Making For Others

October 24, 2026 by Elliot Williams No comments

One of the nicest things about the Hackaday community, and the open-source hardware community at large, is the incredible generosity of one hacker to another. But it’s not purely altruism – it’s also just a great feeling to be able to share your work with other folks who understand what it represents and how to use it.

I’m looking at my workbench right now. Because I’ve been testing out the Supercon badge prototype, there is a small pile of SAOs to the right. SAOs are the perfect size for giving out to fellow hackers, because they can be small, inexpensive, and yet still embody a ton of your creativity. [Tom]’s marvelous Ode to the SAO, even opens with this as one of the main benefits, alongside teaching you “full-stack” PCB production at small scale; they are cheap enough that you can give them away. Of course, you end up getting as many or more than you give, so it’s not just the pure joy of giving at work in the SAO scene.

On my left, I have a couple dev boards made by fellow hackers. One is a clone of the Raspberry Pi Pico that’s made by the high-school students of Hack Club, and the other is [CNLohr]’s ch32v003fun board and esp32s2-funprog programmer. I needed to test out a quick microcontroller application, and having a few dev boards on hand is always useful. Because I know the people who made these boards, I tend to reach for these over their commercial alternatives. Romantic? Maybe. But they were given to me by friends.

And of course the badge prototype is sitting in the middle of all this, and that’s how I really know about the joy of giving away your designs to fellow hackers. We at Hackaday are in the incredibly fortunate position of being able to dream up a new and fun badge every year, and give it out to hundreds of fellow hackers. Heck, this year, we’re making 1,000. I say “fortunate” because we don’t have to pay for them ourselves, but rather our Supercon sponsors help pick up the bill, and that means we can make stuff that’s far cooler than our budgets would otherwise allow.

So to everyone in the SAO scene, may you give away your designs to people who really appreciate them. For the folks who have built tools for other hackers to use, you should know that the recipients probably reach for your boards over their bland commercial alternatives. And for all of you coming to Supercon in two weeks, we hope you dig the badge. It has maybe become a bit of a cliché these days, but you should know that it’s made with love.

Watch VCF Southwest In Retrotastic SGI-Edited Footage

October 24, 2026 by Tyler August No comments

There’s just something about backing way, way off the cutting edge to rediscover the simpler joys of yesteryear. We’ve got a contest about to wrap up along those lines, and there are festivals celebrating all things retro in the world of computers and electronics the world over. Vintage Computer Festival (VCF) Southwest happened back in the summer, but [Wave Design] just posted a gloriously retro retrospective, complete with the full 1990s video-editing workflow, completed on an SGI O2.

The footage was recorded on a 1990s vintage DV camera, and read using a somewhat-newer Sony tapedeck that we sadly have to admit also counts as retro in these late days. That gets piped into a vintage SGI O2 workstation that would have had us drooling back in the day, whose only concession to modernity is the inclusion of an NVMe SSD through a collection of adapters we can only call a hack. This may be burying the lede deep, but it turns out there is now an NVMe driver for IRIX 6.5. Using a modern SSD saves [Wave] from dealing with the literal stack of external drives video editing called for back in the day, so we can’t hardly blame him.

After the hardware walk-through, [Wave]’s video gets into the software, which is surprisingly modern. The footage he creates is decidedly not. It looks exactly like it was broadcast in 1996, perhaps following an episode of ReBoot — which conveniently enough, also used SGI workstations in its production, though with a decidedly rarer type of digital video tape.

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A Walkie Talkie Interface For Claude

October 24, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 4 Comments

[Bookmari] had a problem — working as a delivery driver, they wanted to work on various projects with Claude Code while out and about. Unfortunately, it simply wasn’t practical to write prompts and read answers on the job. Thus, they whipped up Walkie Claudie, so they could use their voice instead.

The concept is simple enough, it’s an interface that lets you talk to Claude using speech recognition, and lets Claude talk back to you with a text-to-speech engine. It runs on a smartphone, with a direct network connection to the PC running Claude, though you can use a VPN if you’re distantly located. [Bookmari] has a push-to-talk setup so that pushing a button on their Bluetooth earbuds lets them talk directly to Claude. There’s also a special mode to keep the channel active during long pauses if you need a while to collect thoughts and vocalize them. Just for fun, the interface is styled like an old-school walkie LCD, and there’s fun little details like synthesized squelch and channel-switch noises and so on.

If you’re looking for a way to stay hooked up to your AI assistant at all times, this could prove useful to you. Alternatively, consider if maybe it’s worth taking a break sometimes, or check out other Claude Code projects we’ve seen of late.

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Using An Unmodded GBA As A Music Synth

October 23, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield No comments

The style and sound of older video games is unique enough that they’re still copied in relatively modern games like Undertale, Celeste, or Shovel Knight. There’s also a vibrant chiptune community making music on the older hardware directly. Often this involves hardware modding or otherwise finding chips from older gaming systems to replicate that unique retro gaming sound authentically. But disassembling older systems is not always necessary. Take a look at this Game Boy Advance synthesizer which uses the GBA hardware with no modifications at all.

