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https://hackaday.com/2025/10/02/sending-toslink-wirelessly-with-lasers/ | Sending TOSLINK Wirelessly With Lasers | Lewin Day | [
"home entertainment hacks",
"Laser Hacks"
] | [
"audio",
"fiber optic",
"optical",
"toslink"
] | TOSLINK was developed in the early 1980s as a simple interface for sending digital audio over fiber optic cables, and despite its age, is still featured on plenty of modern home entertainment devices.
As demonstrated by [DIY Perks]
, this old tech can even be taught some new tricks — namely, transmitting surround sound wirelessly.
Often, a TOSLINK stream is transmitted with a simple LED. [DIY Perks] realized that the TOSLINK signal could instead be used to modulate a cheap red laser diode. This would allow the audio signal to be sent wirelessly through the open air for quite some distance, assuming you could accurately aim it at a TOSLINK receiver. The first test was successful, with the aid of a nifty trick, [DIY Perks] filled the open TOSLINK port with a translucent plastic diffuser to make a larger target to aim at.
The rest of the video demonstrates how this technique can be used for surround sound transmission without cables. [DIY Perks] whipped up a series of 3D printed ceiling mirror mounts that could tidily bounce laser light for each surround channel to each individual satellite speaker.
It’s a very innovative way to do surround sound. It’s not a complete solution to wiring issues—you still need a way to power each speaker. Ultimately, though, it’s a super cool way to run your home theater setup that will surely be a talking point when your guests notice the laser mirrors on the ceiling.
We’ve seen some other stealthy surround sound setups before, too.
[Thanks to jenningsthecat for the tip!] | 30 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8186675",
"author": "make piece not war",
"timestamp": "2025-10-02T16:26:25",
"content": "Hope that pretty lights it won’t atract JDAMs.And why you didn’t mention the hobbit house where you can use those speakers?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,371,412.198457 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/10/02/on-3d-scanners-and-giving-kinects-a-new-purpose-in-life/ | On 3D Scanners And Giving Kinects A New Purpose In Life | Maya Posch | [
"classic hacks",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Kinect hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"3d scanning",
"Kinect"
] | The concept of a 3D scanner can seem rather simple in theory: simply point a camera at the physical object you wish to scan in, rotate around the object to capture all angles and stitch it together into a 3D model along with textures created from the same photos. This
photogrammetry
application is definitely viable, but also limited in the sense that you’re relying on inferring three-dimensional parameters from a set of 2D images and rely on suitable lighting.
To get more detailed depth information from a scene you’d need to perform direct measurements, which can be done physically or through e.g.
time-of-flight
(ToF) measurements. Since contact-free ways of measurements tend to be often preferred, ToF makes a lot of sense, but comes with the disadvantage of measuring of only a single spot at a time. When the target is actively moving, you can fall back on photogrammetry or use an approach called structured-light (SL) scanning.
SL is what consumer electronics like the Microsoft Kinect popularized, using the combination of a visible and near-infrared (NIR) camera to record a pattern projected onto the subject, which is similar to how e.g. face-based login systems like Apple’s Face ID work. Considering how often Kinects have been used for generic purpose 3D scanners, this raises many questions regarding today’s crop of consumer 3D scanners, such as whether they’re all just basically Kinect-clones.
The Successful Kinect Failure
Although Microsoft’s
Kinect
flopped as a gaming accessory despite an initially successful run for the 2010 version released alongside the XBox 360, it does provide us with a good look at what it looks like when trying to make real-time 3D scanning work for the consumer market. The choice of SL-based scanning with the original Kinect was the obvious choice, as it was a mature technology that was also capable of providing real-time tracking of where a player’s body parts are relative in space.
Hardware-wise, the Kinect features a color camera, an infrared laser projector and a monochrome camera capable of capturing the scene including the projected IR pattern. The simple process of adding a known visual element to a scene allows a subsequent algorithm to derive fairly precise shape information based on where the pattern can be seen and how it was distorted. As this can all be derived from a single image frame, with the color camera providing any color information, the limiting factor then becomes the processing speed of this visual data.
PrimeSense diagram of their reference depth sensor platform. (Source:
iFixit
)
After the relatively successful
original Kinect
for the XBox 360, the XBox One saw the introduction of a refreshed Kinect, which kept the same rough layout and functioning, but used much upgraded hardware, including triple NIR laser projectors, as can be seen in the iFixit
teardown
of one of these units.
The naked front of the XBox One Kinect, featuring the same RGB and NIR camera setup alongside an NIR projector. (Credit:
iFixit
)
In both cases much of the processing is performed in the control IC inside the Kinect, which in the case of the original Kinect was made by PrimeSense and for the XBox One version a Microsoft-branded chip presumably manufactured by ST Microelectronics.
The NIR pattern
projected
by the PrimeSense system consists of a static, pseudorandom dot pattern that is projected onto the scene and captured as part of the scene by the NIR-sensitive monochrome camera. Since the system
knows the pattern
that it projects and its divergence in space, it can use this as part of a stereo triangulation algorithm applied to both. The calculated changes to the expected pattern thus create a depth map which can subsequently be used for limb and finger tracking for use with video games.
The ToF phase-measurement principle. (Credit:
Sarbolandi et al
., 2015)
Here it’s interesting to note that for the second generation of the Kinect, Microsoft switched from SL to ToF, with both approaches compared in
this 2015 paper
by Hamed Sarbolandi et al. as
published
in
Computer Vision and Image Understanding
.
Perhaps the biggest difference between the SL and ToF versions of the Kinect is that the former can suffer quite significantly from occlusion, with up to 20% of the projected pattern obscured versus up to 5% occlusion for ToF. The ToF version of the Kinect has much better low-light performance as well. Thus, as long as you can scan a scene quickly enough with the ToF sensor configuration, it should theoretically perform better.
Instead of the singular scanning beam as you might expect with the ToF approach, The 2013 Kinect for XBox One and subsequent Kinect hardware use Continuous Wave (CW) Intensity Modulation, which effectively blasts the scene with NIR light that’s both periodic and intensity modulated, thus illuminating the NIR CMOS sensor with the resulting effect from the scene pretty much continuously.
Both the SL and ToF approach used here suffer negatively when there’s significant ambient background light, which requires the use of bandpass filters. Similarly, semi-transparent and scattering media also pose a significant challenge for both approaches. Finally, there is motion blur, with the Kinect SL approach having the benefit of only requiring a single image, whereas the ToF version requires multiple captures and is thus more likely to suffer from motion blur if capturing at the same rate.
What the comparison by Sarbolandi et al. makes clear is that at least in the comparison between 2010-era consumer-level SL hardware and 2013-era ToF hardware there are wins and losses on both sides, making it hard to pick a favorite. Of note is that the monochrome NIR cameras in both Kinects are roughly the same resolution, with the ToF depth sensor even slightly lower at 512 x 424 versus the 640 x 480 of the original SL Kinect.
Kinect Modelling Afterlife
Over the years the proprietary Kinect hardware has been dissected to figure out how to use them for purposes other than making the playing of XBox video games use more energy than fondling a hand-held controller. A
recent project
by [Stoppi] (in German, see below English-language video) is a good example of one that uses an original Kinect with the official Microsoft SDK and drivers along with the Skanect software to create 3D models.
This approach is reminiscent of the photogrammetry method, but provides a depth map for each angle around the scene being scanned, which helps immensely when later turning separate snapshots into a coherent 3D model.
In this particular project a turning table is made using an Arduino board and a stepper motor, which allows for precise control over how much the object that is being scanned rotates between snapshots. This control feature is then combined with the scanning software – here Skanect – to create the 3D model along with textures created from the Kinect’s RGB camera.
Here it should be noted that Skanect has recently been phased out, and was replaced with an Apple mobile app, but you can still find
official download links
from Structure for now. This is unfortunately a recurring problem with relying on commercial options, whether free or not, as Kinect hardware begins to age out of the market.
Fortunately we can fallback on
libfreenect
for the original SL Kinect and
lifreenect2
for the ToF Kinect. These are userspace drivers that provide effectively full support for all features on these devices. Unfortunately, these projects haven’t seen significant activity over the past years, with the OpenKinect domain name lapsing as well, so before long we may have to resort to purchasing off-the-shelf hardware again, rather than hacking Kinects.
On which note, how different are those commercial consumer-oriented 3D scanners from Kinects, exactly?
Commercial Scanners
The Creality CR-Scan Ferret Pro 3D scanner, with iPhone in place. (Credit:
Creality
)
It should probably not come as a massive surprise that the 3D scanners that you can can purchase for average consumer-levels of money are highly reminiscent of the Kinect. If we ogle the approximately $350 Creality CR-Scan Ferret Pro, for example, we’d be excused for thinking at first glance that someone stuck a tiny Kinect on top of a stick.
When we look at the
user manual
for this particular 3D scanner, however, we can see that it’s got one more lens than a Kinect. This is because it uses two NIR cameras for stereoscopic imaging, while keeping the same NIR projector and single RGB camera that we are used seeing on the Kinect. A similar 30 FPS capture rate is claimed as for the Kinect, with a 1080p resolution for the RGB camera and ‘up to 0.1 mm’ resolution within its working distance of 150 – 700 mm.
The fundamental technology has of course not changed from the Kinect days, so we’re likely looking at ToF-based depth sensors for these commercial offerings. Improvements will be found in the number of NIR cameras used to get more depth information, higher-resolution NIR and RGB sensors, along with improvements to the algorithms that derive the depth map. Exact details here are of course scarce barring someone tearing one of these units down for a detailed analysis. Unlike the Kinect, modern-day 3D scanners are much more niche and less generalized. This makes them far less attractive to hack than cheap-ish devices which flooded the market alongside ubiquitous XBox consoles with all of Microsoft’s mass-production muscle behind it.
When looking at the demise of the Kinect in this way, it is somewhat sad to see that the most accessible and affordable 3D scanner option available to both scientists and hobbyists is rapidly becoming a lost memory, with currently available commercial options not quite hitting the same buttons – or price point – and
open source options
apparently falling back to the excitingly mediocre option of RGB photogrammetry.
Featured image: still from “
Point Cloud Test6
” by [Simon]. | 32 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "8186639",
"author": "Maave",
"timestamp": "2025-10-02T14:21:27",
"content": "great article and description of the tech. Next time I 3D scan with the Kinect I’ll try it in a dark room.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8186651",
... | 1,760,371,412.522536 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/10/02/the-internet-we-didnt-get/ | The Internet We Didn’t Get | Bryan Cockfield | [
"internet hacks"
] | [
"alternative future",
"hypertext",
"internet",
"Ted Nelson",
"transclusion",
"web",
"xanadu"
] | Collective human consciousness is full of imagined or mythical dream-like utopias, hidden away behind mountains, across or under oceans, hidden in mist, or deep in the jungle. From Atlantis, Avalon, El Dorado, and Shangri-La, we have not stopped imagining these secret, fantastical places. One of these, Xanadu, is actually a real place but has been embellished over the years into a place of legend and myth,
and thus became the namesake of an Internet we never got to see like all of those other mystical, hidden places
.
The Xanadu project got its start in the 1960s at around the same time the mouse and what we might recognize as a modern computer user interface were created. At its core was
hypertext
with the ability to link not just other pages but references and files together into one network. It also had version control, rights management, bi-directional links, and a number of additional features that would be revolutionary even today. Another core feature was
transclusion
, a method for making sure that original authors were compensated when their work was linked. However, Xanadu was hampered by a number of issues including lack of funding, infighting among the project’s contributors, and the development of an almost cult-like devotion to the vision, not unlike some of today’s hype around generative AI. Surprisingly, despite these faults, the project received significant funding from Autodesk, but even with this support the project ultimately failed.
Instead of this robust, bi-directional web imagined as early as the 1960s, the Internet we know of today is the much simpler World Wide Web which has many features of Xanadu we recognize. Not only is it less complex to implement, it famously received institutional backing from CERN immediately rather than stagnating for decades. The article linked above contains a tremendous amount of detail around this story that’s worth checking out. For all its faults and lack of success, though, Xanadu is a interesting image of what the future of the past could have been like if just a few things had shaken out differently, and it will instead remain a mythical place like so many others. | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8186596",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-10-02T12:38:38",
"content": "I would never have connected Vannevar Bush and hismemexwith Doug Engelbart and his Mother of All Demos and Ted NelsonComputer Lib/Dream MachinesYou might add Norman Abramson and ALOHAnet to the hard... | 1,760,371,412.394604 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/10/02/3d-print-smoothing-with-lasers/ | 3D Print Smoothing, With Lasers | Fenix Guthrie | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"diode laser",
"FDM",
"print smoothing"
] | As anyone who has used an FDM printer can tell you, it’s certainly not the magical replicator it’s often made out to be. The limitations of the platform are numerous — ranging from anisotropic material characteristics to visual imperfections in the parts. In an attempt to reduce the visual artifacts in 3D prints,
[TenTech] affixed a small diode laser on a 3D printer
.
Getting the 1.5 watt diode laser onto the printer was a simple matter of a bracket and attaching it to the control board as a fan. Tuning the actual application of the laser proved a little more challenging. While the layer lines did get smoothed, it also discolored the pink filament making the results somewhat unusable. Darker colored filaments seem to not have this issue and a dark blue is used for the rest of the video.
The smoothing process begins at the end of a 3D print and uses non-planar printer movements to keep the laser at an ideal focusing distance. The results proved rather effective, giving a noticeably smoother and shiner quality than an unprocessed print. The smoothing works incredibly well on fine geometry which would be difficult or impossible to smooth out via traditional mechanical means. Some detail was lost with sharp corners getting rounded, but not nearly as much as [TenTech] feared.
For a final test, [TenTech] made two candle molds, one smoothed and one processed. The quality difference between the two resulting candles was minimal, with the smoothed one being perhaps even a little worse. However, a large amount of wax leaked into the 3D print infill in the unprocessed mold, with the processed mold showing no signs of leaking.
If you are looking for a bit safer of a 3D print post-processing technique, make sure to check out
[Donal Papp]’s UV resin smoothing experiments!
Thanks [john] for the tip! | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8186508",
"author": "Pete",
"timestamp": "2025-10-02T08:56:14",
"content": "This dude is my favourite youtuber right now. Pushes interesting concepts at an unbelievable fast rate. One of the few 3D printing youtubers who puts in the work for original stuff. But I have to say, this o... | 1,760,371,412.446999 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/10/01/the-making-of-a-minimalist-analog-drum-machine/ | The Making Of A Minimalist Analog Drum Machine | John Elliot V | [
"hardware",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"analog",
"drum machine"
] | Our hacker [Moritz Klein] shows us
how to make a minimalist analog drum machine
. If you want the gory details check out the video embedded below and there is a first class write-up available as a
78 page PDF manual
too. Indeed it has been a while since we have seen a project which was this well documented.
A typical drum machine will have many buttons and LEDs and is usually implemented with a microcontroller. In this project [Moritz] eschews that complexity and comes up with an analog solution using a few integrated circuits, LEDs, and buttons.
The heart of the build are the integrated circuits which include two TL074 quad op amps, a TL072 dual op amp, a CD4520 binary counter, and eight CD4015 shift registers. Fifteen switches and buttons are used along with seven LEDs. And speaking of LEDs, our hacker [Moritz] seems to have an LED schematic symbol tattooed to his hand, and we don’t know about you, but this screams credibility to us! :)
This capable drum machine includes a bunch of features, including: 4 independent channels with one-button step input/removal; up to 16 steps per channel; optional half-time mode per channel; two synchronizable analog low-frequency oscillators (LFOs) for dynamic accents; resistor-DAC output for pitch or decay modulation; and an internal clock with 16th, 8th, and quarter note outputs, which can be synchronized with external gear.
Of course at Hackaday we’ve seen plenty of drum machines before. If you’re interested in drum machines you might also like to check out
Rope Core Drum Machine
and
Shapeshifter – An Open Source Drum Machine
. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8186499",
"author": "Gösta",
"timestamp": "2025-10-02T08:21:04",
"content": "Love this, awesome drumhack :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8186659",
"author": "Christoph",
"timestamp": "2025-10-02T15:40:26",
"conte... | 1,760,371,412.665899 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/10/01/mesa-project-adds-code-comprehension-requirement-after-ai-slop-incident/ | Mesa Project Adds Code Comprehension Requirement After AI Slop Incident | Maya Posch | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Software Development"
] | [
"artificial intellegence",
"ChatGPT"
] | Recently [Faith Ekstrand]
announced
on Mastodon that Mesa was updating its contributor guide. This follows a recent AI slop incident where someone submitted a
massive patch
to the Mesa project with the claim that this would improve performance ‘by a few percent’. The catch? The entire patch was generated by ChatGPT, with the submitter becoming somewhat irate when the very patient Mesa developers tried to explain that they’d happily look at the issue after the submitter had condensed the purported ‘improvement’ into a bite-sized patch.
The entire saga is
summarized
in a recent video by [Brodie Robertson] which highlights both how incredibly friendly the Mesa developers are, and how the use of ChatGPT and kin has made some people with zero programming skills apparently believe that they can now contribute code to OSS projects. Unsurprisingly, the Mesa developers were unable to disabuse this particular individual from that notion, but the
diff
to the Mesa contributor guide by [Timur Kristóf] should make abundantly clear that someone playing Telephone between a chatbot and OSS project developers is neither desirable nor helpful.
That said, [Brodie] also highlights a
recent post
by [Daniel Stenberg] of Curl fame, who thanked [Joshua Rogers] for contributing a massive list of potential issues that were found using ‘AI-assisted tools’, as detailed in
this blog post
by [Joshua]. An important point here is that these ‘AI tools’ are not LLM-based chatbots, but rather tweaked existing tools like static code analyzers with more smarts bolted on. They’re purpose-made tools that still require you to know what you’re doing, but they can be a real asset to a developer, and a heck of a lot more useful to a project like Curl than getting sent fake bug reports by a confabulating chatbot as has happened previously. | 30 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8186504",
"author": "Sword",
"timestamp": "2025-10-02T08:39:44",
"content": "I personally believe AI code should not be included in anything…. but I can possibly understand if someone writes a function, then asks AI to optimize said function. Reads the generated code, fully understa... | 1,760,371,412.807139 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/10/01/electric-surfboard-gets-thrust-vectoring-upgrade/ | Electric Surfboard Gets Thrust Vectoring Upgrade | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"surfboard",
"thrust",
"Thrust vectoring"
] | The internet has already taught us that an electric surfboard is a great way to get around on the water while looking like an absolute badass. [RCLifeOn] is continuing to push the boat forward in this regard, however,
adding thrust vectoring technology to his already-impressive build.
If you’re unfamiliar with the world of
electric surfboards
, the concept is relatively simple. Stick one or more electric ducted fan thrusters on the back, add some speed controllers, and power everything from a chunky bank of lithium-ion batteries. Throw in a wireless hand controller, and you’ve got one heck of a personal watercraft.
Traditionally, these craft are steered simply by leaning and twisting as a surfer would with a traditional board. However, more dynamic control is possible if you add a way to aim the thrust coming from the propulsion system. [RCLifeOn] achieved this by adding steerable nozzles behind the ducted fan thrusters, controlled with big hobby servos to handle the forces involved. The result is a more controllable electric surfboard that can seriously carve through the turns. Plus, it’s now effectively an RC boat all on its own, as it no longer needs a rider on board to steer.
We’ve covered
various developments in this surfboard’s history before, too.
Video after the break. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8186440",
"author": "sikri Ayanami",
"timestamp": "2025-10-02T01:31:47",
"content": "This is sooo tight!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,412.241031 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/10/01/seggers-awkward-usb-c-issue-with-the-j-link-compact-debugger/ | Segger’s Awkward USB-C Issue With The J-Link Compact Debugger | Maya Posch | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"USB C"
] | Theoretically USB-C is a pretty nifty connector, but the reality is that it mostly provides many exciting new ways to make your device not work as expected. With the
gory details covered by [Alvaro]
, the latest to join the party is Segger, with its
J-Link BASE Compact
MCU debugger displaying the same behavior which we saw back when the Raspberry Pi 4 was released in 2019. Back then so-called e-marked USB-C cables failed to power the SBC, much like how this particular J-Link unit refuses to power up when connected using one of those special USB-C cables.
We
covered the issue
in great detail back then, discussing how the CC1 and CC1 connections need to be wired up correctly with appropriate resistors in order for the USB-C supply – like a host PC – to provide power to the device. As [Alvaro] discovered through some investigation, this unit made basically the same mistake as the RPi 4B SBC before the corrected design. This involves wiring CC1 and CC2 together and as a result seeing the same <1 kOhm resistance on the active CC line, meaning that to the host device you just hooked up a USB-C audio dongle, which obviously shouldn’t be supplied with power.
Although it’s not easy to tell when this particular J-Link device was produced, the PCB notes its revision as v12.1, so presumably it’s not the first rodeo for this general design, and the product page already shows a different label than for the device that [Alvaro] has. It’s possible that it originally was sloppily converted from a previous micro-USB-powered design where CC lines do not exist and things Just Work™, but it’s still a pretty major oversight from what should be a reputable brand selling a device that costs €400 + VAT, rather than a reputable brand selling a <$100 SBC.
For any in the audience who have one of these USB-C-powered debuggers, does yours work with e-marked cables, and what is the revision and/or purchase date? | 34 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8186356",
"author": "macsimki",
"timestamp": "2025-10-01T21:00:01",
"content": "the members of the League of Undercover Sadists who came up with usb-c are having a great time. one connector to rule them all.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"... | 1,760,371,412.607809 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/10/01/floss-weekly-episode-849-veilid-be-a-brick/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 849: Veilid: Be A Brick | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"FLOSS Weekly",
"peer-to-peer",
"tor",
"Veilid"
] | This week
Jonathan
talks with Brandon and TC about Veilid, the peer-to-peer networking framework that takes inspiration from Tor, and VeilidChat, the encrypted messenger built on top of it. What was the inspiration? How does it work, and what can you do with it? Listen to find out!
Veilid.com
https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilid
https://veilid.gitlab.io/developer-book/index.html
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on
our YouTube Channel
? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or contact the guest and have them contact us!
Take a look at the schedule here
.
Direct Download
in DRM-free MP3.
If you’d rather read along,
here’s the transcript for this week’s episode
.
Places to follow the FLOSS Weekly Podcast:
Spotify
RSS
Theme music: “Newer Wave” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under
Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,412.283743 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/10/01/lost-techniques-cpu-in-circuit-emulation/ | Lost Techniques: Bond-out CPUs And In Circuit Emulation | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"History",
"Retrocomputing",
"Slider"
] | [
"bond out chip",
"ice",
"in circuit emulation"
] | These days, we take it for granted that you can connect a cheap piece of hardware to a microcontroller and have an amazing debugging experience. Stop the program. Examine memory and registers. You can see and usually change anything. There are only a handful of ways this is done on modern CPUs, and they all vary only by detail. But this wasn’t always the case. Getting that kind of view to an actual running system was an expensive proposition.
Today, you typically have some serial interface, often JTAG, and enough hardware in the IC to communicate with a host computer to reveal and change internal state, set breakpoints, and the rest. But that wasn’t always easy. In the bad old days, transistors were large and die were small. You couldn’t afford to add little debugging pins to each processor you produced.
This led to some very interesting workarounds. Of course, you could always run simulators on a larger computer. But that might not work in real time, and almost certainly didn’t have all the external things you wanted to connect to, unless you also simulated them.
The alternative? Create a special chip, often called a bond-out chip. These were usually expensive and had some way to communicate with the outside world. This might be a couple of pins, or there might be
a bundle of wires coming out of the top of the chip
. You replaced your microprocessor with the expensive bond-out chip and connected it to your very expensive in-circuit emulator.
If you have a better
scan
of the ICE-51 datasheet, we’d love to see it.
For example, the venerable 8051 had an 8051E chip that brought out the address and data bus lines for debugging. In fact, the
history of the 8051
notes that they developed the bond-out chip first. The chip was bigger and sold in lower volumes, so it was more expensive. It needed not just connections but breakpoint hardware to stop the CPU at exactly the right time for debugging.
In some cases, the emulator probe was a board that sat between a stock CPU and the CPU socket. Of course, that meant you had to have room to accommodate the large board. Of course, it also assumes that at least your development board had a socket, although in those days it was rare to have an expensive CPU soldered right down to the board.
Another poor scan, this time of the Lauterbach emulator probe for the 68000.
For example, the Lauterbach ICE-68300 here could take a bond-out chip or a regular chip, although it would be missing features if you didn’t have the special chip.
Of course, you can still find in circuit emulators, but the difference is that they almost certainly have supporting hardware on the standard chip and simply use a serial communication protocol to talk to the on-chip hardware.
Of course, if you want an emulator for an old CPU, you have enough horsepower now that you can probably emulate it like with a modern processor, like the IZE80 does in the video below. Then you can incorporate all kinds of magical debugging features. But be careful what you take on. To properly mimic the hardware means tight timing for things like DRAM refresh and a complete understanding of all the bus timings involved.
But it
can be done
. In any event, on chip debugging or real in-circuit emulation, it sure makes
life easier
. | 18 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8186294",
"author": "Alphatek",
"timestamp": "2025-10-01T17:38:06",
"content": "This is still a thing for chips that have hard real-time circuitry in them. No point looking at registers after the event.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment... | 1,760,371,412.341974 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/10/01/building-an-open-source-point-of-sale-system/ | Building An Open Source Point Of Sale System | Lewin Day | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"kiosk",
"Latte Panda",
"point of sale",
"POS",
"pos system"
] | [Mukesh Sankhla] has been tinkering in the world of Point of Sale systems of late. His latest creation is a simple, straightforward kiosk system,
and he’s open sourced the design.
The Latte Panda MU single-board computer is at the heart of the build, handling primary duties and communicating with the outside world. It’s hooked up to a touchscreen display which shows the various items available for purchase. As an x86 system, the Latte Panda runs Windows 11, along with a simple kiosk software package written in Python. The software uses Google Firebase as a database backend. There’s also an Xiao ESP32 S3 microcontroller in the mix, serving as an interface between the Latte Panda and the thermal printer which is charged with printing receipts.
It’s worth noting that this is just a point-of-sale system; it executes orders, but doesn’t directly deliver or vend anything. With that said, since it’s all open-source, there’s nothing stopping you from upgrading this project further.
We’ve featured other interesting point-of-sale systems before; particularly interesting was
the San Francisco restaurant that was completely automated with no human interaction involved | 21 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8186259",
"author": "Mike Bradley",
"timestamp": "2025-10-01T16:05:02",
"content": "Yes its neat, but not a good direction for a point of sale system, best to use a touch screen with a browser with a back end webserver. so many advantages and more expandable.",
"parent_id": null... | 1,760,371,412.741376 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/10/01/the-hottest-spark-plugs-were-actually-radioactive/ | The Hottest Spark Plugs Were Actually Radioactive | Lewin Day | [
"car hacks",
"Featured",
"History",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"alpha particles",
"alpha radiation",
"firestone",
"polonium",
"polonium-210",
"radiation",
"spark plugs"
] | In the middle of the 20th century, the atom was all the rage. Radiation was the shiny new solution to everything while being similarly poorly understood by the general public and a great deal of those working with it.
Against this backdrop, Firestone Tire and Rubber Company decided to sprinkle some radioactive magic into spark plugs. There was some science behind the silliness, but it turns out there are a number of good reasons we’re not using nuke plugs under the hood of cars to this day.
Hot Stuff
The Firestone Polonium spark plug represented a fascinating intersection of Cold War-era nuclear optimism and automotive engineering. These weren’t your garden-variety spark plugs – they contained small amounts of polonium-210. The theory behind radioactive spark plugs was quite simple from an engineering perspective. As the radioactive polonium decayed into lead, it would release alpha particles supposed to ionize the air-fuel mixture in the combustion chamber, making an easier path for the spark to ignite and reducing the likelihood of misfires. Thus, the polonium-210 spark plugs would theoretically create a better, stronger spark and improve combustion efficiency.
Firestone decided polonium, not radium, was the way to go when it filed a patent of its own. Credit:
US Patent
These plugs hit the market sometime around 1940, though the idea dates back at least a full 11 years earlier. In 1924, Albert Hubbard applied for a patent (US 1,723,422), which was granted five years later. His patent concerned the use of radium to create an ionized path through the gas inside an engine’s cylinder to improve spark plug performance.
Firestone’s patent (US 2,254,169) came much later, granted in 1941. The company decided that polonium-210 was a more viable radioactive source. Radium was considered “too expensive and dangerous”, while uranium and thorium isotopes were found to be “ineffective.” Polonium, though, was the bee’s knees. From the patent filing:
Frequently, conditions will be so unfavorable that a spark will not occur at all, and it will be necessary to turn the engine over a number of times before a spark occurs. However, if the alpha rays of polonium are passing through the gap, a large number of extra ions are formed by each alpha ray (10,000 ions per-alpha ray) and the gap breaks down promptly after the voltage begins to rise and at a lower voltage value than that required by standard spark plugs. Thus, it might be said that polonium creates favorable conditions for gap breakdown under all circumstances. Many tests have been run which substantiate the above explanations. The most conclusive test of this type consisted in comparing the starting characteristics of many polonium-containing spark plugs with ordinary spark plugs, all plugs having had more than a year of hard service, in several engines at -15° F. It was found that thirty per cent fewer revolutions of an engine were required for starting when the polonium plugs were used.
Firestone was quite proud of its new Atomic Age product. Credit: Firestone
As per the patent, the radioactive material was incorporated into the electrodes by adding it to the nickel alloy used to produce them. This would put it in prime position to ionize the air charge in the spark gap where it mattered most.
The science seems to check out on paper, but polonium spark plugs were only on the market for a short period of time, with the last known advertisements being published
sometime around 1953.
If the radioactive spark plugs had serious performance benefits, one suspects they might have stuck around. However, physics tells us they may not have been that special in reality.
