Hackaday Podcast artwork

Hackaday Podcast

280 episodes - English - Latest episode: 3 days ago - ★★★★★ - 53 ratings

Hackaday Editors take a look at all of the interesting uses of technology that pop up on the internet each week. Topics cover a wide range like bending consumer electronics to your will, designing circuit boards, building robots, writing software, 3D printing interesting objects, and using machine tools. Get your fix of geeky goodness from new episodes every Friday morning.

Technology 3dprinting computers electronics robotics
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed

Episodes

Ep 169: 3D Print Vase Mode: Engage, Measuring Nanovolts through Mega DIY, and The Softest Pants are Software Pants

May 20, 2022 15:30 - 49 minutes - 57.3 MB

Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos as we take a tour of our top hacks from the past week. Elliot brought some fairly nerdy fare to the table this time, and Kristina pines for physical media as we discuss the demise of the iPod Touch, the last fruit-flavored mp3-playing soldier to fall. But first, we talk about a why-didn't-I-think-of-that 3D printing hack that leverages vase mode into something structural. We'll take a look inside a see-thro...

Ep 168: Math Flattens Spheres, FPGAs Emulate Arcades, and We Can't Shake Polaroid Pictures

May 13, 2022 15:30 - 53 minutes - 56.7 MB

Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney as they review the top hacks for the week. It was a real retro-fest this time, with a C64 built from (mostly) new parts, an Altoids Altair, and learning FPGAs via classic video games. We also looked at LCD sniffing to capture data from old devices, reimagined the resistor color code, revisited the magic of Polaroid instant cameras, and took a trip down television's memory lane. But it wasn't all old stuff -- there's f...

Ep 167: Deadly Art Projects, Robot Lock Pickers, LED Horticulture, and Good Samaritan Repairs

May 06, 2022 16:00 - 1 hour - 70.5 MB

Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi for a review of all the tech that's fit to print. Things kick off with an update about the Hackaday Prize and a brief account of the 2022 Vintage Computer Festival East. Then we'll talk about an exceptionally dangerous art project that's been making the rounds on social media, a smart tea kettle that gave its life so that others can hack their device's firmware, some suspiciously effective plant grow lights, and the ...

Ep 166: Engraving with the Sun, Explosive Welding, Juggling Chainsaws, and Torturing Wago Connectors

April 29, 2022 15:30 - 1 hour - 72 MB

Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney as they dive into the last week of Hackaday articles. If you love things that go boom, you won't want to miss the discussion about explosive welding. Ever use the sun to burn something with a magnifying glass? Now you can CNC that, if you dare. We'll take a quick trip through the darkroom and look at analog-digital photography as well as a tactical enlarger you can build, watch someone do terrible things to Wago and...

Ep 165: Old Printers, Dark Towers, 3DP Gaskets, and Wavy Traces

April 22, 2022 15:30 - 49 minutes - 58.1 MB

Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos as we gab about the most interesting hacks and stories of the previous week. This time, we start off by marveling over everything happening this weekend. Most urgently, it's your last chance to enter the 2022 Sci-Fi contest, which closes Monday, April 25th at 8:30 AM Pacific Time sharp. Already got your hat in the ring? If you're anywhere in the neighborhood of New Jersey, don't miss the VCF's Vintage Compute...

Ep 164: Vintage NASA Soldering, Mouse Bites, ATTiny85 Graphics, and PVC Pontoons

April 15, 2022 15:30 - 1 hour - 68.8 MB

Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi as they review the most interesting hacks and stories of the previous week. This time we'll start things off by talking about the return of in-person events, and go over several major conventions and festivals that you should add to your calendar now. Then we'll look at a NASA training film from the Space Race, an interesting radio-controlled quirk that Tesla has built into their cars for some reason, a very promisin...

