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https://hackaday.com/2025/04/14/jennys-not-quite-daily-drivers-raspberry-pi-1/ | Jenny’s (Not Quite) Daily Drivers: Raspberry Pi 1 | Jenny List | [
"computer hacks",
"Featured",
"History",
"Interest",
"Slider",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"linux",
"minimalist",
"raspberry pi"
] | An occasional series of mine on these pages has been
Daily Drivers
, in which I try out operating systems from the point of view of using them for my everyday Hackaday work. It has mostly featured esoteric or lesser-used systems, some of which have been unexpected gems and others have been not quite ready for the big time.
Today I’m testing another system, but it’s not quite the same as the previous ones. Instead I’m looking at a piece of hardware, and I’m looking at it for use in my computing projects rather than as my desktop OS. You’ll all be familiar with it: the original Raspberry Pi appeared at the end of February 2012,
though it would be May of that year before all but a lucky few received one
. Since then it has become a global phenomenon and spawned a host of ever-faster successors, but what of that original board from 2012 here in 2025? If you have a working piece of hardware it makes sense to use it, so how does the original stack up? I have a project that needs a Linux machine, so I’m dusting off a Model B and going down memory lane.
Rediscovering An Old Flame
My first Pi from 2012. The heatsinks are my addition.
It’s fair to say that Raspberry Pi have never had the fastest board on the block, or the highest specification. At any point there’s always some board or other touted as a Pi-killer because it claims to do more, but somehow they never make much impact. The reason for this is simple; alongside your Pi you are also buying the ability to run Raspberry Pi OS, and their achievement in creating a solid and well-supported operating system that still runs on their earliest boards is something their competitors can’t touch. So when I pulled out my Model B I was able to go to the Raspberry Pi downloads page and snag a Debian Bookworm image for its 32-bit processor. I went for the “lite” version; while an early Pi will run a desktop and could even be my desktop daily driver, it would be so painfully slow as to be frustrating.
This is what my word trend analysis tool can do. Everyone was talking about Brexit in the UK in 2016.
My purpose for using the Pi is to run a language analysis package. Aside from fiddling with old cameras and writing about tech, I have a long history in computational language processing, and
I have recently returned to my news trend analysis code and made it open-source
. It’s a project whose roots go back nearly two decades, so there’s been an element of working out what my younger self was thinking. It builds and processes a corpus of news data over time from RSS feeds, and presents a web-based analysis client. 2000s-era me wrote it in PHP (don’t judge!) and I evolved a corpus structure using a huge tree of small JSON files for fast access. An earlier version of this package ran on my first Pi for many years, sitting next to my router with a USB hard disk.
Firing up an original Pi in 2025 is easy enough, as with any Pi it’s simply a case of writing the image to an SD card, hooking up the Pi to screen and peripherals, and booting it. Raspberry Pi OS is as straightforward to set up as always, and after rebooting and logging in, there I was with a shell.
Remembering, Computers Weren’t Always This Quick
Yes. it’s slow. But it’s got a shell. macrophile,
CC BY 2.0
.
My main machine is a fairly recent high-end Thinkpad laptop with an Intel Core i7, 32 GB of memory, and the fastest SSD I could afford, equipped with a hefty cache. It’s a supercomputer by any measure from the past, so I have become used to things I do in the shell being blisteringly quick. Sitting at the Pi, it’s evident that I’ll need to recalibrate my expectations, as there’s no way it can match the Thinkpad. As i waited – rather a long time – for
apt
to upgrade the packages, I had time to reflect. Back in the day when I set up Linux on my 486 or my Pentium machine, I was used to waiting like this. I remember
apt upgrade
being a go away and have a coffee thing, and I also remember thinking that Pentium was pretty quick, which it was for its day. But stripped of unnecessary services and GUI cruft, I was still getting all the power of the Pi in my terminal. It wasn’t
bad
, simply visibly slower than the Thinkpad, which to be fair, also applies to all the other computers I own.
So my little Pi 1 model B now sits again hooked up to my router and with a hefty USB drive, again waking up every couple of hours and number-crunching the world’s news. I’ve got used to its relative sloth, and to working again with
nano
and
screen
to get things done on it. It’s a useful little computer for the task I have for it, and it can run all day consuming only a couple of watts. As long as the Raspberry Pi people still make the Pi Zero, and I hope for a few years after they stop, it will continue to have OS support, and thus its future as my language processing machine looks assured.
The point of this piece has been to reflect on why we shouldn’t let our older hardware collect dust if it’s still useful. Of course Raspberry Pi want to sell us a new Pi 5, and that board is an amazing machine. But if your task doesn’t need all that power and you still have the earlier model lying around, don’t forget that it’s still a capable little Linux board that you probably paid quite a lot less for. You can’t argue with that. | 47 | 23 | [
{
"comment_id": "8118524",
"author": "KrakenTamer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T14:37:10",
"content": "Thank you for the reminder! I’ve got a couple of 3B’s in my drawer that I’ve been disregarding for their lack of integrated WiFi when I should really do some extra evaluation if any projects actually ... | 1,760,371,578.39586 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/12/diy-soldering-tweezers-extra-thrifty/ | DIY Soldering Tweezers, Extra Thrifty | Donald Papp | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"diy",
"soldering iron",
"soldering tweezers",
"surface mount",
"TS101"
] | It started when [Mitxela] was faced with about a hundred incorrectly-placed 0603 parts. Given that he already owned two TS101 soldering irons, a 3D printer, and knows how to use FreeCAD (he had just finished designing a custom TS101 holder) it didn’t take long to create
cost-effective DIY soldering tweezers
.
Two screws allow adjusting the irons to ensure the tips line up perfectly.
The result works great! The TS101 irons are a friction-fit and the hinge (designed using the that-looks-about-right method) worked out just fine on the first try. Considering two TS101 irons are still cheaper than any soldering tweezer he could find, and one can simply undock the TS101s as needed, we call this a solid win.
One feature we really like is being able to precisely adjust the depth of each iron relative to each other, so that the tips can be made to line up perfectly. A small screw and nut at the bottom end of each holder takes care of that. It’s a small but very thoughtful design feature.
Want to give it a try? The FreeCAD design file (and .stl model) is available from [Mitxela]’s project page. Just head to the bottom to find the links.
We’ve seen
DIY soldering tweezers using USB soldering irons from eBay
but the TS101 has a form factor that seems like a particularly good fit. | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8118115",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-12T18:16:15",
"content": "It probably has better temperature regulation than Sequre HT140. That one seems to regulate purely based on heater resistance, which isn’t particularly accurate.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"... | 1,760,371,578.018623 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/12/biting-off-more-than-i-can-chew/ | Biting Off More Than I Can Chew | Elliot Williams | [
"Laser Hacks",
"Rants"
] | [
"diy",
"K40 laser cutter",
"problems",
"repair"
] | Earlier this year, I bought one of those K40-style laser machines that was listed at a ridiculously low price, and it arrived broken. Well, let me qualify that: the laser tube and the power supply work perfectly, but that’s about the best you can say about it.
On first power-up, it made a horrible noise, the Y-axis was jammed, the X-axis was so off-square that it was visibly apparent, and it turned out that as I fixed one of these problems after the other, that it was just the tip of the iceberg. The Y-axis was jammed because the belts were so tight that they made the motor bind. Replacing them, because they were simply too short, got the stage moving, but it didn’t engage the endstops. Fixing those revealed that the motor was stepped wrong, and flipping the pins in the connector finally got it homing in the right direction. Full disassembly and reassembly steps required at each stage here.
The X-axis just needed adjustment, but the opto on its endstop had been completely crushed by a previous failed homing, and I had to desolder and resolder in a new one. (Keep your junkbox well stocked!) With the machine working, it became obvious that the driver board was barely usable. It accelerates horribly jerkily, which makes the motors skip and stall. It had to be run artificially slowly because it couldn’t make the corners. So I put in a new motor controller board that handles Gcode and does legitimate acceleration ramps.
Movement mostly fixed, it was time to align the laser. Of course, the optical path is all messed up, they forgot the o-ring that holds the focusing lens in place, and the thing keeps powering down randomly. This turns out to be because of the aiming red laser pointer, which has a positive case, which is shorting through the single wrap of electrical tape that “insulates” it from the machine’s frame. When this shorts, the motor driver board browns out. Lovely!
Once I was finally able to start aligning the beam, I discovered that the frame is warped out of plane. The simple solution is to take it all apart again and shim it until it’s flat, but I just haven’t had the time yet. I’m not beaten, but it’s been eating up hours after hours on the weekends, and that time is scarce.
I love DIY, and I love taking a machine apart in order to understand it. Once. But I’m now on my tenth or twelfth unmounting of the motion stage, and frankly, it’s no fun any more. It would have been quicker, if maybe not cheaper, to have built this machine entirely from scratch. At least for the moment, I’ve bitten off more than I have time to chew.
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
.
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You should sign up
! | 36 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "8118059",
"author": "DougM",
"timestamp": "2025-04-12T14:20:19",
"content": "These days many things I buy I expect to have to fix. I bought a really nice portable air compressor only to find out that the battery life was about 8 minutes. What’s worse was the standby life was only ... | 1,760,371,578.085567 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/12/tiny-pogo-robot-gets-wings-does-flips/ | Tiny Pogo Robot Gets Wings, Does Flips | Donald Papp | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"hopping robot",
"micro",
"mit",
"one-legged",
"pogo",
"wings"
] | Most robots depend on controlled environments, because the real world is hard to get around in. The smaller the robot, the bigger this problem because little wheels (or legs) can take only little steps. One way around that is
MIT’s latest one-legged hopping robot
, which sports a set of four insect-like wings on its top end and can quickly pogo-hop its way across different terrain with ease.
The four wings provide lift, and steer the robot so that its single leg lands precisely.
The wings aren’t for flying in the usual sense. They provide lift, but also help the tiny device steer itself so that its hops land precisely. Earlier incarnations of one-legged hopping robots (
like this one
) accomplished this with propellers and electric motors, but traditional motors are a non-starter on a device that weighs less than a paperclip.
Right now, this little winged hopper is not completely self-contained (power and control systems are off-board) but running it as a tethered unit allows researchers to test and evaluate different, minimalistic ways for a machine to move around efficiently. And efficiency is the whole goal of going in this direction.
Certainly tiny flying drones already exist and get about in the real world just fine. But if one wants to shed mass, ditch conventional motors, and reduce cost and power consumption, this tiny winged hopping machine is one way to do it. And it can even carry payloads! The payloads are tiny, of course, but being able to haul around ten times one’s own weight and still function reliably is an impressive feat.
You can watch it in action in the video embedded just below the page break. Once you’ve watched that, we’d like to remind you that novel locomotion isn’t just the domain of hopping robots.
Tiny robots with explosive joints
is just as wild as it sounds. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8118036",
"author": "Harvie.CZ",
"timestamp": "2025-04-12T11:48:06",
"content": "If only it was able to stand itself upright after tiping over for whatever reason…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118055",
"author": "craig",... | 1,760,371,578.131743 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/12/repairing-classic-sound-cards/ | Repairing Classic Sound Cards | Jenny List | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"ISA card",
"sound card",
"SoundBlaster"
] | Sound hardware has been built into PC motherboards for so long now it’s difficult to remember the days when a sound card was an expensive add-on peripheral. By the mid to late 1990s they were affordable and ubiquitous enough to be everywhere, but three decades later some of them are starting to fail. [Necroware] takes us through
the repair of a couple of Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16s
, which were
the
card to have back then.
The video below is a relaxed look at typical problems afflicting second-hand cards with uncertain pasts. There’s a broken PCB trace on the first one, which receives a neat repair. The second one has a lot more wrong with it though, and reveals some surprises. We would have found the dead 74 series chips, but we’re not so sure we’d have immediately suspected a resistor network as the culprit.
Watching these cards become sought-after in the 2020s is a little painful for those of us who were there at the time, because it’s certain we won’t be the only ones who cleared out a pile of old ISA cards back in the 2000s. If you find one today and don’t have an ISA slot, worry not, because
you can still interface it via your LPC bus
. | 15 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8118005",
"author": "Tom",
"timestamp": "2025-04-12T08:15:31",
"content": "Anyone who cares about good audio will have a internal or external 96/192kHz 24 bit sound card.They are night vs day better than built in(motherboard) SC’sAnd if you are a ham who does “digi modes”- you will ... | 1,760,371,577.798005 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/11/tracing-the-how-the-linux-kernel-handles-the-shebang/ | Tracing The #!: How The Linux Kernel Handles The Shebang | Maya Posch | [
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"linux kernel",
"shell script"
] | One of the delights in Bash, zsh, or whichever shell tickles your fancy in your OSS distribution of choice, is the ease of which you can use scripts. These can be shell scripts, or use the Perl, Python or another interpreter, as defined by the shebang (
#!
) at the beginning of the script. This signature is followed by the path to the interpreter, which can be
/bin/sh
for maximum compatibility across OSes, but how does this actually work? As [Bruno Croci] found
while digging into this question
, it is not the shell that interprets the shebang, but the kernel.
It’s easy enough to find out the basic execution sequence using
strace
after you run an executable shell script with said shebang in place. The first point is in
execve
, a syscall that gets one straight into the Linux kernel (
fs/exec.c
). Here the ‘binary program’ is analyzed for its executable format, which for the shell script gets us to
binfmt_script.c
. Incidentally the
binfmt_misc.c
source file provides an interesting detour as it concerns magic byte sequences to do something similar as a shebang.
As a bonus [Bruno] also digs into the difference between executing a script with shebang or running it in a shell (e.g.
sh script.sh
), before wrapping up with a look at where the execute permission on a shebang-ed shell script is checked. | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8117979",
"author": "El Gru",
"timestamp": "2025-04-12T05:28:03",
"content": "Fun fact: you can script almost anything.just use#!/use/bin/env THEAPPin the header of the file that you would send as an argument to the app, make the file executable und voila, you can run it.I recently ... | 1,760,371,578.305154 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/11/creating-a-somatosensory-pathway-from-human-stem-cells/ | Creating A Somatosensory Pathway From Human Stem Cells | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"biology",
"organoids"
] | Human biology is very much like that of other mammals, and yet so very different in areas where it matters. One of these being human neurology, with aspects like the human brain and the somatosensory pathways (i.e. touch etc.) being not only hard to study in non-human animal analogs, but also (genetically) different enough that a human test subject is required. Over the past years the use of human organoids have come into use, which are (parts of) organs grown from human pluripotent stem cells and thus allow for ethical human experimentation.
For studying aspects like the somatosensory pathways, multiple of such organoids must be combined, with recently [Ji-il Kim] et al.
as published in
Nature
demonstrating the creation of a so-called
assembloid
. This four-part assembloid contains somatosensory, spinal, thalamic and cortical organoids, covering the entirety of such a pathway from e.g. one’s skin to the brain’s cortex where the sensory information is received.
Such assembloids are – much like organoids – extremely useful for not only studying biological and biochemical processes, but also to research diseases and disorders, including tactile deficits as previously studied in mouse models by e.g.
[Lauren L. Orefice] et al.
caused by certain genetic mutations in
Mecp2
and other genes, as well as genes like
SCN9A
that can cause clinical absence of pain perception.
Using these assembloids the development of these pathways can be studied in great detail and therapies developed and tested. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,577.844161 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/11/gemini-2-0-robotics-slam-dunk/ | Gemini 2.0 + Robotics = Slam Dunk? | John Elliot V | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"ai",
"ALOHA robot",
"Google DeepMind",
"Google Gemini 2.0"
] | Over on the Google blog [Joel Meares] explains
how Google built the new family of Gemini Robotics models
.
The bi-arm ALOHA robot equipped with Gemini 2.0 software can take general instructions and then respond dynamically to its environment as it carries out its tasks. This family of robots aims to be highly dexterous, interactive, and general-purpose by applying the sort of non-task-specific training methods that have worked so well with LLMs, and applying them to robot tasks.
There are two things we here at Hackaday are wondering.
Is there anything a robot will
never
do
? And just how cherry-picked are these examples in the slick video? Let us know what you think in the comments! | 41 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8117934",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-12T01:16:57",
"content": "Something for an aging population to consider.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118120",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-04-12T... | 1,760,371,577.968797 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/13/satisfy-your-high-voltage-urges-with-this-printable-flyback-transformer/ | Satisfy Your High-Voltage Urges With This Printable Flyback Transformer | Dan Maloney | [
"High Voltage"
] | [
"coil",
"corona",
"dielectric oil",
"flyback",
"igbt",
"inverter"
] | Sick of raiding old TVs and CRT monitors for flyback transformers to feed your high-voltage addiction? Never fear; if you’re careful,
a 3D-printed flyback
might be just the thing you’re looking for.
To be fair, it’s pretty easy to come by new flyback transformers, so building your own isn’t strictly necessary. But [SciTubeHD] was in the market for a particularly large flyback, in a good-natured effort to displace [Jay Bowles] from his
lofty perch atop the flyback heap
. And it’s also true that this project isn’t entirely 3D-printed, as the split core of the transformer was sourced commercially. The secondary coil, though, was where most of the effort went, with a secondary form made from multiple snap-together discs epoxied together for good measure. The secondary has about a kilometer of 30-gauge magnet wire while the primary holds just ten turns of 8-gauge wire covered with silicone high-voltage insulation.
To decrease the likelihood of arcing, the transformer was placed in a plastic container filled with enough mineral oil
liquid dielectric
to cover the secondary. After degassing in a vacuum chamber for a day, [SciTubeHD] hooked the primary to a couple of different but equally formidable-looking full-bridge inverters for testing. The coil was capable of some pretty spicy arcs — [SciTubeHD] measured 20 amps draw at 35 volts AC input, so this thing isn’t to be trifled with. STL files for the core parts are coming up soon; we trust schematics for the power supply will be available, too. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8118288",
"author": "Gardoni",
"timestamp": "2025-04-13T14:07:16",
"content": "High voltage is very dangerous and there is a risk of death when touching. You’re better off using it remotly from behind a blast shield.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,577.894109 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/13/software-project-pieces-broken-bits-back-together/ | Software Project Pieces Broken Bits Back Together | Donald Papp | [
"Machine Learning",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"broken object",
"machine learning",
"puzzle solver",
"re-assembly"
] | With all the attention on LLMs (Large Language Models) and image generators lately, it’s nice to see some of the more niche and unusual applications of machine learning.
GARF
(
G
eneralizeable 3D re
A
ssembly for
R
eal-world
F
ractures) is one such project.
GARF may play fast and loose with acronym formation, but it certainly knows how to be picky when it counts. Its whole job is to look at the pieces of a broken object and accurately figure out how to fit the pieces back together, even if there are some missing bits or the edges aren’t clean.
Re-assembling an object from imperfect fragments is a nontrivial undertaking.
Efficiently and accurately figuring out how to re-assemble different pieces into a whole is not a trivial task. One may think it can in theory be brute-forced, but the complexity of such a job rapidly becomes immense. That’s where machine learning methods come in, as researchers created a system that can do exactly that. It addresses the challenge of generalizing from a synthetic data set (in which computer-generated objects are broken and analyzed for training) and successfully applying it to the kinds of highly complex breakage patterns that are seen in real-world objects like bones, recovered archaeological artifacts, and more.
The system is essentially a highly adept 3D puzzle solver, but an entirely different beast from something like
this jigsaw puzzle solving pick-and-place robot
. Instead of working on flat pieces with clean, predictable edges it handles 3D scanned fragments with complex break patterns even if the edges are imperfect, or there are missing pieces.
GARF is exactly the kind of software framework that is worth keeping in the back of one’s mind just in case it comes in handy some day. The
GitHub repository
contains the code (although at this moment the custom dataset is not yet uploaded) but there is also a demo available for the curious. | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8118266",
"author": "fiveseven",
"timestamp": "2025-04-13T12:10:49",
"content": "Pft! Batman did it back in 2012.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118271",
"author": "Bobtato",
"timestamp": "2025-04-13T12:24:49... | 1,760,371,578.260929 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/13/learning-linux-kernel-modules-using-com-binary-support/ | Learning Linux Kernel Modules Using COM Binary Support | Maya Posch | [
"Software Development",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"executable",
"linux kernel modules"
] | Have you ever felt the urge to make your own private binary format for use in Linux? Perhaps you have looked at creating the smallest possible binary when compiling a project, and felt disgusted with how bloated the ELF format is? If you are like [Brian Raiter], then this has led you down many rabbit holes, with the conclusion being that flat binary formats are the way to go if you want sleek, streamlined binaries. These are formats like COM, which many know from MS-DOS, but which was already around in the CP/M days. Here ‘flat’ means that the entire binary is loaded into RAM without any fuss or foreplay.
Although Linux does not (yet) support this binary format, the good news is that you can learn how to write kernel modules
by implementing COM support for the Linux kernel
. In the article [Brian] takes us down this COM rabbit hole, which involves setting up a kernel module development environment and exploring how to implement a binary file format. This leads us past familiar paths for those who have looked at e.g. how the Linux kernel handles the
shebang (
#!
) and ‘misc’ formats
.
On Windows, the kernel identifies the COM file by its extension, after which it gives it 640 kB & an interrupt table to play with. The kernel module does pretty much the same, which still involves a lot of code.
Of course, this particular rabbit hole wasn’t deep enough yet, so the COM format was extended into the
.
♚ (Unicode U+265A) format, because this is 2025 and we have to use all those Unicode glyphs for something. This format extension allows for amazing things like automatically exiting after finishing execution (like crashing).
At the end of all these efforts we have not only learned how to write kernel modules and add new binary file formats to Linux, we have also learned to embrace the freedom of accepting the richness of the Unicode glyph space, rather than remain confined by ASCII. All of which is perfectly fine.
Top image: Illustration of [Brian Raiter] surveying the fruits of his labor by [Bomberanian] | 17 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8118239",
"author": "olaf",
"timestamp": "2025-04-13T08:11:00",
"content": "felt disgusted with how bloated the ELF format is?Hm..yes! I thought it wenn Linus switched from aout to elf, but Linus did not listen to me. :-DOlaf",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [... | 1,760,371,578.454273 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/12/a-17th-century-music-computer/ | A 17th Century Music Computer | Al Williams | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"arca musarithmica",
"mechanical computer"
] | We don’t think of computers as something you’d find in the 17th century. But [Levi McClain] found plans for one in a book — books, actually — by [Athanasius Kirker] about music. The
arca musarithmica
, a machine to allow people with no experience to compose church music, might not fit our usual definition of a computer, but as [Levi] points out in the video below, there are a number of similarities to mechanical computers like slide rules.
Apparently, there are a few of these left in the world, but as you’d expect, they are quite rare. So [Levi] decided to take the plans from the book along with some information available publicly and build his own.
The computer is a box of wooden cards — tablets — with instructions written on them. Honestly, we don’t know enough about music theory to quite get the algorithm. [Kirker] himself had this to say in his book about the device:
Mechanical music-making is nothing more than a particular system invented by us whereby anyone, even the ἀμουσος [unmusical] may, through various applications of compositional instruments compose melodies according to a desired style. We shall briefly relate how this mechanical music-making is done and, lest we waste time with prefatory remarks, we shall begin with the construction of the Musarithmic Ark.
If you want to try it yourself, you won’t need to break out the woodworking tools. You can find
a replica
on the web, of course. Let us know if you set any Hackaday posts to music.
We know not everyone thinks something mechanical can be a computer, but
we disagree
. True, some are
more obvious
than others. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8118267",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-04-13T12:10:53",
"content": "I wonder if all the possible outputs from the algorithm are in the in the“all the music” datasets.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118355",
... | 1,760,371,578.862919 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/12/the-incomplete-json-pretty-printer-brought-to-you-by-vibes/ | The Incomplete JSON Pretty Printer (Brought To You By Vibes) | Donald Papp | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Software Development",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"json",
"vibe coding"
] | Incomplete JSON (such as from a log that terminates unexpectedly) doesn’t parse cleanly, which means anything that usually prints JSON nicely, won’t. Frustration with this is what led [Simon Willison] to make
The Incomplete JSON pretty printer
, a single-purpose web tool that pretty-prints JSON regardless of whether it’s complete or not.
Making a tool to solve a particular issue is a fantastic application of software, but in this case it also is a good lead-in to
some thoughts [Simon] has to share about vibe coding
. The incomplete JSON printer is a perfect example of vibe coding, being the product of [Simon] directing an LLM to iteratively create a tool and not looking at the actual code once.
Sometimes, however the machine decides to code something is
fine
.
[Simon] shares that the term “vibe coding” was first used in
a social media post
by [Andrej Karpathy], who we’ve seen shared
a “hello world” of GPT-based LLMs
as well as
how to train one in pure C
, both of which are the product of a deep understanding of the subject (and fantastically educational) so he certainly knows how things work.
Anyway, [Andrej] had a very specific idea he was describing with vibe coding: that of engaging with the tool in almost a state of flow for something like a weekend project, just focused on iterating one’s way to what they want without fussing the details. Why? Because doing so is new, engaging, and fun.
Since then, vibe coding as a term seems to get used to refer to any and all AI-assisted coding, a subject on which folks have quite a few thoughts (many of which were eagerly shared on
a recent
Ask Hackaday
on the subject
).
Of course human oversight is critical to a solid and reliable development workflow. But not all software is the same. In the case of the Incomplete JSON Pretty Printer, [Simon] really doesn’t
care
what the code actually looks like. He got it made in a short amount of time, the tool does exactly what he wants, and it’s hard to imagine the stakes being any lower. To [Simon], however the LMM decided to do things is
fine
, and there’s a place for that. | 21 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8118195",
"author": "Bad Vibes",
"timestamp": "2025-04-13T02:28:28",
"content": "“Vibe coding ain’t all bad” but sure, put the blacl box on the open internet. Nothing can go wrong with that.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "811... | 1,760,371,579.247215 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/12/hacking-a-cheap-rechargeable-lamp-with-non-standard-usb-c-connector/ | Hacking A Cheap Rechargeable Lamp With Non-Standard USB-C Connector | Maya Posch | [
"Reverse Engineering",
"Teardown"
] | [
"ESP32",
"USB C"
] | Recently [Dillan Stock] bought a $17 ‘mushroom’ lamp from his local Kmart that listed ‘USB-C rechargeable’ as one of its features. Unfortunately while this is
technically
true, there’s a pretty major asterisk. This Inaya-branded lamp comes with a USB-C cable with a rather prominent label attached to it that tells you that this lamp requires that specific cable. After trying with a regular USB-C cable, [Dillan] indeed confirmed that the lamp does not charge from a standard USB-C cable. So he did what any reasonable person would do: he bought a second unit
and set about to hacking it
.
