Author: Jenny List

3367 Articles

The Perfect Cheat’s Racing Bicycle

March 3, 2026 by 24 Comments

One of the ongoing rumors and scandals in professional cycle sport concerns “motor doping” — the practice of concealing an electric motor in a bicycle to provide the rider with an unfair advantage. It’s investigated in a video from [Global Cycling Network], in which they talk about the background and then prove its possible by creating a motor doped racing bike.

To do this they’ve recruited a couple of recent graduate engineers, who get to work in a way most of us would be familiar with: prototyping with a set of 18650 cells, some electronics, and electromagnets. It uses what they call a “Magic wheel”, which features magnets embedded in its rim that engage with hidden electromagnets. It gives somewhere just under 20 W boost, which doesn’t sound much, but could deliver those crucial extra seconds in a race.

Perhaps the most interesting part is the section which looks at the history of motor doping with some notable cases mentioned, and the steps taken by cycling competition authorities to detect it. They use infra-red cameras, magnetometers, backscatter detectors, and even X-ray machines, but even these haven’t killed persistent rumors in the sport. It’s a fascinating video we’ve placed below the break, and we thank [Seb] for the tip. Meanwhile the two lads who made the bike are looking for a job, so if any Hackaday readers are hiring, drop them a line.

Continue reading “The Perfect Cheat’s Racing Bicycle” →

Examining A World’s Record From The Age Of Steam

March 2, 2026 by 19 Comments

There aren’t many speed records that remain unbroken for the greater part of a century, but one of them is that of the fastest steam locomotive. As with so many such things, there’s a bit of controversy and more than one contender, but the one in the record books is the A4 Pacific, Mallard. In 1938, this locomotive thundered down an incline on the London & North Eastern Railway’s mainline in the north of England at 126 MPH. But can that number be taken as reliable? The Institute of Mechanical Engineers has a video in which they investigate.

It’s a fascinating look at the science of railway speed measurement as it existed in 1938, the record itself, and the paper dynamometer roll which recorded it. We’ve placed the video below the break, and in it, we see an in-depth analysis of the noise and inconsistencies in the recording, and see them come to the conclusion that a safer figure to quote would be 124 MPH.

Our assessment is that, of course, the LNER wanted to squeeze every morsel of publicity from it in a game of one-upmanship with their arch-rivals in the London Midland and Scottish railway, so it’s likely that their use of a momentary figure makes sense in that light. Even the best-laid 1930s jointed track would have been bumpy compared to modern continuous rail, and we are guessing that the ancient clerestory dynamometer car would hardly be as smooth-riding as a modern express coach. The achievement of measuring at all with mechanical instruments in such an environment at those speeds would have been tricky, to say the least. It leaves us wondering whether 1930s electronics could have produced some kind of trackside measurement device, but perhaps the LNER trusted their mechanical instruments more. Perhaps the Pennsylvania Railroad should have followed its example.

Continue reading “Examining A World’s Record From The Age Of Steam” →

The Long Afterlife Of The Console Modchip

March 1, 2026 by 18 Comments

For a late-1990s engineer with good soldering skills, many a free pint of beer could be earned by installing modchips on the game consoles of the day. Modchips were usually a small microcontroller connected with a few wires to selected pins on the chips or pads on the board that masked or overrode the copy protection and region locking. This scene was brought back for us by a recent [Modern vintage gamer] video looking at the history of console hardware mods, and it’s worth a watch (see the video, below).

The story starts in 1996 with the original PlayStation, largely the source of those free pints for a nascent Hackaday scribe back in the day. Along the way, as he expands the story, we find other memories, for example, the LPC bus-based hijacks of the first XBox console, and the huge modding scenes on both that machine and Sony’s PS2. The conclusion is that this community left its mark on today’s consoles even though the easy hardware hacks may be a thing of the past on the latest hardware, and as past Hackaday articles can attest, jailbreaking older consoles still has a way to go.

