LLM Dialogue In Animal Crossing Actually Works Very Well

September 30, 2025 by 8 Comments

In the original Animal Crossing from 2001, players are able to interact with a huge cast of quirky characters, all with different interests and personalities. But after you’ve played the game for awhile, the scripted interactions can become a bit monotonous. Seeing an opportunity to improve the experience, [josh] decided to put a Large Language Model (LLM) in charge of these interactions. Now when the player chats with other characters in the game, the dialogue is a lot more engaging, relevant, and sometimes just plain funny.

How does one go about hooking a modern LLM into a 24-year-old game built for an entirely offline console? [josh]’s clever approach required a lot of poking about, and did a good job of leveraging some of the game’s built-in features for a seamless result.

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2025 Hackaday Speakers, Round One! And Spoilers

September 30, 2025 by 4 Comments

Supercon is the Ultimate Hardware Conference and you need to be there! Just check out this roster of talks that will be going down. We’ve got something for everyone out there in the Hackday universe, from poking at pins, to making things beautiful, to robots, radios, and FPGAs. And this isn’t even half of the list yet.

We’ve got a great mix of old favorites and new faces this year, and as good as they are, honestly the talks are only half of the fun. The badge hacking, the food, the brainstorming, and just the socializing with the geekiest of the geeky, make it an event you won’t want to miss. If you don’t have tickets yet, you can still get them here.

Plus, this year, because Friday night is Halloween, we’ll be hosting a Sci-Fi-themed costume party for those who want to show off their best props or most elaborate spacesuits. And if that is the sort of thing that you’re into, you will absolutely want to stay tuned to our Keynote Speaker(s) announcement in a little while. (Spoiler number one.)

Joe FitzPatrick
Probing Pins for Protocol Polyglots

This talk explores stacking multiple protocols, like UART, SPI, and I2C, onto the same GPIO pins by exploiting undefined “don’t care” regions. Learn how to bitbang several devices at once, creating protocol polyglots without extra hardware.

Elli Furedy
Sandbox Systems: Hardware for Emergent Games

From Conway’s Game of Life to cyberpunk bounty hunting in the desert, this talk explores how thoughtful design in tech and hardware can lead to human connection and community. Elli Furedy shares lessons from years of building hardware and running an immersive experience at the event Neotropolis.

Andrew [Cprossu] Lewton
Cracking Open a Classic DOS Game

Take a nostalgic and technical deep dive into The Lawnmower Man, a quirky full-motion video game for DOS CD-ROM. We’ll explore the tools and techniques used to reverse-engineer the game, uncover how it was built, and wrap things up with a live demo on original hardware.

Reid Sox-Harris
Beyond RGB: The Illuminating World of Color & LEDs

RGB lighting is everywhere and allows any project to display millions of unique colors. This talk explores the physiology of the human eye that allows RGB to be so effective, when alternatives are better, and how to choose the right lighting for your project.

Cyril Engmann
What Makes a Robot Feel Alive?

This talk dives into the art and engineering of programming personality into pet robots, crafting behaviors, reactions, and quirks that turns a pile of parts into a companion with presence. Learn design tips, technical insights, and lessons from building expressive bots that blur the line between hardware and character.

Artem Makarov
Hacked in Translation: Reverse Engineering Abandoned IoT Hardware

This talk takes us on a tour of adventures reviving an abandoned IoT “AI” translator, 2025-style. From decoding peculiar protocols to reverse engineering firmware & software, discover how curiosity and persistence can breathe new life into forgotten hardware and tackle obscure technical challenges.

Samy Kamkar
Optical Espionage: Lasers to Keystrokes

We’ll learn how to identify what a target is typing from a distance through a window with an advanced laser microphone capable of converting infrared to vibrations to radio back to sound, and the electrical, optical, radio, and software components needed for cutting-edge eavesdropping.

