Hackaday Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Ep110: One Unicode to Rule Them, Hacking Focus Stacking, Virtual Typing, and Zombie Weather Channel Mar 19, 2021

Show notes

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.

Ep109: Cars that Suck, a Synth Packed with 555s, X-ray Letter Reading, and Pecking at a PS/2 Keyboard Mar 12, 2021

Show notes

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.

Ep108: Eulogizing Daft Punk Helmets, Bitcoin Feeling the Heat, Squeezing Soft Robots, and Motorizing Ice Skates Mar 05, 2021

Show notes

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 the balance of quality versus speed when prototyping, and digesting the environmental impact of the Bitcoin network.

Ep107: FTDI Plays Music, LED Dimming Ain't Easy, Measuring Poop Calories, and Sketchy Laser Cutters Feb 26, 2021

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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.

Ep106: Connector Kerfuffle, Tuning Fork Time, Spinach Contact Prints, and Tesla's Permanent Memory Feb 19, 2021

Show notes

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.

Ep 105: 486 Doom on FPGA, How Thick is Your Filament, Raspberry Pi Speaks Android Auto, and We're Headed to Mars Feb 12, 2021

Show notes

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.

Ep104: Delicous AI, DVD Scanning Microscope, and Battery-Friendly Microcontroller Designs Feb 05, 2021

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Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys spin the wheel of hardware hacking brilliance. We're enamored with the quest for a root shell on a Nissan Xterra infotainment system, and smitten with a scanning microscope that uses a laser beam and precision positioning from DVD drives. We speculate on the future of artificial intelligence in the culinary arts. And this week turned up a clever way to monitor utility usage while only changing the battery on your sensor once per year.

Ep103: Antennas for Everyone, a Clock Made of Chains, Magic Eye Tubes, and a Little Google Bashing Jan 29, 2021

Show notes

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams discuss the greatest hacks of the week that was. Antennas aren't rocket science, so this week we really enjoyed a video that demystifies antenna designs and a project that tunes up the antennas on cheap wireless modules in the simplest of ways. Google's in the news this week with the end to project Loon, and a dust-up with the volunteer package maintainers who have spent years making sure Chromium browser is in the Linux repos. Elliot is gaga for magic eye tubes and crazy musical instruments, while Mike is over the moon for a chain-based clock display. We close up the episode talking about the Concorde, and the math behind cable mechanisms.

Ep102: Raspberry Pi Microcontroller, Microphone Killswitch, and a 45-Degree 3D-Printer Jan 22, 2021

Show notes

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys sift through a week of excellent hacks. Big news is of course the Raspberry Pi microcontroller which Elliot had a few weeks to play around with on the bench before the announcement -- it has some fascinating programmable modules (PIO) built in! Philips designed an LED light bulb that under-drives the LEDs for efficiency and long life. And Amazon added a nice little hardware disable circuit for the microphone in the Echo Flex -- a rather extreme teardown shows how they did it. Plus we talk about an open source long-range RC protocol, wall-sized pen plotter art, and a 3D printer that angles the nozzle to avoid needing support.

Ep101: Lasering and Milling Absolutely Everything Jan 15, 2021

Show notes

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams discuss our favorite hacks of the past week. We accidentally chose a theme, as most of the projects use lasers and are about machining work. We lead off with a really powerful laser that can directly etch circuit boards, only to be later outdone by an even more powerful laser using a chemistry trick to etch glass. We look at how to mix up your own rocket motors, bootstrap your own laser tag, and go down the rabbit hole of building tools for embedded development. The episode wraps up as we discuss what exactly NVMe is and where hardware hacking might take it.

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