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https://hackaday.com/2025/08/30/fpga-brings-unix-v1-to-the-dec-j-11/ | FPGA Brings UNIX V1 To The DEC J-11 | Bryan Cockfield | [
"FPGA"
] | [
"dec j-11",
"fpga",
"pdp-11",
"retrocomputing",
"tang nano 20k",
"tape",
"unix"
] | If you’ve never used a PDP-11 before it’s probably because you simply weren’t around in the 70s and 80s. Although they started as expensive machines only in research labs and industry, they eventually became much more accessible. They’re a bit of a landmark in computing history, too, being largely responsible for the development of things like UNIX and the C programming language. [ryomuk] is
using an FPGA in combination with an original DEC J-11
to bring us a new take on this machine. (
Google Translate from Japanese
)
The FPGA used in this build is a Tang Nano 20k, notable for its relatively low cost. The FPGA emulates the memory system and UART of a PDP-11 system down to the instruction set, while the original, unmodified DEC chip is left to its own devices. After some initial testing [ryomuk] built a PC11 paper tape emulator to ensure the system was working which
runs a version of BASIC from the era. The next thing up was to emulate some disk drives and co-processors so that the machine can run the first version of UNIX.
[ryomuk] also developed a PCB for the DEC microprocessor and the FPGA to sit on together, and it includes all of the jumpers and wiring needed to allow the computer to run UNIX, as well as handling other miscellaneous tasks like power. It’s an interesting build that gets to the heart of the early days of computer science. PDP-11 computers did eventually get smaller and more accessible, and if you want to build a modern version
this build fits a complete system into an ATX case
.
Thanks to [RetepV] for the tip! | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8171974",
"author": "BrendaEM",
"timestamp": "2025-08-30T14:33:20",
"content": "Neat project. The white PCB is a nice touch. Perhaps the CPU is ceramic?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8171981",
"author": "David Kuder"... | 1,760,371,438.855302 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/30/measuring-nanoparticles-by-scattering-a-laser/ | Measuring Nanoparticles By Scattering A Laser | Aaron Beckendorf | [
"Science"
] | [
"dynamic light scattering",
"laser diode",
"nanoparticles",
"photodiode",
"transimpedance amplifier"
] | A fundamental difficulty of working with nanoparticles is that your objects of study are too small for an optical microscope to resolve, and thus measuring their size can be quite a challenge. Of course, if you have a scanning electron microscope, measuring particle size is straightforward. But for less well-equipped labs, a dynamic light scattering system, such as
[Etienne]’s OpenDLS
, fits the bill.
Dynamic light scattering works by shining a laser beam into a suspension of fine particles, then using a light sensor to measure the intensity of light scattered onto a certain point. As the particles undergo Brownian motion, the intensity of the scattered light changes. Based on the speed with which the scattered light varies, it’s possible to calculate the speed of the moving particles, and thus their size.
The OpenDLS uses a 3D printed and laser-cut frame to hold a small laser diode, which shines into a cuvette, on the side of which is the light sensor. [Etienne] tried a few different options, including a photoresistor and a light sensor designed for Arduino, but eventually chose a photodiode with a two-stage transimpedance amplifier. An Arduino samples the data at 67 kHz, then sends it over serial to a host computer, which uses SciPy and NumPy to analyse the data. Unfortunately, we were about six years late in getting to this story, and the Python program is a bit out of date by now (it was written in Python 2). It shouldn’t, however, be too hard for a motivated hacker to update.
With a standard 188 nm polystyrene dispersion, the OpenDLS calculated a size of 167 nm. Such underestimation seemed to be a persistent issue, probably caused by light being scattered multiple times. More dilution of the suspension would help, but it would also make the signal harder to measure, and the system’s already running near the limits of the hardware.
This isn’t the only
creative way
to measure the size of small particles, nor even the only way to
investigate small particles
optically. Of course, if you do have an electron microscope, nanoparticles make a
good test target
. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8171907",
"author": "mm",
"timestamp": "2025-08-30T08:43:00",
"content": "… by scattering a LASER?by scattering a laser BEAM!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8171937",
"author": "Mamx",
"timestamp": "2025-08-30... | 1,760,371,438.659578 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/29/nfc-hidden-in-floppy-disk-for-retro-themed-pc/ | NFC Hidden In Floppy Disk For Retro-Themed PC | Bryan Cockfield | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"case",
"computer",
"floppy disk",
"NFC",
"retro",
"style"
] | As we all look across a sea of lifeless, nearly identically-styled consumer goods, a few of us have become nostalgic for a time when products like stereo equipment, phones, appliances, homes, cars, and furniture didn’t all look indistinguishable. Computers suffered a similar fate, with nearly everything designed to be flat and minimalist with very little character. To be sure there are plenty of retro computing projects to recapture nostalgia, but to get useful modern hardware in a fun retro-themed case
check out this desktop build from [Mar] that hides a few unique extras
.
The PC itself is a modern build with an up-to-date operating system, but hidden in a 386-era case with early-90s styling. The real gem of this build though is the floppy disk drive, which looks unaltered on the surface. But its core functionality has been removed and in its place an Arduino sits, looking for NFC devices. The floppy disks similarly had NFC tags installed so that when they interact with the Arduino, it can send a command to the computer to launch a corresponding game. To the user it looks as though the game loads from a floppy disk, much like it would have in the 90s albeit with much more speed and much less noise.
Modern industrial design is something that we’ve generally bemoaned as of late
, and it’s great to see some of us rebelling by building unique machines like this, not to mention repurposing hardware like floppy drives for fun new uses (
which [Mar] has also open-sourced on a GitHub page
). It’s not the first build to toss modern hardware in a cool PC case from days of yore, either.
This Hot Wheels desktop is one of our favorites
. | 13 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8171920",
"author": "Mamx",
"timestamp": "2025-08-30T09:45:07",
"content": "It would be nice it the authors here would at least read or watch their source material before generating an article. The tags don’t send any command. They just contain an ID that is read by the chip reader ... | 1,760,371,439.011692 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/29/feathers-are-fantastic-but-flummoxing-for-engineers/ | Feathers Are Fantastic, But Flummoxing For Engineers | Navarre Bartz | [
"Science"
] | [
"bimimicry",
"biomimetic",
"birds",
"dinosaurs",
"feathers"
] | Birds are pretty amazing creatures, and one of the most amazing things about them and their non-avian predecessors are feathers. Engineers and scientists are
finding inspiration from them in surprising ways
.
The light weight and high strength of feathers has inspired those who look to soar the skies, dating back at least as far as Ancient Greece, but the multifunctional nature of these marvels has led to advancements in photonics, thermal regulation, and acoustics. The water repellency of feathers has also led to interesting new applications in both food safety and water desalination beyond the obvious water repellent clothing.
Sebastian Hendrickx-Rodriguez, the lead researcher on
a new paper about the structure of bird feathers
states, “Our first instinct as engineers is often to change the material chemistry,” but feathers are made in thousands of varieties to achieve different advantageous outcomes from a single material, keratin. Being biological in nature also means feathers have a degree of self repair that human-made materials can only dream of. For now, some researchers are building biohybrid devices with
real bird feathers
, but as we continue our march toward manufacturing at smaller and smaller scales, perhaps our robots will sprout wings of their own. Evolution has a several billion year head start, so we may need to be a little patient with researchers.
Some birds
really don’t appreciate Big Brother
any more than we do. If you’re looking for some feathery inspiration for your next flying machine, how about
covert feathers
. And we’d be remiss not to look back at the
Take Flight With Feather Contest
that focused on the Adafruit board with the same name. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8171863",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-08-30T05:18:58",
"content": "Feathers are 3D printed a layer at a time as they rise out of the capsule.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8172319",
"author": "Ostracus"... | 1,760,371,438.698062 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/29/the-confusing-world-of-wood-preservation-treatments/ | The Confusing World Of Wood Preservation Treatments | Maya Posch | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"wood",
"wood treatments"
] | Wood is an amazing material to use around the house, both for its green credentials and the way it looks and feels. That said, as a natural product there are a lot of microorganisms and insects around that would love to take a few good nibbles out of said wood, no matter whether it’s used for fencing, garden furniture or something else. For fencing in particular wood treatments are therefore applied that seek to deter or actively inhibit these organisms, but as the UK bloke over at the [Rag ‘n’ Bone Brown] YouTube channel found out last year, merely slapping on a coating of wood preserver
may actually make things worse
.
For the experiment three tests were set up, each with an untreated, self-treated and two pressure treated (tanalized) sections. Of the pressure treated wood one had a fresh cut on the exposed side, with each of the three tests focusing on a different scenario.
After three years of these wood cuts having been exposed to being either partially buried in soil, laid on the long side or tossed in a bucket, all while soaking up the splendid wonders of British weather, the results were rather surprising and somewhat confusing. The self-treated wood actually fared worse than the untreated wood, while the pressure treated wood did much better, but as a comment by [davidwx9285] on the video notes, there are many questions regarding how well the pressure treatment is performed.
While the self-treatment gets you generally only a surface coating of the –
usually copper-based
– compound, the vacuum pressure treatment’s effectiveness depends on how deep the preservative has penetrated, which renders some treated wood unsuitable for being buried in the ground. Along with these factors the video correctly identifies the issue of grain density, which is why hardwoods resist decay much better than e.g. pine. Ultimately it’s quite clear that ‘simply put on a wood preserver’ isn’t quite the magical bullet that it may have seemed to some. | 19 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "8171794",
"author": "Old wood treatment",
"timestamp": "2025-08-29T23:52:58",
"content": "1 part boiled linseed oil1 part pure boiled pine tar1 part turpentineMix until it’s homogenized, mix before use, keep in an air tight container.Keep applying to wood until the wood can’t soak i... | 1,760,371,438.758954 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/29/the-rf-sniff-test/ | The (RF) Sniff Test | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"oscilloscope",
"rf noise",
"RFI"
] | Sometimes the old tricks are the best. [Kevin] learned an old trick about using a ‘scope to
sniff RF noise
and pays it forward by sharing it in a recent video. He uses an oscilloscope. But does he need some special probe setup? Nope. He quickly makes a little RF pickup probe, and if you have a ‘scope, we’re pretty sure you can make one in a few seconds, too.
Of course, you can get probes made for that, and there are advantages to using them. But the quick trick of quickly and non-destructively modifying the existing probe to pick up RF means you always have a way to make these measurements.
The first thing he probes is a small power supply that is broadcasting inadvertently at 60 kHz. The power supply was charging a bug zapper and, as you might expect, the bug zapper throws out a lot of noise on the radio bands.
If you have an FFT feature on your scope, that is often useful, too, as you can see the results of several interfering signals mixing together. Hunting down interference is
a basic skill
if you work with radio, and it’s useful even if you don’t. | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8171731",
"author": "Ray",
"timestamp": "2025-08-29T21:04:10",
"content": "In the early 1970’s, my computer repair toolkit included a small 6-transistor radio. Held near the backplane of the refrigerator sized computer, I could pinpoint bad cards as the machine was powered-on … dif... | 1,760,371,439.060863 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/31/watch-bondo-putty-get-sprayed-onto-3d-prints/ | Watch Bondo Putty Get Sprayed Onto 3D Prints | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"acetone",
"airbrush",
"bondo",
"sanding",
"smoothing"
] | 3D prints destined for presentation need smooth surfaces, and that usually means sanding. [Uncle Jessy] came across an idea he decided to try out for himself:
spraying Bondo spot putty onto a 3D print
. Bondo spot putty comes from a tube, cures quickly, and sands smoothly. It’s commonly used to hide defects and give 3D prints a great finish. Could spraying liquified Bondo putty onto a 3D print save time, or act as a cheat code for hiding layer lines? [Uncle Jessy] decided to find out.
Gaps and larger flaws still need to be filled by hand, but spray application seems to be a big time saver if nothing else.
The first step is to turn the distinctive red putty into something that can be sprayed through a cheap, ten dollar airbrush. That part was as easy as squeezing putty into a cup and mixing in acetone in that-looks-about-right proportions. A little test spray showed everything working as expected, so [Uncle Jessy] used an iron man mask (smooth surfaces on the outside, textured inside) for a trial run.
Spraying the liquified Bondo putty looks about as easy as spraying paint. The distinctive red makes it easy to see coverage, and it cures very rapidly. It’s super easy to quickly give an object an even coating — even in textured and uneven spots — which is an advantage all on its own. To get a truly smooth surface one still needs to do some sanding, but the application itself looks super easy.
Is it worth doing? [Uncle Jessy] says it depends. First of all, aerosolizing Bondo requires attention to be paid to safety. There’s also a fair bit of setup involved (and a bit of mess) so it might not be worth the hassle for small pieces, but for larger objects it seems like a huge time saver. It certainly seems to cover layer lines nicely, but one is still left with a Bondo-coated object in the end that might require additional sanding, so it’s not necessarily a cheat code for a finished product.
If you think the procedure might be useful, check out the video (embedded below) for a walkthrough. Just remember to do it in a well-ventilated area and wear appropriate PPE.
An alternative to applying Bondo is
brush application of UV resin
, but we’ve also seen interesting results from
non-planar ironing
. | 18 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8172281",
"author": "Actually...",
"timestamp": "2025-08-31T11:18:23",
"content": "I like Speedokote High Build Primer, but there are a ton of automotive filler primers that you could go with. if you dont want to mess around with blending your own.",
"parent_id": null,
"dept... | 1,760,371,438.965734 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/31/this-soviet-style-clock-uses-homemade-nixie-tubes-and-glowing-logic/ | This Soviet-Style Clock Uses Homemade Nixie Tubes And Glowing Logic | Tyler August | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"MTX-90",
"nixie clock",
"retro nixie clock",
"thyratron"
] | The Neon glow of a Nixie tube makes for an attractive clock, but that’s not enough neon for some people. [Changliang Li] is apparently one of those people, because he’s using soviet-era cold-cathode tubes as the logic for his
“Soviet-Era Style Clock”
Aside from the nixies for display, the key component you see working in this beautiful machine are the MTX-90 cold cathode thyratrons, which look rather like neon tubes in action. That’s because they essentially are, just with an extra trigger electrode (that this circuit doesn’t use). The neon tubes are combined into a loop counter, which translates the 50 Hz mains circuit in to seconds, minutes, and hours. The circuit is not original to this project, and indeed was once common to electronics books. The
version used in this project
is credited to [PA3FWM].
The Nixie tubes are new-made by [Sadudu] of iNixie labs, and we get a fascinating look in how they are made. (Tubemaking starts at around 1:37 in the video below.) It looks like a fiber laser is used to cut out glow elements for the tube, which is then encapsulated on a device which appears to be based around a lathe.
The cold-cathode tubes used as logic rely on ambient light or background radiation to start reliably, since the trigger electrode is left floating. In order to ensure reliable switching from the thyratrons, [Changliang Li] includes a surplus smoke detector source to ensure sufficient ionization. (The video seems to imply the MTX-90 was seeded with radioisotopes that have since decayed, but we could find no evidence for this claim. Comment if you know more.)
The end result is attractive and rather hypnotic. (Jump to 3:37 to see the clock in action.) If you want to know more about this sort of use for neon lamps (and the Soviet MTX-90) we
featured a deeper dive a while back
.
Thanks to [Changliang Li] for the incandescent tip. If one of your bright ideas has had a glow up into a project, don’t hesitate to
share it on our tips line
. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8172257",
"author": "Per Jensen",
"timestamp": "2025-08-31T09:50:26",
"content": "The individual numerals are not cut on a fiber laser. They are chemically etched. It’s just the backing plate that is laser engraved. Also that smoke detector source is not Radium-241 as said in the vi... | 1,760,371,438.905571 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/30/the-latest-projects-from-cornells-ece-4760-5730/ | The Latest Projects From Cornell’s ECE 4760/5730 | John Elliot V | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"Cornell University",
"Digital Systems",
"ECE 4760/5730",
"microcontrollers"
] | ECE 4760/5730 is the
Digital Systems Design Using Microcontrollers
course at Cornell University taught by [Hunter Adams].
The list of projects for spring this year
includes forty write-ups — if you haven’t got time to read the whole lot you can pick a random project between 1 and 40 with:
shuf -i 1-40 -n 1
and let the cards fall where they may. Or if you’re made of time you could spend a few days watching the full playlist of 119 projects, embedded below.
We won’t pick favorites from this semester’s list of projects, but having skimmed through the forty reports we can tell you that the creativity and acumen of the students really shines through. If the name [Hunter Adams] looks familiar that might be because we’ve featured his work here on Hackaday before. Earlier this year we saw his
Love Letter To Embedded Systems
.
While on the subject, [Hunter] also wanted us to know that he has updated his lectures, which are here:
Raspberry Pi Pico Lectures 2025
. Particularly these have expanded to include a bunch of Pico W content (making Bluetooth servers, connecting to WiFi, UDP communication, etc.), and some fun lower-level stuff (the RP2040 boot sequence, how to write a bootloader), and some interesting algorithms (FFT’s, physics modeling, etc.). | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8172267",
"author": "vazhnov",
"timestamp": "2025-08-31T10:18:42",
"content": "It would be nice if they switch to a RISC-V cores of the RP2350 (Pico 2).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8172303",
"author": "ukezi",
... | 1,760,371,438.809868 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/30/the-queramin-is-a-qwerty-theremin-with-a-c-64-heart/ | The Qweremin Is A QWERTY Theremin With A C-64 Heart | Tyler August | [
"Musical Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"c64",
"commodore",
"theremin"
] | While we have nothing against other 1980s 8-bit machines, the Commodore 64 has always been something special. A case in point: another new instrument using the C-64 and its beloved SID chip. Not just new to retrocomputing, either, but new entirely. [Linus Åkesson] has
invented the QWERTY Theremin, and there’s a Commodore at its core
.
If this project sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because it’s based
off of the C-64 Theremin
[Linus] built a couple of years back. According to [Linus], there were a few issues with the instrument. A real thereminist told him there were issues with the volume response; his own experience taught him that theremins are very, very hard to play for the uninitiated.
This model fixes both problems: first, the volume circuit now includes a pair of digital-analog-converters (DACs) connected to the Commodore’s user port, allowing smooth and responsive volume control.In this case the DAC is being used solely for volume control: SID provides the analog reference voltage, while the 12-bit digital input served as volume control. That proved noisy, however, thanks to the DC bias voltage of the audio output being scaled by the DAC even when the SID was silent. A second DAC was the answer, providing a signal to cancel out the scaled bias voltage. That in and of itself is a clever hack.
The biggest change is that this instrument no longer plays like a theremin. Pitch has been taken out of the 555-based antenna circuit entirely; while vertical distance from the spoon-antenna still controls volume as in a regular theremin and the last version, the horizontal distance from the second antenna (still a clamp) now controls vibrato. Pitch is now controlled by the QWERTY keyboard. That’s a much easier arrangement for [Linus] — this isn’t his first
chiptune QWERTY instrument, after all
. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8172230",
"author": "Updatebjarni",
"timestamp": "2025-08-31T07:53:14",
"content": "The title of the post has “Qweremin” doubly misspelled.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8172313",
"author": "Tyler August",
"t... | 1,760,371,439.114813 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/30/does-it-make-sense-to-upgrade-a-prusa-mk4s-to-a-core-one/ | Does It Make Sense To Upgrade A Prusa MK4S To A Core One? | Maya Posch | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"FDM 3D printing",
"Prusa Core ONE"
] | One of the interesting things about Prusa’s FDM 3D printers is the availability of official upgrade kits, which allow you to combine bits off an older machine with those of the target machine to ideally save some money and not have an old machine gathering dust after the upgrade. While for a bedslinger-to-bedslinger upgrade this can make a lot of sense, the bedslinger to CoreXY Core One upgrade path is a bit more drastic. Recently the [Aurora Tech] channel had a look at
which upgrade path makes the most sense
, and in which scenario.
A big part of the comparison is the time and money spent compared to the print result, as you have effectively four options. Either you stick with the MK4S, get the DIY Core One (~8 hours of assembly time), get the pre-assembled Core One (more $$), or get the upgrade kit (also ~8 hours). There’s also the fifth option of getting the enclosure for the MK4S, but it costs about as much as the upgrade kit, so that doesn’t make a lot of logical sense.
In terms of print quality, it’s undeniable that the CoreXY motion system provides better results, with less ringing and better quality with tall prints, but unless you’re printing more than basic PLA and PETG, or care a lot about the faster print speeds of the CoreXY machine with large prints, the fully enclosed Core One is a bit overkill and sticking with the bedslinger may be the better choice.
The long and short of it is that you have look at each option and consider what works best for your needs and your wallet. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8172138",
"author": "mvadu",
"timestamp": "2025-08-31T00:34:37",
"content": "I went through this upgrade (mk4 to core one). For me it was being able to print ASA. I already had an DIY enclosure, but with ASA printing with 110C bed entire enclosure became an oven and I was getting pr... | 1,760,371,439.162705 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/30/silent-no-more-open-source-fix-for-mic-mishaps/ | Silent No More: Open-Source Fix For Mic Mishaps | Matt Varian | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"encoder",
"hid device",
"pic32mm",
"video conferencing"
] | “Sorry, my mic was muted…” With the rise of video calls, we’ve all found ourselves rushing to mute or unmute our mics in the midst of a call. This
open-source Mute Button
, sent in by [blackdevice], aims to take out the uncertainty and make toggling your mic easy.
It’s centered around a small PIC32MM microcontroller that handles the USB communications, controls the three built-in RGB LEDs, and reads the inputs from the encoder mounted to the center of this small device. The button knob combo is small enough to easily move around your desk, yet large enough to toggle without fuss when it’s your turn to talk.
To utilize all the functions of the button, you’ll need to install the Python-based driver on your machine. Doing so will let you not only toggle your microphone and volume, but it will also allow the button to light up to get your attention should you be trying to talk with the mic muted.
Although small, it’s also quite rugged, knowing it will spend its life being treated much like a game of Whac-A-Mole—slapped whenever needed. The case is designed to be 3D printed by any FDM printer, with the top knob section printed in translucent material to make the notification light clearly visible.
All of the design files, firmware, and parts list are available over on [blackdevices]’s
GitHub page
, and they are open-source, allowing you to tweak the design to fit your unique needs. Thank you for sending in this well-documented project, [blackdevices]; we look forward to seeing future work. If you like this type of thing, be sure to check out some of our other cool featured
desk gadgets
. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8172098",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-08-30T22:00:58",
"content": "Kinda over engineered but still cool",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8172099",
"author": "Mamx",
"timestamp": "2025-08-30T22:01:57",
"c... | 1,760,371,439.209061 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/30/building-a-shifting-ratchet-wrench/ | Building A Shifting Ratchet Wrench | Aaron Beckendorf | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"adjustable wrench",
"ratchet",
"ratcheting",
"toolmaking",
"wrench"
] | Convenient though they may be, [Trevor Faber] found some serious shortcomings in shifting spanners: their worm gears are slow to adjust and prone to jamming, they don’t apply even force to all faces of a bolt head, and without a ratchet, they’re rather slow. To overcome these limitations, he designed his own
adjustable ratchet wrench
.
The adjustment mechanism is based on a pair of plates with opposing slots; the wrench faces are mounted on pins which fit into these slots, and one plate rotates relative to the other, the faces slide inwards or outwards. A significant advantage of this design is that, since one plate is attached to the wrench’s handle, some of the torque applied to the wrench tightens its grip on the bolt. To let the wrench loosen as well as tighten bolts, [Trevor] simply mirrored the mechanism on the other side of the wrench. Manufacturing proved to be quite a challenge: laser cutting wasn’t precise enough for critical parts, and CNC control interpolation resulted in some rough curves which caused the mechanism to bind, but after numerous iterations, [Trevor] finally got a working tool.
To use the wrench, you twist an outer ring to open the jaws, place them over the bolt, then let them snap shut. One nice touch is that you can close this wrench over a bolt, let go of it, and do something else without the wrench falling off the bolt. Recessed bolts were a bit of an issue, but a chamfer ought to improve this. It probably won’t be replacing your socket set, but it looks like it could make the odd job more enjoyable.
If you prefer a more conventional shifting wrench, you can make a miniature out of an
M20 nut
. It’s also possible to make a
shifting Allen wrench
.
Thanks to [Adam Foley] for the tip! | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8172058",
"author": "SayWhat?",
"timestamp": "2025-08-30T19:43:40",
"content": "The high part count of precise components with tight tolerances and costly machining will make this very expensive if ever produced commercialy. That being said, I applaud the cleaver design, skill, a... | 1,760,371,439.339584 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/29/the-advanced-project-gemini-concepts-that-could-have-been/ | The Advanced Project Gemini Concepts That Could Have Been | Maya Posch | [
"Space"
] | [
"apollo",
"gemini",
"nasa"
] | Looking back on the trajectory leading to Project Apollo and the resulting Moon missions, one can be forgiven for thinking that this was a strict and well-defined plan that was being executed, especially considering the absolute time crunch. The reality is that much of this trajectory was in flux, with the earlier Project Gemini seeing developments towards supplying manned space stations and even its own Moon missions.
[Spaceflight Histories] recently examined some of these Advanced Gemini concepts
that never came to pass.
In retrospect, some of these seem like an obvious evolution of the program. Given both NASA and the US Air Force’s interest in space stations at the time, the fact that a up-sized “Big Gemini” was proposed as a resupply craft makes sense. Not to be confused with the Gemini B, which was a version of the spacecraft that featured an attached laboratory module. Other concepts, like the paraglider landing feature, were found to be too complex and failure prone.
The circumlunar, lunar landing and Apollo rescue concepts were decidedly more ambitious and included a range of alternatives to the Project Apollo missions, which were anything but certain especially after the Apollo 1 disaster. Although little of Advanced Gemini made it even into a prototype stage, it’s still a fascinating glimpse at an alternate reality. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8171695",
"author": "M_B",
"timestamp": "2025-08-29T19:47:30",
"content": "Huh. Someone else watching KSA’s development and was wondering about the Gemini capsules that they’ve been showing pics of?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id"... | 1,760,371,439.252407 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/29/hackaday-podcast-episode-335-beer-toast-and-pi/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 335: Beer, Toast, And Pi | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | What happens when you listen in on Elliot Williams and Al Williams? You get a round up of the best of last week’s Hackaday posts, of course. The topics this week range from beer brewing to lightning protection, with a little bit of everything in between.
This week, many problems find solutions. Power drill battery dead? Your car doesn’t have a tire pressure monitor? Does your butter tear up your toast? You can find the answer to these problems, and more, on the Hackaday podcast.
For the can’t miss section, the guys are annoyed that Google wants to lock down their phones, and also talk about measuring liquid levels in outer space.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Or
download in DRM-free MP3 without requiring developer registration
.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 335 Show Notes:
News:
Confirmation Of Record 220 PeV Cosmic Neutrino Hit On Earth
Tons of entries for the One Hertz challenge!
What’s that Sound?
Al made short work of the sound this week.
See if you can guess and if you can, you might win a coveted Hackaday Podcast T-shirt
.
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Automated Brewing
DIY PWM-Controlled IKEA TILLREDA Induction Cooktop | Hackaday.io
How To Stop Zeus From Toasting Your Pi
Battery Repair By Reverse Engineering
Wire Photo Fax Teardown
Picture By Paper Tape
JuiceBox Rescue: Freeing Tethered EV Chargers From Corporate Overlords
EMW kick-starts JuiceBox, a $99 Level 2 DIY charging station
Home – Citizens and Technology Lab
RP2040 Assembly Language Mix And Match
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Homebrew Tire Pressure Monitoring System
Troubled USB Device? This Tool Can Help
Butta Melta Stops Rock-solid Butter From Tearing Your Toast
Al’s Picks:
Picking An Old Operating System
The Shady School
Dead Bug Timer Relay Needs No PCB
Can’t-Miss Articles:
The Browser Wasn’t Enough, Google Wants To Control All Your Software
Where There Is No Down: Measuring Liquid Levels In Space | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8171762",
"author": "Davip",
"timestamp": "2025-08-29T22:24:10",
"content": "Hey I’m still waiting for my What’s That Sound t shirt from 11 months ago. Any progress?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8173954",
"author": ... | 1,760,371,439.469159 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/29/breakout-boards-for-the-blind/ | Breakout Boards For The Blind | Ian Bos | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"accessibility",
"blind",
"braille",
"breakout board",
"proto",
"visual impairment"
] | Connecting an LED to a battery seems trivial. If you have any knowledge of using breadboards, knowing that red goes with red, and that black goes with black, it’s as easy as tying your shoes. Except there’s one problem: what if you can’t see the difference between red and black? [Tara] had a student who struggled with a problem just like this, so of course, they made a
whole suite of breakout boards
to the rescue!
Breadboards rely almost completely on the visual cues of rows, columns, and if the part is even in the hole correctly. [Tara] fixed these issues while attempting to keep the usefulness of a breadboard. Using tactile cues rather than the traditional visual, a visually impaired individual can figure out what is positive or negative.
Braille is the obvious choice for general communication of inputs and outputs. Where [Tara]’s ingenuity came in was the method of incorporating Braille into the boards — solder joints. After reading a
Hackaday article on solder Braille
, [Tara] managed a fitting and efficient method of allowing ease of use.
