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https://hackaday.com/2025/04/02/70-diy-synths-on-one-webpage/ | 70 DIY Synths On One Webpage | Elliot Williams | [
"ATtiny Hacks",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"analog",
"digital",
"echo",
"music from outer space",
"synth-diy",
"synthesizer"
] | If you want to dip your toes into the deep, deep water of synth DIY but don’t know where to start, [Atarity] has just the resource for you. He’s
compiled a list of 70 wonderful DIY synth and noise-making projects and put them all in one place
. And as connoisseurs of the bleepy-bloopy ourselves, we can vouch for his choices here.
The collection runs the gamut from [Ray Wilson]’s “Music From Outer Space” analog oddities, through faithful recreations like Adafruit’s XOXBOX, and on to more modern synths powered by simple microcontrollers or even entire embedded Linux devices. Alongside the links to the original projects, there is also an estimate of the difficulty level, and a handy demo video for every example we tried out.
Our only self-serving complaint is that it’s a little bit light on the
Logic Noise / CMOS-abuse
side of synth hacking, but there are tons of other non-traditional noisemakers, sound manglers, and a good dose of musically useful devices here. Pick one, and get to work! | 14 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114788",
"author": "Cad the Mad",
"timestamp": "2025-04-02T17:12:07",
"content": "This is absolutely fantastic. Little DIY synths are a hobby of mine and this site has a LOT of designs I haven’t seen before. These kinds of project aggregations and galleries are a great source of in... | 1,760,371,589.391816 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/02/australias-steady-march-towards-space/ | Australia’s Steady March Towards Space | Lewin Day | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"Australia",
"gilmour space",
"hybrid rocket",
"orbit",
"rocket",
"space program"
] | The list of countries to achieve their own successful orbital space launch is a short one, almost as small as the exclusive club of states that possess nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union was first off the rank in 1957, with the United States close behind in 1958, and a gaggle of other aerospace-adept states followed in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Italy, Iran, North Korea and South Korea have all joined the list since the dawn of the new millennium.
Absent from the list stands Australia. The proud island nation has never stood out as a player in the field of space exploration, despite offering ground station assistance to many missions from other nations over the years. However, the country has continued to inch its way to the top of the atmosphere, establishing its own space agency in 2018. Since then, development has continued apace, and the country’s first orbital launch appears to be just around the corner.
Space, Down Under
The Australian Space Agency has played an important role in supporting domestic space projects, like the ELO2 lunar rover (also known as “Roo-ver”). Credit:
ASA
The establishment of the Australian Space Agency (ASA) took place relatively recently. The matter was seen to be long overdue from an OECD member country; by 2008, Australia was the only one left without a national space agency since previous state authorities had been disbanded in 1996. This was despite many facilities across the country contributing to international missions, providing
critical radio downlink services
and even
welcoming JAXA’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft back to Earth
.
Eventually, a groundswell grew, pressuring the government to put Australia on the right footing to seize growing opportunities in the space arena. Things came to a head in 2018, when the government established ASA to “support the growth and transformation of Australia’s space industry.”
ASA would serve a somewhat different role compared to organizations like NASA (USA) and ESA (EU). Many space agencies in other nations focus on developing launch vehicles and missions in-house, collaborating with international partners and aerospace companies in turn to do so. However, for ASA, the agency is more focused on supporting and developing the local space industry rather than doing the engineering work of getting to space itself.
Orbital Upstarts
Just because the government isn’t building its own rockets, doesn’t mean that Australia isn’t trying to get to orbit. That goal is the diehard mission of Gilmour Space Technologies. The space startup was founded in 2013, and established its rocketry program in 2015, and has been marching towards orbit ever since. As is often the way, the journey has been challenging, but the payoff of genuine space flight is growing ever closer.
Gilmour Space moved fast, launching its first hybrid rocket back in 2016. The successful suborbital launch proved to be a useful demonstration of the company’s efforts to produce a rocket that used 3D-printed fuel. This early milestone aided the company to secure investment that would support its push to grander launches at greater scale. The company’s next major launch was planned for 2019, but frustration struck—when the larger One Vision rocket suffered a failure
just 7 seconds prior to liftoff.
Undeterred, the company continued development of a larger rocket, taking on further investment and signing contracts to launch payloads to orbit in the ensuing years.
Gilmour Space has worked hard to develop its hybrid rocket engines in-house.
With orbital launches and commercial payload deliveries the ultimate goal, it wasn’t enough to just develop a rocket. Working with the Australian government, Gilmour Space established the Bowen Orbital Spaceport
in early 2024
—a launchpad suitable for the scale of its intended space missions. Located on Queensland’s Gold Coast, it’s just 20 degrees south of the equator—closer than Cape Canaveral, and useful for accessing low- to mid-inclination equatorial orbits. The hope was to gain approval to launch later that year, but thus far, no test flights have taken place. Licensing issues around the launch have meant the company has had to hold back on shooting for orbit.
The rocket with which Gilmour Space intends to get there is called Eris. In Block 1 configuration, it stands 25 meters tall, and is intended to launch payloads up to 300 kg into low-Earth orbits. It’s a three-stage design. It uses four of Gilmour’s Sirius hybrid rocket motors in the first stage, and just one in the second stage. The third stage has a smaller liquid rocket engine of Gilmour’s design, named Phoenix. The rocket was first staged vertically on the launch pad in early 2024, and a later “dress rehearsal” for launch was performed in September, with the rocket fully fueled. However, flight did not take place, as launch permits were still pending from Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA).
The Eris rocket was first vertically erected on the launchpad in 2024, but progress towards launch has been slow since then.
After a number of regulatory issues, the company’s first launch of Eris was slated for March 15, 2025. However, that day came and passed, even with CASA approval, as the required approvals were still not available from the Australian Space Agency. Delays have hurt the company’s finances,
hampering its ability to raise further funds.
As for the rocket itself, hopes for Eris’s performance at this stage remain limited, even if you ask those at Gilmour Space. Earlier this month, founder Adam Gilmour spoke to the
Sydney Morning Herald
on his expectations for the initial launch. Realistic about the proposition of hitting orbit on the company first attempt, he expects it to take several launches to achieve, with some teething problems to come. “It’s very hard to test an orbital rocket without just flying it,” he told the
Herald.
“We don’t have high expectations we’ll get to orbit… I’d personally be happy to get off the pad.”
Despite the trepidation, Eris stands as Australia’s closest shot at hitting the bigtime outside the atmosphere. Government approvals and technical hurdles will still need to be overcome, with the Australian Space Agency noting that the company still has licence conditions to meet before a full launch is approved. Still, before the year is out, Australia might join that vaunted list of nations that have leapt beyond the ground to circle the Earth from above. It will be a proud day when that comes to pass. | 29 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114731",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-02T14:11:31",
"content": "I’m surprised there’s no article about FRAM2 mussion, especially considering it has amateur radio on board.https://darc-e39.org/allgemein/sstv-event-fram2-fram2ham/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,... | 1,760,371,589.457807 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/02/the-lowly-wall-wart-laid-bare/ | The Lowly Wall Wart Laid Bare | Tom Nardi | [
"Art",
"Teardown"
] | [
"digital photography",
"teardown",
"wall wart"
] | Getting a look at the internals of a garden variety “wall wart” isn’t the sort of thing that’s likely to excite the average Hackaday reader. You’ve probably cracked one open yourself, and even if you haven’t, you’ve likely got a pretty good idea of what’s inside that sealed up brick of plastic. But sometimes a teardown can be just as much about the journey as it is the end result.
Truth be told, we’re not 100% sure if this
teardown from [Brian Dipert] over at
EDN
was meant as an April Fool’s joke or not. Certainly it was posted on the right day, but the style is close enough to some of his previous work that it’s hard to say. In any event, he’s created a visual feast — never in history has an AC/DC adapter been photographed so completely and tastefully.
An Ode to the Diode
[Brian] even goes so far as to include images of the 2.5 lb sledgehammer and paint scraper that he uses to brutally break open the ultrasonic-welded enclosure. The dichotomy between the thoughtful imagery and the savage way [Brian] breaks the device open only adds to the surreal nature of the piece. Truly, the whole thing seems like it should be part of some avant garde installation in SoHo.
After he’s presented more than 20 images of the exterior of the broken wall wart, [Brian] finally gets to looking at the internals. There’s really not much to look at, there’s a few circuit diagrams and an explanation of the theory behind these unregulated power supplies, and then the write-up comes to a close as abruptly as it started.
So does it raise the simple teardown to an art form? We’re not sure, but we know that we’ll never look at a power adapter in quite the same way again. | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114691",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2025-04-02T11:24:05",
"content": "That article is most certainly a joke, and intended as a joke.The capacitors missing from the PCB are most certainly not intended to form a voltage multiplier. Most likely they are there to reduce sw... | 1,760,371,589.300278 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/02/a-toothbrush-hacked-in-three-parts/ | A Toothbrush Hacked, In Three Parts | Tom Nardi | [
"hardware",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"firmware",
"openocd",
"spi flash",
"wrongbaud"
] | It’s official, we’re living in the future. Certainly that’s the only explanation for how [wrongbaud] was able to write a three-part series of posts on
hacking a cheap electric toothbrush off of AliExpress
.
As you might have guessed, this isn’t exactly a hack out of necessity. With a flair for explaining hardware hacking, [wrongbaud] has put this together as a practical “brush-up” (get it?) on the tools and concepts involved in reverse engineering. In this case, the Raspberry Pi is used as a sort of hardware hacking multi-tool, which should make it relatively easy to follow along.
Modified image data on the SPI flash chip.
The first post in the series goes over getting the Pi up and running, which includes setting up OpenOCD. From there, [wrongbaud] actually cracks the toothbrush open and starts identifying interesting components, which pretty quickly leads to the discovery of a debug serial port. The next step is harassing the SPI flash chip on the board to extract its contents. As the toothbrush has a high-res color display (of course it does), it turns out this chip holds the images which indicate the various modes of operation. He’s eventually able to determine how the images are stored, inject new graphics data, and write it back to the chip.
Being able to display the Wrencher logo on our toothbrush would already be a win in our book, but [wrongbaud] isn’t done yet. For the last series in the post, he shows how to extract the actual firmware from the microcontroller using OpenOCD. This includes how to analyze the image, modify it, and eventually flash the new version back to the hardware — using that debug port discovered earlier to confirm the patched code is running as expected.
If you like his work with a toothbrush, you’ll love seeing what
[wrongbaud] can do with an SSD
or
even an Xbox controller
. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114658",
"author": "Weasel",
"timestamp": "2025-04-02T08:26:25",
"content": "Insert obligatory “when will it run doom?” question here",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8114662",
"author": "Kay",
"timestamp": "20... | 1,760,371,589.064559 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/01/why-the-lm741-sucks/ | Why The LM741 Sucks | Alexander Rowsell | [
"Parts"
] | [
"afrotechmods",
"gain bandwidth product",
"lm741",
"opamp",
"slew rate"
] | First of all, we’d like to give a big shout-out to [Afrotechmods]! After a long hiatus, he has returned to YouTube with an
awesome new video
all about op-amp characteristics, looking at the relatively awful LM741 in particular. His particular way of explaining things has definitely helped many electronics newbies to learn new concepts quickly!
Operational amplifiers have been around for a long time. The uA741, now commonly known as the LM741, was indeed an incredible piece of technology when it was released. It was extremely popular through the 1970s and onward as it saved designers the chore of designing a discrete amplifier. Simply add a few external components, and you have a well-behaved amplifier.
But as the years went on, many new and greatly improved op-amps have been developed, but either because of nostalgia or reticence, many in the field (especially, it seems, professors teaching electronics) have continued to use the LM741 in examples and projects. This is despite its many shortcomings:
Large input offset voltage
Large input offset current
Low gain-bandwidth product
Miserable slew rate of only 0.5V/uS
And that’s not even the full list. Newer designs have vastly improved all of these parameters, often by orders of magnitude, yet the LM741 still appears in articles aimed at those new to electronics, even in 2025. There are literal drop-in replacements for the LM741, such as the TLC081 (not to be confused with the similarly named FET-input TL081), which has 32 times the slew rate, 10 times the gain-bandwidth product, and an input offset voltage almost 2 orders of magnitude better!
So, check out the full video below, learn about op-amp parameters, and start checking out modern op-amps! | 80 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114610",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp": "2025-04-02T06:14:34",
"content": "Along similar lines from earlier in the year:https://hackaday.com/2025/01/06/rethinking-your-jellybean-op-amps/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "811461... | 1,760,371,589.648725 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/01/an-elegant-writer-for-a-more-civilized-age/ | An Elegant Writer For A More Civilized Age | Tom Nardi | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"distraction free",
"laser cut wood",
"mechanical keyboard",
"Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W",
"writerdeck"
] | One of the most exciting trends we’ve seen over the last few years is the rise of
truly
personal computers — that is, bespoke computing devices that are built by individuals to fit their specific needs or wants. The more outlandish of these builds, often inspired by science fiction and sporting non-traditional layouts, tend to be lumped together under the term “cyberdecks”, but there are certainly builds where that description doesn’t quite stick, including the
Cyber Writer from [Darbin Orvar]
.
With a 10-inch screen, you might think it was intended to be a portable, but its laser-cut Baltic birch plywood construction says otherwise. Its overall design reminds us of early computer terminals, and the 60% mechanical keyboard should help reinforce that feeling that you’re working on a substantial piece of gear from yesteryear.
There’s plenty of room inside for additional hardware.
The Cyber Writer is powered by the Raspberry Pi Zero W 2, which might seem a bit underpowered, but [Darbin] has paired it with a custom minimalist word processor. There’s not a lot of detail about the software, but the page for the project says it features integrated file management and easy email export of documents.
The software isn’t yet available to the public, but it sounds like [Darbin] is at least considering it. Granted, there’s
already distraction-free writing software out there
, but we’re pretty firm believers that there’s no such thing as too many choices.
If you’re looking for something a bit more portable, the impressive
Foliodeck might be more your speed
. | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114579",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp": "2025-04-02T03:11:23",
"content": "the Raspberry Pi Zero W 2, which might seem a bit underpoweredThe Zero 2 basically has the same processor as the Pi 3, just with half the ram. Good luck hitting the limit on it with anything that isn’t AI ... | 1,760,371,589.697243 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/01/a-forgotten-photographic-process-characterised/ | A Forgotten Photographic Process Characterised | Jenny List | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"19th century photography",
"collodion",
"photography"
] | Early photography lacked the convenience of the stable roll film we all know, and instead relied on a set of processes which the photographer would have to master from film to final print. Photographic chemicals could be flammable or even deadly, and results took a huge amount of work.
The daguerreotype process of using mercury to develop pictures on polished metal, and the wet-collodion plate with its nitrocellulose solution are well-known, but
as conservators at the British National Archives found out, there was another process that’s much rarer
. The Pannotype uses a collodion emulsion, but instead of the glass plate used by the wet-plate process it uses a fabric backing.
We know so much about the other processes because they were subject to patents, but pannotype never had a patent due to a disagreement. Thus when the conservators encountered some pannotypes in varying states of preservation, they needed to apply modern analytical techniques to understand the chemistry and select the best methods of stabilization. The linked article details those analyses, and provides them with some pointers towards conserving their collection. We look forward to someone making pannotype prints here in 2025, after all
it’s not the first recreation of early photography we’ve seen
. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114766",
"author": "Chris Maple",
"timestamp": "2025-04-02T16:22:25",
"content": "The cited article is disappointing, giving no clue as to the actual photosensitive chemicals and the process. A little internet searching shows that some historical data is available; that the process... | 1,760,371,589.103063 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/01/malfunctional-timekeeping-with-the-vetinari-clock/ | Malfunctional Timekeeping With The Vetinari Clock | Lewin Day | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"discworld",
"Vetinari clock"
] | Lord Vetinari from the
Discworld
series is known for many things, but perhaps most of all a clock that doesn’t quite keep continuous time. Instead, it ticks away at random increments to infuriate those that perceive it, whilst keeping regular time over the long term.
[iracigt] decided to whip up a real world version of this hilarious fictional timepiece.
The clock itself is an off-the-shelf timepiece purchased from Target for the princely sum of $5. However, it’s been deviously modified with an RP2040 microcontroller hidden away inside. The RP2040 is programmed to tick the clock at an
average
of once per second. But each tick itself is not so exact. Instead, there’s an erraticness to its beat – some ticks are longer, some shorter, in the classic Vetinari style. [iracigt] explains the nitty gritty of how it all works, from creating chaos with Markov chains to interfacing the RP2040 electronically with the cheap quartz clock movement.
If you’ve ever wanted to build one of these amusements yourself, [iracigt’s] writeup is a great place to start. Even better, it was inspired by
an earlier post on these very pages
! We love to see the community riff on a theme, and we’d love to see yours, too –
so keep the tips coming, yeah?
Video after the break. | 26 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114487",
"author": "BotherSaidPooh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-01T20:13:13",
"content": "Should put that one in an exam hall to mess with the ‘Muggles’",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8114741",
"author": "iracigt",
... | 1,760,371,589.167711 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/01/shrinking-blinky-as-far-as-possible/ | Shrinking Blinky As Far As Possible | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"blink",
"blinky",
"bytes",
"challenge",
"microcontroller",
"storage"
] | Many of us know the basic Blink Arduino sketch, or have coded similar routines on other microcontrollers. Flashing an LED on and off—it doesn’t get much simpler than that. But how big should a blink sketch be? Or more importantly, how small could you get it?
[Artful Bytes] decided to find out.
The specific challenge? “Write a program that runs on a microcontroller and blinks an LED. The ON and OFF times should be as close to 1000 ms as possible.” The challenge was undertaken using a NUCLEO-L432KC Cortex-M4 with 256 K of flash and 64 K of RAM.
We won’t spoil the full challenge, but it starts out with an incredibly inefficient AI & cloud solution. [Artful Bytes] then simplifies by switching to an RTOS approach, before slimming down further with C, assembly, and then machine code. The challenge was to shrink the microcontroller code as much as possible. However, you might notice the title of the video is “I Shrunk Blinky to 0 Bytes.” As it turns out, if you eliminate the digital code-running hardware entirely… you can still blink an LED with analog hardware. So, yes. 0 bytes is possible.
We’ve featured the world’s smallest blinky before, too,
but in a physical sense rather than with regards to code size
. | 39 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114460",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-04-01T18:57:36",
"content": "It’s nice to see people admit that using a microcontroller really is overkill for some tasks.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8114467",
"auth... | 1,760,371,589.24216 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/01/the-everlasting-hunt-for-the-loch-ness-monster/ | The Everlasting Hunt For The Loch Ness Monster | Jenny List | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Slider"
] | [
"cryptozoology",
"Loch Ness Monster",
"underwater photography"
] | When a Loch Ness Monster story appears at the start of April, it pays to check the date on the article just to avoid red faces. But there should be no hoax with this one published on the last day of March, scientists from the UK’s National Oceanography Centre were conducting underwater robotics tests in Scotland’s Loch Ness, and
stumbled upon a camera trap lost by Nessie-hunters in the 1970s
. Just to put the cherry on the cake of a perfect news story, the submarine in question is the famous “Boaty McBoatface”, so named as a consolation after the British Antarctic Survey refused to apply the name to their new ship when it won an online competition.
The Most Extreme Instamatic in The World
Sadly the NOC haven’t released close-ups of the inner workings of the device.
The camera trap has survived five decades underwater thanks to a sturdy glass housing, and appears to be quite an ingenious device. A humble Kodak Instamatic camera with a 126 film and a flash bulb is triggered and has its film advanced by a clockwork mechanism, in turn operated by a bait line. Presumably because of the four flash bulbs in the Kodak’s flash cube, it’s reported that it could capture four images. The constant low temperature at the bottom of a very deep loch provided the perfect place to store exposed film, and they have even been able to recover some pictures. Sadly none of then contain a snap of Nessie posing for the camera.
An underwater photographic blind used in the 1970s. Immanuel Giel,
Public domain
.
We are not cryptozoologists here at Hackaday so we’re not postulating any theories about Nessie’s existence, but there is some interest to be found in the history of Nessie-hunting, and the complex array of technologies fielded by those who would seek to bag themselves a monster. There have been extensive sonar surveys of the loch, a variety of home-made and more professional submarines have probed its depths, many metres of film and videotape have been shot by Nessie-hunters with long lenses, and of course experts have pored over all the various photographs which over the years have claimed to prove the monster’s existence. Perhaps the epicentre for the world of Nessie-hunting has been the Loch Ness Project,
whose website details a variety of the survey efforts
. Surprisingly, though they had a connection with the Instamatic camera trap they don’t feature it on their website, something we expect to change now it has become newsworthy.
Where Cryptozoology Tourism Is A Thing
The metamorphosis of a legendary beast into a modern-day phenomenon has certainly gripped the tourist industry of the Great Glen, as you’ll see if you take the drive from Inverness to Fort William. Even if you’re not a true believer, it’s still fun to indulge in a bit of touristic gawping at the various Nessie-themed attractions, though on the occasions Hackaday writers have passed by those waters there’s been a marked lack of monstrous life forms. The Nessie-hunters bring a bit of pseudoscientific thrill to the experience, something the
Loch Ness Centre
in Drumandrochit positively encourage: they even recruit visitors into their annual Nessie-spotting event. After all, as the camera discovery shows, there is doubtless plenty more to be found in those waters,
even the occasional (non-Nessie) monster
.
Header image: Bob Jones,
CC BY-SA 2.0
. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114469",
"author": "Louis Poche",
"timestamp": "2025-04-01T19:27:56",
"content": "Weird that only this morning while waiting in line for a coffee ‘boaty mc boatface’ popped into my mind. Then I get to my computer an this article pops up… Either the universe works in very strange wa... | 1,760,371,589.347889 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/01/philadelphia-maker-faire-returns-this-weekend/ | Philadelphia Maker Faire Returns This Weekend | Tom Nardi | [
"cons",
"News"
] | [
"Philadelphia Maker Faire"
] | While there’s still a vaguely robot-shaped hole in our heart from the loss of the New York World Maker Faire, we do take comfort in the fact that smaller Maker Faire events are still happening all over the world, and some of them have managed to gain quite a bit of momentum over the last few years.
If you’re in the Northeast US, the
Philadelphia Maker Faire
is your best bet to scratch that peculiar itch that only seems to respond to a healthy blend of art, technology, and the occasional flamethrower. It will be returning to the Cherry Street Pier this Sunday, April 6th, and
pay-what-you-can tickets are on sale now
. The organizers encourage each attendee to only pay what they are able to afford, with several options ranging from zero to the $25 supporter level.
A look through the exhibits shows the sort of eclectic mix one would expect from a Maker Faire. Where else could you practice picking locks, learn how biodiesel is made, see a display of kinetic sculptures, and stitch together a felt plush monster, all under one roof?
There’s even a few projects on the list that regular Hackaday readers may recognize, such as the
ultra-portable Positron 3D printer
and the
DirectTV dish turned backyard radio telescope
built by Professor James Aguirre.
We’ve made the trip to the Philadelphia Maker Faire several times
since its inception in 2019
, and although it had the misfortune of starting right before COVID-19 came along and
screwed up all of our carefully laid plans
, the event has managed to find a foothold and continues to grow each year. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114456",
"author": "Aaron",
"timestamp": "2025-04-01T18:34:44",
"content": "Our local MakerFaire here in Portland faded away when the pandemic happened. it has since been replaced with the slightly-less ambiguous “Oregon Science Festival”. And while there’s still plenty to see and ... | 1,760,371,589.739434 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/01/on-egyptian-pyramids-and-why-its-definitely-aliens/ | On Egyptian Pyramids And Why It’s Definitely Aliens | Maya Posch | [
"Featured",
"Fiction",
"History",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"april fools",
"no joke",
"power",
"pyramid"
] | History is rather dull and unexciting to most people, which naturally invites exciting flights of fancy that can range from the innocent to outright conspiracies. Nobody truly believes that the astounding finds and (fully functioning) ancient mechanisms in the
Indiana Jones
and
Uncharted
franchises are real, with mostly intact ancient cities waiting for intrepid explorers along with whatever mystical sources of power, wealth or influence formed the civilization’s foundations before its tragic demise. Yet somehow Plato’s fictive Atlantis has taken on a life of its own, along with many other ‘lost’ civilizations, whether real or imagined.
Of course, if these aforementioned movies and video games were realistic, they would center around a big archaeological dig and thrilling finds like pot shards and cuneiform clay tablets, not ways to smite enemies and gain immortality. Nor would it involve solving complex mechanical puzzles to gain access to the big secret chamber, prior to walking out of the readily accessible backdoor. Reality is boring like that, which is why there’s a major temptation to spruce things up. With the Egyptian pyramids as well as similar structures around the world speaking to the human imagination, this has led to centuries of half-baked ideas and outright conspiracies.
Most recently, a questionable 2022 paper hinting at structures underneath the Pyramid of Khafre in Egypt was used for
a fresh boost to old ideas
involving pyramid power stations, underground cities and other fanciful conspiracies. Although we can all agree that the ancient pyramids in Egypt are true marvels of engineering, are we really on the cusp of discovering that the ancient Egyptians were actually provided with Forerunner technology by extraterrestrials?
The Science of Being Tragically Wrong
A section of the ‘runes’ at Runamo. (Credit:
Entheta
, Wikimedia)
In defense of fanciful theories regarding the Actual Truth™ about Ancient Egypt and kin, archaeology as we know it today didn’t really develop until the latter half of the 20th century, with the field being mostly a hobbyist thing that people did out of curiosity as well as a desire for riches. Along the way many comical blunders were made, such as the
Runamo runes
in Sweden that turned out to be just random cracks in dolerite.
Less funny were attempts by colonists to erase
Great Zimbabwe
(11th – ~17th century CE) and the Kingdom of Zimbabwe after the ruins of the abandoned capital were discovered by European colonists and explored in earnest by the 19th century. Much like the wanton destruction of local cultures in the Americas by European colonists and explorers who considered their own culture, religion and technology to be clearly superior, the history of Great Zimbabwe was initially rewritten so that no thriving African society ever formed on its own, but was the result of outside influences.
In this regard it’s interesting how many harebrained ideas about archaeological sites have now effectively flipped, with mystical and mythical properties being assigned and these ‘Ancients’ being almost worshipped. Clearly, aliens visited Earth and that led to pyramids being constructed all around the globe. These would also have been the same aliens or lost civilizations that had technology far beyond today’s cutting edge, putting Europe’s fledgling civilization to shame.
Hence people keep dogpiling on especially the pyramids of Giza and its surrounding complex, assigning mystical properties to their ventilation shafts and expecting hidden chambers with technology and treasures interspersed throughout and below the structures.
Lost Technology
The Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. (Credit: code poet,
Wikimedia
)
The idea of ‘lost technology’ is a pervasive one, mostly buoyed by the axiom that you cannot disprove something, only find evidence for its absence. Much like the possibility of a teapot being in orbit around the Sun right now, you cannot disprove that the Ancient Egyptians did not have hyper-advanced power plants using zero point energy back around 3,600 BCE. This ties in with the idea of ‘
lost civilizations
‘, which really caught on around the Victorian era.
Such romanticism for a non-existent past led to the idea of Atlantis being a real, lost civilization becoming pervasive, with the 1960s seeing significant hype around the
Bimini Road
. This undersea rock formation in the Bahamas was said to have been part of Atlantis, but is actually a perfectly cromulent geological formation. More recently a couple of German tourists
got into legal trouble
while trying to prove a connection between Egypt’s pyramids to Atlantis, which is a theory that refuses to die along with the notion that Atlantis was some kind of hyper-advanced civilization and not just a fictional society that Plato concocted to illustrate the folly of man.
Admittedly there is a lot of poetry in all of this when you consider it from that angle.
Welcome to Shangri-La… or rather Shambhala as portrayed in
Uncharted 3
.
