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 strang...
Nov 13, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Season 2Ep. 93
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 ha...
Nov 06, 2020•52 min•Season 2Ep. 92
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'...
Oct 30, 2020•57 min•Season 2Ep. 91
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 wr...
Oct 23, 2020•1 hr 8 min
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 ...
Oct 16, 2020•45 min
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...
Oct 09, 2020•49 min
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 p...
Oct 02, 2020•54 min
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams take Mike Szczys peruse the world of hacks. There was so much news this week that we lead off the show with a rundown to catch you up. Yet there is still no shortage of hardware hacks, with prosthetic legs for your rubber ducky, a RC cart that channels the spirit of Formula 1, and a project that brings 80's video conferencing hardware to Zoom. There's phosphine gas on Venus and unlimited hacking projects inside your guitar. The week wouldn't be complete without t...
Sep 25, 2020•54 min
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams take a look at all the hacks from the week that was. We think we've found the perfect tentacle robot, and the controller for it is fittingly also a tentacle. An unrelated project uses the same bowden cable trick as the tentacle controller to measure deflection. If you're more of a material-science geek, refining black sand to make your own inductors is a fascinating hack. And we wrap up the episode talking SSH keys and buses that go off road, but ...
Sep 18, 2020•51 min
With Editor in Chief Mike Szczys off this week, Managing Editor Elliot Williams is joined by Staff Writer Dan Maloney to look over the hacks from the last week. If you've ever wondered how the Beatles sound on a floppy disk, wonder no more. Do you fear the coming robopocalypse? This noisy wall-climbing robot will put those fears to rest. We'll take a look at an undersea lab worthy of the Cousteau name, and finally we'll look inside a digital pregnancy test and wonder at its unusual power switch....
Sep 11, 2020•52 min
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams ogle the greatest hacks from the past 168 hours. Did you know that Mars Rover didn't get launched into space all alone? Nestled in it's underbelly is a two-prop helicopter that's a fascinating study in engineering for a different world. Fingerprinting audio files isn't a special trick reserved for Shazam, you can do it just as easily with an ESP32. A flaw in the way Bluetooth COVID tracing frameworks chirp out their anonymized hashes means they're...
Sep 03, 2020•57 min
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys check in on the best hacks from the past week. All the buzz is the algorithm that can reverse engineer your house keys from the way they sound going into the lock. Cardboard construction goes extreme with an RC car build that's beyond wizard-level. Speaking of junk builds, there's a CNC mill tipped on its side grinding out results worlds better than you expect from salvaged CD-ROM drives. And a starburst character display is a clever combination o...
Aug 28, 2020•58 min
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Tom Nardi chew the beef tallow as they take a tour through some of the best and most interesting articles from the past week, from kicking off another round of the popular Circuit Sculpture contest to building artisan coffee makers. We'll look at the engineering behind the post-apocalyptic face mask launcher of our nightmares, and stand in awe at the intersection of orbiting spacecraft and lawn emojis. Several tiny remote controlled vehicles will be discussed, an...
Aug 20, 2020•54 min
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys flip through the index of great hacks. This week we learn of a co-existence attack on WiFi and Bluetooth radios called Spectra. The craftsmanship in a pneumatic drone is so awesome we don't care that it doesn't fly. Building a powerful TEA laser is partly a lesson in capacitor design. And join us in geeking out at the prospect of big rigs getting their juice from miles of overhead wires. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=426831
Aug 14, 2020•52 min
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams gaze upon the most eye-popping projects from the past week. Who would have known that springy doorstops could be so artistic? Speaking of, what happens if you give everyone on the network the chance to collectively paint using pixels? There as better way to catch a rat, and a dubious way to lure mosquitoes. We scratch our heads at sending code to the arctic, and Elliot takes a deep look at the contact tracing apps developed and in use throughout E...
Aug 07, 2020•56 min
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys go down the rabbit hole of hacky hacks. A talented group of radio amateurs have been recording and decoding the messages from Tianwen-1, the Mars probe launched by the Chinese National Space Administration on July 23rd. We don't know exactly how magnets work, but know they do a great job of protecting your plasma cutter. You can't beat the retro-chic look of a Commodore 64's menu system, even if it's tasked with something mundane like running a me...
Jul 31, 2020•58 min
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams are deep in the hacks this week. What if making your own display matrix meant a microcontroller board for every pixel? That's the gist of this incredible neon display. There's a lot of dark art poured into the slivers of microSD cards and this week saw multiple hacks digging into the hidden test pads of these devices. You've heard of Folding@Home, but what about Minecraft@Home, the effort to find world seeds from screenshots. And when USB chargers...
Jul 23, 2020•54 min
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys are enamored by this week's fabrication hacks. There's a PCB mill that isolates traces by scratching rather than cutting. You won't believe how awesome this angle-cutter jig is at creating tapered augers for injection molding/extruding plastic. And you may not need an interactive way to cut foam, but the art from the cut pieces is more than a mere shadow of excellence. Plus we gab about a clever rotary encoder circuit, which IDE is the least frust...
