Hackaday Passes 1,000,000 Comments

October 8, 2020 by Mike Szczys 114 Comments

For just over sixteen years we’ve been publishing fresh hacks every day. We’ve just passed another milestone: the one millionth Hackaday comment was made just a few minutes ago.

A million of anything is impressive, but it’s not the sheer volume that’s on my mind today, but how time and again I’m gobsmacked by the insightful comments I find on these pages, and the people who put them there. We find leads for futures stories, answers to unknowns voiced in the articles, and have conversations with thousands of people whose paths we never would have crossed otherwise.

Not a week goes by that I don’t lose myself in a comment thread, usually taking me down the rabbit hole of exploring a bit of technology previously hidden to me but revealed by a few words. How many Hackaday articles were spawned by someone posting just the right link in the comment section?

Too often the people who moved the world with interesting technologies move through their careers and beyond without anyone to really tell their stories to, and those are some of the best stories from the people working with the tech on a daily basis for decades. But then we publish an article that puts a spotlight on their corner of knowledge and we get to hear how it was from their perspective. It’s so gratifying to get these moments of insight on who and what have kept humanity’s relay-race of science forward.

So thank you! Keep those comments and those stories coming!

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Hackaday Podcast 087: Sound-Shattering Gliders, Pressing Dashcam Buttons, And Ratcheting Up Time

October 2, 2020 by Mike Szczys No comments

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams dish up a hot slice of the week’s hardware hacks. We feature a lot of clocks on Hackaday, but few can compare to the mechanical engineering elegance of the band-saw-blade-based ratcheting clock we swoon over on this week’s show. We’ve found a superb use of a six-pin microcontroller, peek in on tire (or is that tyre) wear particles, and hear the sounds of 500 mph RC gliders. It turns out that 3D printers are the primordial ooze for both pumping water and positioning cameras. This episode comes to a close by getting stressed out over concrete.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (60 MB or so.)

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All The Workshops, And The SMD Challenge Happening At Hackaday Remoticon

September 29, 2020 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

Last week we announced the first fifteen workshops happening at Hackaday Remoticon, November 6-8, 2020. The weekend really is packed full of these hands-on events, and you’re invited to participate from anywhere in the world. Today we’re excited to announce the rest of the workshops, all of which are currently open for registration.

Can we get a few hundred people to show off their soldering skills (or amusing lack of skills) from their own workbench during the event? We think we can, so we’re running the SMD Challenge virtually this year. All of this, plus keynote talks, demos, a show-and-tell, and more make for one wild weekend. Read on!
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Ask Hackaday: Is Windows XP Source Code Leak A Bad Thing?

September 25, 2020 by Mike Szczys 57 Comments

News comes overnight that the Windows XP source code has been leaked. The Verge says they have “verified the material as legitimate” and that the leak also includes Windows Server 2003 and some DOS and CE code as well. The thing is, it has now been more than six years since Microsoft dropped support for XP, does it really matter if the source code is made public?

The Poison Pill

As Erin Pinheiro pointed out in her excellent article on the Nintendo IP leak earlier this year (perhaps the best Joe Kim artwork of the year on that one, by the way), legitimate developers can’t really make use of leaked code since it opens them up to potential litigation. Microsoft has a formidable legal machine that would surely go after misuse of the code from a leak like this. Erin mentions in her article that just looking at the code is the danger zone for competitors.

Even if other software companies did look at the source code and implement their own improvements without crossing the legal line, how much is there still to gain? Surely companies with this kind of motivation would have reverse engineered the secret sauce of the long dead OS by now, right?

Spy vs. Spy

The next thing that comes to mind are the security implications. At the time of writing, statcount pegs Windows XP at a 0.82% market share which is still going to be a very large number of machines. Perhaps a better question to consider is what types of machines are still running it? I didn’t find any hard data to answer this question, however there are dedicated machines like MRIs that don’t have easy upgrade paths and still use the OS and there is an embedded version of XP that runs on point-of-sale, automated teller machines, set-top boxes, and other long-life hardware that are notorious for not being upgraded by their owners.

