Lead A Discord Exodus With A Matrix Server

October 8, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 36 Comments

The Internet, and large groups of people in general, tend to have a remarkably short collective memory. Whether it’s the nature of algorithms or the people themselves to always be chasing the next novelty, maintaining long-term engagement for even relatively small changes can be challenging. Distractions abound, and motivation tends to fade over time. This past spring, Discord’s unpopular decision to force age verification resulted in a brief flash-in-the-pan of outrage that dissipated when they promised to delay its roll-out. Rather than backtrack on unpopular policies, they’ve been slowly boiling the frog with incremental changes towards this same goal in the meantime. One of the options to deal with this is to migrate over to something like a Matrix server, which has a number of benefits over Discord including being open-source and self-hostable.

Unlike Discord, a closed platform subject to the whims of a private company, Matrix is a communications protocol and open standard. Its major server and client implementations are open source, so anyone can build tools around it and integrate it with other systems that also use this protocol. This protocol-vs-platform comparison mirrors email, which is another protocol that isn’t locked down by any one company, and which can easily be used to send messages across various providers. The most commonly used server-side software for Matrix is called Synapse and the most prominent general-purpose clients are the various implementations of Element, and my exploration uses these defaults.

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ESP32 As Your Raspberry Pi’s Linux Wireless Co-processor

October 7, 2026 by Arya Voronova 12 Comments

A laptop with no wireless connectivity feels like a rarity – but when you shop for powerful Linux single-board computers (SBCs), it is pretty common to see one skimp on WiFi. At the same time, current wireless cards can leave much to be desired. A mess of proprietary firmware, ephemeral or even binary blob drivers, weird glitches never resolved, and sometimes entirely source-less blobs with an expiration date. Maybe the SBC doesn’t have a free USB port for a plug-and-play WiFi chip, or you don’t want to design for an obscure hard-to-source castellated module.

What if I told you there’s a unique solution to the problem, as long as the SBC has an SDIO or SPI to spare? There’s a wireless card we can all try to get behind, and it’s certainly not flawless but gives us way more room to grow – it’s got somewhat open-source firmware, it comes from a respectable company, and it’s nigh-guaranteed to be easy to source. I am, of course, talking about esp-hosted – using ESP32 modules as your WiFi/BT card, over SDIO or SPI.

I’ve recently added an ESP32-C6 into my project, and setting up esp-hosted wasn’t ultra straightforward – so here’s a guide, and a discussion on what makes esp-hosted so cool and so incredibly promising. Spoilers: it works with privacy switches that cut out power, it could be hacked into a coprocessor for mesh protocols, and it could potentially help us build a fully open-source SDIO WiFi card.

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A Headset Fit For A Hackaday Writer

October 6, 2026 by Jenny List 20 Comments

I started writing this from a commuter train passing at speed through the outskirts of London, and my headset had just broken. The flexible joint that attaches one earpiece to the headband has snapped, leaving the earpiece dangling on its cable. This is annoying on its own, but what is annoying me enough to write about it is that this isn’t the first time. This is only the latest in a succession of headsets I’ve taken on the road with me has broken, not because of rough treatment, but simply due to flimsy or bad design. What on earth can I do about this?

Failure Built-In

The earpiece of an EPOS headset, detached from its band. — Failure inevitable: the whole headset relied on a tiny piece of plastic in the centre.

The most recent three have been a JVC whose rotating joint allowing the earpiece to lie at a slight angle with my ear has failed, a quite expensive Logitech whose ear sponges failed closely followed by its USB cable, and now an EPOS whose ball joint has failed.

I repaired the JVC and got a bit more life out of it and I’ll have a go at repairing this EPOS, but that’s hardly the point. I’m paying not inconsequential money and I’m getting good sound quality and electronics, but I’m not getting anywhere near the mechanical quality I need. I could buy a set of tough DJ headphones such as the Sennheiser HD25, but they don’t come with a microphone, they’re not a headset.

So if I can’t buy a decent headset without spending military grade money on one from an F16 fighter, what can I do to make my own? I’m an engineer, damnit!

