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https://hackaday.com/2025/08/18/the-pc-in-your-pico/ | The PC In Your Pico | Jenny List | [
"Raspberry Pi",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"286",
"PC emulator",
"pi pico"
] | We’re all used to emulating older computers here, and we’ve seen plenty of projects that take a cheap microcontroller and use it to emulate a classic home computer or gaming platform. They’re fun, but serve mostly as a way to relive old toys.
As microcontrollers become faster though it’s inevitable that the machines they can emulate become more powerful too, so we’re moving into the realm of emulating productivity machines from years past. An example is [Ilya Maslennikov]’s pico-286, which as its name suggests, is
a 286 PC emulator for the Raspberry Pi Pico
.
It has an impressive set of sound and video card emulations, can drive either a VGA or an HDMI monitor, and uses a PS/2 keyboard and mouse. If DOS games are your thing it should provide what you want, but it’s caught our eye because there was a time when a 286 DOS PC was a productivity machine. There’s a huge library of still-useful software for DOS, and thus the prospect of a handheld DOS PC still has some appeal. We’d love to see someone put this in a badge.
MS-DOS may no longer be for sale, but there are several ways to land an open-source DOS in 2025.
FreeDOS is something of a powerhouse
. | 34 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8165551",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-08-19T03:00:51",
"content": "One of the things abot freedos is its a little hungry for ram… while it will boot and run on 640k there’s not much left. That is something to remember on something like the xt class zenith laptop I tried it... | 1,760,371,448.491859 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/18/adjustable-allen-key-after-all-these-years/ | Adjustable Allen Key After All These Years | Tyler August | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"allen key",
"manual machining",
"toolmaking"
] | The Allen key turns 115 this year. It’s strange to believe that in all that time, no one has come up with an adjustable version, but apparently true. Luckily [Chronova Engineering] has taken up the challenge
in his latest video
.
The video is a fascinating glimpse at the toolmaker’s art–manual machining and careful human judgement. Humans being the fallable creatures we are, the design goes through a few iterations. After the first failure in metal, [Chronova] falls back on 3D printing to rapidly prototype the next six iterations. Given how much work goes into manually machining the designs, we can only imagine the time savings that represents.
The final version is has classic hexagonal rod split in two, so that a chisel-shaped rod can spread the two prongs out to engage the sides of the Allen bolt. Even with that settled, the prongs and wedge had to be redesigned several times to find exact shape and heat-treatment that would work. At this point the range is anything between 4 mm and 6 mm, which is admittedly narrow, but [Chronova Engineering] believes the mechanism has the potential to go wider.
The design is not being patented, but the drawings are available via the [Chronova Engineering] Patreon if you really need an adjustable Allen key and don’t feel like reverse-engineering the mechanism from video. It’s a much larger project than we’ve featured from this channel before– enormous, really, compared to
steam engines that fit on pencil erasers
or electric motors that
squeeze through the eye of a needle.
Our thanks hall-of-fame tipster [Keith Olson] for letting us know about this one. If you want a slice of that fame for yourself,
the tips line is always open
. | 40 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "8165543",
"author": "Mark",
"timestamp": "2025-08-19T02:37:56",
"content": "The only thing better than this glorious craftsmanship is getting to see and hear the full end to end thought process to solve this problem.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
... | 1,760,371,448.702383 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/18/i-3d-printer/ | I, 3D Printer | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"3d printer conversion",
"camera rig"
] | Like many of us, [Ben] has too many 3D printers. What do you do with the old ones? In his case, he converted it into
a robotic camera rig
. See the results, including footage from the robot, in the video below. In addition to taking smooth video, the robot can spin around to take photos for photogrammetry.
In fact, the whole thing started with an idea of building a photogrammetry rig. That project didn’t go as well as planned, but it did lead to this interesting project.
Motion control used to be exotic, but 3D printers really put it in the mainstream. The printer has motors, lead screws, gears, and belts. Of course, there are plenty of 3D printed parts, too. He did buy a few new pieces of extrusion and some longer belts. In addition, he had to upgrade one stepper to one that uses gears.
The camera tilts plus or minus 90 degrees on what used to be the X axis. The Y axis moves the camera forward and backward. The Z axis still moves up and down, but the extruder motor has a new job.
The extruder motor rotates the target object. Originally, the plan was to spin the camera, but that was difficult since the ring is 18 inches across. In addition to reliably moving it, there’s the wire management to worry about, too. So even though the original plan was to rotate the camera, the final project rotates the object on a turntable.
After prototyping with the 3D printer, he had an outside service CNC many of the parts in metal, both for the appearance and for the rigidity. But we imagine it would be fine with good-quality 3D printed parts.
Overall, a nice way to upcycle an old printer. We didn’t see the design files for any of the parts, but you’d probably have to customize your approach anyway. We’ve seen plenty of these
camera rigs
. Some of them
recycle other tech
. | 3 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8165456",
"author": "Delta",
"timestamp": "2025-08-18T22:37:21",
"content": "I converted my Ender 3 Pro into an Ender 3 NG. Was definitely worth effort because the Ender 3 brought more fixing and less printing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,448.135449 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/18/2025-one-hertz-challenge-timekeeping-at-one-becquerel/ | 2025 One Hertz Challenge: Timekeeping At One Becquerel | Tyler August | [
"clock hacks",
"contests"
] | [
"2025 Hackaday One Hertz Challenge",
"americium-241",
"gamma ray spectroscopy",
"scintillator",
"Vetinari clock"
] | The Becquerel (Bq) is an SI unit of radioactivity: one becquerel is equivalent to one radioactive decay per second. That absolutely does not make it equivalent to one hertz — the random nature of radioactive decay means you’ll never get one pulse every second — but it does make it interesting. [mihai.cuciuc] certainly thought so, when he endeavored to
create a clock that would tick at one becquerel.
The result is an interesting
version of a Vetinari Clock
, first conceived of by [Terry Pratchett] in his
Discworld
books. In the books, the irregular tick of the clock is used by Lord Vetinari as a form of psychological torture. For some reason,
imposing this torture on ourselves
has long been
popular amongst hackers
.
Without an impractical amount of shielding, any one-becquerel source would be swamped by background radiation, so [mihai] had to get creative. Luckily, he is the creator of the
Pomelo gamma-ray spectroscope,
which allowed him to be discriminating. He’s using an Am-241 source, but just looking for the characteristic 59.5 KeV gamma rays was not going to cut it at such a low count rate. Instead he’s using two of the Pomelo solid-state scintillation as a coincidence detector, with one tuned for the Am-241’s alpha emissions. When both detectors go off simultaneously, that counts as an event and triggers the clock to tick.
How he got exactly one becquerel of activity is a clever hack, too. The Am-241 source he has is far more active than one
decay
per second, but by varying the distance from the gamma detector he was able to cut down to one
detection
per second using the inverse square law and the shielding provided by Earth’s atmosphere. The result is a time signal that is a stable one hertz… if averaged over a long enough period. For now, anyway. As the Am-241 decays away, its activity decreases, and [mihai] admits the clock loses about 0.4 seconds per day.
While we won’t be giving the prize for accuracy in this contest, we are sure Lord Vetinari would be proud. The Geiger-counter sound effect you can hear in the demo video embedded below is great touch. It absolutely increases the psychic damage this cursed object inflicts. | 23 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8165336",
"author": "Joel",
"timestamp": "2025-08-18T18:37:58",
"content": "Any cheap chinese dupes in chat?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8165343",
"author": "dudefromthenorth",
"timestamp": "2025-08-18T18:50:55",
... | 1,760,371,448.295203 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/17/hackaday-links-august-17-2025/ | Hackaday Links: August 17, 2025 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"3I/Atlas",
"aliens",
"Avi Loeb",
"coffee",
"comet",
"continental divide",
"cooling",
"data center",
"drought",
"factory tour",
"hackaday links",
"interstellar",
"it's not aliens",
"office",
"perhelion",
"rivers",
"RTO",
"sequoia",
"Starbucks",
"toyota",
"Tundra"
] | We’ve studiously avoided any mention of our latest interstellar visitor, 3I/Atlas, on these pages, mainly because of all the hoopla in the popular press about
how Avi Loeb thinks it’s aliens
, because of course he does. And we’re not saying it’s aliens either, mainly because we’d never be lucky enough to be alive during an actual alien invasion — life just hasn’t historically been that kind to us. So chances are overwhelming that 3I/Atlas is just a comet, but man, it’s doing its level best to look like it’s not, which means it’s time to brave the slings and arrows and wade into this subject.
The number of oddities surrounding 3I/Atlas just keeps growing, from
its weird Sun-directed particle stream
to
its extreme speed
, not to mention
a trajectory through the solar system
that puts it just a fraction of an astronomical unit from two of the three planets within the “Goldilocks Zone” of our star — ignore the fact that at an estimated seven billion years old, 3I/Atlas likely would have started its interstellar journey well before our solar system had even started forming. Still, it’s the trajectory that intrigues us, especially the fact that it’s coming in at a very shallow along to the ecliptic, and seems like it will cross that imaginary plane almost exactly when it makes its closest approach to the Sun on October 29, which just coincidentally happens to be at the very moment Earth is exactly on the opposite side of our star. We’ll be as far as possible from the action on that date, with the comet conveniently lost in the glare of the Sun. Yes, there’s talk of re-tasking some of our spacecraft around Mars or in the Jovian system to take a peek when 3I/Atlas passes through their neighborhoods, but those are complicated affairs that show no sign of bearing fruit in the short time left before the comet heads back out into the Deep Dark. Too bad; we’d really love an up-close and personal look at this thing.
Starbucks campers, beware — the company would really prefer
you don’t set up a full office in their stores
. At least in South Korea, that is, where patrons have taken things to extremes by bringing full-sized desktop computers and even printers to the cozy confines of their local Starbucks. The company is fighting back against the practice in the most generic way possible, implementing a policy that bans patrons from bringing “bulky items” with them when the caffeine urge strikes. Mind you, we’ve done plenty of work out in the wild. Nearly the whole first year of Hackaday articles from this particular author were written on a humble Chromebook inside either a Starbucks or a Dunkin’ — with heavy emphasis on the latter because of their vastly superior hot cocoa. So we get the new rule, but it almost seems like Starbucks is missing an opportunity here. Why don’t they just lean into it and install a metered printer in each store?
This story gave us a bit of pause when we first read it, and we’re not sure if this is a case of technical ignorance on the part of the UK government, or us. Guidance published this week by the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs asks UK citizens to
delete old emails and images from cloud-based services
due to the current “nationally significant” drought conditions. Apparently, this will save water somehow, presumably by reducing the cooling load on the data centers that house these files. If you’re confused by this, we are too; do the policy wonks think that the hard drives that store these files are water-cooled? Or perhaps that keeping those pictures from 2013 requires some CPU cycles, therefore generating heat that has to be removed? We suppose that’s possible, and that removing the temptation to gaze at photos from Aunt Winifred’s 99th birthday party would spare a few drops of water, but then again, it was our impression that data centers aren’t just running cold water from the taps through their cooling units, but rather running closed-loop systems that consume as little fresh water as possible. We’re willing to be proven wrong, of course — data center cooling actually sounds like great fodder for an article — but on the face of it, this sounds like a government agency throwing something against the wall and seeing if it sticks.
We can’t say why for sure, but the idea of continental divides is unreasonably cool to us. Here in the US, we’ve got a couple of these imaginary geographic lines, the main one being the Atlantic-Pacific divide that roughly transects the continent north to south along the ridges and peaks of the Rocky Mountains. East of the line, water eventually flows into the Atlantic basin, while west of the line, rivers all flow into the Pacific. It’s a fascinating concept, one that’s captured beautifully by
River Runner Global
, an interactive GIS application that lets you trace the path of a virtual drop of water on its journey to the sea. It charts the rivers and streams of your drop’s journey, and the best part is the flyover of the terrain as it courses to the sea. Fair warning, it’s pretty resource hungry; it locked up our machine once while playing. But it’s worth the risk, in our opinion.
And finally, it’s factory tour time again here at Hackaday Links, and this time we’ve got a real treat: a
full tour of Toyota Motors Manufacturing Texas
, the San Antonio mega-plant that makes Tundra pickups and Sequoia SUVs. The factory produces one new vehicle every 67 seconds, starting from raw steel coil stock. The enormity of the presses used to stamp out body panels alone is worth the price of admission, as is the part where the entire body goes for a deep soak in a galvanizing tank to protect the metal. The level of automation is astounding, but it was surprising to see just how many people are still critical to the process. And extra points for the sneak-peek at the new Tundra color near the end. We’re not a fan, but it certainly does make a statement. Enjoy! | 15 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8164686",
"author": "A",
"timestamp": "2025-08-17T23:40:07",
"content": "Everyone knows clouds turn into rain, and thus the best way to make it rain is to delete data from any cloud based devices.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id"... | 1,760,371,448.189256 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/17/2025-one-hertz-challenge-a-flaming-oscillator-and-a-new-take-on-the-candle-clock/ | 2025 One Hertz Challenge: A Flaming Oscillator And A New Take On The Candle Clock | Aaron Beckendorf | [
"contests"
] | [
"2025 Hackaday One Hertz Challenge",
"candle",
"candle flicker",
"capacitance sensor",
"CH32V003",
"oscillator"
] | Candle clocks were once an easy way to build a clock without using complex mechanical devices: just observe how quickly a thin candle burns down, mark an identical candle with periodic gradations, and you had a simple timer. These were the first candle-based timekeeping devices, but as [Tim]’s
flicker-based oscillator
demonstrates, they’re certainly not the only way to keep time with a flame.
Generally speaking, modern candles minimize flickering by using a wick that’s designed to balance the amount of wax and air drawn into the flame. However, when several candles are brought close together, their flames begin to interfere with each other, causing them to flicker in synchrony. The frequency of flickering is a function of gravity and flame diameter alone, so a bundle of three candles will flicker at a fairly constant frequency; in [Tim]’s case, it was about 9.9 Hz.
To sense this oscillation, [Tim] originally used a phototransistor to detect the flame’s light, but he wanted an even simpler solution. He positioned a wire just above the flame, so that as it flickered it would periodically contact the wire. A flame has a different dielectric constant than air does, so the capacitance between this and another wire wrapped around the bundle of candles fluctuates with the flame. To sense this, he used a CH32V003 microcontroller, which reads capacitance, performs some signal processing to get a clean signal, counts oscillations, and uses this time signal to blink an LED once a second. The final result is unusually mesmerizing for a blinking LED.
In something of the reverse of this project, we’ve also seen an oscillator used for
an (artificial) candle
. There’s also a surprising amount of science that can be learned
by studying candles
. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8164627",
"author": "biemster",
"timestamp": "2025-08-17T20:59:01",
"content": "absolutely brilliant!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8164634",
"author": "Feinfinger (super villain in nostalgy mode)",
"timestam... | 1,760,371,448.42056 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/17/recto-in-case-programming-isnt-hard-enough/ | Recto: In Case Programming Isn’t Hard Enough | Al Williams | [
"Software Development",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"lisp",
"visual programming"
] | There’s long been a push to stop writing code as a sequence of lines and go to something graphical, which has been very successful in some areas and less so in others. But even when you use something graphical like Scratch, it is
really
standing in for lines of code? Many graphical environments are really just interface builders, and you still write traditional code underneath. [Masato Hagiwara] asks the question: Can you write code that is actually a 2D graphic? Where the graphical layout isn’t a cover for code, but is the code itself? His answer is
Recto
.
Whereas a C program, for example, has a syntactical structure of lines, a Recto program has rectangles. Rectangles can contain data, and their structure naturally mimics the kinds of structures we usually use: columns, rows, matrices, and so on. Rectangles can also contain… wait for it… other rectangles. Special rectangles act as dictionaries or sets.
We thought this sort of reminded us of Lisp, and, in fact, [Hagiwara] makes that clear later in the post. The real problem is how do you…write? draw?… this kind of code? At first, he laid it out in a spreadsheet before compilation. Now he’s built an editor for it, and you can try it in your browser. There’s also a limited-feature compiler that can handle simple programs.
[Hagiwara] goes on to show how this representation would work for natural human languages, too. Honestly, we have enough trouble with English and the few other human languages we struggle with, but it is interesting to contemplate.
If you like strange languages, there’s
Piet
. Not that either of these is the
weirdest we’ve ever seen
. | 20 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "8164497",
"author": "baltar",
"timestamp": "2025-08-17T17:11:10",
"content": "You want reasonable graphic programming? Try DRAKON.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8164585",
"author": "Benjamin Goldberg",
"timestamp": "20... | 1,760,371,448.23987 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/17/llama-habitat-continues-to-expand-now-includes-the-psp/ | Llama Habitat Continues To Expand, Now Includes The PSP | Tyler August | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"PSP Hacks"
] | [
"llama2",
"local LLM",
"playstation portable",
"psp"
] | Organic Llamas have a rather restricted range, in nature: the Andes Mountains, and that’s it. Humans weren’t content to let the fluffy, friend-shaped creatures stay in their natural habitat, however, and they can now be found on every continent except Antarctica. The Llama2 Large Language Model is like that: while it may have started on a GPU somewhere, thanks to enterprising hackers like [Caio Madeira],
who has ported Llama2 to the PlayStation Portable (PSP),
the fluffiest LLM can be found just about anywhere.
The AI, in all its glory, dooming yet another system.
Ultimately this project has its roots in
Llama2.c
by [karpathy], a project we’ve seen used on
Pentium II under Windows 98
, DOS machines
running 486 processors
, and even the venerable
Commodore 64, of all impossible things
. Now, it’s the PSP’s turn. This implementation uses the same 260K tinystories model as the C64 port, upon which it is based. Of course the PSP’s RAM has room for a much larger model, but [Ciao] apparently prefers to run the tiny model faster on this less-ancient gaming hardware.
Its getting to the point that it’s harder to find systems that won’t run LLMs than those that do. Given that Llama2 seems to be
the new
DOOM
, it’s probably only a matter of time before their virtual fur is all over all our old equipment. Fortunately for allergy sufferers, virtual fur cannot trigger a histamine response.
If you know of another system getting LLMs (Alpaca-adjacent or otherwise),
send in a tip
. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8164419",
"author": "SETH",
"timestamp": "2025-08-17T14:29:25",
"content": "The coherence of the output 🤣",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8164437",
"author": "macsimki",
"timestamp": "2025-08-17T15:33:49",
... | 1,760,371,448.814478 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/17/its-a-pi-but-its-not-quite-a-raspberry-pi/ | It’s A Pi, But It’s Not Quite ARaspberryPi | Jenny List | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"raspberry pi",
"Raspberry pi clone",
"reverse engineering",
"RP3A0"
] | When is a Raspberry Pi not a Raspberry Pi? Perhaps when it’s
a Pi Pico-shaped board with an RP3A0 SoC from a Raspberry Pi Zero 2
, made by [jonny12375].
Back in the early days of the Raspberry Pi, there was
a offering from the Korean manufacturer Odroid
, which wasn’t merely a similar machine with a different SoC, but a full clone in a smaller form factor featuring the same BCM2385 chip as the original. It was electrically and software-wise identically to the real thing, which we suspect didn’t go down very well with the Pi folks in Cambridge. The supply of Broadcom chips dried up, and ever since then the only way to get a real Pi has been from the official source. That’s not quite the end of the unofficial Pi story though, because a few hardy experimenters have made Pi clones like this one using chips desoldered from the real thing.
It’s the fruit of a reverse-engineering project to find the chip’s pinout, and it’s a proof of concept board rather than the intended final target of the work. The process involved
painstakingly sanding down each layer of a Zero 2 board
to reveal the traces and vias. The current board has a few quirks but it boots, making this an impressive piece of work on all counts. We’re looking forward to seeing whatever the final project will be.
If you’re hungry for more Pi-derived goodness,
we’ve also seen one using the part form a Pi 3
. | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8164405",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-08-17T14:02:00",
"content": "I had an Odroid, it wasn’t 100% electrically or software compatible, but it was close. If I remember rightly it could run off a single lithium cell with a charging circuit.Sadly while photographing it near... | 1,760,371,448.756302 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/17/commodore-is-back-selling-new-c64s-but-should-you-buy-them/ | Commodore Is Back Selling New C64s, But Should You Buy Them? | Maya Posch | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"commodore",
"commodore 64"
] | It’s hard to argue with nostalgia, but you
can
toss a bucket of cold facts over it. In the case of the recent rescuing of the Commodore brand from the clutches of relabeling of generic electronics by [Perifractic] of
Retro Recipes
, we got [The Retro Shack]
doing the proverbial bucket dumping in a new video
. Basically the question is whether the fresh Commodore 64 offerings by the new-and-improved
Commodore
are what you really want, or need.
The thing is that over the decades many people have created all the bits that you need to build your own classical C64, or even buy one off-the-shelf, with people like [
bwack
] having reverse-engineered the various C64 mainboards. These can be populated with drop-in replacements for chips like the SID, VIC-II, CIAs and others that are readily available, along with replica cases and keyboards. If you crave something less bulky and complex, you can run a bare metal C64 emulator like BMC64 on a Raspberry Pi, or just run the VICE emulator on your platform of choice. There’re also options like the full-sized TheC64 and Ultimate 64 Elite II systems that you can buy ready to go.
Basically, there is a whole gamut of ways to get some part of the C64 experience, ranging from emulator-only to a full hardware DIY or pre-assembled format. Each of which come with their own price tag, starting at $0 for running VICE on your existing system. With so much choice we can only hope that the renewed Commodore company will become something more than Yet Another C64 Experience. | 108 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "8164246",
"author": "daveb",
"timestamp": "2025-08-17T08:03:05",
"content": "that starlight edition looks excellent.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8165075",
"author": "Nathan Silva",
"timestamp": "2025-08-18T... | 1,760,371,448.632035 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/16/a-second-chance-for-the-single-wheel-monorail/ | A Second Chance For The Single Wheel Monorail? | Heidi Ulrich | [
"Toy Hacks",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"brennan",
"gimbal",
"gyro",
"gyroscope",
"locomotive",
"meccano",
"monorail",
"track",
"train"
] | Lately,
this peculiar little single wheel monorail
came to our attention. Built by [extraglide1976], all from Meccano. His build started with modest tests: one gyro obviously flopped. Two gyros geared together ran slightly better. But when he adds active gimbal control, things suddenly come to life – the model shudders, catches itself, and carries on. The final green-roofed locomotive, with LEDs signalling ‘system go’, trundles smoothly along a single rail on [extraglide1976]’s deck.
To be fair, it houses a lot of mechanics and engineering which we don’t find in the monorails of today. We do have quite a few monorails in our world, but none of them balance on a single wheel like this one. So, where did this invention derail?
Outside of theme parks, Japan is one of the few countries where monorails are still used as serious urban transport: though Germany’s century-old Wuppertal Schwebebahn, the
lesser-known C-Bahn
, China’s sprawling Chongqing and Shanghai systems, Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur line, Brazil’s São Paulo network, the US links in Seattle and Las Vegas, and India’s Mumbai Monorail prove the idea has quietly taken root elsewhere.
The thing you’ll see in nearly all these monorails is how the carriages are designed to clamp onto the tracks. This is of course
the most safe option
, but it loses out on speed to the ones that sit on top of the tracks, balancing on one wheel. Such a train was actually invented, in 1910, by Louis Brennan. His original monorail promised faster, cheaper transport, even using existing rails. The carriages leaned into turns like a motorbike, without any intervention from the driver. Two counter-rotating gyroscopes kept the carriage upright, cancelling precession forces like a mechanical Jedi trick.
Back then, it failed commercially, but today? With cheap sensors, brushless motors, and microcontrollers, and intelligent software, why not let it make a comeback? It could carry freight through narrow urban tunnels. With high-speed single-rail pods?
Investors killed Brennan’s idea, but we live in a different time now. You could start out with a gimmicky ‘snacks and beer’ highline from your fridge to your garage. Share your take on it in the comments! | 27 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "8164218",
"author": "Actually...",
"timestamp": "2025-08-17T06:33:07",
"content": "this has 4 wheels, so not a single wheel monorail.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8164223",
"author": "DurDurDur",
"timestamp": "2025-08... | 1,760,371,448.876931 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/18/how-laser-headlights-died-in-the-us/ | How Laser Headlights Died In The US | Lewin Day | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Misc Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"fmvss",
"headlights",
"laser headlights",
"phosphor",
"regulation"
] | Automotive headlights started out burning acetylene, before regular electric lightbulbs made them obsolete. In due time, halogen bulbs took over, before the industry began to explore even newer technologies like HID lamps for greater brightness. Laser headlights stood as the next leap forward, promising greater visibility and better light distribution.
Only, the fairytale didn’t last. Just over a decade after laser headlights hit the market, they’re already being abandoned by the manufacturers that brought them to fruition. Laser headlights would end up fighting with one hand behind their back, and ultimately became irrelevant before they ever became the norm.
Bright Lights
Laser headlights were first announced by BMW in 2013, with the German company promising the technology would be available on its new halo car, the i8. Fellow German rivals Audi would end up pipping the Bavarians to the punch, launching the limited-production Audi R8 LMX with laser headlights just months before the i8 entered production. Both brands would later bring the technology to a range of luxury models, including sedans and SUVs.
Long-throw laser lights became an option on premium Audi and BMW vehicles. Credit: Audi
The prime selling point of laser headlights was that they could project a very bright, very focused beam a long way down the road.
As we’ve explored previously,
they achieved this by using blue lasers to illuminate yellow phosphors, creating a vibrant white light that could be bounced off a reflector and directed up to 600 m ahead of the vehicle. They weren’t so useful for low-beams, with that duty usually passed off to LEDs. However, they were perfect to serve as an ultra-efficient long-throw high beam that wouldn’t disrupt other road users, albeit with the aid of steerable headlamp assemblies and camera-based tracking systems.
Laser headlights were more expensive to produce, but were also far more capable than any conventional bulb in terms of throw distance. They were also more compact than just about any other automotive lighting technology, giving automotive designers far more freedom when creating a car’s front end. They were even able to outperform LEDs in the efficiency stakes. And yet, both Audi and BMW would come to abandon the technology.
A comparison from 2014 between BMW’s LED high beam (left) and laser high beam (right). Notice the far greater throw of the laser high beam. Credit: BMW
The culprit? Regulations. In particular, headlight rules enforced in the United States. The Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard rule 108 deems that headlight intensity must not exceed 150,000 candela, while beam range must not exceed 250 meters. These rules effectively mean that laser headlights can’t outperform older technologies without falling afoul of US regulations. The rules stand in stark contrast to European regulations, which allow headlights to reach up to 430,000 candela. In an echo of the sealed beam era, US regulations were once again stymying European innovation by being firmly stuck in the past.
Of course, US regulations don’t apply everywhere. European automakers could have kept pursuing laser headlight technology, however, other factors have also come into play. LED headlight technology has continued to improve, with newer models improving brightness and light distribution. Adaptive matrix LED headlights also allow sections of the headlight beam to be turned on and off at will to provide the best illumination without dazzling other road users.
It’s widely considered that Audi beat BMW to market with the laser headlights on the limited-edition R8 LMX, but BMW was the first to enter real series production with laser headlights on the i8. Credit: BMW
To that end, laser headlights are facing decline. While a few models in the Audi and BMW lineups still feature the headlights, both automakers are phasing them out for the future. Speaking on the matter last year, BMW’s large-car product manager, Andreas Suhrer, noted that solely LED-based designs were the future. “At the moment, we still have laser lighting on the G26 and the X7, but we don’t have future plans,” Suhrer stated. “The G60 and G61 do not have it, and the new 7 Series does not have it. I don’t think it’s completely done, but for the next models, we are making the LED Matrix lights our focus. The laser lights are pretty good with absolute range but the latest generation of Matrix LED lights does a better distribution.” Meanwhile, Audi released statements in 2024 noting that there were no plans to implement laser lighting modules in future product.
Ultimately, laser headlights were an expensive, fancy solution to a minor problem. Better high beams are surely a good thing, but given how rarely most motorists use them, they’re hardly a critical feature. Combine their high price and limited usability with the fact that one of the world’s largest car markets just made them useless, and it hardly made sense for Audi or BMW to continue pursuing this unique technology. They will go down as a luxury car curio, to be written about by bloggers every few decades as a reminder of what was once deemed cutting edge. | 140 | 28 | [
{
"comment_id": "8165284",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-08-18T17:31:31",
"content": "“Better high beams are surely a good thing, but given how rarely most motorists use them, they’re hardly a critical feature.”Those in rural areas might differ.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,371,449.451829 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/18/should-you-try-printing-with-polypropylene/ | Should You Try Printing With Polypropylene? | Tyler August | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer filament",
"polypropylene"
] | Of all the plastics that surround us on the daily, the one we hear least about in the 3D printing world is probably polypropylene (PP). Given that this tough, slightly flexible thermoplastic has characteristics you might want for your prints, the question is: why? [Lost in Tech] is not answering that question in a recent video; instead
he’s showing us what we’re missing out on with a review of the material.
A look at the Material Safety Data Sheet and available material has [Lost in Tech] suggesting it won’t be (much) more toxic for you than PLA, but you still wouldn’t want to huff the fumes. The biggest issue printing PP is getting it to stick — glass beds and PEI are
not
your friend, but polypropylene tape is easy to find and makes a fine print surface. He reviews a few other options, but it looks like plain old tape is still your best bet if you can’t get a hold of a Prusa PP bed. The other big issue is shrinkage, but that’s hardly unique to PP and can be accounted for in the model.
Just because it can be used, that doesn’t mean it should be. [Lost in Tech] does make a good case for why you might want to use PP — for one thing, it doesn’t string much, in part because it’s not hygroscopic. That makes it great for those of us in humid climes who don’t want to always faff around with dry boxes, but also wonderful for parts that will be in touch with water. Polypropylene also has great chemical resistance for even scarier chemicals than dihydrogen monoxide. The “killer app” though, at least as far as [Lost in Tech] is concerned, is to use polypropylene with compliant mechanisms: it’s incredibly resilient to bending, and doesn’t fatigue easily. You might even call it a “flexible” filament, but unlike with TPU, you get a nice hard plastic to go with that flexibility.
If you’re interested in this somewhat-forgotten filament, we
featured a “getting started” guide last year.
You can even make your own polypropylene filament
using non-medical “COVID” masks
, but do be sure to wash them first. What do you think? Is it time to give PP another chance, or has the 3D printing world moved on? | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8165399",
"author": "Vik Olliver",
"timestamp": "2025-08-18T20:30:13",
"content": "Having tried this way back when, the problems were twofold: Layer adhesion and shrinkage. The shrinkage was the killer. It needs a high print temperature, and a high coefficient of thermal expansion. ... | 1,760,371,449.025119 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/18/the-terminal-demise-of-consumer-electronics-through-subscription-services/ | The Terminal Demise Of Consumer Electronics Through Subscription Services | Maya Posch | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"consumer electronics"
] | Open any consumer electronics catalog from around the 1980s to the early 2000s and you are overwhelmed by a smörgåsbord of devices, covering any audio-visual and similar entertainment and hobby needs one might have. Depending on the era you can find the camcorders, point-and-shoot film and digital cameras right next to portable music players, cellphones, HiFi sets and tower components, televisions and devices like DVD players and VCRs, all of them in a dizzying amount of brands, shapes and colors that are sure to fit anyone’s needs, desires and budget.
When by the late 2000s cellphones began to absorb more and more of the features of these devices alongside much improved cellular Internet access, these newly minted ‘smartphones’ were hailed as a technological revolution that combined so many consumer electronics into a single device. Unlike the relatively niche feature phones, smartphones absolutely took off.
Fast-forward more than a decade and the same catalogs now feature black rectangles identified respectively as smart phones, smart TVs and tablets, alongside evenly colored geometric shapes that identify as smart speakers and other devices. While previously the onus for this change was laid by this author primarily on
the death of industrial design
, the elephant in the room would seem to be that consumer electronics are suffering from a terminal disease: subscription services.
Ownership And Timeshare
Family watching television in their home, c. 1958 (Credit:
Evert F. Baumgardner
)
In the burgeoning consumer electronics world of the 1950s, everyone was into streaming audio-visual content. This being the once popular phenomena that historians refer to as ‘radio’ and ‘television’, involving the purchase of a compatible device to receive said content on, which was being broadcast via the airwaves. Naturally, this was before the era of on-demand streaming, so you also had to subscribe to a service that would provide you with the time tables for when said content would be streamed.
Although you could buy vinyl records back then, these were relatively expensive even if you already had a record player. Fortunately, by the 1960s affordable cassette tapes for purchase of prerecorded content – as well as home recording – began to appear with Philips’ compact cassette as clear frontrunner.
By the 1970s home video recorders became affordable and surged in popularity by the 1980s and 1990s, with JVC’s VHS format enabling a massive market of both prerecorded content and of blank tapes to record any content from television broadcasts on for later perusal. At this point linear television and radio broadcasts had been largely superseded by people building up their personal audio-visual libraries in addition to borrowing tapes and later DVDs from video rental stores and public libraries.
The popular DEC VT100 terminal. (Credit:
Jason Scott
)
Until the 1970s digital computers were primarily a government and university thing, with businesses anxiously trying to get into the game as well to ease everything from payroll processing to inventory management and engineering. Due to the high cost – and large size – of digital computers at the time, it was more economical to use
time-sharing
. This changed over time from batch processing in the form of university students lugging stacks of punch cards around, to them setting themselves down in front of a terminal like the DEC VT100.
Although these computer terminals looked like computers to the lay person, they are little more than a screen and keyboard tied into I/O buffers that communicate with a remote central computer. With these terminals students could all log into their own student account on the university’s mainframe and thus stop pestering the sysadmins with their stacks of punch cards for an overdue assignment.
