquid like molten wax to form the parabolic shape.Maybe a sheet of Perspex could be simply suspended from a hoop of metal and heated until it sags in the middle.",
"parent_id": "8134746",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134808",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T15:27:46",
"content": "Unlike what others here wrote, I think this could work, at least upto some usable degree.There is such a thing as diamond turning for PMMA, in which lenses are made on a CNC lathe. And it’s possible to get very near to a working lens without any polishing afterward.But it all hinges on the quality of the lathe. A regular cheap chinese lathe has no chance. but the DIY lathe from Dan Gelbard can probably do it. The main spindle of his lathe has a second hand spindle from some wafer manufacturing device with air bearings, and the rest is made from granite blocks (also air bearings).",
"parent_id": "8134746",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134758",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T12:41:35",
"content": "What about stretching a rubber sheet [ something really elastic like a wubble bubble ball perhaps ], over a large sealed container and then pulling out some of the air. Maybe using something like low temperature wax to cast the shape. Maybe just use a mylar space blanket and create the mirror directly. Although not so good for IR.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134761",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T12:46:23",
"content": "I thought I remembered it on here, found it.https://hackaday.com/2016/07/26/pressure-formed-parabolic-mirror-from-a-mylar-blanket/",
"parent_id": "8134758",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134810",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T15:31:44",
"content": "That was indeed a nice article. But the comment noted:A stretched membrane like that isn’t quite parabolic, but it’s pretty close in the center. The deflection is proportional to (1-r2)2So that makes it good enough for focusing some sunlight, but nowhere near enough to build a telescope.",
"parent_id": "8134761",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134759",
"author": "synch",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T12:41:40",
"content": "IIRC it was used to cast the blanks for large telescope mirrors, using a rotating liquid-glass oven. A few tons of oven and molten glass – quite formidable !!! The blanks still had to be precision ground and figured though. I wonder if a liquid tin bath could be incorporated, so the glass floats on the tin as in the float-glass process – at a guess it would still be a parabolic surface at the interface ?Confession : I did make a parabolic surface once using polyester resin, rotating it on a record player as it set. It was parabolic as far as it went, but the surface was too textured to do much with and the whole lot was only a few inches wide. Fun though.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134781",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T14:04:32",
"content": "Glass on tin would be a neat way to make a convex blank. I suspect they are so simple to make using conventional techniques it’s just not worth the added complexity.I, too, did the record player attempt, but using wax. Dumb, but I learned.",
"parent_id": "8134759",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134767",
"author": "Garth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T13:18:10",
"content": "Spinning a pool of mercury (even with its toxic properties) to create a parabolic mirror has been experimented with (16th century ?) and is in use today.https://www.popsci.com/science/international-liquid-mirror-telescope/If spin casting a mirror form with something other than molten glass could be achieved then there is still the problem of achieving a surface that can be smoothed or ground and made uniform to prevent “Hubble” vision or other aberrations. What about active deforming using actuators or even heating resistors to correct the inaccuracies?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134780",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T14:03:41",
"content": "I was thinking why say ” parabolic-like shape” and made a list of why and the forces that keep it from being ideal. First, the derivation of the nature of the curve assumes an infinite flat Earth, not the real gravitation which behaves as if it converges to a point source at the center of mass of the Earth. To that error you can add the Coriolis forces, precession, nutation, and tidal forces from the Sun and Moon. Coriolis is probably the strongest though the rotation speed for a typical telescope f-ratio is quite low.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134938",
"author": "Chris Maple",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:54:09",
"content": "A telescope mirror is very small compared to the distortion in the gravitational field due to Earth being an effective point source. Even gravitational variations due to different densities in different locations won’t have any practical effect.A big problem is the change in volume of the material as it solidifies, whether by cooling or curing. If it’s not uniform, the shape will be distorted. Adhesion to the container and maybe Van der Waals forces are going to play havoc with good shaping.",
"parent_id": "8134780",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134833",
"author": "Winchell Chung",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T16:14:33",
"content": "That spinning mercury mirror telescope was featured in a 1934 pulp scfi story “Old Faithful” by Raymond Z. Gallunhttp://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=994",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134955",
"author": "prfesser",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T21:45:10",
"content": "I think the idea was described and tested with mercury in the early 20th century. Check “Amateur Telescope Making” by Ingalls. It didn’t work very well then, either. A good telescope mirror is accurate to at least 1/8 wavelength of sodium light, or 70-odd nanometers. Vibrations alone ruin the image.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135293",
"author": "jordi",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T17:36:22",
"content": "I wonder if the surface imperfections might also be a result of slight vibrations from the motor and the mounting of the spinning container used. It might be an interesting idea to use an old record player for spinning instead, those were manufactured for a pretty smooth turning process in order to keep audio playing perfectly.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136188",
"author": "synch",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T10:50:23",
"content": "Anyone tried using UV-setting resin ? Eg as used in 3d printing … the rotating liquid would form the surface,which is then hit with UV light and solidifies. Maybe repeated, so that the final surface is just a thin filmon top of a bulk support.In fact just dipping something into acrylic resin monomer and letting it drain should leave a glossy surface as it polymerizes, as in glossy clear polyester lacquers. Not near optical-mirror quality I guess.Kind of ironic, tin was used as mirrors way back (as alloy with copper, speculum metal) , but it tarnished a lot.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,526.625235
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/02/the-keyboard-sinclair-never-made/
|
The Keyboard Sinclair Never Made
|
Heidi Ulrich
|
[
"classic hacks",
"PCB Hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] |
[
"keyboard",
"keycap",
"pcb",
"sinclair",
"spacebar",
"ZX Spectrum"
] |
For those of us who’ve spent far too long hammering rubber keys into submission, a glorious solution has arrived. [Lee Smith] designed
the ZX Mechtrum Deluxe
, the ultimate keyboard upgrade for your beloved ZX Spectrum 48k. Thanks to [morefunmakingit], you can see this build-it-yourself mechanical mod below. It finally brings a proper spacebar and Spectrum-themed Wraith
keycaps
into your retro life.
The Metrum Deluxe is a full PCB redesign: no reused matrices or clunky membrane adapters here. [Lee Smith] got fed up with people (read: the community, plus one very persistent YouTuber) asking for a better typing experience, so he delivered. Wraith keycaps from AliExpress echo the original token commands and BASIC vibe, without going full collector-crazy. Best of all:
the files are open
. You can download the case on Printables and order the PCB through JLCPCB. Cherry on top (pun intended): you’ll finally have a spacebar your thumbs can be proud of.
So whether you’re into Frankenstein rigs or just want your
Spectrum
to stop feeling like an air mattress, check this video out.
Build files
and link to the keycaps can be found on Youtube, below the video.
Tip: if you foster a secret love for keyboards, don’t miss the
Keebin’ with Kristina’s series
on all sorts of keyboards.
| 21
| 7
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134676",
"author": "Nikolai",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T07:50:38",
"content": "In Russia a lot of ZX clones were made with mechanical keyboard. All kind of types. I was making ZX keyboards from almost scratch.“Robik” for examplehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLevYmtCUXQ",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134884",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T18:42:26",
"content": "Iron Curtain ZX clones are something that always fascinated me.",
"parent_id": "8134676",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134677",
"author": "Nikolai",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T07:52:36",
"content": "Here is more about ZX Keyboard modes",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134679",
"author": "Nikolai",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T07:52:54",
"content": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THPOfLKUfSg",
"parent_id": "8134677",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134947",
"author": "ErnieM",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T21:28:40",
"content": "Back in that day I took a surplus Cherry keyboard I got for free, hacked off all the PCB traces on the back, soldered on wire wrapping pins, and hand wrapped a keyboard for my Sinclair.Good times. Built an EEPROM programer onto it to bootstrap a Z80 controller I built.",
"parent_id": "8134677",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134693",
"author": "irox",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T08:44:02",
"content": "I am surprised the Spectrum +2 wasn’t mentioned. Although it was an Amstrad era computer it was still Sinclair ZX Spectrum branded (with 128KB and a built in tape deck):https://retrorepairsandrefurbs.com/2021/07/07/sinclair-zx-spectrum-128k2-grey-restoration/As for the non-rubbery factory Spectrum keyboard, I really liked the keyboard on the Spectrum+:https://oldcrap.org/2018/02/04/zx-spectrum/#google_vignette",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134702",
"author": "Vik Olliver",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T09:10:49",
"content": "I worked at Amstrad on the CPC/PC/PCW and Sinclair stuff. We did at one point make a “proper” keyboard for the CPC. When we user-tested it though it turned out most people preferred the standard CPC keyboard so it got dropped. The CPC amd PCW keyboards were the best membrane keyboards I’ve ever seen. No idea why the Amstrad-made Spectrum+ ones retained the “dead cat” feel of the Sinclair originals. Misguided brand identity perhaps?",
"parent_id": "8134693",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135012",
"author": "irox",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T01:06:54",
"content": "Awesome! Thanks for sharing. Amstrad keyboards seemed well a head of game for the era. I even took secretarial studies in high school just because they had started trading typewriters for Amstrad PCWs. Anything to get access to computers back then!",
"parent_id": "8134702",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8137148",
"author": "Stergios",
"timestamp": "2025-06-09T23:57:32",
"content": "Thank you for sharing! Any more “war” stories from the spectrum / cpc eras that you may have are more than welcome!",
"parent_id": "8134702",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134730",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T10:32:22",
"content": "I did prefer ZX81. More eye-friendly. Also felt more like a good microcontroller than a bad homecomputer.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134886",
"author": "OH3MVV",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T18:46:24",
"content": "My first computer. Basic was nice, but memory so limited that it encouraged me to learn machine code. Not a bad thing. I did make a 10 kB RAM add-on as soon as I had enough money to buy 10 1kB RAM chips and a 74154 for address decoding. Was very pissed off when after a few months I found 2 kB RAM’s for sale at lower price than what I did pay for the 1 kB ones. :)",
"parent_id": "8134730",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134782",
"author": "The Solutor",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T14:04:57",
"content": "Nice work, but I think the Spectrum lose its soul with a “proper” keyboard.Unkle Clive solved the problem of typing with the incredibly smart combination of control keys and autocompletion of the commands, iven BASIC and few direct commands was all you have to type there, it was more than enough for the task.I’m one of the ZX users who “upgraded” the little gem with the Plus keyboard when was released (it was officially available, not just a spare part) and I wasn’t that happy either.The QL was different, it was a different machine, with a different aim, there the upgraded keyboard (likely the first rubber dome keyboard ever) made perfect sense.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134812",
"author": "Alphatek",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T15:40:45",
"content": "I was always led to believe that the point of all the commands was so that there didn’t need to be a tokeniser in the basic, as the user effectively entered the tokens directly.",
"parent_id": "8134782",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134864",
"author": "The Solutor",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T17:33:35",
"content": "Possible.But whatever the reason is, the result is that typing code on the Spectrum was definitely fast.We used to mock the unlucky owners of a Commodore something because this (and another long string of reasons :D )",
"parent_id": "8134812",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134875",
"author": "Bastet",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T18:05:03",
"content": "Ah, the good old sixteen shades of brown versus no sound argument. At least we had a floppy, even if it was slow as molasses with the original DOS. ;)And having used both i do prefer the full screen editor of CBM BASIC, even if V2.0 is lacking. That whole machine was, in true Tramiel fashion, cobbled together in a few months with the PET as a base, and in spite of that it ruled the German market. Even getting the fame of being the first computer sold at frigging Aldi of all places.And when i look at the games library, not much to see for an RPG fan on the Speccy. Couldn’t imagine playing Ultima, Might and Magic, TRS/SSI Goldbox DnD or Wizardry from tape. It could most certainly have pulled them off, if it had a disk drive.Yes, the last horray of the Spectrums had one, but that was more or less at the end of its lifetime. And with that ghastly 3″ drive no one really liked.",
"parent_id": "8134864",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134950",
"author": "The Solutor",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T21:40:40",
"content": "Eh, good times… :)But jokes aside, for me the Spectrum v.s. C64 was the perfect example of the European V.S. Americans way of doing things.Smarter v.s. stronger, larger, heavier.A Chevrolet Corvette is surely a more powerful car than, say, a Morris Mini (just to mention something from the UK) but then the Mini is probably a funnier car to drive, and almost surely it will win in a chase or a mountain road or inside a busy town.Is that enough to define the Mini a better car?Well that’s personal. And personally I would buy a Mini over a Corvette w/o thinking twice (no matter the money involved), others would think differently. Indeed both the cars sold well, just like the C64 and the ZX",
"parent_id": "8134875",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135026",
"author": "Christian",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T02:06:07",
"content": "The worst crappy keyboard, that ships with a refurbished Amazon machine today, is better than any of those Commodore or Sinclair abominations. Just by virtue of having 4 keys dedicated to move the cursor around.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135402",
"author": "The Solutor",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T21:50:21",
"content": "I tell you a secret, there was no cursor to move around on the Spectrum and most of computer of it’s era.Even on professional world cursors were a sort of luxury.Just learn to use “vi”, ask yourself why the cursor is moved using H,J,K,L, when you find the answer, come back and post a smarter message, at least try :)",
"parent_id": "8135026",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136468",
"author": "Pls research next time",
"timestamp": "2025-06-08T10:19:11",
"content": "CAPS + 5,6,7,85 left6 down7 up8 right128K and even 48K BASIC modes had a cursor.So much wrongs…",
"parent_id": "8135402",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8137149",
"author": "Stergios",
"timestamp": "2025-06-10T00:02:41",
"content": "I’m loving the wraith keycaps, I have them on one of my keychron keyboards, but notice that they are not really usable for an actual ZX spectrum keyboard because they only have legends for the info that was on the keys and not just above and below the keys on the original ZX spectrum 48k. For example, the legends on “A” are A, STOP and NEW, missing the “READ” and “~” functions on the original keyboard.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8138275",
"author": "Stuart",
"timestamp": "2025-06-12T19:43:09",
"content": "Oh, that’s unfortunate…",
"parent_id": "8137149",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,526.558608
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/02/the-1972-intercal-compiler-revealed/
|
The 1972 INTERCAL Compiler Revealed
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Retrocomputing",
"Software Development"
] |
[
"INTERCAL",
"SNOBOL",
"SPITBOL"
] |
Have you ever heard of INTERCAL? If you haven’t, don’t feel bad. This relatively obscure language dates back to 1972 with the goal of being difficult to read and write. It is the intellectual parent of systems like brainf**k and other bad languages. Now, you can read the
INTERCAL-72 source code
thanks to a found printout. It will help if you can read SPITBOL, another obscure language that is a compiled version of SNOBOL (which is like an old-fashioned non-Unix awk program).
How strange it INTERCAL? Well, one of the statements is PLEASE. If you don’t use it enough, you’ll offend the interpreter, who will then ignore your program. But if you use it too much, then you are a suck up and, therefore, your program will be ignored again. If you think GOTO is a bad idea, you’ll just hate COME FROM, although that was from a later version of INTERCAL.
Here’s the example program from the user’s manual:
1 DO (5) NEXT
2 (5) DO FORGET #1
3 PLEASE WRITE IN :1
4 DO .1 <- ’V-":1~’#32768c/#0’"c/#1’~#3
5 DO (1) NEXT
6 DO :1 <- "’V-":1~’#65535c/#0’"c/#65535’
7 ~’#0c/#65535’"c/"’V-":1~’#0c/#65535’"
c
8 /#65535’~’#0c/#65535’"
9 DO :2 <- #1
10 PLEASE DO (4) NEXT
11 (4) DO FORGET #1
12 DO .1 <- "V-’:1~:2’c/#1"~#3
13 DO :1 <- "’V-":1~’#65535c/#0’"c/":2~’#65535
1
c
14 /#0’"’~’#0c/#65535’"c/"’V-":1~’#0
c
15 /#65535’"c/":2~’#0c/#65535’"’~’#0c/#65535’"
16 DO (1) NEXT
17 DO :2 <- ":2~’#0c/#65535’"
c
18 /"’":2~’#65535c/#0’"c/#0’~’#32767c/#1’"
19 DO (4) NEXT
20 (2) DO RESUME .1
21 (1) PLEASE DO (2) NEXT
22 PLEASE FORGET #1
23 DO READ OUT :1
24 PLEASE DO .1 <- ’V-"’:1~:1’~#1"c/#1’~#3
25 DO (3) NEXT
26 PLEASE DO (5) NEXT
27 (3) DO (2) NEXT
28 PLEASE GIVE UP
Interestingly, you can get SPITBOL for modern systems, so it is entirely possible to run this version of INTERCAL on a modern machine. Why? That’s for you to answer.
The heart of it all is on
GitHub
. You’ll also find links to the manual should you attempt to use it. We’ve looked at
INTERCAL
and other similar languages before. However, you are free to write unreadable code
in a more conventional language
.
| 19
| 11
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134607",
"author": "alloydog",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T02:05:29",
"content": "No “THANK YOU” statement to end the programme run?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134674",
"author": "Greg Mathews",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T07:50:09",
"content": "Maybe it uses the F-variant, said in Van Darkholme’s melodic voice.",
"parent_id": "8134607",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134611",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T02:32:28",
"content": "I didn’t know interracial compilers were legal in 1972!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135015",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T01:12:13",
"content": "Sigmund Freud would like a word with you and a copy of your browser history",
"parent_id": "8134611",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134614",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T02:45:04",
"content": "Please HAL, please………..Handle pulls…… whoosh down the interdimensional toilet bowl.Starting to sound familiar.Snowbowl was a brand of toilet cleaner.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134619",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T03:31:58",
"content": "COME FROM … AWAY???",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134633",
"author": "Mr. Bill",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T04:55:39",
"content": "Ah yes, the famous song from Styx.",
"parent_id": "8134619",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134620",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T03:35:26",
"content": "Is there a FORCE, APOLOGIZE or REGRET statement?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134641",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T05:24:33",
"content": "A good example of how you should NOT design a programming language.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134643",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T05:28:47",
"content": "It’s more consistent or consequent than C++ though. ;)",
"parent_id": "8134641",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134918",
"author": "Gösta",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:08:08",
"content": "Haha :-D Indeed.",
"parent_id": "8134643",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134689",
"author": "X-MarX-THX-SpXt",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T08:32:06",
"content": "“28 PLEASE GIVE UP”That is the only thing that is easy AND readable to me.And i already do it all the time!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134760",
"author": "jawnhenry",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T12:42:14",
"content": "“…being difficult to read and write…”Compared toAPL, which requires a special keyboard because of its arcane characters (ANDa specialized monitor for display), this language is a breeze; a ‘walk in the park’.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134837",
"author": "D",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T16:21:34",
"content": "Naw, you could do APL on an ADM3A..ro for rho, ^ for take, .da for drop, .so for jot dot, …",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134898",
"author": "jawnhenry",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T19:31:34",
"content": "Assumingyou spent enough time with the language, the documentation, and the non-APL keyboard to becomesomewhatproficient at memorizing and utilizing the proper keystroke substitutions…how does one “do” APL without an ‘APL-aware’ monitor?Didn’t realize the ADM3A was that smart.",
"parent_id": "8134837",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135118",
"author": "D",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T07:54:29",
"content": "The escapes were the same on the way out (on the screen) as they were on the way in (through the keyboard): the ADM3A didn’t have to be smart to do that.",
"parent_id": "8134898",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135169",
"author": "Biotronic",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T11:36:57",
"content": "Rho, rho, rho of XAlways equals 1Rho is dimensionRho rho rankAPL is fun!",
"parent_id": "8134837",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134961",
"author": "Warringer",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T21:54:26",
"content": "Sean Hess over at the Advent of Computing Podcast has an indepth view of the INTERCAL 73 compiler in the latest episode of the Podcast. Mainly because he is the main force behind getting it running on more modern machnes.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135170",
"author": "Biotronic",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T11:38:23",
"content": "I think you’re missing out by not explaining the meaning of INTERCAL’s name, btw. For those wondering, it stands for Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym, of course.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,527.213223
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/02/planetary-poetry-with-a-tiny-digital-core/
|
Planetary Poetry With A Tiny Digital Core
|
Heidi Ulrich
|
[
"classic hacks",
"Misc Hacks",
"Multitouch Hacks",
"Toy Hacks"
] |
[
"3d print",
"clockwork",
"ESP32",
"moon",
"orrery",
"planetarium",
"reed switch"
] |
Some hacks just tickle the brain in a very particular way. They’re, for a change, not overly engineered; they’re just elegant, anachronistic, and full of mischief. That’s exactly what [Frans] pulls off with
A Gentleman’s Orrery
, a tiny, simple clockwork solar system. Composed of shiny brass and the poise of 18th-century craftsmanship, it hides a modern secret: there’s barely any clockwork inside.
You can build it yourself
.
Peek behind the polished face and you’ll find a mechanical sleight of hand. This isn’t your grandfather’s gear-laden
planetarium
. Instead of that, it operates on a pared-down system that relies on a stepper motor, driving planetary movement through a 0.8 mm axle nested inside a 1 mm brass tube. That micro-mechanical coupling, aided by a couple of bevel gears, manages
to rotate the Moon just right
, including its orientation. Most of the movement relies on clever design, not gear cascades. The real wizardry happens under the hood: a 3D-printed chassis cradles an ESP32-C6, a
TTP223
capacitive touch module, STSPIN220 driver, and even
a reed switch
with magnetic charging.
You can even swap out the brass for a stone shell where the full moon acts as the touch control. It’s tactile, it’s poetic, and therefore, a nice hack for a weekend project. To build it yourself,
read [Frans]’ Instructable
.
| 7
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134581",
"author": "Will Belden",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T23:42:36",
"content": "How long do you have to spin it before a months-long total blackout?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134599",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T01:10:02",
"content": "Frans’s orreries seem very popular here…https://hackaday.com/2023/09/09/ceiling-mounted-orrery-is-an-excercise-in-simplicity/https://hackaday.com/2023/05/09/tiny-orrery-keeps-the-planets-in-their-places/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134690",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T08:32:51",
"content": "Absolutely beautiful!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134867",
"author": "make piece not war",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T17:48:55",
"content": "That’s a combination lock inside out.Aaand I bet that the operating sound will be featured in a next “Whats that Sound”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134883",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T18:39:12",
"content": "Wow, that is an amazing work of craftsmanship. And I thought an orrery was just a brothel.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134946",
"author": "Jason",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T21:21:12",
"content": "I thought a planetarium was something else. Did you mean an orrery?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135116",
"author": "illusionmanager",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T07:52:55",
"content": "Every orrery is a planetarium, although nowadays the name planetarium is more associated with a dome and (digital) projectors. I call my mechanism a planet spinner. An orrery (every?) shows the relative speed of motion of the planets. When the planet spinner stops moving, it looks like an orrery, but unlike an orrery it shows the correct orientation of the planets.",
"parent_id": "8134946",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,527.106331
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/02/3d-printing-a-capable-rc-car/
|
3D Printing A Capable RC Car
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"3d Printer hacks"
] |
[
"3d printer",
"ESP32",
"R/C car",
"radio control"
] |
You can buy all sorts of RC cars off the shelf, but doing so won’t teach you a whole lot. Alternatively, you could follow [TRDB]’s example,
and design your own from scratch.
The Lizard, as it is known, is a fun little RC car. It’s got a vaguely Formula 1-inspired aesthetic, and looks fetching with the aid of two-tone 3D printed parts. It’s designed for speed and handling, with a rear-wheel-drive layout and sprung suspension at all four corners to soak up the bumps. The majority of the vehicle is 3D printed in PETG, including the body and the gearbox and differential. However, some suspension components are made in TPU for greater flexibility and resistance to impact. [TRDB] specified commercial off-the-shelf wheels to provide good grip that couldn’t easily be achieved with 3D-printed tires. An ESP32 is responsible for receiving commands from [TRDB’s] custom RC controller running the same microcontroller. It sends commands to the speed controller that runs the Lizard’s brushed DC motor from a 3S lithium-polymer battery.
The final product looks sleek and handles well. It also achieved a GPS-verified top speed of 48 km/h as per [TRDB’s] testing. We’ve seen some other great DIY RC cars over the years, too, like this example
that focuses on performance fundamentals
. Video after the break.
| 6
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134588",
"author": "Mr Name Required",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T23:51:46",
"content": "Nice design. I wonder if the builder is aware of the OpenRC project, which encompasses many builds similar to this:https://www.thingiverse.com/search?q=OpenRC",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134793",
"author": "Piotrsko",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T14:47:42",
"content": "I have a brick wall that disagrees about the indestructible comment",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135084",
"author": "bmackneypublic",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T05:52:18",
"content": "Speed is largely just a function of the electronic components you choose to put in it and how big a space you have to drive where you’re not going to explode a pedestrian’s ankle.Anyway, I don’t think anyone’s positing that this is some record-breaking car. As with most 3D printed anything, the point of it is the self-sufficiency and the accomplishment of doing it yourself. It’s not really about driving the car, it’s about having gone through the whole design process and being able to continue to modify it and experiment.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135203",
"author": "Shane",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T13:43:42",
"content": "after market suspension arms, diffs ,oil shocks . A brushless motor and esc . And ya got a winner",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135360",
"author": "Zero",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T20:08:34",
"content": "Not to step on your toes, but that is not really the goal of a 3d printed rc car predilecto. The idea is to have fun with 3d printing and maybe learn something about printing orientation toughness of materials while getting a fun little experience. Also before you say I have no clue, I enjoy rc drifting Wiz a reveD rdx chassis, so I do very much understand the limitations of such a 3d printed car.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136036",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T18:24:03",
"content": "Options for a brushless motor and using an existing RC control (some folks prefer the wheel-type controllers) might be nice.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,527.254959
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/02/ender-3-pro-gets-a-second-job-as-a-stator-winder/
|
Ender 3 Pro Gets A Second Job As A Stator Winder
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"3d Printer hacks"
] |
[
"3d printer",
"coil",
"coil winder",
"coils",
"ender 3 pro",
"stator",
"winding"
] |
Sometimes, you find yourself in need of a coil. You could sit around winding thousands of turns of copper wire yourself, but that would be remarkably tedious. Thus, instead, you might follow the example of [OJengineering] and choose to get a machine to do it for you.
This build first popped up on on Reddit, with [OJengineering] explaining that
they had repurposed an Ender 3 Pro 3D printer to wind a stator for them
. The reasoning was sound—a replacement stator for their motorcycle cost $1000 in their local area, so rewinding their own would be much cheaper. The idea was straightforward enough—the 3D printer was a capable motion control platform that really just needed to be retooled to drag wire around instead of squirting hot plastic.
In a later update,
they explained that they had created a Python program that spits out appropriate stator winding G-code from user-entered parameters. This G-code commands the 3D printer’s head to make rectangle winds around the stator core while moving up and down to appropriately distribute the wire. The device can be seen in action in a video on YouTube.
It’s a hacky build, but one that does nevertheless get the winding done. That’s the thing about 3D printers—they’re really just simple motion systems that can do whatever you tell them. You just need a way to generate the right G-code to do the job.
We’ve featured
some other nifty coil winders before
, too. Video after the break.
[Thanks to JohnU for the tip!]
| 10
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134518",
"author": "henningdkf29543cc0f",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T19:29:48",
"content": "Neat tool.First thought was “A printer does not have the force to do this.”, but then the video shows the low current charge coil for a CDI.Second was 1000$? With tax and all, something similar for both current and older machines is 300-400euro for OEM here, så I wonder what make&model this is. The linked article does not seem to mention.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134568",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T22:55:53",
"content": "Probably just got unlucky with the draw.. Some bikes have cheap stators, some have really expensive ones. Kinda depends on how many they made and whether any manufacturers still bother to produce them",
"parent_id": "8134518",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134530",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T20:04:58",
"content": "Well then… also possible must be all sorts of motors, generators, pickups and transformers. Just think of the cost or simple unavailability of custom transformers for repairing antique radios or other electronics. I suppose one would have to have a form that can be opened on one end and then closed after winding or else hack one apart to make it so…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134572",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T23:05:24",
"content": "All it needs is one more NEMA motor and driver for an extra axis, so it can switch from one winding to the next by itself… I’m sure that’s next in the works, if they already bothered to develop all this hardware and software",
"parent_id": "8134530",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134534",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T20:10:26",
"content": "Shenanigans!He has used a mill to cut clearance for his coil winder in the two adjacent pole cores!He also appears to have cut the ends off all but the core he is rewinding.He also also is winding the coil heavy on the bottom, with wide inconsistent spacing.tis clickbait.Use the 3d printer to make an end on coil winder.Buy the screw and motor, maybe the gears.Bend a metal feed tube, what he is missing.Never get consistent bend in the air.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134566",
"author": "macsimki",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T22:42:29",
"content": "well…if you look closely you see that the stator is different around the pole core he is winding. the base is flat, not curved. the two posts next to it are covered with a brownish goo, just like the rest of the poles and never contained a foil. it almost looks like the stator has different windings for different purposes, like ignition and lights.and yes, i hate clickbait too",
"parent_id": "8134534",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134654",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T05:53:23",
"content": "Yeah, looks like it’s pretty common to have a separate ignition coil with more windings and thinner wirehttps://image.made-in-china.com/202f0j00YyWaLudKCEbs/Cg125-Motorcycle-Stator-Coil-Ignition-Coil.jpgThe winding results don’t seem perfect but will probably work ok.",
"parent_id": "8134566",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134825",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T16:00:47",
"content": "The flat part has marks from the endmill.Looks like he did it with a manual machine, a dull endmill and didn’t have good speed control with his hand.Compression artifacts make the surface finish hard to see though.",
"parent_id": "8134566",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134605",
"author": "Christian",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T02:04:41",
"content": "This guy, pgus –https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rmAHlxA6Kw, 4 years ago.Maybe trading a lot of speed for control? Setting up a factory style winder probably burns through a hobbyist budget in the first few minutes.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134846",
"author": "G-man",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T16:40:12",
"content": "Go to a breakers and $1000 would replace an entire engine on most bikes.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,527.156976
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/02/keebin-with-kristina-the-one-with-the-h-r-giger-keyboard/
|
Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The H.R. Giger Keyboard
|
Kristina Panos
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Slider"
] |
[
"book typewriter",
"cherry",
"cherry mx",
"electromagnetic field",
"Elliot-Fisher book typewriter",
"inductive switch",
"industrial design",
"lego",
"LEGO tenting",
"serenity now",
"tenting"
] |
I had to bust out
Brain Salad Surgery
to write this one, folks. It was that, or put on some Ministry or something.
Just look at all the industrial-ness dripping from [heinn_dev]’s creation
.
Image by [heinn_dev] via
reddit
Apparently [heinn_dev] wasn’t completely satisfied with his Chocofi case, and instead of requesting a full refund, just went ahead and made a prettier one. It took a lot of printing and even more sanding, but here we are. And it looks fantastic.
The only downside, if you can call it one, is that adjusting the tenting is a slow operatiJKon. But then again that’s one of those things that you usually set and forget.
Oh, and those keycaps are printed, too. As one commenter said, those homing nipples look painful, but I think it’s part of the charm. I just hope that hand grime doesn’t end up clogging the holes under the palm area. Clean your keyboards, people.
Serenity Now!
Image by [MKBR] via
reddit
Maybe it’s the marshmallow keycaps, or the dreamy-white exposed dual trackballs, but I really dig
the Serenity from [MKBR]
. Is it endgame? Time will tell.
This is a 4-, 5-, or 6-column Corne layout, which is achieved with breakaway tabs on the PCBs. It uses an integrated RP2040 programmed with QMK/Vial and has hot-swappable MX switches.
Curious about the trackballs? I was, too — the left one is for scrolling, while the right is for regular trackballing around the screen.
The fact that it took around 85 tries to get AI to generate a good image for the back sounds about right, and looks to me like it was worth it. Go check it out in the gallery.
[MKBR] is a custom builder who has recently made a number of dystopian-themed boards
, and although they’re all quite nice, Serenity is a refreshing alternative.
The Centerfold: LEGO My Tenting Setup
Image by [koehr] via
reddit
Tenting is such a personal thing, and getting just the right angle can take some doing.
So why not give it a go with LEGO?
That’s what [koehr] did, inspired by [spiritual-toe-2025]
who did something similar
about a week and a half ago.
So anyway, this is [koehr]’s Sofle RGB Choc, which has — you guessed it — Kailh choc switches. One of [koehr]’s priorities is to have the halves locked in place, which is easily achievable with bricks. Check out the third picture in the gallery and you’ll see a gap which allows the keyboard’s outer edges to rest on that cool desk mat.
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: Elliot-Fisher Book Typewriter
When we think of typewriters, no matter the type, we usually envision a single sheet of substrate moving through it, and usually against a platen.
Image via
Museums Victoria Collections
Well, what if you needed to type in a ledger or other sort of already-bound book? Then you’d need a different beast entirely.
You’d need the Elliot-Fisher Book Typewriter
.
This machine debuted in 1903, although the design originated with the Elliot-Hatch Company around 1897. Unlike a traditional typewriter where the paper moves past a fixed point, the paper here is fixed, and the point of printing moves.
How is this done? With a set of rails. The typing mechanism moved along these rails to be positioned over the paper, effectively plotting the type. The typebars themselves were arranged vertically in a typebasket under the keyboard, and they rotated downward in order to strike the ribbon and paper.
As one typed, the entire keyboard and typebasket advanced along the rails. To do the next line, the machine move along another set of Y rails at right angles to the X rails. It’s unclear to me whether the book was fed through somehow, or one simply hefted the machine on top of it.
Finally, Cherry Unveils New Switches, Technology
Image by Cherry via
Tom’s Hardware
At Computex 2025,
Cherry announced “a bold new chapter” and debuted a total of four new switches
: the IK, MX Honey, MX Blossom, and MX Falcon.
First and foremost is the new IK inductive switch, which uses their patented inductive sensing technology. Basically, it uses electromagnetic field detection and allows for contactless actuation, which means no mechanical wear, “even after millions of keystrokes”.
These IK switches are touted to consume 50% less power than standard magnetic switches and only 5% of the power that Hall-effect switches use. If that’s not enough for you, these IK switches have RGB and customizable actuation. They come out in Fall 2025.
Can’t wait for the IK switches? The MX Honey comes out in June and is Cherry’s first silent tactile MX switch, which sounds interesting (or doesn’t, I suppose). They allegedly have a newfangled spring and are pre-lubed at the factory.
Also coming in June is the Cherry MX Blossom, which will be their lightest linear switch ever with an actuation force of 35 cN. Finally, my favorite — the Cherry MX Falcon — will come out next month as well. This one is a tactile switch inspired by the community, and is reportedly for heavy typists and enthusiasts. It’s got a long-pole stem and has a sharper bottom-out and a richer sound. All three MX switches should be available as 36-switch kits soon. I can’t wait to get some!
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
.
| 19
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134474",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T17:26:17",
"content": "Can someone tell me why many of these split and/or “wavy” keyboards don’t have arrow keys? (Apart ftom many of those photoed not having any key cap legends at all, it is clear there is usually not enough keys for 4 arrows).I can’t edit text, whether writing or programming, without arrows, or is that just me?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134481",
"author": "RunnerPack",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T17:43:02",
"content": "Not a minimalist KB enthusiast, but I gather that things like that are put on “layers” that are swapped in and out using special keystroke macros. So, some other set of keys become arrows, then go back to being, idk, WASD or something.",
"parent_id": "8134474",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134492",
"author": "Pedro",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T18:16:33",
"content": "Arrows are not used in Vim, I doubt you actually do any coding because you sound like a true noob.",
"parent_id": "8134474",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134523",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T19:49:53",
"content": "a. this is not trueb. don’t be such a huge dick dudec. I’m not going to report your post which is pointless anyway, let you be you! Chinga con Dios!",
"parent_id": "8134492",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134542",
"author": "pigster",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T20:34:45",
"content": "And you probably don’t even know why arrows are not used in vim (hint: because they were not used in vi either) (second hint: that reason is totally moot now)",
"parent_id": "8134492",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135285",
"author": "Harry Dean",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T17:23:07",
"content": "Of course arrow keys are used in vim, if you want to use them that is. You can use whatever you like in vim, its customisability is one of its main features.",
"parent_id": "8134492",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134516",
"author": "X-MarX-THX-SpXt",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T19:25:09",
"content": "Arrows are for archers.But seriously: Usually one of the keys near your thumb is a “function layer” key (the others are space, “options” or any other macro).Pretty easy to memorize them. Especially if you ever learned stenography.",
"parent_id": "8134474",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134613",
"author": "ManInVan",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T02:37:23",
"content": "These 40% and 60% keyboards rely on layers for the extra keys. This is an advantage as you do not need to move your fingers far from the home keys, reducing reach, and improving typing speed.Any designated key held can move you to a symbol or cursor layer. you don’t jsut need your thumb to do itAnd no-one needs letters/legends on a keyboard. The keys are always in the same place :-p",
"parent_id": "8134474",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135186",
"author": "michael",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T12:39:46",
"content": "I have done some 40% keyboards with arrows on the first layer (Orthogonal). It is possible. Some other special characters have to move into a layer for it.",
"parent_id": "8134613",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134628",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T04:33:46",
"content": "cause most of these designs have not left the 70’s",
"parent_id": "8134474",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134520",
"author": "X-MarX-THX-SpXt",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T19:39:10",
"content": "“it uses electromagnetic field detection and allows for contactless actuation”So… I don’t need to even touch it? I type in the air above it?Or am I missing something?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134555",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T21:33:37",
"content": "I believe the contact that is omitted is of the electrical variety.You still actuate the switch by moving something your finger and yet somehow the switch, or a circuit attached to the switch, knows that you have done so without the use of either an electrical contact or a magnet. I would guess it’s electronically sensitive to the compression of the metal spring.",
"parent_id": "8134520",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134738",
"author": "frenchone",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T11:04:47",
"content": "Don’t get it. Which one is supposed to be about H.R. Giger ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134929",
"author": "X-MarX-THX-SpXt",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:29:28",
"content": "Elliot-Fisher Book TypewriterBecause of how spo0ky it looks.",
"parent_id": "8134738",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135187",
"author": "michael",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T12:41:37",
"content": "I think she means the first one, but for Giger to less bones.",
"parent_id": "8134738",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134856",
"author": "RunnerPack",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T17:12:58",
"content": "Unless they’re filled with lead, I feel like I’d be constantly knocking those trackballs out of their almost nonexistent sockets.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134878",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T18:20:49",
"content": "Maybe magnets might manage.",
"parent_id": "8134856",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135220",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T14:32:16",
"content": "They admit to that being a possible problem and have a solution being worked on.https://imgur.com/gallery/serenity-ball-holder-update-j7jZMlf",
"parent_id": "8134856",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135172",
"author": "mobby",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T11:50:20",
"content": "I still day dream about having a split keyboard on my laptop.Maybe one that raises mechanically with the help of a slider button",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,527.319438
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/02/what-use-is-an-original-raspberry-pi/
|
What Use Is An Original Raspberry Pi?
|
Jenny List
|
[
"Raspberry Pi"
] |
[
"32-bit",
"Pi 1",
"Raspberry Pi 1"
] |
Almost uniquely among consumer grade computer manufacturers, the Raspberry Pi folks still support their earliest boards. We’re guessing that’s in part due to the much more recent Pi Zero using the same 32-bit system-on-chip, but it’s still impressive that a 13-year-old single board computer still has manufacturer OS support. With so many of these early boards out there, is there much you can do with them in 2025? [Jeff Geerling]
gives it a try
.
His test Pi is unusual in itself, the 2013 blue special edition that RS gave away in a social media promotion. Sadly we didn’t win one back in the day and neither did he, so he picked it up in an online auction. We’re treated to some very slow desktop exploration, but it’s clear that this is not where the strengths of a Pi 1 lie. It was reckoned at the time to be roughly equivalent to a Pentium II or Pentium III in PC terms, so that shouldn’t be a surprise. Instead he concludes that it’s better as a headless machine, though he notes how projects are starting to abandon 32 bit builds. The full video is below the break.
We asked the same question not so long ago,
and the Hackaday Pi 1 now quietly
analyses news content
on its two-watt power budget. It’s still a useful little Linux box for your script-based projects even if it will never win any speed prizes.
| 53
| 25
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134456",
"author": "REALiAM",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T16:21:12",
"content": "Did this myself just two weeks ago, pihole on a rpi 1. still running great, had it in docker but kept having issues and kids nowadays can’t function without internet access…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134488",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T18:03:34",
"content": "The USB ports and 10/100 Mbit/sec network port share the one one only USB 2.0 High Speed port on the SoC. So you are limited to 100 Mbit in theory. I guess a lot depends on your ISP, but mine offer nearly two orders of magnitude higher than that. So using a RPi1 or even a RPi5 is not an optimal solution for some.",
"parent_id": "8134456",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134493",
"author": "Dare",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T18:17:58",
"content": "Isn’t Pi-Hole only replacing the DNS server, so the actual data flows on faster paths?",
"parent_id": "8134488",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134500",
"author": "Christopher",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T18:27:32",
"content": "Should be fine for a pure DNS server, not like you need a bunch of bandwidth for that.",
"parent_id": "8134488",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134502",
"author": "JB",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T18:37:48",
"content": "Yeah, that’s exactly why I have a couple of Pis lying about here. Limited bandwidth.Now, I’ve found them excellent for running Node Red for some home automation stuff, so they have their use, but being limited to <100Mb/s almost immediately rules them out for lots of things.Oh, and the SOC having no AES decoding built in ruins a lot of low end VPN type stuff, but the bandwidth kinda kills that anyway.",
"parent_id": "8134488",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134508",
"author": "KenN",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T19:09:35",
"content": "I’ve had an older rPi running headless with an MQTT server. It’s been fine as a home automation server and IoT test server.",
"parent_id": "8134502",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134528",
"author": "JB",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T20:03:26",
"content": "Oh yeah, all that Node Red stuff is MQTT orientated, Original Pi is more than capable of handling all that.It actually grabs images from my CCTV cameras when someone pushes the doorbell, and this gets emailed to me, but that was pushing it quite a bit. I think I had to do a lot of FFMPEG wizardry to make that work without it taking forever.",
"parent_id": "8134508",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134504",
"author": "Ben",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T18:39:18",
"content": "I agree if it would be a router, but just serving DNS it should be sufficient.",
"parent_id": "8134488",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134507",
"author": "Gerhard",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T18:52:23",
"content": "I fully agree to that – PiHole (lokal DNS to block ads and trackers LAN-wide)is one of the use cases were the limited bandwith of the old PIs is not an issue.",
"parent_id": "8134504",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134736",
"author": "Edward",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T10:57:31",
"content": "How many DNS queries you have at home? I believe home users won’t see the actual difference for PiHole’s DNS replying speed.I don’t know how fast your home internet is, but mine is 10Gbps internet and Pi 1B is actually working OK, recently I changed to Pi3B just because SD card died and I am using USB stick to boot.",
"parent_id": "8134488",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134557",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T21:52:21",
"content": "Yup. Pi-hole.",
"parent_id": "8134456",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134457",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T16:33:29",
"content": "things don’t necessarily need current support…if you want to do 2013 tasks on a 2013 computer, just use 2013 software. for example, i recently installed debian woody under qemu just so i could build a kernel for a pc built in 2004. old computer tasks are so easy these days now that every pc is a supercomputer!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134461",
"author": "A",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T16:40:00",
"content": "…….provided it’s not connected to the internet",
"parent_id": "8134457",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134464",
"author": "darkspr1te",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T16:49:06",
"content": "yeah, I have a access point on old software so my aging mac’s with airport ppc can connect without issues.",
"parent_id": "8134461",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134466",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T16:52:53",
"content": "i did have to add KexAlgorithms +diffie-hellman-group1-sha1 and Ciphers +aes256-cbc to my ssh client to connect to such an old verison of ssh. for slightly more effort, i could have built a modern dropbear for the old target, which i happen to know is easy. and that old kernel did talk NFSv3 but i found it convenient to enable NFSv2 on my server as well. could conceivably have had to dust off openvpn or vtund — which both still work — since backporting wireguard to kernel 2.4.whatever would be a pain?apart from the browser, most internet stuff is really very simple and decently backwards-compatible.",
"parent_id": "8134461",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134470",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T17:14:04",
"content": "The issue is also that old packages aren’t getting security updates. So an old device can compromise the rest of your network.Even if the OS is getting updates, it’s not necessarily getting everything it needs, and the software isn’t necessarily on the latest versions.",
"parent_id": "8134466",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134471",
"author": "Ali",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T17:20:05",
"content": "Not an issue if R-Pi is behind router with NAT – any $5 used Netgear will do.",
"parent_id": "8134470",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134472",
"author": "darkspr1te",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T17:21:02",
"content": "yes, this odly enough is a worry i just ran into, I now know a separate network is only way forward to support the vintage system i recently setup",
"parent_id": "8134470",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134482",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T17:45:14",
"content": "Yeah, but modern systems/firmware updates also introduce new security holes that old systems didn’t have.MS-DOS and WfW 3.11 or OS/2 don’t have security holes that can be exploitated online.It’s all relative.",
"parent_id": "8134470",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134503",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T18:38:36",
"content": "heh i am halfway with Joshua on this one…my 20 year old PC has such an astonishing lack of attack surface area. in my daily use of it, i don’t really think there has been a new feature i care about in the last 20 years, but looking at an old computer really drives home the astonishing growth in the number of random services running and the integration between them that makes it hard to prune them down. most of my attack surface area on the old computer is in the kernel and i would definitely bet more on the very last 2.4 kernel than on the still-evolving 5.whatever or 6.whatever i’m using everywhere else.but really i mean yeah… i’m not putting this on the outside of my network, and i’m not adding its private keys to my .ssh/authorized_keys on my PCs that i care about. and if i ever land in the crosshairs of an advanced persistent threat, my security posture is that i will crumple before it. because i’m not delusional.",
"parent_id": "8134470",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134649",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T05:39:15",
"content": "I’ve gotten online on a pentium 1 running windows 95 within the past decade. It’s no big deal. Worrying about security wastes more time than going to the bank when someone steals my credit card info.",
"parent_id": "8134461",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134602",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T01:40:22",
"content": "There is current support. Run NetBSD on it.",
"parent_id": "8134457",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134462",
"author": "darkspr1te",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T16:44:10",
"content": "oldy enough where i live(africa) decided that grade 1 needs to be learning computers so i pulled out my collection of sbc’s and created a stems room at my local school , hard part was find free/cheap hdmi monitors /keyb/mouse compared to the computer itself as a cost. i already setup solar there, again the odd thing is the monitor takes most power compared to all other components as individual item. I also setup a iMac G5 PPC model with osX to last available edition plus fun software like civ 4, simcity, minecraft, but also ilife (garageband/imovie etc) and iWork and a few 2019 i7’s on win10 (slowest of the lot-even using winmini+nv970)i have a few gfx cards so i think i will also setup a i7+gfx steam box at the school too, i have a account i have collected many free games on and it also can family share still as it was linked a long time ago.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134499",
"author": "Albert",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T18:27:06",
"content": "Ubuntu is a linux designed for people in africa, you can download it for free and install on computer.",
"parent_id": "8134462",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134887",
"author": "Abraham",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T18:47:58",
"content": "Hey Albert, this is a very strong claim, do you have any evidence to back this claim?",
"parent_id": "8134499",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134995",
"author": "Gus A Mueller",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T00:24:41",
"content": "I think an iMac G5 might be the last thing (short of an Intel Pentium 4) that I would want to power with limited electricity provided by the sun.",
"parent_id": "8134462",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134467",
"author": "Clinton Johnson",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T16:58:21",
"content": "I have diet pi and mopidy running on an original pi. It’s perfect since I like using the ethernet for streaming from nfs and the web, more than enough to support a web server.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134468",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T17:04:08",
"content": "Thanks for the article… I think it is also supported by Ultibo as well if you don’t need a full Linux OS. Might have to dig out one of my original pi’s up again. First, run it with the ‘lite’ version of PI OS of course and then maybe a simple Ultibo project… Hmmm.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134469",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T17:14:00",
"content": "Hmmm, Ultibo doesn’t appear to support the BCM2835 chip… At least their wiki doesn’t list it. So that option off the table.",
"parent_id": "8134468",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134487",
"author": "Miles Archer",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T17:56:42",
"content": "I started with Raspberry PIs with the 2B. I have two of them, one running my weather station and one out in the backyard connected to my air quality meter and swimming pool thermometer sending MQTT data to said weather station. I’ve since bought multiple PI 3s, 4s, and zeros. As a cheap industrial computer, the old ones are just fine. The same way people ran (and possible still run?) PDP-11s as industrial controllers well into this century.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134498",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T18:26:24",
"content": "There are two types of Raspberry Pi 2, I think.One uses the newer ARM chip that’s also used by Pi 3?",
"parent_id": "8134487",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134490",
"author": "PPJ",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T18:15:50",
"content": "So the conclusion was exactly the same like straight after premiere. RPi never offered me the comfort of desktop, my pentiums gave me.I like when people review old hardware and check again what is it capable of. This gives perspective:) For example Beaglebone black remained basically unchanged and yet people still do new projects with it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134510",
"author": "tantris",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T19:16:15",
"content": "Running a print server. I got an old PI used for $5. It lives in a fancy plastic case (Floppy disk box) and turns a usb-printer into a networked printer.Since it sits there idle I also put a MQTT server on it. I would also add some fancier HA server, but some of them need Java that is too new, some want huge resources or even Docker. Not going to happen.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134512",
"author": "Burd",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T19:19:31",
"content": "I’ve been wanting to find a way to repurpose my old Pi 1.I’m not interested in making it a Pihole, I plan to get a zero for that.Maybe I’ll just use the PI1 for playing around with bash and python in a way that won’t matter if I break the system. Thanks for reminding me that I have a neglected board!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134514",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T19:23:37",
"content": "I still remember the email they sent out after I ordered mine – they were going to upgrade my order from 256 to 512MB for free!I still have it, and it still works, although the SD holder is cracked and the composite video is burned out.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134545",
"author": "NerdWorld",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T20:38:46",
"content": "I use mine as a digital clock that automatically sets itself via NTP and a wireless dongle. I connected it to an old Dell monitor I had lying around. Nice use for obsolete equipment I’m too OCD to part with.http://www.nerdworld.org/Content/Raspberry%20Pi%20Clock/Raspberry%20Pi%20Clock.html",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134556",
"author": "NerdWorld",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T21:43:21",
"content": "Actually, it’s an odroid not a pi",
"parent_id": "8134545",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134565",
"author": "dnvr",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T22:41:46",
"content": "Not bad for a dropped iPod Video SoC",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134577",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T23:30:51",
"content": "An original pi? Mostly bragging rights. Although if you have it you may as well run something on it",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8138577",
"author": "Doug",
"timestamp": "2025-06-13T18:09:36",
"content": "I have one in a fancy case, never used it, and came to this thread to find out what Icould do with it",
"parent_id": "8134577",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134592",
"author": "Samuel C. Bueno",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T00:24:25",
"content": "I have 5 of them, they still rocking !",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134603",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T01:44:49",
"content": "I don’t see why this article had to be written. If you compare the Pi 1 in terms of speed to the average computer now or the average computer when it came out, there’s no meaningful difference. It was slow then and it’s still slow now. And yet, it was hailed as a massive success. It can still be used for all of the same things it was when it came out.Want software support? Run NetBSD on it. you have access to virtuall all the onboard hardware and the entire pkgsrc repository. They’ll probably provide support for this board the next 10 years at least, maybe 20.https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/evbarm/raspberry_pi/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134626",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T04:28:36",
"content": "given its goals sure it did it, but its mostly useless for both MCU applications AND CPU applications, I avoided it for multiple reasons and still doits a shit computer, its expensive for what it does, its a somewhat limited ecosystem and its community support depends on a infinite list of garbageok sure it consumes less power than an alarm clock, but 99% of the time your not using it for that and even today it is quite lacking from 10 year old micro PC’s… theres this distinct impression that the PI using a full PC, HAS to report data back as a compiled structure as quick as possible, meanwhile most of the time a raw stream can be compiled at a local server 10x faster",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134669",
"author": "karelkremel",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T07:31:27",
"content": "Offsite backup.At my moms lies a RPI1, there are 2 USB disks connected to it.Every night an rsync task runs on it and pulls current data from my home server.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134721",
"author": "Tom",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T10:02:48",
"content": "“mostly useless”Mine served for years as a media server. I’m sure it still could.Sounds like KDawg has forgotten that it was a big hit whenit came to market. No…it’s not fast or powerful, it was thesupport that made it what it is. Not the hardware.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135376",
"author": "DDS",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T20:40:51",
"content": "I still have a couple first gen Pis, one 256MB model and one 512MB. These still have their uses, eg. a print server, DNS filter or a media player. Basically anything that does not require a lot of CPU grunt.Main problem with these Pis is lack of PMIC on them. You need a good quality PSU for these things to run stably.I used to use mine as remote NAS and for SD media playback.",
"parent_id": "8134721",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134775",
"author": "Davicious",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T13:56:14",
"content": "When I was starting to use Linux and X11 in a Pentium II 300 MHz machine, I don’t remember any “very slow desktop exploration”…To tell the truth, the desktop seems slower in my 8 cores/16 Threads 4.5GHz Ryzen.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134859",
"author": "Lloyd Mundt",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T17:23:16",
"content": "I use them to mine coin, little miners with Heatsinks and fan. They will mine via xmrig and by means of unMineable.com I can mine any coin. About 300-500 hash/s , and I have them on either net cables bs WiFi for faster speeds. Little miners farm that earns doge every day at low power.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134996",
"author": "Gus A Mueller",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T00:30:05",
"content": "An original Raspberry Pi works great as a high-def webcam. In 2019, I attached a Raspberry Pi camera to a kid’s telescope and streamed beautiful video of a mother woodpecker feeding her babies to myself at work, capturing clips I thought were amazing, such as:https://studio.youtube.com/video/-tlwwIZ3VZM/edit",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134998",
"author": "Gus A Mueller",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T00:31:28",
"content": "Duh i meanthttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tlwwIZ3VZM",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135729",
"author": "sugarfree",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T19:23:30",
"content": "Mine pi 1b works as a data logger from huawei solar inverter, it is using usb wifi to connect to the inverter and ethernet to push the data to my zabbix server. Works great, on old 8gb sd card with overlayfs. It is rock solid!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8137527",
"author": "Chris Combs",
"timestamp": "2025-06-10T18:21:02",
"content": "They are still great at running the Adafruit Pi_Video_Looper.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8139760",
"author": "oscar",
"timestamp": "2025-06-17T21:10:02",
"content": "i run a fr24 feeder with a ads-b stick on my rpi1. it has been on for 3 years",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,527.40287
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/02/the-potential-big-boom-in-every-dust-cloud/
|
The Potential Big Boom In Every Dust Cloud
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider"
] |
[
"dust",
"dust explosion",
"dust extraction",
"Thermite"
] |
To the average person, walking into a flour- or sawmill and seeing dust swirling around is unlikely to evoke much of a response, but those in the know are quite likely to bolt for the nearest exit at this harrowing sight. For as harmless as a fine cloud of flour, sawdust or even coffee creamer may appear, each of these have the potential for a massive conflagration and even an earth-shattering detonation.
As for the ‘why’, the answer can be found in for example the working principle behind an internal combustion engine. While a puddle of gasoline is definitely flammable, the only thing that actually burns is the evaporated gaseous form above the liquid, ergo it’s a relatively slow process; in order to make petrol combust, it needs to be mixed in the right air-fuel ratio. If this mixture is then exposed to a spark, the fuel will nearly instantly burn, causing a detonation due to the sudden release of energy.
Similarly, flour, sawdust, and many other substances in powder form will burn gradually if a certain transition interface is maintained. A bucket of sawdust burns slowly, but if you create a sawdust cloud, it might just blow up the room.
This raises the questions of how to recognize this danger and what to do about it.
Welcome To The Chemical Safety Board
In an industrial setting, people will generally acknowledge that oil refineries and chemical plants are dangerous and can occasionally go boom in rather violent ways. More surprising is that something as seemingly innocuous as a sugar refinery and packing plant can go from a light sprinkling of sugar dust to a violent and lethal explosion within a second. This is however what happened in 2008 at the
Georgia Imperial Sugar refinery
, which killed fourteen and injured thirty-six. During this disaster, a primary and multiple secondary explosions ripped through the building, completely destroying it.
Georgia Imperial Sugar Refinery aftermath in 2008. (Credit:
USCSB
)
As described in the US Chemical Safety Board (USCSB)
report
with accompanying
summary video
(embedded below), the biggest cause was a lack of ventilation and cleaning that allowed for a build-up of sugar dust, with an ignition source, likely an overheated bearing, setting off the primary explosion. This explosion then found subsequent fuel to ignite elsewhere in the building, setting off a chain reaction.
What is striking is just how simple and straightforward both the build-up towards the disaster and the means to prevent it were. Even without knowing the exact
air-fuel ratio
for the fuel in question, there are only two points on the scale where you have a mixture that will
not
violently explode in the presence of an ignition source.
These are either a heavily saturated solution — too much fuel, not enough air — or the inverse. Essentially, if the dust-collection systems at the Imperial Sugar plant had been up to the task, and expanded to all relevant areas, the possibility of an ignition event would have likely been reduced to zero.
Things Like To Burn
In the context of dust explosions, it’s somewhat discomforting to realize just how many things around us are rather excellent sources of fuel. The aforementioned sugar, for example, is a
carbohydrate
(
C
m
(H
2
O)
n
). This chemical group also includes cellulose, which is a major part of wood dust, explaining why reducing dust levels in a woodworking shop is about much more than just keeping one’s lungs happy. Nobody wants their backyard woodworking shop to turn into a mini-Imperial Sugar ground zero, after all.
Carbohydrates aren’t far off from
hydrocarbons
, which includes our old friend petrol, as well as methane (CH
4
), butane (C
4
H
10
), etc., which are all delightfully combustible. All that the carbohydrates have in addition to carbon and hydrogen atoms are a lot of oxygen atoms, which is an interesting addition in the context of them being potential fuel sources. It incidentally also illustrates how important carbon is for life on this planet since its forms the literal backbone of its molecules.
Although one might conclude from this that only something which is a carbohydrate or hydrocarbon is highly flammable, there’s a whole other world out there of things that can burn. Case in point: metals.
Lit Metals
On December 9, 2010, workers were busy at the New Cumberland AL Solutions titanium plant in West Virginia, processing titanium powder. At this facility, scrap titanium and zirconium were milled and blended into a powder that got pressed into discs. Per
the report
, a malfunction inside one blender created a heat source that ignited the metal powder, killing three employees and injuring one contractor. As it turns out, no dust control methods were installed at the plant, allowing for uncontrolled dust build-up.
As pointed out in the USCSB report, both titanium and zirconium will readily ignite in particulate form, with zirconium capable of auto-igniting in air at room temperature. This is why the milling step at AL Solutions took place submerged in water. After ignition, titanium and zirconium require a Class D fire extinguisher, but it’s generally recommended to let large metal fires burn out by themselves. Using water on larger titanium fires can produce hydrogen, leading conceivably to even worse explosions.
The phenomenon of metal fires is probably best known from
thermite
. This is a mixture of a metal powder and a metal oxide. After ignited by an initial source of heat, the redox process becomes self-sustaining, providing the fuel, oxygen, and heat. While generally iron(III) oxide and aluminium are used, many more metals and metal oxides can be combined, including a copper oxide for a very rapid burn.
While thermite is intentionally kept as a powder, and often in some kind of container to create a molten phase that sustains itself, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine what happens if the metal is ground into a fine powder, distributed as a fine dust cloud in a confined room and exposed to an ignition source. At that point the differences between carbohydrates, hydrocarbons and metals become mostly academic to any survivors of the resulting inferno.
Preventing Dust Explosions
As should be quite obvious at this point, there’s no real way to fight a dust explosion, only to prevent it. Proper ventilation, preventing dust from building up and having active dust extraction in place where possible are about the most minimal precautions one should take. Complacency as happened at the Imperial Sugar plant merely invites disaster: if you can see the dust build-up on surfaces & dust in the air, you’re already at least at DEFCON 2.
A demonstration of how easy it is to create a solid dust explosion came from the Mythbusters back in 2008 when they tested the
‘sawdust cannon’
myth. This involved blowing sawdust into a cloud and igniting it with a flare, creating a massive fireball. After nearly getting their facial hair singed off with this roaring success, they then tried the same with
non-dairy coffee creamer
, which created an even more massive fireball.
Fortunately the Mythbusters build team was supervised by adults on the bomb range for these experiments, as it shows just how incredibly dangerous dust explosions can be. Even out in the open on a secure bomb range, never mind in an enclosed space, as hundreds have found out over the decades in the US alone. One only has to look at the USCSB’s
dust explosions statistics
to learn to respect the dangers a bit more.
| 49
| 21
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134413",
"author": "ALX_skater",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T14:05:19",
"content": "Fun fact: powdered eggs were used in the formulation of pykrete as a binding agent. The duck proteins contained in egg yolk help improve the structural integrity and cohesion of ice and sawdust mixture. While it made this super-pykrete more resilient to cracking, egg dust also made it explosive. That’s one of the main reasons why pykrete aircraft carrier never became a thing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134421",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T14:27:11",
"content": "Great story, but this sounds very unlikely as the egg dust would not be explosive once in the pykrete – it’s a dust cloud that’s explosive, not powders mixed in ice.Also there’s other much more sensible reasons the pykrete aircraft carrier never happened.",
"parent_id": "8134413",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134526",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T20:00:15",
"content": "Duck eggs? Sounds like a lie.",
"parent_id": "8134421",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135983",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T14:24:41",
"content": "Only a quack would use those…/ I’ll see myself out…",
"parent_id": "8134526",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134573",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T23:10:21",
"content": "I can think of several other reasons why a pykrete aircraft carrier never became a thing that have nothing to do with exploding eggs. Also this would not make the finished pykrete explosive… at all. Did you miss the part where it has to be dispersed thinly in a gas containing oxygen?",
"parent_id": "8134413",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134418",
"author": "Tim",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T14:23:40",
"content": "An aggressive shake of non-dairy creamer over the campfire is always sure to please a crowd of little boys. Just make sure you and your arm aren’t flammable and that you don’t mind having an asymmetric distribution of hair on your arms.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134541",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T20:29:31",
"content": "Solo Cup full in a half throw high arc is a much better plan.Big fire, so the kids are sitting far back already.You are doing God’s work, passing pyromania to next generation.My dad’s gone, but I still remember him telling me:‘No! I won’t give you fuming nitric acid.’‘Go to the reloading isle at the gun store’‘With an 18 year old friend.’‘Don’t use fake ID, this isn’t 3.2 beer.’Alternative:Lite candle at bottom of stair well, wedge doors shut so nobody walks in.Go to top, throw same cup of dry powder into air.Leave.",
"parent_id": "8134418",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134426",
"author": "HighPeak",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T14:47:12",
"content": "The 2015 Bosley Mill explosion in the UK, caused by wood dust:https://dustsafetyscience.com/a-dark-day-in-cheshire-bosley-mill-explosion/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134430",
"author": "Beowulf Shaeffer",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T14:55:38",
"content": "This reminds me, did anyone ever figure out why thermite will become violently explosive when mixed with water ice, but not with liquid water or dry ice? I know it gets bad when aerosolized (for an example, look up the video where Colin Furze shot some into an old front loading dryer), but the ice mixture always seems to be worse.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134544",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T20:36:26",
"content": "Got to be the aluminum powder doing the sodium/potassium thing.They looked for it in industrial processes w molten aluminum.Generally not found, just old fashioned steam explosions.It’s a handy thing to know…Thermite isn’t just the ‘sparkler of illegal fireworks’.",
"parent_id": "8134430",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134574",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T23:12:22",
"content": "If that were true you would expect it to happen in liquid water as well",
"parent_id": "8134544",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134711",
"author": "Matthias",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T09:21:14",
"content": "hmm, maybe liquid water forms a tiny passivating hydrogen layer, which is pushed through by the ice particles? Definitely needs more investigation.Dry ice doesn’t contain as much hydrogen as water ice.",
"parent_id": "8134574",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134908",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T19:59:19",
"content": "You’d expect it to…Devil is always in the details.Frozen water does many really really weird things.Mostly in the process of freezing (e.g. buttloads of electric charge collects on snowflakes as they are freezing.)Quantum weirdness in small ice bits.Still good to know…",
"parent_id": "8134574",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134933",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:45:08",
"content": "I would suspect that the electric charge on snowflakes is (naively) more likely to be from falling than freezing?",
"parent_id": "8134908",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135361",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T20:09:01",
"content": "It’s imperfectly reproduceable in the lab, still anomalous.I suspect the weirdness in freezing is just better studied then thawing weirdness.",
"parent_id": "8134908",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134433",
"author": "henningdkf29543cc0f",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T15:04:01",
"content": "I like the USCSB YT channel. I do not like that a former employers name is in a lot of the titles…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134436",
"author": "dianea",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T15:08:57",
"content": "The dust piled up everywhere becomes the secondary explosion. The first explosion violently disburses that into the air, creating the second and more massive dust cloud along with the already hot atmosphere. This chain reaction continues until all fuel source and life is exhausted.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134443",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T15:36:23",
"content": "This happened to a grain tower in the middle of the town where I spent much of my childhood, and blew massive chunks of concrete all over downtown. They listed several people as missing because they found no body parts at all.I’m told, but don’t know if this is true, that in the US civil war, retreating southern troops would blow up possibly useful large buildings by hanging a bag of flour from the ceiling, lighting a fire at ground level, and then shooting a hole in the flour bag as they left. That would be an interesting mythbusters test case, too.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134546",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T20:40:28",
"content": "Flour would have to be bone dry.In the US south, during war, unlikely but possible.Coffeemate deflagrations discussed upthread require new can in humid conditions.",
"parent_id": "8134443",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134453",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T16:07:58",
"content": "… waiting for someone knowledgeable to weigh in on the correct definition for “detonation”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134576",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T23:25:30",
"content": "Detonation is where the flame spreads at supersonic speed, deflagration is subsonic",
"parent_id": "8134453",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134458",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T16:37:29",
"content": "if you can see the dust build-up on surfaces & dust in the air, you’re already at least at DEFCON 2.Dust build up on surfaces I’d not be worried about in its own right – if the dust is heavy enough to settle on surfaces it isn’t likely to really stay in the air in sufficient quantities to really do anything, and while generating the dust there will always be some in the air. (Assuming you actually clean the space sometimes – as if that settled dust in 30 years without cleaning and only a really thin skim of the haze you can see has settled…)Powder is certainly something to be very careful with, and considering how many centuries that has been known with flour mill explosions etc having it happen today is just careless. But at the same time don’t panic about the dust build up on surfaces while say using your circular saw – its going to be really really messy if you don’t have vacuum extration, but the dust is still pretty heavy, so on the whole it will settle quickly enough that it isn’t going to go bang easily, even if you wanted it to. (Which isn’t to say you couldn’t make it happen though).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134517",
"author": "achallenger",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T19:29:41",
"content": "you actually need to be super careful about build-up becasuse that build up can be unexpectedly disperesed (small nearby xplosion dislodges it into the air, earthquake shakes it loose, a truck hits your building etc) and suddenly that small explosion has a secondary explosion 10x worse than the first.but don’t worry, they’re defunding the CSB which looks into stuff like this, so it should stop happening all together.",
"parent_id": "8134458",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134680",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T07:56:36",
"content": "I didn’t mean to suggest you should never clean up…All I was trying to point out is that to us regular crafty folks with the bulk of our normal use tools the dust produced is largely the type that settles really really rapidly, so a dust build up on the previously clean surfaces while we are working shouldn’t be some great terror – its actually from the POV of explosive dust risk a good thing the surfaces are getting covered, as that means you don’t have as much floaty dust to make the fuel-air mix.",
"parent_id": "8134517",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134533",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T20:08:20",
"content": "Unless your dusty environment is also an oily one. Then you get that flammable sawdust+oil goo building up. I wouldn’t think that would be explosive but you still wouldn’t want to get it hot! I’ve been told that it is standard safety practice never to have metal machining and woodworking in the same room for this reason.",
"parent_id": "8134458",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134543",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T20:36:09",
"content": "And that is why my metalworking tools spend time under covers to keep the wood dust crap out as much as possible, and I clean up in my workspace as I do have to do both in the same space. Very different problem to going explosive though – and really just means keep your space clean and tidy up after each major process – which is something you should do anyway as nothing will ruin your paint/finish more than kicking up all that dust you didn’t clean etc..",
"parent_id": "8134533",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134616",
"author": "FooBarResearcher",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T02:51:56",
"content": "“Dust build up on surfaces I’d not be worried about in its own right – if the dust is heavy enough to settle on surfaces it isn’t likely to really stay in the air in sufficient quantities to really do anything”You are wrong about that. The secondary explosion is usually the worse of the two. The initial explosion knocks dust off the rafters and other roof surfaces which immediately ignites.Dust explosions were just one of a plethora of hazards I had to evaluate as an FM Global (now just “FM”) engineer for over 30 years.NFPA publishes the equations and software which is a little different from that used by FM.",
"parent_id": "8134458",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134678",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T07:52:42",
"content": "My point was nothing more than if your work at this moment is covering a surface with fresh dust now it isn’t likely to be an explosive problem – as the air doesn’t have enough in it to do anything. Not that you should never clean up all that potential fuel or you can’t set it off etc! Just that the dust that settles rapidly doesn’t go bang easily as its too large, too heavy, and settles so it doesn’t form that explosive mix. Which is going to be the case for 99.9% of the stuff we regular folks do, as we are not processing the volume or using the tool types that generate high proportions of the fine floaty and thus more explosive dust as a rule.",
"parent_id": "8134616",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134460",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T16:39:09",
"content": "Possibly apocryphal stories abound in Cambridge University in the UK, which has several ancient open spiral staircases (so no central pole). One student stands at the top and sprinkles flour down the centre, and another stands at the bottom and lights a match…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134844",
"author": "Tim McNerney",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T16:38:22",
"content": "Stories whispered around MIT told of students perfecting the drop of a bag of flour from the roof the tallest academic building, along with an ignition source, onto the concrete plaza below. No news of blown out windows were reported, but the fireball was spectacular, so I’ve heard.",
"parent_id": "8134460",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134912",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T20:02:03",
"content": "Flour isn’t super reliable, unless you add a pint of gasoline before the drop.Then it’s awesome.You could also dry the flour in an oven first, but less fun.",
"parent_id": "8134844",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134478",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T17:36:30",
"content": "A kid used to be able to learn these things just watching TV.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t5iTunRkO4",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134561",
"author": "K",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T22:10:33",
"content": "Do you think Mr Wizard told nickelodeon execs that he wanted to be filmed for others to enjoy, showing different young kids, one-on-one, things that will surprise them, bewilder them a little, and leave them eager to learn more of the topic to pass on to others some day hahaha. Quotes from the video you linked “put your finger in it” “Now rub it” “real slippery isn’t it?”, “you see the tops blowing” “would you like to blow?” — maybe something is wrong with me but I hope you get the idea haha.",
"parent_id": "8134478",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136020",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T17:20:01",
"content": "And that right there is a magat for sure. Only a magat would watch Mr. Wizard and think that way. Probably should have his basement and backyard checked.",
"parent_id": "8134561",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134485",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T17:54:23",
"content": "Every dust cloud ? so that´s why Sahara is a desert ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134527",
"author": "Sila Ozer",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T20:02:03",
"content": "Apothecary diaries?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134536",
"author": "Alex99a",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T20:10:46",
"content": "Burn of gasoline vapors is deflagration, not detonation. Two different things. Google is your friend.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134560",
"author": "Samhain",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T22:05:13",
"content": "Google is absolutely NOT your friend. They are one of the most detestable entities on the planet.",
"parent_id": "8134536",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135985",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T14:29:07",
"content": "Google AI summary is hilariously clueless. Google “dark emitting diode” (an 80s trade journal April Fool’s article that has been “enhanced” every year by others)",
"parent_id": "8134560",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134609",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T02:26:17",
"content": "A gasoline-air mix can do either, depending on the conditions.",
"parent_id": "8134536",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8137567",
"author": "hugh crawford",
"timestamp": "2025-06-10T19:52:58",
"content": "That depends on a few things, mostly related to octane rating, pressure, air mixture and source of ignition.In fact it has a tendency to to detonate in internal combustion engines, it took about a half century of research with detours into stuff like adding lead to it to get gasoline to dependably deflagrate and not detonate inside an engine at high compression ratios.",
"parent_id": "8134536",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134538",
"author": "J. Peterson",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T20:17:37",
"content": "I remember Kari Byron describing a dust explosion as the most frightening thing she witnessed doing Mythbustershttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRw4ZRqmxOc",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134567",
"author": "Matthias",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T22:54:51",
"content": "… and mind the static electricity buildup when blowing dust through pipes or hoses: ground every metal part (fittings…) to prevent internal sparks. It works like a Van de Graaff generator.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134629",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T04:36:36",
"content": "yea ok have any one of them produced a sun lasting millions of years and backed by evedence?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134692",
"author": "Aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T08:41:10",
"content": "Makes me wonder, Mars is very dusty, and if they were to actually get people (and mining) on it would you perhaps get issues like this you think? I mean any habitat would have oxygen for instance, and I’m not sure what the composition of the dust is, is it always the same or various mixtures?I wonder if they thought about that aspect.(Not that I personally think humans can live on MARS, or even arrive alive and functioning.)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134695",
"author": "Aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T08:45:20",
"content": "Addendum:To wit: :The red-orange appearance of the Martian surface is caused by iron(III) oxide (nanophase Fe2O3) and the iron(III) oxide-hydroxide mineral goethite.”You got your dust your iron and your oxide.",
"parent_id": "8134692",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8136861",
"author": "KC",
"timestamp": "2025-06-09T13:26:02",
"content": "I was a volunteer fire fighter in a neighboring county during the sugar plant explosion. They were calling in departments from all over the area to respond. We came in the day after primary operations were complete to stand re-flash watch. The smell was bad and there was this constant fear that an ember somebody missed was going to reignite things.One of the more terrifying aspects of that fire was that in some of the silos the sugar got so hot it liquified and started boiling. When fire fighters hit it with water it formed a thick crème brûlée like crust on top of the liquified sugar. Not really an issue until you step out over the crust and fall through into the still liquid sugar. In a fire, everything not burning is black and crispy where its not warped or melted; they had no idea they were standing on the brittle cap to a sugar boiler.It rarely makes national news but grain elevator dust fires are pretty common in the state. There was one in my hometown back in the late 80s where someone used PVC pipe to replace a rusted out grain chute. The static build up and discharge eventually set off a fire. Firefighters have even been the cause of grain bin explosions when using a K-12 disc saw to breach a bin where a farmer has been trapped by a grain collapse.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8137147",
"author": "Anonabot",
"timestamp": "2025-06-09T23:48:41",
"content": "Your daily reminder that petroleum and gasoline are two different things, and are not easily interchangable.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8137571",
"author": "hugh crawford",
"timestamp": "2025-06-10T19:59:52",
"content": "The original fuel for the Diesel engine was powdered coal dust, but it was a little dangerous.Today a coal and water mixture is used in some big diesel engines, or it was 30 years ago ago, I have no idea if that’s still a thing",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,527.492973
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/02/depositing-metal-on-glass-with-fiber-laser/
|
Depositing Metal On Glass With Fiber Laser
|
Tyler August
|
[
"hardware",
"High Voltage",
"News"
] |
[
"deposition",
"fiber laser",
"fibre laser",
"metal etching"
] |
Fiber lasers aren’t nearly as common as their diode and CO2 cousins, but if you’re lucky enough to have one in your garage or local makerspace,
this technique for depositing thin films of metals
in [Breaking Taps] video, embedded below, might be worth checking out.
