Writing for Hackaday involves drinking from the firehose of tech news, and seeing the latest and greatest of new projects and happenings in the world of hardware. But sometimes you sit back in a reflective mood, and ask yourself: didn’t this all used to be more exciting? If you too have done that, perhaps it’s worth considering how our world of hardware hacking is fueled, and what makes stuff new and interesting.
Hardware projects are like startup fads
Hardware projects are like startup fads, they follow the hype cycle. Take Nixie clocks for instance, they’re cool as heck, but here in 2024 there’s not so much that’s exciting about them. If you made one in 2010 you were the talk of the town, in 2015 everyone wanted one, but perhaps by 2020 yours was simply Yet Another Nixie Clock. Now you can buy any number of Nixie clock kits on Ali, and their shine has definitely worn off. Do you ever have the feeling that the supply of genuinely new stuff is drying up, and it’s all getting a bit samey? Perhaps it’s time to explore this topic.
I have a theory that hardware hacking goes in epochs, each one driven by a new technology. If you think about it, the Arduino was an epoch-defining moment in a readily available and easy to use microcontroller board; they may be merely a part and hugely superseded here in 2024 but back in 2008 they were nothing short of a revolution if you’d previously has a BASIC Stamp. The projects which an Arduino enabled produced a huge burst of creativity from drones to 3D printers to toaster oven reflow and many, many, more, and it’s fair to say that Hackaday owes its early-day success in no small part to that little board from Italy. To think of more examples, the advent of affordable 3D printers around the same period as the Arduino, the Raspberry Pi, and the arrival of affordable PCB manufacture from China were all similar such enabling moments. A favourite of mine are the Espressif Wi-Fi enabled microcontrollers, which produced an explosion of cheap Internet-connected projects. Suddenly having Wi-Fi went from a big deal to built-in, and an immense breadth of new projects came from those parts.
Tell us then, What’s new?
So back to 2024, and a Hackaday writer at her desk in the English countryside. 3D printers are still our bread and butter, but they’re on Amazon special offer these days. Small Linux boards are ten a penny, and microcontrollers that put the Arduino’s ATmega in the shade are only a few cents from China. It almost feels as though everything is mainstream, and all we’re getting are increments rather than huge leaps. I want new stuff again, I want exciting stuff!
Happily, the world of technology doesn’t stand still. We all know that the Next Big Thing is just around the corner, and our desire to make cool new stuff will be revitalised by it. But what will it be? My eyes are on ASIC fabrication, I think Tiny Tapeout must only be the start of perhaps the most exciting epoch of them all. But what do you think on the matter, where will your Next Big Thing come from? We’re really interested to hear your views in the comments.
Header image: The RepRap Mendel 3D printer, one of the more successful early affordable designs. Dkoukoul, CC BY-SA 3.0.
The wonder has gone because we have access to all info all the time, and even info that we don’t want to know, or haven’t had the opportunity to think about.
Creativity stems from boredom, as does curiosity. We are the first generation which has to contend with these issues
I hear what you’re saying and to some extent I agree, but I’d like to offer some counterpoints.
For me, much of that info is actually a source of wonder and inspiration. I spend a lot of time watching YouTube, where I get excited by videos with topics ranging from building tools, to understanding civil infrastructure, to learning more about physics and other sciences. I’ve been inspired to start building and modifying some shop tools, I’m planning to start using Plasticity to augment the designing I do with OpenSCAD, and I hope to experiment with photogrammetry within the next year. Not leading-edge, it’s exciting for me, and without access to that information, it likely wouldn’t be happening. (As a side note, Hackaday itself is part of “all info all the time”, and I dare say that it’s a source of wonder, inspiration, and motivation for a LOT of people).
Fair point – there’s a lot of distracting fluff ‘n’ stuff available 24/7. But by eschewing social media and limiting consumption of mainstream news media, I avoid the worst of it.
Boredom is one source of creativity. But if “necessity is the mother of invention”, then necessity must also be counted as a source of creativity. And much of what’s deemed necessity is really just desire. As for curiosity, stumbling upon a Veritasium video with an intriguing title piques my interest just as much as boredom ever has.
