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

Dec 4, 2020 • 45min
Ep096: Diaphragm Engine, DIY Dish Washer, Forgotten Soviet Computers, and a Starlink Teardown
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys discuss the latest and greatest in geeky goodness. This week we saw a Soviet time capsule come to light with the discovery of a computer lab from a building abandoned in the 1990's. A two-cycle compressed air engine shatters our expectations of what is involved in RC aircraft design. There's a new toolkit for wireless hacking on the scene in the form of a revitalized HackRF PortaPack firmware fork. And what goes into dishwasher design? Find out in this exciting episode. Read the show notes!

Nov 27, 2020 • 15min
Ep095: Booting FreeDOS from a Vinyl Record, Floating on Mushrooms, and Tunneling Through a Living Room
In this short Thanksgiving episode, Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams are talking turkey about the world of hardware hacking. We've still got news updates about the Nintendo Game and Watch hacking progress, the sad farewell to Areceibo, the new chip from Espressif, and the awesome circuit sculptures from our recent contest. We wrap up the show with a lightning round of quick hacks.

Nov 20, 2020 • 58min
Ep094: Fake Sun, Hacked Super Mario, Minimum Viable Smart Glasses, and 3D Printers Can't Do That
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys traverse the hackerscape looking for the best the internet had to offer last week. Nintendo has released the new Game & Watch handheld and it's already been hacked to run custom code. Heading into the darkness of winter, this artificial sun build is one not to miss... and a great way to reuse a junk satellite dish. We've found a pair of smartglasses that are just our level of dumb. And Tom Nardi cracks open some consumer electronics to find a familiar single-board computer doing "network security". https://hackaday.com/2020/11/20/hackaday-podcast…ers-cant-do-that/

Nov 13, 2020 • 1h 5min
Ep093: Hot and Fast Raspberry Pi, Dr. Seuss Drone, M&M Mass Meter, and FPGA Tape Backup
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams wrangle the epic hacks that crossed our screens this week. Elliot ran deep on overclocking all three flavors of the Raspberry Pi 4 this week and discovered that heat sinks rule the day. Mike exposes his deep love of candy-coated chocolates while drooling over a machine that can detect when the legume is missing from a peanut M&M. Core memory is so much more fun when LEDs come to play, one tiny wheel is the power-saving secret for a very strange multirotor drone, and there's more value in audio cassette data transfer than you might think -- let this FPGA show you how it's done.

Nov 6, 2020 • 52min
Ep092: Orbital Data by Mail, Human Flight on Styrofoam Wings, and Seven Shades of E-Ink
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys catch the best hacks you may have missed. This week we look at the new Raspberry Pi 400, use computer vision to get ready for geeky Christmas, and decypher a negative-space calendar. We get an answer to the question of what happens if you scale up a styrofoam airplane to human-size. Facebook is locking down VR headset, will hackers break them free? And take an excellent stroll down memory lane to find out what it was like to be a space-obsessed ham at the dawn of personal computers. https://hackaday.com/2020/11/06/hackaday-podcast…-shades-of-e-ink/

Oct 30, 2020 • 57min
Ep091: Louisville Exploder, Generating Japanese Joinery, Relay Retrocomputer Rally, and Chop the Robopup
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams dig through the greatest hacks that ought not be missed this week. There's a wild one that flexes engineering skills instead of muscles to beat the homerun distance record with an explosively charged bat. A more elegant use of those engineering chops is shown in a CNC software tool that produces intricate wood joinery without needing an overly fancy machine to fabricate it. If your flesh and blood pets aren't keeping up with your interests, there's a new robot dog on the scene that far outperforms its constituent parts which are 3D-printed and of the Pi and Arduino varieties. And just when you thought you'd seen all the craziest retrocomputers, here's an electromechanical relay based machine that took six years to build (although there's so much going on here that it should have taken sixteen). Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=444464

Oct 23, 2020 • 1h 8min
Ep090: DIY Linux SBC, HDMI CEC, Fake Bluepills, and SCARA Arms
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys chat about our favorite hacks from the past week. We start off with a bit of news of the Bennu asteroid and the new Raspberry Pi Compute Module. We drive ourselves crazy trying to understand how bobbin holders on sewing machines work, all while drooling over the mechanical brilliance of a bobbin-winding build. SCARA is the belt and pully champion of robot arms and this week's example cleverly uses redundant bearings for better precision. And we wrap up the show looking in on longform articles about the peppering of microcontrollers found on the Bluepill and wondering what breakthroughs are left to be found for internal combustion. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=443437

Oct 16, 2020 • 45min
Ep089: 770 Potato Battery, Printing Resin Resist, and No-Internet Video Chat
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams weigh the hacking gold found across the internet this week. We can't get over the epic adventure that went into making a battery from 100 pounds of potatoes. It turns out you don't need Internet for video conferencing as long as you're within a coupe of kilometers of everyone else. And move over toner transer method, resin printers want a shot at at-home PCB etching. We'll take a look at what the Tesla selfie cam is doing under the hood, and lose our marbles over a ball-bearing segment clock that's defying gravity. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=442391

Oct 9, 2020 • 49min
Ep088: Flywheel Trebuchet, Thieving Magpies, Hero Engines, and Hypermiling
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys riff on the hardware hacks that took the Internet by storm this week. Machining siege weapons out of aluminum? If they can throw a tennis ball at 180 mph, yes please! Welding aficionados will love to see the Hero Engine come together. We dive into the high-efficiency game of hypermiling, and spin up the polarizing topic of the Sun Cycle. The episode wouldn't be complete without hearing what the game of Go sounds like as a loop sequencer, and how a variable speed cassette player can be abused for the benefit of MIDI lovers the world over. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=435715

Oct 2, 2020 • 54min
Ep087: Sound-Shattering Gliders Pressing Dashcam Buttons, and Ratcheting Up Time
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams dish up a hot slice of the week's hardware hacks. We feature a lot of clocks on Hackaday, but few can compare to the mechanical engineering elegance of the band-saw-blade-based ratcheting clock we swoon over on this week's show. We've found a superb use of a six-pin microcontroller, peek in on tire (or is that tyre) wear particles, and hear the sounds of 500 mph RC gliders. Turns out 3D printers are the primordial ooze for both pumping water and positioning cameras. This episode comes to a close by getting stressed out over concrete. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=434942


