The Supercon 2025 Badge Is Built To Be Customized

October 27, 2025 by 9 Comments

For anyone who’s joined us for previous years, you’ll know that badge hacking and modification are core to the Hackaday Supercon experience. While you’re of course free to leave the badge completely stock, we encourage attendees to tear it apart, learn how it works, and (hopefully) rebuild it into something unique. There are even prizes for the best hacks.

As such, every decision about the badge’s hardware and software is made with hackability in mind. It’s why we always try to add an expansion port to the badge and, in recent years, have leaned into MicroPython to make it easier for attendees to modify the code.

But one thing that’s been largely missing in previous badges is aesthetic customization. Sure, you could strip out the firmware and write something entirely new, or hang some oddball peripheral off the side of the thing, but ultimately it still looked like the badge we gave you at the door. That’s because, at the end of the day, the badges are just PCBs. Short of designing your own enclosure (which has certainly been done), every badge looks the same. That is, until now.

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A 3D Printed 16mm Movie Camera

October 27, 2025 by 4 Comments

The basic principles of a motion picture film camera should be well understood by most readers — after all, it’s been well over a hundred years since the Lumière brothers wowed 19th century Paris with their first films. But making one yourself is another matter entirely, as they are surprisingly complex and high-precision devices. This hasn’t stopped [Henry Kidman] from giving it a go though, and what makes his camera more remarkable is that it’s 3D printed.

The problem facing a 16mm movie camera designer lies in precisely advancing the film by one frame at the correct rate while filming, something done in the past with a small metal claw that grabs each successive sprocket. His design eschews that for a sprocket driven by a stepper motor from an Arduino. His rotary shutter is driven by another stepper motor, and he has the basis of a good camera.

The tests show promise, but he encounters a stability problem, because as it turns out, it’s difficult to print a 16mm sprocket in plastic without it warping. He solves this by aligning frames in post-processing. After fixing a range of small problems though, he has a camera that delivers a very good picture quality, and that makes us envious.

Sadly, those of us who ply our film-hacking craft in 8mm don’t have the luxury of enough space for a sprocket to replace the claw.

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Exploding The Mystical Craftsman Myth

October 27, 2025 by 85 Comments

As a Hackaday writer, I see a lot of web pages, social media posts, videos, and other tips as part of my feed. The  best ones I try to bring you here, assuming of course that one of my ever-vigilant colleagues hasn’t beaten me to it. Along the way I see the tropes of changing content creator fashion; those ridiculous pea-sized hand held microphones, or how all of a sudden everything has to be found in the woods. Some of them make me laugh, but there’s one I see a lot which has made me increasingly annoyed over the years. I’m talking of course about the craftsman myth.

No. The Last True Nuts And Bolts Are Not Being Made In Japan

If you don’t recognise the craftsman myth immediately, I’m sure you’ll be familiar with it even if you don’t realise it yet. It goes something like this: somewhere in Japan (or somewhere else perceived as old-timey in online audience terms like Appalachia, but it’s usually Japan), there’s a bloke in a tin shed who makes nuts and bolts.

But he’s not just any bloke in a tin shed who makes nuts and bolts, he’s a special master craftsman who makes nuts and bolts like no other. He’s about 120 years old and the last of a long line of nut and bolt makers entrusted with the secrets of nut and bolt making, father to son, since the 8th century. His tools are also mystical, passed down through the generations since they were forged by other mystical craftsmen centuries ago, and his forge is like no other, its hand-cranked bellows bring to life a fire using only the finest cedar driftwood charcoal. The charcoal is also made by a 120 year old master charcoal maker Japanese bloke whose line stretches back to the n’th century, yadda yadda. And when Takahashi-san finally shuffles off this mortal coil, that’s it for nuts and bolts, because the other nuts and bolts simply can’t compare to these special ones. Continue reading “Exploding The Mystical Craftsman Myth” →

PCB Edge USB-C

Connector-Free Zone: PCB Edge As USB-C Interfaces

October 27, 2025 by 37 Comments

Sometimes when you’re making a PCB that you plan on programming over USB, but you only plan on plugging in a couple of times, it would be nice to make that connection without another BOM item. Over on GitHub [AnasMalas] has released a PCB edge USB-C connection symbol/footprint to do just that!

