A Simple Portable PS4 Build

August 12, 2024 by Lewin Day 10 Comments

Building a portable console is hard, right? You have to do lots of wiring, maybe trim a few PCBs, and learn all about the finer points of high-end motherboard design! Or, you could keep it simple. That’s just what [Francesco6n] did when he built this portable PS4.

The aim for this build wasn’t to build the smallest, sleekest, or prettiest portable PS4. It was just to build a functional one that worked. To that end, the guts of the PS4 was installed in a 3D-printed case decorated with the usual square-circle-cross-triangle motif. A 1024×600 Acer Aspire One laptop display was installed in a clamshell configuration to act as the screen for the build. Inside the case is a large GPU-style cooler which helps keep temperatures down. As for power, there’s no need to plug this thing in everywhere you go. Instead, it’s capable of running for up to 90 minutes continuously thanks to a battery pack consisting of eighteen 18650 cells. In a beautiful touch of cross-platform cooperation, an Xbox 360 supply is used to power the thing when mains power is available.

It’s a neat build, and one that doesn’t overcomplicate things. Projects like this are a great way to get your feet wet with portable console hacking, letting you learn the ropes without too much pressure. More pictures after the break.
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Prusa Picks Up The Pace With New MK4S Printer

August 12, 2024 by Tom Nardi 28 Comments

One of the things you’re paying for when you buy a 3D printer from Prusa Research is, essentially, your next 3D printer. That’s because Prusa’s machines are designed to be upgraded and modified as time goes on. An upgrade kit is always released to allow each older printer to be converted into its successor, and while there’s occasionally been some debate about whether or not it’s the most cost-effective choice, at least it is a choice you have as an owner.

If you’ve got a Prusa MK4, you’ll soon get to make that decision for yourself. Announced earlier today, the new MK4S brings some notable changes to last year’s printer. The $99 upgrade is scheduled to be available by the end of the month for existing owners, but if you’ve been on the fence about joining Team Orange and Black, you can purchase the MK4S right now in both kit and assembled forms for the same price ($799 and $1,099 respectively) as the previous MK4.

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A single-key macro pad with a screen built into the button.

2024 Tiny Games Contest: Are You A Good Judge Of Time?

August 11, 2024 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

What can you do with a one-button keyboard? Quite a bit, actually, especially if that key has a little screen on it. That’s the idea behind [Maker M0]’s MagicClick macro pad, which is an updated version of a highly useful project we have featured in the past. Well, now there’s a tiny game to go with it.

Think you’re pretty good at measuring the passage of time? This game will likely prove you wrong. Press and hold the button and the timer begins with some pre-determined interval, such as four seconds. Once you think those four seconds have passed, release the button and find out how far off you were.

While the first version of this keyboard used the CH582F RISC-V microcontroller, the second and this third version use an ESP32-S3 on a custom, tightly packed PCB. That TFT display measures 0.85″, and the battery is an 3.7 V 802025 Li-Po. [Maker M0] has also redesigned this to make it easier to print, and plans to support circular screens in the near future.

Hackaday Links: August 11, 2024

August 11, 2024 by Dan Maloney 8 Comments

“Please say it wasn’t a regex, please say it wasn’t a regex; aww, crap, it was a regex!” That seems to be the conclusion now that Crowdstrike has released a full root-cause analysis of its now-infamous Windows outage that took down 8 million machines with knock-on effects that reverberated through everything from healthcare to airlines. We’ve got to be honest and say that the twelve-page RCA was a little hard to get through, stuffed as it was with enough obfuscatory jargon to turn off even jargon lovers such as us. The gist, though, is that there was a “lack of a specific test for non-wildcard matching criteria,” which pretty much means someone screwed up a regular expression. Outside observers in the developer community have latched onto something more dire, though, as it appears the change that brought down so many machines was never tested on a single machine. That’s a little — OK, a lot — hard to believe, but it seems to be what Crowdstrike is saying. So go ahead and blame the regex, but it sure seems like there were deeper, darker forces at work here.

