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https://hackaday.com/2025/05/03/3d-printed-cable-driven-mechanisms-some-strings-attached/ | 3D Printed Cable-Driven Mechanisms – Some Strings Attached | Aaron Beckendorf | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"cable drive",
"cable driven robot",
"compliant mechanism"
] | One of the most basic problems with robotic arms and similar systems is keeping the weight down, as more weight requires a more rigid frame and stronger actuators. Cable-driven systems are a classic solution, and a team of researchers from MIT and Zhejiang University recently shared some techniques for designing
fully 3D printed cable-driven mechanisms
.
The researchers developed a set of four primitive motion components: a bending component, a coil, screw-like, and a compressive component. These components can work together in series or parallel to make much more complicated structures. To demonstrate, the researchers designed a gripping tentacle, a bird’s claw, and a lizard-like walking robot, but much more complicated structures are certainly possible. Additionally, since the cable itself is printed, it can have extra features, such as a one-way ratcheting mechanism or bumps for haptic feedback.
These printed cables are the most novel aspect of the project, and required significant fine-tuning to work properly. To have an advantage over manually-assembled cable-driven systems, they needed to be print-in-place. This required special printer settings to avoid delamination between layers of the cable, cables sticking to other components, or cables getting stuck in the mechanism’s joints. After some experiments, the researchers found that nylon filament gives the best balance between cable strength and flexibility, while not adhering tightly to the PLA structure.
We’ve seen
cable-driven systems
here a
few times before
. If you’re interested in a deeper dive, we’ve
covered that too
.
Thanks to [Madeinoz67] for the tip! | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8124201",
"author": "Cad the Mad",
"timestamp": "2025-05-04T06:17:24",
"content": "This is amazing, and I can immediately think of all sorts of applications for it.I am quite confused by four mechanisms, though. Specifically, I am confused that the “Compress Primitive” rotates when ... | 1,760,371,556.526043 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/03/testing-a-cheap-bench-power-supply-sold-on-amazon/ | Testing A Cheap Bench Power Supply Sold On Amazon | Maya Posch | [
"Reviews",
"Teardown"
] | [
"bench power supply"
] | We’ve all seen those cheap bench power supply units (PSUs) for sale online, promising specifications that would cost at least a hundred dollars or more if it were a name brand model. Just how much of a compromise are these (usually rebranded) PSUs, and should you trust them with your electronics? Recently [Denki Otaku] purchased
a cheap unit off Amazon Japan for a closer look
, and found it to be rather lacking.
Internals of the cheap bench PSU reviewed by Denki Otaku on YouTube.
Major compromises include the lack of an output power switch, no way to check the set current limit without shorting the output, very slow drop in output voltage while adjusting due to the lack of a discharge circuit, and other usability concerns. That’s when the electrical performance of the PSU got tested.
Right off the bat a major issue in this cheap switching mode PSU is clear, as it has 200 mV peak-to-peak noise on its output, meaning very little output filtering. The maximum power output rating was also far too optimistic, with a large voltage drop observed. Despite this, it generally worked well, and the internals – with a big aluminium plate as heatsink – look pretty clean with an interesting architecture.
The general advice is to get a bench PSU that has features like an output power button and an easy way to set the voltage and current limits. Also do not connect it to anything that cares about noise and ripple unless you know that it produces clean, filtered output voltages. | 20 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8124176",
"author": "Jeff",
"timestamp": "2025-05-04T02:38:20",
"content": "I have a similar one 30v 10A . Its ok for simple stuff and is better or just as good as most mid priced units .all in all I would not use it certify anything but but its ok for mucking about semi seriously.... | 1,760,371,556.777318 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/03/llm-ported-to-the-c64-kinda/ | LLM Ported To The C64, Kinda | Lewin Day | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"c64",
"commodore 64",
"llama2",
"LLM"
] | “If there’s one thing the Commodore 64 is missing, it’s a large language model,” is a phrase nobody has uttered on this Earth. Yet, you could run one, if you so desired,
thanks to [ytm] and the Llama2.c64 project!
[ytm] did the hard work of porting the Llama 2 model to the most popular computer ever made. Of course, as you might expect, the ancient 8-bit machine doesn’t
really
have the stones to run an LLM on its own. You will need one rather significant upgrade, in the form of 2 MB additional RAM via a C64 REU.
Now, don’t get ahead of things—this is no wide-ranging ChatGPT clone. It’s not going to do your homework, counsel you on your failed marriage, or solve the geopolitical crisis in your local region. Instead, you’re getting the 260 K tinystories model, which is a tad more limited. In [ytm]’s words… “Imagine prompting a 3-year-old child with the beginning of a story — they will continue it to the best of their vocabulary and abilities.”
It might not be supremely capable, but there’s something fun about seeing such a model talking back on an old-school C64 display. If you’ve been hacking away at your own C64 projects, don’t hesitate to
let us know
. We certainly
can’t get enough of them
!
Thanks to [ytm] for the tip! | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8124150",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-03T23:31:26",
"content": "LLMs as the FPGAs of our time.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8124191",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-05-04T04:41:27",
... | 1,760,371,556.823484 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/03/tablet-suspension-system-avoids-fatigue-at-bedtime/ | Tablet Suspension System Avoids Fatigue At Bedtime | Seth Mabbott | [
"home hacks",
"Tablet Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"ESP32",
"stepper motor",
"suspension"
] | You know how it is. You’re all cozy in bed but not quite ready to doze off. You’re reading Hackaday (Hackaday is your go-to bedtime reading material, right?) or you’re binge-watching your latest reality TV obsession on your tablet. You feel the tablet growing heavier and heavier as your arms fatigue from holding it inches above your face. You consider the embarrassment you’ll endure from explaining how you injured your nose as the danger of dropping the tablet gradually increases. The struggle is real.
[Will Dana] has been engineering his way out of this predicament for a few years now, and with the recent upgrade to his
iPad suspension system
he is maximizing his laziness, but not without putting in a fair amount of hard work first.
The first iteration of the device worked on a manual pulley system whereby an iPad was suspended from the ceiling over his bed on three cords. Pulling on a cord beside the bed would raise the bracket used for holding the iPad out of the way while not in use. This new iteration takes that pesky cord pulling out of the user’s hands, replacing it with a motorized winch. A spot of dark ink on one of the cords in combination with a light sensor helps to calibrate the system so that the ESP32 which controls it always knows the proper limits of operation.
Of course, if, like [Will], you’re using an ESP32, and your room is already fully controlled by a voice interface, you may as well integrate the two. After all, there is no sense in wasting precious energy by pressing buttons. Utter a simple command to Alexa once you’re tucked in, and it’s time for hands-free entertainment.
We’ve covered several of [Will]’s previous creations, such as his
Motorized Relay Computer
and
Harry Potter
-inspired Sorting Hat
. | 12 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8124118",
"author": "jbx",
"timestamp": "2025-05-03T20:38:24",
"content": "No screen in the bedroom !Only books and condoms…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8124119",
"author": "John Schuch",
"timestamp": "2025... | 1,760,371,556.973626 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/03/hacking-different-sized-nozzles-for-anycubic-printers/ | Hacking Different Sized Nozzles For AnyCubic Printers | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"Anycubic",
"Nozzle"
] | If you’ve got a popular 3D printer that has been on the market a good long while, you can probably get any old nozzles you want right off the shelf. If you happen to have an AnyCubic printer, though, you might find it a bit tougher. [Startup Chuck] wanted some specific sized nozzles for his rig,
so set about whipping up a solution himself.
[Chuck]’s first experiments were simple enough
. He wanted larger nozzles than those on sale, so he did the obvious. He took existing 0.4 mm nozzles and drilled them out with carbide PCB drills to make 0.6 mm and 0.8 mm nozzles. It’s pretty straightforward stuff, and it was a useful hack to really make the best use of the large print area on the AnyCubic Kobra 3.
But what about going the other way? [Chuck] figured out a solution for that, too. He started by punching out the 0.4 mm insert in an existing nozzle. He then figured out how to drive 0.2 mm nozzles from another printer into the nozzle body so he had a viable 0.2 mm nozzle that suited his AnyCubic machine.
The result? [Chuck] can now print tiny little things on his big AnyCubic printer without having to wait for the OEM to come out with the right nozzles. If you want to learn more about nozzles,
we can help you there, too
. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8124101",
"author": "Hansmann",
"timestamp": "2025-05-03T18:13:23",
"content": "Don’t get the point?The Anycubic Kobra 3 I have bought from Anycubic directly has regular off-the-shelf nozzles. Same ones I have already used 10 years ago for 3D printing. You can get a sorted 6 piece s... | 1,760,371,556.620102 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/05/water-drops-serve-as-canvas-for-microchemistry-art/ | Water Drops Serve As Canvas For Microchemistry Art | Navarre Bartz | [
"Art",
"chemistry hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"art",
"Chemistry",
"microchemistry",
"micromolecular",
"science"
] | If you’re like us and you’ve been wondering where those viral videos of single water drop chemical reactions are coming from, we may have an answer. [
yu3375349136
], a scientist from
Guangdong,
has been producing some high quality microchemistry videos
that are worth a watch
.
While some polyglots out there won’t be phased, we appreciate the captioning for Western audiences using the elemental symbols we all know and love in addition to the Simplified Chinese. Reactions featured are typically colorful, but simple with a limited number of reagents. Being able to watch diffusion of the chemicals through the water drop and the results in the center when more than one chemical is used are mesmerizing.
We do wish there was a bit more substance to the presentation, and we’re aware not all readers will be thrilled to point their devices to Douyin (known outside of China as TikTok) to view them, but we have to admit some of the reactions are beautiful.
If you’re interested in other science-meets-art projects, how about
thermal camera landscapes of Iceland
, and given the comments on some of these videos, how do you
tell if it’s AI or real
anyway? | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8124864",
"author": "Johno",
"timestamp": "2025-05-05T23:59:18",
"content": "I spent some time wondering if they were just very good renderings – very pretty. I’d love to run some of these reactions, but it always feels wrong to order 100g+ of a material just to mix a few grains… Fe... | 1,760,371,556.869223 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/05/3d-printed-downspout-makes-life-just-a-little-nicer/ | 3D Printed Downspout Makes Life Just A Little Nicer | Tyler August | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"3d print",
"abs",
"drainage",
"rainwater"
] | Sometimes, a hack solves a big problem. Sometimes, it’s just to deal with something that kind of bugs you. This hack from [Dillan Stock] is in the latter category, replacing an ugly, redundant downspout with an
elegant 3D printed pipe
.
As [Dillan] so introspectively notes, this was not something that absolutely required a 3D print, but “when all you have a hammer, everything is a nail, and 3D printing is [his] hammer.” We can respect that, especially when he hammers out such a lovely print.
By modeling this section of his house in Fusion 360, he could produce an elegantly swooping loft to combine the outflow into one downspout. Of course the assembly was too big to print at once, but any plumber will tell you that ABS welds are waterproof. Paint and primer gets it to match the house and hopefully hold up to the punishing Australian sun.
The video, embedded below, is a good watch and a reminder than not every project has to be some grand accomplishment. Sometimes, it can be as simple as keeping you from getting annoyed when you step into your backyard.
We’ve seen rainwater collection hacks before;
some of them a lot less orthodox
. Of course when printing with ABS like this, one should always keep in mind the
ever-escalating safety concerns with the material
. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8124858",
"author": "Danubistheconcise",
"timestamp": "2025-05-05T22:53:42",
"content": "I would think something more UV resistant like ASA would be wiser for this kind of application. Doesn’t ABS get brittle with long term UV exposure?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"... | 1,760,371,556.573026 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/05/round-displays-make-neat-vu-meters/ | Round Displays Make Neat VU Meters | Lewin Day | [
"Parts"
] | [
"audio",
"VU meter"
] | You can still get moving-needle meters off the shelf if you desire that old school look in one of you projects. However, if you want a more flexible and modern solution, you could use round displays to simulate the same thing,
as [mircemk] demonstrates.
At the heart of the build is an ESP32 microcontroller, chosen for its fast clock rate and overall performance. This is key when drawing graphics to a display, as it allows for fast updates and smooth movement — something that can be difficult to achieve on lesser silicon. [mircemk] has the ESP32 reading an audio input and driving a pair of GC9A01 round displays, which are the perfect form factor for aping the looks of a classic round VU meter. The project write-up goes into detail on the code required to simulate the behavior of a real meter, from drawing the graphics to emulating realistic needle movements, including variable sweep rates and damping.
The cool thing about using a screen like this is the flexibility. You can change the dials to a different look — or to an entirely different kind of readout — at will. We’ve seen some of [mircemk]’s projects before, too,
like this capable seismometer
. Video after the break. | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8124801",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-05T19:12:52",
"content": "As far as VU meters go, that choppy refresh rate makes it impossible to tell whether it’s actually tracking the level with any accuracy.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,556.720779 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/05/keebin-with-kristina-the-one-with-the-bobblehead/ | Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Bobblehead | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"bobblehead",
"Christopher Latham Sholes",
"little tikes keyboard",
"monoblock split",
"QWERTYFEST MKE",
"sandwich",
"Victor index typewriter"
] | No, see, it’s what’s inside that counts. Believe it or not,
[nobutternoparm] retrofitted this innocent, adorable little tikes® so-called “Kidboard” rubber-dome keyboard into a mechanical marvel
. Yeah! No, it wasn’t exactly pure, unadulterated fun, nor was it easy to do. But then again nothing worth doing ever is.
Image by [nobutternoparm] via
reddit
For one thing, the PCB ended up being a bit too wide, so the bottom half of the case is a bit mangled. But that’s okay! Onward and upward.
Next problem: a real PCB and mechanical switches (Gateron Baby Kangaroos) are a lot taller than the previous arrangement. This required spacers, a mounting plate, and longer screws to hold it all together. Now imagine lining all that up and trying to keep it that way during assembly.
And then there’s the keycaps. Guess what? They’re non-standard because they’re for rubber domes. So this meant more adapters and spacers. You’ll see in the gallery.
So we know it looks great, but how does it type? Well… [nobutternoparm] gives the feel a 4/10. The keycaps now have too many points of contact, so they bind up and have to be mashed down. But it’s going to be a great conversation piece.
With a Little Luck, You Could Fly On Wings
Before you ask, unfortunately, Wings doesn’t seem to be open-source, at least not as of this writing. But
based on the comments in the reddit thread
, [MoreFruit3042] seems willing to build them for some undisclosed cost.
Image by [MoreFruit3042] via
reddit
That touch pad supports multi-touch gesture operations, so right there, you don’t have to use the mouse as much. And although it’s hard to tell from this picture, there is 6° inward angle between the halves and a 6° front-to-back incline, both of which are designed to match the natural angles of hands.
I really dig the lowered thumb clusters and the fact that they aren’t overloaded with keys. There are low-profile Kailh Chocs under there, which makes for quite a slim keyboard.
Wings runs QMK, has RGB lighting, and supports real-time key-mapping with VIAL. Be sure to check out the build video below.
The Centerfold: A Truly Ergonomic Meal
Image by [Dexter_Lim] via
reddit
Again, very little detail to go off of here
, but the keyboard is a
totem
. Couldn’t even tell you what’s in the right hand (left hand, if you go by the handle orientation) mug. Water, I suppose. But being a two-fisted drinker myself, I can really appreciate this setup, And although the sammy isn’t really my type, the extreme tenting on it is a nice touch.
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: To the Victor Go the Spoils
Image via
The Antikey Chop
The Victor was patented in 1889 and produced until 1892 by the Tilton Manufacturing Company of Boston, Massachusetts. It was invented by Arthur Irving Jacobs.
Probably the most noteworthy factoid about
the Victor Type-Writer is
that it was the first production typewriter ever to employ a daisy wheel. This significant achievement showed up in typewriters all throughout the 1970s and 80s. My IBM Wheelwriter 5 uses a daisy wheel, as do my Brother machines.
The Victor is of course an index typewriter, as evidenced by the lack of keyboard.
To use it
, you would simply move the guide to the letter you wanted, which moved the daisy wheel simultaneously. Then you’d press the innermost left-hand key to swing the hammer and strike the daisy wheel against the paper. The outer left-hand key is the Space bar.
Victors were 8″ by 12″ in their footprint and weighed around 5.25 lbs. They came with wooden cases that were either rectangular or contoured to the shape. The Victor cost $15,
which is close to $500 in 2025 money
.
Finally, There’s Gonna Be a Christopher Latham Sholes Bobblehead
Image via
The National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum
So, this happened.
Someone went and made a Christopher Latham Sholes bobblehead
. You know, the guy who is responsible for the QWERTY layout.
I’m not sure if this is an honor or an insult. But hey, at least it will probably resemble Sholes more than would one of those Funko things. Plus, it’ll actually
do
something.
Here’s hoping the bobblehead itself looks like this image at least in part. One can only wish that there will be a typewriter involved. (Doesn’t there almost have to be?)
This thing is currently available for pre-order
for the low price of $35. You can either have it shipped, or you can pick it up at QWERTYFEST MKE (that means Milwaukee, WI), being held October 3-5.
So what’s the connection? Sholes hailed from Milwaukee, where was a noted newspaper publisher, politician, and of course, a successful commercial typewriter inventor. Do I want one of these? I may or may not be nodding my head right now.
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
. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8124775",
"author": "Rick",
"timestamp": "2025-05-05T18:49:35",
"content": "Moar liek chicken head amrite? XD",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8124985",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T13:00:10",
"content"... | 1,760,371,556.670955 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/05/creative-pcb-business-cards-are-sure-to-make-an-impression/ | Creative PCB Business Cards Are Sure To Make An Impression | Matt Varian | [
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"business card",
"pcb business card"
] | Business cards are a simple way to share contact information, but a memorable design can make them stand out. [Jeremy Cook] has been experimenting with adding artistic finishes to PCBs, and has recently
applied what he’s learned to make some unique business cards
. His write-up consolidates some great resources to get you started in making your own PCB business cards, as well as PCB art in general
To make his cards stand out, he designed them to serve as functional tools beyond sharing contact information. He created two designs: one incorporates an LED and a coin cell battery holder, while the other includes drafting tools, such as a ruler, circle stencils, and a simplified protractor.
While the classic PCB solder mask is green, many board houses now offer alternative finishes and colors to enhance designs. He tested and compared the offerings from various manufacturers, highlighting the importance of researching fabrication options early, as different providers offer a variety of finishes. His creative approach shines in details like using through-hole pads as eyes in a robot illustration, making them stand out against a halftone dot pattern.
If you’re looking for more inspiration, be sure to check out the
winners of our 2024 Business Card Challenge
. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8124702",
"author": "Jeremy Cook",
"timestamp": "2025-05-05T16:14:54",
"content": "Thanks so much for the awesome writeup Matt!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8124740",
"author": "Nick w",
"timestamp": "2025-05-05T17:03... | 1,760,371,556.920711 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/05/what-happened-to-www/ | What Happened To WWW.? | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Interest",
"Misc Hacks",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"Tim Berners-Lee",
"web",
"website",
"www"
] | Once upon a time, typing “www” at the start of a URL was as automatic as breathing. And yet, these days, most of us go straight to “hackaday.com” without bothering with those three letters that once defined the internet.
Have you ever wondered why those letters were there in the first place, and when exactly they became optional? Let’s dig into the archaeology of the early web and trace how this ubiquitous prefix went from essential to obsolete.
Where Did You Go?
The first website didn’t bother with any of that www. nonsense! Credit: author screenshot
It may shock you to find out that the “www.” prefix was actually never really a key feature or necessity at all. To understand why, we need only contemplate the very first website, created by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1990. Running on a NeXT workstation employed as a server, the site could be accessed at a simple URL: “http//info.cern.ch/”—no WWW needed. Berners-Lee had invented the World Wide Web, and called it as such, but he hadn’t included the prefix in his URL at all. So where did it come from?
McDonald’s were ahead of the times – in 1999, their website featured the “mcdonalds.com” domain, no prefix, though you did need it to actually get to the site. Credit: screenshot via Web Archive
As it turns out, the www prefix largely came about due to prevailing trends on the early Internet. It had become typical to separate out different services on a domain by using subdomains. For example, a company might have FTP access on
http://ftp.company.com
, while the SMTP server would be accessed via the smtp.company.com subdomain. In turn, when it came to establish a server to run a World Wide Web page, network administrators followed existing convention. Thus, they would put the WWW server on the www. subdomain, creating
http://www.company.com
.
This soon became standard practice, and in short order, was expected by members of the broader public as the joined the Internet in the late 1990s. It wasn’t long before end users were ignoring the http:// prefix at the start of domains, as web browsers didn’t really need you to type that in. However, www. had more of a foothold in the public consciousness. Along with “.com”, it became an obvious way for companies to highlight their new fancy website in their public facing marketing materials. For many years, this was simply how things were done. Users expected to type “www” before a domain name, and thus it became an ingrained part of the culture.
Eventually, though, trends shifted. For many domains, web traffic was the sole dominant use, so it became somewhat unnecessary to fold web traffic under its own subdomain. There was also a technological shift when the HTTP/1.1 protocol was introduced in 1999, with the “Host” header enabling multiple domains to be hosted on a single server. This, along with tweaks to DNS, also made it trivial to ensure “www.yoursite.com” and “yoursite.com” went to the same place. Beyond that, fashion-forward companies started dropping the leading www. for a cleaner look in marketing. Eventually, this would become the norm, with “www.” soon looking old hat.
Visit microsoft.com in Chrome, and you might think that’s where you really are… Credit: author screenshot
Of course, today, “www” is mostly dying out, at least as far as the industry and most end users are concerned. Few of us spend much time typing in URLs by hand these days, and fewer of us could remember the last time we felt the need to include “www.” at the beginning. Of course, if you want to make your business look out of touch, you could still include www. on your marketing materials, but people might think you’re an old fuddy duddy.
…but you’re not! Click in the address bar, and Chrome will show you the real URL. www. and all. Embarrassing! Credit: author screenshot
Hackaday, though? We rock without the prefix. Cutting-edge out here, folks. Credit: author screenshot
Using the www. prefix can still have some value when it comes to cookies, however. If you
don’t
use the prefix and someone goes to yoursite.com, that cookie would be sent to all subdomains. However, if your main page is set up at
http://www.yoursite.com
, it’s effectively on it’s own subdomain, along with any others you might have… like store.yoursite.com, blog.yoursite.com, and so on. This allows cookies to be more effectively managed across a site spanning multiple subdomains.
In any case, most browsers have taken a stance against the significance of “www”. Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge all hide the prefix even when you are technically visiting a website that does still use the www. subdomain (like
http://www.microsoft.com
). You can try it yourself in Chrome—head over to a www. site and watch as the prefix disappears from the taskbar. If you really want to know if you’re on a www subdomain or not, though, you can click into the taskbar and it will give you the full URL, HTTP:// or HTTPS:// included, and all.
The “www” prefix stands as a reminder that the internet is a living, evolving thing. Over time, technical necessities become conventions, conventions become habits, and habits eventually fade away when they no longer serve a purpose. Yet we still see those three letters pop up on the Web now and then, a digital vestigial organ from the early days of the web. The next time you mindlessly type a URL without those three Ws, spare a thought for this small piece of internet history that shaped how we access information for decades. Largely gone, but not yet quite forgotten. | 59 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "8124663",
"author": "Cody",
"timestamp": "2025-05-05T14:02:07",
"content": "Ummm, most of us go to hackaday.com/blog since you moved it and we don’t like it…Ok, well, I do anyhow…. :D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8124672",
... | 1,760,371,557.339547 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/05/rayhunter-sniffs-out-stingrays-for-30/ | Rayhunter Sniffs Out Stingrays For $30 | Lewin Day | [
"Cellphone Hacks",
"Security Hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"cellular",
"IMSI",
"imsi catcher",
"phone",
"rayhunter",
"stingray"
] | These days, if you’re walking around with a cellphone, you’ve basically fitted an always-on tracking device to your person. That’s even more the case if there happens to be an eavesdropping device in your vicinity. To combat this,
the Electronic Frontier Foundation has created Rayhunter as a warning device.
Rayhunter is built to detect IMSI catchers, also known as Stingrays in the popular lexicon. These are devices that attempt to capture your phone’s IMSI (international mobile subscriber identity) number by pretending to be real cell towers. Information on these devices is tightly controlled by manufacturers, which largely market them for use by law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Rayhunter in use.
To run Rayhunter, all you need is an Orbic RC400L mobile hotspot, which you can currently source for less than $30 USD online. Though experience tells us that could change as the project becomes more popular with hackers. The project offers an install script that will compile the latest version of the software and flash it to the device from a computer running Linux or macOS — Windows users currently have to jump through a few extra hoops to get the same results.
Rayhunter works by analyzing the control traffic between the cell tower and the hotspot to look out for hints of IMSI-catcher activity. Common telltale signs are requests to switch a connection to less-secure 2G standards, or spurious queries for your device’s IMSI. If Rayhunter notes suspicious activity, it turns a line on the Orbic’s display red as a warning. The device’s web interface can then be accessed for more information.
While IMSI catchers really took off on less-secure 2G networks, there are developments
that allow similar devices to work on newer cellular standards
, too. Meanwhile, if you’ve got your own projects built around cellular security, don’t hesitate to
notify the tipsline! | 37 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8124622",
"author": "Clancydaenlightened",
"timestamp": "2025-05-05T11:46:48",
"content": "This probably doesn’t work for cell repeaters on 4g or 5gEach time the change the G they make a new “stingray”So this likely will not work on a lot of 4g and 5g networks at least in the USASi... | 1,760,371,557.239421 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/05/the-convoluted-way-intels-386-implemented-its-registers/ | The Convoluted Way Intel’s 386 Implemented Its Registers | Maya Posch | [
"classic hacks",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"80386",
"ken shirriff",
"x86"
] | The fact that modern-day x86 processors still pretty much support the same operating systems and software as their ancestors did is quite a feat. Much of this effort had already been accomplished with the release of the 80386 (later 386) CPU in 1985, which was not only the first 32-bit x86 CPU, but was also backwards compatible with 8- and 16-bit software dating back to the 1970s. Making this work transparently was anything but straightforward, as [Ken Shirriff]’s
recent analysis of the 80386’s main register file
shows.
Labelled Intel 80386 die shot. (Credit: Ken Shirriff)
Using die shots of the 386’s registers and surrounding silicon, it’s possible to piece together how backwards compatibility was implemented. The storage cells of the registers are implemented using static memory (SRAM) as is typical, with much of the register file triple-ported (two read, one write).
Most interestingly is the presence of different circuits (6) to support accessing the register file for 8-, 16- or 32-bit writes and reads. The ‘shuffle’ network as [Ken] calls it is responsible for handling these distinct writes and reads, which also leads to the finding that the bottom 16 bits in the registers are actually interleaved to make this process work smoother.
Fortunately for Intel (and AMD) engineers, this feat wouldn’t have to be repeated again with the arrival of AMD64 and x86_64 many years later, when the 386’s mere 275,000 transistors on a 1 µm process would already be ancient history.
Want to dive even deeper in to the 386? This isn’t the first time
[Ken] has looked at the iconic chip. | 4 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8124677",
"author": "william payne",
"timestamp": "2025-05-05T14:44:19",
"content": "does the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D have the same isa as the pentium n6000?AI Overview.No, the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D and the Intel Pentium Silver N6000do not have the same Instruction Set Architecture (ISA).... | 1,760,371,557.491014 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/04/lancing-college-shares-critical-design-review-for-uk-cansat-entry/ | Lancing College Shares Critical Design Review For UK CanSat Entry | John Elliot V | [
"hardware",
"Space"
] | [
"Arduino Nano Every",
"atmospheric conditions",
"BE880 GPS module",
"blender",
"BMP388 sensor",
"ChatGPT",
"gantt chart",
"RFM69HCW module",
"telemetry data",
"temperature",
"UK CanSat Project"
] | A group of students from Lancing College in the UK have sent in their
Critical Design Review
(CDR) for their entry in the UK CanSat project.
Per
the competition guidelines
the
UK CanSat project
challenges students aged 14 to 19 years of age to build a satellite which can relay telemetry data about atmospheric conditions such as could help with space exploration. The students’ primary mission is to collect temperature and pressure readings, and these students picked their secondary mission to be collection of GPS data, for use on planets where GPS infrastructure is available, such as on Earth. This CDR follows their
Preliminary Design Review
(PDR).
The six students in the group bring a range of relevant skills. Their satellite transmits six metrics every second: temperature, pressure, altitude reading 1, altitude reading 2, latitude, and longitude. The main processor is an Arduino Nano Every, a BMP388 sensor provides the first three metrics, and a BE880 GPS module provides the following three metrics. The RFM69HCW module provides radio transmission and reception using LoRa.
