BASIC Programming With No Strings Attached

January 9, 2026 by John Elliot V No comments

Today in programming language hacks we have string art rendered in BASIC. String art — also known as pin and thread art, or filography — is an art form where images are invoked by thread woven between pins on the border of an image. In this case the thread and the pins are virtual and there is a simple 67 line BASIC program which generates and renders them.

Of course BASIC, the Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, isn’t just one thing and was a bit of a moving target over the years. Invented in 1964 at Dartmouth College by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz it turned into a family of languages as a dynamic array of implementations added, removed, and changed implementation details as the future unrolled.

We remember GW-BASIC and QuickBASIC, but the landscape was much broader than that. Implementations of QuickBASIC came with a “compiler”, qb45.exe, which worked by bundling the BASIC script as p-code into an executable along with the runtime binary, which we used back in the day to make “real applications”, not mere scripts.

Thanks to [Keith Olson] for writing in to let us know about this one. If you’re interested in seeing what the state of the art in string art is, be sure to check out String Art Build Uses CNC To Make Stringy Art and CNC Router Frame Repurposed For Colorful String Art Bot. The best string art is in the real world, not software!

Math Breakthrough Helps Your Feng Shui

January 9, 2026 by Al Williams 6 Comments

In 1966, a mathematician named [Leo Moser] proposed what sounds like a simple problem: What’s the largest shape you can move through a 1-meter corridor with a right-angle corner? Now, Korean mathematics whiz [Baek Jin-eon] claims to have solved the problem, nearly 60 years later.

The trick is, apparently, the shape of the sofa. By 1968, [John Hammerley] introduced a shape that did better than a rectangle, and by 1992, [Joseph Gerver] proposed something shaped like a phone handset, which remains the largest anyone had found, at 2.2195 square meters.

Continue reading “Math Breakthrough Helps Your Feng Shui” →

Bose SoundTouch Smart Speakers Get An Open Source Lifeline

January 9, 2026 by Maya Posch 5 Comments

After initially announcing that Bose will completely turn off all ‘smart’ features in its SoundTouch series of speaker products, the company has seemingly responded to the wave of unhappy feedback with a compromise solution. Rather than the complete shutdown and cut-off that we reported on previously, Bose will now remove cloud support as its servers shut down, but the SoundTouch mobile app will get an update that gets truncated to just the local support functions. Bose also made the SoundTouch Web API documentation available as a PDF document.

The shutdown date has also been extended from the original February 18 to May 6th of this year. Although these changes mean that the mobile app can no longer use music services, features like grouping speakers and controlling playback will keep working. Features such as presets which were cloud-based will naturally stop working.

With the web API documentation made public it remains to be seen how helpful this will be. From a quick glance at the PDF documentation it appears to be a typical REST API, using HTTP on port 8090 on the SoundTouch device, with an SGML-style tag system to format messages. In so far as the community hasn’t already reverse-engineered this API it’s at least nice to have official documentation.

Seeing Sound With A Laser

January 9, 2026 by Al Williams 11 Comments

You can hear sound, of course, but what if you could see it with a laser? That’s what [Goosetopherson] thought about, and thus a new project that you can see in the video below was born.

The heart of the project is an I2S chip and an ESP32. Sound energy deforms a plastic film that causes a mirror to move. The moving mirror alters the course of the laser’s beam. Continue reading “Seeing Sound With A Laser” →

A UI-Focused Display Library For The ESP32

January 9, 2026 by Lewin Day 7 Comments

If you’re building a project on your ESP32, you might want to give it a fancy graphical interface. If so, you might find a display library from [dejwk] to be particularly useful.

Named roo_display for unclear reasons, the library is Arduino-compatible, and suits a wide range of ESP32 boards out in the wild. It’s intended for use with common SPI-attached display controllers, like the ILI9341, SSD1327, ST7789, and more. It’s performance-oriented, without skimping on feature set. It’s got all kinds of fonts in different weights and sizes, and a tool for importing more. It can do all kinds of shapes if you want to manually draw your UI elements, or you can simply have it display JPEGs, PNGs, or raw image data from PROGMEM if you so desire. If you’re hoping to create a touch interface, it can handle that too. There’s even a companion library for doing more complex work under the name roo_windows.

If you’re looking to create a simple and responsive interface, this might be the library for you. Of course, there are others out there too, like the Adafruit GFX library which we’ve featured before. You could even go full VGA if you wanted, and end up with something that looks straight out of Windows 3.1. Meanwhile, if you’re cooking up your own graphics code for the popular microcontroller platform, you should probably let us know on the tipsline!

Thanks to [Daniel] for the tip!

Fighting Food Poisoning With A Patch

January 9, 2026 by Lewin Day 20 Comments

Food poisoning is never a fun experience. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you’ll bite into something bad and realize soon enough to spit it out. Other times, you’ll only realize your mistake much later. Once the tainted food gets far enough into the digestive system, it’s too late. Your only option is to strap in for the ride as the body voids the toxins or pathogens by every means available, perhaps for several consecutive days.

Proper food storage and preparation are the key ways we avoid food poisoning today. However, a new development could give us a further tool in the fight—with scientists finding a way to actively hunt down and destroy angry little pathogens before they can spoil a good meal.

Continue reading “Fighting Food Poisoning With A Patch” →

Hackaday Podcast Episode 352: Visualizing Sound, And Windows 11 Is A Dog

January 9, 2026 by Kristina Panos No comments

This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over coffee to bring you the latest news, mystery sound results show, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous seven days or so.

On What’s That Sound, Kristina had no idea what was going on, but [Flippin’ Heck] knew it was a flip dot display, and won a Hackaday Podcast t-shirt! Congratulations!

After that, it’s on to the hacks and such, with not one but two ways of seeing sound. We also take a look at benchmarking various Windows releases against each other on 12-year-old hardware.

We also talk about painting on floppies and glitching out jpegs in a binary text editor. Finally, we discuss the history and safety of autopilot, and take a look at the humble time clock.

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 and savor at your leisure.