Two Decades Of Hackaday In Words

September 29, 2025 by Jenny List 24 Comments

I think most of us who make or build things have a thing we are known for making. Where it’s football robots, radios, guitars, cameras, or inflatable textile sculptures, we all have the thing we do. For me that’s over the years been various things but has recently been camera hacking, however there’s another thing I do that’s not so obvious. For the last twenty years, I’ve been interested in computational language analysis. There’s so much that a large body of text can reveal without a single piece of AI being involved, and in pursuing that I’ve created for myself a succession of corpus analysis engines. This month I’ve finally been allowed to try one of them with a corpus of Hackaday articles, and while it’s been a significant amount of work getting everything shipshape, I can now analyse our world over the last couple of decades.

The Burning Question You All Want Answered

A graph of "arduino" versis "raspberry", comparing Arduino and Raspberry Pi coverage over time. — Battle of the Boards, over the decades.

A corpus engine is not clever in its own right, instead it will simply give you straightforward statistics in return for the queries you give it. But the thing that keeps me coming back for more is that those answers can sometimes surprise you. In short, it’s a machine for telling you things you didn’t know. To start off, it’s time to settle a Hackaday trope of many years’ standing. Do we write too much about Arduino projects? Into the engine goes “arduino”, and for comparison also “raspberry”, for the Raspberry Pi.

What comes out is a potted history of experimenter’s development boards, with the graph showing the launch date and subsequent popularity of each. We’re guessing that the Hackaday Arduino trope has its origins in 2011 when the Italian board peaked, while we see a succession of peaks following the launch of the Pi in 2012. I think we are seeing renewals of interest after the launch of the Pi 3 and Pi 4, respectively. Perhaps the most interesting part of the graph comes on the right as we see both boards tail off after 2020, and if I had to hazard a guess as to why I would cite the rise of the many cheap dev boards from China.

Continue reading “Two Decades Of Hackaday In Words” →

InfinityTerminal Brings Infinite Horizontal Scrolling

September 29, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 9 Comments

The creator of infinite vertical scrolling in social media, [Aza Raskin], infamously regrets his creation that has helped to waste a tremendous amount of human attention and time on the Internet. But that’s vertical scrolling. [bujna94] has created infinityTerminal, a program with infinite scrolling, but in the horizontal direction instead. This tool has had the opposite effect to go along with its opposite orientation: increased productivity and improved workflow.

The impetus for infinityTerminal is [bujna94]’s need for many simultaneous SSH sessions, and the fact that no other terminal program can support an indefinite number of visible terminal windows. This application starts with four terminal windows in a 2×2 grid, and allows the user to open more terminals, two at a time, to form a 2xN grid. As many terminals as needed will open in pairs in the horizontal direction with smooth, trackpad-compatible scrolling and automatic color-coded backgrounds for servers accessed by SSH.

For anyone with a similar dislike of tabs like [bujna94], this might be worth trying out. It’s built with Electron, xterm.js, and node-pty.

There are a few more details about the project on a Reddit post. [Bujna94] also made it completely open source and freely available with the files on a GitHub page, and welcomes anyone to try out his creation that wants to. For more terminal magic, we’d also recommend checking out Notcurses, a terminal application capable enough to output SNES-level detail natively.

Franke A600 coffee machine with PicoVoice

Coffee By Command: The Speech2Touch Voice Hack

September 24, 2025 by Heidi Ulrich 1 Comment

If you were to troll your colleagues, you can label your office coffee maker any day with a sticker that says ‘voice activated’. Now [edholmes2232] made it actually come true. With Speech2Touch, he grafts voice control onto a Franke A600 coffee machine using an STM32WB55 USB dongle and some clever firmware hacking.

The office coffee machine has been a suspect for hacking for years and years. Nearly 35 years ago, at Cambridge University, a webcam served a live view of the office coffee pot. It made sure nobody made the trip to the coffee pot for nothing. The funny, but in fact useless HTTP status 418 was brought to life to state that the addressed server using the protocol was in fact a teapot, in answer to its refusal to brew coffee. Enter this hack – that could help you to coffee by shouting from your desk – if only your arms were long enough to hold your coffee cup in place.

Back to the details. The machine itself doesn’t support USB keyboards, but does accept a USB mouse, most likely as a last resort in case the touchscreen becomes irresponsive. That loophole is enough: by emulating touchscreen HID packets instead of mouse movement, the hack avoids clunky cursors and delivers a slick ‘sci-fi’ experience. The STM32 listens through an INMP441 MEMS mic, hands speech recognition to Picovoice, and then translates voice commands straight into touch inputs. Next, simply speaking to it taps the buttons for you.

It’s a neat example of sidestepping SDK lock-in. No reverse-engineering of the machine’s firmware, no shady soldering inside. Instead, it’s USB-level mischief, modular enough that the same trick could power voice control on other touchscreen-only appliances.

Who Wants A Rusty Old Smartphone?

September 24, 2025 by Tyler August 59 Comments

If we’re talking about oxidized iron… probably nobody. If we’re talking about Rust the programming language, well, that might be a different story. Google agrees, and is working on bringing the language into Android. That’s not enough for [Paul Sanja], who has the first Redox OS smartphone.

