Generative Art Machine Does It One Euro At A Time

March 22, 2025 by Elliot Williams 14 Comments

[Niklas Roy] obviously had a great time building this generative art cabinet that puts you in the role of the curator – ever-changing images show on the screen, but it’s only when you put your money in that it prints yours out, stamps it for authenticity, and cuts it off the paper roll with a mechanical box cutter.

If you like fun machines, you should absolutely go check out the video, embedded below. The LCD screen has been stripped of its backlight, allowing you to verify that the plot exactly matches the screen by staring through it. The screen flashes red for a sec, and your art is then dispensed. It’s lovely mechatronic theater. We also dig the “progress bar” that is represented by how much of your one Euro’s worth of art it has plotted so far. And it seems to track perfectly; Bill Gates could learn something from watching this. Be sure to check out the build log to see how it all came together.

You’d be forgiven if you expected some AI to be behind the scenes these days, but the algorithm is custom designed by [Niklas] himself, ironically adding to the sense of humanity behind it all. It takes the Unix epoch timestamp as the seed to generate a whole bunch of points, then it connects them together. Each piece is unique, but of course it’s also reproducible, given the timestamp. We’re not sure where this all lies in the current debates about authenticity and ownership of art, but that’s for the comment section.

If you want to see more of [Niklas]’s work, well this isn’t the first time his contraptions have graced our pages. But just last weekend at Hackaday Europe was the first time that he’s ever given us a talk, and it’s entertaining and beautiful. Go check that out next. Continue reading “Generative Art Machine Does It One Euro At A Time” →

Card Radios Remembered

March 22, 2025 by Al Williams 18 Comments

We know how [Techmoan] feels. In the 1980s we had a bewildering array of oddball gadgets and exciting new tech. But as kids we didn’t have money to buy a lot of what we saw. But he had a £5 note burning a hole in his pocket from Christmas and found a Casio RD-10 “card radio” on sale and grabbed it. He’s long-ago lost that one, but he was able to find a new old stock one and shows us the little gadget in the video below.

The card-thin (1.9 mm) FM radio had many odd features, especially for the 1980s. For one thing, it took a coin cell, which was exotic in those days. The headphones had a special flat connector that reminded us of an automotive fuse. Even the idea of an earbud was odd at that time.

Continue reading “Card Radios Remembered” →

Acoustic Levitation Gets Insects Ready For Their Close-Up

March 22, 2025 by Tom Nardi 6 Comments

The average Hackaday reader is likely at least familiar with acoustic levitation — a technique by which carefully arranged ultrasonic transducers can be used to suspend an object in the air indefinitely. It’s a neat trick, the sort of thing that drives them wild at science fairs, but as the technique only works on exceptionally small and light objects it would seem to have little practical use.

That is, unless, you happen to be interested in exceptionally small and light objects. A paper titled Automated Photogrammetric Close-Range Imaging System for Small Invertebrates Using Acoustic Levitation describes a fascinating device which allows the researchers to image insects in what’s essentially a weightless environment.

With the delicate specimens suspended in front of the lens, there’s no background to worry about and they can be perfectly lit from all angles. What’s more, with careful control of the ultrasonic transducers, it’s possible to control the rotation of the target — allowing researchers to produce 3D scans of the insects using just one camera.

There isn’t a whole lot of technical detail on the device itself, other than the fact that spherical chamber has a radius of 60 mm and is fitted with 96 Murata MA40S4R/S transducers operating at 40 kHz. The paper notes that early attempts to control the transducer array with a Arduino Mega failed, and that the team had to switch over to a FPGA. With their current signal generator stage, the researchers are able to rotate the specimen by 5° angles.

Interested in learning more about acoustic levitation? University of Bristol research scientist Asier Marzo gave a talk on the subject at Hackaday Belgrade in 2018 that you won’t want to miss.

Thanks For Hackaday Europe!

March 22, 2025 by Elliot Williams 10 Comments

We just got back from Hackaday Europe last weekend, and we’re still coming down off the high. It was great to be surrounded by so many crazy, bright, and crazy-bright folks all sharing what they are pouring their creative energy into. The talks were great, and the discussions and impromptu collaborations have added dramatically to our stack of to-do projects. (Thanks?) Badges were hacked, stories were shared, and a good time was had by all.

At the event, we were approached by someone who wanted to know if we could replicate something like Hackaday Europe in a different location, one where there just isn’t as vibrant a hacking scene. And the answer, of course, was maybe, but probably not.

