Humans flew around the Moon this week, but Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi were stuck on Earth — luckily, there was no shortage of stories and hacks to keep them occupied. From the news that Linux might be putting the i486 out to pasture, to the fascinating potential of the threadless ball screw and connecting Bluetooth calipers up to FreeCAD.
You’ll hear about the latest in Internet via high-altitude balloon, the zen of organizing your parts bins, all the problems with Markdown files, and a deep-dive into making a convincing LED fire effect. The episode wraps up with some polarizing opinions on long term data storage, and a freewheeling discussion about the importance of literal moonshots.
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!
Flying around the Moon? Download this episode in DRM-free MP3 so you’ll have something to listen to.
Episode 365 Show Notes:
News:
- 2026 Hackaday Europe: First Round Of Speakers Announced!
- Intel 486 Support Likely To Be Removed In Linux 7.1
- Espressif’s New ESP32-S31: Dual-Core RISC-V With WiFi 6 And GBit Ethernet
What’s that Sound?
- Think you know that sound? Fill out the form for a chance to win!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
- The Threadless Ball Screw Never Took Off, But Don’t Write It Off
- Pocket-Sized E-Ink Gets A Firmware Upgrade
- Turning A Bluetooth Caliper Into A FreeCAD Input Device
- Tracking Parts Box Usage With Stickers
- Magnetic Levitation Using An Induction Cooktop
- Flying Cell Towers For Lower-Latency
Quick Hacks:
- Elliot’s Picks:
- Tom’s Picks:
Listening to the episode now and on the ESP arch topic & Elliot’s comments on AVR assembly: reading his book MAKE: AVR in ~2014 was what took me beyond the Arduino ecosystem into the world I knew had to be out there beyond printf() and coincidentally landed me as a daily reader (+ a later MSE in Controls/Embedded) so thank you Elliot for providing that gateway!
*not printf(), digitalWrite()
No lack of edit function to blame for user input here. I did learn the joy of an ASM version of printf() on the STM32 family shortly later too though!
If it’s worth backing up… I don’t think RAID is the answer.
If your house burns down… sure.. a lot of what you have might not matter compared to what just happened. But.. for example… all your family photos? That’s a big one.
I use a couple of hard drives and a hot-swap bay. I keep one backup drive at home and one at work. Then occasionally I pop the home-one in the bay, run a backup script, pop it out and take it to work. There I swap it with the one that was there and bring it home.
Both my home and my workplace would have to suffer disasters at the same time for me to lose all those pictures of passed away loved ones.. my kid as a young child.. etc…