Hackaday Podcast
Hackaday
Hackaday Editors take a look at all of the interesting uses of technology that pop up on the internet each week. Topics cover a wide range like bending consumer electronics to your will, designing circuit boards, building robots, writing software, 3D printing interesting objects, and using machine tools. Get your fix of geeky goodness from new episodes every Friday morning.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Feb 4, 2022 • 56min
Ep 154: A Good Enough CNC, Stepper Motors Unrolled, Smart Two-Wire LEDs, a Volcano Heard Around the World
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney for this week's podcast as we talk about Elliot's "defection" to another podcast, the pros and cons of CNC builds, and making Nixie clocks better with more clicking. We'll explore how citizen scientists are keeping a finger on the pulse of planet Earth, watch a 2D stepper go through its paces, and figure out how a minimalist addressable LED strip works. From solving a Rubik's cube to answering the age-old question, "Does a watched pot boil?" -- spoiler alert: if it's well designed, yes -- this episode has something for everyone. Check out the show notes for links and more!

Jan 28, 2022 • 56min
Ep 153:A 555 Teardown to Die For, Tetrabyte is Not a Typo, DIY Injection Molding, and Using All the Parts of the Trash Printer
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi on another whirlwind tour of the week's top stories, hacks, and projects. We start off with some breaking Linux security news, and then marvel over impeccably designed pieces of hardware ranging from a thrifty Z table for the K40 laser cutter to a powerful homebrew injection molding rig. The finer technical points of a USB device that only stores 4 bytes at a time will be discussed, and after taking an interactive tour through the internals of the 555 timer, we come away even more impressed by the iconic 50 year old chip. We'll wrap things up by speculating wildly about all the bad things that can happen to floating solar panels, and then recite some poetry that you can compile into a functional computer program should you feel so inclined. Check out the show notes for links and more!

Jan 21, 2022 • 59min
Ep 152: 555 Timer Extravaganza, EMF Chip Glitching 3 Ways, a Magnetic Mechanical Keyboard, and The Best Tricorder Ever
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi as they bring you up to speed on the best stories and projects from the week. There's some pretty unfortunate news for the physical media aficionados in the audience, but if you're particularly keen on 50 year old integrated circuits, you'll love hearing about the winners of the 555 Timer Contest. We'll take a look at a singing circuit sculpture powered by the ESP32, extol the virtues of 3D printed switches, follow one hacker's dream of building the ultimate Star Trek tricorder prop, and try to wrap our heads around how electronic devices can be jolted into submission. Stick around to the end as we take a close look at some extraordinary claims about sniffing out computer viruses, and wrap things up by wondering why everyone is trying to drive so far.

Jan 14, 2022 • 1h 1min
Ep 151: The Hackiest VR Glove, Plotting Boba Fett with Shoelaces, ECU Hacking, and Where Does Ammonia Come From?
Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi are back again to talk about all the weird and wonderful stores from our corner of the tech world. Canon having to temporarily give up on chipping their toner cartridges due to part shortages is just too perfect to ignore, and there's some good news for the International Space Station as the White House signals they're ready to support the orbiting outpost until 2030. We'll also look at an extremely promising project looking to deliver haptic feedback for VR, programming retrocomputers with the Arduino IDE, and the incredible reverse engineering involved in adding a DIY autonomous driving system to a 2010 Volkswagen Golf. Finally we'll find out why most of the human life on this planet depends on a process many people have never heard of, and learn about the long history of making cars heavier than they need to be. Check out all the links over on Hackaday!

Jan 7, 2022 • 1h 3min
Ep 150: Blackberry Runs Out of Juice, NODE has your pinouts, Rats learn DOOM, and 2021 is Done
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi as they ring in the New Year with the first podcast episode of 2022. We get the bad news out early for those still thumbing away at their Blackberries, then pivot into some of the highlights from over the holidays such as the release of NODE's The Pinouts Book and the discovery of a few expectation-defying OpenSCAD libraries. We'll look at modifying a water cooler with Ghidra, and the incredible technology that let's historians uncover the hidden history of paintings. Oh, and we'll also talk about all the best and most important stories of the last 12 months. There's a lot of ground to cover, so get comfortable.

Dec 31, 2021 • 1min
Happy New Year!
The Hackaday Podcast is in its second, and final, week of winter hibernation. So join me and special guest Tom Nardi in the first week of 2022 as we discuss the best of 2021 and the holiday season.

Dec 24, 2021 • 3min
No Podcast This Week, But What's That Sound!
The Podcast is in Holiday Mode this week, so keep on hacking (and reading Hackaday!) until we catch up again in 2022.

Dec 17, 2021 • 54min
Ep 149: Ballerina Bot Balances, Flexures Track Cat Food, PCB Goes Under the Knife, and an ATtiny Does the 555
Newly ordained Hackaday editor-in-chief Elliot Williams and staff writer Dan Maloney jump behind the podcast mic to catch you up on all this week's essential hacks. We'll have a Bob Ross moment with an iPad, go to ridiculous lengths to avoid ordering a 555, and cook up a Wii in toaster. Need to make a VGA adapter from logic chips? Or perhaps you want to quantify the inner depths of human consciousness? Either way, we've got you covered.

Dec 10, 2021 • 55min
Ep 148: Pokemon Trades, Anniversary iPod Prototype, Stupid Satellite Tricks, and LED Strip Sensors
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys get caught up on the week that was. People go to great lengths for video game saves, but this Pokemon hack that does hardware-based trade conversion between the Game Boy's Pokemon 2 and Pokemon 3 is something else. Why do we still use batteries when super capacitors exist? They're different components, silly, and work best at different things. Turns out you can study the atmosphere by sending radio waves through it, and that's exactly what the ESA is doing... around Mars! And will machined parts become as easy to custom order as PCBs have become? This week we take a closer look at prototyping as a service.

Dec 3, 2021 • 56min
Ep 147: Animating Traces, Sucking and Climbing, Spinning Sails, and Squashing Images
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams get caught up on the week that was. You probably know a ton of people who have a solar array at their home, but how many do you know that have built their own hydroelectric generation on property? Retrocomputing software gurus take note, there's an impressive cross-compiler in town that can spit out working binaries for everything from C64 to Game Boy to ZX Spectrum. Tom took a hard look at the Prusa XL, and Matthew takes us back to school on what UEFI is all about. Won't somebody please think of the show notes?!?


