Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start this week’s episode off with an update on the rapidly approaching 2025 Supercon in Pasadena, California. From there they’ll talk about the surprisingly high-tech world of vapes, a flying DeLorean several years in the making, non-contact pulse monitoring, and the potential of backyard radio telescopes to do […]
While our eyes are miraculous little devices, they aren’t very sensitive outside of the normal old red, green, and blue spectra. The camera in your phone is far more sensitive, and scientists want to use those sensors in place of expensive hyperspectral ones. Researchers at Purdue have a cunning plan: use a calibration card. The […]
Randomness is hard. To be precise, without dedicated hardware, randomness is impossible for a computer. This is actually important to keep in mind when writing software. When there’s not hardware providing true randomness, most rnd implementations use a seed value and a pseudo random number generator (PRNG). A PRNG is a function that takes a […]
If you know anything about Mickey Mouse, you’ll be able to tell us that his first outing was in 1928’s Steamboat Willie — an animated short that sees our hero as the hapless pilot of a riverboat battling an assortment of animals and his captain. It entered the public domain last year, meaning that it […]
Although ham radio offers a wide array of bands to transmit on, not to mention plenty of modes to communicate with, not everyone wants or needs to use all of this capability. For those needing simple two-way communication services like FRS or GMRS are available (in North America) with much less stringent licensing requirements, and […]
When Raspberry Pi released the Pi 500, as essentially an RPi 5 integrated into a chiclet keyboard, there were rumors based on the empty spots on the PCB that a better version would be released soon. This turned out to be the case, with [Jeff Geerling] now taking the new RPi 500+ to bits for […]
If you’re mounting solar panels, everybody knows the drill, right? Point them south, angled according to latitude. It’s easy. In a video which demonstrates that [Everyday Dave] is truly out standing in his field, we hear a different story. [Dave] has a year’s worth of data in his Solar Panel Showdown that suggests there are […]
The wheels on roller suitcases are one of their primary failure points. After the destruction of the wheel mount on her DIY suitcase, [Laura Kampf] wondered if it would be better to dispense with wheels altogether. To give her suitcase a lift, [Kampf] decided to turn it into a hovercraft so it couldn’t be stopped […]
We aren’t sure what [theglassman] is working on, but based on his recent projects, we think it is probably something interesting. He’s been decapping ICs, growing oxide on silicon substrates, and has built a tube furnace capable of reaching 1200 °C. What would you do with something that can melt cast iron? We aren’t sure, […]
Perpetual motion devices are either a gag, a scam, or as in the case of this particular toy that [Big Clive] bought on AliExpress, a rather fascinating demonstration of a contact-free inductive sensor combined with a pulsed magnet boost for the metal ball. A cool part about the device is that it comes with a […]