Wiring Up The Railway, All The Live-Long Day

November 21, 2025 by No comments

For those of you who haven’t spent time in North America around this time of year, you may be unaware of two things: one, the obligatory non-stop loop of “All I Want For Christmas Is You” retail workers are subjected to starting November first, and two: there is a strong cultural association between Christmastime and model railroading that may not exist elsewhere. That may down to childhood memories of when we got our first trainsets, or an excellent postwar marketing campaign by Lionel. Either way, now that Mariah Carey is blaring, we’re thinking about our holiday track layouts. Which makes this long presentation on Wiring for Small Layouts by [Chicago Crossing Model Railroad] quite timely.

There are actually three videos in this little course; the first focuses mostly on the tools and hardware used for DCC wiring (that’s Digital Command Control), which will be of less interest to our readers– most of you are well aware how to perform a lineman’s splice, crimp connectors onto a wire, and use terminal blocks.

The second two videos are actually about wiring, in the sense of routing all the wires needed for a modern layout– which is a lot more than “plug the rheostat into the tracks in one spot” that our first Lionel boxed set needed. No, for the different accessories there are multiple busses at 5V, 12V and 24V along with DCC that need to be considered. Unsurprisingly enough given those voltages, he starts with an ATX power supply and breaks out from there.

Even if you’re not into model railroading, you might learn something from these videos if you haven’t done many projects with multiple busses and wire runs before. It’s far, far too easy to end up with a rats nest of wires, be they DCC, I2C or otherwise. A little planning can save some big headaches down the line, and if this is a new skill for you [Chicago Crossing Model Railroad] provides a good starting point for that planning. Just skip ahead a couple minutes for him to actually start talking if you don’t want the musical cliff notes montage at the start of the videos.

If you don’t have any model trains, don’t worry, you can 3D print them.  Lack of room isn’t really an excuse.

Continue reading “Wiring Up The Railway, All The Live-Long Day” →

Commodore’s Most Popular Computer Gets DOOM-style Shooter

November 21, 2025 by 27 Comments

When people talk about the lack of a DOOM being the doom Commodore home computers, they aren’t talking about the C64, which was deep into obsolescence when demon-slaying suddenly became the minimal requirement for all computing devices. That didn’t stop [Kamil Wolnikowski] and [Piotr Kózka] from hacking together Grey a ray-cast first-person shooter for the Commodore 64.

Grey bares more than a passing resemblance to id-software’s most-ported project. It apparently runs at 16 frames per second on a vanilla C64 — no super CPU required. The secret to the speedy game play is the engine’s clever use of the system’s color mapping functionality: updating color maps is faster than redrawing the screen. Yeah, that makes for rather “blockier” graphics than DOOM, but this is running on a Commodore 64, not a 386 with 4 MB of RAM. Allowances must be made. Come to think of it, we don’t recall DOOM running this smooth on the minimum required hardware — check out the demo video below and let us know what you think.

The four-level demo currently available is about 175 kB, which certainly seems within the realms of possibility for disk games using the trusty 1541. Of course nowadays we do have easier ways to get games onto our vintage computers.

If you’re thinking about Commodore’s other home computer, it did eventually get a DOOM-clone. Continue reading “Commodore’s Most Popular Computer Gets DOOM-style Shooter” →

Hackaday Podcast Episode 346: Melting Metal In The Microwave, Unlocking Car Brakes And Washing Machines, And A Series Of Tubes

November 21, 2025 by No comments

Wait, what? Is it time for the podcast again? Seems like only yesterday that Dan joined Elliot for the weekly rundown of the choicest hacks for the last 1/52 of a year. but here we are. We had quite a bit of news to talk about, including the winners of the Component Abuse Challenge — warning, some components were actually abused for this challenge. They’re also a trillion pages deep over at the Internet Archive, a milestone that seems worth celebrating.

As for projects, both of us kicked things off with “Right to repair”-adjacent topics, first with a washing machine that gave up its secrets with IR and then with a car that refused to let its owner fix the brakes. We heated things up with a microwave foundry capable of melting cast iron — watch your toes! — and looked at a tiny ESP32 dev board with ludicrously small components. We saw surveyors go to war, watched a Lego sorting machine go through its paces, and learned about radar by spinning up a sonar set from first principles.

Finally, we wrapped things up with another Al Williams signature “Can’t Miss Articles” section, with his deep dive into the fun hackers can have with the now-deprecated US penny, and his nostalgic look at pneumatic tube systems.

Download this 100% GMO-free MP3.

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A circuit sculpture designed to help you sleep.

