Bridging Older Tasmota Hardware Into Apple Home

August 13, 2026 by 3 Comments

The Tasmota firmware is a popular choice for flashing to a range of Espressif microcontrollers to turn them into smart home devices. If you have such devices in your house, you might wish they were easier to integrate with the Apple Home platform. As it turns out, though, there’s a convenient app for that.

[Christof Müller] built an app called Tasmoshelf for just this purpose. Its primary claim to fame is that it can easily help port a Tasmota-based setup into the Apple Home universe. It can achieve this without requiring a Home Assistant server or MQTT broker or any other workarounds. This is thanks to the fact that Apple Home is compatible with Matter technology, as are ESP32 devices running Tasmota 13 firmware or newer. They can natively jump on an Apple Home setup, and even act as a bridge for older ESP8266 devices that can’t speak Matter themselves. The device is able to run network scans to automatically discover devices and advise whether they can hook up directly to Apple Home, or whether a bridge is needed.

If you’re running Tasmota devices and want to easily integrate them, you might find Tasmoshelf a useful addition to your smart home setup. Just note that it does require a one-off purchase if you intend to use it beyond three devices, a limit which some might find somewhat restrictive.

We’ve looked at Tasmota in detail before; it’s a great way to whip up a smart home to suit your own desires. Meanwhile, if you’re whipping up your own nifty integrations, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline.

Supercon Ten Tickets On Sale Now

August 13, 2026 by 5 Comments

Hackers, start your engines! We’re opening up ticket sales for our tenth, the 2026 Hackaday Supercon, to take place Nov 6-8 in Pasadena, CA. As always, because we haven’t announced the full slate of talks yet, we’d like to give the Hackaday True Believers out there a bonus: early bird tickets for $150 instead of the regular price of $296 (plus fees). If you know you want to attend (and you know that you want to attend) do not delay and order your tickets now!

As we mentioned before, there are a few exciting changes coming to this year’s Supercon. First off, we are moving to a larger venue on Saturday and Sunday: a few blocks south at the ArtCenter South Campus. We’re looking forward to two larger stages, more room for attendees, and more space to spread out and hack. No longer crammed into a cozy alley, we’ll sprawl out in a luxurious courtyard.

We have more tickets available than ever this year, which is great because Supercons past have all sold out. But we’re not expanding so much that we’ll lose the killer signal-to-noise ratio and friendly hacker atmosphere that makes Supercon our favorite con.

But do get your tickets soon! Whether you get in at the True Believer rate or not, Supercon is a bargain. Two and a half days of fully catered hacking and entertainment, plus the great talks, make it a bargain. Then we throw in sweet hackable badge over the top. But it’s truly the assembled crowd that makes it a priceless experience.

If you’re a Hackaday Supercon regular, we look forward to seeing you again soon! If you’ve always wanted to attend, but never pulled the trigger, the nice round number of Supercon Ten is a great excuse.

Of course, the best way to attend any convention is as a presenter, and our call for proposals just got extended for another two weeks. If you have something you’d like to say: let us know soon!

Holograms, From Your Plotter

August 13, 2026 by 13 Comments

When mass-printed holograms appeared on magazines in the 1980s they were a huge novelty, before degrading to the level of kids’ stickers in the years since. At the time they were seen as not for ordinary people to make, but the truth is they can be created without lasers or an optics lab. [Jordan Matelsky] is here to show us how they can be made using as humble a device as a pen plotter.

The effect of an interference pattern from a set of fine lines in a thin film can be demonstrated at its simplest with an oily finger and a mobile phone screen, and once he’s demonstrated that he takes us through some of the theory involved in shifting the light to make an image. There are some false starts with different materials, but eventually he shows us some finished holograms scribed on the polycarbonate of a CD case. It seems you really can make a hologram with a pen plotter. If these images interest you, we’ve looked deeper into the subject in the past. Meanwhile, one of the plotter-scribed holograms can be seen below. Continue reading “Holograms, From Your Plotter” →

Bladerunners And The Mother Of Invention

August 13, 2026 by 23 Comments

There are plenty of stories about inventors who see a problem and decide they can do better. But Van Phillips had a little more motivation than most. The problem was his own leg. In 1976, Phillips was a 21-year-old college student when a water-skiing accident cost him his left leg below the knee. If that wasn’t bad enough, the prosthetic leg he received afterward wasn’t exactly a technological marvel. Prosthetic limbs of the era were generally designed to look and act something like a biological leg and foot, but “act” might be giving them too much credit. They were passive structures that provided something to stand on and roll over while walking.

Phillips wanted to do more than walk. There was just one problem: he wasn’t an engineer. Before the accident, he had been studying business. So, if he was going to build a better leg, first he was going to have to learn how.

Back To School

Traditional prosthetic feet (public domain)

Phillips became fascinated with prosthetics and eventually studied prosthetic design at Northwestern University’s Prosthetic-Orthotic Center. He also worked at the University of Utah’s prosthetics laboratory, where he had access to both the people and equipment he needed to experiment.

