Hackaday Podcast Episode 323: Impossible CRT Surgery, Fuel Cells, Stream Gages, And A Love Letter To Microcontrollers

May 30, 2025 by 1 Comment

Elliot and Dan teamed up this week for the podcast, and after double-checking, nay, triple-checking that we were recording, got to the business of reviewing the week’s hacks. We kicked things off with a look at the news, including a potentially exciting Right to Repair law in Washington state and the sad demise of NASA’s ISS sighting website.

Our choice of hacks included a fond look at embedded systems and the classic fashion sense of Cornell’s Bruce Land, risky open CRT surgery, a very strange but very cool way to make music, and the ultimate backyard astronomer’s observatory. We talked about Stamp collecting for SMD prototyping, crushing aluminum with a boatload of current, a PC that heats your seat, and bringing HDMI to the Commodore 64.

We also took a look at flight tracking IRL, a Flipper-based POV, the ultimate internet toaster, and printing SVGs for fun and profit. Finally, we wrapped things up with a look at the tech behind real-time river flow tracking and a peek inside the surprisingly energetic world of fuel cells.

 

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DIY Solar Generator Inspired By James Webb Telescope

May 30, 2025 by 36 Comments

If you look at this solar generator from [Concept Crafted Creations], you might think it’s somehow familiar. That’s because the design was visually inspired by the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST. Ultimately, though, it’s purpose is quite different—it’s designed to use mirrors to collect and harness solar energy. It’s not quite there yet, but it’s an interesting exploration of an eye-catching solar thermal generator.

To get that JWST look, the build has 18 mirrors assembled on a 3D printed frame to approximate the shape of a larger parabolic reflector. The mirrors focus all the sunlight such that it winds up heating water passing through an aluminum plate. Each mirror was custom made using laser cut acrylic and mirror film. Each mirror’s position and angle can be adjusted delicately with screws and a nifty sprung setup, which is a whole lot simpler than the mechanism used on the real thing. The whole assembly is on a mount that allows it to track the movement of the sun to gain the most sunlight possible. There’s a giant laser-cut wooden gear on the bottom that allows rotation on a big Lazy Susan bearing, as well as a servo-driven tilting mechanism, with an Arduino using light dependent resistors to optimally aim the device.

It’s a cool-looking set up, but how does it compare with photovoltaics? Not so well. The mirror array was able to deliver around 1 kilowatt of heat into the water passing through the system, heating it to a temperature of approximately 44 C after half an hour. The water was warmed, but not to the point of boiling, and there’s no turbines or anything else hooked up to actually take that heat and turn it into electricity yet. Even if there were, it’s unlikely the system would reach the efficiency of a similarly-sized solar panel array. In any case, so far, the job is half done. As explained in the build video, it could benefit from some better mirrors and some structural improvements to help it survive the elements before it’s ready to make any real juice.

Ultimately, if you need solar power fast, your best bet is to buy a photovoltaic array. Still, solar thermal is a concept that has never quite died out.

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This Week In Security: CIA Star Wars, Git* Prompt Injection And More

May 30, 2025 by 3 Comments

The CIA ran a series of web sites in the 2000s. Most of them were about news, finance, and other relatively boring topics, and they spanned 29 languages. And they all had a bit of a hidden feature: Those normal-looking websites had a secret login and hosted CIA cover communications with assets in foreign countries. A password typed in to a search field on each site would trigger a Java Applet or Flash application, allowing the spy to report back. This isn’t exactly breaking news, but what’s captured the Internet’s imagination this week is the report by [Ciro Santilli] about how to find those sites, and the fact that a Star Wars fansite was part of the network.

