Pi-Powered Camera Turns Heads And Lenses In Equal Measure

November 7, 2025 by Tyler August 11 Comments

Have you ever seen photos of retro movie sets where the cameras seem to be bedazzled with lenses? Of course you can only film via one lens at a time, but mounting multiple lenses on a turret as was done in those days has certain advantages –particularly when working with tiny M12 lenses, like our own [Jenny List] recently did with this three-lens, Pi-zero based camera.

Given that it’s [Jenny], the hardware is truly open source, with not just the Python code to drive the Pi but the OpenSCAD code used to generate the STLs for the turret and the camera body all available via GitHub under a generous CC-BY-SA-4.0 license. Even using a cheap sensor and lenses from AliExpress, [Jenny] gets good results, as you can see from the demo video embedded below. (Jump to 1:20 if you just want to see images from the camera.)

The lenses are mounted to a 3D printed ring with detents to lock each quickly in place, held in place by a self-tapping screw, proving we at Hackaday practice what we preach. (Or that [Jenny] does, at least when it comes to fasteners.) Swapping lenses becomes a moment’s twist, as opposed to fiddling with tiny lenses hoping you don’t drop one. We imagine the same convenience is what drove turret cameras to be used in the movie industry, once upon a time.

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The Water-Cooled PS3 Sony Never Made

November 6, 2025 by Tyler August 3 Comments

The Playstation 3 had a dizzying number of variants from its first launch in 2006 to when they stopped selling the slim models over a decade later in 2017. Of all those, you’ve probably never heard of the water-cooled Playstation 3 Pro, for the simple reason that it did not exist until [Zac] of Zac Builds created it in a video to push the limits of the now-vintage hardware.

This hack isn’t totally unique; you used to be able to buy watercooling kits for the PS3, but like the console itself, those have long since left the market. Of course [Zac] is hacking this Playstation 3 in 2025, so he’s doing it in a very modern way: with 3D scanning and CNC machining.

After very, very carefully removing the heat spreaders from the CPU and GPU to replace the dried out thermal paste, [Zac] scans the main board to design mounts for the dual waterblocks. Those mounts are, of course, 3D printed in carbon fibre reinforced nylon. Since the mount is going to be under pressure and rather warm, he anneals the nylon for 24 hours at 85 degrees. 3D printing also comes into play mount the pump and radiator into a handsome case that nearly looks like something Sony could have put out back in the day. That whole workflow seems normal today, but would have been borderline science-fiction with the console was new. .

Note that this is not a 2007 unit. [Zac] picked the newest PS3 he could that was still hackable–each revision got more efficient as the chips moved to smaller architectures, but Sony did eventually lock down the firmware to prevent overclocking. Which is of course the point here: since the stock hardware leaves a lot on the table in terms of thermal management, [Zac] figured there would be great performance boosts available.

As it happens, [Zac] was right about performance boosts– on GPU limited titles, he’s getting upto 50% higher frame rates. (Which makes sense, given he’s overclocking the GPU by about 50%.) Loading times are also much improved with the inevitable HDD to SSD swap.

The last time we featured a watercooled playstation hack was back in 2011, for a PS3 laptop of all things. The modern workflow makes it much easier. It’s been a few years since we last posted a Playstation 3 hack. Perhaps now, as they age into becoming “retro” we’ll see a revival in that category.

Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip, via Yanko Design, which seems to provide an LLM-assisted (or generated) summary of [Zac]’s video.

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ABCCAD Is Voxels Meets LEGO In AR

November 6, 2025 by Tyler August 4 Comments

We get it, CAD software can be daunting to learn. Somehow [Boaztheostrich] found it so daunting he procrastinated his way into a AR voxel-based CAD app he calls “ABCCAD”, written in Godot for the Meta Quest 3.

The app is simplicity itself: pressing A or X on the controller spawns a cube, which you can place wherever you like in virtual space by moving the controller in real space. The trigger then saves the cube position. Grabbing a cube uses the controller’s grab buttons. You can even change colors (with B or Y), but like in OpenSCAD it appears that’s not actually going to have any effect on the exported STL. Check it out in action in the demo video embedded below.

As far as CAD applications go, this is as simplistic as it gets, but there’s a certain charm to its simplicity. It’s almost like virtual LEGO. Besides, TinkerCAD wasn’t much more complicated when it started out, and look at it now.

Sure, one could say if [Boaz] wanted to do CAD he’d have been better off putting the time into learning good old OpenSCAD or FreeCAD (which can now get you SolidWorks certs, apparently), but this is a fun little app that let him stretch his chops in Godot, another great open-source tool. ABCCAD is, itself, open-source under an MIT license.

We seem to have a paucity of posts under the Godot tag, so if you’ve got a hack that uses the open-source game engine, please send us a tip.

