Hackaday Podcast Episode 323: Impossible CRT Surgery, Fuel Cells, Stream Gages, And A Love Letter To Microcontrollers

Elliot and Dan teamed up this week for the podcast, and after double-checking, nay, triple-checking that we were recording, got to the business of reviewing the week’s hacks. We kicked things off with a look at the news, including a potentially exciting Right to Repair law in Washington state and the sad demise of NASA’s ISS sighting website.

Our choice of hacks included a fond look at embedded systems and the classic fashion sense of Cornell’s Bruce Land, risky open CRT surgery, a very strange but very cool way to make music, and the ultimate backyard astronomer’s observatory. We talked about Stamp collecting for SMD prototyping, crushing aluminum with a boatload of current, a PC that heats your seat, and bringing HDMI to the Commodore 64.

We also took a look at flight tracking IRL, a Flipper-based POV, the ultimate internet toaster, and printing SVGs for fun and profit. Finally, we wrapped things up with a look at the tech behind real-time river flow tracking and a peek inside the surprisingly energetic world of fuel cells.

 

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Hackaday Podcast Ep 322: Fake Hackaday Writers, New Retro Computers, And A Web Rant

We’re back in Europe for this week’s Hackaday podcast, as Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List. In the news this week is the passing of Ed Smylie, the engineer who devised the famous improvised carbon dioxide filter that saved the Apollo 13 astronauts with duct tape.

Closer to home is the announcement of the call for participation for this year’s Hackaday Supercon; we know you will have some ideas and projects you’d like to share.

Interesting hacks this week include a new Mac Plus motherboard and Doom (just) running on an Atari ST, while a LoRa secure messenger and an astounding open-source Ethernet switch captivated us on the hardware front. We also take a dive into the Mouse programming language, a minimalist stack-based environment from the 1970s. Among the quick hacks are a semiconductor dopant you can safely make at home, and a beautiful Mac Mini based cyberdeck.

Finally, we wrap up with our colleague [Maya Posch] making the case for a graceful degradation of web standards, something which is now sadly missing from so much of the online world, and then with the discovery that ChatGPT can make a passable show of emulating a Hackaday scribe. Don’t worry folks, we’re still reassuringly meat-based.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 321: Learn You Some 3DP, Let The Wookie Win, Or Design A Thinkpad Motherboard Anew

Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they take a whirlwind tour of the best and brightest hacks of the last week. This episode starts off with an update about that Soviet Venus lander that’s been buzzing the planet, then moves on to best practices for designing 3D printed parts, giving Chrome OS devices a new lease on life, and a unique display technology that brings a Star Wars prop to life.

You’ll also hear about designing new motherboards for beloved old computers, why you might want to put your calipers on a flatbed scanner, and a NASA science satellite that’s putting in double duty as a wartime reporter. Finally, they’ll cover the interesting physics of meteor burst communications, and the latest developments in the ongoing libogc license kerfuffle.

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!

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 320: A Lot Of Cool 3D Printing, DIY Penicillin, And An Optical Twofer

This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up across the universe to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous week.

In Hackaday news, the 2025 Pet Hacks Contest rolls on. You have until June 10th to show us what you’ve got, so head over to Hackaday.IO and get started today!

On What’s That Sound, Kristina actually got it this time, although she couldn’t quite muster the correct name for it, however at Hackaday we’ll be calling it the “glassophone” from now on. Congratulations to [disaster_recovered] who fared better and wins a limited edition Hackaday Podcast t-shirt!

After that, it’s on to the hacks and such, beginning with a complete and completely-documented wireless USB autopsy. We take a look at a lovely 3D-printed downspout, some DIY penicillin, and a jellybean iMac that’s hiding a modern PC. Finally, we explore a really cool 3D printing technology, and ask what happened to typing ‘www.’.

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!

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 319: Experimental Archaeology, Demoscene Oscilloscope Music, And Electronic Memories

It’s the podcast so nice we recorded it twice! Despite some technical difficulties (note to self: press the record button significantly before recording the outro), Elliot and Dan were able to soldier through our rundown of the week’s top hacks.

We kicked things off with a roundup of virtual keyboards for the alternate reality crowd, which begged the question of why you’d even need such a thing. We also looked at a couple of cool demoscene-adjacent projects, such as the ultimate in oscilloscope music and a hybrid knob/jack for eurorack synth modules.

We dialed the Wayback Machine into antiquity to take a look at Clickspring’s take on the origins of precision machining; spoiler alert — you can make gas-tight concentric brass tubing using a bow-driven lathe. There’s a squishy pneumatic robot gripper, an MQTT-enabled random number generator, a feline-friendly digital stethoscope, and a typewriter that’ll make you Dymo label maker jealous.

We’ll also mourn the demise of electronics magazines and ponder how your favorite website fills that gap, and learn why it’s really hard to keep open-source software lean and clean. Short answer: because it’s made by people.

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Hackaday Podcast Ep 318: DIY Record Lathe, 360 Degree LIDAR, And 3D Printing Innovation Lives!

This week Elliot Williams was joined by fellow Europe-based Hackaday staffer Jenny List, to record the Hackaday Podcast as the dusk settled on a damp spring evening.

On the agenda first was robotic sport, as a set of bipedal robots competed in a Chinese half-marathon. Our new Robot overlords may have to wait a while before they are fast enough chase us meatbags away, but it demonstrated for us how such competitions can be used to advance the state of the art.

The week’s stand-out hacks included work on non-planar slicing to improve strength of 3D prints. It’s safe to say that the Cartesian 3D printer has matured as a device, but this work proves there’s plenty more in the world of 3D printing to be developed. Then there was a beautiful record cutting lathe project, far more than a toy and capable of producing good quality stereo recordings.

Meanwhile it’s always good to see the price of parts come down, and this time it’s the turn of LIDAR sensors. There’s a Raspberry Pi project capable of astounding resolution, for a price that wouldn’t have been imaginable only recently. Finally we returned to 3D printing, with an entirely printable machine, including the motors and the hot end. It’s a triumph of printed engineering, and though it’s fair to say that you won’t be using it to print anything for yourself, we expect some of the very clever techniques in use to feature in many other projects.

The week’s cant-miss articles came from Maya Posch with a reality check for lovers of physical media, and Dan Maloney with a history of x-ray detection. Listen to it all below, and you’ll find all the links at the bottom of the page.

Still mourning the death of physical media?  Download an MP3 and burn it to CD like it’s 1999!

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 317: Quantum Diamonds, Citizen Science, And Cobol To AI

When Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams need a break from writing posts, they hop on the podcast and talk about their favorite stories of the past week. Want to know what they were talking about? Listen in below and find out!

In an unusual twist, a listener sent in the sound for this week’s What’s This Sound competition, so it turns out Elliot and Al were both stumped for a change. See if you can do better, and you might just score a Hackaday Podcast T-shirt.

On the hacking front, the guys talked about what they hope to see as entries in the pet hacking contest, quantum diamonds (no kidding), spectrometers, and several science projects.

There was talk of a tiny robot, a space mouse—the computer kind, not a flying rodent—and even an old-fashioned photophone that let Alexander Graham Bell use the sun like a string on a paper cup telephone.

Things really heat up at the end, when there is talk about computer programming ranging from COBOL to Vibe programming. In case you’ve missed it, vibe coding is basically delegating your work to the AI, but do you really want to? Maybe, if your job is to convert all that old COBOL code.

Want to read along? The links are below. Be sure to leave your robot plans, COBOL war stories, and AI-generated Vibe limerics in the comments!

As always, the human-generated Hackaday Podcast is available as a DRM-free MP3 download.

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