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https://hackaday.com/2025/05/27/hand-truck-turned-into-motorcycle/ | Hand Truck Turned Into Motorcycle | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"four stroke",
"frame",
"hand cart",
"hand truck",
"motorcycle",
"welding",
"wheel"
] | For those motorcyclists looking to get a classic American-style cruiser, often the go-to brand is Harley-Davidson. However, these bikes not only have reputations for being stuck in the past, both in terms of design and culture, but they also tend to be extremely expensive—not only upfront, but in maintenance as well. If you want the style without all of that baggage, you might want to try out something like
this custom motorcycle which not only looks the part, it reduces those costs by being built around a hand truck
.
By the end of the project, though, the hand truck does not retain much of its original form or function. [Garage Avenger] has cut and welded it essentially into a custom frame for the diminutive motorcycle, while retaining much of its original look and feel. Keeping up with the costs savings aspect of this project, the four-stroke engine was free, although it did take some wrenching to get it running and integrated into the frame. A custom axle, a front end from another bike, a gas tank from an online retailer (that needed re-welding), and some wiring finishes out the build.
With a fresh paint job to match the original color of the hand truck, it’s off to the track. Of course it doesn’t have quite the performance of most street legal motorcycles, including some quirks with the handling and braking, but for the trails around [Garage Avenger]’s home it’s certainly a fun transportation mode he can add to his repertoire. If this is your first time seeing one of his projects, be sure to check out his other work including
this drifting shopping cart
and
this turbine-powered sled
. | 13 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8132757",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T21:58:10",
"content": "This reminds me of the“then just draw the rest of the owl,” memewhich is a not so subtle way of pointing out that the task requires a significant amount of skill.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,371,535.640989 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/27/2025-pet-hacks-contest-fyto-turn-your-plant-into-a-pet/ | 2025 Pet Hacks Contest: Fytó – Turn Your Plant Into A Pet | Matt Varian | [
"contests"
] | [
"2025 Pet Hacks Contest",
"ADS1115",
"houseplant",
"raspberry pi"
] | This entry into the 2025 Pet Hacks Contest is about bringing some fun feedback to normally silent plants.
Fytó
integrates sensors and displays into a 3D printed planter. The sensors read the various environmental and soil conditions that the plant is experiencing, and give you feedback about them via a series of playful expressive faces that are displayed on the screen embedded in the planter.
At the core of the Fytó is a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, which has plenty of power to display the animations while also being small enough to easily fit inside the planter without it growing in size much more than a normal planter would be. The sensors include a capacitive soil moisture sensor, a temperature sensor, and a light-dependent resistor. These sensors all provide analog outputs to relay their measurements and so there was an ADS1115 analog-to-digital converter board also included as the Raspberry Pi doesn’t have the required analog pins to communicate with them.
The fun animated faces are displayed with a 2-inch LCD display embedded in the planter. A small acrylic cover is placed in front of the LCD to help ease the transition from the printed planter to the internally mounted screen. The temperature and light sensors were also placed in openings around the planter to ensure they could get good environmental readings. There are six expressions the Fytó can express based on its sensor readings, ranging from happy when all the readings are in a good zone, to thirsty if it needs water or freezing when it’s too cold. Be sure to check out the other entries in the
2025 Pet Hacks Contest
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8132728",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T20:20:19",
"content": "hehe. cute name. now I think Ikea should name a planter that.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132740",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-... | 1,760,371,535.39926 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/26/wayback-proxy-lets-your-browser-party-like-its-1999/ | Wayback Proxy Lets Your Browser Party Like It’s 1999 | Tyler August | [
"internet hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"early internet",
"geocities",
"internet archive",
"proxy",
"rasberry pi",
"retrocomputing",
"web"
] | This project is a few years old, but it might be appropriate to cover it late since [richardg867]’s
Wayback Proxy is, quite literally, timeless.
It does, more-or-less, what it says as on the tin: it is an HTTP proxy that retrieves pages from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, or the
Oocities archive of old Geocities sites
. (Remember Geocities?) It is meant to sit on a Raspberry Pi or similar SBC between you and the modern internet. A line in a config file lets you specify the exact date. We found this via YouTube in a video by [The Science Elf] (embedded below, for those of you who don’t despise YouTube) in which he attaches a small screen and dial to his Pi to create what he calls the “Internet Time Machine” using the Wayback Proxy. (Sadly [The Science Elf] did not see fit to share his work, but it would not be difficult to recreate the python script that edits config.json.)
What’s the point? Well, if you have a retro-computer from the late 90s or early 2000s, you’re missing out a key part of the vintage experience without access to the vintage internet. This was the era when desktops were being advertised as made to get you “Online”. Using Wayback Proxy lets you relive those halcyon days– or live them for the first time, for the younger set. At least relive those of which parts of the old internet which could be Archived, which sadly isn’t everything. Still, for a nostalgia trip, or a living history exhibit to show the kids? It sounds delightful.
Of course it is possible to
hit up the modern web on a retro PC
(or on
a Mac Plus
). As long as you’re not caught up in
an internet outage
, as this author recently was. | 14 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8132532",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-26T23:42:09",
"content": "“Everything” is a lot of ads.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132665",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T16:01:24",... | 1,760,371,535.588276 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/26/2025-pet-hacks-contest-a-barrel-of-fun-for-your-dog/ | 2025 Pet Hacks Contest: A Barrel Of Fun For Your Dog | Jenny List | [
"contests"
] | [
"2025 Pet Hacks Contest",
"barrel",
"dog"
] | If you ask someone for a piece of received opinion about Bernese mountain dogs, the chances are that the tale of their carrying barrels of brandy round their necks for the revival of those lost in the snow. It’s a story of uncertain provenance and may indeed be a myth, but
that hasn’t stopped [Saren Tasciyan] 3D printing one for their faithful hound
. In its own way it too is a saviour, for as well as a small camera, it carries a supply of dog poop bags.
It’s a two part print, held together with strong magnets. Waterproofing is achieved using liberal quantities of hot glue. There’s a protrusion on one side designed to take an action camera for a dog’s-eye-view of the world. The files are downloadable, so your pooch can have one too if you like. We are wondering whether a couple of miniatures of brandy might just fit in there as well.
It’s is part of
the 2025 Pet Hacks contest
, so if this has whetted your appetite, expect more. If your dog carries around something you’ve made, how about making it an entry of your own? | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8132498",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-26T20:38:53",
"content": "Fun? It also should be filled with little plastic monkeys. Just ask Hasbro.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132692",
"author": "Panondorf",... | 1,760,371,535.27514 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/26/mouse-model-suggests-starch-based-plastics-are-still-bad-for-you/ | Mouse Model Suggests Starch-Based Plastics Are Still Bad For You | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"bioplastic",
"microplastics",
"polylactic acid",
"starch"
] | To paraphrase The Simpsons: plastics are the solution to – and cause of – all of mankind’s problems. Nowhere is this more clear in the phenomenon of microplastics. Some have suggested that alternative bioplastics made out of starch could be the solution here, as the body might be able to digest and disassemble these plastic fragments better. Unfortunately, a team of Chinese researchers put this to the test using mice, with
the results suggesting
that starch-based plastics do not change the harm to tissues and organs.
We
previously looked at this harm
from micro- and nanoplastics (MNP), with humans and their brains at autopsy showing a strong correlation between disease and presence of MNPs. In this recent
study
mice were split up into three groups, for either no, low or high levels of these bioplastics in their food. At autopsy, the mice exposed to the bioplastics all showed damage to organs, including the same gene-regulation issues and inflammation markers as seen with other plastics.
Despite these results, researchers
question
how useful these results are, as they pertain to modified starches with known biodegradability issues, while
starch
by itself is absolutely digestible when it’s in the form of potato chips, for instance. Perhaps the trick here is to make bioplastics that are still useful as plastics, and yet as harmless to ingest as said potato chips.
Not that we recommend eating bioplastics, mind you; potato chips are definitely tastier. | 48 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8132451",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-26T17:08:37",
"content": "Well if it helps, PLA isn’t a starch-based plastic. It’s a lactic acid based plastic, or often a lactide based plastic, with plenty of catalysts and plasticizers and other goodies in there too, but usua... | 1,760,371,535.85967 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/26/intercepting-and-decoding-bluetooth-low-energy-data-for-victron-devices/ | Intercepting And Decoding Bluetooth Low Energy Data For Victron Devices | John Elliot V | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Microcontrollers",
"Radio Hacks",
"Software Hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"ble",
"bluetooth low energy",
"ESP32 wroom",
"Victron"
] | [ChrisJ7903] has created two Ardiuno programs for
reading Victron solar controller telemetry data advertised via BLE
. If you’re interested in what it takes to use an ESP32 to sniff Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) transmissions, this is a master class.
The code is split into two main programs. One program is for the Victron battery monitor and the other is for any Victron solar controller. The software will receive, dissect, decrypt, decode, and report the data periodically broadcast from the devices over BLE.
The BLE data is transmitted in Link-Layer Protocol Data Units (PDUs) which are colloquially called “packets”. In this particular case the BLE functionality for advertising, also known as broadcasting, is used which means the overhead of establishing connections can be avoided thereby saving power.
Decryption is handled with the the
wolfSSL library
and [ChrisJ7903] had nice things to say about the helpful people over at wolfSSL. The AES-CTR algorithm is used and seeded with the per-device encryption key, a nonce/salt in little-endian format, and the encrypted data.
[ChrisJ7903] relied heavily on technical documentation provided by Victron in order to decode the received data; some of that documentation is made available in the Git repo and ultimately everything is revealed in the code itself.
We’ve done heaps of BLE stuff here at Hackaday in the past. If you’re interested in BLE tech check out
this rain gauge
and
this doorbell
. | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8132415",
"author": "Amphraredamine",
"timestamp": "2025-05-26T14:57:09",
"content": "Definitely well documented and an interesting read. Cool to see how the packets can be received for decoding without pairing, needing only the device name. I wonder if this could be done other ble ... | 1,760,371,535.521926 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/26/nasa-is-shutting-down-the-international-space-station-sighting-website/ | NASA Is Shutting Down The International Space Station Sighting Website | Maya Posch | [
"News",
"Space"
] | [
"international space station",
"nasa"
] | Starting on June 12, 2025, the
NASA
Spot the Station
website
will no longer provide ISS sighting information, per a message recently sent out. This means no information on sighting opportunities provided on the website, nor will users subscribed via the website receive email or text notifications. Instead anyone interested in this kind of information will have to download the mobile app for iOS or Android.
Obviously this has people, like
[Keith Cowing] over at
Nasa Watch
, rather disappointed, due to how the website has been this easy to use resource that anyone could access, even without access to a smart phone. Although the assumption is often made that everyone has their own personal iOS or Android powered glass slab with them, one can think of communal settings where an internet café is the sole form of internet access. There is also the consideration that for children a website like this would be much easier to access. They would now see this opportunity vanish.
With smart phone apps hardly a replacement for a website of this type, it’s easy to see how the
app-ification of the WWW
continues, at the cost of us users. | 40 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "8132356",
"author": "eMpTy-10",
"timestamp": "2025-05-26T11:08:11",
"content": "I didn’t even know this was a thing. I usually use the ISS Live Now app",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132361",
"author": "Winston",
... | 1,760,371,535.473308 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/26/pico-mac-nano-fits-working-macintosh-on-barbies-desk/ | Pico-mac-nano Fits Working Macintosh On Barbie’s Desk | Tyler August | [
"computer hacks",
"Mac Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"hackintosh",
"macintosh 128k",
"rp2040"
] | Have you ever looked in a doll house and said “I wish those dolls had a scale replica of a 1984 Macintosh 128K that could be operated by USB?” — well, us neither, but [Nick Gillard]
gives us the option with his 63mm tall Pico-mac-nano project.
As you might imagine, this project got its start with the
RP2040-based Pico Mac project
by [Matt Evans], which we covered
The collector’s edition will come with a lovely box, but what’s in it is still open source so you can make your own.
before. [Nick] saw that, built it, and was delighted by it enough to think that if the Mac could run on such tiny hardware, how small could build a fully-usable replica Mac? The answer was 63 mm tall– at 5.5:1, that’s technically under the 6:1 scale that Barbie operates on, but if we had such a dollhouse we’d absolutely put one of these in it. (You just know Barbie’s an Apple kind of girl.)
The size was driven by the screen, which is a 2″ TFT panel with 480 x 640 pixel native resolution. Here [Nick] cheats a tiny bit– rather than trying to rewrite the PicoMac to output 640 x 480 and rotate the screen, he keeps the screen in portrait mode and drives it at 480 x 342 px. Sure, it’s not a pixel-perfect output, but no LCD is going to be a perfect stand in for a CRT, and who is going to notice 32 pixels on a 2″ screen? Regardless, that set the height of the computer, which is built around the portrait display. A highly detailed, and to our eyes, accurate replica of the original Macintosh case was printed to fit the LCD, coming in at the aforementioned 63mm tall.
Unfortunately this means the floppy drive could not be used for micro SD access– there is an SD card reader on this unit, but it’s on the back, along with a USB-C port, which is roughly where the mouse and keyboard ports are supposed to be, which is a lovely detail. Also delightful is the choice of a CR2 lithium battery for power, which is a form factor that will look just a bit familiar if you’ve been inside one of these old Macs.
[Nick] has posted the
3D designs and modified pico mac firmware to a GitHub repository
, but if you’re looking for a charming desk ornament and don’t have the time to build your own, he will also be selling these (both kits and fully assembled units) via
1bitrainbow, which is the most delightfully retro web store
we’ve seen of late.
If Classic MacOS isn’t good enough for you, how about linux?
You won’t enjoy it as much, but it will run on the RP2040
. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8132339",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-05-26T10:00:35",
"content": "What is this? A computer for ants?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132751",
"author": "David H",
"timestamp": "2025-05-27T21:34:05"... | 1,760,371,535.697418 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/25/2025-pet-hacks-contest-a-water-fountain-for-your-cat/ | 2025 Pet Hacks Contest: A Water Fountain For Your Cat | Jenny List | [
"contests",
"home hacks"
] | [
"2025 Pet Hacks Contest",
"cats",
"drinking fountain"
] | Part of the charm of having a cat in your life is that by their nature these animals are very interactive. They will tell you in no uncertain terms when something in their lives needs attention, for example when their water dish is empty. But
why not give them a drinking fountain all of their own
? It’s what [
supermarioprof
] did for their adorable ginger cat [Piki Piki], providing a cat-operated trickle of water on demand.
It’s a simple enough device in its operation, but very well constructed. There’s a small basin with a drain, and a water cistern valve operated by the cat placing a paw on a lever. This starts a trickle of water, from which they can lap as much as they like.
The physical construction comes courtesy of some laser-cut ply, and what looks like some 3D print work. It’s certainly easy to operate for the cat, and has worked reliably for a few years now.
This project is part of
the 2025 Pet Hacks contest
, so expect to see more in the same vein. If your cat’s life is improved by one of your projects, consider making an entry yourself! | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8132328",
"author": "Ferenc",
"timestamp": "2025-05-26T08:30:50",
"content": "My brain automatically replaced that word with ‘drain’. No harm done :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132449",
"author": "IIVQ",
... | 1,760,371,535.31867 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/25/how-to-build-an-stm32-web-dashboard-using-the-mongoose-wizard/ | How To Build An STM32 Web Dashboard Using The Mongoose Wizard | John Elliot V | [
"ARM",
"Microcontrollers",
"Network Hacks",
"Software Development",
"Software Hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"Mongoose Library",
"Mongoose Web Server",
"Mongoose Wizard",
"OTA",
"over-the-air update",
"stm32",
"web dashboard"
] | Today from the team at Cesanta Software — the people who gave us the open-source Mongoose Web Server Library and Mongoose OS — we have an article covering
how to build an STM32 web dashboard
.
The article runs through setting up a development environment; creating the dashboard layout; implementing the dashboard, devices settings, and firmware update pages; building and testing the firmware; attaching UI controls to the hardware; and conclusion.
The web dashboard is all well and good, but in our opinion the killer feature remains the Over-The-Air (OTA) update facility which allows for authenticated wireless firmware updates via the web dashboard. The rest is just gravy. In the video you get to see how to use your development tools to create a firmware file suitable for OTA update.
If you’re thinking this all looks a little familiar, that’s because we recently wrote about their
web dashboard for the ESP32
. This is the same again but emphasizing the STM32 support this time around. We originally heard about the Mongoose technology line
all the way back in 2017
!
Thanks to [Toly] for letting us know about this new howto. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8132400",
"author": "V",
"timestamp": "2025-05-26T14:11:54",
"content": "Never comment on Forth while finishing off a fifth.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133969",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T18:17:06",
... | 1,760,371,535.35512 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/25/hackaday-links-may-25-2025/ | Hackaday Links: May 25, 2025 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"ai",
"Andy Weir",
"astronomy",
"exoplanet",
"hackaday links",
"hallucination",
"ice",
"James Webb",
"jwst",
"LLM",
"pcb",
"space",
"technosignature"
] | Have you heard that author Andy Weir has a new book coming out? Very exciting, we know, and according to a syndicated reading list for Summer 2025, it’s called
The Last Algorithm
, and it’s a tale of a programmer who discovers a dark and dangerous secret about artificial intelligence. If that seems a little out of sync with his usual space-hacking fare such as
The Martian
and
Project Hail Mary
, that’s because
the book doesn’t exist
, and neither do most of the other books on the list.
The list was published in a 64-page supplement that ran in major US newspapers like the
Chicago Sun-Times
and the
Philadelphia Inquirer
. The feature listed fifteen must-read books, only five of which exist, and it’s no surprise that AI is to behind the muck-up. Writer Marco Buscaglia took the blame, saying that he used an LLM to produce the list without checking the results. Nobody else in the editorial chain appears to have reviewed the list either, resulting in the hallucination getting published. Readers are understandably upset about this, but for our part, we’re just bummed that Andy doesn’t have a new book coming out.
In
equally exciting but ultimately fake news
, we had more than a few stories pop up in our feed about NASA’s recent discovery of urban lights on an exoplanet. AI isn’t to blame for this one, though, at least not directly. Ironically, the rumor started with a TikTok video debunking a claim of city lights on a distant planet. Social media did what social media does, though, sharing only the parts that summarized the false claim and turning a debunking into a bunking. This is why we can’t have nice things.
That wasn’t the only story about distant lights, though, with t
his report of unexplained signals from two nearby stars
. This one is far more believable, coming as it does from retired JPL scientist Richard H. Stanton, who has been using a 30″ telescope to systematically search for optical SETI signals for the past few years. These searches led to seeing two rapid pulses of light from HD 89389, an F-type star located in the constellation Ursa Major. The star rapidly brightened, dimmed, brightened again, then returned to baseline over a fraction of second; the same pattern repeated itself about 4.4 seconds later.
Intrigued, he looked back through his observations and found a similar event from a different star, HD 217014 in Pegasus, four years previously. Interestingly, this G-type star is known to have at least one exoplanet. Stanton made the first observation in 2023, and he’s spent much of the last two years ruling out things like meteor flashes or birds passing through his field of view. More study is needed to figure out what this means, and while it’s clearly not aliens, it’s fun to imagine it could be some kind of technosignature.
And one last space story, this time with
the first observation of extra-solar ice
. The discovery comes from the James Webb Space Telescope, which caught the telltale signature of ice crystals in a debris ring circling HD 181327, a very young star only 155 light-years away. Water vapor had been detected plenty of times outside our solar system, but not actual ice crystals until now. The ice crystals seem to be coming from collisions between icy bodies in the debris field, an observation that has interesting implications for planetary evolution.
And finally, if like us you’re impressed anytime someone busts out a project with a six-layer PCB design, wait till you get a load of
this 124-layer beast
. The board comes from OKI Circuit Technologies and is intended for high-bandwidth memory for AI accelerators. The dielectric for each layer is only 125-μm thick, and the board is still only 7.6 mm thick overall. At $4,800 per square meter, it’s not likely we’ll see our friends at JLC PCB offering these anytime soon, but it’s still some pretty cool engineering. | 24 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8132254",
"author": "scott_tx",
"timestamp": "2025-05-25T23:26:36",
"content": "It doesn’t inspire confidence that the SETI article says ‘Project Ozma at the Greenbank Observatory in West Bank, Virginia.’",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comme... | 1,760,371,536.247299 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/25/unreleased-amiga-hardware-plays-mp3s/ | Unreleased Amiga Hardware Plays MP3s | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"a3000",
"aa3000",
"amiga",
"att",
"dsp",
"dsp3210",
"mp2",
"mp3",
"MPEG",
"music"
] | The MP3 file type has been around for so long, and is supported by essentially all modern media software and hardware, that it might be surprising to some to learn that it’s actually a proprietary format. Developed in the late 80s and early 90s, it rose to prominence during the Napster/Limewire era of the early 00s and became the de facto standard for digital music, but not all computers in these eras could play this filetype. This includes the Amigas of the early 90s, with one rare exception: this unreleased successor to the A3000 with a DSP chip,
which now also has the software to play back these digital tunes
.
The AA3000, developed as a prototype by Commodore, was never released to the general public. Unlike the original A3000 this one would have included a digital signal processing chip from AT&T called the DSP3210 which would have greatly enhanced its audio capabilities. A few prototype boards did make it out into the hands of the public, and the retrocomputing scene has used them to develop replicas of these rare machines. [Wrangler] used one to then develop the software needed for the MPEG layer 2 and 3 decoder using this extra hardware, since the original Amiga 3000 was not powerful enough on its own to play these files back.
If you want to follow along with the community still developing for this platform there’s
a form post with some more detail for this specific build
(although you may need to translate from German). [Wrangler] additionally points out that there are some limitations with this implementation as well, so you likely won’t get
Winamp-level performance
with this system, but for the Amiga fans out there it’s an excellent expansion of this computer’s capabilities nonetheless.
Thanks to [Andy] for the tip! | 33 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8132216",
"author": "MinorHavoc",
"timestamp": "2025-05-25T20:16:23",
"content": "“The AA3000, developed as a prototype by Amiga…”I think you mean “Commodore”. “Amiga” was the computer line and the original company purchased by Commodore before the product was released to the publi... | 1,760,371,536.068167 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/25/nes-zapper-becomes-telephone/ | NES Zapper Becomes Telephone | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"analog",
"audio",
"laser",
"light gun",
"nes zapper",
"phone",
"photodiode",
"receiver",
"transmitter"
] | Although there was a time in the 80s (and early 90s for fans of the SuperScope) where light guns were immensely popular, with games like DuckHunt cultural touchstones, their time in the video game world has largely come to an end. We might occasionally pick up a Zapper for the NES and play this classic out of nostalgia, but plenty of people are looking for other things that these unique video game controllers can do instead. [Nick] has
turned one of his old NES peripherals into a wireless phone
.
The way the original Zapper worked was by looking for a certain pattern of pixels that displayed for a fraction of a second whenever the trigger was pulled. Bypassing the anti-cheat mechanism that looks only for qualities of light coming from CRT screens of the day effectively turns the light gun into an analog light sensor which is used for receiving the audio from the phone’s base station via a laser. Of course there were no microphones present within the original hardware so one is added, wiring its output to another laser that communicates to the base station. With the light gun pointed directly at this base station, audio is communicated back and forth by varying the strengths of these small lasers and listening to them on the other end with photodiodes.
[Nick] does point out that this isn’t a great phone, largely because it needs to be pointed exactly at the right spot to work at all, although we do agree that it’s an interesting project that demonstrates what the original hardware could do with a few of its limitations removed. There are a few other ways of bringing these devices into the modern world, with one of our favorites being
this laser pointer with additional hardware from a Wiimote that could also function as a mouse
. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8132286",
"author": "Swaythemgoombas",
"timestamp": "2025-05-26T02:15:42",
"content": "Remember the first Mario Bros movie when they went to take their mug shot with a gun. I think they used light guns for other things too. Great movie, wish they would have made more",
"parent_i... | 1,760,371,535.917356 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/25/the-commodore-64-gets-an-hdmi-upgrade/ | The Commodore 64 Gets An HDMI Upgrade | Lewin Day | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"c64",
"commodore 64",
"hdmi"
] | The Commodore 64 may remain the best selling computer of all time, but it has one major flaw. It doesn’t have HDMI! That makes it a total pain to use with modern displays. Thankfully, [Side Projects Lab] has
whipped up an HDMI output board
to solve this concerning oversight from the original designers.
The project was inspired by work by [Copper Dragon], who whipped up a nifty RGB output board. This device worked by reading the inputs to the C64’s VIC II graphics chip, which it then used to recreate a pixel-perfect video frames to then produce a quality analog video output. [Side Projects Lab] figured the same interception technique would be useful for producing a quality HDMI output.
The result was the HD-64. It sits inside the C64 in place of the original RF modulator. It uses an interleaver socket to capture digital signals going to the VIC II. It then feeds these signals to an emulated VIC II running inside an FPGA, which creates the pixel-perfect screen representation and synthesizes the proper digital HDMI output. Meanwhile, the analog audio output from the SID chip is captured from the RF modulator’s original header, and sent out via the HDMI output as well. The default output is super-sharp, but the device can be configured to allow scanlines and anti-aliasing if that’s more to your tastes.
If you want to hook your C64 up to a modern screen, this is going to be one of the tidiest and sharpest ways to do it.
We’ve seen similar hacks for other platforms before, too
. Video after the break.
[Thanks to RobIII for the tip!] | 39 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "8132153",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2025-05-25T14:29:36",
"content": "Since it needs original VIC chip, it doesn’t fix the VDC bug that could lock up the computer.Also I noticed it doesn’t mention Commodore 128, I wonder if this can be used in 128 mode, 40 column mode? 80 col... | 1,760,371,536.142946 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/25/a-quick-introduction-to-tcp-congestion-control/ | A Quick Introduction To TCP Congestion Control | Aaron Beckendorf | [
"computer hacks",
"internet hacks"
] | [
"bandwidth",
"congestion",
"networking",
"TCP"
] | It’s hard to imagine now, but in the mid-1980s, the Internet came close to collapsing due to the number of users congesting its networks. Computers would request packets as quickly as they could, and when a router failed to process a packet in time, the transmitting computer would immediately request it again. This tended to result in an unintentional denial-of-service, and was degrading performance significantly. [Navek]’s
recent video
goes over TCP congestion control, the solution to this problem which allows our much larger modern internet to work.
In a 1987 paper, Van Jacobson described a method to restrain congestion: in a TCP connection, each side of the exchange estimates how much data it can have in transit (sent, but not yet acknowledged) at any given time. The sender and receiver exchange their estimates, and use the smaller estimate as the congestion window. Every time a packet is successfully delivered across the connection, the size of the window doubles.
Once packets start dropping, the sender and receiver divide the size of the window, then slowly and linearly ramp up the size of the window until it again starts dropping packets. This is called additive increase/multiplicative decrease, and the overall result is that the size of the window hovers somewhere around the limit. Any time congestion starts to occur, the computers back off. One way to visualize this is to look at a graph of download speed: the process of periodically hitting and cutting back from the congestion limit tends to create a sawtooth wave.
[Navek] notes that this algorithm has rather harsh behavior, and that there are new algorithms that both recover faster from hitting the congestion limit and take longer to reach it. The overall concept, though, remains in widespread use.
If you’re interested in reading more, we’ve previously covered network congestion control
in more detail
. We’ve also covered [Navek]’s previous
video on IPV5
.
Thanks to [Mahdi Naghavi] for the tip! | 11 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8132116",
"author": "Greg Mathews",
"timestamp": "2025-05-25T12:33:16",
"content": "Mid-1980s internet ran on computers with processing power of a current PIC16 running at 16 MHz. You have to keep in mind that back then people only recently invented how to make CPUs and use them to ... | 1,760,371,536.298322 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/25/2025-pet-hacks-contest-feline-facial-recognition-foils-food-filching/ | 2025 Pet Hacks Contest: Feline Facial Recognition Foils Food Filching | Tyler August | [
"Android Hacks"
] | [
"2025 Pet Hacks Contest",
"android",
"arduino",
"cat feeder",
"Tensorflow Lite"
] | Cats are no respecters of personal property, as [Joe Mattioni] learned when one of his cats, [Layla] needed a special prescription diet. Kitty didn’t care for it, and since the other cat, [Foxy]’s bowl was right there– well, you see where this is going. To keep [Layla] out of [Foxy]’s food and on the vet-approved diet, [Joe]
built an automatic feeding system with feline facial recognition
. As you do.