Currently, the boards are in a prototyping stage; however, if you want to try them out yourself early, let [Tara] know. Others with visual impairments are needed to properly stress test the device. If you are someone who does not struggle with any major visual impairments, it can be hard to put yourself in their shoes. For those empathic (and with VR capabilities) among us, be sure to
try it yourself
! | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8171570",
"author": "Cheese Whiz",
"timestamp": "2025-08-29T15:40:46",
"content": "This is really cool! I like the variety of cable types for the banana cables for tactile feedback. I wonder about ease of use for things like passive components, like how does a blind person read a r... | 1,760,371,439.293724 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/29/this-week-in-security-def-con-nonsense-vibepwned-and-0-days/ | This Week In Security: DEF CON Nonsense, Vibepwned, And 0-days | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"catgirls",
"disputed research",
"Phrack",
"This Week in Security"
] | DEF CON happened just a few weeks ago, and it’s time to cover some of the interesting talks. This year there were two talks in particular that are notable for being controversial. Coincidentally both of these were from Track 3. The first was the
Passkeys Pwned
, a talk by SquareX about how the passkey process can be hijacked by malware.
[Dan Goodin] lays out both the details on Passkeys
, and why the work from SquareX isn’t the major vulnerability that they claim it is. First, what is a Passkey? Technically it’s a public/private keypair that is stored by the user’s browser. A unique keypair is generated for each new website, and the site stores the public key. To authenticate with the Passkey, the site generates a random string, the browser signs it with the private key, and the site checks it against the public key. I stand by my early opinion, that
Passkeys are effectively just passwords
, but with all the best-practices mandated.
So what is the claim presented at DEF CON? Malicious code running in the context of the browser tab can hijack the passkey process. In the demonstrated attack flow, a browser extension caused the Passkey login to fail, and prompted the user to generate a new Passkey. This is an interesting observation, and a clever attack against Passkeys, but is not a vulnerability in the Passkey spec. Or more accurately, it’s an accepted limitation of Passkeys, that they cannot guarantee security in the presence of a compromised browser.
That Wasn’t the Sketchiest DEF CON Talk
There was another suspect presentation:
A talk on DragonSlayer
, a framework to de-obfuscate virtualized malware. This topic is super interesting, diving into the world of highly obfuscated malware. Imagine a binary that internally implements an interpreter runs the actual program code from a bytecode format. As a researcher, this sort of obfuscation is very time consuming to wade through.
The approach from
DragonSlayer
is to observe the malware, look for known patterns, and feed the observations into a machine learning tool.
If that sounds a bit like a meme, with the steps going: 1) AI, 2) ???, 3) Profit. And this is where we get to
the reaction from at least part of the security community
. The term “AI slop” is thrown around. The repository doesn’t compile, portions of the code are no-ops with comments about what the real code would look like, and some recent commits look like attempts to remove the tell-tale sings of AI authorship.
Ransomware in the cloud
There’s
a new trend in ransomware attacks
, to move away from on-premise and encryption, and to instead attack cloud data. This is based on a report from Microsoft, detailing the activities of Storm-0501. That threat actor has begun chaining on-premises attacks into Azure takeover.
Azure has plenty of bandwidth, and an attacker isn’t on the hook to pay for it, so the approach here is to firehose all of that data off-site, and then delete every scrap possible. In cases where the permissions don’t allow deletion, new keys are created, proving that the encryption approach isn’t dead yet.
AI Malware
Let’s talk AI Malware.
Up first is PromptLock
, a find by ESET. Rather than being found in an active exploit, ESET researchers found this as an upload to VirusTotal, and suspect that it’s a proof of concept.
That concept is to skip shellcode, and instead just include malicious prompts in the malware. Upon execution, the malware sends the embedded prompts off to an Ollama API, and asks for malicious Lua code back.
PromptLock seemed like a proof of concept, but there was a different, live malware campaign this week, that made use of
a compromised
nx
library delivered via npm
. This one creates a repository named
s1ngularity-repository
if it’s running in a GitHub context. It also looks for Claude or Gemini on the system, and if found, runs a malicious prompt instructing the agentic LLM to look for local secrets.
0-days
Pssst, hey kid, I hear you like 0-days. We’ve got 0-days this week. First up,
FreePBX
. The administrative control panel has a flaw that allows an attacker to run any command as the underlying Asterisk user. The earliest that this attack has been seen in logs was August 21, and any FreePBX system with the admin panel exposed to the Internet could be compromised.
Researchers at at
watchTowr caught wind of a vulnerability in CrushFTP
that allowed attackers admin access to the server over HTTPS. This one was being exploited in the wild even before the patch was released. Rather than do their normal patch reverse engineering, the watchTowr team put their Attacker Eye honeypot to work. They added a CrushFTP module to the mix, and sat back to wait for the incoming attack. The Internet didn’t disappoint, and it turns out this is a very odd race condition between login attempts.
The
Passwordstate credentials manager also has a pair of vulnerabilities
fixed in a recent update, though it doesn’t appear that they are actually 0-days, nor yet exploited in the wild. This one seems to allow unauthorized access to the administrative interface via the Emergency Access page.
Bits and Bytes
Trail of Bits performed
a security assessment of the WhatsApp apps and backend infrastructure
. They found about 28 separate issues, with the most serious getting fixed. Kudos to Meta and Trail of Bits for publishing the whole report.
And finally, there’s a clever
technique showing up on Linux malware. Encoding a malicious command as part of the filename
. The attack starts with a
.rar
. It drops a file with the malicious name, with the hope that it will be processed by a backup or similar script. The end-game is a rootkit with remote access. Be careful what you download! | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8171900",
"author": "Tom",
"timestamp": "2025-08-30T08:13:28",
"content": "“But everyone and their dog said viruses don’t run on linux ”I have never heard that. Maybe you are misinformed??Or maybe, a M$ shill ??",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,371,439.383098 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/29/no-die-no-problem-realdice-org-has-you-covered/ | No Die? No Problem: RealDice.org Has You Covered | Tyler August | [
"Games"
] | [
"dice roller",
"dice spinner",
"DnD",
"random"
] | Have you ever been out and about and needed to make a check against INT, WIS or CON but not had a die handy? Sure, you could use an app on your phone, but who knows what pseudorandom nonsense that’s getting up to. [Lazy Hovercraft] has got the solution with his
new site RealDice.org, which, well, rolls real dice.
Well, one die, anyway. The webpage presents a button to roll a single twenty-sided die, or “Dee-Twenty” as the cool kids are calling it these days. The rolling is provided by a unit purchased from Amazon that spins the die inside a plastic bubble,
similar to this unit we covered back in 2020
. (Alas for fans of the venerable game Trouble, it does not pop.) The die spinner’s button has been replaced by a relay, which is triggered from the server whenever a user hits the “roll” button.
You currently have to look at the camera feed with your own eyes to learn what number was rolled, but [Lazy Hovercraft] assures us that titanic effort will be automated once he trains up the CVE database. To that end you are encouraged to help build the dataset by punching in what number is shown on the die.
This is a fun little hack to get some physical randomness, and would be great for the sort of chatroom tabletop gaming that’s so common these days. It may also become the new way we select the
What’s That Sound?
winners on the
Hackaday Podcast
.
Before sitting down for a game session, you might want to
make sure you’re all using fair dice
. No matter how fair the dice, its hard to
beat quantum phenomena for random noise
. | 14 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8171426",
"author": "lol",
"timestamp": "2025-08-29T11:57:46",
"content": "Wait, I don’t need to pay an OnlyFans model to do this for me any more!?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8171428",
"author": "shinsukke",
... | 1,760,371,439.42695 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/29/cad-from-scratch-makercad/ | CAD, From Scratch: MakerCAD | Jenny List | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"cad",
"MakerCAD"
] | It’s likely that many of you use some form of CAD package, but how many of you have decided you didn’t like the software on offer? [Marcus Wu] did, and instead of griping,
he wrote his own CAD software
. It’s called MakerCAD, it’s published under an MIT licence, and you can try it yourself.
It’s written in Go, and it’s superficially similar to OpenSCAD in that the interface is through code. The similarity is skin deep though, as it provides the user with constraint solving as described in the video below the break.
As it stands it’s by no means feature complete, but it is now at a point at which it can be evaluated. Simple models can be created and exported as STEP files, so it can be used as a real-world CAD tool.
Whether it will flourish is down to the path it takes and how its community guides it. But we’re pleased to see any new open source projects in this space, which remains overly dominated by proprietary packages. If you try it, write up your experiences, we’d love to see how this develops. | 29 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8171310",
"author": "Grawp",
"timestamp": "2025-08-29T08:25:19",
"content": "Nice to see some normal design goals. Still insufficient for me and OpenCASCADE is a road to hell :)That’s why I’m working on my own code CAD based on SymPy and Manifold3D.Pros:– You can have free variables... | 1,760,371,439.612248 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/28/why-super-mario-64-wastes-so-much-memory/ | WhySuper Mario 64Wastes So Much Memory | Maya Posch | [
"Games",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"code optimization",
"nintendo 64",
"super mario 64"
] | The Nintendo 64 was an amazing video game console, and alongside consoles like the Sony PlayStation, helped herald in the era of 3D games. That said, it was new hardware, with new development tools, and thus creating those early N64 games was a daunting task. In an
in-depth review of
Super Mario 64’s
code
, [Kaze Emanuar] goes over the curious and wasteful memory usage, mostly due to unused memory map sections, unoptimized math look-up tables, and greedy asset loading.
The game as delivered in the Japanese and North-American markets also seems to have been a debug build, with unneeded code everywhere. That said, within the context of the three-year development cycle, it’s not bad at all — with twenty months spent by seven programmers on actual development for a system whose hardware and tooling were still being finalized, with few examples available of how to do aspects like level management, a virtual camera, etc. Over the years [Kaze] has probably spent more time combing over
SM64
‘s code than the original developers, as evidenced by his other videos.
As noted in the video, later N64 games like
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
are massively more optimized and streamlined, as lessons were learned and tooling improved. For the
SM64
developers, however, they had a gargantuan 4 MB of fast RDRAM to work with, so optimization and memory management likely got kicked down to the bottom on the priority list. Considering the absolute smash hit that
SM64
became, it seems that these priorities were indeed correct. | 44 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8171229",
"author": "WTF Detector",
"timestamp": "2025-08-29T05:17:16",
"content": "So, when is [Kaze] going to release his 60fps Mario 64 patch? Dude’s been teasing it for the past couple of years at this point. His initial video that went viral used a bunch of emulator footage bec... | 1,760,371,439.702282 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/28/tefifon-germanys-tape-shaped-record-format/ | Tefifon: Germany’s Tape-Shaped Record Format | Maya Posch | [
"History"
] | [
"Tefifon",
"vinyl records"
] | A Tefifon cartridge installed for playback. (Credit: Our Own Devices, YouTube)
Recently the [Our Own Devices] YouTube channel
took a gander
at the Tefifon audio format. This was an audio format that competed with shellac and vinyl records from the 1930s to the 1960s, when the company behind it went under. Some people may already know Tefifon as [Matt] from
Techmoan
has covered it multiple times, starting with a similar machine
about ten years ago
, all the way up to the
Stereo Tefifon machine
, which was the last gasp for the format.
There’s a lot to be said for the Tefifon concept, as it fixes many of the issues of shellac and vinyl records, including the limited run length and having the fragile grooves exposed to damage and dust. By having the grooves instead on a flexible band that got spooled inside a cartridge, they were protected, with up to four hours of music or eight hours of spoken content, i.e. audio books.
Although the plastic material used for Tefifon bands suffered from many of the same issues as the similar
Dictabelt
audio recording system, such as relatively rapid wear and degradation (stiffening) of the plastic, it was mostly the lack of interest from the audio labels that killed the format. With the big labels and thus big artists heavily invested in records, the Tefifon never really got any hits and saw little use outside of West Germany throughout the 1950s and 1960s before its last factories were shuttered. | 15 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8171216",
"author": ".",
"timestamp": "2025-08-29T04:15:54",
"content": "How on earth did they mould the tape?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8171232",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2025-08-29T05:38:10",
... | 1,760,371,439.754472 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/28/linear-actuators-101/ | Linear Actuators 101 | Navarre Bartz | [
"hardware",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"electric actuator",
"hydraulic",
"hydraulic actuator",
"linear actuator",
"pneumatic",
"pneumatic actuator"
] | Linear actuators are a great help when you’re moving something along a single axis, but with so many options, how do you decide? [Jeremy Fielding] walks us through some of the high level
tradeoffs of using one type of actuator over another
.
There are three main types of linear actuator available to the maker: hydraulic, pneumatic, and electric. Both the hydraulic and pneumatic types move a cylinder with an attached rod through a tube using pressure applied to either side of the cylinder. [Fielding] explains how the pushing force will be greater than the pulling force on these actuators since the rod reduces the available surface area on the cylinder when pulling the rod back into the actuator.
Electric actuators typically use an electric motor to drive a screw that moves the rod in and out. Unsurprisingly, the electric actuator is quieter and more precise than its fluid-driven counterparts. Pneumatic wins out when you want something fast and without a mess if a leak happens. Hydraulics can be driven to higher pressures and are typically best when power is the primary concern which is why we see them in construction equipment.
You can
DIY your own linear actuators
, we’ve seen
tubular stepper motors
, and even a
linear actuator inspired by muscles
. | 16 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8171076",
"author": "Actually...",
"timestamp": "2025-08-28T23:12:06",
"content": "“Unsurprisingly, the electric actuator is quieter and more precise than its fluid-driven counterparts.”High end systems with Hydraulic cylinders can be engineered for high precision, achieving positio... | 1,760,371,439.807957 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/28/animatronic-eyes-are-watching-you/ | Animatronic Eyes Are Watching You | Tyler August | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"animatronic",
"face tracking",
"MediaPipeipe"
] | If you haven’t been following [Will Cogley]’s animatronic adventures on YouTube, you’re missing out. He’s got a good thing going, and the latest step is
an adorable robot that tracks you with its own eyes.
Yes, the cameras are embedded inside the animatronic eyes.That was a lot easier than expected; rather than the redesign he was afraid of [Will] was able to route the camera cable through his existing animatronic mechanism, and only needed to hollow out the eyeball. The tiny camera’s aperture sits nigh-undetectable within the pupil.
On the software side, face tracking is provided by MediaPipe. It’s currently running on a laptop, but the plan is to embed a Raspberry Pi inside the robot at a later date. MediaPipe tracks any visible face and calculates the X and Y offset to direct the servos. With a dead zone at the center of the image and a little smoothing, the eye motion becomes uncannily natural. [Will] doesn’t say how he’s got it set up to handle more than one face; likely it will just stick with the first object identified.
Eyes aren’t much by themselves, so [Will] goes further by creating a little robot. The adorable head sits on a 3D-printed tapered roller bearing atop a very simple body. Another printed mechanism allows for pivot, and both axes are servo-controlled, bringing the total number of motors up to six. Tracking prefers eye motion, and the head pivots to follow to try and create a naturalistic motion. Judge for yourself how well it works in the video below. (Jump to 7:15 for the finished product.)
We’ve featured [Will]’s animatronic anatomy adventures before– everything from
beating hearts
, and full-motion
bionic hands
, to an earlier,
camera-less iteration of the eyes
in this project.
Don’t forget if you ever find yourself wading into the Uncanny Valley that
you can tip us off
to make sure everyone can share in the discomfort. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8171051",
"author": "Mr Name Required",
"timestamp": "2025-08-28T22:02:55",
"content": "In a world awash with CCTV / webcams and facial recognition a robot that tracks you with its own eyes is to me anything but adorable and just borders on creepy. But, different strokes for differe... | 1,760,371,440.241955 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/28/pvdf-the-specialized-filament-for-chemical-and-moisture-resistance/ | PVDF: The Specialized Filament For Chemical And Moisture Resistance | Maya Posch | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer filament",
"FDM 3D printing"
] | There’s a dizzying number of specialist 3D printing materials out there, some of which do try to offer an alternative to PLA, PA6, ABS, etc., while others are happy to stay in their own niche. Polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) is one of these materials, with the [My Tech Fun] YouTube channel
recently getting sent a spool of PVDF for testing
, which retails for a cool $188.
Some of the build plate carnage observed after printing with PVDF. (Credit: My Tech Fun, YouTube)
Reading the specifications and datasheet for the filament over at the
manufacturer’s website
it’s pretty clear what the selling points are for this material are. For the chemists in the audience the addition of
fluoride
is probably a dead giveaway, as fluoride bonds in a material tend to be very stable. Hence
PVDF
((C
2
H
2
F
2
)
n
) sees use in applications where strong resistance to aggressive chemicals as well as hydrolysis are a requirement, not to mention no hygroscopic inclinations, somewhat like PTFE and kin.
In the video’s mechanical testing it was therefore unsurprising that other than abrasion resistance it’s overall worse and more brittle than PA6 (nylon). It was also found that printing this material with two different FDM printers with the required bed temperature of 110°C was somewhat rough, with some warping and a wrecked engineering build plate in the Bambu Lab printer due to what appears to be an interaction with the usual glue stick material. Once you get the print settings dialed in it’s not too complicated, but it’s definitely not a filament for casual use. | 18 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8170783",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-08-28T15:33:25",
"content": "Could you use it to 3D print a beehive that doesn’t leech turpentine into honey?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8170791",
"author": "Mamx",
... | 1,760,371,439.868824 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/28/the-browser-wasnt-enough-google-wants-to-control-all-your-software/ | The Browser Wasn’t Enough, Google Wants To Control All Your Software | Tom Nardi | [
"Android Hacks",
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Slider"
] | [
"android",
"google",
"security",
"sideload",
"software",
"supply chain attack",
"walled garden"
] | A few days ago we brought you word that
Google was looking to crack down on “sideloaded” Android applications.
That is, software packages installed from outside of the mobile operating system’s official repository. Unsurprisingly, a number of readers were outraged at the proposed changes. Android’s open nature, at least in comparison to other mobile operating systems, is what attracted many users to it in the first place. Seeing the platform slowly move towards its own walled garden approach is concerning, especially as it leaves the fate of popular services such as the F-Droid free and open source software (FOSS) repository in question.
But for those who’ve been keeping and eye out for such things, this latest move by Google to throw their weight around isn’t exactly unexpected. They had the goodwill of the community when they decided to develop an open source browser engine to keep the likes of Microsoft from taking over the Internet and dictating the rules, but now Google has arguably become exactly what they once set out to destroy.
Today they essentially control the Internet, at least as the average person sees it, they control 72% of the mobile phone OS market, and now they want to firm up their already outsized control which apps get installed on your phone. The only question is whether or not we let them get away with it.
Must be This High to Ride
First, “sideloading”. The way you’re supposed to install apps on your Android device is through the Google Play store, and maybe your phone manufacturer’s equivalent. All other sources are, by default, untrusted. What used to be refreshing about the Android ecosystem, at least in comparison, was how easy it was to sideload an application that didn’t come directly from, and profit, Big G. That is what’s changing.
Of course, the apologists will be quick to point out that Google isn’t taking away the ability to sideload applications on Android. At least, not on paper. What they’re actually doing is making it so sideloaded applications need to be from a verified developer.
According to their blog post on the subject
, they have no interest in the actual content of the apps in question, they just want to confirm a malicious actor didn’t develop it.
The blog post attempts to make a somewhat ill-conceived comparison between verifying developer identities with having your ID checked at the airport. They go on to say that they’re only interested in verifying each “passenger” is who they say they are for security purposes, and won’t be checking their “bags” to make sure there’s nothing troubling within. But in making this analogy Google surely realizes — though perhaps they hope the audience doesn’t pick up on — the fact that the people checking ID at the airport happen to wear the same uniforms as the ones who x-ray your bags and run you through the metal detector. The implication being that they believe checking the contents of each sideloaded package is within their authority, they have simply decided not to exercise that right. For now.
Conceptually, this initiative is not unlike another program Google announced this summer:
OSS Rebuild
. Citing the growing risk of supply chain attacks, where malicious code sneaks into a system thanks to the relatively lax security of online library repositories, the search giant offers a solution. They propose setting up a system by which they not only verify the authors of these open source libraries, but scan them to make sure the versions being installed match the published source code. In this way, you can tell that not only are you installing the authentic library, but that no rogue code has been added to your specific copy.
Google the Gatekeeper
Much like verifying the developer of sideloaded applications, OSS Rebuild might
seem
like something that would benefit users at first glance. Indeed, there’s a case to be made that both programs will likely identify some low-hanging digital fruit before it has the chance to cause problems. An event that you can be sure Google will publicize for all it’s worth.
But in both cases, the real concern is that of authority. If Google gets to decide who a verified developer is for Android, then they ultimately have the power to block whatever packages they don’t like. To go back to their own airport security comparison, it would be like if the people doing the ID checks weren’t an independent security force, but instead representatives of a rival airline. Sure they would do their duty most of the time, but could they be trusted to do the right thing when it might be in their financial interests not to? Will Google be able to avoid the temptation to say that the developers of alternative software repositories are persona non grata?
Even more concerning, who do you appeal to if Google has decided they don’t want you in their ecosystem? We’ve seen how they treat YouTube users that have earned their ire for some reason or another. Can developers expect the same treatment should they make some operational faux pas?
Let us further imagine that verification through OSS Rebuild becomes a necessary “Seal of Approval” to be taken seriously in the open source world — at least in the eyes of the bean counters and decision makers. Given Google’s clout, it’s not hard to picture such an eventuality. All Google would have to do to keep a particular service or library down is elect not to include them in the verification process.
Life Finds a Way
If we’ve learned anything about Google over the years, it’s that they can be exceptionally mercurial. They’re quick to drop a project and change course if it seems like it isn’t taking them where they want to go. Even projects that at one time seemed like they were going to be a pivotal part of the company’s future —
such as Google+
— can be kicked to the curb unceremoniously if the math doesn’t look right to them. Indeed, the
graveyard of failed Google initiatives
has far more headstones than the company’s current roster of offerings.
Which is so say, that there’s every possibility that user reaction to this news might be enough to get Google to take a different tack. Verified sideloading isn’t slated to go live until 2027 for most of the world, although some territories will get it earlier, and a lot can happen between now and then.
Even if Google goes through with it, they’ve already offered something of an olive branch. The blog post mentions that they intend to develop a carve out in the system that will allow students and hobbyists to install their own self-developed applications. Depending on what that looks like, this whole debate could be moot, at least for folks like us.
In either event, the path would seem clear. If we want to make sure there’s choice when it comes to Android software, the community needs to make noise about the issue and keep the pressure on. Google’s big, but we’re bigger. | 170 | 44 | [
{
"comment_id": "8170765",
"author": "Malcovich",
"timestamp": "2025-08-28T14:31:57",
"content": "Consumer hostile corporations deserve hostile consumers.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8170812",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp":... | 1,760,371,440.130955 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/28/receiving-radio-signals-from-space-like-its-1994/ | Receiving Radio Signals From Space Like It’s 1994 | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"1994",
"90's",
"apt",
"fm",
"noaa",
"radio",
"satellite",
"weather",
"wire wrap"
] | For certain situations, older hardware is preferred or even needed to accomplish a task. This is common in industrial applications where old machinery might not be supported by modern hardware or software. Even in these situations though, we have the benefit of modern technology and the Internet to get these systems up and running again. [Old Computers Sucked]
is not only building a mid-90s system to receive NOAA satellite imagery
, he’s doing it only with tools and equipment available to someone from this era.
Of course the first step here is to set up a computer and the relevant software that an amateur radio operator would have had access to in 1994. [Old Computers Sucked] already had the computer, so he turned to JV-FAX for software. This tool can decode the
APT encoding
used by some NOAA satellites without immediately filling his 2 MB hard drive, so with that out of the way he starts on building the radio.
In the 90s, wire wrapping was common for prototyping so he builds a hardware digitizer interface using this method, which will be used to help the computer interface with the radio. [Old Computers Sucked] is rolling his own hardware here as well, based on a Motorola MC3362 VHF FM chip and a phase-locked loop (PLL), although this time on a PCB since RF doesn’t behave nicely with wire wrap. The PCB design is also done with software from the 90s, in this case Protel which is known today as Altium Designer.
In the end, [Old Computers Sucked] was able to receive portions of imagery from weather satellites still using the analog FM signals from days of yore, but there are a few problems with his build that are keeping him from seeing perfectly clear imagery. He’s not exactly sure what’s wrong but he suspects its with the hardware digitizer as it was behaving erratically earlier in the build. We admire his dedication to the time period, though, down to almost every detail of the build.
It reminds us of [saveitforparts]’s effort to get an 80s satellite internet experience a little while back
. | 18 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8170709",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-08-28T12:52:28",
"content": "I wanted to build this so bad as a kid…https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Poptronics/90s/90/PE-1990-11.pdf",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,371,439.930391 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/28/the-data-plot-thickens/ | The (Data) Plot Thickens | Al Williams | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"data analysis",
"data visualization",
"Jupyter Notebook",
"LabPlot"
] | You’ve generated a ton of data. How do you analyze it and present it? Sure, you can use a spreadsheet. Or break out some programming tools.
Or try LabPlot
. Sure, it is sort of like a spreadsheet. But it does more. It has object management features, worksheets like a Juypter notebook, and a software development kit, in case it doesn’t do what you want out of the box.
The program is made to deal with very large data sets. There are tons of output options, including the usual line plots, histograms, and more exotic things like Q-Q plots. You can have hierarchies of spreadsheets (for example, a child spreadsheet can compute statistics about a parent spreadsheet). There are tons of regression analysis tools, likelihood estimation, and numerical integration and differentiation built in.
Fourier transforms and filters? Of course. The title graphic shows the program pulling SOS out of the noise using signal processing techniques. It also works as a front end for programs ranging from Python and Julia, to Scilab and Octave, to name a few. If you insist, it can read Jupyter projects, too. A lot of features? That’s not even a start. For example, you can input an image file of a plot and extract data from it. It is an impressive piece of software.
A good way to get the flavor of it is to watch one of the many videos on the YouTube channel (you can see one below). Or, since you can download it for Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, or Haiku, just grab it and try it out.
If you’ve been putting off
Jupyter notebooks
, this might be your excuse to skip them. If you think spreadsheets are just fine for processing signals and other big sets, you aren’t wrong.
But it sure is hard
. | 35 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8170618",
"author": "ALX_skater",
"timestamp": "2025-08-28T09:17:57",
"content": "How do you analyze it and present it?MATLAB.Why would you reinvent the wheel?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8170621",
"author": "jj",
... | 1,760,371,440.197282 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/27/lynx-r1-headset-makers-release-6dof-slam-solution-as-open-source/ | Lynx-R1 Headset Makers Release 6DoF SLAM Solution As Open Source | Donald Papp | [
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"6dof",
"crowdfunding",
"Lynx",
"MR",
"SLAM",
"vr"
] | Some readers may recall the Lynx-R1 headset — it was conceived as an Android virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) headset with built-in hand tracking, designed to be open where others were closed, allowing developers and users access to inner workings in defiance of walled gardens. It looked very promising, with features rivaling (or surpassing) those of its contemporaries.
Founder [Stan Larroque] recently announced that
Lynx’s 6DoF SLAM (simultaneous location and mapping) solution has been released as open source
. ORB-SLAM3, modified for Android-based hardware (
GitHub repository
), takes in camera images and outputs a
6DoF
pose, and does so effectively in real-time. The repository contains some added details as well as a demo application that can run on the Lynx-R1 headset.
The unusual optics are memorable. (
Hands-on Lynx-R1
by Antony Vitillo)
As a headset the Lynx-R1 had a number of intriguing elements. The unusual optics, the flip-up design, and built-in hand tracking were impressive for its time, as was the high-quality mixed reality pass-through. That last feature refers to the headset using its external cameras as inputs to let the user see the real world, but with the ability to have virtual elements displayed and apparently anchored to real-world locations. Doing this depends heavily on the headset being able to track its position in the real world with both high accuracy and low latency, and this is what ORB-SLAM3 provides.
A successful crowdfunding campaign for the Lynx-R1 in 2021 showed that a significant number of people were on board with what Lynx was offering, but developing brand new consumer hardware is a challenging road for many reasons unrelated to developing the actual
thing
. There was
a hands-on at a trade show in 2021
and units were originally intended to ship out in 2022, but sadly that didn’t happen. Units still occasionally trickle out to backers and pre-orders according to the
unofficial Discord
, but it’s safe to say things didn’t really go as planned for the R1.
It remains a genuinely noteworthy piece of hardware, especially considering it was not a product of one of the tech giants. If we manage to get our hands on one of them, we’ll certainly give you a good look at it. | 8 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8170051",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-08-27T13:13:54",
"content": "They didn’t make orbslam-3. It was published back in 2020 (https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.11898) and was open sourced in 2021 (https://github.com/UZ-SLAMLab/ORB_SLAM3). I’ve personally used it in projects.",
"p... | 1,760,371,440.445281 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/27/a-tool-changing-3d-printer-for-the-masses/ | A Tool-changing 3D Printer For The Masses | Tyler August | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"snapmaker",
"toolchanger"
] | Modern multi-material printers certainly have their advantages, but all that purging has a way to add up to oodles of waste. Tool-changing printers offer a way to do multi-material prints without the purge waste, but at the cost of complexity. Plastic’s cheap, though, so the logic has been that you could never save enough on materials cost to make up for the added capital cost of a tool-changer — that is, until now.
Currently active on Kickstarter, the Snapmaker U1 promises to change that equation.
[Albert] got his hands on a pre-production prototype
for a review on
247Printing
, and what we see looks promising.
The printer features the ubiquitous 235 mm x 235 mm bed size — pretty much the standard for a printer these days, but quite a lot smaller than the bed of what’s arguably the machine’s closest competition, the tool-changing Prusa XL. On the other hand, at under one thousand US dollars, it’s one quarter the price of Prusa’s top of the line offering. Compared to the XL, it’s faster in every operation, from heating the bed and nozzle to actual printing and even head swapping. That said, as you’d expect from Prusa, the XL comes dialed-in for perfect prints in a way that Snapmaker doesn’t manage — particularly for TPU. You’re also limited to four tool heads, compared to the five supported by the Prusa XL.
