The build relies on an Inkplate e-paper screen as a display, which is probably as close you can get in appearance to the aluminium dust and glass screen used in an Etch-a-Sketch. The display is hooked up to an ESP32 microcontroller, which is charged with reading inputs from a pair of rotary encoders. In standard drawing mode, it emulates the behavior of an Etch-A-Sketch, with the ESP32 drawing to the e-paper display as the user turns the encoders to move the cursor. However, it has a magical “undo” feature, where pressing the encoder undoes the last movement, allowing you to craft complex creations without having to get every move perfect on your first attempt. As a fun aside, [Tekavou] also included a fun Snake game. More specifically, it’s inspired by NIBBLES.BAS, a demo program included with Microsoft QBasic back in the day.
We’ve seen all kinds of Etch-A-Sketch builds around these parts, including this impressive roboticized version. Video after the break.
The 2025 One Hertz Challenge asks you to build a project that does something once every second. While that has inspired a lot of clock and timekeeping builds, we’re also seeing some that do entirely different things on a 1 Hz period. [junkdust] has entered the contest with a project that does something rather mathematical once every second.
[junkdust] wanted to get better acquainted with the venerable ATtiny85, so decided to implement Conway’s Game of Life on it. The microcontroller is hooked up to a 0.91″ OLED display with a resolution of 128 x 32 pixels, however, [junkdust] only elected to implement a 32 x 32 grid for the game itself, using the rest of the display area to report the vital statistics of the game. On power up, the grid is populated with a random population, and the game proceeds, updating once every second.
It’s a neat little desk toy, but more importantly than that, it served as a nicely complicated test project for [junkdust] to get familiar working inside the limitations of the ATtiny85. It may be a humble part, but it can do great things, as we’ve seen many times before!
We’re back! This week Jonathan chats with Mattias Wadman and Michael Farber about JQ! It’s more than just a JSON parser, JQ is a whole scripting language! Tune in to find out more about it.
When do you think the first podcast occurred? Did you guess in the 1890s? That’s not a typo. Telefonhírmondó was possibly the world’s first true “telephone newspaper.” People in Budapest could dial a phone number and listen to what we would think of now as radio content. Surprisingly, the service lasted until 1944, although after 1925, it was rebroadcasting a radio station’s programming.
Tivadar Puskás, the founder of Budapest’s “Telephone Newspaper” (public domain)
The whole thing was the brainchild of Tivadar Puskás, an engineer who had worked with Thomas Edison. At first, the service had about 60 subscribers, but Puskás envisioned the service one day spanning the globe. Of course, he wasn’t wrong. There was a market for worldwide audio programs, but they were not going to travel over phone lines to the customer.
The Hungarian government kept tight control over newspapers in those days. However, as we see in modern times, new media often slips through the cracks. After two weeks of proving the concept out, Puskás asked for formal approval and for a 50-year exclusive franchise for the city of Budapest. They would eventually approve the former, but not the latter.
Unfortunately, a month into the new venture, Puskás died. His brother Albert took over and continued talks with the government. The phone company wanted a piece of the action, as did the government. Before anything was settled, Albert sold the company to István Popper. He finalized the deal, which included rules requiring signed copies of the news reports to be sent to the police three times a day. The affair must have been lucrative. The company would eventually construct its own telephone network independent of the normal phone system. By 1907, they boasted 15,000 subscribers, including notable politicians and businesses, including hotels.
Invention
This was all possible because of Puskás’ 1892 invention of a telephone switchboard with a mechanism that could send a signal to multiple lines at once. The Canadian patent was titled “Telephonic News Dispenser.”
There had been demonstrations of similar technology going back to 1881 when Clément Ader piped stereo music (then called the slightly less catchy binauriclar audition) from the Paris Grand Opéra to the city’s Electrical Exhibition. Fictionally, the 1888 novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887also predicted such a service:
All our bedchambers have a telephone attachment at the head of the bed by which any person who may be sleepless can command music at pleasure, of the sort suited to the mood.”
No Bluetooth for her. (Public Domain)
The 1881 demonstration turned into a similar service in Paris, although it was mostly used for entertainment programming with occasional new summaries. It didn’t really qualify as a newspaper. It also wasn’t nearly as successful, having 1,300 subscribers in 1893. London was late to the game in 1895, but, again, the focus was on live performances and church services. Both services collapsed in 1925 due to radio.
Several attempts to bring a similar service to the United States were made in several states during the early 1900s. None of them had much success and were gone and forgotten in a year or two.
In Budapest, they rapidly abandoned the public phone lines and created a network that would eventually span 1,100 miles (1,800 km), crisscrossing Budapest. Impressive considering that there were no active amplifiers yet. From reading the Canadian patent, it seems they use “induction coils.” We imagine the carbon microphones at the studio also had very high voltages compared to a regular phone, but it is hard to say for sure. As you might expect, you’d need a lot of input signal for this to work.