The “USB C” cable that comes with the Inaya Portable Rechargeable Lamp. (Credit: The Stock Pot, YouTube)
[Dillan] also dug more into what’s so unusual about this cable and the connector inside the lamp. As it turns out, while GND & VCC are connected as normal, the two data lines (D+, D-) are also connected to VCC. Presumably on the lamp side this is the expected configuration, while using a regular USB-C cable causes issues. Vice versa, this cable’s configuration may actually be harmful to compliant USB-C devices, though [Dillan] did not try this.
With the second unit in hand, he started hacking in earnest. The changes include a regular USB-C port for charging, an ESP32 board with integrated battery charger for the 18650 Li-ion cell of the lamp, and an N-channel MOSFET to switch the power to the lamp’s LED. He’s made the full plans and schematics available on his website.
With all of the raw power from the ESP32 available, the two lamps got integrated into the Home Assistant network which enables features such as turning the lamps on when the alarm goes off in the morning. All of this took about $7 in parts and a few hours of work.
Although we commend [Dillan] on hacking his device instead of just returning it to the store, it’s worrying that apparently there’s now a flood of ‘USB C-powered’ devices out there that come with non-compliant cables. It brings back fond memories of hunting down proprietary charging cables,
which was the issue that USB power was supposed to fix
. | 40 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8118171",
"author": "Morz46",
"timestamp": "2025-04-12T23:34:47",
"content": "Just ran into something similar a couple days ago. I bought a new desk fan for my office at work and I accidentally bought one that’s powered by USB. It came with an USBA to USBC cable but the included U... | 1,760,371,579.182439 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/12/vibe-check-false-packages-a-new-llm-security-risk/ | Vibe Check: False Packages A New LLM Security Risk? | Tyler August | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Security Hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"ai",
"code security",
"LLM"
] | Lots of people swear by large-language model (LLM) AIs for writing code. Lots of people swear at them. Still others may be planning to exploit their peculiarities, according to [Joe Spracklen] and other researchers at USTA. At least, the researchers have found a
potential exploit in ‘vibe coding’
.
Everyone who has used an LLM knows they have a propensity to “hallucinate”– that is, to go off the rails and create plausible-sounding gibberish. When you’re vibe coding, that gibberish is likely to make it into your program. Normally, that just means errors. If you are working in an environment that uses a package manager, however (like npm in Node.js, or PiPy in Python, CRAN in R-studio) that plausible-sounding nonsense code may end up calling for a fake package.
A clever attacker might be able to determine what sort of false packages the LLM is hallucinating, and inject them as a vector for malicious code. It’s more likely than you think– while CodeLlama was the worst offender, the most accurate model tested (ChatGPT4) still generated these false packages at a rate of over 5%. The researchers were able to come up with a number of mitigation strategies in their
full paper
, but this is a sobering reminder that an AI cannot take responsibility. Ultimately it is up to us, the programmers, to ensure the integrity and security of our code, and of the libraries we include in it.
We just had a rollicking
discussion of vibe coding
, which some of you seemed quite taken with. Others agreed that
ChatGPT is the worst summer intern ever.
Love it or hate it, it’s likely this won’t be the last time we hear of security concerns brought up by this new method of programming.
Special thanks to [Wolfgang Friedrich] for sending this into our tip line. | 23 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8118142",
"author": "Jason",
"timestamp": "2025-04-12T20:18:26",
"content": "Stop checking my vibes.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118144",
"author": "Henrik Olsson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-12T20:24:51",
"content":... | 1,760,371,578.928586 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/11/a-mouse-no-hands/ | A Mouse, No Hands! | Jenny List | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"brass",
"foot mouse",
"mouse"
] | There are some ideas which someone somewhere has to try. Take [Uri Tuchman]’s foot mouse.
It’s a computer mouse for foot operation
, but it’s not just a functional block. Instead it’s an ornate inlaid-wood-and-brass affair in the style of a very fancy piece of antique footwear.
The innards of an ordinary USB mouse are placed in something best described as a wooden platform heel, upon which is placed a brass sole with a couple of sections at the front to activate the buttons with the user’s toes. The standout feature is the decoration. With engraving on the brass and inlaid marquetry on the wood, it definitely doesn’t look like any computer peripheral we’ve seen.
The build video is below the break, and we’re treated to all the processes sped up. At the end he uses it in a basic art package and in a piloting game, with varying degrees of succes. We’re guessing it would take a lot of practice to gain a level of dexterity with this thing, but we salute him for being the one who tries it.
This has to be the fanciest peripheral we’ve ever seen, but surprisingly
it’s not the first foot mouse we’ve brought you
. | 11 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8117870",
"author": "Dave Boyer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-11T20:27:30",
"content": "The video is truly amazing. I love this project and I’m so excited for it’s creator for making such an incredible amalgamation of engineering prowess and artistic skill.",
"parent_id": null,
"d... | 1,760,371,578.979573 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/11/gps-broken-try-tv/ | GPS Broken? Try TV! | Al Williams | [
"gps hacks",
"Interest",
"News"
] | [
"ASTC",
"BPS",
"gps"
] | GPS and similar satellite navigation systems revolutionized how you keep track of where you are and what time it is. However, it isn’t without its problems. For one, it generally doesn’t work very well indoors or in certain geographic or weather scenarios. It can be spoofed. Presumably, a real or virtual attack could take the whole system down.
Addressing these problems is a new system called Broadcast Positioning System (BPS). It uses upgraded ATSC 3.0 digital TV transmitters to send exact time information from commercial broadcast stations. With one signal, you can tell what time it is within 100 ns 95% of the time. If you can hear four towers, you can not only tell the time, but also estimate your position within about 100 m.
The whole thing is new — we’ve read that there are only six transmitters currently sending such data. However, you can get a good overview from
these slides
from the National Association of Broadcasters. They point out that the system works well indoors and can work with GPS, help detect if GPS is wrong, and stand in for GPS if it were to go down suddenly.
If all digital TV stations adopt this, the presentation mentions that there would be 516 VHF stations operating with up to 10 kW over two widely separated bands. That adds to 1,526 UHF stations running between 100 kW to 1000 kW. So lots of power and very diverse in terms of frequencies. Coverage is spotty in some parts of the country, though. A large part of the western United States would lack visibility of the four stations required for a position fix. Of course, currently there are only five or six stations, so this is theoretical at this point.
The Real Story
If you read the slide deck, the real story is at the end in the backup slides. That shows the ATSC standard frame and how the preamble changes. The math is fairly standard stuff. You know where the stations are, you know what time they think they sent the signal, and you can estimate the range to each station. With three or four stations, you can get a good idea of where you must be based on the relative receive times.
The stations diversify their time sources, which helps guard against spoofing. For example, they may get time information from GPS, the network, a local atomic clock, and even neighboring stations, and use that to create an accurate local time that they send out with their signal.
Learn More
Most of the slides come from more detailed white papers you can find on the
NAB website
. A lot of the site is dedicated to explaining why you can’t live without GPS, but you can’t depend on it, either. The bottom right part of the page has the technical papers you’ll probably be more interested in.
GPS is an
impressive system
, but we know it needs some help. BPS reminded us a bit of
LORAN
. | 37 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "8117821",
"author": "3isenhorn",
"timestamp": "2025-04-11T17:15:12",
"content": "There are also other System under development, especially in the maritime domain. E.g.https://www.r-mode-baltic.eu/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,371,579.056386 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/11/hackaday-podcast-episode-316-soft-robots-linux-the-hard-way-cellphones-into-sbcs-and-the-circuit-graver/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 316: Soft Robots, Linux The Hard Way, Cellphones Into SBCs, And The Circuit Graver | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they talk about the best stories and hacks of the week. This episode starts off with a discussion of the Vintage Computer Festival East and Philadelphia Maker Faire — two incredible events that just so happened to be scheduled for the same weekend. From there the discussion moves on to the latest developments in DIY soft robotics, the challenge of running Linux on 8-pin ICs, hardware mods to improve WiFi reception on cheap ESP32 development boards, and what’s keeping old smartphones from being reused as general purpose computers.
You’ll also hear about
Command and Conquer: Red Alert
running on the Pi Pico 2, highly suspect USB-C splitters, and producing professional looking PCBs at home with a fiber laser. Stick around to the end to hear about the current state of non-Google web browsers, and a unique new machine that can engrave circuit boards with remarkable accuracy.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
As always,
the Hackaday Podcast is available as a DRM-free MP3 download
.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 316 Show Notes:
News:
Celebrating 30 Years Of Windows 95 At VCF
In 2025, The Philly Maker Faire Finds Its Groove
What’s that Sound?
Congratulations to [laserkiwi] for winning a Hackaday Podcast t-shirt!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Salamander Robot Is Squishy
The Future of Robots is Soft (and Squishy!) – YouTube
These Electronics-free Robots Can Walk Right Off the 3D-Printer
FlowIO Platform
8 Pins For Linux
Building The Worst Linux PC Ever
Simple Antenna Makes For Better ESP32-C3 WiFi
ESP32 Range Extender / Antenna Modification
LayerLapse Simplifies 3D Printer Time-lapse Shots
Turning Old Cellphones Into SBCs
IOIO – Wikipedia
Ben Eater Vs. Microsoft BASIC
A Very Trippy Look At Microsoft’s Beginnings
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
A Tiny Tape Synth
If You’re 3D Scanning, You’ll Want A Way To Work With Point Clouds
Why USB-C Splitters Can Cause Magic Smoke Release
Tom’s Picks:
Tracking The ISS Made Easy
Command And Conquer Ported To The Pi Pico 2
Fiber Laser Gives DIY PCBs A Professional Finish
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Which Browser Should I Use In 2025?
qutebrowser
Supercon 2024: Quick High-Feature Boards With The Circuit Graver | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8117841",
"author": "serene85c23199e8",
"timestamp": "2025-04-11T18:13:38",
"content": "The soft robots thing sounds really cool. It doesn’t sound that far from being able to emulate animal muscles with hydraulic actuators.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
... | 1,760,371,579.099736 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/11/audio-effects-applied-to-text/ | Audio Effects Applied To Text | Al Williams | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"audio effects",
"oscilloscope music"
] | If you are a visual thinker, you might enjoy [AIHVHIA’s] recent video, which shows the effect of
applying audio processing
to text displayed on an oscilloscope. The video is below.
Of course, this presupposes you have some way to display text on an oscilloscope. Audio driving the X and Y channels of the scope does all the work. We aren’t sure exactly how he’s doing that, but we suspect it is something like
Osci-Render
.
Does this have any value other than art? It’s hard to say. Perhaps the effect of panning audio on text might give you some insight into your next audio project. Incidentally, panning certainly did what you would expect it to do, as did the pass filters. But some of the effects were a bit surprising. We still want to figure out just what’s happening with the wave folder.
If text isn’t enough for you,
try video
. Filtering that would probably be pretty entertaining, too. If you want to try your own experiments, we bet you could do it all — wave generation and filtering — in
GNU Radio
. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8117808",
"author": "Charlie Strauss",
"timestamp": "2025-04-11T15:55:40",
"content": "My 65O2 based 2K memory computer from the 1970’s does this!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8117865",
"author": "Nikolai",
"timestamp... | 1,760,371,579.3402 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/11/this-week-in-security-ai-spam-sap-and-ivanti/ | This Week In Security: AI Spam, SAP, And Ivanti | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"AI Spam",
"Ivanti",
"sap",
"This Week in Security"
] | AI continues to be used in new and exciting ways…
like generating spam messages
. Yes, it was inevitable, but we now have spammers using LLM to generate unique messages that don’t register as spam. AkiraBot is a Python-powered tool, designed to evade CAPTCHAs, and post sketchy SEO advertisements to web forms and chat boxes around the Internet.
AkiraBot
uses a bunch of techniques
to look like a legitimate browser, trying to avoid triggering CAPTCHAs. It also runs traffic through a SmartProxy service to spread the apparent source IP around. Some captured logs indicate that of over 400,000 attempted victim sites, 80,000 have successfully been spammed.
SSRF Attacking AWS
March brought a spike in instances of
an interesting EC2 attack
.
F5 labs has the details
, and it’s really pretty simple. Someone is sending requests ending in
/?url=hxxp://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/iam/security-credentials/
, with the hope that the site is vulnerable to a Server Side Request Forgery (SSRF).
That IP address is an interesting one. It’s the location where Amazon EC2 makes the Instance Metadata Service available (IMDSv1). Version 1 of this service completely lacks authentication, so a successful SSRF can expose whatever information that service makes available. And that can include AWS credentials and other important information. The easiest fix is to upgrade the instance to IMDSv2, which does have all the authentication features you’d expect.
SAP and setuid
Up next is
this Anvil Secure report from [Tao Sauvage]
, about finding vulnerable setuid binaries in the SAP Linux images.
Setuid is a slightly outdated way to allow a less-privileged user to run a binary with elevated privileges. The simplest example is
ping
, which needs raw socket access to send special ICMP packets. The binary is launched by the user, escalates its privileges to send the packet, and then terminates without actually breaking the security barrier. At least that’s what is supposed to happen. In reality, setuid binaries are a consistent source of privilege escalation problems on Linux. So much so, that it’s now preferred to use the
capabilities
functionality to achieve this. But that’s fairly new, and many distros just give binaries like ping the setuid bit.
This brings us to SAP’s Linux images, like SAP HANA Express. These images include a small collection of custom setuid binaries, with
icmbnd
and
hostexecstart
catching our researcher’s eyes.
icmbnd
notably has the
-f
flag to specify the output file for a debug trace. That’s a typical
setuid
problem, in that a user can specify an oddball location, and the binary will change the system’s state in unexpected ways. It’s an easy denial of service attack, but is there a way to actually get root? It turns out the the Linux
/etc/passwd
file is particularly resilient. Lines that don’t make any sense as password entries are just ignored. Inject a pair of newlines and a single valid
passwd
entry into the
passwd
file, and you too can be root on an SAP system.
The
hostexecstart
vulnerability is a bit more involved. That binary starts and stops the SAP Host Agent on the system. That would be a dead end, except it can also take a SAR archive and upgrade the system agent. [Tao] chased a couple of dead ends regarding library injection and SAR archive signing, before finally using another standard
setuid
technique, the symbolic link. In this case, link the
/etc/passwd
file to the local
sapcar_output
location, and include a malicious
passwd
line inside a cooked SAR archive.
hostexecstart
tries to unpack the archive, and outputs the log right into the local
sapcar_output
file. But that file is really a symbolic link, and it once again clobbers
passwd
.
Google’s Take on End-to-end-encryption
We’re fans of end-to-end encryption around here. If Alice had a message that’s only intended for Bob to see, then it seems only right that Bob is really the only one that can read the message. The reality of modern cryptography is that this is 100% possible via RSA encryption, and the entire variety of asymmetric encryption schemes that followed. The problem with actually using such encryption is that it’s a pain. Between managing keys, getting an email client set up properly, and then actually using the system in practice, end-to-end asymmetric encryption is usually just not worth the hassle for everyday people.
Google feels that pain, and
is bringing easy end-to-end encryption to business Gmail accounts
. Except, it’s not actually asymmetric encryption. This works using the key access control list (KACL). Here Alice writes a message, and asks the KACL server for a key to use to send it to Bob. The server provides a symmetric key, and Alice encrypts the message. Then when Bob receives the message, he asks the same server for the same key, and the server provides it, allowing him to decrypt the message.
So is this actually end-to-end encryption? Yes, but also no. While this solution does mean that Google never has the key needed to decrypt the message, it also means that whoever is running the KACL server
does
have that key. But it is better than the alternative. And the technique in use here could be adapted to make true symmetric encryption far easier for end users.
Ivanti Connect Active Exploit
Google’s Mandiant has announced that
Ivanti Connect Secure boxes are under active exploitation
via an n-day exploit. This is a buffer overflow that Ivanti discovered internally, and patched in February of this year. The overflow was considered to be strictly limited to denial of service, as the characters written to memory could only be digits and the dot symbol. If that sounds like an IP address, just hang on, and we’ll get there.
It’s apparent that malware actors around the world are actively checking for potential vulnerabilities in Ivanti firmware updates, as the group Mandiant calls UNC5221 has apparently worked out a way to achieve Remote Code Execution with this vulnerability, and is using it to deploy malware on these systems. This is thought to be the same Chinese group that Microsoft appropriately calls Silk Typhoon.
Our
friends at watchTowr have dug a bit more into this issue
, and found the exact vulnerable code. It’s in HTTP header handling code, where a specific header is first limited to numerals and the period, and then copied into a fixed size buffer. Remember that observation that this sounds like an IP address? The header is
X-Forwarded-For
, and setting that to a long string of numbers on a vulnerable Ivanti box will indeed trigger a crash in the
web
binary. There’s no word yet on how exactly that was used to achieve RCE, but we’re very much hoping the rest of the story comes to light, because it’s an impressive feat.
Bits and Bytes
About
100,000 WordPress sites have a real problem
. The Ottokit plugin has an authentication bypass issue, where a blank API key can be matched by setting an empty
st_authorization
header in an incoming request. The flaw was reported privately on April 3rd, and a fixed version was released the same day. But within hours exploitation attempts were seen in the wild.
Legacy
Gigacenter devices expose a TR-069 service on port 6998
. That service can be accessed with a simple telnet connection, and the commands entered here are not properly sanitized before being evaluated. Anything inside a
$()
substitution string is executed locally:
$(ping -c5 your.ip.address)
This makes for an exceedingly trivial remote code execution attack on these devices.
And finally, the
Langflow AI workflow tool has a simple remote exploit vulnerability
fixed in version 1.3.0. This vulnerability notably allows bypassing authentication through an API endpoint. While Langflow has Python execution by design, doing it while bypassing authentication is a definite problem. You should update to 1.3.0, and don’t expose Langflow to the Internet at all if you can help it. | 13 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8117873",
"author": "Jay",
"timestamp": "2025-04-11T20:33:56",
"content": "Welp, that sucks. Looking out for the next update to my mail client to make sure it filters out that AI spam crap.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118... | 1,760,371,579.298563 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/11/the-jupiter-ace-remembered/ | The Jupiter Ace Remembered | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"forth",
"Jupiter Ace"
] | It is hard to imagine that it has been more than four decades since two of the original designers of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum broke off to market the Jupiter Ace.
[Nemanja Trifunovic] remembers the tiny computer in a recent post
, and we always love to recall the old computers that used TVs for screens and audio tape recorders for mass storage.
One thing we always loved about the Jupiter Ace is that while most computers of the era had Basic as their native tongue, the Ace used Forth. As the post points out, while this may have given it great geek cred, it didn’t do much for sales, and the little machine was history within a year. However, the post also proposes that Forth wasn’t the real reason for the machine’s lack of commercial success.
Why did they pick Forth? Why not? It is efficient and interactive. The only real disadvantage was that Basic was more familiar to more people. Books and magazines of the day showed Basic, not Forth. But, according to the post, the real reason for its early demise was that it was already using outdated hardware from day one.
The Ace provided only 3K of RAM and did not offer color graphics. While this may sound laughable today, it wasn’t totally out of the question in 1978. Unfortunately, the Ace debuted in 1982. There were options that offered much more for just a little less. There is also the argument that as users became less technical, they just wanted to load pre-programmed tapes or cartridges and didn’t really care what language was running the computer.
Maybe, but we did and we can’t help but imagine a future where Forth was the language of choice for personal computers. Given how few of these were made, we see a lot of projects around them or, at least,
replicas
. Of course, these days that can be as simple as a
single chip
. | 11 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8117731",
"author": "Fungus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-11T11:35:41",
"content": "I had one. It was a case of “wrong time, wrong place”. If it had gone up against the ZX81 instead of the Spectrum it would have been a massive hit.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [... | 1,760,371,579.387666 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/11/brush-up-on-your-trade-craft-with-this-tiny-fm-bug/ | Brush Up On Your Trade Craft With This Tiny FM Bug | Dan Maloney | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"bug",
"fm",
"spy radio",
"transmitter"
] | Would-be spooks and spies, take note:
this one-transistor FM transmitter
is a circuit you might want to keep in mind for your bugging needs. True, field agents aren’t likely to need to build their own equipment, but how cool a spy would you be if you could?
Luckily, you won’t need too many parts to recreate [Ciprian (YO6DXE)]’s project, most of which could be found in a decently stocked junk bin, or even harvested from e-waste. On the downside, the circuit is pretty fussy, with even minor component value changes causing a major change in center frequency. [Ciprian] had to do a lot of fiddling to get the frequency in the FM band, particularly with the inductor in the LC tank circuit. Even dropping battery voltage shifted the frequency significantly, which required a zener diode to address.
[Ciprian] ran a few tests and managed to get solid copy out to 80 meters range, which is pretty impressive for such a limited circuit. The harmonics, which extend up into the ham bands and possibly beyond, are a bit of a problem; while those could be addressed with a low-pass filter, in practical terms, the power of this little fellow is probably low enough to keep you from getting into serious trouble. Still, it’s best not to push your luck.
While you’re trying your hand at one-transistor circuits, you might want to try
[Ciprian]’s one-transistor CW transceiver
next. | 19 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8117679",
"author": "Benji",
"timestamp": "2025-04-11T08:16:26",
"content": "This was the first electronics project I ever did as a kid. So nice to see it pop back up nearly 35 years on.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8117685... | 1,760,371,579.444025 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/10/farewell-economy-7-a-casualty-of-the-long-wave-switch-off/ | Farewell Economy 7, A Casualty Of The Long Wave Switch-Off | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"long-wave",
"radio teleswitch"
] | If you paid attention to advertising in 1980s Britain, you were never far from Economy 7. It was the magic way to heat your house for less, using storage heaters which would run at night using cheap electricity, and deliver warmth day-long. Behind it all was an unseen force, a nationwide radio switching signal transmitted using the BBC’s 198 kHz Long Wave service. Now in 2025
the BBC Radio 4 Long Wave service it relies on is to be turned off
, rendering thousands of off-peak electricity meters still installed, useless. [Ringway Manchester] is here to tell the tale.
The system was rolled out in the early 1980s
, and comprised of a receiver box which sat alongside your regular electricity meter and switched in or out your off-peak circuit. The control signal was phase-modulated onto the carrier, and could convey a series of different energy use programs. 198 kHz had the useful property due to its low frequency of universal coverage, making it the ideal choice.
As we’ve reported in the past
the main transmitter at Droitwich is to be retired due to unavailability of the high-power vacuum tubes it relies on, so now time’s up for Economy 7 too. The electricity companies are slow on the uptake despite years of warning, so there’s an unseemly rush to replace those old meters with new smart meters. The video is below the break.
The earliest of broadcast bands may be on the way out, but it’s not entirely over.
There might even be a new station on the dial for some people
. | 36 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8117668",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2025-04-11T07:15:26",
"content": "I have a modern but non-smart economy 7 meter for overnight car charging. I think it keeps track of time itself, maybe counting 50Hz cycles the old fashioned way. When the clocks go forwards or backwards, the ... | 1,760,371,579.698753 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/10/using-integer-addition-to-approximate-float-multiplication/ | Using Integer Addition To Approximate Float Multiplication | Maya Posch | [
"Software Development",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"floating point",
"FPU",
"gpu"
] | Once the domain of esoteric scientific and business computing, floating point calculations are now practically everywhere. From video games to large language models and kin, it would seem that a processor without floating point capabilities is pretty much a brick at this point. Yet the truth is that integer-based approximations can be good enough to hit the required accuracy. For example, approximating floating point multiplication with integer addition, as [Malte Skarupke]
recently had a poke at
based on an
integer addition-only LLM approach
suggested by [Hongyin Luo] and [Wei Sun].
As for the way this works, it does pretty much what it says on the tin: adding the two floating point inputs as integer values, followed by adjusting the exponent. This adjustment factor is what gets you close to the answer, but as the article and comments to it illustrate, there are plenty of issues and edge cases you have to concern yourself with. These include under- and overflow, but also specific floating point inputs.
Unlike in scientific calculations where even minor inaccuracies tend to propagate and cause much larger errors down the line, graphics and LLMs do not care that much about float point precision, so the ~7.5% accuracy of the integer approach is good enough. The question is whether it’s truly more efficient as the paper suggests, rather than a fallback as seen with e.g. integer-only audio decoders for platforms without an FPU.
Since one of the nice things about FP-focused vector processors like GPUs and derivatives (tensor, ‘neural’, etc.) is that they can churn through a lot of data quite efficiently, the benefits of shifting this to the ALU of a CPU and expecting (energy) improvements seem quite optimistic. | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8117634",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-04-11T03:04:37",
"content": "Neat math trick.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8117635",
"author": "FEW",
"timestamp": "2025-04-11T03:05:23",
"content": "I recently lea... | 1,760,371,579.750126 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/10/windows-on-arm-on-arm/ | Windows On ARM On Arm | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"bootloader",
"kernel",
"pixel watch",
"smartwatch",
"UEFI",
"watch",
"wear os",
"windows",
"windows pe"
] | While some companies like Apple have gone all-in on the ARM architecture, others are more hesitant to dive into the deep end. For example, Microsoft remains heavily invested in the x86 architecture and although it does have some ARM offerings, a lot of them feel a bit half-baked. So you might question why someone like [Gustave] has spent so much time getting Windows to run on unusual ARM platforms. But we don’t need much of a reason to do something off-the-wall like that around these parts,
so take a look at his efforts to get Windows for ARM running on a smartwatch
.
The smartwatch in question here is a Pixel Watch 3, which normally runs a closed-source Android implementation called Wear OS. The bootloader can be unlocked, so [Gustave] took that approach to implement a few clever workarounds to get Windows to boot including adding UEFI to the watch. During the process Google updated these devices to Android 15, though, which broke some of these workarounds. The solution at that point was to fake a kernel header and re-implement UEFI and then load Windows (
technically Windows PE
) onto the watch.
