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Free Your Harley From The Dealer

Vehicles have come with diagnostic ports for many years now, and there are a host of easily available tools to interrogate them. Despite that, there are still proprietary aspects that …

From Phone, To SDR, No Extra Hardware

One of the more exciting recent developments has been the discovery that many radio chips used in common and cheap wireless network interfaces, microcontrollers, LoRa interfaces and others can be …

Reverse Engineering a 1960s Diode-Transistor Logic IC

Before transistor-transistor logic (TTL) took over, diode-transistor logic (DTL) was a common sight especially in pre-IC circuits where it was a major improvement over resistor-transistor logic (RTL). That said, it’s …

Radon Active

When you think about nuclear radiation, you often think about power plants, but it turns out there’s radioactive stuff all over the place: smoke detectors, granite counters, bananas, and potatoes …

Determining Location by Listening for Airplanes

Beyond what people deliberately disclose, there’s a surprising amount of information hidden in everyday messages, especially photos and videos. Even when people try to hide the location or time at …

Space Invaders on a VFD

When most people think of vacuum fluorescent displays (VFDs), they probably imagine the clock on a microwave or the equalizer on a piece of stereo equipment. But there was a …

Lillith Tells Your Future

Maybe you are old enough to remember Zoltar in an arcade, or perhaps you’re just a fan of the movie Big. Either way, maybe you’d like to build an animated fortune …

An FPGA Version of the AT&T UNIX PC for MiSTer

We all have our childhood heroes, which in the case of [Hrvoje Cavrak] was the 1985 AT&T UNIX PC. This 18 kg behemoth of a workstation computer boasted a 10 MHz …

Making a Dog Car Wash Without (very) Fancy Tools

[Stuff Made Here] got fed up with the hassle of washing their dog, and in traditional engineer fashion, decided that automating the process would solve the problem. However, as science …

Play Text Adventures on an E-Paper Handheld

Choose your own adventure books were one of the first media to become gamified in the computer era, and [Jeremy Ngai] wanted to bridge the experience further with an e-paper …

Proper Linux, On An ESP32

The ESP32 series of microcontrollers feature a lot on these pages, offering as they do a significantly powerful processor and in most cases, wireless connectivity. One recent member of the …

Building a Homemade Induction Soldering Iron

Despite not being inherently any better at converting electricity into heat, induction-heated soldering irons often considerably outperform conventional irons with an identical power rating. They manage this by directly heating …

Supercon 2026: Streaming Live

While we’d love to have you all join us in Pasadena for Supercon 2026, the next best thing is to connect up to the festivities remotely through the magic of …

Active Antenna Runs on a Single Lithium-Ion Cell

[skuep]’s Mobile-Whip is a compact, active receive-only antenna that is optimized for operation from a single lithium-ion battery or USB power. This makes it very handy for use on portable …

The Hidden Microcontroller Inside a LoRa chip

If you’ve ever done anything with LoRa, the chances are you’ve used a LoRa chip or module as a peripheral for a microcontroller, and left it at that. But that’s …

A Bike-Friendly, DIY Action Cam Stereo Microphone

[DJJules] had two problems. Being an avid biker, recording audio on a bike-mounted action camera was less than ideal due to wind. In addition, the built-in microphone on action cameras …

Automate That Halloween Treating

We live a Jetsons future of ubiquitous automation, in which the most trivial of human tasks has a machine to take the work out of it. Take doling out Halloween …

DIY Rooftop Tent Sets Up In a Jiffy

[CraftAndu] shares his DIY car rooftop tent design that looks like a pretty accessible build. It allowed him to test drive the concept to his satisfaction while spending a fraction …

It’s Alpine Linux, On A Kindle Paperwhite 3

As computing power becomes cheaper and microprocessors become more capable, a steady trend over recent decades has been to see more everyday devices hiding Linux under the hood somewhere. Sadly …

Why the ULC Audio Codec is a Perfect Fit for the N64

Although the Nintendo 64 could deliver solid 3D graphics with assets loaded at a blistering speed from the game cartridge, audio-wise it was a bit more hampered. The main challenge …

Making Xibalba 64, a New N64 Release in 2026

[Dominic Szablewski] created something that we don’t see every day: a no-kidding new physical Nintendo 64 game for sale, complete with cartridge, manual, and box art. He wrote about what …

