Hackaday Podcast

357 Articles

Hackaday Podcast 111: 3D Graphics Are Ultrasonic, Lobotomizing Alexa, 3D-Printing Leaky Rockets, And Gaming The Font System

March 26, 2021 by 4 Comments

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams curate a week of great hacks. Physical displays created in 3D space are a holy grail, and you can make one with 200 ultrasonic transducers, four FPGAs, and a lot math. Smart speakers have one heck of a microphone array in them, it’s yours for the hacking if you just roll your own firmware. Hobby servos can be awful, but this week we saw they can be made really great by cracking open the DC motor to add a simple DIY position sensor. And lasers are making their way into car headlights; we illuminate the situation in this episode.

Take a look at 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 110: One Unicode To Rule Them, Hacking Focus Stacking, Virtual Typing, And Zombie Weather Channel

March 19, 2021 by 3 Comments

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys cover a great week of hardware hacking. We saw a fault-injection attack that used an electric flyswatter and hand-wound coil to twiddle bits inside of an AVR micro. Focus-stacking is what you want when using a microscope to image circuit boards and there’s a hack for the Eakins cameras that makes it automatic. In our “can’t miss articles” we riff on how to cool off cities in a warming climate, and then gaze with quiet admiration at what the Unicode standard has accomplished. But when it comes to head-spinning hacks, you can’t beat the reverse-engineering efforts being shown off with the rack-mount box that made the Weather Channel awesome back in the 80’s and 90’s.

Take a look at 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 109: Cars That Suck, A Synth Packed With 555s, X-ray Letter Reading, And Pecking At A PS/2 Keyboard

March 12, 2021 by 8 Comments

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams riff on the week’s most interesting hacks. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect piece of art than an original Pong circuit board mounted in a shadow box and playable along with some tasty FPGA tricks to capture the original look of the screen. You could make a synth with a 555 timer, but what about using 20 of them for perfect polyphony? We ogle an old video showing off a clever toothed-disc CNC machine for cutting pastry with a water jet. And the episode wouldn’t be complete without looking at the strange tech that goes into making a fan car.

Take a look at 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 108: Eulogizing Daft Punk Helmets, Bitcoin Feeling The Heat, Squeezing Soft Robots, And Motorizing Ice Skates

March 5, 2021 by 2 Comments

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys travel through the greatest hacks the week had on offer. Charge up your ice skates (literally) by adding spiked electric motors to push you across the frozen pond. If that’s too cold for early March, snuggle up with a good book under the warm light of a clever lamp made from a rotary-dial telephone. We discuss CAD and CAM in your browser, and a software tool to merge images with PCB gerber files. The episode wraps up with a discussion on the balance of quality versus speed when prototyping, and digesting the environmental impact of the Bitcoin network.

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Hackaday Podcast 107: FTDI Plays Music, LED Dimming Ain’t Easy, Measuring Poop Calories, And Sketchy Laser Cutters

February 26, 2021 by No comments

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams gab about all of the geeky things. We had a delightful time watching NASA bring Perseverance down to the Red planet. In Kristina’s words, we pour one out for Fry’s Electronics. And then we jump into a parade of excellent hacks with a magnetic bearing for crooked ball screws, a science-based poop-burning experiment, and the music hack only microcontroller enthusiasts could love as an FTDI cable is plugged directly into a speaker. Smart circuit design is used to hack a dimmer into non-dimmable LED fixtures, and an octet of living clams are the early warning sensors for water pollution.

Take a look at 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 106: Connector Kerfuffle, Tuning Fork Time, Spinach Contact Prints, And Tesla’s Permanent Memory

February 19, 2021 by 1 Comment

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys recount the coolest hacks from the past week. Most clocks keep time with a quartz crystal, but we discuss one that uses a tuning fork… like the kind you use to tune a piano. Ghidra is a powerful reverse engineering tool developed by the NSA that was recently put to good use changing an embedded thermometer display from Celsius to Fahrenheit. We talk turkey on the Texas power grid problems and Tesla’s eMMC failures. And of course there’s some room for nostalgia as we walk down memory lane with the BASIC programming language.

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Hackaday Podcast 105: 486 Doom On FPGA, How Thick Is Your Filament, Raspberry Pi Speaks Android Auto, And We’re Headed To Mars

February 12, 2021 by 3 Comments

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams unpack great hacks of the past week. We loves seeing the TIL311 — a retro display in a DIP package — exquisitely recreated with SMD electronics and resin casting. You might never need to continuously measure the diameter of your 3D printer filament, but just in case there’s a clever hall-effect sensor mechanism for that. Both of us admire the work being done in the FPGA realm and this week we saw a RISC-V core plumbed into quite the FPGA stack to run a version of Doom originally played on 486 computers. And we’re getting excited for the three ring circus of engineering acrobatics that will land NASA’s Perseverance rover on the surface of Mars next week.

Take a look at 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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