The conventional wisdom was that a prosthetic foot should imitate a human foot. That seems perfectly reasonable — evolution has had quite a long time to work on the design. But there’s a problem with simply copying the shape. A real foot isn’t just a foot-shaped object attached to the bottom of your leg. Muscles, tendons, and ligaments store and release energy as you walk or run. Your Achilles tendon, in particular, acts very much like a spring. A conventional prosthetic foot might look right, but it didn’t have anything corresponding to that spring.

Phillips eventually stopped worrying so much about making something that looked like a foot. Instead, he decided to make something that worked like one.

Continue reading “Bladerunners And The Mother Of Invention” →

Hacking Fiber To The Home

August 13, 2026 by 40 Comments

When we think about security threats, we generally imagine them coming from far away across the wider internet. But what if the connection between you and your ISP was the target? [Rithwik Jayasimha] and [Rithvik Vibhu] have explored how fiber to the home connections may not be as secure as you would hope.

The hack centers around fiber-to-the-home connections, of which many deployments rely on Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) standards. The key there is the “passive” part—these networks don’t rely on active components to switch signals. ISPs run central trunk lines out to optical line terminals (OLT), with passive splitters installed in neighborhoods to serve a number of downstream subscribers. Each subscriber then has something called an Optical Network Unit (ONU) in their home, which filters out the traffic intended for that specific subscriber.

Therein lies the flaw, though. Light (and thus, data) for many subscribers flows into the home, and it’s only the ONU that is filtering that out. Hack the ONU, or replace it… and you have access to downstream traffic from your neighbors that you shouldn’t be able to access.

The duo were able to hack an ONU to forward every single frame it receives, revealing downstream data intended for other homes in their immediate neighborhood. A great deal of traffic is encrypted these days, which provides a layer of safety, but it is by no means an ideal situation that such a hack is possible at all. They also explored other threats, such as installing splitters in publicly-accessible infrastructure, and compromising an upstream OLT and using it to flash firmware to other subscriber’s ONUs on the network. All this was presented in a talk at DEF CON, too, which can be viewed online.

It’s a concerning look at an often unconsidered link in the network chain. Few of us expect our data to be snooped upon in between us and the ISP, after all.

Continue reading “Hacking Fiber To The Home” →

The Chernobyl NPP And Forty Years Of Robots For High Radiation Environments

August 13, 2026 by 16 Comments

With the massive steam explosion that shredded the #4 RBMK reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986 it suddenly made robots that could survive a high ionizing radiation environment into the hottest item on the planet. Over the course of forty years many generations of such robots were developed, tested, improved upon or discarded, all to explore and handle hazardous waste throughout the depths of the #4 reactor’s remains.

Researchers of the ISP NPP next to one of the TR robots. (Credit: ISP NPP)
Researchers of the ISP NPP next to one of the TR robots. (Credit: ISP NPP)

Even if the entire development and decisions here would easily fit a couple of feature length movies, the recent documentary by the [Chornobyl Family] provides a solid overview of the engineering challenges, the issues encountered along the way and the forced evolution of initially very basic designs into the robotics that today trundle and wriggle around inside reactor #4, as well as their cousins over at the couple of stricken reactors at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power station.

Unlike the other robots developed from 1986 onwards to provide general clean-up of scattered core material outside of the core, these robots had to venture deep inside, where radiation levels were the highest and correspondingly the challenges much more severe. This was such a problem that initially it were humans who did the exploration, as robots proved to be too fragile and too prone to getting stuck.

Until the 1990s exploration of the ruined core was quite limited, also because of a lack of urgency. While the outside clean-up and construction of the sarcophagus had to be done as quickly as possible, the core exploration was more slow and methodical, based around trying to establish its condition, what core material remained inside and try to take samples of interesting objects like the well-known ‘elephant’s foot’.

Continue reading “The Chernobyl NPP And Forty Years Of Robots For High Radiation Environments” →

Smart Clock Helps With Medication Management

August 12, 2026 by 3 Comments

There are all kinds of smart devices on the market these days, but if you want one to solve a particular personal problem, sometimes it’s easiest to just build your own. That’s precisely what [hvermaak.projects] did when it came to the Ouma Ria Smart Clock.

The clock was primarily intended to act as a useful tool for providing medication reminders, before some extra useful home functionality was folded in. The heart of the build is an ESP32-WROOM-32 hooked up to four 8×8 WS2812B addressable LED panels acting as a display. A further 30 WS2812Bs in a strip act as a status indicator. A DS3231 real-time-clock module ensures the clock keeps accurate time, while a BH1750 ambient light sensor makes sure the clock is responsive to current lighting conditions. There’s also a DFPlayer Mini audio module for spoken announcements and chimes, while there are inputs for AM312 passive infrared motion sensors that allow the clock to act as a rudimentary security monitor. There’s even a web interface for control and scheduling.

The device ultimately evolved into something that helped with daily live, handling everything from medication management to remembering birthdays, and even helping out with kitchen timing tasks.  We’ve featured some other innovative builds in this space in recent years, too, like this explosively loud alarm clock.