Ep 163: Movie Sound, Defeating Dymo DRM, 3DP Guitar Neck, Biometrics Bereft of Big Brother

April 08, 2022 15:30 - 48 minutes - 54.5 MB

Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos as we spend an hour or so dissecting some of the more righteous hacks and projects from the previous week. We'll discuss a DIY TPM module that satisfies Windows 11, argue whether modern guts belong in retrocomputer builds even if it makes them more practical, and marvel at the various ways that sound has been encoded on film. We'll also rock out to the idea of a 3D-printed guitar neck, map out some paths to...

Ep 162: Hackaday Prize is On, Thermal Printers are So Hot These Days, Cloud Chambers are Super Cool, and Batteries Must be Replaceable

April 01, 2022 16:04 - 1 hour - 71.9 MB

Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi for your weekly review of the best projects, hacks, and bits of news that we can cram into 45 minutes or so. We'll look at the latest developments in DIY air-powered engines, discuss the whimsical combination of GitHub's API and a cheap thermal printer, and marvel at impressive pieces of homebrew biology equipment. We've also got an exceptionally polished folding cyberdeck, a bevy of high-tech cloud chambers, and s...

Ep 161: Laser Lithography, Centurion Hard Drive, and Mad BGA Soldering

March 25, 2022 16:21 - 56 minutes - 57.2 MB

Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney for an audio tour of the week's top stories and best hacks. We'll look at squeezing the most out of a coin cell, taking the first steps towards DIY MEMS fabrication, and seeing if there's any chance that an 80's-vintage minicomputer might ride again. How small is too small when it comes to chip packages? We'll find out, and discover the new spectator sport of microsoldering while we're at it. Find out what's involved ...

Ep 160: Pedal Power, OpenSCAD in the Browser, Tasmanian Tigers, and the Coolest Knob

March 18, 2022 16:06 - 51 minutes - 53.2 MB

Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi as they tackle all the hacks that were fit to print this last week. Things start off with some troubling news from Shenzhen (spoilers: those parts you ordered are going to be late), and lead into a What's That Sound challenge that's sure to split the community right down the center. From there we'll talk about human powered machines, bringing OpenSCAD to as many devices as humanly possible, and the finer points of in...

Ep 159: Zombie Killer or Rug Maker, 3D Printed Rims, 1950s Drum Machines, and Batteries on Wheels

March 11, 2022 16:30 - 56 minutes - 62.9 MB

Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi as they look back on the best hacks and stories of the previous week. There's plenty in the news to talk about, though between faulty altimeters and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, it isn't exactly of the positive variety. But things brighten up quickly as discussion moves on to 3D printed car wheels, a fantastically complex drum machine from 1958, a unique take on the seven-segment flip display, and a meticulously ...

Ep 158: Phased Array Physics, CRTs Two Ways, A Micro Microcontroller, and a Surgically Implanted Red Herring

March 04, 2022 16:30 - 50 minutes - 51.9 MB

Join Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney as they take a look at the week's top stories, taken straight off the pages of Hackaday. What happens when you stuff modern parts into a 90's novelty PC case? Nothing good, but everything awesome! Is there any way to prevent PCB soil moisture sensors from being destroyed by, you know, soil moisture? How small is too small for a microcontroller, and who needs documentation anyway? We also cast a jaundiced eye -- err, ear -- at ...

Ep 157: Airtag Security, Warped 3D Printing, Suturing Grapes with a DIY Robot Arm, and the Wizard's Calculator

February 25, 2022 16:30 - 53 minutes - 59.9 MB

This week Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi look at the week's most interesting stories and projects, starting with the dystopian news that several people have had their bionic eye implants turn off without warning. We then pivot into an only slightly less depressing discussion about the poor security of Apple's AirTags network and how it can be used to track individuals without their knowledge. But it's not all doom and gloom. We'll look at new projects ...

Ep 156: 3D-Printing Rainbows, Split-Flap Clocks, Swapping EV Car Batteries, and Floppy Time

February 18, 2022 16:30 - 45 minutes - 40.1 MB

This week, Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos fawn over a beautiful Italian split-flap clock that doesn't come cheap, and another clock made of floppies that could be re-created for next to nothing. We'll also sing the praises of solderless circuitry for prototyping and marvel over a filament dry box with enough sensors to control an entire house. The finer points of the ooh, sparkly-ness of diffraction gratings will be discussed, and by the end of...

