Hackaday Podcast Episode 356: Nanoprinting, Vibe Coding, And Keebin’ With Kristina, IN HELL!

February 6, 2026 by Kristina Panos No comments

This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over coffee to bring you the latest news, mystery sound results show, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous seven days or so.

We found no news to speak of, except that Kristina has ditched Windows after roughly 38 years. What is she running now? What does she miss about Windows? Tune in to find out.

On What’s That Sound, Kristina thought it was a jackhammer, but [Statistically Unlikely] knew it was ground-tamper thingy, and won a Hackaday Podcast t-shirt! Congratulations!

After that, it’s on to the hacks and such, beginning with 3D printing on the nano scale, and a couple of typewriter-based hacks. Then we take a look at the beauty of the math behind graph theory, especially when it comes to circuit sculptures and neckties.

We also talk display hacking, macro pads with haptic feedback knobs, and writing code in Welsh. Finally, we discuss the Virtual Boy, and ponder whether vibe coding is killing open source.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download in DRM-free MP3 and savor at your leisure.

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Toybox Tractor: Plywood, Lathe Hacks, And 350W Of Fun

February 5, 2026 by Matt Varian 9 Comments

When you think of a toy tractor, what probably comes to mind is something with fairly simple lines, maybe the iconic yellow and green, big rear tires, small front ones. Well, that’s exactly what [James] built, with simple, clean lines and a sturdy build that will hold up to driving around off-road in the garden. This Tractor is a great build, combining CAD, metal and wood work, some 3D printing, and electronics.

Starting at the power plant for the build, [James] went with a 350W DC motor powered by a 36V Li-ion battery from an e-bike. The motor turns a solid rear axle he made on a mini-lathe, connected to a set of riding lawn mower wheels. The mini-lathe spindle bore was too small to accommodate the shaft, and the lathe was not long enough to use the tailstock, so [James] had to get creative, using a vice and a piece of wood to make a stand–in tailstock, allowing him to turn this custom rear axle. The signature smoothly curved bonnet was made possible with plywood and body filler, rather than the sheet metal found on full-sized tractors. In fact, most of the build’s frame used plywood, giving it plenty of strength and, once painted, helping give it the appearance of a toy pulled out of a toybox.

This build had a bit of many domains in it, and all combined into a fantastic final result that no doubt will bring a smile to any face that gets to take the Tractor for a ride. Thanks [James] for documenting your build process, the hacks needed to pull off the tough bits along the way in making this fun toy. If you found this fun, be sure to check out another tractor related project.

5K IMac Turned Into 5K Display

February 4, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 12 Comments

While Apple weren’t the first to invent high-DPI displays or to put them into consumer electronics, they did popularize them fairly effectively with the Retina displays in the early 2010s and made a huge number of them in the following years. The computers they’re attached to are getting up there in age, though, and although these displays are still functional it isn’t quite as straightforward to use them outside of their Apple-approved use. [David] demonstrates one way of getting this done by turning a 5k iMac into an external monitor.

The first attempt at getting a usable monitor from the old iMac was something called a Luna Display, but this didn’t have a satisfying latency. Instead, [David] turned to replacing the LCD driver board with a model called the R1811. This one had a number of problems including uneven backlighting, so he tried a second, less expensive board called the T18. This one only has 8-bit color instead of the 10-bit supported by the R1811 but [David] couldn’t personally tell the difference, and since it solved the other issues with the R1811 he went with this one. After mounting the new driver board and routing all of the wires, he also replaced the webcam with an external Logitech model and upgraded the speakers as well.

Even when counting the costs for both driver boards, the bill for this conversion comes in well under the cost of a new monitor of comparable quality from Apple, a company less concerned about innovation these days than overcharging their (admittedly willing) customers. For just a bit of effort, though, these older iMacs and other similar Apple machines with 5k displays can be repurposed to something relatively modern and still usable. Others have done similar projects and funded the upgrades by selling off the old parts.

Lumafield battery quality report cover page

Lumafield Peers Into The 18650 Battery

January 31, 2026 by John Elliot V 22 Comments

[Alex Hao] and [Andreas Bastian] of Lumafield recently visited with [Adam Savage] to document their findings after performing X-ray computed tomography scans on over 1,000 18650 lithium-ion batteries.