People have spent decades of their life and countless sums of money on trying to find Atlantis,
Shangri-La
(possibly inspired by
Shambhala
),
El Dorado
and similar fictional locations. The
Iram of the Pillars
which
featured
in
Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception
is one of the lost cities mentioned in the Qur’an, and is incidentally another great civilization that saw itself meet a grim end through divine punishment. Iram is often said to be Ubar, which is commonly known as
Atlantis of the Sands
.
All of this is reminiscent of the
Giant’s Causeway
in Northern Ireland, and corresponding area at Fingal’s Cave on the Scottish isle of Staffa, where eons ago molten basalt cooled and contracted into basalt columns in a way that is similar to how drying mud will crack in semi-regular patterns. This particular natural formation did lead to many local myths, including how a giant built a causeway across the North Channel, hence the name.
Fortunately for this location, no ‘lost civilization’ tag became attached, and thus it remains a curious demonstration of how purely natural formations can create structures that one might assume to have required intelligence, thus providing fuel for conspiracies. So far only ‘Young Earth’ conspiracy folk have put a claim on this particular site.
What we can conclude is that much like the Victorian age that spawned countless works of fiction on the topic, many of these modern-day stories appear to be rooted in a kind of romanticism for a past that never existed, with those affected interpreting natural patterns as something more in a sure sign of confirmation bias.
Tourist Traps
Tomb of the First Emperor Qin Shi Huang Di, Xi’an, China (Credit:
Aaron Zhu
)
One can roughly map the number of tourist visits with the likelihood of wild theories being dreamed up. These include the Egyptian pyramids, but also similar structures in what used to be the sites of the Aztec and Maya civilizations. Similarly the absolutely massive
mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang
in China with its world-famous Terracotta Army has led to incredible speculation on what might still be hidden inside the unexcavated tomb mound, such as entire seas and rivers of mercury that moved mechanically to simulate real bodies of water, a simulated starry sky, crossbows set to take out trespassers and incredible riches.
Many of these features were described by Sima Qian in the first century BCE, who may or may not have been truthful in his biography of Qin Shi Huang. Meanwhile, China’s authorities have wisely put further excavations on hold, as they have found that many of the recovered artefacts degrade very quickly once exposed to air. The paint on the terracotta figures began to flake off rapidly after excavation, for example, reducing them to the plain figures which we are familiar with.
Tourism can be as damaging as careless excavation. As popular as the pyramids at Giza are, centuries of tourism have taken their toll, with vandalism, graffiti and theft increasing rapidly since the 20th century. The Great Pyramid of Khufu had already been pilfered for building materials over the course of millennia by the local population, but due to tourism part of its remaining top stones were unceremoniously tipped over the side to make a larger platform where tourists could have some tea while gazing out over the the Giza Plateau, as detailed in a recent video on the
History for Granite
channel:
The recycling of building materials from antique structures was also the cause of the demise of the
Labyrinth
at the foot of the pyramid of Amenemhat III at Hawara. Once an architectural marvel, with reportedly twelve roofed courts and spanning a total of 28,000 m
2
, today only fragments remain of its existence. This sadly is how most marvels of the Ancient World end up: looted ruins, ashes and shards, left in the sand, mud, or reclaimed by nature, from which we can piece together with a lot of patience and the occasional stroke of fortune a picture what it once may have looked like.
Pyramid Power
Cover of The Giza Power Plant book. (Credit: Christopher Dunn)
When in light of all this we look at the claims made about the
Pyramid of Khafre
and the persistent conspiracies regarding this and other pyramids hiding great secrets, we can begin to see something of a pattern. Some people have really bought into these fantasies, while for others it’s just another way to embellish a location, to attract more
rubes
tourists and sell more copies of their latest book on the extraterrestrial nature of pyramids and how they are actually amazing lost technologies. This latter category is called
pseudoarcheology
.
Pyramids, of course, have always held magical powers, but the idea that they are literal power plants seems to have been coined by one Christopher Dunn, with the publication of his pseudo-archeological book
The Giza Power Plant
in 1998. That there would be more structures underneath the Pyramid of Khafre is a more recent invention, however. Feeding this particular flight of fancy
appears to be a 2022 paper
by Filippo Biondi and Corrado Malanga, in which synthetic aperture radar (SAR) was used to examine said pyramid interior and subsurface features.
Somehow this got turned into claims about multiple deep vertical wells descending 648 meters along with other structures. Shared mostly via conspiracy channels, it widely extrapolates from claims made in the paper by Biondi et al., with said SAR-based claims never having been peer-reviewed or independently corroborated. On the
Rational Wiki entry
for these and other claims related to the Giza pyramids are savagely tossed under the category of ‘pyramidiots’.
The art that conspiracy nuts produce when provided with generative AI tools. (Source: Twitter)
Back in the real world, archaeologists have found
a curious L-shaped area
underneath a royal graveyard near Khufu’s pyramid that was apparently later filled in, but which seems to lead to a deeper structure. This is likely to be part of the graveyard, but may also have been a feature that was abandoned during construction. Currently this area is being excavated, so we’re likely to figure out more details after archaeologists have finished gently sifting through tons of sand and gravel.
There is also the
ScanPyramids
project, which uses non-destructive and non-invasive techniques to scan Old Kingdom-era pyramids, such as muon tomography and infrared thermography. This way the internal structure of these pyramids can be examined in-depth. One finding was that of a number of ‘voids’, which could mean any of a number of things, but most likely do not contain world-changing secrets.
To this day the most credible view is still that the pyramids of the Old Kingdom were used as tombs, though unlike the mastabas and similar tombs, there is a credible argument to be made that rather than being designed to be hidden away, these pyramids would be eternal monuments to the pharaoh. They would be open for worship of the pharaoh, hence the ease of getting inside them. Ironically this would make them more secure from graverobbers, which was a great idea until the demise of the Ancient Egyptian civilization.
This is a point that’s
made succinctly
on the
History for Granite
channel, with the conclusion being that this goal of ‘inspiring awe’ to worshippers is still effective today, simply judging by the millions of tourists each year to these monuments, and the tall tales that they’ve inspired. | 63 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114400",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-04-01T14:24:34",
"content": "Should just ignore these cranks rambling about granola-powered new age hippie dynamos under the pyramids and just dig up the rest of the Gobekli Tepe complex. And sanction Australia until they stop annihilatin... | 1,760,371,589.972271 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/01/bringing-achievements-to-the-nintendo-entertainment-system/ | Bringing Achievements To The Nintendo Entertainment System | Lewin Day | [
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"achievements",
"nes",
"nintendo"
] | Microsoft made gaming history when it developed Achievements and released them with the launch of the Xbox 360. They have since become a key component of gaming culture, which similar systems rolling out to the rest of the consoles and even many PC games. [odelot] has the honor of being the one to bring this functionality to an odd home—
the original Nintendo Entertainment System!
It’s actually quite functional, and it’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. What [odelot] created is the NES RetroAchievements (RA) Adapter. It contains a Raspberry Pi Pico which sits in between a cartridge and the console and communicates with the NES itself. The cartridge also contains an LCD screen, a buzzer, and an ESP32 which communicates with the Internet.
When a cartridge is loaded, the RA Adapter identifies the game and queries the RetroAchievements platform for relevant achievements for the title. It then monitors the console’s memory to determine if any of those achievements—such as score, progression, etc.—are met. If and when that happens, the TFT screen on the adapter displays the achievement, and a notification is sent to the RetroAchievements platform to record the event for posterity.
It reminds us of other great feats,
like the MJPEG entry into the heart of the Sega Saturn
. | 10 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114354",
"author": "Tony Moncter",
"timestamp": "2025-04-01T12:17:28",
"content": "Interesting project but horrendous text to speech in the video and very little actual info",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8114510",
"... | 1,760,371,589.801986 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/01/hybrid-mechanical-clock-shows-it-both-ways/ | Hybrid Mechanical Clock Shows It Both Ways | Tom Nardi | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"28BYJ-48",
"3D printed parts",
"ESP32-C6",
"hybrid",
"mechanical clock"
] | After seeing some of the interesting clock builds we’ve featured recently, [shiura] decided to throw their hat in the ring and sent us word about their
incredible 3D printed hybrid clock
that combines analog and digital styles.
While the multiple rotating rings might look complex from the front, the ingenious design behind the mechanism is powered by a single stepper motor. Its operation is well explained in the video below, but the short version is that each ring has a hook that pushes its neighboring ring over to the next digit once it has completed a full rotation. So the rightmost ring rotates freely through 0 to 9, then flips the 10-minute ring to the next number before starting its journey again. This does mean that the minute hand on the analog display makes a leap forward every 10 minutes rather than move smoothly, but we think its a reasonable compromise.
Beyond the 28BYJ-48 geared stepper motor and its driver board, the only other electronics in the build is a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32C6 microcontroller. The WiFi-enabled MCU is able to pull the current time down from the Internet, but keep it mind it takes quite awhile for the mechanism to move all the wheels; you can see the process happen at 60x speed in the video.
If you’re looking to recreate this beauty, the trickiest part of this whole build might be the 3D print itself, as the design appears to make considerable use of multi-material printing. While it’s not impossible to build the clock with a traditional printer, you’ll have to accept losing some surface detail on the face and performing some well-timed filament swaps.
[shirua] tells us they were inspired to send their timepiece in after
seeing the post about the sliding clock
that just went out earlier in the week. | 16 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114325",
"author": "Alexey",
"timestamp": "2025-04-01T09:18:35",
"content": "The idea is amazing! Sad it is not FOSS.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8114329",
"author": "BitMage",
"timestamp": "2025-04-01T09:... | 1,760,371,589.857511 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/31/golang-on-the-ps2/ | Golang On The PS2 | Lewin Day | [
"Playstation Hacks",
"Software Development"
] | [
"code",
"Go",
"golang",
"playstation 2",
"ps2"
] | A great many PlayStation 2 games were coded in C++, and there are homebrew SDKs that let you work in C. However, precious little software for the platform was ever created in Golang. [Ricardo] decided this wouldn’t do, and
set about making the language work with Sony’s best-selling console of all time.
Why program a PS2 in Go? Well, it can be easier to work with than some other languages, but also, there’s just value in experimenting in this regard. These days, Go is mostly just used on traditional
computery
platforms, but [Ricardo] is taking it into new lands with this project.
One of the challenges in getting Go to run on the PS2 is that the language was really built to live under a full operating system, which the PS2 doesn’t really have. However, [Ricardo] got around this by using TinyGo, which is designed for compiling Go on simpler embedded platforms. It basically takes Go code, turns it into an intermediate representation, then compiles binary code suitable for the PS2’s Emotion Engine (which is a MIPS-based CPU).
The specifics of getting it all to work are quite interesting if you fancy challenges like these. [Ricardo] was even able to get to an effective Hello World point and beyond. There’s still lots to do, and no real graphical fun yet, but the project has already passed several key milestones. It recalls us of when we saw
Java running on the N64.
Meanwhile, if you’re working to get LOLCODE running on the 3DO, don’t hesitate to
let us know! | 16 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114303",
"author": "Dave Boyer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-01T06:39:08",
"content": "Do NOT use, support or promote language developed by one of those big-tech monsters with sole purpose of squeezing ever more work out of a software developer; also enabling less qualified to come in an... | 1,760,371,590.493946 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/31/software-hacks-unlock-cheap-spectrometer/ | Software Hacks Unlock Cheap Spectrometer | Tom Nardi | [
"Software Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"obfuscated",
"reverse engineering",
"spectrometer"
] | A spectrometer is one of those tools that many of us would love to have, but just can’t justify the price of. Sure there are some DIY options out there, but few of them have the convenience or capability of what’s on the commercial market. [Chris] from
Zoid Technology
recently found a portable spectrometer complete with Android application for just $150 USD on AliExpress
which looked very promising
…at least at first.
The problem is that the manufacturer, Torch Bearer, offers more expensive models of this spectrometer. In an effort to push users into those higher-priced models, arbitrary features such as data export are blocked in the software. [Chris] first thought he could get around this by reverse engineering the serial data coming from the device (interestingly, the spectrometer ships with a USB-to-serial adapter), but while he got some promising early results, he found that the actual spectrometer data was obfuscated — a graph of the results looked like stacks of LEGOs.
That ain’t right — data over the serial link was obfuscated for your
protection
fleecing
His next step was to decompile the Android application and manually edit out the model number checks. This let him enable the blocked features, although to be fair, he did find that some of them actually did require additional hardware capabilities that this cheaper model apparently doesn’t posses. He was able to fix up a few other wonky issues in the application that are described in the video below, and has released a patch that you can use to
bring your own copy of the software up to snuff
.
But that’s not all — while fiddling around inside the Android tool’s source code, he found the missing pieces he needed to understand how the serial data was being obfuscated. The explanation to how it works is pretty long-winded, so we’ll save time and just say that the end result was the creation of a Python library that lets you pull data from the spectrometer without relying on any of the manufacturer’s software. This is the kind of thing a lot of people have been waiting for, so we’re eager to see what kind of response the GPLv3 licensed tool gets from the community.
If you’d still rather piece together your own spectrometer, we’ve seen some
pretty solid examples you can use to get started
. | 25 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114290",
"author": "NFM",
"timestamp": "2025-04-01T03:30:44",
"content": "This is interesting, I could find it useful for measuring the spectral output of LED’s. Especially white ones when building light panels.I wonder if the Android app patch fixes any opsec issues too?",
"pa... | 1,760,371,590.560233 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/31/a-music-box-commanded-by-nfc-tags/ | A Music Box Commanded By NFC Tags | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"mp3 player",
"NFC",
"NFC reader"
] | [Luca Dentella] recently encountered a toy, which was programmed to read different stories aloud based on the figurine placed on top. It inspired him to build
an audio device using the same concept
, only with music instead of children’s stories.
The NFC Music Player very much does what it says on the tin. Present it with an NFC card, and it will play the relevant music in turn. An ESP32 WROOM-32E lives at the heart of the build, which is hooked up over I2S with a MAX98357A Class D amplifier for audio output. There’s also an SD card slot for storing all the necessary MP3s, and a PN532 NFC reader for reading the flash cards that activate the various songs. Everything is laced up inside a simple 3D-printed enclosure with a 3-watt full range speaker pumping out the tunes.
It’s an easy build, and a fun one at that—there’s something satisfying about tossing a flash card at a box to trigger a song. Files are
on Github
for the curious. We’ve featured similar projects before, like the Yaydio—
a fun NFC music player for kids.
Video after the break. | 7 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114265",
"author": "Cad the Mad",
"timestamp": "2025-04-01T00:23:00",
"content": "This is the third NFC-controlled music player in a week. Not that I’m complaining but it is weird how often this is coming up lately.Now I’m wondering if I should make one for my elderly parents.",
... | 1,760,371,590.21659 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/31/levitating-lego-generator-runs-on-air/ | Levitating Lego Generator Runs On Air | Lewin Day | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"generator",
"lego",
"radio"
] | [Jamie] decided to build a generator, and Lego is his medium of choice. Thus was created
a fancy levitating generator that turns a stream of air into electricity.
The basic concept is simple enough for a generator—magnets moving past coils to generate electricity. Of course, Lego doesn’t offer high-strength magnetic components or copper coils, so this generator is a hybrid build which includes a lot of [Jamie’s] non-Lego parts. Ultimately though, this is fun because of the weird way it’s built. Lego Technic parts make a very crude turbine, but it does the job. The levitation is a particularly nice touch—the build uses magnets to hover the rotor in mid-air to minimize friction to the point where it can free wheel for minutes once run up to speed. The source of power for this contraption is interesting, too. [Jamie] didn’t just go with an air compressor or a simple homebrew soda bottle tank. Instead, he decided to use a couple of gas duster cans to do the job. The demos are pretty fun, with [Jamie] using lots of LEDs and a radio to demonstrate the output. The one thing we’d like to see more of is proper current/voltage instrumentation—and some measurement of the RPM of this thing!
While few of us will be rushing out to build Lego generators, the video nonetheless has educational value from a mechanical engineering standpoint. Fluids and gases really do make wonderful bearings,
as we’ve discussed before
. Video after the break. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114206",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2025-03-31T20:12:27",
"content": "Must put out a lot of power to run a Stargate, even a small one like that.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8114259",
"author": "Billy",
"times... | 1,760,371,590.399855 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/31/building-a-sliding-tile-clock/ | Building A Sliding Tile Clock | Lewin Day | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"3d print",
"clock",
"sliding tile"
] | Hackers like making clocks, and we like reporting on them around these parts. Particularly if they’ve got a creative mechanism that we haven’t seen before. This fine timepiece from [gooikerjh] fits the bill precisely—
it’s a sliding tile clock!
The brains of the build is an Arduino Nano ESP32. No, that’s not a typo. It’s basically an ESP32 in a Nano-like form factor. It relies on its in-built WiFi hardware to connect to the internet and synchronize itself with time servers so that it’s always showing accurate time. The ESP32 is set up to control a set of four stepper motors with a ULN2003 IC, and they run the neat time display mechanism.
All the custom parts are 3D printed, and the sliding tile concept is simple enough. There are four digits that show the time. Each digit contains number tiles that slide into place as the digit rotates. To increment the digit by one, it simply needs to be rotated 180 degrees by the relevant stepper motor, and the next number tile will slide into place.
We love a good clock at Hackaday—
the more mechanical, the better.
If you’re cooking up your own nifty and enigmatic clocks at home, don’t hesitate to
drop us a line
! | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114208",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2025-03-31T20:17:20",
"content": "I like it.I’ve seen that type of mechanism. I think it was on a little desk calendar. Never thought about making a clock out of them.Now I need to go see how those things work. I’m stuck on something to do... | 1,760,371,590.283683 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/31/zink-is-zero-ink-sort-of/ | Zink Is Zero Ink — Sort Of | Al Williams | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"Featured",
"Interest"
] | [
"polaroid",
"thermal printer",
"zink"
] | When you think of printing on paper, you probably think of an ink jet or a laser printer. If you happen to think of a thermal printer, we bet you think of something like a receipt printer: fast and monochrome. But in the last few decades, there’s been a family of niche printers designed to print snapshots in color using thermal technology. Some of them are built into cameras and some are about the size of a chunky cell phone battery, but they all rely on a Polaroid-developed technology for doing high-definition color printing known as
Zink
— a portmanteau of zero ink.
For whatever reason, these printers aren’t a household name even though they’ve been around for a while. Yet, someone must be using them. You can buy printers and paper quite readily and relatively inexpensively. Recently, I saw an HP-branded Zink printer in action, and I wasn’t expecting much. But I was stunned at the picture quality. Sure, it can’t print a very large photo, but for little wallet-size snaps, it did a great job.
The Tech
Polaroid was well known for making photographic paper with color layers used in instant photography. In the 1990s, the company was looking for something new. The Zink paper was the result. The paper has three layers of amorphochromic dyes. Initially, the dye is colorless, but will take on a particular color based on temperature.
The key to understanding the process is that you can control the temperature that will trigger a color change. The top layer of the paper requires high heat to change. The printer uses a very short pulse, so that the top layer will turn yellow, but the heat won’t travel down past that top layer.
The middle layer — magenta — will change at a medium heat level. But to get that heat to the layer, the pulse has to be longer. The top layer, however, doesn’t care because it never gets to the temperature that will cause it to turn yellow.
The bottom layer is cyan. This dye is set to take the lowest temperature of all, but since the bottom heats up slowly, it takes an even longer pulse at the lower temperature. The top two layers, again, don’t matter since they won’t get hot enough to change. A researcher involved in the project likened the process to fried ice cream. You fry the coating at a high temperature for a short time to avoid melting the ice cream. Or you can wait, and the ice cream will melt without affecting the coating.
The pulses range from about 500 microseconds for yellow up to 10 milliseconds for cyan. The dyes need to not erroneously react to, say, sunlight, so the temperature targets ranged from 100 °C to 200 °C. A solvent melts at the right temperature and causes the dye to change color. So, technically, the dye doesn’t change color with heating. The solvent causes it to change color, and the heat releases the solvent.
It works well, as you can see in the short clip below. There’s no audio, but the printer does make a little grinding noise as it prints:
The History
Zink started as research from Polaroid. The company’s instant film used color dyes
that diffuse up to the surface unless blocked by a photosensitive chemical
. The problem is that diffusion is difficult to control, so they were interested in finding another alternative.
Chemists at Polaroid had the idea of using a colorless chemical until exposed to light. They would eventually give up in the 1980s, but revisited the idea in the 1990s when digital photography started eroding their market share.
One program designed to save the company was to build a portable printer, and the earlier research on colorless dyes came back around. Thermal print heads were already available. You only needed a paper showing different colors based on some property the print head could control.
The team had success in the early 2000s. A 2″ x 3″ print required 200 million pulses of heat, but the results were impressive, although not quite as good as they needed to be for a commercial device. Unfortunately, in 2001, Polaroid filed for bankruptcy. The company changed hands a few times until the new owner decided it was too expensive to continue researching the new printer technology.
A New Hope
The people driving the project knew they had to find a buyer for the technology if they wanted to continue. Many companies were interested in a finished product, but not as interested in a prototype.
They were using a modified but existing thermal printer from Alps to demonstrate the technology, and when they showed it to Alps, they immediately signed on as a partner to make the hardware. This was enough to persuade an investor to step up and pull the company out of what was left of Polaroid.
Calibration
Of course, there were trials, but the new company, Zink Imaging, managed to roll out a commercially viable product. One problem solved was dealing with the slightly different paper between batches. The answer was to have each pack of paper have a barcode on the first sheet that the printer uses to calibrate itself.
Zink’s business model involves selling the paper it makes. It licenses its technology to companies like Polaroid, Dell, Kodak, and HP, which then have the usual manufacturing partners build the printers. Search your favorite retailer for “zink printer” and you’ll find plenty of options. The 2″ x 3″ paper is still popular, although you can get 4″ x 6″ printers, too.
Of course, saying it is inkless isn’t really true. The “ink” is in the paper and, as you might expect, the paper isn’t that cheap. On the other hand, inkjet ink is also expensive, and you don’t have to worry about a printer clogging up if it is unused for a few months.
More…
One of many internal photos in the FCC filing
While Skymall no longer sells from airplanes, their YouTube channel shows a high-level view of how the printer works in a video, which you can see below.
If you were hoping for a teardown, check out the FCC filings to find plenty of internal pictures (
we’ve mentioned how to do this before
).
We are always surprised these aren’t more common. Do you have one of these printers? Let us know in the comments. The best use we’ve seen of one of these was in
a fake Polaroid camera
. If you really want nostalgic photography, break out
your 3D printer
. | 37 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114162",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2025-03-31T17:37:12",
"content": "The CMY temperature driven layering is a slick concept.Did I miss it in somewhere? Where does the black come from? (Assuming paper starts out white).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies":... | 1,760,371,590.362888 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/31/a-snes-cpu-replacement-via-fpga/ | A SNES CPU Replacement Via FPGA | Lewin Day | [
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"cpu",
"nintendo",
"snes"
] | Let’s say you had a SNES with a busted CPU. What would you do? Your SNES would be through! That is, unless, you had a replacement based on an FPGA.
[leonllr] has been developing just such a thing.
The project was spawned out of necessity. [leonllr] had purchased a SNES which was struck down with a dead CPU—in particular, a defective S-CPU revision A. A search for replacements only found expensive examples, and ones that were most likely stripped from working machines. A better solution was necessary.
Hence, a project to build a replacement version of the chip using the ICE40HX8K FPGA. Available for less than $20 USD, it’s affordable, available, and has enough logic cells to do the job. It’s not just a theoretical or paper build, either. [leonllr] has developed a practical installation method to hook the ICE40HX8K up to real hardware, which uses two flex PCBs to go from the FPGA mainboard to the SNES motherboard itself. As for the IP on the FPGA, the core of the CPU itself sprung from the
SNESTANG project
, which previously recreated the Super Nintendo on Sipeed Tang FPGA boards. As it stands, boards are routed, and production is the next step.
It’s nice to see classic hardware resurrected by any means necessary. Even if you can’t get a whole bare metal SNES, you might be able to use half of one with a little help from an FPGA.
We’ve seen similar work on other platforms, too
. Meanwhile, if you’re working to recreate Nintendo 64 graphics chips in your own basement, or something equally weird, don’t hesitate to
let us know! | 17 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114152",
"author": "Mm",
"timestamp": "2025-03-31T16:08:05",
"content": "Was the Dr. Seuss rhyming on purpose ?! :D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8114291",
"author": "Gunplumber",
"timestamp": "2025-04-01T04... | 1,760,371,590.447906 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/31/keebin-with-kristina-the-one-with-the-leather-keyboard/ | Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Leather Keyboard | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"keyboard cleaning",
"keyboard design",
"leather crafting",
"Levels keyboard",
"Secor typewriter"
] | Are you eager to get your feet wet in the keyboard surf, but not quite ready to stand up and ride the waves of designing a full-size board?
You should paddle out with a macro pad instead, and take on the foam face-first and lying down
.
Image by [Robert Feranec] via
Hackaday.IO
Luckily, you have a great instructor in [Robert Feranec]. In a series of hour-long videos, [Robert] guides you step by step through each part of the process, from drawing the schematic, to designing a PCB and enclosure, to actually putting the thing together and entering a new world of macros and knobs and enhanced productivity.
Naturally, the fewer keys and things you want, the easier it will be to build. But [Robert] is using the versatile Raspberry Pi 2040, which has plenty of I/O pins if you want to expand on his basic plan. Not ready to watch the videos?
You can see the schematic and the 3D files on GitHub
.
As [Robert] says, this is a great opportunity to learn many skills at once, while ending up with something terrifically useful that could potentially live on your desk from then on. And who knows where that could lead?
Holy Leather Work, Batman!
[Notxtwhiledrive] had long wanted to design a keyboard from scratch, but could never think of a compelling concept from which to get going. Then one day while doing some leather work,
it dawned on him to design a portable keyboard much the same way as he would a wallet
.
Image by [Notxtwhiledrive] via
reddit
The result? A stunning keyboard wallet that can go anywhere and may outlast most of us. The Wallet42 is based on
the FFKB layout by Fingerpunch
. This hand-wired unibody split uses the Supermini nRF52840 microcontroller with ZMK firmware and rests inside 2 mm-thick chrome-tanned leather in chocolate and grey.
Switch-wise, it has Otemu low-profile reds wearing TPU keycaps. [Notxtwhiledrive] is thinking about making a hot swap version before open-sourcing everything and/or taking commissions. Even better, he apparently recorded video throughout the process and is planning to upload a video about designing and building this beautiful board.
The Centerfold: Levels, the Prototype
Image by [timbetimbe] via
reddit
At the risk of dating myself, this ’80s kid definitely appreciates the aesthetic of
Levels, a new prototype by redditor [timbetimebe]
. This is a centerfold because look at it, but also because there is like basically no detail at this time.
But watch this space
.
Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad?
Send me a picture
along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!
Historical Clackers: the Secor
When we last left Historical Clackers, we examined the Williams machine with its curious grasshopper-like type bars. If you’ll recall, the Williams Typewriter Company was acquired by
Jerome Burgess Secor
, a former superintendent of the Williams Typewriter Company.
Image via
The Antikey Chop
Secor, an inventor in his own right, began working at Williams in 1899. By 1902, he was
filing typewriter patents
for frontstrike machines that looked nothing like the Williams grasshopper number. By the summer of 1910, Secor took over the failed company.
Though radically different, the Secor typewriters were not radically better than the Williams grasshopper. And though the typist could see more with the Secor, the only real hype surrounded the removable, interchangeable escapement.
The Secor Company produced about 7,000 machines between three models, one with a wide carriage. Between the impending war, competition, and alleged labor issues, the writing was on the wall for the Secor Company, and it folded in 1916.
But you shouldn’t feel sorry for Mr. Secor. His main wheelhouse was mechanical toy and sewing machine manufacture. He did well for himself in these realms, and those items are far more sought after by collectors than his typewriters, interestingly enough.