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500cc Of 4-Wheel Off-Road Fun

August 9, 2024 by Jenny List 9 Comments

Who among us hasn’t at some point thought of building a little vehicle, and better still, a little off-road vehicle for a few high-octane rough-terrain adventures. [Made in Poland] has, and there he is in a new video with a little off-road buggy.

The video which we’ve paced below the break is quite long, and it’s one of those restful metalworking films in which we see the finished project take shape bit by bit. In this case the buggy has a tubular spaceframe, with front suspension taken from a scrap quad and a home-made solid rear axle. For power there’s a 500cc Suzuki two-cylinder motorcycle engine, with a very short chain drive from its gearbox to that axle. The controls are conventional up to a point, though we’d have probably gone for motorcycle style handlebars with a foot shift rather than the hand-grip shift.

The final machine is a pocket drift monster, and one we’d certainly like to have a play with. We’d prefer some roll-over protection and we wonder whether the handling might be improved were the engine sprung rather than being part of a huge swing-arm, but it doesn’t appear to interfere with the fun. If you fancy a go yourself it’s surprisingly affordable to make a small vehicle, just build a Hacky Racer.

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Tickets For Supercon 2024 Go On Sale Now!

August 6, 2024 by Elliot Williams 10 Comments

Tickets for the 2024 Hackaday Supercon are on sale now! Go and get yours while they’re still hot. True-Believer Tickets are half-price at $148 (plus fees), and when that pile of 100 is gone, regular admission is $296 (plus fees).

Come join us on November 1st-3rd in sunny Pasadena, CA, for three days of talks, demos, badge hacking, workshops, and the sort of miscellaneous hardware shenanigans that make Hackaday Hackaday! If you’ve never been to a Supercon, now is the best time to check that off your bucket list. And if you’re a seven-time veteran, we’re stoked to see you again. Supercon is like a year’s worth of posts in one weekend. You don’t want to miss it.

Friday, November 1st, is our chill-out day. You can roll in as soon as the doors open in the morning, get your badge and some bagels, and get down to hacking. Or you can start socializing early. Or, as it almost always happens, both at once. We’ll have food and music and even a few workshops, but for the most part, Fridays are what you all make of them. And we love it that way.

Talks start up on Saturday on both stages, along with the soldering contest and an alley full of hackers. We’ll close out the evening with a special celebration, but more on that in a minute.

On Sunday, in addition to the usual slate of talks, we’ve set aside a big block of time for Lightning Talks. These are seven-minute quickies where you get to tell the bigger Hackaday community what you’re up to. A short talk like this forces you to condense the story down to its essence while giving tons of people their fifteen minutes of fame in half the time! If you’ve got a Lightning Talk that you’d like to present, let us know! We’ll try to fit in everyone we can.

Wrapping up Sunday evening, we’ll give you a chance to show off whatever badge hacks you’ve been working on over the weekend. We love the badge hacking demo because it allows us to see a wide (and wild) range of projects, all of which were put together in record time. Whether funny, flashy, or phenomenal, we want to see what you’ve been up to. Continue reading “Tickets For Supercon 2024 Go On Sale Now!” →

Hackaday Links: August 4, 2024

August 4, 2024 by Dan Maloney 8 Comments

Good news, bad news for Sun watchers this week, as our star launched a solar flare even bigger than the one back in May that gave us an amazing display of aurora that dipped down into pretty low latitudes. This was a big one; where the earlier outburst was only an X8.9 class, the one on July 23 was X14. That sure sounds powerful, but to put some numbers to it, the lower end of the X-class exceeds 10^-4 W/m² of soft X-rays. Numbers within the class designate a linear increase in power, so X2 is twice as powerful as X1. That means the recent X14 flare was about five times as powerful as the May flare that put on such a nice show for us. Of course, this all pales in comparison to the strongest flare of all time, a 2003 whopper that pegged the needle on satellite sensors at X17 but was later estimated at X45.

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