Clickspring’s Experimental Archaeology: Concentric Thin-Walled Tubing

April 25, 2025 by 32 Comments

It’s human nature to look at the technological achievements of the ancients — you know, anything before the 1990s — and marvel at how they were able to achieve precision results in such benighted times. How could anyone create a complicated mechanism without the aid of CNC machining and computer-aided design tools? Clearly, it was aliens.

Or, as [Chris] from Click Spring demonstrates by creating precision nesting thin-wall tubing, it was human beings running the same wetware as what’s running between our ears but with a lot more patience and ingenuity. It’s part of his series of experiments into how the craftsmen of antiquity made complicated devices like the Antikythera mechanism with simple tools. He starts by cleaning up roughly wrought brass rods on his hand-powered lathe, followed by drilling and reaming to create three tubes with incremental precision bores. He then creates matching pistons for each tube, with an almost gas-tight enough fit right off the lathe.

Getting the piston fit to true gas-tight precision came next, by lapping with a jeweler’s rouge made from iron swarf recovered from the bench. Allowed to rust and ground to a paste using a mortar and pestle, the red iron oxide mixed with olive oil made a dandy fine abrasive, perfect for polishing the metal to a high gloss finish. Making the set of tubes concentric required truing up the bores on the lathe, starting with the inner-most tube and adding the next-largest tube once the outer diameter was lapped to spec.

Easy? Not by a long shot! It looks like a tedious job that we suspect was given to the apprentice while the master worked on more interesting chores. But clearly, it was possible to achieve precision challenging today’s most exacting needs with nothing but the simplest tools and plenty of skill. Continue reading “Clickspring’s Experimental Archaeology: Concentric Thin-Walled Tubing” →

Adding An Atari Joystick Port To TheC64 USB Joystick

April 24, 2025 by 1 Comment

“TheC64” is a popular recreation of the best selling computer of all time, the original Commodore 64. [10p6] enjoys hacking on this platform, and recently whipped up a new mod — adding a 9-pin Atari joystick connector for convenience.

When it comes to TheC64 units, they ship with joysticks that look retro, but aren’t. These joysticks actually communicate with the hardware over USB. [10p6]’s hack was to add an additional 9-pin Atari joystick connector into the joystick itself. It’s a popular mod amongst owners of TheC64 and the C64 Mini. All one needs to do is hook up a 9-pin connector to the right points on the joystick’s PCB. Then, it effectively acts as a pass-through adapter for hooking up other joysticks to the system.

While this hack could have been achieved by simply chopping away at the plastic housing of the original joystick, [10p6] went a tidier route. Instead, the joystick was granted a new 3D printed base that had a perfect mounting spot for the 9-pin connector. Clean!

We’ve seen some great hacks from [10p6] lately, like the neat reimagined “C64C” build that actually appears in this project video, too.

Continue reading “Adding An Atari Joystick Port To TheC64 USB Joystick” →

An illustration of two translucent blue hands knitting a DNA double helix of yellow, green, and red base pairs from three colors of yarn. Text in white to the left of the hands reads: "Evo 2 doesn't just copy existing DNA -- it creates truly new sequences not found in nature that scientists can test for useful properties."

LLMs Coming For A DNA Sequence Near You

April 24, 2025 by 16 Comments

While tools like CRISPR have blown the field of genome hacking wide open, being able to predict what will happen when you tinker with the code underlying the living things on our planet is still tricky. Researchers at Stanford hope their new Evo 2 DNA generative AI tool can help.

Trained on a dataset of over 100,000 organisms from bacteria to humans, the system can quickly determine what mutations contribute to certain diseases and what mutations are mostly harmless. An “area we are hopeful about is using Evo 2 for designing new genetic sequences with specific functions of interest.”

To that end, the system can also generate gene sequences from a starting prompt like any other LLM as well as cross-reference the results to see if the sequence already occurs in nature to aid in predicting what the sequence might do in real life. These synthetic sequences can then be made using CRISPR or similar techniques in the lab for testing. While the prospect of building our own Moya is exciting, we do wonder what possible negative consequences could come from this technology, despite the hand-wavy mention of not training the model on viruses to “to prevent Evo 2 from being used to create new or more dangerous diseases.”

We’ve got you covered if you need to get your own biohacking space setup for DNA gels or if you want to find out more about powering living computers using electricity. If you’re more curious about other interesting uses for machine learning, how about a dolphin translator or discovering better battery materials?

3D Printing A Useful Fixturing Tool

April 24, 2025 by 14 Comments

When you start building lots of something, you’ll know the value of accurate fixturing. [Chris Borge] learned this the hard way on a recent mass-production project, and decided to solve the problem. How? With a custom fixturing tool! A 3D printed one, of course.

