Honoring The Legacy Of Robert Murray-Smith

October 8, 2025 by Tom Nardi 51 Comments

We at Hackaday are deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Robert Murray-Smith. The prolific experimenter had spent over a decade on YouTube, creating more than 2,500 videos where he gleefully demonstrated his seemingly endless collection of homemade contraptions. At least eighteen of which ended up on the pages of Hackaday since we first crossed paths with him back in 2013.

Like many of you, we were also shocked to find that Robert made the decision to end his own life. As cliché as it might sound, he simply didn’t seem like the type. His demeanor was always boisterous in his videos, exhibiting an almost child-like joy as he showed off his latest creation with a laugh and smile.

But as explained by his brother Dave in the brief announcement video posted yesterday, his outward appearance was a well-rehearsed mask that covered a deepening depression. Regular viewers of Robert’s videos knew he lost his wife, as he shared a memorial video for her in April of 2024. What he was less open about with his viewers was his own health, which it turns out had been rapidly declining for the last few months.

We now know that simply getting up and walking around had become painful for Robert, a fact obscured by the fact that most of his videos saw him seated at his workbench or in the back garden. That he was able to continue making so many videos at all speaks not only to his passion for technology and engineering, but the great love he had for the community that he’d built.

From the video we also learned that Robert found it very difficult to discuss his declining mental and physical health with friends and family. For men of his generation, the “strong and silent type” was often the ideal. Given all that he was going through, nobody could fault him for experiencing a sense of hopelessness, and yet his brother explains that Robert would never admit to the difficulties he was facing. Whenever pushed to talk about his feelings, he’d respond with that phrase which we’ve all heard (and maybe used once or twice) — “I’m fine.”

Because of this, Robert’s family has partnered with the suicide prevention charity CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) to try and raise awareness about men’s mental health. They ask that anyone who wishes to honor Robert make a donation to CALM, in the hopes that they can help others who may find themselves in a similar situation.

It’s no great secret that many in the hacker and maker communities face their own daily struggles. Whether it’s from being neurodivergent, or the inability to fit in with mainstream society. Several of the staff here at Hackaday are from marginalized groups, and even among those who aren’t, let’s just say we have it on good authority that most of them didn’t get to sit with the “cool kids” back in high school. We also know that, just like Robert, many in the community find it difficult to communicate with others about how this impacts their mental health.

The lasting legacy of Robert Murray-Smith will of course be his incredible body of work, which will continue to inspire millions of viewers. But we can also honor him by making sure that we’re looking out for the well-being of friends, family, and even ourselves. There are resources available, and there’s no shame in asking for help when you need it.

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Just What Have We Become?

July 16, 2021 by Jenny List 69 Comments

The world of open source software is one that often sees disputes between developers, some of which spawn lifelong schisms between devotees of different forks, and others mere storms in a teacup that are settled over a few beers. There are a couple of stories of late though that seem to show the worst in the online world, and which all of us should take a moment to think about.

Many of you may have heard two weeks ago of the passing of [near], the software developer and game translator whose bsnes emulator for the Super Nintendo was the go-to platform for retro Nintendo enthusiasts intent on the pursuit of the closest possible match to the original without possessing real Nintendo hardware. The details of their passing are particularly distressing, in that they committed suicide after numerous attacks over several years from users of Kiwi Farms, a website notorious for the worst kinds of trolling.

Hot on the heels of that distressing story comes news that [Cookie Engineer] is stepping down as maintainer of the project that’s now called Tenacity, a fork of the popular but now-controversial Audacity audio editor. They are doing so after being targeted by users of 4chan, the most well-known of online trolling websites, following an ill-advised Simpsons joke in a naming poll for the software. [Cookie Engineer] alleges that the harassers knocked on doors and windows where they live and a real-world knife attack followed.

Nobody deserves to be hounded to death, to suffer the sort of sustained harassment that [near] encountered, or to be confronted with knife-wielding strangers merely because they have stuck their head above the parapet as an open-source developer. There are no excuses to be made, no justifications for this.

All of us who read Hackaday are likely to be regular users of open-source software, many of us will have used bsnes and may yet use Tenacity, but we probably rarely stop for a moment to think of the real people behind them. Countless hours from innumerable highly-skilled people are what makes the open-source world tick, and aside from the immeasurable sadness of suicide or the horror of a knife attack there can only be harm done to open source software as a whole if to be a prominent developer or maintainer is to expose yourself to this.

The Internet will always have raucous communities at its margins and that’s something which still contributes to its unique culture, but when it jumps off the webpage and into damaging real people then perhaps it has become a monster. As a community we can do so much better, and we shouldn’t be prepared to accept anybody who thinks otherwise among our ranks.

We’d like to remind our readers that help exists for those who have reached the point of considering suicide, and that should you suffer from mental health problems you are not alone in this. Everybody, take care of yourselves, and keep an eye out for each other.

Social Engineering By Railways

June 7, 2018 by Brian McEvoy 29 Comments

Where do you travel every day? Are there any subtle ploys to manipulate your behavior? Would you recognize them or are they just part of the location? Social engineering sometimes gets a bad rap (or is it rep?) in the mainstream, but the public-facing edge of that sword can keep order as it does in Japanese train stations. They employ a whirlwind of psychological methods to make the stations run like clockwork.

The scope of strategies ranges from the diabolical placement of speakers emitting high-frequency tones to discourage youthful loitering to the considerate installation of blue lights to deter suicides. Not every tactic is as enlightened as suicide prevention, sometimes, just changing the grating departure buzzer to a unique tune for each station goes a long way to relieving anxiety. Who wants to stand next to an anxious traveler who is just getting more and more sweaty? Listen below the break to hear what Tokyo subway tunes sound like.

Maybe you can spot some of these tricks where you live or something similar can ease your own commute. Perhaps the nearest subway has a piano for stairs or a 3D printing cyborg.

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