Translating An Old Display To A New One

A quick search through AliExpress will find PCBs that take HDMI or VGA and translate them to DSI lanes for TFT panels, and even boards that translate DSI to HDMI …

Reviving Google Cardboard, Without Google or Cardboard

Remember Google Cardboard? The late, unlamented practice of strapping a phone to your face so you could get motion sickness in a virtual environment? [brenpoly] wants you to reconsider, because …

Stunning Volumetric 3D Display Goes For a Spin

[AncientJames] gives us a detailed look at Vortex, one of his impressive volumetric displays made with two back-to-back LED panels that spin at high speed with a Raspberry Pi 4 …

A Tiny OS for a Tiny Board

As microntrollers have become ever more powerful, we have started to see an increasing number of operating systems written to take advantage of this extra power. Usually they’re aimed at …

I Think We Should See Other SBCs

Are you currently designing a project for a common single-board computer (SBC), and do you expect other people to build your project, too? We routinely feature projects that do exactly …

The First Business Computer Hits 75!

Many of us will have followed the early history of electronic computing, from the urgent necessities of war, to universities, and then on into the wider world. Most of the …

Beautiful Laser Harp Hides Some Neat Tricks

Laser harps aren’t quite a right of passage, in that not everyone builds them, but it’s likely everyone at least contemplates building one at one time or another. We’re lucky …

It’s DOOM, on a Toy Camera

Dirt cheap toy cameras have long been a target for the curious camera hacker, and we’ve seen plenty of lens swaps and other hardware hacks. Until now their internals have …

Making a Wax Motor for Micrometer-Level Control

Although not very glamorous, wax motors are a fairly common type of linear actuator. They use the thermal response of waxes and the resulting volumetric expansion or reduction to create …

Using a Cheap DC Motor to Make a Go-Kart Go

Where Archimedes said that he could move the Earth given a large enough lever and a suitable fulcrum, [Current Concept] decided that he could give his own spin on this …

Cat Feeder Ensures Fed Cats

Automatic cat feeders are a dime a dozen, largely because this is an easy problem to solve. Dry cat food is easy for machines to manipulate, and the electronics needed …

Etching Press Aims To Impress

There’s an old joke about inviting somebody up to your dorm room to ‘look at your etchings’ — but if you’re going to do that, you’d best have some etchings, …

Toddler Phone Calls Family and No One Else

The great thing about the modern world is how connected we are. It’s also the worst thing about the modern world, to be honest. [Allan Binder] wanted to give his …

The Depiction Of Amateur Radio In The Movies And TV

A constant in film and TV if you work with technology is to continually see wildly inappropriate depictions of it on screen. Whether it’s all those hacking scenes in which …

NEMESIS Gives You Control Over Your Hyundai Head Unit

Whether it’s to make more money or because of licensing disagreements, car companies often restrict the abilities of the infotainment units in their vehicles. They can do so much more, …

Flying an RC Airplane with Twin Airblower EDFs

Shortly after [RCMakerLab] posted his question on potentially equipping an RC airplane with the electronic ducted fans (EDFs) from those airblower devices – are sold mostly as a replacement for …

Ask Hackaday: What Puts This Photo In The Pink?

It’s an exciting time to be a camera hacker, because we are at a moment when even cheap camera hardware is starting to have high resolution sensors, and the awesome …

Looking For A Cellular Modem?

Cellular modems come and go, and they can be tricky beasts to tame – yet, in every portable computer project I’ve worked with, “LTE modem” has been a top-three request …

Static Radio For The Chumby One

If you haven’t heard of Static Radio, it’s basically an online radio station made up of podcast content. [Brendan Fitzpatrick] decided to take an old 2009 Chumby One and turn …

A Hackable Analog Phone System

Do you have old landline phones laying around the house, with touchtone buttons or rotary dials? Perhaps you’d like to do something with them! [Scott Dylewski] has built hardware to …

Building The Stranger Things Lights For Halloween

When Stranger Things came out all those years ago, one image left an indelible mark on pop culture. A set of Christmas lights, lined up with letters of the alphabet, such …

Hackaday Links: November 1, 2026

We’re less than a week away from the 2026 Hackaday Supercon, and things are getting a little… intense. So we trust you’ll forgive us if this week’s post weighs in …

An Electronic Candle You Can Set On Fire

Candles are pretty to look at, but they tend to be rather a fire risk and a negative influence on air quality, too. If you want the vibe without the …