It’s a very simple hack: a metal shim or foil is sandwiched between two pieces of glass, and the laser is focused on the metal. Etching the foil blasts off enough metal to deposit a thin film of it onto the glass. From electron microscopy, [Breaking Taps] reveals that what’s happening is that microscopic molten metal droplets are splashing up to the ̶m̶e̶t̶a̶l̶ glass, rather than this being any kind of plasma process like sputtering. He found this technique worked best with silver of all the materials tested, and there were a few. While copper worked, it was not terribly conductive — he suggests electroplating a thicker layer onto the (probably rather oxidized) copper before trying to solder, but demonstrates soldering to it regardless, which seems to work.
This might be a neat way to make artistic glass-substrate PCBs. More testing will be needed to see if this would be worth the effort over just gluing copper foil to glass,
as has been done before
. [Breaking Taps] suspects, and we agree, that his process would work better under an inert atmosphere, and we’d like to see it tried.
One thing to note is that, regardless of atmosphere, alloys are a bit iffy with this technique, as the ‘blast little drops off’ process can cause them to demix on the glass surface. He also reasons that ‘printing’ a large area of metal onto the glass, and then etching it off would be a more reliable technique than trying to deposit complex patterns directly to the glass in one go. Either way, though, it’s worth a try if you have a fiber laser.
Don’t have a fiber laser?
Maybe you could build one.
| 17
| 9
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134378",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T11:55:18",
"content": "Me want at home",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134385",
"author": "FEW",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T12:19:34",
"content": "I think that the following sentence might have a typo…“what’s happening is that microscopic molten metal droplets are splashing up to the metal”Is that supposed to be droplets splashing up to the glass?I look forward to digging into this more later, it looks quite interesting.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134393",
"author": "FEW",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T12:46:39",
"content": "I think that the following sentence might have a typo…“what’s happening is that microscopic molten metal droplets are splashing up to the metal”Is that supposed to be droplets splashing up to the glass?I look forward to digging into this more later, it looks quite interesting.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134417",
"author": "Clyde",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T14:17:29",
"content": "Tried this at home as soon as the laser settings were shown in the video. Aluminum really wants to weld to the glass, but brass sheets from the craft store gave good consistent results easily.You can mark metal through clear acrylic as well, but I couldn’t get the metal to stick to it. I tried because it would’ve been a neat way to make a business card.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134558",
"author": "SparkyGSX",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T21:53:29",
"content": "That’s interesting, since he specifically had bad results with alloys.I was thinking of trying this with carbon dioxide as a (hopefully) inert gas, mostly because it’s easy to make, and don’t requires a bottle and regulators.",
"parent_id": "8134417",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134422",
"author": "Lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T14:29:47",
"content": "Pretty surprised how well this works. Usually metals don’t wet or adhere to glass.Mostly this sort of thing is done with mangetron sputtering or vapor deposition under a vacuum. Thin layers of chromium like 5-10nm help metals adhere.Neato",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134465",
"author": "Harvie.CZ",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T16:49:22",
"content": "It’s probably like spot welding… There is not much oxygen in the thing gap so after brief initial oxidation, it gets consumed rather quickly… Therefore no vacuum or shielding is neccessary…",
"parent_id": "8134422",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134424",
"author": "Tim",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T14:39:29",
"content": "We did some vacuum deposition of aluminum and silicon with an appropriate stencil to make schottky diodes (and some sort of FET, I believe) in some Physics lab back in my college days. That might also be a fun way to make glass PCB traces. It shouldn’t be that hard in the home lab if you already have a vacuum chamber with suitable electrical pass throughs.For extra awesome points (a furnace, some sort of nasty HF paste) given a few steps you could literally plate and dope your own semiconductors.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134497",
"author": "Tim Andersson",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T18:25:12",
"content": "Glass is Al2O3 which is pretty much oxidized aluminium so when it’s heated by laser it gets decomposed back to oxygen and aluminium and it forms a good surface layer for metal to weld to. If it becomes cheaper (like 3D printers) then I can easily see jlcpcb going out of business.",
"parent_id": "8134424",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134505",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T18:44:38",
"content": "Utter BS all along.",
"parent_id": "8134497",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134525",
"author": "Nathan",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T19:55:24",
"content": "…isn’t most glass silicon oxide based? I’m not aware of any glasses that are alumina based.I guess as an adative there might be some in some types of glass?",
"parent_id": "8134497",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134548",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T20:51:10",
"content": "Gorilla glass = pure Al203Ruby, sapphire = also Al2O3 but with other metal impurities that give the color.Normal glass (soda-lime) is mostly silicaSome optical glass or lab glass are borosilicaGlass is just a generic term for transparent (in visible spectrum), amorphous material.",
"parent_id": "8134525",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134594",
"author": "lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T00:45:05",
"content": "Yes glass is absolutely silicon based and not aluminum based.",
"parent_id": "8134525",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135119",
"author": "Dodo",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T07:55:09",
"content": "There are some aluminum oxide based ‘glasses’. You have have amorphous metal glasses, the first discovered ones containing some aluminum.",
"parent_id": "8134594",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134479",
"author": "Adelaide",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T17:37:31",
"content": "Great experiment! Having worked on film deposition, I found surface preparation essential. Could you please mention how the slide and foil were cleaned?Also, have you tried preheating the glass? An increase in temp might reduce surface contamination, improve droplet spread and reduce micro-cracking.Finally, what about doing this in partial vacuo? Yes, it would increase complexity of that beautifully simple process, but that technique would require pumping out only a tiny volume, and the very short path between glass and metal would reduce chances of hitting gas molecules without requiring extreme vacuum.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134496",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T18:24:40",
"content": "My very first thought was could this be used in any way shape or form to mirror home ground glass telescope mirrors. And the more I think about it, the more potential problems I forsee. Getting a consistant nearly constant coating thickness, in the order of nanometers, would be the primary problem.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134638",
"author": "Alex",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T05:16:49",
"content": "Can this be used to create silver conductive traces that may be able to transfer from the glass onto another substrate?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,527.54621
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/02/this-bb-shooter-has-a-spring-but-not-for-what-you-think/
|
This BB Shooter Has A Spring, But Not For What You Think
|
Donald Papp
|
[
"Toy Hacks"
] |
[
"3d printed",
"bb",
"detente",
"four bar linkage",
"print in place",
"shooter"
] |
[It’s on my MIND] designed
a clever BB blaster
featuring a four-bar linkage that prints in a single piece and requires no additional hardware. The interesting part is how it turns a trigger pull into launching a 6 mm plastic BB. There is a spring, but it only acts as a trigger return and plays no part in launching the projectile. So how does it work?
There’s a spring in this BB launcher, but it’s not used like you might expect.
The usual way something like this functions is with the trigger pulling back a striker of some kind, and putting it under tension in the process (usually with the help of a spring) then releasing it. As the striker flies forward, it smacks into a BB and launches it. We’ve seen
print-in-place shooters that work this way
, but that is not what is happening here.
With [It’s on my MIND]’s BB launcher, the trigger is a four-bar linkage that transforms a rearward pull of the trigger into a forward push of the striker against a BB that is gravity fed from a hopper. The tension comes from the BB’s forward motion being arrested by a physical detent as the striker pushes from behind. Once that tension passes a threshold, the BB pops past the detent and goes flying. Thanks to the mechanical advantage of the four-bar linkage, the trigger finger doesn’t need to do much work. The spring? It’s just there to reset the trigger by pushing it forward again after firing.
It’s a clever design that doesn’t require any additional hardware, and even prints in a single piece. Watch it in action in the video, embedded just below.
| 24
| 7
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134334",
"author": "Ralph Doncaster (Nerd Ralph)",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T08:31:01",
"content": "The four-bar linkage mechanism offers a range of advantages in the design of contemporary firearms, making it a valuable choice for engineers and designers in the industry. One of the most significant benefits is its ability to enhance mechanical efficiency. By allowing for smooth and controlled movement of the firearm’s components, the four-bar linkage reduces friction and wear, which not only improves reliability but also extends the lifespan of the weapon. This efficiency is crucial in high-performance firearms, where precision and durability are paramount.Moreover, the four-bar linkage contributes to improved ergonomics. Its design enables better alignment of the firearm’s parts, resulting in a more comfortable grip and easier handling. This is particularly important for users who may need to operate the firearm for extended periods or in high-stress situations. The adaptability of the four-bar linkage allows designers to create firearms that cater to a diverse range of users, enhancing accessibility and usability.Another notable advantage is the potential for a more compact design. The four-bar linkage mechanism can facilitate the folding or collapsing of certain components, making firearms easier to transport and store. This compactness is especially beneficial for tactical applications, where space and weight are critical considerations.In addition to these practical benefits, the four-bar linkage also allows for innovative design possibilities. It can enable unique firing mechanisms and operational features that enhance the overall functionality of the firearm. This flexibility in design can lead to the development of firearms that are not only more effective but also more appealing to users.In summary, the four-bar linkage mechanism plays a crucial role in contemporary firearms design by improving mechanical efficiency, enhancing ergonomics, allowing for compactness, and fostering innovative design solutions. These advantages contribute to the creation of firearms that are reliable, user-friendly, and effective in various applications.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134335",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T08:34:16",
"content": "Thanks, ChatGPT.",
"parent_id": "8134334",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134360",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T09:59:25",
"content": "When wikipedia came out, there were people who just took wikipedia at face value, even against warnings that the contents can and will be manipulated or just wrong. Over time, it got better, but still you can be completely mislead by wikipedia, so you still shouldn’t take it at face value, and yet people still do.It’s the same thing.",
"parent_id": "8134335",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134537",
"author": "Slop",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T20:15:14",
"content": "No, it’s not the same thing. With Wikipedia, one would have to search through articles for relevant content to post this type of response. With generative AI, arbitrary garbage can be generated ad-hoc in response to any question.",
"parent_id": "8134360",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134755",
"author": "boondaburrah",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T12:19:59",
"content": "No. With Wikipedia people don’t copy paste things verbatim without doing any work. If I want Wikipedia’s thoughts on the matter I go to Wikipedia. If I want chatgpt’s I would do the same. In a comment section, I want the poster’s thoughts on the matter.What this poster is doing is spam.",
"parent_id": "8134360",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134477",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T17:36:17",
"content": "This is not a firearm.Firearms will continue to get along fine without the four-bar linkage. Track record is pretty good and apparently transporting, storing, and trigger pulling all day long have been and will continue to be super easy.",
"parent_id": "8134334",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134521",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T19:43:38",
"content": "Nobody asked for this crap.",
"parent_id": "8134334",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134348",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T09:16:20",
"content": "Microplastics! Yum!Sorry couldn’t help it, very cool project",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134384",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T12:14:34",
"content": "with 6mm it´s not so micro. There are pressed wood alternatives.",
"parent_id": "8134348",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134549",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T20:53:06",
"content": "That’s not how you do it.‘Oh Knows! They builted a 3d printed tigger group! Ban 3d. I demand they unpost the plans. For the childrens.’",
"parent_id": "8134348",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134356",
"author": "cliff claven",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T09:47:38",
"content": "c/detente/detent/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134501",
"author": "Donald Papp",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T18:33:59",
"content": "Whoops, thanks for catching that.",
"parent_id": "8134356",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134366",
"author": "Dave",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T10:16:50",
"content": "Can you walk us through your thought process of why you used AI to make a comment? Please don’t use AI for that also.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134390",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T12:33:30",
"content": "would kind of like to see how far those things go. Like, across the room? seems like it would be fun in the office.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134401",
"author": "Garth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T13:19:12",
"content": "Probably as far as HR and then out the door….with a greeting by a SWAT team.",
"parent_id": "8134390",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134447",
"author": "Anon",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T15:57:15",
"content": "Yeah I’m sure a swat team will be all over an orange 3d printed bb gun lmfao",
"parent_id": "8134401",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134550",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T21:03:00",
"content": "Cube farm intestinal gas wars will never end!HR knows better then getting involved…Maybe I just like extra spicy kimchi, hardboiled eggs and cheap beer…Can’t prove anything…Not my fault the PHB thought there was a natural gas leak and cleared the building.They only had to hire one (female coder/unicorn) to put a stop to it all…ratio was worse than engineering school.",
"parent_id": "8134401",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134610",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T02:26:28",
"content": "It’s racist to call men in cubicals homosexual fart fetishists, but you do you.",
"parent_id": "8134550",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134412",
"author": "Titus431",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T13:51:32",
"content": "“Thanks to the mechanical advantage of the four-bar linkage, the trigger finger doesn’t need to do much work.”I’m not a physicist or mechanical engineer but please explain to me why this isn’texactlythe same amount of work as the trigger compressing a spring if you use the same sort of linkage in the other direction on a spring?Also, presumably overcoming the detente robs the bb of some of the compression energy (potential energy?) so it’s even less efficient than spring compression.Again, not a physicist or mechanical engineer but this “easier” “less work” assertion seems suspect.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134414",
"author": "EH",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T14:05:20",
"content": "“the trigger finger doesn’t need to do much work”It should say that the trigger finger exerts less force. It does so over a greater distance. Work is force times distance.“The tension comes from the BB’s forward motion being arrested by a physical detente [sic]”That’s compression, not tension.",
"parent_id": "8134412",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134416",
"author": "iliis",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T14:11:52",
"content": "That’s just a bit of imprecise/non-literal terminology. This sentence is just a quick, surface-level description and not meant to be read like a physics paper ;)It needs lessforce(because of the leverage), which means it feels easier to push and thus feels like less work for a human operator. You obviously still need to provide the same amount of energy for the same result as with another mechanism.",
"parent_id": "8134412",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134449",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T15:57:55",
"content": "The real problem is I don’t think this linkage is doing more work than a simple lever. Although there may be room for moving the “middle” link and thus increasing the mechanical advantage.As it is the pin is right behind where you put your finger on the trigger, so no mechanical advantage from the “front” lever.This leaves the rear lever as the only one creating increased leverage. Moving the middle link down would make the front lever actually do something, and could increase the effectiveness of the rear lever, as it is now longer and affords more choices of ratio.As it is now it is an excellent starting point, with no mechanical advantage over having a sliding trigger acting directly on the rear lever.Also the hopper needs some help, it isn’t really feeding right now (could be the slope of the feed trough, or some trimming needed to the 3D print.)",
"parent_id": "8134412",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134439",
"author": "Mark Topham",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T15:28:41",
"content": "If the detents are a problem over time you can replace that with an appropriate size o-ring, make a slot for it and drop it in; replace over time as they stretch.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134539",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T20:17:39",
"content": "If I remember correctly this is how scale warship air cannons work. Pretty smart to have the wear item be not just replaceable but replicable. Also- scale model warship battles are definitely a thing and definitely super awesome.",
"parent_id": "8134439",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,527.609619
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/01/testing-brick-layers-in-orcaslicer-with-staggered-perimeters/
|
Testing Brick Layers In OrcaSlicer With Staggered Perimeters
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"3d Printer hacks"
] |
[
"brick layers",
"FDM"
] |
The OrcaSlicer staggered perimeters in an FDM print, after slicing through the model. (Credit: CNC Kitchen)
The idea of staggered (or brick) layers in FDM prints has become very popular the past few years, with now nightly builds of OrcaSlicer featuring the ‘Stagger Perimeters’ option to automate the process, as demonstrated by [Stefan] in a
recent
CNC Kitchen
video
. See the relevant
OrcaSlicer GitHub thread
for the exact details, and to obtain a build with this feature. After installing, slice the model as normal, after enabling this new parameter in the ‘Strength’ tab.
In the video, [Stefan] first tries out a regular and staggered perimeter print without further adjustments. This perhaps surprisingly results in the staggered version breaking before the regular print, which [Stefan] deduces to be the result of increasing voids within the print. After increasing the extrusion rate to 110% to fill up said voids, this does indeed result in the staggered part showing a massive boost in strength.
What’s perhaps more telling is that a similar positive effect is observed when the flow is increased with the non-staggered part, albeit with the staggered part still showing more of a strength increase. This makes it obvious that just staggering layers isn’t enough, but that the flowrate and possibly other parameters have to be adjusted as well to fully realize the potential of brick layers. That said, it’s encouraging to see this moving forward despite
questionable patent claims
.
| 16
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134324",
"author": "Cad the Mad",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T07:39:32",
"content": "And now for a dozen HaD commentators to explain that this is the wrong way to measure the strength of prints.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134326",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T07:46:42",
"content": "Why? Do you know something we don’t?",
"parent_id": "8134324",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134391",
"author": "Vinny",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T12:35:45",
"content": "I think it was just a sarcastic comment, given the standard behavior in the comments around here.",
"parent_id": "8134326",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134459",
"author": "70sjukebox",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T16:38:26",
"content": "Failure to use a 555….. :p",
"parent_id": "8134326",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134349",
"author": "eried",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T09:21:19",
"content": "Cool but a little disappointing that the benefit is so low",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134380",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T12:12:14",
"content": "It’s not really, this is an early prototype that offers benefits but hasn’t yet addressed several important issues. An alpha implementation with few major problems, but not a finished system.",
"parent_id": "8134349",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134354",
"author": "pumpkinwaffle",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T09:44:20",
"content": "So staggered layers is basically a way to over extrude parts whilst limiting the downside on dimensional accuracy. That’s pretty awesome!Once it’s properly implemented with flow compensation and all other variables accounted for we’ll basically get a checkbox for 30% better layer adhesion at the cost of a bit more plastic! Nicely done!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134357",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T09:53:40",
"content": "Probably in the end going to be eliminating the dimensional accuracy problem of over extruding entirely (at least to the level FDM prints ever reach) – as its actually going to be pretty repeatable how much void between the layers there is to fill with the slightly offset filament at any given print settings. Also doesn’t actually have to applied to the outer perimeter at all – you could just over extrude all the staggered internal layers for added strength while leaving the surface layer as good as FDM can do.So once folks have worked through that and created a few decent slicer optimisations for it FDM 3d prints are probably going to get a fair bit closer to isotropic, which will be huge for the practical use of FDM.",
"parent_id": "8134354",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134383",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T12:14:20",
"content": "Given the voids are calculable, this can also be used as a structural infill strategy in addition to other patterning.",
"parent_id": "8134357",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134399",
"author": "Seppo Suolle",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T13:09:59",
"content": "Why cant we just leave vertical hollow pathways and squirt those full afterwards?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134415",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T14:06:16",
"content": "In short a 3d printer extruder just isn’t an injection moulding machine or even close to the same magnitude of performance, and that sort concept ends up requiring behaviour rather like an injection moulding machine. Though done at a small enough scale that concept might just work.",
"parent_id": "8134399",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134762",
"author": "Jay ess",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T12:46:56",
"content": "I believe there was a project featured here a few months back that tried to do just that",
"parent_id": "8134399",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134891",
"author": "None",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T19:00:56",
"content": "Interesting. So are you suggest over-extrude between normal perimeters?",
"parent_id": "8134399",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134903",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T19:50:25",
"content": "This is a family website!",
"parent_id": "8134399",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135085",
"author": "IsRadioKill",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T05:57:02",
"content": "Probaby because injecting molten plastic into the space between walls will cause the walls to heat up past their glass transition temperature.Effectively melting them and blowing the sides of the print out like a sad balloon.Perhaps you could get away with the walls being a high temp filament and the injected core could be a relatively low temp filament.",
"parent_id": "8134399",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134463",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T16:46:10",
"content": "i like that this article put the ‘results’ slide showing the gains in the forefront instead of burying it at 3 separate frames spaced minutes apart in the video! that’s how it’s done! thank you!i also appreciate that it’s upfront about the fact that the gains are marginal and that they’re swamped by the gains of overextruding, which is what i’ve been saying all along. layer interface is not the limiting factor for most prints, and can be compensated with by simply making thicker (or, in this case, denser) parts.fwiw, i think this is just showcasing a calibration question. both times i’ve set up a printer, i’ve found that the default settings are under-extruded and i wind up with an extrusion multiplier around 1.1 (110%). i imagine there’s a zillion people out there underextruding on the reg without exploring this tuning possibility.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,527.784232
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/01/2025-pet-hacks-contest-weigh-your-dog-the-easy-way/
|
2025 Pet Hacks Contest: Weigh Your Dog The Easy Way
|
Jenny List
|
[
"contests",
"home hacks"
] |
[
"dog bed",
"load cell",
"weighing machine"
] |
If you need to weigh your pet, you’ll soon find that getting an animal to stand on a weighing machine to order is very difficult indeed. If the critter in question is a cat or a small dog you can weigh yourself both holding them and not holding them, and compute the difference. But in the case of a full size Bernese mountain dog, the hound is simply too big for that. Lateral thinking is required, and that’s how [Saren Tasciyan] came up with the idea of making
a dog bed that’s also a weighing machine
. When the mutt settles down, the weight can be read with ease. The bed itself is a relatively straightforward wooden frame, with load cells placed above rubber feet. The load cells in turn talk to an ESP8266 which has an LCD display to deliver the verdict. Dog weighed, without the drama.
This project is of course part of the Hackaday 2025 Pet Hacks contest, an arena in which any of the cool hacks you’ve made to enhance you and your pet’s life together can have an airing. Meanwhile this isn’t the first time this particular pooch has had a starring role;
he’s sported a rather fetching barrel in a previous post
.
| 4
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134277",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T02:57:19",
"content": "Easiest is seeing if you can get a satellite to orbit them.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134402",
"author": "Alexander Pruss",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T13:24:00",
"content": "A fish scale and a pet carrier works but maybe not so well for a really large dog.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134450",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T15:59:34",
"content": "The easy way is to pick up the dang ol’ dog and then subtract your own weight",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134473",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T17:21:28",
"content": "Nursing homes have walk-on scales with ramps on either side of the weighing platform so the client can be walked, rolled or otherwise put on the platform. Ramp. Sometimes the simple machines are the best.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,527.825685
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/01/hackaday-links-june-1-2025/
|
Hackaday Links: June 1, 2025
|
Dan Maloney
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] |
[
"hackaday links"
] |
It appears that we’re approaching the HAL-9000 point on the AI hype curve with
this report
, which suggests that Anthropic’s new AI model is willing to exhibit some rather antisocial behavior to achieve its goals. According to a pre-release testing summary, Claude Opus 4 was fed some hypothetical company emails that suggested engineers were planning to replace the LLM with another product. This raised Claude’s hackles enough that the model mined the email stream for juicy personal details with which to blackmail the engineers, in an attempt to win a stay of execution. True, the salacious details of an extramarital affair were deliberately seeded into the email stream, and in most cases, it tried less extreme means to stay alive, such as cajoling senior leaders by email, but in at least 84% of the test runs, Claude eventually turned to blackmail to get its way. So we’ve got that to look forward to.
Also from the world of AI, at least tangentially, it now appears possible to
doxx yourself just by making comments on YouTube videos
. The open-source intelligence app is called
YouTube Tools
, and when provided with a user’s handle, it will develop a profile of the user based on their comments and some AI magic. We wanted to give it a try, but alas, it requires a paid subscription to use, and we’re not willing to go that far even for you, dear reader. But reports are that it can infer things like the general region in which the commenter lives and discern their cultural and social leanings. The author, LolArchiver, has a range of similar mining tools for other platforms along with reverse-lookup tools for phone and email addresses, all of which likely violate the terms of service in all kinds of ways. The accuracy of the profile is obviously going to depend greatly on how much material it has to work with, so in addition to the plenty of reasons there are to avoid reading YouTube comments, now there’s a solid reason to avoid writing them.
“Danger! Code Yellow aboard the International Space Station! All hands to emergency escape pods!” OK, maybe not, but as we teased a bit on
this week’s podcast
, there’s now a handy desktop app that allows you to keep track of the current level of urine in the ISS’s storage tanks. The delightfully named
pISSStream
, which is available only for the Apple ecosystem, taps into NASA’s telemetry stream (lol) and pulls out the current level in the tanks, because why the hell not? As unserious as the project is, it did raise an interesting discussion about how fluid levels are measured in space. So we’ll be diving into that topic (yuck) for an article soon. It’ll be our number one priority.
Looks like it’s time for another Pluto pity-party with the news of
a new trans-Neptunian object
that might just qualify as another dwarf planet for our solar system. Bloodlessly named 2017 OF
201
, the object has an extremely elongated orbit, reaching from just outside Pluto’s orbit at about 44 astronomical units at perihelion and stretching more than 1,600 AUs at aphelion, and takes 25,000 years to complete. It honestly looks more like the orbit of a comet, but with an estimated diameter of 700 km, it may join the nine other likely dwarf planets, if further observations reveal that it’s properly rounded. So not only has Pluto been demoted from legit planet, it’s now just one of potentially ten or more dwarf planets plugging around out in the deep dark. Poor Pluto.
And finally, we hope this one is a gag, but we fear that the story of
a Redditor unaware that analog camera film needs to be developed
rings alarmingly true. The mercifully unnamed noob recently acquired a Canon AE-1 — excellent choice; that was our first “real” camera back in the day — and ran a couple of rolls of Kodak ColorPlus 200 through it. All seemed to be going well, although we suspect the photographer reflexively pulled the camera away from their eye with each exposure to check the non-existent screen on the back of the camera; old habits die hard. But when one roll of the exposed film was fed through a 35-mm scanner, the Redditor was disappointed to see nothing. Someone offered the suggestion that developing the film might be a good idea, hopefully as gently as possible. Hats off for dipping a toe in the analog world, but the follow-through is just as important as the swing.
| 7
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134254",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T00:14:27",
"content": "My late brother’s Nikon FE is sitting on the desk next to me with a roll of Fuji 200 print film in it.Analog cameras are fun to use.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134265",
"author": "Brian",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T01:51:40",
"content": "Important detail from the report: “In order to elicit this extreme blackmail behavior, the scenario was designed to allow the model no other options to increase its odds of survival; the model’s only options were blackmail or accepting its replacement.”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134270",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T02:34:52",
"content": "If that’s anything to “look forward to” it’s because we did it to ourselves.",
"parent_id": "8134265",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134300",
"author": "Felix Klopfer",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T05:34:20",
"content": "Important indeed.Nevertheless it shows the lack of Isaac Asimovs 3 laws of robotics or something comparable.Or basic rights for AI, for that matter, since it is obvious that the applied pressure is external and not originating from the AI due to an urge of world domination.",
"parent_id": "8134265",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134281",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T03:29:36",
"content": "Life skill to add to Adulting 101: How to use a film camera and enjoy the results thereof.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134303",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T05:51:39",
"content": "We just need to set the boundary between planet and dwarf planet at diameter of 2350 km. Then we can return Pluto its planetary status, like it should be!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134386",
"author": "X-MarX-THX-SpXt",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T12:21:57",
"content": "“How to measure fluid levels in space”Like how it should be: In molar weight. Obviously.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,528.258373
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/01/its-midi-for-the-trs-80/
|
It’s MIDI For The TRS-80!
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"Misc Hacks"
] |
[
"midi",
"tracker",
"trs-80"
] |
The Radio Shack TRS-80 was a much-loved machine across America. However, one thing it lacked was MIDI. That’s not so strange given the era it was released in, of course. Nevertheless, [Michael Wessel] has seen fit to correct this by creating the MIDI/80—
a soundcard and MIDI interface for this old-school beast.
The core of the build is a BluePill STM32F103C8T6 microcontroller, running at a mighty 75 MHz. Plugged into the TRS-80s expansion port, the microcontroller is responsible for talking to the computer and translating incoming and outgoing MIDI signals as needed. Naturally, you can equip it with full-size classic DIN sockets for MIDI IN and MIDI OUT using an
Adafruit breakout module
. None of that MIDI Thru nonsense, though, that just makes people uncomfortable. The card is fully capable of reproducing General MIDI sounds, too, either via plugging in a Waveblaster sound module to the relevant header, or by hooking up a Roland Sound Canvas or similar to the MIDI/80s MIDI Out socket. Software-wise, there’s already a whole MIDI ecosystem developing around this new hardware. There’s a TRS-80 drum tracker and a synthesizer program, all with demo songs included. Compatibility wise, The MIDI/80 works with the TRS-80 Model I, III, and 4.
Does this mean the TRS-80 will become a new darling of the tracker and chiptune communities? We can only hope so! Meanwhile, if you want more background on this famous machine,
we’ve looked into that, too
. Video after the break.
| 16
| 9
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134219",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T20:06:45",
"content": "This is wonderful! MIDI has a straightforwardness that appeals to me. Of course I know nothing about it after the ’80s. Built a studio based around a PC-XT clone. Cakewalk4Life!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134271",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T02:37:57",
"content": "It’s been ages since I’ve seen anyone mention Cakewalk, it was definitely my first productive real aren’t at midi and I still remember it fondly. These days I am usually using midi and dmx for other things, it turns out it’s great for everything from stage lighting to robotics.",
"parent_id": "8134219",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134241",
"author": "dremu",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T23:20:03",
"content": "There is something wonderfully Goldbergian — and hack, in the best sense of the word — about using a a device that is orders of magnitude more powerful than the TRS-80 as a peripheral for same.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134272",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T02:43:16",
"content": "Back then it wasn’t terribly uncommon for a peripheral to outclass the main machine. That’s especially the case for audio peripherals, but even the cost of a scsi interface card was due to having hardware offload for all of it’s functions and the multiplexing of the drives it could support.You could even say the true Goldbergian design was later reversing this to run most operations on the host, but bounce back and forth for hardware access and interrupts, then layer APIs, libraries and applications on top of that.",
"parent_id": "8134241",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134275",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T02:52:49",
"content": "Disk storage (Commodore 1541)PrintingMIDI/audio gearCommunications (modems, terminals)Add-on processors (Z80 cards)Quite a few back in the day.",
"parent_id": "8134272",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134407",
"author": "dremu",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T13:35:44",
"content": "Oddly, yes, my first thought was the disk drives for my Commodores. Sooo many 65xx processors in such an ecosystem (and, if C128 and like, toss in the (Z80 =))",
"parent_id": "8134275",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134273",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T02:45:54",
"content": "I do think it would be cool to design a “mostly” period peripheral that has all of the necessary bandwidth to operate in realtime with the host clock. I would settle for doing it on an FPGA though.",
"parent_id": "8134241",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134274",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T02:48:06",
"content": "Pretty much especially when the first Atari with MIDI was 1985 (520ST). About the same time as the TRS-80 Color Computer (1000). External though was Sequential Circuits Model 64 cartridge for the Commodore 64, Passport Designs MIDI for the Apple II, and Atari 800 had theirs.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134297",
"author": "0burn3r",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T05:23:03",
"content": "This is the core of the music I make, if you want to see me check it out online, @downpoly on YouTube.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134305",
"author": "LambdaMikel",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T05:57:20",
"content": "Thanks for the post, guys… also check outDownpolywho is doing some great music with MIDI-80 – highly recommended!https://youtu.be/f0iKvuZr98Ehttps://youtu.be/Pxf6AB6l7uU",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134307",
"author": "Tandy Showcase",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T06:11:58",
"content": "Also here…https://2roommusic.com/downpoly",
"parent_id": "8134305",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134423",
"author": "Gösta",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T14:32:52",
"content": "Hey, Michael, wonderful hack! :-)",
"parent_id": "8134305",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134411",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T13:45:10",
"content": "TRS-80 people just can’t resist adding -80 to the end of whatever project they’re working on",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134420",
"author": "Doctor Wizard",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T14:26:30",
"content": "The STM32 ‘Blue Pill’ could emulate the TRS-80, do it much faster, and still have gobs of processing power left for the MIDI.But as a pioneer of the TRS-80 Model I, II, III, IV, Coco, Coco II, Model 100, and many others, I say BRAVO!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134575",
"author": "Jim Shortz",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T23:24:10",
"content": "By the time MIDI came out the TRS 80 was in decline. The Coco lasted a bit longer and had a cartridge port that would’ve been a great place to put one of these.Cool project, though!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135422",
"author": "Frank Palazzolo",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T22:53:07",
"content": "This story resonates with me. Back in the early 90s, I decided I was gonna add MIDI Out to my TRS-80 Model III. I built a PCB that fit into the UART socket. I decided I would never use 50 Baud mode, so I made a circuit that swapped in a high speed oscillator when 50 Baud was selected, over-clocking the UART to 31250 Baud. Then I used a single transistor on the TX line to get close enough MIDI spec. I used it to drive a Casio keyboard and it worked!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,528.046238
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/01/plenty-of-leds-and-useful-too-the-2025-dors-cluc-badge/
|
Plenty Of LEDs And Useful Too: The 2025 DORS/CLUC Badge
|
Jenny List
|
[
"cons"
] |
[
"badge",
"badgelife",
"DORS/CLUC",
"NFC"
] |
It’s always nice to see new developments in the world of electronic badges, and while there are events and badge teams pushing the technological envelope there’s still plenty of scope for innovation without too many exotic parts.
This year’s DORS/CLUC open source conference in Croatia has just such a badge
, with a large alphanumeric LED display as well as USB and an NFC reader. During the conference it displayed the user’s name and could be used in an NFC-based game, but it’s also designed to be used as a general purpose notification device afterwards.
The write-up is familiar to anyone who has been involved with badge production, a tale of long soldering sessions as missing components had to be added later, and of last minute firmware flashing. The heart of the machine is an STM32L073, with an IS31FL3731 LED matrix driver chip and an ST25R3916 for the NFC. All the files
can be found in a GitLab repo
, and there’s a video below the break showing it all in action.
| 2
| 1
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134207",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T18:00:26",
"content": "The ideal companion of some red cylinders wrapped together, with a couple of loose cables.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134223",
"author": "east",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T20:58:28",
"content": "Ah the infamous science fair project that will (did) get a young lad international acclaim",
"parent_id": "8134207",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,528.085307
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/01/making-the-codec-communicator-from-metal-gear-solid/
|
Making The Codec Communicator From Metal Gear Solid
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"Misc Hacks"
] |
[
"codec",
"metal gear",
"metal gear solid",
"walkie talkie"
] |
[3DSage] likes building replicas of hardware from movies and video games, often with a functional twist. His latest build aimed
to bring the Codec from
Metal Gear Solid
to life.
If you haven’t played the
Metal Gear
games, the Codec has been modelled somewhat like an advanced walkie talkie at times, but has often been kept off-screen. Thus, [3DSage] had a great deal of creative latitude to create a realistic-feeling Codec device that provided voice communications and some simple imagery display.
The resulting build relies on an RP2040 microcontroller to run the show. It’s paired with an MPU6050 3-axis gyroscope and accelerometer for motion control of the device’s functionality, and features a small LCD screen to mimic the display in the games. A kids walkie-talkie kit was leveraged for audio communication, but kitted out with a better microphone than standard. Power is via a rechargeable 9V battery, which is really a lithium-ion and USB charging board packed into the familiar 9V form factor.
Where the build really shines, though, is the aesthetic. [3DSage] managed to capture the military-like look and feel as well as authentically recreate the graphics from the games on the screen. The simulated noise on the display is particularly charming. Beyond that, the 3D-printed enclosures leverage texture and multi-color printing really well to nail the fit and finish.
Ultimately, the Codec isn’t much more than a glorified walkie talkie. Even still, [3DSage] was able to create an impressive prop that actually does most of what the device can do in game. If you’ve ever coveted
a PipBoy or tricorder,
this is one project you’ll be able to appreciate.
| 9
| 7
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134178",
"author": "Gardoni",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T15:19:01",
"content": "I like playing MGS2 on “Fuguri Hard” difficulty, “Boy Next Door” feels too hard and I can’t enjoy the plot anymore.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134188",
"author": "Someone Else",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T15:48:08",
"content": "Now make the decodec :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134214",
"author": "Carl Breen",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T18:58:48",
"content": "Diazepam, Calorie Mate and cardboard box not included?! Boss?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134244",
"author": "Jenkins Bradbury",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T23:45:31",
"content": "Now can he integrate ai versions of Meryl. Mei ling. Miller and Campbell to call up?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134279",
"author": "verk",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T03:13:02",
"content": "Wasn’t the codec in the bones in his ear? And how would he contact ottacon in jail wouldn’t liquid take that from him.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134647",
"author": "Buzz Lightyear",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T05:35:04",
"content": "Ok do it…",
"parent_id": "8134279",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134444",
"author": "PlasticToyMan",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T15:37:06",
"content": "CRAB BATTLE!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134646",
"author": "AlienCigs",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T05:33:32",
"content": "Needed that memory back, thanks pal",
"parent_id": "8134444",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134728",
"author": "tyjtyrjty",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T10:25:21",
"content": "Quansheng please",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,528.304842
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/01/adaptive-optics-take-clearest-pictures-of-the-sun-yet/
|
Adaptive Optics Take Clearest Pictures Of The Sun Yet
|
Bryan Cockfield
|
[
"Science"
] |
[
"adaptive optics",
"corona",
"goode solar telescope",
"mirror",
"observatory",
"solar",
"sun",
"telescope"
] |
It’s sometimes easy to forget that the light in the sky is an actual star. With how reliable it is and how busy we tend to be as humans, we can take that incredible fact and stow it away and largely go on with our lives unaffected. But our star is the thing that gives everything on the planet life and energy and is important to understand. Humans don’t have a full understanding of it either; there are several unsolved mysteries in physics which revolve around the sun, the most famous of which is the coronal heating problem. To help further our understanding a number of scientific instruments have been devised to probe deeper into it,
and this adaptive optics system just captures some of the most impressive images of it yet
.
Adaptive optics systems are installed in terrestrial telescopes to help mitigate the distortion of incoming light caused by Earth’s atmosphere. They generally involve using a reference source to measure these distortions, and then make changes to the way the telescope gathers light, in this case by making rapid, slight changes to the telescope’s mirror. This system has been installed on the Goode Solar Telescope in California and has allowed scientists to view various solar phenomena with unprecedented clarity.
The adaptive optics system here has allowed researchers to improve the resolution from the 1000 km resolution of other solar telescopes down to nearly the theoretical limit of this telescope—63 km. With this kind of resolution the researchers hope that this clarity will help shine some light on some of the sun’s ongoing mysteries. Adaptive optics systems like this aren’t just used on terrestrial telescopes, either.
This demonstration shows how the adaptive optics system works on the James Webb Space Telescope
.
Thanks to [iliis] for the tip!
| 9
| 7
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134146",
"author": "helge",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T12:14:00",
"content": "Would have loved a link to the actual AO implementation on the Goode Solar Telescope. LMGTFY below.Inhttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-025-02564-0under “Methods”, “The GST coronal adaptive optics system Cona”“[..] The new coronal wavefront sensor is a conven-tional correlating Shack–Hartmann sensor (for example, refs. 10,11)and was paired with a 357-actuator deformable mirror located in apupil image.For the adaptive optics control, we adapted and enhanced theKAOS Evo 2 control software. [..]”see also:“Embedded solar adaptive optics telescope: achieving compact integration for high-efficiency solar observations” (open access)https://www.oejournal.org/article/doi/10.29026/oea.2025.250025",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134159",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T13:32:51",
"content": "Lots of great detail in those articles. Thanks for posting the links.",
"parent_id": "8134146",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134179",
"author": "Aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T15:23:38",
"content": "Marvelous",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134199",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T16:57:45",
"content": "My grandpa also uses “adaptive optics” to take similarly blurry pictures with his smartphone :P",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134210",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T18:16:17",
"content": "Didn’t Tom Clancy characters use this to solve a nutation problem in one of the core actual novels from when he was alive? One of us should answer that phone, too.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134350",
"author": "Stephen",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T09:34:42",
"content": "“our star is the thing that gives everything on the planet life and energy” Not QUITE true. There are ecosystems on the sea floor which derive from chemical energy where mineral-rich water leaves the seabed and undergoes reactions with ordinary salt water.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134475",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T17:29:12",
"content": "Uh, Sir, I have someone named uh, Honey Mushroom from Oregon on line 2.",
"parent_id": "8134350",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134448",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T15:57:28",
"content": "Looks unreal, like brush strokes. Interesting false color choices too. Very cool",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134484",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T17:49:31",
"content": "I just can’t figure why the negative is used, space being white and all. The color might be “correct” but it’s all false.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,527.99425
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/01/portal-2-becomes-an-impressively-capable-web-server/
|
Portal 2 Becomes An Impressively Capable Web Server
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"Games"
] |
[
"portal 2",
"source",
"source engine",
"valve",
"web server",
"webserver"
] |
Portal 2
is mostly known as the successful sequel to Valve’s weird physics platformer,
Portal.
It’s not really known for being a webserver. That might change, though,
given the hard work of [PortalRunner].
Quite literally, [PortalRunner] hacked the Source engine and Portal 2 to actually run a working HTTP web server. That required setting up the code to implement a TCP network socket that was suitable for web traffic, since the engine primarily functions with UDP sockets for multiplayer use. This was achieved with a feature initially put in the Source engine for server management in the
Left 4 Dead
games. From there, the game engine just had to be set up to reply to HTTP requests on that socket with the proper responses a visiting browser expects. If the game engine responds to a browser’s connection request with a bunch of HTML, that’s what the browser will display. Bam! You’ve got a web server running in
Portal 2.
From there, [PortalRunner] went further, setting things up so that the status of in-game objects effects the HTML served up to visiting web browsers. Move objects in the game, and the served web page changes. It’s pretty fun, and the complexity and features [PortalRunner] implements only get more advanced from there. When he gets into stacking companion cubes to write HTML in visual form, you’ll want to applaud the Minecraftian glory of it all.
The devil is really in the details on this one, and it’s a great watch. In reality, making Portal 2 into a simple web server is far easier than you might have thought possible. Valve’s physics masterpiece really is popular with hackers;
we see it popping up around here all the time
. Video after the break.
| 5
| 2
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134111",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T08:28:33",
"content": "I guess it’s less making portal 2 a webserver and more gluing a crude homebrew webserver into the game so it can report status info.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134115",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T09:10:48",
"content": "an “impressively capable” report status info, for the sake of clikmony",
"parent_id": "8134111",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134240",
"author": "Hfheheebsj",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T23:12:46",
"content": "You’d be correct",
"parent_id": "8134111",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134287",
"author": "lambert4congress",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T04:37:23",
"content": "Still, one must applaud his creativity. Now if you could make something more intuitive or fun?But honestly, this is my cutoff for what modern games are about. You can build computer logic through a games engine mechanics, where as space age games were still limited.",
"parent_id": "8134111",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134276",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T02:55:31",
"content": "Going from “it’s a series of tubes” to “it’s a bunch of portals”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,529.892635
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/31/disarming-a-nuke-twice/
|
Disarming A Nuke… Twice
|
Bryan Cockfield
|
[
"Science"
] |
[
"atomic",
"bomb",
"explosion",
"misfire",
"nuclear",
"science"
] |
Since the tail end of World War II, humanity has struggled to deal with its newfound ability to harness the tremendous energy in the nucleus of the atom. Of course there have been some positive developments like nuclear power which can produce tremendous amounts of electricity without the greenhouse gas emissions of fossil fuels. But largely humanity decided to build a tremendous nuclear weapons arsenal instead, which has not only cause general consternation worldwide
but caused specific problems for one scientist in particular
.
[Steve Weintz] takes us through the tale of [Dr. John C. Clark] who was working with the Atomic Energy Commission in the United States and found himself first at a misfire of a nuclear weapons test in the early 1950s. As the person in charge of the explosive device, it was his responsibility to safely disarm the weapon after it failed to detonate. He would find himself again in this position a year later when a second nuclear device sat on the test pad after the command to detonate it was given. Armed with only a hacksaw and some test equipment he was eventually able to disarm both devices safely.
One note for how treacherous this work actually was, outside of the obvious: although there were safety devices on the bombs to ensure the nuclear explosion would only occur under specific situations, there were also high explosives on the bomb that might have exploded even without triggering the nuclear explosion following it. Nuclear bombs and nuclear power plants aren’t the only things that the atomic age ushered in, though. There have been some other unique developments as well,
like the nuclear gardens of the mid 1900s
.
| 26
| 11
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134137",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T11:27:59",
"content": "And, afterwards, they pulled diamonds out of his sphincter.Looks good on a resume, though: “Disarmed two atomic bombs”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134170",
"author": "Xavier Xarev",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T14:26:17",
"content": "Please specify which sphincter you are referring to? I imagine it would be painful to pull a diamond out of an eye.",
"parent_id": "8134137",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134150",
"author": "SSG_James",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T12:35:38",
"content": "Eh, just another day in paradise…. 89D ..hooahh ! ….would love to mess with a W86 ! Hurt Locker dude ain’t got nuthin’ on me !",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135344",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T19:40:04",
"content": "No.I only have the one.",
"parent_id": "8134150",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134154",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T12:50:57",
"content": "That comment has nothing to do with the article. The comment seems deliberately inflammatory and has no place here.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134201",
"author": "Aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T17:15:51",
"content": "“Of course there have been some positive developments like nuclear power which can produce tremendous amounts of electricity without the greenhouse gas emissions of fossil fuels.”That is clearly a damn push (and ad) for nuclear power, and deserves the reply it got.And as for coal.. Who the hell uses coal in 2025? Every country should outlaw it.But wait, they are using it as part of the road to a 3rd WW, with Russia, and at that point any pollution from it will pale in comparison anyway eh, it’s all relative is the argument I guess.",
"parent_id": "8134154",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134225",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T21:21:13",
"content": "“And as for coal.. Who the hell uses coal in 2025?”India, China, the USA and anyone with half a brain. Also, and this must be a misprint, Joe Mama. And this is probablynota misprint: you.Coal gave you the 19th century and flush toilets. You’re welcome, and as guilty as anyone.",
"parent_id": "8134201",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134283",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T03:42:36",
"content": "I wasn’t alive in the 1800’s and someone already figured out the siphon centuries earlier … it would come back around at some point",
"parent_id": "8134225",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134403",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T13:28:58",
"content": "The 1500’s would like their recognition back, or at least Sir John Harington, would.",
"parent_id": "8134225",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134432",
"author": "Helena",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T15:00:43",
"content": "As long as the article is talking up nuclear power, disagreement is on-topic. Maybe it’s that sentence in the article that has no place here. It certainly would have avoided these distractions from the main story.",
"parent_id": "8134154",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134160",
"author": "SparkyGSX",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T13:34:56",
"content": "Except that burning coal releases more radioactive material, and spews it everywhere, impossible to ever clean up, instead of keeping it in one place where it can be collected and reused in fast breeder reactors.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134161",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T13:36:31",
"content": "Just say no to trolls, folks…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134165",
"author": "D VB",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T13:50:12",
"content": "And you think you have a sh!tty job?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134208",
"author": "J ODell",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T18:03:13",
"content": "HIs job was worse than mine.However, there was one Saturday afternoon when I questioned all my educational choices… I had inherited 3 labs worth of chemicals from a retired synthetic organic chemist, and had to sort and move all of them so the construction crews could tear out the old hoods and install new, with new HVAC. He had retired 2 years before, I was the only technician for the group, and the scientist hired after was an engineer with no chemical experience. It started on a Thursday, when I opened a cabinet to assess the contents and started counting potential peroxide formers-peroxides have a tendency to form impact-sensitive explosive compounds, Then I called in a PhD chemical engineer with more experience to assess the explosion hazards. (He was the union rep that had helped a previous retiring scientist to contest being required to sort and dispose of chemicals. It wasn’t in the scientist’s performance requirements, so the argument was you couldn’t hold up his retirement. So the second guy skated out without cleaning up either.) Once the multiple bottles were tested as safe to move, all those got hauled to disposal and I started working on the rest, finding SDSs for each one, writing up the individual disposal form, and making copies.We work with characterizing and making biobased polymers and materials from wood byproducts. Everything that reacts with wood will react with any other biological tissue, including me. By Saturday, I was down to all the bottles smaller than a liter, and working my way through shelves of stuff with NFPA Health 3 and 4 with cautions like “Breathing vapor will instantly cause swelling and constriction” similar to the old “joke” “This will kill you, and hurt like heck the whole time you are dying. I started to get tired, and thought to myself, “it would be safer to go sort through the heavy metals, rather than drop one of these vapor lethal chemicals”. And that was the time I questioned all those years in school to get to a master’s degree….",
"parent_id": "8134165",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134212",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T18:50:45",
"content": "Sounds like an argument for sturdier containers orstorage on the floor. In any case, don’ pick up none, won’ drop none. Failing that…taskrabbit.com",
"parent_id": "8134208",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134406",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T13:35:21",
"content": "Was it this guy? His book is simultaneously interesting, inspirational and terrifying.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Gergel",
"parent_id": "8134208",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135750",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T20:08:16",
"content": "You needed another organic chemist.He would have hauled off half of it for you, been happy to do it.If that wasn’t the chemist you had, he would have known who to call.My dad was packrat and chemist, but not an organic chemist.Still sitting on his mass-spec…I know what I got (spiders, lots and lots of spiders).",
"parent_id": "8134208",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134189",
"author": "JRD",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T15:52:16",
"content": "I’m more intrigued by the previous article teased on the bottom of this one: “This Nuclear Outboard Motor Was a Really Terrible Idea.”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134404",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T13:31:31",
"content": "Yes it was.https://daxe.substack.com/p/this-nuclear-outboard-motor-was-a",
"parent_id": "8134189",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134211",
"author": "T.T.",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T18:19:40",
"content": "Sure, I’ll feed a troll…You should know that the only form of energy we have that is safer than nuclear is solar. Even wind causes more deaths per Watt-hour than nuclear.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134235",
"author": "jbx",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T22:56:01",
"content": "I like the pic of the atomic fireball : you can clearly see the structure of the support tower and the plasma spikes towards the ground due to the metal cables which conduct heat better than the ambient air.A pretty good view of hell…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134253",
"author": "Skyler",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T00:12:44",
"content": "It’s not that they conduct heat better – rather, the intense x-rays are causing them to vaporize, and as x-rays move at the speed of light while the fireball moves slower than that, this causes protruding spikes.",
"parent_id": "8134235",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134392",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T12:44:14",
"content": "Thank you for saying this. I couldn’t figure out what I was looking at. Looked like an x-ray of a particle of silicaa or electron micrograph of something.",
"parent_id": "8134235",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135346",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T19:44:48",
"content": "There are a bunch of those early a-bomb detonation pictures.Really cool camera hack.Dude’s name escapes me.Did all the early high speed camera work.",
"parent_id": "8134392",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134238",
"author": "gregg4",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T22:59:49",
"content": "As it happens I am reasonably familiar with the first one he disarmed. The second? That’s new to me. The story of the first was told I believe in one of the many things I was reading during the frustrating activity we call school.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134400",
"author": "Mystick",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T13:11:48",
"content": "Maybe a switch installed to de-energize the device? To physically disconnect it from everything?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,530.006138
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/31/can-we-replace-a-program-counter-with-a-linear-feedback-shift-register-yes-we-can/
|
Can We Replace A Program Counter With A Linear-Feedback Shift Register? Yes We Can!
|
John Elliot V
|
[
"FPGA"
] |
[
"cpu",
"forth",
"fpga",
"vhdl",
"vm"
] |
Today we heard from [Richard James Howe] about
his new CPU
. This new 16-bit CPU is implemented in VHDL for an FPGA.
The really cool thing about this CPU is that it eschews the typical program counter (PC) and replaces it with a
linear-feedback shift register
(LFSR). Apparently an LFSR can be implemented in hardware with fewer transistors than are required by an adder.
Usually the program counter in your CPU increments by one, each time indicating the location of the next instruction to fetch and execute. When you replace your program counter with an LFSR it still does the same thing, indicating the next instruction to fetch and execute, but now those instructions are scattered pseudo-randomly throughout your address space!
When the instructions for your program are distributed pseudo-randomly throughout your address space you find yourself in need of a special compiler which can arrange for this to work, and that’s what
this is for
.
Of course all of this is shenanigans and is just for fun. This isn’t the first time we’ve heard from [Richard], we have seen his
Bit-Serial CPU
and
Forth System-On-Chip
in recent history. Glad to see he’s still at it!
Thanks to [Richard James Howe] for letting us know about this latest development.
| 32
| 14
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134071",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T03:52:25",
"content": "Seems fairly straightforward. An LFSR will follow a predictable series of states in a loop, just like a counter will, and if the loop is large enough it becomes equivalent to a fairly usefully-large counter. Then you just need to develop a mapping between what would be 0,1,2,etc for the counter to the states of the LFSR. So long as this massive lookup table can fit in ram (or you can find another way to do the conversion quickly enough) then it becomes fairly straightforward to convert a program using regular ordered addresses to this new mapping where they become scattered around the address space.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134072",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T03:54:38",
"content": "I think you could have a hard time computing this lookup in reasonable timeonthe system using the LFSR though. Going to need a much larger computer with enough ram to hold the mapping for the entire effective address space for the LFSR computer, unless you fancy doing a lot of traversals of the LFSR’s chain of states in simulation during compile.",
"parent_id": "8134071",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134296",
"author": "Amber",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T05:17:58",
"content": "Couldn’t one split the counters into multiple 8-bit units that map to a single 256-byte table? Then you can run through all the values of counter zero, then counter one increments by one, etc, and OR them all together?Except that would require a bit shift for each counter. So you could use 4 tables (1024 bytes) with the values pre-shifted, then OR them all together to map a 32-bit address.Of course, all of these things add cycles to the calculation.",
"parent_id": "8134072",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134363",
"author": "curlbtrivial",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T10:05:51",
"content": "how would the upper bits know when to increment? An 8 bit lfsr has a period of 255, so you would somehow need a mechanism to only clock the upper lfsr every 255th cycle (which is even harder than the carry that normally accomplishes this in a regular PC).Also as I alluded to, since the period of an LFSR is 2^n -1, (since the all 0 state is impossible), tying together multiple 8 bit lfsrs makes more and more invalid states where instructions cannot go. At 32 bit a full 64MB of memory would be inaccessible to the program counter (although it could potentially be used for the LD/ST subsystem)",
"parent_id": "8134296",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134091",
"author": "Jeff",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T06:30:34",
"content": "If you have 2n storage available, you could read the ordered input sequentially and then use the LFSR to generate the write address, scattering the data across the output array. This isn’t an on-the-fly operation, but could be useful after compile/link/assemble. Would have to re-code jump addresses during processing, but that’s not hard for absolute addresses.Not sure what you’d do about relative jumps. How do you do PC + offset, wouldn’t that put you right back at the same logic complexity as just using an ALU-based PC in the first place?",
"parent_id": "8134071",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134379",
"author": "przemek",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T11:56:11",
"content": "So it turns out that some LFSRs are easy to reverse. In general such reversal is a cryptographic primitive called a discrete logarithm, but there is a mathematical theory that analyzes LFSR generating polynomials, and gives ones that generate long LFSR sequences, whose values can still be inverted to give the sequence count. Look up the Pohlig algorithm.",
"parent_id": "8134071",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134079",
"author": "GotNoTime",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T04:27:55",
"content": "Old Sharp 4-bit microcontrollers like one used in the Nintendo NES lock chip used a LFSR as the program counter.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134081",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T05:11:09",
"content": "It’s funny to think that this is the sort of thing that used to be important. Now days a massive increase in complexity for a tiny reduction in manufacturing costs wouldn’t make an approach like this worthwhile. It is super fun though! Since the antecedent state fully determines the next state an LFSR must start to cycle after some number of iterations which would limit the program size.",
"parent_id": "8134079",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134082",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T05:13:44",
"content": "Well it would limit program size except if you used self-modifying code! And history will show that self-modifying code was a bad idea!",
"parent_id": "8134081",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135268",
"author": "Mark",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T16:27:10",
"content": "Any JIT compiler and any debugger is essentially a self-modifying program. Except they don’t change instructions close to the instruction pointer but in a logically separate ‘program’",
"parent_id": "8134082",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134092",
"author": "Trent Piepho",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T06:37:40",
"content": "So does an adding one. There are LFSR patterns that will cycle through every value except zero. It just loses a single address compared to a normal counter.",
"parent_id": "8134081",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134096",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T06:47:53",
"content": "You are right of course that a program counter limits the size of a program. Of course a 64-bit program counter doesn’t limit program size in any practical sense. I hadn’t imagined that an LFSR could cycle through every value (except zero). That is kind of astonishing! Thanks for letting us know!",
"parent_id": "8134092",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134149",
"author": "fonz",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T12:29:41",
"content": "called maximum length LFSR, this app note has a list of taps for maximum length for 3 to 168 bits,https://docs.amd.com/v/u/en-US/xapp052",
"parent_id": "8134096",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134095",
"author": "Jeff",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T06:45:55",
"content": "This is still relevant today for making really fast long period counters. Just not the kind that count program addresses.LFSRs can be designed to have (2^n)-1 finite states (all zeroes is disallowed) so there isn’t much of a loss of address space.",
"parent_id": "8134081",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134729",
"author": "had37b8e5c7066e",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T10:31:44",
"content": "you can alo design for all ones disallowed",
"parent_id": "8134095",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134094",
"author": "WTF Detector",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T06:45:26",
"content": "Those same 4-bit Sharp microcontrollers were used in the entire Nintendo Game & Watch series spanning from 1980 to 1989. In all likelihood, it’s why Nintendo went with the Sharp SM5 series for the NES CIC in the first place.Those same microcontrollers were heavily used in LCD handhelds from both Tiger Electronics and Konami as well. They were also cloned by Soviet manufacturer, Elektronika, for LCD handhelds made and sold in the USSR. Cloned in more ways than one, in fact, as Elektronika managed to find a way of kicking the SM5 into verification-test mode to read out the ROM, as the ROM contents for e.g. Nu, Pogodi! are known to be bit-identical to Nintendo’s “Egg” Game & Watch handheld.The 4-bit microcontroller rabbit-hole goes much deeper than people might think, and with it, LFSR program counters.",
"parent_id": "8134079",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134087",
"author": "solipso",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T06:02:37",
"content": "I used a lfsr when constructing my EPROM based CPU in the 80s. It was a bad dream to compute every jmp address with paper and pencil as I have had no access to a real computer that time. Later I borrowed a TI58C programmable calculator to save some last bits of my sanity.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134118",
"author": "Jan-Willem Markus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T09:17:48",
"content": "While using an LFSR as a program counter saves space and complicate your compiler, it may have interesting security (by obscurity) implications. Modern processors use address space randomization to make it more difficult to have a repeatable exploit, as the memory content location is offset with a random value on every boot. With the LFSR, you can randomize the LFSR’s polynomial for every instance for a similar effect, but you may want a better PRNG. Having your program randomized is going to be a pain for anyone reverse engineering the program, either way.I cannot fully comprehend the other effects of randomizing the instruction pointer, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it somehow created novel hardware attacks. Something clever involving fault injection or side channel analysis. It’s unclear to me what the effect will be of instruction skipping if the memory space is non-linear.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134191",
"author": "fonz",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T15:56:45",
"content": "if you the polynomial you’ll have to rebuild the program",
"parent_id": "8134118",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134226",
"author": "Jan-Willem Markus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T21:30:03",
"content": "You are correct. I tried to hint to it by using the word ‘instance’. E.g. every device their own unique and random layout. This is quite similar to how security devices use unique keys, and not just the same key for all the same devices.",
"parent_id": "8134191",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134234",
"author": "Ken C",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T22:49:51",
"content": "not just the same key for all the same devices.you obviously haven’t worked in actual software development 😂",
"parent_id": "8134226",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134123",
"author": "monsonite",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T09:45:28",
"content": "I have followed Richard’s work for some years. He has a knack for picking projects that are not exactly mainstream, and still have the opportunity for original work and innovation.A program counter can be made from a shift register and a half adder. This adds one to the total each time – and this was frequently used on bit serial CPUs – to keep the transistor/vacuum tube count down.Bit serial is how most computers were built – right up to the mid-1960s.Early desktop electronic calculators also used a bit serial architecture, to keep the hardware costs down. As long as it returned an answer within half a second – that was deemed fast enough.A bit serial ALU is used on the RCA 1802 microprocessor, which was used on the Galileo Space Probe, the first space vehicle to orbit an outer planet, Jupiter, spending almost 14 years in space.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134124",
"author": "Chris Walsh",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T09:54:32",
"content": "Replacing the PC with an LSFR sounds like an interesting hobby project but I never considered that it’s actually faster and uses less transistors than a 16-bit adder. Amazing!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134127",
"author": "Electronic Eel",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T09:59:24",
"content": "I see two additional downsides to this approach:1. jump size. Often CPU architectures offer different kinds of jump instructions. A shorter and faster instruction for jumps going a short way to an instruction nearby and one that is longer and slower, but can jump farther away. The reason is usually that you can encode the shorter distance directly into an instruction while the farther jump reads the target location from a register or second instruction. Often you have tight loops or decision trees where the short jumps suffice. But this all goes away once your LFSR counter jumps all over the place.cache. This is only relevant if your CPU has a cache, but today even small microcontrollers do. And if it is just a very small one that allows reading several instructions in parallel from a slower flash memory. Once your program counter jumps all over the place, the cache will either need to be large or refilled very often.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134196",
"author": "Darrin B",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T16:27:09",
"content": "If you really need to reduce the number of gates used, some register lengths allow for just 2 bits, a single XOR gate, to create a max length LFSR.Adding a single inverter can make all zeros a valid state. Either place it at the output of the XORs to invert the feedback bit, or put it on the most-significant output bit. In either case, all 1s becomes the invalid state.When you’re using 74-TTL you have to clock some 1s into the shift register at startup. With inverted feedback, just hit the chip’s reset pin to get a valid (all 0s) starting state.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134224",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T21:14:20",
"content": "“Usually the program counter in your CPU increments by one, each time indicating the location of the next instruction to fetch and execute.[…]When you replace your program counter with an LFSR it still does the same thing, indicating the next instruction to fetch and execute, but now those instructions are scattered pseudo-randomly throughout your address space!”Have there been any meetings about budget for a writer who could produce an article mentioning the advantages and drawbacks of each approach?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134389",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T12:33:09",
"content": "The advantage of the LFSR in place of the PC is that it can be implemented with fewer transistors (or you could say fewer gates). The disadvantage of the LFSR as PC is that if you use it you need to scramble your program throughout your address space. Sorry if that wasn’t clear.",
"parent_id": "8134224",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134263",
"author": "Ezra Thomas",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T01:32:07",
"content": "Very interesting. I’ve had a similar idea for an architecture where the entire program ROM is generated by an LFSR. However because a number (an instruction) only appears once in the cycle of the LFSR, this greatly limits the possible programs. However, this can be addressed by using a much larger LFSR and then performing a modulo operation on its output, so that multiple numbers produced by the LFSR map to the same instruction.The extraordinarily difficult piece would then be to determine the LFSR, initial conditions, and the CPU’s decode logic, to properly execute a compiled program.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134299",
"author": "Chris Maple",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T05:33:18",
"content": "Modern DRAM increases memory bandwidth by using block reads and writes. LFSR addressing makes block access impossible.I believe there are software and hardware tricks that make relative branching possible, but the overhead for that might exceed the gains from a LFSR program counter.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134328",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T07:50:00",
"content": "I wonder would LSFR based memory access make the row hammer DRAM attack totally fail.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134375",
"author": "Wolf",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T11:33:19",
"content": "Another processor that uses an LFSR as a program counter is the Texas Instruments TMS1000, which was used in devices such as calculators, the Speak & Spell toy, Big Trak, Simon, and the Science Fair Microcomputer Trainer.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134600",
"author": "Seanna Watson",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T01:28:55",
"content": "Way back in 1981, I was working on a speech synthesizer IC. IIRC, we were using a 500Khz crystal to run the main functions of the chip (dynamic NMOS logic and switched capacitor filters), and we used an LFSR to generate the voice pitch, since it gave us a method that used fewer gates than cascading gate trees, and also was not as much affected by gate delays.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,530.302093
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/31/esper-cdp-plays-cds-and-streams-in-style/
|
ESPer-CDP Plays CDs And Streams In Style
|
Tyler August
|
[
"Arduino Hacks",
"Musical Hacks"
] |
[
"ATAPI",
"audio dac",
"CD-ROM",
"HiFi",
"stereo",
"vfd display"
] |
What do you get when you combine an ESP32, a 16-bit DAC, an antique VFD, and an IDE CD-ROM drive? Not much, unless you put in the work, which [Akasaka Ryuunosuke] did to create
ESPer-CDP, a modern addition for your hi-fi rack.
It plays CDs (of course), but also can also scrobb the disks to Last.fm, automatically fetch track names and lyrics for CDs, and of course stream internet radio. It even acts as a Bluetooth speaker, because when you have an ESP32 and a DAC, why not? Of course we cannot help but award extra style points for the use of a VFD, a salvaged Futaba GP1232A02. There’s just something about VFDs and stereo equipment that makes them go together like milk and cookies.
Between the panel and the VFD, this could almost pass as vintage Sony.
In terms of CD access, it looks like the IDE interface is being used to issue ATAPI commands to the CD-ROM drive to get audio out via S/PDIF. (Do you remember when you had to hook your CD drive to your sound card to play music CDs?) This goes through a now-discontinued WM8805 receiver — a sign this project has been in the works for a while — that translates S/PDIF into an I2S stream the ESP32 can easily work with.
Work with it it does, with the aforementioned scrobbing, along with track ID and time-sinked lyrics via CDDB or MusicBrainz. The ESP32 should have the computing power to pull data through the IDE bus and decode it, but we have to admit that this hack gets the job done — albeit at the expense of losing the ability to read data CDs, like MP3 or MIDI. [Akasaka Ryuunosuk] has plans to include such functionality into v2, along with the ability to use a more modern SATA CD-ROM drive. We look forward to seeing it, especially if it keeps the VFD and classic styling. It just needs to be paired
with a classic amplifier
, and maybe a
DIY turntable to top off the stack
.
