Get Ready For Supercon

October 25, 2025 by Elliot Williams 2 Comments

It’s just about all we can think about over here: the week leading up to the 2025 Superconference. From what we hear, it’s all-hands-on over in Pasadena right now, as everyone is putting the finishing touches on preparations for Hackaday’s annual US gathering.

We’ve been heads-down in the badge for a little while, and between that and all of the logistics, it’s easy to get lost in the work. And then we saw this video that [InstantArcade] shot, just casually walking through the event a couple years back. It’s not particularly a highlights reel, but seeing so many of the people I recognized, and remembering the many fantastic conversations we’d had. So much energy, interest, and simple excitement in sharing stories, what they’re working on, or just what they’ve seen lately that blew their mind.

There is no substitute for being there in person, but that doesn’t mean we’re not going to try! We’ll be putting the talks up on our YouTube channel next Saturday, and as always, you’re invited to join in the discussion on our Discord server both during the event and whenever. If you’re not going to be there in the alley, join us virtually!

We’ll be meeting up Thursday night at 7:00 pm at King’s Row for an informal pre-meetup. Bring a hack if you’ve got something to share! Then things start for real on Friday morning over at Supplyframe HQ. We’ll talk badges, get to know each other, and just nerd out and chill. (I love Fridays!) Halloween / sci-fi costume party Friday night, get some sleep, and head on over to the LACM and Design Lab for two tracks of talks and a full day on Saturday going late into the night. And as usual, the change back to standard time gets you an extra hour of sleep so that you’re rested and ready for Sunday.

There is still a lot to do behind the scenes, but seeing you all there makes it more than worth it! See you at Supercon.

(Oh, and no newsletter next week, but you can spend all day Saturday and Sunday watching the talks. That makes up for it, right?)

Easy For The Masses

October 11, 2025 by Elliot Williams 93 Comments

Last week, we were talking about how glad we are to be the type who by-and-large understands technology, and how it’s becoming more and more difficult to simply get along otherwise. We thought we had a good handle on the topic.

Then, we were talking about Google’s plans to require an ID for Android developers, and whether or not this will shut down free and open software development on the Android platform. Would this be the end of the ability to run whatever software that you’d like on your phone? Google offered the figleaf that “sideloading” – installing software through methods other than Google’s official store, would still be be allowed. But there’s a catch – you have to use Android Debug Bridge (ADB).

Is that a relief? It surely means that I will be able to install anything I want: I use ADB all the time, because it’s one of the fastest and easiest ways to transfer files and update software on the device. But how many non-techies do you know who use ADB? We’d guess that requiring this step shuts out 99.9% of Android users. If you make software hard to install for the masses, even if you make it possible for the geeks, you’re effectively killing it.

I have long wondered why end-to-end encrypted e-mail isn’t the default. After all, getting a GPG signing key, distributing it to your friends, and then reading mail with supporting software shouldn’t be a big deal, right? If GPG signing were available by default in Outlook or GMail, everyone would sign their e-mail. But there is no dead-simple, non-techie friendly way to do so, and so nobody does it.

Requiring ADB to load Android software is going to have the same effect, and it’s poised to severely restrict the amount of good, open software we have on the platform unless we can figure out a way to make installing that software easy enough that even the naive users can do it.

How Do The Normal People Survive?

October 4, 2025 by Elliot Williams 115 Comments

It was one of those weeks last week at Hackaday’s home office. My mother-in-law handed me her favorite power bank and said “it’s not charging”. She had every expectation that I’ll open it up, desolder the weary pouch inside, scrounge a LiPo out of some corner of the basement, and have it back up and running before the weekend. And of course that’s what happened, although maybe it looks a little worse for wear because it was hard to open the sealed case without excessive force. Sorry about that!

Then on the weekend, I finally got fed up with the decomposing foam on the face seal on my FPV goggles. It was leaking light all over the place. Of course I could have bought a new seal, but then I’d have to wait a week or so for delivery. So I pulled the velcro backing off, tossed it in the bed scanner, pulled the image up in Inkscape, converted it to Gcode, and cut out a couple seals out of EVA foam on the laser. Not only are they essentially indestructible, but I was able to customize them a little bit, and the fit is now better than ever.

And then, one of our neighbors bought a new garage door fob, flipped the DIP switches into the right configuration, and couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t open the garage door. Knock knock knock. Using the tried-and-true RF probe that everyone with a scope probe has sitting around, namely hooking the ground pin to the tip and putting the radio device in the loop, it was clear that the sense of the DIP switches was inverted from what it said in the instructions. That was a fun little puzzle.

It was the garage door opener that triggered me to think about how normal people would handle any of these situations. “How do the normies even get by?” were the exact words that went through my head. And let’s face it: we’re not entirely normal. Normal people don’t have a soldering setup just sitting around ready to get hot 24/7, or a scope to diagnose a garage door RF transmitter at the drop of a hat. But these things seem to happen to me all the time. How do the normal people survive? Maybe they all know someone with a scope?

I take it as my service to the world to be “that guy” for most of our friends and family, and I pretty much do it without complaint. “With great power” and all that. My wife is just about as gracious when she’s stuck debugging a parent’s Windows setup, so I’m not saying I’m the only saint in the world, either. Surely you have similar stories.