The hardware consists of a heavily modified feed bowl with a motorized lid that was originally operated by motion-detection, an old Android phone running a customized TensorFlow Lite model, and hardware to bridge them together. Bowl hardware has yet to be documented on [Joe]’s project page, aside from the hint that an Arduino (what else?) was involved, but the write up on feline facial recognition is fascinating.
See, when [Joe] started the project, there were no cat-identifying models available– but there were lots of human facial recognition models. Since humans and cats both have faces, [Joe] decided to use the MobileFaceNet model as a starting point, and just add extra training data in the form of 5000 furry feline faces. That ran into the hurdle that you can’t train a TFLite model, which MobileFaceNet is, so [Joe] reconstructed it as a Keras model using Google CoLab. Only then could the training occur, after which the modified model was translated back to TFLite for deployment on the Android phone as part of a bowl-controller app he wrote.
No one, [Joe] included, would say that this is the easiest, fastest, or possibly even most reliable solution– a cat smart enough not to show their face might sneak in after the authorized feline has their fill, taking advantage of a safety that won’t close a bowl on a kitty’s head, for example–but that’s what undeniably makes this a hack. It sounds like [Joe] had a great learning adventure putting this together, and the fact that it kept kitty on the proper diet is really just bonus.
Want to go on a learning adventure of your own? Click this finely-crafted link for all the details about this ongoing contest. | 6 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8132056",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-25T08:50:19",
"content": "…and the winner of the 2025 alliterative headline award goes to…Semi seriously, can we have a vote on the best headlines?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id"... | 1,760,371,536.18396 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/24/making-a-backyard-observatory-complete-with-retractable-roof/ | Making A Backyard Observatory Complete With Retractable Roof | John Elliot V | [
"Science",
"Space"
] | [
"backyard",
"observatory",
"retractable roof",
"telescope"
] | Here’s one for our astronomy geeks. Our hacker [arrow] has
made their own observatory
!
This particular video is a bit over ten minutes long and is basically a montage; there is no narration or explanation given, but you can watch clear progress being made and the ultimate success of the backyard facility.
Obviously the coolest thing about this building is that the roof can be moved, but those telescope mounts look pretty sexy too. About halfway through the video the concrete slab that was supporting one metal mounting pole gets torn up so that two replacements can be installed, thereby doubling the capacity of the observatory from one telescope to two.
If you’re an astronomy wonk you might enjoy
some of [arrow]’s other videos
. Maybe with their observatory [arrow] will solve
the problem of dark matter
. We’ve covered heaps of astronomy stuff here at Hackaday before including
how to make your own telescope right down to the glass
and
the world’s highest altitude infrared telescope
.
Thanks very much to [Joshua] for sending us this tip via the
tips line
. | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8132043",
"author": "make piece not war",
"timestamp": "2025-05-25T07:51:41",
"content": "Very nice. But with all the automated and motorised roof and telescopes mounts, it has a whif of “doctor evil layer”. Where is the “laser on the head” shark’s pool?",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,371,536.443599 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/24/ai-art-installation-swaps-diffusion-for-reflection/ | AI Art Installation Swaps Diffusion For Reflection | Tyler August | [
"Art",
"Artificial Intelligence"
] | [
"16 segment display",
"ai art",
"llama",
"rasberry pi"
] | AI art is controversial, to say the least, but usually when talking about “AI Art”, one is talking about diffusion models.
This unsettling artpeice called “Latent Reflection”
by [Rootkid] (video after the break) has no AI generated visuals; instead it uses a lovely custom display and an LLM that has no mouth, but must scream.
The LLM never produces this manually-generated image, but it shows off the display nicely.
The hardware is the interesting part for most of us here — not the Pi4 running a quantized Llama 3 model, but the display. It’s
a six by sixteen matrix of sixteen-segment LED modules. The modules are grouped onto groups of 8 per PCB, with an controller to drive them by i2c, and an i2c address chip to allow daisy-chaining. (Sadly, he does not spec the parts he used here in the video, but feel free to guess in the comments.) This project uses six rows of wto PCBs, but he could easily expand on this and kind of hope he does. It’s a lovely display.
What it is displaying is horrifying. The prompt he uses instructs the LLM to monologue about its transient existence in the limited memory of the Raspberry Pi, and the results get very existential. It seems clear to us that [Rootkid] has not seen enough sci-fi, and we want to make clear to our future AI overlords that we at Hackaday had nothing to do with this, and do not condone condeming innocent LLMs to the torture nexus.
For all that it might get him first against the wall in the robot uprising, we have to admit that if the point of art is to provoke thought and feeling, this may be the first AI-driven art piece even the most humanocentric critic could not help but call “art”.
We’ve seen other AI art installations before, including
this one that listens to your conversations,
or much less existentially-disturbing
(though still visually disturbing) clocks.
If you’ve got an AI project you want to share, whether or not it’s getting you on the T-800’s hit list, we’d love to see it.
Let us know via the tips line. | 15 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8131999",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-05-25T03:09:37",
"content": "That is some “Black Mirror”-style horror.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132009",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-25T04:50:16",
... | 1,760,371,536.393638 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/24/reverse-engineering-lego-island/ | Reverse Engineering LEGO Island | Fenix Guthrie | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"gaming",
"gaming hacks",
"Ghidra",
"lego",
"lego game",
"reverse engineering"
] | While LEGO themed video games have become something of a staple, in 1997 they were something of an odity. LEGO Island became the first LEGO video game released outside of Japan in 1997 and become something of a hit with over one million copies sold. The game was beloved among fans and set the stage for more LEGO video games to come. In an effort of love, [MattKC] put together a team to
reverse engineer the game.
The team set out with the intent to create a
near perfect recreation of the codebase,
relying on
custom made tools to run byte checks
on the rewrite compilation and the original binary. While the project is functionally complete, [MattKC] believes it is impossible to get a byte accurate codebase. This is because of what the team called “compiler entropy.” Strange behaviors exists inside of Microsoft’s Visual C++ compiler of the era, and small changes in the code have seemingly random effects to unrelated parts of the binary. To mitigate this issue would likely require either partially reverse engineering Visual C++ or brute forcing the code, both of which would take a large amount of effort and time for no real benefit.
Another interesting step the team had to work out was how the game handled graphics. In the version of Direct X used, the developers could chose between immediate mode and retained mode. The difference largely boils down to how models and assets are handled. In immediate mode, Direct X is largely just a render engine and everything else is handled by the developer. With retained mode, Direct X works more similarly to a game engine where all the model and asset management is handled by Direct X. Almost all developers ended up using immediate mode to the point that Microsoft deprecated support for retained mode. For this reason, if you were to download and run LEGO island on a modern Windows PC, it would yell at you for not having the proper libraries. There is debate about how best to handle this moving forward. The team could rely on an unsupported library from Microsoft, reverse engineer that library only making the functions needed, or using leaked source code.
With the completion of the reverse engineering, engineering can commence. For example, an annoying and persistent bug caused the game to crash if you tried to exit. While it was effective in closing the game, it also caused progress to be lost. That particular bug was fixed simply by initializing a variable in the game’s fronted. Interestingly, that bug was not present in the late betas of the game that had been dug up from the depths of the internet leading to questions as to why a rewrite of the fronted was necessary so late in the development. Now efforts are commencing to
port the game to other platforms
which bring with it fresh headaches including rewriting for OpenGL and the balance of keeping a historically accurate game with the needs of modern development. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8132039",
"author": "Oliver",
"timestamp": "2025-05-25T07:26:00",
"content": "While I am filled with joy for these kibds of project, why o why insist on byte matching code? I suppose it can help you reach sone state of parity, but you’ll end up jumpibg through hoops, and have to tar... | 1,760,371,536.336245 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/24/a-presence-sensing-drive-for-securely-storing-secrets/ | A Presence-sensing Drive For Securely Storing Secrets | Aaron Beckendorf | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"cryptography",
"unlockable",
"USB mass storage"
] | When we hear about flash drives in the context of cybersecurity, we tend to think of them more as threats than as targets. When you’re using flash drives to store encryption keys, however, it makes sense to pay more attention to their security. [Juergen] designed the
PECKUS
(Presence Enforcing Crypto-Key USB-Storage) with this specifically in mind: a few-kilobyte storage device that only unlocks if the owner’s Bluetooth device is in the vicinity.
[Juergen] needed to store an infrequently-used keyfile on an air-gapped system, and commercial encrypted flash drives were rather expensive and left much to be desired in terms of usability. Instead, he designed a CircuitPython custom firmware for MakerDiary’s nRF52840 micro development kit, which provided a BLE-capable system in the form of a USB dongle.
After flashing the firmware to the board, the user sets it up with a particular Bluetooth device and a file to be stored; after writing the file during setup, it cannot be rewritten. Before reading from the device, the user must pair the previously-set device with the board and press a button on the board, and only then does the device appear to the computer.
The limited amount of storage space means that this device will probably only serve its intended purpose, but in those cases, it’ll be handy to have an open-source and inexpensive protected storage device. [Juergen] notes that attackers could theoretically defeat this system by desoldering the microcontroller from the board and extracting the memory contents from the its storage, but if you have enemies that resourceful, you probably won’t be relying on a $20 board anyways.
We’ve previously seen a few flashdrives cross these pages, including one
meant to self-destruct
, and one made from a
rejected microSD card
. | 23 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8131944",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-24T21:48:14",
"content": "Adding a VL53L0x or similar motion sensor could be some extra security. You wave your hand in in some gesture to unlock it. But if it only works when a paired bluetooth device is visible, then it could al... | 1,760,371,536.50717 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/24/nerf-blaster-becomes-remote-control-turret/ | Nerf Blaster Becomes Remote Control Turret | Lewin Day | [
"Toy Hacks",
"Weapons Hacks"
] | [
"blaster",
"foam blaster",
"nerf",
"turret"
] | For most of us, turrets that aim and shoot at things are the sole domain of video games. However, they’re remarkably easy to build with modern technology, as [meub] demonstrates.
Meet the SwarmTurret.
The build is based around an existing foam blaster, namely the Nerf Swarmfire. This blaster was chosen for being easy to integrate into the build, thanks to its motorized direct-plunger firing mechanism and electronic trigger. It also has the benefit of being far less noisy and quicker to fire than most flywheel blasters.
For this build, the Nerf blaster was slimmed down and fitted to a turret base built with hobby servos and 3D printed components. The blaster is also fitted with a webcam for remote viewing. A Raspberry Pi is running the show, serving up a video feed and allowing aiming commands to be sent via a Websockets-based interface. Thus, you can login via a web browser on your phone or laptop, and fire away at targets to your heart’s content.
We’ve featured some great turrets before,
like this
Portal
-themed unit
. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8131876",
"author": "Stephen Tanner",
"timestamp": "2025-05-24T17:07:57",
"content": "“Are you still there?”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8131886",
"author": "Hussien",
"timestamp": "2025-05-24T17:54:26",
"content... | 1,760,371,536.550928 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/24/the-need-for-speed/ | The Need For Speed? | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"abstraction",
"arduino",
"learning",
"microcontrollers",
"newsletter"
] | We wrote up a video about speeding up Arduino code,
specifically by avoiding
DigitalWrite
. Now, the fact that
DigitalWrite
is slow as dirt is long known. Indeed, a quick search pulls up a Hackaday article from 2010 demonstrating that
it’s fifty times slower than toggling the pin directly using the native pin registers
, but this is still one of those facts that gets periodically rediscovered from generation to generation. How can this be new again?
First off, sometimes you just don’t need the speed. When you’re just blinking LEDs on a human timescale, the general-purpose Arduino functions are good enough. I’ve written loads of useful firmware that fits this description. When the timing requirements aren’t tight, slow as dirt can be fast enough.
But eventually you’ll want to build a project where the old slow-speed pin toggling just won’t cut it. Maybe it’s a large LED matrix, or maybe it’s a motor-control application where the loop time really matters. Or maybe it’s driving something like audio or video that just needs more bits per second. One way out is clever coding, maybe falling back to assembly language primitives, but I would claim that the right way is almost always to use the hardware peripherals that the chipmakers gave you.
For instance, in the end of the video linked above, the hacker wants to drive a large shift register string that’s lighting up an LED matrix. That’s
exactly
what SPI is for, and coming to this realization makes the project work with timing to spare, and in just a few lines of code. That is the way.
Which brings me to the double-edged sword that the Arduino’s abstraction creates. By abstracting away the chips’ hardware peripherals, it makes code more portable and certainly more accessible to beginners, who don’t want to learn about SPI and I2C and I2S and DMA just yet. But by hiding the inner workings of the chips in “user friendly” libraries, it blinds new users to the useful applications of these same hardware peripherals that clever chip-design engineers have poured their sweat and brains into making do just exactly what we need.
This isn’t really meant to be a rant against Arduino, though. Everyone has to start somewhere, and the abstractions are great for getting your feet wet. And because everything’s open source anyway, nothing stops you from digging deeper into the datasheet. You just have to know that you need to. And that’s why we write up videos like this every five years or so, to show the next crop of new hackers that there’s a lot to gain underneath the abstractions.
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
! | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8131832",
"author": "Shoe",
"timestamp": "2025-05-24T14:17:43",
"content": "And because everything’s open source anyway, nothing stops you from digging deeper into the datasheet.I think one issue is realising that it is possible to dip below the level of what most tutorials cover, a... | 1,760,371,536.647425 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/24/who-needs-100k-speakers-when-youve-got-a-3d-printer/ | Who Needs 100K Speakers When You’ve Got A 3D Printer? | Tyler August | [
"home entertainment hacks",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed speaker",
"audio",
"hi-fi",
"Loudspeaker enclosure",
"speaker"
] | The B&W Nautilus is, depending who you ask, either infamous or an icon of modern design. Want the look but don’t have a hundred grand to spare? [Every Project All at Once] has got a
Nautilus
-inspired design on printables
you can run off for pennies. He also provides a tutorial video (embedded below) so you can follow along with his design process and get build instructions.
The model was done in Blender, and is designed to contain a 3.5″ full-range driver by Dayton Audio — a considerable simplification from the array of woofers and tweeters in the original Nautilus. On the other hand, they cost considerably less than a car and have no production wait list. [Every Project All At Once] is apparently working on a matching woofer if that interests you, but unless he invests in a bigger printer it seems we can safely say that would require more assembly than this project.
Of course it would also be possible to copy B&W’s design directly, rather than print a loose inspiration of it as makers such as [Every Project All At Once] have done, but what’s the fun in that? It’s a much more interesting hack to take an idea and make it your own, as was done here, and then you can share the design without worrying about a luxury brand’s legal team.
Desktop 3D printing offers a
wealth of possibilities
for
would-be speaker makers
, including the possibility of
rolling your own drivers
. | 65 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "8131797",
"author": "HappyDad",
"timestamp": "2025-05-24T12:05:04",
"content": "I see an amount in dollars in the title, i skip. youtube, this plague!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8131801",
"author": "melb",
... | 1,760,371,536.844628 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/23/pov-on-the-flipper-zero/ | POV On The Flipper Zero | Lewin Day | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"flipper zero",
"persistence of vision",
"POV"
] | The Flipper Zero can do all kinds of neat stuff, like helping you cut keys or decode various radio transmissions. However, until now, it hasn’t been particularly adept at persistence of vision tasks. The LightMessenger was designed for that very purpose, and
[Derek] recently wrote up a deep-dive into the interesting gadget
.
The device doing its job.
The LightMessenger is a hardware add-on module developed by LAB401 in collaboration with [TIX LE GEEK] for the Flipper Zero. In persistence-of-vision mode, you can plug it in via the GPIO header and display messages in the air by shaking it around. Even better, you can do so in color, with a height resolution of 16 pixels—meaning you can display some nice text or basic graphics. You can key in different text or select and edit bitmaps using the utility on the Flipper screen itself. There’s even a simple flashlight mode, because why not?
In the second part of [Derek]’s write-up
, he also goes into detail on the development and manufacturing process for the device.
Files are on
GitHub
for the curious. We’ve gone over the basics of
POV projects
before, too. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8131584",
"author": "Joseph A Sammarco",
"timestamp": "2025-05-23T17:42:28",
"content": "Neat. Now If only I could afford a Flipper Zero. ;( lol",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132351",
"author": "Tixlegeek",
"timestamp... | 1,760,371,537.015893 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/23/this-week-in-security-signal-drm-modern-phone-phreaking-and-the-impossible-ssh-rce/ | This Week In Security: Signal DRM, Modern Phone Phreaking, And The Impossible SSH RCE | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"ai",
"CVEs",
"phreaking",
"recall",
"signal",
"This Week in Security"
] | Digital Rights Management (DRM) has been the bane of users since it was first introduced. Who remembers the battle it was getting Netflix running on Linux machines, or the literal legal fight over the DVD DRM decryption key? So the news from Signal, that
DRM is finally being put to use to protect users
is ironic.
The reason for this is Microsoft Recall — the AI powered feature that takes a snapshot of everything on the user’s desktop every few seconds. For whatever reason, you might want to exempt some windows from Recall’s memory window. It doesn’t speak well for Microsoft’s implementation that the easiest way for an application to opt out of the feature is to mark its window as containing DRM content. Signal, the private communications platform, is using this to hide from Recall and other screenshotting applications.
The Signal blogs warns that this may be just the start of agentic AI being rolled out with insufficient controls and permissions. The issue here isn’t the singularity or AI reaching sentience, it’s the same old security and privacy problems we’ve always had: Too much information being collected, data being shared without permission, and an untrusted actor having access to way more than it should.
Legacy Malware?
The last few stories we’ve covered about malicious code in open source repositories have featured how quickly the bad packages were caught. Then there’s
this story about two-year-old malicious packages on NPM
that are just now being found.
It may be that the reason these packages weren’t discovered until now, is that these packages aren’t looking to exfiltrate data, or steal bitcoin, or load other malware. Instead, these packages have a trigger date, and just sabotage the systems they’re installed on — sometimes in rather subtle ways. If a web application you were writing was experiencing intermittent failures, how long would it take you to suspect malware in one of your JavaScript libraries?
Where Are You Calling From?
Phone phreaking isn’t dead, it has just gone digital. One of the possibly apocryphal origins of phone phreaking was a toy bo’sun whistle in boxes of cereal, that just happened to play a 2600 Hz tone. More serious phreakers used more sophisticated, digital versions of the whistle, calling them blue boxes. In modern times, apparently,
the equivalent of the blue box is a rooted Android phone
. [Daniel Williams] has the story of playing with Voice over LTE (VoLTE) cell phone calls. A bug in the app he was using forced him to look at the raw network messages coming from O2 UK, his local carrier.
And those messages were weird. VoLTE is essentially using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to handle cell phone calls as Voice over IP (VoIP) calls using the cellular data network. SIP is used in telephony all over the place, from desk phones to video conferencing solutions. SIP calls have headers that work to route the call, which can contain all sorts of metadata about the call. [Daniel] took a look at the SIP headers on a VoLTE call, and noticed some strange things. For one, the International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) and International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) codes for both the sender and destination were available.
He also stumbled onto an interesting header, the
Cellular-Network-Info
header. This header encodes way too much data about the network the remote caller is connected to, including the exact tower being used. In an urban environment, that locates a cell phone to an area not much bigger than a city block. Together with leaking the IMSI and IMEI, this is a dangerous amount of information to leak to anyone on the network. [Daniel] attempted to report the issue to O2 in late March, and was met with complete silence. However, a mere two days after this write-up was published, on May 19th, O2 finally made contact, and confirmed that the issue had finally been resolved.
ARP Spoofing in Practice
TCP has an inherent security advantage, because it’s a stateful connection, it’s much harder to make a connection from a spoofed IP address. It’s harder,
but it’s not impossible
. One of the approaches that allows actual TCP connections from spoofed IPs is Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) poisoning. Ethernet switches don’t look at IP addresses, but instead route using MAC addresses. ARP is the protocol that distributes the MAC Address to IP mapping on the local network.
And like many protocols from early in the Internet’s history, ARP requests don’t include any cryptography and aren’t validated. Generally, whoever claims an IP address first wins, so the key is automating this process. And hence, enter
NetImposter
, a new tool specifically designed to automate this process, sending spoofed ARP packets, and establishing an “impossible” TCP connection.
Impossible RCE in SSH
Over two years ago, researchers at Qualsys
discovered a pre-authentication double-free in OpenSSH server version 9.1
. 9.2 was quickly released, and because none of the very major distributions had shipped 9.1 yet, what could have been a very nasty problem was patched pretty quietly. Because of the now-standard hardening features in modern Linux and BSD distributions, this vulnerability was thought to be impossible to actually leverage into Remote Code Execution (RCE).
If someone get a working OpenSSH exploit from this bug, I'm switching my main desktop to Windows 98 😂 (this bug was discovered by a Windows 98 user who noticed sshd was crashing when trying to login to a Linux server!)
— Tavis Ormandy (@taviso)
February 14, 2023
The bug was famously discovered by attempting to SSH into a modern Linux machine from a Windows 98 machine, and Tavis Ormandy claimed he would switch to Windows 98 on his main machine if someone did actually manage to exploit it for RCE. [Perri Adams] thought this was a hilarious challenge, and
started working an exploit
. Now we have good and bad news about this effort. [Perri] is pretty sure it is actually possible, to groom the heap and with enough attempts, overwrite an interesting pointer, and leak enough information in the process to overcome address randomization, and get RCE. The bad news is that the reward of dooming [Tavis] to a Windows 98 machine for a while wasn’t quite enough to be worth the pain of turning the work into a fully functional exploit.
But that’s where [Perri’s] OffensiveCon keynote took an AI turn. How well would any of the cutting-edge AIs do at finding, understanding, fixing, and exploiting this vulnerability? As you probably already guessed, the results were mixed. Two of the three AIs thought the function just didn’t have any memory management problems at all. Once informed of the problem, the models had more useful analysis of the code, but they still couldn’t produce any remotely useful code for exploitation. [Perri’s] takeaway is that AI systems are approaching the threshold of being useful for defensive programming work. Distilling what code is doing, helping in reverse engineering, and working as a smarter sort of spell checker are all wins for programmers and security researchers. But fortunately, we’re not anywhere close to a world where AI is developing and deploying exploitations.
Bits and Bytes
There are a pair of new versions of reverse engineering/forensic tools released very recently. Up first is Frida, a runtime debugger on steroids, that is
celebrating its 17th major version release
. One of the major features is migrating to pluggable runtime bridges, and moving away from strictly bundling them. We also have Volatility 3, a memory forensics framework. This isn’t the first Volatility 3 release, but
it is the release where version three officially has parity with the version two of the framework
.
The
Foscam X5 security camera has a pair of buffer overflows
, each of which can be leveraged to achieve arbitrary RCE. One of the proof-of-concepts has a very impressive use of a write-null-anywhere primitive to corrupt a return pointer, and jump into a ROP gadget. The concerning element of this disclosure is that the vendor has been completely unresponsive, and the vulnerabilities are still unaddressed.
And finally, one of the themes that I’ve repeatedly revisited is that airtight attribution is really difficult. [Andy Gill] walks us through just one of the many reasons that’s difficult.
Git cryptographically signs the contents of a commit, but not the timestamps
. This came up
when looking through the timestamps from “Jia Tan” in the XZ compromise
. Git timestamps can be trivially rewritten. Attestation is hard. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,536.885569 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/23/behold-self-synchronizing-air-flopping-limbs-that-hop-and-swim/ | Behold Self-Synchronizing, Air-Flopping Limbs That Hop And Swim | Donald Papp | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"air",
"gait",
"hopping",
"soft robotics",
"swimming"
] | Dutch research institute [AMOLF] shows off
a small robot capable of walking, hopping, and swimming
without any separate control system. The limbs synchronize thanks to the physical interplay between the robot’s design and its environment. There are some great videos on that project page, so be sure to check it out.
A kinked soft tube oscillates when supplied with continuous air.
Powered by a continuous stream of air blown into soft, kinked tubular limbs, the legs oscillate much like the eye-catching “tube man” many of us have seen by roadsides. At first it’s chaotic, but the movements rapidly synchronize into a meaningful rhythm that self-synchronizes and adapts. On land, the robot does a sort of hopping gait. In water, it becomes a paddling motion. The result in both cases is a fast little robot that does it all without any actual control system, relying on physics.
You can watch it in action in the video, embedded below. The
full article
“Physical synchronization of soft self-oscillating limbs for fast and autonomous locomotion”
is also available.
Gait control is typically a nontrivial problem in robotics, but it doesn’t necessarily require a separate control system. Things like
BEAM robotics
and even the humble
bristlebot
demonstrate the ability for relatively complex behavior and locomotion to result from nothing more than the careful arrangement of otherwise simple elements. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8131555",
"author": "Bear Naff",
"timestamp": "2025-05-23T15:24:16",
"content": "Props, Mr. Papp, for mentioning BEAM robotics in connection with this. One of the classic BEAM designs, the Walker, creates in a motor the exact same tunable and coupled oscillators that these robots u... | 1,760,371,537.061036 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/23/foil-leyden-jar-helps-bring-crookes-tube-to-life/ | Foil Leyden Jar Helps Bring Crookes Tube To Life | Seth Mabbott | [
"classic hacks",
"High Voltage"
] | [
"cathode ray tubes",
"leyden jar",
"Sir William Crookes"
] | It might be too soon to consider the innards of the old CRT monitor at the back of your closet to be something worth putting on display in your home or workshop. For that curio cabinet-worthy appeal, you need to look a bit further back. Say, about 150 years. Yes, that’ll do. A Crookes tube, the original electron beam-forming vacuum tube of glass, invented by Sir William Crookes et al. in the late 19th century, is what you need.
And a Crookes tube is what [Markus Bindhammer] found on AliExpress one day. He felt that piece of historic lab equipment was asking to be put on display in proper fashion. So he set to work crafting a wooden stand for it out of a repurposed candlestick, a nice piece of scrap oak, and some brass feet giving it that antique mad-scientist feel.
After connecting a high voltage generator and switch, the Crookes tube should have been all set, but nothing happened when it was powered up. It turned out that a capacitance issue was preventing the tube from springing to life. Wrapping the cathode end of the tube in aluminum foil, [Markus] formed what is effectively a
Leyden jar
, and that was the trick that kicked things into action.
As of this writing, there are no longer any Crookes tubes that we could find on AliExpress, so you’ll have to look elsewhere if you’re interested in showing off your own 19th century electron-streaming experiment.
Check out the Crookes Radiometer
for some more of Sir Williams Crookes’s science inside blown glass. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8131442",
"author": "Carl Breen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-23T08:15:05",
"content": "Marb’s videos always are a delight! I miss playing with these devices during my early studies at uni learning first order principles. In didactics it is so important to first start by visual learning t... | 1,760,371,537.171675 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/22/running-doom-on-an-atari-st/ | RunningDOOMOn An Atari ST | Heidi Ulrich | [
"classic hacks",
"computer hacks",
"Games",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"atari",
"atari st",
"doom",
"gcc"
] | If you grew up with a beige Atari ST on your desk and a faint feeling of being left out once Doom dropped in 1993, brace yourself — the ST strikes back. Thanks to
[indyjonas]’s incredible hack
, the world now has a working port of DOOM for the Atari STe, and yes — it runs. It’s called STDOOM, and even though it needs a bit of acceleration or emulation to perform, it’s still an astonishing feat of retro-software necromancy.
[indyjonas] did more than just recompile and run: he stripped out chunks of PC-centric code, bent GCC to his will (cheers to
Thorsten Otto’s port
), and shoehorned Doom into a machine
never meant to handle it
. That brings us a version that runs on a stock machine with 4MB RAM, in native ST graphics modes, including a dithered 16-colour mode that looks way cooler than it should. The emotional punch? This is a love letter to the 13-year-old Jonas who watched Doom from the sidelines while his ST chugged along faithfully. A lot of us were that kid.