The students present their plan and progress in a Gantt chart, catalog their inventory of relevant skills, assess risks, prepare mechanical and electrical designs, breadboard the satellite circuitry and receiver wiring, design a PCB in KiCad, and develop flow charts for the software. The use of Blender for data visualization was a nice hack, as was using ChatGPT to generate an example data file for testing purposes. Mechanical details such as parachute design and composition are worked out along with a shiny finish for high visibility. The students conduct various tests to ensure the suitability of their design and then conduct an outreach program to advertise their achievements to their school community and the internet at large.
We here at Hackaday would like to wish these talented students every success with their submission and we hope you had good luck on launch day, March 4th!
The backbone of this project is the LoRa technology and if you’re interested in that we’ve covered that here at Hackaday many times before, such as in
this rain gauge
and
these soil moisture sensors
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8124678",
"author": "Lacen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-05T14:45:24",
"content": "As a Broadwater Manor and a CanSat alumnus I was very surprised to see Lancing College pop up on the Hackaday front page! Congratulations to the team!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies":... | 1,760,371,557.377713 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/04/train-with-morse-master/ | Train With Morse Master | Lewin Day | [
"classic hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"morse code",
"morse trainer"
] | Morse code can be daunting to learn when you’re new to the game, particularly if you need it to pass your desired radio license. However, these days, there are a great many tools to aid in the learning process. A good example is the
Morse Master from [Arnov Sharma]
.
The Morse Master is a translator for Morse code, which works in two ways. You can access it via a web app, and type in regular letters which it then flashes out as code on its in-built LEDs. Alternatively, you can enter Morse manually using the physical key, and the results will be displayed on the web app. The Morse key itself is built into the enclosure using 3D printed components paired with a Cherry-style keyboard switch. It’s perhaps not the ideal solution for fast keying, with its limited rebound, but it’s a quick and easy way to make a functional key for practice purposes. If you want to go faster, though, you might want to upgrade to something more capable. We’d also love to see a buzzer added, since Morse is very much intended as an auditory method of communication.
We’ve seen some other great Morse code trainers before, too.
If you’ve trained yourself in this method of communication, don’t hesitate to share your own learning tips below. | 15 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8124530",
"author": "AZdave",
"timestamp": "2025-05-05T02:17:21",
"content": "Learning Morse Code visually is a terrible, terrible idea. I can’t believe that anyone would ever take this seriously as a tutor. Audible and visual reception are two completely different processes. Ho... | 1,760,371,557.540792 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/04/hackaday-links-may-4-2025/ | Hackaday Links: May 4, 2025 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"assay",
"demo hell",
"ESA",
"gold",
"hackaday links",
"humanoid",
"Kosmos 482",
"reverse ATM",
"robot",
"solar",
"soviet",
"space law",
"sun",
"titanium",
"venus"
] | By now, you’ve probably heard about
Kosmos 482
, a Soviet probe destined for Venus in 1972 that fell a bit short of the mark and stayed in Earth orbit for the last 53 years. Soon enough, though, the lander will make its fiery return; exactly where and when remain a mystery, but it should be sometime in the coming week. We talked about the return of Kosmos briefly on this week’s podcast and even joked a bit about how cool it would be if the parachute that would have been used for the descent to Venus had somehow deployed over its half-century in space.
We might have been onto something
, as astrophotographer Ralf Vanderburgh has taken some pictures of the spacecraft that seem to show a structure connected to and trailing behind it. The chute is probably in pretty bad shape after 50 years of UV torture, but how cool is that?
Parachute or not, chances are good that the 495-kilogram spacecraft, built to not only land on Venus but to survive the heat, pressure, and corrosive effects of the hellish planet’s atmosphere, will at least partially survive reentry into Earth’s more welcoming environs. That’s a good news, bad news thing: good news that we might be able to recover a priceless artifact of late-Cold War space technology, bad news to anyone on the surface near where this thing lands. If Kosmos 482 does manage to do some damage, it won’t be the first time. Shortly after launch, pieces of titanium rained down on New Zealand after the probe’s booster failed to send it on its way to Venus, damaging crops and starting some fires. The Soviets, ever secretive about their space exploits until they could claim complete success, disavowed the debris and denied responsibility for it. That made
the farmers whose fields they fell in the rightful owners
, which is also pretty cool. We doubt that the long-lost Kosmos lander will get the same treatment, but it would be nice if it did.
Also of note in the news this week is a brief clip of
a Unitree humanoid robot going absolutely ham
during a demonstration — demo-hell, amiright? Potential danger to the nearby engineers notwithstanding, the footage is pretty hilarious. The demo, with a robot hanging from a hoist in a crowded lab, starts out calmly enough, but goes downhill quickly as the robot starts flailing its arms around. We’d say the movements were uncontrolled, but there are points where the robot really seems to be chasing the engineer and taking deliberate swipes at the poor guy, who was probably just trying to get to the e-stop switch. We know that’s probably just the anthropomorphization talking, but it sure looks like the bot had a beef to settle. You be the judge.
Also from China comes a report of
“reverse ATMs” that accept gold and turn it into cash on the spot
(apologies for yet another social media link, but that’s where the stories are these days). The machine shown has a hopper into which customers can load their unwanted jewelry, after which it is reportedly melted down and assayed for purity. The funds are then directly credited to the customer’s account electronically. We’re not sure we fully believe this — thinking about the various failure modes of one of those fresh-brewed coffee machines, we shudder to think about the consequences of a machine with a 1,000°C furnace built into it. We also can’t help but wonder how the machine assays the scrap gold — X-ray fluorescence? Ramann spectroscopy? Also, what happens to the unlucky customer who puts some jewelry in that they thought was real gold, only to be told by the machine that it wasn’t? Do they just get their stuff back as a molten blob? The mind boggles.
And finally, the European Space Agency has released
a stunning new image of the Sun
. Captured by their Solar Orbiter spacecraft in March from about 77 million kilometers away, the mosaic is composed of about 200 images from the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager. The Sun was looking particularly good that day, with filaments, active regions, prominences, and coronal loops in evidence, along with the ethereal beauty of the Sun’s atmosphere. The image is said to be the most detailed view of the Sun yet taken, and needs to be seen in full resolution to be appreciated. Click on the image below and zoom to your heart’s content. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8124507",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2025-05-05T00:13:30",
"content": "Kosmom 482 looks kind of like a sperm",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8124511",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2025-05-05T00:23... | 1,760,371,557.596451 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/04/all-band-radio-records-signals-plays-mp3s/ | All-Band Radio Records Signals, Plays MP3s | Tyler August | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"AM/FM",
"audio",
"dsPic",
"longwave",
"medium-wave",
"mp3",
"radio",
"shortwave"
] | In these days of everything-streaming, it’s great to see an old school radio build. It’s even better when it’s not old-school at all, but packed full of modern ICs and driven by a micro-controller like the dsPIC in [Minh Danh]’s dsMP3 build. Best of all is when we get enough details that the author needs two blog posts —
one for hardware
, and
one for firmware
— like [Minh Danh] has done.
This build does it all: radio, MP3 playback, and records incoming signals. The radio portion of the build is driven by an Si4735, which allows for receiving both in FM and AM — with all the AM bands, SW, MW and LW available. The FM section does support RDS, though because [Minh Danh] ran out of pins on the dsPIC, isn’t the perfect implementation.
Just look at that thru-hole goodness.
The audio section is a good intro to audio engineering if you’ve never done a project like this: he’s using a TDA1308 for headphones, which feeds into a NS8002 to drive some hefty stereo speakers– and he tells you
why
he selected those chips, as well as providing broken-out schematics for each. Really, we can’t say enough good things about this project’s documentation.
That’s before we get to the firmware, where he tells us how he manages to get the dsPIC to read out MP3s from a USB drive, and write WAVs to it. One very interesting detail is how he used the dsPIC’s ample analog inputs to handle the front panel buttons on this radio: a resistor ladder. It’s a great solution in a project that’s full of them.
Of course we’ve seen
radio receivers before
, and
plenty of MP3 players
, too — but this might be the first time we’ve seen an electronic Swiss army knife with all these features, and we’re very glad [Minh Danh] shared it with us. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8124556",
"author": "Cad the Mad",
"timestamp": "2025-05-05T05:54:28",
"content": "Considering the dsPIC family hasn’t been properly supported in over 7 years, I’d say it is pretty old school.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8... | 1,760,371,557.430258 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/04/pcb-renewal-aims-to-make-old-boards-useful-again/ | PCB Renewal Aims To Make Old Boards Useful Again | Lewin Day | [
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"KiCAD",
"reuse"
] | We’ve all made a few bad PCBs in our time. Sometimes they’re recoverable, and a few bodge wires will make ’em good. Sometimes they’re too far gone and we have to start again. But what if you could take an existing PCB, make a few mods, and turn it into the one you really want? That’s what “PCB Renewal” aims to do, as per the
research paper from [Huaishu Peng] and the research group at the University of Maryland
.
The plugin quantifies resource and time savings made by reusing an old board.
The concept is straightforward — PCB Renewal exists as a
KiCad plugin
that can analyze the differences between the PCB you have and the one you really want. Assuming they’re similar enough, it will generate toolpaths to modify the board with milling and epoxy deposition to create the traces you need out of the board you already have.
Obviously, there are limitations. You’ll never turn a PlayStation motherboard into something you could drop into an Xbox with a tool like this. Instead, it’s more about gradual modifications. Say you need to correct a couple of misplaced traces or missing grounds, or you want to swap one microcontroller for a similar unit on your existing board. Rather than making brand new PCBs, you could modify the ones you already have.
Of course, it’s worth noting that if you already have the hardware to do epoxy deposition and milling, you could probably just make new PCBs whenever you need them. However, PCB Renewal lets you save resources by not manufacturing new boards when you don’t have to.
We’ve seen work from [Huaishu Peng]’s research group before, too, in the form of
an innovative “solderless PCB”
. | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8124410",
"author": "suhwan hong",
"timestamp": "2025-05-04T17:47:16",
"content": "Good job to Zeyu & Advait, cool seeing our lab being featured on one of my favorite websites :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8124413",
"au... | 1,760,371,557.746201 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/04/electric-catamaran-sails-high-seas-of-inland-canada/ | Electric Catamaran Sails High Seas Of Inland Canada | Bryan Cockfield | [
"green hacks",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"boat",
"catamaran",
"electric",
"plans",
"solar",
"woodworking"
] | There are a number of plans for DIY boats available online, so [Phil] went in search of one for a custom catamaran to travel the inland waterways of Canada. But none of the plans he found had options for electric motors so he modified one popular plan to include not only that, but plenty of other unique features as well
throughout a long series of videos
.
This isn’t [Phil]’s first electric boat, either. His first was a monohull with a long canopy above, providing shade for the occupants and a platform to mount solar panels. But that one was top heavy and unstable, so he pivoted to this catamaran design instead which has the perk of not only stability but a small draft. The plans were modified to use a similar propulsion system, though, but mounting the heavy panels on the roof of this boat was much less problematic. The roof itself retracts, and also includes some mosquito netting to enclose the cabin. He’s also added a head which is situated inside one of the hulls and has doors which fit into the retractable roof structure as well.
For navigating the peaceful inland waterways of Canada like the famous Rideau Canal, the Trent Severn Waterway which [Phil] frequents, or even quiet Ontario lake towns like
Bobcaygeon
we can’t imagine a better way to go that a peaceful, small electric boat like this one.
As summer rolls around in the northern hemisphere we’ll hope to see other solar electric boats like these out on the water, like this
smaller electric-assisted kayak
or
this much larger solar electric houseboat
. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8124436",
"author": "mip",
"timestamp": "2025-05-04T18:52:35",
"content": "At Boote-Forum there are also project logs of people having built a B Kohler design.One person sadly passed away during his built, but there are two projects which are thriving.Seehttps://www.boote-forum.de/... | 1,760,371,557.634851 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/03/knowing-whats-possible/ | Knowing What’s Possible | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"creativity",
"examples",
"hackaday",
"ideas",
"possible"
] | Dan Maloney and I were talking on the podcast about his memories of the old electronics magazines, and how they had some gonzo projects in them. One,
a DIY picture phone from the 1980s
, was a monster build of a hundred ICs that also required you to own a TV camera. At that time, the idea of being able to see someone while talking to them on the phone was pure science fiction, and here was a version of that which you could build yourself.
Still, we have to wonder how many of these were ever built. The project itself was difficult and expensive, but you actually have to multiply that by two if you want to talk with someone else. And then you have to turn your respective living rooms into TV studios. It wasn’t the most practical of projects.
But amazing projects did something in the old magazines that we take a little bit for granted today: they showed what was possible. And if you want to create something new, you’re not necessarily going to know how to do it, but just the idea that it’s possible at all is often enough to give a motivated hacker the drive to make it real.
As skateboard hero Rodney Mullen put it
, “the biggest obstacle to creativity is breaking through the barrier of disbelief”.
In the skating world, it’s seeing someone else do a trick in a video that lets you know that it’s possible, and then you can make it your own. In our world, in prehistoric times, it was these electronics magazines that showed you what was possible. In the present, it’s all over the Internet, and all over Hackaday. So when you see someone’s amazing project, even if you aren’t necessarily into it, or maybe don’t even fully understand it, your horizons of what’s possible are nonetheless expanded, and that helps us all be more creative.
Keep on pushing!
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
! | 13 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8124047",
"author": "lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-05-03T14:32:16",
"content": "I really like these “Perspectives” style articles. I hope the HaD team keeps making them. They are either encouraging, and thought or discussion provoking.A big part of what we do as hackers is see w... | 1,760,371,557.69017 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/03/getting-started-with-attiny-configurable-custom-logic-ccl/ | Getting Started With ATtiny Configurable Custom Logic (CCL) | John Elliot V | [
"ATtiny Hacks",
"hardware"
] | [
"attiny",
"ccl",
"CIP",
"Configurable Custom Logic",
"core independent peripherals",
"tinyAVR"
] | In the Microchip tinyAVR {0,1,2}-series we see Configurable Custom Logic (CCL) among the Core Independent Peripherals (CIP) available on the chip. In this YouTube video [Grug Huhler] shows us
how to make your own digital logic in hardware using the ATtiny CCL peripheral
.
If you have spare pins on your tinyAVR micro you can use them with the CCL for “glue logic” and save on your bill of materials (BOM) cost. The CCL can do simple to moderately complex logic, and it does it without the need for support from the processor core, which is why it’s called a core independent peripheral. A good place to learn about the CCL capabilities in these tinyAVR series is
Microchip Technical Brief TB3218: Getting Started with Configurable Custom Logic (CCL)
or if you need more information see a datasheet, such as the
ATtiny3226 datasheet
mentioned in the video.
A tinyAVR micro will have one or two CCL peripherals depending on the series. The heart of the CCL hardware are two Lookup Tables (LUTs). Each LUT can map any three binary inputs into one binary output. This allows each LUT to be programmed with one byte as simple 2-input or 3-input logic, such as NOT, AND, OR, XOR, etc. Each LUT output can optionally be piped through a Filter/Sync function, an Edge Detector, and a Sequencer (always from the lower numbered LUT in the pair). It is also possible to mask-out LUT inputs.
In
the source code that accompanies the video
[Grug] includes a demonstration of a three input AND gate, an SR Latch using the sequencer, an SR Latch using feedback, and a filter/sync and edge detection circuit. The Arduino library [Grug] uses is
Logic.h
from
megaTinyCore
.
We have covered CIP and CCL technology here on Hackaday before, such as back when we showed you
how to use an AVR microcontroller to make a switching regulator
. | 20 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8124019",
"author": "Tim Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-05-03T13:08:56",
"content": "I haven’t done many projects with it yet, but it seems to do what it says on the box. Some highlights:Peak current mode SMPS (make a flip-flop, combine with high speed comparator, DAC for peak curre... | 1,760,371,557.866766 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/03/ratcheting-mechanism-gives-tendons-a-tug/ | Ratcheting Mechanism Gives Tendons A Tug | Ian Bos | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"biomechanics",
"biomedical engineering",
"chicken",
"Cutting and Machining"
] | A common ratchet from your garage may work wonders for tightening hard to reach bolts on whatever everyday projects around the house. However, those over at [Chronova Engineering] had a particularly unusual project where a special ratchet mechanism needed to be developed. And developed it was, an absolutely beautiful machining job is done to create a
ratcheting actuator for tendon pulling
. Yes, this mechanical steampunk-esk ratchet is meant for yanking on the fleshy strings found in all of us.
The unique mechanism is necessary because of the requirement for bidirectional actuation for bio-mechanics research. Tendons are meant to be pulled and released to measure the movement of the fingers or toes. This is then compared with the distance pulled from the actuator. Hopefully, this method of actuation measurement may help doctors and surgeons treat people with impairments, though in this particular case the “patient” is a chicken’s foot.
Blurred for viewing ease
Manufacturing the mechanism itself consisted of a multitude of watch lathe operations and pantographed patterns. A mixture of custom and commercial screws are used in combination with a peg gear, cams, and a high performance servo to complete the complex ratchet. With simple control from an Arduino, the system completes its use case very effectively.
In all the actuator is an incredible piece of machining ability with one of the least expected use cases. The original public listed video chose to not show the chicken foot itself due to fear of the YouTube overlords.
If you wish to see the actuator in proper action check out the uncensored and
unlisted video here
.
Thanks to [DjBiohazard] on our
Discord server
tips-line! | 3 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8123956",
"author": "Naxes",
"timestamp": "2025-05-03T08:16:27",
"content": "I’m starting to think my YouTube recommendations algorithm moonlights for Hackaday.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8123985",
"author": "Anon... | 1,760,371,557.914086 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/02/a-neat-e-paper-digit-clock-or-four/ | A Neat E-Paper Digit Clock (or Four) | Lewin Day | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"e-paper",
"sprite_tm"
] | [sprite_tm] had a problem. He needed a clock for the living room, but didn’t want to just buy something off the shelf. In his own words, “It’s an opportunity for a cool project that I’d rather not let go to waste.”
Thus started a project to build a fun e-paper digit clock!
There were several goals for the build from the outset. It had to be battery driven, large enough to be easily readable, and readily visible both during the day and in low-light conditions. It also needed to be low maintenance, and “interesting,” as [sprite_tm] put it. This drove the design towards an e-paper solution. However, large e-paper displays can be a bit pricy. That spawned a creative idea—why not grab four smaller displays and make a clock with separate individual digits instead?
The build description covers the full design, from the ESP32 at the heart of things to odd brownout issues and the old-school Nokia batteries providing the juice. Indeed, [sprite_tm] even went the creative route, making each individual digit of the clock operate largely independently. Each has its own battery, microcontroller, and display. To save battery life, only the hours digit has to spend energy syncing with an NTP time server, and it uses the short-range ESPNow protocol to send time updates to the other digits.
It’s an unconventional clock, to be sure; you could even consider it four clocks in one. Ultimately, though,
that’s what we like in a timepiece here at Hackaday
. Meanwhile, if you’ve come up with a fun and innovative way to tell time, be sure to let us know
on the tipsline!
[Thanks to Maarten Tromp for the tip!] | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8123947",
"author": "Zamorano",
"timestamp": "2025-05-03T07:25:36",
"content": "Way cool! One day these displays will be borderless and maybe even have the ability to be wrinkled a bit to make them indistinguishable from real paper.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repl... | 1,760,371,558.159688 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/02/a-gentle-introduction-to-impedance-matching/ | A Gentle Introduction To Impedance Matching | Aaron Beckendorf | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"impedance",
"impedance matching",
"smith chart"
] | Impedance matching is one of the perpetual confusions for new electronics students, and for good reason: the idea that increasing the impedance of a circuit can lead to more power transmission is frighteningly unintuitive at first glance. Even once you understand this, designing a circuit with impedance matching is a tricky task, and it’s here that [Ralph Gable]’s
introduction to impedance matching
is helpful.
The goal of impedance matching is to maximize the amount of power transmitted from a source to a load. In some simple situations, resistance is the only significant component in impedance, and it’s possible to match impedance just by matching resistance. In most situations, though, capacitance and inductance will add a reactive component to the impedance, in which case it becomes necessary to use the complex conjugate for impedance matching.
The video goes over this theory briefly, but it’s real focus is on explaining how to read a Smith chart, an intimidating-looking tool which can be used to calculate impedances. The video covers the basic impedance-only Smith chart, as well as a full-color Smith chart which indicates both impedance and admittance.
This video is the introduction to a planned series on impedance matching, and beyond reading Smith charts, it doesn’t really get into many specifics. However, based on the clear explanations so far, it could be worth waiting for the rest of the series.
If you’re interested in more practical details, we’ve also covered
another example
before. | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8124078",
"author": "BrendaEM",
"timestamp": "2025-05-03T16:17:15",
"content": "I will never feel confident at this, and I seem to have no choice but watch the video. I need some Liquid Courage, first, or something from around the house. I should throw some money at the problem, and... | 1,760,371,558.119859 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/02/prusa-mini-nozzle-cam-on-the-cheap/ | Prusa Mini Nozzle Cam On The Cheap | Heidi Ulrich | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"digital cameras hacks",
"Lifehacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"camera",
"endoscope",
"endoscope cam",
"Nozzle",
"nozzle camera",
"PETG",
"prusa",
"Prusa Mini",
"usb"
] | Let me throw in a curveball—watching your 3D print fail in real-time is
so much
more satisfying when you have a crisp, up-close view of the nozzle drama. That’s exactly what [Mellow Labs] delivers in
his latest DIY video
: transforming a generic HD endoscope camera into a purpose-built nozzle cam for the Prusa Mini. The hack blends absurd simplicity with delightful nerdy precision, and comes with a full walkthrough, a printable mount, and just enough bad advice to make it interesting. It’s a must-see for any maker who enjoys solder fumes with their spaghetti monsters.
What makes this build uniquely brilliant is the repurposing of a common USB endoscope camera—a tool normally reserved for inspecting pipes or internal combustion engines. Instead, it’s now spying on molten plastic. The camera gets ripped from its aluminium tomb, upgraded with custom-salvaged LEDs (harvested straight from a dismembered bulb), then wrapped in makeshift heat-shrink and mounted on a custom PETG bracket. [Mellow Labs] even micro-solders in a custom connector just so the camera can be detached post-print. The mount is parametric, thanks to a community contribution.
This is exactly
the sort of hacking to love
—clever, scrappy, informative, and full of personality. For the tinkerers among us who like their camera mounts hot and their resistor math hotter,
this build
is a weekend well spent. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8123915",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-03T04:51:46",
"content": "USB endoscope cameras are also nice for CNC positioning. Very quick and easy way to set zero with about 0.1 mm accuracy – enough for a lot of purposes.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": ... | 1,760,371,558.07108 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/02/smart-speaker-gets-brain-surgery-line-out/ | Smart Speaker Gets Brain Surgery, Line-Out | Tyler August | [
"digital audio hacks",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"3.5mm audio",
"audio dac",
"smart speaker"
] | Sometimes you find a commercial product that is almost, but not exactly perfect for your needs. Your choices become: hack together a DIY replacement, or hack the commercial product to do what you need. [Daniel] chose door number two when he realized his Yamaha MusicCast smart speaker was perfect for his particular use case, except for its tragic lack of line out.
A little surgery and a Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC) breakout board solved that problem.
You can’t hear it in this image, but the headphones work.
[Daniel] first went diving into the datasheet of the Yamaha amplifier chip inside of the speaker, before realizing it did too much DSP for his taste. He did learn that the chip was getting i2s signals from the speaker’s wifi module. That’s a lucky break, since i2s is an open, well-known protocol. [Daniel] had an Adafruit DAC; he only needed to get the i2s signals from the smart speaker’s board to his breakout. That proved to be an adventure, but we’ll let [Daniel] tell the tale on his blog.
After a quick bit of OpenSCAD and 3D printing, the DAC was firmly mounted in its new home. Now [Daniel] has the exact audio-streaming-solution he wanted: Yamaha’s MusicCast, with line out to his own hi-fi.
[Daniel] and hackaday go way back:
we featured his robot lawnmower in 2013.
It’s great to see he’s still hacking. If you’d rather see what’s behind door number one, this
roll-your-own smart speaker
may whet your appetite. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8123818",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2025-05-02T20:59:13",
"content": "an adafruit DAC ? what Fruit is it ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8123884",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-05-03T00:04... | 1,760,371,558.265942 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/02/3d-printed-spirograph-makes-art-out-of-walnut/ | 3D Printed Spirograph Makes Art Out Of Walnut | Tyler August | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"router",
"spirograph",
"woodworking"
] | Who else remembers Spirograph? When making elaborate spiral doodles, did you ever wish for a much, much bigger version? [Fortress Fine Woodworks] had that thought, and
“slapped a router onto it” to create a gorgeous walnut table.
This printed sanding block was a nice touch.
The video covers not only 3D printing the giant Spirograph, which is the part most of us can easily relate to, but all the woodworking magic that goes into creating a large hardwood table. Assembling the table out of choice lumber from the “rustic” pile is an obvious money-saving move, but there were a lot of other trips and tricks in this video that we were happy to learn from a pro. The 3D printed sanding block he designed was a particularly nice detail; it’s hard to imagine getting all those grooves smoothed out without it.
Certainly this pattern could have been carved with a CNC machine, but there is a certain old school charm in seeing it done (more or less) by hand with the Spirograph jig. [Fortress Fine Woodworks] would have missed out on quite the workout if he’d been using a CNC machine, too, which may or may not be a plus to this method depending on your perspective. Regardless, the finished product is a work of art and worth checking out in the video below.
Oddly enough, this isn’t the first time
we’ve seen someone use a Spirograph to mill things.
It’s not the first
giant-scale Spirograph we’ve highlighted, either
. To our knowledge, it’s the first time someone has combined them with
an artful walnut table
. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8123777",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-02T19:11:44",
"content": "They were fun with those multicolor pens.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8123779",
"author": "macegr",
"timestamp": "2025-05-02T19:16:48",
... | 1,760,371,558.313341 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/02/supercon-2024-turning-talk-into-action/ | Supercon 2024: Turning Talk Into Action | Lewin Day | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"2024 Hackaday Supercon",
"cons",
"talk"
] | Most of us have some dream project or three that we’d love to make a reality. We bring it up all the time with friends, muse on it at work, and research it during our downtime. But that’s just talk—and it doesn’t actually get the project done!
At the 2024 Hackaday Supercon, Sarah Vollmer made it clear—her presentation is about turning talk into action. It’s about how to overcome all the hurdles that get in the way of achieving your grand project, so you can actually make it a reality. It might sound like a self-help book—and it kind of is—but it’s rooted in the experience of a bonafide maker who’s been there and done that a few times over.
At the outset, Sarah advises us on the value of friends when you’re pursuing a project. At once, they might be your greatest cheerleaders, or full of good ideas. In her case, she also cites several of her contacts in the broader community that have helped her along the way—with a particular shoutout to Randy Glenn, who also gave us
a great Supercon talk last year
on the value of the CAN bus. At the same time, your friends might—with good intentions—lead you in the wrong direction, with help or suggestions that could derail your project. Her advice is to take what’s useful, and politely sidestep or decline what won’t help your project.
Next, Sarah highlights the importance of watching out for foes. “Every dream has your dream crushers,” says Sarah. “It could be you, it could be the things that are being told to you.” Excessive criticism can be crushing, sapping you of the momentum you need to get started. She also relates it to her own experience, where her project faced a major hurdle—the tedious procurement process of a larger organization, and the skepticism around whether she could overcome it. Whatever threatens the progress of your project could be seen as a foe—but the key is knowing
what
is threatening your project.
Sarah’s talk is rooted in her personal experiences across her haptics work and other projects.
The third step Sarah recommends? Finding a way to set goals amidst the chaos. Your initial goals might be messy or vague, but often the end gets clearer as you start moving. “Be clear about what you’re doing so you can keep your eye on the prize,” says Sarah. “No matter what gets in your way, as long as you’re clear about what you’re doing, you can get there.” She talks about how she started with a simple haptics project some years ago. Over the years, she kept iterating and building on what she was trying to do with it, with a clear goal, and made great progress in turn.
Once you’re project is in motion, too, it’s important not to let it get killed by criticism. Cries of “Impossible!” might be hard to ignore, but often, Sarah notes, these brick walls are really problems you create actions items to solve. She also notes the value of using whatever you can to progress towards your goals. She talks about how she was able to parlay a Hackaday article on her work (and her previous 2019 Supercon talk) to help her gain access to an accelerator program to help her start her nascent lab supply business.