In particular, polonium-210 has a relatively short half-life of just 138 days. In a year, 84% of the initial polonium-210 would have already decayed. Thus, between manufacturing, shipping, purchase, and installation, it’s hard to say how much “heat” would have been left in the plugs by the time they even reached the consumer. These plugs would quickly lose their magic simply sitting on the shelf. Beyond that, there are some questions of their performance in a real working engine. Firestone’s patent claimed improved performance over time, but a more sceptical view would be that deposits left on the spark plug electrodes over time would easily block any alpha particles that would otherwise be emitted to help cause ionization.
Examples of the polonium-impregnated spark plugs can be readily found online, though the radioactive material decayed away long ago. Credit:
eBay
Ultimately, while the plugs may have had some small benefit when new, any additional performance was minor enough that they never really found a market. Couple this with ugly problems around dispersal, storage, and disposal of radioactive material, and it’s perhaps quite a good thing that these plugs didn’t really catch on.
Despite the lack of market success, however, it’s still possible to find these spark plugs in the wild today. A simple search on online auction sites will turn up dozens of examples, though don’t expect them to show up glowing. The radioactive material within will long have decayed to the point where
they’re not going to significantly exceed typical background radiation.
Still, they’re an interesting call back to an era when radioactivity was the hottest new thing on the block. | 57 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "8186210",
"author": "Tony",
"timestamp": "2025-10-01T14:22:04",
"content": "100 years later, how much things similar with “Artificial Intelligence” or “Quantic” ? ;-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8186222",
"author": "Mile... | 1,760,371,412.919008 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/10/01/an-fpga-based-mechanical-keyboard/ | An FPGA-Based Mechanical Keyboard | Lewin Day | [
"FPGA",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"fpga",
"keyboard"
] | You can buy all kinds of keyboards these days, from basic big-brand stuff to obscure mechanical delicacies from small-time builders. Or, you can go the maker route, and build your own.
That’s precisely what [Lambert Sartory] did with their Clavier build.
This build goes a bit of a different route to many other DIY keyboards out there, in that [Lambert] was keen to build it around an FPGA instead of an off-the-shelf microcontroller. To that end, the entire USB HID stack was implemented in VHDL on a Lattice ECP5 chip. It was a heavy-duty way to go, but it makes the keyboard quite unique compared to those that just rely on existing HID libraries to do the job. This onboard hardware also allowed [Lambert] to include JTAG, SPI, I2C, and UART interfaces right on the keyboard, as well as a USB hub for good measure.
As for the mechanical design, it’s a full-size 105-key ISO keyboard with one bonus key for good measure. That’s the coffee key, which either locks the attached computer when you’re going for a break, or resets the FPGA with a long press just in case it’s necessary. It’s built with Cherry MX compatible switches, has N-key rollover capability, and a mighty 1000 Hz polling rate. If you can exceed that by hand, you’re some sort of superhuman.
The great thing about building your own keyboard
is you can put in whatever features you desire
. If you’re whipping up your own neat interface devices, don’t hesitate to
let us know! | 15 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8186133",
"author": "anon",
"timestamp": "2025-10-01T11:28:06",
"content": "Mech keybs are already crazy overpriced without an fpga…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8186171",
"author": "fuzzyfuzzyfungus",
"time... | 1,760,371,413.152764 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/10/01/porting-a-fortran-flight-simulator-to-unity3d/ | Porting A Fortran Flight Simulator To Unity3D | Al Williams | [
"Games",
"Software Development"
] | [
"F-16",
"flight simulator",
"FORTRAN",
"Unity3d"
] | There’s an old saying (paraphrasing a quote attributed to Hoare): “I don’t know what language scientists will use in the future, but I know it will be called Fortran.” The truth is, there is a ton of very sophisticated code in Fortran, and if you want to do something more modern, it is often easier to borrow it than to reinvent the wheel. When [Valgriz] picked up a textbook on aircraft simulation, he noted that it had an F-16 simulation in it. In Fortran. The challenge?
Port it to Unity3D
.
If you have a gamepad, you can
try the result
. However, the real payoff is the blog posts describing what he did. They go back to 2021, although the most recent was a few months ago, and they cover the entire process in great detail. You can also find the code on
GitHub
. If you are interested in flight simulation, flying, Fortran, or Unity3D, you’ll want to settle in and read all four posts. That will take some time.
One limitation. The book’s simulator was all about modeling the aerodynamics using data from wind tunnel tests. However, the F-16 is notorious for being a negative stability aircraft — meaning it’s virtually impossible to fly by hand. It is very maneuverable, but only if you let the computer drive using the flight control system. When you direct the aircraft, the control system makes your desire happen, while accounting for all the strange extra motions the plane will create as it flies.
The problem: the book doesn’t include code for the flight controller. [Valgriz], of course, wrote his own. He uses some PID controllers along with limiters for G-force and angle of attack. Interestingly, to do this, the simulator actually runs its own stripped-down simulator to determine the effects of different control inputs.
This is one of those projects we aren’t sure we would attempt, but we’re glad someone did, and we can watch. Just be careful. An interest in flight simulation can lead to
reduced space in your garage
. We know of at least
one F-16,
by the way, that has an Arduino in it. However, it is probably the only one. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8186108",
"author": "Maria",
"timestamp": "2025-10-01T10:15:39",
"content": "the F-16 is notorious for being a negative stability aircraftAs demonstrated by Maciej “Slab” Krakowian during Radom Air Show 2025.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UHcO3tfAYwNow all that’s left of him is a ... | 1,760,371,412.980493 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/30/toy-train-joins-the-internet-of-things/ | Toy Train Joins The Internet Of Things | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"internet of things",
"train"
] | [Zoltan] was developing a workshop on Matter for DEF CON, and wanted to whip up a fun IoT project to go with it. His idea was simple—take a simple toy train,
and put it on the Internet of Things.
Speed and low cost were the goals here, with a budget of around $40 and a timeline of one week. The train set sourced for the build was a 43 piece set with a locomotive, one carriage, and a simple oval track, retailing for $25. The toy train got a new brain in the form of an ESP32-C3 DevKitM-1, with the goal of commanding the device over Wi-Fi for ease of use. The microcontroller was set up to control the train’s brushed DC motor with an IRL540 MOSFET. A USB battery bank was initially employed to power the rig, which sat neatly on the train’s solitary carriage. This was later swapped out for a CR123A battery, which did the job for the train’s short duration in service.
Code for the project was simple enough. The ESP32 simply listens for commands via Matter protocol, and turns the train on and off as instructed. [Zoltan] demos the simple interoperability of the Matter protocol by switching the train on and off with Google Home voice commands, and it works perfectly well.
Toy trains
aren’t something we typically see included in smart homes, but maybe they should be. If you’re cooking up your own oddball IoT hacks, be sure to let us know
on the tipsline! | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8186103",
"author": "make piece not war",
"timestamp": "2025-10-01T10:00:23",
"content": "As you know, trains and “other toy” is what boys and men have in common, the only difference is the amount of money involved. Now I am waiting for a brave DIYer to create an “on/off” IoT remote... | 1,760,371,413.200321 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/30/unitree-humanoid-robot-exploit-looks-like-a-bad-one/ | Unitree Humanoid Robot Exploit Looks Like A Bad One | Donald Papp | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"ble",
"unitree",
"vulnerability",
"worm"
] | Unitree have a number of robotic offerings, and are one of the first manufacturers offering humanoid robotic platforms. It seems they are also the subject of
UniPwn
, one of the first public exploits of a vulnerability across an entire robotic product line. In this case, the vulnerability allows an attacker not only to utterly compromise a device from within the affected product lines, but infected robots can also infect others within wireless range. This is done via a remote command-injection exploit that involves a robot’s Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Wi-Fi configuration service.
Unitree’s flagship
G1
humanoid robot platform (one of the many models affected)
While this may be the first public humanoid robot exploit we have seen (it also affects their quadruped models), the lead-up to announcing the details in
a post on X
is a familiar one. Researchers discover a security vulnerability and attempt responsible disclosure by privately notifying the affected party. Ideally the manufacturer responds, communicates, and fixes the vulnerability so devices are no longer vulnerable by the time details come out. That’s not always how things go. If efforts at responsible disclosure fail and action isn’t taken, a public release can help inform people of a serious issue, and point out workarounds and mitigations to a vulnerability that the manufacturer isn’t addressing.
The biggest security issues involved in this vulnerability (summed up in a total of
four CVEs
) include:
Hardcoded cryptographic keys for encrypting and decrypting BLE control packets (allowing anyone with a key to send valid packets.)
Trivial handshake security (consists simply of checking for the string “unitree” as the secret.)
Unsanitized user data that gets concatenated into shell commands and passed to
system()
.
The complete attack sequence is a chain of events that leverages the above in order to ultimately send commands which run with root privileges.
We’ve seen a Unitree security glitch before, but it was used to provide an unofficial SDK that
opened up expensive features of the Go1 “robot dog” model for free
. This one is rather more serious and reportedly affects not just the humanoid models, but also newer quadrupeds such as the Go2 and B2. The whole exploit is comprehensively documented, so get a fresh cup of whatever you’re drinking before sitting down to read through it. | 11 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8186004",
"author": "ChipMaster",
"timestamp": "2025-10-01T02:49:54",
"content": "Reminds me of the Tom Selleck movie, “Runaway.”…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8186007",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-10-01T03... | 1,760,371,413.482044 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/30/improved-3d-printer-cannibalizes-two-older-printers/ | Improved 3D Printer Cannibalizes Two Older Printers | Bryan Cockfield | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"CoreXY",
"duender",
"ender 3",
"kinematics"
] | In the late 2010s, the Ender 3 printers were arguably the most popular line of 3D printers worldwide, and for good reason. They combined simplicity and reliability in a package that was much less expensive than competitors, giving a much wider range of people access to their first printers. Of course there are much better printers on the market today, leaving many of these printers sitting unused. [Irbis3D] had an idea that with so many of these obsolete, inexpensive printers on the secondhand market,
he could build something better with their parts
.
The printer he eventually pieces together takes parts from two donor Ender printers and creates a printer with a CoreXY design instead of the bedslinger (Cartesian) design of the originals. CoreXY has an advantage over other printer topologies in that the print head moves in X and Y directions, allowing for much faster print times at the expense of increased complexity. There are some challenges to the design that [Irbis3D] had to contend with, such as heating problems with the extruder head that needed some modifications, as well as a resonance problem common with many printer designs which can generally be solved by replacing parts one-by-one until satisfactory prints are achieved.
Of course, not all of the parts for the new printer come from the old Ender printers. The longer belts driving the print head needed to be ordered, as well as a few other miscellaneous bits. But almost everything else is taken from these printers, which can be found fairly cheaply on the secondhand market nowadays. In theory it’s possible to build this version for much less cost than an equivalent printer as a result. If you’re looking for something even more complicated to build,
we’d recommend this delta printer with a built-in tool changer
.
Thanks to [BusterCasey] for the tip! | 12 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185999",
"author": "Ccecil",
"timestamp": "2025-10-01T02:39:13",
"content": "I like this…Couple years back I suggested a similar thing but making opensource hardware designs that used “recipes” that called for other used printers. Saving some ewaste in the process.Still think that... | 1,760,371,413.427218 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/30/hard-hat-becomes-bluetooth-direction-finder/ | Hard Hat Becomes Bluetooth Direction Finder | Lewin Day | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"ble",
"bluetooth",
"ESP32",
"radio"
] | Have you ever wanted to find a Bluetooth device out in the wild while looking like the comic relief character from a science-fiction series? You might like Dendrite,
the direction-finding hat from [SolidStat3].
Dendrite is intended for hunting down Bluetooth devices. It’s capable of direction estimation based on signal strength readings from four ESP32 microcontrollers mounted on an off-the-shelf hard hat. Each ESP32 searches for BLE devices in the immediate area and reports the apparent signal strength to a fifth ESP32, which collates readings from all units. It then runs a simple multilateration algorithm to estimate the direction of the device. This information is then displayed via a ring of addressable LEDs around the perimeter of the hat. White LEDs marking the direction of the detected device. The only problem? You can’t see the LEDs while you’re wearing the hat. You might need a friend to help you… or you can simply take it off to see what it’s doing.
Ultimately, this project is a useful direction-finding hard hat that would also make a perfect prop from an episode of
Inspector Spacetime.
We’ve covered direction finding in other contexts before, too
. Meanwhile, if you’re cooking up your own innovative hard hat (or radio) hacks,
don’t hesitate to let us know! | 10 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185946",
"author": "dremu",
"timestamp": "2025-09-30T21:39:02",
"content": "I like hacks and I like hardhats (is it a ‘hackhat’?) but my overpowering urge is to keep shouting “Six seasons and a movie!”. Or talk about Kickpuncher III: The Final Kickening. Etc.",
"parent_id": nul... | 1,760,371,413.381694 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/30/llm-dialogue-in-animal-crossing-actually-works-very-well/ | LLM Dialogue InAnimal CrossingActually Works Very Well | Donald Papp | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Games",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"animal crossing",
"dialogue",
"LLM",
"mod",
"reverse engineering"
] | In the original
Animal Crossing
from 2001, players are able to interact with a huge cast of quirky characters, all with different interests and personalities. But after you’ve played the game for awhile, the scripted interactions can become a bit monotonous. Seeing an opportunity to improve the experience,
[josh] decided to put a Large Language Model (LLM) in charge of these interactions
. Now when the player chats with other characters in the game, the dialogue is a lot more engaging, relevant, and sometimes just plain funny.
How does one go about hooking a modern LLM into a 24-year-old game built for an entirely offline console? [josh]’s clever approach required a lot of poking about, and did a good job of leveraging some of the game’s built-in features for a seamless result.
In addition to distinct personalities, villagers have a small shared “gossip” memory.
The game runs on a GameCube emulator, and the first thing needed is a way to allow the game and an external process to communicate with each other. To do this, [josh] uses a modding technique called Inter-Process Communication (IPC) via shared memory. This essentially defines a range of otherwise unused memory as a mailbox that both the game state and an external process (like a Python script) can access.
[josh] then nailed down the exact memory locations involved in dialogue. This was a painstaking process that required a lot of memory scanning, but eventually [josh] found where the game stores the active speaker and the active dialogue text when the player speaks to a villager. That wasn’t all, though. The dialogue isn’t just plain ASCII, it contains proprietary control codes that sprinkle things like sounds, colors, and speaker emotes into conversations.
The system therefore watches for dialogue, and when a conversation is detected, the “Writer” LLM — furnished with all necessary details via the shared memory mailbox — is asked to create relevant dialogue for the character in question. A second “Director” LLM takes care of adding colors, facial expressions, and things of that nature via control codes.
[josh] even added a small bit of shared “gossip” memory among all villagers which keeps track of who said what to who, and how they felt about it. This perhaps unsurprisingly results in a lot of villagers grumbling about just how much currency flows directly to Tom Nook, the raccoon proprietor of the local store.
A very clever detail pointed out by [Simon Willison]
is how [josh] deals with the problem of the game expecting dialogue to be immediately available at the given memory location. After all, LLMs don’t work instantly. Turns out [josh]’s code makes clever use of a built-in dialogue control code that creates a short pause. Whenever a dialogue screen opens, a few short pauses ensure that the LLM’s work is done in time.
If
Animal Crossing
isn’t retro enough, or you prefer your LLMs to be a little more excitable,
AI commentary for
Pong
is totally a thing. | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185910",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-09-30T20:21:52",
"content": "Eventually more games may use something like this.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8185922",
"author": "anon",
"timestamp": "2025-09-30T20:5... | 1,760,371,413.536217 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/29/tekasketch-where-etch-a-sketch-meets-graph-theory/ | TekaSketch: Where Etch A Sketch Meets Graph Theory | Heidi Ulrich | [
"Art",
"handhelds hacks",
"News",
"Raspberry Pi",
"Software Hacks",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"drawing",
"etch a sketch",
"mac mini",
"python",
"raspberry pi",
"Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W",
"Raspi"
] | The Etch A Sketch was never supposed to meet a Raspberry Pi, a camera, or a mathematical algorithm, but here we are.
[Tekavou]’s Teka-Cam and TekaSketch
are a two-part hack that transforms real photos into quite stunning, line-drawn Etch A Sketch art. Where turning the knobs only results in wobbly doodles, this machine plots out every curve and contour better than your fingertips ever could.
Essentially, this is a software hack mixed with hardware: an RPi Zero W 2, a camera module, Inkplate 6, and rotary encoders. Snap a picture, and the image is conveyed to a Mac Mini M4 Pro, where Python takes over. It’s stripped to black and white, and the software creates a skeleton of all black areas. It identifies corner bridges, and unleashes a modified
Chinese Postman Algorithm
to stitch everything into one continuous SVG path. That file then drives the encoders, producing a drawing that looks like a human with infinite patience and zero caffeine jitters. Originally, the RPi did all the work, but it was getting too slow so the Mac was brought in.
It’s graph theory turned to art, playful and serious at the same time, and it delivers quite unique pieces. [Tekavou] is planning on improving with video support. A bit of love for his efforts might accellerate his endeavours. Let us know in the comments below! | 6 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185614",
"author": "TravelingInChina?",
"timestamp": "2025-09-30T03:16:13",
"content": "Where does “Chinese Postman” come from? The linked article only mentions “Traveling Salesman”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8185702",
... | 1,760,371,413.243566 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/29/macintosh-system-7-ported-to-x86-with-llm-help/ | Macintosh System 7 Ported To X86 With LLM Help | Lewin Day | [
"Machine Learning",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"ai",
"LLM",
"macintosh",
"port",
"system 7"
] | You can use large language models for all sorts of things these days, from writing terrible college papers to bungling legal cases. Or, you can employ them to more interesting ends, such as porting Macintosh System 7 to the x86 architecture,
like [Kelsi Davis] did.
When Apple created the Macintosh lineup in the 1980s, it based the computer around Motorola’s 68K CPU architecture. These 16-bit/32-bit CPUs were plenty capable for the time, but the platform ultimately didn’t have the same expansive future as Intel’s illustrious x86 architecture that underpinned rival IBM-compatible machines.
[Kelsi Davis] decided to port the Macintosh System 7 OS to run on native x86 hardware, which would be challenging enough with full access to the source code. However, she instead performed this task by analyzing and reverse engineering the System 7 binaries with the aid of Ghidra and a large language model. Soon enough, she had the classic System 7 desktop running on QEMU with a fully-functional Finder and the GUI working as expected. [Kelsi] credits the LLM with helping her achieve this feat in just three days, versus what she would expect to be a multi-year effort if working unassisted.
Files are
on GitHub
for the curious. We love a good port around these parts; we particularly enjoyed these efforts
to recreate Portal on the N64
. If you’re doing your own advanced tinkering with Macintosh software from yesteryear, don’t hesitate to
let us know. | 50 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185550",
"author": "Dave Etchells",
"timestamp": "2025-09-29T20:08:28",
"content": "Holy cr*p this is impressive: Porting a functioning operating system in just 3 days, working only from binaries. 🤯",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment... | 1,760,371,413.335295 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/29/lumafield-shows-why-your-cheap-18650-cells-are-terrible/ | Lumafield Shows Why Your Cheap 18650 Cells Are Terrible | Jenny List | [
"Battery Hacks"
] | [
"18650",
"CT Scan",
"fire",
"lithium ion"
] | Lithium-ion cells deliver very high energy densities compared to many other battery technologies, but they bring with them a danger of fire or explosion if they are misused. We’re mostly aware of the battery conditioning requirements to ensure cells stay in a safe condition, but how much do we know about the construction of the cells as a factor? [Lumafield] is an industrial imaging company, and to demonstrate their expertise,
they’ve subjected a large number of 18650 cells from different brands to a CT scan
.
The construction of an 18650 sees the various layers of the cell rolled up in a spiral inside the metal tube that makes up the cell body. The construction of this “jellyroll” is key to the quality of the cell. [Lumafield’s] conclusions go into detail over the various inconsistencies in this spiral, which can result in cell failure. It’s important that the edges of the spiral be straight and that there is no electrode overhang. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they find that cheap no-name cells are poorly constructed and more likely to fail, but it’s also interesting to note that these low-quality cells also have fewer layers in their spiral.
We hope that none of you see more of the inside of a cell in real life than you have to, as they’re best left alone, but this report certainly sheds some light as to what’s going on inside a cell. Of course, even the best cells
can still be dangerous without protection
. | 38 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185640",
"author": "Timmay",
"timestamp": "2025-09-30T06:03:14",
"content": "Of all the articles I’ve seen on nearly 20 years on Hackaday, I’m gobsmacked that this has zero comments. This is afascinatingstudy, and has real-world implications for nearly every tech object that uses 1... | 1,760,371,413.615276 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/29/ask-hackaday-how-do-you-distro-hop/ | Ask Hackaday: How Do You Distro Hop? | Al Williams | [
"Ask Hackaday",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Linux Hacks",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"Distro hopping",
"kde",
"linux",
"opensuse"
] | If you read “Jenny’s Daily Drivers” or “Linux Fu” here on Hackaday, you know we like Linux. Jenny’s series, especially, always points out things I want to try on different distributions. However, I have a real tendency not to change my distro, especially on my main computer. Yet I know people “distro hop” all the time. My question to you? How do you do it?
The Easy but Often Wrong Answer
Sure, there’s an easy answer. Keep your
/home
directory on a separate disk and just use it with a new boot image. Sounds easy. But the truth is, it isn’t that easy. I suppose if you don’t do much with your system, that might work. But even if you don’t customize things at the root level, you still have problems if you change desktop environments or even versions of desktop environments. Configuration files change over time. Good luck if you want to switch to and from distros that are philosophically different, like
systemd
vs old-school
init
; apparmor vs SELinux. So it isn’t always as simple as just pointing a new distro at your home directory.
One thing I’ve done to try out new things is to use a virtual machine. That’s easy these days. But it isn’t satisfying if your goal is to really switch to a new distro as your daily driver.
The Reason
Not a cuddly logo, but a good distro nonetheless.
The reason this came up is that I generally like KDE and was using Kubuntu for a number of years. They tend to lag a bit on the KDE desktop, so when KDE came out with Neon, I was sold. However, since they were both based on Ubuntu/Debian, there was a mostly working upgrade path to convert a Kubuntu installation to Neon.
Fast forward to today. Neon has been suffering lately. I hear there is one volunteer keeping it running. KDE has decided to shift focus to
a new distro
that does things I’m not crazy about (immutable system; Wayland). So it was time to hop again.
I’d heard that OpenSUSE was good at keeping up with KDE, and the rolling release of Tumbleweed appeals to me. So I made the switch.
The Hard Way
I am in no way suggesting you do this. It was a bad idea, and while it worked, it was a lot of effort. Even so, it only worked because I have way more disk storage than I need: my root file system is way under 3 TB, and I have about 9 TB of RAID as my primary hard drive. Of course, you should be backed up. But if you’ve ever had to restore from a backup, you know that’s no fun. Better to have it
and
not need it.
So what did I do? I used kvm to stand up a virtual machine, and then I installed Tumbleweed on it. I turned off the btrfs features since I didn’t plan to use them. Then I set about matching my Neon desktop. All the KDE settings. All the strange
systemd
services and timers I have set up. The systems I use to run my own dynamic DNS. As much of everything as I could think of.
I got to the point where working in the VM was comfortable. My browsers and all my other tools were ready and configured.
You know I forgot something. I knew too, so I wanted to save things for reference. First, I booted from a live image and made a copy of my entire root file system under
/NEON
. Then I rebooted and created a new virtual machine and booted a “live” ISO file on it.
A Hard Day’s Night
The next step was to copy the snapshot of the
/NEON
directory into the VM. Sure, I could have used LVM snapshots or, if I were still using btrfs, a snapshot from that. But I have plenty of disk space, especially after pruning off some very large directories from the copy.
The key to this, by the way, is using the
nbd
program to mount the VM’s disk image. You do need the
nbd
module loaded, if you have it as a module, and then you export it using
nbd
. From there, you get a device you can mount just like any other. I’d explain it, but you really shouldn’t be taking this as instructions. Still, if you need to do it, [shamil] has a
good, concise explanation.
Of course, the new VM won’t boot. You have to
bind
mount all the running directories (like
/run
and
/proc
) to the right mountpoint and then
chroot
into the mounted file system. Once there, you can rebuild your init image and run
grub
. After that, you should be able to boot into the old Neon system in the new VM.
The Beauty of It…
It has been a while since I’ve installed Linux from a CD, but you still have an ISO file.
So at this point, I had not made any changes to my main OS. I had a copy of it for backup purposes, and I was able to boot into a clone of it using a VM. I could also boot into the target system with a different VM.
The next step was to boot to a live image again and nuke nearly everything on the root file system except for
/NEON
, and the VMs, of course, which were on separate drives.
I thought about running the Tumbleweed installer and then copying files from the VM, but instead I decided to just do it by hand. I copied the files from the new VM over to the real root drive, using
nbd
again. Then I had to do the whole bind/mount/chroot/reinstall steps again.
Did It Boot?
It did, in fact, boot up. There were a few glitches, mostly due to self-inflicted problems. When I restored some large directories and some SSD-based temporary directories, I created some SELinux problems that were fun to track down. I had, of course, forgotten a few things installed deeply, too. But that wasn’t a problem. I could still go grab stuff from
/NEON
or even boot the Neon install up in the VM to compare things.
I am about to the point where I will delete the extra copies of things. I’ve already released the Tumbleweed VM. But it occurs to me: I won’t do this again. That leads to my question for you. If you distro hop, how do you do it? Let us know in the comments. Then again, current thinking is to have a minimal system and then
put everything in its own container anyway
.
Again, I beg you, don’t follow my example. This was way too much work and risk. But I’m also crazy enough to
relocate /usr
. | 36 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185525",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-09-29T17:38:05",
"content": "My home ‘data’ is on a home server. The other machines /home folder is periodically backed up to it. So changing desktops/laptops/SBCs to a new distro would be no big deal — IF (big if) I want to do so. ... | 1,760,371,413.740708 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/29/10-lego-tyre-is-practical-nostalgia/ | 10″ LEGO Tyre Is Practical Nostalgia | Tyler August | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"3d printing",
"lego",
"nostalgia",
"tire",
"TPU"
] | If there’s one thing that has come to define the generations after the baby boom, it’s probably nostalgia. It’s heavily marketed and weaponized by the market: yearning for better, simpler times seems to be a core thread of the consumer economy these days. [Makerneer] combined his xilennial love of LEGO bricks with the flat tires on his log splitter to produce a
10″ TPU tyre will never go flat
, and provide a dopamine release every time he sees it.
The tyre is a custom model to fit his particular rims, but he does provide STEP and F3D files if you’d like to try modifing it for your own purpose — they’re at Step 6 of the Instructable. Props to [Makerneer] for
truly open-sourcing the design
instead of just tossing STL files online. His build log also takes the time to point out the ways he had to modify the LEGO tyre profile to make it amenable to 3D printing: notably chamfering some of the tread pattern to eliminate bridging, which is a bit of a no-no with TPU.
As you can see in the (unfortunately vertical) demo video below, it’s a bit quite a bit squishier than a regular run-flat tyre, but that was part of [Makerneer]’s design goal. He didn’t like how rigid the non-pneumatic tyres he’d tried were, so endevoured to design something himself; the whole LEGO thing was just for fun. If you wanted to replicate this tyre with a bit less skoosh, you need only tune the infill on your print.
While only time will tell how long this LEGO-inspired add-on will continue adding whimsy to [Makerneer]’s log-splitting, we have tests to show it will
outperform any other plastic he might have printed.
This project is probably more practical than a
3D printed bicycle tyre,
which doesn’t even have the side benefit of whimsy. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185505",
"author": "gnramires",
"timestamp": "2025-09-29T15:54:33",
"content": "I have been making a wheel as well (as wheel?) for a groceries cart and have been philosophizing/engineerizing about wheels. I wanted to make a good wheel out of rigid material, so I thought about addin... | 1,760,371,413.65823 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/29/two-decades-of-hackaday-in-words/ | Two Decades Of Hackaday In Words | Jenny List | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Slider",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"computational linguistics",
"hackaday",
"history",
"language",
"trends"
] | I think most of us who make or build things have a thing we are known for making. Where it’s football robots, radios, guitars, cameras, or inflatable textile sculptures, we all have the thing we do. For me that’s over the years been various things but has recently been camera hacking, however there’s another thing I do that’s not so obvious. For the last twenty years,
I’ve been interested in computational language analysis
. There’s so much that a large body of text can reveal without a single piece of AI being involved, and in pursuing that I’ve created for myself a succession of corpus analysis engines. This month I’ve finally been allowed to try one of them with a corpus of Hackaday articles, and while it’s been a significant amount of work getting everything shipshape, I can now analyse our world over the last couple of decades.
The Burning Question You All Want Answered
Battle of the Boards, over the decades.
A corpus engine is not clever in its own right, instead it will simply give you straightforward statistics in return for the queries you give it. But the thing that keeps me coming back for more is that those answers can sometimes surprise you. In short, it’s a machine for telling you things you didn’t know. To start off, it’s time to settle a Hackaday trope of many years’ standing. Do we write too much about Arduino projects? Into the engine goes “arduino”, and for comparison also “raspberry”, for the Raspberry Pi.
What comes out is a potted history of experimenter’s development boards, with the graph showing the launch date and subsequent popularity of each. We’re guessing that the Hackaday Arduino trope has its origins in 2011 when the Italian board peaked, while we see a succession of peaks following the launch of the Pi in 2012. I think we are seeing renewals of interest after the launch of the Pi 3 and Pi 4, respectively. Perhaps the most interesting part of the graph comes on the right as we see both boards tail off after 2020, and if I had to hazard a guess as to why I would cite the rise of the many cheap dev boards from China.
The Perils Of The Corpus Maintainer
The astute among you might wonder why the figures on the graph above are not higher, because surely we have featured more Arduino or Raspberry Pi projects than that. And here we touch on a problem faced by anyone working with data. It comes down to this: are we looking at spotting the trends from the data, or absolute figures? When I built this corpus, I had to make two choices, one over how much I was allowed to stress Hackaday’s infrastructure, and the other in how much computing power and physical storage space I was prepared to give the project on my bench. I lack a computing cloud for my work, instead I have to rely on silicon and spinning rust I own, and to that there’s a finite limit.
