Celebrating A Decade Of Bootleg Hackaday Merch

January 12, 2023 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

A listener of the podcast recently wrote in to tell us that, in the process of trying to purchase a legitimate Hackaday t-shirt, they discovered this 2012 Instructable from [yeltrow] that covers how you can cheaply crank out your own Wrencher shirts via screen printing.

Now historically, as long as you’re not trying to make a buck off of our name, we’ve never felt the need to stop folks from putting our logo on their projects. So we’re not too concerned that somebody was making Wrencher shirts, especially since they were almost certainly for their own personal use. Though the fact that [yeltrow] apparently described the project as a “Hackster-Style shirt” to try and avoid using our name ended up being a prophetic 4D chess meta-joke that you couldn’t make up if you tried. Continue reading “Celebrating A Decade Of Bootleg Hackaday Merch” →

Java Is Now On The Nintendo 64!

January 12, 2023 by Lewin Day 29 Comments

Whether it’s your favorite programming language, or your favorite beverage, there’s no denying Java is everywhere. Now, it’s even on the Nintendo 64, thanks to the valiant efforts of [Mike Kohn]. Even better, he’s coded a demo to show off its capabilities!

The project took plenty of work. [Mike] went all the way down to the assembly level to get Java code running on the N64. The project builds on the work that he did previously to get Java running on the PlayStation 2. Notably, both the Sony and Nintendo consoles do have some similarities — both are based on MIPS CPUs.

The demo itself is a work of art. It features the typical “3 billion devices run Java” screen, followed by some truly chunky bass and wailing guitar sounds. It’s followed by all the dancing shapes, sinusoidal text, and bright colors you could shake a stick at.

For those interested in the nitty gritty, [Mike] delves deep into the details of what it took to get everything running. That includes both using the code in an emulator, as well as how to get it going on real Nintendo hardware, something we’ve looked at before.

Continue reading “Java Is Now On The Nintendo 64!” →

3D Printering: Can You Ever Have Enough Vitamins?

January 12, 2023 by Jenny List 66 Comments

As a community we owe perhaps more than we realise to the RepRap project. From it we get not only a set of open-source printer designs, but that 3D printing at our level has never become dominated by proprietary manufacturers in the way that for example paper printing is. The idea of a printer that can reproduce itself has never quite been fully realised though, because of what the RepRap community refer to as “vitamins“.

These are the mass-produced parts such as nuts, bolts, screws, and other parts which a RepRap printer can’t (yet) create for itself. It’s become a convenience among some of my friends to use this term in general for small pieces of hardware, which leads me to last week. I had a freshly printed prototype of one of my projects, and my hackerspace lacked the tiny self-tapping screws necessary for me to assemble it. Where oh where, was my plaintive cry, are the vitamins!

So my hackerspace is long on woodscrews for some reason, and short on machine screws and self-tappers. And threaded inserts for that matter, but for some reason it’s got a kit of springs. I’m going to have to make an AliExpress order to fix this, so the maybe I need you lot to help me. Just what vitamins does a a lone hardware hacker or a hackerspace need? Continue reading “3D Printering: Can You Ever Have Enough Vitamins?” →

DIY Game Boy Games Make The Perfect Christmas Gift

January 12, 2023 by Lewin Day 3 Comments

Sometimes, the best gift is the one you make yourself. [Pigeonaut] decided to whip up a few Game Boy games of their very own creation to gift to the special people in their life.

The games were crafted using a platform called GB Studio. It’s a tool that allows the drag-and-drop creation of games for the Game Boy and Game Boy Color handhelds. It’s capable of creating ROM files to run in an emulator, within a web page, or they can be flashed to a cartridge and played on real Nintendo hardware.

For the full effect, [Pigeonaut] went with the latter method. Four games were created: Phantom Shock, Climbing Mount Crymore, Cozy Cat Cafe, and A Tiny Hike. Each was flashed onto a real cart and given a high-quality label to make a lovely tangible gift. Upon gifting, [Pigeonaut]’s friends and partner were able to play their way through their personalized titles on a GameCube running the Game Boy Player accessory.

