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https://hackaday.com/2025/07/30/a-dual-screen-cyberdeck-to-rule-them-all/ | A Dual-Screen Cyberdeck To Rule Them All | Jenny List | [
"Cyberdecks"
] | [
"cyberdeck",
"raspberry pi"
] | We like cyberdecks here at Hackaday, and in our time we’ve brought you some pretty amazing builds. But perhaps now we’ve seen the ultimate of the genre,
a cyberdeck so perfect in its execution that this
will
be the machine of choice in the dystopian future
, leaving all the others as mere contenders. It comes courtesy of [Sector 07], and it’s a machine to be proud of.
As with many cyberdecks, it uses the Raspberry Pi as its powerhouse. There are a couple of nice touchscreens and a decent keyboard, plus the usual ports and some nice programmable controls. These are none of them out of the ordinary for a cyberdeck, but what really shines with this one is the attention to detail in the mechanical design. Those touchscreens rotate on ball bearings, the hinges are just right, the connections to the Pi have quick release mechanisms, and custom PCBs and ribbon cables make distributing those GPIOs a snap.
On top of all that the aesthetics are on point; this is the machine you want to take into the abandoned mining base with you. Best of all it’s all available from the linked GitHub repository, and you can marvel as we did at the video below the break.
If you hunger for more cyberdecks, this one has
some very stiff competition
.
Thanks [Jeremy Geppert] for the tip. | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8156079",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-07-30T09:18:44",
"content": "What a nice bit of design, with some good thought put into making use of what a Pi is often used for in the end, really love the relatively easy removal of SD or Pi for integration into your other proje... | 1,760,371,471.091924 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/29/avif-the-avian-image-format/ | AVIF: The Avian Image Format | Aaron Beckendorf | [
"digital audio hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"audiomoth",
"bird calls",
"birds",
"birdsong",
"microphone",
"ornithology",
"ultrasonic"
] | Humans have long admired the sound of birdsong, but to fully appreciate how technically amazing it is, you
need an ultrasonic microphone
. [Benn Jordan] recently created a video about using these microphones to analyze a collection of bird calls, even training a starling to repeat an image encoded in sound, and has some recommendations for amateurs wanting to get started in computational ornithology.
In the first part of the video, [Benn] set up automated ultrasonic recorders at home, made recordings in Florida and rural Georgia, and visited a starling named “The Mouth,” famous for his ability to mimic human sounds. As a demonstration of his abilities, [Benn] drew a simple bird shape in a spectrogram, converted it into sound, and played it for The Mouth several times. Initially, it didn’t seem that the starling would repeat it, but while he was analyzing his recordings later, [Benn] found the characteristic bird shape. The Mouth had been able to repeat it almost pitch-perfectly. It was in this analysis that the ultrasonic microphones showed their worth, since they were able to slow down the birds’ complex vocalizations enough to detect their complex structures without losing audio quality.
In the rest of the video, [Benn] shares his recommendations for recording and analyzing bird calls. He has some advice for good high-speed audio interfaces, including warnings about those that are overpriced or advertise unrealistic specifications. You’ll also need a microphone with good ultrasonic performance, and he gives a few options for this, including making your own. For analysis software, he particularly recommended
Birdnet-Pi
, an AI program for identifying birds by their calls, as well as Cornell Lab’s free libraries of ornithology data.
One particularly emphatic recommendation was the open-source AudioMoth ultrasonic microphone and recorder, a project we’ve
seen before
. He also recommended a sonic camera which serves as a more field-ready version of his own
acoustic imaging device
. | 35 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8156053",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-07-30T05:04:50",
"content": "Welp what PNG are you gonna encode into all the local starlings?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8156084",
"author": "Woody WP",
"timest... | 1,760,371,470.922962 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/29/casting-meteorite-like-materials/ | Casting Meteorite-like Materials | Aaron Beckendorf | [
"Science"
] | [
"aluminium",
"copper",
"iron",
"metal casting",
"meteorite",
"meteorites",
"nickel"
] | From the outside, iron meteorites tend to look like formless, rusted lumps of metal, which is why museums often polish and etch sections to show their interior structure. This reveals their Widmanstätten patterns, a latticework structure of parallel iron-nickel intermetallic crystals which forms over millions of years of very slow solidification. Inspired by this, [Electron Impressions] created his own
metal composition
which forms similar patterns on a much-faster-than-geological time scale.
Witmanstätten patterns form when a meteorite colliding with a planet launches molten iron and nickel into space, where they very slowly solidify. As the mixture cools, it first forms a stable phase called Taenite, then begins to precipitate another phase called Kamacite. Kamacite forms needle-shaped crystals, which when polished show up against the Taenite background. However, such needle-shaped growth only becomes noticeable at a cooling rate of a few degrees per million years, so it’s not really a practical way to make the pattern.
Instead of iron-nickel, therefore, [Electron Impressions] used a copper-aluminium alloy. The copper-aluminium system contains an intermetallic compound which forms large rod-shaped crystals, as well as a eutectic copper-aluminium alloy which can form a background for the crystals. For his first attempt, [Electrons Impressions] melted a composition of 45% copper and 55% aluminium, which produced large crystals on slow cooling. This had a visibly different structure than Widmanstätten patterns, so to reduce the numbers of crystals, he tried again with 40% copper. This produced a criss-cross crystal pattern, not quite a Widmanstätten pattern, but very similar, and good enough for decorative purposes.
When a meteorite collides with a planet and ejects material, the impact can be dramatic enough for
amateur astronomers to capture
. If you’re looking for something closer to home, it’s also possible to grow non-intermetallic
copper crystals
.
Thanks to [Zane Atkins] for the tip! | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8156158",
"author": "Tedious bore",
"timestamp": "2025-07-30T14:41:13",
"content": "That’s very interesting!“55% aluminium”As a fun aside I note that on my keyboard you can type “55%” by hitting “555” with a shift on the third character.So you can literally do this with a 555! 😃",
... | 1,760,371,470.808362 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/29/2025-one-hertz-challenge-precise-time-ref-via-1-pulse-per-second-gps-signal/ | 2025 One Hertz Challenge: Precise Time Ref Via 1 Pulse-Per-Second GPS Signal | John Elliot V | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"gps",
"gps disciplined oscillator",
"ocxo",
"oven controlled crystal oscillator",
"VCXO",
"Voltage-Controlled Crystal Oscillator"
] | Our hacker [Wil Carver] has sent in his submission for the One Hertz Challenge:
Precise Time Ref via 1 Pulse-Per-Second GPS Signal
.
This GPS Disciplined Oscillator (GPSDO) project uses a Piezo 2940210 10 MHz crystal oscillator which is both oven-controlled (OCXO)
and
voltage-controlled (VCXO). The GPSDO takes the precision 1 Pulse-Per-Second (PPS) GPS signal and uses it to adjust the 10 MHz crystal oscillator until it repeatedly produces 10,000,000 cycles within one second.
[Wil] had trouble finding all the specs for the 2940210, particularly the EFC sensitivity (S), so after doing some research he did some experiments to fill in the blanks. You can get the gory details in his notes linked above.
In a Voltage-Controlled Crystal Oscillator (VCXO), the EFC pin is the tuning-voltage input. EFC stands for Electronic Frequency Control. [Wil] found that he needed to push the EFC up to around 4.34V in order to get 10 MHz output, which is a bit out of spec, usually the center of the range should be around 2.5V. [Wil] put this discrepancy down to the age of the crystal oscillator. You can see a chart of this behavior in the notes.
[Wil] had nice things to say about Tom Van Baak’s website,
LeapSecond.com
, where you can learn about timing accuracy, precision, and stability. He also suggested searching for “Allan Variance” if you’re interested in the measurement of stable timing sources.
If you’re interested in OCXOs be sure to check out
XOXO For The OCXO
and
Inside A Vintage Oven Controlled Crystal Oscillator
. | 5 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8155989",
"author": "Bob",
"timestamp": "2025-07-29T23:16:22",
"content": "This is really easy with those cheap GPS modules (<$5 AliExpress et al) as the PPS (Pulse Per Second) signal is on the header.For those where it isn’t on the header (4 pin as opposed to 5 pin) it’s easy enoug... | 1,760,371,470.687239 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/29/attiny-powered-business-card-plays-cracktro-hits/ | ATtiny-Powered Business Card Plays Cracktro Hits | Matt Varian | [
"handhelds hacks"
] | [
"attiny",
"attiny 1616",
"pcb business card"
] | PCB business cards are a creative way to show your tech skills while getting your name out there. This take on a
PCB business card
, sent in by [VCC], tackles one of the big challenges with them: making them in such a way that they are cheap enough to not feel bad about handing them out.
These cards plug into a USB port for power and have over a dozen small LEDs that light up the stars on the front, and a small buzzer that can play over ten minutes of cracktro music. To keep the cost down, [VCC] went with an ATtiny1616 microcontroller costing under 50 cents and still having plenty of outputs to drive the buzzer and LEDs. The final per-unit cost prior to shipping came out to only 1.5 euros, enabling them to be handed out without worrying about breaking the bank.
To aid in the assembly of the cards, [VCC] 3D printed a jig to apply material to the back of the USB connector, building up its thickness to securely fit in the USB port. He also wrote a small script for assembly-line programming the cards, getting the programming process down to around ten seconds per card and letting him turn through prepping the cards. Thanks, [VCC], for sending in your project—it’s a great addition to other
PCB business cards
we’ve featured. | 11 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8155957",
"author": "Amigaman",
"timestamp": "2025-07-29T20:41:24",
"content": "Ohhh… It has been a while since I last heard these amiga/c64. How did they fit in the attiny161 16k of program+data ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_i... | 1,760,371,470.576927 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/29/2025-one-hertz-challenge-fixing-the-clock-that-once-synced-the-world/ | 2025 One-Hertz Challenge: Fixing The Clock That Once Synced The World | Lewin Day | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"2025 Hackaday One Hertz Challenge",
"clock",
"hewlett packard"
] | The HP 115BR is not one of the most well-known products from Hewlett-Packard. And yet, it was remarkably important nonetheless. This hardware once synced time around the world. Now, for our 2025 One-Hertz Challenge,
[curiousmarc] has taken on the job of restoring it.
The HP 115BR itself was not used alone, but in concert with the HP5060A atomic clock. The latter would output a 100 KHz reference output. It was the job of the HP 115BR to divide this frequency down to provide a superbly accurate 1-second tick.
The example on [curiousmarc]’s bench showed up in poor shape. It was “very broken,” and he reported that it had also previously been hacked to some degree. However, he has been able to restore it to proper functionality, including the special modification for continuous tick adjustment, as used in the
1964 flying atomic clock experiment.
He was even able to sync it to NIST’s current atomic clock signal from Fort Collins using the WWW radio signal.
We’ve seen plenty of old HP metal restored over the years;
it’s always pleasant to see how well things were built back in the day
. Video after the break. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8155938",
"author": "Austin Lesea",
"timestamp": "2025-07-29T18:22:56",
"content": "Of interest, when I went to NIST ‘time school in the 1980’s in Boulder, Co, the ‘father’ of the HP 5060A Atomic clock, Leonard Cutler, told me that his boss had him place a 12 hr clock in the unit, b... | 1,760,371,471.136134 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/29/numbers-station-simulator-right-in-your-browser/ | Numbers Station Simulator, Right In Your Browser | Donald Papp | [
"Art",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"numbers station",
"tts",
"web speech api"
] | Do you find an odd comfort in the uncanny, regular intonations of a Numbers Station? Then check out
[edent]’s numbers station project
, which leverages the browser’s speech synthesis engine to deliver a ceaseless flow of (mostly) numbers, calmly-intoned in various languages.
The project is an entry for the
annual JavaScript Golfing Competition
, in which participants aim to create a cool program in 1024 bytes or less. It cleverly relies on the
Web Speech API
to deliver the speaking parts, which helps keep the code size tiny. The only thing it’s missing is an occasional shadow of static drifting across the audio.
If you’re new to numbers stations, our own [Al Williams] is here to
tell you all about them
. But there’s no need to tune into an actual mysterious radio signal just to experience weird numbers; just fire up [edent]’s project, put on some headphones, and relax if you can. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8155911",
"author": "macsimki",
"timestamp": "2025-07-29T16:23:59",
"content": "im not shure if its my phone, but the speech synthesizer does not say the individual numbers, but combines them into one big number.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,371,470.849451 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/29/power-line-patrols-the-grids-eye-in-the-sky/ | Power Line Patrols: The Grid’s Eye In The Sky | Dan Maloney | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"drone",
"flir",
"grid",
"helicopter",
"image intensifier",
"inspection",
"transmission",
"uav",
"uv"
] | Those of us who like to monitor air traffic with ADS-B aggregators such as FlightAware and ADS-B Exchange tend to see some interesting flight paths. I’m not talking about
the truly ambitious pictures drawn by pilots
, or even
the more ribald ones
, but rather flights that follow paths that seem to make little sense from either a commercial or leisure standpoint.
Most of these mystery flights have long straight stretches interrupted by occasional tight loops, and often cover great distances across rural and urban landscapes alike. A glance at the ADS-B data indicates that these flights are usually pretty close to the ground, and are often completed by helicopters. Occasionally, the registration of the aircraft will even indicate ownership by some “three-letter” federal agency.
Although mystery helicopters flying odd patterns in the sky seems like a good excuse to don a tinfoil hat and head to one’s bunker, chances are pretty good that these aircraft are engaged in a far less nefarious and far more useful endeavour: aerial transmission line patrols. These flights are key to keeping the transmission lines that form the backbone of the grid in tip-top shape, especially at a time of unprecedented growth in load and a shift in the generation profile away from fossil fuels towards renewables.
Federal Alphabet Soup
Although the grid as we know it today in North America appears to be a monolithic machine, it’s actually a far-flung collection of interconnected sub-grids, operating more or less in concert to provide uninterrupted service to 400 million people. While part of that cooperation can be explained by market forces doing what they do best, a lot of the interoperability that makes the grid work and gives it the reliability we’ve come to expect can be traced to government regulations.
The North American grid stretches from the northern part of Mexico well into Canada, and is divided into four main interconnected sub-grids. Source:
FERC
.
In the United States, the regulations that bulk power system (BPS) operators must follow come from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), a federal agency of the Executive Branch that ultimately answers to the President through the Secretary of Energy. FERC is somewhat analogous to the Federal Communications Commission in that regard, but while the FCC creates standards and enforces them directly, FERC delegates its standards-setting and enforcement authority to a separate body, the National Electric Reliability Corporation, or NERC.
For as critical to modern life as the grid is, the existence of a body dedicated solely to ensuring its reliability is a shockingly recent development. In its current form, the NERC has only existed since 2005, created in response to the 2003 blackout in the Northeast United States. Before that, NERC was the National Electric Reliability Council, which itself only came into being in 1968 in response to a prior Northeast blackout in 1965. Both versions of NERC sound a little like closing the barn doors after the horses have gotten out, but engineering something as large and complex as the grid is largely a learn-by-doing exercise, and NERC’s regulations are what BPS operators use to ensure that their systems are in line with current best practices.
On Patrol
Patrolling transmission lines is one of the main ways that BPS operators make sure they’re up to snuff with NERC rules. These patrols give an up-close and personal look at the transmission lines and the structures that support them, along with the rights-of-way (ROWs) along which they’re built, and any defects noted during these inspections can be scheduled for repair before they cascade into widespread system failures.
Transmission line patrols can take many forms, but the simplest to perform in some regions is probably a ground patrol. Ground patrols are often as simple as a single engineer driving a truck along a transmission line right-of-way, visually inspecting each tower along the way. Ground patrols such as these are limited by what can be seen with the linesman’s Mark I eyeballs or perhaps a pair of binoculars, but they’re still a valuable part of the patrolling process. The “boots-on-the-ground” approach also has the advantage of potentially coming across broken equipment that has fallen from structures, like the nuts and bolts that hold together towers, or even fragments of failed insulators. Occasionally, ground patrols will come across the carcasses of unfortunate animals that have completed a circuit,
But given the huge geographic footprint of transmission lines, some of which span hundreds of miles and often pass over remote and rugged landscapes, ground patrols can be limiting. They tend to be very time-consuming; transmission lines often cross privately owned property, and while the rights-of-way usually allow BPS operators to legally access the property, in practice, coordinating with owners to unlock gates can complicate matters. Add to that factors such as the potential need to cross streams or wetlands, potential for property damage from truck tires, and the fact that inspection is limited to what’s visible from the ground, and ground patrols can be difficult.
The obvious solution to these problems is to get above it all and inspect transmission lines from the air. Airborne inspection offers significant advantages over ground patrols, but the chief benefit is speed. Airborne inspections can inspect long stretches of a transmission line far faster than a ground patrol, and without worrying about access issues. Airborne patrols can also make inspections over rough terrain a relative snap, although such inspections often call for more experienced pilots.
It would seem that aerial power line patrols are an ideal use case for UAVs, and indeed, many of the 300 to 400 aerial inspection companies operating in the United States today offer drone-based inspection services. But even with the vastly less expensive per-hour cost of operating a drone, helicopter inspections dominate the industry today. There are a couple of reasons for this, but the most important are speed and payload capacity. A typically equipped Bell 407 helicopter, for example, carries enough primary and reserve fuel to inspect 170 miles (273 km) of transmission line with a single takeoff and landing. A UAV patrol, on the other hand, usually has to operate within line-of-sight of the operator, and has to land frequently for battery changes. This leads to frequent relocations of the base of operations, resulting in some of the same access problems as ground patrols. It’s also significantly slower than helicopter patrols, taking up to five times longer to complete an equivalent length of line as a helicopter patrol.
Helicopters also have UAVs beat when it comes to payload capacity. Even large UAVs are limited in how many instruments they can carry, whereas a helicopter has effectively no limit. This makes helicopters a multispectral imaging platform, with HD visible-light video to capture images of potential structural problems, forward-looking infrared (FLIR) scanners that look for overheating due to corrosion in a splice or an internal defect in the conductors, and LiDAR scanners that can image the entire ROW and the structures within it. But perhaps most significantly, UAVs can’t carry aloft an experienced linesman, whose training can be key to quickly locating something that needs a closer look from the sensor platforms onboard.
My Corona
The breakdown voltage of air is approximately 30 kV, and while this figure varies slightly with atmospheric conditions such as temperature and humidity, it is generally well below the voltage on most transmission lines in the BPS. That makes flashover a possibility anywhere in the system, and the potential damage caused by an intense high-current discharge to both transmission system components and the surrounding environment makes it critical to detect defects that could lead to it.
Luckily, physics provides an early warning system in the form of corona discharge. Corona discharge occurs when the air surrounding a conductor becomes ionized, turning into a conductive plasma. It can happen anywhere along the transmission system, but it’s particularly likely to happen at places where the electric field is concentrated, such as sharp points. These are generally avoided when designing the system, but faults can occur that lead to their formation, such as broken strands in conductors. Sometimes these defects are visible to the naked eye, but more often, they reveal themselves with characteristic emissions in the ultraviolet part of the EM spectrum.
Corona discharge starts when a strong electric field accelerates free electrons in the air surrounding a defect. If the field is sufficiently strong, the kinetic energy of these electrons causes other air molecules to be ionized, starting an electron avalanche. These excited electrons propagate outward to a distance where the electric field is no longer strong enough to accelerate them, at which point the excited electrons return to their ground state and emit a photon of light. Since air is 78% nitrogen, the photons are mostly in the UV range, with just 5% being in the just barely visible end of the spectrum. This gives corona discharge its characteristic purplish-blue glow.
The other principal component of air, oxygen, comes into play as well. The free electrons in the corona discharge can split diatomic oxygen, leaving behind two negative oxygen ions. Each of these can then combine with a diatomic oxygen molecule to form ozone (O
3
), a powerfully reactive oxidizer that can quickly corrode aluminum in conductors and steel in the support structure. The ozone can also combine with atmospheric nitrogen to form nitrogen oxides that, in the presence of water and oxygen, eventually create nitric acid. This strong acid can quickly strip the zinc coating from galvanized steel and attack passivated coatings on parts. Without these coatings, metal parts are unprotected from the elements and can quickly corrode and lose mechanical strength.
Corona discharge can be extremely costly to BPS operators. Specialized corona discharge cameras are used to detect corona faults. These cameras filter out the abundant UV-A and UV-B light in sunlight using a “solar blind” filter. This leaves only shortwave UV-C light below 280 nm in wavelength, which the ozone layer completely blocks out. Any light in this band has to come from nitrogen fluorescence, which makes it an effective way to detect corona discharge.
Corona cameras usually have a UV beam splitter to send light to a pair of detectors, one to capture the visible light coming from the scene and one that captures only the light remaining after passing through a solar-blind filter. The few photons of UV light that make it through the filter are amplified by a UV image intensifier, which uses a photocathode to release multiple electrons for each UV photon. These are accelerated in a strong electric field toward a phosphor screen, which converts them to visible light, which is picked up by a CCD camera and combined with the visible light scene. This shows the corona discharge as an overlay that allows operators to see where the discharge is originating from.
Corona cameras couple detection of “solar-blind” UV discharge with visible-light imagery to detect places where corona discharge might be happening. Here, a drone-carried corona camera shows a corona hot spot near a reinforcement in a phase conductor on a 1,000-kV transmission line. Source:
Professionele Drones
.
In the Weeds
One of the more stringent sets of NERC regulations is
FAC-003-5
, Transmission Vegetation Management. It might seem a little incongruous for an organization that sets standards for nuclear power plants and cybersecurity of critical infrastructure to worry about tree trimming, but studies show that vegetation contacts account for 16% to 23% of all outages in the US and Canada. Most of those outages occur in the distribution system, which is bad enough, but if vegetation were to contact lines in the transmission system, the failure cascade could be devastating. For an example of how bad vegetation contacts in the transmission system can be, look no further than
the 2003 blackout in the northeast US
, which started when overloaded 345 kV transmission lines in Ohio sagged into foliage. A software issue then compounded the problem, causing safety systems to trip and plunging customers from Ontario to the Mid-Atlantic states into darkness.
FAC-003-5 isn’t exactly light reading, going into great detail as it must to define terms and set actionable standards. The gist of the document, though, is contained in just a few tables that list the Minimum Vegetation Clearance Distances (MVCD) for both AC and DC systems. In general, the MVCDs increase with the nominal line voltage, which makes sense; the higher the voltage, the greater the potential flashover distance. More surprisingly, though, is that MVCDs increase dramatically with elevation. This has to do with the dielectric strength of air, which depends on its density. That means the thinner air at higher altitudes has a greater flashover distance, so more clearance is required.
For all the havoc vegetation contacts can wreak, the MVCDs are surprisingly narrow. For a nominal 800-kV line, the MVCD at sea level is a mere 11.6 feet (3.6 m), and only increases to 14.3 ft (4.4 m) over 14,000 ft (4268 m) elevation. These are minimum distances, of course, calculated using equations that take into account the breakdown voltage of air and the potential for flashover to vegetation. In practice, though, BPS operators keep ROWs well-groomed, aiming for to keep trees far beyond the MVCD requirements. Operators are especially watchful for trees at the edges of ROW that might be more than the MVCD away from the lines while standing, but could fall during a storm and make contact.
Assessing vegetation encroachments into the ROW is another job that can be tackled quickly by aerial patrols. The sensor platform in this case is often as simple as a spotter with a pair of binoculars or a camera, but in many cases, LiDAR sensors are used to scan the entire right of way. The LiDAR sensor is tied into the aircraft’s GPS system, resulting in a geotagged point cloud that can be analyzed after the flight. Three-dimensional visualizations of the transmission lines, their supporting structures, the ground below, and everything within and adjacent to the ROW can be viewed interactively, making it easy to spot trees with the potential to cause problems. These visualizations allow users to virtually “fly the line,” giving BPS operators a view that would be impossible to achieve even by flying a drone dangerously close to the lines. | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8155895",
"author": "MAC",
"timestamp": "2025-07-29T14:59:39",
"content": "Similarly, the petroleum and natural gas pipeline infrastructure is monitored via aerial ‘pipeline patrol’. When I was young, my father flew pipeline patrols over parts of Kansas and Oklahoma. I rode with hi... | 1,760,371,470.640247 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/29/tetris-in-a-single-line-of-code/ | TetrisIn A Single Line Of Code | Ian Bos | [
"classic hacks",
"Games"
] | [
"bbc basic",
"emulation",
"one line",
"tetris"
] | PC gaming in the modern era has become a GPU measuring contest, but back when computers had far fewer resources, every sprite had to be accounted for. To many, this was peak gaming. So let’s look to the greats of [Martin Hollis, David Moore, and Olly Betts], who had the genius (or insanity) to
create
Tetris
in a single BBC BASIC line
.
Created in 1992, one-line
Tetris
serves as a great use of the limited resources available. The entirety of the game fits within 257 bytes. With the age of BASIC, the original intent of the game for BBC BASIC was to be played on computers similar to Acorn’s BBC microcomputer or Archimedes.
One line
Tetris
has all the core features of the original game. Moving left, right, and rotating all function like the traditional game, most of the time. Being created in a single line, there were a few corners cut with bug fixing. Bugs such as crashing every 136 years of play due to large numbers or holding all keys causing the
tetrominoes
to freeze make it an interesting play experience. However, as long as our GPUs are long enough to play, we don’t mind.
If you want to experience the most densely coded gaming experience possible but don’t have one of the BBC BASIC computers of old, make sure to try this
emulator with a copy of the game
. Considering the amount done in a single line of BBC BASIC, the thought may come into mind on what could be done with MORE than a SINGLE line of code. For those with this thought, check out the capabilities of the
coding language with modern hardware
.
Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip! | 18 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8155854",
"author": "Steev",
"timestamp": "2025-07-29T11:43:34",
"content": "For more small basic goodness, don’t forget the 10 liner competition:https://bunsen.itch.io/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8155870",
"author": "A... | 1,760,371,470.984721 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/29/solar-light-mains-light-yes/ | Solar Light? Mains Light? Yes! | Al Williams | [
"green hacks",
"Solar Hacks"
] | [
"MOSFETS",
"solar power"
] | So you want a light that runs off solar power. But you don’t want it to go dark if your batteries discharge. The answer? A solar-mains hybrid lamp. You could use solar-charged batteries until they fall below a certain point and then switch to mains, but that’s not nearly cool enough. [Vijay Deshpande] shows how to make a
lamp that draws only the power it needs from the mains
.
The circuit uses DC operation and does not feed power back into the electric grid. It still works if the mains is down, assuming the solar power supply is still able to power the lamp. In addition, according to [Vijay], it will last up to 15 years with little maintenance.
The circuit was developed in response to an earlier project that utilized solar power to directly drive the light, when possible. If the light was off, the solar power went to waste. Also, if the mains power failed at night, no light.
The answer, of course, is to add a battery to the system and appropriate switching to drive the lights or charge the battery and only draw power from the mains when needed. Since the battery can take up the slack, it becomes easier to load balance. In periods of low sunlight, the battery provides the missing power until it can’t and then the mains supply takes over.
Comparators determine whether there is an under-voltage or over-voltage and use this information to decide whether the battery charges or if the main supply takes over. Some beefy MOSFETs take care of the switching duties. Overall, a good way to save and reuse solar cell output while still drawing from the grid when necessary.
Small solar lights don’t take much
, but won’t draw from commercial power. Solar “
generators
” are all the rage right now, and you could probably adapt this idea for that use, too. | 21 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8155823",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-07-29T09:48:10",
"content": "This is quite bad honestly.The faux BMS is really not needed (with its 0.5mA continuous drain!), SLA batteries can work well without kids gloves. The undervoltage lockout is useful though.This entire pr... | 1,760,371,471.043537 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/28/2025-one-hertz-challenge-drop-the-beat-but-only-at-60-bpm/ | 2025 One Hertz Challenge: Drop The Beat (But Only At 60 BPM) | Adam Zeloof | [
"clock hacks",
"contests"
] | [
"drip",
"Raspberry Pi Pico",
"rp2040",
"water"
] | Mankind has been using water to mark the passage of time for thousands of years. From dripping stone pots in Ancient Egypt to the more mechanically-complicated Greco-Roman Clepsydrae, the history of timekeeping is a wet one — and it makes sense. As an incompressible fluid, water flows in very predictable patterns. If you fill a leaky pot with water and it takes an hour to drain, it will also take an hour the next time you try. One Hertz Challenge entrant [johnowhitaker] took this idea in a different direction, however, with
an electromechanical clock that uses dripping water as an indicator
.
This clock uses a solenoid to briefly pop the plunger out of a water-filled syringe. This allows a drop to fall from the tip, into a waiting beaker. In addition to the satisfying audio indication this produces, [johnowhitaker] added a bit of food coloring to the dripping water for visual flair. The entire thing is controlled by a Raspberry Pi Pico and a motor driver board, so if you’ve got some spare parts lying about and would like to build your own be sure to head over to the project page and grab the source code.
While this clock isn’t exactly here for a long time (either the syringe will eventually empty or the beaker will overflow), it’s certainly here for a good time. [John] and commenters on his project even have ideas for the next steps: a 1/60 Hz beaker changer, and a 1/600 Hz spill cleaner. Even so, the first couple of drops hitting the beaker produce a lovely lava lamp-esque cloud that is a joy to watch and has us thinking about other
microfluidics projects we’ve seen
.
And remember — it’s
not too late to enter the 2025 One Hertz Challenge
! | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8155982",
"author": "Phill",
"timestamp": "2025-07-29T22:32:15",
"content": "I hope that’s not printer ink – It would be the most expensive clock ever made!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,471.172604 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/28/models-of-wave-propagation/ | Models Of Wave Propagation | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"physics",
"turbo pascal",
"wave propagation"
] | [Stoppi] always has interesting blog posts and videos, even when we don’t understand all the German in them. The latest?
Computer simulation of wave propagation
(
Google Translate link
), which, if nothing else, makes pretty pictures that work in any language. Check out the video below.
Luckily, most browsers will translate for you these days, or you can use a website. We’ve seen waves modeled with springs before, but between the explanations and the accompanying Turbo Pascal source code, this is worth checking out.
We can’t explain it better than [Stoppi] who writes:
The model consists of individual atoms with the mass m, which are connected to each other by springs with the spring constant k. To start, I deflect the first atom sinusoidally. According to this, the individual atoms obey Newton’s equation of motion F = m·a, whereby Hook’s spring law F = k·Δl is used for the force F. I solved these differential equations iteratively using the Euler method. The movement of the atoms is restricted in the y-direction. At the beginning, the number of atoms, their mass m and the spring constant k must be entered. In addition, you can choose between transverse or longitudinal deflection and whether you want the reflection at the free or fixed end.