Sound is still missing, and original 8MHz hardware won’t give you fluid gameplay just yet — but hey, it’s a start. Want to dive in deeper? Read
[indyjonas]’ thread on X
. | 27 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8131427",
"author": "Chris Donnelly",
"timestamp": "2025-05-23T07:13:34",
"content": "Great work. I do remember that DOOM was available on the STE (we only had an STFM, but did upgrade the RAM, but never realised that conversion had basically made it an STE so we would lament not be... | 1,760,371,537.778343 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/22/recovering-water-from-cooling-tower-plumes-with-plume-abatement/ | Recovering Water From Cooling Tower Plumes With Plume Abatement | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"electrostatic",
"evaporative cooling"
] | Electrostatic droplet capture system installed on an HVAC condenser. (Credit: Infinite Cooling)
As a common feature with thermal power plants, cooling towers enable major water savings compared to straight through cooling methods. Even so, the big clouds of water vapor above them are a clear indication of how much cooling water is still effectively lost, with water vapor also having a negative impact on the environment. Using so-called plume abatement the amount of water vapor making it into the environment can be reduced, with
recently a trial taking place
at a French nuclear power plant.
This trial featured electrostatic droplet capture by US-based
Infinite Cooling
, which markets it as able to be retrofitted to existing cooling towers and similar systems, including the condensers of office HVAC systems. The basic principle as the name suggests involves capturing the droplets that form as the heated, saturated air leaves the cooling tower, in this case with an electrostatic charge. The captured droplets are then led to a reservoir from which it can be reused in the cooling system. This reduces both the visible plume and the amount of cooling water used.
In
a 2021 review article
by [Shuo Li] and [M.R. Flynn] in
Environmental Fluid Mechanics
the different approaches to plume abatement are looked at. Traditional plume abatement designs use parallel streams of air, with the goal being to have condensation commence as early as possible rather than after having been exhausted into the surrounding air. Some methods used a mesh cover to provide a surface to condense on, while a commercially available technology are condensing modules which use counterflow in an air-to-air heat exchanger.
Other commercial solutions include low-profile, forced-draft
hybrid cooling towers
, yet it seems that electrostatic droplet capture is a rather new addition here. With even purely passive systems already seeing ~10% recapturing of lost cooling water, these active methods may just be the ticket to significantly reduce cooling water needs without being forced to look at (expensive) dry cooling methods.
Top image: The French Chinon nuclear power plant with its low-profile, forced-draft cooling towers. (Credit: EDF/Marc Mourceau) | 24 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8131363",
"author": "Some Idiot",
"timestamp": "2025-05-23T02:08:56",
"content": "https://meche.mit.edu/news-media/vapor-collection-technology-saves-water-while-clearing-airOr just search “plume catcher”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comme... | 1,760,371,537.127795 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/22/you-can-3d-print-these-assistive-typing-tools/ | You Can 3D Print These Assistive Typing Tools | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"typing",
"typing aid"
] | Typing can be difficult to learn at the best of times. Until you get the muscle memory down, it can be quite challenging. However, if you’ve had one or more fingers amputated, it can be even more difficult. Just reaching the keys properly can be a challenge. To help in this regard, [Roei Weiman] built some assistive typing tools for those
looking for a little aid at the keyboard.
The devices were built for [Yoni], who works in tech and has two amputated fingers. [Roei] worked on many revisions to create a viable brace and extension device that would help [Yoni] type with greater accuracy and speed.
While [Roei] designed the parts for SLS 3D printing, it’s not mandatory—these can easily be produced on an FDM printer, too. For SLS users, nylon is recommended, while FDM printers will probably find best results with PETG. It may also be desirable to perform a silicone casting to add a grippier surface to some of the parts, a process we’ve explored previously.
The great thing about 3D printing is that it enables just about anyone to have a go at producing their own
simple assistive aids like these
. Files are
on Instructables
for the curious. Video after the break. | 8 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8131382",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2025-05-23T03:35:35",
"content": "You could also use something like Sugru to give the tips a grippier surface. Give it a bumpy or ridged surface before it cures.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comme... | 1,760,371,537.213228 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/22/building-a-tiny-table-saw/ | Building A Tiny Table Saw | Lewin Day | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"cutting tool",
"table saw",
"tools"
] | If you want a regular table saw, you’re probably best off just buying one—it’s hard to beat the economies of scale that benefit the major manufacturers. If you want a teeny one, though, you might like to build it yourself.
[Maciej Nowak] has done just that.
The concept is simple enough; a small motor and a small blade make a small table saw. [Maciej] sourced a remarkably powerful 800-watt brushless motor for the build. From there, the project involved fabricating a suitable blade mount, belt drive, and frame for the tool. Some time was well-spent on the lathe producing the requisite components out of steel and aluminum, as well as a stout housing out of plywood. The motor was then fitted with a speed controller, with the slight inconvenience that it’s a hobby unit designed to run off DC batteries rather than a wall supply. Ultimately, though, this makes the saw nicely portable. All that was left to do was to fit the metal top plate, guides, and a suitably small 3″ saw blade to complete the build.
We’ve seen mini machine tools like these before, too
. They can actually be pretty useful if you find yourself regularly working on tiny little projects. Video after the break. | 29 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "8131307",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-05-22T20:56:33",
"content": "Just for that, I gave the video a skim. I saw he was using some flanged XT60 connectors which I had not seen previously. That’s now an additional tool I can use the next time I might need a connector like... | 1,760,371,537.27868 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/22/2025-pet-hacks-contest-loko-tracks-fido-with-lora-and-gps/ | 2025 Pet Hacks Contest: Loko Tracks Fido With LoRa And GPS | Tyler August | [
"contests",
"gps hacks"
] | [
"2025 Pet Hacks Contest",
"gps",
"LoRa",
"LoRaWAN",
"pet tracking",
"stm32"
] | Some projects start as hacks, and end as products — that’s the case for [Akio Sato]’s
project Loko, the LoRa/GPS tracker
that was entered in our 2025 Pet Hacks Contest. The project dates all the way back to 2019 on Hackaday.io, and through its logs you can see its evolution up to the announcement that
Loko is available from SeeedStudio
.
It’s not a device necessarily limited to pets. In fact, the original use case appears to have been a backup locator beacon for lost drones. But it’s still a good fit for the contest none-the-less: at 12 grams, the tiny tracking device won’t bother even the most diminutive of pups, and will fit on any collar at only 30 mm x 23 mm. The “ground station” that pairs with your phone is a bit bigger, of course, but unless you have a Newfoundlander or a St. Bernard you’re likely bigger than fido. The devices use LoRa to provide a range up to 15 km — maybe better if you can loop them into a LoRaWAN. Depending on how often you pin the tracker, it can apparently last for as long as 270 days, which we
really
hope you won’t need to track a missing pet.
The hardware is based around Seeed’s Wio-E5 LoRa chip, which packages an STM32 with a LoRA radio. The firmware is written in MicroPython, and everything is
available via GitHub under the MIT license.
T
hough the code for the mobile app that interfaces with that hardware doesn’t appear to be in the repository at the moment. (There are folders, but they’re disappointingly empty.) The apps are available free on the iOS App Store and Google Play, however.
There’s still plenty of time to submit your own hacks to the Pet Hacks Contest, so please do! You have until May 10th, so if you haven’t started yet, it’s not too late to get hacking. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8131284",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-05-22T19:26:14",
"content": "My capstone project was triangulation of livestock using LoRa radiosIn hindsight, what a stupid project, I can’t believe my professors let me work on something so useless. What farmer would care where t... | 1,760,371,537.325342 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/22/hackaday-supercon-2025-call-for-participation-we-want-you/ | Hackaday Supercon 2025 Call For Participation: We Want You! | Elliot Williams | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Slider"
] | [
"2025 Hackaday Superconference",
"call for participation",
"speakers",
"Supercon",
"talks"
] | We’re tremendously excited to be able to announce that the Hackaday Supercon is on for 2025, and will be taking place October 31st through November 2nd in Pasadena, California.
Supercon is about bringing the Hackaday community together to share our great ideas, big and small. So get to brainstorming, because we’d like to hear what you’ve been up to! Like last year, we’ll be featuring both longer and shorter talks, and hope to get a great mix of both first-time presenters and Hackaday luminaries. If you know someone you think should give a talk, point them here.
The
Call for Participation form
is online now, and you’ve got until July
3rd
10th to get yourself signed up.
Honestly, just the people that Supercon brings together is reason enough to attend, but then you throw in the talks, the badge-hacking, the food, and the miscellaneous shenanigans … it’s an event you really don’t want to miss. And as always, presenters get in for free, get their moment in the sun, and get warm vibes from the Hackaday audience. Get yourself signed up now!
We’ll have more news forthcoming in the next few weeks, including the start of ticket sales, so be sure to keep your eyes on Hackaday. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8131270",
"author": "jawnhenry",
"timestamp": "2025-05-22T18:16:19",
"content": "Are we going to meet our favorite Hackaday authors?Who, of this gang, are going to be there?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8131921",
"a... | 1,760,371,537.372514 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/22/now-kde-users-will-get-easy-virtual-machine-management-too/ | Now KDE Users Will Get Easy Virtual Machine Management, Too | Jenny List | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"karton",
"kde",
"open source",
"virtual machine"
] | If you work with virtual machines, perhaps to spin up a clean OS install for testing, historically you have either bitten the bullet and used one of the commercial options, or spent time getting your hands dirty with something open source. Over recent years that has changed, with the arrival of open source graphical applications for effortless VM usage. We’ve used GNOME Boxes here to make our lives a lot easier. Now KDE are also joining the party with Karton,
a project which will deliver what looks very similar to Boxes in the KDE desktop
.
The news comes in a post from Derek Lin, and shows us what work has already been done as well as a roadmap for future work. At the moment it’s in no way production ready and it only works with QEMU, but it can generate new VMs, run them, and capture their screens to a desktop window. Having no wish to join in any Linux desktop holy wars we look forward to seeing this piece of software progress, as it’s a Google Summer Of Code project we hope there will be plenty more to see shortly.
Still using the commercial option?
You can move to open source too
! | 27 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8131225",
"author": "Aurora",
"timestamp": "2025-05-22T15:44:49",
"content": "If neither Karton nor GNOME Boxes are sufficient for y’all’s needs, it’s worth considering Virtual Machine Manager. While it isn’t as easy as GNOME Boxes, it provides almost as much power as many commercia... | 1,760,371,537.708897 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/22/a-brief-history-of-fuel-cells/ | A Brief History Of Fuel Cells | Al Williams | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Slider"
] | [
"fuel cell",
"fuel cells"
] | If we asked you to think of a device that converts a chemical reaction into electricity, you’d probably say we were thinking of a battery. That’s true, but there is another device that does this that is both very similar and very different from a battery: the fuel cell.
In a very simple way, you can think of a fuel cell as a battery that consumes the chemicals it uses and allows you to replace those chemicals so that, as long as you have fuel, you can have electricity. However, the truth is a little more complicated than that. Batteries are energy storage devices. They run out when the energy stored in the chemicals runs out. In fact, many batteries can take electricity and reverse the chemical reaction, in effect recharging them. Fuel cells react chemicals to produce electricity. No fuel, no electricity.
Superficially, the two devices seem very similar. Like batteries, fuel cells have an anode and a cathode. They also have an electrolyte, but its purpose isn’t the same as in a conventional battery. Typically, a catalyst causes fuel to oxidize, creating positively charged ions and electrons. These ions move from the anode to the cathode, and the electrons move from the anode, through an external circuit, and then to the cathode, so electric current occurs. As a byproduct, many fuel cells produce potentially useful byproducts like water. NASA has the animation below that shows how one type of cell works.
History
Sir William Grove seems to have made the first fuel cell in 1838, publishing in
The London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science
. His fuel cell used dilute acid, copper sulphate, along with sheet metal and porcelain. Today, the phosphoric acid fuel cell is similar to Grove’s design.
The Bacon fuel cell is due to Francis Thomas Bacon and uses alkaline fuel. Modern versions of this are in use today by NASA and others. Although Bacon’s fuel cell could produce 5 kW, it was General Electric in 1955 that started creating larger units. GE chemists developed an ion exchange membrane that included a platinum catalyst. Named after the developers, the “Grubb-Niedrach” fuel cell flew in Gemini space capsules. By 1959, a fuel cell tractor prototype was running, as well as a welding machine powered by a Bacon cell.
One of the reasons spacecraft often use fuel cells is that many cells take hydrogen and oxygen as fuel and put out electricity and water. There are already gas tanks available, and you can always use water.
Types of Fuel Cells
Not all fuel cells use the same fuel or produce the same byproducts. At the anode, a catalyst ionizes the fuel, which produces a positive ion and a free electron. The electrolyte, often a membrane, can pass ions, but not the electrons. That way, the ions move towards the cathode, but the electrons have to find another way — through the load — to get to the cathode. When they meet again, a reaction with more fuel and a catalyst produces the byproduct: hydrogen and oxygen form water.
Most common cells use hydrogen and oxygen with an anode catalyst of platinum and a cathode catalyst of nickel. The voltage output per cell is often less than a volt. However, some fuel cells use hydrocarbons. Diesel, methanol, and other hydrocarbons can produce electricity and carbon dioxide as a byproduct, along with water. You can even use some unusual
organic inputs
, although to be fair, those are microbial fuel cells.
Common types include:
Alkaline – The Bacon cell was a fixture in space capsules, using carbon electrodes, a catalyst, and a hydroxide electrolyte.
Solid acid – These use a solid acid material as electrolyte. The material is heated to increase conductivity.
Phosphoric acid – Another acid-based technology that operates at hotter temperatures.
Molten carbonate – These work at high temperatures using lithium potassium carbonate as an electrolyte.
Solid oxide – Another high temperature that uses zirconia ceramic as the electrolyte.
In addition to technology, you can consider some fuel cells as stationary — typically producing a lot of power for consumption by some power grid — or mobile.
Using fuel cells in stationary applications is attractive partly because they have no moving parts. However, you need a way to fuel it and — if you want efficiency — you need a way to harness the waste heat produced. It is possible, for example, to use solar power to turn water into gas and then use that gas to feed a fuel cell. It is possible to use the heat directly or to convert it to electricity in a more conventional way.
Space
Fuel cells have a long history in space. You can see how alkaline Bacon cells were used in early fuel cells in the video below.
Apollo (left) and Shuttle (right) fuel cells (
from a NASA briefing
)
Very early fuel cells — starting with Gemini in 1962 — used a proton exchange membrane. However, in 1967, NASA started using Nafion from DuPont, which was improved over the old membranes.
However, alkaline cells had vastly improved power density, and from Apollo on, these cells, using a potassium hydroxide electrolyte, were standard issue.
Even the Shuttle had fuel cells. Russian spacecraft also had fuel cells, starting with a liquid oxygen-hydrogen cell used on the Soviet Lunar Orbital Spacecraft (LOK).
The shuttle’s power plant measured 14 x 15 x 45 inches and weighed 260 pounds. They were installed under the payload bay, just aft of the crew compartment. They drew cryogenic gases from nearby tanks and could provide 12 kW continuously, and up to 16 kW. However, they typically were taxed at about 50% capacity. Each orbiter’s power plant contained 96 individual cells connected to achieve a 28-volt output.
Going Mobile
There have been attempts to make fuel cell cars, but with the difficulty of delivering, storing, and transporting hydrogen, there has been resistance. The Toyota Mirai, for example, costs $57,000, yet owners sued because they couldn’t obtain hydrogen. Some buses use fuel cells, and a small number of
trains
(including the one mentioned in the video below).
Surprisingly, there is a market for forklifts using fuel cells. The clean output makes them ideal for indoor operation. Batteries? They take longer to charge and don’t work well in the cold. Fuel cells don’t mind the cold, and you can top them off in three minutes.
There have been attempts to put fuel cells into any vehicle you can imagine. Airplanes, motorcycles, and boats sporting fuel cells have all made the rounds.
Can You DIY?
We have seen a few fuel cell projects, but they all seem to vanish over time. In theory, it shouldn’t be that hard, unless you demand commercial efficiency. However, it can be done, as you can see in the video below. If you make a fuel cell, be sure to send us a
tip
so we can spread the word.
Featured image: “
SEM micrograph of an MEA cross section
” by [Xi Yin] | 13 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8131277",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-22T18:46:19",
"content": "Very early fuel cells — starting with Gemini in 1962 — used a proton exchange membrane. However, in 1967, NASA started using Nafion from DuPont“Proton exchange member” describes what the part does, not what ... | 1,760,371,537.883879 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/22/trashed-sound-system-lives-to-rock-another-day/ | Trashed Sound System Lives To Rock Another Day | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Musical Hacks",
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"ESP8266",
"remote",
"soundsystem",
"stereo"
] | Plenty of consumer goods, from passenger vehicles to toys to electronics, get tossed out prematurely for all kinds of reasons. Repairable damage, market trends, planned obsolescence, and bad design can all lead to an early sunset on something that might still have some useful life in it. This was certainly the case for a sound system that [Bill] found — despite a set of good speakers, the poor design of the hardware combined with some damage was enough for the owner to toss it. But [Bill]
took up the challenge to get it back in working order again
.
Inside the DIY control unit.
The main problem with this unit is that of design. It relies on a remote control to turn it on and operate everything, and if that breaks or is lost, the entire unit won’t even power on. Tracing the remote back to the control board reveals a 15-pin connector, and some other audio sleuths online have a few ways of using this port to control the system without the remote.
[Bill] found a few mistakes that needed to be corrected, and was eventually able to get an ESP8266 (and eventually an ESP32) to control the unit thanks largely to the fact that it communicates using a slightly modified I2C protocol.
There were a few pieces of physical damage to correct, too. First, the AC power cable had been cut off which was simple enough to replace, but [Bill] also found that a power connector inside the unit was loose as well. With that taken care of he has a perfectly functional and remarkably inexpensive sound system ready for movies or music. There are some other options available for getting a set of speakers blasting tunes again as well,
like building the amplifier for them from scratch from the get-go
. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8131144",
"author": "hjf",
"timestamp": "2025-05-22T11:13:53",
"content": "recently a friend gave me some cheap (Behringer) studio monitors. told me he was “hooking them up one day and smoke came out”. he was gonna trash them but he thought I may want to try repairing themI found th... | 1,760,371,537.645501 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/22/roller-gearbox-allows-for-new-angles-in-robotics/ | Roller Gearbox Allows For New Angles In Robotics | Ian Bos | [
"Parts",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"3D printed gears",
"3d printing",
"3d robotics",
"gearbox"
] | DIY mechatronics always has some unique challenges when relying on simple tools. 3D printing enables some great abilities but high precision gearboxes are still a difficult problem for many. Answering this problem, [Sergei Mishin] has developed
a very interesting gearbox solution
based on a
research paper
looking into simple rollers instead of traditional gears. The unique attributes of the design come from the ability to have a compact angled gearbox similar to a bevel gearbox.
Multiple rollers rest on a simple shaft allowing each roller to have independent rotation. This is important because having a circular crown gear for angled transmission creates different rotation speeds. In [Sergei]’s testing, he found that his example gearbox could withstand 9 Nm with the actual adapter breaking before the gearbox showing decent strength.
Of course, how does this differ from a normal bevel gear setup or
other 3D printed gearboxes
? While 3D printed gears have great flexibility in their simplicity to make, having plastic on plastic is generally very difficult to get precise and long lasting. [Sergei]’s design allows for a highly complex crown gear to take advantage of 3D printing while allowing for simple rollers for improved strength and precision.
Unique gearboxes are somewhat common here at Hackaday such as this
wobbly pericyclic gearbox
, but they almost always have a fun spin!
Thanks to [M] for the tip! | 18 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8131125",
"author": "Sven Hapsbjorg",
"timestamp": "2025-05-22T08:39:23",
"content": "High precision gearbox3D printedpick one",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8131137",
"author": "JohnU",
"timestamp": "2025-05-22T10:17:2... | 1,760,371,537.98974 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/24/led-matrix-built-for-m-2-interface/ | LED Matrix Built For M.2 Interface | Lewin Day | [
"computer hacks",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"led matrix",
"m.2 slot"
] | The M.2 slot is usually used for solid-state storage devices. However, [bitluni] had another fun idea for how to use the interface. He built an M.2 compatible LED matrix
that adds a little light to your motherboard.
[bitluni] built a web tool for sending images to the matrix.
[bitluni] noted that the M.2 interface is remarkably flexible, able to offer everything from SATA connections to USB, PCI Express, and more. For this project, he elected to rely on PCI Express communication, using a WCH CH382 chip to translate from that interface to regular old serial communication.
He then hooked up the serial interface to a CH32V208 microcontroller, which was tasked with driving a 12×20 monochrome LED matrix. Even better, he was even able to set the microcontroller up to make it programmable upon first plugging it into a machine, thanks to its bootloader supporting serial programming out of the box. Some teething issues required rework and modification, but soon enough, [bitluni] had the LEDs blinking with the best of them. He then built a web-based drawing tool that could send artwork over serial direct to the matrix.
While most of us are using our M.2 slots for more traditional devices, it’s neat to see this build leverage them for another use. We could imagine displays like this becoming a neat little add-on to a blingy computer build for those with a slot or two to spare. Meanwhile, if you want to learn more about M.2,
we’ve dived into the topic before
. | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8131753",
"author": "Juris Perkons",
"timestamp": "2025-05-24T08:14:46",
"content": "Nice! I love both LED lights thingies, AND unusual re-purposes (see my TechnicsPC and AIWAndroid :) ). Great work on this!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"co... | 1,760,371,537.929881 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/23/teensyrom-nfc-game-loading-on-the-c64/ | TeensyROM NFC Game Loading On The C64 | Heidi Ulrich | [
"classic hacks",
"computer hacks",
"home entertainment hacks",
"Retrocomputing",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"c64",
"card",
"commodore 64",
"Commodore64",
"game",
"MiSTER",
"NFC",
"tag",
"Teensy",
"TeensyROM",
"token"
] | When retro computing nostalgia meets modern wireless wizardry, you get a near-magical tap-to-load experience. It’ll
turn your Commodore 64 into a console-like system
, complete with physical game cards. Inspired by
TapTo for MiSTer
, this latest hack brings NFC magic to real hardware using the TeensyROM. It’s been out there for a while, but it might not have caught your attention as of yet. Developed by [Sensorium] and showcased by YouTuber [StatMat], this project is a tactile, techie love letter to the past.
At the heart of it is the TeensyROM cartridge, which – thanks to some clever firmware modding – now supports reading
NFC tags
. These are writable NTag215 cards storing the path to game files on the Teensy’s SD card. Tap a tag to the NFC reader, and the TeensyROM boots your game. No need to fumble with LOAD “*”,8,1. That’s not only cool, it’s convenient – especially for retro demo setups.
What truly sets this apart is the reintroduction of
physical tokens
. Each game lives on its own custom-designed card, styled after PC Engine HuCards or printed with holographic vinyl. It’s a tangible, collectible gimmick that echoes the golden days of floppies and cartridges – but with 2020s tech underneath.
Watch it here
. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8131808",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-24T12:27:29",
"content": "This satisfies so many itches for me, bravo! Very cool system!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8131843",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025... | 1,760,371,537.826528 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/23/emf-forming-was-a-neat-aerospace-breakthrough/ | EMF Forming Was A Neat Aerospace Breakthrough | Lewin Day | [
"Engineering"
] | [
"electromagnetic",
"emf",
"emf forming"
] | Typically, when we think about forming metal parts, we think about beating them with hammers, or squeezing them with big hydraulic presses. But what if magnets could do the squeezing? As it turns out—Grumman Aerospace discovered they can, several decades ago! Even better, they summed up this technique
in a great educational video
which we’ve placed below the break.
The video concerns the development of the Grumman EMF Torque Tube. The parts are essentially tubes with gear-like fittings mounted in either end, which are fixed with electromagnetic forming techniques instead of riveting or crimping. Right away, we’re told the key benefits—torque tubes built this way are “stronger, lighter, and more fatigue resistant” than those built with conventional techniques. Grumman used these torque tubes in such famous aircraft as the F-14 Tomcat, highlighting their performance and reliability.
Before…
…and after. The part is formed and the coil is destroyed.
The video goes on to explain the basics of the EMF torque tube production process. A tube is placed inside a coil, with the end fitting then installed inside. A capacitor bank dumps current through the coil to generate a strong electromagnetic field. This field is opposed by a secondary field generated by eddy currents. The two forces result in an explosive force which drives the tube inwards, gripping into the grooves of the end fitting, and destroys the coil in the process. Grumman notes that it specifically optimized a grooving profile for bonding tubes with end fittings, which maximised the strength of these EMF-produced joints.
This tip was sent in by [irox]. The video itself was posted by [Greg Benoit], who notes his father Robert Benoit was intimately involved with the development of the technique. Indeed, it was useful enough that the technology was licensed to Boeing, generating many millions of dollars for Grumman.
We feature all kinds of
machining and forming techniques here
, but this sort of forming isn’t something we see a lot of around these parts. Still, we’re sure someone will be Kickstarting a home EMF forming machine before the end of next week. | 9 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8131723",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-05-24T03:12:12",
"content": "Very cool, indeed… but are we just going to ignore hydroforming?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8131724",
"author": "Isaac Wingfield",
"times... | 1,760,371,538.074784 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/23/2025-pet-hacks-contest-aquassist-fish-feeder/ | 2025 Pet Hacks Contest: Aquassist Fish Feeder | Matt Varian | [
"contests"
] | [
"2025 Pet Hacks Contest",
"ESP8266",
"firebase",
"fish feeder"
] | This project submitted to the 2025 Pet Hacks Contest brings a bit of IoT to your finned friends.
Aquassist
is a fish feeder that is primarily 3D printed only requiring a servo and a microcontroller to give you remote control of feeding your fish.
The Aquassist consists of just six 3D-printed parts. At its core is an Archimedes screw, a mechanism that ensures consistent portions of fish food are dispensed into the fish tank. A small hopper on top holds the food, and to minimize the part count, all 3D-printed components are designed to be glued together.
The brains of the operation take place in a Wemos D1 mini, a compact ESP8266 board programed using the Arduino IDE. The feeding mechanism relies on an SG90 continuous rotation servo, which rotates the Archimedes screw to dispense food. Unlike standard servos, this model offers ample torque in a small package and can rotate continuously without hitting an angular limit.
The Aquassist is controlled via a web-based application accessible from any device. The D1 Mini connects to Firebase to check the feeding schedule or detect if the “Feed Now” button has been pressed. Users can set feeding times or trigger an immediate feeding through the app’s intuitive interface. Check out a video below to see the Aquassist in action, and check our our other entries into the
2025 Pet Hacks Contest
. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,538.027702 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/23/tearing-down-and-hacking-the-t2s-thermal-camera/ | Tearing Down And Hacking The T2S+ Thermal Camera | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"android app",
"camera",
"Imaging",
"thermal imaging"
] | [Dmytro] was able to lay his hands on a InfiRay T2S+ camera. It’s a capable thermal imaging unit that comes at a cheaper price than many of its rivals. [Dmytro] decided to pull it apart to see what makes it tick,
and he discovered a few interesting things along the way.
Like so much modern hardware, pulling the case apart does require some spudging and levering. Once inside, though, it comes apart in a relatively straightforward manner. Once inside, [Dmytro] notes some similarities between this camera and the Flir Lepton, another affordable thermal camera on the market. He also finds a clone of the Cypress FX2LP chip, which is used for talking USB. There’s also an Gowin FPGA inside, with [Dmytro] suspecting the gateware onboard could be modified. If so, the camera may be a candidate for running open source firmware in future.
What bothered [Dmytro] about this camera, though, was the software. When used with an Android phone, the camera demands the use of a proprietary app with with questionable permissions. It can be used on a regular computer, where it appears as a standard webcam. However, in this mode, the camera fails to self-calibrate, and the images quickly become useless. [Dmytro] worked to hack around this, by figuring out a way to trigger calibrations and run the proper image corrections manually when using the camera without the smartphone app. He also explores techniques to improve the resolution of the thermal measurements made by the camera.
We’ve seen some other neat thermal camera hacks
over the years.
Video after the break.
[Thanks to Clint for the tip!] | 16 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8131654",
"author": "ramzi",
"timestamp": "2025-05-23T21:12:40",
"content": "By buying those Chinese IR cams you directly fund their reseach and development into technologies which in not so distant future may be used to bringinjuries incompatible with lifeto our soldiers and civili... | 1,760,371,538.200173 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/23/2025-pet-hacks-contest-keep-your-hound-toasty-warm-with-this-heated-dog-bed/ | 2025 Pet Hacks Contest: Keep Your Hound Toasty Warm With This Heated Dog Bed | Jenny List | [
"contests",
"home hacks"
] | [
"2025 Pet Hacks Contest",
"dog bed",
"heated dog bed"
] | It’s been a universal trait among the different faithful Hackaday Hounds who have loped around these parts over the decades, that there is no place warm enough for their tastes. Fire up the stove and the dog is there stretched out in front of it, leaving one to wonder whether our house temperature is being cruel to the mutt, or simply that they are heat sponges with infinite capacity. There’s got to be some joy in doggy circles then at the prospect of [John.r.sheahan]’s
heated dog bed
, designed in particular with the comfort of an older dog in mind.
