2025 Hackaday Component Abuse Challenge: Let The Games Begin!

September 16, 2025 by Elliot Williams 39 Comments

In theory, all parts are ideal and do just exactly what they say on the box. In practice, everything has its limits, most components have non-ideal characteristics, and you can even turn most parts’ functionality upside down.

The Component Abuse Challenge celebrates the use of LEDs as photosensors, capacitors as microphones, and resistors as heat sources. If you’re using parts for purposes that simply aren’t on the label, or getting away with pushing them to their absolute maximum ratings or beyond, this is the contest for you.

If you committed these sins against engineering out of need, DigiKey wants to help you out. They’ve probably got the right part, and they’re providing us with three $150 gift certificates to give out to the top projects. (If you’re hacking just for fun, well, you’re still in the running.)

This is the contest where the number one rule is that you must break the rules, and the project has to work anyway. You’ve got eight weeks, until Nov 11th. Open up a project over at Hackaday.io, pull down the menu to enter in the contest, and let the parts know no mercy!

Honorable Mention Categories:

We’ve come up with a few honorable mention categories to get your ideas flowing. You don’t have to fit into one of these boxes to enter, but we’ll be picking our favorites in these four categories for a shout-out when we reveal the winners.

Bizarro World: There is a duality in almost every component out there. Speakers are microphones, LEDs are light sensors, and peltier coolers generate electricity. Turn the parts upside down and show us what they can do.
Side Effects: Most of the time, you’re sad when a part’s spec varies with temperature. Turn those lemons into lemonade, or better yet, thermometers.
Out of Spec: How hard can you push that MOSFET before it lets go of the magic smoke? Show us your project dancing on the edge of the abyss and surviving.
Junk Box Substitutions: What you really needed was an igniter coil. You used an eighth-watt resistor, and got it hot enough to catch the rocket motor on fire. Share your parts-swapping exploits with us.

Inspiration

Diodes can do nearly anything. Their forward voltage varies with temperature, making them excellent thermometers. Even the humble LED can both glow and tell you how hot it is. And don’t get us started on the photo-diode. They are not just photocells, but radiation detectors.

Here’s a trick to double the current that a 555 timer can sink. We’d love to see other cases of 555 abuse, of course, but any other IC is fair game.

Resistors get hot. Thermochromic paint changes color with temperature. Every five years or so, we see an awesome new design. This ancient clock of [Sprite_tm]’s lays the foundation, [Daniel Valuch] takes it into the matrix, and [anneosaur] uses the effect to brighten our days.

Of course, thin traces can also be resistors, and resistors can get really hot. Check out [Carl Bujega]’s self-soldering four-layer PCB. And while magnetism is nearly magic, a broken inductor can still be put to good use as a bike chain sensor.

Or maybe you have a new twist on the absolutely classic LEDs-as-light-sensors? Just because it’s been done since the early says of [Forrest Mims] doesn’t mean we don’t want to see your take.

Get out there and show us how you can do it wrong too.

MOSFETs — The Hidden Gate

December 8, 2023 by Al Williams 12 Comments

How many terminals does a MOSFET have? Trick question since most have three leads, even though there are really four connections to the underlying device. It isn’t a conspiracy, though and [Aaron Lanterman] talks about how MOSFETs really work and why thinking of them as three-terminal devices can lead you astray in a recent video that you can watch below.

Like many people, [Aaron] points out the parallel between a triode vacuum tube and a MOSFET. That’s not surprising, since a solid-state tube was exactly what they were looking for when they developed the FET. Since tubes and FETs are both voltage controllers, it is easy to think of the gate as the grid, the source as the cathode, and the drain as the plate. But, [Aaron] shows this isn’t really a very accurate picture.

Continue reading “MOSFETs — The Hidden Gate” →

Watch Those 1% Resistors

July 7, 2023 by Al Williams 54 Comments

Decades ago, electronic components were not as easy to acquire as they are today. Sure, you could get some things at Radio Shack. But you might not have many choices, and the price would be on the high side. TV repair components were another option, but, again, big bucks. Some places sold surplus parts, which could be cheap. These often came from manufacturing runs where a company bought 10,000 components and made 8,000 products. But today, you can order parts inexpensively and get them on your doorstep in a day or, sometimes, even less. Are these inexpensive parts really any good? [Denki Otaku] likes to find out. In a recent video, he checks out some Amazon-supplied 1% resistors to find out how good they are. You can watch his results below.

Continue reading “Watch Those 1% Resistors” →

3D Printed Tool Lets You Measure Component Reels Easily

April 15, 2023 by Lewin Day 5 Comments

Component reels are a highly-0ptimized packaging format. They deliver components to pick and place machines for effective high-speed assembly. As more of us get into working with SMD components, we’re exposed to them as well. [MG] wanted a way to easily measure tape from component reels, which is difficult because they’re often curled up. Thus, they whipped up a nifty little tool for the job.

