Time for another European flavoured Hackaday Podcast this week, as Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List, two writers sweltering in the humidity of a Central European summer. Both of our fans and air conditioners made enough noise to be picked up on the microphone when they were turned on, so we’re suffering for your […]
Most humans with two ears have a pretty good sense of directional hearing. However, you can build equipment to localize audio sources, too. That’s precisely what [Sam], [Ezra], and [Ari] did for their final project for the ECE4760 class at Cornell this past Spring. It’s an audio localizer! The project is a real-time audio localizer […]
Earlier this year, I was required to move my server to a different datacenter. The tech that helped handle the logistics suggested I assign one of my public IPs to the server’s Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) port, so I could access the controls there if something went sideways. I passed on the offer, and not […]
Robots can look like all sorts of things, but they’re often more fun if you make them look like some kind of charming animal. That’s precisely what [Ananya], [Laurence] and [Shao] did when they built Cucumber the Robot Dog for their final project in the ECE 4760 class. Cucumber is controllable over WiFi, which was […]
We have all suffered from this; the boss wants you to compile a report on the number of paper clips and you’re crawling up the wall with boredom, so naturally your mind strays to other things. You check social media, or maybe the news, and before you know it a while has been wasted. [Neil […]
[Hunter Irving] is a talented hacker with a wicked sense of humor, and he has written in to let us know about his latest project which is to make a GameCube keyboard controller work with Animal Crossing. This project began simply enough but got very complicated in short order. Initially the goal was to get […]
[Ralph] is excited about impedance matching, and why not? It is important to match the source and load impedance to get the most power out of a circuit. He’s got a whole series of videos about it. The latest? Matching using a PI network and the venerable Smith Chart. We like that he makes each […]
[Ruud], the creator of [Capturing Dust], started his latest video with what most of us would consider a solved problem: the dust collection system for his shop already had a three-stage centrifugal dust separator with more than 99.7% efficiency. This wasn’t quite as efficient as it could be, though, so [Ruud]’s latest upgrade shrinks the […]
For as versatile and inexpensive as switch-mode power supplies are at all kinds of different tasks, they’re not always the ideal choice for every DC-DC circuit. Although they can do almost any job in this arena, they tend to have high parts counts, higher complexity, and higher cost than some alternatives. [Jasper] set out to […]
In theory, writing a Linux device driver shouldn’t be that hard, but it is harder than it looks. However, using libusb, you can easily deal with USB devices from user space, which, for many purposes, is fine. [Crescentrose] didn’t know anything about writing user-space USB drivers until they wrote one and documented it for us. […]