Ep 180: Tiny CRTs, Springy PCBs, and Measuring Trees

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 out the show notes!

30 Huhti 202148min

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 models of 3D scanned objects.

23 Huhti 202145min

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 chainsaw, leading to many hijinks; among them the headache of path planning such a machine. And we got to hear a really awesome story about resurrecting a computer game lost to obscurity, by using one of the main tools of the copyright office. For links and more, go read the show notes!

16 Huhti 202144min

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 gear, it's hard to beat a spinning tape-head sequencer. Check out the show notes for links and more!

9 Huhti 202152min

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 Hackaday's own [Mortiz v. Sivers]. A treat for the ears, [Linus Akesson] aka [lft] shows off a Commodore64 that seriously sounds a good as a cathedral organ. And a masterpiece of OpenCV and Blender, you can't miss the project by [Matthew Earl] that overlays video of the Mars landing on still satellite photos... perfection! Check out the show notes!

2 Huhti 202152min

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 making their way into car headlights; we illuminate the situation in this episode. Check out the show notes!

26 Maalis 202149min

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 Unicode standard has accomplished. But when it comes to head-spinning hacks, you can't beat the reverse-engineering efforts being shown off with the rack-mount box that made the Weather Channel awesome back in the 80's and 90's.

19 Maalis 202151min

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 episode wouldn't be complete without looking at the strange tech that goes into making a fan car.

12 Maalis 202146min