39C3: Hardware, And The Hard Bit

December 29, 2025 by Elliot Williams 11 Comments

The 39th annual Chaos Communication Congress (39C3) is underway, and it kicked off with a talk that will resonate deeply with folks in the Hackaday universe. [Kliment] gave an impassioned invitation for everyone to start making hardware based on his experience both in the industry and in giving an intro-to-surface-mount workshop to maybe thousands of hackers over the years.

His main points are that the old “hardware is hard” cliche is overdone. Of course, working on a complicated high-reliability medical device isn’t child’s play, but that’s not where you start off. And getting started in hardware design and hobby-scale manufacture has never been easier or cheaper, and the open-source tooling gives you a foot in the door.

He tells the story of an attendee at a workshop who said “I kept waiting for the hard part to come, but then I was finished.” Starting off with the right small-scale projects, learning a few techniques, and ramping up skills built on skills is the way to go. ([Kliment] is a big proponent of hand-placed hot-plate reflow soldering, and we concur.)

This is the talk that you want to show to your software friends who are hardware-curious. It’s also a plea for more experimentation, more prototyping, more hacking, and simply more people in the hardware / DIY electronics scene. Here at Hackaday, it’s maybe preaching to the choir, but sometimes it’s just nice to hear saying it all out loud.

Retrocomputing: Simulacrum Or The Real Deal?

December 20, 2025 by Elliot Williams 35 Comments

The holidays are rapidly approaching, and you probably already have a topic or two to argue with your family about. But what about with your hacker friends? We came upon an old favorite the other day: whether it “counts” as retrocomputing if you’re running a simulated version of the system or if it “needs” to run on old iron.

This lovely C64esque laptop sparked the controversy. It’s an absolute looker, with a custom keyboard and a retro-reimagining-period-correct flaptop design, but the beauty is only skin deep: the guts are a Raspberry Pi 5 running VICE. An emulator! Horrors!

We’ll admit to being entirely torn. There’s something about the old computers that’s very nice to lay hands on, and we just don’t get the same feels from an emulator running on our desktop. But a physical reproduction like with many of the modern C64 recreations, or [Oscar Vermeulen]’s PiDP-8/I really floats our boat in a way that an in-the-browser emulation experience simply doesn’t.

Another example was the Voja 4, the Supercon 2022 badge based on a CPU that never existed. It’s not literally retro, because [Voja Antonics] designed it during the COVID quarantines, so there’s no “old iron” at all. Worse, it’s emulated; the whole thing exists as a virtual machine inside the onboard PIC.

But we’d argue that this badge brought more people something very much like the authentic PDP-8 experience, or whatever. We saw people teaching themselves to do something functional in an imaginary 4-bit machine language over a weekend, and we know folks who’ve kept at it in the intervening years. Part of the appeal was that it reflected nearly everything about the machine state in myriad blinking lights. Or rather, it reflected the VM running on the PIC, because remember, it’s all just a trick.

So we’ll fittingly close this newsletter with a holiday message of peace to the two retrocomputing camps: Maybe you’re both right. Maybe the physical device and its human interfaces do matter – emulation sucks – but maybe it’s not entirely relevant what’s on the inside of the box if the outside is convincing enough. After all, if we hadn’t done [Kevin Noki] dirty by showing the insides of his C64 laptop, maybe nobody would ever have known.

User Serviceable Parts

December 13, 2025 by Elliot Williams 18 Comments

Al and I were talking on the podcast about the Home Assistant home automation hub software. In particular, about how devilishly well designed it is for extensibility. It’s designed to be added on to, and that makes all of the difference.
That doesn’t mean that it’s trivial to add your own wacky control or sensor elements to the system, but that it’s relatively straightforward, and that it accommodates you. If your use case isn’t already covered, there is probably good documentation available to help guide you in the right direction, and that’s all a hacker really needs. As evidence for why you might care, take the RTL-HAOS project that we covered this week, which adds nearly arbitrary software-defined radio functionality to your setup.

And contrast this with many commercial systems that are hard to hack on because they are instead focused on making sure that the least-common-denominator user is able to get stuff working without even reading a single page of documentation. They are so focused on making everything that’s in-scope easy that they spend no thought on expansion, or worse they actively prevent it.

Of course, it’s not trivial to make a system that’s both extremely flexible and relatively easy to use. We all know examples where the configuration of even the most basic cases is a nightmare simply because the designer wanted to accommodate everything. Somehow, Home Assistant has managed to walk the fine line in the middle, where it’s easy enough to use that you don’t have to be a wizard, but that you can make it do what you want if you are, and hence it got spontaneous hat-tips from both Al and myself. Food for thought if you’re working on a complex system that’s aimed at the DIY / hacker crowd.

Something New Every Day, Something Relevant Every Week?

December 6, 2025 by Elliot Williams 41 Comments

The site is called Hackaday, and has been for 21 years. But it was only for maybe the first half-year that it was literally a hack a day. By the 2010s, we were putting out four or more per day, and in the later 20-teens, we settled into our current cadence of eight hacks per day, plus some original pieces over the top. That’s a lot of hacks per day! (But “Eight-to-Ten-Hacks-a-Day” just isn’t as catchy.)