Ep 155: Dual Integrating Spheres, More Magnetic Switches, PlottyBot, Red Hair in Your Wafers

February 11, 2022 16:30 - 1 hour - 71 MB

This week Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi take a close look at two pairs of projects that demonstrate the wildly different approaches that hackers can take while still arriving at the same conclusion. We'll also examine the brilliant mechanism that the James Webb Space Telescope uses to adjust its mirrors, and marvel over a particularly well-developed bot that can do your handwriting for you. The finer points of living off home-grown algae will be discu...

Ep 154: A Good Enough CNC, Stepper Motors Unrolled, Smart Two-Wire LEDs, a Volcano Heard Around the World

February 04, 2022 16:30 - 55 minutes - 56.7 MB

Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney for this week's podcast as we talk about Elliot's "defection" to another podcast, the pros and cons of CNC builds, and making Nixie clocks better with more clicking. We'll explore how citizen scientists are keeping a finger on the pulse of planet Earth, watch a 2D stepper go through its paces, and figure out how a minimalist addressable LED strip works. From solving a Rubik's cube to answering the age-old question, "D...

Ep 153:A 555 Teardown to Die For, Tetrabyte is Not a Typo, DIY Injection Molding, and Using All the Parts of the Trash Printer

January 28, 2022 16:30 - 55 minutes - 57.6 MB

Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi on another whirlwind tour of the week's top stories, hacks, and projects. We start off with some breaking Linux security news, and then marvel over impeccably designed pieces of hardware ranging from a thrifty Z table for the K40 laser cutter to a powerful homebrew injection molding rig. The finer technical points of a USB device that only stores 4 bytes at a time will be discussed, and after taking an interactive to...

Ep 152: 555 Timer Extravaganza, EMF Chip Glitching 3 Ways, a Magnetic Mechanical Keyboard, and The Best Tricorder Ever

January 21, 2022 16:30 - 59 minutes - 65.8 MB

Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi as they bring you up to speed on the best stories and projects from the week. There's some pretty unfortunate news for the physical media aficionados in the audience, but if you're particularly keen on 50 year old integrated circuits, you'll love hearing about the winners of the 555 Timer Contest. We'll take a look at a singing circuit sculpture powered by the ESP32, extol the virtues of 3D printed switches, follow o...

Ep 151: The Hackiest VR Glove, Plotting Boba Fett with Shoelaces, ECU Hacking, and Where Does Ammonia Come From?

January 14, 2022 16:30 - 1 hour - 62.8 MB

Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi are back again to talk about all the weird and wonderful stores from our corner of the tech world. Canon having to temporarily give up on chipping their toner cartridges due to part shortages is just too perfect to ignore, and there's some good news for the International Space Station as the White House signals they're ready to support the orbiting outpost until 2030. We'll also look at an extremely promising project look...

Ep 150: Blackberry Runs Out of Juice, NODE has your pinouts, Rats learn DOOM, and 2021 is Done

January 07, 2022 16:30 - 1 hour - 69.4 MB

Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi as they ring in the New Year with the first podcast episode of 2022. We get the bad news out early for those still thumbing away at their Blackberries, then pivot into some of the highlights from over the holidays such as the release of NODE's The Pinouts Book and the discovery of a few expectation-defying OpenSCAD libraries. We'll look at modifying a water cooler with Ghidra, and the incredible technology that let's...

Happy New Year!

December 31, 2021 16:30 - 1 minute - 1.85 MB

The Hackaday Podcast is in its second, and final, week of winter hibernation. So join me and special guest Tom Nardi in the first week of 2022 as we discuss the best of 2021 and the holiday season. 

No Podcast This Week, But What's That Sound!

December 24, 2021 17:00 - 3 minutes - 4.85 MB

The Podcast is in Holiday Mode this week, so keep on hacking (and reading Hackaday!) until we catch up again in 2022.  