The short version — don’t buy cheap cells! The cheaper brands were found to have higher levels of manufacturing defects which can lead them to being unsafe. All the nitty-gritty details are available in the report, which can be downloaded for free from Lumafield, as well as the Tested video they did with [Adam] below.

Actually we’ve been talking here at Hackaday over at our virtual water-cooler (okay, okay, our Discord server) about how to store lithium-ion batteries and we learned about this cool bit of kit: the BAT-SAFE. Maybe check that out if you’re stickler for safety like us! (Thanks Maya Posch!)

We have of course heard from [Adam Savage] before, check out [Adam Savage] Giving A Speech About The Maker Movement and [Adam Savage]’s First Order Of Retrievability Tool Boxes.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 355: Person Detectors, Walkie Talkies, Open Smartphones, And A WiFi Traffic Light

January 30, 2026 by Jenny List No comments

Another chilly evening in Western Europe, as Elliot Williams is joined this week by Jenny List to chew the fat over the week’s hacks.

It’s been an auspicious week for anniversaries, with the hundredth since the first demonstration of a working television system in a room above a London coffee shop. John Logie Baird’s mechanically-scanned TV may have ultimately been a dead-end superseded by the all-electronic systems we all know, but the importance of television for the later half of the 20th century and further is beyond question.

The standout hacks of the week include a very clever use of the ESP32’s WiFi API to detect people moving through a WiFi field, a promising open-source smartphone, another ESP32 project in a comms system for cyclists, more cycling on tensegrity spokes, a clever way to smooth plaster casts, and a light sculpture reflecting Wi-Fi traffic. Then there are a slew of hacks including 3D printed PCBs and gem-cut dichroic prisms, before we move to the can’t-miss articles. There we’re looking at document preservation, and a wallow in internet history with a look at the Netscape brand.

As usual all the links you need can be found below, so listen, and enjoy!

Or download the podcast old-school, with a direct link to the MP3 file in question.

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Hackaday Links: January 25, 2026

January 25, 2026 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

If predictions hold steady, nearly half of the United States will be covered in snow by the time this post goes live, with the Northeast potentially getting buried under more than 18 inches. According to the National Weather Service, the “unusually expansive and long-duration winter storm will bring heavy snow from the central U.S. across the Midwest, Ohio Valley, and through the northeastern U.S. for the remainder of the weekend into Monday.” If that sounds like a fun snow day, they go on to clarify that “crippling to locally catastrophic impacts can be expected”, so keep that in mind. Hopefully you didn’t have any travel plans, as CNBC reported that more than 13,000 flights were canceled as of Friday night. If you’re looking to keep up with the latest developments, we recently came across StormWatch (GitHub repo), a slick open source weather dashboard that’s written entirely in HTML. Stay safe out there, hackers.

Speaking of travel, did you hear about Sebastian Heyneman’s Bogus Journey to Davos? The entrepreneur (or “Tech Bro” to use the parlance of our times) was in town to woo investors attending the World Economic Forum, but ended up spending the night in a Swiss jail cell because the authorities thought he might be a spy. Apparently he had brought along a prototype for the anti-fraud device he was hawking, and mistakenly left it laying on a table while he was rubbing shoulders. It was picked up by security guards and found to contain a very spooky ESP32 development board, so naturally he was whisked off for interrogation. A search of his hotel room uncovered more suspicious equipment, including an electric screwdriver and a soldering iron. Imagine if a child had gotten their hands on them?

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 354: Firearms, Sky Driving, And Dumpster Diving

January 23, 2026 by Al Williams 1 Comment

Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams took a break to talk about their favorite hacks last week. You can drop in to hear about articulated mirrors, triacs, and even continuous 3D-printing modifications.

Flying on an airplane this weekend? Maybe wait until you get back to read about how the air traffic control works. Back home, you can order a pizza on a Wii or run classic Basic games on a calculator.

For the can’t miss articles, the guys talked about very low Earth orbit satellites and talked about readers who dumpster dive.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and don’t be shy. Tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

As always, this episode is available in DRM-free MP3.