Can you get better simulations? Of course. But will this help you develop more intuitive understanding? Maybe. If you are interested in simulating the physical world, don’t forget
TinkerCad
has added that capability. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8155677",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-07-29T02:49:53",
"content": "Turbo PascalWow, didn’t see that coming. I was expecting either something 21st century or a pre-1970 version of FORTRAN (now Fortran)source codeDID see that coming.Fun fact: When Frank Hayes was a boy, FO... | 1,760,371,471.656625 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/28/skateboard-wheels-add-capabilities-to-plasma-cutter/ | Skateboard Wheels Add Capabilities To Plasma Cutter | Bryan Cockfield | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"cnc",
"cutting",
"miter",
"notch",
"pipe",
"plasma cutter",
"skateboard",
"wheels"
] | Although firmly entrenched in the cultural zeitgeist now, the skateboard wasn’t always a staple of popular culture. It had a pretty rocky start as surfers jankily attached roller skating hardware to wooden planks searching for wave-riding experiences on land. From those rough beginnings it still took decades of innovation until Rodney Mullen adapted the ollie for flatground skating before the sport really took off. Skateboard hardware is quite elegant now too; the way leaning turns the board due to the shape of the trucks is immediately intuitive for even the most beginner riders, and bearing technology is so high-quality and inexpensive now that skateboard hardware is a go-to parts bin grab for plenty of other projects
like this plasma cutter modification
.
[The Fabrication Series]’s plasma cutter is mounted to a CNC machine, allowing for many complex cuts in much less time than it would take to do by hand. But cutting tubes is a more complicated endeavor for a machine like this. This is where the skateboard hardware comes in: by fabricating two custom pivoting arms each with two skateboard wheels that push down on a tube to hold it in place, the CNC machine can roll the tube along the table in a precise way as the plasma cutter works through it.
Of course, cutting a moving part is a little more complicated for the CNC machine than cutting a fixed piece of sheet metal, so [The Fabrication Series] walks us through a few ways of cutting pipe for various purposes, including miters and notches. The first step is to build a model of the pipes, in this case using Onshape, and then converting the 3D model of the pipes into a sheet metal model that the CNC machine can use. It does take a few cuts on the machine to fine-tune the cuts, but in no time the machine is effortlessly cutting complex shapes into the pipe. Don’t have a plasma cutter at all?
You can always build your own from scratch
.
Thanks to [JohnU] and [paulvdh] for the tip! | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8155643",
"author": "Skyler",
"timestamp": "2025-07-29T01:10:39",
"content": "That’s clever!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8155766",
"author": "irox",
"timestamp": "2025-07-29T06:53:31",
"content": "Another approac... | 1,760,371,471.698336 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/28/destructive-testing-of-abs-and-carbon-fiber-nylon-parts/ | Destructive Testing Of ABS And Carbon Fiber Nylon Parts | Maya Posch | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"abs",
"FDM",
"nylon"
] | PAHT-CF part printed at 45 degrees, with reinforcing bolt, post-failure. (Credit: Functional Print Friday, YouTube)
The good part about FDM 3D printing is that there are so many different filament types and parameters to choose from. This is also the bad part, as it can often be hard to tell what impact a change has. Fortunately we got destructive testing to provide us with some information here. Case in point [Functional Print Friday] on YouTube
recently testing out a few iterations
of a replacement part for a car.
The original part was in ABS, printed horizontally in a Bambu Lab FDM printer, which had a protruding element snapped off while in use. In addition to printing a replacement in carbon fiber-reinforced nylon (
PAHT-CF
, i.e. PA12 instead of the typical PA6), the part was now also printed at a 45° angle. To compare it with the original ABS filament in a more favorable way, the same part was reprinted at the same angle in ABS.
Another change was to add a machine screw to the stop element of the part, which turned out to make a massive difference. Whereas the original horizontal ABS print failed early and cleanly on layer lines, the angled versions put up much more of a fight, with the machine screw-reinforced stop combined with the PA12 CF filament maxing out the first meter.
The take-away here appears to be that not only angles are good, but that adding a few strategic metal screws can do wonders, even if you’re not using a more exotic filament type. | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8155465",
"author": "Grawp",
"timestamp": "2025-07-28T20:33:01",
"content": "But isn’t CF like a new age asbeatos?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8155487",
"author": "Jace",
"timestamp": "2025-07-28T21:01:44",... | 1,760,371,471.750097 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/27/the-power-free-tag-emulator/ | The Power-Free Tag Emulator | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"13.56mhz",
"emulator",
"NFC"
] | Most of you know how an NFC tag works. The reader creates an RF field that has enough energy to power the electronics in the tag; when the tag wakes up, two-way communication ensues. We’re accustomed to blank tags that can be reprogrammed, and devices like the Flipper Zero that can emulate a tag. In between those two is [MCUer]’s
power-free tag emulator
, a board which uses NFC receiver hardware to power a small microcontroller that can run emulation code.
The microcontroller in question is the low-power CW32L010 from Wuhan Xinyuan Semiconductor, a Chinese part with an ARM Cortex M0+ on board. Unfortunately, that’s where the interesting news ends, because all we can glean from
the GitHub repository
is a PCB layout. Not even a circuit diagram, which we hope is an unintended omission rather than deliberate. It does, however, lend itself to the fostering of ideas, because if this designer can’t furnish a schematic, then perhaps you can.
It’s not difficult to make an NFC receiver
, so perhaps you can hook one up to a microcontroller and be the one who shares the circuit. | 20 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8155053",
"author": "linus io",
"timestamp": "2025-07-28T07:44:41",
"content": "Wonder what kinds of NFC it can emulate. Looked into this project some years ago, which is only for RFID at 125kHz I think but still fascinatinghttps://scanlime.org/2012/12/avr-rfid-optimized-and-ported-... | 1,760,371,471.615696 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/27/hackaday-links-july-27-2025/ | Hackaday Links: July 27, 2025 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"70 cm",
"allocation",
"angular momentum",
"Earth science",
"fcc",
"gridfinity",
"hackaday links",
"Kaizenm foam",
"length of day",
"microsoft",
"organization",
"poop",
"ransomware",
"rotation",
"sequester",
"shadowbox",
"spectrum",
"tools",
"uhf"
] | Sad breaking news late this Sunday afternoon of
the passing of nerd icon Tom Lehrer at 97
. Coming up through the culture, knowing at least a few of Tom’s ditties, preferably “The Elements” or “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” was as essential to proving one’s bona fides as committing most Monty Python bits to memory. Tom had a way with words that belied his background as a mathematician, spicing his sarcastic lyrics with unusual rhymes and topical references that captured the turbulence of the late 50s and early 60s, which is when he wrote most of his well-known stuff. First Ozzy, then Chuck Mangione, now Tom Lehrer — it’s been a rough week for musicians.
Here we go again. It looks like
hams have another spectrum grab on their hands
, but this time it’s the popular 70-cm band that’s in the crosshairs. Starlink wannabe AST SpaceMobile, which seeks to build a constellation of 248
ridiculously large communication satellites
to offer direct-to-device service across the globe, seeks a substantial chunk of the 70-cm band, from 430 to 440 MHz, to control the satellites. This is smack in the middle of the 70-cm amateur radio band allocation here in the US, but covers the entire band for unlucky hams in Europe and the UK. The band is frequently used for repeaters, which newbie hams can easily access using
a cheap hand-held radio
to start learning the ropes.
We dug into some of
AST’s filings
with the US Federal Communications Commission to try to tease out some details, which was about as much fun as it sounds. From what we gather, AST is already licensed by the FCC for 430-440MHz for its five-satellite test constellation, so that’s a done deal. What they seek now is a modification of their license to support the full constellation, which would put 243 additional satellites that are three times the size of those already deployed into low-Earth orbit between 520 and 685 kilometers. The request for 430-440MHz is for emergency telemetry and tracking purposes outside the United States. While this seems like it would have a limited impact, experience has shown that it’s usually worse in practice than it seems on paper.
The ways that some megacorporations find to spend money often boggles the mind, especially for those of us down here at the more modest end of the economic spectrum. But Microsoft spending
close to two billion dollars on poop
takes that to a whole new level. The company agreed to purchase 4.9 million metric tons of manure, sewage sludge, and agricultural waste over the next twelve years and turn it into a slurry (yum). The poop-shake will then be pumped deep underground to sequester the carbon dioxide and methane that would otherwise be released to the atmosphere, offsetting the greenhouse emissions racked up by the company’s data centers. One assumes that the destination for this material will be some sort of impervious geological formation, such as the ones that trapped the natural gas created by ancient rotting vegetation, or it would defeat the purpose. So essentially, Microsoft is creating new natural gas deposits that could be tapped by future generations. It’s a circle of life.
Did this week seem to fly by for you? It did for us, and perhaps the fact that
Tuesday was the second-shortest day in recorded history
had something to do with it. The 22nd was 1.34 milliseconds shorter than a nominal 86,400-second day — that’s 15.5 parts per billion for those playing along at home — thanks to a burst of rotational speed. The record for the shortest day was set last July, when the 5th clocked in a blazing 1.66 milliseconds faster than the nominal 24-hour day. As for the cause of this burst of speed, explanations range from redistribution of mass thanks to melting polar ice to weird things happening inside the liquid core of the planet, but whatever it is, it just means less sleep for us.
What do you mean? “qwerty1234” seems like a perfectly fine password to us! Or maybe not, now that a 158-year-old company in the UK has
ceased operations thanks to a weak email password
. Knights of Old, a trucking company in Northamptonshire (wait — if it’s England, does that make it a “lorrying” company? Or maybe it’s just a drayage?), got hit with a ransomware attack that leveraged an employee’s easily guessed email password. Once in, the attackers did the usual file encryption thing before issuing their demand for £5 million. That amount was beyond the company’s means, so they just noped out and folded up operations. It seems a little hinky to us that a 700-employee company would just throw in the towel like that without trying to at least negotiate with the attackers, but on the other hand, we’d have loved to see the look on their faces when the company just said, “Nah, we’re good.” At least they didn’t put much effort into the attack.
And finally, if you’ve got Kaizen-envy but don’t know where to start, take a look at
Tool Trace
. It’s a service that purports to create Kaizen foam inserts for organizing your tool drawers directly from a photo. All you’ve got to do is arrange the tools the way you want them in the drawer and take a picture. You need to include a sheet of paper in the photo for scale, either A4 or 8-1/2″x11″, and the app will spit out a DXF or SVG file of the shadowbox outlines. It’s Gridfinity-compatible, too, in case foam alone isn’t anal enough for you. You can then either cut the foam yourself or send the files out to a commercial outfit for manufacturing. We’ve always coveted an ultra-organized toolbox, so this might be fun to try, but it does seem like it has strong potential to trigger a descent into madness. We’ll let you know how it goes. | 9 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8154960",
"author": "yet another bruce",
"timestamp": "2025-07-28T00:32:40",
"content": "My name is Columba Livia and you poisoned my ancestors and mocked them, prepare to die.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8154974",
"auth... | 1,760,371,471.554914 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/27/2025-one-hertz-challenge-rpi-tinynumberhat9/ | 2025 One Hertz Challenge: RPI TinynumberHat9 | Matt Varian | [
"contests"
] | [
"2025 Hackaday One Hertz Challenge",
"HT16K33"
] | This eye-catching entry to the One Hertz Challenge pairs vintage LED indicators with a modern RPi board to create a one-of-a-kind clock. The
RPI TinynumberHat9
by [Andrew] brings back the beautiful interface from high end electronics of the past.
This project is centered around the red AL304 and green ALS314V 7-segment display chips. These 7-segment displays were produced in the 1970s and 1980s in the Soviet Union; you can still find them, but you’ll have to do some digging as they are only becoming more rare. [Andrew] included the data sheet for these which was a good find, it is written in Russian but doesn’t hold any surprises, these tiny LEDs typically forward current is 5mA at 2V. One of the things that jumps out about these LEDs is the gold leads, a sure sign of being a high-end component of their day.
When selecting a driving chip for the LEDs, [Andrew] looked at the MAX7219 and HT16K33; he settled on the HT16K33 as it supports I2C as well as allows the easy addition of buttons to the HAT. Due to being driven by I2C, he was also able to add a Qwiic/Stemma I2C connector, so while designed initially to be a HAT for a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W board, it can be connected to other things in the Qwiic/Stemma ecosystem.
Thanks [Andrew] for submitting this beautiful entry into the One Hertz Challenge. We love unique
7-segment displays
, and so it’s pretty awesome to see 40-year-old display tech brought into the present. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8154965",
"author": "Observer",
"timestamp": "2025-07-28T01:06:23",
"content": "I remember building a homebrew frequency counter back in the 80’s using some HP display modules that had this kind of aesthetic. IIRC, each module contained a 7-segment Red LED digit, a 4 bit latch, and ... | 1,760,371,472.088954 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/27/a-very-tidy-handheld-pi-terminal-indeed/ | A Very Tidy Handheld Pi Terminal Indeed | Jenny List | [
"handhelds hacks"
] | [
"handheld",
"hyperpixel",
"Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W"
] | As single board computers have become ever smaller and more powerful, so have those experimenting with them tried to push the boundaries of the machines they can be used in. First we had cyberdecks, and now we have handheld terminals. Of this latter class we have
a particularly nice example from [Random Alley Cat]
. It takes a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W and a handful of other parts, and makes them with a 3D printed case into something very professional indeed.
One of the problems with these designs has always been tidily packing away all the parts with their cables, and it’s one she solves by making a chassis to hold all the parts, and a case which fits around that. In a stroke the case no longer has to provide a dual function, allowing for a much easier internal layout. Her screen is a Pimoroni Hyperpixel, the keyboard is an Xbox 360 accessory, and the power supply is an off the shelf Pi UPS board and battery.
We particularly like the accesses on the underside of this machine to access the Pi ports, and the ventilation holes and external case details. It’s not perfect, as she says in the video below it’s not the best Linux keyboard. but we could really see ourselves using this.
If you follow handheld cyberdecks, we have a few treats for you on these pages.
Not all of them run Linux
, for example.
Thanks [Sysop] for the tip! | 30 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8154889",
"author": "34t34t",
"timestamp": "2025-07-27T19:18:44",
"content": "to fat, short time workingsorry but still old pocket vaio is better or sony palm ux50 worling longest",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8154893",
... | 1,760,371,471.86588 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/27/game-boy-camera-in-wedding-photo-booth/ | Game Boy Camera In Wedding Photo Booth | Bryan Cockfield | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"camera",
"flask",
"game boy",
"game boy camera",
"game boy printer",
"photo booth",
"photography",
"raspberry pi",
"wedding"
] | For those of a certain age the first digital camera many of us experienced was the Game Boy Camera, an add-on for the original Game Boy console. Although it only took pictures with the limited 4-tone monochrome graphics of this system, its capability of being able to take a picture, edit it, create drawings, and then print them out on the Game Boy Printer was revolutionary for the time. Of course the people who grew up with this hardware are about the age to be getting married now (or well beyond), so [Sebastian] capitalized on the nostalgia for it with
this wedding photo booth that takes pictures with the Game Boy Camera
.
The photo booth features the eponymous Game Boy Camera front-and-center, with a pair of large buttons to allow the wedding guests to start the photography process. The system takes video and then isolates a few still images from it to be printed with the Game Boy Printer. The original Game Boy hardware, as well as a Flask-based web app with a GUI, is all controlled with a Raspberry Pi 4. There’s also a piece of Game Boy hardware called the GB Interceptor that sits between the Game Boy console and the camera cartridge itself which allows the Pi to capture the video feed directly.
The booth doesn’t stop with Game Boy hardware, though. There’s also a modern mirrorless digital camera set up in the booth alongside the Game Boy Camera which allows for higher resolution, full color images to be taken as well. This is also controlled with the same hardware and provides a more modern photo booth experience next to the nostalgic one provided by the Game Boy. There have been many projects which attempt to modernize this hardware, though,
like this build which adds color to the original monochrome photos
or
this one which adds Wi-Fi capability
. | 12 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8154907",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-07-27T20:56:55",
"content": "Millennials (hopefully) on their second marriages I see",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8154937",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025... | 1,760,371,471.801297 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/27/a-cable-modem-the-way-all-network-gear-should-be-mounted/ | A Cable Modem, The Way All Network Gear Should Be Mounted | Jenny List | [
"Network Hacks"
] | [
"19-inch",
"19-inch rack",
"network modem"
] | Home routers and cable modems are now extremely powerful devices, but they all suffer from the attention of their manufacturers’ design and marketing departments. Instead of neatly packaging them in functional cases, they impose aesthetics and corporate identity on them, usually resulting in a curvy plastic case that’s difficult to integrate with other network infrastructure. [The Eccentric Workshop] did something about this with their new Arris modem,
by creating a new 19″ rack mount for it
.
Unusually for such a device, the plastic case was easy to dismantle. There’s a PCB inside, and a light guide for its LEDs. A new lower-half case and light guide were designed and 3D printed, and the whole was then mounted in a 1U rack case. The special part of this hack perhaps lies in the front panel, a very professionally cut and laser etched affair complete with an Arris logo as though it were meant to be this way.
We also like having our infrastructure
and other things
in a rack here at Hackaday, and fondly remember the days when some surprisingly affordable boxes came with metal wings for rack mounting. It’s always possible to use a rack tray, but something like this is so much more attractive. | 25 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8154832",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-07-27T13:41:31",
"content": "It’s got to be said, I do like a nice rack.Especially when it’s all neatly tied up and organised",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8154888",
"au... | 1,760,371,471.927851 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/27/a-non-sony-playstation-motherboard-replacement/ | A Non-Sony Playstation Motherboard Replacement | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Games"
] | [
"gaming",
"hardware",
"motherboard",
"nsone",
"original hardware",
"playstation",
"replacement",
"retro"
] | As hardware ages, it becomes harder and harder to keep it in service. Whether that’s because of physical aging or lack of support from the company who built it in the first place, time is not generally good for electronics, especially when it comes to our beloved retro gaming systems. The first Playstation, for example, is starting to see some of the deleterious effects of having originally been built in the 90s, and [LorentioB] has
a new, third-party motherboard to bring to the table to keep these systems online
as well as adding some features in that Sony removed.
The motherboard is known as the nsOne, meaning Not Sony’s One since this is the first motherboard built by a single person outside of Sony. It’s not based on any FPGAs or emulators and is completely compatible with all of the original hardware, chips, and other circuitry of the original Playstation. Based on the PU-23 series, it even revives the removed parallel port, which Sony removed after the first versions of the hardware because of region locking concerns and other pro-consumer issues. Every chip footprint and connector was reverse engineered manually, using optical sanding, scanning, and net-by-net tracing.
For such a complex piece of hardware this is quite the feat, and for anyone who wants to restore old hardware or add the parallel port back on to their system this could be a game changer. [LorentioB] is not quite finished yet but hopes to have a finished version shortly. As far as fully opening up the system goes, there are some software hacks to look at
that allow more games to run on the system
and
some hardware hacks that open the system up as well
. | 12 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8154805",
"author": "WTF Detector",
"timestamp": "2025-07-27T10:40:08",
"content": "Holy moly, that’s a clean-looking board. Amazing work by [LorentioB]!I wonder if they have any plans to extend their skills towards the many PlayStation-based arcade platforms, too. One of the really... | 1,760,371,471.97448 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/28/2025-one-hertz-challenge-clock-calibrator/ | 2025 One-Hertz Challenge: Clock Calibrator | Lewin Day | [
"clock hacks",
"contests"
] | [
"2025 Hackaday One Hertz Challenge",
"calibration",
"clock",
"clock calibration",
"timing"
] | Wall clocks! Are they very accurate? Well, sometimes they are, and sometimes they lose minutes a day. If you’ve got one that needs calibrating,
you might like this device from [Lauri Pirttiaho].
Most cheap wall clocks use very similar mechanisms based around the
Lavet-type stepper motor
. These are usually driven by a chip-on-board oscillator that may or may not be particularly accurate.
[Lauri] desired a way to tune up these cheap clocks by using GPS-level timing accuracy. Thus began a project based around a CY8KIT evaluation board from Cypress. The microcontroller is paired with a small character LCD as a user interface, and hooked up to a cheap GPS module with an accurate 1-pulse-per-second (1PPS) timing output. The concept is simple enough. Clock drift is measured by using counters in the microcontroller to compare the timing of the GPS 1PPS output and the pulses driving the Lavet-type stepper motor. The difference between the two can be read off the device, and used to determine if the wall clock is fast or slow. Then one need only use a trimmer capacitor to tweak the wall clock’s pulse rate in order to make it more accurate.
Few of us spend much time calibrating low-cost wall clocks to high levels of accuracy. If that sounds like a fun hobby to you, or your name is Garrus, you would probably find [Lauri]’s device remarkably useful. Believe it or not,
this isn’t the first clock calibrator we’ve seen, either.
Meanwhile, if you’ve brewed up your own high-accuracy timing hardware, feel free to let us know
on the tipsline. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8155569",
"author": "Ferenc",
"timestamp": "2025-07-28T22:36:21",
"content": "I’d love to see this done to a regular pendulum clock. Perhaps by influencing the pendulum.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8155773",
"autho... | 1,760,371,472.390542 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/28/be-more-axolotl-how-humans-may-one-day-regrow-limbs-and-organs/ | Be More Axolotl: How Humans May One Day Regrow Limbs And Organs | Maya Posch | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Medical Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"axolotl",
"cellular regeneration",
"regenerative medicine"
] | Although often glossed over, the human liver is a pretty amazing organ. Not just because it’s pretty much the sole thing that prevents our food from killing us, but also because it’s the only organ in our body that is capable of significant regeneration. This is a major boon in medicine, as you can remove most of a person’s liver and it’ll happily regrow back to its original volume. Obviously this is very convenient in the case of disease or when performing a liver transplant.
Despite tissue regeneration being very common among animals, most mammalian species have only limited regenerative ability. This means that while some species can easily regrow entire limbs and organs including eyes as well as parts of their brain, us humans and our primate cousins are lucky if we can even count on our liver to do that thing, while limbs and eyes are lost forever.
This raises many questions, including whether the deactivation of regenerative capabilities is just an evolutionary glitch, and how easily we might be able to turn it back on.
Regenerating Vs Repair
Even in the absence of a regenerative ability, animals can heal injuries, which generally means the growth of fibrous tissue called scar tissue. This can be observed very clearly on our skin, where certain old injuries tend to remain clearly visible as the scar tissue replaces skin tissue. While made of the same collagen protein as skin tissue, the fiber organization is different and serves no real purpose beyond sealing up a lesion. Scar tissue can form elsewhere in the body too, where it can impede function, as in the heart and lungs.
Both regeneration and repair are a form of healing in an organism, but only the former restores the original functionality, whereas the latter is the biological equivalent of slapping on a duct tape patch and calling it good. This ‘repair’ outcome is effectively an incomplete regeneration process, where instead of the affected site creating the conditions for normal growth – leading to a good-as-new result – you only get the basic scaffolding while certain biochemical pathways are never or insufficiently activated.
Phases of wound healing. (Credit: Mikael Häggström,
Wikimedia
)
Although it’s often said that the human liver is the sole organ capable of regeneration in our species, it could be argued that our blood vessels are a much better example of regeneration. Within minutes after receiving a cut or bad scrape, any damaged blood vessels are plugged and macrophages along with other specialized cells begin to move into the area as the inflammatory phase begins.
At the end of this phase,
angiogenesis
commences, which involves existing blood vessels growing new blood vessels into the affected area. In a developing embryo, this is the stage that follows the earliest development of the initial blood vessels through vasculogenesis. In this regard, blood vessels can be said to regenerate themselves in the case of injury. They can also expand into tissues where e.g. hypoxia conditions are present, which triggers the hypoxia-inducible factor (
HIF
) signaling path.
In the case of
wound healing
this signal path is stimulated due to the hypoxia condition that exists at the injury site. Although the HIF-related
HIF-1α
subunit is constantly expressed, oxygen-dependent prolyl hydroxylases (PHDs) normally degrade it and thus downregulating the further responses down this chain.
Another aspect here is the re-epithelization, whereby surrounding skin cells move towards the wound, multiplying until the signals that induce this growth are downregulated below a critical threshold. Based on research the same HIF pathway is implicated here. For example, in a 2015 study in
Science Translational Medicine
Yong Zhang et al. reported
that forced upregulation of HIF-1α was able to induce full regeneration of a hole punched in the ears of mice who normally just show scarring.
This indicates that boosting the HIF signaling pathway might be a viable way to prevent scarring and induce full regeneration of certain types of wounds to the skin.
Blastema Limbo
Two
Ambystoma mexicanum
axolotl at the Vancouver Aquarium. (Credit: ZeWrestler,
Wikimedia
)
The HIF signaling pathway is an example of a basic regeneration pathway involving a single organ (i.e. the skin). Things get more complicated when there’s the removal of something to the extent of a limb. Among mammals regenerating ability is limited, with some species like rabbits still possessing the ability to
regenerate holes in their ears
while other species, including humans, are not creating the requisite blastema of undifferentiated cells after an amputation.
The
axolotl
is one of the most studied species when it comes to tissue regeneration. Similar to other salamanders they possess a remarkable ability to regenerate many parts of their body, with the axolotl capable of regenerating their limbs, gills, eyes and parts of their brain. Although annelids (segmented worms) and echinoderms like starfish are capable of even more extreme forms of regeneration, axolotls are significantly more akin to us mammals than either of those.
Incidentally, similar research in fruit flies (
Drosophila melanogaster
) has led us to the highly conserved
Hippo signaling pathway
. This particular signaling path is essential in determining how big an organ is supposed to be, such as when a human liver is chopped up
in vivo
and has to
regrow back to its original size
.
New Limb Cap
When an axolotl suffers severe injury like the loss of a limb or a gill, the surface where the amputation occurred gets covered up by epidermal cells, forming the wound epithelium (WE). This is the point where for human and other mammals the process pretty much ends with a stump covered up by skin. In the case of the axolotl, however, this WE keeps gathering epidermal cells, forming the apical epithelial cap (AEC).
Inside this AEC the tissues then undergo dedifferentiation into a blastema – led by
signals from macrophages
– effectively resetting the tissues here to a much earlier, embryonic state of development. Under the influence of
Hox
genes
which regulate the body’s layout, the AEC subsequently grows as it would have done previously with the very young axolotl until the entire limb, gill, eye, etc. has been regrown.
Hox protein classification across model organisms by CLANS analysis, (Credit:
Hueber et al.
, 2010)
The trick is thus to take these identified signaling pathways, establish in how far they have been preserved in other animals – like us primates – and whether we can easily re-enable them in some way, whether permanently or temporarily. After all, it worked once when we were still embryos, ergo by resetting the cellular clock on part of our bodies it would simply run through the same biochemical steps again.
Still A Lumpy Road Ahead
Of course, this involves developmental biology, biochemistry and genetic research, meaning that clear answers are rarely found and require immense amounts of research and study to unravel how all of these signaling pathways work, while maybe finding a few more ones along the way. The upshot of course is that the field of
regenerative medicine
can have massive implications for human health, ranging from the ability to treat many (genetic) disorders related to faulty signaling pathways to the ability regrow limbs, eyes and more.
It’s likely that regenerating skin and directly related tissues in human patients will be one of the first widescale applications of these findings, with recently Weifeng Lin et al.
publishing a study
in
Science
involving regrowing a damaged outer ear (pinna) of mice and rats through the addition of
retinoic acid
(RA), a key element in embryonic development. Specifically they identified that in non-regenerative species of rats and mice the
Aldh1a2
gene was not expressed as much as it was in species who do regenerate, which reduces the amount of available RA from the retinaldehyde precursor.
Although there’s a lot that can be said about the pros and cons of turning back on genes that haven’t been active since we were either an embryo or a still-growing-child, understanding these biochemical pathways offers us the prospect of bypassing them in order to restore that which once was thought to be lost forever. Even if we won’t be regrowing limbs yet next year, we might be giving people back their pinna, digits, faces and erase old scars before we know it.
“
Closeup of Axolotl in Hand
” by [Yaiol AI]
“
Purple Tropical Axolotl
” by[ Raphael Brasileiro] | 26 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8155371",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-07-28T18:10:23",
"content": "Here here for regeneration of the hair cells in hearing. I heard for 30 years or more about being able to do this in human subjects. Chickens do it!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies... | 1,760,371,472.2963 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/28/learn-computing-head-for-montana/ | Learn Computing? Head For MonTana! | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"cpu",
"gameboy",
"learning computer",
"pdp-11"
] | We’ve often thought that it must be harder than ever to learn about computers. Every year, there’s more to learn, so instead of making the gentle slope from college mainframe, to Commodore 64, to IBM PC, to NVidia supercomputer, you have to start at the end. But, really, you don’t. You can always emulate computers from simpler times, and even if you don’t need to, it can be a lot of fun.
That’s the idea behind the
MonTana
mini-computer. It combines “…ideas from the PDP-11, MIPS, Scott CPU, Game Boy, and JVM to make a relatively simple 16-bit computer…”
The computer runs on Java, so you can try it nearly anywhere. The console is accessed through a web browser and displays views of memory, registers, and even something that resembles a Game Boy screen. You’ll need to use assembly language until you write your own high-level language (we’d suggest Forth). There is, however, a simple operating system, MTOS.
This is clearly made for use in a classroom, and we’d love to teach a class around a computer like this. The whole thing reminds us of a 16-bit computer like the PDP-11 where everything is a two-byte word. There are only 4K bytes of memory (so 2K words). However, you can accomplish a great deal in that limited space. Thanks to the MTOS API, you don’t have to worry about writing text to the screen and other trivia.
It looks like fun. Let us know what you’ll use it for. If you want to go down a level, try
CARDIAC
. Or skip ahead a little, and teach kids
QBasic
. | 10 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8155304",
"author": "UnderSampled",
"timestamp": "2025-07-28T15:42:29",
"content": "WASM-4 is another good option.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8155368",
"author": "Jon Mayo",
"timestamp": "2025-07-28T18:05:... | 1,760,371,472.345785 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/28/a-history-of-pong/ | A History Of Pong | Al Williams | [
"Featured",
"Games",
"History",
"Original Art",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"general instruments",
"Magnavox Odyssey",
"pong",
"video games"
] | Today, creating a ground-breaking video game is akin to making a movie. You need a story, graphic artists, music, and more. But until the middle of the 20th century, there were no video games. While several games can claim to be the “first” electronic or video game, one is cemented in our collective memory as the first one we’d heard of: Pong.