Ep 149: Ballerina Bot Balances, Flexures Track Cat Food, PCB Goes Under the Knife, and an ATtiny Does the 555

December 17, 2021 16:30 - 54 minutes - 55.1 MB

Newly ordained Hackaday editor-in-chief Elliot Williams and staff writer Dan Maloney jump behind the podcast mic to catch you up on all this week's essential hacks. We'll have a Bob Ross moment with an iPad, go to ridiculous lengths to avoid ordering a 555, and cook up a Wii in toaster. Need to make a VGA adapter from logic chips? Or perhaps you want to quantify the inner depths of human consciousness? Either way, we've got you covered.

Ep 148: Pokemon Trades, Anniversary iPod Prototype, Stupid Satellite Tricks, and LED Strip Sensors

December 10, 2021 16:30 - 55 minutes - 61.4 MB

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys get caught up on the week that was. People go to great lengths for video game saves, but this Pokemon hack that does hardware-based trade conversion between the Game Boy's Pokemon 2 and Pokemon 3 is something else. Why do we still use batteries when super capacitors exist? They're different components, silly, and work best at different things. Turns out you can study the atmosphere by sending radio waves through it, and that's exactly what the...

Ep 147: Animating Traces, Sucking and Climbing, Spinning Sails, and Squashing Images

December 03, 2021 16:30 - 56 minutes - 63.7 MB

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams get caught up on the week that was. You probably know a ton of people who have a solar array at their home, but how many do you know that have built their own hydroelectric generation on property? Retrocomputing software gurus take note, there's an impressive cross-compiler in town that can spit out working binaries for everything from C64 to Game Boy to ZX Spectrum. Tom took a hard look at the Prusa XL, and Matthew takes us back to school on ...

Ep 146: Dueling Trackballs, Next Level BEAM Robot, Take Control of Your Bench, and Green Programming

November 26, 2021 16:30 - 58 minutes - 61.2 MB

Postpone your holiday shopping and spend some quality time with editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams as they sift through the week in Hackaday. Which programming language is the greenest? How many trackballs can a mouse possibly have? And can a Bluetooth dongle run DOOM? Join us to find out! You don't need a pencil to jot down the links. Just check out the podcast page!

Ep 145: Remoticon is On, Movie FX, Cold Plasma, and The Purest Silicon

November 19, 2021 16:30 - 50 minutes - 51.6 MB

With literally just hours to go before the 2021 Hackaday Remoticon kicks off, editors Tom Nardi and Elliot Williams still managed to find time to talk about some of the must-see stories from the last week. There's fairly heavyweight topics on the docket this time around, from alternate methods of multiplying large numbers to the incredible engineering that goes into producing high purity silicon. But we'll also talk about the movie making magic of Stan Winston and some Pokemon-themed environ...

Ep 144: Jigs Jigs Jigs, Faberge Mic, Paranomal Electronics, and a 60-Tube Nixie Clock

November 12, 2021 16:30 - 51 minutes - 58.2 MB

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys get caught up on the week that was. Two builds are turning some heads this week; one uses 60 Nixie tube bar graphs to make a clock that looks like the sun's rays, the other is a 4096 RGB LED Cube (that's 12,288 total diodes for those counting at home) that leverages a ton of engineering to achieve perfection. Speaking of perfection, there's a high-end microphone built on a budget but you'd never know from the look and the performance -- no won...

Ep 143: More Magnesium Please, Robot Bicep Curls, Malamud's General Index, and Are You Down with EMC?

November 05, 2021 15:30 - 52 minutes - 55.6 MB

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams catch up on a week's worth of hacks. Get a grip on robot hands: there's an eerily human one on offer this week. If you're doing buck/boost converter design, the real learning is in high-frequency design patterns that avoid turning your circuits into unintentional radiators. Those looking for new hobbies might want to take up autonomous boat racing. We saw a design that's easy enough to print on the average 3D printer -- and who doesn't want to...

