Nerdly News Curated from Interesting Sites
High-voltage experimenters are a unique breed. They’re particularly adept at scrounging for parts in all kinds of places, and identifying how to put all manner of components to use in the service of the almighty arc. [Jay] is one such inventor, and recently came across a useful device from Subaru. …read more
We don’t know where [Scott M. Baker] calls home, but it must be a pretty humid place indeed. After all, he has invested quite a bit in fancy vacuum storage containers to keep his 3D-printer filament dry, with the result being this sensor-laden filament drying farm.
[Scott] wasn’t content to …read more
It is easy to find technology success stories: the PC, DVD, and cell phone are all well-documented tales. However, it is a little harder to find the stories behind the things that didn’t quite take off as planned. As the old saying goes, “success has many parents but failure is …read more
By now most of us should be used to backlit LEDs, in which a bare board with no copper or soldermask as an LED mounted on its reverse side to shine through as if with a diffuser. [Wim Van Gool] has created such an LED display with a twist, instead …read more
We have covered the astonishing diversity of conference badges to a great extent over the years, and we are always pleased and surprised at the creativity and ingenuity that goes into their creation. But the saddest thing about so many badges is that after the event they go into the …read more
Sit next to any piece of machinery long enough and you get to know it by the sounds it makes. Think about the sounds coming from any 3D-printer or CNC machine; it’s easy to know without looking when the G code is working through the sines and cosines needed to …read more
We don’t know what normal people argue about, but we know we spend a lot of time arguing about the best microcontroller, which editor is the best, and what language or compiler does the best job. The problem with all those compilers is getting them loaded and digging into the …read more
Direct from the “Just Because I Can” department, this blog post by [Eddie Zhang] shows us how easy it is to get the Xiaomi robotic vacuum cleaner working as what might be the world’s most unnecessary Spotify Connect speaker. Will your home be the next to play host to an …read more
Sometimes we manage to miss projects when they first appear, only to have the joy of discovering them a while later. So it is with [John Opsahl]’s Project Convert To Paint, a CNC painting ‘bot that takes a bitmap image and paints it on canvas as a fine artist would, …read more
A badge modelled after the handle of a light sabre? Yes Please! This Star Wars themed hardware is the work of hardware designer Thomas Flummer for the 2019 BornHack conference held in Denmark last month. (Check out my roundup of the event if this is the first you’ve heard of …read more
Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams get caught up on the most interesting hacks of the past week. On this episode we take a deep dive into radiation-monitor projects, both Geiger tube and scintillator based, as well as LED cube projects that pack pixels onto six PCBs with parts …read more
What’s in your crypto wallet? The simple answer should be fat stacks of Bitcoin or Ethereum and little more. But if you use a hardware cryptocurrency wallet, you may be carrying around a bit fat vulnerability, too.
At the 35C3 conference last year, [Thomas Roth], [Josh Datko], and [Dmitry Nedospasov] …read more
We’re going to go out on a limb here and say that the controller for Steel Battalion on the original Xbox is the most impressive video game peripheral ever made. Designed to make players feel like they were really in the cockpit of a “Vertical Tank”, the controller features dual …read more
Counting frequency is one of those tasks that seems simple on the face of it, but actually has quite a bit of nuance. There are two obvious methods, of which the first is to count zero crossings for some period. If that period is one second you are done, otherwise …read more
There are a few common lessons that get repeated by anyone who takes on the task of assembling a few hundred PCBs, but there are also unique insights to be had. [DominoTree] shared his takeaways after making a couple hundred electronic badges for DEFCON 26 (that’s the one before the …read more
With the winter months not far off, [Ben Brooks] was looking for a way to help circulate the heat from his wood-burning fireplace throughout his home. Rather than go with a commercial solution, he decided to come up with his own automated air circulation system powered by the mesh networking …read more
State-of-the-art welding machines aren’t cheap, and for good reason: pushing around that much current in a controlled way and doing it over an entire workday takes some heavy-duty parts. There are bargains to be found, though, especially in the most basic of machines: AC stick welders. The familiar and aptly …read more
The TP-Link TL-WR841N isn’t a particularly impressive piece of hardware, but since it works decently well and sells for under $20 USD, it’s one of the most popular consumer routers on Amazon. Now, thanks to [TrendyTofu] of the Zero Day Initiative, we now have a concise step-by-step guide on how …read more
If you’ve been reading Hackaday for awhile, there’s an excellent chance you’ve seen a project or two powered by the Smoothieboard. The open source controller took Kickstarter by storm in 2013, promising to be the last word in CNC thanks to its powerful 32-bit ARM processor. Since then we’ve seen …read more
The picture above appears to show two unremarkable 2U rack servers, of the kind that are probably hosting the page you’re reading right now. Nothing special there – until you look carefully and realize that the rack server case on the left is made entirely from Lego. And what’s more, …read more