Keep Reading, Keep Watching

September 13, 2025 by Elliot Williams 13 Comments

I’ve been flying quadcopters a fair bit lately, and trying to learn some new tricks also means crashing them, which inevitably means repairing them. Last weekend, I was working on some wiring that had gotten caught and ripped a pad off of the controller PCB. It wasn’t so bad, because there was a large SMT capacitor nearby, and I could just piggyback on that, but the problem was how to re-route the wires to avoid this happening again.

By luck, I had just watched a video where someone else was building up a new quad, and had elegantly solved the exact same routing problem. I was just watching the video because I was curious about the frame in question, and I had absolutely no idea that it would contain the solution to a problem that I was just about to encounter, but because I was paying attention, it make it all a walk in the park.

I can’t count the number of times that I’ve had this experience: the blind luck of having just read or seen something that solves a problem I’m about to encounter. It’s a great feeling, and it’s one of the reasons that I’ve always read Hackaday – you never know when one hacker’s neat trick is going to be just the one you need next week. Indeed, that’s one of the reasons that we try to feature not just the gonzo hacks that drill down deep on a particular feat, but also the little ones too, that solve something in particular in a neat way. Because reading up on the hacks is free, and particularly cheap insurance against tomorrow’s unexpected dilemmas.

Knowing That It Is Possible

September 6, 2025 by Elliot Williams 10 Comments

We like to think that we can do almost anything. Give me a broken piece of consumer electronics, and I’ll open it up and kick the capacitors. Give me an embedded Linux machine, and I’ll poke around for a serial port and see if it’s running uboot. But my confidence suddenly pales when you hand me a smartphone.

Now that’s not to say that I’ve never replaced a broken screen or a camera module with OEM parts. The modern smartphone is actually a miracle of modularity, with most sub-assemblies being swappable, at least in principle, and depending on your taste for applying heat to loosen up whatever glue holds the damn things together.

But actually doing hardware hacking on smartphones is still outside of my comfort zone, and that’s a shame. So I was pretty pleased to see [Marcin Plaza] attempt gutting a smartphone, repackaging it into a new form factor, and even adding a new keyboard to it. The best moment in that video for me comes around eight minutes in, when he has completely disassembled all of the modules and is laying them out on his desk to see how little he needs to make the thing work. And the answer is batteries, motherboard, USB-C, power button, and a screen. That starts to seem like a computer build, and that’s familiar turf.

That reminded me of [Scotty Allen]’s forays into cell-phone hackery that culminated in his building one completely from parts, and telling us all about it at Supercon ages ago. He told me that the turning point for him was realizing that if you have access to the tools to put it together and can get some of the impossibly small parts manufactured and/or assembled for you, that it’s just like putting a computer together.

So now I’ve seen two examples. [Scotty] put his together from parts, and [Marcin] actually got a new daughterboard made that interfaces with the USB to add a keyboard. Hardware hacking on a cellphone doesn’t sound entirely impossible. You’d probably want a cheap old used one, but the barrier to entry there isn’t that bad. You’ll probably have to buy some obscure connectors – they are tiny inside smartphones – and get some breakout boards made. But maybe it’s possible?

Anyone have more encouragement?

Finding A New Model For Hacker Camps

August 22, 2025 by Jenny List 68 Comments

A nicht scene in a post-apocalyptic future, in this case an electronics bazaar adjacent to the rave area in EMF 2018 Null Sector. — Electromagnetic Field manage to get live music at a hacker camp right, by turning it into the most cyberpunk future possible.

A couple of decades ago now, several things happened which gave life to our world and made it what it has become. Hackerspaces proliferated, giving what was previously dispersed a physical focus. Alongside that a range of hardware gave new expression to our projects; among them the Arduino, affordable 3D printing, and mail-order printed circuit boards.

The result was a flowering of creativity and of a community we’d never had before.Visiting another city could come with a while spent in their hackerspace, and from that new-found community blossomed a fresh wave of events. The older hacker camps expanded and morphed in character to become more exciting showcases for our expression, and new events sprang up alongside them. The 2010s provided me and my friends with some of the most formative experiences of our lives, and we’re guessing that among those of you reading this piece will be plenty who also found their people.

And then came COVID. Something that sticks in my mind when thinking about the COVID pandemic is a British news pundit from March 2020 saying that nothing would be quite the same as before once the pandemic was over. In our community this came home to me after 2022, when the first large European hacker camps made a return. They were awesome in their own way, but somehow sterile, it was as though something was missing. Since then we’ve had a few more summers spent trailing across the continent to hang out and drink Club-Mate in the sun, and while we commend the respective orgas for creating some great experiences, finding that spark can still be elusive. Hanging out with some of my friends round a European hackerspace barbecue before we headed home recently, we tried to put our finger on exactly where the problem lay.

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Metric, Imperial, And Flexibility

August 16, 2025 by Elliot Williams 90 Comments

Al Williams wrote up a seemingly innocent piece on a couple of rules-of-thumb to go between metric and US traditional units, and the comment section went wild! Nothing seems to rile up the Hackaday comment section like the choice of what base to use for your unit system. I mean, an idealized version of probably an ancient Egyptian’s foot versus a fraction of the not-quite-right distance from the North Pole to the equator as it passes through Paris? Six of one, half a dozen the other, as far as I’m concerned. Both are arbitrary.