The key to making this work is the GBA’s multiboot feature, which allowed these systems to send executable code over a link cable to other consoles which didn’t have cartridges. This meant that friends could play multiplayer games without each one needing their own cartridge, but it also means that nowadays people can send their own custom software directly to the console’s RAM without much extra effort. To run the synthesizer software, the GBA is connected to a computer, the software is started, and then when the GBA is powered on the snythesizer is automatically loaded into its RAM. The audio output is played over the headphone jack, and various controls are available on the computer and on the console.

In the video linked below, [Andy] is using the GBA with some other musical hardware and the sounds he’s getting from the unmodified console are impressive. It could certainly be a go-to for anyone interested in getting started in this style of music or who doesn’t want to do something like take apart an original Sega Genesis for the audio circuitry.

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RepRapMicron Uses Fibre Optics To Print Tiny Benchy In Resin

October 23, 2026 by Maya Posch 5 Comments

The 0.5 mm Benchy made with the MicroRepRap UV head.

The RepRapMicron (also µRepRap) is pretty much the microscopic take on what RepRap did for more macroscale manufacturing, with the most recent innovation being a UV print head, called the PIKA UV Head. What this does is use off-the-shelf optical fiber and UV LED modules to create 3D structures in-situ in a UV resin, allowing for pretty small structures to be printed, down to a resolution of about 9 µm.

More photos of prints can be found on the blog page with links to YouTube videos. It’s naturally somewhat tricky to get clean photographs of a 3D print that’s small enough to lose forever if you so much as sneeze or breathe too loudly.

For the UV head assembly a single mode fiber optical cable was used in the form of a regular patch cord that got trimmed a bit with a hacksaw. This was used in combination with a “3W” UV LED module, which may or may not be its true rating, but it was definitely able to cure the SLA resin. The used resin was regular eSun Standard Resin.

Afterwards you have to do the typical SLA post-processing, including cleaning off of liquid resin – both the part and fiber – and curing the part. So far results are pretty decent, with overhangs still being a weak spot that will be addressed in future revisions.

A black 3D printed machine sits on a workbench. A coil of copper wire is suspended from one side of it, and a screen on the front of it reads "Homing".

Automatic Coil Winder Takes The Tedium Out Of Actuators

October 23, 2026 by Aaron Beckendorf 4 Comments

Anyone who’s ever built their own motors knows how tedious winding the coils soon becomes; in [Larry]’s case, the issue was even worse. He’s building his own flip-dot matrix display, and each dot uses two electromagnetic coils to flip a magnet in the dot. Rather than wind each of these by hand, therefore, he built his own coil-winding machine.

The coil winder uses two stepper motors: one to wind wire onto the bobbin, and one to move the wire guide carriage back and forth, distributing the wire evenly across the bobbin. The bobbin is held in place by a retainer, which doubles as a tie point for the end of the wire. The spool of wire rotates on a pair of bearings, and the wire is fed between two pieces of foam to provide adjustable tension. The housing is mostly 3D-printed, with some metal rods, bearings, and belt drives fleshing out the structure. On the electronics side, a Teensy controls the winder, with an OLED display and a rotary encoder for control. Before beginning on a coil, it homes the guide carriage against an end-stop switch, then winds on layers, keeping track of the number of layers applied.

We’ve seen a few coil winders here in the past, including a 3D printer adapted to winding stators. For more on this winder’s application, check out [Larry]’s flip-dot design.

Reconstructing The Ancient Chinese Storm Of Crows Weapon

October 23, 2026 by Maya Posch 13 Comments

The Chinese had been using large crossbows – akin to Greek and Roman ballistae – for warfare for many of the same reasons that European armies loved them. Their single, large arrow was effectively unstoppable, though this also was rather useless against large groups of infantry unless they were so kind to neatly line up. Old Chinese records mention a special kind of ammunition, called a cup arrow, or ‘storm of crows’, which involves launching many smaller arrows instead of a single large one, a feat that [Tod] really wanted to try and recreate.

In itself this doesn’t sound too complex: just grab some arrows, loosely tie them together in a bundle and slap them on the crossbow. Yet with the immense forces applied on this bundle it clearly turns out that the engineering challenge isn’t quite that straightforward, as the arrows love to scatter wildly in all directions or otherwise be rather unpredictable.

Although we can find historical references to multiple bolt siege crossbows being used, details are sparse on how the Chinese engineers addressed these aforementioned issues, so [Tod] tries a range of approaches to try and make it work on his own siege crossbow. Unfortunately he wasn’t able to make it work reliably, but he says he’ll be back with a range of improvements, with the community invited to pitch in their own ideas.

These type of weapons were very commonly used in China and surrounding nations from hundreds of years BCE to around the 16th century CE, when black powder was used to launch projectiles like fire arrows from a Huo Che or the Korean equivalent of the Hwacha, effectively multiple rocket launchers, not unlike the MLRS units seen in militaries today.

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