Although this project was released on April 1, and is by [Gustave]’s own admission fairly ridiculous and not something he actually recommends anyone do, he does claim that it’s real and provides everything needed for others to run Windows on their smartwatches if they want to. Perhaps one of our readers will be brave enough to reproduce the results and post about it in the comments. In the meantime,
there are a few more open options for smartwatches available
if you’re looking for something to tinker with instead.
Thanks to [Ruhan] for the tip! | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8117600",
"author": "Bill rowe",
"timestamp": "2025-04-10T23:48:52",
"content": "Very cool. Could you use a Bluetooth keyboard?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8117745",
"author": "RunnerPack",
"timestamp": "2025-04-11T1... | 1,760,371,579.920438 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/10/a-new-mechanical-keyboard-for-an-old-computer/ | A New Mechanical Keyboard For An Old Computer | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"3d printed",
"commodore",
"Commodore64",
"keyboard",
"mechanical keyboard",
"pcb",
"retrocomputing",
"retrofit"
] | As computers age, a dedicated few work towards keeping some of the more interesting ones running. This is often a losing battle of sorts, as the relentless march of time comes for us all, human and machine alike. So as fewer and fewer of these machines remain new methods are needed to keep them running as best they can.
[CallousCoder] demonstrates a way of building up a new keyboard for a Commodore 64
which both preserves the original look and feel of the retro computer but also adds some modern touches.
One of the main design differences between many computers of the 80s and modern computers is that the keyboard was often built in to the case of the computer itself. For this project, that means a custom 3D printed plate that can attach to the points where the original keyboard would have been mounted inside the case of the Commodore. [CallousCoder] is using a print from [Wolfgang] to get this done, and with the plate printed and a PCB for the keys it was time to start soldering. The keyboard uses modern switches and assembles like most modern keyboards do, with the exception of the unique layout for some of the C64 keys including a latching shift key, is fairly recognizable for anyone who has put together a mechanical keyboard before.
[CallousCoder] is using the original keycaps from a Commodore 64, so there is an additional step of adding a small adapter between the new switches and the old keycaps. But with that done and some amount of configuring, he has a modern keyboard that looks like the original. If you’re more a fan of the original hardware, though,
you can always take an original C64 keyboard and convert it to USB to use it on your modern machines instead
. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8117549",
"author": "Neil",
"timestamp": "2025-04-10T20:31:09",
"content": "Are there any series resistors? IIRC the original keys have a ~50 ohm impedance when closed. Modern switches probably less. Could that cause any issues?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies"... | 1,760,371,580.034067 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/10/improving-magnetoplasmadynamic-ion-thrusters-with-superconductors/ | Improving Magnetoplasmadynamic Ion Thrusters With Superconductors | Maya Posch | [
"Space"
] | [
"ion drive",
"space propulsion"
] | Ion thrusters are an amazing spacecraft propulsion technology, providing very high efficiency with relatively little fuel. Yet getting one to produce more thrust than that required to lift a sheet of A4 paper requires a lot of electricity. This is why they have been only used for applications where sustained thrust and extremely low fuel usage are important, such as the attitude management of satellites and other spacecraft. Now researchers in New Zealand have created a prototype magnetoplasmadynamic (MPD) thruster with a superconducting electromagnet that is claimed to
reduce the required input power by 99%
while generating a three times as strong a magnetic field.
Although
MPD thrusters
have been researched since the 1970s – much like their electrostatic cousins, Hall-effect thrusters – the power limitations on the average spacecraft have limited mission profiles. Through the use of a high-temperature superconducting electromagnet with an integrated cryocooler, the MPD thruster should be able to generate a very strong field, while only sipping power. Whether this works and is as reliable as hoped will be tested this year when the prototype thruster is installed on the ISS for experiments. | 24 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8117515",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-10T18:56:05",
"content": "I wonder why all the bother with a superconductor. They say the magnet coil draws 1 watt to generate a 0.5 Tesla magnetic field, “a 99 percent reduction in input power compared to a copper electromagnet”.I ... | 1,760,371,580.162644 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/10/ask-hackaday-whats-a-sun-like-star/ | Ask Hackaday: What’s A Sun-Like Star? | Al Williams | [
"Ask Hackaday",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"astronomy",
"exoplanets"
] | Is a bicycle like a motorcycle? Of course, the answer is it is and it isn’t. Saying something is “like” something else presupposes a lot of hidden assumptions. In the category “things with two wheels,” we have a winner. In the category “things that require gasoline,” not so much. We’ve noticed before that news stories about astronomy often talk about “sun-like stars” or “Earth-like planets.” But what does that really mean? [Paul Gilster] had the same questions, if you want to read
his opinion about it
.
[Paul] mentions that even textbooks can’t agree. He found one that said that Centauri A was “sun-like” while Centauri B was sometimes considered sun-like and other times not. So while Paul was looking at the examples of press releases and trying to make sense of it all, we thought we’d just ask you. What makes a star like our sun? What makes a planet like our planet?
Part of the problem is we don’t really know as much as we would like about other planets and their stars. We know more than we used to, of course. Still, it would be like wondering if the motorcycle was like that distant point of light. Maybe.
This is one of those things that seems deceptively simple until you start thinking about it. Is a planet Earth-like if it is full of water? What if it is totally covered in water? What if there’s no life at all? But life isn’t it, either. Methane-breathing silicon-based life probably doesn’t live on Earth-like planets.
Maybe Justice Potter Stewart was on to something when he said, “I know it when I see it!” Unfortunately, that’s not very scientific.
So what do you think? What’s a sun-like star? What’s an Earth-like planet? Discuss in the comments.
Don’t even get us started on
super-earths
, whatever they are. We are learning more about our
neighbors
every day, though. | 20 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8117402",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2025-04-10T14:27:00",
"content": "Yawn. Like nothing new under the sun-like sun.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8117406",
"author": "Pedro",
"timestamp": "2025-04-10T14:28:18",
... | 1,760,371,580.09131 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/10/clever-engineering-leaves-appliance-useless/ | Clever Engineering Leaves Appliance Useless | Tom Nardi | [
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"LED display",
"multiplexing",
"optimization",
"short circuit"
] | Around these parts, we generally celebrate clever hacks that let you do more with less. So if somebody wrote in to tell us how they used multiplexing to drive the front panel of their latest gadget with fewer pins on the microcontroller than would normally be required, we’d be all over it. But what if that same hack ended up leading to a common failure in a piece of consumer hardware?
As [Jim] recently found out, that’s precisely what seems to be ailing the Meaco Arete dehumidifier. When his stopped working, some
Internet searching uncovered the cause of the failure
: if a segment in the cheap LED display dies and shorts out, the multiplexing scheme used to interface with the front panel essentially reads that as a stuck button and causes the microcontroller to lock up. He passed the info along to us as a cautionary tale of how over-optimization can come with a hidden cost down the line.
Judging by the thread from the
Badcaps
forum, the problem was identified last summer. But unless you had this particular dehumidifier and went searching for it, it’s not the kind of thing that you’d otherwise run into. The users start by going through the normal diagnostic steps, but come up short (no pun intended).
Given its simplicity, the front panel PCB was not an obvious failure point.
Eventually, user [CG2] resorts to buzzing out all the connections to the two digit seven-segment LED display on the front panel, and finds a dead short on one of the segments. After removing the display, the dehumidifier sprung back to life and everything worked as expected. It wasn’t hard to identify a suitable replacement display on AliExpress, and swapping it out brought the appliance back up to full functionality.
Now to be fair, a shorted out component is likely to cause havoc wherever it might be in the circuit, and as such perhaps it’s the lowest-bidder LED display with the unusually high failure rate that’s really to blame here. But it’s also more likely you’d interpret a dark display as a symptom of the problem rather than the cause, making this a particularly tricky failure to identify.
In any event,
judging by how many people seem to be having the same problem
, and the fact that there’s
now an iFixit guide on how to replace the shorted display
, it seems like this particular product was cost-optimized just a bit too far. | 23 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8117324",
"author": "Josh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-10T11:10:21",
"content": "It’s a bit of a shame as this is otherwise the best dehumidifier on the market.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8117327",
"author": "jeremy S",
... | 1,760,371,579.98704 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/10/everyones-talking-gpmi-should-you/ | Everyone’s Talking GPMI, Should You? | Jenny List | [
"home entertainment hacks"
] | [
"displayport",
"GPMI",
"hdmi"
] | The tech press has been full of announcements over the last day or two regarding GPMI. It’s a new standard with the backing of a range of Chinese hardware companies, for a high-speed digital video interface to rival HDMI. The Chinese semiconductor company HiSilicon
have a whitepaper on the subject
(Chinese language,
Google Translate link
), promising a tremendously higher data rate than HDMI, power delivery well exceeding that of USB-C, and interestingly, bi-directional data transfer. Is HDMI dead? Probably not, but the next few years will bring us some interesting hardware as they respond to this upstart.
Reading through pages of marketing from all over the web on this topic, it appears to be an early part of the push for 8k video content. There’s a small part of us that wonders just how far we can push display resolution beyond that of our eyes without it becoming just a marketing gimmick, but it is true to say that there is demand for higher-bandwidth interfaces. Reports mention two plug styles: a GPMI-specific one and a USB-C one. We expect the latter to naturally dominate. In terms of adoption, though, and whether users might find themselves left behind with the wrong interface, we would expect that far from needing to buy new equipment, we’ll find that support comes gradually with fallback to existing standards such as DisplayPort over USB-C, such that we hardly notice the transition.
Nearly a decade ago
we marked the passing of VGA
. We don’t expect to be doing the same for HDMI any time soon in the light of GPMI. | 74 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "8117276",
"author": "Carl Breen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-10T08:27:29",
"content": "The Licensing Administrations in the U.S. will never allow it. Even the more free Display Port is being kept out of AV receivers and TVs. HDMI doesn’t have to be a technically superior standard, but a ... | 1,760,371,580.352627 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/09/making-liquid-oxygen-far-from-easy-but-worth-the-effort/ | Making Liquid Oxygen: Far From Easy But Worth The Effort | Dan Maloney | [
"chemistry hacks"
] | [
"concentrator",
"cryocooler",
"cryogenic",
"Liquid oxygen",
"LOX",
"oxygen",
"pressure swing adsorption",
"PSA",
"stirling"
] | Normally, videos over at The Signal Path channel on YouTube have a certain vibe, namely teardowns and deep dives into high-end test equipment for the microwave realm. And while we always love to see that kind of content,
this hop into the world of cryogenics and liquid oxygen production
shows that [Shahriar] has other interests, too.
Of course, to make liquid oxygen, one must first have oxygen. While it would be easy enough to get a tank of the stuff from a gas supplier, where’s the fun in that? So [Shahriar] started his quest with a cheap-ish off-the-shelf oxygen concentrator, one that uses the pressure-swing adsorption cycle we saw used to great effect with
DIY O
2
concentrators
in the early days of the pandemic. Although analysis of the machine’s output revealed it wasn’t quite as capable as advertised, it still put out enough reasonably pure oxygen for the job at hand.
The next step in making liquid oxygen is cooling it, and for that job [Shahriar] turned to the cryocooler from a superconducting RF filter, a toy we’re keen to see more about in the future. For now, he was able to harvest the Stirling-cycle cryocooler and rig it up in a test stand with ample forced-air cooling for the heat rejection end and a manifold to supply a constant flow of oxygen from the concentrator. Strategically placed diodes were used to monitor the temperature at the cold end, a technique we can’t recall seeing before. Once powered up, the cryocooler got down to the 77 Kelvin range quite quickly, and within an hour, [Shahriar] had at least a hundred milliliters of lovely pale blue fluid that passed all the usual tests.
While we’ve seen a few attempts to
make liquid nitrogen before
, this might be the first time we’ve seen anyone make liquid oxygen. Hats off to [Shahriar] for the effort. | 26 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8117281",
"author": "metalman",
"timestamp": "2025-04-10T08:56:47",
"content": "next step is to create liquid o² injectors for a drag race motor…,……….….no intake side….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8117307",
"author... | 1,760,371,580.232186 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/09/ask-hackaday-vibe-coding/ | Ask Hackaday: Vibe Coding | Jenny List | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Ask Hackaday",
"Slider",
"Software Development"
] | [
"ai",
"LLM",
"vibe coding"
] | Vibe coding is the buzzword of the moment. What is it? The practice of writing software by describing the problem to an AI large language model and using the code it generates. It’s not quite as simple as just letting the AI do your work for you because the developer is supposed to spend time honing and testing the result, and its proponents claim it gives a much more interactive and less tedious coding experience. Here at Hackaday, we are pleased to see the rest of the world catch up, because back in 2023, we were the first mainstream hardware hacking news website to embrace it, to deal with
a breakfast-related emergency
.
Jokes aside, though, the fad for vibe coding is something which should be taken seriously, because it’s seemingly being used in enough places that vibe coded software will inevitably affect our lives. So here’s the
Ask Hackaday:
is this a clever and useful tool for making better software more quickly, or a dangerous tool for creating software nobody quite understands, containing bugs which could cause a disaster?
Our approach to writing software has always been one of incrementally building something from the ground up, which satisfies the need. Readers will know that feeling of being in touch with how a project works at all levels, with a nose for immediately diagnosing any problems that might occur. If an AI writes the code for us, the feeling is that we might lose that connection, and inevitably this will lead to less experienced coders quickly getting out of their depth. Is this pessimism, or the grizzled voice of experience? We’d love to know your views in the comments. Are our new AI overlords the new senior developers? Or are they the
worst summer interns ever
? | 92 | 41 | [
{
"comment_id": "8117227",
"author": "prosper",
"timestamp": "2025-04-10T02:15:57",
"content": "Personally, I’ve found that going through the thought process well enough to articulate it for an AI to grok is like 90% of the mental effort of designing a program anyway. You need to think about the pro... | 1,760,371,580.488593 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/09/going-to-the-top-with-a-raspberry-pi-elevator/ | Going To The Top With A Raspberry Pi Elevator | Al Williams | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"elevator",
"mqtt"
] | [BorisDigital] was mesmerised by a modern elevator. He decided to see how hard it would be to design
his own elevator
based on Raspberry Pis. He started out with a panel for the elevator and a call panel for the elevator lobby. Of course, he would really need three call panels since he is pretending to have a three-floor building.
It all looks very professional, and he has lots of bells and whistles, including an actual alarm. With the control system perfected, it was time to think about the hydraulics and mechanical parts to make a door and an actual lift.
It is still just a model, but he does have 10A AC switches for the pumps. Everything talks via MQTT over WiFi. There’s also a web-based control dashboard. We didn’t count how many Pi boards are in the whole system, but it is definitely more than three.
If you are wondering why this was built, we are too. But then again, we never really need an excuse to go off on some project, so we can’t throw stones.
Want to see a more practical build?
Check it out
. Perhaps he’ll start on an
escalator
next. | 17 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8117221",
"author": "dremu",
"timestamp": "2025-04-10T00:14:19",
"content": "One word: SimTower. Or is that two? Or four? Either way,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTower.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8117222",
"author":... | 1,760,371,580.545972 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/09/floss-weekly-episode-828-incus-inception/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 828: Incus Inception | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"FLOSS Weekly"
] | This week,
Jonathan Bennett
and
Rob Campbell
talk to
Stéphane Graber
about LXC, Linux Containers, and Incus! Why did Incus fork from LXD, why are Fortune 500 companies embracing it, and why might it make sense for your home lab setup? Watch to find out!
https://stgraber.org
Incus:
https://linuxcontainers.org/incus
Online demo:
https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/try-it/
https://github.com/lxc/incus
Incus Deploy:
https://github.com/lxc/incus-deploy
Incus OS:
https://github.com/lxc/incus-os
Terraform Provider:
https://github.com/lxc/terraform-provider-incus
Migration Manager:
https://github.com/futurfusion/migration-manager
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 | [] | 1,760,371,580.589412 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/09/self-hosting-a-cluster-on-old-phones/ | Self-Hosting A Cluster On Old Phones | Bryan Cockfield | [
"handhelds hacks"
] | [
"bootloader",
"k3s",
"kubernetes",
"linux",
"postmarketos",
"raspberry pi",
"smartphone",
"unlockable"
] | The phones most of us carry around in our pockets every day hold a surprising amount of computing power. It’s somewhat taken for granted now that we can get broadband in our hands in most places; so much so that when one of these devices has reached the end of its life it’s often just tossed in a junk drawer even though its capabilities would have been miraculous only 20 years ago. But those old phones can still be put to good use though,
and [Denys] puts a few of them back to work running a computing cluster
.
Perhaps the most significant flaw of smartphones, though, is that most of them are locked down so much by their manufacturers that it’s impossible to load new operating systems on them. For this project you’ll need to be lucky enough (or informed enough) to have a phone with an unlockable bootloader so that a smartphone-oriented Linux distribution called postmarketOS can be installed. With this nearly full-fledged Linux distribution to work from, the phones can be accessed by ssh and then used to run Kubernetes for the computing cluster. [Denys] has three phones in his cluster that run a few self-hosted services for him.
[Denys] also points out in his guide that having a phone that can run postmarketOS might save some money when compared to buying a Raspberry Pi to run the same service, and the phones themselves can often be more powerful as well.
This is actually something that a few others have noted in the past as well
. He’s gone into a considerable amount of detail on how to set this up, so if you have a few old smartphones gathering dust, or even those with broken screens or other physical problems where the underlying computing resources are still usable, it’s a great way to put these machines back to work.
Thanks to [mastro Gippo] for the tip! | 35 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "8117108",
"author": "zoobab",
"timestamp": "2025-04-09T17:52:09",
"content": "Try proot-docker under Termux, you can spin docker images without being root.Working on adding skopeo to Termux.With proot it fakes the root, but you can run a lot of stuff.I am sure i could run a simple s... | 1,760,371,580.665725 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/09/you-shouldnt-build-an-x-ray-machine-but-you-could/ | You Shouldn’t Build An X-Ray Machine, But You Could | Al Williams | [
"Medical Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"x-ray"
] | Ever wanted your own X-ray machine? Of course you have! Many of us were indoctrinated with enticing ads for X-ray specs and if you like to see what’s inside things, what’s better than a machine that looks inside things? [Hyperspace Pirate] agrees, and he shows you the dangers of having
your own X-ray machine
in the video below.
The project starts with an X-ray tube and a high voltage supply. The tube takes around 70,000 volts which means you need a pretty stout supply, an interesting 3D printed resistor, and some mineral oil.
The output display? A normal camera. You also need an intensifying screen, which is just a screen with phosphor or something similar. He eventually puts everything in lead and reminds you that this is a very dangerous project and you should probably skip it unless you are certain you know how to deal with X-ray dangers.
Overall, looks like a fun project. But if you want real credit, do like [Harry Simmons] and
blow your own X-ray tube
, too. We see people build
similar machines
from time to time. You shouldn’t, but if you do, remember to be careful and to
tell us about it
! | 18 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8117081",
"author": "zxm",
"timestamp": "2025-04-09T15:51:45",
"content": "my father had a 1920s copy of ‘the boy electrician’ which showed how to make one. an earlier copy is on project gutenburg. the parts were more available back then.https://www.gutenberg.org/files/63207/63207-h... | 1,760,371,580.810492 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/09/in-2025-the-philly-maker-faire-finds-its-groove/ | In 2025, The Philly Maker Faire Finds Its Groove | Tom Nardi | [
"cons",
"Featured",
"Slider"
] | [
"Philadelphia Maker Faire"
] | The first Philadelphia Maker Faire was extremely impressive
, and seemed poised to be one of the premier maker events on the East Coast. Unfortunately, it had the misfortune of happening just a few months before COVID-19 made such events impossible. Robbed of all its momentum, the event tried out different venues after the shadow of the pandemic was gone, but struggled to meet the high bar set by that inaugural outing.
But after attending the the
2025 Philadelphia Maker Faire
this past weekend, I can confidently say the organizers have moved the needle forward. This year marks the second time the event has been held at the
Cherry Street Pier
, a mixed-use public space with an artistic bent that not only lends itself perfectly to the spirit of Maker Faire but offers room for expansion in the future. The pier was packed with fascinating exhibits and excited attendees, and when the dust settled, everyone I spoke to was thrilled with how the day went and felt extremely positive about the future of the Faire.
Providing coverage of an event like this is always difficult, as there’s simply no way I could adequately describe everything there was to see and do. The following represents just a few of the projects that caught my eye; to see all that the Philadelphia Maker Faire has to offer, I’d strongly suggest you make the trip out in 2026.
Wasteworld Toys
Of all the awesome projects I saw during the Faire, the one that stuck with me the most has to be
Brett Houser’s
Wasteworld Toys
. This incredible collection of hand-made remote controlled vehicles invoke the look and feel of the
Mad Max
universe, but are populated with its own cast of post-apocalyptic characters that come from the depths of Brett’s obviously considerable imagination.
Whether your saw them as pieces of art or electronic marvels, it was impossible not to be impressed with the work Brett put into these builds. While there were some 3D printed parts and cannibalized model kits, much of the raw material used to build the vehicles and characters came from the trash. Brett has an eye for repurposing everyday objects, like taking the metal top from a disposable lighter and turning it into an armored faceplate for one of his Wasteworld warriors.
Beyond being able to simply drive them around, most of the vehicles had some secondary function. One was equipped with an Airsoft cannon, another had a functional flame-thrower, and there was even a mobile rocket launcher that actually fired tiny rockets. They weren’t all weapons of war though: there was a surveillance van that featured a tiny display showing nearby WiFi networks, and a tricked-out station wagon that had an emulated version of
Contra
running in the back that you could play with a Bluetooth PlayStation controller.
Many of the vehicles featured first person view (FPV) capabilities, with the cameras so expertly hidden on the vehicles and cybernetic characters that at first glance you assume they’re just part of the visual theme and not functional components. To make the experience even more immersive, several vehicles featured displays that were really only visible when looking through the FPV gear, such as digital readouts of the system’s battery voltage.
As impressive as the vehicles of
Wasteworld Toys
was, it was perhaps Brett himself who left the biggest impression on me. Humble, affable, and eager to share the intricate details of his work, he was even willing to hand the controls of his creations over to attendees, much to their delight. The
Wasteworld
couldn’t have asked for a better ambassador.
Myelin BCI Board
Hackaday readers may recall the OpenBCI project, which made some headlines about a decade ago with their relatively low-cost development boards for experimenting with brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). We covered a few projects that used their software and hardware,
including a flying shark controlled by EEG signals
.
It turns out that OpenBCI has now turned their attention to some kind of mixed reality headset that costs as much as a new car, leaving the future of their more hobbyist friendly hardware in question. Which is why Mike Recine has been working on the Myelin, an open source hardware project that continues the legacy of OpenBCI’s early work. Powered by the ESP32, the battery-powered board can wirelessly link to your phone or computer to deliver 16 channels of EEG data.
Mike is hoping to launch a Kickstarter for the hardware soon, offering up assembled and ready-to-use Myelin boards. Kits are also on the horizon, and of course as an open source hardware project, spinning up your own board will be an option as well. The project doesn’t have much of an online presence currently, but
interested parties can sign up to be notified
when more information goes live.
A Cardboard Table Saw
The ChompSaw is advertised as a “kid-safe power tool for cutting cardboard” but it doesn’t take long to realize that’s selling the machine a bit short. There’s no blade in the machine, instead it uses a small metal piston to rapidly nibble away at the cardboard, a mechanism that co-founder Max Liechty says could be thought of as a “full-auto hole punch.” Even though there’s no blade, the business end of the ChompSaw is still under a protective cover that keeps anything thicker than 3 mm cardboard out. You couldn’t hurt yourself with this machine if you tried.
It rapidly rips through cardboard in any direction, making it easy to follow patterns and cut out complex shapes. Though it was designed primarily for common cardboard (think: all those Amazon boxes you’ve got stacked up), it can chew through other thin materials such as paper, foam, and plastic, opening up even more possibilities.
https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/pmf25_chomp.mp4
The ChompSaw brought in over $1 million
during its 2023 Kickstarter campaign
, and is available for
purchase through their site
. While it might not seem like the kind of machine we’d usually get excited about at Hackaday, its ability to cut through foam and other materials holds promise for more practical applications than rainy day arts and crafts. Plus, one should never underestimate the value of CAD:
Cardboard Aided Design
.
The Sights of Philly Maker Faire
The Road Ahead
In addition to the attendees and exhibitors, I also got the chance to talk to some of the folks behind the Philadelphia Maker Faire. It will probably come as no surprise to hear they all share a passion for discovering and showcasing local talent, and are very excited about the future of the event. There was even some talk about coordinating efforts with other art and
tech events in the area such as JawnCon
.
Considering they were up against some dreary weather, the organizers were encouraged by the fantastic turnout. Similarly, the venue itself was more than up to the challenge, and should have no trouble supporting the event as it grows. Put simply, the Philadelphia Maker Faire has found its stride, and promises to be even bigger and better next year. If you’re in the Northeast US, this is an event you should keep on your calendar for 2026 and beyond. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8117050",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-09T14:43:38",
"content": "hahaha totally off the wall “why won’t this guy shut up” anecdote herein dec 2000 i was taking a greyhound trip to NYC and i had a substantial layover in philadelphia and i thought i would take advantage o... | 1,760,371,580.873898 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/09/forget-propellers-embrace-tentacle-based-locomotion/ | Forget Propellers, Embrace Tentacle-based Locomotion | Donald Papp | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"flagella",
"marine",
"robot",
"rov",
"tentacles",
"underwater"
] | Underwater robots face many challenges, not least of which is how to move around.
ZodiAq
is a prototype underwater soft robot
(link is to research paper) that takes an unusual approach to this problem: multiple flexible appendages. The result is a pretty unconventional-looking device that can not only get around effectively, but can do so without disturbing marine life.
ZodiAq
sports a soft flexible appendage from each of its twelve faces, but they aren’t articulated like you might think. Despite this, the device can crawl and swim.