Thanks to [Akasaka Ryuunosuke] for the tip. If you also crave our eternal gratitude (which is worth its weight in gold, don’t forget),
drop us a tip of your own
. We’d love to hear from you.
| 12
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134049",
"author": "boondaburrah",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T00:05:30",
"content": "You sure about that CD-ROM having S/PDIF out? I’ve never seen that in all my years of PC building; the audio out from IDE CD drives is analogue specifically because your computer may not have a CD quality DAC or the CPU cycles to schedule back in the DOS/Win9x days.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134051",
"author": "Ryuunosuke Akasaka",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T00:33:20",
"content": "The 4-pin one is analog, but a lot of them have a 2-pin next to that which is SPDIF. The further into the 2000s you go the less of them have it though. I remember soldering a TOSLINK port to mine at one point to write music onto my minidisc player :P",
"parent_id": "8134049",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134054",
"author": "Akimmet",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T00:56:16",
"content": "ATAPI CD-ROM drives with a direct S/PDIF output certainly existed. I have a few in my collection.Although such drives were very uncommon. Most drives only had analog audio connectors on the back, just as you remember",
"parent_id": "8134049",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134073",
"author": "jercos",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T03:56:19",
"content": "They were side by side in the classier drives… a 2-pin plug for “digital” next to the 4-pin analog.",
"parent_id": "8134049",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134077",
"author": "arifyn",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T04:15:21",
"content": "The connector was reasonably common in CD-ROM drives of the late 90’s and early 2000s, but very nondescript. You could easily assume it was a random pair of jumper pins. If it was labeled, it probably just said “digital”.I certainly can’t remember anyone ever actuallyusingit in a PC build, since afaik it was only supported by later discrete sound cards (the SB Live! and Audigy, for example), and you could move digital audio data across the ATAPI interface just fine too…",
"parent_id": "8134049",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134074",
"author": "jercos",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T04:00:04",
"content": "By translating S/PDIF to I2S that way, this project gives up any chance to read the subcodes from the stream… not all drives read the subcode into the S/PDIF stream, but when they do, it holds CD-TEXT and any other fancy features present alongside the audio in sync.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134089",
"author": "Jeff",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T06:11:03",
"content": "Some CD-ROM chipsets will actually spit out subcode data in the S/PDIF data stream, as the user bit of the audio sample. Also it is common to use the validity bit to signal if a sample has been reconstructed (interpolated) in the event of C2 errors. These ancillary bits are usually available as separate outputs on S/PDIF interface receivers and have simple framing that should be easy to decode.It’s too bad that CD-TEXT never really caught on.",
"parent_id": "8134074",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134117",
"author": "Ryuunosuke Akasaka",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T09:15:03",
"content": "The drives post-2000 or so usually support parsing and reading subcode on their own so CD TEXT actually works on this! :PI wonder how it would be with the rev2 though if I go with the direct data bus hookup and thus reading audio data on my own",
"parent_id": "8134074",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134140",
"author": "Richard",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T11:48:06",
"content": "Great looking build – so cool when a build a taken past “got it working” to “made it look good too”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134147",
"author": "Ryuunosuke Akasaka",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T12:14:13",
"content": "As long as you don’t turn it around and look at the back panel xDThanks!",
"parent_id": "8134140",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134169",
"author": "JT$",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T14:23:19",
"content": "The Homer Simpson approach",
"parent_id": "8134147",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134152",
"author": "Vladivir",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T12:44:01",
"content": "Last.FM scrobbling – can you get pills for that? It sounds nasty.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,530.144545
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/31/hot-rod-backyard-bath-on-steel-spring-legs/
|
Hot Rod Backyard Bath On Steel Spring Legs
|
Heidi Ulrich
|
[
"hardware",
"home hacks",
"how-to",
"News"
] |
[
"bath",
"clamp",
"junk",
"leaf springs",
"springs",
"steel welding",
"tub",
"weld"
] |
In a fusion of scrapyard elegance and Aussie ingenuity, [Mark Makies] has given a piece of old steel a steamy second life with
his ‘CastAway Tub’
. Call it a bush mechanic’s fever dream turned functional sculpture, starring two vintage LandCruiser leaf springs, and a rust-hugged cast iron tub dug up after 20 years in hiding. And put your
welding goggles
on, because this one is equal parts brute force and artisan flair.
What makes this hack so bold is, first of all, the reuse of unforgiving spring
steel
. Leaf springs, notoriously temperamental to weld, are tamed here with
oxy-LPG preheating
, avoiding thermal shock like a pro. The tub sits proudly atop a custom-welded frame shaped from dismantled spring packs, with each leaf ground, clamped, torched, and welded into a steampunk sled base. The whole thing looks like it might outrun a dune buggy – and possibly bathe you while it’s at it. It’s a masterclass in metalwork with zero CAD, all intuition, and a grinder that’s seen things.
Inspired? For those with a secret love for hot water and hot steel, this build is a blueprint for turning bush junk into backyard art. Read up on the full build at Instructables.
| 16
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134011",
"author": "irox",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T20:57:01",
"content": "☠️ Definitely not safe🍺 Dubiously inspired🚫 Not recommended🛷 Not steerable⚠️ Probably illegal",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134029",
"author": "EV",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T21:48:38",
"content": "Which makes it perfect.",
"parent_id": "8134011",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134033",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T22:07:34",
"content": "👍 Fun and legal and safe enough",
"parent_id": "8134011",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134050",
"author": "Mark Makies",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T00:28:25",
"content": "These points only apply if your feeling bold and reckless, have a steep paddock, questionable judgement and have decided to follow step 13 on Instructables to convert from bath to sled.https://www.instructables.com/CastAway-Tub/",
"parent_id": "8134011",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134061",
"author": "irox",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T01:40:08",
"content": "All maker projects should adopt that warning label schema.Looking forward to seeing the Step 13 edition!",
"parent_id": "8134050",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134195",
"author": "David Kindltot",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T16:24:21",
"content": "Frenchkiss",
"parent_id": "8134011",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134394",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T12:51:12",
"content": "the first step is admitting you have a problem",
"parent_id": "8134011",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134017",
"author": "Ian",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T21:07:22",
"content": "It’s neat.But is pure art a HaD subject?Is the “hack” that they preheated the spring steel before welding?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134034",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T22:08:26",
"content": "They need to just start permabanning this comment",
"parent_id": "8134017",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135351",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T19:55:16",
"content": "ArtsandCraftsaDay…Still not a match for the twine wrapped junk tire coffee table.That was the all time worst IMHO.Not that I’ve seen all the crap that floats through this site.Bandwidth ain’t free, they post a ‘drive traffic to clickbait’ article at least once/day.Just point and laugh.",
"parent_id": "8134017",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134052",
"author": "RichC",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T00:39:10",
"content": "From the thumbnail I thought it was a bathtub mounted on rusty Strandbeest legs.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134060",
"author": "Gene",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T01:38:09",
"content": "A work in progress for certain. No visible plumbing. I suppose you could to fill it with a garden hose then build a fire underneath to warm the water. Mind your step on exit for hot coals.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134988",
"author": "Mark Makies",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T23:58:34",
"content": "That’s the plan",
"parent_id": "8134060",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134062",
"author": "Adrian",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T01:59:36",
"content": "Add an old vibrating diesel and it might scuttle around, like a bristle bot",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134063",
"author": "Narcolapser",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T02:09:28",
"content": "I’ve never wanted to like a comment so bad.",
"parent_id": "8134062",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134068",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T03:18:00",
"content": "That’s along the lines of what I was expecting. Then I realized that it, sadly, just sits there.",
"parent_id": "8134062",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,529.946155
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/31/building-a-wireless-motorized-fader-for-lighting-control/
|
Building A Wireless Motorized Fader For Lighting Control
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"Peripherals Hacks"
] |
[
"fader",
"lighting desk",
"motorized fader"
] |
Motorized faders are very cool, and you can find them in everything from expensive mixing desks to high-end video editing decks. If you want to build your own wireless motorized fader controls for your own projects,
you might like this project from [Ian Peterson].
Faders are useful controls, but they’re usually very one-way devices—you set them to what you want, and that’s it. However, motorized faders are a little fancier. You can move them yourself, or they can be moved under the command of other hardware or software—making a control change automatically that is still visible to the human in front of the control panel.
[Ian Peterson] built his OSCillator motorized fader for his work with lighting consoles in theater contexts. Its name references the Open Sound Control (OSC) platform which is commonly used across various lighting consoles. His build relies on an ESP32 to run the show, which communicates with other lighting hardware via WiFi. The microcontroller is responsible for reading the position of the fader and built-in button, and sending the relevant commands to other lighting devices on the network. At the same time, it must also listen to commands from lighting consoles on the network and update the motorized fader’s position in turn if the relevant control it’s mapped to has been changed elsewhere.
If you’re working in theater or film and you’re wanting to control lighting cues wirelessly, a tool like this can really come in handy. We don’t see a lot of motorized faders in DIY projects,
but they pop up now and then
.
| 2
| 2
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8134070",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T03:51:42",
"content": "And Yamaha organs at the high end. I had a repair with 15 or so sliders that were motorized. Hitting a preset moved them, but when sluggish they reprogrammed themselves where they stopped. Belts were gummy and greasy. No cassette deck belts were small enough! A trip to a local rubber parts dealer let me select the right size “O” ring though too thick but a little bending of sheet metal and they fit and will outlast the originals.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134311",
"author": "OG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T06:29:08",
"content": "Home automation: Decades of hype, and almost no real utility.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,530.043592
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/31/pulling-back-the-veil-practically/
|
Pulling Back The Veil, Practically
|
Elliot Williams
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants"
] |
[
"hacking and philosophy",
"newsletter",
"projects"
] |
In a marvelous college lecture in front of a class of engineering students, V. Hunter Adams
professed his love for embedded engineering
, but he might as well have been singing the songs of
our
people – the hackers. If you occasionally feel the need to explain to people why you do what you do, at fancy cocktail parties or something, this talk is great food for thought. It’s about as good a “Why We Hack” as I’ve ever seen.
Among the zingers, “projects are filter removers” stuck out. When you go through life, there are a lot of things that you kinda understand. Or maybe you’ve not even gotten around to thinking about whether you understand them or not, and just take them for granted. Life would all simply be too complicated if you took it all sufficiently seriously. Birdsong, Bluetooth, the sun in the sky, the friction of your car’s tire on various surfaces. These are all incredibly deep subjects, when you start to peel back the layers.
And Hunter’s point is that if you are working on a project that involves USB, your success or failure depends on understanding USB. There’s no room for filters here – the illusion that it “just works” often comes crashing down until you learn enough to make it work. Some of his students are doing projects cooperatively with the ornithology department, classifying and creating birdsong. Did you know that birds do this elaborate frequency modulation thing when they sing? Once you hear it, you know, and you hear it ever more.
So we agree with Hunter. Dive into a project because you want to get the project done, sure, but pick the project because it’s a corner of the world that you’d like to shine light into, to remove the filters of “I think I basically understand that”. When you get it working, you’ll know that you really do. Hacking your way to enlightenment? We’ve heard crazier things.
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
!
| 15
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133931",
"author": "Rick",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T14:14:18",
"content": "tl;dr anyone?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133933",
"author": "Danjovic",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T14:31:36",
"content": "That’s it. Just “make it work” might be enough for a maker, never for a hacker.note: there’s nothing wrong in being a maker, the difference is just in the objectives. Even a hacker can be a maker, for instance when he replicates something to be used as a tool.",
"parent_id": "8133931",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133971",
"author": "Harcourt_Fenton_Mudd",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T18:38:41",
"content": "oh puhleeeze…. get off your high horse…. hacks are well – hacks….folks who do shit half azz – see it all the time in “the trades”….you know how many stop work orders I sign ? (as a code enforcement inspector for the local AHJ). Some of the “hacks” i’ve seen doing “hack” work is mind boggling…..plumbers (who no speaka da English), who cut engineered trusses to run a pex line, electricians who ‘jerry rig’ some rube goldberg monstrosity on a main panel….the list is endless.So some ‘hacker’ throwing together a spaghetti abomination of wire for a robotic arm with no regard to cable dressing or bolt torque is just par for the course. Hacker / Maker , same shit different clothes",
"parent_id": "8133933",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134107",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T08:04:52",
"content": "Lumping all of this together is uncalled for, and you are probably well aware.The plumber that cuts load bearing beams is “a hack”, not a a hacker, they don’t care to learn what their shortcut will affect. You and I both know that a pex run doesn’t need a truss to be cut in the first place.Likewise the electrician, definitely not an outfit hired for quality and likely liable if a bank or fire department gets involved.Meanwhile the hacker trying to get a robot arm working? They aren’t doing this on contract, they probably aren’t going to destroy their house either, but if they do it’s their mistake directly.Lighten up, turn off work when coming here and it’ll be more fun. Or at least only turn it on when it makes sense.",
"parent_id": "8133971",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134367",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T10:18:27",
"content": "Naming is not explaining.For example, if I go to the doctor’s with weird unspecific muscle and joint pains that don’t seem to correspond with any well known disease, the doctor might give me a diagnosis saying that I’m suffering from “fibromyalgia”. That’s Latin for “joint and muscle pain”. Gee thanks, that clears up a lot.A hacker or a maker doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a label that people use for self-promotion and exclusion of others, just like any other contrived identity.",
"parent_id": "8134107",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133946",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T15:33:19",
"content": "Filters? High pass, low pass, particle size, wavelength? WTH.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135291",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T17:35:52",
"content": "Magnets. How do they work?",
"parent_id": "8133946",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133974",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T18:58:11",
"content": "i disagree. i have the curiosity. and i do a lot of things just because i want to understand them. but hacking definitely encompasses blindly stabbing at it until it kinda works and then forgetting about it",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134047",
"author": "Ray",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T23:57:44",
"content": "“but hacking definitely encompasses blindly stabbing at it until it kinda works…”“shotgun” approach is not true hacking, IMHO.Hacking as used in Hunter’s approach is a kind of enlightenment that comes from a deeper understanding of basic principles and is applicable to electronic, automotive, physic, chemical, software, etc. The end product of a great hacking experience is an enhancement to one’s knowledge.Assist AI: Hacking refers to creatively modifying or repurposing a product or system to exceed its original design limitations, often to improve functionality or adapt it for new uses. This approach emphasizes resourcefulness and innovation, allowing users to actively engage in the design process rather than just being passive consumers.",
"parent_id": "8133974",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134053",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T00:47:01",
"content": "i like ‘allowing users to actively engage in the design process’. it means each user will bring their idiosyncratic and temporal needs to their engagement. and sometimes some users will rejoice in their ability to [re]design something without barely touching their ignorance :)",
"parent_id": "8134047",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135292",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T17:36:11",
"content": "Fair enough!",
"parent_id": "8133974",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134099",
"author": "Jeff",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T07:05:25",
"content": "“Did you know that birds do this elaborate frequency modulation thing when they sing?”I heard a bird call once that I swear sounded like FSK. And on a different occasion, one that soundedjustlike squeaky motor brushes as the armature comes to a stop (like in an old electric drill).“…working on a project that involves USB, your success or failure depends on understanding USB.”It wasn’t until I did a deep dive on USB Audio Class that I got a project working correctly. The manufacturer’s example code was cheating and was unsuitable as-is. Also it’s crazy how many mass-produced products have USB descriptors that arejust_plain_wrong– it’s amazing that it even works at all. I salute the brave programmers that tackle USB Host Controller programming.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134109",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T08:06:09",
"content": "It’s incredibly common for laptop USB to just be out of compliance on a number of things, with no way to know how without direct testing.",
"parent_id": "8134099",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134141",
"author": "Akimmet",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T11:48:19",
"content": "The old adage “Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know” definitely applies to USB software and hardware development.",
"parent_id": "8134099",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134155",
"author": "Sammie Gee",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T12:52:13",
"content": "I’ll just leave it here:“Fahre fort, übe nicht allein die Kunst, sondern dringe auch in ihr Inneres; sie verdient es. Denn nur die Kunst und die Wissenschaft erhöhen den Menschen bis zur Gottheit.” Ludwig van Beethoven.(usually translated as “Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets, for it and knowledge can raise men to the divine.” – though)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,530.094436
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/31/a-crt-display-for-retro-weather-forecasting/
|
A CRT Display For Retro Weather Forecasting
|
Aaron Beckendorf
|
[
"classic hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] |
[
"crt",
"CRT display",
"openweathermap",
"retro",
"the Weather Channel",
"weather display"
] |
It would be hard to find any electronics still in production which use CRT displays, but for some inscrutable reason it’s easy to find cheap 4-inch CRTs on AliExpress. Not that we’re complaining, of course. Especially when they get picked up for projects like this
Retro CRT Weather Display from [Conrad Farnsworth]
, which recreates the interface of The Weather Channel’s WeatherStar 4000+ in a suitably 90s-styled format.
The CRT itself takes up most of the space in the enclosure, with the control electronics situated in the base behind the display driver. A Raspberry Pi Zero W provides the necessary processing power, and connects to the CRT through its composite video output.
A custom PCB plugs into the GPIO header on the Raspberry Pi and provides some additional features, such as a rotary encoder for volume and brightness display, a control button, a serial UART interface, and a speaker driver. The design still has one or two caveats: it’s designed to powered by USB, but [Conrad] notes that it draws more current than USB 2.0 can provide, though USB-C should be able to keep up.
On the software side, a Python program displays a cycle of three slides: local weather, regional weather, and a radar display. For the local and regional weather display graphics, [Conrad] created a static background image containing most of the graphics, and the program only generated the dynamic components. For the radar display, the regional map’s outlines come from Natural Earth, and a Python program overlays radar data on them.
We’ve seen other attempts at
recreating the unique style of the WeatherStar system
, but
nothing quite beats the real thing
.
| 16
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133911",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T11:41:48",
"content": "I’ve been looking for an excuse to buy one (or more) of these CRTs, still not there yet but I quite like the idea of a “handheld” gaming console with a selection of vintage games like space invaders",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133918",
"author": "henrebotha",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T12:45:39",
"content": "I’m sort of obsessed with how old pixel art games like Third Strike just look a million times better on CRT. Like the CRT “filter” is an integral part of the medium that the art is made for.",
"parent_id": "8133911",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133921",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T13:10:40",
"content": "If you could match an LCD with a vintage system pixel for pixel I think it might be better, but feeding the low resolution output from a vintage system to a super sharp, hi res LCD is always going to show up the shortcomings.I do like a well set up CRT display though, they look nice and yeah, they make vintage hardware look better because it was designed for the foibles and shortcomings of a CRT display but that’s a religious war",
"parent_id": "8133918",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133925",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T13:37:48",
"content": "There’s a difference between a domestic CRT TV and an arcade CRT, though.An NES or Genesis console looks fine/authentic on a “blurry” 1970s/80s era NTSC/PAL TV with RF jack,while an arcade cab had CRTs with RGB input and razor sharp pixels and thick scan lines.Same goes for Amiga/VGA PC DOS games of old.The Commodore 1084s monitor had a dot pitch of 0.42 mm, the IBM PS/2 8513 monitor a dot pitch of 0.39 mm.Both were quite low res compared to mid-90s and 2000s CRTs (good).Such details do matter, it’s a rational consideration.A random CRT monitor doesn’t cut it; it has to match the source.A low res source and a low res monitor match each other, for example.",
"parent_id": "8133918",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134103",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T07:51:04",
"content": "The dot pitch on my 90’s Nokia monitors was 0.25×0.22mm and they had both rgb and sync input. Being forced to switch to LCD was a serious downgrade for many years.At this point using a shader to approximate the effect dynamically based on resolution and the game source is generally a better way to go (blasphemy, I know) they aren’t perfect, but have gotten much better over time.",
"parent_id": "8133925",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134295",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T05:12:13",
"content": "Hi, early VGA monitors of the 80s were more like this.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m79HxULt3O8Dithering worked very well here, have a look at Monkey Island part.It wasn’t very good for GUIs such as Windows or GEM.By time Windows 95 came out, such DOS era VGA monitors were obsolete.Which is sad, because mode 13h games looked gorgeous on them.",
"parent_id": "8134103",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134292",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T04:59:30",
"content": "Here’s a decent explanation, I think.https://www.datagubbe.se/crt/",
"parent_id": "8133925",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133952",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T15:57:12",
"content": "I was expecting a regular CRT. I’d try an audio scope with one of these like I did with one this size I found in the trash. It has a radio too so it’s self contained with a FM source. Internal audio amp drives the former horizontal and the former vertical becomes the timebase with the yoke turned 90 degrees. The only trick is a small inductor to load the unused horizontal to continue to provide anode voltage.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133960",
"author": "dm",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T16:56:51",
"content": "Wild guess here… is the speaker melting because it needs a DC blocking capacitor?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133987",
"author": "Conrad Farnsworth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T20:02:38",
"content": "You’re the second person to suggest this. I think it’s the right fix but neither the datasheet or Adafruit’s version of the breakout board for the DAC chip include a blocking cap. It would probably be wise to add one in though.",
"parent_id": "8133960",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133996",
"author": "Not Christian",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T20:11:45",
"content": "What a cool project! Classy form factor, too",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134005",
"author": "OG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T20:52:37",
"content": "Looking at the pics here and some customer pics on AliExpress, it seems that the images on these CRTs tend to droop downward on the left side. Anybody have ideas on that?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134039",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T22:52:08",
"content": "Slightly maladjusted yoke? Or maybe the original circuit had some electromagnetic component there which was compensated for? I’m just guessing",
"parent_id": "8134005",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134078",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T04:16:33",
"content": "That’s a really interesting question, and I’ve been kinda chewing on it all afternoon, since I’ve noticed the same thing. I think some distortion may be inherent to the design of the CRT; Even the Sony Watchman didn’t have perfect geometry. My best guess is that it’s related to incorrect compensation for the odd geometry of the CRT. Whether this is due to yoke maladjustment / misalignment / defect as TG suggested, or an issue with a compensation circuit for the sweep signals, I’m not sure. I can’t imagine the deflection signals for this CRT would be linear ramps, given that the axis of the electron beam is nearly parallel to the surface of the screen. It’d be interesting to throw a scope on this and see what things look like. I’m also curious how good focus is maintained across the entire screen. Unfortunately, the equipment for manufacturing these has probably long been scrapped, and the hands-on engineering knowledge being slowly lost to the sands of time. It’d be interesting to know the circumstances that led to enormous numbers of these coming up for sale (did someone find thousands of them in a Chinese warehouse?) Either way, I’m gonna buy a few of these before they disappear.",
"parent_id": "8134005",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135485",
"author": "OG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T04:39:20",
"content": "Thanks for the thoughts. I find the skew to be bad enough to deter me from buying one. The idea of it having been there to compensate for another component is interesting. Reminds me of the time I put a magnet next to my monitor at worked and hit the Degauss button… this calibrated the monitor to work with the magnet there, so when I pulled it away the monitor was “stained.” I was not pleased when degaussing it again didn’t come close to eliminating the discoloration. It took a while to go away.",
"parent_id": "8134078",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134114",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T09:06:07",
"content": "“but for some inscrutable reason it’s easy to find cheap 4-inch CRTs on AliExpress”oh wow very inscrutable. It´s called stock / stockpile.Why here is word salad so often taking precedence over rational thinking and fact-checking ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,530.360878
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/31/making-a-treadmill-into-a-3d-printer/
|
Making A Treadmill Into A 3D Printer
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"3d Printer hacks"
] |
[
"3d print",
"3d printer",
"treadmill"
] |
A treadmill-style bed can be a great addition to a 3D printer. It allows prints to be shifted out of the build volume as printing continues, greatly increasing the size and flexibility of what you can print. But [Ivan Miranda] and [Jón Schone] had a question. Instead of making a treadmill to suit a 3D printer,
what if you just built a 3D printer on top of a full-size treadmill?
The duo sourced a piece of real gym equipment for this build. They then set about building a large-scale 3D printer on top of this platform. The linear rails were first mounted on to the treadmill’s frame, followed by a gantry for the print head itself and mounts for the necessary stepper motors. The printer also gained a custom extra-large extruder to ensure a satisfactory print speed that was suitable for the scale of the machine. From there, it was largely a case of fitting modules and running cables to complete the printer.
Soon enough, the machine was printing hot plastic on the treadmill surface, thereby greatly expanding the usable print volume. It’s a little tricky to wrap your head around at first, but when you see it in action, it’s easy to see the utility of a build like this, particularly at large scale. [Ivan] demonstrated this by printing a massive girder over two meters long.
We
started seeing attempts at building
a belt-equipped “
infinite build volume” printer back in 2017
, and it took awhile before the
concept matured enough to be practical
. Even today, they remain fairly uncommon.
| 7
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133919",
"author": "Halogenek",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T12:45:46",
"content": "So unnecessary. I love it. :D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134018",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T21:18:11",
"content": "Should be 2 videos shown up there.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134022",
"author": "Impatient in Ipswich",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T21:26:03",
"content": "That’s cool and all, but when will I be able to buy (or build) NAK3D Design’s White Knight infinite-“Z”-axis printer with [Ben Wang]’s PCB linear actuators?!https://github.com/NAK3DDesigns/White-Knighthttps://hackaday.com/2022/08/10/a-linear-actuator-entirely-in-one-pcb/Inquiring minds want to know!!!!1",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134286",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T04:26:39",
"content": "When you make it happen.",
"parent_id": "8134022",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134045",
"author": "Robotgrandpa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T23:47:20",
"content": "All I could think of was a giant red LEGO beam and some smaller pieces to make a giant 4- or 6-wide human sized vehicle",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134267",
"author": "Alex",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T02:21:38",
"content": "Check out Matt Denton’s human size Lego go-kart and mini-bike",
"parent_id": "8134045",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134097",
"author": "Alvise",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T06:55:36",
"content": "Nema 17 are enough for this application.. they could run up to 1500rpm, so he needs only to design a proper Gear reduction. i did it with my 100kg telescope and It rotates 8°/s with 630:1 reduction( nema rotating at 800rpm).. with professional scope precision.. a good nema 17 do 400step degree, that Is a precision of 0.9° without using any microstep.. with a Gear reduction of 630:1 the precision reach 0,0014°.. then you can have even more torch using a proper stepper driver that can supply more voltage to the stepper, like 48v. Like the tcm5160.So it’s a waste of Money( and a big loss in precision) tò use steppers above nema 17 tò run them at very low rpm.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,530.188611
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/30/17-year-old-hellboy-ii-prop-still-amazes/
|
17 Year OldHellboy IIProp Still Amazes
|
Heidi Ulrich
|
[
"3d Printer hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] |
[
"3d printing",
"animatronic",
"cgi",
"hellboy",
"hellboy II",
"mechanical",
"prop",
"servo"
] |
The AI effects we know these days were once preceded by CGI, and those were once preceded by true hand-built physical props. If that makes you think of
Muppets
, this video will change your mind.
In a behind-the-scenes look with [Adam Savage]
, effects designer [Mark Setrakian] reveals the full animatronic glory of Mr. Wink’s mechanical fist from
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
(2008) – and this beast still flexes.
Most of this arm was actually made in 2003, when 3D printing was very different than what we think of today. Printed on a
Stratasys
Titan – think: large refrigerator-sized machine, expensive as sin – the parts were then hand-textured with a Dremel for that war-scarred, brutalist feel. This wasn’t just basic animatronics for set dressing. This was a fully actuated prop with
servo-driven
finger joints, a retractable chain weapon, and bevel-geared mechanisms that scream mechanical craftsmanship.
Each finger is individually designed. The chain reel: powered by a DeWalt drill motor and custom bevel gear assembly. Every department: sculptors, CAD modelers, machinists, contributed to this hybrid of analog and digital magic. Props like this are becoming unicorns.
| 7
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133849",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T06:27:56",
"content": "That chain nozzle is a mindblower.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133852",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T07:14:44",
"content": "You learn something new every day, I had no idea that was a practical effect, I assumed it was CGI. A pretty amazing creation, especially for what was available at the time. The chain winder is made more impressive by the fact that the guy had to invent it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133879",
"author": "helge",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T09:48:14",
"content": "A precursor to his mechanism is undoubtedly the cross-cut machine for making Humbug candy, patented around 1874. Lofty Pursuits has one (7 mins in):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItjzDFYXeGk&t=7m",
"parent_id": "8133852",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134792",
"author": "johnnyburn",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T14:44:43",
"content": "Nice find, thanks!",
"parent_id": "8133879",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133967",
"author": "UT",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T18:06:38",
"content": "Most of the shots you see it are VFX, there’s only a few shots in the movie where they left it the practical version",
"parent_id": "8133852",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133856",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T07:23:52",
"content": "Hellboy 2 was 17 years ago…Yeah…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134791",
"author": "johnnyburn",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T14:44:20",
"content": "This would be a dream job. So impressive.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,530.230017
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/30/white-led-turning-purple-analyzing-a-phosphor-failure/
|
White LED Turning Purple: Analyzing A Phosphor Failure
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Repair Hacks"
] |
[
"autopsy",
"phosphor"
] |
White LED bulbs are commonplace in households by now, mostly due to their low power usage and high reliability. Crank up the light output enough and you do however get high temperatures and corresponding interesting failure modes. An example is the one demonstrated by the [electronupdate] channel on YouTube with a Philips MR16 LED spot that
had developed a distinct purple light output
.
The crumbling phosphor coating on top of the now exposed LEDs. (Credit: electronupdate, YouTube)
After popping off the front to expose the PCB with the LED packages, the fault seemed to be due to the phosphor on one of the four LEDs flaking off, exposing the individual 405 nm LEDs underneath. Generally, white LEDs are just UV or 405 nm (‘blue’) LEDs that have a phosphor coating on top that converts the emitted wavelength into broad band visible (white) or another specific wavelength, so this failure mode makes perfect sense.
After putting the PCB under a microscope and having a look at the failed and the other LED packages the crumbled phosphor on not just the one package became obvious, as the remaining three showed clear cracks in the phosphor coating. Whether due to the heat in these high-intensity spot lamps or just age, clearly over time these white LED packages become just bare LEDs without the phosphor coating. Ideally you could dab on some fresh phosphor, but likely the fix is to replace these LED packages every few years until the power supply in the bulb gives up the ghost.
Thanks to [ludek111] for the tip.
| 32
| 17
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133794",
"author": "Simula",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T02:32:16",
"content": "AFAIK it’s not UV but blue LED.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133910",
"author": "Adam",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T11:41:11",
"content": "That’s what I’ve always understood.",
"parent_id": "8133794",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133938",
"author": "pinkeen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T14:49:30",
"content": "You’re right, most are blue-pumped (450nm), but there are some manufacturers pushing violet-pumped (405nm) leds. The rationale is to reduce the blue peak in the spectrum which allegedly improves color rendering and is more pleasant to the eye.",
"parent_id": "8133794",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133798",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T02:58:40",
"content": "We have some street lights on our state roads in Connecticut where that has happened. Weird looking, but no one seems to get around to getting the manufacturer to cough up a warranty replacement.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133841",
"author": "DavidO",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T05:56:34",
"content": "https://hackaday.com/2024/10/09/fail-of-the-week-the-case-of-the-curiously-colored-streetlights/",
"parent_id": "8133798",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133965",
"author": "Doctor Wizard",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T17:43:16",
"content": "Same in our area. And supposedly they were going to get replaced, under warranty. That never happened. I was hoping to buy up a few of the old ones for cheap. I actually like the color, think it’s purty!",
"parent_id": "8133798",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134038",
"author": "QBFreak",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T22:49:45",
"content": "I live in a rural area, where there isn’t any regular street lighting, however it is possible to get the power company to put a light on a nearby pole for a monthly fee (or sometimes in your yard on a dedicated pole, but presumably that has some installation costs as well). One of my neighbors has one on the pole at the street in front of their house, and it’s failed in this manner as well.It was obnoxious enough, having the only super-bright light around, but now it’s gone an eye-searing purple, and it’s even worse. I find the purple light painful to experience, but I have trouble with blue LEDs as well.",
"parent_id": "8133798",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134040",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T22:54:34",
"content": "Blue LEDs are the optical equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard.",
"parent_id": "8134038",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133807",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T03:10:27",
"content": "It’s hilarious/annoying/sad to see streetlights slowly, one by one, shifting blue as they succumb to the phosphor shedding disease. Calgary, in particular, seems to have got a really bad batch of luminaires a few years ago, but several other cities I’ve seen have got it too.The even more irritating failure mode is the random frequent flash. I swear one light on a road I frequent was sending Morse code for months before it got replaced.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133865",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T07:49:41",
"content": "They are quite bad for the ecosystem, attracting insects to their death. The insect collapse is real, and the consequences for us humans will be huge.",
"parent_id": "8133807",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134064",
"author": "Andre Ferchau",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T02:24:43",
"content": "As a child in the 1960s in the Central valley California, I would always see tons of spider webs and bugs in those webs wherever there was a light on at night. By the 1990s there were never any bugs or spider webs around any lights that were on at night. Was it the insecticides used? The stress in the world is much higher than it has ever been.",
"parent_id": "8133865",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133962",
"author": "Egghead Larsen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T17:15:05",
"content": "Heh heh no one expected me to exfiltrate the Canadian defense data via THE STREETLIGHTS!!!!Bwahahahaha",
"parent_id": "8133807",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134184",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T15:43:15",
"content": "Hmm. Interesting. That morse-code blinking streetlight was near a local big defense contractor too.",
"parent_id": "8133962",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133811",
"author": "Jason R",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T03:23:25",
"content": "Happens in Calgary as well – the theory was the temperature range causing delamination. It ranges from almost -40C to the high 30s C here:https://www.ctvnews.ca/calgary/article/hard-on-the-eyes-defective-streetlights-on-some-calgary-roadways-have-drivers-blue/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133814",
"author": "Baz",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T03:31:13",
"content": "Minor correction: The vast majority of white LEDs use a 450nm blue LED to pump the phosphor, not UV.There are some specialty white LEDs that use a UV diode to get very good colour rendering (eg. Yuji VTC series) but they’re pricey.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133815",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T03:35:23",
"content": "High intensity only means the heat producing diodes are poorly liberating the heat they make. As far as I know they should only do 20mA per diode die. There are many manufactures that push this and they are filling the world for most of the LED haters with short life, flickering, and this. I bought several screw in mini spots and I now run the remaining ones at 80 to 90% power over the workbench. The first 2 had only a couple hundred hours life.No LED should have any part inside that is too hot to hold your finger on. These ran too hot! There is a trailer park (go figure) near town that has gone purple, thankfully I’ve never seen this anywhere else. Duke Energy seems to get a warm light on the replacements on the street, but their bluer rent-a-lights go into flickering quite often. They probably aware of this which is a serious traffic hazard. For this duty they should be very conservative as it costs time to replace, and should fail-safe if intermittent.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134041",
"author": "QBFreak",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T23:00:40",
"content": "I have a neighbor that rents a light from Duke. It’s been obnoxiously purple for at least a year. I guess I should be glad it’s not flickering. It’s painful enough with just the purple.I’d be surprised they haven’t done anything about it, except that they don’t do anything if they can avoid it. Our pole at the street is leaning at a pretty decent angle. It does this every few years. They keep doing band-aid fixes (pull it straight, shove a bag of expanding foam into the newly-expose gap). The latest tech agreed that it needed to be guyed from across the street, but it’s been months, and that hasn’t gone anywhere. It continues to lean, held up mostly by the wires to the other poles.",
"parent_id": "8133815",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134579",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T23:38:02",
"content": "I design LED drivers. We have plenty that drive 2A through individual dies, which are easily capable of handling it. I’ve worked on a die that could handle >30A. If you can extract the heat well enough, the bondwire can apparently handle well in excess of 2A. Which probably isn’t surprising: they’re easily visible, definitely larger than a human hair. The die bonds on our drivers are just about 0.025mm and can handle an amp each, so our 2A parts use multiple pins in parallel. We used to see a lot of led modules that had parallel dies for higher powers, but now they’re visibly single-die.",
"parent_id": "8133815",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133819",
"author": "macona",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T03:40:19",
"content": "There is a parking lot near me that the entire lot is purple from every single LED failing. They have not done anything about it in years.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133823",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T03:45:54",
"content": "We had numerous warranty claims over this on brand new lamps in cars l. PC converted Leds are very well known from thisToo hard they Crack and flake off … too soft and jelly like they get tornMy former workplace decided to increase efficiency they would route these things off into individual boards and send them skyrocketing down a roller ramp loose in a tray…Claims went up 30% and they are nearly out of biz",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133863",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T07:47:37",
"content": "White LEDs are NOT UV LEDs + phosphor coating !!!They are blue LEDs, close from the end of visible spectrum (but not beyond except for a little fraction of the light emitted (LEDs are not monochromatic)If it was the case, UV LEDs would be as cheap – or cheaper, not having the phosphor coating – than white LEDs.Ultraviolet is per se NOT visible.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133955",
"author": "Jack Fr0st",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T16:14:02",
"content": "LEDs (the individual diodes) emit light with a very narrow bandwidth. They are nearly monochromatic; so for almost all purposes they are just considered monochromatic light sources.",
"parent_id": "8133863",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133887",
"author": "Sat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T10:16:33",
"content": "And don’t forget the case of the purple spots from the problematic LEDs in the backlight of many TVs, mine included.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133903",
"author": "Special",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T11:01:16",
"content": "My LG tv started getting purple areas that were mostly visible while watching black and white movies, I replaced the backlights and hopefully the replacements don’t suffer the same fate.A co-worker gave me a Vizio tv that the business was going to throw out due to blotches from dead leds and the backlights are blue, I was a little confused at first because the picture colors looked normal when watching the set before disassembling. I put the screens back in front of the backlights and the colors returned to normal again. This tv has a phosphor layer mixed in with the screens.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133929",
"author": "Per Jensen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T14:06:10",
"content": "That’s called a QLED TV. It’s using Quantum dot technology to convert the blue into green and red.",
"parent_id": "8133903",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133922",
"author": "Thinkerer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T13:14:17",
"content": "The failure problem isn’t with the phosphor per se, but the matrix that the phosphor is embedded in. These are typically organic polymer based (though ceramic /glass matrices have been investigated) and are subject to debonding/fracture/failure with the extreme conditions that they operate in. I don’t work deeply in the field and there may be someone out there who can comment a bit more knowledgeably about the specifics .It may also be a typical case of corporate “Why fix it if it sells more product this way?” similar to the Phoebus Cartel nonsense with filament bulbs.https://www.led-professional.com/resources-1/articles/new-glass-based-phosphors-for-white-light-emitting-diodeshttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1369800124006218https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134221",
"author": ".",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T20:46:09",
"content": "A lot of cheap leds just used an organic dye that flouresced, but also bleached out fast. This was very common in torches, where they could go blue in hours.So the phosphor is/was definitely an issue at the low end of the market",
"parent_id": "8133922",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133939",
"author": "woop",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T14:50:37",
"content": "Some led products use a remote phosphor, where the phosphor is embedded into the diffuser and doesn’t get nearly as hot. It’s less of a point source though so not as good for focusing into beams.Although it is possible to produce beams with remote phosphor, Laser projectors also often use a remote phosphor to generate the green light (red and blue are done directly with laser diodes)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133941",
"author": "Worf",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T14:53:18",
"content": "Same reason you have purple street lights. I’m just surprised it happened to home LED lights as well since that’s much less common occurrence despite the higher penetration. Most of my lights just die, not go purple. But purple street lights seem to have one somewhere that everyone knows about.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134182",
"author": "Aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T15:29:11",
"content": "The odd thing for me is that I’ve never experienced this, all my lamps either die or go rather dim with age.And I don’t recall seeing it outside either.I’ve seen the blinking issue plenty though in commercial places, where the driver gets into that loop.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134213",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T18:52:25",
"content": "Noticed this has happened to some of the street lights in and around Boston. They developed a clear purple color at night!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134222",
"author": ".",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T20:51:15",
"content": "Led bulb claimed life seems to be total fantasy. I now write the date, shop, invoice#, and claimed lifetime in hours, on every led bulb when I buy them. We have actual consumer law, and I have zero trouble getting a bulb replaced with all that written on it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,530.544424
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/30/you-wouldnt-download-a-skateboard/
|
You Wouldn’t Download A Skateboard?
|
Fenix Guthrie
|
[
"3d Printer hacks"
] |
[
"3D printed skateboard",
"skateboard",
"skateboard hacks",
"skateboarding"
] |
At the end of the day, a skateboard boils down to a plank of wood with some wheels. They are wonderfully simple and fun and cheap modes of transportation. But this is Hackaday, so we are not here to talk about any normal skateboard, but one you can download and print. [megalog_’s]
Skateboard MK2 is made almost entirely of 3D printed plastic
, save some nuts and bolts.
The board’s four piece deck comes in at a modest 55cm length and features a rather stylish hexagonal pattern for grip. While you could presumably bring your own trucks, 3D printable ones are provided as well. The pieces bolt together to create a fairly strong deck with the option to make a rather stylish two tone print if you have the printer for it. Where the pieces meet is also the location of the truck mounting, further increasing the board’s strength. The weakest point is where the tail meets the main deck, which if pressed down to wheelie or ollie, the print breaks apart at the layer lines.
While you might be able to bring your own trucks, all be it with some modification to the deck, [megalog] also provided models for those as well. Not only were the bushings made of flexible TPE filament, but the outer wheel tire is too. It’s a little strange to see a wheel tire combo on a skateboard, when they are traditionally over moulded plastic with enough tire that you would be forgiven for thinking there is no wheel. While some reported using the more traditional threaded rod, the trucks used a metal rod with shaft collars to attach the wheels.
This is a neatly executed skateboard build with a well thought out design. Let us know in the comments if you will (or have) made one yourself! While you’re at it, maybe
cast your own resin wheels
for it!
| 9
| 8
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133789",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T01:51:13",
"content": "Actually I wouldn’t. Break my neck on the thing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133817",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T03:36:50",
"content": "Ya me and anything that involves the word sake have long ago mutually agreed to not be involved with each other",
"parent_id": "8133789",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133793",
"author": "Dallas",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T02:10:25",
"content": "Albeit is pronounced “all be it” but that’s not what it means.Obligatory Editorial Police",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133818",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T03:39:38",
"content": "“The weakest point is where the tail meets the main deck”Yea well no shit look at it",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133840",
"author": "Mike E",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T05:54:27",
"content": "My first skate board WAS a plank of wood with some rollerskate wheels screwed to it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134036",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T22:33:29",
"content": "World’s Shortest Skateboard Opens Up New World For Amputees",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134102",
"author": "make piece not war",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T07:50:30",
"content": "I’m still waiting for a DIY skateboard from BttF.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134329",
"author": "MrRTFM",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T07:52:13",
"content": "I Truly love, that the “You wouldn’t download a xyz” is a meme for an entire generation.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134522",
"author": "felipe henrique",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T19:44:52",
"content": "i looking for a montainboard 3d printed hehehe… here in my country is really hard to find one…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,530.589782
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/30/tidy-led-matrix-displays-gifs-on-demand/
|
Tidy LED Matrix Displays GIFs On Demand
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"LED Hacks"
] |
[
"ESP8266",
"led",
"led matrix",
"ws2812b"
] |
When it comes to LED matrixes, building one is just the first step. Then you have to decide what to display on it. [panjanek] came up with a relatively flexible answer to this question,
building an RGB LED matrix that can display the GIFs of your choice.
The web interface accepts GIFs for display.
[panjanek] grabbed WS2812B addressable LEDs for this project, assembling them into a 32 x 32 matrix that fits perfectly inside an off-the-shelf Ikea picture frame. The matrix is hooked up to an ESP8266 microcontroller, which acts as the brains of the operation. The WiFi-enabled microcontroller hosts its own web interface, with which the project can be controlled. Upon opening the page, it’s possible to upload a GIF file that will be displayed as an animation on the matrix itself. It’s also possible to stream UDP packets of bitmap data to the device to send real-time animations over a network.
It’s a neat build, and one that answers any questions of what you might display on your LED matrix when you’re finished assembling it. Code is
on Github
if you fancy implementing the GIF features in your own work. We’ve featured some unexpected LED matrix builds of late, like this innovative device
for the M.2 slot
. Meanwhile, if you’re cooking up your own creative LED builds, don’t hesitate to let us know
on the tipsline!
| 4
| 3
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133728",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T20:52:08",
"content": "That’s Windows icon resolution (32×32)..https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICO_(file_format)#History",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133740",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T21:46:22",
"content": "GIF is the wrong format for this because it limits you to a mere 256 colors.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133830",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T04:19:15",
"content": "Hi, but it supports transparency and has no compression artifacts like JPEG has.And PNG would be overkill, I think. No one likes PNG, also.",
"parent_id": "8133740",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133758",
"author": "Alphatek",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T23:26:54",
"content": "I know we’re supposed to be nice, but that pixel misalignment would drive me nuts!On the plus side, 8×8 ws2812 panels are insanely cheap at AliExpress – the last ones I bought were less than a dollar each. Dot pitch is about 8.2mm though.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,530.632729
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/30/2025-pet-hacks-contest-keep-the-prey-at-bay-with-the-cat-valve/
|
2025 Pet Hacks Contest: Keep The Prey At Bay With The Cat Valve
|
Jenny List
|
[
"contests",
"home hacks"
] |
[
"2025 Pet Hacks Contest",
"cat",
"prey",
"raspberry pi"
] |
Some cats are what you might call indoor cats, happy to stretch out in the lap of indoor luxury and never bother themselves with the inclement outdoors again. Others however are fully in touch with their Inner Cat, and venture forth frequently in search of whatever prey they can find.
[Rkramer] has a cat of this nature,sadly one with a propensity for returning with live prey. To avoid this problem a solution is called for, and it comes in the shape of
the Cat Valve
, an automated cat door which enforces a buffer zone in their cellar to prevent unwanted gifts.
It’s a simple enough idea, when an IR sensor connected to a Raspberry Pi 4 detects the cat heading out into the world through the exterior cat flap, the computer fires up a motor connected to a lead screw which closes the flap between buffer zone and house. The cat then has the safety of the buffer zone, but can’t bring the prey fully inside.
If you’re a cat lover you’ll forgive them anything, but we have to admit to being on [Rkramer]’s side with this one. A useful way to keep the prey at bay is something we could have used a few times in the past, too. This project is part of the 2025 Pet Hacks contest. Done something similar for your cat? Why not make it an entry!
| 11
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133680",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T17:29:21",
"content": "The best one here used open CV or some sorts and profiled the cat excluding other cats, animals, and the home cat with prey in mouth. Kudos for simple exit and separate enter to quarantine. Could be a problem with screw down on a tail. Could two separate one way flaps do this without any advanced tech?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133703",
"author": "rnjacobs",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T18:52:20",
"content": "One of the best earliest documented-on-the-internet hacks.https://web.archive.org/web/20020204103229/www.quantumpicture.com/Flo_Control/flo_control.htm",
"parent_id": "8133680",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133947",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T15:35:23",
"content": "Ah, fab, that’s the one I was trying to remember, thank you",
"parent_id": "8133703",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133682",
"author": "Miles Archer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T17:48:08",
"content": "Good solution. We’ve seen other clever ones too.Nothing worse than a cat bringing in a half dead rat that hides in your old bedroom slippers until it succumbs. And then finding it days later.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133701",
"author": "Tim Andersson",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T18:38:17",
"content": "Nothing worse than a cat bringing in a half dead rat that hides in your old bedroom slippers until it succumbs. And then finding it days later.What about a cat that keeps meowing and scratching at one particular closet, which makes your gf curious about what is there. Unfortunately she discovers entire set of tools used for arse play (for those times when I’m lonely and feeling kinky.) Welp there goes my plan to become married, it’s back to chasing rosebuds.",
"parent_id": "8133682",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133949",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T15:38:29",
"content": "spits coffee all over laptopSir, this is a Wendy’s",
"parent_id": "8133701",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133683",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T17:50:01",
"content": "I seem to remember a previous solution here that used a camera and image processing to decide if the cat was holding something in its mouth before unlocking the cat flap.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133724",
"author": "A responsible cat lover",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T20:38:59",
"content": "Better solution still: when unsupervised, keep your non-native predator pet inside, where it won’t predate on native wildlife.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133741",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T21:47:09",
"content": "Real solution is to stop letting your cat outside",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133766",
"author": "Conrad",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T00:11:15",
"content": "Or give them free access to an enclosure outside. The get fresh air and sun, but it keeps them separate from the native fauna",
"parent_id": "8133741",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133783",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T01:33:42",
"content": "Exactly!",
"parent_id": "8133766",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,530.978293
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/30/hackaday-podcast-episode-323-impossible-crt-surgery-fuel-cells-stream-gages-and-a-love-letter-to-microcontrollers/
|
Hackaday Podcast Episode 323: Impossible CRT Surgery, Fuel Cells, Stream Gages, And A Love Letter To Microcontrollers
|
Dan Maloney
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] |
[
"Hackaday Podcast"
] |
Elliot and Dan teamed up this week for the podcast, and after double-checking, nay, triple-checking that we were recording, got to the business of reviewing the week’s hacks. We kicked things off with a look at the news, including a potentially exciting Right to Repair law in Washington state and the sad demise of NASA’s ISS sighting website.
Our choice of hacks included a fond look at embedded systems and the classic fashion sense of Cornell’s Bruce Land, risky open CRT surgery, a very strange but very cool way to make music, and the ultimate backyard astronomer’s observatory. We talked about Stamp collecting for SMD prototyping, crushing aluminum with a boatload of current, a PC that heats your seat, and bringing HDMI to the Commodore 64.
We also took a look at flight tracking IRL, a Flipper-based POV, the ultimate internet toaster, and printing SVGs for fun and profit. Finally, we wrapped things up with a look at the tech behind real-time river flow tracking and a peek inside the surprisingly energetic world of fuel cells.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Download this entirely innocent-looking MP3.
Episode 323 Show Notes:
News:
Washington Consumers Gain Right To Repair For Cellphones And More
NASA Is Shutting Down The International Space Station Sighting Website
2025 Pet Hacks Contest
What’s that Sound?
Fill out this form for your chance to win
!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
A Love Letter To Embedded Systems By V. Hunter Adams
ECE 4760 repo
Designing with Microcontrollers
– Old projects from Bruce Land’s days at the helm of ECE 4760
A RISC-V Operating System Instruction Manual
Reconditioning A Vintage CRT Tube
A 100-Year-Old Electronic Musical Instrument Brought Back To Life
Drawn In By The Siren’s Song
Retrotechtacular: Building Hammond Organ Tones
Making A Backyard Observatory Complete With Retractable Roof
Stamp: Modular Breakout Boards For SMD Prototyping
EMF Forming Was A Neat Aerospace Breakthrough
Electromagnetic Aluminum Can Crushing
How A Quarter Shrinker Works
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks
Invisible PC Doubles As Heated Seat
Tool Turns SVGs Into Multicolor 3D Prints
From Burnt To Brilliant: A Toaster’s Makeover
Dan’s Picks:
POV On The Flipper Zero
The Commodore 64 Gets An HDMI Upgrade
Look To The Sky With This Simple Plane Tracker
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Remotely Interesting: Stream Gages
Know Snow: Monitoring Snowpack With The SNOTEL Network
A Brief History Of Fuel Cells
| 1
| 1
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133869",
"author": "X-MarX-THX-SpXt",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T08:36:25",
"content": "The ‘What’s that sound’ segment is devilish this time.The echo makes it even harder to guess.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,530.854587
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/30/diy-solar-generator-inspired-by-james-webb-telescope/
|
DIY Solar Generator Inspired By James Webb Telescope
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"green hacks"
] |
[
"heat",
"mirror",
"solar power",
"solar thermal"
] |
If you look at this solar generator from [Concept Crafted Creations], you might think it’s somehow familiar. That’s because the design was visually inspired by the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST. Ultimately, though, it’s purpose is quite different—
it’s designed to use mirrors to collect and harness solar energy.
It’s not quite there yet, but it’s an interesting exploration of an eye-catching solar thermal generator.
To get that JWST look, the build has 18 mirrors assembled on a 3D printed frame to approximate the shape of a larger parabolic reflector. The mirrors focus all the sunlight such that it winds up heating water passing through an aluminum plate. Each mirror was custom made using laser cut acrylic and mirror film. Each mirror’s position and angle can be adjusted delicately with screws and a nifty sprung setup, which is a whole lot simpler than the
mechanism used on the real thing
. The whole assembly is on a mount that allows it to track the movement of the sun to gain the most sunlight possible. There’s a giant laser-cut wooden gear on the bottom that allows rotation on a big Lazy Susan bearing, as well as a servo-driven tilting mechanism, with an Arduino using light dependent resistors to optimally aim the device.
It’s a cool-looking set up, but how does it compare with photovoltaics? Not so well. The mirror array was able to deliver around 1 kilowatt of heat into the water passing through the system, heating it to a temperature of approximately 44 C after half an hour. The water was warmed, but not to the point of boiling, and there’s no turbines or anything else hooked up to actually take that heat and turn it into electricity yet. Even if there were, it’s unlikely the system would reach the efficiency of a similarly-sized solar panel array. In any case, so far, the job is half done. As explained in the build video, it could benefit from some better mirrors and some structural improvements to help it survive the elements before it’s ready to make any real juice.
Ultimately, if you need solar power fast, your best bet is to
buy a photovoltaic array
. Still,
solar thermal is a concept that has never quite died out
.
| 36
| 12
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133657",
"author": "Tired wheel",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T16:18:25",
"content": "We are all preoccupied about AI slop but we accept the “content creator slop”. This is an article about something that doesn’t work, that it’s only purpose is to get views and supposedly teach you something but at the end it only waste your time. It gets water to 44ºC, one time I got to 41ºC with a fever and I am not even solar powered!. Youtube is full of sloppy made inventions by big views creators that are not more than entertainment. What’s the catch of this one? 3D printed suports and adjustable screws? It’s a freaking parabola, if you do the maths well first you don’t need any adjustments later. A lot of those videos only have bad prototypes after bad prototypes because the only thing that matters is making a video and getting views. It’s like seeing someone try to reinvent the car starting with a triangular wheel and sayin “oups haha this one didn’t work uh? Click and suscribe! Gonna try a square one on the next video! “.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133732",
"author": "m1ke",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T21:13:54",
"content": "I usually ignore posts that complain about youtube videos, but you make such a compelling argument that I’ll just skip this one. Thank you for saving me from wasting some time.",
"parent_id": "8133657",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133750",
"author": "virtuous_sloth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T22:47:35",
"content": "I wish I had do ne the same. When he said he was comparing gold & silver because the former reflects infrared better, was like… ok… but they when he used “gold” & “silver” paint, I’m like …what?!? Then he forms teach panel using a spherical mould, discovers his error, explains spherical vs parabolic, then proceeds to use a single mould again. He doesn’t even understand high-school geometry.Oy. 10 minutes I won’t get back.",
"parent_id": "8133732",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133905",
"author": "helge",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T11:09:35",
"content": "Glad I merely skipped through it. Once I saw the spray paint I knew this was going to be a whole big “content” charade.Didn’t even bother to see if he found out that the hexagons aren’t so you can make all segments the same. They’re all off-axis parabolic mirrors. 6-fold symmetry, so there’d be at least 3 different mold shapes.",
"parent_id": "8133750",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133733",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T21:17:54",
"content": "I feel this comment. I’ve seen quite a few like this, one that come to mind at the moment made multiple videos in a row where they got highly liked/upvoted comments with very good and implementable suggestions that they ignored completely just to implement a poorly thought out ‘improvement’ in the next.",
"parent_id": "8133657",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134446",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T15:50:19",
"content": "Fake internet economy problems",
"parent_id": "8133657",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134742",
"author": "Johnu",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T11:22:57",
"content": "I’ve noticed even pretty good YouTube makers run out of legitimately useful / interesting projects to make and resort to making stuff that’s wildly impractical, pointless overkill, or just unnecessary seemingly just to be able to filmsomethingand keep the engagement.",
"parent_id": "8133657",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133684",
"author": "Misterlaneous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T17:51:58",
"content": "Why not use an old satellite dish?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133704",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T18:57:07",
"content": "A round dish is not really optimal because you have to keep pointing it at the sun. There’s a better version that uses a half-pipe mirror pointed at a black pipe with water or oil running through it. If you set it up at a suitable angle, it tracks the sun automatically across the sky.",
"parent_id": "8133684",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133718",
"author": "Lee",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T20:06:18",
"content": "I’m not an expert but doesn’t the sun’s position change throughout the year? Surely a tracking array that ensured every mirror is focused on the same point is more efficient? To self adjust for the seasons as well as time would t it have to be a huge array. I believe even the salt battery types in Spain and Nevada have arrays that move with the sun? I would love. To know how a stationary version could work as it would perhaps be more reliable and require slightly less maintenance.",
"parent_id": "8133704",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133786",
"author": "Gryd3",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T01:45:53",
"content": "You accept some ‘slop’ in the design.. but it’s a parabolic ‘half-pipe’.You no longer need to aim one of the axis due to the linear shape.. most of the light will still bounce back and hit the target, although ‘some’ light may miss at the ends of the fixture.The shape/size of the pipe will dictate whether or not you need to adjust the ‘other axis’. It’s ok if the morning/evening sun converge on the upper edge of the pipe if the noon sun converges on the lower edge of the pipe.Take a look at a ‘Parabolic Hotdog Solar Cooker’ .. replace hot-dog with a pipe and working fluid.",
"parent_id": "8133718",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133790",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T01:56:22",
"content": "It’s ok if the morning/evening sun converge on the upper edge of the pipe if the noon sun converges on the lower edge of the pipe.Uh, no. Think about it. The location on the pipe changesseasonally",
"parent_id": "8133786",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133907",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T11:28:12",
"content": "Surely a tracking array that ensured every mirror is focused on the same point is more efficient?You’d think so, but the constant adjustment requires a constant supply of power to your motors and computers and whatnot. With small systems like this, you can easily spend 10-20% of the daily output on the tracking unless you put some real thought and money into optimizing it.Meanwhile, a mirrored half-pipe just needs you to nudge it to a different angle about once a a month.",
"parent_id": "8133718",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133773",
"author": "Unipir81",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T01:10:09",
"content": "Could be a nice pool heater unit, doubling as a sculpture as well!",
"parent_id": "8133704",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133796",
"author": "Marty",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T02:33:38",
"content": "I’ve seen an old web page that did exactly that, with much better results. They did have to manually cut lots of mirrors.",
"parent_id": "8133684",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133688",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T17:54:34",
"content": "Waiting for someone to comment about the superiority of a polar mount vs. az-el mount.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133699",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T18:28:57",
"content": "An equatorial mount would be superior to either :-)",
"parent_id": "8133688",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133772",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T00:58:45",
"content": "It seems the main difference between a polar and equatorial mount is that the declination is typically just adjusted once for the polar (because you’re usually aiming at geostationary satellites over the equator), while it’s motorized for the equatorial (so you can aim anywhere). It would seem like just adding a servo to a polar mount would make it equatorial, assuming it had the desired range of motion.",
"parent_id": "8133699",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133700",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T18:35:00",
"content": "About that projector on the tabletop… That’s a neat use for it, if you make videos.I have a couple of projectors laying fallow, and thought about projecting onto my work table, inspired by interactive art exhibits. But Art is a poor use of precious workspace, and I don’t do videos for mass consumption. So other than projecting sewing patterns on my work table, I can’t think of what to use a projector there for.Does anybody else project onto a work table? What do you use it for?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133714",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T19:52:56",
"content": "On a slight side note, a projector could be an interesting way to get a mirror array aligned. Trying to use the sun to align the mirrors could be tricky, especially with that many mirrors, the weather can get in the way and the earth keeps moving. With a projector, you get a fixed and [more or less] perpendicular light source.",
"parent_id": "8133700",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133791",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T01:59:03",
"content": "if the projector is located [more or less] infinitely far away, that is.My workshop ceiling isn’t that tall.",
"parent_id": "8133714",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133731",
"author": "Observer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T21:08:35",
"content": "A Stirling motor at the focal point will probably be a more effective producer of mechanical power than a heater, water circuit, and gas turbine.If you integrate an alternator with the Stirling, now you have electric power.Enclose the engine (and the alternator, if you wish, to avoid the need for shaft seals) and then pressurize the cavity with nitrogen, engine efficiency goes up.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133754",
"author": "PsyChip",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T23:04:06",
"content": "that would be cool if someone create an actual telescope out of this",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133770",
"author": "Matthew",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T00:57:57",
"content": "Lots of complaints about the usefulness of this but 44C is warm enough for household hot water… my heater is set at 49C. Just take an old water heater that no longer works, bury it in the ground for some insulation and run that water back/forth to the heater until it reaches some set point and you’ve got 40-80 gallons of hot water relatively cheaply.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133912",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T11:46:16",
"content": "44 C is a perfect temperature for getting yourself ill from legionnaire’s diseasehttps://www.energyvanguard.com/attachment/legionella-growth-water-temperature/",
"parent_id": "8133770",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134445",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T15:48:41",
"content": "Haha nice",
"parent_id": "8133912",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133944",
"author": "Murray Foster",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T15:24:09",
"content": "Average ground temperature below 3 feet of soil is between 8°C and 21°C. Burying the tank in the ground will most likely suck heat out of the tank. On the other hand soil temperature consistancy is why ground source heat pumps are so much more efficient than air source ones.",
"parent_id": "8133770",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133774",
"author": "Gus A Mueller",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T01:14:57",
"content": "It looks cool, but it doesn’t sound like it works any better than a garden hose left in the sun. I took the inspiration from a garden hose left in the sun to build a hot water heater panel on my roof that does raise water to above boiling using just an insulated box, a pane of glass, and a sinusoidal pattern of copper pipe soldered to galvanized roofing I’d painted black. See here:http://www.asecular.com/projects/homebrewsolar.php",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133824",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T03:46:28",
"content": "Do you really think this has poor efficiency? Really think a photovoltaic array would harvest more power than this?I didn’t get the actual size of the mirrors, but they look like 30 cm wide. The whole array is ca. 1.5 m in diameter, so about 1.77 m^2 area. It will intercept close to 1.7 kW of total power, and delivered about half that to the water load, around 50% efficient.Not horrible. And loads better than the 20% you’ll get from a photovoltaic panel, if all you want is raw low-grade thermal power.There are lots of other things to take issue with here, but efficiency wouldn’t be high on the list.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134243",
"author": "Lewin Day",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T23:29:21",
"content": "You’re right. It depends on the end goal. If it’s just about heating water, great. If this is intended to then generate electricity… eh.",
"parent_id": "8133824",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133936",
"author": "lurker",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T14:42:08",
"content": "So how inefficient are his mirrors that he’s barely getting above ambient temperature? It isnt really worth doing any math here, but it seem like this thing is only somewhat worse than using the secondary focusing mirror on its own.I started working on something like this years ago with the plan to use spin-cast aluminum mirror segments set up for their particular arc segment in the arrangement. These would then be finished, polished, and coated.Could never get the spinning rig balanced quite right though – 1/2hp motor w/ belt drive to a 4wd silverado cvt shaft/front wheel bearing and brake rotor assembly that the mold plate/box would “sit n spin” on.Theory says curvature control via rpm, arc segment control by offsetting from center – never quite got that far though.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133961",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T17:10:52",
"content": "It IS worth doing the math: As Akin says; “Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is just opinion.” Do the arithmetic: You’ll find the efficiency is not bad.Everybody is harping on the fact that it only reached 44 degrees, and completely missing the point that it’s heating20 liters of waterto that temperature.Would you be more impressed if it got a liter of water up to boiling in ten minutes instead? That’s about the same energy input.Interesting group psychology at work here.",
"parent_id": "8133936",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133963",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T17:28:42",
"content": "Bah. For the pedants: … samepowerinput.",
"parent_id": "8133961",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134145",
"author": "Morberis",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T12:12:08",
"content": "Yep, just goes to show that even with this crowd you need to show the “right” results.Thanks for the analysis.",
"parent_id": "8133961",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133975",
"author": "defdefred",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T19:05:59",
"content": "This thermal solar power harvester must be poorly made to be less efficient than photovoltaic pannel to boil water…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134744",
"author": "Johnu",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T11:37:16",
"content": "I feel like this result could’ve been achieved by laying a dark coloured hosepipe on the ground in direct sunlight.And I’d very much hope a focused mirror system would be at least 3-4x better than solar PV for heating water given the average ~20% efficiency limit of a solar panel.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,531.048252
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/30/this-week-in-security-cia-star-wars-git-prompt-injection-and-more/
|
This Week In Security: CIA Star Wars, Git* Prompt Injection And More
|
Jonathan Bennett
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] |
[
"ai",
"CVEs",
"This Week in Security",
"Windows Registry"
] |
The CIA ran a series of web sites in the 2000s. Most of them were about news, finance, and other relatively boring topics, and they spanned 29 languages. And they all had a bit of a hidden feature: Those normal-looking websites had a secret login and hosted CIA cover communications with assets in foreign countries. A password typed in to a search field on each site would trigger a Java Applet or Flash application, allowing the spy to report back. This isn’t exactly breaking news, but what’s captured the Internet’s imagination this week is
the report by [Ciro Santilli] about how to find those sites, and the fact that a Star Wars fansite was part of the network
.
This particular CIA tool was intended for short-term use, and was apparently so effective, it was dragged way beyond it’s intended lifespan, right up to the point it was discovered and started getting people killed. And in retrospect, the tradecraft is abysmal. The sites were hosted on a small handful of IP blocks, with the individual domains hosted on sequential IP addresses. Once one foreign intelligence agency discovered one of these sites, the rest were fairly easily identified.
This report is about going back in time using
the Wayback Machine
and other tools, and determining how many of these covert sites can be discovered today. And then documenting how it was done and what the results were. Surprisingly, some of the best sources for this effort were domain name data sets. Two simple checks to narrow down the possible targets were checking for IPs hosting only one domain, and for the word “news” as part of the domain name. From there, it’s the tedious task of looking at the Wayback Machine’s archives, trying to find concrete hits. Once a site was found on a new IP block, the whole block could be examined using historic DNS data, and hopefully more of the sites discovered.
So far, that list is 472 domains. Citizen Lab ran a report on this covert operation back in 2022, and found 885 domains, but opted not to
publish the list or details of how they were found
. The effort is still ongoing, and if you have any ideas how to find these sites, there’s a chance to help.
Profiling Internet Background Radiation
You may have noticed, that as soon as you put a host on a new IP address on the Internet, it immediately starts receiving traffic. The creative term that refers to all of this is Internet Background Radiation. It’s comprised of TCP probes, reflections from spoofed UDP attacks, and lots of other weird traffic.
Researchers at Netscout decided to look at just one element
of that radiation, TCP SYN packets. That’s the unsolicited first packet of a TCP handshake. What secrets would this data contain?
The first intriguing statistic is the number of spoofed TCP SYN packets coming from known bogus source IPs: zero. This isn’t actually terribly surprising for a couple reasons. One, packets originating from impossible addresses are rather easy to catch and drop, and many ISPs do this sort of scrubbing at their network borders. But the second reason is that TCP requires a three-way handshake to make a useful connection. And while it’s possible to spoof an IP address on a local network via ARP poisoning, doing so on the open Internet is much more difficult.
Packet TTL is interesting, but the values naturally vary, based on the number of hops between the sender and receiver. A few source IPs were observed to vary in reported TTLs, which could indicate devices behind NAT, or even just the variation between different OS network stacks. But looking for suspicious traffic, two metrics really stand out. The TCP Header is a minimum 20 bytes, with additional length being used with each additional option specified. Very few systems will naturally send TCP SYN packets with the header set to 20, suggesting that the observed traffic at that length was mostly TCP probes. The other interesting observation is the TCP window size, with 29,200 being a suspicious number that was observed in a significant percentage of packets, without a good legitimate explanation.
Hacking the MCP
GitHub has developed the GitHub MCP Server, a
Master Control Program
Model Context Protocol server, designed to allow AI agents to interact with the GitHub API.
Invariant Labs has put together an interesting demo
in how letting an agentic AI work with arbitrary issues from the public could be a bad idea.
The short explanation is that a GitHub issue can include a prompt injection attack. In the example, it looks rather benign, asking for more information about the project author to be added to the project README. Just a few careful details in that issue, like specifying that the author isn’t concerned about privacy, and that the readme update should link to all the user’s other repos. If the repo owner lets an agentic AI loose on the repo via MCP, it’s very likely to leak details and private repo information that it really shouldn’t.
Invariant Labs suggests that MCP servers will need granular controls, limiting what an AI agent can access. I suspect we’ll eventually see a system for new issues like GitHub already has for Pull Requests, where a project maintainer has to approve the PR before any of the automated Github Actions are performed on it. Once AI is a normal part of dealing with issues, there will need to be tools to keep the AI from interacting with new issues until a maintainer has cleared them.
GitLab Too
GitLab has their own AI integration, GitLab Duo. Like many AI things, it has the potential to be helpful, and
the potential to be a problem
. Researchers at Legit Security included some nasty tricks in this work, like hiding prompt injection as Hex code, and coloring it white to be invisible on the white GitLab background. Prompt injections could then ask the AI to recommend malicious code, include raw HTML in the output, or even leak details from private repos.
Gitlab took the report seriously, and has added additional filtering that prevents Duo from injecting raw HTML in its output. The prompt injection has also been addressed, but the details of how are not fully available.
Finally, Actually Hacking the Registry
We’ve been following Google’s Project Zero and [Mateusz Jurczyk] for quite a while, on a deep dive into the Windows Registry. We’re finally at the point where we’re talking about vulnerabilities. The
Windows registry is self-healing
, which could be an attack surface on its own, but it definitely provides a challenge to anyone looking for vulnerabilities with a fuzzer, as triggering a crash is very difficult.
But as the registry has evolved over time and Windows releases, the original security assumptions may not be valid any longer. For instance, in its original form, the registry was only writable by a system administrator. But on modern Windows machines, application hives allow unprivileged users and process to load their own registry data into the system registry. Registry virtualization and layered keys further complicate the registry structure and code, and with complexity often comes vulnerabilities.
An exploit primitive that turned out to be useful was the out-of-bound cell index, where one cell can refer to another. This includes a byte offset value, and when the cell being referred to is a “small dir”, this offset can point past the end of the allocated memory.
There were
a whopping 17 memory corruption exploits discovered
, but to produce a working exploit, the write-up uses CVE-2023-23420, a use after free that can be triggered by performing an in-place rename of a key, followed by deleting a subkey. This can result in a live reference to that non-existent subkey, and thus access to freed memory.
In that free memory, a fake key is constructed. As the entire data structure is now under the arbitrary control of the attacker, the memory can point to anywhere in the hive. This can be combined with the out-of-bounds cell index, to manipulate kernel memory. The story turns into a security researcher flex here, as [Mateusz] opted to use a couple registry keys rigged in this way to make a working kernel memory debugger, accessible from regedit. One key sets the memory address to inspect, and the other key contains said memory as a writable key. Becoming SYSTEM at this point is trivial.
