Field News

Lithium batteries have taken over as the primary battery chemistry from applications ranging from consumer electronics to electric vehicles and all kinds of other things in between. But the standard lithium ion battery has a few downsides, namely issues operating at temperature extremes. Lead acid solves some of these problems but has much lower energy […]
3D printing is wonderful, but sometimes you just don’t want to look at a plastic peice. Beethoven’s bust wouldn’t look quite right in front of your secret door if it was bright orange PLA, after all. [Denny] over at “Shake the Future” on YouTube is taking a break from metal casting to show off a […]
Few things rival the usability and speed of a full-sized keyboard for text input. For decades, though, keyboards were mostly wired, which can limit where you use your favorite one. To address this, [KoStard]’s latest project uses an ESP32 to bridge a USB keyboard to BLE devices. The ESP32-S3 packs a ton of fantastic functionality […]
Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams took a break to talk about their favorite hacks last week. You can drop in to hear about articulated mirrors, triacs, and even continuous 3D-printing modifications. Flying on an airplane this weekend? Maybe wait until you get back to read about how the air traffic control works. Back […]
Äike were an Estonian scooter company, which sadly went bust last year. [Rasmus Moorats] has one, and since the app and cloud service the scooter depends on have lost functionality, he decided to reverse engineer it. Along the way he achieved his goal, but found a vulnerability that unlocks all Äike scooters. The write-up is […]
We miss the slide rule. It isn’t so much that we liked getting an inexact answer using a physical moving object. But to successfully use a slide rule, you need to be able to roughly estimate the order of magnitude of your result. The slide rule’s computation of 2.2 divided by 8 is the same […]
Today’s PCs are locked up with Trusted Platform Module (TPM) devices so much so that modern Windows versions insist on having a recent TPM to even install. These have become so prevalent that even larger embedded boards now have TPM and, of course, if you are repurposing consumer hardware, you’ll have to deal with it, […]
After having been sent a vacuum fluorescent display (VFD) based clock for a review, [Anthony Francis-Jones] took the opportunity to explain how these types of displays work. Although VFDs are generally praised for their very pleasant appearance, they’re also relatively low-power compared to the similar cathode ray tubes. The tungsten wire cathode with its oxide […]
What happens when a traditional board game company decides to break into electronic gaming? Well, if it were a UK gaming company in 1978, the result would be a Waddingtons 2001 The Game Machine that you can see in the video from [Re:Enthused] below. The “deluxe console model” had four complete games: a shooting gallery, […]
Over on YouTube [Nic Barker] gives us: UTF-8, Explained Simply. If you’re gonna be a hacker eventually you’re gonna have to write software to process and generate text data. And when you deal with text data, in this day and age, there are really only two main things you need to know: 7-bit ASCII and […]