The device consists of a 3D printed bracket which is designed to fit on a cheap electronic tape measure from Amazon. The bracket holds an 8mm wide component tape against the measuring wheel. As the component tape is fed through the device, it turns the wheel, and the measurement appears on the screen. No more must you try and flatten out a tape and measure it section by section. Instead, you just feed it in, yank it through, and you’re done!

[MG] notes that the tape measure itself runs on an STM32 microcontroller. As an extra-credit assignment, they suggest that the device could be reprogrammed to display component count instead of distance if that’s more suitable for your application. If you happen to make that mod, be sure to notify us on the tipline!

Hackaday Links: September 25, 2022

September 25, 2022 by Dan Maloney 15 Comments

Looks like there’s trouble out at L2, where the James Webb Space Telescope suffered a mechanical anomaly back in August. The issue, which was just announced this week, involves only one of the six imaging instruments at the heart of the space observatory, known as MIRI, the Mid-Infrared Instrument. MIRI is the instrument on Webb that needs the coldest temperatures to work correctly, down to six Kelvins — we’ve talked about the cryocooler needed to do this in some detail. The problem has to do with unexpectedly high friction during the rotation of a wheel holding different diffraction gratings. These gratings are rotated into the optical path for different measurements, but apparently the motor started drawing excessive current during its move, and was shut down. NASA says that this only affects one of the four observation modes of MIRI, and the rest of the instruments are just fine at this time. So they’ve got some troubleshooting to do before Webb returns to a full program of scientific observations.

There’s an old saying that, “To err is human, but to really screw things up takes a computer.” But in Russia, to really screw things up it takes a computer and a human with a really poor grasp on just how delicately balanced most infrastructure systems are. The story comes from Moscow, where someone allegedly spoofed a massive number of fake orders for taxi rides (story in Russian, Google Translate works pretty well) through the aggregator Yandex.Taxi on the morning of September 1. The taxi drivers all dutifully converged on the designated spot, but instead of finding their fares, they just found a bunch of other taxis milling about and mucking up traffic. Yandex reports it has already added protection against such attacks to its algorithm, so there’s that at least. It’s all fun and games until someone causes a traffic jam.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: September 25, 2022” →

Let Slip The Chips Of War

September 13, 2022 by Dave Rowntree 71 Comments

We’re going to go out on a limb and predict that future history books will note that the decision to invade a sovereign nation straight after a worldwide pandemic wasn’t exactly the best timing. Turns out the global electronics shortage the pandemic helped to catalyze isn’t just affecting those of us with peaceful intentions, as the Russian war machine is having a few supply issues with the parts needed to build modern weapons and their associated control equipment.

As you might expect, many of these parts are electronic in nature, and in some cases they come from the same suppliers folks like us use daily. This article from POLITICO includes an embedded spreadsheet, broken down by urgency, complete with part numbers, manufacturers, and even the price Moscow expects to pay!

Chips from US-based firms such as Texas Instruments are particularly hard for the Kremlin to source.

So what parts are we talking about anyway? The cheapest chip on the top priority list is the Marvell ‘Alaska’ 88E1322 which is a dual Gigabit Ethernet PHY costing a mere $7.10 USD according to Moscow. The most expensive is the 10M04DCF256I7G, which is an Altera (now Intel) Max-10 series FPGA, at $1,101 USD (or 66,815 Rubles, for those keeping score).

But it’s not just chips that are troubling them, mil-spec D-sub connectors by Airborn are unobtainable, as are all classes of basic passive parts, resistors, diodes, discrete transistors. Capacitors are especially problematic (aren’t they always). A whole slew of Analog Devices chips, as well as many from Maxim, Micrel and others. Even tiny logic chips from Nexperia.

Of course, part of this is by design. Tightened sanctions prevent Russia from purchasing many of these parts directly, which is intended to make continued aggression as economically unpleasant as possible. But as the POLITICO article points out, it’s difficult to prevent some intermediaries from ‘helping out’ without the West knowing. After all, once a part hits the general market, it is next to impossible to guarantee where it will eventually get soldered down.

Thanks to [Kim Tae] for the tip!

Hackaday Links: April 3, 2022

April 3, 2022 by Dan Maloney 7 Comments

It’s that time of year again — the 2022 Hackaday Prize has officially launched, and we’re excited to see what it turns out. This year’s theme is “Sustainability, Resilience, and Circularity,” and just in time, too; if the last couple of years has taught us anything, it’s that we’ve got a lot of failure points built into the systems that run our world. As broken as things are, it’s tempting to just curl up in a ball and pretend everything’s fine, but that’s not how hackers respond to adversity. We need to control what we can control, and there’s plenty of work to be done. From sustainable energy ideas to ways to reduce the amount of stuff we throw away, from breathing new life into old equipment to building communities that can take care of themselves, there’s plenty of work to be done. So get over to the Hackaday Prize page, check out the launch summit video if you need some inspiration, and get hacking. And hurry up — things are only going to get better if people like us make it happen.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: April 3, 2022” →