With movement inspired by bacterial flagella, ZodiAq moves in an unusual but highly controllable way.
Each soft appendage is connected to a motor, which rotates the attached appendage. This low-frequency but high-torque rotation, combined with the fact that each appendage has a 45° bend to it, has each acting as a rotor. Rotation of the appendages acts on the surrounding fluid, generating thrust. When used together in the right way, these appendages allow the unit to move in a perfectly controllable manner.
This locomotion method is directly inspired by the swimming gait of bacterial flagella, which the paper mentions are regarded as the only example of a biological “wheel”.
How fast can it go? The prototype covers a distance of two body lengths every fifteen seconds. True, it’s no speed demon compared to a propeller, but it doesn’t disturb marine life or environments as it moves around. This method of movement has a lot going for it. It’s adaptable and doesn’t use all twelve appendages at once; so there’s redundancy built in. If some get damaged or go missing, it can still move, just slower.
ZodiAq
‘s design strikes us as a very accessible concept, should any aspiring marine robot hackers wish to give it a shot. We’ve seen other highly innovative and beautiful underwater designs as well, like
body-length undulating fins
and
articulated soft arms
.
We do notice that since it lacks a “front” — it might be a challenge to decide how to mount something like a camera. If you have any ideas, share them in the comments. | 25 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8116993",
"author": "jon",
"timestamp": "2025-04-09T11:09:00",
"content": "If I saw this whilst swimming, I’d release my brown ink.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8116997",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2025-... | 1,760,371,580.999308 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/09/better-bearings-take-the-wobble-out-of-premium-scroll-wheel/ | Better Bearings Take The Wobble Out Of Premium Scroll Wheel | Dan Maloney | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"bluetooth",
"moment of inertia",
"scroll wheel"
] | Sitting in front of a computer all day isn’t exactly what the firmware between our ears was tuned to do. We’re supposed to be hunting and gathering, not hunting and pecking. So anything that makes the computing experience a little more pleasurable is probably worth the effort, and
this premium wireless scroll wheel
certainly seems to fit that bill.
If this input device seems familiar, that’s because
we featured [Engineer Bo]’s first take on this
back at the end of 2024. That version took a lot of work to get right, and while it delivered high-resolution scrolling with a premium look and feel, [Bo] just wasn’t quite satisfied with the results. There were also a few minor quibbles, such as making the power switch a little more user-friendly and optimizing battery life, but the main problem was the one that we admit would have driven us crazy, too: the wobbling scroll wheel.
[Bo]’s first approach to the wobble problem was to fit a larger diameter bearing under the scroll wheel. That worked, but at the expense of eliminating the satisfying fidget-spinner action of the original — not acceptable. Different bearings yielded the same result until [Bo] hit on the perfect solution: a large-diameter ceramic bearing that eliminated the wobble while delivering the tactile flywheel experience.
The larger bearing left more room inside for the redesigned PCB and a lower-profile, machined aluminum wheel. [Bo] also had a polycarbonate wheel made, which looks great as is but would really be cool with internal LEDs — at the cost of battery life, of course. He’s also got plans for a wheel machined from wood, which we’ll eagerly await. | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8116979",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-09T09:02:10",
"content": "I am interested in a better mouse, but not in a separate scroll wheel, but still, this looks like quite a nice project if you want this kind of thing.Some Ideas I had while watching the video:The device c... | 1,760,371,580.929696 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/08/salamander-robot-is-squishy/ | Salamander Robot Is Squishy | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"microfluidics",
"salamander"
] | If you want to get started in microfluidic robotics, [soiboi soft’s]
salamander
is probably too complex for a first project. But it is impressive, and we bet you’ll learn something about making this kind of robot in the video below.
The pneumatic muscles are very impressive. They have eight possible positions using three sources of pressure. This seems like one of those things that would have been nearly impossible to fabricate in a home lab a few decades ago and now seems almost trivial. Well, maybe trivial isn’t the right word, but you know what we mean.
The soft robots use layers of microfluidic channels that can be made with a 3D printer. Watching these squishy muscles move in an organic way is fascinating. For right now, the little salamander-like ‘bot has a leash of tubes, but [soiboi] plans to make a self-contained version at some point.
If you want something modular, we’ve seen
Lego-like microfluidic
blocks. Or, grab the
shrinky dinks
. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8116986",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-04-09T10:19:38",
"content": "Only indecent things come to my mind, every time I see a soft robot/actuators",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8117168",
"author": "O",
... | 1,760,371,581.039614 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/08/dozens-of-solenoids-turn-vintage-typewriter-into-a-printer/ | Dozens Of Solenoids Turn Vintage Typewriter Into A Printer | Dan Maloney | [
"classic hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"Electric Typewriter",
"matrix",
"mosfet",
"printer",
"solenoid",
"typewriter"
] | An electric typewriter is a rare and wonderful thrift store find, and even better if it still works. Unfortunately, there’s not as much use for these electromechanical beauties, so if you find one, why not follow [Konstantin Schauwecker]’s lead and
turn it into a printer
?
The portable typewriter [Konstantin] found, a Silver Reed 2200 CR, looks like a model from the early 1980s, just before PCs and word processing software would sound the death knell for typewriters. This machine has short-throw mechanical keys, meaning that a physical press of each key would be needed rather than electrically shorting contacts. Cue the order for 50 low-voltage solenoids, which are arranged in rows using 3D printed holders and aluminum brackets, which serve as heat sinks to keep the coils cool. The solenoids are organized into a matrix with MOSFET drivers for the rows and columns, with snubber diodes to prevent voltage spikes across the coils, of course. A Raspberry Pi takes care of translating an input PDF file into text and sending the right combination of GPIO signals to press each key.
The action of the space bar is a little unreliable, so page formatting can be a bit off, but other than that, the results are pretty good. [Konstantin] even managed to hook the printer up to
his typewriter keyboard
, which is pretty cool, too. | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8116876",
"author": "Kenneth Welles",
"timestamp": "2025-04-09T02:22:00",
"content": "Printers were way beyond my graduate student budget in 1975 when I got my Altair 8800. I bought a used IBM Selectric and added about 11 or 12 solenoids to make it into a printer (~5 char / second)... | 1,760,371,581.190046 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/08/ascii-to-mainframe/ | ASCII To Mainframe | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"ibm",
"mainframe"
] | IBM mainframes are known for very unusual terminals. But IBM made many different things, including the
IBM 3151 ASCII terminal
, which uses a cartridge to emulate a VT220 terminal. [Norbert Keher] has one and explains in great detail how to connect it to a mainframe.
It had the 3151 personality cartridge for emulating multiple
IBM and DEC terminals
. However, the terminal would not start until he unplugged it. The old CRT was burned in with messages from an IBM 3745, which helped him work out some of the configuration.
If you’ve only used modern ASCII terminals, you might not realize that many terminals from IBM and other vendors used to use a block mode where the computer would dump a screen to the terminal. You could “edit” the screen (that is, fill in forms or enter lines). Then you’d send the whole screen back in one swoop. This is “block” mode, and some of the terminals the 3151 can emulate are character mode, and others are block mode, which explains its odd keyboard and commands.
[Norbert] gets the terminal running with a virtual mainframe, but along the way, he explains a lot about what’s going on. The video is about an hour long, but it is an hour well spent if you are interested in mainframe history.
Of course, you can always get the
real deal to connect
. If you don’t have your own
virtual mainframe
, you are missing out. | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8116863",
"author": "jbx",
"timestamp": "2025-04-09T00:19:24",
"content": "csmt shut, yes",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8116934",
"author": "Old Guy",
"timestamp": "2025-04-09T06:21:01",
"content": "Z... | 1,760,371,581.101271 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/08/designing-a-tone-control-properly/ | Designing A Tone Control Properly | Jenny List | [
"home entertainment hacks"
] | [
"audio",
"filters",
"headphone amplifier",
"tone control"
] | Many years ago, audio equipment came with a tone control, a simple RC filter that would cut or boost the bass to taste. As time passed, this was split into two controls for bass and treble, and then finally into three for bass, mid, and treble. When audiophile fashion shifted towards graphic equalisers, these tone controls were rebranded as “3-band graphic equalisers”, a misleading term if ever we heard one. [Gabriel Dantas]
designed one of these circuits,
and unlike the simple passive networks found on cheap music centres of old, he’s doing a proper job with active filters.
The write-up is worth a read even if you are not in the market for a fancy tone control, for the basic primer it gives on designing an audio filter. The design contains, as you might expect, a low-pass, a bandpass, and a high-pass filter. These are built around TL072 FET-input op-amps, and an LM386 output stage is added to drive headphones.
The final project is built on a home-made PCB, complete with mains power supply. Audiophiles might demand more exotic parts, but we’re guessing that even with these proletarian components it will still sound pretty good. Probably better than the headphone amplifier featured in
a recent project from a Hackaday writer
, at least. There’s a build video, below the break. | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8116814",
"author": "mime",
"timestamp": "2025-04-08T20:10:26",
"content": "Just for additional info; I can’t yet find the exact page but there was a long ago article which explained that with treble and bass (baxandall) style equalisation a larger range of adjustment is possible.Th... | 1,760,371,581.282958 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/08/the-computers-of-epcot/ | The Computers Of EPCOT | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"exec 8",
"univac"
] | Even if you aren’t a Disney fan, you probably know about EPCOT — Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow — a Disney attraction that promised a glimpse of the future. [ErnieTech] takes
a glimpse at the UNIVAC computer that ran the operation
in the 1980s. A lot of schools had UNIVAC 1100-series computers back in those days, so while you don’t hear as much about them as, say, IBM 360s, there are hordes of people who have used the 1100s, even if they don’t remember it.
EPCOT opened in 1982, and the UNIVAC not only ran the attraction but was also visible as part of the exhibit’s ambiance. They even used the Pepper’s Ghost illusion to superimpose a little man on top of the equipment.
Sperry used the relationship with Disney for promotional purposes. We’ve never found a good emulator for the 1100s. The UNIVAC had a 36-bit word and 6-bit characters. We’d love to see something like Hercules that could support Exec 8.
The UNIVAC originated with the Remington Rand company, which had bought Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. Remington Rand later merged with the Sperry Corporation to become Sperry Rand. Eventually, the company reverted to the Sperry name before merging with Burroughs in 1986 to form UNISYS — a company that still exists today. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8116829",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-04-08T20:59:57",
"content": "Brings back memories. My wife and I were at EPCOT back in the late 80s and saw the computer area. It was really ‘cool’ to see at the time for me, as a newly ‘fresh’ CS major working with real-time system... | 1,760,371,581.232896 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/08/freedos-1-4-released/ | FreeDOS 1.4 Released | Maya Posch | [
"News",
"Software Development"
] | [
"freedos",
"operating systems"
] | Even in 2025 there are still many applications for a simple Disk Operating System (DOS), whether this includes running legacy software (including MS-DOS games & Windows 3.x), or (embedded) systems running new software where the overhead of a full-fat Linux or BSD installation would be patently ridiculous.
This is where the FreeDOS project provides a modern, fully supported DOS,
with the recent 1.4 release
adding a whole range of features and updates to existing components like the FreeCOM command shell. This is the first stable release since 1.3 was released in 2022.
FreeDOS
saw its first release in 1994
and has become the de facto replacement for MS-DOS — featuring many improvements to make it work well on modern hardware and a package manager to manage installed software much like on Linux & BSD. The new kernel didn’t quite make it into this release, but it and some other items will be available in the monthly test builds.
You can download
the new 1.4 release here
, with live & installer CD images, a USB installer and even a Floppy Edition available. System requirements include an (Intel) x86 CPU, a BIOS (or legacy UEFI mode), 640 kB of RAM and 20 MB of storage. | 22 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8116749",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-04-08T16:04:08",
"content": "There’s some weirdness going on with Freedos, it’s not possible to install it on a UEFI system but HP offer it as an option on brand new, UEFI only laptops that have no option for legacy modes in the BIOS.I’... | 1,760,371,581.34305 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/08/turning-old-cellphones-into-sbcs/ | Turning Old Cellphones Into SBCs | Elliot Williams | [
"Cellphone Hacks",
"computer hacks",
"green hacks"
] | [
"cellphone",
"computer",
"recycling",
"single board computer"
] | [David] sent us a tip about a company in Belgium, Citronics, that is looking to
turn old cellphones into single-board computers for embedded Linux applications
. We think it’s a great idea, and
have long lamented how many pocket supercomputers simply get tossed in the recycling stream
, when they could be put to use in hacker projects. So far, it looks like Citronics only has a prototyping breakout board for the Fairphone 2, but it’s a promising idea.
One of the things that’s stopping us from re-using old phones, of course, is the lack of easy access to the peripherals. On the average phone, you’ve got one USB port and that’s it. The Citronics dev kit provides all sorts of connectivity: 4x USB 2.0, 1x Ethernet 10/100M, and a Raspberry Pi Header (UART, SPI, I2C, GPIO). At the same time, for better or worse, they’ve done away with the screen and its touch interface, and the camera too, but they seem to be keeping all of the RF capabilities.
The whole thing runs Linux, which means that this won’t work with every phone out there, but projects like
PostmarketOS
and others will certainly
broaden the range of usable devices
. And stripping off the camera and screen has the secondary advantages of removing the parts that get most easily broken
and
have the least support from custom Linux distros.
We wish we had more details about the specifics of the break-out boards, but we like the idea. How long before we see an open-source implementation of something similar? There are so many cheap used and broken cellphones out there that it’s certainly a worthwhile project! | 35 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "8116719",
"author": "RunnerPack",
"timestamp": "2025-04-08T14:23:39",
"content": "Great idea! I would throw in a capacitive touch PCB that could connect to the phone’s interface, to make it easy to add controls to a project. Even if it’s not identical to the original glass, it shoul... | 1,760,371,581.697209 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/08/layerlapse-simplifies-3d-printer-time-lapse-shots/ | LayerLapse Simplifies 3D Printer Time-lapse Shots | Tom Nardi | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"g-code",
"hall effect sensor",
"time-lapse",
"timelapse 3d printing"
] | We know you’ve seen them: the time-lapses that show a 3D print coming together layer-by-layer without the extruder taking up half the frame. It takes a little extra work compared to just pointing a camera at the build plate, but it’s worth it to see your prints materialize like magic.
Usually these are done with a plugin for OctoPrint, but with all due respect to that phenomenal project, it’s a lot to get set up if you just want to take some pretty pictures. Which is why
[Whopper Printing] put together the LayerLapse
. This small PCB is designed to trigger your DSLR or mirrorless camera once its remotely-mounted hall effect sensor detects the presence of a magnet.
The remote hall effect sensor.
The idea is that you just need to stick a small magnet to your extruder, add a bit of extra G-code that will park it over the sensor at the end of each layer, and you’re good to go. There’s even a spare GPIO pin broken out should you want to trigger something else on each layer of your print. Admittedly we can’t think of anything else right now that would make sense, other than some other type of camera, but we’re sure some creative folks out there could put this feature to use.
Currently, [Whopper Printing] is selling the LayerLapse as a finished product, though it does sound like a kit version is in the works. There’s also
instructions for building a DIY version of the hardware
using your microcontroller of choice. Whether you buy or build the hardware, the firmware is available under the MIT license for your tinkering pleasure.
Being hardware hackers, we appreciate the stand-alone nature of this solution. But if you’re already controlling your printer through OctoPrint, you’re probably better off just
setting up one of the available time-lapse plugins
. | 15 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8116701",
"author": "Alexander Pruss",
"timestamp": "2025-04-08T13:24:08",
"content": "If the camera has a wifi or USB connection that streams its preview data, you could stick a marker that OpenCV can easily recognize (e.g. arUco) on the extender, and take pictures after it disappe... | 1,760,371,581.60547 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/08/printed-robotic-arm-pumps-up-with-brushless-motors/ | Printed Robotic Arm Pumps Up With Brushless Motors | Tom Nardi | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"6dof",
"BLDC",
"BLDC controller",
"CAN",
"robotic arm"
] | [JesseDarr] recently wrote in to tell us about their
dynamic Arm for Robitc Mischief (dARM)
, a mostly 3D printed six degrees of freedom (6DOF) robotic arm that’s designed to be stronger and more capable than what we’ve seen so far from the DIY community.
The secret? Rather than using servos, dARM uses brushless DC (BLDC) motors paired with ODrive S1 controllers. He credits [James Bruton] and [Skyentific] (
two names which
regular Hackaday readers are
likely familiar with
) for introducing him to not only the ODrive controllers, but the robotics applications for BLDCs in the first place.
dARM uses eight ODrive controllers on a CAN bus, which ultimately connect up to a Raspberry Pi 4B with a RS485 CAN Hat. The controllers are connected to each other in a daisy chain using basic twisted pair wire, which simplifies the construction and maintenance of the modular arm.
As for the motors themselves, the arm uses three different types depending on where they are located, with three Eaglepower 8308 units for primary actuators, a pair of GB36-2 motors in the forearm, and finally a GM5208-24 for the gripper. Together, [JesseDarr] says the motors and gearboxes are strong enough to lift a 5 pound (2.2 kilogram) payload when extended in a horizontal position.
The project’s documentation includes assembly instructions for the printed parts, a complete Bill of Materials, and guidance on how to get the software environment setup on the Raspberry Pi. It’s not exactly a step-by-step manual, but it looks like there’s more than enough information here for anyone who’s serious about building a dARM for themselves.
If you’d like to start off by putting together something a bit easier, we’ve seen
considerably less intimidating robotic arms
that you might be interested in. | 17 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8116654",
"author": "eMpTy-10",
"timestamp": "2025-04-08T10:51:15",
"content": "Of course it’s shaky, it’s all plastic",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8116658",
"author": "George",
"timestamp": "2025-04-08T11:0... | 1,760,371,581.760784 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/07/the-1980s-computer-french-style/ | The 1980s Computer, French Style | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"6803",
"french computers",
"Matra Alice"
] | Should you travel around Europe, you may notice that things in France are ever so slightly
different
. Not necessarily better or worse, simply that the French prefer to plough their own furrow rather than importing cultural tends from their neighbors.
In the 1980s this was evident in their home computers, because as well as a Minitel terminal in your house, you could have an all-French machine plugged into your TV.
[Retro Krazy] has just such a machine
— it’s a Matra Hachette Alice 32, and its red plastic case hides hardware any of us would have been proud to own back in the day.
At first sight it appears superficially similar to a Sinclair Spectrum, with its BASIC keywords next to the keys. But under that slightly calculator style AZERTY keyboard is an entirely different architecture, a Motorola 6803. The first Alice computer was a clone of a Radio Shack model, and while this one has no compatibility with its predecessor it retains some silicon choices. On the back are a series of DIN sockets, one for a SCART adapter, and more for serial connectivity and a cassette deck. The overall impression is of a well-engineered machine, even if that red color is a little garish.
The Alice hasn’t appeared here on its own before, but
we have taken a look at French retrocomputers here in the past
. | 10 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8116591",
"author": "ChrisMicro",
"timestamp": "2025-04-08T05:47:23",
"content": "The main information is missing in this video: What type is the microprocessor and the other chips? What architecture has the computer?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{... | 1,760,371,581.812098 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/07/simple-antenna-makes-for-better-esp32-c3-wifi/ | Simple Antenna Makes For Better ESP32-C3 WiFi | Dan Maloney | [
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"antenna",
"CA-C03",
"esp32-C3",
"RSSI",
"wifi"
] | We’ve seen tons of projects lately using the ESP32-C3, and for good reason. The microcontroller has a lot to offer, and the current crop of tiny dev boards sporting it make adding a lot of compute power to even the smallest projects dead easy. Not so nice, though, is the poor WiFi performance of some of these boards, which [Peter Neufeld] addresses with
this quick and easy antenna
.
There are currently a lot of variations of the ESP32-C3 out there, sometimes available for a buck a piece from the usual suspects. Designs vary, but a lot of them seem to sport a CA-C03 ceramic chip antenna at one end of the board to save space. Unfortunately, the lack of free space around the antenna makes for poor RF performance. [Peter]’s solution is a simple antenna made from a 31-mm length of silver wire. One end of the wire is formed into a loop by wrapping it around a 5-mm drill bit and bending it perpendicular to the remaining tail. The loop is then opened up a bit so it can bridge the length of the ceramic chip antenna and then soldered across it. That’s all it takes to vastly improve performance as measured by [Peter]’s custom RSSI logger — anywhere from 6 to 10 dBm better. You don’t even need to remove the OEM antenna.
The video below, by [Circuit Helper], picks up on [Peter]’s work and puts several antenna variants to further testing. He gets similarly dramatic results, with 20 dBm improvement in some cases. He does note that the size of the antenna can be a detriment to a project that needs a really compact MCU and tries coiling up the antenna, with limited success. He also did a little testing to come up with an optimal length of 34 mm for the main element of the antenna.
There seems to be a lot of room for experimentation here. We wonder how mounting the antenna with the loop perpendicular to the board and the main element sticking out lengthwise would work. We’d love to hear about your experiments, so make sure to ping us with your findings. | 44 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8116552",
"author": "Feinfinger (M-x totally-tame-mode)",
"timestamp": "2025-04-08T02:38:38",
"content": "Would replacing the onboard antenna with a pigtail work?I’d have some more freedom to attach different antennae then.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,371,581.899068 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/07/atomic-clock-trades-receiver-for-an-esp8266/ | Atomic Clock Trades Receiver For An ESP8266 | Tom Nardi | [
"clock hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"atomic clock",
"ESP8266",
"radio clock",
"simulator",
"wwvb"
] | The advantage of a radio-controlled clock that receives the time signal from WWVB is that you never have to set it again. Whether it’s a little digital job on your desk, or some big analog wall clock that’s hard to access, they’ll all adjust themselves as necessary to keep perfect time. But what if the receiver conks out on you?
Well, you’d still have a clock. But you’d have to set it manually like some kind of Neanderthal. That wasn’t acceptable to [jim11662418], so after he yanked the misbehaving WWVB receiver from his clock,
he decided to replace it with an ESP8266
that could connect to the Internet and get the current time via Network Time Protocol (NTP).
This modification was made all the easier by the fact that the WWVB receiver was its own PCB, connected to the clock’s main board by three wires: one for the clock signal, another that gets pulled low when the clock wants to turn on the receiver (usually these clocks only update themselves once a day), and of course, ground. It was simply a matter of connecting the ESP8266 dev board up to the two digital lines and writing some code that would mimic the responses from the original receiver.
If you take a look through the provided source code, a comment explains that the WWVB signal is recreated
based on the official documentation
from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) website. There are functions in the code to bang out the 500 ms “one” and 200 ms “zero” bits, and once the microcontroller has picked up the correct time from the Internet, they’re called in quick succession to build the appropriate time signal. As such, this code
should
work on any clock that has an external WWVB receiver like this, but as always, your mileage may vary.
This is a very clean hack, but if you wanted to pull off something similar without having to gut all the clocks in your house, we’ve seen a
WWVB simulator that can broadcast an NTP-backed time signal
to anything listening nearby. | 20 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8116526",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-07T23:40:14",
"content": "It’s better than even odds that the 60 kHz receiver is functioning just fine, and that it is just swamped by rising ambient noise floor from more and more bad switching power supplies in the vicinity.",
... | 1,760,371,583.677474 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/07/buyer-beware-cheap-power-strips-hold-hidden-horrors/ | Buyer Beware: Cheap Power Strips Hold Hidden Horrors | Dan Maloney | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"contact",
"Ground",
"harbor freight",
"outlet",
"spring",
"testing",
"tools"
] | We’ve got a love-hate relationship with discount tool outlet Harbor Freight: we hate that we love it so much. Apparently, [James Clough] is of much the same opinion, at least now that
he’s looked into the quality of their outlet strips
and found it somewhat wanting.
The outlet strips in question are Harbor Freight’s four-foot-long, twelve-outlet strips, three of which are visible from where this is being written. [James] has a bunch of them too, but when he noticed an intermittent ground connection while using an outlet tester, he channeled his inner [Big Clive] and tore one of the $20 strips to bits. The problem appears to be poor quality of the contacts within each outlet, which don’t have enough spring pre-load to maintain connection with the ground pin on the plug when it’s wiggled around. Actually, the contacts for the hot and neutral don’t look all that trustworthy either, and the wiring between the outlets is pretty sketchy too. The video below shows the horrors within.
What’s to be done about this state of affairs? That’s up to you, of course. We performed the same test on all our outlets and the ground connections all seemed solid. So maybe [James] just got a bad batch, but he’s still in the market for better-quality strips. That’s going to cost him, though, since similar strips with better outlets are about four times the price of the Harbor Freight units. We did find
a similar strip at Home Depot
for about twice the price of the HF units, but we can’t vouch for the quality. As always, caveat emptor.
Thanks to [cliff claven] for the tip. | 84 | 25 | [
{
"comment_id": "8116457",
"author": "Cogidubnus Rex",
"timestamp": "2025-04-07T20:16:32",
"content": "Fault seems to lie with the flakey NEMA outlet that generally falls out should you look at it the wrong way. Easily solved with something like a CEE 7 or BS 4373.",
"parent_id": null,
"dept... | 1,760,371,584.174763 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/07/a-tiny-tape-synth/ | A Tiny Tape Synth | Jenny List | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"cassette tape",
"tape loop",
"tape synth"
] | Afficionados of vintage electric organs will know about the Melotron, an instrument from the 1960s that had pre-recorded sounds on a bank of tape loops. A real Melotron in working order will set you back a bit, but it’s possible to play with the idea using much more attainable hardware. [Decurus]
has made a simple tape based synth using a cassette deck
.
It uses a loop of cassette tape, and varies the pitch by changing the speed of the cassette motor. There’s an RP2040 and a motor controller, which can take a MIDI signal and use it to drive the motor. We’re sorry to see that there’s no recording of the result, but it’s described as a drone.
Part of this project is a 3D printed tape loop holder to fit a cassette mechanism. We won’t go as far as to call it a cassette in itself, instead it’s a sort of tape loop frame. We can see that it might be an interesting component for other tape loop experimenters, now that cassettes themselves are no longer ubiquitous.
