Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys get caught up on the week that was. People go to great lengths for video game saves, but this Pokemon hack that does hardware-based trade conversion between the Game Boy’s Pokemon 2 and Pokemon 3 is something else. Why do we still use batteries when super capacitors exist? They’re different components, silly, and work best at different things. Turns out you can study the atmosphere by sending radio waves through it, and that’s exactly what the ESA is doing… around Mars! And will machined parts become as easy to custom order as PCBs have become? This week we take a closer look at prototyping as a service.
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 (55 MB)
Episode 148 Show Notes:
What’s that Sound?
- That sound was mobs from Minecraft
- [Jort] was randomly drawn from 23 correct responses and wins the shirt!
- Hash any file to create a “random” number
- Try it with the Podcast Logo!
New This Week:
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
- Cracking The Spotify Code
- IPod, Therefore I Am: Looking Back At An Original IPod Prototype
- SuperCapacitors Vs Batteries Again
- Two Wire Sensors On LED Strips
- Bridging Game Worlds With The ‘Impossible’ Pokémon Trade
- Two Mars Orbiters Chatted For Atmospheric Science
Quick Hacks:
- Elliot’s Picks
- Mike’s Picks:
Re using the Pokemon transfer skills to interface mainframes with modern web tech: there’s software for that. Back in the early 2000’s most of the online banking and airline sites ran on screen scraping hacks where middleware emulated a user sitting in front of a green screen. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s still the case today.
i work for the City of New York and i can 100% tell you there are these decades-old mainframe systems still in use tracking employee sick leave, as well as a modern web based scheduling system. as you might imagine, conflicts occur all the time and require two bureaus in the same department to phone and coordinate with each other on them. it’s ridiculous!