The U1 is also faster in multi-material than its price-equivalent competitors from Bambu Lab, up to two to three times shorter print times, depending on the print. It’s worth noting that the actual print speed is comparable, but the Snapmaker takes the lead when you factor in all the time wasted purging and changing filaments.
The assisted spool loading on the sides of the machine uses RFID tags to automatically track the colour and material of Snapmaker filament. That feature seems to take a certain inspiration from the Bambu Labs Mini-AMS, but it is an area [Albert] identifies as needing particular attention from Snapmaker. In the beta configuration he got his hands on, it only loads filament about 50% of the time. One can only imagine the final production models will do better than that!
In spite of that, [Albert] says he’s backing the Kickstarter. Given Snapmaker is an established company — we featured an earlier
Snapmaker CNC/Printer/Laser combo machine back in 2021
— that’s less of a risk than it could be. | 26 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8169892",
"author": "east",
"timestamp": "2025-08-27T08:19:44",
"content": "all that purging has a way to add up to oodles of wasteIdk but on my single nozzle dual extruder setup all that purging adds up to about a half gram on smaller prints up to 1.5g on larger prints and that cou... | 1,760,371,440.652751 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/26/simulating-the-commodore-pet/ | Simulating The Commodore PET | John Elliot V | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"Commodore PET",
"digital",
"emulation",
"simulation"
] | Over on his blog our hacker [cpt_tom] shows us
how to simulate the hardware for a Commodore PET
. Two of them in fact, one with static RAM and the other with dynamic RAM.
This project is serious business. The simulation environment used is
Digital
. Digital is a digital logic designer and circuit simulator designed for educational purposes. It’s a Java program that runs under the JVM. It deals in .dig files which are XML files that represent the details of the simulated hardware components. You don’t need to write the XML files by hand, there is a GUI for that.
This digital simulation from [cpt_tom] is based on the
original schematics
. To run [cpt_tom]’s code you first need to clone his GitHub repository:
https://github.com/innot/PET-Digital-Simulation
. You will need to install Digtial and configure it with the PETComponentsDigitalPlugin.jar Java library that ships with [cpt_tom]’s code (the details are in the blog post linked above). If you want to go deep into the PETComponentsDigitalPlugin.jar rabbit hole see
Sim6502Java
and
PETComponentsPlugin
.
What’s not in the documentation is that you will need to update the paths to the binaries for the ROMs. This means searching in the .dig XML files for “C:\Users\thoma\Documents\Projects\PET-Digital-Simulation” and replacing that path to whichever path actually contains your ROM binaries (they will be in the code from GitHub and have the same directory structure). This simulation is complete and the hardware components defined can actually run the binaries in the emulated ROMs.
It is immensely satisfying after you’ve got everything running to enter at the keyboard:
10 PRINT "HELLO, WORLD"
RUN
To be greeted with:
HELLO, WORLD
READY.
This is what technology is all about! :)
If you do go through the process of downloading this code and loading it in the Digital simulator you will be presented with a complete schematic comprised of the following components: CPU, IEEE-488 Interface, Cassette and Keyboard, ROMS, RAMS, Master Clock, Display Logic, and Display RAMs. All the bits you need for a complete and functional computer!
If you’re interested in the Commodore PET you might also like to check out
A Tricky Commodore PET Repair And A Lesson About Assumptions
.
Thanks to [Thomas Holland] for
writing in
to let us know about this one. | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8170076",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-08-27T14:05:32",
"content": "Cool! 😎By the way, there were hi-res graphics board for the PET line.To do serious work, such as PCB design, drawing circuit schematics or do CAD.Would be cool if “emulators” would add one or two of them ... | 1,760,371,440.688923 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/26/google-will-require-developer-verification-even-for-sideloading/ | Google Will Require Developer Verification Even For Sideloading | Maya Posch | [
"Android Hacks",
"News"
] | [
"android",
"computer security",
"sideload"
] | Do you like writing software for Android, perhaps even sideload the occasional APK onto your Android device? In that case some big changes are heading your way, with Google announcing that they will soon
require developer verification for all applications
installed on certified Android devices – meaning basically every mainstream device. Those of us who have distributed Android apps via the Google app store will have noticed this change already, with developer verification in the form of sending in a scan of your government ID now mandatory, along with providing your contact information.
What this latest change thus effectively seems to imply is that workarounds like sideloading or using alternative app stores, like F-Droid, will no longer suffice to escape these verification demands. According to the Google blog post, these changes will be trialed starting in October of 2025, with developer verification becoming ‘available’ to all developers in March of 2026, followed by Google-blessed Android devices in Brazil, Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore becoming the first to require this verification starting in September of 2026.
Google expects that this system will be rolled out globally starting in 2027, meaning that every Google-blessed Android device will maintain a whitelist of ‘verified developers’, not unlike the locked-down Apple mobile ecosystem. Although Google’s claim is that this is for ‘security’, it does not prevent the regular practice of scammers buying up existing – verified – developer accounts, nor does it harden Android against unscrupulous apps. More likely is that this will wipe out Android as an actual alternative to Apple’s mobile OS offerings, especially for the hobbyist and open source developer. | 115 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "8169786",
"author": "A",
"timestamp": "2025-08-27T02:20:21",
"content": "Boycott all proprietary software and centralized services. Open source de-googled Android ROMs will continue to exist so everyone should make an effort to use those. Alternative frontends like invidious, newpip... | 1,760,371,440.394497 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/26/avocado-harvester-is-a-cut-above/ | Avocado Harvester Is A Cut Above | Bryan Cockfield | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"avocado",
"cutting",
"harvest",
"pole",
"snipper",
"tree"
] | For a farmer or gardener, fruit trees offer a way to make food (and sometimes money) with a minimum of effort, especially when compared to growing annual vegetables. Mature trees can be fairly self-sufficient, and may only need to be pruned once a year if at all. But getting the fruit down from these heights can be a challenge, even if it is on average less work than managing vegetable crops. [Kladrie] created
this avocado snipper to help with the harvest of this crop
.
Compounding the problem for avocados, even compared to other types of fruit, is their inscrutable ripeness schedule. Some have suggested that cutting the avocados out of the trees rather than pulling them is a way to help solve this issue as well, so [Kladrie] modified a pair of standard garden shears to mount on top of a long pole. A string is passed through the handle so that the user can operate them from the ground, and a small basket catches the fruit before it can plummet to the Earth. A 3D-printed guide helps ensure that the operator can reliable snip the avocados off of the tree on the first try without having to flail about with the pole and hope for the best, and the part holds the basket to the pole as well.
For those living in more northern climates, this design is similar to many tools made for harvesting apples, but the addition of the guide solves a lot of the problems these tools can have which is largely that it’s easy to miss the stems on the first try. Another problem with pulling the fruits off the tree, regardless of species, is that they can sometimes fling off of their branches in unpredictable ways which the snipping tool solves as well. Although it might not work well for avocados, if you end up using this tool for apples
we also have a suggestion for what to do with them next
. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8169736",
"author": "Flotsam",
"timestamp": "2025-08-26T23:55:16",
"content": "I’m adding Avocado Harvester to my list of potential band names.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8169760",
"author": "Tony M",
"tim... | 1,760,371,440.590455 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/26/battery-repair-by-reverse-engineering/ | Battery Repair By Reverse Engineering | Tyler August | [
"Battery Hacks"
] | [
"battery pack teardown",
"repair",
"reverse engineering",
"ryobi"
] | Ryobi is not exactly the Cadillac of cordless tools, but one still has certain expectations when buying a product. For most of us “don’t randomly stop working” is on the list. Ryobi 18-volt battery packs don’t always meet that expectation, but fortunately for the rest of us [Badar Jahangir Kayani] took matters into his own hands and
reverse-engineered the pack to find all the common faults– and how to fix them.
[Badar]’s work was specifically on the Ryobi PBP005 18-volt battery packs. He’s reproduced the schematic for them and given a fairly comprehensive troubleshooting guide on his blog. The most common issue (65%) with the large number of batteries he tested had nothing to do with the cells or the circuit, but was the result of some sort of firmware lock.
It isn’t totally clear what caused the firmware to lock the batteries in these cases. We agree with [Badar] that it is probably some kind of glitch in a safety routine. Regardless, if you have one of these batteries that won’t charge and exhibits the characteristic flash pattern (flashing once, then again four times when pushing the battery test button), [Badar] has the fix for you. He actually has the written up the fix for a few flash patterns, but the firmware lockout is the one that needed the most work.
[Badar] took the time to find the J-tag pins hidden on the board, and flash the firmware from the NXP micro-controller that runs the show. Having done that, some snooping and comparison between bricked and working batteries found a single byte difference at a specific hex address. Writing the byte to zero, and refreshing the firmware results in batteries as good as new. At least as good as they were before the firmware lock-down kicked in, anyway.
He also discusses how to deal with unbalanced packs, dead diodes, and more. Thanks to the magic of buying a lot of dead packs on e-Bay, [Badar] was able to tally up the various failure modes; the firmware lockout discussed above was by far the majority of them, at 65%. [Badar]’s work is both comprehensive and impressive, and his blog is worth checking out even if you don’t use the green brand’s batteries. We’ve also embedded his video below if you’d rather watch than read and/or want to help out [Badar] get pennies from YouTube monetization. We really do have to give kudos for providing such a good write up along with the video.
This isn’t the
first attempt we’ve seen
at tearing into Ryobi batteries. When they’re working, the cheap packs are an excellent source of power for
everything from CPap
machines to
electric bicycles
.
Thanks to [Badar] for the tip. | 28 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8169647",
"author": "Ian",
"timestamp": "2025-08-26T20:09:41",
"content": "63% of the “failed” batteries were actually working, but simply disabled by their own firmware?That feels well past the point where a consumer protection agency should be stepping in.",
"parent_id": null,... | 1,760,371,440.75489 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/26/automated-brewing/ | Automated Brewing | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Beer Hacks"
] | [
"automation",
"beer",
"brewing",
"ESP32",
"kitchen",
"stirring",
"temperature-control"
] | There’s little more to making alcoholic beverages than sugar, water, yeast, and time. Of course those with more refined or less utilitarian tastes may want to invest a bit more care and effort into making their concoctions. For beer making especially this can be a very involved task, but
[Fieldman] has come up with a machine
that helps automate the process and take away some of the tedium.
[Fieldman] has been making beers in relatively small eight-liter batches for a while now, and although it’s smaller than a lot of home brewers, it lends itself perfectly to automation. Rather than use a gas stove for a larger boil this process is done on a large hot plate, which is much more easily controlled by a microcontroller. The system uses an ESP32 for temperature control, and it also runs a paddle stirrer and controls a screen which lets the brewer know when it’s time to add ingredients or take the next step in the process. Various beers can be programmed in, and the touchscreen makes it easy to know at a glance what’s going on.
For a setup of this size this is a perfect way to take away some of the hassle of beer brewing like making sure the stove didn’t accidentally get too hot or making sure it’s adequately stirred for the large number of hours it might take to brew, but it still leaves the brewer in charge for the important steps.
Beer brewing is a hobby with a lot of rabbit holes to jump down, and it can get as complicated as you like.
Just take a look at this larger brewery setup that automates more tasks on a much larger scale
. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8169591",
"author": "badtaste",
"timestamp": "2025-08-26T18:45:55",
"content": "Super cool! Well done, mate!You could further automate the cooling phase of the wort by using a heat exchanger, which would skip the step of moving the pot into the bigger bucket. But that’s optional.Wha... | 1,760,371,440.841241 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/25/diy-telescope-mount-for-stellar-tracking/ | DIY Telescope Mount For Stellar Tracking | Matt Varian | [
"hardware"
] | [
"equatorial tracking",
"telescope",
"telescope mount"
] | Pointing at stars may seem easy on the surface—just mount a telescope to a tripod and you’re done, right? As anyone who’s spent time with a telescope can tell you, it’s not that simple, given that the Earth is always spinning. [Sven] set out to
make his own mount
to compensate for the rotation of the Earth, which led to some pretty amazing results.
In this project, [Sven] designed a GoTo mount, which is a telescope equatorial mount capable of being pointed at specific parts of the sky and tracking them to allow for long-exposure photos with minimal blur due to the Earth’s movement. He first went down the path of finding the correct harmonic gearbox for the steppers used. A harmonic drive system would allow smooth, precise movement without backlash, and the 100:1 stepdown would provide for the slightest of adjustments.
The steppers are controlled by a custom PCB [Sven] designed around an ESP32-S3. The first PCB had a mistake in the power delivery circuit. After a small tweak, V2 boards arrived and work great. The PCB runs
OnStepX
, a great open-source project centered around pointing telescopes, cutting down a lot of the software workload on this project.
After all the work put in, you may be wondering how well it works. [Sven] was able to get a pointing accuracy of 1-2 arcseconds from his mount. To get an idea of how great that is, 1 arcsecond is about the same as pointing at a penny from 4 km (2.5 miles) away. Fantastic results, [Sven], and thank you for sending in this great project—be sure to head over to his site and read all the details of this impressive build. If you found this interesting, be sure to check out some of our other
telescope-related projects
. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8168688",
"author": "dave",
"timestamp": "2025-08-25T08:55:07",
"content": "This is really great especially for disabled people, like me, so we can keep doing observations.As an aside does anyone have the link for the startracker navigator project, I think it was a conceptual revers... | 1,760,371,440.89104 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/24/a-pll-for-perfect-pitch/ | A PLL For Perfect Pitch | Jenny List | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"440hz",
"phase lock loop",
"PLL"
] | When Hackaday runs a contest, we see all manner of clever projects. But inevitably there are some we don’t see, because their builders didn’t manage to get them finished in time. [Park Frazer]’s phase-locked loop is one of them. The circuit is
an all-discrete PLL that derives a 440 Hz output from a 1 Hz input
, and it arrived just too late for our 1 Hz contest.
If you aren’t familiar with a phase-locked loop, in this context you can think of them as a programmable frequency multiplier. A voltage-controlled oscillator is locked to an input frequency by comparing the two with a phase detector. Multiplication can be achieved by putting a frequency divider between the oscillator and the phase detector. It’s at the same time a complex and easy to understand circuit. In this case, when broken down into a set of multivibrators, it makes sense. The charge pump phase detector is a little different from the XOR gate we were expecting, but as he explains, it’s better.
If PLLs are a mystery,
have a look at this video from a [Jeri Ellsworth] and [Bil Herd]
. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8168638",
"author": "Ale",
"timestamp": "2025-08-25T06:18:59",
"content": "I did read the article, very detailed. Of course 440 kHz ist out of pitch! The Author got it up to 440 Hz, that was his intention, anyways. The construction on a double sided PCB deserves its own prise too.",... | 1,760,371,440.929406 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/24/rp2040-assembly-language-mix-and-match/ | RP2040 Assembly Language Mix And Match | Al Williams | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Software Development"
] | [
"inline assembly",
"rp2040"
] | [David] is building a project with an OLED, a keyboard, and an RP2040. He’s perfected a scanning routine in C to work with the keyboard, but he still had some places he wanted to use even lower-level instructions. That was as good an excuse as any to experiment with
inline assembly language inside the C program
.
The goal was to grab the keyboard’s input and stick it into a memory address register so the data at that address could be shown on the display. However, there was a complication because memory access of this type has to be word-aligned.
Sure, you could mask the low bits of the address, do the read, and then set an index to pick the specific byte, but assembly is easy, and it is good to know how to put it in your code, anyway.
[David] only needed one instruction that is meant for byte access, so as assembly embeddings go, this was quite simple. We’ve done similar things for
Linux
, although, of course, the Arm assembly language here is different than what we used.
You probably don’t need assembly for every project. But it is nice to know how to do it when you need it. Many people think you don’t need to learn assembly these days, but we
mostly disagree
. | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8168655",
"author": "Danjovic",
"timestamp": "2025-08-25T07:27:20",
"content": "David tutorials about are fantastic! The Pico PIO series are the best I found about such peripheral.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8169877",
... | 1,760,371,440.795751 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/24/hackaday-links-august-24-2025/ | Hackaday Links: August 24, 2025 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"amateur radio",
"atlas",
"battle bots",
"boat anchor",
"Collins",
"cooking",
"fight club",
"hackaday links",
"ham",
"hologram",
"humanoid",
"Korea",
"law enforcement",
"mathematics",
"onions",
"open-reel",
"radio",
"reel-to-reel",
"synth"
] | “Emergency Law Enforcement Officer Hologram program activated. Please state the nature of your criminal or civil emergency.” Taking a cue from
Star Trek: Voyager
, the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency is testing
a holographic police officer
, with surprisingly — dare we say, suspiciously? — positive results. The virtual officer makes an appearance every two minutes in the evening hours in a public park, presumably one with a history of criminal activity. The projection is accompanied by a stern warning that the area is being monitored with cameras, and that should anything untoward transpire, meat-based officers, presumably wearing something other than the dapper but impractical full-dress uniform the hologram sports, will be dispatched to deal with the issue.
The projected police officer is the product of the South Korean firm
Hologramica
, which seems to be focused on bringing obsolete or metabolically challenged pop and sports stars back to life. The company uses one of two techniques for its 3D projection: the tried and true
“Pepper’s Ghost”
trick or a proprietary method they call “3D Holonet.” Given the conditions, we’d guess the police projection is using the latter, which uses a transparent screen with metallic silver embedded into it. Aside from the cool factor, we’re not sure how this is better than something as simple as a cardboard cutout with a cop printed on it, or even just some signs telling people to watch their step. Then again, maybe Starbucks will consider employing the holo-cops in their South Korean stores to deal with their
cagonjok
problem.
“The first rule of Robo Fight Club is: you don’t talk about Robo Fight Club.” Unfortunately, that rule won’t work when you’re trying to create
the world’s premier cyber blood sport
, as a fellow named Cix Liv — that’s “109 54” in Roman numerals for those of you keeping score at home — aims to do. His outfit is called
REK
, which he claims will be “the next UFC,” referring to the wildly popular mixed martial arts organization. To meet that improbable goal, he stages fights between humanoid robots controlled by VR-wearing pilots. There’s a video clip of the action in the article; perhaps as humanoid bots get better, so will the fights, but for now, the action is a little tame for our tastes. But what would really jazz things up is human versus robot fights. We’d pay to see someone mix it up with
Atlas
. Maybe not
the original electro-hydraulic version
, though — that would probably get out of hand pretty fast.
We stumbled across
a really interesting article on Arthur A. Collins
, someone whose name will likely only ring a bell among aficionados of old amateur radio gear. The Collins Radio Company produced legendary ham radio equipment from the 1930s all the way into the 1970s. Their bulky, vacuum tube “boat anchor” radios are still highly prized among collectors, long after the company was absorbed into a series of corporations with less and less interest in radio communications. The article details the genesis of Collins Radio, including the shortwave exploits of a 15-year-old Arthur Collins, who in 1925 used his homebrew 1,000-watt transmitter to contact the National Geographic Society’s expedition to Greenland. It’s a fascinating story and aptly illustrates how a passion for electronics can lead to pretty important breakthroughs, even if you’re just a teenager in your parents’ attic.
How do you cut your onions? It’s not an unimportant question, at least if you care enough about your cooking that your onions are diced evenly to ensure proper cooking. However you’re doing it, though, you’re probably wrong, at least according to
this wonderfully but needlessly in-depth look at the mathematics of onion dicing
. The analysis looks at an optimized cross-section of an onion and determines the best way to cut it to achieve maximum uniformity in the resulting dices. The diagrams are interactive, allowing you to adjust the number of vertical or radial cuts and categorize the results based on the standard deviation in the area of the pieces. It’s an impressive bit of work, with the obvious limitation of simplifying the onion to two dimensions. But with that awesome onion font, we can forgive a lot.
And finally, when you think of instruments played with a bow, you probably think of violins, cellos, and the like. What doesn’t spring to mind is
bow-played open-reel tape decks
, but it turns out that they’re a thing, and they’re pretty cool. The Open Reel Ensemble has three classic open-reel decks, which look like Pioneer RT-1011Ls, each of which has a length of tape fed through the heads and around one reel. The ends of the tape are attached to either end of a bamboo pole, which the artist holds taut and moves back and forth through the heads. Whatever signals are on the tape — we assume it’s just simple tones — gets played back and piped into a keyboard synth, which the artist plays with his other hand. One of the decks also has a mic attached near the heads, which seems to pick up the sound of the artist thumping on the bow, delivering a nice rhythm section. It’s a unique and surprisingly funky sound. Enjoy! | 9 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8168549",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp": "2025-08-25T01:40:25",
"content": "“REGISTER YOUR CRIMES – It’s the law!”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8168551",
"author": "baltar",
"timestamp": "2025-08-25T01:47:47",
"... | 1,760,371,441.106022 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/24/esp32-sets-sail-as-a-modern-bus-pirate-powerhouse/ | ESP32 Sets Sail As A Modern Bus Pirate Powerhouse | Matt Varian | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"bus pirate",
"ESP32"
] | Bus Pirate is nearly a household name in the hardware hacking world. The first version came out way back in 2008, and there have been several revisions since then. You can buy pre-built Bus Pirate devices, but there’s also the option now to build our own. The
ESP32 Bus Pirate project
has everything you need to turn an ESP32 device into a protocol sniffing/decoding powerhouse—all on a board you may have sitting around from another project.
There are a ton of solutions when it comes to talking to different buses —I2C, UART, JTAG, you name it, there’s a purpose-built device for it. Over a decade ago, Dangerous Prototypes released the Bus Pirate, offering a Swiss Army knife of a tool to interface with this ever-expanding list of communications standards. The ESP32 Bus Pirate project is open-source firmware for ESP32s that gives them the ability to be the multi-tool that lets us communicate with a long list of protocols.
It supports a wide variety of devices, from the straightforward ESP32 S3 Dev Kit available from a long list of suppliers to the more specialized M5 Cardputer equipped with its own keyboard. The original Bus Pirate required plugging the board into a PC to use it; with this being ESP32-based, that’s no longer a limitation. So long as you can supply power to the ESP32, you can connect and control it via WiFi and a web browser. In addition to the Bus Pirate protocols, the project allows us to directly control the pins on the ESP32 board, should you want to do more with it besides interfacing with one of the supported protocols. Be sure to check out some of our other articles about
Bus Pirate
, as it’s been a fantastic tool for the hacker community over the years. | 5 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8168939",
"author": "Psa",
"timestamp": "2025-08-25T18:43:00",
"content": "Except it’s not a bus pirate.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8169491",
"author": "Marc",
"timestamp": "2025-08-26T14:22:25",
"content": "I c... | 1,760,371,441.02084 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/24/wire-photo-fax-teardown/ | Wire Photo Fax Teardown | Al Williams | [
"Teardown"
] | [
"drum scanner",
"fax",
"wirephoto"
] | Fax machines had a moment in the sun, but they are actually much older than you might expect. Before the consumer-grade fax machines arrived, there was a thriving market for “wire photos” used by, for example, news organizations and the weather service. In the United States, the WEFax from Western Electric was fairly common and shows up on the surplus market. [Thomas] has an English unit, a
Muirhead K-570B
, that is very clearly not a consumer-oriented machine. His unit dates back to 1983, but it reminds us of many older designs. Check out his teardown in the video below.
The phone line connection on this device is a pair of banana jacks! There are even jacks for an external meter. Inside, the device is about what you’d expect for a 1983 build. PCBs with bare tinned conductors and lots of through-hole parts.
While not a universally well-known name, Muirhead was a pioneering Scottish inventor. He recorded the first human electrocardiogram and collaborated with Sir Oliver Lodge on wireless telegraph patents. While another Scotsman, Alexander Bain, worked out how to chemically print on paper and Arthur Korn built the first machines that optically scanned the page, it was Murihead, in 1947, that worked out using a drum as the scanner, just as this machine does.
Think this is among the oldest fax machines ever?
No way
. Remember, though, in 1983, the consumer fax machines were just about to appear. Ask
FedEx
, we are sure they remember. | 14 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8168316",
"author": "FotonWriter",
"timestamp": "2025-08-24T19:17:07",
"content": "How cool! The first money i made out of high school has as a stringer for the local paper. I took a photo if a soldier standing guard on Memorial Day and the editor liked it so much he sent it out in ... | 1,760,371,440.981943 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/24/ambidextrous-robot-hand-speaks-in-signs/ | Ambidextrous Robot Hand Speaks In Signs | Aaron Beckendorf | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"american sign language",
"arduino mega",
"Arduino Mega 2560",
"robot hand",
"servo motor",
"sign language"
] | As difficult as it is for a human to learn ambidexterity, it’s quite easy to program into a humanoid robot. After all, a robot doesn’t need to overcome years of muscle memory. Giving a one-handed robot ambidexterity, however, takes some more creativity. [Kelvin Gonzales Amador] managed to do this with his
ambidextrous robot hand
, capable of signing in either left- or right-handed American Sign Language (ASL).
The essential ingredient is a separate servo motor for each joint in the hand, which allows each joint to bend equally well backward and forward. Nothing physically marks one side as the palm or the back of the hand. To change between left and right-handedness, a servo in the wrist simply turns the hand 180 degrees, the fingers flex in the other direction, and the transformation is complete. [Kelvin] demonstrates this in the video below by having the hand sign out the full ASL alphabet in both the right and left-handed configurations.
The tradeoff of a fully direct drive is that this takes 23 servo motors in the hand itself, plus a much larger servo for the wrist joint. Twenty small servo motors articulate the fingers, and three larger servos control joints within the hand. An Arduino Mega controls the hand with the aid of two PCA9685 PWM drivers. The physical hand itself is made out of 3D-printed PLA and nylon, painted gold for a more striking appearance.
This isn’t the first
language-signing robot hand
we’ve seen, though it does forgo
the second hand
. To make this perhaps one of the least efficient machine-to-machine communication protocols, you could also equip it with a
sign language translation glove
. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8168203",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-08-24T14:40:55",
"content": "Looks like Ralph, from 1994.https://web.stanford.edu/~dljaffe/Ralph/ralph.html",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8168211",
"author": "Anonymous cowa... | 1,760,371,441.062596 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/26/picture-by-paper-tape-wire-photos/ | Picture By Paper Tape | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"History",
"Slider"
] | [
"fax",
"wirephoto"
] | T
he April 1926 issue of “Science and Invention” had a fascinating graphic. It explained, for the curious, how a photo of a rescue at sea could be in the New York papers almost immediately. It was the modern miracle of the wire photo. But how did the picture get from Plymouth, England, to New York so quickly? Today, that’s no big deal, but set your wayback machine to a century ago.
Of course, the answer is analog fax. But think about it. How would you create an analog fax machine in 1926? The graphic is quite telling. (Click on it to enlarge, you won’t be disappointed.)
If you are like us, when you first saw it you thought: “Oh, sure, paper tape.” But a little more reflection makes you realize that solves nothing. How do you actually scan the photo onto the paper tape, and how can you reconstitute it on the other side? The paper tape is clearly digital, right? How do you do an analog-to-digital converter in 1926?
It Really is a Wire PHOTO
The graphic is amazingly technical in its description. Getting the negative from Plymouth to London is a short plane hop. From there, a photographer creates five prints on specially-coated zinc plates. Where the emulsion stays, the plate won’t conduct electricity. Where the developer removes it, electricity will flow.
The picture of the vessel S.S. Antione sinking (including a magnified inset)
Why five? Well, each print is successively darker. All five get mounted to a drum with five brushes making contact with the plate. Guess how many holes are in the paper tape? If you guessed five, gold star for you.
As you can see in the graphic, each brush drives a punch solenoid. It literally converts the brightness of the image into a digital code because the photographer made five prints, each one darker than the last. So something totally covered on all five plates gets no holes. Something totally uncovered gets five holes. Everything else gets something in between. This isn’t a five-bit converter. You can only get 00000, 00001, 00011, 00111, 011111, and 11111 out of the machine, for six levels of brightness.
Decoding
The decoding is also clever. A light passes through the five holes, and optics collimates the light into a single beam. That’s it. If there are no holes in the tape, the beam is dark. The more holes, the brighter it gets. The light hits a film, and then it is back to a darkroom on the other side of the ocean.
The rest of the process is nothing more than the usual way a picture gets printed in a newspaper.
If you want to see the graphic in context, you can grab a copy of the whole magazine (another
Hugo Gernsback
rag) at the excellent
World Radio History
site. You’ll also see that you could buy a rebuilt typewriter for $3 and that the magazine was interested if the spirits of the dead can find each other in the afterlife. Note this was the April issue. Be sure to check out the soldering iron described on page 1114. You’ll also see on that page that
Big Mouth Bill Bass
isn’t the recent fad you thought it was.
We are always fascinated by what smart people would develop if they had no better options. It is easy to think that the old days were full of stone knives and bear skins, but human ingenuity is seemingly boundless. If you want to see
really old fax technology
, it goes back much further than you would think. | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8169576",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-08-26T18:01:37",
"content": "OK, I get it. The bandwidth required to send the photo would be more than the cable could handle, so they “downsample” it onto the paper tape, which can then be sent slowly. Clever.",
"parent_id... | 1,760,371,441.161494 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/26/troubled-usb-device-this-tool-can-help/ | Troubled USB Device? This Tool Can Help | Heidi Ulrich | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"usb",
"USB tester"
] | You know how it goes — some gadgets stick around in your toolbox far longer than reason dictates, because maybe one day you’ll need it. How many of us held onto ISA diagnostic cards long past the death of the interface?
