Hackaday Editor in Chief Mike Szczys is taking a bit of vacation this week, so Managing Editor Elliot Williams is joined by Staff Writer Dan Maloney to talk about all the cool hacks and great articles that turned up this week. Things were busy, so there was plenty to choose from, but how would we not pick one that centers around strapping a jet engine to your back to rollerskate without all that pesky exercise? And what about a light bulb that plays Doom - with a little help, of course. We'll ch...
Jun 18, 2021•50 min•Season 3Ep. 123
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys marvel at the awesome hacks from the past week. We had way too much fun debated whether a wind-powered car can travel faster than the wind, and whether or not you can call that sailing. Low-temperature desoldering was demystified (it's the bismuth!) while a camera gimbal solves the problem of hand tremor during soldering. Ford just wants to become your PowerWall. And the results are in from NASA's mission to spin mice up in a centrifuge on the ISS...
Jun 11, 2021•53 min•Season 3Ep. 122
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams discuss a great week of hardware hacks. Two delightful mechanical hacks focus on bicycles: one that puts a differential on the front fork, and the other a flywheel between the knees. Elliot was finally impressed by something involving AI -- a machine-learning guitar pedal. You've heard of a delta bot? The tripteron is similar but with a single rail for the three arms. After a look at flip dots, tiny robots, and solar air planes we close the show g...
Jun 04, 2021•49 min•Season 3Ep. 121
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys recount a week of awesome hacks. One you might have missed involves a Roku-based smart TV that was rooted and all secrets laid bare for the sole purpose of making an Ambilight setup work with it. We take a look at a creative blade-tracking system for a scrollsaw CNC project, and a robot arm that brings non-flat layers to 3D printing and envisions composite material printing. There's a great template for video glitching using inexpensive VGA to CGA...
May 28, 2021•50 min•Season 3Ep. 120
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams pick up on the neatest hacks you may have missed. We start off with another "What's that Sound?" so put your geeky-ears to the test and win a Hackaday Podcast T-shirt. Here are a couple of classic hacks to bring you joy: music based on Markov chains, and a squiggly take on the classic Nokia game of snake. For the more hardcore science geeks we dive into the B Meson news coming out of CERN's physics experiments. And after taking a detour in bristle...
May 21, 2021•51 min•Season 3Ep. 119
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys gather to ooh and aah over a week of interesting hacks. This week we're delighted to welcome special guest Kristina Panos to talk about the Inputs of Interest series she has been working on over the last couple of years. In the news is the effort to pwn the new Apple AirTags, with much success over the past week. We look at turning a screenless Wacom tablet into something more using a donor iPad, stare right into the heart of a dozen 555 die shots...
May 14, 2021•58 min•Season 3Ep. 118
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams discuss the latest hacks from around the Internet. 3D-Printed linear rails don't sound like a recipe for a functional CNC machine but there was one this week that really surprised us. We were delighted by the procedurally generated music from a $0.03 microcontroller inside of an RCA plug (the clever flexible PCB may be the coolest part of that one). There's an interesting trick to reverse engineering Bluetooth comms of Android apps by running in a...
May 07, 2021•46 min•Season 3Ep. 117
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys select our favorite hardware hacks of the past week. This episode is packed with DIY lab instruments, including a laser microscope, a Raspberry Pi spectrometer, and a stepper motor tester that can tell you what's going on all the way down to the microsteps. We wax poetic about what modular hardware really means, fall in love with a couple of stock-ticker robots, and chat with special guest Tom Nardi about his experience at the VCF Swap Meet. Check...
Apr 30, 2021•49 min•Season 3Ep. 116
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams pull back the curtain on a week of excellent hacks. We saw an awesome use of RGB LEDs as a data channel on a drone, and the secrets of an IP camera's OS laid bare with some neat reverse engineering tools. There's an AI project for the Linux terminal that guesses at the commands you actually want to run. And after considering how far autopilot has come in the aerospace industry, we jump into a look at the gotchas you'll find when working with model...
Apr 23, 2021•45 min•Season 3Ep. 115
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys marvel at the hacks that surfaced over the past week. An eye-popping webcam hack comes in the form of an animatronic that gives that camera above your screen an eyeball to look around, an eyelid to blink with, and the skin, eyelashes, and eyebrow to complete the illusion (and make us shudder at the same time). Dan did a deep dive on Zinc Flu -- something to avoid when welding parts that contain zinc, like galvanized metals. A robot arm was given a...
