How Magnetic Fonts Twisted Up Numbers And Saved Banking Forever

February 10, 2025 by Lewin Day 48 Comments

If you’ve ever looked at the bottom of a bank check, you probably glanced over some strangely formed numbers? If you’re a fan of science fiction or retro computers, you’ve probably spotted the same figures on any number of books from the 1980s. They’re mostly readable, but they’re chunky and thin in places you don’t expect.

Those oddball numerals didn’t come from just anywhere—they were a very carefully crafted invention to speed processing in the banking system. These special fonts were created to be readable both by humans and machines—us with our eyes, and the computers with magnetic sensors. Let’s explore the enigmatic characters built for Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR). Continue reading “How Magnetic Fonts Twisted Up Numbers And Saved Banking Forever” →

Basically, It’s BASIC

February 10, 2025 by Jenny List 36 Comments

The BASIC language may be considered old-hat here in 2025, and the days when a computer came as a matter of course with a BASIC interpreter are far behind us, but it can still provide many hours of challenge and fun. Even with our love of all things 8-bit, though, we’re still somewhat blown away by [Matthew Begg]’s BASIC interpreter written in 10 lines of BASIC. It’s an entry in the BASIC 10-liner competition, and it’s written to run on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

The listing can be viewed as a PNG file on the linked page. It is enough to cause even the most seasoned retrocomputer enthusiasts a headache because, as you might expect, it pushes the limits of the language and the Sinclair interpreter. It implements Tiny Basic as a subset of the more full-featured BASICs, and he’s the first to admit it’s not fast by any means. He gives a line-by-line explanation, and yes, it’s about as far away from the simple Frogger clones we remember bashing in on our Sinclairs as it’s possible to get.

We love it that there are still boundaries to be pushed, even on machines over four decades old, and especially that this one exceeds what we thought was a pretty good knowledge of Sinclair BASIC. Does this language still have a place in the world? We always look forward to the BASIC 10-liner competition.

Header: background by Bill Bertram, CC BY-SA 2.5.

Flip Flops Make Great Soft Switches

February 10, 2025 by Lewin Day 46 Comments

Mechanical switches are pretty easy to understand—the contacts touch, the current flows, and Bob is, presumably, your uncle. But what about soft switches? Well, they’re not that difficult to understand either, as explained by [EDN].

*You can build a touch switch quite easily with old-school chips.*

The traditional softswitch takes input from a momentary single-pole pushbutton and lets you press to toggle power on and off. This operation is easy to achieve with a simple flip-flop constructed with old-school logic to create a “bistable” circuit. That means it will happily remain stable in one of two states unless you do something to make it switch.

Continue reading “Flip Flops Make Great Soft Switches” →

Fixing a hoodie zipper with a drinking straw and hot glue.

Hack That Broken Zipper!

February 9, 2025 by Kristina Panos 21 Comments

We’ve all been there. That sad day when the zipper on our favorite hoodie, bag, or pair of pants breaks in some seemingly irreparable way. But there is hope, and [Magic Stitches] is gonna show you how to make some common repairs using household items and, in some cases, just a little bit of easy hand sewing. After a warm up with a kitchen fork, the video moves on to more significant problems.

The first problem — a chewed-away zipper bottom — is quite common, but requires no sewing to fix. As you’ll see in the video below, all it takes is a drinking straw, some hot glue, a lighter, and a pair of scissors to recreate the plastic bit that keeps the zipper from splitting in twain.

Now the second issue concerns a pair of pants wherein the head has come off the static side of the zipper. This one seems impossible to fix, but [Magic Stitches] cuts into the static side about five teeth from the bottom, slides the head back on, and sews the bottom of the zipper together.

This one we take a little bit of an issue with, because it assumes that you can get your jeans on over your hips without needing the zipper head to be fully down. But what else are you going to do but ~~throw the jeans away~~ upcycle the jeans into a fanny pack or something to immortalize them?

