NASA is going back to the Moon! We’ll follow the crew of Artemis II every step of the way.
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Hackaday Podcast Episode 364: Clocks, Cameras, And Free Will
This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over assorted beverages 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.
In the news, there’s quite a bit to talk about. Regarding Hackaday Europe, you can rest assured that the talks will be announced soon. The Green-Powered Challenge is still underway, and we need your entry to truly make it a contest. You have until April 24th to enter, so show us what you can do with power you scrounge up from the environment!
As usual, we published a handful of April Fool’s posts, which you may or may not find amusing. And finally — no fooling — our own Tom Nardi wrote up the Artemis moon launch, and is going to update the post every day until the mission ends.
On What’s That Sound, we can score one for Kristina, which brings her record to approximately three wins and sixty-eight losses. She knew without a doubt that the dialogue was from the Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Oh, what? There was a remake in 2008? Kristina should get bonus points, then.
After that, it’s on to the hacks, beginning with the basics of making clean enclosures that are decidedly not 3D-printed, a couple of sweet lo-fi cameras, and a nice way to tame the tape when it comes to SMT parts. We also discuss a clock that marks time in a mathematical way, watch an electro-permanent magnet in action, and improving soda by turning it into mead. Finally, we discuss the solar balconies taking Europe by storm, and Copilot’s terrifying terms of service.
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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A Novel 555 Circuit In 2026
The humble NE555 has been around for over five decades now, and while during that time we’ve seen a succession of better and faster versions of the original, the circuits which surround it are pretty well known. There can’t be anything new in the world of 555s, can there? [Stephen Woodward] claims he’s made a novel 555 circuit, with his 1 MHz linear voltage to frequency converter. Since he’s been in love with the 555 since 1974, we’re inclined to trust him on this part.
It’s visibly the 555 astable oscillator we’re all familiar with, given the addition of a current source in place of the normal charging resistor. This makes for a much more linear sawtooth waveform, but it still doesn’t fix the linearity of the voltage to frequency curve. The novel bit comes in adding an extra resistor between the threshold and discharge pins, with a value calculated for a time constant with the capacitor to match the 555’s own switching delay. This provides the necessary compensation, and gives the circuit its linearity.
This is so brilliantly simple that it’s almost a shock that it’s new, but it’s also a great example of the old-school electronic engineer’s art. We can’t think of an immediate need for a 555 voltage to frequency converter on the Hackaday bench at the moment, but you can bet we’ll come back to this one if we do.
We had someone pushing a newer 555 variant to its limit, when we ran our component abuse challenge.
Writing An Open-World Engine For The Nintendo 64
Anyone who has ever played Nintendo 64 games is probably familiar with the ways that large worlds in these games got split up, with many loading zones. Another noticeable aspect is that of the limited drawing distance, which is why even a large open area such as in Ocarina of Time‘s Hyrule Field has many features that limit how far you can actually see, such as hills and a big farming homestead in the center. Yet as [James Lambert] demonstrates in a recent video, it’s actually possible to create an open world on the N64, including large drawing distances.
As explained in the video, the drawing distance is something that the developer controls, and thus may want to restrict to hit certain performance goals. In effect he developer sets where the far clipping plane is set, beyond which items are no longer rendered. Of course, there are issues with just ramping up the distance to the far clipping plane, as the N64 only has a 15-bit Z-buffer, after which you get ‘Z fighting’, where render order becomes an issue as it’s no longer clear what is in front of what.
One fix is to push the near clipping plane further away from the player, but this comes with its own share of issues. Ergo [James] fixed it by doing two render passes: first all the far-away objects with Z-buffer disabled, and then all the nearby objects. These far-away objects can be rendered back-to-front with low level-of-detail (LoD), so this is relatively fast and also saves a lot of RAM, as the N64 is scraping by in this department at the best of times.
In the video the full details of this rendering approach, as well as a new fog rendering method, are explained, with the code and such available on GitHub for those who wish to tinker with it themselves. [James] and friends intend to develop a full game using this engine as well, so that’s definitely something to look forward to.