Finally, a Quick Guide to Cleaning That Awful Keyboard Of Yours
Oh, I’m pointing one finger back at myself, trust me. You should see this thing. I really should go at it with the compressor sometime soon. And I might even take all the steps outlined in
this keyboard deep-cleaning guide
by [Ben Smith].
[Ben] estimates that this exercise will take 30 minutes to an hour, but also talks about soaking the keycaps, so (in my experience) you can add several hours of drying time to that ballpark. Plan for that and have another keyboard to use.
Apparently he has two cats that sit directly on the keyboard at every opportunity. I’m not so lucky, so although there is definitely cat hair involved, it doesn’t blanket the switch plate or anything. But you should see [Ben]’s keyboard.
Click to judge [Ben] for his dirty keyboard. Then go de-cap yours, ya filthy animal. Image by [Ben Smith] via
Pocket-lint
So basically, start by taking a picture of it so you can reassemble the keycaps later. He recommends looking up the key map online; I say just take a picture. You’re welcome. Then you should unplug the thing or power it down. Next up is removing the keycaps. This is where I would take it out to the garage and use the ol’ pancake compressor, or maybe just use the vacuum cleaner turned down low with the brushy attachment. But [Ben] uses canned air. Whatever you’ve got.
Everyone enjoys a nice shower now and then. Image by [Ben Smith] via
Pocket-lint
For any hangers-on, bust out an old toothbrush and go to town on those browns. This is as good a time as any to put your keycaps in a bowl with some warm water and a bit of dish soap.
My suggestion — if they’re super gross, put them in something with a lid so you can shake the whole concoction around and knock the dirt off with force.
After about half an hour, use a colander to strain and drain them while rinsing them off. Then let them get good and dry, and put your board back together.
Enjoy the feeling of non-oily keycaps and the sound of full thock now that the blanket of cat hair has been lifted. Rejoice!
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
. | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114139",
"author": "ozone-101",
"timestamp": "2025-03-31T15:06:14",
"content": "‘canned air’ – is actually green house gas in a can, usually one of the refrigerants that are generally illegal to release from AC systems, but apparently fine to spray out of a can. If you don’t have a... | 1,760,371,590.619689 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/31/diy-linear-tubular-motor-does-precise-slides/ | DIY Linear Tubular Motor Does Precise Slides | Donald Papp | [
"Parts"
] | [
"linear actuator",
"linear motor",
"magnets",
"motor driver",
"tubular stepper motor"
] | We’ve seen plenty of motor projects, but [Jeremy]’s
DIY Tubular Linear Motor
is a really neat variety of stepper motor in a format we certainly don’t see every day. It started as a design experiment in making a DIY reduced noise, gearless actuator and you can see the result here.
Here’s how it works: the cylindrical section contains permanent magnets, and it slides back and forth through the center of a row of coils depending on how those coils are energized. In a way, it’s what one would get by unrolling a typical rotary stepper motor. The result is a gearless (and very quiet) linear actuator that controls like a stepper motor.
While a tubular linear motor is at its heart a pretty straightforward concept, [Jeremy] found very little information on how to actually go about making one from scratch. [Jeremy] acknowledges he’s no expert when it comes to motor design or assembly, but he didn’t let that stop him from iterating on the concept (which included figuring out optimal coil design and magnet spacing and orientation) until he was satisfied. We love to see this kind of learning process centered around exploring an idea.
We’ve seen DIY linear motors
embedded in PCBs
and even seen them pressed into service as
model train tracks
, but this is the first time we can recall seeing a tubular format.
Watch it in action in the short video embedded below, and dive into the
project log that describes how it works
for added detail. | 25 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114103",
"author": "Steven",
"timestamp": "2025-03-31T11:43:11",
"content": "I’ve also been very interested in these motors and finding it hard to find information to DIY the controller. I found the same paper Jeremy used for the physical construction of the motor, but it’s hard to... | 1,760,371,590.686641 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/31/tiny-bubbles-in-the-memory/ | Tiny Bubbles In The Memory | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Teardown"
] | [
"bubble memory"
] | We are always fascinated by bubble memory. In the late 1970s, this was the “Next Big Thing” that, as you may have guessed, was, in fact, not the next big thing at all. But there were a number of products that used it as non-volatile memory at a time when the alternative was tape or disk. [Smbakeryt] has a cool
word processor with an acoustic coupler modem made by Teleram
. Inside is — you guessed it — bubble memory.
The keyboard was nonfunctional, but fixable. Although we wouldn’t have guessed the problem. Bubble memory was quite high tech. It used magnetic domains circulating on a thin film of magnetic material. Under the influence of a driving field, the bubbles would march past a read-write head that could create, destroy, or read the state of the bubble.
Why didn’t it succeed? Well, hard drives got cheap and fairly rugged. The technology couldn’t compete with the high-density hard drives that could be reached with improved heads and recording strategies. Bubble memory did find use in high-vibration items, but also wound up in things like this terminal, at least one oscilloscope, and a video game.
Bubble memory evolved from twistor memory, one of
several pre-disk technologies
. While they are hard to come by today, you can find
the occasional project
that either uses some surplus or steals a part off of a device like this one. | 16 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114049",
"author": "H. Linky",
"timestamp": "2025-03-31T08:36:15",
"content": "First link is broken, fyi",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8114143",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-03-31T15:33:36... | 1,760,371,590.737979 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/30/a-prototyping-board-with-every-connector/ | A Prototyping Board With Every Connector | Jenny List | [
"hardware"
] | [
"prototype board",
"prototyping"
] | Prototyping is a personal affair, with approaches ranging from dead-bug parts on tinplate through stripboard and protoboard, to solderless breadboards and more. Whichever you prefer, a common problem is that they don’t offer much in the way of solid connections to the outside world. You could use break-out boards, or you could do like [Pakequis] and
make a prototyping board with every connector you can think of ready to go
.
The board features the expected prototyping space in the middle, and we weren’t joking when we said every connector. There are analogue, serial, USB, headers aplenty, footprints for microcontroller boards, an Arduino shield, a Raspberry Pi header, and much more. There will doubtless be ones that readers will spot as missing, but it’s a pretty good selection.
We can imagine that with a solderless breadboard stuck in the middle it could be a very useful aid for teaching electronics, and we think it would give more than a few commercial boards a run for their money.
It’s not the first we’ve featured, either
. | 32 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114021",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2025-03-31T05:42:35",
"content": "It misses a fuel nozzle! (http://xkcd.com/1406/)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8114040",
"author": "AggregatVier",
"timestamp": "202... | 1,760,371,590.973321 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/30/reconfigurable-fpga-for-single-photon-measurements/ | Reconfigurable FPGA For Single Photon Measurements | Heidi Ulrich | [
"FPGA"
] | [
"experiment",
"fpga",
"measure",
"photon",
"webinar"
] | Detecting single photons can be seen as the backbone of cutting-edge applications like LiDAR, medical imaging, and secure optical communication. Miss one, and critical information could be lost forever. That’s where FPGA-based instrumentation comes in, delivering picosecond-level precision with zero dead time. If you are intrigued, consider sitting in on the 1-hour webinar that [Dr. Jason Ball], engineer at Liquid Instruments, will host on April 15th.
You can read the announcement here
.
Before you sign up and move on, we’ll peek into a bit of the matter upfront. The power lies in the hardware’s flexibility and speed. It has the ability to timestamp every photon event with a staggering 10 ps resolution. That’s comparable to measuring the time it takes light to travel just a few millimeters. Unlike traditional photon counters that choke on high event rates, this FPGA-based setup is reconfigurable, tracking up to four events in parallel without missing a beat. From Hanbury-Brown-Twiss experiments to decoding pulse-position modulated (PPM) data, it’s an all-in-one toolkit for photon wranglers. [Jason] will go deeper into the subject and do a few live experiments.
Measuring single photons can be achieved
with photomultipliers
as well. If exploring the possibilities of FPGA’s is more your thing,
consider reading this article
. | 6 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8113996",
"author": "moo",
"timestamp": "2025-03-31T02:55:58",
"content": "i’m sure liquid instruments appreciates you reposting their sponsored content. hopefully you’re getting kickbacks at least.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_i... | 1,760,371,590.908229 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/30/hackaday-links-march-30-2025/ | Hackaday Links: March 30, 2025 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"23andMe",
"bankruptcy",
"Cygnus",
"data privacy",
"dragon",
"genetic",
"hackaday links",
"iss",
"model car",
"nasa",
"northrop grumman",
"Plutonium",
"SpaceX",
"trinitite"
] | The hits just keep coming for the International Space Station (ISS), literally in the case of
a resupply mission scheduled for June that is now scrubbed
thanks to a heavy equipment incident that damaged the cargo spacecraft. The shipping container for the Cygnus automated cargo ship NG-22 apparently picked up some damage in transit from Northrop Grumman’s Redondo Beach plant in Los Angeles to Florida. Engineers inspected the Cygnus and found that whatever had damaged the container had also damaged the spacecraft, leading to the June mission’s scrub.
Mission controllers are hopeful that NG-22 can be patched up enough for a future resupply mission, but that doesn’t help the ISS right now, which is said to be running low on consumables. To fix that, the next scheduled resupply mission, a SpaceX Cargo Dragon slated for an April launch, will be modified to include more food and consumables for the ISS crew. That’s great, but it might raise another problem: garbage. Unlike the reusable Cargo Dragons, the Cygnus cargo modules are expendable, which makes them a great way to dispose of the trash produced by the ISS crew since everything just burns up on reentry. The earliest a Cygnus is scheduled to dock at the ISS again is sometime in this autumn, meaning it might be a long, stinky summer for the crew.
By now you’ve probably heard the news that
genetic testing company 23andMe has filed for bankruptcy
. The company spent years hawking their spit-in-a-tube testing kits, which after DNA sequence analysis returned a report revealing all your genetic secrets. This led to a lot of DNA surprises, like finding
a whole mess of half-siblings
, learning that
your kid isn’t really related to you
, and even
catching an alleged murderer
. But now that
a bankruptcy judge has given permission
for the company to sell that treasure trove of genetic data to the highest bidder, there’s a mad rush of 23andMe customers to delete their data. It’s supposed to be as easy as signing into your account and clicking a few buttons to delete your data permanently, with the option to have any preserved samples destroyed as well. Color us skeptical, though, that the company would willingly allow its single most valuable asset to be drained. Indeed, there were
reports of the 23andMe website crashing on Monday
, probably simply because of the rush of deletion requests, but then again, maybe not.
It may not have been 121 gigawatts-worth, but the tiny sample of plutonium that a hapless Sydney “science nerd” procured
may be enough to earn him some jail time
. Emmanuel Lidden, 24, pleaded guilty to violations of Australia’s nuclear proliferation laws after ordering a small sample of the metal from a US supplier, as part of his laudable bid to collect a sample of every element in the periodic table. Shipping plutonium to Australia is apparently a big no-no, but not so much that the border force officials who initially seized the shipment didn’t return some of the material to Lidden. Someone must have realized they made a mistake, judging by the outsized response to re-seize the material, which included shutting down the street where his parents live and a lot of people milling about in hazmat suits. We Googled around very briefly for plutonium samples for sale, which is just another in a long list of searches since joining Hackaday that no doubt lands us on a list, and found this small chunk of
trinitite
encased in an acrylic cube for $100. We really hope this isn’t what the Australian authorities got so exercised about that Lidden now faces ten years in prison. That would be really embarrassing.
And finally, we couldn’t begin to tote up the many happy hours of our youth spent building plastic models. New model day was always the best day, and although it’s been a while since we’ve indulged, we’d really get a kick out of building models of some of the cars we had an emotional connection to, like the 1972 Volkswagen Beetle that took us on many high school adventures, or our beloved 1986 Toyota 4×4 pickup with the amazing 22R engine. Sadly, those always seemed to be vehicles that wouldn’t appeal to a broad enough market to make it worth a model company’s while to mass-produce. But if you’re lucky, the car of your dreams might just be available as a download thanks to
the work of Andrey Bezrodny
, who has created quite a collection of 3D models of off-beat and quirky vehicles. Most of the files are pretty reasonably priced considering the work that obviously went into them, and all you have to do is download the files and print them up. It’s not quite the same experience as taking the shrink-wrap off a Revell or Monogram box and freeing the plastic parts from they’re trees to glue them together, but it still looks like a lot of fun. | 11 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8113942",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2025-03-31T00:04:44",
"content": "Plutonium? Wouldn’t it be easier to rip off terrorist and give them a fake bomb full of junk and keep plutonium for his time machine? Or rather his all natural periodic table display?",
"parent_id": null... | 1,760,371,591.019202 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/29/an-esp32-pomdoro-timer/ | An ESP32 Pomodoro Timer | Jenny List | [
"Lifehacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"ESP32",
"pomdoro timer",
"productivity"
] | The Pomdoro technique of time management has moved on a little from the tomato-shaped kitchen timer which gave it a name, as [Rukenshia] shows us with
this nifty ESP32 and e-paper design
. It’s relatively simple in hardware terms, being a collection of off-the-shelf modules in a 3D printed case, but the software has a custom interface for the friend it was built for.
At its heart is a NodeMCU board and a Waveshare display module, with a rotary encoder and addressable LED as further interface components. A lot of attention has been paid to the different options for the interface, and to make the front end displayed on the screen as friendly and useful as possible. Power comes via USB-C, something that should be available in most working environments here in 2025.
We’ve tried a variant on this technique for a while now with varying success, maybe because a mobile phone doesn’t make for as good a timer as a dedicated piece of hardware such as this. Perhaps we should follow this example. If we did, the Hackaday timer
couldn’t possibly use an ESP32
. | 15 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8113578",
"author": "jenningsthecat",
"timestamp": "2025-03-29T23:23:44",
"content": "There’s an “o” missing there Jenny – it should be “Pomodoro”… :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8113583",
"author": "Pedro",
"timest... | 1,760,371,591.070025 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/29/amsat-oscar-7-the-ham-satellite-that-refused-to-die/ | AMSAT-OSCAR 7: The Ham Satellite That Refused To Die | Maya Posch | [
"History",
"Space"
] | [
"AMSAT",
"ham radio",
"NiCd",
"OSCAR 7"
] | When the AMSAT-OSCAR 7 (AO-7) amateur radio satellite was launched in 1974, its expected lifespan was about five years. The plucky little satellite made it to 1981 when a battery failure caused it to be written off as dead. Then, in 2002 it came back to life. The prevailing theory being that one of the cells in the satellites NiCd battery pack, in an extremely rare event, failed open — thus allowing the satellite to run (intermittently) off its solar panels.
In a recent video by [Ben]
on the
AE4JC Amateur Radio
YouTube channel goes over the construction of
AO-7
, its operation, death and subsequent revival are covered, as well as a recent
QSO
(direct contact).
The battery is made up of multiple individual cells.
The solar panels covering this satellite provided a grand total of 14 watts at maximum illumination, which later dropped to 10 watts, making for a pretty small power budget. The entire satellite was assembled in a ‘clean room’ consisting of a sectioned off part of a basement, with components produced by enthusiasts associated with
AMSAT
around the world. Onboard are two radio transponders: Mode A at 2 meters and Mode B at 10 meters, as well as four beacons, three of which are active due to an international treaty affecting the 13 cm beacon.
Positioned in a geocentric LEO (1,447 – 1,465 km) orbit, it’s quite amazing that after 50 years it’s still mostly operational. Most of this is due to how the satellite smartly uses the Earth’s magnetic field for alignment with magnets as well as the impact of photons to maintain its spin. This passive control combined with the relatively high altitude should allow AO-7 to function pretty much indefinitely while the PV panels keep producing enough power. All because a NiCd battery failed in a very unusual way. | 46 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8113533",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2025-03-29T20:40:42",
"content": "one of the cells in the satellites NiCd battery pack, … , shorted open“Shorted open”? Is that an accepted technical expression / electrician’s term (in English)?I know fail-safe, failed-closed and -open bu... | 1,760,371,591.419144 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/29/open-source-framework-aims-to-keep-tidbyt-afloat/ | Open Source Framework Aims To Keep Tidbyt Afloat | Tom Nardi | [
"home hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"custom firmware",
"HUB75",
"IoT",
"Tidbyt"
] | We recently got a note in the tips line from [Tavis Gustafson], who is one of the developers of Tronbyt — a
replacement firmware and self-hosted backend
that breaks the Tidbyt smart display free from its cloud dependency. When they started the project, [Tavis] says the intent was simply to let privacy-minded users keep their data within the local network, which was itself a goal worthy enough to be featured on these pages.
But now that
Tidbyt has been acquired by Modal
and has announced they’ll no longer be producing new units, things have shifted slightly. While the press release says that the Tidbyt backend is going to stay up and running for existing customers, the writing is clearly on the wall. It’s now possible that the Tronbyt project will be able to keep these devices from ending up in landfills when the cloud service is inevitably switched off, especially if they can get the word out to existing users before then.
What’s that? You say you haven’t heard of Tidbyt? Well, truth be told, neither had we. So we did some digging, and this is where things get
really
interesting.
A look inside the original Tidbyt.
It turns out, Tidbyt started its life as a
project on Hackaday.io by [Rohan Singh] back in 2020
. The hardware consists of a 64×32 HUB75 LED panel and a small custom PCB holding an ESP32 inside of a wooden box, and while it doesn’t appear to have ever been an open source device per se, how it worked internally was hardly a secret. The software side of things however
was
released on GitHub
, which likely made creating the custom firmware that much easier for [Travis] and co.
By March of 2021,
Tidbyt was on Kickstarter
, where it blew past its goal in 48 hours and ultimately brought in just shy of one million dollars. In October of 2023,
they were back on Kickstarter
with a second generation of Tidbyt hardware, and this time brought in even more money than the first time.
So what’s the takeaway from all of this? Well, first of all we can’t believe this whole thing was developed right under our noses without us even realizing it. This seems like a good time as any to remind folks to
drop us a line if you’re working on something cool
and you want to share it with the class. We would’ve loved to connect with [Rohan] as Tidbyt was on the rise.
Rohan Singh (center) poses with Modal founders, three years after posting the project on Hackaday.io
But more importantly, it’s a great example of just how much better devices that were developed in the open can weather a storm
than their proprietary counterparts
. [Rohan] kept enough of Tidbyt open to the community that they were able to successfully create their own firmware and backend — a decision which now might end up being the only thing keeping some of these devices up and running in the future.
Oh yeah, and keep starting awesome projects on Hackaday.io and turning them into multi-million dollar ventures too. We like that also. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8113464",
"author": "Titus431",
"timestamp": "2025-03-29T17:55:48",
"content": "I’d never heard of these before so I checked eBay where they run, used $250 – $500.The third hit in Google shared this painfully hip(ster) 2024 article about this “strange (but wonderful) clock” that ev... | 1,760,371,591.333381 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/29/contagious-ideas/ | Contagious Ideas | Elliot Williams | [
"classic hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants"
] | [
"art",
"idea",
"plotter",
"wall plotter"
] | We ran a story about a wall-mounted plotter bot this week,
Mural
. It’s a simple, but very well implemented, take on a theme that we’ve seen over and over again in various forms. Two lines, or in this case timing belts, hang the bot on a wall, and two motors drive it around. Maybe a servo pulls the pen in and out, but that’s about it. The rest is motor driving and code.
We were thinking about the first such bot we’ve ever seen, and couldn’t come up with anything earlier than
Hektor
, a spray-painting version of this idea by [Juerg Lehni]. And since then,
it’s reappeared in numerous variations
.
Some implementations mount the motors on the wall, some on the bot. There are
various geometries
and refinements to try to make the system behave more like a simple Cartesian one, but in the end, you always have to deal with a little bit of geometry, or just relish the not-quite-straight lines. (We have yet to see an implementation that maps out the nonlinearities using a webcam, for instance, but that would be cool.) If you’re feeling particularly reductionist, you can even
do away with the pen-lifter entirely
and simply
draw everything as a connected line, Etch-a-Sketch style
.
Maslow CNC
swaps out the pen for a router, and cuts wood.
What I love about this family of wall-plotter bots is that none of them are identical, but they all clearly share the same fundamental idea. You certainly wouldn’t call any one of them a “copy” of another, but they’re all related, like riffing off of the same piece of music, or painting the same haystack in different lighting conditions: robot jazz, or a study in various mechanical implementations of the same core concept. The collection of all wall bots is more than the sum of its parts, and you can learn something from each one. Have you made yours yet?
(Fantastic plotter-bot art by [Sarah Petkus] from
her write-up
ten years ago!)
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
! | 10 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8113437",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-03-29T15:46:22",
"content": "There was a guy making these, huge ones, in the mid 1980’s West of Palo Alto (along San Gregorio creek? Pescadero?). IIRC he had commercial customers who would do entire walls for places like aut... | 1,760,371,591.509607 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/29/recreating-the-analog-beauty-of-a-vintage-tektronix-oscillator/ | Recreating The Analog Beauty Of A Vintage Tektronix Oscillator | Dan Maloney | [
"classic hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"analog",
"fft",
"oscillator",
"sine wave",
"Tek",
"tektronix",
"THD",
"total harmonic distortion"
] | Tektronix must have been quite a place to work back in the 1980s. The company offered a bewildering selection of test equipment, and while the digital age was creeping in, much of their gear was still firmly rooted in the analog world. And some of the engineering tricks the Tek wizards pulled off are still the stuff of legend.
One such gem of analog design was the SG505, an ultra-low-distortion oscillator module that
[Paul] is trying to replicate with modern parts
. That’s a tall order since not only did the original specs on this oscillator call for less than 0.0008% total harmonic distortion over a frequency range of 20 Hz to 20 kHz, but a lot of the components it used are no longer manufactured. Tek also tended to use a lot of custom parts, especially mechanical ones like the barrel switch used to select attenuation levels in the SG505, leaving [Paul] no choice but to engineer his way around them.
So far, [Paul] has managed to track down most of the critical components or source suitable substitutes. One major win was locating the original J-FET Tek used in the oscillator’s AGC circuit. One part that’s proven more elusive is the potentiometer that Tek used to adjust the frequency; who knew that finding a dual-gang precision wirewound 10k single-turn pot with no physical stop would be such a chore?
[Paul] still seems to be very much in the planning stages of this project yet, and that’s probably for the best since projects such as these live and die on proper planning. We’re keen to see how this develops, and we’re very much looking forward to seeing the FFT results. We also imagine he’ll be busting out
his custom curve tracer
at some point in the build, too. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8113376",
"author": "Akimmet",
"timestamp": "2025-03-29T11:56:07",
"content": "There are very few JFETs left in production. There are even fewer low noise parts to choose from.I’m happy to see that TI introduced JFE150 and JFE2140 recently.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,371,591.283925 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/29/how-to-make-a-13-mm-hole-with-a-1-2-drill-bit/ | How To Make A 13 Mm Hole With A 1/2″ Drill Bit | Donald Papp | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"13mm",
"drill",
"resize",
"tin foil"
] | As everyone knows, no matter how many drill bits one owns, one inevitably needs a size that
isn’t
on hand. Well, if you ever find yourself needing to drill a hole that’s precisely 13 mm, here’s a trick from [AvE] to keep in mind for
doing it with a 1/2″ bit
. It’s a hack that only works in certain circumstances, but hey, it just may come in handy some day.
So the first step in making a 13 mm hole is to drill a hole with a 1/2″ bit. That’s easy enough. Once that’s done, fold a few layers of tinfoil over into a small square and lay it over the hole. Then put the drill bit onto the foil, denting it into the hole (but not puncturing it) with the tip, and drill at a slow speed until the foil wraps itself around the bit like a sheath and works itself into the hole. The foil enlarges the drill bit slightly and — as long as the material being drilled cooperates — resizes the hole a tiny bit bigger in the process. The basic idea can work with just about any drill bit.
It’s much easier demonstrated than described, so watch it in action in the video
around the 2:40 mark
which will make it all very clear.
It’s not the most elegant nor the most accurate method (the hole in the video actually ends up closer to 13.4 mm) but it’s still something worth keeping in the mental toolbox. Just file it away along with
laying your 3D printer on its side
to deal with tricky overhangs. | 75 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "8113349",
"author": "El Gru",
"timestamp": "2025-03-29T09:36:00",
"content": "Or just shoot at the hole with a .45 magnum at a slight angle, that would yield a similar useful result.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8113383",
... | 1,760,371,591.619151 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/28/pictures-from-a-high-altitude-balloon/ | Pictures From A High Altitude Balloon | Al Williams | [
"classic hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"high altitude balloon",
"SSTV"
] | How do you get images downlinked from 30 km up? Hams might guess SSTV — slow scan TV — and that’s
the approach [desafloinventor] took
. If you haven’t seen it before (no pun intended), SSTV is a way to send images over radio at a low frame rate. Usually, you get about 30 seconds to 2 minutes per frame.
The setup uses regular, cheap walkie-talkies for the radio portion on a band that doesn’t require a license. The ESP32-CAM provides the processing and image acquisition. Normally, you don’t think of these radios as having a lot of range, but if the transmitter is high, the range will be very good. The project steals the board out of the radio to save weight. You only fly the PC board, not the entire radio.
If you are familiar with SSTV, the ESP-32 code encodes the image using Martin 1. This color format was developed by a ham named [Martin] (G3OQD). A 320×256 image takes nearly two minutes to send. The balloon system sends every 10 minutes, so that’s not a problem.
Of course, this technique will work anywhere you want to send images over a communication medium. Hams use these SSTV formats even on noisy shortwave frequencies, so the protocols are robust.
Hams used
SSTV to trade memes
way before the Internet. Need to receive SSTV?
No problem
. | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8113333",
"author": "Nikolaj Møbius",
"timestamp": "2025-03-29T06:58:39",
"content": "Cool project. I see that they use my code from this post:https://hackaday.com/2022/11/20/this-standalone-camera-gets-the-picture-through-with-sstv/Happy flying!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth"... | 1,760,371,591.468289 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/28/make-diy-conductive-biodegradable-string-right-in-your-kitchen/ | Make DIY Conductive, Biodegradable String Right In Your Kitchen | Donald Papp | [
"chemistry hacks",
"how-to",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"alginate",
"biodegradable",
"conductive",
"dress",
"led",
"pendant",
"wearable"
] | [ombates] shares
a step-by-step method for making a conductive bio-string from scratch
, no fancy equipment required. She demonstrates using it to create a decorative top with touch-sensitive parts, controlling animations on an RGB LED pendant. To top it off, it’s even biodegradable!
The string is an alginate-based bioplastic that can be made at home and is shaped in a way that it can be woven or knitted. Alginate comes primarily from seaweed, and it gels in the presence of calcium ions. [ombates] relies on this to make a goopy mixture that, once extruded into a calcium chloride bath, forms a thin rubbery length that can be dried into the strings you see here. By adding carbon to the mixture, the resulting string is darkened in color and also conductive.
There’s no details on what the actual resistance of a segment of this string can be expected to measure, but while it might not be suitable to use as wiring it is certainly conductive enough to act as a touch sensor in a manner similar to
the banana synthesizer
. It would similarly be compatible with a
Makey Makey
(the original and incredibly popular hardware board for turning household objects into touch sensors.)
What you see here is [ombates]’ wearable demonstration, using the white (non-conductive) string interwoven with dark (conductive) portions connected to an Adafruit Circuit Playground board mounted as an LED pendant, with the conductive parts used as touch sensors.
Alginate is sometimes used to make
dental molds
and while alginate molds lose their dimensional accuracy as they dry out, for this string that’s not really a concern. If you give it a try,
visit our tip line
to let us know how it turned out! | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8113310",
"author": "Then",
"timestamp": "2025-03-29T05:25:42",
"content": "Why is there a usb cable sticking out the orb? Kinda defeats the message?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8113389",
"author": "Dan",
"... | 1,760,371,591.662212 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/28/math-optimized-swedens-maximal-multi-divi/ | Math, Optimized: Sweden’s Maximal Multi-Divi | Heidi Ulrich | [
"classic hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"book",
"calculation",
"divi",
"multi-divi",
"multiplication",
"numbers",
"sweden"
] | Back in the early 1900s, before calculators lived in our pockets, crunching numbers was painstaking work. Adding machines existed, but they weren’t exactly convenient nor cheap. Enter Wilken Wilkenson and his Maximal Multi-Divi, a massive multiplication and division table that turned math into an industrialized process. Originally published in Sweden in the 1910’s, and refined over decades, his book was more than a reference. It was a modular calculating instrument, optimized for speed and efficiency.