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DIY Powerwall Blows Clouds, Competition Out Of The Water

November 6, 2025 by Tyler August 34 Comments

Economists have this idea that we live in an efficient market, but it’s hard to fathom that when disposable vapes are equipped with rechargeable lithium cells. Still, just as market economists point out that if you leave a dollar on the sidewalk someone will pick it up, if you leave dollars worth of lithium batteries on the sidewalk, [Chris Doel] will pick them up and build a DIY home battery bank that we really hope won’t burn down his shop.

The Powerwall-like arrangement uses 500 batteries salvaged from disposable vapes. His personal quality control measure while pulling the cells from the vapes was to skip any that had been discharged past 3 V. On the other hand, we’d be conservative too if we had to live with this thing, solid brick construction or not.

That quality control was accomplished by a clever hack in and of itself: he built a device to blow through the found vapes and see if they lit up. (That starts at 3:20 in the vid.) No light? Not enough voltage. Easy. Even if you’re not building a hoe powerbank, you might take note of that hack if you’re interested in harvesting other people’s deathsticks for lithium cells. The secret ingredient was the pump from a CPAP machine. Actually, it was the only ingredient.)

In another nod to safety, he fuses every battery and the links between the 3D printed OSHA unapproved packs. The juxtoposition between janky build and careful design nods makes this hack delightful, and we really hope [Chris] doesn’t burn down his shed, because like the cut of his jib and hope to see more hacks from this lad. They likely won’t involve nicotine-soaked lithium, however, as the UK is finally banning disposable vapes.

In some ways, that’s a pity, since they’re apparently good for more than just batteries — you can host a website on some of these things. How’s that for market efficiency?

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Hacking Buttons Back Into The Car Stereo

November 5, 2025 by Tyler August 19 Comments

To our younger readers, a car without an all-touchscreen “infotainment” system may look clunky and dated, but really, you kids don’t know what they’re missing. Buttons, knobs, and switches all offer a level of satisfying tactility and feedback that touchscreens totally lack. [Garage Tinkering] on YouTube agrees; he also doesn’t like the way his aftermarket Kenwood head unit looks in his 2004-vintage Nissan. That’s why he decided to take matters into his own hands, and hack the buttons back on.

Rather than source a vintage stereo head unit, or try and DIY one from scratch, [Garage Tinkering] has actually hidden the modern touchscreen unit behind a button panel. That button panel is actually salvaged from the stock stereo, so the looks fit the car. The stereo’s LCD gets replaced with a modern color unit, but otherwise it looks pretty stock at the end.

Adding buttons to the Kenwood is all possible thanks to steering-wheel controls. In order to make use of those, the touchscreen head unit came with a little black box that translated the button press into some kind of one-wire protocol that turned out to be an inverted and carrier-less version of the NEC protocol used in IR TV remotes. (That bit of detective work comes from [michaelb], who figured all this out for his Ford years ago, but [Garage Tinkering] is also sharing his code on GitHub.) Continue reading “Hacking Buttons Back Into The Car Stereo” →

SolidWorks Certification… With FreeCAD?

November 5, 2025 by Tyler August 26 Comments

There are various CAD challenges out there that come with bragging rights. Some, like the Certified Solid Works Professional Exam (CWSP) might actually look good on a resume. [Deltahedra] is apparently not too interested in padding his resume, nor does he have much interest in SolidWorks, and so decided to conquer the CWSP with FreeCAD in the name of open source — and to show us all how he did it.

Because these CAD exams are meant to show your chops with the program, the resulting video makes an awesome FreeCAD tutorial. Spoiler alert: he’s able to model the part, though it takes him about 15 minutes. After modeling the part, the CWSP exam needs you to find the mass of the part, which [Deltahedra] does with the FCInfo macro — which, of course, he shows us how to install and use. The second and third questions are similar: change some variables (it is a parametric modeling software, after all) and find the new mass. In a second exercise, he needs to modify the model according to a new drawing. Modifying existing models can sometimes be more difficult than creating them, but [Deltahedra] and FreeCAD pass with flying colors once again.

If you’re at all curious about what FreeCAD can do, this video is a really impressive demonstration of FreeCAD’s part modeling workbench. We’ve had a few FreeCAD guides of our on on Hackaday, like this one on reverse engineering STLs and this one on best practices in the software, but if you’d asked us before the release of v1.0 we’d never have guessed you could use it for a SolidWorks exam in 2025. So while there are kudos due to [Deltahedra], the real accolades belong to the hardworking team behind FreeCAD that has brought it this far. Bravo!

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MCE Blaster Translates TTL For Modern(ish) Monitors

November 3, 2025 by Tyler August 15 Comments

VGA isn’t much used anymore, but it’s not hard to get a hold of monitors with that input. How about the older standards like EGA, CGA, or MDA? Well, it’s good luck on eBay or at the recycling yard to get a period-appropriate monitor, but the bulky, fragile CRTs seem to have been less likely to survive than computers that drove them. That’s what [Scrap Computer]’s MCE Blaster is for: it sits betwixt the retrocomputer’s TTL output and the VGA input of a (more) modern monitor, be it CRT or LCD.

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