With that many posts daily, we also tend to reach out to a broader array of interests. Quite simply, not every hack is necessarily going to be just exactly what you are looking for, but we wouldn’t be writing it up if we didn’t think that someone was looking for it. Maybe you don’t like CAN bus hacks, but you’re into biohacking, or retrocomputing. Our broad group of writers helps to make sure that we’ll get you covered sooner or later.

What’s still surprising to me, though, is that a couple of times per week, there is a hack that is actually relevant to a particular project that I’m currently working on. It’s one thing to learn something new every day, and I’d bet that I do, but it’s entirely another to learn something new and relevant.

So I shouldn’t have been shocked when Tom and I were going over the week’s hacks on the podcast, and he picked an investigation of injecting spray foam into 3D prints. I liked that one too, but for me it was just “learn something new”. Tom has been working on an underwater ROV, and it perfectly scratched an itch that he has – how to keep the top of the vehicle more buoyant, while keeping the whole thing waterproof.

That kind of experience is why I’ve been reading Hackaday for 21 years now, and it’s all of our hope that you get some of that too from time to time. There is a lot of “new” on the Internet, and that’s a wonderful thing. But the combination of new and relevant just can’t be beat! So if you’ve got anything you want to hear more about, let us know.

Elli Furedy Brings Cyberpunk Games To Life

November 26, 2025 by Elliot Williams 4 Comments

When you’re designing a bounty hunter game for a five-day cyberpunk live-action-role-play out in the middle of the Mojave desert, you’ve got to bring something extra cool. But [Elli]’s Hackaday Supercon talk isn’t just about the hardware; it’s as much about the design philosophy behind the game – how you bring something immersive and exciting to hundreds of players.

Sandbox Systems

The game itself is fairly simple: bounty hunters try to find the bounty, and when they do, they have a quick-draw to see who wins. Everyone is issued a color-coded Portable Data Node device, and when a hunter jacks into a bounty’s Node, a countdown begins, and the first to press the button after the display say “Go” wins.

But the simplicity of the game is by design, and [Elli] talks about the philosophy that she and her team followed to make it a success. If you’re designing a conference badge or an immersive game for a large group of people, take note.

The first principle is to focus on the people first before the tech. Here, that essentially means making the experience as simple as possible in order to leave room for the players to put their own spin on it – it’s a role-play event after all.

Next is providing opportunities over demands. In this game, for instance, if you’re playing the bounty hunter role, you have to deliver a “Declaration of Intent to Seize” when you encounter a bounty player, but what deciding on your personal catchphrase for this is left up to you. Continue reading “Elli Furedy Brings Cyberpunk Games To Life” →

Why Do We Love Weird Old Tech?

November 22, 2025 by Elliot Williams 72 Comments

One of our newer writers, [Tyler August], recently wrote a love letter to plasma TV technology. Sitting between the ubiquitous LCD and the vanishing CRT, the plasma TV had its moment in the sun, but never became quite as popular as either of the other display techs, for all sorts of reasons. By all means, go read his article if you’re interested in the details. I’ll freely admit that it had me thinking that I needed a plasma TV.

I don’t, of course. But why do I, and probably a bunch of you out there, like old and/or odd tech? Take [Tyler]’s plasma fetish, for instance, or many people’s love for VFD or nixie tube displays. At Supercon, a number of people had hit up Apex Electronics, a local surplus store, and came away with some sweet old LED character displays. And I’ll admit to having two handfuls of these displays in my to-hack-on drawer that I bought surplus a decade ago because they’re so cute.

It’s not nostalgia. [Tyler] never had a plasma growing up, and those LED displays were already obsolete before the gang of folks who had bought them were even born. And it’s not simply that it’s old junk – the objects of our desire were mostly all reasonably fancy tech back in their day. And I think that’s part of the key.

My theory is that, as time and tech progresses, we see these truly amazing new developments become commonplace, and get forgotten by virtue of their ever-presence. For a while, having a glowing character display in your car stereo would have been truly futuristic, and then when the VFD went mainstream, it kind of faded into our ambient technological background noise. But now that we all have high-res entertainment consoles in our cars, which are frankly basically just a cheap tablet computer (see what I did there?), the VFD becomes an object of wonder again because it’s rare.

Which is not to say that LCD displays are anything short of amazing. Count up the rows and columns of pixels, and multiply by three for RGB, and that’s how many nanoscale ITO traces there are on the screen of even the cheapest display these days. But we take it for granted because we are surrounded by cheap screens.

I think we like older, odder tech because we see it more easily for the wonder that it is because it’s no longer commonplace. But that doesn’t mean that our current “boring” tech is any less impressive. Maybe the moral of the story is to try to approach and appreciate what we’ve got now with new eyes. Pretend you’re coming in from the future and finding this “old” gear. Maybe try to figure out how it must have worked.