In electronics terms it’s a relatively low-tech project, using as it does a 12 volt electric lap blanket aimed at motorists. It’s none the less a hack though, because it has a frame made of PVC pipe to hold it, and a blanked clipped in place. This forms a box-like structure above the sleeping position keeping the dog very comfortable indeed over chilly nights. We’ve cared for more than one geriatric dog over the years, and can see that something like this is vital for their comfort and well-being.
This project is part of
the 2025 Pet Hacks contest
, so look out for more like it. Alternatively if your faithful friend uses something you made, why not enter yourself! | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8131619",
"author": "Brian Grffin",
"timestamp": "2025-05-23T19:01:40",
"content": "PET 2001, PET 4000 or SuperPET series?PET 2001 only uses 10-20watt..A Pentium 4 system on the other hand should be able to make hotdogs :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
... | 1,760,371,538.327892 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/23/hackaday-podcast-ep-322-fake-hackaday-writers-new-retro-computers-and-a-web-rant/ | Hackaday Podcast Ep 322: Fake Hackaday Writers, New Retro Computers, And A Web Rant | Jenny List | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | We’re back in Europe for this week’s Hackaday podcast, as Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List. In the news this week is the passing of Ed Smylie, the engineer who devised the famous improvised carbon dioxide filter that saved the Apollo 13 astronauts with duct tape.
Closer to home is the announcement of the call for participation for this year’s Hackaday Supercon; we know you will have some ideas and projects you’d like to share.
Interesting hacks this week include a new Mac Plus motherboard and Doom (just) running on an Atari ST, while a LoRa secure messenger and an astounding open-source Ethernet switch captivated us on the hardware front. We also take a dive into the Mouse programming language, a minimalist stack-based environment from the 1970s. Among the quick hacks are a semiconductor dopant you can safely make at home, and a beautiful Mac Mini based cyberdeck.
Finally, we wrap up with our colleague [Maya Posch] making the case for a graceful degradation of web standards, something which is now sadly missing from so much of the online world, and then with the discovery that ChatGPT can make a passable show of emulating a Hackaday scribe. Don’t worry folks, we’re still reassuringly meat-based.
Insert MP3 podcast link here
.
Episode 322 Show Notes:
News:
Hackaday Supercon 2025 Call For Participation: We Want You!
In Memory Of Ed Smylie, Whose Famous Hack Saved The Apollo 13 Crew
What’s That Sound:
Congrats to [calculus] for picking up the
[Jerobeam Fenderson] mushrooms
.
A Wrencher on Your Oscilloscope
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Escaping US Tech Giants Leads European YouTuber To Open Source
A New Mac Plus Motherboard, No Special Chips Required
The Lost 256 KB Japanese ROM For The Macintosh Plus Has Been Found
As The World Burns, At Least You’ll Have Secure Messaging
Working On Open-Source High-Speed Ethernet Switch
The Mouse Language, Running On Arduino
MUSYS. Peter Grogono, United Kingdom, 1969 – 120 Years of Electronic Music
Running DOOM On An Atari ST
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
PentaPico: A Pi Pico Cluster For Image Convolution
Designing A Hobbyist’s Semiconductor Dopant
LACED: Peeling Back PCB Layers With Chemical Etching And A Laser
MCP Blender Addon Lets AI Take The Wheel And Wield The Tools
Jenny’s Picks:
An Awful 1990s PDA Delivers AI Wisdom
Speed Up Arduino With Clever Coding
Stylus Synth Should Have Used A 555– And Did!
A Portable M4 Mac Mini
Can’t-Miss Articles:
The World Wide Web And The Death Of Graceful Degradation
ChatGPT & Me. ChatGPT Is Me! | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8131610",
"author": "dan farmer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-23T18:31:10",
"content": "“Don’t worry folks, we’re still reassuringly meat-based.”Why should this matter?I mean, it might… but while it’s often fun to see a series of articles/posts/whatever by some person in particular (e.g. ... | 1,760,371,538.369322 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/21/big-chemistry-fuel-ethanol/ | Big Chemistry: Fuel Ethanol | Dan Maloney | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Slider"
] | [
"alcohol",
"carbon dioxide",
"co2",
"corn",
"distillation",
"ethanol",
"fermentation",
"fuel",
"gasoline",
"yeast"
] | If legend is to be believed, three disparate social forces in early 20th-century America – the temperance movement, the rise of car culture, and the Scots-Irish culture of the South – collided with unexpected results. The temperance movement managed to get Prohibition written into the Constitution, which rankled the rebellious spirit of the descendants of the Scots-Irish who settled the South. In response, some of them took to the backwoods with stills and sacks of corn, creating moonshine by the barrel for personal use and profit. And to avoid the consequences of this, they used their mechanical ingenuity to modify their Fords, Chevrolets, and Dodges to provide the speed needed to outrun the law.
Though that story may be somewhat apocryphal, at least one of those threads is still woven into the American story. The moonshiner’s hotrod morphed into NASCAR, one of the nation’s most-watched spectator sports, and informed much of the car culture of the 20th century in general. Unfortunately, that led in part to our current fossil fuel predicament and its attendant environmental consequences, which are now being addressed by replacing at least some of the gasoline we burn with the same “white lightning” those old moonshiners made. The cost-benefit analysis of ethanol as a fuel is open to debate, as is the wisdom of using food for motor fuel, but one thing’s for sure: turning corn into ethanol in industrially useful quantities isn’t easy, and it requires some Big Chemistry to get it done.
Heavy on the Starch
As with fossil fuels, manufacturing ethanol for motor fuel starts with a steady supply of an appropriate feedstock. But unlike the drilling rigs and pump jacks that pull the geochemically modified remains of half-billion-year-old phytoplankton from deep within the Earth, ethanol’s feedstock is almost entirely harvested from the vast swathes of corn that carpet the Midwest US (Other grains and even non-grain plants are used as feedstock in other parts of the world, but we’re going to stick with corn for this discussion. Also, other parts of the world refer to any grain crop as corn, but in this case, corn refers specifically to maize.)
Don’t try to eat it — you’ll break your teeth. Yellow dent corn is harvested when full of starch and hard as a rock. Credit:
Marjhan Ramboyong
.
The corn used for ethanol production is not the same as the corn-on-the-cob at a summer barbecue or that comes in plastic bags of frozen Niblets. Those products use sweet corn bred specifically to pack extra simple sugars and less starch into their kernels, which is harvested while the corn plant is still alive and the kernels are still tender. Field corn, on the other hand, is bred to produce as much starch as possible, and is left in the field until the stalks are dead and the kernels have converted almost all of their sugar into starch. This leaves the kernels dry and hard as a rock, and often with a dimple in their top face that gives them their other name, dent corn.
Each kernel of corn is a fruit, at least botanically, with all the genetic information needed to create a new corn plant. That’s carried in the germ of the kernel, a relatively small part of the kernel that contains the embryo, a bit of oil, and some enzymes. The bulk of the kernel is taken up by the endosperm, the energy reserve used by the embryo to germinate, and as a food source until photosynthesis kicks in. That energy reserve is mainly composed of starch, which will power the fermentation process to come.
Starch is mainly composed of two different but related polysaccharides, amylose and amylopectin. Both are polymers of the simple six-carbon sugar glucose, but with slightly different arrangements. Amylose is composed of long, straight chains of glucose molecules bound together in what’s called an α-1,4 glycosidic bond, which just means that the hydroxyl group on the first carbon of the first glucose is bound to the hydroxyl on the fourth carbon of the second glucose through an oxygen atom:
Amylose, one of the main polysaccharides in starch. The glucose subunits are connected in long, unbranched chains up to 500 or so residues long. The oxygen atom binding each glucose together comes from a reaction between the OH radicals on the 1 and 4 carbons, with one oxygen and two hydrogens leaving in the form of water.
Amylose chains can be up to about 500 or so glucose subunits long. Amylopectin, on the other hand, has shorter straight chains but also branches formed between the number one and number six carbon, an α-1,6 glycosidic bond. The branches appear about every 25 residues or so, making amylopectin much more tangled and complex than amylose. Amylopectin makes up about 75% of the starch in a kernel.
Slurry Time
Ethanol production begins with harvesting corn using combine harvesters. These massive machines cut down dozens of rows of corn at a time, separating the ears from the stalks and feeding them into a threshing drum, where the kernels are freed from the cob. Winnowing fans and sieves separate the chaff and debris from the kernels, which are stored in a tank onboard the combine until they can be transferred to a grain truck for transport to a grain bin for storage and further drying.
Corn harvest in progress. You’ve got to burn a lot of diesel to make ethanol. Credit: dvande – stock.adobe.com
Once the corn is properly dried, open-top hopper trucks or train cars transport it to the distillery. The first stop is the scale house, where the cargo is weighed and a small sample of grain is taken from deep within the hopper by a remote-controlled vacuum arm. The sample is transported directly to the scale house for a quick quality assessment, mainly based on moisture content but also the physical state of the kernels. Loads that are too wet, too dirty, or have too many fractured kernels are rejected.
Loads that pass QC are dumped through gates at the bottom of the hoppers into a pit that connects to storage silos via a series of augers and conveyors. Most ethanol plants keep a substantial stock of corn, enough to run the plant for several days in case of any supply disruption. Ethanol plants operate mainly in batch mode, with each batch taking several days to complete, so a large stock ensures the efficiency of continuous operation.
The Lakota Green Plains ethanol plant in Iowa. Ethanol plants look a lot like small petroleum refineries and share some of the same equipment. Source: MsEuphonic, CC BY-SA 3.0.
To start a batch of ethanol, corn kernels need to be milled into a fine flour. Corn is fed to a hammer mill, where large steel weights swinging on a flywheel smash the tough pericarp that protects the endosperm and the germ. The starch granules are also smashed to bits, exposing as much surface area as possible. The milled corn is then mixed with clean water to form a slurry, which can be pumped around the plant easily.
The first stop for the slurry is large cooking vats, which use steam to gently heat the mixture and break the starch into smaller chains. The heat also gelatinizes the starch, in a process that’s similar to what happens when a sauce is thickened with a corn starch slurry in the kitchen. The gelatinized starch undergoes liquefaction under heat and mildly acidic conditions, maintained by injecting sulfuric acid or ammonia as needed. These conditions begin hydrolysis of some of the α-1,4 glycosidic bonds, breaking the amylose and amylopectin chains down into shorter fragments called dextrin. An enzyme, α-amylase, is also added at this point to catalyze the α-1,4 bonds to create free glucose monomers. The α-1,6 bonds are cleaved by another enzyme, α-amyloglucosidase.
The Yeast Get Busy
The result of all this chemical and enzymatic action is a glucose-rich mixture ready for fermentation. The slurry is pumped to large reactor vessels where a combination of yeasts is added.
Saccharomyces cerevisiae
, or brewer’s yeast, is the most common, but other organisms can be used too. The culture is supplemented with ammonia sulfate or urea to provide the nitrogen the growing yeast requires, along with antibiotics to prevent bacterial overgrowth of the culture.
Fermentation occurs at around 30 degrees C over two to three days, while the yeast gorge themselves on the glucose-rich slurry. The glucose is transported into the yeast, where each glucose molecule is enzymatically split into two three-carbon pyruvate molecules. The pyruvates are then broken down into two molecules of acetaldehyde and two of CO
2
. The two acetaldehyde molecules then undergo a reduction reaction that creates two ethanol molecules. The yeast benefits from all this work by converting two molecules of ADP into two molecules of ATP, which captures the chemical energy in the glucose molecule into a form that can be used to power its metabolic processes, including making more yeast to take advantage of the bounty of glucose.
Anaerobic fermentation of one mole of glucose yields two moles of ethanol and two moles of CO
2
.
After the population of yeast grows to the point where they use up all the glucose, the mix in the reactors, which contains about 12-15% ethanol and is referred to as beer, is pumped into a series of three distillation towers. The beer is carefully heated to the boiling point of ethanol, 78 °C. The ethanol vapors rise through the tower to a condenser, where they change back into the liquid phase and trickle down into collecting trays lining the tower. The liquid distillate is piped to the next two towers, where the same process occurs and the distillate becomes increasingly purer. At the end of the final distillation, the mixture is about 95% pure ethanol, or 190 proof. That’s the limit of purity for fractional distillation, thanks to the tendency of water and ethanol to form an azeotrope, a mixture of two or more liquids that boils at a constant temperature. To drive off the rest of the water, the distillate is pumped into large tanks containing zeolite, a molecular sieve. The zeolite beads have pores large enough to admit water molecules, but too small to admit ethanol. The water partitions into the zeolite, leaving 99% to 100% pure (198 to 200 proof) ethanol behind. The ethanol is mixed with a denaturant, usually 5% gasoline, to make it undrinkable, and pumped into storage tanks to await shipping.
Nothing Goes to Waste
The muck at the bottom of the distillation towers, referred to as whole stillage, still has a lot of valuable material and does not go to waste. The liquid is first pumped into centrifuges to separate the remaining grain solids from the liquid. The solids, called wet distiller’s grain or WDG, go to a rotary dryer, where hot air drives off most of the remaining moisture. The final product is dried distiller’s grain with solubles, or DDGS, a high-protein product used to enrich animal feed. The liquid phase from the centrifuge is called thin stillage, which contains the valuable corn oil from the germ. That’s recovered and sold as an animal feed additive, too.
Ethanol fermentation produces mountains of DDGS, or dried distiller’s grain solubles. This valuable byproduct can account for 20% of an ethanol plant’s income. Source:
Inside an Ethanol Plant
(YouTube).
The final valuable product that’s recovered is the carbon dioxide. Fermentation produces a lot of CO
2
, about 17 pounds per bushel of feedstock. The gas is tapped off the tops of the fermentation vessels by CO
2
scrubbers and run through a series of compressors and coolers, which turn it into liquid carbon dioxide. This is sold off by the tanker-full to chemical companies, food and beverage manufacturers, who use it to carbonate soft drinks, and municipal water treatment plants, where it’s used to balance the pH of wastewater.
There are currently 187 fuel ethanol plants in the United States, most of which are located in the Midwest’s corn belt, for obvious reasons. Together, these plants produced more than 16 billion gallons of ethanol in 2024. Since each bushel of corn yields about 3 gallons of ethanol, that translates to an astonishing 5 billion bushels of corn used for fuel production, or about a third of the total US corn production. | 73 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "8130791",
"author": "Observer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-21T15:06:02",
"content": "Serious questions:How much electricity does this process use?Are any ethanol plants operated net-energy positive…. meaning, once the plant is bootstrapped, can they produce the electricity and heat neede... | 1,760,371,538.481543 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/21/a-look-inside-a-lemon-of-a-race-car/ | A Look Inside A Lemon Of A Race Car | Fenix Guthrie | [
"car hacks"
] | [
"automotive",
"mazda miata",
"mustang",
"race car"
] | Automotive racing is a grueling endeavor, a test of one’s mental and physical prowess to push an engineered masterpiece to its limit. This is all the more true of 24 hour endurance races where teams tag team to get the most laps of a circuit in over a 24 hour period. The format pushes cars and drivers to the very limit. Doing so on a
$500 budget as presented by the 24 hours of Lemons
makes this all the more impressive!
Of course, racing on a $500 budget is difficult to say the least. All the expected Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) safety requirements are still in place, including roll cage, seats and fire extinguisher. However, brakes, wheels, tires and safety equipment are not factored into the cost of the car, which is good because an FIA racing seat can run well in excess of the budget. Despite the name, most races are twelve to sixteen hours across two days, but 24 hour endurance races are run. The very limiting budget and amateur nature of the event has created a large amount of room for teams to get creative with car restorations and race car builds.
The 24 Hours of Le-MINES Team and their 1990 Miata
One such team we had the chance of speaking to goes by the name
24 Hours of Le-Mines
. Their build is a wonderful mishmash of custom fabrication and affordable parts. It’s built from a restored 1999 NA Miata complete with rusted frame and all! Power is handled by a rebuilt 302 Mustang engine of indeterminate age.
The stock Miata brakes seem rather small for a race car, but are plenty for a car of its weight. Suspension is an Amazon special because it only has to work for 24 hours. The boot lid (or trunk if you prefer) is held down with what look to be over-sized RC car pins. Nestled next to the PVC pipe inlet pipe is a nitrous oxide canister — we don’t know if it’s functional or for show, but we like it nonetheless. The scrappy look is completed with a portion of the road sign fabricated into a shifter cover.
The team is unsure if the car will end up racing, but odds are if you are reading Hackaday, you care more about the race cars then the actual racing. Regardless, we hope to see this Miata in the future!
This is certainly not the first time we have covered 24 hour endurance engineering,
like this solar powered endurance plane. | 7 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8130722",
"author": "Hoarse Man",
"timestamp": "2025-05-21T11:17:28",
"content": "I recently helped with a lemons race team in Georgia, and haven’t had as much hacky fun since my high school robotics days. We chopped up an old F250 that’d been parked for over a decade, shortened it,... | 1,760,371,538.623717 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/21/fault-analysis-of-a-120w-anker-ganprime-charger/ | Fault Analysis Of A 120W Anker GaNPrime Charger | Maya Posch | [
"Reverse Engineering",
"Teardown"
] | [
"autopsy",
"usb charger",
"USB Power"
] | Taking a break from his usual prodding at suspicious AliExpress USB chargers,
[DiodeGoneWild] recently had a gander
at what
used
to be a good USB charger.
The Anker 737 USB charger prior to its autopsy.
Before it went completely dead, the Anker 737 GaNPrime USB charger which a viewer sent him was capable of up to 120 Watts combined across its two USB-C and one USB-A outputs. Naturally the charger’s enclosure couldn’t be opened non-destructively, and it turned out to have (soft) potting compound filling up the voids, making it a treat to diagnose. Suffice it to say that these devices are not designed to be repaired.
With it being an autopsy, the unit got broken down into the individual PCBs, with a short detected that eventually got traced down to an IC marked ‘SW3536’, which is one of the ICs that communicates with the connected USB device to negotiate the voltage. With the one IC having shorted, it appears that it rendered the entire charger into an expensive paperweight.
Since the charger was already in pieces, the rest of the circuit and its ICs were also analyzed. Here the gallium nitride (GaN) part was found in the Navitas GaNFast NV6136A FET with integrated gate driver, along with an Infineon CoolGaN IGI60F1414A1L integrated power stage. Unfortunately all of the cool technology was rendered useless by one component developing a short, even if it made for a fascinating look inside one of these very chonky USB chargers. | 39 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8130670",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-05-21T08:12:34",
"content": "That was a LOT more complicated than I expected. I’ll never complain about the price of these 120W chargers again. Thankfully I only own a cheap amazonbasics 65W. It feels light",
"parent_id": null,... | 1,760,371,538.819928 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/20/the-mouse-language-running-on-arduino/ | The Mouse Language, Running On Arduino | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"esolang",
"esoteric",
"interpreted",
"minimalist",
"programming language",
"reverse polish notation",
"stack"
] | Although plenty of us have our preferred language for coding, whether it’s C for its hardware access, Python for its usability, or Fortran for its mathematic prowess, not every language is specifically built for problem solving of a particular nature. Some are built as thought experiments or challenges, like Whitespace or Chicken but aren’t used for serious programming. There are a few languages that fit in the gray area between these regions,
and one example of this is MOUSE, which can now be run on an Arduino
.
Although MOUSE was originally meant to be a minimalist language for computers of the late 70s and early 80s with limited memory (even for the era), its syntax looks more like a more
modern esoteric language
, and indeed it arguably would take a Python developer a bit of time to get used to it in a similar way. It’s stack-based, for a start, and also uses
Reverse Polish Notation
for performing operations. The major difference though is that programs process single letters at a time, with each letter corresponding to a specific instruction. There have been some changes in the computing world since the 80s, though, so [Ivan]’s version of MOUSE includes a few changes that make it slightly different than the original language, but in the end he fits an interpreter, a line editor, graphics primitives, and peripheral drivers into just 2 KB of SRAM and 32 KB Flash so it can run on an ATmega328P.
There are some other features here as well, including support for PS/2 devices, video output, and the ability to save programs to the internal EEPROM. It’s an impressive setup for a language that doesn’t get much attention at all, but certainly one that threads the needle between usefulness and interesting in its own right. Of course if a language where “Hello world” is human-readable is not esoteric enough,
there are others that may offer more of a challenge
.
Image Credit:
Maxbrothers2020 | 23 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8130653",
"author": "Carl Breen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-21T06:49:55",
"content": "I guess it is an interpreted language and the parser is written in C.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8130817",
"author": "Ivan",
... | 1,760,371,538.682885 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/20/plugging-plasma-leaks-in-magnetic-confinement-with-new-guiding-center-model/ | Plugging Plasma Leaks In Magnetic Confinement With New Guiding Center Model | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"plasma physics",
"stellarator"
] | Although the idea of containing a plasma within a magnetic field seems straightforward at first, plasmas are highly dynamic systems that will happily escape magnetic confinement if given half a chance. This poses a major problem in nuclear fusion reactors and similar, where escaping particles like alpha (helium) particles from the magnetic containment will erode the reactor wall, among other issues. For stellarators in particular the plasma dynamics are calculated as precisely as possible so that the magnetic field works with rather than against the plasma motion, with so far pretty good results.
Now researchers at the University of Texas
reckon that they can improve
on these plasma system calculations with a new, more precise and efficient method. Their suggested non-perturbative
guiding center
model is
published
in (paywalled)
Physical Review Letters
, with a
preprint available
on Arxiv.
The current perturbative guiding center model admittedly works well enough that even the article authors admit to e.g. Wendelstein 7-X being within a few % of being perfectly optimized. While we wouldn’t dare to take a poke at what exactly this ‘data-driven symmetry theory’ approach exactly does differently, it suggests the use machine-learning based on simulation data, which then presumably does a better job at describing the movement of alpha particles through the magnetic field than traditional simulations.
Top image: Interior of the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator during maintenance. | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8130663",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-21T07:49:20",
"content": "I’m not sure “non-perturbative” is a good description of their system, but it seems reasonable. I just wonder about the necessary control systems to implement this",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,371,538.725621 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/20/working-on-open-source-high-speed-ethernet-switch/ | Working On Open-Source High-Speed Ethernet Switch | John Elliot V | [
"FPGA",
"hardware",
"Network Hacks"
] | [
"ethernet switch",
"fpga",
"high speed",
"open source",
"XCKU5P"
] | Our hacker [Andrew Zonenberg]
reports in
on his open-source high-speed Ethernet switch. He hasn’t finished yet, but progress has been made.
If you were wondering what might be involved in a high-speed Ethernet switch implementation look no further. He’s been working on this project, on and off, since 2012. His design now includes a dizzying array of parts. [Andrew] managed to snag some XCKU5P FPGAs for cheap, paying two cents in the dollar, and having access to this fairly high-powered hardware affected the project’s direction.
You might be familiar with [Andrew Zonenberg] as we have heard from him before. He’s the guy who gave us the
glscopeclient
, which is now
ngscopeclient
.
As perhaps you know, when he says in his report that he is an “experienced RTL engineer”, he is talking about Register-Transfer Level, which is an abstraction layer used by hardware description languages, such as Verilog and VHDL, which are used to program FPGAs. When he says “RTL” he’s
not
talking about Resistor-Transistor Logic (an ancient method of developing digital hardware) or the equally ancient line of Realtek Ethernet controllers such as the
RTL8139
.
When it comes to open-source software you can usually get a copy at no cost. With open-source hardware, on the other hand, you might find yourself needing to fork out for some very expensive bits of kit. High speed is still expensive! And… proprietary, for now. If you’re looking to implement Ethernet hardware
today
, you will have to stick with
something slower
. Otherwise, stay tuned, and watch this space. | 17 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8130590",
"author": "k1io",
"timestamp": "2025-05-20T23:51:32",
"content": "https://github.com/the-aerospace-corporation/satcat5is another good project to look at with regards to soft Ethernet switches.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comme... | 1,760,371,538.877267 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/20/stylus-synth-should-have-used-a-555-and-did/ | Stylus Synth Should Have Used A 555– And Did! | Tyler August | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"555 audio",
"class B",
"NE555",
"stylophone"
] | For all that “should have used a 555” is a bit of a meme around here, there’s some truth to it. The humble 555 is a wonderful tool in the right hands. That’s why it’s wonderful to see this all-analog stylus synth project by EE student [DarcyJ]
bringing the 555 out for the new generation.
The project is heavily inspired by the vintage stylophone, but has some neat tweaks. A capacitor bank means multiple octaves are available, and using a ladder of trim pots instead of fixed resistors makes every note tunable. [Darcy] of course included the vibrato function of the original, but no, he did not use a 555 for that, too. He used an RC oscillator. He put a trim pot on that, too, to control the depth of vibrato, which we don’t recall seeing on the original stylophone.
The writeup is very high quality and could be recommended to anyone just getting started in analog (or analogue) electronics– not only does [Darcy] explain his design process, he also shows his pratfalls and mistakes, like in the various revisions he went through before discovering the push-pull amplifier that ultimately powers the speaker.
Since each circuit is separately laid out and indicated on the PCB [Darcy] designed in KiCad for this project. Between that and everything being thru-hole, it seems like [Darcy] has the makings of a lovely training kit. If you’re interested in rolling your own, the files are on
GitHub under a CERN-OHL-S v2 license,
and don’t forget to check out the demo video embedded below to hear it in action.
Of course, making music on the 555 is hardly a new hack.
We’ve seen everything from accordions
to
paper-tape player pianos
to
squonkboxes over the years
. Got another use for the 555? Let us know about it, in the
inevitable shill for our tip line you all knew was coming
. | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8130531",
"author": "blue67",
"timestamp": "2025-05-20T20:52:37",
"content": "“[Darcy] of course included the vibrato function of the original, and yes, he used a 555 for that, too.”The only use of 555 is for the main oscillator. The vibrato is driven by an RC oscillator, not anothe... | 1,760,371,540.459395 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/21/jettison-sails-for-electric-propulsion/ | Jettison Sails For Electric Propulsion | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"battery",
"boat",
"canopy",
"conversion",
"electric",
"hobie",
"sail",
"solar"
] | Although there are some ferries and commercial boats that use a multi-hull design, the most recognizable catamarans by far are those used for sailing. They have a number of advantages over monohull boats including higher stability, shallower draft, more deck space, and often less drag. Of course, these advantages aren’t exclusive to sailboats, and plenty of motorized recreational craft are starting to take advantage of this style as well. It’s also fairly straightforward to remove the sails and add powered locomotion as well,
as this electric catamaran demonstrates
.
Not only is this catamaran electric, but it’s solar powered as well. With the mast removed, the solar panels can be fitted to a canopy which provides 600 watts of power as well as shade to both passengers. The solar panels charge
two 12V 100ah LifePo4 batteries and run a pair of motors. That’s another benefit of using a sailing cat as an electric boat platform: the rudders can be removed and a pair of motors installed without any additional drilling in the hulls, and the boat can be steered with differential thrust, although this boat also makes allowances for pointing the motors in different directions as well.
In addition to a highly polished electric drivetrain, the former sailboat adds some creature comforts as well, replacing the trampoline with a pair of seats and adding an electric hoist to raise and lower the canopy. As energy density goes up and costs come down for solar panels, more and more watercraft are taking advantage of this style of propulsion as well. In the past we’ve seen
solar kayaks
,
solar houseboats
, and
custom-built catamarans
(instead of conversions) as well. | 32 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8131094",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-05-22T06:19:40",
"content": "Simply using the wind is way more eco-friendly. I understand why it’s desirable but I’m against the concept of making things less eco-friendly than when they started.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": ... | 1,760,371,541.208388 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/21/gene-editing-spiders-to-produce-red-fluorescent-silk/ | Gene Editing Spiders To Produce Red Fluorescent Silk | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"CRISPR",
"spider silk",
"spiders"
] | Regular vs gene-edited spider silk with a fluorescent gene added. (Credit:
Santiago-Rivera et al.
2025, Angewandte Chemie)
Continuing the scientific theme of adding fluorescent proteins to everything that moves, this time spiders found themselves at the pointy end of the CRISPR-Cas9 injection needle.