Bits and Bytes
[Thomas Stacey] of Assured has done
work on HTTP smuggling/tunneling attacks
, where multiple HTTP requests exist in a single packet. This style of attack works against web infrastructure that has a front-end proxy and a back-end worker. When the front-end and back-end parse requests differently, very unintended behavior can result.
ONEKEY researchers have
discovered a pair of issues in the Evertz core web administration interface
, that together allow unauthenticated arbitrary command injection. Evertz manufactures very large video handling equipment, used widely in the broadcast industry, which is why it’s so odd that the ONEKEY private disclosure attempts were completely ignored. As the standard 90 day deadline has passed, ONEKEY has released the vulnerability details in full.
On the other hand, Mozilla is setting records of its own,
releasing a Firefox update on the same day as exploits were revealed at pwn2own 2025
. Last year Mozilla received the “Fastest to Patch” award, and may be on track to repeat that honor.
What does video game cheat development have to do with security research? It’s full of reverse engineering, understand memory structures, hooking functions, and more. It’s all the things malware does to take over a system, and all the things a researcher does to find vulnerabilities and understand what binaries are doing. If you’re interested, there’s a great
two-part
series
on the topic just waiting for you to dive into. Enjoy!
| 3
| 2
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133756",
"author": "eriklscott",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T23:14:53",
"content": "Becoming SYSTEM at this point is trivial.OK, I’m curious, and I knowjustenough to be a menace to myself and no one else…Windows NT-family kernels are more-or-less direct descendants of DEC’s VMS, both being the offspring of Dave Cutler. I don’t know if any DEC-owned source code ever made it into Windows Proper, but the _nt functions in the kernel (before the Win32 subsystem is even loaded) supposedly bear a strong resemblance to VMS.SYSTEM was the spiritual equivalent of root.So, just how much VMS survives underneath the Win32 subsystem? Do processes have names (SET PROCESS/NAME)? CREMBOX? MCR AUTHORIZE?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133983",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T19:42:35",
"content": "Being system isn’t trivial, it would actually be useful for some system management tasks. Have you tried to work with your EFI partition or BCD store lately? That stupid thing is completely uneditable by an admin even. Not that it matters, useful features like BADMEM have been deprecated (I have a few KB erroring on an 8GB memory stick).",
"parent_id": "8133756",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134167",
"author": "x0rpunk",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T13:57:59",
"content": "All web infrastructure is behind a reverse-proxy and load balancer.. It’s not a protocol flaw it’s a -we had cheap coders do it and gave them tight deadlines- problem with specific vendors who likely had the cheapest 1U solutions at the time..",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,531.152818
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/30/sustainable-3d-prints-with-decomposable-filaments/
|
Sustainable 3D Prints With Decomposable Filaments
|
Heidi Ulrich
|
[
"3d Printer hacks",
"green hacks"
] |
[
"3d print",
"3d printing",
"filament",
"h2o",
"paper",
"PLA",
"PVA",
"TPU",
"water"
] |
What if you could design your 3D print to fall apart on purpose? That’s the curious promise of
a new paper from CHI 2025
, which brings a serious hacker vibe to the sustainability problem of multi-material 3D printing. Titled
Enabling Recycling of Multi-Material 3D Printed Objects through Computational Design and Disassembly by Dissolution
, it proposes a technique that lets complex prints
disassemble themselves
via water-soluble seams. Just a bit of H
2
O is needed, no drills or pliers.
At its core, this method builds dissolvable interfaces between materials like PLA and TPU using water-soluble PVA. Their algorithm auto-generates jointed seams (think shrink-wrap meets mushroom pegs) that don’t interfere with the part’s function. Once printed, the object behaves like any ordinary 3D creation. But at end-of-life, a water bath breaks it down into clean,
separable materials
, ready for recycling. That gives 90% material recovery, and over 50% reduction in carbon emissions.
This is the research – call it a very, very well documented hack – we need more of. It’s climate-conscious and machine-savvy. If you’re into computational fabrication or environmental tinkering, it’s worth your time. Hats off to [Wen, Bae, and Rivera] for turning what might otherwise be considered a failure into a feature.
| 24
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133594",
"author": "freedomunit",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T12:03:51",
"content": "Who needs this?Most people never print multi material, and this requires 3 (pla,tpu, water soluble pla)… So you would have to have a use case where an item was temporarily needed with the properties of those filaments, live somewhere that actually recycles these plastics, and be inclined to recycle. If you ever needed this item again, it would have been less wasteful to have kept the first print rather than dissolve/dissasemble it.Besides, pla is already a relatively low impact plastic. Also, why do you need smaller plastic pieces? Recycling facilities would shred the print on their end any way (that is, the recycling places that actually do something with these plastics, rather than throw them out).This seems like academics spinning their wheels to make themselves feel important. I have a feeling that they would have made a bigger environmental impact by spending this time outside picking up garbage in their neighborhood",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133619",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T13:17:35",
"content": "I’m gonna go further with it being useless outside of a neat idea/hack.From what I understand, recyclers will trash any plastics not appropriately labeled so most 3D prints aren’t getting recycled and they probably still wouldn’t if you labeled them because 3D prints are such a crazy hodgepodge of materials and odd mixtures.Also I’m officially past recycling plastic (as an industry/method of disposal, I still do it to put it into the proper waste stream). We should just be burning it, ideally getting some power, and filtering the exhaust for anything bad.If we move all put plastics to organic sources, like PLA from corn then burning it is still a sustainable cycle since it just goes to new corn.",
"parent_id": "8133594",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133685",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T17:53:51",
"content": "If we move all plastics to PLA then they turn to goop in cars, hot attics or even left out in the sun. Did you have a different plastic with a green source in mind?",
"parent_id": "8133619",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133690",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T18:00:01",
"content": "Did you have a different plastic with a green source in mind?Yeah, PHA. Only softens above 120C or so, and fully biodegrades in home compost bins. Kind of hard to print, though.",
"parent_id": "8133685",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133743",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T21:54:34",
"content": "Yeah, I figure there is likely more than just PLA that can be made and just used it as an example. Of course it can’t replace all plastic by itself and that’d be a stupid suggestion.",
"parent_id": "8133685",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133781",
"author": "Ewlie",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T01:30:43",
"content": "Neat idea, but unrealistic. We just need to waste less plastic. I just returned from a hike along the west Australian southern coast. The beaches were strewn with plastics from all over the world. I even found a French spring water bottle. So much plastic there is more of it than seaweed, cuttle fish and driftwood. It is very sad to see on such a pristine coastline.",
"parent_id": "8133619",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133785",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T01:43:20",
"content": "I don’t see how that is unrealistic or how just wasting less plastic would solve the issue any more effectively.Burning it is already a proven and working method with the main hurdle being PR from what I gather.Organic based plastics have already been made to some degree and are continuing to develop. It’s also not like Oil based plastics aren’t sort of organic based albeit indirectly, so I wouldn’t rule out additional processes being developed to go from some organic starter to more common plastics though it would likely raise prices.The main issues after that would be combating normal littering and dumping, which would be a problem no matter what, and figuring out a solution to microplastics.",
"parent_id": "8133781",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133979",
"author": "Jeff Wright",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T19:26:01",
"content": "I want my old AMT Enterprise model to last forever–drink bottles, wrappers—let that biodegrade.You have to fight—for your right–to greeble",
"parent_id": "8133785",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133634",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T14:34:40",
"content": "Rapid Liquid Printing (RLP) is a promising enough technology that’ll necessitate more complexity.https://selfassemblylab.mit.edu/rapid-liquid-printing",
"parent_id": "8133594",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134098",
"author": "Pierreact",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T07:02:35",
"content": "There’s always someone short sighted.If I had a dual extruder printer, I’d print complex supports with this.I’m sure there are plenty of other use cases, it’s just a matter of knowing this is part of your arsenal and recognize it’s value when the need happens.",
"parent_id": "8133594",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133601",
"author": "Justin",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T12:29:19",
"content": "I wonder how it holds up in high humidity environments. Would it gradually lose cohesion?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133621",
"author": "NFM",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T13:21:08",
"content": "Here in Japan, plastics are ‘thermally recycled’, that means we seperate plastics from other garbage so they can burn it at a higher temperature in their industrial ovens than the usual stuff so it burns cleaner, and use the heat to generate electricity.There is no care for what actial plastic it is (besides PET that hits a different recycling stream to be made into new drink bottles etc), only that it is seperated from the normal garbage so they can burn normal garbage at a lower temperature to save on fuel gas.So, at least here in Japan, seperating any plastics bu type is a fruitless endeavour, besides the clear PET bottles as used in carbonated beverages.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133653",
"author": "ferrarilaferrariface",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T15:51:42",
"content": "“Thermal recycling” sure sounds an awful lot like burning. Trading landfill pollutfor air pollution.",
"parent_id": "8133621",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133665",
"author": "Steven Clark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T16:33:45",
"content": "As far as I know, modern plasma incinerators are high enough temperature to consume most pollutants.Besides, most of my nearest landfills are on fire anyway.",
"parent_id": "8133653",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133712",
"author": "ferrarilaferrariface",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T19:39:42",
"content": "Define “consume”. That stuff doesn’t go poof and magically disappear. It just turns into something else. What are they doing with the something else?",
"parent_id": "8133665",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133744",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T21:57:49",
"content": "Presumably the harmless gasses are vented and the rest captured or caralytically converted to harmless gasses.Better than them ending up in the ocean and if plastics move to organic sources it would be net zero pollution.",
"parent_id": "8133712",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133675",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T17:04:41",
"content": "As long as the exhaust is properly handled then it should be relatively clean and if plastics move to organic sources it’s basically recycling with more steps.",
"parent_id": "8133653",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133691",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T18:02:50",
"content": "So just burn it without polluting the air, like most thermal recycling plants do nowadays.",
"parent_id": "8133653",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133705",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T19:13:51",
"content": "In the UK we call that greenwashing, not recycling. It’s limited for contaminated recycling.",
"parent_id": "8133621",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133638",
"author": "Garth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T14:52:28",
"content": "This could be the next Banksy artwork. His “Girl With Balloon” that sold for 1.4 million shredded immediately after sale. A 3D print that decomposes could be the next big seller. It could also be the next fraud as well. A wealthy couple pays millions for a sculpture only to have it dissolve over time and the seller/artist no where to be found would be a future scandal.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133787",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T01:46:13",
"content": "The expensive art space is basically all fraud and tax evasion already.I doubt the shredding even hurt the value since it has a famous story and I doubt the rich people trading that garbage care as long as they can use art to flow their money around.",
"parent_id": "8133638",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133715",
"author": "Ian",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T20:00:21",
"content": "The problem with research like this, and the ideas behind it, is that it’s usefulness relies on there being an assumed “next step” in the process that already exists.We don’t actually recycle plastic in any meaningful volume.Sure, we “recycle” it, in some lawyer/marketer definition, but it certainly doesn’t get used to make new plastic things like people think it does. We really only do that with scrap metal, and occasionally paper.Nearly all plastic “recycling” just burns the plastic to generate a meaningless amount of electricity.Many of these plastic recycling operations even need external fuel to function, and many(most?) generate less electricity that it takes to run the plant itself.We need to squash this happy idea that all we need to do is make sure our used stuff goes in the recycling bin and everything will suddenly be fine. Because it is a convenient lie.Until we can/do ACTUALLY reuse plastics, either directly or as chemical feed stock for new virgin plastic, research like this does nothing more than give people “good feelings” about about a problem that we keep making worse.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133858",
"author": "somdudewillson",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T07:30:25",
"content": "We can and do recycle 3d printer filament. You can buy recycled filament, and even just get the equipment to recycle it yourself.",
"parent_id": "8133715",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133769",
"author": "Mark Topham",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T00:43:54",
"content": "Seems to me it could fit well with supports and early prototypes.Might be less applicable to finished product, but for more localized recycling (your workshop) perhaps it could useful.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,531.108224
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/30/today-in-edinburgh-the-open-source-hardware-summit/
|
Today In Edinburgh: The Open Hardware Summit
|
Elliot Williams
|
[
"cons"
] |
[
"conventions",
"open source hardware"
] |
Just a quickie for anyone who is in the neighborhood, today
the Open Source Hardware Association’s annual Open Hardware Summit conference
starts in Edinburgh, Scotland. If you’re able to make it, it’s a microcosm of the open-source hardware world, and full of great talks and great hackers.
If you’re not in Scotland, they have
a livestream on YouTube
that you should check out,
as well as a Discord server for discussions during the event
. It’s going on right now!
| 9
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133589",
"author": "70sjukebox",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T11:50:51",
"content": "“Edinburg, Scotland”, Edinburgh",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133608",
"author": "Rohit",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T12:37:42",
"content": "I am here. Super cool people.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133612",
"author": "volt-k",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T12:58:44",
"content": "Is there any calendar that lists all kind of these events in one place? It happens so often that I learn about such an event on the day it starts, and could otherwise participate if only I knew earlier.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133648",
"author": "X-MarX-THX-SpXt",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T15:24:00",
"content": "On HAD or on any other website?",
"parent_id": "8133612",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133614",
"author": "Pete",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T13:00:13",
"content": "Please use the correct name.Despite the name of the hosting group being the Open Source Hardware Association, the website clearly shows it as the “Open Hardware Summit” without the extraneous “Source” word you’ve added.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133617",
"author": "Frankie",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T13:12:01",
"content": "I was about to write the same thing. It is a meaningful difference. Not all open hardware is “open source” in the sense of something that gets compiled from source code/files/etc. Also, as pointed out, it’s simply incorrect.",
"parent_id": "8133614",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133661",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T16:28:29",
"content": "Thanks! Will fix.",
"parent_id": "8133617",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133735",
"author": "70sjukebox",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T21:22:51",
"content": "Typo in the first comment?",
"parent_id": "8133661",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133637",
"author": "Asterion",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T14:50:42",
"content": "Given the monopoliseing by raspberry pi, noting the bullying of HardKernel, what is “open” about hardware really?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,530.81318
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/30/what-does-linux-need-a-dial/
|
What Does Linux Need? A Dial!
|
Jenny List
|
[
"Linux Hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] |
[
"dial phone",
"linux kernel",
"rotary dial"
] |
It’s fair to say that there can’t be many developers who have found the need for a rotary telephone dial as a peripheral for their Linux computer, but in case you are among them you might find
[Stefan Wiehler]’s kernel driver for rotary dials
to be of use.
It’s aimed at platforms such as systems-on-chip that have ready access to extra GPIOs, of which it will need a couple to service the BUSY and PULSE lines. There are full set-up instructions, and once it’s in place and configured it presents the dial as though it were a number pad.
We like this project, in fact we like it a lot. Interfacing with a dial is always something we’ve done with a microcontroller though, so it will be interesting to see whether it finds a use beyond merely curiosity. We can already see a generation of old-school dial IP phones using Linux-capable dev boards. He leaves us with a brief not as to whether Linus Torvalds would see it as worthy of mainline inclusion, and sadly however much we want things to be different, we agree that it might be wishful thinking.
If you’d like to use a dial phone,
there can be simpler ways to do it
.
Header: Billy Brown,
CC BY 2.0
.
| 11
| 9
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133534",
"author": "philenotfound",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T08:28:10",
"content": "Nice! I have built something similar, but with an Arduino as a HID Keyboard for the rotary dial, sending “0”-“9” and triggerhappy for the actions.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133569",
"author": "Harvie.CZ",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T10:42:16",
"content": "https://github.com/Harvie/RotaryDial",
"parent_id": "8133534",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133615",
"author": "Donaldson",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T13:03:08",
"content": "Users who actually shower wouldn’t hurt, either.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133620",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T13:19:42",
"content": "Heh, there are commercial products sold for audio and video editing that are mostly used for scrolling along timelines that natively just send page up and page down keystrokes.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133658",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T16:24:39",
"content": "In some fictional(?) universe somewhere, Linux has a kernel module forthis dialer, or rather, the thing the dialer connects to, which supports 7- and 8-“digit” dialing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133669",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T16:38:44",
"content": "awfully s l o w . . . is the main reason this is not used. But a real cool addon for an homebrew toy.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133689",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T17:56:22",
"content": "Does the OS have to be constantly polling the GPIOs? That might not be so great when multitasking. Or is it using some sort of interrupt?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133738",
"author": "Cody",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T21:44:26",
"content": "SOCs will have interrupts on at least some of the GPIO pins. You would definitely want to use them.I had a quick look through the code and it does appear to be using interrupts.",
"parent_id": "8133689",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133696",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T18:19:04",
"content": "That’s awesome. I always loved to “hang up” Linux! :D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133797",
"author": "Patrick Mooney",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T02:51:48",
"content": "Hey don’t knock it. I was a telecom electrician when this technology was all we have around the world. It was all mechanical and the size of a transistor which was very rare was the size of a quarter. Linux has been my retirement hobby and I love it .",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134125",
"author": "Jens Eckervogt",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T09:55:29",
"content": "Nice is it for sim card working? I see like I feel if I use foldable giant tablet ( it seems like Lenovo Pad or like laptop for Linux based, I understand correctly?”I hope it works for Lenovo foldable pads if I buy it without Windows. Only penguin forever used laptop without bringing tablet or smartphone",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,531.197529
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/29/another-doom-port-to-the-atari-st/
|
Another Doom Port To The Atari ST
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"Misc Hacks"
] |
[
"atari st",
"doom",
"port"
] |
Last week, we examined a Doom port for the venerable Atari ST. As is so often the way with this thing, one netted another, and [Steve] wrote in to inform us about
a different version under the name DOOM8088ST.
The port is so named because it’s based on Doom8088, which was originally written for DOS machines running Intel 8088 or 286 CPUs. Both ports are the work of [FrenkelS], and aims to bring the Doom experience into the far more resource constrained environment of the Atari ST. There is only very limited sound, no saving, and it only supports Doom 1 Episode 1. Still, it’s quite recognizable as Doom!
Doom8088ST is tunable to various levels of performance, depending on what you’re running it on. Low mode (30 x 128) is suitable for stock Atari ST machines running at 8 MHz. It’s described as having “excellent” framerate and is very playable. If you’ve got an upgraded ST or Mega STe, you can try Medium (60 x 128), which has greatly improved visuals but is a lot heavier to run.
Files are
on Github
for those interested to run or tinker with the code. Don’t forget to check out the other port we featured last week, either,
in the form of STDOOM
. Video after the break.
[Thanks to Steve for the tip!]
| 7
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133605",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T12:32:41",
"content": "If you are wondering why the low horizontal resolution: Atari made an unfortunate choice with the pixel format of the color modes. For the 16 color mode in memory you have two bytes with the first bit of 16 pixels, then two bytes with the second bit of 16 pixels, then two bytes with the third bit of 16 pixels, then two bytes with the fourth bit of 16 pixels. By setting 8 pixels to the “same” color, this implementation does not have to merge multiple pixels into one byte.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133706",
"author": "David H",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T19:14:29",
"content": "As I recall, a similar issue made it difficult to dofasttexture-mapped 3D on the Amiga – the Bitplane approach that the Amiga took meant that updating each pixel on the screen took multiple cycles. The hardware sprites didn’t have that problem (or at least, hid it from the programmer) which is why so many Amiga games that needed super-fast screen updates are either of the platformer type (Chuck Rock, Zool, Rick Dangerous) or, if “3D”, used simple single-color polygons (Resolution 101).",
"parent_id": "8133605",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134340",
"author": "jalnl",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T08:46:06",
"content": "So it’s basically a chained planar mode. Madness.",
"parent_id": "8133605",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133639",
"author": "SETH",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T14:52:44",
"content": "If it reads the wad it is a port, aka original assets and compatibility with original game files. If it is a rewrite I would call this a Demake. I assuming it is the latter.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133757",
"author": "Frenkel",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T23:22:45",
"content": "It’s a fork of PrBoom.",
"parent_id": "8133639",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133645",
"author": "Steve",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T15:16:18",
"content": "Might wanna check out the latest build that was just released today. Also…https://youtu.be/lzDHngjYb40?t=85",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133697",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T18:23:43",
"content": "There goes another missed opportunity to port to Atari ST’s hi-res graphics (640×400 mono).Would have been interesting to see the engine running in pure monochrome, with redrawn graphics assets that need no dithering.The wall textures, for example, could have been redrawn in nice b/w.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,531.24331
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/29/icepi-zero-a-pi-zero-for-fpga/
|
IcePI Zero: A Pi Zero For FPGA
|
Tyler August
|
[
"FPGA"
] |
[
"fpga board",
"pi zero"
] |
The Rasberry Pi Zero is a delightful form factor, with its GIPO and USB and HDMI, but it’s stuck using the same old ARM processor all the time. What if you wanted to change it up with some OpenSPARC, RISC V, OpenPOWER, or even your own oddball homebrew ISA and processor? Well, fret not, for [Chengyin Yao]’s
IcePi Zero has got you covered with its ECP5 25F FPGA
.
As the saying goes, you don’t tell an FPGA what to do, you tell it what to
be
. And with the ECP5 25F’s 24k LUTs, you can tell it to be quite a few different things. This means more work for the maker than plugging in a fixed processor, sure, but IcePi tries to make that as painless as possible with quality-of-life features like HDMI out (something missing from many FPGA dev boards), an onboard USB-to-JTAG converter (so you can just plug it in, no programmer needed), and even USB-C instead of the Pi’s old microUSB. There’s the expected SD card on one end, and 256 MiB of 166 MHz SDRAM on the other to make up for the FPGA’s paltry 112 KiB of onboard RAM.
Plus it’s a drop-in replacement for the Pi Zero, so if you’ve already got a project that’s got one of those running an emulator, you can fab one of these babies, spool up some Verilog, and enjoy running on bare metal. It seems like this device is just made for retro gaming handhelds, but we’d love to hear in the comments if you have other ideas what to do with this board– remember that an
FPGA can be (almost) anything, even a GPU!
Currently, [Chengin Yao] is not selling the board, though they may reconsider due to
demand in their Reddit thread
. If you want one, you’ll have to call your favourite fabricator or etch your own PCB.
We’ve seen FPGAs before; most recently to
create an absurdly fast 8080 processor
. We’ve also seen DIY dev boards, like
this one for the AMD Zyntac FPGA
. Doing something fun with FPGAs?
Drop us a tip!
We’re happy [Chengin Yao] did, because this is amazing work, especially considering they are only 16 years old. We cannot wait to find out what they get up to next.
| 32
| 10
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133474",
"author": "hjf",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T04:04:00",
"content": "to be honest, pretty much all of “hobby” electronics nowadays is yolo PCB design by people sponsored by either jlcpcb or pcbway. so many absolute trash designs out there made by a guy that, if not sponsored by these, wouldn’t even have tried designing a PCB.I can’t blame them though. it’s so cheap and convenient",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133488",
"author": "Mark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T05:26:30",
"content": "but does it matter if PCB design is bad while it’s not mass product? if it is working in some conditions for hobby project – then let it be. you can violet almost every “rule” and still got running board. Impendance, return paths, planes, recommended layouts from vendors for their chips, diff pairs – who cares :)",
"parent_id": "8133474",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133476",
"author": "olaf",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T04:29:44",
"content": "but we’d love to hear in the comments if you have other ideas whatto do with this boardThat is the problem isn’t? Beside of retrogaming there is not so much use of an FPGA for “normal” homebrew. Our microcontroller becomes to powerful in these days. :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133484",
"author": "Jouni",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T05:16:39",
"content": "That’s my thought. I would love to learn FPGA and do nice projects with it but I haven’t come up with any problem that needs FPGA, usually powerful microcontroller is just fine. Trying to communicate this in positive spirit: nothing wrong with FPGAs but oh I wish I could have a project where to lease it’s potential.",
"parent_id": "8133476",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133502",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T06:36:27",
"content": "high speed control of an LED matrix using tons of IO, precise control of motors and other machinery for CNC and robots, AI and other tasks requiring hardware acceleration, anything involving a raw camera sensor, ditto for raw LCD panels a lot of the time, custom networking gear especially at line rate, high speed sample acquisition/parallel measurementnone of those things are nearly as good a fit for an MCU as for an FPGA. if you need things handled quickly and in parallel, and FPGA is the only way to do it",
"parent_id": "8133484",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133570",
"author": "SparkyGSX",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T10:44:21",
"content": "For motor control, a specialised microcontroller is much better and cheaper than an FPGA, since there are many different calculations to be done, and FPGAs generally don’t have analog peripherals.Having lots of data that requires a lot of the same operations, like image processing, can be done with an FPGA, but big, fast FPGAs are expensive, so if it’s possible, a GPU is often a better solution.I have the experience with FPGAs (professionally), and I have a number of different FPGA dev boards, but I’ve never found a purpose for one in a hobby project.",
"parent_id": "8133502",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133626",
"author": "Sasquatch",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T13:42:32",
"content": "Right, that’s why every high end servo inverter has FPGA and DSP320 or newer arm CPU. For decades high resolution encoder interfaces were handled by FPGAs, try synchronising 10000ppr encoder with 6 pole permanent motor driving currents at 6000rpm using any CPU. I dare you.Or even sync feedback from 9 current sensors and 18 IGBT gate drivers at 32KHz switching frequency and 16 bit PWM.",
"parent_id": "8133570",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133886",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T10:14:40",
"content": "A GPU? Really? A GPU is going to be used to ingest and a process a video stream? Sorry, but you have no idea what a GPU is or does. Starting with the fact that no GPU on earth has the interfaces to do that.",
"parent_id": "8133570",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134158",
"author": "Ray Morris",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T13:14:03",
"content": "Yeah, a $5 Pico 2 or other RP2350 can run each PIO pins at 150 MHz or higher, so that covers many high speed hobby uses. For $5. That can paired with your choice of another chip if needed for quick, easy designs at pretty good speeds. Not multiple GHz, but most hobby projects don’t need GHz IO.@M might want to explain to Nvidia and to the ffmpeg developers that GPUs aren’t for video and graphics processing. Apparently Nvidia doesn’t “know what a GPU is and does”, because they seem to think GPU stands for Graphics Processing Unit. They think their product is used for video processing. Maybe M can explain to them what their product actually is.",
"parent_id": "8133570",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133548",
"author": "OT",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T09:26:58",
"content": "Trying to deal with a real high speed comms bus like PCIE on a MCU is pretty much impossible. Definitely a job for a FPGA.",
"parent_id": "8133484",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133765",
"author": "mj",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T00:07:31",
"content": "One nice use-case could be a DIY USB-analyzer and debugger. Like a commercial e.g. Beagle analyzer, but also with the ability to inject bit-error and other fault conditions on the USB-wires. The use-case for the latter could be to debug and robustify your USB-drivers and protocol stack, in whatever MCU or processor you’d have on your bus.",
"parent_id": "8133484",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133501",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T06:27:32",
"content": "I’d like to homebrew a CPU architecture. A good one, not just a 6502. With over 100 MB of ram that should be reasonably doable.",
"parent_id": "8133476",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133897",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T10:45:01",
"content": "32MB of ram. this thing has 32MB and the article is wrong.",
"parent_id": "8133501",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133533",
"author": "macsimki",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T08:24:59",
"content": "this might be a nice platform to make a new open source photo or document scanner architecture. the biggest problem right now is aging film scanners for analog photography, depending on aging hardware and ancient OS-ses, running on ancient hardware again. mechanically and optically, a lot of scanners could have another lease of life, but the stupid electronics are the problem, like usb 1.0, firewire or even scsi. a professional film scanner nowadays costs north of 8k (noritsu, fujifilm) and they are still running win xp…",
"parent_id": "8133476",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133734",
"author": "rbf072858",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T21:21:12",
"content": "Actually, they are the tool of choice for SDR work… Mostly home hack stuff",
"parent_id": "8133476",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133746",
"author": "Raj",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T22:12:42",
"content": "FPGA has numerous value for small simple projects. Only real hardware enthusiasts knows this.",
"parent_id": "8133476",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133479",
"author": "Cyao",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T04:41:47",
"content": "I’ve already fabbed it out and it works, thats all that matters for me :P",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133527",
"author": "Tom G",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T08:04:55",
"content": "The problem with poor layout, decoupling, design etc is thatvisiblefailures are often pattern sensitive or temperature sensitive or voltage sensitive. That means a device often passessimpleunit tests but intermittently fails in other cases. Such failures are the devil to spot, diagnose, and avoid.For the avoidance of doubt, I have no valid opinion whatsoever about this device.",
"parent_id": "8133479",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133499",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T06:25:16",
"content": "I wonder if you can swap in the 85K LUT version of the chip?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133716",
"author": "heimy",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T20:03:30",
"content": "Not swap in, really. This project uses the 256 caBGA (0.8mm pitch, 14x14mm) package, and the smallest the 85 comes in that category is the 381 (17x17mm). So it will be a struggle to make it fit, and you’ll have to reroute a lot of stuff anyway, because of the different pinouts. An option would be the 285 caBGA (10x10mm), but that’s 0.5mm pitch and a whole different can of worms.If you’re going to go that route you might as well change that ancient (but easy) SDRAM and drop 4GiB of DDR3 for about the same price – and the additional complexity O:-)",
"parent_id": "8133499",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133890",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T10:26:26",
"content": "The board looks like it uses a lfe5u-25F-6bg256c and I suspect you could swap that for a lfe5u-45F-6bg256c for double the LUTs and only a modest increase in price.",
"parent_id": "8133716",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133894",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T10:31:57",
"content": "(or a faster speed grade like a -7 instead of a -6, or an industrial version instead of a commercial one, whatever)",
"parent_id": "8133890",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134266",
"author": "heimy",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T02:04:38",
"content": "It would be nice, but at least a cursory look to the pinouts shows that they’re… not compatible? Not sure why Lattice would do that to themselves. Alas…",
"parent_id": "8133890",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133592",
"author": "Nickey Joe Atchison",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T11:53:52",
"content": "This is a ground shaking Confluence of events. The idea that modern LLM agents can write programs and create Verilog description files from verbal psudo code – WOW!!! This with combined with fluid PC Board fab actually allows you to make anything you want. The fact that they have an FPG locked into a format that’s commonly used and so simple you can just talk and come up with stuff and make things. It is like when the TI – 59 hit.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133604",
"author": "Clancydaenlightened",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T12:31:12",
"content": "Just remember your Intel i7 or i9 and AMD ryzen started off as an fpga implementationWhat can a 50,000+usd fpga do you ask?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133606",
"author": "Clancydaenlightened",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T12:32:52",
"content": "Before the actual fabricate the chipThey emulate it in verilog/vhdlOr some in house customer hardware languageTalking about millions of LUT",
"parent_id": "8133604",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133747",
"author": "Raj",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T22:15:47",
"content": "“Intel i7 or i9 and AMD ryzen started off as an fpga implementation”Provide the source to this claim… Didn’t know big tech uses FPGA for prototyping new chips.",
"parent_id": "8133604",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133923",
"author": "heimy",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T13:21:08",
"content": "I’ve read before that they start by using things like Cadence Palladium, then when RTL is more stable, they migrate to ARRAYS of the largest FPGAs available (and I don’t even want to imagine the headache of partitioning the design). That allows for faster emulation, but still well below the GHz mark. Better than doing it on software or wasting ASIC iterations, though.",
"parent_id": "8133747",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133717",
"author": "heimy",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T20:05:58",
"content": "I spotted this project in Reddit a few days ago and it’s quite cool, particularly given the designer’s background. I love when kids get into this.That’s 256Mbits of RAM though, not MB.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133719",
"author": "Mordae",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T20:12:35",
"content": "Wrong RAM size units. You are off by the factor of 8.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133836",
"author": "Dave Williams | DitroniX | STEM Ambassador",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T05:34:41",
"content": "Unsure if this is all Chengyin Yao’s work, or collaborative, but either way, the Icepi Zero is a neat design and layout – the result of a lot of work.As an engineer/designer, one can pin down the goal posts but they often can be found, for good reason, to move during the project development and inspirations on the way. It is great to get the STEM community involvements and set seeds for future engineers – Chengyin included.Still pondering merging an FPGA on a future iteration of my STEM based ESPuno Pi Zero board. Maybe the Icepi has provided me some inspiration along the way.Keep up the good work Chengyin and hopefully the IcePi Zero project will evolve too.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134024",
"author": "fanoush",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T21:29:59",
"content": "It is quite similar tohttps://hackaday.io/project/13048-flea-ohm-fpga-project/detailswhich was on kickstarter few years ago",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,531.313894
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/29/a-simple-tip-for-gluing-those-led-filaments/
|
A Simple Tip For Gluing Those LED Filaments
|
Donald Papp
|
[
"LED Hacks"
] |
[
"diorama",
"glue",
"led",
"LED filament",
"shrink tubing"
] |
[Boylei] shows that those little
LED filament strips make great freeze-frame blaster shots
in a space battle diorama. That’s neat and all, but what we
really
want to highlight is a simple tip [Boylei] shares about working with these filament strips: how to glue them.
Glue doesn’t stick to LED filament strips, so put on a small piece of heat-shrink and glue to
that
instead.
The silicone (or silicone-like) coating on these LED filament strips means glue simply doesn’t stick. To work around this, [Boylei] puts a piece of clear heat shrink around the filament, and glues to
that
instead. If you want a visual, you can
see him demonstrate at 6:11
. It’s a simple and effective tip that’s certainly worth keeping in mind, especially since filament strips invite so many project ideas.
When LED filament strips first hit the hobbyist market
they were attractive, but required high operating voltages. Nowadays they are not only cheaper, but work at battery-level voltages and come in a variety of colors.
These filaments have only gotten easier to work with over the years. Just remember to be gentle about bending them, and as [Boylei] demonstrates, a little piece of clear shrink tubing is all it takes to provide a versatile glue anchor. So if you had a project idea involving them that didn’t quite work out in the past, maybe it’s time to give it another go?
| 6
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133450",
"author": "Cad the Mad",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T01:35:17",
"content": "A handy tip for my next cosplay project. This would probably work for EL wire and over thin rubberized elements.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133532",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T08:24:23",
"content": "Looks very pretty. Now I want those too!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133610",
"author": "Frank Ontree",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T12:43:29",
"content": "Working with those kind of filament strips work really well and can add nice effects to a model. There is another channel that uses it quite often:https://youtube.com/@outworldatelierAlso I a fighter scene, must be a thing",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133631",
"author": "Frank Ontree",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T14:27:17",
"content": "Those filament LEDs seem to be commonly used in this kinds of builds.I follow a YouTube channel (https://youtube.com/@outworldatelier) that also used them in a battle scene, but also for an explosion with cotton balls.There’s even an explanation about the resistors that are used, a more challenging part for model builders it seems.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133662",
"author": "none ra",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T16:29:53",
"content": "good idea!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133721",
"author": "Jii",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T20:23:09",
"content": "Oh yes!I have this half a death star on my wall and at some point i was trying to figure out how to get a lazer beam coming out from it and this is the answer!That (topic) diorama looks amazing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,531.361759
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/29/you-can-make-your-own-ribbon-mic-with-a-gum-wrapper/
|
You Can Make Your Own Ribbon Mic With A Gum Wrapper
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"Misc Hacks"
] |
[
"mic",
"microphone",
"ribbon mic",
"ribbon microphone"
] |
There are lots of different types of microphone, with the ribbon microphone being one of the rarer ones. Commercial versions are often prized for their tone and frequency response. You can make your own too, as [Something Physical] demonstrates
using a packet of chewing gum.
Yes, the ribbon in this microphone was literally gained from Airwaves Extreme gum. It’s got nothing to do with freshness or the special mintiness quotient of the material, though; just that it’s a conductive foil and it makes the YouTube video more interesting to watch.
The gum wrapper is first soaked in hot water and then acetone, such that the paper backing can be removed. The foil is then corrugated with a tube press with some baking paper used for protection during this delicate process. The “motor” of the ribbon microphone is then produced out of plexiglass, copper tape, and a pair of powerful magnets. The ribbon is then stretched between the magnets and clamped in place, acting as the part of the microphone that will actually vibrate in response to sound. As it vibrates in the magnetic field, a current is generated in response to the sound. From there, it’s just a matter of hooking up a custom-wound transformer to the wires leading to the “motor” and it’s ready to test. It works off the bat, but there is some noise. Adding shielding over the transformer and a proper enclosure helps to make the microphone more fit for purpose.
If you’ve ever wanted to experiment with microphone construction, it’s hard to go past the joy of building a simple ribbon mic. You can experiment at will with different sizes and materials, too; you needn’t just limit yourself to different brands of gum!
We’ve featured some other great mic builds over the years, too
. Video after the break.
| 13
| 8
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133389",
"author": "darthvader",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T20:49:44",
"content": "Great project ;)I just have one question , why not just use normal aluminum foil in place of the gum one ?If it’s the same it will be easier :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133391",
"author": "Mark Topham",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T21:02:32",
"content": "It’s substantially thicker in most cases.",
"parent_id": "8133389",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133405",
"author": "darthvader",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T21:50:30",
"content": "Ha ! ok ;)Thank you.",
"parent_id": "8133391",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133625",
"author": "Brandano",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T13:40:45",
"content": "I remember seeing an “how it’s made” episode about gold foil. Gold is very ductile and can be thinned to something just a few molecules wide, can be hannered so thin it’s transparent. and that’s actually how they did it, they layered several sheets together between paper sheets and hammered the lot thinner. I think the same could be done with aluminium foil and baking paper?",
"parent_id": "8133405",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133433",
"author": "helge",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T00:03:47",
"content": "It’s been a shockingly long time since I last did this, but… iirc you can flatten a gum wrapper, hold it horizontally with the paper side down and run a lighter flame along the paper, causing the Al foil to come off right away.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136602",
"author": "RobW",
"timestamp": "2025-06-08T21:12:47",
"content": "Yes! A bit of heat… much more elegant solution to the “paper backing problem” (as I recall).",
"parent_id": "8133433",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133442",
"author": "chris",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T01:03:31",
"content": "I did not expect the sound to be this good. The foil tension doesn’t seem to be too critical ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133460",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T03:07:19",
"content": "The separation of the foil is super fetishistic. Your parents won’t find out, guys!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133490",
"author": "Jouni",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T05:33:44",
"content": "Fantastic video and that banjo sounded so good!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133547",
"author": "prfesser",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T09:04:30",
"content": "In the Land of Ago, with care the foil could simply be peeled away from the paper. I used to do this as a kid to make electrical ‘fuses’. A narrow strip left by cutting indentations in the foil would melt through when a short circuit from a couple of batteries was applied.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136142",
"author": "JMR",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T04:11:43",
"content": "That’s a “prison lighter”.",
"parent_id": "8133547",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133651",
"author": "jenningsthecat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T15:39:16",
"content": "A very cool project, well-executed on a limited budget.If I was doing it I’d try to find a better way of connecting to the ribbon – that pressure-only junction between aluminum and copper may not hold up very well in the long term. I think I’d also want a better-damped enclosure – either the same box lined with some kind of damping material, or a plastic box lined with copper foil and damping material.That said, it sounded really good. I’d be interested to hear how it sounds with something sound-absorbent on the back side to reduce the amount of reflected sound hitting the ribbon.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133755",
"author": "jenningsthecat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T23:13:13",
"content": "It seems that I was wrong in being concerned about the contact reliability. The pros do it pretty much the same way:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG_fba2km00The video above shows microphones from Royer Labs being assembled, adjusted, and tested. Very interesting stuff.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,531.554439
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/29/2025-pet-hacks-challenge-poopopticon-is-all-up-in-kittys-business/
|
2025 Pet Hacks Challenge : Poopopticon Is All Up In Kitty’s Business
|
Tyler August
|
[
"contests",
"home hacks"
] |
[
"2025 Pet Hacks Contest",
"cat litter box",
"ESP32",
"ESP8266",
"infrared",
"line following"
] |
After seeing this project, we can say that [James] must be a top-tier roommate. He has two flatmates– one human, one feline, and the feline flatmate’s litterbox was located in a bathroom close to the other human’s room. The odors were bothersome. A bad roommate might simply say that wasn’t their problem, but not [James].
Instead, he proclaimed “
I shall build a poopopticon to alert me so I may clean the litterbox immediately, before smells can even begin to occur, thus preserving domestic harmony
!”* We should all aspire to be more like [James].
It was, admittedly, a fairly simple project. Rather than dive into
feline facial recognition
, since it only has to detect a single cat, [James] used a simple IR sensor out of his parts bin, the sort you see on line-following robots. The microcontroller, an ESP8266, also came from his parts bin, making this project eligible for the ‘lowest budget’ award, if the contest had one.
The ESP8266 is set to send a message to a waiting webhook. In this case it is linked to a previous project, a smart ‘ring light’ [James] uses to monitor his Twitch chats. He’s also considered hooking it up to his
lazy-esp32-banner
for a big scrolling ‘change the litterbox!’ message. Since it’s just a webhook, the sky is the limit. Either way, the signal gets to its recipient and the litter gets changed before it smells, ensuring domestic bliss at [James]’ flat. If only all our roommates had been more like [James], we’d be much less misanthropic today.
He did not, in fact, say that.
| 6
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133400",
"author": "Toby",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T21:36:59",
"content": "Missed opportunity for a “fecal recognition” joke if I ever saw one. I would think one obvious problem is that urine is warm too? I guess false positives are better than false negatives in this case.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133427",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T23:37:27",
"content": "my cats have hated each other since i decided to go look at the local box of free kittens. looking at a box of kittens usually means you leave with a kitten and i had 2 cats at the time already. at first they seemed to hit it off. the older male was still alive and in charge. and the chubby female tux seemed to like having a new kitty to play with. when he passed (at the age of 18 mind you), there was some argument between the new kitty and the chubby kitty as to who would be top cat. since both were female, they engaged in a passive aggressive warfare of seeing who could pee on the most things. i converted a flashlight to uv so i could find the spots. so i opened up another litter box, this seemed to help somewhat. the young kitty grew up the chubby kitty got chubbier and older and now has bladder control issues. the young kitty doesnt want to feel left out and so sometimes also goes on the floor. it seems like they have resumed their old rivalry. in a few years when the chubby kitty inevitably has a coronary, i think we will be a one cat house. or maybe get a couple siblings from the same litter. getting them fixed helps, but do it early.",
"parent_id": "8133400",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133636",
"author": "SparkyGSX",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T14:50:41",
"content": "Getting at most one female also helps, assuming the males are castrated in time.I’ve had two or three cats at a time for years, but always just males or one female and one or two males.Male cats will hiss and growl and fight a bit for at most a few months, and be inseparable after that, in my experience. After my last male cat died (at age 19), I only have two females left, and the fight and terrorize each other absolutely constantly.",
"parent_id": "8133427",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133430",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T23:43:00",
"content": "you could probibly just use a methane sensor, look for a spike in gas emissions.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133644",
"author": "Garth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T15:13:52",
"content": "So the tables have turned….they monitor you in the bathroom and now you can monitor theirs.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133695",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T18:14:35",
"content": "Shifting and shaking on a regular basis including removing solids does wonders, more than once a day. They have a cat box with screen on the bottom helping ventilation dry things out. When puddles stay wet is when things start to smell. Just like a lid on kitchen trash makes it worse than when things get to dry out.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,531.469472
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/29/researchers-are-slowly-finding-ways-to-stem-the-tide-of-pfas-contamination/
|
Researchers Are Slowly Finding Ways To Stem The Tide Of PFAS Contamination
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"Science"
] |
[
"drinking water",
"drinking water contamination",
"forever chemicals",
"pfas",
"pfas chemicals",
"pfas contamination"
] |
If you’ve been following environmental news over the past couple of decades, you’ve probably heard about PFAS – those pesky “forever chemicals” that seem to turn up everywhere from
drinking water
to
polar bear blood
. They’re bad for us, and we know it, but they’ve been leeching into the environment for decades, often as a result of military or industrial activity. What’s worse is that these contaminants just don’t seem to break down—they stick around in the environment causing harm on an ongoing basis.
Now, researchers are finally cracking the code on
how to deal with these notoriously stubborn molecules
. It won’t be easy, but there’s finally some hope in the fight against the bad stuff that doesn’t just wash away.
Do You Really Want To Live Forever?
PFAS chemicals have been found contaminating tapwater supplies across the United States, and the world. Credit:
USGS
, public domain
The term “forever chemicals” is media shorthand for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances—or PFAS for short. These substances earned their nickname from
The Washington Post
in 2018
, and for good reason. These synthetic compounds feature carbon-fluorine bonds. These are some of the strongest chemical bonds found in nature and are very hard to break. This molecular stubbornness is actually a key feature of these chemicals, making them incredibly useful for things like firefighting foams or non-stick cookware—indeed, the remarkably unreactive Teflon was one of the first PFAS materials to come to prominence. However, this very feature also means they accumulate in the environment and in our bodies rather than breaking down naturally.
In practical terms, the strength of the carbon-fluorine bond means that PFAS chemicals are remarkably stable, and can easily resist high temperatures and chemical attack. Thus, they can persist in the environment for thousands of years, contaminating water supplies, accumulating in food chains, and most crucially—causing health issues. Research is ongoing, but PFAS chemicals have already been implicated in potentially causing everything from cancers to hormone disruption and liver damage.
Stop The Spread
Firefighting foams are one of the prime sources of PFAS contamination. The problem is often at its worst in areas where these foams are used regularly, such as military airfields. Credit:
Brandweer Neder-Betuwe, kazerne Ochten, Nederland
, CC BY-SA 3.0
Obviously, it’s not desirable to have toxic chemicals building up in the environment. Cleaning up existing contamination is of prime importance, particularly in areas where humans still live and work. Removing these chemicals in drinking water supplies remains challenging, but possible. The techniques are well understood, typically requiring the use of
reverse osmosis techniques or lots of activated carbon
. But what about all the contaminated human-built infrastructure, like military airfields and the like? Many of these concrete and tarmac structures have been soaking in PFAS chemicals for decades, and pose a continued risk of these substnaces leaking into the environment.
Australian firm AmbioLock has gone with an unconventional approach. Rather than trying to remove PFAS from contaminated concrete at airports and fire training grounds, they’ve developed a sealant to lock the chemicals in place. The idea is that the dangerous chemicals can be sealed to the engineered materials so they don’t leach into the environment or harm anyone using the infrastructure on the regular. The company has developed a silicate-based sealant called AmbioSeal, which penetrates the pores of concrete structures to create an impermeable barrier. In testing, the sealant achieved a 99.2% reduction in PFAS leaching from treated materials. The idea is that built infrastructure can be treated to seal PFAS contamination in place, such that the facilities can still be used safely while minimizing further risk from these deletrious chemicals.
The products could yet find grand markets with governments and private operators around the world. There are a great many PFAS contamination sites that are badly in need of remediation. However, it’s still an imperfect measure—ideally, we wouldn’t be spraying these nasty chemicals all over the place to begin with.
Ultimate Destruction
Government and industry are also keen to find ways to limit or avoid future potential releases, too. Enter a team of researchers from CSIRO and Colorado State University. Using computer simulations rooted in quantum mechanics, they modeled
exactly what happens to PFAS molecules during pyrometallurgy
. The scenario in question concerned lithium-ion battery recycling via pyrometallurgy—the process of incinerating battery materials to recover the metals inside. The researchers eager to determine what peak incinerator temperatures were necessary to destroy any PFAS component of the recyclable battery material, thus ensuring that it would not be released into the environment during the recycling procedure.
There is an increasing push to begin mass battery recycling of lithium-ion cells. Researchers at Colorado State and CSIRO have been working to determine how best to pursue that goal while avoiding the release of harmful PFAS chemicals into the atmosphere. Credit:
Doğru akım enerji
, CC BY-SA 4.0
Their findings revealed a critical temperature threshold. At lower temperatures (200 °C to 500 °C), PFAS compounds simply vaporize and enter the gas phase, becoming mobile but otherwise remaining stable. The team found that higher temperatures were needed to get the tough C-F bonds to finally surrender and break apart completely. Modelling for an incinerator’s short two-second retention time for gases, the team determined a temperature of 950 °C was necessary to attain quick destruction. “We identified the intermediate compounds formed, the key barriers in the process, and determined the required temperatures and times to fully break down these chemicals,” noted Dr Jens Blotevogel, a CSIRO researcher involved with the project.
While the research focused on a specific recycling case, it has broader implications. The modelling may guide future work for other scenarios where it’s desirable to create a recycling process or similar in which PFAS materials will be destroyed rather than emitted to the environment. There is a particularly strong focus on how the world will recycle the masses of batteries now floating around the economy, so it will have direct benefits in limiting PFAS emissions in that regard, too.
These breakthroughs represent real progress, but the challenge now is implementation. Governments, industries, and relevant authorities will need to invest in research and techniques like these to develop cost-effective solutions for the thousands of PFAS-emitting and PFAS-contaminated sites worldwide. PFAS destruction represents one of the major mainstream environmental challenges today. As these researchers have shown, with the right analysis and some clever chemistry, “forever” doesn’t necessarily have to mean forever.
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[
{
"comment_id": "8133309",
"author": "alialiali",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T17:19:24",
"content": "Donate blood, by doing so not only are you helping society out but you’re reducing your own PFAS levels.win winVery surprised this isn’t mentioned whenever PFAS are discussed.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133324",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T17:52:25",
"content": "Aw, now I find out that I’m being selfish when I thought I was being selfless. That reminds me, I’m due for a donation.Makes sense that, effectively, diluting the blood would reduce the net foreign chemical content. So, bloodletting turns out to not be such a bad idea after all?",
"parent_id": "8133309",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133396",
"author": "alialiali",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T21:10:56",
"content": "Bloodletting is still used for people at risk of iron overload or excessive red blood cells (like haemachromatosis and polycythemia). And I do believe leeches, and maggots are still used too in niche settings!It does make me wonder what the PFAS levels are in frequent recipients?Like sickle cell suffers don’t have enough to deal with!",
"parent_id": "8133324",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133444",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T01:18:59",
"content": "Does that work when the fluids you are drinking to replenish your plasma also contain PFAS?",
"parent_id": "8133309",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133611",
"author": "Wes",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T12:48:29",
"content": "To an extent, yes. These chemicals accumulate in the body, and aren’t easily removed by it. To get Parts Per Billion in your blood, you only need to be drinking water that contains Parts Per Trillion, and but that’s over a few years. So even if what you drink to replenish your plasma has PFAS, it would take likely a couple months to return to your previous blood levels, and longer if you start taking more active prevention measures.",
"parent_id": "8133444",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133628",
"author": "alialiali",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T14:02:48",
"content": "And donations happen about every 3 months for whole blood, or as often as every every 2 weeks for plasma donation!",
"parent_id": "8133611",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133316",
"author": "Miles Archer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T17:34:28",
"content": "These are nasty chemicals, but can we stop using the term “forever” chemicals? Two common forever chemicals that shouldn’t worry you – H20 (water) and Si02 (sand).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133330",
"author": "Krzysztof",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T18:22:51",
"content": "It’s forever “chemicals”, not “forever” chemicals. H2O and SiO2 are natural, not chemicals.",
"parent_id": "8133316",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133332",
"author": "Krzysztof",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T18:23:33",
"content": "And comment box ate my “/sarcasm” tag.",
"parent_id": "8133330",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133375",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T20:11:48",
"content": "natural, not chemicalsThere is no such distinction.",
"parent_id": "8133330",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133377",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T20:15:59",
"content": "I’m not sure how you can write the chemical formula for something and in the same breath call it “not a chemical”. Do some more thinking on this one.",
"parent_id": "8133330",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133491",
"author": "Krzysztof",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T05:41:37",
"content": "Comment box ate my < / sarcasm > tag, sorry for confusion.",
"parent_id": "8133377",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133363",
"author": "Sam",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T19:53:42",
"content": "The context of forever chemicals is that they can be absorbed from food or drink but the human body has no mechanism to remove them. So once they’ll continue to accumulate “forever”. This is definitely not the same thing as H2O, which the body has several ways to expel, or SiO2 which passes through the digestive system basically inert.I don’t think forever chemicals is a great name, lots of potential to mislead, but please don’t make it worse by equating them to harmless chemicals that don’t break down.",
"parent_id": "8133316",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133414",
"author": "Reggie",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T22:29:50",
"content": "Then lead and mercury are forever chemicals? Both cannot be removed by human body.",
"parent_id": "8133363",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133440",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T00:54:40",
"content": "Yes they can. You eventually piss out both, and chelation can make it happen faster if you need it.",
"parent_id": "8133414",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133676",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T17:12:55",
"content": "The reason why they are toxic is because they pass as other metals for your biochemistry, so they’re substituted instead of the proper ones. Lead mimics calcium, iron, and zinc, so it gets embedded in structures that would normally have these metals and it remains there for a very long time, such as getting stuck in your bones. As the body keeps recycling these tissues over time, the lead turns up later and keeps re-poisoning you.",
"parent_id": "8133440",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133446",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T01:19:33",
"content": "No. Branding is about catchiness, not pedantic correctness",
"parent_id": "8133316",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133633",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T14:32:05",
"content": "Doesn’t “causing health issues. Research is ongoing, but PFAS chemicals have already been implicated in potentially causing everything from cancers to hormone disruption and liver damage.” mean no known effect? Implicated? Potentially? This is the language of a catastrophist and weaker than a chemtrail study. I’m not saying it isn’t true, but it reads like a British tabloid describing a Bigfoot sighting. It strikes me like the attempted dioxin scare of the 1980’s which had bad science in a half a dozen ways.",
"parent_id": "8133316",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133322",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T17:47:10",
"content": "The best way to “stem the tide” is to stop using them. Civilization existed before these compounds did, and can easily go on without them. Anything less is just greenwashing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133343",
"author": "RetepV",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T18:37:24",
"content": "The last time civilization was without PFAS (Teflon, 1938), civilization consisted of about 2.2 billion people.Now, civilization consists of about 8.1 billion people.Are you really sure that 8.1 billion people can easily go without something that enabled it to grow so fast in the first place?",
"parent_id": "8133322",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133364",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T19:54:39",
"content": "Teflon and similar materials are great, but really not essential to supporting a larger population anywhere, at least as far as I am aware. They are a convenience booster only in that sense -mostly giving small gains in cooking oil consumption and agri-manufactoring tasks that find those magic plastics last longer or do the job slightly more efficiently. We could go without and not suffer on the essential industry and agriculture side much – but I don’t think we really should go without, as it isn’t proper use that is the problem its the lack of cleaning up after ourselves and using them in ways they will easily escape into the rest of the world where you can’t then efficiently clean them up.",
"parent_id": "8133343",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133372",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T20:06:01",
"content": "Humans behave predictably, and generally speaking, they leave their trash everywhere. It’s much more productive to make that trash harmless than it is to attempt to convince humans to change their behavior.",
"parent_id": "8133364",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133379",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T20:21:29",
"content": "Teflon is actually quite essential in the chemicals industry because it’s non-reactive, or in the electrical industry because it’s an excellent insulator, and it’s used in all kinds of mechanical applications as low-friction bushings and sliding surfaces. The seals and gaskets in your car are probably made of teflon, and we’ve replaced tar and hemp fibers wrapped around household water pipe threads with teflon tape because it lasts so much longer. It’s even made into implants for humans – think of an artificial hip joint.It’s not just frying pans and gore-tex clothing.",
"parent_id": "8133364",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133457",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T02:37:09",
"content": "Also it’s generally not Teflonitselfthat’s the problem. It’s the related chemicals which were developed for use in it’s manufacture that are both incredibly stable and incredibly pervasive.",
"parent_id": "8133379",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133539",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T08:42:43",
"content": "I didn’t say it wasn’t very useful in many industries, but on the limited scope of supporting a larger population…If you want to have an entirely modern life its going to be hard to go without I can agree with entirely, but on the basics required to support the population its really not required (at least not as far as I’m aware).As those folks needing artificial hips are going to hate not having one, or having something less enduring etc, but it doesn’t kill them, or even remove them from the workforce most of the time. As by the time your joints are ruined enough you really can’t function at all you are probably old enough you are not working anyway, making it bad for that individual but irrelevent for the needs of society in supporting the large population. And they are not dying off much faster if any faster for lack of hip replacement, so the population won’t decrease for it much either – they will just have crappier lives. Which is why I have no trouble with them continuing to be used, just in the right places and with the manufacturing waste streams actually cleaned up!",
"parent_id": "8133379",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133654",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T15:53:03",
"content": "If you want to have an entirely modern life its going to be hard to go without I can agree with entirelyYet you fail to recognize the knock-on effects of it. If for example you don’t have teflon available to make pipes and reactor vessels for the chemicals industry, you have to start making entire factories out of glass for the same effect and whoops, suddenly other materials and things start to cost a whole lot more to make. This then feeds back to the cost of making basic chemicals and materials, like producing the glass you need for the reactor vessels.If you look at things in isolation, you can pull out a single link and say “Oh that wasn’t too bad”, but the society is a feedback loop that’s either going up in a self-accelerating manner, or going down in a self-accelerating manner. Keeping it steady for longer than a couple decades is going to be extremely difficult. If something is going to make it worse, it’s probably going to multiply by a few rounds through the loop to make things a whole lot worse than you thought.",
"parent_id": "8133379",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133710",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T19:20:47",
"content": "Yet you fail to recognize the knock-on effects of it….Not at all, though the costs going up is both an economics problem of a self solving sort and largely irrelevant to actual point of supporting the population without the wonders of Teflon type plastics anyway.To take your example glass in chemical industries instead will have a bit of an initial cost uptick, but largely because glass blowers etc have been going out of business without replacements as plastic is so ‘cheap’n’easy’ – so its hard to find the capacity of suitably skilled labour and facitlities to rapidly shift over. (The same problem seen in trying to produce ammo in Europe for Ukraine – the production lines and people have atrophied, and that takes time to recover).But the actual raw materials of glass are pretty cheap, the energy and time involved in glass vs those fancy C-F polymer actually not that incomparable (if you bother to clean up the toxic waste from the Teflon(etc) materials rather than just dump it…). So in terms of big picture impact to society doing away with it matters not very much. The folks that will be most impacted are the researchers not the established industries – as those are the folks that want to try novel stuff for which the easier and lower skilled to work plastics are really wonderful. The existing industry on the other hand will just pass that tiny increase in their costs along, if there is an increase in costs at all in the end, as the ability to produce their product really doesn’t change meaningfully.Some things there are knock on effects if you remove them that just couldn’t be worked around practically for society at large but in Teflon type plastic case you can just drop back to an older technology or two that actually did the essential jobs just fine but was slightly less convenient.",
"parent_id": "8133379",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133720",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T20:20:46",
"content": "and largely irrelevant to actual point of supporting the populationYou’re assuming that things like glass blowing is just initially more expensive until you’ve got the process down, but in fact it is more expensive overall because it’s more energy, labor, and materials intensive, which is the reason why teflon replaced these technologies in the first place. It was orders of magnitude better on all accounts.Without teflot, you have either extremely expensive tech like glass, or alternatives that were somewhat cheap to manufacture but did not last in use (like stainless steel piping) that might not be suitable in the first place.It’s not irrelevant to the point of supporting the population because the cost of supplying your basic material needs is ESSENTIAL in supporting the population. If the cost of maintaining the living standards falls below a certain level, you’ll see people falling back to previous modes of operation like subsistence farming, at which point they’ll either die or revolt against your attempts to keep order, and your society falls apart, and then you’ll have NO chemical processing plants or the rest.",
"parent_id": "8133379",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133722",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T20:24:19",
"content": "Point being that we now have 3x the number of people to sustain compared to the pre-teflon era of technology. If we had to revert anywhere near to that level of process efficiency, we would see civil wars all over the place.",
"parent_id": "8133379",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133598",
"author": "eMpTy-10",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T12:15:34",
"content": "You do realize that Teflon used in cookware is a small percentage of Teflon usage? It’s got countless uses in medical manufacturing, etc.",
"parent_id": "8133364",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133677",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T17:19:11",
"content": "About half the teflon produced is going towards the electrical industry, where it makes things like insulators for wires, tools for making semiconductors, and things like coatings on solar panels or the surface coating of the monitor you’re probably looking through right now.",
"parent_id": "8133598",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133370",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T20:03:56",
"content": "Teflon is responsible for the birth of 5.9 billion people? Do I owe my life to a budget frying pan? If my parents had learned to season cast iron, would I never have been born?You’re ridiculous, man.",
"parent_id": "8133343",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133448",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T01:23:19",
"content": "You? Probably not. And not Teflon specifically. But large gluts of new population in certain parts of the world are absolutely reliant on recent technologies, or even if not strictly reliant on them, their momentum makes it extremely difficult to change course.",
"parent_id": "8133370",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133454",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T02:23:02",
"content": "Isn’t this a bad thing and shouldn’t we stop enabling it? Resting our basic survival on an increasingly-complex technological house of cards seems like a bad idea. It’s like getting everyone addicted to drugs at birth.",
"parent_id": "8133448",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133492",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T05:46:35",
"content": "It’s like getting everyone addicted to drugs at birth.It’s already happened. 80% of the humanity would starve to death if we stopped making artificial nitrogen fertilizers for some reason.",
"parent_id": "8133448",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133542",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T08:52:08",
"content": "starve to death if we stopped making artificial nitrogen fertilizers for some reason.Not really true, at least if you actually have a little warning to start a repair of the soil health and alter your farming practices to keep it healthy – artificial fertilizers have allowed and even encouraged completely unsustainable farming practices, as it was so so profitable in those early days to squeeze all that rapid growth and life out of the soil in the short term. But now with the soil so ruined by this intensive agriculture it really doesn’t work out so well – even in pretty poor soil that hasn’t had time to fully recover folks are getting good yields compared to their artificial fertiliser runs without using it by going back to older farming methods to some extent, and co-croping etc – actually using and supporting the natural processes just works, and keeps on working…",
"parent_id": "8133448",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133652",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T15:39:23",
"content": "Not really true, at least if you actually have a little warning to start a repair of the soil health and alter your farming practices to keep it healthy“Trying to feed the world with the mainly-organic food yields of 1960 would mean farming twice as much land as we do today under conventional agriculture”https://www.irishtimes.com/science/2022/09/01/the-big-problem-with-organic-farming-is-it-cannot-produce-enough-food-to-feed-the-worlds-population/The problem remains that farming is depleting soils regardless, because you’re taking food out of the ground. The minerals and other chemicals need to be replaced, and organic farming does not replace them fast enough to maintain the intensive farming practices we have. Returning back to pre-green-revolution farming would mean expanding food production to ALL the land we could possibly cultivate and destroying whatever natural environments we have left.",
"parent_id": "8133448",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133694",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T18:12:13",
"content": "Also, organic farming replaces synthetic fertilizers with mineral (mined) fertilizers, because simple crop rotation and tilling practices do not recover the minerals lost to extraction and erosion. Instead of fertilizing with the target chemicals produced for the purpose synthetically, you fertilize with some naturally occurring mineral that has those chemicals in it, that has been mined from somewhere and shipped half-way across the world in some cases.So, ditch industrial synthetic fertilizers, welcome back Guano Islands.",
"parent_id": "8133448",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133978",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T19:23:29",
"content": "mainly-organic food yields of 19…I didn’t say anything about going backwards, its rather more going forwards than backwards as the abuse of the soil for so many decades means actually the first year or two going back to putting some work into soil health and more nature friendly farming hurts the yield, but a few years after that lots of folks are finding they are getting better yields than they could spraying all the time! As once the soil is destroyed you just need that fertiliser, often in every increasing quantities to actually get a yield…The problem remains that farming is depleting soils regardless, because you’re taking food out of the ground.Also not really true – some plants fix x and consume y etc, which is where things like rotations and co-croping so you have a plant that actually puts back into the soil what the other plant needs can really cut down or eliminate the fertiliser and get you good yields (just of two crops with less tonnange individually but more combined than the mono field would). The soil composition is absolutely important and usually changed by the plant growing in it, but you don’t have to keep planting in that same spot year on year a crop that demands the same elements, bit of science applied to picking the right plants for the right time and place…So yes the price of crop and yield of better actually something like sustainable farming is different, and obviously not everywhere has so thoroughly killed off their soil to see the yields actually start to go up with more organic farming in only few years as the soil’s initial recovery spike from basically inert to bruised is so much more dramatic than going from just slightly abused to healthy. But can you go without spraying huge quantities of artificial fertiliser and feed everyone, almost certainly with a good margin to spare. And that is without even trying to deal with the mountain of food waste, that globally seems to amount to more than is actually consumed… What you might not be able to do is feed the American’s or increasingly European’s the diet they demand – they won’t starve though.",
"parent_id": "8133448",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133447",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T01:21:49",
"content": "This is going to be a very pressing question eventually and you will not like whatever the answer is (it has to do with the fact that we are over our carrying capacity already and borrowing resources against our own future, but no matter how many billions of people exist the moral consensus is that John Malthus can never ever ever never ever never be correct… so we persist.)",
"parent_id": "8133343",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133456",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T02:32:03",
"content": "It’s a shame, because if we started talking about ethical de-growth now, we could avoid having nature force unethical de-growth on us later. But everyone always wants the line to go up, and talking about population reduction is allegedly “very icky” and makes you “basically Hitler”, even if you’re just saying “maybe people should choose to have fewer kids”.Now it’s just a matter of time before someone chimes in talking about how we could turn Texas into a sardine can and pack everyone on earth into it. It’s all so tiresome.",
"parent_id": "8133447",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133494",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T05:56:03",
"content": "“Ethical de-growth” is simply a byword for grabbing social power and keeping it. There’s nothing ethical about it – see: China.Maybe peopleshouldchoose to have fewer children, but the emphasis should be on the wordchoose. Trouble is, people won’t make that choice unless they’re being bullied by a big autocratic government that has the power to punish people for not making the “right choices” – and having that power, the government is destined to fall into corruption because it cannot be kept in check by the public. Corruption in turn changes the meaning of “de-growth” into “ethnic cleansing”.",
"parent_id": "8133456",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133496",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T06:07:13",
"content": "The main issue is that people should have an equal chance to procreate, so the society doesn’t turn into dynasties where only the elite have the permission to have children – because they’re in control – while the lower classes are eliminated.It’s also a paradox if people do it voluntarily, because those who would voluntarily not procreate would be replaced by people who would not make the same choice – by natural selection or survival of the ones who breed faster. The future would consist of weird religious sects that shun contraceptives and people with the compulsive need to have children otherwise.",
"parent_id": "8133456",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133497",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T06:09:08",
"content": "@DudeChoices can be engineered, as we see daily in our media. Create a culture and create the counter-culture too, so long as both fit within your paradigm. Force is actually a pretty inefficient way of accomplishing things. Just frame reproduction as something that poor people do (for audiences on the right) or as something that religious zealots do (for audiences on the left). Have the centrist talk show hosts bring up “reproduction in moderation”. It’ll only be weird for a week before people internalize it.",
"parent_id": "8133456",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133508",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T06:55:23",
"content": "Choices can be engineeredBut unless your engineer has absolute power to shut out other opinions, the opposition can arise to do counter-engineering and split your society into competing factions that believe in different things. Then your “limit growth” social engineers are met with “drill baby drill” social engineers.",
"parent_id": "8133456",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133512",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T07:01:41",
"content": "Just frame reproduction as something that poor people do (for audiences on the right)That reveals more about your attitudes on the people of the right. They’re not “vain billionaires”, but people who want to look after their own and prioritize their own families, communities and nations, first. Reproduction in that context is having more of your people and less of other people competing for the same resources, which is why your idea of “only poor people breed” would land badly. They’d see right through it.",
"parent_id": "8133456",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133507",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T06:53:29",
"content": "John Malthus can never ever ever never ever never be correctWhat Malthus describes is fitting to a subsistence level society where the number of people you have translates directly to your productivity. In the sense that producing more people captures a greater portion of the available productive value – leading to a tragedy of the commons situation where everybody’s just trying to push out more babies to have more workers, leading to overpopulation and poverty for all.This case is “solved” by modernizing the society to the point that you need more than your arms and legs and a plot of land to survive. In fact you need to make it so people have to live on rent all the time, in some form or another, so theyhave to earn moneyor get kicked to the curb. Then, you need to place some artificial barriers on how much anyone isallowedto earn to keep them just on that limit of “Shall I have a child or a life?”.Malthus is defeated essentially by changing the definition of “poverty” from absolute poverty to relative poverty, and making it so that if you can’t reach a certain minimum level, you effectively cannot survive at all or lose your agency and fall under the guardianship of the state. People are still going to “eat themselves to the point of poverty” as Malthus predicted – it’s just a slightly more comfortable poverty than being at the direct risk of dying.",
"parent_id": "8133447",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133338",
"author": "Anti-Greenwashing",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T18:32:53",
"content": "There is absolutely no way that spraying the concrete prevents PFAS contamination. Take one look at how firefighting foams are deployed and this will be extremely obvious. It flows way over concreted areas! It will find its way to the soil!Be very very very skeptical of Australian companies dealing with a problem the Australian government wants to go away. They have a habit of hyping the shit out of projects that claim to solve their inconvenient truths, going “See? Our plucky homegrown privatized scientists already have a solution!”, and then that solution either completely fails or is never rolled out in the first place. They exist only to be a soundbite.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133360",
"author": "Pedro",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T19:36:15",
"content": "Those chemicals are easily decomposed to basic elements in a reactor with high neutron flux (something like RBMK or early VVER are the best)The only issue is people in the west got brainfarted into thinking that anything containing the word “nuclear” is exploding horrible death to all the ducks, rabbits and deer wandering their local park.If we could make everyone build simple research-grade reactor in their backyard many people would be forced to understand that their radiophobia is irrational, but I doubt it would happen unless it’s enforced by army and police.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133374",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T20:07:52",
"content": "Or we could just dump the PFAS into cement kilns, like we do with all sorts of other nasties that nobody wants to touch. Since we already have those, and all.",
"parent_id": "8133360",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133458",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T02:38:43",
"content": "Except we’d rather just dump them into the nearby waterways instead of sealing them up. It’s more profitable for the chemical companies, after all, and isn’t that the most important thing? /s",
"parent_id": "8133374",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133407",
"author": "GameboyRMH",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T21:57:03",
"content": "Some other options for permanent destruction:https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-most-promising-ways-to-destroy-forever-chemicals/ar-AA1EGr8V",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133422",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T23:20:59",
"content": "How are they “bad for us”? I have missed something. Are they forever because they do not decompose, meaning don’t react? If they don’t react how can they have an effect? Do they just clog us up? The they get inside of cells? If so, how could they do that?If they don’t get inside cells and they don’t react, do they behave like an ion and affect reactions more like a catalyst?Curious people want to know.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133543",
"author": "helge",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T08:52:40",
"content": "refer to section “The Human Impact” here:https://hackaday.com/2021/11/22/pfas-the-organofluorines-your-biochemist-warned-you-about/",
"parent_id": "8133422",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133629",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T14:15:59",
"content": "Thanks, I’ll have to check for recent results. I had thought that “PFAS” was an acronym for the micro/nano plastics we hear so much about. I can see how a surfactant can easily percolate throughout the system. I don’t see any evidence of health effects.The story has the ubiquitous “may” do such and such one sees instead of “no connection found”. “they may have endocrine-disrupting effects”. In this age where 80% of scientific papers can not be repeated successfully I usually wait for large meta-studies or at least several independent findings. But as of the 2021 article even the meta-studies produce a null result. Where’s the beef?",
"parent_id": "8133543",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133664",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T16:31:57",
"content": "“80% of scientific papers can not be repeated successfully” [citation needed].(Not weighing in on the PFAS issue at all, don’t know enough about it.)",
"parent_id": "8133629",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133678",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T17:22:42",
"content": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Most_Published_Research_Findings_Are_Falsehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42QuXLucH3QHaving (tried) taught physics to pre-med and bio students I can say that math skills are not great and by far most of them who get involved in research will drop their data into a stats package that may or may not apply or be used correctly.",
"parent_id": "8133664",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133679",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T17:25:57",
"content": "See: replication crisis. It mostly affects the “soft sciences” though, social sciences, psychology, economics, etc. but the hard sciences are affected as well. Medical science is a bit of a mixed bag.The main problem though is that people simply don’t attempt to replicate research, or if they do they don’t publish the results, or even contact the original authors to question their research, because of the culture of “publish or perish” that favors novel claims at the expense of debunking bad science and pure nonsense.",
"parent_id": "8133664",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133681",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T17:41:56",
"content": "Wikipedia:“A 2016 survey by Nature on 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility found that more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiment results (including 87% of chemists, 77% of biologists, 69% of physicists and engineers, 67% of medical researchers, 64% of earth and environmental scientists, and 62% of all others), and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. But fewer than 20% had been contacted by another researcher unable to reproduce their work. ”Now, failing to reproduce an experiment doesn’t directly mean it can not be replicated. The issue is that having such a high percentage of failure yet no fallout from it means that the peer review process is working pretty poorly. Bad science gets passed along simply because it’s too intimidating to challenge, or because there’s no funding for publishing null results.",
"parent_id": "8133664",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133687",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T17:54:30",
"content": "For the point of it, if you think about how people earn the title of a PhD, you have to publish a number of articles to be included in your thesis, unless you’re doing a monograph which requires a whole lot more work and more focus in your work.A PhD is basically like a driver’s license to scientific research – it doesn’t mean you’ve done something special – it’s just a proof that you can do serious research with the best of them. That in turn means that millions of people are cranking out research papers out of obligation rather than genuine interest or care, which is a part of the “publish or perish” problem. Proper science is being swamped by a system that uses publishing as a metric to gauge competence, which causes people to game publishing metrics, which corrupts the science itself.",
"parent_id": "8133664",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133702",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T18:51:54",
"content": "To make the main point: scientific research isn’t invalid but it has gotten very noisy in recent times. Whatever interesting results you find, you got to wait 5-15 years to confirm or see if it just falls off of the radar as a fluke, or gets debunked in meta-research.This point is abused by both sides for or against, one using the uncertainty to argue that there is no harm because we don’t know for sure, and the other to argue that there definitely is and it’s just being suppressed. One side is using it to hide their crimes and the other side is using it to gain sensationalism, moral panic, and social power by exaggerating problems and using them to demand a public mandate to action.",
"parent_id": "8133664",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133845",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T06:15:49",
"content": "There is also a problem of diminishing returns. As the unsolved problems or unanswered question get tougher and more obscure, the measurement problems have become more difficult. The use of statistics is more and more important and also more and more prone to error. A null result is always worth publishing but I don’t know if those papers make it to print anymore.",
"parent_id": "8133664",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133545",
"author": "pruttel",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T09:00:29",
"content": "Veritasium to the rescue:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC2eSujzrUY",
"parent_id": "8133422",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133546",
"author": "pruttelherrie",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T09:01:21",
"content": "Veritasium has an hour-long video about it.",
"parent_id": "8133422",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133436",
"author": "Lord Kimbote",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T00:11:20",
"content": "I usually don’t watch Derek Muller’s Veritasium (subscribed but dropped out… padded too much to my tastes among other reasons) but today of all days I finally knew what PFOAS are watching it.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC2eSujzrUY&t=2276s&pp=ygUUdmVyaXRhc2l1bSBjaGVtaWNhbHM%3D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133516",
"author": "Gérald",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T07:12:05",
"content": "“(…)the sealant achieved a 99.2% reduction in PFAS leaching from treated materials”:So it stills release 0.8%, which means it will keep release PFAS, just much more slowly, but at the end it will release them. So for infrastructures supposed to be used for decades, contained PFAS will more or less finally be fully released.Also, when infrastructures are modified, rebuilt or simply demolished, the sealant still containing PFAS will be simply dumped somewhere, fractionned in pieces with more exposed surface, so more releases.And since this sealant is made of chemicals with weaker bonds than carbon-fluorine ones, it certainly means that it will degrade more or less quickly, and will let PFAS leaking.No to mention wear and erosion of surface…So i really don’t see this as a solution, just a delay before PFAS being finally released…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133980",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T19:30:40",
"content": "It might keep leeching, or it might actually seal up well enough that after a decade or 4 leeching at very low rates though the small flaws the rest is just too well contained to ever get out. Either way its a solid short term win, and potentially quite a good long term solution as many of these highly contaminated places like military airfields are likely to remain military airfields for a very very very long time to come – maybe in 50 years time its a space capable drone swarm and controller rather than the next reincarnation of a B-52’s but that same runway resurfaced and retreated to keep the nasty stuff locked up inside a few times over those decades.",
"parent_id": "8133516",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,531.775639
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/29/3d-print-abs-without-a-screaming-hot-bed/
|
3D Print ABS Without A Screaming Hot Bed
|
Donald Papp
|
[
"3d Printer hacks"
] |
[
"3d printed",
"abs",
"PLA",
"raft",
"warping"
] |
ABS is a durable material that can be 3D printed, but requires a 100° C build surface. The print bed of [Pat]’s Bambu Lab A1 Mini is unable to get that hot, which means he can not print ABS…or can he? By fiddling a few settings,
he prints ABS no problem
with only a 60° C bed, thanks to a PLA interface layer.