Zachary Peterson
Cal Poly NerdFlare: Bringing #badgelife to Academia

A small experiment with PCB art and interactive badges became a campus-wide creative movement. Hear how students combined art, technology, and real-world tools to build community, develop skills, and create projects that are as accessible as they are unforgettable.

Javier de la Torre
Off the Grid, On the Net: Exploring Ham Radio Mesh Networks.

This talk dives into using outdoor wireless access points to join a ham radio mesh network (ham net). Learn how services like weather stations, video streams, email, and VOIP are run entirely over the mesh, without needing commercial internet, all within FCC Part 97 rules.

Debra Ansell
LEDs Get Into Formation: Mechanically Interesting PCB Assemblies

This talk discusses a range of projects built from custom LED PCBs combined into two and three dimensional structures. Explores methods of connecting them into creative arrangements, both static and flexible, including the “Bendy SAO” which won a prize at Supercon 2024.

Jeremy Hong
Rad Reverb: Cooking FPGAs with Gamma Rays

This talk presents research on destructive testing of commercial off-the-shelf (CoTS) FPGAs using cobalt-60 and cesium-137 radiation to study failure modes and resilience in high-radiation environments. Learn about a novel in-situ measurement method that allows real-time observation of integrated circuits during exposure, capturing transient faults and degradation without interrupting operation.

Doug Goodwin
Aurora Blue

Earth’s magnetic field is glitching out. Phones fail, satellites drop, auroras flood the skies. This talk dives into Aurora Blue, which imagines this future through post-digital imaging hacks: cyanotype prints exposed by custom light-field instruments that flow like auroras. Deep-blue works built to endure, sky relics you can hold after the cloud crashes.

Workshop News, and another Spoiler

Sadly, we’ve got to announce that the Meshtastic workshop with Kody Kinzie will not be taking place. But Spoiler Number Two is that the badge this year will have all of the capabilities of that project and much, much more. If you’re into LoRA radio, meshes, and handheld devices, you’ll want to watch out for our badge reveal in the upcoming weeks.

Oh, and go get your tickets now before it’s too late. Supercon has sold out every year, so you can’t say that we didn’t tell you.

A Trail Camera Built With Raspberry Pi

September 30, 2025 by 9 Comments

You can get all kinds of great wildlife footage if you trek out into the woods with a camera, but it can be tough to stay awake all night. However, this is a task you can readily automate, as [Luke] did with his DIY trail camera.

A Raspberry Pi Zero 2W serves as the heart of the build. It’s compact and runs on very little power, but also provides a good amount more processing power than the original Raspberry Pi Zero. It’s kitted out with the Raspberry Pi AI Camera, which uses the Sony IMX500 Intelligent Vision Sensor — providing a great platform for neural networks doing image classification and similar machine learning tasks. A Witty Pi power management module is used both for its real time clock and to schedule start-ups and shutdowns to best manage the power on offer from the batteries. All these components are wrapped up in a 3D printed housing to keep the Pi safe out in the wild.

We’ve seen some neat projects in this vein before.

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A Cut Above: Surgery In Space, Now And In The Future

September 30, 2025 by 3 Comments

In case you hadn’t noticed, we live in a dangerous world. While our soft, fleshy selves are remarkably good at absorbing kinetic energy and healing the damage that results, there are very definite limits to what we humans can deal with, beyond which we’ll need some help. Car crashes, falls from height, or even penetrating trauma such as gunshot wounds — events such as these will often land you in a trauma center where, if things are desperate enough, you’ll be on the operating table within the so-called “Golden Hour” of maximum survivability, to patch the holes and plug the leaks.

While the Golden Hour may be less of a hard limit than the name implies, it remains true that the sooner someone with a major traumatic injury gets into surgery, the better their chances of survival. Here on planet Earth, most urban locations can support one or more Level 1 trauma centers, putting huge swathes of the population within that 60-minute goal. Even in rural areas, EMS systems with Advanced Life Support crews can stabilize the severely wounded until they can be evacuated to a trauma center by helicopter, putting even more of the population within this protective bubble.