Thus in building this corpus I reasoned that the more important words pertaining to each story would be nearer the start, and restricted myself to the title and first paragraph of each Hackaday piece, or about a hundred words. It’s definitely enough for trend analysis, but for obvious reasons if the word you are looking for is way down in the third or fourth paragraph, you’ll be disappointed. Furthermore if this technique angers you, don’t look too closely at how your oscilloscope samples higher frequency waveforms.
World Events Playing Out On Our 3D Printers
We’re not a world news site, but there are times when events intrude upon our world. Perhaps the greatest of these was the COVID pandemic, when for many people the world stopped. Hackaday kept going, but unsurprisingly there was a lot of discussion of the pandemic and the projects which surrounded it.
Do you remember the period in which governments were in a panic about not having enough ventilators? We had quite a few stories on the subject at the time, and they appear in the corpus. Fortunately it was pretty soon understood that home made ventilators would be dangerous so we were right to be cautious covering such projects.
Language Evolving Before Our Very Eyes
Rise Of The Retrocomputers!
When I started on my corpus software projects, I was interested in the relationships between words because I had spent a while working in the search engine business. Later on I became interested in using the same techniques to spot trends in news content which is what has sustained my interest, but there’s another use for these techniques.
In the dictionary business, lexicographers use corpus engines to track developments in language, and we can see that in action in Hackaday too. When did you first hear the term “Retrocomputer”? We’ve all been fooling around with old computers for years now, but in our corpus it first appeared in 2012. Since then it’s had a few ups and downs, but it remains on an upward trajectory. For the graph I combined all the various forms of the word, “retrocomputer”, “retrocomputing”, and so on.
So What’s Under The Hood?
Computers are not clever in themselves, they are merely very good at repetitively doing something you tell them to, for many hours without complaint. In this case, my computer is analysing and indexing a large body of text, and the way I’m doing it was arrived at over quite a few iterations. It’s a product of the hardware I had when i started work on it, an Intel Core laptop which was quite flashy for the mid-2000s, and then later a pair of always-on Raspberry Pi boards with USB hard drives. My problem was that if I tried to use any of the available databases to store my index they would quickly become unusable due to its immense size, so I arrived at a technique using flat files instead.
We Brits only use the word “soccer” when Americans play it. From my UK news corpus, not from Hackaday.
You can run a version of my software yourself,
it can be found in my GitHub repository
. The processing script takes the text and splits it into sentences and words, then stores frequency and collocate data as a huge tree of small JSON files on a hard disk volume, the reasoning being that the filesystem is an extremely fast way to retrieve data categorised by directory and filename.
The version I’ve used only deals in single word phrases, but other versions have extended the directory tree based index to support multi-word phrases. You can also plumb in a part-of-speech tagger if you wish. The result is a fully functional corpus engine
that can run on an original Raspberry Pi 1
, not bad considering that it can mine multi-million-word corpora in an instant. Mine has the task of continually updating a corpus of news data, allowing me to watch events unfold in real time.
Now. Over To You
I have spent a lot of time over the last month getting the Hackaday corpus together and ready for analysis, and then more time gathering the data for and writing this story. I’ve only been able to show you a small amount of what’s in this trove of data, so perhaps there are trends you’d like to see explored. Use the comments below to request, and maybe I can show them in a follow-up. | 23 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185484",
"author": "Aleks Clark",
"timestamp": "2025-09-29T14:46:29",
"content": "Erm not to be that guy but…HaD’s infrastructure will trivially handle a 1-time full scrape, and this isn’t even that much data, it’s weird you had to get permission for that.I think you’d find that a ... | 1,760,371,413.807196 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/29/mini-laptop-needs-custom-kernel/ | Mini Laptop Needs Custom Kernel | Al Williams | [
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"cyberdeck",
"kernel",
"linux",
"subnotebook"
] | These days, you rarely have to build your own Linux kernel. You just take what your distribution ships, and it usually works just fine. However, [Andrei] became enamored with a friend’s cyberdeck and decided that he’d prefer to travel with a very small laptop. The problem is, it didn’t work well with a stock kernel. So, time to
build the kernel again
.
Of course, he tried to simply install Linux. The installer showed a blank screen. You might guess that you need to add ‘nomodeset’ to the kernel options. But the screen was still a bit wacky. [Andrei] likens troubleshooting problems like this to peeling an onion. There are many layers to peel back, and you are probably going to shed some tears.
He did turn to ChatGPT for some help, but found there were many hallucinations, so it was sometimes helpful and sometimes not. What follows is a detective story with many twists and turns.
He finally decided he needed a custom kernel and had to learn the steps. If you haven’t done it, it really isn’t that hard. If you are trying to get “close” to another existing kernel, you can read /proc/config.gz to get a list of how the person who built your kernel set it up (even if that someone was you).
The custom kernel worked. Sort of. The screen finally turned on, but it was rotated 90 degrees. Not too convenient. A few more options paid off. Along the way, he mentions a few common debugging procedures, like divide and conquer or testing kernels on a virtual machine before moving to real hardware.
The culprit turned out to be an errant video module. But… there was still no sound or touchpad. That caused even more detective work that uncovered some confusing documentation. At the end, he has a mostly working machine, although he didn’t have sleep mode, and the machine tends to run hot. He’s ok with that. We often find that we have similar problems with things like orientation sensors, although the situation is improving.
Of course, building the kernel is a far cry from writing new code for it. If you want to get your feet wet, maybe start with an
old version
. You can even find some automation scripts that help you get
straight to debugging
your
code
. | 12 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185471",
"author": "DerAxeman",
"timestamp": "2025-09-29T13:18:04",
"content": "I always build my own kernel. For one I tune the compiler for my processor. Secondly, I build the modules my machine uses into the kernel directly to maximize performance. This leverages huge pages to m... | 1,760,371,414.175292 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/30/2025-hackaday-speakers-round-one-and-spoilers/ | 2025 Hackaday Speakers, Round One! And Spoilers | Elliot Williams | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"News"
] | [
"2025 Hackaday Superconference",
"announcement",
"speakers",
"talks"
] | Supercon is the Ultimate Hardware Conference and you need to be there! Just check out this roster of talks that will be going down. We’ve got something for everyone out there in the Hackday universe, from poking at pins, to making things beautiful, to robots, radios, and FPGAs. And this isn’t even half of the list yet.
We’ve got a great mix of old favorites and new faces this year, and as good as they are, honestly the talks are only half of the fun. The badge hacking, the food, the brainstorming, and just the socializing with the geekiest of the geeky, make it an event you won’t want to miss. If you don’t have tickets yet,
you can still get them here
.
Plus, this year, because Friday night is Halloween, we’ll be hosting a Sci-Fi-themed costume party for those who want to show off their best props or most elaborate spacesuits. And if that
is
the sort of thing that you’re into, you will absolutely want to stay tuned to our Keynote Speaker(s) announcement in a little while. (Spoiler number one.)
Joe FitzPatrick
Probing Pins for Protocol Polyglots
This talk explores stacking multiple protocols, like UART, SPI, and I2C, onto the same GPIO pins by exploiting undefined “don’t care” regions. Learn how to bitbang several devices at once, creating protocol polyglots without extra hardware.
Elli Furedy
Sandbox Systems: Hardware for Emergent Games
From Conway’s Game of Life to cyberpunk bounty hunting in the desert, this talk explores how thoughtful design in tech and hardware can lead to human connection and community. Elli Furedy shares lessons from years of building hardware and running an immersive experience at the event Neotropolis.
Andrew [Cprossu] Lewton
Cracking Open a Classic DOS Game
Take a nostalgic and technical deep dive into The Lawnmower Man, a quirky full-motion video game for DOS CD-ROM. We’ll explore the tools and techniques used to reverse-engineer the game, uncover how it was built, and wrap things up with a live demo on original hardware.
Reid Sox-Harris
Beyond RGB: The Illuminating World of Color & LEDs
RGB lighting is everywhere and allows any project to display millions of unique colors. This talk explores the physiology of the human eye that allows RGB to be so effective, when alternatives are better, and how to choose the right lighting for your project.
Cyril Engmann
What Makes a Robot Feel Alive?
This talk dives into the art and engineering of programming personality into pet robots, crafting behaviors, reactions, and quirks that turns a pile of parts into a companion with presence. Learn design tips, technical insights, and lessons from building expressive bots that blur the line between hardware and character.
Artem Makarov
Hacked in Translation: Reverse Engineering Abandoned IoT Hardware
This talk takes us on a tour of adventures reviving an abandoned IoT “AI” translator, 2025-style. From decoding peculiar protocols to reverse engineering firmware & software, discover how curiosity and persistence can breathe new life into forgotten hardware and tackle obscure technical challenges.
Samy Kamkar
Optical Espionage: Lasers to Keystrokes
We’ll learn how to identify what a target is typing from a distance through a window with an advanced laser microphone capable of converting infrared to vibrations to radio back to sound, and the electrical, optical, radio, and software components needed for cutting-edge eavesdropping.
Zachary Peterson
Cal Poly NerdFlare: Bringing #badgelife to Academia
A small experiment with PCB art and interactive badges became a campus-wide creative movement. Hear how students combined art, technology, and real-world tools to build community, develop skills, and create projects that are as accessible as they are unforgettable.
Javier de la Torre
Off the Grid, On the Net: Exploring Ham Radio Mesh Networks.
This talk dives into using outdoor wireless access points to join a ham radio mesh network (ham net). Learn how services like weather stations, video streams, email, and VOIP are run entirely over the mesh, without needing commercial internet, all within FCC Part 97 rules.
Debra Ansell
LEDs Get Into Formation: Mechanically Interesting PCB Assemblies
This talk discusses a range of projects built from custom LED PCBs combined into two and three dimensional structures. Explores methods of connecting them into creative arrangements, both static and flexible, including the “Bendy SAO” which won a prize at Supercon 2024.
Jeremy Hong
Rad Reverb: Cooking FPGAs with Gamma Rays
This talk presents research on destructive testing of commercial off-the-shelf (CoTS) FPGAs using cobalt-60 and cesium-137 radiation to study failure modes and resilience in high-radiation environments. Learn about a novel in-situ measurement method that allows real-time observation of integrated circuits during exposure, capturing transient faults and degradation without interrupting operation.
Doug Goodwin
Aurora Blue
Earth’s magnetic field is glitching out. Phones fail, satellites drop, auroras flood the skies. This talk dives into Aurora Blue, which imagines this future through post-digital imaging hacks: cyanotype prints exposed by custom light-field instruments that flow like auroras. Deep-blue works built to endure, sky relics you can hold after the cloud crashes.
Workshop News, and another Spoiler
Sadly, we’ve got to announce that the Meshtastic workshop with Kody Kinzie will not be taking place. But Spoiler Number Two is that the badge this year will have all of the capabilities of that project and much, much more. If you’re into LoRA radio, meshes, and handheld devices, you’ll want to watch out for our badge reveal in the upcoming weeks.
Oh, and go
get your tickets now
before it’s too late. Supercon has sold out every year, so you can’t say that we didn’t tell you. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185836",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2025-09-30T17:24:01",
"content": "Wow that’s a lot of speakers!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8185853",
"author": "Aar",
"timestamp": "2025-09-30T18:05:09",
"co... | 1,760,371,414.12549 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/30/a-trail-camera-built-with-raspberry-pi/ | A Trail Camera Built With Raspberry Pi | Lewin Day | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"ai camera",
"camera",
"raspberry pi",
"wildlife",
"wildlife camera"
] | You can get all kinds of great wildlife footage if you trek out into the woods with a camera, but it can be tough to stay awake all night. However, this is a task you can readily automate,
as [Luke] did with his DIY trail camera.
A Raspberry Pi Zero 2W serves as the heart of the build. It’s compact and runs on very little power, but also provides a good amount more processing power than the original Raspberry Pi Zero. It’s kitted out with the Raspberry Pi AI Camera, which uses the Sony IMX500 Intelligent Vision Sensor — providing a great platform for neural networks doing image classification and similar machine learning tasks. A Witty Pi power management module is used both for its real time clock and to schedule start-ups and shutdowns to best manage the power on offer from the batteries. All these components are wrapped up in a 3D printed housing to keep the Pi safe out in the wild.
We’ve seen
some neat projects in this vein before
. | 10 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185871",
"author": "Tim Andersson",
"timestamp": "2025-09-30T18:54:30",
"content": "I get the learning aspect of this project, but using camera for motion detection ofliving thingsis still a fail. Store-bought cameras use a PIR sensor, which is very low power. Image capture is done... | 1,760,371,413.903028 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/30/a-cut-above-surgery-in-space-now-and-in-the-future/ | A Cut Above: Surgery In Space, Now And In The Future | Dan Maloney | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"iss",
"medicine",
"space",
"space flight",
"space medicine",
"surgery",
"weightless",
"zero g"
] | In case you hadn’t noticed, we live in a dangerous world. While our soft, fleshy selves are remarkably good at absorbing kinetic energy and healing the damage that results, there are very definite limits to what we humans can deal with, beyond which we’ll need some help. Car crashes, falls from height, or even penetrating trauma such as gunshot wounds — events such as these will often land you in a trauma center where, if things are desperate enough, you’ll be on the operating table within the so-called “Golden Hour” of maximum survivability, to patch the holes and plug the leaks.
While the Golden Hour may be less of a hard limit than the name implies, it remains true that the sooner someone with a major traumatic injury gets into surgery, the better their chances of survival. Here on planet Earth, most urban locations can support one or more Level 1 trauma centers, putting huge swathes of the population within that 60-minute goal. Even in rural areas, EMS systems with Advanced Life Support crews can stabilize the severely wounded until they can be evacuated to a trauma center by helicopter, putting even more of the population within this protective bubble.
But ironically, residents in the highest-priced neighborhood in human history enjoy no such luxury. Despite only being the equivalent of a quick helicopter ride away, the astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station are pretty much on their own when it comes to any traumatic injuries or medical emergencies that might crop up in orbit. While the ISS crews are well-prepared for that eventuality, as we’ll see, there’s only so much we can do right now, and we have a long way to go before we’re ready to perform surgery in space
Stacking the Deck
In the relatively short time that humans have been going to space, we’ve been remarkably lucky in terms of medical emergencies. Except for the incidents resulting in total loss of ship and crew, on-orbit medical events tend to be few and far between, and when they do occur, they tend to be minor, such as cuts, abrasions, nasal congestion, and “space adaptation syndrome,” a catch-all category of issues related to getting used to weightlessness. On the more serious end of the spectrum are several cases of cardiac arrhythmias, none of which required interventions or resulted in casualties.
There are a few reasons why medical incidents in space have been so few and far between. Chief among these is the stringent selection process for astronauts and cosmonauts, which tends to weed out anyone with underlying problems that might jeopardize a mission. This means that everyone who goes to space tends to be remarkably fit, which reduces the chance of anything untoward happening in orbit. Pre-flight quarantines are also used to keep astronauts from bringing infectious diseases up to orbit, where close quarters could result in rapid transmission between crew members.
Also, once these extremely fit individuals get to orbit, they’re among the most closely medically monitored people in history. Astronauts of the early Space Race programs and into the Shuttle program days were heavily instrumented, with flight surgeons constantly measuring just about every medical parameter engineers could dream up a sensor for. Continuous monitoring of crew vital signs isn’t really done much anymore, unless it’s for a particular on-orbit medical study, but astronauts are still better monitored than the average Joe walking around on the ground, and that offers the potential to pick up on potential problems early and intervene before they become mission-threatening issues.
Strangely enough, all this preoccupation with mitigating medical risks doesn’t appear to include the one precaution you’d think would be a no-brainer: preflight prophylactic appendectomy. While certain terrestrial adventures, such as overwintering in Antarctica, require the removal of the appendix, the operation isn’t mandated for astronauts and cosmonauts, probably due to the logic that anyone with a propensity toward intestinal illness will likely be screened out of the program before it becomes an issue. Also, even routine surgery like an appendectomy carries the risk of surgical complications like abdominal adhesions. This presents the risk of intestinal obstruction, which could be life-threatening if it crops up in orbit.
Mechanisms of Injury
Down here on Earth, we have a lot of room to get into trouble. We’ve got stairs to fall down, rugs to trip over, cars to crash, and through it all, that pesky acceleration vector threatening to impart enough kinetic energy to damage our fragile shelves. In the cozy confines of the ISS or any of the spacecraft used to service it, though, it’s hard to get going fast enough to do any real damage. Also, the lack of acceleration —
most of the time
— eliminates the risk of falling and hitting something, one of the most common mechanisms of injury here on Earth.
Still, space is a dangerous place, and there is an increasing amount of space debris with the potential to cause injuries. Even with ballistic shielding on the ISS hull and micrometeoroid protection built into EVA suits, penetrating trauma is still possible. Blunt-force trauma is a concern as well, particularly during extravehicular activities where astronauts might be required to handle large pieces of equipment; even in free-fall, big things are dangerous to be around. Bones tend to demineralize during extended spaceflights, too, meaning an EVA could result in a fracture. EVAs can also present cardiac risks, with the stress of spacewalking potentially triggering an undetected and potentially serious arrhythmia.
Advanced Diagnostic Ultrasound in Microgravity (ADUM) is currently the only medical imaging modality available on the ISS. Source:
NASA
Another underappreciated risk of spaceflight is urological problems. Fred Haise, lunar module pilot for the doomed Apollo 13 mission, famously developed a severe urinary tract infection due to the stress and dehydration of the crew’s long, cold return to Earth. Even in routine spaceflights, maintaining adequate hydration is difficult; coupled with excessive urination caused by the redistribution of fluids and increased excretion of calcium secondary to bone demineralization, kidney stones are a real risk.
Kidney stones aren’t just a potential problem; they have happened. A cosmonaut, reportedly Anatoly Solovyev, developed symptomatic kidney stones during a
Mir
mission in the 1990s. Luckily, he was able to continue the mission with just fluids and pain medications, but kidney stones can be excruciatingly painful and completely debilitating, and should a stone cause an obstruction and urinary retention, it could require surgery to resolve.
The Vertical Ambulance Ride
Given all these potential medical risks, is the ISS equipped for surgical interventions? In a word: no. While ISS crew members undergo extensive medical training, and the station’s medical kit is well-stocked, no allowance has been made for even the simplest of surgical procedures in orbit. The reasoning is simple: with at least one Soyuz or Dragon capsule berthed at the station at all times and a small, low-risk population aboard, the safest approach to a major medical issue is to evacuate the patient back to Earth.
That’s easier said than done, of course. Launching a Soyuz or Crew Dragon from the ISS takes a minimum of three to six hours, and potentially longer if a severely injured astronaut cannot easily don the required pressure suit. Recovery time once the capsule lands could be prolonged for an unplanned lifeboat return; adding in transport time to a medical facility, it could be six hours or more before advanced treatment can begin.
To make sure the astronaut survives what amounts to a protracted and very expensive ambulance ride, the crew will attempt to stabilize the patient as best as possible. The designated crew medical officer (CMO) has training in starting IVs, performing endotracheal intubation, and even thoracocentesis, or the placement of a chest tube. On top of the medications available in the station med kit and with help from flight surgeons on the ground, the crew should be able to stabilize the patient well enough for the ride home.
Practice Makes Perfect
Obviously, though, the medevac strategy only works if the accident occurs close to Earth. As we push crewed missions deeper into space, evacuation will likely be off the table, and even with a crew carefully curated for extreme fitness, eventually the law of averages will catch up to us, and it will become necessary to perform surgery in space. And even though that first space surgery will likely be performed under emergent conditions, probably by an untrained crew, that doesn’t mean future space surgeons will be flying completely blind.
Back in 2016, a multidisciplinary group in Canada undertook a
unique comparative study of simulated surgery under weightless conditions
. Using a Dassault Falcon 20 Research Aircraft — essentially Canada’s version of NASA’s famous “Vomit Comet” — a team of ten surgeons took turns performing a common trauma procedure: surgical hemorrhage control of an exsanguinating liver laceration. Such an injury could easily occur in space, either through blunt-force or penetrating trauma, especially on a mission that would include any sort of construction tasks.
The goal of the trial was to compare simulated blood loss between surgery performed in zero-g conditions and the same operation performed on the ground. A surgical simulator called a “Cut Suit,” which looks and acts like a human torso, was secured to a makeshift surgical table in the cramped confines of the Falcon — a good simulation of what will likely be the cramped quarters of any future interplanetary spacecraft. The surgeon and an assistant were secured in a kneeling position in front of the simulator using bungee cords, along with a technician charged with maintaining a simulated blood pressure of 80 mm Hg in the Cut Suit.
For the zero-g surgery, the Falcon flew parabolic paths that resulted in 20-second bursts of weightlessness. All airborne surgical tasks were performed only during weightlessness; for the 1-
g
operation, which was performed with the same aircraft parked in a hangar, the surgeons were limited to 20-second work windows at the same cadence as the zero-
g
surgery. The surgeries were extensively documented with video cameras for post-surgical review and corroboration with simulated blood flow measurements during the procedures.
The results were surprisingly good. All ten surgeries were completed successfully, although two surgeons had to tap out of the final closing task to keep from vomiting into the surgical field. Although all surgeons reported that the zero-
g
surgery was subjectively harder, objective results, such as blood loss and time needed to complete each surgical task, were all at least slightly better at zero-
g
than 1-
g
. It needs to be stressed that even for simulations, these were simplified surgeries, perhaps overly so. There was no attempt at infection control; no draping of the patient or disinfection of the field, no gowning or scrubbing, and no aseptic procedure while handling of instruments. Also, there was no simulated anesthesia, a critical step in the procedure. But still, it suggests that the basic mechanics of one kind of surgery could be manageable under deep-space conditions.
Simulating space surgery aboard NASA’s “Vomit Comet.” This study from the University of Kentucky Louisville aims to develop tools and techniques to make space surgery possible. Source:
Seeker
Aside from testing more realistic surgical procedures under zero-
g
, more testing will be required to see what weightless post-op and recovery look like. The operation selected for the trial was somewhat incomplete because packing a liver wound isn’t really an endpoint in itself, but more of a stop along the way to recovery. Packing is just what it sounds like — absorbent material packed around the wound to staunch the flow of blood and to provide some direct pressure to allow blood to clot so the wound can heal naturally. The packing material will have to be removed eventually, and while it’s possible to remove it via surgical drains placed during the packing operation, it’s more likely that another open-field or at least a laparoscopic operation will be needed to take the packing material out and tidy up any wounds that haven’t healed by themselves.
The placement of surgical drains also brings up another problem of zero-
g
surgery. In terrestrial surgery, drains are generally placed in locations where blood and fluids are expected to pool. For the liver packing example, drains would generally be placed posterior to the liver, since the patient would be lying in bed during recovery and the blood would tend to pool at the back of the peritoneal cavity. In space, though, how those fluids would be removed is an open question. Exploring that question might be difficult; since recovery takes days or even weeks, it would be hard to simulate in 20-second bursts. Artificial gravity might help with wound drainage, but the effects of the Coriolis force on the healing process would have to be explored, too.
Given that we’ve been doing surgery here on earth for thousands of years, it’s surprising to have question marks for doing exactly the same things in microgravity. But for surgery, space still remains the final frontier. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185859",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2025-09-30T18:27:13",
"content": "“A Cut Above”.I see what you did there.And I like it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8185912",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-09-30... | 1,760,371,413.856964 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/30/ask-hackaday-whats-the-top-programming-language-of-2025/ | Ask Hackaday: What’s The Top Programming Language Of 2025 | Al Williams | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"programming languages",
"top programming langauges"
] | We did an informal poll around the Hackaday bunker and decided that, for most of us, our favorite programming language is solder. However, [Stephen Cass] over at IEEE Spectrum released their annual post on
The Top Programming Languages
. We thought it would be interesting to ask you what you think is the “top” language these days and why.
The IEEE has done this since 2013, but even they admit there are some issues with how you measure such an abstract idea. For one thing, what does “top” mean anyway? They provide three rankings. The first is the “Spectrum” ranking, which draws data from various public sources, including Google search, Stack Exchange, and GitHub.
The post argues that as AI coding “help” becomes more ubiquitous, you will care less and less about what language you use. This is analogous to how most programmers today don’t really care about the machine language instruction set. They write high-level language code, and the rest is a detail beneath their notice. They also argue that this will make it harder to get new languages in the pipeline. In the old days, a single book on a language could set it on fire. Now, there will need to be a substantial amount of training data for the AI to ingest. Even now, there have been observations that AI writes worse code for lesser-used languages.
The other two views are by their trend and by the number of jobs. No matter how you slice it, if you want to learn something, it looks like it should be Python. Of course, some of this depends on how you define programmer, too. Embedded programmers don’t use PHP or Perl, as a rule. Business programmers are unlikely to know Verilog.
A few surprises: Visual Basic is still holding its own in the job market. Verilog outweighs VHDL, but VHDL still has more jobs than LabVIEW. Who would guess? There are still pockets of
Ada
. Meanwhile,
Fortran
and Arduino are about equally ranked, as far as jobs go (though we would argue that Arduino is really C++).
So you tell us. Do you agree with the rankings? Do you think hackers would rank languages differently? Will AI reduce us to describing algorithms instead of writing them? We aren’t holding our breath, but who knows what tomorrow brings? Discuss in the comments. | 51 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185706",
"author": "TheDarkTiger",
"timestamp": "2025-09-30T11:14:21",
"content": "There is no “best language”, there is languages more fitted for some usecase (and there is bad language too).My take is simple, learn a powerful language (C, C++, or the modern contendents), and a sc... | 1,760,371,413.997178 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/30/driving-a-laser-at-200-volts-for-nanoseconds/ | Driving A Laser At 200 Volts For Nanoseconds | Aaron Beckendorf | [
"High Voltage",
"Laser Hacks"
] | [
"avalanche breakdown",
"laser diode",
"laser driver",
"pulse laser"
] | If there’s one lesson to be learned from
[Aled Cuda]’s pulsed laser driver
, it’s that you can treat the current limits on electronic components as a suggestion if the current duration is measured in nanoseconds.
The components in question are a laser diode and an NPN transistor, the latter of which operates in avalanche mode to drive nanosecond-range pulses of high current through the former. A buck-boost converter brings a 12 volt power supply up to 200 volts, which then passes through a diode and into the avalanche transistor, which is triggered by an external pulse generator. On the other side of the transistor is a pulse-shaping network of resistors and capacitors, the laser diode, and a parallel array of low-value resistors, which provide a current monitor by measuring the voltage across them. There is an optoisolator to protect the pulse generator from the 200 volt lines on the circuit board, but for simplicity’s sake it was omitted from this iteration; there is some slight irony in designing your own laser driver for the sake of the budget, then controlling it with “a pulse generator we don’t mind blowing up.” We can only assume that [Aled] was confident in his work.
The video below details the assembly of the circuit board, which features some interesting details, such as the use of a transparent solder mask which makes the circuit layout clear while still helping to align components during reflow. The circuit did eventually drive the diode without destroying anything, even though the pulses were probably 30 to 40 watts. A pulse frequency of 360 hertz gave a nice visual beating effect due to small mismatches between the pulse frequency of the driver and the frame rate of the camera.
This isn’t the first laser driver to use
avalanche breakdown
for
short, high-power pulses
, but it’s always good to see new implementations. If you’re interested in further high-speed electronics, we’ve covered them
in more detail before
. | 26 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185672",
"author": "Me",
"timestamp": "2025-09-30T08:17:47",
"content": "Ooh, an eternal pulse generator, fancy!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8185676",
"author": "Steve",
"timestamp": "2025-09-30T08:30:27",
"cont... | 1,760,371,414.248136 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/29/youtube-over-dial-up/ | YouTube… Over Dial Up | Fenix Guthrie | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"dialup",
"early internet",
"modem"
] | In the days of yore, computers would scream strange sounds as they spoke with each other over phone lines. Of course, this is dial up, the predecessor to modern internet technology, offering laughable speeds compared to modern connections. But what if dial up had more to offer? Perhaps it could even stream a YouTube video. That’s what the folks over at
The Serial Port
set out to find out
.
The key to YouTube over dial up is a little known part of the protocol added right around the time broadband was taking off called multilink PPP. This protocol allows for multiple modems connected to a PC in parallel for faster connections. With no theoretical limit in sight, and YouTube’s lowest quality requiring a mere 175 Kbps, the goal was clear: find if there is a limit to multilink PPP and watch YouTube over dialup in the process.
Setting Up the Server Side Connection
For the ISP setup, a Cisco IAD VoIP gateway with a T1 connection to a
3Com
Total Control
modem was configured for this setup. On the client side, an
IBM Net Vista A21I with Windows ME was chosen for its period correct nature. First tests with two modems proved promising, but Windows ME dials only one modem at a time, making the connection process somewhat slow.
But for faster speeds, more ports are needed, so an Equinox com port adapter was added to the machine. However, drivers for Windows ME were unavailable, so a Windows 2000 computer was used instead. Unfortunately, this still was an unusable setup as no browser capable of running YouTube could be installed on Windows 2000. Therefore, the final client side computer was an IBM Think Center A50 from 2004 with Windows XP.
But a single Equinox card was still not enough, so a second eight port com card was installed. However, the com ports showed up in windows numbered three through ten on both cards with the driver unable to change the addresses on the second card. Therefore, a four port Digi card was used instead, giving a total of thirteen com ports including the one on the motherboard.
Testing with a mere four modems showed that Windows XP had far better multilink support, with all the modems creating a cacophony of sound dialing simultaneously. Unfortunately, this test with four modems failed due to numerous issues ranging from dial tones to hardware failures. As it turned out the DIP switches on the bottom of the modems needed to be set identically. After a few reterminating cables, three of the four modems worked.
The next set was eight modems. Despite persistent connection issues, five modems got connected in this next test with just over 200 kbps, 2000 era broadband speeds. But a neat feature of multilink is the ability to selectively re-dial, so by re-trying the connection of the three unconnected modems, all eight could work in parallel, reaching over 300 kbps.
