It’s The Speech Synthesiser You Wanted, For The Computer You Had
If you had an 8-bit computer in the 1980s and bought a speech synthesiser for it, what you got was invariably an alophone-based synthesiser using the SP0256 or …
CircuitPython Goes Turbo With Precompiled Functions
It would not be at all original to declare that Python is the new BASIC. Like BASIC, it has been the first programming language for a whole generation of coders…
Dramatically Increasing Usable Closet Space
As any science YouTuber or first-year physics student is quick to point out, the universe is mostly empty space. Not just space itself, but the amount of “…
Re-creating NASA’s Heat Shield Problem
After the Orion capsule of the Artemis I lunar mission returned to Earth, it was found that massive chunks of its heatshield had been ripped off, posing a serio…
Hackaday Links: September 13, 2026
We try to steer clear of politics and societal issues here at Hackaday, so a protest is not usually the sort of thing we’d cover. But we figure it’s…
Rusting an E-scooter (In a Good Way)
It is a classic Hackaday situation. You have an Egret GT E-scooter. It has a screen that shows the usual dash stats, but that led to an annoyance. You could …
A 386 PC For Your RP2350
We’re at a fortunate moment: microcontrollers available at modest prices are edging into the capability level previously reserved for full-fat systems and…
Analyzing the FScale Instruction in Intel’s 8087 FPU
During his continuing analysis of the architecture and microcode of Intel’s highly influential 8087 floating point unit (FPU) co-processor, [Ken Shirriff]…
Keeping Time on Tumbling Icosahedra
Clocks are almost the ideal devices to inspire creativity in hackers — they have a simple, well-defined task, but there’s an almost unlimited number of wa…
Whip-Cracking Machine Reliably Breaks the Sound Barrier
We tend to think of breaking the sound barrier as a comparatively modern accomplishment, but on a smaller scale, cattle herders have been breaking it for centur…
Spin FV-1 Emulator Simplifies Sound Pedal Development
If you’ve never heard of the Spin Semiconductors FP-1 digital signal processor chip, don’t worry– that just means you haven’t been deep …
2026 Retrocomputing Challenge: 16-Bit Homebrew Relay Computer
You want Retro? We did, when we started our retrocomputing challenge. [Peter] decided that transistors weren’t retro enough, and sent us this lovely homeb…
Making an Air-Powered Circular Saw with LEGO
Although building a table saw out of LEGO is probably not the first thing that comes to mind when you look at those colorful bits of plastic, [Jamie] has been &…
Makers Of Orange County Unite This Weekend!
INSTAGRAM I WEBSITE I FACEBOOK Maker Faire Orange County is back for another round at the OC Fair & Event Center this weekend, September 12th &13th. The…
Big Infinity Mirror Clock Invites You To Gaze Deeply
[Andy Huot] has a fantastic-looking infinity mirror digital clock that really raises the bar. It uses high quality components, smart use of RGB LED animations, …
This Mac Is Open Source Hardware
Apple hardware has always been proprietary, sometimes to an extreme. But that’s not to say that it’s impossible to make something that does the same…
Supercon is Nigh!
The 2026 Hackaday Superconference is just around the corner in November. It’s hard to believe that we’ve been having an annual gathering for so long, but this i…
The Heavy Disco-Ball Satellite Designed to Do… Nothing
Launched in 1976, LAGEOS-1 (LAser GEOdynamic Satellite) is unusual in that it contains no instrumentation, no electronics, no power supply, and no means of prop…
Looking at a TRS-80 12 MB External Hard Drive from 1983
Although hard disks weren’t a common feature yet in many home computers in the 1980s, they were becoming increasingly more affordable. For relative meanin…
All The Best Computers Boot To… Python?