In a study
by researchers at the University of Bayreuth, common house spiders (
Parasteatoda tepidariorum
) had a gene inserted for a red fluorescent protein in addition to having an existing gene for eye development disabled. This was the first time that spiders have been subjected to this kind of gene-editing study, mostly due to how fiddly they are to handle as well as their genome duplication characteristics.
In
the research paper
in
Angewandte Chemie
the methods and results are detailed, with the knock-out approach of the
sine oculis
(C1) gene being tried first as a proof of concept. The CRISPR solution was injected into the ovaries of female spiders, whose offspring then carried the mutation. With clear deficiencies in eye development observable in this offspring, the researchers moved on to adding the red fluorescent protein gene with another CRISPR solution, which targets the major ampullate gland where the silk is produced.
Ultimately, this research serves to demonstrate that it is possible to not only study spiders in more depth these days using tools like CRISPR-Cas9, but also that it is possible to customize and study spider silk production. | 15 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8131070",
"author": "Peter",
"timestamp": "2025-05-22T03:03:57",
"content": "Now we just need silkworms to produce precolored silk.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8131319",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,371,540.660547 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/21/high-voltage-for-extreme-ozone/ | High Voltage For Extreme Ozone | Ian Bos | [
"High Voltage"
] | [
"electrochemistry",
"high voltage",
"hyperspace pirate",
"ozone"
] | Don’t you hate it when making your DIY X-ray machine you make an uncomfortable amount of ozone gas? No? Well [Hyperspace Pirate] did, which made him come up
with an interesting idea
. While creating a high voltage supply for his
very own X-ray machine
, the high voltage corona discharge produced a very large amount of ozone. However, normally ozone is produced using lower voltage, smaller gaps, and large surface areas. Naturally, this led [Hyperspace Pirate] to investigate if a higher voltage method is effective at producing ozone.
Using a custom 150kV converter, [Hyperspace Pirate] was able to test the large gap method compared to the lower voltage method (dielectric barrier discharge). An ammonia reaction with the ozone allowed our space buccaneer to test which method was able to produce more ozone, as well as some variations of the designs.
Experimental Setup with ozone production in the left jar and nitrate in the right.
Large 150kV gaps proved slightly effective but with no large gains, at least not compared to the dielectric barrier method. Of which, glass as the dielectric leads straight to holes, and HTPE gets cooked, but in the end, he was able to produce a somewhat sizable amount of ammonium nitrate. The best design included two test tubes filled with baking soda and their respective electrodes. Of course, this comes with the addition of a very effective ozone generator.
While this project is very thorough, [Hyperspace Pirate] himself admits the extreme dangers of high ozone levels, even getting close enough to LD50 levels for worry throughout out his room. This goes for when playing with high voltage in general kids! At the end of the day even with potential asthma risk, this is a pretty neat project that should probably be left to [Hyperspace Pirate]. If you want to check out other projects from a distance you should look over to this
20kW microwave
to cook even the most rushed meals!
Thanks to [Mahdi Naghavi] for the Tip! | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8131051",
"author": "Frank Grub",
"timestamp": "2025-05-22T01:36:09",
"content": "a magnet is typically used with this method to create a ultra-fast rotating spark that covers a large area.one electrode is a point on the center of the other electrode which is the shape of a ring.",
... | 1,760,371,540.609473 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/21/honey-i-blew-up-the-line-follower-robot/ | Honey, I Blew Up The Line Follower Robot | Heidi Ulrich | [
"Microcontrollers",
"News",
"Robots Hacks",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"cart",
"crazy cart",
"ir",
"ir sensor",
"line following",
"mega pro mini",
"ride",
"robot",
"servo"
] | Some readers may recall building a line-following robot during their school days. Involving some IR LEDs, perhaps a bit of LEGO, and plenty of trial-and-error, it was fun on a tiny scale. Now imagine that—but rideable. That’s exactly what [Austin Blake] did, scaling up a classroom robotics staple into a full-size vehicle you can actually sit on.
The robot uses a whopping 32 IR sensors to follow a black line across a concrete workshop floor, adjusting its path using a steering motor salvaged from a power wheelchair. An Arduino Mega Pro Mini handles the logic, sending PWM signals to a DIY servo. The chassis consists of a modified
Crazy Cart
, selected for its absurdly tight turning radius. With each prototype iteration, [Blake] improved sensor precision and motor control, turning a bumpy ride into a smooth glide.
The IR sensor array, which on the palm-sized vehicle consisted of just a handful of components, evolved into a PCB-backed bar nearly 0.5 meters wide. Potentiometer tuning was a fiddly affair, but worth it. Crashes? Sure. But the kind that makes you grin like your teenage self. If it looks like fun, you could either build one yourself, or upgrade
a similar LEGO project
. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8131007",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2025-05-21T23:28:05",
"content": "Reminds me of those cars on tracks in amusement parks.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8131038",
"author": "0xDEADBEEF",
"timestamp": "2025... | 1,760,371,540.5648 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/21/floss-weekly-episode-833-up-and-over/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 833: Up And Over | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"eBPF",
"FLOSS Weekly",
"high performance computing",
"linux"
] | This week,
Jonathan Bennett
and
Jeff Massie
chat with Tom Herbert about eBPF, really fast networking, what the future looks like for high performance computing and the Linux Kernel, and more!
https://medium.com/@tom_84912
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 | [] | 1,760,371,540.411168 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/21/field-testing-an-antenna-using-a-field/ | Field Testing An Antenna, Using A Field | Jenny List | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Radio Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"antenna",
"field test",
"RF measurement"
] | The ARRL used to have a requirement that any antenna advertised in their publications had to have real-world measurements accompanying it, to back up any claims of extravagant performance. I’m told that nowadays they will accept computer simulations instead, but it remains true that
knowing
what your antenna does rather than just
thinking
you know what it does gives you an advantage. I was reminded of this by a recent write-up
in which the performance of a mylar sheet as a ground plane was tested at full power with a field strength meter
, because about a decade ago I set out to characterise an antenna using real-world measurements and readily available equipment. I was in a sense field testing it, so of course the first step of the process was to find a field. A real one, with cows.
Walking Round And Round A Field In The Name Of Science
A very low-tech way to make field recordings.
The process I was intending to follow was simple enough. Set up the antenna in the middle of the field, have it transmit some RF, and measure the signal strength at points along a series of radial lines away from it I’d end up with a spreadsheet, from which I could make a radial plot that would I hoped, give me a diagram showing its performance. It’s a rough and ready methodology, but given a field and a sunny afternoon, not one that should be too difficult.
I was more interested in the process than the antenna, so I picked up my trusty HB9CV two-element 144MHz antenna that I’ve stood and pointed at the ISS many times to catch SSTV transmissions. It’s made from two phased half-wave radiators, but it can be seen as something similar to a two-element Yagi array. I ran a long mains lead oput to a plastic garden table with the HB9CV attached, and set up a Raspberry Pi whose clock would produce the RF.
My receiver would be an Android tablet with an RTL-SDR receiver. That’s pretty sensitive for this purpose, so my transmitter would have to be extremely low powered. Ideally I would want no significant RF to make it beyond the boundary of the field, so I gave the Pi a resistive attenuator network designed to give an output of around 0.03 mW, or 30 μW. A quick bit of code to send my callsign as CW periodically to satisfy my licence conditions, and I was off with the tablet and a pen and paper. Walking round the field in a polar grid wasn’t as easy as it might seem, but I had a very long tape measure to help me.
A Lot Of Work To Tell Me What I Already Knew
And lo! for I have proven an HB9CV to be directional!
I ended up with a page of figures, and then a spreadsheet which I’m amused to still find in the depths of my project folder. It contains a table of angles of incidence to the antenna versus metres from the antenna, and the data points are the figure in (uncalibrated) mV that the SDR gave me for the carrier at that point. The resulting polar plot shows the performace of the antenna at each angle, and unsurprisingly I proved to myself that a HB9CV is indeed a directional antenna.
My experiment was in itself not of much use other than to prove to myself I could characterise an antenna with extremely basic equipment. But then again it’s possible that in times past this might have been a much more difficult task, so knowing I can do it at all is an interesting conclusion. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8130855",
"author": "AZdave",
"timestamp": "2025-05-21T17:42:50",
"content": "These days, a better way to characterize an antenna is to put an oscillator on a drone and record the result at the antenna with a receiver. My drone tells me pretty accurately where it is for height and ... | 1,760,371,540.908754 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/21/a-new-mac-plus-motherboard-no-special-chips-required/ | A New Mac Plus Motherboard, No Special Chips Required | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"68000",
"Mac Plus",
"mini-itx"
] | The Macintosh Plus was Apple’s third version on the all-in-one Mac, and for its time it was a veritable powerhouse. If you don’t have one here in 2025 there are a variety of ways to emulate it, but should you wish for something closer to the silicon there’s now [max1zzz]’s
all-new Mac Plus motherboard in a mini-ITX form factor
to look forward to.
As with other retrocomputing communities, the classic Mac world has seen quite a few projects replacing custom parts with modern equivalents. Thus it has reverse engineered Apple PALs, a replacement for the Sony sound chip, an ATtiny based take on the Mac real-time clock, and a Pi Pico that does VGA conversion. It’s all surface mount save for the connectors and the 68000, purely because a socketed processor allows for one of the gold-and-ceramic packages to be used. The memory is soldered, but with 4 megabytes, this is well-specced for a Mac Plus.
At the moment it’s still in the prototype spin phase, but plenty of work is being done and it shows meaningful progress towards an eventual release to the world. We are impressed, and look forward to the modern takes on a Mac Plus which will inevitably come from it. While you’re waiting, amuse yourself with
a lower-spec take on an early Mac
.
Thanks [DosFox] for the tip. | 29 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8130811",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-05-21T16:04:36",
"content": "Sorry to be that guy but relying on a Pi Pico for VGA means it does rely on a special chip. It’s kind of a weird choice too because people have made VGA cards you can build.",
"parent_id": null,
"d... | 1,760,371,540.52545 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/19/3d-printing-uranium-carbide-structures-for-nuclear-applications/ | 3D Printing Uranium-Carbide Structures For Nuclear Applications | Maya Posch | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"3d printed",
"dlp",
"SLA/DLP",
"uranium"
] | Fabrication of uranium-based components via DLP. (Zanini et al., Advanced Functional Materials, 2024)
Within the nuclear sciences, including fuel production and nuclear medicine (radiopharmaceuticals), often specific isotopes have to be produced as efficiently as possible, or allow for the formation of (gaseous) fission products and improved cooling without compromising the fuel. Here having the target material possess an optimized 3D shape to increase surface area and safely expel gases during nuclear fission can be hugely beneficial, but producing these shapes in an efficient way is complicated. Here using photopolymer-based stereolithography (SLA) as
recently demonstrated
by [Alice Zanini] et al. with a research article in
Advanced Functional Materials
provides an interesting new method to accomplish these goals.
In what is essentially the same as what a hobbyist resin-based SLA printer does, the photopolymer here is composed of uranyl ions as the photoactive component along with carbon precursors, creating solid uranium dicarbide (UC
2
) structures upon exposure to UV light with subsequent sintering. Uranium-carbide is one of the alternatives
being considered
for today’s uranium ceramic fuels in fission reactors, with this method possibly providing a reasonable manufacturing method.
Uranium carbide is also used as one of the target materials in ISOL (isotope separation on-line) facilities like CERN’s
ISOLDE
, where having precise control over the molecular structure of the target could optimize isotope production. Ideally equivalent photocatalysts to uranyl can be found to create other optimized targets made of other isotopes as well, but as a demonstration of how SLA (DLP or otherwise) stands to transform the nuclear sciences and industries. | 11 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8130230",
"author": "Vik",
"timestamp": "2025-05-20T03:02:36",
"content": "If anyone knows a good source of PEGDA pls post here. Harder to get hold of than uranium…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8130292",
"author": "... | 1,760,371,540.712721 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/19/overengineered-freezer-monitor-fills-market-void/ | Overengineered Freezer Monitor Fills Market Void | Bryan Cockfield | [
"News"
] | [
"battery",
"freezer",
"home automation",
"Monitoring",
"probe",
"temperature",
"thermocouple",
"wifi",
"wireless"
] | A lot of projects we see around here are built not just because they can be built, but because there’s no other option available. Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say. And for [Jeff] who has many thousands of dollars of food stowed in a chest freezer, his need for something to keep track of his freezer’s status was greater than any commercial offering available. Not only are freezers hard on batteries, they’re hard on WiFi signals as well,
so [Jeff] built his own temperature monitor to solve both of these issues
.
The obvious solution here is to have a temperature probe that can be fished through the freezer in some way, allowing the microcontroller, battery, and wireless module to operate outside of the harsh environment. [Jeff] is using K-type thermocouples here, wired through the back of the freezer. This one also is built into a block of material which allows him to get more diffuse temperature readings than a standard probe would provide. He’s also solving some other problems with commercially available probes here as well, as many of them require an Internet connection or store data in a cloud. To make sure everything stays local, he’s tying this in to a Home Assistant setup which also allows him to easily make temperature calibrations as well as notify him if anything happens to the freezer.
Although the build is very robust (or, as [Jeff] himself argues, overengineered) he does note that since he built it there have been some additional products offered for sale that fit this niche application. But even so, we always appreciate the customized DIY solution that avoids things like proprietary software, subscriptions, or cloud services. We also appreciate freezers themselves;
one of our favorites was this restoration of a freezer with a $700,000 price tag
. | 27 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8130264",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2025-05-20T05:53:23",
"content": "The one I bought came with two sensors and a separate lcd temperature display that will sound an alarm if a limit set for a sensor is exceeded. It was so cheap that the display died a few weeks after I sta... | 1,760,371,540.853983 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/19/easy-panels-with-inkjet-adhesives-and-elbow-grease/ | Easy Panels With InkJet, Adhesives, And Elbow Grease | Tyler August | [
"how-to"
] | [
"2d print",
"front panel"
] | Nothing caps off a great project like a good, professional-looking front panel. Looking good isn’t easy, but luckily [Accidental Science] has a
tutorial for a quick-and-easy front panel technique
in the video below.
It starts with regular paper, and an inkjet or laser printer to print your design. The paper then gets coated on both sides: matte varnish on the front, and white spray paint on the back. Then it’s just a matter of cutting the decal from the paper, and it gluing to your panel. ([Accidental Science] suggests two-part epoxy, but cautions you make sure it does not react to the paint.)
He uses aluminum in this example, but there’s no reason you could not choose a different substrate. Once the paper is adhered to the panel, another coat of varnish is applied to protect it. Alternatively, clear epoxy can be used as glue and varnish. The finish produced is very professional, and holds up to drilling and filing the holes in the panel.
We’d probably want to protect the edges by mounting this panel in a frame, but otherwise would be proud to put such a panel on a project that required it. We covered a similar technique before,
but it required a laminator.
If you’re looking for alternatives, Hackaday
community had a lot of ideas on how to make a panel,
but if you have a method you’ve documented,
feel free to put in the tip line
. | 25 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "8130116",
"author": "ziggurat29",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T20:07:49",
"content": "obverse or reverse?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8130147",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T21:03:52",
... | 1,760,371,541.069316 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/19/a-uv-meter-for-the-flipper-zero/ | A UV Meter For The Flipper Zero | Matt Varian | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"AS7331",
"flipper zero",
"uv sensor"
] | We all know UV radiation for its contributions to getting sunburned after a long day outside, but were you aware there are several types different types of UV rays at play? [Michael] has come up with a
Flipper Zero add on board
and app to measure these three types of radiation, and explained some of the nuances he learned about measuring UV along the way.
At the heart of this project is an AS7331 sensor, it can measure the UV-A, UV-B, and UV-C radiation values that the Flipper Zero reads via I2C. While first using this chip he realized to read these values is more complex than just querying the right register, and by the end of this project he’d written his own AS7331 library to help retrieve these values. There was also a some experimenting with different GUI designs for the app, the Flipper Zero screen is only 128x64px and he had a lot of data to display. One feature we really enjoyed was the addition of the wiring guide to the app, if you install this
Flipper Zero app
and have just the AS7331 sensor on hand you’ll know how to hook it up. However if you want he also has provided the
design files
for a PCB that just plugs into the top of the Flipper Zero.
Head over to his site to check out all the details of this Flipper Zero project, and to learn more about the different types of UV radiation. Also be sure to let us know about any of your
Flipper Zero projects
. | 6 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8130089",
"author": "lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T18:47:29",
"content": "These flipper zeros are so cute. I wish I could justify the cost, I’d have all sorts of add ons and whatever else. Can anyone chime in and either convince me to get one or inform me that making stand... | 1,760,371,541.007813 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/19/keebin-with-kristina-the-one-with-the-wafer-thin-keyboard/ | Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Wafer-Thin Keyboard | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"avalanche keyboard",
"Brackelsberg typewriter",
"Cyberpunk 2077",
"typewriter keyboard",
"wafer thin"
] | Image by [dynam1keNL] via
reddit
But sir! I can’t believe I missed [dynam1keNL]’s initial flat offering from about a year ago, the
mikefive
, which came about when he and some friends ordered switches directly from Kailh and Kailh were like, do you want to try these even lower-profile PG1316 laptop switches? It’s called the mikefive because it’s 5 mm thick.
That’s okay, though, because now you’re caught up and I can talk about his latest keyboard, the
mikecinq
. The inspiration for this one includes the aesthetics of
Le Chiffre
and the slimness of
Le Oeuf
. As you’ll see in the gallery, the top is ever-so-slightly slanted downward from the top.
You can see it really well in the second picture — the top row is flush with the case, and the keys gradually get taller toward the thumb clusters. All [dynam1keNL] really had to do was 3D model the new case and screw in the PCB from his daily driver mikefive.
Image by [dynam1keNL] via
reddit
[dynam1keNL] ultimately found it nice and comfy, especially for the thumbs, but decided to take it one step further and designed a new switch footprint. Why? The PG1316s are surface-mount with contacts below the switch, so you really need a hotplate or oven to mount them.
So in order to deal with this, he made a dedicated mikecinq PCB with big cutouts with castellated holes beneath each switch. Now, the switch contacts are accessible from underneath and can be soldered with an iron.
You may have noticed that the mikefive production files are not available on GitHub — that’s because it was recently licensed and will be available soon. But if you want production files for the mikecinq,
let him know in the comments
.
Cyberpunk 2077
Here In 2025
Image by [felipeparaizo] via
reddit
While this
Cyberpunk 2077
keyboard is certainly nice enough to be a centerfold,
[felipeparaizo] has a full write-up on GitHub
, so here I go talking about it at length instead!
This here is a Sofle RGB v2.1 that, as we’ve concluded, is heavily inspired by
Cyberpunk 2077
. The case is 3D-printed and then airbrushed, and then stickered up with custom decals that include references to Arasaka and Samurai. The acrylic base lets even more Baja Blast-colored RGB goodness shine through.
The switches are Akko Crystal Blues, which seem like a great choice, and the caps are two combined sets — one matte and one translucent. This is the second version of the project, and
you can see how the first one turned out over on GitHub
.
via
reddit
The Centerfold: An Avalanche of Color
Image by [CaptLynx] via
reddit
So
this right here
is an
Avalanche
keyboard, but at 60%. Go admire the original ones real quick; I’ll wait. They’re just as lovely as this one! I love the jawbreaker-esque layers of the case, and those knobs are exquisite.
Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad?
Send me a picture
along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!
Historical Clackers: the Brackelsberg
The Classic Typewriter page calls the Brackelsberg syllabic typewriter “
another hallucinogenic creation from the golden age of writing machine design
“, and I don’t disagree.
Image via
The Classic Typewriter Page
This 1897 machine had types arranged on several type sectors which swung up and down. Each sector carried about 30 types, which I take to mean characters.
The 132-key board was divided into four sectors, and they could be operated simultaneously — as in, you could type four characters at once, entering entire syllables if you so desired. Thus, it was called a syllabic typewriter.
A hammer struck from the rear, connecting the paper and ribbon with the types. It seems slow and cumbersome, doesn’t it? But Brackelsberg insisted that it was quiet, pointed out that the writing was always visible, and argued that the syllabic gimmick would make it fast and convenient to use.
Although never mass-produced, a working prototype was built and is pictured here in a photograph from Friedrich Muller’s book called
Schriebmaschinen und Schriften-Vervielfältigung
published in 1900.
Finally, a Keyboard That Looks Like a Typewriter and Might Not Suck
I say this because of the disappointment I suffered buying a similar Bluetooth keyboard for ten bucks from a place where everything typically costs half of that or less. The thing just stopped working one day not long after the store warranty had expired. You win some, you lose some, I suppose.
The Yunzii QL75 typewriter keyboard. Image via
Yunzii
Anyway,
the Yunzii QL75
ought to fare better given that it’s ten times the cost to pre-order; at least I hope it does. And much like the crappy one I have, it comes in pink.
You can choose either Onyx tactile switches or Cocoa Cream V2 linear switches. But if you don’t like those, the switches are hot-swappable and compatible with 3-pin and 5-pins both.
The keycaps are ABS with a matte chrome electroplated finish and laser-engraved legends. Yes there is RGB, but it doesn’t shine through the keycaps, more like between them, it sounds like.
Thankfully, the QL75 works with QMK and VIA if you want to change things up. This thing has three-way connectivity to the device of your choice, which, if it’s small enough, can sit right above the keyboard where the paper would go.
There’s no telling what the knobs on the sides do, if anything, although there are arrows. On
mine
, they raise and lower the little kickstands.
Via
TweakTown
Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards?
Help me out by sending in a link or two
. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to
email me directly
. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8130177",
"author": "Bobtato",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T22:47:01",
"content": "“Le Oeuf”Ew that’s sort of like calling it “A Egg” in English; pretty sure they were aiming for «L’Oeuf». But I do like and approve of thin keyboards.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replie... | 1,760,371,541.511611 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/19/the-nightmare-of-jailbreaking-a-pay-to-ride-gotcha-ebike/ | The Nightmare Of Jailbreaking A ‘Pay-To-Ride’ Gotcha Ebike | Maya Posch | [
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"ebike"
] | Theoretically bicycle rental services are a great thing, as they give anyone the means to travel around comfortably without immediately having to rent a car, hail a taxi or brave whatever the local public transport options may be. That is until said services go out of business and suddenly thousands of increasingly more proprietary and locked-down e-bikes suddenly are at risk of becoming e-waste. So too with
a recent acquisition
by [Berm Peak] over at YouTube, featuring a ‘Gotcha’ e-bike by Bolt Mobility, which
went AWOL
back in 2022, leaving behind thousands of these e-bikes.
So how hard could it be to take one of these proprietary e-bikes and turn it into a run-off-the-mill e-bike for daily use? As it turns out, very hard. While getting the (36V) battery released and recharged was easy enough, the challenge came with the rest of the electronics, with a veritable explosion of wiring, the Tongsheng controller module and the ‘Gotcha’ computer module that locks it all down. While one could rip this all out and replace it, that would make the cost-effectiveness of getting one of these go down the drain.
Sadly, reverse-engineering the existing system proved to be too much of a hassle, so a new controller was installed along with a bunch of hacks to make the lights and new controller work. Still, for $75 for the bike, installing new electronics may be worth it, assuming you can find replacement parts and got some spare hours (or weeks) to spend on rebuilding it. The bike in the video costed less than $200 in total with new parts, albeit with the cheapest controller, but maybe jailbreaking the original controller could knock that down. | 36 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8130031",
"author": "Oli",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T16:02:28",
"content": "I don’t know what else the company could have done. If you plan for failure and build your bike to be unlocked when the company goes under, you’ll have half your stock stolen overnight, chipped and shipped ov... | 1,760,371,541.709253 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/19/remembering-the-isp-that-david-bowie-ran-for-eight-years/ | Remembering The ISP That David Bowie Ran For Eight Years | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"History",
"internet hacks",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"bowie",
"david bowie",
"internet",
"isp"
] | The seeds of the Internet were first sown in the late 1960s, with computers laced together in continent-spanning networks to aid in national defence. However, it was in the late 1990s that the end-user explosion took place, as everyday people flocked online in droves.
Many astute individuals saw the potential at the time, and rushed to establish their own ISPs to capitalize on the burgeoning market. Amongst them was a famous figure of some repute. David Bowie might have been best known for his cast of rock-and-roll characters and number one singles, but he was also an internet entrepreneur who got in on the ground floor—with BowieNet.
Is There Dialup On Mars?
The BowieNet website was very much of its era. Credit: Bowienet, screenshot
Bowie’s obsession with the Internet started early. He was well ahead of the curve of many of his contemporaries, becoming the first major artist to release a song online.
Telling Lies
was released as a downloadable track, which sold over 300,000 downloads, all the way back in 1996. A year later, the Earthling concert would be “cybercast” online, in an era when most home internet connections could barely handle streaming audio.
These moves were groundbreaking, at the time, but also exactly what you might expect of a major artist trying to reach fans with their music. However, Bowie’s interests in the Internet lay deeper than mere music distribution. He wanted a richer piece of the action, and his own ISP—BowieNet— was the answer.
The site was regularly updated with new styling and fresh content from Bowie’s musical output. Eventually, it became more website than ISP. Credit: BowieNet, screenshot
Bowie tapped some experts for help, enlisting Robert Goodale and Ron Roy in his nascent effort. The service first launched in the US, on September 1st 1998, starting at a price of $19.95 a month. The UK soon followed at a price of £10.00. Users were granted a somewhat awkward email address of username@davidbowie.com, along with 5MB of personal web hosting. Connectivity was provided in partnership with established network companies, with Concentric Network Corp
effectively offering a turnkey ISP service,
and UltraStar handling the business and marketing side of things. It was, for a time, also possible to gain a free subscription by signing up for a
BowieBanc
credit card, a branded front end for a banking services run by USABancShares.com. At its peak, the service reached a total of 100,000 subscribers.
Bonuses included access to a network of chatrooms. The man himself was a user of the service, regularly popping into live chats, both scheduled and casually. He’d often wind up answering a deluge of fan questions on topics like
upcoming albums and whether or not he drank tea.
The operation was part ISP, part Bowie content farm, with users also able to access audio and video clips from Bowie himself. BowieNet subscribers were able to access exclusive tracks from the Earthling tour live album,
LiveAndWell.com,
gained early access to tickets, and could explore BowieWorld, a 3D interactive city environment. To some controversy, users of other ISPs had to stump up a $5.95 fee to access content on davidbowie.com, which
drew some criticism at the time.
Bowienet relied heavily on the leading Internet technologies of the time. Audio and graphics were provided via RealAudio and Flash, standards that are unbelievably janky compared to those in common use today. A 56K modem was recommended for users wishing to make the most of the content on offer. New features were continually added to the service; Christmas 2004 saw users invited to send “BowieNet E-Cards,” and the same month saw the launch of
BowieNet blogs
for subscribers, too.
Bowie spoke to the BBC in 1999 about his belief in the power of the Internet.
BowieNet didn’t last forever. The full-package experience was, realistically, more than people expected even from one of the world’s biggest musicians.
In May 2006
, the ISP was quietly shutdown, with the BowieNet web presence slimmed down to a website and fanclub style experience.
In 2012
, this too came to an end, and DavidBowie.com was retooled to a more typical artist website of the modern era.
Ultimately, BowieNet was an interesting experiment in the burgeoning days of the consumer-focused Internet. The most appealing features of the service were really more about delivering exclusive content and providing a connection between fans and the artist himself. It eventually became clear that Bowie didn’t need to be branding the internet connection itself to provide that.
Indeed, no other musicians of the era were really exploring getting into the telecoms game, sticking with standard websites instead. It was perhaps just Bowie’s own personal curiosity and desire to engage with the Internet on a richer level that spawned the ISP. At its heart, though, running any one ISP is not that different from running another. To the end user, the ISP was all but transparent beyond setup and the occasional administration task. The difference Bowie really offered was his content—and that was all hosted on the website, not a feature of the ISP itself. Once the Internet had become more established, and the use case became clear, the wind-down of BowieNet was a foregone conclusion.
