AI Not Needed For Hackaday Projects

It was Supercon this weekend, and Hackaday staffers made their way to Pasadena for what was by all accounts an excellent event. Now they’re all on their way home on red-eye flights and far from their benches, so spare a thought for the lonely editor holding the fort while they’ve been having fun. The supply of cool hacks for your entertainment must continue, so what’s to be done? Fortunately Hackaday writer [Anne Ogborn] has the answer, in the form of an automated Hackaday article generator.

We once had a commenter make a withering insult that one of our contributors’ writing styles looked like the work of an AI driven bot, a sentence that the writer in question treasures enough to have incorporated in their Hackaday email signature. [Anne] is a data scientist and Prolog programmer by trade so knows a bit about AI, and she has no need for such frippery. Instead she’s made a deck of cards each marked with a common theme among the work featured here, and generating new article titles is a simple case of drawing cards from the pack and assembling the resulting sentence.

The result is both amusing and we think, uncannily on the mark. Who wouldn’t want an ESP8266 powered cardboard drone? We think it will make a valuable addition to the Hackaday armoury, to be brought out on days such as the first of April, when there’s always an unexpected shortage of hacks. Video below the break.

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Flaming Power Wheels Skeleton Wins Halloween

When the project description starts with the sentence “I use an RC remote and receiver, an esp32, high-current motor drivers, servos, an FPV camera, and a little propane”, you know that this is one which deserves a second look. And so [gearscodeandfire]’s Halloween project caught our eye. It’s a pink Power Wheels jeep driven by a skeletal rider, and the best part is that the whole thing is remote controlled down to a pan-and-tilt skull, a first-person video feed, and even real flames.

At its heart is an ESP32 with a set of motor controllers and relays to do the heavy lifting. The controller is a standard radio remote controller, and the first-person view is an analogue feed as you’d find on a drone. The skeleton is given a child-like appearance by discarding the original adult-proportioned plastic skull and replacing it with a much larger item. The thought that plastic Halloween skulls are available in a range of standard sizes and can be considered as a part in their own right is something we find amusing. The propane burner is supplied from a small cylinder via a solenoid valve, and ignited with the spark from a high-voltage transformer.

The result, we think, wins Halloween hands down. Twelve-foot skeletons are SO 2023!

The video is below the break.

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