This certainly isn’t the first tape pitch synth we’ve seen
. | 12 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8116428",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-07T19:12:34",
"content": "Story is incomplete without noting that this organ was a cheap/bad knockoff of a Hammond.Hammond organs were much neater.They had hard drive style platters (stacked high) rotating at variable speed with diff... | 1,760,371,583.601744 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/07/keebin-with-kristina-the-one-where-we-embrace-the-jank/ | Keebin’ With Kristina: The One Where We Embrace The Jank | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"cozy vibes",
"jank",
"Maskelyne",
"Maskelyne typewriter",
"mice",
"MMO mice",
"MMO trackball",
"sawn keyboard",
"trackball mouse"
] | Yeah, yeah — not a keyboard. But one keyboard-adjacent topic I’m certainly interested in is
that of finding a satisfying mouse
. Why settle for ticky micro-switches when you could have full-on thock in both peripherals?
My own personal peripherals. Banana mat for scale.
I’ve been using a Logitech Ergo M575 for a couple of years now. As you can see, it’s a trackball with two extra buttons, which come programmed for forward and back. I find this next to useless, so I employed
AutoHotKey
and changed them to Ctrl+C on the up switch, and Ctrl+V on the down switch.
[Aknup]
commented on the previous Keebin’ and brought up MMO mice
, which, I didn’t know those things had a name other than maybe ‘multi-button mice’. And yes, there are a few trackball MMOs out there. I’ve got my eye on a couple already.
Does anyone have a trackball MMO? I hate to spend $100+ on something I won’t like. I’m intrigued that
the one I found that’s the most attractive
is less a thumb trackball and more a two-fingers-at-once kind of situation. That will take some getting used to, but the way my trackball moves sometimes, it could be a really positive change.
Embrace the Jank, Why Don’t You?
[VideoPuzzleheaded884]
built this keyboard over a the course of a few evenings
for a total cost of around $30 AUD ($18.33 USD as of this writing), as a way to motivate themselves to finally start soldering.
Image by [VideoPuzzleheaded884] via
reddit
I for one like the look of the acrylic plate, which was worked with a Dremel and hand tools. And the wiring looks fine to me, so I hesitate to actually call this janky myself. But [VideoPuzzleheaded884] did it for me.
You can tell [VideoPuzzleheaded884] is one of us — they cobbled this Corne mini layout-having keyboard together with stuff on hand, and did a fine job of soldering one of their first projects. Hey, if it works, it works. And the use of all-black wires should be commended.
The microcontroller is an ESP32-C3 [VideoPuzzleheaded884] found in box somewhere, and the switches are Gateron Silvers from an unknown time. All in all, this project was a fun diversion from programming, and this probably won’t be the last keyboard they solder.
The Centerfold: Alas, Poor Yorick; I Knew Thee Cozy Vibes Well
Image by [Ryuk_void666] via
reddit
This one’s all about the vibes
, and not necessarily the peripherals. The keyboard is an Amazon UK number and the mouse is whatever, but the wrist rests sure look comfy, and the padding around the edge of the desk is divine.
The moon lamp looks great along with the fill light coming in from the right, and I could totally get down with some death metal and WFH with this setup.
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: Oh Maskelyne, Why Can’t You Be True?
What’s a magician to do if they need something to fall back on?
Sell typewriters, I suppose
. Why else would a father-and-son team of illusionists named
John Nevil Maskelyne
(Jr. and Sr.) do such a thing?
Image via
ozTypewriter
The Maskelynes’ machine was initially seen at the Paris World’s Fair, which lasted from May to October 1889. Four years later, it finally hit the market.
The main selling point of the Maskelyne was that it offered differential spacing. Most typewriters output monospaced text — the skinny ‘i’ takes up the same width on the page as the ‘w’ does. On the Maskelyne, each character takes up a different amount of horizontal space. This makes for a nicer-looking document overall.
By 1897, the writing was on the wall. Maskelynes under heavy usage were falling apart. They were not built to withstand the vibration that typewriters must endure. As a result, things would go awry — maybe the escapement clutch no longer moved far enough, or went too far, or the bars needed to make differential spacing possible clashed together.
By the third model of Maskelyne, they did away with differential spacing. But the investors were unhappy, and by 1899, the Maskelyne Typewriter concern did a disappearing act.
ICYMI: Stop Me If You Saw This Keyboard
We’re embracing the jank this week, remember? And the end result of [nomolk]’s labor? Not janky at all.
Image by [nomolk] via
YouTube
After sawing apart a perfectly good mechanical keyboard and re-connecting about 50 wires, [nomolk] managed to get it working again, and
now has a true split keyboard
. Be sure to watch
the video
!
This labor of love took almost three weeks, between rewiring all the broken connections and testing the wiring. [nomolk] tried it out and found it wasn’t working as expected, with some keys not registering, and other keys registering two characters.
Once it was working, [nomolk] had a fine mess of all-black wires (!) to deal with. Between the zip ties and the plastic spiral wire wrap thingy, the beast was eventually tamed. That Spacebar would drive me crazy, though.
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
. | 17 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8116382",
"author": "Snarkenstein",
"timestamp": "2025-04-07T17:25:33",
"content": "I used to have that same trackball, Kristina – until I started getting tendon pain in my right arm. I had to move to a Kensington with the ball in the middle to give my thumb some relief. No trouble ... | 1,760,371,583.998874 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/07/fiber-laser-gives-diy-pcbs-a-professional-finish/ | Fiber Laser Gives DIY PCBs A Professional Finish | Tom Nardi | [
"PCB Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"fiber laser",
"PCB etching",
"silkscreen",
"soldermask",
"UV resin"
] | While low-cost professional PCB fabrication has largely supplanted making circuit boards at home, there’s still something to be said for being able to go from design to prototype in an afternoon. Luckily we aren’t limited to the old toner transfer trick for DIY boards these days, as CNC routers and powerful lasers can be used to etch boards quickly and accurately.
But there’s still a problem — those methods leave you with a board that has exposed traces. That might work in a pinch for a one-off, but such boards are prone to shorts, and frankly just don’t look very good. Which is why [Mikey Sklar] has been experimenting with applying both a
soldermask and silkscreen to his homemade boards
.
The process he describes starts after the board has already been etched. First he rolls on the soldermask, and then sandwiches the board between layers of transparency film and clear acrylic before curing it under a UV light. After two coats of the soldermask, the board goes into a fiber laser and the silkscreen and mask layers are loaded into the software and the machine is set to a relatively low power (here, 40%). The trick is that the mask layer is set to run four times versus the single run of the silkscreen, which ensures that the copper is fully exposed.
Since the board doesn’t need to be moved between operations, you don’t have to worry about the registration being off. The end result really does look quite nice, with the silkscreen especially popping visually a lot more than we would have assumed.
We’ve previously covered how
[Mikey] uses his CNC router and fiber laser
to cut out and etch the boards, so this latest installment brings the whole thing full circle. The equipment you’ll need to follow along at home isn’t cheap, but we can’t argue with the final results. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8116387",
"author": "Alex",
"timestamp": "2025-04-07T17:45:34",
"content": "The results look amazing!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8116426",
"author": "Tomsz",
"timestamp": "2025-04-07T18:59:17",
"content": "Doubl... | 1,760,371,583.460253 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/07/which-browser-should-i-use-in-2025/ | Which Browser Should I Use In 2025? | Jenny List | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"internet hacks",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"browser",
"comparison"
] | Over the history of the Web, we have seen several major shifts in browsing software. If you’re old enough to have used NCSA Mosaic or any of the other early browsers, you probably welcomed the arrival of Netscape Navigator, and rued its decline in the face of Internet Explorer. As Mozilla and then Firefox rose from Netscape’s corpse the domination by Microsoft seemed inevitable, but then along came Safari and then Chrome.
For a glorious while there was genuine competition between browser heavyweights, but over the last decade we’ve arrived at a point where Chrome and its associated Google domination is the only game in town. Other players are small, and the people behind Firefox
seem hell-bent on fleeing to the Dark Side
, so where should we turn? Is there a privacy-centric open source browser that follows web standards and doesn’t come with any unfortunate baggage in the room? It’s time to find out.
It’s All In The Engine
It’s Hackaday, in NetSurf!
If you look at the breadth of standards which a modern web browser has to support, it’s clear that writing a web browser is a Herculean task. Many browsers take the route of not trying to implement everything, for example minimalist browsers such as
Dillo
or
NetSurf
concentrate only on rendering web pages. For the purposes of this piece we’re looking at full-fat browsers capable of being a daily driver though, and for that a browser needs some very capable software.
Many development teams are not capable of writing such a browser engine, and thus use one developed for another browser. Despite there being many names on the table then, peering under the hood there are surprisingly few options. The Apple
Webkit
and Google
Blink
family of browsers dominate, followed by Mozilla
Gecko
and its
Goanna
fork, and then by promising bit-part players such as
Servo
, or the
Ladybird
browser’s LibWeb. Having so much of the web’s browser software dominated by Apple and Google is not an ideal situation, but it’s where we find ourselves.
It’s Hackaday, in Ladybird!
So when choosing a browser, the first thing we look at is its engine. Whose ecosystem are we becoming part of, and does that have any effect on us? Within reason all modern full-featured browser engines render websites the same, so there should be little to choose from in terms of the websites themselves.
Having considered the browser engine, next up are whatever the developer uses to differentiate themselves. It’s surprisingly straightforward to construct a bare-bones web browser on top of WebKit, so to stand out each browser has a unique selling point. Is it privacy you’re after, ad blocking, or just following a UI path abandoned by a previous browser? And perhaps most importantly, are you simply departing a problematic developer for one even shadier? It’s worth doing your homework, and not being afraid to try multiple browsers before you find your home.
So Where Did Hackaday Land?
It’s Hackaday, in Vivaldi! (We are sure you are getting the idea by now)
Over the course of writing for Hackaday it’s inevitable that a bunch of different browsers will find their way on to my bench. Some of them like Ladybird or Servo I would love the chance to use as my daily driver, but they simply aren’t mature enough for my needs. Others such as Brave have too much of a whiff of controversy around them for someone seeking a quiet life of open-source obscurity.
As I write this I have a preposterous number of browsers installed on my machine, and if there’s one thing which the experience has taught me it’s that they are much more the same than I expected. In three decades our expectation of a browser has homogenised to the extent that I’m hard pressed to tell between them. How do I pick one, without blindly throwing a dart at a corkboard covered in browser logos?
In the end, I looked for two candidates, one each from the Firefox and Apple/Google orbits. I tried them all, and settled on LibreWolf from the former, and Vivaldi from the latter.
LibreWolf
because it’s done a fine job of making Firefox without it being Firefox, and
Vivaldi
because its influence from the early Opera versions gave it a tiny bit of individuality missing in the others. I set up both with my usual Hackaday bookmarks, tabs, and shortcuts, changed the search engine to the EU-based
Qwant
. I’m ready to go, with a bit more control over how my data is shared with the world once more.
A refugee from the early Web writes…
It’s a fairly regular occurrence, that I will Do a Linux Thing in my hackerspace, only to have one of my younger friends point out a much newer and better tool than the one I know, which I probably learned to use some time in the mid-1990s. I’ve fond looking at web browsers to be in some respects a similar experience even if the browsers are much closer to each other than I expected, because for a couple of decades now I’ve been a Firefox user simply because Firefox was the plucky upstart open-source browser. Mozilla’s previous attempts to take Netscape 6 and make it the only piece of Internet software you needed were horribly bloated, and Firefox, or “Phoenix” as it launched, was an easy choice. Just as
my operating system journey
taught me about software complacency a couple of years ago, so I’ve now had the same awakening in the browser. The Web will never look the same again. | 84 | 33 | [
{
"comment_id": "8116324",
"author": "El Gru",
"timestamp": "2025-04-07T14:19:00",
"content": "Firefox with a bunch of extensions on Desktop. Brave on Mobile. Chrome on both to check how normal people experience the hell hole the internet has become.And if the rare case occurs I have to design somet... | 1,760,371,583.939373 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/07/why-usb-c-splitters-can-cause-magic-smoke-release/ | Why USB-C Splitters Can Cause Magic Smoke Release | Maya Posch | [
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"PSA",
"USB C",
"USB-C PD"
] | Using USB for powering devices is wonderful, as it frees us from a tangle of incompatible barrel & TRS connectors, not to mention a veritable gaggle of proprietary power connectors. The unfortunate side-effect of this is that the obvious thing to do with power connectors is to introduce splitters, which can backfire horribly, especially since USB-C and USB Power Delivery (USB-PD) were introduced. The [Quiescent Current] channel on YouTube
recently went over the ways
in which these handy gadgets can literally turn your USB-powered devices into a smoldering pile of ashes.
Much like Qualcomm’s
Quick Charge
protocols, USB-PD negotiates higher voltages with the power supply, after which this same voltage will be provided to any device that’s tapped into the power supply lines of the USB connector. Since USB-C has now also taken over duties like analog audio jacks, this has increased the demand for splitters, but these introduce many risks. Unless you know how these splitters are wired inside, your spiffy smartphone may happily negotiate 20V that will subsequently fry a USB-powered speaker that was charging off the same splitter.
In the video only a resistor and LED were sacrificed to make the point, but in a real life scenario the damage probably would be significantly more expensive. | 40 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8116259",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-04-07T11:07:59",
"content": "What an absolutely hilarious problem, truly shotgun to your own foot worthy.Why not just stick 5K1 on the CC1 and CC2 lines and be done with it? Again, I’m no expert on USB-PD et al, but that seems like... | 1,760,371,584.245606 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/05/a-look-inside-macpaint/ | A Look Inside MacPaint | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"macintosh",
"macpaint"
] | Usually when we talk about retrocomputing, we want to look at — and in — some old hardware. But [Z→Z] has a different approach:
dissecting MacPaint
, the Apple drawing program from the 1980s.
While the program looks antiquated by today’s standards, it was pretty hot stuff back in the day. Things we take for granted today were big deals at the time. For example, being able to erase a part of something you drew prompted applause at an early public demo.
We enjoyed the way the program was tested, too. A software “monkey” was made to type keys, move things, and click menus randomly. The teardown continues with a look inside the Pascal and assembly code with interesting algorithms like how the code would fill an area with color.
The program has been called “beautifully organized,” and [Z→Z] examines that assertion. Maybe the brilliance of it has been overstated, but it did work and it did influence many computer graphics programs over the years.
We love
digging through old source code
. Even
old games
. If you do your own teardowns, be sure to send us a
tip
. | 28 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8115691",
"author": "Technophobe",
"timestamp": "2025-04-05T15:37:09",
"content": "“A software “monkey” was made to type keys, move things, and click menus randomly.”I have no clue what a software monkey is, even if you put it in quotation marks.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth"... | 1,760,371,583.804943 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/05/disneys-bipedal-bdx-series-droid-gets-the-diy-treatment/ | Disney’s Bipedal, BDX-Series Droid Gets The DIY Treatment | Donald Papp | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"bipedal",
"disney",
"robot",
"robotics",
"walking"
] | [Antoine Pirrone] and [Grégoire Passault] are making a DIY miniature re-imagining of Disney’s BDX droid design, and while it’s still early, there is definitely a lot of progress to see. Known as the
Open Duck Mini v2
and coming in at a little over 40 cm tall, the project is expected to have a total cost of around 400 USD.
The inner workings of Open Duck Mini use a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, hobby servos, and an absolute-orientation IMU.
Bipedal robots are uncommon, and back in the day they were downright rare. One reason is that the state of
controlled falling
that makes up a walking gait isn’t exactly a plug-and-play feature.
Walking robots are much more common now, but gait control for legged robots is still a big design hurdle. This goes double for bipeds. That brings us to one of the interesting things about the
Open Duck Mini v2
: computer simulation of the design is playing a big role in bringing the project into reality.
It’s a work in progress but the repository collects all the design details and resources you could want, including CAD files, code, current bill of materials, and links to a Discord community. Hardware-wise, the main work is being done with very accessible parts: Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, fairly ordinary hobby servos, and an BNO055-based absolute orientation IMU.
So, how far along is the project?
Open Duck Mini v2
is already waddling nicely and can remain impressively stable when shoved! (A “testing purposes” shove, anyway. Not a “
kid being kinda mean to your robot
” shove.)
Check out
the videos
to see it in action, and if you end up making your own, we want to hear about it, so remember to
send us a tip
! | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8116075",
"author": "Cad the Mad",
"timestamp": "2025-04-06T20:05:46",
"content": "Disney’s droids were co-developed with Nvidia and each carries an Nvidia Jetson Orin. They connect to a larger GPU-enabled server wirelessly and use the Nvidia Omniverse platform to run realtime AI mo... | 1,760,371,583.727686 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/05/8-pins-for-linux/ | 8 Pins For Linux | Jenny List | [
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"8-pin",
"linux",
"soic"
] | We’ve seen a Linux-based operating system made to run on some widely varying pieces of hardware over the years, but [Dmitry Grinberg]’s latest project may be one of the most unusual. It’s a PCB with 3 integrated circuits on it which doesn’t seem too interesting at first, but
what makes it special is that all three of those chips are in 8-pin SOIC packages
. How on earth can Linux run on 8-pin devices? The answer lies as you might expect, in emulation.
Two of the chips are easy to spot, a USB-to-serial chip and an SPI RAM chip. The processor is an STM32G0 series device, which packs a pretty fast ARM Cortex M0+ core. This runs a MIPS emulator
that we’ve seen on a previous project
, which is ripe for overclocking. At a 148 MHz clock it’s equivalent to a MIPS running at about 1.4 MHz, which is just about usable. Given that the OS in question is a full-featured Debian, it’s not running some special take on Linux for speed, either.
We like some of the hardware hacks needed to get serial, memory, and SD card, onto so few pins. The SD and serial share the same pins, with a filter in place to remove the high-frequency SPI traffic from the low-frequency serial traffic. We’re not entirely sure what use this machine could be put to, but it remains an impressive piece of work. | 27 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8115583",
"author": "Peter",
"timestamp": "2025-04-05T08:16:29",
"content": "But can it run Doom?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8115708",
"author": "Dmitry Grinberg",
"timestamp": "2025-04-05T17:00:53",
... | 1,760,371,584.061069 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/04/lockdown-remote-control-project-is-free-and-open/ | Lockdown Remote Control Project Is Free And Open | Elliot Williams | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"lockdown",
"project",
"quad",
"radio control",
"rc",
"receiver",
"transmitter"
] | If you flew or drove anything remote controlled until the last few years, chances are very good that you’d be using some faceless corporation’s equipment and radio protocols. But recently, open-source options have taken over the market, at least among the enthusiast core who are into squeezing every last bit of performance out of their gear. So why not take it one step further and roll your own complete system?
Apparently, that’s what [Malcolm Messiter] was thinking when, during the COVID lockdowns, he
started his own RC project that he’s calling LockDownRadioControl
. The result covers the entire stack, from the protocol to the transmitter and receiver hardware, even to the software that runs it all. The 3D-printed remote sports a Teensy 4.1 and off-the-shelf radio modules on the inside, and premium FrSky hardware on the outside. He’s even got an extensive folder of sound effects that the controller can play to alert you. It’s
very
complete. Heck, the transmitter even has a game of Pong implemented so that you can keep yourself amused when it’s too rainy to go flying.
Of course, as we alluded to in the beginning, there is a healthy commercial infrastructure and community around other open-source RC projects, namely
ExpressLRS
and
OpenTX
, and you can buy gear that runs those software straight out of the box, but it never hurts to have alternatives. And nothing is easier to customize and start hacking on than something you built yourself, so maybe [Malcolm]’s full-stack RC solution is right for you? Either way, it’s certainly impressive for a lockdown project, and evidence of time well spent.
Thanks [Malcolm] for sending that one in! | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8115559",
"author": "Fred",
"timestamp": "2025-04-05T05:57:08",
"content": "“Heck, the transmitter even has a game of Pong implemented so that you can keep yourself amused when it’s too rainy to go flying.”What, no Doom?!?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
... | 1,760,371,584.285329 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/04/the-transputer-in-your-browser/ | The Transputer In Your Browser | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"cpu",
"parallel architecture",
"transputer"
] | We remember when the transputer first appeared. Everyone “knew” that it was going to take over everything. Of course, it didn’t. But [Oscar Toledo G.] gives us a taste of what life could have been like with a
JavaScript emulator for the transputer
, you can try in your browser.
If you don’t recall, the transputer was a groundbreaking CPU architecture made for parallel processing. Instead of giant, powerful CPUs, the transputer had many simple CPUs and a way to chain them all together. Sounds great, but didn’t quite make it. However, you can see the transputer’s influence on CPUs even today.
Made to work with occam, the transputer was built from the ground up for concurrent programming. Context switching was cheap, along with simple message passing and hardware scheduling.
The ersatz computer has a lot of messages in Spanish, but you can probably muddle through if you don’t
hablar
español
. We did get the ray tracing example to work, but it was fairly slow.
Want to know more about the CPU?
We got you
. Of course, these days, you can
emulate a transputer
with nearly anything and probably outperform the original. What we really want to see is
a GPU emulation
. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8115578",
"author": "Tom G",
"timestamp": "2025-04-05T08:05:27",
"content": "There is a modern equivalent to the Transputer plus Occam from one of the same team (David May): the XMOS xCORE plus xC; buy them at DigiKey.Up to 32 processors on a chip (i.e. 4000MIPS) and expandable.xC h... | 1,760,371,584.330499 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/04/first-pcb-with-the-smallest-mcu/ | First PCB With The Smallest MCU? | Elliot Williams | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"microcontroller",
"tiny"
] | [Morten] works very fast. He has already
designed, fabbed, populated, and tested a breakout board for the new tiniest microcontroller on the market
, and he’s even made a video about it, embedded below.
You might have heard about this new TI ARM Cortex MO micro on these very pages, where we asked you
what you’d do with this grain-of-rice-sized chunk of thinking sand
. (The number one answer was “sneeze and lose it in the carpet”.)
From the video, it looks like [Morten] would design a breakout board using Kicad 8, populate it, get it blinking, and then use its I2C lines to make a simple digital thermometer demo. In the video, he shows how he worked with the part, from making a custom footprint to spending quite a while nudging it into place before soldering it carefully down.
But he nailed it on the first try, and honestly it doesn’t look nearly as intimidating as we’d feared, mostly because of the two-row layout of the balls. It actually looks easy enough to fan out. Because you can’t inspect the soldering work underneath the chip, he broke out all of the lines to a header to make it quick to check for shorts between those tiny little balls. Smart.
We love to see people trying out the newest hotness. Let us know down in the comments what new parts you’re trying out.
Thanks [Clint] for the tip! | 31 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "8115528",
"author": "Nathan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-05T00:37:23",
"content": "^second",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8115535",
"author": "lordnothing0.0@gmail.com",
"timestamp": "2025-04-05T01:08:35",
... | 1,760,371,584.852805 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/04/vintage-computer-festival-east-this-weekend/ | Vintage Computer Festival East This Weekend | Elliot Williams | [
"News",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"Brian Kernighan",
"Vintage Computer Festival",
"Vintage Computer Festival East"
] | If you’re on the US East Coast, you should head on over to Wall, NJ and
check out the Vintage Computer Festival East
. After all, [Brian Kernighan] is going to be there. Yes,
that
[
Brian Kernighan
].
Events are actually well underway, and you’ve already missed the first few
TRS-80 Color Computer programming workshops
, but rest assured that they’re going on all weekend. If you’re from the other side of the retrocomputing fence, namely the C64 side, you’ve also got a lot to look forward to, because the theme this year is “The Sounds of Retro” which means that your favorite chiptune chips will be getting a workout.
[Tom Nardi] went to VCF East last year
, so if you’re on the fence, just have a look at his writeup and you’ll probably hop in your car, or like us, wish you could. If when you do end up going, let us know how it was in the comments! | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8115502",
"author": "Jonathan Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-04T22:02:53",
"content": "I wish there was something as cool as VCF where I am here in Brisbane, Australia.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8115539",
"author... | 1,760,371,584.614617 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/04/supercon-2024-quick-high-feature-boards-with-the-circuit-graver/ | Supercon 2024: Quick High-Feature Boards With The Circuit Graver | Lewin Day | [
"cons",
"Featured",
"Slider"
] | [
"2024 Hackaday Superconference",
"circuit graver",
"copper clad",
"pcb",
"Printed Circuit Board"
] | These days, if you want to build something with modern chips and components, you probably want a custom PCB. It lets you build a neat and compact project that has a certain level of tidiness and robustness that you can’t get with a breadboard or protoboard. The only problem is that ordering PCBs takes time, and it’s easy to grow tired of shipping delays when you don’t live in the shadow of the Shenzhen board houses.
[Zach Fredin] doesn’t suffer this problem, himself. He’s whipping up high-feature PCBs at home with speed and efficiency that any maker would envy. At the 2024 Hackaday Supercon, he was kind enough to give a talk to explain
the great engineering value provided by the Circuit Graver.
It’s always been possible to make PCBs at home. Many have experimented with irons and toner and etchant baths to varying levels of success. You can do great things if you invest in tools and upskilling, but fundamentally, it can be difficult to make
good
PCBs that do what you want. After all, there are a things that you might want out of your custom PCBs—fine traces a being prime among them. These can be challenging to do at home with traditional techniques.
Why mill when you can carve trenches into a PCB for isolation routing instead?
[Zach’s] focus was on finding a way to make these “high feature” boards at home—specifically, referring to boards with an excellent minimum feature size. Right away, his talk shows off an example board, featuring an 0.5 mm-pitch DFN chip, paired with 0804 resistors and 0402 LEDs. [Zach] made this board in his apartment, using a machine of his own creation—the Circuit Graver.
You might be expecting some kind of laser-etching machine or a PCB mill, but the Circuit Graver is a little different. Instead of a high-speed spinning engraving head, it uses a pointy tool to scrape copper-clad boards to create the desired traces. [Zach] was inspired to go with this route due to the limitations he’d found during his experiences with traditional PCB milling machines. He found them be loud, messy, and slow, and limited in their resolution. He’d found it difficult to build designs with anything smaller than DIP or SOIC chips when relying on milled boards.
The Circuit Graver.
