Hackaday Podcast

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams marvel at a week packed full of great hardware hacks. Do you think the engineers who built the earliest home computers knew that their work would be dissected decades later for conference talks full of people hungry to learn the secret sauce? The only thing better than the actual engineering of the Commodore hard drive is the care with which the ult...

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys look back on a great week of hardware hacking. What a time to be alive when you can use open source tools to decode signals from a probe that has long since left our solar system! We admire two dirt-cheap builds, one to measure current draw in mains power, another to mill small parts with great precision for only a few bucks. A display built from a...

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Tom Nardi go over the best stories and hacks from the previous week, covering everything from sidestepping rockets to homebrew OLED displays. We'll cover an incredible attempt to really emulate the Nintendo Game Boy, low-cost injection molding of rubbery parts, a tube full of hypersonic shockwaves, and how a hacked depth finder and a rowboat can help chart those lo...

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys are joined by contributing editor Jenny List to talk about her adventure at Born Hack last week. We also discuss the many capacitor values that go into regen receivers, the quest for a Raspberry Pi handheld that includes a slide-out keyboard, and how capacitive touch might make mice (mouses?) and touchpads better. There's a deep dive into 3D-printer...

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams wade into a week of wonderful hacks. There's an acrylic lens that hides images in the network of caustics: the light rays that shine through it. Boston Dynamics is finally showing the good stuff; people wrenching on 'bots, and all kinds of high-end equipment failure, along with some epic successes. Can you grow better plants by inferring what they n...

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys debate the great mysteries of the hacking universe. On tap this week is news that Sam Zeloof has refined his home lab chip fabrication process and it's incredible! We see a clever seismometer built from plastic pipe, a laser, and a computer mouse. There's a 3D printed fabric that turns into a hard shell using the same principles as jamming grippers....

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams recount the past week in hardware hacking. There's a new Tamagochi hack that runs the original ROM on plain old microcontrollers like the STM32. Did you know you can blast the Bayer filter off a camera sensor using a powerful laser and the sensor will still work? We didn't. There was a lot of debate this week about a commercial jet design alteration...

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys get charged up on the best hacks the week had to offer. The 3D printer design gods were good to us, delivering an upside-down FDM printer and a hack that can automatically swap out heated beds for continuous printing. We look at a drone design that builds vertical wings into the frame of a quadcopter -- now when it tips on its side it's a fixed-wing...

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams have found a critical mass of projects this week that wouldn't be possible without 3D printers. There's an absolutely astounding model roller coaster that is true to the mechanisms and physics of the original (and beholden to hours of sanding and painting). Adding sheet material to the printing process is a novel way to build durable hinges and fold...

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys bubble sort the best hardware hacks so you don't miss 'em. This week we're smitten by the perfection of a telephone tape loop message announcer. We enjoyed seeing Blender's ray tracing to design mirrors, and a webcam and computer monitor to stand in for triple-projector-based fractal fun. There's a bit of injection molding, some Nintendo Switch disa...

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams help you get caught up on a week of wonder hacks. We don't remember seeing a floppy drive headline the demoscene, but sure enough, there's a C64 demo that performs after the computer is disconnected. What causes bench tools to have unreliable measurements? Sometimes a poor crystal choice lets AC ruin the party. We dive into the ongoing saga of the A...

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys dive into a week of exceptional hacks. Tip-top of the list has to be the precision measuring instrument that uses a cable spooling mechanism. There's news that the Starlink base station firmware has been dumped and includes interesting things like geofencing for the developer modes. We saw a garage robot that will plug in your electric vehicle if yo...

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams look through the most interesting hacks of the week. We spent ample time in adulation of the automatons built by François Junod ; wizard-level watchmaking wrapped in endless levels of artistic detail. A couple projects stuffed into old cellphones turned Elliot's head. We got to see what happens if you spin a gear's teeth on two axes to make a univer...

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys marvel at the dangerous projects on display this week, including glass etching with hydrofluoric acid and pumping 200,000 A into a 5,000 A fuse. A new board that turns the Raspberry Pi into an SDR shows off the power of the secondary memory interface (SMI) present in those Broadcom chips. We also discuss the potential for graphene in hard drives, an...

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 p...

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 y...

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...

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 co...

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...

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 Waco...

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)....

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-t...

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 co...

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 -- some...

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 sta...