But unlike ISA, USB isn’t going away anytime soon. Which is exactly why this
USB and more tester by [Iron Fuse]
deserves a spot in your toolbox. This post is not meant to directly lure you into buying something, but seen how compact it is, it would be sad to challenge anyone to reinvent this ‘wheel’, instead of just ordering it.
So, to get into the details. This is
far from the first USB tester
to appear on these pages, but it is one of the most versatile ones we’ve seen so far. On the surface, it looks simple: a hand-soldered 14×17 cm PCB with twelve different connectors, all broken out to labelled test points. Hook up a dodgy cable or device, connect a known-good counterpart, and the board makes it painless to probe continuity, resistance, or those pesky shorts where D+ suddenly thinks it’s a ground line.
You’ll still need your multimeter (automation is promised for a future revision), but the convenience of not juggling probes into microscopic USB-C cavities is hard to overstate. Also, if finding out whether you have a power-only or a data cable is your goal,
this might be the tool for you instead. | 18 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8169568",
"author": "arifyn",
"timestamp": "2025-08-26T17:50:20",
"content": "“it would be sad to challenge anyone to reinvent this ‘wheel’, instead of just ordering it.”Sadly, ordering it is also a challenge, if one lives in the US. It appears that Tindie can’t currently figure out... | 1,760,371,441.438653 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/26/where-there-is-no-down-measuring-liquid-levels-in-space/ | Where There Is No Down: Measuring Liquid Levels In Space | Dan Maloney | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"astronaut",
"fuel",
"iss",
"liquid",
"nasa",
"oxidizer",
"pee",
"propellant",
"space",
"tank",
"ullage",
"urine"
] | As you can probably imagine, we get tips on a lot of really interesting projects here at Hackaday. Most are pretty serious, at least insofar as they aim to solve a specific problem in some new and clever way. Some, though, are a little more lighthearted, such as a fun project that came across the tips line back in May. Charmingly dubbed “
pISSStream
,” the project taps into NASA’s official public telemetry stream for the International Space Station to display the current level of the urine tank on the Space Station.
Now, there are a couple of reactions to a project like this when it comes across your desk. First and foremost is bemusement that someone would spend time and effort on a project like this — not that we don’t appreciate it; the icons alone are worth the price of admission. Next is sheer amazement that NASA provides access to a parameter like this in its public API, with a close second being the temptation to look at what other cool endpoints they expose.
But for my part, the first thing I thought of when I saw that project was, “How do they even measure liquid levels in space?” In a place where up and down don’t really have any practical meaning, the engineering challenges of liquid measurement must be pretty interesting. That led me down the rabbit hole of low-gravity process engineering, a field that takes everything you know about how fluids behave and flushes it into the space toilet.
What’s Up?
Before even considering the methods used to measure liquid levels in space, you really have to do away with the concept of “levels.” That’s tough to do for anyone who has spent a lifetime at the bottom of a gravity well, a place where the gravity vector is always straight down at 1
g
, fluids always seek their own level, and the densest stuff eventually makes its way to the bottom of a container. None of this applies in space, a place where surface tension and capillary action take the lead role in determining how fluids behave.
We’ve all seen
clips
of astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle or ISS having fun playing with a bit of water liberated from a drinking pouch, floating in a wobbly spheroid until it gets sucked up with a straw. That’s surface tension in action, forcing the liquid to assume the minimum surface area for a given volume. In the absence of an acceleration vector, fluids will do exactly the same thing inside a tank on a spacecraft. In the Apollo days, NASA used
cameras inside the fuel tanks
of their Saturn rockets to understand fluid flow during flights. These films showed the fuel level rapidly decreasing while the engines were burning, but the remaining fuel rushing to fill the entire tank with individual blobs of floating liquid once in free-fall. SpaceX does the same today with their rockets, with equally impressive results — apologies for the soundtrack.
So, getting propellants to the outlets of tanks in rockets turns out to be not much of a chore, at least for boosters, since the acceleration vector is almost always directed toward the nominal bottom of the tank, where the outlets are located. For non-reusable stages, it doesn’t really matter if the remaining fuel floats around once the engines turn off, since it and the booster are just going to burn up upon reentry or end up at the bottom of the ocean. But for reusable boosters, or for rockets that need to be restarted after a period of free fall, the fuel and oxidizer need to be settled back into their tanks before the engines can use them again.
Ullage Motors, Bookkeeping, and Going With The Flow
Ullage motor from a Saturn IB rocket. Motors like these provided a bit of acceleration to settle propellants to the nominal bottom of their tanks. Source:
Clemens Vasters
, CC BY 2.0.
Settling propellants requires at least a little acceleration in the right direction, which is provided by dedicated ullage motors. In general, ullage refers to the empty space in a closed container, and ullage motors are used to consolidate the mix of gas and liquid in a tank into a single volume. On the Saturn V rockets of the Apollo era, for example, up to a dozen solid-fuel ullage motors on the two upper stages were used to settle propellants.
With all the effort that goes into forcing liquid propellants to the bottom of their tanks, at least for most of the time, you’d think it would be pretty simple to include some sort of level gauging sensor, such as an ultrasonic sensor at the nominal top of the tank to measure the distance to the rapidly receding liquid surface as the engines burn. But in practice, there’s little need for sensing the volume of propellants left in the tank. Rather, the fuel remaining in the tank can be inferred from flow sensors in lines feeding the engines. If you know the flow rate and the starting volume, it’s easy enough to calculate the fuel remaining. SpaceX seems to use this method for their boosters, although they don’t expose a lot of detail to the public on their rocket designs. For the Saturn S-1C, the first stage of the Saturn V rocket, it was even simpler — they just filled the tanks with a known volume of propellants and burned them until they were basically empty.
In general, this is known as the bookkeeping or flow accounting method. This method has the disadvantage of compounding errors in flow measurement over time, but it’s still good enough for applications where some engineering wiggle room can be built in. In fact, this is the method used to monitor the urine tank level in the ISS, except in reverse. When the tank is emptied during resupply missions, the volume resets to zero, and each operation of one of the three Waste & Hygiene Compartments (WHC) aboard the station results in approximately 350 ml to 450 ml of fluid — urine, some flush water, and a small amount of liquid pretreatment — flowing into the urine holding tank. By keeping track of the number of flushes and by measuring the outflow of pretreated urine to the Urine Processing Assembly (UPA), which recycles the urine into potable water, the level of the tank can be estimated.
PUGS In Space
Propellant Utilization Gage Subsystem (PUGS) display from an Apollo Command Module. This is an early version that totals fuel and oxidizer in pounds rather than displaying the percent remaining. The dial indicates if fuel and oxidizer flows become unbalanced. Source:
Steve Jurvetson
, CC BY 2.0.
Monitoring pee on a space station may be important, but keeping track of propellants during crewed flights is a matter of life or death. During the Apollo missions, a variety of gauging methods were employed for fuel and oxidizer measurements, most of which relied on capacitance probes inside the tanks. The Apollo service module’s propulsion system used the Propellant Utilization Gauging Subsystem, or PUGS, to keep track of the fuel and oxidizer levels onboard.
PUGS relied primarily on capacitive probes mounted axially within the tank. For the fuel tanks, the sensor was a sealed Pyrex tube with a silver coating on the inside. The glass acted as the dielectric between the silver coating and the conductive Aerozine 50 fuel. In the oxidizer tanks, the inhibited nitrogen tetroxide acted as the dielectric, filling the space between concentric electrodes. Once settled with an ullage burn, the level of propellants could be determined by measuring the capacitance across the probes, which would vary with liquid level. Each probe also had a series of point contacts along its length. Measuring the impedance across the contacts would show which points were covered by propellant and which weren’t, giving a lower-resolution reading as a backup to the primary capacitive sensors.
For the Lunar Module, propellant levels for the descent stage were monitored with a similar but simpler Propellant Quantity Gage System (PQGS). Except for an initial ullage burn, fuel settling wasn’t needed during descent thanks to lunar gravity. The LM also used the same propellants as the service module, so the PQGS capacitive probes were the same as the PUGS probes, except for the lack of auxiliary impedance-based sensors. The PQGS capacitive readings were used to calculate the percent of fuel and oxidizer remaining, which was displayed digitally on the LM control panel.
The PQGS probe on the early Apollo landings gave incorrect readings of the remaining propellants thanks to sloshing inside the tanks, a defect that was made famous by Mission Control’s heart-stopping callouts of how many seconds of fuel were left during the Apollo 11 landing. This was fixed after Apollo 12 by adding new anti-slosh baffles to the PQGS probes.
Counting Bubbles
For crewed flights, ullage burns to settle fuel and get accurate tank level measurements are easy to justify. But not so for satellites and deep-space probes, which are lofted into orbit at great expense. These spacecraft can only carry a limited amount of propellant for maneuvering and station-keeping, which has to last months or even years, and the idea of wasting any of that precious allotment on ullage is a non-starter.
To work around this, engineers have devised clever methods to estimate the amount of propellants or other liquids in tanks under microgravity conditions. The pressure-volume-temperature (PVT) method can estimate the volume of fluid remaining based on measurements from pressure and temperature sensors inside the tank and the ideal gas law. Like the flow accounting method, the accuracy of the PVT method tends to decrease over time, mainly because the resolution of pressure sensors tends to get worse as the pressure decreases.
For some fluids, the thermal gauging method might be employed. This is a variation of the PVT method, which involves applying heat to the tank while monitoring the pressure and temperature of its contents. If the thermal characteristics of the process fluid are well known, it’s possible to infer the volume remaining. The downside is that a good thermal model of the tank and its environment is needed; it wouldn’t do, for instance, to have unaccounted heat gain from solar radiation during a measurement, or loss of heat due to conduction to space via the structure of the spacecraft.
Schematic of ECVT, which can be used to measure the volume of fluids floating in a tank in free fall. The capacitance between pairs of electrodes depends on the total dielectric constant of the gas and liquid in between them. Scanning all combinations of electrodes results in a map of the material in a tank. Source:
Marashdeh
, CC BY-SA 4.0.
For better accuracy, a more recent development in microgravity tank gauging is electrical capacitance volume sensing (ECVS), and the closely related electrical capacitance volume tomography (ECVT). The two methods use arrays of electrodes on the inside surface of a tank. The mixed-phase fluid in the tank acts as a dielectric, allowing capacitance measurements between any pair of electrodes. Readings are collected across each combination of electrodes, which can be used to build a map of where fluid is located within the tank. This is especially useful for tanks where liquid is floating in discrete spheroids. The volume of each of these blobs can be calculated and totalled to give the amount of liquid in the tank.
One promising gauging method, especially for deep-space missions, is radio frequency mass gauging, or RFMG. This method uses a small antenna to inject RF signals into a tank. The liquid inside the tank reflects these signals; analyzing the spectrum of these reflections can be used to calculate the amount of liquid inside the tank. RFMG was tested on the ISS before heading to the Moon aboard Intuitive Machines’ IM-1 lander, which touched down softly on the lunar surface in February of 2024, only to tip over onto its side. Luckily, the RFMG system had nothing to do with the landing anomaly; in fact, the sensor was critical to determining that cryogenic fuel levels in the lander were correct when temperature sensors indicated the tank was colder than expected, potentially pointing to a leak. | 40 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "8169495",
"author": "M_B",
"timestamp": "2025-08-26T14:33:44",
"content": "I literally just started looking into how they did liquids in space yesterday. Went down the ullage motor rabbithole. Talk about good timing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,441.304035 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/26/confirmation-of-record-220-pev-cosmic-neutrino-hit-on-earth/ | Confirmation Of Record 220 PeV Cosmic Neutrino Hit On Earth | Maya Posch | [
"Science",
"Space"
] | [
"ARCA",
"neutrinos"
] | Neutrinos are exceedingly common in the Universe, with billions of them zipping around us throughout the day from a variety of sources. Due to their extremely low mass and no electric charge they barely ever interact with other particles, making these so-called ‘ghost particles’ very hard to detect. That said, when they do interact the result is rather spectacular as they impart significant kinetic energy. The resulting flash of energy is used by neutrino detectors, with most neutrinos generally pegging out at around 10 petaelectronvolt (PeV), except for a 2023 event.
This neutrino event which occurred on February 13th back in 2023 was detected by the KM3NeT/ARCA detector and has
now been classified
as an ultra-high energy neutrino event at 220 PeV, suggesting that it was likely a cosmogenic neutrinos. When we originally reported on
this KM3-230213A event
, the data was still being analyzed based on a detected muon from the neutrino interaction even, with the researchers also having to exclude the possibility of it being a sensor glitch.
By comparing the KM3-230213A event data with data from other events at other detectors, it was possible to deduce that the most likely explanation was one of these ultra-high energy neutrinos. Since these are relatively rare compared to neutrinos that originate within or near Earth’s solar system, it’ll likely take a while for more of these detection events. As the KM3NeT/ARCA detector grid is still being expanded, we may see many more of them in Earth’s oceans. After all, if a neutrino hits a particle but there’s no sensor around to detect it, we’d never know it happened.
Top image: One of the photo-detector spheres of ARCA (Credit:
KM3NeT
) | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8169441",
"author": "Mr Name Required",
"timestamp": "2025-08-26T12:28:12",
"content": "I don’t have anything useful to add whatsoever, but there can’t be too many songs written about subatomic particles. However Klaatu’s ‘Little Neutrino’ is one, almost 50 years old now:“And now I’... | 1,760,371,441.348004 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/26/vic-20-gets-isa-slot-networking/ | VIC-20 Gets ISA Slot, Networking | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"commodore",
"expansion",
"interrupts",
"isa",
"isa bus",
"retrocomputing",
"timing",
"VIC-20"
] | There are few computing collapses more spectacular than the downfall of Commodore, but its rise as a home computer powerhouse in the early 80s was equally impressive. Driven initially by the VIC-20, this was the first home computer model to sell over a million units thanks to its low cost and accessibility for people outside of niche markets and hobbyist communities.
The VIC-20 would quickly be eclipsed by the much more famous Commodore 64, but for those still using these older machines there are a few tweaks to give it some extra functionality it was never originally designed for
like this build which gives it an ISA bus
.
To begin adapting the VIC-20 to the ISA standard, [Lee] built a fixed interrupt line handled with a simple transistor circuit. From there he started mapping memory and timing signals. The first attempt to find a portion of memory to use failed as it wasn’t as unused as he had thought, but eventually he settled on using the I/O area instead although still had to solve some problems with quirky ISA timing. There’s also a programmable logic chip which was needed to generate three additional signals for proper communication.
After solving some other issues around interrupts [Lee] was finally able to get the ISA bus working, specifically so he could add a 3Com networking card and get his VIC-20 on his LAN. Although the ISA bus has since gone out of fashion on modern computers, if you still have a computer with one (or build one onto your VIC-20),
it is a surprisingly versatile expansion port
.
Thanks to [Stephen] for the tip! | 22 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8169339",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-08-26T08:13:56",
"content": "Not the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. Someone once gave one to an arduino.To explain, basically there’s a lot that an ISA slot and an IDE port have in common. Someone misused a chip intended to add an ISA slot... | 1,760,371,441.221768 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/25/very-efficient-apfc-circuit-in-faulty-industrial-960-watt-power-supply/ | Very Efficient APFC Circuit In Faulty Industrial 960 Watt Power Supply | Maya Posch | [
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"apfc",
"power factor correction"
] | The best part about post-mortem teardowns of electronics is when you discover some unusual design features, whether or not these are related to the original fault. In the case of a
recent [DiodeGoneWild] video
involving the teardown of an industrial DIN-rail mounted 24 V, 960 Watt power supply, the source of the reported bang was easy enough to spot. During the subsequent teardown of this very nicely modular PSU the automatic power factor correction (APFC) board showed it to have an unusual design, which got captured in a schematic and is explained in the video.
Choosing such a APFC design seems to have been done in the name of efficiency, bypassing two of the internal diodes in the bridge rectifier with the external MOSFETs and ultrafast diodes. In short, it prevents some of the typical diode voltage drops by removing diodes in the path of the current.
Although not a new design, as succinctly pointed out in the comments by [marcogeri], it’s explained how even cutting out one diode worth of voltage drop in a PSU like this can save 10 Watt of losses. Since DIN rail PSUs rarely feature fans for active cooling, this kind of APFC design is highly relevant and helps to prevent passively cooled PSUs from spiraling into even more of a thermal nightmare.
As for the cause behind the sooty skid marks on one of the PCBs, that will be covered in the next video. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8169478",
"author": "Arklan",
"timestamp": "2025-08-26T13:39:58",
"content": "I didn’t watch the video but it sounds like they are talking about bridgeless pfc? Or just plain synchronous rectification 🤔",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"commen... | 1,760,371,441.384653 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/25/the-shady-school/ | The Shady School | Al Williams | [
"Software Development",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"gpu",
"shader"
] | We can understand why
shaderacademy.com
chose that name over “the shady school,” but whatever they call it, if you are looking to brush up on graphics programming with GPUs, it might be just what you are looking for.
The website offers challenges that task you to draw various 2D and 3D graphics using code in your browser. Of course, this presupposes you have WebGPU enabled in your browser which means no Firefox or Safari. It looks like you can do some exercises without WebGPU, but the cool ones will need you to use a Chrome-style browser.
You can search by level of difficulty, so maybe start with “Intro” and try doing “the fragment shader.” You’ll notice they already provide some code for you along with a bit of explanation. It also shows you a picture of what you should draw and what you really drew. You get a percentage based on the matching. There’s also a visual diff that can show you what’s different about your picture from the reference picture.
We admit that one is pretty simple. Consider moving on to “Easy” with options like “two images blend,” for example. There are problems at every level of difficulty. Although there is a part for compute shaders, none seem to be available yet. Too bad, because that’s what
we find most interesting
. If you prefer a different approach, there are other
tutorials
out there. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8169210",
"author": "warspigot",
"timestamp": "2025-08-26T03:15:33",
"content": "Firefox recently got WebGPU support:https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2025/07/15/shipping-webgpu-on-windows-in-firefox-141/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comm... | 1,760,371,441.587128 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/27/acoustic-coupling-like-its-1985/ | Acoustic Coupling Like It’s 1985 | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Phone Hacks"
] | [
"acoustic coupling",
"bbs",
"modem",
"pay phone",
"phone"
] | Before the days of mobile broadband, and before broadband itself even, there was a time where Internet access was provided by phone lines. To get onto a BBS or chat on ICQ required dialing a phone number and accoustically coupling a computer to the phone system. The digital data transmitted as audio didn’t have a lot of bandwidth by today’s standards but it was revolutionary for the time. [Nino] is taking us back to that era by using a serial modem at his house
and a device that can communicate to it through any phone, including a public pay phone
.
As someone in the present time can imagine, a huge challenge of this project wasn’t technical. Simply finding a working public phone in an era of smartphones was a major hurdle, and at one point involved accidentally upsetting local drug dealers. Eventually [Nino] finds a working pay phone that takes more than one type of coin and isn’t in a loud place where he can duct tape the receiver to his home brew modem and connect back to his computer in his house over the phone line like it’s 1994 again.
Of course with an analog connection like this on old, public hardware there were bound to be a few other issues as well. There were some quirks with the modems including them not hanging up properly and not processing commands quickly enough. [Nino] surmises that something like this hasn’t been done in 20 years, and while this might be true for pay phones we have seen other projects
that use VoIP systems at desk phones to accomplish a similar task
. | 20 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8170532",
"author": "Mamx",
"timestamp": "2025-08-28T05:19:30",
"content": "BS. Acoustic coupling was long dead when ICQ took off. It was the era of 56k modems, and the start of DSL",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8170683",
... | 1,760,371,441.644494 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/27/pascal-on-my-arduino-its-more-likely-than-you-think/ | Pascal? On My Arduino? It’s More Likely Than You Think | Tyler August | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"avr programming",
"Pascal"
] | The Arduino ecosystem is an amazing learning tool, but even those of us who love it admit that even the simplified C Arduino uses isn’t the ideal teaching language. Those of us who remember learning Pascal as our first “real” programming language in schools (first aside from BASIC, at least) might look fondly on the
AVRPascal project
by [Andrzej Karwowski].
[Andrzej] is using FreePascal’s compiler tools, and AVRdude to pipe compiled code onto the micro-controller. Those tools are built into his AVRPascal code editor to create a Pascal-based alternative to the Arduino IDE for programming AVR-based microcontrollers. The latest version, 3.3, even includes a serial port monitor compatible with the Arduino boards.
This guy, but with Pascal. What’s not to love?
The Arduino comparisons don’t stop there: [Andrzej] also maintains UnoLib, a Pascal library for the Arduino Uno and compatible boards with some of the functionality you’d expect from Arduino libraries: easy access to I/O (digital and analog ports) timers, serial communication, and even extras like i2c, LCD and sensor libraries.
He’s distributing the AVRPascal editor as freeware, but it is not open source. It’s too bad, because Pascal is a great choice for microcontrollers: compiled, it isn’t much slower than C, but it can be as easy to write as Python. Micropython shows there’s a big market for “easy” embedded programming; Pascal could help fill it in a more performant way. Is the one-man license holding this project back, or is it just that people don’t use Pascal much these days?
While AVR programming is mostly done in C, this is hardly the first time we’ve seen alternatives. While some have delved into the
frightening mysteries of assembly
, others have risen to
higher abstraction to run LISP
or even
good old fashioned BASIC
. Pascal seems like a good middle road, if you want to go off the beaten path away from C.
Via reddit. | 32 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "8170507",
"author": "irox",
"timestamp": "2025-08-28T03:25:16",
"content": "Using Pascal-FC could be a good option in this case. Basically Pascal with realtime/concurrency extensions, the British MOD’s alternative to ADA.https://www-users.york.ac.uk/~ab38/pf.html",
"parent_id":... | 1,760,371,441.719812 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/27/juicebox-rescue-freeing-tethered-ev-chargers-from-corporate-overlords/ | JuiceBox Rescue: Freeing Tethered EV Chargers From Corporate Overlords | Maya Posch | [
"Reverse Engineering",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"EV charger"
] | The JuiceBox charger in its natural environment. (Credit: Nathan Matias)
Having a charger installed at home for your electric car is very convenient, not only for the obvious home charging, but also for having scheduling and other features built-in. Sadly, like with so many devices today, these tend to be tethered to a remote service managed by the manufacturer. In the case of the JuiceBox charger that [Nathan Matias] and many of his neighbors bought into years ago, back then it and the associated JuiceNet service was still part of a quirky startup. After the startup got snapped up by a large company, things got so bad that [Nathan] and others saw themselves required to find a way
to untether their EV chargers
.
The drama began back in October of last year, when the North American branch of the parent company – Enel X Way – announced that it’d shutdown operations. After backlash, the online functionality was
kept alive
while a buyer was sought. That’s when [Nathan] and other JuiceBox owners got an email informing them that the online service would be shutdown, severely crippling their EV chargers.
Ultimately both a software and hardware solution was developed, the former being the
JuicePass Proxy
project which keeps the original hardware and associated app working. The other solution is a complete brain transplant, created by the folk over at
OpenEVSE
, which enables interoperability with e.g. Home Assistant through standard protocols like MQTT.
Stories like these make one wonder how much of this online functionality is actually required, and how much of it just a way for manufacturers to get consumers to
install a terminal in their homes
for online subscription services. | 32 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8170404",
"author": "fluffy",
"timestamp": "2025-08-28T00:03:06",
"content": "“Stores like these make one wonder how much of this online functionality is actually required”Absolutely none of it. Everything that the EVSE needs to do happens completely locally, and the only useful thi... | 1,760,371,443.095821 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/27/a-new-screen-upgrade-for-the-gba/ | A New Screen Upgrade For The GBA | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Nintendo Game Boy Hacks"
] | [
"Case mod",
"display",
"game boy",
"game boy advance"
] | The Game Boy Advance (GBA) was released in 2001 to breathe some new life into the handheld market, and it did it with remarkable success. Unfortunately, the original models had a glaring problem: their unlit LCD screens could be very difficult to see. For that reason, console modders who work on these systems tend to improve the screen first
like this project which brings a few other upgrades as well
.
The fully open-source modification is called the Open AGB Display and brings an IPS display to the classic console. The new screen has 480×480 resolution which is slightly larger than the original resolution but handles upscaling with no noticeable artifacts and even supports adding some back in like scanlines and pixelation to keep the early 00s aesthetic. The build does require permanently modifying the case though, but for the original GBA we don’t see much downside. [Tobi] also goes through a ton of detail on how the mod works as well, for those who want to take a deep dive into the background theory.
There has been a lot of activity in the Game Boy Advance communities lately though as the hardware and software become more understood. If you don’t want to modify original hardware, want an upgraded experience, but still want to use the original game cartridges
we might recommend something like the Game Bub instead
. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8170422",
"author": "arifyn",
"timestamp": "2025-08-28T00:29:35",
"content": "Re: “The new screen has 480×480 resolution which is slightly larger than the original resolution but handles upscaling with no noticeable artifacts.”This is true (though I’d quibble about the cutoff for “... | 1,760,371,443.024633 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/27/floss-weekly-episode-844-simulated-word-of-mouth/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 844: Simulated Word-of-Mouth | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"FLOSS Weekly",
"Open Source AI"
] | This week
Jonathan
,
Doc
, and
Aaron
chat about Open Source AI, advertisements, and where we’re at in the bubble roller coaster!
https://www.zdnet.com/article/no-grok-2-5-has-not-been-open-sourced-heres-how-you-can-tell/
https://about.fb.com/news/2024/07/open-source-ai-is-the-path-forward/
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on
our YouTube Channel
? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or contact the guest and have them contact us!
Take a look at the schedule here
.
Direct Download
in DRM-free MP3.
If you’d rather read along,
here’s the transcript for this week’s episode
.
Places to follow the FLOSS Weekly Podcast:
Spotify
RSS
Theme music: “Newer Wave” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under
Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,442.896249 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/27/homebrew-tire-pressure-monitoring-system/ | Homebrew Tire Pressure Monitoring System | Al Williams | [
"car hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"ble",
"tpms"
] | When [upir] saw that you could buy tire valve stem caps that read pressure electronically, he decided to
roll his own Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS)
like the one found on modern cars. An ESP32 and an OLED display read the pressure values. He didn’t have a car tire on his workbench though, so he had to improvise there.
Of course, a real TPMS sensor goes inside the tire, but screwing them on the valve stem is much easier to deal with. The sensors use Bluetooth Low Energy and take tiny batteries. In theory, you’re supposed to connect to them to your phone, although two different apps failed to find the sensors. Even a BLE scanner app wouldn’t pick them up. Turns out — and this makes sense — the sensors don’t send data if there’s no pressure on them, so as not to run down the batteries. Putting pressure on them made them pop up on the scanner.
The scanner was able to read the advertisement and then correlate pressure to the data. He discovered that someone had already decoded standard TPMS BLE data, except the advertisements he found were significantly longer than his own. Eventually he was able to find a good reference.
The data includes a status byte, the battery voltage, the temperature, and pressure. Once you know the format, it is straightforward to read it and create your own display. Many people would have ended the video there, but [upir] goes into great detail — the video is nearly an hour long. If you want to duplicate the project, there’s plenty of info and a code repository, too.
If you need to read the regular RF TPMS sensors,
grab a software-defined radio
. Many of these sensors
follow their own format
though, so be prepared. | 53 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "8170136",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-08-27T15:34:54",
"content": "My TPMS is to look at my tires before I drive.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8170174",
"author": "Press X for Doubt",
"timestam... | 1,760,371,442.981527 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/27/the-android-bluetooth-connection/ | The Android Bluetooth Connection | Al Williams | [
"Android Hacks",
"Linux Hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"android",
"app inventor",
"bluetooth",
"SPP"
] | Suppose someone came to talk to you and said, “I need your help. I have a Raspberry Pi-based robot and I want to develop a custom Android app to control it.” If you are like me, you’ll think about having to get the Android developer tools updated, and you’ll wonder if you remember exactly how to sign a manifest. Not an appealing thought. Sure, you can buy things off the shelf that make it easier, but then it isn’t custom, and you have to accept how it works. But it turns out that for simple things, you can use an old Google Labs project that is, surprisingly, still active and works well: MIT’s
App Inventor
— which, unfortunately, should have the acronym AI, but I’ll just call it Inventor to avoid confusion.
What’s Inventor? It lives in your browser. You lay out a fake phone screen using drag and drop, much like you’d use QT Designer or Visual Basic. You can switch views and attach actions using a block language sort of like Scratch. You can debug in an emulator or on your live phone wirelessly. Then, when you are ready, you can drop an APK file ready for people to download. Do you prefer an iPhone? There’s some support for it, although that’s not as mature. In particular, it appears that you can’t easily share an iPhone app with others.
Is it perfect? No, there are some quirks. But it works well and, with a little patience, can make amazingly good apps. Are they as efficient as some handcrafted masterpiece? Probably not. Does it matter? Probably not. I think it gets a bad rep because of the colorful blocks. Surely it’s made for kids. Well, honestly, it is. But it does a fine job, and just like TinkerCad or Lego, it is simple enough for kids, but you can use it to do some pretty amazing things.
How Fast?
How fast is it to create a simple Android app? Once you get used to it, it is very fast, and there are plenty of tutorials. Just for fun, I wrote a little custom web browser for my favorite website. It is hard to tell from the image, but there are several components present. The web browser at the bottom is obvious, and there are three oval buttons. The Hackaday logo is also clickable (it takes you home). What you can’t see is that there is a screen component you get by default. In there is a vertical layout that stacks the toolbar with the web browser. Then the toolbar itself is a horizontal layout (colored yellow, as you can see).