It’s not that we don’t try to put on a good show, bring along fun schwag, and schedule up a nice location. But it’s the crowd of people who attend who make a Hackaday event a Hackaday event. Without you all, it just wouldn’t work.

So in that spirit, thanks to everyone who attended, and who brought along their passions and projects! It was great to see you all, and we’ll do it again soon.

The Fastest MS-DOS Gaming PC Ever

March 22, 2025 by Maya Posch 28 Comments

After [Andy]’s discovery of an old ISA soundcard at his parents’ place that once was inside the family PC, the onset of a wave of nostalgia for those old-school sounds drove him off the deep end. This is how we get [Andy] building the fastest MS-DOS gaming system ever, with ISA slot and full hardware compatibility. After some digging around, the fastest CPU for an Intel platform that still retained ISA compatibility turned out to be Intel’s 4th generation Core series i7-4790K CPU, along with an H81 chipset-based MiniITX mainboard.

Of note is that ISA slots on these newer boards are basically unheard of outside of niche industrial applications, ergo [Andy] had to tap into the LPC (low pin count) debug port & hunt down the LDRQ signal on the mainboard. LPC is a very compact version of the ISA bus that works great with ISA adapter boards, specially an LPC to ISA adapter like [Andy]’s dISAppointment board as used here.

A PCIe graphics card (NVidia 7600 GT, 256 MB VRAM), ISA soundcard, dodgy PSU and a SATA SSD were added into a period-correct case. After this Windows 98 was installed from a USB stick within a minute using [Eric Voirin]’s Windows 98 Quick Install. This gave access to MS-DOS and enabled the first tests, followed by benchmarking.

Benchmarking MS-DOS on a system this fast turned out to be somewhat messy with puzzling results. The reason for this was that the BIOS default settings under MS-DOS limited the CPU to non-turbo speeds. After this the system turned out to be actually really quite fast at MS-DOS (and Windows 98) games, to nobody’s surprise.

If you’d like to run MS-DOS on relatively modern hardware with a little less effort, you could always pick up a second-hand ThinkPad and rip through some Descent.

Continue reading “The Fastest MS-DOS Gaming PC Ever” →

Biosynthesis Of Polyester Amides In Engineered Escherichia Coli

March 22, 2025 by Maya Posch 8 Comments

Polymers are one of the most important elements of modern-day society, particularly in the form of plastics. Unfortunately most common polymers are derived from fossil resources, which not only makes them a finite resource, but is also problematic from a pollution perspective. A potential alternative being researched is that of biopolymers, in particular those produced by microorganisms such as everyone’s favorite bacterium Escherichia coli (E. coli).

These bacteria were the subject of a recent biopolymer study by [Tong Un Chae] et al., as published in Nature Chemical Biology (paywalled, break-down on Arstechnica).

By genetically engineering E. coli bacteria to use one of their survival energy storage pathways instead for synthesizing long chains of polyester amides (PEAs), the researchers were able to make the bacteria create long chains of mostly pure PEA. A complication here is that this modified pathway is not exactly picky about what amino acid monomers to stick onto the chain next, including metabolism products.

Although using genetically engineered bacteria for the synthesis of products on an industrial scale isn’t uncommon (see e.g. the synthesis of insulin), it would seem that biosynthesis of plastics using our prokaryotic friends isn’t quite ready yet to graduate from laboratory experiments.

A Cute Handheld Gaming Device That You Can Build In An Altoids Tin

March 21, 2025 by Lewin Day 10 Comments

The MintyPi was a popular project that put a Raspberry Pi inside an Altoids tin to make a pocketable gaming handheld. Unfortunately, it’s not the easiest build to replicate anymore, but [jackw01] was still a fan of the format. Thus was born the Pi Tin—a clamshell handheld for portable fun!

Neat, huh? More pocket-sized than the Game Boy Pocket.

The build is based around the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, which packs more power than the original Pi Zero into the same compact form factor. It’s combined with a 320 x 240 TFT LCD screen and a 2000 mAh lithium-polymer battery which provides power on the go.

There are also a pair of custom PCBs used to lace everything together, including the action buttons, D-pad, and power management hardware. Depending on your tastes, you have two main enclosure options. You can use the neat 3D printed clamshell seen here in beautiful teal, or you can go with the classic Altoids tin build—just be careful when you’re cutting it to suit! Files can be found on GitHub for the curious.

We love a good handheld project around these parts; it’s particularly awesome how much gaming you can fit in your pocket given the magic of the Raspberry Pi and modern emulation. If you’re cooking up your own little retro rig, don’t hesitate to let us know!