In this episode of [Adrian’s Digital Basement], we dive into the world of retro computing with a focus on diagnosing and repairing an old full-height 5.25-inch floppy drive from an IBM 5150 system. Although mechanically sound, the drive had trouble reading disks, and Adrian quickly set out to fix the issue. Using a Greaseweazle—a versatile […]
There are a lot of fantastic things about Hackaday Supercon, but for me personally, the highlight is always seeing the dizzying array of electronic bits and bobs that folks bring with them. If you’ve never had the chance to join us in Pasadena, it’s a bit like a hardware show-and-tell, where half the people you […]
Sometimes those moments arise when a new device comes on the market and hardware hackers immediately take to it. Over a few days, an observer can watch them reverse engineer it and have all sorts of fun making it do things it wasn’t intended to by the original manufacturer. We’re watching this happen in real […]
A few years back NVIDIA created a dedicated cryptocurrency mining GPU, the CMP 170HX. This was a heavily restricted version of its flagship A100 datacenter accelerator, using the same GA100 chip. It was intended for accelerating Ethash, the Etherium proof-of-work algorithm, and nothing else. [niconiconi] bought one to use for accelerating PCB electromagnetic simulations and […]
While classroom learning isn’t for everyone, one awesome benefit of the Internet is that you have a variety of college classes available to you, even if they aren’t for credit. You can virtually audit classes from institutions around the world on just about any topic you can think of. Of course, the topic we think […]
Docker and other containerization applications have changed a lot about the way that developers create new software as well as how they maintain virtual machines. Not only does containerization reduce the system resources needed for something that might otherwise be done in a virtual machine, but it standardizes the development environment for software and dramatically […]
We don’t know how you feel when designing hardware, but we get uncomfortable at the extremes. High voltage or current, low noise figures, or extreme frequencies make us nervous. [Orion Serup] from CrabLabs has been turning up a few of those variables and has created a fairly beefy 3-phase motor driver using GaN technology that can operate up […]
There are a ton of fun Raspberry Pi and Linux projects that require audio output – music players, talking robots, game consoles and arcades, intelligent assistants, mesh network walkie-talkies, and much more! There’s no shortage of Pi-based iPods out there, and my humble opinion is that we still could use more of them. To help […]
A curious custom that survives from the pre-computer era is that of the business card. If you walk the halls at a trade event you’ll come a way with a stack of these, each bearing the contact details of someone you’ve encountered, and each in a world of social media and online contact destined to […]
It may come as little surprise to find that Hackaday does not often play host to typewriter projects. While these iconic machines have their own particular charm, they generally don’t allow for much in the way of hardware modification. But then the IBM Wheelwriter 1000 isn’t exactly a traditional typewriter, which made its recent conversion […]