But still, this is not enough. So after adding more phone lines and scrounging up some more modems, an additional four modems got added to the computer. With twelve modems connected, a whopping 668.8 kbps was achieved over dial up, well in excess of what’s needed for YouTube video playback, and even beating out broadband of the era. Despite this logical extreme, there is still no theoretical limit in sight, so make sure to stay tuned for the next dial up speed record attempt!
If you too enjoy the sounds of computers screaming for their internet connection,
make sure to check out this dialup over Discord hack next! | 25 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185660",
"author": "Stephen",
"timestamp": "2025-09-30T07:49:35",
"content": "Absolute lunacy. And I mean that in a good way. Well done!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8185691",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2... | 1,760,371,414.434817 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/29/creating-python-guis-with-gimp/ | Creating Python GUIs With GIMP | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks",
"News"
] | [
"gimp",
"gui",
"ms paint",
"python"
] | GUI design can be a tedious job, requiring the use of specialist design tools and finding a suitable library that fits your use case. If you’re looking for a lightweight solution, though, you might consider
just using a simple image editor with a nifty Python library that [Manish Kathuria] whipped up.
[Manish’s] intention was to create a better-looking user interface solution for Python apps that was also accessible. He’d previously considered other Python GUI options to be unimpressive, requiring a lot of code and delivering undesirable results. His solution enables the use of just about any graphic you can think of as a UI object, creating all kinds of visually-appealing possibilities. He also was eager to make sure his solution would work with irregular-shaped buttons, sliders, and other controls—a limitation popular libraries like Tkinter never quite got around.
The system simply works by using layered image files to create interactive interfaces, with a minimum of code required to define the parameters and performance of the interface. You’re not strictly limited to using the GIMP image editor, either; some of the examples
use MS Paint instead
. Files are
on Github
for those eager to try the library for themselves.
We’ve featured some neat GUI tools before, too,
like this library for embedded environments.
Video after the break. | 30 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185622",
"author": "FeRDNYC",
"timestamp": "2025-09-30T04:16:26",
"content": "“a better-looking user interface solution for Python apps that was also accessible.”I assume that was meant in the sense of “accessible to vibe coders who think learning a programming language sounds, lik... | 1,760,371,414.321589 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/29/infinityterminal-brings-infinite-horizontal-scrolling/ | InfinityTerminal Brings Infinite Horizontal Scrolling | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"color coded",
"horizontal scroll",
"infinite scroll",
"infinity terminal",
"productivity",
"ssh",
"terminal",
"workflow"
] | The creator of infinite vertical scrolling in social media, [Aza Raskin], infamously regrets his creation that has helped to waste a tremendous amount of human attention and time on the Internet. But that’s
vertical
scrolling. [bujna94] has created
infinityTerminal, a program with infinite scrolling
, but in the horizontal direction instead. This tool has had the opposite effect to go along with its opposite orientation: increased productivity and improved workflow.
The impetus for infinityTerminal is [bujna94]’s need for many simultaneous SSH sessions, and the fact that no other terminal program can support an indefinite number of visible terminal windows. This application starts with four terminal windows in a 2×2 grid, and allows the user to open more terminals, two at a time, to form a 2xN grid. As many terminals as needed will open in pairs in the horizontal direction with smooth, trackpad-compatible scrolling and automatic color-coded backgrounds for servers accessed by SSH.
For anyone with a similar dislike of tabs like [bujna94], this might be worth trying out. It’s built with Electron, xterm.js, and node-pty.
There are a few more details about the project
on a Reddit post
. [Bujna94] also made it completely open source and freely available
with the files on a GitHub page
, and welcomes anyone to try out his creation that wants to. For more terminal magic,
we’d also recommend checking out Notcurses
, a terminal application capable enough to output SNES-level detail natively. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185436",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2025-09-29T08:50:20",
"content": "For anyone with a similar dislike of tabsAt last! Tabs are an awful concept – they prevent side-by-side comparisons and they hide things you know you had open somewhere.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1... | 1,760,371,414.479802 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/28/wall-es-forgotten-sibling-rebuilt/ | WALL-E’s Forgotten Sibling Rebuilt | Al Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"BURN-E",
"robot",
"servo",
"wall-e"
] | Do you remember the movie WALL-E? Apparently, [Leviathan engineering] did, and he wasn’t as struck by the title character, or Eva, or even the Captain. He was captivated by
BURN-E
. His working model shows up in the video below.
We’ll be honest.
BURN-E
didn’t ring a bell for us, though we remember the movie. He grabbed a 3D design for the robot on the Internet and planned out holes for some servos and other hardware.
That was the idea, anyway. Turns out he didn’t quite leave enough clearance for the motors, so a little hand surgery was in order. The painting was, by his own admission, suboptimal (we would point him to oil paint markers, which are amazing).
The next step was to get the servos actually working, along with the small LCD screen. Space in the body is tight, so it took a few tries to get everything wired up. We didn’t see any code, but it should be pretty simple to draw the eyes and move the servos as you like.
We can’t remember seeing another BURN-E build. But we’ve seen a number of
WALL-Es
. Some have even
been useful
. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185428",
"author": "Peter_s",
"timestamp": "2025-09-29T08:16:06",
"content": "Hmm. Surprise, surprise.Using Tinkercad in a project like this raises questions.I’m familar with the many limitations Tinkercad has.At least the creater could or should had improved i.e. the model of the ... | 1,760,371,414.364575 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/28/playing-doom-in-discord-with-a-special-image-url/ | PlayingDOOMIn Discord With A Special Image URL | Maya Posch | [
"Games"
] | [
"Discord",
"does it run doom",
"doom"
] | Can you play DOOM in Discord? At first glance, that may seem rather nonsensical, as Discord is a proprietary chat service and neither a hardware device nor something else that may seem like an obvious target for being (ab)used for demon-shooting points. That is, until you look at Discord’s content embedding feature. This is where [PortalRunner]’s Doomcord hack comes into play, allowing you to
play the entire game in a Discord client
by submitting text messages after embedding a very special image URL.
Rather than this embedding being done in the client as done with e.g., IRC clients, the Discord backend handles the content fetching, caching, and handing off to clients. This system can easily be used with an animated GIF of gameplay, but having it be seen as a GIF file required adding
.gif
to the end of the URL to trick Discord’s backend into not simply turning it into a static PNG. After this, Discord’s throttling of message speed turned out to kill the concept of real-time gameplay, along with the server load.
Plan C thus morphed into using Chocolate Doom headless, rendering gameplay into cached video files by using the demo gameplay feature in DOOM. The
Doomcord server template
project provides a server if you want to give it a whirl yourself. Since this uses recorded gameplay, the switch was made from GIF to the WEBP format to save space, along with a cache expiry system. Just level 1 with all possible input sequences takes up 12 TB of disk space. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185400",
"author": "elwing",
"timestamp": "2025-09-29T04:52:00",
"content": "12 TB is not the full level 1 with all commands, but rather, just for all possible combination of ten steps…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8186574",... | 1,760,371,414.536885 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/28/hackaday-links-september-28-2025/ | Hackaday Links: September 28, 2025 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"1984",
"Apple 1",
"arcade",
"auction",
"brick",
"commingling",
"crime",
"defender",
"drone",
"dymo",
"dystopia",
"gpu",
"hackaday links",
"pots",
"repair",
"retail",
"shoplifting",
"T carrier",
"T1",
"telco",
"trunk",
"uav"
] | In today’s “News from the Dystopia” segment, we have
a story about fighting retail theft with drones
. It centers on Flock Safety, a company that provides surveillance technologies, including UAVs, license plate readers, and gunshot location systems, to law enforcement agencies. Their flagship Aerodome product is a rooftop-mounted dock for a UAV that gets dispatched to a call for service and acts as an eye-in-the-sky until units can arrive on scene. Neat idea and all, and while we can see the utility of such a system in a first responder situation, the company is starting to market a similar system to retailers and other private sector industries as a way to contain costs. The retail use case, which the story stresses has not been deployed yet, would be to launch a drone upon a store’s Asset Protection team noticing someone shoplifting. Flock would then remotely pilot the drone, following the alleged thief back to their lair or hideout and coordinating with law enforcement, who then sweep in to make an arrest.
Police using aerial assets to fight crime is nothing new; California has
an entire entertainment industry
focused on live-streaming video from police chases, after all. What’s new here is that these drones lower the bar for getting aerial support into the mix. At a $1,000 per hour or more to operate, it’s hard to justify sending a helicopter to chase down a shoplifter. Another objection is that these drones would operate entirely for the benefit of private entities. One can certainly make a case for a public interest in reducing retail theft, since prices tend to increase for everyone when inventory leaves the store without compensation. But we don’t know if we really like the idea of being tailed home by a drone just because a minimally trained employee on the Asset Protection team of BigBoxCo is convinced a crime occurred. It’s easy enough to confuse one person for another or to misidentify a vehicle, especially on the potato-cams retailers seem to love using for their security systems. We also really don’t like one of the other markets Flock is targeting:
residential HOAs
. The idea of neighborhoods being patrolled by drones and surveilled by license plate cameras is a bridge too far, at least to our way of thinking.
Are you old enough to remember when having access to a T1 line was a true mark of geek cachet? We sure are, and in a time when the plebes were stuck with 9,600-baud dial-up over their POTS lines, working on a T1 line was a dream come true. Such was the allure that we can even recall apartment complexes in the tech neighborhoods outside of Boston listing T1 lines among their many amenities. It was pretty smart marketing, all things considered, especially compared to the pool you could only use three months a year. But according to
a new essay
by J. B. Crawford over at “Computers Are Bad”, T1 lines were actually pretty crappy, even in the late 90s and early 2000s. The article isn’t just dunking on T1, of course, but rather a detailed look at the whole T-carrier system, which can trace its roots back to the 1920s with Bell’s frequency-division multiplexing trunking systems. T1 was an outgrowth of those trunking systems, intended to link central offices but evolving to service customers on the local loop. Fascinating stuff, as always, especially the bit about replacing the loading coils that were used every 6,600′ along trunk lines to compensate for capacitance with repeaters.
We’ve heard of bricking a GPU, but
ordering a GPU and getting a brick instead
is something new. A Redditor who ordered an RTX 5080 from Amazon was surprised to find a plain old brick in the package instead. To be fair, whoever swiped the card was kind enough to put the brick in the original antistatic bag; one can’t be too careful, after all. The comments on the Reddit post have a good selection of puns — gigabricks, lol — and good fun was had by all, except perhaps for the unfortunate brickee. The article points out that this might not be a supply chain issue, such as
the recent swap of a GPU for a backpack
, which, given the intact authentication seals, was likely done at the factory. In this case, it seems like someone returned the GPU after swapping it out for the brick, assuming (correctly, it would seem) that Amazon wouldn’t check the contents of the returned package beyond perhaps weighing it. How the returned inventory made it back into circulation is a bit of a mystery; we thought returned items were
bundled together on pallets
and sold off at auction.
Speaking of auctions, someone just spent almost half a million bucks on
one of the nine estimated remaining wooden-cased Apple I computers
. It’s a lovely machine, to be sure, with its ByteShop-style wooden case intact and in excellent shape. The machine is still working, too, which is a nice plus, but $475,000? Even with a Dymo embossed label in Avocado Green — or is that Harvest Gold? — that seems a bit steep. There’s apparently some backstory to the machine that lends to its provenance, including former ownership by the first female graduate of Stanford Law School, June Blodgett Moore. This makes it the “Moore Apple-1” in the registry (!) for these machines, only 50 of which were ever made. One wonders if the registry makes allowance for basic maintenance of vintage electronics like these machines; does routine recapping affect their value?
And finally, continuing with the vintage theme, we’ve been following the adventures of [Buy It Fix It] over on YouTube as he attempts to
revive a Williams
Defender
arcade machine from the 1980s
. We remember this game well, having fed far too many quarters into the one at the Crazy 8s Pool and Arcade back in the day. This machine is in remarkably good shape for being over 40 years old, but it still needed some TLC to get it running again. The video documents a series of cascading failures and maddening intermittent faults, requiring nearly every tool in his kit to figure out. At the end of
the second video
, [Buy It] reckons he put 60 hours into the repair, a noble effort with fantastic results. Enjoy! | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185345",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-09-28T23:39:48",
"content": "The other problem with the drone idea is simply no kind of traffic control, and air saturation.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8185366",
... | 1,760,371,414.720001 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/28/decorate-your-neck-with-the-first-z80-badge/ | Decorate Your Neck With The First Z80 Badge | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"badgelife",
"RC2014",
"z80"
] | Over the years, we’ve brought you many stories of the creative artwork behind electronic event badges, but today we may have a first for you. [Spencer] thinks
nobody before him has made a badge powered by a Z80
, and we believe he may be right. He’s the originator of the RC2014 Z80-based retrocomputer, and the badge in question comes from the recent RC2014 Assembly.
Fulfilling the function of something you can write your name on is a PCB shaped like an RC2014 module, with LEDs on all the signal lines. It could almost function as a crude logic analyser for the system, were the clock speed not far too high to see anything. To fix this, [Spencer]’s badge packs a single-board RC2014 Micro with a specially slow clock, and Z80 code to step through all memory addresses, resulting in a fine set of blinkenlights.
Thus was created the first Z80-based event badge, and we’re wondering whether or not it will be the last. If you’re curious what this RC2014 thing is about,
we reviewed the RC2014 Micro
when it came out. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185314",
"author": "targetdrone",
"timestamp": "2025-09-28T21:22:57",
"content": "Well now that’s just starting something. Next will be the 6502 crowd, then the 8051s, then the 8080s, and someone will eventually find a supplier of 4004s.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,371,414.760529 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/28/a-walk-down-pc-video-card-memory-lane/ | A Walk Down PC Video Card Memory Lane | Al Williams | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"AGP",
"isa",
"pci",
"Tseng",
"vesa",
"vga",
"video card"
] | These days, video cards are virtually supercomputers. When they aren’t driving your screen, they are decoding video, crunching physics models, or processing large-language model algorithms. But it wasn’t always like that. The old video cards were downright simple. Once PCs gained more sophisticated buses, video cards got a little better. But hardware acceleration on an old-fashioned VGA card would be unworthy of the cheapest burner phone at the big box store. Not to mention, the card is probably twice the size of the phone. [Bits and Bolts] has a look at several old cards, including a PCI version of the
Tseng ET4000
, state-of-the-art of the late 1990s.
You might think that’s a misprint. Most of the older Tseng boards were ISA, but apparently, there were some with the PCI bus or the older VESA local bus. Acceleration here typically meant dedicated hardware for handling BitBlt and, perhaps, a hardware cursor.
It is fun watching him test these old cards and work on them under the microscope, too. Since the PCI bus was new when this board was introduced, it apparently had some bugs that made it incompatible with certain motherboards.
We recall being blown away by the color graphics these boards provided when they were new. Now, of course, you wouldn’t see graphics like this even on a cheap video game. Still, fun to take a walk down memory lane with these old boards.
[Bits and Bolts] definitely
has a hobby
. We love that these were high-tech in their day, but now designing a VGA card is well within reach for anyone
adept at using FPGAs
. | 30 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185263",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-09-28T18:23:46",
"content": "What hardware acceleration? Isn’t an “old-fashioned VGA card” basically just a double ported ram and a DAC? A bit of control logic to push bytes into the ram, and that’s it?",
"parent_id": null,
"dep... | 1,760,371,414.604735 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/28/fully-local-ai-agent-runs-on-raspberry-pi-with-a-little-patience/ | Fully-Local AI Agent Runs On Raspberry Pi, With A Little Patience | Donald Papp | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"AI agent",
"LLM",
"Max Headroom",
"raspberry pi"
] | [Simone]’s AI assistant, dubbed
Max Headbox
, is a wakeword-triggered local AI agent capable of following instructions and doing simple tasks. It’s an experiment in many ways, but also a great demonstration not only of what is possible with the kinds of open tools and hardware available to a modern hobbyist, but also a reminder of just how far some of these software tools have come in only a few short years.
Max Headbox
is not just a local large language model (LLM) running on Pi hardware; the model is able to make tool calls in a loop, chaining them together to complete tasks. This means the system can break down a spoken instruction (for example, “find the weather report for today and email it to me”) into a series of steps to complete, utilizing software tools as needed throughout the process until the task is finished.
Watch
Max
in action in
the video
(also embedded just below).
Max
is a little slow, but not unusably so. As far as proofs of concept go, it demonstrates that a foundation for such systems is perfectly feasible on budget hardware running free, locally installed software. Check out the
GitHub repository
.
The name is, of course, a play on
Max Headroom
, the purportedly computer-generated TV personality of the ’80s who was actually an actor in a mask, just like the person behind what was probably
the most famous broadcast TV hack of all time
(while wearing a Max Headroom mask).
Thanks to [JasonK] for the tip! | 25 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185203",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-09-28T14:29:07",
"content": "I love it. The speed would make it unusable for me but its still a great demoI have made an alexa like totally local persona on my PC. It runs a speech to text model, a 7B LLM and a text to speech model... | 1,760,371,414.665633 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/27/whither-the-chip-shortage/ | Whither The Chip Shortage? | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Parts",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"chip shortage",
"how quickly we forget",
"newsletter",
"parts"
] | Do you remember the
global chip shortage
? Somehow it seems so long ago, but it’s not even really been three years yet. Somehow, I had entirely forgotten about it, until two random mentions about it popped up in short succession, and brought it all flooding back like a repressed bad dream.
Playing the role of the ghost-of-chip-shortage-past was a module for a pair of FPV goggles. There are three versions of the firmware available for download at the manufacturer’s website, and I had to figure out which I needed. I knew it wasn’t V1, because that was the buggy receiver PCB that I had just ordered the replacement for. So it was V2 or V3, but which?
Digging into it, V2 was the version that fixed the bug, and V3 was the redesign around a different microcontroller chip, because they couldn’t get the V2 one during the chip shortage.
I saw visions of desperate hackers learning new toolchains, searching for alternative parts, finding that they
could
get that one chip, but that there were only 20 of them left and they were selling for $30 instead of $1.30. I know a lot of you out there were designing through these tough couple years, and you’ve all probably got war stories.
And yet here we are, definitively post-chip-shortage. How can you be sure?
A $30 vape pen
includes a processor that we would have killed for just three years ago. The vape includes a touchscreen, just because. And it even has a Bluetooth LE chip
that it’s not even using
. My guess is that the hardware designers just put it in there hoping that the firmware team would get around to using it for something.
This vape has 16 MB of external SPI Flash! During the chip shortage, we couldn’t even get 4 MB SPI flash.
It’s nice to be on the other side of the chip shortage. Just order whatever parts you want and you get them, but don’t take for granted how luxurious that feels. Breathe easy, and design confidently. You can finally use that last genuine STM32F103 blue pill board without fear of it being the last one on earth.
(Featured image is
not
an actual photo of the author, although he does sometimes have that energy.)
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
! | 40 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8184912",
"author": "Then",
"timestamp": "2025-09-27T14:09:44",
"content": "I remember the shortage, because today i found the reason, 25+ raspi’s in a box at my new work, so thats where the world wide stock went!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,371,414.835212 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/27/bringing-bluetooth-to-the-zune/ | Bringing Bluetooth To The Zune | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"bluetooth",
"controller",
"ESP32",
"hackerspace",
"ir",
"music",
"speaker",
"zune"
] | The Zune might have joined the portable media player game too late to ever really be competition for the iPod, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t pick up some devoted fans along the way. Some of them are still breathing new life into the device, such as [The Director of Legal Evil Emeritus] at the Louisville Hackerspace,
with this project that gives it Bluetooth capability
.
As far as media players go, there’s still some solid reasons to rock a Zune. Compared to other devices of the era, it offers a better DAC, an FM tuner, and no iTunes reliance. The goal of this project was to bring a bit of modern functionality without having to do any modification of the Zune itself. As the player supported docks with IR remotes, this build involves using an ESP32 to listen to the Bluetooth signal coming from the speakers, interpret any button presses, and forward them along to the Zune’s dock.
There is a dedicated scene for these old music players, but this build is unique for not needing to crack open the case and splice in a Bluetooth module. Even then, those typically don’t have the ability to interact with things like this speaker with its integrated control buttons.
We don’t often seen Zune hacks come our way — the last time Microsoft’s player graced these pages was in 2010,
when the Open Zune Development Kit was released
.
Thanks to [JAC_101] for the tip! | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8184996",
"author": "ShouldaCouldaHave",
"timestamp": "2025-09-27T18:15:26",
"content": "Yeah, Microsoft really screwed up on this one. They quit making it before they added a Bluetooth to the unit. BIG MISTAKE….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,371,414.885755 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/27/an-led-sphere-for-your-desk/ | An LED Sphere For Your Desk | Lewin Day | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"ESP8266",
"led",
"sphere"
] | The Las Vegas Sphere is great and all, but few of us can afford the expense to travel to out there to see it on the regular. If you’re looking for similar vibes you can access at home, you might enjoy the desk toy that
[AGBarber] has designed.
The scale is small — the sphere measures just 98 mm (3.6 inches) in diameter — but that just means it’s accessible enough to be fun. The build is based around various sizes of WS2812B addressable LED rings, and contains 120 individual RGB LEDs in total. They’re wrapped up in a 3D printed housing which does a great job of diffusing the light. Transparent filament was used to print parts that light up with a richly-saturated glow with few visible hotspots. Commanding the LEDs is an ESP8266 microcontroller in the form of a Wemos D1 Mini, which provides plenty of grunt to run animations as well as great wireless connectivity options. [AGBarber] relied on their own Pixel Spork library to handle all the cool lighting effects. Files are
on GitHub
for the curious.
Maybe you don’t like spheres, and icosahedrons are more your speed. Well, we’ve featured those too—
with 2,400 LEDs, no less
. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185113",
"author": "make piece not war",
"timestamp": "2025-09-28T06:10:22",
"content": "Looks like a thermal detonator to me. A nice one thou.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,414.977813 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/26/unix-for-a-legacy-ti/ | UNIX For A Legacy TI | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"c++",
"software",
"texas instruments",
"ti",
"TI-99",
"unix",
"unix-like"
] | Although now mostly known as a company who cornered the market on graphing calculators while only updating them once a decade or so, there was a time when Texas Instruments was a major force in the computing world. In the late 70s and early 80s they released a line of computers called the TI-99 to compete (unsuccessfully) with various offerings from Commodore, and these machines were fairly robust for the time. They did have limited memory but offered a 16-bit CPU and plenty of peripherals,
and now there’s even a UNIX-like OS that they can run
.
This version of UNIX is called UNIX99 and is the brainchild of AtariAge forum member [mrvan] who originally wasn’t looking to develop a full operating system for this computer but rather a set of standard C libraries to help with other projects. Apparently the step from that to a UNIX-flavored OS wasn’t too big so this project was born. While the operating system doesn’t have a UNIX certification, it has most of the tools any of us would recognize on similar machines. The OS has support for most of the TI-99 hardware, file management, a basic user account system, and a command shell through which scripts can be written and executed.
That being said, the limitations of the hardware do come through in the operating system. There’s no multitasking, for example, and the small amount of memory is a major hurdle as well. But that’s what makes this project all the more impressive, and [mrvan] isn’t stopping here. He’s working on a few other improvements to this platform, and we look forward to seeing future releases. UNIX itself is extremely influential in the computing world,
and has been used a the model for other homebrew UNIX-like operating systems on similar platforms of this era such as the Z80
.
Thanks to [Stephen] for the tip!
Photo courtesy of Rama & Musée Bolo via Wikimedia Commons | 13 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8184838",
"author": "Agammamon",
"timestamp": "2025-09-27T05:26:59",
"content": "while only updating them once a decade or soLet’s be fair – by the mid 1990’s these things were full-featured enough that there isn’t really a whole lot that you can update to justify a constant stream ... | 1,760,371,415.094224 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/26/the-19th-century-quantum-mechanics/ | The 19th Century Quantum Mechanics | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"Hamilton",
"mathematics",
"newton"
] | While William Rowan Hamilton isn’t a household name like, say, Einstein or Hawking, he might have been. It turns out the Irish mathematician almost stumbled on quantum theory in the or around 1827. [Robyn Arianrhod] has the story in a post on
The Conversation
.
Famously, Newton worked out the rules for the motion of ordinary objects back in 1687. People like Euler and Lagrange kept improving on the ideas of what we call Newtonian physics. Hamilton produced an especially useful improvement by treating light rays and moving particles the same.
Sure, he was using it as an analogy. But fast forward a bit, and we find out that while light is like a wave, it is also like a particle. In 1924, de Broglie proposed that perhaps, then, matter could also be a particle or a wave. He was right, and this was the birth — or at least the conception — of what we now call quantum mechanics. This led to work from Schrödinger, Dirac, and others. Schrödinger, in particular, was intrigued with Hamilton’s analogies and joined them to de Broglie’s ideas. This led to his famous wave equation.
Hamilton did many other things, too. He was an amateur poet and developed the algebra of
quaternions
, although another mathematician, Benjamin Rodrigues, had written about an early version of them a few years earlier. He was also famous, or perhaps infamous, for being struck by inspiration while on a walk and carving an equation into a nearby bridge. | 18 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8184825",
"author": "jawnhenry",
"timestamp": "2025-09-27T03:37:00",
"content": "“I want to emphasize that light comes in this form — particles. It is very important to know that light behaves like particles, especially for those of you who have gone to school, where you were probab... | 1,760,371,414.944252 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/26/active-probe-reaches-3-ghz/ | Active Probe Reaches 3 GHz | Al Williams | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"active probe",
"oscilloscope"
] | When you think of a scope probe, you usually think of what is basically a wire with a spring hook and an attenuator. Those are passive probes. [Kerry Wong] shows off
a pre-release active probe
that sidesteps some problems with those ordinary passive probes.
The trick is that passive probes have input capacitance that interferes with very high-frequency signals. They also tend to have less noise. Although the probe isn’t on the market yet, it is set to debut at a price lower than competitive probes. Still, be warned. The reason you don’t see them more often is that $1,000 is relatively inexpensive for an active probe.
Because the probe is pretty hefty, it comes with a tripod that can hold it while you use it. [Kerry] connects some probe adapters to a PCB with two square wave oscillators. Square waves are a good test waveform because they have odd-numbered harmonics that rise well above the target frequency.
The probe adapters are a little longer than you might like, which causes some ringing on the input signal. However, if you compare the results to a standard passive probe, you’ll quickly see the value of the active probe setup.
You can save some money if you
roll your own
, of course. Most of the ones we’ve seen
don’t quite make 3 GHz
, though. | 6 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8184870",
"author": "Christoph",
"timestamp": "2025-09-27T09:15:16",
"content": "I didn’t spend 20mins to watch the video, but what’s the use of a 3GHz probe on a 500MHz scope?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8184885",
... | 1,760,371,415.134865 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/26/detecting-surveillance-cameras-with-the-esp32/ | Detecting Surveillance Cameras With The ESP32 | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"ALPR",
"automated license plate reader",
"camera",
"license plate reader",
"surveillance camera"
] | These days, surveillance cameras are all around us, and they’re smarter than ever. In particular, many of them are running advanced algorithms to recognize faces and scan license plates, compiling ever-greater databases on the movements and lives of individuals. Flock You is a project that aims to, at the very least, catalogue this part of the surveillance state,
by detecting these cameras out in the wild.
The system is most specifically set up to detect surveillance cameras from Flock Safety, though it’s worth noting a wide range of companies produce plate-reading cameras and associated surveillance systems these days. The device uses an ESP32 microcontroller to detect these devices, relying on the in-built wireless hardware to do the job. The project can be built on a Oui-Spy device from Colonel Panic, or just by using a standard Xiao ESP32 S3 if so desired. By looking at Wi-Fi probe requests and beacon frames, as well as Bluetooth advertisements, it’s possible for the device to pick up telltale transmissions from a range of these cameras, with various pattern-matching techniques and MAC addresses used to filter results in this regard. When the device finds a camera, it sounds a buzzer notifying the user of this fact.
Meanwhile, if you’re interested in just how prevalent plate-reading cameras really are, you might also find
deflock.me
interesting. It’s a map of ALPR camera locations all over the world, and you can submit your own findings if so desired. The techniques used by in the Flock You project are based on learnings from the DeFlock project. Meanwhile, if you want to join the surveillance state on your own terms,
you can always build your own license plate reader instead!
[Thanks to Eric for the tip!] | 34 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "8184766",
"author": "That's on a need to know basis",
"timestamp": "2025-09-26T21:25:37",
"content": "I wonder how long it takes for one of these devices to detect a flock camera. Having one in a car might be nice.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,371,415.251868 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/26/robot-bartender-is-the-life-of-the-party/ | Robot Bartender Is The Life Of The Party | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"adult beverage",
"drinks",
"party",
"robot",
"robot arm",
"robot bartender",
"tuxedo"
] | As the old saying goes, when the only tool you have is a 6 DOF industrial robotic arm, every problem looks like an opportunity to make it serve up adult beverages. [benkokes]
found himself in this familiar predicament and did what any of us would do
, but his process wasn’t without a few party fouls as well as a few head-scratchers.
One of the common problems that people who suddenly find themselves with an old industrial robot have is that there’s usually no documentation or instructions. This was true here with the added hiccup of the robot’s UI being set to Chinese. Luckily no one had changed the root password, and eventually he was able to get the robot up and working.
Getting it to make drinks was a different matter altogether. [benkokes] needed a custom tool to hold the cup as well as shake it, and 3D printed a claw-style end effector with a lid. Out of his multi-colored pack of party cups, however, the orange cups were different enough in dimension to cause problems for the shaking lid which was discovered when the robot spilled a drink all over the table.
Eventually, though, the robot was successfully serving drinks at a party. One of [benkokes]’s friends happened to be a puppet maker and was able to outfit it with a tailored tuxedo for the party as well, and he also programmed it to dance in between serving drinks, completing the AI revolution we have all been hoping for. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is a common project for
people who suddenly come to posses a large general-purpose industrial robot
, while others
build robots specifically for this task alone
. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8184737",
"author": "12L14",
"timestamp": "2025-09-26T18:59:37",
"content": "Robots Have No Tails ;)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8184773",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-09-26T21:44:58",
"content":... | 1,760,371,415.183189 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/26/hackaday-podcast-episode-339-the-vape-episode-a-flying-delorean-and-diy-science/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 339: The Vape Episode, A Flying DeLorean, And DIY Science | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start this week’s episode off with an update on the rapidly approaching 2025 Supercon in Pasadena, California. From there they’ll talk about the surprisingly high-tech world of vapes, a flying DeLorean several years in the making, non-contact pulse monitoring, and the potential of backyard radio telescopes to do real astronomy. You’ll hear about a dodecahedron speaker, a page turning peripheral, and 3D printed tools for unfolding boxes. They’ll wrap things up by taking a look at the latest generation of wearable smart glasses, and wonder if putting a bank of batteries in your home is really with the hassle.