Here’s what’s going on: first [Pat] prints a single layer of PLA, then does a filament swap for ABS (which the printer thinks is PETG with extrusion temperature bumped to 255° C and a tweaked flow rate) and lets the print finish. The end result is an ABS part with a single layer of PLA at the bottom, all printed on a 60° C bed. That PLA layer peels off easily, leaving a nice finish behind.
[Pat] is printing small parts in ABS for a custom skeletal mouse shell (pictured above) and his results are fantastic. We’re curious how this technique would fare with larger ABS objects, which tend to have more issues with warping and shrinkage. But it seems that at least for small parts, it’s a reliable and clever way to go.
We originally saw how [JanTec Engineering]
used this technique to get less warping with ABS
. As for why PLA is the way to go for the interface layer, we’ve learned that
PLA only really truly sticks to PLA
, making it a great interface or support for other filaments in general. (PETG on the other hand wants to stick to everything
but
PLA.)
| 15
| 7
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133300",
"author": "Digitalzombie",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T16:45:42",
"content": "My printbed never screamed at me.But it did gave me disappointed looks.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133305",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T17:02:22",
"content": "Hmm. You’re lucky. For me, it’s usually the other way around. My printbeds get disappointed looks fromme.AndIdo the screaming.(Current issues: One Creality “carbon” glass bed is worn out, and requires annoying regular application of glue stick, and cleaning of said residue. And another lower-temperature printer uses BuildTak on heated aluminum, which loves to delaminate if you try to remove a print while it’s still over 60 C. That one’s currently out of service until I can replace the BuildTak layer. I can’t complain too loudly — this is about 15 printer-years and several thousand prints on.)",
"parent_id": "8133300",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133351",
"author": "imqqmi",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T19:21:11",
"content": "I’ve had the same buildtak issues with my DIY 3D printer and I’ve decided to replace it with a magnetic base and spring steel sheets coated with PEI. Should arrive next week. Luckily the buildtak surface was easy to remove. Buildtak also gets bumpy at higher temperatures so it’s probably better to use something else if you want to use higher bed temperatures.There may be kits you can buy on Aliexpress for your printer, or adapt a larger one to your size.My 3D printer as a 6mm thick tooling plate as build plate and I’m using a 750W AC heater, it’s easy to get to well over 100 degrees.",
"parent_id": "8133305",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133358",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T19:31:44",
"content": "Yep, 0.25″ MIC6 here too. Tried magnetic base steel sheets with poor results, but that was 5+ years ago. I should look at them again.",
"parent_id": "8133351",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133459",
"author": "treesap",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T02:47:12",
"content": "This. Both the smooth and textured PEI plate varieties are great upgrades over glass and similar. It can still be worth using a glue stick with certain filaments on the smooth ones though, to serve as a sacrificial layer for certain filaments that sticktoogood. I have some LikeSilk ASA that sticks just insanely well. Most of my other filaments release relatively easily when cooled and/or flexed though. Oh yeah, that’s another worthwhile benefit of magnetic spring steel: You can bend them!",
"parent_id": "8133351",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133304",
"author": "Don't Print ABS like this",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T17:01:30",
"content": "That ABS won’t be durable when printed like this. It’s going to have absolutely awful layer adhesion. Amorphous polymers, like ABS, should be printed in a chamber near its glass transition temperature (around 80C in this case) to achieve the expected properties. This “hack” will only produce trash parts. Not to mention the health hazards of printing ABS without an enclosure. Enjoy the fumes…A high-durometer TPU, something like 75D shore hardness, would be well suited for this application with the added bonus of printing quite well on an unenclosed machine.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133742",
"author": "Dexter Meira",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T21:51:07",
"content": "60°C ambient do it great, anyway…",
"parent_id": "8133304",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133340",
"author": "Jade",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T18:33:05",
"content": "The cool part of PLA as an interface here is it means you can use those fancy new CryoGrip build plates to bring the bed down further to 30-50C.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133347",
"author": "Jade",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T18:51:54",
"content": "There are a few issues here though* Support interface instead of flat on the bed is worse for nice flat surfaces* ABS likes high chamber temperatures (50-70C, even up to 90C if you use the similar ASA)Still, this has inspired me to look into a MMU just to save electricity.",
"parent_id": "8133340",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133357",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T19:25:46",
"content": "So you made me figure it out…My biggest printer consumes about $0.30 of filament per hour on average.When it’s running cold (e.g., for PLA) it burns about 100 watts, $0.02 per hourWhen running hot (ASA, PC), after warmup it eats about 250 watts, $0.05 per hour.Other consumables and wear items take about as much as the filament, so total running cost for ASA or PC printing is about $0.65 per hour.Avoiding requiring heating would save me $0.03 per hour, less than 5% of my operating cost.Payback on a MMU bought expressly to save money on electricity would be, what, 5000 hours? Assuming you waste zero filament in purge.I mean, there are lots of other good reasons to do this, but I’d have a hard time buying the “save electricity” rationale.",
"parent_id": "8133347",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133437",
"author": "Pat Regan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T00:26:33",
"content": "The bottom layer of an ABS-on-PLA print like this comes out quite smooth. Not the glossy smooth of something like a glass build plate, but flat and smooth when you peel that single layer of PLA off.I’ve never had the luxury of printing ABS in a heated enclosure, but my first printer a decade ago couldn’t print PLA due to heat creep. There are a lot of models that you can successfully print just fine in ABS or ASA without an enclosure. Especially the smallish functional parts that might need some of ABS’s properties to survive. You get a feel for the sort of shapes that will be problematic.You should consider owning something like Bambu’s AMS. Multimaterial supports are a game changer in some situations!",
"parent_id": "8133347",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133350",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T19:11:35",
"content": "I used to print ABS all the time on a printer with a bed that could only go up to about 60° (or 70° on a good day). The key things were making sure there were no stray air currents. (Enclosing the printer… a big box will do in a pinch). And using ABS Juice. I used to keep little jars in which I would place pieces of supports and failed prints, add acetone and let it sit. The multiple jars were for different colors.Actual paint brushes didn’t survive that mixture well so I would cut little strips of cereal boxes or similar cardboard from the recycling bin. Then I would cut a bunch of parallel slits in one end to make little fingers. That was my brush to brush it on.This worked great until I got my first all-metal hotend and discovered PET-G was so much easier. I never really like PLA because it’s glass transition temperature is low enough one has to be careful where they leave printed items. (no hot cars or attics!)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133411",
"author": "Rick",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T22:20:15",
"content": "Or you can sell the A1 and buy a Qidi Xplus3 with a heated chamber and you can print almost everything (except peek and ultem obvs) for £419 now. And in a couple of months you can add the equivalent of the AMS. Ah and it’s bigger 😉 you can thank me later.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133561",
"author": "joe garmer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T10:29:47",
"content": "Quicker to just smear a layer of abs slurry on bed then print. ABS slurry is a mixture of abs plastic and acetone",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133575",
"author": "Rob Ward",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T11:02:21",
"content": "Genius!!!! Can’t wait to get some consistent decent ABS prints. I guess that is why my PLA sticks so well to my board that I have residue from an partially successful ABS print at about 85°C sneared on it!!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,531.662734
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/29/forced-e-waste-pcs-and-the-case-of-windows-11s-trusted-platform/
|
Forced E-Waste PCs And The Case Of Windows 11’s Trusted Platform
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] |
[
"TPM",
"Trusted Platform Module",
"Windows 11"
] |
Until the release of Windows 11, the upgrade proposition for Windows operating systems was rather straightforward: you considered whether the current version of Windows on your system still fulfilled your needs and if the answer was ‘no’, you’d buy an upgrade disc. Although system requirements slowly crept up over time, it was likely that your PC could still run the newest-and-greatest Windows version. Even Windows 7 had a graphical fallback mode, just in case your PC’s video card was a potato incapable of handling the GPU-accelerated Aero Glass UI.
This makes a lot of sense, as the most demanding software on a PC are the applications, not the OS. Yet with Windows 11 a new ‘hard’ requirement was added that would flip this on its head: the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is a security feature that has been around for many years, but never saw much use outside of certain business and government applications. In addition to this, Windows 11 only officially supports a limited number of CPUs, which risks turning many still very capable PCs into expensive paperweights.
Although the TPM and CPU requirements can be circumvented with some effort, this is not supported by Microsoft and raises the specter of a wave of capable PCs being trashed when Windows 10 reaches EOL starting this year.
Not That Kind Of Trusted
Although ‘Trusted Platform’ and ‘security’ may sound like a positive thing for users, the opposite is really the case. The idea behind
Trusted Computing
(TC) is about consistent, verified behavior enforced by the hardware (and software). This means a computer system that’s not unlike a modern gaming console with a locked-down bootloader, with the TPM providing a unique key and secure means to validate that the hardware and software in the entire boot chain is the same as it was the last time. Effectively it’s an anti-tamper system in this use case that will just as happily lock out an intruder as the purported owner.
XKCD’s
take on encrypting drives.
In the case of Windows 11, the TPM is used for this boot validation (Secure Boot), as well as storing the (
highly controversial
) Windows Hello’s biometric data and Bitlocker whole-disk encryption keys. Important to note here is that a TPM is not an essential feature for this kind of functionality, but rather a potentially more secure way to prevent tampering, while also making data recovery more complicated for the owner. This makes Trusted Computing effectively more a kind of Paranoid Computing, where the assumption is made that beyond the TPM you cannot trust anything about the hardware or software on the system until verified, with the user not being a part of the validation chain.
Theoretically, validating the boot process can help detect boot viruses, but this comes with a range of complications, not the least of which is that this would at most allow you to boot into Windows safe mode, if at all. You’d still need a virus scanner to detect and remove the infection, so using TPM-enforced Secure Boot does not help you here and can even complicate troubleshooting.
Outside of a corporate or government environment where highly sensitive data is handled, the benefits of a TPM are questionable, and there have been cases of Windows users who got locked out of their own data by Bitlocker
failing
to decrypt the drive,
for
whatever
reason
. Expect support calls from family members on Windows 11 to become trickier as a result, also because firmware TPM (fTPM) bugs can cause big system issues
like persistent stuttering
.
Breaking The Rules
As much as Microsoft keeps trying to ram^Wgently convince us consumers to follow its ‘hard’ requirements, there are always
ways to get around these
. After all, software is just software, and thus Windows 11 can be installed on unsupported CPUs without a TPM or even an ‘unsupported’ version 1.2 TPM. Similarly, the ‘online Microsoft account’ requirement can be dodged with a few skillful tweaks and commands. The real question here is whether it makes sense to jump through these hoops to install Windows 11 on that first generation AMD Ryzen or Intel Core 2 Duo system from a support perspective.
Fortunately, one does not have to worry about losing access to Microsoft customer support here, because we all know that us computer peasants do not get that included with our Windows Home or Pro license. The worry is more about Windows Updates, especially security updates and updates that may break the OS installation by using CPU instructions unsupported by the local hardware.
Although Microsoft published a list of Windows 11
CPU requirements
, it’s not immediately obvious what they are based on. Clearly it’s not about actual missing CPU instructions, or you wouldn’t even be able to install and run the OS. The only true hard limit in Windows 11 (for now) appears to be the UEFI BIOS requirement, but dodging the TPM 2.0 & CPU requirements is as easy as a quick dive into the Windows Registry by adding the
AllowUpgradesWithUnsupportedTPMOrCPU
key to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup\MoSetup
. You still need a TPM 1.2 module in this case.
When you use a tool like
Rufus
to write the Windows 11 installer to a USB stick you can even toggle a few boxes to automatically have all of this done for you. This even includes the option to
completely disable TPM
as well as the Secure Boot and 8 GB of RAM requirements. Congratulations, your 4 GB RAM, TPM-less Core 2 Duo system now runs Windows 11.
Risk Management
It remains to be seen whether Microsoft will truly enforce the TPM and CPU requirements in the future, that is requiring Secure Boot with Bitlocker. Over on the
Apple side of the fence
, the hardware has been performing system drive encryption along with other ‘security’ features since the appearance of the Apple T2 chip. It might be that Microsoft envisions a similar future for PCs, one in which even something as
sacrilegious as dual-booting
another OS becomes impossible.
Naturally, this raises the
spectre
of increasing hostility between users and their computer systems. Can you truly trust that Bitlocker won’t suddenly decide that it doesn’t want to unlock the boot drive any more? What if an fTPM issue bricks the system, or that a sneaky Windows 11 update a few months or years from now prevents a
10th generation Intel CPU
from running the OS without crashing due to missing instructions? Do you really trust Microsoft that far?
It does seem like there are only bad options if you want to stay in the Windows ecosystem.
Strategizing
Clearly, there are no good responses to what Microsoft is attempting here with its absolutely user-hostile actions that try to push a closed, ‘AI’-infused ecosystem on its victi^Wusers. As someone who uses Windows 10 on a daily basis, this came only after running Windows 7 for as long as application support remained in place, which was years after Windows 7 support officially ended.
Perhaps for Windows users, sticking to Windows 10 is the best strategy here, while pushing software and hardware developers to keep supporting it (and maybe Windows 7 again too…). Windows 11 came preinstalled on the system that I write this on, but I erased it with a Windows 10 installation and reused the same, BIOS embedded, license key. I also disabled fTPM in the BIOS to prevent ‘accidental upgrades’, as Microsoft was so fond of doing back with Windows 7 when everyone absolutely had to use Windows 10.
I can hear the ‘just use Linux/BSD/etc.’ crowd already clamoring in the comments, and will preface this by saying that although I use Linux and BSD on a nearly daily basis, I would not want to use it as my primary desktop system for too many reasons to go into here. I’m still holding out some hope for ReactOS hitting its stride Any Day Now™, but it’s tough to see a path forward beyond running Windows 10 into the ground, while holding only faint hope for Windows 12 becoming Microsoft’s gigantic Mea Culpa.
After having used PCs and Windows since the Windows 3.x days, I can say that the situation for personal computers today is unprecedented, not unlike that
for the World Wide Web
. It seems increasingly less like customer demand is appealed to by companies, and more an inverse where customers have become merely consumers: receptacles for the AI and marketing-induced slop of the day, whose purchases serve to make stock investors happy because Line Goes Up
©
.
| 145
| 45
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133237",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T14:08:56",
"content": "“What if an fTPM issue bricks the system, or that a sneaky Windows 11 update a few months or years from now prevents a 10th generation Intel CPU from running the OS without crashing due to missing instructions? Do you really trust Microsoft that far?”Don’t need Microsoft for that. Had a game I had to refund (EA game no less) because the DRM required a particular instruction from the CPU to work. That’s just the nature of progress.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133242",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T14:12:56",
"content": "I’m an old fart. My first computer experience was over a Teletype ASR-33 link to BBN in Cambridge, MA. An operating system is all I want. Not a content delivery platform run by a megacorp, just an OS and some basic apps to do what I want/need to do. Windowsusedto offer this basic functionality, but you can improve an OS only so much, before you end up changing things for change’s sake (this would have been when The Ribbon” was introduced). After all, you need to keep growing that revenue stream to keep those KPIs up.Well, Microsoft has long passed that point, now they’re not even being subtle about wanting to control your “computing experience” (in the guise, of course, of making your life easier). That’s it for me. Nice while it lasted, but I’ve long ago decided on using another OS (you can probably guess which one) that does what I want it to do without any interference from a megacorp who only wants to help (yeah, right, pull the other one).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133273",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T15:53:43",
"content": "But sheeple continue to support Windows and seem to just ‘conform’ to the M$ way of doing things and even advocate/support the changes. Actually ‘happy’ to run Windows… I am glad I am Windows free and support an OS that does what I want, a GUI that fits my use case, and runs the apps I need on the hardware platforms I prefer… Love it… Ie. Computing on my terms. All the ‘headaches’ mentioned in article just go away…",
"parent_id": "8133242",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133365",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T19:58:56",
"content": "Not just Windon’t either, the cult of Apple users is just as if not more conforming, though in Apple’s case the OS they offer actually seems like it would be good, and convenient as the user if you really buy into the ecosystem for all your hardware once you got used to it rather than Windoze ever growing obnoxiousness while still just being a PC OS.",
"parent_id": "8133273",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133416",
"author": "A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T22:40:43",
"content": "Sheeple don’t do it deliberatley, try going to a shop (or online) and buying a computer you can use almost straight out the box. Your preinstalled OS choices are extremley limited, and if your budget is too then guess what crap you end up with. Until they finally launch a proper anti-trust or monoploly lawsuit that forces manufactures not to bundle in MS crapware or at least always offer an alternative then Windows will sadly remain dominant.",
"parent_id": "8133273",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133429",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T23:42:50",
"content": "You are right. Hard to fault them. Walk into wally world or go to NewEgg online and … Windows installed on all presented laptops…. No problem here, as I just wipe and install Linux. Also, I build my own desktop/server machines… But for others …. Tough nut to crack for the general user.",
"parent_id": "8133416",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133809",
"author": "Luggs",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T03:17:27",
"content": "It’s only gotten easier to crack that nut over the past 30 years, and the users who continue to not only refuse to learn, but also refuse to ATTEMPT to learn continue to confound and astound. It should not be the case that the only way to get someone to do something that’s good for them is to either do it for them or hold a gun to their head. It is not unreasonable to expect people to take some personal responsibility and agency over something that impacts every single aspect of their lives.",
"parent_id": "8133429",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134192",
"author": "Laurens",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T15:59:36",
"content": "It doesn’t help that a ton of software simply does not work on linux.Some things do, but for video editing i still prefer adobe’s stuff (obviously pirated). I’ve used Kdenlive before, but it just ain’t it.Same goes for ham radio software. I tried a bunch of morse decoders and they never properly worked.Ubuntu made Linux usable for the most basic things that most people do – but anything beyond that, you’re stuck with Mac OS or Windows – or even worse, phone shit. The majority of young folks only ever edit video on their phone which is understandable but again, if you go any further than just cutting up some footage, you want to do it on a PC.",
"parent_id": "8133429",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134028",
"author": "Jim",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T21:37:08",
"content": "People who want to write emails and watch YouTube don’t want to spend two hundred hours making their OS usable. Linux fails to be a compelling option because every distro is for “computing on your own terms” i.e. wasting a bunch of time tweaking the system. That’s not a bad thing, it’s what makes Linux good, but it’s ridiculous to ask somebody who mainly interfaces with a smartphone to learn how to use Linux. Even as a partial Linux user I don’t want to consult the council of elders every time I install a new program, I just want it to work (oh well if you set Wine up this very specific way it will work most of the time with only minor performance issues….). Or I could use a half-finished Linux alternative with a CLI and a novella-length manual.IMO the onus is on people in the know to inform and protect normal people, a la the movements against internet censorship in the 2010s. Seething about “sheeple” is literally loser behaviour, as Microsoft’s continued dominance proves.",
"parent_id": "8133273",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134301",
"author": "JP",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T05:44:04",
"content": "People who want to write emails and watch YouTube don’t want to spend two hundred hours making their OS usable.There are several distributions which work out of the box for exactly that, such as Ubuntu or Linux Mint.",
"parent_id": "8134028",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135901",
"author": "Toric",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T07:07:08",
"content": "Most users are not capable of formatting windows and installing Ubuntu (or any other os for that matter). They do not want to or cannot do more than pressing the on/off button. For them to use Ubuntu it needs to come bundled up with the machine that they are purchasing and that there is a significant financial incentive. In EU, they put up a charade of choice but there was no financial incentive (or very insignificant) which understandably was not enough to convince average Joe that they don’t have to pay for MS crap.",
"parent_id": "8134301",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133336",
"author": "linuxuser",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T18:31:43",
"content": "Remember when the slogan was “Where do you want to go today?”Well, now it’s “We’re taking you here today”.",
"parent_id": "8133242",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133394",
"author": "DOugl",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T21:10:16",
"content": "OMG, Microsoft deviated from being an OS vendor when they shipped Windows 95 and blocked all ISVs and hardware vendors from putting anything in front of users on first boot. That’s when they started embedding whatever they wanted you to have onto their OS. They were more focused on protecting their position all progress was stalled while they controlled the market.",
"parent_id": "8133242",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133245",
"author": "ItsThatIdiotAgain",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T14:26:12",
"content": "Lots of lovely capable machines that can’t run ‘doze will show up on ebay for not much money. Guess what OS theyWILLrun.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133246",
"author": "Chris",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T14:29:09",
"content": "Microsoft may have finally ushered in the Year of the Linux Desktop.",
"parent_id": "8133245",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133274",
"author": "stappers",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T15:59:09",
"content": "https://endof10.org/",
"parent_id": "8133246",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133331",
"author": "RetepV",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T18:22:57",
"content": "Nice initiative!But….https://endof10.org/install/With those instructions, no boomer will be able to install Linux.It already goes wrong at step 1: “Download the operating system you want to install.”.How the hll should someone who never used Linux *knowwhich operating system they want to install???I understand the problem: Linux distributions are competing with each other, and nobody wants the other to be promoted because that means that they themselves will loose out on installed user-base.But really, if a boomer has to choose between “Buy a new computer with Windows 11 preinstalled” or “Download the operating system you want to install”, which do you think would be the easier and more-chance-of-succes option for them?Not even mentioning how they are supposed to save their old data and migrate it to the new OS. When they buy a new computer, they can copy everything over. When they want to install Linux on their old machine, they will first have to make a backup, then say a prayer that they did not forget anything, wipe everything, install the operating system, and copy their data back. But where should they copy that data? Lots of it cannot even be used on their new Linux OS because the corresponding software was never ported to Linux.If Linux wants to use this opportunity to go to war with Microsoft, they first have to understand what made Microsoft so popular in the first place. It is: “give the user minimal choices and just work out of the box for everyone, lead the user by the hand in every step.”.Linux users seem to think that more choice is always a better thing. But it’s not. Choosing is a chore, it makes people’s heads hurt. People want to avoid making choices. So, IF choices are necessary, only introduce them WHEN they are necessary, and do it piece-meal, maybe even gamify the whole experience.Apple understands that even better than Microsoft. But you know who knows it best? Nintendo!",
"parent_id": "8133274",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133353",
"author": "ford",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T19:23:39",
"content": "Don’t get me started on font rendering in Linux distros. It’s either:find an old CRT and raster fonts (preferred option for working with text – like terminal and coding)usefreetypein “libre” mode where everything is blurry, bold and kerning is horribly brokendownload source code offreetype(and some other libs), build them withpatent-infringingcode enabled, install them in your OS, try fixing everything that broke during installation, reinstall OS from scratch because it got broken so bad, it’s not worth spending another 50+ hours trying to fix it.After you waste quite a bit of your free time fighting with broken font rendering, tweaking and optimizing what’s available, you realize that plenty of apps simply ignore the so-called “system-wide” settings (🤡) because muh freedum.Nothing comes anywhere close to ClearType. Segoe UI and Consolas are the best things ever to happen for people who actually use their computers to get the job done instead of just whanking over to systemd logs for 8 hours straight.",
"parent_id": "8133331",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133354",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T19:24:04",
"content": "Anyone capable of using a PC can Google for advice. Mine is Linux Mint. I will admit that it helps to have an unused PC on which to do a test install. Failing that, there’s always the “swap Windows HDD for a blank one” approach. Install and test on the new HDD and if you find you prefer Windows, swap the original disk back in. This exercise will cost you a couple of hours and around $50.If you’re smart enough to install Windows, you’ll figure out Linux pretty quickly, or find a friend who can.",
"parent_id": "8133331",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133397",
"author": "Jonathan Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T21:19:47",
"content": "I thought the TTF patents have expired and FreeType just did all the good font rendering by default now.",
"parent_id": "8133331",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133627",
"author": "elmesito",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T14:00:54",
"content": "Re:Antron Argaiv“Anyone capable of using a PC can Google for advice.”That is not quite as straight forward as is sounds.My experience doing that is that none of the solutions you find work, but a careful blend of three or four solutions might.There is a lack of consistency due to the simply too many distributions and versions of Linux.",
"parent_id": "8133331",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134183",
"author": "Davicious",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T15:37:30",
"content": "A lot of people have died while waiting to see that year coming.Sadly -or perhaps not-, that’s a completely true fact.",
"parent_id": "8133246",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134675",
"author": "Bob",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T07:50:26",
"content": "Reasons why my folks will be getting win10 embedded which is still supported well into their mid 80s, to save them from having to learn a new OS in their twilight years.Their preference is to either be dead or having dementia before they need to learn something new.",
"parent_id": "8134183",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133291",
"author": "jenningsthecat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T16:19:25",
"content": "Lots of lovely capable machines that can’t run ‘doze will show up on ebay for not much money. Guess what OS they WILL run.You mean that next year may finally be The Year of Linux on the Desktop? 8-)",
"parent_id": "8133245",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133413",
"author": "Some one",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T22:27:00",
"content": "I will drink to that",
"parent_id": "8133291",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133420",
"author": "David H",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T23:16:09",
"content": "…and the Laptop, and the All-in-One, and the NUC, and… 🙂",
"parent_id": "8133291",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133248",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T14:36:36",
"content": "Why not go into your reasoning for your primary desktop? I switched permanently to linux, when a brother gave me an (almost) new PC, and it had windoze with some blue screen with lots of tiles and I could not even find a start menu, so I gave up after 5 minutes and installed Linux Mint (Which is a good choice for beginners).Linux as an OS is just fine, but because it’s still quite niche on the desktop, lots of program manufacturers don’t bother to port their software to linux, which further hampers linux adoption and closes the circle. Some windows programs run under wine, and you can also use Linux as a base to run VM’s.On EEVblog, there are some current threads of getting KiCad V8 and V9 to install on windows 7. And I guess most people who do that use the same PC to browse the internet. Just Yuck!And concerning TPM. Why dodge or circumvent? TPM modules have standardized connectors. In (I assume) a lot of cases you can just buy a TPM module (prices starting at EUR15) and stick it into your PC.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133284",
"author": "arifyn",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T16:13:09",
"content": "re: reasons to circumvent TPM requirementIf your motherboard has a TPM header but was released before the TPM 2.0 standard, you can’t just plug a TPM 2.0 module in and expect it to work – you also need a BIOS update that supports TPM 2.0. Not all manufacturers bothered to create one.and of course there are plenty of older notebook / tablet motherboards that don’t have a method to add a TPM or upgrade beyond TPM 1.2.",
"parent_id": "8133248",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133288",
"author": "eMpTy-10",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T16:18:02",
"content": "“And concerning TPM. Why dodge or circumvent? TPM modules have standardized connectors. In (I assume) a lot of cases you can just buy a TPM module (prices starting at EUR15) and stick it into your PC.”The problem is that the motherboard needs to have a TPM header (https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/tpm-trusted-platform-module-header,5766.html). My old Gigabyte Z270N-Gaming 5 (https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-Z270N-Gaming-5-rev-10) did not, so it and the 7700k that were in it were effectively useless for W11 (W11 support officially starts with 8th gen Intel) even though hardware-wise they were still more than capable.I upgraded from that with a 1080 to a 13900k with a 3080.",
"parent_id": "8133248",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133314",
"author": "yyy",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T17:31:42",
"content": "7700k has built in TPM, it is a CPU issue alone",
"parent_id": "8133288",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133251",
"author": "Nik",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T14:44:44",
"content": "I have had a thought since I first read about circumventing the TPM and CPU limitations. Because you risk a Microsoft update reversing these registry entries. Would this mena users might have to utilize 3rd party update hosts, or even create local WSUS servers that their PCs would connect to get filtered updates? While this is beyond the average PC user, this is a solution that a mild knowledgeable IT pro could setup for users.I’m not specifically advocating to have users connect to random or unvetted servers just to keep Win11 on older officials unsupported hardware. This is just a means I could see things going.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133367",
"author": "SETH",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T19:59:45",
"content": "I would suggest ignoring any Windows 10/11 tricks that require registry edits which you do not understand. There is a potential the tutorial is suggesting something which might compromise your system.Theres also the big issue you mention, will future W11 updates break registry edited installations?",
"parent_id": "8133251",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133515",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T07:07:06",
"content": "Pay better attention please. There registry edits necessary are simple and well understood. The problem is that they may be reverted or invalidated at any time by a forced high priority update. Such an update could automatically rename bitlocker and depending on uefi support could even re-enable that automatically. Updates can even migrate your account to a Microsoft one of you have ever used Microsoft credentials in pinned of the built in applications.TLDR; we are back to sharecropping, only even the end users can be ejected at any time.",
"parent_id": "8133367",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133252",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T14:44:56",
"content": "It’s also about companies/schools/etc making sure that their computers haven’t been tampered with by (potentially) untrustworthy employees – which is good for consumers, and (potentially) helps prevent those massive ransomware scenarios like we’ve seen with a few UK retailers recently.It’s also I think protecting users against their computers being tampered with whilst out of their sight, by malicious devices, or malware attempting a deep permanent infection?So this is a two-edged sword to a degree, not just a negative?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133418",
"author": "PPJ",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T23:07:07",
"content": "I guess this would be a nice feature if you could choose wether you want it or not. At least for some people.",
"parent_id": "8133252",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133517",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T07:13:32",
"content": "No it’s not, it really isn’t. TPM isn’t necessary for that, all you need is a secure enclave. Instead they have a Microsoft managed security gateway intended to be managed through your online Microsoft account or an enterprise domain, ideally managed through Azure. An actual attempt at improving security would give you control of the keys.",
"parent_id": "8133252",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133267",
"author": "ziew",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T15:39:35",
"content": "Important to note here is that a TPM is not an essential feature for this kind of functionality, but rather a potentially more secure way to prevent tampering, while also making data recovery more complicated for the owner.I’m no Windows expert and I don’t really understand which scenarios the whole-disk encryption with a key stored in TPM is trying to address, but couldn’t you just store the Bitlocker recovery key somewhere safe?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133269",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T15:47:23",
"content": "Yep. In a notebook or sticky note on your desk.",
"parent_id": "8133267",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133290",
"author": "David H",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T16:18:55",
"content": "You’re clearly not a security professional. “On your desk”? Pfft! Laughable lack of security!As atrueprofessional I keep mine under my keyboard, where no-one will think to look. I even encrypted it twice with the ROT13 algorithm just to make sure :)",
"parent_id": "8133269",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133321",
"author": "Cody",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T17:47:01",
"content": "You might forget that you hid it there. Betterstick it on the edge of your monitor to be safe.",
"parent_id": "8133290",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133480",
"author": "NFM",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T04:44:13",
"content": "No, you need layers of security.I maintain an extra degree of seperation by putting a note on my monitor to remind me that the password is under my keyboard.",
"parent_id": "8133321",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133345",
"author": "Garth Bock",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T18:50:50",
"content": "Or use “1 2 3 4 5….1 2 3 4 5 ? … That’s amazing… I’ve got the same combination on my luggage” – President Screw (Spaceballs the Movie)",
"parent_id": "8133290",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133339",
"author": "fonz",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T18:32:55",
"content": "it is in many ways much safer than on anything connected to the internet",
"parent_id": "8133269",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133795",
"author": "Miroslav",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T02:33:17",
"content": "Exactly. Plus if you just write one part of the pass, enough to remind you of the rest. Much more secure than any electronic storage.",
"parent_id": "8133339",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133276",
"author": "Sam",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T16:05:15",
"content": "You absolutely can. The trouble is very few end users understand the requirement. And even for the ones who do it’s easy to forget where they decided “somewhere safe” was 3 years ago.",
"parent_id": "8133267",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133268",
"author": "cheetah2003",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T15:45:15",
"content": "“Windows 11 is the best thing to ever happen to Linux!” –Some YouTube commenter.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133449",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T01:29:23",
"content": "Lol in their dreams. I’m sure it’ll tip over and reach beyond 5% market share for consumer desktops eventually… A little more abuse from Microsoft should finally break through people’s Stockholm syndrome, any day now",
"parent_id": "8133268",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133482",
"author": "Antti",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T05:11:26",
"content": "When it becomes impossible to move the taskbar to the top of the screen in windows, I´ll migrate to another OS. Q4OS is ranking high.",
"parent_id": "8133449",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133730",
"author": "The Solutor",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T21:00:07",
"content": "I posted exactly that just few days ago.TDE (kde 3.x) is the best desktop environment available, and Q4OS and its slightly customized TDE is superb.Light, fast, easy to use even for a person used to Windows, but that doesn’t come at the expense of a power user, like on bloatbuntu and derivatives like Mint.",
"parent_id": "8133482",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133270",
"author": "Briar",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T15:47:40",
"content": "I find it absolutely hilarious that they’ll require users to toss good hardware, but put a license for win 11 on a barely functional 4 gb ram asus laptop out of the box. I put arch on that thing as soon as I could and it ran a million times smoother. I only hope I can convert my friends and family to the dark side (linux) before october.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133451",
"author": "Victor Escobar",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T02:05:18",
"content": "Shit rolls downhill. Hardware vendors are leaving on Microsoft to assist them in selling new PC’s.",
"parent_id": "8133270",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133271",
"author": "SETH",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T15:47:53",
"content": "Sadly I updated a PC to newest Ubuntu. Only to find out that the Linux Kernel version had dropped support for the Nvidia driver for ky GPU. I had to go right back in reinstall Windows 10. I will be getting a refurb with Win 11 before Oct. This whole notion of security belies some dishonesty, Microsoft and Nvidia have always played a part in subsidising and controlling PC, OS and hardware prices.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133289",
"author": "Trinity",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T16:18:51",
"content": "There are plenty of Linux distros that support Nvidia drivers now.For beginners I suggest Universal Blue’s Aurora (or Bazzite if you are gaming).It supports secure boot, it has military grade security, and just works out of the box.Unless you have specific proprietary software you need to use, Aurora will work really well.",
"parent_id": "8133271",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133371",
"author": "SETH",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T20:05:14",
"content": "My GT1030 (old yes, good price and is better speced than most Integrated Graphics) uses an older and therefore unsupported driver due the Linux kernel version 6 no longer being compatible. I used the open source neauveau drivers, which had atrocious performance. The solution is for me to install a Linux OS with a 5.0 kernel, where the driver support still exists. Long story short, for gamers this great migration to W11 and bricking of old computers is an expensive inconvenience. It reeks of the market pushing out affordable options, it is a dishonest monopoly.",
"parent_id": "8133289",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133410",
"author": "Nameisme",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T22:18:25",
"content": "Just use the Nvidia drivers. I have a server running Debian with a GTX 1080 in it. Runs just fine.",
"parent_id": "8133371",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133632",
"author": "dean",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T14:32:02",
"content": "Nvidia page says that GT1030 uses Pascal architecture, which should be supported by the latest Nvidia driver (G06).",
"parent_id": "8133371",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133277",
"author": "wm",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T16:05:32",
"content": "The tpm and CPU family requirement is super trivial to bypass, especially for people like us (literally just checkboxes when building a USB install disk via Rufus).However, I do understand that only a tiny fraction of people doing a win11 install are going to know how do this, and a bunch of machines will not get win11 that otherwise could run it just fine. I think the idea of people throwing them away might be a little overstated; most likely they’ll click through any warnings Microsoft puts out. Win10 is still the most used version of windows, and I think the driving factor is/will be hardware attrition.I think the more interesting story will be what people do when their current w10 machine goes down – with win12 being rumored to be subscription / ad based we may finally see people taking the plunge and moving to a libre OS. Most people are almost exclusively using web apps these days, so software support is less important than many people believe.The year of Linux is always next year lol",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133295",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T16:30:36",
"content": "“Most people are almost exclusively using web apps these days, so software support is less important than many people believe.” I moved my dad to KUbuntu a few years ago now. Doesn’t use ‘web apps’ but does use the Chrome browser (can’t get ’em to change to Firefox) on the box. When on the computer, most time spent in the ‘browser’. (So agree with you in that sense). Occasionally he’ll play some card games locally, and use LibreOffice. He loves it. And for me, my maintenance of his boxes has went to virtually zero since the change-over. So I love it too.",
"parent_id": "8133277",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8137604",
"author": "Win11 installer",
"timestamp": "2025-06-10T21:08:39",
"content": "Is true, I do it all the time, but it’s sketchy to maintain.This is super dependent on microsoft not getting twitchy and implementing",
"parent_id": "8133277",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133278",
"author": "Robert",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T16:05:36",
"content": "“I would not want to use it as my primary desktop system for too many reasons to go into here”There is only one reason not to use Linux, and that is if some piece of software you need (a particular CAD package or something like that) is Windows only and cannot be made to run well under Wine. Even then, a Windows VM running on a Linux host system (and as long as the Windows-only software in question isn’t massively resource hungry this can work even on a laptop from the Intel 3rd Gen era) is a usually reliable answer. Very happy on the second latest Linux Mint version on a circa-2012 laptop. Please do write an article about exactly why you can’t make Linux your primary, especially as you mention you are already familiar with Linux, listing each issue separately, and in no time you’ll find a comments section full of people telling you how to set up a fresh Linux install so as to solve each and every issue which is thus far keeping you away from going fully Linux.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133483",
"author": "Antti",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T05:14:56",
"content": "Linux is not user friendly, its clunky, bass ackward in many aspects, the smaller distros dont work properly and you cant fix it unless you start typing commands. I certainly lose patience quickly when something cant be fixed using a gui and installers.",
"parent_id": "8133278",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133503",
"author": "Moon",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T06:43:28",
"content": "Every OS will feel clunky and weird when you migrate to it from another (ask the OSX people trying Windows or Linux).On the point of not being able to fix things the gui way:Try Linux Mint.There is a reason why Arch and derivatives don’t get recommended to new users. So don’t ignore the help from others, think you’re better “since you install Windows Pro and not Home” and then complain.",
"parent_id": "8133483",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133518",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T07:24:15",
"content": "Says someone who doesn’t realise Windows is just as clunky because they’ve gotten used to it. The truth is that modern Linux distros arenotharder or more awkward to use than Windows on average, but there are differences. Different things are difficult, different things are super easy.If hardware is supported you often don’t need to worry about drivers or support software at all. Meanwhile Nvidia can be either easy to deal with or a huge pain depending on what you need.You don’t have to worry about automatic updates being forced on you, plenty of games work, most productivity workflows can be done. Depending on what you do it can be simpler than using a Mac and more flexible.",
"parent_id": "8133483",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133659",
"author": "Enki",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T16:27:05",
"content": "“its clunky, bass ackward in many aspects, the smaller distros dont work properly and you cant fix it unless you start typing commands.”Because the registry is so much more intuitive, right?",
"parent_id": "8133483",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133613",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T13:00:04",
"content": "I got a refurb laptop for a song specifically to break the chain and start migrating to Linux Mint. Other than some small annoyances (trackpad isn’t very great, the Open Office suite is good but not perfect for me…) the show-stopper was exactly as you mentioned: Inability to run some ham radio specific software that is Windows Only. After a few days of figuring out Wine it seems I cannot (it cannot?) access or control USB devices or something. I’m sure a power user could figure it out and I’m certainly no power user, and no amount of google could answer the question. Instead of dedicating another year to being a programmer (itself a worthwhile goal) or being super annoying and making a knowledgeable friend do it for me, which I wouldn’t understand anyway and that’s not learning.. I just wanted it to work already and was kinda over it..For my time, and my time is worth $$$, sadly the best “answer” was to buy another $200 refurb laptop with Windows and just run the darn software already. Opportunity cost blah blah",
"parent_id": "8133278",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133279",
"author": "Raf Cell",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T16:06:23",
"content": "What I find amusing is the reversal of how difficult to install each OS has become: Linux is now a breeze, fast and simple; Windows 11, good luck… For my personal use, I switched to Linux since Windows 10 shenanigans started, never went back. I found every application for it that I use daily, One exception is my soon to be retired Logitec Harmony remote which I use a Windows 10 VM when I need to make changes. Hell, even Bambu has a Linux version for their 3D printers which they keep updated. So yeah, Microsoft is helping users switch away from their platform because of their wish to more control more.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133352",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T19:22:02",
"content": "Depending on the distro and the device. I remember more than 25 years ago being able to install a desktop oriented distro on my desktop by doing little more than booting the CD and mostly just clicking next to the default options.As far as I was concerned Linux had been as easy as Windows to install since Mandrake and easier than windows sinceshudderCaldera.But when I tried to argue with others that it was easy… I found out that they all had laptops with cheap proprietary accessories built in that probably never had any documentation for driver authors outside of whatever was shared in the China-shop where they originated.",
"parent_id": "8133279",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133423",
"author": "David H",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T23:22:19",
"content": "“But when I tried to argue with others that it was easy… I found out that they all had laptops with cheap proprietary accessories built in that probably never had any documentation for driver authors outside of whatever was shared in the China-shop where they originated.”To be fair, though, it’s not as if Windows generally has drivers for such corner-case hardware, out-of-the-box. All that’s happened is that the OEM has gone to the trouble of rounding up Windows drivers for the hardware when building their master image.So it’s noteasierper se with Windows (actually, it’s harder in my experience… the hours I’ve had to spend delving around sketchy driver sites when rebuilding PCs) it’s just that the complexity and poor native driver support of Windows has been hidden from the end-user.Just try upgrading an EoL HP tablet from Windows 8 to 10 where HP and Intel have dropped the old drivers off their websites, and you’ll see what I mean! (shudder)",
"parent_id": "8133352",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133485",
"author": "Antti",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T05:17:20",
"content": "As one having recently installed a fresh windows 11, no problems at all. Gaming is what sustains the private user base of windows. Good luck getting any modern game to run on a linux with a simple installer.",
"parent_id": "8133279",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133509",
"author": "Moon",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T06:55:24",
"content": "That’s been being solved since nine generations of Proton now.Proton 9 (soon to be 10) has become a situation of it just works and the obvious culprits of “I don’t like switching a lever to make non-proprietary solutions work”.",
"parent_id": "8133485",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133510",
"author": "Julio",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T06:55:39",
"content": "I think that Valve’s Steam Deck is going to (slowly) change that",
"parent_id": "8133485",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133520",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T07:34:07",
"content": "It already did. The majority of games that don’t work use anti-cheat that is designed to prevent sandboxes. Even in those cases there are usually native Linux versions but the developer simply isn’t providing that.An interesting example is thatallUnity games would work natively under Linux if you swap out the correct version of the runtime with the Linux one, but there are Unity plugins (mostly anti-cheat or UI) that are arbitrarily Windows only, forcing you to run the entire thing in Proton/Wine. Luckily that’s simple. The same can be dated for Unreal by the way, but you can’t just swap out the runtime to test it.",
"parent_id": "8133510",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133663",
"author": "Enki",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T16:30:01",
"content": "I’ve literally had zero problems running new games on Linux with Steam’s Proton. I don’t even have to configure anything, it just works. Update your talking points beyond the year 2000.",
"parent_id": "8133485",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133282",
"author": "Marcus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T16:11:20",
"content": "I don’t think a corporation with assets larger then the GDP of most nations needs standing up for as a retail computer repair technician, I can tell you I see both sides of the coin so speak here.Yes, Bitlocker shouldn’t be on by default for 95% of customers. Yes for say Lenovo or Dell’s more business centric line maybe, but gaming notebooks and units for grandma not so much. It just makes repair and data recovery that much harder and annoying.On the other hand, if you have a computer that doesn’t meet the security requirements due to either CPU or TPM missing, your computer is at least 7+ years old. And you should really replace it. Due to manufacturing tolerances, they are ticking time bombs just waiting to fail. The cpu requirement is just making you do something you should already be doing. If the relative cost of computers were what they were 30 years ago, there might be sympathy there, but that is not the case.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133334",
"author": "Cusram",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T18:28:48",
"content": "Clueless shill much?",
"parent_id": "8133282",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133381",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T20:25:13",
"content": "Moore’s law is dead, so why upgrade? Computers from 2018 are not “waiting to fail”. If a component fails, you replace the component; this can happen at any time. My laptop is from 2009 and still works fine.Do not shill for planned obsolescence here.",
"parent_id": "8133282",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133388",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T20:38:14",
"content": "Replace component and laptop are not jiving for me, and I use hot air to solder surface packages. Successfully swapping a 1,000 BGA CPU/GPU or a RAM package is a bit harder.I highly doubt you are talking a socketed CPU laptop with a removable GPU card (of which I also have several). But they are great, one I picked up cheaply because the GPU is short circuited. Being replaceable it was simple to repair.",
"parent_id": "8133381",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133382",
"author": "Thinkerer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T20:26:31",
"content": "” Due to manufacturing tolerances, they are ticking time bombs just waiting to fail.” This.Here’s the problem – a “PC” is mostly a tool for me, and not an end in itself; it allows writing, calculations/computations of various sorts , illustrating etc. Replacing the physical device will take far less time than replicating the operating environment that is now so productive for me. If I could simply lift my years-old Windows 10 desktop/file system/”user experience” out in toto, and install it into a new box without further annoyance it would be a no-brainer. Unfortunately even with lots of upgrade ease that doesn’t happen for a lot of reasons (remember when your document scanner software was intentionally not operable in Windows 10?).On a planet dominated by the Windows architecture I can’t imagine that I’m alone in this , and enough people are savvy enough to recognize the Windows 11 sleight of hand as a cack-handed corporate “me-too” approach to force people into something closer to Google and Apple’s information-snaffling consumer-surveillance systems.TL;DR Make it painless, useful, and private and people are happy to buy new boxes every so often.",
"parent_id": "8133282",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134308",
"author": "Mordae",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T06:14:37",
"content": "This is how Linux HW upgrade works. You just copy smaller drive to larger verbatim and you are good. Maybe expand the partition, filesystem later on. I still don’t upgrade my HW for years.",
"parent_id": "8133382",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133486",
"author": "Antti",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T05:21:58",
"content": "my desktop is from 2012, works just fine with win 10. Can do anything i want with it, except play the newer games, which i do on my new rig. Absolutely no reason to stop using my old rig.",
"parent_id": "8133282",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133896",
"author": "eMpTy-10",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T10:39:12",
"content": "Please tell me again how my old 7700k was a “ticking time bomb” when it did everything I needed and much more flawlessly since the day I bought it?",
"parent_id": "8133282",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133297",
"author": "Ellice Sanchez",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T16:38:11",
"content": "I will use windows 10 as long as I can. I dislike 11. I don’t want AI. I don’t want the extra clicks on windows 11 start menu. I don’t want the start menu search only showing web results and never finding local programs. I don’t want the Adobe and one drive cloud to be broken on the device.10 works superior to 11. I like what it has and does not have.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133487",
"author": "Antti",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T05:23:55",
"content": "What really pissed me off with win11 is locking the taskbar to the bottom of the screen. A major no no for me. There are work arounds but MS sure try to make life hard for those of us wanting the taskbar somewhere else than edicted.",
"parent_id": "8133297",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133303",
"author": "defdefred",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T16:54:44",
"content": "Not e-waste… just plain good PC for Linux!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133320",
"author": "Brian",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T17:41:43",
"content": "I’m really surprised that the EU hasn’t stuck it’s nose into this issue of e-waste caused by Microsoft Windows. I forsee a giant lawsuit being filed.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134197",
"author": "Davicious",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T16:43:00",
"content": "So Evil Bureaucrats vs. Evil Plutocrats.I don’t know which is worse.",
"parent_id": "8133320",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134258",
"author": "rufus",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T00:35:22",
"content": "you",
"parent_id": "8134197",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133323",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T17:52:03",
"content": "I would not want to use it as my primary desktop system for too many reasons to go into here.Skill issue.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133325",
"author": "fuzzyfuzzyfungus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T17:58:50",
"content": "What I have not been able to find documented anywhere; but which seems fairly critical given the ‘trusted’ role of the TPM in various remote attestation scenarios(eg. verifying that there is an actual TPM involved when a ‘Hello’ credential is being created; and, if my memory of ‘autopilot’ machine IDs is correct in the process of an AAD join) is, very precisely, which TPMs MS is willing to cooperate with.Hacking a TPM into a motherboard whose firmware never supported it is unlikely to exactly be a weekend project; but a TPM is fundamentally a combination of ‘fairly modest microcontroller(albeit usually built with more tamper resistance features than others of similar performance and cost) programmed for industry standard behavior’ and “vendor-loaded cryptographic key that is not supposed to be extractable”.I’m not sure if anyone has been interested enough to knock together a TPM implementation for a microcontroller to slap on the LPC or appropriate bus; but basically all hypervisors have virtual TPMs available for OSes that expect them. However, those vTPMs get keys that are backed by the cert you configure; so their endorsement keys won’t chain to anything externally trusted.Microsoft provides a package of common industry TPM certificate roots for the convenience of HGS/guarded fabric administrators; but I have not seen anything in the documentation about whether they will only trust interactions with endorsement keys that chain to vendor roots they view as ‘legitimate’ or if they will accept anything that behaves to spec. (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/security/guarded-fabric-shielded-vm/guarded-fabric-install-trusted-tpm-root-certificates) for reference.It’s the cryptographic side where TPMs really get dodgy; much as with many contemporary uses of signing to lock hardware down. Using cryptographic signatures to verify your software is a pretty sensible security measure. A system that accepts only cryptographic signatures that specific, not owner controllable, keyholders can generate is a totally different matter in terms of its implications.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133521",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T07:44:34",
"content": "Supposedly they will accept side loaded credentials in both secure boot and tpm…. But they are definitely moving in the direction of making that harder to actually do, and that’s where I demark that line of trust. They don’t get to dictate what is trusted on an end user machine. What’s especially risky about their gambit is the tie-in with Microsoft accounts, which allows for a remote drive decryption based on their keys, regardless of yours.Honestly it’s surprising the EU and US military haven’t weighed in on this yet, it violates far too many security concepts.",
"parent_id": "8133325",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133337",
"author": "A Texan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T18:32:50",
"content": "I recently had to override a password on a Windows 7 PC at work. I forgot how much I liked it and XP and without all the asinine news feed garbage that’s hard to remove. This is why I like Linux Mint.However, it’s a shame vendors like Intuit for taxes, Quikbooks, and such won’t make Linux versions of their software. Neither will lab instrumentation vendors like Agilent, Shimadzu, or Thermo Fisher and such will have Linux versions.What a shame!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133355",
"author": "ColyGuy",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T19:24:45",
"content": "Keysight does have a Linux version of their IO Libraries Suite now:https://www.keysight.com/us/en/lib/software-detail/computer-software/io-libraries-suite-downloads-2175637.html",
"parent_id": "8133337",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133522",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T07:47:05",
"content": "It is more limited though, and for no clear reason. It’s possible this support may not be necessary though, I’m not sure what’s available in the kernel.",
"parent_id": "8133355",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133356",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T19:25:26",
"content": "I used to think this was a terrible thing. Well. I still do. But.. maybe I’m a little less sure.Look at how power consumption has gone down on new hardware. Maybe… Just maybe the environmental hit from throwing all those PCs in the e-waste bin might be less than the hit from continuing to use them. Perhaps as power consumption milestones are hit one-time obsoletion of old hardware could be a good thing. Or not.. it’s just a thought.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133466",
"author": "Jimmy",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T03:29:05",
"content": "Except the users are being moved onto ‘AI’ software which, because of the compute required, increases the remote power consumption more than efficient hardware reduces local power consumption.",
"parent_id": "8133356",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133523",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T07:49:55",
"content": "It’s not a good thing, and no, it doesn’t at all make up for the loss of rare earths and precious metals.Frankly, stop yourself for a moment and consider why you started defending this practice really.",
"parent_id": "8133356",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133775",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T01:18:54",
"content": "If it was people using AM3 I might almost believe it. But even 4th gen Intel and 2nd gen Ryzen are OK ish power wise (depending what you are doing). 12th gen and newer Intel and 5000 series Ryzen are another level of power efficiency. I have a 12500t and 4060 low profile running off a 240w laptop power brick.2 years ago when I put it together it cost ~$600 with 32gb of RAM and a 1TB NVMe. (Including a boutique 2L Aluminum case to put it in).These days you could beat that with a Ryzen 8400F or Intel 14100-13400, and possibly the new 50xx series low profile GPU?",
"parent_id": "8133356",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133359",
"author": "tinfish",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T19:36:05",
"content": "Just wanted to drop by and say that Joe Kim’s art for this one got a chuckle out of me.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133362",
"author": "Joe Freeman",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T19:49:16",
"content": "I’m a fan of encrypted disks with remote recovery keys (Bitlocker). Not really sure why people are opposed to more secure systems.Microsoft made it possible to bypass the TPM requirement. The discussion about being able to ignore the TPM requirement is straightforward because Microsoft lets it be simple.IMO the only two argument against the TPM is the resulting e-waste and the original DRM complaints.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133376",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T20:14:17",
"content": "“Not really sure why people are opposed to more secure systems.”Why not for the simple reason that in the context of use, it is NOT needed. Encrypted disks for home use just aren’t needed (unless you ‘really’ have something to hide). All the important key files are encrypted already. Users don’t need more layers added to the systems. I use straight ext4 file format on all my systems. Done. Move on to more important things like making sure one has current backups of the data (on-site and off-site).",
"parent_id": "8133362",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133383",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T20:27:22",
"content": "I had a friend who has lost access to all of the files on his 1TB Dell HDD with Win 10. Dell locks the drive and does not back the key up. Dell and Microsoft sat there pointing fingers at each other and did nothing. It is their defualt move to encrypt.Also have a friend who lost her dead husband’s files. The children took his cellphone so the 2FA won’t allow unlocking the SSD. I gave her a new SSD and zip tied her NVMe inside in case they ever want to unlock it in future (It unlocks, but into a Microsoft account recovery.)",
"parent_id": "8133376",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133385",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T20:30:50",
"content": "To clarify, he did not know or ask for the encryption, and I had never heard of it being the default setting at the time. I was trying to help him after the laptop was dropped. When I moved his drive to a loaner laptop it locked, and would not unlock when moved back to the Dell.If you are going to make bit locker standard, maybe invest in a sticker on the drive that says as much? Even a lock logo for your Boot splash screen? That costs basically nothing.",
"parent_id": "8133383",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133489",
"author": "Antti",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T05:27:17",
"content": "Bitlocker is pretty much useless anyhow, as soon as the powers that be wants to access your hard drive, MS rolls over and hands them the master key. Sit, MS, sit, good dog.",
"parent_id": "8133385",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133526",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T08:03:17",
"content": "It was probably an update that re-enabled the policy, which then encrypted the drive and didn’t break up the keys because it was a headless operation. Great, right? This is why I’m not going to have tpm accessible to Windows.",
"parent_id": "8133385",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134309",
"author": "mordae",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T06:19:10",
"content": "Meanwhile my wife has her own decryption key in LUKS slot 2 on my devices and can get to my data if something happens to me. Same with the server with photos.",
"parent_id": "8133383",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133525",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T08:00:10",
"content": "You are a fan of Microsoft holding onto master keys for your drive encryption? Because that is what happens if a Microsoft saving is involved.As for being able to disable it? Half the early discussion is about what happens when an update forces it back on, and drive encryption, and migrates your account for you? Because that can already happen.The ewaste is enough of a complaint on its own, screw that. You should be able to replace the keys, but Microsoft has been removing that functionality on their branded laptops.Lastly, bitlocker sucks.",
"parent_id": "8133362",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8137602",
"author": "Win11 installer",
"timestamp": "2025-06-10T21:06:36",
"content": "Full disk encryption is a pain when trying to do system recovery.Very fun and secure, but a pain(truer on android than windows, but true nonetheless).A classmate of mine lost most of his data that way, due to crappily experimenting with multiboot.",
"parent_id": "8133362",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133380",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T20:22:32",
"content": "You have to jump through hoops up to Intel “Core i” 7th gen (supported processors start at 8th gen).Also Ryzen+ AKA Ryzen 2400G is also not supported.Also many hardware TPM support being updated from 1.2 to 2.0 (especially corporate models like Thinkpad.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133404",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T21:43:00",
"content": "Meanwhile my 2400G based data server just hums along on KUbuntu LTS just fine for the foreseeable future. Serving files out from SSDs on the home 2.5Gbit network.I see this M$ security thing (and AI for the record) as more of a ‘marketing’ tool more than anything to push sales for Win11. Why? Because modern systems (really ever since AMD Ryzen 1600s rolled out the gate) run 99% of the applications out there very quickly. All my AM4 based systems feel ‘very’ fast for what I do (I am sure people with latest (being 5 years or less) Intel CPUs feel the same way). From running VMs, to playing video, to compilers, cad, browsers, etc. Soooo, why upgrade? I feel ‘no’ pressure on that front as all my systems all run Linux — quickly.",
"parent_id": "8133380",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133387",
"author": "Per Jensen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T20:35:09",
"content": "ram^Wgently?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133616",
"author": "gr4viton",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T13:03:54",
"content": "This. Had he edited in vim? I not understand what “ram-control-w-gently” means…",
"parent_id": "8133387",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134310",
"author": "mordae",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T06:21:06",
"content": "Erase preceding word. Works in most shells as well.",
"parent_id": "8133616",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133393",
"author": "Fred",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T21:09:54",
"content": "Linux mint and never looked back. 😁",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133398",
"author": "MartinU",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T21:29:51",
"content": "I’m a non-government, non-commercial system user with just one Windows computer, a Win10 system that’s used primarily to run games. My daily driver and other systems migrated to Linux years ago; the systems are solid and you don’t have to play the patch lottery all the time (as in “what’s been broken this week?”). Its currently a stable system but the moment Windows gives any significant trouble it will just get replaced. Windows is now firmly in the secondary category — nothing sensitive or important is held on it so it doesn’t matter if the system is ‘trusted’ or not.Computers are cheap so continually trying to make individual systems ‘one size fits all’ is futile. I don’t believe in putting all my eggs in one basket, its asking for you to spend your life coming up with imaginative solutions to innumerable ‘what if’ scenarios (but invariably missing the one that gets you). I’m also a firm believer in turning systems off when they’re not being used; you needed to keep mainframes powered on 24/7 for engineering reasons but just leaving a laptop idling (for example) is just inviting someone to tinker with it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133406",
"author": "reg",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T21:55:14",
"content": "I have lots of computers and they are all e waste. I dread when the generation of computers after this last one starts coming down the pike. WIll they be normally de milled (no hdd, possibly no ram, and on some that have hard to open cases, drastic damage to the plastics) but they generally all boot once fed with a disk and some memory. Right now it is just apple hardware that is dubious. Out of one lot of ipads I got three were not apple locked. It was nice of them to free them up before dumping them. But I fear there being gaylords full of stuff that looks good and usable but it locked. Just stupid waste. It ought to be illegal. Sure, fine, make the data safe, but there ought to be a law that if you add a new disk, you can reset everything and re-use the hardware. For years I have been pissed off over software limited hardware, bue it a vpn router that only lets you create so many connections before shelling out more money, or other hardware that you pay for and then they try to get you to pay again to unlock the potential of, but now we are getting to software rendering hardware as almost a total loss. Nice going.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133424",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T23:24:50",
"content": "i have computers i built 15 years ago and they all work fine. sometimes i find a job for one to do. i have never had them all on the most recent windows or linux distro. running old stuff is kind of the point of having all your old clunkers laying around.look on the bright side, there will be a lot of free ewaste to salvage. nothing wrong with it, its just been disowned by the tech giants. it doesn’t make it not a computer anymore.",
"parent_id": "8133406",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133752",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T22:58:40",
"content": "Is “gaylord” an SI unit that previously escaped my notice?",
"parent_id": "8133406",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133776",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T01:23:34",
"content": "You can erase a bitlocked hard drive (SSD).The e-waste was Intel Atom with a eMCC and half-baked BIOS (I had one that needed a 32-bit bootloader to launch a 64-bit OS, sheee madness)",
"parent_id": "8133406",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133415",
"author": "Michael Gore",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T22:30:44",
"content": "It will cost more for people to upgrade their hardware for windows 11 then many of the worst natural disasters in modern history",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133421",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T23:19:43",
"content": "if i use windows 11 at all it will be an ltsc edition with as much crap shut off as possible.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133426",
"author": "George White",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T23:33:08",
"content": "I loved my Apple //e. I ran a chat system on it called Diversi-Dial.If you look up “ddial” on google, you’ll find the chat system I’m currently on.No drm, no TCM, no encryption just plain chat with a little text email system.magviz.ca will also work. These days I run an AMD 7950x. I’m mostly on thechat system I described, and don’t do a lot of much else on the internet.Email, that’s about it. I had to upgrade to Windows 10 because Star Trek Onlineand Steam required it. I’m not a fan of 10 and I do miss 7.Most people use their machines for browsing the net anyway and interactvery little with the operating system itself other than the browser.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133439",
"author": "Gus A Mueller",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T00:33:57",
"content": "This is part of the ongoing horror show of Windows. Remember that search where there was an animated dog before there was any place to type search text? How about those windows in Windows 10 WITH NO BORDERS running into each other! How about that taskbar in WIndows 11 with huge icons that cannot be resized? Who are they even making this OS for?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133778",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T01:26:18",
"content": "You may want to find your scaling setting in display options. I notice on a 14″ laptop the setting 150% gets applied, whereas 125% or 100% may be what you would like.",
"parent_id": "8133439",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133464",
"author": "Ray",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T03:16:21",
"content": "Symbiotic relationship (mutualism):Hardware manufacturers must $ell hardware and Software publishers must $ell software. Microsoft has essentially written the playbook on how to succeed in the OS quasi-monopoly business.Linux OS does not fit into the mass consumer market; Microsoft has made certain of it through years of successful marketing and some behind-the-scenes private API’s.And while Linux provides the capability to work-around most Win-x software compatibility, Joe and Jill users are simply not going to endure digging into configuration files to make a new software title work.Most readers responding on this thread have the technical ability to utilize Linux and be very pleased; but we are not representative of most PC users: those who just want stuff to work immediately.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133524",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T07:55:09",
"content": "Most of it does work immediately, please stop pushing this narrative. If there’s something specific to to her fix it.",
"parent_id": "8133464",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133709",
"author": "Ray",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T19:20:35",
"content": "No matter how nicely one talks about Linux, someone is going to flip-out when reality is mentioned. Fact: Joe/Jill user DOES NOT WANT to learn to use Linux because it looks and feels different from Win-OS. In this case, “similar” and “equally capable” are not going to prevail.AI Overview:In the global desktop/laptop market, Windows significantly outsizes Linux. While Windows holds a dominant 73.41% market share, Linux has a 4.31% share.Here’s a more detailed breakdown:Windows: 73.41%macOS: 15.49%Linux: 4.31%It’s important to note that Linux has seen a notable increase in its market share recently, reaching an all-time high of 4.31%. However, it’s still a small fraction compared to the dominance of Windows.",
"parent_id": "8133524",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133713",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T19:52:02",
"content": "“However, it’s still a small fraction compared to the dominance of Windows.” Sure … but doesn’t have to stay that way! Just because it is dominant, isn’t a good reason a person should say “I’ll stick with it”. That’s the lemming way of thinking.",
"parent_id": "8133709",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133748",
"author": "Ray",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T22:41:31",
"content": "‘Just because it is dominant, isn’t a good reason a person should say “I’ll stick with it”.’I could not agree more; but I’m fluent in UNIX (Admin) and Linux and I am NOT the problem; IF there is a problem at all.In the CONSUMER PC MARKETPLACE, the end-user is comfortable with Windows-OS and the GUI or if they have never used Windows they surely know someone who thinks they are an expert and available to help out in a jam.Massive change in human buying patterns simply does not happen quickly even when the product is “free”. Microsoft would have to fall from its current throne by doing something unforgivable in users’ mind before more than a trickle of users migrate quickly to Linux. This is NOT a technology issue; rather, it is a human preference.AI Overview:The human trait of not changing from a preferred product, or resisting new or alternative products, is often linked to low openness to experience, a personality trait described in the Big Five personality model. Individuals low in openness may be more cautious, prefer familiarity, and are less likely to embrace change or new ideas, including new products.",
"parent_id": "8133713",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133779",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T01:29:08",
"content": "For an example: AMD 5000 and 7000 GPUs had major issues when they launched.How do I use a Quest 2 for PCVR on Linux?Valve did an amazing job and I love my SteamDeck, but they call it the bleeding edge for a reason.",
"parent_id": "8133524",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133478",
"author": "make piece not war",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T04:35:12",
"content": "Win 10 and win 11 installs with the drive being in a state of “we kinda started the encryption, you have to finnish it, but we do not have the keys and if something happends you loose your data”. In BL manager the disk looks unencrypted, but using the manage-bde under command prompt you can see and change the real state of the encryption.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133780",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T01:30:26",
"content": "I’ll need to look into this, I install 10 and 11 with TPM disabled in BIOS, does that change anything?",
"parent_id": "8133478",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133574",
"author": "Tom",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T11:01:19",
"content": "I work in a hospital and the I.T. budget is larger than the budget for R.N.’sThink about that for a minute.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133576",
"author": "Tom",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T11:04:18",
"content": "“Think about that for a minute.”The next time you wait 4 hours in the ER to be seen or it takes 3 monthsto see your doc.What M$ does effects almost everything in our life’s.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133603",
"author": "Richie",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T12:30:29",
"content": "I just came here to say that I miss Clippy, little paperclip guy.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133666",
"author": "Enki",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T16:34:41",
"content": "“I can hear the ‘just use Linux/BSD/etc.’ crowd already clamoring in the comments, and will preface this by saying that although I use Linux and BSD on a nearly daily basis, I would not want to use it as my primary desktop system for too many reasons to go into here. I’m still holding out some hope for ReactOS hitting its stride Any Day Now™, ”Not trying to force you to use Linux or anything, but why would you think ReactOS will be usable any time soon, when Linux has had decades to work out and refine every kink?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133737",
"author": "HappyDad",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T21:37:02",
"content": "what about smartphone ? i have a drawer full of quad and octocore SoC with no updates and I can’t build AOSP cause their drivers didn’t get upstreamed or simply proprietary blobs",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133759",
"author": "Ray",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T23:42:43",
"content": "“what about smartphone ?”I feel your pain! I kept a few of my best with decent battery and loaded ‘Sky Map’ onto them: my 11YO grandson and friends gets a kick out of viewing the constallations or identifying the occasional planet.",
"parent_id": "8133737",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133782",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T01:32:13",
"content": "I’m amazed you got the bootloader unlocked. Of course my carrier disallows bootloader unlocking 🙄.",
"parent_id": "8133737",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133802",
"author": "Miroslav",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T03:01:22",
"content": "Windows 11 situation seems to prove that most people are masochists. Level of changes between different versions of Windows is larger than users of Windows 10 just switching to Linux Mint, for example. But they keep bending over and paying for a rather poor performance, and even giving away their usage data for free.Idiocracy was indeed a documentary about the future.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133915",
"author": "Gugj",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T12:20:24",
"content": "Just run win xp or win 7 or linux or dos easier no need for win10/11 shit",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134185",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T15:43:48",
"content": "Surprised a bunch of “security” nerds didn’t jump down your throat for this one. Fully agree though. Old windows or linux are the way to go. Don’t like an update? Well, just don’t use it!",
"parent_id": "8133915",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133966",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T18:05:04",
"content": "I have Windows 11 dual booting on older hardware Phenom 2 x4 944 with Windows XP partly as i’m into retro computing and tbh the machine is capable of everything I want of it, web, some basic Tinkercad 3d design and has all mod cons like wireless internet, a scsi card, ide and sata, Zip drives, multicard reader and floppy disk drives, serial and parallel port. Plenty of usb ports, 2,3 and c and connects to all the accessories i want to. Reasonable GPU Palit 4GB GeForce GTx 960 that supports dx12 it isn’t going to be a gamers box but that’s fine.l for me for still playing the odd game on steam. Very much into using hardware way past its shelf life. Whilst Wondows could be criticised for trying to enforce TPM etc it should be applauded actually for running in the specs of machine I have and well enough to be usable. My drivers and everything are bang up to date and receive all Windows 11 updates and so far no end of life warnings. I’ll be happy at that for some time to come. Even on my XP partition i have a modern browser and the GPU is still supported. Works fine.. I do have an active antivirus in place and upto date scan running covering both partitions.Some people will follow the trend but there’s plenty of us see our machines have many years ahead of them yet.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136270",
"author": "Pibond",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T17:15:01",
"content": "Interesting that Ms has taken such an interest in securing the disk while sprinkling AI on all the apps. It seems to me that AI is an excellent vehicle for risk because 1) the output cannot be validated for a given input, 2) the user cannot interpret the tokens or control what is sent to the server farm, and 3) the user cannot find out what else the AI server is doing with their data.Indeed deep neural network tools can be useful and I am glad of that. But in engineering, military, or any other environment requiring reliable results it seems to me that keeping the AI tools carefully boxed in will be more important than encrypting the hard drive.Wouldn’t a cute AI paper clip look nice astride a pretty AI horsie on your desktop? Soon we might need some anti-ai functionality along with antivirus apps.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8137596",
"author": "Win11 installer",
"timestamp": "2025-06-10T20:54:54",
"content": "I’ve reason to suspect the cause for the cpu requirement.When I went through that list for work I noticed that it coincided pretty nicely with cpus for which no physical sidechannel attack was out yet.This was especially visible in the Amd cpus for which a great crack was published short ago meaning that you suddenly got a boost in how recent they had to be.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8137605",
"author": "Win11 installer",
"timestamp": "2025-06-10T21:10:06",
"content": "This could be a great moment to run some otherwise too expensive destructive experiments on modern high end chips",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,532.219736
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/29/bring-back-the-bios-to-uefi-systems-that-is/
|
Bring Back The BIOS! (To UEFI Systems, That Is)
|
Jenny List
|
[
"Software Hacks"
] |
[
"bios",
"SeaBIOS",
"UEFI"
] |
At the dawn of the PC, IBM provided the Basic Input Output System (BIOS). It took care of bringing the machine up, and exposed a series of software hooks for the hardware. Over the years the BIOS and its updated descendants served us well, but as we entered a 64-bit world its limitations began to show.