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Hackaday Links: March 29, 2026
Whether it’s a new couch or a rare piece of hardware picked up on eBay, we all know what it feels like to eagerly await a delivery truck. But the CERN researchers involved in a delivery earlier this week weren’t transporting anyone’s Amazon Prime packages, they were hauling antimatter.
Moving antimatter, specifically antiprotons, via trucks might seem a bit ridiculous. But ultimately CERN wants to transfer samples between various European laboratories, and that means they need a practical and reliable way of getting the temperamental stuff from point A to B. To demonstrate this capability, the researchers loaded a truck with 92 antiprotons and drove it around for 30 minutes. Of course, you can’t just put antiprotons in a cardboard box, the experiment utilized a cryogenically cooled magnetic containment unit that they hope will eventually be able to keep antimatter from rudely annihilating itself on trips lasting as long as 8 hours.
Speaking of deliveries, anyone building a new computer should be careful when ordering components. Shady companies are looking to capitalize on the currently sky high prices of solid-state drives by counterfeiting popular models, and according to the Japanese site AKIBA PC Hotline, there are some examples in the wild that would fool all but the most advanced users. They examine a bootleg drive that’s a nearly identical replica of the Samsung 990 PRO — the unit and its packaging are basically a mirror image of the real deal, the stated capacity appears valid, and it even exhibits similar performance when put through a basic benchmark test.
Hackaday Podcast Episode 363: The History Of PLA, Laser DIY PCBs, And Corporate Craziness
What did Elliot Williams and Al Williams read on Hackaday last week? Tune in and find out. After a bit of news, [Vik Oliver] chimes in with some deep PLA knowledge. Then the topic changed to pressure advance measurements, SDRs, making super-resolution PCBs with a fiber laser, and more.
Want to 3D print wire strippers? A robot arm? Or just make your own Z-80? Those hacks are in there, too.
For the long articles, we talked about old tech, including the :CueCat and the Iomega Zip Drive. Let us know if you had either one in the comments.
What do you think? Leave us a comment or record something and send it to our mailbag.
Download a copy of the podcast with no corporate trackers in the clean MP3.
Reconstructed SC62015 Opcode Reference For Sharp Pocket Computers
Pocket computers like Sharp’s 8-bit computing marvels were a big part of the 1980s, providing super-portable processing power to anyone who wanted a bit more than what something like a scientific calculator could provide at the time. These days they are mostly just a collector’s item for retrocomputing enthusiasts, which also means that a lot of the knowledge about how to program the CPUs in them is at risk of being lost.
This is why [gikonekos] decided to combine as much knowledge they can glean from official documentation into a reference project on GitHub for the SC62015 equipped Sharp pocket computers like the PC-E550.
Generally you’d program in Sharp’s dialect of BASIC on these computers, such as the ‘PLAY3’ program that [gikonekos] recently unearthed from a November 1993 copy of ‘Pocket Computer Journal’ using which you can create polyphonic tunes. This only unlocks a small part of what the hardware can do, of course, so having a full opcode reference like this is important.
While still a work in progress, it’ll eventually contain the full opcode and register tables, addressing modes, instruction summaries and of course a full accounting of how all of this was reconstructed. As the original Sharp documentation wasn’t released to the public, providing these scans is also not a goal, especially not under any kind of free license.
A cursory search reveals an instruction table for the PC-E500 from 1995 by [Andrew Woods], so documenting this is not a new thing, although at the time these Sharp pocket PCs didn’t count as ‘retro systems’ yet.
FLOSS Weekly Episode 867: Pangolin: People Can Lie
This week Jonathan chats with Milo Schwartz about Pangolin, the Open Source tunneling solution. Why do we need something other than Wireguard, and how does Pangolin fix IoT and IT problems? And most importantly, how do you run your own self-hosted Pangolin install? Watch to find out!
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