This particular CIA tool was intended for short-term use, and was apparently so effective, it was dragged way beyond it’s intended lifespan, right up to the point it was discovered and started getting people killed. And in retrospect, the tradecraft is abysmal. The sites were hosted on a small handful of IP blocks, with the individual domains hosted on sequential IP addresses. Once one foreign intelligence agency discovered one of these sites, the rest were fairly easily identified.
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3D Filament lizards show decomposable joints

Sustainable 3D Prints With Decomposable Filaments

May 30, 2025 by 24 Comments

What if you could design your 3D print to fall apart on purpose? That’s the curious promise of a new paper from CHI 2025, which brings a serious hacker vibe to the sustainability problem of multi-material 3D printing. Titled Enabling Recycling of Multi-Material 3D Printed Objects through Computational Design and Disassembly by Dissolution, it proposes a technique that lets complex prints disassemble themselves via water-soluble seams. Just a bit of H2O is needed, no drills or pliers.

At its core, this method builds dissolvable interfaces between materials like PLA and TPU using water-soluble PVA. Their algorithm auto-generates jointed seams (think shrink-wrap meets mushroom pegs) that don’t interfere with the part’s function. Once printed, the object behaves like any ordinary 3D creation. But at end-of-life, a water bath breaks it down into clean, separable materials, ready for recycling. That gives 90% material recovery, and over 50% reduction in carbon emissions.

This is the research – call it a very, very well documented hack – we need more of. It’s climate-conscious and machine-savvy. If you’re into computational fabrication or environmental tinkering, it’s worth your time. Hats off to [Wen, Bae, and Rivera] for turning what might otherwise be considered a failure into a feature.

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Today In Edinburgh: The Open Hardware Summit

May 30, 2025 by 9 Comments

Just a quickie for anyone who is in the neighborhood, today the Open Source Hardware Association’s annual Open Hardware Summit conference starts in Edinburgh, Scotland. If you’re able to make it, it’s a microcosm of the open-source hardware world, and full of great talks and great hackers.

If you’re not in Scotland, they have a livestream on YouTube that you should check out, as well as a Discord server for discussions during the event.  It’s going on right now!

 

What Does Linux Need? A Dial!

May 30, 2025 by 11 Comments

It’s fair to say that there can’t be many developers who have found the need for a rotary telephone dial as a peripheral for their Linux computer, but in case you are among them you might find [Stefan Wiehler]’s kernel driver for rotary dials to be of use.

It’s aimed at platforms such as systems-on-chip that have ready access to extra GPIOs, of which it will need a couple to service the BUSY and PULSE lines. There are full set-up instructions, and once it’s in place and configured it presents the dial as though it were a number pad.

We like this project, in fact we like it a lot. Interfacing with a dial is always something we’ve done with a microcontroller though, so it will be interesting to see whether it finds a use beyond merely curiosity. We can already see a generation of old-school dial IP phones using Linux-capable dev boards. He leaves us with a brief not as to whether Linus Torvalds would see it as worthy of mainline inclusion, and sadly however much we want things to be different, we agree that it might be wishful thinking.

If you’d like to use a dial phone, there can be simpler ways to do it.

Header: Billy Brown, CC BY 2.0 .

Another Doom Port To The Atari ST

May 29, 2025 by 7 Comments

Last week, we examined a Doom port for the venerable Atari ST. As is so often the way with this thing, one netted another, and [Steve] wrote in to inform us about a different version under the name DOOM8088ST.

The port is so named because it’s based on Doom8088, which was originally written for DOS machines running Intel 8088 or 286 CPUs. Both ports are the work of [FrenkelS], and aims to bring the Doom experience into the far more resource constrained environment of the Atari ST. There is only very limited sound, no saving, and it only supports Doom 1 Episode 1. Still, it’s quite recognizable as Doom!

Doom8088ST is tunable to various levels of performance, depending on what you’re running it on. Low mode (30 x 128) is suitable for stock Atari ST machines running at 8 MHz. It’s described as having “excellent” framerate and is very playable. If you’ve got an upgraded ST or Mega STe, you can try Medium (60 x 128), which has greatly improved visuals but is a lot heavier to run.

Files are on Github for those interested to run or tinker with the code. Don’t forget to check out the other port we featured last week, either, in the form of STDOOM. Video after the break.

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