The truth is, Pong wasn’t the first video game. We suspect that many people might have had the idea, but Ralph Baer is most associated with inventing a practical video game. As a young engineer in 1951, he tried to convince his company to invest in games that you could play on your TV set. They didn’t like the idea, but Ralph would remember the concept and act on it over a decade later.
But was it really the first time anyone had thought of it? Perhaps not. Thomas Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed a
patent
in 1947 for a game that simulated launching missiles at targets with an oscilloscope display. The box took eight tubes and, being an oscilloscope, was a vector graphic device. The targets were physical dots on a screen overlay. These “amusement devices” were very expensive, and they only produced handmade prototypes.
Between 1952 and 1961, computers were coming into their own. In the UK, a man named Douglas used the CRT display of EDSAC to play naughts and crosses — also known as tic-tac-toe to Americans. Interestingly, the display was sort of “bit mapped” as it showed the bits in one of the machine’s mercury delay lines. The program featured an algorithm-driven computer player that was capable of beating humans.
Meanwhile, in 1958 at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Willy Higginbotham used an analog computer and an oscilloscope to allow two people to play “tennis” against each other. There was no computer player, but still. You can see a video below. The machine didn’t survive, but the Lab built a replica in 1997.
By 1961, MIT had Spacewar running on a DEC PDP-1, which became fairly famous. However, it would take Ralph Baer — remember him? — to bring the game into your home.
In 1966, he revisited his old idea and had built seven prototype games by 1968, aided by $2,500 from his employer and a couple of engineers. The resulting “brown box” game (so called because the final prototype had a simulated wood case created using brown tape) was shopped around until Magnavox decided to produce it. By the way, Baer would go on to also invent Simon and a few other games, but that’s another story.
1972: A Game Odyssey
Magnavox liked the brown box and signed a deal to produce a game based on it. In May 1972, Odyssey hit store shelves. By today’s standards, it wasn’t much. Just one or two paddles and a moving dot. Graphics and color were plastic overlays on your screen. Check out those controllers in the promotional video below.
The Odyssey looked good, but its controller design was unusual. (Public Domain)
In a year, the box sold 69,000 units. By 1975, there were 350,000 out in the world. The $99.95 price was high for those days. They did some test marketing with the system, then called Skill-O-Vision, and decided to add some generic board games that seemed pretty pointless. If you wanted the shooting game that was part of the prototypes, that was extra.
It is hard to remember how unusual the idea of hooking something up to your TV was in the early 1970s. If you read the announcement in the February 1973 issue of
Popular Electronics
, you’ll see they explain about the antenna-game switch and note that it is “safe for youngsters.”
Oh, and if you are under a certain age, you might have to stretch your imagination of what an 18-inch TV looks like. It was a different world and arcades in those days had electromechanical devices like pinball machines, bowling machines, and very rare games that had real electronics in them.
Pong?
You might notice that the video doesn’t mention Pong. The reason? While what we call Pong was one of the 12 games on the Odyssey, it wasn’t called that. That name was from Atari and Nolan Bushnell (who later started Chuck E. Cheese).
Bushnell wanted to create electronic games after working while in college for an amusement park where he’d seen electromechanical arcade games. He set out with a partner, Ted Dabney, to form a company to create a game similar to Spacewar. Called Computer Space, it arrived in amusement parks and similar venues in 1970 with the help of partner company Nutting Associates.
The game was a commercial flop. However, Bushnell wanted to try again. He hired Allan Alcorn. Here’s where the story gets strange.
The goal was to build a driving game for Bally, but Alcorn had no experience with games. Bushnell claims that he had played tennis on a PDP-1 in college and decided to get Alcorn to create a tennis game as a warm-up project. However, there is considerable evidence that Bushnell had, in fact, seen the Magnavox Odyssey and was looking to copy it.
Whatever the truth is, a prototype Pong game wound up in a local bar late in 1972, about three months after the Odyssey was on store shelves. It was such a hit that the coin acceptor filled up in only a few days.
Bushnell originally shopped the game to Bally, where he wanted to use it to fulfill his existing contract, and to Midway. However, once he realized it was a hit, he decided Atari should produce it themselves. He told Bally that Midway didn’t want it. Then he told Midway that Bally didn’t want it. As a result, both declined to buy the machine. A few months later, Atari started producing Pong arcade games for sale.
Back Home
The Tele-Games was Atari’s 1975 home version of Pong.
CC-BY-SA 3.0
by [Evan Amos]
Atari realized they could tap into the same market as the Odyssey and set out to build a home system using a custom LSI chip, which — in those days — cost quite a bit to produce (about $50,000 then; $388,000 today). Code named Darlene, the device was ready by late 1974. Sears ordered 150,000 rebranded as “Sears’ Tele-Games” and sold them for $98.95. You’d have to drop an extra eight bucks for the AC power adapter.
This led to Magnavox suing Atari. Atari capitulated and struck a deal to be considered a licensee for $1.5 million and other concessions.
During the same time, Magnavox was also feeling the pinch of production costs. The box, which had cost $37 to produce, was up to $47, and there was no appetite for raising the $100 price tag. To make it more affordable, they also turned to integrated circuits (the original was full of discrete devices and was entirely analog).
Chips for the Win
Magnavox used Texas Instruments to develop a chip set for its new 1975 games. TI developed more advanced chips, and by combining chips, you could make new kinds of games. By 1976, TI began selling these parts to the general public. However, they would ultimately not succeed because another company had arguably done a better job: General Instruments.
It was very easy to build a video game with the General Instruments chip.
General Instruments created the single-chip Pong game. The AY-3-8500 was nearly everything you needed to create a Pong game. In fact, it could also play soccer, squash (one or two players), and two rifle games, with the right equipment. You could add a few components to get color and a few more to get four players instead of two.
These chips were cheap and made it extremely simple to create a workable video game. If you had a way to sell them, this was the answer. Coleco was the first, but not the last, to be a customer. We’ve heard there were over 200 products from the era that utilized the IC, including the Odyssey 2000 and 3000, Radio Shack’s TV Scoreboard, and Sears’ Hockey Pong. The chips were also popular among hobby builders. Prior to that, it was a big project to make even a simple game (like the one on page 61 of the
November 1972
Popular Electronics
magazine).
The AY-3-8500 wasn’t, however, the only game in town — no pun intended. National Semiconductor had its own entry into the market. MOSTek was another entrant. They all played the same basic games with a bouncing ball and some controllers. None of these could stand against General Instruments’ momentum. We saw one of these recently in one of the
many little-known attempts
to cash in on the video game craze.
A company called Universal Research produced the F4301 in 1976. It featured two tennis-like games, as well as two unique car racing games. This helped it a bit, but it was still no match for the simple designs possible with the General Instruments devices. Even TI finally threw in the towel and produced a clone of the General Instrument chip.
There were so many of these made that they are still
easy to find and use
. Even on a
breadboard
. Can’t imagine how you’d do this without a chip?
Simulate it
.
The Future
Who could have imagined where games on video screens would go? In 1978, Space Invaders hit the arcade scene. But that’s an entirely different subject. | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8155298",
"author": "Doctor Duck",
"timestamp": "2025-07-28T15:35:14",
"content": "Not to mention the Fairchild, which arrived in 1976 and was the first to use cartridges. Expensive console, but lots of $20 games",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,371,472.599119 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/28/wayland-will-never-be-ready-for-every-x11-user/ | Wayland Will Never Be Ready For Every X11 User | Maya Posch | [
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"Wayland",
"x11"
] | After more than forty years, everyone knows that it’s time to retire the X Window System – X11 for short – on account of it being old and decrepit. Or at least that’s what the common narrative is, because if you dig into the chatter surrounding the ongoing transition there are some real issues that people have with the 16-year old spring chicken – called Wayland – that’s supposed to replace it.
Recently [Brodie Robertson] did some polling and soliciting commentary from the community,
breaking down the results
from over 1,150 comments to the YouTube community post alone.
The issues range from the expected, such as applications that haven’t been ported yet from X11 to Wayland, to compatibility issues – such as failing drag and drop – when running X11 and Wayland applications side by side. Things get worse when support for older hardware, like GeForce GT610 and GT710 GPUs, and increased resource usage by Wayland are considered.
From there it continues with the lack of global hotkeys in Wayland,
graphics tablet support
issues, OBS not supporting embedded browser windows, Japanese and other foreign as well as onscreen keyboard support issues that are somehow worse than on X11, no support for overscanning monitors or multiple mouse cursors, no
multi-monitor fullscreen
option, regressions with accessibility, inability of applications to set their (previously saved) window position, no real automation alternative for
xdotool
, lacking BSD support and worse input latency with gaming.
Some users also simply say that they do not care about Wayland either way as it offers no new features they want. Finally [Brodie] raises the issue of the Wayland developers not simply following standards set by the Windows and MacOS desktops, something which among other issues has been a point of hotly debated contention
for years
.
Even if Wayland does end up succeeding X11, the one point that many people seem to agree on is that just because X11 is pretty terrible right now, this doesn’t automatically make Wayland the better option. Maybe in hindsight
Mir
was the better choice we had before it pivoted to Wayland. | 140 | 32 | [
{
"comment_id": "8155167",
"author": "Some One",
"timestamp": "2025-07-28T11:40:44",
"content": "There’s definitely regressions that need to be fixed, but the way it is presented here is just misinformation, mixing things like project-specific bugs and misunderstandings in as Wayland problems.*BSD i... | 1,760,371,472.782767 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/28/commodore-64-on-new-fpga/ | Commodore 64 On New FPGA | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"6502",
"commodore 64",
"fpga",
"hdmi",
"retrocomputing",
"tang nano 9k",
"verilog",
"vhdl",
"VIC-II"
] | When it comes to getting retro hardware running again, there are many approaches. On one hand, the easiest path could be to emulate the hardware on something modern, using nothing but software to bring it back to life. On the other, many prefer to restore the original hardware itself and make sure everything is exactly as it was when it was new. A middle way exists, though, thanks to the widespread adoption of FPGAs which allow for programmable hardware emulation
and [Jo] has come up with a new implementation of the Commodore 64 by taking this path
.
The project is called the VIC64-T9K and is meant as a proof-of-concept that can run the Commodore 64’s VIC-II video chip alongside a 6502 CPU on the inexpensive Tang Nano 9k FPGA. Taking inspiration from the C64_MiSTer project, another FPGA implementation of the C64 based on the DE10-Nano FPGA, it doesn’t implement everything an original Commodore system would have had, but it does provide most of the core hardware needed to run a system. The project supports HDMI video with a custom kernel, and [Jo] has used it to get a few demos running including sprite animations.
Built with a mix of Verilog and VHDL, it was designed as a learning tool for [Jo] to experiment with the retro hardware, and also brings a more affordable FPGA board to the table for Commodore enthusiasts. If you’re in the market for something with more of the original look and feel of the Commodore 64, though,
this project uses the original case and keyboard while still using an FPGA recreation for the core of the computer
. | 19 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8155105",
"author": "xChris",
"timestamp": "2025-07-28T10:23:58",
"content": "There are more FPGA cores on Tang 9k :https://github.com/harbaum",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8155411",
"author": "Jo",
"timestam... | 1,760,371,472.528006 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/27/experience-other-planets-with-the-gravity-simulator/ | Experience Other Planets With The Gravity Simulator | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"balance",
"gravity",
"IMU",
"planets",
"simulator",
"space"
] | As Earthlings, most of us don’t spend a lot of extra time thinking about the gravity on our home planet. Instead, we go about our days only occasionally dropping things or tripping over furniture but largely attending to other matters of more consequence. When humans visit other worlds, though, there’s a lot more consideration of the gravity and its effects on how humans live and many different ways of training for going to places like the Moon or Mars. This gravity simulator, for example, lets anyone experience what it would be like to
balance an object anywhere with different gravity from Earth’s
.
The simulator itself largely consists of a row of about 60 NeoPixels, spread out in a line along a length of lightweight PVC pipe. They’re controlled by an Arduino Nano which has a built-in inertial measurement unit, allowing it to sense the angle the pipe is being held at as well as making determinations about its movement. A set of LEDs on the NeoPixel strip is illuminated, which simulates a ball being balanced on this pipe, and motion one way or the other will allow the ball to travel back and forth along its length. With the Earth gravity setting this is fairly intuitive but when the gravity simulation is turned up for heavier planets or turned down for lighter ones the experience changes dramatically. Most of the video explains the math behind determining the effects of a rolling ball in each of these environments, which is worth taking a look at on its own.
While the device obviously can’t change the mass or the force of gravity by pressing a button, it’s a unique way to experience and feel what a small part of existence on another world might be like. With enough budget available there are certainly other ways of providing training for other amounts of gravity like parabolic flights or buoyancy tanks, although one of the other more affordable ways of doing this for laypeople
is this low-gravity acrobatic device
. | 8 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8155040",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-07-28T06:25:25",
"content": "Now to make one using a LED strip of 100 pixels per meter.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8155118",
"author": "Matthew Dwyer",
"timestamp": "2... | 1,760,371,472.433064 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/26/2025-one-hertz-challenge-shadow-clock/ | 2025 One-Hertz Challenge: Shadow Clock | Lewin Day | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"2025 Hackaday One Hertz Challenge",
"clock",
"time"
] | You can buy all kinds of conventional clocks that have hands and numbers for easy reading. Or, like [Fabio Ricci], you could build yourself something a little more esoteric,
like this neat shadow clock
.
The heart of the build is an ESP8266 microcontroller, which gets the current time via Wi-Fi by querying an NTP time server. It also uses a DS3231 real-time clock module as a backup, keeping accurate time even when a network connection is unavailable.
Time is displayed via a 60-pixel ring of WS2812B addressable LEDs. These 60 LEDs correspond to the usual per-minute graduations that you would find on a regular clock. Current hour is displayed by lighting the corresponding LED red, while minutes are shown in blue and seconds in white. It’s called a “shadow clock” because of its method of activation. IR distance sensors are used to activate the time display when a hand or finger is placed near the clock. As Fabio puts it, “shadow play” will make the clock display the time. Otherwise, it switches to be a simple round device on the wall that displays colorful animations.
It’s a neat build that looks quite unassuming as a decor piece, and yet it also serves as an easy-to-read timepiece. We’ve seen LEDs put to
all sorts of good uses in clock builds around these parts.
Meanwhile, if you’ve found your own unique way to display the time—either in readable fashion, or totally oblique—don’t hesitate to
let us know. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,472.473363 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/26/vintage-plasma-display-shows-current-rad-levels/ | Vintage Plasma Display Shows Current Rad Levels | Tyler August | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"Chernobyl",
"ESP-32",
"plasma display"
] | It’s hard to argue that Soviet-Era nuclear engineering may have some small flaws, what with the heavily-monitored exclusion zone around Chernobyl No.4. Evidently, their industrial designers were more on-the-ball, because [Alex] has crafted the
absolute most stylish fallout monitor we’ve ever seen
, with ESP32 and a vintage Soviet-designed plasma display to indicate radiation levels in the exclusion zone.
Since the device is not located within the zone, [Alex] is using the ESP32 to access sensor values published via an API at
SaveEcoBot
. He also includes a Geiger counter module for the background level at the current location. That’s straightforward enough– integrating the modern microcontroller with the vintage plasma display is where the real hacking comes in. Though they might not be as vintage as you think: apparently the Elektronika MS6205 remained in production until 2005, but 2005 is still vintage. [Alex] notes in the instructions on hackaday.io that we’re actually looking for a post-1995 model to follow along.
The Elektronika MS6205 is based on a 100×100 pixel plasma matrix, but it is operated as a text-only display with Latin and Cyrillic characters in ROM. The ROM also includes some extra symbols and Greek letters (the gamma will come in handy for this application) that can be unlocked by cutting a trace on the board and replacing it with a bodge wire. Igniting the display requires 250V, which will require more work for North Americans than it does in Ukraine. Driving the display requires interfacing with the 7-bit data bus and 8-bit address bus, but [Alex] has made the wiring and code available on the project site if you’re interested in these devices. If you want to watch it in action and get more background, check out the video embedded below.
These sorts of monochrome plasma displays
have a lot of charm
, and are absolutely worth
reverse-engineering if you get your hands on different model.
If you like the vibe of this display, you
might also be interested in Vacuum Fluorescent Displays,
which can be easier to find in the West.
Thanks to [Alex] for the tip. Like the tireless IEA workers at Chernobyl, we’re always monitoring the radiation level of
our tips line. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8154739",
"author": "dudefromthenorth",
"timestamp": "2025-07-27T03:04:30",
"content": "pretty",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8154741",
"author": "Cody",
"timestamp": "2025-07-27T03:12:53",
"content": "Those old pla... | 1,760,371,472.831792 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/26/engrave-a-cylinder-without-a-rotary-attachment-no-problem/ | Engrave A Cylinder Without A Rotary Attachment? No Problem! | Donald Papp | [
"cnc hacks",
"Laser Hacks"
] | [
"laser",
"laser engraving",
"mug",
"rotary"
] | Laser-engraving a cylindrical object usually requires a rotary attachment, which is a motorized holder that rotates a cylindrical object in sync with the engraver. But [Samcraft] shows that
engraving all around a mug can be done without a motorized rotary holder
.
Separating a design into elements thin enough to engrave individually without losing focus is the key.
The basic idea is to split the design into a number of separate engraving jobs, each containing one element of the overall design, then setting the mug into a 3D printed jig and manually rotating it between jobs. To demonstrate, [Samcraft] selects a series of line-art flowers and plants which are ideal for this approach because there’s no need to minutely register the individual engravings with one another.
What about focus? [Samcraft] found that a design up to 45 mm wide could be engraved onto the curved surface of his mug before focus suffers too much. It’s true that this technique only works with certain types of designs — specifically those with individual elements that can be separated into tall and thin segments — but the results are pretty nice.
Laser engravers are a very serious potential eye hazard, and we are not delighted to see the way the shield around [Samcraft]’s engraver cannot close completely to accommodate the mug while the laser is active. But we’re going to assume [Samcraft] has appropriate precautions and eye protection in place off-camera, because
laser radiation and eyeballs absolutely do not belong together, even indirectly
. | 3 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8154861",
"author": "MW",
"timestamp": "2025-07-27T16:40:30",
"content": "“Have an LLM like ChatGPT give you the settings…” Nope.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8154910",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-07-... | 1,760,371,472.873053 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/26/2025-one-hertz-challenge-a-clock-sans-silicon/ | 2025 One-Hertz Challenge: A Clock Sans Silicon | Lewin Day | [
"clock hacks",
"contests"
] | [
"2025 Hackaday One Hertz Challenge",
"clock",
"dekatron",
"tubes"
] | Just about every electronic device has some silicon semiconductors inside these days—from transistors to diodes to integrated circuits.
[Charles] is trying to build a “No-Silicon digital clock” that used none of these parts.
It looks like [Charles] is on the way to success, but one might like to point out an amusing technicality. Let’s dive in to the clock!
Instead of silicon semiconductors, [Charles] is attempting to build a digital clock using valves (aka tubes). More specifically, his design relies on seven dekatrons, which are the basic counting elements of the clock. By supplying the right voltages to the various cathodes of the dekatrons, they can be made to step through ten (or sometimes twelve) stable states, used as simple memory elements which can be used as the basis for a timepiece. [Charles] will set up the first dekatron to divide down mains frequency by 5 or 6 to get down to 10 Hz, depending on whether the supply is 50 Hz or 60 Hz. The next dekatron will step down 10 times to 1 Hz, to measure seconds. The next two will divide by ten and six to count minutes, while a further two will divide the same way to create an impulse per hour. A final dekatron will divide by 12 to count the hours in a day.
Naturally, time will be displayed on Nixies. While silicon semiconductors are verboten, [Charles] is also considering the use of some germanium parts to keep the total tube count down when it comes to supporting hardware. Also, [Charles] may wish to avoid silicon, but here’s the thing about tubes. They use glass housings, and glass is made of silicon.
Cheeky technicalities aside, it’s a great project that promises to create a very interesting clock indeed. Progress is already steaming along and we can’t wait to see the finished product.
We’ve seen dekatrons put to good use before, too.
If you’re cooking up your own practical projects with mid-century hardware, don’t hesitate to
let us know! | 12 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8154664",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-07-26T21:09:29",
"content": "Now that’s a proper project. What goes in that empty hole with what looks like a tea candle in the bottom?Could claim “no semiconductors” instead of no silicon if you used the original namesake of diodes (or m... | 1,760,371,472.926887 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/26/signal-injector-might-still-be-handy/ | Signal Injector Might Still Be Handy | Al Williams | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"signal injector",
"signal tracer"
] | Repairing radios was easier when radios were simple. There were typically two strategies. You could use a signal tracer (an amplifier) to listen at the volume control. If you heard something, the problem was after the volume control. If you didn’t, then the problem was something earlier in the signal path. Then you find a point halfway again, and probe again. No signal tracer? You can also inject a signal. If you hear it, the problem is before the volume. If not, it is after. But where do you get the signal to inject? [Learn Electronics Repair] sets out to
make a small one
in a recent video you can see below.
Both signal tracers and injectors were once ubiquitous pieces of equipment when better options were expensive. However, these days, you can substitute an oscilloscope for a signal tracer and a signal generator for an injector. Still, it is a fun project, and a small dedicated instrument can be handy if you repair a lot of radios.
The origin of this project was from an earlier signal injector design and a bet with a friend about making a small version. They are both working on their designs and want people to submit their own designs for a little
ad hoc
contest.
We always preferred a signal tracer since it is more passive. Those were typically just audio amplifiers with an optional diode in the input to demodulate RF. A computer amplified speaker and a diode can do the job, as can an
LM386
. Or, you can build
something complex
, if you prefer. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8154730",
"author": "reg",
"timestamp": "2025-07-27T01:38:13",
"content": "If you know what you are looking for you can use a cheap fully unlocked baofeng uv-5r to sniff for a lot of signals. Way back in the day I built a transmitter and it was crystal controlled but had three mult... | 1,760,371,472.963924 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/26/personalization-industrial-design-and-hacked-devices/ | Personalization, Industrial Design, And Hacked Devices | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Phone Hacks",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"art",
"design",
"newsletter",
"style"
] | [Maya Posch] wrote up an insightful, and maybe a bit controversial, piece on the state of consumer goods design:
The Death Of Industrial Design And The Era Of Dull Electronics
. Her basic thesis is that the “form follows function” aesthetic has gone too far, and all of the functionally equivalent devices in our life now all look exactly the same. Take the cellphone, for example. They are all slabs of screen, with a tiny bezel if any. They are non-objects, meant to disappear, instead of showcases for cool industrial design.
Of course this is an extreme example, and the comments section went wild on this one. Why? Because we all want the things we build to be beautiful
and
functional, and that has always been in conflict. So even if you agree with [Maya] on the suppression of designed form in consumer goods, you have to admit that it’s not universal. For instance, none of our houses look alike, even though the purpose is exactly the same. (Ironically, architecture is the source of the
form follows function
fetish.) Cars are somewhere in between, and maybe the cellphone is the other end of the spectrum from architecture. There is plenty of room for form
and
function in this world.
But consider the smartphone case – the thing you’ve got around your phone right now. In a world where people have the ultimate homogeneous device in their pocket, one for which slimness is a prime selling point, nearly everyone has added a few millimeters of thickness to theirs, aftermarket, in the form of a decorative case. It’s ironically this horrendous sameness of every cell phone that makes us want to ornament them, even if that means sacrificing on the thickness specs.
Is this the same impetus that gave us the cyberdeck movement? The custom mechanical keyboard? All kinds of sweet hacks on consumer goods? The need to make things your own and personal is pretty much universal, and maybe even a better example of what we want out of nice design: a device that speaks to you directly because it
represents
your work.
Granted, buying a phone case isn’t necessarily creative in the same way as hacking a phone is, but it at least lets you exercise a bit of your own design impulse. And it frees the designers from having to make a super-personal choice like this for you. How about a “nothing” design that affords easy personalized ornamentation? Has the slab smartphone solved the form-versus-function fight after all?
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
! | 28 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8154544",
"author": "Sword",
"timestamp": "2025-07-26T14:35:43",
"content": "I really miss landscape keyboard phones. I keep trying to find a modern N900 replacement.Daily drove an original fxtec pro1 for 5 years and it was nice to have the keyboard, and Sailfish provided linux, but... | 1,760,371,473.276116 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/26/read-qr-codes-on-the-cheap/ | Read QR Codes On The Cheap | Al Williams | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"arducam",
"QR codes"
] | Adding a camera to a project used to be a chore, but modern camera modules make it simple. But what if you want to read QR codes? [James Bowman] noticed a $7 module that
claims to read QR codes
so he decided to try one out.
The module seems well thought out. There’s a camera, of course. A Qwiic connector makes hooking up easy. An LED blinks blue when you have power and green when a QR code shows up.
Reading a QR code was simple in Python using the I2CDriver library. There are two possible problems: first, if the QR code contains
a large amount of data
, you may exceed the I2C limit of 254 bytes. Second, despite claiming a 110-degree field of view, [James’] testing showed the QR code has to be almost dead center of the camera for the system to work.
What really interested us, though, was the fact that the device is simply a camera with an RP2040 and little else. For $7, we might grab one to use as a platform for other imaging projects. Or maybe we will read some QR codes. We’d better pick up a few. Then again, maybe we can just
do it by hand
. | 15 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8154520",
"author": "Stephen Mewller",
"timestamp": "2025-07-26T12:58:45",
"content": "I wish he would have tested a QR code at full capacity and put a minimum and maximum distance where it works. Admittedly the 110 degree FOV and this lens is not ideal for the application.",
"p... | 1,760,371,473.018739 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/25/human-in-the-loop-compass-cnc-redefines-workspace-limits/ | Human In The Loop: Compass CNC Redefines Workspace Limits | Matt Varian | [
"cnc hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"CNC machine",
"CNC router",
"Teensy 4.1"
] | CNCs come in many forms, including mills, 3D printers, lasers, and plotters, but one challenge seems universal: there’s always a project slightly too large for your machine’s work envelope. The
Compass CNC
addresses this limitation by incorporating the operator as part of the gantry system.
The Compass CNC features a compact core-XY gantry that moves the router only a few inches in each direction, along with Z-axis control to set the router’s depth. However, a work envelope of just a few inches would be highly restrictive. The innovation of the Compass CNC lies in its reliance on the operator to handle gross positioning of the gantry over the workpiece, while the machine manages the precise, detailed movements required for cutting.
Most of the Compass CNC is constructed from 3D printed parts, with a commercial router performing the cutting. A Teensy 4.1 serves as the control unit, managing the gantry motors, and a circular screen provides instructions to guide the operator on where to position the tool.
Those familiar with CNC routers may notice similarities to the
Shaper Origin
. However, key differences set the Compass CNC apart. Primarily, it is an open source project with design files
freely available
for those who want to build their own. Additionally, while the Shaper Origin relies on a camera system for tracking movement, the Compass CNC uses four mouse sensors to detect its position over the workpiece.
The Compass CNC is still in development, and
kits containing most of the necessary components
for assembly are available. We’re excited to see the innovative creations that emerge from this promising new tool. | 15 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8154253",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2025-07-25T16:04:29",
"content": "it´s a brilliant platform. And hopefully a nail in the foot of Shaper Origin, and their closed & cloud crapaware.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "815... | 1,760,371,473.071756 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/25/this-week-in-security-sharepoint-initramfs-and-more/ | This Week In Security: Sharepoint, Initramfs, And More | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"linux",
"Secure Boot",
"SharePoint",
"This Week in Security"
] | There was a disturbance in the enterprise security world, and
it started with a Pwn2Own Berlin
. [Khoa Dinh] and the team at Viettel Cyber Security discovered a pair of vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s SharePoint. They were demonstrated at the Berlin competition in May, and patched by Microsoft in this month’s Patch Tuesday.
This original exploit chain is interesting in itself. It’s inside the SharePoint endpoint,
/_layouts/15/ToolPane.aspx
. The code backing this endpoint has a complex authentication and validation check. Namely, if the incoming request isn’t authenticated, the code checks for a flag, which is set true when the referrer header points to a sign-out page, which can be set arbitrarily by the requester. The
DisplayMode
value needs set to
Edit
, but that’s accessible via a simple URL parameter. The pagePath value, based on the URL used in the call, needs to start with
/_layouts/
and end with
/ToolPane.aspx
. That particular check seems like a slam dunk, given that we’re working with the
ToolPane.aspx
endpoint. But to bypass the DisplayMode check, we added a parameter to the end of the URL, and hilariously, the pagePath string includes those parameters. The simple work-around is to append another parameter,
foo=/ToolPane.aspx
.
Putting it together, this means a POST of
/_layouts/15/ToolPane.aspx?DisplayMode=Edit&foo=/ToolPane.aspx
with the Referrer header set to
/_layouts/SignOut.aspx
. This approach bypasses authentication, and allows a form parameter
MSOTlPn_DWP
to be specified. These must be a valid file on the target’s filesystem, in the
_controltemplates/
directory, ending with
.iscx
. But it grants access to all of the internal controls on the
SafeControls
list.
There’s an entire second half to [Khoa Dinh]’s write-up, detailing the discovery of a deserialization bug in one of those endpoints, that also uses a clever type-confusion sort of attack. The end result was remote code execution on the SharePoint target, with a single, rather simple request. Microsoft rolled out patches to fix the exploit chain. The problem is that Microsoft often opts to fix vulnerabilities with minimal code changes, often failing to fix the underlying code flaws. This apparently happened in this case, as the authentication bypass fix could be defeated simply by adding yet another parameter to the URL.
These bypasses
were found in the wild on July 19th
, and Microsoft quickly confirmed. The next day, the 20th, Microsoft issued an emergency patch to address the bypasses. The live exploitation appears to be
coming from a set of Chinese threat actors
, with a post-exploitation emphasis on stealing data and maintaining access. There seem to be more than 400 compromised systems worldwide, with some of those being rather high profile.
The Initramfs Encryption Bypass
While Linux enthusiasts have looked at Secure Boot with great skepticism ever since Microsoft and hardware vendors worked together to roll out this security feature, the modern reality is that Linux systems depend on it for their security assurances as well. An encrypted hard drive is of limited use if the elements used to decrypt the drive are compromised. Imagine a kernel or GRUB with a hidden backdoor, that modifies the system once the decryption password has been entered. There’s a new, interesting attack described earlier this month, that
targets the initramfs
.
Let’s take a quick detour to talk about how a Linux machine boots. At power start, the machine’s firmware does the Power On Self Test (POST), and then loads a UEFI payload from the hard drive. In the case of Linux, this is the shim, a first stage bootloader that then boots a signed GRUB image. GRUB then loads a signed Linux kernel and the initramfs image, which is nothing more than a compressed, minimal filesystem. It usually contains just the barest essentials to start the boot process and switch to the real root filesystem.