But ironically, residents in the highest-priced neighborhood in human history enjoy no such luxury. Despite only being the equivalent of a quick helicopter ride away, the astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station are pretty much on their own when it comes to any traumatic injuries or medical emergencies that might crop up in orbit. While the ISS crews are well-prepared for that eventuality, as we’ll see, there’s only so much we can do right now, and we have a long way to go before we’re ready to perform surgery in space

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Ask Hackaday: What’s The Top Programming Language Of 2025

September 30, 2025 by 47 Comments

We did an informal poll around the Hackaday bunker and decided that, for most of us, our favorite programming language is solder. However, [Stephen Cass] over at IEEE Spectrum released their annual post on The Top Programming Languages. We thought it would be interesting to ask you what you think is the “top” language these days and why.

The IEEE has done this since 2013, but even they admit there are some issues with how you measure such an abstract idea. For one thing, what does “top” mean anyway? They provide three rankings. The first is the “Spectrum” ranking, which draws data from various public sources, including Google search, Stack Exchange, and GitHub.

The post argues that as AI coding “help” becomes more ubiquitous, you will care less and less about what language you use. This is analogous to how most programmers today don’t really care about the machine language instruction set. They write high-level language code, and the rest is a detail beneath their notice. They also argue that this will make it harder to get new languages in the pipeline. In the old days, a single book on a language could set it on fire. Now, there will need to be a substantial amount of training data for the AI to ingest. Even now, there have been observations that AI writes worse code for lesser-used languages.

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A violet laser beam is shown expanding outward from a diode in a darkened room and illuminating the back of a man's hand.

Driving A Laser At 200 Volts For Nanoseconds

September 30, 2025 by 24 Comments

If there’s one lesson to be learned from [Aled Cuda]’s pulsed laser driver, it’s that you can treat the current limits on electronic components as a suggestion if the current duration is measured in nanoseconds.

The components in question are a laser diode and an NPN transistor, the latter of which operates in avalanche mode to drive nanosecond-range pulses of high current through the former. A buck-boost converter brings a 12 volt power supply up to 200 volts, which then passes through a diode and into the avalanche transistor, which is triggered by an external pulse generator. On the other side of the transistor is a pulse-shaping network of resistors and capacitors, the laser diode, and a parallel array of low-value resistors, which provide a current monitor by measuring the voltage across them. There is an optoisolator to protect the pulse generator from the 200 volt lines on the circuit board, but for simplicity’s sake it was omitted from this iteration; there is some slight irony in designing your own laser driver for the sake of the budget, then controlling it with “a pulse generator we don’t mind blowing up.” We can only assume that [Aled] was confident in his work.

The video below details the assembly of the circuit board, which features some interesting details, such as the use of a transparent solder mask which makes the circuit layout clear while still helping to align components during reflow. The circuit did eventually drive the diode without destroying anything, even though the pulses were probably 30 to 40 watts. A pulse frequency of 360 hertz gave a nice visual beating effect due to small mismatches between the pulse frequency of the driver and the frame rate of the camera.

This isn’t the first laser driver to use avalanche breakdown for short, high-power pulses, but it’s always good to see new implementations. If you’re interested in further high-speed electronics, we’ve covered them in more detail before.

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YouTube… Over Dial Up

September 29, 2025 by 24 Comments

In the days of yore, computers would scream strange sounds as they spoke with each other over phone lines. Of course, this is dial up, the predecessor to modern internet technology, offering laughable speeds compared to modern connections. But what if dial up had more to offer? Perhaps it could even stream a YouTube video. That’s what the folks over at The Serial Port set out to find out.

The key to YouTube over dial up is a little known part of the protocol added right around the time broadband was taking off called multilink PPP. This protocol allows for multiple modems connected to a PC in parallel for faster connections. With no theoretical limit in sight, and YouTube’s lowest quality requiring a mere 175 Kbps, the goal was clear: find if there is a limit to multilink PPP and watch YouTube over dialup in the process.

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