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Hackaday Podcast 086: News Overflow, Formula 1/3 Racer, Standing Up For Rubber Duckies, And Useless Machine Takes A Turn

September 25, 2020 by Mike Szczys No comments

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys peruse the world of hacks. There was so much news this week that we lead off the show with a rundown to catch you up. Yet there is still no shortage of hardware hacks, with prosthetic legs for your rubber ducky, a RC cart that channels the spirit of Formula 1, and a project that brings 80’s video conferencing hardware to Zoom. There’s phosphine gas on Venus and unlimited hacking projects inside your guitar. The week wouldn’t be complete without the joy of riffing on the most useless machine concept.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (60 MB or so.)

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Remoticon Tickets And Workshops Just Dropped

September 22, 2020 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

Hackaday Remoticon happens November 6-8 worldwide! The weekend will be packed with virtual activities, and most of them are hands-on workshops that you can participate in from the comfort of your home, lab, garage, basement, lair, or other socially distanced location of your choosing.

The news today is that everyone should register for Remoticon right now, and that we’re opening up registration for about half of the total workshops. More details on the remaining workshops, demos, and some special events will be available in a future article.

Get a Ticket for Remoticon, Then Register for Workshops

Step 1: Register for the Con. What you want to do right now is head over to the Remoticon ticketing page and register for the conference. We need to get a headcount so that our servers don’t melt down during this massive online social event. You can get a ticket for free, or you can choose pay as you wish — scroll to the bottom of the tickets under “Donations” — and those proceeds go to charities that feed, house, or educate people. In these hard times, if you’re in a position to spare a few bucks, please do so.

Step 2: Buy your workshop ticket(s). A workshop isn’t a workshop unless you can ask questions and get help along the way. Workshop tickets are for attendees who want to participate live, interacting with the presenters and other attendees via video chat. We’ve made all workshop tickets $10 as “skin in the game” to help ensure that these limited slots go to good use. Proceeds from workshop tickets will be used to offset the costs of hosting Remoticon.

If there is one request that we get every Supercon, it’s to film the workshops. This year, we can! If you can’t attend a workshop that you’re interested in we plan to record, edit, and publish them all so everyone can follow along at a later date.

The registration page has workshop descriptions listed when you select your ticket, but here are the titles whet your appetite. Thank you to everyone who submitted a workshop proposal, none of this is possible without you, naturally.

Basics of RF Emissions Debugging
Crowd-Controlled Robots
The Hackers Guide to Hardware Debugging
How to 3D Print onto Fabric
Introduction to Firmware Reverse Engineering
Introduction to Modular Synthesis using VCV Rack
KiCad to Blender > Photorealistic PCB renders
Learn How to Hack a Car
Live Breaking into Encrypted 3D Printer Firmware
MachineChat – JEDI One – A Universal Sensor Hub
PCB Reverse Engineering
Prototyping to the Max
Soldering, Nothing To Be Afraid Of!
Tiny ML
Zero to ASIC in Two Hours

Casio Computer Rebuild Puts New Wine In An Old Bottle

September 18, 2020 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

With a glut of vintage consumer electronics available from eBay it should be easy to relive your glory days, right? Unfortunately the march of time means that finding gear is easy but finding gear that works is not. So was the case when [Amen] acquired not one, but two used calculator/computer units hoping to end up with one working device. Instead, he went down the rabbit hole of redesigning his own electronics to drive the Casio QT-1 seen here.

Especially interesting is the prototyping process for the replacement board. [Amen] used a “BluePill” STM32 microcontroller board at its heart, and used point-to-point soldering for the rest of the circuitry on a rectangle of protoyping board. That circuit is non-trivial, needing a 23 V source to drive the original VFD from the computer, a battery-backed real-time-clock (MCP7940), and a GPIO expander to scan the keys on the keypad.

It worked great, but couldn’t be cut down to fit in the case. The solution was a PCB designed to fit the footprint of the original. The modern guts still need more firmware work and a couple of tweaks like nudging that 23 V rail a bit higher to 26 V for better brightness, but the work already warrants a maniacal cry of “It’s Alive!”.

This isn’t [Amen’s] first rodeo. Back in March we looked in on another vintage Casio refurb that sniffed out the display protocol.