What Are Your Indispensable Software Skills?

September 19, 2026 by Elliot Williams 77 Comments

Using tools properly takes skill, and this goes for software tools as well as hardware. You don’t just buy a paintbrush and on day one paint the Mona Lisa. Similarly, you can’t just open up a CAD program and whip out whatever 3D objects your heart desires, or fire up Vim and start typing. Software tools take a bit of learning before you can wield them efficiently, if even at all. And because you can’t be skilled at everything, no matter how hard we are all trying, it’s good to have at least some of the software tools you know do double duty.

Tom and I were watching [Clough42] design an electronics cabinet for a CNC machine. He does a lot of CNC machining and design work, so he’s no stranger to CAD software. So he downloaded all of the parts that he needed inside cabinet, slid them onto virtual DIN rails, modeled the hinges, and made sure that everything fit before buying anything.

Now I know that some of you out there do CAD modeling like this all the time, but for Tom and I, who are 3D printerers and PCB layouterers, doing the CAD without then following through and finishing up with the CAM seemed a bit novel. I never open CAD unless I’m going to have a machine make the thing – otherwise I’d just draw it out on paper, right? But [Clough42]’s point is that getting models of all of the subparts is so easy these days, you might as well model it.

If, and this is the big “if”, you know your way around the CAD tool of your choice. If you don’t yet, it’s going to be a couple of days’ worth of effort to get there. But once you reach CAD nirvana, you’ll find it’s useful for sketching up anything that has a third dimension to it, not just stuff you need to print out.

What other software tools are like CAD in that once you know them well enough, a wealth of applications opens up before you? Of was this just an instance of having a hammer and everything looking like a nail?

If At First You Don’t Succeed…

September 5, 2026 by Elliot Williams 12 Comments

… at least document what failed and give the failure analysis a good effort. And then later on, you can “try, try again” or let someone else carry on with the work; they’ll have a good basis to start from.

We were talking about a project to use 10 W blue lasers to post-smooth 3D prints when I came up with this not-very-catchy catchphrase. The project itself is very much “in progress”, which is a nice way of saying that it hasn’t yet fully met its goals. But nonetheless I was entirely happy to watch not one, but two, videos where [I changed a thing] discussed the intricacies of laser-smoothing 3D prints, precisely because it sounds easy but absolutely isn’t, and because the problems were laid out so well.

I definitely take for granted how easy the slice-it-into-layers nature of FDM 3D printers makes path planning. After all, you can print interlocking knots, hinges, and even entire sections of chain mail as long as you only have to go one layer at a time. When you print this way, you never have to worry about the print head crashing into something that you’ve printed before, or being unable to reach into a small valley. To smooth two or more layers of a 3D print into each other, you are suddenly out of the comfy flatland. You have to worry about collisions, obstructions, and all the rest of actual 3D.

But those issues and more were carefully documented as [I changed a thing] went through his attempts at writing the software to drive the laser-augmented machine, and honestly that attention to the problems that were confounding him was worth a dozen “success” videos. In that sense, it worked on me a little like nerd sniping.

Those were my takeaways from the video series, then. One, it’s hard to do laser smoothing uniformly. But two, documenting the difficulties, considerations, and failures for your future self, or for others, is not just good practice, but can also encourage other people to help you with your project, or to take it on themselves. The more thought you put into how and why your project failed, the more bait you’re laying out for the next nerd. And that’s at least one part of what makes the open-source ethos work.

Same As It Ever Was

August 29, 2026 by Elliot Williams 143 Comments

Whether you like it or not, the use of LLMs to write code is kind of a big deal at the moment. We’ve been asking ourselves what, if anything, this means for us here at Hackaday. Should we try to figure out what percentage of a project was done by an actual human and how much was done by a machine? Does it really matter? What is our AI policy anyway?

Clearly, Hackaday is pro-human. We’re in it for the hackers as much as for the hacks. Our community is, like Soylent Green, made of people. It’s your inspirations and innovations that keep us reading and writing every day. And we produce 100% of our content the old-fashioned way, with projects selected through the taste and judgement of our writers, and their own words telling the story.

What about the hacks? We’ve seen a lot of projects recently that were coded with the help of an LLM. Does that diminish the work? In the end, what rings truest to us is what has always been Hackaday’s editorial guiding star: Is there something special in the hack that makes it worth talking about? Then we write about it. Was it written using vim or emacs? Did the author consult friends or a chatbot while working on the project? That’s not really relevant.

But in the past few years, the BS-generation machines have found our hobby, and we’re finding a lot more projects that don’t have any spark to them. We’re seeing circuits that make no sense, and claims that defy physics. Of course, we always have. The LLM-nonsense project is today’s version of the perpetual motion machines of old. Just like we never trust a hardware project that is all renders, seeing only AI-generated images is a huge red flag. It’s our job to separate out the wheat from the chaff for you all, but it’s something that you must be doing everyday as well.

We’ve seen amazing hacks over Hackaday’s 22-year history. Hackaday is older than YouTube and older than Stack Overflow. We’ve seen technology come and go. We’ve seen C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser gate. (OK, maybe not.) And in the end, our AI policy is our same-old policy: we write up hacks that inspire us in the hope that they inspire you.

So if you’re using Claude to help you with the UI bits, or if you’re hand-writing it all in assembly, or wiring up the logic in diodes, we just want to see your cool hacks. And we hope that our collective signal will be so loud that we drown out the noise, at least in our own little corner of the hacker universe.