For government purposes the same terminal-based approach offered a good balance, while for businesses the target mainframe over at the time-sharing business was more easily accessed by something like dial-up due to the distances involved, with the mainframe’s owner charging for the used resources. This spread the expenses of owning and maintaining these early computers over as many users as possible while keeping costs low for businesses making use of these time-share services.
Casual home entertainment of the early 2000s with money being no object. (Source:
Wikimedia
)
This lasted until the era of mass-produced home computers arrived by the late 1970s with microcomputers such as the Commodore PET, before culminating with the 1981 release of IBM’s 5150 Personal Computer (PC), which was decidedly the point when time-sharing of mainframes and the use of terminals had begun to rapidly fade. Within years every student, corporate worker and government employee could economically be given access to a fully capable computer system, whether in the form of a PC, Macintosh, MSX or something else, along with dedicated server systems tucked away in the business’ server room or under a desk somewhere.
Even children could now be given dedicated computers to play video games on, which would have seemed a frivolous waste of computing resources in the 1960s to anyone
except university students
.
Thus, as the 1980s rolled over into the 1990s it seemed like the future of technology had truly arrived, with every home potentially a true Mecca of computing power and audio-visual entertainment.
Terminal Decline
A contemporary living room. (Source:
Wikimedia
)
After most of the world celebrated the arrival of the new millennium in 2000, followed by the arrival of the 3rd millennium a year later, the remaining euphoria of having made it to the future would quickly run into the quicksand pit of reality. After having had a quarter of the 21st century to sober up, it seems like this is the time to take a look back and question how in blazes’ name we got where we are today.
Over the past years, the living room has metamorphized from something that looks lived in, into the modern-day living room that can alternatively be described as ‘clean’ or ‘sterile’. The theme here is ‘surfaces’, which preferentially are white, black, grey or some other inoffensive color.
As you enter such a living room to be audio-visually entertained, you will pick up the smart remote that turns on the smart TV. Except the TV is always on, as it is smart and probably is always listening and running firmware updates in the background anyway. Ignoring that, your choices of entertainment are:
A game console that is logged into your Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft account with likely paid-for digital games and services
A video streaming service or two, or four, the overwhelming majority of which are subscription-only and/or force you to watch ads like in the good ol’ days of cable TV. Only the ads are much, much worse
Content streamed off your local NAS, if you’re a total nerd
A Blu-ray or DVD player if you’re old-fashioned and refuse to join the Digital-Only Content Age
For the overwhelming majority of smart TV users, they are a recurring revenue source for streaming services, with the TV being the device purchased by the viewer in order to access said services. Much the same is true with modern game consoles, where you effectively must be logged into your online account to do much of anything with the console and an increasing amount of games, if only to obtain the latest updates to fix bugs. This triply so if you are one of those people who are into
cloud gaming
.
As you ignore that your smart TV is basically a cross between a very advanced VT100 terminal and a
Telescreen
, you glance at the glass-and-plastic slab in your hand as one of your friends just messaged you on a messaging app – which annoyingly again advertises a premium subscription account – about this rad new music album on this one streaming audio service. Fortunately you are already a member, so you add the album for later listening.
That your smart TV, game console, and smart phone are all just terminals for some remote server begins to sink in once your internet access has been cut off. You cannot stream any audio-visual content, and many of your video games outright refuse to run because of a lack of internet connectivity. Ditto for your smart speakers, which have begun to stubbornly ignore your calls for attention.
When you sigh and flip open your laptop to maybe do some work, you find that your software products refuse to even launch, as they absolutely needed to refresh their license key verification this instant. Feeling mildly upset by their accusations of you having pirated their over-priced software after forking over so much cash each month, you slam the laptop shut again. This is when you realize that your project files are stored safely on the now unreachable cloud storage account anyway.
Ultimately you find yourself just staring at the black rectangles and inoffensive geometric shapes that once entertained you or made you more productive, but which now have left you terrifyingly alone with your own thoughts. Maybe you will have to do something drastic soon, like try reading a book, drag out that old CD player, play chess against yourself, or do some sketching on paper. With a real pencil.
Shareholder Value
The move from a boxed copy of stand-alone software and physical products to something with a recurring monthly or annual cost has been a gradual one. Much of it can already be traced back to the overly optimistic days leading up to the
dot-com bubble
, when the internet was going to make everyone rich and the selling of online goods the new normal.
Although the resulting fallout from this bubble popping was rather extensive, it left the investors who escaped the catastrophe wiser and still positively slavering at the thought of using the Internet for unimaginable levels of that sweetest reward of all: recurring revenue, with people giving you their money every month just to keep what they mistakenly thought that they had purchased.
The challenge is of course that people in general like to own things, and are
rather hesitant
to buy into anything that makes them have fewer things. How do you make people voluntarily buy into owning less and less, with what they do own having fewer features? The answer would seem to lie in blinding them with shiny new features, while insisting that they really don’t need the features that you are about to remove or nerf.
For example, initially people loved the idea of a smartphone because it meant that they could carry around in their pocket a cellphone, a camcorder, photo camera, portable internet-capable computer, an FM radio, a music player and more, all in a single device. Unfortunately all of these functions have been nerfed in some way or form.
FM Radio
Although regular analog radio on the FM and AM bands has lost a lot of importance these days, having FM radio available can be incredibly useful. Consider being out somewhere with poor cell coverage, not wanting to use up your data allowance for the month, or when everything has gone sideways in the form of a hurricane and the local grid, internet and cell network have collapsed. Especially in the latter case it would be convenient if you could just open the FM radio app on your smartphone to tune into emergency broadcasts.
Unfortunately this feature has been
purposefully disabled or left out
by device manufacturers, with Apple having opted to not even add an FM radio to its custom SoCs. A quick look at a couple of major smartphone manufacturers
over at GSM Arena
for smartphones released in 2024 or 2025 featuring an FM radio only shows two, both budget Samsung models.
Typically only budget-level smartphones have an FM radio feature enabled, as one aspect of the FM radio feature is that it requires its own antenna, which generally is a set of headphones plugged into the 3.5 mm audio jack. This logically means that the survival chances of budget smartphone buyers is significantly higher during a natural disaster than for people buying iPhones or higher-end Samsung and Xiaomi phones.
Audio Jack
Generic USB-C to audio jack and USB-C charging adapter.
The analog audio from a 3.5 mm audio jack is a low-latency, high-fidelity way to experience audio, only limited by the used audio DAC and the headphones or in-ears plugged into the jack. This makes it rather baffling that it’s also among the most vilified features. The reason here isn’t that it compromises waterproofing, or impedes thinness or adds cost, but rather it gets dropped on higher-end smartphones because Apple dropped it to
promote their Bluetooth headphones
and others followed.
Unfortunately, Bluetooth audio is neither low-latency nor high-fidelity, with newer codecs like LDAC, AptX, and AAC slightly improving the audio quality over the default SBC codec, but keeping all the other compromises. Meanwhile a fraction of the USB-C connectors on phones support the alternative analog audio mode, returning an audio jack to the device with a dongle, yet not re-enabling the use of headphones as an FM antenna and also making it impossible to use the USB-C port for any data transfers, while making the entire setup significantly more clunky, just to get a previously eliminated port back on the device instead of just putting it on there in the first place.
SD Cards
An important feature of a digital camera and camcorder is being able to quickly get the data off it and onto a computer for processing and viewing. Unfortunately in so far as smartphones supported SD card expansion, this at the very least required taking off the plastic back to swap cards. These days the SD card either shares space with the SIM card(s), or is eliminated altogether.
The idea here is of course to increase recurring revenue: the easiest way to get data onto a smartphone or off it is via the device manufacturer’s cloud storage solutions, with a minor fee to bump it up to a usable amount of storage. You’re also not supposed to load your own audio files onto the internal storage either, but use the paid-or-ad-supported streaming solution. Why would you want to be un-cool and not listen to losslessly streamed audio files mangled by some Bluetooth codec through the second pair of wireless in-ears of this month as the previous ones fell out somewhere?
Fortunately, the marketing is very convincing, as you can now listen to or watch anything that you want – as long as it’s available on the streaming service – and you can even use your voice to tell any of your smart devices to play a song or open a movie, because this is what the future looks like. Never mind that you do not technically own much any more, but at least you are happy.
Terminal Life
Probably the biggest question here is whether or not this terminalification is harmful. Sure, this change has meant that industrial design got effectively shivved in the proverbial dark alley – since the user interface of devices now lives on the device manufacturer’s servers – but you now have all these cool features. Things like a smart home full of Internet of Things devices, each of which are first and foremost terminals for the manufacturer’s services, with local control an afterthought, if a thought at all.
Even governments and businesses haven’t managed to escape these changes with their own vortex back to the 1960s. Rather than using a dial-up modem to connect to a time-share mainframe, they now use a broadband Internet connection to connect to a time-share mainframe, except we now call it a ‘cloud’.
It’s often been said that the centralization and decentralization of computer technology in particular is cyclical, with the 1980s and 1990s forming the pinnacle of decentralization. If we are currently in a trough of terminal terminalification, then logically decentralization and determinalification should follow next. One could make the point here that the Right to Repair movement is part of this change, as it wrests control away from manufacturers.
Even so, we still have a long way to go if this is the next stop, with our current
physical media revival kerfuffle
being just one of the many things that we have to come to terms with. Between the glossy marketing and the often conflicting desires and needs of the average consumer, it’s probably anyone’s guess what the second quarter of the 21st century will look like for consumer electronics and beyond. | 86 | 29 | [
{
"comment_id": "8165140",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-08-18T14:14:06",
"content": "Ma’am, This Is A Wendy’s.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8165169",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-08-18T14:55:27",
"co... | 1,760,371,449.189294 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/18/sniffing-5g-with-software-defined-radio/ | Sniffing 5G With Software-Defined Radio | Fenix Guthrie | [
"Security Hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"5g",
"cellular",
"cellular network",
"wireless sniffing"
] | The fifth generation mobile communications protocol (5G) is perhaps the most complicated wireless protocol ever made. Featuring wildly fast download speeds, beam forming base stations, and of course non-standard additions, it’s rather daunting prospect to analyze for the home hacker and researcher alike. But this didn’t stop the ASSET Research Group from developing a
5G sniffer and downlink injector.
The crux of the project is focused around real-time sniffing using one of two Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) software-defined radios (SDRs), and a substantial quantity of compute power. This sniffed data can even be piped into Wireshark for filtering. The frequency is hard-coded into the sniffer for improved performance with the n78 and n41 bands having been tested as of writing. While we expect most of you don’t have the supported USRP hardware, they provided a sample capture file for anyone to analyze.
The other main feature of the project is an exploitation framework with numerous attack vectors developed by ASSET and others. By turning an SDR into a malicious 5G base station, numerous vulnerabilities and “features” can be exploited to with results ranging from downgrading the connection to 4G, fingerprinting and much more. It even includes an attack
method we preciously covered called 5Ghull
which can cause device failure requiring removal of the SIM Card. These vulnerabilities offer a unique look inside the inner workings of 5G.
If you too are interested in 5G sniffing but don’t have access to the hardware needed, check out
this hack turning a Qualcomm phone into a 5G sniffer! | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8165268",
"author": "NS",
"timestamp": "2025-08-18T17:08:07",
"content": "Beamforming is intimidating enought for me, that I just stay out of any of that. I get flashbacks from my basic attempts into trying to get the basics.Is there like a module or device that does all that scary ... | 1,760,371,449.065717 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/18/chinas-great-solar-wall-is-a-big-deal/ | China’s Great Solar Wall Is A Big Deal | Navarre Bartz | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"China’s Great Solar Wall",
"Great Solar Wall",
"infrastructure",
"megaproject",
"solar",
"solar energy"
] | Data centers and the electrification of devices that previously ran on fossil fuels is driving increased demand for electricity around the world. China is addressing this with
a megaproject
that is a new spin on their most famous piece of infrastructure.
At 250 miles long and 3 miles wide with a generating capacity of 100 GW, the Great Solar Wall will be able to provide enough energy to power Beijing, although the energy will more likely be used to power industrial operations also present in the Kubuqi Desert. NASA states, “The Kubuqi’s sunny weather, flat terrain, and proximity to industrial centers make it a desirable location for solar power generation.” As an added bonus, previous solar installations in China have shown that they can help combat further desertification by locking dunes in place and providing shade for plants to grow.
Engineers must be having fun with the project as they also designed the Guinness World Record holder for the largest image made of solar panels with the Junma Solar Power Station (it’s the horse in the image above). The Great Solar Wall is expected to be completed by 2030 with 5.4 GW already installed in 2024.
Want to try solar yourself on a slightly smaller scale? How about this solar thermal array inspired by the
James Webb Telescope
or building a
solar-powered plane
? | 60 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8164934",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-08-18T08:20:48",
"content": "Now only if I can figure out a use for my 120W panel…It was an impulse buy (45$)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8164948",
"author": "ano... | 1,760,371,449.735836 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/17/cracking-abandonware-drm-like-its-1999/ | Cracking Abandonware DRM Like It’s 1999 | Tyler August | [
"Games",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"abandonware",
"cracking",
"drm"
] | As long as there have been games, there have been crackers breaking their copy protections. “Digital Rights Management” or DRM, is a phrase for copy protection coined near the end of the 1990s, and subverted shortly thereafter. But how? [Nathan Baggs] show us what it took to be a cracker in the year 2000,
as the first step to get an old game going again turned out to be cracking it.
The game in question is “
Michelin Rally Masters: Race of Champions
” by DICE, a studio that was later subsumed by EA and is today best known as the developers of the
Battlefield
franchise. The game as acquired from an abandonware site does not run in a virtual machine, and after a little de-obfuscation of the code causing the crash, [Nathan] discovers LaserLock is to blame. LaserLock was a DRM tool to lock down a game to its original CD-ROM that dates all the way back to 1995. Counters to LaserLock were probably well-known in the community back in the day, but in 2025, [Nathan] walks us through attempting to crack it it from first principles.
We won’t spoil the whole assembly-poking adventure, but the journey does involve unboxing an original CD to be able to compare what’s happening when the disc is physically present compared to running from the ISO. Its tedious work and can only be partially automated. Because it did prove so involved, [Nathan]’s original aim — getting the game to work in Windows 11 — remains unfulfilled so far.
Perhaps he’d have had better luck if he’d been
listening to the appropriate music.
Frustrating DRM isn’t always this hard;
sometimes all you needed was a paperclip. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8165036",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2025-08-18T11:46:16",
"content": "So what you’re saying is: Don’t show how you did it (because you might earn a bit of money on the way and that is bad) and instead just use a pre-made solution?I mean it’s not (only) about making a decade ... | 1,760,371,449.781243 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/17/practical-guide-to-pedal-powered-electrical-generators/ | Practical Guide To Pedal-Powered Electrical Generators | Maya Posch | [
"green hacks",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"electrical generator",
"emergency power"
] | An adult human can produce about 100 Wh of mechanical power whilst cycling, which is a not inconsiderable amount if you can convert that to electricity with reasonable efficiency.
In a recent article
on
EDN
[T. K. Hareendran] goes over a few ways that you can turn the rotary motion of pedaling into usable electrical power.
Suggested voltage regulator for pedal-powered generator. (Credit: T. K. Hareendran, EDN)
A basic form of this is already widely deployed, in the form of a bicycle dynamo that is used to supply power to the front and rear lights. These typically put out something like 3 watts at 6 VAC, so with a simple bridge rectifier and some smoothing this can power a pretty bright LED or two. To get more out of it, you need to use a more capable generator, which can also be a brushed or brushless DC motor in a pinch, with ideally a flywheel in the whole contraption to balance out variations in the human power input.
As for the potential here, a commercial solution like the K-Tor
Power Box 50
is specified for ‘greater than’ 50 Watt, with a nominal 12 VDC output. Its target market is emergency generators, with enough capability to keep phones, radios and flashlights charged. Considering the $435 asking price, there is probably quite a lot of DIY potential well within that price bracket, especially if you already have many of the requisite parts lying around.
Fortunately this is
not a new idea
, with us
having
covered
using bicycles as well as
gym equipment
to generate electricity in the past. | 51 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "8164747",
"author": "Dr. Energy.",
"timestamp": "2025-08-18T02:07:10",
"content": "That should be 100 Watts of power.100 Watt-Hour is an amount of energy.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8165209",
"author": "Mr. Unit",... | 1,760,371,449.58521 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/16/from-smartphone-to-a-home-server/ | From Smartphone To A Home Server | Tyler August | [
"Android Hacks",
"Network Hacks"
] | [
"android",
"docker",
"home-assistant",
"homelab"
] | Some people like their homelabs to be as big and fancy as possible, with racks of new or surplus server hardware sucking down power. [Hardware Haven] evidently has the opposite idea, given he just made a video about making the cheapest,
smallest server possible: an Android phone
.
Sure, it’s not going to be streaming terabytes of data at multiple gigabytes per second, but that’s not everyone’s use case. Don’t forget, flagship phones had multiple cores and gigabytes of RAM a decade ago, so even an old and busted smartphone has more than enough power for something like Home Assistant, which is what gets installed in this video.
After considering loading termux and rooting his device for Docker-on-Android, he opted for
postmarket
OS, the premiere Linux for old smartphones
. That’s not because the Linux environment you get with termux wouldn’t work; it’s just that he wanted something native. To that end, he bought a somewhat worse-for-wear Xiaomi Mi A1 from eBay to get hardware Alpine-based postmarket could use.
Software wise, it was just a matter of following instructions and reading manuals — Linux is Linux, after all. The firewall proved to be his main challenge, though trying to branch out from Home Assistant to run Minecraft Server did run into Java issues [Hardware Haven] had no interest in troubleshooting. Hardware wise, though, well — do you want to leave a phone plugged in permanently? Smokey the Bear suggests you not, especially if you live near a forest. Besides, you probably don’t want your server on WiFi, and at least this smartphone wouldn’t charge when using a networking dongle.
That meant phone surgery: the battery came out, and 5 V from an old USB charger was piped into the battery charge controller via a diode. The diode was used for its voltage drop, to bring the 5 V supply down to a believable battery voltage — a buck converter might have been better, but you use what you have, and the diode drop doesn’t dissipate much power. Power dissipation is still one watt at idle, six during a stress test.
Given how cheap the phone was, and how little power this thing sips, [Hardware Heaven] has an excellent answer to those who say homelabbing is a rich person’s hobby. This project also reminds us that while our phones might
not be as hackable as we’d like
, they’re still far from totally locked down. You can even
run NixOS on (some of) them. | 27 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8164219",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-08-17T06:33:40",
"content": "The diode was used for its voltage drop, to bring the 5 V supply down to a believable battery voltageNote that the diode forward voltage depends on the current you draw through it. The normal assumption of 0... | 1,760,371,449.64506 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/16/morphlex-the-tpu-filament-that-goes-soft-after-you-print-it/ | MorPhlex: The TPU Filament That Goes Soft After You Print It | Maya Posch | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"FDM",
"FDM 3D printing",
"TPU"
] | In FDM 3D printing cycles TPU is a bit of a special filament. Not so much because of its properties, but because it’s rather stretchy even as a filament, which makes especially printing certain hardness grades of TPU into somewhat of an nightmare. An interesting new contender here comes from a company called BIQU, who reckon that their ‘MorPhlex’ TPU solves many of those problems. Recently the [ModBot] channel on YouTube got
sent a spool of the filament for testing
.
The BIQU MorPhlex TPU filament being turned into squishy slippers. (Credit: ModBot, YouTube)
The ‘magic’ here is that this TPU
claims to be a 90A TPU grade
while on the spool, but after printing it becomes 75A, meaning a lot softer and squishier. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a big selling point on their product page is that you can print squishy shoes with it. Beyond this is claims to be compatible with ‘most FDM printers’, and the listed printing parameters are typical for TPU in terms of extruder and bed temperature.
After drying the filament as recommended for TPU in general, test prints were printed on a Bambu Lab H2D. Here BIQU recommends not using the AMS, but rather the dedicated TPU feeding channel. For the test prints some slippers were printed over the course of two days. In hindsight glue stick should have been applied to make parts removal easier.
The slippers were indeed squishy, but the real test came in the form of a Shore A hardness meter and some test cube prints. This showed an 80 – 85A for the BIQU MorPhlex test cube depending on whether to test the side or top. As the product datasheet indicates a final hardness of 75A +/- 3A, one could argue that it’s kind-of in spec, but it mostly raises questions on how parameters like temperature and extrusion speed affect the final result. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8164076",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-08-16T23:02:27",
"content": "cycles -> circles",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8164098",
"author": "the gambler",
"timestamp": "2025-08-16T23:44:07",
"content": "how is thi... | 1,760,371,449.496309 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/16/2025-one-hertz-challenge-stm32-blinks-in-under-50-bytes/ | 2025 One Hertz Challenge: STM32 Blinks In Under 50 Bytes | Lewin Day | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"2025 Hackaday One Hertz Challenge",
"stm32",
"STM32F4"
] | Many of us have run a Blink program on a microcontroller before. It’s effectively the “Hello, World!” of the embedded space. However, few of us have ever thought about optimizing our Blink code to be as miniscule as possible.
But that’s precisely what [Rudra Lad] did for this entry into the 2025 One Hertz Challenge!
This example of Blink,
delay_blinky_13
, is built specifically for the STM32F4 Discovery microcontroller development board. [Rudra] notes the code is “highly optimized” and compiles down to a binary size of under 50 bytes. The code doesn’t even use RAM, and it aims to get the blink as close to 1 Hz as possible. Many optimizations were used to crunch it down as small as possible. For example, the standard startup code isn’t used, with the entire program instead written in the Reset_Handler to save space. Bit-band is also used to write to peripheral registers to blink the LED, since this uses less instructions than the typical methods. Meanwhile, with many tweaks to the delay counting routine, [Rudra] was eventually able to get the blink frequency to 1.00019 Hz, as measured on a logic analyzer. That’s pretty darn close!
While it’s rare that you have only 50 bytes of binary space to blink an LED, work like this is a great way to
flex your coding muscles
. Code is
on Github
for the curious, and if you’ve worked up your own impressive tiny binaries, don’t hesitate to
let us know! | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8164023",
"author": "ALX_skater",
"timestamp": "2025-08-16T20:51:36",
"content": "Finally a worthwile contestant. I’m surprised though that this wasn’t done by FreddieChopin. He’s the definitive authority when it comes to STM32 code.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"rep... | 1,760,371,449.827581 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/16/the-nibbler-was-quite-a-scamp/ | The Nibbler Was Quite A Scamp | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"National Semiconductor",
"SC/MP"
] | The late 1970s were an interesting time for microcomputers. The rousing success of things like the 8080, the Z80, the 6800, and the 6502 made everyone wanted a piece of the action. National Semiconductor produced its SC/MP. That was technically the Simple Cost-effective Micro Processor, but it was commonly known as Scamp. There were several low-cost development boards built around this processor and [Hello World] is looking at
Digikey’s “Nibbler”
which was a fairly nice computer for only $150. Check it out in the video below.
The SC/MP was made to be cheap. It had a strange bank switching scheme reminiscent of the Microchip PIC 16F family. It also had, like a lot of old discrete computers, a serial ALU, which made it slower than many of its contemporaries. It did have good features, though. It was cheap and required very few extra parts along with a single 5 V supply in the second and subsequent versions. In addition, it had pins that were made for connecting more than one CPU, which was quite a feat for those days.
[Hello World] mentions that you don’t hear much about the SC/MP anymore and, in fact, we had all but forgotten about it. There is an effort underway to recreate the plucky little computer for anyone who wants to build a new one.
The $150 price tag seems reasonable, at least compared to other computers of the day. However, don’t forget that you still need a power supply, probably a card cage, and the biggest problem of all: a terminal. It is hard to remember how difficult it used to be to get your hands on a terminal at a reasonable cost. Your main choices were
a TV typewriter
or something surplus like a
TeleType
. | 39 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "8163983",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2025-08-16T19:06:01",
"content": "Oh sothat’swhat SC/MP stands for, thanks! Only 50+ years too late!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8163991",
"author": "jawnhenry",
"timestamp": "... | 1,760,371,449.911699 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/16/metric-imperial-and-flexibility/ | Metric, Imperial, And Flexibility | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants"
] | [
"imperial",
"metric",
"newsletter",
"religious war",
"units"
] | Al Williams wrote up
a seemingly innocent piece on a couple of rules-of-thumb to go between metric and US traditional units
, and the comment section went wild! Nothing seems to rile up the Hackaday comment section like the choice of what base to use for your unit system. I mean, an idealized version of probably an ancient Egyptian’s foot versus a fraction of the not-quite-right distance from the North Pole to the equator as it passes through Paris? Six of one, half a dozen the other, as far as I’m concerned. Both are arbitrary.
What’s fun, though, is how many of us need to know both systems and how schizophrenic it all can be. My favorite example is PCB layout, where tenths and thousandths of an inch are unavoidable in through-hole and surface-mount parts, yet we call out board sizes and drill bits in millimeters – on the same object, and without batting an eye. American 3D printer enthusiasts will know their M3 hardware, and probably even how much a kilogram weighs, because that’s what you buy spools of filament in. Oddly enough, though I live in Europe, I have 3/4” thread on my garden hose and a 29” monitor on my desk. Americans buy two liter bottles of soda without thinking twice.
The absolute kings of this are in the UK, where the distance between cities is measured in miles, but the dimensions of an apartment in meters. They’ll buy gas in liters and beer in pints. Humans are measured
both
in feet-and-inches and centimeters, and weighed in pounds, kilograms, or even stone.
And I think that’s just fine. Once you give up on the rightness of either system, they both have their pros and cons. Millimeters are superb for doing carpentry in – that’s just about how tight my tolerances are with hand tools anyway, and if it’s made of wood, you can fudge 0.5 mm either way pretty easily. Sure, you could measure in 32nds of an inch, but have you ever bought a plywood sheet that’s 1536 x 3072 thirty-seconds? (That’s 4’ x 8’, or 1200 mm x 2400 mm.) No, you haven’t.
But maybe stick to one system
when lives or critical systems are on the line
. Or at least be very careful to call out your units. While it’s annoying to spec the wrong SMT part size because KiCAD calls some of them out in millimeters
and
inches – 0402 in inches is tiny, but 0402 in metric is microscopic – it’s another thing entirely to load up half as much fuel as you need for a commercial airline flight because of metric vs imperial tons. There’s a limit to how units-flexible you want to be.
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
! | 89 | 34 | [
{
"comment_id": "8163868",
"author": "alloydog",
"timestamp": "2025-08-16T14:06:06",
"content": "Don’t forget car tyres: diametre in inches snd width in millimetres.Being an old git who went to school just as the UK went metric means I’m happy with either system. In fact, more than once, I have meas... | 1,760,371,450.029046 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/16/how-to-convert-a-drain-into-a-hydropower-facility/ | How To Convert A Drain Into A Hydropower Facility | John Elliot V | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"drainage",
"gravitation water vortex power plant",
"hydroelectric",
"hydropower"
] | Over on his YouTube channel [Construction General] shows us how to
convert a drain into a hydropower facility
. This type of hydroelectric facility is known as a
gravitation water vortex power plant
. The central structure is a round basin which includes a central drain. The water feeds into the basin through a series of pipes which help to create the vortex which drives the water turbine before flowing out the drain.
To make the facility [Construction General] starts by laying some slabs as the foundation. One of the slabs has a hole to which the central drain pipe is attached. Bricks and mortar are then used to build the basin around the drain. A temporary central pipe is used for scaffolding along with some strings with hooks attached to hold the bricks and mortar in place for the basin. Integrated into the top half of the basin are fifteen inlet pipes which feed in water at an angle.
The next step is to build the dam wall. This is a bricks and mortar affair which includes the drain in the bottom of the wall and two spillways at the top. The spillways are for letting water flow out of the dam if it gets too full. Around the drainage in the dam wall a valve is installed. This valve is called the low-level outlet or the bottom outlet, and in this case it is a sluice, also known as a slide gate, which can be raised or lowered to control the rate of flow through the turbine.
Once the basin is complete and the low-level outlet is in place the scaffolding is removed. The basin is then painted, pink on the inside and white around the top. A turbine is constructed from various metal pieces and installed into the basin. The turbine is attached to a generator which is fixed atop the basin. The apparatus for operating the low-level outlet is installed and the dam is left to fill.
Hydropower is a topic we’ve covered here at Hackaday before, if you’re interested in the topic you might like to check out
A Modest But Well-Assembled Home Hydropower Setup
,
Hydropower From A Washing Mashine
, or
Bicycle Hub Hydropower
. | 31 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8163819",
"author": "lespaul1963",
"timestamp": "2025-08-16T11:18:14",
"content": "Now it’s YoutubeShorts-a-day?FFS, what’s next? TikTok? Most of us here are not brainrotten zombies looking for another clickbaity dopamine shot.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies":... | 1,760,371,450.103205 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/16/walter-is-a-tiny-cellular-modem-for-your-projects/ | Walter Is A Tiny Cellular Modem For Your Projects | Tyler August | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"GSM module",
"IoT"
] | It wasn’t that long ago that projects with cellular connectivity were everywhere, but with 2G no longer universally available, glory days of cheap 2G modules seem to be on their way out. So when [Data Slayer] titled his
video “You’ve Never Seen Cellular Like This”
about a new GSM radio module, we couldn’t help but think that we have — and that we’re glad to see it back.
The module is the
Walter, by DPTechnics
out of Belgium. It’s fully open-source and contains a ESP32-S3 for WiFi and BLE plus a Sequans Monarch chip for GSM and GNSS connectivity. It’s not the blazing-fast 5G you’re paying your phone carrier for: this is an IoT modem, with LTE-M and NB-IoT. We’re talking speeds in the kbps, not Mbps– but we’re also talking very, very low power usage. Since it’s LTE-M rather than full LTE, you’re probably not going to be bringing back the golden days of
Arduino Cellphones,
(since LTE-M doesn’t support VoLTE) but if
LoRa isn’t your jam
, and you hang out around cell towers, this level of connectivity might interest you.
Walter is actually a drop-in replacement for PyCom’s old GPy module, so if you had a project in mind for that and are frustrated by it being EoL — well, here you are. [Data Slayer] seemed impressed enough with its capabilities as a GPS tracker. We’re impressed with the 9.8 µA consumed in deep sleep mode, and the fact that it has already been certified with the CE, FCC, IC, RCM and UKCA. Those certs mean you could go from prototype to product without getting tangled in red tape, assuming Walter is the only radio onboard.
Our thanks to [Keith Olson] for phoning in the tip. If you have a tip and want to connect,
operators are standing by
. | 21 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8163787",
"author": "JustSayin",
"timestamp": "2025-08-16T08:56:36",
"content": "plenty of cheaper 4g options out there that will give you Mbps.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8163796",
"author": "Urgon",
"tim... | 1,760,371,450.158747 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/14/diy-wind-turbine-gets-a-3-phase-rectifier/ | DIY Wind Turbine Gets A 3-Phase Rectifier | Al Williams | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"3-phase",
"rectifier"
] | [Electronoobs] is using some brushless motors to make a DIY wind turbine. His recent video isn’t about the turbine itself, but a crucial electronic part: the
three-phase rectifier
. The reason it is so important is due to the use of brushless motors. Normal motors are not ideal for generating power for several reasons, as explained in the video below.
The brushless motors have three windings and generate three outputs, each out of phase with the others. You can’t just join them together because they are 120 degrees out of phase. But a special rectifier can merge the inputs efficiently and output a low-ripple DC voltage.
The rectifier will have to handle a lot of power, so it uses beefy devices with heat sinks. The design is very similar to a full-wave bridge rectifier, but instead of two legs, each with two diodes, this one has three legs. This is still not as efficient as you would like. A synchronous rectifier would be even more efficient but also more complicated.
Still, we have no doubt the board will do its job. We’re anxious to see the turbine come together. Want to build your own? Maybe
start smaller
. Too big? You can
strip it down
even further. | 18 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8162898",
"author": "NerdWorld",
"timestamp": "2025-08-14T20:07:31",
"content": "Pushing 1,5 kW through heatsink designed for a 7805 doing maybe 800 mA peak… yeah hope he’s got some eye protection cause it’s gonna be one hell of a fireworks when it pops.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,371,451.079253 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/14/2025-one-hertz-challenge-blinking-an-led-with-the-aid-of-radio-time/ | 2025 One Hertz Challenge: Blinking An LED With The Aid Of Radio Time | Lewin Day | [
"contests",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"2025 Hackaday One Hertz Challenge",
"led",
"ne567",
"time station"
] | If you want to blink an LED once every second, you could use just about any old timer circuit to create a 1 Hz signal. Or, you could go the complicated route like [Anthony Vincz]
and grab 1 Hz off a radio clock instead.
The build is an entry for the
2025 One Hertz Challenge
, with [Anthony] pushing himself to whip up a simple entry on a single Sunday morning. He started by grabbing a NE567 tone decoder IC, which uses a phase-locked loop to trigger an output when detecting a tone of a given frequency. [Anthony] had used this chip hooked up to an Arduino to act as a Morse decoder, which picked up sound from an electret mic and decoded it into readable output.
However, he realized he could repurpose the NE567 to blink in response to output from radio time stations like the 60 KHz British and 77.5 KHz German broadcasts. He thus grabbed a software-defined radio, tuned it into one of the time stations, and adjusted the signal to effectively sound a regular 800 Hz tone coming out of his computer’s speakers that cycled once every second. He then tweaked the NE567 so it would trigger off this repetitive tone every second, flashing an LED.