The Circuit Graver was spawned by a technique [Zach] developed years ago, when he started carving boards using a modified box cutter blade by hand, before realizing the same technique could benefit from the magic of Computer Numerical Control (CNC). Rather than move the tool yourself, why not have the computer do it more accurately?
The machine design itself is conventional, but packed with clever details, and built with eBay parts and 3D printed components. [Zach] built a Cartesian motion platform to move the tool over a copper clad board, with X and Y axes for positioning and a Z axis to lift the tool when necessary and also control the downward pressure. There’s also a stepper motor for the tool, to keep the cutter lined up with the direction of the trace to be carved.
You could do this with a box-cutter blade, but that is not quite good enough for the resolution that [Zach] was hoping to achieve. To that end, he equipped the Circuit Graver with a carbide insert intended for use as lathe tooling. The tool has a 100 micron tip radius which can create a 0.2 mm trench in copper-clad board, right out of the box. That allows the creation of traces roughly around 8 mil or so. You can even sharpen the tooling and get it down to 0.1 mm or less, which is
theoretically
good enough for 4 mil spaces. That’s perfect for working with smaller feature size parts.
An example board built using the Circuit Graver, featuring 0402 LEDs and an 0.5 mm pitch IC.
[Zach]’s talk provides a realistic assessment of the Circuit Graver’s real-world performance. Right now, it’s capable of carving 8/8 (0.2 mm) features on small boards quite well, while 6/6 (0.15 mm) features are “marginal.” The hope is to get down to 4/4 (0.1 mm) level with future upgrades. Speed is excellent, however—the Circuit Graver can carve good traces at 20-50 mm/s. For now, though, manual setup is still required—to ensure correct zeroing and that the tooling pressure is correct, for example.
It’s not something you’d use for production PCBs, per se—a real board house will always win for those sort of applications. However, for producing boards for quick prototyping, even with modern fine-featured components? It’s easy to see the value of the Circuit Graver. Imagine ordering some new parts and whipping up a unique project board just minutes or hours after you finish the design on your PC—it’s almost intoxicating to think about.
We actually featured the Circuit Graver
on the blog last year
—and there are design files
on Hackaday.io
for the curious. If you’re eager to start whipping up simple high-feature boards at home, it might be a build worth looking into! | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8115483",
"author": "Bobtato",
"timestamp": "2025-04-04T20:15:40",
"content": "That’s very cool.As someone who has been frustrated by the realities of PCB milling for years, I’m open to any alternative that might actually be reliable. The pressure feedback part sounds very promisin... | 1,760,371,585.002169 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/04/hackaday-podcast-episode-315-conductive-string-theory-decloudified-music-players-and-wild-printing-tech/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 315: Conductive String Theory, Decloudified Music Players, And Wild Printing Tech | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up across the (stupid, lousy) time zones to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous week.
Again, no news is good news. On What’s That Sound, Kristina didn’t get close at all, but at least had a guess this time. If you think you can identify the sound amid all the talking, you could win a Hackaday Podcast t-shirt!
After that, it’s on to the hacks and such, beginning with a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation when it comes to a pair of formerly-cloud music players. We take a look at a crazy keyboard hack, some even crazier conductive string, and a perfectly cromulent list of 70 DIY synths on one wild webpage. Finally, we rethink body art with LEDs, and take a look at a couple of printing techniques that are a hundred years or so apart in their invention.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Download in
DRM-free MP3
and savor at your leisure.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 315 Show Notes:
News:
No news is good news!
What’s that Sound?
Can you figure it out
?
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Open Source Framework Aims To Keep Tidbyt Afloat
Can Hackers Bring Jooki Back To Life?
Reddit – The heart of the internet
DIY Split Keyboard Made With A Saw
70 DIY Synths On One Webpage
Programmer’s Macro Pad Bangs Out Whole Functions
Supercon 2024: Rethinking Body Art With LEDs
Make DIY Conductive, Biodegradable String Right In Your Kitchen
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
The Magic Touch: A 555 Touch Switch
Handheld 18650 Analyzer Scopes Out Salvaged Cells
The Lowly Wall Wart Laid Bare
A Forgotten Photographic Process Characterised
Pictures From A High Altitude Balloon
Kristina’s Picks:
An ESP32 Pomodoro Timer
Yaydio, A Music Player For Kids
An Elegant Writer For A More Civilized Age
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Zink Is Zero Ink — Sort Of
Ditto That | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8117116",
"author": "bj",
"timestamp": "2025-04-09T18:16:39",
"content": "Hi, XOXBOX is a tb303 clone not a 909. Thanks for sharing the awesome list!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,584.699307 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/04/3d-print-and-play-the-super-mario-tune-as-a-fidget-toy/ | 3D Print (and Play!) The Super Mario Tune As A Fidget Toy | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"music",
"Music box",
"musical instrument",
"retrogaming",
"theme"
] | [kida] has a highly innovative set of 3D-printable,
musical fidget toys that play classic video game tunes
. Of course there’s the classic Super Mario ditty, but there’s loads more. How they work is pretty nifty, and makes great use of a 3D printer’s strengths.
To play the device one uses a finger to drag a tab (or striker) across the top, and as it does so it
twangs
vertical tines one-by-one. Each tine emits a particular note — defined by how tall the thicker part is — and plays a short tune as a result. Each one plays a preprogrammed melody, with the tempo and timing up to the user. Listen to them in action in the videos embedded just under the page break!
There are some really clever bits to the design. One is that the gadget is made in two halves, which effectively doubles the notes one can fit into the space. Another is that it’s designed so that holding it against something like a tabletop makes it louder because the surface acts like a sounding board. Finally, the design is easily modified so making new tunes is easy.
[kida]’s original design
has loads of non-videogame tunes (like the
Jeopardy!
waiting theme) as well as full instructions on making your very own versions.
Fidget toys are a niche all their own when it comes to 3D printed devices. The
fidget knife
has a satisfying snap action to it, and this printable
linear toggle design
is practically a fidget toy all on its own. | 34 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "8115407",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2025-04-04T16:55:07",
"content": "This is among the cleverest things I’ve seen on hackaday, ever. What a great design.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8115590",
"auth... | 1,760,371,584.948295 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/04/this-week-in-security-target-coinbase-leaking-call-records-and-microsoft-hotpatching/ | This Week In Security: Target Coinbase, Leaking Call Records, And Microsoft Hotpatching | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"coinbase",
"github",
"Oracle",
"This Week in Security"
] | We know a bit more about
the GitHub Actions supply chain attack
from last month. Palo Alto’s Unit 42 has been leading the charge on untangling this attack, and they’ve
just released an update to their coverage
. The conclusion is that Coinbase was the initial target of the attack, with the open source
agentkit
package first (unsuccessfully) attacked. This attack chain started with
pull_request_target
in the
spotbugs/sonar-findbugs
repository.
The
pull_request_target
hook is exceptionally useful in dealing with pull requests for a GitHub repository. The workflow here is that the project defines a set of Continuous Integration (CI) tests in the repository, and when someone opens a new Pull Request (PR), those CI tests run automatically. Now there’s an obvious potential problem, and Github thought of it and fixed it a long time ago. The GitHub Actions are defined right in the repository, and letting any pull request run arbitrary actions is a recipe for disaster. So GitHub always uses actions as they are defined in the repository itself, ignoring any incoming changes in the PR. So
pull_request_target
is safe now, right? Yes, with some really big caveats.
The simplest security problem is that many projects have build scripts in the repository, and those are not considered part of GitHub Actions by GitHub. So include malicious code in such a build script, make it a PR that runs automatically, and you have access to internal elements like organization and repository secrets and access tokens. The most effective mitigation against this is to require approval before running workflows on incoming PRs.
So back to the story. The
spotbugs/sonar-findbugs
repository had this vulnerability, and an attacker used it to export secrets from a GitHub Actions run. One of those secrets happened to be a Personal Access Token (PAT) belonging to a spotbugs maintainer. That PAT was used to invite a throwaway account, [jurkaofavak], into the main
spotbugs
repository. Two minutes after being added, the [jurkaofavak] account created a new branch in
spotbugs/spotbugs
, and deleted it about a second later. This branch triggered yet another malicious CI run, now with arbitrary Github Actions access rather than just access through a build script. This run leaked yet another Personal Access Token, belonging to a maintainer that worked on both the
spotbugs
and
reviewdog
projects.
That token had access to create and edit tags in
reviewdog/action-setup
, a GitHub Action that runs as a dependency for multiple other actions. The attacker created a fork of this repository, added malicious code, and then overwrote the
v1
git tag to point to this malicious code. The
tj-actions/changed-files
ran a CI flow that made use of the malicious
reviewdog/action-setup
fork, leaking a GitHub token with write permission to
tj-actions/changed-files
.
The tag override trick does a lot of heavy lifting in this story, and that’s what was used on
tj-actions/changed-files
too. Another malicious fork, and a specific tag was overridden to point there. The tag chosen was one used in a Coinbase repository. Specifically
coinbase/agentkit
used the newly malicious tag in one of its workflows. A Coinbase maintainer discovered this, and deleted the targeted workflow, putting an end to the Coinbase-specific attack. At this point, the attacker opted to burn the pilfered access, and pushed malicious code to
every
tj-actions/changed-files
tag. The idea apparently being that there would likely be some interesting secrets that were leaked. It’s also possible this was intended to hide Coinbase as the primary target. Regardless, that’s the widespread attack we’ve already covered, and now you know the rest of the story.
ZendTo: No CVE, No Problem?
ZendTo is a nifty Open Source, web-based file sharing platform. It’s been around for a while, and the release notes from a 2021 release makes reference to a “security fix” with no additional details given. That
caught the attention of [Jay] from Project Black
. It sounds like a potential vulnerability, but it seems like no CVE was ever assigned, and no further details were given.
Here’s the issue: ZendTo has an anonymous file upload feature on by default. This has a security feature built in, in the form of scanning the uploaded file with ClamAV in a temporary location, before moving the file to its long term storage directory. Part of this process includes the ever lovely
exec("/bin/chmod go+r " . $ccfilelist);
line. PHP has some footguns to be aware of, and calling
exec()
with any user-provider input is one of them. And of course, the user-provided
tmp_name
value is used to construct the
$ccfilelist
string. Set
tmp_name
to
1;command
, and you’ve got code execution.
There is another outstanding issue, where legacy md5 passwords that happen to begin with
0e
will be interpreted as a number in scientific notation. PHP handles some type comparisons a bit weirdly. These scientific notation values all evaluate as 0. Using any password that also evaluates to one of these special “scientific” md5 hashes, and the comparison collapses to
0 == 0
. So one out of every 256 users have a trivially bypassed password — if their account was still using a md5 password hash.
So here we have a pair of serious vulnerabilities, though one has limited exposure, with neither being fully disclosed nor given CVEs. What’s the result of this lack of transparency? Old, vulnerable installs of ZendTo are still on the Internet. Without a CVE, there’s much less pressure to update. No CVE doesn’t necessarily mean no vulnerabilities.
Leaking Call Records
Researcher [Evan Connelly]
was looking into the Verizon Call Filter iOS app
, and found it to be using an interesting web service. The
callLogRetrieval
endpoint allows a user to look up call logs for their own Verizon number. Authorization is done using JSON Web Tokens (JWT), which included a “sub” field, indicating the phone number the token was authorized to fetch. The request itself also has a field to indicate the number being queried. This particular endpoint uses a JWT for authorization, but returns the information requested in the query field — without comparing the two values. Yes, any customer that could obtain a valid JWT could query the call records of virtually any other Verizon number. While this is particularly bad, Verizon acknowledged it quickly, and rolled a fix out in less than a month.
When Parameterized Queries Aren’t
What’s the single most powerful tool to prevent SQL injection attacks? Easy: Parameterized queries. Write the SQL query ahead of time, the library converts it into native database code, and only then are the user-generated values plugged in. In theory that means those values can never be understood as part of the SQL logic. While there are ways this can still go wrong, the basic approach is sound. But what if a language,
like Nim
, had a parameterization option that didn’t actually do parameterized queries?
Yes, Nim’s
db_postgres
module provides the facility to run code like
getRow(sql"SELECT username FROM users WHERE username=?;", "user")
, which is intended to protect against SQL injection. But, under the hood, it really is just doing string replacement with character escaping, like replacing null characters with
\\0
. Now consider PostreSQL’s
standard_conforming_strings
setting, which among other things, removes the backslash as a special character. But if that setting is disabled, the backslash can be used to escape quotes. Nim doesn’t know anything about that behavior. This combination of not-actually-parameterized parameterization, and lack of awareness of the
standard_conforming_strings
behavior, means that
./poc '\' ' OR user_id=1; --'
is once again a potential SQL injection. Whoops.
Oracle: Oh, That Oracle Cloud!
We finally have a bit more insight into what’s going on at Oracle. You probably remember that the company has continually denied a breach into Oracle Cloud. It seems this is
a bit of verbal sleight-of-hand
, as Oracle has renamed part of their cloud offering to Oracle Cloud Classic. The remaining, current generation service is the Oracle Cloud. Oracle Cloud Classic has suffered the breach, not technically Oracle Cloud.
It’s not clear that this is really all there is to the story, though, as
more data is getting released by the attacker
, including video of a web meeting from 2019. Oracle has started reaching out to customers and confirmed the breach, though apparently strictly avoiding putting anything in writing.
Microsoft Joins the Hotpatch Game
Enterprise Linux distros have long had support for various forms of live-patching. We even
interviewed TuxCare about this feature for FLOSS Weekly a few weeks ago
. It seems that
Microsoft finally wants in on the fun
. Windows 11 Enterprise has in-memory security patching starting with the 24H2 update. This support is strictly for machines with an Enterprise or certain Education Microsoft subscriptions. The Hotpatches will be available for 8 of the 12 monthly security patches, with an enforced quarterly update via traditional updates and a reboot.
Bits and Bytes
Researchers at GreyNoise have
noted an uptick in IPs scanning for Palo Alto device login pages
for several days in March. The scanning had as many as 20,000 unique IPs hunting for these login interfaces, which suggests a botnet has been tasked with finding these devices. It’s very possible that a threat actor has found a new vulnerability in Palo Alto devices, and is preparing to launch an attack.
And finally, a pair of posts from ZDI caught our attention this week. The first is
a dive into how Binary Ninja’s static code analysis
can find potential use-after-free vulnerabilities. The second is all about
building an electric car simulator
, that can actually plug into real electric vehicle charging stations, and actually fool the charger into believing a car is attached. How is this problem approached safely, given the high voltages and amperages involved? Very carefully. | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8115426",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-04-04T17:26:48",
"content": "“The Hotpatches will be available for 8 of the 12 monthly security patches, with an enforced quarterly update via traditional updates and a reboot.” . That would be nice(r) for work. Every week we reboot ... | 1,760,371,584.662427 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/04/keep-bears-at-bay-with-the-crackle-of-280000-volts/ | Keep Bears At Bay With The Crackle Of 280,000 Volts | Lewin Day | [
"High Voltage"
] | [
"arc",
"Plasma Channel",
"spark",
"voltage multiplier"
] | Bears! Are they scared of massive arcs that rip through the air, making a lot of noise in the process? [Jay] from the
Plasma Channel
sure hopes so,
because that’s how his bear deterrent works!
[Jay] calls it the
Bear Blaster 5000
. Right from the drop, this thing looks like some crazy weapon out of
Halo.
That’s because it throws huge arcs at 280,000 volts. The basic concept behind it is simple enough—a battery drives a circuit which generates (kinda) low voltage AC. This is fed to the two voltage multipliers which are set up with opposite polarity to create the greatest possible potential difference between the two electrodes they feed. The meaty combination is able to arc across electrodes spaced over four inches apart. It’s all wrapped up in a super-cool 3D printed housing that really shows off the voltage multiplier banks.
Given its resemblance to a stun gun, you might think the idea is to jab an attacking bear with it. But the reality is, if the bear is close enough that you could press this device against it, you’re already lunch. [Jay] explains that it’s more about scaring the animal off with the noise and light it produces. We’d certainly take a few steps back if we heard this thing fire off in the woods.
[Jay] does a great job of explaining how the whole setup works, as well as showing off its raw ability to
spark.
We’ve seen some great builds from [Jay] before, too,
like this beefy custom flyback transformer. | 42 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "8115303",
"author": "lj",
"timestamp": "2025-04-04T11:27:11",
"content": "“This lunch makes funny noises”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8115457",
"author": "David H",
"timestamp": "2025-04-04T18:50:55",
... | 1,760,371,585.23273 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/04/a-portable-electronics-workstation/ | A Portable Electronics Workstation | Al Williams | [
"Raspberry Pi",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"portable workshop"
] | You don’t see them as often as you used to, but it used to be common to see “electronics trainers” which were usually a collection of components and simple equipment combined with a breadboard, often in a little suitcase. We think [Pro Maker_101’s]
portable electronics workstation
is in the same kind of spirit, and it looks pretty nice.
The device uses a 3D printed case and a custom PC board. There are a number of components, although no breadboard. There is a breakout board for Raspberry Pi GPIO, though. So you could use the screw terminals to connect to an external breadboard. We were thinking you could almost mount one as a sort of lid so it would open up like a book with the breadboard on one side and the electronics on the other. Maybe version two?
One thing we never saw on the old units? An HDMI flat-screen display! We doubt you’d make one exactly like this, of course, but that’s part of the charm. You can mix and match exactly what you want and make the prototyping station of your dreams. Throw in a small portable soldering iron, a handheld scopemeter, and you can hack anywhere.
We’d love to see something like this that was
modular
.
Beats what you could build in 1974
. | 26 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8115265",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-04-04T08:26:23",
"content": "For what purpose?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8115268",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-04-04T08:40:21",
"cont... | 1,760,371,585.059416 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/03/playstacean-evolves-the-psone-into-the-crab-it-was-always-meant-to-be/ | Playstacean Evolves The PSOne Into The Crab It Was Always Meant To Be | Navarre Bartz | [
"Games"
] | [
"carcinization",
"Case mods",
"console",
"console hack",
"playstation",
"sony"
] | Odd hardware designs crop up in art and renders far more frequently than in the flesh, but console modder [GingerOfOz] felt the need to bring [Anh Dang]’s image of the
inevitable carcinization of our gaming consoles
to life.
Starting with the image as inspiration, [GingerOfOz] got to work in CAD, creating an entirely new shell for the battered PSOne he adopted for the project. The final product is slightly less curvy than the picture, but some artistic license was necessary to go from the page to the real world.
The enclosure itself looks straightforward, if a bit tedious, but the articulating crab controller is a work of art itself. He could’ve made the arms static or non-functional, but they’re a fully-functional PlayStation controller that can move around just like on your favorite crustacean at the beach, minus the pinching. We love this whimsical take on the console mod which is a breath of salty air to the continuous race to get increasingly complex consoles into handheld form, although there’s certainly nothing wrong with that!
If you’re looking for some other console mods, how about this
Apple M1 inside a Wii
or getting your old
Ouya up-and-running again
? | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8115226",
"author": "ford",
"timestamp": "2025-04-04T05:20:52",
"content": "It’s not giant and it’s not an enemy that existed in ancient japan. Meh.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8115229",
"author": "Kaz",
"t... | 1,760,371,585.096271 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/03/a-proper-os-for-the-sega-genesis-megadrive/ | A Proper OS For The Sega Genesis/Megadrive | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"FUSIX",
"sega genesis",
"Sega Megadrive"
] | The console wars of the early 1990s had several players, but the battle that mattered was between Nintendo’s SNES and Sega’s Genesis, or Megadrive if you are European. They are both famous for their games, but in terms of software they can only run what’s on a cartridge. The Genesis has a Motorola 68000 on board though, which is capable of far more than just
Sonic the Hedgehog
. [EythorE] evidently thinks so, because
here’s a port of Fusix, a UNIX-like OS, for the Sega platform
.
As it stands, the OS is running on the BlastEm emulator, but given a Sega Saturn keyboard or a modified PC keyboard for the Sega, it could be run on real hardware. What you get is a basic UNIX-like OS with a working shell and the usual UNIX utilities. With 64k of memory to play with this will never be a powerhouse, but on the other hand we’d be curious to see it in a working cartridge.
Meanwhile, if the console interests you further,
someone has been into its workings in great detail
.
Header: Evan-Amos,
CC BY-SA 3.0
. | 20 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8115201",
"author": "Vinny",
"timestamp": "2025-04-04T02:32:30",
"content": "You mean Megadrive in the rest of the world, not just Europe. It was huge in Brazil back in the day.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8115283",
... | 1,760,371,585.151647 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/03/the-weird-way-a-dec-alpha-boots/ | The Weird Way A DEC Alpha Boots | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"alphastation",
"dec alpha",
"workstation"
] | We’re used to there being an array of high-end microprocessor architectures, and it’s likely that many of us will have sat in front of machines running x86, ARM, or even PowerPC processors. There are other players past and present you may be familiar with, for example SPARC, RISC-V, or MIPS. Back in the 1990s there was another, now long gone but at the time the most powerful of them all, of course we’re speaking of DEC’s Alpha architecture. [JP] has a mid-90s AlphaStation that doesn’t work, and as part of debugging it
we’re treated to a description of its unusual boot procedure
.
Conventionally, an x86 PC has a ROM at a particular place in its address range, and when it starts, it executes from the start of that range. The Alpha is a little different, on start-up it needs some code from a ROM which configures it and sets up its address space. This is applied as a 1-bit serial stream, and like many things DEC, it’s a little unusual. This code lives in a conventional ROM chip with 8 data lines, and each of those lines contains a separate program selectable by a jumper. It’s a handy way of providing a set of diagnostics at the lowest level, but even with that discovery the weirdness isn’t quite over. We’re treated to a run-down of DEC Alpha code encoding, and should you have one of these machines, there’s all the code you need.
The Alpha was so special in the 1990s because with 64-bit and retargetable microcode in its architecture it was significantly faster than its competitors. From memory it could be had with DEC Tru64 UNIX, Microsoft Windows NT, or VMS, and with the last of which it was the upgrade path for VAX minicomputers. It faded away in the takeover by Compaq and subsequently HP, and we are probably the poorer for it. We look forward to seeing more about this particular workstation, should it come back to life. | 46 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "8115191",
"author": "anachronda",
"timestamp": "2025-04-04T00:52:55",
"content": "mv5+, a vax that is (mostly) pin-compatible with an alpha, boots by loading a serial eprom into its cache and jumping to it. i once wroye a forth that lived entirely within the nv5+ cache. it could pre... | 1,760,371,585.309575 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/03/teardown-of-a-scam-ultrasonic-cleaner/ | Teardown Of A Scam Ultrasonic Cleaner | Maya Posch | [
"hardware"
] | [
"scam",
"ultrasonic cleaning"
] | Everyone knows that ultrasonic cleaners are great, but not every device that’s marketed as an ultrasonic cleaner is necessarily such a device. In
a recent video
on the
Cheap & Cheerful
YouTube channel the difference is explored, starting with a teardown of a fake one. The first hint comes with the use of the description ‘Multifunction cleaner’ on the packaging, and the second in the form of it being powered by two AAA batteries.
Unsurprisingly, inside you find not the ultrasonic transducer that you’d expect to find in an actual ultrasonic cleaner, but rather a vibration motor. In the demonstration prior to the teardown you can see that although the device makes a similar annoying buzzing noise, it’s very different. Subsequently the video looks at a small ultrasonic cleaner and compares the two.
Among the obvious differences are that the ultrasonic cleaner is made out of metal and AC-powered, and does a much better job at cleaning things like rusty parts. The annoying thing is that although the cleaners with a vibration motor will also clean things, they rely on agitating the water in a far less aggressive way than the ultrasonic cleaner, so marketing them as something which they’re not is very unpleasant.
In the video the argument is also made that you do not want to clean PCBs with an ultrasonic cleaner, but we think that people here may have different views on that aspect. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8115176",
"author": "Yer Mowth",
"timestamp": "2025-04-03T22:28:46",
"content": "TMI Greg.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8115199",
"author": "jbx",
"timestamp": "2025-04-04T02:10:49",
"content": "When a product loo... | 1,760,371,585.356083 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/03/australias-silliac-computer/ | Australia’s Silliac Computer | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"Australia",
"illiac",
"SILLIAC"
] | When you think about the dawn of modern computers, you often think about the work done in the UK and the US. But Australia had an early computer scene, too, and [State of Electronics] has done a series of videos about the history of computers down under.
The latest episode talks about SILLIAC
, a computer similar to ILLIAC built for the University of Sydney in the late 1950s.
How many racks does your computer fill up? SILLIAC had quite a few.
This episode joins earlier episodes about CSIRAC, and WREDAC. The series starts with the CSIR Mark I, which was the first computer in the southern hemisphere.
The -AC computers have
a long history
. While you often hear statements like, “…in the old days, a computer like this would fill a room,” SILLIAC, in fact, filled three rooms. The three meters of cabinets were in one room, the power supply in another. The third room? Air conditioning. A lot of tubes (valves, in Australia at the time) generate a lot of heat.
It is hard to put an exact cost on SILLIAC, but the original estimate was about AU£35,200. That sounds modest, but at the time, you could buy about ten suburban homes near Sydney for that price. Like most projects, the cost rose, and completion depended on a larger donation from a horse race. At the end, the cost was about AU£75,000!
SILLIAC had a reputation of being more reliable than some other computers based on the same design. That was probably because most computers use 6J6 tubes, but SILLIAC used 2C51 devices. Bell Labs created the 2C51 for use in undersea cables. Of course, they were also about six times the cost of a 6J6.
The computer did important work until 1968. It was, sadly, dismantled, but pieces of it are hanging around the Powerhouse Museum and at the University as display items.