This isn’t the first PCB edge USB-C connector we’ve seen, but this one has some nice features. It’s available in both KiCad and EasyEDA formats, allowing you to easily add it into your preferred ECAD software. As well as supporting multiple software packages, there are two versions included: a 10-pin and 14-pin version. The 10-pin version has, on each side, 2 USB voltage pins, 2 ground pins, and a CC1 or CC2 pin on its respective side; this version is ideal if you’re looking to just supply power via the connector. The 14-pin version has all the pins of the 10-pin version with the addition of four data-positive and data-negative pins needed to relay information to the board, ideal if you’re planning on programming a microcontroller with this connection.

One important note is that, while most PCBs default to 1.6 mm thickness, if you use this connector you’ll need to drop that down to ~0.8 mm to properly interface with a common USB cable. [AnasMalas] also suggests using ENIG board finish to preserve the connectors on your USB cable.

For such a small and common connector, USB-C holds a ton of potential. Be sure to check out our series all about USB-C for more details.

Thanks to [Ben] for the tip.

The Channel Crossing Bridge That Never Was

October 27, 2025 by 17 Comments
Full marks for clarity of message. Credit: Euro Route materials

When the Channel Tunnel opened in 1994, the undersea rail link saw Britain grew closer to the European mainland than ever before. However, had things gone a little differently, history might have taken a very different turn. Among the competing proposals for a fixed Channel crossing was a massive bridge. It was a scheme so audacious that fate would never allow it to come to fruition.

Forget the double handling involved in putting cars on trains and doing everything by rail. Instead, the aptly-named Euro Route proposed that motorists simply drive across the Channel, perhaps stopping for duty-free shopping in the middle of the sea along the way.

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Satellite Snooping Reveals Sensitive Unencrypted Data

October 27, 2025 by 25 Comments

In an era where running a website without HTTPS is shunned, and everyone wants you to encrypt your DNS queries, you’d expect that the telecommunications back-ends are secured tightly as well. Especially the wireless bits between terra firma and geosynchronous communication satellites.

But as recently discovered by US researchers, the opposite is actually true. The paper by [Wenyi Morty Zhang] et al. (PDF) goes into great detail on how they discovered these unencrypted IP traffic flows and what they found in these captures.

With an off-the-shelf consumer satellite dish mounted to the roof of a university building in San Diego, they performed a scan of IP traffic on 39 geosynchronous satellites. To their surprise, they found unencrypted data that belonged to companies like T-Mobile for their cellular backhaul, Internet traffic targeting airliners, and VoIP communication — all in the clear.

Even more worrying was what looked like military traffic and corporate VPN data containing unencrypted login details, corporate emails and much more. While T-Mobile immediately enabled encryption after this discovery, it remains to be seen whether anyone else will. It’s probably best to assume that any communication can be intercepted and to use e.g. PGP-encrypted emails for anything sensitive.

The researchers have made the IP encapsulation parser (in Python) for DVB-S2(X) captures available for anyone who wants to give this experiment a whirl themselves.

Magazine Transistor Tester Lives Again

October 27, 2025 by 9 Comments

One of the lost pleasures of our modern world is the experience of going shopping at a grocery store, a mall, or a drugstore, and finding this month’s electronics magazine festooned with projects that you might like to build. Sure, you can find anything on the Internet, but there’s something to be said about the element of surprise. Can any of those old projects still be of interest?

[Bettina Neumryr] thinks so. She has a hobby of finding old magazine projects and building them. Her most recent installment is a transistor tester from the June 1983 issue of Everyday Electronics.

The tester was quite a neat job for 1983, with a neat case and a PC board. It measures beta and leakage. There’s an analog meter that can measure the collector current for a fixed base current (beta or hfe). Leakage is how much current flows between emitter and collector with the base turned off.

In 1983, we’d have loved to have a laser printer to do toner transfer for the PC board, but of course, that was unheard of in hobby circles of the day. The tester seemed to work right off the bat, although there was a small adjustment necessary to calibrate the device. All that was left was to put it in a period-appropriate box with some printed labels.

We loved the old electronics and computer magazines. Usually, when we see someone working on an old magazine project, it is probably not quite a literal copy of it. But either way is cool.

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