Smartphone Runs Home Server

It’s one of the great tragedies of our technological era. Smartphones that feature an incredible amount of computational power compared to computers the past, are largely locked down by carri…

PlayStation Motherboard Sanded And Scanned, But There’s More To Do

If you want to reverse engineer the boards in a modern console, you’d better have a lab, a lot of fancy gear, and a good few months to dedicate to the task. The humble PlayStation, on the oth…

Raspberry Pi 500 And The Case Of The Missing M.2 Slot

Raspberry Pi just dropped the new Raspberry Pi 500, which like its predecessor puts the similarly named SBC into a keyboard. In a detailed review and teardown video, [Jeff Geerling] goes over all t…

Do 3D Printers Dream Of LEGO Sheep?

Imagine the power to clone your favorite LEGO piece—not just any piece, but let’s say, one that costs €50 second-hand. [Balazs] from RacingBrick posed this exact question: can a 3D scanner re…

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Funny Keyboard

What’s the most important keyboard macro you know? Honestly, it’s probably Ctrl-S. But do you use that one often enough? Chances are, you do not. What you need is a giant, dedicated Sav…

Electric Bike Uses No Electronics, Weird Motor

E-bikes combine a bicycle with a big lithium battery, a speed controller, and a motor. What you get from that combination is simple, efficient transportation. [Tom Stanton] wanted to build an e-bik…

Finally Putting The RK1 Through Its Paces

The good folks at Turing Pi sent me a trio of RK1 modules to put through their paces, to go along with the single unit I bought myself. And the TLDR, if you need some real ARM processing power, and…

Robot Rodents: How AI Learned To Squeak And Play

In an astonishing blend of robotics and nature, SMEO—a robot rat designed by researchers in China and Germany — is fooling real rats into treating it like one of their own. What sets SMEO apa…

Debugging The UE1 Paper Tape Reader And Amplification Circuit

After recently putting together the paper tape reader for his custom tube-based UE1 computer, [David Lovett] did get squiggles on the outputs, but not quite the right ones. In the most recent video…

Magic Eye Images In Your Spreadsheet

Ah, the 1990s. It was a simpler time, when the web was going to be democratic and decentralised, you could connect your Windows 95 PC to the internet without worrying much about it being compromise…

Silicon Carbide May Replace Zirconium Alloys For Nuclear Fuel Rod Cladding

Since the construction of the first commercial light water nuclear power plants (LWR) the design of their fuel rods hasn’t changed significantly. Mechanically robust and corrosion-resistant z…

Hackaday Links: December 8, 2024

For some reason, we never tire of stories highlighting critical infrastructure that’s running outdated software, and all the better if it’s running on outdated hardware. So when we lear…

Pedaling Your Mobile Web Server Across The Globe

We tinkerers often have ideas we know are crazy, and we make them up in the most bizarre places, too. For example, just imagine hosting a website while pedaling across the world—who would (not) wan…

New Tullomer Filament Claims To Beat PEEK, Aluminium And Steel

Recently a company called Z-Polymers introduced its new Tullomer FDM filament that comes with a lofty bullet list of purported properties that should give materials like steel, aluminium, and vario…

Tiny NFC-Powered Keychain Thermometer

What if your keychain could tell you the temperature, all while staying battery-free? That’s the essence of this innovative keychain ‘NFC_temp’ by [bjorn]. This nifty gadget harnesses e…

The Audiophile Carrot

The widely quoted carrot factoid that the vegetable’s orange colour is the result of patriotic Dutch farmers breeding them that way may be an urban myth, but it’s certainly true that th…

WASM-4: Retro Game Dev Right In Your Browser

Have you ever dreamt of developing games that run on practically anything, from a modern browser to a microcontroller? Enter WASM-4, a minimalist fantasy console where constraints spark creativity.…

Cheap FPGA PCIe Development

Typically, if you want to build an FPGA project inside a PC, you’d need a fairly expensive development board that plugs into the bus. However, [CircuitValley] found some IBM RS-485 boards tha…

A Look Inside IKEA’s Vallhorn Motion Sensor Teardown

A good source of hackable home automation parts has come for a while in the form of inexpensive modules offered by large retailers such as Lidl, or IKEA. They’re readily available and easy to…

Microchess Remembered

Playing chess has always been a bellwether for computers. The game isn’t trivial, but the rules are managably simple. However, the game is too complex to be easily solved entirely, so you hav…