Chris’s build is simple enough. He created 3D-printed workplates covered in a grid of specially-shaped apertures, each of which can hold a single bolt. Plastic fixtures can then be slotted into the grid, and fastened in place with nuts that thread onto the bolts inserted in the base. [Chris] can 3D print all kinds of different plastic fixtures to mount on to the grid, so it’s an incredibly flexible system.

3D printing fixtures might not sound the stoutest way to go, but it’s perfectly cromulent for some tasks. Indeed, for [Chris]’s use case of laser cutting, the 3D printed fixtures are more than strong enough, since the forces involved are minimal. Furthermore, [Chris] aided the stability of the 3D-printed workplate by mounting it on a laser-cut wooden frame filled with concrete. How’s that for completeness?

We’ve seen some other great fixturing tools before, too. Video after the break.

Continue reading “3D Printing A Useful Fixturing Tool” →

Onkyo Receiver Saved With An ESP32

April 24, 2025 by 23 Comments

[Bill Dudley] had a problem. He had an Onkyo AV receiver that did a great job… until it didn’t. A DSP inside failed. When that happened, the main microprocessor running the show decided it wouldn’t play ball without the DSP operational. [Bill] knew the bulk of the audio hardware was still good, it was just the brains that were faulty. Thus started a 4-month operation to resurrect the Onkyo receiver with new intelligence instead.

[Bill’s] concept was simple. Yank the dead DSP, and the useless microprocessor as well. In their place, an ESP32 would be tasked with running things. [Bill] no longer cared if the receiver had DSP abilities or even the ability to pass video—he just wanted to use it as the quality audio receiver that it was.

His project report steps through all the hard work he went through to get things operational again. He had to teach the ESP32 to talk to the front panel display, the keys, and the radio tuner. More challenging was the core audio processor—the obscure Renaisys R2A15218FP. However, by persevering, [Bill] was able to get everything up and running, and even added some new functionality—including Internet radio and Bluetooth streaming.

It’s a heck of a build, and [Bill] ended up with an even more functional audio receiver at the end of it all. Bravo, we say. We love to see older audio gear brought back to life, particularly in creative ways. Meanwhile, if you’ve found your own way to save a piece of vintage audio hardware, don’t hesitate to let us know!

A black and blue swirl background with the logo of a blue dolphin over the word DolphinGemma with dolphin in white and Gemma in blue

DolphinGemma Seeks To Speak To Dolphins

April 24, 2025 by 42 Comments

Most people have wished for the ability to talk to other animals at some point, until they realized their cat would mostly insult them and ask for better service, but researchers are getting closer to a dolphin translator.

DolphinGemma is an upcoming LLM based on the recordings from the Wild Dolphin Project. Using the hours and hours of dolphin sounds recorded by researchers over the decades, the hope is that the LLM will allow us to communicate more effectively with the second most intelligent species on the planet.

The LLM is designed to run in the field on Google Pixel phones, due to it being based on Google’s in-house Gemini product, which is a bit less cumbersome than hauling a mainframe on a dive. The Wild Dolphin Project currently uses the Georgia Tech developed CHAT (Cetacean Hearing Augmentation Telemetry) device which has a Pixel 6 at its heart, but the newer system will be bumped up to a Pixel 9 to take advantage of all those shiny new AI processing advances. Hopefully, we’ll have a better chance of catching when they say, “So long and thanks for all the fish.”

If you’re curious about other mysterious languages being deciphered by LLMs, we have you covered.

Continue reading “DolphinGemma Seeks To Speak To Dolphins” →

A Bicycle Is Abandonware Now? Clever Hack Rescues Dead Light

April 24, 2025 by 75 Comments

A bicycle is perhaps one of the most repairable pieces of equipment one can own — no matter what’s wrong with it, and wherever you are on the planet, you’ll be able to find somebody to fix your bike without too much trouble. Unfortunately as electric bikes become more popular, predatory manufacturers are doing everything they can to turn a bike into a closed machine, only serviceable by them.

That’s bad enough, but it’s even worse if the company happens to go under. As an example, [Fransisco] has a bike built by a company that has since gone bankrupt. He doesn’t name them, but it looks like a VanMoof to us. The bike features a light built into the front of the top tube of the frame, which if you can believe it, can only be operated by the company’s (now nonfunctional) cloud-based app.

The hack is relatively straightforward. The panel for the VanMoof electronics is removed and the works underneath are slid up the tube, leaving the connector to the front light. An off the shelf USB-C Li-Po charger and a small cell take the place of the original parts under a new 3D printed panel with a switch to run the light via a suitable resistor. If it wasn’t for the startling green color of the filament he used, you might not even know it wasn’t original.

We would advise anyone who will listen, that hardware which relies on an app and a cloud service should be avoided at all costs. We know most Hackaday readers will be on the same page as us on this one, but perhaps it’s time for a cycling manifesto to match our automotive one.

Thanks [cheetah_henry] for the tip.