Is it the easiest way to flash an LED
? No. It’s complicated, but it’s also creative. They say a one hertz signal is always in the last place you look. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8162862",
"author": "Dave Boyer",
"timestamp": "2025-08-14T19:26:46",
"content": "As far as modernisation of older PCs is concerned, a very precise 1Hz clock signal can be obtained from PCI-express clock pins. Just need to divide it with a microcontroller or some 7400 ICs.",
"pa... | 1,760,371,450.417282 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/14/for-americans-only-estimating-celsius-and-other-mental-metrics/ | For Americans Only: Estimating Celsius And Other Mental Metrics | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"mental math",
"metric"
] | I know many computer languages, but I’ve struggled all my life to learn a second human language. One of my problems is that I can’t stop trying to translate in my head. Just like Morse code, you need to understand things directly, not translate. But you have to start somewhere. One of the reasons metric never caught on in the United States is that it is hard to do exact translations while you are developing intuition about just how hot is 35 °C or how long 8 cm is.
If you travel, temperature is especially annoying. When the local news tells you the temperature is going to be 28, it is hard to do the math in your head to decide if you need a coat or shorts.
Ok, you are a math whiz. And you have a phone with a calculator and, probably, a voice assistant. So you can do the right math, which is (9/5) x °C + 32. But for those of us who can’t do that in our heads, there is an easier way.
Field Expedient
Close enough for a quick estimate
Most of us can’t multiply by 9/5 in our heads. But 9/5 is very nearly two. So if you double the Celsius temperature, you are halfway there. Of course, the number will be too high. But to make up for it, instead of adding 32, just add 30. For weather temperatures, this gives you a ballpark estimate. For 0 °C, you get 30 °F instead of 32. For 20 °C, you get 70 °F instead of 68. For 35 °C, you get 100 °F instead of 95. All close enough.
If you want to flip the error as the temperature goes up, you can remember to add 25 instead of 30 if the temperature is more than, say 25 °C. Then 35 °C gives you 95 °F on the dot, although other temperatures will still have some error, of course.
The error gets worse as the temperature rises, but it has to get fairly high before it gets useless. For example, my AMD CPU is currently at 48 °C. Using the +25 estimate, that’s 121 °F, instead of the correct 118. But maybe it won’t help you set up your metal smelting furnace.
Other Estimates
Centimeters to inches the easy way.
This is a useful way to embrace metric. Find rough estimates for units you deal with. For example, 2.54 cm/inch is not the easiest thing to apply. But if you remember that 5 cm is about 2 in, that works well. So a 160 mm rod is 16 cm. If you think of that as 3 x 5 + 1, you’ll know it is 6 inches plus an extra centimeter. The right answer is about 6.3 inches. Not close enough to start cutting things, but it does give you a feel for how big a thing you are talking about.
If you lived through the time when gasoline in the US went from less than $1/gallon to over, you might remember that many gas stations switched to liters because the pumps couldn’t be set for a dollar. The reason is a liter is very nearly a quart, and there are four quarts to a gallon. So 12 liters is practically 12 quarts or 3 gallons. This turns out to be very close.
Kilograms and kilometers are a bit trickier. The right way to imprecisely convert kilograms to pounds is to multiply by 2.2. But a nice mental math trick is to double it. Then remove the last digit and add the rest back in to the whole result. Then put the last digit you removed after the decimal point. So 8 kg would be 16+1 (throw away the six) or 17 pounds. Then put the 0.6 in for the correct answer of 17.6 pounds. Of course, the conversion factor isn’t exactly 2.2, but that’s what most people use anyway. If you are trying to be scientifically accurate, none of this is going to help you.
Estimating kilometers.
The factor for kilometers is roughly 0.6 miles in a kilometer or 1.6 km/mile. If you halve the kilometers, that will get you a fairly low estimate. So 35 km (21.7 miles) is easy to guess as more than 17.5 miles. That’s a pretty big difference, though. But if you then add 10% of the 35 back (3.5) you get 21 miles which is close.
Advice
I’m not trying to say that these rule-of-thumb tricks are good when you need an exact answer. But they are handy when you simply want a gut feel over some measure. Over time, you’ll just naturally know that 35 °C is summer-weather hot and you need more than a coffee mug to hold 3 liters.
Do you have a favorite fast conversion back or forth from metric? Share it in the comments. Americans love their
strange measuring system
. Turns out, some of the reasons we didn’t get metric was due to pirates, as you can see in the video below.
Featured image:
Wood thermometer on white background
by
Marco Verch
under
Creative Commons 2.0 | 194 | 47 | [
{
"comment_id": "8162764",
"author": "The Solutor",
"timestamp": "2025-08-14T17:12:52",
"content": "You are too optimist, most Americans aren’t even able to spell “Celsius” correctly (Selsius), let alone doing math from “Harry Potter” units to SI / IS :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,371,450.913311 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/14/3d-printing-a-self-cleaning-water-filter/ | 3D Printing A Self-cleaning Water Filter | Al Williams | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"coanda effect",
"water filter"
] | No one likes cleaning out water spouts. [NeedItMakeIt] wanted to collect rainwater and was interested in using a Coanda filter that those used on hydroelectric plants to separate out debris. Ultimately, he
decided to design his own and 3D print it
.
The design uses a sloping surface with teeth on it to coax water to go in one direction and debris to go in another. It fits into a typical spout, and seems like it works well enough. Some commenters note that varying volumes of rain and different types of debris behave differently, which is probably true. However, there are similar commercial products, so you’d guess there would be some value to using the technique.
The water pushes the debris off the slope, so you end up losing a little water with the debris. So as always, there’s a trade-off. You can see in the video that if the water flow isn’t substantial, the debris tends to stall on the slope. Could the filter be improved? That was the point in trying a second design.
It wasn’t a big improvement. That’s where there’s a plot twist. Well, actually, a literal twist. Instead of making a flat slope, the new design is a conic shape with a spiral channel. That improved flow quite a bit. We weren’t clear from the video of exactly where the debris was going with the last version.
Usually, when we think of the Coanda effect, we are thinking
aerodynamics
. It can be
quite uplifting
. | 22 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8162701",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2025-08-14T15:47:07",
"content": "We weren’t clear from the video of exactly where the debris was going with the last version.The crap falls straight through and goes down the rest of the downspout, presumably to the sewer connection.... | 1,760,371,450.655013 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/14/how-the-widget-revolutionized-canned-beer/ | How The Widget Revolutionized Canned Beer | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"beer",
"beverage",
"beverage engineering",
"guinness",
"widget"
] | Walk into any pub and order a pint of Guinness, and you’ll witness a mesmerizing ritual. The bartender pulls the tap, fills the glass two-thirds full, then sets it aside to settle before topping it off with that iconic creamy head. But crack open a can of Guinness at home, and something magical happens without any theatrical waiting period. Pour it out, and you get that same cascading foam effect that made the beer famous.
But how is it done? It’s all thanks to a tiny little device that is affectionately known as The Widget.
Beer Engineering
A pint of Guinness, pictured with the iconic foamy head. Credit:
Sami Keinänen
, CC BY SA 2.0
In 1959, draught Guinness diverged from other beers. The pints served from the tap at the pub were charged with a combination of nitrogen gas and carbon dioxide, rather than just carbon dioxide alone. Nitrogen is less soluble in beer than carbon dioxide, and low temperatures and higher pressures are required to get it to stay in the fluid. Charging the beer in this way, and then forcing it through a tap with a restrictor plate with many fine holes, allows the pouring of a beer with small, fine bubbles. This is what gives Guinness its signature smooth, creamy texture and characteristic dense head. The lower carbon dioxide level also contributes to the flavor, removing some of the sharp taste present in regular carbonated beers.
When Guinness started using the nitrogenation method, it quickly gained popularity and became the default way to serve the draught beer. The problem was that it wasn’t initially practical to do the same for bottled Guinness. Without being poured through the fine holes of a special tap under pressure, it wasn’t possible to create the same foamy head. Bottled Guinness thus remained carbonated in the traditional manner, and it was thus very much unlike the draught beer served at the pub. The desire was to produce a better version—”bottled draught Guinness” was a term often bandied about. The company experimented with a variety of methods of serving nitrogenated Guinness from a bottle or can. It even sold some bottles
with a special “initiator” syringe to generate head in select markets
, but it was all too clumsy to catch on with the beer drinking public. A better solution was needed.
The modern floating Guinness widget, pictured in a can that has been cut open. Credit:
Duk
, CC BY SA 3.0
The modern widget was developed as the technological solution to this fundamental problem in beverage physics. Guinness tackled this challenge by essentially putting a tiny pressure vessel inside the larger pressure vessel of the can itself. The widget is a small plastic sphere, hollow inside, with a tiny hole on the surface. The widget and beer are placed inside the can on the production line. Liquid nitrogen is then added, before the can’s lid is sealed. The can is then inverted as the liquid nitrogen quickly boils off into a gas. This effectively fills the widget with gaseous nitrogen under pressure, often along with a small amount of beer. It’s a charged pressure vessel lurking inside the can itself.
The magic happens when the beverage is served. When you crack open the can, the pressure inside drops rapidly to atmospheric pressure. The nitrogen under pressure in the widget thus wants to equalize with the now lower-pressure environment outside. Thus, the nitrogen sprays out through the tiny hole with tremendous force, creating countless microscopic bubbles that act as nucleation sites for the rest of the nitrogen dissolved in the surrounding beer. As the beer is poured into a glass, a foamy head forms, mimicking the product served fresh from the tap at the local pub.
Today’s widget, first marketed in 1997, is the floating sphere type, but the original version was a little different. The original widget launched in 1989 was a flat disc, which was mounted in the bottom of the can, but fundamentally worked in the same way. However, it had a tendency to cause rapid overflowing of the beer if opened when warm. The floating spherical widget reduced this tendency, though the precise engineering reasons why aren’t openly explained by the company. The fixed widget actually had a surprise return in 2020
due to COVID-19 supply chain issues
, suggesting it was still mostly fit for purpose in the brewery’s eyes.
The key to the widget’s performance is in the filling and the construction. It’s important to ensure the widget is filled with pressurized gas, hence the inversion step used in the filling process. If the pressurized nitrogen was allowed to simply sit in the empty space in the top of the can, it would just vent out on opening without making any head. The orifice size on the widget is also critical. Too large, and the pressure equalizes too quickly without creating the necessary turbulence. Too small, and insufficient gas and beer volume flows through to generate adequate nucleation. The widget as it stands today is the result of much research and development to optimize its performance.
A finned “rocket” widget as used in Guinness beer bottles. Credit:
Joeinwap
, CC0
Further different widget designs have emerged over the years. The company had mastered draught Guinness in a can, though it needed to be poured into a glass to be drank properly. The company later looked to create draught Guinness that could be drank straight from the bottle. This led to the creation of the “rocket widget.” It worked largely in the same way, but was designed to float while remaining in the correct orientation inside the neck of the bottle. Fins ensured it wouldn’t fall out of the bottle during drinking. It would charge the beer with bubbles when first opened, and continue to boost the head to a lesser degree each time the bottle was tilted for a sip.
Guinness could have left this problem unsolved. It could have remained a beautiful tap-based beer, while selling its lesser carbonated products in bottles and cans for home consumption. Instead, it innovated, finding a way to create the same creamy tap-poured experience right out of the can.
The next time you crack open a widget-equipped can and watch that mesmerizing cascade of bubbles, you’re witnessing a masterpiece of beverage engineering that took years to perfect. It’s a reminder that sometimes the most elegant engineering solutions hide in the most ordinary places, waiting for someone clever enough to recognize that a tiny plastic ball could revolutionize how we experience beer outside the pub. | 76 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "8162657",
"author": "ford",
"timestamp": "2025-08-14T14:19:15",
"content": "But why? What’s the need for that kind of stupid, consumerist ritual? At home when I drinkŻubrbeer I just open a can and drink it. No need to pour it into a glass. Beer is all about alcohol and taste, not wa... | 1,760,371,451.026583 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/14/hacking-the-bluetooth-enabled-anker-prime-power-bank/ | Hacking The Bluetooth-Enabled Anker Prime Power Bank | Maya Posch | [
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"bluetooth low energy",
"custom firmware",
"powerbank"
] | Selling power banks these days isn’t easy, as you can only stretch the reasonable limits of capacity and output wattage so far. Fortunately there is now a new game in town, with ‘smart’ power banks, like the Anker one that
[Aaron Christophel] recently purchased for reverse-engineering
. It features Bluetooth (BLE), a ‘smart app’ and a rather fancy screen on the front with quite a bit of information. This also means that there’s a lot to hack here beyond basic battery management system (BMS) features.
As detailed on the GitHub project page, after you get past the glue-and-plastic-clip top, you will find inside a PCB with a GD32F303 MCU, a Telink TLSR8253 BLE IC and the 240×240 ST7789 LCD in addition to a few other ICs to handle BMS functions, RTC and such. Before firmware version 1.6.2 you can simply overwrite the firmware, but Anker added a signature check to later firmware updates.
The BLE feature is used to communicate with the Anker app, which the
official product page advertises
as being good for real-time stats, smart charging and finding the power bank by making a loud noise. [Aaron] already reverse-engineered the protocol and offers his own alternative on the project page. Naturally updating the firmware is usually also done via BLE.
Although the BLE and mobile app feature is decidedly a gimmick, hacking it could allow for some interesting UPS-like and other features. We just hope that battery safety features aren’t defined solely in software, lest these power banks can be compromised with a nefarious or improper firmware update. | 35 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8162556",
"author": "Stephen Mewller",
"timestamp": "2025-08-14T11:12:01",
"content": "added a signature check to later firmware updatesThanks Maya! Sometimes a news is extremely informative what companies to avoid. I’m also pointing at a certain 3d-printer company. Rossmann was rig... | 1,760,371,450.485371 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/14/steampunk-copper-pc-is-as-cool-as-it-runs/ | Steampunk Copper PC Is As Cool As It Runs | Tyler August | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"copper pipe",
"pc",
"steampunk",
"wall mounted",
"water cooled"
] | Copper! The only thing it does better than conduct heat is conduct a great steampunk vibe. [Billet Labs]’ latest video is an
artfully done wall PC that makes full use of both of those properties
.
The parts are what you’d expect in a high-end workstation PC: a Ryzen 9 and an 3090Ti with oodles of RAM. It’s the cooling loop where all the magic happens: from the copper block on the CPU, to the plumbing fixtures that give the whole thing a beautiful brewery-chiq shine when polished up. Hopefully the water-block in the GPU is equally cupriferous too, but given the attention to detail in the rest of the build, we cannot imagine [Billet Labs] making such a rookie mistake as to invite Mr. Galvanic Corrosion to the party.
There’s almost no visible plastic or paint; the GPU and PSU are hidden by a brass plates, and even the back panel everything mounts to is shiny metal. Even the fans on the radiator are metal, and customized to look like a quad throttle body or four-barreled carburetor on an old race car. (Though they sound more like a jet takeoff.)
The analog gauges are a particular treat, which push this build firmly into “steampunk” territory. Unfortunately the temperature gauge glued onto the GPU only measures the external temperature of the GPU, not the temperature at the die or even the water-block. On the other hand, given how well this cooling setup seems to work later in the video, GPU temps are likely to stay pretty stable. The other gauges do exactly what you’d expect, measuring the pressure and temperature of the water in the coolant loop and voltage on the twelve volt rail.
Honestly, once it gets mounted on the wall, this build looks
more like an art piece
than any
kind of computer
— only the power and I/O cables do anything to give the game away. Now that he has the case, perhaps
some artful peripherals are in order?
Thanks to prolific tipster [Keith Olson] for cluing us into this one. If you see a project you take a shine to, why not
drop us a tip? | 26 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8162536",
"author": "Stephen",
"timestamp": "2025-08-14T10:36:10",
"content": "This looks like the sort of computer Agatha Heterodyne would build in the Girl Genius comic books:https://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20070618",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"rep... | 1,760,371,451.191177 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/15/why-lordes-clear-cd-has-so-many-playback-issues/ | Why Lorde’s Clear CD Has So Many Playback Issues | Maya Posch | [
"digital audio hacks"
] | [
"audio cd",
"red book audio cd"
] | Despite the regularly proclaimed death of physical media, new audio albums are still being published on CD and vinyl. There’s something particularly interesting about Lorde’s new album
Virgin
however — the CD is a completely clear disc. Unfortunately there have been many reports of folks struggling to get the unique disc to actually play, and some sharp-eyed commentators have noted that the CD doesn’t claim to be Red Book compliant by the absence of the Compact CD logo.
The clear Lorde audio CD in all its clear glory. (Credit: Adrian’s Digital Basement,
YouTube
)
To see what CD players see, [Adrian] of
Adrian’s Digital Basement
got out some tools and multiple CD players
to dig into the issue
. These players range from a 2003 Samsung, a 1987 NEC, and a cheap portable Coby player. But as all audio CDs are supposed to adhere to the Red Book standard, a 2025 CD should play just as happily on a 1980s CD player as vice versa.
The first step in testing was to identify the laser pickup (RF) signal test point on the PCB of each respective player. With this hooked up to a capable oscilloscope, you can begin to see the eye pattern forming. In addition to being useful with tuning the CD player, it’s also an indication of the signal quality that the rest of the CD player has to work with. Incidentally, this is also a factor when it comes to CD-R compatibility.
While the NEC player was happy with regular and CD-R discs, its laser pickup failed to get any solid signal off the clear Lorde disc. With the much newer Samsung player (see top image), the clear CD does play, but as the oscilloscope shot shows, it only barely gets a usable signal from the pickup. Likewise, the very generic Coby player also plays the audio CD, which indicates that any somewhat modern CD player with its generally much stronger laser and automatic gain control ought to be able to play it.
That said, it seems that very little of the laser’s light actually makes it back to the pickup’s sensor, which means that along with the gain the laser output gets probably cranked up to 11, and with that its remaining lifespan will be significantly shortened. Ergo it’s probably best to just burn that CD-R copy of the album and listen to that instead. | 72 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "8163484",
"author": "Mark Topham",
"timestamp": "2025-08-15T15:39:24",
"content": "Somebody want to explain this comment:“That said, it seems that very little of the laser’s light actually makes it back to the pickup’s sensor, which means that the gain gets probably cranked up to 11... | 1,760,371,451.372459 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/15/this-week-in-security-the-ai-hacker-fortmajeure-and-project-zero/ | This Week In Security: The AI Hacker, FortMajeure, And Project Zero | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"ai",
"darpa",
"project zero",
"This Week in Security"
] | One of the hot topics currently is using LLMs for security research. Poor quality reports written by LLMs have become the bane of vulnerability disclosure programs. But there is an equally interesting effort going on to put LLMs to work doing actually useful research. One such story is
[Romy Haik] at ULTRARED, trying to build an AI Hacker
. This isn’t an over-eager newbie naively asking an AI to find vulnerabilities, [Romy] knows what he’s doing. We know this because he tells us plainly that the LLM-driven hacker failed spectacularly.
The plan was to build a multi-LLM orchestra, with a single AI sitting at the top that maintains state through the entire process. Multiple LLMs sit below that one, deciding what to do next, exactly how to approach the problem, and actually generating commands for those tools. Then yet another AI takes the output and figures out if the attack was successful. The tooling was assembled, and [Romy] set it loose on a few intentionally vulnerable VMs.
As we hinted at up above, the results were fascinating but dismal. This LLM successfully found one Remote Code Execution (RCE), one SQL injection, and three Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) flaws. This whole post is sort of sneakily an advertisement for ULTRARED’s actual automated scanner, that uses more conventional methods for scanning for vulnerabilities. But it’s a useful comparison, and it found nearly 100 vulnerabilities among the collection of targets.
The AI did what you’d expect, finding plenty of false positives. Ask an AI to describe a vulnerability, and it will glad do so — no real vulnerability required. But the real problem was the multitude of times that the AI stack did demonstrate a problem, and failed to realize it. [Romy] has thoughts on why this attempt failed, and two points stand out. The first is that while the LLM can be creative in making attacks, it’s really terrible at accurately analyzing the results. The second observation is one of the most important observations to keep in mind regarding today’s AIs. It doesn’t actually want to find a vulnerability. One of the marks of security researchers is the near obsession they have with finding a great score.
DARPA
Don’t take the previous story to mean that AI will never be able do vulnerability research, or even that it’s not a useful tool right now. The US DARPA sponsored a competition at this year’s DEF CON, and another security professional pointed out that
Buttercup AI Cyber REasoning System (CRS) is the second place winner
. It’s
now available as an Open Source project
.
This challenge was a bit different from an open-ended attack on a VM. In the DARPA challenge, the AI tools are given specific challenges, and a C or Java codebase, and told to look for problems. Buttercup uses an AI-guided fuzzing approach, and one of the notable advantages with this challenge is that often times a vulnerability will cause an outright crash in the program, and that’s hard to miss, even for an AI.
Team Atlanta took first place, and
has some notes on their process
. Their first-place finish was almost derailed from the start, due to a path checking rule to comply with contest rules. The AI tools were provided fuzzing harnesses that they were not allowed to modify, and the end goal was for the AIs to actually write patches to fix the issues found. All of the challenges were delivered inside directories containing
ossfuzz
, triggering the code that protected against breaking the no modification rules. A hasty code hacking session right at the last moment managed to clear this, and saved the entire competition.
FortMajeure
We have
this write-up from [0x_shaq], finding a very fun authentication bypass in FortiWeb
. The core problem is the lack of validation on part of the session cookie. This cookie has a couple of sections that we care about. The
Era
field is a single digit integer that seems to indicate a protocol version or session type, while the
Payload
and
AuthHash
fields are the encrypted session information and signed hash for verification.
That
Era
field is only ever expected to be a 0 or a 1, but the underlying code processes the other eight possible values the same way: by accessing the nth element of an array, even if the array doesn’t actually have that many initialized elements. And one of the things that array will contain is the encryption/signing key for the session cookie. This uninitialized memory is likely to be mostly or entirely nulls, making for a very predictable session key.
Project Zero
Google has a couple interesting items on their Project Zero blog. The first is from late July, and
outlines a trial change to disclosure timelines
. The problem here is that a 90 day disclosure gives the immediate vendor plenty of time to patch an issue, but even with a 30 day extension, it’s a race for all of the downstream users to apply, test, and distribute the fix. The new idea is to add a one week vulnerability pre-disclosure. One week after a vulnerability is found, it’s existence is
added to the chart of upcoming releases
. So if you ship Dolby’s Unified Decoder in a project or product, mark your calendar for September 25, among the other dozen or so pre-released vulnerabilities.
The second item from Project Zero is
a vulnerability found in Linux, that could be triggered from within the Chrome renderer sandbox
. At the heart of the matter is the Out Of Band byte that could be sent as a part of Unix Sockets. This is a particularly obscure feature, and yet enabled by default, which is a great combination for security research.
The kernel logic for this feature could get confused when dealing with multiples of these one-byte messages, and eventually free kernel memory while a pointer is still pointing to it. Use the
recv()
syscall again on that socket, and the freed memory is accessed. This results in a very nice kernel memory read primitive, but also a very constrained write primitive. In this case, it’s to increment a single byte, 0x44 bytes into the now-freed data structure. Turning this into a working exploit was challenging but doable, and mainly consisted of constructing a fake object in user-controlled memory, triggering the increment, and then using the socket again to coerce the kernel into using the fake object.
Bits and Bytes
Cymulate has the story of
a Microsoft NTLM patch that wasn’t quite enough
. The original problem was that a Windows machine could be convinced to connect to a remote NTLM server to retrieve a
.ico
file. The same bug can be triggered by creating a shortcut that implies the .ico is embedded inside the target binary itself, and put that on a remote SMB share. It’s particularly bad because this one will acess the server, and leak the NTLM hash, just by displaying the icon on the decktop.
Xerox FreeFlow Core had a pair of exploits, the more serious of which
could enable an unauthenticated RCE
. The first is an XML External Entity (XXE) injection issue, where a user request could result in the server fetching remote content while processing the request. The more serious is a simple file upload with path traversal, making for an easy webshell dropper.
Claroty’s
Team82 dug into the Axis Communications protocol
for controlling security cameras, and found some interesting items. The Axis.Remoting protocol uses mutual TLS, which is good. But those are self-signed certificates that never validated, allowing for trivial man in the middle. The most serious issue was a JSON deserialization vulnerability, allowing for RCE on the service itself. Patches are available, and are particularly important for Axis systems that are available on the open Internet. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8163466",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-08-15T14:43:08",
"content": "“It doesn’t actually want to find a vulnerability. One of the marks of security researchers is the near obsession they have with finding a great score.”Couple more rounds of evolution will produce a secu... | 1,760,371,451.125523 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/15/teletext-around-the-world-still/ | Teletext Around The World, Still | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"teletext",
"videotex"
] | When you mention Teletext or Videotex, you probably think of the 1970s British system, the well-known system in France, or the short-lived US attempt to launch the service. Before the Internet, there were all kinds of crazy ways to deliver customized information into people’s homes. Old-fashioned? Turns out Teletext is alive and well in many parts of the world, and [text-mode] has the
story of both the past and the present
with a global perspective.
The whole thing grew out of the desire to send closed caption text. In 1971, Philips developed a way to do that by using the vertical blanking interval that isn’t visible on a TV. Of course, there needed to be a standard, and since standards are such a good thing, the UK developed three different ones.
The TVs of the time weren’t exactly the high-resolution devices we think of these days, so the 1976 level one allowed for regular (but Latin) characters and an alternate set of blocky graphics you could show on an expansive 40×24 palette in glorious color as long as you think seven colors is glorious. Level 1.5 added characters the rest of the world might want, and this so-called “World System Teletext” is still the basis of many systems today. It was better, but still couldn’t handle the 134 characters in Vietnamese.
Meanwhile, the French also wanted in on the action and developed Antiope, which had more capabilities. The United States would, at least partially, adopt this standard as well. In fact, the US fragmented between both systems along with a third system out of Canada until they converged on AT&T’s PLP system, renamed as North American Presentation Layer Syntax or NAPLPS. The post makes the case that NAPLPS was built on both the Canadian and French systems.
That was in 1986, and the Internet was getting ready to turn all of these developments, like $200 million Canadian system, into a roaring dumpster fire. The French even abandoned their homegrown system in favor of the World System Teletext. The post says as of 2024, at least 15 countries still maintain teletext.
So that was the West. What about behind the Iron Curtain, the Middle East, and in Asia? Well, that’s the last part of the post, and you should definitely check it out.
Japan’s version of teletex, still in use as of the mid-1990s, was one of the most advanced.
If you are interested in the underlying technology, teletext data lives in the vertical blanking interval between frames on an analog TV system. Data had page numbers. If you requested a page, the system would either retrieve it from a buffer or wait for it to appear in the video signal. Some systems send a page at a time, while others send bits of a page on each field. In theory, the three-digit page number can range from 100 to 0x8FF, although in practice, too many pages slow down the system, and normal users can’t key in hex numbers.
For PAL, for example, the data resides in even lines between 6 and 22, or in lines 318 to 335 for odd lines. Systems can elect to use fewer lines. A black signal is a zero, while a 66% white signal is a one, and the data is in NRZ line coding. There is a framing code to identify where the data starts. Other systems have slight variations, but the overall bit rate is around 5 to 6 Mbit/s. Character speeds are slightly slower due to error correction and other overhead.
Honestly, we thought this was all ancient history. You have to wonder which country will be the last one standing as the number of Teletext systems continues to dwindle. Of course, we still have
closed captions
, but with digital television, it really isn’t the same thing. Can Teletext run Doom? Apparently,
yes
, if you stretch your definition of success a bit. | 17 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8163383",
"author": "Steve",
"timestamp": "2025-08-15T11:10:43",
"content": "It’s important not to confuse teletext delivery in analogue composite VBI with the continued running of teletext services.Many European countries have continued to use the same 40×25 WST system long after a... | 1,760,371,451.265402 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/15/open-source-lithium-titanate-battery-management-system/ | Open Source Lithium-Titanate Battery Management System | Maya Posch | [
"Battery Hacks"
] | [
"battery management system",
"bms",
"Lithium-titanate battery"
] | Lithium-titanate (LTO) is an interesting battery chemistry that is akin to Li-ion but uses Li
2
TiO
3
nanocrystals instead of carbon for the anode. This makes LTO cells capable of much faster charging and with better stability characteristics, albeit at the cost of lower energy density. Much like LiFePO
4
cells, this makes them interesting for a range of applications where the highest possible energy density isn’t the biggest concern, while providing even more stability and long-term safety.
That said, LTO is uncommon enough that finding a battery management system (BMS) can be a bit of a pain. This is where [Vlastimil Slintak]’s open source
LTO BMS project
may come in handy, which targets single cell (1S) configurations with the typical LTO cell voltage of around 1.7 – 2.8V, with 3 cells in parallel (1S3P). This particular BMS was designed for low-power applications like Meshtastic nodes, as explained on the
accompanying blog post
which also covers the entire development and final design in detail.
The BMS design features all the stuff that you’d hope is on there, like under-voltage, over-voltage and over-current protection, with an ATtiny824 MCU providing the brains. Up to 1 A of discharge and charge current is supported, for about 2.4 Watt at average cell voltage. With the triple 1,300 mAh LTO cells in the demonstrated pack you’d have over 9 Wh of capacity, with the connected hardware able to query the BMS over I2C for a range of statistics.
Thanks to [Marcel] for the tip. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8163300",
"author": "Holger, DM5TT",
"timestamp": "2025-08-15T08:05:25",
"content": "Very Cool!Just for information: many energy harvesters (TQ BQ25570, ePeas, etc.) have a highly configurable storage interface. So they easily can be adjusted for LTO, LiFePo4, etc.The BQ25570 is abl... | 1,760,371,451.416225 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/14/rediscovering-microsofts-oddball-music-generator-from-the-1990s/ | Rediscovering Microsoft’s Oddball Music Generator From The 1990s | Lewin Day | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"microsoft",
"midi",
"music"
] | There has been a huge proliferation in AI music creation tools of late, and a corresponding uptick in the number of AI artists appearing on streaming services. Well before the modern neural network revolution, though, there was an earlier tool in this same vein.
[harke] tells us all about Microsoft Music Producer 1.0
, a forgotten relic from the 1990s.
The software wasn’t ever marketed openly. Instead, it was a part of Microsoft Visual InterDev, a web development package from 1997. It allowed the user to select a style, a personality, and a band to play the song, along with details like key, tempo, and the “shape” of the composition. It would then go ahead and algorithmically generate the music using MIDI instruments and in-built synthesized sounds.
As [harke] demonstrates, there are a huge amounts of genres to choose from. Pick one, and you’ll most likely find it sounds nothing like the contemporary genre it’s supposed to be recreating. The more gamey genres, though, like “Adventure” or “Chase” actually sound pretty okay. The moods are hilariously specific, too — you can have a “noble” song, or a “striving” or “serious” one. [harke] also demonstrates building a full song with the “7AM Illusion” preset, exporting the MIDI, and then adding her own instruments and vocals in a DAW to fill it out. The result is what you’d expect from a composition relying on the Microsoft GS Wavetable synth.
Microsoft might not have cornered the generative music market in the 1990s,
but generative AI is making huge waves in the industry today
. | 8 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8163245",
"author": "WTF Detector",
"timestamp": "2025-08-15T05:28:13",
"content": "Personally, I could go for some Defiant Jazz. But only 5 minutes of it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8163436",
"author": "Maave",
"ti... | 1,760,371,451.459018 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/14/calibration-good-old-calibration/ | Calibration, Good Old Calibration | Al Williams | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"calibration",
"dmm"
] | Do you calibrate your digital meters? Most of us don’t have the gear to do a proper calibration, but [Mike Wyatt] shares his simple way to calibrate his DMMs using a
precision resistor coupled with a thermistor
. The idea is to use a standard dual banana plug along with a 3D-printed housing to hold the simple electronics.
The calibration element is a precision resistor. But the assembly includes a 1% thermistor. In addition to the banana plugs, there are test points to access the resistor and another pair for the thermistor.
In use, you plug the device into the unit you want to test. Then you clip a different temperature sensor to the integrated thermistor. Because the thermistor is in close proximity to the meter’s input, it can tell the difference between the ambient temperature and the meter. [Mike] says the bench meters get warmer than hand-held units.
This is, of course, not a perfect setup if you are a real metrology stickler. But it can be helpful. [Mike] suggests the precision resistor be over 100 ohms since anything less really isn’t a candidate for a precision measurement with
two wires
. Debating over
calibration
? We do that, too. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8163154",
"author": "Vinny",
"timestamp": "2025-08-15T02:39:51",
"content": "The link for the calibration is wrong.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8163469",
"author": "Al Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-08-15T14... | 1,760,371,451.497299 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/14/bench-top-wireless-power-transmission/ | Bench-Top Wireless Power Transmission | John Elliot V | [
"High Voltage"
] | [
"Class-E Tesla Coil",
"Solid State Tesla Coil",
"SSTC",
"tesla coil",
"Wireless Power Transmission"
] | [mircemk] has been working on
wireless power transmission
. Using a Class-E Tesla coil with 12 turns on the primary and 8 turns on the secondary and a 12 volt input he can send a few milliwatts to power an LED over a distance of more than 40 centimeters or power a 10 watt bulb over a distance of about 10 centimeters. With the DC input set at 24 volts the apparatus can deliver 5 watts over a distance of a few centimeters and a light is still visible after separating the primary and secondary coils by more than 30 centimeters.
There are many
types of Tesla coil
and we can’t go into the details here but they include Spark-Gap Tesla Coils (SGTC) and Solid-State Tesla Coils (SSTC), among others. The Class-E coil demonstrated in this project is a type of SSTC which in general is more efficient than an SGTC alternative.
Please bear in mind that while it is perfectly safe to watch a YouTube video of a person demonstrating a functional Tesla coil, building your own is hazardous and probably not a good idea unless you really understand what you’re doing! Particularly high voltages can be involved and EMI/RFI emissions can violate regulations. You can damage your body with
RF burns
while not feeling any pain, and without even knowing that it’s happening.
