This summer, I was pleasantly surprised when a friend of mine from Chicago turned up at one of the hacker camps I attended. A few days of hanging out in the sun ensued, doing cool hacker camp stuff, drinking unusual beverages, and generally having fun. It strikes me as a shame that this is such […]
This week on the Podcast, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos joined forces to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous week. First up in the news: we’ve extended the 2024 Supercon Add-On contest by a week! That’s right, whether you were held up […]
The double-slit experiment, first performed by [Thomas Young] in 1801 provided the first definitive proof of the dual wave-particle nature of photons. A similar experiment can be performed that shows diffraction at optical frequencies by changing the reflectivity of a film of indium-tin-oxide (ITO), as demonstrated in an April 2024 paper (preprint) by [Romain Tirole] […]
Depending on who you ask, the big news this week is that quantum computing researchers out of China have broken RSA. (Here’s the PDF of their paper.) And that’s true… sort of. There are multiple caveats, like the fact that this proof of concept is only factoring a 22-bit key. The minimum RSA size in […]
These days, when something electronic breaks, most folks just throw it away and get a new one. But as hackers, we prefer to find out what the actual problem is and fix it. [Bonsembiante] took that very tack when a MOTU brand audio interface wasn’t booting. As it turns out, a bit of investigative work […]
Ah, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. A popular computer in Britain and beyond, but now rather thin on the ground. If you can’t find one, fear not, for now—you can apparently build a new one with new parts! [TME Retro] is here to demonstrate how. Before you get excited, no—Sinclair has not risen from the dead. […]
Redbox was a service for renting DVDs from automated kiosks. The business was going well until it wasn’t anymore, and then the company went bankrupt in July this year. And yet… the machines live on. At least, that’s according to YouTuber [Smokin’ Silicon], who spotted some remaining Redbox kiosks out and about. Including at his […]
If you get an inexpensive diode laser cutter, you might have been disappointed to find it won’t work well with transparent acrylic. The material just passes most of the light at that wavelength, so there’s not much you can do with it. So how did [Rich] make a good-looking sign using a cheap laser? He […]
Sometimes you need to create a satellite navigation tracking device that communicates via a low-power mesh network. [Powerfeatherdev] was in just that situation, and they whipped up a particularly compact solution to do the job. As you might have guessed based on the name of its creator, this build is based around the ESP32-S3 PowerFeather […]