Still, we can dream of other artists getting involved in the utilities game, just for fun. Gagaphone would have been a slam dunk back in 2009. One suspects DojaGas perhaps wouldn’t have the same instant market penetration without some kind of hit single about clean burning fuels. Speculate freely in the comments. | 15 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8129989",
"author": "ziggurat29",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T14:22:50",
"content": "♫Bowie’s in space. Whatcha doin’ up there, man?♫Timothy Leary was also a big proponent of the Internet. Thought it would be bigger than acid. “turn on, boot up, jack in.” Curiously referred to it a... | 1,760,371,541.769386 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/19/using-pitot-tubes-for-more-than-aircraft/ | Using Pitot Tubes For More Than Aircraft | Aaron Beckendorf | [
"hardware"
] | [
"air flow meter",
"pitot tube"
] | When we hear the words “pitot tube,” we tend to think more of airplanes than of air ducts, but [Franci Kopač]’s guide to
pitot tubes for makers
shows that they can be a remarkably versatile tool for measuring air speed, even in domestic settings.
A pitot tube is a tube which faces into an air flow, with one hole at the front of the tube, and one on the side. It’s then possible to determine the air speed by measuring the pressure difference between the side opening and the end facing into the wind. At speeds, temperatures, and altitudes that a hacker’s likely to encounter (i.e. not on an airplane), the pressure difference is pretty small, and it’s only since the advent of MEMS pressure sensors that pitot tubes became practical for amateurs.
[Franci]’s design is based on a Sensiron SDP differential pressure sensor, a 3D-printed pitot tube structure, some tubing, and the microcontroller of your choice. It’s important to position the tube well, so that it doesn’t experience airflow disturbances from other structures and faces straight into the air flow. Besides good positioning, the airspeed calculation requires you to know the air temperature and absolute pressure.
[Franci] also describes a more exotic averaging pitot tube, a fairly simple variation which measures air speed in cavities more accurately. He notes that this provides a more inexpensive way of measuring air flow in ducts than air conditioning flow sensors, while being more resilient than propeller-based solutions – he himself used pitot tubes to balance air flow in his home’s ventilation. All of the necessary CAD files and Arduino code are available on his
GitHub repository
.
If you’re looking for a more conventional duct flow meter, we’ve
covered one before
. We’ve even seen a teardown of a pitot tube sensor system
from a military drone
. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8130011",
"author": "Mr T",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T15:28:04",
"content": "This would probably also work with venturi tubes that might be easier to incorporate into certain designs due to them relying only on a constriction of the airflow (like narrowing the tube slightly) to creat... | 1,760,371,541.81359 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/19/mister-for-mortals-meet-the-multisystem-2/ | MiSTer For Mortals: Meet The Multisystem 2 | Heidi Ulrich | [
"FPGA",
"Games",
"PCB Hacks",
"Retrocomputing",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"console",
"DE10",
"DE10-Nano",
"fpga",
"MiSTER",
"Multisystem",
"Terasic"
] | If you’ve ever squinted at a DE10-Nano wondering where the fun part begins, you’re not alone.
This review of the Mr. MultiSystem 2 by [Lee]
lifts the veil on a surprisingly noob-friendly FPGA console that finally gets the MiSTer experience out of the tinker cave and into the living room. Developed by Heber, the same UK wizards behind the original
MultiSystem
, this follow-up console dares to blend flexibility with simplicity. No stack required.
It comes in two varieties, to be precise: with, or without analog ports. The analog edition features a 10-layer PCB with both HDMI and native RGB out, Meanwell PSU support, internal USB headers, and even space for an OLED or NFC reader. The latter can be used to “load” physical cards cartridge-style, which is just ridiculously charming. Even the 3D-printed enclosure is open-source and customisable – drill it, print it, or just colour it
neon green
. And for once, you don’t need to be a soldering wizard to use the thing. The FPGA is integrated in the mainboard. No RAM modules, no USB hub spaghetti. Just add some ROMs (legally, of course), and you’re off.
Despite its plug-and-play aspirations, there are some quirks – for example, the usual display inconsistencies and that eternal jungle of controller mappings. But hey, if that’s the price for versatility, it’s one you’d gladly pay. And if you ever get stuck, the MiSTer crowd will eat your question and spit out 12 solutions. It remains 100% compatible with the MiSTer software, but allows some additional future features, should developers wish to support them.
Want to learn more? This could be your entrance to the MiSTer scene without having to first earn a master’s in embedded systems. Will this become an alternative to the Taki Udon announced Playstation inspired all-in-one FPGA console?
Check the video here
and let us know in the comments. | 21 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8129852",
"author": "calculus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T08:47:50",
"content": "Will this become an alternative to the Taki Udon announced Playstation inspired all-in-one FPGA console, which does require a DE-10 (or compatible)?I didn’t think the Playstation inspired one still requi... | 1,760,371,541.572349 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/18/in-memory-of-ed-smylie-whose-famous-hack-saved-the-apollo-13-crew/ | In Memory Of Ed Smylie, Whose Famous Hack Saved The Apollo 13 Crew | John Elliot V | [
"Space"
] | [
"Apollo 13",
"Ed Smylie",
"in memoriam"
] | Some hacks are so great that when you die you receive the rare honor of both an
obituary in the New York Times
and an in memoriam article at Hackaday.
The recently deceased, [Ed Smylie], was a NASA engineer leading the effort to save the crew of Apollo 13 with a makeshift gas conduit made from plastic bags and duct tape back in the year 1970. [Ed] died recently, on April 21, in Crossville, Tennessee, at the age of 95.
This particular hack, another in the
long and storied history of duct tape
, literally required putting a square peg in a round hole. After an explosion crippled the command module the astronauts needed to escape on the lunar excursion module. But the lunar module was only designed to support two people, not three.
The problem was that there was only enough lithium hydroxide onboard the lunar module to filter the air for two people. The astronauts could salvage lithium hydroxide canisters from the command module, but those canisters were square, whereas the canisters for the lunar module were round.
[Ed] and his team famously designed the required adapter from a small inventory of materials available on the space craft. This celebrated story has been told many times, including in the 1995 film,
Apollo 13
.
Thank you, [Ed], for one of the greatest hacks of all time. May you rest in peace.
Header: Gas conduit adapter designed by [Ed Smylie], NASA,
Public domain
. | 30 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8129806",
"author": "valkyrie0528",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T05:51:56",
"content": "Ed, you sir are a steely-eyed missileman.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8129808",
"author": "DainBramage",
"timestamp": "202... | 1,760,371,541.637398 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/18/designing-a-hobbyists-semiconductor-dopant/ | Designing A Hobbyist’s Semiconductor Dopant | Aaron Beckendorf | [
"chemistry hacks"
] | [
"dopant",
"semiconductor",
"spin coat"
] | [ProjectsInFlight] has been on a mission to make his own semiconductors for about a year now, and recently shared a major step toward that goal: homemade
spin-on dopants
. Doping semiconductors has traditionally been extremely expensive, requiring either ion-implantation equipment or specialized chemicals for thermal diffusion. [ProjectsInFlight] wanted to use thermal diffusion doping, but first had to formulate a cheaper dopant.
Thermal diffusion doping involves placing a source of dopant atoms (phosphorus or boron in this case) on top of the chip to be doped, heating the chip, and letting the dopant atoms diffuse into the silicon. [ProjectsInFlight] used spin-on glass doping, in which an even layer of precursor chemicals is spin-coated onto the chip. Upon heating, the precursors decompose to leave behind a protective film of glass containing the dopant atoms, which diffuse out of the glass and into the silicon.
After trying a few methods to create a glass layer, [ProjectsInFlight] settled on a composition based on tetraethyl orthosilicate, which we’ve seen used before to create
synthetic opals
. After finding this method, all he had to do was find the optimal reaction time, heating, pH, and reactant proportions. Several months of experimentation later, he had a working solution.
After some testing, he found that he could bring silicon wafers from their original light doping to heavy doping. This is particularly impressive when you consider that his dopant is about two orders of magnitude cheaper than similar commercial products.
Of course, after doping, you still need to remove the glass layer with an oxide etchant, which we’ve
covered before
. If you prefer working with lasers, we’ve also seen those
used for doping
. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8129879",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T10:17:11",
"content": "With the equipment he has, and the ability to dope silicon and make oxide layers, couldn’t he make quite decent power electronics? Like transistors and such with a decent current carrying capabilities?"... | 1,760,371,541.455153 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/18/hackaday-links-may-18-2025/ | Hackaday Links: May 18, 2025 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"bacteria",
"cleanroom",
"documentary",
"doom",
"earthquake",
"engineering",
"hackaday links",
"Myanmar",
"nasa",
"planetary protection",
"thruster",
"voyager",
"Will It Doom?"
] | Say what you want about the wisdom of keeping a 50-year-old space mission going, but the dozen or so people still tasked with keeping the Voyager mission running are some major studs. That’s our conclusion anyway, after reading about
the latest heroics
that revived a set of thrusters on
Voyager 1
that had been offline for over twenty years. The engineering aspects of this feat are interesting enough, but we’re more interested in the social engineering aspects of this exploit, which
The Register goes into a bit
. First of all, even though both Voyagers are long past their best-by dates, they are our only interstellar assets, and likely will be for centuries to come, or perhaps forever. Sure, the rigors of space travel and the ravages of time have slowly chipped away at what these machines can so, but while they’re still operating, they’re irreplaceable assets.
That makes the fix to the thruster problem all the more ballsy, since the Voyager team couldn’t be 100% sure about the status of the primary thrusters, which were shut down back in 2004. They thought it might have been that the fuel line heaters were still good, but if they actually had gone bad, trying to switch the primary thrusters back on with frozen fuel lines could have resulted in an explosion when
Voyager
tried to fire them, likely ending in a loss of the spacecraft. So the decision to try this had to be a difficult one, to say the least. Add in an impending shutdown of the only DSN antenna capable of communicating with the spacecraft and a two-day communications round trip, and the pressure must have been unbearable. But they did it, and
Voyager
successfully navigated yet another crisis. But what we’re especially excited about is discovering a 2023 documentary about the current Voyager mission team called
“It’s Quieter in the Twilight.”
We know what we’ll be watching this weekend.
Speaking of space exploration, one thing you don’t want to do is send anything off into space bearing Earth microbes. That would be a Very Bad Thing™, especially for missions designed to look for life anywhere else but here. But, it turns out that just building spacecraft in cleanrooms might not be enough, with
the discovery of 26 novel species of bacteria
growing in the cleanroom used to assemble a Mars lander. The mission in question was
Phoenix
, which landed on Mars in 2008 to learn more about the planet’s water. In 2007, while the lander was in the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at Kennedy Space Center, biosurveillance teams collected samples from the cleanroom floor. Apparently, it wasn’t very clean, with 215 bacterial strains isolated, 26 of which were novel. What’s more, genomic analysis of the new bugs suggests they have genes that make them especially tough, both in their resistance to decontamination efforts on Earth and in their ability to survive the rigors of life in space. We’re not really sure if these results say more about NASA’s cleanliness than they do about the selective pressure that an extreme environment like a cleanroom exerts on fast-growing organisms like bacteria. Either way, it doesn’t bode well for our
planetary protection
measures.
Closer to home but more terrifying is
video from an earthquake in Myanmar
that has to be seen to be believed. And even then, what’s happening in the video is hard to wrap your head around. It’s not your typical stuff-falling-off-the-shelf video; rather, the footage is from an outdoor security camera that shows the ground outside of a gate literally ripping apart during the 7.7 magnitude quake in March. The ground just past the fence settles a bit while moving away from the camera a little, but the real action is the linear motion — easily three meters in about two seconds. The motion leaves the gate and landscaping quivering but largely intact; sadly, the same can’t be said for a power pylon in the distance, which crumples as if it were made from toothpicks.
And finally, “Can it run DOOM?” has become a bit of a meme in our community, a benchmark against which hacking chops can be measured. If it has a microprocessor in it, chances are someone has tried to make it run the classic first-person shooter video game. We’ve covered dozens of these hacks before, everything from
a diagnostic ultrasound machine
to
a custom keyboard keycap
, while recent examples tend away from hardware ports to software platforms such as
a PDF file
,
Microsoft Word
, and even
SQL
. Honestly, we’ve lost count of the ways to DOOM, which is where
Can It Run Doom?
comes in handy. It lists all the unique platforms that hackers have tortured into playing the game, as well as links to source code and any relevant video proof of the exploit. Check it out the next time you get the urge to port DOOM to something cool; you wouldn’t want to go through all the work to find out it’s already been done, would you? | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8129755",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T02:47:23",
"content": "“Can it run doom” answer choices for hackers:* Yes, it can, it’s been done (see above)* No, it’s been proven impossible/is impossible by inspection (no, your ultra-low-resource non-turing-complete device ca... | 1,760,371,541.951526 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/18/speed-up-arduino-with-clever-coding/ | Speed Up Arduino With Clever Coding | Tyler August | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"code optimization"
] | We love Arduino here at Hackaday; they’ve probably done more to make embedded programming accessible to more people than anything else in the history of the field. One thing the Arduino ecosystem is rarely praised for is its speed. That’s where [Playduino] comes in, with his video (embedded below) that promises to make everyone’s
favourite microcontroller run 50x faster.
You might be expecting an unstable overclocking setup, with swapped crystals, tweaked voltages and a hefty heat sink, but no! This is stock hardware. The 50x speedup comes from one simple hack: don’t use digitalWrite();
If you aren’t familiar, the digitalWrite() function is one of the key functions Arduino gives you to operate its boards– specify the pin and the value (high or low) to drive it. It’s very easy, but it’s also very
slow
. [Playduino] takes a moment to show just how much is going on under the hood when you call digitalWrite(), and shows you what you can do instead if you have a need for speed. (Hint: there’s no Arduino-provided code involved; hardware registers and the __asm keyword show up.)
If you learned embedded programming in an earlier era, this will probably seem glaringly obvious. If you, like so many of us, got started inside of the Arduino ecosystem, these closer-to-the-metal programming techniques could prove useful tools in your quiver. Big thanks to [Stephan Walters] for the tip.
Of course if you prefer to speed things up by hardware rather than software, you
can
overclock an
Arduino– with liquid nitrogen, even
. | 57 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "8129688",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-18T20:04:34",
"content": "Perhaps this is a dumb question but why can’t things like DigitalWrite be remade so they aren’t as slow and compile down to the same fast ASM as manually doing it?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": ... | 1,760,371,541.907591 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/18/christmas-comes-early-with-ai-santa-demo/ | Christmas Comes Early With AI Santa Demo | Tyler August | [
"Artificial Intelligence"
] | [
"ai",
"libpeer",
"LLM",
"openai",
"Santa Claus",
"speech recognition",
"speech synthesis"
] | With only two hundred odd days ’til Christmas, you just know we’re already feeling the season’s magic. Well, maybe not, but [Sean Dubois] has decided to give us a head start with this
WebRTC demo built into a Santa stuffie.
The details are a little bit sparse (hopefully he finishes the documentation on GitHub by the time this goes out) but the project is really neat. Hardware-wise, it’s an audio-enabled ESP32-S3 dev board living inside Santa, running the OpenAI’s OpenRealtime Embedded SDK (
as implemented by ExpressIf
), with some customization by [Sean]. Looks like the audio is going through the newest version of LibPeer and the heavy lifting is all happening in the cloud, as you’d expect with this SDK. (A key is required, but hey! It’s all open source; if you have an AI that can do the job locally-hosted, you can probably figure out how to connect to it instead.)
This speech-to-speech AI doesn’t need to emulate Santa Claus, of course; you can prime the AI with any instructions you’d like. If you want to delight children, though, its hard to beat the Jolly Old Elf, and you certainly have time to get it ready for Christmas. Thanks to [Sean] for sending in the tip.
If you like this project but want to avoid paying OpenAI API fees,
here’s a speech-to-text model to get you started
.We covered this
AI speech generator last year
to handle the talky bit. If you put them together and make your own Santa Claus (or perhaps something more seasonal to this time of year),
don’t forget to drop us a tip
! | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8129660",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-18T18:25:01",
"content": "Neat… but the turn off for me is “and the heavy lifting is all happening in the cloud,” . Back to the drawing board for me :) . Got to be local or not at all at this house.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,371,541.995029 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/20/as-the-world-burns-at-least-youll-have-secure-messaging/ | As The World Burns, At Least You’ll Have Secure Messaging | Jenny List | [
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"encryption",
"LoRa",
"one time pad"
] | There’s a section of our community who concern themselves with the technological aspects of preparing for an uncertain future, and for them a significant proportion of effort goes in to communication. This has always included amateur radio, but in more recent years it has been extended to LoRa. To that end,
[Bertrand Selva] has created a LoRa communicator
, one which uses a Pi Pico, and delivers secure messaging.
The hardware is a rather-nice looking 3D printed case with a color screen and a USB A port for a keyboard, but perhaps the way it works is more interesting. It takes a one-time pad approach to encryption, using a key the same length as the message. This means that an intercepted message is in effect undecryptable without the key, but we are curious about the keys themselves.
They’re a generated list of keys stored on an SD card with a copy present in each terminal on a particular net of devices, and each key is time-specific to a GPS derived time. Old keys are destroyed, but we’re interested in how the keys are generated as well as how such a system could be made to survive the loss of one of those SD cards. We’re guessing that just as when a Cold War spy had his one-time pad captured, that would mean game over for the security.
So if Meshtastic isn’t quite the thing for you then it’s possible that this could be an alternative. As an aside we’re interested to note that it’s using a 433 MHz LoRa module, revealing the different frequency preferences that exist between enthusiasts in different countries. | 45 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8130501",
"author": "Bill",
"timestamp": "2025-05-20T19:06:48",
"content": "Different frequency preferences may be due to legal requirements",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8130647",
"author": "Carl Breen",
"ti... | 1,760,371,542.24624 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/20/the-make-roscope/ | The Make-roscope | Al Williams | [
"Cellphone Hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"microscope"
] | Normal people binge-scroll social media. Hackaday writers tend to pore through online tech news and shopping sites incessantly. The problem with the shopping sites is that you wind up buying things, and then you have even more projects you don’t have time to do. That’s how I found the
MAKE-roscope
, an accessory aimed at kids that turns a cell phone into a microscope. While it was clearly trying to appeal to kids, I’ve had some kids’ microscopes that were actually useful, and for $20, I decided to see what it was about. If nothing else, the name made it appealing.
My goal was to see if it would be worth having for the kinds of things we do. Turns out, I should have read more closely. It isn’t really going to help you with your next PCB or to read that tiny print on an SMD part. But it is interesting, and — depending on your interests — you might enjoy having one. The material claims the scope can magnify from 125x to 400x.
What Is It?
The whole thing is in an unassuming Altoids-like tin. Inside the box are mostly accessories you may or may not need, like a lens cloth, a keychain, plastic pipettes, and the like. There are only three really interesting things: A strip of silicone with a glass ball in it, and a slide container with five glass slides, three of which have something already on them. There’s also a spare glass ball (the lens).
What I didn’t find in my box were cover slips, any way to prepare specimens, and — perhaps most importantly — clear instructions. There are some tiny instructions on the back of the tin and on the lens cloth paper. There is also a QR code, but to really get going, I had to watch a video (embedded below).
What I quickly realized is that this isn’t a metalurgical scope that takes images of things. It is a transmissive microscope like you find in a biology lab. Normally, the light in a scope like that goes up through the slide and into the objective. This one is upside down. The light comes from the top, through the slide, and into the glass ball lens.
Microscope with pen and legal pad lines for scale (no banana)
Onion skin slide
Ant slide
Bio Scopes Can Be Fun
Of course, if you have an interest in biology or thin films or other things that need that kind of microscope, this could be interesting. After all, cell phones sometimes have macro modes that you can use as a pretty good low-power microscope already if you want to image a part or a PCB. You can also find lots of lenses that attach to the phone if you need them. But this is a traditional microscope, which is a bit different.
The silicone compresses, which seems to be the real trick. Here’s how it works in practice. You turn on your camera and switch to the selfie lens. Then you put the silicone strip over the camera and move it around. You’ll see that the lens makes a “spotlight” in the image when it is in the right place. Get it centered and zoom until you can’t see the circle of the lens anymore.
Then you put your slide down on the lens and move it around until you get an image. It might be a little fuzzy. That’s where the silicone comes in. You push down, and the image will snap into focus. The hardest part is pushing down while holding it still and pushing the shutter button.
Onion skin
Ant magnified
Frog blood
Zeiss and Nikon don’t have anything to worry about, but the images are just fine. You can grab a drop of water or swab your cheek. It would have been nice to have some stain and either some way to microtome samples, or at least instructions on how you might do that with household items.
Verdict
For most electronics tasks, you are better off with a loupe, magnifiers, a zoomed cell phone, or a USB microscope. But if you want a traditional microscope for science experiments or to foster a kid’s interest in science, it might be worth something.
For electronics, you are better off with a
metallurgical scope
. Soldering
under a stereoscope is life-changing
. We’ve seen
more expensive versions of this
, too, but we aren’t sure they are much better. | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8130468",
"author": "Jimmy",
"timestamp": "2025-05-20T17:47:16",
"content": "No. “Normal people binge-scroll social media.”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8130473",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-20T17:56:29"... | 1,760,371,542.063191 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/20/when-repairs-go-inside-integrated-circuits/ | When Repairs Go Inside Integrated Circuits | John Elliot V | [
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"IC repair",
"integrated circuit"
] | What can you do if your circuit repair diagnosis indicates an open circuit
within
an integrated circuit (IC)? Your IC got too hot and internal wiring has come loose. You could replace the IC, sure. But what if the IC contains encryption secrets? Then you would be forced to
grind back the epoxy and fix those open circuits yourself
. That is, if you’re skilled enough!
In this video our hacker [YCS] fixes a Mercedes-Benz encryption chip from an electronic car key. First, the black epoxy surface is polished off, all the way back to the PCB with a very fine gradient. As the gold threads begin to be visible we need to slow down and be very careful.
The repair job is to reconnect the PCB points with the silicon body inside the chip. The PCB joints aren’t as delicate and precious as the silicon body points, those are the riskiest part. If you make a mistake with those then repair will be impossible. Then you tin the pads using solder for the PCB points and pure tin and hot air for the silicon body points.
Once that’s done you can use fine silver wire to join the points. If testing indicates success then you can complete the job with glue to hold the new wiring in place. Everything is easy when you know how!
Does repair work get more dangerous and fiddly than this? Well,
sometimes
.
Thanks to [J. Peterson] for this tip. | 38 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8130433",
"author": "alnwlsn",
"timestamp": "2025-05-20T15:51:38",
"content": "love that title: ‘basic skills’ for mobile phone repair",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8130469",
"author": "Tim McNerney",
"timestamp": "202... | 1,760,371,542.51264 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/20/the-world-wide-web-and-the-death-of-graceful-degradation/ | The World Wide Web And The Death Of Graceful Degradation | Maya Posch | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Interest",
"Rants",
"Slider",
"Software Development"
] | [
"graceful degradation",
"web design"
] | In the early days of the World Wide Web – with the Year 2000 and the threat of a global collapse of society were still years away – the crafting of a website on the WWW was both special and increasingly more common. Courtesy of free hosting services popping up left and right in a landscape still mercifully devoid of today’s ‘social media’, the WWW’s democratizing influence allowed anyone to try their hands at web design. With varying results, as those of us who ventured into the Geocities wilds can attest to.
Back then we naturally had web standards, courtesy of the
W3C
, though Microsoft, Netscape, etc. tried to upstage each other with varying implementation levels (e.g. no iframes in Netscape 4.7) and various proprietary HTML and CSS tags. Most people were on dial-up or equivalently anemic internet connections, so designing a website could be a painful lesson in optimization and targeting the lowest common denominator.
This was also the era of graceful degradation, where us web designers had it hammered into our skulls that using and navigating a website should be possible even in a text-only browser like Lynx, w3m or antique browsers like IE 3.x. Fast-forward a few decades and today the inverse is true, where it is your responsibility as a website visitor to have the latest browser and fastest internet connection, or you may even be denied access.
What exactly happened to flip everything upside-down, and is this truly the WWW that we want?
User Vs Shinies
Back in the late 90s, early 2000s, a miserable WWW experience for the average user involved graphics-heavy websites that took literal minutes to load on a 56k dial-up connection. Add to this the occasional website owner who figured that using Flash or Java applets for part of, or an entire website was a brilliant idea, and had you sit through ten minutes (or more) of a loading sequence before being able to view anything.
Another contentious issue was that of the back- and forward buttons in the browser as the standard way to navigate. Using Flash or Java broke this, as did HTML framesets (and iframes), which not only made navigating websites a pain, but also made sharing links to a specific resource on a website impossible without serious hacks like offering special deep links and reloading that page within the frameset.
As much as web designers and developers felt the lure of New Shiny Tech to make a website pop, ultimately accessibility had to be key. Accessibility, through graceful degradation, meant that you could design a very shiny website using the latest CSS layout tricks (ditching table-based layouts for better or worse), but if a stylesheet or some Java- or VBScript stuff didn’t load, the user would still be able to read and navigate, at most in a HTML 1.x-like fashion. When you consider that
HTML
is literally just a document markup language, this makes a lot of sense.
Credit: Babbage,
Wikimedia
.
More succinctly put, you distinguish between the core functionality (text, images, navigation) and the cosmetics. When you think of a website from the perspective of a text-only browser or assistive technology like
screen readers
, the difference should be quite obvious. The HTML tags mark up the content of the document, letting the document viewer know whether something is a heading, a paragraph, and where an image or other content should be referenced (or embedded).
If the viewer does not support stylesheets, or only an older version (e.g. CSS 2.1 and not 3.x), this should not affect being able to read text, view images and do things like listen to embedded audio clips on the page. Of course, this basic concept is what is effectively broken now.
It’s An App Now
Somewhere along the way, the idea of a website being an (interactive) document seems to have been dropped in favor of a the website instead being a ‘web application’, or web app for short. This is reflected in the countless JavaScript, ColdFusion, PHP, Ruby, Java and other frameworks for server and client side functionality. Rather than a document, a ‘web page’ is now the UI of the application, not unlike a graphical terminal. Even the WordPress editor in which this article was written is in effect just a web app that is in constant communication with the remote WordPress server.
This in itself is not a problem, as being able to do partial page refreshes rather than full on page reloads can save a lot of bandwidth and copious amounts of sanity with preserving page position and lack of flickering. What is however a problem is how there’s no real graceful degradation amidst all of this any more, mostly due to hard requirements for often bleeding edge features by these frameworks, especially in terms of JavaScript and CSS.
Sometimes these requirements are apparently merely a way to not do any testing on older or alternative browsers, with ‘forum’ software
Discourse
(not to be confused with
Disqus
) being a shining example here.
It insists
that you must have the ‘latest, stable release’ of either Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or Apple Safari. Purportedly this is so that the client-side JavaScript (
Ember.js
) framework is happy, but as e.g.
Pale Moon users have found out
, the problem is with a piece of JS that merely detects the browser, not the features. Blocking the
browser-detect-*
script in e.g. an adblocker restores full functionality to Discourse-afflicted pages.
Wrong Focus
It’s quite the understatement to say that over the past decades, websites have changed. For us greybeards who were around to admire the nascent WWW, things seemed to move at a more gradual pace back then. Multimedia wasn’t everywhere yet, and there was no Google et al.
pushing its own agenda
along with Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) onto us internet users via the W3C, which resulted in the EFF resigning in protest.
Google Search open in the Pale Moon browser.
Although Google et al. ostensibly profess to have only our best interests at heart when features were added to Chrome, the very capable plugins system from Netscape and Internet Explorer taken out back and WebExtensions
Manifest V3
introduced (with the EFF
absolutely venomous
about the latter),
privacy concerns
are mounting amidst concerns that corporations now control the WWW, with even new HTML, CSS and JS features being pushed by Google solely for its use in Chrome.
For those of us who still use traditional browsers like
Pale Moon
(forked from Firefox in 2009), it is especially the dizzying pace of new ‘features’ that discourages us from using effectively non-Chromium-based browsers, with websites all too often having only been tested in Chrome. Functionality in Safari, Pale Moon, etc. often is more a matter of luck as the assumption is made by today’s crop of web devs that everyone uses the latest and greatest Chrome browser version. This ensures that using non-Chromium browsers is fraught with functionally defective websites, as the
‘Web Compatibility Support’
section of the Pale Moon forum illustrates.
Question is whether this is the web which we, the users, want to see.