Sarah’s previous Hackaday Supercon appearance helped open doors for her work in haptics.
Anyone who has ever worked in a corporate environment will also appreciate Sarah’s advice to avoid the lure of endless planning, which can derail even the best planned project. “Once upon a time I went to meetings, those meetings became meetings about meetings,” she says. “Those meetings about meetings became about planning, they went on for four hours on a Friday, [and] I just stopped going,” Her ultimate dot point? “We don’t talk, talk is cheap, but too much talk is bankrupting.”
“When all else fails, laugh and keep going,” Sarah advises. She provides an example of a 24/7 art installation she worked on that was running across multiple physical spaces spread across the globe. “During the exhibit, China got in a fight with Google,” she says. This derailed plans to use certain cloud buckets to run things, but with good humor and the right attitude, the team were able to persevere and work around what could have been a disaster.
Overall, this talk is a rapid fire crash course in how she pushed her projects on through challenges and hurdles and came out on top. Just beware—if you’re offended by the use of AI art, this one might not be for you. Sarah talks fast and covers a lot of ground in her talk, but if you can keep up and follow along there’s a few kernels of wisdom in there that you might like to take forward. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,558.443535 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/02/hackaday-podcast-episode-319-experimental-archaeology-demoscene-oscilloscope-music-and-electronic-memories/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 319: Experimental Archaeology, Demoscene Oscilloscope Music, And Electronic Memories | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | It’s the podcast so nice we recorded it twice! Despite some technical difficulties (note to self: press the record button significantly
before
recording the outro), Elliot and Dan were able to soldier through our rundown of the week’s top hacks.
We kicked things off with a roundup of virtual keyboards for the alternate reality crowd, which begged the question of why you’d even need such a thing. We also looked at a couple of cool demoscene-adjacent projects, such as the ultimate in oscilloscope music and a hybrid knob/jack for eurorack synth modules.
We dialed the Wayback Machine into antiquity to take a look at Clickspring’s take on the origins of precision machining; spoiler alert — you can make gas-tight concentric brass tubing using a bow-driven lathe. There’s a squishy pneumatic robot gripper, an MQTT-enabled random number generator, a feline-friendly digital stethoscope, and a typewriter that’ll make you Dymo label maker jealous.
We’ll also mourn the demise of electronics magazines and ponder how your favorite website fills that gap, and learn why it’s really hard to keep open-source software lean and clean. Short answer: because it’s made by people.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Download the zero-calorie MP3.
Episode 319 Show Notes:
News:
There’s A Venusian Spacecraft Coming Our Way
You Wouldn’t Steal A Font…
Sigrok Website Down After Hosting Data Loss
What’s that Sound?
Fill out this form for your chance to win
!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Weird And Wonderful VR/MR Text Entry Methods, All In One Place
Just a moment…
Clickspring’s Experimental Archaeology: Concentric Thin-Walled Tubing
Amazing Oscilloscope Demo Scores The Win At Revision 2025
osci-render
Tripping On Oscilloshrooms With An Analog Scope
Crossing Commodore Signal Cables On Purpose
Look! It’s A Knob! It’s A Jack! It’s Euroknob!
Robot Gets A DIY Pneumatic Gripper Upgrade
Vastly Improved Servo Control, Now Without Motor Surgery
Remembering Heathkit
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks
A New And Weird Kind Of Typewriter
Terminal DAW Does It In Style
Comparing ‘AI’ For Basic Plant Care With Human Brown Thumbs
Dan’s Picks:
Quantum Random Number Generator Squirts Out Numbers Via MQTT
Onkyo Receiver Saved With An ESP32
Quick And Easy Digital Stethoscope Keeps Tabs On Cat
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Libogc Allegations Rock Wii Homebrew Community
The DIY 1982 Picture Phone | 4 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8124109",
"author": "Greg",
"timestamp": "2025-05-03T19:18:28",
"content": "It would be cool if you could add the link to the show notes in the podcast description, so that we could go directly from our podcast app to the show notes.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"rep... | 1,760,371,558.219018 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/02/preparing-for-the-next-pandemic/ | Preparing For The Next Pandemic | Navarre Bartz | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"bird flu",
"contact tracing",
"Disease",
"epidemiology",
"flu",
"infectious diseases",
"medicine",
"pandemic"
] | While the COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t an experience anyone wants to repeat, infections disease experts like [Dr. Pardis Sabeti] are looking at what we can do
to prepare for the next one
.
While the next pandemic could potentially be anything, there are a few high profile candidates, and bird flu (H5N1) is at the top of the list. With birds all over the world carrying the infection and the prevalence in poultry and now dairy agriculture operations, the possibility for cross-species infection is higher than for most other diseases out there, particularly anything with an up to 60% fatality rate. Only one of the 70 people in the US who have contracted H5N1 recently have died, and exposures have been mostly in dairy and poultry workers. Scientists have yet to determine why cases in the US have been less severe.
To prevent an H5N1 pandemic before it reaches the level of COVID and ensure its reach is limited like earlier bird and swine flu variants, contact tracing of humans and cattle as well as offering existing H5N1 vaccines to vulnerable populations like those poultry and dairy workers would be a good first line of defense. So far, it doesn’t seem transmissible human-to-human, but more and more cases increase the likelihood it could gain this mutation. Keeping current cases from increasing,
improving our science outreach
, and continuing to fund scientists working on this disease are our best bets to keep it from taking off like a meme stock.
Whatever the next pandemic turns out to be,
smartwatches could help flatten the curve
and surely hackers will rise to the occasion to fill in the gaps where traditional infrastructure fails again. | 69 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "8123678",
"author": "Sloppy Moses",
"timestamp": "2025-05-02T16:17:09",
"content": "My, aren’t we edgy. Go back to 4chan.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8123730",
"author": "BrightCandle",
"timestamp": "2025-05-02T17:2... | 1,760,371,558.547272 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/02/this-week-in-security-airborne-evilnotify-and-revoked-rdp/ | This Week In Security: AirBorne, EvilNotify, And Revoked RDP | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"AirBorne",
"CVEs",
"rdp",
"supply chain attack",
"This Week in Security"
] | This week, Oligo has announced
the AirBorne series of vulnerabilities in the Apple Airdrop protocol
and SDK. This is a particularly serious set of issues, and notably affects MacOS desktops and laptops, the iOS and iPadOS mobile devices, and many IoT devices that use the Apple SDK to provide AirPlay support. It’s a group of 16 CVEs based on 23 total reported issues, with the ramifications ranging from an authentication bypass, to local file reads, all the way to Remote Code Execution (RCE).
AirPlay is a WiFi based peer-to-peer protocol, used to share or stream media between devices. It uses port 7000, and a custom protocol that has elements of both HTTP and RTSP. This scheme makes heavy use of property lists (“plists”) for transferring serialized information. And as we well know, serialization and data parsing interfaces are great places to look for vulnerabilities. Oligo provides an example, where a plist is expected to contain a dictionary object, but was actually constructed with a simple string. De-serializing that plist results in a malformed dictionary, and attempting to access it will crash the process.
Another demo is using AirPlay to achieve an arbitrary memory write against a MacOS device. Because it’s such a powerful primative, this can be used for zero-click exploitation, though the actual demo uses the music app, and launches with a user click. Prior to the patch, this affected any MacOS device with AirPlay enabled, and set to either “Anyone on the same network” or “Everyone”. Because of the zero-click nature, this could be made into a wormable exploit.
Apple has released updates for their products for all of the CVEs, but what’s going to really take a long time to clean up is the IoT devices that were build with the vulnerable SDK. It’s likely that many of those devices will never receive updates.
EvilNotify
It’s apparently the week for Apple exploits, because
here’s another one, this time from [Guilherme Rambo]
. Apple has built multiple systems for doing Inter Process Communications (IPC), but the simplest is the Darwin Notification API. It’s part of the shared code that runs on all of Apple’s OSs, and this IPC has some quirks. Namely, there’s no verification system, and no restrictions on which processes can send or receive messages.
That led our researcher to ask what you may be asking: does this lack of authentication allow for any security violations? Among many novel notifications this technique can spoof, there’s one that’s particularly problematic: The device “restore in progress”. This locks the device, leaving only a reboot option. Annoying, but not a permanent problem.
The really nasty version of this trick is to put the code triggering a “restore in progress” message inside an app’s widget extension. iOS loads those automatically at boot, making for an infuriating bootloop. [Guilherme] reported the problem to Apple, made a very nice $17,500 in the progress. The fix from Apple is a welcome surprise, in that they added an authorization mechanism for sensitive notification endpoints. It’s very likely that there are other ways that this technique could have been abused, so the more comprehensive fix was the way to go.
Jenkins
Continuous Integration is one of the most powerful tools a software project can use to stay on top of code quality. Unfortunately as those CI toolchains get more complicated, they are more likely to be vulnerable,
as [John Stawinski] from Praetorian has discovered
. This attack chain would target the Node.js repository at Github via an outside pull request, and ends with code execution on the Jenkins host machines.
The trick to pulling this off is to spoof the timestamp on a Pull Request. The Node.js CI uses PR labels to control what CI will do with the incoming request. Tooling automatically adds the “needs-ci” label depending on what files are modified. A maintainer reviews the PR, and approves the CI run. A Jenkins runner will pick up the job, compare that the Git timestamp predated the maintainer’s approval, and then runs the CI job. Git timestamps are trivial to spoof, so it’s possible to load an additional commit to the target PR with a commit timestamp in the past. The runner doesn’t catch the deception, and runs the now-malicious code.
[John] reported the findings, and Node.js maintainers jumped into action right away. The primary fix was to do SHA sum comparisons to validate Jenkins runs, rather than just relying on timestamp. Out of an abundance of caution, the Jenkins runners were re-imaged, and then [John] was invited to try to recreate the exploit. The
Node.js blog post has some additional thoughts
on this exploit, like pointing out that it’s a Time-of-Check-Time-of-Use (TOCTOU) exploit. We don’t normally think of TOCTOU bugs where a human is the “check” part of the equation.
2024 in 0-days
Google has published
an overview of the 75 zero-day vulnerabilities that were exploited in 2024
. That’s down from the 98 vulnerabilities exploited in 2023, but the Threat Intelligence Group behind this report are of the opinion that we’re still on an upward trend for zero-day exploitation. Some platforms like mobile and web browsers have seen drastic improvements in zero-day prevention, while enterprise targets are on the rise. The real stand-out is the targeting of security appliances and other network devices, at more than 60% of the vulnerabilities tracked.
When it comes to the attackers behind exploitation, it’s a mix between state-sponsored attacks, legal commercial surveillance, and financially motivated attacks. It will be interesting to see how 2025 stacks up in comparison. But one thing is for certain: Zero-days aren’t going away any time soon.
Perplexing Passwords for RDP
The world of computer security just got an interesting surprise, as
Microsoft declared it not-a-bug
that Windows machines will continue to accept revoked credentials for Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) logins. [Daniel Wade] discovered the issue and reported it to Microsoft, and then after being told it wasn’t a security vulnerability, shared his report with Ars Technica.
So what exactly is happening here? It’s the case of a Windows machine login via Azure or a Microsoft account. That account is used to enable RDP, and the machine caches the username and password so logins work even when the computer is “offline”. The problem really comes in how those cached passwords get evicted from the cache. When it comes to RDP logins, it seems they are simply never removed.
There is a stark disconnect between what [Wade] has observed, and what Microsoft has to say about it. It’s long been known that Windows machines will cache passwords, but that cache will get updated the next time the machine logs in to the domain controller. This is what Microsoft’s responses seem to be referencing. The actual report is that in the case of RDP, the cached passwords will never expire, regardless of changing that password in the cloud and logging on to the machine repeatedly.
Bits and Bytes
Samsung makes a digital signage line, powered by the MagicINFO server application. That server has an unauthenticated endpoint, accepting file uploads with insufficient filename sanitization.
That combination leads to arbitrary pre-auth code execution
. While that’s not great, what makes this a real problem is that the report was first sent to Samsung in January, no response was ever received, and it seems that no fixes have officially been published.
A series of
Viasat modems have a buffer overflow in their SNORE web interface
. This leads to unauthenticated, arbitrary code execution on the system, from either the LAN or OTA interface, but thankfully not from the public Internet itself. This one is interesting in that it was found via static code analysis.
IPv6 is the answer to all of our IPv4 induced woes, right? It has Stateless Address Autoconfiguration (SLAAC) to handle IP addressing without DHCP, and Router Advertisement (RA) to discover how to route packets. And now, taking advantage of that great functionality is
Spellbinder, a malicious tool to pull off SLACC attacks
and do DNS poisoning. It’s not entirely new, as we’ve seen Man in the Middle attacks on IPv4 networks for years. IPv6 just makes it so much easier. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8123669",
"author": "x0rpunk",
"timestamp": "2025-05-02T16:05:16",
"content": "Most exploits are JIT type confusion and UAF. Which means all those hardware assisted page policies(NX), offset randomizing in userland and kernel(ASLR and KLSR), and control-flow enforcement technologies... | 1,760,371,558.58899 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/02/is-this-the-truck-weve-been-waiting-for/ | Is This The Truck We’ve Been Waiting For? | Tyler August | [
"car hacks"
] | [
"automotive industry",
"electric cars",
"electric truck"
] | Imagine a bare-bones electric pickup: it’s the size of an old Hilux, it seats two, and the bed fits a full sheet of plywood. Too good to be true? Wait until you hear
that the Slate Pickup
is being designed for DIY repairability and modification, and will sell for only $20,000 USD, after American federal tax incentives.
Using the cellphone for infotainment makes for a less expensive product and a very clean dash. (Image: Slate Motors)
There are a few things missing: no infotainment system, for one. Why bother, when almost everyone has a phone and Bluetooth speakers are so cheap? No touch screen in the middle of the dash also means the return of physical controls for the heat and air conditioning.
There is no choice in colors, either. To paraphrase Henry Ford, the Slate comes in any color you want, as long as it’s grey. It’s not something we’d given much though to previously, but apparently painting is a huge added expense for automakers. Instead, the truck’s bodywork is going to be injection molded plastic panels, like an old Saturn coupe. We remember how resilient those body panels were, and think that sounds like a great idea. Injection molding is also a less capital-intensive process to set up than traditional automotive sheet metal stamping, reducing costs further.
That being said, customization is still a big part of the Slate. The company intends to sell DIY vinyl wrap kits, as well as a bolt-on SUV conversion kit which customers could install themselves. The plan is to have a “Slate University” app that would walk owners through maintaining their own automobile, a
delightfully
novel choice for a modern carmaker.
With a color wrap and an SUV add-on, it looks like a different beast. (Image: Slate Motors)
Of course, it’s all just talk unless Slate can make good on their promises. With rumors that Jeff Bezos is interested in investing, maybe they can pull it off and produce what could be a Volkswagen for 21st century America.
Interested readers can check out the
Slate Motors website
, and preorder for only $50 USD. For now, Slate is only interested in doing business within the United States, but we can hope they inspire copycats elsewhere. There’s no reason similar vehicles couldn’t be made anywhere from Alberta to Zeeland, if the will was there.
What do you think? Is this the perfect hackermobile, or have Slate fallen short? Let us know in the comments.
We’ve covered electric trucks before, but t
hey were just a bit bigger
, and some of
them didn’t use batteries
. | 172 | 49 | [
{
"comment_id": "8123546",
"author": "Benedikt Reinartz",
"timestamp": "2025-05-02T11:34:58",
"content": "I wish all the best for this car to reach the market. Reminds me of the Sono Sion though. I peronally lost a few hundred euro with this due to preorder but I’m ok with that. I was aware of the r... | 1,760,371,558.850562 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/02/pinoutleaf-simplifying-pinout-references/ | Pinoutleaf: Simplifying Pinout References | Matt Varian | [
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"documentation",
"pcb",
"pinouts"
] | We all appreciate clear easy-to-read reference materials. In that pursuit [Andreas] over at Splitbrain sent in his latest project,
Pinoutleaf
. This useful web app simplifies the creation of clean, professional board pinout reference images.
The app uses YAML or JSON configuration files to define the board, including photos for the front and back, the number and spacing of pins, and their names and attributes.For example, you can designate pin 3 as GPIO3 or A3, and the app will color-code these layers accordingly. The tool is designed to align with the standard 0.1″ pin spacing commonly used in breadboards. One clever feature is the automatic mirroring of labels for the rear photo, a lifesaver when you need to reverse-mount a board. Once your board is configured, Pinoutleaf generates an SVG image that you can download or print to slide over or under the pin headers, keeping your reference key easily accessible.
Visit the
GitHub page
to explore the tool’s features, including its Command-Line Interface for batch-generating pinouts for multiple boards. Creating clear
documentation
is challenging, so we love seeing projects like Pinoutleaf that make it easier to do it well. | 10 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8123500",
"author": "Nikolai",
"timestamp": "2025-05-02T08:05:36",
"content": "I had an idea a while ago. Make something like “Enlarged PCBs” Basically same PCBs, but enlarged for “aging electronic hobbyists”.And should be not just enlarged. Butt have some kind of standard.",
"p... | 1,760,371,558.63228 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/01/single-board-z80-computer-draws-inspiration-from-picasso/ | Single-Board Z80 Computer Draws Inspiration From Picasso | Lewin Day | [
"News"
] | [
"picasso",
"RC2014",
"z80"
] | Picasso and the Z80 microprocessor are not two things we often think about at the same time. One is a renowned artist born in the 19th century, the other, a popular CPU that helped launch the microcomputer movement. And yet, the latter has come to inspire a computer based on the former.
Meet the RC2014 Mini II Picasso!
As [concretedog] tells the story, what you’re fundamentally looking at is an RC2014 Mini II.
As we’ve discussed previously
, it’s a single-board Z80 retrocomputer that you can use to do fun things like run BASIC, Forth, or CP/M. However, where it gets kind of fun is in the layout. It’s the same fundamental circuitry as the RC2014, but it’s been given a rather artistic flair. The ICs are twisted this way and that, as are the passive components; even some of the resistors are dancing all over the top of one another. The kit is a limited edition, too, with each coming with a unique combination of colors where the silkscreen and sockets and LED are concerned. Kits are available via
Z80Kits
for those interested.
We love a good artistic PCB design; indeed,
we’ve supported the artform heavily at Supercon and beyond
. It’s neat to see the RC2014 designers reminding us that components need not live on a rigid grid; they too can dance and sway and flop all over the place like the eyes and or nose on a classic Picasso.
It’s weird, though; in a way, despite the Picasso inspiration, the whole thing ends up looking distinctly of the 1990s. In any case, if you’re cooking up any such kooky builds of your own, modelled after Picasso or any other Spanish master, don’t hesitate to
notify the tipsline. | 19 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "8123474",
"author": "PodeCoet",
"timestamp": "2025-05-02T05:12:34",
"content": "The layout of the PCB, misaligned component outlines and warped text is giving me seriously uncanny AI vibes, but it seems like the real deal. Well done?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"rep... | 1,760,371,558.906067 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/01/blurry-image-placeholders-generated-with-minimal-css/ | Blurry Image Placeholders, Generated With Minimal CSS | Donald Papp | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"css",
"image render",
"lqip"
] | Low-quality image placeholders (LQIPs) have a solid place in web page design. There are many different solutions but the main gotcha is that generating them tends to lean on things like JavaScript, requires lengthy chunks of not-particularly-human-readable code, or other tradeoffs. [Lean] came up with
an elegant, minimal solution in pure CSS to create LQIPs
.
Here’s how it works: all required data is packed into a single CSS integer, which is decoded directly in CSS (no need for any JavaScript) to dynamically generate an image that renders immediately. Another benefit is that without any need for wrappers or long strings of data this method avoids cluttering the HTML. The code is little more than a line like
<img src="…" style="--lqip:567213">
which is certainly tidy, as well as a welcome boon to those who hand-edit files.
The trick with generating LQIPs from scratch is getting an output that isn’t hard on the eyes or otherwise jarring in its composition. [Lean] experimented until settling on an encoding method that reliably delivered smooth color gradients and balance.
This method therefore turns a single integer into a perfectly-serviceable LQIP, using only CSS. There’s even a separate tool [Lean] created to compress any given image into the integer format used (so the result will look like a blurred version of the original image). It’s true that the results look
very
blurred but the code is clean, minimal, and the technique is easily implemented. You can see it in action in [Lean]’s
interactive LQIP gallery
.
CSS has a lot of capability baked into it, and it’s capable of much more than just styling and lining up elements. How about
trigonometric functions in CSS
? Or from the other direction, check out implementing a CSS (and HTML) renderer
on an ESP32
. | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8123483",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-02T06:16:21",
"content": "I bet the reason for the mystery of values getting rounded beyond 6 digits is that it is stored as 32 bit float at some point for some reason.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
... | 1,760,371,558.951071 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/01/printable-pegboard-pc-shows-off-the-rgb/ | Printable Pegboard PC Shows Off The RGB | Tyler August | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"3d print",
"pc"
] | Sometimes it seems odd that we would spend hundreds (or thousands) on PC components that demand oodles of airflow, and stick them in a little box, out of sight. The fine folks at Corsair apparently agree, because they’ve released files for an
open-frame pegboard PC case on Printables
.
According to the write-up on their blog,
these prints have held up just fine with ordinary PLA– apparently there’s enough airflow around the parts that heat sagging isn’t the issue we would have suspected. ATX and ITX motherboards are both supported, along with a few power supply form factors. If your printer is smaller, the ATX mount is per-sectioned for your convenience. Their GPU brackets can accommodate beefy dual- and triple-slot models. It’s all there, if you want to unbox and show off your PC build like the work of engineering art it truly is.
Of course, these files weren’t released from the kindness of Corsair’s corporate heart– they’re meant to be used with fancy pegboard desks the company also sells. Still to their credit, they
did
release the files under a CC4.0-Attribution-ShareAlike license. That means there’s nothing stopping an enterprising hacker from remixing this design for the ubiquitous SKÅDIS or any other perfboard should they so desire.
We’ve covered
artful open-cases before
here on Hackaday, but if you prefer to hide the expensive bits from dust and cats, this
mid-century box might be more your style
. If you’d rather no one know you own a computer at all, you can always do the
exact opposite of this build, and hide everything inside the desk
. | 19 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8123446",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-02T01:08:30",
"content": "In the 1990s I made this using nails and drywall. It did not look as nice. No RGB either",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8123491",
"author": "Er... | 1,760,371,559.005135 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/01/make-your-own-telescope-right-down-to-the-glass/ | Make Your Own Telescope, Right Down To The Glass | Lewin Day | [
"Space"
] | [
"astronomy",
"mirrors",
"telescope"
] | Telescopes are great tools for observing the heavens, or even surrounding landscapes if you have the right vantage point. You don’t have to be a professional to build one though; you can make all kinds of telescopes as an amateur,
as this guide from the Springfield Telescope Makers demonstrates.
The guide is remarkably deep and rich; no surprise given that the Springfield Telescope Makers club dates back to the early 20th century. It starts out with the basics—how to select a telescope, and how to decide whether to make or buy your desired instrument. It also explains in good detail why you might want to start with a simple Newtonian reflector setup on Dobsonian mounts if you’re crafting your first telescope, in no small part because mirrors are so much easier to craft than lenses for the amateur. From there, the guide gets into the nitty gritty of mirror production, right down to grinding and polishing techniques, as well as how to test your optical components and assemble your final telescope.
It’s hard to imagine a better place to start than here as an amateur telescope builder. It’s a rich mine of experience and practical advice that should give you the best possible chance of success. You might also like to peruse some of
the other telescope projects we’ve covered previously
. And, if you succeed, you can always tell us of your tales
on the tipsline! | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8123411",
"author": "prfesser",
"timestamp": "2025-05-01T20:52:13",
"content": "Grinding, polishing, and figuring a telescope mirror is enormously rewarding. I did my first 8″ just over 50 years ago, and the idea that I could make an item accurate to millionths of an inch with primi... | 1,760,371,559.162118 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/01/libogc-allegations-rock-wii-homebrew-community/ | Libogc Allegations Rock Wii Homebrew Community | Tom Nardi | [
"Featured",
"Nintendo Wii Hacks",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Software Development"
] | [
"gamecube",
"nintendo",
"reverse engineering",
"sdk",
"wii"
] | Historically, efforts to create original games and tools, port over open source emulators, and explore a game console’s hardware and software have been generally lumped together under the banner of “homebrew.” While not the intended outcome, it’s often the case that exploring a console in this manner unlocks methods to run pirated games. For example, if a bug is found in the system’s firmware that enables a clever developer to run “Hello World”, you can bet that the next thing somebody tries to write is a loader that exploits that same bug to play a ripped commercial game.
But for those who are passionate about being able to develop software for their favorite game consoles, and the developers who create the libraries and toolchains that make that possible, the line between homebrew and piracy is a critical boundary. The general belief has always been that keeping piracy at arm’s length made it less likely that the homebrew community would draw the ire of the console manufacturers.
As such, homebrew libraries and tools are held to a particularly high standard. Homebrew can only thrive if developed transparently, and every effort must be taken to avoid tainting the code with proprietary information or code. Any deviation could be the justification a company like Nintendo or Sony needs to swoop in.
Unfortunately, there are fears that covenant has been broken in light of multiple allegations of impropriety against the developers of
libogc
, the
C library used by nearly all homebrew software for the Wii and GameCube
. From potential license violations to uncomfortable questions about the origins of the project, there’s mounting evidence that calls the viability of the library into question. Some of these allegations, if true, would effectively mean the distribution and use of the vast majority of community-developed software for both consoles is now illegal.
Homebrew Channel Blows the Whistle
For those unfamiliar, the Wii Homebrew Channel (HBC) is a front-end used to load homebrew games and programs on the Nintendo Wii, and is one of the very first things anyone who’s modded their console will install. It’s not an exaggeration to say that essentially anyone who’s run homebrew software on their Wii has done it through HBC.
But as of a few days ago, the
GitHub repository for the project was archived
, and lead developer Hector Martin added a long explanation to the top of its README that serves as an overview of the allegations being made against the team behind
libogc
.
Somewhat surprisingly, Martin starts by admitting that he’s believed
libogc
contained ill-gotten code since at least 2008. He accuses the developers of decompiling commercial games to get access to the C code, as well as copying from leaked documentation from the official Nintendo software development kit (SDK).
For many, that would have been enough to stop using the library altogether. In his defense, Martin claims that he and the other developers of the HBC didn’t realize the full extent to which
libogc
copied code from other sources. Had they realized, Martin says they would have launched an effort to create a new low-level library for the Wii.
But as the popularity of the Homebrew Channel increased, Martin and his team felt they had no choice but to reluctantly accept the murky situation with
libogc
for the good of the Wii homebrew scene, and left the issue alone. That is, until new information came to light.
Inspiration Versus Copying
The story then fast-forwards to the present day, and new claims from others in the community that large chunks of
libogc
were actually copied from the
Real-Time Executive for Multiprocessor Systems (RTEMS) project
— a real-time operating system that was originally designed for military applications but that these days finds itself used in a wide-range of embedded systems. Martin links to a
GitHub repository maintained by a user known as derek57
that supposedly reversed the obfuscation done by the
libogc
developers to try and hide the fact they had merged in code from RTEMS.
Now, it should be pointed out that RTEMS is actually an open source project. As you might expect from a codebase that dates back to 1993, these days it includes several licenses that were inherited from bits of code added over the years. But the primary and preferred license is BSD 2-Clause, which Hackaday readers may know is a permissive license that gives other projects the right to copy and reuse the code more or less however they chose. All it asks in return is attribution, that is, for the redistributed code to retain the copyright notice which credits the original authors.
In other words, if the
libogc
developers did indeed copy code from RTEMS, all they had to do was properly credit the original authors. Instead, it’s alleged that they superficially refactored the code to make it appear different, presumably so they would not have to acknowledge where they sourced it from. Martin points to the following function as an example of RTEMS code being rewritten for
libogc
:
While this isolated function doesn’t necessarily represent the entirety of the story, it does seem hard to believe that the
libogc
implementation could be so similar to the RTEMS version by mere happenstance. Even if the code was not literally copy and pasted from RTEMS, it’s undeniable that it was used as direct inspiration.
libogc Developers Respond
At the time of this writing, there doesn’t appear to be an official response to the allegations raised by Martin and others in the community. But individual developers involved with
libogc
have attempted to explain their side of the story through social media, comments on GitHub issues, and personal blog posts.