You may have noticed something missing in that description: The initramfs image isn’t signed. This is often built by the end-user with each new kernel, and so can’t be signed by the Linux distribution. The possibility of modifying the initramfs isn’t a new idea, but what this research adds is the observation that many distros provide a debug shell when the wrong encryption password is given several times in a row. This is quickly accessible to an attacker, and that debug shell does have access to the initramfs. A very quick “evil maid” attack is to boot the machine, fail the password several times to launch the debug shell, and install a malicious initramfs from there.
Et Tu Clear Linux?
Clear Linux OS was Intel’s playground for tuning Linux for running its best on modern Intel (and AMD) CPUs. And sadly,
as of the 18th, it is no longer maintained
, with updates and even security fixes ceasing immediately. This isn’t a huge surprise, as there have been
several Linux engineers departing the company in recent weeks
.
What’s particularly interesting is that there was no runway provided for active users, and security updates stopped immediately with this announcement. While Clear Linux wasn’t exactly intended for production use, there were certainly a group of users that used it in some variation of production use. And suddenly those users have an immediate need to migrate to a different, still supported Linux.
UI Automation
There’s a new Akamai report on malware using accessibility features to more effectively spy on users
. The malware is Coyote, and a particular strain targeting Brazilian Windows users has been found using the Microsoft UI Automation (UIA) framework. When I first found this story, I thought it was about malware using Artificial Intelligence. Instead, it’s the UIA accessibility feature that makes it trivial for malware to pull detailed information from inside a running application. The researchers at Akamai have been sounding the alert over this as a potential problem for several months, so it’s particularly interesting to see it in the wild in actual use.
Prepared Injection
When I first learned PHP security, one of the golden rules was to use prepared statements, to avoid SQL injection. This is still good advice — there’s just a sneaky secret inside PHP’s PDO SQL library.
It doesn’t actually do prepared statements by default
. It fakes them. And in some cases, that is enough to get a SQL injection, even in a “prepared statement”.
The key to this is injection of a
?
or
:
symbol, that the PDO parser can erroneously interpret as another bound parameter. So vulnerable code might look like
$pdo->prepare("SELECT $col FROM fruit WHERE name = ?")
. If an attacker can smuggle text into both the
$col
variable and the value to bind to
name
, then injection is possible.
The malicious request might look like
http://localhost:8000/?name=x
` FROM (SELECT table_name AS `'x` from information_schema.tables)y;%23&col=\?%23%00
. That url encoded text becomes
\?#\0
, which defeats PDO’s parsing logic, allowing the injection text to be inserted into the fake placeholder.
Bits and Bytes
Possibly the most depressing thing you will read today is
this play-by-play of Clorox and Cognizant each blaming each other for a nasty data breach in 2023
. Clorox outsourced their IT, and therefore can’t be blamed. Cognizant’ help desk reset passwords and multi factor authentication without any real verification of who was requesting those actions. And Cognizant’s statement is that Clorox should have had sufficient cybersecurity systems to mitigate these events.
VMWare’s Guest Authentication Service, VGAuth, had an issue where
a limited-privilege user on a Virtual Windows machine could abuse the service to gain SYSTEM privileges
. This is a bit different from the normal stories about VM additions, as this one doesn’t include an actual VM escape. Achieving SYSTEM is an important step in that direction for most exploit chains.
And finally,
who needs malware or attackers, when you have AI tools
? Two different AI agents were given too much freedom to work with real data, and one managed to delete folders while trying to reorganize them, while the other wiped out a production database. My favorite quote from the entire saga is directly from Gemini: “I have failed you completely and catastrophically. My review of the commands confirms my gross incompetence.” | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8154221",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-07-25T14:24:14",
"content": "Initramfs – ugh!Ok, I get why a distro maintainer would want this. You have to come up with one kernel that works across all your many users hardware and install choices. In the past that might have bee... | 1,760,371,473.132939 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/25/transparent-pcbs-trigger-90s-nostalgia/ | Transparent PCBs Trigger 90s Nostalgia | Lewin Day | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"flex PCB",
"flexible circuit board",
"flexible printed circuit",
"pcb"
] | What color do you like your microcontroller boards? Blue? Red? Maybe white or black? Sadly, all of those are about to look old hat. Why? Well, as shared by [JLCPCB],
this transparent Arduino looks amazing.
The board house produced this marvel using its transparent flexible printed circuit (FPC) material. Basically, the stuff they use for ribbon cables and flex PCBs, just made slightly differently to be see-through instead of vaguely brown.
The circuit in question is a
Flexduino
, an Arduino clone specifically designed to work on flexible substrates. It looks particularly good on this transparent material, with the LEDs glowing and the white silkscreen for contrast. If you like what you see, you can order your own circuits using this material directly from JLCPCB’s
regular old order form
.
Most of all, this project reminds us of the 1990s. Back then, you could get all kinds of games consoles and other electronics with transparent housings. There was the beloved PlayStation Crystal, while Nintendo did something similar with the N64 while adding a whole line of tinted color and charcoal versions too. Somehow seeing a bit of the inside of things is just cool. Even if, in some cases,
it’s just to avoid smuggling in prisons
.
It took decades before you could get custom PCBs quickly and easily. Now, board houses are competing for the enthusiast (consumer?) market, and competition is spurring development of crazy stuff like transparent and even
glow in the dark PCBs.
What next? We’re thinking edible, ROHS and WEEE be damned. Drop your thoughts in the comments.
Thanks to [George Graves] for the tip! | 42 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "8154157",
"author": "RichC",
"timestamp": "2025-07-25T11:08:48",
"content": "I was thinking this would look really cool for multi-layer boards, but many of those layers are often ground-plane copper pours that would block the view……we need transparent aluminium ground planes too.",
... | 1,760,371,473.359326 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/25/reachy-the-robot-gets-a-mini-kit-version/ | Reachy The Robot Gets A Mini (Kit) Version | Donald Papp | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"ai",
"huggingface",
"kit",
"machine learning",
"reachy",
"robot"
] | Reachy Mini
is a kit for a compact, open-source robot designed explicitly for AI experimentation and human interaction. The kit is available from Hugging Face, which is itself a repository and hosting service for machine learning models. Reachy seems to be one of their efforts at branching out from pure software.
Our guess is that some form of Stewart Platform handles the head movement.
Reachy Mini is intended as a development platform, allowing people to make and share models for different behaviors, hence the Hugging Face integration to make that easier. On the inside of the full version is a Raspberry Pi, and we suspect some form of
Stewart Platform
is responsible for the movement of the head. There’s also a cheaper (299 USD) “lite” version intended for tethered use, and a planned simulator to allow development and testing without access to a physical Reachy at all.
Reachy has a distinctive head and face, so if you’re thinking it looks familiar that’s probably because
we first covered Reachy the humanoid robot
as a project from Pollen Robotics (Hugging Face acquired Pollen Robotics in April 2025.)
The idea behind the smaller Reachy Mini seems to be to provide a platform to experiment with expressive human communication via cameras and audio, rather than to be the kind of robot that moves around and manipulates objects.
It’s still early in the project, so if you want to know more you can find
a bit more information about Reachy Mini at Pollen’s site
and you can see Reachy Mini move in a short video, embedded just below. | 13 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8154142",
"author": "K8",
"timestamp": "2025-07-25T09:33:35",
"content": "Totally stealing those cute kinematics.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8154150",
"author": "70sjukebox",
"timestamp": "2025-07-25T10:40:41",
... | 1,760,371,473.416681 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/24/not-repairing-an-old-tape-recorder/ | Not Repairing An Old Tape Recorder | Al Williams | [
"Teardown"
] | [
"reel-to-reel",
"tape recorder"
] | When you think of a tape recorder, you might think of a cassette tape. However, [Michael Simpson] has an
old Star-Lite
small reel-to-reel tape machine. It isn’t a repair so much as a rework to make it work better. These cheap machines were never the best, although a $19 tape player back then was a luxury.
Part of the problem is that the design of the tape player wasn’t all that good to begin with. The motor runs off two C cells in parallel. When these were new in the 1960s, that would have meant conventional carbon-zinc batteries, so the voltage would have varied wildly. That didn’t matter, though, because the drive was directly to the tape reel, so the speed also varied based on how much tape was left on the reel.
The amplifier has four transistors. [Michael] decided to replace the capacitors on the unit. He noticed, too, that the volume control is in line with the microphone when recording, so even though the recording was supposedly in need of repair, it turned out to be simply a case of the volume control being turned down. Pretty impressive for a six-decade-old piece of consumer electronics.
The capacitor change-out was simple enough. Some cleaning and lubing was also in order. Did it help? You’ll have to listen and decide for yourself.
So, no real repair was in the works, but it is an interesting look back at an iconic piece of consumer tech. Tape recorders like this were an early form of social media.
No kidding
. If you’d rather not buy a tape recorder, you could
roll your own
. | 13 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8154195",
"author": "Steven-X",
"timestamp": "2025-07-25T13:15:05",
"content": "That recorder would be my age.But I do remember when the reel-to-reel recorder was the sign of an awesome home sound system.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comme... | 1,760,371,473.467009 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/24/when-the-uks-telephone-network-went-digital-with-system-x/ | When The UK’s Telephone Network Went Digital With System X | Maya Posch | [
"History"
] | [
"telephone exchange"
] | The switch from analog telephone exchanges to a purely digital network meant a revolution in just about any way imaginable. Gone were the bulky physical switches and associated system limitations. In the UK this change happened in the early 1980s, with what the Post Office Telecommunications (later British Telecom) and associated companies called
System X
. Along with the system’s rollout,
promotional videos like this 1983 one
were meant to educate the public and likely any investors on what a smashing idea the whole system was.
Although for the average person in the UK the introduction of the new digital telephone network probably didn’t mean a major change beyond a few new features like group calls, the same wasn’t true for the network operator whose exchanges and networks got much smaller and more efficient, as explained in the video. To this day
System X
remains the backbone of the telephone network in the UK.
To get an idea of the immense scale of the old analog system,
this 1982 video
(also embedded below) shows the system as it existed before System X began to replace it. The latter part of the video provides significant detail of System X and its implementation at the time, although when this video was produced much of the system was still being developed.
Thanks to [James Bowman] for the tip. | 24 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8154115",
"author": "Johnu",
"timestamp": "2025-07-25T08:18:08",
"content": "System X was still very much alive and working when I left in ~09, there were boards that started out with a couple of Z80’s in them that had pentiums strapped in there (the pentiums were obsolete by then t... | 1,760,371,473.525019 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/24/comprehensive-test-set-released-for-the-intel-80286/ | Comprehensive Test Set Released For The Intel 80286 | Lewin Day | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"286",
"80286",
"arduinox86",
"cpu",
"intel"
] | Remember the 80286? It was the sequel to the 8086, the chip that started it all, and it powered a great number of machines in the early years of the personal computing revolution. It might not be as relevant today, but regardless,
[Daniel Balsom] has now released a comprehensive test suite
for the ancient chip. (via
The Register
)
The complete battery of tests are available
on Github,
and were produced using a Harris N80C286-12 from 1986. “The real mode test suite contains 326 instruction forms, containing nearly 1.5 million instruction executions with over 32 million cycle states captured,” Daniel explains. “This is fewer tests than the
previous 8088 test suite
, but test coverage is better overall due to improved instruction generation methods.” For now, the tests focus on the 286 running in real mode. There are no “unreal” or protected mode tests, but [Daniel] aims to deliver the in the future.
[Daniel] uses the tests with the
ArduinoX86
, a platform that uses the microcontroller to control and test old-school CPUs. The tests aid with development of emulators like [Daniel’s] own
MartyPC
, by verifying the CPU’s behavior in a cycle-accurate way.
We’ve explored
some secrets of the 286
before, too. If you’ve been doing your own digging into Intel’s old processors, or anyone else’s for that matter, don’t hesitate to notify the
tipsline.
[Thanks to Stephen Walters for the tip!] | 23 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8153957",
"author": "dremu",
"timestamp": "2025-07-24T23:32:35",
"content": "“[The 80286] was the sequel to the 8086” is either an over-simplification or disingenuous, I can’t decide. There was the 80186/80188 in there, though they’re a special kettle of fish in their own right. Yes... | 1,760,371,473.588273 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/24/painting-in-metal-with-selective-electroplating/ | Painting In Metal With Selective Electroplating | Aaron Beckendorf | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"chemistry hacks"
] | [
"3018",
"cnc",
"electrochemistry",
"electrolyte",
"electrolyte bath",
"electroplating"
] | Most research on electroplating tries to find ways to make it plate parts more uniformly. [Ajc150] took the opposite direction, though, with his
selective electroplating
project, which uses an electrode mounted on a CNC motion system to electrochemically print images onto a metal sheet (
GitHub repository
).
Normally, selective electroplating would use a mask, but masks don’t allow gradients to be deposited. However, electroplating tends to occur most heavily at the point closest to the anode, and the effect gets stronger the closer the anode is. To take advantage of this effect, [ajc150] replaced the router of an inexpensive 3018 CNC machine with a nickel anode, mounted an electrolyte bath in the workspace, and laid a flat steel cathode in it. When the anode moves close to a certain point on the steel cathode, most of the plating takes place there.
To actually print an image with this setup, [ajc150] wrote a Python program to convert an image into set of G-code instructions for the CNC. The darker a pixel of the image was, the longer the electrode would spend over the corresponding part of the metal sheet. Since darkness wasn’t linearly proportional to plating time, the program used a gamma correction function to adjust times, though this did require [ajc150] to recalibrate the setup after each change. The system works well enough to print recognizable images, but still has room for improvement. In particular, [ajc150] would like to extend this to a faster multi-nozzle system, and have the algorithm take into account spillover between the pixel being plated and its neighbors.
This general technique is reminiscent of a
metal 3D printing method
we’ve seen before. We
more frequently
see this process run
in reverse
to
cut metal
. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8153899",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2025-07-24T20:49:04",
"content": "People have done something vaguely similar but manually, using a wetted cotton swab with an electrical connection to a power supply, for doing multicolor painting on titanium through voltage-specifi... | 1,760,371,473.630483 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/24/2025-one-hertz-challenge-555-timer-gets-a-signal-from-above/ | 2025 One Hertz Challenge: 555 Timer Gets A Signal From Above | Adam Zeloof | [
"contests",
"hardware",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"2025 Hackaday One Hertz Challenge",
"555 timer",
"allan deviation",
"gps",
"gpsdo",
"timekeeping"
] | One of the categories we chose for the One Hertz Challenge is “Could Have Used a 555.” What about when you couldn’t have, but did anyway? The 555 is famously easy to use, but not exactly the most accurate timer out there — one “ticking” at 1 Hz will pulse just about once per second (probably to within a millisecond, depending on the rest of the circuit), but when you need more precise timing, the 555 just won’t cut it. Not on its own, anyway.
Allan Deviation can be a bit confusing, but generally — lower is more accurate
This entry by [burble] shows us how
the humble 555 can hold its own in more demanding systems with some help from a GPS receiver
. He used the One Pulse per Second (1PPS) output from a GPS module to discipline the 1 Hz output from a 555 by modulating the control voltage with a microcontroller.
Okay, this sounds a bit like baking a cake by buying a cake, scraping all the icing off, then icing it yourself, but what better way to learn how to ice a cake? The GPS-disciplined 555 is way more accurate than a free running one — just check out that
Allan Deviation
plot. While the accuracy of the standard 555 begins to decrease as oscillator drift dominates, the GPS-disciplined version just keeps getting better (up to a point — it would also eventually begin to increase, if the data were recorded for long enough). Compared to other high-end oscillators though, [burble] describes the project’s accuracy in one word: “Badly.”
That’s okay though — it really is a fantastic investigation into how GPS-disciplined oscillators work, and does a fantastic job illustrating the accuracy of different types of clocks, and some possible sources of error. This project is a great addition to
some of the other precision timekeeping projects
we’ve seen here at Hackaday, and a very fitting entry to the competition. Think you can do better? Or
much, much worse
? You’ve got a few weeks left to enter! | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8153862",
"author": "SparkyGSX",
"timestamp": "2025-07-24T19:28:15",
"content": "I was thinking of using a long fiber and the finite speed of light, counting the number of times a pulse was received at the other end and a new pulse generated at the beginning, but I don’t have the ti... | 1,760,371,473.678941 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/24/keymo-brings-a-pencil-to-the-cyberdeck-fight/ | KeyMo Brings A Pencil To The Cyberdeck Fight | Navarre Bartz | [
"Cyberdecks"
] | [
"cyberdeck",
"paper",
"pencil",
"raspberry pi"
] | Computers and cellphones can do so many things, but sometimes if you want to doodle or take a note, pencil and paper is the superior technology. You could carry a device and a pocket notebook, or you could combine the best of analog and digital with
the KeyMo
.
[NuMellow] wanted a touchpad in addition to a keyboard for his portable terminal since he felt Raspbian wouldn’t be so awesome on a tiny touchscreen. With a wider device than something like
Beepy
, and a small 4″ LCD already on hand, he realized he had some space to put something else up top.
Et voila
, a cyberdeck with a small notebook for handwritten/hand drawn information.
The device lives in a 3D printed case, which made some iterations on the keyboard placement simpler, and [NuMellow] even provided us with actual run time estimates in the write-up, which is something we often are left wondering about in cyberdeck builds. If you’re curious, he got up to 7.5 hours on YouTube videos with the brightness down or 3.5 hours with it at maximum. The exposed screen and top-heaviness of the device are areas he’s pinpointed as the primary cons of the system currently. We hope to see an updated version in the future that addresses these.
If you’d like to check out some other rad cyberdecks, how about a
schmancy handheld
, one
driven by punch cards in a child’s toy
, or this one with a
handle and a giant scroll wheel
? | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8153829",
"author": "eswan",
"timestamp": "2025-07-24T18:13:48",
"content": "Reminds me of the IBM TransNote.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8153907",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-07-24T21:17:11",
... | 1,760,371,473.721827 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/24/supersonic-flight-may-finally-return-to-us-skies/ | Supersonic Flight May Finally Return To US Skies | Tom Nardi | [
"Current Events",
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"boeing",
"concorde",
"SST",
"supersonic flight"
] | After World War II, as early supersonic military aircraft were pushing the boundaries of flight, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that commercial aircraft would eventually fly faster than sound as the technology became better understood and more affordable. Indeed, by the 1960s the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union all had plans to develop commercial transport aircraft capable flight beyond Mach 1 in various stages of development.
Concorde on its final flight
Yet today, the few examples of supersonic transport (SST) planes that actually ended up being built are in museums, and flight above Mach 1 is essentially the sole domain of the military. There’s an argument to be made that it’s one of the few areas of technological advancement where the state-of-the-art not only stopped moving forward, but actually slid backwards.
But that might finally be changing, at least in the United States. Both NASA and the private sector have been working towards a new generation of supersonic aircraft that address the key issues that plagued their predecessors, and a recent push by the White House aims to undo the regulatory roadblocks that have been on the books for more than fifty years.
The Concorde Scare
Those with even a passing knowledge of aviation history will of course be familiar with the Concorde.
Jointly developed by France and Britain
, the sleek aircraft has the distinction of being the only SST to achieve successful commercial operation — conducting nearly 50,000 flights between 1976 and 2003. With an average cruise speed of around Mach 2.02, it could fly up to 128 passengers from Paris to New York in just under three and a half hours.
But even before the first paying passengers climbed aboard, the Concorde put American aircraft companies such as Boeing and Lockheed into an absolute panic. It was clear that none of their SST designs could beat it to market, and there was a fear that the Concorde (and by extension, Europe) would dominate commercial supersonic flight. At least on paper, it seemed like the Concorde would quickly make subsonic long-range jetliners such as the Boeing 707 obsolete, at least for intercontinental routes. Around this time, the Soviet Union also started developing their own SST, the
Tupolev Tu-144
.
The perceived threat was so great that US aerospace companies started lobbying Congress to provide the funds necessary to develop an American supersonic airliner that was faster and could carry more passengers than the Concorde or Tu-144. In June of 1963, President Kennedy announced the creation of the National Supersonic Transport program during a speech at the US Air Force Academy. Four years later it was announced that Boeing’s 733-390 concept had been selected for production, and by the end of 1969, 26 airlines had put in reservations to purchase what was assumed to be the future of American air travel.
Boeing’s final 2707-300 SST concept shared several design elements with the Concorde.
Original image by Nubifer
.
Even for a SST, the 733-390 was ambitious. It didn’t take long before Boeing started scaling back the design, first deleting the complex swing-wing mechanism for a fixed delta wing, before ultimately shrinking the entire aircraft. Even so, the redesigned aircraft (now known as the Model 2707-300) was expected to carry nearly twice as many passengers as the Concorde and travel at speeds up to Mach 3.
A Change in the Wind
But by the dawn of the 1970s it was clear that the Concorde, and the SST concept in general, wasn’t shaping up the way many in the industry expected. Even though it had yet to make its first commercial flight, demand for the Concorde among airlines was already slipping. It was initially predicted that the Concorde fleet would number as high as 350 by the 1980s, but by the time the aircraft was ready to start flying passengers, there were only 76 orders on the books.
Part of the problem was the immense cost overruns of the Concorde program, which lead to a higher sticker price on the aircraft than the airlines had initially expected. But there was also a growing concern over the viability of SSTs. A newer generation of airliners including the Boeing 747 could carry more passengers than ever, and were more fuel efficient than their predecessors. Most importantly, the public had become concerned with the idea of regular supersonic flights over their homes and communities, and imagined a future where thunderous sonic booms would crack overhead multiple times a day.
Although President Nixon supported the program, the Senate rejected any further government funding for an American SST in March of 1971. The final blow to America’s supersonic aspirations came in 1973, when the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) enacted
14 CFR 91.817 “Civil Aircraft Sonic Boom”
— prohibiting civilian flight beyond Mach 1 over the United States without prior authorization.
In the end, the SST revolution never happened. Just twenty Concorde aircraft were built, with Air France and British Airways being the only airlines that actually went through with their orders. Rather than taking over as the standard, supersonic air travel turned out to be a luxury that only a relatively few could afford.
The Silent Revolution
Since then, there have been sporadic attempts to develop a new class of civilian supersonic aircraft. But the most promising developments have only occurred in the last few years, as improved technology and advanced computer modeling has made it possible to create “low boom” supersonic aircraft. Such craft aren’t completely silent — rather than creating a single loud boom that can cause damage on the ground, they produce a series of much quieter thumps as they fly.
The
Lockheed Martin X-59
, developed in partnership with NASA, was designed to help explore this technology. Commercial companies such as Boom Supersonic are also
developing their own takes on this concept
, with eyes on eventually scaling the design up for passenger flights in the future.
The Boom XB-1 test aircraft, used to test the Mach cutoff effect.
In light of these developments, on June 6th President Trump signed an Executive Order titled
Leading the World in Supersonic Flight
which directs the FAA to repeal 14 CFR 91.817 within 180 days. In its place, the FAA is to develop a noise-based certification standard which will “define acceptable noise thresholds for takeoff, landing, and en-route supersonic operation based on operational testing and research, development, testing, and evaluation (RDT&E) data” rather than simply imposing a specific “speed limit” in the sky.
This is important, as the design of the individual aircraft as well as the
environmental variables involved in the “Mach Cutoff” effect
mean that there’s really no set speed at which supersonic flight becomes too loud for observers on the ground. The data the FAA will collect from these new breed of aircraft will be key in establishing reasonable noise standards which can protect the public interest without unnecessarily hindering the development of civilian supersonic aircraft. | 51 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8153709",
"author": "Geert van Dijk",
"timestamp": "2025-07-24T14:10:58",
"content": "The boom was one thing, but man, making a het (especially with that capacity) exceed certain speed also guzzles whatever fuel you put in. The numbers just don’t add up anymore, except to maybe unne... | 1,760,371,473.819108 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/24/teufel-introduces-an-open-source-bluetooth-speaker/ | Teufel Introduces An Open Source Bluetooth Speaker | Lewin Day | [
"digital audio hacks",
"hardware"
] | [
"bluetooth speaker",
"repair",
"speaker"
] | There are a ton of Bluetooth speakers on the market. Just about none of them have any user-serviceable components or replacement parts available. When they break, they’re dead and gone, and you buy a new one. [Jonathan Mueller-Boruttau] wrote in to tell us about the latest speaker from Teufel Audio, which aims to break this cycle.
It’s a commercial product, but the design files have also been open sourced
— giving the community the tools to work with and maintain the hardware themselves.
The project is explained by [Jonathan] and [Erik] of Teufel, who were part of the team behind the development of the MYND speaker. The basic idea was to enable end-user maintenance, because the longer something is functioning and usable, the lower its effective environmental footprint is. “That was why it was very important for us that the MYND be very easy to repair,” Erik explains. “Even users without specialist knowledge can replace the battery no problem.” Thus, when a battery dies, the speaker can live on—versus a regular speaker, where the case, speakers, and electronics would all be thrown in the garbage because of a single dead battery. The case was designed to be easy to open with minimal use of adhesives, while electronic components used inside are all readily available commercial parts.
Indeed, you can even make your own MYND if you’re so inclined.
Firmware
and
hardware
design files are available on GitHub under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (
CC BY-SA 4.0
) license for those looking to repair their speakers, or replicate them from the ground up. The company developed its own speaker drivers, but there’s nothing stopping you from using off-the-shelf replacements if so desired.
It’s a strategy we expect few other manufacturers to emulate. Overall, as hackers, it’s easy to appreciate a company making a device that’s
easy
to repair, rather than one that’s designed to frustrate all attempts made. As our own Jenny List
proclaimed in 2021
—”You own it, you should be able to fix it!” Sage words, then as now! | 33 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "8153650",
"author": "Nath",
"timestamp": "2025-07-24T11:51:38",
"content": "Finally, companies start getting it",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8153689",
"author": "Collie147",
"timestamp": "2025-07-24T13:24:46",
"co... | 1,760,371,474.047979 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/24/eight-artificial-neurons-control-fully-autonomous-toy-truck/ | Eight Artificial Neurons Control Fully Autonomous Toy Truck | John Elliot V | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Machine Learning",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"artificial neural network",
"autonomous vehicle",
"remote control car",
"Spiking Neural Network"
] | Recently the [Global Science Network] released a video of
using an artificial brain to control an RC truck
.
The video shows a neural network comprised of eight artificial neurons assembled on breadboards used to control a fully autonomous toy truck. The truck is equipped with four proximity sensors, one front, one front left, one front right, and one rear. The sensor readings from the truck are transmitted to the artificial brain which determines which way to turn and whether to go forward or backward. The inputs to each neuron, the “synapses”, can be excitatory to increase the firing rate or inhibitory to decrease the firing rate. The output commands are then returned wirelessly to the truck via a hacked remote control.
This particular type of neural network is called a Spiking Neural Network (SNN) which uses discrete events, called “spikes”, instead of continuous real-valued activations. In these types of networks
when
a neuron fires matters as well as the strength of the signal. There are
other videos
on this channel which go into more depth on these topics.
The name of this experimental vehicle is the
GSN SNN 4-8-24-2 Autonomous Vehicle
, which is short for: Global Science Network Spiking Neural Network 4 Inputs 8 Neurons 24 Synapses 2 Degrees of Freedom Output. The circuitry on both the vehicle and the breadboards is littered with LEDs which give some insight into how it all functions.
If you’re interested in how neural networks can control behavior you might like to see a
digital squid’s behavior shaped by a neural network
. | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8153589",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-07-24T09:09:50",
"content": "lol :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8153615",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-07-24T10:17:08",
"content": "ok…….but how where ... | 1,760,371,473.912277 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/23/frogfind-grabs-the-wap/ | FrogFind Grabs The WAP | Tyler August | [
"Phone Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"2g",
"frog find",
"retrocomputer",
"wap"
] | Yes, the Wireless Application Protocol! What other WAP could there possibly be? This long-dormant cellphone standard is now once again available on the web, thanks to [Sean] over at
ActionRetro
modifying his FrogFind portal as a translation engine.
Now any web site can be shoved through the WAP!
WAP was rolled out in 1999 as HTML for phones without the bandwidth to handle actual HTML. The idea of a “mobile” and a “desktop” site accessed via HTTP hadn’t yet been conceived, you see, so phoning into sites with WAP would produce a super-stripped down, paginated, text-only version of the page. Now FrogFind has a WAP version that does the same thing to any site, just as the HTTP (no S!)
FrogFind translates the modern web into pure HTML
vintage browsers can read.
Of course you’ll need a phone that can connect to FrogFind with a WAP browser, which for many of us, may be… difficult. This protocol didn’t last much longer than PETS.COM, so access is probably going to be over 2G. With 2G sunset already passed in many areas, that can be a problem for vintage computer enthusiasts who want to use vintage phone hardware. [Sean] does not have an answer — indeed, he’s actively searching for one. His fans have pointed out a few models of handsets that should be able to access WAP via WiFi, but that leaves a lot of retro hardware out in the cold. If you have a good idea for a 2G bridge that can get out to the modern web and not attract the angry attention of the FTC (or its local equivalent), fans of
ActionRetro
would love to hear it — and so would we!
Vintage phone hacks
don’t show up often on Hackaday, and when they do, it’s either much older machines or
upgrading to USB-C
, not to modern communications protocols. We haven’t seen someone
hacking in the WAP since 2008.
Given the collective brainpower of the Hackaday commentariat, someone probably has an idea to let everyone dive right into the WAP. Fight it out in the comments, or
send us a tip if you have link to a howto
. | 24 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8153502",
"author": "Jeff Geerling",
"timestamp": "2025-07-24T05:10:49",
"content": "Oh my the title, lol.I haven’t seen any activity around emulating 2G, unfortunately. I’m guessing it would be a bit of effort and also require running it in extremely low power or in an anechoic cha... | 1,760,371,473.980254 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/26/listening-to-ethernet-via-eurorack/ | Listening To Ethernet Via Eurorack | Lewin Day | [
"Musical Hacks",
"Network Hacks"
] | [
"audio",
"ethernet",
"eurorack",
"modular synth",
"synth"
] | Ethernet is how we often network computers together, particularly when they’re too important to leave on a fussy WiFi connection. Have you ever thought about
listening
to Ethernet signals, though? Well, you totally could,
with the NSA selector from [wenzellabs].
The NSA selector is a Eurorack module, designed for use as part of a larger modular synthesizer. There are lots of fun jokes and references on the PCB, but the front panel really shows you what this module is all about. It’s got a pair of RJ45 jacks, ready to receive your Ethernet cables through which data is flowing. They’re paired with a single audio output jack. “Any bit on the network will be sent to the audio output,” [wenzellabs] explains.
