Author: Jenny List

3214 Articles

Ask Hackaday: Now You Install Your Friends’ VPNs. But Which One?

September 3, 2025 by 75 Comments

Something which may well unite Hackaday readers is the experience of being “The computer person” among your family or friends. You’ll know how it goes, when you go home for Christmas, stay with the in-laws, or go to see some friend from way back, you end up fixing their printer connection or something. You know that they would bridle somewhat if you asked them to do whatever it is they do for a living as a free service for you, but hey, that’s the penalty for working in technology.

Bad Laws Just Make People Avoid Them

There’s a new one that’s happened to me and no doubt other technically-minded Brits over the last few weeks: I’m being asked to recommend, and sometimes install, a VPN service. The British government recently introduced the Online Safety Act, which is imposing ID-backed age verification for British internet users when they access a large range of popular websites. The intent is to regulate access to pornography, but the net has been spread so wide that many essential or confidential services are being caught up in it. To be a British Internet user is to have your government peering over your shoulder, and while nobody’s on the side of online abusers, understandably a lot of my compatriots want no part of it. We’re in the odd position of having 4Chan and the right-wing Reform Party alongside Wikipedia among those at the front line on the matter. What a time to be alive.

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An Amiga Demo With No CPU Involved

September 2, 2025 by 27 Comments

Of the machines from the 16-bit era, the Commodore Amiga arguably has the most active community decades later, and it’s a space which still has the power to surprise. Today we have a story which perhaps pushes the hardware farther than ever before: a demo challenge for the Amiga custom chips only, no CPU involved.

The Amiga was for a time around the end of the 1980s the most exciting multimedia platform, not because of the 68000 CPU it shared with other platforms, but because of its set of custom co-processors that handled tasks such as graphics manipulation, audio, and memory. Each one is a very powerful piece of silicon capable of many functions, but traditionally it would have been given its tasks by the CPU. The competition aims to find how possible it is to run an Amiga demo entirely on these chips, by using the CPU only for a loader application, with the custom chip programming coming entirely from a pre-configured memory map which forms the demo.

The demoscene is a part of our community known for pushing hardware to its limits, and we look forward to seeing just what they do with this one. If you have never been to a demo party before, you should, after all everyone should go to a demo party!

Amiga CD32 motherboard: Evan-Amos, Public domain.

No Need For Inserts If You’re Prepared To Use Self-Tappers

September 2, 2025 by 57 Comments

As the art of 3D printing has refined itself over the years, a few accessories have emerged to take prints to the next level. One of them is the threaded insert, a a piece of machined brass designed to be heat-set into a printed hole in the part. They can be placed by hand with a soldering iron, or for the really cool kids, with a purpose-built press. They look great and they can certainly make assembly of a 3D printed structure very easy, but I’m here to tell you they are not as necessary as they might seem. There’s an alternative I have been using for years which does essentially the same job without the drama. Continue reading “No Need For Inserts If You’re Prepared To Use Self-Tappers” →

A Label Printer Gets A New Brain

September 1, 2025 by 9 Comments

The internals of a printer, whatever technology it may use, are invariably proprietary, with an abstracted more standard language being used to communicate with a host computer. Thus it’s surprisingly rare to see hacks on printers as printers, rather than printer hacks using the parts for some other purpose. This makes [Oelison]’s brain-swap of a Casio thermal label printer a welcome surprise, as it puts an ESP32 in the machine instead of whatever Casio gave it.

The value in the hack lies in the insight it gives into how a thermal printer works as much as it does in the ESP32 and the Casio, as it goes into some detail on the various signals involved. The strobe line for instance to enable the heater is a nuance we were unaware of. The resulting printer will lose its keyboard and display, but  make up for it in connectivity.

Despite what we said earlier this isn’t the first label printer hack we’ve seen. A previous one was Linux-based though.

Lightning Talks On Time, With This Device

August 31, 2025 by 3 Comments

Ask a Hackaday scribe who’s helped run the lightning talks at one of our events, and they’ll tell you that keeping the speakers on time is a challenge. Conversely if the staffer is trying to indicate to the speaker how much time they have left, it must be difficult from the podium to keep track while delivering your talk. Fortunately there’s [makeTVee] waiting in the wings with a solution, a cube whose faces each have a custom 5×7 LED matrix on them. The countdown is clear and unambiguous, and should provide no distractions.

The brains behind it all is a XIAO nRF52840 Sense board using the Zephyr RTOS, the LEDs are WS2812s on their own PCBs, and the party piece is only revealed at the end of the countdown. A tilt mechanism triggered by a servo releases a ball bearing down a track, where it hits a telephone bell and provides a very audible reminder to the speaker. The result saw action during the lightning talks at the Hackaday Europe event earlier in the year, but it’s taken a while for the write-up to make it online.

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CAD, From Scratch: MakerCAD

August 29, 2025 by 29 Comments

It’s likely that many of you use some form of CAD package, but how many of you have decided you didn’t like the software on offer? [Marcus Wu] did, and instead of griping, he wrote his own CAD software. It’s called MakerCAD, it’s published under an MIT licence, and you can try it yourself.

It’s written in Go, and it’s superficially similar to OpenSCAD in that the interface is through code. The similarity is skin deep though, as it provides the user with constraint solving as described in the video below the break.

As it stands it’s by no means feature complete, but it is now at a point at which it can be evaluated. Simple models can be created and exported as STEP files, so it can be used as a real-world CAD tool.

Whether it will flourish is down to the path it takes and how its community guides it. But we’re pleased to see any new open source projects in this space, which remains overly dominated by proprietary packages. If you try it, write up your experiences, we’d love to see how this develops.

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