Author: Al Williams

4256 Articles

Toasty Subwoofer Limps Back To Life

October 11, 2025 by 6 Comments

[JohnAudioTech] noticed there was no bass on the TV at his parents’ house. That led to the discovery of a blown fuse and a corresponding repair. When he opened it up, he could smell that something had gone on in the amplifier. You can follow the repair in the video below.

His first theory was that some glue became conductive and shorted the power rails. We were skeptical, to be honest. When he fed power to it through a current limiter, he could hear a sizzling noise and even see a little glowing from the hot component.

Disassembly ensued. Removing the suspect components showed some seriously burned components and some charring under a switching transistor. The capacitors looked much worse for wear, and the PCB needed some wires to jumper burned conductors.

At the end, there was thumping, so it seems the surgery was a success. However, testing blew a fuse again, which made us nervous. Still, seems to work if you don’t drive it too hard.

We always enjoy watching a teardown, and if there’s a repair too, that’s even better.

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Possibly The Newest ISA Card

October 10, 2025 by 13 Comments

Back when the IBM PC was new, laying out an ISA board was a daunting task. You probably didn’t have a very fast ‘scope, if you had one at all. Board layout was almost certainly done on a drafting table with big pieces of tape. It was hard for small companies, much less hobbyists, to make a new card. You could buy a prototype board and wirewrap or otherwise put together something, but that was also not for the faint of heart. But with modern tools, something like that is a very doable project and [profdc9] has, in fact, done it. The card uses an ATMega328P and provides two SD cards for use as mass storage on an old computer.

The design tries to use parts that won’t be hard to get in the future. At least for a while, yet. There’s capacity for expansion, too, as there is an interface for a Wiznet 5500 Ethernet adapter.

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QUIC! Jump To User Space!

October 10, 2025 by 18 Comments

Everyone knows that Weird Al lampooned computers in a famous parody song (It’s All About the Pentiums). But if you want more hardcore (including more hardcore language, so if you are offended by rap music-style explicit lyrics, maybe don’t look this up), you probably want “Kill Dash 9” by Monzy. There’s a line in that song about “You thought the seven-layer model referred to a burrito.” In fact, it refers to how networking applications operate, and it is so ingrained that you don’t even hear about it much these days. But as [Codemia] points out, QUIC aims to disrupt the model, and for good reason.

Historically, your application (at layer 7) interacts with the network through other layers like the presentation layer and session layer. At layer 4, though, there is the transport layer where two names come into play: TCP and UDP. Generally, UDP is useful where you want to send data and you don’t expect the system to do much. Data might show up at its destination. Or not. Or it might show up multiple times. It might show up in the wrong order. TCP solves all that, but you have little control over how it does that.

When things are congested, there are different strategies TCP can use, but changing them can be difficult. That’s where QUIC comes in. It is like a user-space TCP layer built over a UDP transport. There are a lot of advantages to that, and if you want to know more, or even just want a good overview of network congestion control mitigations, check the post out.

If you want to know more about congestion control, catch a wave.

Hackaday Podcast Episode 340: The Best Programming Language, Space Surgery, And Hacking Two 3D Printers Into One

October 3, 2025 by No comments

Elliot Williams and Al Williams got together to share their favorite hacks of the week with you. If you listen in, you’ll hear exciting news about the upcoming SuperCon and the rare occurrence of Al winning the What’s That Sound game.

For hacks, the guys talk about the IEEE’s take on the “best” programming languages of 2025 and how they think AI is going to fundamentally transform the job of a programmer. On a lighter note, there’s an industrial robot who retired to bartending, a minimal drum machine, a high-powered laser, and a Fortran flight simulator reborn with Unity 3D.

In the “can’t miss” category, you’ll learn how not to switch Linux distributions and what to expect when you need surgery while on your next mission to outer space.

There’s lots more. Want to follow along? Check out the links below. As always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Or download in DRM-free MP3 playable even over 56K modems.

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Lost Techniques: Bond-out CPUs And In Circuit Emulation

October 1, 2025 by 18 Comments

These days, we take it for granted that you can connect a cheap piece of hardware to a microcontroller and have an amazing debugging experience. Stop the program. Examine memory and registers. You can see and usually change anything. There are only a handful of ways this is done on modern CPUs, and they all vary only by detail. But this wasn’t always the case. Getting that kind of view to an actual running system was an expensive proposition.

Today, you typically have some serial interface, often JTAG, and enough hardware in the IC to communicate with a host computer to reveal and change internal state, set breakpoints, and the rest. But that wasn’t always easy. In the bad old days, transistors were large and die were small. You couldn’t afford to add little debugging pins to each processor you produced.

This led to some very interesting workarounds. Of course, you could always run simulators on a larger computer. But that might not work in real time, and almost certainly didn’t have all the external things you wanted to connect to, unless you also simulated them. Continue reading “Lost Techniques: Bond-out CPUs And In Circuit Emulation” →

Porting A Fortran Flight Simulator To Unity3D

October 1, 2025 by 8 Comments

There’s an old saying (paraphrasing a quote attributed to Hoare): “I don’t know what language scientists will use in the future, but I know it will be called Fortran.” The truth is, there is a ton of very sophisticated code in Fortran, and if you want to do something more modern, it is often easier to borrow it than to reinvent the wheel. When [Valgriz] picked up a textbook on aircraft simulation, he noted that it had an F-16 simulation in it. In Fortran. The challenge? Port it to Unity3D.

If you have a gamepad, you can try the result. However, the real payoff is the blog posts describing what he did. They go back to 2021, although the most recent was a few months ago, and they cover the entire process in great detail. You can also find the code on GitHub. If you are interested in flight simulation, flying, Fortran, or Unity3D, you’ll want to settle in and read all four posts. That will take some time.

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Ask Hackaday: What’s The Top Programming Language Of 2025

September 30, 2025 by 51 Comments

We did an informal poll around the Hackaday bunker and decided that, for most of us, our favorite programming language is solder. However, [Stephen Cass] over at IEEE Spectrum released their annual post on The Top Programming Languages. We thought it would be interesting to ask you what you think is the “top” language these days and why.

The IEEE has done this since 2013, but even they admit there are some issues with how you measure such an abstract idea. For one thing, what does “top” mean anyway? They provide three rankings. The first is the “Spectrum” ranking, which draws data from various public sources, including Google search, Stack Exchange, and GitHub.

The post argues that as AI coding “help” becomes more ubiquitous, you will care less and less about what language you use. This is analogous to how most programmers today don’t really care about the machine language instruction set. They write high-level language code, and the rest is a detail beneath their notice. They also argue that this will make it harder to get new languages in the pipeline. In the old days, a single book on a language could set it on fire. Now, there will need to be a substantial amount of training data for the AI to ingest. Even now, there have been observations that AI writes worse code for lesser-used languages.

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