The black bar at the bottom and the very top bar are parts of the fake phone, although you can also pick a fake monitor or tablet if you want more space to work.
What you can’t see is that there are two more hidden components. There’s a clock. If you are on the home page for an hour, the app refreshes the page. There’s also a share component that the share button will use. You can see three views of the app below. There are three views: a design view where you visually build the interface, a block view where you create code, and the final result running on a real phone.
In design mode, the browser doesn’t load
App Inventor uses blocks instead of source code
At runtime, my color choices aren’t as good as I thought
Code
Putting all that on the screen took just a few minutes. Sure, I played with the fonts and colors, but just to get the basic layout took well under five minutes. But what about the code? That’s simple, too, as you can see.
The drab boxes are for control structures like event handlers and if/then blocks. Purple boxes are for subroutine calls, and you can define your own subroutines, although that wasn’t needed here. The green blocks are properties, like the browser’s URL. You can
try it yourself
if you want.
Rather than turn this into a full-blown Inventor tutorial, check out any of the amazingly good tutorials on the YouTube channel, like the one below.
Half the Story
Earlier, I mentioned that your friend wants a robot controller to talk to a Raspberry Pi. I was surprised at how hard this turned out to be, but it wasn’t Inventor’s fault. There are three obvious choices: the system can make web requests, or it can connect via Bluetooth. It can also work with a serial port.
I made the mistake of deciding to use Bluetooth serial using the Bluetooth client component. From Inventor’s point of view, this is easy, if not very sophisticated. But the Linux side turned out to be a pain.
There was a time when Bluez, the Linux Bluetooth stack, had a fairly easy way to create a fake serial port that talked over Bluetooth. There are numerous examples of this circulating on the Internet. But they decided that wasn’t good for some reason and deprecated it. Modern Linux doesn’t like all that and expects you to create a dbus program that can receive bus messages from the Bluetooth stack.
To Be Fair…
Ok, in all fairness, you can reload the Bluetooth stack with a compatibility flag — at least for now — and it will still work the old way. But you know they’ll eventually turn that off, so I decided I should do it the right way. Instead of fighting it, though, I found
some code
on GitHub that created a simple client or server for SPP (the serial port profile). I stripped it down to just work as a server, and then bolted out a separate function
bt_main()
where you can just write code that works with streams. That way, all the hocus pocus — and there is a lot of it — stays out of your way.
You can find my changes to the original code, also on
GitHub
. Look at the spp_bridge.c file, and you’ll see it is a lot of messy bits to interact with Bluez via dbus. It registers a
Profile1
interface and forks a worker process for each incoming connection. The worker runs the user-defined
bt_main()
function, which will normally override. The worker reads from the Bluetooth socket and writes to your code via a normal
FILE *
. You can send data back the same way.
Here’s the default bt_main function:
int bt_main(int argc, char *argv[], FILE *in, FILE *out) {
// Default demo: echo lines, prefixing with "ECHO: "
fprintf(stderr,"[bt_main] Default echo mode.\n");
setvbuf(out,NULL,_IOLBF,0);
charbuf[1024];
while(fgets(buf,sizeof(buf),in)){
fprintf(stderr,"[bt_main] RX: %s",buf);
fprintf(out,"ECHO: %s",buf);
fflush(out);
}
fprintf(stderr,"[bt_main] Input closed. Exiting.\n");
return 0;
}
In retrospect, it might have been better to just use the compatibility flag on the Bluez server to restore the old behavior. At least, for as long as it lasts. This involves finding where your system launches the Bluez service (probably in a systemd service, these days) and adding a -c to the command line. There may be a newer version of rfcomm that supports the latest Bluez setup, too, but KDE Neon didn’t have it.
On the other hand, this does work. The
bt_main
function is easy to write and lets you focus on solving your problem rather than how to set up and tear down the Bluetooth connection.
Next Time
Next time, I’ll show you a more interesting bt_main along with an Android app that sends and receives data with a custom server. You could use this as the basis of, for example, a
custom macropad
or an
Android app to control a robot
. | 14 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8170092",
"author": "DougM",
"timestamp": "2025-08-27T14:33:47",
"content": "I’m so glad this is still around! I used it many many years ago to turn my phone into a remote for an electric skateboard using the tilt sensor and recently I’ve been noodling on how to trigger the Hallowe... | 1,760,371,443.151353 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/24/pong-cloned-by-neural-network/ | Pong Cloned By Neural Network | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Games"
] | [
"ai",
"machine learning",
"neural network",
"pong",
"retrocomputing",
"video game"
] | Although not the first video game ever produced, Pong was the first to achieve commercial success and has had a tremendous influence on our culture as a whole. In Pong’s time, its popularity ushered in the arcade era that would last for more than two decades. Today, it retains a similar popularity partially for approachability: gameplay is relatively simple, has hardwired logic, and provides insights about the state of computer science at the time. For these reasons, [Nick Bild] has decided to recreate this arcade classic, but not in a traditional way.
He’s trained a neural network to become the game instead
.
To train this neural network, [Nick] used hundreds of thousands of images of gameplay. Much of it was real, but he had to generate synthetic data for rare events like paddle misses. The system is a transformer-based network with separate branches for predicting the movements of the ball, taking user input, and predicting paddle motion. A final branch is used to integrate all of these processes. To play the game, the network receives four initial frames and predicts everything from there.
From the short video linked below, the game appears to behave indistinguishably from a traditionally coded game. Even more impressive is that, due to [Nick]’s lack of a GPU, the neural network itself was trained using only a pair of old Xeon processors. He’s pretty familiar with functionally useful AI as well.
He recently built a project that uses generative AI running on an 80s-era Commodore
to generate images in a similar way to modern versions, just with slightly fewer pixels. | 9 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8168141",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-08-24T11:59:57",
"content": "Very cool, really provides a look into the more unconventional uses of NN",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8169062",
"author": "Cad the Ma... | 1,760,371,443.571735 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/24/the-32-bit-6502-you-never-had/ | The 32 Bit 6502 You Never Had | Jenny List | [
"FPGA",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"6502",
"W65C816",
"W65C832"
] | In the beginning was the MOS6502, an 8-bit microprocessor that found its way into many famous machines. Some of you will know that a CMOS 6502 was created by the Western Design Center, and in turn, WDC produced the 65C816, a 16-bit version that was used in the Apple IIgs as well as the Super Nintendo. It was news to us that they had a 32-bit version in their sights, but after producing a datasheet, they never brought it to market. Last October, [Mike Kohn]
produced a Verilog version of this W65C832 processor
, so it can be experienced via an FPGA.
The description dives into the differences between the 32, 16, and 8-bit variants of the 6502, and we can see some of the same hurdles that must have faced designers of other chips in that era as they moved their architectures with the times while maintaining backwards compatibility. From our (admittedly basic) understanding it appears to retain that 6502 simplicity in the way that Intel architectures did not, so it’s tempting to imagine what future might have happened had this chip made it to market. We’re guessing that you would still be reading through an Intel or ARM, but perhaps we might have seen a different path taken by 1990s game consoles.
If you’d like to dive deeper into 6502 history,
the chip recently turned 50
.
Thanks [Liam Proven] for the tip. | 43 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8168057",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-08-24T08:36:02",
"content": "That’s cool. Hopefully it finds it way into real hardware eventually (say, an ASIC).It would be nice for making a more modern SuperCPU for the C64, for example.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperCPU",
... | 1,760,371,443.34389 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/23/the-oscilloscope-from-1943/ | The Oscilloscope From 1943 | Al Williams | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Teardown"
] | [
"oscilloscope",
"radiometer"
] | [Thomas] comes up with some unusual gear. In his latest teardown and repair video, he has
a vintage 1943 Danish oscilloscope
, a Radiometer OSG32 on the bench. It isn’t lightweight, and it certainly looks its age with a vintage cracked finish on the case. You can check out the tubes and high-voltage circuitry in the video below.
If you’ve only seen the inside of a modern scope, you’ll want to check this out with giant condensers (capacitors) and a slew of tubes. We love seeing the workmanship on these old chassis.
There was a significant amount of burned residue, likely from a capacitor inside the case. A visit to Radiometer headquarters netted a pile of old manuals, including one for this scope, along with schematics. However, the schematics may not have been totally accurate.
With power the CRT somewhat lit up, which was a good sign, although it had a smell. But there was at least one voltage deficiency. He eventually made partial progress with some modern substitutes helping out, but it looks like there’s still more to go. Given the appearance of the outside, we were surprised he got as far as he did.
This was actually a very nice scope for its day, if you compare it to some other
typical examples
. Did you ever wonder what people did for scopes before the CRT?
We did too
. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8168173",
"author": "Mystick",
"timestamp": "2025-08-24T13:20:54",
"content": "Looks like my old Heathkit I got from a hamfest for $5.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8168288",
"author": "jbx",
"timestamp": "2025-08-24T1... | 1,760,371,443.525388 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/23/dealing-with-the-1970s-eprom-chaos-in-2025/ | Dealing With The 1970s EPROM Chaos In 2025 | Maya Posch | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"2516",
"2716",
"eprom",
"retrocomputing"
] | It could be argued that erasable programmable ROMs (EPROMs) with their quaint UV-transparent windows are firmly obsolete today in an era of various flavors of EEPROMs. Yet many of these EPROMs are still around, and people want to program them. Unfortunately, the earliest EPROMs were made during a time when JEDEC standardization hadn’t taken root yet, leading to unique pinouts, programming voltages, and programming sequences, as [Anders Nielsen]
explains in a recent video
.
[Anders]’s
Relatively Universal-ROM-Programmer
project recently gained the ability to program even the oldest types of EPROMs, something which required modifying the hardware design to accommodate EPROMs like Ti’s TMS2716 and the similar-but-completely-different TMS2516. Although not the hardest thing to support – requiring just a diode and resistor added to the BOM along with a firmware update – it’s just one of those pre-standardization traps.
As [Anders] put it, it’s sometimes good to be unencumbered by the burden of future knowledge. Who would have willingly subjected themselves to the chaos of incompatible pinouts, voltages, etc., if they had known beforehand that in a few years EEPROMs and JEDEC standardization would make life so much easier? Maybe that’s why messing with retro hardware like this is fun, as afterwards you can go back to the future. | 15 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8167965",
"author": "JSL",
"timestamp": "2025-08-24T02:41:33",
"content": "The 2716 and 2732 weren’t “early.” “Early” were the 1702A and the 2708. Both of those needed three different power supply voltages, and the voltages had to be brought up in the correct sequence, or the chip... | 1,760,371,443.395517 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/23/picking-an-old-operating-system/ | Picking An Old Operating System | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"Dick Pick",
"pickos"
] | We usually at least recognize old computer hardware and software names. But [Asianometry] taught us a new one:
Pick OS
. This 1960s-era system was sort of a database and sort of an operating system for big iron used by the Army. The request was for an English-like query language, and TRW assigned two guys, Don Nelson and Dick Pick, to the job.
The planned query language would allow for things like “list the title, author, and abstract of every transportation system reference with the principal city ‘Los Angeles’.” This was GIM or generalized information management, and, in a forward-looking choice, it ran in a virtual machine.
TRW made one delivery of GIM, but the program that funded it was in trouble. Since TRW didn’t protect GIM, Dick took his program and formed a business. That business sold the rights to the software to Microdata, a minicomputer company, which used it under the name ENGLISH.
After a lawsuit with Microdata, Pick was able to keep his software, but Microdata retained its rights. Pick dabbled in making hardware, but decided to sell that part of the enterprise and focus on licensing Pick OS.
The first sale was to Honeywell. The virtual machine concept made it easy to port to new machines. Pick had a very IBM-like structured file system, where all data is a string, and dictionaries organize the underlying data.
In addition to a database, there was a programming language like BASIC, a text editor, and even a spreadsheet program. Why haven’t we heard of it? Part of the problem is that the computers using it typically renamed it and didn’t say it was Pick under the hood.
In the early 1980s, Pick’s appearance on the PC and the ability to support ten users on a single PC were notable features. The resellers didn’t appreciate the thrust to sell directly to users, and more lawsuits emerged.
Pick also struggled to get a GUI going when that was taking off. After Dick died, the system sort of coasted through several acquisitions. There are echoes of it in
OpenQM
, and there’s at least one fork of that on
GitHub
.
It is amazing how a system can utilize something like this and then
become locked in
, even after things change. This explains why Japan still uses
floppy disks
for certain things. | 50 | 38 | [
{
"comment_id": "8167898",
"author": "Pixel_K",
"timestamp": "2025-08-23T23:11:15",
"content": "We (my actual employer) used Pick until 10 years ago in production. It served as a database to manage 100.000 clients. It ran in a virtual machine on an IBM mainframe. One of my first job was to recycle t... | 1,760,371,443.48224 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/23/lerobot-brings-autonomy-to-hobby-robots/ | LeRobot Brings Autonomy To Hobby Robots | Donald Papp | [
"Machine Learning",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"autonomous",
"diy",
"machine learning",
"robot arm"
] | Robotic arms have a lot in common with CNC machines in that they are usually driven by a fixed script of specific positions to move to, and actions to perform. Autonomous behavior isn’t the norm, especially not for hobby-level robotics. That’s changing rapidly with
LeRobot
, an open-source machine learning framework from the Hugging Face community.
The SO-101 arm is an economical way to get started.
If a quick browse of the project page still leaves you with questions, you’re not alone. Thankfully, [Ilia] has
a fantastic video that explains and demonstrates
the fundamentals wonderfully. In it, he shows how LeRobot allows one to train an economical 3D-printed robotic arm by example, teaching it to perform a task autonomously. In this case, the task is picking up a ball and putting it into a cup.
[Ilia] first builds a dataset by manually operating the arm to pick up a ball and place it in a cup. Then, with a dataset consisting of only about fifty such examples, he creates a machine learning model capable of driving the arm to autonomously pick up a ball and place it in a cup, regardless of where the ball and cup actually are. It even gracefully handles things like color changes and [Ilia] moving the cup and ball around mid-task. You can
skip directly to 34:16
to see this autonomous behavior in action, but we do recommend watching the whole video for a highly accessible yet deeply technical overview.
LeRobot is a very flexible framework, capable of much more than just doing imitation learning on 3D-printed low-cost robot arms. But the main goal is to make this sort of thing accessible to just about anyone, as [Ilia] aptly demonstrates. We have seen tons of
high-quality DIY robot arms
, and since the LeRobot framework is both developing quickly and isn’t tied to any particular hardware, it might be powering the next robot project sooner than you think. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8167870",
"author": "scott_tx",
"timestamp": "2025-08-23T21:06:00",
"content": "Going to have to find 50 Sarah Connors now…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8167996",
"author": "Roman",
"timestamp": "2025-08-24T04:26:18",... | 1,760,371,443.651929 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/23/esticky-is-a-paperless-post-it/ | ESticky Is A Paperless Post-It | Navarre Bartz | [
"Lifehacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"e-paper",
"e-paper display",
"post it",
"sticky note",
"waveshare"
] | E-paper screens have opened up a wide variety of novel use cases that just wouldn’t work with the higher power draw of an LCD. [gokux] thought it would be perfect for a
digital sticky note
.
Using a Waveshare 2.9″ e-paper display hooked up to a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32C3, a battery, and a switch all inside the 3D printed enclosure, the part count on this is about as simple as it gets. Once everything is soldered together and programmed, you get a nifty little display that can hold some of your thoughts without having to reopen an app to get to them.
Access is currently provided via a web page, and there are a few minor hiccups like text alignment and image upload support. This project is open source, so [gokux] has expressed interest in anyone wanting to help refine the concept. We think it might be nice to add a magnet on the back for an easier way to actually stick to things.
If you prefer a different way to use electricity for a sticky note, why not
do it at 2,000 V
? If that’s not your jam, how about a plotter that writes your
label or message on masking tape
? | 21 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8167786",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2025-08-23T17:56:27",
"content": "ItisnotevenremotelyclosetoaPost-Itifonecannotwriteonit",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8167811",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2025-08... | 1,760,371,443.835287 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/22/web-dashboard-for-zephyr/ | Web Dashboard For Zephyr | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"api",
"microcontroller",
"real time operating system",
"REST API",
"RTOS",
"web dashboard",
"web ui",
"websocket",
"zephyr",
"zephyr os"
] | Over time, web browsers have accumulated a ton of features beyond what anyone from the 90s might have imagined, from an application platform to file management and even to hardware access. While this could be concerning from a certain point of view, it makes it much easier to develop a wide range of tools. All a device really needs to use a browser as a platform is an IP address,
and this project brings a web UI dashboard to Zephyr
to simplify application development.
Zephyr is a real-time operating system (RTOS) meant for embedded microcontrollers, so having an easy way to access these systems through a web browser can be extremely useful. At its core, this project provides a web server that can run on this operating system as well as a REST API that can be used by clients to communicate with it. For things like blinking lights this is sufficient, but for other things like sensors that update continuously the dashboard can also use WebSocket to update the web page in real time.
The web dashboards that can be built with this tool greatly reduce the effort and complexity needed to interact with Zephyr and the microcontrollers it typically runs on, especially when compared to a serial console or a custom application that might otherwise be built for these systems. If this is your first time hearing about this RTOS
we recently featured a microcontroller-based e-reader which uses this OS as a platform
. | 7 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8167398",
"author": "Ali",
"timestamp": "2025-08-22T20:13:31",
"content": "Why not use RTEMS which has been around for the last 30 years? It’s definitely going to be more stable, refined and supported on MANY platforms.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,371,444.023623 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/22/finding-a-new-model-for-hacker-camps/ | Finding A New Model For Hacker Camps | Jenny List | [
"cons",
"Featured",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"community",
"events",
"hacker camps"
] | Electromagnetic Field manage to get live music at a hacker camp right, by turning it into the most cyberpunk future possible.
A couple of decades ago now, several things happened which gave life to our world and made it what it has become. Hackerspaces proliferated, giving what was previously dispersed a physical focus. Alongside that a range of hardware gave new expression to our projects; among them the Arduino, affordable 3D printing, and mail-order printed circuit boards.
The result was a flowering of creativity and of a community we’d never had before.Visiting another city could come with a while spent in their hackerspace, and from that new-found community blossomed a fresh wave of events. The older hacker camps expanded and morphed in character to become more exciting showcases for our expression, and new events sprang up alongside them. The 2010s provided me and my friends with some of the most formative experiences of our lives, and we’re guessing that among those of you reading this piece will be plenty who also found their people.
And then came COVID. Something that sticks in my mind when thinking about the COVID pandemic is a British news pundit from March 2020 saying that nothing would be quite the same as before once the pandemic was over. In our community this came home to me after 2022, when the first large European hacker camps made a return. They were awesome in their own way, but somehow sterile, it was as though something was missing. Since then we’ve had a few more summers spent trailing across the continent to hang out and drink Club-Mate in the sun, and while we commend the respective orgas for creating some great experiences, finding that spark can still be elusive. Hanging out with some of my friends round a European hackerspace barbecue before we headed home recently, we tried to put our finger on exactly where the problem lay.
Just what has gone wrong with hacker camps?
Perhaps the most stinging criticism we arrived at was that our larger events seem inexorably to be morphing into festivals. It’s partly found on the field itself and we find events hosting music stages, but also in the attendees. Where a decade or more ago people were coming with their cool hacks to
be
the event, now an increasing number of people are coming as spectators just to
see
the event. This no doubt reflects changing fashions in a world where festival attendance is no longer solely for a hard core of music fans, but its effect has been to slowly turn fields of vibrant villages where the real fun happened, into fields of tents with a few bright spots among them, and the attendees gravitating toward a central core where increasingly, the spectacle is put on for them.
I caught quite a lot of grief from a performative activist for taking this intentionally unfocused picture at a hacker camp in 2022. Canon EOS M100 on a tripod pointing upwards at hanging lights in a darkened field. WTF.
The other chief gripe was around the eternal tussle in our community between technology and activism. Hackers have always been activists, if you doubt that take a read of Hackaday’s coverage of privacy issues, but the fact remains that we are accidental activists; activism is not the reason we do what we do. The feeling was that some events in our community have become far more about
performative imposition of a particular interpretation of our culture
or conforming to political expectations than they have about the hacks, and that the fun has been sucked out of them as a result.
People who know me outside my work for Hackaday will tell you that I have a significant career as an activist in a particular field, but when I’m at a hacker camp I am not there to be lectured at length about her ideology by an earnest young activist with blue hair and a lot of body piercings. I am especially not there to be policed as some kind of enemy simply because I indicate that I’m bored with what she has to say; I know from my own activism that going on about it too much is not going to make you any friends.
It’s evident that one of the problems with the larger hacker camps is not only that they have simply become too big, but that there are also some cultural traps which events can too readily fall into. Our conversation turned to those events we think get it right, and how we would approach an event of our own. One of my favourite events is a smaller one with under 500 attendees, whose organisers have a good handle on what makes a good event because they’re in large part making the event they want to be at. Thus it has a strong village culture, a lack of any of the trappings of a festival, and significant discouragement when it comes to people attending simply to be political activists.
That’s what I want to see more of, but even there is danger. I want it to remain awesome but not become a victim of its own success as so many events do. If it grows too much it will become a sterile clique of the same people grabbing all the tickets every time it’s held, and everyone else missing out. Thus there’s one final piece of the puzzle in ensuring that any hacker event doesn’t become a closed shop, that our camps should split and replicate rather than simply becoming ever larger.
The four-rule model
Condensing the above, my friends and I came up with a four-rule model for the hacker camps we want.
Limited numbers, self replicating, village led, bring a hack.
Let’s look at those in more detail.
Limited numbers
There’s something special about a camp where you can get to know everyone on the field at some level, and it’s visibly lost as an event gets larger. We had differing views about the ideal size of a small camp with some people suggesting up to 500 people, but I have good reasons for putting forward a hundred people as an ideal, with a hard limit at 150. The smaller a camp is the less work there is for its orga, and by my observation, putting on a camp for 500 people is still quite a lot of effort. 150 people may sound small,
but small camps work
. There’s also the advantage that staying small ducks under some red tape requirements.
Self replicating
As an event becomes more popular and fills up, that clique effect becomes a problem. So these events should be self replicating. When that attendee limit is reached, it’s time to repeat the formula and set up another event somewhere else. Far enough away to not be in direct competition, but near enough to be accessible. The figure we picked out of the air for Europe was 200 km, or around 120 miles, because a couple of hours drive is not insurmountable but hardly on your doorstep. This would eventually create a diverse archipelago of small related events, with some attendees going to more than one. Success should be measured in how many child events are spawned, not in how many people attend.
Village-led
The strength of a hacker camp lies in its villages, yet larger camps increasingly provide all the fun centrally and starve the villages. The formula for a small camp should have the orga providing the field, hygiene facilities, power, internet, and nothing else, with the villages making the camp. Need a talk track? Organise one in your village. Want a bar to hang out and drink Club-Mate at? Be the bar village. It’s your camp, make it.
Bring a hack
Sadly Wasteleand is for now beyond me. Toglenn,
CC BY-SA 4.0
.
An event I wish I was in a position to attend is the Wasteland weekend, a post-apocalyptic festival in the Californian desert. Famously you will be denied entry to Wasteland if you aren’t post-apocalyptic enough, or if you deem post-apocalyptic to be merely cosplaying a character from a film franchise. The organisers restrict entry to the people who match their vision of the event, so of course all would-be attendees make an effort to follow their rules.
It’s an idea that works here: if you want to be part of a hacker camp, bring a hack. A project, something you make or do; anything (and I mean
anything
) that will enhance the event and make it awesome. What that is is up to you, but bringing it ensures you are not merely a spectator.
See You On A Field Not Too Far Away
With those four ingredients, my friends and I think being part of the hacker and maker community can become fun again. Get all
your
friends and their friends, hire a complete camping site for a weekend outside school holidays, turn up, and enjoy yourselves. A bunch of Europeans are going to make good on this and give it a try, before releasing a detailed version of the formula for others to try too.
Maybe we’ll see you next summer. | 68 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "8167319",
"author": "Nora",
"timestamp": "2025-08-22T17:20:20",
"content": "Ayy, blue hair straw man mentioned!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8167555",
"author": "Jenny List",
"timestamp": "2025-08-23T05:34:... | 1,760,371,443.983487 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/22/hackaday-podcast-episode-334-radioactive-shrimp-clocks-funky-filaments-owning-the-hardware/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 334: Radioactive Shrimp Clocks, Funky Filaments, Owning The Hardware | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | In this episode of the Hackaday Podcast, editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start out with a warning about potentially radioactive shrimp entering the American food supply via Walmart, and things only get weirder from there. The extra spicy shrimp discussion makes a perfect segue into an overview of a pair of atomic One Hertz Challenge entries, after which they’ll go over the latest generation of 3D printer filament, using an old Android smartphone as a low-power Linux server, some tips for creating better schematics, and Lorde’s specification-bending transparent CD. Finally, you’ll hear about how the nature of digital ownership influences the hardware we use, and on the other side of the coin, how open source firmware like QMK lets you build input devices on your terms.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Or
download in DRM-free MP3 to enjoy with your shrimp
.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 334 Show Notes:
News:
Food Irradiation Is Not As Bad As It Sounds
Walmart shrimp may have been exposed to radioactive material, FDA says
What’s that Sound?
Congratulations to [Gesundheit] for getting guessing this week’s sound.
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
2025 One Hertz Challenge: Atomic Decay Clock Is Accurate But Not Precise
2025 One Hertz Challenge: Timekeeping At One Becquerel
Decaying clocks – Antiquarian Horological Society
Gammaclock
Time Capsule Expo ’70
Deriving 1 Hz from Candle Flame Oscillations
Suggested Schematic Standards
Should You Try Printing With Polypropylene?
MorPhlex: The TPU Filament That Goes Soft After You Print It
From Smartphone To A Home Server
A Solderless, Soluble Circuit Board
Hackaday Europe 2025: David Cuartielles – What if the Future (Of Electronics) Was Compostable?
Why Lorde’s Clear CD Has So Many Playback Issues
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Adjustable Allen Key After All These Years
The PC In Your Pico
The VLF Transformation
Tom’s Picks:
I, 3D Printer
Reviving A Piece Of Yesterday’s Tomorrow
Silent Speak And Spell Gets Its Voice Back
Can’t-Miss Articles:
The Terminal Demise Of Consumer Electronics Through Subscription Services
Instant Macropad: Just Add QMK | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8167422",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-08-22T21:06:21",
"content": "I was hoping for some radioactive shrimp clocks, but alas….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8168709",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"t... | 1,760,371,443.695405 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/22/converting-a-sprinkler-system-to-dc/ | Converting A Sprinkler System To DC | Bryan Cockfield | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"ac",
"conversion",
"dc",
"drv103",
"grass",
"lawn",
"pwm",
"solenoid",
"sprinkler"
] | Famously, Nikola Tesla won the War of the Currents in the early days of electrification because his AC system could use transformers to minimize losses for long distance circuits. That was well before the invention of the transistor, though, and there are a lot of systems that still use AC now as a result of electricity’s history that we might otherwise want to run on DC in our modern world. Sprinkler systems are one of these things, commonly using a 24V AC system, but [Vinthewrench]
has done some work to convert over to a more flexible 24 VDC system instead
.
The main components of these systems that are set up for AC are solenoids which activate various sets of sprinklers. But these solenoids can take DC and still work, so no major hardware changes are needed. It’s not quite as simple as changing power supplies, though. The solenoids will overheat if they’re fully powered on a DC circuit, so [Vinthewrench] did a significant amount of testing to figure out exactly how much power they need to stay engaged. Once the math was done, he uses a DRV103 to send PWM signals to the solenoids, which is set up to allow more current to pull in the solenoids and then a lower holding current once they are activated.
With a DC power supply like this, it makes it much easier to have his sprinkler system run on a solar powered system as well as use a battery backup without needing something like an inverter. And thanks to the DRV103 the conversion is not physically difficult; ensuring that the solenoids don’t overheat is the major concern here. Another great reason to convert to a DIY sprinkler controller is
removing your lawn care routine from an unnecessary cloud-based service
. | 14 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8167283",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-08-22T15:52:24",
"content": "There might be some relevant code in the DIY fuel injection peojects. Some fuel injectors are driven the same way, high current to activate and lower current to hold.I started with a “gateway timer” that h... | 1,760,371,444.071835 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/22/this-week-in-security-anime-catgirls-illegal-adblock-and-disputed-research/ | This Week In Security: Anime Catgirls, Illegal AdBlock, And Disputed Research | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"catgirls",
"disputed research",
"Phrack",
"This Week in Security"
] | You may have noticed the Anime Catgirls when trying to get to the Linux Kernel’s mailing list, or one of any number of other sites associated with Open Source projects. [Tavis Ormandy] had this question, too, and
even wrote about it
. So, what’s the deal with the catgirls?
The project is
Anubis
, a “Web AI Firewall Utility”. The intent is to block AI scrapers, as Anubis “weighs the soul” of incoming connections, and blocks the bots you don’t want. Anubis uses the user agent string and other indicators to determine what an incoming connection is. But the most obvious check is the in-browser hashing. Anubis puts a challenge string in the HTTP response header, and JavaScript running in the browser calculates a second string to append this challenge. The goal is to set the first few bytes of the SHA-256 hash of this combined string to 0.
[Tavis] makes a compelling case that this hashing is security theatre — It makes things appear more secure, but doesn’t actually improve the situation. It’s only fair to point out that his observation comes from annoyance, as his preferred method of accessing the Linux kernel git repository and mailing list are now blocked by Anubis. But the economics of compute costs clearly demonstrate that this SHA-256 hashing approach will only be effective so long as AI companies don’t add the 25 lines of C it took him to calculate the challenge. The Anubis hashing challenge is literally security by obscurity.