Ep 142: 65 Days of Airtime, Racecars Staring at the Ceiling, a Pushy White Cane, and Soapy Water Rockets

October 29, 2021 15:30 - 54 minutes - 58 MB

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys flap their gums about all the great hacks of the week. Something as simple as a wheel can be totally revolutionary, as we saw with a white cane mod for the visually impaired which adds an omniwheel that knows where it's going. We enjoyed the collection of great hacks from all over the community that went into a multi-two-liter water rocket build. You'll hear Elliot and Mike's great debate about the origin of comments in computer code. And we s...

Ep 141: LowFER Badges, Outrun Clocks, Dichroic Lamps, and Piano Action

October 22, 2021 15:30 - 48 minutes - 49.9 MB

Hackaday editors Mike and Elliot Williams catch up on a week's worth of hacks. It turns out there are several strange radio bands that don't require a license, and we discuss this weekend's broadcast where you can listen in. It's unlikely you've ever seen the website check-box abused quite like this: it's the display for playing Doom! Just when you thought you'd seen all the ESP32's tricks it gets turned into a clock styled after Out Run. Mike geeks out over how pianos work, we're both excit...

Ep140: Aqua Battery, IBM Cheese Cutter, Waiting for USB-C, and Digging ADCs

October 15, 2021 15:30 - 52 minutes - 54.6 MB

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys chew the fat over the coolest of hacks. It's hard to beat two fascinating old-tech demonstraters; one is a mechanical computer for accurate cheese apportionment, the other an ADC built from logic chips. We gawk two very different uses of propeller-based vehicles; one a flying-walker, the other a ground-effect coaster. Big news shared at the top of the show is that Keith Thorne of LIGO is going to present a keynote at Hackaday Remoticon. And we...

Ep 139: Furter Burner, Glowing Potato Peeler, Hacked Smartwatch, and The Last Atlas

October 08, 2021 15:30 - 50 minutes - 52.8 MB

Hackaday editors Tom Nardi and Elliot Williams bring you up to speed on the most interesting stories of the week. Hackaday's Remoticon and Germany's Chaos Communication Congress are virtual again this year, but the Vintage Computer Festival will be live. We'll also talk about ocean-going drones, the recreation of an old-school light bulb with a potato peeler, cheap smart watches with hidden potential, and sanding down shady modules to figure out just how you've been scammed. Stick around for...

Ep 138: Breakin' Bluetooth, Doritos Rockets, Wireless Robots, and Autonomous Trolling

October 01, 2021 15:30 - 50 minutes - 52.4 MB

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys peruse the great hardware hacks of the past week. There's a robot walker platform that wirelessly offloads motor control planning to a computer. We take a look at automating your fishing boat with a trolling motor upgrade, building the hoover dam in your back yard, and playing Holst's Planets on an army of Arduini. Make sure you stick around until the end as we stroll through distant memories of Gopher, and peek inside the parking garages of t...

Ep 137: Maximum Power Point, Electric Car Hacking, Commodore Drive Confidential, and Tesla Handles

September 24, 2021 15:30 - 51 minutes - 54 MB

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams marvel at a week packed full of great hardware hacks. Do you think the engineers who built the earliest home computers knew that their work would be dissected decades later for conference talks full of people hungry to learn the secret sauce? The only thing better than the actual engineering of the Commodore hard drive is the care with which the ultimate hardware talk unpacks it all! We look upon a couple of EV hacks -- one that replaces the i...

Ep 136:Smacking Asteroids, Decoding Voyager, Milling Cheap, and PS5 Triggered

September 17, 2021 15:30 - 50 minutes - 53.4 MB

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys look back on a great week of hardware hacking. What a time to be alive when you can use open source tools to decode signals from a probe that has long since left our solar system! We admire two dirt-cheap builds, one to measure current draw in mains power, another to mill small parts with great precision for only a few bucks. A display built from a few hundred 7-segment modules begs the question: who says pixels need to be the same size? We ja...