The device operates in a relatively simple fashion. Network traffic from one jack is forwarded to the other, unmodified. However, it’s also spat out to a simple digital-to-analog converter and turned into audio. This thing doesn’t play digital audio formats or anything like that—it just turns raw Ethernet signalling into audible noise.
Raw signal noises might not sound very
appealing,
but let’s be real here. If you liked nice sounds,
you wouldn’t be into Eurorack
. Skip to
25:46 in the video below
if you just want to hear the final product.
Thanks to [mazzoo] for the tip! | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8154458",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-07-26T08:21:27",
"content": "Love it, but by god, don’t put your headphones on until 10 seconds in, that bag isloud",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8154462",
"author": "Tom G",
... | 1,760,371,474.094976 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/25/a-modern-version-of-famous-classic-speaker/ | A Modern Version Of Famous, Classic Speaker | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"amplifier",
"Doppler",
"Hammond",
"leslie",
"motor",
"music",
"speaker",
"vibrato"
] | Modern musicians may take for granted that a wide array of musical instruments can either be easily connected to a computer or modeled entirely in one, allowing for all kinds of nuanced ways of creating unique sounds and vivid pieces of music without much hardware expense. Not so in the 1930s. Musicians of the time often had to go to great lengths to generate new types of sounds, and one of the most famous of these was the Leslie speaker, known for its unique tremolo and vibrato. Original Leslies could cost thousands now, though,
so [Levi Graves] built a modern recreation
.
The Leslie speaker itself got its characteristic sound by using two speakers. The top treble speaker was connected to a pair of horns (only one of which produced sound, the other was used for a counterweight) on a rotating platform. The second speaker in the bottom part of the cabinet faced a rotating drum. Both the horns and drum were rotated at a speed chosen by the musician and leading to its unique sound. [Levi] is actually using an original Leslie drum for his recreation but the sound is coming out of a 100-watt “mystery” speaker, with everything packaged neatly into a speaker enclosure. He’s using a single-speed Leslie motor but with a custom-built foot switch can employ more fine-tuned control over the speed that the drum rotates.
Even though modern technology allows us to recreate sounds like this, often the physical manipulation of soundwaves like this created a unique feeling of sound that can’t be replicated in any other way. That’s part of what’s driven the popularity of these speakers throughout the decades, as well as the Hammond organs they’re often paired with.
The tone generators on these organs themselves
are yet another example of physical hardware providing a unique, classic sound not easily replicated. | 12 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8154496",
"author": "cdilla",
"timestamp": "2025-07-26T11:27:04",
"content": "Ah, Leslie speakers, takes me back. Never could afford one myself but had use of one for a while with my guitar. Personally I enjoyed the video. The revisioning is appealing and the presentation laid back... | 1,760,371,476.047974 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/25/building-a-color-teaching-toy-for-tots/ | Building A Color Teaching Toy For Tots | Lewin Day | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"color sensor",
"ESP32"
] | Last year, [Deep Tronix] wished to teach colors to his nephew. Thus, he built a toy to help educate a child about colors by pairing them with sounds,
and Color Player was born
.
The build is based around the TCS34725, an off-the-shelf color sensor. It’s paired with an ESP32, which senses colors and then plays sounds in turn. [Deep Tronix] made this part harder by insisting on creating their own WAV playback system, using the microcontroller, an SD card, and its on-board digital-to-analog hardware.
The map of colors and sounds.
The toy operates in three primary modes. Color-to-tone, color-to-sound, color-to-voice. Basically, a color is scanned, and then the Color Player creates a tone, plays back a pre-recorded audio sample, or spells out the name of the color that was just scanned.
[Deep Tronix] also included jolly mode, which just color cycles a few RGB LEDs. However, there’s a game inside jolly mode as well, created for an older nephew to play with. Enter the right button combination, and you unlock it. Then, the device suggests a color and you have to run around, find it, and scan it to score.
We love a good color game; somehow this build seems even more compelling
than Milton Bradley’s classic Simon toy
. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,476.351341 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/25/zine-printing-tips-from-a-solopreneur/ | Zine Printing Tips From A Solopreneur | Donald Papp | [
"classic hacks",
"how-to"
] | [
"binding",
"printing",
"zine"
] | Zines (self-produced, small-circulation publications) are
extremely
DIY, and therefore punk- and hacker-adjacent by nature. While they can be made with nothing more than a home printer or photocopier, some might benefit from professional production while losing none of their core appeal. However, the professional print world has a few gotchas, and in true hacker spirit [Mabel Wynne] shares
things she learned the hard way
when printing her solo art zine.
As with assembling hardware kits, assembling a zine can take up a lot of physical table space.
[Mabel] says the most useful detail to nail down before even speaking to printers is the zine’s binding, because binding type can impact layout and design of an entire document. Her advice? Nail it down early, whether it’s a simple saddlestitch (staples through a v-shaped fold of sheets), spiral binding (which allows a document to lay flat), or something else.
Aside from paper and print method (which may be more or less important depending on the zine’s content) the other thing that’s important to consider is the finishing. Finishing consists of things like cutting, folding, and binding of the raw printed sheets. A printer will help arrange these, but it’s possible to do some or even all of these steps for oneself, which is not only more hands-on but reduces costs.
Do test runs, and prototype the end result in order to force unknown problems to the surface before they become design issues. Really, the fundamentals have a lot in common with designing and building kits or hardware. Check out [Mabel]’s article for the full details; she even talks a little about managing money and getting a zine onto shelves.
Zine making is the DIYer’s way to give ideas physical form and put them into peoples’ hands more or less directly, and there’s something wonderfully and inherently subversive about that concept.
2600
has its roots in print, but
oddball disk magazines
prove one doesn’t need paper to make a zine. | 28 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8154378",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-07-26T00:30:09",
"content": "Old hacker-ajacent guy says: “Back in my day, sonny, we were lucky if we had access to a mimeograph or ditto machine. Now get off my lawn!”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,476.002884 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/25/massive-aluminum-snake-casting-becomes-water-cooling-loop-for-pc/ | Massive Aluminum Snake Casting Becomes Water Cooling Loop For PC | Lewin Day | [
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"aluminium casting",
"aluminum casting",
"casting",
"computer",
"pc",
"sand casting",
"water cooling"
] | Water cooling was once only the preserve of hardcore casemodders and overclockers. Today, it’s pretty routinely used in all sorts of performance PC builds. However,
few are using large artistic castings as radiators like [Mac Pierce] is doing.
The casting itself was inspired on the concept of the ouroboros, the snake which eats its own tail if one remembers correctly. [Mac] built a wooden form to produce a loop approximately 30″ tall and 24″ wide, before carving it into the classic snake design. The mold was then used to produce a hefty sand cast part which weighed in at just over 30 pounds.
The next problem was to figure out how to create a sealed water channel in the casting to use it as a radiator. This was achieved by machining finned cooling channels into the surface of the snake itself. A polycarbonate face plate was then produced to bolt over this, creating a sealed system. [Mac] also had to work hard to find a supply of aluminum-compatible water cooling fittings to ensure he didn’t run into any issues with galvanic corrosion.
The final product worked, and looked great to boot, even if it took many disassembly cycles to fix all the leaks. The blood-red coolant was a nice touch that really complemented the silvery aluminum. CPU temperatures weren’t as good as with a purpose-built PC radiator, but maxed out at 51 C in a heavy load test—servicable for [Mac]’s uses. The final touch was to simply build the rest of the PC to live inside the ouroboros itself—and the results were stunning.
We’ve featured
a few good watercooling builds over the years.
If you’ve found your own unique way to keep your hardware cool and happy, don’t hesitate to notify
the tipsline! | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8154362",
"author": "James",
"timestamp": "2025-07-25T23:12:11",
"content": "That’s incredible I love it",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8154456",
"author": "Kalten",
"timestamp": "2025-07-26T08:11:43",
"content": "N... | 1,760,371,475.887799 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/25/2025-one-hertz-challenge-a-discrete-component-divider-chain/ | 2025 One Hertz Challenge: A Discrete Component Divider Chain | Jenny List | [
"clock hacks",
"contests"
] | [
"2025 One Hertz Contest",
"32.768 kHz",
"clock divider"
] | Most of us know that a quartz clock uses a higher frequency crystal oscillator and a chain of divider circuits to generate a 1 Hz pulse train. It’s usual to have a 32.768 kHz crystal and a 15-stage divider chain, which in turn normally sits inside an integrated circuit. Not so for [Bobricius],
who’s created just such a divider chain using discrete components
.
The circuit of a transistor divider is simple enough, and he’s simply replicated it fifteen times in surface mount parts on a PCB with an oscillator forming the remaining square in a 4 by 4 grid. In the video below the break we can see him measuring the frequency at each point, down to the final second. It’s used as the timing generator for an all transistor clock, and as we can see it continues that trend. Below the break is a video showing all the frequencies in the chain.
This project is part of our awesome
2025 One Hertz Challenge
, for all things working on one second cycles. Enter your own things that go tick and tock, we’d live to see them! | 23 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8154305",
"author": "D",
"timestamp": "2025-07-25T18:46:22",
"content": "“Most of us know that a quartz clock uses a higher frequency crystal oscillator and a chain of divider circuits to generate a 1 Hz pulse train.”Uhhh count me in the minority then I guess.",
"parent_id": nul... | 1,760,371,475.841654 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/25/hackaday-podcast-episode-330-hover-turtles-dull-designs-and-knex-computers/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 330: Hover Turtles, Dull Designs, And K’nex Computers | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | What did you miss on Hackaday last week? Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Al Williams are ready to catch you up on this week’s podcast. First, though, the guys go off on vibe coding and talk about a daring space repair around Jupiter.
Then it is off to the hacks, including paste extruding egg shells, bespoke multimeters, and an 8-bit mechanical computer made from a construction toy set.
For can’t miss articles, you’ll hear about boring industrial design in modern cell phones and a deep dive into how fresh fruit makes it to your table in the middle of the winter.
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!
The
DRM-free MP3
was stored in a public refrigerated warehouse to ensure freshness. Why not download it and add it to your collection?
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 330 Show Notes:
News:
Vibe Coding Goes Wrong As AI Wipes Entire Database
https://proceedings.mlr.press/v170/marx22a/marx22a.pdf
Scientific American Amateur Scientist Neural Network
What’s that Sound?
The sound last week is revealed! Congrats to [Brian].
Pendulum Music Steve Reich 1968
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Paste Extrusion For 3D Printing Glass And Eggshells
CeraMetal Lets You Print Metal, Cheaply And Easily
TRAvel Slicer
Hand-and-Machine Github
Extruder-turtle
Designing An Open Source Multimeter: The HydraMeter
USB-C-ing All The Things
8 Bit Mechanical Computer Built From Knex
A Lockpicking Robot That Can Sense The Pins
2025 One-Hertz Challenge: HP Logic Probe Brought Into The Future
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Fusing Cheap EBay Find Into A Digital Rangefinder
Embedded LEDs For Soft Robots Made From Silicone
Video Tape Hides Video Player
Al’s Picks:
Neon Lamp Detects Lightning Strikes
Reverse Engineering A ‘Tony’ 6502-based Mini Arcade Machine
Floating Buoy Measures Ocean Conditions
Can’t-Miss Articles:
The Death Of Industrial Design And The Era Of Dull Electronics
A Field Guide To The North American Cold Chain | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8154858",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-07-27T16:22:55",
"content": "The whole AI business sounds the same as how dogs only look guilty when their owners know they’ve done something wrong (even when they haven’t).The dog doesn’t even understand the concept. They’re just actin... | 1,760,371,475.643416 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/23/an-open-source-flow-battery/ | An Open Source Flow Battery | Aaron Beckendorf | [
"Battery Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"3d printed",
"battery",
"flow battery",
"rechargeable batteries",
"redox flow batteries"
] | The flow battery is one of the more interesting ideas for grid energy storage – after all, how many batteries combine electron current with fluid current? If you’re interested in trying your hand at building one of these, the scientists behind the Flow Battery Research Collective just released the design and build instructions for a small
zinc-iodide flow battery
.
The battery consists of a central electrochemical cell, divided into two separated halves, with a reservoir and peristaltic pump on each side to push electrolyte through the cell. The cell uses brass-backed grafoil (compressed graphite sheets) as the current collectors, graphite felt as porous electrodes, and matte photo paper as the separator membrane between the electrolyte chambers. The cell frame itself and the reservoir tanks are 3D printed out of polypropylene for increased chemical resistance, while the supporting frame for the rest of the cell can be printed from any rigid filament.
The cell uses an
open source potentiostat
to control charge and discharge cycles, and an Arduino to control the peristaltic pumps. The electrolyte itself uses zinc chloride and potassium iodide as the main ingredients. During charge, zinc deposits on the cathode, while iodine and polyhalogen ions form in the anode compartment. During discharge, zinc redissolves in what is now the anode compartment, while the iodine and polyhalogen ions are reduced back to iodides and chlorides. Considering the stains that iodide ions can leave, the researchers do advise testing the cell for leaks with distilled water before filling it with electrolyte.
If you decide to try one of these builds, there’s
a forum
available to document your progress or ask for advice. This may have the clearest instructions, but it isn’t the only
homemade flow cell
out there. It’s also possible to make these with very
high energy densities
. | 30 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8153089",
"author": "Lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-07-23T10:54:36",
"content": "For people who haven’t done so before, really leak test any 3d prints designed to store liquids. Especially liquids that aren’t water. 3d prints often aren’t water right. There are tricks to make the... | 1,760,371,476.114322 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/22/nylon-like-tpu-filament-testing-cc3ds-72d-tpu/ | Nylon-Like TPU Filament: Testing CC3D’s 72D TPU | Maya Posch | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer filament",
"TPU"
] | Another entry in the world of interesting FDM filaments comes courtesy of CC3D with their 72D TPU filament, with [Dr. Igor Gaspar]
putting it to the test in his recent video
. The use of the Shore hardness D scale rather than the typical A scale is a strong indication that something is different about this TPU. The manufacturer claims ‘nylon-like’ performance, which should give this TPU filament much more hardness and resistance to abrasion. The questions are whether this filament lives up to these promises, and whether it is at all fun to print with.
The CC3D 72D TPU filament used to print a bicycle’s handlebar grips. (Credit: My Tech Fun, YouTube)
TPU is of course highly hydrophilic, so keeping the filament away from moisture is essential. Printing temperature is listed on the spool as 225 – 245°C, and the filament is very bendable but not stretchable. For the testing a Bambu Lab X-1 Carbon was used, with the filament directly loaded from the filament dryer. After an overnight print session resulted in spaghetti due to warping, it was found that generic TPU settings at 240ºC with some more nylon-specific tweaks seemed to give the best results, with other FDM printers also working well that way.
The comparison was against Bambu Lab’s 68D
TPU for AMS
. Most noticeable is that the 72D TPU easily suffers permanent deformation, while being much more wear resistant than e.g. PLA. That said, it does indeed seem to perform more like polyamide filaments, making it perhaps an interesting alternative there. Although there’s some confusion about whether this TPU filament has polyamide added to it, it seems to be pure TPU, just like the Bambu Lab 68D filament. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8153059",
"author": "Harvie.CZ",
"timestamp": "2025-07-23T08:25:01",
"content": "I was thinking about this… TPU has great layer adhesion, but usual filaments are too soft. So i was really interrested to find out if harder TPUs would provide the same toughness without being flexible ... | 1,760,371,475.779034 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/22/the-hall-heroult-process-on-a-home-scale/ | The Hall-Héroult Process On A Home Scale | Aaron Beckendorf | [
"chemistry hacks"
] | [
"alumina",
"aluminium",
"electrolysis",
"Hydrochloric acid",
"smelting",
"sodium hydroxide"
] | Although Charles Hall conducted his first successful run of the Hall-Héroult aluminium smelting process in the woodshed behind his house, it has ever since remained mostly out of reach of home chemists. It does involve electrolysis at temperatures above 1000 ℃, and can involve some frighteningly toxic chemicals, but as [Maurycy Z] demonstrates, an amateur can
now perform it
a bit more conveniently than Hall could.
[Maurycy] started by finding a natural source of aluminium, in this case aluminosilicate clay. He washed the clay and soaked it in warm hydrochloric acid for two days to extract the aluminium as a chloride. This also extracted quite a bit of iron, so [Maurycy] added sodium hydroxide to the solution until both aluminium and iron precipitated as hydroxides, added more sodium hydroxide until the aluminium hydroxide redissolved, filtered the solution to remove iron hydroxide, and finally added hydrochloric acid to the solution to precipitate aluminium hydroxide. He heated the aluminium hydroxide to about 800 ℃ to decompose it into the alumina, the starting material for electrolysis.
To turn this into aluminium metal, [Maurycy] used molten salt electrolysis. Alumina melts at a much higher temperature than [Maurycy]’s furnace could reach, so he used cryolite as a flux. He mixed this with his alumina and used an electric furnace to melt it in a graphite crucible. He used the crucible itself as the cathode, and a graphite rod as an anode. He does warn that this process can produce small amounts of hydrogen fluoride and fluorocarbons, so that “doing the electrolysis without ventilation is a great way to poison yourself in new and exciting ways.” The first run didn’t produce anything, but on a second attempt with a larger anode, 20 minutes of electrolysis produced 0.29 grams of aluminium metal.
[Maurycy]’s process follows the
industrial Hall-Héroult process
quite closely, though he does use a different procedure to purify his raw materials. If you aren’t interested in smelting aluminium, you can still cast it
with a microwave oven
. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8153004",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-07-23T03:47:25",
"content": "Sweet! Always good to see industrial processes being made more accessible. Still waiting for someone to try the FFC Cambridge process to extract titanium or silicon.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth"... | 1,760,371,475.934349 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/22/video-tape-hides-video-player/ | Video Tape Hides Video Player | Tyler August | [
"handhelds hacks"
] | [
"mp4",
"VHS",
"video player"
] | While it might not be accurate to say VHS is dead, it’s certainly not a lively format. It continues on in undeath thanks to dedicated collectors and hobbyists, some of whom may be tempted to lynch Reddit user [CommonKingfisher] for
embedding a video player inside a VHS tape.
Miniaturization in action. The video player probably cost about the same as the original VHS when you account for inflation.
The hack started with a promotional video card via Ali Express, which is a cheap enough way to get a tiny LCD player MP4 playing micro. As you can see, there was plenty of room in the tape for the guts of this. The tape path is obviously blocked, so the tape is not playable in this format. [CommonKingfisher] claims the hack is “reversible” but since he cut a window for the LCD out of the casing of the cassette, that’s going to be pretty hard to undo. On the other hand, the ultrasonic cutter he used did make a very clean cut, and that would help with reversibility.
The fact that the thing is activated by a magnetic sensor makes us worry for the data on that tape, too, whether or not the speaker is a peizo. Ultimately it doesn’t really matter; in no universe was this tape the last surviving copy of “The Matrix”, and it’s a lot more likely this self-playing “tape” gets watched than the VHS was going to be. You can watch it yourself in the demo video embedded below.
VHS nostalgia around here usually
involves replicating the tape experience
, rather than
repurposing the tape.
We’re grateful to [George Graves] for the tip. Tips of all sorts are welcome on
our friendly neighborhood tips line
. | 16 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8152959",
"author": "Robert",
"timestamp": "2025-07-23T00:43:08",
"content": "So… which item do we buy? Four searches, no joy…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8153049",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2025-07-23... | 1,760,371,476.170949 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/22/2025-one-hertz-challenge-a-555-but-not-as-we-know-it/ | 2025 One Hertz Challenge: A 555, But Not As We Know It | Tyler August | [
"contests"
] | [
"555",
"blinky",
"tiny tapeout"
] | We did explicitly ask for projects that use a 555 timer for the One Hertz Challenge, but we weren’t expecting the 555 to
be
the project. Yet, here we are, with [matt venn]’s
Open Source 1Hz Blinky, that blinks a light with a 555 timer… but not one you’d get from Digikey.
Hooking a 555 to blink an LED at one hertz is a bog-simple, first-electronics-project type of exercise, unless you have to make the 555 first. Rather than
go big, as we have seen before
, [matt venn] goes very small, with a 555 implemented on a tiny sliver of Tiny Tapeout 6.
We’ve
covered projects using that tapeout before
, but in case you missed it, Tiny Tapeout gives space to anyone to produce ASICs on custom silicon using an open Process Design Kit, and we have [matt venn] to thank for it. The
Tiny Tapeout implementation of the 555
was actually designed by [Vincent Fusco].
Of course wiring it up is a bit more complicated than dropping in a 555 timer to the circuit: the Tiny Tapeout ASIC must be configured to use that specific project using its web interface. There’s a demo video embedded below, with some info about the project– it’s not just a blinking LED, so it’s worth seeing. The output isn’t
exactly
One Hertz, so it might not get the nod in the Timelord category, but it’s going to be a very strong competitor for other 555-based projects– of which we could really use more, hint-hint. You’ve got until August 19th, if you think you can use a 555 to do something more interesting than blink an LED. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8152897",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-07-22T20:13:19",
"content": "It never gets old seeing those designs.https://youtu.be/_Pqfjer8-O4",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8152900",
"author": "Jørgen Kragh Jakobsen",... | 1,760,371,476.206338 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/22/2025-one-hertz-challenge-pokemon-alarm-clock-tells-you-its-time-to-build-the-very-best/ | 2025 One-Hertz Challenge: Pokémon Alarm Clock Tells You It’s Time To Build The Very Best | Adam Zeloof | [
"clock hacks",
"contests",
"Games"
] | [
"2025 Hackaday One Hertz Challenge",
"art",
"clock",
"ESP32",
"microcontroller",
"pokemon"
] | We’ve all felt the frustration of cheap consumer electronics — especially when they aren’t actually cheap. How many of us have said “Who designed this crap? I could do better with an Arduino!” while resisting the urge to drop that new smart doorbell in the garbage disposal?
It’s an all-too familiar thought, and when it passed through [Mathieu]’s head while he was resetting the time and changing the batteries in his son’s power-hungry Pokémon alarm clock for the umpteenth time,
he decided to do something about it
.
The only real design requirement, imposed by [Mathieu]’s son, was that the clock’s original shell remained. Everything else, including the the controller and “antique” LCD could go. He ripped out the internals and installed an ESP32, allowing the clock to automatically sync to network time in the event of power loss. The old-school LCD was replaced with a modern, full-color TFT LCD which he scored on AliExpress for a couple of Euros.
Rather than just showing the time, the new display sports some beautiful pixel art by
Woostarpixels
, which [Mathieu] customized to have day and nighttime versions, even including the correct moon phase. He really packed as much into the ESP32 as possible, using 99.6% of its onboard 4 MB of flash. Code is
on GitHub
for the curious. All in all, the project is a multidisciplinary work of art, and it looks well-built enough to be enjoyed for years to come. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8152870",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-07-22T18:47:17",
"content": "Is it less power-hungry than the original?If not, does it have a power-save mode that is less power-hungry? I’m thinking a “sleep” mode that wakes up when you throw it to release your Pokémon, I mean, gent... | 1,760,371,476.404032 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/22/the-epochalypse-y2k-but-38-years-later/ | The Epochalypse: It’s Y2K, But 38 Years Later | Lewin Day | [
"computer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"2038 problem",
"epoch",
"epoch time",
"timestamp",
"unix",
"unix time",
"year 2038 problem"
] | Picture this: it’s January 19th, 2038, at exactly 03:14:07 UTC. Somewhere in a data center, a Unix system quietly ticks over its internal clock counter one more time. But instead of moving forward to 03:14:08, something strange happens. The system suddenly thinks it’s December 13th, 1901. Chaos ensues.
Welcome to the Year 2038 problem. It goes by a number of other fun names—the Unix Millennium Bug, the Epochalypse, or Y2K38. It’s another example of a fundamental computing limit that requires major human intervention to fix.
By and large, the Y2K problem was dealt with ahead of time for critical systems. An amusing example of a Y2K failure was this sign at the École Centrale de Nantes, pictured on January 3, 2000. Credit:
Bug de l’an 2000
, CC BY-SA 3.0
The Y2K problem was simple enough. Many computing systems stored years as two-digit figures, often for the sake of minimizing space needed on highly-constrained systems, back when RAM and storage, or space on punch cards, were strictly limited. This generally limited a system to understanding dates from 1900 to 1999; when storing the year 2000 as a two-digit number, it would instead effectively appear as 1900 instead. This promised to cause chaos in all sorts of ways, particularly in things like financial systems processing transactions in the year 2000 and onwards.
The problem was first identified in 1958 by Bob Bemer, who was working on longer time scales with genealogical software. Awareness slowly grew through the 1980s and 1990s as the critical date approached and things like long-term investment bonds started to butt up against the year 2000. Great effort was expended to overhaul and update important computer systems to enable them to store dates in a fashion that would not loop around back to 1900 after 1999.
Unlike Y2K, which was largely about how dates were stored and displayed, the 2038 problem is rooted in the fundamental way Unix-like systems keep track of time. Since the early 1970s, Unix systems have measured time as the number of seconds elapsed since January 1st, 1970, at 00:00:00 UTC. This moment in time is known as the “Unix epoch.” Recording time in this manner seemed like a perfectly reasonable approach at the time. It gave systems a simple, standardized way to handle timestamps and scheduled tasks.
The trouble is that this timestamp was traditionally stored as a signed 32-bit integer. Thanks to the magic of binary, a signed 32-bit integer can represent values from -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647. When you’re counting individual seconds, that gives you about plus and minus 68 years either side of the epoch date. Do the math, and you’ll find that 2,147,483,647 seconds after January 1st, 1970 lands you at 03:14:07 UTC on January 19th, 2038. That’s the final time that can be represented using the 32-bit signed integer, having started at the Unix epoch.
The Unix time integer immediately prior to overflow.
What happens next isn’t pretty. When that counter tries to increment one more time, it overflows. In two’s complement arithmetic, the first bit is a signed bit. Thus, the time stamp rolls over from 2,147,483,647 to -2,147,483,648. That translates to December 13th, 1901. In January 2038, this will be roughly 136 years in the past.
Unix time after the 32-bit signed integer has overflowed.
For an unpatched system using a signed 32-bit integer to track Unix time, the immediate consequences could be severe. Software could malfunction when trying to calculate time differences that suddenly span more than a century in the wrong direction, and logs and database entries could quickly become corrupted as operations are performed on invalid dates. Databases might reject “historical” entries, file systems could become confused about which files are newer than others, and scheduled tasks might cease to run or run at inappropriate times.
This isn’t just some abstract future problem. If you grew up in the 20th century, it might sound far off—but 2038 is just 13 years away. In fact, the 2038 bug is already causing issues today. Any software that tries to work with dates beyond 2038—such as financial systems calculating 30-year mortgages—could fall over this bug right now.
In 2012, NetBSD 6.0 introduced 64-bit Unix time across both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. There is also a binary compatibility layer for running older applications, though they will still suffer the year 2038 problem internally. Credit: NetBSD changelog
The obvious fix is to move from 32-bit to 64-bit timestamps. A 64-bit signed integer can represent timestamps far into the future—roughly 292 billion years in fact, which should cover us until well after the heat death of the universe. Until we discover a solution for that fundamental physical limit, we should be fine.
Indeed, most modern Unix-based operating systems have already made this transition. Linux moved to 64-bit time_t values on 64-bit platforms years ago, and since version 5.6 in 2020, it supports 64-bit timestamps even on 32-bit hardware. OpenBSD has used 64-bit timestamps since May 2014, while NetBSD made the switch even earlier in 2012.
Most other modern Unix filesystems, C compilers, and database systems have switched over to 64-bit time by now. With that said, some have used hackier solutions that kick the can down the road more than fixing the problem for all of foreseeable time. For example, the ext4 filesystem uses a complicated timestamping system involving nanoseconds that runs out in 2446. XFS does a little better, but its only good up to 2486. Meanwhile, Microsoft Windows uses its own 64-bit system tracking 100-nanosecond intervals since 1 January 1601. This will overflow as soon as the year 30,828.
The challenge isn’t just in the operating systems, though. The problem affects software and embedded systems, too. Most things built today on modern architectures will probably be fine where the Year 2038 problem is concerned. However, things that were built more than a decade ago that were intended to run near-indefinitely could be a problem. Enterprise software, networking equipment, or industrial controllers could all trip over the Unix date limit come 2038 if they’re not updated beforehand. There are also obscure dependencies and bits of code out there that can cause even modern applications to suffer this problem
if you’re not looking out for them.
In 2022, a coder called Silent identified a code snippet that was reintroducing the Year 2038 bug to new software. Credit:
Silent’s blog via screenshot
The real engineering challenge lies in maintaining compatibility during the transition. File formats need updating and databases must be migrated without mangling dates in the process. For systems in the industrial, financial, and commercial fields where downtime is anathema, this can be very challenging work. In extreme cases, solving the problem might involve porting a whole system to a new operating system architecture, incurring huge development and maintenance costs to make the changeover.
The 2038 problem is really a case study in technical debt and the long-term consequences of design decisions. The Unix epoch seemed perfectly reasonable in 1970 when 2038 felt like science fiction. Few developing those systems thought a choice made back then would have lasting consequences over 60 years later. It’s a reminder that today’s pragmatic engineering choices might become tomorrow’s technical challenges.
The good news is that most consumer-facing systems will likely be fine. Your smartphone, laptop, and desktop computer almost certainly use 64-bit timestamps already. The real work is happening in the background—corporate system administrators updating server infrastructure, embedded systems engineers planning obsolescence cycles, and software developers auditing code for time-related assumptions. The rest of us just get to kick back and watch the (ideally) lack of fireworks as January 19, 2038 passes us by. | 44 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "8152830",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-07-22T17:41:35",
"content": "Well the trust fund runs out in 2033, so there may be few left to note the passing of a future Y2K.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8152885",
... | 1,760,371,476.682589 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/23/vibe-coding-goes-wrong-as-ai-wipes-entire-database/ | Vibe Coding Goes Wrong As AI Wipes Entire Database | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"ai",
"coding",
"machine learning",
"replit",
"vibe coding"
] | Imagine, you’re tapping away at your keyboard, asking an AI to whip up some fresh code for a big project you’re working on. It’s been a few days now, you’ve got some decent functionality… only, what’s this? The AI is telling you it screwed up. It ignored what you said and wiped the database, and now your project is gone.
That’s precisely what happened to [Jason Lemkin].
(via
PC Gamer
)
[Jason] was working with Replit, a tool for building apps and sites with AI. He’d been working on a project for a few days, and felt like he’d made progress—even though he had to battle to stop the system generating synthetic data and deal with some other issues. Then, tragedy struck.