If you’d like to read more about wireless power transmission it is certainly a topic we’ve covered here at Hackaday in the past, you might like to check out
Wireless Power Makes For Cable-Free Desk
or
Transmitting Wireless Power Over Longer Distances
. | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8163140",
"author": "mythoughts62",
"timestamp": "2025-08-15T02:21:24",
"content": "IMHO, that’s not a Tesla coil. That’s an oscillator driving an air-core transfomer. I don’t see a resonant secondary providing high voltage RF.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies":... | 1,760,371,451.909147 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/15/this-polaroid-esque-ocr-machine-turns-text-to-braille-in-the-wild/ | This Polaroid-esque OCR Machine Turns Text To Braille In The Wild | Navarre Bartz | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"accessibility",
"blind",
"braille",
"computer",
"computer vision",
"impaired",
"ocr",
"raspberry pi",
"read",
"seeing",
"tesseract-ocr",
"vision"
] | One of the practical upsides of improved computer vision systems and machine learning has been the ability of computers to translate text from one language or format to another. [Jchen] used this to develop
Braille Vision
which can turn inaccessible text into braille on the go.
Using a headless Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 running Tesseract OCR, the device has a microswitch shutter to take a picture of a poster or other object. The device processes any text it finds and gives the user an audible cue when it is finished. A rotary knob on the back of the device then moves the braille display pad through each character. When the end of the message is reached, it then cycles back to the beginning.
Development involved breadboarding an Arduino hooked up to some MOSFETs to drive the solenoids for the braille display until the system worked well enough to solder together with wires and perfboard. Everything is housed in a 3D printed shell that appears similar in size to an old Polaroid instant camera.
We’ve seen a
vibrating braille output prototype for smartphones
, how
blind makers are using 3D printing
, and are wondering
what ever happened with “tixel” displays
? If you’re new to braille, try
3D printing your own trainer out of TPU
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8163779",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2025-08-16T08:09:01",
"content": "It´s more akin to a ticket printer than “Polaroid”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8163793",
"author": "tyju5tyjt",
"timestamp": "2025-08-16T09:5... | 1,760,371,452.038904 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/15/suggested-schematic-standards/ | Suggested Schematic Standards | Al Williams | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"schematics"
] | We often think that if a piece of software had the level of documentation you usually see for hardware, you wouldn’t think much of it. Sure, there are exceptions. Some hardware is beautifully documented, and poorly documented software is everywhere. [Graham Sutherland’s] been reviewing schematics and put together some notes on
what makes a clean schematic
.
Like coding standards, some of these are a bit subjective, but we thought it was all good advice. Of course, we’ve also violated some of them when we are in a hurry to get to a simulation.
Most of the rules are common sense: use enough space, add labels, and avoid using quirky angles. [Flannery O’Connor] once said, “You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.” She was talking about writing, but the same could be said about schematics.
[Graham] says as much, pointing out that these are more guidelines. He even points out places where you might deliberately break the rules. For example, in general, wires should always go horizontally or vertically. However, if you are crossing two parallel wires, you probably should take advantage of the diagonals.
So what are your schematic rules? Software has standards like MISRA, CERT, and various
NASA standards
. Oddly enough, one of our
favorite quick schematic editors
is truly terrible but obeys most of these rules. But you can surely
do better than that
. | 45 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "8163710",
"author": "WestfW",
"timestamp": "2025-08-16T02:23:24",
"content": "I like to make an “edit history” layer to document the changes I make, which I guess you could skip with careful use of git or equivalent…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,452.002611 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/15/2025-one-hertz-challenge-educational-tool-becomes-10-stopwatches/ | 2025 One Hertz Challenge: Educational Tool Becomes 10 Stopwatches | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"smart response pe",
"stopwatch",
"watch"
] | Around the globe, some classrooms are using fancy digital handheld devices to let people answer questions. One such example of this hardware is the Smart Response PE. These devices are largely useless outside the classroom,
so [Ray Burne] decided to hack one for our 2025 One Hertz Challenge.
The Smart Response PE device is similar in shape and size to an old-school candybar cellphone. It runs on a Texas Instruments CC2533 microcontroller, which drives a simple black-and-white LCD. User interface is via a numeric keypad and a few extra control buttons on the front panel. Thanks to Github user [serisman],
there are readily available development tools for this hardware
. [Ray] notes it provides a straightforward Arduino-like programming experience.
[Ray] decided to modify the hardware to act as a stopwatch. But not just one stopwatch—ten stopwatches at once! Pressing a number from 0 to 9 will activate that given timer, and it will start ticking up on the LCD screen. One can pause the screen updates to get a temporary laptime reading by pressing the enter key. Meanwhile, pressing the Home button will reset the screen and all timers at once. [Ray] also explains on the project page how to add a real power switch to the device, and how to modify the programming pins for easy access.
It’s a fun build, and one that could prove useful if you regularly find yourself having to time ten of something at once.
Maybe eggs
? In any case, it’s certainly easier than juggling ten separate stopwatches at once! Meanwhile, if you’re hacking your own obscure hardware finds, don’t hesitate to
notify the tipsline! | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8163744",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-08-16T05:02:03",
"content": "He has also turned one of these into an RPN calculator. (I think I like this guy).And how much power does this CC2533 use? In the calculator he also put in a hard on/off switch, and a LiFePo4 battery.Appa... | 1,760,371,452.080181 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/15/liberating-a-collapsible-chair-from-a-single-piece-of-wood/ | Liberating A Collapsible Chair From A Single Piece Of Wood | John Elliot V | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"Collapsible Chair",
"woodworking"
] | Over on his YouTube channel our hacker [GrandpaAmu]
liberates a collapsible chair from a single piece of wood
.
With the assistance of an extra pair of hands, but without any power tools in sight, this old master marks up a piece of wood and then cuts a collapsible chair out of it. He uses various types of saw, chisels, a manual drill, and various other hand tools. His workspace is a humble plank with a large clamp attached. At the end he does use a powered hot air gun to heat the finish he uses to coat the final product.
We love videos like this which communicate, record, and capture old know-how. Even in our electrified future with factory-made commodities everywhere, we’re all still gonna appreciate having something portable to sit on. If you’re interested in collapsible furniture you might also be interested in
The Ultimate Workstation That Folds Up
. | 11 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8163619",
"author": "i alone possess the truth",
"timestamp": "2025-08-15T20:14:10",
"content": "So cool! Beautiful.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8163625",
"author": "mayhem",
"timestamp": "2025-08-15T20:27:11",
... | 1,760,371,451.865448 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/15/2025-one-hertz-challenge-an-arduino-based-heart-rate-sensor/ | 2025 One Hertz Challenge: An Arduino-Based Heart Rate Sensor | Lewin Day | [
"contests"
] | [
"2025 Hackaday One Hertz Challenge",
"heart rate",
"heart rate sensor",
"pulse oximeter",
"Pulse oximetry"
] | How fast does your heart beat? It’s a tough question to answer, because our heart rate changes all the time depending on what we’re doing and how our body is behaving. However, [Ludwin] noted that resting heart rates often settle somewhere near 60 bpm on average. Thus,
they entered a heart rate sensor to our 2025 One Hertz Challenge!
The build is based around a Wemos D1 mini, a ESP8266 development board. It’s hooked up to a MAX30102 heart beat sensor, which uses
pulse oximetry
to determine heart rate with a photosensor and LEDs. Basically, it’s possible to determine the oxygenation of blood by measuring its absorbance of red and infrared wavelengths, usually done by passing light through a finger. Meanwhile, by measuring the change in absorption of light in the finger as blood flows with the beat of the heat, it’s also possible to measure a person’s pulse rate.
The Wemos D1 takes the reading from the MAX30102, and displays it on a small OLED display. It reports heart rate in both beats per minute and in Hertz. if you can happen to get your heartrate to exactly 60 beats per minute, it will be beating at precisely 1 Hertz. Perhaps, then, it’s the person
using
Ludwin’s build that is actually eligible for the One Hertz Challenge, since they’re the one doing something once per second?
In any case, it shows just how easy it is to pick up biometric data these days. You only need a capable microcontroller and some off-the-shelf sensors,
and you’re up and running
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8163762",
"author": "Ewald",
"timestamp": "2025-08-16T06:14:55",
"content": "With pulse rate you probably mean Oxygen saturation (SpO2)?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8164238",
"author": "mtr",
"timestamp": "2025-08-17... | 1,760,371,452.15036 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/15/gentle-processing-makes-better-rubber-that-cracks-less/ | Gentle Processing Makes Better Rubber That Cracks Less | Lewin Day | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Science"
] | [
"materials",
"materials science",
"rubber",
"vulcanization"
] | Rubber! It starts out as a goopy material harvested from special trees, and is then processed into a resilient, flexible material used for innumerable important purposes. In the vast majority of applications, rubber is prized for its elasticity, which eventually goes away with repeated stress cycles, exposure to heat, and time. When a rubber part starts to show cracks, it’s generally time to replace it.
Researchers at Harvard have now found a way to potentially increase rubber’s ability to withstand cracking. The paper, published in
Nature Sustainability
, outlines how the material can be treated to provide far greater durability and toughness.
Big Flex
Note the differences between a short-chain crosslinked structure, and the longer-chain tanglemer structure with far less crosslinks. The latter is far better at resisting crack formation, since the longer chain can deconcentrate stress over a longer distance, allowing far greater stretch before failure. Credit:
research paper
The traditional method of producing rubber products starts with harvesting the natural rubber latex from various types of rubber tree. The trees are tapped to release their milky sap, which is then dried, processed with additives, and shaped into the desired form before heating with sulfur compounds to vulcanize the material. It’s this last step that is key to producing the finished product we know as rubber, as used in products like tires, erasers, and o-rings. The vulcanization process causes the creation of short crosslinked polymer chains in the rubber, which determine the final properties and behavior of the material.
Harvard researchers modified the traditional rubber production process to be gentler. Typical rubber production includes heavy-handed mixing and extruding steps which tend to “masticate” the polymers in the material, turning them into shorter chains. The new, gentler process better preserves the long polymer chains initially present in the raw rubber. When put through the final stages of processing, these longer chains form into a structure referred to as a “tanglemer”, where the tangles of long polymer chains actually outnumber the sparse number of crosslinks between the chains in the structure.
The gentler production method involves drying the latex and additive mixture at room temperature to form a film, before hot-pressing it to form the final tanglemer structure. This process isn’t practical for producing large, thick parts. Credit:
research paper
This tanglemer structure is much better at resisting crack formation. “At a crack tip in the tanglemer, stress deconcentrates over a long polymer strand between neighbouring crosslinks,” notes the research paper. “The entanglements function as slip links and do not impede stress deconcentration, thus decoupling modulus and fatigue threshold.” Plus, these long, tangled polymer chains are just generally better at spreading out stress in the material than the shorter crosslinked chains found in traditional vulcanized rubber. With the stress more evenly distributed, the rubber is less likely to crack or fail in any given location. The material is thus far tougher, more durable, and more flexible. These properties hold up even over repeated loading cycles.
Overall, the researchers found the material to be four times better at resisting crack growth during repeated stretch cycles. It also proved to be ten times tougher than traditional rubber. However, the new gentler processing method is fussy, and cannot outperform traditional rubber processing in all regards. After all, there’s a reason things are done the way they are in industry. Most notably, it relies on a lot of water evaporation, and it’s not currently viable for thick-wall parts like tires, for example. For thinner rubber parts, though, the mechanical advantages are all there—and this method could prove useful.
Ultimately, don’t expect to see new this ultra-rubber revolutionizing the tire market or glove manufacturing overnight. However, the research highlights an important fact—rubber can be made with significantly improved properties if the longer polymer chains can be preserved during processing, and tangled instead of excessively cross-linked. There may be more fruitful ground to explore to find other ways in which we can improve rubber by giving it a better, more resilient structure. | 19 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8163546",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-08-15T17:57:08",
"content": "I heard of a method to chemically revitalize old dried and hardened rubber by boiling it in wintergreen oil. So that does not work, in case anybody else is tempted to try it. Definitely stinks up your shop, th... | 1,760,371,452.221128 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/15/hackaday-podcast-episode-333-nightmare-whiffletrees-18650-safety-and-a-telephone-twofer/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 333: Nightmare Whiffletrees, 18650 Safety, And A Telephone Twofer | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over the tubes to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous week.
In Hackaday news,
get your Supercon 2025 tickets
while they’re hot! Also,
the One Hertz Challenge
ticks on, but time is running out. You have until Tuesday, August 19th to show us what you’ve got, so head over to Hackaday.IO and get started now. Finally, its the end of eternal September as
AOL discontinues dial-up service
after all these years.
On What’s That Sound, Kristina got sort of close, but this is neither horseshoes nor hand grenades. Can you get it? If so, you could win a limited edition Hackaday Podcast t-shirt!
After that, it’s on to the hacks and such, beginning with a talking robot that uses typewriter tech to move its mouth. We take a look at hacking printed circuit boards to create casing and instrument panels for a PDP-1 replica. Then we explore a fluid simulation business card, witness a caliper shootout, and marvel at one file in six formats. Finally, it’s a telephone twofer as we discuss the non-hack-ability of the average smart phone, and learn about what was arguably the first podcast.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Download in
DRM-free MP3
and savor at your leisure.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 333 Show Notes:
News:
Get Your Tickets For Supercon 2025 Now!
Announcing The 2025 Hackaday One Hertz Challenge
End Of The Eternal September, As AOL Discontinues Dial-Up
What’s that Sound?
Think you know what the sound is?
Fill out the form
for your shot at a shirt.
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Josef Prusa Warns Open Hardware 3D Printing Is Dead
Continuous-Path 3D Printed Case Is Clearly Superior
FullControl – Unconstrained Design
The Trials Of Trying To Build An Automatic Filament Changer
Talking Robot Uses Typewriter Tech For Mouth
Hacking Printed Circuit Board To Create Casing And Instrument Panels
That’s No Moon, Er, Selectric
The WHY 2025 Badge And Its 18650s
LEDs That Flow: A Fluid Simulation Business Card
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Calipers: Do You Get What You Pay For?
Building A Trash Can Reverb
Coping With Disappearing Capacitance In A Buck Converter
One File, Six Formats: Just Change The Extension
Kristina’s Picks:
2025 One Hertz Challenge: Abstract Aircraft Sculpture Based On Lighting Regulations
Don’t Say This DIY Diskette Was A Flop
Digital Etch-A-Sketch Also Plays Snake
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Smartphone Hackability, Or, A Pocket Computer That Isn’t
Ask Hackaday: Why Aren’t We Hacking Cellphones?
The World’s First Podcaster? | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8163541",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-08-15T17:35:10",
"content": "I wish the little embedded player thingy had a volume control. The volume level of the podcast is much higher than other things that play on my system. I have to turn the system volume down, but then othe... | 1,760,371,452.271989 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/20/floss-weekly-episode-843-money-usually-helps/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 843: Money Usually Helps | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"FLOSS Weekly",
"kde",
"kdenlive"
] | This week
Jonathan
and
Dan
chat with
Farid Abdelnour
about Kdenlive! It’s top quality video editing software, and happens to be what we use to edit the show! What’s next for the project, and how can you help? Watch to find out!
https://kdenlive.org/
https://kdenlive.org/news/releases/25.08.0/
https://www.estudio.gunga.com.br/
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 | [] | 1,760,371,452.11619 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/20/instant-macropad-just-add-qmk/ | Instant Macropad: Just Add QMK | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"how-to",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"keyboard",
"keypad",
"macropad",
"pi pico",
"QMK"
] | I recently picked up one of those
cheap macropads
(and wrote about it, of course). It is surprisingly handy and quite inexpensive. But I felt bad about buying it. Something like that should be easy to build yourself. People build keyboards all the time now, and with a small number of keys, you don’t even have to scan a matrix. Just use an I/O pin per switch.
The macropad had some wacky software on it that, luckily, people have replaced with open-source alternatives. But if I were going to roll my own, it would be smart to use something like QMK, just like a big keyboard. But that made me wonder, how much trouble it would be to set up QMK for a simple project. Spoiler: It was pretty easy.
The Hardware
Simple badge or prototype macropad? Why not both?
Since I just wanted to experiment, I was tempted to jam some switches in a breadboard along with a Raspberry Pi Pico. But then I remembered the
“simple badge”
project I had up on a nearby shelf. It is simplicity itself: an RP2040-Plus (you could just use a regular Pi Pico) and a small add-on board with a switch “joystick,” four buttons, and a small display. You don’t really need the Plus for this project since, unlike the badge, it doesn’t need a battery. The USB cable will power the device and carry keyboard (or even mouse) commands back to the computer.
Practical? No. But it would be easy enough to wire up any kind of switches you like. I didn’t use the display, so there would be no reason to wire one up if you were trying to make a useful copy of this project.
The Software
There are several keyboard firmware choices out there, but QMK is probably the most common. It supports the Pico, and it’s well supported. It is also modular, offering a wide range of features.
The first thing I did was clone the
Git repository
and start
my own branch
to work in. There are a number of source files, but you won’t need to do very much with most of them.
There is a directory called
keyboards
. Inside that are directories for different types of keyboards (generally, brands of keyboards). However, there’s also a directory called
handwired
for custom keyboards with a number of directories inside.
There is one particular directory of interest:
onekey
. This is sort of a “Hello World” for QMK firmware. Inside, there are directories for different CPUs, including the RP2040 I planned to use. There are many other choices, though, if you prefer something else.
Surprise!
Quick guide to the files of interest.
So, that directory probably has a mess of files in it, right? Not really. There are five files, including a readme, and that’s it. Of those, there are only two I was going to change:
config.h
and
keyboard.json
. In addition, there are a few files that may be important in the parent directory:
config.h
,
onekey.c
, and
info.json
.
I didn’t want to interfere with the stock options, so I created a directory at
~/qmk_firmware/keyboards/handwired/hackaday
. I copied the files from
onekey
to this directory, along with the
rp2040
and
keymap
directories (that one is important). I renamed
onekey.c
to
hackaday.c
.
It seems confusing at first, but maybe the diagram will help. This
document
will help, too. The good news is that most of these files you won’t even need to change. Essentially,
info.json
is for any processor,
keyboard.json
is for a specific processor, and
keymap.json
goes with a particular keymap.
Changes
The root directory config.h didn’t need any changes, although you can disable certain features here if you care. The
hackaday.c
file had some debugging options set to true, but since I wanted to keep it simple, I set them all to false.
The
info.json
file was the most interesting. You can do things like set the keyboard name and USB IDs there. I didn’t change the rest, even though the
diode_direction
key in this file won’t be used for this project. For that matter, the
locking
section is only needed if you have physical keys that actually lock, but I left it in since it doesn’t hurt anything.
In the
rp2040
directory, there are more changes. The
config.h
file allows you to set pin numbers for various things, and I also put some mouse parameters there (more on that later). I didn’t actually use any of these things (SPI and the display), so I could have deleted most of this.
But the big change is in the
keyboard.json
file. Here you set the processor type. But the big thing is you set up keys and some feature flags. Usually, you describe how your keyboard rows and columns are configured, but this simple device just has direct connections. You still set up fake rows and columns. In this case, I elected to make two rows of five columns. The first row is the four buttons (and a dead position). The second row is the joystick buttons. You can see that in the
matrix_pins
section of the file.
The layouts section is very simple and gives a name to each key. I also set up some options to allow for fake mouse keys and media keys (
mousekey
and
extrakey
set to true). Here’s the file:
{
"keyboard_name": "RP2040_Plus_Pad",
"processor": "RP2040",
"bootloader": "rp2040",
"matrix_pins": {
"direct": [
["GP15", "GP17", "GP19", "GP21", "NO_PIN"],
["GP2", "GP18", "GP16", "GP20", "GP3"]
]
},
"features": {
"mousekey": true,
"extrakey": true,
"nkro": false,
"bootmagic": false
},
"layouts": {
"LAYOUT": {
"layout": [
{ "label":"K00", "matrix": [0, 0], "x": 0, "y": 0 },
{ "label": "K01", "matrix": [0, 1], "x": 1, "y": 0 },
{ "label": "K02", "matrix": [0, 2], "x": 2, "y": 0 },
{ "label": "K03", "matrix": [0, 3], "x": 3, "y": 0 },
{ "label": "K10", "matrix": [1, 0], "x": 0, "y": 1 },
{ "label": "K11", "matrix": [1, 1], "x": 1, "y": 1 },
{ "label": "K12", "matrix": [1, 2], "x": 2, "y": 1 },
{ "label": "K13", "matrix": [1, 3], "x": 3, "y": 1 },
{ "label": "K14", "matrix": [1, 4], "x": 4, "y": 1 }
]
}
}
}
The Keymap
It still seems like there is something missing. The keycodes that each key produces. That’s in the
../hackaday/keymaps/default
directory. There’s a json file you don’t need to change and a C file:
#include QMK_KEYBOARD_H
const uint16_t PROGMEM keymaps[][MATRIX_ROWS][MATRIX_COLS] = {
[0] = LAYOUT(
// 4 buttons
KC_KB_VOLUME_UP, KC_KB_MUTE, KC_KB_VOLUME_DOWN, KC_MEDIA_PLAY_PAUSE,
// Mouse
QK_MOUSE_CURSOR_UP, QK_MOUSE_CURSOR_DOWN,
QK_MOUSE_CURSOR_LEFT, QK_MOUSE_CURSOR_RIGHT,
QK_MOUSE_BUTTON_1
),
};
. . .
Mousing Around
I didn’t add the mouse commands until later. When I did, they didn’t seem to work. Of course, I had to enable the mouse commands, but it still wasn’t working. What bit me several times was that the QMK flash script (see below) doesn’t wait for the Pi Pico to finish downloading. So you sometimes think it’s done, but it isn’t. There are a few ways of solving that, as you’ll see.
Miscellaneous and Building
Installing QMK is simple, but varies depending on your computer type. The
documentation is your friend
. Meanwhile, I’ve left
my fork of the official firmware
for you. Be sure to switch to the
rp2040
branch, or you won’t see any differences from the official repo.
There are some build options you can add to
rules.mk
files in the different directories. There are plenty of APIs built into QMK if you want to play with, say, the display. You can also add code to your
keymap.c
(among other places) to run code on startup, for example. You can find out more about what’s possible in the documentation. For example, if you wanted to try an OLED display, there are
drivers ready to go
.
The first time you flash, you’ll want to put your Pico in bootloader mode and then try this:
qmk flash -kb handwired/hackaday/rp2040 -km default
If you aren’t ready to
flash
, try the
compile
command. You can also use
clean
to wipe out all the binaries. The binaries wind up in
qmk_firmware/.build
.
Once the bootloader is installed the first time (assuming you didn’t change the setup), you can get back in bootloader mode by double-tapping the reset button. The onboard LED will light so you know it is in bootloader mode.
It is important to wait for the Pi to disconnect, or it may not finish programming. Adding a
sync
command to the end of your flash command isn’t a bad idea. Or just be patient and wait for the Pi to disconnect itself.
Usually, the device will reset and become a keyboard automatically. If not, reset it yourself or unplug it and plug it back in. Then you’ll be able to use the four buttons to adjust the volume and mute your audio. The joystick fakes being a mouse. Don’t like that? Change it in
keymap.c.
There’s a lot more, of course, but this will get you started. Keeping it all straight can be a bit confusing at first, but once you’ve done it once, you’ll see there’s not much you have to change. If you browse the documentation, you’ll see there’s plenty of support for different kinds of hardware.
What about debugging? Running some user code? I’ll save that for next time.
Now you can build your dream macropad or keyboard, or even use this to make fake keyboard devices that feed data from something other than user input. Just remember to
drop us a note with your creations
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8166562",
"author": "irox",
"timestamp": "2025-08-21T00:39:57",
"content": "Cool to see a deeper drive into QMK!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8166568",
"author": "brad",
"timestamp": "2025-08-21T00:55:59",
"conten... | 1,760,371,452.318521 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/20/building-a-robotic-arm-without-breaking-the-bank/ | Building A Robotic Arm Without Breaking The Bank | Maya Posch | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"diy robot arm"
] | There are probably at least as many ways to construct a robotic arm as there are uses for them. In the case of [Thomas Sanladerer] his primary requirement for the robotic arm
was to support a digital camera
, which apparently has to be capable of looking vaguely menacing in a completely casual manner. Meet Caroline, whose styling and color scheme is completely coincidental and does not promise yummy moist cake for anyone who is still alive after all experiments have been run.
Unlike typical robotic arms where each joint in the arm is directly driven by a stepper motor or similar, [Thomas] opted to use a linear rail that pushes or pulls the next section of the arm in a manner that’s reminiscent of the action by the opposing muscles in our mammalian appendages. This 3D printer-inspired design is pretty sturdy, but the steppers like to skip steps, so he is considering replacing them with brushless motors.
Beyond this, the rest of the robotic arm uses aluminium hollow stock, a lot of 3D printed sections and for the head a bunch of
Waveshare ST3215 servos
with internal magnetic encoder for angle control. One of these ~€35 ST3215s did cook itself during testing, which is somewhat worrying. Overall, total costs was a few hundred Euro, which for a nine-degree robotic arm like this isn’t too terrible. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8166752",
"author": "Portal",
"timestamp": "2025-08-21T13:11:29",
"content": "GLaDOS 😍",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8166803",
"author": "Cabba",
"timestamp": "2025-08-21T15:46:49",
"content": "I watched the video... | 1,760,371,452.397707 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/20/death-of-the-cheque-australia-moves-on/ | Death Of The Cheque: Australia Moves On | Lewin Day | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Misc Hacks",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"banks",
"checks",
"cheques",
"payment"
] | Check (or cheques) have long been a standard way for moving money from one bank account to another. They’re essentially little more than a codified document that puts the necessary information in a standard format to ease processing by all parties involved in a given transaction.
The check was once a routine, if tedious, way for the average person to pay for things like bills, rent, or even groceries. As their relevance continues to wane in the face of newer technology, though, the Australian government is making a plan to phase them out for good.
Put Some Respect On My Check
Check use has been in heavy decline in recent decades. Credit: Treasury.gov.au
The pending demise of the checks was first floated in June 2023, with the release of the government’s Strategic Plan for Australia’s Payments System. With the rise of credit and debit cards, digital payments via smartphones, and Osko instant bank transfers, checks had diminished to a lower level of importance than ever.
Government statistics indicated that checks were used for less than 0.1% of retail payments within Australia. In 2004, over 10,000,000 personal checks were used every month. Fast forward to 2024, and that number had dwindled to somewhere below 300,000. As volumes have fallen, the price of processing individual checks has effectively increased. In an era where digital payments happen instantly for near-zero cost, a check can take 3 to 7 days to clear, with government statistics stating processing costs for a single check now exceed $5.
Ultimately, the check is now seen as a slow and unwieldy way to make payments, and one no longer worthy of being maintained into the future. Companies have even been questioned openly in the media for the rationale of
still using checks to issue refunds
in this day and age. The rationale is that winding down the check system for good will lead users to prioritize cheaper, faster methods of transferring money. The aim is to reduce transaction costs, improve productivity in the financial system, and just generally grease the wheels of commerce across the country.
The Australian Payments Network issued design specifications for Australian checks, last updated in 2017, but these will soon be defunct. Credit: Australian Payments Network
The current transition plan has two major milestones. By 30 June 2028, Australian banks will cease issuing personal, commercial, government, and bank checks. Any check written after this date will not be accepted and effectively deemed invalid, with no payment made. By 30 September 2029, financial institutions will cease accepting personal, commercial, government and bank cheques entirely. Any remaining checks, whenever created, will effectively be void.
These dates were chosen specifically because personal, commercial, and government checks go “stale” 15 months after they are first drawn. Thus, checks of these types that are written on the very last valid day will still be able to be cashed in the usual period of validity before the system is shut down for good. The intention is that there will be no checks that would otherwise still be valid to cash past 30 September 2029 had the system not been closed. Bank checks do not technically go “stale,” so there is still an open question as to whether there will be a need to honor unpresented bank checks after this date.
There are still a few years left until the big shut down. This gives the government and financial institutions time to ensure they have alternative payment methods in place for the handful of remaining check use cases. There are some concerns that various banks may attempt to leave the checking system prior to the government shut down date, burdening other financial institutions with the costs of keeping the system afloat until the end. The government has stated its expectations that banks will work together to ensure a smooth transition.
To that end, there are exit conditions expected to be adhered to for banks that are shutting down checking. Tier 1 banks are expected to maintain operations until the end date to support smaller institutions that rely on them for check clearing services. Additionally, banks which cease checking operations must still remain members of the Australian Paper Clearing System and fund the system. Banks will also need to provide 6 month warnings to customers ahead of any decision to shut down their checking operations.
While the domestic Australian checking system will shut down, this will not impact foreign checks coming into the country. Since these checks are processed outside the existing Australian checking system, this will not be an issue—financial institutions that process foreign checks will continue to do so. | 108 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "8166345",
"author": "Vinny",
"timestamp": "2025-08-20T14:40:48",
"content": "Here in Brazil a report from our bank federation in January 2025 said that check usage is down 95.87% since 1995, and 18.4% in comparison to 2023, accounting for 0.5% of the financial operations in the coun... | 1,760,371,452.837049 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/20/thermal-batteries-for-lower-carbon-industrial-processes/ | Thermal Batteries For Lower Carbon Industrial Processes | Navarre Bartz | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"chrome oxide",
"chromia",
"e-brick",
"heat energy",
"industrial process",
"refractory brick",
"thermal battery",
"thermal storage"
] | Heating things up is one of the biggest sources of cost and emissions for many industrial processes we take for granted. Most of these factories are running around the clock so they don’t have to waste energy cooling off and heating things back up, so how can you match this 24/7 cycle to the intermittent energy provided by renewables? This
MIT spin-off
thinks one solution is thermal storage refractory bricks.
Electrified Thermal Solutions
takes the relatively simple technology of refractory brick to the next level. For the uninitiated, refractory bricks are typically ceramics with a huge amount of porosity to give them a combination of high thermal tolerance and very good insulating properties. A number of materials processes use them to maximize the use of the available heat energy.
While the exact composition is likely proprietary, the founder’s Ph.D. thesis tells us the bricks are likely a doped chromia (chrome oxide) composition that creates heat in the brick when electrical energy is applied. Stacked bricks can conduct enough current for the whole stack to heat up without need for additional connections. Since these bricks are thermally insulating, they can time shift the energy from solar or wind energy and even out the load. This will reduce emissions and cost as well. If factories need to pipe additional grid power, it would happen at off-peak hours instead of relying on the fluctuating and increasing costs associated with fossil fuels.
If you want to implement thermal storage on a smaller scale, we’ve seen
sand batteries
and storing
heat from wind
with water or other fluids. | 39 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8166295",
"author": "Pete",
"timestamp": "2025-08-20T12:00:37",
"content": "What we really need is seasonal energy storage. Eg. capture excess solar energy during the summer to use for heating during the winter.That’s a harder problem to solve, at least economically, as it implies ... | 1,760,371,454.799162 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/20/reviving-a-piece-of-yesterdays-tomorrow/ | Reviving A Piece Of Yesterday’s Tomorrow | Tyler August | [
"digital audio hacks",
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"minidisc",
"oled display"
] | To anyone who remembers Y2K, Sony’s MiniDisc format will probably always feel futuristic. That goes double for Sony’s MZ-RH1, the last MiniDisk recorder ever released, back in 2006. It’s barely larger than the diminutive disks, and its styling is impeccable. There’s a reason they’ve become highly collectible and sell for insane sums on e-Bay.
Unfortunately, they come with a ticking time-bomb of an Achilles heel: the first-generation OLED screens. Failure is not a question of if, but when, and many units have already succumbed. Fortunately enterprising hacker
[Sir68k] has come up with replacement screen
to keep these two-decade old bits of the future alive.
Replacement screens glowing brightly, and the custom firmware showing track info, something you’d never see on a stock RH1.
Previous revisions required some light surgery to get the twin OLED replacement screens to fit, but as of the latest incarnation (revision F+), it’s now a 100% drop-in replacement for the original Sony part. While it is a drop-in, don’t expect it to be easy. The internals are very densely packed, and fairly delicate — both in the name of miniaturization. You’ll need to break out the micro-screwdrivers for this one, and maybe some magnifiers if your eyes are as old as ours. At least Sony wasn’t gluing cases together back in 2006, and [Sir68k] does provide
a very comprehensive repair guide.
He’s even working on new firmware, to make what many considered best MD recorder better than ever. It’s not ready yet, but when it is [Sir68k] promises to open-source the upgrade. The replacement screens are sadly not open source hardware, but they’re a fine hack nonetheless.
We may see more MiniDisc hacks as the format’s apparent revival continues. Things like
adding Bluetooth to the famously-cramped internals,
or allowing
full data transfer
— something Sony was unwilling to allow until the RH1, which is one of the reasons these units are so desirable. | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8166230",
"author": "JustSayin",
"timestamp": "2025-08-20T08:13:44",
"content": "Minidisc were okay., but at 64mm diameter with a 340gb capacity (later HI-MD hit 1gb). I was always more impressed by Dataplay’s 32mm diameter 500 gb capacity. It was unfortunate that the company made... | 1,760,371,454.851915 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/19/using-ultra-wideband-for-3d-location-and-tracking/ | Using Ultra-Wideband For 3D Location And Tracking | John Elliot V | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"3D Location and Tracking",
"AI Thinker BU03",
"Ultra-Wideband Module"
] | Interested in playing with ultra-wideband (UWB)? [Jaryd] recently put together a fairly comprehensive
getting started guide featuring the AI Thinker BU03
that looks like a great place to start. These modules can be used to determine distance between two of them to an accuracy in the order of 10 centimeters, and they can do so in any orientation and with obstacles in the line of sight. It is possible to create a network of these UWB modules to get multiple distance measurements at once and enable real-time 3D tracking for your project.