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!
Direct download in DRM-free MP3
.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
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Spotify
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Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 339 Show Notes:
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Interesting Hacks of the Week:
When Low SRAM Keeps The DOOM Off Your Vape
Hosting A Website On A Disposable Vape
Full Scale Styrofoam DeLorean Finally Takes Flight
Full-Scale Flying DeLorean Gets Closer To Liftoff
Mega-CNC Router Carves Styrofoam Into A Full-Size Flying Delorean
Heart Rate Measurement Via WiFi, The DIY Way
Heart Rate Monitoring Via WiFi
Hey Google, Is My Heart Still Beating?
Low-Cost, High-Gain: A Smart Electronic Eyepiece For Capturing The Cosmos
How A Failed Video Format Spawned A New Kind Of Microscope
Listening For The Next Wow! Signal With Low-Cost SDR
The Wow! Signal And The Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence
Damage To Arecibo Leaves Gaping Hole In Astronomy
Roofing Radio Telescope Sees The Galaxy
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Dodecahedron Speaker Is Biblically Accurate
Robot Balances Ball On A Plate
This Device Is A Real Page Turner
Tom’s Picks:
Calculator Battery Mod Lets You Go The Distance
For A Robot Claw, The Eyes Have It
Mandrel Magic: Small Box Assembly With 3D Printing
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Meta’s Ray-Ban Display Glasses And The New Glassholes
How Regulations Are Trying To Keep Home Battery Installs Safe | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8184747",
"author": "magnetic monopole",
"timestamp": "2025-09-26T19:41:42",
"content": "Elliot, you should have taken a quick look at your favourite search engine:https://earth-planets-space.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40623-024-02118-0scanning magnetic microscopy exists.Per... | 1,760,371,415.297888 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/26/set-phone-to-hyperspectral/ | Set Phone To… Hyperspectral | Al Williams | [
"Phone Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"calibration",
"hyperspectral"
] | While our eyes are miraculous little devices, they aren’t very sensitive outside of the normal old red, green, and blue spectra. The camera in your phone is far more sensitive, and scientists want to use those sensors in place of expensive hyperspectral ones. Researchers at Purdue have a cunning plan:
use a calibration card
.
The idea is to take a snap of the special card and use it to understand the camera’s exact response to different colors in the current lighting conditions. Once calibrated to the card, they can detect differences as small as 1.6 nanometers in light wavelengths. That’s on par with commercial hyperspectral sensors, according to the post.
You may wonder why you would care. Sensors like this are useful for medical diagnostic equipment, analysis of artwork, monitoring air quality, and more. Apparently, high-end whisky has a distinctive color profile, so you can now use your phone to tell if you are getting the cheap stuff or not.
We also imagine you might find a use for this in
phone-based spectrometers
. There is plenty to see in the
hyperspectral world
. | 24 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8184679",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-09-26T16:06:01",
"content": "The actual paper’s here:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11125864I have no idea why media outlets feel the need to hyperlink random definitions in their text, making it virtually impossible to find the or... | 1,760,371,415.359898 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/26/this-week-in-security-randomness-is-hard-snmp-shouldnt-be-public-and-github-malware-delivery/ | This Week In Security: Randomness Is Hard, SNMP Shouldn’t Be Public, And GitHub Malware Delivery | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"BMC",
"randomness",
"SNMP",
"This Week in Security"
] | Randomness is hard. To be precise, without dedicated hardware, randomness is impossible for a computer. This is
actually important to keep in mind when writing software
. When there’s not hardware providing true randomness, most
rnd
implementations use a seed value and a pseudo random number generator (PRNG). A PRNG is a function that takes a seed value, and turns it into a seemingly random value, and also produces a new seed for the next time a random value is needed. This could be as simple as a
SHA256
sum, where the hash output is split to become the next seed and the random value.
The PRNG approach does still have a challenge. Where does the initial seed come from? There are a few common, if flawed, approaches, and one of the most common is to use the system clock. It’s not a bulletproof solution, but using the microsecond counter since the last system boot is often good enough, because there are a lot of them to choose from — the entropy is high. With that brief background in mind, let’s talk about what happens in VBScript. The
Randomize
call is used to seed that initial value, but
Randomize
has some quirks.
The first is a great feature: calling
Randomize
a second time with the same seed doesn’t reset the PRNG engine back to the same initial state. And second, when called without a value,
Randomize
uses the number of system ticks since midnight as the PRNG seed. There are 64 ticks per second, giving five-and-a-half million possible seeds, or 22 bits of entropy. This isn’t great on its own, but
Randomize
internally typecasts that number of ticks into a narrower value, with a maximum possible of time-based seeds set at 65,536, which is a lot easier to brute-force.
We don’t know the exact application where the researchers at Doyensec found VBScript generating secure tokens, but in their Proof of Concept (PoC) test run, the generated token could be found in four guesses. It’s a terrible security fail for basically any use, and it’s a deceptively easy mistake to make.
GoAnywhere Exploit
The folks at WatchTowr have
a report on a blistering 10.0 CVE in the GoAnywhere
Managed File Transfer (MFT) product. This vulnerability was first published on September 18, and the WatchTowr crew took a look at it, and had questions. This bug is a deserialization attack that can land even without any authentication. It can result in command injection, and the latest update from GoAnywhere vendor Forta vaguely indicates that it is being used for attacks in the wild. But this is particularly odd: before the vulnerable interface deserializes, it first checks for a valid signature. And WatchTowr researchers couldn’t find a leak of a valid private key. So how was the vulnerability in use in the wild?
Lucky for us,
there’s a part two to this story
, but not all of the mysteries are explained. This CVE is indeed being exploited in the wild, with the earliest known exploit being September 10th. Since there was a full week between the earliest known compromise and the release of the patch, it seems unfortunate that it took WatchTowr this long to confirm that this vulnerability was actually exploited in the wild.
Cisco and Public SNMP
Two million
Cisco systems are at risk from CVE-2025-20352
. This is a remotely accessible flaw in the handling of Simple Network Management Protocol traffic. The attack does require valid credentials, but the attack works using SNMPv1, v2, or v3. While SNMPv3 has more secure user credentials, the earlier SNMP versions just used “community strings”, a text based password that was often set to “public”.
This vulnerability seems to lead to either a crash or a Remote Code Exploitation (RCE). It’s not entirely clear how difficult it is to achieve RCE, but it’s noteworthy that RCE here is run as root, a level of access not usually available even to administrators of Cisco equipment. So far there’s no indication that this was used in the wild, but now that some information and a patch is available, it’s likely not going to take long for someone to reverse-engineer the vulnerability and weaponize it.
More Spilled Tea
Remember
the Tea Spilling from a couple months ago
? The Tea app had an unsecured Firebase database. It turns out that wasn’t an isolated incident. [Mike Oude Reimer] has been working on OpenFirebase, an auditing tool for FireBase installs. And to prove the point,
did an audit on 400 of the most popular Android apps
from a trio of categories in the play store, and found 150 Firebase servers that granted unintended access of some sort. That’s a bit stunning, that over one in three Android apps have insecure Firebase servers associated with them.
Github Malware Delivery
There’s a malware campaign that has happened in the last couple weeks,
based around Search Engine Optimization and GitHub repositories
. The instructions peddle malicious commands to users looking for popular software on the Mac, like LastPass and others. I was prepared to write about how Ad Blocking is really a form of security protection, as these campaigns are often delivered via advertising, but this one seems to primarily be based on real search engine placement.
This isn’t the only malware campaign that takes advantage of GitHub’s reputation as a trusted source of software.
A phishing campaign was also recently spotted
, where spam messages were added as GitHub issues, with the spammers tagging their victims, and offering fake Y Combinator sponsorships. Since the messages were sent via GitHub, most spam blockers treated them as legitimate. This campaign was a bit more clever than most, making use of domain typo-squatting, with the
y-comblnator.com
domain used as part of the campaign. The goal here being draining the crypto accounts of people sufficiently fooled by the messages.
Bits and Bytes
Is nothing sacred? In addition to GitHub,
malware appears to be distributed via Steam
, in updates to games. The most recent example was the Block Blasters game, which was
on Steam for nearly two months
before shipping malicious code.
How can you figure out whether an image is AI, or has been manipulated with AI or other tools? There’s quite a few approaches, but one of the interesting ones is
to look at the JPEG artifacting
. If part of the image has ever been compressed via JPEG, this results in blocky artifacts that are hard for the human eye to spot, but easy to see with the right tools.
And finally, in a blast from the past, Supermicro has
another pair of vulnerabilities that could allow malicious firmware on server Baseboard Management Controller (BMCs)
. The way these images are signed is slightly odd, with the various portions of the file signed independently. The attack is to treat these sections like cards in a deck, and shuffle malicious slices into the stack. The verification routine thinks all the important pieces are signed, but during a real boot,
the malicious code runs instead
. Patches coming soon. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8184686",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-09-26T16:20:24",
"content": "While I hate to see attacks achieving root on things like routers and server hardware. It is sometimes nice to know it’s possible to re-purpose EOL equipment instead of E-Wasting it.I got a security record... | 1,760,371,417.248514 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/26/steamboat-willie-still-tests-copyright/ | Steamboat WillieStill Tests Copyright | Jenny List | [
"Art",
"News"
] | [
"copyright",
"disney",
"steamboat willie"
] | If you know anything about Mickey Mouse, you’ll be able to tell us that his first outing was in 1928’s
Steamboat Willie —
an animated short that sees our hero as the hapless pilot of a riverboat battling an assortment of animals and his captain. It entered the public domain last year, meaning that it and the 1928 incarnation of Mickey are now free of any copyright obligation to the media giant.
There’s an interesting development from Florida on that front though as it seems Disney may have been testing this through legal means, and now
a law firm wants to see them in court
over their proposed use of the film in an advert.
Of course here at Hackaday we don’t cover the dry subject of Florida legal news as a rule, but we are interested in the world of copyright as it applies to many other things that do come under our eye. As we understand it the law firm is requesting the judge assert their protection from trademark claims over the use of Disney’s 1928
Willie
, given that there have been claims from the entertainment giant against others doing the same thing.
It’s hardly surprising that a large corporation might seek to use legal muscle and trademark law to
de facto
extend the term of Mickey’s protection beyond the defined copyright expiration date, so for once it’s refreshing to see them come up against someone unafraid of a courtroom.
We hope that common sense will prevail, and this undermining of a cherished right (not to mention
prior case law
) is not allowed to succeed. Meanwhile if you’d like a 1928 Mickey that Disney have shied away from coming after,
look no further than the EFF
. | 18 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8184625",
"author": "Ray",
"timestamp": "2025-09-26T13:16:59",
"content": "“We hope that common sense will prevail…”Arcane laws, money-thirsty lawyers, and consumer interests are not good ingredients for creating common sense.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": ... | 1,760,371,416.598428 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/26/a-ham-adjacent-portable-radio-repeater/ | A Ham-Adjacent Portable Radio Repeater | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"baofeng",
"battery powered",
"gmrs",
"ham",
"portable",
"radio",
"repeater",
"uhf cb",
"UV-5R"
] | Although ham radio offers a wide array of bands to transmit on, not to mention plenty of modes to communicate with, not everyone wants or needs to use all of this capability. For those needing simple two-way communication services like FRS or GMRS are available (in North America) with much less stringent licensing requirements, and GMRS even allows repeaters to be used to extend their range beyond the typical mile or so.
[Dave] aka [N8DAV] has built an off-grid simplex repeater
that can travel around with him wherever he goes.
The repeater itself is based on a pre-built simplex repeater module, which means that it has to record an incoming signal and then play it back on the same frequency. Compared to a split frequency repeater which uses different frequencies for transmit and receive this can be a bit cumbersome but simplifies the design and the use. A Baofeng UV-5R is used to perform the actual radio duties paired to a 40 watt amplifier to extend the range as much as possible. It’s all packed into a Pelican-like case and set up with a large battery that could power it for a number of days, making it useful for camping, rescue, or other off-grid activities.
For those wondering why [Dave] is using his ham call sign instead of his GMRS one, all of the equipment in this build will work in either the UHF ham bands or the channels reserved for GMRS with minor adjustments, so it’s perfectly possible to use the setup for one’s preferred license. And, for those in other parts of the world without GMRS there’s a similar class of radio called
UHF CB
which might be able to support similar builds, but be sure to check your local jurisdiction’s laws before hooking something like this up.
For an even longer-range radio repeater using similar equipment we’d recommend looking to the skies
.
Thanks to [Red] for the tip! | 45 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8184526",
"author": "Stuart Longland",
"timestamp": "2025-09-26T08:20:27",
"content": "methinks the Australian Communications and Media Authority would have words to say about someone lashing a Baofeng UV-5R up to a 40W power amp as a way of home-brewing a UHF CBRS repeater.",
"... | 1,760,371,416.540549 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/25/the-new-raspberry-pi-500-better-gaming-with-less-soldering-required/ | The New Raspberry Pi 500+: Better Gaming With Less Soldering Required | Maya Posch | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"raspberry pi",
"raspberry pi 500"
] | When Raspberry Pi released the Pi 500, as essentially an RPi 5 integrated into a chiclet keyboard, there were rumors based on the empty spots on the PCB that a better version would be released soon. This turned out to be the case, with [Jeff Geerling]
now taking the new RPi 500+ to bits
for some experimentation and keyboard modding.
The 500’s case was not designed to be opened, but if you did, you’d find that
there was space allocated
for a Power-Over-Ethernet section as well as an M.2 slot, albeit with all of the footprints unpopulated. Some hacking later and enterprising folk found that soldering the appropriate parts on the PCB does in fact enable
a working M.2 slot
. What the 500+ thus does is basically do that soldering work for you, while sadly not offering a PoE feature yet without some DIY soldering.
Perhaps the most obvious change is the keyboard, which now uses short-travel mechanical switches – with RGB – inside an enclosure that is now fortunately easy to open, as you may want to put in a different NVMe drive at some point. Or, if you’re someone like [Jeff] you want to use this slot to install an M.2 to Oculink adapter for some external GPU action.
After some struggling with eGPU devices an AMD RX 7900 XT was put into action, with the AMD GPU drivers posing no challenge after a kernel recompile. Other than the Oculink cable preventing the case from closing and also losing the M.2 NVMe SSD option, it was a pretty useful mod to get some real gaming and LLM action going.
With the additions of a presoldered M.2 slot and a nicer keyboard, as well as 16 GB RAM, you have to decide whether the $200 asking price is worth it over the $90 RPi 500. In the case of [Jeff] his kids will have to make do with the RPi 500 for the foreseeable future, and the RPi 400 still finds regular use around his studio. | 36 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "8184506",
"author": "Jonathan Bennett",
"timestamp": "2025-09-26T06:59:45",
"content": "I ordered one, as the Pi 500 is already a good compile + hardware test bed, and the only thing it lacked was NVMe and more ram. The only real struggle I’ll have is to decide whether the Argon40 O... | 1,760,371,416.924508 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/25/vertical-solar-panels-are-out-standing/ | Vertical Solar Panels Are Out Standing | Tyler August | [
"Solar Hacks"
] | [
"solar panel orientation",
"solar panels",
"solar power"
] | If you’re mounting solar panels, everybody knows the drill, right? Point them south, angled according to latitude. It’s easy. In a video which demonstrates that [Everyday Dave] is truly out standing in his field, we hear a different story. [Dave] has a year’s worth of data in his
Solar Panel Showdown
that suggests there are good reasons to mount your panels vertically.
Specifically, [Dave] is using bifacial solar panels– panels that have cells on both sides. In his preferred orientation, one side faces South, while the other faces North. [Dave] is in the Northern Hemisphere, so those of you Down Under would have to do the opposite, pointing one face North and the other South.
Since [Dave] is far from the equator, the N/S vertical orientation beats the pants off of East-West facing panels, especially in winter. What’s interesting is how much better the bifacial panels do compared to the “standard” tilted orientation. While peak power in the summer is much better with the tilted bifacial panels (indeed, even the tilted single-sided panels), in winter the vertical N/S panels blow them out of the water. (Especially when snow gets involved. Vertical panels don’t need sweeping!)
Even in the summer, though, there are advantages: the N/S panels may produce less power overall, but they give a trickle earlier and later in the day than the tilted orientation. Still, that extra peak power really shows, and over a six-month period from solstice-to-solstice, the vertical panels only produced 77% what the tilted bifacial panels did (while tilted single-sided panels produced 90%).
Is it worth it? That depends on your use case. If most of the power is going to A/C, you’ll need the extra in the warmer months. In that case, you want to tilt the panels. If you have a steady, predictable load, though, having even production winter/summer might be more to your liking– in that case you can join [Dave] in sticking solar panels straight up and down.
These results probably apply at latitudes similar to [Dave] who is in cloudy and snowy Ohio, which is perhaps not the ideal place for solar experimentation. If you’re not an Ohio-like distance from the equator, you might find an
East-West array is the best bang for the buck
. Of course if you really want to max out power from each individual cell,
you can’t beat sun tracking
regardless of where you are. | 95 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "8184431",
"author": "Hoopstar",
"timestamp": "2025-09-26T02:27:34",
"content": "Some of us live in the Southern hemisphere.. ;)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8184471",
"author": "Leonardo",
"timestamp": "202... | 1,760,371,416.728143 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/25/hovercraft-suitcase-gives-your-luggage-a-smooth-ride/ | Hovercraft Suitcase Gives Your Luggage A Smooth Ride | Navarre Bartz | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"hovercase",
"hovercraft",
"roller bag",
"suitcase"
] | The wheels on roller suitcases are one of their primary failure points. After the destruction of the wheel mount on her DIY suitcase, [Laura Kampf] wondered if it would be better to
dispense with wheels altogether
.
To give her suitcase a lift, [Kampf] decided to turn it into a hovercraft so it couldn’t be stopped by pavement or puddles. The first task was finding an appropriate fan, and a compact leaf blower donated it’s body to makerdom for the project. After reducing the blower to it’s constituent components and finding a secret turbo switch, work began on the momentum curtain.
“Nose-holing” the arrangement and size of the holes to pipe air through the stapled tarp and tape skirt seemed to be the bulk of the trial-and-error in this one. Based on other hovercraft designs [Kampf] found, keeping the holes near the center of the inflated portion gave better lift. In the end, the carry-on is able to lift a decent amount even on its lowest setting, resulting in a suitcase that is “not embarrassing” for travel. No word yet on what TSA thinks.
If you’re looking for another unexpected lift off, how about a full-sized
flying Delorean replica
? We’ve also covered some of the reasons
why we don’t see more of these all terrain wonders
. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8184402",
"author": "SteveS",
"timestamp": "2025-09-26T00:12:06",
"content": "Right out of college I worked for a defense contractor, and on one part of the factory floor the company built out “mobility shelters”, essentially field-deployable repair workshops constructed inside ship... | 1,760,371,417.028925 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/25/tube-furnace-is-the-real-hotness/ | Tube Furnace Is The Real Hotness | Al Williams | [
"chemistry hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"tube furnace"
] | We aren’t sure what [theglassman] is working on, but based on his recent projects, we think it is probably something interesting. He’s been decapping ICs, growing oxide on silicon substrates, and has built
a tube furnace capable of reaching 1200 °C
.
What would you do with something that can melt cast iron? We aren’t sure, but maybe you’ll tell us in the comments. We do have a fair idea of what [theglassman] is doing, though.
The core of the oven is a quartz tube. Insulation is via refractory cement and alumina ceramic wool. The heating itself is classic Nichrome wire and a tiny thermocouple. The real key, though, is to the proper controller. [theglassman] suggests a ramp/soak controller. These allow you to program sequences that heat up and then stop, which, if done properly, can prevent your fragile quartz tube from cracking.
Naturally, you need the tube furnace to
grow oxides on silicon
. It is less clear why
he’s decapping ICs
. We were nervous about his process of boiling down sulfuric acid (fuming nitrate works better, anyway, if you just want to remove the epoxy). If you want to remove everything like he does, sodium hydroxide will also work well.
Obviously, we need to keep an eye on [theglassman]. We are curious what he’s working towards. Maybe making a
custom transistor
? Or, dare we hope, a
homemade IC
? | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8184332",
"author": "David H",
"timestamp": "2025-09-25T20:36:47",
"content": "“Obviously, we need to keep an eye on [theglassman].”…from a safe distance and with large, solid concrete structures to duck behind at a moment’s notice, apparently!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": ... | 1,760,371,416.780819 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/25/surprisingly-refined-perpetual-motion-device-teardown/ | Surprisingly Refined Perpetual Motion Device Teardown | Maya Posch | [
"Reverse Engineering",
"The Hackaday Prize",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"Big Clive",
"perpetual motion",
"teardown"
] | Perpetual motion devices are either a gag, a scam, or as in the case of this particular toy that [Big Clive] bought on AliExpress,
a rather fascinating demonstration
of a contact-free inductive sensor combined with a pulsed magnet boost for the metal ball. A cool part about the device is that it comes with a completely clear enclosure, so you can admire its internals while it’s operating. Less cool was that after unboxing the device wasn’t working as the detector wasn’t getting the 12 V it needs to operate, requiring a bit of repairing first.
The crucial part of the perpetual motion device schematic with the sensor, MCU and coil. (Credit: bigclivedotcom, YouTube)
Based on the label on the bottom of the device with the creative model identifier
P-toy-002
, its standby current is 10 µA which ramps up to 3 A when it’s operating. This makes sense when you look at the two core components: the industrial inductive detector, and a rather big electromagnet that’s driven by a bank of three 10 mF, 35V capacitors, turning it into something akin to a coilgun. Annoyingly, an attempt was made to erase most of the IC package markings.
The circuitry isn’t too complex, fortunately, with an adjustable electromagnet coil voltage circuit combined with a MOSFET to provide the pulse, and a 78L12 regulator to generate the 12 VDC from the coil’s voltage rail for the sensor that is monitored by a MCU. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8184320",
"author": "alialiali",
"timestamp": "2025-09-25T20:01:03",
"content": "That looks suspiciously like a model Steve Mould had made..I wonder if that’s where the market for a transparent one sprung from.I would like one tho!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repli... | 1,760,371,416.839227 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/25/how-water-vapor-makes-smartphones-faster/ | How Water Vapor Makes Smartphones Faster | Lewin Day | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Phone Hacks"
] | [
"coolant",
"cooling",
"heat pipe",
"phase change",
"phase change cooling",
"smartphone",
"vapor chamber"
] | Once upon a time, home computers were low-powered enough that they barely needed any cooling at all. An Amiga 500 didn’t even have a heatsink on the CPU, while the early Macintosh got by with a single teeny little fan.
Modern smartphones are far more powerful than these ancient machines, packed with multi-core processors running at speeds of many gigahertz. Even still, they’ve generally been able to get by without any active cooling devices. However, as manufacturers continue to push the envelope of performance, they’ve had to scramble for ways to suck heat out of these handheld computers. Vapor chamber cooling has risen as a solution to this problem, using simple physics to keep your handset humming along at maximum speed for longer.
Cool Runnings
Keeping a smartphone cool is a unique challenge compared to other computing devices. In a desktop or laptop computer, designers can rely on fans, heatsinks, and even water cooling loops with radiators to get heat out of a device. However, for a phone, these methods aren’t so practical. Any air vents would be quickly blocked by pocket lint, and even the slimmest fan or heatsink would add a huge amount of bulk, which is unacceptable for a handheld device.
Samsung has been using vapor chambers in phones for almost a decade, relying on them to keep thermal throttling to a minimum. Credit: Samsung
Thus far, smartphones have largely avoided heating issues in two ways. Firstly, by using low-power chipsets that simply don’t generate a lot of heat in the first place. Secondly, by thermally coupling the main chips to metal heat spreaders and sometimes the smartphone’s external housing, to effectively create a simple heatsink. However, smartphones continue to grow more powerful, generating more heat during demanding tasks like recording high-resolution video. Thus, engineers have had to find new ways to dump greater amounts of heat without compromising the aesthetics and usability of their devices.
Enter vapor chamber cooling. Picture a sealed metal cavity built into a smartphone, inside which is a small amount of water-based coolant. The phone’s chipset is thermally coupled to the cavity, such that the heat is absorbed by the coolant inside. Thanks to the physical properties of water, notably its huge specific heat value, it’s able to absorb a great deal of heat energy, particularly as it passes through the phase-change regime as the fluid turns from a liquid into a gas. As it heats up and vaporizes, the coolant spreads to fill the entire cavity, spreading the heat into the whole thermal mass of the casing where it can be released into the surroundings. As heat is released, the vapor cools back into a liquid, and the cycle can begin again. The idea is exactly the same as is used in
heat pipes
—where a liquid is heated beyond its phase change point into a vapor, and used to spread heat to other areas of a sealed cavity.
A visual demonstration of a vapor chamber at work. The fluid is heated until it evaporates, and then spreads around the cavity. Credit: Apple
The vapor chamber has benefits over traditional metal heatsinks. The liquid coolant is very effective at evaporating and spreading heat around the entire chamber, wicking heat away from hot chips more quickly. Traditional heatsinks can end up with a hotspot over individual chips, whereas the vapor chamber is more effective at distributing the heat over a wider area.
The intention behind this is to allow phones to run at maximum performance for longer. Whether you’re shooting video or playing a game, it’s no good if your phone has to start throttling clock rates to stay cool in the middle of a task. The vapor chamber simply helps engineers suck more heat out of a phone’s chipset and get rid of it faster.
Google has recently seen fit to include vapor chambers in various models of the Pixel 9 series, aiming to keep phones running at maximum performance for longer. Credit: Google
One drawback is that vapor chambers are obviously far more complex to manufacture than traditional heatsinks. Rather than a flat metal heat spreader, you have a delicate chamber into which coolant must be injected, and then the chamber must be sealed. The coolant must be able to soak up a great deal of heat, as well as safely deal with many cycles of vaporization and condensation, without causing any corrosion or damage to the chamber in the process. The entire vapor chamber must be able to survive the rough-and-tumble life of a handheld device that’s stuffed into pockets and thrown into bags every day of its life.
Vapor chambers have been around for a while now, first showing up in the Galaxy S7 in 2016. They’ve gradually become more popular, though, and these days, you’ll find a vapor chamber in phones like the Google Pixel 9 Pro, the Samsung Galaxy S25+, and the Apple iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max. They’re still largely the preserve of flagship devices, perhaps as much due to their high-tech appeal and higher cost than traditional cooling solutions. Still, as the smartphone arms race continues, and these parts become more common, expect the technology to trickle down to more humble models in the years to come. | 25 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8184251",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-09-25T17:56:45",
"content": "The earliest Macintosh had no fan:Macintosh 128K Teardown",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8184330",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2... | 1,760,371,417.108748 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/25/trapped-soul-in-time-for-halloween/ | Trapped Soul In Time For Halloween | Al Williams | [
"Art",
"Holiday Hacks"
] | [
"halloween",
"round LCD"
] | While it is sort of disturbing, it is one of the best uses for a round LCD we’ve seen lately. What is it?
Just [vishalsoniindia]’s
SoulCage
— a pendant that appears to have a poor soul trapped inside of it. Just in time for the upcoming spooky holiday. You can see the device in operation in the short video below.
The heart (sorry, unintentional pun) of the device is an ESP32-S3 round display. That means the rest of it is software, a battery, and a 3D printed case. There’s a switch, too, to select a male or female image as well as shut the device off when not in use.
The display has its own metal case, but to make room for the battery, the printed back replaces the default one. Of course, you want low current consumption when the device is asleep. However, the board has some additional components, so a small hack on the board was required to allow it to stop drawing current.
In particular, a switch was added to put a regulator in shutdown mode, the USB to serial converter needed a change, and a battery level detection circuit was cut. When off, the device draws about one microamp, so battery life should be very long in storage. In operation, the 85 mA draw provides approximately 11 hours of use per full charge. Plenty of time for a holiday party. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8184222",
"author": "callegustafsson",
"timestamp": "2025-09-25T16:29:43",
"content": "It looks cool. It would be fun if they had a small vibrator motor to add some tactility to the breakout attempts",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id... | 1,760,371,416.977058 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/25/spy-tech-the-nro-and-apollo-11/ | Spy Tech: The NRO And Apollo 11 | Al Williams | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"apollo",
"nro",
"weather satellite"
] | When you think of “secret” agencies, you probably think of the CIA, the NSA, the KGB, or MI-5. But the real secret agencies are the ones you hardly ever hear of. One of those is the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). Formed in 1960, the agency was totally secret until the early 1970s.
If you have heard of the NRO, you probably know they manage spy satellites and other resources that get shared among intelligence agencies. But did you know they played a major, but secret, part in the Apollo 11 recovery? Don’t forget, it was 1969, and the general public didn’t know anything about the shadowy agency.
Secret Hawaii
Captain Hank Brandli was an Air Force meteorologist assigned to the NRO in Hawaii. His job was to support the Air Force’s “Star Catchers.” That was the Air Force group tasked with
catching film buckets dropped from the super-secret Corona spy satellites
. The satellites had to
drop film
only when there was good weather.
Spoiler alert: They made it back fine.
In the 1960s, civilian weather forecasting was not as good as it is now. But Brandli had access to data from the NRO’s Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP), then known simply as “417”. The high-tech data let him estimate the weather accurately over the drop zones for five days, much better than any contemporary civilian meteorologist could do.
When Apollo 11 headed home, Captain Brandli ran the numbers and found there would be a major tropical storm over the drop zone, located at 10.6° north by 172.5° west, about halfway between Howland Island and Johnston Atoll, on July 24th. The storm was likely to be a “screaming eagle” storm rising to 50,000 feet over the ocean.
