Two hands working a TekaSketch

TekaSketch: Where Etch A Sketch Meets Graph Theory

September 29, 2025 by 6 Comments

The Etch A Sketch was never supposed to meet a Raspberry Pi, a camera, or a mathematical algorithm, but here we are. [Tekavou]’s Teka-Cam and TekaSketch are a two-part hack that transforms real photos into quite stunning, line-drawn Etch A Sketch art. Where turning the knobs only results in wobbly doodles, this machine plots out every curve and contour better than your fingertips ever could.

Essentially, this is a software hack mixed with hardware: an RPi Zero W 2, a camera module, Inkplate 6, and rotary encoders. Snap a picture, and the image is conveyed to a Mac Mini M4 Pro, where Python takes over. It’s stripped to black and white, and the software creates a skeleton of all black areas. It identifies corner bridges, and unleashes a modified Chinese Postman Algorithm to stitch everything into one continuous SVG path. That file then drives the encoders, producing a drawing that looks like a human with infinite patience and zero caffeine jitters. Originally, the RPi did all the work, but it was getting too slow so the Mac was brought in.

It’s graph theory turned to art, playful and serious at the same time, and it delivers quite unique pieces. [Tekavou] is planning on improving with video support. A bit of love for his efforts might accellerate his endeavours. Let us know in the comments below!

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Macintosh System 7 Ported To X86 With LLM Help

September 29, 2025 by 50 Comments

You can use large language models for all sorts of things these days, from writing terrible college papers to bungling legal cases. Or, you can employ them to more interesting ends, such as porting Macintosh System 7 to the x86 architecture, like [Kelsi Davis] did.

When Apple created the Macintosh lineup in the 1980s, it based the computer around Motorola’s 68K CPU architecture. These 16-bit/32-bit CPUs were plenty capable for the time, but the platform ultimately didn’t have the same expansive future as Intel’s illustrious x86 architecture that underpinned rival IBM-compatible machines.

[Kelsi Davis] decided to port the Macintosh System 7 OS to run on native x86 hardware, which would be challenging enough with full access to the source code. However, she instead performed this task by analyzing and reverse engineering the System 7 binaries with the aid of Ghidra and a large language model. Soon enough, she had the classic System 7 desktop running on QEMU with a fully-functional Finder and the GUI working as expected. [Kelsi] credits the LLM with helping her achieve this feat in just three days, versus what she would expect to be a multi-year effort if working unassisted.

Files are on GitHub for the curious. We love a good port around these parts; we particularly enjoyed these efforts to recreate Portal on the N64. If you’re doing your own advanced tinkering with Macintosh software from yesteryear, don’t hesitate to let us know.

Lumafield Shows Why Your Cheap 18650 Cells Are Terrible

September 29, 2025 by 36 Comments

Lithium-ion cells deliver very high energy densities compared to many other battery technologies, but they bring with them a danger of fire or explosion if they are misused. We’re mostly aware of the battery conditioning requirements to ensure cells stay in a safe condition, but how much do we know about the construction of the cells as a factor? [Lumafield] is an industrial imaging company, and to demonstrate their expertise, they’ve subjected a large number of 18650 cells from different brands to a CT scan.

The construction of an 18650 sees the various layers of the cell rolled up in a spiral inside the metal tube that makes up the cell body. The construction of this “jellyroll” is key to the quality of the cell. [Lumafield’s] conclusions go into detail over the various inconsistencies in this spiral, which can result in cell failure. It’s important that the edges of the spiral be straight and that there is no electrode overhang. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they find that cheap no-name cells are poorly constructed and more likely to fail, but it’s also interesting to note that these low-quality cells also have fewer layers in their spiral.

We hope that none of you see more of the inside of a cell in real life than you have to, as they’re best left alone, but this report certainly sheds some light as to what’s going on inside a cell. Of course, even the best cells can still be dangerous without protection.

Ask Hackaday: How Do You Distro Hop?

September 29, 2025 by 33 Comments

If you read “Jenny’s Daily Drivers” or “Linux Fu” here on Hackaday, you know we like Linux. Jenny’s series, especially, always points out things I want to try on different distributions. However, I have a real tendency not to change my distro, especially on my main computer. Yet I know people “distro hop” all the time. My question to you? How do you do it?

The Easy but Often Wrong Answer

Sure, there’s an easy answer. Keep your /home directory on a separate disk and just use it with a new boot image. Sounds easy. But the truth is, it isn’t that easy. I suppose if you don’t do much with your system, that might work. But even if you don’t customize things at the root level, you still have problems if you change desktop environments or even versions of desktop environments. Configuration files change over time. Good luck if you want to switch to and from distros that are philosophically different, like systemd vs old-school init; apparmor vs SELinux. So it isn’t always as simple as just pointing a new distro at your home directory.