Ep 135: Three Rocket Hacks, All the Game Boy Gates, and Depth Sounding from a Rowboat

September 10, 2021 15:30 - 54 minutes - 51.6 MB

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Tom Nardi go over the best stories and hacks from the previous week, covering everything from sidestepping rockets to homebrew OLED displays. We'll cover an incredible attempt to really emulate the Nintendo Game Boy, low-cost injection molding of rubbery parts, a tube full of hypersonic shockwaves, and how a hacked depth finder and a rowboat can help chart those local rivers and lakes that usually don't get any bathymetric love. Plus, even though he's on vaca...

Ep 134: Hackers Camping, Metal Detecting, 360o Hearing, and Pocket Computing

September 03, 2021 15:30 - 50 minutes - 56.7 MB

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys are joined by contributing editor Jenny List to talk about her adventure at Born Hack last week. We also discuss the many capacitor values that go into regen receivers, the quest for a Raspberry Pi handheld that includes a slide-out keyboard, and how capacitive touch might make mice (mouses?) and touchpads better. There's a deep dive into 3D-printer bed-leveling, a junk-box metal detector build, and an ambisonic microphone which can listen any...

Ep 133: Caustic Lenses, Not Ice-Cream Automation, Archery Mech Suit, and the Cheapest Robot Arm

August 27, 2021 15:30 - 46 minutes - 51.9 MB

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams wade into a week of wonderful hacks. There's an acrylic lens that hides images in the network of caustics: the light rays that shine through it. Boston Dynamics is finally showing the good stuff; people wrenching on 'bots, and all kinds of high-end equipment failure, along with some epic successes. Can you grow better plants by inferring what they need by accurately weighing them? In more turbulent news, a police drone slammed into a Cessna mi...

Ep 132: Laser Disco Ball, Moore's Law in Your Garage, Cheap Cyborg Glasses, and a Mouse That Detects Elephants

August 20, 2021 15:30 - 50 minutes - 57.1 MB

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys debate the great mysteries of the hacking universe. On tap this week is news that Sam Zeloof has refined his home lab chip fabrication process and it's incredible! We see a clever seismometer built from plastic pipe, a laser, and a computer mouse. There's a 3D printed fabric that turns into a hard shell using the same principles as jamming grippers. And we love the idea of high-powered lasers being able to safely direct lighting to where you w...

Ep 131: Have a Heart, Transputer Pi, Just the Wing, and a Flipped Cable Fries Radio

August 13, 2021 15:30 - 42 minutes - 48 MB

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams recount the past week in hardware hacking. There's a new Tamagochi hack that runs the original ROM on plain old microcontrollers like the STM32. Did you know you can blast the Bayer filter off a camera sensor using a powerful laser and the sensor will still work? We didn't. There was a lot of debate this week about a commercial jet design alteration that would remove windows -- but it's for the good cause of making the plane more efficient. We...

Ep 130: Upside Down 3D-Printer, Biplane Quadcopter, Gutting a Calculator Watch, and GitHub CoPilot

August 06, 2021 15:30 - 51 minutes - 57.4 MB

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys get charged up on the best hacks the week had to offer. The 3D printer design gods were good to us, delivering an upside-down FDM printer and a hack that can automatically swap out heated beds for continuous printing. We look at a drone design that builds vertical wings into the frame of a quadcopter -- now when it tips on its side it's a fixed-wing aircraft! We chew the artificially-intelligent fat about GitHub CoPilot's ability (or inability...

Ep 129: Super Clever 3D Printing, Jigs and Registration Things, 90s Car Audio, and Smooth LED Fades

July 30, 2021 15:30 - 50 minutes - 56.3 MB

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams have found a critical mass of projects this week that wouldn't be possible without 3D printers. There's an absolutely astounding model roller coaster that is true to the mechanisms and physics of the original (and beholden to hours of sanding and painting). Adding sheet material to the printing process is a novel way to build durable hinges and foldable mechanisms. Elliot picks out not one, but two quadruped robot projects that leverage 3D-pri...