The most detailed comes from Alberto Mardegan, a relatively new contributor to
libogc
. While the code in question was added before his time with the project, he directly addresses the claim that
functions were lifted from RTEMS
in a blog post from April 28th. While he defends the
libogc
developers against the accusations of outright code theft, his conclusions are not exactly a ringing endorsement for how the situation was handled:
In short, Mardegan admits that some of the code is so similar that it must have been at least inspired by reading the relevant functions from RTEMS, but that he believes this falls short of outright copyright infringement. As to why the
libogc
developers didn’t simply credit the RTEMS developers anyway, he theorizes that they may have wanted to avoid any association with a project originally developed for military use.
As for claims that
libogc
was based on stolen Nintendo code, the
libogc
developers seem to consider it irrelevant at this point.
When presented with evidence that the library was built on proprietary code
, Dave [WinterMute] Murphy, who maintains the devkitPro project that
libogc
is a component of, responded that “The official stance of the project is that we have no interest in litigating something that occurred 21 years ago”.
In posts to Mastodon, Murphy acknowledges that some of the code may have been produced by reverse engineering parts of the official Nintendo SDK, but then goes on to say that “There was no reading of source code or tools to turn assembly into C”.
From his comments, it’s clear that Murphy believes that the benefit of having
libogc
available to the community outweighs concerns over its origins. Further, he feels that enough time has passed since its introduction that the issue is now moot. In comparison, when other developers in the homebrew and emulator community have found themselves in similar situations, they’ve gone to great lengths to
avoid tainting their projects with leaked materials
.
Doing the Right Thing?
The Wii Homebrew Channel itself had not seen any significant updates in several years, so Martin archiving the project was somewhat performative to begin with. This would seem to track with his reputation — in addition to clashes with the
libogc
developers,
Martin has also recently left Asahi Linux
after a multi-bag-of-popcorn spat within the kernel development community
that ended with Linus Torvalds declaring that “the problem is you”
.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t merit to some of his claims. At least part of the debate could be settled by simply acknowledging that RTEMS was an inspiration for
libogc
in the library’s code or documentation. The fact that the developers seem reluctant to make this concession in light of the evidence is troubling. If not an outright license violation, it’s at least a clear disregard for the courtesy and norms of the open source community.
As for how the leaked Nintendo SDK factors in, there probably isn’t enough evidence one way or another to ever determine what really happened. Martin says code was copied verbatim, the
libogc
team says it was reverse engineered.
The key takeaway here is that both parties agree that the leaked information existed, and that it played some part in the origins of the library. The debate therefore isn’t so much about
if
the leaked information was used, but
how
it was used. For some developers, that alone would be enough to pass on
libogc
and look for an alternative.
Of course, in the end, that’s the core of the problem. There is no alternative, and nearly 20 years after the Wii was released, there’s little chance of another group having the time or energy to create a new low-level C library for the system. Especially without good reason.
The reality is that whatever interaction there was with the Nintendo SDK happened decades ago, and if anyone was terribly concerned about it there would have been repercussions by now. By extension, it seems unlikely that any projects that rely on
libogc
will draw the attention of Nintendo’s legal department at this point.
In short, life will go on for those still creating and using homebrew on the Wii. But for those who develop and maintain open source code, consider this to be a cautionary tale — even if we can’t be completely sure of what’s fact or fiction in this case. | 59 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "8123374",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-05-01T19:08:12",
"content": "Yeah, right? Sometimes we don’t use ’em when everyone is under their real name.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8123375",
"author": "Gre... | 1,760,371,559.109549 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/01/open-source-firmware-for-the-jye-tech-dso-150/ | Open Source Firmware For The JYE TECH DSO-150 | Lewin Day | [
"Software Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"dso-150",
"firmware",
"open source",
"oscilloscope"
] | The Jye Tech DSO-150 is a capable compact scope that you can purchase as a kit. If you’re really feeling the DIY ethos, you can go even further, too, and kit your scope out with the
latest open source firmware
.
The Open-DSO-150 firmware is a complete rewrite from the ground up, and packs the scope with lots of neat features. You get one analog or three digital channels, and triggers are configurable for rising, falling, or both edges on all signals. There is also a voltmeter mode, serial data dump feature, and a signal statistics display for broader analysis.
For the full list of features, just head over to the GitHub page. If you’re planning to install it on your own DSO-150, you can build the firmware in the free STM32 version of Atollic trueSTUDIO.
If you’re interested in the Jye Tech DSO-150 as it comes from the factory,
we’ve published our very own review, too.
Meanwhile, if you’re cooking up your own scope hacks, don’t hesitate to
let us know!
Thanks to [John] for the tip! | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8123321",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-01T17:17:40",
"content": "Looks impressive. Nice to see work is being done on this thing. (I see it’s forked from a DSO138 variant)I also bought one of these (and a DSO138 too). (I also have a Siglent SDS1104X-E)I see it already h... | 1,760,371,559.20905 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/01/researchers-create-a-brain-implant-for-near-real-time-speech-synthesis/ | Researchers Create A Brain Implant For Near-Real-Time Speech Synthesis | Lewin Day | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"brain",
"brain-computer interface",
"neurology",
"speech"
] | Brain-to-speech interfaces have been promising to help paralyzed individuals communicate for years. Unfortunately, many systems have had significant latency that has left them lacking somewhat in the practicality stakes.
A team of researchers across UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco
has been working on the problem and made significant strides forward in capability. A new system developed by the team offers near-real-time speech—capturing brain signals and synthesizing intelligible audio faster than ever before.
New Capability
The aim of the work was to create more naturalistic speech using a brain implant and voice synthesizer. While this technology
has been pursued previously
, it faced serious issues around latency, with delays of around eight seconds to decode signals and produce an audible sentence. New techniques had to be developed to try and speed up the process to slash the delay between a user trying to “speak” and the hardware outputting the synthesized voice.
The implant developed by researchers is used to sample data from the speech sensorimotor cortex of the brain—the area that controls the mechanical hardware that makes speech: the face, vocal chords, and all the other associated body parts that help us vocalize. The implant captures signals via an electrode array surgically implanted into the brain itself. The data captured by the implant is then passed to an AI model which figures out how to turn that signal into the right audio output to create speech. “We are essentially intercepting signals where the thought is translated into articulation and in the middle of that motor control,” said Cheol Jun Cho, a Ph.D student at UC Berkeley. “So what we’re decoding is after a thought has happened, after we’ve decided what to say, after we’ve decided what words to use, and how to move our vocal-tract muscles.”
The AI model had to be trained to perform this role. This was achieved by having a subject, Ann, look at prompts and attempting to “speak ” the phrases. Ann has suffered from paralysis after a stroke which left her unable to speak. However, when she attempts to speak, relevant regions in her brain still lit up with activity, and sampling this enabled the AI to correlate certain brain activity to intended speech. Unfortunately, since Ann could no longer vocalize herself, there was no target audio for the AI to correlate the brain data with. Instead, researchers used a text-to-speech system to generate simulated target audio for the AI to match with the brain data during training. “We also used Ann’s pre-injury voice, so when we decode the output, it sounds more like her,” explains Cho. A recording of Ann speaking at her wedding provided source material to help personalize the speech synthesis to sound more like her original speaking voice.
To measure performance of the new system, the team compared the time it took the system to generate speech to the first indications of speech intent in Ann’s brain signals. “We can see relative to that intent signal, within one second, we are getting the first sound out,” said Gopala Anumanchipalli, one of the researchers involved in the study. “And the device can continuously decode speech, so Ann can keep speaking without interruption.” Crucially, too, this speedier method didn’t compromise accuracy—in this regard, it decoded just as well as previous slower systems.
Pictured is Ann using the system to speak in near-real-time. The system also features a video avatar. Credit:
UC Berkeley
The decoding system works in a continuous fashion—rather than waiting for a whole sentence, it processes in small 80-millisecond chunks and synthesizes on the fly. The algorithms used to decode the signals were not dissimilar from those used by smart assistants like Siri and Alexa, Anumanchipalli explains. “Using a similar type of algorithm, we found that we could decode neural data and, for the first time, enable near-synchronous voice streaming,” he says. “The result is more naturalistic, fluent speech synthesis.”
It was also key to determine whether the AI model
was genuinely communicating what Ann was trying to say. To investigate this, Ann was qsked to try and vocalize words outside the original training data set—things like the NATO phonetic alphabet, for example. “We wanted to see if we could generalize to the unseen words and really decode Ann’s patterns of speaking,” said Anumanchipalli. “We found that our model does this well, which shows that it is indeed learning the building blocks of sound or voice.”
For now, this is still groundbreaking research—it’s at the cutting edge of machine learning and brain-computer interfaces. Indeed, it’s the former that seems to be making a huge difference to the latter, with neural networks seemingly the perfect solution for decoding the minute details of what’s happening with our brainwaves. Still, it shows us just what could be possible down the line as the distance between us and our computers continues to get ever smaller.
Featured image: A researcher connects the brain implant to the supporting hardware of the voice synthesis system. Credit:
UC Berkeley | 17 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8123284",
"author": "wb7ond",
"timestamp": "2025-05-01T14:16:11",
"content": "NuraLink is making good headway in this technology, 3 people have been outfitted with Nuralink.https://www.foxnews.com/health/paralyzed-man-als-third-receive-neuralink-implant-can-type-brainGreat article t... | 1,760,371,559.496492 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/01/a-dual-mirror-system-for-better-cycling-safety/ | A Dual Mirror System For Better Cycling Safety | Donald Papp | [
"Transportation Hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"cycling",
"helmet",
"mirror",
"rear-view"
] | Rear-view mirrors are important safety tools, but [Mike Kelly] observed that cyclists (himself included) faced hurdles to using them effectively. His solution? A helmet-mounted dual-mirror system he’s calling the
Mantis Mirror
that looks eminently DIY-able to any motivated hacker who enjoys cycling.
One mirror for upright body positions, the other for lower positions.
Carefully placed mirrors eliminate blind spots, but a cyclist’s position changes depending on how they are riding and this means mirrors aren’t a simple solution. Mirrors that are aligned just right when one is upright become useless once a cyclist bends down. On top of that, road vibrations have a habit of knocking even the most tightly-cinched mirror out of alignment.
[Mike]’s solution was to attach two small mirrors on a short extension, anchored to a cyclist’s helmet. The bottom mirror provides a solid rear view from an upright position, and the top mirror lets one see backward when in low positions.
[Mike] was delighted with his results, and got enough interest from others that he’s considering a crowdfunding campaign to turn it into a product. In the meantime, we’d love to hear about it if you decide to tinker up your own version.
You can learn all about the Mantis Mirror in the video below, and if you want to see the device itself a bit clearer, you can see that in some
local news coverage
. | 54 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8123252",
"author": "Bob the builder",
"timestamp": "2025-05-01T11:46:06",
"content": "I don’t wear a helmet when cycling but I was thinking about a sort of similar solution for riding a motorcycle, by having some tiny high def screen connected to a camera on the back of the helmet,... | 1,760,371,559.392978 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/01/gaze-upon-robby-the-robots-mechanical-intricacy/ | Gaze Upon Robby The Robot’s Mechanical Intricacy | Donald Papp | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"prop",
"replica",
"robby the robot"
] | One might be tempted to think that re-creating a film robot from the 1950s would be easy given all the tools and technology available to the modern hobbyist, but as [Mike Ogrinz]’s
quest to re-create Robby the Robot
shows us, there is a lot moving around inside that domed head, and requires careful and clever work.
The “dome gyros” are just one of the complex assemblies, improved over the original design with the addition of things like bearings.
Just as one example, topping Robby’s head is a mechanical assembly known as the
dome gyros
. It looks simple, but as the video (embedded below) shows,
re-creating it involves a load of moving parts
and looks like a fantastic amount of work has gone into it. At least bearings are inexpensive and common nowadays, and not having to meet film deadlines also means one can afford to design things in a way that allows for easier disassembly and maintenance.
Robby the Robot first appeared in the 1956 film
Forbidden Planet
and went on to appear in other movies and television programs. Robby went up for auction in 2017 and luckily [Mike] was able to take tons of reference photos. Combined with other enthusiasts’ efforts, his replica is shaping up nicely.
We’ve seen [Mike]’s work before when he shared his
radioactive
Night Blossoms
which will glow for decades to come. His work on Robby looks amazing, and we can’t wait to see how it progresses. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8123282",
"author": "jbx",
"timestamp": "2025-05-01T14:14:26",
"content": "Robby’s gyros : doneNow let’s work on Robby’s belly whisky factory…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8123316",
"author": "Egghead Larsen",
... | 1,760,371,559.438266 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/30/vintage-stereo-stack-becomes-neat-pc-case/ | Vintage Stereo Stack Becomes Neat PC Case | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"Case mod",
"case modding",
"pc",
"Technics"
] | Vintage hi-fi gear has a look and feel all its own. [ThunderOwl] happened to be playing in this space, turning a heavily-modified Technics stereo stack into an awesome neo-retro PC case.
Meet the “TechnicsPC!”
This is good. We like this.
You have to hunt across BlueSky for the goodies, but it’s well worth it. The main build concerned throwing a PC into an old Technics receiver, along with a pair of LCD displays and a bunch of buttons for control. If the big screens weren’t enough of a tell that you’re looking at an anachronism, the USB ports just below the power switch will tip you off. A later addition saw
a former Technics tuner module stripped out and refitted
with card readers and a DVD/CD drive. Perhaps the most era-appropriate addition, though,
is the scrolling LED display on top
. Stuffed inside another tuner module, it’s a super 90s touch that somehow just works.
These days, off-the-shelf computers are so fancy and glowy that DIY casemodding has fallen away from the public consciousness. And yet, every so often, we see a magnificent build like this one that reminds us
just how creative modders can really be
. Video after the break.
“Live test”. All more or less as planned, as “cons” – it does not interrupt ongoing scroll cycle with new stuff, it puts new content info with next cycle, so, kinda “info delays”:
[image or embed]
— ThunderOwl (
@thunderowl.one
)
10 March 2025 at 07:39 | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8123237",
"author": "G-man",
"timestamp": "2025-05-01T09:23:03",
"content": "I’m still running my PC in a Thermaltake DH102https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/htpc-lcd-touchscreen,2129-6.html– I bought it as it fits perfectly in a rack with my amplifier. No one even guesses it’s a ... | 1,760,371,559.546398 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/30/neutron-flux-impact-on-quartz-expansion-rate/ | Neutron Flux Impact On Quartz Expansion Rate | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"neutron",
"Quartz"
] | Radiation-induced volumetric expansion (RIVE) is a concern for any concrete structures that are exposed to neutron flux and other types of radiation that affect crystalline structures within the aggregate. For research facilities and (commercial) nuclear reactors, RIVE is generally considered to be one of the factors that sets a limit on the lifespan of these structures through the cracking that occurs as for example quartz within the concrete undergoes temporary amorphization with a corresponding volume increase. The significance of RIVE within the context of a nuclear power plant is however still poorly studied.
A
recent study
by [Ippei Maruyama] et al. as published in the
Journal of Nuclear Materials
placed material samples in the LVR-15 research reactor in the Czech Republic to expose them to an equivalent neutron flux. What their results show is that at the neutron flux levels that are expected at the biological shield of a nuclear power plant, the healing effect from recrystallization is highly likely to outweigh the damaging effects of amorphization, ergo preventing RIVE damage.
This study
follows earlier research
on the topic at the University of Tokyo by [Kenta Murakami] et al., as well as by Chinese researchers, as in e.g.
[Weiping Zhang] et al.
in
Nuclear Engineering and Technology
. [Murayama] et al. recommend that for validation of these findings concrete samples from decommissioned nuclear plants are to be examined for signs of RIVE.
Heading image: SEM-EDS images of the pristine (left) and the irradiated (right) MC sample. (Credit:
I. Murayama et al
, 2022) | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8123199",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-01T02:05:56",
"content": "Well, now Ireallywant a project where this research would be relevant. :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8123331",
"author": "TG",
"... | 1,760,371,559.663085 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/30/a-new-and-weird-kind-of-typewriter/ | A New And Weird Kind Of Typewriter | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"typewriter"
] | Typewriters aren’t really made anymore in any major quantity, since the computer kind of rained all over its inky parade. That’s not to say you can’t build one yourself though,
as [Toast] did in a very creative fashion.
After being inspired by so many typewriters on YouTube, [Toast] decided they simply had to 3D print one of their own design. They decided to go in a unique direction, eschewing ink ribbons for carbon paper as the source of ink. To create a functional typewriter, they had to develop a typebar mechanism to imprint the paper, as well as a mechanism to move the paper along during typing. The weird thing is the letter selection—the typewriter doesn’t have a traditional keyboard at all. Instead, you select the letter of your choice from a rotary wheel, and then press the key vertically down into the paper. The reasoning isn’t obvious from the outset, but [Toast] explains why this came about after originally hitting a brick wall with a more traditional design.
If you’ve ever wanted to build a typewriter of your own, [Toast]’s example shows that you can have a lot of fun just by having a go and seeing where you end up. We’ve seen
some other neat typewriter hacks over the years,
too. Video after the break.
[Thanks to David Plass for the tip!] | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8123166",
"author": "shiura",
"timestamp": "2025-04-30T23:29:45",
"content": "I just remember DYMO.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8123185",
"author": "anon",
"timestamp": "2025-05-01T00:50:53",
"conte... | 1,760,371,559.618512 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/30/layout-a-pcb-with-tscircuit/ | Layout A PCB With Tscircuit | Al Williams | [
"PCB Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"Hardware Description Language",
"pcb",
"tscircuit"
] | Most of us learned to design circuits with schematics. But if you get to a certain level of complexity, schematics are a pain. Modern designers — especially for digital circuits — prefer to use some kind of hardware description language.
There are a few options to do similar things with PCB layout, including tscircuit. There’s a
walk-through for using it to create an LED matrix
and you can even try it out online, if you like. If you’re more of a visual learner, there’s also an introductory video you can watch below.
The example project imports a Pico microcontroller and some smart LEDs. They do appear graphically, but you don’t have to deal with them graphically. You write “code” to manage the connections. For example:
<trace from={".LED1 .GND"} to="net.GND" />
If that looks like HTML to you, you aren’t wrong. Once you have the schematic, you can do the same kind of thing to lay out the PCB using footprints. If you want to play with the actual design, you can
load it in your browser
and make changes. You’ll note that at the top right, there are buttons that let you view the schematic, the board, a 3D render of the board, a BOM, an assembly drawing, and several other types of output.
Will we use this? We don’t know. Years ago, designers resisted using HDLs for FPGAs, but the bigger FPGAs get, the fewer people want to deal with page after page of schematics. Maybe a better question is: Will you use this? Let us know in the comments.
This
isn’t a new idea
, of course. Time will tell which HDLs will survive and which will whither. | 23 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8123136",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-04-30T20:34:53",
"content": "I dunno gotten pretty lazy with altium netlables and copy paste special for simpler repetitive things like the keyboard example … pretty sure ki-cad can do some similar magic tricks. For complex items maybe... | 1,760,371,559.722037 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/30/floss-weekly-episode-831-lets-have-lunch/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 831: Let’s Have Lunch | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"dns",
"FLOSS Weekly"
] | This week,
Jonathan Bennett
and
Dan Lynch
chat with
Peter van Dijk
about PowerDNS! Is the problem always DNS? How did PowerDNS start? And just how big can PowerDNS scale? Watch to find out!
https://github.com/PowerDNS/
https://github.com/Habbie
https://github.com/voorkant/
https://7bits.nl/journal/
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 | [] | 1,760,371,559.832202 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/29/read-motor-speed-better-by-making-the-rp2040-pio-do-it/ | Read Motor Speed Better By Making The RP2040 PIO Do It | Donald Papp | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"motor speed",
"PIO",
"quadrature encoder",
"rp2040"
] | A quadrature encoder provides a way to let hardware read movement (and direction) of a shaft, and they can be simple, effective, and inexpensive devices. But [Paulo Marques] observed that when it comes to reading motor speeds with them, what works best at high speeds doesn’t work at low speeds, and vice versa. His solution?
PicoEncoder
is a library providing a lightweight and robust method of using the Programmable I/O (PIO) hardware on the RP2040 to get better results, even (or especially) from cheap encoders, and do it
efficiently
.
The results of the sub-step method (blue) resemble a low-pass filter, but is delivered with no delay or CPU burden.
The output of a quadrature encoder is typically two square waves that are out of phase with one another. This data says
whether a shaft is moving, and in what direction
. When used to measure something like a motor shaft, one can also estimate rotation speed. Count how many steps come from the encoder over a period of time, and use that as the basis to calculate something like revolutions per minute.
[Paulo] points out that one issue with this basic method is that the quality depends a lot on how much data one has to work with. But the slower a motor turns, the less data one gets. To work around this, one can use a different calculation optimized for low speeds, but there’s really no single solution that handles high and low speeds well.
Another issue is that readings at the “edges” of step transitions can have a lot of noise. This can be ignored and assumed to average out, but it’s a source of inaccuracy that gets worse at slower speeds. Finally, while an ideal encoder has individual phases that are exactly 50% duty cycle and exactly 90 degrees out of phase with one another. This is almost never actually the case with cheaper encoders. Again, a source of inaccuracy.
[Paulo]’s solution was to roll his own method with the RP2040’s PIO, using a hybrid approach to effect a “sub-step” quadrature encoder. Compared to simple step counting,
PicoEncoder
more carefully tracks transitions to avoid problems with noise, and even accounts for phase size differences present in a particular encoder. The result is a much more accurate calculation of motor speed and position without any delays. Most of the work is done by the PIO of the RP2040, which does the low-level work of counting steps and tracking transitions without any CPU time involved. Try it out the next time you need to read a quadrature encoder for a motor!
The PIO is one of the more interesting pieces of functionality in the RP2040 and it’s great to see it used in a such a clever way. As our own Elliot Williams put it when he
evaluated the RP2040
, the PIO promises never having to bit-bang a solution again. | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122948",
"author": "Bob A.",
"timestamp": "2025-04-29T23:43:26",
"content": "Nice use of the PIO. For those unfamiliar with the PIO, it’s a small piece of IP available in Raspberry Pi Pico SOCs that can clock and manipulate a bitstream under the control of its own tiny instruction ... | 1,760,371,559.792508 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/29/crossing-commodore-signal-cables-on-purpose/ | Crossing Commodore Signal Cables On Purpose | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"analog",
"audio",
"c64",
"chiptune",
"commodore 64",
"filter",
"video"
] | On a Commodore 64, the computer is normally connected to a monitor with one composite video cable and to an audio device with a second, identical (although uniquely colored) cable. The signals passed through these cables are analog, each generated by a dedicated chip on the computer. Many C64 users may have accidentally swapped these cables when first setting up their machines, but [Matthias] wondered if this could be done purposefully —
generating video with the audio hardware and vice versa
.
Getting an audio signal from the video hardware on the Commodore is simple enough. The chips here operate at well over the needed frequency for even the best audio equipment, so it’s a relatively straightforward matter of generating an appropriate output wave. The audio hardware, on the other hand, is much less performative by comparison. The only component here capable of generating a fast enough signal to be understood by display hardware of the time is actually the volume register, although due to a filter on the chip the output is always going to be a bit blurred. But this setup is good enough to generate large text and some other features as well.
There are a few other constraints here as well, namely that loading the demos that [Matthias] has written takes so long that the audio can’t be paused while this happens and has to be bit-banged the entire time. It’s an in-depth project that shows mastery of the retro hardware, and for some other C64 demos
take a look at this one which is written in just 256 bytes
.
Thanks to [Jan] for the tip! | 19 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122915",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2025-04-29T21:02:19",
"content": "“so long that the audio can’t be paused while this happens and has to be bit-banged the entire time.”Do you mean the audio that is video or the video that is audio?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,371,559.885143 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/29/theres-an-venusian-spacecraft-coming-our-way/ | There’s A Venusian Spacecraft Coming Our Way | Jenny List | [
"Space"
] | [
"cosmos-482",
"spacecraft",
"Venera"
] | It’s not unusual for redundant satellites, rocket stages, or other spacecraft to re-enter the earth’s atmosphere. Usually they pass unnoticed or generate a spectacular light show, and very rarely a few pieces make it to the surface of the planet. Coming up though is something entirely different,
a re-entry of a redundant craft in which the object in question might make it to the ground intact
. To find out more about the story we have to travel back to the early 1970s, and Kosmos-482. It was a failed Soviet Venera mission, and since its lander was heavily over-engineered to survive entry into the Venusian atmosphere there’s a fascinating prospect that it might survive Earth re-entry.
This model of the earlier Venera 7 probe shows the heavy protection to survive entry into the Venusian atmosphere. Emerezhko,
CC BY-SA 4.0
.
At the time of writing the re-entry is expected to happen on the 10th of May, but as yet due to its shallow re-entry angle it is difficult to predict where it might land. It is thought to be about a metre across and to weigh just under 500 kilograms, and its speed upon landing is projected to be between 60 and 80 metres per second. Should it hit land rather than water then, its remains are thought to present an immediate hazard only in its direct path.
Were it to be recovered it would be a fascinating artifact of the Space Race, and once the inevitable question of its ownership was resolved — do marine salvage laws apply in space? –we’d expect it to become a world class museum exhibit. If that happens, we look forward to bringing you our report if possible.
This craft
isn’t the only surviving relic of the Space Race
out there, though it may be the only one we have a chance of seeing up-close.
Some of the craft from that era are even still alive
.
Header: Moini,
CC0
. | 29 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122893",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2025-04-29T18:45:28",
"content": "we look forward to bringing you our report if possible.LOL I look forward to reading it if possible.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122896",
"author... | 1,760,371,560.197896 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/29/the-diy-1982-picture-phone/ | The DIY 1982 Picture Phone | Al Williams | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Phone Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"picture phone",
"radio electronics",
"SSTV"
] | If you’ve only been around for the Internet age, you may not realize that Hackaday is the successor of electronics magazines. In their heyday, magazines like Popular Electronics, Radio Electronics, and Elementary Electronics brought us projects to build. Hacks, if you will. Just like Hackaday, not all readers are at the same skill level. So you’d see some hat with a blinking light on it, followed by some super-advanced project like a TV typewriter or a computer.
Or a picture phone
.
In 1982, Radio Electronics, a major magazine of the day, showed plans for building a picture phone. All you needed was a closed-circuit TV camera, a TV, a telephone, and about two shoeboxes crammed full of parts.
Like many picture phones of its day, it was stretching the definition a little. It actually used ham radio-style slow scan TV (SSTV) to send a frame of video about once every eight seconds. That’s not backwards. The frame rate was 0.125 Hz. And while the resulting 128 x 256 image would seem crude today, this was amazing high tech for 1982.
Slow Scan for the Win
Hams had been playing with SSTV for a long time. Early experiments used high-persistence CRTs, so you’d see the image for as long as the phosphor kept glowing. You also had to sit still for the entire eight seconds to send the picture.
It didn’t take long for hams to take advantage of modern circuits to capture the slow input and convert it to a normal TV signal for as long as you wanted, and that’s what this box does as well. Early “scan converters” used video storage tubes that were rejects (because a perfect new one might have cost $50,000). However, cheap digital memory quickly replaced these storage tubes, making SSTV more practical and affordable.
One of Mitsubishi’s Picture Phones
Still, it never really caught on for telephone networks. A few years later, a few commercial products offered similar tech. Atari made a phone that was bought up by Mitsubishi and sold as the Luna, for example, around 1986. Mitsubishi, Sony, and others tried, unsuccessfully, to get the market to accept these slow picture phones. Between the cost of making a call and a minimum of $400 to buy one, though, it was a hard sell.
You might think this sounds like a weekend project with a Pi-Cam, and you are probably right if you did it now. But in 1982, the amount of work it took to make this work was significant. It helped that it used MM5280 dynamic RAM chips, which held a whopping 4,096 bits (not bytes) of memory. The project needed 16 of the chips, which, at the time, were about $5 each. Remember that $80 in those days was a lot more than $80 today, and you had to buy the rest of the parts, the camera (the article estimates that’s $150, alone), and so on. This wasn’t a poor high school student project.
Robot Kits
You could buy entire kits or just key parts, which was a common thing for magazines to do in those days. The kits came from Robot Research, which was known for making SSTV equipment for hams, so it makes sense that they knew how to do this. The author mentions that “this project is not for beginners.” He explains there are nearly 100 ICs on a “tightly-packed double-sided PC board.”
The device had two primary inputs: fast scan from the camera and slow scan from the phone line. Both could be digitized and stored in the memory array. The memory can also output fast scan TV for the monitor or slow scan for the phone line. Obviously, the system was half duplex. If you were sending a picture, you wouldn’t expect to receive a picture at the same time.
