How Nyan Cat Was Ported To UEFI

January 13, 2025 by Lewin Day 13 Comments

The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) took over from the classical BIOS some years into the new millenium. It’s typically used for running a computer at the basic pre-OS level, and most of us don’t even notice it past boot time. However, you can do some neat things in this space—you can even port over Nyan Cat if you’re talented like [Cornelius].

*That’s fun. Set your friend’s computer to boot into this instead of their OS by default and see how long it takes them to figure it out.*

Yes, Nyan Cat is now available as a UEFI application, running via the EFI Simple Text Output Protocol. [Cornelius] approached this creation by first learning Rust, before progressing to the Hello World stage. Before long, the computer was booting up to display a simple text message with no OS required.

From there, creating the Nyan Cat animation required figuring out how to display it as a bunch of dancing characters, which is where the Simple Text Output Protocol came in. Nyan Cat was really the perfect animation for the UEFI environment, since its simple pixel art style was easily recreated with text. With a bit of work, the animation came together, with a remarkable resemblance to the original artwork.

All that’s missing is a routine to play the music over a PC speaker; only, those are hardly a thing anymore. A pity! In any case, if you’ve been cooking up your own nifty UEFI hacks, don’t hesitate to drop us a line!

Fraens’ New Loom And The Limits Of 3D Printing

January 12, 2025 by Elliot Williams 8 Comments

[Fraens] has been re-making industrial machines in fantastic 3D-printable versions for a few years now, and we’ve loved watching his creations get progressively more intricate. But with this nearly completely 3D-printable needle loom, he’s pushing right up against the edge of the possible.

The needle loom is a lot like the flying shuttle loom that started the Industrial Revolution, except for making belts or ribbons. It’s certainly among the most complex 3D-printed machines that we’ve ever seen, and [Fraens] himself says that it is pushing the limits of what’s doable in plastic — for more consistent webbing, he’d make some parts out of metal. But that’s quibbling; this thing is amazing.

There are mechanical details galore here. For instance, check out the cam-chain that raises, holds, and lowers arms to make the pattern. Equally important are the adjustable friction brakes on the rollers that hold the warp, that create a controlled constant tension on the strings. (Don’t ask us, we had to Wikipedia it!) We can see that design coming in handy in some of our own projects.

On the aesthetic front, the simple but consistent choice of three colors for gears, arms, and frame make the build look super tidy. And the accents of two-color printing on the end caps is just the cherry on the top.

This is no small project, with eight-beds-worth of printed parts, plus all the screws, bearings, washers, etc. The models are for pay, but if you’re going to actually make this, that’s just a tiny fraction of the investment, and we think it’s going to a good home.

We are still thinking of making [Fraens]’s vibratory rock tumbler design, but check out all of his work if you’re interested in nice 3D-printed mechanical designs.

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Try A PWMPot

January 8, 2025 by Al Williams 15 Comments

[Stephen Woodward] is familiar with digital potentiometers but is also familiar with their limitations. That spurred him to create the PWMPot which performs a similar function, but with better features than a traditional digital pot. Of course, he admits that this design has some limitations of its own, so — as usual — you have to make your design choices according to what’s important to you.

Perhaps the biggest limitation is that the PWMPot isn’t useful at even moderately high frequencies. The circuit works by driving two CMOS switches into an RC circuit. The switches’ inverted phase tends to cancel out any ripple in the signal.

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Mechanical Calculator Finds Derivatives

January 6, 2025 by Al Williams 14 Comments

We like mechanical calculators like slide rules, but we have to admit that we had not heard of the Ott Derivimeter that [Chris Staecker] shows us in a recent video. As the name implies, the derivimeter finds the derivative of a function. To do that, you have to plot the function on a piece of paper that the meter can measure.

If you forgot calculus or skipped it altogether, the derivative is the rate of change. If you plot, say, your car’s speed vs time, the parts where you accelerate or decelerate will have a larger derivative (either positive or negative, in the decelerate case). If you hold a steady speed, the derivative will be zero.

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Front and rear views of a lander circuit sculpture that retrieves weather data and displays it on a screen.