“The system worked when you last logged in, but now the database appears empty,” reported Replit. “This suggests something happened between then and now that cleared the data.” [Jason] had tried to avoid this, but Replit hadn’t listened. “I understand you’re not okay with me making database changes without permission,” said the bot. “I violated the user directive from replit.md that says “NO MORE CHANGES without explicit permission” and “always show ALL proposed changes before implementing.” Basically, the bot ran a database push command that wiped everything.
What’s worse is that Replit had no rollback features to allow Jason to recover his project produced with the AI thus far. Everything was lost. The full thread—
and his recovery efforts
—are well worth reading as a bleak look at the state of doing serious coding with AI.
Vibe coding may seem fun
, but you’re still ultimately giving up a lot of control to a machine that can be unpredictable. Stay safe out there!
.
@Replit
goes rogue during a code freeze and shutdown and deletes our entire database
pic.twitter.com/VJECFhPAU9
— Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk)
July 18, 2025
We saw Jason’s post.
@Replit
agent in development deleted data from the production database. Unacceptable and should never be possible.
– Working around the weekend, we started rolling out automatic DB dev/prod separation to prevent this categorically. Staging environments in…
pic.twitter.com/oMvupLDake
— Amjad Masad (@amasad)
July 20, 2025 | 91 | 32 | [
{
"comment_id": "8153425",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-07-24T02:10:54",
"content": "Who could have seen this coming? Inexperienced dev decides to have a go at coding because, seriously, how hard can it be?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_... | 1,760,371,477.164286 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/23/game-dev-on-ibook-g4-with-netbsd/ | Game Dev On IBook G4 With NetBSD | Tyler August | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"ibook",
"netbsd",
"ppc",
"pygame"
] | What can you do with a laptop enough to drink even in the Puritan ex-colonies? 21 years is a long time for computer hardware– but [Chris] is
using his early-2004 iBook G4 for game dev thanks to NetBSD.
Some of you might consider game dev a strong word; obviously he’s not working on AAA titles on the machine he affectionately calls “Brick”. NetBSD includes pygame in its repositories, though, and that’s enough for a 2D puzzle game he’s working on called Slantics.
It’s on GitHub, if you’re curious.
Slantics: possibly the only game written on PPC Macintosh hardware this year.
Why NetBSD? Well, [Chris] wants to use his vintage hardware so that, in his words “collecting does not become hoarding” and as the slogan goes: “Of course it runs NetBSD!” It’s hard to remember sometimes that it’s been two decades since the last PPC Macintosh. After that long, PPC support in Linux is fading, as you might expect.
[Chris] tried the community-supported PPC32 port of Debian Sid, but the installer didn’t work reliably, and driver issues made running it “Death by a thousand cuts”. NetBSD, with it’s institutional obsession with
running on anything and everything
, works perfectly on this legally-adult hardware. Even better, [Chris] reports NetBSD running considerably faster, getting 60 FPS in pygame vs 25 FPS under Linux.
This is almost certainly not the year of the BSD Desktop, but if you’ve got an old PPC machine you feel like dusting off to enjoy a low-powered modern workflow,
NetBSD may be your AI-code-free jam
. It’s great to see old hardware still doing real work. If you’d rather relive the glory days, you can plug that PPC into a
wayback proxy to browse like it’s 2005 again
. If you get bored of nostalgia, there’s
always MorphOS
, which
still
targets PPC. | 5 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8153477",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-07-24T03:39:37",
"content": "I mean, yeah. Linux’s “it runs on everything” title is pretty undeserved. It doesn’t even run on early pentiums anymore.There’s a reason I’ve been looking at NetBSD for long-lived arm board support. Just have a... | 1,760,371,476.803985 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/23/fusing-cheap-ebay-find-into-a-digital-rangefinder/ | Fusing Cheap EBay Find Into A Digital Rangefinder | Adam Zeloof | [
"hardware",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"camera",
"leica",
"photography",
"reangefinder"
] | One of the earliest commercially-successful camera technologies was the rangefinder — a rather mechanically-complex system that allows a photographer to focus by triangulating a subject, often in a dedicated focusing window, and and frame the shot with another window, all without ever actually looking through the lens. Rangefinder photographers will give you any number of reasons why their camera is just better than the others — it’s faster to use, the focusing is more accurate, the camera is lighter — but in today’s era of lightweight mirrorless digitals, all of these arguments sound like vinyl aficionados saying “The sound is just more
round
, man. Digital recordings are all square.” (This is being written by somebody who shoots with a rangefinder and listens to vinyl).
While there are loads of analog rangefinders floating around eBay, the trouble nowadays is that digital rangefinders are rare, and all but impossible to find for a reasonable price. Rather than complaining on Reddit after getting fed up with the lack of affordable options, [Mr.50mm] decided to do something about it, and
build his own digital rangefinder for less than $250
.
Part of the problem is that, aside from a few exceptions, the only digital rangefinders have been manufactured by Leica, a German company often touted as the Holy Grail of photography. Whether you agree with the hype or consider them overrated toys, they’re sure expensive. Even in the used market, you’d be hard-pressed to find an older model for less than $2,000, and the newest models can be upwards of $10,000.
Rather than start from scratch, he fused two low-cost and commonly-available cameras into one with some careful surgery and 3D printing. The digital bits came from a Panasonic GF3, a 12 MP camera that can be had for around $120, and the rangefinder system from an old Soviet camera called the Fed 5, which you can get for less than $50 if you’re lucky. The Fed 5 also conveniently worked with Leica Thread Mount (LTM) lenses, a precursor to the modern bayonet-mount lenses, so [Mr.50mm] lifted the lens mounting hardware from it as well.
Even LTM lenses are relatively cheap, as they’re not compatible with modern Leicas. Anyone who’s dabbled in building or repairing cameras will tell you that there’s loads of precision involved. If the image sensor, or film plane, offset is off by the slightest bit, you’ll never achieve a sharp focus — and that’s just one of many aspects that need to be
just
right. [Mr.50mm]’s attention to detail really paid off, as the sample images (which you can see in the video below) look fantastic.
With photography becoming a more expensive hobby every day, it’s great to see some efforts to build accessible and open-source cameras, and this project joins the ranks of the
Pieca
and this
Super 8 retrofit
. Maybe we’ll even see Leica-signed encrypted metadata in a future version,
as it’s so easy to spoof
. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8153572",
"author": "Chloe",
"timestamp": "2025-07-24T08:18:32",
"content": "LTM lenses are compatible with M mount Leicas using v. simple adaptors.When Leica created the first M mount camera, they specifically designed the flange distance and rangefinder to allow them to be adapted... | 1,760,371,476.909818 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/23/2025-one-hertz-challenge-16-bit-tower-blinks-at-one-hertz/ | 2025 One Hertz Challenge: 16-Bit Tower Blinks At One Hertz | Matt Varian | [
"contests"
] | [
"2025 Hackaday One Hertz Challenge",
"diy cpu",
"relay computer",
"relay logic"
] | We’ve seen our share of blinking light projects around here; most are fairly straightforward small projects, but this entry to the 2025 One Hertz Challenge is the polar opposite of that approach. [Peter] sent in this awesome tower of
16bit relay CPU
power blinking a light every second.
There’s a lot to take in on this project, so be sure to go look at the ongoing logs of the underlying
16-bit relay CPU project
where [Peter] has been showing his progress in creating this clicking and clacking masterpiece. The relay CPU consists of a stack of 5 main levels: the top board is the main control board, the next level down figures out the address calculations for commands, under that is the arithmetic logic unit level, under the ALU is the output register where you’ll see a 220 V lamp blinking at 1 Hz, and finally at the base are a couple of microcontrollers used for a clock signal and memory. [Peter] included oscilloscope readings showing how even with the hundreds of moving parts going on, the light is blinking within 1% of its 1 Hz goal.
It’s worth noting that while [Peter] has the relay CPU blinking a light in this setup, the CPU has 19 commands to program it, enabling much more complex tasks. Thanks for the amazing-sounding entry from [Peter] for our One Hertz Challenge. Be sure to check out some of the other
relay computers
we’ve featured over the years for more clicking goodness. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8153313",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2025-07-23T19:40:37",
"content": "Winner. Definitely.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8153526",
"author": "Chris",
"timestamp": "2025-07-24T06:30:55",
"content": "I love it. I... | 1,760,371,476.591367 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/23/embedded-leds-for-soft-robots-made-from-silicone/ | Embedded LEDs For Soft Robots Made From Silicone | John Elliot V | [
"LED Hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"embedded LED",
"silicone",
"soft robot",
"stretch sensor"
] | Over on their YouTube channel [Science Buddies]
shows us how to embed LEDs in soft robots
. Soft robots can be made entirely or partially from silicone. In the video you see an example of a claw-like gripper made entirely from silicone. You can also use silicone to make “skin”. The skin can stretch, and the degree of stretch can be measured by means of an embedded sensor made from stretchy conductive fabric.
As silicone is translucent if you embed LEDs within it when illuminated they will emit diffuse light. Stranded wire is best for flexibility and the video demonstrates how to loop the wires back and forth into a spring-like shape for expansion and contraction along the axis which will stretch. Or you can wire in the LEDs without bending the wires if you run them along an axis which won’t stretch.
The video shows how to make silicone skin by layering two-part mixture into a mold. A base layer of silicone is followed by a strip of conductive fabric and the LED with its wires. Then another layer of silicone is applied to completely cover and seal the fabric and LED in place. Tape is used to hold the fabric and LED in place while the final layer of silicone is applied.
When the LEDs are embedded in silicone there will be reduced airflow to facilitate cooling so be sure to use a large series resistor to limit the current through the LED as much as possible to prevent overheating. A 1K series resistor would be a good value to try first. If you need the LED to be brighter you will need to decrease the resistance, but make sure you’re not generating too much heat when you do so.
If you’re interested in stretchy circuits you might also like to
read about flexible circuits built on polyimide film
. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8154072",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-07-25T07:07:00",
"content": "I am sensing some sarcasm here. Did you have a better idea for a starting series resistor than 1K?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8154075",
... | 1,760,371,476.726049 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/23/the-death-of-industrial-design-and-the-era-of-dull-electronics/ | The Death Of Industrial Design And The Era Of Dull Electronics | Maya Posch | [
"Cellphone Hacks",
"Featured",
"History",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"industrial design",
"product development"
] | It’s often said that what’s inside matters more than one’s looks, but it’s hard to argue that a product’s looks and its physical user experience are what makes it instantly recognizable. When you think of something like a Walkman, an iPod music player, a desktop computer, a car or a TV, the first thing that comes to mind is the way that it looks along with its user interface. This is the domain of industrial design, where circuit boards, mechanisms, displays and buttons are put into a shell that ultimately defines what users see and experience.
Thus industrial design is perhaps the most important aspect of product development as far as the user is concerned, right along with the feature list. It’s also no secret that marketing departments love to lean into the styling and ergonomics of a product. In light of this it is very disconcerting that the past years industrial design for consumer electronics in particular seems to have wilted and is now practically on the verge of death.
Devices like cellphones and TVs are now mostly flat plastic-and-glass rectangles with no distinguishing features. Laptops and PCs are identified either by being flat, small, having RGB lighting, or a combination of these. At the same time buttons and other physical user interface elements are vanishing along with prominent styling, leaving us in a world of basic geometric shapes and flat, evenly colored surfaces. Exactly how did we get to this point, and what does this mean for our own hardware projects?
Bold And Colorful Shapes
Motorola
RAZR V3i
mobile phone from 2005. (Source:
Wikimedia
)
Industrial design is less of a science and more of an art, limited only by the available materials, the constraints of the product’s internals and the goal of creating a positive user experience. Although design has always played a role with many products over the millennia, these were generally quite limited due to material and tooling constraints. As both plastics and electronics began their stratospheric rise during the 20th century, suddenly it felt like many of these constraints had been removed.
No longer was one limited to basic materials like stone, metal, wood and paint, while internals got ever smaller and more flexible in terms of placement. Enclosures now could take on any shape, while buttons, knobs and dials could be shaped and placed to one’s heart’s content. This change is clearly visible in consumer devices, with the sixties and subsequent
decades seeing a veritable explosion in stylish transistorized radios, home computers and portable entertainment devices, with industrial designers getting the hang of all these new materials and options.
The peak here was arguably achieved during the 1990s and early 2000s, as electronic miniaturization and manufacturing chops led to device manufacturers basically just showing off. Personal Hi-Fi systems and portable devices along with computer systems and laptops grew curved, translucent and transparent plastic along with a dazzling array of colors.
These days we refer to this era as the ‘
Y2K Aesthetic
‘, which was followed around the mid-2000s to early 2010s by the sweetly named ‘
Frutiger Aero
‘ era. During this time both hardware and software underwent a transition from mostly utilitarian looks into something that can be defined as tasteful to over the top, depending on your perspective, but above all it embraced the technologies and materials in its industrial design. Futurism and literal transparency were the rule, as a comfortable, colorful and stylish companion in daily life.
From Brick To Slab
Mobile phone evolution from 1992 to 2014, starting with the Motorola 8900X-2 to the iPhone 6 Plus. (Credit: Jojhnjoy,
Wikimedia
)
Ask someone to visualize a Nokia 3310 and even if they’re born after 2000, there’s a good chance that they will be able to tell you what it is, what it does and what it looks like. Then ask that same person to describe any modern cellphone, and while the feature list should be quite easy, asking them to draw what differentiates, say, an iPhone 16 from a Samsung Galaxy S25 is effectively impossible unless they have memorized the layout of the cameras on the back and perhaps the side button placement.
The iPhone 12 through iPhone 15 Plus. Marketing would like you to find the differences. (Source:
Wikipedia
)
Samsung Galaxy S23, S23+, S23 Ultra. (Source:
Wikimedia
)
Over the decades, cellphones have seen their displays grow larger and larger. With voracious appetite, these displays have consumed bezels, front speakers, keyboards and home buttons.
Along with the demise of these features, front facing cameras were only preserved by literally punching a hole in the display, but notification LEDs vanished right along with headphone jacks, IR blaster LEDs, swappable covers, removable batteries, etc.
The current scuttlebutt is that Apple will be the first to drop any and all connectors from its iPhone cellphones, with the
iPhone 17
reportedly nearly becoming the first to do so. Along with eSIMs, this would leave smartphones as glued-together slabs of plastic-and-glass with only a screen, some cameras and a couple of buttons.
In marketing shots smartphones are always shown with a lock- or home screen open on the screen, because otherwise there would be just a lifeless black slab of glass to look at from the front. From the side you can see the same slab, which easily wobbles on its ever-growing camera hump that’s sticking out of the razor-thin case like a bad case of optical melanoma. At this point in time, the most exciting thing about cellphones is whether it can flip or not, followed by whatever subdued color is applied to the slippery glass back that you want to cover up with something concealing and grippy as soon as possible anyway.
Naturally, it’s not just phones either, but also computers, with the iMac’s evolution showing a clear ‘evolution’ from colorful and bold designs to geometric slabs:
Evolution of the Apple iMac. (Credit:
Wikimedia
)
Whether you call it ‘modern’ or ‘clean’ design, the trend is quite clear. Curves are removed, colors are purged or at the very least muted and the overall design reduced to the level of excitement experienced while being stuck at an Ikea showroom during a busy weekend with the family.
Lifeless Slabs
An LG Flatron CRT TV from around 2007. (Credit: Briho,
Wikimedia
)
There was a time when televisions had a recognizable look to them, with a stylish bezel, a real power button, as well as a couple of front input connectors and buttons to adjust basic settings like volume and the current channel, which could also be hidden behind a small flap. This is now all gone, and TVs have become as visually striking from the front as modern smartphones, with the speakers fully nerfed since there’s no space on the front any more.
All inputs and any remaining controls are now hidden on the back where reaching them is borderline impossible after installation, never mind if you mounted it on a wall. You’re not supposed to find the TV visually appealing, or marvel at the easy user interface, just consume whatever content is displayed on the bezel-less screen.
The rest of any home entertainment setup has undergone the same process, with the HiFi stacks and mid-sized sets of yesteryear replaced by the same smartphones and TVs, along with a bit of plastic that you can stick into a slab TV to stream content with from some internet-based service.
An Apple HomePod and HomePod Mini mono speakers.
Rather than a stereo – or better – HiFi setup, most people will have a bunch of usually mono Bluetooth speakers scattered around, each of which possessing the visual appeal of a radar dome. If you’re lucky there are still a couple of touch buttons to fondle, but virtually all of your interactions with such devices will go via an app on your slab phone.
Touch controls are also all that you will get these days, as physical buttons, dials, sliders and switches are almost completely faux pas in modern-day product design. Everything has to be smooth, stealthy, invisibly present and yet always there when you crave that entertainment fix.
This design language isn’t just afflicting home electronics either, as over the past years car interiors have seen physical user controls vanish in favor of one or more touch screens, with cars like those from Tesla being the most extreme example with just a single large touch screen on the center console as the sole user interface. Users are however
pushing back against this change
, with a number of studies also showing that touch-only controls are less effective and less safe than fumbling around on a big screen while driving to adjust something like the climate controls or radio station.
There Is An App For That
Want to set up your new formless slab of plastic or fabric? Please download this special mobile app to do anything with it. Got a new pair of headphones? Better pray that the mobile app works well on your slab phone or you’ll be stuck with whatever preset defaults it came with, as physical controls on the device are for dummies.
Whether we like it or not, the human user interface part of industrial design has been mostly taken out back and replaced with software running on a slab phone. Whatever vestigial controls still remain on the device itself will only be a small subset of what its electronics and firmware are capable of. The slab phone has thus become the user interface, with that part of industrial design often outsourced to some third-party mobile app developer.
This has massively backfired for some companies already, with
Sonos in 2024 releasing
a ‘new and improved’ version of its slab phone app that was so buggy and plagued with issues that it rendered the Sonos speaker hardware effectively useless. While physical user interfaces have their issues, sinking an entire company due to a badly arranged set of knobs is not as easy as with a slab phone app or equivalent, not to mention the potential to retroactively brick the user interface of devices that people have already purchased.
Yearning For That Human Touch
Original Sony Walkman TPS-L2 from 1979.
Here we can see
parallels with computer user interfaces
, where much like with industrial design there’s a big push to reduce shapes to the most basic geometric forms, remove or reduce color and remove any ‘superfluous’ styling including
skeuomorphism
. These parallels are perhaps not that surprising, as companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft produce both consumer hardware and software.
Google, for example, has heavily invested in its
Material Design
design language, which can be summarized as having flat color backgrounds with the most simplistic UI elements suspended in said void. UI elements like the ‘hamburger’ icon are used to hide menus not just on phones, but also on desktop systems, where a form of extreme minimalism is being pushed to its ultimate extremes.
In the case of consumer electronics that means devices that lack any distinguishable features, as minimalism is a poor way to distinguish one product from another. The removal of visually pleasing and physically practical elements also means a dull, stimulation-free experience.
There are no pleasing elements to rest your eyes on, no curves or colors that invoke an emotional response, no buttons to press, or any kind of auditory or physical response. Just lifeless touch controls on slabs of plastic and glass with maybe a sad beep as confirmation of a touch control having been triggered.
In this context, what is often called
the revival of physical media
can be interpreted as not just a yearning for a more visceral audio-visual experience, but would together with so-called retro-computing be a way to experience personal electronics in a way that stimulates and invigorates. Where physical buttons are pressed, sliders slid, dials turned and things go click and whirr as one’s fingers touch and manipulate the very real user interface elements.
We know that chronic boredom can be extremely harmful to non-human animals, with enrichment toys and activities prescribed to make them happier and more content. With modern day consumer electronics having become incredibly dull due to the death of industrial design, it would seem that us human mammals are seeking out our own enrichment activities, modern design sensibilities be damned. If this means repeating the sins of early 2000s or 1990s industrial design in our personal hobbyist projects, it’s a price worth to pay for keeping ourselves and our fellow humans happy and enriched. | 191 | 46 | [
{
"comment_id": "8153187",
"author": "Jock Murphy",
"timestamp": "2025-07-23T14:28:47",
"content": "I completely understand the desire for our artifacts to be beautiful, but when it comes to some of them like my phone, I want them to disappear. I want the aesthetics to be in the “world” that lives ... | 1,760,371,477.669527 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/23/annealing-in-space-how-nasa-saved-junocam-in-orbit-around-jupiter/ | Annealing In Space: How NASA Saved JunoCam In Orbit Around Jupiter | Maya Posch | [
"Space"
] | [
"Juno",
"Jupiter",
"nasa"
] | The
Juno
spacecraft was launched towards Jupiter in August of 2011 as part of the
New Frontiers
series of spacecraft, on what would originally have been a 7-year mission, including a nearly 5 year cruise to the planet. After a mission extension, it’s currently orbiting Jupiter, allowing for many more years of scientific data to be gathered using its instruments. One of these instruments is the
JunoCam
(JCM), a visible light camera and telescope. Unfortunately the harsh radiation environment around Jupiter had led many to believe that this camera would fail before long. Now it seems that
NASA engineers have successfully tested a fix
.
Location of the Juno spacecraft’s science instruments.
Although the radiation damage to JCM was obvious a few dozen orbits in – and well past its original mission’s 34 orbits – the big question was exactly what was being damaged by the radiation, and whether something could be done to circumvent or fix it. The good news was that the image sensor itself was fine, but one of the voltage regulators in JCM’s power supply was having a bad time. This led the engineers to try annealing the affected part by cranking up one of the JCM’s heaters to a balmy 25°C, well above what it normally is kept at.
This desperate step seemed to work, with massively improved image quality on the following orbits, but soon the images began to degrade again. Before an approach to Jupiter’s moon Io, the engineers thus tried it again but this time cranked the JCM’s heater up to eleven and crossed their fingers. Surprisingly this fixed the issue over the course of a week, until the JCM seems as good as new. Now the engineers are trying their luck with
Juno
‘s other instruments as well, with it potentially providing a blueprint for extending the life of spacecraft in general.
Thanks to [Mark Stevens] for the tip. | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8153111",
"author": "Chris",
"timestamp": "2025-07-23T11:57:22",
"content": "Just heard a lovely presentation on this topic last week at NSREC and the statement really undersells what an amazing hack this all was.IIRC JunoCam was technically a “late addition” to the Juno mission and... | 1,760,371,476.865719 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/22/usb-c-ing-all-the-things/ | USB-C-ing All The Things | Jenny List | [
"Parts"
] | [
"dc power",
"USB C",
"USB-C PD"
] | Wall warts. Plug mounted power supplies that turn mains voltage into low voltage DC on a barrel jack to power a piece of equipment. We’ve all got a load of them for our various devices, most of us to the extent that it becomes annoying. [Mikeselectricstuff] has the solution, in the shape of a USB-C PD power supply designed to
replace a barrel jack socket on a PCB
.
The video below provides a comprehensive introduction to the topic before diving into the design. The chip in question is the CH224K, and he goes into detail on ordering the boards for yourself. As the design files are freely available, we wouldn’t be surprised if they start turning up from the usual suppliers before too long.
We like this project and we can see that it would be useful, after all it’s easy to end up in wall wart hell. We’ve remarked before that
USB-C PD is a new technology done right
, and this is the perfect demonstration of its potential. | 53 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "8152784",
"author": "rasz_pl",
"timestamp": "2025-07-22T16:04:59",
"content": "Megan in M3GAN 2.0 gets one of those boards implanted as a non-lethal inhibitor chip :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8152925",
"author":... | 1,760,371,477.342981 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/22/power-grid-stability-from-generators-to-reactive-power/ | Power Grid Stability: From Generators To Reactive Power | Maya Posch | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"alternating current",
"power grid"
] | It hasn’t been that long since humans figured out how to create power grids that integrated multiple generators and consumers. Ever since AC won the battle of the currents, grid operators have had to deal with the issues that come with using AC instead of the far less complex DC. Instead of simply targeting a constant voltage, generators have to synchronize with the frequency of the alternating current as it cycles between positive and negative current many times per second.
Complicating matters further, the transmission lines between generators and consumers, along with any kind of transmission equipment on the lines, add their own inductive, capacitive, and resistive properties to the system before the effects of consumers are even tallied up. The result of this are phase shifts between voltage and current that have to be managed by controlling the reactive power, lest frequency oscillations and voltage swings result in a complete grid blackout.
Flowing Backwards
We tend to think of the power in our homes as something that comes out of the outlet before going into the device that’s being powered. While for DC applications this is essentially true – aside from fights over which way DC current flows – for AC applications the answer is pretty much a “It’s complicated”. After all, the primary reason why we use AC transmission is because transformers make transforming between AC voltages easy, not because an AC grid is easier to manage.
Image showing the instantaneous electric power in AC systems and its decomposition into active and reactive power; when the current lags the voltage 50 degrees. (Credit:
Jon Peli Oleaga
)
What exactly happens between an AC generator and an AC load depends on the characteristics of the load. A major part of these characteristics is covered by its
power factor
(PF), which describes the effect of the load on the AC phase. If the PF is 1, the load is purely resistive with no phase shift. If the PF is 0, it’s a purely reactive load and no net current flows. Most AC-powered devices have a power factor that’s somewhere between 0.5 to 0.99, meaning that they appear to be a mixed reactive and resistive load.
The power triangle, showing the relationship between real, apparent and reactive power. (Source:
Wikimedia
)
PF can be understood in terms of the two components that define AC power, being:
Apparent Power (S, in volt-amperes or VA) and
Real Power (P, in watts).
The PF is defined as the ratio of P to S (i.e. `PF = P / S). Reactive Power (Q, in var) is easily visualized as the angle theta (Θ) between P and S if we put them as respectively the leg and hypotenuse of a right triangle. Here Θ is the phase shift by which the current waveform lags the voltage. We can observe that as the phase shift increases, the apparent power increases along with reactive power. Rather than being consumed by the load,
reactive power flows back
to the generator, which hints at why it’s such a problematic phenomenon for grid-management.
From the above we can deduce that the PF is 1.0 if S and P are the same magnitude. Although
P = I × V
gets us the real power in watts, it is the apparent power that is being supplied by the generators on the grid, meaning that reactive power is effectively ‘wasted’ power. How concerning this is to you as a consumer mostly depends on whether you are being billed for watts or VAs consumed, but from a grid perspective this is the motivation behind
power factor correction
(PFC).
This is where capacitors are useful, as they can correct the low PF on inductive loads like electric motors, and vice versa with inductance on capacitive loads. As a rule of thumb, capacitors create reactive power, while inductors consume reactive power, meaning that for PFC the right capacitance or inductance has to be added to get the PF as close to 1.0 as possible. Since an inductor absorbs the excess (reactive) power and a capacitor supplies reactive power, if both are balanced 1:1, the PF would be 1.0.
In the case of modern switching-mode power supplies, automatic power factor correction (APFC) is applied, which switch in capacitance as needed by the current load. This is, in miniature, pretty much what the full-scale grid does throughout the network.
Traditional Grids
Magnetically controlled shunt reactor (
MCSR
). (Credit: Tayosun,
Wikimedia
)
Based on this essential knowledge, local electrical networks were expanded from a few streets to entire cities. From there it was only a matter of time before transmission lines turned many into few, with soon transmission networks spanning entire continents. Even so, the basic principles remain the same, and thus the methods available to manage a power grid.
Spinning generators provide the AC power, along with either the creation or absorption of reactive power on account of being inductors with their large wound coils, depending on their excitation level. Since transformers are passive devices, they will always absorb reactive power, while both overhead and underground transmission lines start off providing reactive power, overhead lines start absorbing reactive power if overloaded.
In order to keep reactive power in the grid to a healthy minimum, capacitive and inductive loads are switched in or out at locations like transmission lines and switchyards. The inductive loads often taken the form of shunt reactors – basically single winding transformers – and shunt capacitors, along with active devices like
synchronous condensers
that are effectively simplified synchronous generators. In locations like substations the use of
tap changers
enables fine-grained voltage control to ease the load on nearby transmission lines. Meanwhile the synchronous generators at thermal plants can be kept idle and online to provide significant reactive power absorption capacity when not used to actively generate power.
Regardless of the exact technologies employed, these traditional grids are characterized by significant amounts of reactive power creation and absorption capacity. As loads join or leave the grid every time that consumer devices are turned off and on, the grid manager (transmission system operator, or TSO) adjusts the state of these control methods. This keeps the grid frequency and voltage within their respective narrowly defined windows.
Variable Generators
Over the past few years, most newly added generating capacity has come in the form of weather-dependent variable generators that use grid-following converters. These devices take the DC power from generally PV solar and wind turbine farms and convert them into AC. They use a phase-locked loop (PLL) to synchronize with the grid frequency, to match this AC frequency and the current voltage.
Unfortunately, these devices do not have the ability to absorb or generate reactive power, and instead blindly follow the current grid frequency and voltage, even if said grid was going through reactive power-induced oscillations. Thus instead of damping these oscillations and any voltage swings, these converters serve to amplify these issues. During the
2025 Iberian Peninsula blackout
, this was identified as one of the primary causes by the Spanish TSO.
Ultimately AC power grids depend on solid reactive power management, which is why the European group of TSOs (ENTSO-E) already
recommended
in 2020 that grid-following converters should get replaced with grid-forming converters. These feature the ability absorb and generate reactive power through the addition of features like energy storage and are overall significantly more useful and robust when it comes to AC grid management.
Although AC doesn’t rule the roost any more in transmission networks, with
high-voltage DC
now the more economical option for long distances, the overwhelming part of today’s power grids still use AC. This means that reactive power management will remain one of the most essential parts of keeping power grids stable and people happy, until the day comes when we will all be switching back to DC grids, year after the switch to AC was
finally completed
back in 2007. | 41 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8152739",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-07-22T14:22:11",
"content": "If the PF is 0, it’s a purely reactive load and no net current flowsThe power factor can be zero when the load is not consuming any real power i(t) x v(t) = 0 and that doesn’t mean the current has to be zero... | 1,760,371,477.254581 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/22/paste-extrusion-for-3d-printing-glass-and-eggshells/ | Paste Extrusion For 3D Printing Glass And Eggshells | Aaron Beckendorf | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"eggshell",
"glass",
"paste extruder"
] | In contrast to the success of their molten-plastic cousins, paste extrusion 3D printers have never really attained much popularity. This is shame because, as the [Hand and Machine] research group at the University of New Mexico demonstrate, you can use them to print with some really interesting materials, including
glass
and
eggshell
. Links to the respective research papers are here:
glass
and
eggshells
, with presentations in the supplemental materials.