This is just the main board!
The input conversion is done with comparators for speed. Luckily, the conversion is only four bits of monochrome, so you only need 16 (IC73-80) to get the job done. The memory speed was also a concern. Each memory chip’s enable line activated while the previous chip’s was half way through with a cycle.
Since there is no microcontroller, the design includes plenty of gates, op amps, bipolar transistors, and the like. The adjacent picture shows just the device’s main board!
Lots of Parts
If you want to dig into the details, you’ll also want to look at
part 2
. There’s more theory of operation there and the parts list. The article notes that you could record the tones to a cassette tape for later playback, but that you’d “probably need a device from your local phone company to couple the Picture Phone to their lines.” Ah, the days of the
DAA
.
They even noted in part 2 that connecting a home-built Picture Phone directly to the phone lines was illegal, which was true at the time.
Part 3
talks even more about the phone interface (and, that same issue has a very cool roundup of all the computers you could buy in 1982, ranging from $100 to $6,000).
Part 4
was all about alignment and yet more about the phone interface.
Alignment shouldn’t have been too hard. The highest tone on the phone line was 2,300 Hz. While there are many SSTV standards today for color images, this old-fashioned scheme was simple: 2,300 Hz for white and 1,500 Hz for black. A 1,200 Hz tone provided sync signals. Interestingly, sharp jumps in color could create artifacts, so the converters use a gray code to minimize unnecessary sharp jumps in value.
The Phone Book
It wouldn’t make sense to make only one of these, so we wonder how many pairs were built. The magazine did ask people to report if they had one and intended to publish a picture phone directory. We don’t know if that ever happened, but given what a long-distance phone call cost in 1982, we imagine that idea didn’t catch on.
The
video phone
was long a dream, and we still don’t have exactly what people imagined. We would really like to replicate this picture phone on a PC using
GNU Radio
, for example. | 19 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122876",
"author": "jbx",
"timestamp": "2025-04-29T17:32:37",
"content": "In the 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” director S. Kurbrick introduced the visual telephone in a scene with Dr. Floyd and his daughter from the space station.At that time, no one, not even Kurbrick, had ye... | 1,760,371,562.261308 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/29/peeking-at-poking-health-tech-the-g7-and-the-libre-3/ | Peeking At Poking Health Tech: The G7 And The Libre 3 | Heidi Ulrich | [
"chemistry hacks",
"Medical Hacks",
"Teardown"
] | [
"cgm",
"diabetes",
"diabetics",
"glucose",
"monitor"
] | Continuous glucose meters (CGMs) aren’t just widgets for the wellness crowd. For many, CGMs are real-time feedback machines for the body, offering glucose trendlines that help people rethink how they eat. They allow diabetics to continue their daily life without stabbing their fingertips several times a day, in the most inconvenient places.
This video by [Becky Stern]
is all about comparing two of the most popular continuous glucose monitors (CGMs): the Abbott Libre 3 and the Dexcom G7.
Both the Libre 3 and the G7 come with spring-loaded applicators and stick to the upper arm. At first glance they seem similar, but the differences run deep. The Libre 3 is the minimalist of both: two plastic discs sandwiching the electronics. The G7, in contrast, features an over-molded shell that suggests a higher production cost, and perhaps, greater robustness. The G7 needs a button push to engage, which users describe as slightly clumsy compared to the Libre’s simpler poke-and-go design. The nuance: G7’s ten-day lifespan means more waste than the fourteen-day Libre, yet the former allows for longer submersion in water, if that’s your passion.
While these devices are primarily intended for people with diabetes, they’ve quietly been adopted by a growing tribe of biohackers and curious minds who are eager to explore their own metabolic quirks. In February, we featured
a dissection of the Stelo CGM
, cracking open its secrets layer by layer. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122875",
"author": "JAL4JC",
"timestamp": "2025-04-29T17:30:11",
"content": "Man. With that awesome title, I really thought a BASIC reference was coming.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122922",
"author": "Dan",
"times... | 1,760,371,562.423358 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/29/keebin-with-kristina-the-one-with-the-protractor-keyboard/ | Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Protractor Keyboard | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"aluminium keyboard",
"AR-60%",
"keyboard gun",
"Malling-Hansen Takygraph",
"protractor",
"protractor keyboard",
"research battlestation",
"Takygraf",
"Takygraph",
"the Cleaver keyboard"
] | Don’t you love it when the title track is the first one on the album?
I had to single out this adjustable keyboard called the Protractor
, because look at it! The whole thing moves, you know. Go look at the gallery.
Image by [BFB_Workshop] via
reddit
If you use a true split, even if you never leave the house, you know the pain of losing the good angle and/or separation you had going on for whatever reason. Not only does this monoblock split solve that simply by being a monoblock split, you can always find the right angle you had via the built-in angle finder.
[BFB_Workshop] used a nice!nano v2, but you could use any ZMK-supported board with the same dimensions. This 5 x 12 has 60 Gateron KS-33 switches, which it was made for, and has custom keycaps. You can, of course, see all the nice, neat ribbon cable wiring through the clear PLA, which is a really great touch.
This bad boy is flat enough that you can use the table as your palm rest. To me, that doesn’t sound so comfortable, but then again, I like key wells and such. I’d still love to try a Protractor, because it looks quite interesting to type on. If you want to build one,
the files and instructions are available on Printables
.
Present Arms: the AR-60%
Image by [Sli22ard] via
reddit
Yes I stole that joke, sort of. Don’t shoot! Anyway, as [Sli22ard] asks,
does your keyboard have a mil-spec stock?
I’m guessing no, although you might have a knife nearby. I myself have a fancy-handled butter knife for opening mail.
This is [Sli22ard]’s latest “abomination”, and the best part is that the MOE fixed carbine stock folds up so that the whole thing fits on the ever-important keyboard display. (Click to the second picture and be sure to admire the Dreamcast that was in storage for however long.)
The case is a
Keysme Pic60
, custom Cerakoted, with a
4pplet waffling60 PCB
within its walls. That case is meant to have things hanging off the upper left corner, so that must have been a great place to start as far as connecting up the stock.
[Sli22ard] used Gateron Type R switches and a NovelKeys Cream Arc switch for the Spacebar. Most of the keycaps are GMK Striker, with the 10u Spacebar from Awekeys.
I particularly like the midnight-y keycaps along with that monster gold Spacebar. [Sli22ard] says it thocks like nobody’s business, and I believe it.
The Centerfold: the Quiet Type
Image by [Pleasant_Dot_189] via
reddit
[Pleasant_Dot_189] sure has a pleasant
research-only battlestation
, don’t they? Sure, there are four screens, but there’s no RGB, and the only plant can safely be ignored for weeks at a time. Why four screens? This way, [Pleasant_Dot_189] doesn’t have to switch between tasks or tabs and can just write as they work on their fifth book.
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 Malling-Hansen Takygraf
The astute among you will remember that we’ve covered the Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, the more well-known offering from M-H. Well, this here is
the Malling-Hansen Takygraf
(or Takygraph, depending upon where you are in the world), and it was quite the writing machine. Only one was created, and its whereabouts are unknown.
Image via
The Malling-Hansen Society
Rasmus Malling-Hansen’s intention was to create a typewriter that could type at the speed of human speech. And he succeeded — the Takygraf could reach speeds of 1200 characters per minute. He hoped the Takygraf would be used for stenography.
The VP of the Malling-Hansen Society describes the function of the Takygraf as follows: “The first Takygraf from 1872 was combined with a writing ball but the bottom of each piston forms a blunt point and so it forms only impressions in the paper. The paper band was prepared to conduct electricity. Under the paper band there were metal points which were connected to electromagnets. The form impressions in the paper band are brought in contact with the fixed metal points under the paper as the paper moves along and so the corresponding electromagnets are brought into action. When the electromagnets attracted the keepers, then the types made their impressions on the paper band (through the invention of a colored or carbonized strip of paper).
In the year 1874 follows a modified Takygraf combined with a writing ball but instead of the prepared paper (to conduct electricity) and the form impressions in the paper Rasmus Malling-Hansen developed a mechanical memory-unit, which contacts the electromagnets in the right time to make the needed type impressions on the paper band. It was possible to write with this brilliant invention as fast as we talk.”
Be sure to visit
this fantastic model viewer of the Takygraph
on your way out.
Finally, a Keyboard for Metalheads
Actually,
the Cleaver
is another aluminium keyboard, not
the Icebreaker from a couple Keebins ago
. But they’re from the same company, and the idea is basically the same. Aluminium wherever possible, and tiny, laser-cut holes that make up the legends. At least these are more legible.
Image by Serene Industries via
Yanko Design
And, whereas the Icebreaker definitely doubled as bludgeoning device, the Cleaver is much slimmer and more streamlined. Both are machined from a single block of aluminium.
Much like its predecessor, the Cleaver is a Hall-effect keyboard, which I would really like to type on someday while I consider how they can never really wear out in the traditional switch sense.
Inside the metal block, the electronics are huddled away from its raw power inside of a silicone core. This is meant to enhance the typing acoustics, protect against dust, sweat, and coffee, and has the added effect of popping out the underside to be a nice, non-slip foot.
Unlike the Icebreaker, which
started
at $2100, the pre-order price for the Cleaver is a mere $850. And to get this one in black? Still just $850. I’m curious to know how much it weighs, since it’s much more portable-looking. The Cleaver would be an icebreaker for sure.
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
. | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122838",
"author": "deshipu",
"timestamp": "2025-04-29T14:19:00",
"content": "Thinking about all the lard scraped from the fingers that is going to accumulate in those tiny metal holes is making me feel unwell.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,561.85461 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/29/hydrogen-trains-not-the-success-germany-hoped-they-would-be/ | Hydrogen Trains: Not The Success Germany Hoped They Would Be | Jenny List | [
"green hacks",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"hydrogen train",
"hydrogen transport"
] | As transport infrastructure in Europe moves toward a zero-carbon future, there remain a number of railway lines which have not been electrified. The question of replacing their diesel traction with greener alternatives, and there are a few different options for a forward looking railway company to choose from. In Germany the Rhine-Main railway took delivery of a fleet of 27 Alstom hydrogen-powered multiple units for local passenger services, but
as it turns out they have not been a success
(German language,
Google translation
.). For anyone enthused as we are about alternative power, this bears some investigation.
It seems that this time the reliability of the units and the supply of spare parts was the issue, rather than the difficulty of fuel transport as seen in other failed hydrogen transport problems, but whatever the reason it seems we’re more often writing about hydrogen’s failures than its successes. We really want to believe in a hydrogen future in which ultra clean trains and busses zip around on hydrogen derived from wind power, but sadly that has never seemed so far away. Instead trains seem inevitably to be following cars, and
more successful trials using battery units
point the way towards their being the future.
We’re sure that more hydrogen transport projects will come and go before either the technological problems are overcome, or they fade away as impractical
as the atmospheric railway
. Meanwhile we’d suggest hydrogen transport as the example
when making value judgements about technology
. | 95 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122796",
"author": "rasz_pl",
"timestamp": "2025-04-29T11:25:17",
"content": "It seems that this time the reliability of the units and the supply of spare parts was the issue, rather than the difficulty of fuel transport“However, trips and connections have to be canceled time and a... | 1,760,371,562.199998 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/30/supercon-2024-photonics-optical-stack-for-smart-glasses/ | Supercon 2024: Photonics/Optical Stack For Smart-Glasses | Lewin Day | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"2024 Hackaday Supercon",
"ar",
"augmented reality",
"cons",
"smart glasses",
"talks"
] | Smart glasses are a complicated technology to work with. The smart part is usually straightforward enough—microprocessors and software are perfectly well understood and easy to integrate into even very compact packages. It’s the glasses part that often proves challenging—figuring out the right optics to create a workable visual interface that sits mere millimeters from the eye.
Dev Kennedy is no stranger to this world.
He came to the 2024 Hackaday Supercon to give a talk
and educate us all on photonics, optical stacks, and the technology at play in the world of smart glasses.
Good Optics
Dev’s talk begins with an apology. He notes that it’s not possible to convey an entire photonics and optics syllabus in a short presentation, which is understandable enough. His warning, regardless, is that his talk is as dense as possible to maximise the insight into the technical information he has to offer.
Things get heavy fast, as Dev dives into a breakdown of all the different basic technologies out there that can be used for building smart glasses. On one slide, he lays them all out with pros and cons across the board. There are a wide range of different illumination and projection technologies, everything from micro-OLED displays to fancy liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS) devices that are used to create an image with the aid of laser illumination. When you’re building smart glasses, though, that’s only half the story.
Dev explains the various optical technologies involved in AR and their strengths and weaknesses.
Once you’ve got something to make an image, you then need something to put it on in front of the eye. Dev goes on to talk about different techniques for doing this, from reflective waveguides to the amusingly-named birdbath combiners. Ultimately, you’re hunting for something that provides a clear and visible image to the user in all conditions, while still providing a great view of the world around them, too. This can be particularly challenging in high-brightness conditions, like walking around outdoors in daylight.
The talk also focuses on a particular bugbear for Dev—the fact that AR and VR aren’t treated as differently as they should be. “VR is a stack of pancakes,” says Dev. “Why is it a stack of pancakes? It’s because all of the PCBs, the optics, the emissions source for the light—is in front of the user’s nose.” Because VR is just about beaming images into the eye, with no regard for the outside world, it’s a little more straightforward. “It’s basically a stack of technology outward from the eye relief point to the back of the device.” Dev explains.
When it comes to AR, though, the solutions must be more complicated. “What’s different is AR is actually an archer,” says Dev, referring to the way such devices must fling light around. “What an archer does is it shoots light around the side of the arm, and it might have to bend it one way or another, up on the crossbar and spread it out through a waveguide, and at the very exist point… at the coupling out portion… the light has to make one more right turn… towards your eye.” Ultimately, the optics and display hardware involved tend to diverge a long way from what can be used in VR displays. “These technologies are fundamentally different,” says Dev. “It strains me to great extent that people kind of batch them into the same category.”
Snapchat’s fifth-generation Spectacles have some interesting optics, but they’re perhaps not quite market ready in Dev’s opinion.
The talk also steps away from raw hardware chat, and covers some of the devices on the market, and those that left it years ago. Dev makes casual mention of Google Glass, spawned all the way back in 2013, before also noting developments Microsoft made with Hololens over the year. As for the current state of play, Dev namechecks Project Orion from Meta, as well as the fifth-generation of Snapchat Spectacles.
He gives particular credit to Meta for their work on refining input modalities that work with the smart glasses interrface paradigm. Meanwhile, he notes Snapchat needs work on “comfort, weight, and looks,” given how bulky their current product is. Overall, with these products, there are problems to be overcome before they can really become mainstream tools for every day use. “The important part is the relatability of these devices,” Dev goes on to explain. “We don’t see that just yet, as a $25,000 device from Meta and something that is too thick to be socially acceptable from Snapchat.
Fundamentally, as Dev’s talk highlights, AR remains a technology still at a nascent stage of development. It’s worth remembering—it took decades to develop computers that could fit in our pockets (smartphones) or on our wrists (smartwatches). Expect smart glasses to actually go mainstream as soon as the technical and optical issues are worked out, and the software and interface solutions actually help people in day to day life. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8123125",
"author": "Evaprototype",
"timestamp": "2025-04-30T19:24:21",
"content": "Are the slides documented somewhere?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8123192",
"author": "Lewin Day",
"timestamp": "2025-05-01... | 1,760,371,561.797076 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/30/radio-repeaters-in-the-sky/ | Radio Repeaters In The Sky | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"antenna",
"encryption",
"geostationary",
"military",
"radio",
"repeater",
"space",
"yagi-uda"
] | One of the first things that an amateur radio operator is likely to do once receiving their license is grab a dual-band handheld and try to make contacts with a local repeater. After the initial contacts, though, many hams move on to more technically challenging aspects of the hobby. One of those being activating space-based repeaters instead of their terrestrial counterparts.
[saveitforparts] takes a look at some more esoteric uses
of these radio systems in his latest video.
There are plenty of satellite repeaters flying around the world that are actually legal for hams to use, with most being in low-Earth orbit and making quick passes at predictable times. But there are others, generally operated by the world’s militaries, that are in higher geostationary orbits which allows them to serve a specific area continually. With a specialized three-dimensional Yagi-Uda antenna on loan, [saveitforparts] listens in on some of these signals. Some of it is presumably encrypted military activity, but there’s also some pirate radio and state propaganda stations.
There are a few other types of radio repeaters operating out in space as well, and not all of them are in geostationary orbit. Turning the antenna to the north, [saveitforparts] finds a few Russian satellites in an orbit specifically designed to provide polar regions with a similar radio service. These sometimes will overlap with terrestrial radio like TV or air traffic control and happily repeat them at brief intervals.
[saveitforparts] has plenty of videos looking at other satellite communications, including
grabbing images from Russian weather satellites
,
using leftover junk to grab weather data from geostationary orbit
, and
accessing the Internet via satellite with 80s-era technology
. | 10 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8123134",
"author": "D",
"timestamp": "2025-04-30T20:09:49",
"content": "I’m assuming these are old satellites, and that a modern military communication device would have a mechanism to prevent it from repeating pirate radio or civilian tv? I.E. a digital signal with authentication?... | 1,760,371,561.912702 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/30/a-gentle-introduction-to-cobol/ | A Gentle Introduction To COBOL | Maya Posch | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Slider",
"Software Development"
] | [
"cobol",
"gcc-cobol",
"gnucobol"
] | As the Common Business Oriented Language, COBOL has a long and storied history. To this day it’s quite literally the financial bedrock for banks, businesses and financial institutions, running largely unnoticed by the world on mainframes and similar high-reliability computer systems. That said, as a domain-specific language targeting boring business things it doesn’t quite get the attention or hype as general purpose programming or scripting languages. Its main characteristic in the public eye appears be that it’s ‘boring’.
Despite this, COBOL is a very effective language for writing data transactions, report generating and related tasks. Due to its narrow focus on business applications, it gets one started with very little fuss, is highly self-documenting, while providing native support for decimal calculations, and a range of I/O access and database types, even with mere files. Since version 2002 COBOL underwent a number of modernizations, such as free-form code, object-oriented programming and more.
Without further ado, let’s fetch an open-source COBOL toolchain and run it through its paces with a light COBOL tutorial.
Spoiled For Choice
It used to be that if you wanted to tinker with COBOL, you pretty much had to either have a mainframe system with OS/360 or similar kicking around, or, starting in 1999, hurl yourself at setting up a mainframe system using the
Hercules
mainframe emulator. Things got a lot more hobbyist & student friendly in 2002 with the release of
GnuCOBOL
, formerly OpenCOBOL, which translates COBOL into C code before compiling it into a binary.
While serviceable, GnuCOBOL is not a compiler, and does not claim any level of standard adherence despite scoring quite high against the NIST test suite. Fortunately, The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) just got updated with a brand-new COBOL frontend (gcobol) in the 15.1 release. The only negative is that for now it is
Linux-only
, but if your distribution of choice already has it in the repository, you can fetch it there easily. Same for Windows folk who have WSL set up, or who can use GnuCOBOL with MSYS2.
With either compiler installed, you are now ready to start writing COBOL. The best part of this is that we can completely skip talking about the
Job Control Language
(JCL), which is an eldritch horror that one would normally be exposed to on IBM OS/360 systems and kin. Instead we can just use GCC (or GnuCOBOL) any way we like, including calling it directly on the CLI, via a Makefile or integrated in an IDE if that’s your thing.
Hello COBOL
As is typical, we start with the
‘Hello World’ example
as a first look at a COBOL application:
IDENTIFICATION
DIVISION
.
PROGRAM-ID
.
hello-world
.
PROCEDURE
DIVISION
.
DISPLAY
"Hello, world!".
STOP RUN.
Assuming we put this in a file called
hello_world.cob
, this can then be compiled with e.g. GnuCOBOL:
cobc -x -free hello_world.cob
.
The
-x
indicates that an executable binary is to be generated, and
-free
that the provided source uses free format code, meaning that we aren’t bound to specific column use or sequence numbers. We’re also free to use lowercase for all the verbs, but having it as uppercase can be easier to read.
From this small example we can see the most important elements, starting with the
identification division
with the program ID and optionally elements like the author name, etc. The program code is found in the
procedure division
, which here contains a single
display
verb that outputs the example string. Of note is the use of the period (.) as a statement terminator.
At the end of the application we indicate this with
stop run.
, which terminates the application, even if called from a sub program.
Hello Data
As fun as a ‘hello world’ example is, it doesn’t give a lot of details about COBOL, other than that it’s quite succinct and uses plain English words rather than symbols. Things get more interesting when we start looking at the aspects which define this domain specific language, and which make it so relevant today.
Few languages support decimal (fixed point) calculations, for example. In this
COBOL Basics project
I captured a number of examples of this and related features. The main change is the addition of the
data division
following the identification division:
DATA DIVISION.
WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.
01 A PIC 99V99 VALUE 10.11.
01 B PIC 99V99 VALUE 20.22.
01 C PIC 99V99 VALUE 00.00.
01 D PIC $ZZZZV99 VALUE 00.00.
01 ST PIC $*(5).99 VALUE 00.00.
01 CMP PIC S9(5)V99 USAGE COMP VALUE 04199.04.
01 NOW PIC 99/99/9(4) VALUE 04102034.
The
data division
is unsurprisingly where you define the data used by the program. All variables used are defined within this division, contained within the
working-storage section
. While seemingly overwhelming, it’s fairly easily explained, starting with the two digits in front of each variable name. This is the
data level
and is how COBOL structures data, with
01
being the highest (root) level, with up to 49 levels available to create hierarchical data.
This is followed by the variable name, up to
30 characters,
and then the
PICTURE
(or
PIC
) clause. This specifies the type and size of an elementary data item. If we wish to define a decimal value, we can do so as two numeric characters (represented by
9
) followed by an implied decimal point
V
, with two decimal numbers (
99
). As shorthand we can use e.g.
S9(5)
to indicate a signed value with 5 numeric characters. There a few more special characters, such as an asterisk which replaces leading zeroes and
Z
for zero suppressing.
The
value
clause does what it says on the tin: it assigns the value defined following it to the variable. There is however a gotcha here, as can be seen with the
NOW
variable that gets a value assigned, but due to the
PIC
format is turned into a formatted date (
04/10/2034
).
Within the
procedure division
these variables are subjected to addition (
ADD A TO B GIVING C.
), subtraction with rounding (
SUBTRACT A FROM B GIVING C ROUNDED.
), multiplication (
MULTIPLY A BY CMP
.) and division (
DIVIDE CMP BY 20 GIVING ST.
).
Finally, there are a few different internal formats, as defined by
USAGE
: these are computational (COMP) and display (the default). Here COMP stores the data as binary, with a variable number of bytes occupied, somewhat similar to
char
,
short
and
int
types in C. These internal formats are mostly useful to save space and to speed up calculations.
Hello Business
In
a previous article
I went over the reasons why a domain specific language like COBOL cannot be realistically replaced by a general language. In that same article I discussed the
Hello Business project
that I had written in COBOL as a way to gain some familiarity with the language. That particular project should be somewhat easy to follow with the information provided so far. New are mostly file I/O, loops, the use of
perform
and of course the Report Writer, which is probably best understood by reading the
IBM Report Writer Programmer’s Manual
(PDF).
Going over the entire code line by line would take a whole article by itself, so I will leave it as an exercise for the reader unless there is somehow a strong demand by our esteemed readers for additional COBOL tutorial articles.
Suffice it to say that there is a lot more functionality in COBOL beyond these basics. The
IBM ILE COBOL reference
(PDF), the
IBM Mainframer COBOL tutorial
, the
Wikipedia entry
and others give a pretty good overview of many of these features, which includes object-oriented COBOL, database access, heap allocation, interaction with other languages and so on.
Despite being only a novice COBOL programmer at this point, I have found this DSL to be very easy to pick up once I understood some of the oddities about the syntax, such as the use of data levels and the
PIC
formats. It is my hope that with this article I was able to share some of the knowledge and experiences I gained over the past weeks during my COBOL crash course, and maybe inspire others to also give it a shot. Let us know if you do! | 70 | 37 | [
{
"comment_id": "8123057",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2025-04-30T14:09:43",
"content": "Nice illustration for the Title!Thanks Joe Kim!(now I’ll read the article…)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8123062",
... | 1,760,371,562.531973 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/30/terminal-daw-does-it-in-style/ | Terminal DAW Does It In Style | Fenix Guthrie | [
"Linux Hacks",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"DAW",
"digital audio",
"digital music",
"music hacks",
"terminal"
] | As any Linux chat room or forum will tell you, the most powerful tool to any Linux user is a terminal emulator. Just about every program under the sun has a command line alternative, be it CAD, note taking, or web browsing. Likewise, the digital audio workstation (DAW) is the single most important tool to anyone making music. Therefore, [unspeaker] decided the two should, at last, be combined with a
terminal based DAW called Tek
.
Tek functions similarly to other DAWs, albeit with keyboard only input. For anyone used to working in Vim or Emacs (we ask you keep the inevitable text editor comment war civil), Tek will be very intuitive. Currently, the feature set is fairly spartan, but plans exist to add keybinds for save/load, help, and more. The program features several modes including a multi-track sequencer/sampler called the “arranger.” Each track in the arranger is color coded with a gradient of colors generated randomly at start for a fresh look every time.
Modern audio workflows often span across numerous programs, and Tek was built with this in mind. It can take MIDI input and output from the JACK Audio Connection Kit, and plans also exist to create a plugin server so Tek could be used with other DAWs like Ardor or Zrythm. Moreover, being a terminal program opens possibilities for complicated
shell scripting and other such Linux-fu.
Maybe a terminal DAW is not your thing, so make sure to
check out this physical one instead! | 30 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8123037",
"author": "Harvie.CZ",
"timestamp": "2025-04-30T12:34:39",
"content": "I’ve also found two similar projects:https://github.com/danfrz/PLEBTrackerhttps://zuggamasta.de/projects/miditracker/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_i... | 1,760,371,561.991923 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/30/building-an-nrf52840-and-battery-powered-zigbee-gate-sensor/ | Building An NRF52840 And Battery-Powered Zigbee Gate Sensor | Maya Posch | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"nRF52840",
"zigbee"
] | Recently
[Glen Akins] reported on Bluesky
that the Zigbee-based sensor he had made for his garden’s rear gate was still going strong after a Summer and Winter on the original 2450 lithium coin cell. The construction plans and design for the unit are
detailed in a blog post
. At the core is the
MS88SF2
SoM by Minew, which features a Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 SoC that provides the Zigbee RF feature as well as the usual MCU shenanigans.
Previously [Glen] had created a similar system that featured buttons to turn the garden lights on or off, as nobody likes stumbling blindly through a dark garden after returning home. Rather than having to fumble around for a button, the system should detect when said rear gate is opened. This would send a notification to [Glen]’s phone as well as activate the garden lights if it’s dark outside.
Although using a reed relay switch seemed like an obvious solution to replace the buttons, holding it closed turned out to require too much power. After looking at a few commercial examples, he settled for a Hall effect sensor solution with the Ti DRV5032FB in a TO-92 package.
Whereas the average person would just have put in a PIR sensor-based solution, this Zigbee solution does come with a lot more smart home creds, and does not require fumbling around with a smartphone or yelling at a voice assistant to turn the garden lights on. | 23 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8123011",
"author": "Carl Breen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-30T08:58:22",
"content": "Makes me almost wonder if he could have put a solar cell and energy harvesting chip in there and use a rechargeable battery. Of course his design and power profiling in the in-depth article is pure gen... | 1,760,371,562.376632 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/29/back-to-reality-with-the-time-brick/ | Back To Reality With The Time Brick | Bryan Cockfield | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"design",
"display",
"error handling",
"ESP-01",
"weather",
"wifi"
] | There are a lot of distractions in daily life, especially with all the different forms of technology and their accompanying algorithms vying for our attention in the modern world. [mar1ash] makes the same observation about our shared experiences fighting to stay sane with all these push notifications and alerts, and wanted something a little simpler that can just tell time and perhaps a few other things.
Enter the time brick
.
The time brick is a simple way of keeping track of the most basic of things in the real world: time and weather. The device has no buttons and only a small OLED display. Based on an ESP-01 module and housed in a LEGO-like enclosure, the USB-powered clock sits quietly by a bed or computer with no need for any user interaction at all. It gets its information over a Wi-Fi connection configured in the code running on the device, and cycles through not only time, date, and weather but also a series of pre-programmed quotes of a surreal nature, since part of [mar1ash]’s goals for this project was to do something just a little bit outside the norm.