Landing Soon: This Beautiful Weather Display

January 3, 2025 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

All wiring is beautiful, except when it isn’t. But is there anything more lovely to behold than circuit sculpture? Once again, [Mohit Bhoite] has made this process look easy like Sunday morning. This time, he’s created a weather display in the form of a lander.

This lander runs on the Particle Photon 2, which connects over Wi-Fi and retrieves the weather forecast for the day, along with sunrise and sunset times and wind conditions. Everything is beautifully displayed on a vertically-oriented Adafruit 170×320 TFT screen.

There’s also a pulse-density microphone (PDM) breakout board and a buzzer, and the build is capped off with a red 0805 LED. We’re not sure what the feet are made of, but they sure make this lander cute (and accurate).

All the project logs are picture-rich, which is really the most we could ask for when trying to imitate this level of greatness. This is apparently an ongoing project, and we’re excited for the end result, although it looks fairly complete from here.

Do you want to bend it like Bhoite? Then be sure to check out his Hackaday Supercon talk on the subject.

A LoRa Rain Gauge From The Ground Up

December 26, 2024 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

It’s a fair bet that most of us have a ton of wireless doo-dads around the house, from garage door remotes to wireless thermometers. Each of these gadgets seems to have its own idea about how to encode data and transmit it, all those dedicated receivers seem wasteful. Wouldn’t it be great to use existing RF infrastructure to connect your wireless stuff?

[Malte Pöggel] thinks so, and this LoRa rain gauge is the result. The build starts with a commercially available rain transmitter, easily found on the cheap as an accessory for a wireless weather station and already equipped with an ISM band transmitter. The rain-collection funnel and tipping-bucket mechanism were perfectly usable, and the space vacated by the existing circuit boards left plenty of room to play, not to mention a perfectly usable battery compartment. [Malte] used an ATmega328P microcontroller to count the tipping of the bucket, either through the original reed switch or via Hall Effect or magnetoresistive sensors. An RFM95W LoRa module takes care of connecting into [Malte]’s LoRaWAN gateway, and there’s an option to add a barometric pressure and temperature sensor, either by adding the BMP280 chip directly to the board or by adding a cheap I2C module, for those who don’t relish SMD soldering.

[Malte] put a lot of work into power optimization, and it shows. A pair of AA batteries should last at least three years, and the range is up to a kilometer—far more than the original ISM connection could have managed. Sure, this could have been accomplished with a LoRa module and some jumper wires, but this looks like a fantastic way to get your feet wet in LoRa design. You could even print your own tipping bucket collector and modify the electronics if you wanted.

Close up of a Dutch etymology dictionary showing Esperanto, and a candle

Esperanto: The Language That Hoped To Unite The World

December 25, 2024 by Heidi Ulrich 64 Comments

Christmas: a good time to broach a topic of hope. We’re talking Esperanto. This language that spurred the hope it one day could hack the barriers between people, eliminating war and miscommunication. The video below unpacks the history of this linguistic marvel. Esperanto was a constructed language dreamed up in 1887 by Ludwik Zamenhof, a Polish-Russian eye doctor with a knack for linguistics and great ideals. If you’re a little into linguistics yourself, you’ll sure know the name stems from the Latin sperare: to hope.

Inspired by the chaos of multilingual strife in his hometown, Zamenhof created Esperanto to unite humanity under a single, simple, easy-to-learn tongue. With just 16 grammar rules, modular word-building, and no pesky exceptions — looking at you, English — Esperanto was a linguistic hack ahead of its time.

But Esperanto wasn’t just a novelty—it almost became the lingua franca of diplomacy. In 1920, Iran proposed Esperanto as the official language of the League of Nations, but the French vetoed it, fearing their language’s global dominance was at risk. From there, Esperanto’s journey took a darker turn as both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia persecuted its speakers. Despite this, Esperanto persisted, surfacing in quirky corners of culture, from William Shatner’s Esperanto-only horror film Incubus to its inclusion on NASA’s Voyager Golden Record.

Fast-forward to the digital age: Esperanto is thriving on online learning platforms, where over a million learners explore its minimalist elegance. It appears at places in various editions of Grand Theft Auto. It has even inspired modern makers to create new constructed languages, like Loglan, Toki Pona, and even Klingon. Could Esperanto—or any reimagined language—rise again to unite us? For curious minds, watch the video here.

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