Robotic Screw And Bolt Sorter Seeks A New Challenge

August 8, 2026 by 16 Comments

As someone who disassembles and repairs hardware, [Aad] eventually ended up with a huge collection of mixed bolts and screws. This led to creating the automatic bolt and screw sorting system you see here, although in a way it is just a proof of concept. Bolts and screws happen to be a useful application for now, but the system is capable of sorting just about any small objects.

A bit of machine vision detects the size and shape of each object. Weight can also be measured.

Mixed pieces go onto a large conveyor belt, shown on the right. This feeds a few screws at a time down a chute, where they roll onto an illuminated platform.

Above the lit platform is a camera, and machine vision is used to detect the size and shape and orientation of each screw. A robotic gripper on a gantry picks the screws up one by one — separating them first if they happened to clump together — and places each in a drop-off cart. The cart drops the object into a receptacle with its brethren, making sure similar ones are grouped together. Watch it in action in the video, embedded below the page break.

It’s a great build that shows fancy components aren’t necessary for good results. Servos and steppers are controlled with an ESP32-WROOM board, and a piezo sensor detects screws falling off the conveyor. Some of you may have noticed a repurposed Ultimaker 3D printer serving as the bulk of the system, its hot end having been replaced with a gripper that can raise and lower. The overhead camera is an ESP32-CAM adapted to accept M12 lenses so it can focus on the platform.

There’s one more feature worth mentioning — the system also has the ability to measure the weight of a picked object by placing it onto a moveable inspection platform, which can optionally put it under a USB microscope for a closer look. Everything is controlled by a nearby PC, so there’s a lot of flexibility built into the system.

We suppose that once all the screws and bolts in a shop are sorted, it only makes sense to sort all the nuts. Are there other objects besides screws and bolts that would be useful to sort with a system like this? If you have any ideas, don’t keep them to yourself! [Aad] would love to hear your comments and ideas, so share them below.

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Junkbin, A Way To Efficiently Reuse Your Old Electronics

August 8, 2026 by 30 Comments

We all have that bin in the corner of our shops — the one with all the circuit boards or broken electronics that we are totally gonna do something with. We might rationalize that they’re worth keeping for the parts alone, but the reality is, unless you desolder and sort all the components ahead of time, most of us will never really use these spare parts to their full potential. Except it really doesn’t have to be that way. Junkbin.io is an attempt to improve on the state of that corner bin.

Though in its early years, Junkbin has a variety of the previously mentioned resources as well as many others. Currently, it is ripe to contribute, and we here at Hackaday know how important the community is to get these projects truly off the ground and to their full potential.

Created by [Steve Cap], Junkbin is a community dictionary of sorts to document and reuse electronic components found on many of the devices found around you. Do you need a single small form factor resistor of a specific resistance? That’s where Junkbin comes in to show you where you might find that specific component.

If you want a more macro-scale example of electronics recycling, make sure to check out our other featured projects such as these reused laptops! Or maybe take a look at this graveyard of defunct electronics to add to Junkbin…

Tim Hunkin’s History Of Arcade Machines

August 8, 2026 by 10 Comments

There was a particular treat at the recent Electromagnetic Field event in the UK, as [Tim Hunkin] delivered a talk on the history of arcade machines. Given that he’s something of an engineering hero for his many years of delighting us with machines, it’s definitely worth a watch.

He has a special interest in arcade machines given that he runs a pair of arcades featuring his own creations. Part of the history tour explains the influence some machines have had on his creations, from the early automata he starts with, through to the Pachinko machine that graces Novelty Automation in London. We’re introduced to Victorian saucy film viewers, one-armed bandits, and pinball machines, and along the way the secret of that most British of machines, the penny falls, is revealed. We particularly like the rare electromechanical Pepper’s Ghost style video game cabinets he describes.

A few years ago now we took a trip to Novelty Automation, and wrote a profile for its creator. If you’re ever in London or Southwold, we suggest you do too. The video from EMF is below the break.

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Want Energy Efficiency? Dude, You’re Getting A Dell!

August 8, 2026 by 27 Comments

With a title like “Intel Just Matched Apple Silicon. Seriously.“, the latest video from [Jeff Geerling] makes some pretty bold claims. But as we’d expect from [Jeff], he’s got the benchmarks up on GitHub for both the MacBook Neo and Dell’s latest XPS 13 to back it up.