In this video
, [Chris Staecker] tells all about this fascinating relic.
What makes the Multi-Divi special isn’t just its sheer size – handling up to 9995 × 995 multiplications – but its clever design. Wilkenson formatted the book like a machine, with modular sections that could be swapped out for different models. If you needed an expanded range, you could just swap in an extra 200 pages. To sell it internationally, just replace the insert – no translation needed. The book itself contains zero words, only numbers. Even the marketing pushed this as a serious calculating device, rather than just another dusty math bible.
While
pinwheel machines and comptometers
were available at the time, they required training and upkeep. The Multi-Divi, in contrast, required zero learning curve – just look up the numbers for instant result. And it wasn’t just multiplication: the book also handled division in reverse, plus compound interest, square roots, and even amortizations. Wilkenson effectively created a pre-digital computing tool, a kind of
pocket calculator
on steroids (if pockets were the size of briefcases).
Of course, no self-respecting hacker would take claims of ‘the greatest invention ever’ at face value. Wilkenson’s marketing, while grandiose, wasn’t entirely wrong – the Multi-Divi outpaced mechanical calculators in speed tests. And if you’re feeling adventurous, [Chris] has scanned the entire book, so you can try it yourself. | 30 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8113256",
"author": "WTF Detector",
"timestamp": "2025-03-28T23:11:51",
"content": "“Vilin Vinson”? It says “Wilken Wilkenson”, legibly, right there in the article’s header image.In fact, the only search result for “Vilin Vinson” online is this specific article.I could understand if... | 1,760,371,591.723964 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/28/an-artificial-sun-in-a-manageable-size/ | An Artificial Sun In A Manageable Size | Jenny List | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"artificial sunlight",
"diffuser",
"sunlight"
] | The sun is our planet’s source of natural illumination, and though we’ve mastered making artificial light sources, it remains extremely difficult to copy our nearby star. As if matching the intensity wasn’t enough, its spectral quality, collimation, and atmospheric scattering make it an special challenge. [Victor Poughon]
has given it a go though
, using a bank of LEDs and an interesting lens system.
We’re used to lenses being something that can be bought off-the-shelf, but this design eschews that convenience by having the lenses manufactured and polished as an array, by JLC. The scattering is taken care of by a sheet of inkjet printer film, and the LEDs are mounted on a set of custom PCBs.
The result is certainly a very bright light, and one whose collimation delivers a sun-like effect of coming from a great distance. It may not be as bright as the real thing, but it’s certainly something close. If you’d like something to compare it to,
it’s not the first such light we’ve featured
. | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8113235",
"author": "iliis",
"timestamp": "2025-03-28T20:53:23",
"content": "This very exact project has been high up my todo list for ages! Nicely done.Apart from a higher intensity I suspect you also need LEDs with better color rendering, as a CRI of 95 is actually quite bad still... | 1,760,371,591.81488 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/28/take-a-little-bit-of-acorn-to-work/ | Take A Little Bit Of Acorn To Work | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"6502",
"BBC Micro",
"embedded computer"
] | When we think of 8-bit computers, it’s natural to start with home computers. That’s where they live on in the collective memory. But a Z80, a 6502, or similar was more likely to be found unseen in a piece of industrial machinery, doing the job for which we’d today reach for a microcontroller. Sometimes these two worlds intersected, and thus we come to the EuroBEEB, a derivative of Acorn’s BBC Micro on a Eurocard. [Steve Crozier]
has performed extensive research into this system and even produced a recreated PCB
, providing a fascinating window into embedded computing in the early 1980s.
The EuroBEEB was the work of Control Universal, a Cambridge-based company specialising in embedded computers. They produced systems based upon 6502 and 6809 processors, and joining their product line to the then-burgeoning BBC Micro ecosystem would have been an obvious step. The machine itself is a Eurocard with a simple 6502 system shipped with ACORN BBC Basic on ROM, and could be seen as a cut-down BBC Micro with plenty of digital I/O, accesible through a serial port. It didn’t stop there though, as not only could it export its graphics to a “real” BBC Micro, it had a range of expansion Eurocards that could carry the missing hardware such as analogue input, Teletext, or high-res graphics.
The reverse-engineered PCB comes from analysis of surviving schematics, and included a couple of gate array logic chips to replace address decoding ROMs in the original. If it seems overkill for anyone used to a modern microcontroller, it’s worth remembering that by the standards of the time this was a pretty simple system. Meanwhile if you only fancy trying BBC BASIC,
there’s no need to find original hardware
. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8113207",
"author": "Kaz",
"timestamp": "2025-03-28T18:49:32",
"content": "Fitting a Beeb on a Eurocard was a fitting thing to do, given that Acorn’s original machines (the System 1 through 5) were all Eurocard machines.The Acorn Atom (immediate predecessor of the Acorn BBC Micro) w... | 1,760,371,591.766735 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/28/hackaday-podcast-episode-314-its-pi-but-also-pcbs-in-living-color-and-ultrasonic-everything/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 314: It’s Pi, But Also PCBs In Living Color And Ultrasonic Everything | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | It might not be Pi Day anymore, but Elliot and Dan got together for the approximately 100*Pi-th episode of the Podcast to run through the week’s coolest hacks. Ultrasound seemed to be one of the themes, with a deep dive into finding bugs with sonar as well as using sound to cut the cheese — and cakes and pies, too.
The aesthetics of PCBs were much on our minds, too, from full-color graphics on demand to glow-in-the-dark silkscreens. Is automation really needed to embed fiber optics in concrete? Absolutely! How do you put plasma in a bottle? Apparently, with kombucha, Nichrome, and silicone. If you need to manage your
M:TG
cards, scribble on the walls, or build a mechanical chase light, we’ve got the details. And what exactly is a supercomputer? We can’t define it, but we know one when we see it.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Download the zero-calorie MP3.
Episode 314 Show Notes:
News:
No news is good news!
What’s that Sound?
Congrats to [IrishBoss] for guessing the angle grinder. And from Dan Maloney: “It was the ear protection, I swear!”
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
2024 Hackaday Supercon Talk: Killing Mosquitoes With Freaking Drones, And Sonar
“Unnecessary” Automation Of A DIY Star Lamp Build
Relevant xkcd
Supercon 2024: A New World Of Full-Color PCBs
Successful Experiments In Multicolor Circuit Boards
The Way Of The PCB Artist: How To Make Truly Beautiful Circuit Boards
Integrated BMS Makes Battery Packs Easy
Massive 20-oz. Copper PCB Enables Electric Racing
Mural: The Plotter That Draws On Walls
Jürg Lehni & Uli Franke
Pen Plotter Is About As Simple As It Can Get
Stringent, the $15 Wall Plotter – Hackster.io
Cable Bots, Arise! Domination Of The Universe Is At Hand
[Homo Faciens] Builds A Winchbot
Cheap Endoscopic Camera Helps Automate Pressure Advance Calibration
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks
Chase Light SAO Shouldn’t Have Used A 555, And Didn’t
Turning A Kombucha Bottle Into A Plasma Tube
LED Filaments Become Attractive Time Piece
Glow In The Dark PCBs Are Pretty Cool
Dan’s Picks:
Aluminum Business Cards Make Viable PCB Stencils
CNC Router And Fiber Laser Bring The Best Of Both Worlds To PCB Prototyping
Booting A Desktop PDP-11
3D-Printed Scanner Automates Deck Management For Trading Card Gamers
Can’t-Miss Articles:
So What Is A Supercomputer Anyway?
High Frequency Food: Better Cutting With Ultrasonics
Fail Of The Week: The Little Ultrasonic Knife That Couldn’t
Waterjet-Cut Precision Pastry | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8113163",
"author": "calculus",
"timestamp": "2025-03-28T16:49:54",
"content": "Seems to be the wrong download the zero-calorie mp3 link (goes to ep 306).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8113227",
"author": "Elliot Wil... | 1,760,371,591.860916 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/28/keep-tabs-on-your-vehicles-needs-with-lubelogger/ | Keep Tabs On Your Vehicle’s Needs With LubeLogger | Tom Nardi | [
"Software Hacks",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"car maintenance",
"self hosting",
"web based"
] | It doesn’t matter if its a Vespa or a Peterbilt truck — if you ignore the maintenance needs of your vehicle, you do so at your own peril. But it can be difficult enough to keep track of basic oil changes, to say nothing of keeping records on what parts were changed when. Instead of cramming more receipts into your glove box,
maybe give LubeLogger a try
.
This free and open source software tool is designed to make it easy for individuals to keep track of both the routine maintenance needs of their vehicles, as well as keep track of any previous or upcoming repairs and upgrades. Released under the MIT license, LubeLogger is primarily distributed as a Docker image that makes it easy to self-host the tool should you wish to keep your data safe at home rather than on somebody’s server out in the Wild West of the modern Internet.
In perhaps the most basic example, LubeLogger allows the user to add their vehicle to a virtual garage and
set up routine maintenance tasks (such as oil changes)
, and fire off reminders when tasks are due. But it can also do things like track your vehicle’s mileage and fuel efficiency over time, and break down its operating costs.
LubeLogger has been around for a little over a year now, and it seeing active development, with the last release dropping just a few weeks back. While not everyone is going to need such a powerful tool, we’re glad to see there’s a self-hosted open source option out there for those that do.
Thanks to [STR-Alorman] for the tip. | 21 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8113151",
"author": "Stanl Lee",
"timestamp": "2025-03-28T16:17:00",
"content": "Sounds like checking a cow if its pregnant.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8113157",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-03-28T16:30:55... | 1,760,371,592.073017 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/28/this-week-in-security-ingressnightmare-nextjs-and-leaking-dna/ | This Week In Security: IngressNightmare, NextJS, And Leaking DNA | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"23andMe",
"IngressNightmare",
"NextJS",
"This Week in Security"
] | This week, researchers from Wiz Research
released a series of vulnerabilities
in the Kubernetes Ingress NGINX Controller that, when chained together, allow an unauthorized attacker to completely take over the cluster. This attack chain is known as IngressNightmare, and it affected over 6500+ Kubernetes installs on the public Internet.
The background here is that web applications running on Kubernetes need some way for outside traffic to actually get routed into the cluster. One of the popular solutions for this is the Ingress NGINX Controller. When running properly, it takes incoming web requests and routes them to the correct place in the Kubernetes pod.
When a new configuration is requested by the Kubernetes API server, the Ingress Controller takes the Kubernetes Ingress objects, which is a standard way to define Kubernetes endpoints, and converts it to an NGINX config. Part of this process is the admission controller, which runs
nginx -t
on that NGINX config, to test it before actually deploying.
As you might have gathered, there are problems. The first is that the admission controller is just a web endpoint without authentication. It’s usually available from anywhere inside the Kubernetes cluster, and in the worst case scenario, is accessible directly from the open Internet. That’s already not great, but the Ingress Controller also had multiple vulnerabilities allowing raw NGINX config statements to be passed through into the config to be tested.
And then there’s
nginx -t
itself. The man page states, “Nginx checks the configuration for correct syntax, and then tries to open files referred in the configuration.” It’s the opening of files that gets us, as those files can include shared libraries. The
ssl_engine
fits the bill, as this config line can specify the library to use.
That’s not terribly useful in itself. However, NGINX saves memory by buffering large requests into temporary files. Through some trickery, including using the
/proc/
ProcFS pseudo file system to actually access that temporary file, arbitrary files can be smuggled into the system using HTTP requests, and then loaded as shared libraries. Put malicious code in the
_init()
function, and it gets executed at library load time: easy remote code execution.
This issue was privately disclosed to Kubernetes, and fixed in Ingress NGINX Controller version 1.12.1 and 1.11.5, released in February. It’s not good in any Kubernetes install that uses the Ingress NGINX Controller, and disastrously bad if the admission controller is exposed to the public Internet.
Next.js
Another project, Next.js, has a middleware component that serves a similar function as an ingress controller. The Nixt.js middleware can do path rewriting, redirects, and authentication. It has an interesting behavior, in that it adds the
x-middleware-subrequest
HTTP header to recursive requests, to track when it’s talking to itself. And the thing about those headers is that they’re just some extra text in the request. And
that’s the vulnerability
: spoof a valid
x-middleware-subrequest
and the Next.js middleware layer just passes the request without any processing.
The only hard part is to figure out what a valid header is. And that’s changed throughout the last few versions of Next.js. The latest iteration of this technique is to use
x-middleware-subrequest: middleware:middleware:middleware:middleware:middleware
or a minor variant, to trigger the middleware’s infinite recursion detection, and pass right through. In some use cases that’s no problem, but if the middleware is also doing user authentication, that’s a big problem. The issue can be mitigated by blocking
x-middleware-subrequest
requests from outside sources, and the 14.x and 15.x releases have been updated with fixes.
Linux’ No-op Security Function
The linux kernel uses various hardening techniques to make exploitation of bugs difficult. One technique is
CONFIG_RANDOM_KMALLOC_CACHES
, which makes multiple copies of memory allocation caches, and then randomizes which copy is actually used, to make memory corruption exploitation harder. Google researchers found a flaw in nftables, and
wrote up the exploit
, which includes the observation that this mitigation is completely non-functional when used from
kvmalloc_node
.
This happens as a result of how that randomization process is done. The function that calculates which of the copies to actually call actually uses its own return address as the seed value for the random value. That makes sense in some cases, but the calling function is an “exported symbol”, which among other things, means the return value is always the same, rendering the hardening attempt completely ineffective. Whoops. This
was fixed in the Linux 6.15 merge window
, and will be backported to the stable kernels series.
Your DNA In Bankruptcy
I’ve always had conflicting feelings about the 23andMe service. On one hand, there is some appeal to those of us that may not have much insight to our own genetic heritage, to finally get some insight into that aspect of our own history. On the other hand, that means willingly giving DNA to a for-profit company, and just trusting them to act responsibly with it. That concern has been brought into sharp focus this week, as
23andMe has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy
. This raises a thorny question, of what happens to that DNA data as the company is sold?
The answer seems to be that the data will be sold as well, leading to calls for 23andMe customers to log in and request their data be deleted. Chapter 11 bankruptcy does not prevent them from engaging in business activities, and laws like the GDPR continue to apply, so those requests should be honored. Regardless, it’s a stark reminder to be careful what data you’re willing to entrust to what business, especially something as personal as DNA. It’s unclear what the final fallout is going to be from the company going bankrupt, but it’s sure to be interesting.
Appsmith and a Series of Footguns
Rhino Security did a review of the Appsmith platform, and
found a series of CVEs
. On the less severe side, that includes a error handling problem that allows an unauthorized user to restart the system, and an easily brute-forced unique ID that allows read-only users to send arbitrary SQL queries to databases in their workspace. The more serious problem is a pseudo-unauthenticated RCE that is in some ways more of a default-enabled footgun than a vulnerability.
On a default Appsmith install, the default postgres database allows local connections to any user, on any database. Appsmith applications use that local socket connection. Also in the default configuration, Appsmith will allow new users to sign up and create new applications without needing permission. And because that new user created their own application on the server, the user has permissions to set up database access. And from there postgres will happily let the user run a
FROM PROGRAM
query that runs arbitrary bash code.
Bits and Bytes
There’s been a rumor for about a week that Oracle Cloud suffered a data breach, that Oracle has so far denied. It’s beginning to look like the breach is a real one, with
Bleeping Computer confirming that the data samples are legitimate
.
Google’s Project Zero has a blast from the past, with
a full analysis of the BLASTPASS exploit
. This was a 2003 NSO Group exploit used against iMessage on iOS devices, and allowed for zero-click exploitation. It’s a Huffman tree decompression vulnerability, where attempting to decompress the tree overwrites memory and triggers code execution. Complicated, but impressive work.
Resecurity researchers
cracked the infrastructure
of the BlackLock ransomware group via a vulnerability in the group’s Data Leak Site. Among the treasures from this action, we have the server’s
history
logs, email addresses, some passwords, and IP address records. While no arrests have been reported in connection with this action, it’s an impressive hack. Here’s hoping it leads to some justice for ransomware crooks.
And finally, Troy Hunt, master of pwned passwords, has
finally been stung by a phishing attack
. And had a bit of a meta-moment when receiving an automated notice from his own
haveibeenpwned.com
service. All that was lost was the contents of Troy’s Mailchimp mailing list, so if your email address was on that list, it’s available in one more breach on the Internet. It could have been worse, but it’s a reminder that it can happen to even the best of us. Be kind.
This is too many levels of meta for my head to grasp 🤯
pic.twitter.com/Pr0iFQGNlh
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt)
March 25, 2025 | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8113125",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-03-28T14:14:34",
"content": "Fun fact: 23and me is NOT covered by HIPPA. They’re a direct-to-consumer service, not healthcare as defined in the law. The only thing they have to abide by is their ever-changing privacy policy.",
"parent_... | 1,760,371,592.889393 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/27/supercon-2024-yes-you-can-use-the-controller-area-network-outside-of-cars/ | Supercon 2024: Yes, You Can Use The Controller Area Network Outside Of Cars | Lewin Day | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"2024 Hackaday Superconference",
"Bosch",
"CAN",
"can-bus"
] | Ah, the CAN bus. It’s become a communication standard in the automotive world, found in a huge swathe of cars built from the mid-1990s onwards. You’ll also find it in aircraft, ships, and the vast majority of modern tractors and associated farm machines, too.
As far as [Randy Glenn] is concerned, though, the CAN bus doesn’t have to be limited to these contexts. It can be useful far beyond its traditional applications with just about any hardware platform you care to use! He came down to tell us all about it at the
2024 Hackaday Supercon.
[Randy]’s talk was titled “Yes, You CAN: Use The Controller Area Network Outside Of Cars.” We have to assume the pun was intended. In any case, the CAN bus came to us from Bosch, which began developing the standard in 1983. The company officially released it at the Society of Automotive Engineers conference in 1986, with compatible chips first hitting the market a year later. It took a little while longer for the standard to find traction, with Mercedes-Benz being the first to implement it in a production vehicle in 1991. It soon caught on with the wider industry as a robust and reliable way to let a vehicle’s various control units communicate with all the important sensors that were proliferating on modern automobiles. CAN got its big break when it was mandated as part of the OBD-II standard in North America, which defacto put it into virtually every car sold in that market from 1996 onwards.
Since then, CAN has proliferated well beyond the automotive space, into marine and aerospace contexts as well. As [Randy] explains, beyond transportation, you’ll also find it in everything from robots to pinball machines and even elevators. Basically, wherever it’s important to have robust local communication between distributed embedded systems, CAN is a great candidate for the job.
Since it’s so widespread, it’s easy to find hardware and software that’s CAN-ready out of the box. The vast majority of microcontroller manufacturers include some sort of CAN compatibility; for example, Espressif’s ESP32 has the “Two Wire Automotive Interface” which is built for this purpose. Linux is more than happy to talk CAN, too, and most programming languages have some sort of library available, too. Whether you’re working with Arduino, MicroPython, or CircuitPython, you can certainly find what you need. Even if you have a device without CAN built in—like a Raspberry Pi—SPI-ready CAN controllers can be had for cheap from vendors like Microchip.
Depending on your hardware, you might have to add a CAN controller or transceiver to get it talking on the CAN bus. However, this is usually trivial.
There are specific reasons why you might consider CAN for your embedded communication needs. It uses a differential bus, which gives it an inherent ability to resist disruption from electrical noise. Addressing, error-checking, and retransmission functionality are also baked in to CAN controllers, so you don’t have to handle it yourself. You can also find tons of CAN compatible hardware on the market to do whatever you’re trying to do, and a lot of it is pretty cheap because manufacturers are churning it out by the millions.
Of course, there are some limits. Traditionally, you’re stuck with only 32 devices on a bus, though there are
some
ways to work around it at lower data rates. Peak data rate is 1 megabit per second on a traditional CAN bus operating at the high data rate; this limits you to a total bus length of 25 meters. You can up this to 250 meters if you drop to 250 kbit/s instead. Packets are also limited to 8 bytes in size.
Beyond the basic performance specs, [Randy] also explains how you might go about typical implementations with different hardware. For example, if you’ve got a microcontroller with no CAN capability baked in, you might hook it up with a CAN controller and transceiver over SPI. Alternatively, you might choose to work with a more advanced microcontroller that has all the CAN communication hardware built into the chip, simplifying your build. For parts like the ESP32 and some STM32s, you might find you’ve got a CAN controller on board, but you’re lacking the hardware to do the fancy differential signalling—in that case, you just need to hook up a CAN transceiver to get your hardware on the bus. [Randy] also highlights the usual conventions, such as terminology and wire colors, while explaining that these aren’t always rigidly adhered to in the field.
Talking CAN on Linux is as easy as plugging in a cheap USB dongle.
On the communication level, the CAN bus standard mandates that nodes transmit frames, with each each frame containing up to 8 bytes of data. [Randy] explains how messages are formatted and addressed to ensure the right nodes get the right data they’re looking for. There are standard message frames, as well as Remote Transmission Request (RTR) frames—where one node requests data from another. A typical example is a controller asking a sensor to report a value. There are also special Error and Control Frames, which [Randy] notes are complicated and beyond the scope of his Supercon talk. However, he recommends resources that exist
to explain them in great detail
.
Data of a complete CAN frame laid over the traces of the bus itself. Credit:
Ken Tindell, Canis Automotive Labs Ltd. via CC BY-SA 4.0
Much of [Randy’s] talk explains how CAN works. But, as promised, he also takes the time to explain possible non-automotive applications for this technology. He steps through an amusing Halloween build, where a CAN bus is used to trigger scary lightning and sound effects when people press a doorbell.
If you’ve ever wanted a good CAN primer, [Randy]’s talk is just what you need. As far as robust embedded communication standards go, it’s one of the most popular and long-lived out there. It might just pay dividends to put the CAN bus in your own toolbox for future use! | 21 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112870",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2025-03-27T17:10:51",
"content": "FWIW there are also level-shifting CAN transceivers, if you need to have the CAN bus a different voltage than some of the nodes, which is very convenient. Some CAN transceivers can use arbitrary vo... | 1,760,371,592.595589 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/27/custom-slimline-cd-player-hides-out-under-speaker/ | Custom Slimline CD Player Hides Out Under Speaker | Tom Nardi | [
"digital audio hacks"
] | [
"audio cd",
"cd drive",
"ir receiver",
"vlc",
"wireless speaker"
] | In the era of digital streaming, the market is full of wireless speakers that will play content from your smartphone or pull it down from the Internet directly over WiFi. But if you’re feeling a bit nostalgic and want to throw on one of your old CDs, well, you might have a problem. That’s the situation [Chad Boughton] recently found himself in, so he decided to
build a compact CD player
that could discreetly connect up to his fancy Klipsch speaker.
The optical drive itself was the easy part, as [Chad] already had a laptop-style drive in an external enclosure that he could liberate. But of course, the speaker wouldn’t know what to do with an external disc drive, so there needed to be an intermediary. Enter the Raspberry Pi.
It might not look like it at first glance, but that’s a Pi 3 tucked into the back of the 3D printed frame. It would have been too tall in its original configuration, so [Chad] removed the USB and Ethernet ports;
a modification we’ve covered in the past
. Of course, he still needed to
use
the USB ports, so he ended up soldering the two cables — one to the CD drive and the other to the back of the speaker — directly to the Pi.
When plugged into the Raspberry Pi, the Klipsch speaker shows up as a USB audio device, so the software side of things was relatively simple. [Chad] installed VLC to handle CD playback, but he still needed a way to control everything. To that end, a IR receiver hooked up to the Pi’s GPIO pins means the Pi can detect the signals coming from the speaker’s original remote and pass the appropriate command on to VLC. The whole thing is very well integrated, and you could be forgiven for thinking it might be some kind of stock upgrade module at first glance.
Despite
recently celebrating its 40th birthday
, the CD is
unlikely to completely disappear from our lives
anytime soon. Manufacturers can turn their back on the standard if they want, but so long as folks still want to play them, they’ll keep coming up with
inventive ways to make it happen
. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112857",
"author": "Steven-X",
"timestamp": "2025-03-27T16:17:53",
"content": "I just acquired a HP laptop CD drive from our E_Waste bin at work (they let me raid it from time to time) so maybe this article will inspire a project!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repli... | 1,760,371,592.431247 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/27/general-fusion-claims-success-with-magnetized-target-fusion/ | General Fusion Claims Success With Magnetized Target Fusion | Maya Posch | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"nuclear fusion"
] | It’s rarely appreciated just how much more complicated nuclear fusion is than nuclear fission. Whereas the latter involves a process that happens all around us without any human involvement, and where the main challenge is to keep the nuclear chain reaction within safe bounds, nuclear fusion means making atoms do something that goes against their very nature, outside of a star’s interior.
Fusing helium isotopes can be done on Earth fairly readily these days, but doing it in a way that’s repeatable — bombs don’t count — and in a way that makes economical sense is trickier. As
covered previously
, plasma stability is a problem with the popular approach of tokamak-based magnetic confinement fusion (MCF). Although this core problem has now been largely addressed, and stellarators are mostly unbothered by this particular problem, a Canadian start-up figures that they can do even better, in the form of a nuclear fusion reactors based around the principle of magnetized target fusion (MTF).
Although General Fusion’s piston-based fusion reactor has people mostly very confused, MTF is based on real physics and with GF’s current LM26 prototype
having recently achieved first plasma
, this seems like an excellent time to ask the question of what MTF is, and whether it can truly compete billion-dollar tokamak-based projects.
Squishing Plasma Toroids
Lawson criterion of important magnetic confinement fusion experiments (Credit:
Horvath, A., 2016
)
In general, to achieve nuclear fusion, the target atoms have to be pushed past the
Coulomb barrier
, which is an electrostatic interaction that normally prevents atoms from approaching each other and even spontaneously fusing. In stars, the process of
nucleosynthesis
is enabled by the intense pressures due to the star’s mass, which overcomes this electrostatic force.
Replicating the nuclear fusion process requires a similar way to overcome the Coulomb barrier, but in lieu of even a small-sized star like our Sun, we need alternate means such as much higher temperatures, alternative ways to provide pressure and longer confinement times. The efficiency of each approach was originally captured in the
Lawson criterion
, which was developed by John D. Lawson in a (then classified) 1955 paper (
PDF on Archive.org
).
In order to achieve a self-sustaining fusion reaction, the energy losses should be less than the energy produced by the reaction. The break-even point here is expressed as having a Q (
energy gain factor
) of 1, where the added energy and losses within the fusion process are in balance. For sustained fusion with excess energy generation, the Q value should be higher than 1, typically around 5 for contemporary fuels and fusion technology.
In the slow march towards ignition, we have seen many reports in the popular media that turn out to be rather meaningless, such as the
horrendous inefficiency demonstrated
by the laser-based inertial confinement fusion (ICF) at the National Ignition Facility (NIF). This makes it rather fascinating that what General Fusion is attempting is closer to ICF, just without the lasers and artisan Hohlraum-based fuel pellets.
Instead they use a plasma injector, a type of
plasma railgun
called a Marshall gun, that produces hydrogen isotope plasma, which is subsequently contained in a magnetic field as a self-stable
compact toroid
. This toroid is then squished by a mechanical system in a matter of milliseconds, with the resulting compression induces fusion. Creating this toroid is the feat that was recently demonstrated in the current Lawson Machine 26 (LM26) prototype reactor with its first plasma in the target chamber.