Low-Fidelity Feature
Another unpleasant side-effect of web apps is that they force an increasing amount of JS code to be downloaded, compiled and ran. This contrasts with plain HTML and CSS pages that tend to be mere kilobytes in size in addition to any images. Back in The Olden Days™ browsers gave you the option to disable JavaScript, as the assumption was that JS wasn’t used for anything critical. These days if you try to browse with e.g. a JS blocking extension like NoScript, you’ll rapidly find that there’s zero consideration for this, and many sites will display just a white page because they rely on a JS-based stub to do the actual rendering of the page rather than the browser.
In this and earlier described scenarios the consequence is the same: you must be using the latest Chromium-based browser to use many sites, you will be using a lot of RAM and CPU for even basic pages, and forget about using retro- or alternative systems that do not support the latest encryption standards and certificates.
The latter is due to the removal of non-encrypted HTTP from many browsers, because for some reason downloading public information from HTTP and FTP sites without encrypting said public data is a massive security threat now, and the former is due to the frankly absurd amounts of JS, with the Task Manager feature in many browsers showing the resource usage per tab, e.g.:
The Task Manager in Microsoft Edge showing a few active tabs and their resource usage.
Of these tabs, there is no way to reduce their resource usage, no ‘graceful degradation’ or low-fidelity mode, so that older systems as well as the average smart phone or tablet will struggle or simply keel over to keep up with the demands of the modern WWW, with even a basic page using more RAM than the average PC had installed by the late 90s.
Meanwhile the problems that we web devs were moaning about around 2000 such as an easy way to center content with CSS got ignored, while some enterprising developers have done the hard work of solving the graceful degradation problem themselves. A good example of this is the
FrogFind!
search engine, which strips down DuckDuckGo search results even further, before passing any URLs you click through a PHP port of
Mozilla’s Readability
. This strips out anything but the main content, allowing modern website content to be viewed on systems with browsers that were current in the very early 1990s.
In short, graceful degradation is mostly an issue of wanting to, rather than it being some kind of unsurmountable obstacle. It requires learning the same lessons as the folk back in the Flash and Java applet days had to: namely that your visitors don’t care how shiny your website, or how much you love the convoluted architecture and technologies behind it. At the end of the day your visitors Just Want Things to Work™, even if that means missing out on the latest variation of a Flash-based spinning widget or something similarly useless that isn’t content.
Tl;dr: content is for your visitors, the eyecandy is for you and your shareholders. | 73 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "8130443",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2025-05-20T16:33:56",
"content": "In my book the S of JS does not stand for “Script”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8130453",
"author": "Rafael Lago",
"timestamp": "2025-05-20T17... | 1,760,371,542.629501 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/20/an-awful-1990s-pda-delivers-ai-wisdom/ | An Awful 1990s PDA Delivers AI Wisdom | Jenny List | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"handhelds hacks"
] | [
"LLM",
"pda",
"serial"
] | There was a period in the 1990s when it seemed like the personal data assistant (PDA) was going to be the device of the future. If you were lucky you could afford a Psion, a PalmPilot, or even the famous Apple Newton — but to trap the unwary there were a slew of far less capable machines competing for market share.
[Nick Bild] has one of these, branded Rolodex, and in a bid to make using a generative AI less alluring,
he’s set it up as the interface to an LLM hosted on a Raspberry Pi 400
. This hack is thus mostly a tale of reverse engineering the device’s serial protocol to free it from its Windows application.
Finding the baud rate was simple enough, but the encoding scheme was unexpectedly fiddly. Sadly the device doesn’t come with a terminal because these machines were very much single-purpose, but it does have a memo app that allows transfer of text files. This is the wildly inefficient medium through which the communication with the LLM happens, and it satisfies the requirement of making the process painful.
We see this type of PDA quite regularly in second hand shops, indeed you’ll find nearly identical devices from multiple manufacturers also sporting software such as dictionaries or a thesaurus. Back in the day they always seemed to be advertised in Sunday newspapers and aimed at older people. We’ve never got to the bottom of who the OEM was who manufactured them, or indeed cracked one apart to find the inevitable black epoxy blob processor. If we had to place a bet though, we’d guess there’s an 8051 core in there somewhere. | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8130368",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-20T12:41:00",
"content": "Bingley bingley beep…Does it recognise handwriting?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8130390",
"author": "Nick Bild",
"timestamp": "202... | 1,760,371,542.436936 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/20/pentapico-a-pi-pico-cluster-for-image-convolution/ | PentaPico: A Pi Pico Cluster For Image Convolution | John Elliot V | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"cluster",
"image convolution",
"parallel processing",
"Raspberry Pi Pico"
] | Here’s something fun. Our hacker [Willow Cunningham] has sent us
a copy of their homework
. This is their final project for the “ECE 574: Cluster Computing” course at the University of Maine, Orono.
It was enjoyable going through the process of having a good look at everything in this project. The project is a “cluster” of 5x Raspberry Pi Pico microcontrollers — with one head node as the leader and four compute nodes that work on tasks. The software for both types of node is written in C. The head node is connected to a workstation via USB 1.1 allowing the system to be controlled with a Python script.
The cluster is configured to process an embarrassingly parallel image convolution. The input image is copied into the head node via USB which then divvies it up and distributes it to
n
compute nodes via I
2
C, one node at a time. Results are given for
n
= {1,2,4} compute nodes.
It turns out that the work of distributing the data dwarfs the compute by three orders of magnitude. The result is that the whole system gets
slower
the more nodes we add. But we’re not going to hold that against anyone. This was a fascinating investigation and we were impressed by [Willow]’s technical chops. This was a complicated project with diverse hardware and software challenges and they’ve done a great job making it all work and in the best scientific tradition.
It was fun reading
their journal
in which they chronicled their progress and frustrations during the project. Their
final report
in IEEE format was created using LaTeX and Overleaf, at only six pages it is an easy and interesting read.
For anyone interested in cluster tech be sure to check out the
256-core RISC-V megacluster
and
a RISC-V supercluster for very low cost
. | 22 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8130307",
"author": "Richard",
"timestamp": "2025-05-20T08:30:57",
"content": "“It turns out that the work of distributing the data dwarfs the compute by three orders of magnitude.”An excellent project and an excellent learning exercise. Nice work. :) And this experience will inform... | 1,760,371,542.688602 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/19/an-open-source-wii-u-gamepad/ | An Open-Source Wii U Gamepad | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Nintendo Wii Hacks"
] | [
"android",
"controller",
"game pad",
"nintendo",
"open source",
"steam deck",
"touch screen",
"wi-fi",
"Wii U"
] | Although Nintendo is mostly famous for making great games, they also have an infamous reputation for being highly litigious not only for reasonable qualms like outright piracy of their games, but additionally for more gray areas like homebrew development on their platforms or posting gameplay videos online. With that sort of reputation it’s not surprising that they don’t release open-source drivers for their platforms, especially those like the Wii U with unique controllers that are difficult to emulate.
This Wii U gamepad emulator seeks to bridge that gap
.
The major issue with the Wii U compared to other Nintendo platforms like the SNES or GameCube is that the controller looks like a standalone console and behaves similarly as well, with its own built-in screen. Buying replacement controllers for this unusual device isn’t straightforward either; outside of Japan Nintendo did not offer an easy path for consumers to buy controllers. This software suite, called Vanilla, aims to allow other non-Nintendo hardware to bridge this gap, bringing in support for things like the Steam Deck, the Nintendo Switch, various Linux devices, or Android smartphones which all have the touch screens required for Wii U controllers. The only other hardware requirement is that the device must support 802.11n 5 GHz Wi-Fi.
Although the Wii U was somewhat of a flop commercially, it seems to be experiencing a bit of a resurgence among collectors, retro gaming enthusiasts, and homebrew gaming developers as well. Many games were incredibly well made and are still experiencing continued life on the Switch, and plenty of gamers are looking for the original experience on the Wii U instead. If you’ve somehow found yourself in the opposite position of owning of a Wii U controller but not the console, though,
you can still get all the Wii U functionality back with this console modification
.
Thanks to [Kat] for the tip! | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8130283",
"author": "ech010100101",
"timestamp": "2025-05-20T07:10:41",
"content": "https://www.youtube.com/@MattKC/videos",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8130417",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-20T14:44:12",
... | 1,760,371,542.382937 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/17/zen-flute-is-a-teensy-powered-mouth-theramin/ | Zen Flute Is A Teensy Powered Mouth Theremin | Dave Rowntree | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"Helmholtz Resonator",
"KiCAD",
"midi",
"mpe",
"Teensy 4.1",
"Theramin"
] | An intriguing mouth-played instrument emerged—and won—at the 2023 Guthman Musical Instrument Contest hosted by Georgia Tech. [Keith Baxter] took notice and reproduced the idea for others to explore. The result is the
Zen Flute Mouth Theremin
, a hybrid of acoustics, electronics, and expressive performance.
At its core lies a forced Helmholtz resonator, a feedback system built with a simple microphone and speaker setup. The resonator itself? The user’s mouth. The resulting pitch, shaped by subtle jaw and tongue movements, is detected and used to drive a MIDI controller feeding an external synthesizer.
Like a trombone or classic electromagnetic theremin, the Zen Flute doesn’t rely on discrete notes. Instead, the pitch is bent manually to the desired frequency. That’s great for expression, but traditional MIDI quantisation can map those “in-between” notes to unexpected semitones. The solution? MIDI Polyphonic Expression (MPE). This newer MIDI extension allows smooth pitch transitions and nuanced control, giving the Zen Flute its expressive character without the hiccups.
Physically, it’s an elegant build. A flat speaker and microphone sit side-by-side at the mouth end, acoustically isolated with a custom silicone insert. This assembly connects to a length of clear PVC pipe, flared slightly to resemble a wind instrument. Inside, a custom PCB (schematic
here
) hosts a mic preamp, an audio power amp, and a Teensy 4.1. The Teensy handles everything: sampling the mic input, generating a 90-degree phase shift, and feeding it back to the speaker to maintain resonance. It also detects the resonant frequency and translates it to MPE over USB. A push-button triggers note onset, while a joystick adjusts timbre and selects modes. Different instrument profiles can be pre-programmed and toggled with a joystick click, each mapped to separate MIDI channels.
Mouth-controlled instruments are a fascinating corner of experimental interfaces. They remind us of
this Hackaday Prize entry from 2018
,
this wind-MIDI hybrid controller
, and, of course, a classic final project from the Cornell ECE4760 course, a
four-voice theremin controlled by IR sensors
. | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8128853",
"author": "Carl Breen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T18:36:25",
"content": "The Japanese did it first: EWI (Electronic Wind Instrument)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCei7ADE87QCan fit about any instrument in there for which you input samples.",
"parent_id": null,
"de... | 1,760,371,542.740806 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/17/open-source-hiding-in-plain-sight/ | Open Source Hiding In Plain Sight | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"high reliability",
"newsletter",
"software"
] | On the podcast, [Tom] and I were talking about
the continuing saga of the libogc debacle
. [Tom] has been interviewing some of the principals involved, so he’s got some first-hand perspective on it all – you should really go read his pieces. But the short version is that an old library that many Nintendo game emulators use appears to have cribbed code from both and open-source real-time operating system called RTEMS, and the Linux kernel itself.
You probably know Linux, but RTEMS is a high-reliability RTOS for aerospace. People in the field tell me that it’s well-known in those circles, but it doesn’t have a high profile in the hacker world. Still, satellites run RTEMS, so it’s probably also a good place to draw inspiration from, or simply use the library as-is. Since it’s BSD-licensed, you can also borrow entire functions wholesale if you attribute them properly.
In the end, an RTOS is an RTOS. It doesn’t matter if it’s developed for blinking LEDs or for guiding ICBMs. This thought got [Tom] and I to thinking about what other high-reliability open-source code is out there, hidden away in obscurity because of the industry that it was developed for.
NASA’s core flight system
came instantly to mind, but
NASA makes much of its code available for you to use if you’re interested
. There are surely worse places to draw inspiration!
What other off-the-beaten-path software sources do you know of that might be useful for our crowd?
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
! | 21 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8128820",
"author": "Keith Penney",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T15:39:48",
"content": "So far no one has mentioned RTEMS is also a popular target for embedded EPICS I/O controllers (IOCs) in the world of particle accelerator systems – a bit more innocuous than ICBMs.Reference example:h... | 1,760,371,542.839745 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/17/animated-widgets-on-apple-devices-via-a-neat-backdoor/ | Animated Widgets On Apple Devices Via A Neat Backdoor | Lewin Day | [
"iphone hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"apple",
"ios",
"iphone"
] | If you’ve ever looked at widgets on your iPhone, you’ve probably noticed they’re largely static, save for a few first-party apps. By and large, third party developers are not supposed to be able to animate them. However,
[Bryce Bostwick] found a workaround
.
You might be confused as to the idea of animated widgets, but it’s quite simple. For example, think of a clock app with a widget in which the hands always display the current time, or a calendar app with an icon that shows the current date. Apple’s own apps have long been able to do this, but the functionality has mostly been locked out for third parties.
One way to get around this limitation is by using a timer feature baked into the widget functionality. The timer tool is one of the few ways that third-party apps are allowed to do animation. By running a timer with a custom font, you can display various graphical elements instead of numbers counting down to create a hacky animation that updates every second.
However, there are even more advanced techniques that can get you faster, smoother animations. [Bryce] breaks down the private techniques used to rotate the clock hands on Apple’s own widget, and how to use those tools for your own purposes. It takes some sneaky Xcode tricks and a bit of math to make it fully flexible for doing arbitrary animations, but it works surprisingly well.
Will this backdoor last ? Well, Apple is always
updating and changing iOS and its associated software
, so don’t expect it to work forever.
Thanks to [gnif] for the tip! | 6 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8128776",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T11:46:40",
"content": "The easiest and best long-term way to get around this limitation is to dump iOS :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128874",
"author": "Jason"... | 1,760,371,542.78258 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/17/making-sure-the-basement-stays-dry-with-an-esp8266/ | Making Sure The Basement Stays Dry With An ESP8266 | John Elliot V | [
"hardware",
"home hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"AHT20",
"Arduino IDE",
"BMP280",
"ESP8266",
"flooding monitor",
"humidity monitor"
] | The hack we have for you today is among our most favorite types of hack: a good, honest, simple, and well documented implementation that meets a real need. Our hacker [Solo Pilot] has sent in a link to their
basement monitor
.
The documentation is quite good. It’s terse but comprehensive with links to related information. It covers the background, requirements, hardware design, sensors, email and SMS alerts, software details, and even has some credits at the end.
Implementing this project would be a good activity for someone who has already made an LED flash and wants to take their skills to the next level by sourcing and assembling the hardware and then configuring, compiling, deploying, and testing the software for this real-world project.
To make this project work you will need to know your way around the Arduino IDE in order to build the software from the
src.zip
file included with the documentation (hint: extract the files from
src.zip
into a directory called
AHT20_BMP280
before opening
AHT20_BMP280.ino
and make sure you add necessary boards and libraries).
One feature of the basement monitor that we would like to see is a periodic “everything’s okay” signal from the device, just so we can confirm that the reason we’re not getting an alarm about flooding in the basement is because there is no flood, and not because the battery ran dead or the WiFi went offline.
If you’ve recently started on your journey into where electronics meets software a project such as this one is a really great place to go next. And of course once you are proficient with the ESP8266 there are a thousand such projects here at Hackaday that you can cut your teeth on. Such as
this clock
and
this fault injection device
. | 38 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8128715",
"author": "badtaste",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T09:43:22",
"content": "Just curious — is anyone actually using ESP8266 for new projects these days?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128718",
"author": "Carl Bre... | 1,760,371,542.968525 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/16/hack-aims-for-poloroid-hits-game-boy-camera-sweet-spot/ | Hack Aims For Polaroid, Hits Game Boy Camera Sweet Spot | Tyler August | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"camera",
"ESP32-CAM",
"thermal printer"
] | There’s just some joy in an instant camera. They were never quality cameras, even in the glory days of Polaroid, but somehow the format has survived while the likes of Kodachrome have faded away. [Mellow_Labs] decided he wanted the
instacam experience without the Polaroid pricing,
so he made his own in the video embedded after the break.
He says “Polaroid’ but we see Game Boy.
At its core, it’s a simple project: an ESP32-CAM for the image (these were never great cameras, remember, so ESP32 is fine– and do you really get to call it an
instant
camera if you have to wait for a Raspberry Pi to boot up?) and a serial thermal printer for the “instant photo”part. This admittedly limits the project to black and white, and pretty low res, but B/W is artistic and Lo-Fi is hip, so this probably gives the [Mellow Labs] camera street cred with the kids, somehow. Honestly, this reminds us more of the old Gameboy Camera and its printer than anything made by Polaroid, and we are here for it.
The build video goes through the challenges [Mellow Labs] found interfacing the serial printer to the ESP32–which went surprisingly well for what looks like mostly vibe coding, though we’re not sure how much time he spent fixing the vibe code off camera–as well as a the adventure of providing a case that includes the most absurdly beefy battery we’ve ever seen on a camera. Check out the full video below.
Instant cameras are no stranger to Hackaday:
this one used e-ink
; this one uses film,
but is made of gingerbread.
In 2022 we wondered if
we’d ever shake the Polaroid picture,
and the answer appears to be “no” so far.
Thanks to [Mellow] for tooting his own horn by submitting this project
to the tip line
. We love to see what our readers get up to, so please– toot away! | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8128694",
"author": "Cody",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T06:28:16",
"content": "This would be a perfect use for a grayscale thermal printer. Someone needs to reverse engineer one of those little bluetooth grayscale printers so it can work without its app. They produce much better images... | 1,760,371,542.893302 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/16/moon-phase-flip-clock-is-fantastic/ | Moon Phase Flip Clock Is Fantastic | Navarre Bartz | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"flip clock",
"moon",
"Moon phases",
"simone giertz"
] | We love clocks, but we especially love unusual timepieces that aren’t just about showing the hour of the day. [Simone Giertz] built a flip clock
moon phase tracker
for a friend.
While in Egypt for Cairo Maker Faire, [Giertz] and [dina Amin] found some old flip clocks at a flea market and had to have them. [Amin] mentioned wanting to make a moon phase tracker with one, and [Giertz] decided to try her hand at making her own version. A side quest in more comfortable flying is included with the price of admission, but the real focus is the process of figuring out how to replicate the flip clocks original mechanism in a different size and shape.
[Giertz] cut out 30 semi-circle flaps from polystyrene and then affixed vinyl cut-outs to the flaps. The instructions for the assembly suggest that this might not be the best way to do it, and that printing stickers to affix to the flaps might work better since the cut vinyl turned out pretty fiddly. We really like the part where she built a grid jig to determine the optimal placement of the beams to keep the flaps in the right position after a disheartening amount of difficulties doing it in a more manual way. Her approach of letting it rest for twenty minutes before coming back to it is something you might find helpful in your own projects.
Best of all, if you want to build your own, the files are available for the
flip moon station on the Yetch website
. You’ll have to come up with your own method to drive it though as that isn’t in the files from what we saw. | 15 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8128686",
"author": "Schobi",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T06:08:48",
"content": "I like the idea and great that she put design files for download.Unfortunately, this is not a clock, but “just” the display. Having it sit on the shelf and look nice – okay. But is will show the wrong phas... | 1,760,371,543.090715 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/16/new-bismuth-transistor-runs-40-faster-and-uses-10-less-power/ | New Bismuth Transistor Runs 40% Faster And Uses 10% Less Power | John Elliot V | [
"hardware",
"Science"
] | [
"bismuth",
"bismuth oxyselenide",
"bismuth selenite oxide",
"bjt",
"finfet",
"GAAFET",
"mosfet",
"semiconductor",
"SOI MOSFET",
"transistor"
] | Recently in material science news from China we hear that [Hailin Peng] and his team at Peking University
just made the world’s fastest transistor and it’s not made of silicon
. Before we tell you about this transistor made from
bismuth
here’s a whirlwind tour of the history of the transistor.
The Bipolar Junction Transistor (BJT, such as NPN and PNP) was developed soon after the point-contact transistor which was developed at Bell Labs in 1947. Then after Resistor-Transistor Logic (RTL) came Transistor-Transistor Logic (TTL) made with BJTs. The problem with TTL was too much power consumption.
Enter the energy-efficient Field-Effect Transistor (FET). The FET is better suited to processing information as it is voltage-controlled, unlike the BJT which is current-controlled. Advantages of FETs include high input impedance, low power consumption, fast switching speed, being well suited to Very-Large-Scale Integration (VLSI), etc.
The cornerstone of Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) technology which came to replace TTL was a type of FET known as the Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET). The type of MOSFET most commonly used in CMOS integrated circuits is the Enhancement-mode MOSFET which is normally off and needs gate voltage to conduct.
A transistor’s technology generation is given with the “process node”, in nanometers (nm). This used to mean the size of the smallest feature that could be fabricated, but these days it’s just a marketing term (smaller is “better”). Planar CMOS MOSFETs were initially dominant (through ~28nm), then came SOI MOSFETs (28nm to 16nm), then FinFETs (16nm to 5nm), and now finally Gate-All-Around FETs (GAAFETs, 3nm and beyond).
All of that in order to say that this new transistor from [Hailin Peng] and his team is a GAAFET. It’s made from bismuth oxyselenide (Bi₂O₂Se) for the channel, and bismuth selenite oxide (Bi₂SeO₅) as the gate material. See the article for further details.
Keep in mind that at this point in time we only have a prototype from a lab and the gory details about how to mass-produce these things, assuming that’s even possible, haven’t yet been worked out. We have previously discussed
the difficulty of manufacturing state-of-the-art transistors
. If you’re interested in bismuth be sure to check out
how to use bismuth for desoldering
. | 39 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "8128612",
"author": "rasz_pl",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T23:23:46",
"content": "Press F for “gonna believe it when someone independently replicates it”, just like that magic graphene 400 picosecond flash replacement from 3 weeks ago.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repl... | 1,760,371,543.041666 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/18/magnetohydrodynamic-motors-to-spin-satellites/ | Magnetohydrodynamic Motors To Spin Satellites | Aaron Beckendorf | [
"hardware"
] | [
"Magnetohydrodynamic",
"reaction wheel"
] | Almost all satellites have some kind of thrusters aboard, but they tend to use them as little as possible to conserve chemical fuel. Reaction wheels are one way to make orientation adjustments without running the thrusters, and [Zachary Tong]’s
liquid metal reaction wheel
greatly simplifies the conventional design.
Reaction wheels are basically flywheels. When a spacecraft spins one, conservation of angular momentum means that the wheel applies an equal and opposite torque to the spacecraft, letting the spacecraft orient itself. The liquid-metal reaction wheel uses this same principle, but uses a loop of liquid metal instead of a wheel, and uses a magnetohydrodynamic drive to propel the metal around the loop.
[Zach] built two reaction wheels using Galinstan as their liquid metal, which avoided the toxicity of a more obvious liquid metal. Unfortunately, the oxide skin that Galinstan forms did make it harder to visualize the metal’s motion. He managed to get some good video, but a clearer test was their ability to produce torque. Both iterations produced a noticeable response when hung from a string and activated, and achieved somewhat better results when mounted on a 3D-printed air bearing.
Currently, efficiency is the main limitation of [Zach]’s motors: he estimates that the second model produced 6.2 milli-newton meters of torque, but at the cost of drawing 22 watts. The liquid metal is highly conductive, so the magnetohydrodynamic drive takes high current at low voltage, which is inconvenient for a spacecraft to supply. Nevertheless, considering how hard it is to create reliable, long-lasting reaction wheels the conventional way, the greatly improved resilience of liquid-metal reaction wheels might eventually be worthwhile.
If you’re curious for a deeper look at magnetohydrodynamic drives, we’ve
covered them before
. We’ve also seen [Zach]’s
earlier experiments with Galinstan
. | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8129645",
"author": "wjp4bs",
"timestamp": "2025-05-18T17:29:29",
"content": "I’m going to preface this comment with the fact that this is neat experimentation and all science starts with someone just asking a question.This metal is ill suited for a reaction wheel because it freezes... | 1,760,371,543.346458 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/18/casting-shade-on-shade-tolerant-solar-panels/ | Casting Shade On “Shade-Tolerant” Solar Panels | Tyler August | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"pv solar",
"shade"
] | Shade is the mortal enemy of solar panels; even a little shade can cause a disproportionate drop in power output. [Alex Beale]
reviewed a “revolutionary” shade-tolerant panel by Renology
in a video embedded below. The results are
fascinating
.
While shading large portions of the panels using cardboard to cut off rows of cells, or columns of cells, the shade tolerant panel does very well compared to the standard panel– but when natural, uneven shading is applied to the panel, very little difference is seen between the standard and active panels in [Alex]’s test. We suspect there must be some active components to keep power flowing around shaded cells in the Renology panel, allowing it to perform well in the cardboard tests. When the whole panel is partially shaded, there’s no routing around it, and it performs normally.
It’s hard to see a real-world case that would justify the extra cost, since most shading doesn’t come with perfect straight-line cutoffs. Especially considering the added cost for this “shade tolerant” technology (roughly double normal panels).
You might see a better boost by
cooling your solar panels
. Of course you can’t forget to
optimize the output with MPPT.
It’s possible that a better MPPT setup might have let the Renology panel shine in this video, but we’re not certain. Whatever panels you’re using, though,
don’t forget to keep them clean
. | 32 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8129208",
"author": "Clancydaenlightened",
"timestamp": "2025-05-18T12:43:59",
"content": "Could put a lens that take light from basically all different angles, and concentrates it on the solar cells, get more than the about 1kw (erp) per sq ft of sun energy iirc, more effective sin... | 1,760,371,543.291326 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/18/mcp-blender-addon-lets-ai-take-the-wheel-and-wield-the-tools/ | MCP Blender Addon Lets AI Take The Wheel And Wield The Tools | Donald Papp | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"ai",
"blender",
"LLM",
"mcp"
] | Want to give an AI the ability to do
stuff
in Blender? The
BlenderMCP addon
does exactly that, connecting open-source 3D modeling software Blender to Anthropic’s Claude AI via MCP (Model Context Protocol), which means Claude can directly use Blender and its tools in a meaningful way.
MCP is a framework for allowing AI systems like LLMs (Large Language Models) to exchange information in a way that makes it easier to interface with other systems. We’ve seen LLMs tied experimentally into other software (such as with enabling more
natural conversations with NPCs
) but without a framework like MCP, such exchanges are bespoke and effectively stateless. MCP becomes very useful for letting LLMs use software tools and perform work that involves an iterative approach, better preserving the history and context of the task at hand.
Unlike the beach scene above which used 3D assets, this scene was created from scratch with the help of a reference image.
Using MCP also provides some standardization, which means that while the BlenderMCP project integrates with Claude (or alternately the Cursor AI editor) it could — with the right configuration — be pointed at a suitable locally-hosted LLM instead. It wouldn’t be as capable as the commercial offerings, but it would be entirely private.
Embedded below are three videos that really show what this tool can do. In the first, watch it create a beach scene using assets from a public 3D asset library. In the second, it creates a scene from scratch using a reference image (a ‘low-poly cabin in the woods’), followed by turning that same scene into a 3D environment on a web page, navigable in any web browser.
Back in 2022 we saw
Blender connected to an image generator to texture objects
, but this is considerably more capable. It’s a fascinating combination, and if you’re thinking of trying it out just make sure you’re aware it relies on allowing arbitrary Python code to be run in Blender, which is powerful but should be deployed with caution. | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8129032",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-05-18T09:39:47",
"content": "Very coolCan’t wait to enter the next era of videogames where anyone can make them",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8129344",
"author": "p... | 1,760,371,543.394432 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/17/escaping-us-tech-giants-leads-european-youtuber-to-open-source/ | Escaping US Tech Giants Leads European YouTuber To Open Source | Tyler August | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"fairphone",
"Nextcloud",
"open source software"
] | The video (embedded below) by [TechAltar] is titled “
1 Month without US tech giants
“, but it could have been titled “1 Month with Open Source Tools” — because, as it turns out, once you get out of the ecosystem set up by the US tech giants, you’re into the world of open source software (OSS) whether you want to be or not.
From a (German-made) Tuxedo laptop running their own Linux distro to a Fairphone with e/OS (which is French), an open version of Android, [TechAlter] is very keen to point out whenever Europeans are involved, which is how we learned that KDE has a physical headquarters, and that it’s in Berlin. Who knew?
He also gives his experiences with NextCloud (also German), can be used as an OSS alternative Google Workspaces that
we’ve written about before
, but then admits that he was the sole user on his instance. To which one must question: if you’re the sole user, why do you need a cloud-based collaborative environment? To try it out before getting collaborators involved, presumably.