Sweet Sound Sculpture Helps You Sleep Soundly

November 21, 2025 by 1 Comment

Have trouble sleeping, or getting to sleep in the first place? You’ve no doubt heard of white noise machines, but know it would be much cooler to make your own. Enter Noise Maker, a DIY sound sculpture by [optimus103733], who wanted to learn something in the process of creating.

The best thing about this sound sculpture aside from the looks is that you can not only play five different sounds (e.g. birds, traffic, water, frog, white noise), you can mix them together into a rich but relaxing cacophony.

As you can probably see from the picture, Noise Maker is based on the ESP32 and uses an SD card module, an amplifier, and five pots. Be sure to check out the pictures, because there are three layers of copper connections and a lot of careful bending to make it all come together. In the video after the break, you can hear it in action.

It seems [optimus103733] isn’t completely satisfied and wants to make a few improvements in the future, such as a voltage regulator, a power switch, and a timer to automatically stop playback once (we assume) sleep has come. Evidently the ESP32 struggles a little with mixing six audio sources, but hey, lesson learned.

Wait, why do we sleep in the first place?

Continue reading “Sweet Sound Sculpture Helps You Sleep Soundly” →

This Week In Security: Cloudflare Wasn’t DNS, BADAUDIO, And Not A Vuln

November 21, 2025 by 5 Comments

You may have noticed that large pieces of the Internet were down on Tuesday. It was a problem at Cloudflare, and for once, it wasn’t DNS. This time it was database management, combined with a safety limit that failed unsafe when exceeded.

Cloudflare’s blog post on the matter has the gritty details. It started with an update to how Cloudflare’s ClickHouse distributed database was responding to queries. A query of system columns was previously only returning data from the default database. As a part of related work, that system was changed so that this query now returned all the databases the given user had access to. In retrospect it seems obvious that this could cause problems, but it wasn’t predicted to cause problems. The result was that a database query to look up bot-management features returned the same features multiple times.

That featurelist is used to feed the Cloudflare bot classification system. That system uses some AI smarts, and runs in the core proxy system. There are actually two versions of the core proxy, and they behaved a bit differently when the featurelist exceeded the 200 item limit. When the older version failed, it classified all traffic as a bot. The real trouble was the newer Rust code. That version of the core proxy threw an error in response, leading to 5XX HTTP errors, and the Internet-wide fallout. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Cloudflare Wasn’t DNS, BADAUDIO, And Not A Vuln” →

Remember XBMC? It’s Back!

November 21, 2025 by 17 Comments

The original Xbox was different from the consoles that had gone before, in that its hardware shared much with a PC of the day. It was found to be hackable, and one of the most successful projects to take advantage of it was a media centre. You know it as Kodi, but its previous name was XBMC, for Xbox Media Centre. The last version that still ran on an original Xbox saw the light of day in 2016, so it’s definitely a surprise that a new version has appeared.

XBMC version 4.0 brings a host of new features to the venerable platform, including the Estuary user interface that will be famniliar to users of more recent Kodi versions, a better games library,, and more. The plugin system has been revamped too, and while it retains the Python 2 version from back in the day it’s promised that a Python 3 update is in the works. That’s right, it sounds as though there will be more releases. Get them from the GitHub repository.

We’re not sure how many of you have early Xbox hardware along with the inclination to use it as a media centre, after all Kodi runs so well on a lot of very accessible hardware. But we’re impressed that the developers of this release have managed so much within the confines of a machine with a 2000s-era spec, and have released it at all.

If you’re curious about Xbox hacking, take a look at some of its early history.

Handling Human Waste In The Sky

November 21, 2025 by 14 Comments

Have you ever wondered what goes into making it possible to use the restroom at 30,000 feet (10,000 m)? [Jason Torchinsky] at the Autopian recently gave us an interesting look at the history of the loftiest of loos.

The first airline toilets were little more than buckets behind a curtain, but eventually the joys of indoor plumbing took to the skies. Several interim solutions like relief tubes that sent waste out into the wild blue yonder or simple chemical toilets that held waste like a flying porta-potty predated actual flush toilets, however. Then, in the 1980s, commercial aircraft started getting vacuum-driven toilets that reduce the amount of water needed, and thus the weight of the system.

These vacuum-assisted aircraft toilets have PTFE-lined bowls that are rinsed with blue cleaning fluid that helps everything flow down the drain when you flush. The waste and fluid goes into a central waste tank that is emptied into a “honey truck” while at the airport. While “blue ice” falling from the sky happens on occasion, it is rare that the waste tanks leak and drop frozen excrement from the sky, which is a lot better than when the lavatory was a funnel and tube.

The longest ever flight used a much simpler toilet, and given the aerospace industry’s love of 3D printing, maybe a 3D printed toilet is what’s coming to an airplane lavatory near you?