You Gotta Want It

August 22, 2026 by Elliot Williams 20 Comments

On Hackaday last week, and on the podcast, we were talking about one of the educational toys of yesteryear that launched a thousand careers, at least if the comment section is to be believed: the Radio Shack 200-in-1 electronics kit. The “toy” itself was basically a bunch of components with spring terminals, but the secret sauce was in in the instruction book, and maybe the marketing.

Tom had one of these when he was a kid, and told a great story about wanting it desperately based on the ads he had seen with kids Morse coding to each other. When he got the kit, and found out that “it was just a bunch of wires” he was fully pissed off. But he worked through the examples, learned some basic electronics, and the rest is history.

What I really love about this story is the siren’s call of a good project. Tom was pulled in, and maybe even fooled, by the advertising, but it probably changed his life. It’s funny how many of our folks can remember the first project that got them hooked as well. With me it was some simple audio effects pedals and then maybe later some simple BEAM robots, and for younger hackers maybe it was a 3D printer or Arduino project.

Digital or analog, the common ground here is that we all thought that some project was cool enough to warrant the sweat of learning enough to do it. Good instructions are helpful of course, and having the parts on hand never hurts. But it’s the promise of making something that you really want that I think underlies all good first projects. (And heck, every subsequent project as well.)

So while Tom, and a bunch of our readers, were looking back with nostalgia at the 200-in-1, I’m thinking about how many more than 200 projects I’ve seen made by our community, and even featured here on Hackaday, that are out there to provide the motivation to get someone started. Keep on hacking!

Fully Characterized Systems

August 15, 2026 by Elliot Williams 13 Comments

A friend from my old hackerspace was in grad school for electrical engineering. He had a professor who would ask, when something went wrong with a student project, “Have you fully characterized the system?” It’s a good, if lofty, goal, but it also became an inside joke around the hackerspace because YOLO was our MO about 95% of the time. Head crashes on the 3D printer – “not fully characterized”. Forgot to take out the trash last weekend? Was the system fully characterized?

It’s maybe also the difference between theory and practice: In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice, and all systems can be fully characterized. But in practice, it’s hard to fully characterize a system that you don’t yet fully understand.

Case in point: we have nine small saplings growing in our front yard, and I have to water them. It’s boring moving the hose from tree to tree, so I thought I’d take a length of hose, stopper it at one end, and drill enough holes in it so that it could irrigate all of the trees at once. I kinda characterized the system: I figured out how much water flows per minute through our hose, and divided that up into a reasonable outflow in my mind, and drilled holes that ended up being way too large.

Why? Because a length of hose has a resistance to flow, and the water came pouring out of the first few holes, while the last few were dry. It wasn’t a constant pressure system like I thought it would be. I hadn’t even thought that the drag in the hose would matter, so there was no way I would have tried to measure it. But how would I characterize this resistance anyway? You could make a hose with too-large holes and measure the falloff. (Oops, that’s exactly what I did.)

In retrospect, professional drip irrigation systems always have holes that are tiny relative to the pipe diameter, which avoids this pressure-drop phenomenon, which means that they don’t have to worry about characterizing the hose resistance. So that’s what I ended up doing. I cut the hole size in half, and later widened up some of the downstream holes until it looked about right. Not even close to fully characterized, but it works.

So now, in addition to the engineer’s “have you fully characterized the system?”, I have the hacker’s “can you avoid characterizing parts of the system?” in my mind. And a holey chunk of hose in the trashcan.

Supercon News

Just briefly, in case you missed it: Tickets are on sale now for Supercon Ten, and we’ve extended the call for participation by another two weeks. If you’re a Hackaday fan, you owe it to yourself to join us at our annual gathering.

Commercialization And Innovation

August 1, 2026 by Elliot Williams 17 Comments

The last year or two has seen relatively affordable multi-material printers hit the market, and the question that [Tom Nardi] and I were kicking around when he was writing up the 2025 year-in-review article was what it was going to mean for our folks. I don’t think he got it wrong per se, but his heading for that section “Grandma is 3D-Printing in Color” only tells half the story.

He did get that part right, though. We’ve certainly seen a flourishing of multi-material designs out there that take advantage of the availability of (usually) four colors. The ability to print in color has given life to the purely decorative models, of course. Think full-color Pokemon desktop toys, for instance. But even functional prints have benefited from contrasting color labels printed right into the box, not to even mention the multi-material supports that pull off easier and cleaner than ever before.

Since most of these multi-filament machines are pretty much locked down as far as hardware tinkering goes, our sights were firmly locked on what the end-user would do with the new capability. But we overlooked the third axis of 3D printering: the software hackers. And it’s precisely in this area of slicer and path-planning that we’ve seen some of the coolest developments this year. Why? Because people have the hardware in their hands that they need to test out the algorithms.

FullSpectrum and the more recent ImageMap are two techniques to get the missing in-between colors out of a four-filament printer, and in particular ImageMap tries to get the job done faster, and with fewer purges. We are amazed to see two different approaches to color blending popping up in just a few months of each other, and we have no doubt that work on this is going to continue.

At the end of the day, this really is just “put new tools in the hands of creative hackers, and they’ll find new ways to use them”, so we shouldn’t have been surprised at all. But if this is what comes out of the commercialization of the multi-material printer, what’s going to come when some of the more esoteric machine designs go mainstream? We can’t wait to find out!