At its most basic, a headset is a springy band that goes over the head, with an earpiece at its end. But a human head is not a cube with vertical parallel sides, it’s a complex shape and every one is different. So those earpieces have to have some “give” in them in order to fit comfortably against the ear. In the simplest case this is achieved by giving the earpiece a soft surround that moulds itself to the ear, but most headsets incorporate some articulation. The earpiece must rotate a little around a vertical line parallel with the ear, and also with a horizontal line at right angles to the axis of the ear. The EPOS managed both axes by means of a ball joint, while the JVC had a stirrup with pins to achieve the horizontal motion, and a circular joint — the part which broke — for the vertical. In both case the weak point was a thin part of the plastic moulding which broke, on the EPOS a short stalk for the ball in the ball joint, and in the JVC a similar stalk for the circular joint. Any design I come up with must avoid this type of weak point, and spread the load of an earpiece over considerably more material than my broken headset. Continue reading “A Headset Fit For A Hackaday Writer” →

Using LineageOS For Phones And DIY Smart TVs Is Pretty Nifty

October 6, 2026 by Maya Posch 25 Comments

Although Android is essentially just another Linux distribution, most people only experience it in the form of the rather restrictive and proprietary versions found on smartphones, tablets and smart TVs. While this is probably fine for the average person, there’s also a lot to be said for the more pure Android experience in the form of LineageOS.

With this fully open and community-supported version of Android you’re free to muck about with your hardware to your heart’s content, without annoyances like unremovable bloatware apps and restrictions on e.g. enabling developer mode.

Even more fun is that there are ports of LineageOS to systems such as the Raspberry Pi SBC, including in the Android TV configuration. This means that not only can your ten year old Android phone get a make-over with a recent version of Android, you can also create your own Android TV-based smart TV without all the spying and other nasty things that commercial smart TVs love to do.

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How A British Engineer Homebrewed The Quietest Carbine

October 5, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 29 Comments

Hollywood has a lot to answer for when it comes to “silencers” on firearms. On screen, a suppressed pistol makes a pinging thud, and the bad guy in the next room flops to the floor. Real life is rather less cinematic. A suppressor takes the edge off the report, but it’s by no means quiet or silent. Hence why the term “silencer” is more of a colloquialism, and why “suppressor” is more appropriate.

Every so often, though, someone gets remarkably close to the movie version. The best-known example is probably the De Lisle carbine. A British commando weapon from the Second World War, it was cobbled together from bits and pieces and ended up being a stellar performer in the world of clandestine operations.

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The FPGA Chronicles: Open Source It

October 5, 2026 by Al Williams 11 Comments

Last time, we looked at getting started with the GOWIN tools and a Tang Nano 20K FPGA. The software from GOWIN isn’t bad, but it isn’t open source, and there are a few oddities about it. In addition, simulation is through a third-party simulation package that has undergone some changes since an acquisition. There are tons of free simulation programs that are extremely good, and there is an open-source toolchain for the FPGA.

You could go grab everything you need piece by piece. But you don’t have to. There are several efforts to produce a toolchain from all the different pieces. We’re going to look at APIO.

APIO

APIO isn’t so much an FPGA toolchain project as it is an aggregator of toolchain projects. It reminded us of PlatformIO, and notes that it was inspired by it. It updates the tools you need, includes its own libraries, and gives you a common workflow across the FPGAs it supports.

You can download it for the command line, but you can also install it as a Visual Studio Code extension, which is what I did. You have to create a simple file that describes your project, and that’s about it.

Install Problems

Since APIO has its own libraries, it is possible that you will find some conflicts with your system libraries. In my case, the libreadline.so.8 file (in ~/.apio/bin/_internal) was causing problems that prevented anything from working. I simply renamed it out of the way, or you can just delete it. That took care of the problem.

Keep in mind that APIO just orchestrates a bunch of other tools like Yosys and GTKWave. Even if you have your own versions, APIO expects to use its private copies. For example, GTKWave on my system is a different version than the APIO copy, and if I try to read wave files without using APIO, I get error messages. You can, however, open a shell from the Tools/Misc menu of the APIO panel in Visual Studio Code.

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Hackaday Links: October 3, 2026

October 4, 2026 by Tom Nardi 6 Comments

If you’re interested in aerospace, there’s an excellent chance you’ve heard the rumor that NASA is trying to get its SR-71 flying again. Or at the very least, they are interested in what exactly it would take to bring the iconic Mach 3+ spy plane back online.

The story started a couple of weeks ago when NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced the agency would be reinvesting in their famed “X-Plane” experimental aircraft program in an effort to get “back in the business of flying high and fast again.” Not long after, keen-eyed observers noted that the SR-71 that had been sitting on the tarmac at the Armstrong Flight Research Center in California had been moved to an unknown location. Several individuals who worked on the plane while it was operational have since claimed NASA representatives contacted them about potentially refurbishing it.

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