Among all the machines of the 8-bit home computer era which booted straight to a BASIC prompt, there were a very few that went their own way with another langua…
How To Fold Curved Lines in Metal Without Fancy Tools
Folding a sheet of metal in a straight line is one thing, but how does one fold multiple curved lines into a sheet of aluminum without fancy machines? [John] de…
Trying to Fix a Suspiciously Cheap Enterprise-Grade Network Switch
When you see a listing for an Ethernet switch whose specification list is in effect ‘yes’, with a four-digit price tag when new, and with the seller…
Making a Neo Nuvistor Project in 2026
For a little while vacuum tubes and semiconductors were fighting a heated battle for dominance, with bipolar junction transistors and 1959’s RCA Nuvistor …
Hand-Coded ASM Powers Homebrew SNES Game
Nintendo has made many game consoles in its long history — one that famously overlaps that of the Ottoman Empire — but only one of them was ever Sup…
Hackaday Podcast Episode 386: Doomscroll Tamagotchis, Clavichords, and Vibrotrucks
In this specially-numbered podcast episode that lines up quite nicely with our Retrocomputing Challenge, Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met over surprisingl…
This Machine Makes 35mm (Almost) Film
The revival in film photography has brought a range of specialist films to tempt the experimenter, as well as increased the popularity of loading your own cartr…
This Week in Security: It’s Patch Tuesday Again, TVs Spying, Supply Chain Worms Return, Prolonged Hack Impacts, Stolen IDs
Several times this summer, Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday, the monthly roundup of major security patches for Microsoft products, has included record-breaking n…
Purely Random TV In Your Browser
One of the things we used to appreciate about broadcast television is that… you kinda just got what you got. You didn’t have to choose beyond pickin…
Parents Are Bringing AI to the IEP Meeting. How Should Teachers Respond?
Using AI in IEP meetings can benefit parents and teachers – if done correctly.
This Circuit Sculpture is an ESP32-Powered Console
Expressif might not have intended the ESP32-S3 to become an emulation powerhouse, but that’s certainly what has happened. The little microcontroller seems…
Lara Croft on a Microcontroller
Once upon a time, you had to carefully budget your microcontroller’s resources if you wanted to do something as simple as flash a bunch of LEDs. These day…
Changing Nozzle Internal Geometry to Increase FDM Flowrate
As FDM printers keep getting faster, we are forced to deal with a range of bottlenecks, all of which conspire to hold us back from another Benchie world record.…
Creating a Custom Hinge for a Motorbike’s Fuel Access Panel
A fun part of modifying something like a motorbike is that you sometimes have to come up with creative solutions to basic questions, like how you can still acce…
Cytrence Kiwi+ Makes Working on a Raspberry Pi Easier
Cytrence Kiwi turns your laptop into a KVM (keyboard/video/mouse), making it an excellent match for Raspberry Pi or other headless projects. The post Cytrence K…
Little Droid Has Party Mode
Remember those tiny little droids skittering around the pristine corridors of the Death Star in Star Wars? [heychaostheory] has put together something vaguely a…
3D Imaging Without a Lens
There are plenty of ways to capture 3D images or simulations of such if you know what you’re doing with camera hardware and fancy mathematics. However, a …
Custom AMOLED Wearable Makes Great Icebreaker
Nifty little AMOLED screens are easy to get nowadays, and [Sophie D] demonstrates they are both thin and light enough to be worn with OpenChoker, a design for a…
Tech In Plain Sight: Meet The Robot That Does CPR
Usually in Tech In Plain Sight, we talk about technology you probably see every day, even if you don’t notice it. But we hope you don’t get to see o…
Open Source Acoustic Drone Detection
Drones have become a potent military threat, particularly on the small scale. Nimble multi-rotor drones are fast, difficult to spot, and can cause plenty of har…
If It’s Electronic Paper, Why Not Print To It?