This series is a great look at what was happening in the computer world south of the equator during these days. While SILLIAC is fascinating, you might want to start with
episode 1
. Supercomputers have come
a long way
. | 17 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8115122",
"author": "Jace",
"timestamp": "2025-04-03T19:04:37",
"content": "A lot of articles hailing Australian technology…sounds like southern-Hemisphere propaganda to me! Don’t forget that we Northerners will ALWAYS be on top!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replie... | 1,760,371,585.497466 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/03/ditto-that/ | Ditto That | Kristina Panos | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Interest",
"Slider"
] | [
"cyclostyle",
"ditto",
"ditto machine",
"hectograph",
"makin' copies",
"mimeograph",
"spirit duplicator",
"stencil duplicator"
] | All the news that was fit to print. Image via
Wikipedia
In the 1982 movie
Fast Times At Ridgemont High
, a classroom of students receives a set of paperwork to pass backward. Nearly every student in the room takes a big whiff of their sheet before setting it down. If you know, you know, I guess, but if you don’t, keep reading.
Those often purple-inked papers were fresh from the ditto machine, or
spirit duplicator
. Legend has it that not only did they smell good when they were still wet, inhaling the volatile organic compounds within would make the sniffer just a little bit lightheaded. But the spirit duplicator didn’t use ghosts, it used either methanol (wood alcohol), isopropyl, or, if you were loaded, ethyl alcohol.
Invented in 1923 by Wilhelm Ritzerfeld, ditto machines were popular among schools, churches, and clubs for making copies of worksheets, fliers, and so on before the modern copy machine became widespread in the 1980s. Other early duplicating machines include the mimeograph, the
hectograph
, and the
cyclostyle
.
Getting A Handle On Duplication
To use the ditto machine, one would first make a master copy using a special sheet of paper with a special type of waxy ink on the back that dissolves in alcohol. These types of sheets are still around today, in a way — if you’ve ever gotten a tattoo, you know that they don’t usually just freehand it; the artist will draw out your design on special paper that they can then use to lay down a temporary tattoo on your freshly-shaved skin before going for it.
Image via
Wikipedia
But don’t get too excited; tattoo transfer sheets aren’t compatible with ditto machines for a number of reasons. As I mentioned, ditto sheets use alcohol to transfer the ink, and tattoo sheets use heat and pressure. They’re too thin for the mechanics of the ditto machine’s drum, anyway.
So once you’ve typed or drawn up your master sheet, you’d mount it on the drum of the ditto machine. Then, with a big crank handle, you’d roll the drum over sheet after sheet until you had what you needed. The average master could make roughly 50 to 500 copies depending a number of factors.
The rise of higher-quality master sheets is largely responsible for this wide range, but there are other factors at play, like the color that gets used. Purple was made from a dye called aniline purple and lasted longest on paper, although there was also green, red, and black. You see a lot of purple dittos because of its vibrancy and the fact that it was highly soluble in alcohol.
The type of paper entered into the equation as well: absorbent paper like newsprint would make fewer copies than smoother, less porous bond paper. And, as you might imagine, dense text and images used more ink and would wear out the master faster.
As with many paper-based things from decades ago, the durability of dittoes is not so great. They will fade gradually when exposed to UV light. Although there is no citation,
Wikipedia claims that the average ditto would fade in direct sunlight after about a month
. It goes on to assume that most ditto machine users printed onto low-quality paper and will eventually “yellow and degrade due to residual acid in the untreated pulp”.
Not a Mimeograph
It’s worth mentioning that mimeographs are not quite the same thing as ditto machines. For one thing, ditto machines were often hand cranked, and many mimeographs were motorized. Interestingly enough,
the mimeograph predates the spirit duplicator
, having been patented on
August 8, 1876
by Thomas Edison and popularized by the A.B. Dick Company in the 1880s.
Also known as stencil duplicators,
mimeographs were a competing technology
that used ink and stencils to produce 50 to several thousand copies. A special stencil sheet bearing a wax coating would be typed on a regular typewriter with the ribbon disengaged and the machine set to this mode, and/or written or drawn upon using a special stylus and lettering guides.
The stencil sheet would then be fed into the machine, which had a large drum with an ink pad. The mimeograph would then squish ink through the stencil and onto the paper. You can see all this and more in the video below, which illustrates just how much of an art this whole process was compared to makin’ copies today.
Mimeographs were largely done in black, but color could be done “easily”, as the video demonstrates. You basically had to hand paint the colors onto your stencil. It doesn’t seem as though changing out the giant ink pad was an option. Unlike dittoes, mimeographs required better paper, so they should last longer in theory.
Before You Run Off
Duplication for the common man is as important as the printing press itself. While today you might just set the printer to provide the number of copies you need, the history of duplication shows that we’ve come a long way in terms of effort on the user’s end. Keep this in mind the next time you want to go
Office Space
on it. | 42 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "8115091",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-04-03T17:33:06",
"content": "“or, if you were loaded” nice one.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8115097",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-04-03T18:03:32",
"c... | 1,760,371,585.435195 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/03/mit-wants-you-to-secure-your-hardware-designs/ | MIT Wants You To Secure Your Hardware Designs | Al Williams | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"education",
"mit",
"Rowhammer"
] | When you think of attacking or defending computer systems, you probably think of software viruses and the corresponding anti-virus software. But MIT’s 6.5950 class teaches secure hardware design — how to attack and defend CPUs from bad actors. Interested? The
course is open source
, so you can follow along as long as you don’t mind not getting a grade.
Browsing some of the lecture slides shows that the material isn’t as stuffy as you might imagine. A slide about side channel attacks, for example, features an article called “And Bomb the Anchovies,” which says that Washington DC pizza places know when big news is about to break because pizza delivery to places like the White House or the Pentagon trend upward (something spies call pizza-int, by the way).
Even if you don’t have a burning desire to design more secure hardware, some of the lecture slides make for an interesting flip through on a rainy weekend day. For example, the charts about
RowHammer
(“RowHammer in One Sentence”) is a great explanation about how software can cause DRAM failures to attack a computer. We only wished they’d identified companies A, B, and C in their study. There are also labs and they politely clarify what setup you need to do each lab (typically, just a Linux server, although some you can do with just a browser).
One of the great things about the Internet is that you can virtually audit classes from anywhere in the world,
often for free
. MIT is always up to
something interesting
. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8115074",
"author": "Alexey",
"timestamp": "2025-04-03T16:16:12",
"content": "And the sources repo ishttps://github.com/MATCHA-MIT/SHD-StarterCode?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8115094",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,371,585.675328 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/03/remembering-betty-webb-bletchley-park-pentagon-code-breaker/ | Remembering Betty Webb: Bletchley Park & Pentagon Code Breaker | Maya Posch | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"Bletchley Park",
"obituary"
] | S/Sgt Betty Vine-Stevens, Washington DC, May 1945.
On 31 March of this year we
had to bid farewell
to Charlotte Elizabeth “Betty” Webb (née Vine-Stevens) at the age of 101. She was one of the cryptanalysts who
worked at Bletchley Park
during World War 2, as well as being one of the few women who worked at Bletchley Park in this role. At the time existing societal biases held that women were not interested in ‘intellectual work’, but as manpower was short due to wartime mobilization, more and more women found themselves working at places like Bletchley Park in a
wide variety of roles
, shattering these preconceived notions.
Betty Webb had originally signed up with the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), with her reasoning
per a 2012 interview
being that she and a couple of like-minded students felt that they ought to be serving their country, ‘rather than just making sausage rolls’. After volunteering for the ATS, she found herself being interviewed at Bletchley Park in 1941. This interview resulted in a years-long career that saw her working on German and Japanese encrypted communications, all of which had to be kept secret from then 18-year old Betty’s parents.
Until secrecy was lifted, all her environment knew was that she was a ‘secretary’ at Bletchley Park. Instead, she was fighting on the frontlines of cryptanalysis, an act which got acknowledged by both the UK and French governments years later.
Writing The Rulebook
Enigma machine
Although encrypted communications had been a part of warfare for centuries, the level and scale was vastly different during World War 2, which spurred the development of mechanical and electronic computer systems. At Bletchley Park these were the
Bombe
and
Colossus
computers, with the former being an electro-mechanical system. Both were used for deciphering German Enigma machine encrypted messages, with the tube-based Colossus taking over starting in 1943.
After enemy messages were intercepted, it was the task of these systems and the cryptanalysis experts to decipher them as quickly as possible. With the introduction of the Enigma machine by the Axis, this had become a major challenge. Since each message was likely to relate to a current event and thus time-sensitive, any delay in decrypting it would render the resulting decrypted message less useful. Along with the hands-on decrypting work, there were many related tasks to make this process work as smoothly and securely as possible.
Betty’s first task at Bletchley was to do the registering of incoming messages, which she began with as soon as she had been subjected to the contents of the Official Secrets Act. This forbade her from disclosing even the slightest detail of what she did or had seen at Bletchley, at the risk of severe punishment.
As was typical at Bletchley Park, each member of the staff there was kept as much in the dark of the whole as possible for operational security reasons. This meant that of the thousands of incoming messages per day, each had to be carefully kept in order and marked with a date and obfuscated location. She did see a Colossus computer once when it was moved into one of the buildings, but this was not one of her tasks, and snooping around Bletchley was discouraged for obvious reasons.
Paraphrasing
The Bletchley Park Mansion where Betty Webb worked initially before moving to Block F, which is now demolished. (Credit: DeFacto,
Wikimedia
)
Although Betty’s German language skills were pretty good thanks to her mother’s insistence that she’d be able to take care of herself whilst travelling on the continent, the requirements for the translators at Bletchley were much more strict, and thus eventually she ended up working in the Japanese section located in Block F. After decrypting and translating the enemy messages, the texts were not simply sent to military headquarters or similar, but had to be paraphrased first.
The paraphrasing task entails pretty much what it says: taking the original translated message and paraphrasing it so that the meaning is retained, but any clues about what the original message was from which it was paraphrased is erased. In the case that such a message then falls into enemy hands, via a spy at HQ, it is made much harder to determine where this particular information was intercepted.
Betty was deemed to be very good at this task, which she attributed to her mother, who encouraged her to relate stories in her own words. As she did this paraphrasing work, the looming threat of the Official Secrets Act encouraged those involved with the work to not dwell on or remember much of the texts they read.
In May of 1945 with the war in Europe winding down, Betty was transferred to the Pentagon in the USA to continue her paraphrasing work on translated Japanese messages. Here she was the sole ATS girl, but met up with a girl from Hull with whom she had to share a room, and bed, in the rundown Cairo hotel.
With the surrender of Japan the war officially came to an end, and Betty made her way back to the UK.
Secrecy’s Long Shadow
When the work at Bletchley Park was finally made public in 1975, Betty’s parents had sadly already passed away, so she was never able to tell them the truth of what she had been doing during the war. Her father had known that she was keeping a secret, but because of his own experiences during World War 1, he had shown great understanding and appreciation of his daughter’s work.
After keeping her secrets along with everyone else at Bletchley, the Pentagon and elsewhere, Betty wasn’t about to change anything about this. Her husband had never indicated any interest in talking about it either. In her eyes she had just done her duty and that was good enough, but when she got asked to talk about her experiences in 1990, this began a period in which she would not only give talks, but also write about her experiences. In 2015 Betty was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) and in 2021 as a
Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur
(Knight of the Legion of Honour) in France.
Today, as more and more voices from of those who experienced World War 2 and who were involved the heroic efforts to stop the Axis forces fall silent, it is more important than ever to recognize their sacrifices and ingenuity. Even if Betty Webb didn’t save the UK by her lonesome, it was the combined effort from thousands of individuals like her that cracked the Enigma encryption and provided a constant flow of intel to military command, saving countless lives in the process and enabling operations that may have significantly shortened the war.
Top image: A Colossus Mark 2 computer being operated by Dorothy Du Boisson (left) and Elsie Booker (right), 1943 (Credit:
The National Archives, UK
) | 30 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8115053",
"author": "Titis",
"timestamp": "2025-04-03T15:01:27",
"content": "Bro, you mad?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8115056",
"author": "Titus431",
"timestamp": "2025-04-03T15:07:01",
"content": "Dude, serious... | 1,760,371,585.971315 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/07/tracking-the-iss-made-easy/ | Tracking The ISS Made Easy | Elliot Williams | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"international space station",
"tracker"
] | If you made something blink, and now it’s time for you to make something
move
, something like a point-to-a-satellite tracker is a great idea.
[Farid Rener] made this moving arrow that always points at the ISS
, and documented it nicely to boot.
And there’s a little bit of everything here, from orbital mechanics and fetching the two-line elements (TLE) from the web, to writing the code to translate that into the tabletop machine’s coordinate system. It looks like [Farid] hadn’t done much 3D CAD before, so he got a chance to stretch those muscles too. Finally, it served as an introduction to resource-constrained programming: “This was the first time I’ve had to think about the size of a compiled binary – the most frustrating part was figuring out that using a C++ stringstream was adding too much code to my binary.”
[Farid] is learning a lot here, and you might too. For instance, using pencil lead (graphite) as a lubricant on sliding 3D-printed parts is new to us, but makes sense. We’ll have to try that out.
And while this is a simple desktop tracker, with a
lot
more mechanical design, the same basics could be put to real use for pointing a receiver dish. Of course, who says you need fancy motors and computers to point a satellite dish anyway? If you work on your arm muscles a bit,
you could become the satellite pointer
. | 3 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8116361",
"author": "victroniko",
"timestamp": "2025-04-07T15:44:58",
"content": "Graphite powder is a well known lubricant for keylocks and small (metal) machinery in general. IDK how it performs on plastics over time, though. I tend to use silicone grease.Just be aware it’s higly ... | 1,760,371,585.71028 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/06/a-tale-of-nuclear-shenanigans-from-down-under/ | A Tale Of Nuclear Shenanigans From Down Under | Jenny List | [
"News",
"Science"
] | [
"crime",
"law",
"Plutonium"
] | It’s likely that among the readers of this article there will be many who collect something. Whether it’s rare early LEDs or first-year-of-manufacture microprocessors, you’ll scour the internet to find them, and eagerly await mystery packages from the other side of the world.
There’s a tale emerging from Australia featuring just such a collector,
whose collection now has him facing a jail sentence
for importing plutonium. The story however is not so clear-cut, featuring a media frenzy and over-reaction from the authorities worthy of Gatwick Airport. [Explosions&Fire]
has a rather long video unpacking the events
, which we’ve placed below the break.
Emmanuel Lidden is an element collector, someone who tries to assemble an entire Periodic Table in their collection. He ordered a range of elements from an American element collectors’ supply website, including samples of plutonium and thorium. He seems to have been unaware he was committing any crime, with the microscopic samples available from legitimate websites with no warnings attached. The case becomes murkier as the Australian authorities flagged the thorium sample and instructed the courier not to deliver it, which they did anyway. Then a raid of the type you’d expect for the terrorists who stole the plutonium in
Back To The Future
was launched, along with that
Gatwick-esque
media frenzy.
We’re inclined to agree that the penalty likely to be meted out to him for buying a sliver of a Soviet smoke detector embedded in a Lucite cube seems overly steep, but at the same time his obvious naivety over dealing in radioactive materials marks him as perhaps more than a little foolhardy. It’s something over which to ponder though, have we managed to amass anything illegal disguised as outdated devices? Have you? Perhaps it’s something to discuss in the comments. | 47 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "8116156",
"author": "Cad the Mad",
"timestamp": "2025-04-07T05:03:27",
"content": "I collect mercury tilt switches. I don’t think they’re illegal…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8116166",
"author": "Vik",
"tim... | 1,760,371,585.79061 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/06/plutos-not-a-planet-but-it-is-a-spectrum-analyzer/ | Pluto’s Not A Planet, But It Is A Spectrum Analyzer | Al Williams | [
"Tool Hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"ADALM-PLUTO",
"plutosdr",
"spectrum analyzer"
] | The RTL-SDR dongles get most of the love from people interested in software-defined radio, but the Pluto is also a great option, too. [FromConceptToCircuit] shares code to turn one of these radios into
a spectrum analyzer
that sweeps up to 6 GHz and down to 100 MHz. You can see a video of how it works below.
While it may seem that 100 MHz is a bit limiting, there’s plenty of activity in that range, including WiFi, Bluetooth, radio systems, both commercial and amateur, and even cell phones.
The system uses a lock-in amplifier technique for best performance. The Python code is straightforward. You simply scan all frequencies and determine the signal strength at each point. Of course, the devil is in the details.
We covered using
Pluto with GNU Radio
a while back. We like how it connects like a network adapter, among other things. Spectrum analysis is a
common project
for one of these SDRs. | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8116157",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-07T05:09:46",
"content": "Ouch on the price tag though.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8116187",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-04-07T07:17:16",
... | 1,760,371,586.024303 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/06/command-and-conquer-ported-to-the-pi-pico-2/ | Command And ConquerPorted To The Pi Pico 2 | Tom Nardi | [
"classic hacks",
"Games"
] | [
"Command and Conquer",
"electronic arts",
"port",
"raspberry pi pico 2"
] | A couple of months back, Electronic Arts did something uncharacteristically benevolent and released several of the old
Command and Conquer
games under the GPLv3. Logically, we knew that opened the doors up to the games being ported to new operating systems and architectures, but we admit that it was still a little surprising to see
Command and Conquer: Red Alert
running on the Raspberry Pi Pico 2.
[Charlie Birks] documented the process of
getting the 1996 game up and running on the microcontroller
in a series of Mastodon posts spanning a few days in March. Seeing the incremental progress made each day makes for interesting reading, as he moves from the game just barely starting up to being able to complete missions and eventually even get multiplayer going between two Picos.
As [Charlie] clarifies, he’s technically using the Pimoroni Pico Plus 2 W, which takes the RP2350B from the official Pico 2, adds 8 MB of PSRAM, and bumps the onboard flash to 16 MB. The upgraded specs and an SD card are required to get the game running, as content that would have originally been held in RAM on the computer must instead be pulled from flash.
For an even more streamlined experience, he eventually slaps the Pico Plus 2 W into the Pimoroni Pico VGA Demo Base — which provided not only an integrated SD card slot, but (as the name implies) VGA output.
It’s still early days, but [Charlie] has been pushing all of his code changes into his
fork of
Red Alert
on GitHub
for anyone who wants to play along at home. If you get his fork compiled and running on your own Pico, we’d love to hear about it in the comments. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8116184",
"author": "mc",
"timestamp": "2025-04-07T07:11:54",
"content": "It’d be great to have this game on a handheld form factor with touch-LCD. A dedicated device to play just 1 game sounds a little extra but sometimes that’s just what I’d love to have right now.",
"parent_i... | 1,760,371,586.074198 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/06/reverse-engineering-the-ibm-pc110-one-pcb-at-a-time/ | Reverse Engineering The IBM PC110, One PCB At A Time | Tom Nardi | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"drop-in replacement",
"ibm pc110",
"KiCAD",
"reverse engineering"
] | There’s a dedicated group of users out there that aren’t ready to let their beloved IBM PC110 go to that Great Big Data Center in the Sky. Unfortunately, between the limited available technical information and rarity of replacement parts, repairing the diminutive palmtops can be tricky.
Which is why
[Ahmad Byagowi] has started a project
that aims to not only collect all the available schematics and datasheets that pertain to the machine, but to reverse engineer all of the computer’s original circuit boards. Working from optical and x-ray scans, the project has already recreated the motherboard, power supply, modem, keyboard, and RAM module PCBs in KiCad.
Just last week the project released production-ready Gerbers for all the boards, but considering there have been 45+ commits to the repository since then, we’re going to assume they weren’t
quite
finalized. Of course, with a project of this magnitude, you’d expect it to take a few revisions to get everything right. (Hell, we’ve managed to screw up board layouts that had fewer than a dozen components on them.)
If you’d like to lend a hand, [Ahmad] says he could use the help. Beyond checking the boards for problems and reporting issues, he’s also on the hunt for any datasheets or other documentation that can be found for the PC110 or its components. It looks like there’s still schematic work that needs to be done as well, so if your idea of zen is figuring out how ~30 year old computers were wired up internally, this might be the perfect summer project for you.
Interestingly, our very own
[Arya Voronova] has been working
on creating a drop-in replacement motherboard for the Sony Vaio P using KiCad and imported board images. That hobbyists are now able to do this kind of work using free and open source tools is a reminder of just how far things have come in the last few years.
Thanks to [adistuder] for the tip. | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8116084",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2025-04-06T20:26:58",
"content": "I´m impatient to see AI taking over PCB reverse engineering. This is a rewarding and interesting task for bubbling AI specialists.Identifying chips, pulling datasheets, building a BOM, a netlist from visible ... | 1,760,371,586.122175 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/06/an-amstrad-pcw-receives-a-bit-of-love/ | An Amstrad PCW Receives A Bit Of Love | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"Amstrad",
"amstrad PCW",
"pcw"
] | If Clive Sinclair’s genius in consumer electronics was in using ingenious hacks to make cheaper parts do greater things, then his Amstrad competitor Alan Sugar’s was in selling decade-old technology to consumers as new and exciting. His PCW series of computers are a great example, 1970s CP/M machines smartly marketed for late 1980s home offices. They were a popular choice at the time, and [Retro Recipes] has one. In a video filmed in period standard definition
he’s taking us through a repair to its Gotek drive, and then a RAM upgrade
.
The repair and upgrade are fairly straightforward, the former being a failed OLED screen on the drive and the latter being the installation of a bank of DIP memory chips. The interest lies in how they cost-minimised a CP/M machine as a consumer product. The board relies heavily on custom chips as you might expect, and there’s a brief glimpse of one of those unusual 3″ floppy drives. The power supply is part of the monitor board as was often the case with Amstrad machines, and the whole thing is about as simple as it can be. The full video can be found below the break.
We’re guessing that particularly in the UK there will be plenty of PCWs still languishing in dusty attics, but surprisingly given their popularity at the time we see less of them that might be expected. There has been
a significantly upgraded model
on these pages though. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8116039",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-06T18:23:06",
"content": "Wonderful! 💚 Where I live the PCW was known as the Schneider Joyce!This electric video typewriter was so underrated.It could run CP/M-80 and had hi-res graphics comparable to Hercules (MGA) on IBM PC (720... | 1,760,371,586.166891 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/06/emulating-iphone-on-qemu/ | Emulating IPhone On QEMU | Al Williams | [
"iphone hacks"
] | [
"ios",
"iphone",
"qemu"
] | [Georges Gagnerot] has been trying to emulate iOS and run iPhone software in a virtual environment. There were a few choices, and qemu-t8030 had a number of interesting features that you can
check out in his post
.
The project requires a patched QEMU, and [Georges] did some basic jailbreaking techniques. The real problem, of course, was not having the Apple Silicon GPU. Older versions of iOS let you select software rendering, but that option is gone on newer versions. However, it was possible to patch the phone to still use software rendering. There are still apps that directly use Metal or OpenGL that won’t run, but that’s another problem.
There is a plan to explore forwarding GPU calls to a real device. However, that seems difficult so it will have to wait for now.
That wasn’t the last problem, of course. But the post gives you a great view into the detective work. There is still work to go, but it looks like a lot of progress.
You can find the t8030 code on
GitHub
. Most of the iPhone hacking we see
is hardware
even if it means
cutting the screen
. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8115971",
"author": "Jouni",
"timestamp": "2025-04-06T14:47:51",
"content": "This is some next level commitment and crazynes!Hats off.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8115984",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,371,586.292915 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/03/a-very-trippy-look-at-microsofts-beginnings/ | A Very Trippy Look At Microsoft’s Beginnings | Tom Nardi | [
"classic hacks",
"News"
] | [
"bill gates",
"microsoft",
"web design"
] | It’s not often you’ll see us singing the praises of Microsoft on these pages, but credit where credit is due,
this first-person account
of how the software giant got its foot in the proverbial door by Bill Gates himself is pretty slick.
Now it’s not the story that has us excited, mind you. It’s the website itself. As you scroll down the page, the text and images morph around in a very pleasing and retro-inspired way. Running your cursor over the text makes it flip through random ASCII characters, reminding us a bit of the “decryption” effect from
Sneakers
. Even the static images have dithering applied to them as if they’re being rendered on some ancient piece of hardware. We don’t know who’s doing Billy’s web design, but we’d love to have them come refresh our
Retro Edition
.
Presentation aside, for those who don’t know the story: back in 1975, Gates and Paul Allen told the manufacturer of the Altair 8800 that they had a version of BASIC that would run on the computer and make it easier for people to use. Seeing the potential for increased sales, the company was very interested, and asked them to come give a demonstration of the software in a few weeks.
There was just one problem — Bill and Paul lied. They had never even seen an Altair in person, let alone wrote any code for one. So they set off on a mad dash to complete the project in time, with Allen famously still working on the code on the plane as they flew to the meeting. As you’ve probably guessed, they ended up pulling it off, and the rest is history.
At the very end of the page, you can download the actual source code for Altair BASIC that Gates and Allen co-delivered, presented as scans of the original printout. A little light reading as you wait to find out if that latest Windows update that’s installing is
going to tell you that your machine is too old to use anymore
. | 38 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114991",
"author": "hammarbytp",
"timestamp": "2025-04-03T11:19:43",
"content": "In 1975, Paul Allen and I created Microsoft because we believed in our vision of gouging out every cent for software you use – fixed it for yahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists",... | 1,760,371,586.253232 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/03/handheld-18650-analyzer-scopes-out-salvaged-cells/ | Handheld 18650 Analyzer Scopes Out Salvaged Cells | Tom Nardi | [
"Battery Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"18650",
"battery charger",
"battery tester"
] | You can salvage lithium 18650 cells from all sorts of modern gadgets, from disposable vapes to cordless power tools. The tricky part, other than physically liberating them from whatever they are installed in, is figuring out if they’re worth keeping or not. Just because an 18650 cell takes a charge doesn’t necessarily mean it’s any good — it could have vastly reduced capacity, or fail under heavy load.
If you’re going to take salvaging these cells seriously, you should really invest in a charger that is capable of running some capacity tests against the cell. Or if you’re a bit more adventurous, you can build this
“Battery Health Monitor” designed by [DIY GUY Chris]
. Although the fact that it can only accept a single cell at a time is certainly a limitation if you’ve got a lot of batteries to go though, the fact that it’s portable and only needs a USB-C connection for power means you can take it with you on your salvaging adventures.
The key to this project is a pair of chips from Texas Instruments. The BQ27441 is a “Fuel Gauge” IC, and is able to determine an 18650’s current capacity, which can be compared to the cell’s original design capacity to come up with an estimate of its overall health. The other chip, the BQ24075, keeps an eye on all the charging parameters to make sure the cell is being topped up safely and efficiently.