There are a few other quirks in this tiny device as well, including animations for the weather display, a “night mode” that’s automatically activated to account for low-light conditions, and the ability to easily handle WiFi drops and other errors without crashing. All of the project’s code is also available
on its GitHub page
. As far as design goes, it’s an excellent demonstration that successful projects have to avoid feature creep,
and that doing one thing well is often a better design philosophy than adding needless complications
. | 8 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122998",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-04-30T08:17:32",
"content": "EARTH HAS 4 CORNER SIMULTANEOUS 4-DAY TIME CUBE IN ONLY 24 HOUR ROTATION.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8123024",
"author": "Bobtato",
... | 1,760,371,562.309155 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/29/comparing-ai-for-basic-plant-care-with-human-brown-thumbs/ | Comparing ‘AI’ For Basic Plant Care With Human Brown Thumbs | Maya Posch | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"green hacks"
] | [
"artificial intelligence",
"automated plant care",
"automatic plant watering",
"soil moisture sensor"
] | The future of healthy indoor plants, courtesy of AI. (Credit: [
Liam
])
Like so many of us, [Liam] has a big problem. Whether it’s the curse of Brown Thumbs or something else, those darn houseplants just keep dying despite guides always telling you how
incredibly easy
it is to keep them from wilting with a modicum of care each day, even without opting for succulents or cactuses. In a fit of despair [Liam] decided to pin his hopes on what we have come to accept as the Savior of Humankind, namely ‘AI’, which can stand for a lot of things, but it’s definitely really smart and can even generate pretty pictures, which is something that the average human can not. Hence it’s time to let an LLM
do all the smart plant caring stuff
with ‘PlantMom’.
Since LLMs so far don’t come with physical appendages by default, some hardware had to be plugged together to measure parameters like light, temperature and soil moisture. Add to this a grow light and a water pump and all that remained was to tell the LMM using an extensive prompt, containing Python code, what it should do (keep the the plant alive), and what Python methods are available. All that was left now was to let the Google’s Gemma 3 handle it.
To say that this resulted in a dramatic failure along with what reads like an emotional breakdown on the part of the LLM would be an understatement. The LLM insisted on turning the grow light on when it should be off and had the most erratic watering responses imaginable based on absolutely incorrect interpretations of the ADC data, flipping dry and wet. After this episode the poor chili plant’s soil was absolutely saturated and is still trying to dry out, while the ongoing LLM experiment, with an empty water tank, has the grow light blasting more often than a weed farm.
So far it seems like that the humble state machine’s job is still safe from being taken over by ‘AI’, and not even brown thumb folk can kill plants this efficiently. | 18 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122976",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-04-30T02:36:58",
"content": "It was a practice run. Next, humans.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8123067",
"author": "elmesito",
"timestamp": "2025-04-30T14:43:... | 1,760,371,562.588247 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/29/weird-and-wonderful-vr-mr-text-entry-methods-all-in-one-place/ | Weird And Wonderful VR/MR Text Entry Methods, All In One Place | Donald Papp | [
"Software Hacks",
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"interface",
"MR",
"text entry",
"vr",
"XR"
] | Are you a developer or experimenter pondering options for text entry in virtual or mixed reality? If that’s the case (or you’re merely curious) then here’s the resource you need:
TEXT
, or the
T
ext
E
ntry for
X
R
T
rove. It’s a collection of all the things people have tried when it comes to creating text entry interfaces for virtual and mixed reality (VR/MR) systems, all in a searchable list, complete with animated demonstrations.
There are a lot of different ways to approach this problem, ranging from simple to strange.
VR and MR are new frontiers, and optimal interfaces are still very much a work in progress. If one wishes to avoid reinventing the wheel, it’s a good idea to research prior art. This resource makes it very easy to browse all the stuff people have tried when it comes to text entry.
It’s also fun just to browse and see what kinds of unusual solutions people have come up with that go pretty far beyond “floating over-sized virtual keyboard”.
Lenstouch
for example involves tapping directly on the touch-sensitive front of the headset, and
PalmType
reminds us somewhat of the Palm Pilot’s
Graffiti
system.
It’s a treasure trove of creativity with a nice, searchable interface. Have you come up with your own, or know of a method that isn’t there? Submit it to the collection so others can find it. And if you’re in the process of cooking something up yourself, we have some
DIY handwriting recognition resources
you might find useful. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122785",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-04-29T10:11:42",
"content": "What’s the difference between MR and AR",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122810",
"author": "Ethan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-29T12:32:25",
... | 1,760,371,562.636165 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/28/pi-pico-throws-us-for-a-midi-loop/ | Pi Pico Throws Us For A (MIDI) Loop | Tyler August | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"diy midi",
"electronic music",
"midi loop",
"Pi Pico W",
"Pico-W"
] | Modern micro-controllers are absolute marvels, but it isn’t too many projects use one and nothing else. For an example of such simplicity, take a look at [oyama]’s
Pi Pico MIDI looper
.
It uses the PicoW to interface with a synth via MIDI-BLE, which can be anything from pro equipment to an app on your smartphone. The single control button is already provided by the Pico W– the bootsel button is wearing a lot of hats here, allowing one to select betwixt 4 tracks (all different drums), set the tempo, and input notes on the selected track.
The action is simple: pound out the rhythm for each track, and it will repeat forever, or at least until you press the single button again to change it. There’s also a nice serial interface so you can see what’s going on via UART or USB. For what it does, it is amazingly simple: the BOM is one item, the Pi Pico W. To see it in action, check out the demo video below.
Given the ADC chops on the Pico, it would probably be easy to extend this build with a speaker to make a tiny stand-alone, one-button synth. Or you could add more buttons buttons, but then it’s no longer the beautifully simple single-line BOM project that [oyama] showed us.
Of course, everything is
open-source on GitHub,
under the BSD license, and forking is encouraged, so [oyama] would doubtless be more than happy to see you go nuts hacking and extending this tiny MIDI looper.
We’ve actually seen the MIDI-BLE standard used before,
like this hack adding it to a Eurorack
. If you like synths, you may be interested to see
what it takes to design one from scratch
, sans microcontroller. | 3 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122787",
"author": "matt",
"timestamp": "2025-04-29T10:25:30",
"content": "Very cool, I had a teenage engineering pocket operator and loved it, but this is a much cheaper way to get the same essence, for a lot cheaper!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,371,562.673674 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/28/deriving-the-reactance-formulas/ | Deriving The Reactance Formulas | Al Williams | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"calculus",
"math",
"radian frequency",
"Reactance"
] | If you’ve dealt with reactance, you surely know the two equations for computing inductive and capacitive reactance. But unless you’ve really dug into it, you may only know the formula the way a school kid knows how to find the area of a circle. You have to have a bit of higher math to figure out why the equation is what it is. [Old Hack EE] wanted to figure out why the formulas are what they are, so
he dug in
and shared what he learned in a video you can see below.
The key to understanding this is simple. The reactance describes the voltage over the current through the element, just like resistance. The difference is that a resistance is just a single number. A reactance is a curve that gives you a different value at different frequencies. That’s because current and voltage are out of phase through a reactance, so it isn’t as easy as just dividing.
If you know calculus, the video will make a lot of sense. If you don’t know calculus, you might have a few moments of panic, but you can make it. If you think of frequency in Hertz as cycles per second, all the 2π you find in these equations convert Hz to “radian frequency” since one cycle per second is really 360 degrees of the sine wave in one second. There are 2π radians in a circle, so it makes sense.
We love developing intuition about things that seem fundamental but have a lot of depth to them that we usually ignore. If you need a refresher or a jump start on calculus, it
isn’t as hard
as you probably think. Engineers usually use vectors or
imaginary numbers to deal with reactance
, and we’ve talked about that too, if you want to learn more. | 9 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122770",
"author": "TheJoe",
"timestamp": "2025-04-29T06:11:25",
"content": "I sometimes wonder… this is high school level physics (where I went to school). It is not complex. We are not discussing quantum mechanics. What is it about the education system that people don’t know this... | 1,760,371,563.030424 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/28/eclairm0-the-pocket-notepad/ | EclairM0, The Pocket Notepad | Matt Varian | [
"handhelds hacks"
] | [
"OLED SSD1306",
"SAMD21",
"T9",
"tinygo"
] | Roughly the size of a Tic Tac container,
this project
packs a punch in a compact package. [Matt] sent in this beautifully documented pocket device that brings back great memories of texting on early cellphones.
The EclairM0’s firmware is written in TinyGo, a language he hadn’t used before but found perfect for a microcontroller project where storage space is tight. The 14-button input mimics early phone keypads, using multi-tapping and combo key presses to offer various functions. The small SSD1306 OLED display is another highlight. Building on an earlier CircuitPython project, [Matt] optimized the screen’s performance, speeding up its response time for a snappy user experience. The battery picked was only 3 mm thick, however the protection circuity on the battery added another 2 mm so he moved that protection circuity to the main PCB itself to keep it as thin as initially planned.
Weighing just 15 grams, this lightweight device runs on a SAMD21 microcontroller, which supports USB host functionality. This allows the EclairM0 to act as a keyboard, mouse, or even USB peripherals. Housed in a 3D-printed case, the entire project is open-source, with design and firmware files
available on GitHub
.
We love small
handheld projects
around here and this well-documented, fun pocket device is no exception, if you want your own he has a page dedicated to helping you
build a EclairM0
. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122766",
"author": "Peter",
"timestamp": "2025-04-29T05:10:09",
"content": "I’m impressed by the elegant design of it. I would probably like some indication of special functions on the keyboard, because I would quickly forget which combo did what.I am fascinated by these types of p... | 1,760,371,562.934461 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/28/tinycorder-isnt-quite-a-tricorder-but/ | Tinycorder Isn’t Quite A Tricorder, But… | Al Williams | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"ESP32",
"tester"
] | The Star Trek tricorder was a good example of a McGuffin. It did anything needed to support the plot or, in some cases, couldn’t do things also in support of the plot. We know [SirGalaxy] was thinking about the tricorder when he named the
Tinycorder
, but the little device has a number of well-defined features. You can see a brief video of it working below the break.
The portable device has a tiny ESP32 and a battery. The 400×240 display is handy, but has low power consumption. In addition to the sensors built into the ESP32, the Tinycorder has an AS7341 light sensor, an air quality sensor, and a weather sensor. An odd combination, but like its namesake, it can do lots of unrelated things.
The whole thing goes together in a two-part printed case. This is one of those projects where you might not want an exact copy, but you very well might use it as a base to build your own firmware. Even [SirGalaxy] has plans for future developments, such as adding a buzzer and a battery indicator.
This physically reminded us of those
ubiquitous component testers
. That another multi-purpose tester that started simple and gets more features through software. | 12 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122683",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T20:08:37",
"content": "Seeing the spanish menu reminded me of something I have been meaning to do.. look up HaD like content in languages I practice on DuoLingo for more experience and vocab in something that interests me. T... | 1,760,371,562.89112 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/28/paint-mixing-theory-for-custom-filament-colors/ | Paint Mixing Theory For Custom Filament Colors | Aaron Beckendorf | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"color matching",
"color mixing",
"colored 3d printer filament",
"filament extruder"
] | Recycling 3D filament is a great idea in theory, and we come across homemade filament extruders with some regularity, but they do have some major downsides when it comes to colored filaments. If you try to recycle printer waste of too many different colors, you’ll probably be left with a nondescript gray or brown filament. Researchers at Western University, however, have
taken advantage of this pigment mixing
to create colors not found in any commercial filament (
open access paper
).
They started by preparing samples of 3D printed waste in eight different colors and characterizing their spectral reflectance properties with a visible-light spectrometer. They fed this information into their SpecOptiBlend program (open source,
available here
), which optimizes the match between a blend of filaments and a target color. The program relies on the Kubelka-Munk theory for subtractive color mixing, which is usually used to calculate the effect of mixing paints, and minimizes the difference which the human eye perceives between two colors. Once the software calculated the optimal blend, the researchers mixed the correct blend of waste plastics and extruded it as a filament which generally had a remarkably close resemblance to the target color.
In its current form, this process probably won’t be coming to consumer 3D printers anytime soon. To mix differently-colored filaments correctly, the software needs accurate measurements of their optical properties first, which requires a spectrometer. To get around this, the researchers recommend that filament manufacturers freely publish the properties of their filaments, allowing consumers to mix their filaments into any color they desire.
This reminds us of another technique that treats filaments like paint to achieve
remarkable color effects
. We’ve also seen
a number
of
filament extruders
before, if you’d like to try replicating this. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122692",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T20:49:39",
"content": "I wonder if you could mix in the hot end, perhaps with some ultrasonic agitation to keep it moving through.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122694",
... | 1,760,371,562.981322 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/28/supercon-2024-sketching-with-machines/ | Supercon 2024: Sketching With Machines | Lewin Day | [
"cnc hacks",
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"2024 Hackaday Supercon",
"3d printer",
"g-code",
"tool paths"
] | When it comes to our machines, we generally have very prescribed and ordered ways of working with them. We know how to tune our CNC mill for the minimum chatter when its chewing through aluminium. We know how to get our FDM printer to lay perfect, neat layers to minimize the defects in our 3D prints.
That’s not what Blair Subbaraman came down to talk about at the 2024 Hackaday Supercon, though. Instead, Blair’s talk covered the magic that happens when you work
outside
the built-in assumptions and get creative.
It’s all about sketching with machines.
Blair starts out by highlighting various items that were fabricated with an eye to tool pathing itself, before relating this to his work with 3D printers.
Early on, Blair’s talk focuses on some unique objects, fabricated with digital methods, but in unconventional ways. “These objects aren’t purely designed in CAD, but also kind of designed directly in the machine tool paths.” Motioning to a carved vase that makes good use of tool marks, Blair explains the concept. “The design is really driven by the mark that the endmill has left in the wood,” he says. “That’s not something that’s encoded or specified in the geometry file, you just have to try a bunch of settings and see what happens and see what looks good to your eye.”
Jumping back to the concept of sketching, and he Blair roots the concept in its modern uses—like Arduino sketches, or those used with the Processing framework. “If we can write a little program and we can sketch with pixels or LEDs, what might it look like to sketch with a 3D printer? he asks.
Via direct control of the printer’s behavior, it was possible for Blair to create this blobby, stringy 3D printed vase.
Right away, he gives a potent and clear example—a unique 3D printed vase. It’s not produced in the usual way, however. Blair didn’t create a CAD model, then throw it in a slicer, before chucking the G-code on the printer. Instead, it’s created with more direct control of the 3D printer itself. The printer’s extruder is commanded to run in place, creating a hot blob of plastic, before the gantry gently pulls away, creating a string to the next stack of blobs, where the process repeats again. Rather than a solid 3D-printed wall, the result is altogether more delicate and complex, with fine strings linking towers of delicately melted plastic. It’s something that you couldn’t really create just by using standard 3D printing tools.
“This is what I mean by designing directly in toolpaths,” Blair explains. It’s achieved through precise control over the extruder and motion platform. The G-code is finessed to create blobs of plastic that are
just right
, and to move the head at just the right speed to create a contiguous molten string without breaking or sagging.
Blair’s p5.fab framework exists to make this sort of experimentation easier and more accessible.
Blair created the p5.fab Javascript library to make it easier to craft—or sketch—in this manner. His library includes simple commands for controlling, say, a 3D printer. Stacking up commands to control moves and various extruder operations allows the creation of objects in an entirely different way than just using CAD to specifically define the desired geometry directly. “We can use these really simple commands to quickly build up more complicated objects,” says Blair. “You can print some fun things that you’d maybe be hard pressed to do with CAD and a slicer, here, and you can do it in a really computationally modest way.” A particularly enjoyable example? Printing a handle on the side of a disposable coffee cup. It’s a gimmick, but one that does show the possibilities at play.
Blair’s inspiration to work with toolpaths directly has its benefits. “Whatever slicer you like might come out with a wire printing mode or some other experimental slicing mode, but some of the motivation here is that I don’t want to wait for my slicer to come out with a blob mode in order to print blobby things,” says Blair. “Probably my slicer is never going to make blobs the way I like my blobs.”
If hooking up a MIDI controller to a 3D printer doesn’t blow your mind, it really should.
Blair’s talk goes further with some really neat ideas. A particular highlight is using a MIDI controller with knobs and sliders to control a 3D printer. Imagine being able to make tweaks to print settings like movement speed or extrusion rate on the fly. It’s not what you’d want for producing an accurate part, for sure. And yet, Blair demonstrates how it allowed him to discover how to print neatly stacked coils in TPU, just by giving his hands direct control over the machine parameters in a live sense.
Overall, it’s a talk that makes us think about how to get closer to the machines we create with. Slicers and CAD are perfect for making our regular 3D prints. At the same time, there are great and wild things that can be achieved by taking more direct control over the machinery, and indeed—sketching with the machines! | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122658",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T18:43:32",
"content": "there’s something neat about being able to control the tool path directly but it doesn’t seem very generally applicable to me. you go a short way down that path and before you know it you’re inventing a n... | 1,760,371,563.121925 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/27/how-methane-took-over-the-booster-world/ | How Methane Took Over The Booster World | Tyler August | [
"Space"
] | [
"aerospace",
"liquid fuel rocket",
"liquid fuel rocket engine",
"methane",
"rocketry"
] | Go back a generation of development, and excepting the shuttle-derived systems, all liquid rockets used RP-1 (aka kerosene) for their first stage. Now it seems everybody and their dog wants to fuel their rockets with methane. What happened? [Eager Space] was
eager to explain in recent video
, which you’ll find embedded below.
Space X Starship firing its many Raptor engines. The raptor pioneered the new generation of methalox. (Image: Space X)
At first glance, it’s a bit of a wash: the density and specific impulses of kerolox (kerosene-oxygen) and metholox (methane-oxygen) rockets are very similar. So there’s no immediate performance improvement or volumetric disadvantage, like you would see with hydrogen fuel. Instead it is a series of small factors that all add up to a meaningful design benefit when engineering the whole system.
Methane also has the advantage of being a gas when it warms up, and rocket engines tend to be warm. So the injectors don’t have to worry about atomizing a thick liquid, and mixing fuel and oxidizer inside the engine does tend to be easier. [Eager Space] calls RP-1 “a soup”, while methane’s simpler combustion chemistry makes the simulation of these engines quicker and easier as well.
There are other factors as well, like the fact that methane is much closer in temperature to LOX, and does cost quite a bit less than RP-1, but you’ll need to watch the whole video to see how they all stack up.
We write about rocketry fairly often on Hackaday, seeing projects with both liquid-fueled and solid-fueled engines. We’ve even
highlighted at least one methalox rocket
, way back in 2019. Our thanks to space-loving reader [Stephen Walters] for the tip. Building a rocket of your own? Let us know about it
with the tip line
. | 42 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122414",
"author": "ziggurat29",
"timestamp": "2025-04-27T20:31:46",
"content": "so rocketry iz wut we about, yo! lol",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122415",
"author": "cliff claven",
"timestamp": "2025-04-27T20:36:24... | 1,760,371,563.205193 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/27/quick-and-easy-digital-stethoscope-keeps-tabs-on-cat/ | Quick And Easy Digital Stethoscope Keeps Tabs On Cat | Dan Maloney | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"audacity",
"auscultation",
"feline",
"Krita",
"lavalier",
"stethoscope",
"vet"
] | For all their education, medical practitioners sometimes forget that what’s old hat to them is new territory for their patients. [David Revoy] learned that when a recent visit to the veterinarian resulted in the need to monitor his cat’s pulse rate at home, a task that he found difficult enough that he hacked together
this digital cat stethoscope
.
Never fear; [David] makes it clear that his fur-baby [Geuloush] is fine, although the gel needed for an echocardiogram likely left the cat permanently miffed. With a normal feline heart rate in the 140s, [David] found it hard to get an accurate pulse by palpation, so he bought a cheap stethoscope and a basic lavalier USB microphone. Getting them together was as easy as cutting the silicone tubing from the stethoscope head and sticking the microphone into it.
The tricky part, of course, would be getting [Geuloush] to cooperate. That took some doing, but soon enough [David] had a clean recording to visualize in an audio editor. From there it’s just a simple matter of counting up the peaks and figuring out the beats per second. It probably wouldn’t be too hard to build a small counter using a microcontroller so he doesn’t have to count on the cat napping near his PC, but in our experience, keyboards are pretty good cat attractants.
This is one of those nice, quick hacks whose simplicity belies their impact. It’s certainly not as fancy as some of
the smart stethoscopes we’ve seen
, but it doesn’t need to be.
Thanks to [Spooner] for the tip. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122369",
"author": "lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-04-27T17:17:46",
"content": "Purfection. These are the hacks I adore. Show us more 20$ hacks that can do cool things like keep kitties healthy! This could also be useful for diagnostics of pumps and other activities I’m sure.I t... | 1,760,371,563.074628 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/27/vesc-mods-made-via-vibe-coding/ | VESC Mods Made Via Vibe Coding | Lewin Day | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"coding",
"gemini",
"vesc",
"vibe coding"
] | [David Bloomfield] wanted to make some tweaks to an embedded system, but didn’t quite have the requisite skills.
He decided to see if
vibe coding
could help.
[David]’s goal was simple. To take the
VESC Telemetry Display
created by [Lukas Janky] and add some tweaks of his own. He wanted to add more colors to the display, while changing the format of the displayed data and tweaking how it gets saved to EEPROM. The only problem was that [David] wasn’t experienced in coding at all, let alone for embedded systems like the Arduino Nano. His solution? Hand over the reins to a large language model. [David] used Gemini 2.5 Pro to make the changes, and by and large, got the tweaks made that he was looking for.
There are risks here, of course. If you’re working on an embedded system, whatever you’re doing could have real world consequences. Meanwhile, if you’re relying on the AI to generate the code and you don’t fully understand it yourself… well, the possibilities are obvious. It pays to know what you’re doing at the end of the day. In this case, it’s hard to imagine much going wrong with a simple telemetry display, but it bears considering the risks whatever you’re doing.
We’ve talked about the advent of vibe coding before, too,
with [Jenny List] exploring this nascent phenomenon.
Expect it to remain a topic of controversy in coding circles for some time. | 19 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122347",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-27T15:20:39",
"content": "“It pays to know what you’re doing at the end of the day. ”Just imagine the damage an AI-driven poster could do.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8... | 1,760,371,563.438619 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/27/save-cells-from-the-landfill-get-a-power-bank-for-your-troubles/ | Save Cells From The Landfill, Get A Power Bank For Your Troubles | Donald Papp | [
"Battery Hacks"
] | [
"diy",
"lithium battery",
"lithium ion",
"power bank",
"rechargeable",
"salvage"
] | A hefty portable power bank is a handy thing to DIY, but one needs to get their hands on a number of matching lithium-ion cells to make it happen. [Chris Doel] points out an easy solution:
salvage them from disposable vapes and build a solid 35-cell power bank
. Single use devices? Not on his watch!
[Chris] has made it his mission to build useful things like power banks out of cells harvested from disposable vapes. He finds them — hundreds of them — on the ground or in bins (especially after events like music festivals) but has also found that vape shops are more than happy to hand them over if asked. Extracting usable cells is most of the work, and [Chris] has refined safely doing so into an art.
Disposable vapes are in all shapes and sizes, but cells inside are fairly similar.
Many different vapes use the same cell types on the inside, and once one has 35 identical cells in healthy condition it’s just a matter of using a compatible 3D-printed enclosure with two PCBs to connect the cells, and a pre-made board handles the power bank functionality, including recharging.
We’d like to highlight a few design features that strike us as interesting. One is the three little bendy “wings” that cradle each cell, ensuring cells are centered and held snugly even if they aren’t exactly the right size. Another is the use of spring terminals to avoid the need to solder to individual cells. The PCBs themselves also double as cell balancers, providing a way to passively balance all 35 cells and ensure they are at the same voltage level during initial construction. After the cells are confirmed to be balanced, a solder jumper near each terminal is closed to bypass that functionality for final assembly.
The result is a hefty power bank that can power just about anything, and maybe the best part is that it can be opened and individual cells swapped out as they reach the end of their useful life. With an estimated 260 million disposable vapes thrown in the trash every year in the UK alone, each one containing a rechargeable lithium-ion cell, there’s no shortage of cells for an enterprising hacker willing to put in a bit of work.
Power banks not your thing? [Chris] has also
created a DIY e-bike battery using salvaged cells
, and that’s a money saver right there.
Learn all about it in the video, embedded below. And if you find yourself curious about what exactly goes on in a lithium-ion battery, let our own
Arya Voronova tell you all about it
. | 35 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122317",
"author": "GarberPark",
"timestamp": "2025-04-27T11:57:22",
"content": "Applause, Applause!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122334",
"author": "H Hack",
"timestamp": "2025-04-27T12:56:14",
"... | 1,760,371,563.379471 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/27/deep-dive-on-panel-making/ | Deep Dive On Panel Making | Al Williams | [
"how-to"
] | [
"front panel",
"laminate"
] | It is easier than ever to produce projects with nice enclosures thanks to 3D printing and laser cutting. However, for a polished look, you also need a labeled front panel. We’ve looked at several methods for doing that in the past, but we enjoyed [Accidental Science’s] video showing his method for making
laminated panels
.
His first step is to draw the panel in Inkscape, and he has some interesting tips for getting the most out of the program. He makes a few prints and laminates one of them. The other is a drill guide. You use the drill guide to make openings in the panel, which could be aluminum, steel, plastic, or whatever material you want to work in.
The laminated print goes on last with just enough glue to hold it. Is it a lot of work? You bet it is. But the results look great. There are a number of things to look out for, so if you plan to do this, the video will probably save you from making some mistakes.
There are many ways to get this job done. We’ve asked you for ideas before and, as usual,
you came through
. If you want a different take on laminated panels, there are a few different tips you can glean from
this project
. | 24 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122314",
"author": "user",
"timestamp": "2025-04-27T10:47:59",
"content": "When printing something make sure to check if your printer keeps correct dimmensions. In my case, to achieve accurate results from my laser printer I have to scale page with using 101,4% factor. Otherwise pr... | 1,760,371,563.497058 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/26/creating-an-electronic-board-for-catan-compatible-shenanigans/ | Creating An Electronic Board For Catan-Compatible Shenanigans | Lewin Day | [
"News"
] | [
"board game",
"settlers of catan"
] | [Sean Boyce] has been busy building board games. Specifically,
an electronic strategy boardgame that is miraculously also compatible with Settlers of Catan.
[Sean’s] game is called Calculus. It’s about mining asteroids and bartering. You’re playing as a corporation attempting to mine the asteroid against up to three others doing the same. Do a good job of exploiting the space-based resource, and you’ll win the game.
Calculus is played on a board made out of PCBs. A Xiao RP2040 microcontroller board on the small PCB in the center of the playfield is responsible for running the show. It controls a whole ton of seven-segment displays and RGB LEDs across multiple PCBs that make up the gameboard. The lights and displays help players track the game state as they vie for asteroid mining supremacy. Amusingly, by virtue of its geometry and some smart design choices, you can also use [Sean]’s board to play Settlers of Catan. He’s even designed a smaller, cheaper travel version, too.
We do see some interesting board games around these parts
, because hackers and makers are just that creative. If you’ve got your own board game hacks or builds in the works, don’t hesitate to
let us know! | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,563.533342 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/26/another-coil-winder-project/ | Another Coil Winder Project | Al Williams | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"coil winder"
] | If you build electronics, you will eventually need a coil. If you spend any time winding one, you are almost guaranteed to think about building a coil winder. Maybe that’s why so many people do. [Jtacha] did
a take on the project
, and we were impressed — it looks great.
The device has a keypad and an LCD. You can enter a number of turns or the desired inductance. It also lets you wind at an angle. So it is suitable for RF coils, Tesla coils, or any other reason you need a coil.
There are a number of 3D printed parts, so this doesn’t look like an hour project. Luckily, none of the parts are too large. The main part is 2020 extrusion, and you will need to tap the ends of some of the pieces.
There is a brief and strangely dark video in the post if you want to see the machine in operation. The resulting coil looked good, especially if you compare it to how our hand-wound ones usually look.