Continue reading “Hack That Broken Zipper!” →

Powerful Flashlight Gets Active Air Cooling

February 9, 2025 by Lewin Day 16 Comments

LEDs were once little more than weedy little indicators with low light output. Today, they’re absolute powerhouses, efficiently turning a flow of electrons into a searing beam of light. Despite their efficiency, they can still put out a fair whack of heat. Thus, if you’re building a powerful flashlight like [CrazyScience], you might wanna throw some active cooling on there just to keep things happy. Check out the video below.

The build will not be unfamiliar to any casual observer of the modern DIY flashlight scene. It uses a flatpack LED module of great brightness and a wad of 18650 lithium-ion cells to provide the juice to run it. The LED itself is mounted in a 3D-printed frame, which leaves its rear exposed, and a small PC fan is mounted for air cooling. It’s not the most optimized design, as airflow out of the fan is somewhat restricted by the 3D-printed housing, but it’s a lot better than simple passive cooling. It allows the torch to be more compact without requiring a huge heatsink to keep the LED at an acceptable temperature.

The final torch doesn’t have the most ergonomic form factor, but it does work. However, as a learning project for a new maker, it’s a start, and the learning value of building something functional can’t be understated. If your desire for flashlights swerves to the more powerful, we’ve covered those, too. Just be careful out there.

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Hackaday Links: February 9, 2025

February 9, 2025 by Dan Maloney 15 Comments

January 9 ended up being a very expensive day for a Culver City, California man after he pleaded guilty to recklessly operating a drone during the height of the Pacific Palisades wildfire. We covered this story a bit when it happened (second item), which resulted in the drone striking and damaging the leading edge of a Canadian “Super Scooper” plane that was trying to fight the fire. Peter Tripp Akemann, 56, admitted to taking the opportunity to go to the top of a parking garage in Santa Monica and launching his drone to get a better view of the action to the northwest. Unfortunately, the drone got about 2,500 meters away, far beyond visual range and, as it turns out, directly in the path of the planes refilling their tanks by skimming along the waters off Malibu. The agreement between Akemann and federal prosecutors calls for a guilty plea along with full restitution to the government of Quebec, which owns the damaged plane, plus the costs of repair. Akemann needs to write a check for $65,169 plus perform 150 hours of community service related to the relief effort for the fire’s victims. Expensive, yes, but probably better than the year in federal prison such an offense could have earned him.

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A Twin-Lens Reflex Camera That’s Not Quite What It Seems

February 9, 2025 by Jenny List 3 Comments

The Camp Snap is a simple fixed-focus digital camera with only an optical viewfinder and a shot counter, which has become a surprise hit among photography enthusiasts for its similarity to a disposable film camera. [Snappiness] has one, and also having a liking for waist-level viewfinders as found on twin-lens reflex cameras, decided to make a new Camp Snap with a waist-level viewfinder. It’s a digital twin-lens reflex camera, of sorts.

Inside the Camp Snap is the little webcam module we’ve come to expect from these cameras, coupled with the usual microcontroller PCB that does the work of saving to SD card. It’s not an ESP32, but if you’ve ever played with an ESP32-CAM board you’re on a similar track. He creates a 3D-printed TLR-style case designed to take the PCB and mount the camera module centrally, with ribbon cable extensions taking care of placement for the other controls. The viewfinder meanwhile uses a lens, a mirror, and a Fresnel lens, and if you think this might look a little familiar it’s because he’s based it upon his previous clip-on viewfinder project.

The result, with an added “Snappiflex” logo and filter ring, is a rather nice-looking camera, and while it will preserve the dubious quality of the Camp Snap, it will certainly make the process of using the camera a lot more fun. We think these cheap cameras, and particular their even less expensive AliExpress cousins, have plenty of hacking potential as yet untapped, and we’re keen to see more work with them. The full video is below the break.

Continue reading “A Twin-Lens Reflex Camera That’s Not Quite What It Seems” →