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Visualize Regular Expressions with Marbles

If you are one of those people who visualize things physically better than in the abstract, then Regex Marble Run by [bottomless] might be for you. You enter a test …

Making Photovoltaic Solar Cells with a Microwave

Although solar panels may seem like a kind of magic, they’re really quite simple devices, in their silicon form featuring nothing but the p-type silicon wafer and an n-type layer …

An RV on a Bike

Bicycles are the ultimate form of transportation freedom. They’re easy to repair, parts are cheap, and they will travel almost anywhere for free, as long as the rider has enough …

Meshtastic Sniffer for DragonOS

Meshtastic has gained a lot of popularity over the last few years thanks to its low barrier of entry. No licenses are needed and the hardware is dirt cheap, at …

An Open Micro-Maniplulator Improved

If you need a micro-manipulator, you probably already have a good idea of what it does. For example, you might be moving a probe over an IC die or wafer. …

One-stop Tool Shows Apple Intelligence The Door

Don’t want AI features on your Mac? Tough luck, unless one wants to imperfectly do it by hunting down settings in about a dozen different places. Even then, the multi-gigabyte …

An LCR Meter with Compromises

YouTube, like the Internet, has its plusses and minuses. On the plus side, you can find information on just about anything. On the minus side, you don’t always know if …

Driving On the Moon at a Blistering 11.6 MPH

As NASA continues humanity’s slow march back to the Moon, different pieces of the puzzle of establishing a more permanent base there are falling into place. One of these pieces …

Thunderbolt Strikes Windows98

If there’s one thing everyone hated about Windows 98, was the lack of USB4.0 support. We remember vividly the cries of anguish at the launch party when we found out …

Hackaday Links: October 17, 2026

While Hackaday doesn’t maintain a crime blotter, we couldn’t help but start this week’s post off with a bit of civil disobedience — a retired professor from the University of …

Off-Grid Refrigeration Using Fire and Salt

Refrigeration has been a challenge for humanity since the start. Ancient civilizations in dry climates like Persia and Egypt could use evaporative cooling on a large scale with specialized architecture, …

Building a Microscope with a 3D View

As electronic components grow ever smaller, a microscope has become an increasingly indispensable tool for any fine work; when inspecting electronics, though, especially solder joints, [Corebb] found a top-down view …

A Plasma Donut

We know [The Action Lab] always has something hands-on. This time, the video shows a toroidal plasma demo and how it relates to nuclear fusion. Plasma has a high temperature, …

Evolving RC circuits

We are surrounded by evolving algorithms and AI models, and it feels like we have to evolve to them as well. Of course, the world itself is always evolving, and …

Turning a Wi-Fi Adapter into an SDR

Since the discovery of an undocumented I/Q sampling feature in ESP32 chips about two weeks ago, there’s been a flood of similar features being found in other wireless chips, including …

Building a Flying Drone With a Single Propeller

Technically all that you need in order to make a drone fly is a single motor and single propeller, but realistically it becomes basically impossible to fly it at that …

Discovering SDRs Everywhere

To quote commenter [douyarou], “It’s like our little version of a Precambrian explosion”. A bunch of hackers have discovered, independently and building on each other’s work, software-defined radio (SDR) capabilities …

Making One Fender From Another

There’s a tendency among cherished brands to licence their name and logo onto all sorts of novelty items in order to make a quick buck. Joining this trend is the …

The Trials And Tribulations Of Your First Badge

On the face of it, making an event badge should be an easy process. After all, most of us can hand-assemble a microcontroller, some buttons, a battery, and a screen. …

Simplifying Slide Rule Calculations with Trig

[Bob the Science Guy] remembers how to use a slide rule. Even after all these years, it is pretty easy to remember how to multiply and divide. If you can’t …

The 10€ Gamepad

We aren’t sure what [Lazy_Duck] is doing with video games, but it must require a lot of controllers. Dismayed at the cost and complexity of commercial gamepads, they started soldering …

TAKTO, Open Source Hand-Tracking Built Like LEGO

Hand tracking in VR/AR can add a substantial amount of immersion and added interactivity. Unfortunately, most camera based tracking suffers when fingers get covered, intertwined, or simply out of view …