It’s hard to imagine a more touching gift than a personal game crafted from the ground up. Getting to play it on a real Nintendo is even better, and we’ve seen hardware that can achieve that before. Try out the games in your web browser via the links above, or send us in your own cool homebrew hacks to the Tipsline!

AI-Controlled Twitch V-Tuber Has More Followers Than You

January 12, 2023 by Kristina Panos 45 Comments

Surely we have all at least heard of Twitch by now. For the as-yet uninitiated: imagine you had your own TV channel. What would you do on it? Although Twitch really got going as a place for gamers to stream the action, there are almost as many people jamming out on their guitars, or building guitars, or just talking about guitars. And that’s just the example that uses guitars — if you can think of it, someone is probably doing it live on Twitch, within the Terms of Service, of course.

Along with the legions of people showing their faces and singing their hearts out, you have people in partial disguise, and then you have v-tubers. That stands for virtual tubers, and it just means that the person is using an anime avatar to convey themselves.

Now that you’re all caught up, let’s digest the following item together: there’s a v-tuber on Twitch that’s controlled entirely by AI. Let me run that by you again: there’s a person called [Vedal] who operates a Twitch channel. Rather than stream themselves building Mad Max-style vehicles and fighting them in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, or singing Joni Mitchell tunes, [Vedal] pulls the strings of an AI they created, which is represented by an animated character cleverly named Neuro-sama. Not only does Neuro-sama know how to play Minecraft and osu!, she speaks gamer and interacts regularly with chat in snarky, 21st century fashion. And that really is the key behind Twitch success — interacting with chat in a meaningful way.

Continue reading “AI-Controlled Twitch V-Tuber Has More Followers Than You” →

plantpot made from recycled audio tape filament in a 3D printer. Pot contains a succulent plant and is surrounded by tape

3D Printer Filament From Reel-to-Reel Audio Tapes

January 12, 2023 by Dave Walker 18 Comments

At heart, 3D printers are just machines that can melt plastic “wire” into interesting shapes. It’s well-known and oft-lamented that plastic of various sorts has been used to make all manner of household objects that might eventually end up in landfill or otherwise littering the environment. With these facts in mind and a surplus of tape, [brtv-z] decided to see if he could recycle some old reel-to-reel audio tapes into working filament for a 3D printer.

The homebrew rig to convert old audio tape into the unconventional filament

This isn’t the first time he has tried to print with unusual second-hand polymers, back in 2020 he pulled of a similar trick using VHS tape. Through experimentation, it was soon determined that seven strands of quarter-inch tape could be twisted together and fused to form a very tough-looking filament approximately 1.7 mm in diameter, which could then be fed into the unsuspecting printer.

The resulting prints are certainly different in a number of respects from using virgin filament. The material is porous, brittle and (unsurprisingly) rather rusty-looking, but it does have some interesting properties. It retains its magnetism and it catches the light in an unusual way. The video is after the break (in Russian, but YouTube does a reasonable job of generating English captions).

Don’t have any tape handy? No worries, we’ve also covered machines that can recycle plastic waste into filament before. In fact, two of them even won the 2022 Hackaday Prize. What else could you melt down that might otherwise be thrown away?

Continue reading “3D Printer Filament From Reel-to-Reel Audio Tapes” →

Organic Fibonacci Clock Is All About The Spiral

January 12, 2023 by Lewin Day 5 Comments

Whether you’re a fan of compelling Tool songs, or merely appreciate mathematical beauty, you might be into the spirals defined by the Fibonacci sequence. [RuddK5] used the Fibonacci curve as the inspiration for this fun clock build.

The intention of the clock is not to display the exact time, but to give a more organic feel of time, via a rough representation of minutes and hours. A strip of addressable LEDs is charged with display duty. The description is vague, but it appears that the 24 LEDs light up over time to show the amount of the day that has already passed by. The LEDs are wound up in the shape of a Fibonacci spiral with the help of a 3D printed case, and is run via a Wemos D1 microcontroller board.

It’s a fun build, and one that we can imagine would scale beautifully into a larger wall-hanging clock design if so desired. It at once could display the time, without making it immediately obvious, gradually shifting the lighting display as the day goes on.

We’ve seen other clocks rely on the mathematics of Fibonacci before, too. If you’ve cooked up your own fun clock build, don’t hesitate to let us know!