Jul 17, 2020•55 min
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams scoop up a basket of great hacks from the past week. Be amazed by the use of traditional Japanese joinery in a 3D-printed design -- you're going to want to print one of these Shoji lamps. We behold the beautiful sound of a noise generator, and the freaky sound from the Golden Gate. There's a hack for Android app development using Javascript on an IDE hosted from the phone as a webpage on your LAN. And you'll like the KiCAD trick that makes enclosu...
Jul 10, 2020•46 min
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys recap a week of hacks. A telescope mirror that can change shape, and a helicopter without a swashplate lead the charge for fascinating engineering. These are closely followed by a vibratory wind generator that has no blades to spin. The Open Source Hardware Association announced a new spec this week to remove "Master" and "Slave" terminology from SPI pin names. The Segway is no more. And a bit of bravery and rock solid soldering skills can resurre...
Jul 03, 2020•52 min
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams review a great week in the hacking world. There's an incredible 4k projector build that started from a broken cellphone, a hand-cranked player (MIDI) piano, and a woeful story of clipboard vulnerabilities found in numerous browsers and browser-based apps. Plus you'll love the field-ready solder splice that works like a strike-on box match (reminiscent of using thermite to weld railroad rail) and we spend some time marveling at the problem of findi...
Jun 26, 2020•50 min
With Editor-in-Chief Mike Szczys on a well-earned vacation, Staff Writer Dan Maloney sits in with Managing Editor Elliot Williams to run us through the week's most amazing hacks and answer your burning questions. What do you do when you can't hit a golf ball to save your life? Build a better club, of course, preferably one that does the thinking for you. Why would you overclock a graphing calculator? Why wouldn't you! Will an origami boat actually float? If you use the right material, it just mi...
Jun 19, 2020•56 min
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams fan through a fantastic week of hacking. Most laser cutters try to go bigger, but there's a minuscule one that shows off a raft of exotic components you'll want in your bag of tricks. Speaking of tricks, this CNC scroll saw has kinematics the likes of which we've never seen before -- worth a look just for the dance of polar v. Cartesian elements. We've been abusing printf() for decades, but it's possible to run arbitrary operations just by calling...
Jun 11, 2020•53 min
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys bubble sort a sample set of amazing hacks from the past week. Who has every used the smart chip from an old credit card in as a functional component in their own circuit? This guy. There's something scientifically devious about the way solder smoke heat-seeks to your nostrils. There's more than one way to strip 16-bit audio down to five. And those nuclear tests from the 40s, 50s, and 60s? Those are still affecting how science takes measurements of...
Jun 05, 2020•56 min
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams march to the beat of the hardware hacking drum as they recount the greatest hacks to hit the 'net this week. First up: Casio stepped in it with a spurious DMCA takedown notice. There's a finite matrix of resistors that form a glorious clock now on display at CERN. Will a patio paver solve your 3D printer noise problems? And if you ever build with copper clad, you can't miss this speedrun of priceless prototyping protips. Show notes: https://hackad...
May 29, 2020•53 min
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys ride the rails of hackerdom, exploring the sweetest hacks of the past week. There's a dead simple component feeder for a pick and place (or any bench that hand-stuffs SMD), batteries for any accomplished mixologist, and a droid build that's every bit as cool as its Star Wars origins. Plus we gab about obsolescence in the auto industry, fawn over a frugal microcontroller, and ogle some old iron. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=413924
May 22, 2020•59 min
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams explore the coolest hacks of the past 168 hours. The big news this week: will Wink customers pony up $5 a month to turn their lights on and off? There's a new open source design for a pick and place machine. You may not have a Vectrex gaming console, but there's a scratch-built board that can turn you oscilloscope into one. And you just can't miss this LED sign technology that programs every pixel using projection mapping. Show notes: https://hack...
May 15, 2020•1 hr
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys stomp through a forest full of highly evolved hardware hacks. This week seems particularly plump with audio-related projects, like the thwack-tackular soldenoid typewriter simulator. But it's the tape-loop scratcher that steals our hearts; an instrument that's kind of two-turntables-and-a-microphone meets melloman. We hear the clicks of 10-bit numbers falling into place in a delightful adder, and follow it up with the beeps and sweeps of a smartph...
May 08, 2020•52 min
Ep065: Game Boy Hacks Galore, Cable Robo Elbow, Pi Cam Solargraphy, and the Deepest Sub is Crushing It Check out the show's writeup so that you don't have to take notes on your own: https://hackaday.com/?p=410890
Apr 30, 2020•1 hr 4 min
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys pan for gold in a week packed with technological treasure. The big news is Apple/Google are working on contact tracing using BTLE. From adoption, to privacy, to efficacy, there's a lot to unpack here and many of the details have yet to take shape. Of course the episode also overflows with great hacks like broken-inductor bike chain sensors, parabolic basketball backboards, bizarre hose clamp tools, iron-on eTextile trials, and hot AM radio towers....
Apr 24, 2020•1 hr 5 min
