Hackaday Podcast

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys recount the coolest hacks from the past week. Most clocks keep time with a quartz crystal, but we discuss one that uses a tuning fork... like the kind you use to tune a piano. Ghidra is a powerful reverse engineering tool developed by the NSA that was recently put to good use changing an embedded thermometer display from Celsius to Fahrenheit. We talk turkey on the Texas power grid problems and Tesla's eMMC failures. And of course there's some room for nostalgia as we walk down memory lane with the BASIC programming language.

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams unpack great hacks of the past week. We loves seeing the TIL311 -- a retro display in a DIP package -- exquisitely recreated with SMD electronics and resin casting. You might never need to continuously measure the diameter of your 3D printer filament, but just in case there's a clever hall-effect sensor mechanism for that. Both of us admire the work being done in the FPGA realm and this week we saw a RISC-V core plumbed into quite the FPGA stack to run a version of Doom originally played on 486 computers. And we're getting excited for the three ring circus of engineering acrobatics that will land NASA's Perseverance rover on the surface of Mars next week.

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys spin the wheel of hardware hacking brilliance. We're enamored with the quest for a root shell on a Nissan Xterra infotainment system, and smitten with a scanning microscope that uses a laser beam and precision positioning from DVD drives. We speculate on the future of artificial intelligence in the culinary arts. And this week turned up a clever way to monitor utility usage while only changing the battery on your sensor once per year.

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams discuss the greatest hacks of the week that was. Antennas aren't rocket science, so this week we really enjoyed a video that demystifies antenna designs and a project that tunes up the antennas on cheap wireless modules in the simplest of ways. Google's in the news this week with the end to project Loon, and a dust-up with the volunteer package maintainers who have spent years making sure Chromium browser is in the Linux repos. Elliot is gaga for magic eye tubes and crazy musical instruments, while Mike is over the moon for a chain-based clock display. We close up the episode talking about the Concorde, and the math behind cable mechanisms.

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys sift through a week of excellent hacks. Big news is of course the Raspberry Pi microcontroller which Elliot had a few weeks to play around with on the bench before the announcement -- it has some fascinating programmable modules (PIO) built in! Philips designed an LED light bulb that under-drives the LEDs for efficiency and long life. And Amazon added a nice little hardware disable circuit for the microphone in the Echo Flex -- a rather extreme teardown shows how they did it. Plus we talk about an open source long-range RC protocol, wall-sized pen plotter art, and a 3D printer that angles the nozzle to avoid needing support.

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams discuss our favorite hacks of the past week. We accidentally chose a theme, as most of the projects use lasers and are about machining work. We lead off with a really powerful laser that can directly etch circuit boards, only to be later outdone by an even more powerful laser using a chemistry trick to etch glass. We look at how to mix up your own rocket motors, bootstrap your own laser tag, and go down the rabbit hole of building tools for embedded development. The episode wraps up as we discuss what exactly NVMe is and where hardware hacking might take it.

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys kick off the first episode of the new year with the best hacks the internet has to offer. There's a deep dive into water-level sensing using a Christmas tree as an excuse. We ooh and ah over turning a CD-ROM drive into a CD player (miraculous tech of the previous century?). Do you have any use cases for ATtiny oscillator calibration registers? We look in on a hack that makes it dead simple to measure and set their values. The episode finishes up with a discussion of the constantly moving goal posts of virtual reality.

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams celebrate the 100th episode! It's been a pleasure to marvel each week at the achievements of awesome people and this is no different. This week there's a spinning POV display that solves pixel density and clock speed in very interesting ways. A macro keyboard made of OLED screens gives us a "do want" moment. And you can run a Raspberry Pi photo frame by sipping power from ambient light if you use the right power-tending setup. We wrap up the last episode of 2020 with a dive into ballpoint pens and solar racers. Check the show notes!

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi contemplate a few of the most interesting stories that made their way through the tubes this week. We'll learn how old VHS tapes can be turned into a unique filament for your 3D printer, and realize that the best way to learn about a 2,000 year old computer is to break out the hand drill and make one yourself. Hobby grade RC gear and a some foam board stand in for SpaceX's next-generation Mars spacecraft, and a manufacturer of cheap 3D printers attempts to undercut a popular open source project with hilarious results. Finally, we'll take a close look at some hidden aluminum boogers and discuss how China's history making trek to the Moon might be a prelude to the country making a giant leap of their own. Read the show notes!

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams round up the latest hardware hacks. This week we check out the latest dead-simple automation -- a wire cutting stripping robot that uses standard bypass strippers. Put on your rocket scientist hat and watch what happens in a 3D-printed rocket combustion chamber. Really small robots are so easy to love, this micromouse is the size of a coin. And whatever happened to those drone sightings at airports? We talk about all that, and round up the episode with Hyperloop, and Xiaomi thermometers. Read the show notes!