Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams discuss the highlights of the great hacks from the past week. On this episode we discuss wireless charging from scratch, Etch-A-Sketch selfies, the robot arm you really should build yourself, bicycle tires and steel nuts for anti-slip footwear, and bending the piezo-electric effect to act as a VLF antenna. Plus we delve into articles you can’t miss about 5G and robot firefighting.
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Direct download (60 MB or so.)
Episode 015 Show Notes:
New This Week:
- Elliot’s Eggbot lives!
- Mike was at Cyphercon 4.0 last week. The badge had a paper tape reader, and he interviewed Trenton Ivey about the Capture the Flag going on at the con.
- Cyphercon Badge Has a Paper Tape Reader Built In
- Tymkrs have played with this tech before (YouTube) and written about it.
- Next Week Is KiCon: Come For The Talks, Stay For The Parties
- Anool Mahidharia and Kerry Scharfglass will be doing talks.
- Check out Anool’s guide to parts libraries: KiCAD Best Practices: Library Management
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
- Implementing Qi Inductive Charging Yourself
- Here’s a really small antenna for very-low frequency radios: Piezoelectric Antennas For Very, Very Low Frequencies
- Here’s the paper on this design: A high Q piezoelectric resonator as a portable VLF transmitter
- VLF was used in the cave rescues in 2018: Ham-designed Gear Used in Thailand Cave Rescue
- Brush up on your radio knowledge with Dan Maloney’s series: The $50 Ham: Checking Out the Local Repeater Scene
- Etch-A-Snap Will Sketch Your Selfies
- Home-Brew CNC Router Mills A Wooden Mouse
- A robot arm on a gantry uses computer vision to Pick and Place For Toys
- Analysing National Budgets With File System Tools
Quick Hacks:
- Elliot’s Picks:
- Mike’s Picks:
Can’t-Miss Articles:
- The Drones and Robots that Helped Save Notre Dame
- How 5G is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk
- Dig into how weather satellites sense moisture by learning about microwave radiometers
Interview:
- Mike caught up with Trenton Ivey to talk about what a Capture the Flag (CTF) is all about and how the CTF for Cyphercon was designed. You can still check out the scoreboard — the social view is really neat but you may need to scroll your mouse wheel to get the graph to render.
Another great podcast, Mike and Elliot. Just curious if you guys have metrics on number of listeners? Don’t ever see too many comments left here when you post the show notes.
Stories I really enjoyed:
Cyphercon Badge: a tape reader? You’ve got to be kidding! Makes me think of the old card readers I used in college for submitting FORTRAN engineering programs. :-)
Eggbot: how could we NOT like a story Elliot mentions a googleplex number of times on the podcast? ;-) Going to have to build one someday. Looks fun. Btw, kudos to Elliot for how he always engages his commenters on his articles with so many responses.
Piezo VLF: had no idea this was possible. Always thought that VLF required ridiculous antenna lengths. Thx for sharing.
Etch a Sketch: a true hack. Everyone loves the toy, and tying it to graphics as an output device is just plain fun.
Analyzing Budgets w/File Tools: craziest story of the week. A true testament to people’s hacking madness demon to create something so outrageous yet so cool!
5G Weather: another topic I wasn’t aware of and learned a lot. Again, thx for sharing.
Hope you guys continue to do these. I’m enjoying them each week.
🙂
Not sure if it’s good or bad, but if you follow the embedded soundcloud object back to soundcloud itself, you can see how many times each podcast has been played. The few that I looked at seem to be in the 2.5 to 4k plays which I assume take into account the embedded plays (so direct from here).
And I’ve learnt to not always trust the comments on HaD, or even the lack thereof.
I also enjoy listening (not least to catch the latest rendition of the ‘quick-hacks’ link :-) even when I’m generally up-to-date with the updates on the main page.
But a scuba mask on a football? O_o
Thanks both for commenting! We’re having a fun time making these and glad you enjoy listening.
As Sheldon mentioned, you can see a stream count on Soundcloud. This only shows a portion of the listens, but thus far those metrics have been a bit confusing. Depending on how we format the Direct Download link, downloads will be shown or not shown in that number. If you scroll past previous episodes you’ll see some are like 2,500 and others are closer to 5k — that’s the swing. We’re at a bit more than 20k listens a month right now that we can see form the full metrics. But it’s hard to tell which platforms everything is being counted on.
I’ve never listened through SoundCloud (I don’t believe) … I have the Pocket Casts app for iOS that downloads each podcast each week .
Love the podcast it’s my new favorite! At about 29:11 you guys mentioned an article that sounded like it was by someone named “bob badly” about reclaiming your time? it was kind of an aside but I really want to read that article and haven’t had any success googling it, do you have a link?
Yeah, sorry we didn’t include the link for that. Bob Baddeley’s article was: Make the Time to Fix Your Time Debt
https://hackaday.com/2019/02/06/make-the-time-to-fix-your-time-debt/