We’ve embedded the full video below, which has [Jeff]’s comparative review of the two laptops. The Mac wins on iGPU, sound, and not shipping Windows, while the Dell gets points for being able to load Linux and having a backlit keyboard. But the figure we were hoping to see is the efficiency. After all, it’s ARM’s ability to crank out gigaflops on fewer watts that won them the mobile market and got Apple interested in that architecture in the first place. If Intel is catching up, that’s news.

On [Jeff]’s version of the Top500 benchmark — the same HPL Linpak test used for Supercomputers — the MacBook cranked out 57.012 Gflops at 10.6W, for 5.38 Gflops/W while the Dell managed 127.91 Gflops at 20.6W, for 6.21 Gflops/W. That’s just astounding, considering the historical data all goes the other way. This Dell also beats out both M4 and M3 Mac Studios, only failing to the M4 Mac Mini at 7.57 Gflops/W. Even when not crunching big numbers, say at idle or web browsing, the XPS matches the MacBook sip for sip in energy efficiency.

Some people have been saying for a few years now that ARM’s observed advantages in power consumption have more to do with the chips themselves than the instruction architecture, and it looks like the Core 5 320 chip in this Dell proves them right when it comes to x86.

While you might think you need to code in Assembly or C to maximize those efficiency gains, your choice of language may not be as important as you think.

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The BBC Tetris Companion

August 7, 2026 by 2 Comments

[Leaded Solder] took on an interesting challenge. The BBC, apparently, produced a game console known as the BBC Bridge Companion that connected to your TV and helped you learn to play Bridge back in 1985. At £200, we doubt many were sold new, but there were nine ROM cartridges available, presumably at an additional cost. [Leaded Solder] doesn’t care about playing bridge, but decided to teach the computer itself to play Tetris.

Inside is what you might expect for 1985. A Z80 and TI video chip, although naturally enough, it is the PAL variant. With 16K of VRAM the machine would have been very capable for its day. Unlike some game systems, the Bridge Companion runs its own code before launching what’s on the ROM cartridge. That required a few evenings of reverse engineering to figure out the correct header. Meanwhile, the surplus real hardware needed a quick repair on its cartridge slot before he could test it with real metal.

There were more hurdles, including adapting the PAL output for a composite monitor. Don’t miss the second part of the series for more technical details, and we’ll be interested in following the posts to their conclusion later this month.

Oddly enough, we think this is the first time the BBC Bridge Companion has made an appearance on Hackaday. However, we’ve had no shortage of card shufflers.

Block, Shmock — Just Pump Water Over The Chip

August 7, 2026 by 25 Comments

If you’re water cooling a PC, it’s generally accepted that you need some interface between the coolant and the chips — a water block of copper or aluminum that carries the heat-removing fluid. What if you just…didn’t? That’s what [TrashBench] asked with his direct water cooling experiment. Instead of integrated pump or copper water block, he just epoxied a 3D printed pipe fitting onto his bare GPU and CPU.

The results are interesting: while the directly-cooled GPU outperforms the professional system by a decent margin, the same technique fails when applied to the CPU. It also leaks and nearly ruins his hardware, but those are the risks you take when doing mad science, and it’s nothing more epoxy can’t fix. In any case, the fact that directly exposing chips to liquid can cool them down isn’t exactly a revelation. People have been dunking computers in oil for years, but the fact that he sees such a difference between CPU and GPU is quite interesting. [TrashBench] has his own theory in the video, but what do you think is going on here?

In any case, if he continues his direct cooling experiments he’s still going to need a radiator, and if we may be so bold, we would like to recommend a giant metal snake.

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This Filesystem Is Born To Fail

August 7, 2026 by 31 Comments

Sandboxing a Linux process usually means spending a lot of effort deciding what it isn’t allowed to see. You might put it in a mount namespace, bind-mount a few directories into place, hide some others, add a chroot, and generally construct a carefully restricted version of the filesystem. But a new Linux kernel feature is about to change all of that. Instead of carefully hiding most of the filesystem, why not just take the filesystem away?

That’s essentially the idea behind FailFS, a tiny pseudo-filesystem expected to land in Linux 7.3. As the name suggests, it doesn’t do very much. In fact, that’s the point: every operation that reaches FailFS returns EOPNOTSUPP, meaning “operation not supported.”

The interesting bit is what happens when a process uses FailFS as its root or current working directory. At that point, normal pathname lookup essentially ceases to work. Absolute paths fail. Absolute symbolic links fail. Relative paths using the normal current-directory mechanism fail. If the application tries to open /etc/passwd, there simply isn’t a useful /etc to find.

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