Ep 128: 3D-Printing Injection Molds, Squiggly Audio Tape, Curvy Mirrors, and Space Cadets

July 23, 2021 15:30 - 44 minutes - 47.3 MB

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys bubble sort the best hardware hacks so you don't miss 'em. This week we're smitten by the perfection of a telephone tape loop message announcer. We enjoyed seeing Blender's ray tracing to design mirrors, and a webcam and computer monitor to stand in for triple-projector-based fractal fun. There's a bit of injection molding, some Nintendo Switch disassembling, and the Internet on a calculator. We close the show with a pair of Space stories, inc...

Ep 127: Whippletree Clamps, Sniffing Your Stomach Radio, Multimeter Hum Fix, and C64 Demo; No C64

July 16, 2021 15:30 - 53 minutes - 56.2 MB

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams help you get caught up on a week of wonder hacks. We don't remember seeing a floppy drive headline the demoscene, but sure enough, there's a C64 demo that performs after the computer is disconnected. What causes bench tools to have unreliable measurements? Sometimes a poor crystal choice lets AC ruin the party. We dive into the ongoing saga of the Audacity open source project's change of ownership, and talk about generator exciter circuits -- ...

Ep 126: Cable 3D-Scanner, Tesla Charger Robot, Ultrasonic Anemometer, and a Zoetrope

July 09, 2021 15:30 - 48 minutes - 51.8 MB

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys dive into a week of exceptional hacks. Tip-top of the list has to be the precision measuring instrument that uses a cable spooling mechanism. There's news that the Starlink base station firmware has been dumped and includes interesting things like geofencing for the developer modes. We saw a garage robot that will plug in your electric vehicle if you're the forgetful sort. And we close up by talking about heavier-than-air helium airships and C...

Ep 125: Linux Users Talking Windows 11, Pop Bottle Filament, Old Phones with Modern Guts, and Eavesdropping in RF

July 02, 2021 15:30 - 54 minutes - 56.9 MB

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams look through the most interesting hacks of the week. We spent ample time in adulation of the automatons built by François Junod; wizard-level watchmaking wrapped in endless levels of artistic detail. A couple projects stuffed into old cellphones turned Elliot's head. We got to see what happens if you spin a gear's teeth on two axes to make a universal spherical gear. And we conclude the episode with a look at how Windows 11 may send a lot of ...

Ep 124: Hard Drivin' with Graphene, Fooled by Lasers, Etching with Poison Acid, and All The Linux Commands

June 25, 2021 15:30 - 52 minutes - 55.3 MB

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys marvel at the dangerous projects on display this week, including glass etching with hydrofluoric acid and pumping 200,000 A into a 5,000 A fuse. A new board that turns the Raspberry Pi into an SDR shows off the power of the secondary memory interface (SMI) present in those Broadcom chips. We also discuss the potential for graphene in hard drives, and finish up with a teardown of a very early electronic metronome. You know you want to read th...

Ep 123: Radioactive Rhinos, Wile-E-Coyote Jetpack, Radio Hacks 3-Ways, and Battery Welders on the Spot

June 18, 2021 15:30 - 50 minutes - 50.8 MB

Hackaday Editor in Chief Mike Szczys is taking a bit of vacation this week, so Managing Editor Elliot Williams is joined by Staff Writer Dan Maloney to talk about all the cool hacks and great articles that turned up this week. Things were busy, so there was plenty to choose from, but how would we not pick one that centers around strapping a jet engine to your back to rollerskate without all that pesky exercise? And what about a light bulb that plays Doom - with a little help, of course. We'l...

Ep 122: Faster Than Wind Travel, Sisyphish, ALU Desktop Calculator, and Mice in Space

June 11, 2021 15:30 - 53 minutes - 56.4 MB

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys marvel at the awesome hacks from the past week. We had way too much fun debated whether a wind-powered car can travel faster than the wind, and whether or not you can call that sailing. Low-temperature desoldering was demystified (it's the bismuth!) while a camera gimbal solves the problem of hand tremor during soldering. Ford just wants to become your PowerWall. And the results are in from NASA's mission to spin mice up in a centrifuge on the...