Magneto-Inertial Fusion
Whereas magnetic confinement fusion does effectively what it says on the tin, magnetic target fusion is pretty much a hybrid of magnetic confinement fusion and the laser-based intertial confinement fusion. Because the magnetic containment is only there to essentially keep the plasma in a nice stable toroid, it doesn’t have nearly the same requirements as in a tokamak or stellarator. Yet rather than using complex and power-hungry lasers, MCF applies mechanical energy using an impulse driver — the liner — that rapidly compresses the low-density plasma toroid.
Schematic of the Lawson Machine 26 MTF reactor. (Credit: General Fusion)
The juiciest parts of General Fusion’s experimental setup can be found in the
Research Library
on the GF website. The above graphic was copied from the LM26 poster (
PDF
), which provides a lot of in-depth information on the components of the device and its operation, as well as the experiments that informed its construction.
The next step will be to test the ring compressor that is designed to collapse the lithium liner around the plasma toroid, compressing it and achieving fusion.
Long Road Ahead
Interpretation of General Fusion’s commercial MTF reactor design. (Credit:
Evan Mason
)
As promising this may sound, there is still a lot of work to do before MTF can be considered a viable option for commercial fusion. As
summarized on the Wikipedia entry
for General Fusion, the goal is to have a liquid liner rather than the solid lithium liner of LM26. This liquid lithium liner will both breed new tritium fuel from neutron exposure, as well as provide the liner that compresses the deuterium-tritium fuel.
This liquid liner would also provide cooling, linked with a heat exchanger or steam generator to generate electricity. Because the liquid liner would be infinitely renewable, it should allow for about 1 cycle per second. To keep the liquid liner in place on the inside of the sphere, it would need to be constantly spun, further complicating the design.
Although getting plasma in the reaction chamber where it can be squished by the ring compressor’s lithium liner is a major step, the real challenge will be in moving from a one-cycle-a-day MTF prototype to something that can integrate not only the aforementioned features, but also run one cycle per second, while being more economical to run than tokamaks, stellarators, or even regular nuclear fission plants, especially Gen IV fast neutron reactors.
That said, there is a strong argument to be made that MTF is significantly more practical for commercial power generation than ICF. And regardless, it is just really cool science and engineering.
Top image: General Fusion’s Lawson Machine 26. (Credit:
General Fusion
) | 21 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112839",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-03-27T15:24:38",
"content": "“which is an electrostatic interaction that normally prevents atoms from approaching each other and even spontaneously fusing. In stars, the process of nucleosynthesis is enabled by the intense pressures due ... | 1,760,371,592.342707 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/27/chase-light-sao-shouldnt-have-used-a-555-and-didnt/ | Chase Light SAO Shouldn’t Have Used A 555, And Didn’t | Dan Maloney | [
"classic hacks",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"2025 Hackaday Europe",
"chaser",
"mask",
"sao"
] | Around these parts, projects needlessly using a microcontroller where a simpler design would do are often derided with the catch-all “Should have used a 555,” even if the venerable timer chip wouldn’t have been the ideal solution. But the sentiment stands that a solution more complicated than it needs to be is probably one that needs rethinking, as
this completely mechanical chaser light badge Simple Add-On (SAO)
aptly demonstrates.
Rather than choosing any number of circuits to turn a strip of discrete lights on and off, [Johannes] took inspiration for his chaser lights from factory automation mechanisms that move parts between levels on steps that move out of phase with each other, similar to
the marble-raising mechanism
used in [Wintergatan]’s Marble Machine X.
Two thin plates with notches around the edge are sandwiched together inside the 3D printed case of the SAO, between the face and the light source. A small motor and a series of gears rotate the two masks 180° out of phase with each other, which creates the illusion that the light is moving.
It’s pretty convincing; when we first saw the video below, we were sure it was a row of tiny LEDs around the edge of the badge.
Hats off to [Johannes] for coming up with such a clever mechanism and getting it working just in time for
Hackaday Europe
. If you need to catch up on the talks, we’ve got
a playlist
ready for you. | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112785",
"author": "strawberrymortallyb0bcea48e7",
"timestamp": "2025-03-27T11:52:25",
"content": "Berlin sign should point left.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8112794",
"author": "Mark Topham",
"timestamp":... | 1,760,371,592.532138 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/27/pi-pico-turns-atari-2600-into-a-lo-fi-photo-frame/ | Pi Pico Turns Atari 2600 Into A Lo-fi Photo Frame | Jenny List | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"atari",
"photo frame",
"pi pico"
] | The cartridge based game consoles of decades ago had a relatively simple modus operandi — they would run a program stored in a ROM in the cartridge, and on the screen would be the game for the enjoyment of the owner. This made them simple in hardware terms, but for hackers in the 2020s, somewhat inflexible. The Atari 2600 is particularly troublesome in this respect, with its clever use of limited hardware making it not the easiest to program at the best of times. This makes
[Nick Bild]’s Atari 2600 photo frame project
particularly impressive.
The 2600 has such limited graphics hardware that there’s no handy frame buffer to place image data into, instead there are some clever tricks evolved over years by the community to build up bitmap images using sprites. Only 64 by 84 pixels are possible, but for mid-70s consumer hardware this is quite the achievement.
In the case of this cartridge the ROM is replaced by a Raspberry Pi Pico, which does the job of both supplying the small Atari 2600 program to display the images, and feeding the image data in a form pre-processed for the Atari.
The result is very 8-bit in its aesthetic and barely what you might refer to as photos at all, but on the other hand making the Atari do this at all is something of a feat. Everything can be found
in a GitHub repository
.
If new hardware making an old console perform unexpected tricks is your bag,
we definitely have more for you
. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112802",
"author": "alnwlsn",
"timestamp": "2025-03-27T12:47:21",
"content": "Reminds me very much of Tom7’s “Reverse Emulation” for the NES:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8112805",
... | 1,760,371,592.479453 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/26/why-are-micro-center-flash-drives-so-slow/ | Why Are Micro Center Flash Drives So Slow? | Maya Posch | [
"Reverse Engineering",
"Teardown"
] | [
"flash drive"
] | Every year, USB flash drives get cheaper and hold more data. Unfortunately, they don’t always get faster. The reality is, many USB 3.0 flash drives aren’t noticeably faster than their USB 2.0 cousins, as [Chase Fournier] found with the ultra-cheap specimens purchased over at his local Micro Center store.
Although these all have USB 3.0 interfaces, they transfer at less than 30 MB/s, but why exactly? After
popping open a few of these drives
the answer appears to be that they use the old-style Phison controller (PS2251-09-V) and NAND flash packages that you’d expect to find in a USB 2.0 drive.
Across the 32, 64, and 256 GB variants the same Phison controller is used, but the PCB has provisions for both twin TSOP packages or one BGA package. The latter package turned out to be identical to those found in the iPhone 8. Also interesting was that the two 256 GB drives [Chase] bought had different Phison chips, as in one being BGA and the other QFP. Meanwhile some flash drives use eMMC chips, which are significantly faster, as demonstrated in the video.
It would seem that you really do get what you pay for, with $3 “USB 3.0” flash drives providing the advertised storage, but you really need to budget in the extra time that you’ll be waiting for transfers. | 45 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112683",
"author": "aki009",
"timestamp": "2025-03-27T05:05:27",
"content": "The quality of the firmware also varies widely. I’ve seen some real abominations over the years.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8113115",
"... | 1,760,371,592.721803 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/26/fitting-a-spell-checker-into-64-kb/ | Fitting A Spell Checker Into 64 KB | Bryan Cockfield | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"algorithm",
"bloom filter",
"compression",
"hash",
"memory",
"spell check",
"unix"
] | By some estimates, the English language contains over a million unique words. This is perhaps overly generous, but even conservative estimates generally put the number at over a hundred thousand. Regardless of where the exact number falls between those two extremes, it’s certainly many more words than could fit in the 64 kB of memory allocated to the spell checking program on some of the first Unix machines. This article by [Abhinav Upadhyay] takes a deep dive on
how the early Unix engineers accomplished the feat despite the extreme limitations of the computers they were working with
.
Perhaps the most obvious way to build a spell checker is by simply looking up each word in a dictionary. With modern hardware this wouldn’t be too hard, but disks in the ’70s were extremely slow and expensive. To move the dictionary into memory it was first whittled down to around 25,000 words by various methods, including using an algorithm to remove all affixes, and then using a Bloom filter to perform the lookups. The team found that this wasn’t a big enough dictionary size, and had to change strategies to expand the number of words the spell checker could check. Hash compression was used at first, followed by hash differences and then a special compression method which achieved an almost theoretically perfect compression.
Although most computers that run spell checkers today have much more memory as well as disks which are orders of magnitude larger and faster, a lot of the innovation made by this early Unix team is still relevant for showing how various compression algorithms can be used on data in general.
Large language models, for one example, are proving to be the new frontier for text-based data compression
. | 16 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112710",
"author": "WTF Detector",
"timestamp": "2025-03-27T07:13:08",
"content": "What does this have to do with the article at all?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8112792",
"author": "Winston",
"timestamp": "2025-03-... | 1,760,371,592.645592 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/30/help-propel-the-original-arm-os-into-the-future/ | Help Propel The Original ARM OS Into The Future | Jenny List | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"arm",
"operating system",
"RiscOS"
] | We use ARM devices in everything from our microcontroller projects to our laptops, and many of us are aware of the architecture’s humble beginnings in a 1980s Acorn Archimedes computer. ARM processors are not the only survivor from the Archimedes though, its operating system has made it through the decades as well.
RISC OS is a general purpose desktop operating system for ARM platforms that remains useful in 2025, as well as extremely accessible due to a Raspberry Pi port. No software can stand still though, and if RISC OS is to remain relevant it must move with the times. Thus RISC OS Open, the company behind its development,
have launched what they call a Moonshots Initiative
, moving the OS away from incremental development towards much bolder steps. This is necessary in order for it to support the next generation of ARM architectures.
We like RISC OS here at Hackaday
and have kept up to date with its recent developments
, but even we as fans can see that it is in part a little dated. From the point of view of RISC OS Open though, they identify support for 64-bit platforms as their highest priority, and to that end they’re looking for developers, funding partners, and community advocates. If that’s you, get in touch with them! | 33 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8113903",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-03-30T21:08:33",
"content": "without support for memory protection, there’s a pretty low ceiling to the level of software complexity I’m willing to develop and support on it as a platform. without memory protection it becomes impossible to... | 1,760,371,592.840441 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/30/protocol-analyzer-remembered/ | Protocol Analyzer Remembered | Al Williams | [
"classic hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"protocol analyzer",
"rs232",
"test equipment"
] | Anyone will tell you that as hard as it is to create a working system, the real trick is making two systems talk to each other, especially if you created only one or none of them. That’s why tools that let you listen in on two systems talking are especially valuable.
If you were a well-funded lab back in the RS232 days, you might have
an HP4957A protocol analyzer
. The good news is that if you still use RS232, these kinds of things are now cheap on the surplus market. [IMSAI Guy] got one of these decidedly cool devices and shows it to us in the video below.
The look of these was pretty neat for their time—a folded-up instrument with a cute keyboard and a CRT-100. You can load different interpreters from ROM to RAM, such as the VT-100, which is essentially an application for the device. Of course, now you could rig one of these up in a few minutes with a PC or even a Pi Pico. But it wouldn’t have the same charm, we are sure you would agree.
You can find a lot of old RS232 gear around, from breakout boxes to advanced sniffers like this one. Too bad we couldn’t afford them when we really needed them.
This could be handy if you have a lot of ports. Either
real
or
virtual
. Or,
do it yourself
. | 22 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8113830",
"author": "LookAtDaShinyShiny",
"timestamp": "2025-03-30T17:15:04",
"content": "this reminded me of the interfaker…https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/vintage-interfaker-mt25-iv-rs232-242317684",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"c... | 1,760,371,592.778254 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/30/can-hackers-bring-jooki-back-to-life/ | Can Hackers Bring Jooki Back To Life? | Tom Nardi | [
"digital audio hacks",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"bankruptcy",
"jooki",
"obsolescence",
"root access",
"smart speaker"
] | Another day, another Internet-connected gadget that gets abandoned by its creators. This time it’s Jooki — a screen-free audio player that let kids listen to music and stories by placing specific tokens on top of it. Parents would use a smartphone application to program what each token would do, and that way even very young children could independently select what they wanted to hear.
Well, until the company went bankrupt and shutdown their servers down, anyway. Security researcher
[nuit] wrote into share the impressive work they’ve done so far
to identify flaws in the Jooki’s firmware, in the hopes that it will inspire others in the community to start poking around inside these devices. While there’s unfortunately not enough here to return these devices to a fully-functional state today, there’s several promising leads.
It probably won’t surprise you to learn the device is running some kind of stripped down Linux, and [nuit] spends the first part of the write-up going over the partitions and peeking around inside the filesystem. From there the post briefly covers how over-the-air (OTA) updates were supposed to work when everything was still online, which may become useful in the future when the community has a new firmware to flash these things with.
Where things really start getting interesting is when the Jooki starts up and exposes its HTTP API to other devices on the local network. There are some promising endpoints such as
/flags
which let’s you control various aspects of the device, but the real prize is
/ll
, which is a built-in backdoor that runs whatever command you pass it with root-level permissions! It’s such a ridiculous thing to include in a commercial product that we’d like to think they originally meant to call it
/lol
, but in any event, it’s a huge boon to anyone looking to dig deeper in to the device.
The inside of a second-generation Jooki
But wait, there’s more! The Jooki runs a heartbeat script that regularly attempts to check in with the mothership. The expected response when the box pings the server is your standard HTTP
200 OK
, but in what appears to be some kind of hacky attempt at implementing a secondary OTA mechanism, any commands sent back in place of the HTTP status code will be executed as root.
Now as any accomplished penguin wrangler will know, if you can run commands as root, it doesn’t take long to fire up an SSH server and get yourself an interactive login. Either of these methods can be used to get into the speaker’s OS, and as [nuit] points out, the second method means that whoever can buy up the Jooki domain name would have remote root access to every speaker out there.
Long story short, it’s horrifyingly easy to get root access on a Jooki speaker. The trick now is figuring out how this access can be used to restore these devices to full functionality.
We just recently covered a project
which offered a new firmware and self-hosted backend for an abandoned smart display, hopefully something similar for the Jooki isn’t far off. | 16 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8113786",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-03-30T15:19:14",
"content": "More proof that the S in IoT stands for security.Nice to see yet another cloud based service collapse and leave the users high n dry too",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,594.522635 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/30/automatically-crack-safes-with-this-autodialer/ | Automatically Crack Safes With This Autodialer | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"autodialer",
"combination",
"safe",
"safe cracking",
"security",
"stepper motor"
] | When attempting to secure something, whether it’s a computer, sensitive data, or valuables, there’s always going to be a way to break that security. It might be impossibly hard, like taking centuries to brute-force an encryption algorithm, but it’s weakness is still there. And, like the future might make certain encryption obsolete, modern electronics has made security of the past somewhat obsolete as well.
[Startup Chuck] has been using tools
the creators of safes from the late 1800s could probably not have imagined.
The tool that [Startup Chuck] has come up with is known as an autodialer in the safe-cracking world, and as its name suggests it automates the process of opening the safe by trying as many combinations as possible. The autodialer attaches to the safe with three magnetic feet and couples to the dial through a chuck attached to a magnetic clutch, which allows the autodialer to disengage as soon as the correct combination is found. It’s driven with a stepper motor which can test out combinations so fast that [Startup Chuck] needed to take 240 fps video and slow it down to make sure that the mechanism was behaving properly.
The autodialer itself can’t actually open the safe, though. The last step of the process is taken care of by a bungie cord, attached to the safe handle to pre-tension it enough so that when the correct combination is finally entered the safe pops open automatically. For anyone looking to duplicate the project, [Startup Chuck] has added the program code to
a GitHub page
. If you’re looking at a more modern safe, though,
there are of course ways to crack their security systems as well
. | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8113738",
"author": "Jan-Willem Markus",
"timestamp": "2025-03-30T12:42:16",
"content": "Congrats to [Startup Chuck] to making an auto dialer and improving it to the point where it works in the real world. These projects interest me as it shows how security evolves. It’s also a lock... | 1,760,371,594.860408 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/30/chip-glitching-101-with-hash/ | Chip Glitching 101 With [Hash] | Dan Maloney | [
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"chip whisperer",
"glitching",
"GPNVM",
"SAM4C32",
"smart meter",
"vector",
"vulberability",
"zero-day"
] | Ever want to get into reverse engineering but don’t know where to start? You’re in luck — [Hash] just dropped
a case study in chip glitching
that should get you off on the right foot.
The object of this reverse engineering effort in the video below is a Microchip SAM4C32C, removed from one of the many smart electrical meters
[Hash] loves to tear into
. This microcontroller was supposed to be locked to prevent anyone from sniffing around in the code, but after soldering the chip to a target board and plugging it into a Chip Whisperer, [Hash] was able to find some odd-looking traces on the oscilloscope. Of particular interest was an unusual pattern on the scope while resetting the chip, which led him to an AI-assisted search for potential vulnerabilities. This allowed him to narrow down the target time for a power glitch, and in only a few seconds, the chip was forced to bypass its security bit and drop into its boot loader. With the keys to the kingdom, [Hash] was able to read the firmware and find all sorts of interesting tidbits.
Obviously, chip glitching isn’t always as easy as this, and even when a manufacturer leaves a vector like this in the chip, exploiting it does take some experience and finesse. But,
if you’re going to get started glitching
, it makes sense to start with the low-hanging fruit, and having [Hash] along for the ride doesn’t hurt either. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8113701",
"author": "alialiali",
"timestamp": "2025-03-30T09:12:53",
"content": "I’ve always wanted to get into this great video!It blows my mind to this day all the kids with reset glitch hacked Xboxes without realising the insanity of the engineering that went into them.",
"pa... | 1,760,371,594.813259 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/29/yaydio-a-music-player-for-kids/ | Yaydio, A Music Player For Kids | Jenny List | [
"digital audio hacks",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"mp3",
"music player",
"NFC"
] | Music consumption has followed a trend over the last decade or more of abandoning physical media for online or streaming alternatives. This can present a problem for young children however, for whom a simpler physical interface may be an easier way to play those tunes. Maintaining a library of CDs is not entirely convenient either, so [JakesMD] has created the Yaydio.
It’s a music player for kids, that plays music when a card is inserted in its slot
.
As you might expect, the cards themselves do not contain the music. Instead they are NFC cards, and the player starts the corresponding album from its SD card when one is detected. The hardware is simple enough, an Arduino Nano with modules for MP3 playback, NFC reading, seven segment display, and rotary encoder. The whole thing lives in a kid-friendly 3D printed case.
Some thought has been given to easily adding albums and assigning cards to them, making it easy to keep up with the youngster’s tastes.
This isn’t the first such kid-friendly music player we’ve seen
, but it’s certainly pretty neat. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8113732",
"author": "Grant",
"timestamp": "2025-03-30T11:51:09",
"content": "This is literally a clone of the yoto player.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8113798",
"author": "Sebastian",
"timestamp": "2025-03-... | 1,760,371,594.618519 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/29/diy-split-keyboard-made-with-a-saw/ | DIY Split Keyboard Made With A Saw | Maya Posch | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"split keyboard"
] | Split keyboards are becoming more popular, but because they’re still relatively niche, they can be rather expensive if you want to buy one. So why not make your own? Sure, you could assemble one from a kit, but why not take a cheap mechanical keyboard, slice it in half and just
waves hands
connect the two halves back together? If this thought appeals to you, then [nomolk]’s literal hackjob
video should not be ignored
. Make sure to enable English subtitles for the Japanese-language video.
Easy split keyboard tip: just reconnect both halves… (Credit: nomolk, YouTube)
In it, the fancy (but cheap) mechanical keyboard with Full RGB™ functionality is purchased and tested prior to meeting its demise. Although the left side with the cable and controller still works, the right side now needs to be connected, which is where a lot of tedious wires have to be soldered to repair traces.
Naturally this will go wrong, so it’s important to take a (sushi) break and admire the sunset before hurling oneself at the tracing of faulty wiring. This process and the keyboard matrix is further detailed on
the blog entry
(in Japanese) for this process.
Although this was perhaps easier than the other split keyboard project involving a membrane keyboard, this tongue-in-cheek project demonstrates the limits of practicality with this approach even if it could be cleaned up more with fancier wiring.
We give it full points for going the whole way, however, and making the keyboard work again in the end. | 23 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8113645",
"author": "Olivier",
"timestamp": "2025-03-30T02:12:36",
"content": "Hah, nicely done 👍😁",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8113684",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2025-03-30T07:59:59",
"content": "I wonde... | 1,760,371,594.774977 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/28/dwingeloo-to-venus-report-of-a-successful-bounce/ | Dwingeloo To Venus: Report Of A Successful Bounce | Heidi Ulrich | [
"News",
"Radio Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"dwingeloo",
"signal",
"telescope",
"transmission",
"venus"
] | Radio waves travel fast, and they can bounce, too. If you are able to operate a 25-meter dish, a transmitter, a solid software-defined radio, and an atomic clock, the answer is: yes, they can go all the way to Venus and back. On March 22, 2025, the Dwingeloo telescope in the Netherlands successfully pulled off an Earth-Venus-Earth (EVE) bounce, making them the second group of amateurs ever to do so. The full breakdown of this feat is available
in their write-up here
.
Bouncing signals off planets isn’t new. NASA has been at it since the 1960s – but
amateur radio astronomers have far fewer toys to play with
. Before Dwingeloo’s success, AMSAT-DL achieved the only known amateur EVE bounce back in 2009. This time, the Dwingeloo team transmitted a 278-second tone at 1299.5 MHz, with the round trip to Venus taking about 280 seconds. Stockert’s radio telescope in Germany also picked up the returning echo, stronger than Dwingeloo’s own, due to its more sensitive receiving setup.
Post-processing wasn’t easy either. Doppler shift corrections had to be applied, and the received signal was split into 1 Hz frequency bins. The resulting detections clocked in at 5.4 sigma for Dwingeloo alone, 8.5 sigma for Stockert’s recording, and 9.2 sigma when combining both datasets. A clear signal, loud and proud, straight from Venus’ surface.
The experiment was cut short when Dwingeloo’s transmitter started failing after four successful bounces. More complex signal modulations will have to wait for the next Venus conjunction in October 2026. Until then, you can read
our previously published article
on achievements of the Dwingeloo telescope. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8113079",
"author": "strawberrymortallyb0bcea48e7",
"timestamp": "2025-03-28T12:00:44",
"content": "What about FCC and upsetting satellites?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8113095",
"author": "Dave M",
"timest... | 1,760,371,594.986201 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/28/scanning-film-the-way-it-was-meant-to-be/ | Scanning Film The Way It Was Meant To Be | Jenny List | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"film scan",
"rgb",
"scan light"
] | Scanning a film negative is as simple as holding it up against a light source and photographing the result. But should you try such a straightforward method with color negatives it’s possible your results may leave a little to be desired. White LEDs have a spectrum which
looks
white to our eyes, but which doesn’t quite match that of the photographic emulsions.
[JackW01] is here with a negative scanning light
that uses instead a trio of red, green, and blue LEDs whose wavelengths have been chosen for that crucial match. With it, it’s possible to make a good quality scan with far less post-processing.
The light itself uses 665 nm for red, 525 nm for green, and 450 nm blue diodes mounted in a grid behind a carefully designed diffuser. The write-up goes into great detail about the spectra in question, showing the shortcomings of the various alternatives.
We can immediately see the value here at Hackaday, because like many a photographer working with analogue and digital media, we’ve grappled with color matching ourselves.
This isn’t the first time we’ve considered film scanning but it may be the first project we’ve seen go into such detail with the light source.
We have looked at the resolution of the film though
. | 37 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "8113061",
"author": "Josiah David Gould",
"timestamp": "2025-03-28T10:54:33",
"content": "It’s a great idea, and simple to change around for different film stock if you need different wavelengths. Could go whole-hog and make the LEDs individually addressable to take a set of single ... | 1,760,371,594.936802 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/27/aqmood-is-an-air-quality-monitor-with-an-attitude/ | AqMood Is An Air Quality Monitor With An Attitude | Tom Nardi | [
"home hacks",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"addressable leds",
"air quality",
"emoji",
"environmental monitor"
] | You take your air quality seriously, so shouldn’t your monitoring hardware? If you’re breathing in nasty VOCs or dust, surely a little blinking LED isn’t enough to express your displeasure with the current situation. Luckily,
[Tobias Stanzel] has created the AqMood
to provide us with some much-needed anthropomorphic environmental data collection.
To be fair, the AqMood still does have its fair share of LEDs. In fact, one might even say it has several device’s worth of them — the thirteen addressable LEDs that are run along the inside of the 3D printed diffuser will definitely get your attention. They’re sectioned off in such a way that each segment of the diffuser can indicate a different condition for detected levels of particulates, VOCs, and CO2.
But what really makes this project stand out is the 1.8 inch LCD mounted under the LEDs. This display is used to show various emojis that correspond with the current conditions. Hopefully you’ll see a trio of smiley faces, but if you notice a bit of side-eye, it might be time to crack a window. If you’d like a bit more granular data its possible to switch this display over to a slightly more scientific mode of operation with bar graphs and exact figures…but where’s the fun in that?
[Tobias] has not only shared all the files that are necessary to build your own AqMood, he’s done a fantastic job of documenting each step of the build process. There’s even screenshots to help guide you along when it’s time to flash the firmware to the XIAO Seeed ESP32-S3 at the heart of the AqMood.
If you prefer your air quality monitoring devices be a little less ostentatious,
IKEA offers up a few hackable models
that
might be more your speed
. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,594.463474 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/27/half-the-reflow-oven-you-expected/ | Half The Reflow Oven You Expected | Jenny List | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"reflow oven",
"toaster oven"
] | Toaster oven reflow projects are such a done deal that there should be nothing new in one here in 2025. Take a toaster oven, an Arduino, and a thermocouple, and bake those boards! But [Paul J R]
has found a new take on an old project
, and better still, he’s found the most diminutive of toaster ovens from the Australian version of Kmart. We love the project for the tiny oven alone.
The brains of the operation is an ESP32, in the form of either a TTGO TTDisplay board or an S3-Zero board on a custom carrier PCB, with a thermistor rather than a thermocouple for the temperature sensing, and a solid state relay to control mains power for the heater. All the resources
are in a GitHub repository
, but you may have to make do with a more conventionally-sized table top toaster oven if you’re not an Aussie.
If you’re interested, but want a better controller board,
we’ve got you covered
. | 17 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112997",
"author": "scott_tx",
"timestamp": "2025-03-28T02:16:08",
"content": "My reflow oven is my hand on the temp knob and my eyes on the thermal probe readout. on….off….on….off…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8113000",
... | 1,760,371,594.577431 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/27/an-inexpensive-way-to-break-down-plastic/ | An Inexpensive Way To Break Down Plastic | Bryan Cockfield | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"catalyst",
"monomer",
"pet",
"plastic",
"polymer",
"recycling"
] | Plastic has been a revolutionary material over the past century, with an uncountable number of uses and an incredibly low price to boot. Unfortunately, this low cost has led to its use in many places where other materials might be better suited, and when this huge amount of material breaks down in the environment it can be incredibly persistent and harmful. This has led to many attempts to recycle it, and one of the more promising efforts recently came out of a lab at
Northwestern University
.
Plastics exist as polymers, long chains of monomers that have been joined together chemically. The holy grail of plastic recycling would be to convert the polymers back to monomers and then use them to re-make the plastics from scratch. This method uses a catalyst to break down polyethylene terephthalate (PET), one of the more common plastics. Once broken down, the PET is exposed to moist air which converts it into its constituent monomers which can then be used to make more PET for other uses.