Redox OS is a Unix-like operating system written entirely in Rust, and somehow we haven’t covered it until now. Unlike Asterinas, a project to recreate the Linux kernel in Rust, Redox has few pretensions of being anything but its own thing, and that’s great! On desktop, Redox has a working windowing system and many utilities, including a basic browser in the form of NetSurf.

It’s claims to be source-compatible with Linux and BSD programs, and partially POSIX compliant. A certain someone around here might want to try it as a daily driver. The header image is a desktop screenshot, because there’s more to see there and it fits our aspect ratio.

On smartphones, it… boots. Some smartphones, anyway. It’s actually a big first step. That booting is possible is actually thanks to the great work put in by the Postmarket OS team to get Uboot working on select android devices. That uboot loader doesn’t need to load the Linux-based Postmarket OS. It can be used for anything compatible. Like, say, Redox OS, as [Paul] shows us.

Of course, Redox OS has no drivers for the touchscreen or anything else, so at the moment that rusty smartphone can only boot to a login screen. But thanks to Rust, you can rest assured that login screen hasn’t got any memory leaks! Jokes aside, this is a great start and we’re hoping to see more.

Redox is a promising project on mobile or desktop, and its development seems a much better use of time and effort than fighting over Rust in the Linux kernel.

Jenny’s Daily Drivers: KDE Linux

September 22, 2025 by Jenny List 44 Comments

Over this series test-driving operating systems, we’ve tried to bring you the unusual, the esoteric, or the less mainstream among the world of the desktop OS. It would become very boring very quickly of we simply loaded up a succession of Linux distros, so we’ve avoided simply testing the latest Debian, or Fedora.

That’s not to say that there’s no space for a Linux distro on these pages if it is merited though, as for example we marked its 30th anniversary with a look at Slackware. If a distro has something interesting to offer it’s definitely worth a look, which brings us to today’s subject.

KDE Linux is an eponymous distro produced by the makers of the KDE Plasma desktop environment and associated applications, and it serves as a technical demo of what KDE can be, a reference KDE-based distribution, and an entirely new desktop Linux distribution all in one. As such, it always has the latest in all things KDE, but aside from that perhaps what makes it even more interesting is that as an entirely new distribution it has a much more modern structure than many of the ones we’re used to that have their roots in decades past. Where in a traditional distro the system is built from the ground up on install, KDE Linux is an immutable base distribution, in which successive versions are supplied as prebuilt images on which the user space is overlaid. This makes it very much worth a look. Continue reading “Jenny’s Daily Drivers: KDE Linux” →

Think You Need A New PC For Windows 11? Think Again

September 18, 2025 by Tyler August 25 Comments

As the sun sets on Windows 10 support, many venues online decry the tsunami of e-waste Windows 11’s nonsensical hardware requirements are expected to create. Still more will offer advice: which Linux distribution is best for your aging PC? [Sean] from Action Retro has an alternate solution: get a 20 year old Sun Workstation, and run Windows 11 on that.

The Workstation in question from 2005 is apparently among the first Sun made using AMD’s shiny new 64-bit Opteron processor. Since Windows has no legacy 32-bit support– something it shares with certain Linux distributions– this is amongst the oldest hardware that could conceivably install and run Redmond’s latest.

And it can! Not in unaltered form, of course– the real hack here is courtesy of [ntdevlabs], whose “Tiny11” project strips all the cruft from Windows 11, including its hardware compatibility checker. [ntdevlabs] has produced a Tiny11Builder script that is available on GitHub, but the specific version [Sean] used is available on Archive.org.

[Sean] needed the archived version of Tiny11 because Windows 11 builds newer than 22H2 use the POPCNT operation, which was not present in AMD’s first revision of the x86_64 instruction set. POPCNT is part of Intel’s SSE4 extension from 2007, a couple years after this workstation shipped.

If you’re sick of being told to switch to Linux, but can’t stomach staying with Windows either, maybe check out Haiku, which we reported as ready for daily driving early last year.

Continue reading “Think You Need A New PC For Windows 11? Think Again” →

UTF-8 Is Beautiful

September 14, 2025 by Jenny List 30 Comments

It’s likely that many Hackaday readers will be aware of UTF-8, the mechanism for incorporating diverse alphabets and other characters such as 💩 emojis. It takes the long-established 7-bit ASCII character set and extends it into multiple bytes to represent many thousands of characters. How it does this may well be beyond that basic grasp, and [Vishnu] is here with a primer that’s both fascinating and easy to read.

UTF-8 extends ASCII from codes which fit in a single byte, to codes which can be up to four bytes long. The key lies in the first few bits of each byte, which specify how many bytes each character has, and then that it is a data byte. Since 7-bit ASCII codes always have a 0 in their most significant bit when mapped onto an 8-bit byte, compatibility with ASCII is ensured by the first 128 characters always beginning with a zero bit. It’s simple, elegant, and for any of who had to deal with character set hell in the days before it came along, magic.

We’ve talked surprisingly little about the internals of UTF-8 in the past, but it’s worthy of note that this is our second piece ever to use the poop emoji, after our coverage of the billionth GitHub repository.

Emoji bales: Tony Hisgett, CC BY 2.0.