In the movies, of course, spaceships are tough and can land in bad weather. In real life, the high winds could rip the parachutes from the capsule, and the impact would probably have killed the crew.
What to Do?
Brandli knew he had to let someone know, but he had a problem. The whole thing was highly classified. Corona and the DMSP were very dark programs. There were only two people cleared for both programs: Brandli and the Star Catchers’ commander. No one at NASA was cleared for either program.
With the clock ticking, Brandli started looking for an acceptable way to raise the alarm. The Navy was in charge of NASA weather forecasting, so the first stop was DoD chief weather officer Captain Sam Houston, Jr. He was unaware of Corona, but he knew about DMSP.
Brandli was able to show Houston the photos and convince him that there was a real danger. Houston reached out to Rear Admiral Donald Davis, commanding the Apollo 11 recovery mission. He just couldn’t tell the Admiral where he got the data. In fact, he couldn’t even show him the photos, because he wasn’t cleared for DMSP.
Career Gamble
There was little time, so Davis asked permission to move the USS Hornet task force, but he couldn’t wait. He ordered the ships to a new position 215 nautical miles away from the original drop zone, now at 13.3° north by 169.2° west. President Richard Nixon was en route to greet the explorers, so if Davis were wrong, he’d be looking for a new job in August. He had to hope NASA could alter the reentry to match.
The forecast was correct. There were severe thunderstorms at the original site, but Apollo 11 splashed down in a calm sea about 1.7 miles from the target, as you can see below. Houston received a Navy Commendation medal, although he wasn’t allowed to say what it was for until 1995.
In hindsight, NASA has said they were also already aware of the weather situation due to the Application Technology Satellite 1, launched in 1966. Although the weather was described as “suitable for splashdown”, mission planners say they had planned to move the landing anyway.
Modern Times
Weather predictions really are better than they used to be. (CC-BY: [Hannah Ritchie])
These days, the NRO isn’t quite as secretive as it once was, and, in fact, much of the information for this post derives from two
stories from their website
. The NRO was also involved in the
Manned Orbital Laboratory
project and considered using
Apollo as part of that program.
Weather forecasting, too, has gotten better. Studies show that even in 1980, a seven-day forecast might be, at best, 45 or 50% accurate. Today, they are nearly 80%. Some of that is better imaging. Some of it is better models and methods, too, of course.
However, thanks to one — or maybe a few — meteorologists, the Apollo 11 crew returned safely to Earth to enjoy their ticker-tape parades. After, of course, their
quarantine
. | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8184173",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-09-25T14:05:54",
"content": "Heck, even the NSA has a museum (https://www.nsa.gov/museum/), which is worth a visit if you’re in the DC area. NSA’s website is pretty interesting, and they have a lot of history pages. CIA has a ... | 1,760,371,417.310111 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/28/smart-home-gets-a-custom-keypad-controller/ | Smart Home Gets A Custom Keypad Controller | Lewin Day | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"home",
"home hacks",
"smarthome"
] | Voice assistants and smartphones are often the go-to interfaces for modern smart home systems. However, if you fancy more direct physical controls, you can go that route as well. To that end,
[Salim Benbouziyane] whipped up a nifty keypad to work with his Home Assistant setup.
The build is based on an ESP32 microcontroller, which has wireless hardware onboard to communicate with the rest of [Salim’s] Home Assistant setup. Using the ESPHome firmware framework as a base, the microcontroller is connected to a four-by-three button keypad array, built using nice clicky key switches. There’s also an indicator light on top as a system status indicator. A fingerprint scanner provides an easy way for users to authenticate when disarming the alarm.
Security and speed were the push for [Salim] to whip up this system. He found it difficult to disarm his alarm in a hurry when fumbling with his phone, and the direct keypad entry method was far more desirable.
Sometimes, the easiest route to the smart home of your dreams is to
just build the exact solutions you need
. Video after the break. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185197",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-09-28T13:34:59",
"content": "I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s less keen on phone controls for this stuff! Of course, the ideal is that the system is truly smart and turns stuff on/off based on timers, sensors, etc, but there always re... | 1,760,371,417.348311 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/28/ntron-plays-games-music/ | NTRON Plays Games, Music | Al Williams | [
"Games",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"chiptune",
"game console",
"retropie"
] | What do you get if you meld a Raspberry Pi, a chiptune synthesizer, and a case that looks like an imaginary Kenback-2000? Well, if you are [Artifextron], you get the
NTRON
. Part Nintendo console, part chip tune synthesizer, and part objet d’art. You can see the device do its things in the video below.
This is less of a bare metal design and more of a synthesis of parts, but it is a very clever system design using audio mixers and an assortment of modules to do its tasks. It does have an IC handling the gamepad ports. Of course, it also features a ton of 3D printed parts.
Not only is the build excellent-looking, but the documentation is painstakingly detailed. If the old Heathkit manuals were a perfect 10, this one is easily in the 7.5 to 8 range. Pictures, diagrams, and links for the materials are all there. It should be reasonably easy to replicate one of the variants described in the manual.
Overall, a great fusion of items in a gorgeous presentation. Maybe enough time to get one made to give as a holiday gift.
Chiptune
is definitely a thing. We see plenty of RetroPie projects, some of which
don’t even use a Pi
. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185147",
"author": "Mr Name Required",
"timestamp": "2025-09-28T08:19:19",
"content": "It is not in the 7.5 to 8 range of Heathkit being 10. Heathkit would never have been so daft as to leave off panel labelling of switches and buttons. I’d say more of a 3.",
"parent_id": null,... | 1,760,371,417.396086 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/27/kinethreads-a-low-cost-haptic-exo-suit/ | Kinethreads: A Low Cost Haptic Exo-Suit | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"exosuit",
"haptic",
"haptic feedback",
"research"
] | There have been lots of haptic vest devices over the years, though the vast majority have been very simple. Many existing suits pack in a few speakers or vibration motors to give feedback to the wearer. Kinethreads aims to go further, serving as a full-body haptic suit
using an innovative mechanical setup.
Kinethreads is effectively an exosuit, which mounts several motorized pulley systems to the wearer’s body. These pulleys are attached to the user’s hands, feet, back, torso, and head via strings. By winding in the pulleys, it’s possible for the device to effectively tug on different parts of the body, creating rich, dynamic physical feedback that can easily be felt and interpreted by the user. The whole system weighs 4.6 kilograms—not light, but very practical. It can also run for 6 hours on a single charge. The whole suit can be donned or doffed in under a minute. Cost is stated to be under $500.
It’s a particularly interesting device for VR use. The team notes applications such as simulating the weight of picking up a virtual object, creating the feeling of virtual “gravity,” or giving continuous dynamic feedback during a driving simulation. Other demos include mimicking the sensation of touching hard objects, or the more diffuse feeling of standing under a waterfall.
As virtual worlds become a bigger part of our daily lives, expect ever more developments in these kinds of exosuit feedback systems.
We’ve seen other great work in this space before, too
. Video after the break. | 9 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185110",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-09-28T05:42:29",
"content": "Been reading too much Hawaii Pidgin, read that as ‘kine’ (Kain) threads 😂. Intead of ˈkin(ə)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8185161",
"author": ... | 1,760,371,417.937932 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/27/drones-at-danish-airports-a-plea-for-responsible-official-response/ | Drones At Danish Airports, A Plea For Responsible Official Response | Jenny List | [
"drone hacks",
"News"
] | [
"Denmark",
"drone",
"drone law",
"Gatwick",
"multirotor"
] | In Europe, where this is being written, and possibly further afield, news reports are again full of drone sightings closing airports. The reports have come from Scandinavia,
in particular Denmark
, where sightings have been logged across the country. It has been immediately suggested that the Russians might somehow be involved, something they deny, which adds a dangerous geopolitical edge to the story.
To us here at Hackaday, this is familiar territory. Back in the last decade, we covered the saga of
British airports closing
due to drone sightings. In that case, uninformed hysteria played a large part in the unfolding events, leading to further closures. The problem was that the official accounts did not seem credible. Eventually, after a lot of investigation and freedom of information requests by the British drone community, there was a shamefaced admission that
there had never been any tangible evidence of a drone being involved
.
In the case of the Danish drone sightings, it seems that credible evidence has been shown for some of the events. The problem is this: just as we saw a few years ago in southern England, and in late 2024 in the US, such things create a fertile atmosphere for mass hysteria. Large numbers of people with no idea what a drone looks like are nervously scanning the skies. Before too long, they are seeing phantom drones everywhere, and then the danger is that a full-scale drone panic ensues over nothing.
Based on our on-the-ground experience of the debacle in the UK in 2018, we hope that our Danish neighbours don’t fall into the same trap as their UK counterparts by escalating matters to a crescendo based on sketchy evidence. We trust that their response will be sober, proportionate, and based on evidence for all to see.
Our concern back in 2018 was for drone enthusiasts who might lose the right to fly, while now it’s more one for all of our collective safety. | 49 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185089",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2025-09-28T02:52:04",
"content": "I read “Drones near Airport” in the news and have no idea if it is little hobby-level multi-rotors or large plane-sized military UAVs!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,417.887353 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/27/how-many-phones-sport-a-5-and-1-4-diskette-drive-this-one/ | How Many Phones Sport A 5 And 1/4 Diskette Drive? This One. | Tyler August | [
"Phone Hacks"
] | [
"5 1/4\" drive",
"Commodore 1541",
"internet argument",
"postmarketos"
] | It all started with a sarcastic comment right here on Hackaday.com: ” How many phones do you know that sport a 5 and 1/4 inch diskette drive?” — and [Paul Sanja] took that personally, or at least thought “Challenge accepted” because he immediately hooked an old
Commodore floppy drive to his somewhat-less-old smartphone.
The argument started over UNIX file directories,
in a post about Redox OS on smartphones
— which was a [Paul Sajna] hack as well. [Paul] had everything he needed to pick up the gauntlet, and evidently did so promptly. The drive is a classic
Commodore 1541,
which means you’ll want to watch the demo video at 2x speed or better. (If you thought loading times felt slow in the old days, they’re positively glacial by modern standards.) The old floppy drive is plugged into a Google Pixel 3
running Postmarket OS
. Sure, you could do this on Android, but a fully open Linux system is obviously the hacker’s choice. As a bonus, it makes the whole endeavor almost trivial.
Between the seven-year-old phone and the forty-year-old disk drive is an Arduino Pro Micro, configured with the
XUM1541 firmware
by [OpenBCM] to act as a translator. On the phone, the VICE emulator pretends to be a C64, and successfully loads Impossible Mission from an original disk. Arguably, the phone doesn’t “sport” the disk drive–if anything, it’s the other way around, given the size difference–but we think [Paul Sajna] has proven the point regardless. Bravo, [Paul].
Thanks to [Joseph Eoff], who accidentally issued the challenge and submitted the tip. If you’ve vexed someone into hacking (or been so vexed yourself), don’t hesitate to
drop us a line!
We wish more people would try hacking their way through disagreements. It really, really beats a flame war. | 13 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185069",
"author": "Derek Tombrello",
"timestamp": "2025-09-27T23:33:18",
"content": "Just the other day, just for the hell of it, I wondered if a cellphone could access an external DVD drive. Turns out… it can! You need to use a powered USB hub, but…. never know when that informat... | 1,760,371,417.798603 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/27/nec-v20-the-original-pc-processor-upgrade/ | NEC V20: The Original PC Processor Upgrade | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"8088",
"nec v20",
"pc"
] | In the early 1980s, there was the IBM PC, with its 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 processor. It was an unexpected hit for the company, and within a few years there were a host of competitors. Every self-respecting technology corporation wanted a piece of the action including processor manufacturers, and among those was NEC with their V20 chip and its V30 sibling. From the outside they were faster pin-compatible 8088 and 8086 clones, but internally they could also run both 8080 and 80186 code.
[The Silicon Underground] has a look back at the V20
, with some technical details, history, and its place as a PC upgrade.
For such a capable part it’s always been a surprise here that it didn’t take the world by storm, and the article sheds some light on this in the form of an Intel lawsuit that denied it a critical early market access. By the time it was available in quantity the PC world had moved on from the 8088, so we saw it in relatively few machines. It was a popular upgrade for those in the know back in the day though as it remains in 2025, and aside from its immediate speed boost there are a few tricks it lends to a classic PC clone. The version of DOS that underpinned Windows 95 won’t run on an 8086 or 8088 because it contains 8016 instructions, but a V20 can run it resulting in a much faster DOS experience. One to remember, if an early PC or clone cones your way.
Hungry for the good old days of DOS?
You don’t need to find 80s hardware for that
. | 16 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185035",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-09-27T21:12:24",
"content": "sed ‘s/8016/80186/’",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8185099",
"author": "-jeffB",
"timestamp": "2025-09-28T04:40:02",
"content": ... | 1,760,371,417.748772 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/27/bluetooth-earrings-pump-out-the-tunes/ | Bluetooth Earrings Pump Out The Tunes | Lewin Day | [
"digital audio hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"bluetooth",
"bluetooth speaker",
"earrings",
"jewelery",
"jewelry",
"speaker"
] | When you think of a Bluetooth speaker, you’re probably picturing a roughly lunchbox-sized device that pumps out some decent volume for annoying fellow beachgoers, hikers, or public transport users. [Matt Frequencies] has developed something in an altogether different form factor—
tiny Bluetooth speakers you can dangle from your earlobes!
They’re called Earrays, and they’re awesome.
The build started with [Matt] harvesting circuit boards from a pair of off-the-shelf Bluetooth earbuds. These are tiny, and perfect for picking up a digital audio stream from a smartphone or other device, but they don’t have the grunt to drive powerful speakers. Thus, [Matt] hooked them up to a small Adafruit PAM8302A amplifier board, enabling them to drive some larger speaker drivers that you can actually hear from a distance. These were then installed in little 3D printed housings that are like a tiny version of the speaker arrays you might see hanging from the rigging at a major dance festival. Throw on a little earring hook, and you’ve got a pair of wearable Bluetooth speakers that are both functional, fashionable, and very audible!
[Matt] has continued to develop the project
, even designing a
matching pendant
and a
charging base
to make them practical to use beyond a proof-of concept. Despite the weight of the included electronics, they’re perfectly wearable, as demonstrated by [DJ Kaizo Trap] modelling the hardware in the images seen here.
We’ve seen plenty of great LED earrings over the years,
but very few jewelry projects in the audio space thus far. Perhaps that will change in future—if you pursue such goals,
let us know! | 14 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8184985",
"author": "Mark Topham",
"timestamp": "2025-09-27T18:02:05",
"content": "While it’s an interesting project, does anybody actually want to be around someone wearing these? Ever?The advantage of ear buds are the privacy. I don’t have to hear your music, I can hear mine.The d... | 1,760,371,417.69387 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/25/radio-shack-rebirth-may-have-gone-awry-in-alleged-ponzi-like-scheme/ | Radio Shack Rebirth May Have Gone Awry In Alleged Ponzi-Like Scheme | Lewin Day | [
"News"
] | [
"business",
"investment",
"radio shack"
] | Oh, Radio Shack. What a beautiful place you once were, a commercial haven for those seeking RC cars, resistors, and universal remotes. Then, the downfall, as you veered away from your origins, only to lead to an ultimate collapse. More recently, the brand was supposed to return to new heights online… only to fall afoul of the Securities and Exchange Commission. (via
Yahoo Finance
,
Bloomberg
)
The Radio Shack brand was picked up a few years ago by a company known as Retail Ecommerce Ventures (REV). The company’s modus operandi was to take well-known but beleaguered brands and relaunch them as online-only operations. Beyond Radio Shack, REV also owned a number of other notable brand names, like Pier 1, Modell’s Sporting Goods, and Dress Barn.
Unfortunately, the Radio Shack rebirth probably won’t reach the stellar heights of the past. Namely, because REV has been accused of operating a Ponzi-like scheme by the SEC. Despite huge boasts allegedly made to investors, none of REV’s portfolio of brands were actually making profits, and the SEC has charged that the company was paying investor returns with cash raised from other investors — unsustainable, and a major no-no, legally speaking. In any case, the SEC charges apply directly to REV. The RadioShack brand has since been acquired by Unicomer Group, which operates the current online business, and has no ties to REV or its former operators.
We were cautiously optimistic
when we heard about the REV buyout back in 2020
, but at this point, it’s probably best to come to terms with the fact that Radio Shack won’t be returning to its former glory. The name will linger in our hearts for some time to come,
but the business we knew is long gone.
Sometimes it’s better to look to the future than to try and recreate the magic of the past, especially if you’re doing inappropriate things with other people’s money in the process. | 33 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8184109",
"author": "Chr El",
"timestamp": "2025-09-25T11:24:54",
"content": "Oof, too bad.Not like the relaunched RS would even have anything going for it except nostalgia…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8184115",
"a... | 1,760,371,417.63829 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/25/solar-powered-rc-boat-has-unlimited-range/ | Solar-Powered RC Boat Has Unlimited Range | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"boat",
"mppt",
"raspberry pi",
"remote control",
"satellite internet",
"solar panel"
] | For RC aircraft there are generally legal restrictions that require the craft to stay within line of sight of the operator, but an RC boat or car can in theory go as far as the signal will allow — provided there is ample telemetry to let the operator navigate. [Thingify] took this idea to the extreme with
a remote-controlled boat that connects to a satellite internet service and adds solar panels
for theoretically unlimited range, in more ways than one.
The platform for this boat is a small catamaran, originally outfitted with an electric powertrain running on a battery. Using a satellite internet connection not only allows [Thingify] to receive telemetry and pilot the craft with effectively unlimited range, but it’s a good enough signal to receive live video from one of a pair of cameras as well. At that point, the main limiting factor of the boat was the battery, so he added a pair of flexible panels on a custom aluminum frame paired with a
maximum power point tracking charge controller
to make sure the battery is topped off. He also configured it to use as much power as the panels bring in, keeping the battery fully charged and ready for nightfall where the boat will only maintain its position and wait for the sun to rise the next morning.
With this setup [Thingify] hopes to eventually circumnavigate Lake Alexandrina in Australia. Although he has a few boat design issues to work out first; on its maiden voyage the boat capsized due to its high center of gravity and sail-like solar panels. Still, it’s an improvement from the
earlier version of the craft we saw at the beginning of the year
, and we look forward to his next iteration and the successful voyage around this lake. | 5 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8184072",
"author": "bob",
"timestamp": "2025-09-25T08:44:49",
"content": "Flexible solar panels covering a sealed body which then doesn’t matter what direction is facing up.Electric motor.Batteries.GPS nav.ESP32/RPi/Arduino – to please HaD readership.Small enough not to appear on r... | 1,760,371,417.984011 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/24/coffee-by-command-the-speech2touch-voice-hack/ | Coffee By Command: The Speech2Touch Voice Hack | Heidi Ulrich | [
"cooking hacks",
"home hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"coffee",
"Franke A600",
"hid",
"picovoice",
"speech",
"stm32",
"usb",
"voice"
] | If you were to troll your colleagues, you can label your office coffee maker any day with a sticker that says ‘voice activated’. Now [edholmes2232] made it actually come true. With
Speech2Touch
, he grafts voice control onto a Franke A600 coffee machine using an STM32WB55 USB dongle and some clever firmware hacking.
The office coffee machine has been a suspect for hacking for years and years. Nearly 35 years ago, at Cambridge University, a webcam served
a live view of the office coffee pot
. It made sure nobody made the trip to the coffee pot for nothing. The funny, but in fact useless
HTTP status 418
was brought to life to state that the addressed server using the protocol was in fact a teapot, in answer to its refusal to brew coffee. Enter this hack – that could help you to coffee by shouting from your desk – if only your arms were long enough to hold your coffee cup in place.
Back to the details. The machine itself doesn’t support USB keyboards, but does accept a USB mouse, most likely as a last resort in case the touchscreen becomes irresponsive. That loophole is enough: by emulating touchscreen
HID packets
instead of mouse movement, the hack avoids clunky cursors and delivers a slick ‘sci-fi’ experience. The STM32 listens through an INMP441 MEMS mic, hands speech recognition to
Picovoice
, and then translates voice commands straight into touch inputs. Next, simply speaking to it taps the buttons for you.
It’s a neat example of sidestepping SDK lock-in. No reverse-engineering of the machine’s firmware, no shady soldering inside. Instead, it’s USB-level mischief, modular enough that the same trick could power voice control on other touchscreen-only appliances. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8184246",
"author": "purple6f9f83edef",
"timestamp": "2025-09-25T17:46:52",
"content": "“If you were to troll your colleagues, you can label your office coffee maker any day with a sticker that says ‘voice activated’.”You could do the same for your colleagues.",
"parent_id": nul... | 1,760,371,418.020685 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/24/its-a-bird-its-a-plane-its-an-air-breathing-satellite/ | It’s A Bird! It’s A Plane! It’s… An Air Breathing Satellite?! | Tyler August | [
"Space"
] | [
"ion propulsion",
"low earth orbit",
"satellite",
"very low earth orbit"
] | The big problem with Low Earth Orbit is, oddly enough, air resistance. Sure, there’s not enough air to breathe in space, but there is enough to create drag when you’re whipping around the planet at 28,000 km/h (17,000 mph) or more. Over time, that adds up to a decaying orbit. [Eager Space] recently did a video summarizing a paradoxical solution:
go even lower, and let the air work for you.
So called air-breathing satellites would hang out in very low earth orbit– still well above the Karman line, but below 300 km (186 miles)– where atmospheric drag is too dominant for the current “coast on momentum” satellite paradigm to work. There are advantages to going so low, chiefly for communications (less latency) and earth observation (higher resolutions). You just need to find a way to fight that drag and not crash within a couple of orbits.
It turns out this space isn’t totally empty (aside from the monoatomic oxygen) as missions have been at very low orbits using conventional,
Xenon-fueled ion engines
to counter drag. The xenon runs out pretty quick in this application, though, and those satellites all had fairly short lifetimes.
That’s where the air-breathing satellites come in. You don’t need a lot of thrust to stabilize against drag, after all, and the thin whisps of air at 200 km or 300 km above ground level should provide ample reaction mass for some kind of solar-electric ion engine. The devil is in the details, of course, and [Eager Space] spends 13 minutes discussing challenges (like corrosive monoatomic oxygen) and various proposals.
Whoever is developing these satellites, they could do worse than talk to [Jay Bowles], whose
air-breathing ion
thrusters have been
featured here
several times over the years. | 18 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8183975",
"author": "JSL",
"timestamp": "2025-09-25T02:35:01",
"content": "So how would the space/ground communications work on such a satellite, when the plasma produced by the atmospheric collision will effectively shield RF communications?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,... | 1,760,371,418.116298 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/24/meter-mods-make-radioactive-prospecting-more-enjoyable/ | Meter Mods Make Radioactive Prospecting More Enjoyable | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"AVR128DA28",
"background",
"geiger",
"prospecting",
"radiation",
"radioactivity",
"scintillation"
] | While we often get a detailed backstory of the projects we cover here at Hackaday, sometimes the genesis of a build is a bit of a mystery. Take [maurycyz]’s
radiation survey meter modifications
, for instance; we’re not sure why such a thing is needed, but we’re pretty glad we stumbled across it.
To be fair, [maurycyz] does give us a hint of what’s going on here by choosing the classic Ludlum Model 3 to modify. Built like a battleship, these meters would be great for field prospecting except that the standard G-M tube isn’t sensitive to gamma rays, the only kind of radiation likely not to be attenuated by soil. A better choice is a scintillation tube, but those greatly increase the background readings, making it hard to tease a signal from the noise.
To get around this problem and make rockhounding a little more enjoyable, [maurycyz] added a little digital magic to the mostly analog Ludlum. An AVR128 microcontroller taps into the stream of events the meter measures via the scintillation tube, and a little code subtracts the background radiation from the current count rate, translating the difference into an audible tone. This keeps [maurycyz]’s eyes on the rocks rather than on the meter needle, and makes it easier to find weakly radioactive or deeply buried specimens.
If you’re not ready to make the leap to a commercial survey meter, or if you just want to roll your own, we’ve got plenty of examples to choose from, from
minimalist
to
cyberpunkish
. | 1 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,418.055147 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/24/3d-printed-book-demonstrates-mechanical-actions/ | 3D Printed “Book” Demonstrates Mechanical Actions | Tyler August | [
"Art"
] | [
"3D printed gears",
"mechanical engineering",
"mechanism"
] | A book of mechanical actions is a wondrous thing — mechanically inclined children have lost collective decades pouring over them over the generations. What could possibly be better? Why, if the mechanisms in the book were present, and moved! That’s exactly what
[AxelMadeIt] produced for a recent video
.
Being just four pages, you might argue this is but a pamphlet. But since it takes up a couple inches of shelf space, it certainly looks like a book from the outside, which is exactly what [AxelMadeIt] was going for. To get a more book-like spine, his hinge design sacrificed opening flat, but since the pages are single-sided, that’s no great sacrifice.
At only 6 mm (1/4″) thick, finding printable mechanisms that could actually fit inside was quite a challenge. If he was machining everything out of brass, that would be room for oodles of layers. But [Axel] wanted to print the parts for this book, so the mechanisms need to be fairly thick. One page has a Roberts linkage and a vault-locking mechanism, another has planetary gears, with angled teeth to keep them from falling out. Finally, the first page has a
geneva mechanism
, and an escapement, both driven by a
TPU belt drive
.
All pages are driven from an electric motor that is buried in the last page of the “book”, along with its motor, battery, and a couple of micro-switches to turn it on when you open the book and off again when you reach the last page. Rather than a description of the mechanisms, like most books of mechanical actions, [Axel] used multi-material printing to put lovely poems on each page. A nice pro-tip is that “Futura”, a font made famous by flying to the moon, works very well when printed this way. If you just want to watch him flip through, jump to 8:00 in the video.
This reminds us of another project we once featured,
which animated 2100 mechanical mechanisms
. While this book can’t offer near that variety, it makes up for it in tactility. | 22 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "8183807",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-09-24T20:17:20",
"content": "Awesome!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8183844",
"author": "Thomas",
"timestamp": "2025-09-24T21:37:33",
"content": "Marvelous! I want o... | 1,760,371,418.177015 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/24/floss-weekly-episode-848-open-the-podbay-doors-siri/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 848: Open The Podbay Doors, Siri | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"FLOSS Weekly",
"home-assistant",
"Open Home"
] | This week
Jonathan
and
Rob
chat with Paulus Schoutsen about Home Assistant, ESPHome, and Music Assistant, all under the umbrella of the Open Home Foundation. Watch to see Paulus convince Rob and Jonathan that they need to step up their home automation games!
https://www.home-assistant.io/
https://esphome.io/
https://www.music-assistant.io/
https://www.openhomefoundation.org/
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on
our YouTube Channel
? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or contact the guest and have them contact us!
Take a look at the schedule here
.
Direct Download
in DRM-free MP3.
If you’d rather read along,
here’s the transcript for this week’s episode
.
Places to follow the FLOSS Weekly Podcast:
Spotify
RSS
Theme music: “Newer Wave” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under
Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8185372",
"author": "Gus Mueller",
"timestamp": "2025-09-29T02:16:35",
"content": "They mentioned solar inverters as something to monitor via Home Assistant. This is essential if you want to be able to control loads (such as EV charging) to maximize charging when there is extra ene... | 1,760,371,418.214299 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/24/retrotechtacular-the-ferguson-system/ | Retrotechtacular: The Ferguson System | Jenny List | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"farming",
"Ferguson",
"three point linkage",
"tractors"
] | Of the many great technological leaps made in the middle of the 20th century, one of the ones with perhaps the greatest impact on our modern life takes a back seat behind the more glamorous worlds of electronics, aeronautics, or computing. But the ancestor of the modern tractor has arguably had more of an impact on the human condition in 2025 than that of the modern computer, and if you’d been down on the farm in the 1940s you might have seen one.
The Ferguson system refers to the three-point implement linkage you’ll find on all modern tractors, the brainchild of the Irish engineer Harry Ferguson.
The film below the break
is a marketing production for American farmers, and it features the Ford-built American version of the tractor known to Brits and Europeans as the Ferguson TE20.
“
Ferguson TE20 2006
” by [Malcolmxl5]
The evolution of the tractor started as a mechanisation of horse-drawn agriculture, using either horse-drawn implements or ones derived from them. While the basic shape of a modern tractor as a four wheel machine with large driving wheels at the rear evolved during this period, other types of tractor could be found such as
rein-operated machines
intended to directly replace the horse, or
two-wheeled machines with their own ecosystem of attachments
.
As the four-wheeled machines grew in size and their implements moved beyond the size of their horse-drawn originals, they started to encounter a new set of problems which the film below demonstrates in detail. In short, a plough simply dragged by a tractor exerts a turning force on the machine, giving the front a tendency to lift and the rear a lack of traction. The farmers of the 1920s and 1930s attempted to counter this by loading their tractors with extra weights, at the expense of encumbering them and compromising their usefulness. Ferguson solved this problem by rigidly attaching the plough to the tractor through his three-point linkage while still allowing for flexibility in its height. The film demonstrates this in great detail, showing the hydraulic control and the feedback provided through a valve connected to the centre linkage spring.
A modern tractor is invariably much larger than the TE20, will have all-wheel drive, a wider-spaced three-point linkage for much larger implements, and a much more sophisticated transmission. But the principle is exactly the same, and in use it provides an identical level of utility to the original. While the TE20 is most likely to appear in over-restored-form at a tractor show in 2025 running on an odd mix of
paraffin and petrol
they can still sometimes be found at work, and albeit a few decades ago now I’ve even taken a turn on one myself. What struck me at the time was how small a machine it is compared to the heavyweight drawbar tractors it replaced; the effect of the three point linkage on ground pressure was such that it simply didn’t need the extra size. It’s equivalent to what we today would refer to as a yard tractor or an orchard tractor, the last one I drove being used for ground maintenance at a sports pitch. I have to admit that if I saw one in need of TLC at the right price I’d be sorely tempted.