Braino! Takes the Cheap Yellow Display to School

These days, it’s common to give even very young children a mobile device loaded up with educational software that aims to improve everything from basic motor skills to reading and …

Disposing of PLA and Why Composting is Not an Option

The ‘biofriendly’ nature of poly(lactic acid) (PLA) filament often gets touted as one of its main advantages over alternatives like PETG, but even a modicum of research ought to inform …

Running DOOM (Sort Of) on a Sonoff Smart Switch

It’s often said in this community that DOOM can be made to run on anything, and as time goes on, that’s becoming more and more accurate. We’re at the point …

Another Wireless Chip has a Hidden SDR Revealed

The news of the past couple of weeks has seen the ESP32 turned into an software-defined radio (SDR) thanks to a hidden baseband mode, an exciting development by anyone’s standards. …

A Thermal Camera That Uses WebUSB

When creating a peripheral for a mobile phone, an obvious path is to create a companion app with which to talk to it. But as we all know today’s app …

Building An M7 Pan Tilt Head Controller

The Soonpho M7 Pan Tilt Head is a useful photography tool for remotely aiming a decently-sized camera. Only, [Kyle Housley] wanted a little more control than was available out of …

Pager Converted to Meshtastic Node

Text messaging has been around on cellular networks en masse for around three decades now. It’s so common that it’s difficult to remember a time without it. Its two-way quick …

AI Controls iPhone Via ESP32

Do you want to get an AI agent to do something to an iPhone? You could try and jailbreak the device and do some heavy software hacking, or… you could …

2026 Hackaday Supercon: Workshops are Open!

Supercon is Hackaday’s annual gathering, and you absolutely need to be there. Today, we’re pleased to announce our lineup of workshops, and it’s more than we’ve ever offered, thanks to …

Single Button, Handheld Gaming Console

Those of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s might be familiar with the Atari 2600 console and its now relatively unrecognizable (by modern standards) controller with only …

Tiny e-Paper Display Delivers 30 FPS of Game Boy Fun

Slow refresh, ghosting and low-contrast — wait, are we talking about passive matrix LCDs, or e-paper displays? That might be why e-paper Game Boy emulators are a thing: the limitations …

DIY Force Sensing Joysticks are a Cheap Way To Go

Traditional joysticks typically use potentiometers or hall effect sensors to determine the displacement of the stick itself when moved by the operator. Force-sensing joysticks are considered more desirable for certain …

What’s a Nonius?

If you already know what a nonius is, you can probably skip this post. But, if like us, you would have to look it up, we’ll tell you what we …

Testing Oneself for AI Slop

The feed of a Hackaday writer brings many surprises, some rubbish, and the occasional diamond which of course we bring to you. Sometimes a page catches the eye that’s not …

Rendering 3D Prints From G-Code

Your CAD software generally has some rudimentary tools for rending images of your parts, from simply-textured models to more photo-realistic options. However, those renders are of the geometry you created—not …

Does It Run… Duke Nukem 3D?

When id Software released DOOM back in 1993 it helped define the genre, but it was hardly the only hit first-person shooter of that decade. There was also 3D Realms’ 1996 Duke …

JawnCon 0x3 Kicks off in Philadelphia this Friday

Philadelphia’s homegrown hacker con returns this weekend, and this time it’s starting a day early to pack in even more talks, demos, and activities. Tickets are still available for anyone …

ESP-SDR Can Now Transmit

Well, that was fast! Last week, we reported on two apparently simultaneous hacks using the 2.4 GHz radio inside many ESP32 variants that enabled raw access to the radio samples, …

The FPGA Chronicles: Ready to Probe

In the last few installments, we looked at using the Tang Nano 20K with both the GOWIN tools and some open-source tools. The open-source tools certainly had the advantage of …

A Modern Browser for the PlayStation Portable

The Sony PlayStation Portable, better known as the PSP, is now over two decades old. In its day it was an impressive handheld gaming machine, not least because of the …

