Using Vibration To Make Stuff Stick Contact-Free To Ceilings

October 2, 2026 by 2 Comments

Generally making stuff stick to something like a ceiling requires resorting to suction cups, glue or something much more permanent, but [Steve Mould] starts his video featuring a playing card that is clearly defying gravity with no such measures. All that it seems to take is the small vibration motor placed on said playing card, with its vibrations making the card stick like a kind of magic trick.

Although the easy explanation would be that it creates a kind of Bernoulli grip – a common pneumatic, contactless gripping device – [Steve] explains how it’s more complex than that. This vibration adhesion effect doesn’t rely on the same constant pressure drop that a Bernoulli grip experiences within the small gap between the surface and the object. Although a gap is present, it’s much smaller in this case.

Of note is that this effect only occurs when the object is made of a flexible enough material that can vibrate along with the vibration source, in the form of a motor or transducer. As demonstrated in the video, this creates standing waves that affect the surrounding air. When pushed against a rigid surface, these standing waves change into travelling waves, which result in the air that enters this small gap constantly being pushed out and thus lowering the air pressure.

The air pressure between the rigid and flexible surfaces thus becomes lower than that of the surrounding air, creating the resulting suction effect without touching the surface as something like a suction cup would.

One can imagine practical uses for this effect much like with Bernoulli grips. These are especially common in the semiconductor industry for handling delicate items like silicon wafers with zero risk of contamination. In the video it’s shown how you can use the effect to even hold the weight of a person, though they failed to get past a few dozen kilograms with the used setup involving a 400 Watt transducer, possibly due to their ‘ceiling’ not being rigid enough, leading to energy loss.

There are also papers such as this 2025 one by [Siquan Li] et al. who suggest a ‘Micro-Vibration Adhesion’  (VBA) system to help small robots climb up walls for use in repairs and inspection. In their experimental setup they found an adhesion-to-weight ratio exceeding 51 times, making it an interesting way to have small robots defy gravitational pull without a complicated mechanism.

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This Week In Security: ShinyHunters Won’t Dox The FBI, Pentagon Data Stolen, And OBS Vulnerable

October 2, 2026 by 1 Comment

404 Media reports that the ShinyHunters group who stole multiple terabytes of FBI employee data say they do not plan to release the data.

Known for ransomware and extortion of innumerable companies and government agencies, ShinyHunters used a zero-day vulnerability in Oracle PeopleSoft to compromise the employment site of the FBI and pivot into scraping the content of FBI AWS instances, claiming to have the full employment and health data of all FBI agents, employees, and spouses.

The hacker group took exception to an FBI press release that claimed that the group over-stated stolen data and that they directly harass victims and victim’s families.  The group publicized the FBI data breach, demanding a retraction of the statements, and it was generally assumed that the group would follow their typical methods of releasing the data publicly if the demands were not met.

The group has told 404 media that they had always agreed internally to not release the stolen data, saying “This was all a marketing campaign to protect our business and actively combat disinformation”.  Meanwhile the FBI continues the investigation, and Shiny Hunters may be hoping to defer some of the ire.

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Teardown Of An USB-C Cable With Integrated LCD

October 2, 2026 by 7 Comments

The past years we have been seeing screens pop up in many new places, but seeing them in USB-C cables is still a bit of a novel thing. Out of sheer curiosity [Aaron Christophel] recently took apart one of these, to see what’s inside and what else you can do with them beyond fondling its single touch control and watch reported voltages and current.

Naturally, these devices aren’t exactly meant to be serviced by anyone, so the biggest challenge is to get into them without too much violence. Risking a blood sacrifice to the Hardware Gods, [Aaron] first attacks the display cover of this €15, 240 Watt-rated UGreen cable with sharp utensils before just taking apart the aluminium case, which ultimately gets him inside.

After this it’s clear that attacking the display cover was the right way, just requiring knowing where to apply pressure in order to invert the assembly process. Following that it’s less clear how it was assembled, though it may have involved liberal amounts of glue after sliding in the components. Rather than bothering with applying heat, instead some side-cutters quickly take care of that pesky aluminium shell.

The tiny IPS LC display is attached via a flat flex cable to the PCB with a connector, with the PCB featuring multiple voltage regulators, a MOSFET for the backlight and other parts in addition to the EN32LF056 marked MCU. After some prodding on the exposed SWD interface, it was confirmed to be a Cortex-M0+-based MCU with 64 kB of Flash and 4 kB of SRAM, which made it easy enough to use the little display to display some video frames of everyone’s favorite artist.

Since this MCU is only wired up to measure currents and voltages it cannot use the USB interface, but with some knowledge of how to non-destructively disassemble one of these connectors at least to the point of accessing the SWD pads underneath the display it could be a fun party trick to reflash the firmware with something custom.