Of course, the other thing that any “holy grail” of plastic recycling needs is to actually be cheaper and easier than making new plastic from crude oil, and since this method is still confined to the lab it remains to be seen if it will one day achieve this milestone as well. In the meantime,
PET can also be recycled fairly easily by anyone who happens to have a 3D printer around
. | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8113028",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-03-28T06:58:32",
"content": "The biggest challenge in recycling plastics in this manner is that the catalysts are somewhat selective or fouled by chemicals other than the intended plastic, so the feedstock needs to be clean and devoid o... | 1,760,371,594.421094 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/27/inside-a-fake-wifi-repeater/ | Inside A Fake WiFi Repeater | Maya Posch | [
"Teardown"
] | [
"fake hardware",
"teardown",
"wifi repeater"
] | Fake WiFi repeater with a cheap real one behind it. (Credit: Big Clive, YouTube)
Over the years we have seen a lot of fake electronics, ranging from fake power saving devices that you plug into an outlet, to fake car ECU optimizers that you stick into the OBD port. These are all similar in that they fake functionality while happily lighting up a LED or two to indicate that they’re doing ‘something’. Less expected here was that we’d be seeing fake WiFi repeaters, but recently [Big Clive] got his hands on one and undertook
the arduous task of reverse-engineering it
.
The simple cardboard box which it comes in claims that it’s a 2.4 GHz unit that operates at 300 Mbps, which would be quite expected for the price. [Clive] obtained a real working WiFi repeater previously that did boast similar specifications and did indeed work. The dead giveaway that it is a fake are the clearly fake antennae, along with the fact that once you plug it in, no new WiFi network pops up or anything else.
Inside the case – which looks very similar to the genuine repeater – there is just a small PCB attached to the USB connector. On the PCB are a 20 Ohm resistor and a blue LED, which means that the LED is being completely overdriven as well and is likely to die quite rapidly. Considering that a WiFi repeater is supposed to require a setup procedure, it’s possible that these fake repeaters target an audience which does not quite understand what these devices are supposed to do, but they can also catch more informed buyers unaware who thought they were buying some of the cheap real ones. Caveat emptor, indeed. | 29 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112919",
"author": "Chr El",
"timestamp": "2025-03-27T20:18:46",
"content": "The placebo effect is still an effect!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8113132",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2025-03-28T14:51:23... | 1,760,371,595.059732 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/27/your-badminton-racket-needs-restringing-theres-a-diy-machine-for-that/ | Your Badminton Racket Needs Restringing? There’s A DIY Machine For That | Elliot Williams | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [] | We don’t often get our badminton rackets restrung, but if we did,
[kuokuo702]’s PicoBETH project
would be where we’d turn. This is a neat machine build for a
very
niche application, but it’s also a nicely elaborated project with motors, load cells, and even a sweet knobby-patterned faceplate that is certainly worth a look even if you’re not doing your own restringing.
We’ll admit that everything we know about restringing rackets we learned by watching
[kuokuo]’s demo video
, but the basic procedure goes like this: you zigzag the string through the holes in the racket, controlling the tension at each stage along the way. A professional racket frame and clamp hold the tension constant while you fiddle the string through the next hole, but getting the tension just right in the first place is the job of [kuokuo]’s machine. It does this with a load cell, stepper motor, and ball screw, all under microcontroller control. Pull the string through, let the machine tension it, clamp it down, and then move on to the next row.
Automating the tension head allows [kuokuo] to do some fancy tricks, like pre-stretching the strings and even logging the tension in the string at each step along the way. The firmware has an extensive self-calibration procedure, and in all seems to be very professional. But it’s not simply functional; it also has a fun LEGO-compatible collection of bumps integrated into the 3D-printed dust cover. That way, your minifigs can watch you at work? Why not!
Automating random chores is a great excuse to build fun little machines, and in that vein, we salute [kuokuo]’s endeavor. Once you start, you’ll find stepper motors sprouting all around like crocuses in a spring field. And speaking of spring, Easter is just around the corner. So if you don’t play badminton, maybe it’s
time to build yourself an eggbot
. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8113051",
"author": "strawberrymortallyb0bcea48e7",
"timestamp": "2025-03-28T09:44:35",
"content": "Badmington… :D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8113229",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-03-28... | 1,760,371,595.364877 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/26/integrated-bms-makes-battery-packs-easy/ | Integrated BMS Makes Battery Packs Easy | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Battery Hacks"
] | [
"battery",
"battery management",
"bms",
"lithium battery",
"lithium iron phosphate",
"pcb"
] | [Editor’s note: The hacker requested that we remove the image for legal reasons, so it’s blurry now. We hope all’s well!]
Lithium technology has ushered in a new era of batteries with exceptionally high energy density for a reasonably low cost. This has made a lot possible that would have been unheard of even 20 years ago such as electric cars, or laptops that can run all day on a single charge. But like anything there are tradeoffs to using these batteries. They are much more complex to use than something like a lead acid battery, generally requiring a battery management system (BMS) to keep the cells in tip-top shape. Generally these are standalone systems but [CallMeC]
integrated this one into the buswork for a battery pack instead
.
The BMS is generally intended to make sure that slight chemical imbalances in the battery cells don’t cause the pack to wear out prematurely. They do this by maintaining an electrical connection to each cell in the battery so they can charge them individually when needed, making sure that they are all balanced with each other. This BMS has all of these connections printed onto a PCB, but also included with the PCB is the high-power bus that would normally be taken care of by bus bar or nickel strips. This reduces the complexity of assembling the battery and ensures that any time it’s hooked up to a number of cells, the BMS is instantly ready to go.
Although this specific build is meant for fairly large lithium iron phosphate batteries, this type of design could go a long way towards making quick battery packs out of cells of any type of battery chemistry that typically need a BMS system,
from larger 18650 packs
or perhaps even larger cells
like those out of a Nissan Leaf
. | 40 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112625",
"author": "juli",
"timestamp": "2025-03-26T23:11:00",
"content": "I woukd to see this for 18650.A Pcb bms to plug the battery directly for 4s or more",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8112741",
"author": "CallM... | 1,760,371,595.477828 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/26/3d-printed-scanner-automates-deck-management-for-trading-card-gamers/ | 3D-Printed Scanner Automates Deck Management For Trading Card Gamers | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"magic the gathering",
"paper handling",
"scanner",
"TCG",
"trading card game"
] | Those who indulge in trading card games know that building the best deck is the key to victory. What exactly that entails is a mystery to us muggles, but keeping track of your cards is a vital part of the process, one that
this DIY card scanner
(original German;
English translation
) seeks to automate.
At its heart, [Fraens]’ card scanner is all about paper handling, which is always an engineering task fraught with peril. Cards like those for
Magic: The Gathering
and other TCGs are meant to be handled by human hands, and automating the task of flipping through them presents some challenges. [Fraens] uses a pair of motorized 3D-printed rollers with O-rings to form a conveyor belt that can pull one card at a time off the bottom of a deck. An adjustable retaining roller made from the most adorable linear bearing we’ve ever seen ensures that only one card at a time is pulled from the hopper onto an imaging platen. An adjustable mount holds a smartphone to take a picture of the card, which is fed into an app that extracts all the details and categorizes the cards in the deck.
Aside from the card handling mechanism, there are some pretty slick details to this build. The first is that [Fraens] noticed that the glossy finish on some cards interfered with scanning, leading him to add a diffused LED ringlight to the rig. If an image isn’t scannable, the light goes through a process of dimming and switching colors until a good scan is achieved. Also, to avoid the need to modify the existing TCG deck management app, [Fraens] added a microphone to the control side of the scanner that listens for the sounds the app makes when it scans cards. And if
Magic
isn’t your thing, the basic mechanism could easily be modified to scan everything from business cards to old family photos. | 12 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112592",
"author": "Chris Pepin",
"timestamp": "2025-03-26T20:38:16",
"content": "Props to the video maker who actually included shots of the device running at the BEGINNING of the video, instead of buried somewhere near the end!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replie... | 1,760,371,595.322117 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/26/floss-weekly-episode-826-fedora-42-and-kde/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 826: Fedora 42 And KDE | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"fedora",
"FLOSS Weekly",
"kde"
] | This week,
Jonathan Bennett
chats with
Neal Gompa
about Fedora 42 and KDE! What’s new, what’s coming, and why is flagship status such a big deal?
Website:
https://neal.gompa.dev/
GitHub Sponsors:
https://github.com/sponsors/Conan-Kudo
Neal’s business (Velocity Limitless):
https://velocitylimitless.com/
Neal’s podcast (Sudo Show):
https://tuxdigital.com/sudoshow
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 | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112584",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-03-26T20:07:29",
"content": "I sure don’t like KDE, and every time I have a Linux update, I have my son put Gnome Flashback Compiz back on.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,371,595.405677 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/26/supercon-2024-a-new-world-of-full-color-pcbs/ | Supercon 2024: A New World Of Full-Color PCBs | Lewin Day | [
"cons",
"Featured",
"PCB Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"2024 Hackaday Supercon",
"color pcb",
"pcb"
] | Printed circuit boards were once so simple. One or two layers of copper etched on a rectangular fiberglass substrate, with a few holes drilled in key locations so components could be soldered into place. They were functional objects, nothing more—built only for the sake of the circuit itself.
Fast forward to today, and so much has changed. Boards sprout so many layers, often more than 10, and all kinds of fancy geometric features for purposes both practical and pretty. But what catches they eye more than that, other than rich, saturated color? [Joseph Long] came to the
2024 Hackaday Supercon to educate us on the new world of full color PCBs.
[Joseph] begins his talk with an explanation of terminology. We often look at a PCB and cite its color—say, green for example. As [Joseph] explains, the color comes from the solder mask layer—so called for its job in ensuring solder can only go where it’s supposed to go. The solder mask sits atop the copper layer, but beneath the silk screen which has all the component outlines and part labels.
Solder mask was traditionally green, and this is still the most common color you’ll find in the majority of electronics. However, in recent decades, the available gamut of colors has increased. Now, you can routinely order yellow, blue, purple, and red solder masks quite easily, as well as black or white if you’re so inclined.
As some creative makers have found
, when designing a board, it’s possible to get several colors into a design even if you’re just using one color of solder mask. That’s because the solder mask appears in slightly different shades when it’s laid over the bare fiberglass of the PCB, versus being laid over copper, for example. Add in white silkscreen and you’ve got quite a lot to work with.
PCB Color Palette
by
u/Half_Slab_Conspiracy
in
PrintedCircuitBoard
Different colors are achievable on a PCB even just by using a single soldermask color.
We’re used to having a choice of color on our PCB orders today, but so much more is possible.
But what if you want more? What if you want real color? [Joseph] realized this could be possible when he found out that PCB board houses were already using inkjet-like printers to lay down silkscreen layers on small-run boards. Since there was already a printer involved in the board production process, wouldn’t it be simple to start printing on circuit boards in full color?
As it turns out, this was very practical. Two big Shenzhen board houses—JLCPCB and PCBWay—both started delivering color printed boards in 2024. The method involved using a white solder mask layer, with a full-color “silkscreen” layer printed on top using UV-cured ink. Using this ink was a particular key to unlocking full color PCBs. The UV-cured inks are more robust under the tough conditions PCBs face, such as the high temperatures during reflow or hand soldering.
Color printing PCBs might sound trivial and only relevant for cosmetic purposes, but [Joseph] points out it has lots of practical applications too. You can easily color code pinouts and traces right on the the board, a feature that has obvious engineering value. You can even use photorealistic footprints to indicate where other board-level modules should be soldered in, too, making assembly more intuitive. Plus, full color boards are fun—don’t discount that!
[Joseph] likes using the full-color prints to aid in assembly, by using far more realistic footprints for items like board-scale modules and batteries.
[Joseph] is also a big fan of
the SAO format
, having designed several compatible boards himself. At his talk, he showed off special “extender” boards of his own creation and offered giveaways to attendees.
If you’re wondering how to get started, [Joseph]’s talk covers all the important ground. He goes over the workflow for doing color PCBs with typical board houses. As the main suppliers in this area, PCBWay and JLCPCB both have slightly different ways of working with design files for color boards. Obviously, creating a color board involves making images outside of your traditional board design software. It’s straightforward enough, but you have to follow some careful practices to ensure your images are printed in the right size and right orientation to match the rest of your PCB design. PCBWay lets you make your own images and submit them with your Gerber files from whatever board design tool, while JLCPCB requires you to produce your PCB within their EasyEDA design software and put the graphics directly in there. [Joseph] also explains the costs involved for printing these boards, which does come at a premium relative to traditional boards.
As a bonus, we even get to see some of Joseph’s awesome color boards. The graphics are stunning—they really show the potential of full-color PCBs and how they can elevate a project or a fun badge design. If you’re eager to try this out, go ahead and watch [Joseph]’s primer and dive in for yourself! | 12 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112542",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2025-03-26T18:13:12",
"content": "Except that it’s art, which means maybe it doesn’t go obsolete..",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8112544",
"author": "Clara Hobbs",
"ti... | 1,760,371,595.53538 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/26/teardown-of-casio-credit-card-sized-radio/ | Teardown Of Casio Credit Card-Sized Radio | Maya Posch | [
"Teardown"
] | [
"casio",
"radio receiver",
"teardown"
] | These days we don’t get too fussed about miniaturized electronics, not when you can put an entire processor and analog circuitry on a chip the size of a grain of sand. Things were quite different back in the 1980s, with the idea of a credit card-sized radio almost preposterous. This didn’t stop the engineers over at Casio from having a go at this and many other nutty ideas, with [Matt] from
Techmoan
having a go at
taking one of these miniaturized marvels apart
.
The Casio FM Stereo radio in happier days. (Credit: Techmoan, YouTube)
On the chopping block is the FM stereo device that was featured in
a previous episode
. Out of the four credit card-sized radios in that video, the one with the rechargeable battery (obviously) had ceased to work, so it was the obvious choice for a teardown. This mostly meant peeling off the glued-on top and bottom, after which the circuitry became visible.
In addition to the battery with a heavily corroded contact, the thin PCB contains a grand total of three ICs in addition to the analog circuitry. These were identified by [Spritetm] as an AM/FM tuner system IC (TA7792), an FM PLL MPX (TA7766AF) and a headphone amplifier (TA7767F), all of them manufactured by Toshiba.
Although [Matt] reckons this was a destructive teardown, we’re looking forward to the repair video where a fresh cell is soldered in and the case glued back together. | 33 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112501",
"author": "Basti",
"timestamp": "2025-03-26T15:45:18",
"content": "the super thin adjustable capacitor is interesting",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8112536",
"author": "Then",
"timestamp": "2025-03-... | 1,760,371,595.658307 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/26/tech-in-plain-sight-hearing-aids/ | Tech In Plain Sight: Hearing Aids | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"History",
"Medical Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"hearing aid"
] | You might think you don’t need a hearing aid, and you might be right. But in general, hearing loss eventually comes to all of us. In fact, you progressively lose hearing every year, which is why kids can have high-pitched ringtones their parents can’t hear.
You’d think hearing aids would be pretty simple, right? After all, we know how to pick up sounds, amplify them, and play them back. But there’s a lot more to it. Hearing aids need to be small, comfortable, have great battery life, and cram a microphone and speaker into a small area. That also can lead to problems with feedback, which can be very uncomfortable for the user. In addition, they need to handle very soft and loud sounds and accommodate devices like telephones.
Although early hearing aids just made sound louder and, possibly, blocked unwanted sound, modern devices will try to increase volume only in certain bands where the user has hearing loss. They may also employ sophisticated methods to block or reduce noise.
A Brief History
Hearing loss is nothing new. Ear trumpets appeared around the 17th century. These were just simple sound baffles that directed sound to your ear and, perhaps, cut some noise out that wasn’t in the trumpet’s direction.
The modern hearing aid dates back to the akouphone in 1895. [Miller Hutchison] developed the device for a friend who was deaf from a bout of scarlet fever. It was bulky — sitting on a table top — and used a carbon microphone, but it did work. He was also able to sell several models to royalty, many of whom suffered from hereditary deafness. This included Denmark’s Queen Alexandra, who, reportedly, was very impressed with the results.
The Acousticon microphone (left) and complete unit (right) (From
Hawkins Electrical Guide #7
, 1923)
Around 1902, [Hutchison] changed the device’s name to the acousticon, making it more portable with battery power. Despite impressive marketing, not all medical professionals were sold. If you were totally deaf, the device did nothing, unsurprisingly. In addition, the bulky batteries required frequent replacement, and the frequency response was poor.
It was still better than nothing, and the invention also led to the massacon and akoulalion that converted sound into vibration for the profoundly deaf. He later sold the rights for the acousticon to [Kelley Turner], who would not only improve the device, but also use the technology to launch the dictograph, which was a well-known office machine for many years.
Modern Times
The Zenith Miniature 75 (photo by [France1978]
CC-BY-SA-2.0
).
Amplified hearing aids appeared around 1913, but they were still large boxes. By 1920, the
vactuphone
used vacuum tubes to perform amplification. At “only” seven pounds, the vactuphone was considered quite portable.
Keep in mind that portable hearing aids in the 1920s was a relative term. Typically, you’d have a unit carried in a bag or hung around your neck. World War II brought advances in minaturization which benefited hearing aids like the Zenith Miniature 75.
Transistors, of course, changed everything, including hearing aids. The Sonotone 1010, which appeared in 1952, used both transistors and tubes. Early transistor units were known to fail early due to moisture and heat. Silicon transistors and encapsulation helped.
Naturally, all of these hearing aids were analog as were the earliest IC-based devices. However, with the advent of ICs, it was possible to use digital techniques.
Patent drawing from 1984 — Hardly portable!
The path to digital hearing aids was difficult. In the 1970s, large computers could program digital elements in hearing aids to tune the device to set frequency bands and gains.
By 1980, several groups were experimenting with real digital hearing aids, although many of them had wireless links to real computers. A fully digital hearing aid first appeared in
a 1984 patent
, but it wasn’t tiny. Since then, things have gotten smaller and more capable.
Physical Form
Hearing aids went from table-top devices, to boxes hanging on necks. Getting smaller devices allowed for small boxes that hug the back of the ear with the earpiece into the ear canal.
With even smaller devices, the entire apparatus can be placed in the ear canal. Many of these go so deeply into the ear that they are largely invisible. There are also hearing aids that can surgically attach to your skull using a titanium post embedded in the bone. This can transmit sound even to people who can’t hear sound directly since it relies on bone conduction.
Other places to find hearing aids are built into thick glasses frames. Doctors with hearing problems can opt for stethoscopes with integrated hearing aids.
Modern hearing aids sometimes have rechargeable batteries. Otherwise, there will be some kind of small battery. There was a time that mercury cells were common, but with those banned in most places, many aids now take zinc-air batteries that deliver about 1.4 V.
We hear from an 8th grader that you can make hearing aid batteries last longer by
peeling the sticker from them and waiting five minutes
before installing them. Apparently, giving them a little time to mix with the air helps them.
What’s Next?
On the market today are hearing aids that use neural networks, have Bluetooth connections, and use other high tech tricks. We’ve looked at the insides of a hearing aid and
why they cost so much before
. If you want to roll your own, there is an
open source design
. | 38 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112494",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2025-03-26T15:11:21",
"content": "British comedian Eric Sykes often appeared on TV and in films wearing glasses with no lenses – that’s because he became profoundly deaf as an adult and his glasses fames contained an early bone-conducting hear... | 1,760,371,595.797272 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/26/build-customized-raspberry-pi-os-images-with-rpi-image-gen/ | Build Customized Raspberry Pi OS Images With Rpi-image-gen | Maya Posch | [
"Raspberry Pi",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"Raspberry Pi OS"
] | Recently Raspberry Pi publicly
announced the release
of their new
rpi-image-gen
tool, which is advertised as making custom Raspberry Pi OS (i.e. Debian for specific Broadcom SoCs) images in a much more streamlined fashion than with the existing
rpi-gen
tool, or with third-party solutions. The general idea seems to be that the user fetches the tool from the
GitHub project page
, before running the
build.sh
script with parameters defining the configuration file and other options.
The main advantage of this tool is said to be that it uses binary packages rather than (cross-)compiling, while providing a range of profiles and configuration layers to target specific hardware & requirements. Two examples are provided in the GitHub project, one for a
‘slim’ project
, the other for a ‘
webkiosk
‘ configuration that runs a browser in a restricted (Cage) environment, with required packages installed in the final image.
Looking at the basic ‘slim’ example, it defines the INI-style configuration in
config/pi5-slim.cfg
, but even when browsing through the main README it’s still somewhat obtuse. Under
device
it references the
mypi5
subfolder which contains its own shell script, plus a
cmdline.txt
and
fstab
file. Under
image
it references the
compact
subfolder with another bunch of files in it. Although this will no doubt make a lot more sense after taking a few days to prod & poke at this, it’s clear that this is not a tool for casual users who just want to quickly put a custom image together.
This is also reflected in the Raspberry Pi blog post, which strongly insinuates that this is targeting commercial & industrial customers, rather than hobbyists. | 21 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112433",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2025-03-26T11:59:50",
"content": "I wonder how does this thing fares in comparison to buildroot or yocto …",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8112438",
"author": "RoganDawes",
"times... | 1,760,371,595.587662 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/26/admit-it-you-want-this-go-kart/ | Admit It. You Want This Go-Kart | Jenny List | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"electric go cart",
"go-kart",
"ride on"
] | Many of us could have been lucky enough to have some form of pedal go-kart in our formative years, and among such lucky children there can have been few who did not wish for their ride to have a little
power
. Zipping around the neighborhood remained a strenuous affair though, particularly for anyone whose hometown was on a hill. What a shame we didn’t have [Matto Godoy] as a dad then, because he has taken a child’s go-kart and turned it into
the electrically-propelled ride of dreams
.
Out come the pedals and in goes a wooden floor panel, and at the rear the axle is replaced by a set of hoverboard motors and associated batteries and controllers. The wheels are off-the-shelf wheelbarrow parts, and the 36 V lithium-polymer gives it plenty of go. It looks too small for us, but yes! We want one.
If you want one too, you could do worse than considering
a Hacky Racer
. And if more motor power is your thing,
raid the auto recyclers
! | 17 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112392",
"author": "paul shallard",
"timestamp": "2025-03-26T09:01:55",
"content": "yes I do want this, I admit itbut I have some concerns for children that might drive this on the road or footpathassuming this has a range of 4 kilometres or more, and a top speed of 10-15 kph, thi... | 1,760,371,595.718724 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/25/designing-a-portable-mac-mini/ | Designing A Portable Mac Mini | Lewin Day | [
"Mac Hacks"
] | [
"mac mini",
"macintosh",
"macintosh mini"
] | When Apple first launched the Macintosh, it created a new sort of “Lunchbox” form factor that was relatively portable and very, very cool. Reminiscent of that is this neat portable Macintosh Mini,
created by [Scott Yu-Jan].
[Scott] has created something along these lines before—putting an iPad dock on top of a Macintosh Studio to create a look vaguely reminiscent of the very first Macintosh computers. However, that build wasn’t portable—it wasn’t practical to build such a thing around the Macintosh Studio. In contrast, the Mac Mini is a lithe, lightweight thing that barely sups power—it’s much more suitable for a “luggable” computer.
The build relies on a 3D printed enclosure that wraps around the Mac Mini like a glove. Inside, there’s a chunky 20,800 mAh power bank with enough juice to run the computer for over three hours. Just like the original Mac, there’s a handle on top, too. The build’s main screen is actually an iPad Mini, hooked up to the Mac Mini. If you want to use it separately, it can be popped out just by pushing it via a cutout in the bottom of the enclosure.
[Scott] notes that it’s cool, but not exactly practical—it weighs seven pounds, mostly due to the weight of the heavy power bank. We’ve featured [Scott’s] stylish builds before, too,
like this nice iPhone dock
. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112377",
"author": "boondaburrah",
"timestamp": "2025-03-26T08:16:18",
"content": "[Scott] notes that it’s cool, but not exactly practical—it weighs seven pounds, mostly due to the weight of the heavy power bank.Yeah well considering that it’s less than half of the weight of the Ma... | 1,760,371,595.940225 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/25/physical-key-copying-starts-with-a-flipper-zero/ | Physical Key Copying Starts With A Flipper Zero | Dan Maloney | [
"lockpicking hacks"
] | [
"duplicating",
"flipper zero",
"lock picking",
"locksports",
"pen testing"
] | A moment’s inattention is all it takes to gather the information needed to make a physical copy of a key. It’s not necessarily an easy process, though, so if pen testing is your game, something like
this Flipper Zero key copying toolchain
can make the process quicker and easier when the opportunity presents itself.
Of course, we’re not advocating for any illegal here; this is just another tool for your lock-sports bag of tricks. And yes, there are plenty of other ways to accomplish this, but using a Flipper Zero to attack a strictly mechanical lock is kind of neat. The toolchain posted by [No-Lock216] starts with an app called
KeyCopier
, which draws a virtual key blank on the Flipper Zero screen.
The app allows you to move the baseline for each pin to the proper depth, quickly recording the bitting for the key. Later, the bitting can be entered into an online app called
keygen
which, along with information on the brand of lock and its warding, can produce an STL file suitable for downloading and printing.
Again, there are a ton of ways to make a copy of a key if you have physical access to it, and the comments of the original Reddit post were filled with suggestions amusingly missing the entire point of this. Yes, you can get a key cut at any hardware store for a buck or two that will obviously last a lot longer than a 3D printed copy. But if you only have a few seconds to gather the data from the key, an app like KeyCopier could be really convenient. Personally, we’d find a smartphone app handier, but if you’ve got a Flipper, why not leverage it?
Thanks to [JohnU] for the tip. | 26 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112338",
"author": "Cody",
"timestamp": "2025-03-26T05:40:47",
"content": "You don’t even need the flipper zero or 3d printer for this. All you need is a picture of the key, a blank, and a file. There is only about half a dozen or so bitting depths for a key. You can decode them an... | 1,760,371,596.014736 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/25/brazilian-modders-upgrade-nvidia-geforce-gtx-970-to-8-gb-of-vram/ | Brazilian Modders Upgrade NVidia Geforce GTX 970 To 8 GB Of VRAM | Maya Posch | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"NVIDIA",
"vram"
] | Although NVidia’s current disastrous RTX 50-series is getting all the attention right now, this wasn’t the first misstep by NVidia. Back in 2014 when NVidia released the GTX 970 users were quickly dismayed to find that their ‘4 GB VRAM’ GPU had actually just 3.5 GB, with the remaining 512 MB being used in a much slower way at just 1/7th of the normal speed. Back then NVidia was subject to a $30/card settlement with disgruntled customers, but there’s a way to at least partially fix these GPUs, as
demonstrated by a group of Brazilian modders
(
original video
with horrid English auto-dub).
The mod itself is quite straightforward, with the original 512 MB, 7 Gbps GDDR5 memory modules replaced with 1 GB, 8 Gbps chips and adding a resistor on the PCB to make the GPU recognize the higher density VRAM ICs. Although this doesn’t fix the fundamental split VRAM issue of the ASIC, it does give it access to 7 GB of faster, higher-density VRAM. In benchmarks performance was massively increased, with Unigine Superposition showing nearly a doubling in the score.
In addition to giving this GTX 970 a new lease on life, it also shows just how important having more VRAM on a GPU is, which is ironic in this era where somehow GPU manufacturers deem 8 GB of VRAM to be acceptable in 2025. | 24 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112267",
"author": "D",
"timestamp": "2025-03-25T23:18:06",
"content": "This is fun, but wake me up when someone successfully applies the technique to modern cards so you can mod a budget GPU to have 24+ gb ram to self-host big LLMs.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"re... | 1,760,371,596.082295 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/25/led-filaments-become-attractive-time-piece/ | LED Filaments Become Attractive Time Piece | Lewin Day | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"led",
"LED filament"
] | There are a million ways to use LEDs to make a clock. [sjm4306] chose to go a relatively conventional route, making something that approximates a traditional analog timepiece.
However, he did it using LED filaments to create a striking and unique design
.