But last week it made me reflect on how good we’ve got it, and that does make me want to pay it forward a little bit. If you’re one of the people who can, try to help out those who can’t.

Whither The Chip Shortage?

September 27, 2025 by Elliot Williams 40 Comments

Do you remember the global chip shortage? Somehow it seems so long ago, but it’s not even really been three years yet. Somehow, I had entirely forgotten about it, until two random mentions about it popped up in short succession, and brought it all flooding back like a repressed bad dream.

Playing the role of the ghost-of-chip-shortage-past was a module for a pair of FPV goggles. There are three versions of the firmware available for download at the manufacturer’s website, and I had to figure out which I needed. I knew it wasn’t V1, because that was the buggy receiver PCB that I had just ordered the replacement for. So it was V2 or V3, but which?

Digging into it, V2 was the version that fixed the bug, and V3 was the redesign around a different microcontroller chip, because they couldn’t get the V2 one during the chip shortage.

I saw visions of desperate hackers learning new toolchains, searching for alternative parts, finding that they could get that one chip, but that there were only 20 of them left and they were selling for $30 instead of $1.30. I know a lot of you out there were designing through these tough couple years, and you’ve all probably got war stories.

And yet here we are, definitively post-chip-shortage. How can you be sure? A $30 vape pen includes a processor that we would have killed for just three years ago. The vape includes a touchscreen, just because. And it even has a Bluetooth LE chip that it’s not even using. My guess is that the hardware designers just put it in there hoping that the firmware team would get around to using it for something.

This vape has 16 MB of external SPI Flash! During the chip shortage, we couldn’t even get 4 MB SPI flash.

It’s nice to be on the other side of the chip shortage. Just order whatever parts you want and you get them, but don’t take for granted how luxurious that feels. Breathe easy, and design confidently. You can finally use that last genuine STM32F103 blue pill board without fear of it being the last one on earth.

(Featured image is not an actual photo of the author, although he does sometimes have that energy.)

Keep Reading, Keep Watching

September 13, 2025 by Elliot Williams 13 Comments

I’ve been flying quadcopters a fair bit lately, and trying to learn some new tricks also means crashing them, which inevitably means repairing them. Last weekend, I was working on some wiring that had gotten caught and ripped a pad off of the controller PCB. It wasn’t so bad, because there was a large SMT capacitor nearby, and I could just piggyback on that, but the problem was how to re-route the wires to avoid this happening again.

By luck, I had just watched a video where someone else was building up a new quad, and had elegantly solved the exact same routing problem. I was just watching the video because I was curious about the frame in question, and I had absolutely no idea that it would contain the solution to a problem that I was just about to encounter, but because I was paying attention, it make it all a walk in the park.

I can’t count the number of times that I’ve had this experience: the blind luck of having just read or seen something that solves a problem I’m about to encounter. It’s a great feeling, and it’s one of the reasons that I’ve always read Hackaday – you never know when one hacker’s neat trick is going to be just the one you need next week. Indeed, that’s one of the reasons that we try to feature not just the gonzo hacks that drill down deep on a particular feat, but also the little ones too, that solve something in particular in a neat way. Because reading up on the hacks is free, and particularly cheap insurance against tomorrow’s unexpected dilemmas.

Knowing That It Is Possible

September 6, 2025 by Elliot Williams 10 Comments

We like to think that we can do almost anything. Give me a broken piece of consumer electronics, and I’ll open it up and kick the capacitors. Give me an embedded Linux machine, and I’ll poke around for a serial port and see if it’s running uboot. But my confidence suddenly pales when you hand me a smartphone.

Now that’s not to say that I’ve never replaced a broken screen or a camera module with OEM parts. The modern smartphone is actually a miracle of modularity, with most sub-assemblies being swappable, at least in principle, and depending on your taste for applying heat to loosen up whatever glue holds the damn things together.

But actually doing hardware hacking on smartphones is still outside of my comfort zone, and that’s a shame. So I was pretty pleased to see [Marcin Plaza] attempt gutting a smartphone, repackaging it into a new form factor, and even adding a new keyboard to it. The best moment in that video for me comes around eight minutes in, when he has completely disassembled all of the modules and is laying them out on his desk to see how little he needs to make the thing work. And the answer is batteries, motherboard, USB-C, power button, and a screen. That starts to seem like a computer build, and that’s familiar turf.

That reminded me of [Scotty Allen]’s forays into cell-phone hackery that culminated in his building one completely from parts, and telling us all about it at Supercon ages ago. He told me that the turning point for him was realizing that if you have access to the tools to put it together and can get some of the impossibly small parts manufactured and/or assembled for you, that it’s just like putting a computer together.

So now I’ve seen two examples. [Scotty] put his together from parts, and [Marcin] actually got a new daughterboard made that interfaces with the USB to add a keyboard. Hardware hacking on a cellphone doesn’t sound entirely impossible. You’d probably want a cheap old used one, but the barrier to entry there isn’t that bad. You’ll probably have to buy some obscure connectors – they are tiny inside smartphones – and get some breakout boards made. But maybe it’s possible?

Anyone have more encouragement?