Elliot does the podcast on the road to Supercon Europe, and Al is in the mood for math and nostalgia this week. Listen in and find out what they were reading on Hackaday this week.
The guys talked about the ESP-32 non-backdoor and battery fires. Then it was on to the hacks.
Self-balancing robots and satellite imaging were the appetizers, but soon they moved on to Kinect cameras in the modern day. Think you can’t travel at the speed of light? Turns out that maybe you already are.
Did you know there was a chatbot in 1957? Well, sort of. For the can’t miss stories: watches monitor your heart and what does the number e really mean?
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Download in DRM-free MP3 and stream it on the big speakers.
Episode 312 Show Notes:
News:
- The ESP32 Bluetooth Backdoor That Wasn’t
- Open Safety In The Auto Business: Renault Shares Its Battery Fire Suppression Tech
- Hackaday Europe 2025 Welcomes David Cuartielles, Announces Friday Night Bring-a-Hack
What’s that Sound?
- We had a ton of answers this week, and many of them were correct. It was a disposable film camera being wound and shot. Congratulations to [Bobby Tables] for getting the correct answer and winning the webcam-driven dice toss.
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
- Taming The Wobble: An Arduino Self-Balancing Bot
- PIDDYBOT – A Self Balancing Teaching Tool
- Building A Self-Balancing Robot Made Easy
- Self-balancing Arduino Does It Without An IMU
- Yet Another Self-Balancing Unicycle
- Self-balancing Robot Keeps Things On The Straight And Narrow
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_predictive_control
- https://github.com/kerrj/segway
- Satellite Imagery You Can Play With
- The Strange Afterlife Of The Xbox Kinect
- You Are Already Traveling At The Speed Of Light
- Lies, Damned Lies, And IGBT Datasheets
- Fictional Computers: EMERAC Was The Chatbot Of 1957
Quick Hacks:
- Elliot’s Picks:
- Al’s Picks:
The problem with “It’s going to take our jobs” IS exactly that it did, and people had to shift to doing other stuff. It did happen, and it keeps on happening. Guess what – eventually we’ll run out of “other stuff” to do.
The entire modern services sector/economy evolved out of the need of people to do something when basic manual jobs disappeared and most people couldn’t become experts and specialists because of a lack of demand or aptitude for the job. Instead, they started serving you food or selling you stuff, marketing, fashion, tourism, leisure, art, entertainment, bureaucracy, politics, moral entrepreneurship, etc. People started doing things that drive up the consumption of material resources and require people to consume more and more so the servants could get paid their wages.
With fewer of the people in the economy actually taking any part or contributing into producing the material resources they’re using to get paid, the distribution of wealth became disconnected from the actual production of wealth. Prices became completely disconnected from material costs and inflation runs rampant, because the major cost is actually the people themselves demanding more money to get stuff without contributing back to the means of producing that stuff. In the extreme, people are literally voting themselves more money just to live and survive.
For example, the actual production of food only costs around 1% of the GDP but you may be spending a quarter of your income on buying food. This is because people are wasting so much effort and resources to basically do trivial and unnecessary stuff, to justify getting paid the money to buy food, and the whole economy is dragging that weight along. How many Youtube content creators does it take to grow a field of corn?
TL;DR, the automation (also off-shoring) of everything has created a rapidly growing “idle class” that has to invent make-work in order to get paid, and this is unsustainable.