Give Us One Manual For Normies, Another For Hackers

December 2, 2025 by No comments

We’ve all been there. You’ve found a beautiful piece of older hardware at the thrift store, and bought it for a song. You rush it home, eager to tinker, but you soon find it’s just not working. You open it up to attempt a repair, but you could really use some information on what you’re looking at and how to enter service mode. Only… a Google search turns up nothing but dodgy websites offering blurry PDFs for entirely the wrong model, and you’re out of luck.

These days, when you buy an appliance, the best documentation you can expect is a Quick Start guide and a warranty card you’ll never use. Manufacturers simply don’t want to give you real information, because they think the average consumer will get scared and confused. I think they can do better. I’m demanding a new two-tier documentation system—the basics for the normies, and real manuals for the tech heads out there.

Continue reading “Give Us One Manual For Normies, Another For Hackers” →

Build Your Own Glasshole Detector

December 2, 2025 by 7 Comments

Connected devices are ubiquitous in our era of wireless chips heavily relying on streaming data to someone else’s servers. This sentence might already start to sound dodgy, and it doesn’t get better when you think about today’s smart glasses, like the ones built by Meta (aka Facebook).

[sh4d0wm45k] doesn’t shy away from fighting fire with fire, and shows you how to build a wireless device detecting Meta’s smart glasses – or any other company’s Bluetooth devices, really, as long as you can match them by the beginning of the Bluetooth MAC address.

[sh4d0wm45k]’s device is a mini light-up sign saying “GLASSHOLE”, that turns bright white as soon as a pair of Meta glasses is detected in the vicinity. Under the hood, a commonly found ESP32 devboard suffices for the task, coupled to two lines of white LEDs on a custom PCB. The code is super simple, sifting through packets flying through the air, and lets you easily contribute with your own OUIs (Organizationally Unique Identifier, first three bytes of a MAC address). It wouldn’t be hard to add such a feature to any device of your own with Arduino code under its hood, or to rewrite it to fit a platform of your choice.

We’ve been talking about smart glasses ever since Google Glass, but recently, with Meta’s offerings, the smart glasses debate has reignited. Due to inherent anti-social aspects of the technology, we can see what’d motivate one to build such a hack. Perhaps, the next thing we’ll see is some sort of spoofed packets shutting off the glasses, making them temporarily inoperable in your presence in a similar way we’ve seen with spamming proximity pairing packets onto iPhones.

Little Lie Detector Is Probably No Worse Than The Big Ones

December 2, 2025 by 5 Comments

Want to know if somebody is lying? It’s always so hard to tell. [dbmaking] has whipped up a fun little polygraph, otherwise known as a lie detector. It’s nowhere near as complex as the ones you’ve seen on TV, but it might be just as good when it comes to finding the truth.

The project keeps things simple by focusing on two major biometric readouts — heart rate and skin conductivity. When it comes to the beating heart, [dbmaking] went hardcore and chose an AD8232 ECG device, rather than relying on the crutch that is pulse oximetry. It picks up heart signals via three leads that are just like those they stick on you in the emergency room. Skin conductivity is measured with a pair of electrodes that attach to the fingers with Velcro straps. The readings from these inputs are measured and then used to determine truth or a lie if their values cross a certain threshold. Presumably, if you’re sweating a lot and your heart is beating like crazy, you’re telling a lie. After all, we know Olympic sprinters never tell the truth immediately after a run.

Does this work as an actual, viable lie detector? No, not really. But that’s not just because this device isn’t sophisticated enough; commercial polygraph systems have been widely discredited anyway. There simply isn’t an easy way to correlate sweating to lying, as much as TV has told us the opposite. Consider it a fun toy or prop to play with, and a great way to learn about working with microcontrollers and biometric sensors.

Continue reading “Little Lie Detector Is Probably No Worse Than The Big Ones” →

Converting A 1980s Broadcast Camera To HDMI

December 1, 2025 by 8 Comments

Although it might seem like there was a sudden step change from analog to digital sometime in the late 1900s, it was actually a slow, gradual change from things like record players to iPods or from magnetic tape to hard disk drives. Some of these changes happened slowly within the same piece of hardware, too. Take the Sony DXC-3000A, a broadcast camera from the 1980s. Although it outputs an analog signal, this actually has a discrete pixel CCD sensor capturing video. [Colby] decided to finish the digitization of this camera and converted it to output HDMI instead of the analog signal it was built for.

The analog signals it outputs are those that many of us are familiar with, though: composite video. This was an analog standard that only recently vanished from consumer electronics, and has a bit of a bad reputation that [Colby] thinks is mostly undeserved. But since so many semi-modern things had analog video outputs like these, inspiration was taken from a Wii mod chip that converts these consoles to HDMI. Unfortunately his first trials with one of these had confused colors, but it led him to a related chip which more easily outputted the correct colors. With a new PCB in hand with this chip, a Feather RP2040, and an HDMI port the camera is readily outputting digital video that any modern hardware can receive.