So next time you see a tractor, take a look at its three-point linkage and think for a moment of those 1940s machines it’s derived from. It’s likely almost everything you eat has at some point been touched by that piece of machinery. | 37 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "8183737",
"author": "bob",
"timestamp": "2025-09-24T17:20:46",
"content": "I think every operator is familiar with the three point linkage at this stage. It was found with ferguson’s method of placing the lift cylinder inside the back end that the cast iron cylinders could occasion... | 1,760,371,418.294472 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/24/pill-sized-scoop-of-your-internals/ | Pill Sized Scoop Of Your Internals | Ian Bos | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"bio-robotics",
"biomedical",
"biomedical engineering",
"magnetics",
"research"
] | Taking a look inside the human body has never been easier — just swallow a camera in the shape of a pill. However, what is not quite as easy is retrieving a piece of whatever you’re viewing. This is exactly what researchers from HIT Shenzhen have attempted to solve with
their magnetic capsule bot.
When traditional procedures want to take a sample somewhere in the intestinal tract they generally require somewhat invasive procedures sticking something up…well you know. With this pill, robot magnetic control allows physicians to choose exactly where and when to take a sample, all without shoving unpleasant objects into…again you know.
A magnetic field is generated to open the capsule and suck liquids inside. This traps a sample that can be retrieved through later bowel movements. The technology hasn’t been tested on a living patient yet, but but animal trials are planned for the foreseeable future.
Check out the fine details with the
paper itself here.
Biomedical engineering is always an interesting topic with so much potential for more hacking. We at Hackaday are no strangers to this wonderful
world of bodily hacks
. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8183701",
"author": "Danny Andreev",
"timestamp": "2025-09-24T16:18:12",
"content": "reminds me ofhttps://endiatx.com/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8183978",
"author": "Jose",
"timestamp": "2025-09-25T02:40:06",
"... | 1,760,371,418.408668 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/24/how-regulations-are-trying-to-keep-home-battery-installs-safe/ | How Regulations Are Trying To Keep Home Battery Installs Safe | Lewin Day | [
"Current Events",
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"battery",
"home battery",
"solar battery"
] | The advent of rooftop solar power generation was a huge step forward for renewable energy. No longer was generating electricity the sole preserve of governments and major commercial providers; now just about any homeowner could start putting juice into the grid for a few thousand dollars. Since then, we’ve seen the rise of the home battery, which both promises to make individual homes more self sufficient, whilst also allowing them to make more money selling energy to the grid where needed.
Home batteries are becoming increasingly popular, but as with any new home utility, there come risks. After all, a large capacity battery can present great danger if not installed or used correctly. In the face of these dangers, authorities in jurisdictions around the world have been working to ensure home batteries are installed with due regard for the safety of the occupants of the average home.
Hot Stuff
Home batteries have become a popular addition to home solar systems. Credit: Batterlution, CC BY-SA 4.0
Home batteries exist for one reason—to store electrical energy for later use. Currently, this is most effectively achieved with the use of lots of lithium-ion cells. While the dangers of lithium-ion cells are often overstated and dramatized, they do nonetheless pose a safety risk when things go wrong. There is of course, the electrical danger, however adherence to proper wiring standards and such typically manages that problem. The greater concern when it comes to home battery installations is around fire. If a large bank of lithium cells catches alight, either through its own malfunction or an external cause, the resultant blaze can be fierce, and incredibly difficult to extinguish. It is for this reason that authorities have developed extensive regulations around home battery installations. The aim is generally to avoid the likelihood of ignition or fire wherever possible, and limit the possible harms if such a thing should occur.
Basically, you don’t want a massive lithium battery fire to overwhelm you with smoke and flames, trap you in your home, or otherwise cause great injury. Thus, most jurisdictions post strict regulations about where a battery may be installed in a typical home. For example, in the US, NFPA rules mandate that residential batteries can only be installed in garages, on exterior walls or outdoors at least three feet away from windows, or in utility closets and storage spaces. Regulations in other jurisdictions are similarly strict; Australian rules ban installations under stairs or ventilation ducts, for example, along with any installations in ceilings or wall cavities. It might feel convenient to tuck batteries away where they can’t be seen, but the risks are considered too great. It’s just generally considered a bad idea to pack your walls or roof full of highly-combustible material.
Raised installations are common in areas where it’s desirable to avoid any vehicle impact risk. Most jurisdictions also mandate installing batteries at certain minimal distances from areas like bedrooms or other “habited” areas. Credit:
Rsparks3
, CC0
Often, many jurisdictions also require some level of non-combustible barrier to protect nearby structures that are made of combustible material. For example, if installing a battery near a wooden part of a building, regulations may insist upon the use of materials like brick or concrete that won’t readily catch alight if the battery enters thermal runaway. Capacity limits are also typical, as it’s undesirable to have an excessively large battery in a residential installation where it could one day become an unstoppable inferno in an inhabited area.
It might then seem, based on all the safety concerns around putting big batteries near inhabited structures, that a more remote installation would be best. However, standalone outdoor installations are often also subject to their own restrictions. For example, in Australia’s hot climate, outdoor installs must be protected to some degree from direct sunlight to avoid overheating issues that could lead to disaster. Garage or garage-adjacent installations generally require protection against potential vehicles impacts, too. For example, the NFPA 855 standard requires the use of hefty 4-inch bollards set 3-feet deep in concrete to protect against accidental vehicle impact in commercial installations, while noting that any risk of impact is unacceptable for residential garage installations.
These are just some of the hurdles you will have to clear if you wish to install a large storage battery in your home. There are so many others, from regulations around approved batteries and inverters, wiring rules, as well as the necessary signage to indicate to tradespeople and first responders that a large battery is connected to the home’s electrical supply. It can be a lot to take in, though for the average customer, it’s up to their home battery installer to ensure compliance in these regards. If you’re looking at such an installation, though, and you’re wondering why you can’t put your battery exactly where you like, just know that there are likely many good reasons behind it! | 81 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "8183654",
"author": "Donald",
"timestamp": "2025-09-24T14:19:15",
"content": "That Batterlution installation looks like shit.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8183686",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-09-24T15:41:13"... | 1,760,371,418.513375 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/24/who-wants-a-rusty-old-smartphone/ | Who Wants A Rusty Old Smartphone? | Tyler August | [
"blackberry hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"Redox OS",
"rustlang",
"smartphone hacking",
"uboot"
] | If we’re talking about oxidized iron… probably nobody. If we’re talking about Rust the programming language, well, that might be a different story. Google agrees, and is working on bringing the language into Android. That’s not enough for [Paul Sanja],
who has the first Redox OS smartphone.
It’s alive!
Redox OS is a Unix-like
operating system written entirely in Rust, and somehow we haven’t covered it until now. Unlike Asterinas,
a project to recreate the Linux kernel in Rust
, Redox has few pretensions of being anything but its own thing, and that’s great! On desktop, Redox has a working windowing system and many utilities, including a basic browser in the form of NetSurf.
It’s claims to be source-compatible with Linux and BSD programs, and partially POSIX compliant. A certain someone around here might
want to try it as a daily driver.
The header image is a desktop screenshot, because there’s more to see there and it fits our aspect ratio.
On smartphones, it… boots. Some smartphones, anyway. It’s actually a big first step. That booting is possible is actually thanks to the great work put in by the Postmarket OS team to get Uboot working
on select android devices.
That uboot loader doesn’t need to load the Linux-based Postmarket OS. It can be used for anything compatible. Like, say, Redox OS, as [Paul] shows us.
Of course, Redox OS has no drivers for the touchscreen or anything else, so at the moment that rusty smartphone can only boot to a login screen. But thanks to Rust, you can rest assured that login screen hasn’t got any memory leaks! Jokes aside, this is a great start and we’re hoping to see more.
Redox is a promising project on mobile or desktop, and its development seems a much better use of time and effort than fighting over Rust in the Linux kernel. | 57 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8183601",
"author": "Maria",
"timestamp": "2025-09-24T11:18:48",
"content": "I wish people would sit back and reconsider whether POSIX API from 1970s designed to work as embedded system in telephone exchanges is really fit for computing problems of 2025 – this includes ergonomics. P... | 1,760,371,418.611097 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/24/rtings-10-year-equivalent-tv-longevity-update-with-many-casualties/ | RTINGS 10-Year Equivalent TV Longevity Update With Many Casualties | Maya Posch | [
"hardware",
"home entertainment hacks"
] | [
"endurance",
"LCD TV",
"oled",
"quantum dot"
] | For the past two-and-half years Canadian consumer testing outfit RTINGS has been running an accelerated aging experiment across a large number of TVs available to a North-American audience.
In their most recent update
, we not only find out about the latest casualties, but also the impending end of the experiment after 18,000 hours — as the TVs are currently failing left and right as they accelerate up the ascending ramp of the
bathtub curve
.
Some of these LEDs are dead, others are just wired in series.
The dumbest failure type has to be the TVs (such as the Sony X90J) where the failure of a single dead backlight LED causes the whole TV to stop working along with series-wired LED backlights where one dead LED takes out a whole strip or zone. Other failures include degrading lightguides much as with
our last update coverage
last year, which was when edge-lit TVs were keeling over due to overheating issues.
Detailed updates can be found on the
constantly updating log
for the experiment, such as on the failed quantum dot diffusor plate in a TCL QLED TV, as the quantum dots have degraded to the point of green being completely missing. Although some OLEDs are still among the ‘living’, they’re showing severe degradation – as pictured above – after what would be the equivalent of ten years of typical usage.
Once the experiment wraps up it will be fascinating to see who the survivors are, and what the chances are of still using that shiny new TV ten years from now. | 35 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8183578",
"author": "ALX_skater",
"timestamp": "2025-09-24T09:16:50",
"content": "This is what you get for watching TV.#pcmr 4 lyfe",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8183598",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "20... | 1,760,371,418.737866 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/23/dodecahedron-speaker-is-biblically-accurate/ | Dodecahedron Speaker Is Biblically Accurate | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"dodecahedron",
"speaker"
] | Once upon a time, many radios and TVs only came with a single (mono) speaker. Then someone decided all audio hardware should have as many speakers as we have ears. That was until [Olivia] came along,
and whipped up a dodecahedron speaker as an educational piece for workshops
. Really, it shows us that twelve speakers should be the minimum standard going forward.
The speaker relies on a 3D-printed frame. The dodecahedron shell is assembled from 12 individual faces, each of which hosts a small individual speaker. Multichannel audio fans shouldn’t get too excited—all twelve speakers are wired to the same input in four groups of three, making this essentially an exceptionally complicated mono device. It might sound silly, but it’s actually a great way to deliver audio in many directions all at once. [Olivia] even went to the effort of running some sweep tests in anechoic and reverberation chambers to see how they performed, which is a fun bit of extra detail in the build log.
[Olivia] notes that these unique speakers are great as a beginner workshop build. They’re easy to modify in various ways to suit different ideas or levels of ability, and they can be made for less than $30 a pop. We’d love to see an advanced version that maybe packed in a lithium battery and a Bluetooth module to make them a
standalone audio device
. Video after the break. | 27 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8183541",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2025-09-24T05:50:19",
"content": "im still a “speakers found on the side of a road” kind of guy. just make sure rodents dont live inside. ask me how my know, and why my cats are fat.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repli... | 1,760,371,418.848917 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/23/how-a-failed-video-format-spawned-a-new-kind-of-microscope/ | How A Failed Video Format Spawned A New Kind Of Microscope | Lewin Day | [
"classic hacks",
"home entertainment hacks"
] | [
"microscope",
"RCA",
"videodisc"
] | The video cassette tape was really the first successful home video format; discs just couldn’t compete back in the early days. That’s not to say nobody tried, however, with RCA’s VideoDisc a valiant effort that ultimately fell flat on its face. However, the forgotten format did have one benefit, in that it led to the development of an entirely new kind of microscope,
as explained by
IEEE Spectrum.
The full story is well worth the read; the short version is that it all comes down to capacitance. RCA’s VideoDisc format was unique in that it didn’t use reflective surfaces or magnetic states to represent data. Instead, the data was effectively stored as capacitance changes. As a conductive stylus rode through an undulating groove in a carbon-impregnated PVC disc, the capacitance between the stylus and the disc changed. This capacitance was effectively placed into a resonant circuit, where it would alter the frequency over time, delivering an FM signal that could be decoded into video and audio by the VideoDisc player.
The VideoDisc had a capacitance sensor that could detect such fine changes in capacitance, that it led to the development of the Scanning Capacitance Microscope (SCM). The same techniques used to read and inspect VideoDiscs for quality control could be put to good use in the field of semiconductors. The sensors were able to be used to detect tiny changes in capacitance from dopants in a semiconductor sample, and the SCM soon became an important tool in the industry.
It’s perhaps a more inspiring discovery than when cheeky troublemakers figured out you could use
BluRay diodes to pop balloons
. Still fun, though. An advertisement for the RCA VideoDisc is your video after the break. | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8183514",
"author": "Derek Tombrello",
"timestamp": "2025-09-24T02:45:43",
"content": "I still have hundreds of these discs and several of the players. (as well as LaserDisc and Betamax players and media, too)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,418.787775 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/23/play-capacitor-cupid-with-the-matchmaker/ | Play Capacitor Cupid With TheMatchmaker | Donald Papp | [
"classic hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"capacitor matching",
"CD4013B",
"diy",
"test equipment"
] | Occasionally a design requires capacitors that are
much
closer to being identical in value to one another than the usual tolerance ranges afford. Precision matching of components from parts on hand might sound like a needle-in-a-haystack problem, but not with [Stephen Woodward]’s
Capacitor Matchmaker
design.
The larger the output voltage, the greater the mismatch between capacitors A and B.
The Matchmaker is a small circuit intended to be attached to a DVM, with the output voltage indicating whether two capacitors (A and B) are precisely matched in value. If they are
not
equal, the voltage output indicates the degree of the mismatch as well as which is the larger of the two.
The core of the design is complementary excitation of the two capacitors (the CD4013B dual flip-flop achieves this) which results in a measurable signal if the two capacitors are different; nominally 50 mV per % of mismatch. Output polarity indicates which of the capacitors is the larger one. In the case of the two capacitors being equal, the charges cancel out.
Can’t precision-matched capacitors be purchased? Absolutely, but doing so is not always an option. As [Stephen] points out, selection of such components is limited and they come at an added cost. If one’s design requires extra-tight tolerances, requires capacitor values or types not easily available as precision pairs, or one’s budget simply doesn’t allow for the added cost, then the DIY approach makes a lot more sense.
If you’re going to go down this road, [Stephen] shares an extra time-saving tip: use insulated gloves to handle the capacitors being tested. Heating up a capacitor before testing it — even just from one’s fingers — can have a measurable effect.
[Stephen]’s got a knack for insightful electronic applications. Check out his
PWMPot
, a simple DIY circuit that can be an awfully good stand-in for a digital potentiometer. | 5 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8183225",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-09-23T12:47:55",
"content": "There used to be a lot of DIY hobbyist test gear in the past which used a DMM as the front end. Its like I totally forgot about them!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,371,418.660787 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/22/reviving-a-scrapped-sound-blaster-2-0-isa-soundcard/ | Reviving A Scrapped Sound Blaster 2.0 ISA Soundcard | Maya Posch | [
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"Creative",
"sound blaster"
] | What do you do when you find a ISA Sound Blaster 2.0 card in a pile of scrap? Try to repair the damage on it to give it a second shot at life, of course. This is what [Adrian Black]
did with one hapless victim
, with the card in question being mostly in good condition minus an IC that had been rather rudely removed. The core Creative CT1336A and Yamaha YM3812 ICs were still in place, so the task was to figure out what IC was missing, find a replacement and install it.
The
CT1350
is the final revision of the original 8-bit ISA Sound Blaster card, with a number of upgrades that makes this actually quite a desirable soundcard. The CT1350B revision featured here on a card from 1994 was the last to retain compatibility with the C/MS chips featured on the original SB card. After consulting with [Alex] from the
Bits und Bolts
YT channel, it was found that not only is the missing IC merely an Intel 8051-based Atmel MCU, but replacements are readily available. After [Alex] sent him a few replacements with two versions of the firmware preflashed, all [Adrian] had to do was install one.
Before installation, [Adrian] tested the card to see whether the expected remaining functionality like the basic OPL2 soundchip worked, which was the case. Installing the new MCU got somewhat hairy as multiple damaged pads and traces were discovered, probably because the old chip was violently removed. Along the way of figuring out how important these damaged pads are, a reverse-engineered
schematic
of the card was discovered, which was super helpful.
Some awkward soldering later, the card’s Sound Blaster functionality sprung back to life, after nudging the volume dial on the card up from zero. Clearly the missing MCU was the only major issue with the card, along with the missing IO bracket, for which
a replacement
was printed after the video was recorded. | 7 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8183341",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-09-23T17:59:31",
"content": "i definitely uderstand the nostalgia factor of a bit of 1990s PC hardware, but it seems to me like it would’ve been easier to buy a soundblaster on ebay than to use one that’s already suffered a vicious at... | 1,760,371,418.90014 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/22/blue-alchemist-promises-rocket-fuel-from-moon-dust/ | Blue Alchemist Promises Rocket Fuel From Moon Dust | Tyler August | [
"chemistry hacks",
"Space"
] | [
"electrolysis",
"in situ resource utilization",
"IRSU",
"lunar exploration",
"rocket fuel"
] | Usually when an alchemist shows up promising to turn rocks into gold, you should run the other way. Sure, rocket fuel isn’t gold, but on the moon it’s worth more than its weight in the yellow stuff. So there would be reason to be skeptical if this “Blue Alchemist” was actually an alchemist, and not a
chemical reactor under development by the Blue Origin corporation
.
The chemistry in question is quite simple, really: take moon dust, which is rich in aluminum silicate minerals, and melt the stuff. Then it’s just a matter of electrolysis to split the elements, collecting the gaseous oxygen for use in your rockets. So: moon dust to air and metals, just add power. Lots and lots of power.
Melting rock takes a lot of temperature, and the molten rock doesn’t electrolyse quite as easily
as the water we’re more familiar with
splitting. Still, it’s very doable; this is
how aluminum is produced on Earth,
though notably not from the sorts of minerals you find in moon dust. Given the image accompanying the press release, perhaps on the moon the old expression will be modified to “make oxygen while the sun shines”.
Hackaday wasn’t around to write about it, but forward-looking researchers at NASA, expecting just such a chemical reactor to be developed someday, proposed an
Aluminum/Liquid Oxygen slurry monopropellant rocket back in the 1990s.
That’s not likely to be flying any time soon, but of course even with the
Methalox rockets in vogue these days,
there are appreciable cost savings to leaving your oxygen and home. And we’re not biologists, but maybe Astronauts would like to breathe some of this oxygen stuff? We’ve heard it’s good for your health. | 16 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8183120",
"author": "CMH62",
"timestamp": "2025-09-23T02:45:31",
"content": "There was a very good treatment of making fuel from natural resources on Mars, as documented in the very fine book “The Case For Mars” by Robert Zubrin.https://tinyurl.com/2eu6wu3e",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,371,418.954863 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/22/full-scale-styrofoam-delorean-finally-takes-flight/ | Full Scale Styrofoam DeLorean Finally Takes Flight | Tyler August | [
"drone hacks"
] | [
"carbon fiber",
"carbon fiber rod",
"cnc",
"expanded polystyrene foam",
"flying car",
"multicopter",
"practical effect"
] | It’s 2025 and we still don’t have flying cars — but we’ve got this
full-scale flying DeLorean prop
from [Brian Brocken], and that’s almost as good. It’s airborne and on camera in the video embedded below.
We’ve written about this project before; first about the
mega-sized CNC router
[Brian] used to carve the DeLorean body out of Styrofoam panels, and an update last year that
showed the aluminum frame
and motorized louvers and doors.
Well, the iconic gull-wing doors are still there, and still motorized, and they’ve been joined by a tire-tilting mechanism for a
Back To The Future
film-accurate flight mode. With the wheels down, the prop can use them to steer and drive, looking for all the world like an all-white DMC-12.
The aluminum frame we covered before is no longer in the picture, though. It’s been replaced by a lighter, stiffer version made from carbon fibre. It’s still a ladder frame, but now with carbon fiber tubes and
“forged” carbon fiber
corners made of tow and resin packed in 3D printed molds. There’s been a tonne of work documented on the build log since we last covered this project, so be sure to check it out for all the details.
Even in unpainted white Styrofoam, it’s surreal to see this thing take off; it’s the ultimate in practical effects, and totally worth the wait. Honestly, with talent like [Brian] out there its a wonder anyone still bothers with CGI, economics aside.
Thanks to [Brian] for the tip! If you have a project you’ve hit a milestone with, we’d love to see it, even if it doesn’t trigger the 80s nostalgia gland we apparently all have embedded in our brains these days.
Send us a tip! | 13 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8183127",
"author": "Bruce G. Gettel Jr.",
"timestamp": "2025-09-23T03:40:48",
"content": "SICK. I have a love / hate relationship with most of the stuff on HAD. I love pretty much all of it and I hate that I have zero chance of replicating any of it. I hope this DeLorean can go ... | 1,760,371,419.007761 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/22/building-your-own-dvb-s2-receiver/ | Building Your Own DVB-S2 Receiver | Lewin Day | [
"home entertainment hacks",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"dvb-s2",
"satellite receiver",
"satellite TV",
"tv"
] | Generally, a digital TV tuner is something you buy rather than something you make yourself. However, [Johann] has always been quite passionate about the various DVB transmission standards,
and decided he wanted to build his own receiver just for the fun of it.
[Johann]’s build is designed to tune in DVB-S2 signals transmitted from satellites, and deliver that video content over a USB connection. When beginning his build, he noted it was difficult to find DVB reception modules for sale as off-the-shelf commercial parts. With little to nothing publicly available, he instead purchased a “Formuler F1 Plug & Play DVB-S2 HDTV Sat Tuner” and gutted it for the Cosy TS2M08-HFF11 network interface module (NIM) inside. He then paired this with a Cypress CY7C68013A USB bridge to get the data out to a PC. [Johann] then whipped up a Linux kernel driver to work with the device.
[Johann] doesn’t have hardcore data on how his receiver performs, but he reports that it “works for me.” He uses it in South Germany to tune in the Astra 19.2E signal.
We don’t talk a lot about DVB these days, since so much video content now comes to us over the Internet. However, we have still featured
some nifty DVB hacks in the past.
If you’re out there tinkering with your own terrestrial or satellite TV hardware, don’t hesitate to
notify the tipsline! | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8183052",
"author": "g3gg0",
"timestamp": "2025-09-22T20:03:18",
"content": "Congratulations, really good work :DMy approach with ESP32 sits on a pile of other unfinished stuff for now.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8183069",
... | 1,760,371,419.061045 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/22/robot-balances-ball-on-a-plate/ | Robot Balances Ball On A Plate | Lewin Day | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"ball balancing",
"pid control",
"robot"
] | Imagine trying to balance a heavy metal ball bearing on a cafeteria tray. It’s not the easiest thing in the world! In fact, it’s perhaps a task better automated,
as [skulkami3000] demonstrates with this robotic build.
The heart of the build is a flat platform fitted with a resistive touchscreen panel on top. The panel is hooked up to a Teensy 4.0 microcontroller. When a heavy ball bearing is placed on the touch panel, the Teensy is thus able to accurately read its position. It then controls a pair of NEMA 17 stepper motors via TCM2208 drivers in order to tilt the panel in two axes in order to keep the ball in the centre of the panel. Thanks to its quick reactions and accurate sensing, it does a fine job of keeping the ball centred, even when the system is perturbed.
Projects like these are a great way to learn
the basics of PID control
. Understanding these concepts will serve you well in all sorts of engineering contexts, from controlling industrial processes to building capable quadcopter aircraft. | 26 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8183022",
"author": "fluffy",
"timestamp": "2025-09-22T18:45:37",
"content": "A fun next step for this would be to account for the velocity and acceleration to try to make it do a dead stop at the target location instead of oscillating like a dampened spring.",
"parent_id": null... | 1,760,371,419.123349 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/22/jennys-daily-drivers-kde-linux/ | Jenny’s Daily Drivers: KDE Linux | Jenny List | [
"computer hacks",
"Featured",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"daily driver",
"kde",
"kde linux",
"linux",
"operating system"
] | Over this series test-driving operating systems, we’ve tried to bring you the unusual, the esoteric, or the less mainstream among the world of the desktop OS. It would become very boring very quickly of we simply loaded up a succession of Linux distros, so we’ve avoided simply testing the latest Debian, or Fedora.
That’s not to say that there’s no space for a Linux distro on these pages if it is merited though, as for example we marked its 30th anniversary with a look at Slackware. If a distro has something interesting to offer it’s definitely worth a look, which brings us to today’s subject.
KDE Linux
is an eponymous distro produced by the makers of the KDE Plasma desktop environment and associated applications, and it serves as a technical demo of what KDE can be, a reference KDE-based distribution, and an entirely new desktop Linux distribution all in one. As such, it always has the latest in all things KDE, but aside from that perhaps what makes it even more interesting is that as an entirely new distribution it has a much more modern structure than many of the ones we’re used to that have their roots in decades past. Where in a traditional distro the system is built from the ground up on install, KDE Linux is an immutable base distribution, in which successive versions are supplied as prebuilt images on which the user space is overlaid. This makes it very much worth a look.
New From The First Boot
The first thing any would-be KDE Linux user in 2025 should understand is that this bears no relation to the previous KDE Neon distro, it’s a very new distro indeed, and still at an alpha testing phase. That’s not to say it’s not very usable, but it’s worth remembering that for now it’s not something you should trust your digital existence to. Stripping away the cruft of legacy distros is evident right from the start, as even the USB installer will only boot in UEFI mode. You might be surprised how many machines try to boot external drives in BIOS mode by default, but this one requires a trip to your motherboard settings to force UEFI. The USB disk boots straight to a KDE desktop from which you can run the installer, and as you might expect, everything is graphical. That immutable base delivers probably the most hassle-free install process of any modern Linux system, and in no time you’re booting your machine into KDE Linux.
It’s KDE Plasma, not much more to say.
KDE is a very slick desktop, and this distro gives you the environment at its most well-oiled. I’m a GNOME user in my day to day life, but I say that not in some vi-versus-emacs sense of a software holy war; this is an environment in which everything is just right where you expect it. The sense of hitting the ground running is high here.
KDE Linux does not have a traditional package manager due to its immutable nature, but we’re told it is capable of using Arch packages. Instead of a package manager it has Discover, which handles both updates and finding applications as prepackaged Flatpaks. As
someone who’s had a very bad experience with Ubuntu’s frankly awful Snap packaging
, I am instinctively suspicious of packaged applications, but I have to concede the experience of using Flatpak is much less painful than the Ubuntu equivalent. I installed my usual LibreOffice and GIMP alongside Firefox, and got on with writing and editing some Hackaday.
So, What’s It Like To Use?
Hardly powerhouse hardware to test this system.
My test machine for this distro is not particularly quick, packing as it does a dual-core Sandy Bridge Pentium G630 and six gigabytes of memory. It’s saved from terminal sluggishness by having an SSD, but this is still decade old hardware at best. I selected it on purpose to gain a real idea of the performance; I know this machine is acceptable for day to day use running Manjaro so it gives me a good point for comparison.
Since I’ve been using it now for a few days to do my work, I guess KDE Linux makes the grade. There are none of the endless wait dialogues I got with Ubuntu Snaps on a far faster machine, and while you can certainly feel the age of the hardware at times, it’s just as usable as the native Manjaro installation on the same hardware.
You come into contact with that immutable base every time you reboot your system, as recent upgrades appear in the boot menu. If something is wrong with the latest base version then booting back into the previous one is particularly easy and seamless. The disadvantage is that you won’t have all the nuts-and-bolts configuration you are used to with more conventional distros, and some software such as older Nvidia graphics card drivers may have problems.
So in KDE Linux, there’s a new-from-the-ground-up distribution that not only has the reference implementation of KDE, but also a well-thought-out and modern structure behind it. It’s alpha software at the moment so you may not want to make the jump just yet, but it definitely doesn’t feel like an alpha. This is probably the most pain-free Linux install and user experience I have ever had. It’s a definite everyday contender, and over the last three decades I must have installed a large number of different distros. If they can keep it maintained and reach a stable version there’s no reason why this shouldn’t become one of the go-to desktop distributions, which as I see it is quite an achievement. Well done KDE! | 43 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "8183018",
"author": "xChris",
"timestamp": "2025-09-22T18:43:31",
"content": "@Jenny, could you please share any experience working with USB devices like USB oscilloscopes/logic analysers or other devices like EEPROM writers or eg Greaseweasle , because the last time I tried to use ... | 1,760,371,419.206157 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/23/build-your-own-6k-camera/ | Build Your Own 6K Camera | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"C-mount",
"camera"
] | [Curious Scientist] has been working with some image sensors. The latest project around it is
a 6K camera
. Of course, the sensor gives you a lot of it, but it also requires some off-the-shelf parts and, of course, some 3D printed components.
An off-the-shelf part of a case provides a reliable C mount. There’s also an IR filter in a 3D-printed bracket.
The processor gets hot, so he used different heat sinks and a fan, too. Overall, this isn’t much custom electronics, but this is an excellent example of assembling existing parts with high-quality 3D printed components.
Heat-set inserts provide a tripod mount. There’s also a custom HDMI monitor mount if you don’t want to use your phone as a viewfinder. One neat oddity that helps is a USB-A cable that splits into three USB-C connectors. Of course, only one of them has data lines. The other two feed power to different parts of the camera.
A good-looking build. At a glance, you could easily think this was a commercial product. We do like these digital camera builds, but we also find
3D printed film cameras fascinating
. If 6K is too much for you, you can always
downsize
. | 17 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8183519",
"author": "Ject",
"timestamp": "2025-09-24T03:12:11",
"content": "It’s a cool project and all, but I have a pet peve about titles like this. It’s like saying: “I built a 6k camera using only a 3D printer and a 6k camera”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replie... | 1,760,371,419.258739 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/23/calculator-battery-mod-lets-you-go-the-distance/ | Calculator Battery Mod Lets You Go The Distance | Dan Maloney | [
"Battery Hacks"
] | [
"calculator",
"casio",
"FXCG50",
"lipo",
"mcp1640",
"TP4056"
] | Disposable batteries seem so 1990s. Sure, it’s nice to be able to spend a couple of bucks at the drugstore and get a flashlight or TV remote back in the game, but when the device is a daily driver, rechargeable batteries sure seem to make more financial sense. Unfortunately, what makes sense to the end user doesn’t always make sense to manufacturers, so
rolling your own rechargeable calculator battery pack
might be your best option.