With these two purpose-built chips doing a lot of the heavy lifting, it only takes a relatively simple microcontroller to tie them together and provide user feedback. In this case [DIY GUY Chris] has gone with the ATmega328P, with a pair of addressable WS2812B LED bars to show the battery’s health and charge levels. As an added bonus, if you plug the device into your computer, it will output charging statistics over the serial port.
The whole project is released under the MIT license, and everything from the STL files for the 3D printed enclosure to the MCU’s Arduino-flavored firmware is provided. If you’re looking to build one yourself, you can either follow along with the step-by-step assembly instructions, or watch the build video below. Or really treat yourself and do both — you deserve it.
If your battery salvaging operation is too large for a single-cell tester, perhaps it’s time to upgrade to this
40-slot wall mounted unit
. | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114980",
"author": "JPB",
"timestamp": "2025-04-03T10:02:54",
"content": "Missing a critical parameter => Internal Resistance !",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8115079",
"author": "arifyn",
"timestamp": "2025-... | 1,760,371,586.410461 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/02/the-magic-touch-a-555-touch-switch/ | The Magic Touch: A 555 Touch Switch | Al Williams | [
"classic hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"555",
"touch switch"
] | There seems to be nothing a 555 can’t do. We’ve seen it before, but [electronzapdotcom] reminds us you can use a 555 and a few parts to make a
reasonable touch switch
in this video, embedded below.
The circuit uses some very large resistors so that noise from your body can overcome the logic level on the trigger and threshold inputs. You can easily adapt this idea if you need a simple touch switch. Though we imagine this circuit wouldn’t work well if you were in a quiet environment. We suspect 50 or 60 Hz hum is coupling through your finger and triggering the pins, but it could be a different effect.
How reliable is it? Beats us. The circuit is a bistable, so essentially your finger pumps a signal into a flip-flop. This is old trick, but could be useful. Of course, if you really need a touch switch, you have plenty of options. You can get
little modules
. Or, directly
measure skin resistance
. | 14 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114941",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-04-03T05:04:18",
"content": "In b4 someone suggests you could have used a ‘555.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8114954",
"author": "Carl Breen",
"timestamp": "2... | 1,760,371,586.461985 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/02/monitor-your-smart-plugs-on-the-command-line/ | Monitor Your Smart Plugs On The Command Line | Jenny List | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"cli",
"power measurement",
"smart plug"
] | The plethora of smart home devices available today deliver all manner of opportunities, but it’s fair to say that interfacing with them is more often done in the browser or an app than in the terminal.
WattWise from [Naveen Kulandaivelu]
is a tool which changes all that, it’s a command-line interface (CLI) for power monitoring smart plugs.
Written in Python, the tool can talk either directly to TP-Link branded smart plugs, or via Home Assistant. It tracks the power consumption with a simple graph, but the exciting part lies in how it can be used to throttle the CPU of a computer in order to use power at the points in the day when it is cheapest.
You can find the code in a GitHub repository
.
We like the idea of using smart plugs as instruments, even if they may not be the most accurate of measurement tools. It takes them even further beyond the simple functionality and walled-garden interfaces provided by their manufacturers, which in our view can only be a good thing.
Meanwhile, for further reading
we’ve looked at smart plugs in detail in the past
. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114994",
"author": "Larry Matthews",
"timestamp": "2025-04-03T11:43:19",
"content": "I use about 15 TP-Link type smart plugs with my Sense home monitor system. They are the best thing since sliced bread to know how much energy you are using every minute in your home. When I switch ... | 1,760,371,586.64757 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/02/one-book-to-boot-them-all/ | One Book To Boot Them All | Heidi Ulrich | [
"how-to"
] | [
"book",
"development",
"guide",
"operating system",
"os",
"Step-by-step",
"x86"
] | Somewhere in the universe, there’s a place that lists every x86 operating system from scratch. Not just some bootloaders, or just a kernel stub, but documentation to build a fully functional, interrupt-handling, multitasking-capable OS. [Erik Helin and Adam Renberg] did just that by documenting every step in
The Little Book About OS Development
.
This is not your typical dry academic textbook. It’s a hands-on, step-by-step guide aimed at hackers, tinkerers, and developers who want to demystify
kernel
programming. The book walks you through setting up your environment, bootstrapping your OS, handling interrupts, implementing virtual memory, and even tackling system calls and multitasking. It provides just enough detail to get you started but leaves room for
exploration
– because, let’s be honest, half the fun is in figuring things out yourself.
Completeness and structure are two things that make this book stand out. Other OS dev guides may give you snippets and leave you to assemble the puzzle yourself. This book documents the entire process, including common pitfalls. If you’ve ever been lost in the weeds of segmentation, paging, or serial I/O, this is the map you need. You can
read it online
or fetch it as a single 75-page long
PDF
.
Mockup photo source:
Matthieu Dixte | 19 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114885",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-04-03T00:15:04",
"content": "Another good resource is theOSDev Wikiwhich has even more info and for more than just x86.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8115006",
"author... | 1,760,371,586.582119 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/02/programmers-macro-pad-bangs-out-whole-functions/ | Programmer’s Macro Pad Bangs Out Whole Functions | Tom Nardi | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"Arduino Micro Pro",
"macro pad",
"programming"
] | Macro pads are handy for opening up your favorite programs or executing commonly used keyboard shortcuts. But why stop there?
That’s what [Jeroen Brinkman] must have been thinking while creating the
Programmer’s Macro Pad
. Based on the Arduino Pro Micro, this hand-wired pad is unique in that a single press of any of its 16 keys can virtually “type” out multiple lines of text. In this case, it’s a capability that’s being used to prevent the user from having to manually enter in commonly used functions, declarations, and conditional statements.
For example, in the current firmware, pressing the “func” key will type out a boilerplate C function:
int () { //
;
return 0;
}; // f
It will also enter in the appropriate commands to put the cursor where it needs to be so you can actually enter in the function name. The other keys such as “array” and “if” work the same way, saving the user from having to enter (and potentially, even remember) the correct syntax.
The firmware is kept as simple as possible, meaning that the functionality of each key is currently hardcoded. Some kind of tool that would let you add or change macros without having to manually edit the source code and flash it back to the Arduino would be nice…but hey, it
is
a Programmers Macro Pad, after all.
Looking to speed up your own day-to-day computer usage?
We’ve covered a lot of macro pads
over the years, we’re confident at least a few of them should catch your eye. | 24 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114842",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-02T20:45:45",
"content": "No coder, in history, has been limited by typing speed.Not even when using Ada.Which, being a government/DOD spec language, requires you code in triplicate.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repl... | 1,760,371,586.738665 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/02/floss-weekly-episode-827-yt-dlp-sometimes-you-cant-see-the-tail/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 827: Yt-dlp, Sometimes You Can’t See The Tail | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"FLOSS Weekly",
"youtube-dl",
"yt-dlp"
] | This week,
Jonathan Bennett
chats with Bashonly about yt-dlp, the audio/video downloader that carries the torch from youtube-dl! Why is this a hard problem, and what does the future hold for this swiss-army knife of video downloading? Watch to find out!
https://github.com/bashonly
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
https://discord.gg/H5MNcFW63r
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 | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8115211",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2025-04-04T04:10:50",
"content": "How to Use YT-DLP: Guide and Commands (2025)By Diego Asturias (you can skip the email harvesting attempts)Last updated on March 7, 2025https://www.rapidseedbox.com/blog/yt-dlp-complete-guideNote: If you are... | 1,760,371,587.512954 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/06/celebrating-30-years-of-windows-95/ | Celebrating 30 Years Of Windows 95 At VCF | Adam Fabio | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"CommodoreZ",
"microsoft",
"Ms-Dos5",
"VCF East 2025",
"windows 95"
] | It’s been 30 years since Windows 95 launched. [
Ms-Dos5
] and [
Commodore Z
] are celebrating with an epic exhibit at
Vintage Computer Festival East 2025
. They had no fewer than nine computers — all period-correct machines running versions of Windows 95. The pictures don’t do it justice, so if you are near Wall, NJ, on Sunday, April 5, 2025, definitely go check out this and the rest of the exhibits at VCF.
An exhibit like this isn’t thrown together overnight. [Commodore Z] and [Ms-Dos5] worked for months to assemble the right mix of desktops, laptops, and peripherals to showcase Windows 95. Many of the computers are networked as well – which was no easy task.
One particular Thinkpad 760e required pliers and force to remove a stuck PCMCIA modem card. After a struggle that was ultimately destructive to the card, the pair determined it was stuck due to a sticker that had effectively glued the card into the laptop. As the sticker finally gave up, the card popped itself out of the laptop.
Hardware isn’t the only story of this Windows 95 exhibit. An operating system
is
software, after all. The team has plenty of software running. Some highlights are Kid Pix, MS-paint,
LEGO Island
,
Full Throttle
,
Duke Nukem 3D
, Word 97, and
Space Cadet Pinball
, which came with the Plus! expansion pack. There is a huge array of original boxes for Windows 95 software. It’s a nostalgia trip to see software in boxes, especially in all those bright 90’s colors.
The various versions of Windows 95 are also represented. [Ms-Dos5] and [Commodore Z] are running all major versions from Chicago beta 73g to Windows 95 C / OSR2.5.
If you’re old enough to remember it, the Windows 95 launch event was a big deal. Windows 3.0 series was five years old at that point. Millions of people owned PC compatible computers and were ready for something new and flashy, and Windows 95 delivered. Thanks to [Commodore Z] and [Ms-Dos5] keeping this bit of internet history alive. | 78 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "8115922",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-06T11:32:34",
"content": "By the way, its predecessor, Windows 3.1 was released 33 years ago today – on April 6, 1992.https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.1x",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
... | 1,760,371,586.864264 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/06/a-low-f-number-lens-from-scratch/ | A Low F Number Lens, From Scratch | Jenny List | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"f-stop",
"lens",
"projector lens"
] | The F-number of a photographic lens is a measure of its light-gathering ability, and is expressed as its aperture diameter divided by its focal length. Lenses with low F-numbers are prized by photographers for their properties, but are usually expensive because making a good one can be something of a challenge. Nevertheless [Rulof] is giving it a go, making
an 80mm F0.5 lens with a Sony E-mount
. The video below the break has all the details, and also serves as a fascinating primer on lens design if you are interested.
Rather than taking individual lenses, he’s starting with the second-hand lens from an old projector. It’s got the required huge aperture, but it’s by no means a photographic lens. An interesting component is his choice of diaphragm for the variable aperture, it’s a drafting aid for drawing circles which closely resembles a photographic part. This is coupled with the triplet from an old SLR lens in a 3D-printed enclosure, and the result is a lens that works even if it may not be the best. We know from experiences playing with lens systems that adjusting the various components of a compound lens like this one can be very difficult; we can see it has the much sought-after bokeh or blurred background, but it lacks sharpness.
Perhaps because a camera is an expensive purchase, we don’t see as much of this kind of hacking as we’d like.
That’s not to say that lenses don’t sometimes make their way here
. | 52 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "8115909",
"author": "Tony",
"timestamp": "2025-04-06T10:43:41",
"content": "Small correcrion, f-number is measure by focal length divided by the aperture diameter. That why it is written f/8. The f stands for focal length. Great read! Thanks for the article.",
"parent_id": nul... | 1,760,371,587.123387 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/05/ben-eater-vs-microsoft-basic/ | Ben Eater Vs. Microsoft BASIC | Elliot Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [] | [Ben Eater]’s breadboard 6502 computer is no stranger to these parts, so it was a bit of a surprise that when [Mark] wrote in asking us if we’d covered [Ben]’s getting MS BASIC running on the breadboard, that our answer was “no”. Well, that changes today!
This is a three-part video series, documenting how [Ben Eater] ports a 1977 version of MS BASIC to his 6502-based computer. The first video is all about
just getting the BASIC up and working
. It’s full of detail about how MS BASIC adapts to different architectures on the inside, and [Ben] essentially defines his own along the way.
Once he has BASIC working, the next two videos are about making it work not just with the serial terminal that he has attached, but also with the LCD display peripheral he has plugged into the breadboard.
BASIC fans will not be surprised to see that it’s all about using POKE
. But that ends up being to slow, so he extends it out with his own
LCDPRINT
command written in assembly.
Now that he can write a character to the LCD, he wants to be able to pass it a string:
LCDPRINT “Hello world”.
But that requires his command to be able to parse a string, and this has him
diving down the rabbit hole into how MS BASIC parses strings, handles evals, and so on
. If you want to know how MS BASIC works on the inside, this is the video for you. This video makes a lot of use of
wozmon
, which seems an almost ideal tool for this kind of low-level poking around.
All of this is done in [Ben]’s very well rehearsed, accessible, but pulling-no-punches style. Get ready to nerd out. All three of the videos are embedded just below the break.
While it’s not
the Altair BASIC that Bill himself was writing about last week
, it’s probably a direct descendent, and reading about the Altair version was what spurred [Mark Stevens] to send us the tip. Thanks! | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8115850",
"author": "8bitwiz",
"timestamp": "2025-04-06T06:04:39",
"content": "I’ve been working with MS-BASIC since the original TRS-80, and I’ve seen and disassembled most of the different versions for all the different CPUs. It’s really fun that there are enough versions of the o... | 1,760,371,586.927617 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/05/inside-an-edison-phonograph/ | Inside An Edison Phonograph | Al Williams | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"edison",
"phonograph",
"wax cylinder"
] | If you think of records as platters, you are of a certain age. If you don’t remember records at all, you are even younger. But there was a time when audio records were not flat — they were drums, which was how the original Edison phonograph worked. [Our Own Devices] did a video earlier showing one of these devices, but since it was in a museum, he didn’t get to open it up. Lucky for us, he now has one of his own, and we
get to see inside
in the video below.
Ironically, Edison was deaf yet still invented the phonograph. While he did create the working phonograph — his self-identified most important invention — the original invention wasn’t commercially viable. You could record and playback audio on tin foil wrapped around a drum. But you couldn’t remove the foil without destroying it.
Edison was busy, but another inventor related to Bell created a similar system that used wax cylinders instead of foil. Edison’s vision for his invention didn’t include popular music, which hurt sales.
If you want to skip the history lesson — although it is well worth watching — you can skip to the 9-minute mark. You can hear the machine play and then see the box come off.
Oddly, people were recording things
before they were able to play them back
. Keeping a machine like this running can be
quite a challenge
. | 14 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8115822",
"author": "few",
"timestamp": "2025-04-06T02:30:00",
"content": "They have and operate one of these at Greenfield Village, in Detroit, where the original Edison labs have been moved to. I didn’t watch the video, but the Greenfield Village recordings both record and play ba... | 1,760,371,587.225923 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/05/how-shrinking-feature-size-made-modern-wireless-work/ | How Shrinking Feature Size Made Modern Wireless Work | Elliot Williams | [
"hardware",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"cmos",
"history",
"RF ICs"
] | If you’re living your life right, you probably know what as MOSFET is. But do you know the MESFET? They are like the faster, uninsulated, Schottky version of a MOSFET, and they used to rule the roost in radio-frequency (RF) silicon. But if you’re like us, and you have never heard of a MESFET, then give
this phenomenal video by [Asianometry]
a watch. In it, among other things, he explains how the shrinking feature size in CMOS made RF chips cheap, which brought you the modern cellphone as we know it.
MESFET
MOSFET
The basic overview is that in the 1960s, most high-frequency stuff had to be done with discrete parts because the bipolar-junction semiconductors of the time were just too slow. At this time,
MOSFETs were just becoming manufacturable
, but were even slower still. The MESFET, without its insulating oxide layer between the metal and the silicon, had less capacitance, and switched faster. When silicon feature sizes got small enough that you could do gigahertz work with them, the MESFET was the tech of choice.
As late as the 1980s, you’d find MESFETs in radio devices. At this time, the feature size of the gates and the thickness of the oxide layer in MOSFETs kept them out of the game. But as CPU manufacturers pushed CMOS features smaller, not only did we get chips like the 8086 and 80386,
two of Intel’s earliest CMOS designs
, but the tech started getting fast enough for RF. And the world never looked back.
If you’re interested in the history of the modern monolithic RF ICs, definitely give the 18-minute video a watch. (You can
skip the first three or so
if you’re already a radio head.) If you just want to build some radio circuits,
this fantastic talk from [Michael Ossmann] at the first-ever Supercon
will make you an RF design hero. His secrets? Among them, making the most of exactly these modern everything-in-one-chip RF ICs so that you don’t have to think about that side of things too hard.
Thanks [Stephen] for the tip! | 4 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8115821",
"author": "J",
"timestamp": "2025-04-06T02:25:16",
"content": "“CPU manufacturers pushed CMOS theses features smaller”What?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8115867",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "... | 1,760,371,587.273833 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/05/how-a-tiny-relay-became-a-usb-swiss-army-knife/ | How A Tiny Relay Became A USB Swiss Army Knife | Heidi Ulrich | [
"computer hacks",
"Linux Hacks",
"Microcontrollers",
"News",
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"BOOT0",
"relay",
"servo",
"stm32",
"swiss army knife",
"swiss knife",
"uart",
"usb"
] | Meet the little board that could:
[alcor6502]’s tiny USB relay controller
, now evolved into a multifunction marvel. Originally built as a simple USB relay to probe the boundaries of JLCPCB’s production chops, it has become a compact utility belt for any hacker’s desk drawer. Not only has [alcor6502] actually built the thing, he even provided instructions. If you happened to be at
Hackaday in Berlin
, you now might even own one, as he handed out twenty of them during his visit. If not, read on and build it yourself.
This thing is not just a relay, and that is what makes it special. Depending on a few solder bridges and minimal components, it shape-shifts into six different tools: a fan controller (both 3- and 4-pin!), servo driver, UART interface, and of course, the classic relay. It even swaps out a crystal oscillator for USB self-sync using
STM32F042
‘s internal RC – no quartz, less cost, same precision. A dual-purpose
BOOT0
button lets you flash firmware and toggle outputs, depending on timing. Clever reuse, just like our mothers taught us.
It’s the kind of design that makes you want to tinker again. Fewer parts. More function. And that little smile when it just works. If this kind of clever compactness excites you too,
read [alcor6502]’s build log and instructions
here. | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8115778",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-04-05T22:22:49",
"content": "I wouldn’t call it multifunction device so much as call it multipurpose PCB. The reason being that in order to switch between functions, you must bridge or remove a particular set of components. Unless you... | 1,760,371,587.179588 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/05/if-youre-3d-scanning-youll-want-a-way-to-work-with-point-clouds/ | If You’re 3D Scanning, You’ll Want A Way To Work With Point Clouds | Donald Papp | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"3d scanning",
"mesh",
"point cloud",
"software"
] | 3D scanning is becoming much more accessible, which means it’s more likely that the average hacker will use it to solve problems — possibly odd ones. That being the case, a handy tool to have in one’s repertoire is a way to work with point clouds. We’ll explain why in a moment, but that’s where
CloudCompare
comes in (
GitHub
).
Not all point clouds are destined to be 3D models. A project may call for watching for changes in a surface, for example.
CloudCompare is an open source tool with which one can load up and do various operations on point clouds, including generating mesh models from them. Point clouds are what 3D scanners create when an object is scanned, and to become useful, those point clouds are
usually
post-processed into 3D models (specifically, meshes) like an
.obj
or
.stl
file.
We’ve gone into detail in the past about
how 3D scanning works
, what to expect from it, and taken a
hands-on tour
of what an all-in-one wireless scanner can do. But what do point clouds have to do with getting the most out of 3D scanning? Well, if one starts to push the boundaries of how and to what purposes 3D scanning can be applied, it sometimes makes more sense to work with point clouds directly instead of the generated meshes, and CloudCompare is an open-source tool for doing exactly that.
For example, one may wish to align and merge two or more different clouds, such as from two different (possibly incomplete) scans. Or, you might want to conduct a deviation analysis of how those different scans have changed. Alternately, if one is into designing wearable items, it can be invaluable to be able to align something to a 3D scan of a body part.
It’s a versatile tool with numerous tutorials, so if you find yourself into 3D scanning but yearning for more flexibility than you can get by working with the mesh models — or want an alternative to modeling-focused software like
Blender
— maybe it’s time to work with the point clouds directly. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8115715",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-04-05T17:31:18",
"content": "Could use an article on HunYuan3D-2, currently the best close to open source model that’s out there, it’s able to take a literal sketch on a napkin, or literally any photo of any object, or AI genned object... | 1,760,371,587.321119 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/02/supercon-2024-rethinking-body-art-with-leds/ | Supercon 2024: Rethinking Body Art With LEDs | Lewin Day | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"2024 Hackaday Supercon",
"body art",
"glowable",
"glowables",
"glowing",
"led",
"sprite lights"
] | Tattoos. Body paint. Henna. All these are popular kinds of body art with varying histories and cultural connotations, many going back centuries or even longer. They all have something in common, though—they all change how the body reflects light back to the viewer. What if, instead, body art could shine a light of its very own?
This is the precise topic which [Katherine Connell] came to discuss
at the 2024 Hackaday Supercon.
Her talk concerns rethinking body art with the use of light emitting diodes—and is both thoroughly modern and aesthetically compelling. Beyond that, it’s an engineering development story with liquid metal and cutting-edge batteries that you simply don’t want to miss!
[Katherine] wearing her stick-on LED body art, known as Sprite Lights. Credit:
SpriteLights.com
In her quest to create self-glowing body art, [Katherine] invented Sprite Lights. In her own words, “these body safe light up temporary tattoos combine art, flex PCBs, screen printed batteries, and a body-safe adhesive tape.” Basically, you can place them on your skin, and they’ll shine and catch eyes for as long as there’s juice left in the sticker.
The inspiration behind this project was simple. [Katherine] grew up in the 80s, and being exposed to that neon-soaked era gave her a desire to glow-in-the-dark. However, she didn’t want to get into any hardcore body modification—hence, she pursued a non-invasive stick-on solution.
As you might imagine, creating these wasn’t trivial. They need to stick to the skin for long periods of time without causing irritation, while also being lightweight and slim enough to be practical to wear. Indeed, to that end, Sprite Lights are less than 1.5 mm thick—an impressive engineering feat.
Her first attempts involved creating a synthetic skin-like material using latex, with LEDs stuck underneath. However, this wasn’t a particularly desirable solution. Latex allergies are relatively common, and producing the designs took a lot of careful hand-soldering and manual work. It was also difficult to attach the latex to the skin, and to color match it with the wearer to make it look right.
Early experiments with latex had a few flaws.
From there, [Katherine] experimented with 3D-printing thin films with transparent PLA, with LEDs underneath. This was a much quicker way to work, but still didn’t attach well to the skin and had some aesthetic flaws. Another 3D-printing attempt saw [Katherine] create molds to produce transparent silicone films with LEDs embedded underneath, but this again proved very labor intensive and it’s difficult to get silicone to stick to anything, including humans. [Katherine] even tried experimenting with Galinstan, a very off-beat metallic alloy, to make circuits inside flexible silicone. She created viable stretchable circuits but they were not very robust, particularly since the Galinstan tends to melt at body temperature.
Undeterred from early hurdles, [Katherine] persevered with new techniques, using 3D-printing, silicone molds, and even strange gallium alloys to create real glowing body art.
Later experiments with copper tape enabled [Katherine] to make flexible circuits a bit more easily. She used a Cricut to cut out traces in copper tape, and then stuck them on clear heat-resistant plastic. From there, she used a Walmart griddle to heat the assembly until solder paste liquified and her components were soldered in place. It required careful attention and speed to avoid melting everything, but it worked.
Having developed decent flexible circuits that could light up, power was next on the agenda. Desiring to create stick-on devices with an ultra-thin form factor, there was no room to include a traditional battery, so [Katherine] had to figure out how to power Sprite Lights effectively. She found flexible batteries from a company called Zinergy that could deliver 3V and 20 mAh. She was able to specify a custom flat round design, with the company able to make them just 0.7mm thick and 55 mm round. They use a compound similar to regular AA batteries, which is screen printed onto one layer of plastic and sealed with another layer on top. The batteries have the benefit of being safe to place on skin, with no risk of explosion or chemical exposure, even if they happen to be punctured or cut while worn. Perhaps the only drawback is that they’re non-rechargeable—they’re safe, but single-use.
Custom ultra-thin non-rechargeable batteries made Sprite Lights possible.
Armed with her new batteries, [Katherine] developed her concept further. She stepped up to using commercially-available flex PCBs produced by JLCPCB, in place of her homebrewed concepts used previously. She combined these with the flexible Zinergy batteries underneath, and custom-made die-cut stickers from MakeStickers on top. This gave her an art layer, an LED circuit layer, and a battery layer underneath, with a hypoallergenic medical tape used as the final layer to stick the assembly to the skin. An intermediate fabric tape layer is included to connect the battery’s contacts to the flex PCB, which is populated with LEDs. By leaving a paper layer on the fabric tape between the contacts, this allows the Sprite Light to remain off until it’s ready to be used. The combination comes in under 1.5 mm thick.
[Katherine] has developed Sprite Lights into a super-clean final product. Credit:
SpriteLights.com
[Katherine] went through a great deal of iteration and development to get Sprite Lights to where they are today. She notes that you can learn anything online if you put in the work and connect to the right communities—it was through self-directed research that she taught herself the skills to get the project over the line. Beyond that, it’s also worth noting that technology might not be quite up to what you need right now—her project relies heavily on brand-new custom Zinergy batteries to be as thin as possible. Her next challenge is mass production—something she has pursued
via a crowd-funding campaign.
Ultimately, Sprite Lights are a super-cool piece of body art. But beyond that, [Katherine] told us the great engineering story behind these astounding self-glowing stickers. As her fine example demonstrates, you can do really cool things if you just keep working at it and teach yourself the right skills along the way! | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8114879",
"author": "dielectric",
"timestamp": "2025-04-02T23:06:22",
"content": "Now that’s some good hacking!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8114950",
"author": "Skalamanga",
"timestamp": "2025-04-03T06:34:44",
"c... | 1,760,371,587.368458 |
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