[Jaryd] gathers up nine UWB modules and uses a Raspberry Pi Pico for command and control purposes. He explains how to nominate the “tag” (the device being tracked) and the “base stations” (which help in locating the tag). He reports having success at distances of up to about 10 meters and in favorable circumstances all the way up to as much as 30 meters.
If you don’t know anything about UWB and would like a primer on the technology be sure to check out
What Is Ultra Wideband? | 15 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8166215",
"author": "Abur",
"timestamp": "2025-08-20T07:05:50",
"content": "in FiRa UWB spec the “base stations” are called anchors.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8166497",
"author": "Jii",
"timestamp": "2025... | 1,760,371,454.60905 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/13/flyback-converter-revealed/ | Flyback Converter Revealed | Al Williams | [
"Parts"
] | [
"flyback",
"SPICE"
] | As [Sam Ben-Yaakov] points out in a recent video, you don’t often see flyback converters these days. That’s because there are smarter ways to get the same effect, which is to convert between two voltages. If you work on old gear, you’ll see plenty of these, and going through the analysis is educational, even if you’ll never actually work with the circuit. That’s what the video below shows: [Sam’s]
analysis of why this circuit works
.
The circuit in question uses a bridge rectifier to get a high-voltage DC voltage directly from the wall. Of course, you could just use a transformer to convert the AC to a lower AC voltage first, but then you probably need a regulator afterwards to get a stable voltage.
The converter operates as an oscillator. The duty cycle of the oscillator varies depending on the difference between the output voltage and a zener diode reference. These circuits are often difficult to model in a simulator, but [Ben] shows an LTSpice simulation that did take a few tweaks.
As he mentions, today you’d get a switching regulator on a chip and be done with it. But it is still interesting to understand how the design works. Another common flyback circuit
used an oscillator driving a CRT
for the primary, more or less. If you want to
learn more
, we can help with that, too. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8162452",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-08-14T07:58:11",
"content": "Ahh yes the fuzzy feeling on your fingers because flyback wall wart manufacturers are allergic to small good quality class Y caps and low making transformers with enough leakage inductance it can probab... | 1,760,371,454.944018 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/13/2025-one-hertz-challenge-digital-clock-built-with-analog-timer/ | 2025 One Hertz Challenge: Digital Clock Built With Analog Timer | Lewin Day | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"555",
"555 timer",
"Arduino Uno",
"clock"
] | You can use a microcontroller to build a clock. After all, a clock is just something that counts the passage of time. The only problem is that microcontrollers can’t track time very
accurately.
They need some kind of external timing source that doesn’t drift as much as the microcontroller’s primary clock oscillator. To that end,
[Josh] wanted to try using a rather famous IC with his Arduino to build a viable timepiece.
[Josh]’s idea was straightforward—employ a 555 timer IC to generate a square wave at 1 Hz. He set up an Arduino Uno to count the pulses using edge detection. This allowed for a reliable count which would serve as the timebase for a simple 24-hour clock. The time was then displayed on an OLED display attached over I2C, while raw pulses from the 555 were counted on a 7-segment display as a useful debugging measure. Setting the time is easy, with a few pushbuttons hooked up to the Arduino for this purpose.
[Josh] claims a drift of “only ~0.5 seconds” but does not state over what time period this drift occurs. In any case, 555s are not really used for timekeeping purposes in this way, because timers based on resistor-capacitor circuits tend to drift a
lot
and are highly susceptible to temperature changes. However, [Josh] could easily turn this into a highly accurate clock merely by replacing the 555 square wave input with a 1PPS clock source from another type of timer or GPS device.
We’ve had quite a few clocks entered into the One Hertz Competition already,
including this hilariously easy Nixie clock build
. You’ve got
until August 19
to get your own entry in, so wow us with your project that does
something
once a second! | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8162975",
"author": "George",
"timestamp": "2025-08-14T21:40:14",
"content": "Analog timer?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,454.424094 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/13/digital-etch-a-sketch-also-plays-snake/ | Digital Etch-A-Sketch Also Plays Snake | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"etch a sketch",
"toy"
] | The Etch-A-Sketch has been a popular toy for decades. It can be fun to draw on, but you have to get things right the first time, because there’s no undo button.
[Tekavou] decided to recreate this popular toy in digital form instead to give it more capabilities.
The build relies on an Inkplate e-paper screen as a display, which is probably as close you can get in appearance to the aluminium dust and glass screen used in an Etch-a-Sketch. The display is hooked up to an ESP32 microcontroller, which is charged with reading inputs from a pair of rotary encoders. In standard drawing mode, it emulates the behavior of an Etch-A-Sketch, with the ESP32 drawing to the e-paper display as the user turns the encoders to move the cursor. However, it has a magical “undo” feature, where pressing the encoder undoes the last movement, allowing you to craft complex creations without having to get every move perfect on your first attempt. As a fun aside, [Tekavou] also included a fun Snake game. More specifically, it’s inspired by NIBBLES.BAS, a demo program included with Microsoft QBasic back in the day.
We’ve seen all kinds of Etch-A-Sketch builds around these parts, including this
impressive roboticized version
. Video after the break. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8162275",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2025-08-13T23:27:54",
"content": "It can be fun to draw on, but you have to get things right the first time, because there’s no undo button.You don’t have to explain what that’s like to HaD commentors! :-P",
"parent_id": null,
"depth":... | 1,760,371,454.561435 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/13/2025-one-hertz-challenge-a-game-of-life/ | 2025 One Hertz Challenge: A Game Of Life | Lewin Day | [
"contests"
] | [
"2025 Hackaday One Hertz Challenge",
"attiny85",
"conway",
"conways game of life",
"game of life"
] | The 2025 One Hertz Challenge asks you to build a project that does something once every second. While that has inspired a lot of clock and timekeeping builds, we’re also seeing some that do entirely different things on a 1 Hz period. [junkdust] has entered the contest with
a project that does something rather mathematical once every second.
[junkdust] wanted to get better acquainted with the venerable ATtiny85, so decided to implement Conway’s Game of Life on it. The microcontroller is hooked up to a 0.91″ OLED display with a resolution of 128 x 32 pixels, however, [junkdust] only elected to implement a 32 x 32 grid for the game itself, using the rest of the display area to report the vital statistics of the game. On power up, the grid is populated with a random population, and the game proceeds, updating once every second.
It’s a neat little desk toy, but more importantly than that, it served as a nicely complicated test project for [junkdust] to get familiar working inside the limitations of the ATtiny85. It may be a humble part, but it can do great things,
as we’ve seen many times before! | 6 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8162214",
"author": "scott_tx",
"timestamp": "2025-08-13T20:22:49",
"content": "If I’m going to write Conway’s Game of Life I’m using ALL the pixels!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8162218",
"author": "threeve",
... | 1,760,371,454.478195 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/13/floss-weekly-episode-842-will-the-real-jq-please-stand-up/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 842: Will The Real JQ Please Stand Up | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"FLOSS Weekly",
"JQ",
"json"
] | We’re back! This week
Jonathan
chats with
Mattias Wadman
and
Michael Farber
about JQ! It’s more than just a JSON parser, JQ is a whole scripting language! Tune in to find out more about it.
https://jqlang.github.io/jq/manual/
https://play.jqlang.org/
https://github.com/wader/jqjq
https://github.com/wader/fq
https://github.com/01mf02/jaq
https://github.com/01mf02/jq-lang-spec/
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 | 7 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8162220",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-08-13T20:33:10",
"content": "They might want to work on that initialism.. Do some A/B testing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8162231",
"author": "wader",
"timestam... | 1,760,371,454.893793 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/13/the-worlds-first-podcaster/ | The World’s First Podcaster? | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"History",
"Phone Hacks"
] | [
"budapest",
"telephone"
] | When do you think the first podcast occurred? Did you guess in the 1890s? That’s not a typo.
Telefonhírmondó
was possibly the world’s first true “telephone newspaper.” People in Budapest could dial a phone number and listen to what we would think of now as radio content. Surprisingly, the service lasted until 1944, although after 1925, it was rebroadcasting a radio station’s programming.
Tivadar Puskás, the founder of Budapest’s “Telephone Newspaper” (public domain)
The whole thing was the brainchild of Tivadar Puskás, an engineer who had worked with Thomas Edison. At first, the service had about 60 subscribers, but Puskás envisioned the service one day spanning the globe. Of course, he wasn’t wrong. There was a market for worldwide audio programs, but they were not going to travel over phone lines to the customer.
The Hungarian government kept tight control over newspapers in those days. However, as we see in modern times, new media often slips through the cracks. After two weeks of proving the concept out, Puskás asked for formal approval and for a 50-year exclusive franchise for the city of Budapest. They would eventually approve the former, but not the latter.
Unfortunately, a month into the new venture, Puskás died. His brother Albert took over and continued talks with the government. The phone company wanted a piece of the action, as did the government. Before anything was settled, Albert sold the company to István Popper. He finalized the deal, which included rules requiring signed copies of the news reports to be sent to the police three times a day. The affair must have been lucrative. The company would eventually construct its own telephone network independent of the normal phone system. By 1907, they boasted 15,000 subscribers, including notable politicians and businesses, including hotels.
Invention
This was all possible because of Puskás’ 1892 invention of a telephone switchboard with a mechanism that could send a signal to multiple lines at once. The Canadian patent was titled “Telephonic News Dispenser.”
There had been demonstrations of similar technology going back to 1881 when Clément Ader piped stereo music (then called the slightly less catchy binauriclar audition) from the Paris Grand Opéra to the city’s Electrical Exhibition. Fictionally, the 1888 novel
Looking Backward: 2000-1887
also predicted such a service:
All our bedchambers have a telephone attachment at the head of the bed by which any person who may be sleepless can command music at pleasure, of the sort suited to the mood.”
No Bluetooth for her. (Public Domain)
The 1881 demonstration turned into a similar service in Paris, although it was mostly used for entertainment programming with occasional new summaries. It didn’t really qualify as a newspaper. It also wasn’t nearly as successful, having 1,300 subscribers in 1893. London was late to the game in 1895, but, again, the focus was on live performances and church services. Both services collapsed in 1925 due to radio.
Several attempts to bring a similar service to the United States were made in several states during the early 1900s. None of them had much success and were gone and forgotten in a year or two.
In Budapest, they rapidly abandoned the public phone lines and created a network that would eventually span 1,100 miles (1,800 km), crisscrossing Budapest. Impressive considering that there were no active amplifiers yet. From reading
the Canadian patent
, it seems they use “induction coils.” We imagine the carbon microphones at the studio also had very high voltages compared to a regular phone, but it is hard to say for sure. As you might expect, you’d need a lot of input signal for this to work.
To that end, the company hired especially loud announcers who worked in ten-minute shifts as they were effectively screaming into the microphones. The signal would run to the central office, to one of 27 districts, and then out to people’s homes. We had hoped a 1907 article about the system in
Scientific American
might have more technical detail, but it didn’t. However,
The Electrical World
did have a bit more detail:
…the arrangement which he adopts is to have a separate primary and secondary coil for each subscriber, all the primaries being connected in series with the single transmitter…
Last Mile
In a subscriber’s home, there were two earpieces. You could put one on each ear, or share with a friend. There was a buzzer to let you know about special alerts. An American who returned from Budapest in 1901 said that the news was “highly satisfactory,” but wasn’t impressed with the quality of musical programs on the service (see page 640 of
The World’s Work, Volume 1
)
.
Concert room at the studio (Public Domain).
The company issued daily schedules you could hang on the wall. Programs included news, news recaps, stories, poetry readings, musical performances, lectures, and language lessons. Typically, transmissions ran from 1030 in the morning to 2230 at night, although this was somewhat flexible.
You are probably wondering what this all cost? A year’s service — including a free receiver — was 18 krones. At the time, that was about US$7.56. That doesn’t sound like much, but in 1901 Budapest, you could buy about 44 pounds (20 kg) of coffee for that much money. The service also ran ads, costing 1 krone for a 12-second spot. They also had some coin-operated receivers to generate revenue.
Radio
It makes sense that in 1925, the service opened Budapest’s first radio station. The programming was shared, and by 1930, the service had over 91,000 subscribers. The private phone network, however, didn’t survive World War II, and that was the end of telephonic newspapers, at least in Budapest.
The technology was also put to use in Italy. A US businessman tried to make a go of it in New Jersey for about a year and then in Oregon for another year before throwing in the towel. Ironically, the tube technology that made phones more capable of covering distances with clear results also doomed phone broadcasting. Those same tubes would make radio practical.
Why Budapest?
You have to wonder why the only really successful operation was in Budapest. We don’t know if it was the politics that made an independent news source with a little less scrutiny attractive, or if it was just that Popper ran an excellent business. After all, Popper and the Puskás brothers anticipated the market for radio. And Popper, in fact, successfully embraced radio instead of letting it sink his business.
We talked about Hugo Gernsback’s predictions that doctors would
operate by telephone
. He also predicted telephone music in 1916. Of course, music by phone is still a thing. If you are
on hold
.
Featured image: “
A TelefonHírmondó announcer reading the news in 1901 (Public Domain
)”
Thumbnail image: “
Telefon Hirmondo – Home subscriber
” in the public domain. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8162209",
"author": "macsimki",
"timestamp": "2025-08-13T20:05:21",
"content": "interesting to see two carbon microphones used in tandem to get more power on the lines. or probably two separate lines. and the cone with microphone over the grand piano.",
"parent_id": null,
"d... | 1,760,371,454.728739 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/13/pcb-business-card-plays-pong-attracts-employer/ | PCB Business Card PlaysPong, Attracts Employer | Tyler August | [
"Games",
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"pcb business card",
"pong",
"stm32"
] | Facing the horrifying realization that he’s going to graduate soon, EE student [Colin Jackson] AKA [Electronics Guy] needed a business card. Not just any business card: a PCB business card. Not just any PCB business card:
a PCB business card that can play pong.
[Colin] was heavily inspired by the card [Ben Eater] was handing out at OpenSauce last year, and openly admits to copying the button holder from it. We can’t blame him: the routed-out fingers to hold a lithium button cell were a great idea. The original idea, a
3D persistence-of-vision display
, was a little too ambitious to fit on a business card, so [Colin] repurposed the 64 LED matrix and STM32 processor to play
Pong
. Aside from the LEDs and the microprocessor, it looks like the board has a shift register to handle all those outputs and a pair of surface-mount buttons.
Of course you can’t get two players on a business card, so the microprocessor is serving as the opponent. With only 64 LEDs, there’s no room for score-keeping — but apparently even the first, nonworking prototype was good enough to get [Colin] a job, so not only can we not complain, we offer our congratulations.
The video is a bit short on detail, but [Colin] promises a PCB-business card tutorial at a later date. If you can’t wait for that, or just want to see other hackers take on the same idea, take a gander at some of the entries to last year’s
Business Card Challenge
. | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8162122",
"author": "Pedro",
"timestamp": "2025-08-13T16:46:25",
"content": "Without making it open-source for others to replicate it’s just pure, facebook-grade vanity. I’m not interested in your skills, I want to open a github and have a fun hardware project to hack with.",
"p... | 1,760,371,454.523469 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/13/ore-formation-introduction-and-magmatic-processes/ | Ore Formation: Introduction And Magmatic Processes | Tyler August | [
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Science"
] | [
"Earth science",
"minerals",
"ore"
] | Hackaday has a long-running series on
Mining and Refining
, that tracks elements of interest on the human-made road from rocks to riches. What author Dan Maloney doesn’t address in that series is the natural history that comes before the mine. You can’t just plunk down a copper mine or start squeezing oil from any old stone, after all: first, you need ore. Ore has to come from somewhere. In this series, we’re going to get down and dirty into the geology of ore-forming processes to find out from wither come the rocks that hold our elements of interest.
What’s In an Ore?
Though we’re going to be talking about Planetary Science in this series, we should recognize the irony that “ore” is a word without any real scientific meaning. What distinguishes ore from other rock is its utility to human industry: it has elements or compounds, like gems, that we want, and that we think we can get out economically. That changes over time, and one generation’s “rock” can be another generation’s “ore deposits”. For example, these days prospectors are chasing copper in porphyry deposits at concentrations as low as 1000 ppm (0.1%) that simply were not economic in previous decades. The difference? Improvements in mining and refining, as well as a rise in the price of copper.
This may or may not be the fabled “mile of gold”. Image:
“Main Street Kirkland Lake” by P199
.
There’s a story everyone tells in my region, about a street in Kirkland Lake, Ontario that had been paved using waste rock from one of the local gold mines and then torn up when the price of gold rose enough to reprocess the pavement a part-per-million of microscopic flakes of yellow metal. That story is apocryphal: history records that there was mine product accidentally used in road works, but it does not seem it has ever been deemed economic to dig it back up. (Or if it was, there’s no written record of it I could find.)
It is established fact that they did drain and reprocess 20th century tailings ponds from Kirkland Lake’s gold mines, however. Tailings are, by definition, what you leave behind when concentrating the ore. How did the tailings become ore? When somebody wanted to process them, because it had become economic to do so.
It’s similar across the board. “Aluminum ore” was a meaningless phrase until the 1860s; before that, Aluminum was a curiosity of a metal extracted in laboratories. Even now, the concentration of aluminum in its main ore, Bauxite, is lower than some aluminum silicate rocks– but we can’t get aluminum out of silicate rock economically. Bauxite, we can. Bauxite, thus, is the ore, and concentration be damned.
So, there are two things needed for a rock to be an ore: an element must be concentrated to a high enough level,
and
it be in a form that we can extract it economically. No wonder, then, that almost all of the planet’s crust doesn’t meet the criteria– and that that will hold on every rocky body in the solar system.
Blame Archimedes
It’s not the planetary crusts’ fault; blame instead Archimedes and Sir Issac Newton. Rocky crusts, you see, are much depleted in metals because of those two– or, rather, the physical laws they are associated with. To understand, we have to go back, way back, to the formation of the solar system.
It might be metal, but there’s no ore in the core. Image: nau.edu, CC3.0
There’s a primitive elemental abundance in the solid bodies that first coalesced out of the protoplanetary disk around a young Sol and our crust is depleted in metals compared to it. The reason is simple: as unaltered bodies accreted to form larger objects, the collisions released a great deal of energy, causing the future planetoid to melt, and stay molten. Heat rejection isn’t easy in the thermos vacuum of space, after all. Something planetoid sized could stay molten long enough for gravity to start acting on its constituent elements.
Like a very slow centrifuge, the heavier elements sunk and the lighter ones rose by Archimedes principle. That’s where almost all of Earth’s metals are to this day: in the core. Even the Moon has an iron core thanks to this process of differentiation.
In some ways, you can consider this the first ore-forming process, though geologists don’t yet count planetary differentiation on their lists of such. If we ever start to mine the nickel-iron asteroids, they’ll have to change their tune, though: those metallic space-rocks are fragments of the core of destroyed planetoids, concentrated chunks of metal created by differentiation. That’s also where most of the metal in the Earth’s crust and upper mantle is supposed to have come from, during the Late Heavy Bombardment.
Thank the LHB
Image:
“Comet Crash” by Ben Crowder.
Repeat 10000x.
The Late Heavy Bombardment is exactly what it sounds like: a period in the history of this solar system 3.8 to 4.1 billion years ago that saw an uncommonly elevated number of impacts on inner solar system objects like the Earth, Moon, and Mars. Most of our evidence for this event comes from the Moon, in the form of isotopic dating of lunar rocks brought back by the Apollo missions, but the topography of Mars and what little geologic record we have on Earth are consistent with the theory. Not all of these impactors were differentiated: many are likely to have been comets, but those still had the primordial abundance of metals. Even cometary impacts, then, would have served to enrich the planet’s crust and upper mantle in metals.
Is that the story, then? Metal ores on Earth are the remnants of the Late Heavy Bombardment? In a word: No. Yes, those impacts probably brought metals back to the lithosphere of this planet, but there are very few rocks of that age left on the surface of this planet, and none of them are ore-bearing. There has been a lot of geology since the LHB– not just on Earth, but on other worlds like the Moon and Mars, too. Just like the ore bodies here on Earth, any ore we find elsewhere is likely to be from other processes.
It looks impressive, but don’t start digging just yet. (Image:
Stromboli Eruption by Petr Novak
)
One thing that seems nearly universal on rocky bodies is volcanism, and the so-called magmatic ore-forming processes are among the easiest to understand, so we’ll start there.
Igneous rocks are rocks formed of magma — or lava, if it cools on surface. Since all the good stuff is down below, and there are slow convection currents in the Earth’s mantle, it stands to reason some material might make its way up. Yet no one is mining the lava fields of Hawaii or Iceland– it’s not just a matter of magma = metals. Usually some geochemical processes has to happen to that magma in order to enrich it, and those are the magmatic ore forming processes, with one exception.
Magmatic Ore Formation: Kimberlite Pipes
Cross-sectional diagram of a kimberlite deposit. You can see why it’s called a pipe. The eruption would be quite explosive. (Image: Kansas Geological Survey)
Kimberlite pipes are formations of ultramaphic (very high in Magnesium) rock that explode upwards from the mantle, creating vertical, carrot-shaped pipes. The olivine that is the main rock type in these pipes isn’t a desirable magnesium ore because it’s too hard to refine.
What’s interesting economically is what is often brought to surface in these pipes: diamonds, and occasionally gold. Diamonds can only form under the intense pressures beneath the Earth’s crust, so the volcanic process that created kimberlite pipes are our main source of them. (Though not all pipes contain diamonds, as many a prospector has discovered to their disappointment.)
The kimberlite pipes seem to differ from ordinary vulcanism both due to the composition of the rock — ultramaphic rocks from relatively deep in the mantle — and the speed of that rock’s ascent at up to 400 m/s. Diamonds aren’t stable in magma at low pressures, so the magma that makes up a kimberlite pipe must erupt very quickly (in geologic terms) from the depths. The hypothesis is that these are a form of mantle plume.
A different mantle plume is believed to drive volcanism in Hawaii, but that plume expresses itself as steady stream and contains no diamonds. Hawaii’s lava creates basalt, less magnesium-rich rocks than olivine, and come from a shallower strata of the Earth’s mantle. Geochemically, the rocks in Hawaii are very similar to the oceanic crust that the mantle plume is pushing through. Kimberlite pipes, on the other hand, have only been found in ancient continental crusts, though no one seems entirely sure why.
You bet your Tanpi that Mars has had mantle plumes! (Image: NASA)
The great shield volcanoes on Mars show that mantle plumes have occurred on that planet, and there’s no reason to suppose kimberlite-type eruptions could not have occurred there as well. While some of the diamond-creating carbon in the Earth’s mantle comes from subducted carbonate rocks, some of it seems to be primordial to the mantle.
It is thus not unreasonable to suppose that there may be some small diamond deposits on Mars, if anyone ever goes to look. Venus, too, though it’s doubtful anyone will ever go digging to check. The moon, on the other hand, lacks the pressure gradients required for diamond formation even if it does have vulcanism. What the moon likely does posses (along with the three terrestrial planets) is another type of ore body: layered igneous intrusions.
A Delicious Cake of Rock
Chromite layers in the Bushveld Igneous Complex. Image:
Kevin Walsh
.
Layered igneous intrusions are, as the name suggests, layered. They aren’t always associated with ore bodies, but when they are, they’re big names like Stillwater (USA) and Bushveld (South Africa). The principle of ore formation is pretty simple: magma in underground chambers undergoes a slow cooling that causes it to fractionate into layers of similar minerals.
Fractional crystallization also has its role to play in concentrating minerals: as the melt cools, it’s natural that some compounds will have higher melting points and freeze out first. These crystals may sink to the bottom of the melt chamber or float to the top, depending on their density relative to the surrounding lava. Like the process of differentiation writ in miniature, heavy minerals sink to the bottom and light ones float to the top, concentrating minerals by density and creating the eponymous layers. Multiple flows of lava can create layers upon layers upon layers of the same, or similar, stacks of minerals.
There’s really no reason to suspect that this ore formation process should not be possible on any terrestrial planet: all one needs is a rich magma and slow cooling. Layered igneous intrusions are a major source of chromium, mainly in the form of Chromatite, an iron-chromium-oxide, but also economically important sources of iron, nickel, copper and platinum group elements (PGEs) amongst other metals. If nickel, copper, or PGEs are present in this kind of deposit, if they’re going to be economically extractable, it will be in the form of a sulfide. So-called sulfide melt deposits can coexist within layered igneous intrusions (as at Bushveld, where they produce a notable fraction of the world’s nickel) or as stand-alone deposits.
When Magma Met Sulfur
One of the problems with igneous rocks from a miner’s perspective is that they’re too chemically stable. Take olivine: it’s chock full of magnesium you cannot extract. If you want an an easily-refined ore, rarely do you look at silicate rock first. Igneous rocks, though, even when ultramafic like in Kimberlite pipes or layered melt deposits, are still silicates.
There’s an easy way to get ore from a magma: just add sulfur. Sulfur pulls metals out of the melt to create sulfide minerals, which are both very concentrated sources of metals and, equally importantly, very easy to refine. Sulfide melt deposits are some of the most economically important ones on this planet, and there’s no reason to think we couldn’t find them elsewhere. (The moon isn’t terribly depleted in sulfur.)
The Bear Stream Quarry is one of many Ni/Cu mines created by the Siberian Traps. (Image: Nikolay Zhukov, CC3.0)
Have you heard of the Siberian Traps? That was a series of volcanoes that produced a flood basalt, like the lunar mare. The volcanoes of the Siberian Traps were a primary cause of the End-Perimian mass extinction, and they put out somewhere between two and four million cubic kilometers of rock. Most of that rock is worthless basalt Most, except in Norilsk.
The difference? In Norilsk, there was enough sulfur in the melt, thanks to existing sedimentary rocks, to pull metals out of the melt. 250 million years after it cooled, this became Eurasia’s greatest source of Nickel and Platinum Group Elements, with tonnes and tonnes of copper brought to surface as a bonus.
Norilk’s great rival in the Cold War was Sudbury, Canada– another sulfide melt deposit, this one believed to be associated with the meteorite impact that created the Sudbury Basin. The titanic impact that created the basin also melted a great deal of rock, and as it cooled, terrestrial sulfur combined with metals that had existed in the base rock, and any brought down in the impactor, to freeze out of the melt as sulfides.
Most mining still ongoing in the Sudbury Basin is deep underground, like at Nickel Rim South Mine. (
Image: P199
.)
While some have called Sudbury “humanity’s first asteroid mine”, it’s a combination of sulfur and magma that created the ore body; there is little evidence to suggest the impactor was itself a nickel-iron asteroid. Once the source of the vast majority of the world’s nickel, peaking at over 80% before WWI, Sudbury remains the largest hard-rock mining centre in North America, and one of the largest in the world, on the weight of all that sulfide.
Since the Moon does not seem to be terribly depleted in sulfur, and has more flood basalt and impact craters than you can shake a stick at, it’s a fairly safe bet that if anyone ever tries to mine metals on Luna, they will be sulfide melt deposits. There’s no reason not to expect Mars to posses its fair share as well. | 10 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8162084",
"author": "RP",
"timestamp": "2025-08-13T14:58:43",
"content": "That was a very interesting article",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8162202",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-08-13T19:53:1... | 1,760,371,455.002474 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/13/josef-prusa-warns-open-hardware-3d-printing-is-dead/ | Josef Prusa Warns Open Hardware 3D Printing Is Dead | Ian Bos | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"Joseph Prusa",
"patent law",
"patent troll",
"prusa"
] | It’s hard to overstate the impact desktop 3D printing has had on the making and hacking scene. It drastically lowered the barrier for many to create their own projects, and much of the prototyping and distribution of parts and tools that we see today simply wouldn’t be possible via traditional means.
What might not be obvious to those new to the game is that much of what we take for granted today in the 3D printing world has its origins in open source hardware (OSHW). Unfortunately, [Josef Prusa] has reason to believe that
this aspect of desktop 3D printing is dead.
If you’ve been following 3D printing for awhile, you’ll know how quickly the industry and the hobby have evolved. Just a few years ago, the choice was between spending the better part of $1,000 USD on a printer with all the bells and whistles, or taking your chances with a stripped-down clone for half the price. But today, you can get a machine capable of self calibration and multi-color prints for what used to be entry-level prices. According to [Josef] however, there’s a hidden cost to consider.
(Data from Espacenet International Database by European Patent Organization, March 2025) – Major Point made by Prusa on the number of patents from certain large-name companies
From major development comes major incentives. In 3D printing’s case, we can see the Chinese market dominance. Printers can be sold for a loss, and patents are filed when you can rely on government reimbursements, all help create the market majority we see today.
Despite continuing to improve their printers
, these advantages have made it difficult for companies such as Prusa Research to remain competitive.
That [Josef] has become disillusioned with open source hardware is unfortunately not news to us. Prusa’s CORE One, as impressive as it is, marked a clear turning point in
how the company released their designs
. Still, [Prusa]’s claims are not unfounded. Many similar issues have arisen in 3D printing before. One major innovation was even falsely patented twice,
slowing adoption of “brick layering” 3D prints
.
Nevertheless, no amount of patent trolling or market dominance is going to stop hackers from hacking. So while the companies that are selling 3D printers might not be able to offer them as OSHW, we feel confident the community will continue to embrace the open source principles that helped 3D printing become as big as it is today.
Thanks to [JohnU] for the tip. | 141 | 31 | [
{
"comment_id": "8162004",
"author": "Harvie.CZ",
"timestamp": "2025-08-13T11:16:48",
"content": "I hear people talking a lot about Voron, but haven’t investigated it yet… How does it compare to modern commercial desktop FDM printers?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{... | 1,760,371,455.429694 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/13/running-guitar-effects-on-a-playstation-portable/ | Running Guitar Effects On A PlayStation Portable | Aaron Beckendorf | [
"digital audio hacks",
"PSP Hacks"
] | [
"audio effects",
"distortion",
"electric guitar",
"guitar effect",
"guitar effects",
"latency",
"sony psp"
] | If your guitar needs more distortion, lower audio fidelity, or another musical effect, you can always shell out some money to get a dedicated piece of hardware. For a less conventional route, though,
you could follow [Brek Martin]’s example
and reprogram a handheld game console as a digital effects processor.
[Brek] started with a Sony PSP 3000 handheld, with which he had some prior programming experience, having previously written a GPS maps program and an audio recorder for it. The PSP has a microphone input as part of the connector for a headset and remote, though [Brek] found that a Sony remote’s PCB had to be plugged in before the PSP would recognize the microphone. To make things a bit easier to work with, he made a circuit board that connected the remote’s hardware to a microphone jack and an output plug.
[Brek] implemented three effects: a flanger, bitcrusher, and crossover distortion. Crossover distortion distorts the signal as it crosses zero, the bitcrusher reduces sample rate to make the signal choppier, and the flanger mixes the current signal with its variably-delayed copy. [Brek] would have liked to implement more effects, but the program’s lag would have made it impractical. He notes that the program could run more quickly if there were a way to reduce the sample chunk size from 1024 samples, but if there is a way to do so, he has yet to find it.
If you’d like a more dedicated digital audio processor, you can also
build one
, perhaps using some techniques
to reduce lag
. | 8 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8162112",
"author": "SETH",
"timestamp": "2025-08-13T16:27:04",
"content": "I would suggest a randomize all parameters button for chaotic exploration. Is JUCE, or puredata being used for the audio API? I could write this in C, but real-time audio is above my understanding currentl... | 1,760,371,455.197467 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/12/thats-no-moon-er-selectric/ | That’s No Moon, Er, Selectric | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"Juki",
"Selectric",
"typewriter"
] | If you learned to type anytime in the mid-part of the 20th century, you probably either had or wanted an IBM Selectric. These were workhorses and changed typing by moving from typebars to a replaceable element. They were expensive, though worth it since many of them still work (including mine). But few of us could afford the $1,000 or more that these machines cost back in the day, especially when you consider that $1,000 was enough to buy a nice car for most of that time. [Tech Tangents] looks at something different:
a clone Selectric
from the sewing machine and printer company Juki.
The typewriter was the brainchild of [Thomas O’Reilly]. He sold typewriters and knew that a $500 compatible machine would sell. He took the prototype to Juki, which was manufacturing typewriters for Olivetti at the time.
Although other typewriters used typeballs, none of them were actual clones and didn’t take IBM typeballs. Juki even made their own typeballs. You’d think IBM might have been upset, but they were already moving towards the “wheelwriter,” which used a daisywheel element. Juki would later make a Xerox-compatible daisywheel printer, again at a fraction of the cost of the original.
Even the Juki manual was essentially a rip-off of the IBM Selectric manual. Sincerest form of flattery, indeed. It did appear that the ribbon was not a standard IBM cartridge. That makes them hard to find compared to Selectric ribbons, but they are nice since they have correction tape built in. The video mentions that you can find them on eBay and similar sites.
There were a few other cost savings. First, the Juki was narrower than most Selectrics. It also had a plastic case, although if you have ever had to carry a Selectric up a few flights of stairs, you might consider that a feature.
The Juki in the video doesn’t quite work, but it is a quirky machine with an odd history. Today, you can
print your own typeballs
. We wonder if these would be amenable to
computer control
like the Selectrics? | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8161943",
"author": "macsimki",
"timestamp": "2025-08-13T07:37:47",
"content": "“by moving from typebars to a replaceable wheel”. Ball. I think you meant to write ball. the wheels were slower but way cheaper to make. moving from the mechanical realm to the electronical one.",
"p... | 1,760,371,455.136293 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/12/creating-a-new-keyboard-flex-for-an-old-calculator/ | Creating A New Keyboard Flex For An Old Calculator | Lewin Day | [
"PCB Hacks",
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"calculator",
"flat flex",
"flex PCB"
] | [Menadue] had a vintage Compucorp 326 calculator with an aging problem. Specifically, the flex cable that connects the button pad had turned corroded over time. However, thanks to the modern PCB industrial complex,
replacing the obscure part was relatively straightforward
!
