Hackaday Podcast Episode 375: Rebuilding Tech On Our Terms And The Hero Nerd

June 26, 2026 by 1 Comment

In this episode, Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start off by taking a trip down the Raspberry Pi memory lane and then tackle a fresh pile of listener mail. The discussion moves on to hacking bike counter, homebrew upgrades to the Nintendo Entertainment System, and building RAM from whats in the parts bin. You’ll hear about the latest drop-in upgrade for a classic Casio watch, hosting light bulbs that host subversive literature, and loading Wii U games from a weird disk drive from the 1980s. They’ll wrap things up with a dive into the evolving portrayals of brilliant rebels in media, and all the things you can do with a cheap router.

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

Direct download in DRM-free MP3.

Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast Episode 375: Rebuilding Tech On Our Terms And The Hero Nerd” →

FLOSS Weekly Episode 872: I’m Not Satoshi

June 24, 2026 by 1 Comment

This week Jonathan chats with Tristan Sherliker about the Craig Wright case, Open Source and the law, and Tristan’s own Open Source project, BunTool. How did Open Source help win the day at the Bitcoin trial? And why is right now such an interesting time to be in the legal field? Watch to find out!

Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 872: I’m Not Satoshi” →

Hackaday Podcast Episode 374: Flippin’ Phones, Sexy Spraysers, And Frikkin’ Lasers

June 19, 2026 by 3 Comments

Things are back to normal around the Podcast studio, and this week you’ll hear the dulcet tones of Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos.

In Hackaday news, we still have a Frikkin’ Lasers Challenge going on, and now you can even enter your project into it! Join the ranks, won’t you?

Not only do we have a triple mailbag this week, we have another failed attempt at guessing the sound by Kristina. However, [Baron Maximilian von Knuthausen] knew that it was a train, a British one, even. Then it’s on to the hacks, of course, which ought to go far in explaining the show title.

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 lovely MP3.

Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast Episode 374: Flippin’ Phones, Sexy Spraysers, And Frikkin’ Lasers” →

8087's 4-bit adder block. (Credit: Ken Shirriff)

The Adder At The Heart Of Intel’s 8087 FPU

June 16, 2026 by 10 Comments

As simple as the concept of adding two numbers appears at first glance, doing it in the 1970s in Intel’s 8087 FPU with its 69-bit adder was still a tall order. This is namely the core feature that many features like tangents, cosines and exponentiation rely on, so it had to be basically perfect. In a recent die-level analysis of the 8087 [Ken Shirrif] dives into the structure, layout and functioning of this ‘beating heart’ of this piece of semiconductor history.

The Intel 8087 adder and associated registers. (Credit: Intel)
The Intel 8087 adder and associated registers. (Credit: Intel)

Although anyone can build a simple binary adder out of off-the-shelf parts including 74-series logic ICs, the problem is to make it fast so that the 69th bit doesn’t have to wait for e.g. a carry to trickle all the way through the preceding bits. The main way that this is solved is by breaking addition into 4-bit blocks, reducing the problem by a factor of four, along with an optimized Manchester carry-chain carry-lookahead implementation.

The main advantage of this variation of a carry-lookahead is that it reduces the number of required transistors, without sacrificing too much performance. Later on Intel would switch to the faster, but more transistor-intensive Kogge-Stone adder.

Implementing this entire adder with NMOS technology and wiring it all up to the rest of the die required a lot of ingenuity on the side of the Intel engineers, as previously noted this adder is effectively always used in any operation at some stage. This necessitates many surrounding registers and in turn circuitry to manage these, with part of the complexity handled in microcode and part in silicon.

Double The VRAM Of An RTX 3070

June 14, 2026 by 22 Comments

Modern games are quite often limited by the amount of volatile memory available to the GPU. Games can require many gigabytes of data during the rasterization process. So the obvious solution for better performance would be to buy a faster GPU, right? Well, not for [AssassinWarlord], who decided to find just what happens when you double the VRAM on an RTX 3070. The forum post is in German, but a translator gets the job done rather nicely.

For those of you following along at home, you will need a set of eight Samsung K4ZAF325BM-HC16 GDDR6 memory modules. In this case, the memory modules were salvaged from an AMD RX6900XT with a defective core. Naturally, you will need to re-ball the chips. To help the process, [AssassinWarlord] bought a stencil from AliExpress, with a 3D-printed holder for the memory modules.

Continue reading “Double The VRAM Of An RTX 3070” →

Hackaday Podcast Ep 373: GPS, Danger In Space, And Robby The Robot

June 12, 2026 by 3 Comments

Last week, Elliot got his foot stepped on by a 1.5 metric ton draft horse, and boy is he glad to be back to the relative safety of podcasting! Joining him today is Jenny List, no stranger to farm life, who has been trodden by a cow. It’s going to be one of those podcasts, folks.

Another thing the two hosts have in common is a love for the mystery of the numbers station. But did you know that GPS satellites, for the last 20 years, have broadcast literally millions of secret messages to everyone on the earth with a receiver? After that bombshell, we have an ATtiny85 emulating an 8080, a primer on how to embed magnets in 3D prints, definitive proof that more than one cassette mechanism is still being manufactured, and a look at what makes home automation enthusiasts tick.

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 play it in space.

Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast Ep 373: GPS, Danger In Space, And Robby The Robot” →