Cheap FPGA Board Becomes Retro-Style Computer

The Tang Nano 9K is a cheap FPGA development board that can usually be acquired for around $15 or so. [ThePartsBin] has been experimenting with this hardware and figured out …

A Game Engine For Microcontrollers

If you wanted to make a game that ran on a commodity microcontroller, you could be forgiven for not knowing where to start. Never fear, for [Fedyfausto] has just the …

FloppoScope is a Disk Image Analyzer

If you’re a big retro tech fan, you might still have a floppy drive on hand, or even some sort of high-end disk imaging solution. If you’re a little less …

Turning Syngas into Hydrocarbons with the Right Alpha

Although the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis (F-T synthesis) process is well-known and on face value quite straightforward, using it for DIY production of a somewhat defined length hydrocarbons is fairly tricky. This …

Building an ADS-B Receiver For Less Than You Think

If you’ve ever wondered about the planes flying above your head, you could always listen in to ADS-B transmissions to learn more about them. [thefatmoop] has built a rig to …

Upgrading an Action Camera with an External Battery

[Evan Monsma], the prolific experimenter with cameras, found himself with an issue: he had a small Sony action camera with good performance in every respect but battery life, which was …

Rooting an Amazon Echo Dot

The Amazon Echo Dot is one of Amazon’s so-called ‘smart speaker’ offerings that tie into their larger Alexa-fueled ecosystem, designed to be a pretty minimalistic device that gives you access …

Voyager 1 Briefly Goes Silent, Scaring Everyone

It’s no big secret at this point that we are looking at the final years of the two venerable Voyager spacecraft. With their power supplies diminishing and their 1970s-era electronics …

Bring On Supercon!

Standing room only during a 2017 Hackaday Supercon talk

Learn to Edit STL Files in Just a Few Minutes

Sometimes an STL file needs a bit of editing, but if one doesn’t already know how to use a mesh editor it’s unlikely that one has the time to sit …

3D Printed Einstein-Szilard Refrigerator Cools with Fire

They may not deliver the highest efficiency, but absorption refrigerators have earned a persistent place in camper vans and industrial plants thanks to a few distinct advantages: they can operate …

Novelty Camera To USB Camera

The Godox C100 is a cheap camera that’s best described as a toy, its party trick being a large clear viewfinder with a head-up-display light meter. It’s by no means …

VR Headset Ditches the Base Stations with DIY Tracking

Those in the virtual reality scene might be interested in [Prohurtz]’s add-on for the Bigscreen Beyond VR headset. BSB-SLAM adds SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) tracking to the headset by attaching …

A 1982 Modem for $100

[Dave Farquhar] takes a walk down memory lane about the Commodore 1600 VICModem, perhaps the first phone modem to sell for less than $100. Commodore, of course, was famous for …

A Modern Smalltalk

In the history of object-oriented (OO) computer languages, Smalltalk has a special place. It wasn’t the first OO language, and it hasn’t spread as well as some others. But it …

Snake On a Seven-Segment Display is Gloriously Bad

You’ve no doubt heard the saying, “If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well.” But there’s actually a counter-perspective to this particular philosophy that says it’s also worth doing …

Is This The Only Instrument You Need?

When working on an electronic project it’s likely you will find yourself working with a variety of different instruments, be they logic analysers, oscilloscopes, or whatever. These can take up …

Putting a MiSTer Marquee on a Better Display

Some MiSTer users put a small secondary “marquee” display on the FPGA board that can show information about the system such as the currently loaded core and what game it …

2026 Hackaday Supercon: All the Speakers!

We announced our first round of speakers, and then the workshops, and we were going to dribble out updates on the rest of the speakers as they came in, but …

Replicating the Color-Changing Effect of the Lycurgus Cup

Although most archaeological finds from ancient civilizations aren’t quite as exciting as what you might expect from the movies, occasionally you come across something that’s truly special. The Lycurgus Cup …

An Attempt at a Useful Desktop OS For Microcontrollers

We’re living at an interesting time here in 2026, when microcontrollers are becoming powerful enough to surpass the capabilities of “real” computers from a time when those real computers were …

Robot Picks up Othello

Experience is a great teacher. Ask [Jeneus], who, in high school, tried to make a program that played Othello. It didn’t go well. But years later, the idea produced an impressive …