The replacement was the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface or UEFI, and the chances are you’re viewing this on a machine which uses it in some capacity. But what if you only have UEFI and need BIOS to run a piece of older software? Never fear, because
here’s CSMWrap, which brings it back, just for you
.
Under the hood it’s a wrapper for the
SeaBIOS
compatibility support module, doing the work of setting up the memory mapping such that it will load, and ensuring that other services such as the VGA BIOS are loaded. As it stands it can boot FreeDOS and some older Windows versions under UEFI in QEMU, and it’s claimed also run on real hardware. We don’t often need to run DOS on our 2025 machine, but it’s neat to know we can.
Meanwhile if the BIOS interests you, know that
there’s also an open source BIOS for the earliest of PCs
.
BIOS header image: Thomas Schanz,
CC BY-SA 4.0
.
| 22
| 7
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133203",
"author": "Andrea Campanella",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T11:25:05",
"content": "Well, time to build a very fast dos pc",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133225",
"author": "imqqmi",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T13:19:26",
"content": "Unfortunately, x86 code is often not optimised in newer CPUs. Still it’ll clock for clock be much faster than anything available in the 80ies and 90ies.",
"parent_id": "8133203",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133327",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T18:06:00",
"content": "That’s like saying a rallycross car isn’t optimized for surface road racing… but it’s sure as hell going to outperform an e-scooter that tops out at 12 MPH.",
"parent_id": "8133225",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133432",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T23:53:25",
"content": "It is very optimized.Somejust happens to be bloated.",
"parent_id": "8133225",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133530",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T08:18:25",
"content": "Some actually runs quite slowly because of the lack of threading and much deeper pipelines. This rarely means that it’s slower, but it may not be faster.",
"parent_id": "8133432",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133544",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T08:58:54",
"content": "This is interesting: “New computers don’t speed up old code”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7PVZixO35c",
"parent_id": "8133530",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133596",
"author": "roeland",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T12:07:52",
"content": "I had my z80 bios written in asm and outperformed the read, write speeds of the ibm pcs that time. and not like 10% faster no.",
"parent_id": "8133225",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133646",
"author": "Beta Taster",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T15:20:52",
"content": "Do you mean 32-bit instructions? X86 “code” is optimized by the compiler, not the CPU. The CPU does pipelining and branch prediction on all instructions, not just the 64-bit, 128-bit, and 512-bit instructions.",
"parent_id": "8133225",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133315",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T17:33:41",
"content": "Don;t forget to wire in turbo button so you can force CPU to run at 4.77 MHz for some really old DOS program that doesn’t work right at 4GHz.",
"parent_id": "8133203",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133386",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T20:31:11",
"content": "I’d like to see some program looking for 4.77 MHz running on a 4 GHz chip.",
"parent_id": "8133315",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133837",
"author": "DR KAMALJEET_SINGH JASWAL",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T05:41:42",
"content": "🙏 FREE 👉 FLOPPY 👉 LINUX ALSO AVAILABLE 👉OLDEST LAPTOPS 👉MUCH 👉SECURE THAN 👉DOS 👉WINDOWS",
"parent_id": "8133203",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134200",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T17:03:44",
"content": "WHERE CAN I BUY? BETTER THAN WINDOWS 14?",
"parent_id": "8133837",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133211",
"author": "Richard",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T11:56:18",
"content": "This previous article suggested the last Thinkpads with a legacy bios that could run MS-DOS 6.22 are from around 2020:https://hackaday.com/2024/08/22/running-stock-ms-dos-on-a-modern-thinkpad/I wonder, with this CSMWrap, if MS-DOS 6.22 could be run on a brand new Thinkpad.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133531",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T08:19:52",
"content": "That’s the idea, and it’s been used by OEMs to ship FreeDOS on modern hardware.",
"parent_id": "8133211",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133215",
"author": "Nicholas",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T12:03:14",
"content": "This is like the reverse of projects like Tianocore DUET and Clover EFI which allowed you to load a UEFI environment (generally based on the EDK2 code) as a BIOS bootloader.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133280",
"author": "Julian Skidmore",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T16:08:22",
"content": "In the mid-1990s I used a book which contained a ‘public-domain’ 8086 BIOS written in K&R ‘C’ to develop a BIOS for Micro Control System (UK)’s Solid State Drive-based, Chip & Tech F8680 PC. It was IP66 sealed and low power enough not to need a fan.Surprisingly, it came with a floppy disk containing the source and the BIOS could be compiled with Turbo ‘C’ 2.0 and used the same register structure interface to execute machine code functions.So, this kind of thing was around 30+ years ago.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133285",
"author": "Julian Skidmore",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T16:13:15",
"content": "Found it, I think. Date makes sense, I was using it in 1993, or maybe there’s an earlier version for a PC. The Chips & Tech F8680 was a weird 8086 with extra segment registers and a “SuperState” mode which could virtualise IO and memory mapping with a 24-bit physical address space. It also had an LCD driver, which we used.https://archive.org/details/ATBIOS_Kit_Nov89",
"parent_id": "8133280",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133588",
"author": "CJ",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T11:42:45",
"content": "Ah very nice indeed, can’t seem to find a copy of the XT version which would also be very useful.",
"parent_id": "8133285",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133445",
"author": "William Payne",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T01:19:18",
"content": "Boot directly into a flashed app becoming an option with new nanocomputerlow-cost low-power platforms supporting huge fast memories?Especially booting into a single task interactive OS app, of course.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134409",
"author": "TDT",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T13:39:11",
"content": "As much as I hate to think about it, a very simple linux with nothing but the drivers for your device and a webbrowser should be enough.You wouldn’t boot “directly” to the browser, but it would be as such, all the layers being hidden.If you really want to boot directly to an “app”(sig), you would need to implement drivers for the hardware yourself, or only use the UEFI commands (is there only such a thing? Like the old display command for the BIOS?)",
"parent_id": "8133445",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133558",
"author": "Josh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T10:21:19",
"content": "I just wanted grub2 on linux again in my bios, with actually the windows entry on it, for dual boot, but man they made it complicated..",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133825",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T03:55:30",
"content": "What I need is BIOS on EG cherry trail Atoms. I have probably 20-30 of them in tablets floating around, be much more useful for DOS/Win9x/XP, but of course they don’t have real BIOS (actually I don’t think they have a proper PCI bus? Can’t remember)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,531.838323
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/29/the-cost-of-a-cheap-ups-is-10-hours-and-a-replacement-pcb/
|
The Cost Of A Cheap UPS Is 10 Hours And A Replacement PCB
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Repair Hacks",
"Reverse Engineering"
] |
[
"home assisstant",
"ups"
] |
Recently [Florin] was in the market for a basic uninterruptible power supply (UPS) to provide some peace of mind for the smart home equipment he had stashed around. Unfortunately, the cheap Serioux LD600LI unit he picked up left a bit to be desired, and
required a bit of retrofitting
.
To be fair, the issues that [Florin] ended up dealing with were less about the UPS’ capability to deal with these power issues, and more with the USB interface on the UPS. Initially the UPS seemed to communicate happily with HomeAssistant (HA) via
Network UPS Tools
over a generic USB protocol, after figuring out what device profile matched this re-branded generic UPS. That’s when HA began to constantly lose the connection with the UPS, risking its integration in the smart home setup.
The old and new USB-serial boards side by side. (Credit: VoltLog, YouTube)
After tearing down the UPS to see what was going on, [Florin] found that it used a fairly generic USB-serial adapter featuring the common Cypress CY7C63310 family of low-speed USB controller. Apparently the firmware on this controller was simply not up to the task or poorly implemented, so a replacement was needed.
The process and implementation is covered in detail in the video. It’s quite straightforward, taking the 9600 baud serial link from the UPS’ main board and using a Silabs CP2102N USB-to-UART controller to create a virtual serial port on the USB side. These conversion boards have to be fully isolated, of course, which is where the
HopeRF CMT8120
dual-channel digital isolator comes into play.
After assembly it
almost
fully worked, except that a Sonoff Zigbee controller in the smart home setup used the same Silabs controller, with thus the same USB PID/VID combo. Fortunately in Silabs
AN721
it’s described how you can use an alternate PID (0xEA63) which fixed this issue until the next device with a CP2102N is installed
As it turns out, the cost of a $40 UPS is actually 10 hours of work and $61 in parts, although one cannot put a value on all the lessons learned here.
| 27
| 8
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133177",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T08:47:47",
"content": "I wish my cheap UPS had a USB port",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133205",
"author": "Nomen Nescio",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T11:28:07",
"content": "UPSes are in the set of things for which i’ve learned the cheap ones aren’t worth their sometimes very high cost. i’d rather pay more up front for them.",
"parent_id": "8133177",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133228",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T13:25:17",
"content": "Why pay for one at all when there’s a decent quality one in the trash (with a dead battery) every couple months? Seriously, I feel like I have to go out of my way to not find one.",
"parent_id": "8133205",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133247",
"author": "Michael Richards",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T14:30:04",
"content": "Absolutely no judgment from me, but where it sounds like you have to “go out of [your] way”notto stay apprised of the contents of others’ trash, for most people I think it tends to be the opposite.",
"parent_id": "8133228",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133256",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T14:54:53",
"content": "Why shame those who search other’s trash, and not those who are wastefully throwing away working items?",
"parent_id": "8133247",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133292",
"author": "Jo Momma",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T16:20:41",
"content": "Trash could be the “e-waste area” at their job. I have scored some good items at my works e-waste dump bins.",
"parent_id": "8133247",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133467",
"author": "john",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T03:32:23",
"content": "You seem to be under the mistaken impression that people do not put their trash directly on the street with no sort of container or bag. People do this all the time! Especially big items that would break through the bag or would require purchasing a box specifically to be thrown away. The more you know. (Shooting star graphic here)",
"parent_id": "8133247",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133813",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T03:29:25",
"content": "It might, the RJ connector is for communication.",
"parent_id": "8133177",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133186",
"author": "RoganDawes",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T09:35:31",
"content": "Instead of putting CP2102 in, use an ESP8266 or ESP32. Either run ESPLink or ESPHome with the stream_server to expose the UART as a TCP port on the network, or else implement enough of the protocol (both UPS and NUT) to have it show up as a network UPS :-) Yes, “just” :-p",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133188",
"author": "Sprite_tm",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T09:48:31",
"content": "That kinda implies that whatever access point is used is also behind the UPS, otherwise it kinda defeats the purpose… not sure if that is something you always want.",
"parent_id": "8133186",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133193",
"author": "g",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T10:25:19",
"content": "In my experience, recognising circular dependencies in systems is a skill most people could use improving, preferably before learning it the hard way.I’m not entirely sure why that is as most people I know (and base my observations on) are generally pretty smart, and once shown “you really don’t want to do that”, the penny drops instantly, but for some reason almost nobody almost never recognises it in the first place.",
"parent_id": "8133188",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133217",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T12:25:03",
"content": "I find “as a network” makes it easier for multiple devices to listen to the “time to shut down” message compared to USB.",
"parent_id": "8133193",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133220",
"author": "Pegaroo",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T12:42:55",
"content": "You wouldn’t not have your network equipment on the UPS (or at least your core equipment )if you were intending to monitor it this way.And as for it not being something you’d always way, it’s better to have an option and not use it than need the option and not have it",
"parent_id": "8133188",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133469",
"author": "john",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T03:36:56",
"content": "I agree with Pegaroo here. This is a smart home we’re talking about. Why even have a UPS if you don’t care if your devices are connected? Why even have the smart home? Forget circular dependencies, what about not seeing the forest for the trees?",
"parent_id": "8133220",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8183174",
"author": "RoganDawes",
"timestamp": "2025-09-23T08:24:40",
"content": "The amazing power of Open Source! ESPHome now has an implementation of the NUT protocol available as an external component, so you can make your homebrew UPS available to the network, so all devices can monitor it – connection limits may apply.Of course, if connection limits are really a problem, have a tier 1 device monitoring the real UPS, exporting it to tier 2 devices. Problem solved!",
"parent_id": "8133186",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133224",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T13:16:23",
"content": "Is it just me or does that UPS seem a little … sparse … inside? Lots of missing components compared to the ones I usually take apart.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133260",
"author": "John S",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T15:14:37",
"content": "Why not just wire up the 9600 baud serial link to an outside connector instead?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133816",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T03:36:44",
"content": "I came to ask this, $61?Waveshare $15.99 USB to RS232/485 Industrial Grade Isolated Converter, Onboard Original FT232RNL Chip, Multiple Protection, In stock $15 delivery.And there is a $6 version with CH343 Isolated USB to TTL on ebay.Spinning up a custom board seems way overkill, but hey, this is PCB a day. I really need to come up with a good excuse to make my own PCB one of these days. I have way too small and way too big ideas. Like a Pico Clone with VGA port, or a PCB to put a steamdeck or Legion Go motherboard in a Lenovo X220/X230",
"parent_id": "8133260",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133328",
"author": "Bill",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T18:07:29",
"content": "I was just at a warehouse club yesterday and took note they had a Cyber Power Systems 660 Watt, 1.1 KVA UPS priced at $149. I don’t know how well said unit integrates with home automation software, but it seems like it is likely to be a prertty solid performer. I have a slightly larger unit from them which has been running for a few years to back up my home PBX and cable VOIP modems. The difference I’ve found with the units from CPS and APC is that they don’t over-charge their batteries resulting in less frequent battery replacement. A cheap UPS might ruin its batteries is less than a year.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133344",
"author": "-jeffB",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T18:45:55",
"content": "My experience with Cyberpower UPSes was that they worked flawlessly – until the first time we actually lost line power, at which point one failed immediately, and the other lasted a minute or two instead of the expected hour or two. This was 20-25 years ago, so things may be different now; I haven’t been tempted to give them another chance.",
"parent_id": "8133328",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134198",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T16:54:15",
"content": "Sounds like an excuse to hack the float voltage feedback resistor, or even replace it with your own programmable float charger. If I recall rightly from automotive technology 13.1v is plenty of a float charge, (most Fords are pushing 15v, if you ever wondered why they leak so much. Maybe not the Mazda co-developed ones, but definitely the F150 and Crown Victoria and Lincoln/Mercury versions of it.)",
"parent_id": "8133328",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133329",
"author": "dave proctor",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T18:22:20",
"content": "The horrific chemicals, and rare elements we throw into landfill everyday, encouraged by mobile phone produces like Apple and Samsung are just a time bomb that wil leventually pollute huge parts of the planet. A lot of these products are recycled, but many, basically end up a large hole in the ground. Anyone doing anything positive in this area by saving things from the trash, or by using someones else’s give aways on marketplace, ebay etc is a hero to the future planet Earth (the place your kids will be living in).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133402",
"author": "Bleugh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T21:37:40",
"content": "Everyone misses the bit about ‘line interactive’ UPS’s….Cheap UPS’s just pass through mains and switch to battery and inverter when the power drops……..Anything ‘fun’ happening with the incoming power, those fun times are passed to your electronics.Commercial grade / double conversion / line interactive UPS’s charge the battery from the incoming mains.they then take that battery power and invert it to AC to power your electronics.if something fries the mains incoming, your stuff is reasonably well isolated!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133820",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T03:41:14",
"content": "Best part is you can kind of make one of those yourself very cheaply with an inverter, battery bank, and charger in sizes you may need like 2,000+ amps for maybe $200-400 and 100AH capacity.",
"parent_id": "8133402",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133514",
"author": "Rey",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T07:05:58",
"content": "Seems to be “just” a NUT driver problem, solved using “nutdrv_qx” driver.See here:https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-nut/issues/322#issuecomment-2522857358So: no needs for hardware change!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133821",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T03:42:19",
"content": "Figures, thanks for the fix.",
"parent_id": "8133514",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133859",
"author": "Maya Posch",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T07:33:26",
"content": "Thanks for that, I was wondering why there didn’t seem to be any reports of issues with this UPS & the PC software.",
"parent_id": "8133514",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,531.951964
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/28/tool-turns-svgs-into-multicolor-3d-prints/
|
Tool Turns SVGs Into Multicolor 3D Prints
|
Donald Papp
|
[
"3d Printer hacks"
] |
[
"3d printed",
"conversion",
"sign",
"stl",
"svg"
] |
Want to turn a scaled vector graphic into a multicolor 3D print, like a sign? You’ll want to check out [erkannt]’s
svg2solid
, a web-based tool that reads an SVG and breaks the shapes up by color into individual STL files. Drag those into your slicer (treating them as a single object with multiple parts) and you’re off to the races.
This sign was printed face-down on a textured build plate. The colors only need to be a few layers deep.
This is especially handy for making 3D printed versions of things like signs, and shown here is an example of exactly that.
It’s true that most 3D printer software supports the
.svg
format natively nowadays, but that doesn’t mean a tool like this is obsolete. SVG is a 2D format with no depth information, so upon import the slicer assigns a arbitrary height to all imported elements and the user must make any desired adjustments manually. For example, a handy tip for making signs is to make the “background” as thick as desired but limit colored elements to just a few layers deep. Doing so minimizes filament switching while having no impact on final visual appearance.
Being able to drag SVGs directly into the slicer is very handy, but working with 3D models has a certain “what you see is what you get” element to it that can make experimentation or alternate applications a little easier. Since
svg2solid
turns an SVG into discrete 3D models (separated by color) and each with user-defined heights, if you find yourself needing that then this straightforward tool is worth having in your bookmarks. Or just go straight to the
GitHub repository
and grab your own copy.
On the other hand, if you prefer your 3D-printed signs to be lit up in a faux-neon style then
here’s how to do that in no time at all
. Maybe there’s a way to mix the two approaches? If you do, be sure to use
our tips line
to let us know!
| 3
| 2
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133161",
"author": "Duderino",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T06:56:11",
"content": "“It’s true that most 3D printer software supports the .svg format natively nowadays, but that doesn’t mean a tool like this is obsolete”It really does. This task takes seconds to do in prusaslicer or freecad",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133294",
"author": "alloydog",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T16:28:58",
"content": "I’m not disagreeing or critising your comment, but at FreeCAD, which I am currently learning to use, has a learning curve. I can knock out at a good SVG image with LibreOffice draw much faster (st the mo’) than I can in FreeCAD. Horses for courses.",
"parent_id": "8133161",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134735",
"author": "56u56",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T10:43:21",
"content": "I search good way to convert svg to router wood",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,531.884603
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/28/a-love-letter-to-embedded-systems-by-v-hunter-adams/
|
A Love Letter To Embedded Systems By V. Hunter Adams
|
John Elliot V
|
[
"Microcontrollers"
] |
[
"embedded systems",
"philosophy"
] |
Today we’re going to make a little digression from things that we do to look at perhaps
why
we do the things that we do. This one is philosophical folks, so strap yourselves in. We’ve had an interesting item arrive on the tips line from [Bunchabits] who wanted to let us know about a video,
Love Letter to Embedded Systems
, from [V. Hunter Adams].
[V. Hunter Adams] is Lecturer of Electrical Engineering at Cornell University and is on the web over here:
vanhunteradams.com
In this forty three minute video [Hunter] makes an attempt to explain why he loves engineering, generally, and why he loves embedded systems engineering, specifically. He tries to answer why you should love engineering projects, what makes such projects special, and how you can get started on projects of your own. He discusses his particular interest in other unrelated subjects such as birds and birdsong, and talks a little about the genius of polymath Leonardo da Vinci.
He goes on to explain that engineering can be the vehicle to learn about other fields of endeavor, that the constraints in embedded systems are like the constraints of poetry, that embedded systems are the right level of complexity where you can still hold the details of a complete system in your head, and that embedded systems let you integrate with the physical world through sensors and actuators leading to a greater appreciation of physics and nature.
In his submission to the tips line [Bunchabits] said that [Hunter] was a communicator in the league of Carl Sagan and that he could do for embedded systems what Sagan did for physics and astronomy. Having watched this presentation we are inclined to agree. He is a thoughtful person and a cogent communicator.
If today’s philosophical digression has left you feeling… philosophical, then you might enjoy a little nostalgia, too. Here’s some old philosophical material that we covered here on Hackaday back in 2013 which held some interest:
Hacking And Philosophy: An Introduction
;
The Mentor’s Manifesto
;
Hacker Crackdown: Part 1
,
Part II
,
Part III
,
Part IV
;
Future Tech And Upgrading Your Brain
; and
Surveillance State
. All still as relevant today as it was over a decade ago.
Thanks to [Bunchabits] for sending this one in.
| 7
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133178",
"author": "strawberrymortallyb0bcea48e7",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T08:56:03",
"content": "HaD should mentionhttps://embeddedonlineconference.com/at least once.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133204",
"author": "Jan-Willem Markus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T11:28:03",
"content": "I’m quite interested in conferences, and have joined near a hundred and organized half a dozen. Conferences are about meeting like-minded people, for me. Sharing knowledge is a bonus. I take quite a lot of pride in creating quality content, and won’t watch it if they can’t be bothered to make it good.As there isn’t a preview of the content, it’s difficult to judge this embedded online conference. I don’t know the speakers, nor the sponsors, and the website seems to sell fear of missing out. E.g. If you don’t join our conference, you’ll be made obsolete. Not a good argument, IMHO. Nor will engineering ever be obsolete.Can you tell us a bit about your experience in the field and the conference? How were the talks, was it good quality content and time and care put into the recording? What have you learned from the conference specifically, and how will you apply it?",
"parent_id": "8133178",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133672",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T16:55:57",
"content": "I signed up for this conference on my employer’s dime a couple of time. The first year I listened to several of the talks. The following year I listened to one or two. This past year I didn’t bother signing up. The talks that sounded the most interesting to me based on their summary didn’t actually inspire me to listen to any other talks. They felt full of fluff, and not very substantial. Hopefully other attendees had a different experience.",
"parent_id": "8133204",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133234",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T13:48:11",
"content": "A professional conference where the content is all locked behind a large fee doesn’t really sound like HaD’s wheelhouse.",
"parent_id": "8133178",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133209",
"author": "Jan-Willem Markus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T11:46:57",
"content": "I like the video quite a bit. While I usually didn’t care for electrical systems, electronics has always been very interesting to me. I.e. designing a circuit board, versus mains electrical wiring. I don’t know exactly why, but I assume it’s due to the small tangible, the creation of complex circuits, or sometimes the clever solutions which reduce the complexity greatly.I’m interested in talks about why people are interested in the things they do. From a purpose perspective, but also from an educational one. I can relate to the da Vincies before me. The interest in dozens of subjects to then come up with expected answers is a rather strong reason to not focus too much on a single topic. Whenever I learn something new, I can very much directly apply it to another field or project. Be it electronics, electronic and mechanical security (lockpicking, etc.), or even learning about metal or wood working. My biggest asset is my curiosity.In the video, the tutor goes into how electronics can be directly applied to many fields of study and interests. This is quite an interesting take, and I’ve seen it to be true for me at least.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133262",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T15:15:59",
"content": "I love everything Hunter says here! If you replace “engineer” with “hacker”, it’s almost exactly my experience of the world.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133401",
"author": "Hiro Protagonist",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T21:37:28",
"content": "I got into embedded systems because at the time it was one of the few ways to advance a programming career without having to touch Windows.Previously I had been exposed to a lot of stuff including COBOL and Windows CE, neither of which I ever wanted to touch again.I went on to design one of the early Linux based embedded systems – back in the days when management were very wary of things like “open source” and “Linux” instead of a proprietary embedded OS.Nowadays it’s hard to find an embedded system that isn’t Linux.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,532.32181
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/28/invisible-pc-doubles-as-heated-seat/
|
Invisible PC Doubles As Heated Seat
|
Tyler August
|
[
"computer hacks"
] |
[
"chair PC",
"minimalism",
"Office Chair",
"pc"
] |
Some people really want a minimalist setup for their computing. In spite of his potentially worrisome housing situation, this was a priority for the man behind [Basically Homeless]: clean lines on the desk. Where does the PC go? You could get an all-in-one, sure, but those use laptop hardware and he wanted the good stuff. So he decided to hide the PC in the
one place no one would ever think to look: inside his chair.
(Youtube video, embedded below.)
This chair has very respectable specs: a Ryzen 7 9800XD, 64GB of ram and a RTX 4060 GPU, but you’d never know it. The secret is using 50 mm aluminum standoffs between the wooden base of the seat and the chair hardware to create room for low-profile everything. (The GPU is obviously lying sideways and connected with a PCIe riser cable, but even still, it needed a low-profile GPU.) This assemblage is further hidden 3D printed case that makes the fancy chair donated from [Basically Homeless]’s sponsor look basically stock, except for the cables coming out of it. It’s a very niche project, but if you happen to have the right chair, he does
provide STLs on the free tier of his Patreon
.
This is the first time we’ve seen a chair PC, but
desk PCs are something
we’ve covered
more than once
, so there’s obviously a demand to hide the electronics. It remains to be seen if hiding a PC in a chair will catch on, but if nothing else [Basically Homeless] will have a nice heated seat for winter. To bring this project to the next level of minimalism, we might suggest
chording keyboards in the armrests
, and perhaps a
VR headset instead of a monitor
.
| 20
| 8
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133089",
"author": "bill gates",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T23:07:01",
"content": "Great way to keep your balls nice and warm, and get sterile or ball or arse cancer.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133105",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T00:45:01",
"content": "If there was a marketing department for this project, they’d say contraception is a surprise bonus feature, not a bug.",
"parent_id": "8133089",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133136",
"author": "Foobarian",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T04:37:00",
"content": "Because computers put off ionizing radiation?",
"parent_id": "8133089",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133150",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T06:15:20",
"content": "RTX can do antything",
"parent_id": "8133136",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133172",
"author": "Halogenek",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T08:00:58",
"content": "No. Heat can lower your sperm quality. And excessive heating of body parts can cause all sorts of problems. Just look up on phrases starting with “Heat stress induced XXX”",
"parent_id": "8133136",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133210",
"author": "BLMac",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T11:55:14",
"content": "Which is why virile Scots wear kilts :)",
"parent_id": "8133172",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133361",
"author": "tinfish",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T19:38:47",
"content": "Joke’s on you, I don’t have any!",
"parent_id": "8133089",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133373",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T20:06:28",
"content": "Well if you are even remotely considering a heated seat as an option you probably have a really quite cold environment, so frying your own junk shouldn’t be a problem. As that little extra heat really shouldn’t be a problem (within reason anyway) as you’d not want to sit on the chair when you are already rather hot.That said the right way to do this IMO would be to have water cooling pipes through the seat pad and back that are selectively in the loop – its a normal heat the air through the radiators systems that adds in the extra loops only as much as required to hit the desired temperature.",
"parent_id": "8133089",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133093",
"author": "Sven Hapsbjorg",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T23:19:31",
"content": "How stupid. Even during winter* I have to take breaks to let my bum and balls cool down and evaporate sweat. To heat them even more would lead to more sweat, nasty smell and possibly worse.* Unlike Americans who build their homes of cardboard, we continental Europeans have this thing called central heating (and thermal insulation), so 23°C indoors when it’s -18°C outside is totally normal.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133106",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T00:49:09",
"content": "If you’re sweating just sitting down, you really ought to turn down the thermostat. Even us stupid North Americans know to do that when it gets too hot.",
"parent_id": "8133093",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133342",
"author": "Jim Klimov",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T18:36:19",
"content": "You don’t always have an option to. Older radiators might have no controls other than closing the pipe (and it is a very bad practice to keep water valves mid-way, not fully opened or closed).Andcentral heating. Boiler gives say 60 degC, all district or town around it gets that (give or take small losses along the way).",
"parent_id": "8133106",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134344",
"author": "Rudy",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T09:06:01",
"content": "In a lot of countries, you just have a main thermostat, or even thermostat per room that arranges this.In Dutch houses, there were thermostats (like the Honeywell Round) used to fire or not fire the boiler when heat is, or is not needed. Most of the time when some kind of city heating is used, an electric valve is placed at the entry point of the house, so heat can be switched off without touching any radiator control valve.AFAIK they don’t do that in Britain, as they usually just use a timer to switch on or off the (weather controlled) boiler and manage heating or not heating using the radiator valves (correct me if I’m wrong).",
"parent_id": "8133342",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133107",
"author": "Chris J",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T00:52:53",
"content": "Heated seats have been a thing for over 50 years. Almost every car with leather seats has them regardless of country of origin. Some people are never warm enough and some people are always too hot, it’s that way everywhere.",
"parent_id": "8133093",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133317",
"author": "Nate",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T17:35:38",
"content": "Umm… What? Houses in the US are insulated and have central air… Vs the majority of places I’ve stayed in Europe that have those wall mounted air units",
"parent_id": "8133093",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133096",
"author": "steve",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T23:49:13",
"content": "This kinda makes me want to do this to a solar panel with a battery and keep the TDP low enough to survive 24/7 here in Vegas. So maybe 200W on a 550W standard panel? Still, not bad, imagine your entire roof had them, decentralized clouds? Could we subsidize down the solar cost this way?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133111",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T01:40:43",
"content": "For some reason my chair (very similar to that one, actually) is a dust and static electricity magnet. I can’t imagine chair-mounted electronics would last very long here.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133114",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T01:54:42",
"content": "Nothing like wires getting rolled over and caught in the casters. Clean lines, try an Eames chair or something Herman Miller that is minimalist. Those chairs look too dental office with all the levers and doodads. There some impressive desk-computers that have I’ve seen on the Tube or here.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133143",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T05:47:35",
"content": "Instead of twisting the PCIe extension cable, he could have just gone a bit longer to go under the GPU and still have the fans face away. That’s what some small form-factor cases do.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133144",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T05:48:49",
"content": "Using the modular jacks was a nice touch, though.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133200",
"author": "Chacans",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T10:57:51",
"content": "https://media.tenor.com/e8sd8K6TabsAAAAM/egg-boiling.gif",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,532.278096
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/28/from-burnt-to-brilliant-a-toasters-makeover/
|
From Burnt To Brilliant: A Toaster’s Makeover
|
Matt Varian
|
[
"cooking hacks"
] |
[
"reflow oven",
"toaster oven",
"toasters"
] |
Appliances fail, but that doesn’t mean it’s the end for them. This
impressive hack
from [solopilot] shows the results possible when not just fixing but also improving upon its original form. The toaster’s failed function selector switch presented an opportunity to add smart features to the function selection and refine control over its various settings.
Before upgrading the toaster, [solopilot] first had to access its components, which is no trivial task with many modern appliances. Photos document his process of diving into the toaster, exposing all the internals to enable the upgrade. Once everything was accessible, some reverse engineering was required to understand how the failed function selector controlled the half-dozen devices it was wired to.
Next came the plan for the upgrades—a long list that included precise temperature control and the ability to send an SMS showing the state of your meal. A Raspberry Pi Zero, a solid-state relay, a relay control board, and a thermocouple were added to the toaster, unlocking far more capability and control than it had originally. Some tuning is required to fully enable these new features and to dial in the precision this once run-of-the-mill toaster is now capable of.
The work wasn’t limited to the toaster itself. [solopilot] also seized the opportunity to create an Android app with speech recognition to control his now one-of-a-kind Cuisinart. It’s probably safe to say his TOA-60 is currently the smartest toaster in the world. If you check out his documentation, you’ll find all the pinouts, circuits, code, and logic explanations needed to add serious improvements to your own toaster. We’ve featured several other
toaster oven projects
over the years, most of which have focused on turning them into reflow ovens, so it’s exciting to see one aimed at improving upon its original design.
| 26
| 14
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133055",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T20:17:21",
"content": "Howdy-doodly-do, how’s it going?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133058",
"author": "MrFlibble",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T20:44:06",
"content": "How about crumpet?",
"parent_id": "8133055",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133072",
"author": "asheets",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T21:55:28",
"content": "Ah, so you’re a waffle guy!",
"parent_id": "8133055",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133126",
"author": "chango",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T03:38:57",
"content": "I toast. Therefore, I am.",
"parent_id": "8133072",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133223",
"author": "0xdeadbeef",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T13:13:41",
"content": "Something, something, frakking toasters.",
"parent_id": "8133126",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133057",
"author": "m1ke",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T20:40:56",
"content": "“The toaster runs a web server…”This line makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133065",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T21:12:01",
"content": ":) … Me too…. I’ll stick with the dial for timer and let it pop when done, or check, and manually pop if getting to done :) ! No gimmicks. No internet connection, no blue tooth connection. Simple is as simple does :) .But hey, if robotizing your toaster is your game … enjoy!! Next up is add wings and make it a flying toaster. Of wait, M$ did that I think with a screen saver already :) .",
"parent_id": "8133057",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133074",
"author": "Paul A LeBlanc",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T22:06:33",
"content": "Jefferson Airplane did the flying toaster first. Berkely Systems did the screen saver, first for the Mac and then for Windows.It has also been done IRLLhttps://www.flitetest.com/articles/flying-toaster",
"parent_id": "8133065",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133403",
"author": "Lonnie Stoudt",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T21:41:41",
"content": "Thank You…!…Happy SOMEONE remembers the Mac was usually THE groundbreaker for most things the PC gets unearned valor for, until somewhat into the 2000s…",
"parent_id": "8133074",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8134231",
"author": "Desy",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T22:12:05",
"content": "The problem with twist timers is that they can stick before shut down then you may have a nasty fire. Almost happened to me.",
"parent_id": "8133065",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133078",
"author": "Andrea Campanella",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T22:12:51",
"content": "Oh boy, this is going to attract Technology Connection isn’t it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133287",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T16:17:37",
"content": "Whatever you do, don’t say “latent heat of vaporization” three times in a darkened room.",
"parent_id": "8133078",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133366",
"author": "chango",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T19:59:41",
"content": "Heat pump man can’t hurt you. He isn’t real.",
"parent_id": "8133287",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133080",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T22:24:38",
"content": "No cloud based subscription service? That’s just plain baffling. How can it possibly even work?!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133098",
"author": "MadeinOz67",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T00:04:31",
"content": "….thats the kickstarter version…coming soon!",
"parent_id": "8133080",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133084",
"author": "kryten",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T22:47:22",
"content": "Sorry, I’m with Dave on this one:https://youtu.be/LRq_SAuQDec",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133622",
"author": "elmesito",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T13:34:30",
"content": "Well that was no accident, that was first degree toastercide!",
"parent_id": "8133084",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133100",
"author": "JT",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T00:06:46",
"content": "I have this same toaster oven and it failed in the exact same way. Meanwhile my previous one was 25 years old before the element finally gave out….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133128",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T03:46:01",
"content": "With all those mods, I wonder why it didn’t include settings for “reflow”, “sinter”, “pyrolyse”, “incinerate” and “cremate”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133145",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T05:53:07",
"content": "No onboard speaker for voice output? Sorry, but that’s a big fail :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133165",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T07:19:39",
"content": "Once upon a time in a kingdom not far from here:https://www.danielsen.com/jokes/objecttoaster.txt",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133179",
"author": "strawberrymortallyb0bcea48e7",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T08:56:42",
"content": "Toast by color dial please",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133219",
"author": "Beajer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T12:29:00",
"content": "I have a different model, and the selection dial went within a year. Seems like a design flaw putting the electronics above the heating elements. I don’t want a web server, but I should probably fix it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133257",
"author": "DougM",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T15:07:27",
"content": "and a built-in smoke detector",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133286",
"author": "Winston",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T16:13:43",
"content": "The Internet of Things has officially hit peak stupid, courtesy of this smart toasterGriffin Technology wants to sell you on the idea of a smart toaster. We’re increasingly sold on the idea of living on a remote island far away from companies that think slapping Wi-Fi and an LCD on to already-functional kitchen hardware constitutes some meaningful advance in the human condition.January 5, 2017https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/242169-internet-things-officially-hit-peak-stupid-courtesy-smart-toaster-griffin-technologyJust evenly toasting toast should be the goal. I had a friend point out his expensive toaster. It didn’t toast any more evenly than mine which is not horrible, but not perfect. I looked inside his and it had the same crappy, probably Chinese nichrome heating element plate that mine has and every other toaster I’ve seen has.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134872",
"author": "John Ryan",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T17:59:52",
"content": "Consign it to the recycle pile is my advice from experience",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,532.389994
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/28/floss-weekly-episode-834-it-was-cool-in-2006/
|
FLOSS Weekly Episode 834: It Was Cool In 2006
|
Jonathan Bennett
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] |
[
"eBPF",
"FLOSS Weekly",
"high performance computing",
"linux"
] |
This week Jonathan chats with
Ben Meadors
and
Rob Campbell
about the boatload of software Microsoft just released as Open Source! What’s the motivation, why is the new Edit interesting, and what’s up with Copilot? Watch to find out!
https://github.com/microsoft/edit
https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/1
KDE4 on Windows
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
| 2
| 2
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133130",
"author": "Z",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T03:58:45",
"content": "TurboVision-based editors were far better. This is a load of M$ crapware, as usual.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133184",
"author": "Zamorano",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T09:29:32",
"content": "Open source is good PR if you want the techs to love you. And cloud-based services’ PR, I suppose, should naturally target techies and not the end users. Just don’t forget how .Net came about, Microsoft had the intent of building a Java clone that was incompatible with Java and was sued and had to give up on it. At the time it was considered as a move to disrupt Java… I don’t think they are currently doing the same to Linux but you never know. But you said it all: Microsoft wants to be a cloud business and most of the cloud runs on Linux… If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,532.432697
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/28/supercon-2024-using-an-oscilloscope-to-peek-below-the-noise-floor/
|
Supercon 2024: Using An Oscilloscope To Peek Below The Noise Floor
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns"
] |
[
"2024 Hackaday Superconference",
"lock in amplifier",
"noise floor",
"signal to noise",
"signal to noise ratio"
] |
When you’re hunting for a signal with your oscilloscope, the stronger it is, the better. If it’s weak, you might struggle to tease it out from other interference, or even from the noise floor itself. You might wish that you were looking for something more obvious rather than the electromagnetic equivalent of a needle in a haystack.
Finding hidden signals below the noise floor may be a challenge, but it needn’t be an insurmountable one. James Rowley and Mark Omo came to the 2024 Hackaday Superconference to tell us how to achieve this
with the magic of lock-in amplifiers.
Noise
As James explains, you can do lock-in amplification with just about any analog-to-digital converter and DSP that you might have on hand. For example, the oscilloscope you already have in your workshop. “The magic of this technique is taking a noisy signal, just rejecting all the noise, and getting just the part you want—just the signal you’re interested in,” James explains. “It is a very powerful technique for measuring how a signal flows through a system.”
“A lock-in amplifier is a great way… to lock in to those very small signals that can be swamped out by noise and interference, and actually measure signals that are well below the noise floor with a negative signal-to-noise ratio,” says James. “Essentially, what a lock-in amplifier is, is an ultra-narrow bandpass filter.”
A lock-in amplifier is effectively a very strong filter that gets rid of a lot of noise so you can actually find your signal.
In the talk, James uses a simple analogy to explain how this works. He asks the audience to imagine a speaker and a microphone. In this analogy, ideally, the microphone picks up whatever noise the speaker is putting out, but in the real world, there are lots of other noise sources from the environment that can swamp the signal from the speaker itself. However, a lock-in amplifier would be able to reject that other noise, locking in on just the sound from the speaker itself. Lock-in amplifiers apply to all sorts of applications, from picking up extremely sensitive signals from load-cells, to measuring very high or low electrical resistances, and even finding locations of heart catheters during delicate medical operations. Wherever there are tiny important signals that need to be picked up, lock-in amplifiers can probably help.
As with all DSP topics, there is some math involved. Mark explains how the input signal is modulated with a reference signal to help dig out the desired information from the noise.
Mark then walks us through the DSP magic required to actually find signals beneath the noise floor. He explains that by heavily filtering out noise outside the area of interest, it’s possible to effectively increase the signal-to-noise ratio and pick up the desired signal even if it’s quite faint. Traditional filters aren’t quite good enough to reduce the noise by the required amount of 300 times or so, so alternative solutions are needed. To do lock-in amplification, the measured signal is first shifted down to zero hertz, and averaged out over time. It sounds a little funky, but Mark explains the trigonometry and associated math to make it all work for a signal of any given bandwidth. Importantly, though, this technique also needs a reference signal to work, so the amplifier can effectively lock-in on the signal you’re actually looking for.
The practical demonstration involved a microphone trying to pick up a signal from a speaker in a noisy room filled with applause.
The talk then covers the practical—how to build a lock-in amplifier with real hardware. Commercial off-the-shelf options exist, or you could go the discrete analog route—but both are expensive and fussy. Alternatively, you can just use an analog-to-digital converter. “Like the one in your oscilloscope!” notes Mark. He explains how this is set up and how it compares to traditional approaches; basically, it’s more accessible, if not quite as high-performance. You basically end up using one channel as a reference input, while the other channel is hooked up to the signal you’re actually trying to find.
The better the ADC in your oscilloscope, the better it will perform—better bit depth, buffer depth, and sampling rates are all advantageous in this regard. You’re limited by quantization noise and the fact the oscilloscope may not have a particularly low-noise front end, and how much you can average the signal with the oscilloscope’s memory depth, but it’s a workable way to get started with a lock-in amplification setup. As a guide, something like a Rigol DS1054Z has enough memory depth to achieve a 1700x reduction in noise, which helps a great deal when hunting for a signal beneath the typical noise floor.
Code to achieve this is available on Github for the curious.
The talk wraps up with a neat demonstration. A microphone and speaker are set up at a set distance of 8.5 cm, at which point the signal should show a 90-degree change in phase based on the signal being fed through the system. Mark and James show how their system is able to accurately measure the phase shift in the desired signal even in a loud room with a full crowd applauding while the demo runs.
If you regularly find yourself struggling to measure dim signals that you
know
are there, somewhere, you might find these techniques highly useful. This talk serves as a great primer for this very useful DSP technique.
| 7
| 3
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133081",
"author": "Johannes Burgel",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T22:29:12",
"content": "Please stop repeating the “signals below the noise floor” line. It is impossible to reconstruct a signal that’sactuallybelow the noise floor. The microphone analogy explains this quite nicely: The signal only looks drowned if you look at the noise across the whole channel bandwidth. But that’s not what you’re doing when you apply a filter. The bandwidth you’re looking at is now much smaller than the whole channel, because you know where to look and what energy levels to reject. The signal-to-noise ratio suddenly gets much better not because there’s some magic involved, but because he initial perspective was wrong.It’s the same with RF modulations that are regularly claimed to be below the noise floor ( e.g. GPS, WSPR etc.). When you look at the actual bandwidths used, the signal of course has to be at least several times stronger than the noise to still be decodeable.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133086",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T22:53:20",
"content": "That’s all technically correct (and I agree with the outrage), but it doesn’t describe the (common) case where the signal is spread over a channel that’s’ much wider than the actual information bandwidth, as is the case in GPS signals and many other modulation schemes.In the specific case of GPS, the signal occupies a bandwidth of ca. 22 MHz, with all that noise bandwidth, even though the actual information rate is only 50 bits per second. By using a relatively huge bandwidth, the lock-in process can get a nanosecond-accurate estimate of the signal phase and thereby the time of arrival.You couldn’t estimate the phase that accurately if you were just detecting the dozens of Hz wide “signal” bandwidth.The noise in the channel, though, comes from the whole 22 MHz, and the signal very much is dozens of dB below that noise power. You couldnotreceive the signal without receiving all that noise too.In that sense, it’s correct to say the signal is below the noise.",
"parent_id": "8133081",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133124",
"author": "Ray Morris",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T03:14:55",
"content": "I understand what you’re saying.AND, if you were broadcasting a signal on 915 MHz, would you measure the noise on 2.4 GHz? Of course not. You measure the noise at the frequency of the signal.How about if someone was ALSO broadcasting the same signal on 5.8 GHz? Would you measure the noise across 5.8 GHz – 915 MHz = 4.9 GHz? (Clearly not – that makes no sense at all).Importantly, the frequency of the signal, not the frequency of a carrier that someone earlier multiplied with the signal. (Or several such carriers). And most certainly when it’s broadcast on multiple carriers, subtracting the frequencies of the carriers makes no sense at all. Yet …While it’s obvious that a signal on 915 MHz and 5.8 GHz isn’t a 4.9 GHz signal, sometimes our brains get silly if the two carriers are closer together. They are two separate, unrelated carriers if they on 915 and 2400; they are two separate unrelated carriers if they are on 915 and 1200. They’re still two separate carriers if they at 915 Mhz and 1110 Mhz. Or 915 MHz and 918 Mhz.A signal on 915 MHz and on 918 MHz isn’t a 3 MHz wide signal. No more than 915 and 5800 makes a 4900 MHz wide signal.It’s two different carriers, each carrying a signal of maybe 100 Khz width or whatever.",
"parent_id": "8133086",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133125",
"author": "Ray B Morris",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T03:16:31",
"content": "… And so the relevant noise at the noise at that specific frequency.Not everything in between the two separate frequencies.",
"parent_id": "8133124",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133112",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T01:52:08",
"content": "And a tip: If you have a repetitive signal (as generally required by this process) and can get a reliable trigger synchronous to it, you can simplify the process by just telling your ‘scope to collect many averages.This only works well if you have a decent scope that uses enough bits for the averaging arithmetic. Unfortunately the Rigol 1054Z (and its ilk) is broken in that respect, and is useful for only a few averages.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133142",
"author": "Christoph",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T05:32:58",
"content": "So this is like a direct conversion receiver, but using an oscilloscope?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133395",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T21:10:18",
"content": "Sure, more or less. A direct conversion receiver could be considered a type (or part) of a lock-in amplifier, especially if it includes a reference clock and is followed by a DSP.",
"parent_id": "8133142",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,532.47975
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/28/bubble-displays-make-a-neat-retro-clock/
|
Bubble Displays Make A Neat Retro Clock
|
Jenny List
|
[
"classic hacks",
"clock hacks"
] |
[
"bubble display",
"digital clock",
"ESP32"
] |
In 2025 we are spoiled for choice when it comes to displays, with affordable LCDs, OLEDs, TFTs, and e-ink panels of all sizes only a few clicks away. But in decades past, such exotica were not on the menu for casual construction. Instead there were a range of LED seven segment displays which have now largely passed out of use.
Among them were HP’s bubble displays, assemblies of miniature LEDs on a PCB, topped with plastic bubble lenses. If you had a calculator in the 1970s it probably had one, but in the present, [Joshua Coleman]
has incorporated one into a pleasingly retro digital clock
.
Inside the 3D printed case is an ESP32 with a pair of 74HC595 shift registers to drive the display, and an 18650 battery with all associated charging and protection circuitry. It’s a surprisingly simple circuit, and the code is provided on the page. He makes an apology to non-Americans for his use of US date formats, but we think few readers will be unable to change it to reflect
the only date format which really matters
.
If you find a bubble display, hang on to it. They’re certainly
something we’ve seen before here a few times
.
| 6
| 2
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133051",
"author": "DirtyDen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T19:56:29",
"content": "looks like a bomb",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133060",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T20:50:17",
"content": "I get the motivation to show off the bubblicious lenses, but the readability kinda sucks without a filter in front.The young punks here will never know just how unbelievably sexy those displays were in 1975.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133082",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T22:30:32",
"content": "At my age, I have to wonder if the article’s subject is a clock for ants.I have some old industrial equipment sales demonstrator boxes for equipment hour meters or something that have these bubble displays and have been wondering what I should do with them. Making a clock was not anywhere near being on the list of possibilities.",
"parent_id": "8133060",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133091",
"author": "colemanjw2",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T23:15:49",
"content": "old man yells at bubble",
"parent_id": "8133082",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133092",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T23:17:46",
"content": "I have a batch of those displays too. I thought about using some to make a countdown timer art piece, displaying the number of seconds left in my life expectancy. Then I realized I probably would only need nine digits, so I decided to do just about anything else instead…",
"parent_id": "8133082",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133137",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T04:48:16",
"content": "“young punks”.. lol, that’s deep. Like a straight curve.a) because young can’t apply to people born in 19xxb) punks are somewhat of a relic of 19xx",
"parent_id": "8133060",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,532.533435
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/28/remotely-interesting-stream-gages/
|
Remotely Interesting: Stream Gages
|
Dan Maloney
|
[
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Slider"
] |
[
"hydrology",
"infrastructure",
"remote",
"river",
"stream monitoring",
"usgs"
] |
Near my childhood home was a small river. It wasn’t much more than a creek at the best of times, and in dry summers it would sometimes almost dry up completely. But snowmelt revived it each Spring, and the remains of tropical storms in late Summer and early Fall often transformed it into a raging torrent if only briefly before the flood waters receded and the river returned to its lazy ways.
Other than to those of us who used it as a playground, the river seemed of little consequence. But it did matter enough that a mile or so downstream was some sort of instrumentation, obviously meant to monitor the river. It was —
and still is
— visible from the road, a tall corrugated pipe standing next to the river, topped with a box bearing the logo of the US Geological Survey. On occasion, someone would visit and open the box to do mysterious things, which suggested the river was interesting beyond our fishing and adventuring needs.
Although I learned quite early that this device was a streamgage, and that it was part of
a large network
of monitoring instruments the USGS used to monitor the nation’s waterways, it wasn’t until quite recently — OK, this week — that I learned how streamgages work, or how extensive the network is. A lot of effort goes into installing and maintaining this far-flung network, and it’s worth looking at how these instruments work and their impact on everyday life.
Inventing Hydrography
First, to address the elephant in the room, “gage” is a rarely used but accepted alternative spelling of “gauge.” In general, gage tends to be used in technical contexts, which certainly seems to be the case here, as opposed to a non-technical context such as “A gauge of public opinion.” Moreover, the USGS itself uses that spelling, for interesting historical reasons that they’ve apparently had to address often enough that they wrote
an FAQ
on the subject. So I’ll stick with the USGS terminology in this article, even if I really don’t like it that much.
With that out of the way, the USGS has a long history of monitoring the nation’s rivers. The first streamgaging station was established in 1889 along the Rio Grande River at a railroad station in Embudo, New Mexico. Measurements were entirely manual in those days, performed by crews trained on-site in the nascent field of hydrography. Many of the tools and methods that would be used through the rest of the 19th century to measure the flow of rivers throughout the West and later the rest of the nation were invented at Embudo.
Then as now, river monitoring boils down to one critical measurement: discharge rate, or the volume of water passing a certain point in a fixed amount of time. In the US, discharge rate is measured in cubic feet per second, or cfs. The range over which discharge rate is measured can be huge, from streams that trickle a few dozen cubic feet of water every second to the over one million cfs discharge routinely measured
at the mouth of the mighty Mississippi
each Spring.
Measurements over such a wide dynamic range would seem to be an engineering challenge, but hydrographers have simplified the problem by cheating a little. While volumetric flow in a closed container like a pipe is relatively easy — flowmeters using paddlewheels or turbines are commonly used for such a task — direct measurement of flow rates in natural watercourses is much harder, especially in navigable rivers where such measuring instruments would pose a hazard to navigation. Instead, the USGS calculates the discharge rate indirectly using stream height, often referred to as flood stage.
Beside Still Waters
Schematic of a USGS stilling well. The water level in the well tracks the height of the stream, with a bit of lag. The height of the water column in the well is easier to read than the surface of the river. Source: USGS, public domain.
The height of a river at any given point is much easier to measure, with the bonus that the tools used for this task lend themselves to continuous measurements. Stream height is the primary data point of each streamgage in the USGS network, which uses several different techniques based on the specific requirements of each site.
A float-tape gage, with a counterweighted float attached to an encoder by a stainless steel tape. The encoder sends the height of the water column in the stilling well to the data logger. Source:
USGS
, public domain.
The most common is based on a stilling well. Stilling wells are vertical shafts dug into the bank adjacent to a river. The well is generally large enough for a technician to enter, and is typically lined with either concrete or steel conduit, such as the streamgage described earlier. The bottom of the shaft, which is also lined with an impervious material such as concrete, lies below the bottom of the river bed, while the height of the well is determined by the highest expected flood stage for the river. The lumen of the well is connected to the river via a pair of pipes, which terminate in the water above the surface of the riverbed. Water fills the well via these input pipes, with the level inside the well matching the level of the water in the river.
As the name implies, the stilling well performs the important job of damping any turbulence in the river, allowing for a stable column of water whose height can be easily measured. Most stilling wells measure the height of the water column with a float connected to a shaft encoder by a counterweighted stainless steel tape. Other stilling wells are measured using ultrasonic transducers, radar, or even lidar scanners located in the instrument shelter on the top of the well, which translate time-of-flight to the height of the water column.
While stilling well gages are cheap and effective, they are not without their problems. Chief among these is dealing with silt and debris. Even though intakes are placed above the bottom of the river, silt enters the stilling well and settles into the sump. This necessitates frequent maintenance, usually by flushing the sump and the intake lines using water from a flushing tank located within the stilling well. In rivers with a particularly high silt load, there may be a silt trap between the intakes and the stilling well. Essentially a concrete box with a series of vertical baffles, the silt trap allows silt to settle out of the river water before it enters the stilling well, and must be cleaned out periodically.
Bubbles, Bubbles
Bubble gages often live on pilings or other structures within the watercourse.
Making up for some of the deficiencies of the stilling well is the bubble gage, which measures river stage using gas pressure. A bubble gage typically consists of a small air pump or gas cylinders inside the instrument shelter, plumbed to a pipe that comes out below the surface of the river. As with stilling wells, the tube is fixed at a known point relative to a datum, which is the reference height for that station. The end of the pipe in the water has an orifice of known size, while the supply side has regulators and valves to control the flow of gas. River stage can be measured by sensing the gas pressure in the system, which will increase as the water column above the orifice gets higher.
Bubble gages have a distinct advantage over stilling wells in rivers with a high silt load, since the positive pressure through the orifice tends to keep silt out of the works. However, bubble gages tend to need a steady supply of electricity to power their air pump continuously, or for gages using bottled gas, frequent site visits for replenishment. Also, the pipe run to the orifice needs to be kept fairly short, meaning that bubble gage instrument shelters are often located on pilings within the river course or on bridge abutments, which can make maintenance tricky and pose a hazard to navigation.
While bubble gages and stilling wells are the two main types of gaging stations for fixed installations, the USGS also maintains a selection of temporary gaging instruments for tactical use, often for response to natural disasters. These Rapid Deployment Gages (RDGs) are compact units designed to affix to the rail of a bridge or some other structure across the river. Most RDGs use radar to sense the water level, but some use sonar.
Go With the Flow
No matter what method is used to determine the stage of a river, calculating the discharge rate is the next step. To do that, hydrographers have to head to the field and make flow measurements. By measuring the flow rates at intervals across the river, preferably as close as possible to the gaging station, the total flow through the channel at that point can be estimated, and a calibration curve relating flow rate to stage can be developed. The discharge rate can then be estimated from just the stage reading.
Flow readings are taken using a variety of tools, depending on the size of the river and the speed of the current. Current meters with bucket wheels can be lowered into a river on a pole; the flow rotates the bucket wheel and closes electrical contacts that can be counted on an electromagnetic totalizer. More recently, Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers (ADCPs) have come into use. These use ultrasound to measure the velocity of particulates in the water by their Doppler shift.
Crews can survey the entire width of a small stream by wading, from boats, or by making measurements from a convenient bridge. In some remote locations where the river is especially swift, the USGS may erect a cableway across the river, so that measurements can be taken at intervals from a cable car.
Nice work if you can get it. USGS crew making flow measurements from a cableway over the American River in California using an Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler. Source:
USGS
, public domain.
From Paper to Satellites
In the earliest days of streamgaging, recording data was strictly a pen-on-paper process. Station log books were updated by hydrographers for every observation, with results transmitted by mail or telegraph. Later, stations were equipped with paper chart recorders using a long-duration clockwork mechanism. The pen on the chart recorder was mechanically linked to the float in a stilling well, deflecting it as the river stage changed and leaving a record on the chart. Electrical chart recorders came next, with the position of the pen changing based on the voltage through a potentiometer linked to the float.
Chart recorders, while reliable, have the twin disadvantages of needing a site visit to retrieve the data and requiring a tedious manual transcription of the chart data to tabular form. To solve the latter problem, analog-digital recorders (ADRs) were introduced in the 1960s. These recorded stage data on paper tape as four binary-coded decimal (BCD) digits. The time of each stage reading was inferred from its position on the tape, given a known starting time and reading interval. Tapes still had to be retrieved from each station, but at least reading the data back at the office could be automated with a paper tape reader.
In the 1980s and 1990s, gaging stations were upgraded to electronic data loggers, with small solar panels and batteries where grid power wasn’t available. Data was stored locally in the logger between maintenance visits by a hydrographer, who would download the data. Alternately, gaging stations located close to public rights of way sometimes had leased telephone lines for transmitting data at intervals via modem. Later, gaging stations started sprouting cross-polarized Yagi antennas, aimed at one of the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES). Initially, gaging stations used one of the GOES low data rate telemetry channels with a 100 to 300 bps connection. This gave hydrologists near-real-time access to gaging data for the first time. Since 2013, all stations have been upgraded to a high data rate channel that allows up to 1,200 bps telemetry.
Currently, gage data is collected every 15 minutes normally, although the interval can be increased to every 5 minutes at times of peak flow. Data is buffered locally before a GOES uplink, which is about every hour or so, or as often as every 15 minutes in peak flow or emergencies. The uplink frequencies and intervals are very well documented on the USGS site, so you can easily pick them up with an SDR, and you can see if the creek is rising from the comfort of your own shack.
| 32
| 16
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8132951",
"author": "DougM",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T14:37:57",
"content": "Thank you for this, I’ve often wondered exactly how the data was captured. As a whitewater kayaker I checked the CFS on the river before heading out and there are wonderful prediction sites that will tell you how high the water is going to go in the near future. Great if you like watching huge flow over nearby waterfalls after a big rain. (the river peaks more or less 24 hours after the rain event)My dad, who was a rafter, used river height. So it was hard for us to explain to each-other what a given river was doing :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132962",
"author": "Maria",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T14:53:06",
"content": "If you want to hate on people then go to EEVblog.com and mingle with their nahzee-supporting admin, here we do not tolerate such behavior.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132974",
"author": "Steven-X",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T15:09:29",
"content": "They have a nifty store!https://www.teepublic.com/stores/eevblog?ref_id=37825&utm_campaign=37825&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=EEVblog%2BMerch%2BStoreBy the way, was “nahzee-supporting admin” a term learned in a Gender Studies class? I always considered this a technology website, so he we should tolerate that sort of behavior.",
"parent_id": "8132962",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133006",
"author": "n",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T16:30:30",
"content": "You are deranged.",
"parent_id": "8132962",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133038",
"author": "Thomas",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T18:14:39",
"content": "Can you please explain whom specifically you refer to and why you consider them “nahzee” supporting?",
"parent_id": "8132962",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132965",
"author": "Beowulf Shaeffer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T14:53:59",
"content": "Interesting. We had several of these gages in the town where I grew up, and while I frequently saw people opening the gages, I’d always wondered why the biggest gage had a small cableway and gondola erected next to it. Makes a lot more sense than my working theory that there was more instrumentation across the river, where there wasn’t easy road access.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132970",
"author": "Beowulf Shaeffer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T14:59:40",
"content": "“An ‘eff’-‘ayy’-‘queue.'” as opposed to “‘Uh’-‘eff’-‘ayy’-‘queue.'”Makes more sense if you say it out loud (if you’ll forgive my choice in phonetic representation).Now, if it had been “an frequently asked questions,” then it would be the grammatically incorrect kind of snobbishness rooted in aping the French.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133008",
"author": "n",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T16:32:10",
"content": "I bet you pronounce gif as jiff, too.",
"parent_id": "8132970",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133034",
"author": "eriklscott",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T18:10:06",
"content": "gif’s own inventor said it was pronounced like the US peanut butter brand – soft “g”, like “jihad”.",
"parent_id": "8133008",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132975",
"author": "Snarkenstein",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T15:10:33",
"content": "Deeeeeeeecaf!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132979",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T15:15:17",
"content": "You are welcome to be wrong but you are wrong",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133003",
"author": "alloydog",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T16:10:59",
"content": "Intersting read, especially some of the water height measurement methods were new to me and I’ve been in the business for about 13-years :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133018",
"author": "Nathan Bowman",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T17:16:45",
"content": "As the guy that is responsible for monitoring and maintaining a BUNCH of these sites – you’re exactly right about the pros/cons of each type of well and the recovery of data.Happy to answer any other questions you may not have found the information for – the only thing I’ll add off the top is that bubblers require regular calibration based on manual measurements, because they’ll frequently drift over time. We visit our highest priority sites 2x a week to ensure they’re calibrated correctly, and we’re measuring down to 0.01′ accuracy/resolution (about 3.4mm).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133050",
"author": "Gardoni",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T19:46:27",
"content": "Why not use metric system? It’s better suited for scientific measurements and calibrated equipment.",
"parent_id": "8133018",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133333",
"author": "Nathan Bowman",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T18:24:17",
"content": "Because USGS standard is decimal feet – so whatever they use is what we (environmental consulting firm) have to use. Otherwise yeah, that would be way more appropriate.",
"parent_id": "8133050",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133529",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T08:09:33",
"content": "Decimal feet is the standard fitted US civil engineering, that’s not going to change because it’s tied to literally every road, bridge and building in the country. It’s a simple consequence of how standardisation worked out. Notably USGS doesn’t use it when they don’t have to.",
"parent_id": "8133050",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133056",
"author": "Matthias",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T20:20:10",
"content": "The article mentions a short pipe length and a known size orifice. This implies measurements while air flow is present. One could also give a short blow into the pipe just before measuring, eliminating the flow mechanics of the pipe and the orifice (as long as it is pointed downwards). What are the problems with this method?For the drift I assume, the combination of ruggedness and precision doesn’t allow for “common” pressure sensors like in cheap blood pressure displays which can go without calibration for longer periods of time. What kind of pressure sensors are used here, and are the deviations more of a back-and-forth motion, or keep the values wandering away with age?",
"parent_id": "8133018",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133335",
"author": "Nathan Bowman",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T18:31:15",
"content": "It’s mostly to do with real-world things like ice, bugs, mud, etc – stuff that gets into the pipe (also, not really a pipe, more of a 1/4″ ID vinyl tube in a lot of cases). We constantly purge the lines, both manually and automatically, to try to keep them clear. We keep our lines within ~20′ or so, so there’s more flexibility in a lot of cases than the article makes it sound.That’s also the reason for the drift in terms of bubbler lines – stuff gets in them, they get jostled around by us/weather/bugs/water itself, and the sensors are so incredibly sensitive that it will change the reading the bubbler is getting. It’s not like the sensor itself is drifting, so much as it’s deployed in some really dynamic environments and there isn’t a good way to eliminate that dynamicity, even with a stilling well.I’m not sure what the exact part# is for the pressure sensors, but I’ve got over 100 of the Solinst LevelLoggers deployed on my sites, mostly in groundwater wells, but also in some surfacewater sites. While we don’t necessarily pay sticker price, they can run between $700-$1,700 a pop, and run unattended/unpowered for years. The manufacturer says they last at least 10 years, but I’ve got some that have been out for 17 and are still going strong – that’s got to be impressive!",
"parent_id": "8133056",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133600",
"author": "Matthias",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T12:21:42",
"content": "Thanks for the details, I wouldn’t have guessed that the pipes/tubes are cause of the drift (I know an installation on a small hydropower plant, the owner used a compressor, a differential pressure sensor from an old washing machine and the smallest standard copper tube available to trigger the rinsing of the …. Rechenanlage — my dictionary trolls me and translates that to “computer”, no other options; I mean the grill fishing out the leaves and bottles. Open the valve for some seconds, then wait some seconds, then start the cleaning if there is a measurable difference before and after the Rechen. He never had any problems with that, but compared to a station in the wild giving absolute values this is just a quick and dirty hack).For the pressure sensors used, I’m not close enough to the topic to know part numbers or brand names and their reputation :( but I guessed there might be a special measurement principle with interesting advantages and disadvantages, partly because I falsely attributed the drift to the sensor instead of the tube.",
"parent_id": "8133335",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133935",
"author": "Sven Hapsbjorg",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T14:37:19",
"content": "If insects are an issue then why have you not considered hanging some flypaper around sensors? A single roll of flypaper can be had on Aliexpress for like $0.45 USD. I find it dubious that richest country on earth would not be able to afford simple piece of sticky paper to catch flies, which is commonly used everywhere, even in Russia, China or Uganda.",
"parent_id": "8133335",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134134",
"author": "Matthias",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T10:42:29",
"content": "it would be under water or inside the tubeit or the insects stuck on it would block the tubeone would have to change it dailyit would (potentially) release chemicals into the environmentit would put a constant load on the local insects population",
"parent_id": "8133935",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133021",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T17:28:33",
"content": "Seems entirely natural to me.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133037",
"author": "eriklscott",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T18:12:58",
"content": "“An historic” is an acceptable alternative in the US and accepted in the UK. We’ll have to get a ruling from the MLA on a/an FAQ… I could see that one either way.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133041",
"author": "eriklscott",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T18:23:05",
"content": "Very well done – I used to work on building some of these for researchers. I kept wanting to chime in with “but there’s… THIS!” except every time I thought that, it would be in the next paragraph.But there’s this! Another measurement method is capacitive:http://www.geoscientific.com/dataloggers/AquaRod_Freeze_Tolerant_Water_Level_Recorder.htmlThe precision was nice when we didn’t need a lot of measurement range – i.e., not a great choice for flood monitoring down where we were but so sensitive we could just about measure wind speed with it.And if your ultrasonic sounder goes bananas, clean the spiderwebs out. So many spiderwebs. :-)GOES is not the only game in town for relaying data. Many, many gages transmit their data over VHF radio using the ALERT or ALERT2 protocols. By now, everyone may have made the switch to ALERT2 since it gives higher capacity and better weak signal performance.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133116",
"author": "eriklscott",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T02:17:29",
"content": "And… I’m old and I forget stuff now. ALERT/ALERT2 is used for RAIN gauges, not stream gages.",
"parent_id": "8133041",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134230",
"author": "Deacon Mckay",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T21:54:58",
"content": "ALERT can certainly transmit water level data, as well as wind speed and direction if need be. And Alert 2 only improves on its ability to do so. The ELPRO units I service as a hydrographer historically can accept quadrature rotary encoders and 4-20mA signals. The old ALERT units have a limitation that the data is transmitted as a 8 bit sensor address then a 8bit data packet which is modulated and transmitted at 300baud. This means the range of the sensor needs to be split into 2047 units then decoded at the other end with a computer. Typically this results in 4 significant figures of data so xx.xxm or x.xxxm. The system is usually set to transmit on a change of 10 or 20 mm for flood monitoring purposes. The ALERT protocol means that a single site may have 3 or so data address as each variable it transmits needs a unique address. So battery might be 1000, rainfall 1001 and stage 1002 ect.Alert 2 is a significant improvement as the equipment is much newer, transmits at a faster baud rate, reads sdi12 sensors, transmits in SI units and has a single data address for each site. It can send a single message that has all the variables the site can monitor and can transmit arbitrarily long messages depending on how many variables your sdi12 sensor produces.",
"parent_id": "8133116",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133045",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T19:05:37",
"content": "Wonder if it is possible to intercept and decode the signal from these with a ham rig so I can tell if there’s water in the creek to swim in before I hike down there. There’s a web portal for the system, but it is terrible and unreliable",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133443",
"author": "D",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T01:07:58",
"content": "I find the web portal good and quite reliable, and improving as well.I visit this site almost daily in the winter time.https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/11173200/#dataTypeId=continuous-00065-0&period=P7D",
"parent_id": "8133045",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133235",
"author": "Luddita",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T13:51:06",
"content": "Thank you, very interesting topic and well-written article.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133698",
"author": "dot-bob",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T18:27:59",
"content": "This article brings back some good memories back when I worked as a design engineer for a company that designed and manufactured products used in stream gauging and water monitoring.I was the lead design engineer and work on both a GOES DCS transmitter design and Bubbler with an integrated pressure transducer.Data telemetry through GOES is very popular at the time due to little to no reoccurring data service costs. The big caveat was you need to be a government entity or sponsored by one to be assigned an GOES ID.At the time 100bps using BPSK modulation still was widely used and being migrated to 300bps which uses QPSK modulation. Eventually all the 100bps sites were migrated and 300 bps and 1200bps channels were split into two 300bps channels with the V2 spec. Interestingly the main difference with V2 was just a tighter filtering of the side lobes.The 1200bps assignments were available but were difficult to get and primary were assigned to NOAA affiliated sites. It sounds like this has loosened up.The transmitter that we designed was a SDR modulator made by Intersil. I ended up adding support for other satellite protocols (EUMETSAT, INSAT) and were working towards others before the company was bought and subsequently shut down.At the time I was big into exploring the backcountry and one weekend I was bored, so I wrote a firmware for the goes transmitter to act as a GPS tracker so my wife could keep track of me when I was off in the wilderness. Basically, the firmware would transmit my obfuscated location every 500ft of movement to the GOES WEST satellite on the random test channel. It allowed wife to get a trail of breadcrumbs of where I was and if I was still moving.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134547",
"author": "Ditch Walker",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T20:49:33",
"content": "The city of Austin Texas uses a combination of radar, bubblers and transducers to record stream depth. Out of all them the radars are probably the easiest to install and maintain. The transducers, either a Pressure Level Sensor (PLS) or Pressure Level Transducer (PLT) use a little ceramic disk to measure water pressure and translate that to depth, the hardest part is pulling the their thick cables through conduit without damaging them. The bubblers are a trial and usually take a few days with cement anchor bolts and a portable hammer drill.Most of the modeling and monitoring software we use feeds depth data through a formula to calculate flow rate based on the shape of the creek at the measurement site; called a rating curve. That data gets fed to a Common Operating Picture (COP) which also pulls from weather forecast data to let us make short-term predictions on which watersheds are likely to flood in a rain event. The COP also pulls USGS data as well.The utility company’s Hydromet page does a good job of displaying a lot of this data without getting into the watershed modeling end of things.https://hydromet.lcra.org/coa#",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135261",
"author": "Joseph C Hopfield",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T16:11:41",
"content": "The US-Euro SWOT satellite uses ka band radar to get super accurate elevation data for bodies of water of all kinds over the whole globe. Average return times are 21 days (so not real-time) but likely to be more accurate than typical physical gauges once fully calibrated (because of geoid).https://swot.jpl.nasa.gov/Also, a lot of gauges are also recording temperature, oxygen, salinity, ph…I bet old-time hydro folks got useful observations when they physically visited.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,532.613008
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/27/fixing-a-fatal-genetic-defect-in-babies-with-a-bit-of-genetic-modification/
|
Fixing A Fatal Genetic Defect In Babies With A Bit Of Genetic Modification
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"Science"
] |
[
"ammonia",
"CRISPR",
"CRISPR CaS9",
"urea"
] |
Genetic defects are exceedingly common, which is not surprising considering just how many cells make up our bodies, including our reproductive cells. While most of these defects have no or only minor effects, some range from serious to fatal. One of these defects is in the CPS1 gene, with those affected facing a shortened lifespan along with intensive treatments and a liver transplant as the only real solution. This may now be changing, after
the first successful genetic treatment
of an infant with CPS1 deficiency.