E-ink is supposed to be the electronic version of dead-tree paper, but there’s one enormous difference: how you get your images and text onto it. For pape…
Origami Sensors That You Can Wear
Origami is a wonderful art form, but as a new project from the Shibaura Institute of Technology demonstrates, it can also have applications in the world of wear…
3D Printable Lenticular Indicators
You can 3D print all kinds of things, from Yoda heads to little models of Pikachu. Eventually, though, most of us get to a point where we want to print …r…
Local LLMs Can Work Better Than Claude, At Least For Some
This is going to be a very personal question, because when you’re talking cloud vs local anything, it comes down to this: how much are you willing to pay …
Reverse Engineering The Philips PM5139
The Philips PM5139 is not famous. It won no great victories on the battlefield, nor was instrumental in changing the political landscape. It was just a useful f…
FLOSS Weekly Episode 881: Eating Its Own Tail
This week Jonathan chats with Olivier Vernin of Updatecli, the tool that helps you update everything! Need to roll out dependency updates intelligently? Or even…
It’s GNU Radio Companion, But in the Browser
The progression of the web browser from a tool for simple static information browsing into a do-everything computing environment has been inexorable, with packa…
Stitching the Future: Technology as a Sacred Trust
By grounding our digital strategy in the same values as our ancestors, we can ensure technology serves our school community rather than consuming it.
Two Students, Two Questions They Wouldn’t Let Go
Students asking why learning matters in the age of AI forces two teachers to respond.
Are Desktop PC-ABS Prints Outperformed by Industrial FDM? Not Really
[Igor] of [My Tech Fun] set out to discover what differences, if any, can be found between parts printed in PC-ABS filament on an industrial 3D printer, and tho…
Fixing a 1990s LEGO Electric Train Speed Regulator
Before LEGO train sets moved to battery-powered locomotives with plastic rails, all of them worked pretty much like any other train set of the era. This meant m…
Hackaday Europe 2026: Outdoors with Robots
Erin Kennedy has been building robots for over a decade now, with a focus on smaller bots that interact with, or maybe even clean up, the outdoor environment. S…
Disassembling a Mini Air Blower to Make RC Airplanes
As a certified RC airplane fan, the [RCMakerLab] on YouTube found themselves looking at one of those nifty mini air blowers that provide an alternative to a com…
A 1024 Byte Python Interpreter
Like many of us, [Austin] finds writing code satisfying — especially if it is challenging. His latest challenge: shoehorn something that looks like Python…
AI Videos Are Warping Early Learning, Teachers Say
The rise of so-called “baby slop” is turning early childhood educators into media critics.
Old iPad Keyboard Makes For a Modern Netbook
Netbooks were a class of tiny laptops which hit their peak over a decade ago, with the idea being that you could use the Internet and do your computing on ̷…
How Bats Prevent Doppler Acoustic Interference
As great as echolocation is, things can get rather messy once it’s not just you chirping away, but also hundreds of your buddies in roughly the same area.…
Kelvin–Helmholtz Instabilities Found to Drive Plasma Mixing on the Sun
As easy as the Sun is to observe, it’s simultaneously very hard to study due to how extreme the conditions are, even on the surface of a rather unassuming…
ESP32-P4 Powers Video Alarm Clock
Once upon a time, you had the option of waking up to a bell, a harsh buzzer, or whatever happened to be on the radio that morning. Now that it’s …re…
Track Aircraft With ADSBee, an Open Source ADS-B Receiver
Track aircraft with a low-cost, open source, embedded ADS-B receiver that you can build into anything. The post Track Aircraft With ADSBee, an Open Source ADS-B…
A Vacuum Tube Computer For The Home
The earliest all-electronic computers used vacuum tubes, and most of us will know about machines such as ENIAC or Colossus. Vast machines that required the budg…
The Helicopter with Radioactive Blades
Sometimes you find gold in unexpected places. In this case, it’s from a video about the CH-53 helicopter. The CH-53 Sea Stallion first entered service in …
How To Talk To A Machine Without Anthropomorphising It
LLMs remain a divisive topic in these times. Perhaps we all know someone who’s become over-infatuated with their new robotic friend, or who believes it ha…
The First Spacecraft Launched To Orbit From Europe
The history of European space exploration is a long and distinguished one, with many decades and whole families of launch vehicles. It might therefore come as a…
Comparing PETG and PCTG Filaments
The average 3D printer owner knows a few types of filaments – PLA, ABS, somewhere in the middle, PETG. PCTG is another option that can be confusingly sim…
NES Radar Tracks Flights at 9600 Baud
Air traffic visualizers seem to be having a bit of a moment right now, and now that moment has come to the venerable NES thanks to [k6lcm]’s NES Radar pro…
How Charged Water Drops Induce Corrosion
Generally, we do not look at the gentle patter of raindrops on a surface with much concern, but according to a study by [Zhongyuan Ni] et al. in Nature, we shou…
Hackaday Links: September 6, 2026
Yesterday, Isar Aerospace secured its place in the history books when the upper stage of their Spectrum rocket put a payload of CubeSats into low Earth orbit (L…
Saturn’s South Pole is Apparently Decagon-Shaped
Although some would argue that the hexagon is the bestagon, astronomers have discovered that Saturn appears to favor the ten-sided decagon on its south pole. Th…
Is This the Year of The Linux… Television?
