Supercon 2024: Sketching With Machines

April 28, 2025 by Lewin Day 2 Comments

When it comes to our machines, we generally have very prescribed and ordered ways of working with them. We know how to tune our CNC mill for the minimum chatter when its chewing through aluminium. We know how to get our FDM printer to lay perfect, neat layers to minimize the defects in our 3D prints.

That’s not what Blair Subbaraman came down to talk about at the 2024 Hackaday Supercon, though. Instead, Blair’s talk covered the magic that happens when you work outside the built-in assumptions and get creative. It’s all about sketching with machines.

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X-Rays From An Overdriven Magnetron

April 28, 2025 by Dan Maloney 34 Comments

If you say that you’re “nuking” something, pretty much everyone will know that you mean you’re heating something in the microwave. It’s technically incorrect, of course, as the magnetron inside the oven emits only non-ionizing radiation, and is completely incapable of generating ionizing radiation such as X-rays. Right?

Perhaps not, as these experiments with an overdriven magnetron suggest. First off, this is really something you shouldn’t try; aside from the obvious hazards that attend any attempt to generate ionizing radiation, there are risks aplenty here. First of all, modifying magnetrons as [SciTubeHD] did here is risky thanks to the toxic beryllium they contain, and the power supply he used, which features a DIY flyback transformer we recently featured, generates potentially dangerous voltages. You’ve been warned.

For the experiment, [SciTubeHD] stripped the magnets off a magnetron and connected his 40-kV AC power supply between the filament and the metal case of the tube. We’re not completely clear to us how this creates X-rays, but it appears to do so given the distinctive glow given off by an intensifying screen harvested from an old medical X-ray film cassette. The light is faint, but there’s enough to see the shadows of metallic objects like keys and PCBs positioned between the tube and the intensifying screen.

Are there any practical applications for this? Probably not, especially considering the potential risks. But it’s still pretty cool, and we’re suitably impressed that magnetrons can be repurposed like this.

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Life On K2-18b? Don’t Get Your Hopes Up Just Yet

April 28, 2025 by Tom Nardi 27 Comments

Last week, the mainstream news was filled with headlines about K2-18b — an exoplanet some 124 light-years away from Earth that 98% of the population had never even heard about. Even astronomers weren’t aware of its existence until the Kepler Space Telescope picked it out back in 2015, just one of the more than 2,700 planets the now defunct observatory was able to identify during its storied career. But now, thanks to recent observations by the James Web Space Telescope, this obscure planet has been thrust into the limelight by the discovery of what researchers believe are the telltale signs of life in its atmosphere.

Well, maybe. As you might imagine, being able to determine if a planet has life on it from 124 light-years away isn’t exactly easy. We haven’t even been able to conclusively rule out past, or even present, life in our very own solar system, which in astronomical terms is about as far off as the end of your block.

To be fair the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy researchers, lead by Nikku Madhusudhan, aren’t claiming to have definitive proof that life exists on K2-18b. We probably won’t get undeniable proof of life on another planet until a rover literally runs over it. Rather, their paper proposes that abundant biological life, potentially some form of marine phytoplankton, is one of the strongest explanations for the concentrations of dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide that they’ve detected in the atmosphere of K2-18b.

As you might expect, there are already challenges to that conclusion. Which is of course exactly how the scientific process is supposed to work. Though the findings from Cambridge are certainly compelling, adding just a bit of context can show that things aren’t as cut and dried as we might like. There’s even an argument to be made that we wouldn’t necessarily know what the signs of extraterrestrial life would look like even if it was right in front of us.

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ASUS GPU Uses Gyroscope To Warn For Sagging Cards

April 28, 2025 by Maya Posch 51 Comments

It’s not really an understatement to say that over the years videocards (GPUs) — much like CPU coolers — have become rather chonky. Unfortunately, the PCIe slots they plug into were never designed with multi-kilogram cards in mind. All this extra weight is of course happily affected by gravity.

The problem has gotten to the point that the ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 card added a Bosch Sensortec BMI323 inertial measurement unit (IMU) to provide an accelerometer and angular rate (gyroscope) measurements, as reported by [Uniko’s Hardware] (in Chinese, see English [Videocardz] article).

There are so-called anti-sag brackets that provide structural support to the top of the GPU where it isn’t normally secured. But since this card weighs in at over 6 pounds (3 kilograms) for the air cooled model, it appears the bracket wasn’t enough, and active monitoring was necessary.

The software allows you to set a sag angle at which you receive a notification, which would presumably either allow you to turn off the system and readjust the GPU, or be forewarned when it is about to rip itself loose from the PCIe slot and crash to the bottom of the case.