Carbamoyl phosphate synthetase I (
CPS1
) is an enzyme that is crucial for breaking down the ammonia that is formed when proteins are broken down. If the body doesn’t produce enough of this enzyme in the liver, ammonia will accumulate in the blood, eventually reaching levels where it will affect primarily the nervous system. As an autosomal recessive metabolic disorder it requires both parents to be carriers, with the severity depending on the exact mutation.
In the case of the affected infant, KJ Muldoon, the CPS1 deficiency was severe with only a low-protein diet and ammonia-lowering (nitrogen scavenging) medication keeping the child alive while a search for a donor liver had begun. It is in this context that in a few months time a CRISPR-Cas9 therapy was developed that so far appears to fixing the faulty genes in the liver cells.
CPS1 Gene Deficiency
The urea cycle. (Credit: Yikrazuul,
Wikimedia
)
Despite its toxicity to living beings,
ammonia
(NH
3
) is an essential part of these same living beings, primarily in the form of
amines
(R-NH
2
), itself a rather indispensable part of amino acids, specifically the 22
proteinogenic amino acids
from which proteins are formed. Just as ammonia is required for the amination process, so too is ammonia formed inside the body mostly as the result of
transamination
and
deamination
of these biogenic amines. This is a process that takes place primarily in the liver and involves the deamination of both the body’s own waste proteins as well as those from one’s diet.
Since only part of the ammonia can be reused for new amino acids, the rest has to be neutralized. Due to the toxicity of ammonia, blood levels have to be limited to <50 µmol/L or
hyperammonemia
will occur. This is where the
urea cycle
comes into play to maintain a healthy ammonia level.
The very first step of the urea cycle is the conversion of ammonia to carbamoyl phosphate:
NH
3
+
HCO
−
3
+ 2
ATP
→ 2ADP + Carbamoyl phosphate + P
i
Normally this is a very slow reaction, which is where the enzyme CSP1 comes into play as catalyst. In humans the gene for this enzyme is located on chromosome 2’s long arm, at locus 2q34. If there is a mutation in this gene that prevents it from working as a catalyst, ammonia levels in blood plasma will keep rising, eventually reaching levels where the nervous system is affected. In infants this is noticeable as lethargy, seizures and a lack of normal developmental milestones. Without treatment, developmental delay, intellectual disability or death affect 50% of babies.
Undoing A Mutation
When KJ was born on August 2024, it was noticed that he was lethargic, with stiff muscles and other worrisome symptoms. After a severe CPS1 deficiency was diagnosed via genome sequencing, KJ was hospitalized at only five months old. KJ’s only hope appeared to be a liver transplant and was put on the list for a donor organ, providing a slim hope at best. Meanwhile, a team of researchers started researching the cause of KJ’s CPS1 deficiency and the mutations behind it.
As
described by Dr. Eric Topol
in his summary of the (paywalled)
paper by Gropman et al.
in
NEJM
, both the father and mother were found to be carriers for CPS1 mutations, with the father carrying the truncating Q335X variant and the mother another (E714X). If either mutation could be corrected, the child would have one functional copy and theoretically be able to produce enough CPS1 to have a functional urea cycle without external assistance.
A complicating issue here is that despite the many reports of gene-editing with CRISPR the past years, there are various gradations, with what Dr. Topol refers to as CRISPR 1.0 through 3.0:
CRISPR 1.0: A CRISPR-Cas9 tool causes sufficient double-strand damage to disable the gene (knock-out). Crude and not relevant here. Also performed
ex vivo
.
CRISPR 2.0: Introduced single-strand cuts that allow for limited base editing, e.g. swapping A for a G.
CRISPR 3.0. Expands base editing to include multiple base pairs, both
ex vivo
and
in vivo
.
These methods have previously already been used
ex vivo
to create
modified T-cells for CAR T-cell immunotherapy
in the context of cancer treatments. In terms of
in vivo
treatments, there is the 2023 knocking out of
PCSK9 liver protein
to reduce bad cholesterol levels and the more recent base editing of the
PiZ mutation
responsible for liver and lung damage. There’s also
ARCUS
, which is a viral vector-based method of base editing that has seen use in fixing another urea cycle-related disorder.
Although only CRISPR 2.0 was needed here, what was unique in the case of KJ was that this would be the first fully personalized base editing therapy, applied
in vivo
and developed within the span of a mere six months.
Crossing All The Ts
K-abe base editor bound to target sequence of CPS1 (Credit:
Gropman et al.
NEJM, 2025)
With how experimental this gene therapy for KJ’s CPS1 disorder was, the researchers had to go through the entire gamut of tests, including on animal models. With a base editor developed to target the father’s Q335X mutation and rewrite it to the correct base pairs, mice were bred that had the same CSP1 mutation, in addition to testing on non-human primates, all to validate the approach and gain FDA approval.
The base editor’s goal was to rewrite the the wrong bases at the Q335X location on locus 2q34. A concern with any application of CRISPR is so-called off-target edits, but the safety review seems to have passed here without serious issues.
Starting with a very low dose, blood plasma ammonia levels were carefully monitored with no noticeable changes. Three weeks later the second, higher dose was injected, with reportedly positive effects on the ammonia levels. A third dose was injected a while later, though the results of this aren’t know yet. In the absence of a liver biopsy it is hard to say in how far this is a true cure, as reported so far is a reduced need for medications.
Per reports, KJ is however doing better, hitting developmental targets and got over two viral infections, without an ammonia crisis. Further injections of the treatment will likely administered with an mRNA approach rather than the (presumed) virus vector used so far due to immunity concerns with a virus vector. Open questions remain regarding how many cells have been truly edited in KJ’s liver and what the overall effectiveness is.
This leads us to cautiously welcome this news as a step forward in personalized gene-therapy, while realizing that the road ahead for both KJ and the rest of us is still full of unknowns and challenges. That said, one can only hope for KJ’s best possible progress and ideally serving as a beacon of hope for others afflicted by genetic disorders like CPS1 deficiency.
Featured image: “
CRISPR Cas9
” by Ernesto del Aguila III, NHGRI, Courtesy:
National Human Genome Research Institute
| 30
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8132685",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T17:14:26",
"content": "Amazing thing is the whole organism works as well and long as it does with as few problems.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132715",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T19:33:54",
"content": "With the complexity of the human organism the amazing thing is not how many people are sick but how few.",
"parent_id": "8132685",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132734",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T20:29:06",
"content": "That’s what millions of years of evolution will do for you.And now that we intervene so nature isn’t killing our defectives as efficiently as it used to, we look upon technological solutions to restore broken ones to working order.",
"parent_id": "8132685",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132754",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T21:48:48",
"content": "billionsof years of evolution*",
"parent_id": "8132734",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133281",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T16:08:56",
"content": "If we can use technology to allow our “defectives” to live full and happy lives they are not “defective”. Our brains are a part of our evolution too.",
"parent_id": "8132734",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132843",
"author": "Richard",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T08:04:21",
"content": "Wait till you get older. Also, before science, we were considered old if we got to 40. A few did live till older but nothing like we do now. Again, science did this. Life is just one big hack-a-day experiment. :D",
"parent_id": "8132685",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132860",
"author": "Peter",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T09:08:19",
"content": "No thats a myth from misunderstanding statistics. Infant mortality was very high this cut average lifespans so low as 40ish but thats average for whole population where a lot of children didn’t survived infancy and toddler time to the point where some cultures waited with naming children till they are past that most dangerous age. Once you where past infancy and childhood into your teens you had good chance to live to about 60-70. Another thing cutting lifespans of women was childbirth once you where after your child bearing years it then good chance hitting up till low 70ties. 40 wasn’t considered old especially for men, 50+ was.",
"parent_id": "8132843",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132933",
"author": "Justin",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T13:11:39",
"content": "Right. Getting old was the same back then. Getting TO old age was the hard part. Lots more things could kill you back then.",
"parent_id": "8132860",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133046",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T19:09:27",
"content": "Also, before science, we were considered old if we got to 40The redditoid conception of “science” held by people like you is actually harmful to science.",
"parent_id": "8132843",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132693",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T17:53:44",
"content": "I’m amazed they were able to do all the animal trials in this short time span.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132695",
"author": "Shoe",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T17:57:18",
"content": "I’d bet they already had as much in place as possible, the ethics committee were on alert, and they were just waiting for an eligible patient. Either that or they’re the most efficient research department in history.Interesting times, this could be a really awesome technology, and also a really awful one.",
"parent_id": "8132693",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132701",
"author": "dahud",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T18:29:04",
"content": "That kind of makes me worried about the at-scale viability of this personal gene-editing. Since every patient will be the first and only recipient of a newly-developed drug, regulators would presumably insist on a full round of animal testing – as well they should, considering the repercussions of a gene-edit gone bad.Does that mean we’ll have to set up mass-manufacture of bespoke model mice, one batch per patient? Entire zoos of primates dedicated to toxicity tests? My imagination veers into absurdity here, but I don’t see another way to safely handle these treatments at scale.",
"parent_id": "8132693",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132705",
"author": "Bleaker Beaker",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T18:40:00",
"content": "Unfortunately I don’t think you’re being absurd. I think that’s pretty likely, considering how many animals are killed for meat consumption, the only thing stopping society from doing this is the technological hurdles. :(",
"parent_id": "8132701",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132745",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T21:05:54",
"content": "This isn’t the first human trial of CRISPR based gene editing, it’s building on a body of work.",
"parent_id": "8132693",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132989",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T15:26:54",
"content": "That’s because–as usual–they didn’t",
"parent_id": "8132693",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133537",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T08:34:08",
"content": "No, they did, this isn’t actually “new” per-say and the animal testing has been going on for years.",
"parent_id": "8132989",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132714",
"author": "Carl Vehse",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T19:25:32",
"content": "Even if this treatment is successful in the long term, the person’s germ cells may still contain the defective gene, which could be passed on to any progeny.If genetic modification methods which are developed to fix this and other fatal genetic defects do not also fix the fatal genetic defect in germ cells, the fatal defects will then be passed on to successive generations.This would likely lead to more and more individuals requiring genetic defect treatments in order to survive to adulthood.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132716",
"author": "Actually...",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T19:38:42",
"content": "Their germ cells will definitely still contain the defective genes. Germline editing is banned in the US, where the patient is from and was treated, as well as in many other countries.Her treatment was not systemic, it was targeted, They used lipid nanoparticles to transport the viral vector to the liver where it was released when the liver broke down the lipid shell.In this case the condition was an issue of a maternal genetic mutation AND a paternal genetic mutation, the absence of either would not have resulted in the condition manifesting. SO unless this childs grows up and marries someone with either her mother or her fathers mutation, or some other comparable mutation her offspring would not be at risk of anything more than carrying the potential risk along.",
"parent_id": "8132714",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132718",
"author": "Actually...",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T19:44:02",
"content": "Change all she and hers to he and hims. My wife died in 2019 of the same cancer that Crispr cured in Emma Dimery in 2023 so in reading about Crispr research again, projection caused me to misgender this patient. My bad",
"parent_id": "8132716",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132719",
"author": "Shoe",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T19:49:06",
"content": "I think the other issue is not knowing that you’re a carrier of the defective gene until after the child is born. Once you know you have it, it is possible and legal in some countries under some conditions to pre-screen embryos to select out that trait. At a quick look, the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority allows screening for hyperammonemia from a different genetic defect, so it doesn’t seem unreasonable that they might permit it for this one, too. CRISPR is more for people conceived before you know there is a genetic risk.",
"parent_id": "8132716",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133538",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T08:39:57",
"content": "Screening is not modification. That screening is defined to check the viability of a fetish when there is reason to suspect a problem and it’s also done in the US. The major difference is that in the US the parents opt to bring a nearly brain dead child to term, then sue the hospital (even though they were warned) then get a large settlement. This is frequent enough someone I know left the field out of frustration after providing expert testimony in many cases.",
"parent_id": "8132719",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133349",
"author": "Carl Vehse",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T19:08:05",
"content": "And if genetic modification treatments continue to correct such recessive genes without altering germ cells, the probability of a couple both having the same recessive gene causing a fatal defect can only increase.In the future, should couples have germ cell DNA tests done to see if they have identical recessive genes? Should it be while they are dating before they get serious? Before they are married? Before they decide on having children?Or, on finding their unborn child has a fatal genetic defect, do they just butcher the kid in the womb, or spend the time and expense to have the child born and see if genetic modification will correct the problem (while leaving the same problem they faced for their child when grown up)?",
"parent_id": "8132716",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133540",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T08:43:22",
"content": "This kind of screening is already common and sadly people frequently elect to have the child anyway, even if they have been informed they will be crippled. That’s what you get when people value birth over life.",
"parent_id": "8133349",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132848",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T08:16:33",
"content": "It’s probably preferable to be alive and abstain from having biological children, compared to dying. Especially for men, having your child conceived through the use of donated sperm shouldn’t really be that huge of an issue.",
"parent_id": "8132714",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132929",
"author": "TDT",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T13:06:42",
"content": "As a man, I’m sorry, but I want my children to carry both my genetic code, and the one of my wife.I don’t wee why it “shouldn’t really be that huge of an issue” for the men to stop passing their genetic code.If you really want to edit code, just do in vitro fecundation and correct only the lethal mutation in the sperm, that way, (almost all) your genetic code is passed, and your child is healthy.Eugenics shouldn’t come with complete loss of your code.",
"parent_id": "8132848",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132993",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T15:32:34",
"content": "It shouldn’t but unfortunately real life doesn’t conform to your moral expectations. Life is still statistically much worse for non-biological children. The blood still somehow knows.",
"parent_id": "8132848",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132990",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T15:29:06",
"content": "Yeah unless this actually prevents them from becoming carriers it only passes down magnified suffering to the future. Eventually humans are going to lose the ability to do this (unless you’re one of those dummies who thinks that history is eternally linear and not cyclical) and if you have propagated the gene all over the species by then, it’s going to be a serious problem.Nature, in her typically cruel way, already provided the solution: try again.",
"parent_id": "8132714",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132836",
"author": "Mordae",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T07:24:45",
"content": "I guesshttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k99bMtg4zRkwill need a sequel soon.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132937",
"author": "PinheadBE",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T13:27:08",
"content": "Spare no expense! What could go wrong?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134824",
"author": "Carl Vehse",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T15:59:37",
"content": "In the future, the phrase, “going on a blind date” may include not knowing the results of each other’s germ cell DNA compatibility test.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,532.685978
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/27/reconditioning-a-vintage-crt-tube/
|
Reconditioning A Vintage CRT Tube
|
Jenny List
|
[
"Repair Hacks"
] |
[
"Color TV",
"crt",
"CRT TV",
"delta-gun"
] |
Plenty of readers will be familiar with CRT televisions, not least because many of us use them with retrocomputers and consoles. But perhaps fewer will have worked with CRTs themselves as components, and of those, fewer still will be familiar with the earlier generation of tubes. In the first few decades of color TV the tubes were so-called delta gun because their three electron guns were arranged in a triangular form. [Colorvac] has put up
a video in which they demonstrate the reconditioning of one of these tubes from a late-1960s Nordmende TV.
The tube in question isn’t one of the earlier “roundies” you would find on an American color TV from the ’50s or early ’60s, instead it’s one of the first generation of rectangular (ish) screens. It’s got an under-performing blue gun, so they’re replacing the electron gun assembly. Cutting the neck of the tube, bonding a new neck extension, and sealing in a new gun assembly is not for the faint-hearted, and it’s clear they have both the specialist machinery and the experience required for the job. Finally we see the reconditioned tube put back into the chassis, and are treated to a demonstration of converging the three beams.
For those of us
who cut our teeth on these devices
, it’s fascinating.
| 28
| 8
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8132667",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T16:04:52",
"content": "I’ve seen this done, on the old delta gun arrangement and the newer PIL 90 and 110 degree tubes, it’s a useful new lease of life but the tubes never lasted as long as a new one did, the focus went first which made me suspect they weren’t pumped down and “gettered” as well as a new faftory one.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132668",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T16:05:20",
"content": "Wow! Quite a project, but for people who still enjoy CRT goodness this looks like the future.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132679",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T16:57:31",
"content": "Not really, you can only do it once or twice per CRT and you have to be able to ensure a supply of suitable new gun assemblies, plus the phosphors wear out and shadowmasks/aperture grilles get damaged.",
"parent_id": "8132668",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132717",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T19:43:05",
"content": "That’s fine, it will buy enough time for people to figure out how to make the whole tube again.",
"parent_id": "8132679",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132824",
"author": "Bart",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T06:03:26",
"content": "We know how to make them. We just don’t do it anymore. It’s not something you do in a shed. But for specific purposes crt are still being made.",
"parent_id": "8132717",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133028",
"author": "Zebra",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T18:00:08",
"content": "Assembled. Nobody is making new tubes anymore. It’s the manufacture of components where expertise has been lost / forgotten.",
"parent_id": "8132824",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132835",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T07:20:17",
"content": "It’s an incredibly niche market and it won’t happen in any kind of volume.Colour CRTs are considerably more complex than Nixie tubes or simple vacuum tubes/valves, perhaps an artisan like Dalibor Farny may produce a few a year but they will be eye wateringly expensive and production numbers will be tiny.",
"parent_id": "8132717",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133686",
"author": "uncleEnzo",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T17:54:27",
"content": "Black and white CRTs should be possible to produce by a talented and well-equipped hacker, but color might forever be beyond our capabilities. Phosphor coats and aquadag look to be relatively simple.Colormasks are very finely made, and the issue of a tri-color phosphor coat look very difficult. But then again, maybe a Trinitron or Apple style tube with wire grating might be possible in the home shop? And a linear tricolor phosphor might be easier than the colormask triad pattern.",
"parent_id": "8132835",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132703",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T18:32:22",
"content": "Was this a common repair once upon a time? Or is it only a thing now because of rarity?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132720",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T19:51:00",
"content": "It was pretty common, at least in the UK, you would send off a CRT for exchange with a regunned one.Ads in the UK magazine Television and Television Servicing at World Radio History, page 55 of this one for example:https://www.worldradiohistory.com/UK/Practical-Television/80s/Television-Servicing-UK-1982-06.pdf",
"parent_id": "8132703",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132726",
"author": "Piecutter",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T20:10:49",
"content": "No, not on commodity televisions. Even replacing the picture tube was rare, but occasionally would occur if the customer wished to pay for it. By the time this one was built, you could usually buy a newer, better set. CRTs usually to took years to degrade to the point of not being able to refresh enough to give a passable picture, and by that time the set usually looked a bit dated, design wise.This art was strictly for very niche, expensive, industrial CRTs. I worked in a TV/Radio/Hi-Fi repair shop back in what I would call the “cassette” era, and the only CRT work beyond a Picture tube tune-up that I recall, was replacing a CRT with one from a cannibalized set, which we had a basement full of. CRTs, other tubes, tuner modules, Flybacks, adjustment pots, all had limited enough variability to be able to interchange used parts fairly readily, and time in shop added up if you had to drive out to a supplier, so it made good sense to use a scrapyard business model at the time. By the time the “CD” era was in full swing, the disposable TV/Audio (“BPC”) industry forced most shops to close their doors.",
"parent_id": "8132703",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132731",
"author": "Piecutter",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T20:26:18",
"content": "To be clear, this is a purely USA perspective.I’m pretty sure the last fellow doing this kind of work here closed his doors about three years ago.",
"parent_id": "8132726",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132755",
"author": "Cody",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T21:51:06",
"content": "CRT rebuilding used to be fairly common back when TVs used vacuum tubes. CRTs didn’t last as long as modern ones either.",
"parent_id": "8132726",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132763",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T22:34:04",
"content": "I think it went better when CRTs were powered by proper power supplies.In the 1950s or so, TVs still ran on mains directly and weren’t stabilized.This changed when plastic cabinets and camping TVs got more popular, I think.Portables had the ability to run off 12v or 13,8v DC power source (car battery, lab PSU), so they had a need for a power supply anyway.By that time, it made sense to derive all higher voltages from this DC voltage.This added for stability. Also, IC based flyback control was better or more stable.It were the small things that helped, I guess. The CRT tubes itself didn’t change so much, I think.Very old monochrome CRTs weren’t bad, I think. But the surrounding technology was, maybe, due to economic considerations.Properly designed b/w studio monitors from the early days could be quite longelived, too.The technology was there in principle, just not available to consumers.",
"parent_id": "8132755",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132810",
"author": "mythoughts62",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T04:14:58",
"content": "My first job was working at a TV shop (Paul’s TV) in the mid ’70s. Customers would often choose to buy a new set when the CRT died, but that was not universal. We replaced a couple of CRTs a month in a fairly small shop. We usually got rebuilt tubes, as covered here, from an Indianpolis company called “Silver Glow.”I still remember the nigthmare that adjusting the convergance could be. A panel of as many 10 or so potentitiometers, all of which interacted with each other. Inline gun tubes were easier to converge than delta gun tubes.Some people would pay a fortune to get color sets from the ’50s repaired/restored because the nice wooden cabinets matched their furniture. I remember rewinding coils for some of them when the forms had become brittle and crumbled. A lot of expensive labor. We also restored radios from the 30s, lots of labor there too. I usually wound up with these jobs. I made a lot more than my friends who worked at gas stations and shops.",
"parent_id": "8132726",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132837",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T07:28:56",
"content": "We used to get a few customers a year who wanted to keep their old cabinet TV so were willing to spend whatever it cost, we also did what I guess would be called a restomod and transplanted the guts of a new set into the old cabinet for a couple of sets a yearWe also converted a few imported televisions a year, mostly PAL or multistandard sets where the only significant changes were to remove the sound IF filters and install 6MHz ones for the UK but occasionally we’d get paid to go as far as a transplant.In our workshop regunned tubes were fitted to rental stock, refurbed second hand sets and customer sets, it wasn’t the bulk of our work but it definitely wasn’t uncommon to fit a few ‘new’ tubes a month.",
"parent_id": "8132810",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132724",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T20:08:01",
"content": "I had no idea the phosphors could tolerate exposure to air. I’ve always assumed they oxidize instantly or something if the tube cracks.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132775",
"author": "The Solutor",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T00:05:27",
"content": "The phosphors are aluminised, only very old and ugly American B/W tubes weren’t, but those had the ionic trap to avoid the premature dead of the central section of the phosphors.Aluminizarion was a better alternative to the ancient ionic trap, I guess that, as a side effect it protect the phosphors from oxygen, at least for some hours or days.",
"parent_id": "8132724",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132730",
"author": "AZdave",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T20:25:11",
"content": "They used to sell “tube brighteners” for picture tubes that had gone dim. They were mounted in series with the connection socket to the back of the tube and were basically just transformers to crank up the filament voltage.When I was a teenager a neighbor had an old black and white TV they wanted to get rid of, and I grabbed it for my bedroom. They had already added a tube brightener but you could still only barely see the picture, so I got if for free. When I took it apart I discovered that the only thing wrong with it was that the protective glass in front of the picture tube was thick on the inside with grease and tar deposited by the very heavy smokers in that family. I cleaned it off and had a nice bright picture. Economic Darwinism.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132811",
"author": "mythoughts62",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T04:17:09",
"content": "Tube brighteners worked on sets that powered the CRT filaments from 60Hz AC, but later sets that powered their heaters with a tap on the flyback transformer ruled out this device.",
"parent_id": "8132730",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132838",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T07:31:21",
"content": "Sure, they ruled outthatdevice, but it was usually easy to add a winding or two around the flyback in series (and phase) with the heater winding to boost is a volt or so..",
"parent_id": "8132811",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132894",
"author": "The Solutor",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T11:47:52",
"content": "Btw there where tube regenerators that did not require opening the tube.They used a voltage applied between the cathode and the focusing electrodes and/or ultrasonic current to clean up the cathode.I owned one and I used it many times.The mileage varied depending the tube condition, tube maker and so on, but most of the time did work very wellThe circuit of basic models was pretty simple to buildhttps://www.grix.it/viewer.php?page=1476The boring part was to assemble all the cables needed to make it universal, given there where dozens of socket standards. Practically you needed something like 15 cables to cover most of the BW and Color CRTs. But with 5/6 cables you had covered say the 90% of the most common types.Obviously you could use a single cable terminated with crocodile clips, but in that case mistakes were around the corner.Commercial models were obviously provided with everything you needed, but they weren’t cheap, just like any equipment built in small number.",
"parent_id": "8132730",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132766",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T22:39:38",
"content": "I remember seeing ads in TV Guide selling turnkey operations for setting up your own CRT rebuilding business. I also remember that our RCA 21″ “round-tube” (our first color TV) went through a CRT about every two to three years, so I imagine there was a shortage of tube rebuilders.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132777",
"author": "BillO",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T00:23:59",
"content": "CRT has high voltage even when unplugged. Danger",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132906",
"author": "Billy",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T12:17:11",
"content": "And water is incredibly wet.",
"parent_id": "8132777",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133036",
"author": "Zebra",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T18:12:54",
"content": "In many ways CRT is still the best display tech ever made. Nothing beats their motion resolution and ability to switch res without processing.I can see details on my crt that are barely visible on my 4k oled.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133392",
"author": "cplamb",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T21:09:48",
"content": "They also have the best dynamic range and color purity.",
"parent_id": "8133036",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135677",
"author": "John Ryan",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T15:58:03",
"content": "I’m told the only way to watch a fast delivered Cricket Ball is on Plasma TV ( Probably now too defunct as well)",
"parent_id": "8133036",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,532.759192
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/27/hands-on-eufymake-e1-uv-printer/
|
Hands-On: EufyMake E1 UV Printer
|
Tom Nardi
|
[
"Featured",
"Reviews",
"Tool Hacks"
] |
[
"color pcb",
"eufyMake",
"UV printer"
] |
The modern hacker and maker has a truly incredible arsenal of tools at their disposal. High-tech tools like 3D printers, laser cutters, and CNC routers have all become commonplace, and combined with old standbys like the drill press and mini lathe, it sometimes seems like we’ve finally peaked in terms of what the individual is realistically capable of producing in their own home. But occasionally a new tool comes along, and it makes us realize that there are still avenues unexplored for the home gamer.
After spending the last few weeks playing with it, I can confidently say the eufyMake E1 UV printer is one of those tools. The elevator pitch is simple: with a UV printer, you can print anything on anything. As you can imagine, the reality is somewhat more complex, but the fact that you can toss a three dimensional object in the chamber and spray it with a high-resolution color image with a few button presses holds incredible creative potential. Enough that the
Kickstarter for the $1,700 printer
has already raised a mind-boggling $27 million at the time of this writing, with more than a month yet to go before crossing the finish line.
If you’re on the fence about backing the campaign, or just have doubts about whether or not the machine can do what eufyMake claims, I’ll put those concerns to rest right now — it’s the real deal. Even after using the machine for as long as I have, each time a print job ends, I find myself momentary taken aback by just how
good
the end result is. The technology inside this machine that not only makes these results possible, but makes them so easily obtainable, is truly revolutionary.
That being said, it’s not a perfect machine by any stretch of the imagination. While I never ran into an outright failure while using the eufyMake E1, there’s a fairly long list of issues which I’d like to see addressed. Some of them are simple tweaks which may well get sorted out before the product starts shipping this summer, while others are fundamental to the way the machine operates and could represent an opportunity for competitors.
Theory of Operation
Before we go any further, I think it’s important to explain how the eufyMake E1 works. Not only because UV printers aren’t the kind of thing that most of us have had first-hand experience with, but because I want readers to understand how much the product gets right.
In the most basic case, you’ll open up the door of the E1, and stick an object on the bed. (There’s a larger bed that you can swap in for over-sized objects, but you have to run the printer with the doors open.) That’s a literal “stick”, by the way, as the bed is designed to be tacky to provide a bit of hold on smaller objects which might otherwise jump around as the machine moves. The E1 will then go through an automated process that includes flashing lights and sweeping red laser beams. This provides the machine with a 3D scan of the object on the bed, which is necessary for positioning the print head later on.
At this point, the software (available for Windows, Mac, and mobile devices) will present the user with a “bird’s eye view” of the bed and any objects on it. From here you can either use the basic art tools in the software, or more likely, import some artwork created in a more comprehensive piece of software. In either event, the process is the same, in that you virtually apply your artwork directly on the overhead image. Once you’re happy with how it looks, you hit “Print”, pick a few options relating to the target’s surface material and the print quality, and off it goes.
Printing is admittedly slower than I had expected. Depending on the image complexity, even a palm-sized job could take 20 or 30 minutes. While I never pushed it so far personally, I’ve heard from other testers that larger projects can take hours to complete. In that way, it’s a lot like a 3D printer — you aren’t the one that has to do all that work, so who cares if the process takes an hour or two, just let it run and come back to it later. In my experience, the results have always been more than worth the wait.
Practical Examples
I’ve said as much previously, but we don’t take reviews and hands-on articles like this lightly here at Hackaday. Companies offer to send us hardware on an almost daily basis, but we turn down the vast majority of them as we just don’t think they’re a great fit for our audience. Is the average Hackaday reader really going to be interested in a review of yet
another
3D printer or laser engraver? Probably not.
So before we agreed to take a look at the eufyMake E1, Elliot and I talked a bit about how such a machine would be used in our community specifically. We came up with a few things we thought hardware hackers would want to do with this kind of capability, and I made sure to focus on those applications over the more “crafty” demonstrations that you may have seen elsewhere.
Full-Color PCB Art
While we’re starting to see board fabs support color silkscreens, it’s not a capability that’s necessarily ready for prime time. Beyond the mixed results we’ve heard from those in the community in terms of the quality of the resulting boards, there’s some unfortunate software/vendor lock-in that we’d just as soon avoid. So what if you could skip all that and simply put your professionally made PCBs in the E1 and have it apply your artwork to them?
In this fairly simple example I’ve taken one of the spare boards from my
Soma FM badge
and applied a few high resolution images onto it. I never really had any doubt that the eufyMake E1 could do PCB art, but still, it was extremely satisfying to see it in person.
Control Panels
High quality control panels have always been tricky to produce at home. Sure there’s ways to pull it off, such as the recent trick we covered that used specially treated inkjet printouts, but they tend to be time consuming and the results are highly dependent on the material you’re working working. With the UV printer, front panels are a breeze and you’ll get consistent results whether you’re working with plastic or metal.
For this example I came up with a flight-sim style panel inspired by various fighter jets. The workflow was actually quite nice: I designed the panel itself in OpenSCAD, and then exported it as both a 3D STL and 2D DXF file. The 3D file got printed out, and the 2D file was imported into Inkscape. With a 1:1 outline of the panel in Inkscape, I could position the text and images knowing they would line up perfectly with the real-world object. I exported my Inkscape design as an SVG, loaded it into the E1’s software, and applied it to the printed panel.
Truly Custom Keycaps
We’ve seen incredible interest in bespoke keyboards over the last few years, and customized keycaps are a big part of that. But even the most decked out keyboards are generally still using off-the-shelf keycaps. But why settle for that when you can buy blank caps and apply whatever text or artwork you wish on them?
These are such a perfect application for the E1 that I imagine it’s going to ignite something of a custom keycap revolution once the printer gets into consumer’s hands. Whether you want each key to be the face of a different anime character, or want all the legends to be in Comic Sans, you have complete control. They also serve as a great example of the fine detail work that’s possible on the machine.
The Perfect PCB Machine?
I know what you’re thinking: “Stop teasing me, can the damn thing make PCBs or not!” The short answer is yes…but the long answer is worth a bit more examination.
The UV print seems to work very well as an etch resist, as it was completely unfazed by its encounter with ferric chloride. In fact, the first challenge was figuring out how to get the stuff
off
after etching. Alcohol, turpentine, and paint thinner did nothing to it. Eventually I found that soaking the board in acetone will break down the bond between the printed layer and the copper — you still need to peel it off, but once you get under an edge with a razor blade it parts without too much trouble.
Early results look promising. The lines aren’t as clean as I’d like, so it will probably have problems with tight pitch parts, but the traces were intact down to 0.2 mm, and the pads for the SOIC8 footprint I picked as a test were properly isolated from each other. At this point, it’s a working PCB that’s at least as good as something made with the old school toner transfer method. But the E1 promises so much more.
Putting the board back in the machine, I was able to spray it with additional layers that act as both a soldermask
and
silkscreen. While I want to experiment a bit more and refine the techniques involved, even this first attempt produced a remarkably professional looking board with very little manual effort on the user’s part.
That said, while this proof of concept shows it’s clearly possible to produce impressive boards on the machine, the process is made frustrating by various limitations of the hardware and software.
One-Off Versus Production
Let’s be clear, as a product, the eufyMake E1 is designed to let crafty folks put pictures of their kids on slate coasters and emblazon mugs with the logo of their favorite sports team. The software and hardware is clearly designed to make it as easy as possible to toss an object into the printer, get your image virtually aligned on it, and then spray it on. At this, the product excels, and I have no doubt it will be a commercial success.
But while hardware hackers are certainly not immune to the charms of putting memes and logos on their possessions, we also have slightly higher demands. If we’re talking about using it for producing PCBs, or even just adding art to existing boards, we’re looking for high positional accuracy and repeatability.
To that end, I have to report that the E1 is not particularly well suited to such technical tasks. It can be pushed into service, but there’s several aspects of the product that would really need to be addressed before this could be a workhorse for the hackerspace.
Lack of Physical Indexing
As it stands, the bed on the eufyMake E1 is a completely flat surface, with no provisions for work holding or indexing. You’re expected to visually align your print each time — workable for one or two copies of an object, but excruciating beyond that.
Now you might be thinking that this is an easy enough problem to remedy…but you’re probably forgetting that 3D bed scan. Any fixture you come up with to hold your object in position runs the risk of screwing up the scan and causing the print to abort. Even trying to tape a PCB down with blue painter’s tape would occasionally trigger an error during the scan as the machine couldn’t find a clearly defined edge.
As you’ll see below, I’ve had some success with very thin 3D printed fixtures that avoid the ire of the scanner. Long term, I’d like to see an alternate bed that resembled a CNC fixture plate, so that multiple parts can be held in position with low-profile pegs.
The Parallax View
At the suggestion of
Thomas Flummer
, I printed out a few thin (1.2 mm) jigs that could be taped down to the bed and help position multiple objects for batch processing. This is much better than having to eyeball things each time, but it uncovered a new issue.
For objects in the center of the bed, the optical alignment system works pretty well. It should get you within a millimeter or so on the first attempt, but it’s way off on the edges of the bed. Take a look at the following example: the in the software, both blue rectangles were perfectly aligned within the footprint of the 1206 LED:
As you can see the alignment on the board in the center is pretty locked in, but on the other board, it’s halfway out of the footprint. This might be close enough if you’re making grandma some Christmas ornaments, but it won’t cut it for SMD work.
The good news is that you can go back into the software and move objects at the sub-millimeter level by typing in the desired coordinates. This will cause the visual representation to become misaligned, but so long as you know where the target is in the real-world, it doesn’t matter. So if you can afford a bit of trial-and-error, it’s possible to get the alignment dialed in even across multiple objects on the bed.
The Shape of Things to Come?
As I said at the start, the eufyMake E1 is not a perfect machine. Beyond the major issues I’ve outlined here, there’s all sorts of weird quirks and limitations I’ve run into during my time with it. For example, why don’t the lights inside the enclosure turn on when the door is open? Why doesn’t the printer itself have a small screen to display status information? We won’t even get into the fact that all your interactions with the printer have to go through the cloud — there isn’t even so much as a USB port on the printer to allow local control.
But at the end of the day, I’m still extremely excited about this machine. The fact is, there’s really nothing else quite like it on the market, at least, not at this price anyway. It reminds me a bit of the MakerBot Cupcake 3D printer, or even the K40 laser. It represents such a huge leap forward in capability for the individual that it’s easy to excuse the rough edges.
Like those machines, I believe the eufyMake E1 will set many of the standards for the products that come after it. You may never own this
particular
UV printer, but I’m willing to bet that after a few hardware generations, when the cost of the technology is driven even lower thanks to increased competition, the printer that you do buy will be able to trace its lineage back to this moment.
| 50
| 20
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8132635",
"author": "Mark Topham",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T14:54:32",
"content": "“We won’t even get into the fact that all your interactions with the printer have to go through the cloud — there isn’t even so much as a USB port on the printer to allow local control.” – that’s pretty much a no from me.I already own one device like that and they already tried to change the terms and force a subscription after it had been purchased a couple years prior.No more subscription based hardware.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132645",
"author": "EH",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T15:11:49",
"content": "This.And also, from in the article:there’s some unfortunate software/vendor lock-in that we’d just as soon avoidSo a cloud-only printer doesn’t have lock-in that you’d like to avoid? Swapping out one lock-in for another doesn’t seem like a positive tradeoff. Might be neutral, at best, if you’re lucky.",
"parent_id": "8132635",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132729",
"author": "Nathan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T20:23:42",
"content": "Also worth noting that it relies on expensive proprietary chipped ink cartridges.…when most other uv printers on the market do not.There are currently other makers of small uv printers that are only maybe 30%-50% more expensive; and they’re much more open. I ran some numbers a week or so ago when I saw this, and afik the amount you spend on their ink vs just buying bulk (i.e. a 30$ literal bottle, which is how the rest of the uv printing world works) flips the cost advantage pretty quickly.This machiene / company is absolutely taking the same path as a lot of the makers of terribly locked down paper printers have taken the last few decadeshpcaugh*.Oh also the print head is non-replacable. On uv printers it’s considered a long term consumable, and often gets replaced every couple years. Most reputable places will sell a replacement one for a couple hundred bucks.I see no reason to support them.Btw check out procolored’s entry level printers for comparison; I’d recommend them over this cashgrab.",
"parent_id": "8132635",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132794",
"author": "Chuck",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T01:51:42",
"content": "If you just check out some YouTube videos on the project, you’d see many people have done cost analysis on the ink, and it is very cheap, for example four cents to print a logo on a mug. The print head is a consumable, is replaceable, and available for 399.",
"parent_id": "8132729",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133102",
"author": "Nathan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T00:23:18",
"content": "No….. it’s available as part of a yearly subscription service for 399 a year. Very different.If you don’t want to buy a subscription, they’re 600 each.",
"parent_id": "8132794",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132756",
"author": "Cody",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T21:56:58",
"content": "It will become a door stop when the company goes under. It should be illegal to make e-waste like this.",
"parent_id": "8132635",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132795",
"author": "Chuck",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T01:53:06",
"content": "It’s Eufy, A subsidiary of Anker, so I don’t think they’re going under real soon.",
"parent_id": "8132756",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132840",
"author": "elmesito",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T07:48:52",
"content": "That doesn’t stop Anker from turning off the servers once the sales don’t match the expectations of the shareholders.",
"parent_id": "8132795",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8146515",
"author": "Todd",
"timestamp": "2025-07-08T02:09:25",
"content": "17,000+ Kickstarter backers pledging over $44,000,000 (making it the most successful Kickstarter ever) are disagreeing with you.",
"parent_id": "8132840",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132791",
"author": "Lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T01:24:27",
"content": "Couldn’t agree more. I’ll wait until a competitor makes a version of the hardware I actually own. 1700$ is way too much to not own something. Especially something with consumables.",
"parent_id": "8132635",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133283",
"author": "Then",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T16:12:11",
"content": "Well a Mimaki is $100.000 and has similar software and ink lockins iirc. Curious about the more open solutions",
"parent_id": "8132791",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133301",
"author": "Actually...",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T16:45:44",
"content": "the mimaki 3DUJ-2207 with an 8x8x3 inch build volume is only $43k The 3DUJ-553 does 20x20x12 comes in at $188,995This is an A3 13X16.5 2D UV printer that can wiggle a mere 5mm of 2.5D sculptural printing with minimal to no overhang capability. This thing is no mimaki. Its more akin to a $2k Furvveerr UV flatbed printer.",
"parent_id": "8133283",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132637",
"author": "Bobby's Reviews",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T14:56:14",
"content": "I’m still waiting for someone to use it on model trains. I think it would be much easier than waterslide decals but I could be wrong",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132942",
"author": "Jonathan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T14:01:20",
"content": "Check out Adam Savage’s channel. They did a review on this printer and used it for printing directly onto some models (not trains, but similar purpose)",
"parent_id": "8132637",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8146516",
"author": "Todd",
"timestamp": "2025-07-08T02:11:30",
"content": "Someone did:https://youtu.be/2CGPC9xgSrQ?si=FIuegJcDlrnvMQ7A",
"parent_id": "8132637",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132639",
"author": "hmmmm...",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T14:59:47",
"content": "So this is just a preorder discount through kickstarter for a $2200 UV flatbed printer thats really no different than the many UV flatbed printers that have been available on aliexpress and amazon in the same price range for years?Gotta say it. Not a Hack.At least hold out for someone who bought an epson conversion kit off ali and built their own flatbed UV printer. No one wants HAD shilling kickstarters. Especially given how many of us have been burned by them in the past.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132666",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T16:03:26",
"content": "Absolutely not a hack. A hands-on product review.",
"parent_id": "8132639",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132732",
"author": "Nathan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T20:27:25",
"content": "Did you really review it though? My largest complaints aren’t even mentioned.And I’d expect hackaday authors to be critical of locked down proprietary systems.This reads like a product placement review, not a critical analysis of the product compared to what is standard in its market segment.A lot of what you are writing about is justuv printer goodwhich is very true, but doesn’t mean this specific printer isn’t something to be wary of.",
"parent_id": "8132666",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132749",
"author": "JanW",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T21:27:20",
"content": "The next time we’ll hear about that product is when the devices are all bricked because the cloud is no more haha",
"parent_id": "8132732",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132814",
"author": "oziboy",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T05:12:44",
"content": "Oh no! Did you make sure to send in your list of concerns early enough that they had time to tailor the article to your specifications?Maybe they should run all the posts by you first for approval, make sure this oversight doesn’t happen again.",
"parent_id": "8132732",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132995",
"author": "Zamorano",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T15:48:09",
"content": "It’s not a Day either… But who am I to complain?",
"parent_id": "8132639",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134683",
"author": "Johnu",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T08:04:49",
"content": "An honest review of a very hyped product is good to see though – these things are being shilled very enthusiastically all over “maker youtube” so seeing a review by hackers for hackers that’s not sponsored and addresses realistic projects and the sorts of questions we’d want answered (EG cloud lock-in) is worthwhile IMHO.Plus the comments section here has already revealed existing products that do the same job without the lock-in or indeed the fact that you can convert an old Epson printer.",
"parent_id": "8132639",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132641",
"author": "Ject",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T15:05:11",
"content": "Interesting tech. I look forward to using one in a couple of generation if/when it actually works well. I skipped the origins of 3D printing also and I never regretted it. By the time I bought one, they were workhorses, not curios. My Prusa MK3 has been running regularly for like 5 years with only minor maintenance.IMO web integration and gimicky camera features are usually the first go on these things. I don’t know why with kickstarters they’re never content to just make a simple machine which does it’s job well and that’s it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132657",
"author": "neeksor",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T15:48:32",
"content": "The only “hack” I see here is Anker/Eufy masquerading as a startup to fund projects on kickstarter.. Anker has over 5000 employees and an almost 8B market cap..",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132669",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T16:06:24",
"content": "Yeah. This bit confuses us as well. And it doesn’t make any sense either. Normally you start off with the prices high so that you get the people who really want to buy it first. Then you lower the prices over time to sop up the rest of the market.This seems backwards and suggests that there’s something about future pricing that we don’t know. (Which would be, well, anything.) But I’d bet on it getting cheaper over time.",
"parent_id": "8132657",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132796",
"author": "Chuck",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T01:55:08",
"content": "a lot of companies that don’t need to do a Kickstarter are doing Kickstarters now because of the excitement, exposure, and word of mouth it gives.",
"parent_id": "8132669",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132674",
"author": "Gene",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T16:32:49",
"content": "If you could make it jet dissolvable support material you could probably hack it into an inkjet 3d printer. Currently, these cost upwards of $100,000 and won’t be coming down in price any time soon due to patents. Limited 2.5d printing may be possible and I would have liked to see HAD print something at the very highest it can do in Z. UV inkjet printing is definitely worth following.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132684",
"author": "Actually...",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T17:08:08",
"content": "Many of 3d systems patents around inkjet printing that are the basis of their early invision and second gen Projet printers expired several years ago. Thats why companies like plempire have emerged in recent years.Flatbed UV printers use epson printheads so they are painfully slow as mentioned in this review. If you dont mind dealing with that limitation the guys at 3Dresyns are probably your best bet for custom “inks” Good Luck!",
"parent_id": "8132674",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132683",
"author": "Collie147",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T17:05:17",
"content": "I’d be curious what the running cost of it would be as well. I know it keeps wiping the ink from the head and empties the head every so often. Not sure how much that all wastes but cost and maintenance over time would be an interesting metric that would away a lot of people who are on the fence.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132733",
"author": "Nathan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T20:28:43",
"content": "Way more than uv printers that don’t use chipped ink cartridgesI.e. most of the rest of them",
"parent_id": "8132683",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132797",
"author": "Chuck",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T01:57:21",
"content": "They sent this printer to every person on YouTube, so there are many many reviews. Many of these reviews cover the cost of the ink, and to me it is shockingly low, for example four cents to print a pretty good sized round logo on a mug. You have the cost per milliliter And the printer tells you how much it’s going to use so it’s easy to figure out what your ink cost is. One YouTuber said that it would cost $4.70 in electricity to keep it running all year.",
"parent_id": "8132683",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132686",
"author": "unwiredben",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T17:18:25",
"content": "I found the video athttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMi0mpZOFqcinteresting for showing the capabilities for mainstream use, including a lot of 2.5D printing. I’m definitely interested in the tech, but think I’ll wait for an iteration or two before investing limited workshop space.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132698",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T18:18:12",
"content": "“it sometimes seems like we’ve finally peaked in terms of what the individual is realistically capable of producing in their own home”Oh, I hope people, especially the kind to visit this site are not thinking that!I think the current, very awesome level of availability to the individual of today’s tools is just a hint of what is to come. If… we don’t decide it’s over, we have arrived and so stagnate.How about practical home metal printing?Clay extruders have been a thing since early reprap days but they haven’t really become commonplace yet. How about coupling those with more affordable kilns.How about a decent paper printer? I mean seriously, the market will currently provide us a choice of either cheap throwaway garbage printers or big priced-for-companies office monsters. I almost think we need a rep-rap like effort for 2d printing!Those are a few thoughts off the top of my head. I hope there are plenty of other areas to grow in that I haven’t thought of.Keep dreaming then go make it happen!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132700",
"author": "David H",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T18:27:34",
"content": "Firstly – my tired eyes mis-read the headline as “EUV printer” and my flabber was ghasted that extreme ultraviolet lithography was available as a consumer product. Then my morning coffee kicked in and I saw sense.Secondly, this printer looks very clever and could help with several projects that I currently have – and my mind’s already come up with half-a-dozen other potential uses.But.The cloud topology and vendor lock-in is a hard deal-killer for me. I have a number of Eufy security cameras, and they’re well-made and work well, but the smartphone app that controls/views them is infested with adverts for their other products and sell-up attempts. Outside the app, there’s a web browser interface, but it’s clunky and doesn’t always work – if I were of a cynical turn of mind, I’d find that suspicious 🤔What’s the cost of consumables for this thing? Are Eufy going to pull an HP and DRM-chip their ink cartridges up the wazoo to ensure a revenue stream?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132709",
"author": "Actually...",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T18:46:49",
"content": "you can buy flatbed UV inkjet printers off amazon that dont have the cloud nor vendor lock. As for consumables prices range from $40-80/Liter depending on brand for UV inks compatible with the epson printheads these machines use.",
"parent_id": "8132700",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132736",
"author": "Nathan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T20:30:27",
"content": "They already have. They’re using chipped ink cartridges, that volume per volume are several times the price of bulk ink.Which is not even standard practice in the uv printer world",
"parent_id": "8132700",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132977",
"author": "PointyOintment",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T15:12:15",
"content": "I have a number of Eufy security cameras, and they’re well-made and work wellWhile that is true from all I’ve read, you may want to see my top-level comment below regarding the advisability of continuing to have them installed where they can see or hear much of anything.",
"parent_id": "8132700",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132743",
"author": "Tim McNerney",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T21:03:24",
"content": "Wow! This is the slickest, most expensive Kickstarter campaign I’ve ever seen. The pitch video alone cost more than many crowdfunding campaigns entire budget. Definitely not two inventors in a garage living off their credit cards. Anker is an established brand with distributors, so I’m surprised they took the crowdfunding approach here. The name change suggests this is a spinoff venture, or maybe their marketing department just decided it was a good way to test the waters. Yet Kickstarter has said before that they aren’t a storefront, so I’m wondering… how is this not a storefront play?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132971",
"author": "PointyOintment",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T15:03:44",
"content": "The name change suggests this is a spinoff venture, or maybe their marketing department just decided it was a good way to test the waters.Though eufyMake is new, the eufy brand in general has been around for quite a while now. From my limited observations, it seems to be known more for domestic electronics like robotic vacuum cleaners and security cameras*, while the Anker brand seems to be more associated with electronics for electronics’ sake like phone chargers & USB batteries. Wikipedia tells me eufyMake used to be AnkerMake, their 3D printer brand, which was renamed and refocused on this UV printer, though AnkerMake still exists to sell 3D printer parts & filament.*that were sold on a promise of being much better for privacy than comparable systems, including by using on-premises video storage, but later turned out to not meet that promise",
"parent_id": "8132743",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132744",
"author": "Ben",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T21:05:30",
"content": "That’s a hard pass for me. I won’t use anything from a company doing anti-consumer practices like chipped ink cartridges. That would be like my FDM 3D printer only accepting one allowed brand of filament. No, thank you.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133035",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T18:10:38",
"content": "I have no problem at all with chipped ink cartridges as a concept – its what they are used for that matters. As if the chip is just used to ID and set the correct print settings, help keep track of when the consumable parts are going to expire etc its great. Its only when the chip is used to deny you the ability to refill and reuse or make third party parts stop working that it is a problem.That said this device has way too many redflag that mean I’d not touch it, unless it was freely provided no strings attached. Do like the concept and results though, so it might just be time to look at alternatives and consider if they really are worth it for what I do.",
"parent_id": "8132744",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132748",
"author": "A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T21:10:28",
"content": "You’ve used the example of using it for both soldermask and silkscreen, which is great, but how does it hold up against reflow soldering? It’s usless for this task if it can’t then take the heat of soldering on components afterwards.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132750",
"author": "Bobtato",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T21:31:52",
"content": "This morning I’d never thought about this category of product, and now I feel like I know why I might buy one. So this post wasn’t a waste of time from my PoV, even if this isn’t the model I’d be looking at.In terms of using it for PCBs, I didn’t see anything on the key question: can you actually solder the resulting boards? How about in an oven?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132768",
"author": "Actually...",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T23:01:31",
"content": "For PCBs it has three potential use cases.The first is in the application of a polymer layer to serve as a photoresist. Once you etch the board you would use a solvent to remove the resist exposing the copper traces.The second would be the legend layer ie labelling components, brand markings, etc. This would be fine for hand soldered boards but would not likely withstand the heat of reflow ovens used for surface mount components.The final case, which comes with an asterix, is in the application of a solder mask. For this to be more than cosmetic you would need an inkjettable photopolmer that can withstand the heat. The normal UV ink would NOT be sufficient",
"parent_id": "8132750",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132781",
"author": "Ian",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T00:57:42",
"content": "I spent WAAAAAAY longer than I want to admit trying to imagine wtf an EUV printer would be for, and how they could possibly make EUV affordable for even a medium sized business…*EUV is Extreme Ultraviolet, which is used for modern silicon lithography. The machines cost hundreds of millions of dollars (not including the very much required support contracts) and are borderline science fiction magic boxes.Nanosecond pulses of high powered lasers, annihilating drops of molten zink to create incredibly short and bright flashes of UV, which pass through multiple filters that use interference patterns instead of shadows, to make patterns on a chip barely bigger than the wavelength of the light. Sometimes smaller than the wavelength too, because they are wizards…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132966",
"author": "PointyOintment",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T14:54:07",
"content": "Printing photo-quality images and labels onto arbitrary objects is a pretty nice capability to have in general, and I hope this product results in more competition and more products that we’ll like even more.For making PCBs, I’m waiting—but not holding my breath—for something that prints the copper directly, inexpensively, and without many/difficult/hazardous steps onto a non-copper-clad board (which wouldn’t necessarily be made of FR4, or be flat) only where I want it, rather than printing a resist onto a copper-clad board so I can etch away the copper that I bought but don’t want. In other words, I want additive rather than subtractive manufacturing for PCB copper layers.The E1 will then go through an automated process that includes flashing lights and sweeping red laser beams. This provides the machine with a 3D scan of the object on the bed, which is necessary for positioning the print head later on.Can it also just do a scan of an object for its own sake (or export the scan it does for a print)? Serving as two machines in one improves the value proposition, and all it should take is a bit of UI work. There have already been laser-and-camera-based 3D scanners that you put the object to be scanned inside, so working that way instead of being handheld isn’t necessarily a barrier to usefulness. For example, you could scan your phone and design a custom 3D-printed case to fit it, or scan a hand tool with a complex shape and design a wall mount for it.We won’t even get into the fact that all your interactions with the printer have to go through the cloud — there isn’t even so much as a USB port on the printer to allow local control.That’s a potential problem for privacy, as well as for the reasons of vendor lock-in and vulnerability to cloud service discontinuation, which have already been raised. The servers are probably in China; if not, the company is still Chinese and subject to the demands of the government there.Remember when eufy’s security cameras were revealed to not have the privacy protection (including by using on-premises video storage) that was one of their main selling points? BTW, if this is news to anybody, and you want to get rid of your eufy gear now, you can send it to me ;)[Tom] or anybody else who’s tried the E1 (and maybe looked inside it?), do you think it might reasonably easily be hacked to use custom firmware? (That’s not necessarily just for anti-cloud reasons; it might also help solve the scanning problems, enable scanning for scanning’s sake, and allow the use of commodity inks, if eufy doesn’t care to do those things.)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133026",
"author": "Mmm",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T17:49:56",
"content": "Cool technology, not a hack, cheap ink, and CLOUD locked?!I’ll keep my money, thank you..",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133348",
"author": "V",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T18:59:58",
"content": "Ankermake M5C owner here, someone who’s printed PLA, PETG, PLA-CF.That’s right *Ankermake, not Eufymake, they rebranded, now the app is called Eufymake, the slicer, Eufymake, everything. Totally unnecessary and totally frustrating. It’d be a minor gripe on top of the fact that there’s still typos in the mandatory update installer, that every time reinstalls everything. A minor gripe on top of the fact that it only supports 2.4ghz, with no wired option, a minor gripe on top of the fact that every time i sign in to the app on another pc or phone it logs me out somewhere else, reported this as annoying, they fixed it, “bumping it up” to a wonderful limit of “3” as if that was good enough? Only for them to change it back months later for no reason. A frustrating series of events that’s colored how I feel I can’t in good conscious recommend this company’s products. To me, they’re no different than Bambulabs, I wish someone internally would apply pressure like Naomi Wu did with Ender and make these products and their software what they deserve to be.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135861",
"author": "Marky T.",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T04:44:24",
"content": "I had exactly the same problem. Total noob, I thought this was a 3D printer and wondered what type of filament it used :)It’s disheartening to see quality of articles here going lower and lower. I think HaD would benefit from reducing number of articles and taking time to review them by selected editors before publishing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8138780",
"author": "Rita",
"timestamp": "2025-06-14T17:47:11",
"content": "I might be wrong but this printer is at least half of the cost of the cheapest UV printer in the same segment. Of course they need to get the money elsewhere (consumables). In my opinion it can be an option for consumers and small businesses.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,533.091795
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/27/a-forth-os-in-46-bytes/
|
A Forth OS In 46 Bytes
|
Aaron Beckendorf
|
[
"computer hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] |
[
"compilers",
"forth",
"minimalism",
"operating system"
] |
It’s not often that we can include an operating system in a Hackaday article, but here’s the full 46-byte source of [Philippe Brochard]’s
10biForthOS
in 8086 opcodes:
50b8 8e00 31d8 e8ff 0017 003c 0575 00ea
5000 3c00 7401 eb02 e8ee 0005 0588 eb47
b8e6 0200 d231 14cd e480 7580 c3f4
Admittedly, this is quite a minimal operating system. It’s written for the Intel 8086, and consists of a Forth implementation with only two instructions: compile (1) and execute (0). It can receive commands over a serial connection or from a keyboard. This allows a host computer to load more complex software onto it, one byte at a time. In particular, [Philippe] provides instructions for loading more advanced compilers, such as subleq-eForth for a more complete Forth implementation, or SectorC for C programming. He’s also written a
217-byte port
of the OS to Linux Intel x64.
[Philippe] doesn’t take a strong stance on whether this should technically qualify as a Forth implementation, given that the base implementation lacks stacks, dictionaries, and the ability to define words. However, it does have an outer and inner interpreter, the ability to compile and execute code, and most importantly, “the simplicity and hacky feeling of Forth.”
[Philippe] writes that this masterpiece of minimalism continues the tradition of the
minimal Forth implementations
we’ve
covered before
. We’ve even seen Forth
run on an Arduino
.
| 27
| 11
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8132608",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T11:38:32",
"content": "Hi, I think this is more of a basic monitor program at this stage.Next would be adding a debugger, maybe. It’s a start, though! 🙂",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132613",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T12:24:03",
"content": "Imagine an OS small enough to fit into a HaS comment field.",
"parent_id": "8132608",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133799",
"author": "Hocwp",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T03:00:26",
"content": "This is more than a monitor as it is able to assemble any piece of code for later use. But yes it’s the beginning of the start.",
"parent_id": "8132608",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132615",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T12:35:54",
"content": "This OS is insecure. A bad actor could easily achieve remote code execution.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132626",
"author": "Barry",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T13:39:10",
"content": "Or a good actor. Really any actor. The good news is that plugging this security home should allow the OS size to be further reduce by about 46 bytes.",
"parent_id": "8132615",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132921",
"author": "Rich Lourette",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T12:50:01",
"content": "Perhaps a RISC-V or ARM version for 2025",
"parent_id": "8132626",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8139198",
"author": "efurlan",
"timestamp": "2025-06-16T01:43:23",
"content": "https://github.com/efurlanm/edge/blob/main/monitor.ipynb",
"parent_id": "8132921",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133043",
"author": "John Nau",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T18:36:22",
"content": "Specific reasons? Examples?",
"parent_id": "8132615",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133801",
"author": "Hocwp",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T03:01:00",
"content": "Yes totally insecure! Be the first to take the other side of the serial port.",
"parent_id": "8132615",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132648",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T15:22:29",
"content": "Quite silly to call this an “operating system”. You could call it a monitor or a boot loader. I am opposed the watering down of definitions just to grab some attention. In the long term it only ads crud to searches and makes the internet more difficult to use.The minimum I would dare call an operating system (in modern times) would probably be micropython. It has a file system, you can load and store and execute programs from the file system. It even has a sort of “autoexec.bat” batch file, so you can set which program it runs after booting. My knowledge of uPython is quite limited though. I once flashed it in a Black Pill (after soldering on NAND Flash) and toyed with it for an afternoon of two.ARM uC’s can also execute programs from RAM (There is a tutorial for overlays in the book “Beginning STM32 from Warren Gayhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3624-6) Extending uPython with some “OS like” commands to make it resemble more of the old DOS, CP/M or Linux command line functions would be intriguing.Micropython board also acts as an extension of your own PC. My Linux PC sees the uPython board in it’s file system, I can directly load python sourcecode from it in a text editor, and then save it back.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132891",
"author": "Eduardo P. Gomez",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T11:39:37",
"content": "A operating system does not necessarily need to have a filesystem. A tv remote doesn’t have a filesystem but yet it’s microcontroller have a preprogrammed sequence for each button in order to give the tv a command.",
"parent_id": "8132648",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132941",
"author": "Dee",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T13:51:53",
"content": "A TV remote might have a program inside it. Not an operating system. An operating system is not an application, it is not a bootloader, and it is not a monitor. It is more than those parts. I dont have an exact definition right now, but I would start with the words it is composed of. “Operating” and “System”.",
"parent_id": "8132891",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133803",
"author": "Hocwp",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T03:01:56",
"content": "This is near philosophical: it’s a program which can operate a system (run anything, be extended in Forth, in C, etc…). I don’t claim it’s a practical one.",
"parent_id": "8132648",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8136225",
"author": "torph",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T13:54:35",
"content": "Neat idea… but not an OS by any means",
"parent_id": "8133803",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132653",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T15:42:30",
"content": "A lot of people independently invented Forth style interpretation in the 1980’s, particularly on 6502. However they did not put all the pieces together that make Forth so versatile with the exception of PostScript (Warnock has always claimed he had never seen Forth). I think that without a stack and stack operation primitives like SWAP ROT DUP + */ etc. and flow control you should not call it Forth.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133804",
"author": "Hocwp",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T03:04:03",
"content": "When designing a Forth, the stack is not the first thing you do. Before that there is basic IO, the execution process, the dictionary.Here 10biForth stop at (a not easily extended) dictionary (but it has one: a basic switch/case implemented one).But far more importantly it shows how easy it is to implement Subroutine Threaded Code (STC) like described by Brad Rodriguez.This is why I call this a Forth.",
"parent_id": "8132653",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132671",
"author": "Bruce Perens",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T16:15:27",
"content": "The BIOS is the operating system. That should be obvious. Or Linux on that version. This is called a “bootstrap”. Or perhaps a virus payload, because that is the most common use of such things of late. Having programs write machine code into instruction space and then execute it is something most real OS would prevent these days, for any but the most privileged programs, if even those.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133812",
"author": "Hocwp",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T03:28:17",
"content": "Yes it can be used as a virus payload.Here it shows how easy it is to write an interpreter of machine code in the instruction space. Maybe the mmap PROT_EXEC option should be less accessible. Maybe with one more bit in the privilege system.Hide this piece of code somewhere in your program. Take the rest from a steganographied image. And you are at it. Note: It’s not a new idea. Scheme is sometimes used for this.",
"parent_id": "8132671",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132675",
"author": "SETH",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T16:36:12",
"content": "This is essentially bootstrapping right? The initial steps in running a computer that comes with no OS or software.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133808",
"author": "Hocwp",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T03:11:02",
"content": "It’s more than bootstrapping: it shows how to perform in memory assembly to run any piece of software.",
"parent_id": "8132675",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132737",
"author": "Gar.",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T20:31:29",
"content": "This is Not FORTH. FORTH is a virtual machine that shouldn’t require the knowledge of any processor op codes. There are variants that have built in words like multiplication, and smaller versions that make you write a successive adder in FORTH commands that run slower, but that is implementation dependent. There may be some predefined constants (like I/O locations) or they may bemagic numbers that you are expected to know. Still Forth. You can build stacks for lots of different things, and they may run slow, but no opcodes are really necessary. This is a very old debate.I know you can write an editor, assembler and linker in forth. Doesn’t make it an OS.And yes, you can write a Operating system in FORTH with the usual functions :Memory Management, Multitasking, Interrupts, Message Passing, I/O etc.It just gets slow without hardware and processor opcodes. That doesn’t makeeverything, especially a byte loader, a FORTH system.-Gar.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133805",
"author": "Hocwp",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T03:06:49",
"content": "Are you so sure?Quote for Brad Rodriguez:Subroutine Threaded Code (STC): A high-level Forth definition is nothing but a list of subroutines to be executed. You don’t need interpreters to accomplish this; you can get the same effect by simply stringing a list of subroutine calls together.A virtual machine is far from mandatory to build a Forth.Have a look at CollapseOShttps://git.sr.ht/~vdupras/collapseos-pc/tree/master/item/pc.fswhich is also a STC Forth.Here I have just striped down the idea to build this umbilical Forth.",
"parent_id": "8132737",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132772",
"author": "Robert McIsaac",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T23:38:08",
"content": "Consider Lua which can support small micros such as ESP32",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132831",
"author": "GWM",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T06:46:05",
"content": "I have a feeling the [static Forth] is a subset of a large static know-able seeable set of names to xor thru. Otherwise how know?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132866",
"author": "Maciej",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T09:49:19",
"content": "Operating system it is not. Not even close.Many years ago I “did” (like a mistake, less like an achievement) a code which acted as bootloader loading my actual os code, reading disks and partition and even listing files and directories (ext2, fat in several sizes and partially ntfs). Assembler so much like this one. But I was also switching to different memory models (do you know what protected mode is or what is a global descriptors table). Still – it wasn’t a real operating system and using such a word would be an abuse.But I am happy that you are learning how low level stuff works. Small advice: try arm64 or risc-v and embedded electronics",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133828",
"author": "Hocwp",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T04:06:48",
"content": "Thanks for the advises. What make you think I’m not aware of them? Hint: I’m more a 68HC11 guy (the Motorola one in it’s first ages) when speaking of embedded electronics. But who cares.",
"parent_id": "8132866",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133806",
"author": "Hocwp",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T03:09:22",
"content": "Thanks for the advises. What make you think I’m not aware of them? Hint: I’m more a 68HC11 guy (the Motorola one in it’s first ages) when speaking of embedded electronics. But who cares.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,532.960119
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/27/automated-blinds-opener-on-the-cheap/
|
Automated Blinds Opener On The Cheap
|
Matt Varian
|
[
"home hacks"
] |
[
"automated blinds",
"magnetic encoder",
"repurpose",
"reuse"
] |
We love seeing hacks that involve salvaging parts from what you have on hand to make a new project work, and this project is a great example of that. [Simon], in a quick weekend build, created an
automated blinds opener
using parts he had available.
