Ride On With FOSS And GoldenCheetah

December 3, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 1 Comment

If you exclude certain companies like Peloton, the world of cycling technology is surprisingly open. It’s not perfect by any means, but there are enough open or open-ish standards for many different pieces of technology from different brands to interoperate with each other, from sensors and bike computers and even indoor trainers to some extent. This has also made it possible for open source software to exist in this realm as well, and the GoldenCheetah project has jumped in for all of us who value FOSS and also like to ride various bicycles from time to time.

GoldenCheetah focuses on gathering data from power meters, allowing cyclists to record their rides and save them in order to keep track of their training performance over time. It works well with sensors that use the ANT+ protocol, and once it has that data it can provide advanced analytics such as power curves, critical power modeling, and detailed charts for power, heart rate, and cadence. It can display and record live indoor-training data, and in some situations it can even run interval workouts, although not every indoor trainer is supported. There are no social features, subscriptions, or cloud requirements which can be refreshing in the modern world, but is a bit of a downside if you’re used to riding with your friends in something like Zwift.

All in all, though, it’s an impressive bit of software that encourages at least one realm of consumer electronics to stay more open, especially if those using bike sensors, computers, and trainers pick ones that are more open and avoid those that are proprietary, even if they don’t plan to use GoldenCheetah exclusively. And if you were wondering about the ANT+ protocol mentioned earlier, it’s actually used for many more things that just intra-bike wireless communications.

Two four-cylinder engines mechanically linked and exhausting into a trombone.

Franken-engine Plays Its Own Swan Song At 15k RPM

December 3, 2025 by Tyler August 3 Comments

Back during WWII, Chrysler bodged five inline-6 engines together to create the powerful A57 multibank tank engine. [Maisteer] has some high-revving inline-4 motorcycle engines he’s trying to put together too, but unlike 1940s Chrysler, he also has a trombone… and a lot more RPMs to deal with.

The Chrysler flatheads were revving at a few thousand RPM– their redline was almost certainly in the three-thousand range. [Maisteer] is working at 15,000 RPM, which is where the real challenge of this build lies: the trombone in the image is just for fun. He wanted to use a heavy chain to link the crankshafts, but at that rotational speed, a heavy chain becomes really heavy— or at least, it feels a force many times its weight due to centrifugal force. The lietmotief of this video is a quote by an automotive engineer to the effect that chains don’t work over 10,000 RPM.

That leads to a few problems for the intrepid “not an engineer” that take most of the video to deal with and ultimately doom the engine linkage– for now. Not before he gets an iconic 8-cylinder sound out (plus some fire) out of a trombone, though. Of particular note is the maker-type workflow Hackaday readers will appreciate: he 3D scans the engines, CADs up parts he needs and sends away to have them CNC’d and SLS printed.

Hacking motorcycle engines into cars is nothing new. Hacking them together into franken-engines is something we see less often.

Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip! Remember, if you want to toot your own horn– or toot about someone else’s project, for that matter–the tips line is always open.

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 857: SOCification

December 3, 2025 by Jonathan Bennett No comments

This week Jonathan chats with Konstantinos Margaritis about SIMD programming. Why do these wide data instructions matter? What’s the state of Hyperscan, the project from Intel to power regex with SIMD? And what is Konstantinos’ connection to ARM’s SIMD approach? Watch to find out!

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3D Printering: That New Color Printer

December 3, 2025 by Al Williams 4 Comments

Color 3D printing has gone mainstream, and we expect more than one hacker will be unpacking one over the holidays. If you have, say, a color inkjet printer, the process is simple: print. Sure, maybe make sure you tick the “color” box, but that’s about it. However, 3D printers are a bit more complicated.

There are two basic phases to printing color 3D prints. First, you have to find or make a model that has different colors. Even if you don’t make your own models (although you should), you can still color prints in your slicer.

The second task is to set the printer up to deal with those multiple colors. There are several different ways to do this, and each one has its pros and cons. Of course, some of this depends on your slicer, and some depends on your printer. For the purposes of this post, I’ll assume you are using a Slic3r fork like Prusa or OrcaSlicer. Most of the lower-priced printers these days work in roughly the same way. Continue reading “3D Printering: That New Color Printer” →

That Power Bank Isn’t Quite So Sweet

December 3, 2025 by Jenny List 6 Comments

An unlikely hit of the last few months’ consumer hardware has been a power bank branded by the German confectionery company Haribo. It first gained attention in backpacking circles because of its high capacity for a reasonable weight, and since then has been selling like the proverbial hot cakes. Now Amazon have withdrawn it from their store over “A potential safety or quality issue”. The industrial imaging company Lumafield have taken a look at the power bank with a CT scanner, to find out why.

