IoT devices rarely ever just do what they’re advertised. They’ll almost always take up more space than they need to – on top of that, their processor and memory alone should be enough to run a multitude of other tasks while not necessarily compromising the task they were built to do. That’s partially the motivation […]
If you’ve purchased a piece of consumer electronics in the last few years, there’s an excellent chance that you were forced to use some proprietary application (likely on a mobile device) to unlock its full functionality. It’s a depressing reality of modern technology, and unless you’re willing to roll your own hardware, it can be […]
Blindsided by missing pin allocations? Perhaps you’re working on a piece of hardware and you notice that the documentation is entirely wrong. How can you get your device to work? [Dani Eichhorn]’s troubles began when running an IoT workshop using a camera module. Prior to the work, no one had through to check if all […]
We start this week with very sad news indeed. You may have heard about the horrific fire on the dive boat Conception off Santa Cruz Island last week, which claimed 33 lives. Sadly, we lost one of our own in the tragedy: Dan Garcia, author of the wildly popular FastLED library. Dan, 46, was an […]
Before swearing my fealty to the Jolly Wrencher, I wrote for several other sites, creating more or less the same sort of content I do now. In fact, the topical overlap was enough that occasionally those articles would get picked up here on Hackaday. One of those articles, which graced the pages of this site […]
Cyclic redundancy codes (CRC) are a type of checksum commonly used to detect errors in data transmission. For instance, every Ethernet packet that brought you the web page you’re reading now carried with it a frame check sequence that was calculated using a CRC algorithm. Any corrupted packets that failed the check were discarded, and […]
First soldering irons are often of the Radioshack or Maplin firestarter variety. They’re basically wall power shorted across a nichrome heater or similar with some inline resistance to make it harder to burn down the house. You plug them in, the current flows, and they get hot. Done. If you stick with the hobby for […]
Wyze are a company that produces a variety of home automation products. Their Wyze Sense package is a system of contact and PIR home security sensors, that piggy backs off their Wyze Cam product. In the interests of being able to use this hardware outside the prescribed corporate ecosystem, [Xuan Xing] got down to hacking. […]
If you’re a fan of DOS games from the 1990s, you’ve almost certainly used DOSBox to replay them on a modern computer. It allows you to run software in a virtual environment that replicates an era-appropriate computer. That’s great for historical accuracy, but doesn’t do you much good if you’re trying to leverage modern computing […]