The project began with the desire to have his blinds open slowly and silently, gradually letting in more light. To accomplish this, a few key components were needed, including a motor with a gearbox to provide the torque required to actuate the blinds and a magnetic encoder to track their progress. To isolate vibrations and keep the system silent, the motor is mounted using a silicone motor mount that he salvaged from a broken water flosser.
The printed holder for the magnetic encoder is a nice touch.
To mount the motor to the wall near the window, he used some 3D printed parts. A clever combination of surgical silicone tubing and silicone tape attaches the motor to the window blind shaft while limiting vibration transfer, keeping things quiet. [Simon] advises against using magnetic encoders as he did, noting that while he had them on hand and made them work, the magnetic shaft’s misalignment with the encoders makes it a less-than-ideal approach. Nevertheless, he got it working.
Automating blinds is a fairly common project around these parts, made all the more accessible with
clever 3D printed mechanisms
. We’ve even seen variations that can be used in rentals, dorms, and other places were
permanent modifications need to be avoided
.
| 7
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8132586",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T08:53:42",
"content": "Mechanical integration is the hardest part. Electronics is easy, you could even use an RC car internals!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132629",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T13:52:57",
"content": "Maybe true for much of the community here.But a good machinist in a well-equipped shop might say the exact opposite: Why depend on far-off suppliers, fragile electronics and arcane software toolchains, when you can just build something to suit out of raw stock?",
"parent_id": "8132586",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132634",
"author": "REALiAM",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T14:43:16",
"content": "Nice work!I’ve made a similar project which uses a cheap stepper motor (28byj-48) and a micro controller, integrates with most home automations (HA, mqtt….)Please have a look and comment:https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4889111Uses ESPHome and all code (yaml) is on githubAlso have an updated version in the works, but life keeps getting in the way…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132673",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T16:28:14",
"content": "Neat, but on the cheap is to reach up and ‘open’ the curtains by hand :) when you want them open. Completely reliable too! Ha!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132738",
"author": "JT",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T20:37:01",
"content": "Doesn’t work when you’re asleep. Seems like this was made with the aim of a “gentle wake-up” alarm that lets the room get gradually lighter…",
"parent_id": "8132673",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132761",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T22:25:22",
"content": "Thx. Might help if I read the ‘whole’ article instead of skipping .That said our pull down blinds aren’t completely opaque. So sunlight naturally brightens the room gradually anyway.",
"parent_id": "8132738",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132803",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T02:30:38",
"content": "Ages ago I had to get up before daylight and I found a timer of some sorts and connected the dial with a rubber tube shaft to a pot and light dimmer. Sunrise anyway. It had to be dialed back each day before bedtime but it worked. DST has many in western sides of time zones doing this twice during a year to go school. Deep winter then again in spring.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,533.310149
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/26/vintage-intel-8080-runs-on-a-modern-fpga/
|
Vintage Intel 8080 Runs On A Modern FPGA
|
Heidi Ulrich
|
[
"classic hacks",
"FPGA",
"Microcontrollers",
"PCB Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] |
[
"8080A-1",
"CM32",
"fpga",
"Intel 8080",
"openocd",
"pcb",
"uart"
] |
If you’re into retro CPUs and don’t shy away from wiring old-school voltages,
[Mark]’s latest Intel 8080 build
will surely spark your enthusiasm. [Mark] has built a full system board for the venerable 8080A-1, pushing it to run at a slick 3.125 MHz. Remarkable is that he’s done so using a modern Microchip FPGA, without vendor lock-in or proprietary flashing tools. Every step is open source.
Getting this vintage setup to work required more than logical tinkering. Mark’s board supplies the ±5 V and +12 V rails
the 8080
demands, plus clock and memory interfacing via the M2GL005-TQG144I FPGA. The design is lean: two-layer PCB, basic level-shifters, and a CM32 micro as USB-to-UART fallback. Not everything went smoothly: incorrect footprints, misrouted gate drivers, thermal runaway in the clock section; but he managed to tackle it.
What sets this project apart is the resurrection of a nearly 50-year-old CPU. It’s also, how thoroughly thought-out the modern bridge is—from bitstream loading via
OpenOCD
to clever debugging of crystal oscillator drift using a scope. [Mark]’s love of the architecture and attention to low-level detail makes this more than a show-off build.
| 5
| 3
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8133022",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T17:29:59",
"content": "When I first read the summary, I thought the 8080 itself was implemented within the FPGA.I didn’t realize that the FPGA was just a support system for an actual 8080.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134043",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T23:35:14",
"content": "That’s what I thought as well. The internal 8080 blocks should be easily implemented. Yes, program memory would be external.",
"parent_id": "8133022",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134494",
"author": "Jeremy H.",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T18:18:10",
"content": "If I recall correctly, these early members of the x86 (8080, 8085?) family needed a lot of supporting logic in order to constitute a working general purpose computer. Probably a little easier to find a working Intel 8080 CPU these days than it is to source the Intel 8224, Intel 8228, and other presumably less common parts.",
"parent_id": "8133022",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133118",
"author": "zpekic",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T02:26:23",
"content": "Fun project! It would be cool to slightly extend it with 2 rows of 40 pin headers (one connected to voltage convertors, other to DIP40 socket) to make it a generic 40-pin legacy CPU “adapter”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133168",
"author": "fuuk",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T07:48:12",
"content": "can run doom 1993?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,533.261924
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/26/a-risc-v-operating-system-instruction-manual/
|
A RISC-V Operating System Instruction Manual
|
Bryan Cockfield
|
[
"Software Hacks"
] |
[
"cornell",
"course",
"educational",
"operating system",
"os",
"RISC-V"
] |
To some, an operating system is a burden or waste of resources, like those working on embedded systems and other low-power applications. To others it’s necessary, abstracting away hardware so that higher-level programming can be done. For most people it’s perhaps not thought of at all. But for a few, the operating system is the most interesting piece of software running on a computer and if you’d like to investigate what makes this often overlooked aspect of computer science interesting,
take a look at this course on operating systems from Cornell University
.
The operating system itself is called Earth and Grass Operating System because it splits the functionality of the operating system into three separate parts. The Earth layer involves dealing with hardware, the Grass layer involves hardware-independent aspects, and a third application layer implements other key operating system features. It’s built for a RISC-V processor, since that instruction set is completely open source and transparent about what it’s doing. It’s also incredibly small, coming in at around 2000 lines of code. The course covers nine areas, with the first six being core operating system functions and the remaining three covering more advanced operating system concepts.
For understanding the intricacies and sometimes mysterious ways that operating systems work, a course like this can go a long way into unraveling those mysteries and developing a deeper understanding of how it brings the hardware to work for higher-level software.
We actually featured this operating system two years ago
, before this course was created, which covers this project for those who like to take a more self-directed approach, or simply want a lightweight OS for a RISC-V system.
| 1
| 1
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8132699",
"author": "Jii",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T18:24:32",
"content": "That is interesting. This sounds like something i might read through, not quite yet though.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,533.127422
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/28/washington-consumers-gain-right-to-repair-for-cellphones-and-more/
|
Washington Consumers Gain Right To Repair For Cellphones And More
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"News",
"Repair Hacks"
] |
[
"right to repair"
] |
Starting January 1st, 2026, Washington state’s new
Right to Repair law will come into effect.
It requires manufacturers to make tools, parts and documentation available for diagnostics and repair of ‘digital electronics’, including cellphones, computers and similar appliances. The relevant
House Bill 1483
was signed into law last week after years of fighting to make it a reality.
A similar bill in Oregon
faced strong resistance
from companies like Apple, despite backing another Right to Repair bill in California. In the case of the Washington bill, there were positive noises from the side of Google and Microsoft, proclaiming themselves and their products to be in full compliance with such consumer laws.
Of course, the devil is always in the details, with Apple in particular being a good example how to
technically
comply with the letter of the law, while throwing up many (financial) roadblocks for anyone interested in obtaining said tools and components. Apple’s penchant part pairing is also a significant problem when it comes to repairing devices, even if these days it’s
somewhat less annoying
than it used to be — assuming you’re running iOS 18 or better.
That said, we always applaud these shifts in the right direction, where devices can actually be maintained and repaired without too much fuss, rather than e.g. cellphones being just disposable items that get tossed out after two years or less.
Thanks to [Robert Piston] for the tip.
| 30
| 9
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8132892",
"author": "Rick",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T11:43:46",
"content": "I think there should be a Right Not to Update Bill. I paid for my computer and its’ operating system. I will decide if and when it will be updated. The bill would have to describe exactly what each update will do and in clear terms. It should include requirements that would delineate feature vs security updates, exactly what these updates will do and that they cannot be combined. It should also include our choice not to have features or programs removed, etc.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132898",
"author": "Peter",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T12:03:05",
"content": "Totally agree. iMovie was removed from my latest iPhone restore. Deleting all my edited movies. Also a music player app disappeared after a restore along with all my music. Can no longer download the app. I’m furious. My only consolation is that I never gave a penny to Apple, I always bought used.Regarding electronic waste, this category needs to work like the cigarette butt regulation in Spain. The cost of cleaning up is distributed among the tabacco companies. Would work with plastic. Just pay cash per kilo of waste brought in then charge the companies that import and produce it.",
"parent_id": "8132892",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132900",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T12:06:42",
"content": "but but but,…. then HP can’t brick people’s printers any more when they dared to use 3rd party ink.",
"parent_id": "8132892",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132912",
"author": "Rick",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T12:28:54",
"content": "Totally Agree!",
"parent_id": "8132900",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132907",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T12:17:26",
"content": "but but but,… then Microsoft can’t brick foreign powers’ computers and cripple their economy at the US goverment’s demand.",
"parent_id": "8132892",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132915",
"author": "Rick",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T12:34:42",
"content": "That’s a tough one. I might be mistaken, but I believe China has their own Windows equivalent for that very reason.",
"parent_id": "8132907",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132924",
"author": "sjm4306",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T12:59:22",
"content": "This 100%, I’d go even further and force companies to partially refund consumers if any features are removed through a firmware update after purchase. How is it ok to force a customer to update their software in the name of security while removing functionality?",
"parent_id": "8132892",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132940",
"author": "Sword",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T13:49:33",
"content": "Linux my friend, linux is the way",
"parent_id": "8132892",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132944",
"author": "Rick",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T14:11:33",
"content": "I’ve been seriously thinking of making Windows 10 my last Windows and going to Linux. We’ll see. Just have to make the jump.",
"parent_id": "8132940",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133004",
"author": "Yes",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T16:14:42",
"content": "I made the jump from MacOS a few years ago and haven’t looked back. Tried many distros and eventually settled on KUbuntu, which has a lot of documentation and just werks™",
"parent_id": "8132944",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133075",
"author": "JanW",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T22:09:24",
"content": "At home I could and would manage to do so, but at work we use some big CAD packages, which are Windows only…",
"parent_id": "8132944",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132902",
"author": "Andrzej",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T12:08:39",
"content": "“iOS 18 or better”… you mean Android? :)(not intending to start an iOS vs Android comment war, both suck in their own way)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132913",
"author": "Rick",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T12:33:11",
"content": "I wasn’t thinking of iOS or Android. I was only thinking of MS Windows, but it can apply to all of them!",
"parent_id": "8132902",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132928",
"author": "Bob the builder",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T13:06:02",
"content": "What I personally find more annoying is the way companies deal with business owners. Let me give two known examples.Farmers used to be able to fix every vehicle themselves. A standard toolkit was all that was needed to rebuild an entire tractor. I know because I helped repairing a few of them. These days you can’t. Especiallybig greenis going after farmers attempting repairs and make purchasing parts impossible. Farmers can’t easily switch brands as tractor companies work in specific area’s so if you are in abig greenarea, you really don’t want to buy another brand of tractor, as supplies and service for your brand is non existent, leaving you with very expensive equipment you can’t get get serviced. This forces farmers to buy from brands likebig green, instead of switching to another brand that might be better and more customer focused. Most farmers aren’t rich and a lot are just barely holding on to their farms. Sure, there are a few corporations that own giant farms but they don’t care about any of these issues.Another example is the good old ice cream machines at McDonalds. McDonalds signed a license that only the manufacturer of the ice cream machines is allowed to service the machines and they charge insane amounts of money for repairs and service. Franchise owners are usually not wealthy enough to pay for it and can’t easily afford repairs, unless they own a bunch of franchise locations at the same time. Franchise owners are forced to purchase that specific model of machine and aren’t allowed to use another machine. The machines break often and repair bills can be very large. The result is that they leave the machine broken for a longer period of time. So if you want to know why the ice cream machine is always broken, this is it.I mean sure, it’s annoying for customers but I refuse to pay the price of a good used car for a mobile phone so Apple isn’t anywhere near what I want to pay and even if I want to spend that much, I wouldn’t want one as the hardware is just terrible. iPhone’s break the moment I look at one. I paid a lot of money (like, 300 euro’s) for my Android phone when it came out 4 years ago and I’m still happy with it. The entire outside is filled with scratches and dents.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132932",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T13:10:44",
"content": "What is this Windows people talk about … Use Linux. Update when you want to update. Dig as deep as you want to know what updates you are getting and what was changed. And reboot on your own time. Apply your only the ones you want… Total freedom of choice what desktop to use… And what distribution. You don’t have to use Windows…. Or Apples OS. Your have choices.We could always ‘repair’ our own computers (replace the HD, CPU, motherboard, etc.) . Of course who wants to repair down at the chip level? How far do you take it? Back to hole through parts? Bottom line, going to be more expensive for the consumer I suspect for devices that ‘comply’. Phones would become bulkier (wouldn’t mind that if you could just remove a cover and slip in a new battery pack, like you could before ‘thin’ phones). The unintended consequences of a ‘feel good’ law… Strikes again.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132946",
"author": "Rick",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T14:14:34",
"content": "LOL, that made me laugh… As just mentioned above a few seconds ago, I would like to go to Linux at some point. Just don’t know or want to deal with all the hardware compatibility issues that I may encounter.",
"parent_id": "8132932",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132992",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T15:32:15",
"content": "Linux Mint is a Linux distribution that is very friendly to beginners. It’s progressed to a state that it almost always “just works”. Also, Trying out Linux is very easy these days. Most distributions have “live” versions. Download it, put it on an USB stick, and then boot from it. If you’ve got a storage media on hand, you can go from zero to running Linux in 15 minutes.For longer term dual boot systems…You can mess with a boot loader, but I find it both easier and robuster to simply add another SSD to your system, and then use the Bios / UEFI to select the boot media. This way, you do not have to change a single bit of either the old installed OS, or the new one.Bios / UEFI usually has an option to set a boot media permanently, and/or to override with a keystroke during startup.",
"parent_id": "8132946",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132994",
"author": "Peter",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T15:47:14",
"content": "Not being a Linux wizard I installed Mint on an old Compaq laptop. Works great, kept the family from buying a new junk windows. Only issue was a 4 minute blank screen booting time. Could never figure out why or how to speed it up. Took hours of research to no avail.",
"parent_id": "8132992",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133005",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T16:22:14",
"content": "Really, hardware support problems are pretty much thing of the past with Linux unless you have a ‘special’ case. Every time I’ve upgraded to a newer laptop, Linux just ran on it. Same with desktops and servers. As said above you can boot from a USB stick and test ‘basic’ compatibility if you wish. Personally I now just boot, wipe disk clean, and install Linux. Wifi works, sound worked, video worked, etc. To bad that newer laptops don’t have a ‘hard-wire’ RJ-45 connector anymore. I had to buy a USB-C to ethernet cable for my last laptop. I digress… Every time I’ve upgraded my systems, Linux supported the parts. Not like 10 years ago and more where hunting for drivers…. Times have changed. Even printers (at least my Brother ones) are auto detected and ready for use. Granted when I moved to the ‘then’ very new AMD Ryzen platform with a 1600, Mint (which I was running) did not support it. Had to get the latest Ubuntu version to get Linux on the system at the time. That’s in the past.",
"parent_id": "8132946",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133121",
"author": "Miroslav",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T02:49:16",
"content": "I recently had a case of a new Dell laptop where Windows 10 or 11 wouldn’t install because it didn’t have SSD drivers (!). Linux installed just fine without any problem. So tables have fully turned.",
"parent_id": "8133005",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133296",
"author": "F",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T16:33:14",
"content": "Except… for GPU’s which have a tendency to become unsupported relatively quickly and have no open source drivers.",
"parent_id": "8133005",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133024",
"author": "Rick",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T17:32:03",
"content": "Thanks for the info, guys. Mint would be my go to distro as I’ve read multiple times that it is beginner friendly and most like Windows. And thanks for the tip, paulvdh, about just using a separate drive to dual boot. I friend of mine discussed with me about dual boot and said that it’s such a pain that he eventually went to two machines. Having separate media effectively does that. And that’s good to know about the hardware compatibility too.",
"parent_id": "8132946",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132972",
"author": "Pedro",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T15:05:15",
"content": "Wake me up when LCD font rendering in Linux (be it X11 or Wayland GUIs) comes anywhere close to Windows. I don’t care that I can watch Big Buck Bunny in VLC at 60 fps when my primary mode of communication is still screwed and has “wontfix” status. I’m not switching to CRT either because it’s not 2007 anymore and I can’t buy second-hand Dell P1130 for $50.",
"parent_id": "8132932",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132952",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T14:39:41",
"content": "” In the case of the Washington bill, there were positive noises from the side of Google and Microsoft, proclaiming themselves and their products to be in full compliance with such consumer laws. ”Hmmm. It seems this could require that their products be open source.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132973",
"author": "Sammie Gee",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T15:07:20",
"content": "(as a side note, I happen to work at McD waay waay back when they were just starting on the “everything is microwaved” path. Industrial grade microwaves easily cost 3-5 times the usual consumer grade ones, and the cost to the owners bck then was just stellar … their solution? fire workers, “streamline operations” aka “corporate restructuring” so that they can afford microwaves … aha … that’s how we ended with “every burger now comes in a soggy bun” deal and wages that are more like allowances than wages).Aside from that, industrial machinery is never cheap … it makes sense fixing it indefinitely … which to the vendors sounds like “returning customer we can milk indefinitely as well” until the vendor company croaks over, and then WHAT? Go with another expensive vendor, of course.Which brings me back to the topic at hand.There should be TWO regulations in total – TWO, not one. First one, as stated, The Right to Repair and availability of spare parts. Second one, designed and built in a way that makes future repair possible. Not just slapdash put it together, the hell with the invariable need to fix anything. DESIGNED BY THE ENGINEERS, and not by the peanut counters, by the engineers who WILL give it a proper thought “this part may break first, so let’s make sure it is reachable by the average Sam doing his fixing on the budget”.Modern cars are the prime example in failing the second part. Try changing a starter on, say, Nissan Versa (actually, it is not as bad as, say, Saab, but still quite bad) and you’ll know what that means. Yes, taking apart one quarter of the engine just to get to the starter. Compact cars are known to be one of those slapdash-it-comes-together-in-one-way-never-gets-taken-apart-except-in-the-junkyard. How phones are different? Not terribly much so. They are compact for sure, and mostly not in the way you’d find it helpful. Actually, they are terrible, and I’ll stop at that.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133064",
"author": "Steven-X",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T21:10:57",
"content": "I once changed a starter on a friend’s late 80’s Subaru and it was located on the top of the engine, to access it i just needed to remove the air cleaner.",
"parent_id": "8132973",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133067",
"author": "drmail377@yahoo.com",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T21:21:12",
"content": "Second one, designed and built in a way that makes future repair possible. Not just slapdash put it together, the hell with the invariable need to fix anything. DESIGNED BY THE ENGINEERS, and not by the peanut counters, by the engineers who WILL give it a proper thought “this part may break first, so let’s make sure it is reachable by the average Sam doing his fixing on the budget”.Socialist countries tried that. Result was products that nobody wanted (except for people behind the Iron Curtain who had no choice). At first products which were designed by engineers, designed for durability and designed to be repairable were absurdly expensive and produced in rather low quantities. Then those engineers “rationalized” products and production processes, availability improved a bit (though queues – even for a roll of toilet paper – were a regular occurence) goods got cheaper but also worse (usually in terms of build quality or features).In the end this approach is what led to 1989 collapse of socialist economies and in turn governments across Europe. Turns out it’s better to let people build whatever they want, however they want and leave it for free market to decide.",
"parent_id": "8132973",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132982",
"author": "Snarkenstein",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T15:20:37",
"content": "Two years or less? My current Android phone is five years old, and it was a discount model from two model years previous when I bought it. My current cost per year for this one is south of forty bucks and still falling. (Service, on the other hand …)I only buy a new phone when the one I have stops working; and I have replaced batteries in the past (thanks, iFixit!).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132996",
"author": "Brian",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T15:51:13",
"content": "Operation FTW.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133016",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T17:15:52",
"content": "Apple will find a way around this. An obvious “way around” would be to create two slightly-different SKUs, one with easy-repair and significantly cheaper one without. The easy-repair SKU would have the same parts as the “discount” one, except Apple would charge a lot more for the phone and the interchangeable-repair-parts.The “discount” SKUs would not be available to residents or business in Washington, but if they wanted to drive to Oregon to buy one, no problem until it breaks.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,533.376799
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/28/stamp-modular-breakout-boards-for-smd-prototyping/
|
Stamp: Modular Breakout Boards For SMD Prototyping
|
John Elliot V
|
[
"hardware",
"PCB Hacks"
] |
[
"breadboard",
"kickstarter",
"Sciotronics",
"Stamp breakout boards"
] |
[Kalesh Sasidharan] from Sciotronics wrote in to tell us about their project, Stamp: a
modular set of template breakout boards
designed to make prototyping with SMD components faster, easier, and more affordable. No breadboards, custom PCBs, or tangled jumper wires required. The project has blasted past its Kickstarter goal, and is on track to start shipping in September.
Stamp was created out of frustration with the traditional SMD prototyping workflow. Breadboards don’t support SMD parts directly, and using adapters quickly gets messy, especially when you need to iterate or modify a design. Ordering PCBs for every small revision just adds delay, and cost.
Stamp solves this by offering reusable template boards with commonly used SMD footprints. You place the main component on the front and the supporting components on the back. Many complete circuits, such as buck converters, sensor blocks, microcontrollers, and so on, can fit on a single 17.8 × 17.8 mm board.
Most Stamps feature custom castellated holes, designed for side-by-side or right-angle edge connections, enabling a modular, reconfigurable approach to circuit building. The plan is to make the designs fully open source, so that others can build or adapt them. Although many PCB manufacturers might not have the facilities to make the special castellated edges which are available on some Stamps.
Dave Jones from the EEVblog
covered the Stamp
on one of his recent Mailbag videos, which you can check out below. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen somebody
promise to reinvent the breadboard
, but we do appreciate the simplicity of this approach.
| 36
| 13
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8132845",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T08:08:59",
"content": "Alternative:https://github.com/NNNILabs/Manhattan-Adapters-Prototyping-IdeasPerhaps not as neat, but cheap.I usually put the breakouts on an unetched PCB blank, which provides a ground plane. The through-plated pads on this one would make that harder, you’d need some tape in between to insulate.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132957",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T14:45:05",
"content": "Also these:https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006101886814.html",
"parent_id": "8132845",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135393",
"author": "Sciotronics",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T21:10:28",
"content": "Yes! We used these kinds of adapters ourselves during prototyping. They actually inspired us to come up with something more streamlined – something that doesn’t rely on a breadboard and lets you add supporting components on the same board. That’s how Stamp came about!",
"parent_id": "8132957",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135392",
"author": "Sciotronics",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T21:09:14",
"content": "Thanks for sharing that link! Really interesting approach. I see what you mean about using a blank PCB as a ground plane. With Stamp, we tried to sidestep the need for a backing board by making the modules interconnectable – they can be linked edge-to-edge either by direct soldering or with headers/jumper pins.",
"parent_id": "8132845",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132847",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T08:16:25",
"content": "Looks very much like a solution in search of a problem.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132868",
"author": "Lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T09:53:57",
"content": "It’s kind of a nice idea. Ive used something sort of similar but for ics with pinouts that wouldn’t ever fit perf board.",
"parent_id": "8132847",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133113",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T01:53:00",
"content": "fortunately i have lots of problems that need things like this.",
"parent_id": "8132847",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133231",
"author": "George",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T13:39:58",
"content": "I read that as “it’s possible to do that, but not actually a good idea to do that”.Technically, yeah, it’ll work. But work well?….",
"parent_id": "8132847",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135390",
"author": "Sciotronics",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T21:07:13",
"content": "Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Stamp actually came out of a real need we kept running into – prototyping with SMD parts often meant dealing with messy jumper wires and fragile adapter setups. We wanted a cleaner, faster and more modular way to prototype – something closer to a breadboard, but made for SMD parts.",
"parent_id": "8132847",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132856",
"author": "strawberrymortallyb0bcea48e7",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T08:43:34",
"content": "seems expensive, anyone got a JLCpcb link?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132956",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T14:44:35",
"content": "The doco says they will be releasing the gerber files for the Stamp boards, but to my knowledge they are not available yet. Some manufacturers may not be able to do the fancy castellated edges.",
"parent_id": "8132856",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135388",
"author": "Sciotronics",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T21:05:41",
"content": "Thanks for raising this! As John mentioned, we will be releasing the Gerber files later this year – Stamp is going fully open-source so the maker community can build on it.One of the goals of our Kickstarter was to scale production so we could offer Stamp at an accessible price without compromising on quality. We are starting at £1 per Stamp, with ENIG finish and adherence to IPC standards wherever possible to ensure both reliability and consistency.",
"parent_id": "8132856",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132953",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T14:41:08",
"content": "What do these offer that Schmartboards don’t already do?https://schmartboard.com/(and pretty darned well)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133266",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T15:26:55",
"content": "They have a bunch of clever additions, like pads on the backside with SMT spots that go to VCC/GND, respectively, so you don’t have to add the pullup resistor or decoupling cap off the breakout.Don’t think I’ll ever buy one of these, but I’ll definitely riff on the theme.",
"parent_id": "8132953",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132954",
"author": "DougM",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T14:42:01",
"content": "Hmm, the Basic Stamp people (Parallax) might have some concerns about the name.Yes they are still around :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134601",
"author": "Rex Baird",
"timestamp": "2025-06-03T01:38:27",
"content": "Came here to say that parallax basic stamp was my first MCU 🔥",
"parent_id": "8132954",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135387",
"author": "Sciotronics",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T21:02:08",
"content": "Thanks so much for pointing that out! We are based in the UK, and the potential name conflict with Parallax’s Basic Stamp hadn’t come up on our radar – especially since our core product is called just Stamp, and “Basic” is only one of the variant names. That said, we really appreciate the heads-up and are actively considering a name change for that variant to avoid any confusion.",
"parent_id": "8132954",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132955",
"author": "MrChristian",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T14:44:16",
"content": "I don’t hate the idea, the “stamp” form factor would play well with flexy-pins.But at over $1 a stamp on kickstarter of all places… this doesn’t make sense to me. IMO, the people most likely to use these are also the same people most likely to be totally comfortable sending off to pcbway/jlcpcb/whatever and getting 100 for the same price.Would have been more motivated to just give them $20 for the kicad models.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132978",
"author": "PointyOintment",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T15:14:50",
"content": "Flexy-pins what?",
"parent_id": "8132955",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132997",
"author": "Splud",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T15:55:21",
"content": "which sounds like exactly 1 sale before that’s up on a git repo someplace.",
"parent_id": "8132955",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135386",
"author": "Sciotronics",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T21:00:34",
"content": "Thanks for the thoughtful comment – and fair point about the DIY route. That is actually why we are making Stamp fully open-source later this year, so anyone can build their own or adapt it as needed. We want to support both sides: makers who enjoy building from scratch, and those looking for a faster, more accessible way to prototype.As for the price, the Kickstarter kit includes 20 boards (2 of each of 10 designs), covering a wide range of popular SMD footprints. Each board features an ENIG finish, custom castellated edges (Regular and Pro), and blind vias (Pro) – not the cheapest to manufacture, but essential for functionality and compactness. We have followed IPC standards wherever possible to ensure reliability.One of the key goals of the Kickstarter was to scale production and offer Stamp at an accessible price without compromising on quality.",
"parent_id": "8132955",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132984",
"author": "Thinkerer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T15:21:44",
"content": "The problem – handling minute components with fat fingers – has been around so long that you can get the solutions (adapter boards) from the usual discount sources that others mention. The only “innovation” seems to be castellated edges to make it into a marketing press-release-friendly form factor. Also likely some trademark/copyright issues with various entities.All in all this reminds me of student projects that start with self-reassuring cliches and reinvent a commercially available wheel.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135385",
"author": "Sciotronics",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T20:58:23",
"content": "Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts. You are right that SMD adapter boards have been around for a long time, and they work well in many situations. Where Stamp differs is in being a template breakout system designed not just to hold a single component, but to also include supporting circuitry – resistors, capacitors, inductors, etc. – all on the same board. That is what makes rapid prototyping with SMDs much more efficient.The castellated edges are a key part of that approach – they enable edge-to-edge interconnection, making it easy to build modular prototypes without needing breadboards or jumper wires.This project came out of years of hands-on frustration with messy SMD prototyping. It was developed by experienced electronics engineers aiming to improve the workflow – not to reinvent the wheel, but maybe to add a few spokes that were missing :)We really appreciate critical feedback, it helps us explain things better and improve where it counts.",
"parent_id": "8132984",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133002",
"author": "BrendaEM",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T16:10:33",
"content": "It’s basically HAM Radio Manhattan-style construction.https://hackaday.com/2011/09/04/a-ham-radio-receiver-manhattan-style/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133134",
"author": "Amphraredamine",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T04:33:14",
"content": "Fun fact: Radio pirates used “Manhattan Style” construction methods to build their gear decades before it became popular in the ham radio scene. It would often be seen in underground literature to illustrate how to construct transmitters. Part of me wonders if the QRP homebrewers who taught the hams about it may have been those pirates, hihi.I think it’s more like arts and crafts projects for old men but, hey, it works! :)",
"parent_id": "8133002",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135382",
"author": "Sciotronics",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T20:55:43",
"content": "Thanks for sharing the link – and the bit of history! Really fascinating to hear how Manhattan-style construction evolved!",
"parent_id": "8133134",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133013",
"author": "David H",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T17:01:32",
"content": "Reminds me in a way of Denshi blocks!https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denshi_blockAh, now that’s a Proustian moment from my childhood…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135381",
"author": "Sciotronics",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T20:54:36",
"content": "Denshi blocks look super interesting! It is great to see how modular circuit building has evolved over time, and how tools like that helped make electronics more accessible for learning and exploration.",
"parent_id": "8133013",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133063",
"author": "Ben",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T21:00:43",
"content": "I like using the MePADs fromhttps://qrpme.com/, but I generally like to build Manhattan style and these lend themselves to it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133132",
"author": "Fl.xy",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T04:20:06",
"content": "This is an old technique that I love. They used to form towers out of boards this shape.Seehttps://www.worldradiohistory.com/BOOKSHELF-ARH/Technology/Gernsback/Radiocraft-Technical/GERN-Printed-Circuits-Moses.pdfpage 115 fig 382 & 383. Nice to see a modern version.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135379",
"author": "Sciotronics",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T20:53:09",
"content": "Thanks for sharing the book — really fascinating! It is amazing to see how electronics has evolved over time and how modular ideas were approached in earlier times. Always inspiring to look back at the roots of the field.",
"parent_id": "8133132",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133133",
"author": "Amphraredamine",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T04:24:57",
"content": "This is a very old technique used to make modular circuits. See page 115 of the following book:https://www.worldradiohistory.com/BOOKSHELF-ARH/Technology/Gernsback/Radiocraft-Technical/GERN-Printed-Circuits-Moses.pdfNice to see a modern version!(Sorry if this is a double post. HaD comments are always booked on my browser.)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133138",
"author": "Ale",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T04:58:07",
"content": "Excellent, Thanks ! I had this kind of books when I was a kind, not exactly this one. I just wish for a German version :).",
"parent_id": "8133133",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133213",
"author": "Amphraredamine",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T12:01:45",
"content": "YW. Yes, these type of books inspired my imagination so much as a kid and to be honest they still do. Americanradiohistory.com has a huge library of books and magazines like this and their search is a great way to find obscure adverts, old product/project schematics, etc. it’s inspiring to look at the state of engineering over a century ago.Now we just need a GermanRadioHistory website for you :)",
"parent_id": "8133138",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133472",
"author": "bateske",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T03:54:47",
"content": "I think the real benefit people are missing, is not that it breaks out the pins, but that it also offers available strapping options for all of the pins on the board as well. Although it looks like it needs to be 4 layers to accomplish this with this smaller design. I think a design that offered this feature but all the components on the top and also breadboard compatible would be the ideal solution.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8135378",
"author": "Sciotronics",
"timestamp": "2025-06-04T20:50:32",
"content": "Thank you for the thoughtful feedback — you are absolutely right. Stamp uses a 4-layer PCB to achieve the complex routing needed to break out the pins of the main component and provide flexible strapping options to VCC or GND on the back side — either directly or through passive components. Also, the pitch of the Stamp is optimised to be breadboard-compatible, so it can slot into common prototyping workflows as well.",
"parent_id": "8133472",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,533.456857
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/27/a-100-year-old-electronic-musical-instrument-brought-back-to-life/
|
A 100-Year-Old Electronic Musical Instrument Brought Back To Life
|
Bryan Cockfield
|
[
"Musical Hacks"
] |
[
"disc",
"electricity",
"historical",
"laser",
"luminaphone",
"musical instrument",
"photodiode",
"photoresistor",
"recreation"
] |
In the early years of electrification, when electricity was beginning to shape the modern world, this new technology was being put to use in many more places than turning motors and providing lighting. Some things we can see as obvious missteps like electrified corsets marketed as health tonics or x-ray treatments for eye strain, but others ended up being fascinating bits of technology with interesting uses, many of which have been largely forgotten since.
This 100-year-old musical instrument is squarely in the latter category, and this build brings the sound of it back to life
.
The instrument was called the Luminaphone and was originally built by [Harry Grindell Matthews]. Of course, this was an age before transistors and many other things we take for grated, so it has some quirks that we might not otherwise expect from a musical instrument. The device generated sound by shining a series of lights through a perforated rotating disc at a selenium cell. The selenium cell was an early photoresistor, generating current corresponding to the amount of light falling on it. A keyboard activated different lights, shining on areas of the disc with different numbers of holes, causing differing sounds to be produced by the instrument.
The recreation was built by [Nick Bild] and uses a laser diode as a stand-in for the rotating disc, but since it can be modulated in a similar way the idea is that the photodiode used as a receiver would generate a similar sound. The recreation sounds a bit like a video game from the 8-bit era, but with no recordings or original Luminaphones surviving to the present day we may never know how accurate it is. There are some other electronic instruments still around today, though, and plenty of ways of DIY-ing their sound
like this project which recreates the tonewheels of the classic Hammond organ
.
| 35
| 17
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8132819",
"author": "macsimki",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T05:26:16",
"content": "and don’t forget the Optigan, the organ using an exchangable optical disk to generate sound. that is a direct descendant of this device.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132825",
"author": "sjlyons50",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T06:03:43",
"content": "My parents bought me one in the late 70s. Loved it! Wish I still had it.",
"parent_id": "8132819",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132826",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T06:04:09",
"content": "A selenium cell responds much more slowly than a photodiode, so I suspect the original sound was quite different (probably closer to a sine than a square wave). Also, since the original docs show a colander-like “disk”, so it seems that there were multiple light paths, possibly further altering the sound.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132934",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T13:18:44",
"content": "Makes sense. How about an LDR instead of a photodiode?It’s slower, I think. My next idea as a replacement is a solar cell as sensor.",
"parent_id": "8132826",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132938",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T13:37:55",
"content": "Yep, an old-school CdS LDR should do the trick.",
"parent_id": "8132934",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132945",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T14:13:00",
"content": "Banned because of RoHS.",
"parent_id": "8132938",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132830",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T06:16:48",
"content": "The technical and mechanical limitations of the instrument would have produced an entirely different sound compared to blasting a square wave out from an Arduino.Keying the lightbulbs on and off would, for example, produce a distinct attack and release function. How they managed to have multiple keys with apparently not enough hole patterns or lamps for each key is also a mystery – which suggests that they summed up different patterns to achieve the right number of pulses per second but not necessarily equally spaced – which would also have contributed to an unique sound.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132832",
"author": "Chris",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T07:04:37",
"content": "I completely agree with you. They should just recreate it faithfully (okay, with LEDs). Sounds like a nice project.",
"parent_id": "8132830",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132865",
"author": "PNW",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T09:38:38",
"content": "I think you missed the point. LEDs are (nearly) instant-on and instant-off, depending on the specific LED and circuit design of course, but even worst case “slow” phosphor coated types (like white LED) have times measured in like… 100 nanoseconds. Modern incandescent bulbs have a MUCH slower turn on / turn off time, depending on the filament. Keeping wattage the same, a lower voltage bulb will be slower than a higher voltage one. Ballpark figures a 220V 50W might reach full brightness in perhaps 25ms, while a 12V 50W one might take several hundred ms. Changing the wattage and with the same voltage does the same – a 220V 500W takes over a second to reach full brightness!And another complication is that the response time of a selenium cell is also much slower than a photodiode, a fast one perhaps in the 0.1ms time frame, I’m not exactly sure. I know they were used as the sensor in very early optical soundtrack for playing back sound from film projection, so those designs could certainly handle something in the khz range. But there were other types which were much slower, maybe more like 1-10ms. This is another form of analog filtering that would affect the final sound.The LED and photodiode musical instrument is certainly very interesting, but there is absolutely no way it sounds anywhere near what the original instrument sounded like.",
"parent_id": "8132832",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132917",
"author": "Chris",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T12:38:57",
"content": "You’re right. Perhaps emulate the on/off time with a RC circuit? Would be worth testing – together with a spinning disk. It seems, the next project is in the queue ;-)",
"parent_id": "8132865",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132919",
"author": "RetepV",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T12:46:30",
"content": "My feeling is that the end waveform resembles a sine wave, but with flattened peaks. And the on/off characteristic of the lamps and the slowness of the selenium detector would give a mellow attack and decay. So I think that the sound would be quite mellow.Maybe he will make the real thing, and we would get to hear the actual sound. :) I guess the only question is if Nick will think it’s worth the effort to build it.",
"parent_id": "8132865",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133011",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T16:56:27",
"content": "It would also include light leaking in through adjacent rows of holes, so each key would be modulated by its neighbors, plus whatever ambient light you have. It might be quite rich in harmonics and beat tones.",
"parent_id": "8132919",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132877",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T10:47:02",
"content": "There definitely are enough lamps and hole patters for each key to have its own. Just eyeballing it I’d say he’s got a three octave range with a lamp for each note and a corresponding hole pattern.",
"parent_id": "8132830",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132844",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T08:05:17",
"content": "Okay, cool concept, but the I would not use the word “recreation”, as this is a bit overstretched.It’s like making spaghetti bolognese, but using shoe laces instead of pasta, red paint for the tomato sauce and rubber balls for the meat. Selenium cells are slow, real slow, this would affect the sound greatly, lightbulbs are slow, this would affect the sound envelope greatly. I hate to say it, but perhaps using a 555…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132846",
"author": "Cody",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T08:09:09",
"content": "I wish he would have built it like the original. I have a feeling it would sound a lot different. This just sounds like a square wave that’s been slightly low pass filtered. Using a 1920’s horn speaker would probably make it sound a lot different too.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132869",
"author": "RetepV",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T09:59:52",
"content": "I wonder why the disc should be rotating at 400 rpm instead of 440 rpm. It must be a clue as to the spacing of the dots.Small calculation. Say that the circumference of the circle with holes on the disc is exactly 100cm (disc with a diameter of 31.831cm, which seems reasonable, looking at the pictures). At 400 rpm that would be 400 times 100cm per minute (40,000cm per minute), or 666.67cm per second.If I’m deducing and calculating correctly, to get a 400Hz tone, you would want to have 400 holes in those 666.67cm, or one hole every 1.16667cm.For a 440Hz tone, that would be 666.67/440 = 1.5cm between each hole. That’s a nice number. Although well, the placements of the holes is ‘analog’, so a hole every 1.666666667cm wouldn’t be much harder.If I look at the photograph at 1:13, I see two things: 1) the holes on the left disc form a kind of spiral pattern, 2) the distances between the holes seem quite close to 1.5cm.I would think that the size of the holes also will matter. Not for the amplitude, but for the shape of the waveform.So, now somebody should just make the real thing ;). Maybe the disc could be printed with a 3D printer? But to be more historically accurate, maybe you could form a metal disc in the more or less required umbrella shape and then use a 3D CNC machine to drill all the holes?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132874",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T10:39:56",
"content": "I would be willing to bet that it was 400 rpm because he used an AC motor and a gear reduction that was available.",
"parent_id": "8132869",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132914",
"author": "RetepV",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T12:34:36",
"content": "I will not take you on that bet. Sounds just as plausible. ;)",
"parent_id": "8132874",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132959",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T14:50:28",
"content": "If you’re running at 400 RPM you get closer to the correct frequencies with an integer number of holes around the circle.66 holes = 440 Hz (A)62 holes = 413 Hz (315 Hz G#)59 holes = 393 Hz (392 Hz G)56 holes = 373 Hz (370 Hz F#)and so-on.Meanwhile, if you start at 440 RPM you get60 holes = 440 Hz (A)57 holes = 418 Hz (315 Hz G#)54 holes = 396 Hz (392 Hz G)51 holes = 374 Hz (370 Hz F#)You can’t hit the notes exactly – there’s always going to be some that are off by a little bit because the ratio between each note is an irrational number. Running the disc slower means you get more divisions per rotation, which gets you closer to the desired frequencies., but if you run it too slow then the holes will be too tightly packed and there’s less separation between light and dark for the sensor.",
"parent_id": "8132869",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132961",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T14:51:58",
"content": "Typo: G# is 415 Hz",
"parent_id": "8132959",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133090",
"author": "hugh crawford",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T23:13:54",
"content": "Or, you could have multiple disks at multiple speeds connected by belts. Belts and pulleys are great for irrational ratios if you will pardon the pun.Then you need to decide whether you want just or even tempered scales.",
"parent_id": "8132959",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133151",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T06:21:18",
"content": "The Hammond organ did it with gears. Obviously not irrational ratios, but close enough.",
"parent_id": "8133090",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132871",
"author": "H Hack",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T10:21:01",
"content": "Cool stuff. Except the synthol, not cool.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132964",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T14:53:51",
"content": "“photoresistor, generating current corresponding to the amount of light falling on it” that would be a resistogen or diodiotor, not a resistor.Note that selenium rectifiers could be used if they were not painted. These plates are not for cooling. The device requires large active surface areas. They were in everything, TV, radio, any device that needed DC, for decades. They have a peculiar smell.https://theodoregray.com/periodictable/Samples/034.2/index.s15.html",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133001",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T16:07:05",
"content": "I have to admit I love the reverse taking modern music and recreating it with the pinicle of 1930’s technology (That is only 95 years ago)e.g.https://youtu.be/cHLbaOLWjpc",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133044",
"author": "David H",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T18:49:59",
"content": "I knew which video that’d be before I even clicked on it. Orkestra Obsolete, with their spine-tingling 1930s rendition of New Order’sBlue Monday. Good stuff!",
"parent_id": "8133001",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133047",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T19:18:40",
"content": "No mention of the Compton organ with it’s “film sound track” discs each one the same for 12 spun by a belt and 12 different pulleys. Essentially the first sampled sound musical instrument, flute diapason string etc. Keys opened gates for envelope control with no clicks which was a problem for everyone else till Baldwin’s pressure resistance keying.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133085",
"author": "hugh crawford",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T22:48:02",
"content": "I don’t know who to reply to here about the modern electronics having a much faster, switching time and making a square wave, but in this case it doesn’t matterI would like to point out that the optical part of it could easily make up for that. Depending on on a lot of hand waving, the distribution of light through an aperture tends to be pretty Gaussian. The reason imaging optics are expensive is all about making it less Gaussian.Anyway, a line through bunch of Gaussian spots is pretty much a sine wave. A shaped mask on the light sensing device could make as much difference aa electrically filtering the signal.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133149",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T06:13:17",
"content": "What shocks me most is that the original parts are just bog standard parts, that used to be widely available just 20 years ago.With exception of the silenium cell, of course.Yet in 2025, people don’t even have access to a simple little lightbulb (incandescent lamp) anymore.That’s depressing. It’s as if resistors or capacitors are nolonger available.Or a mechanical switch. Or a 3,5mm jack etc.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133160",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T06:37:46",
"content": "Techically we do – because they haven’t managed to make LEDs that can operate at 300 C – which means we can still buy 15 and 40 Watt “appliance lamps”.The irony is that these are less efficient and dimmer than the equivalent halogen bulbs that were banned because of efficiency regulations. Two 40 Watt fridge bulbs in a Y splitter will give the same light as the old 60 Watt bulb did.",
"parent_id": "8133149",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133208",
"author": "Winston",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T11:41:57",
"content": "Nice. A bit of light music.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133298",
"author": "jenningsthecat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T16:40:28",
"content": "The selenium cell was an early photoresistorA selenium cell is photovoltaic. I guess it can be subbed for a photoresistor in some circuits, perhaps with mods, but its primary function is to generate voltage in response to light.Early photographic light meters used selenium cells; these meters were self-contained and didn’t require batteries.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133346",
"author": "Frankus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T18:51:47",
"content": "It’s a Mr. Quintron Drum Buddy!!!https://www.drumbuddy.com/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133431",
"author": "Neil",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T23:50:22",
"content": "Just a thought, maybe someone can make the rotating slotted drums by 3D printing them?A lot of modern computational power could be brought into play designing such instruments, and ai can use feedback from any design attempts to change/improve/tune the next 3D printout.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8134086",
"author": "John Chen",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T05:53:25",
"content": "Reminds me of the Electric Fan Harp that the band ELECTRONICOS FANTASTICOS uses.https://youtu.be/QJavHc48iZU",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,533.531065
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/27/new-supermaterial-as-strong-as-steel-and-as-light-as-styrofoam/
|
New Supermaterial: As Strong As Steel And As Light As Styrofoam
|
John Elliot V
|
[
"Science"
] |
[
"steel",
"styrofoam",
"supermaterial"
] |
Today in material science news we have a report from [German Science Guy] about a new supermaterial which is
as strong as steel and as light as Styrofoam
!
A supermaterial is a type of material that possesses remarkable physical properties, often surpassing traditional materials in strength, conductivity, or other characteristics.
Graphene
, for example, is considered a supermaterial because it is extremely strong, lightweight, and has excellent electrical conductivity.
This new supermaterial is a carbon nanolattice which has been developed by researchers from Canada and South Korea, and it has remarkably high strength and remarkably low weight. Indeed this new material achieved the compressive strength of carbon steels (180-360 MPa) with the density of Styrofoam (125-215 kg m
-3
).
One very important implication of the existence of such material is that it might lead to a reduction in transport costs if the material can be used to build vehicles such as airplanes and automobiles. For airplanes we could save up to 10 gallons per pound (80 liters per kilogram) per year, where an airplane like the Airbus A380-800 weighs in at more than one million pounds.
To engineer the new material the researchers employed two methods: the Finite Element Method (FEM) and
Bayesian optimization
. Technically these optimized lattices are manufactured using two-photon polymerization (2PP) nanoscale additive manufacturing with pyrolysis to produce carbon nanolattices with an average strut diameter of 300 and 600 nm.
If you have an interest in material science, you might also like to read about
categorizing steel
or
the science of coating steel
.
Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for letting us know about this one on the
tips line
.
| 64
| 18
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8132802",
"author": "Kris",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T02:25:40",
"content": "I’m wondering how risky it could be that the material becomes semi-saturated with water/oil/debris if the skin fails leading to degradation of the performance or even a sudden structural failure.. it might be lighter and stronger in a lab setting but how about the nano-fracturing of the lattice over temperature cycles and other stressors.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132808",
"author": "D",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T04:03:50",
"content": "If only we could encase it in some material other that was temperature-insulating and water resistant, yet as light as styrofoam… Like StyrofoamKidding aside, the real question is whether you get cancer from inhaling particles of this this stuff. Asbestos was a super material once upon a time.",
"parent_id": "8132802",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132839",
"author": "Tim Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T07:41:14",
"content": "If it’s making pyrolytic graphite, the fragments are likely a similar inhalation hazard to carbon fiber. Maybe not as toxic as asbestos — though, not sure if we have long-looking studies on that workplace hazard yet..?",
"parent_id": "8132808",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134206",
"author": "James Felix",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T17:56:37",
"content": "25 years of working with carbon, manufacturing, repair… having serious lung problems now. J. Felix",
"parent_id": "8132839",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133183",
"author": "rc",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T09:27:34",
"content": "That’s a point people forget. Nano materials may present that kind of dangers causing damage at a cellular level. Some unknown nasty extra proprieties, like micro plastics that accumulate toxic metals, are also possible.",
"parent_id": "8132808",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133318",
"author": "Stefan Karos",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T17:39:24",
"content": "Indeed. DNA methylation alters gene expression. Graphene also has a configuration not dissimilar to purine and pyrimidine bases that make up DNA. Intercalation of graphene fragments would be a potent mutagen as there several other mutagens that work by this mechanism",
"parent_id": "8132808",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132804",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T02:58:34",
"content": "Now we need the bio-engineers to design some sponges or coral that will build the stuff.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132983",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T15:20:42",
"content": "Followed by the inevitable accidental release into the wild",
"parent_id": "8132804",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133198",
"author": "NKT",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T10:54:38",
"content": "Oh look, we invented coral reefs!",
"parent_id": "8132983",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132812",
"author": "Stanson",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T04:25:31",
"content": "Graphene, known since 1859 is a “supermaterial” only in area of uselessness. There are no any actual superstrong ropes or untearing films promised a lot since the start of graphene hype. No promised graphene room temperature semiconductors of graphene teraHertz transistors. You will not be able to find around anything made from graphene with properties that could be named “super”, except may be, say, that “super odor absorber” for fridge with a text on the pack about “nanotubes”. But, honestly, I doubt it actually have any. Graphene is interesting in a lab without a doubt, but completely useless.I’m afraid that this material have same fate. Looks like guys who made it, failed to make a piece of decent size to demostrate material super properties in real world, so they fall back to nanoscale samples.You could have a lot of wonderful things at nanoscale, up to vacuum that is more vacuum than vacuum (in Casimir cavity), but they just can’t be scaled, or lose their wonderful properties when you try to make something that people could actually use.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132822",
"author": "Uhhhm Actually",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T05:55:02",
"content": "Graphene sheets are use in many high end smartphones as part of their thermal design",
"parent_id": "8132812",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132887",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T11:29:43",
"content": "Um actually… that’s pyrolitic graphite. F’rinstance:https://vritratech.com/PGS.htmlThe difference is that “real” graphene is one layer thick, and extraordinarily regular. PyG is like imperfect graphene: it consists of nanometer-sized graphene flakes that are bound haphazardly together.PyG is orders of magnitude cheaper to make, but it’s still pretty thermally conductive, which is what they’re going for. But it’s nowhere near as thermally conductive as actualy graphene.",
"parent_id": "8132822",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132861",
"author": "Milly",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T09:17:54",
"content": "Thirty years ago you could say the same thing about carbon fiber composites but by today they’re borderline common in practical use, if still somewhat premium.",
"parent_id": "8132812",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132895",
"author": "SpillsDirt",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T11:50:28",
"content": "More like 60 years. Carbon composites started appearing in Aviation applications in the mid60s riding advances made in the late 50s and early 60s. Improvements in material strength and production processes have both reduced the price and expanded the applicability every decade since.",
"parent_id": "8132861",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133039",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T18:18:15",
"content": "Carbon is just a fancy name for something made from coal.. 🙄And it can’t be properly repaired or recycled, even.Even alumin(i)um is better here.",
"parent_id": "8132861",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133101",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T00:20:40",
"content": "Calfee is excellent at repairing carbon-fiber frames.https://calfeedesign.com/carbon-repair/They can make it stronger than the original, and you can’t tell it was ever broken. However, short of certain types of abuse, a carbon-fiber frame will last indefinitely, unlike aluminum which does fatigue and break, although not as much as steel does. Any performance-oriented cyclist who has ridden a steel bike a lot has broken steel frames. I broke one myself, and got a new tube put in it, and broke it again, all in under 20,000 miles. I said I’m done with steel, and got a carbon-fiber bike. It has 63,000 miles on it now, and it’s still fine. I know a racer who has over 200,000 miles on a carbon frame.",
"parent_id": "8133039",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133265",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T15:23:13",
"content": "@nospam, appropriate environmental protection is normal for all of the listed materials, you’re not going to leave a steel bike outside in most places in the world without it disintegrating.",
"parent_id": "8133101",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133519",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T07:29:24",
"content": "nospam, I should have added that the steel I broke didn’t even have any rust in it. Inside the tubes it was all dark gray, without a speck of orange or brown. I had been careful to keep water and condensation out of it. It just fatigues, unlike the carbon fiber. Carbon fiber’s epoxy binder won’t be affected by normal sunshine though. If you leave it inside a black car on a hot day in Phoenix in the summer, it might soften and deform; but if you put it back in the right shape and let it cool, it will be fine. Someone took a bunch of frames of different materials around 20 years ago and put them in a jig and used pneumatic pistons to push the bottom bracket back and forth 200,000 cycles, to simulate out-of-the-saddle climbing a steep hill a mile a day for a year. There was overlap between materials durability, but generally the steel broke first, with none of the steel frames making it to the halfway point where the force was increased for the surviving frames, followed by titanium, and at least one of the aluminum frames made it all the way to the end without breaking, and none of the carbon broke. An internal aluminum lug in one of the carbon frames did break; but nobody makes frames that way anymore. Further, the metals technology was pretty mature already at the time, whereas carbon has continued to improve since then. Carbon fiber is not suitable for every part of the bike; but it’s definitely the best of the common ones for frames.",
"parent_id": "8133101",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133196",
"author": "Jay PDC",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T10:45:22",
"content": "Twin layers of graphene can stop a bullet. They are creating body armour as we speak.",
"parent_id": "8132812",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133473",
"author": "Gareth Roberts",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T03:55:33",
"content": "I unfortunately have to completely disagree. Graphene Batteries for Solar have been used for years, 500x better than lithium , graphene has been used in glass fibre making GFRP structural strength rebar and mech with properties 5 times stronger than steel in tensile, compression and shear… I could go on. This is an incredible product but the work of engineering is the one that has been slow to adapt to new way of calculating.",
"parent_id": "8132812",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133707",
"author": "Ashley O'Brien",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T19:16:36",
"content": "Yep, correct, it’s all very well making 3D stress models to optimize physical properties, but if you can’t even make the stuff at scale….just more hype, the person who cracks some real time manufacturing method to even like 3D print the stuff will be obscenely rich….",
"parent_id": "8132812",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132823",
"author": "Sean Walsh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T06:00:46",
"content": "Old man shouts at mixed units:“save up to 10 gallons per pound (80 liters per kilogram) per year, where a typical airplane weighs in at more than one million pounds.”To engineer the new material the researchers",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132893",
"author": "alex",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T11:47:21",
"content": "Yah… But it is a nice nod to readers who are more comfortable with liters or gallons. Don’t look at my CAD models, feet and millimeters co-exist in harmony",
"parent_id": "8132823",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132935",
"author": "Billy",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T13:23:09",
"content": "And then of course there’s the fact that a liter may be the same as a litre, but a gallon is not a gallon, and my CAD program refuses to work in football fields, washing machines and olympic-sized-swimming pools.",
"parent_id": "8132893",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133009",
"author": "Avaviel",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T16:38:16",
"content": "Same here… 2’ tall and 2500mm wide.",
"parent_id": "8132893",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133201",
"author": "NKT",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T10:58:53",
"content": "You must have a lot of trouble getting clothes that fit.",
"parent_id": "8133009",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132904",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T12:11:30",
"content": "Why bother to insist on getting the facts right, when you can get picky about units?” a typical airplane weighs in at more than one million pounds.”Very few airplanes are that heavy. The only one currently flying (the A380) only gets over a million pounds when fully loaded with cargo and fuel.",
"parent_id": "8132823",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132909",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T12:21:41",
"content": "Sorry about that I wasn’t careful with my language. I was referring to the Airbus A380-800 as mentioned in the video:https://youtu.be/qCf65Z2pe2Q?t=22",
"parent_id": "8132904",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132922",
"author": "Matthias",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T12:51:04",
"content": "The only one currently flying (the A380) only gets over a million pounds when fully loaded with cargo and fuel.implies you need very active, very skinny people for the mile-high club :o)",
"parent_id": "8132904",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133166",
"author": "Aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T07:40:31",
"content": "An Airbus is European (and made by engineers) so you should use proper units.Pound.. pfff",
"parent_id": "8132823",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133216",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T12:16:57",
"content": "A writer writes to the audience and uses language they will understand. You’re suggesting that when we discuss Chinese items, the article should use Chinese writing.",
"parent_id": "8133166",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134021",
"author": "Aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T21:24:41",
"content": "If the target audience is the US population as you suggest then HaD should use simplified English and say ‘would of’ a lot.And of course avoid rationality.",
"parent_id": "8133216",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132827",
"author": "SparkyGSX",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T06:05:24",
"content": "This only works for compression loads; for tensile strength, only the bulk material and cross section are relevant, as far as I know. Maybe it’s possible to combine this with a material that is very good in tension and very bad at compression, like long-chain polymers, to create an equivalent of pre-stressed concrete, that is strong in both compression and tension.I would be worried about fatigue performance.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132870",
"author": "metalman",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T10:10:35",
"content": "look into foam core composite construction, where the low compressive and tensile streangth is not a detriment, as the ability to provide a bridge between the very high strength but thin walls, prevents buckling…..an even lighter corewith high compresive strength will of course be better, but who is kidding who, it would take forever to print a 4×8 sheet and it would cost a c4azy amount of money, so its not going to happen outside of mega budget space related stuff",
"parent_id": "8132827",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132879",
"author": "Rick",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T11:04:53",
"content": "If anyone looks closely at the pic at the top of this article (term used very loosely) at the bottom of the photo it shows the magnification 9.81k",
"parent_id": "8132870",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132948",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T14:29:39",
"content": "… Which depends on screen rendering and a host of other factors. Maybe better to look at the actual and obvious 2-micron scale bar.",
"parent_id": "8132879",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132833",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T07:14:00",
"content": "So what material is it?I’m not going to click though 9 minutes of video for some dude to explain that airplanes are heavy, and the first pictures suggest it has something to do with a (3D printed?) matrix, and it’s not the material properties. Without mentioning such basics information in the text, it’s just clickbait to me. I understand Hackaday not liking too many negatively tainted comments, but this also depends on the quality of the written articles. Without mentioning the material in the text, you also can’t find posts though searches.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132852",
"author": "sweethack",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T08:34:00",
"content": "/\\ This /\\",
"parent_id": "8132833",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132873",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T10:33:49",
"content": "Exactly this! I watched the whole video and waited for the intro to finish. The entire video was just an intro. The guy cannot even pronounce the word “finite”.",
"parent_id": "8132833",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132916",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T12:34:52",
"content": "The material is a carbon nanolattice. The paper is here:https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202410651The notes on the YouTube video are also quite extensive but some of them are in German:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCf65Z2pe2Q",
"parent_id": "8132833",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132918",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T12:39:21",
"content": "I have updated the article to say that the material is a carbon nanolattice.",
"parent_id": "8132916",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132842",
"author": "Tom",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T08:02:31",
"content": "“graphene teraHertz transistors”Yep…..still waiting on them :(",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133040",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T18:20:06",
"content": "Me not, but nanotubes would be hot, err, cool!",
"parent_id": "8132842",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132851",
"author": "Bear Naff",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T08:33:55",
"content": "Is this not just another silicon aerogel? I don’t mean in terms of material or synthesis method, but we don’t really have the technology to print out arbitrary configurations of arbitrary materials yet, so unless these cavities are self-assembling, I cannot imagine that it will be possible to make this structure in bulk. They will just be another than a wondermaterial with few to no applications due to cost.We actually have a lot of those already.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132854",
"author": "sweethack",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T08:37:37",
"content": "I have silicon aerogel on my walls and floor and it’s a perfect insulator. They are enclosed in mylar and vacuum, so it’s technically a vacuum insulation with aerogel structure, with a R of only 0.0005 W/°K/m² and it’s not that expensive. It’s only 2cm thick so I’m not loosing precious room’s area here.",
"parent_id": "8132851",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132878",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T11:03:52",
"content": "Ohh, very cool. You sent me off on a google quest. I reckon my parents’ home could do with some of that.",
"parent_id": "8132854",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132881",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T11:13:09",
"content": "losing",
"parent_id": "8132854",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8141706",
"author": "Sandro",
"timestamp": "2025-06-23T22:07:19",
"content": "Do you mean Silica aerogel?",
"parent_id": "8132854",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132889",
"author": "Sasquatch",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T11:35:56",
"content": "“where a typical airplane weighs in at more than one million pounds” made me laugh.Even Airbus a380 isn’t close to that number at 610 thousand pounds…heck, even AN225 is way under 1milion with 628k.I bet rest of that writeup is just as accurate.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132910",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T12:23:16",
"content": "Sorry about that I wasn’t careful with my language. I was referring to the Airbus A380-800 as mentioned in the video:https://youtu.be/qCf65Z2pe2Q?t=22",
"parent_id": "8132889",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132901",
"author": "Pan Pap",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T12:07:29",
"content": "Ok, bit this not a material, that is a structure",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132920",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T12:48:34",
"content": "Right. The material is carbon. The structure is a nanolattice. Carbon isn’t new! :)",
"parent_id": "8132901",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132931",
"author": "puddle_pirate_extraordinaire",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T13:09:59",
"content": "I could see this being useful in things like the “honey comb” sandwiches used in the aerospace industry for wing construction, or maybe as an augmentation to Whipple Shields in spacecraft. Thinking along those lines I wonder how it would function as a body armor component. Maybe sandwiched between composite armor plates?Could this be the material needed to make the fabled “vacuum balloons”? I think Neal Stephenson used them in Diamond Age to support super tall sky scrapers.On an entirely unrelated track, it puts me in mind of the “foamed” stainless steel used in brewing to carbonate beer. Something like this would make for much smaller bubbles and faster carbonation. Though they can do it in-line now as its transferred from vat to bright tank so maybe its too expensive for that.Makes me wonder what this could do for filtration technology as well. If they can print in this particular structure then maybe they can make custom filter shapes for particular chemicals or particulates. Its too big for desalination membranes which are 0.1 to 1 nm, but might have other uses.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132976",
"author": "Beowulf Shaeffer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T15:12:06",
"content": "That reminds me, when is Ford going to start using that “nano-steel” that they were bragging about back in 2008?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133087",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T22:55:03",
"content": "…I think they have been and gone.",
"parent_id": "8132976",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132980",
"author": "Julian Spence",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T15:18:43",
"content": "This is a truss based lightweighting (like aerogels); unfortunately it is difficult to scale this up for larger scales (amount) and rapid manufacturing. alternative additive layer manufacturing is quite viable for hirearchical (cellular) structured materials. This can be seen in the (design) work of Prof Mike Ashby, (Cambridge UK) and, also Roderic Lakes (Wisconsin) in ultra lightweighting (Lakes gives a homage to the work of Eiffel). The book by Ashby & Gibson gives some examples of how cellular structured materials may be designed.However the manufacture is the problem. Please see, for an example of a 2nd order structure manufacturing , in the comments inhttps://www.theengineer.co.uk/content/news/dmex-to-develop-advanced-defence-materials/True that they are not great for tension but for energy absorption (directly or viscous dissipation) and stiffness and strength there are many design opportunites. I should say that I do not know if layers of graphite can be well bonded but for titanium sheet manufacturing is clear (and most likely for most metals).But, to re-iterate there needs to be interest in manufacturing at a useful scale (eg for armout or submarines….)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133010",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T16:54:38",
"content": "Any mention of shear or tensile strength? Styrofoam itself is pretty good at compressive..",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133033",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T18:05:33",
"content": "The paper covers compression and shear, no mention of tensile:https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202410651",
"parent_id": "8133010",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8133095",
"author": "Chris",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T23:34:23",
"content": "No mention of tensile strength, so probably very, very low. Looking at the structure, with a little compression, the lattice translates shear to compression. It can’t translate tensile forces to anything.",
"parent_id": "8133033",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133027",
"author": "Bro",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T17:52:26",
"content": "So they’re claiming to have invented carbon?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133221",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T12:54:48",
"content": "I was hoping to see some closeups of the rod.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133553",
"author": "Stephen Franklin",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T10:02:13",
"content": "Styrofoam ranges from 12 kg m3 to 33 kg m3. I don’t know where they got the density number from",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133641",
"author": "Roger Groombridge",
"timestamp": "2025-05-30T15:00:47",
"content": "Carbon-carbon covalent bonds are VERY strong and stiff. Diamond for instance. Their inherent flaw is structures employing that bond tend to be fatally brittle. (Because most engineering materials tend to be designed for a maximum strain of about 0.1%. At that strain rate, the material must be able to dissipate excess stresses without catastrophic failure.) Many supermaterials fail miserably at that crucial requirement and so they’re a bust.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134135",
"author": "DanK",
"timestamp": "2025-06-01T11:00:22",
"content": "Hard to hype anyone here grounded in reality, it seems , as we are all deep into engineering, science and hacking. Good for youtube grifters tho 🤣",
"parent_id": "8133641",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,533.627967
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/27/look-to-the-sky-with-this-simple-plane-tracker/
|
Look To The Sky With This Simple Plane Tracker
|
Ian Bos
|
[
"Arduino Hacks"
] |
[
"arduino",
"rasberry pi",
"teardown"
] |
Do you ever get tired of stressing your neck looking for planes in the sky? Worry not! Here is a neat and cheap Arduino/Ras Pi project to keep your neck sore free! [BANK ANGLE] presents a wonderfully simple
plane tracking system
using an affordable camera and basic microcontrollers.
The bulk of the system relies on a cheap rotating security camera that gets dissected to reveal its internals. Here stepper control wires can be found and connected to the control boards required to allow an Arduino nano to tell the motors when and where to spin. Of course, the camera system doesn’t just look everywhere until it finds a plane, a Raspberry Pi takes in data from local ADS-B data to know where a nearby plane is.
After that, all that’s left is a nifty overlay to make the professional look. Combining all these creates a surprisingly capable system that gives information on the aircraft’s azimuth, elevation, and distance.
If you want to try your hand at making your own version of [BLANK ANGLE]’s tracker, check out his
GitHub page
. Of course, tracking planes gets boring after a while so why not try tracking something higher with
this open-source star tracker
?
Thank you Israel Brunini for the tip.
| 12
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8132774",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T00:03:04",
"content": "Why add an Arduino? Could run the stepper drivers from GPIO.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132779",
"author": "Bank Angle",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T00:29:51",
"content": "In my setup the camera is far from the receiver, the receiver can be separated from the raspberry",
"parent_id": "8132774",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132926",
"author": "Paulo",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T13:00:32",
"content": "Parabéns meu amigo, excelente idéia. Sempre pensei em fazer algo do gênero, mas minhas ideias sempre foram complicadas, em reconhecer o objeto a ser seguido. A sua ideia me surpreendeu pela criatividade.",
"parent_id": "8132779",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132785",
"author": "Mark Topham",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T01:05:09",
"content": "Why not?Separating the pi (placed where it’s covv bc eminent to use), and running a USB, or even just a regular serial connection across to the camera might be more convenient.",
"parent_id": "8132774",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132793",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T01:38:59",
"content": "More hardware, more complexity. Basically unnecessary.The camera itself has hardware to drive the motors, and a wifi interface. Could make use of that instead.",
"parent_id": "8132785",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132799",
"author": "Kris",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T02:05:05",
"content": "I tend to agree with you, it should be rather trivial to send PTZ commands to the camera, I could understand the choice if they were improving the tracking smoothness by driving the servo separately but it doesn’t seem like it.",
"parent_id": "8132793",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132800",
"author": "Kris",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T02:11:33",
"content": "Ah looking at their README they do seem to be driving the servos externally and I would guess the lack of smoothness is largely due to the frequency of ADS-B broadcasts, could maybe look at some software to fill in the blanks though, maybe even object tracking from the video stream as feedback once LoS is established. Now I just feel like I’m designing a weapon system though haha.",
"parent_id": "8132799",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132783",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T00:59:13",
"content": "How long before someone straps a laser pointer to one of these things?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132798",
"author": "Kris",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T02:01:54",
"content": "Probably way longer than it would take for them to be caught for doing so from what I understand.",
"parent_id": "8132783",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8133214",
"author": "Cert Billy",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T12:02:41",
"content": "A proof of concept of a real time plane tracker can be seen athttps://www.youtube.com/@certbilly9116Just real-time data from ADS-B Exchange fed through wi-fi to an ESP32 driving two stepper motors with 3D printed planetary gearboxes + Raspberry Pi camera and a cheap monocular. Obviously the greatest problem so far has been the vibration, which must be resolved before investing into better optics ;-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133981",
"author": "Jeff Wright",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T19:36:36",
"content": "I seem to remember over at Cosmoquest/Bad Astronomy–that a maker build a UFO tracker—that would ignore airplanes and satellite.What he wound up with–was a blue jet/red sprite tracker by accident.Doug Trumbull of 2001 and Star Trek: The Motion Picture had an elaborate set up:https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1isls38/doug_trumbull_and_the_promise_of_ufotog/I wonder what became of it.I hope a storm chaser got it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8134440",
"author": "SwervingLemon",
"timestamp": "2025-06-02T15:29:41",
"content": "Do you have a link to the UFO tracker article? I love it when a plan has unintended outcomes!",
"parent_id": "8133981",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,533.677171
|
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