2025 Component Abuse Challenge: Pushing A 555 To The Limit

November 7, 2025 by 1 Comment

The humble 555 timer has its origins back in the early 1970s as the NE555, a bipolar integrated circuit. Over the years it has spawned a range of derivatives, including dual versions, and ones using CMOS technology. Have these enhancements improved the performance of the chip significantly? [MagicWolfi] has been pushing the envelope in an effort to see just how fast an astable 555 can be.

The Microchip MIC1555 may be the newest of the bunch, a 5-pin CMOS SOT-23 which has lost the frequency control and discharge pins of the original. It’s scarcely less versatile though, and it’s a fine candidate for an oscillator to push. We see it at a range of values for the capacitor and resistor in an astable configuration, each of which is tested across the supply voltage range. It’s rated as having a maximum frequency of 5 MHz, but with a zero Ohm resistor and only the parasitic capacitance of an open circuit, it reaches the giddy heights of 9.75 MHz. If we’re honest we find this surprising, but on reflection the chip would never be a first choice for super-fast operation.

We like it that someone’s managed to tie in the 555 to the contest, and given that it still has a few days to run at the time of writing, we’re hoping some of you might be inspired to enter one of your own.

2025 Hackaday Component Abuse Challenge

Hackaday Podcast Episode 344: Board With Lasers, Op-Amp Torture, And Farewell Supercon 9

November 7, 2025 by No comments

Hackaday Editors Tom Nardi and Al Williams spent the weekend at Supercon and had to catch up on all the great hacks. Listen in as they talk about their favorites. Plus, stick around to the end to hear about some of the highlights from their time in Pasadena.

If you’re still thinking about entering the Component Abuse Contest, you’re just about out of time. Need some inspiration? Tom and Al talk about a few choice entries, and discuss how pushing parts out of their comfort zone can come in handy. Do you make your own PCBs? With vias? If you have a good enough laser, you could. Or maybe you’d rather have a $10 Linux server? Just manage your expectations. The guys both admit they aren’t mechanical geniuses and, unlike [4St4r], aren’t very good at guessing sounds either. They round up with some 3D printing projects and a collection of quick hacks.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download in DRM-free MP3 no PDP-1, 3D Printer, or lasers needed to listen.

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An LED Projector As A Lighting Effect

November 7, 2025 by 3 Comments

If you had an array of high power addressable LEDs, how would you project them onto a wall? Perhaps you’d use a Fresnel lens, or maybe an individual lens on the top of each. [Joo] faced this problem when making a lighting effect using just such an array, and the solution they came up with used both.

The problem facing a would-be LED array projector is that should the lens be too good, it will project the individual points of light from the LEDs themselves, when a more diffuse point is required. Thus the Fresnel required the aid of a separate array of lenses, resin printed in one in clear plastic. From this we get some useful tips on how to do this for best lens quality, and while the result is not quite optically perfect, it’s certainly good enough for the job in hand.

The linked Printables page comes with all you need to make the parts, and you too can have your own projected LED effect. Now we want one, too! Perhaps we really need our own Wrencher signal instead.

This Week In Security: Bogus Ransom, WordPress Plugins, And KASLR

November 7, 2025 by 10 Comments

There’s another ransomware story this week, but this one comes with a special twist. If you’ve followed this column for long, you’re aware that ransomware has evolved beyond just encrypting files. Perhaps we owe a tiny bit of gratitude to ransomware gangs for convincing everyone that backups are important. The downside to companies getting their backups in order is that these criminals are turning to other means to extort payment from victims. Namely, exfiltrating files and releasing them to the public if the victim doesn’t pay up. And this is the situation in which the Akira ransomware actors claim to have Apache’s OpenOffice project.

There’s just one catch. Akira is threatening to release 23 GB of stolen documents, which include employee information — and the Apache Software Foundation says those documents don’t exist. OpenOffice hasn’t received a demand and can’t find any evidence of a breach. It seems likely that Akira has hit some company, but not part of the Apache Software Foundation. Possibly someone that heavily uses OpenOffice, or even provides some level of support for that application. There is one more wrinkle here.

Since Apache OpenOffice is an open source software project, none of our contributors are paid employees for the project or the foundation…

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Pi-Powered Camera Turns Heads And Lenses In Equal Measure

November 7, 2025 by 5 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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Guitar Picks made from recycled sheets

Artsy And Durable Recycling From A Heat Press

November 7, 2025 by 4 Comments

Plastic recycling is something that many of us strive to accomplish, but we often get caught up in the many hurdles along the way. [Brothers Make] are experienced in the world of plastic recycling and graced us with a look into a simple and reliable way to get consistent thin sheets of durable plastic. Using a common T-shirt press and a mixture of plastic scraps, you can get the process down quickly.

Summarizing the process is pretty easy due to its simplicity. You take a T-shirt press, put some Teflon baking sheets on both sides of some plastic scraps, and then press. Repeating this a couple of times with different colored plastic will get you a nice looking sheet of usable sheets for any purpose you could dream of. Thicker pieces can have some life changing applications, or as simple as guitar picks, as shown by [Brothers Make].

Make sure to try out this technique yourself if you have access to a press! Overuse of plastic is a widely known issue, and yet it feels like almost no one attempts to solve it. If you want a different kind of application, try making your own 3D printing filament out of recycled plastic!

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The Water-Cooled PS3 Sony Never Made

November 6, 2025 by 1 Comment

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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