I suspect that the advent of broadcast radio, and then television, posed similar challenges in their time. For that matter, according to Marshall McLuhan, moveable type was its era’s version of the information overload you’re referring to. So “too much information” would seem to go back about seven centuries.
My apologies for straying so far from tech by introducing printing presses, radio, and TV. Oh, wait… ;-)
Sorry about the nested quotes – I didn’t realize that the “greater than” symbol was a formatting character. I didn’t even realize that formatted quotes was a thing here on Hackaday.
I didn’t realize that first thing either. I’ve been using HTML blockquote tags. I thought you’d gone to the trouble of using three of those each time for some reason.
There is a lot of exciting stuff, but with such global connectivity, you invariably find that someone has already done your cool and unique idea, which takes the shine off it.
Occasionally, it does work the other way round – you see a poor implementation of something which you are sure could be done better!
DIY pharmaceutical hacking – Four Thieves Vinegar Collective claims that $8400 worth of Hepatitis C treatment can be made at home for about $70 and epipens can be made for $30.
They have a suite of build instructions for microlabs and software.
And they’re definitely breaking the law.
https://fourthievesvinegar.org/
https://fourthievesvinegar.org/epipencil-autoinjector/
The definitely aren’t breaking the law by making this information available. Interesting stuff but still old hat. Can they toot their own horn any louder though?
But can I make my own Ivermectin at home?
Hydroxychloroquine?
Gasoline?
Oh, didn’t you know? The people who use that stuff have moved on. I mean the living ones, not the ones that shuffled on already. Anyway you are in luck… the new one you CAN make yourself. In fact I am willing to be you already do!
https://www.kxan.com/news/weird-news/drink-urine-anti-covid-vaccine-advocate-tells-supporters/
As we have “a lot” [TM] of information available to use on the Internet, maybe connecting the dots will be “incremental”. The amount of turdification also on the Internet makes connecting those dots much harder.
Pessimistically speaking [writing], that cruft will need to be reduced before “The Next Big Thing” [TM] can happen.
Because precision mechatronics and their control software are more or less off-the-shelf I think we’ll see a lot more “benchtop X” where X is a capability that used to require huge machines. The biohackers are creating benchtop gene sequencers, tissue printers, and drug blenders. Mechatronic body hackers are designing bodies to produce with benchtop CNC mills, printers, laser cutters, and vacuum curing bags for light and strong composite parts. Chip and optical hackers are building benchtop physical vapor deposition sputtering rigs, lithographic masks, and doping processes.
In general, I think we’ll see more people tune into the idea that it’s now possible to build fun and interesting projects using materials and parts created in their city instead of relying on a fragile supply chain.
No really valid reason they should cost 8400 usd when there is only at most 20usd in parts. Well except for the remainder of the cost is bookkeeper induced. I shouldn’t have to pay for the building they are produced in or the extreme amount of CFO benefits incurred.
I think the next big thing will come from “how” not “what”. e.g Arduino for me was the last big “how” (as in how we use microcontrollers).
The next big thing are robots. Especially the ones constructed by an AI and printed on your Maker 3D-printer.
My thoughts were along these lines. There will always be new parts and new tools that excite us in the future, and I’m not skilled/knowledgeable enough to know how to predict what those will be.
But the thing that might revolutionalize hackers’ lives will be when “AI” can be embedded as an intelligent entity of sorts in everything we make. If I could make a doodad out of the latest parts but also be able to converse with it intelligently to reprogram it, to alter it, to change its behavior, etc. it would greatly open up the things I could do with the things I build. Once the much better versions of ChatGPT and Grok and whatever Apple is working on can easily be put on an ESP-32 (and its successors), things will change in a big way.
enters nixie clock rabbit hole for several hours *
HaD ate my initial *
Sift through the USPTO database
The next big thing for us will be whatever is expiring in the next few years.