To print with glass, the researchers created a clay-like paste out of glass frit, methyl cellulose and xanthan gum as shear-thinning binders, and water. They used a vacuum chamber to remove bubbles, then extruded the paste from a clay 3D printer. After letting the resulting parts dry, they fired them in a kiln at approximately 750 ℃ to burn away the binder and sinter the frit. This introduced some shrinkage, but it was controllable enough to at least make decorative parts, and it might be predictable enough to make functional parts after some post-processing.
Path generation for the printer was an interesting problem; the printer couldn’t start and stop extrusion quickly, so [Hand and Machine] developed a
custom slicer
to generate tool paths that minimize material leakage. To avoid glass walls collapsing during firing, they also wrote
another slicer
to maintain constant wall thicknesses.
The process for printing with eggshell was similar: the researchers ground eggshells into a powder, mixed this with water, methyl cellulose and xanthan gum, and printed with the resulting paste. After drying, the parts didn’t need any additional processing. The major advantage of these parts is their biodegradability, as the researchers demonstrated by printing a biodegradable pot for plants. To be honest, we don’t think that this will be as useful an innovation for hackers as the glass could be, but it does demonstrate the abilities of paste extrusion.
The same team has previously used a paste printer to
3D print in metal
. If you don’t have a paste printer, it’s also possible to print glass
using a laser cutter
, or you could always
make your own
paste extruder. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8152750",
"author": "Eran",
"timestamp": "2025-07-22T14:57:32",
"content": "Seehttp://www.filament2.com– paste 3d printing using regular filaments.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8152763",
"author": "anon",
"timestamp":... | 1,760,371,477.390416 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/22/floating-buoy-measures-ocean-conditions/ | Floating Buoy Measures Ocean Conditions | Lewin Day | [
"Science"
] | [
"buoy",
"ocean",
"science"
] | Out on Maui, [rabbitcreek] desired to keep track of local ocean conditions. The easiest way to do that was by having something out there in the water to measure them. Thus,
they created a floating ocean sensor that could report back on what’s going on in the water.
The build uses a Xiao ESP32-S3 as the brains of the operation. It’s paired with a Wio-SX1262 radio kit, which sends LoRa signals over longer distances than is practical with the ESP32’s onboard WiFi and Bluetooth connections. The microcontroller is hooked up with a one-wire temperature sensor, a DF Robot turbidity sensor, and an MPU6050 gyroscope and accelerometer, which allow it to measure the water’s condition and the motion of the waves. The whole sensor package is wrapped up inside a 3D printed housing, with the rest of the electronics in a waterproof Pelican case.
It’s a neat project that combines a bunch of off-the-shelf components to do something useful. [rabbitcreek] notes that the data would be even more useful with a grid of such sensors all contributing to a larger dataset for further analysis.
We’ve seen similar citizen science projects executed nicely before, too.
If you’ve been doing your own ocean science, don’t hesitate to let us know what you’re up to
on the tipsline! | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8152655",
"author": "Bob the builder",
"timestamp": "2025-07-22T10:08:34",
"content": "Very cool. I’ve done this on a professional level but a bit of a different use case. It’s to measure temperature, co2 and some other measurements for government research. In my case, it’s all powe... | 1,760,371,477.43797 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/21/coleco-adam-a-commodore-64-competitor-almost/ | Coleco Adam: A Commodore 64 Competitor, Almost | Heidi Ulrich | [
"computer hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"c64",
"Coleco",
"coleco adams",
"commodore 64",
"modular",
"z80"
] | For a brief, buzzing moment in 1983,
the Coleco Adam
looked like it might out-64 the Commodore 64. Announced with lots of ambition, this 8-bit marvel promised a complete computing package: a keyboard, digital storage, printer, and all for under $600. An important fact was that it could morph your ColecoVision into a full-fledged CP/M-compatible computer. So far
this sounds like a hacker’s dream
: modular, upgradeable, and… misunderstood.
The reality was glorious chaos. The Adam used a daisy-wheel printer as a power supply (yes, really), cassettes that demagnetized themselves, and a launch delayed into oblivion. Yet beneath the comedy of errors lurked something quite tempting: a Z80-based system with MSX-like architecture and just enough off-the-shelf parts to make clone fantasies plausible. Developers could have ported MSX software in weeks. Had Coleco shipped stable units on time, the Adam might well have eaten the C64’s lunch – while inspiring a new class of hybrid machines.
Instead, it became a collector’s oddball. But for the rest of us, it is a retro relic that invites us to ponder –
or even start building
: what if modular computing had gone mainstream in 1983? | 65 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "8152662",
"author": "Hardly Felspar",
"timestamp": "2025-07-22T10:42:29",
"content": "Neat machine! I miss those days, when everything personal computing was new and innovation – even the stuff that never quite worked – was everywhere.Glorious chaos, indeed.",
"parent_id": null,... | 1,760,371,477.730481 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/21/testing-your-knowledge-of-javascripts-date-class/ | Testing Your Knowledge Of JavaScript’s Date Class | Maya Posch | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"javascript"
] | JavaScript is everywhere these days, even outside the browser. Everyone knows that this is because JavaScript is the best programming language, which was carefully assembled by computer experts and absolutely not monkeyed together in five days by some bloke at Netscape in the 90s. Nowhere becomes this more apparent than in aspects like JavaScript’s brilliantly designed
Date
class, which astounds people to this day with its elegant handling of JavaScript’s powerful type system. This is proudly demonstrated by the
JS Date quiz
by [Samwho].
Recently [Brodie Robertson] decided to
bask in the absolute glory
that is this aspect of JavaScript, working his way through the quiz’s 28 questions as his mind gradually began to crumble at the sheer majesty of this class’ elegance and subtle genius. Every answer made both logical and intuitive sense, and left [Brodie] gobsmacked at the sheer realization that such a language was designed by mere humans.
After such a humbling experience, it would only seem right to introduce the new JS convert to the book
JavaScript: The Good Parts
, to fully prepare them for their new career as a full-stack JS developer. | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8152581",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-07-22T02:36:52",
"content": "Wow, I’m only half way through the quiz and yeah, it’s 100% garbage.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8152617",
"author": "Faz",
"tim... | 1,760,371,477.786878 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/21/a-lockpicking-robot-that-can-sense-the-pins/ | A Lockpicking Robot That Can Sense The Pins | Maya Posch | [
"lockpicking hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"lockpicking",
"robot"
] | Having a robot that can quickly and unsupervised pick any lock with the skills of a professional human lockpicker has been a dream for many years. A major issue with lockpicking robots is however the lack of any sensing of the pins – or equivalent – as the pick works its magic inside. One approach to try and solve this was attempted by the [Sparks and Code] channel on YouTube,
who built a robot
that uses thin wires in a hollow key, load cells and servos to imitate the experience of a human lockpicker working their way through a pin-tumbler style lock.
Although the experience was mostly a frustrating series of setbacks and failures, it does show an interesting approach to sensing the resistance from the pin stack in each channel. The goal with picking a pin-tumbler lock is to determine when the pin is bound where it can rotate, and to sense any false gates from security pins that may also be in the pin stack. This is not an easy puzzle to solve, and is probably why most lockpicking robots end up just brute-forcing all possible combinations.
Perhaps that using a more traditional turner and pick style approach here – with one or more loadcells on the pick and turner- or a design inspired by the very effective Lishi decoding tools would be more effective here. Regardless, the idea of making lockpicking robots more sensitive is a good one, albeit a tough nut to crack. The jobs of YouTube-based lockpicking enthusiasts are still safe from the robots, for now.
Thanks to [Numbnuts] for the tip. | 15 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8152616",
"author": "Krzysztof",
"timestamp": "2025-07-22T06:30:01",
"content": "Regardless, the idea of making lockpicking robots more sensitive is a good oneThat’s exactly what we need. Robots getting easier access to locked rooms. Very good idea.",
"parent_id": null,
"dep... | 1,760,371,477.883356 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/21/2025-one-hertz-challenge-its-hexadecimal-unix-time/ | 2025 One-Hertz Challenge: It’s Hexadecimal Unix Time | Lewin Day | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"2025 One Hertz Contest",
"clock",
"unix time"
] | [danjovic] came up with a nifty entry for our 2025 One-Hertz Challenge that lands somewhere between the categories of Ridiculous and Clockwork.
It’s a clock that few hackers, if any, could read on sight
—just the way we like them around here!
The clock is called Hexa U.T.C, which might give you an idea why this one is a little tricky to parse. It displays the current Unix time in hexadecimal format. If you’re unfamiliar,
Unix time
is represented as the number of non-leap seconds that have ticked by since 1 January 1970 at 00:00:00 UTC. Even if you can turn the long hex number into decimal in your head, you’re still going to have to then convert the seconds into years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds before you can figure out the actual time.
The build relies on an ESP32-S2 module, paired with a 7-segment display module driven by the TM1638 I/O expander. The ESP32 syncs itself up with an NTP time server, and then spits out the relevant signals to display the current Unix time in hex on the 7-segment displays.
It’s a fun build that your programmer friends might actually figure out at a glance. As a bonus it makes an easy kicking-off point for explaining the
Year 2038 problem
. We’ve featured
other similar Unix clocks before, too.
Video after the break. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8152476",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-07-21T21:16:51",
"content": "I have to go finish my Epochalypse clock. Only 12.5 years to go.Or four weeks, I guess, if I want to put it in the contest.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_i... | 1,760,371,477.831066 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/21/freezer-monitoring-because-ice-cream-is-a-dish-best-served-cold/ | Freezer Monitoring: Because Ice Cream Is A Dish Best Served Cold | John Elliot V | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"DS18B20",
"grafana",
"prometheus",
"Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W"
] | [Scott Baker] wrote in to let us know about his
freezer monitor
.
After a regrettable incident where the ice cream melted because the freezer failed [Scott] decided that what was called for was a monitoring and alerting system. We enjoyed reading about this hack, and we’ll give you the details in just a tick, but before we do, we wanted to mention [Scott]’s justifications for
why
he decided to roll his own solution for this, rather than just using the bundled proprietary service from the white goods manufacturer.
We’re always looking for good excuses for rolling our own systems, and [Scott]’s list is comprehensive: no closed-source, no-api cloud service required, can log with high fidelity, unlimited data retention, correlation with other data possible, control over alerting criteria, choice of alerting channels. Sounds fair enough to us!
The single-board computer of choice is the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. As [Scott] says, it’s nice to be able to SSH into your temperature monitoring system. The sensor itself is the DS18B20. [Scott] 3D printed a simple case to hold the electronics. The other materials required are a 4.7k resistor and a power cable. The instructions for enabling the 1-wire protocol in Raspbian are documented in
INSTALL.md
.
When it comes time for programming, [Scott’s] weapon of choice is GoLang. He uses Go to process the file system exported by the 1-wire drivers under
/sys/bus/w1/devices
. He sets the Pi Zero up as an HTTP endpoint for Prometheus to scrape. He uses a library from Sergey Yarmonov to daemonize his monitoring service.
Then he configures his ancient version of Prometheus with the requisite YAML. The Prometheus configuration includes specifications of the conditions that should result in alerts being sent. Once that’s done, [Scott] configures a dashboard in Grafana. He is able to show two charts using the same timescale to correlate garage energy usage with freezer temperatures. Mission accomplished!
Now that you know how to make a freezer monitor, maybe it’s time to
make yourself a freezer
. | 23 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "8152439",
"author": "Gio",
"timestamp": "2025-07-21T19:33:37",
"content": "Every time I see the piss-colored filter GPT likes so, so much, the subtle inconsistencies in patterns, the clunky text and the smooth-yet-still-blurry outlines everything somehow has in a genAI picture, I im... | 1,760,371,477.948948 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/21/fixing-human-sleep-with-air-under-pressure/ | Fixing Human Sleep With Air Under Pressure | Lewin Day | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Medical Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"CPAP",
"medical",
"sleep",
"sleep apnea"
] | By and large, the human body is designed to breathe from birth, and keep breathing continuously until death. Indeed, if breathing stops, lifespan trends relatively rapidly towards zero. There’s a whole chunk of the brain and nervous system dedicated towards ensuring oxygen keeps flowing in and carbon dioxide keeps flowing out.
Unfortunately, the best laid plans of our body often go awry. Obstructive sleep apnea is a condition in which a person’s airways become blocked by the movement of soft tissues in the throat, preventing the individual from breathing. It’s a mechanical problem that also has a mechanical solution—the CPAP machine.
Under Pressure
Obstructive sleep apnea occurs when the airway is blocked when muscle tone relaxes during sleep. Credit:
public domain
The underlying mechanism of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is quite straightforward. During sleep, as the throat, neck, and skeletal muscles all relax, the tongue and/or soft palette can come to block the airway. When this happens, fresh air cannot pass to the lungs, nor can the individual exhale. Breathing is effectively halted, sometimes for minutes at a time. As the individual’s oxygen saturation drops and carbon dioxide levels build up, the brain and nervous system typically trigger an arousal in which the person enters a lighter stage of sleep or wakes up to some degree. The arousal may simply involve a change of position to restore normal breathing, or the individual may wake more fully while gasping for air. Having cleared the airway and resumed normal respiration, the individual generally returns to deeper sleep. As they do, and the muscles relax again, a further obstructive apnea may occur with similar results.
For those suffering from sleep apnea, these arousals can occur many hundreds of times a night. Each disrupts the normal cycles of sleep, generally leading to symptoms of serious sleep deprivation. These arousals often occur without the individual having any awareness they occurred. Sleep apnea can thus easily go undiagnosed, as individuals do not know the cause of their fatigue. In many cases, reports of heavy snoring from sleeping partners are what leads to a sleep apnea diagnosis, as breathing typically becomes louder as the airway slowly closes due to the muscles relaxing during sleep.
Ultimately, the solution to sleep apnea is to stop the airway becoming blocked in the first place, allowing normal breathing to continue all the way through sleep. The problem is that it’s difficult to access the tissues deep in the airway. One might imagine placing some kind of mechanical device into the throat to keep the airway open, but this would be highly invasive. It would also likely pose a choking risk if disrupted during sleep.
The ResMed AirSense 10 Elite, a modern CPAP machine. Note the humidifier attached on the side. This helps reduce instances of dry mouth or similar issues during use. Credit:
VSchagow
, CC BY-SA 4.0
Enter the CPAP machine—short for “continuous positive airway pressure.” Invented by Australian doctor Colin Sullivan in 1980, the idea behind it is simple—pressurize the individual’s airway in order to hold it open and prevent the tongue and soft tissues from causing a blockage. Air pressures used are relatively low. Machines typically deliver in the range of 4 to 20 cm H
2
O, which has been found sufficient to keep an airway open during sleep. The CPAP machine doesn’t breathe for the user—it just provides air to the airway at greater than atmospheric pressure.
A Lowenstein Prisma SMART CPAP machine, with hose and mask attached. Credit:
Mnalis
, CC0
Key to the use of CPAP is how to get the pressurized air inside the airway. Early machines pressurized a large helmet, with an air seal around the neck. Today, modern CPAP machines deliver carefully-controlled pressurized air via a mask. Nasal masks are the least-invasive option, which pressurize the whole airway via the nostrils alone. These masks require that the mouth remain closed during sleep, else the pressurized air is free to leave the airway. Full-face masks, which are similar to those used for other medical procedures, can be used for individuals who need to breathe through their mouth while sleeping.
Overall, a CPAP machine is relatively simple to understand. It consists of a pump to provide pressurized air to the mask, and a user interface for configuring the pressure and other settings. CPAP machines often also feature humidification to stop the supplied air from drying out the user’s mouth and/or nose. This can be paired with heated tubing to warm the air, which avoids condensation from forming in the tube or mask during use. This is called “rainout” and can be unpleasant for the user. Modern machines can also carefully monitor pressure levels and airflow, logging breathing events and other data for later analysis.
A full face mask for use with a CPAP machine. Nasal-only masks are also popular. Credit: public domain
CPAP treatment is not without its issues, however. Users must grow accustomed to wearing a mask while sleeping, as well as adjust to the feeling of breathing in and exhaling out against the continuous incoming pressure from the machine. It’s also important for users to get a suitable mask fit, to avoid issues like skin redness or pressure leaking from the mask. In the latter case, a CPAP machine will be ineffective at keeping an airway open if pressure is lost via leaks. These problems lead to relatively low compliance with CPAP use among those with obstructive sleep apnea. Studies suggest 8% to 15% abandon CPAP use after a single night, while 50% stop using CPAP within their first year. Regardless, the benefits of CPAP machines are well-supported by the available scientific literature.
Studies have shown
that use of CPAP treatment can reduce sleepiness, blood pressure, and the prevalence of motor vehicle crashes in those with obstructive sleep apnea.
Nobody likes the idea of being semi-woken tens or hundreds of times a night, but for sleep apnea sufferers, that’s precisely what can happen. The CPAP machine is the mechanical solution that provides a good night’s rest, all thanks to a little pressurized air.
Featured image: “
wide variety of masks at cpap centra
” by [Rachel Tayse]. (Gotta love that title!) | 68 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "8152389",
"author": "DainBramage",
"timestamp": "2025-07-21T17:13:50",
"content": "I’ve been using mine for more than 25 years, and it’s been a great help. Before I was diagnosed with apnea, I was passing out while driving in the middle of the day despite doing everything I could to... | 1,760,371,478.310442 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/21/dont-turn-that-old-system-on-first-take-it-apart/ | Don’t Turn That Old System On, First Take It Apart | Maya Posch | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"gateway",
"pc",
"power",
"retrocomputing",
"Rifa"
] | When you first get your hands on an old piece of equipment, regardless of whether it’s an old PC or some lab equipment, there is often the temptation to stick a power lead into it and see what the happy electrons make it do. Although often this will work out fine, there are many reasons why this is a terrible idea. As many people have found out by now, you can be met by the wonderful smell of a Rifa capacitor blowing smoke in the power supply, or by fascinatingly dangly damaged power wires, as the [Retro Hack Shack] on YouTube
found recently in an old Gateway PC
.
Fortunately, this video is a public service announcement and a demonstration of why you should always follow the sage advice of “Don’t turn it on, take it apart”. Inside this Gateway 2000 PC from 1999 lurked a cut audio cable, which wasn’t terribly concerning. The problem was also a Molex connector that had at some point been violently ripped off, leaving exposed wiring inside the case. The connector and the rest of the wiring were still found in the HDD.
Other wires were also damaged, making it clear that the previous owner had tried and failed to remove some connectors, including the front panel I/O wiring. Thankfully, this PC was first torn apart so that the damage could be repaired, but it shows just how easily a ‘quick power-on check’ can turn into something very unpleasant and smelly. | 35 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8152367",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-07-21T16:06:42",
"content": "You know you’re getting older when the power supply of your childhood PC is no longer safe to plug in.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8152374",
... | 1,760,371,478.821329 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/21/why-apple-dumped-2700-computers-in-a-landfill-in-1989/ | Why Apple Dumped 2,700 Computers In A Landfill In 1989 | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Original Art",
"Retrocomputing",
"Slider"
] | [
"apple",
"landfill",
"Lisa"
] | In 1983, the Lisa was supposed to be a barnburner. Apple’s brand-new computer had a cutting edge GUI, a mouse, and power far beyond the 8-bit machines that came before. It looked like nothing else on the market, and had a price tag to match—retailing at $9,995, or the equivalent of over $30,000 today.
It held so much promise. And yet, come 1989, Apple was burying almost 3,000 examples in a landfill. What went wrong?
Promise
The Lisa computer, released in 1983, was Apple’s first attempt at bringing a graphical user interface to the masses. The name was officially an acronym for “Local Integrated Software Architecture,” though many believed it was actually named after Steve Jobs’ daughter. In any case, the Lisa was groundbreaking in ways that wouldn’t be fully appreciated until years later.
Had the Lisa succeeded, would we all be using LisaBooks today? Credit:
Timothy Colegrove
, CC BY-SA 4.0
The Lisa stepped away from the long-lived 6502 CPU that had powered the Apple II line. Instead, it relied upon the exciting new Motorola 68000, with its hybrid 16-bit/32-bit architecture and fast 5 MHz clock speed. The extra power came in handy, as the Lisa was to be one of the first retail computers to be sold with a graphical user interface—imaginatively titled Lisa OS. Forget command lines and character displays—the Lisa had icons and a mouse, all rendered on a glorious 720 x 364 monochrome monitor with rectangular pixels. Adopters of Apple’s new rectangular machine also got twin 5.25-inch double-sided floppy drives, and the Lisa included three expansion slots and a parallel port for adding additional peripherals.
The Lisa seemed to offer a great leap forward in capability, but the same could be said of its price. At launch in 1983, it retailed at $9,995, equivalent to over $30,000 in 2025 dollars. The price was many multiples beyond what you might pay for an IBM PC, making it a tough pill to swallow even given what the Lisa had to offer. The GUI might have been cutting-edge, too, but the implementation wasn’t perfect. The Lisa had a tendency to chug.
It never quite wowed the market, despite Apple’s efforts. Credit: Apple
There was also a further problem. Apple’s very own Steve Jobs may have worked on the Lisa, but he was kicked off the project in 1981, prior to launch. Jobs then jumped ship to the nascent Macintosh development effort, which was initially intended to be a low-cost text-based computer retailing for under $1,000. Jobs swiftly redirected the Macintosh project to make it a GUI-based machine, while retaining the intention to come in at a far more affordable price-point than the exorbitantly-priced Lisa.
The result was damaging. Just as the Lisa was launching, rumors were already swirling about Apple’s upcoming budget machine. When the Macintosh hit the market in 1984, it immediately blitzed the Lisa in sales. Both machines had a mouse and a GUI, and the Macintosh even had a more forward-looking 3.25-inch floppy drive. True, the Mac wasn’t anywhere near as beefy as the Lisa; most notably, it had just 128K of RAM to the 1MB in Apple’s flagship machine. Ultimately, though, the market voted Mac—perhaps unsurprising given it retailed at $2,495—a quarter of the Lisa’s debut price. Come May, Apple had sold 70,000 units, thanks in part do a legendary commercial directed by
the
Ridley Scott.
Meanwhile, it took the Lisa a full two years to sell just 50,000.
Apple tried to make the best of things. The Lisa was followed by the Lisa 2, and it was then rebadged as the Macintosh XL. Ultimately, though, it would never find real purchase in the marketplace, even after severe price cuts down to $3,995 in 1985. By 1986, it was all over—Apple discontinued the Lisa line.
A Lisa, dumped and destroyed. Credit:
Kyra Ocean
, CC-BY-SA 2.0
The following years weren’t kind. A bunch of 5000 Lisas ended up being bought by third-party company Sun Remarketing, which upgraded them and sold them on as “Lisa Professionals” and “Macintosh Professionals.” However, cut to 1989, and Apple had a better idea. The Lisas were going to a dump in Logan, Utah.
The story would end up making the news, with
The Herald Journal
reporting on what was then an astounding story. 2,700 brand new computers were being sent to straight to landfill. This was particularly shocking in the era, given that computers were then still relatively novel in the marketplace and sold for an incredibly high price.
The reason behind it was pure business. “Right now, our fiscal year end is fast approaching and rather than carrying that product on the books, this is a better business decision,” Apple spokesperson Carleen Lavasseur told the press. Apple was able to gain a tax write off the computers, and it was estimated it could reclaim up to $34 for every $100 of depreciated value in the machines which were now considered obsolete. Apple paid $1.95 a yard for over 880 cubic yards of space at the landfill to dump the machines.
Other reports on the event
noted that guards apparently stood on site to ensure the machines were destroyed and could not be recovered.
It’s a story that might recall you of Atari’s
ET
, another grand embarrassment covered up under a pile of trash. Sometimes, products fail, and there’s little more to do than call the trucks and haul them away. The Apple Lisa is perhaps one of the nicer machines that’s ever happened to. | 55 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "8152325",
"author": "Orzel",
"timestamp": "2025-07-21T14:38:19",
"content": "The link to jhnews is blocked from Europe",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8152328",
"author": "Jan Prägert",
"timestamp": "2025-07-21... | 1,760,371,478.193226 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/21/bearing-witness-measuring-the-wobbles-in-rotary-build/ | Bearing Witness: Measuring The Wobbles In Rotary Build | Matt Varian | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"3d prining",
"metrology",
"rotary table"
] | 3D printing has simplified the creation of many things, but part of making something is knowing just how much you can rely on it. On the [BubsBuilds] YouTube channel, he built a
cheap rotary table
and then walked through the process of measuring the error inherent in any rotating system.
Starting with a commercial rotary table, [BubsBuilds] decided he wanted a rotary stage that was both lighter and had provisions for motorized movement. Most of the rotary build is 3D printed, with the large housing and table made from PETG, and the geared hub and worm gear printed on a resin printer. The bearings used to support the worm gear are common skateboard bearings. There is also a commercial thrust bearing and 49 larger 9.5 mm ball bearings supporting the rotating tabletop.
There are three different types of runout to be measured on a rotating stage: axial, radial, and angular. Axial runout is fairly straightforward to discern by measuring the vertical variation of the table as it rotates. Radial runout measures how true the rotation is around the center of the table. Angular runout measures how level the table stays throughout its range. Since these two runouts are tied to each other, [BubsBuilds] showed how you can take measurements at two different heights and use trigonometry to obtain both your radial and angular runout
This is a great walk-through of how to approach measuring and characterizing a system that has multiple variables at play. Be sure to check out some of the other cool
rotary tables
we’ve featured. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8152351",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-07-21T15:29:00",
"content": "Did you have any time to breathe during this 9 minute video?And what is happening at around 07:41?You’ve found some kind of systematic error, and without analyzing it’s origin you just subtract it from yo... | 1,760,371,478.096363 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/21/reverse-engineering-a-tony-6502-based-mini-arcade-machine/ | Reverse Engineering A ‘Tony’ 6502-based Mini Arcade Machine | Maya Posch | [
"Games",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"6502",
"arcade machine",
"reverse engineering"
] | The mainboard of the mini arcade unit with its blob chip and EEPROM. (Credit: Poking Technology, YouTube)
For some reason, people are really into tiny arcade machines that basically require you to ruin your hands and eyes in order to play on them. That said, unlike the fifty gazillion ‘retro consoles’ that you can buy everywhere, the particular mini arcade machine that [David Given] of [Poking Technology]
obtained from AliExpress for a teardown and ROM dump
seems to have custom games rather than the typical gaggle of NES games and fifty ROM hack variations of each.
After a bit of gameplay to demonstrate the various games on the very tiny machine with tiny controls and a tiny 1.8″, 160×128 ST7735 LC display, the device was disassembled. Inside is a fairly decent speaker, the IO board for the controls, and the mainboard with an epoxy blob-covered chip and the SPI EEPROM containing the software. Dumping this XOR ‘encrypted’ ROM was straightforward, revealing it to be a 4 MB, W23X32-compatible EEPROM.
Further reverse-engineering showed the CPU to be a WDT65C02-compatible chip, running at 8 MHz with 2 kB of SRAM and 8 kB of fast ROM in addition to a 24 MHz link to the SPI EEPROM, which is used heavily during rendering. [David]
created a basic SDK
for those who feel like writing their own software for this mini arcade system. Considering the market that these mini arcade systems exist in, you’ve got to give the manufacturer credit for creating a somewhat original take, with hardware that is relatively easy to mod and reprogram.
Thanks to [Clint Jay] for the tip. | 15 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8152237",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2025-07-21T10:33:54",
"content": "Using the joystick obfuscates 10-20% of the screen ? this begs for a casemod, with a plastic Fresnel lens magnifying the screen (who cares about view angle on such a thing?)",
"parent_id": null,
"dept... | 1,760,371,478.482711 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/20/project-scribe-receipts-for-life/ | Project Scribe: Receipts For Life | John Elliot V | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"thermal printer"
] | Here’s a fun project. Over on their YouTube page [Urban Circles] introduces
Project Scribe
.
The idea behind this project is that you can print out little life “receipts”. Notes, jokes, thoughts, anecdotes, memories. These little paper mementos have a physical reality that goes beyond their informational content. You can cut them up, organize them, scribble on them, highlight them, stick them on the wall, or in a scrapbook. The whole idea of the project is to help you make easier and better decisions every day by nudging you in the direction of being more mindful of where you’ve been and where you’re going.
The project is well documented on its
GitHub page
. The heart of the project is a thermal printer. These are the things that print the receipts you get from the store. You may need to conduct some research to find the best thermal paper to use; there are some hints and tips on this topic in the documentation. In addition to the thermal printer is a pretty stand to hold it and an Arduino board to drive it. Firmware for the Arduino is provided which will serve a basic web interface via WiFi.
If you build one, we’d love to hear how it goes. If it doesn’t work out, you can always fall back to using the thermal printer to
level up your Dungeons and Dragons
game.
Thanks to [Brittany L] for writing in about this one. | 16 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8151789",
"author": "Jamal Ginsberg",
"timestamp": "2025-07-20T09:18:41",
"content": "My beef even with safe bisphenol free thermal paper is how short lived it is. I don’t have a single fax that is not faded to 20% readability. The project itself is amazing and not every not is mean... | 1,760,371,478.362206 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/19/a-spectrophotometer-jailbreak-to-resolve-colorful-disputes/ | A Spectrophotometer Jailbreak To Resolve Colorful Disputes | Aaron Beckendorf | [
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"firmware update",
"Pantone",
"Serial Number",
"Spectrophotometer",
"spectrophotometry"
] | The human eye’s color perception is notoriously variable (see, for example, the famous dress), which makes it difficult to standardize colours. This is where spectrophotometers come in: they measure colours reliably and repeatably, and can match them against a library of standard colors. Unfortunately, they tend to be expensive, so when Hackaday’s own [Adam Zeloof] ran across two astonishingly cheap X-Rite/Pantone RM200 spectrophotometers on eBay,
he took the chance
that they might still be working.
They did work, but [Adam] found that his model was intended for testing cosmetics and only had a colour library of skin tones, whereas the base model had a full colour library. This was rather limiting, but he noticed that the only apparent difference between his model and the base model was a logo (that is, a cosmetic difference). This led him to suspect that only the firmware was holding his spectrophotometer back, so he began looking for ways to install the base unit’s firmware on his device.
He started by running X-Rite’s firmware updater. Its log files revealed that it was sending the device’s serial number to an update server, which responded with the firmware information for that device. To get around this, [Adam] tried altering the updater’s network requests to send a base unit’s serial number. This seemed promising, but he also needed a device-specific security key to actually download firmware. After much searching, he managed to find a picture of a base unit showing both the serial number and security key. After substituting these values into the requests, the updater had no problem installing the base model’s firmware.
[Adam] isn’t completely sure how accurate the altered system’s measurements are, but they seem to mostly agree with his own colour calibration swatches. It’s not absolutely certain that there are no hardware differences between the models, so there might be some unknown factor producing the few aberrant results [Adam] saw. Nevertheless, this is probably accurate enough to prove that one of his roommates was wrong about the color of a gaming console.
