This excellent content from the Hackaday writing crew highlights recurring topics and popular series like Linux-Fu, 3D-Printering, Hackaday Links, This Week in Security, Inputs of Interest, Profiles in Science, Retrotechtacular, Ask Hackaday, Teardowns, Reviews, and many more.
This week, Jonathan Bennett and Rob Campbell talk with Shimon Schocken about Nand2Tetris, the free course about building a computer from first principles. What was the inspiration for the course? Is there a sequel or prequel in the works? Watch to find out!
We’re proud to announce the last round of speakers, as well as the two workshops that we’ll be running at 2025 Hackaday Europe in Berlin on March 15th and 16th — and Friday night the 14th, if you’re already in town.
The last two years that we’ve done Hackaday Europe in Berlin have been awesome, and this year promises to keep up the tradition. We can’t wait to get our hands on the crazy selection of SAO badge addons that are going to be in each and every schwag bag.
Tickets for the event itself are going fast, but the workshop tickets that go on sale at 8:00 AM PST sell out even faster. And you need the one to enjoy the other, so get your tickets now!
Continue reading “Hackaday Europe 2025: Workshops And More Speakers”
You wake up in the morning, and check Hackaday over breakfast. Then it’s off to work or school, where you’ve already had to explain the Jolly Wrencher to your shoulder-surfing colleagues. And then to a hackspace or back to your home lab, stopping by the skull-and-cross-wrenches while commuting, naturally. You don’t bleed red, but rather #F3BF10. It’s time we talked.
The Hackaday writing crew goes to great lengths to cover all that is interesting to engineers and enthusiasts. We find ourselves stretched a bit thin and it’s time to ask for help. Want to lend a hand while making some extra dough to plow back into your projects? We’re looking for contributors to write a few articles per week and keep the Hackaday flame burning.
Contributors are hired as private contractors and paid for each article. You should have the technical expertise to understand the projects you write about, and a passion for the wide range of topics we feature. You’ll have access to the Hackaday Tips Line, and we count on your judgement to help us find the juicy nuggets that you’d want to share with your hacker friends.
If you’re interested, please email our jobs line (jobs at hackaday dot com) and include:
Questions? Don’t hesitate to ask below. Ladies and Gentlemen, start your applications!
Okay, you have to see the gallery to appreciate it, but this keyboard was designed to resemble a red cedar tree with the green shell and wood bottom and the copper PCB showing through the tree cutouts on the sides.
Oh, and are those Nintendo Switch joysticks above the PS2 buttons? Those are for the mouse and vertical/horizontal scrolling. Honestly, this seems like a great amount of thumb controls. The basics are there (presumably), and there isn’t any thumb-extending excess, like keys on the insides by the mouse.
This bad mama jama runs on an RP2040 and has 50 hand-wired Cherry Brown switches plus the PS2 buttons. In the build guide, you can read all about [WesternRedCdar]’s troubles with integrating those. The Nintendo Switch joysticks weren’t terribly easy, either, since the ribbon connector can’t be soldered directly.
The final issue was one of weight. Since many of the switches stand quite tall, it sort of jostles the keyboard to actuate them. [WesternRedCdar] opined that that the ideal solution would have been to use metal base plates instead of wood, but took care of the issue by adding layers of 1/8″ steel flat bar inside the case.
Continue reading “Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With All The Green Keyboards”
Ho-hum — another week, another high-profile bricking. In a move anyone could see coming, Humane has announced that their pricey AI Pin widgets will cease to work in any meaningful way as of noon on February 28. The company made a splash when it launched its wearable assistant in April of 2024, and from an engineering point of view, it was pretty cool. Meant to be worn on one’s shirt, it had a little bit of a Star Trek: The Next Generation comm badge vibe as the primary UI was accessed through tapping the front of the thing. It also had a display that projected information onto your hand, plus the usual array of sensors and cameras which no doubt provided a rich stream of user data. Somehow, though, Humane wasn’t able to make the numbers work out, and as a result they’ll be shutting down their servers at the end of the month, with refunds offered only to users who bought their AI Pins in the last 90 days.
In Al Williams’s marvelous rant he points out a number of the problems with speaking to computers. Obvious problems with voice control include things like multiple people talking over each other, discerning commands from background conversations, and so on. Somehow, unlike on the bridge in Star Trek, where the computer seems to understand everyone just fine, Al sometimes can’t even get the darn thing to play his going-to-sleep playlist, which should be well within the device’s capabilities.
In the comments, [rclark] suggests making a single button that plays his playlist, no voice interaction required, and we have to admit that it’s a great solution to this one particular problem. Heck, the “bedtime button” would make fun project in and of itself, and it’s such a limited scope that it could probably only be an weekend’s work for anyone who has touched the internals of their home automation system, like Al certainly has. We love the simplicity of the idea.
But it ignores the biggest potential benefit of a voice control system: that it’s a one-size-fits-all solution for everything. Imagine how many other use cases Al would need to make a single button device for, and how many coin cell batteries he’d be signing himself up to change out over the course of the year. The trade-off is that the general purpose solution tends not to be as robust as a single-tasker like the button, but also that it can potentially simplify the overall system.
I suffer this in my own home. It’s much more a loosely-coupled web of individual hacks than an overall system, and that has pros and cons. Each individual part is easier to maintain and hack on, but the overall system is less coordinated than it could be. If we change the WiFi password on the home automation router, for instance, I’m going to have to individually log into about eight ESP8266s and change their credentials. Yuck!
It’s probably a matter of preference, but I’ll still take the loose, MQTT-based system that I’ve got now over an all-in-one. Like [rclark], I value individual device simplicity and reliability above the overall system’s simplicity, but because our stereo isn’t even hooked up to the network, I can’t play myself to sleep like Al can. Or at least like he can when the voice recognition is working.
We hear a lot about how ham radio isn’t what it used to be. But what was it like? Well, the ARRL’s film “The Ham’s Wide World” shows a snapshot of the radio hobby in the 1960s, which you can watch below. The narrator is no other than the famous ham [Arthur Godfrey] and also features fellow ham and U.S. Senator [Barry Goldwater]. But the real stars of the show are all the vintage gear: Heathkit, Swan, and a very oddly placed Drake.
The story starts with a QSO between a Mexican grocer and a U.S. teenager. But it quickly turns to a Field Day event. Since the film is from the ARRL, the terminology and explanations make sense. You’ll hear real Morse code and accurate ham lingo.