Open Firmware Fixes Dead Onkyo AV Receivers

If you’ve been reading Hackaday for any length of time, you’ll know we love seeing hackers replacing the stock firmware on their devices with open source alternatives. Usually this is …

WiFi Router Does Software-Defined Radio

Perhaps the most famous of software-defined radios is the RTL-SDR, which is very cheap because it’s a digital TV receiver that’s been pressed into service delivering raw I and Q …

DARPA Lift Challenge Won by Helicopter

America’s mad scientists all have one dream: DARPA money. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, regularly throws round sweet, sweet tax dollars to push the envelope on any number …

Your Computer Memory is a Lie

When you first learn to program, memory seems pretty straightforward. You have a bunch of bytes, each with an address. If you want to read or write something, you specify …

Backup Tapes Come Back to the Homelab

It’s one of the great mysteries of computing, how somehow in the Year Of OLlama 2026, tape remains the god of cheap storage. A while back [Ben Pettis] recounted his …

A Free Cloud AI

If you would like an AI “personal agent” but don’t want your data on some opaque cloud computer, there’s a new option that appears to be somewhat nicer: [rociiu] has …

DECing Out the Homelab with an AlphaServer 2100

Retrocomputer enthusiasts have a bad rap as nerds who just want to play old video games. There’s some truth in this, but the reality is that we’re nerds who want …

Hackaday Links: October 11, 2026

It probably goes without saying that if you send four humans to observe the Moon up close, they’ll see things that those of us stuck here on Earth have never …

Littelfuse Announces Retirement of the EZ80

Although the demise of the Zilog Z80 processor has long been predicted, it would seem that this moment has finally arrived. The owner of the Zilog name – Littelfuse – …

Thorium Clocks Start Ticking with Lasers

Atomic clocks are super accurate. But, unsurprisingly, some atomic clocks are better than others, depending on your definition of better. Researchers at Vienna University claim to have a superior thorium-based …

Improving an Autorouter with a Hexagonal Grid

Despite the recent leaps forward in other forms of computer-driven design, the reliability of PCB autorouters remains questionable; on the positive side, though, the lack of massive training data makes …

Mars Pathfinder: What Really Happened?

You’ve probably heard of Mars Pathfinder, the NASA lander and its Sojourner rover that took up residence on Mars in 1997. At first, all was well, but after a few …

Slim Type for Small Screens, with PixelFonts

Small displays are affordable and easy to use, but their size can present a challenge. To help address this, [mcer12] created PixelFonts, a family of condensed fonts designed specifically for …

Restoring an Altimeter Watch to Former Heights

Finding inexpensive broken hardware for sale, buying it, and restoring it to working condition is a long-standing tradition for hackers on a limited budge. But there are some devices that …

The Weirdest Video Games were Hacks

We were looking into the marvelous recent project by [Throaty Mumbo] to recreate and reimagine the forgotten world of VHS-tape-based video games. Wait, what? Yes, back in the day, when …

Another IKEA Product Yields an LED Matrix

The IKEA Kortlinje is a digital clock that costs around 20 dollars, featuring a hygrometer and thermometer. It’s another cheap appliance, you might think, were it not that the display …

Super Mario 64 Comes to the Microsoft Zune

As a portable media player, Microsoft’s Zune simply couldn’t compete with Apple’s juggernaut iPod — the latter essentially becoming the de facto personal media player until smartphones took over. But …

Two-Component H-shifter for Racing Sims

Flying and driving simulators can go as far as money will take you, and at some point it might end up being cheaper to buy a plane or race car …

Getting to Know the TP223 Capacitive Touch Sensor

Mechanical and prone to failure, switches can seem quaint these days. Plus, everyone is used to having touch screens on their phones and other devices. So why not use touch …

Belt File from Old Mixer and Junk Bin Parts

Making one’s own power tools can be a rewarding way to upcycle parts, and [bluesyann] does exactly that with a belt file made from an old mixer. We like how …

Low Current Density Nickel Plating

We imagine that electroplating is like making PC boards or soldering surface-mount chips. Before you’ve done it, it seems like a lot. Afterward, you can’t remember why it was such …