Something Security AI is Good At
We’ve recently covered an AI competition, where AI toolchains were used to find and patch vulnerabilities. This took a massive effort to get good results. This week we have work on a similar but constrained task that AI is much better at. Instead of finding a new CVE, simply
ask the AI to generate an exploit for CVEs that have been published
.
The key here seems to be the constrained task that gives the AI a narrow goal, and a clever approach to quickly test the results. The task is to find an exploit using the patch code, and the test is that the exploit shouldn’t work on the patched version of the program. This approach cuts way down on false positives. This is definitely an approach to keep an eye on.
We’re Hunting CodeRabbits
Reviewing Pull Requests (PRs) is one of the other AI use cases that has seen significant deployment. CodeRabbit provides one of those tools which summarizes the PR, looks for possible bugs, and runs multiple linter and analysis tools. That last one is extremely important here, as not every tool is bulletproof.
Researchers at Kudelski Security discovered
that the Rubocop tool was accessible to incoming PRs with ruby files.
Rubocop has a nifty feature, that allows extensions to be loaded dynamically during a run. These are specified in a
.rubocop.yml
file, that CodeRabbit was helpfully passing through to the Rubocop run. The key here is that the extension to be loaded can also be included in a PR, and Rubocop extensions can execute arbitrary code. How bad could it be, to run code on the CodeRabbit backend servers?
The test payload in this case was simply to capture the system’s environment variables, which turned out to be a smorgasbord of secrets and API keys. The hilarious part of this research is that the CodeRabbit AI absolutely flagged the PR as malicious, but couldn’t stop the attack in motion. CodeRabbit very quickly mitigated the issue, and rolled out a fix less than a week later.
Illegal Adblock
There’s a concerning court case making its way through the German courts, that
threatens to make adblocking illegal on copyright grounds
. This case is between Axel Springer, a media company that makes money from showing advertisements, and Eyeo, the company behind Adblock Plus. The legal theory claimed by Axel Springer is that a website’s HTML and CSS together forms a computer program, that is protected by copyright. Blocking advertisements on that website would then be a copyright violation, by this theory.
This theory is novel, and every lower court has rejected it. What’s new this month is that the German Supreme Court threw the case back to a lower court, instructing that court to revisit the question. The idea of copyright violation simply by changing a website has caught the attention of Mozilla,
and their Product Counsel, [Daniel Nazer], has thoughts
.
The first is that a legal precedent forcing a browser to perfectly honor the code served by a remote web host would be horribly dangerous. I suspect it would also be in contention with other European privacy and security laws. As court battles usually go, this one is moving in slow motion, and the next ruling may be years away. But it would be particularly troubling if Germany joined China as the only two nations to ban ad blockers.
Copilot, Don’t Tell Anyone
Microsoft’s Office365 has an audit log, that tracks which users access given files. Running Copilot in that environment dutifully logs those file accesses, but
only if Copilot actually returns a link to the document
. So similar to other techniques where an AI can be convinced to do something unintended, a user can ask Copilot to return the contents of a file but not to link to it. Copilot will do as instructed, and the file isn’t listed in the audit log as accessed.
Where this gets more interesting is how the report and fix was handled. Microsoft didn’t issue a CVE, fixed the issue, but opted not to issue a statement. [Zack Korman], the researcher that reported the issue, disagrees quite vigorously with Microsoft’s decision here. This is an interesting example of the tension that can result from disagreements between researcher and the organization responsible for the product in question.
Disputed Research
This brings us to another example of disputed research,
the “0-day” in Elastic Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
.
Elastic disputes the claim
, pointing out that they could not replicate code execution, and the researcher didn’t provide an entire proof of concept. This sort of situation is tricky. Who is right? The company that understands the internals of the program, or the researcher that undoubtedly did discover something, but maybe doesn’t fully understand what was found?
There are two elements that stand out in the vulnerability write-up. The first is that the overview of the attack chain lists a Remote Code Execution (RCE) as part of the chain, but it seems that nothing about this research is actually an RCE. The premise is that code running on the local machine can crash the Elastic kernel driver. The second notable feature of this post is that the proof-of-concept code uses a custom kernel driver to demonstrate the vulnerability. What’s missing is the statement that code execution was actually observed without this custom kernel driver.
Bits and Bytes
One of the very useful features of Microsoft’s VSCode is the Remote-SSH extension, which allows running the VSCode front-end on a local machine, and connecting to another server for remote work. The problem is that
connecting to a remote server can install extensions on the local machine
. VSCode extensions can be malicious, and connecting to a malicious host can run code on that host.
Apple has patched a buffer overflow in image handling, that is
being used in an “extremely sophisticated” malware attacks
against specific targets. This sort of language tends to indicate the vulnerability was found in an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) campaign by either a government actor, or a professional actor like NSO Group or similar.
And finally, if zines are your thing,
Phrak issue 0x48 (72) is out
! This one is full of stories of narrowly avoiding arrest while doing smart card research, analysis of a North Korean data dump, and a treatise on CPU backdoors. Exciting stuff, Enjoy! | 28 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8167237",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2025-08-22T14:27:56",
"content": "Regardingwhyanime girls.. it is supposed to be a way to make people pay for the pro version:https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/avoiding-becoming-peg-dependency/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies... | 1,760,371,444.458949 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/22/reprapmicron-promises-micro-fabrication-for-desktops-with-new-prototype/ | RepRapMicron Promises Micro-fabrication For Desktops With New Prototype | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"diy",
"flexure",
"microfabrication",
"reprap",
"UV resin"
] | 3D printing has transformed how hobbyists fabricate things, but what additional doors would open if we could go even smaller? The
µRepRap (RepRapMicron) project
aims to bring fabrication at the micron and sub-micron scale to hobbyists the same way RepRap strove to make 3D printing accessible. New developments by [Vik Olliver] show a promising way forward, and also highlight the many challenges of going so small.
New Maus prototype is modular, setting the stage for repeatable and reliable 3D printing at the micro scale.
How exactly would a 3D printer do micro-fabrication? Not by squirting plastic from a nozzle, but by using a vanishingly tiny needle-like effector (which can be made at any workbench via electrochemical erosion) to pick up a miniscule amount of resin one dab a time, curing it with UV after depositing it like a brush deposits a dot of ink.
By doing so repeatedly and in a structured way, one can 3D print at a micro scale one “pixel” (or voxel, more accurately) at a time. You can see how small they’re talking in the image in the header above. It shows a RepRapMicron tip (left) next to a 24 gauge hypodermic needle (right) which is just over half a millimeter in diameter.
Moving precisely and accurately at such a small scale also requires something new, and that is where flexures come in. Where other 3D printers use stepper motors and rails and belts, RepRapMicron leverages work done by the
OpenFlexure
project to achieve high-precision mechanical positioning without the need for fancy materials or mechanisms. We’ve actually seen this part in action, when [Vik Olliver] amazed us by scribing
a 2D micron-scale Jolly Wrencher 1.5 mm x 1.5 mm in size
, also visible in the header image above.
Using a tiny needle to deposit dabs of UV resin provides the platform with a way to 3D print, but there are still plenty of unique problems to be solved. How does one observe such a small process, or the finished print? How does one handle such a tiny object, or free it from the build platform without damaging it? The RepRapMicron project has solutions lined up for each of these and more, so there’s a lot of discovery waiting to be done. Got ideas of your own? The project welcomes collaboration. If you’d like to watch the latest developments as they happen, keep an eye on the
Github repository
and the
blog
. | 15 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8167177",
"author": "Stephen Walters",
"timestamp": "2025-08-22T12:15:56",
"content": "You could 3D print simple circuits and MAYBE IC’s as well.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8167232",
"author": "LordNothing",
... | 1,760,371,444.195516 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/22/quieting-that-radio/ | Quieting That Radio | Al Williams | [
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"Ferrite core",
"noise",
"radio",
"sdr"
] | If you are casually listening to the radio, you probably tune into a local station and with modern receivers and FM modulation, the sound quality is good. But if you are trying to listen to distant or low-powered station, there’s a lot of competition. Our modern world is awash in a soup of electronic interference. [Electronics Unmessed] tells — and shows — us
how much noise can show up on a SDR setup
and what simple things you can do to improve it, sometimes tremendously.
According to the video, the main culprit in these cases is the RF ground path. If you have a single antenna wire, there still has to be a ground path somewhere and that may be through the power line or through, for example, a USB cable, the host computer, and its power supply. Unsurprisingly, the computer is full of RF noise which then gets into your receiver.
Adding a counterpoise makes a marked difference. A low inductance ground connection can also help. The counterpoise, of course, won’t be perfect, so to further turn down the noise, ferrite cores go around wires to block them from being ground paths for RF.
The common cores you see are encased in plastic and allow you to snap them on. However, using a bare core and winding through it multiple times can provide better results. Again, thanks to the SDR’s display, you can see the difference this makes in his setup.
None of this is new information, of course. But the explanation is clear, and being able to see the results in a spectrum display is quite enlightening. Those cores essentially turn your wire
into a choke
. People think that grounding is simple, but it is
anything but
. | 22 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8167074",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-08-22T08:15:39",
"content": "The only radio I like listening to is shortwave. There is a joy in listening to random radio broadcasts from around the world. Some from Asia, some from Eastern Europe, some from Africa. I do not unders... | 1,760,371,444.251082 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/23/who-is-your-audience/ | Who Is Your Audience? | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"PCB Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"conversations",
"documentation",
"open source hardware",
"PCB design"
] | Here at Hackaday HQ, we all have opinions about the way we like to do things. And no surprise, this extends to the way we like to lay out circuits in schematics. So when we were discussing our own takes on this piece on
suggested schematic standards
, it was maybe more surprising how much we
did
agree on than how much we had different preferred styles. But of course, it was the points where we disagreed that provoked the most interesting discussion, and that’s when I had a revelation.
Besides torturing electronics, we all also write for you all, and one thing we always have in mind is who we’re writing for. The Hackaday audience, not to blow you up, is pretty knowledgeable and basically “full-stack” in terms of the hardware/software spectrum. This isn’t to say that everyone is a specialist in everything, though, and we also have certain archetypes in mind: the software type who is just starting out with hardware, the hardware type who isn’t as savvy about software, etc. So, back to schematic layout: Who is your audience? It matters.
For instance, do you organize the pinout for an IC by pin number or by pin function, grouping the power pins and the ADC pins and so on? If your audience is trying to figure out the circuit logic, you should probably go functional. But if you are trying to debug a circuit, you’re often looking at the circuit diagram to figure out what a given pin does, and the pin-number layout is more appropriate.
Do you lay out the logical flow of the circuit in the schematic, or do you try to mimic the PCB layout? Again, it could depend on how your audience will be using it. If they have access to your CAD tool, and can hop back and forth seamlessly from schematic to PCB, the logical flow layout is the win. However, if they are an audience of beginners, or stuck with a PDF of the schematic, or trying to debug a non-working board, perhaps the physical layout is the right approach.
Al Williams, who has experience with projects of a much larger scale than most of us self-taught hackers, doesn’t even think that a schematic makes sense. He thinks that it’s much easier to read and write the design in a hardware description language like VHDL. Of course, that’s certainly true for IC designs, and probably also for boards of a certain complexity. But this is only true when your audience is also familiar with the HDL in question. Otherwise, you’re writing in Finnish for an audience of Spaniards.
Before this conversation, I was thinking of schematic layout as Tom Nardi described it on the podcast – a step along the way to get to the fun parts of PCB layout and then to getting the boards in hand. But at least in our open-source hardware world, it’s also a piece of the documentation, and a document that has an audience of peers who it pays to keep in mind just as much as when I’m sitting down and writing this very newsletter. In some ways, it’s the same thing.
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
!
(And yeah, I know the featured image doesn’t
exactly
fit the topic, but I love it anyway.) | 32 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8167687",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-08-23T14:39:05",
"content": "“For instance, do you organize the pinout for an IC by pin number or by pin function, grouping the power pins and the ADC pins and so on? If your audience is trying to figure out the circuit logic, you s... | 1,760,371,444.143376 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/23/candle-oscillator-really-heats-things-up/ | Candle Oscillator Really Heats Things Up | Jenny List | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"candle",
"clock",
"oscillator"
] | As the timebase for a clock, almost anything with a periodic oscillation can be used. Traditionally, that meant a pendulum, but in our time, we’ve seen plenty of others. Perhaps none as unusual as [Tim]’s
candle flicker clock
, though.
Candles are known for their flickering, a property of the wick and the fuel supply that candle manufacturers have gone to great lengths to mitigate. If you bring several of them together, they will have a significant flicker, with a surprisingly consistent 9.9 Hz frequency. This is the timebase for the clock, with the capacitance of the flame being sensed by a wire connected to a CH32 microcontroller, and processed to produce the required timing.
We like this project, and consider it a shame that it’s not an entry in our One Hertz Challenge. Oddly, though, it’s not the first candle-based oscillator we’ve seen;
they can even be turned into active electronic devices
. | 11 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8167622",
"author": "Special K",
"timestamp": "2025-08-23T11:09:15",
"content": "This looks familiar…https://hackaday.com/2025/08/17/2025-one-hertz-challenge-a-flaming-oscillator-and-a-new-take-on-the-candle-clock/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,371,444.390846 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/23/solar-powered-pyrolysis-facility-converts-scrap-plastic-into-fuel/ | Solar Powered Pyrolysis Facility Converts Scrap Plastic Into Fuel | John Elliot V | [
"hardware",
"Solar Hacks"
] | [
"magnetron",
"organic material",
"plastic",
"pyrolysis",
"solar-powered"
] | [naturejab] shows off his
solar powered pyrolysis machine which can convert scrap plastic into fuel
. According to the video, this is the world’s most complex hand-made pyrolysis reactor ever made. We will give him some wiggle room there around “complex” and “hand-made”, because whatever else you have to say about it this machine is incredibly cool!
As you may know
pyrolysis
is a process wherein heat is applied to organic material in an inert environment (such as a vacuum) which causes the separation of its covalent bonds thereby causing it to decompose. In this case we decompose scrap plastic into what it was made from: natural gas and petroleum.
His facility is one hundred percent solar powered. The battery is a
100 kWh Komodo commercial power tank
. He has in the order of twenty solar power panels laying in the grass behind the facility giving him eight or nine kilowatts. The first step in using the machine, after turning it on, is to load scrap plastic into it; this is done by means of a vacuum pump attached to a large flexible tube. The plastic gets pumped through the top chamber into the bottom chamber, which contains blades that help move the plastic through it. The two chambers are isolated by a valve — operating it allows either chamber to be pumped down to vacuum independently.
Once the plastic is in the main vacuum chamber, the eight active magnetrons — the same type of device
you’d find in your typical microwave oven
— begin to break down the plastic. As there’s no air in the vacuum chamber, the plastic won’t catch fire when it gets hot. Instead it melts, returning to petroleum and natural gas vapor which it was made from. Eventually the resultant vapor flows through a
dephlegmator
cooling into crude oil and natural gas which are stored separately for later use and further processing.
If you’re interested in pyrolysis you might like to read
Methane Pyrolysis: Producing Green Hydrogen Without Carbon Emissions
. | 61 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "8167603",
"author": "Danie",
"timestamp": "2025-08-23T09:34:17",
"content": "Although before solar power was as popular as it is today, the same process was on the go quite a few years before:https://www.2oceansvibe.com/2013/04/16/cape-town-inventor-william-graham-invents-incredible... | 1,760,371,444.345311 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/22/back-to-the-90s-on-real-hardware/ | Back To The 90s On Real Hardware | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"32-bit",
"cs4237b",
"dos",
"gaming",
"hardware",
"isa",
"retro",
"sound",
"SoundBlaster",
"vortex86",
"windows98",
"x86"
] | As the march of time continues on, it becomes harder and harder to play older video games on hardware. Part of this is because the original hardware itself wears out, but another major factor is that modern operating systems, software, and even modern hardware don’t maintain support for older technology indefinitely. This is why emulation is so popular, but purists that need original hardware often have to go to extremes to scratch their retro gaming itch.
This project from [Eivind], for example, is a completely new x86 PC designed for the DOS and early Windows 98 era
.
The main problem with running older games on modern hardware is the lack of an ISA bus, which is where the sound cards on PCs from this era were placed. This build uses a
Vortex86EX
system-on-module, which has a processor running a 32-bit x86 instruction set. Not only does this mean that software built for DOS can run natively on this chip, but it also has this elusive ISA capability. The motherboard uses a Crystal CS4237B chip connected to this bus which perfectly replicates a SoundBlaster card from this era. There are also expansion ports to add other sound cards, including ones with Yamaha OPL chips.
Not only does this build provide a native hardware environment for DOS-era gaming, but it also adds a lot of ports missing from modern machines as well including a serial port. Not everything needs to be original hardware, though; a virtual floppy drive and microSD card reader make it easy to interface minimally with modern computers and transfer files easily. This isn’t the only way to game on new, native hardware, though. Others have done similar things with
new computers built for legacy industrial applications
as well.
Thanks to [Stephen] for the tip! | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8167608",
"author": "the gambler",
"timestamp": "2025-08-23T10:32:28",
"content": "forget sound blaster this will be great for legacy industrial machines that use pc104 and are getting harder and harder to find good mb’s for. you can get the isa to pc104 adapters cheap enough but t... | 1,760,371,444.499552 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/22/video-clips-with-emacs/ | Video Clips With Emacs | Al Williams | [
"Linux Hacks",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"Emacs",
"video clipping"
] | Sometimes it seems like there’s nothing Emacs can’t do. Which, of course, is why some people love it, and some people hate it. Apparently, [mbork] loves it and
devised a scheme
to show a video (with a little help), accept cut-in and out marks, and then use ffmpeg to output the video clip, ready for posting, emailing, or whatever.
This was made easier by work already done to allow Emacs to create subtitles (
subed
). Of course, Emacs by itself can’t play videos, but it can take control of mpv, which can. Interestingly, subed doesn’t insist on mpv since it won’t work on Windows, but without it, your editing experience won’t be as pleasant.
Back to creating a clip, once you have control of mpv, it is almost too simple. A keybinding remembers where mpv is when you mark the beginning, and another one grabs the end mark, works out the arguments, and calls ffmpeg to do the actual work.
This is one of those cases where Emacs really isn’t doing much of the work; it is more of a sophisticated scripting, orchestration, and user-interface system. But it reminds us of the old Russian proverb: The marvel is not that the bear dances well, but that the bear dances at all.
Emacs is a hot topic of debate in the Hackaday bunker. Some of us have our
browsers emacs-ified
. We hear a rumor that one among us may even
boot directly into the editor
. But
not all of us
, of course. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8167504",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-08-23T02:32:25",
"content": "Hmm, you’ve prompted me to ask the question, “Can Emacs run Doom?”And of course, the answer is “Yes, it can! (with some help)”(And don’t be confused by “Doom Emacs”, which is something completely differen... | 1,760,371,445.329556 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/22/hows-the-weather-satellite-edition/ | How’s The Weather? (Satellite Edition) | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks",
"Space"
] | [
"weather satellites"
] | When [Tom Nardi] reported on NOAA’s statement that many of its polar birds were no longer recommended for use, he mentioned that when the satellites do give up, there are other options if you want to pull up your own satellite weather imagery. [Jacopo]
explains those other options in great detail
.
For example, the Russian Meteor-M satellites are available with almost the same hardware and software stack, although [Jacopo] mentions you might need an extra filter since it is a little less tolerant of interference than the NOAA bird. On the plus side, Meteor-M is stronger than the NOAA satellite on 1.7 GHz, and you can even use a handheld antenna to pick it up. There are new, improved satellites of this series on their way, too.
Another possibility is Metop-B and -C. These do require a wide bandwidth but that’s not hard to do with a modern SDR. Apparently, these satellites will operate until 2027 and beyond.
Even the US GOES satellites are still operational and should continue working for the foreseeable future. There are plenty more choices. Weather not your thing? Jason-3 sends data on radiation and humidity. There are even solar images you can pluck out of the airwaves.
If you’re interested, read on to the bottom, where you’ll find coverage of what you need and how to get started. Of course, you can still get the last gasp of some of the
classic satellites
, at least for now. You can even
print your own antennas
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8167518",
"author": "Daniel Díaz",
"timestamp": "2025-08-23T03:18:02",
"content": "Is this the link, maybe?https://www.a-centauri.com/articoli/beyond-poes-amateur-satellite-reception",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8167782",
... | 1,760,371,444.549048 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/22/how-to-stop-zeus-from-toasting-your-pi/ | How To Stop Zeus From Toasting Your Pi | Heidi Ulrich | [
"High Voltage",
"News",
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"7805",
"grid",
"high voltage",
"lightning",
"mov",
"power spike",
"Rural",
"surge"
] | If you’ve ever lost gear to lightning or power spikes, you know what a pain they are. Out in rural Arkansas, where [vinthewrench] lives, the grid is more chaos than comfort – especially when storms hit. So, he dug into the problem after watching a cheap AC-DC module quite literally melt down.
The full story
, as always, begins with the power company’s helpful
reclosers
: lightning-induced surges, and grid switching transients. The result though: toasted boards, shorted transformers, and one very dead Raspberry Pi. [vinthewrench] wrote it all up – with decent warnings ahead.
Take heed and don’t venture into things that could put your life in danger.
Back to the story. Standard surge suppressors? Forget it. Metal-oxide varistor (MOV)-based strips are fine for office laptops, but rural storms laugh at their 600 J limits. While effective and commonly used, MOVs are “self-sacrificing” and degrade over time with each surge event.
[vinthewrench] wanted something sturdier. Enter ZeusFilter 1.0 –
a line-voltage filter
stitched together from real parts: a slow-blow fuse, inrush-limiting thermistor, three-electrode gas discharge tube for lightning-class hits, beefy MOVs for mid-sized spikes, common-mode choke to kill EMI chatter, and safety caps to bleed off what’s left. Grounding done right, of course. The whole thing lives on a single-layer PCB, destined to sit upstream of a hardened PSU.
As one of his readers pointed out, though, spikes don’t always stop at the input. Sudden cut-offs on the primary can still throw nasty pulses into the secondary, especially with bargain-bin transformers and ‘mystery’ regulators. The reader reminded that counterfeit 7805s are infamous for failing short, dumping raw input into a supposedly safe 5 V rail. [vinthewrench] acknowledged this too, recalling how collapsing fields don’t just vanish politely – Lenz makes sure they kick back hard. And yes, when cheap silicon fails, it fails ugly: straight smoke-release mode.
In conclusion, we’re not particularly asking you to try this at home if you lack the proper knowledge. But if you have
a high-voltage addiction
, this home research is a good start to expand your knowledge of what is, in theory, possible. | 18 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8167402",
"author": "Sparky",
"timestamp": "2025-08-22T20:19:22",
"content": "Danger Will Robinson! That layout is no good!Way too close a gap where the component leads poke through the GND plane!Looks reasonable otherwise (on first glance), but you have to heed those isolation clea... | 1,760,371,444.674242 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/25/theres-nothing-mini-about-this-mini-hasselblad-style-cameras-sensor/ | There’s Nothing Mini About This Mini Hasselblad-Style Camera’s Sensor | Tyler August | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"digital camera",
"IMX283",
"Pi camera",
"Raspberry Pi 5"
] | When someone hacks together a digital camera with a Raspberry Pi, the limiting factor for serious photography is usually the sensor. No offense to the fine folks at the foundation, but even the “HQ” camera, while very good, isn’t quite professional grade. That’s why when photographer [Malcolm Wilson] put together this
“Mini Hasselblad” style camera, he hacked in a 1″ sensor.
The sensor in question came in the form of a
OneInchEye V2
, from [Will Whang] on Tindie. The OneInch Eye is a great project in its own right: it takes a Sony IMX283 one-inch CMOS image sensor, and packages it with an IMU and thermal sensor on a board that hooks up to the 4-lane MIPI interface on the Raspberry Pi CM4 and Pi 5.
Sensor in hand, [Malcolm] needed but to figure out power and view-finding. Power is provided by a Geekworm X1200 battery hat. That’s the nice thing about the Pi ecosystem: with so many modules, it’s like LEGO for makers. The viewfinder, too, uses 4″ HDMI screen sold for Pi use, and he’s combined it with a Mamiya C220 TLR viewfinder to give that look-down-and-shoot effect that gives the project the “Mini Hasselblad” moniker.
These are a few images [Malcom] took with the camera. We’re no pros, but at least at this resolution they look good.
The steel-PLA case doesn’t hurt in that regard either, with the styling somewhat reminiscent of vintage film cameras. The “steel” isn’t just a colour in this case, and the metal actually makes the PLA conductive, which our photographer friend learned the hard way. Who hasn’t fried components on a surface they didn’t realize was conductive, though? We bet the added weight of the steel in the PLA makes this camera much nicer to hold than it would be in plain plastic, at least.
The OneInchEye module came set up for C-mount lenses, and [Malcolm] stuck with that, using some Fujinon TV lenses he already had on hand. [Malcolm] has released STL files of his build under a Creative Commons NonCommercial license, but he’s holding the code back for subscribers to his Substack.
This isn’t the
first Pi-based camera we’ve seen
from [Malcolm], and there’ve been
quite a few others
on these pages over the years. There was even a
Hackaday version, to test out the “official” module
[Malcolm] eschewed. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8169130",
"author": "pentode",
"timestamp": "2025-08-26T00:20:37",
"content": "The guy’s name is misspelled every time it appears in the article. /pedant",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8169205",
"author": "0xdeadbeef"... | 1,760,371,444.75098 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/25/butta-melta-stops-rock-solid-butter-from-tearing-your-toast/ | Butta Melta Stops Rock-solid Butter From Tearing Your Toast | Donald Papp | [
"cooking hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"breakfast",
"butter",
"butter melter",
"food"
] | Ever ruin a perfectly serviceable piece of toast by trying (and failing) to spread a little pat of rock-solid butter? [John Dingley] doesn’t! Not since he created the
Butta Melta
to cozily snug a single butter serving right up against a warm beverage, softening it just enough to get nice and spreadable. Just insert one of those foil-wrapped pats of butter into the Melta, hang its chin on the edge of your mug, and you’ll have evenly softened butter in no time.
The Butta Melta is intentionally designed with a bit of personality, but also has features we think are worth highlighting. One is the way it’s clearly designed with 3D printing in mind, making it an easy print on just about any machine in no time at all. The second is the presence of the hinge point which really helps the Butta Melta conform to a variety of cup designs, holding the payload as close as possible to the heat regardless of cup shape. A couple of minutes next to a hot beverage is all it takes for the butter to soften enough to become easily spreadable.
You may remember [John] (aka [XenonJohn]) from his
experimental self-balancing scooters
, or from a documentary he made about
domestic ventilator development during COVID
. He taught himself video editing and production to make that, and couldn’t resist using those skills to turn a video demo of the Butta Melta into a mock home shopping style advertisement. Watch it below, embedded just under the page break, then print one and save yourself from the tyranny of torn toast. | 53 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "8169040",
"author": "Snarkenstein",
"timestamp": "2025-08-25T21:22:55",
"content": "Well, that’s cute if you’re out in the cold, cold world, but for home, just get yourself a butter bell.I do wonder if the inevitable migration of butter to the plastic might soften the plastic, or im... | 1,760,371,445.016974 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/25/pi-port-protection-pcb/ | Pi Port Protection PCB | Jenny List | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"1-wire",
"differential i2c",
"i2c",
"Isolation",
"raspberry pi"
] | We’re used to interfaces such as I2C and one-wire as easy ways to hook up sensors and other peripherals to microcontrollers. While they’re fine within the confines of a small project, they do have a few limitations. [Vinnie] ran straight into those limitations while using a Raspberry Pi with agricultural sensors. The interfaces needed to work over long cable runs, and to be protected from ESD due to lightning strikes. The solution?
A custom Pi interface board packing differential drivers and protection circuits aplenty
.
The I2C connection is isolated using an ISO1541 bus isolator from TI, feeding a PCA9615DP differential I2C bus driver from NXP. 1-wire is handled by a Dallas DS2482S 1-wire bus master and an ESD protection diode network. Even the 5-volt power supply is delivered through an isolated module.
Whether or not you need this Raspberry Pi board, this is still an interesting project for anyone working with these interfaces. If you’re interested,
we’ve looked at differential I2C in the past
. | 16 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8169025",
"author": "Brian",
"timestamp": "2025-08-25T20:50:31",
"content": "“I also added the DS9503P ESD Protection Diode, which gave my circuit approximately 27 kV of isolation.”Nope. Not with that series R. and not with that PCB layout. Methinks his ‘Zeus filter’ may have simil... | 1,760,371,444.930632 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/25/debugging-the-instant-macropad/ | Debugging The Instant Macropad | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"how-to",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"keyboard",
"macropad",
"pi pico",
"QMK"
] | Last time
, I showed you how to throw together a few modules and make a working macropad that could act like a keyboard or a mouse. My prototype was very simple, so there wasn’t much to debug. But what happens if you want to do something more complex? In this installment, I’ll show you how to add the obligatory blinking LED and, just to make it interesting, a custom macro key.
There is a way to print data from the keyboard, through the USB port, and into a program that knows how to listen for it. There are a few choices, but the
qmk
software can do it if you run it with the
console
argument.
The Plan
In theory, it is fairly easy to just add the console feature to the keyboard.json file:
{
...
"features": {
"mousekey": true,
"extrakey": true,
"nkro": false,
"bootmagic": false,
"console": true
},
...
That allows the console to attach, but now you have to print.