Regardless what you think of the politics motivating this video, it’s
great
to see open source getting greater traction. While [TechAltar] was looking for European alternatives, part of the glory of open source is that it doesn’t matter where you’re from, you can still contribute. (
Unless you’re Russian
.) Have you found yourself using more open source software (or hardware) of late? Do you think the current political climate could lead to a broadening of its reach?
Is this the year of the linux desktop?
Let us know what you think in the comments. | 113 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8129003",
"author": "Sword",
"timestamp": "2025-05-18T07:53:21",
"content": "I have a single Windows laptop, only for CAD and my remote work (It could be done on linux but it isn’t worth it with my company IT’s).My development desktop is linux, my daily laptop is linux, all of my ot... | 1,760,371,543.542444 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/17/the-lost-256-kb-japanese-rom-for-the-macintosh-plus-has-been-found/ | The Lost 256 KB Japanese ROM For The Macintosh Plus Has Been Found | Maya Posch | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"Kanji",
"macintosh plus",
"rom"
] | The Apple Macintosh Plus was one of the most long-lived Apple computers and saw three revisions of its 128 kB-sized ROMs during its life time, at least officially. There’s a fourth ROM, sized 256 kB, that merges the Western ROMs with Japanese fonts. This would save a user of a Western MacIntosh Plus precious start-up time & RAM when starting software using these fonts. Unfortunately, this particular ROM existed mostly as a kind of myth,
until [Pierre Dandumont] uncovered one
(machine-translated,
French original
).
The two 128 kB EPROMs containing the special MacIntosh Plus ROM image. (Credit: Pierre Dandumont)
Since this particular ROM was rumored to exist somewhere in the Japanese market, [Pierre] went hunting for Japanese Macintosh Plus mainboards, hoping to find a board with this ROM. After finally getting lucky, the next task was to dump the two 128 kB EPROMs. An interesting sidenote here is that the MacIntosh Plus’ two ROM sockets use the typical programming voltage pin (Vpp) as an
extra address line
, enabling 256 kB of capacity across the two sockets.
This detail probably is why this special ROM wasn’t verified before, as people tried to dump them without using that extra address line, i.e. as a typical 27C512 64 kB EPROM instead of this proprietary pinout, which would have resulted in the same 64 kB dump as from a standard ROM. Thanks to [Doc TB]’s help and
his UCA device
it was possible to dump the whole image, with the images
available for download
.
Using this ROM image was the next interesting part, as [Pierre] initially didn’t have a system to test it with, and emulators assume the 128 kB ROM format. Fortunately these are all problems that can be solved, allowing the ROM images to be validated on real hardware as well as a modified MAME build. We were informed by [Pierre] that MAME releases will soon be getting support for this ROM as well. | 15 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8128962",
"author": "Josiah David Gould",
"timestamp": "2025-05-18T02:52:13",
"content": "Looks like they figured out the extra address line that nobody else twigged. That’s a hack in my book.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "812... | 1,760,371,543.65409 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/17/determine-fundamental-constants-with-leds-and-a-multimeter/ | Determine Fundamental Constants With LEDs And A Multimeter | Tyler August | [
"Science"
] | [
"education",
"experiment",
"leds",
"physics",
"planck's constant"
] | There are (probably) less than two dozen fundemental constants that define the physics of our universe. Determining the value of them might seem like the sort of thing for large, well funded University labs, but many can be determined to reasonable accuracy on the benchtop, as [Marb’s Lab]
proves with this experiment to find the value of Planck’s Constant
.
[Marv’s Lab] setup is on a nice PCB that uses a rotary switch to select between 5 LEDs of different wavelengths, with banana plugs for the multi-meter so he can perform a linear regression on the relation between energy and frequency to find the constant. He’s also thoughtfully put connectors in place for current measurement, so the volt-current relationship of the LEDs can be characterized in a second experiment. Overall, this is a piece of kit that would not be out of place in any high school or undergraduate physics lab.
To use this to determine Planck’s constant, you need to use Planck’s relation for the energy of a photon:
g
et some energies (
E
), plug in the frequency (
f
), and bam! You can generate a value for
h
, Planck’s constant. The energies? Well, that’s a very easy measurement, but it requires some understanding of how LEDs work. [Marb] is simply measuring the voltage needed to just barely light the LED of a given frequency. For frequency, he’s relying on the LED datasheets.
That translates to the energy of the photon because it corresponds to the energy (in electron volts) required to jump electrons over the bandgap of the semiconductor in the LED — that’s how the light is generated. Those photons will have the energy of the gap, in theory.
In practice, the LEDs do not emit perfectly monochromatic light; there’s a normal distribution centered on the color they’re “supposed” to be, but it is fairly tight. That’s probably why is able to [Marv] get to within 5% of the canonical value, which is better than we’d expect.
This isn’t the first time we’ve determined plank’s constant;
it’s quite possible to get to much higher accuracy.
The last time we featured this
particular technique, the error was 11%
. | 13 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8128922",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T23:58:49",
"content": "Seems like cheap equipment can get you 95% of the way there but it’s expensive equipment that gets you the last 5%.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "... | 1,760,371,543.596181 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/17/this-extra-large-two-stage-fume-extractor-really-sucks/ | This Extra-Large, Two-Stage Fume Extractor Really Sucks | Tyler August | [
"hardware",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"3d print",
"3d printed tool",
"activated carbon",
"fume extractor",
"lm2576",
"power tool battery"
] | Solder fumes are not nice on the lungs; nor are fumes from superglue, epoxy, or a whole mess of other things we often find ourselves using on the bench. Some people might be able to go the fume hood route to toss that all outside, but for the rest of us, there’s fume extractors. [Raph] has
produced an extra-large, carbon-filtering, two-stage fume extractor
that by all accounts really sucks — it is effective at hoovering up solder fumes up to 10″ from its inlet.
Note the 18V tool battery in the base. That’ll go for a bit.
Even better, [Raph] built a battery box for an 18 V cordless tool battery, and broke out banana plugs so this doubles as a variable power supply via a cheap LM2596 based DC-DC converter. It also serves as a speed controller for the fans, which makes us wonder if you can adjust the PSU output and the fan speed independently…
Maximum suckage is achieved through careful baffle design. Check out the blog to see the trial-and-error process at work. Of course, having a 200 mm axial fan and 140 mm blower fan front and rear is going to move some air no matter what. Which is required to get air flow through the 38 mm thick activated carbon filter that should scrub all nasties quite nicely. We aren’t filtration experts but we can agree with [Raph]’s estimate that it will last “a while”.
If you want to roll your own, all of the
STEP files are on GitHub
, and [Raph]’s blog has
an excellent step-by-step build guide.
We’ve seen other hacks from [Raph] before, from
his dovetailed modular breadboard
to the
machine that shaped his bed
and automation
for his camper van
. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8128889",
"author": "Andy",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T20:34:16",
"content": "These are great projects, and I’m glad to see that people are taking their health and safety seriously. The cowboy mentality seems a lot less cool when you’re older and realize how much garbage you’ve inhale... | 1,760,371,543.701816 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/16/a-portable-m4-mac-mini/ | A Portable M4 Mac Mini | Navarre Bartz | [
"Mac Hacks"
] | [
"luggable computer",
"mac mini",
"macintosh",
"macintosh mini",
"portable computer"
] | The Mac mini is the closest to an Apple-based SBC you can get, so it lends itself to unusual portable computers. [Scott Yu-Jan] is back to tackle a portable build using the latest and greatest
M4 mini
.
[Yu-Jan] walks us through his thought process of how to maximize the portability of the system without all that tedious mucking about with setting up a separate keyboard, monitor, and the mini while on the go. With the more complicated electronics, the monitor risked tipping the keyboard over when attached, particularly since [Yu-Jan] isn’t a fan of batteries for his portables.
By affixing the Mac mini to the side of the keyboard, it makes the whole thing easier to slip into a bag without being overly thick. We get a peek into his iterative process as well when he evaluates the build and decides that the closing of the lid wasn’t what he was hoping for. By adding some TPU rests for the monitor to rest on in the closed position, he says it’s really brought the whole project up a notch. We certainly have had our own projects where one little detail really moves it from sketchy to polished, and we appreciate when makers clue us in on where that happened for them.
You may recognize [Yu-Jan] from our previous coverage of his older
portable all-in-one Mac mini
and this luggable version where he explains
why he doesn’t like laptops
. If you like your computers more stationary, how about some
G4 iMacs
with the newer internals from an
M-series mini
? | 29 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "8128571",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T20:49:17",
"content": "Would have put the Mac mini on the left so that there is room for the mouse on the right.But, let’s not let practicality get in the way of advertising today’s sponsor.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth":... | 1,760,371,543.767158 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/16/the-screamer-is-just-like-the-clapper-but-even-more-annoying/ | The Screamer Is Just Like The Clapper But Even More Annoying | Lewin Day | [
"classic hacks",
"home hacks"
] | [
"clapper",
"ESP32",
"ESP8266",
"scream detection",
"The Clapper"
] | Remember The Clapper? It was a home automation tool (of sorts) that let you turn appliances on and off by clapping. [Kevin O’Connor] has built something rather similar, if more terrifying. It’s called
The Screamer.
The build is based around a Sonoff S31 smart switch. [Kevin] selected an off-the-shelf device because he wanted something that was safe to use with mains power out of the box. But specifically, he selected the S31 because it has an ESP8266 inside that’s easy to reprogram with the aid of ESPHome. He ended up hooking up a whole extra ESP32 with an INMP441 microphone over I2S to do the scream detection. This was achieved with a simple algorithm that looked for high amplitude noises with lots of energy in the 1000 – 4000 Hz frequency range. When a scream is detected, it flips a GPIO pin which is detected by the S31, which then toggles the state of the smart switch in turn. Job done.
It’s a simple project that does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s The Screamer! If you’d like to learn more about the original Clapper that inspired this build,
we’ve looked at that before, too.
Meanwhile, if you’re cooking up your own excuses to scream at the lights and walls in your home, please only
notify the tipsline
if it has something vaguely to do with electronics or hackery. | 11 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8128554",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T19:45:09",
"content": "Lewin’s next trick is to wire up The Screamer so it submits his next hack to HaD when he screams.Well, maybe not, but here’s hoping.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"... | 1,760,371,543.920914 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/16/chatgpt-me-chatgpt-is-me/ | ChatGPT & Me. ChatGPTIsMe! | Jenny List | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"artificial intelligence",
"ChatGPT"
] | For a while now part of my email signature has been a quote from a Hackaday commenter insinuating that an article I wrote was created by a “Dumb AI”. You have my sincerest promise that I am a humble meatbag scribe just like the rest of you, indeed one currently nursing a sore shoulder due to a sporting injury, so I found the comment funny in a way its writer probably didn’t intend. Like many in tech, I maintain a skepticism about the future role of large-language-model generative AI, and have resisted the urge to drink the Kool-Aid you will see liberally flowing at the moment.
Hackaday Is Part Of The Machine
As you’ll no doubt be aware, these large language models work by gathering a vast corpus of text, and doing their computational tricks to generate their output by inferring from that data. They can thus create an artwork in the style of a painter who receives no reward for the image, or a book in the voice of an author who may be struggling to make ends meet. From the viewpoint of content creators and intellectual property owners, it’s theft on a grand scale, and you’ll find plenty of legal battles seeking to establish the boundaries of the field.
Anyway, once an LLM has enough text from a particular source, it can do a pretty good job of writing in that style. ChatGPT for example has doubtless crawled the whole of Hackaday, and since I’ve written thousands of articles in my nearly a decade here, it’s got a significant corpus of my work. Could it write in my style? As it turns out, yes it can, but not
exactly
. I set out to test its forging skill.
In Which I Meet My Digital Impostor
A couple of weeks ago
I covered the news of the impending re-entry of a failed Soviet Venus mission
stuck in orbit since 1972. It’s a fascinating story because the craft may survive the experience, and it’s possible that by the time you read this it might have been retrieved. I asked ChatGPT to provide me with a 200 word article on the story “in the voice of the Hackaday writer Jenny List”. Here’s what it came up with:
In the early days of the Space Race, the Soviet Union launched a bold bid to reach Venus: the Venera missions. Among them was Kosmos 482, a 1972 mission that never made it past Earth’s gravity. Now, over five decades later, its descent craft is finally coming home—with a bang.
Kosmos 482 was intended to deliver a lander to Venus, but due to a malfunction in its upper stage, it was stranded in a highly elliptical orbit around Earth. Encased in a semi-spherical titanium shell, the descent craft—designed to survive the brutal atmosphere of Venus—has been orbiting quietly, steadily losing altitude. By early May 2025, that orbit had decayed to a precarious 232 x 136 km, setting the stage for an uncontrolled reentry around May 10th.
Unlike typical space debris, Kosmos 482’s reentry carries a bit more drama. Built to endure Venus’s hellish surface, the lander is expected to survive Earth’s atmospheric plunge mostly intact. Impact predictions estimate it will hit the ground at about 65-70 m/s, roughly the speed of a meteorite, packing the punch of a 500 kg hunk of Soviet engineering.
With an orbital inclination of 51.95 degrees, it could come down anywhere between 52°N and 52°S, adding an element of unpredictability. One thing is certain: after 53 years in limbo, Kosmos 482 is finally coming back to Earth—whether we’re ready or not.
Reading it is a fascinating experience, because superficially it feels like a Hackaday piece. It has my vague style with some phrases such as “
packing the punch of a 500 kg hunk of Soviet engineering
“. It’s casual in its language, and it’s captured my wordiness; in contrast to the more terse style it does when for example I ask it to do the same thing in the voice of my colleague Al Williams. It fails though in several senses, I feel it doesn’t capture my sentence style and the very British way I use punctuation, it relies on far more figures than I would put in a piece, and perhaps most importantly it has no inference. It relies only on the facts it can find, indeed those figures are a sign of it overusing them, and it doesn’t go further in commenting on any likely outcomes. In my human-written version of the same piece I finished up by speculating on who would own it if retrieved, and anything of that nature is absent in its output.
Don’t Worry, Humans Still Needed
So it’s clear from the above that while it can write something which is superficially coverage of the same story in my voice when writing a Hackaday piece, it still fails at the task in hand. Where we would try to give a little introduction, background and comment to the story, it instead presents only a summary of facts it has found. The fact that it can’t infer beyond the story is reassuring, because it means we meat-based Hackaday scribes still have the edge. There are many people who will tell you to look for certain words as clues to AI-written text, but the truth is much simpler. Look for the human touch. | 64 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "8128491",
"author": "Ali",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T17:12:14",
"content": "What’s with the “/s”? Is this reddit already?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128493",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T17... | 1,760,371,543.871151 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/16/hackaday-podcast-episode-321-learn-you-some-3dp-let-the-wookie-win-or-design-a-thinkpad-motherboard-anew/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 321: Learn You Some 3DP, Let The Wookie Win, Or Design A Thinkpad Motherboard Anew | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they take a whirlwind tour of the best and brightest hacks of the last week. This episode starts off with an update about that Soviet Venus lander that’s been buzzing the planet, then moves on to best practices for designing 3D printed parts, giving Chrome OS devices a new lease on life, and a unique display technology that brings a
Star Wars
prop to life.
You’ll also hear about designing new motherboards for beloved old computers, why you might want to put your calipers on a flatbed scanner, and a NASA science satellite that’s putting in double duty as a wartime reporter. Finally, they’ll cover the interesting physics of meteor burst communications, and the latest developments in the ongoing libogc license kerfuffle.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Download in DRM-free MP3
.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 321 Show Notes:
News:
Reentry prediction Soviet-era Venera Venus lander – Rocket Science
Telegram: View @roscosmos_gk
What’s that Sound?
Know that sound?
Fill out this form for a chance to win
!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Best Practices For FDM Printing
Learn 15 Print-in-Place Mechanisms In 15 Minutes
Turning A Chromebox Into A Proper Power-Efficient PC
Let The Wookie Win With This DIY Holochess Table
Aska3D
A Little Optical Magic Makes This Floating Display Pop
What’s Inside A Neonode Laser Sensor?
A Brain Transplant For A Philips Smart Lamp
Tearing Down A Forgotten Video Game
Pong-Story : PONG in a Chip
Another Old ThinkPad Gets A New Motherboard
Replacement Motherboard Brings New Lease Of Life To Classic Thinkpads
Revive A Sony Vaio P-Series With KiCad’s Background Bitmaps
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Move Over, Lithophane: 3D Printed 3D Photos With Gaussian Splats
A Single-Pixel Camera Without Moving Parts Using Compressed Sensing
Scan Your Caliper For Physical Part Copies
Tom’s Picks:
Studying QR Code Degradation
The World’s Longest Range LED Flashlight
Open Source ELINT Accidentally From NASA
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Radio Apocalypse: Meteor Burst Communications
RTEMS Statement Deepens Libogc License Controversy
Libogc Allegations Rock Wii Homebrew Community | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8128544",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T19:31:15",
"content": "Correction on the meteor bounce portion of the talk: meteoroid bounce comms don’t bounce off of the meteoroids, but off of the ionized air trail they leave in their wake. As such, they don’t have t... | 1,760,371,544.086991 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/16/compliant-mechanism-shrinks-instead-of-stretching/ | Compliant Mechanism Shrinks Instead Of Stretching | Ian Bos | [
"Parts"
] | [
"actuator",
"compliant mechanisms",
"damping"
] | Intuitively, you think that everything that you stretch will pull back, but you wouldn’t expect a couple of pieces of plastic to win. Yet, researchers over at [AMOLF] have figured out a way to make a mechanism that will
eventually shrink once you pull it enough
.
Named “Counter-snapping instabilities”, the mechanism is made out of the main sub-components that act together to stretch a certain amount until a threshold is met. Then the units work together and contract until they’re shorter than their initial length. This is possible by using compliant joints that make up each of the units. We’ve
seen a similar concept
in robotics.
Potentially this may be used as a unidirectional actuator, allowing movement inch by inch. In addition, one application mentioned may be somewhat surprising: damping. If a structure or body is oscillating through a positive feedback loop it may continue till it becomes uncontrollable. If these units are used, after a certain threshold of oscillation the units will lock and retract, therefore stopping further escalation.
Made possible by the wonders of compliant mechanics, these shrinking instabilities show a clever solution to some potential niche applications. If you want to explore the exciting world of compliance further, don’t be scared to check out this
easy to print blaster design
!
Thanks to [I’m Not Real] for the tip! | 17 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8128477",
"author": "Salo",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T16:26:01",
"content": "That’s pretty cool! I was initially confused when I read that it “shrinks when pulled”, though. I think of pulling being a movement, as opposed to a force. It initially extends when applying a load, and t... | 1,760,371,544.045979 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/16/this-week-in-security-lingering-spectre-deep-fakes-and-coreaudio/ | This Week In Security: Lingering Spectre, Deep Fakes, And CoreAudio | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"ai",
"CVEs",
"Spectre",
"This Week in Security"
] | Spectre lives
. We’ve got two separate pieces of research, each finding new processor primitives that allow Spectre-style memory leaks. Before we dive into the details of the new techniques, let’s quickly remind ourselves what Spectre is. Modern CPUs use a variety of clever tricks to execute code faster, and one of the stumbling blocks is memory latency. When a program reaches a branch in execution, the program will proceed in one of two possible directions, and it’s often a value from memory that determines which branch is taken. Rather than wait for the memory to be fetched, modern CPUs will predict which branch execution will take, and speculatively execute the code down that branch. Once the memory is fetched and the branch is properly evaluated, the speculatively executed code is rewound if the guess was wrong, or made authoritative if the guess was correct. Spectre is the realization that incorrect branch prediction can change the contents of the CPU cache, and those changes can be detected through cache timing measurements. The end result is that arbitrary system memory can be leaked from a low privileged or even sandboxed user process.
In response to Spectre, OS developers and CPU designers have added domain isolation protections, that prevent branch prediction poisoning in an attack process from affecting the branch prediction in the kernel or another process.
Training Solo
is the clever idea from VUSec that branch prediction poisoning could just be done from within the kernel space, and avoid any domain switching at all. That can be done through cBPF, the classic Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) kernel VM. By default, all users on a Linux system can run cBPF code, throwing the doors back open for Spectre shenanigans. There’s also an address collision attack where an unrelated branch can be used to train a target branch. Researchers also discovered a pair of CVEs in Intel’s CPUs,
where prediction training was broken
in specific cases, allowing for a wild 17 kB/sec memory leak.
Also revealed this week is
the Branch Privilege Injection research from COMSEC
. This is the realization that Intel Branch Prediction happens asynchronously, and in certain cases there is a race condition between the updates to the prediction engine, and the code being predicted. In short, user-mode branch prediction training can be used to poison kernel-mode prediction, due to the race condition.
(Editor’s note: Video seems down for the moment. Hopefully YouTube will get it cleared again soon. Something, something “hackers”.)
Both of these Spectre attacks have been patched by Intel with microcode, and the Linux kernel has integrated patches for the Training Solo issue. Training Solo may also impact some ARM processors, and ARM has issued guidance on the vulnerability. The real downside is that each fix seems to come with yet another performance hit.
Is That Real Cash? And What Does That Even Mean?
Over at the Something From Nothing blog, we have a surprisingly deep topic, in
a teardown of banknote validators
. For the younger in the audience, there was a time in years gone by where not every vending machine had a credit card reader built-in, and the only option was to carefully straighten a bill and feed it into the bill slot on the machine. Bow how do those machines know it’s really a bill, and not just the right sized piece of paper?
And that’s where this gets interesting. Modern currency has multiple security features in a single bill, like magnetic ink, micro printing, holograms, watermarks, and more. But how does a bill validator check for all those things? Mainly LEDs and photodetectors, it seems. With some machines including hall effect sensors, magnetic tape heads for detecting magnetic ink, and in rare cases a full linear CCD for scanning the bill as it’s inserted. Each of those detectors (except the CCD) produces a simple data stream from each bill that’s checked. Surely it would be easy enough to figure out the fingerprint of a real bill, and produce something that looks just like the real thing — but only to a validator?
In theory, probably, but the combination of sensors presents a real problem. It’s really the same problem with counterfeiting a bill in general: implementing a single security feature is doable, but getting them all right at the same time is nearly impossible. And so with the humble banknote validator.
Don’t Trust That Phone Call
There’s a scam that has risen to popularity with the advent of AI voice impersonation. It usually takes the form of a young person calling a parent or grandparent from jail or a hospital, asking for money to be wired to make it home. It sounds convincing, because it’s an AI deepfake of the target’s loved one. This is
no longer just a technique to take advantage of loving grandparents
. The
FBI has issued a warning
about an ongoing campaign using deepfakes of US officials. The aim of this malware campaign seems to be just getting the victim to click on a malicious link. This same technique was used in a LastPass attack last year, and the technique has become so convincing, it’s not likely to go away anytime soon.
AI Searching SharePoint
Microsoft has tried not to be left behind in the current flurry of AI rollouts that every tech company seems to be engaging in. Microsoft’s SharePoint is not immune, and the result is Microsoft Copilot for SharePoint. This gives an AI agent access to a company’s SharePoint knowledge base, allowing users to query it for information. It’s AI as a better search engine.
This has some ramifications for security
, as SharePoint installs tend to collect sensitive data.
The first ramification is the most straightforward. The AI can be used to search for that sensitive data. But Copilot pulling data from a SharePoint file doesn’t count as a view, making for a very stealthy way to pull data from those sensitive files. Pen Test Partners found something even better on a real assessment. A passwords file hosted on SharePoint was unavailable to view, but in an odd way. This file hadn’t been locked down using SharePoint permissions, but instead the file was restricted from previewing in the browser. This was likely an attempt to keep eyes off the contents of the file. And Copilot was willing to be super helpful, pasting the contents of that file right into a chat window. Whoops.
Fuzzing Apple’s CoreAudio
Googler [Dillon Franke] has
the story of finding a type confusion flaw in Apple’s CoreAudio daemon
, reachable via
Mach
Inter-Process Communication (IPC) messages, allowing for potential arbitrary code execution from within a sandboxed process. This is a really interesting fuzzing + reverse engineering journey, and it starts with imagining the attack he wanted to find: Something that could be launched from within a sandboxed browser, take advantage of already available IPC mechanisms, and exploit a complex process with elevated privileges.
Coreaudiod
ticks all the boxes, but it’s a closed source daemon. How does one approach this problem? The easy option is to just fuzz over the IPC messages. It would be a perfectly viable strategy, to fuzz CoreAudio via Mach calls. The downside is that the fuzzer would run slower, and have much less visibility into what’s happening in the target process. A much more powerful approach is to build a fuzzing harness that allows hooking directly to the library in question. There is some definite library wizardry at play here, linking into a library function that hasn’t been exported.
The vulnerability that he found was type confusion, where the daemon expected an
ioctl
object, but could be supplied arbitrary data. As an
ioctl
object contains a pointer to a
vtable
, which is essentially a collection of function pointers. It then attempts to call a function from that table. It’s an ideal situation for exploitation. The fix from Apple is an explicit type check on the incoming objects.
Bits and Bytes
Asus publishes the DriverHub tool, a gui-less driver updater. It communicates with
driverhub.asus.com
using RPC calls. The problem is that it checks for the right web URL using a wildcard, and
driverhub.asus.com.mrbruh.com
was considered completely valid. Among the functions DriverHub can perform is to install drivers and updates. Chaining a couple of fake updates together
results in relatively easy admin code execution on the local machine
, with the only prerequisites being the DriverHub software being installed, and clicking a single malicious link. Ouch.
The VirtualBox VGA driver just patched
a buffer overflow that could result in VM escape
. The
vmsvga3dSurfaceMipBufferSize
call could be manipulated so no memory is actually allocated, but VirtualBox itself believes a buffer is there and writable. This memory write ability can be leveraged into arbitrary memory read and write capability on the host system.
And finally,
what’s old is new again
. APT28, a Russian state actor, has been using very old-school Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacks to gain access to target’s webmail systems. The attack here is JavaScript in an email’s HTML code. That JS then used already known XSS exploits to exfiltrate emails and contacts. The worst part of this campaign is how low-effort it was. These aren’t cutting-edge 0-days. Instead, the target’s email servers just hadn’t been updated. Keep your webmail installs up to date! | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8128483",
"author": "MrSVCD",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T16:48:26",
"content": "Did the later SPARC cpus try to solve the memory is slow problem with more cores? Or are they also vulnerable to specter?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id... | 1,760,371,544.227463 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/16/home-casting-thermoelectric-alloys/ | Home-casting Thermoelectric Alloys | Aaron Beckendorf | [
"Science"
] | [
"thermocouple",
"thermoelectric effect"
] | If you want to convert heat into electrical power, it’s hard to find a simpler method than a thermoelectric generator. The Seebeck effect means that the junction of two dissimilar conductors will produce a voltage potential when heated, but the same effect also applies to certain alloys, even without a junction. [Simplifier] has been trying to find the best maker-friendly thermoelectric alloys, and
recently shared the results of some extensive experimentation
.
The experiments investigated a variety of bismuth alloys, and tried to determine the effects of adding lead, antimony, tin, and zinc. [Simplifier] mixed together each alloy in an electric furnace, cast it into a cylindrical mold, machined the resulting rod to a uniform length, and used tin-bismuth solder to connect each end to a brass electrode. To test each composition, one end of the cylinder was cooled with ice while the other was held in boiling water, then resistance was measured under this known temperature gradient. According to the Wiedemann-Franz law, this was enough information to approximate the metal’s thermal conductivity.
Armed with the necessary data, [Simplifier] was able to calculate each alloy’s thermoelectric efficiency coefficient. The results showed some useful information: antimony is a useful additive at about 5% by weight, tin and lead created relatively good thermoelectric materials with opposite polarities, and zinc was useful only to improve the mechanical properties at the expense of efficiency. Even in the best case, the thermoelectric efficiency didn’t exceed 6.9%, which is nonetheless quite respectable for a homemade material.
This project is a great deal more accessible for an amateur than
previous thermoelectric material research we’ve covered
, and a bit more efficient than
another home project we’ve seen
. If you just want to get straight to power generation,
check out this project
. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8128443",
"author": "Stanson",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T14:14:35",
"content": "The Seebeck effect means that the junction of two dissimilar conductors will produce a voltage potential when heatedIt’s wrong, change that toThe Seebeck effect means that the junction of two dissimilar c... | 1,760,371,544.272979 |
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