A photo of tye blub glowing in the workshop

What Happens When You Pump 30,000 Watts Into A Tungsten Incandescent Light Bulb?

December 3, 2025 by 32 Comments

Over on YouTube [Drake] from the [styropyro] channel investigates what happens when you take an enormous tungsten incandescent light bulb and pump 30,000 watts through it.

The answer: it burns bright enough to light up the forest at night, and hot enough to cook food and melt metal. And why on Earth would anybody do such a thing? Well [Drake] said it was because he wanted to outdo [Photonicinduction] who had already put 20,000 watts through a light bulb. Nothing like a little friendly competition to drive… progress?

Continue reading “What Happens When You Pump 30,000 Watts Into A Tungsten Incandescent Light Bulb?” →

The Database Powering America’s Hospitals May Not Be What You Expect

December 3, 2025 by 25 Comments

Ever heard of MUMPS? Both programming language and database, it was developed in the 1960s for the Massachusetts General Hospital. The goal was to streamline the increasingly enormous timesink that information and records management had become, a problem that was certain to grow unless something was done. Far from being some historical footnote, MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System) grew to be used by a wide variety of healthcare facilities and still runs today. If you’ve never heard of it, you’re in luck because [Asianometry] has a documentary video that’ll tell you everything.

MUMPS had rough beginnings but ultimately found widespread support and use that continues to this day. As a programming language, MUMPS (also known simply as “M”) has the unusual feature of very tight integration with the database end of things. That makes sense in light of the fact that it was created to streamline the gathering, processing, and updating of medical data in a busy, multi-user healthcare environment that churned along twenty-four hours per day.

It may show its age (the term “archaic” — among others — gets used when it’s brought up) but it is extremely good at what it does and has a proven track record in the health care industry. This, combined with the fact that efforts to move to newer electronic record systems always seem to find the job harder than expected, have helped keep it relevant. Have you ever used MUMPS? Let us know in the comments!

And hey, if vintage programming languages just aren’t unusual enough for you, we have some truly strange ones for you to check out.

Continue reading “The Database Powering America’s Hospitals May Not Be What You Expect” →

Two four-cylinder engines mechanically linked and exhausting into a trombone.

Franken-engine Plays Its Own Swan Song At 15k RPM

December 3, 2025 by 16 Comments

Back during WWII, Chrysler bodged five inline-6 engines together to create the powerful A57 multibank tank engine. [Maisteer] has some high-revving inline-4 motorcycle engines he’s trying to put together too, but unlike 1940s Chrysler, he also has a trombone… and a lot more RPMs to deal with.

The Chrysler flatheads were revving at a few thousand RPM– their redline was almost certainly in the three-thousand range. [Maisteer] is working at 15,000 RPM, which is where the real challenge of this build lies: the trombone in the image is just for fun. He wanted to use a heavy chain to link the crankshafts, but at that rotational speed, a heavy chain becomes really heavy— or at least, it feels a force many times its weight due to centrifugal force. The lietmotief of this video is a quote by an automotive engineer to the effect that chains don’t work over 10,000 RPM.

That leads to a few problems for the intrepid “not an engineer” that take most of the video to deal with and ultimately doom the engine linkage– for now. Not before he gets an iconic 8-cylinder sound out (plus some fire) out of a trombone, though. Of particular note is the maker-type workflow Hackaday readers will appreciate: he 3D scans the engines, CADs up parts he needs and sends away to have them CNC’d and SLS printed.

Hacking motorcycle engines into cars is nothing new. Hacking them together into franken-engines is something we see less often.

Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip! Remember, if you want to toot your own horn– or toot about someone else’s project, for that matter–the tips line is always open.

Continue reading “Franken-engine Plays Its Own Swan Song At 15k RPM” →

FLOSS Weekly Episode 857: SOCification

December 3, 2025 by No comments

This week Jonathan chats with Konstantinos Margaritis about SIMD programming. Why do these wide data instructions matter? What’s the state of Hyperscan, the project from Intel to power regex with SIMD? And what is Konstantinos’ connection to ARM’s SIMD approach? Watch to find out!

Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 857: SOCification” →

PN26 badge

Shelf Life Extended: Hacking E-Waste Tags Into Conference Badges

December 3, 2025 by 10 Comments

Ever wonder what happens to those digital price tags you see in stores once they run out of juice? In what is a prime example of e-waste, many of those digital price tags are made with non-replaceable batteries, so once their life is over they are discarded. Seeing an opportunity to breathe new life into these displays, [Tylercrumpton] went about converting them to be the official badge of the Phreaknic 26 conference.