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The Game Boy Test Lab Provides A Cartridge-Sized Diagnostic Lab

October 2, 2026 by No comments

Most of the time when you see a repair video of a Game Boy it’ll be demonstrated with a cartridge inserted and booting up into the game, but does this actually mean that the system is truely fully functional? There can still be more intermittent faults, dodgy buttons, or even something like a defective link port — all of which can be much harder to detect than firing up a copy of Tetris. This is where the GB Test Lab cartridge by [Marcel Pflug] of the Game Boy Museum comes into play.

With the freely available ROM put on an EverDrive or similar flash cartridge, you can test a whole range of functions of the original Game Boy (DMG-01), most of them autonomously and some with some user input.

This is similar to the test cartridge that Nintendo themselves used in the form of the DMG-AGING-01, which validated the basic functionality of the handheld. Since then a myriad of test cartridges have been created by the homebrew community, but not all try to test quite literally everything possible. In the case of the GB Test Lab this includes the typical like CPU, RAM, interrupts, etc., but also key bounce time, intermittent connectivity and playing a game of Pong between two GBs connected by link cable as well as using the GB Printer.

Results are saved per GB and persisted if the flash cartridge has battery backup or similar. Overall it seems quite comprehensive and something that’s worth giving a shot if you’re the kind of person who owns one or more GBs. Perhaps the neatest part of this ROM is that it also contains a built-in reference for all the components and other useful details, including how to interpret results and symptoms.

Gardening With…OpenSCAD?

October 1, 2026 by 5 Comments

Unless it’s automated or using some other form of high-tech trickery, a vegetable garden isn’t exactly the sort of thing you’d expect to see on Hackaday. Be that as it may, the bountiful crop of peppers [Mihai Oltean] grew on the side of his house was done the old fashioned way, with nary a transistor in sight. So what’s the catch?

Well, in this case, it’s more about the journey than the end result. The produce sprouting in [Mihai]’s garden may be common enough, but the method in which he designed the garden itself is worth a closer look. To our knowledge, it’s the first time somebody sat down and wrote out all the code to generate a 3D model of a vertical garden in OpenSCAD.

Usually, we see OpenSCAD used to produce design files for 3D printing or occasionally 2D CNC operations. But that’s not what’s happening here. The goal was to simply plan out how all the parts of the system would come together, and [Mihai] felt comfortable tackling it in the code-centric workflow offered by OpenSCAD. We know the feeling well.

Though the code isn’t necessarily being used to produce parts for manufacture, [Mihai] does bring in a bunch of virtual components to stand in for their corporeal counterparts. We’re partial to using a parts library such as NopSCADlib for this kind of thing, but from the looks of the GitHub repo, [Mihai] decided to implement his own versions of the screws, nuts, washers, and sections of metal extrusion used to construct the garden wall.

We recently covered the advantages of “building” a complex multi-part project like a CNC control cabinet virtually in your CAD tool of choice before bending metal on the real thing. This project is a fantastic example of that concept, as it shows that the technique isn’t limited to electronic components.

Power It With Sodium (But Please Don’t)

October 1, 2026 by 11 Comments

[Applied Science] has a new demo of an old 1970s patent for a portable generator that is both interesting and terrifying. The generator uses sodium and water, which, if you remember your old chemistry classes, will combust spontaneously. Turns out, though, it won’t if you draw power from it fast enough. Don’t draw enough power? BOOM, apparently. Check it out in the video below.

Of course, lithium-ion batteries might catch fire, too, but this looks a lot more likely. The patent made some wild claims about how much you could draw from the device, but the video shows that practical results are somewhat less.

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Elgato Key Lights Get Matter Upgrade

October 1, 2026 by 3 Comments

[Michael H Thiesen] had a couple of Elgato Key Lights in his home streaming setup. The only problem was that they would stop responding regularly, requiring a power cycle to get them going again. He never quite pinned down where the problem lay; instead, he set about replacing the light controllers wholesale to provide more reliable functionality.

In place of the original controllers, a pair of ESP32-C3 boards were substituted in. The original design simply had a Realtek controller chip wired into a PCA9635 LED controller, so the swap was as easy as plucking one out and wiring the new microcontroller in its place. The capable ESP32-C3 offers native Matter support, which enabled the new controllers to join [Michael’s] Apple Home setup natively. Running a firmware coded in Rust, the controllers offer power, brightness, and colour-temperature control right in Apple Home. As a bonus, there was no need to use Homebridge to get the lights hooked up to the smarthome setup anymore, eliminating a dependency and a possible source of occasional failures.

Design files are on Github for the curious. We’ve featured other great Elgato hacks before, too, like this nifty capture card firmware hack. If you’re tinkering with your own smarthome hacks, be sure to let us know on the tipsline.