While most of the coil winders we see have
some type of motor
, that’s
not a necessity
. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122262",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-04-27T02:50:15",
"content": "Forget “another” this is a sane and reproducible coil winder. I’ve seen many DIY coil winders and they all seem to rely on far too many commercial components or handmade one-offs. The arduino-based winder ... | 1,760,371,563.57351 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/28/x-rays-from-an-overdriven-magnetron/ | X-Rays From An Overdriven Magnetron | Dan Maloney | [
"High Voltage",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"flyback",
"high voltage",
"intensifying screen",
"magnetron",
"x-ray"
] | If you say that you’re “nuking” something, pretty much everyone will know that you mean you’re heating something in the microwave. It’s technically incorrect, of course, as the magnetron inside the oven emits only non-ionizing radiation, and is completely incapable of generating ionizing radiation such as X-rays. Right?
Perhaps not, as
these experiments with an overdriven magnetron
suggest. First off, this is really something you shouldn’t try; aside from the obvious hazards that attend any attempt to generate ionizing radiation, there are risks aplenty here. First of all, modifying magnetrons as [SciTubeHD] did here is risky thanks to the toxic beryllium they contain, and the power supply he used, which features
a DIY flyback transformer we recently featured
, generates potentially dangerous voltages. You’ve been warned.
For the experiment, [SciTubeHD] stripped the magnets off a magnetron and connected his 40-kV AC power supply between the filament and the metal case of the tube. We’re not completely clear to us how this creates X-rays, but it appears to do so given the distinctive glow given off by an intensifying screen harvested from an old medical X-ray film cassette. The light is faint, but there’s enough to see the shadows of metallic objects like keys and PCBs positioned between the tube and the intensifying screen.
Are there any practical applications for this? Probably not, especially considering the potential risks. But it’s still pretty cool, and we’re suitably impressed that magnetrons can be repurposed like this. | 34 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122610",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T15:39:24",
"content": "A quick superficial search didn’t reveal concrete answers either way but does theold medical X-ray film cassettejust and ONLY react to “X-rays”? Maybe it just reacted to lower energy radiation.",
"pare... | 1,760,371,563.71385 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/28/life-on-k2-18b-dont-get-your-hopes-up-just-yet/ | Life On K2-18b? Don’t Get Your Hopes Up Just Yet | Tom Nardi | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"extraterrestrial life",
"james webb space telescope",
"K2-18b",
"SETI"
] | Last week, the mainstream news was filled with headlines about K2-18b — an exoplanet some 124 light-years away from Earth that 98% of the population had never even heard about. Even astronomers weren’t aware of its existence until the Kepler Space Telescope picked it out back in 2015, just one of the more than 2,700 planets the now defunct observatory was able to identify during its storied career. But now, thanks to recent observations by the James Web Space Telescope, this obscure planet has been thrust into the limelight by the discovery of
what researchers believe are the telltale signs of life in its atmosphere
.
Artist’s rendition of planet K2-18b.
Well, maybe. As you might imagine, being able to determine if a planet has life on it from 124 light-years away isn’t exactly easy. We haven’t even been able to conclusively rule out past, or even present, life in our very own solar system, which in astronomical terms is about as far off as the end of your block.
To be fair the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy researchers, lead by Nikku Madhusudhan, aren’t claiming to have definitive proof that life exists on K2-18b. We probably won’t get
undeniable
proof of life on another planet until a rover literally runs over it. Rather,
their paper proposes that abundant biological life
, potentially some form of marine phytoplankton, is one of the strongest explanations for the concentrations of dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide that they’ve detected in the atmosphere of K2-18b.
As you might expect, there are already challenges to that conclusion. Which is of course exactly how the scientific process is supposed to work. Though the findings from Cambridge are certainly compelling, adding just a bit of context can show that things aren’t as cut and dried as we might like. There’s even an argument to be made that we wouldn’t necessarily know what the signs of extraterrestrial life would look like even if it was right in front of us.
Life as We Know It
Credit where credit is due, most of the news outlets have so far treated this story with the appropriate amount of skepticism. Reading though the coverage, Cambridge’s findings are commonly described as the “strongest evidence yet” of potential extraterrestrial life, rather than being treated as definitive proof. Well, other than the
Daily Mail
anyway.
They decided to consult with ChatGPT
and other AI tools in an effort to find out what lifeforms on K2-18b would look like.
So, AI-generated frogmen renders not withstanding, what makes these findings so difficult to interpret? For one thing, we have very little idea of what extraterrestrial life would actually be like, so proving that it exists is exceptionally difficult. Scientists have precisely one data point for what constitutes as life, and you’re sitting on it. We only know what life on Earth looks like, and while there’s an incredible amount of biodiversity on our home planet, it all still tends to play by the same established rules.
On Earth, dimethyl sulfide (DMS) is produced by phytoplankton.
We assume those rules to be a constant on other planets, but that’s only because we don’t know what else to look for. Consider that the bulk of our efforts in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) thus far have been based on the idea that other sentient beings would
develop some form of radio technology similar to our own
, and that if we simply pointed a receiver at their star, we would be able to pick up their version of
I Love Lucy
.
This is a preposterous presupposition, which doesn’t even make much sense when compared to humanity’s history. Consider the science, literature, and art that humankind was able to produce before the advent of the electric light. Now imagine that Proxima Centauri’s answer to Beethoven is putting the finishing touches on their latest masterpiece as our radio telescope silently checks their planet off the list of inhabited worlds because it wasn’t emanating any RF transmissions we recognize.
Similarly, here on Earth dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) are produced exclusively by biological processes. DMS specifically is so commonly associated with marine phytoplankton that we often associate its smell with being in proximity of the sea. This being the case, you could see how finding large quantities of these gases in the atmosphere of an alien planet would seem to indicate that it must be teaming with aquatic life.
But just because that’s true on Earth doesn’t mean it’s true on K2-18b. We know these gases can be created abiotically in the laboratory, which means there are alternative explanations to how they could be produced on another planet — even if we can’t explain them currently. Further, a paper released in November 2024 pointed out that
DMS was detected on comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko
by the European Space Agency’s
Rosetta
spacecraft, indicating there’s some unknown method by which it can be produced in the absence of any biological activity.
Finding What You’re Looking For
All that being said, let’s assume for the sake of argument that the presence of dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide was indeed enough to confirm there was life on the planet. You’d still need to confirm beyond a shadow of a doubt that those gases were present in the atmosphere. So how do you do that?
Within our own solar system, you could send a probe. Which is what’s been suggested to
investigate the possibility that phosphine gas exists on Venus
. But remember, we’re talking about a planet that’s 124 light-years away. In this case, the only way to study the atmosphere is through spectroscopy — that is, examining the degree to which various wavelengths of light (visible and otherwise) are blocked as they pass through it.
This is, as you may have guessed, easier said than done. The amount of data you can collect from such a distant object, even with an instrument as powerful as the James Webb Space Telescope is minuscule. You need to massage the data with various models to extract any useful information from the noise, and according to some critics, that’s when bias can creep in.
In a recently released paper
, Jake Taylor from the University of Oxford argues that the only reason Nikku Madhusudhan and his team found signs of DMS and DMDS in the spectrographic data is because that’s what they were looking for.
Given their previous research
that potentially detected methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of K2-18b, it’s possible the team was already primed to find further evidence of biological processes on the planet, and were looking a bit too hard to find evidence to back up their theory.
When analyzing the raw data without any preconceived notion of what you’re looking for, Taylor says there’s “no strong statistical evidence” to support the detection of DMS and DMDS in the atmosphere of K2-18b. This conclusion itself will need to be scrutinized, of course, though it does have the benefit of Occam’s razor on its side.
In short, there may or may not be dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide gases in the atmosphere of K2-18b, and that may or may not mean there’s potentially some form of biological life in the planet’s oceans…which it may or may not actually have. If you’re looking for anything more specific than that, the science is still out. | 27 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122593",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T14:58:31",
"content": "“When analyzing the raw data without any preconceived notion of what you’re looking for, Taylor says there’s “no strong statistical evidence” to support the detection of DMS and DMDS”No, it’s actually a ton s... | 1,760,371,563.64463 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/28/asus-gpu-uses-gyroscope-to-warn-for-sagging-cards/ | ASUS GPU Uses Gyroscope To Warn For Sagging Cards | Maya Posch | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"gyroscope",
"VideoCard"
] | It’s not really an understatement to say that over the years videocards (GPUs) — much like CPU coolers — have become rather chonky. Unfortunately, the PCIe slots they plug into were never designed with multi-kilogram cards in mind. All this extra weight is of course happily affected by gravity.
The problem has gotten to the point that the ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 card added a Bosch Sensortec BMI323 inertial measurement unit (IMU) to provide an accelerometer and angular rate (gyroscope) measurements, as
reported
by [Uniko’s Hardware] (in Chinese, see English
[Videocardz] article)
.
There are so-called anti-sag brackets that provide structural support to the top of the GPU where it isn’t normally secured. But since this card weighs in at over 6 pounds (3 kilograms) for the air cooled model, it appears the bracket wasn’t enough, and active monitoring was necessary.
The software allows you to set a sag angle at which you receive a notification, which would presumably either allow you to turn off the system and readjust the GPU, or be forewarned when it is about to rip itself loose from the PCIe slot and crash to the bottom of the case. | 51 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122533",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T11:38:41",
"content": "Bonkers that we have gotten to the stage that sensor makes any sense at all, though that is a great way to differentiate your product and could well become the default wanted by anybody that still LAN p... | 1,760,371,563.803831 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/28/look-its-a-knob-its-a-jack-its-euroknob/ | Look! It’s A Knob! It’s A Jack! It’s Euroknob! | Dan Maloney | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"3.5-mm",
"AS5600",
"encoder",
"eurorack",
"jack",
"magnetic",
"patch",
"plug",
"synthesizer",
"TRS"
] | Are your Eurorack modules too crowded? Sick of your patch cables making it hard to twiddle your knobs? Then you might be very interested in
the new Euroknob
, the knob that sports a hidden patch cable jack.
Honestly, when we first saw the Euroknob demo board, we thought [Mitxela] had gone a little off the rails. It looks like nothing more than a PCB-mount potentiometer or perhaps an encoder with a knob attached. Twist the knob and a row of LEDs on the board light up in sequence. Nice, but not exactly what we’re used to seeing from him. But then he popped the knob off the board, revealing that what we thought was the pot body is actually a 3.5-mm audio jack, and that the knob was attached to a mating plug that acts as an axle.
The kicker is that underneath the audio jack is an AS5600 magnetic encoder, and hidden in a slot milled in the tip of the audio jack is a tiny magnet. Pop the knob into the jack, give it a twist, and you’ve got manual control of your module. Take the knob out, plug in a patch cable, and you can let a control voltage from another module do the job. Genius!
To make it all work mechanically, [Mitxela] had to sandwich a spacer board on top of the main PCB. The spacer has a large cutout to make room for the sensor chip so the magnet can rotate without hitting anything. He also added a CH32V003 to run the encoder and drive the LEDs to provide feedback for the knob-jack. The video below has a brief demo.
This is just a proof of concept, to be sure, but it’s still pretty slick. Almost as slick as [Mitxela]’s
recent fluid-motion simulation pendant
, or his
dual-wielding soldering irons
. | 25 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122517",
"author": "elwing",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T10:19:08",
"content": "brillant hack, through I share his durability worries…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122526",
"author": "Giake",
"timestamp": "20... | 1,760,371,563.864209 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/27/kaleidoscopico-shows-off-pi-picos-capabilities/ | Kaleidoscopico Shows Off Pi Pico’s Capabilities | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"amiga",
"assembly",
"chiptune",
"demo",
"graphics",
"hardware",
"pi pico",
"raspberry pi",
"retrocomputing",
"RISC-V",
"video"
] | In the early days of computing, and well into the era where home computers were common but not particularly powerful, programming these machines was a delicate balance of managing hardware with getting the most out of the software. Memory had to be monitored closely, clock cycles taken into account, and even video outputs had to be careful not to overwhelm the processor. This can seem foreign in the modern world where double-digit gigabytes of memory is not only common, it’s expected, but if you want to hone your programming skills
there’s no better way to do it than with the limitations imposed by something like a retro computer or a Raspberry Pi Pico
.
This project is called Kaleidoscopio, built by [Linus Åkesson] aka [lft] and goes deep into the hardware of the Pi Pico in order to squeeze as much out of the small, inexpensive platform as possible. The demo is written with 17,000 lines of assembly using the RISC-V instruction set. The microcontroller has two cores on it, with one core acting as the computer’s chipset and the other acts as the CPU, rendering the effects. The platform has no dedicated audio or video components, so everything here is done in software using this setup to act as a PC from the 80s might. In this case, [lft] is taking inspiration from the Amiga platform, his favorite of that era.
The only hardware involved in this project apart from the Pi Pico itself are a few resistors, an audio jack, and a VGA port, further demonstrating that the software is the workhorse in this build. It’s impressive not only for wringing out as much as possible from the platform but for using the arguably weaker RISC-V cores instead of the ARM cores, as the Pi Pico includes both. [lft] goes into every detail on the project’s page as well, for those who are still captivated by the era of computer programming where every bit mattered. For more computing demos like this,
take a look at this one which is based on [lft]’s retrocomputer of choice, the Amiga
. | 14 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122477",
"author": "Jouni",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T06:13:07",
"content": "That demo is frickin’ amazing.The real hack is how in the earth he can focus himself learning and build such a long demo with all we saw? That guy is a mental hacker in the first place – and even more if yo... | 1,760,371,563.917574 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/27/design-constraints-bring-lockbox-to-life/ | Design Constraints Bring Lockbox To Life | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Art"
] | [
"combination",
"keypad",
"lock",
"Lockbox",
"passive components",
"relay",
"woodworking"
] | One of the most paradoxical aspects of creating art is the fact that constraints, whether arbitrary or real, and whether in space, time, materials, or rules, often cause creativity to flourish rather than to wither. Picasso’s blue period,
Gadsby
by Ernest Vincent Wright, Tetris, and even the Volkswagen Beetle are all famous examples of constraint-driven artistic brilliance. Similarly, in the world of electronics we can always reach for a microcontroller
but this project from [Peter] has the constraint of only using passive components, and it is all the better for it
.
The project is a lockbox, a small container that reveals a small keypad and the associated locking circuitry when opened. When the correct combination of push buttons is pressed, the box unlocks the hidden drawer. This works by setting a series of hidden switches in a certain way to program the combination. These switches are connected through various diodes to a series of relays, so that each correct press of a button activates the next relay. When the final correct button is pushed, power is applied to a solenoid which unlocks the drawer. An incorrect button push will disable a relay providing power to the rest of the relays, resetting the system back to the start.
The project uses a lot of clever tricks to do all of this without using a single microcontroller, including using capacitors that carefully provide timing to the relays to make them behave properly rather than all energizing at the same time. The woodworking is also notable as well, with the circuit components highlighted when the lid is opened (but importantly, hiding the combination switches). Using relays for logic is not a novel concept, though;
they can be used for all kinds of complex tasks including replacing transistors in single-board computers
. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122506",
"author": "RetepV",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T08:40:04",
"content": "Funny intro for the video! But hmm, your dog must have quite a hearing problem. :DA nice addition would be a spring at the back of the drawer, so it automatically gets pushed open a bit when the lock disen... | 1,760,371,563.991724 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/27/hackaday-links-april-27-2025/ | Hackaday Links: April 27, 2025 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"ai",
"anti-submarine warfare",
"Deepfake",
"dexterity",
"dj",
"hackaday links",
"Hoover Dam",
"humanoid",
"LLM",
"magnetomoter",
"nitrogen-vacancy",
"quantum",
"radio station",
"robot",
"tecxt-to-speech"
] | Looks like the Simpsons had it right again
, now that an Australian radio station has been caught using
an AI-generated DJ
for their midday slot. Station CADA, a Sydney-based broadcaster that’s part of the Australian Radio Network, revealed that “Workdays with Thy” isn’t actually hosted by a person; rather, “Thy” is a generative AI text-to-speech system that has been on the air since November. An actual employee of the ARN finance department was used for Thy’s voice model and her headshot, which adds a bit to the creepy factor.
The discovery that they’ve been listening to a bot for months apparently has Thy’s fans in an uproar, although we suspect that the media doing the reporting is probably more exercised about this than the general public. Radio stations have used robo-jocks for the midday slot for ages, albeit using actual human DJs to record patter to play between tunes and commercials. Anyone paying attention over the last few years probably shouldn’t be surprised by this development, and we suspect similar disclosures will be forthcoming across the industry now that the cat’s out of the bag.
Also from the world of robotics, albeit the hardware kind, is this excellent essay from Brian Potter over at Construction Physics about
the sad state of manual dexterity in humanoid robots
. The whole article is worth reading, not least for the link to
a rogue’s gallery of the current crop of humanoid robots
, but briefly, the essay contends that while humanoid robots do a pretty good job of navigating in the world, their ability to do even the simplest tasks is somewhat wanting.
Brian’s example of unwrapping and applying a Band-Aid, a task that any toddler can handle, as being unimaginably difficult for any current robot to handle is quite apt. He attributes the gap in abilities between gross movements and fine motor control partly to hardware and partly to software. We think the blame skews more to the hardware side; while the legs and torso of the typical humanoid robot offer a lot of real estate for powerful actuators, squeezing that much equipment into a hand approximately the size of a human’s is a tall order. These problems will likely be overcome, of course, and when they do, Brian’s helpful list of “Dexterity Evals” or something similar will act as a sort of Turing test for robot dexterity. Although the day a humanoid robot can start a new roll of toilet paper without tearing the first sheet is the day we head for the woods.
We recently did a story on the use of
nitrogen-vacancy diamonds as magnetic sensors
, which we found really exciting because it’s about the simplest way we’ve seen to play with quantum physics at home. After that story ran, eagle-eyed reader Kealan noticed that Brian over at the “Real Engineering” channel on YouTube had recently run
a video on anti-submarine warfare
, which includes the uses of similar quantum magnetometers to detect submarines. The magnetometers in the video are based on the Zeeman effect and use laser-pumped helium atoms to detect tiny variations in the Earth’s magnetic field due to large ferrous objects like submarines. Pretty cool video; check it out.
And finally, if you have the slightest interest in civil engineering you’ve got to check out
Animagraff’s recent 3D tour of the insides of Hoover Dam
. If you thought a dam was just a big, boring block of concrete dumped in the middle of a river, think again. The video is incredibly detailed and starts with accurate 3D models of Black Canyon before the dam was built. Every single detail of the dam is shown, with the “X-ray views” of the dam with the surrounding rock taken away being our favorite bit — reminds us a bit of the book
Underground
by
David Macaulay
. But at the end of the day, it’s the enormity of Hoover Dam that really comes across in this video. The way that the structure dwarfs the human-for-scale included in almost every sequence is hard to express — megalophobics, beware. We were also floored by just how much machinery is buried in all that concrete. Sure, we knew about the generators, but the gates on the intake towers and the way the spillways work were news to us. Highly recommended. | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122434",
"author": "Allan-H",
"timestamp": "2025-04-27T23:43:46",
"content": "“the enormity of Hoover Dam”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122524",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T10:52:10",
... | 1,760,371,564.135259 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/25/hash-functions-with-the-golden-ratio/ | Hash Functions With The Golden Ratio | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Science"
] | [
"computer science",
"efficiency",
"fibbonaci",
"hash",
"hashing",
"modulo",
"processing time"
] | In the realm of computer science, it’s hard to go too far without encountering hashing or hash functions. The concept appears throughout security, from encryption to password storage to crypto, and more generally whenever large or complex data must be efficiently mapped to a smaller, fixed-size set. Hashing makes the process of looking for data much faster for a computer than performing a search and can be incredibly powerful when mastered. [Malte] did some investigation into hash functions and
seems to have found a method called Fibonacci hashing
that not only seems to have been largely forgotten but which speeds up this lookup process even further.
In a typical hashing operation, the data is transformed in some way, with part of this new value used to store it in a specific location. That second step is often done with an integer modulo function. But the problem with any hashing operation is that two different pieces of data end up with the same value after the modulo operation is performed, resulting in these two different pieces of data being placed at the same point. The Fibonacci hash, on the other hand, uses the golden ratio rather than the modulo function to map the final location of the data, resulting in many fewer instances of collisions like these while also being much faster. It also appears to do a better job of using the smaller fixed-size set more evenly as a consequence of being based around Fibonacci numbers, just as long as the input data doesn’t have a large number of Fibonacci numbers themselves.
Going through the math that [Malte] goes over in his paper shows that, at least as far as performing the mapping part of a hash function, the Fibonacci hash performs much better than integer modulo. Some of the comments mention that it’s a specific type of a more general method called multiplicative hashing. For those using hash functions in their code it might be worth taking a look at either way, and [Malte] admits to not knowing everything about this branch of computer science as well but still goes into an incredible amount of depth about this specific method. If you’re more of a newcomer to this topic,
take a look at this person who put an enormous bounty on a bitcoin wallet which shows why reverse-hashing is so hard
. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122089",
"author": "jawnhenry",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T04:52:23",
"content": "“…just as long as the input data doesn’t have a large number of Fibonacci numbers themselves…”Given that the Fibonacci Sequence–meaning Fibonacci numbers, of course–appears so regularly and is so pervas... | 1,760,371,564.08517 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/25/xor-gate-as-a-frequency-doubler/ | XOR Gate As A Frequency Doubler | Al Williams | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"frequency doubler",
"xor"
] | [IMSAI Guy] grabbed an obsolete XOR gate and tried a classic circuit to turn it into
a frequency doubler
. Of course, being an old part, it won’t work at very high frequencies, but the circuit is super simple, just using the gate and an RC network. You can see a video of his exploration below.
The simple circuit seems like it should work, but in practice, it needed an extra component. In theory, the RC circuit acts as an edge detector. So, each edge of the input signal causes a pulse on the output as the second input lags the first.
That sounds good, but it looked terrible on the scope until a 1K resistor tied to the capacitor shifted the bias point of the gate. In all fairness, the original schematic used a Schmitt trigger gate, which may have made a difference had one been available. There were slight differences, though, depending on the type of device. An LS part, for example, didn’t need the extra resistor.
Of course, an RC network is just one way to delay the input, and the delay determines the width of the output pulse and constrains the input frequency and duty cycle. However, you could use other gates, including the other XOR gates in the package to realize a fast delay.
Frequency doublers
are very common at microwave frequencies
, but they don’t work in the same way. There are several ways to do it, but a common method is to use a nonlinear element to generate plenty of harmonics and then filter off everything but the second one. Or the third one, if you wanted a tripler instead. | 10 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122070",
"author": "Lee Gleason",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T01:14:10",
"content": "IMSAI Guy is the best. I love seeing him demonstrate a new chip every day.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122079",
"author": "paulvdh",
... | 1,760,371,564.18363 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/25/robot-gets-a-diy-pneumatic-gripper-upgrade/ | Robot Gets A DIY Pneumatic Gripper Upgrade | Lewin Day | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"pneumatic",
"pneumatic gripper",
"Pneumatics",
"robot arm"
] | [Tazer] built a small desktop-sized robotic arm, and it was more or less functional. However, he wanted to improve its ability to pick things up, and attaching a pneumatic gripper seemed like the perfect way to achieve that.
Thus began the build!
The concept of [Tazer]’s pneumatic gripper is simple enough. When the pliable silicone gripper is filled with air, the back half is free to expand, while the inner section is limited in its expansion thanks to fabric included in the structure. This causes the gripper to deform in such a way that it folds around as it fills with air, which lets it pick up objects. [Tazer] designed the gripper so that that could be cast in silicone using 3D printed molds. It’s paired with a 3D printed manifold which delivers air to open and close the gripper as needed. Mounted on the end of [Tazer]’s robotic arm, it’s capable of lifting small objects quite well.
It’s a fun build, particularly for the lovely sounds of silicone parts being ripped out of their 3D printed molds. Proper ASMR grade stuff, here. We’ve also seen
some other great work on pneumatic robot grippers over the years. | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122171",
"author": "Eric Mockler",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T16:31:39",
"content": "This is pretty good, there should be comments.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8123319",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timesta... | 1,760,371,564.275773 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/25/sigrok-website-down-after-hosting-data-loss/ | Sigrok Website Down After Hosting Data Loss | Maya Posch | [
"News"
] | [
"sigrok"
] | When it comes to open source signal analysis software for logic analyzers and many other sensors, Sigrok is pretty much the only game in town. Unfortunately after an issue with the server hosting, the
website,
wiki, and other documentation is down until a new hosting provider is found and the site migrated. This leaves just the
downloads
active, as well as the IRC channel (#sigrok) over at Libera.chat.
This is
not the first time
that the Sigrok site has gone down, but this time it seems that it’s more final. Although it seems a new server will be set up over the coming days, this will do little to assuage those who have been ringing the alarm bells about the Sigrok project. Currently access to documentation is unavailable, except via the
WaybackMachine’s archive.
A tragic reality of FOSS projects is that they are not immortal, with them requiring constant time, money and effort to keep servers running and software maintained. This might be a good point for those who have a stake in Sigrok to consider what the project means to them, and what it might mean if it were to shutdown. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8121990",
"author": "Rob",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T17:08:05",
"content": "I would rather say it seemslessfinal, as they are moving to a more dependable location.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122030",
"author": "Ha... | 1,760,371,564.234595 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/25/hackaday-podcast-ep-318-diy-record-lathe-360-degree-lidar-and-3d-printing-innovation-lives/ | Hackaday Podcast Ep 318: DIY Record Lathe, 360 Degree LIDAR, And 3D Printing Innovation Lives! | Jenny List | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | This week Elliot Williams was joined by fellow Europe-based Hackaday staffer Jenny List, to record the Hackaday Podcast as the dusk settled on a damp spring evening.
On the agenda first was robotic sport, as a set of bipedal robots competed in a Chinese half-marathon. Our new Robot overlords may have to wait a while before they are fast enough chase us meatbags away, but it demonstrated for us how such competitions can be used to advance the state of the art.
The week’s stand-out hacks included work on non-planar slicing to improve strength of 3D prints. It’s safe to say that the Cartesian 3D printer has matured as a device, but this work proves there’s plenty more in the world of 3D printing to be developed. Then there was a beautiful record cutting lathe project, far more than a toy and capable of producing good quality stereo recordings.
Meanwhile it’s always good to see the price of parts come down, and this time it’s the turn of LIDAR sensors. There’s a Raspberry Pi project capable of astounding resolution, for a price that wouldn’t have been imaginable only recently. Finally we returned to 3D printing, with an entirely printable machine, including the motors and the hot end. It’s a triumph of printed engineering, and though it’s fair to say that you won’t be using it to print anything for yourself, we expect some of the very clever techniques in use to feature in many other projects.
The week’s cant-miss articles came from Maya Posch with a reality check for lovers of physical media, and Dan Maloney with a history of x-ray detection. Listen to it all below, and you’ll find all the links at the bottom of the page.
Still mourning the death of physical media?
Download an MP3
and burn it to CD like it’s 1999!
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 318 Show Notes:
News:
China Hosts Robot Marathon
Announcing The Hackaday Pet Hacks Contest
What’s that Sound:
Congrats to [Bultza] for knowing what that sound was better than we did!
It was thrusters firing aboard the Dragon
(Instagram link)
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Non-planar Slicing Is For The Birds
Unique 3D Printer Has A Print Head With A Twist
3D Printering: Non-Planar Layer FDM
A Universal, Non-planar Slicer For 3D Printing Is Worth Thinking About
Improved And Open Source: Non-Planar Infill For FDM
DIY Record Cutting Lathe Is Really Groovy
A Pi-Based LiDAR Scanner
The Evertop: A Low-Power, Off-Grid Solar Gem
Robot Picks Fruit And Changes Light Bulbs With Measuring Tape
Compliant Robot Gripper Won’t Scramble Your Eggs
Dead Simple Jamming Gripper Design
The Most Printable 3D Printer Yet
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Printed Perpetual Calendar Clock Contains Clever Cams
Haircuts In Space: How To Keep Your Astronauts Looking Fresh
Jolly Wrencher Down To The Micron
Jenny’s Picks:
Low Cost Oscilloscope Gets Low Cost Upgrades
Open Source DMR Radio
A Scratch-Built Commodore 64, Turing Style
Restoration Of Six-Player Arcade Game From The Early 90s
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Why Physical Media Deserved To Die
To See Within: Detecting X-Rays | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122508",
"author": "Lee Roberts",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T08:54:47",
"content": "Mike Harrison has a couple of teardowns of xray sensor plates on his youtube channel. Very interesting stuff inside.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_... | 1,760,371,564.315539 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/25/you-wouldnt-steal-a-font/ | You Wouldn’t Steal A Font… | Jenny List | [
"Business",
"History",
"Interest"
] | [
"copyright",
"dvd",
"you wouldnt steal a car"
] | In the 2000s, the DVD industry was concerned about piracy, in particular the threat to their business model presented by counterfeit DVDs and downloadable movies. Their response was a campaign which could be found embedded into the intro sequences of many DVDs of the era, in which an edgy font on a black background began with “You wouldn’t steal a car.. “. It was enough of a part of the background noise of popular culture that it has become a meme in the 2020s, reaching many people with no idea of its origins. Now in a delicious twist of fate, it has been found that
the font used in the campaign was itself pirated
. Someone should report them.