The basic idea was simple enough: measure the original flex cable, and recreate it with the flat-flex PCB options available at many modern PCB houses that cater to small orders and hobbyists. [Menadue] had some headaches, having slightly misjudged the pitch of the individual edge-connector contacts. However, he figured that if lined up just right, it was close enough to still work. With the new flex installed, the calculator sprung into life…only several keys weren’t working. Making a new version with the correct pitch made all the difference, however, and the calculator was restored to full functionality.
It goes to show that as long as your design skills are up to scratch, you can replace damaged flex-cables in old hardware with brand new replacements.
There’s a ton of other cool stuff you can do with flex PCBs, too
. | 19 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8161930",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2025-08-13T06:50:15",
"content": "I have a similar problem. But it´s a whole keyboard, integrated into a venerable DOS era computer, with a nice matrix LCD. The whole works, except the membrane kb whose layers cracked. It is highly unobtainiu... | 1,760,371,455.86773 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/12/leds-that-flow-a-fluid-simulation-business-card/ | LEDs That Flow: A Fluid Simulation Business Card | Matt Varian | [
"handhelds hacks"
] | [
"business card",
"flip",
"rp2350"
] | Fluid-Implicit-Particle or FLIP is a method for simulating particle interactions in fluid dynamics, commonly used in visual effects for its speed. [Nick] adapted this technique into an impressive
FLIP business card
.
The first thing you’ll notice about this card is its 441 LEDs arranged in a 21×21 matrix. These LEDs are controlled by an Raspberry Pi RP2350, which interfaces with a LIS2DH12TR accelerometer to detect card movement and a small 32Mb memory chip. The centerpiece is a fluid simulation where tilting the card makes the LEDs flow like water in a container. Written in Rust, the firmware implements a FLIP simulation, treating the LEDs as particles in a virtual fluid for a natural, flowing effect.
This eye-catching business card uses clever tricks to stay slim. The PCB is just 0.6mm thick—compared to the standard 1.6mm—and the 3.6mm-thick 3.7V battery sits in a cutout to distribute its width across both sides of the board. The USB-C connection for charging and programming uses clever PCB cuts, allowing the plug to slide into place as if in a dedicated connector.
Inspired by a
fluid simulation pendant
we previously covered, this board is just as eye-catching. Thanks to [Nick] for sharing the design files for this unique business card. Check out other
fluid dynamics
projects we’ve featured in the past. | 18 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8161851",
"author": "Cody",
"timestamp": "2025-08-13T00:22:48",
"content": "That USB connector won’t last long. 0.6mm PCB is not very strong. It doesn’t look like it’s been made as a proper card edge connector either. The PCB would normally be beveled where they route off the shorti... | 1,760,371,455.528591 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/12/3d-printing-a-full-sized-kayak-in-under-a-day/ | 3D-Printing A Full-Sized Kayak In Under A Day | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"kayak",
"water"
] | If you want to get active out on the water, you could buy a new kayak, or hunt one down on Craigslist, Or, you could follow [Ivan Miranda]’s example,
and print one out instead
.
[Ivan] is uniquely well positioned to pursue a build like this. That’s because he has
a massive 3D printer which uses a treadmill as a bed
. It’s perfect for building long, thin things, and a kayak fits the bill perfectly. [Ivan] has actually printed a kayak before, but it took an excruciating 7 days to finish. This time, he wanted to go faster. He made some extruder tweaks that would allow his treadmill printer to go much faster, and improved the design to use as much of the belt width as possible. With the new setup capable of extruding over 800 grams of plastic per hour, [Ivan] then found a whole bunch of new issues thanks to the amount of heat involved. He steps through the issues one at a time until he has a setup capable of extruding an entire kayak in less than 24 hours.
This isn’t just a dive into 3D printer tech, though. It’s also about watercraft! [Ivan] finishes the print with a sander and a 3D pen to clean up some imperfections. The body is also filled with foam in key areas, and coated with epoxy to make it watertight. It’s not the easiest craft to handle, and probably isn’t what you’d choose for ocean use. It’s too narrow, and wounds [Ivan] when he tries to get in. It might be a floating and functional kayak, just barely, for a smaller individual, but [Ivan] suggests he’ll need to make changes if he were to actually use this thing properly.
Overall, it’s a project that shows you can 3D print big things quite quickly with the right printer, and that maritime engineering principles are key
for producing viable watercraft
. Video after the break. | 25 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "8161772",
"author": "Steven Stewart",
"timestamp": "2025-08-12T20:38:01",
"content": "He got the filament for free.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8161783",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-08-12T21:14:10",
"... | 1,760,371,455.725893 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/19/lisp-in-99-lines-of-c-with-tinylisp/ | Lisp In 99 Lines Of C With TinyLisp | Maya Posch | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"lisp"
] | As one of the oldest programming languages still in common use today, and essential for the first wave of Artificial Intelligence research during the 1950s and 60s, Lisp is often the focus of interpreters that can run on very low-powered systems. Such is the case with [Robert van Engelen]’s
TinyLisp
, which only takes 99 lines of C code and happily runs on the Z80-based Sharp
PC-G850V(S)
pocket computer with its 2.3 kB of internal RAM and native C support.
The full details on how TinyLisp was implemented and how to write it yourself can be found in the
detailed article
that’s part of the GitHub project. It supports static scoping, double-precision floating point and features 21 Lisp primitives along with a garbage collector. Two versions for the Sharp PC-G850 (using BCD (i.e. NaN) boxing) are provided, along with a number of generic implementations, using either double or single precision floating point types. A
heavily commented
version is probably the version to keep alongside the article while reading.
TinyLisp is – as the name implies – very tiny, and thus more full-featured Lisp implementations are widely available. This includes two versions – linked at the bottom of the Readme – also by [Robert] that use a gargantuan 1,000 lines of C, providing a more advanced garbage collector and dozens more Lisp primitives to handle things like exceptions, file loading, strings and debug features. | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8166233",
"author": "Harvey",
"timestamp": "2025-08-20T08:25:16",
"content": "They’re 99 horrid, terrible lines, no one would ever write. Simply atrocious to read. If the author got rid of the useless preprocessor macros and formatted the code, it would help heaps, but it wouldn’t b... | 1,760,371,455.612068 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/19/a-solderless-soluble-circuit-board/ | A Solderless, Soluble Circuit Board | Aaron Beckendorf | [
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed circuits",
"circuit board",
"gallium",
"indium",
"liquid metal",
"PVA"
] | Anyone who’s spent significant amounts of time salvaging old electronics has probably wished there were a way to take apart a circuit board without desoldering it. [Zeyu Yan] et al seem to have had the same thought, and
designed circuit boards that can be dissolved and recycled
when they become obsolete. Read the
details in the research paper
. (PDF)
The researchers printed the circuit boards out of water-soluble PVA, with hollow channels in place of interconnects. After printing the boards, they injected a eutectic gallium-indium liquid metal alloy into these channels, populated the boards with components, making sure that their leads were in contact with the liquid alloy, and finally closed off the channels with PVA glue, which also held the components in place. When the board is ready to recycle, they simply dissolve the board and glue in water. The electric components tend to separate easily from the liquid alloy, and both can be recovered and reused. Even the PVA can be reused: the researchers evaporated the solution left after dissolving a board, broke up the remaining PVA, and extruded it as new filament.
The researchers designed a
FreeCAD plugin
to turn single or multi-layer KiCad circuit layouts into printable files. They had to design a few special sockets to hold components in place, since no solder will be fastening them, but it does support both SMD and through-hole components. The traces have a bit more cross-sectional area than normal copper traces, which has the advantage of compensating for the liquid alloy’s higher resistance; their standard traces had no trouble dissipating heat when carrying 5 amps of current. As a proof of concept, they were able to make a Bluetooth speaker, an electronic fidget toy, and a flexible gripper arm.
This isn’t the first time these researchers have worked on reducing circuit board e-waste; they’ve made
solderless
and
reusable circuit boards
before. If you’re interested in more PVA printing, we’ve seen some
unusual applications
for it. | 25 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8166120",
"author": "Maurycy Z",
"timestamp": "2025-08-20T01:05:16",
"content": "I wonder if this method would have problems becuase of liquid metal embrittlement?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8166363",
"author": "s... | 1,760,371,455.670694 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/19/roll-your-own-ssb-receiver/ | Roll Your Own SSB Receiver | Al Williams | [
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"gnu radio",
"ham radio",
"sdr",
"Single sided band",
"software-defined radio",
"ssb"
] | [Paul Maine] was experimenting with GNU Radio and an RTL-SDR dongle. He created
an SSB receiver
and, lucky for us, he documented it all in a video you can see below. He walks through how to generate SSB, too. If videos aren’t your thing, you can go back to the blog post from [Gary Schafer] that inspired him to make the video, which is also
a wealth of information
.
There is a little math — you almost can’t avoid it when talking about this topic. But [Paul] does a good job of explaining it all as painlessly as possible. The intuitive part is simple: An AM signal has most of its power in the carrier and half of what’s left in a redundant sideband. So if you can strip all those parts out and amplify just one sideband, you get better performance.
We love to play with GNU Radio. Sure, the GNU Radio Companion is just a fancy shell over some Python code, but we like how it maps software to blocks like you might use to design a traditional receiver.
If you want to try any of this out and don’t have a sufficient HF antenna or even an HF-capable SDR, no worries. [Paul] thoughtfully recorded some IQ samples off the air into a file. You can play back through your design to test how it works.
If you have never used GNU Radio, starting with audio isn’t a bad way to get your feet wet. That’s how we
started our tutorial
a decade ago. Still worth working through it if you are trying to get started. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8166040",
"author": "Hardware ssb",
"timestamp": "2025-08-19T21:19:59",
"content": "Great article, thanks.If you’re into a somewhat more hardware defined ssb transceiver Charlie Morse,ZL2CM, has some great design walkthroughs on his chanel. He gets step by step through the design pr... | 1,760,371,455.565648 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/19/2025-one-hertz-challenge-atomic-decay-clock-is-accurate-but-not-precise/ | 2025 One Hertz Challenge: Atomic Decay Clock Is Accurate But Not Precise | Adam Zeloof | [
"clock hacks",
"contests"
] | [
"2025 Hackaday One Hertz Challenge",
"atomic clock",
"Geiger tube",
"geiger-muller",
"radioactive",
"radioactive decay"
] | At this point, atomic clocks are old news. They’ve been quietly keeping our world on schedule for decades now, and have been through several iterations with each generation gaining more accuracy. They generally all work under the same physical principle though — a radio signal stimulates a gas at a specific frequency, and the response of the gas is used to tune the frequency. This yields high accuracy and high precision — the spacing between each “tick” of an atomic clock doesn’t vary by much, and the ticks cumulatively track the time with very little drift.
All of this had [alnwlsn] thinking about whether he could make an “atomic” clock that measures actual radioactive decay, rather than relying on the hyperfine transition states of atoms. Frustratingly, most of the radioactive materials that are readily available have pretty long half-lives — on the order of decades or centuries. Trying to quantify small changes in the energy output of such a sample over the course of seconds or minutes would be impossible, so
he decided to focus on the byproduct of decay — the particles being emitted
.
He used a microcontroller to count clicks from a Geiger-Müller tube, and used the count to calculate elapsed time by multiplying by a calibration factor (the expected number of clicks per second). While this is wildly inaccurate in the short term (he’s actually used the same system to generate random numbers), over time it smooths out and can provide a meaningful reading. After one year of continuous operation, the counter was only off by about 26 minutes, or 4.4 seconds per day. That’s better than most mechanical wristwatches (though a traditional Rubidium atomic clock would be less than six milliseconds off, and NIST’s Strontium clock would be within 6.67×10
-11
seconds).
The end result is a probabilistic radiometric timepiece that has style (he even built a clock face with hands, rather than just displaying the time on an LCD). Better yet, it’s got a
status page
where you can check on on how it’s running. We’ve seen quite a few
atomic clocks
over the years, but this one is unique and a great entry into the
2025 One Hertz Challenge
. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8165969",
"author": "alnwlsn",
"timestamp": "2025-08-19T19:05:54",
"content": "Thanks for the writeup! If you decide to check the status page, it’s only got an uptime of a couple days; there was an extended power outage this weekend. Got to start counting all over again. It was only... | 1,760,371,455.912834 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/19/food-irradiation-is-not-as-bad-as-it-sounds/ | Food Irradiation Is Not As Bad As It Sounds | Lewin Day | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Science"
] | [
"electron beam",
"fda",
"food",
"food irradiation",
"gamma ray",
"gamma rays",
"radiation",
"radiatoin",
"who?",
"x-ray",
"X-Rays"
] | Radiation is a bad thing that we don’t want to be exposed to, or so the conventional wisdom goes. We’re most familiar with it in the context of industrial risks and the stories of nuclear disasters that threaten entire cities and contaminate local food chains. It’s certainly not something you’d want anywhere near your dinner, right?
You might then be surprised to find that a great deal of research has been conducted into the process of food irradiation. It’s actually intended to ensure food is safer for human consumption, and has become widely used around the world.
Drop It Like It’s Hot
Food irradiation might sound like a process from an old science fiction movie, but it has a very real and very useful purpose. It’s a reliable way to eliminate pathogens and extend shelf life, with only a few specific drawbacks. Despite being approved by health organizations worldwide and used commercially since the 1950s, it remains one of the most misunderstood technologies in our food system.
The basic concept is simple—radiation can kill pathogens while leaving the food unharmed. Credit:
IAEA
The fundamental concept behind food irradiation is simple. Food is exposed to ionizing radiation in controlled doses in order to disrupt the DNA of harmful microorganisms, parasites, and insects. The method is both useful in single serving contexts, such as individual meal rations, as well as in bulk contexts, such as shipping large quantities of wheat. Irradiation can outright kill bacteria in food that’s intended for human consumption, or leave pests unable to reproduce, ensuring a shipment of grain doesn’t carry harmful insects across national borders.
It’s important to note that food irradiation doesn’t make the food itself radioactive. This process doesn’t make food radioactive any more than a chest X-ray makes your body radioactive, since the energy levels involved simply aren’t high enough. The radiation passes through the food, breaking the chemical bonds that make up the genetic material of unwanted organisms. It effectively sterilizes or kills them, ideally without significantly changing the food itself. It also can be used to reduce sprouting of some species like potatoes or onions, and also delay ripening of fruits post-harvest, thanks to its effect on microbes and enzymes that influence these processes.
The concept of food irradiation dates back a long way, far beyond what we would typically call the nuclear age. At the dawn of the 20th century, there was some interest in using then-novel X-rays to deal with pests in food and aid with preservation. A handful of patents were issued, though these had little impact outside the academic realm.
It was only in the years after World War II that things really kicked off in earnest, with the US Army in particular investing a great deal of money to investigate the potential benefits of food irradiation (also known as radurization). With the aid of modern, potent sources of radiation, studies were undertaken at laboratories at the Quartermaster Food and Container Institute, and later at the Natick R&D Command. Much early research focused on meats—specifically beef, poultry, and pork products. A technique was developed which involved cooking food, portioning it, and sealing it in vacuum packs. It would then be frozen and irradiated at a set minimum dose. This process was developed to the point that refrigeration became unnecessary in some cases, and avoided the need to use potentially harmful chemical preservatives in food. These were all highly desirable attributes which promised to improve military logistics.
Food irradiation eventually spread beyond research and into the mainstream.
The technology would eventually spread beyond military research. By the late 1950s, a German effort was irradiating spices at a commercial level. By 1985, the US Food and Drug Administration had approved irradiation of pork, which became a key target for radurization in order to deal with trichinosis parasites. In time, commercialized methods would be approved in a number of countries to control insects in fruits, vegetables, and bulk foods like legumes and grain, and to prevent sprouting during transport. NASA even began using irradiated foods for space missions in the 1970s, recognizing that traditional food preservation methods aren’t always practical when you’re orbiting Earth. This space-age application highlights one of irradiation’s key advantages—it works without chemicals and eliminates the need for ongoing refrigeration to avoid spoilage. That’s a huge benefit for space missions which can save a great deal of weight by not taking a fridge with them. It also helps astronauts avoid foodborne illnesses, which are incredibly impractical in the confines of a spaceship. Irradiated food has also been used in hospitals to protect immune-compromised patients from another potential source of infection.
How It’s Done
A truck-mounted food irradiator, used in a demonstration tour around the United States in the late 1960s. Credit: US Department of Energy
Three main types of radiation are used commercially to treat food. Gamma rays from cobalt-60 or cesium-137 sources penetrate deeply into food, and it’s possible to use these isotopes to produce uniform and controlled doses of radiation. Cobalt-60 is more commonly used, as it is easier to obtain and can be used with less risks. Isotope sources can’t be switched “off,” so are stored in water pools when not in use to absorb their radiation output. Electron beams, generated by linear accelerators, offer precise control of dosage, but have limited penetration depth into food, limiting their use cases to specific foods. X-rays, produced when high-energy electrons strike a metal target, combine the benefits of both gamma rays and electron beams. They have excellent penetration and can be easily controlled by switching the X-ray source on and off. The choice depends on the specific application, with factors like food density, package size, and required dose uniformity all playing roles. Whatever method is used, there’s generally no real risk of food becoming irradiated. That’s because the X-rays, electron beams, and gamma rays used for irradiation are all below the energy levels that would be required to actually impact the nucleus of the atoms in the food. Instead, they’re only strong enough to break chemical bonds. It is thus important to ensure the irradiation process does not cause harmful changes in whatever material the food is stored in; much research has gone into finding safe materials that are compatible with the irradiation process.
A chamber used for gamma ray food irradiation with cobalt-60. Credit:
Swimmaaj
The dosage levels used in food irradiation are carefully calibrated and measured in units in Grays (Gy) or more typically, kiloGrays (kGy). Low doses of 0.1 to 1 kGy can inhibit sprouting in potatoes and onions or delay ripening in fruits. Medium doses of 1 to 10 kGy eliminate insects and reduce pathogenic bacteria. High doses above 10 kGy can sterilize foods for long-term storage or for space-or hospital-based use, though these doses are not as widely used for commercial food products.
By and large, irradiation does not have a major effect on a food’s taste, appearance, or texture. Studies have shown that irradiation can cause some minor changes to food’s nutritional content, as noted by the
World Health Organization
. However, while irradiation can highly degrade vitamins in a pure solution, in food items, losses are typically on the order of a few percent at most. The losses are often comparable to or less than those from traditional processing methods like canning or freezing. Changes to carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids are usually very limited. The US FDA, World Health Organization, and similar authorities in many countries have approved food irradiation in many contexts, with studies bearing out its overall safety.
The Radura logo is used to mark foods that have been treated with irradiation. Credit: US FDA
In some extreme cases, though, irradiation can cause problems. In 2008,
Orijen cat foods
were recalled in Australia after the irradiated product was found to be causing illness in cats. This was not a result of any radioactive byproduct. Instead, the issue was that the high dose (>50 kGy) of radiation used had depleted vitamin A content in the food. Since pets are often fed a very limited diet, this led to nutrient deficiencies and the unfortunate deaths of a number of animals prior to being recalled.
The regulatory landscape varies significantly worldwide, both in dose levels and in labelling. While the United States allows irradiation of various foods including spices, fruits, vegetables, grains, and meats, rules mandate that irradiated products are clearly identified. The distinctive radura symbol—a stylized flower in a circle—must appear alongside text stating “treated with radiation” or “treated by irradiation.” Some countries have embraced the technology more fully; others less so. EU countries primarily allow radiation treatments for herbs and spices only, while in Brazil, just about any food may be irradiated to whatever dose deemed necessary, though doses above 10 kGy should have a legitimate technological purpose.
Overall, food irradiation is a a scary-sounding technology that actually makes food a lot safer. It’s not something we think about on the regular, but it has become an important part of the international food supply nonetheless. Where there are pests to prevent and pathogens to quash, irradiation can prove a useful tool to preserve the quality of food and protect those that eat it. | 50 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "8165927",
"author": "Dionb",
"timestamp": "2025-08-19T17:43:50",
"content": "This guy likes to send various cameras through an electron beam irradiator for our viewing pleasure. Id imagine coming face to face with that feed horn/scanner would suck muchly.https://youtu.be/Uf4Ux4SlyT4... | 1,760,371,456.003988 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/19/the-vlf-transformation/ | The VLF Transformation | Al Williams | [
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"ham radio",
"loop antenna",
"vlf"
] | People have long been interested in very low frequency (VLF) radio signals. But it used to be you pretty much had to build your own receiver which, luckily, wasn’t as hard as building your own VHF or UHF gear. But there is a problem. These low frequencies have a very long wavelength and, thus, need very large antennas to get any reception. [Electronics Unmessed] says
he has an answer
.
These days, if you want to explore any part of the radio spectrum, you can probably do it easily with a software-defined radio (SDR). But the antenna is the key part that you are probably lacking. A small antenna will not work well at all. While the video covers a fairly common idea: using a loop antenna, his approach to loops is a bit different using a matching transformer, and he backs his thoughts up with modeling and practical results.
Of course, transformers also introduce loss, but — as always — everything is a trade-off. Running hundreds of feet of wire in your yard or even in a loop is not always a possibility. This antenna looks like it provides good performance and it would be simple to duplicate.
Early radio
was VLF
. Turns out, VLF may provide an
unexpected public service in space
. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8165955",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-08-19T18:33:57",
"content": "I’ll just leave this here for people interested in the VLF band (3 to 30 kHz) and belowhttp://www.vlf.it/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8165966",
... | 1,760,371,456.043241 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/19/how-to-sink-a-ship-preparing-the-ss-united-states-for-its-final-journey/ | How To Sink A Ship: Preparing The SSUnited StatesFor Its Final Journey | Tom Nardi | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art"
] | [
"museum",
"ocean liner",
"preservation",
"restoration",
"ship",
"SS United States"
] | When we
last brought you word of the SS
United States
, the future of the storied vessel was unclear. Since 1996, the 990 foot (302 meter) ship — the largest ocean liner ever to be constructed in the United States — had been wasting away at Pier 82 in Philadelphia. While the
SS
United States
Conservancy
was formed in 2009 to support the ship financially and attempt to redevelop it into a tourist attraction, their limited funding meant little could be done to restore or even maintain it. In January of 2024, frustrated by the lack of progress, the owners of the pier took the Conservancy to court and began the process of evicting the once-great liner.
SS
United States
docked at Pier 82 in Philadelphia
It was hoped that a last-minute investor might appear, allowing the Conservancy to move the ship to a new home. But unfortunately, the only offer that came in wasn’t quite what fans of the vessel had in mind: Florida’s Okaloosa County offered $1 million to purchase the ship so they could sink it and turn it into the world’s largest artificial reef.
The Conservancy originally considered it a contingency offer, stating that they would only accept it if no other options to save the ship presented themselves. But by October of 2024, with time running out, they accepted Okaloosa’s offer as a more preferable fate for the
United States
than being scrapped.
It at least means the ship will remain intact — acting not only as an important refuge for aquatic life, but as a destination for recreational divers for decades to come. The Conservancy has also announced plans to open a museum in Okaloosa, where artifacts from the ship will be on display.
Laying a Behemoth to Rest
Sinking a ship is easy enough, it happens accidentally all the time. But
intentionally
sinking a ship, technically referred to as scuttling, in such a way that it sits upright on the bottom is another matter entirely. Especially for a ship the size of the SS
United States
, which will officially become both the largest intact ocean liner on the seafloor (beating out HMHS
Britannic
and her sister RMS
Titanic
) and the largest artificial reef in the world (taking the title from the USS
Oriskany
) when it eventually goes down.
The SS
United States
is currently in Mobile, Alabama, where it is being prepared for scuttling by Modern American Recycling Services and Coleen Marine. After a complete survey of the ship’s structural state, holes will be strategically cut throughout the hull. These will let the ship take on water in a more predictable way during the sinking, and also allow access to the inside of the hull for both sea life and divers. Internally, hatches and bulkheads will be removed for the same reason, though areas deemed too dangerous for recreational divers may be sealed off for safety.
At the same time, the ship must be thoroughly cleaned before it makes its final plunge into the waters off of Florida’s coast. Any remaining fuel or lubricants must be removed, as will any loose paint. Plastics that could break down, and anything that might contain traces of toxins such as lead or mercury, will also be stripped from the ship. In the end, the goal is to have very little left beyond the hull itself and machinery that’s too large to remove.
The forward funnel of the SS
United States
is removed and loaded onto a barge.
Finally, there’s the issue of depth. While the final resting place of the SS
United States
has yet to be determined, the depth is limited by the fact that Okaloosa wants to encourage recreational divers to visit. The upper decks of the ship must be located at a depth that’s reasonable for amateur divers to reach safely, but at the same time, the wreck can’t present a hazard to navigation for ships on the surface.
Once on the bottom, the goal is to have the
upper decks of the ship at a depth of approximately 55 feet
(17 m), making it accessible to even beginner divers. Unfortunately, the ship’s iconic swept-back funnels stand 65 feet (20 m) off the deck. While the tips of the funnels breaking through the surface of the water might make for a striking visual, it would of course be completely impractical.
As such, the funnels and mast of the United States have just recently been removed. But thankfully, they aren’t being sent off to the scrapper. Instead, they will become key components of what the Conservancy is calling the “SS
United States
Museum and Visitor Experience.”
Honoring America’s Flagship
While the SS
United States
will welcome visitors willing to get their feet wet, not everyone who wants to explore the legacy of the ship will have to strap on a scuba tank. As part of the deal to purchase the ship, Okaloosa County has been working with the Conservancy to develop a museum dedicated to the ship and the cultural milieu in which she was developed and built.
Naturally, the museum will house many artifacts from the ship’s career. The Conservancy is already in the process of
recalling many of the items in their collection which were loaned out
while the ship was docked in Philadelphia. But uniquely, the building will also incorporate parts of the ship itself, including the funnels, mast, anchor, and at least one of the propellers.
Concept art for the SS
United States
Museum and Visitor Experience by Thinc Design.
Combined with some
clever architecture by Thinc Design
, the idea is for the museum’s structure to invoke the look of the ship itself. The Conservancy has released a number of concept images that depict various approaches being considered, the most striking of which essentially recreates the profile of the great liner with its bow extended out over the Florida waters.
A Bittersweet Farewell
To be sure, this is not the fate that the SS
United States
Conservancy had in mind when they purchased the ship. Over the years, they put forth a number of proposals that would have seen the ship either turned into a static attraction like the
Queen Mary
or returned to passenger service. But the funding always fell through, and with each year that passed the ship’s condition only got worse, making its potential restoration even more expensive.
Image Credit: SS
United States
Conservancy
It’s an unfortunate reality that many great ships have ended up being sold for scrap. Consider the RMS
Olympic;
despite being the last surviving ship of her class after the sinking of her sisters
Titanic
and
Britannic,
and having a long and storied career that included service as a troop ship during the First World War, she ended up having her fittings auctioned off before ultimately being torn to pieces in the late 1930s. It was an ending so unceremonious that the exact date of her final demolition has been lost to time. Meanwhile her sunken sisters, safe from the scrapper’s reach on the sea floor, continue to be studied and explored to this day.
In an ideal world, the SS
United States
would be afforded the
same treatment as the USS New Jersey
— it would be lovingly restored and live on as a museum ship for future generations to appreciate. But failing that, it would seem that spending the next century or so playing host to schools of fish and awestruck scuba divers is a more fitting end to America’s flagship than being turned into so many paperclips. | 82 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "8165801",
"author": "dahud",
"timestamp": "2025-08-19T14:13:31",
"content": "It’s not immediately obvious to me why having the funnels protrude above water level would be a problem. If anything, they’d serve as navigational aids for passing ships. Maybe they’re worried about the fun... | 1,760,371,456.261278 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/11/calipers-do-you-get-what-you-pay-for/ | Calipers: Do You Get What You Pay For? | Al Williams | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"calipers",
"harbor freight",
"Mitutoyo"
] | Generally, you think that if you pay more for something, it must be better, right? But that’s not always true. Even if it is true at the lower end, sometimes premium brands are just barely better than the midrange. [Project Farm] looks at a bunch of different calipers — a constant fixture around the shop if you do any machining, 3D printing, or PCB layout. The price range spans from less than $10 for some Harbor Freight specials to brands like Mitutoyo, which cost well over $100.
Where’s the sweet spot?
See the video below to find out.
The first part of the video covers how much the units weigh, how smooth the action is, and how much force it takes to push it down. However, those are not what you probably care most about. The real questions are how accurate and repeatable they are.
If you just want a summary of the first part of the video, skip to the ten minute mark. The table there shows that the three instruments that have the most consistent force on the slide range in price from $27 to $72. The $454 pair (which, to be fair, included a micrometer) was number six by that measure. The smoothness factor, which is somewhat subjective, came in favor of the most expensive pair, but there was a $25 caliper that was nearly as good in the number two slot.
Using a calibration block and some special techniques, he attempts to see how accurate they all are. We wish he’d used millimeters instead of inches, but in the inch range, none of them are bad. Only one set had a real problem of not making consistent readings.
If you want to jump right to the tables again, jump to the 17:20 mark. With two exceptions, they were all mostly accurate and fell into three groups. We wondered if there are three different chipsets involved. The cheapest caliper in the first group cost $27 and was as good as the expensive Mitutoyo. The second group ranged from $18 to as much as $40 and were only 0.000675 inches (only 0.017145 mm) off from the higher group.
Which was the best? That table is at about the 18:00 minute mark. In all fairness, the best, by his estimation, did cost $144, so it was the second most expensive set in the review. But that’s still cheaper than the Mitutoyo, which placed third. The fourth-place set was good, too, and came in at $27. For a few bucks less, the sixth-place caliper was also good.
Do you know how to do
all the measurements
your calipers are capable of? Ever wonder what’s inside those things?
We did too
. | 53 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "8161326",
"author": "dave b",
"timestamp": "2025-08-12T02:17:34",
"content": "“Generally, you think that if you pay more for something, it must be better, right?”Wrong. If you must pay more for something it means 1 thing, and 1 thing only. The company wants to charge more for their ... | 1,760,371,456.133136 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/11/watertight-and-wireless-in-one-go-the-diy-sea-scooter/ | Watertight And Wireless In One Go: The DIY Sea Scooter | Heidi Ulrich | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Toy Hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"bluetooth",
"hull",
"print in place",
"sea scooter",
"underwater",
"watertight",
"wifi"
] | To every gadget, tool, or toy, you can reasonably think: ‘Sure I could buy this… but can I make it myself?’ And that’s where [Ben] decided he could, and got to work. On
a sea scooter
, to be exact.
This sea scooter was to be a fully waterproof, hermetically sealed 3D-printed underwater personal propulsion device, with the extreme constraint that the entire hull and mechanical interfaces are printed in one go. No post-printing holes for shafts, connectors, or seals. It also meant [Ben] needed to embed all electronics, motor, magnetic gearbox, custom battery pack, wireless charging, and non-contact magnetic control system inside the print during the actual print process.
As [Ben] explains, both Bluetooth and WiFi ranges are laughable once underwater. He elegantly solves this with a reed-switch-based magnetic control system. The non-contact magnetic drive avoids shaft penetrations entirely. Power comes from a custom 8S LiFePO₄ pack, charged wirelessly through the hull. Lastly, everything’s wrapped in epoxy to
make it as watertight
as a real submarine.
The whole trick of ‘print-in-place’ is that [Ben] pauses the builder mid-print, and drops in each subsystem like a secret ingredient. Continuing, he tweaks the printer’s Z-offset, and onwards it goes. It’s tense, high-stakes work; a 14-hour print where one nozzle crash means binning hundreds of dollars’ worth of embedded components.
Still, [Ben] took the chance, and delivered a cool, fully packed and fully working sea scooter. Comment below to discuss the possibilities of building one yourself. | 26 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8161247",
"author": "Rusty Cans",
"timestamp": "2025-08-11T23:53:43",
"content": "Someone needs to send this guy a book on “design for maintenance”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8161300",
"author": "TG",
"ti... | 1,760,371,456.660857 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/11/compliant-contacts-hacking-door-locks-with-pen-springs/ | Compliant Contacts: Hacking Door Locks With Pen Springs | Matt Varian | [
"hardware"
] | [
"Beagle Bone",
"home automation",
"RC filter",
"spring"
] | As you may have guessed given our name, we do love hacks around here, and this one is a great example of making some common, everyday things work in uncommon ways. [Nathan] sent in his hack to detect the
door lock position
in his basement.
Having a house that dates back to the 1890s, much of it was not very conducive to using off-the-shelf home automation devices. [Nathan] wanted a way to check the status of the basement deadbolt. He went about putting together a custom sensor using some spare parts, including a spare BeagleBone Black. Going full MacGyver, [Nathan] used springs from a ballpoint pen to craft a compliant contact for his sensor.
The pair of springs sat in the door frame and came in contact with the deadbolt; given they are springs, the exact position of the sensor was not very sensitive, as if too close it would just compress the springs slightly more. The springs were wired to the BeagleBone Black’s GPIO, acting as a switch to sense when there was conductivity between the springs through the deadbolt.