This slick hack comes to us from [Magmabow], who uses a Casio FXCG50 calculator, a known battery hog. With regular use, it goes through a set of four alkaline AA batteries every couple of months, which adds up quickly. In search of a visually clean build, [Magmabow] based the build around the biggest LiPo pillow-pack he could find that would fit inside the empty battery compartment, and planned to tap into the calculator’s existing USB port for charging. A custom PCB provides charging control and boosts the nominal 3.7-volt output of the battery to the 5-ish volts the calculator wants to see. The PCB design is quite clever; it spans across the battery compartment, with its output feeding directly into the spring contacts normally used for the AAs. A 3D-printed insert keeps the LiPo and the PCB in place inside the battery compartment.
Almost no modifications to the calculator are needed, other than a couple of bodge wires to connect the battery pack to the calculator’s USB port. The downside is that the calculator’s battery status indicator won’t work anymore since the controller will just shut the 5-volt output down when the LiPo is discharged. It seems like there might be a simple fix for that, but implementing it on such a small PCB could be quite a challenge, in which case
a calculator with a little more room to work with
might be nice. | 23 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8183406",
"author": "Clancydaenlightened",
"timestamp": "2025-09-23T20:15:36",
"content": "Or just get a ti nspire cx or cas that already has a USB rechargeable batteryArm CPU, and like 64mb of ram etc",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"commen... | 1,760,371,419.493313 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/23/automatic-feeder-keeps-fish-sated/ | Automatic Feeder Keeps Fish Sated | Lewin Day | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"fish",
"fish feeder",
"fish tank"
] | [Noisy Electrons] is a maker who also likes to keep fish. He sometimes needs to travel and keep his fish fed in the meantime, so he created an
automated solution to handle that for him
.
The build is based around an STM32 microcontroller, paired with a MCP7940N real-time clock to keep time. The microcontroller is hooked up to a few buttons and a small display to serve as an interface, allowing the feeding times and dosage amounts to be configured right on the device. Food is distributed from a 3D printed drum with a hole in it, which is rotated via a stepper motor. Each time the drum rotates, some food falls through the hole and into the tank. Dosage amount is measured in rotations — the more times the drum rotates, the more food is delivered to the fish.
[Noisy Electron] built three of these devices for three separate tanks. Thus far, it’s been three weeks and all the fish are still alive, so we’ll take that as a vote of confidence in the build. We’ve featured
some other great pet feeders over the years, too | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8183481",
"author": "captnmike",
"timestamp": "2025-09-24T00:04:31",
"content": "Nice clean build, I like the positive metering with the drum vs/ some with an auger. I used to do industrial systems and we would put a sensor system of some sort to be able to make sure the drum rotat... | 1,760,371,419.385861 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/23/2025-hackaday-superconference-announcing-our-workshops-and-tickets/ | 2025 Hackaday Superconference: Announcing Our Workshops And Tickets | Elliot Williams | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Slider"
] | [
"2025 Hackaday Superconference",
"conference",
"tickets",
"workshop"
] | Can you feel the nip of fall in the air? That can only mean one thing: Supercon is just around the corner. The next few weeks are going to bring a blitz of Supercon-related reveals, and we’re starting off with a big one: the workshops.
Supercon is the Ultimate Hardware Conference, and you need to be there to attend a workshop. Both
workshop and general admission tickets are on sale now
! Don’t wait — they sell out fast.
Kody Kinzie
Meshtastic for Beginners: Solder Your Own Cat-Themed LoRa Weather Station!
If you’ve wanted to create off-grid, encrypted mesh networks that can span over a hundred miles, this class will serve as a beginner’s guide to Meshtastic. We’ll be soldering and setting up our own custom cat-themed Meshtastic weather station nodes!
Seth Hillbrand
Level Up Your Board Game with KiCad
This workshop will teach you how to use KiCad with other common open-source tools, including Inkscape and FreeCAD, to level up your board game. We’ll make a beautiful PCB-based board game. You’ll learn techniques for better circuit layout, art transfer, case fitting, and 3D modeling.
Pat Deegan
Tiny Tapeout
In this workshop, participants will get the opportunity to design and manufacture their own design on an ASIC! Participants will learn the basics of digital logic, the basics of how semiconductors are designed and made, how to use an online digital design tool to build and simulate a simple design, and how to create the GDS files for manufacture on the open-source Sky130 PDK. Participants will have the option to submit their designs for manufacturing on the next shuttle as part of the Tiny Tapeout project.
Estefannie and Bob Hickman
Bling It On: Programming Your Own Generative Art Matrix
In this intermediate-level maker workshop, you will learn the fundamentals of generative algorithms and apply them using either Circuit Python or C++ to create a dynamic display that can pull data over WiFi from one or more APIs and use the data to visualize some generative art. The results will be beautiful and practical, and attendees will leave with an amazing 130 mm x 130 mm LED matrix.
Shawn Hymel
Introduction to Embedded Rust
Rust curious? This hands-on workshop will introduce you to this fascinating (relatively) new language and how you can use it to develop firmware for your various microcontroller projects. We’ll cover the basics of Rust’s ownership model, blink an LED (as you do), and read from an I2C sensor. (Shawn’s workshop is sponsored by DigiKey.)
November is just around the corner. Get your tickets now and we’ll see you at Supercon! | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8183351",
"author": "Johhnnay",
"timestamp": "2025-09-23T18:31:17",
"content": "I don’t see Kody’s class in the tickets. Was it cancelled?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8183410",
"author": "Jon",
"timestamp": "2025-09... | 1,760,371,419.434654 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/23/using-moondream-ai-to-make-your-pi-see-like-a-human/ | Using Moondream AI To Make Your Pi “See” Like A Human | John Elliot V | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"Moondream AI",
"Raspberry Pi 5"
] | [Jaryd] from Core Electronics shows us
human-like computer vision with Moondream on the Pi 5
.
Using the
Moondream
visual language model, which runs directly on your Raspberry Pi, and not in the cloud, you can answer questions such as “are the clothes on the line?”, “is there a package on the porch?”, “did I leave the fridge open?”, or “is the dog on the bed?” [Jaryd] compares Moondream to an alternative visual AI system,
You Only Look Once
(YOLO).
Processing a question with Moondream on your Pi can take anywhere from just a few moments to 90 seconds, depending on the model used and the nature of the question. Moondream comes in two varieties, based on size, one is two billion parameters and the other five hundred million parameters. The larger model is more capable and more accurate, but it has a longer processing time — the fastest possible response time coming in at about 22 to 25 seconds. The smaller model is faster, about 8 to 10 seconds, but as you might expect its results are not as good. Indeed, [Jaryd] says the answers can be infuriatingly bad.
In the write-up, [Jaryd] runs you through how to use Moonbeam on your Pi 5 and the video (embedded below) shows it in action. Fair warning though, Moondream is quite RAM intensive so you will need at least 8 GB of memory in your Pi if you want to play along.
If you’re interested in machine vision you might also like to check out
Machine Vision Automates Trainspotting With Unique Full-Length Portraits
. | 9 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8183304",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-09-23T16:17:37",
"content": "This doesn’t seem to be particularly useful setup for anything needing real-time recognition. However, I could see this being part of a larger inventory system.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,371,419.54058 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/23/the-impending-crt-display-revival-will-be-televised/ | The Impending CRT Display Revival Will Be Televised | Maya Posch | [
"Featured",
"hardware",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"CRT display",
"lcd",
"oled",
"sed"
] | Until the 2000s vacuum tubes practically ruled the roost. Even if they had surrendered practically fully to semiconductor technology like integrated circuits, there was no escaping them in everything from displays to video cameras. Until CMOS sensor technology became practical, proper video cameras used video camera tubes and well into the 2000s you’d generally scoff at those newfangled LC displays as they couldn’t capture the image quality of a decent CRT TV or monitor.
For a while it seemed that LCDs might indeed be just a flash in the pan, as it saw itself competing not just with old-school CRTs, but also its purported successors in the form of SED and FED in particular, while plasma TVs made home cinema go nuts for a long while with sizes, fast response times and black levels worth their high sale prices.
We all know now that LCDs survived, along with the newcomer in OLED displays, but despite this CRTs do not feel like something we truly left behind. Along with a retro computing revival, there’s an increasing level of interest in old-school CRTs to the point where people are actively prowling for used CRTs and the discontent with LCDs and OLED is clear with people longing for futuristic technologies like MicroLED and QD displays to fix all that’s wrong with today’s displays.
Could the return of CRTs be nigh in some kind of format?
What We Have Lost
As anyone who was around during the change from CRT TVs to ‘flat screen’ LCD TVs can attest to, this newfangled display technology came with a lot of negatives. Sure, that 21″ LCD TV or monitor no longer required a small galaxy of space behind the display on the desk or stand, nor did it require at least two people to transport it safely, nor was the monitor on your desk the favorite crispy warm napping spot of your cat.
The negatives mostly came in the form of the terrible image quality. Although active matrix technology fixed the smearing and extreme ghosting of early LC displays at higher refresh rates, you still had multi-millisecond response times compared to the sub-millisecond response time of CRTs, absolutely no concept of blacks and often horrendous backlight bleeding and
off-angle
visual quality including image inverting with TN-based LCD panels. This is due to how the stack of filters that make up an LC display manipulate the light, with off-angle viewing disrupting the effect.
Color shift comparison for IPS (X800H) versus VA (H9G) LC displays. (Credit:
RTINGS
)
Meanwhile, CRTs are capable of OLED-like perfect blacks due to phosphor being self-luminous and thus requiring no backlight. This is a feat that OLED tries to replicate, but with its own range of issues and workarounds, not to mention the limited lifespan of the organic light-emitting diodes that make up its pixels, and their relatively low brightness that e.g. LG tries to compensate for with a bright white sub-pixel in their
WOLED
technology.
Even so, OLED displays will get dimmer much faster than the phosphor layer of CRTs, making OLED displays relatively fragile. The ongoing
RTINGS longevity test
is a good study case of a wide range of LCD and OLED TVs here, with the pixel and panel refresh features on OLEDs turning out to be
extremely important
to even out the wear.
CRTs are also capable of syncing to a range of resolutions without scaling, as CRTs do not have a native resolution, merely a maximum dot pitch for their phosphor layer beyond which details cannot be resolved any more. The change to a fixed native resolution with LCDs meant that
subpixel rendering
technologies like Microsoft’s ClearType became crucial.
To this day LCDs are still pretty bad at off-angle performance, meaning that you have to look at a larger LCD from pretty close to forty-five degrees from the center line to not notice color saturation and brightness shifts. While per-pixel response times have come down to more reasonable levels, much of this is due to
LCD overdriving
, which tries to compensate for ghosting by using higher voltages for the pixel transitions, but can lead to overshoot and a nasty corona effect, as well as reduce the panel’s lifespan.
Blur Busters pursuit camera example of blur reduction. (Credit:
Blur Busters
)
Both OLEDs and LCDs suffer from persistence blurring even when their pixel-response times should be fast enough to keep up with a CRT’s phosphors. One current workaround is to
insert a black frame
(BFI) which can be done in a variety of ways, including strobing the backlight on LCDs, but this is just one of many
motion blur reduction
workarounds.
As noted by the Blur Busters article, some of these blur reduction approaches work better than others, with issues like strobe crosstalk generally still being present, yet hopefully not too noticeably.
In short, modern LCDs and OLED displays are still really quite bad by a number of objective metrics compared to CRTs, making it little wonder that there’s a strong hankering for something new, along with blatant nostalgia for plasma and CRT technology, flawed as they are. That said, we live in 2025 and thus do not have to be constrained by the technological limitations of 1950s pre-semiconductor vacuum tube technology.
The SED Future
An LG Flatron CRT TV from around 2007. (Credit: Briho,
Wikimedia
)
One major issue with CRTs is hard to ignore, no matter how rose-tinted your nostalgia glasses are. Walking into an electronics store back in the olden days with a wall of CRT TVs on display you’re hit by both the high-pitched squeal from the high-voltage flyback converters and the depth of these absolute units. While these days you got flat panel TVs expanding into every larger display sizes, CRT TVs were always held back by the triple electron gun setup. These generate the electrons which are subsequently magnetically guided to the bit of phosphor that they’re supposed to accelerate into.
Making such CRTs flat can be done to some extent by getting creative with said guidance, but with major compromises like divergence and you’ll never get a real flat panel. This dilemma led to the concept of replacing the glass tube and small number of electron guns with semiconductor or carbon-nanotube electron emitters. Placed practically right on top of the phosphor layer, each sub-pixel could have its own miniscule electron gun this way, with the whole setup being reminiscent of plasma displays in many ways, just thinner, less power-hungry and presumably cheaper.
Internal structures of SED (top) versus FED, showing the difference between the cathode plates. (Source:
Fink et al.
, Applied Nanotech, 2007)
Canon began research on Surface-conduction Electron-Emitter Display (
SED
) technology in 1986 as a potential successor to CRT technology. This was joined in 1991 by a similar ‘ThinCRT’ effort that used field emission, which evolved into Sony’s
FED
take on the very similar SED technology. Although both display technologies are
rather similar
, they have a very different emitter structure, which affects the way they are integrated and operated.
Both of them have in common that they can be very thin, with the thickness determined by the thickness of the cathode plate – featuring the emitters – combined with that of the anode and the vacuum space in between. As mentioned in the review article by
Fink et al.
from 2007, the vacuum gap at the time was 1.7 mm for a 36″ SED-type display, with spacers inside this vacuum providing the structural support against the external atmosphere not wanting said vacuum to exist there any more.
This aspect is similar to CRTs and vacuum fluorescent displays (
VFDs
), though one requirement with both SED and FED is to have a much better vacuum than in CRTs due to the far smaller tolerances. While in CRTs it was accepted that the imperfect vacuum would create ions in addition to electrons, this molecule-sized issue did necessitate the integration of so-called
ion traps
in CRTs prior to aluminized CRT faces, but this is not an option with these new display types.
For SEDs and FEDs there is fortunately a solution to maintain a pure vacuum through the use of so-called
getters
, which is a reactive material that reacts with gas molecules to remove them from the vacuum gap. With all of this in place and the unit sealed, the required driving voltage for SED at the time was about 20V compared to 50-100V for FED, which is still far below the kilovolt-level driving voltage for CRTs.
A Tenuous Revival
Both the companies behind SED and Sony decided to spin down their R&D on this new take on the veritable CRT, as LCDs were surging into the market. As consumers discovered that they could now get 32+” TVs without having to check the load-bearing capacity of their floor or resorting to the debauchery of CRT (rear) projectors, the fact that LCD TVs weren’t such visual marvels was a mere trifle compared to the fact that TVs were now wall-mountable.
Even as image quality connoisseurs flocked first to plasma and then OLED displays, the exploding market for LCDs crowded out alternatives. During the 2010s you’d find CRTs discarded alongside once prized plasma TVs, either given away for practically free or scrapped by the thousands. Then came the retro gaming revival, which is currently sending the used CRT market skyrocketing, and which is leading us to ask major questions about where the display market is heading.
Although CRTs never really went away from a manufacturing point of view, it’s mostly through specialized manufacturers like
Thomas Electronics
who will fulfill your CRT fix, though on a strict ‘contact us for a quote’ basis. Restarting a mass-manufacturing production line for something like once super-common CRT TVs would require a major investment that so far nobody is willing to front.
Meanwhile LCD and OLED technology have hit some serious technological dead-ends, while potential non-organic LED alternatives such as
microLED
have trouble scaling down to practical pixel densities and yields.
There’s a chance that Sony and others can open some drawers with old ‘thin CRT’ plans, dust off some prototypes and work through the remaining R&D issues with SED and FED for potentially a pittance of what alternative, brand-new technologies like MicroLED or quantum dot displays would cost.
Will it happen? Maybe not. It’s quite possible that we’ll still be trying to fix OLED and LCDs for the next decade and beyond, while waxing nostalgically about how much more beautiful the past was, and the future could have been, if only we hadn’t bothered with those goshdarn twisting liquid crystals. | 112 | 32 | [
{
"comment_id": "8183261",
"author": "SETH",
"timestamp": "2025-09-23T14:29:06",
"content": "Unpopular opinion, pixel art looks better without gaussian blur",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8183280",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,371,419.74289 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/23/heart-rate-measurement-via-wifi-the-diy-way/ | Heart Rate Measurement Via WiFi, The DIY Way | Lewin Day | [
"Medical Hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"channel state information",
"ESP32",
"heart rate",
"wifi"
] | A few weeks back, we reported on a research group that figured out how to measure heartrate using perturbations in WiFi signals. [Nick Bild] was interested in this so-called “Pulse-Fi” technique, but noted the paper explaining it was behind a paywall. Thus, he worked to recreate the technology himself so he could
publish the results openly for anyone eager to learn.
[Nick] paid for the research paper, and noted that it was short on a few of the finer details and didn’t come with any code or data from the original research team. He thus was left to figure out the finer details of how to measure heart rate via WiFi in his own way, though he believes his method is quite close to the original work.
The basic concept is simple enough. One ESP32 is set up to transmit a stream of Channel State Information packets to another ESP32, with a person standing in between. As the person’s heart beats, it changes the way the radio waves propagate from the transmitting unit to the receiver. These changes can be read from the packets, and processed to estimate the person’s heart rate. [Nick] explains the various data-massaging steps involved to go from this raw radio data to a usable heart rate readout.
It’s a great effort from [Nick] to recreate this research all on his own in his home lab. Files are
on GitHub
for the curious. If you’re eager to learn more about these innovative measurement techniques,
you might like to read our prior reporting on the tech.
Also, it’s worth remembering—don’t use your homebrew prototypes for any serious healthcare purposes. | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8183191",
"author": "mordae",
"timestamp": "2025-09-23T11:19:11",
"content": "I don’t quite understand what the NN is used for here. The data looks pretty clean already. Basically ready for FFT.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,371,419.586786 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/22/this-device-is-a-real-page-turner/ | This Device Is A Real Page Turner | Lewin Day | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"arduino pro micro",
"pro micro",
"thumbwheel"
] | You can read e-books on just about anything—your tablet, your smartphone, or even your PC. However, the interface can be lacking somewhat compared to a traditional book—on a computer, you have to use the keyboard or mouse to flip the pages. Alternatively, you could do what [NovemberKou] did,
and build a dedicated page-turning device.
The device was specifically designed for use with the Kindle for Mac or Kindle for PC reader apps, allowing the user to peruse their chosen literature without using the keyboard to change pages. It consists of a thumb wheel, rotary encoder, and an Arduino Pro Micro mounted in a 3D printed shell. The Pro Micro is set up to emulate a USB keyboard, sending “Page Up” or “Page Down” key presses as you turn the thum bwheel in either direction.
Is it a frivolous device with a very specific purpose? Yes, and that’s why we love it. There’s something charming about building a bespoke interface device
just to increase your reading pleasure
, and we wholeheartedly support it. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8182962",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-09-22T16:00:27",
"content": "I wonder how tough it would be to make a capacitive thingy that detects your hand moving in front of the e-reader as you make a normal page-turning gesture and it determines whether you moved your hand from le... | 1,760,371,419.789087 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/22/metas-ray-ban-display-glasses-and-the-new-glassholes/ | Meta’s Ray-Ban Display Glasses And The New Glassholes | Maya Posch | [
"computer hacks",
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"google glass",
"smart glasses"
] | It’s becoming somewhat of a running gag that any device or object will be made ‘smart’ these days, whether it’s a phone, TV, refrigerator, home thermostat, headphones or glasses. This generally means somehow cramming a computer, display, camera and other components into the unsuspecting device, with the overarching goal of somehow making it more useful to the user and not impacting its basic functionality.
Although smart phones and smart TVs have been readily embraced, smart glasses have always been a bit of a tough sell. Part of the problem here is of course that most people do not generally wear glasses, between people whose vision does not require correction and those who wear e.g. contact lenses. This means that the market for smart glasses isn’t immediately obvious. Does it target people who wear glasses anyway, people who wear sunglasses a lot, or will this basically move a smart phone’s functionality to your face?
Smart glasses also
raise many privacy concerns
, as their cameras and microphones may be recording at any given time, which can be unnerving to people. When Google launched their Google Glass smart glasses, this led to the coining of the term ‘
glasshole
‘ for people who refuse to follow perceived proper smart glasses etiquette.
Defining Smart Glasses
Meta’s Ray-Ban Display smart glasses with its wristband. (Credit:
Meta
)
Most
smart glasses
are shaped like rather chubby, often thick-rimmed glasses. This is to accommodate the miniaturized computer, battery and generally a bunch of cameras and microphones. Generally some kind of projection system is used to either project a translucent display on one of the glasses, or in more extreme cases a laser directly projects the image into your retina. The control interface can range from a smartphone app to touch controls, to the new ‘Neural Band’ wristband that’s part of Meta’s
collaboration with Ray-Ban
in a package that some might call rather dorky.
This particular device crams a 600 x 600 pixel color display into the right lens, along with six microphones and a 12 MP camera in addition to stereo speakers. Rather than an all-encompassing display or an augmented-reality experience, this is more of a display that you reportedly see floating when you glance somewhat to your right, taking up 20 degrees of said right eyepiece.
Perhaps most interesting is the neural band here, which uses
electromyography
(EMG) to detect the motion of muscles in your wrist by their electrical signals to determine the motion that you made with your arm and hand. Purportedly you’ll be able to type this way too, but this feature is currently ‘in beta’.
Slow March Of Progress
Loïc Le Meur showing off the Google Glass Explorer Edition in 2013. (Credit:
Loïc Le Meur
)
When we compare these Ray-Ban Display smart glasses to 2013’s
Google Glass
, when the Explorer Edition was made available in limited quantities to the public, it is undeniable that the processor guts in the Ray-Bans are more powerful, it’s got double the Flash storage, but the RAM is the same 2 GB, albeit faster LPRDDR4x. In terms of the display it’s slightly higher resolution and probably slightly better fidelity, but this still has to be tested.
Both have similar touch controls on the right side for basic control, with apparently the new wristband being the major innovation here. This just comes with the minor issue of now having to wear another wrist-mounted gadget that requires regular charging. If you are already someone who wears a smart watch or similar, then you better have some space on your other wrist to wear it.
One of the things that Google Glass and similar solutions have really struggled with – including Apple’s Vision AR gadget – is that of practical use cases. As cool as it can be to have a little head-mounted display that you can glance at surreptitiously, with nobody else around you being able to glance at the naughty cat pictures or personal emails currently being displayed, this never was a use case that convinced people into buying their own Google Glass device.
In the case of Meta’s smart glasses, they seem to bank on Meta AI integration, along with real-time captions for conversations in foreign languages. Awkward point here is of course that none of these features are impossible with a run-of-the-mill smartphone, and those can do even more, with a much larger display.
Ditto with the on-screen map navigation, which overlays a Meta Maps view akin to that of Google’s and Apple’s solutions to help you find your way. Although this might seem cool, you will still want to whip out your phone when you have to ask a friendly local when said route navigation feature inevitably goes sideways.
Amidst the scrambling for a raison d’être for smart glasses, it seems unlikely that society’s attitude towards ‘glassholes’ has changed either.
Welcome To The Panopticon
Example of a panopticon design in the prison buildings at Presidio Modelo, Isla de la Juventud, Cuba. (Credit: Friman,
Wikimedia
)
The idea behind the
panopticon design
, as created by Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century, is that a single person can keep an eye on a large number of individuals, all of whom cannot be certain that they are or are not being observed at that very moment. Although Bentham did not intent for it to be solely used with prisons and similar buildings, this is where it found the most uptake. Inspired by this design, we got more modern takes, such as the Telescreens in Orwell’s novel
Nineteen-Eighty Four
whose cameras are always on, but you can not be sure that someone is watching that particular screen.
In today’s modern era where cameras are basically everywhere, from CCTV cameras on and inside buildings, to doorbells and the personal surveillance devices we call ‘smartphones’, we also got areas where people are less appreciative of having cameras aimed on them. Unlike a smartphone where it’s rather obvious when someone is recording or taking photos, smart glasses aren’t necessarily that obvious. Although some do light up a LED or such, it’s
easy to miss this sign
.
In that article a TikTok video is described by a woman who was distraught to see that the person at the wax salon that she had an appointment at was wearing smart glasses. Unless you’re actively looking at and listening for the cues emitted by that particular brand of smart glasses, you may not know whether your waxing session isn’t being recorded in glorious full-HD or better for later sharing.
This is a concern that blew up during the years that Google Glass was being pushed by Google, and so far it doesn’t appear that people’s opinions on this have changed at all. Which makes it even more awkward when those smart glasses are your only prescription glasses that you have on you at the time. Do you still take them off when you enter a place where photography and filming is forbidden?
Dumber Smart Glasses
Although most of the focus in the media and elsewhere is on smart glasses like Google Glass and now Meta/Ray-Ban’s offerings, there are others too that fall under this
umbrella term
. Certain auto-darkening sunglasses are called ‘smart glasses’, while others are designed to act more like portable screens that are used with a laptop or other computer system. Then there are the augmented- and mixed-reality glasses, which come in a wide variety of forms and shapes. None of these are the camera-equipped types that we discussed here, of course, and thus do not carry the same stigma.
Whether Meta’s attempt where Google Glass failed will be more successful remains to be seen. If the criteria is that a ‘smart’ version of a device enhances it, then it’s hard to argue that a smart phone isn’t much more than just a cellular phone. At the same time the ‘why’ for cramming a screen and computer into a set of dorky glasses remains much harder to answer.
Feel free to sound off in the comments if you have a good use case for smart glasses. Ditto if you would totally purchase or have already purchased a version of the Ray-Ban Display smart glasses. Inquisitive minds would like to know whether this might be Google Glass’ redemption arch. | 133 | 30 | [
{
"comment_id": "8182942",
"author": "R.",
"timestamp": "2025-09-22T14:34:58",
"content": "Considering how many countries in Europe that have laws regarding dashcams and similar, and certain countries forbid their use and even stored in the car when just passing through the country, when glasses lik... | 1,760,371,419.955804 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/22/iphone-air-still-apparently-repairable-despite-its-compact-construction/ | IPhone Air Still Apparently Repairable Despite Its Compact Construction | Lewin Day | [
"Phone Hacks"
] | [
"apple iphone",
"ifixit",
"iphone",
"iphone air",
"repair"
] | Miniaturization is a trend that comes and goes in the cellular phone space. For a while, our phones were all getting smaller, then they started getting bigger again as screens expanded to show us ever more content and advertising. The iPhone air is going back the other way, with a design that aims to sell based on its slimness.
[iFixit] reckons that despite its diminutive dimensions, it should still be quite repairable.
“Thinner usually means flimsier, harder to fix, and more glued-down parts, but the iPhone Air proves otherwise,” states Elizabeth Chamberlain for the repair outlet. Much of this comes down to clever design, that makes repair possible at the same time as ensuring compactness. A big part of this is the way that Apple made the bottom half of the phone pretty much just battery. Most of the actual electronic components are on a logic board up by the camera. Segmenting the phone in this way makes it easier to access commonly-replaced parts like the battery without having to pull a lot of other parts out of the way first.
[iFixit] refers to this as flattening the “disassembly tree”—minimizing the number of components you have to touch to replace what you’re there to fix. In this regard, the thinness of the iPhone Air is actually a boon. The phone is so thin, it wasn’t possible to stack multiple components on top of each other, so everything is easier to get to. The design is also reasonably modular, which should make routine repairs like USB C port swaps relatively straightforward.
Whatever smartphone you’re working on, it often helps to have a disassembly guide to ensure you don’t wreck it when you’re trying to fix something.
[iFixit] remains a stellar resource in that regard. | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8182892",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2025-09-22T11:16:56",
"content": "Tip for presenter: don’t hold up a thin black thing against your black T-shirt to show how thin it is.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8182898",
"auth... | 1,760,371,420.020032 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/22/restoring-a-vintage-computer-and-its-plotter/ | Restoring A Vintage Computer And Its Plotter | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"CE-150",
"docking station",
"ink",
"pen",
"plotter",
"refill",
"sharp",
"trs-80"
] | Repairing vintage computers is bread-and-butter for many of us around here. The machines themselves tend to be fairly fixable, assuming spare parts are available and there hasn’t been too much physical damage. Peripherals can be another matter, though. Since they interface with the real world they can have more esoteric problems that aren’t always solvable. [joekutz] was handed just such a device in the form of a CE-150 docking station for a Sharp PC1500 Pocket Computer, which has a plotter built in.
Here’s his “tip” for getting plotters like these working again
.
The first step here is to disassemble the original, dried out pens to scavenge a few of the parts. The outer case needs to be kept so that it can be put back into the plotter, and a small O-ring is saved as well. To replace the dried-out tips [joekutz] discards the original tips and replaces them with tips from a common ink pen, using shrink wrap tubing to help fit the pen’s tip into the original plotter cylinder. He also takes the ink from the pen to fill the plotter’s cartridge, completing the surgery on the multi-colored plotter and bringing it back to life.
Of course this build goes well beyond the plotter, including bringing the PC1500 back to life as well. There are a few other videos about this project
covering that original restoration
as well as
demonstrating some of the quirks of how this computer is meant to be programmed
. But we mostly focused on the plotter here since that is a little bit out of the ordinary, and
we’re also sure that refilling ink cartridges of any sort gets under the skin of everyone at HP
. | 23 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8182867",
"author": "RetepV",
"timestamp": "2025-09-22T09:28:23",
"content": "To be honest, I’m not impressed by the plotting quality of fineliners at all. The tips are basically fibers and dragging them across the paper deforms them, which translates to imprecise plots. And you can... | 1,760,371,420.081945 |
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