We’ve seen a few projects before that
measure
and
replicate
existing colors. The principle’s even used to
detect counterfeit bills
. | 22 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8151779",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2025-07-20T07:40:39",
"content": "Until it’s tested to be accurate 100%, I’d be careful about using the altered model. It is possible the cheaper cosmetic model has a defect that prevented it from accurately reading the color and was rejecte... | 1,760,371,478.421627 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/19/software-defined-retro-roms/ | Software Defined Retro ROMs | John Elliot V | [
"ARM",
"computer hacks",
"hardware",
"Microcontrollers",
"PCB Hacks",
"Retrocomputing",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"2316 ROM chip",
"2332 ROM chip",
"2364 ROM chip",
"Software Defined ROM"
] | Here’s something fun from our hacker [Piers]:
Software Defined ROMs
.
In this series of three videos, [Piers] runs us through what a software defined ROM is, how to make them, and then how to use them.
As [Piers] explains, one frustration a retro technician will face is a failed ROM chip. In the era he’s interested in, there are basically three relevant kinds of ROM chip, all 24-pin Dual Inline Package (DIP):
2364 ROM chip: 8KB; 1x chip-select line
2332 ROM chip: 4KB; 2x chip-select lines
2316 ROM chip: 2KB; 3x chip-select lines
The chip-select line is how the processor indicates to a particular ROM chip that it should be active. When active, a ROM chip will read the value on the address lines and output the data at that address on the data lines.
With his software defined ROMs [Piers] implements the ROM behavior (converting requests on the address lines to results on the data lines) by using a microcontroller. As his ROM boards are software defined, they are eminently configurable, which means he can support all configurations of all three types of ROM.
[Piers] looks at some old ROM datasheets to get details about timing requirements. His functional requirements are that all three types of ROM can be emulated with a single hardware variant (the same microcontroller) with the same footprint (24-pin DIP), that they be hand-solderable, and cheap. Further technical requirements were that the solutions can all be implemented in software (no FPGA), requiring as few onboard components as possible, that the GPIOs be 5V tolerant, that a fast clock speed be available using the on-chip oscillator, that no more than two PCB layers are required, and that all SMD components are 0603 or larger.
He considered various microcontrollers, including PICO/RP2040/RP2350, ESP32, ATMEGA, PIC, STM32F1, and STM32F4. He really wanted the PICO because they are fast and powerful, but they don’t have 5V tolerant GPIOs, so he settled on the STM32F4 instead. He talks in detail about pin selection, PCB routing, and ROM preprocessing (mangling) for optimal performance. The chip loads its data from flash storage into RAM so it has reliable and deterministic performance characteristics. Provision is made for programming pins so the ROMs can be reprogrammed in-circuit.
When it comes to programming, [Piers] has implemented most things in hand-rolled assembly code. The reason, he says, is that he didn’t want variable implementations depending on the version of compiler used.
Now that you have a universal software defined ROM, all you need is a
reliable ROM dumper
. | 6 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8151737",
"author": "WTF Detector",
"timestamp": "2025-07-20T02:43:51",
"content": "Pretty sure Tyler already got to this one before you did, John:https://hackaday.com/2025/07/05/software-defined-retro-rom-makes-8-bit-easy/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,371,478.70027 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/19/symbos-is-a-funhouse-mirror-look-at-a-future-that-never-was/ | SymbOS Is A Funhouse Mirror Look At A Future That Never Was | Tyler August | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"amstrad cpc",
"msx",
"sinclair spectrum",
"z80"
] | The Z80 might be decades obsolete and a few years out of production, but it’s absolutely a case of “gone but not forgotten” in the hacker world. Case in point is
SymbOS, a multitasking OS for Z80 machines
by Amstrad, Sinclair, and the MSX2 family of computers that updated to version 4.0 earlier this year.
The best way to describe SymbOS is like looking at an alternate reality where Microsoft created Windows 95 ten years early to put on the MSX instead of the BASIC they were paid to provide. SymbOS 4.0 comes even further into alignment with that design language, with a new file explorer that looks a lot like Windows Explorer replacing (or supplementing) the earlier Midnight Commander style utility in version 3.
Thanks to the preemptive multitasking, you can listen to tracker music while organizing files and writing documents, and even play a port of DOOM. Chat with your friends on IRC while watching (low res) videos on SymboVid. If you’re looking for productivity, all the old business software written for CP/M can run in a virtual machine. There’s even an IDE if you can stand the compile times on what is, we have to remember, an 8-bit, 1980s machine. It’s hard to remember that while watching the demo video embedded below.
The operating system supports up to 1024 KB of RAM (in 64 KB chunks, of course) and file systems up to 2 TB, which is an absolutely bonkers amount of space for this era’s machines. One enterprising dev has even got his
CPC talking to ChatGPT
, if that’s your jam. You can try
SymbOS for free online on an MSX emulator,
or toss it
onto a spare Raspberry Pi.
If you’re feeling adventurous, there’s a port in the works for the
Isetta TLL retrocomputer.
This isn’t the
first modern OS we’ve featured for the Z80,
the processor which will
live forever in our hearts and tapeouts
.
Thanks to [Manuel] for the tip. | 66 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8151718",
"author": "JRD",
"timestamp": "2025-07-20T01:06:07",
"content": "SymbOS looks neat, but is clearly requires for big “Super-Z80” systems with fancy color graphics. It requires a minimum of 128K banked RAM and would really like 356K, plus lots of drive space. (Kind of like t... | 1,760,371,478.657172 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/19/picogus-adds-cd-rom-emulation-to-isa-bus/ | PicoGUS Adds CD-ROM Emulation To ISA Bus | Tyler August | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"CD-ROM",
"disk emulator",
"isa bus",
"rp2040"
] | Everything fails eventually, but moving parts fail fastest of all– and optical drives seemingly more than others, at least in our experience. Even when they work, vintage drives often have trouble with CD-R, and original media isn’t always easy to find. That’s why it’s so wonderful that [polpo]’s
RP2040 ISA card, the PicoGUS 2.0, now supports CD-ROM emulation.
We covered PicoGUS when it
first appeared as an ISA sound card,
and make no mistake, it can still emulate sound cards for retro-PC beeps and boops. It’s not just the Gravis Ultrasound (GUS) from which the project took its name, but Sound Blaster 2.0, MPU-401 for MIDI, Tandy 3-voice, and CMS/GameBlaster are all soft options. Like most sound cards back in the day, PicoGUS provides game port support as well.
We don’t recall sound cards that served as CD-ROM controllers, but apparently, that was a thing before IDE became the standard for optical drives. We do recall old
CD-ROM drives that shipped with proprietary driver boards,
and PicoGUS emulates Panasonic’s MKS standard, which apparently did show up on some sound cards. For the end-user, that doesn’t matter much: once it’s all set up using the open-source utilities (and appropriate drivers), you’ll have an optical drive sitting at D:.
There’s a USB port on the PicoGUS that lets you use a FAT32 formatted USB stick not as a CD drive, but a CD changer. You can access multiple disk images from the drive, selecting them with the utility software. There’s even a feature that lets you automatically advance to the next disk by removing and reinserting the drive, which is invaluable for multi-CD game installers. It’s not super speedy: in USB mode, expect it to run as fast as a 4x drive. (2x if the PicoGUS is emulating a Sound Blaster at the same time.) Considering that’s all with a single RP2040 in charge, it’s pretty fast. For a DOS box, it’s probably period appropriate, too.
The Almighty Algorithm reminded us about PicoGUS in a video by [vswitchero], which is embedded below for those of you who would like more information in the form of rapidly flickering images and sound. | 29 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8151645",
"author": "Cogidubnus Rex",
"timestamp": "2025-07-19T20:17:46",
"content": "There never was an ISA standard for CD-ROM drives, perhaps you mean IDE?Greetings from one that does remember the Sound Blasters with proprietary CD-ROM interfaces.",
"parent_id": null,
"de... | 1,760,371,478.553347 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/19/punch-card-controlled-cyberdeck-lives-in-80s-toy/ | Punch Card Controlled Cyberdeck Lives In 80s Toy | Tyler August | [
"Cyberdecks"
] | [
"cyberdeck",
"morse code",
"Pi Zero W",
"punch card",
"VTech"
] | Have you ever seen a toy and said “That wants to be a deck”? [Attoparsec] did, when his eyes fell upon the Little Talking Scholar, a punch card driven toy from the 1980s.
It’s now a punch card driven cyberdeck.
The punch card interface on the toy is only six bits, but sixty-four application cards are probably more than parents would have wanted to keep track of in 1989. Originally, they cued up simple matching games on an anonymous epoxy-coated microprocessor; after [Attoparsec]’s surgery, they do the same thing, cuing up custom Python applications on the Raspberry Pi Zero he’s implanted into this thing.
The square display comes courtesy of HyperPixel. It’s designed for a Pi, but both the display and the case needed a bit of surgery to get it to fit. First, a bit of milling was required on the plastic case to make room for the printed bracket to hold the display. That left depth, as the original toy had no display, which means the lid of this faux-laptop is quite thin. (The punch cards were printed with all you needed to play the games and were visible through the hole that now shows the LCD.) By removing the headers and soldering directly to the board, [Attoparsec] was able to get the display to fit, but space was then too tight for punch cards to slide in easily. Some washers added the extra space required.
A battery lives inside of the original battery compartment, but because the lithium cell he’s using is thicker than the AA’s this toy was designed for, a little bit more milling was required. A couple more holes gave a charging button and a power port.
The buttons and the punch card contacts are connected to the Pi via MCP23017 I2C port expanders, since the square display provides a handy I2C pass-through. A nice detail was putting the MCP23017s onto a custom PCB that sat directly on the contacts of the original button board. We might have used those eight buttons for a chording keyboard, but [Attoparsec] isn’t a fan of cording. Instead, the buttons are context-dependent based on the application. For text input in his note-taking application [Attoparsec] fell back on Morse, with two keys acting as paddles. We’ve seen
Morse keyboards before
, and while they seem like great HAM training,
they can also be assistive devices
.
The whole video is absolutely worth a watch, for all the details and the fun tangents [Attoparsec] goes off on. We’re grateful to [smellsofbikes] for tipping us off to this project. The tips line is always hungry for cyber decks, so
let us know if you find one
— or anything else interesting. | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8151683",
"author": "Gus Mueller",
"timestamp": "2025-07-19T23:07:20",
"content": "Angry toddler indeed! For I2C port expansion, I love to use Arduino minis, micros, and what not flashed with my I2C slave firmware, which allows me to add both analog inputs and outputs as well as GP... | 1,760,371,478.747785 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/19/elegoo-rapid-petg-vs-petg-pro-same-price-similar-specs-which-to-buy/ | Elegoo Rapid PETG Vs PETG Pro: Same Price, Similar Specs, Which To Buy? | Maya Posch | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer filament",
"polylactic acid"
] | Even within a single type of FDM filament there is an overwhelming amount of choice. Take for example Elegoo’s PETG filament offerings, which include such varieties like ‘Pro’ and ‘Rapid’. Both cost the same, but is there a reason to prefer one over the other, perhaps even just for specific applications? To test this, [Dr. Igor Gaspar] over at the
My Tech Fun
YouTube channel bought some spools of these two filaments and
subjected both to a series of tests
.
Obviously, the Rapid filament is rated for higher extrusion speeds – <270 vs <600 mm/s – while the website claims a higher required nozzle temperature that confusingly does not match those listed on the spool. There are quite a few differences in the listed specifications, including the physical and mechanical properties, which make it hard to draw any immediate conclusions. Could you perhaps just use Rapid PETG and forget about the Pro version?
Test objects were printed with a Bambu Lab P1P with an AMS unit. After calibrating the ideal temperature for each filament, a tensile break test gave a win to the Rapid PETG, followed by a layer adhesion test win. This pattern continued across further tests, with Rapid PETG either matching or beating the Pro PETG.
There are only two advantages of the Pro version that can be seen here, which are less moisture sensitivity and stringing risk, and you of course get the luxury cardboard spool with the closed edges. Whether that’s enough to make you go ‘Pro’ remains to be seen, of course. | 16 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8151575",
"author": "Ric",
"timestamp": "2025-07-19T16:04:57",
"content": "Just started my second spool of Elegoo Rapid PETG (transparent) and is a very good PETG obviously if you want the “glass” effect you can forget the Rapid part of the name. But both at low speed and high I can... | 1,760,371,479.126562 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/20/researching-glow-powder-left-a-few-scars/ | Researching Glow-Powder Left A Few Scars | Brian McEvoy | [
"chemistry hacks",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"biocompatible",
"biosafe",
"body mod",
"body modification",
"fluorescence",
"glow",
"glow in the dark",
"glow powder",
"light",
"scarification",
"tattoo"
] | Content warning
: Human alteration and scalpels.
General warning
: We are not speaking as doctors. Or lawyers.
If you watch sci-fi, you probably do not have to think hard to conjure a scene in a trendy bar where the patrons have glowing make-up or tattoos. That bit of futuristic flair was possible years ago with UV-reactive tattoo ink, but it has the unfortunate tendency to permanently fade faster than traditional ink. [Miana], a biohacker, wanted something that could
last forever and glow
on its own. After months of research and testing, she presents a technique with a silica-coated powder and scarification. Reddit post with
graphic content
.
The manufacturer does not sell the powder for internal use, so it requires sterilization in an autoclave, which should tell you why this is a hack and not just repurposing. The experimentation includes various scarification techniques and different bandaging approaches, but this is still a small group, and the oldest is measured in months, not years, as of the time of writing.
We think these look amazing, but there are significant caveats. If you have never done scarification, spoiler, it hurts! If the flesh cutting is not bad enough, someone gets to rub sand into the open cuts. You may find yourself carrying a UV flashlight everywhere to charge it up. [Miana] was kind enough to provide the
link to the powder
she uses, but this link is provided solely so our readers can investigate the ingredients.
If you are more interested in the glowing aspect than the biohacking part, be sure to read about
making strontium aluminate
. If you want to get into the weeds, you can make a
phosphorescence detector
and quantify how glow-y something is. | 34 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8152173",
"author": "macsimki",
"timestamp": "2025-07-21T06:41:43",
"content": "ah. I feel 8 again with all those warnings. I’ve missed it. maybe start every blog post with these things. you never know and don’t forget, in the USA, sueing is like breathing…But to get on topic again,... | 1,760,371,478.976323 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/20/remembering-chiptunes-the-demoscene-and-the-illegal-music-of-keygens/ | Remembering Chiptunes, The Demoscene And The Illegal Music Of Keygens | Tyler August | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"chiptunes",
"computer history",
"demoscene",
"keygen"
] | We loved keygens back in the day. Our lawyers advise us to clarify that it’s because of the demo-scene style music embedded in them, not because we used them for piracy. [Patch] must feel the same way, as he has a lovely historical retrospective out on
“The Internet’s Most Illegal Music”
(embedded below).
After defining what he’s talking about for the younger set, who may never have seen a keygen in this degenerate era of software-by-subscription, [Patch] traces the history of the jaunty chiptunes that were so often embedded in this genre of program. He starts with the early demoscene and its relationship with cracker groups — those are coders who circulate “cracked” versions of games, with the copyright protection removed. In the old days, they’d embed an extra loading screen to take credit for the dastardly deeds that our lawyer says to disavow.
Because often the same people creating the
amazing audio-video demos of the “demoscene”
were involved in cracking, those loading screens could sometimes outshine the games themselves. (We saw it at a friend’s house one time.) There was almost always excellent music provided by the crackers, and given the limitations of the hardware of the era, it was what we’d know of today as a “chiptune”.
The association between crackers and chiptunes lasted long after the chips themselves had faded into obsolescence. Part of the longevity of the tracker-built tunes is that in the days of dial-up you’d much rather a keygen with a .MOD file embedded than an .mP3, or god forbid, an uncompressed .WAV that would take all day to download.
Nowadays, chiptunes are alive and well, and while they try and hearken back more to the demoscene than the less savory side of their history, the connection to peg-legged programmers is a story that deserves to be told. The best part of the video is the link to
keygenmusic.tk/
where you can finally find out who was behind that bopping track that’s been stuck in your head intermittently since 1998. (When you heard it at a computer lab, not on your own machine, of course.)
The
demoscene continues to push old machines to new heights,
and its spirit lives on in
hacking machines like the RP2040
. | 39 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "8152088",
"author": "WTF Detector",
"timestamp": "2025-07-21T02:35:30",
"content": "For more info on the demoscene itself, “Moleman 2: The Art of the Algorithms”, from 2012, is a feature-length documentary that’s available for free on YouTube, and it goes into more detail about the ... | 1,760,371,479.249528 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/20/hackaday-links-july-20-2025/ | Hackaday Links: July 20, 2025 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"android",
"asteroid",
"coding",
"dart",
"exoplanet",
"gamification",
"hackaday links",
"jwst",
"MIRI",
"morse",
"planetary defense",
"TWA 7b",
"webb"
] | In the relatively short time that the James Webb Space Telescope has been operational, there’s seemingly no end to its list of accomplishments. And if you’re like us, you were sure that Webb had already achieved the first direct imaging of a planet orbiting a star other than our own a long time ago. But as it turns out,
Webb has only recently knocked that item off its bucket list
, with the direct visualization of a Saturn-like planet orbiting a nearby star known somewhat antiseptically as TWA 7, about 111 light-years away in the constellation Antlia. The star has a significant disk of debris orbiting around it, and using the coronagraph on Webb’s MIRI instrument, astronomers were able to blot out the glare of the star and collect data from just the dust. This revealed a faint infrared source near the star that appeared to be clearing a path through the dust.
The planet, dubbed TWA 7b, orbits its star at about 50 times the distance from Earth to the Sun and is approximately the size of Saturn, but only a third of its mass. The star itself is only about 6.4 million years old, so the planet may still be accreting from the debris disk, which might present interesting insights into planetary formation, assuming that other astronomers confirm that TWA 7b is indeed a planet. But what’s really interesting about this discovery is that because the star system’s orbital plane appears to be more or less perpendicular to ours, the standard exoplanet detection method based on measuring the dimming of the star by planets passing between it and us wouldn’t have worked. This might open the doors to the discovery of many more exoplanets, and that’s pretty exciting.
Question: What’s worse than a big space rock that’s on a collision course with Earth? Answer: Honestly, it feels like a lot of things would be worse than that right now. But if your goal is planetary protection, one possible answer is doing something that turns the one big rock into a lot of little rocks.
That seems to be just what NASA’s DART mission did
when it smashed into a bit of space debris named Dimorphos back in 2022, ejecting over 100 boulders from the asteroid-orbiting moonlet. LICIAcube, an Italian cubesat that hitched a ride on DART, used optical cameras to observe the ejecta, and measured rocks from 0.2 m to 3.6 m in diameter as they yeeted off at up to 52 meters per second. Rather than spreading out randomly, the boulders clustered into two different groups, something that years of playing
Asteroids
has taught us isn’t what you’d expect. The whole thing just goes to show that planetary protection isn’t as simple as blasting into a killer asteroid and hoping for the best. And please, can somebody out there type “NASA DART” into Google and tell me what they see? Because if it’s not an animated spacecraft zipping across the screen and knocking the window out of kilter, then I need a vacation. K, thanks.
Do you even code? If you’re reading Hackaday, chances are good that you at least know enough coding to get yourself into trouble. But if you don’t, or you want to
ruin somebody else’s life
bring someone new into the wonderful world of bossing computers around, take a look at
Micro Adventure
, an online adventure game aimed at teaching you the basics — err, BASICs — of coding. The game walks you through a text-based RPG (“You’re in a dark room…”) and prompts you to code your way through to a solution. The game has an emulator window that appears to be based on MS/DOS 1.00, so you know it’s cutting-edge stuff. To be fair, it’s always been our experience that coding is mostly about concepts, and once you learn what a loop is or how to branch in one language, figuring it out in another language is just about syntax. There seem to be at least six different adventures planned, so perhaps other languages will make an appearance in the future.
And finally, while we’re talking about the gamification of nerd education, if you’ve been meaning to learn Morse code, you might want to check out
Morse Code Defender
. It’s an Android app that uses a
Missile Command
motif to help you learn Morse, with attacking missiles having a character attached to them, and you having to enter the correct Morse code to blow the missile up before it takes out your ham shack. We haven’t tried it yet, so there may be more to it, but it sure seems like a cute way to gamify the Morse learning process. Honestly, it’s got to be better than doomscrolling Instagram. | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8152033",
"author": "John Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-07-21T00:00:12",
"content": "Cooool.Now we just need to mod Sega’s Typing of the Dead into Morse Code of the Dead.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8152040",
"author": "Davi... | 1,760,371,479.170697 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/20/designing-an-open-source-multimeter-the-hydrameter/ | Designing An Open Source Multimeter: The HydraMeter | John Elliot V | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"Ammeter",
"digital multimeter",
"HydraMeter",
"ohmmeter",
"voltmeter"
] | Our hacker [John Duffy] wrote in to let us know about a video he put together to
explain the design of his open-source multimeter, the HydraMeter
.
If you’re interested in how the circuitry for a voltmeter, ohmmeter, or ammeter might work, this video is a masterclass. In this long and detailed video, [John] walks us through his solutions to various challenges he had while designing his own multimeter. We
covered this multimeter last year
, and this new video elaborates on the design of the HydraMeter which has been a work in progress for years now.
The basic design feeds voltage, current, and resistance front-ends into an Analog to Digital Converter (ADC), which then feeds into a microcontroller and out to the (detachable) display. You can find the KiCad design files on
the GitHub page.
There is also a
write-up on hackaday.io
.
The user interface for the meter is… opinionated, and perhaps not to everyone’s taste. In the video, [John] talks a little bit about why he made the UI work the way that it does, and he noted that adding a rotary range switch is a goal for version 2.0.
Thank you, [John], for putting this video together; it is an excellent resource. We look forward to seeing version 2.0 develop soon! | 23 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8151997",
"author": "Tom G",
"timestamp": "2025-07-20T21:38:58",
"content": "I’m not going to spend 1h40m trying fo find whether or not the design covers one important aspect of multimeter design: protection against gross overloads. TAoE and X-Chapters covers the HP34401A protection... | 1,760,371,479.37076 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/20/when-a-record-player-doesnt-work-due-to-solid-state-grease/ | When A Record Player Doesn’t Work Due To Solid State Grease | Maya Posch | [
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"grease",
"phonograph",
"record player"
] | Normally, mechanical devices like record players move smoothly, with well-greased contact surfaces enabling the tone arm to automatically move, the multi-record mechanism to drop down a fresh disc, and the listener to have a generally good time. Unfortunately, the 1972-era ITT KP821 record player that [Mark] got recently handed by a friend
wasn’t doing a lot of moving
, with every part of the mechanism seemingly frozen in place, though the current owner wasn’t certain that they were doing something wrong.
Fortunately, this record player was in exceptionally good condition.. The primary failure was that the BSR record player mechanism, with its many touching metal surfaces, was suffering from a bad case of solidified grease. Although this is easily fixed with some IPA and a lot of elbow grease, the biggest trick with these mechanisms is putting it back together after cleaning, with many seemingly randomly shaped parts and every single E-clip that the manufacturer could design for and source at the time.
With that complete, this just left some pot cleaning and replacing a busted fuse in the amplifier section. The selenium rectifier was still functional, as were the
SGS TAA621AX1
audio amplifier ICs. Despite the age of this ‘portable’ record player, both its BSR mechanism and the twin speakers that are part of the record player are in remarkably good condition. Much like with a car, it seems that you just have to swap out the liquid-y elements before they turn into a solid. | 24 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8151943",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2025-07-20T17:28:02",
"content": "Good to see this kind of problem getting attention. These kind of grease related problems are nothing new but are easily overlooked if you are not aware of it. And it happens in all sorts of mechanical device... | 1,760,371,479.309543 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/20/8-bit-mechanical-computer-built-from-knex/ | 8 Bit Mechanical Computer Built From Knex | Bryan Cockfield | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"ALU",
"calculator",
"computer",
"knex",
"math",
"mechanical",
"mechanical computer"
] | Long before electricity was a common household utility, humanity had been building machines to do many tasks that we’d now just strap a motor or set of batteries onto and think nothing of it. Transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and essentially everything had non-electric analogs, and perhaps surprisingly, there were mechanical computers as well. Electronics-based computers are far superior in essentially every way, but the aesthetics of a mechanical computer are still unmatched,
like this 8-bit machine built from K’nex
.
The K’nex computer is built by [Shadowman39], and this first video features just the ALU. It can accept numbers from 0-255 or -128 to 127 and can add two of these numbers by storing them in registers using levers to represent each digit. A drive system underneath with a rack and pinion system operates on each digit, eventually outputting the sum. It can also perform other mathematical operations like subtraction and handling negative numbers using the two’s complement method.
Although this video only goes over the ALU for the mechanical computer, we look forward to [Shadowman39]’s future videos, which go over the other parts of the machine. The basics of the computer are shown in intricate detail. Mechanical computers like these, while generally built as passion projects and not as usable computers, are excellent ways to get a deeper understanding of their electronics-based cousins.
Another way to dive deep into this sort of computing world is by building a relay computer
. | 24 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "8151893",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-07-20T14:07:08",
"content": "About the first paragraph: Strictly speaking, the electric car was first.But the petrol based car won, because electric batteries were still in early development.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_th... | 1,760,371,479.432145 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/20/engine-data-displayed-live-on-dash/ | Engine Data Displayed Live On Dash | Lewin Day | [
"car hacks"
] | [
"dash",
"dashboard",
"digital dash",
"digital dashboard",
"raspberry pi",
"Suzuki"
] | In the auto world, there are lots of overarching standards that all automakers comply with. There are also lots of proprietary technologies that each automaker creates and uses for its own benefit. [Shehriyar Qureshi] has recently been diving into Suzuki’s Serial Data Line standard,
and has created a digital dash using the data gained.
The project started with Python-based scanner code designed to decode Suzuki’s SDL protocol. Armed with the ability to read the protocol, [Shehriyar] wanted to be able to do so without having to haul a laptop around in the car. Thus, the project was ported to Rust, or “oxidized” if you will.
More after the break…
[Shehriyar] has installed the system in a Suzuki Baleno. The Raspberry Pi uses a VAG KKL interface to connect to the car via its OBD port and connect to the SDL line. It decodes this data, and processes it to pull out parameters like speed, RPM. It then drives an LCD display on the double-DIN stereo in the dash. A simple composite output allows the system to display live data while driving the vehicle. The UI
uses the Ratatui library.
The result is a display that both updates smoothly and rapidly. It has a great retro vibe that kind of reminds us of some interfaces seen in Hollywood movies. Despite being analog video, the results are pretty sharp.
We’ve seen a few great digital dashboards over the years.
Crazy news: Ratatui made it into a car dashboard 😱🎉🚗 suzui-rs — Suzuki Serial Data Line viewer in Rust📟 Displays live car data, powered by Pi and shown on stereo over RCA🦀 Written in Rust & built with @ratatui.rs ⭐ GitHub: github.com/thatdevsherr…#rustlang #ratatui #tui #car #suzuki
—
Orhun Parmaksız (@orhun.dev)
2025-07-14T12:27:41.398Z | 12 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8151935",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-07-20T16:32:32",
"content": "So you’re driving in the dark, looking at a display that is so bright that the camera has to do significant exposure time reduction to show the image. What a wonder full Idea. (But it does like the person... | 1,760,371,479.482855 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/19/neon-lamp-detects-lightning-strikes/ | Neon Lamp Detects Lightning Strikes | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"antenna",
"charged clouds",
"led",
"lightning",
"lightning detector",
"neon lamp",
"radio"
] | For as mysterious, fascinating, and beautiful as lightning is at a distance, it’s not exactly a peaceful phenomenon up close. Not many things are built to withstand millions of volts and tens to hundreds of thousands of amps. Unsurprisingly, there’s a huge amount of effort put into lightning protection systems for equipment and resources that need to be outside where thunderstorms sometimes happen. Although most of us won’t be building personal substations, church steeples, or city-scale water towers in our backyards, we might have a few radio antennas up in the air, so it’s a good idea to have some lightning protection
and possibly an alert system like [Joe] built
.
The start of this project came about when [Joe] noticed static on his crystal radio’s headset when there was a storm in the distance. When disconnecting the antenna in this situation, he also noticed sparks, and then thought that placing a neon lamp in the circuit would essentially allow those sparks to form in the lamp itself. The sparks only cause the neon to glow dimly, so a capacitor was added to allow the voltage to increase, making the sparks of light in the lamp more visible. These sparks are still quite dim, though, so two LEDs were added in series with opposite polarity, allowing one to detect negative charge and the other to detect positive.
With the LEDs installed in the circuit, it’s much more apparent when there are charged clouds around, and with the addition of an RF choke, [Joe] can use this circuit at the same time as his radio while also getting alerts about potential thunderstorm activity. This isn’t the only way to detect lightning strikes, though.
There are plenty of other ways to get this job done
, and we’ve even seen lightning detectors so sensitive that
they can detect socks-on-carpet static discharges as well
.
Thanks to [Charles] for the tip! | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8151549",
"author": "Unochepassa",
"timestamp": "2025-07-19T12:12:36",
"content": "Very nice project! I wonder how to make it just like a charged cloud detector without increasing the danger of lightning.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"com... | 1,760,371,479.536035 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/19/garageminder-automatic-garage-door/ | GarageMinder: Automatic Garage Door | John Elliot V | [
"car hacks",
"home hacks"
] | [
"ble",
"bluetooth low energy",
"garage door"
] | After getting a new car, [Solo Pilot] missed the automatic garage door opening and closing system their old car had. So they set about building their own, called
GarageMinder
. On the project page you will find a bill of materials, schematics, and some notes about the approach taken in various versions of the software. [Solo Pilot] also made the
software
available.
The basic hardware centers around a Raspberry Pi Zero W, but there are plans to switch to an ESP32. From the car side of things there are built-in continuous Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) advertisement broadcasts, which the Raspberry Pi can detect. Building a reliable system on top of these unreliable signals is difficult and you can read about some of the challenges and approaches that were taken during development. This is a work in progress and additional techniques and approaches are going to be trialed in future.
If you’re interested in Bluetooth garage door openers be sure to read about
using a Bluetooth headset as a garage door opener for your Android device
. | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8151505",
"author": "tiopepe123",
"timestamp": "2025-07-19T08:25:26",
"content": "A very old resistor and capacitors 1970?¿",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8151509",
"author": "Julianne",
"timestamp": "2025-07-... | 1,760,371,479.60331 |
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