Apr 16, 2021•44 min•Season 3Ep. 114
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams recap a week of great hacks. You won't want to miss the dynamometer Leo Fernekes built to measure the power output of his sterling motor (also DIY). In this age of lithium-powered multirotors, it's nice to step back and appreciate a hand-built rubberband-powered ornithopter. We have a surprising amount to say about Python's addition of the match statement (not be be confused with switch statements). And when it comes to electromechanical synth gea...
Apr 09, 2021•52 min•Season 3Ep. 113
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys celebrate the cleverest projects from the week that was. We tried to catch a few fools on Thursday with our Lightmode™ and NFT articles -- make sure you go back and read those for a good chuckle if you haven't already. While those fall under not a hack , many other features this week are world-class hacks, such as the 555 timer built from 1.5-dozen vacuum tubes, and the mechanical word-clock that's 64 magnetic actuators built around PCB coils by H...
Apr 02, 2021•52 min•Season 3Ep. 112
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams curate a week of great hacks. Physical displays created in 3D space are a holy grail, and you can make one with 200 ultrasonic transducers, four FPGAs, and a lot math. Smart speakers have one heck of a microphone array in them, it's yours for the hacking if you just roll your own firmware. Hobby servos can be awful, but this week we saw they can be made really great by cracking open the DC motor to add a simple DIY position sensor. And lasers are ...
Mar 26, 2021•49 min•Season 3Ep. 111
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys cover a great week of hardware hacking. We saw a fault-injection attack that used an electric flyswatter and hand-wound coil to twiddle bits inside of an AVR micro. Focus-stacking is what you want when using a microscope to image circuit boards and there's a hack for the Eakins cameras that makes it automatic. In our "can't miss articles" we riff on how to cool off cities in a warming climate, and then gaze with quiet admiration at what the Unicod...
Mar 19, 2021•51 min•Season 3Ep. 110
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams riff on the week's most interesting hacks. It's hard to imagine a more perfect piece of art than an original Pong circuit board mounted in a shadow box and playable along with some tasty FPGA tricks to capture the original look of the screen. You could make a synth with a 555 timer, but what about using 20 of them for perfect polyphony? We ogle an old video showing off a clever toothed-disc CNC machine for cutting pastry with a water jet. And the ...
Mar 12, 2021•47 min•Season 3Ep. 109
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys travel through the greatest hacks the week had on offer. Charge up your ice skates (literally) by adding spiked electric motors to push you across the frozen pond. If that's too cold for early March, snuggle up with a good book under the warm light of a clever lamp made from a rotary-dial telephone. We discuss CAD and CAM in your browser, and a software tool to merge images with PCB gerber files. The episode wraps up with a discussion the balance ...
Mar 05, 2021•45 min•Season 3Ep. 108
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams gab about all of the geeky things. We had a delightful time watching NASA bring Perseverance down to the Red planet. In Kristina's words, we pour one out for Fry's Electronics. And then we jump into a parade of excellent hacks with a magnetic bearing for crooked ball screws, a science-based poop-burning experiment, and the music hack only microcontroller enthusiasts could love as an FTDI cable is plugged directly into a speaker. Smart circuit desi...
Feb 26, 2021•54 min•Season 3Ep. 107
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 roo...
Feb 19, 2021•56 min•Season 3Ep. 106
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 t...
Feb 12, 2021•51 min•Season 3Ep. 105
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.
Feb 05, 2021•56 min•Season 3Ep. 104
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 ...
Jan 29, 2021•49 min•Season 3Ep. 103
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 te...
Jan 22, 2021•53 min•Season 3Ep. 102
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 embedd...
Jan 15, 2021•42 min•Season 3Ep. 101
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 w...
Jan 08, 2021•59 min
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 ...
Dec 24, 2020•57 min•Season 2Ep. 99
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 atte...
Dec 18, 2020•58 min•Season 2Ep. 98
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...
Dec 11, 2020•52 min•Season 2Ep. 97
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...
Dec 04, 2020•45 min•Season 2Ep. 96
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 27, 2020•15 min
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 ...
Nov 20, 2020•58 min•Season 2Ep. 94
