Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they swap their favorite hacks and stories from the week. In this episode, they’ll start off by marveling over the evolution of the “smart knob” and other open hardware input devices, then discuss a futuristic propulsion technology you can demo in your own kitchen sink, and a cheap handheld game system that get’s a new lease on life thanks to the latest version of the ESP32 microcontroller.
From there they’ll cover spinning CRTs, creating custom GUIs on Android, and yet another thing you can build of out that old Ender 3 collecting dust in the basement. The episode wraps up with a discussion about putting Valve’s Steam Deck to work and a look at the history-making medical evacuation of the International Space Station.
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!
As always, this episode is available in DRM-free MP3.
Episode 353 Show Notes:
What’s that Sound?
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Interesting Hacks of the Week:
- Simplifying The SmartKnob
- Yamato-1: The World’s First Ship With Magnetohydrodynamic Propulsion
- When Electricity Doesn’t Take The Shortest Path
- Looking At A Real Fake Raspberry Pi RP2040 Board
- An Open Source Electromagnetic Resonance Tablet
- ESP32-P4 Powers Retro Handheld After A Transplant
Quick Hacks:
- Elliot’s Picks:
- Tom’s Picks:
I’m a little surprised by the mildly skewed view back on the state of microcontrollers and USB support some 15 or 20 years ago here.
USBasp goes back to 2005: https://www.fischl.de/usbasp/
I certainly used those a fair bit back then.
And then there’s TinyUSB / V-USB: https://www.obdev.at/products/vusb/index.html
Back in ~2014 that was the way to make an ATMega32u4 enumerate as a USBAudio device. The poor thing was maxed out with 2000 samples/sec read from an accelerometer (BMA180, BMA220 or BMA250).
Yeah, right? V-USB was awesome back in the day, and you could stand up simple devices on an ATTiny85, even. Writing your own descriptor files, however, was no fun.
I was going to hassle Tom about it, but then he did say “only greybeards” did that back then, and I looked in the mirror really quickly… my beard is literally grey.
(We made a MAME cabinet for Schmoocon way back in 2008 with V-USB on the Mega8!)