One thing I’ve done to try out new things is to use a virtual machine. That’s easy these days. But it isn’t satisfying if your goal is to really switch to a new distro as your daily driver. Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: How Do You Distro Hop?” →

Blocky tread, yellow hub-- yep, it looks like LEGO

10″ LEGO Tyre Is Practical Nostalgia

September 29, 2025 by 6 Comments

If there’s one thing that has come to define the generations after the baby boom, it’s probably nostalgia. It’s heavily marketed and weaponized by the market: yearning for better, simpler times seems to be a core thread of the consumer economy these days. [Makerneer] combined his xilennial love of LEGO bricks with the flat tires on his log splitter to produce a 10″ TPU tyre will never go flat, and provide a dopamine release every time he sees it.

The tyre is a custom model to fit his particular rims, but he does provide STEP and F3D files if you’d like to try modifing it for your own purpose — they’re at Step 6 of the Instructable. Props to [Makerneer] for truly open-sourcing the design instead of just tossing STL files online. His build log also takes the time to point out the ways he had to modify the LEGO tyre profile to make it amenable to 3D printing: notably chamfering some of the tread pattern to eliminate bridging, which is a bit of a no-no with TPU.

As you can see in the (unfortunately vertical) demo video below, it’s a bit quite a bit squishier than a regular run-flat tyre, but that was part of [Makerneer]’s design goal. He didn’t like how rigid the non-pneumatic tyres he’d tried were, so endevoured to design something himself; the whole LEGO thing was just for fun. If you wanted to replicate this tyre with a bit less skoosh, you need only tune the infill on your print.

While only time will tell how long this LEGO-inspired add-on will continue adding whimsy to [Makerneer]’s log-splitting, we have tests to show it will outperform any other plastic he might have printed. This project is probably more practical than a 3D printed bicycle tyre, which doesn’t even have the side benefit of whimsy. Continue reading “10″ LEGO Tyre Is Practical Nostalgia” →

Two Decades Of Hackaday In Words

September 29, 2025 by 22 Comments

I think most of us who make or build things have a thing we are known for making. Where it’s football robots, radios, guitars, cameras, or inflatable textile sculptures, we all have the thing we do. For me that’s over the years been various things but has recently been camera hacking, however there’s another thing I do that’s not so obvious. For the last twenty years, I’ve been interested in computational language analysis. There’s so much that a large body of text can reveal without a single piece of AI being involved, and in pursuing that I’ve created for myself a succession of corpus analysis engines. This month I’ve finally been allowed to try one of them with a corpus of Hackaday articles, and while it’s been a significant amount of work getting everything shipshape, I can now analyse our world over the last couple of decades.

The Burning Question You All Want Answered

A graph of "arduino" versis "raspberry", comparing Arduino and Raspberry Pi coverage over time.
Battle of the Boards, over the decades.

A corpus engine is not clever in its own right, instead it will simply give you straightforward statistics in return for the queries you give it. But the thing that keeps me coming back for more is that those answers can sometimes surprise you. In short, it’s a machine for telling you things you didn’t know. To start off, it’s time to settle a Hackaday trope of many years’ standing. Do we write too much about Arduino projects? Into the engine goes “arduino”, and for comparison also “raspberry”, for the Raspberry Pi.

What comes out is a potted history of experimenter’s development boards, with the graph showing the launch date and subsequent popularity of each. We’re guessing that the Hackaday Arduino trope has its origins in 2011 when the Italian board peaked, while we see a succession of peaks following the launch of the Pi in 2012. I think we are seeing renewals of interest after the launch of the Pi 3 and Pi 4, respectively. Perhaps the most interesting part of the graph comes on the right as we see both boards tail off after 2020, and if I had to hazard a guess  as to why I would cite the rise of the many cheap dev boards from China.

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Mini Laptop Needs Custom Kernel

September 29, 2025 by 8 Comments

These days, you rarely have to build your own Linux kernel. You just take what your distribution ships, and it usually works just fine. However, [Andrei] became enamored with a friend’s cyberdeck and decided that he’d prefer to travel with a very small laptop. The problem is, it didn’t work well with a stock kernel. So, time to build the kernel again.

Of course, he tried to simply install Linux. The installer showed a blank screen. You might guess that you need to add ‘nomodeset’ to the kernel options. But the screen was still a bit wacky. [Andrei] likens troubleshooting problems like this to peeling an onion. There are many layers to peel back, and you are probably going to shed some tears.

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