This wasn’t just a plug-it-in-and-it-works type of project, mind you; the BeagleBone Black was over 15 ft away from the sensors, lending plenty of opportunity for noise to be introduced into the lines. To combat this, [Nathan] created an RC filter to filter out all the high-frequency noise picked up by his sensor. Following the RC filter, he added in some code to handle the debounce of the sensor, as the springs have some inherent noise in them. Thanks [Nathan] for sending in your resourceful hack; we love seeing the resourcefulness of reusing things already on hand for other purposes. Be sure to check out some of the other
repurposed components
we’ve featured. | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8161128",
"author": "Steve",
"timestamp": "2025-08-11T20:45:10",
"content": "Hate to be that guy but why not use a microswitch like every other deadbolt sensor? This looks a lot less reliable and susceptible to dirt and corrosion.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replie... | 1,760,371,456.450252 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/11/building-a-trash-can-reverb/ | Building A Trash Can Reverb | Lewin Day | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"plate reverb",
"reverb",
"trash",
"trashcan"
] | These days, if you want a reverb effect, you just dial up whatever software plugin most appeals to you and turn the dials to taste. However, [Something Physical] specialises in… physical things… and thus built a reverb the old fashioned way.
Using a trashcan, of course.
The concept is simple enough—the method of operation is exactly the same as any old plate reverb. Audio is played through a speaker connected to the plate (or trashcan), causing it to vibrate. The sound is then picked up at another point on the plate (or trashcan) with some kind of microphonic pickups, amplified, and there you have your reverb signal.
Given it’s built around a piece of street furniture, [Something Physical] has dubbed this the Street-Verb. It uses a class D amp to drive a speaker with a bolt stuck to it. The bolt is then put in contact with the trashcan itself to transfer the vibration. A pair of piezo elements are used as the pickups, run through a preamps built with a humble BC109C transistor. Since there are two pickups, the Street-Verb is effectively a stereo reverb unit, though the input is only mono. [Something Physical] set up the speaker driver and pickups to be easily movable, and was able to test the device with all kinds of street furniture, like gates and street signs, but the trashcan ‘verb setup is by far the most compelling.
We’ve featured other plate reverb builds before, too,
albeit less garbage-themed.
Video after the break. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8161067",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2025-08-11T19:08:18",
"content": "“Given it’s built around a piece of street furniture, [Something Physical] has dubbed this the Street-Verb.”Myself, I would have a called it “Oscar”. :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repli... | 1,760,371,456.702362 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/11/neon-bulbs-theyre-a-gas/ | Neon Bulbs? They’re A Gas! | Al Williams | [
"classic hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"High Voltage",
"Slider"
] | [
"NE-2",
"neon bulb"
] | When you think of neon, you might think of neon signs or the tenth element, a noble gas. But there was a time when neon bulbs like the venerable NE-2 were the 555 of their day, with a seemingly endless number of clever circuits. What made this little device so versatile? And why do we see so few of them today?
Neon’s brilliant glow was noted when William Ramsay and Morris Travers discovered it in 1898. It would be 1910 before a practical lighting device using neon appeared. It was 1915 when the developer, Georges Claude, of Air Liquide fame, received a patent on the unique electrodes suitable for lighting and, thus, had a monopoly on the technology he sold through his company Claude Neon Lights.
However, Daniel Moore in 1917 developed a different kind of neon bulb while working for General Electric. These bulbs used coronal discharge to produce a red glow or, with argon, a blue glow. This was different enough to earn another patent, and neon bulbs found use primarily as indicator lamps before the advent of the LED. However, it would also find many other uses.
How It Worked
An NE-2 with AC power applied (public domain by [junkyardsparkle]).
Despite the name, a neon bulb typically has only 99.5% neon, and the rest is usually argon, which tunes the voltage where the gas breaks down. This breakdown voltage is the key to the bulb’s properties. The gas is at a very low pressure. Other gases and impurities can also change the color of the bulb, but the most common ones were neon and argon.
There are two electrodes within, an anode and a cathode. When a DC voltage excites the bulb sufficiently, a glow forms around one electrode. AC makes both electrodes glow alternately. The striking voltage changes based on ambient light or radioactive exposure, as well as the bulb’s gas mix and pressure.
Until the strike voltage occurs, the bulb is effectively an open circuit. When it does strike, however, the resistance goes down and will sustain even at a lower voltage. Like an LED, current limiting is essential, or the bulb will burn out. The NE-2, arguably the most common neon bulb, triggers at 90 V, nominally, and will conduct until the voltage drops to about 60 V.
So It Lights Up?
The lighting up is good, but you do need a lot of voltage to get it going. The bulb will easily light up from 120 V line voltage, for example. But the really interesting property is that the bulbs, when glowing, exhibit negative resistance. That is, as current increases, voltage decreases.
You can also make the bulbs operate in a bistable mode, where they can work in logic circuits. They weren’t common, but some bulbs had special features for logic use. These bulbs were not made to glow necessarily, and sometimes had a third wire used as a control electrode.
Since the gas inside the tube can ionize, neon bulbs can also
detect things like light
, microwaves, or
heavy electrostatic fields
. They can even
pick up audio
.
What Could You Do?
Of course, the normal application was to use the devices as a lamp, like you’d use an LED today. Power pilot lights were common. Special neon lights looking like digits form the basis of nixie tubes.
Another neat display trick was the “blown fuse” indicator. Fuse holders often had neon bulbs in them that connected across the fuse terminals. In normal operation, the voltage across the fuse was practically zero, so the bulb stayed dark. But if the fuse blew, you’d have 120 V across the bulb, which would then light up. A high-value resistor prevented any significant current from flowing.
By far the most common non-lighting use was as a part of a relaxation oscillator. Consider a circuit with a resistor and a capacitor, but the capacitor has a neon bulb across it. The capacitor will charge until it hits the neon bulb’s trigger voltage. The bulb will light and discharge the capacitor until it drops below the holding voltage for the bulb. Then the process starts over. You could
use neons to make a clock
.
Long History
The NE-2 could create high-voltage regulator circuits (from Elementary Electronics, 1965)
[E. Norbert Smith] wrote about the “1001” uses for the NE-2 — probably not an exaggeration, but [Smith] didn’t get that many in the article — in a 1965
Elementary Electronics
magazine article.
The circuits he shows include a 50 V regulated power supply. (Regulators weren’t held to the same standard in those days as we would expect now.) Need 150 V? Use three of them. Or put them in parallel to improve regulation performance.
Some of the circuits are probably not useful if you aren’t building with tubes. And, of course, if you aren’t building with tubes, you are less likely to have the high voltages you need, so there is that.
He also covers the classic self-indicating fuse and the relaxation oscillator. Of course, if you can make one neon bulb blink, you can also make two blink alternately. Blink it fast enough and you can make a code practice oscillator with just a few parts and a 90 V battery.
A 100 kHz oscillator gets the divide by 10 treatment with a simple neon bulb circuit (from Elementary Electronics, 1965)
If you wondered how neon bulbs could handle logic, that same article will answer that question, too. Just be aware that a logic 1 is 10 V — not a problem — but a logic 0 is -10 V. The nice thing about demonstrating logic circuits with neon bulbs is that you don’t need a logic probe or scope to see the state of the machine.
There were many other ways to use these bulbs. Since the trigger voltage was stable, you could use it as a voltage indicator if you coupled it with a voltage divider. In fact, many cheap AC socket testers still work this way. A typical circuit for a capacitor checker could be found in “
36 Time Tested Circuits
,” a book from Popular Electronics.
This capacitor tester required a keen eye and sense of timing. From a collection of circuits from Popular Electronics, 1992.
The capacitor is hooked up to the AC line via some 470 kΩ resistors. If you connect a capacitor to it, the neon bulb should light up. If not, it is open. When you push the button, you switch to DC, and you should be able to see one side of the neon bulb dim. If it doesn’t dim or doesn’t go all the way off, the capacitor is shorted or leaky. Supposedly, you could get a feel for the value of the capacitor by how long it took half of the bulb to go out. Makes you appreciate your digital capacitance meter, right?
Why Gone?
Why do you so rarely see neon bulbs today? They are still around, but the number of circuits you have where you have the requisite 100 V or so to drive them is not what it used to be. On top of that, as an indicator, an LED is usually a far better choice.
If you want negative resistance, your choices are less obvious. Some special diodes present a negative resistance in certain operating regimes, and you can coax the behavior from some transistors. However, as a matter of practicality, today, you’d probably just use an active switch and be done with it, especially for an oscillator circuit. Then again, if you really want an oscillator, as we are always reminded, you can do it with a 555, among other methods.
We have no doubt that [Smith] was right. There are probably at least 1,001 different uses, but you get the idea. Did you use an NE-2 for something interesting? Let us know about it in the comments. Still want more neon bulb circuits?
We’ve seen plenty
. | 39 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "8160998",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2025-08-11T17:14:37",
"content": "My dad built some beautiful ring oscillators with neon bulbs, where the bulb blinker progression is set by the bulb breakdown. As a result I have a box of 2000 (minus what he used on his displays) ... | 1,760,371,456.605172 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/11/end-of-the-eternal-september-as-aol-discontinues-dial-up/ | End Of The Eternal September, As AOL Discontinues Dial-Up | Jenny List | [
"internet hacks"
] | [
"AOL",
"dial-up",
"internet"
] | If you used the internet at home a couple of decades or more ago, you’ll know the characteristic sound of a modem connecting to its dial-up server. That noise is a thing of the past, as we long ago moved to fibre, DSL, or wireless providers that are always on. It’s a surprise then to read that
AOL are discontinuing their dial-up service at the end of September this year
, in part for the reminder that AOL are still a thing, and for the surprise that in 2025 they still operate a dial-up service.
There was a brief period in which instead of going online via the internet itself, the masses were offered online services through walled gardens of corporate content. Companies such as AOL and Compuserve bombarded consumers with floppies and CD-ROMs containing their software, and even Microsoft dipped a toe in the market with the original MSN service before famously pivoting the whole organisation in favour of the internet in mid 1995. Compuserve was absorbed by AOL, which morphed into the most popular consumer dial-up ISP over the rest of that decade. The dotcom boom saw them snapped up for an exorbitant price by Time Warner, only for the expected bonanza to never arrive, and by 2023 the AOL name was dropped from the parent company’s letterhead. Over the next decade it dwindled into something of an irrelevance, and is now owned by Yahoo! as a content and email portal. This dial-up service seems to have been the last gasp of its role as an ISP.
So the eternal September, so-called because the arrival of AOL users on Usenet felt like an everlasting version of the moment a fresh cadre of undergrads arrived in September, may at least in an AOL sense, finally be over. If you’re one of the estimated 0.2% of Americans still using a dial-up connection don’t despair, because
there are a few other ISPs still (just) serving your needs
. | 38 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "8160955",
"author": "J. Samson",
"timestamp": "2025-08-11T15:46:13",
"content": "Yahoo being owned by Verizon now…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8160960",
"author": "Tim Andersson",
"timestamp": "2025-08-11T1... | 1,760,371,456.526024 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/11/smartphone-hackability-or-a-pocket-computer-that-isnt/ | Smartphone Hackability, Or, A Pocket Computer That Isn’t | Arya Voronova | [
"Cellphone Hacks",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [] | Smartphones boggle my mind a whole lot – they’re pocket computers, with heaps of power to spare, and yet they feel like the furthest from it. As far as personal computers go, smartphones are surprisingly user-hostile.
In the last year’s time, even my YouTube recommendations are full of people, mostly millennials, talking about technology these days being uninspiring. In many of those videos, people will talk about phones and the ecosystems that they create, and even if they mostly talk about the symptoms rather than root causes, the overall mood is pretty clear – tech got bland, even the kinds of pocket tech you’d consider marvellous in abstract. It goes deeper than
cell phones all looking alike
, though. They all behave alike, to our detriment.
A thought-provoking exercise is to try to compare smartphone development timelines to those of home PCs, and see just in which ways the timelines diverged, which forces acted upon which aspect of the tech at what points, and how that impacted the alienation people feel when interacting with either of these devices long-term. You’ll see some major trends – lack of standardization through proprietary technology calling the shots, stifling of innovation both knowingly and unknowingly, and finance-first development as opposed to long-term investments.
Let’s start with a fun aspect, and that is hackability. It’s not perceived to be a significant driver of change, but I do believe it to be severely decreasing chances of regular people tinkering with their phones to any amount of success. In other words, if you can’t hack it in small ways, you can’t really make it yours.
Can’t Tinker, Don’t Own
In order to tinker with your personal computer, you need just that, the computer itself. Generally, you need a whole another computer to hack on your smartphone; sometimes you even need a custom cable, and it’s not rare you can’t do it at all. Phone tinkering is a path you explicitly set out to do, whereas computer-based hacking is something you can do idly.
A Nokia N900 in hands of a user (by
Victorgrigas
, CC BY-SA 3.0)
There’s good reasons for this, of course – first, a phone was generally always a “subservient” device not meant or able to be used as a development bench unto itself. Then – phones started really growing in an age and an environment where proprietary technology reigned supreme, with NDAs and utter secrecy (particularly for GSM modems with their inordinate amount of IP) being an especially prominent fixture in the industries surrounding phones. Even Android’s open-source technology was mostly for manufacturers’ benefit rather than a design advantage for users, as demonstrated by the ever-worsening non-open-source driver situation.
Only a few phones ever bucked these trends, and those that did, developed pretty devoted followings if the hardware was worthwhile. Just look at the Nokia N900 with its hardware capability and alt OS support combo, Pixel phones with their mainline kernel support letting alternative OSes flourish, or old keypad Motorolas with leaked baseband+OS source code. They’re remembered pretty fondly, and it’s because they facilitated hacking, on-device or even off-device.
Hacking starts by probing at a device’s inner workings, deducing how things work, and testing the boundaries, but it doesn’t happen when boundaries are well-protected and hidden away from your eyes. A typical app, even on Android, is surprisingly non-explorable, and unlike with PCs, again, if you want to explore it, you need a whole another device. Does it benefit app developers? For sure. I also have a strong hunch it doesn’t benefit users that we could otherwise see become developers.
Part of it is the need to provide a polished user experience, a respectable standard to have, especially so for producing pocket computers to be used by millions of people at once. However, I’d argue that modern phones are suffocating, and that the lack of transparency is more akin to encasing an already reliable device in epoxy for no reason. A device designed to never ever challenge you, is a device that can’t help you grow, and it’s not really a device you can grow attached to, either.
Of course, complaints are one thing, and actionable suggestions is another.
What Do?
If I were asked how to fix this, I wouldn’t limit myself to opening filesystems back up to a user’s exploration habits, beyond the way they were open even in early Android days. I think modern phones could use a pre-installed Python interpreter, with a healthy amount of graphics libraries, a decent amount of control over the system, snappy well-configured autocomplete, and a library of example scripts you could edit in place; essentially, an Arduino IDE-like environment.
In other words, let people easily program phones to flash the screen every time an SMS from a specific person is received, or start audio recording when the user taps the touchscreen three times as the phone’s locked, or send accelerometer movements into a network socket as fast as the OS can receive them. Then, let them wrap those programs into apps, share apps easily with each other, and, since the trend of fast obsolescence requires regular collectie infusions of cash, transfer them from phone to phone quickly.
By the way, if days of Bluetooth and IrDA transfers evaded you, you missed out. We used to stand next to each other and transfer things from one phone to another, a field previously handled, but nowadays these things are somehow relegated to proprietary technologies like Airdrop. This isn’t a problem for personal computers, in fact, they somehow keep getting better and better at it; just recently, I transferred some movies between two laptops using a Thunderbolt cable during a flight, and somehow, this was one of the few “wow” moments that I’ve had recently with consumer-grade tech.
The idea is pretty simple on its own – if phones are to be personal computers, they should be very easy to program.
The Doohickey Port
What about a bonus suggestion, for hardware customization? USB-C ports are really cool and powerful, but they’re relatively bespoke, and you only ever get one, to be unplugged every time you need to charge or sync. Plus, even if you have OTG, all that 5V step-up action isn’t great for the battery, and neither are USB hardware/firmware stacks.
I like I2C. Do you like I2C? I know most of you do. I enjoy I2C a lot, and I like how it’s decently well standardized, to the point things tend to just work. It’s not as great at as many things as USB can be, but it’s also comparably low-frills, you don’t need a software stack or a hefty bespoke board. For the most part, with I2C, you can just send bytes back and forth. It’s a low-bandwidth yet high-impact bus, with a healthy amount of devices you can attach to it. Also, CPUs tend to have plenty of I2C ports to go around, often leaving a good few to spare.
What else? Keeping up with the times, these days, you can manufacture flex PCBs decently quickly, with stiffener at no extra cost, and for dirt cheap, too. On a physical level, phones tend to come with cases, overwhelmingly so. In a way, there’s suddenly plenty of free space on the back of a phone, for those with the eyes to see, and that’s after accounting for the ever-increasing camera bump, too.
My bonus idea to make phones more customizable at low entry level, would be an I2C accessory port. In effect, a latch-less FFC socket with exposed I2C, and some 3.3V at non-negligible power. Of course, protect all lines electrically, current-limit the 3.3V and make its power switchable. With modern tech, you don’t need to compromise waterproofing, either, and you can add a whole bunch of protection to such a port.
From there, you can get GPIOs, you can get PWM, and so much more. You could have a reasonably simple GPIO expansion, but also a fully-fledged board with DACs and ADCs bolted on, or a servo control board, or an extra display of the kind phone designers like to add once in a generation, only to find it never be used by third-party apps as sales numbers never really reach the point of wider adoption. Experimental chording keyboards, touch surfaces, thermal pixel sensors,
Does it feel like you’ve seen that implemented? Of course, this resembles the PinePhone addon scheme, with FPCs wedged between the back cover and a set of pogo pins. Notably though, this kind of standard is about having compatibility between models and even manufacturers. You also shed a lot of Bluetooth cruft generally required when developing accessories for modern phones. It requires a flex PCB, sure, but so do pogopin schemes, and there’s barely any mechanics compared to a pogopin array. Is it more fragile than a pogopin array? Yes, but it’s fragile addon-side, not as much phone-side, whereas pogopin arrays tend to be the opposite.
A Sketch And A Dream
Of course, this also relies on the aforementioned Python interpreter, and a decent exposed I2C API. If the only way to tinker with yours and others’ accessories is through bespoke intransparent apps you need a whole different device to make (or modify, if you’re lucky), the hackability aspect wanes quick. In essence, what I’m proposing is a phone-contained sandbox, not in a security sense, but in an educational sense. Personal computers have been serving as sandboxes for decades now, and yet, phones could never really fulfill such a niche.
I think one of the big problems with modern phones is that a phone is barely ever a sandbox, all for mostly historic reasons. Now, if that’s the case, we should make it one. If it’s a sandbox, then it can be molded to your needs through hacking and tinkering. If it can be molded to your needs, then it belongs to you in a whole different way. Will this happen? Quite unlikely, though, I do feel like making some prototypes. Instead, it’s about highlighting a significant aspect that contributes to tech alienation, and imagining how we could solve it given enough market buy-in. | 86 | 23 | [
{
"comment_id": "8160926",
"author": "DainBramage",
"timestamp": "2025-08-11T14:55:52",
"content": "“…the lack of transparency is more akin to encasing an already reliable device in epoxy for no reason.”Please don’t give them any ideas.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},... | 1,760,371,457.078405 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/12/2025-one-hertz-challenge-abstract-aircraft-sculpture-based-on-lighting-regulations/ | 2025 One Hertz Challenge: Abstract Aircraft Sculpture Based On Lighting Regulations | Lewin Day | [
"contests",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"2025 Hackaday One Hertz Challenge",
"attiny85",
"coin cell",
"led"
] | The 2025 One Hertz Challenge is really heating up with all kinds of projects that do
something
once every second. [The Baiko] has given us a rather abstract entry that
looks like a plane…if you squint at it under the right conditions
.
It’s actually quite an amusing abstract build. If you’ve ever seen planes flying in the night sky, you’ve probably noticed they all have similar lights. Navigation lights, or position lights as they are known, consist of a red light on the left side and a green light on the right side. [The Baiko] assembled two such LEDs on a small sliver of glass along with an ATtiny85 microcontroller.
Powered by a coin cell, they effectively create a abstract representation of a plane in the night sky, paired with a flashing strobe that meets the requirements of the contest. [The Baiko] isn’t exactly sure of the total power draw, but notes it must be low given the circuit has run for weeks on a 30 mAh coin cell.
It’s an amusing piece of PCB art, though from at least one angle, it does appear the red LED might be on the wrong side to meet FAA regulations. Speculate on that in the comments.
In any case, we’ve had a few flashers submitted to the competition thus far, and you’ve got until August 19
to get your own entry in! | 9 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8161745",
"author": "Spacedog",
"timestamp": "2025-08-12T19:21:26",
"content": "<3",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8161790",
"author": "Glenn",
"timestamp": "2025-08-12T21:25:45",
"content": "Looks good to me. – bli... | 1,760,371,456.807428 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/12/design-review-lattepanda-mu-nas-carrier/ | Design Review: LattePanda Mu NAS Carrier | Arya Voronova | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"PCB Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"PCB design",
"pcb layout",
"project review"
] | It is a good day for design review!
Today’s board is the MuBook
, a Lattepanda Mu SoM (System-on-Module) carrier from [LtBrain], optimized for a NAS with 4 SATA and 2 NVMe ports. It is cheap to manufacture and put together, the changes are non-extensive but do make the board easier to assemble, and, it results in a decent footprint x86 NAS board you can even order assembled at somewhere like JLCPCB.
This board is based on the Lite Carrier KiCad project that the LattePanda team open-sourced to promote their Mu boards. I enjoy seeing people start their project from a known-working open-source design – they can save themselves lots of work, avoid reinventing the wheel and whole categories of mistakes, and they can learn a bunch of design techniques/tips through osmosis, too. This is a large part of why I argue everyone should open-source their projects to the highest extent possible, and why I try my best to open-source all the PCBs I design.
Let’s get into it! The board’s on GitHub as linked, already containing the latest changes.
Git’ting Better
I found the very first review item when downloading the repo onto my computer. It took a surprising amount of time, which led me to believe the repo contains a fair bit of binary files – something quite counterproductive to keep in Git. My first guess was that the repo had no .gitignore for KiCad, and indeed – it had the backups/ directory with a heap of hefty
.zip
s, as well as a fair bit of stuff like gerbers and footprint/symbol cache files. I checked in with [LtBrain] that these won’t be an issue to delete, and then added a .gitignore from the Blepis project.
This won’t make the repo easier to check out in the future, sadly – the hefty auto-generated files are still in the repo history. However, at least it won’t grow further as KiCad puts new archives into the
backups/
directory, and, it’s good to keep .gitignore files in your KiCad repos so you can easily steal them every time you start a new project.
Apart from that, a .gitignore also makes working with your repository way way easier! When seeing changes overview in
git status
or GitHub Desktop, it’s way nicer to, and you even get a shot at reviewing changes in your commits to make sure you’re not adding something you don’t want in the repository. Oh, and, you don’t risk leaking your personal details as much, since things like auto-generated KiCad lockfiles will sometimes contain your computer name or your user name.
Now that the PCB Git-ability has been improved, let’s take a look at the board, first and foremost; the schematic changes here are fairly minimal, and already reviewed by someone else.
Cheap With Few Compromises
There’s plenty of PCIe, USB3, and SATA on this board – as such, it has to be at least four layers, and this one is. The SIG-GND-GND-SIG arrangement is only slightly compromised by a VDC (12 V to 15 V) polygon on one of the layers, taking up about 30% of space, and used to provide input power to Mu and also onboard 3.3 V and 5 V regulators.
Of course, with so many interfaces, you’ll also want to go small – you’ll have to fit a lot of diffpairs on the board, and you don’t want them flowing too close to each other to avoid interference. This board uses approximately 0.1 mm / 0.1 mm clearances, which, thankfully, work well enough for JLCPCB – the diffpairs didn’t even need to be redrawn much. Apart from that, the original design used 0.4 mm / 0.2 mm vias. Problem? JLC has a $30 surcharge for such vias for a board of this size. No such thing for 0.4 mm / 0.3 mm vias, surprisingly, even though the annular ring is way smaller.
a few overly long lines took a heap of space,
but were reasonably easy to fix
I went and changed all 0.4 mm / 0.2 mm vias to 0.4 mm / 0.3mm vias, and that went surprisingly well – no extra DRC errors. The hole-to-copper distance is set to be pretty low in this project, to 0.15 mm, because that’s inherited from LattePanda carrier files, so I do hope that JLC doesn’t balk at those vias during the pre-production review. Speaking of DRC, I also set all courtyard errors to “ignore” – not only does this category have low signal-to-noise ratio, the LattePanda module courtyard also would raise problems at all items placed under the module, even though there’s plenty of space as long as you use a DDR socket tall enough.
One thing looked somewhat critical to me, though – the VDC polygon, specifically, the way it deprived quite a few diffpairs from GND under them.
Redraw, Nudge, Compromise
Remember, you want a ground polygon all along the underside of the differential pair, from start to finish, without interruptions – that ground polygon is where ground return current flows, and it’s also crucial in reaching the right differential pair impedance. The VDC polygon did interrupt a good few pairs, however.
Most of those interruptions were fixed easily by lifting the VDC polygon. Highlighting the net (
`
keyboard key) showed that there’s only really 4 consumers of the VDC power input, and all of them were above the overwhelming majority of the diffpairs. REFCLKs for M.2 sockets had to be rerouted to go over ground all throughout, though, and I also added a VDC cutout to pull gigabit Ethernet IC PCIe RX/TX pairs over VDC for most of their length.
This polygon carries a fair bit of current, a whole N100 (x86) CPU’s worth and then some, and remember – inner layers are half as thick, only 0. 5oz instead of 1 oz you get for outer layers by default. So, while we can cut into it, the VDC path has to be clear enough. A lot of items on VDC, like some gigabit controller power lines, ended up being moved from the VDC polygon layer to the opposite inner layer – now, they’re technically on the layer under PCIe and gigabit Ethernet pairs, but it’s a better option than compromising VDC power delivery. I also moved some VDC layer tracks to B.Cu and F.Cu; remember, with high-speed stuff you really want to minimize the number of inner layer tracks.
Loose Ends
With the vias changed and polygon redrawn, only a few changes remained. Not all diffpair layer crossings had enough vias next to them, and not all GND pads had vias either – particularly on the Mu and M.2 slots, what’s with high-speed communications and all, you have to make sure that all GND pads have GND vias on them. Again, highlight GND net (
`
) and go hunting. Afterwards, check whether you broke any polygons on inner layers – I sure did accidentally make a narrow passage on VDC even more narrow with my vias, but it didn’t take much to fix. Remember, it’s rare that extra vias cost you extra, so going wild on them is generally safe.
The SATA connector footprint from Digikey was faulty – instead of plated holes for through-hole pins, it had non-plated holes. Not the kind of error I’ve ever seen with
easyeda2kicad
, gotta say. As an aside, it was quite a struggle to find the proper datasheet on Digikey – I had to open like five different PDFs before I found one with footprint dimension recommendations.
A few nets were NC – as it turned out, mostly because some SATA ports had conflicting names; a few UART testpoints were present in the schematic but not on the board, so I wired them real quick, too. DRC highlighted some unconnected tracks – always worth fixing, so that KiCad can properly small segments into longer tracks, and so that your track moves don’t then result in small track snippets interfering with the entire plan. Last but not least, the BIOS sheet in the schematic was broken for some reason; KiCad said that it was corrupted. Turned out that instead of
BIOS.kicad_sch
, the file was named
bios.kicad_sch
– go figure.
Production Imminent
These changes helped [LtBrain] reduce PCB manufacturing cost, removed some potential problems for high-speed signal functioning, and fixed some crucial issues like SATA port mounting pins – pulling an otherwise SMD-pad SATA port off the board is really easy on accident! They’re all on GitHub now, as you’d expect, and you too can benefit from this board now. | 17 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8161726",
"author": "regent",
"timestamp": "2025-08-12T18:12:05",
"content": "Cool writeup, as a software-toucher and EE amateur there are lots of design considerations I have no knowledge or intuition for.This carrier looks nice, it’s exactly what I thought of making when I saw tha... | 1,760,371,456.763006 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/12/continuous-path-3d-printed-case-is-clearly-superior/ | Continuous-Path 3D Printed Case Is Clearly Superior | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"3d printer",
"enclosure",
"ESP32"
] | [porchlogic] had a problem. The desire was to print a crystal-like case for an ESP32 project, reminiscent of so many glorious game consoles and other transparent hardware of the 1990s. However, with 3D printing the only realistic option on offer, it seemed difficult to achieve a nice visual result. The solution? Custom G-code to produce as nice a print as possible,
by having the hot end trace a single continuous path.
The first job was to pick a filament. Transparent PLA didn’t look great, and was easily dented—something [porchlogic] didn’t like given the device was intended to be pocketable. PETG promised better results, but stringing was common and tended to reduce the visual appeal. The solution to avoid stringing would be to stop the hot end lifting away from the print and moving to different areas of the part. Thus, [porchlogic] had to find a way to make the hot end move in a single continuous path—something that isn’t exactly a regular feature of common 3D printing slicer utilities.
The enclosure itself was designed from the ground up to enable this method of printing. Rhino and Grasshopper were used to create the enclosure and generate the custom G-code for an all-continuous print. Or, almost—there is a single hop across the USB port opening, which creates a small blob of plastic that is easy to remove once the print is done, along with strings coming off the start and end points of the print.
Designing an enclosure in this way isn’t easy, per se, but it did net [porchLogic] the results desired. We’ve seen some other neat hacks in this vein before, too, like using
innovative non-planar infill techniques
to improve the strength of prints.
Thanks to [Uxorious] and [Keith Olson] for the tip! | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8161684",
"author": "LookAtDaShinyShiny",
"timestamp": "2025-08-12T16:15:40",
"content": "https://fullcontrol.xyz/#/modelshas been doing stuff like this for a while. Wondering why they didn’t slow the print down to go for a glass effect for the whole print with the petg?",
"par... | 1,760,371,456.955164 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/12/remembering-james-lovell-the-man-who-cheated-death-in-space/ | Remembering James Lovell: The Man Who Cheated Death In Space | Maya Posch | [
"Biography",
"Featured",
"History",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"biography"
] | Many people have looked Death in the eye sockets and survived to tell others about it, but few situations speak as much to the imagination as situations where there’s absolutely zero prospect of rescuers swooping in. Top among these is the harrowing tale of the Apollo 13 moon mission and its crew – commanded by James “Jim” Lovell – as they found themselves stranded in space far away from Earth in a crippled spacecraft, facing near-certain doom.
Lovell and his crew came away from that experience in one piece, with millions tuning into the live broadcast on April 17 of 1970 as the capsule managed to land safely back on Earth, defying all odds. Like so many NASA astronauts, Lovell was a test pilot. He graduated from the US Naval Academy in Maryland, serving in the US Navy as a mechanical engineer, flight instructor and more, before being selected as NASA astronaut.
On August 7, 2025, Lovell died at the age of 97 at his home in Illinois, after a dizzying career that saw a Moon walk swapped for an in-space rescue mission like never seen before.
Joining The Navy
The USS
Shangri-La
underway in 1970. (Credit:
US Navy
)
James Arthur Lovell Jr.
was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on March 25, 1928. He was the sole child, with his father dying in a car accident when he was five years old. After this he and his mother lived with a relative in Indiana, before moving to Wisconsin where Lovell attended Juneau High School. He attained the Boy Scouts’ highest rank of
Eagle Scout
, while also displaying an avid interest in rocketry including the building of flying models.
After graduating from high school, Lovell studied engineering under the US Navy’s
Flying Midshipman
program from 1946 to 1948, which focused on training new naval aviators. This was a sponsored program by the US Navy, with the student required to enlist as Apprentice Seaman and to serve in the Navy for five years, including one year of active duty.
As this program was being rolled back in the wake of the end of WW2, Lovell saw himself and others like him pressured to transfer out, with Lovell applying at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Here he would continue his engineering studies, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in the Spring of 1952.
After graduation he was commissioned as an ensign in the US Navy, got selected for naval aviation training and was later assigned to the
Essex
-class aircraft carrier
USS
Shangri-La
during the 1950s where he flew many missions, racking up a reported total of 107 carrier landings. Once back ashore he became a flight instructor for Navy pilots.
To Space And Beyond
With NASA selecting its future astronauts from the military’s test pilots for a variety of reasons, it was only a matter of time before Lovell would be in the running for the first group of astronauts considering his performance in the Navy. Although he got put on the list of potential astronauts for Project Mercury, he narrowly missed joining the
Mercury Seven
. After applying for the second group, however, he ended up being selected for Mercury’s successor project: Project Gemini.
The Pacific Ocean as seen from the Gemini 7 capsule on 8 December 1965 by astronauts Borman and Lovell. (Credit
NASA
)
Lovell would fly on two Gemini missions,
Gemini 7
and
Gemini 12
, with the latter seeing Lovell being joined by Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin as the pilot. Before embarking on Gemini 7, Lovell and his fellow astronaut Frank F. Borman were given the advice by Pete Conrad – who had previously spent eight days on Gemini 5 – to take books along for the ride. Considering that Gemini 7 was an endurance mission lasting nearly two weeks, this turned out to be very good advice, indeed.
Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin performing an EVA during the first day of the 4-day Gemini 12 mission. (Credit:
NASA
, James Lovell)
The four-day Gemini 12 mission would be the last mission in the project, taking place during November of 1966. During this mission Aldrin demonstrated a number of extra-vehicular activities (EVAs), showing that humans could perform activities outside of the spacecraft, thus clearing the way for Project Apollo.
Lucky Apollo 13
Although Lovell is generally associated with Apollo 13, his third spaceflight was on
Apollo 8
which launched on December 21st of 1968. This was the first manned Apollo mission to make it to the Moon following Apollo 7 which stayed in Earth’s orbit. During Apollo 8 the crew of three – Borman, Lovell and Anders – completed ten orbits around Earth’s companion, making it the first time that humans had laid eyes on the far side of the Moon and were able to observe an Earthrise.