Thus the name—FilamenTIME!
LED filaments are still relatively new on the scene. They’re basically a bunch of tiny LEDs mounted in a single package to create a single “filament” of light that appears continuous. It’s great if you want to create a bar of light without messing around with populating tons of parts and having to figure out diffusion on your own.
[sjm4306] used them to create glowing bar elements in a clock for telling the time. The outer ring contains 60 filaments for the 60 minutes in an hour, while the inner ring contains 12 filaments to denote the hours themselves. To handle so many LEDs, there are 9 shift registers on board. They’re driven by an ATmega328P which runs the show, with a DS3232MZ real-time clock onboard for keeping time. As you might imagine, creating such a large circular clock required a large PCB—roughly a square foot in size. It doesn’t come cheap, though [sjm4306] was lucky enough to have sponsorship to cover the build. [sjm4306] is still working on the firmware, and hopes to build a smaller, more compact version, which should cut costs compared to the large single board.
It’s a neat clock, and we’d know, having seen
many a timepiece around these parts
. Video after the break. | 39 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112248",
"author": "Halogenek",
"timestamp": "2025-03-25T21:45:56",
"content": "Ok… That’s a cool clock. Never seen this idea before.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8112270",
"author": "Halogenek",
"timestamp... | 1,760,371,596.219376 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/25/the-vectrex-home-computer-you-never-had/ | The Vectrex Home Computer You Never Had | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"home computer",
"vapourware",
"vectrex"
] | The Vectrex console from the early 1980s holds a special place in retrocomputing lore thanks to its vector display — uniquely for a home system, it painted its graphics to the screen by drawing them with an electron beam, instead of scanning across a raster as a TV screen would. It thus came with its own CRT, and a distinctive vertical screen form factor.
For all that though, it was just a games console, but there were rumors that it might have become more. [Intric8] embarked on a quest to find some evidence, and
eventually turned up what little remains in a copy of
Electronic Games
magazine
. A keyboard, RAM and ROM expansion, and a wafer drive were in the works, which would have made the Vectrex a quirky equal of most of what the likes of Commodore and Sinclair had to offer.
It’s annoying that it doesn’t specify which issue of the magazine has the piece, and after a bit or browsing archive.org we’re sorry to say we can’t find it ourselves. But the piece itself bears a second look, for what it tells us about the febrile world of the 8-bit games industry. This was a time of intense competition in the period around the great console crash, and developers would claim anything to secure a few column inches in a magazine. It’s not to say that the people behind the Vectrex wouldn’t have produced a home computer add-on for it if they could have done, but we remember as teenagers being suckered in by too many of these stories. We still kinda want one, but we’d be surprised if any ever existed.
If you have a Vectrex,
it’s possible to give it a light pen
. | 15 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112200",
"author": "TheJBW",
"timestamp": "2025-03-25T17:36:03",
"content": "Can anyone elaborate on what a “wafer drive” (or in the article “Software for the computer is made on wafer-tapes”) is?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id... | 1,760,371,596.143921 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/25/ancient-pocket-computer-gets-a-serious-serial-upgrade/ | Ancient Pocket Computer Gets A Serious Serial Upgrade | Lewin Day | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"pocket pc",
"serial",
"serial port",
"zeos pocket pc"
] | [Robert’s Retro] is one of those great YouTube channels that shows us the ins and outs of old and obscure computers. [Robert] likes going a step beyond the traditional teardown though, repairing and upgrading these old machines. His latest project involves
giving the ZEOS Pocket PC a fully-functional serial port.
If you’re unfamiliar with the ZEOS Pocket PC, you might know it as the Tidalwave PS-1000—it’s a pretty straightforward clone. Originally, these machines could be had with a proprietary serial adapter to enable them to interface with external peripherals. However, like most obscure cables and connectors from three decades ago, they’re virtually unobtainable today.
To solve this problem, [Robert] decided to hack in a traditional DE-9 connector instead. Commonly referred to as the DB-9, this is the most common serial port design used on IBM PCs and compatibles. Getting the larger port into the compact PC required some careful hacking of the case, as well as delicate soldering to hook up the pins to the right signals on the tightly-packed motherboard. This video does involve cutting some vintage plastic, but overall it’s a very neat mod that is handled with due respect and care.
This isn’t the first time
we’ve seen him upgrade a classic portable computer
, either. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112188",
"author": "Thijzert",
"timestamp": "2025-03-25T16:55:05",
"content": "This brings back memories to when I used packetradio om UHF on a DOS device like this (HP)…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8112305",
"aut... | 1,760,371,596.259976 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/25/supercon-2024-killing-mosquitoes-with-freaking-drones-and-sonar/ | Supercon 2024: Killing Mosquitoes With Freaking Drones, And Sonar | Elliot Williams | [
"cons",
"drone hacks",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Slider"
] | [] | Suppose that you want to get rid of a whole lot of mosquitoes with a quadcopter drone by chopping them up in the rotor blades. If you had
really
good eyesight and pretty amazing piloting skills, you could maybe fly the drone yourself, but honestly this looks like it should be automated. [Alex Toussaint]
took us on a tour of how far he has gotten toward that goal in his amazingly broad-ranging 2024 Superconference talk
. (Embedded below.)
The end result is an amazing 380-element phased sonar array that allows him to detect the location of mosquitoes in mid-air, identifying them by their particular micro-doppler return signature.
It’s an amazing gadget called LeSonar2
, that he has open-sourced, and that doubtless has many other applications at the tweak of an algorithm.
Rolling back in time a little bit, the talk starts off with [Alex]’s thoughts about self-guiding drones in general. For obstacle avoidance, you might think of using a camera, but they can be heavy and require a lot of expensive computation. [Alex] favored ultrasonic range finding. But then an array of ultrasonic range finders could locate smaller objects and more precisely than the single ranger that you probably have in mind. This got [Alex] into beamforming and he built an early prototype,
which we’ve actually covered in the past
. If you’re into this sort of thing, the talk contains a very nice description of the necessary DSP.
[Alex]’s big breakthrough, though, came with shrinking down the ultrasonic receivers. The angular resolution that you can resolve with a beam-forming array is limited by the distance between the microphone elements, and traditional ultrasonic devices like we use in cars are kinda bulky. So here comes a hack: the TDK T3902 MEMS microphones work just fine up into the ultrasound range, even though they’re designed for human hearing. Combining 380 of these in a very tightly packed array, and pushing all of their parallel data into an FPGA for computation, lead to the LeSonar2. Bigger transducers put out ultrasound pulses, the FPGA does some very intense filtering and combining of the output of each microphone, and the resulting 3D range data is sent out over USB.
After a marvelous demo of the device, we get to the end-game application: finding and identifying mosquitoes in mid-air. If you don’t want to kill flies, wasps, bees, or other useful pollinators while eradicating the tiny little bloodsuckers that are the drone’s target, you need to be able to not only locate bugs, but discriminate mosquitoes from the others.
For this, he uses the micro-doppler signatures that the different wing beats of the various insects put out. Wasps have a very wide-band doppler echo – their relatively long and thin wings are moving slower at the roots than at the tips. Flies, on the other hand, have stubbier wings, and emit a tighter echo signal. The mosquito signal is even tighter.
If you told us that you could use sonar to detect mosquitoes at a distance of a few meters, much less locate them and differentiate them from their other insect brethren, we would have thought that it was impossible.
But [Alex] and his team are building these devices
, and you can even build one yourself if you want. So watch the talk, learn about phased arrays, and start daydreaming about what you would use something like this for. | 51 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112162",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-03-25T14:39:10",
"content": "“we would have thought that it was impossible” – it WAS, until now",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8112164",
"author": "strawberrymortallyb0bcea48e... | 1,760,371,596.515109 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/25/reactos-0-4-15-released-with-major-improvements/ | ReactOS 0.4.15 Released With Major Improvements | Maya Posch | [
"News",
"Software Development"
] | [
"operating systems",
"reactos",
"update"
] | Recently the ReactOS project
released the much anticipated 0.4.15
update, making it the first major release since 2020. Despite what might seem like a minor version bump from the previous 0.4.14 release, the update introduces sweeping changes to everything from the kernel to the user interface and aspects like the audio system and driver support. Those who have used the nightly builds over the past years will likely have noticed a lot of these changes already.
Japanese input with MZ-IME and CJK font (Credit: ReactOS project)
A notable change is to plug-and-play support which enables more third party drivers and booting from USB storage devices. The Microsoft FAT filesystem driver from the Windows Driver Kit can now be used courtesy of better compatibility, there is now registry healing, and caching and kernel access checks are implemented. The latter improvement means that many ReactOS modules can now work in Windows too.
On the UI side there is a much improved IME (input method editor) feature, along with native ZIP archive support and various graphical tweaks.
Meanwhile since 0.4.15 branched off the master branch six months ago, the latter has seen even more features added, including SMP improvements, UEFI support, a new NTFS driver and improvements to power management and application support. All of this accompanied by many bug fixes, which makes it totally worth it to
regularly check out the nightly builds
. | 82 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112106",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-03-25T11:07:52",
"content": "I hope they can implement DirectX 12 and GPU driver support, so that I can fully shift to ReactOS for my videogamesIts getting harder to tolerate windows. 7 was the last “good” version, 10 I tolerate bu... | 1,760,371,596.786468 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/25/metal-detector-built-with-smartphone-interface/ | Metal Detector Built With Smartphone Interface | Lewin Day | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"metal detector",
"microcontroller",
"smartphone"
] | If you think of a metal detector, you’re probably thinking of a fairly simple device with a big coil and a piercing whine coming from a tinny speaker. [mircemk] has built a more modern adaptation. It’s a metal detector
you can use with your smartphone instead.
The metal detector part of the project is fairly straightforward as far as these things go. It uses the pulse induction technique, where short pulses are fired through a coil to generate a magnetic field. Once the pulse ends, the coil is used to detect the decaying field as it spreads out. The field normally fades away in a set period of time. However, if there is metal in the vicinity, the time to decay changes, and by measuring this, it’s possible to detect the presence of metal.
In this build, an ESP32 is in charge of the show, generating the necessary pulses and detecting the resulting field. It’s paired with the usual support circuitry—an op-amp and a few transistors to drive the coil appropriately, and the usual smattering of passives. The ESP32 then picks up the signal from the coil and processes it, passing the results to a smartphone via Bluetooth.
The build is actually based on a design by [Neco Desarrollo],
who presents more background and other variants for the curious
. We’ve featured plenty of [mircemk]’s projects before,
like this neat proximity sensor build. | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112103",
"author": "strawberrymortallyb0bcea48e7",
"timestamp": "2025-03-25T10:48:38",
"content": "what about FFT?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8112129",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-03-25T12:34:... | 1,760,371,596.322452 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/24/handheld-console-plays-original-pong-with-modern-e-waste/ | Handheld Console Plays OriginalPongWith Modern E-Waste | Donald Papp | [
"Games",
"handhelds hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"console",
"e-waste",
"pong",
"salvage",
"Sony Watchman"
] | [Simon] wrote in to let us know about
DingPong
, his handheld portable
Pong
console. There’s a bit more to it than meets the eye, however. Consider for a moment that back in the 1970s playing
Pong
required a considerable amount of equipment, not least of which was dedicated electronics and a CRT monitor. What was huge (in more than one way) in the 70s has been shrunk down to handheld, and implemented almost entirely on modern e-waste in the process.
The 1970s would be blown away by a handheld version of Pong, made almost entirely from salvaged components.
DingPong
is housed in an old video doorbell unit (hence the name) and the screen is a Sony Video Watchman, a portable TV from 1982 with an amazing 4-inch CRT whose guts [Simon] embeds into the enclosure. Nearly everything in the build is either salvaged, or scrounged from the junk bin. Components are in close-enough values, and power comes from nameless lithium-ion batteries that are past their prime but still good enough to provide about an hour of runtime. The paddle controllers? Two pots (again, of not-quite-the-right values) sticking out the sides of the unit, one for each player.
At the heart of
DingPong
one will
not
find any flavor of Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or ESP32. Rather, it’s built around an
AY-3-8500
“Ball & paddle” (aka ‘Pong’) integrated circuit from 1977, which means
DingPong
plays the real thing!
We have seen
Pong
played on a Sony Watchman
before, and we’ve also seen a vintage
Pong console brought back to life
, but we’re pretty sure this is the first time we’ve seen a Sony Watchman running
Pong
off a chip straight from the 70s. Watch it in action in the video (in German), embedded below. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112054",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2025-03-25T06:42:37",
"content": "The age of dedicated ICs seems so foreign now. One chip plays happy birthday, another one is a calculator, a third one is pong. Nowadays we just have a microcontroller for everything.",
"parent_id": null,... | 1,760,371,596.56882 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/24/glow-in-the-dark-pcbs-are-pretty-cool/ | Glow In The Dark PCBs Are Pretty Cool | Lewin Day | [
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"glow in the dark",
"pcb",
"PCBWay"
] | What if circuit boards could glow in the dark? It’s a fun question, and one [Botmatrix] sought to answer when approached by manufacturer PCBWay to run a project together.
It turns out that it’s quite possible to make glowing PCBs, with attractive results.
(Video after the break.)
Specifically, PCBWay has developed a workable glow-in-the-dark silkscreen material that can be applied to printed circuit boards. As a commercial board house, PCBWay hasn’t rushed to explain how precisely they pulled off this feat, but we don’t imagine that it involved anything more than adding some glow-in-the-dark powder to their usual silkscreen ink, but we can only speculate.
On [Botmatrix]’s end, his video steps through some neat testing of the performance of the boards. They’re tested using sensors to determine how well they glow over time.
It might seem like a visual gimmick, and to an extent, it’s just a bit of fun. But still, [Botmatrix] notes that it could have some practical applications too. For example, glow-in-the-dark silkscreen could be used to highlight specific test points on a board or similar, which could be instantly revealed with the use of a UV flashlight. It’s an edge case, but a compelling one. It’s also likely to be very fun for creating visually reactive conference badges or in other applications where the PCB plays a major cosmetic role.
[Botmatrix] says these are potentially the first commercially-available glow-in-the-dark printed PCBs. We love glow in the dark stuff;
we’ve even explored how to make your own glowing material before, too
. . | 11 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112021",
"author": "FEW",
"timestamp": "2025-03-25T02:43:19",
"content": "It’s worth noting that conformal coating typically also includes fluorescent dyes. Then you can add waterproofing/dust protection and glow-in-the-dark at once.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"re... | 1,760,371,596.613402 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/24/pps-is-the-hottest-usb-c-feature-you-didnt-know-about/ | PPS Is The Hottest USB-C Feature You Didn’t Know About | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"PPS",
"Tindie",
"USB C",
"USB Power Delivery"
] | USB Power Delivery is widely considered to be a
good thing
. It’s become relatively standard, and is a popular way for makers to easily power their projects at a number of specific, useful voltages. However, what you may not know is that it’s possible to get much more
variable
voltages out of some USB chargers out there.
As [GreatScott!] explains
, you’ll want to meet USB-C PPS.
PPS stands for Programmable Power Supply. It’s a method by which a USB-C device can request variable voltage and current delivery on demand. Unlike the Power Delivery standard, you’re not limited to set voltages at tiers of 5V, 9V, 15V and 20V. You can have your device request the exact voltage it wants, right from the charger. Commercially, it’s most typically used to allow smartphones to charge as fast as possible by getting the optimum voltage to plumb into the battery. However, with the right techniques, you can use PPS to get a charger to output whatever voltage
you
want, from 3.3 V to 21 V, for your own nefarious purposes. You can choose a voltage in 20 mV increments, and even set a current limit in 50 mA increments. Don’t go mad with power, now.
However, there’s a hitch. Unlike USB PD, there isn’t yet a whole ecosystem of $2 PPS breakout boards ready to gloop into your own little projects. As [GreatScott!] suggests, if you want to use PPS, you might want to take a look at the AP33772S IC. It’s a USB PD3.1 Sink Controller. You can command it over I2C to ask for the voltage and current you want. If that’s too hard, though, [CentyLab] has
a solution on Tindie
to get you going faster. It’s also got some exciting additional functionality—like USB-C AVS support. It offers higher voltage and more power, albeit with less resolution, but chargers with this functionality are quite obscure at this stage.
We’ve actually touched on PPS capability before
in our exploration of the magic that is USB-C Power Delivery.
Video after the break.
[Thanks to Keith Olson for the tip!] | 28 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112003",
"author": "Mb",
"timestamp": "2025-03-25T00:19:47",
"content": "This could make a nice bench voltage supply. 0-10,0-5, 2-10, all from a wall wart or usb c powerbank. Can anybody think of way of getting that resolution down to single digit mA to handle 4-20mA? A device like... | 1,760,371,596.850924 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/24/mural-the-plotter-that-draws-on-walls/ | Mural: The Plotter That Draws On Walls | Lewin Day | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"Crayola",
"crayola markers",
"plotter",
"wall plotter"
] | Let’s say you’ve got a big bare wall in your home, and you want some art on it. You could hang a poster or a framed artwork, or you could learn to paint a mural yourself. Or, like [Nik Ivanov], you could build a plotter
called
Mural,
and get it to draw something on the wall for you.
The build is straightforward enough. It uses a moving carriage suspended from toothed belts attached to two points up high on the wall. Stepper motors built into the carriage reel the belts in and out to move it up and down the wall, and from side to side. In this case, [Nik] selected a pair of NEMA 17 steppers to do the job. They’re commanded by a NodeMCU ESP32, paired with TMC2209 stepper motor drivers. The carriage also includes a pen lifter, which relies on a MG90s servo to lift the drawing implement away from the wall.
The build is quite capable, able to recreate SVG vector graphics quite accurately, without obvious skew or distortion. [Nik] has been using the plotter with washable Crayola markers, so he can print on the wall time and again without leaving permanent marks. It’s a great way to decorate—over and over again—on a budget. Total estimated cost is under $100, according to [Nik].
We’ve featured
some neat projects along these lines before, too.
Video after the break. | 15 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8111963",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2025-03-24T20:41:46",
"content": "When I first saw a similar mechanism used for the Maslow CNC router, I started wondering how hard it would be to put an oxyacetylene torch or plasma cutter on a mechanism like this and have a really... | 1,760,371,596.664816 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/23/hackaday-links-march-23-2025/ | Hackaday Links: March 23, 2025 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"astronauts",
"atari",
"chatbot",
"ChatGPT-4o",
"dragon",
"ESA",
"hackaday links",
"iss",
"LLM",
"Meme",
"nasa",
"retrocomputing",
"Starliner",
"surplus",
"Vivaldi"
] | What a long, strange trip it’s been for NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Bruce Wilmore, who finally completed their eight-day jaunt to space after 289 days.
The duo returned to Earth
from the ISS on Tuesday along with two other returning astronauts in a picture-perfect splashdown, complete with
a dolphin-welcoming committee
. For the benefit of those living under rocks these past nine months, Williams and Wilmore slipped the surly bonds way back in June on the first crewed test flight of the Boeing Starliner, bound for a short stay on the ISS before a planned return in the same spacecraft. Alas, all did not go to plan as their ride developed some mechanical difficulties on the way upstairs, and so rather than risk their lives on a return in a questionable capsule, NASA had them cool their heels for a couple of months while Starliner headed home without them.
There’s been a lot of talk about how Butch and Suni were “stranded,” but that doesn’t seem fair to us. Sure, their stay on the ISS was unplanned, or at least it wasn’t Plan A; we’re sure this is always a contingency NASA allows for when planning missions. Also unfortunate is the fact that
they didn’t get paid overtime for the stay
, not that you’d expect they would. But on the other hand, if you’re going to get stuck on a work trip, it might as well be at the world’s most exclusive and expensive resort.
Speaking of space, while it’s statistically unlikely that anyone reading this will ever get there, you can still get a little taste of what space travel is like if you’re willing to
give up ten days of your life to lie in a waterbed
. What’s more, the European Space Agency will pay you 5,000 euros to do it. The experiment is part of the ESA’s Vivaldi III campaign, an exploration of the effects of extended spaceflight on the human body. The “waterbed” thing is a little misleading, though; since the setup is designed to simulate the posture the body takes in microgravity, they use a tank of water (heated, we hope) with a waterproof cover to submerge volunteers up to their torso. This
neutral body posture
looks pretty comfortable if you’re sleeping in space, but we tend to think it’d get annoying pretty quickly down here. Especially for potty breaks, which aren’t done astronaut-style but rather by being transferred to a trolley which lets you do your business without breaking from the neutral posture. Still, 5,000 euros is 5,000 euros.
Bad news for the meme-making community, as it appears AI might be coming for you, too.
A recent study
found that LLMs like ChatGPT can meme better than humans, at least under certain conditions. To come to that conclusion, researchers used some pretty dank meme templates and pitted humans against ChatGPT-4o to come up with meme-worthy captions. They also had a different group of humans collaborate with the LLM to come up with meme captions, which for practical purposes probably means the humans let the chatbot do the heavy lifting and just filtered out the real stinkers. When they showed the memes to crowdsourced participants to rate them on humor, creativity, and shareability, they found that the LLM consistently produced memes that scored higher across all three categories. This makes sense when you think about it; the whole job of an LLM is to look at a bunch of words and come up with a consensus on what the next word should be. Happily, the funniest memes were written by humans, and the human-LLM collaborations were judged more creative and shareable. So we’ve got that going for us, which is good.
We noted the passing of quite a few surplus electronics shops in this space before, and the closing of each of them, understandable as they may, marks the end of an era. But we recently learned about
one surplus outfit that’s still going strong
. Best Electronics, which specializes in Atari retrocomputing, has been going strong for over 40 years, a neat trick when Atari itself went bankrupt over 30 years ago. While they appear to have a lot of new old stock bits and bobs — they’re said to have acquired “thousands and thousands” of pallets of Atari goods from their Sunnyvale warehouse when the company folded — they also claim to spend a lot of money on engineering development.
Their online presence
is delightfully Web 1.0, making it pretty hard to sort through, but we think that development is mainly upgraded PCBs for things like joysticks and keyboards. Whatever they’re doing, they should just keep on doing it.
And finally, have you ever seen
a knitted breadboard
? Now you have, and while it’s of no practical value, we still love it. Alanna Okun made it for
the ITP Stupid Hackathon
at NYU back in February. There aren’t any instructions or build docs, so it’s not clear how it works, but from the photos we’d guess there’s either conductive yarn or solid copper wire knitted into the pattern to serve as bus bars. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8111680",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2025-03-23T23:45:20",
"content": "Lie in a waterbed for 10 days? Depends on who is laying with me.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8111689",
"author": "fumthings",
"timestam... | 1,760,371,597.093815 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/23/rtl-sdr-with-only-a-browser/ | RTL-SDR With Only A Browser | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"RTL-SDR",
"WebUSB"
] | Surely by now you’ve at least heard of RTL-SDR — a software project that let’s cheap TV tuner dongles work as a software-defined radios. A number of projects and tools have spun off the original effort, but in his latest video, [Tech Minds] shows off a particularly unique take. It’s a
Web browser-based radio application
that uses WebUSB, so it doesn’t require the installation of any application software. You can see the program operating in the video below.
There are a few things you should know. First, you need the correct USB drivers for your RTL-SDR. Second, your browser must support WebUSB, of course. Practically, that means you need a Chromium-type browser. You may have to configure your system to allow raw access to the USB port, too.
Watching the video, you can see that it works quite well. According to the comments, it will work with a phone, too, which is an interesting idea. The actual
Web application
is available as open source. It isn’t going to compete with a full-fledged SDR program, but it looked surprisingly complete.
These devices have grown from a curiosity to a major part of radio hacking
over the years
. Firefox users can’t use WebUSB — well, not
directly
, anyway. | 16 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8111642",
"author": "Jouni",
"timestamp": "2025-03-23T20:57:53",
"content": "Question is which one want to sell your data and privacy: Google or Microsoft?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8111654",
"author": "TG",
... | 1,760,371,596.902276 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/23/building-the-simplest-atomic-force-microscope/ | Building The Simplest Atomic Force Microscope | Elliot Williams | [
"classic hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"atomic force microscope",
"science"
] | Doing it yourself may not get you the most precise lab equipment in the world, but it gets you a hands-on appreciation of the techniques that just can’t be beat. Today’s example of this adage: [Stoppi]
built an atomic force microscope out of mostly junk parts
and got pretty good results, considering. (Original is in German;
read it translated here
.)
The traditional AFM setup uses a piezo micromotor to raise and lower the sample into a very, very fine point. When this point deflects, it reads the height from the piezo setup and a motor stage moves on to the next point. Resolution is essentially limited by how fine a point you can make and how precisely you can read from the motion stages. Here, [stoppi]’s motion stage follows the traditional hacker avenue of twin DVD sleds, but instead of a piezo motor, he bounces a laser off of a mirror on top of the point and reads the deflection with a line sensor. It’s a clever and much simpler solution.
A lot of the learnings here are in the machine build. Custom nichrome and tungsten tips are abandoned in favor of a presumably steel compass tip. The first-draft spring ended up wobbling in the X and Y directions, rather than just moving in the desired Z, so that mechanism got reinforced with aluminum blocks. And finally, the line sensors were easily swamped by the laser’s brightness, so neutral density filters were added to the project.
The result? A nice side effect of the laser-bouncing-off-of-mirror setup is that the minimum resolvable height can be increased simply by moving the line sensors further and further away from the sample, multiplying the deflection by the baseline. Across his kitchen, [stoppi] is easily able to resolve the 35-um height of a PCB’s copper pour. Not bad for junk bin parts, a point from a crafts store, and a line sensor.
If you want to know how far you can push a home
AFM
microscope project,
check out [Dan Berard]’s absolutely classic hack
. And once you have microscope images of every individual atom in the house,
you’ll, of course, want to print them out
. | 22 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8111609",
"author": "Christoph (stoppi)",
"timestamp": "2025-03-23T18:00:37",
"content": "Hello! Here you can find a short video of my AFM on YouTube 😉https://youtube.com/shorts/Vr66sw34qPI?si=VQf4NmhgJgbSrlss",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,371,597.048543 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/23/the-mysterious-mindscape-music-board/ | The Mysterious Mindscape Music Board | Maya Posch | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"soundcard"
] | Sound cards on PC-compatible computer systems have a rather involved and convoluted history, with not only a wide diversity of proprietary standards, but also a collection of sound cards that were never advertised as such. Case in point the 1985 Mindscape Music Board, which was an add-on ISA card that came bundled with [Glen Clancy]’s Bank Street Music Writer software for IBM PC. This contrasted with the Commodore 64 version which used the Commodore SID sound chip. Recently both
[Tales of Weird Stuff]
and
[The Oldskool PC]
on YouTube both decided to cover this very rare soundcard.
Based around two
General Instruments AY-3-8913
programmable sound generators, it enabled the output of six voices, mapped to six instruments in the
Bank Street Music Writer
software. Outside of this use this card saw no use, however, and it would fade into obscurity along with the software that it was originally bundled with. Only four cards are said to still exist, with [Tales of Weird Stuff] getting their grubby mitts on one.
As a rare slice of history, it is good to see this particular card getting some more love and attention, as it was, and still is, quite capable. [The Oldskool PC] notes that because the GI chip used is well-known and used everywhere, adding support for it in software and emulators is trivial, and efforts to reproduce the board are already underway.
Top image: Mindscape Music Board (Credit:
Ian Romanick
) | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8111575",
"author": "Gösta",
"timestamp": "2025-03-23T14:50:13",
"content": "Only four are known to exist! What a lovely story :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8111602",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025... | 1,760,371,597.146625 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/23/booting-a-desktop-pdp-11/ | Booting A Desktop PDP-11 | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"DEC",
"pdp-11",
"unix"
] | Ever heard of VENIX? There were lots of variants of Unix back in the day, and VENIX was one for the DEC Professional 380, which was — sort of — a PDP 11. The 1982 machine normally ran the unfortunately (but perhaps aptly) named P/OS, but you could get VENIX, too.
