Field News

Classic demos from the demoscene are all about showing off one’s technical prowess, with a common side order of a slick banging soundtrack. That’s precisely what [BUS ERROR Collective] members [DJ_Level_3] and [Marv1994] delivered with their prize-winning Primer demo this week. This demo is a grand example of so-called “oscilloscope music”—where two channels of audio […]
Sometimes, a flat display just won’t cut it. If you’re looking for something a little rounder, perhaps your vision could persist in in looking at [lhm0]’s rotating LED sphere RP2040 POV display. As you might have guessed from that title, this persistence-of-vision display uses an RP2040 microcontroller as its beating (or spinning, rather) heart. An […]
In the realm of computer science, it’s hard to go too far without encountering hashing or hash functions. The concept appears throughout security, from encryption to password storage to crypto, and more generally whenever large or complex data must be efficiently mapped to a smaller, fixed-size set. Hashing makes the process of looking for data […]
[IMSAI Guy] grabbed an obsolete XOR gate and tried a classic circuit to turn it into a frequency doubler. Of course, being an old part, it won’t work at very high frequencies, but the circuit is super simple, just using the gate and an RC network. You can see a video of his exploration below. […]
[Tazer] built a small desktop-sized robotic arm, and it was more or less functional. However, he wanted to improve its ability to pick things up, and attaching a pneumatic gripper seemed like the perfect way to achieve that. Thus began the build! The concept of [Tazer]’s pneumatic gripper is simple enough. When the pliable silicone […]
When it comes to open source signal analysis software for logic analyzers and many other sensors, Sigrok is pretty much the only game in town. Unfortunately after an issue with the server hosting, the website, wiki, and other documentation is down until a new hosting provider is found and the site migrated. This leaves just […]
This week Elliot Williams was joined by fellow Europe-based Hackaday staffer Jenny List, to record the Hackaday Podcast as the dusk settled on a damp spring evening. On the agenda first was robotic sport, as a set of bipedal robots competed in a Chinese half-marathon. Our new Robot overlords may have to wait a while […]
In the 2000s, the DVD industry was concerned about piracy, in particular the threat to their business model presented by counterfeit DVDs and downloadable movies. Their response was a campaign which could be found embedded into the intro sequences of many DVDs of the era, in which an edgy font on a black background began […]
Researchers at Aikido run the Aikido Intel system, an LLM security monitor that ingests the feeds from public package repositories, and looks for anything unusual. In this case, the unusual activity was five rapid-fire releases of the xrpl package on NPM. That package is the XRP Ledger SDK from Ripple, used to manage keys and […]
Alvin Lucier was an American experimental composer whose compositions were arguably as much science experiments as they were music. The piece he is best known for, I Am Sitting in a Room, explored the acoustics of a room and what happens when you amplify the characteristics that are imparted on sound in that space by […]