The famous ‘Earthrise’ photo by William Anders taken during Apollo 8. (Source:
NASA
)
With the Apollo program in constant flux, Apollo 8’s mission profile was changed from a more conservative Earth orbit-bound test with the – much delayed lunar module (LM) – to the very ambitious orbiting of the Moon. This put the Apollo program back on track, however, as it skipped a few intermediate steps. After Apollo 9 demonstrated the full lunar EVA suit in space as well as docking with the LM in Earth orbit, Apollo 10 was the wet dress rehearsal for the first true Moon landing with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin taking the honors.
After Apollo 12 delivered its second batch of astronauts to the lunar surface, it was finally time for Lovell as the commander and Fred Haise as the LM pilot to add their footprints to the lunar regolith as part of the
Apollo 13
mission. After two successful Moon landings, when Apollo 13 took off from the landing pad on April 11, 1970, it seemed that this was going to be mostly a routine mission.
After making it about 330,000 km from Earth, the Apollo 13 crew was going through their well-practiced schedule, with only one active issue bothering them and ground control in Houston. This issue involved the pressure sensor in one of the service module (SM) oxygen tanks. Ground control requested that the crew try activating the stirring fans in the oxygen tanks to see whether de-stratifying the contents of the affected oxygen tank might fix the odd readings.
Ninety-five seconds after Command Module (CM) pilot John Swigert activated these fans the three astronauts heard a loud bang, accompanied by electrical power fluctuations and the attitude control thrusters automatically engaging. After briefly losing communications with Earth, Swigert called back to Houston with the now famous “Houston, we have had a problem.” phrase.
As indicated by the resulting investigations, one of the oxygen tanks (Oxygen Tank 2) that fed the fuel cells for power generation had turned into a bomb owing to manufacturing and handling defects years prior. The resulting explosion also caused the loss of Oxygen Tank 1 and ultimately put all of the CM’s fuel cells out of commission. With the CM’s batteries rapidly draining, the Apollo 13 astronauts only had minutes to put a plan together with Houston to use the LM as their lifeboat and to devise a way to plan a course back to Earth after a fly-by of the Moon.
As these immediate concerns were addressed and Apollo 13 found itself on a course that should take it safely back to Earth, two new issues cropped up. The first was that of potable water, as normally the CM’s fuel cells would create all the water that they’d need during the mission. With the CM and its fuel cells out of commission, they had to strictly ration their limited supply, all the way down to 200 mL per person per day.
The adapted carbon dioxide scrubber on Apollo 13. (Credit:
NASA
)
The other issue concerned the carbon dioxide levels. Although the LM carried sufficient oxygen, CO
2
scrubbers were required to keep the levels of this gas at healthy levels, even as the crew kept adding to it with their breathing. The lithium hydroxide pellet-based scrubbers in the CM and LM were up to their individual tasks, but the LM was equipped only for the 45 hours that two astronauts would spend on the lunar surface, not keep three astronauts alive for the time that it’d take to travel back to Earth.
Annoyingly, the CM and LM scrubber canisters had different dimensions that prevented the astronauts from simply availing themselves of the CM scrubbers. This was fortunately nothing that some solid arts and crafts experience can’t fix, and the CM canisters were made to work using plastic manual covers, duct tape, and whatever else was needed to bridge the gaps.
With all the essentials dealt with as well as possible considering the circumstances, the three astronauts set in for a very long and very cold wait. As most systems were shut down to preserve every bit of energy, there was little any of them could do against the cold of space itself seeping into the LM, even as moisture condensed on all surfaces.
Before nearing Earth, Lovell and his crew were tasked with configuring the LM’s navigation computer in preparation for final approach, as well as starting the CM up from its cold shutdown. With every step of this re-entry and required separation of the SM, CM, and ultimately the LM being completely unlike the normal procedure that they had trained for, there existed significant uncertainty about how well it all would work.
Fortunately, everything went off relatively without any issues, and on April 17, 1970, all three Apollo 13 astronauts made a soft splashdown on Earth. This would also be Lovell’s fourth and final spaceflight.
Retirement
Apollo 13’s capsule splashing down on April 17 1970. (Credit:
NASA
)
Lovell would retire from the Navy and the space program on March 1, 1973. For decades afterwards, he’d serve as CEO, president, and similar roles for a range of companies before retiring in 1991, only staying on the board of directors for a number of corporations, including the Astronautics Corporation of America. With the fame that Apollo 13 had brought him and his two fellow astronauts, none of them ever fully left the public eye.
A number of films and documentaries were made about the Apollo 13 mission, which was termed a ‘successful failure’. Lovell would make a number of cameos, with the 1995 film
Apollo 13
, based on Lovell’s book
Lost Moon
, being one of the most notable examples.
With Lovell’s death,
Fred Haise
is now the last remaining member of Apollo 13 to still be alive, after
Jack Swigert
died from cancer in 1982.
Although a lot has been said already about Apollo 13 nearly ending in tragedy, including its inauspicious number in many Western cultures, it’s impossible to deny that this mission’s crew were among the luckiest imaginable. In the dark and cold of Space, trapped between Earth and the Moon, they found themselves among the best friends imaginable to together solve a puzzle, even as their own lives were on the line.
If the oxygen tank had exploded on the return trip from the Moon, all astronauts would have likely perished. Similarly, if any of the other events during the mission had played out slightly differently, or if another emergency had occurred on top of the existing ones, things might have turned out very differently.
If there’s anything to be learned from Lovell’s life, it is probably that ‘luck’ is relative, and that team work goes a very long way. | 15 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8161642",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2025-08-12T14:22:39",
"content": "Surely the ultimate hack!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8161670",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-08-12T15:36:58",
"con... | 1,760,371,457.142091 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/12/when-a-badge-misses-the-mark-why-2025/ | The WHY 2025 Badge And Its 18650s | Jenny List | [
"cons",
"News"
] | [
"badgelife",
"electronic design",
"unprotected cells",
"WHY2025"
] | The largest European hacker camp this year was in the Netherlands — What Hackers Yearn (WHY) 2025 is the latest in the long-running series of four-yearly events from that country, and 2025 saw a move from the Flevoland site used by SHA2017 and MCH2021, back to just north of Alkmaar in Noord-Holland, where the OHM2013 event took place. WHY has found itself making the news in the Dutch technical media for all the wrong reasons over the last few days,
after serious concerns were raised about the fire safety of its badge
.
This is the cell supplied with the WHY badge, complete with manufacturer’s warning.
The concerns were raised from the RevSpace hackerspace in Leidschendam, and centre around the design of the battery power traces on the PCB between the battery holders and the power supply circuitry. Because the 18650 cells supplied with that badge lack any protection circuitry, bridging the power traces could be a fire risk.
In short: their report names the cell holders as having tags too large for their pads on the PCB, a too-tight gap between positive and negative battery traces, protected only by soldermask, and the inadequacy of the badge’s short circuit protection. In the event that metal shorted these battery tags, or wore through the soldermask, the batteries would be effectively shorted, and traces or components could get dangerously hot.
The WHY organizers have responded
with a printed disclaimer leaflet warning against misuse of the cells, and added a last-minute epoxy coating to the boards to offer additional protection.
Some people are 3D-printing cases
, which should also help reduce the risk of short-circuiting due to foreign metal objects. Using an external powerbank with short-circuit protection instead of the cells would solve the problem as well. Meanwhile a group of hackers collecting aid for Ukraine are accepting the batteries as donations.
It’s understood that sometimes bugs find their way into any project, and in that an event badge is no exception. In this particular case, the original Dutch badge team resigned en masse at the start of the year following a disagreement with the WHY2025 organizers, so this badge has been a particularly hurried production. Either way, we are fortunate that the issue was spotted, and conference organizers took action before any regrettable incidents occurred. | 38 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8161581",
"author": "Sword",
"timestamp": "2025-08-12T11:26:38",
"content": "“The group that brought the 18650 concerns to light has some overlap with the group that left the WHY2025 badge project”No shock there and it seems much ado about very little. If my cellphone gets stabbed t... | 1,760,371,457.220604 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/12/current-source-mixes-old-school-and-new/ | Current Source Mixes Old School And New | Al Williams | [
"classic hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"constant current source",
"Microchip PIC"
] | At first glance,
[RobBest]’s constant current source
looks old school. The box is somewhat old-fashioned, featuring switches and binding posts. Most importantly, there’s a large analog meter dominating the front panel. Then you notice the OLED display, and you know something’s up.
The device can source or sink a constant current. In addition, it features a timer that calculates milliamp-hours and automatically turns off when not in use. The brain is a PIC 16F1765, which controls the screen, the buttons, and a few relays. While that might seem an odd choice for the processor, it is actually smart. The device has both a DAC and an ADC, plus an internal op amp. The analog output and a single pass transistor control the current flow, while the two relays flip it between a source and a sink.
Without that op amp, the DAC can’t produce much current. However, by passing it through the onboard amplifier, the output can drive about 100 mA, which is sufficient for this project.
This is a classic circuit, but the addition of a CPU and a display gives it capabilities that would have been very difficult to build back in the day. Want to dive into the theory behind
constant current sources
? Or just the practical use of
a voltage regulator to make one
? | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8161543",
"author": "PinheadBE",
"timestamp": "2025-08-12T09:32:13",
"content": "Furthermore, the firmware is written in JAL, which is an exceptionally efficient and simple to learn language for 8-bit PIC’s. Simplier to learn and use than Arduino, with a ton of well-written librari... | 1,760,371,457.261688 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/11/physical-aimbot-shoots-for-success-in-valorant/ | Physical Aimbot Shoots For Success In Valorant | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"aimbot",
"mouse",
"Valorant"
] | Modern competitive games have a great deal of anti-cheat software working to make sure you can’t hack the games to get a competitive advantage.
[Kamal Carter] decided to work around this by building a physical aimbot for popular FPS
Valorant.
The concept is straightforward enough. [Kamal] decided to hardmount an optical mouse to a frame, while moving a mousepad around beneath it with an off-the-shelf Cartesian CNC platform, but modified to be driven by DC motors for quick response. This gave him direct control over the cursor position which is largely undistinguishable from a human being moving the mouse. Clicking the mouse is achieved with a relay. As for detecting enemies and aiming at them, [Kamal] used an object detection system called YOLO. He manually trained the classifier to detect typical Valorant enemies and determine their position on the screen. The motors are then driven to guide the aim point towards the enemy, and the fire command is then given.
The system has some limitations—it’s really only capable of completing the shooting range challenges in Valorant. The vision model isn’t trained on the full range of player characters in
Valorant
, and it would prove difficult to use such a system in a competitive match. Still, it’s a neat way to demonstrate
how games can be roboticized and beaten outside of just the software realm
. Video after the break. | 17 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8161423",
"author": "Ploegmma",
"timestamp": "2025-08-12T05:54:36",
"content": "I don’t understand why you use a mechanical device to interface with a physical mouse. Why not just replace this with a simple HID enabled MCU like a cheap Arduino with HID support? Then you can send mou... | 1,760,371,457.312665 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/10/building-a-7-segment-shadow-clock/ | Building A 7-Segment Shadow Clock | Lewin Day | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"DS3231",
"ESP32",
"real time clock"
] | There are plenty of conventional timepieces out there in the world; we’ve also featured a great many that are aesthetically beautiful while being unreadably esoteric.
This neat “shadow clock” from [Smart Solutions for Home] is not conventional, but it’s still a clock you could use every day.
The display is made of four seven-segment digits, which have a subtle appearance. Each segment uses a solenoid to extend it forward out of the display, or to retract it flush with the faceplate. This creates a numerical display in all one color, with the physical protrusion doing the job of making the numbers visible. This is perhaps where the “shadow clock” name comes from, though you notice the protruding segments moreso than the shadows they cast on the faceplate.
Running the show is an ESP32, paired with H-bridges to drive the solenoids that make up the 7-segment displays. The H-bridges are driven via shift registers to reduce the number of GPIO pins needed. Unlike many other ESP32 clock builds, this one uses a DS3231 real-time clock module to keep accurate time, rather than solely relying on Internet-based NTP time servers. Configuring the clock can be done via a web interface. Design files
are available online.
If you think you’ve seen this recently, maybe you’re thinkig of
this prototype for a very similar display
by [indoorgeek]. And that’s not the only way to make
shadow clocks
either. After all, the term is not enforced or defined by any global horological organization. Maybe that’s a good thing! Video after the break. | 6 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8160246",
"author": "Karl Mueller",
"timestamp": "2025-08-10T12:16:34",
"content": "looks a little like a license plate. an arbitrary license plate renderer would be super handy for the ultimate getaway car",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"... | 1,760,371,457.354499 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/10/cheap-thermal-camera-fits-the-bill/ | Cheap Thermal Camera Fits The Bill | Al Williams | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"ir camera",
"MLX90640"
] | If you want to save a little money on a thermal camera, or if you just enjoy making your own, you should have a look at [Evan Yu’s]
GitHub
repository, which has a well thought out project built around the MLX90640 and an ESP32. The cost is well under $100. You can watch it do its thing in the video below.
There’s a PCB layout, a 3D-printed case, and — of course — all the firmware files. The code uses the Arduino IDE and libraries. It leverages off-the-shelf libraries for the display and the image sensor.
The image sensor isn’t going to wow you. It has a resolution of 24 x 32, although that’s better than some cheap cameras, and it can still honestly be good for “what part is heating up” explorations. There is probably room for some clever smoothing in software as well. For only three or four times the price, you can find cameras with resolutions around 256×192, which is good for a thermal camera, even though it isn’t the megapixels we expect from our optical cameras or our phones.
The bill of materials is relatively short. The bulk of the circuit and effort is in the circuit to charge the battery, regulate it, and protect it against bad behavior.
Can’t decide if you need a camera at all?
You aren’t alone
. Or you can
cheap out
, but you might get what you pay for. | 14 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8160160",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2025-08-10T08:37:39",
"content": "Current crop of Chinese thermal cam have a way higher resolution than that (256×192 or more) for a lower or similar price. But for sure it´s closed source, and the sensor they use have no marking. I´d really ... | 1,760,371,457.402287 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/09/sparcstation-1-finally-gets-attention/ | SparcStation 1+ Finally Gets Attention | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"sparc",
"sparcstation",
"sun"
] | We can’t throw stones. [Leaded Solder] picked up a SparcStation 1+ in 2018 and found it only produced illegal instruction errors. We’re sure he’s like us and meant to get back to it, and, instead, it sat on the bench, taking up space. You eventually have to move it, though, so seven years later, it was time for
another go at it
.
The first pass back in 2018 revealed that the machine had an interesting life. The full-sized hard drive was salvaged from an Apple computer. Removing the drive resolved the illegal instruction error. The drive seemed to work, but there was still nothing that suggested the machine would fully boot up. The next step was to try booting from a floppy, but that didn’t work either. The floppy cable had been surgically altered, again hinting this machine had seen some tough love.
Fast forward to 2025. This time, a Pi Pico-based SCSI emulator would stand in for the aging and suspect hard drive. Unfortunately, as noted, this machine has undergone some extensive and strange surgery. The power cable feeding the emulator had been rewired backwards, exposing the poor Pi Pico to 12 V, with predictable results. Luckily, it didn’t seem to phase the SparcStation.
The machine has some hard-to find micro fuses and one that powers the SCSI bus was blown. You could wonder if the SCSI emulator blew the fuse, but it appears it didn’t. Pulling the Ethernet fuse and placing it in the SCSI slot improved the machine’s behavior. But the termination power was still a problem. A USB cable temporarily solved that and, in fact, got the machine a little bit further.
That’s as far as he got this time. We’d imagine if you know a lot about this computer and have ideas on how to solve some of the remaining problems [Leaded Solder] would be glad to hear from you. But take your time. We estimate you have at least a few years.
There was a time when every geek wanted
a Sun computer
. Of course, if this is too much work for you, there’s
always emulation
. | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8160155",
"author": "Menno",
"timestamp": "2025-08-10T08:27:09",
"content": "Put the Ethernet fuse back and use net boot?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8160247",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-08-10T1... | 1,760,371,457.697272 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/09/hacking-printed-circuit-board-to-create-casing-and-instrument-panels/ | Hacking Printed Circuit Board To Create Casing And Instrument Panels | John Elliot V | [
"hardware",
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"casing",
"instrument panel",
"pcb",
"PDP-1",
"Printed Circuit Board"
] | Over on Hackaday.io our hackers [Angelo] and [Oscarv] are making
a replica of the PDP-1
. That is interesting in and of itself but the particularly remarkable feature of this project is its novel use of printed circuit boards for casing and instrument panels.
What does that mean in practice? It means creating
a KiCad file
with a PCB for each side of the case/panel. These pieces can then be ordered from a board house and assembled. In the video below the break you will see an example of putting such a case together. They use sticky tape for scaffolding and then finish things off by soldering the solder joints on each edge together.
We cover so many PCB hacks over here at Hackaday that we have an entire category dedicated to them:
PCB Hacks
. If you’re interested in PCBs you might like to
read about their history
, as before they were everywhere they were nowhere.
Thanks to [Oscarv] for writing in to let us know about this one. | 11 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8160034",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-08-10T03:07:49",
"content": "Quite a few years ago I found the PDF below. It’s a tutorial for this, only they use “raw” plated FR4, which is of course still a lot cheaper then buying PCB’s. It has some very nice details such as compe... | 1,760,371,457.653529 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/09/desk-top-peltier-powered-cloud-chamber-uses-desktop-parts/ | Desk Top Peltier-Powered Cloud Chamber Uses Desktop Parts | Tyler August | [
"Science"
] | [
"cloud chamber",
"peltier cooler",
"physics",
"radiation",
"water cooling"
] | There was a time when making a cloud chamber with dry ice and alcohol was one of those ‘rite of passage’ type science projects every nerdy child did. That time may or may not be passed, but we doubt many children are making cloud chambers quite like [Curious Scientist]’s
20 cm x 20 cm Peltier-powered desktop unit
.
The dimensions were dictated by the size of the off-the-shelf display case which serves as the chamber, but conveniently enough also allows emplacement of four TEC2-19006 Peltier cooling modules. These are actually “stacked” modules, containing two thermoelectric elements in series — a good thing, since the heat delta required to make a cloud chamber is too great for a single element. Using a single-piece two stage module simplifies the build considerably compared to stacking elements manually.
To carry away all that heat, [Curious Scientist] first tried heatpipe-based CPU coolers, but moved on to CPU water blocks for a quieter, more efficient solution. Using desktop coolers means almost every part here is off the shelf, and it all combines to work as well as we remember the dry-ice version. Like that childhood experiment, there doesn’t seem to be any provision for recycling the condensed alcohol, so eventually the machine will peter out after enough vapor is condensed.
This style of detector isn’t terribly sensitive and so needs to be “seeded” with spicy rocks to see anything interesting, unless an external electric field is applied to encourage nucleation around weaker ion trails. Right now [Curious Scientist] is doing that by rubbing the glass with microfiber to add some static electricity, but if there’s another version, it will have a more hands-off solution.
We’ve seen
Peltier-Powered cloud chambers
before (albeit without PC parts), but the
“dry ice and alcohol” hack is still a going concern
. If even that’s too much effort, you could just
go make a cup of tea, and watch very, very carefully. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8160070",
"author": "OG",
"timestamp": "2025-08-10T04:06:02",
"content": "Eh, cloud TANKS are much more visually interesting:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RypKl8MJPRE",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8160179",
"author... | 1,760,371,457.602893 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/09/2025-one-hertz-challenge-estimating-pi-with-an-arduino-nano-r4/ | 2025 One Hertz Challenge: Estimating Pi With An Arduino Nano R4 | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"mathematics",
"Monte Carlo",
"Monte Carlo method",
"Pi"
] | Humanity pretty much has Pi figured out at this point. We’ve calculated it many times over and are confident about what it is down to many,
many
decimal places. However, if you fancy estimating it with some electronic assistance,
you might find this project from [Roni Bandini] interesting.
[Roni] programmed an Arduino Nano R4 to estimate Pi using the Monte Carlo method. For this specific case, it involves drawing a circle inscribed inside a square. Points are then randomly scattered inside the square, and checked to see if they lie inside or outside the circle based on their position and distance of the circle’s outline from the center point of the square. By taking the ratio of the points inside the circle to the total number of points, you get an approximation of the ratio of the square and circle’s areas, which is equal to Pi/4. Thus, multiply the ratio by 4, and you’ve got your approximation of Pi.
[Roni] coded a program to run the Monte Carlo simulation on the Arduino Nano R4, taking advantage of the mathematical benefits of its onboard Floating Point Unit. It generates 100 new samples for the Monte Carlo approximation every second, improving the estimation of pi as it goes. It then displays the result on a 7-segment display, and beeps as it goes. [Roni] readily admits the project is a little too close in appearance to a classic Hollywood bomb.
We’ve seen some other neat Pi-calculating projects before, too
. | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8159899",
"author": "Ecan Barnes",
"timestamp": "2025-08-09T20:19:02",
"content": "How is this related to the 1Hz Challenge?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8160181",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "... | 1,760,371,457.752141 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/09/the-kilopixel-display/ | The Kilopixel Display | Jenny List | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"cnc",
"display",
"gantry"
] | Despite the availability of ready-made displays never being better, there are still some hardy experimenters who take on the challenge of making their own. In [Ben Holmen]’s case the display he built is somewhat unusual and not the most practical, but for us
a giant-sized wooden kilopixel display
is exactly what the world needs.
It’s a kilopixel display because it has a resolution of 40 by 25 pixels, and it takes the form of a rack of wooden cubes, each of which can be turned by a tool on a gantry to expose either a black or a white side. It’s very slow indeed — he has
an over nine hour long video of it in operation
— but it is an effective device.
His write-up goes into great detail about the steps taken in its design, starting with spherical pixels rotated by a LEGO wheel and progressing to cubes poked at their corner to rotate. The pusher in this case is a hot glue stick, for the required flexibility. For practicality
we’re reminded of this serial oil-and-water display
.
The whole thing is online, and if you want you can submit your own images for it to draw. Whether a Wrencher in 25 pixel resolution has enough detail, we’ll leave to you. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8159861",
"author": "Peter Knoppers",
"timestamp": "2025-08-09T18:21:21",
"content": "With rotating cubes (presuming two faces are along the axis of rotation) there are four faces that can face the viewer. He could have made it a 2-bits per pixel gray scale display for (almost) the ... | 1,760,371,457.867486 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/11/dont-say-this-diy-diskette-was-a-flop/ | Don’t Say This DIY Diskette Was A Flop | Tyler August | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"3.5\" floppy disk",
"cnc",
"scratch built"
] | Sometimes, you build a thing because you need a thing. Sometimes, you do it just to see if you can. This project is in category two: [polymatt] didn’t need to
create a floppy disk from scratch-
– plenty of old disks still exist– but we’re glad he made the attempt because it makes for a fascinating video that’s embedded below.
Some of you are going to quibble with the terminology [polymatt] uses in this video: first of all, he didn’t begin by creating the universe, so is he really starting “from scratch”? Secondly, the “floppy” format he’s attempting to copy is a 3
½
” diskette, which does not flop at all.
Choosing newer stiff-walled medium does allow him to practice his CNC skills and make the coolest-looking floppy enclosure we’ve ever seen. (It turns out brushed aluminum is even cooler-looking than the translucent neon ones.) On the other hand, we can’t help but wonder if a lower-density format 5¼” disk might have been an easier hurdle to jump. The diskette that was built does magnetize, but it can’t read or write actual files. We wonder if the older format might have been more forgiving of grain size and composition of his ferrite coating. Even more forgiving still would be to use these techniques to
make magnetic tape
which is a
perfectly viable way to store data
.
Instead of storing data, you could
make your own cleaning floppy
. It’s not like data storage was really the point here, anyway– its not the destination, but the journey. So whatever you call this DIY diskette, please don’t call it a flop.
Thanks to [Anonymous] for the great tip! | 21 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8160836",
"author": "WTF Detector",
"timestamp": "2025-08-11T11:56:07",
"content": "Where’s the “imbue commenter with a sense of humor” link?Comment sections riddled with tinfoil-hat conspiracy-theorist nutjobs, all measure of bigotry (an article just the other day had someone in th... | 1,760,371,457.931791 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/11/the-trials-of-trying-to-build-an-automatic-filament-changer/ | The Trials Of Trying To Build An Automatic Filament Changer | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"filament",
"filament changer"
] | Running out of filament mid-print is a surefire way to ruin your parts and waste a lot of time. [LayerLab] was sick of having this problem, and so sought to find a proper solution. Unfortunately, between off-the-shelf solutions and homebrew attempts,
he was unable to solve the problem to his satisfaction.
[LayerLab] had a simple desire. He wanted his printer to swap to a second spool of filament when the first one runs out, without ruining or otherwise marring the print. It sounds simple, but the reality is more complicated. As an Australian, he couldn’t access anything from InfinityFlow, so he first attempted to use the “auto refill” features included on the Bambu Labs AMS 2. However, it would routinely make filament changes in outside wall areas of a print, leaving unsightly marks and producing poorer quality parts.
His next effort was to use the Wisepro Auto Refill Filament Buffer. It’s a feeder device that takes filament from two spools, and starts feeding the backup spool in to your printer when the primary spool runs out. Unfortunately, [LayerLab] had a cavalcade of issues with the device. It would routinely feed from the secondary spool when there was still primary filament available, jamming the device, and it didn’t come with a proper mounting solution to work with consumer printers. It also had bearings popping out the top of the housing. Attempts to rework the device into a larger twin-spool rig helped somewhat, but ultimately the unreliability of the Wisepro when changing from one spool to another meant it wasn’t fit for purpose. Its feeder motors were also to trigger the filament snag cutters that [LayerLab] had included in his design.
Ultimately, the problem remains unsolved for [LayerLab]. They learned a lot along the way, mostly about what not to do, but they’re still hunting for a viable automatic filament changer solution that suits their needs.
Filament sensors help
, but can only do so much. If you reckon you know the answer, or a good way forward, share your thoughts in the comments. Video after the break. | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8160873",
"author": "Slugsie",
"timestamp": "2025-08-11T13:05:32",
"content": "I’m surprised that 1KG spools still seem to be the norm, and most machines spool holding capabilities are built around such spools. I’m sure it’s time that bigger spools became at least an option. I reali... | 1,760,371,457.826817 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/10/amiga-programming-in-2025-with-amiblitz/ | Amiga Programming In 2025 With AmiBlitz | Tyler August | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"amiga",
"game developement",
"retrocomputing",
"vibe coding"
] | Having owned an Amiga microcomputer is apparently a little bit like having shaken hands with Shoggoth: no one can escape unchanged from the experience. Thirty-two years on, [Neil] at The Retro Collective remains haunted by the memories — specifically, the memory of BlitzBasic 2, an Amiga-specific programming language he never found the time to use.
What better time to make a game for the Amiga than the year 2025 of the common era?
[Neil] takes us on a long journey, with more than a little reminiscing along the way. BlitzBasic may not have been the main programming language for the Amiga, but it was by no means the least, with a good pedigree that included the best-selling 1993 game Skidmarks. Obviously BlitzBasic was not a slow, interpreted language as one might think hearing “BASIC”. Not only is it a compiled language, it was fast enough to be billed as the next best thing to C for the Amiga, according to [Neil].
[Neil] wasn’t the only one whose dreams have been haunted by the rugose touch of the Amiga and its scquomose BlitzBasic language– you’ll find a version on
GitHub called AmiBlitz3
that is maintained by [Sven] aka [honitas] to this day, complete with an improved IDE. The video includes a history lesson on the open-source AmiBlitz, and enough information to get you started.
For the vibe-coders amongst you, [Neil] has an excellent tip that you can use LLMs like ChatGPT to help you learn niche languages like this not by asking for code (which isn’t likely to give you anything useful, unless you’ve
given it special training
) but by requesting techniques and psudocode you can then implement to make your game. The LLM also proved a useful assistent for [Neil]’s excel-based pixel art workflow.
If you’re wondering why bother, well, why not? As [Neil] says, writing Amiga games is his version of a crossword puzzle. It may also be the only way to keep the dreams at bay. Others have taken to writing
new operating systems
or
reproducing PCBs
to keep vintage Amiga hardware alive. If some gather under the light of the full moon to chant “Ia! Ia! Commodore f’thagan”– well, perhaps we can thank them for
Commodore for rising from the sunless depths of bankruptcy once again
. | 30 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8160701",
"author": "Johnu",
"timestamp": "2025-08-11T07:56:03",
"content": "I will remember the Amiga Power review of Skidmarks 2 forever:COWS! WHEELS! CARAVANS! GO!Truly it was the game of champions, bested only by Gravity Power which was a PD game that Amiga Power liked so much t... | 1,760,371,458.080223 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/10/hackaday-links-august-10-2025/ | Hackaday Links: August 10, 2025 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"apollo",
"archive",
"asphalt",
"astronaut",
"civil engineering",
"con",
"dam",
"gemini",
"hackaday links",
"hope",
"magazine",
"nasa",
"obituary",
"Popular Mechanics",
"reservoir",
"stem"
] | We lost a true legend this week with
the passing of NASA astronaut Jim Lovell
at the ripe old age of 97. Lovell commanded the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission back in 1970, and along with crewmates Jack Swigert and Fred Haise — along with just about every person working at or for NASA — he managed to guide the mortally wounded
Odyssey
command module safely back home. While he’s rightly remembered for the heroics on 13, it was far from his first space rodeo. Lovell already had two Gemini missions under his belt before Apollo came along, including the grueling Gemini 7, where he and Frank Borman undertook the first long-duration space mission, proving that two men stuffed into a Volkswagen-sized cockpit could avoid killing each other for at least two weeks.
Lovell also served as Command Module Pilot on Apollo 8, the first crewed mission to lunar orbit. Apollo 8 was notable for its many technical and scientific accomplishments, but it’s perhaps best known as the mission where Lunar Module Pilot Bill Anders, who
died only last year in a plane crash
, proved his photography chops by capturing
the iconic
Earthrise
image
, as well as (probably)
the first full-disk image of Earth from space
. Along with Gemini 12, Lovell racked up four flights, making him the first person to reach that number, and spent nearly a solid month in space. He was also the only person to make it to lunar orbit twice without having landed on the surface, which we’d have found intolerable, but which he always seemed to take in stride.
We harp on about the Apollo era all the time not only because we’re rapidly losing its alumni — with the passing of Jim Lovell, only five astronauts from the program are left, and every one of them is in their 90s — but because the achievements from that program were so definitional and formative to many of us who went into STEM. Magazines such as
Popular Mechanics
played a similar role, too, which is why we were excited to find out about
this massive online trove of
PM
issues
stretching all the way back to 1902. The digitized volumes are maintained by a variety of archives, including The Internet Archive and Google Books, and it looks like every issue through the end of 2005 is included and free of charge to browse. We were charmed to learn that the classic “Written so that you can understand it” tagline made its first appearance on the masthead way back on issue 6. In a lot of ways, Hackaday is the spiritual successor to
PM
and other magazines like it, but with 123 years of publication under its belt, we’ve got a ways to go to catch up.
It looks like
the speaker schedule for HOPE_16
is filling up fast, as you’d expect since the conference is next weekend. The lineup looks fantastic; our early unofficial award for best talk title goes to Kody Kinzie’s Meshtastic talk
“Spooky Action at a Discount.”
If you’re planning to attend the conference, we’d love to get a heads-up on talks we should cover once the videos are published, so hit us up at
tips@hackaday.com
.
And finally, we’d have sworn the era of building dams was long gone in the United States, but
it seems we were mistaken
. A massive dam project, the Chimney Hollow Reservoir Project, is nearing completion in Colorado, and Aaron Witt got to take a second look at the project after first checking it out in 2023. The earthen dam, which will be 350 feet tall and over 1,000 feet wide at completion, is somewhat unique in that it doesn’t impound an existing stream, but rather will collect water from the Colorado River via a tunnel through the mountain that abuts the dam. Also unique is the asphalt core of the dam. Most earthen dams use a layer of packed clay to prevent the flow of water, but since clay was hard to come by locally, they used an extra gooey wall of asphalt two feet thick. As is typical for Aaron, he geeks out on the heavy equipment, which we can’t complain about at all, but it’s the civil engineering that really caught our fancy. Enjoy! | 11 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8160789",
"author": "Aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-08-11T10:34:42",
"content": "I wonder if moonlanding deniers on average acknowledge the Appolo 13 failed-to-land mission.Since they failed to land and all, and you’d think a failed mission is more likely than a successful one if you ar... | 1,760,371,458.167685 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/10/2025-one-hertz-challenge-using-industrial-relays-to-make-a-flasher/ | 2025 One Hertz Challenge: Using Industrial Relays To Make A Flasher | Lewin Day | [
"contests"
] | [
"2025 Hackaday One Hertz Challenge",
"electronic",
"electronics",
"flasher",
"flasher circuit",
"relay"
] | These days, if you want to flash some LEDs, you’d probably grab a microcontroller. Maybe you’d go a little more old-school, and grab a 555. However, [Jacob] is even more hardcore than that,
as evidenced by this chunky electromechanical flasher build.
[Jacob] goes into great detail
on his ancillary write-up,
describing how the simple building blocks used by industrial control engineers can be used to make a flasher circuit that cycles once per second. Basically, two relays are paired with two 0.5-second delay timers. The two relays tag each other on and off on delay as their timers start and expire, with the lamp turned on and off in turn.
We’ve had lots of other great entries to our One Hertz Challenge, too — from
clocks
to
not-clocks
. There’s still time to get an entry in — the deadline for submission is Tuesday, August 19 at 9:00AM Pacific time. Good luck out there! | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8160476",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-08-10T22:33:35",
"content": "Nice, I’ve had one of those in my junk drawer for decades. Congrats on finding a use for yours… Kinda.Eventually I assume mine will become a turn signal flasher with a fancy variable flash period. Maybe that’s... | 1,760,371,458.121782 |
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