Look! It’s A Knob! It’s A Jack! It’s Euroknob!

April 28, 2025 by Dan Maloney 25 Comments

Are your Eurorack modules too crowded? Sick of your patch cables making it hard to twiddle your knobs? Then you might be very interested in the new Euroknob, the knob that sports a hidden patch cable jack.

Honestly, when we first saw the Euroknob demo board, we thought [Mitxela] had gone a little off the rails. It looks like nothing more than a PCB-mount potentiometer or perhaps an encoder with a knob attached. Twist the knob and a row of LEDs on the board light up in sequence. Nice, but not exactly what we’re used to seeing from him. But then he popped the knob off the board, revealing that what we thought was the pot body is actually a 3.5-mm audio jack, and that the knob was attached to a mating plug that acts as an axle.

The kicker is that underneath the audio jack is an AS5600 magnetic encoder, and hidden in a slot milled in the tip of the audio jack is a tiny magnet. Pop the knob into the jack, give it a twist, and you’ve got manual control of your module. Take the knob out, plug in a patch cable, and you can let a control voltage from another module do the job. Genius!

To make it all work mechanically, [Mitxela] had to sandwich a spacer board on top of the main PCB. The spacer has a large cutout to make room for the sensor chip so the magnet can rotate without hitting anything. He also added a CH32V003 to run the encoder and drive the LEDs to provide feedback for the knob-jack. The video below has a brief demo.

This is just a proof of concept, to be sure, but it’s still pretty slick. Almost as slick as [Mitxela]’s recent fluid-motion simulation pendant, or his dual-wielding soldering irons.

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Kaleidoscopico Shows Off Pi Pico’s Capabilities

April 27, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 14 Comments

In the early days of computing, and well into the era where home computers were common but not particularly powerful, programming these machines was a delicate balance of managing hardware with getting the most out of the software. Memory had to be monitored closely, clock cycles taken into account, and even video outputs had to be careful not to overwhelm the processor. This can seem foreign in the modern world where double-digit gigabytes of memory is not only common, it’s expected, but if you want to hone your programming skills there’s no better way to do it than with the limitations imposed by something like a retro computer or a Raspberry Pi Pico.

This project is called Kaleidoscopio, built by [Linus Åkesson] aka [lft] and goes deep into the hardware of the Pi Pico in order to squeeze as much out of the small, inexpensive platform as possible. The demo is written with 17,000 lines of assembly using the RISC-V instruction set. The microcontroller has two cores on it, with one core acting as the computer’s chipset and the other acts as the CPU, rendering the effects. The platform has no dedicated audio or video components, so everything here is done in software using this setup to act as a PC from the 80s might. In this case, [lft] is taking inspiration from the Amiga platform, his favorite of that era.

The only hardware involved in this project apart from the Pi Pico itself are a few resistors, an audio jack, and a VGA port, further demonstrating that the software is the workhorse in this build. It’s impressive not only for wringing out as much as possible from the platform but for using the arguably weaker RISC-V cores instead of the ARM cores, as the Pi Pico includes both. [lft] goes into every detail on the project’s page as well, for those who are still captivated by the era of computer programming where every bit mattered. For more computing demos like this, take a look at this one which is based on [lft]’s retrocomputer of choice, the Amiga.

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Design Constraints Bring Lockbox To Life

April 27, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 1 Comment

One of the most paradoxical aspects of creating art is the fact that constraints, whether arbitrary or real, and whether in space, time, materials, or rules, often cause creativity to flourish rather than to wither. Picasso’s blue period, Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright, Tetris, and even the Volkswagen Beetle are all famous examples of constraint-driven artistic brilliance. Similarly, in the world of electronics we can always reach for a microcontroller but this project from [Peter] has the constraint of only using passive components, and it is all the better for it.

The project is a lockbox, a small container that reveals a small keypad and the associated locking circuitry when opened. When the correct combination of push buttons is pressed, the box unlocks the hidden drawer. This works by setting a series of hidden switches in a certain way to program the combination. These switches are connected through various diodes to a series of relays, so that each correct press of a button activates the next relay. When the final correct button is pushed, power is applied to a solenoid which unlocks the drawer. An incorrect button push will disable a relay providing power to the rest of the relays, resetting the system back to the start.

The project uses a lot of clever tricks to do all of this without using a single microcontroller, including using capacitors that carefully provide timing to the relays to make them behave properly rather than all energizing at the same time. The woodworking is also notable as well, with the circuit components highlighted when the lid is opened (but importantly, hiding the combination switches). Using relays for logic is not a novel concept, though; they can be used for all kinds of complex tasks including replacing transistors in single-board computers.

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