The font in question is
FF Confidential
, designed by [Just van Rossum], whose brother [Guido] you may incidentally know as the originator of the Python programming language. The font in the campaign isn’t FF Confidential though, as it turns out it’s
XBAND Rough
, a pirated copy of the original. What a shame nobody noticed this two decades ago.
It’s a bit of fun to delight in an anti-piracy campaign being caught using a dodgy font, but if this story serves to tell us anything it’s that the web of modern intellectual property is so labyrinthine as to be almost impossible to navigate without coming a cropper somewhere. Sadly the people caught out in this case would be the last to call for reform of the intellectual property environment, but as any sane heads would surely agree, such reform is overdue.
If copyright gives you a headache,
here’s our take on it
. | 67 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "8121948",
"author": "Mark Topham",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T15:32:54",
"content": "“a pirated copy of the original”When it comes to fonts, you need to define that in detail.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121951",
"author"... | 1,760,371,564.641776 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/25/this-week-in-security-xrp-poisoned-mcp-bypassed-and-more/ | This Week In Security: XRP Poisoned, MCP Bypassed, And More | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"CVEs",
"mcp",
"supply chain attack",
"This Week in Security"
] | Researchers at Aikido run the Aikido Intel system, an LLM security monitor that ingests the feeds from public package repositories, and looks for anything unusual. In this case, the unusual activity was
five rapid-fire releases of the
xrpl
package on NPM
. That package is the XRP Ledger SDK from Ripple, used to manage keys and build crypto wallets. While quick point releases happen to the best of developers, these were odd, in that there were no matching releases in the source GitHub repository. What changed in the first of those fresh releases?
The most obvious change is the
checkValidityOfSeed()
function added to
index.ts
. That function takes a string, and sends a request to a rather odd URL, using the supplied string as the
ad-referral
header for the HTML request. The name of the function is intended to blend in, but knowing that the string parameter is sent to a remote web server is terrifying. The seed is usually the root of trust for an individual’s cryptocurrency wallet. Looking at the actual usage of the function confirms, that this code is stealing credentials and keys.
The
releases were made by a Ripple developer’s account
. It’s not clear exactly how the attack happened, though credential compromise of some sort is the most likely explanation. Each of those five releases added another bit of malicious code, demonstrating that there was someone with hands on keyboard, watching what data was coming in.
The good news is that the malicious releases only managed a total of 452 downloads for the few hours they were available. A legitimate update to the library, version 4.2.5, has been released. If you’re one of the unfortunate 452 downloads, it’s time to do an audit, and rotate the possibly affected keys.
Zyxel FLEX
More specifically, we’re talking about Zyxel’s USG FLEX H series of firewall/routers. This is Zyxel’s new Arm64 platform, running a Linux system they call Zyxel uOS. This series is for even higher data throughput, and given that it’s a new platform, there are some interesting security bugs to find, as discovered by
[Marco Ivaldi] of hn Security
and
[Alessandro Sgreccia] at 0xdeadc0de
. Together they discovered an exploit chain that allows an authenticated user with VPN access only to perform a complete device takeover, with root shell access.
The first bug is a wild one, and is definitely something for us Linux sysadmins to be aware of. How do you handle a user on a Linux system, that you don’t want to have SSH access to the system shell? I’ve faced this problem when a customer needed SFTP access to a web site, but definitely didn’t need to run
bash
commands on the server. The solution is to
set the user’s shell to
nologin
, so when SSH connects and runs the shell, it prints a message, and ends the shell, terminating the SSH connection. Based on the code snippet, the FLEX is doing something similar, perhaps with
-false
set as the shell instead:
$ ssh user@192.168.169.1
(user@192.168.169.1) Password:
-false: unknown program '-false'
Try '-false --help' for more information.
Connection to 192.168.169.1 closed.
It’s slightly janky, but seems set up correctly, right? There’s one more step to do this completely: Add a
Match
entry to
sshd_config
, and disable some of the other SSH features you may not have thought about, like X11 forwarding, and TCP forwarding. This is the part that Zyxel forgot about. VPN-only users can successfully connect over SSH, and the connection terminates right away with the invalid shell, but in that brief moment, TCP traffic forwarding is enabled. This is an unintended security domain transverse, as it allows the SSH user to redirect traffic into internal-only ports.
Next question to ask, is there any service running inside the appliance that provides a pivot point? How about PostgreSQL? This service is set up to allow local connections on port 5432 — without a password. And PostgreSQL has a wonderful feature, allowing a
COPY FROM
command to specify a function to run using the system shell. It’s essentially arbitrary shell execution as a feature, but limited to the PostgreSQL user. It’s easy enough to launch a reverse shell to have ongoing shell access, but still limited to the PostgreSQL user account.
There are a couple directions exploitation can go from there. The
/tmp/webcgi.log
file is accessible, which allows for grabbing an access token from a logged-in admin. But there’s an even better approach, in that the unprivileged user can use the system’s Recovery Manager to download system settings, repack the resulting zip with a custom binary, re-upload the zip using Recovery Manager, and then interact with the uploaded files. A clever trick is to compile a custom binary that uses the
setuid(0)
system call, and because Recovery Manager writes it out as root, with the setuid bit set, it allows any user to execute it and jump straight to root. Impressive.
Power Glitching an STM32
Micro-controllers have a bit of a weird set of conflicting requirements. They need to be easily flashed, and easily debugged for development work. But once deployed, those same chips often need to be hardened against reading flash and memory contents. Chips like the STM32 series from ST Microelectronics have multiple settings to keep chip contents secure. And Anvil Secure has
some research on how some of those protections could be defeated
. Power Glitching.
The basic explanation is that these chips are only guaranteed to work when run inside their specified operating conditions. If the supply voltage is too low, be prepared for unforeseen consequences. Anvil tried this, and memory reads were indeed garbled. This is promising, as the memory protection settings are read from system memory during the boot process. In fact, one of the hardest challenges to this hack was determining the exact timing needed to glitch the right memory read. Once that was nailed down, it took about 6 hours of attempts and troubleshooting to actually put the embedded system into a state where firmware could be extracted.
MCP Line Jumping
Trail of Bits is starting
a series on MCP security
. This has echoes of
the latest FLOSS Weekly episode
, talking about agentic AI and how Model Context Protocol (MCP) is giving LLMs access to tools to interact with the outside world. The security issue covered in this first entry is Line Jumping, also known as tool poisoning.
It all boils down to the fact that MCPs advertise the tools that they make available. When an LLM client connects to that MCP, it ingests that description, to know how to use the tool. That description is an opportunity for prompt injection, one of the outstanding problems with LLMs.
Bits and Bytes
Korean
SK Telecom has been hacked
, though not much information is available yet. One of the notable statements is that SK Telecom is offering customers a free SIM swapping protection service, which implies that a customer database was captured, that could be used for SIM swapping attacks.
WatchTowr is back with
a simple pre-auth RCE in Commvault using a malicious zip upload
. It’s a familiar story, where an unauthenticated endpoint can trigger a file download from a remote server, and file traversal bugs allow unzipping it in an arbitrary location. Easy win.
SSD Disclosure
has discovered a pair of Use After Free bugs in Google Chrome
, and Chrome’s Miracleptr prevents them from becoming actual exploits. That technology is a object reference count, and “quarantining” deleted objects that still show active references. And for these particular bugs, it worked to prevent exploitation.
And finally, [Rohan] believes there’s an argument to be made, that
the simplicity of ChaCha20 makes it a better choice as a symmetric encryption primitive than the venerable AES
. Both are very well understood and vetted encryption standards, and ChaCha20 even manages to do it with better performance and efficiency. Is it time to hang up AES and embrace ChaCha20? | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8121918",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T14:20:47",
"content": "Kind of a bad naming for something AI, calling it MCP.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121946",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2... | 1,760,371,564.685501 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/26/ykks-self-propelled-zipper-less-crazy-than-it-seems/ | YKK’s Self-Propelled Zipper: Less Crazy Than It Seems | Maya Posch | [
"News"
] | [
"zipper"
] | The self-propelled zip fastener uses a worm gear to propel itself along the teeth. (Credit: YKK)
At first glance the very idea of a zipper that unzips and zips up by itself seems somewhat ridiculous. After all, these contraptions are mostly used on pieces of clothing and gear where handling a zipper isn’t really sped up by having an electric motor sluggishly move through the rows of interlocking teeth. Of course, that’s not the goal of YKK, which is the world’s largest manufacturer of zip fasteners. The
demonstrated prototype
(
original PR
in Japanese) shows this quite clearly, with a big tent and equally big zipper that you’d be hard pressed to zip up by hand.
The basic application is thus more in industrial applications and similar, with one of the videos, embedded below, showing a large ‘air tent’ being zipped up automatically after demonstrating why for a human worker this would be an arduous task. While this prototype appears to be externally powered, adding a battery or such could make it fully wireless and potentially a real timesaver when setting up large structures such as these. Assuming the battery isn’t flat, of course.
It might conceivably be possible to miniaturize this technology to the point where it’d ensure that no fly is ever left unzipped, and school kids can show off their new self-zipping jacket to their friends. This would of course have to come with serious safety considerations, as anyone who has ever had a bit of their flesh caught in a zipper can attest to.
https://www.theverge.com/news/656535/ykk-self-propelled-zipper-prototype
https://www.ykk.com/newsroom/g_news/2025/20250424.html | 40 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122228",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T23:09:39",
"content": "Ever heard of aroad zipper? I wonder how many of these are fully-automated now and how many will become fully-automated in the next decade.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{... | 1,760,371,565.279505 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/26/remembering-heathkit/ | Remembering Heathkit | Al Williams | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"heathkit"
] | While most hams and hackers have at least heard of Heathkit, most people don’t know the strange origin story of the legendary company. [Ham Radio Gizmos]
takes us all through the story
.
In case you don’t remember, Heathkit produced everything from shortwave radios to color TVs to test equipment and even computers. But, for the most part, when you bought something from them, you didn’t get a finished product. You got a bag full of parts and truly amazing instructions about how to put them together. Why? Well, if you are reading Hackaday, you probably know why. But some people did it to learn more about electronics. Others were attracted by the lower prices you paid for some things if you built them yourself. Others just liked the challenge.
But Heathkit’s original kit wasn’t electronic at all. It was an airplane kit. Not a model airplane, it was an actual airplane. Edward Heath sold airplane kits at the affordable price around $1,000. In 1926, that was quite a bit of money, but apparently still less than a commercial airplane.
Sadly, Heath took off in a test plane in 1931, crashed, and died. The company struggled to survive until 1935, when Howard Anthony bought the company and moved it to the familiar Benton Harbor address. The company still made aircraft kits.
During World War II, the company mobilized to produce electronic parts for wartime aircraft. After the war, the government disposed of surplus, and Howard Anthony casually put in a low bid on some. He won the bid and was surprised to find out the lot took up five rail cars. Among the surplus were some five-inch CRTs used in radar equipment. This launched the first of Heathkit’s oscilloscopes — the O1. At $39.50, it was a scope people could afford, as long as they could build it. The
O-series
scopes would be staples in hobby workshops for many years.
There’s a lot more in the video. Well worth the twenty minutes. If you’ve never seen a Heathkit manual, definitely check out the one in the video. They were amazing. Or
download a couple
. No one creates instructions like this anymore.
If you watch the video, be warned, there will be a quiz, so pay attention. But here’s a hint: there’s no right answer for #3. We keep hearing that someone owns the
Heathkit
brand now, and there have been a few new products. But, at least so far, it hasn’t really been the same. | 22 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122210",
"author": "Miles Archer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T20:36:35",
"content": "I learned to solder building a kit that my dad got me. probablyhttps://people.ohio.edu/postr/bapix/HD-1416.htm",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,371,564.747423 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/26/quantum-random-number-generator-squirts-out-numbers-via-mqtt/ | Quantum Random Number Generator Squirts Out Numbers Via MQTT | Lewin Day | [
"Network Hacks"
] | [
"quantum",
"random",
"randomness",
"rng",
"trng"
] | Sometimes you need random numbers — and
properly
random ones, at that. Hackaday Alum [Sean Boyce] whipped up a rig that serves up just that,
tasty random bytes delivered fresh over MQTT.
[Sean] tells us he’s been “designing various quantum TRNGs for nearly 15 years as part of an elaborate practical joke” without further explanation. We won’t query as to why, and just examine the project itself. The main source of randomness — entropy, if you will — is a pair of transistors hooked up to create a bunch of avalanche noise that is
apparently truly random, much like the zener diode method.
In any case, the noise from the transistors is then passed through a bunch of hex inverters and other supporting parts to shape the noise into a nicely random square wave. This is sampled by an ATtiny261A acting as a
Von Neumann extractor
, which converts the wave into individual bits of lovely random entropy. These are read by a Pi Pico W, which then assembles random bytes and pushes them out over MQTT.
Did that sound like a lot? If you’re not in the habit of building random number generators, it probably did. Nevertheless,
we’ve heard from [Sean] on this topic before.
Feel free to share your theories on the best random number generator designs below, or send your best builds straight
to the tipsline
. Randomly, of course! | 24 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122184",
"author": "ziggurat29",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T17:44:00",
"content": "I suspect the joke was both funny and non-funny at the same time, hence the reticence to disclose.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122191",
... | 1,760,371,564.809204 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/26/from-good-enough-to-best/ | From Good Enough To Best | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants"
] | [
"coffee roaster",
"hacking projects",
"rants"
] | It was probably
Montesquieu
who coined the proto-hacker motto “the best is the mortal enemy of the good”. He was talking about compromises in drafting national constitutions for nascent democracies, of course, but I’ll admit that I do hear his voice when I’m in get-it-done mode and start cutting corners on a project. A working project is better than a gold-plated one.
But what should I do, Monte, when good enough turns out to also be the mortal enemy of the best? I have a DIY coffee roaster that is limping along for years now on a blower box that uses a fan scavenged in anger from an old Dust Buster. Many months ago, I bought a speed-controllable and much snazzier brushless blower fan to replace it, that would solve a number of minor inconveniences with the current design, but which would also require some building and another dive into the crufty old firmware.
So far, I’ve had good enough luck that the roaster will break down from time to time, and I’ll use that as an excuse to fix that part of the system, and maybe even upgrade another as long as I have it apart. But for now, it’s running just fine. I mean, I have to turn the fan on manually, and the new one could be automatic. I have only one speed for the fan, and the new one would be variable. But the roaster roasts, and a constant source of coffee is mission critical in this house. The spice must flow!
Reflecting on this situation, it seems to me that the smart thing to do is work on smoothing the transitions from good enough to best. Like maybe I could prototype up the new fan box without taking the current one apart. Mock up some new driver code on the side while I’m at it?
Maybe Montesquieu was wrong, and the good and the best aren’t opposites after all. Maybe the good enough is just the first step on the path toward the best, and a wise man spends his energy on making the two meet in the middle, or making the transition from one to the other as painless as possible.
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
! | 24 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122141",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T14:03:08",
"content": "Good enough brings us a planet full of life.https://youtu.be/DZ_T4zMBx6E",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122149",
"author": "Gravis",
... | 1,760,371,564.873079 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/26/digital-squids-behavior-shaped-by-neural-network/ | Digital Squid’s Behavior Shaped By Neural Network | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Machine Learning"
] | [
"digital pet",
"hebbian",
"machine learning",
"neural network"
] | In the 90s, a video game craze took over the youth of the world — but unlike today’s games that rely on powerful PCs or consoles, these were simple, standalone devices with monochrome screens, each home to a digital pet. Often clipped to a keychain, they could travel everywhere with their owner, which was ideal from the pet’s perspective since, like real animals, they needed attention around the clock. [ViciousSquid] is updating this 90s idea for the 20s with
a digital pet squid that uses a neural network to shape its behavior
.
The neural network that controls the squid’s behavior takes a large number of variables into account, including whether or not it’s hungry or sleepy, or if it sees food. The neural network adapts as different conditions are encountered, allowing the squid to make decisions and strengthen its algorithms. [ViciousSquid] is using a
Hebbian learning algorithm
which strengthens connections between neurons which activate often together. Additionally, the squid’s can form both short- and long-term memories, and the neural network can even form new neurons on its own as needed.
[ViciousSquid] is still working on this project, and hopes to eventually implement a management system in the future, allowing the various behavior variables to be tracked over time and overall allow it to act in a way more familiar to the 90s digital pets it’s modeled after. It’s an interesting and fun take on those games, though, and much of the code is available on GitHub for others to experiment with as well. For those looking for the original 90s games, head over to
this project where an emulator for Tamagotchis was created using modern microcontroller platforms
. | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122192",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T18:48:20",
"content": "Modern Tamagotchi perhaps?Although, if it can add neurons as required, perhaps there’s no limit to how smart it could get with enough time and computing capacity.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,371,564.921973 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/26/amazing-oscilloscope-demo-scores-the-win-at-revision-2025/ | Amazing Oscilloscope Demo Scores The Win At Revision 2025 | Lewin Day | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"demo",
"demoscene",
"oscilloscope",
"oscilloscope music",
"revision 2025"
] | Classic demos from the demoscene are all about showing off one’s technical prowess, with a common side order of a slick banging soundtrack. That’s precisely what [BUS ERROR Collective] members [DJ_Level_3] and [Marv1994] delivered
with their prize-winning
Primer
demo this week.
This demo is a grand example of so-called “oscilloscope music”—where two channels of audio are used to control an oscilloscope in X-Y mode. The sounds played determine the graphics on the screen, as we’ve explored previously.
The real magic is when you create
very cool
sounds that also draw
very cool
graphics on the oscilloscope. The
Primer
demo achieves this goal perfectly. Indeed, it’s intended as a “primer” on the very artform itself, starting out with some simple waveforms and quickly spiraling into a graphical wonderland of spinning shapes and morphing patterns, all to a sweet electronic soundtrack. It was created with a range of tools, including
Osci-Render
and apparently Ableton 11, and the recording performed on a gorgeous BK Precision Model 2120 oscilloscope in a nice shade of green.
If you think this demo is
fully sick
, you’re not alone. It took out first place in the Wild category at the
Revision 2025 demo party
, as well as the Crowd Favorite award. High praise indeed.
We love
a good bit of demoscene magic
around these parts.
Thanks to [STrRedWolf] for the tip! | 34 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122117",
"author": "Rpol404",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T11:13:39",
"content": "Really cool! Had an Amiga demo vibe from the late 80’s and early 90’s.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122118",
"author": "Mack",
"timestam... | 1,760,371,565.097073 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/25/rp2040-spins-right-round-inside-pov-display/ | RP2040 Spins Right ‘Round Inside POV Display | Tyler August | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"POV",
"POV display",
"rp2040"
] | Sometimes, a flat display just won’t cut it. If you’re looking for something a little rounder, perhaps your vision could persist in in looking at [lhm0]’s
rotating LED sphere RP2040 POV display
.
As you might have guessed from that title, this persistence-of-vision display uses an RP2040 microcontroller as its beating (or spinning, rather) heart. An optional ESP01 provides a web interface for control. Since the whole assembly is rotating at high RPM, rather than slot in dev boards (like Pi Pico) as is often seen, [lhm0] has made custom PCBs to hold the actual SMD chips. Power is wireless, because who wants to deal with slip rings when they do not have to?
The LED-bending jig is a neat hack-within-a-hack.
[lhm0] has also bucked the current trend for individually-addressable LEDs, opting instead to address individual through-hole RGB LEDs via a 24-bit shift-register. Through the clever use of interlacing, those 64 LEDs produce a 128 line display. [lhm0] designed and printed an LED-bending jig to aid mounting the through-hole LEDs to the board at a perfect 90 degree angle.
What really takes this project the extra mile is that [lhm0] has also produced a custom binary video/image format for his display, .rs64, to encode images and video at the 128×256 format his sphere displays.
That’s on github,
while a seperate library hosts the
firmware and KiCad files for the display itself
.
This is
hardly the first POV display
we’ve highlighted, though admittedly it
isn’t the cheapest one.
There are even
other spherical displays
, but none of them seem to have gone to the trouble of creating a file format.
If you want to see it in action and watch construction, the video is embedded below. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8122151",
"author": "Ralph Jerzy",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T14:46:05",
"content": "Cool idea, with a bit higher res and a full circular ring vs an arch, this would be awesome. Sooner or later someone will take this idea and commercialize it for anyone to purchase, like the POV fans ... | 1,760,371,564.970233 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/25/posthumous-composition-being-performed-by-the-composer/ | Posthumous Composition Being Performed By The Composer | Seth Mabbott | [
"Art",
"Musical Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"experimental music",
"neurons",
"organoids",
"stem cells"
] | Alvin Lucier was an American experimental composer whose compositions were arguably as much science experiments as they were music. The piece he is best known for,
I Am Sitting in a Room,
explored the acoustics of a room and what happens when you amplify the characteristics that are imparted on sound in that space by repeatedly recording and playing back the sound from one tape machine to another. Other works have employed galvanic skin response sensors, electromagnetically activated piano strings and other components that are not conventionally used in music composition.
Undoubtedly the most unconventional thing he’s done (so far) is to perform in an
exhibit at The Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth which opened earlier this month
. That in itself would not be so unconventional if it weren’t for the fact that he passed away in 2021. Let us explain.
While he was still alive, Lucier entered into a collaboration with a team of artists and biologists to create an exhibit that would push art, science and our notions of what it means to live beyond one’s death into new ground.
The resulting exhibit, titled
Revivication
, is a room filled with gong-like cymbals being played via actuators by Lucier’s brain…sort of. It is a brain organoid, a bundle of neurons derived from a sample of his blood which had been induced into
pluripotent stem cells
. The organoid sits on a mesh of electrodes, providing an interface for triggering the cymbals.
A brain organoid derived from Alvin Lucier’s blood cells sits on a mesh of electrodes.
“But the organoid isn’t aware of what’s happening, it’s not
performing
” we hear you say. While it is true that the bundle of neurons isn’t likely to have intuited hundreds of years of music theory or its subversion by experimental methodology, it
is
part of a feedback loop that potentially allows it to “perceive” in some way the result of its “actions”.
Microphones mounted at each cymbal feed electrical stimulus back to the organoid, presumably providing it with something to respond to. Whether it does so in any meaningful way is hard to say.
The exhibit asks us to think about where creativity comes from. Is it innate? Is it “in our blood” so to speak? Do we have agency or are we being conducted? Can we live on beyond our own deaths through some creative act? What, if anything, do brain organoids experience?
This makes us think about some of the interesting mind-controlled musical interfaces we’ve seen, the promise of
pluripotent stem cell research
, and of course those
brain computer interfaces
. Oh, and there was that time the
Hackaday Podcast
featured Alvin Lucier’s
I Am Sitting in a Room
on
What’s that Sound
. | 15 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8121864",
"author": "Lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T11:13:54",
"content": "Long live Alvin Lucier. Hopefully his mastery of chaotic acoustics goes for many years.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121874",
"aut... | 1,760,371,565.027241 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/25/clicksprings-experimental-archaeology-concentric-thin-walled-tubing/ | Clickspring’s Experimental Archaeology: Concentric Thin-Walled Tubing | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"antikythera",
"antiquity",
"boring",
"lapping",
"lathe",
"machining",
"polishing",
"reaming",
"rouge"
] | It’s human nature to look at the technological achievements of the ancients — you know, anything before the 1990s — and marvel at how they were able to achieve precision results in such benighted times. How could anyone create a complicated mechanism without the aid of CNC machining and computer-aided design tools? Clearly, it was aliens.
Or, as [Chris] from Click Spring demonstrates by
creating precision nesting thin-wall tubing
, it was human beings running the same wetware as what’s running between our ears but with a lot more patience and ingenuity. It’s part of his series of experiments into how the craftsmen of antiquity made complicated devices like
the Antikythera mechanism
with simple tools. He starts by cleaning up roughly wrought brass rods on
his hand-powered lathe
, followed by drilling and reaming to create three tubes with incremental precision bores. He then creates matching pistons for each tube, with an almost gas-tight enough fit right off the lathe.
Getting the piston fit to true gas-tight precision came next, by lapping with a jeweler’s rouge made from iron swarf recovered from the bench. Allowed to rust and ground to a paste using a mortar and pestle, the red iron oxide mixed with olive oil made a dandy fine abrasive, perfect for polishing the metal to a high gloss finish. Making the set of tubes concentric required truing up the bores on the lathe, starting with the inner-most tube and adding the next-largest tube once the outer diameter was lapped to spec.
Easy? Not by a long shot! It looks like a tedious job that we suspect was given to the apprentice while the master worked on more interesting chores. But clearly, it was possible to achieve precision challenging today’s most exacting needs with nothing but the simplest tools and plenty of skill. | 32 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8121847",
"author": "Barnaby Relph",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T09:37:03",
"content": "Very odd – that’s an unlisted video – it’s been up over 2 weeks with only a few hundred views.Fascinating content – getting that close of a fit with such manual methods is quite incredible",
"pa... | 1,760,371,565.347754 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/24/adding-an-atari-joystick-port-to-thec64-usb-joystick/ | Adding An Atari Joystick Port To TheC64 USB Joystick | Lewin Day | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"9-pin",
"C64 mini",
"commodore 64",
"thec64"
] | “TheC64” is a popular recreation of the best selling computer of all time, the original Commodore 64. [10p6] enjoys hacking on this platform, and recently whipped up a new mod —
adding a 9-pin Atari joystick connector for convenience
.
When it comes to TheC64 units, they ship with joysticks that
look
retro, but aren’t. These joysticks actually communicate with the hardware over USB. [10p6]’s hack was to add an additional 9-pin Atari joystick connector into the joystick itself. It’s a popular mod amongst owners of TheC64 and the C64 Mini. All one needs to do is hook up a 9-pin connector to the right points on the joystick’s PCB. Then, it effectively acts as a pass-through adapter for hooking up other joysticks to the system.
While this hack could have been achieved by simply chopping away at the plastic housing of the original joystick, [10p6] went a tidier route. Instead, the joystick was granted a new 3D printed base that had a perfect mounting spot for the 9-pin connector. Clean!
We’ve seen some great hacks from [10p6] lately,
like the neat reimagined “C64C” build
that actually appears in this project video, too. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8121818",
"author": "10p6",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T06:36:51",
"content": "Hi. Note that when I made this video, I had no idea that the other one had been done. Also, unlike the other one, this adds power to the port, so as seen in the video, it supports wireless adapters too, an... | 1,760,371,565.387575 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/24/llms-coming-for-a-dna-sequence-near-you/ | LLMs Coming For A DNA Sequence Near You | Navarre Bartz | [
"Artificial Intelligence"
] | [
"artificial intellegence",
"biohacking",
"biology",
"CRISPR",
"LLM",
"machine learning",
"synthetic biology"
] | While tools like CRISPR have blown the field of genome hacking wide open, being able to predict what will happen when you tinker with the code underlying the living things on our planet is still tricky. Researchers at Stanford hope their new
Evo 2 DNA generative AI tool can help
.
Trained on a dataset of over 100,000 organisms from bacteria to humans, the system can quickly determine what mutations contribute to certain diseases and what mutations are mostly harmless. An “area we are hopeful about is using Evo 2 for designing new genetic sequences with specific functions of interest.”
To that end, the system can also generate gene sequences from a starting prompt like any other LLM as well as cross-reference the results to see if the sequence already occurs in nature to aid in predicting what the sequence might do in real life. These synthetic sequences can then be made using CRISPR or similar techniques in the lab for testing. While the prospect of building our own
Moya
is exciting, we do wonder what possible negative consequences could come from this technology, despite the hand-wavy mention of not training the model on viruses to “to prevent Evo 2 from being used to create new or more dangerous diseases.”
We’ve got you covered if you need to get your own biohacking space setup for
DNA gels
or if you want to find out more about powering
living computers
using
electricity
. If you’re more curious about other interesting uses for machine learning, how about a
dolphin translator
or
discovering better battery materials
? | 16 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8121782",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T02:06:56",
"content": "Oh boy, those “hallucinations” are going to be so much fun.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121866",
"author": "Sammy",
"timestam... | 1,760,371,565.437427 |
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