To that end, the company hired especially loud announcers who worked in ten-minute shifts as they were effectively screaming into the microphones. The signal would run to the central office, to one of 27 districts, and then out to people’s homes. We had hoped a 1907 article about the system in Scientific American might have more technical detail, but it didn’t. However, The Electrical World did have a bit more detail:
…the arrangement which he adopts is to have a separate primary and secondary coil for each subscriber, all the primaries being connected in series with the single transmitter…
Last Mile
In a subscriber’s home, there were two earpieces. You could put one on each ear, or share with a friend. There was a buzzer to let you know about special alerts. An American who returned from Budapest in 1901 said that the news was “highly satisfactory,” but wasn’t impressed with the quality of musical programs on the service (see page 640 of The World’s Work, Volume 1).
Concert room at the studio (Public Domain).
The company issued daily schedules you could hang on the wall. Programs included news, news recaps, stories, poetry readings, musical performances, lectures, and language lessons. Typically, transmissions ran from 1030 in the morning to 2230 at night, although this was somewhat flexible.
You are probably wondering what this all cost? A year’s service — including a free receiver — was 18 krones. At the time, that was about US$7.56. That doesn’t sound like much, but in 1901 Budapest, you could buy about 44 pounds (20 kg) of coffee for that much money. The service also ran ads, costing 1 krone for a 12-second spot. They also had some coin-operated receivers to generate revenue.
Radio
It makes sense that in 1925, the service opened Budapest’s first radio station. The programming was shared, and by 1930, the service had over 91,000 subscribers. The private phone network, however, didn’t survive World War II, and that was the end of telephonic newspapers, at least in Budapest.
The technology was also put to use in Italy. A US businessman tried to make a go of it in New Jersey for about a year and then in Oregon for another year before throwing in the towel. Ironically, the tube technology that made phones more capable of covering distances with clear results also doomed phone broadcasting. Those same tubes would make radio practical.
Why Budapest?
You have to wonder why the only really successful operation was in Budapest. We don’t know if it was the politics that made an independent news source with a little less scrutiny attractive, or if it was just that Popper ran an excellent business. After all, Popper and the Puskás brothers anticipated the market for radio. And Popper, in fact, successfully embraced radio instead of letting it sink his business.
We talked about Hugo Gernsback’s predictions that doctors would operate by telephone. He also predicted telephone music in 1916. Of course, music by phone is still a thing. If you are on hold.
Facing the horrifying realization that he’s going to graduate soon, EE student [Colin Jackson] AKA [Electronics Guy] needed a business card. Not just any business card: a PCB business card. Not just any PCB business card: a PCB business card that can play pong.
[Colin] was heavily inspired by the card [Ben Eater] was handing out at OpenSauce last year, and openly admits to copying the button holder from it. We can’t blame him: the routed-out fingers to hold a lithium button cell were a great idea. The original idea, a 3D persistence-of-vision display, was a little too ambitious to fit on a business card, so [Colin] repurposed the 64 LED matrix and STM32 processor to play Pong. Aside from the LEDs and the microprocessor, it looks like the board has a shift register to handle all those outputs and a pair of surface-mount buttons.
Of course you can’t get two players on a business card, so the microprocessor is serving as the opponent. With only 64 LEDs, there’s no room for score-keeping — but apparently even the first, nonworking prototype was good enough to get [Colin] a job, so not only can we not complain, we offer our congratulations.
Hackaday has a long-running series on Mining and Refining, that tracks elements of interest on the human-made road from rocks to riches. What author Dan Maloney doesn’t address in that series is the natural history that comes before the mine. You can’t just plunk down a copper mine or start squeezing oil from any old stone, after all: first, you need ore. Ore has to come from somewhere. In this series, we’re going to get down and dirty into the geology of ore-forming processes to find out from wither come the rocks that hold our elements of interest.
What’s In an Ore?
Though we’re going to be talking about Planetary Science in this series, we should recognize the irony that “ore” is a word without any real scientific meaning. What distinguishes ore from other rock is its utility to human industry: it has elements or compounds, like gems, that we want, and that we think we can get out economically. That changes over time, and one generation’s “rock” can be another generation’s “ore deposits”. For example, these days prospectors are chasing copper in porphyry deposits at concentrations as low as 1000 ppm (0.1%) that simply were not economic in previous decades. The difference? Improvements in mining and refining, as well as a rise in the price of copper. Continue reading “Ore Formation: Introduction And Magmatic Processes”→
It’s hard to overstate the impact desktop 3D printing has had on the making and hacking scene. It drastically lowered the barrier for many to create their own projects, and much of the prototyping and distribution of parts and tools that we see today simply wouldn’t be possible via traditional means.
What might not be obvious to those new to the game is that much of what we take for granted today in the 3D printing world has its origins in open source hardware (OSHW). Unfortunately, [Josef Prusa] has reason to believe that this aspect of desktop 3D printing is dead.
If you’ve been following 3D printing for awhile, you’ll know how quickly the industry and the hobby have evolved. Just a few years ago, the choice was between spending the better part of $1,000 USD on a printer with all the bells and whistles, or taking your chances with a stripped-down clone for half the price. But today, you can get a machine capable of self calibration and multi-color prints for what used to be entry-level prices. According to [Josef] however, there’s a hidden cost to consider.