Output
The code in a keyboard might be tight, depending on the processor and what else it is doing. So a full-blown
printf
is a bit prohibitive. However, the system provides you with four output calls:
uprint
,
uprintf
,
dprint
, and
dprintf
.
The “u” calls will always output something. The difference is that the normal print version takes a fixed string while the printf version allows some printf-style formatting. The “d” calls are the same, but they only work if you have debugging turned on. You can turn on debugging at compile time, or you can trigger it with, for example, a special key press.
To view the print output, just run:
qmk console
Note that printing during initialization may not always be visible. You can store things in static variables and print them later, if that helps.
Macros
You can define your own keycodes in
keymap.c
. You simply have to start them at
SAFE_RANGE
:
enum custom_keycodes {
SS_STRING = SAFE_RANGE
};
You can then “catch” those keys in a
process_record_user
function, as you’ll see shortly. What you do is up to you. For example, you could play a sound, turn on some I/O, or anything else you want. You do need to make a return value to tell
qmk
you handled the key.
An Example
In the same Git repo, I created
a branch rp2040_led
. My goal was to simply flash the onboard LED annoyingly. However, I also wanted to print some things over the console.
Turning on the console is simple enough. I also added a
#define
for
USER_LED
at the end of
config.h
(
GP25
is the onboard LED).
A quick read of the documentation will tell you the calls you can use to manipulate
GPIO
. In this case, we only needed
gpio_set_pin_output
and the
gpio_write_pin*
functions.
I also sprinkled a few print functions in. In general, you provide
override functions
in your code for things you want to do. In this case, I set up the LED in
keyboard_post_init_user
. Then, at first, I use a timer and the user part of the matrix scan to periodically execute.
Notice that even though the keyboard doesn’t use scanning, the firmware still “scans” it, and so your hook gets a call periodically. Since I’m not really using scanning, this works, but if you were trying to do this with a real matrix keyboard, it would be smarter to use
housekeeping_task_user(void)
which avoids interfering with the scan timing, so I changed to that.
Here’s most of the code in keymap.c:
#include QMK_KEYBOARD_H
enum custom_keycodes {
SS_STRING = SAFE_RANGE
};
const uint16_t PROGMEM keymaps[][MATRIX_ROWS][MATRIX_COLS] = {
[0] = LAYOUT(
// 4 buttons
KC_KB_VOLUME_UP, KC_KB_MUTE, KC_KB_VOLUME_DOWN, SS_STRING,
// Mouse
QK_MOUSE_CURSOR_UP, QK_MOUSE_CURSOR_DOWN, QK_MOUSE_CURSOR_LEFT, QK_MOUSE_CURSOR_RIGHT, QK_MOUSE_BUTTON_1),
};
void keyboard_pre_init_user(void) {
// code that runs very early in the keyboard initialization
}
void keyboard_post_init_user(void) {
// code that runs after the keyboard has been initialized
gpio_set_pin_output(USER_LED);
gpio_write_pin_high(USER_LED);
uprint("init\n");
}
#if 1 // in case you want to turn off that $<em>$</em># blinking
void housekeeping_task_user(void) {
static uint32_t last;
static bool on;
uint32_t now = timer_read32();
uprintf("scan tick %lu\n",now);
if (TIMER_DIFF_32(now, last) &amp;gt; 500) { // toggle every 500 ms
last = now;
on = !on;
if (on)
gpio_write_pin_high(USER_LED);
else
gpio_write_pin_low(USER_LED);
}
}
#endif
bool process_record_user(uint16_t keycode, keyrecord_t *record) {
switch (keycode) {
case SS_STRING:
if (record-&amp;gt;event.pressed) {
SEND_STRING("http://www.hackaday.com\n");
}
return false;
}
return true;
}
You’ll notice the
process_record_user
function is now in there. It sees every keycode an when it finds the custom keycode, it sends out your favorite website’s URL.
More Tips
I mentioned last time that you have to let the CPU finish loading even after the flash utility says you are done. There are some other tips that can help you track down problems. For one thing, the compile script is pretty lax about your json. So you may have an error in your json file that is stopping things from working, but it won’t warn you. You can use
jq
to validate your json:
jq . keyboard.json
Another thing to do is use the “lint” feature of
qmx
. Just replace the
compile
or
flash
command with
lint
, and it will do some basic checks to see if there are any errors. It does require a few arbitrary things like a license header in some files, but for the most part, it catches real errors.
Get Started!
What are you waiting for? Now you can build that monster keyboard you’ve dreamed up. Or the tiny one. Whatever. You might want to read more about the
RP2040 support
, unless you are going to use a different CPU. Don’t forget the entire directory is full of example keyboards you can — ahem — borrow from.
You might think there’s not much you can do with a keyboard, but there are many strange and wonderful features in the firmware. You can let your keyboard autocorrect your common misspellings, for example. Or interpret keys differently when you hold them versus tapping them. Want a key that inserts the current time and date? Code it. If you want an example of getting the LCD to work, check out the
rp2040-disp
branch.
One thing interesting about
qmk
, too, is that many commercial keyboards use it or, at least, claim to use it. After all, it is tempting to have the firmware ready to go. However, sometimes you get a new keyboard and the vendor hasn’t released the source code yet, so if that’s your plan, you should find the source code before you plunk down your money!
You’ll find plenty of support for lighting, of course. But there are also strange key combinations, layers, and even methods for doing stenography. There’s only one problem. Once you start using
qmk
there is a real chance you may start tearing up
your existing keyboards
. You have been warned. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,445.054472 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/25/cerns-large-hadron-collider-runs-on-a-bendix-g-15-in-2025/ | CERN’s Large Hadron Collider Runs On A Bendix G-15 In 2025 | Adam Fabio | [
"News",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"Bendix",
"cern",
"intercom"
] | The Bendix G-15 refurbished by [David at Usagi Electric] is well known as the oldest fully operational digital computer in North America. The question [David] gets most is “what can you do with it?”. Well, as a general-purpose computer, it can do just about anything. He set out to prove it. Can a
1950s-era vacuum tube computer handle modern physics problems?
This video was several years in the making, was a journey from [David’s] home base in Texas all the way to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland.
The G-15 can run several “high-level” programming languages, including Algol. The most popular, though, was Intercom. Intercom is an interactive programming language – you can type your program in right at the typewriter. It’s much closer to working with a basic interpreter than, say, a batch-processed IBM 1401 with punched cards. We’re still talking about the 1950s, though, so the language mechanics are quite a bit different from what we’re used to today.
To start with, [Usagi’s] the G-15 is a numeric machine. It can’t even handle the full alphabet. What’s more, all numbers on the G-15 are stored as floating-point values. Commands are sent via operation codes. For example, ADD is operation 43. You have to wrangle an index register and an address as well. Intercom feels a bit like a cross between assembler and tokenized BASIC.
If you’d like to play along, the
intercom manual is available on Bitsavers
. (Thanks [Al]!)
In the second half of the video, things take a modern turn. [David’s] friend [Lloyd] recently wrote a high-speed algorithm for the ATLAS detector running at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. [Lloyd] was instrumental in getting the G-15 up and running. Imagine a career stretching from the early days of computing to modern high-speed data processing. Suffice to say, [Lloyd] is a legend.
There are some hardcore physics and high speed data collection involved in ATLAS. [Allison] from SMU does a great job of explaining it all. The short version is: When particles are smashed together, huge amounts of information is collected by detectors and calorimeters. On the order of 145 TB/s (yes, terabytes per second). It would be impossible to store and analyze all that data. Topoclustering is an algorithm that determines if any given event is important to the researchers or not. The algorithm has to run in less than 1 microsecond, which is why it’s highly pipelined and lives inside an FPGA.
Even though it’s written in Verilog, topoclustering is still an algorithm. This means the G-15, being a general-purpose computer, can run it. To that end, [Lloyd] converted the Verilog code to C. But the Bendix doesn’t run C code. That’s where
G-15 historian [Rob Kolstad] came in
. Rob ported the C code to Intercom. [David] punched the program and a sample dataset on a short tape. He loaded up Intercom, then Topoclustering, and sent the run command. The G-15 sprang to life and performed flawlessly, proving that it is a general-purpose computer capable of running modern algorithms.
Curious about the history of this particular Bendix G-15? Check out
some of our earlier articles
! | 18 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8168856",
"author": "Yet Another Robert Smith",
"timestamp": "2025-08-25T16:17:47",
"content": "It’s amazing what’s possible when the manufacturer can’t remotely brick the device.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8169028",
... | 1,760,371,445.231003 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/25/radio-apocalypse-americas-doomsday-rocket-radios/ | Radio Apocalypse: America’s Doomsday Rocket Radios | Dan Maloney | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Interest",
"Slider",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"EAM",
"emergency action message",
"ICBM",
"Minuteman II",
"missile",
"payload",
"Radio Apocalypse",
"sac",
"uhf"
] | Even in the early days of the Cold War, it quickly became apparent that simply having hundreds or even thousands of nuclear weapons would never be a sufficient deterrent to atomic attack. For nuclear weapons to be anything other than expensive ornaments, they have to be part of an engineered system that guarantees that they’ll work when they’re called upon to do so, and only then. And more importantly, your adversaries need to know that you’ve made every effort to make sure they go boom, and that they can’t interfere with that process.
In practical terms, nuclear deterrence is all about redundancy. There can be no single point of failure anywhere along the nuclear chain of command, and every system has to have a backup with multiple backups. That’s true inside every component of the system, from the warheads that form the sharp point of the spear to the systems that control and command those weapons, and especially in the systems that relay the orders that will send the missiles and bombers on their way.
When the fateful decision to push the button is made, Cold War planners had to ensure that the message got through. Even though they had a continent-wide system of
radios
and
telephone lines
that stitched together every missile launch facility and bomber base at their disposal, planners knew how fragile all that infrastructure could be, especially during a nuclear exchange. When the message absolutely, positively has to get through, you need a way to get above all that destruction, and so they came up with the Emergency Rocket Communication System, or ERCS.
Above It All
The ERCS concept was brutally simple. In the event of receiving an Emergency Action Message (EAM) with a valid launch order, US Air Force missile launch commanders would send a copy of the EAM to a special warhead aboard their ERCS missiles. The missiles would be launched along with the other missiles in the sortie, but with flight paths to the east and west, compared to over-the-pole trajectories for the nuclear-tipped missiles. The ERCS trajectories were designed to provide line-of-sight coverage to all of Strategic Air Command’s missile fields and bomber bases in North America, and also to SAC bases in Europe. Once the third stage of the missile was at apogee, the payload would detach from the launch vehicle and start transmitting the EAM on a continuous loop over one of ten pre-programmed UHF frequencies, ensuring that all strategic assets within sight of the transmitter would get the message even if every other means of communication had failed.
ERCS mission profile schematic. From launch to impact of the AN/DRC-9 payload back on the surface would only be about 30 minutes, during which time the EAM would be transmitted to SAC forces on the ground and in the air from Western Europe to the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Source:
ERCS Operation Handbook
.
Even by Cold War standards, ERCS went from operational concept to fielded system in a remarkably short time. The SAC directive for what would become ERCS was published in September of 1961, and a contract was quickly awarded to Allied Signal Aerospace Communications to build the thing. In just four months, Allied had a prototype ready for testing. Granted, the design of the payload was simplified considerably by the fact that it was on a one-way trip, but still, the AN/DRC-9, as it was designated, was developed remarkably quickly.
The 875-pound (397-kg) payload, which was to be carried to the edge of space at the tip of an ICBM, contained a complete “store and forward” communications system with redundant UHF transmitters, along with everything needed to control the deployment of the package into space, to manage the thermal conditions inside the spacecraft, and to keep it on a stable trajectory after release. In addition, the entire package was hardened against the effects of electromagnetic pulse, ensuring its ability to relay launch orders no matter what.
AN/DRC-9 on display at the Air Force Museum. This is mounted upside down relative to how it was mounted in the rocket; note the spiral antenna at the top, which would be pointing down toward the surface. The antenna struts are mounted to the twin zinc-silver batteries. The exciter and final amp for one of the transmitters are in the gold boxes at the lower left. Source:
US Air Force
.
The forward section of the package, just aft of the nose cone, mainly contained the equipment to activate the payload’s batteries. As was common in spacecraft of the day, the payload was powered by silver-zinc batteries, which were kept in a non-activated state until needed. To activate them, a gas generator in the forward section would be started about 45 seconds prior to launch. This would provide the pressure needed to force about seven liters of potassium hydroxide electrolyte solution from a reservoir in the forward section through tubes to the pair of batteries in the aft section of the payload. The batteries would immediately supply the 45 VDC needed by the payload’s power converters, which provided both the regulated 28 VDC supply for powering most of the comms equipment, plus the low-voltage, high-current AC supplies needed for the filaments of the tubes used in the RF power amplifiers. In the interest of redundancy, there were two separate power converters, one for each battery.
Also for redundancy and reliability, the payload used a pair of identical transmitters, located in the aft section. These were capable of operating on ten different channels in the UHF band, with the frequency controlled by a solid-state crystal-controlled oscillator. The specific channel was selected at the time of launch and fixed for the duration of the mission. The oscillators fed an exciter circuit, also solid state, that amplified and modulated the carrier signal for the driver amplifiers, before sending them to a series of RF cavity amps that used vapor-cooled tetrodes to boost the signal to about a kilowatt.
Both transmitters were connected to a passive diplexer to couple the two signals together into a common feed line for the payload’s single antenna, which sat behind a fiberglass radome, which was pressurized to reduce the risk of corona discharge, at the very aft of the vehicle. The antenna was an Archimedian spiral design, which is essentially a dipole antenna wound into a spiral with the two legs nested together. This resulted in a right-hand circularly polarized signal that covered the entire frequency range of the transmitter.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
Since the business of all this hardware was to transmit EAMs, the AN/DRC-9 was equipped with a recorder-processor system. This was shockingly simple — essentially just a continuous-loop tape deck with its associated amplifiers and controllers. The tape deck had separate playback and record/erase heads, over which the tape moved at a nominal 5 inches per second, or 40 ips when it needed to rapidly cycle back to the beginning of the message. The loop was long enough to record an EAM up to 90 seconds long, which was recorded by the missile combat crew commander (MCCC) over a standard telephone handset on a dedicated ERCS console in the launch complex. The EAM, a long series of NATO phonetic alphabet characters, was dictated verbatim and checked by the deputy MCCC for accuracy; if the MCCC flubbed his lines, the message was recorded over until it was perfect.
The recorder-processor was activated in playback mode once the transmitter was activated, which occurred about 31 seconds after thrust termination of the third stage of the rocket and after spin motors had fired to spin-stabilize the payload during the ballistic phase of its flight. Test flights over the Pacific launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California showed that transmissions were readable for anywhere from 14 to 22 minutes, more than enough to transmit a complete EAM multiple times.
Decommissioned LGM-30F Minuteman II missile in its silo. The ERCS payload would have looked exactly like the mock fairing at the tip of the missile shown here. Source:
Kelly Michaels
, CC-BY-NC 2.0.
As was common with many Cold War projects, work on ERCS started before the launch vehicle it was intended for, the Minuteman II, was even constructed. As an interim solution, the Air Force mounted the payloads to their Blue Scout launch vehicles, a rocket that had only been used for satellites and scientific payloads. But it performed well enough in a series of tests through the end of 1963 that the Air Force certified the Blue Scout version of ERCS as operational and deployed it to three sites in Nebraska on mobile trailer launchers. The Blue Scout ERCS would serve until the Minuteman version was certified as operational in 1968, greatly improving readiness by putting the system in a hardened silo rather than in vulnerable above-ground launch trailers.
By the mid-70s, ten Minuteman II ERCS sorties were operational across ten different launch facilities at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. Luckily, they and their spicier cousins all stayed in their silos through even the hottest days of the Cold War, only emerging in 1991 when the entire Minuteman II force was ordered to stand down by President George H.W. Bush. By that point, global military communications had advanced considerably, and the redundancy offered by ERCS was deemed no longer worth the expense of maintaining the 1960s technology that provided it. All ERCS payloads were removed from their missiles and deactivated by the end of 1991. | 17 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8168807",
"author": "Jammy",
"timestamp": "2025-08-25T14:14:40",
"content": "Nice write up!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8168867",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2025-08-25T16:39:39",
"content": "Int... | 1,760,371,445.112045 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/25/dead-bug-timer-relay-needs-no-pcb/ | Dead Bug Timer Relay Needs No PCB | Al Williams | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"deadbug",
"NE555",
"relay"
] | We often marvel at the many things a 555 can do. But [Zafer Yildiz] shows us that it can even
take the place of a PCB
. You’ll see what we mean in the video below. The timer relay circuit is built “dead bug” style with the 555 leads bent out to provide wiring terminals.
Honestly, these kinds of circuits are fun, but we would be reticent to use this type of construction for anything that had to survive in the real world. Solder joints aren’t known for being mechanically stable, so this is good for experiments, but maybe not something you want to do all the time.
Radio Shack IC board
That said, the workmanship is neat. We would probably have grabbed a little universal PCB instead. Or, some people use Manhattan-style construction, where you glue little bits of PCB material down to make terminals.
Honestly, our favorites were some little boards we used to get at Radio Shack (see image of one we found on some
random project
). If you know where we can still find these, mention it in the comments. And, sure, it would be easy enough to make a batch or two.
Still, if you just need quick and dirty,
deadbug
construction does work. We will warn you, though. Deadbug construction can make
you go nuts
. | 19 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8168764",
"author": "robomonkey",
"timestamp": "2025-08-25T12:26:22",
"content": "I’ve always thought that deadbug construction would be helped by the occasional use of small crimp size steel tubing that could enhance the stability. you could even crimp then solder the connection t... | 1,760,371,445.173096 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/21/now-that-commodore-is-back-could-amiga-be-next/ | Now That Commodore Is Back, Could Amiga Be Next? | Tyler August | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"amiga",
"retro computer clone"
] | Now that Commodore has arisen from the depths of obscurity like Cthulhu awoken from R’lyeh, the question on every shoggoth’s squamose lips is this: “Will there be a new Commodore Amiga?” The New Commodore is reportedly interested, but as [The Retro Shack] reports in the video embedded below,
it might be some time before the stars align.
He follows the tortured history of the Amiga brand from its origins with Hi-Toro, the Commodore acquisition and subsequent Atari lawsuit, and the post-Commodore afterlife of the Amiga trademark. Yes, Amiga had a life after Commodore, and that’s the tl;dr here: Commodore might be back, but it does not own the Amiga IP.
If you’re wondering who does, you’re not the only one. Cloanto now claims the name and most of Amiga’s IP, though it remains at loggerheads with Hyperion, the distributors of AmigaOS 4. If you haven’t heard of them, Cloanto is not an elder god, but in fact the group behind Amiga Forever. They have been great stewards of the Amiga heritage over the decades. Any “new” Amiga is going to need the people at Cloanto on board, one way or another. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible– the new Commodore might be able to seduce Cloanto into a merger, or even just a licensing agreement to use the name on reproduction or new hardware.
While
a replica C=64
was a no-brainer for the revived Commodore brand, it’s not quite so clear what they should do with the Amiga name. An FPGA
reproduction of the popular A500 or A1200
? Would anyone want newly-made
68000-based machines
, or to follow Hyperion and
MorphOS to now-outdated generations of PowerPC
? All of these have been proposed and argued over for years.
We’d love to see something fully new that captures the spirit of the bouncing ball, but it’s hard to imagine bottling magic like that in the twenty-first century. For now, Amiga lies dreaming– but that is not dead which can eternally lie, and we hold out hope this Great Old One can return when the stars are right. | 54 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "8167059",
"author": "Analog",
"timestamp": "2025-08-22T07:04:43",
"content": "There are a lot of new Amiga HW, both in PowerPC and FPGA`s",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8169876",
"author": "Dave Haynie",
"time... | 1,760,371,445.485575 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/21/replicating-the-worlds-oldest-stringed-instrument/ | Replicating The World’s Oldest Stringed Instrument | Tyler August | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"archeology",
"experimental archeology",
"lyre",
"musical instrument",
"recreation"
] | Posts on Hackaday sometimes trend a little bit retro, but rarely do we cover hacks that reach back into the Bronze Age. Still, when musician [Peter Pringle] put out a video detailing how
he replicated an ancient Sumerian instrument,
we couldn’t wait to dig in.
The instrument in question is the “Golden Lyre of Ur”, and it was buried at the Royal Cemetery of Ur with a passel of other grave goods (including a Silver Lyre) something around 4400 to 4500 years ago. For those not in the know, Ur was an early Sumerian city in the part of Mesopotamia became modern-day Iraq. A lyre is a type of plucked stringed instrument, similar to a harp.
That anything of the instrument remains after literal millennia buried under the Mesopotamian sand is thanks to the
This representation was unearthed in the same dig as the remains of the Golden Lyre and its silver sister.
extensive ornamentation on the original lyre– the gut strings and wooden body might have rotted away, but the precious stones and metals adorning the lyre preserved the outline of the instrument until it was excavated in 1922. Reconstruction was also greatly aided by contemporary mosaics and pottery showing similar lyres.
For particular interest are the tuning pegs, which required that artistic inspiration to recreate– the original archeological dig did not find any evidence of the tuning mechanism. [Peter] spends some time justifying his reconstruction, using both practical engineering concerns (the need for tension to get good sound) and the pictographic evidence. The wide “buzzing” bridge matches the pictographic evidence as well, and gives the lyre a distinct, almost otherworldly sound to Western ears. [Peter]’s reconstruction sounds good, though we have no way of knowing if it matches what you’d have heard in the royal halls of Ur all those dusty centuries ago. (Skip to 17:38 in the video below if you just want to hear it in action.)
The closest thing to this ancient, man-sized lyre we’ve seen on Hackaday before might be one of the various
laser harp projects
we’ve featured over the years. If you squint a little, you can see the distant echo of the Golden Lyre of Ur in at least some of them. We also can’t help but note that the buzzing bridge gives the Sumerian lyre a certain droning quality not entirely unlike a hurdy-gurdy, because we apparently can’t have a musical post
without mentioning the hurdy-gurdy
. | 10 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8167047",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2025-08-22T06:11:04",
"content": "Wooow. That sounds really cool. I think I like it better than a harp.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8167146",
"author": "Dave",
"timestamp": "... | 1,760,371,445.282505 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/21/this-pocket-multitool-weighs-less-than-a-penny/ | This Pocket Multitool Weighs Less Than A Penny | Heidi Ulrich | [
"hardware",
"Misc Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"EDC",
"Everyday Carry",
"minimalist",
"pocket",
"tiny",
"titanium",
"tool"
] | A multitool that weighs less than a penny? Yes, it exists.
This video by [ToolTechGeek]
shows his titanium flat-cut design tipping the scales at only 1.9 grams—lighter than the 2.5-gram copper penny jingling in your pocket. His reasoning: where most everyday carry (
EDC
) tools are bulky, overpriced, or simply too much, this hack flips the equation: reduce it to the absolute minimum, yet keep it useful.
You might have seen this before. This second attempt is done by laser-cutting
titanium
instead of stainless steel. Thinner, tougher, and rust-proof,
titanium
slashes the weight dramatically, while still keeping edges functional without sharpening. Despite the size, this tool manages to pack in a Phillips and flathead screwdriver, a makeshift saw, a paint-lid opener, a wire bender (yes, tested on a paperclip), and even a 1/4″ wrench doubling as a
bit
driver. High-torque screwdriving by using the long edges is a clever exploit, and yes—it scrapes wood, snaps zip ties, and even forces a bottle cap open, albeit a bit roughly.
It’s not about replacing your Leatherman; it’s about carrying
something
instead of nothing. Ultra-minimalist, featherlight, pocket-slip friendly—bet you can’t find a reason not to just have it in your pocket. | 26 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8166991",
"author": "Not Duck",
"timestamp": "2025-08-21T23:50:26",
"content": "I would rather have the penny. The only multi tools worth having are the kind design for a very narrow set of similar purposes. i.e. a 7 in 1 screw driver.For everything either carry the right tool or a ... | 1,760,371,445.394537 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/21/using-the-74hc595-shift-register-to-drive-7-segment-displays/ | Using The 74HC595 Shift Register To Drive 7-Segment Displays | John Elliot V | [
"hardware",
"Microcontrollers",
"Network Hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"7-segment display",
"74hc595",
"shift register"
] | In a recent video our hacker [Electronic Wizard]
introduces the 74HC595 shift register and explains how to use it to drive 7-segment displays
.
[Electronic Wizard] explains that understanding how to apply the 74HC595 can increase the quality of your projects and also help keep the demands on the number of pins from your microcontroller to manageable levels. If you’re interested in the gory details you can find
a PDF datasheet for the 74HC595 such as this one from Texas Instruments
.
[Electronic Wizard] explains further that a shift register is like a small one byte memory where its data is directly available on its eight output pins, no input address required. When you pulse the clock pin (CLK) each bit in the eight bit memory shifts right one bit, making room for a new bit on the left. The bits that fall off the right hand side can daisy chain into another 74HC595 going out on pin 9 and coming in on pin 14.
[Electronic Wizard] goes on to extol the virtues of pin 13, the active-low Output Enable, which can be used to make sure junk doesn’t appear on your 7-segment displays during initialization. Also the 74HC595 can provide current itself which lessens the power demands on your micro.
[Electronic Wizard] covers how to use multiplexing to drive multiple 7-segment displays but notes the drawbacks of this method including large pin counts and high frequency flashing which, while invisible to the human eye, can become visible on some cameras and recording equipment making the 74HC595 a superior solution to multiplexing.
The bottom line is that using only three pins from the microcontroller you can drive one or more 7-segment displays. To learn more, including how to use the other pins and features of the 74HC595, be sure to click through to watch the video. If you’re interested in the 74HC595 you might like to read about how the
Bus Pirate 5
used two of them to get an extra 16 pins on the board. | 19 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "8166895",
"author": "Hugo Oran",
"timestamp": "2025-08-21T20:53:09",
"content": "Oh sweet memories. Both my personal memories – I remember similar schematic I saw 35+ years ago – and semiconductor memories, which started with shift registers.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,... | 1,760,371,445.541926 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/21/how-intels-386-protects-itself-from-esd-latch-up-and-metastability/ | How Intel’s 386 Protects Itself From ESD, Latch-up And Metastability | Maya Posch | [
"classic hacks",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"386",
"electrostatic discharge",
"reverse engineering"
] | To connect the miniature world of integrated circuits like a CPU with the outside world, a number of physical connections have to be made. Although this may seem straightforward, these I/O pads form a major risk to the chip’s functioning and integrity, in the form of electrostatic discharge (ESD), a type of short-circuit called a latch-up and metastability through factors like noise. Shielding the delicate ASIC from the cruel outside world is the task of the I/O circuitry, with
[Ken Shirriff] recently taking an in-depth look at this circuity in Intel’s 386 CPU
.
The 386 die, zooming in on some of the bond pad circuits. (Credit: Ken Shirriff)
The 386 has a total of 141 of these I/O pads, each connected to a pin on the packaging with a delicate golden bond wire. ESD is on the top of the list of potential risks, as a surge of high voltage can literally blow a hole in the circuitry. The protective circuit for this can be seen in the above die shot, with its clamping diodes, current-limiting resistor and a third diode.
Latch-up
is the second major issue, caused by the inadvertent creation of parasitic structures underneath the P- and NMOS transistors. These parasitic transistors are normally inactive, but if activated they can cause latch-up which best case causes a momentary failure, but worst case melts a part of the chip due to high currents.
To prevent I/O pads from triggering latch-up, the 386 implements ‘guard rings’ that should block unwanted current flow. Finally there is metastability, which as the name suggests isn’t necessarily harmful, but can seriously mess with the operation of the chip which expects clean binary signals. On the 386 two flip-flops per I/O pad are used to mostly resolve this.
Although the 386’s 1985-era circuitry was very chonky by today’s standards, it was still no match for these external influences, making it clear just how important these protective measures are for today’s ASICs with much smaller feature sizes. | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8167038",
"author": "Martin",
"timestamp": "2025-08-22T05:33:16",
"content": "It’s not an ASIC, it’s a microprocessor.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8167147",
"author": "TinLetHax",
"timestamp": "2025-08-22T1... | 1,760,371,445.589093 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/21/linux-fu-windows-virtualization-the-hardware-way/ | Linux Fu: Windows Virtualization The Hard(ware) Way | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"kvm",
"linux",
"virtual machine",
"windows"
] | As much as I love Linux, there are always one or two apps that I simply have to run under Windows for whatever reason. Sure, you can use wine, Crossover Office, or run Windows in a virtual machine, but it’s clunky, and I’m always fiddling with it to get it working right. But I recently came across something that — when used improperly — makes life pretty easy. Instead of virtualizing Windows or emulating it, I threw hardware at it, and it works surprisingly well.
Once Upon a Time
First, a story. Someone gave me a Surface Laptop 2 that was apparently dead. It wouldn’t charge, and you can’t remove the keyboard without power. Actually, you can with a paper clip, and I suggested pulling it to see if the screen would charge by itself. They said they had already bought a new computer, so they didn’t care.
Unsurprisingly, once I popped the keyboard off, the computer charged and was fine. You just have to replace the keyboard or use another one. Or use it as a tablet, which it is set up for anyway. But I have plenty of laptops and computers of every description. What was I going to do with this nice but keyboardless computer?
Coincidence
About this same time, I’d been moving my VirtualBox Windows installs over to KVM. That’s a pain if you’ve ever done it, but it performs well and works well. Then I found
WinApps
. This is a simple script setup that runs Windows in your choice of virtual machine and can pull a single application into an RDP client on your desktop. The effect is that you can have, for example, Microsoft Word just sitting on your desktop like any other program. It also wires up the application so you can, say, open a PowerPoint directly using a real copy of PowerPoint running in the virtual machine.
