This week Jonathan Bennett and Katherine Druckman chat with Steve Seguin about VDO.Ninja and Social Stream Ninja, tools for doing live WebRTC video calls, recording audio and video, wrangling comments on a bunch of platforms, and more!
Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 787: VDO Ninja — It’s A Little Bit Hacky”
What do capstans, direct conversion receivers, and fracking have in common? They were all topics Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams found fascinating this week. If you wonder what makes an electrical ground a ground, or what a theodolite is, you should check it out.
This week, the hacks came fast and furious. Capstans, instead of gears, work well for 3D-printed mechanisms, a PI Pico can directly receive radio signals, and the guys saw a number of teardowns and reverse engineering triumphs. You’ll also find solid-state heat pumps, flying wings, spectroscopy, and more.
The can’t miss articles this week? Learn about theodolites, a surveying feat from ancient Greece, and how fracking works.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what we’ve mispronounced — or any other thoughts on the episode — in the comments!
This week Jonathan Bennett and Rob Campbell chat with Brodie Robertson about Linux, Wayland, YouTube, Microsoft’s Windows Recall and more. Is Linux ready for new users? Is Recall going to kick off a migration? All this and more!
Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 786: What Easy Install Script?”
This week, it was Kristina’s turn in the hot seat with Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams. First up in the news: Germany’s solar and wind power generation have resulted in excess energy, which some people think is bad. In Hackaday news, the entries in the 2024 Business Card Challenge are really stacking up.
Then it’s on to What’s That Sound, which Kristina provided this week and managed to stump Elliot. Can you get it? Can you figure it out? Can you guess what’s making that sound? If you can, and your number comes up, you get a special Hackaday Podcast t-shirt.
Then it’s on to the hacks, beginning with an improved spectrometer that wasn’t easy, and a rotary phone kitchen timer that kind of was. We’ll talk about badges turned invitations, reinventing rotary switches, and dynamic button blobs. Finally, we get the lowdown on the state of nuclear fusion, and posit why chatting online isn’t what it used to be.
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!
This week Jonathan Bennett chats with Dennis and Goran about EEZ, the series of projects that started with an Open Source programmable power supply, continued with the BB3 modular test bench tool, and continues with EEZ Studio, a GUI design tool for embedded devices.
Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 785: Designing GUIs And Building Instruments With EEZ”
[Felipe Tavares] wasn’t satisfied with the boring default fonts on an HD44780-based display. And while you can play some clever tricks with user-defined characters, if you want to treat the display as an array of pixels, you’ve got to get out your scalpel and cut up a data line.
The hack builds on work from [MisterHW] who documented the bits going from the common display driver to the display, and suggested that by cutting the data line and sending your own bits, you could send arbitrary graphics. The trick was to make sure that they’re in sync with the display, though, which means reading the frame sync line in user code.
This done, it looks like [Felipe] has it working! If you can read Rust for the ESP32, he has even provided us with a working demo of the code that makes it work.
We can’t help but wonder if it’s not possible to go even lower-level and omit the HD44780 entirely. Has anyone tried driving one of these little LCD displays directly from a microcontroller, essentially implementing the HD44780 yourself?
Any way you slice it, this is a cool hack, and it opens up the doors to DOOM, or as [MisterHW] suggests, Bad Apple on these little displays . If you do it, we want to see it.
If your needs aren’t so exotic, the classic HD44780 display is a piece of cake to get working, and an invaluable tool in anyone’s toolbox.
Even among ThinkPads, which are nearly universally loved by hardware hackers and Linux tinkerers alike, the 701c is a particularly rare and desirable machine. Best known for it’s “butterfly” slide out keyboard, the IBM-designed subnotebook from the mid-1990s has gained a following all its own, with active efforts to repair and restore any surviving specimens still out in the wild.
[polymatt] has already taken on a number of 701c restoration projects, but the recent release of a 3D printable case for the vintage laptop is arguably the most impressive to date. After spending an untold number of hours with an original case and a pair of calipers, the final design has been released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license — in other words, you’re free to print one to spruce up your 701c, but don’t run off a stack of them and start trying to move them on Etsy.
Continue reading “Printing A Replacement Case For The ThinkPad 701c”