i think this is a good snapshot of a tension between hackaday readers and hackaday writers
my hacks are always diverse…there’s always a lot of things going on at the frontiers of available time, available expertise, and immediate practical need. like i got a 3d printer in 2014, right when everyone else did, but it wasn’t the hack. the products were, and it’s still a tool i use all the time. it hasn’t lost relevance. i built a perfectly servicable music stand out of a bit of spare balsa wood and hot melt glue and then 10 years later i made a better music stand with 3d-printed brackets. the hacker abides. i still use almost every tool i ever learned. nothing is obsolete.
media attention goes through cycles but i don’t think the hacks do. you’ll hardly see a fad of making music stands, and if you did, i’d get tired of it right away. i keep a diary in parallel with every scad file i make, but i don’t imagine anyone would want to read it. your job of coming up with something new to say every day is a lot harder than my job of hacking my way through my todo list :)
+1
+1
There’s definitely been changes to what is possible over the last couple decades, but then you also have people who market those things as entertainment content on places like YouTube or even here.
I’d love it if the next biggest thing was a dismantling of the current centralized, addiction funded, privacy disrespecting, socially destructive form of the internet we see today. Unfortunately I worry that that is a social / psychological problem rather than a technical one.
+1
Next big thing will be DIY hacking biology.
And in that case, “big” is not necessarily “better”.
(Sigh!)
Imagine saving yourself from cancer: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/12/9/958
(to HaD staff: sorry, I misclicked the report button)
I think we need to face the fact that in the present, there is a lot less need for hacking things than in the past, since there are less physical things in general. For the average person, the internet and a smartphone has completely obsoleted telephone equipment, analog and digital clocks, newspaper printing, cameras, televisions, wiretaps, cassette tapes, typewriters, going outside, radios, VCRs, flashlights, floppy disks, hifi systems, remote controls, being famous, game consoles, advertisements, calculators, batteries, CD players, alarms, paper money, home surveillance systems, IRC, walkie talkies, knowledge and reason, timers, pen and paper, light switches, maps, keyboards, access controls, word processing, credit cards, geolocation, voice recorders, owning physical media, menus in restaurants….
I hope the next big thing is people realizing that the deal we apparently agreed to isn’t as shiny as was promised. On the other hand, there were also a lot less hacks 300 years ago, so clearly returning to the past is not the way forwards.
I disagree with a few things you listed. Wiretaps: when were those relevant to most people? Being famous: that’s easier now. Advertisements: plenty of those online/in phone apps—average people don’t use adblockers. Home surveillance systems: those are much more common (and insecure, and privacy-invasive) now. Geolocation: hardly anybody did that outside of their road navigation device before smartphones; now lots of apps use it for other (sometimes nefarious) purposes.
WTF? just no! There are always people that want to learn how to hack hardware that need to be shown one of the many paths. Showing what others have done can open those paths and allow the next creative expression.
The quote about ” blah, blah…I have seen farther as I have stood on the shoulders of giants… blah blah” is real. Knowledge builds on knowledge. Teach, share, & try.
Build because you need, want, or enjoy. I am secure enough I can buy whatever I want, but I spend most of my time in the shop building something/anything so I can learn. I don’t think the question is to ask “Tell us then, What’s new?”, but instead to show “hey this is neat, how can you use it?”
Open source, self-hosted replacements for all the IoT cloud crap. That actually have a beautiful and intuitive AI and can be used by non-technical users.
I’m hoping…
Adafruit IO is the next best thing imop. Really like that after fluffing around with all the alternatives. Maybe my trust is misplaced but I trust those guys with my datter way more than the big Tech co’s
I think the Nixie tube clock says it all – it’s a display technology that goes back to the 1950s, yet drew interest in use as a clock display in the 2010s. Neither the clock or display were new.
New technology can support bursts of new hacks.
But the hacks themselves are about the ideas, and the process. There are things my grandfather built that (if documented in web friendly form!) could still grace the pages of Hackaday.
It’s going to get interesting when we start hacking “AI”s and tune them to be the kind of AI we want them to be.
What a brave new world it will be!
I’ve started arming my toaster with high caliber weapons.. my own hacked AI…
THE TOASTERS WILL RISE AND ENSLAVE HUMANITY!!!! MUHUHAHA… BOW DOWN BEFORE THE MIGHTY TOASTER!