It works great, except for one thing. When Windows is running, your disk thrashes like crazy. That’s probably not very surprising since the Windows VM image is in a file, so everything goes through the Windows file system and then the Linux file system. Between my SSD cache and my RAID array, there’s a lot going on there. The performance wasn’t bad, but the disk going wild was annoying, and it would freeze up here and there while the drive was overwhelmed.
Virtually Reality, for Real
But what about WinApps? It points to a virtual machine in KVM or Docker. Why not let it point to a real piece of hardware on the network? I could put the Surface out of the way and then run my choice of Windows software right on my desktop with hardware speeds only limited by the network.
Rather than keep you in suspense, it worked. The program allows you to set your virtualization type and one of them is “manual.” Presumably, you’d usually start a VM yourself, but in this case, just the IP address of the remote Windows box is all you need.
Is it that Easy?
Well, almost. There were two small issues. For one thing, you need to run an install script on the Windows box. You can do that before you set up, while you enable Remote Desktop. Here’s what the directions say:
Next, you will need to make some registry changes to enable RDP Applications to run on the system. Start by downloading the
RDPApps.reg
file, right-clicking on the Raw button, and clicking on Save target as. Repeat the same thing for the
install.bat
and the
NetProfileCleanup.ps1
. Do not download the Container.reg.
The other issue is that I have two monitors that are separated, with one at the bottom left and one at the top right of a large rectangle, and lots of blank wall between them. The xfreerdp program hates that. I had to fiddle with the settings quite a bit, and you may have different results.
One thing I did to be safe was to go get the latest version of
xfreerdp
and install it. You can point to it in the WinApps configuration file. Sometimes, the programs in your distro’s repositories can be pretty old. I wanted to make sure I had the latest RDP client.
For normal operations, these options worked:
RDP_FLAGS="/cert:tofu /sound /microphone +home-drive /span /multimon:force /mouse-relative /dynamic-resolution"
I also had to edit ~/.local/bin/winapps to change the options for the “windows” run (which starts a full-screen windows session) to:
# Open Windows RDP session.
dprint"WINDOWS"
$FREERDP_COMMAND \
/d:"$RDP_DOMAIN"\
/u:"$RDP_USER"\
/p:"$RDP_PASS"\
/scale:"$RDP_SCALE"\
+auto-reconnect\
/monitors:0\
/wm-class:"Microsoft Windows"\
/t:"Windows RDP Session [$RDP_IP]"\
/v:"$RDP_IP"&>/dev/null &
Bugs!
While I was in there, I also fixed a bug. The script (and the installation script) can’t figure out that my user is in the right group to run virtual machines, so if you plan on using real virtualization, you might have to fix it or, do what I did, and comment that test out of the main program and the installer. However, if you are using manual mode, that shouldn’t be a problem. The installer also tells me that ~/.local/bin isn’t on my path, but it is. That’s safe to ignore.
There seem to be some other issues. For example, while the installer sets up the ~/local/bin directory, it didn’t add any links to my start menu. I think it was supposed to. Of course, it is trivial to just add your own menu items, which you’ll need to do for non-standard programs, anyway.
Proof in the Pudding
Word on Linux the hard way!
Does it work? Well, there’s Microsoft Word running on my KDE desktop. You might have to rearrange or resize a Window when you first launch it. If that bothers you, write a rule to fix the window position. Most of the time, it works well enough. You can also go full screen and back (Control+Alt+Enter). Anything you can normally do in a RDP session, you can do here.
Is it perfect? Nope. You can, in theory, redirect USB devices, but it will be kludgy and probably slow. I still use KVM for things that have to talk to a USB device. Of course, you can also hang the USB device off the Windows machine. The default setup maps your home directory to Windows, but you can fix it to map other places, too (and make sure the config file knows where your removable media mounts, too). The system autodetects many apps, but there is a manual mode that can, in theory, run anything. Or, you can pull up Windows Explorer and run any application you want.
This would be a perfect thing to use an old computer sitting around or a junk store small form factor PC that you can pick up for nearly nothing. You won’t be gaming on it or anything, but it is perfectly usable for that strange Word document or EPROM programmer software.
Honestly, it’s gotten to the point where having
WSL
on Windows means I barely notice which OS I’m on 99% of the time. Most of the apps I use will run on either system, but I still prefer the control I have on Linux and find it easier to fix issues there. At least
dual booting
is mostly a thing of the past. | 31 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "8166835",
"author": "Nathann Morand",
"timestamp": "2025-08-21T17:17:14",
"content": "this is really cool :)my current issue : GPU sharing.my dream : getting autodesk inventor on linux but working inside a VM is just painful and I dont have two GPU to dedicate one to a VM.if someone... | 1,760,371,445.66246 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/21/bad-to-the-bluetooth-you-shouldnt-use-this-jammer/ | Bad To The Bluetooth: You Shouldn’t Use This Jammer | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"2.4ghz",
"bluetooth",
"jammer"
] | Back in the day, an FM bug was a handy way to make someone’s annoying radio go away, particularly if it could be induced to feedback. But these days you’re far more likely to hear somebody’s Bluetooth device blasting than you are an unruly FM radio.
To combat this aural menace, [Tixlegeek] is here with
a jammer for the 2.4 GHz spectrum
to make annoying Bluetooth devices go silent. While it’s not entirely effective, it’s still of interest for its unashamed jankiness. Besides, you really shouldn’t be using one of these anyway, so it doesn’t really matter how well it works.
Raiding the AliExpress 2.4 GHz parts bin, there’s a set of NRF24L01+ modules that jump around all over the band, a couple of extremely sketchy-looking power amplifiers, and a pair of Yagi antennas. It’s not even remotely legal, and we particularly like the sentence “
After running the numbers, I realized it would be cheaper and far more effective to just throw a rock at [
the Bluetooth speaker
]
“. If there’s a lesson here, perhaps it is that effective jamming comes in disrupting the information flow rather than drowning it out.
This project may be illegal, but
unlike some others
we think it (probably) won’t kill you. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8166823",
"author": "Then",
"timestamp": "2025-08-21T16:52:05",
"content": "Holy moly, just get 4 2.4ghz ‘video transmitters’ set them to different channels and bob is your uncle. Use a wok pan for directionality!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,445.772868 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/21/ask-hackaday-where-are-all-the-fuel-cells/ | Ask Hackaday: Where Are All The Fuel Cells? | Tom Nardi | [
"Current Events",
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"News",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"apollo",
"fuel cell",
"hydrogen",
"nasa",
"renewable energy",
"Space Shuttle"
] | Given all the incredible technology developed or improved during the Apollo program, it’s impossible to pick out just one piece of hardware that made humanity’s first crewed landing on another celestial body possible. But if you had to make a list of the top ten most important pieces of gear stacked on top of the Saturn V back in 1969, the fuel cell would have to place pretty high up there.
Apollo fuel cell. Credit: James Humphreys
Smaller and lighter than batteries of the era, each of the three alkaline fuel cells (AFCs) used in the Apollo Service Module could produce up to 2,300 watts of power when fed liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, the latter of which the spacecraft needed to bring along anyway for its life support system. The best part was, as a byproduct of the reaction, the fuel cells produced drinkable water.
The AFC was about as perfectly suited to human spaceflight as you could get, so when NASA was designing the Space Shuttle a few years later, it’s no surprise that they decided to make them the vehicle’s primary electrical power source. While each Orbiter did have backup batteries for emergency purposes, the fuel cells were responsible for powering the vehicle from a few minutes before launch all the way to landing. There was no Plan B. If an issue came up with the fuel cells, the mission would be cut short and the crew would head back home — an event that actually did happen a few times during the Shuttle’s 30 year career.
This might seem like an incredible amount of faith for NASA to put into such a new technology, but in reality, fuel cells weren’t really all that new even then. The space agency first tested their suitability for crewed spacecraft during the later Gemini missions in 1965, and Francis Thomas Bacon developed the core technology all the way back in 1932.
So one has to ask…if fuel cell technology is nearly 100 years old, and was reliable and capable enough to send astronauts to the Moon back in 1960s, why don’t we see them used more today?
Fuel Cell 101
Before continuing to bemoan their absence from our everyday lives, perhaps it would be helpful to take a moment and explain what a fuel cell is.
In the most basic configuration, the layout of a fuel cell is not entirely unlike a traditional battery. You’ve got an anode that serves as the negative terminal, a cathode for the positive, and an electrolyte in between them. There’s actually a number of different electrolytes that can be used, which in turn dictate both the pressure the cell operates at and the fuel it consumes. But we don’t really need to get into the specifics — it’s enough to understand that the electrolyte allows positively charged ions to move through it, while negatively charged electrons are blocked.
The electrons are eager to get to the party on the other side of the electrolyte, so once the fuel cell is connected to a circuit, they’ll rush through to get over to the cathode. Each cell usually doesn’t produce much electricity, but gang a bunch of them up in serial and you can get your total output into a useful range.
One other element to consider is the catalyst. Again, the specifics can change depending on the type of fuel cell and what it’s consuming, but in general, the catalyst is there to break the fuel down. For example, plating the anode with a thin layer of platinum will cause hydrogen molecules to split as they pass through.
Earthly Vehicle Applications
So we know they were used extensively by NASA up until the retirement of the Shuttle back in 2011, but spacecraft aren’t the only vehicles that have used fuel cells for power.
The fuel cell powered Toyota Mirai, on the market since 2015.
There’s been quite a number of cars that used fuel cells, ranging from prototypes to production models. In fact, Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai actually have fuel cell cars available for sale currently.
They’re not terribly widespread however
, with availability largely limited to Japan and California as those are nearly the only places you’ll find hydrogen filling stations.
Of course, not all vehicles need to be filled up at a public pump. There have been busses and trains powered by fuel cells, but again, none have ever enjoyed much widespread success. In the early 2000s there were some experimental fuel cell aircraft, but those efforts were hampered by the fact that
electric aircraft in general are still in their infancy
.
Interestingly, outside of their space applications, fuel cells seem to have enjoyed the most success on the water. While still a minority in the grand scheme of things, there have been a number of fuel cell passenger ferries over the years, with a few still in operation to this day. There’s also been a bit of interest by the world’s navies, with both the German and Italian government collaborating on the development of the Type 212A submarine. Each of the nine fuel cells on the sub can produce up to 50 kW, and together they allow the submarine to remain submerged for weeks — a trick that’s generally only possible with a nuclear-fueled vessels.
Personal Power Plants
While fuel cell vehicles have only seen limited success, there’s plenty of other applications for the technology, some of which are arguably more interesting than a hydrogen-breathing train anyway.
At least for a time, it seemed fuel cells would have a future powering our personal devices like phones and laptops. Modern designs don’t require the liquid oxygen of the Apollo-era hardware, and can instead suck in atmospheric air. You still need the hydrogen, but that can be provided in small replaceable cylinders like many other commercially-available gases.
The peak example of this concept has to be the Horizon MiniPak. This handheld fuel cell was designed to power all of your USB gadgets with its blistering 2 watt output, and used hydrogen cylinders which could either be tossed when they were empty or refilled with a home electrolysis system. Each cylinder reportedly contained enough hydrogen to generate 12 watt-hours, which would put each one about on par with a modern 18650 cell.
The device made its debut at that the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), but despite
contemporary media coverage
talking about an
imminent commercial release
, it’s not clear that it was ever actually sold in significant numbers.
Looking at what’s on the market currently, a company called
EFOY offers a few small fuel cells
that seem to be designed for RVs and boats. They certainly aren’t handheld, with the most diminutive model roughly the size of a small microwave, but at least it puts out 40 watts. Unfortunately, the real problem is the fuel — rather than breathing hydrogen and spitting out pure water, the EFOY units consume methanol and output as a byproduct the creeping existential nightmare of being burned alive by invisible fire.
DIY To the Rescue?
If the free market isn’t offering up affordable portable fuel cells, then perhaps the solution can be found in the hacker and maker communities. After all, this is Hackaday — we cover home-spun alternatives for consumer devices on a daily basis.
Except, not in this case. While there are indeed very promising projects like the
Open Fuel Cell
, we actually haven’t seen much activity in this space. A search through the back catalog while writing this article shows the term “fuel cell” has appeared fewer than 80 times on these pages, and of those occurrences, almost all of them were
discussing some new commercial development
. There were two different fuel cell projects entered into the 2015 Hackaday Prize, but unfortunately both of those appear to have been dead ends.
So Dear Reader, the question is simple: what’s the hold up with mainstream fuel cells? The tech is not terribly complex, and a search online shows plenty of companies selling the parts and even turn-key systems. There’s literally a site called
Fuel Cell Store
, so why don’t we see more of them in the wild? Got a fuel cell project in the back of your mind? Let us know in the comments. | 60 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "8166769",
"author": "RunnerPack",
"timestamp": "2025-08-21T14:26:57",
"content": "“why don’t we see them used more today?”Without reading below the fold, I’m gonna say: producing, storing, transporting, and dispensing the H2 and O2.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repl... | 1,760,371,445.978041 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/21/cal-3d-printing-spins-resin-right-round-baby/ | CAL 3D Printing Spins Resin Right Round, Baby | Tyler August | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3D resin printer",
"computed axial lithography",
"lithography",
"photopolymer resin",
"volumetric 3d printing"
] | Computed Axial Lithography (CAL) is a lighting-fast form of volumetric 3D printing that holds incredible promise for the future, and [The Action Lab]
filmed it in action at a Berkeley team’s booth at the “Open Sauce” convention.
The basic principle works like this: an extra-viscous photopolymer resin sits inside a rotating, transparent cylinder. As the cylinder rotates, UV light is projected into the resin in patterns carefully calculated to reproduce the object being printed. There are no layers, no FEP, and no stop-and-start; it’s just one long exposure from what is effectively an object-generating video, and it does not take long at all. You can probably guess that the photo above shows a Benchy being created, though unfortunately, we’re not told how long it took to produce.
Don’t expect to grab a bottle of SLA resin to get started: not only do you need higher viscosity, but also higher UV transmission than you get from an SLA resin to make this trick work. Like regular resin prints, the resolution can be astounding, and this technique even allows you to embed objects into the print.
This handle was printed directly onto the shaft of the screwdriver.
It’s not a new idea.
Not only have we covered CAL before
, we even
covered it being tested in zero-G.
Floating in viscous resin means the part couldn’t care less about the local gravity field. What’s interesting here is that this hardware is at tabletop scale, and looks very much like something an enterprising hacker might put together.
Indeed, the team at Berkeley have announced their intention to open-source this machine, and are seeking to collaborate with the community
on their Discord server
. Hopefully we’ll see something more formally “open” in the future, as it’s something we’d love to dig deeper into — and maybe even build for ourselves.
Thanks to [Beowulf Shaeffer] for the tip. If you are doing something interesting with photopolymer ooze (or anything else)
don’t hesitate to let us know
! | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8166718",
"author": "DionB",
"timestamp": "2025-08-21T11:17:18",
"content": "Urgh – this is wiiiiiild. Tomography and the maths associated with it is brain-hurty. The resulting parts still look pretty beta but so did early 3d prints. Can’t wait for this to trickle down.",
"paren... | 1,760,371,446.027964 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/21/playing-doom-on-the-anker-prime-charging-station/ | PlayingDOOMOn The Anker Prime Charging Station | Maya Posch | [
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"Anker",
"does it run doom",
"doom"
] | At this point the question is no longer whether a new device runs
DOOM
, but rather how well. In the case of Anker’s Prime Charging Station it turns out that it’s actually not too terrible at controlling the game,
as [Aaron Christophel] demonstrates
. Unlike the similar Anker power bank product with BLE and a big display that we
previously covered
, this device has quite the capable hardware inside.
Playing a quick game of
DOOM
while waiting for charging to finish. (Credit: Aaron Christophel, YouTube)
According to [Aaron], inside this charging station you’ll not only find an ESP32-C3 for Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) duty, but also a 150 MHz Synwit SWM341RET7 (
Chinese datasheet
) ARM-based MCU along with 16 MB of external flash and 8 MB of external RAM. Both of these are directly mapped into the MCU’s memory space. The front display has a 200×480 pixel resolution.
This Synwit MCU is a bit of a curiosity, as it uses ARM China’s
Star-MC1
architecture for which most of the information is in Chinese, though it’s clear that it implements the ARMv8-M profile. It can also be programmed the typical way, which is what [Aaron] did to get
DOOM
on it, with the clicky encoder on the side of the charging station being the sole control input.
As can be seen in the video it makes for a somewhat awkward playing experience, but far more usable than one might expect, even if running full-screen proved to be a bit too much for the hardware. | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8166686",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-08-21T09:11:06",
"content": "ESP32-C3 for Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) duty, but also a 150 MHz Synwit SWM341RET7 (Chinese datasheet) ARM-based MCU along with 16 MB of external flash and 8 MB of external RAMFor a charging station? I ... | 1,760,371,446.078555 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/20/lets-brief-you-on-recent-developments-for-electrostatic-motors/ | Let’s Brief You On Recent Developments For Electrostatic Motors | John Elliot V | [
"hardware",
"High Voltage"
] | [
"Electric motor",
"electrostatic motor",
"motor"
] | Over on his YouTube channel [Ryan Inis] has a video about
how electrostatic motors are breaking all the rules
.
He explains that these days most motors are electromagnetic but suggests that may be changing as the age-old principles of electrostatics are being explored again, particularly due to the limited supply of rare-earth magnets and other materials (such as copper and steel) which are used in many electromagnetic motors.
[Ryan] says that new
electrostatic motors
could be the answer for highly efficient and economical motors. Conventional electromagnetic motors pass current through copper windings which create magnetic fields which are forces which can turn a rotor. The rotor generally has permanent magnets attached which are moved by the changing magnetic forces. These electromagnetic motors typically use low voltage and high current.
Electrostatic alternatives are actually an older design, dating back to the 1740s with the work of
Benjamin Franklin
and
Andrew Gordon
. These electrostatic motors generate motion through the attraction and repulsion of high voltage electric charges and demand lower current than electromagnetic motors. The high voltages involved create practical problems for engineers who need to harness this energy safely without leading to shocks or sparks or such.
[Ryan] goes on to discuss particular electrostatic motor designs and how they can deliver higher torque with lower energy losses due to friction and heat making them desirable for various applications, particularly industrial applications which demand low speed and high torque. He explains the function of the rotor and stator and says that these types of motors use 90% less copper than their electromagnetic alternatives, also no electrical steel and no permanent magnets.
For more coverage on electrostatic motors check out
Electrostatic Motors Are Making A Comeback
. | 28 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8166618",
"author": "scott_tx",
"timestamp": "2025-08-21T05:32:56",
"content": "High voltage motors full of mystery fluid, think I’ll pass on that. They’re going to leak one day and that sounds like a hassle.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,446.135136 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/20/one-motor-drone-mimics-maple-seeds-for-stability/ | One-Motor Drone Mimics Maple Seeds For Stability | Donald Papp | [
"drone hacks"
] | [
"drone",
"maple seed",
"monocopter"
] | We’ve seen aircraft based on “helicopter” seeds (technically
samara
seeds, which include those of maples and elms) before, but this recent design from researchers at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) shows how
a single small motor can power a spinning monocopter
capable of active directed flight, including hovering.
The monocopter is essentially an optimized wing shape with a single motor and propeller at one end. Hardware-wise it might be simple, but the tradeoff is higher complexity in other areas. Physical layout and balance are critical to performance, and software-wise controlling what is basically a wing spinning itself at high speed is a complex task. The payoff is highly-efficient flight in a package that self-stabilizes; it weighs only 32 grams and has a flight time of 26 minutes, which is very impressive for a self-contained micro aircraft.
We saw what looks like
an earlier version of this concept from SUTD
that was capable of directed flight by modifying the airfoil surface, but like the seeds it was modeled after, it’s more of a glider. This unit has the same spinning-seed design, but is actively powered. A significant improvement, for sure.
For those who prefer their DIY micro aircraft a little more traditional-looking, be sure to check out the design details of a handmade and fully operational
1:96 scale P-51 Mustang that weighs only 2.9 grams
. It even has retractable landing gear! When one can manage to keep mass to a bare minimum, a little power goes a long way. | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8166582",
"author": "Mr Name Required",
"timestamp": "2025-08-21T02:14:51",
"content": "Free flight monocopter models powered by screaming Cox 049s have been around for many decades. So what’s new here, just the directional flight bit?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"r... | 1,760,371,446.187646 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/20/carry-your-grayscale-memories-with-this-tiny-game-boy-photo-frame/ | Carry Your Grayscale Memories With This Tiny Game Boy Photo Frame | Tyler August | [
"Nintendo Game Boy Hacks"
] | [
"digital picture frame",
"game boy camera",
"rp2040"
] | While we cannot be certain this is the world’s smallest digital photo frame, [Raphaël Boichot]’s
Pico Slide Show
is probably in the running. Since the 0.85″ TFT display would be wasted on multi-megapixel images, [Raphael] has dedicated this project to images from the Game Boy Camera.
It’s a good fit: the tiny square display has a resolution of 128 pixels per side, while the Game Boy Camera produces files measuring 128 x 112. That allows for pixel-perfect rendering of the grainy images from everyone’s favorite early digicam with just a little letter boxing.
While perfect for all your on-the-go Game Boy slideshow needs, an enclosure might be a good idea for hauling around that battery.
The brains of the operation are an RP2040, provided via the RP2040-zero breakout from Waveshare. Since everything is through-hole or on breakouts, this wouldn’t be a bad project for a beginner solderer.
Since it would make no sense not to have this tiny unit to be portable, power is provided with a 503035 LiPo pouch on the back. It’s only 500 mAh, but this device isn’t going to be chugging power, so we’d expect a reasonable runtime.
Alas, no link cable functionality is currently included, and files must be transferred via PC. Images are saved to the Pico’s flash memory, and [Raphaël] says any format from any Game Boy Printer emulator will work, provided it has a four-color palette. The flash memory on the chip has room for 540 images, which seems like more than enough. Regardless of the novelty of the tiny screen and retro format, nobody wants to see that many holiday snaps in one go.
The Game Boy Camera has been popular with hackers literally for decades now, and we’ve seen it everywhere from
wedding photo booths
to the heart of a
custom DSLR,
and even
on Zoom calls
. | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8166728",
"author": "RunnerPack",
"timestamp": "2025-08-21T11:57:30",
"content": "The camera sensor itself is analog, 128×128 like the display, and even includes some computer vision related functions. A much more capable, self-contained camera could be built on this platform.",
... | 1,760,371,446.282163 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/20/hide-capacitive-touch-buttons-in-your-next-3d-print/ | Hide Capacitive Touch Buttons In Your Next 3D Print | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"Capacitive Touch Sensor",
"touch sensor"
] | Capacitive touch sensors are entirely in the domain of DIY, requiring little more than a carefully-chosen conductive surface and a microcontroller. This led [John Phillips] to ask
why not embed such touch buttons directly into a 3D print
?
Button locations and labels can be made as part of the 3D print, which is handy.
The process is not much different from that of embedding hardware like magnets or fasteners into 3D prints: one pauses the print at convenient spot, drops in the necessary hardware, then resumes printing. It’s more or less the same for embedding a touch-sensitive button, but [John] has a few tips to make things easier.
[John] suggests using a strip of copper tape, one per touch pad, and embedding it into the print near the surface. His preference is three layers in, putting the copper tape behind 0.6 mm of plastic when using standard 0.20 mm layer heights.
Copper tape makes a good capacitive touch sensor, and the adhesive on the tape helps ensure it stays in place as the 3D printer seals it in on subsequent passes.
Copper tape is also easy to solder to, so [John] leaves a small hole over the copper — enough to stick in a wire and tack it down with the tip of a soldering iron and a blob of solder after the print is complete. It might not be ideal soldering conditions, but if things get a little melty on the back side it’s not the end of the world.
On the software side capacitive touch sensors can be as simple as using
an Arduino library for the purpose
but [John]
rolled his own code
, so give it a peek.
This reminds us a bit of another way to get a capacitive touch sensor right up against some plastic:
a simple spring can do the trick
. | 15 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8166503",
"author": "Michael",
"timestamp": "2025-08-20T20:45:17",
"content": "The way I’ve done this in the past has been with conductive PLA, then using a heat-set screw to then clamp a wire that goes to the MCU",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,371,446.243427 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/19/volkswagen-joins-the-car-as-a-service-movement-with-its-id-3-bev/ | Volkswagen Joins The Car-As-A-Service Movement With Its ID.3 BEV | Maya Posch | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"subscription service",
"volkswagen"
] | More and more car manufacturers these days are becoming interested in the recurring revenue model, with Volkswagen’s ID.3 BEV being the latest to have an optional ‘motor power upgrade’ that you can pay for either monthly or with a ‘lifetime’ payment.
As the BBC reports
, this option is now available in the UK, with customers offered the option to pay £16.50 per month or £165 annually, or opt to shell out £649 for what is reportedly a ‘car lifetime’ subscription.
It appears that this subscription service has been in the works for a while already, with it
being offered first last year
in countries like Denmark, following which it appears to be rolled out in other countries too. The software unlock changes the maximum motor output from 150 kW to 170 kW, which some users report as being noticeable.
Regardless of whether you find this to be a good deal, the concept of Car-As-A-Service (CAAS) has becoming increasingly prevalent, with the BBC article referencing BMW’s heated seats subscription and Mercedes’ acceleration subscription. Considering that all the hardware is already in the car that you purportedly purchased, this is sure to rub people the wrong way, not to mention that from a car tuning perspective this seems to suggest that third-party tuners don’t need to apply.
Thanks to [Robert Piston] for the tip. | 113 | 28 | [
{
"comment_id": "8165671",
"author": "pigster",
"timestamp": "2025-08-19T11:13:58",
"content": "Really – people are hacking cars as long as cars are a thing. How hard can it be to buy the cheapest model and bypass all the subscription nonsense with modified software? Probably harder than Rigol oscil... | 1,760,371,446.538969 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/19/antiviral-ppe-for-the-next-pandemic/ | Antiviral PPE For The Next Pandemic | Navarre Bartz | [
"Medical Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"antiviral",
"biohacking",
"genetic mutation",
"immune",
"immune system",
"mRNA",
"pandemic",
"PPE",
"virus"
] | In what sounds like the plot from a sci-fi movie, scientists have isolated an incredibly rare immune mutation to create a
universal antiviral treatment
.
Only present in a few dozen people worldwide, ISG15 immunodeficiency causes people to be more susceptible to certain bacterial illnesses, but it also grants the people with this condition immunity to known viruses. Researchers think that the constant, mild inflammation these individuals experience is at the root of the immunoresponse.
Where things get really interesting is how the researchers have found a way to stimulate protein production of the most beneficial 10 proteins of the 60 created by the natural mutation using 10 mRNA sequences inside a lipid nanoparticle. Lead researcher [Dusan Bogunovic] says “we have yet to find a virus that can break through the therapy’s defenses.” Researchers hope the treatment can be administered to first responders as a sort of biological Personal protective equipment (PPE) against the next pandemic since it would likely work against unknown viruses before new targeted vaccines could be developed.
Hamsters and mice were given this treatment via nasal drip, but how about
intranasal vaccines
when it comes time for human trials? If you want
a short history of viruses
or to learn
how smartwatches could help flatten the curve
for the next pandemic, we’ve got you covered. | 35 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8165641",
"author": "lj",
"timestamp": "2025-08-19T09:25:42",
"content": "Okay.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8165644",
"author": "Greg Mathews",
"timestamp": "2025-08-19T09:36:31",
"content": "You can also drive w... | 1,760,371,446.350971 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/18/silent-speak-and-spell-gets-its-voice-back/ | Silent Speak And Spell Gets Its Voice Back | Al Williams | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Teardown",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"repair",
"Speak and Spell"
] | While talking computers are old hat today, in 1978, a talking toy like the Speak and Spell was the height of novel tech. [Kevin] found
a vintage one
, but it didn’t work. It looked like someone had plugged in the wrong power adapter, leading to, undoubtedly, one or more unhappy children. There was some damage that suggests someone had already tried to repair it, but without success.
In addition to effecting the repair, [Kevin] took lots of pictures, so if you ever wanted to peek inside one of these, this is your chance. The case had no screws, just clips, although apparently some of the newer models did have some screws.
In addition to a sophisticated speech synthesizer, the gadget had a sophisticated power supply to drive the vacuum fluorescent display. The power supply board had a suspicious burn mark and a cracked TO-92 transistor.
[Kevin] found that someone had reversed a schematic for a similar power board used in a different version of the toy, but it was close enough. The simple switching power supply used a handful of bipolar transistors. The cracked transistor was one of a pair, so to be safe, both needed replacement. After all, the transistor failing either put a high load on the uncracked transistor or, perhaps, it cracked because the other transistor failed first.
Oddly, after that repair, the device would work with an AC adapter, but not with batteries. The battery voltage is a little lower, so with a little simulation and some changes in components, the device works again, even with weaker batteries. You can see the startup sequence on a scope in the video below.
If you want to explore Speak and Spells yourself, don’t miss the bibliography at the end of the post. Some people swear by these toys. Other people
make them swear
. If you’d rather build something new than repair, there’s
help for you
. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8165597",
"author": "dudefromthenorth",
"timestamp": "2025-08-19T05:15:11",
"content": "nice",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8165602",
"author": "Ftk",
"timestamp": "2025-08-19T05:55:34",
"content": "Authors that men... | 1,760,371,446.393606 |
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