As you might imagine, the power bank is all battery inside, with pouch type lithium ion cells taking up all of the space. Immediately a clue appears as to why Amazon withdrew them, as the individual layers of the cells are misaligned, laying open a risk of failure. They also take a look at a set of earbuds from the same source and find something even more concerning — torn electrodes. Thus neither device can be regarded as safe, and the backpackers will have to haul around a little bit more in the future.

You’ll not find the Wrencher on a power bank, but you can be sure if you did, we’d make sure there was an element of quality control at play. Meanwhile we feel slightly sorry for the branding executive responsible at Haribo, who we are guessing has had a bad day. We’ve featured Lumafield’s work here before quite a few times, most recently looking at similar defects in 18650 cells.

In Which I Vibe-Code A Personal Library System

December 3, 2025 by Kristina Panos 21 Comments

When I was a kid, I was interested in a number of professions that are now either outdated, or have changed completely. One of those dreams involved checking out books and things to patrons, and it was focused primarily on pulling out the little card and adding a date-due stamp.

Of course, if you’ve been to a library in the last 20 years, you know that most of them don’t work that way anymore. Either the librarian scans special barcodes, or you check materials out yourself simply by placing them just so, one at a time. Either way, you end up with a printed receipt with all the materials listed, or an email. I ask you, what’s the fun in that? At least with the old way, you’d usually get a bookmark for each book by way of the due date card.

As I got older and spent the better part of two decades in a job that I didn’t exactly vibe with, I seriously considered becoming a programmer. I took Java, Android, and UNIX classes at the local junior college, met my now-husband, and eventually decided I didn’t have the guts to actually solve problems with computers. And, unlike my husband, I have very little imagination when it comes to making them do things.

Fast forward to last weekend, the one before Thanksgiving here in the US. I had tossed around the idea of making a personal library system just for funsies a day or so before, and I brought it up again. My husband was like, do you want to make it tonight using ChatGPT? And I was like, sure — not knowing what I was getting into except for the driver’s seat, excited for the destination.

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Shelf Life Extended: Hacking E-Waste Tags Into Conference Badges

December 3, 2025 by Matt Varian 7 Comments

Ever wonder what happens to those digital price tags you see in stores once they run out of juice? In what is a prime example of e-waste, many of those digital price tags are made with non-replaceable batteries, so once their life is over they are discarded. Seeing an opportunity to breathe new life into these displays, [Tylercrumpton] went about converting them to be the official badge of the Phreaknic 26 conference.

Looking for a solution for a cheap display for the upcoming conference badge, [Tylercrumpton] recalled seeing the work [Aaron Christophel] did with reusing electronic shelf labels. Looking on eBay, he picked up a lot of 100 ZBD 55c-RB labels for just $0.70 a piece. When they arrived, he got to work liberating the displays from their plastic cases. The long-dead batteries in the devices ended up being easily removed, leaving behind just the display and the PCB that drives it.

Another hacker assisting with the badge project, [Mog], noticed that the spacing of the programming pads on the PCB was very close to the spacing of a DB9/DE9 cable. This gave way to a very clever hack for programming the badges: putting pogo pins into a female connector. The other end of the cable was connected to a TI CC Debugger which was used to program the firmware on the displays. But along the way, even this part of the project got an upgrade with moving to an ESP32 for flashing firmware, allowing for firmware updates without a host computer.

The next challenge was how to handle customizing 200 unique badges for the conference. For this, each badge had a unique QR code embedded in the back of the 3D printed case that pointed to an online customization tool. The tool allowed the user to change which of the images was used for the background, as well as input the name they wanted to be displayed on the badge. Once finished, the server would provide a patched firmware image suitable for flashing the badge. The original intent was to have stations where attendees could plug in their badge and it would update itself; however, due to some 11th hour hiccups, that didn’t pan out for this conference. Instead, [Tylercrumpton] ran the update script on his machine, and it gave him a great opportunity to interact with conference attendees as they stopped by to update their badges.

For the Phreaknic 27 badge, the plan is to once again use electronic shelf labels, but this time to utilize some of the advanced features of the tags such as the EEPROM and wireless communications. We’re eager to see what the team comes up with.

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