What’s fun, though, is how many of us need to know both systems and how schizophrenic it all can be. My favorite example is PCB layout, where tenths and thousandths of an inch are unavoidable in through-hole and surface-mount parts, yet we call out board sizes and drill bits in millimeters – on the same object, and without batting an eye. American 3D printer enthusiasts will know their M3 hardware, and probably even how much a kilogram weighs, because that’s what you buy spools of filament in. Oddly enough, though I live in Europe, I have 3/4” thread on my garden hose and a 29” monitor on my desk. Americans buy two liter bottles of soda without thinking twice.

The absolute kings of this are in the UK, where the distance between cities is measured in miles, but the dimensions of an apartment in meters. They’ll buy gas in liters and beer in pints. Humans are measured both in feet-and-inches and centimeters, and weighed in pounds, kilograms, or even stone.

And I think that’s just fine. Once you give up on the rightness of either system, they both have their pros and cons. Millimeters are superb for doing carpentry in – that’s just about how tight my tolerances are with hand tools anyway, and if it’s made of wood, you can fudge 0.5 mm either way pretty easily. Sure, you could measure in 32nds of an inch, but have you ever bought a plywood sheet that’s 1536 x 3072 thirty-seconds? (That’s 4’ x 8’, or 1200 mm x 2400 mm.) No, you haven’t.

But maybe stick to one system when lives or critical systems are on the line. Or at least be very careful to call out your units. While it’s annoying to spec the wrong SMT part size because KiCAD calls some of them out in millimeters and inches – 0402 in inches is tiny, but 0402 in metric is microscopic – it’s another thing entirely to load up half as much fuel as you need for a commercial airline flight because of metric vs imperial tons. There’s a limit to how units-flexible you want to be.

For Americans Only: Estimating Celsius And Other Mental Metrics

August 14, 2025 by Al Williams 194 Comments

I know many computer languages, but I’ve struggled all my life to learn a second human language. One of my problems is that I can’t stop trying to translate in my head. Just like Morse code, you need to understand things directly, not translate. But you have to start somewhere. One of the reasons metric never caught on in the United States is that it is hard to do exact translations while you are developing intuition about just how hot is 35 °C or how long 8 cm is.

If you travel, temperature is especially annoying. When the local news tells you the temperature is going to be 28, it is hard to do the math in your head to decide if you need a coat or shorts.

Ok, you are a math whiz. And you have a phone with a calculator and, probably, a voice assistant. So you can do the right math, which is (9/5) x °C + 32. But for those of us who can’t do that in our heads, there is an easier way.

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A Love Letter To Prototype Zero

August 9, 2025 by Elliot Williams 11 Comments

An old friend of mine at my hackerspace introduced me to the concept of Prototype Zero: The Version that Even Your Own Sweet Mother Isn’t Allowed to See. The idea is that when you’re building something truly new, or even just new to you, your first take will almost always be ugly, and nothing will work the way it will by the time you make your second one. But it’s also important to the exercise that you see it all the way through to the end if you can.

I’m reminded of this after seeing a marvelous video by [Japhy Riddle] where he discusses his Prototype Zero of the Tape-Speed Keyboard. About halfway through the video he says that he would have done it totally differently if he knew then what he knows now: the hallmark of Prototype Zero. Yet he finishes it up, warts and all, documents it, and plays around with all of its possibilities. (Documenting it publicly isn’t part of the Prototype Zero method.)

I don’t think that [Japhy] is going to make a Prototype 1.0 out of this project, but I could be wrong; he seems to be content with having scratched the variable-speed tape itch. But if he did want to, he’s learned all of the gotchas on the engineering side, and found out exactly what such an instrument is capable of. And this loops back to the importance of getting Prototype Zero finished. You may have learned all of the tricks necessary to build the thing even before you’ve put the last screw in, but it’s when you actually have the thing in your hands to explore that you get the ideas for refinement that you simply can’t think up when it’s still just a concept.

Don’t be afraid to make your prototype quick and dirty, because if it ends up too dirty, you can just call it Prototype Zero. But don’t be tempted by the siren’s song of the 80% finished prototype either. Exploring putting Prototype Zero into use is its real purpose.

Thanks, Tamiya-san

August 2, 2025 by Elliot Williams 18 Comments

We’re saddened to report the passing of Shunsaku Tamiya, the man behind the Tamiya line of models. What was surprising about this, though, is how many of our readers and writers alike felt touched by the Tamiya model company. I mean, they made great models, and they’re definitely a quality outfit, but the outpouring of fond memories across a broad spectrum was striking.

For example, we originally ran the story as breaking news, but our art director Joe Kim spent a good part of his childhood putting together Tamiya kits, and felt like he absolutely had to do a portrait of Mr. Tamiya to pay his respects. I presume Joe is more on the painting-the-models end of the spectrum of Tamiya customers, given his artistic bent. Jenny’s writeup is absolutely touching, and her fond remembrances of the kits shines through her writing.

Myself, I’m on the making-small-robots end of the spectrum, and was equally well served. Back in the early ’90s, the “twin motor gearbox” was a moderately challenging and tremendously rewarding build for me, but it was also the only variable-ratio small motor gearbox that we had easy access to for making small bots to run around the living room.

Indeed, the Tamiya line included a whole series of educational models and components that were just perfect for the budding robot builder. I’m sure I have a set of their tank treads or a slip clutch in a box somewhere, even today.

It’s nice to think of how many people’s lives were touched by their kits, and to get even a small glimpse of that, you just need to read our comment section. We hope the company holds on to Mr. Tamiya’s love for quality kits that inspire future generations, whether they end up becoming artists, engineers, or simply hackers.