[OldVCR] wanted to put one of these back online
and decided the ST-506 hard drive was too risky. A solid-state drive upgrade and doubling the RAM to a whole megabyte was the plan.
It might seem funny to think of a desktop workstation that was essentially a PDP-11 minicomputer, but in the rush to corner the personal computer market, many vendors did the same thing: shrinking their legacy CPUs. DEC had a spotty history with small computers. [Ken Olsen] didn’t think anyone would ever want a personal computer, and the salespeople feared that cheap computers would eat into traditional sales. The Professional 350 was born out of DEC’s efforts to catch up, as [OldVCR] explains. He grabbed this one from a storage unit about to be emptied for scrap.
The post is very long, but you get a lot of history and a great look inside this vintage machine. Of course, the PDP-11 couldn’t actually handle more than 64K without tricks and you’ll learn more about that towards the end of the post, too.
Just as a preview, the story has a happy ending, including a surprising expression of gratitude from the aging computer. DEC didn’t enjoy much success in the small computer arena, eventually being bought by Compaq, which, in turn, was bought by
Dell
HP. During their heyday, this would have been unthinkable.
The PDP/11 did have some success because it was put on a chip that ended up in several lower-end machines, like the
Heathkit H11
. Ever wonder how people programmed the PDP computers with
switches and lights
? | 22 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8111547",
"author": "GotNoTime",
"timestamp": "2025-03-23T11:09:59",
"content": "Minor correction. Compaq was bought by HP not Dell.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8111581",
"author": "eriklscott",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,371,597.20901 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/23/musings-on-a-good-parallel-computer/ | Musings On A Good Parallel Computer | Maya Posch | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"CPU architecture",
"gpu",
"parallel computing"
] | Until the late 1990s, the concept of a 3D accelerator card was something generally associated with high-end workstations. Video games and kin would run happily on the CPU in one’s desktop system, with later extensions like MMX, 3DNow!, and SSE providing a significant performance boost for games that supported them. As 3D accelerator cards (colloquially called graphics processing units, or GPUs) became prevalent, they took over almost all SIMD vector tasks, but one thing that they’re not good at is being a general-purpose parallel computer. This really ticked [Raph Levien] off and it
inspired him to cover his grievances
.
Although the interaction between CPUs and GPUs has become tighter over the decades, with PCIe in particular being a big improvement over AGP and PCI, GPUs are still terrible at running arbitrary computing tasks, and even PCIe links are still glacial compared to communication within the GPU and CPU dies. With the introduction of asynchronous graphic APIs this divide became even more intense. [Raph]’s proposal is to invert this relationship.
There’s precedent for this already, with Intel’s
Larrabee
and IBM’s
Cell
processor merging CPU and GPU characteristics on a single die, though both struggled with developing for such a new kind of architecture. Sony’s PlayStation 3 was forced to add a GPU due to these issues. There is also the DirectStorage API in DirectX, which bypasses the CPU when loading assets from storage, effectively adding CPU features to GPUs.
As [Raph] notes, so-called AI accelerators also have these characteristics, with often multiple SIMD-capable, CPU-like cores. Maybe the future is Cell after all. | 28 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "8111524",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-03-23T08:22:24",
"content": "The Super Nintendo had used co-processors in early 90s already.Or “Mappers” in NES or Gameboy terminology.SuperFX chip might be most popular, but there also had been 6502 derivatives (or 65C816 derivatives... | 1,760,371,597.419857 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/22/piezo-sensor-reviewed/ | Piezo Sensor Reviewed | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"piezo sensor",
"z probe"
] | If you do FDM 3D printing, you know one of the biggest problems is sensing the bed. Nearly all printers have some kind of bed probing now, and it makes printing much easier, but there are many different schemes for figuring out where the bed is relative to the head. [ModBot] had a Voron with a clicky probe but wanted to reclaim the space it used for other purposes. In the video, also linked below,
he reviews the E3D PZ probe
which is a piezoelectric washer, and the associated electronics to sense your nozzle crashing into your print bed.
There are many options, and it seems like each has its pros and cons. We do like solutions that actually figure out where the tip is so you don’t have to mess with offsets as you do with probes that measure from a probe tip instead of the print head.
Of course, there are other piezo probes we’ve seen. There are also many other kinds of sensors available. The version from E3D is available as a kit you can add to anything, assuming you can figure out how. Or you can do like [ModBot] did and opt for an E3D heatsink with the washer already in place which, presumably, will best fit E3D products.
From the printer’s point of view, the device looks like a normal end stop, so it is simple to configure the printer. There are other ways to
sense a head crash
, of course. We keep meaning to install one of the
“real time” sensors
you can get now, but our CR Touch works well enough that we never find the time. | 16 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8111549",
"author": "east",
"timestamp": "2025-03-23T11:41:41",
"content": "Is this really an issue? My bed needs leveling every 50-100 prints and it takes 5 minutes max.Are all these solutions really only for print farms? What’s the utility to the average user?More importantly, the... | 1,760,371,597.258591 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/24/wearable-computing-goes-woven-wireless-and-washable/ | Wearable Computing Goes Woven, Wireless, And Washable | Donald Papp | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"body",
"fabric",
"flex PCB",
"wearable computing"
] | Sometimes we come across a wild idea that really tries to re-imagine things, and
re-conceiving wearable computing as a distributed system of “fiber computers” embedded into textiles
is definitely that. The research paper presents fully-functional fiber computers and sensors that are washable, weave-able, wireless, and resist both stretching and bending.
The research paper
with all the details is behind a paywall at this time, but we’ll summarize the important parts that are likely to get a hacker’s mind working.
Each fiber strand (like the one shown here) is a self-contained system. Multiple fibers can communicate with one another wirelessly to create a network that, when integrated into garments, performs tasks like health and activity monitoring while using very little power. And what’s
really
interesting about these fibers is their profound lack of anything truly exotic when it comes to their worky bits.
The inner components of a fiber computer are pretty recognizable: each contains a surface-mount microcontroller, LEDs, BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) radio, light sensor, temperature sensor, accelerometer, and photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor for measuring blood volume changes through skin. Power is supplied by a separate segment containing a tiny cylindrical lithium-polymer battery, with a simple plug connector. It’s a tiny battery, but the system is so low-power that it still provides hours of operation.
If there’s a secret sauce, it’s in the fabrication. The first step is stretching a system into a long, thin circuit. Each component is nested onto a small piece of flex PCB that acts a little like a breakout board, and that flex PCB gets rolled around each component to make as tiny a package as possible. These little payloads are connected to one another by thin wires, evenly spaced to form a long circuit. That circuit gets (carefully!) sealed into a thermoformed soft polymer and given an overbraid, creating a fiber that has a few lumps here and there but is nevertheless remarkably thin and durable. The result can be woven into fabrics, worn, washed, bent, and in general treated like a piece of clothing.
Closeups of components that make up a single strand of “fiber computer”.
Multiple fibers are well-suited to being woven into clothing in a distributed way, such as one for each limb. Each fiber is self-contained but communicates with its neighbors using a BLE mesh, or transmitting data optically via embedded LEDs and light sensors. Right now, such a distributed system has been shown to be able to perform health monitoring and accurately classify different physical activities.
We’ve seen
sensors directly on skin
and transmitting
power over skin
, but this is a clever fusion of conventional parts and unconventional design — wearable computing that’s not just actually wearable and unobtrusive, but durable and even washable. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8111924",
"author": "E. D.",
"timestamp": "2025-03-24T18:42:44",
"content": "The Hackaday conference 2024 had a pretty good presentation about a similar project (also from MIT):https://youtube.com/watch?v=OA_IuWRBbfM",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,597.524164 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/24/the-snes-seems-to-be-getting-faster-over-time/ | The SNES Seems To Be Getting Faster Over Time | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"nintendo",
"snes",
"speedrun",
"speedrunning",
"super nintendo"
] | Every Super Nintendo console should run at the same speed. They were all built in factories with the same components so they should all operate at the steady clip mandated by Nintendo all those years ago. Except, apparently,
the SNES is speeding up as it gets older.
The matter was brought to the public’s attention by the [TASBot] team, a group within the speedrunning community. If anyone was going to notice vintage consoles suddenly running a hair faster, you could bet it would be the speedrunners. Soon enough, a call was put out to
crowdsource some data
. Submitters were asked to run a set piece of code to test the DSP sample rate on consoles when cold and warm, to get the best idea of what was going on.
As reported by
Ars Technica,
the group seems to have pinned down the problem to the SNES’s Audio Processing Unit. It’s supposed to run at 24.576 MHz, with a sample rate of 32,000 Hz. However, over the years, emulator developers and speedrunners had noticed that 32,040 Hz seemed to be a more realistic figure for what real consoles were actually running the DSP sample rate at. Developers found that building emulators to run the DSP at this rate was important to run commercial games as expected, suggesting the hardware might have
always
been a little faster than expected.
However, more recently, it seems that the average speed of the DSP sample rate has increased further. The average result collected by [TASBot] from modern consoles is 32,076 Hz. What’s more interesting is the range of submitted figures—from 31,976 Hz to 32,349 Hz. It seems that the DSP’s ceramic resonator—used instead of a quartz crystal—might degrade over time, causing the speedup. [TASBot] team members also tested temperature changes, but only found a 32 Hz variation from a frozen SNES to one at room temperature.
The fact that console components degrade over time isn’t exactly news; we’ve featured plenty of articles on
leaky batteries and corroded traces
. Still, for speedrunners, the idea that the hardware standard itself can shift over time? It’s like feeling quicksand under your feet. What even is reality anymore?
[Thanks to s7726 for the tip!] | 24 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8111893",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2025-03-24T16:03:28",
"content": "range of submitted figures—from 31,976 Hz to 32,349 Hzvs.but only found a 32 Hz variation from a frozen SNES to one at room temperature.Uh – is that supposed to be 0,32 Hz? or mHz?(interesting otherwise)",... | 1,760,371,597.478077 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/24/keebin-with-kristina-the-one-with-the-grasshopper-typewriter/ | Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Grasshopper Typewriter | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"battle axes",
"erkbd",
"glass",
"glass keyboard",
"Glass PCB",
"grasshopper typewriter",
"hama beads",
"melty beads",
"perler beads",
"Williams typewriter"
] | Do you consider your keyboard to be a fragile thing?
Meet the glass keyboard by [BranchNo9329], which even has a glass PCB
. At least, I think the whole thing is glass.
Image via [BranchNo9329] via
reddit
There are so frustratingly few details that this might as well have been a centerfold, but I thought you all should see it just the same. What we do have are several pictures and a couple of really short videos, so dive in.
I can tell you that [BranchNo2939] chose a glass substrate mainly due to curiosity about its durability compared with FR4. And that the copper circuitry was applied with
physical vapor deposition
(PVD) technology.
Apparently one of [BranchNo2939]’s friends is researching the bonding of copper on to glass panels, so they thought they’d give a keyboard a go. Right now the thing is incomplete — apparently there’s going to be RGB. Because of course there’s going to be RGB.
erkbd Can Be yrkbd, Too
Erik + Keyboard =
erkbd
, and now [EarflapsOpen]’s wide split is open-source and now has a
fully documented build guide on GitHub
by special request.
Image by [EarflapsOpen] via
reddit
Inspired mostly by
the Corne
and
the Void Ergo S
layout, this is a 44-key, hand-wired number that runs on a pair of Waveshare RP2040 Zeros programmed with QMK.
I really like the inclusion of OLEDs and rotary encoders, although I feel I would inadvertently turn them by accident. Maybe not. At the very least, they appear to be taller than the keys and might get in the way.
[EarflapsOpen] addresses this a bit at the bottom of the reddit thread, stating that they are not in the way when typing. But since they are kind of far from the home row, you have to move your entire hand to use them. Currently, [EarflapsOpen] uses them for scrolling, adjusting volume, video scrubbing, and so on.
The Centerfold: Battle Axes
Image by [delusionalreddit] via
reddit
So perhaps
[delusionalreddit]’s setup is a bit of a departure from the regular centerfold material
, but that’s okay. Just look at all those guitars! Yours truly is down to just six or so, and really ought to have them situated similarly around the laboratory. Maybe someday.
So there isn’t much detail here, especially about the peripherals, and I apologize for that. Please see the next paragraph. Almost no one sends me centerfolds! You know your keeb is sexy; now get it out there.
Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad?
Send me a picture
along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!
Historical Clackers: the Williams
When the people demand some new advancement in technology, the early response by manufacturers can sometimes be less than appealing, visually speaking.
A Williams No. 1 model. Image by
The Antikey Chop
This is not the case with
the stunning Williams line of typewriters
, which were developed in response to heavy demand for visible typewriters — machines that let the typist see what was being typed without having to stop and do something first. Of course, you could only see a few lines at a time, and just by peering over the tippy-top of the machine, but this was revolutionary.
Form follows function in these lovely machines, which don’t seem to waste an inch of space on frivolity. To create visibility, the Williams typewriters had the platen situated in the center, between two sets of type bars that struck from the front and rear, kicking like grasshopper legs. The paper is first secured along the top and curled downward into the basket.
Don’t quite understand? Don’t blame you. Check out this short video, which demonstrates how to insert paper and type on a Williams Academy model.
Isn’t that cool? The earliest Williams models like the No. 1 pictured above became available in 1891. The keyboard was curved slightly, and the body featured Victorian-inspired filigree. Beginning in 1895, the No. 1 was manufactured with a straight keyboard. The No. 2 came out in 1897 and were nearly identical to the straight-keyboarded No. 1s, but they got an upgrade in the form of typebar alignment. No. 2s were also called Academy like the one in the video, or Englewood.
Inventor John Williams was quite the character and inventor, and was known to rub elbows with Alexander Graham Bell and Emile Berliner. He patented all kinds of things, from cigar cutters to one of the first helicopters in 1912. Unfortunately, the Williams Typewriter Company was fairly short-lived, as they were in litigation for patent infringement pretty much the whole time, until 1909. They were acquired by Jerome Burgess Secor, who would go on to produce a completely different typewriter. Stay tuned!
Finally, Another Use for All Those Melty Beads
So [humanplayer2] was having some fun last Saturday while his daughter played with those melty beads.
After some trial and error, it seems we have a new viable switch plate material!
Image by [humanplayer2] via
reddit
The trial and error was, of course, about finding out what inner bead configuration would result in the snuggest fit. As it turns out, a plain old open square holds them the best, followed by hand-cut-away corners, then full interiors.
For what it’s worth, [humanplayer2] was using Hama beads specifically, which is why the holes are almost all completely melted shut.
Keep in mind that
not all melty beads are created equally
, so your mileage may vary depending on what you’ve got. But it probably shouldn’t matter too-too much in this case, unless you use the ones that are supposed to be really terrible.
Be sure to check out the custom Hama bead game pad he made for her so she can play Paw Patrol in style
.
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
. | 10 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8112058",
"author": "PCBoi",
"timestamp": "2025-03-25T07:00:20",
"content": "“Because of course there’s going to be RGB”The whole thing is see-through. If anything deserves an RGB treatment, this keyboard surely does.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{... | 1,760,371,597.57678 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/24/cloudflares-ai-labyrinth-wants-bad-bots-to-get-endlessly-lost/ | Cloudflare’s AI Labyrinth Wants Bad Bots To Get Endlessly Lost | Donald Papp | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"security",
"web scraping"
] | Cloudflare has gotten more active in its efforts to identify and block unauthorized bots and AI crawlers that don’t respect boundaries. Their solution?
AI Labyrinth
, which uses generative AI to efficiently create a diverse maze of data as a defensive measure.
This is an evolution of efforts to thwart bots and AI scrapers that don’t respect things like “no crawl” directives, which accounts for an ever-growing amount of traffic. Last year we saw Cloudflare
step up their game in identifying and blocking such activity
, but the whole thing is akin to an arms race. Those intent on hoovering up all the data they can are constantly shifting tactics in response to mitigations, and simply identifying bad actors with honeypots and blocking them doesn’t really do the job any more. In fact, blocking requests mainly just alerts the baddies to the fact they’ve been identified.
Instead of blocking requests, Cloudflare goes in the other direction and creates an all-you-can-eat sprawl of linked AI-generated content, luring crawlers into wasting their time and resources as they happily process an endless buffet of diverse facts unrelated to the site being crawled, all while Cloudflare learns as much about them as possible.
That’s an important point: the content generated by the Labyrinth might be pointless and irrelevant, but it isn’t
nonsense
. After all, the content generated by the Labyrinth can plausibly end up in training data, and fraudulent data would essentially be increasing the amount of misinformation online as a side effect. For that reason, the human-looking data making up the Labyrinth isn’t
wrong
, it’s just useless.
It’s certainly a clever method of dealing with crawlers, but the way things are going it’ll probably be rendered obsolete sooner rather than later, as the next move in the arms race gets made. | 37 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8111831",
"author": "Carl Breen",
"timestamp": "2025-03-24T11:09:59",
"content": "I doubt this will work. The first defense a crawler designer would implement is detect the general HTML tree to not be a real website. Real websites have diverse CSS layouts, lots of scripts and are ju... | 1,760,371,597.657461 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/24/rolling-foam-cutter-gives-mattress-a-close-shave/ | Rolling Foam Cutter Gives Mattress A Close Shave | Tom Nardi | [
"classic hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"foam",
"foam cutter",
"hot wire foam cutter"
] | There’s many different reasons why somebody might have to hack together their own solution to a problem. It could be to save money, or to save time. Occasionally it’s because the problem is unique enough that there might not be an accepted solution, so you’re on your own to create one. We think the situation that [Raph] recently found himself in was a combination of several of these aspects, which makes his success all the sweeter.
The problem? [Raph] had a pair of foam mattresses from his camper van that needed to be made thinner — each of the three inch (7.62 cm) pieces of foam needed to have one inch (2.5 cm) shaved off as neatly and evenly as possible. Trying to pull that off over the length of a mattress with any kind of manual tools was obviously a no-go,
so he built a low-rider foam cutter
.
With the mattresses laying on the ground, the idea was to have the cutter simply roll across them. The cutter uses a 45″ (115 cm) long 14 AWG nichrome wire that’s held in tension with a tension arm and bungee cords, which is juiced up with a Volteq HY2050EX 50 V 20 A variable DC power supply. [Raph] determined the current experimentally: the wire failed at 20 A, and cutting speed was too low at 12 A. In the end, 15 A seemed to be the sweet spot.
The actual cutting process was quite slow, with [Raph] finding that the best he could do was about 1/8″ (3 mm) per second on the wider of the two mattresses. While the result was a nice flat cut, he does note that at some point the mattresses started to blister, especially when the current was turned up high. We imagine this won’t be a big deal for a mattress though, as you can simply put that side on the bottom.
In the end, the real problem was the smell. As [Raph] later discovered, polyurethane foam is usually cut mechanically, as cutting it with a hot wire gives off nasty fumes. Luckily he had plenty of ventilation when he was making his cuts, but he notes that the mattresses themselves still have a stink to them a couple days later. Hopefully they’ll finish outgassing before his next camping trip.
As you can imagine, we’ve covered a
great number of DIY foam cutters
over the years,
ranging from the very simple
to
computerized marvels
. But even so, there’s something about the project-specific nature of this cutter that we find charming. | 19 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8111815",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-03-24T10:05:58",
"content": "Any good ways to get some soft foam to make a mattress with? The good mattresses always seem to cost a leg but the inexpensive ones are just not good to sleep on.Surely someone has hacked their sleeping... | 1,760,371,597.726047 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/23/build-a-starship-starship-bridge-simulator-with-emptyepsilon/ | Build A Starship Bridge Simulator With EmptyEpsilon | Maya Posch | [
"Games"
] | [
"science fiction",
"simulator",
"star trek"
] | Who hasn’t dreamed of serving on the bridge of a
Star Trek
starship? Although the
EmptyEpsilon project
isn’t adorned with the Universe-famous LCARS user interface, it does provide a comprehensive simulation scenario, in a multiplayer setting. Designed as a LAN or WAN multiplayer game hosted by the server that also serves as the main screen, four to six additional devices are required to handle the non-captain tasks. These include helm, weapons, engineering, science and relay, which includes comms.
Scenarios are created by the game master, not unlike a D&D game, with the site providing a reference and various examples of how to go about this.
The free and open source game’s binaries can be obtained directly from the site, but it’s also
available on Steam
. The game isn’t limited to just
Trek
either, but scenarios can be crafted to fit whatever franchise or creative impulse feels right for that LAN party.
Obviously
building the whole thing into a realistic starship bridge is optional
, but it certainly looks like more fun that way. | 26 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8111743",
"author": "Aaron",
"timestamp": "2025-03-24T05:06:52",
"content": "At my last job (pre-pandemic) we used to do a weekly Empty Epsilon game – it can be a lot of fun, and EE is flexible enough to act as multiple kinds of games.If you’re really interested in the kinds of cust... | 1,760,371,597.791432 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/23/unnecessary-automation-of-a-diy-star-lamp-build/ | “Unnecessary” Automation Of A DIY Star Lamp Build | Elliot Williams | [
"classic hacks",
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"automation",
"cnc",
"machine"
] | It all started with a gift idea: a star-field lamp in the form of a concrete sphere with lightpipes poking out where the stars are, lit up from the inside by LEDs. When you’re making one of these, maybe-just-maybe you’d be willing to drill a thousand holes and fit a thousand little plastic rods, but by the time you’re making a second, it’s time to build a machine to do the work for you.
So maybe we quibble with the channel name “Unnecessary Automation,” but we won’t quibble with the results.
It’s a machine that orients a sphere, drills the hole, inserts the plastic wire, glues it together with a UV-curing glue, and then trims the end off
. And if you like crazy machines, it’s a beauty.
The video goes through all of the design thoughts in detail, but it’s when it comes time to build the machine that the extra-clever bits emerge. For instance, [UA] used a custom 3D-printed peristaltic pump to push the glue out. Taking the disadvantage of peristaltic pumps – that they pulse – as an advantage,
a custom housing was designed that dispensed the right amount between the rollers
. The
rolling glue dispenser mechanism
tips up and back to prevent drips.
There are tons of other project-specific hacks here, from the form on the inside of the sphere that simplifies optic bundling and routing to the clever use of a razor blade as a spring. Give it a watch if you find yourself designing your own wacky machines. We think
Rube Goldberg
would approve. Check out this video for
a more software-orientated take on fiber-optic displays
. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8111728",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-03-24T04:12:36",
"content": "Not that I’d want to make more than one of those but the results are fantastic.I surprised myself when I hand laid about 1000 miniature copper plates on a ship model I built. It was relaxing, almost zen. I ... | 1,760,371,598.065807 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/22/twisting-magnetism-to-control-electron-flow/ | Twisting Magnetism To Control Electron Flow | Heidi Ulrich | [
"Misc Hacks",
"News",
"Science"
] | [
"chiral",
"chirality",
"circuit",
"diode",
"electron",
"europium",
"magnetic",
"rectification"
] | If you ever wished electrons would just behave, this one’s for you. A team from Tohoku, Osaka, and Manchester Universities has cracked open
an interesting phenomenon in the chiral helimagnet α-EuP
3
: they’ve induced one-way electron flow without bringing diodes into play. Their findings are
published
in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The twist in this is quite literal. By coaxing europium atoms into a chiral magnetic spiral, the researchers found they could generate rectification: current that prefers one direction over another. Think of it as adding a one-way street in your circuit, but based on magnetic chirality rather than semiconductors. When the material flips to an achiral (ferromagnetic) state, the one-way effect vanishes. No asymmetry, no preferential flow. They’ve essentially toggled the electron highway signs with an external magnetic field. This elegant control over band asymmetry might lead to low-power, high-speed data storage based on magnetic chirality.
If you are curious how all this ties back to quantum theory, you can trace the roots of chiral electron flow back to
the early days of quantum electrodynamics
– when physicists first started untangling how particles and fields really interact.
There’s a whole world of weird physics waiting for us. In the field of chemistry, chirality has been covered by Hackaday, foreshadowing the lesser favorable ways of use.
Read up on the article
and share with us what you think. | 11 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8111504",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-03-23T02:57:14",
"content": "Stuff like this does make me wonder if a small change or two in our history could have lead to the development electronics that are based on something other than semiconductors.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,371,597.886194 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/22/generative-art-machine-does-it-one-euro-at-a-time/ | Generative Art Machine Does It One Euro At A Time | Elliot Williams | [
"Art"
] | [
"art",
"lcd",
"machine",
"niklas roy"
] | [Niklas Roy] obviously had a great time building
this generative art cabinet
that puts you in the role of the curator – ever-changing images show on the screen, but it’s only when you put your money in that it prints yours out, stamps it for authenticity, and cuts it off the paper roll with a mechanical box cutter.
If you like fun machines, you should absolutely
go check out the video,
embedded below. The LCD screen has been stripped of its backlight, allowing you to verify that the plot exactly matches the screen by staring through it. The screen flashes red for a sec, and your art is then dispensed. It’s lovely mechatronic theater. We also dig the “progress bar” that is represented by how much of your one Euro’s worth of art it has plotted so far. And it seems to track perfectly; Bill Gates could learn something from watching this.
Be sure to check out the build log
to see how it all came together.
You’d be forgiven if you expected some AI to be behind the scenes these days, but the algorithm is custom designed by [Niklas] himself, ironically adding to the sense of humanity behind it all. It takes the Unix epoch timestamp as the seed to generate a whole bunch of points, then it connects them together. Each piece is unique, but of course it’s also reproducible, given the timestamp. We’re not sure where this all lies in the current debates about authenticity and ownership of art, but that’s for the comment section.
If you want to see more of [Niklas]’s work, well
this isn’t the first time his contraptions have graced our pages
.
But just last weekend at Hackaday Europe
was
the first time that he’s ever given us a talk
, and it’s entertaining and beautiful. Go check that out next. | 14 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8111491",
"author": "Hdjd",
"timestamp": "2025-03-22T23:42:28",
"content": "Niiiiiiiiiceeeeeeeee love it!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8111494",
"author": "Jim J Jewett",
"timestamp": "2025-03-23T00:33:36",
"conte... | 1,760,371,597.837767 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/22/card-radios-remembered/ | Card Radios Remembered | Al Williams | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"card radio",
"casio"
] | We know how [Techmoan] feels. In the 1980s we had a bewildering array of oddball gadgets and exciting new tech. But as kids we didn’t have money to buy a lot of what we saw. But he had a £5 note burning a hole in his pocket from Christmas and found a
Casio RD-10 “card radio”
on sale and grabbed it. He’s long-ago lost that one, but he was able to find a new old stock one and shows us the little gadget in the video below.
The card-thin (1.9 mm) FM radio had many odd features, especially for the 1980s. For one thing, it took a coin cell, which was exotic in those days. The headphones had a special flat connector that reminded us of an automotive fuse. Even the idea of an earbud was odd at that time.
It was a good idea not to lose the earbud, as it had that strange connector. The earbud worked as the antenna and power switch, too. Oddly enough, you could get a slightly fatter AM radio version, and they even made one that was AM and FM. Unsurprisingly, Casio even made a version with a calculator built-in. It had a solar cell, but that only powers the calculator. You still needed the coin cell for the radio.
The sound? Meh. But what did you expect? There was a stereo version, too. However, that one had a rechargeable battery, which was not in good health after a few decades. He also shows a Sony card radio that is a bit different. We were hoping for a teardown, especially of the rechargeable since it was toast, anyway, but for now, we’ll have to imagine what’s inside.
We love nostalgic radios, although usually they are
a little older
. We miss the days when a kid might think it was cool to see an ad touting:
“Oh boy! We’re radio engineers!” | 18 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8111484",
"author": "jameswilddev",
"timestamp": "2025-03-22T23:30:20",
"content": "I managed to find a thumbnail of the internals on Google but the site it linked to (radiomuseum) didn’t seem to have the full imagehttps://imgur.com/a/mwZYXJ6",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,... | 1,760,371,598.116381 |
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