Besides being an interesting build, the project highlights a few other things. First of all, this Sony camera has a complete set of schematics, a manual meant for the end user, and almost complete user serviceability built in by design. In our modern world of planned obsolescence, religious devotion to proprietary software and hardware, and general user-unfriendliness this 1980s design is a breath of fresh air, and perhaps one of the reasons that so many people are converting old analog cameras to digital instead of buying modern equipment.

Necroprinting Isn’t As Bad As It Sounds

December 1, 2025 by 9 Comments

A mosquito has a very finely tuned proboscis that is excellent at slipping through your skin to suck out the blood beneath. Researchers at McGill University recently figured that the same biological structure could also prove useful in another was—as a fine and precise nozzle for 3D printing (via Tom’s Hardware).

Small prints made with the mosquito proboscis nozzle. Credit: research paper

To achieve this feat, the research team harvested the proboscis from a female mosquito, as only the female of the species sucks blood in this timeline. The mosquito’s proboscis was chosen over other similar biological structures, like insect stingers and snake fangs. It was prized for its tiny size, with an inside diameter of just 20 micrometers—which outdoes just about any man-made nozzle out there. It’s also surprisingly strong, able to resist  up to 60 kPa of pressure from the fluid squirted through it.

Of course, you can’t just grab a mosquito and stick it on your 3D printer. It takes very fine work to remove the proboscis and turn it into a functional nozzle; it also requires the use of 3D printed scaffolding to give the structure additional strength. The nozzle is apparently used with bio-inks, rather than molten plastic, and proved capable of printing some basic 3D structures in testing.

Amusingly, the process has been termed 3D necroprinting, we suspect both because it uses a dead organism and because it sounds cool on the Internet. We’ve created a necroprinting tag, just in case, but we’re not holding our breath for this to become the next big thing. At 20 um, more likely the next small thing.

Further details are available in the research paper. We’ve actually featured quite a few mosquito hacks over the years. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Necroprinting Isn’t As Bad As It Sounds” →

TARS-Like Robot Both Rolls, And Walks

December 1, 2025 by 5 Comments

[Aditya Sripada] and [Abhishek Warrier]’s TARS3D robot came from asking what it would take to make a robot with the capabilities of TARS, the robotic character from Interstellar. We couldn’t find a repository of CAD files or code but the research paper for TARS3D explains the principles, which should be enough to inspire a motivated hacker.

What makes TARS so intriguing is the simple-looking structure combined with distinct and effective gaits. TARS is not a biologically-inspired design, yet it can walk and perform a high-speed roll. Making real-world version required not only some inspired mechanical design, but also clever software with machine learning.

[Aditya] and [Abhishek] created TARS3D as a proof of concept not only of how such locomotion can be made to work, but also as a way to demonstrate that unconventional body and limb designs (many of which are sci-fi inspired) can permit gaits that are as effective as they are unusual.

TARS3D is made up of four side-by-side columns that can rotate around a shared central ‘hip’ joint as well as shift in length. In the movie, TARS is notably flat-footed but [Aditya] found that this was unsuitable for rolling, so TARS3D has curved foot plates.

The rolling gait is pretty sensitive to terrain variations, but the walking gait proved to be quite robust. All in all it’s a pretty interesting platform that does more than just show a TARS-like dual gait robot can be made to actually work. It also demonstrates the value of reinforcement learning for robot gaits.

A brief video is below in which you can see the bipedal walk in action. Not that long ago, walking robots were a real challenge but with the tools available nowadays, even a robot running a 5k isn’t crazy.

Continue reading “TARS-Like Robot Both Rolls, And Walks” →

Using A Level 2 Charger To Work Around Slow 120 VAC Kettles

December 1, 2025 by 50 Comments

To those of us who live in the civilized lands where ~230 VAC mains is the norm and we can shove a cool 3.5 kW into an electric kettle without so much as a second thought, the mere idea of trying to boil water with 120 VAC and a tepid 1.5 kW brings back traumatic memories of trying to boil water with a 12 VDC kettle while out camping. Naturally, in a fit of nationalistic pride this leads certain North American people like that bloke over at the [Technology Connections] YouTube to insist that this is fine, as he tries to demonstrate how ridiculous 240 VAC kettles are by abusing a North American Level 2 car charger to power a UK-sourced kettle.

Ignoring for a moment that in Europe a ‘Level 1’ charger is already 230 VAC (±10%) and many of us charge EVs at home with three-phase ~440 VAC, this video is an interesting demonstration, both of how to abuse an EV car charger for other applications and how great having hot water for tea that much faster is.

Friendly tea-related transatlantic jabs aside, the socket adapter required to go from the car charger to the UK-style plug is a sight to behold. All which we starts as we learn that Leviton makes a UK-style outlet for US-style junction boxes, due to Gulf States using this combination. This is subsequently wired to the pins of the EV charger connector, after which the tests can commence.

Continue reading “Using A Level 2 Charger To Work Around Slow 120 VAC Kettles” →