In the early days, our recollection is that the PlayStation modchips were driven by the region locking rather than piracy, for the simple reason that Sony used 80-minute ISOs which wouldn’t fit on the then-available consumer 74-minute CD-R. We also remember them being used by people who couldn’t afford a blue debuugging PlayStation,. or the rare black developer model.

Continue reading “The Long Afterlife Of The Console Modchip” →

Reflections On Ten Years With The Wrencher

February 27, 2026 by 26 Comments

An auspicious anniversary passed for me this week, as it’s a decade since I started writing for Hackaday. In that time this job has taken me all over  Europe, it’s shown me the very best and most awesome things our community has to offer, and I hope that you have enjoyed my attempts to share all of that with you. It’s worth a moment to reflect on the last ten years in terms of what has made our world during that time. Continue reading “Reflections On Ten Years With The Wrencher” →

CSS, Now It’s Got Your 8086

February 27, 2026 by 12 Comments

The modern web browser is now far more than a thing for rendering web pages, it’s a multi-faceted environment that can provide a home for almost any application you could imagine. But why should JavaScript or Wasm have all the fun? CSS is Turing complete now, right? Why not, as [Lyra Rebane] has done, write an 8086 emulator in pure CSS?

The web page at the link above may contain an 8086, but missing MMU aside, don’t expect it to run Linux just yet. Instead it has limited resources, just enough to run a demo program. It needs a Chrome-adjacent browser because it uses some CSS functions not available in for example Firefox, but we’ll forgive it that oddity. Its clock is provided by a small piece of JavaScript not because CSS can’t provide one, but because the JS version is more stable.

On one hand this is of little practical use, but to dismiss it as such is to entirely miss the point. It’s in the fine spirit of experimentation, and we love it. Perhaps a better way to look at it is to see what could be done more efficiently with the same idea. A 1970s CISC microprocessor might not be the best choice, but would for example a minimalist and optimized RISC design be more capable? We’re looking forward to where others take this thread.

It’s not the first unexpected computing environment we’ve found, who could forget the DOOM calculator!

Header: Thomas Nguyen, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Building The Haxocorder

February 26, 2026 by 9 Comments

The Haxophone is an open source MIDI saxophone project that has achieved some popularity. It’s caught the attention of [Shieladixon] not because she is a saxophonist but because she plays the recorder and is dissatisfied with existing MIDI recorder peripherals. She’s set about modifying the device to produce the Haxocorder, a better MIDI recorder.

The video below the break is the third of a series, of which part one and part two deal with the Haxophone and the shortcomings of her existing recorder peripheral. She’s replacing the Pi Zero of the Haxophone with a Pi Pico in a Zero form factor, and simplifying its design significantly to remove unnecessary features. The result is a versatile instrument capable at a touch of becoming the full range of recorders, which she demonstrates with some nifty duet work.

The upstream Haxophone project can be found here if you are interested, and we hope she follows this up with a release of her mods to make the Haxocorder. Meanwhile if you feel you might have seen her work before, she’s the brains behind the MIDISID.

Continue reading “Building The Haxocorder” →

The Engineering Of A Jimi Hendrix Performance

February 26, 2026 by 32 Comments

The guitarist Jimi Hendrix had a unique sound which has influenced countless musicians over the decades. He achieved it through mastery not only of his instrument, but of the complex feedback relationship between amplifier, environment, and guitar — coupled with a series of effects pedals including some then-unique ones made for him. Musical commentators have pored over his work for decades, but a recent piece in IEEE Spectrum is particularly interesting as it examines things from a technical perspective.

It centers around an electrical simulation of Hendrix’s effects chain, and makes an assertion that’s obvious on consideration but not the usual take on a Hendrix performance; that in his hands it became a wave synthesizer rather than the instrument itself. Certainly for anyone with an interest in analogue audio electronics as they pertain to musical synthesis it helps in placing the influence of the different circuits on the sound, and in hearing the familiar performances in a new light.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen someone take a modelling approach to a guitar effects chain, indeed it’s obvious something missing from the work above is the guitar itself.

Header image: Gemeente Rotterdam (Stadsarchief) CC-0.