Looking for a solution for a cheap display for the upcoming conference badge, [Tylercrumpton] recalled seeing the work [Aaron Christophel] did with reusing electronic shelf labels. Looking on eBay, he picked up a lot of 100 ZBD 55c-RB labels for just $0.70 a piece. When they arrived, he got to work liberating the displays from their plastic cases. The long-dead batteries in the devices ended up being easily removed, leaving behind just the display and the PCB that drives it.

db9 programmerAnother hacker assisting with the badge project, [Mog], noticed that the spacing of the programming pads on the PCB was very close to the spacing of a DB9/DE9 cable. This gave way to a very clever hack for programming the badges: putting pogo pins into a female connector. The other end of the cable was connected to a TI CC Debugger which was used to program the firmware on the displays. But along the way, even this part of the project got an upgrade with moving to an ESP32 for flashing firmware, allowing for firmware updates without a host computer.

The next challenge was how to handle customizing 200 unique badges for the conference. For this, each badge had a unique QR code embedded in the back of the 3D printed case that pointed to an online customization tool. The tool allowed the user to change which of the images was used for the background, as well as input the name they wanted to be displayed on the badge. Once finished, the server would provide a patched firmware image suitable for flashing the badge. The original intent was to have stations where attendees could plug in their badge and it would update itself; however, due to some 11th hour hiccups, that didn’t pan out for this conference. Instead, [Tylercrumpton] ran the update script on his machine, and it gave him a great opportunity to interact with conference attendees as they stopped by to update their badges.

For the Phreaknic 27 badge, the plan is to once again use electronic shelf labels, but this time to utilize some of the advanced features of the tags such as the EEPROM and wireless communications. We’re eager to see what the team comes up with.

Continue reading “Shelf Life Extended: Hacking E-Waste Tags Into Conference Badges” →

LoRa Repeater Lasts 5 Years On PVC Pipe And D Cells

December 2, 2025 by 64 Comments

Sometimes it makes sense to go with plain old batteries and off-the-shelf PVC pipe. That’s the thinking behind [Bertrand Selva]’s clever LoRaTube project.

PVC pipe houses a self-contained LoRa repeater, complete with a big stack of D-size alkaline cells.

LoRa is a fantastic solution for long-range and low-power wireless communication (and popular, judging by the number of projects built around it) and LoRaTube provides an autonomous repeater, contained entirely in a length of PVC pipe. Out the top comes the antenna and inside is all the necessary hardware, along with a stack of good old D-sized alkaline cells feeding a supercap-buffered power supply of his own design. It’s weatherproof, inexpensive, self-contained, and thanks to extremely low standby current should last a good five years by [Bertrand]’s reckoning.

One can make a quick LoRa repeater in about an hour but while the core hardware can be inexpensive, supporting electronics and components (not to mention enclosure) for off-grid deployment can quickly add significant cost. Solar panels, charge controllers, and a rechargeable power supply also add potential points of failure. Sometimes it makes more sense to go cheap, simple, and rugged. Eighteen D-sized alkaline cells stacked in a PVC tube is as rugged as it is affordable, especially if one gets several years’ worth of operation out of it.

You can watch [Bertrand] raise a LoRaTube repeater and do a range test in the video (French), embedded below. Source code and CAD files are on the project page. Black outdoor helper cat not included.

Continue reading “LoRa Repeater Lasts 5 Years On PVC Pipe And D Cells” →

Retrotechtacular: Learning The Slide Rule The New Old Fashioned Way

December 2, 2025 by 14 Comments

Learning something on YouTube seems kind of modern. But if you are watching a 1957 instructional film about slide rules, it also seems old-fashioned. But Encyclopædia Britannica has a complete 30-minute training film, which, what it lacks in glitz, it makes up for in mathematical rigor.

We appreciated that it started out talking about numbers and significant figures instead of jumping right into the slide rule. One thing about the slide rule is that you have to sort of understand roughly what the answer is. So, on a rule, 2×3, 20×30, 20×3, and 0.2×300 are all the same operation.

You don’t actually get to the slide rule part for about seven minutes, but it is a good idea to watch the introductory part. The lecturer, [Dr. Havery E. White] shows a fifty-cent plastic rule and some larger ones, including a classroom demonstration model. We were a bit surprised that the prestigious Britannica wouldn’t have a bit better production values, but it is clear. Perhaps we are just spoiled by modern productions.

We love our slide rules. Maybe we are ready for the collapse of civilization and the need for advanced math with no computers. If you prefer reading something more modern, try this post. Our favorites, though, are the cylindrical ones that work the same, but have more digits.

Continue reading “Retrotechtacular: Learning The Slide Rule The New Old Fashioned Way” →