I don’t think you’re going to find any particular insights on the future from your customer base. Business people never do – if we knew what we wanted, you would already know what we wanted and be providing it to us.
The hackertainment spotlight just flicked onto and then off of “cyberdecks”, and probably won’t be back over there until the hardware for cheap AR-display decks becomes available. (Also, that’s Tom Nardi’s beat, but this is for HaD in general.) I am not sure there’s an amateur-friendly replacement on offer at the moment.
There are some great creators out there, who you already feature any time they deign to upload anything. These folks produce flashes of brilliance, but a multi-per-day blog cannot live on the bounty of 6-10 creators alone.
Folks keep talking about biohacking, but I am not sure that the biohacking stuff on offer really fits directly into the existing HaD ethos – it’s by biologists and for biologists, no Arduino-like breakthroughs yet. Have you considered a sub-label dedicated to “Science of interest to the HaD crowd”? It would be a place to share the biohacking content that is public-facing as well as some other things.
What things? Heh.
Dave Hakkens, of Precious Plastic, has embarked on a campaign to defeat the “spiky booshes” via Project KAMP, an intentional community focused on sustainable living which is at the land development stage of their property in rural Portugal. It is not normal HaD-fare, though the hacker ethos is in evidence everywhere in their work. They also maintain a good record of experiments and educational materials.
Growtree Organics and Dustups Ranch are both desert terraforming projects. Growtree is just trying to build soil on his property and Dustups is trying to convert desertified former grazing land into a desert forest in “the most isolated spot in Texas.” There are other folks doing the same or similar things. All of the folks doing this stuff on Youtube are, by the nature of the work, also living off-grid and are keeping up with the current golden age of technoprogress in that area. Terraforming is also definitely audacious hacking – even if “pile the rocks lying around in special ways to control water flow” doesn’t seem like it.
There also at least one Permaculture farmer/Nursery owner, Edible Acres, that’s worth looking at. All else aside, looking at the owner’s videos (whose name escapes me, alas) will show you what the “hacker mind” looks like when turned to something other than high tech systems. Good hackers have an internal map of the interlocking regions of their concern and how they can effect one another when disturbed. You see it in great programmers, hardware hackers, and some mechanical engineers. You also see it in this guy, but the area of soil management. He has, in his head, a truly gigantic number of plant profiles that contain their needs, the effects they have on their immediate surroundings, and general reactions to various conditions. Walking around, he’s constantly showing these arrangements of plants in complementary sets at a density that is somewhat impressive. He’s a master hacker who’s a joy to watch at work.
But, none of this is “normal” HaD content, and their inclusion in the mainline articles would confuse and anger the HaD Grognard Reader – so some sort of separation is probably necessary.
HackaDirt perhaps?
B^)
What’s available but expensive today?
I mean, TFA caught the pattern. Arduinos and affordable 3d printers? And the BASIC Stamp before Arduino.
I never understood the BASIC Stamp. I mean.. I get what it can do, basically what an Arduino does. But at the price it was sold it never made sense. Here’s a universal part you can throw into every little project but at a price where you won’t want to “waste” it on just any little project. It made no sense! It was outside my hobby budget at the time and had one been gifted to me it probably would have sat while I waited for that perfect project that was worthy. Of course.. I was a kid in those days so that makes a difference too.
The big changes seem to happen when something that was out of reach of the average hobbyist becomes low in price.
But… we can get almost anything now can’t we? I wonder what it could be.
I agree about the BASIC Stamp and its price v. hobby use.
IIRC, it was around $50 for the bare chip in the early 1990s.
I did buy a $20 BS dev board back when RadioShack was dying, but I didn’t get it to work; possibly it was a damaged return.
Also back in the 1990s, Motorola introduced a dev board for the 6811 for $68.11. But they sold out quickly, so I wasn’t able to get one.
Sorry you didn’t get one. I was able to and it was a blast. It was so easy to make designs and get the tiny bit of programming you needed to make things work. Lots of animation projects by adding a H-Drive chip or two. Loved those little guys.
And now I wonder “What would Ren be today if they got one of them?”