The Year of the Linux Desktop hasn’t been on its way for quite as long as nuclear fusion plants, but somehow it seems to recede into the horizon at just &…
This Clavichord is a Well-Tempered Project
The Clavichord needs no introduction to fans of Early Music, and a lengthy one to literally everyone else. Even classical music buffs who have heard of BachR…
Printing Micron-Scale Benchies With Resin and Turmeric
Resin 3D printing has opened up a whole new scale of resolution for hackers, but the technology can go still finer; commercial micro-SLA and two-photon polymeri…
Ready, Set, Make: 5 Inaugural September Maker Faires
September is always a busy month for Maker Faire and this year five first time events, scattered around the world, are joining the scene. Its always exciting to…
WordStar Lives Again (and Again)
Word processors and editors are a funny thing. It doesn’t really matter what’s “best,” whatever that means. If you have finger memory bu…
There’s Whole Computer Inside This Mouse
[Gadget Industry] bills it as “a PC inside a Mouse“, but that depends on your definition of a “PC”. This is a Personal Computer inside a…
Can AI Now Design PCBs That Just Work?
With the recent release of its GPT-6 Astra model, OpenAI explicitly pushed the claim that it is capable of designing complete circuit boards in KiCad, starting …
Running Apple ][ Software on a Commodore 64 — Silently
The computer business in 1984 was a bizarre mix of hobby-level companies, a few small companies that had made it big, and a lot of big companies starting to tak…
Pixel Watch 5 Demonstrates Good Repairability
Although we often find ourselves drowning in a seemingly unending sea of portable devices that are effectively e-waste once an internal component gives out, it&…
Voicebox FX is a Blueprint for CircuitPython I2S Audio
[Adafruit]’s Voicebox FX gadget is a fun, well-documented project that serves another useful purpose: being a fantastic reference design for audio on Circ…
If at First You Don’t Succeed…
… at least document what failed and give the failure analysis a good effort. And then later on, you can “try, try again” or let someone else carry on with ̷…
Free Your Rotary Telephone From Its Wire
It’s said that a teenager given a rotary telephone in 2026 would be mystified by its operation, yet there are enough surviving instruments for them to be …
COSMAC Elf Turns 50
If you were interested in computers in the early 1970s, you struggled to get time on real computers since owning your own was all but impossible. In the middle …
Parchment Paper Paired With 3D-Printed Grid Gives a Nice Glow
This custom enclosure for a 64×64 RGB LED matrix by [Davisan1001] not only provides a mount point for a Raspberry Pi, but presents a clean and smooth face …
Fixing an Expensive Seagate LaCie Hard Drive Array
After the [Slow Mo Guys] acquired a 168 TB Seagate LaCie Thunderbolt 3-based RAID storage system back in 2019 to store their video footage, they were obviously …
Are Schools Inadvertently Making Students More Stressed?
Cathy Vatterott, author of “The Teens Are Not Alright,” believes schools are treating the symptoms of student stress instead of looking at the real problem.
A City Of Makers In The Black Rock Desert
As the Burning Man Project noted earlier this year, “Burning Man and the global maker movement are inextricably intertwined. Both welcome beginners and ex…
Making a Pole Balance Itself With Propellers
A fun trick with a pole is to try to balance it so that it can stand on one end. This can be done in a few ways, such as …read more
Repairing Traces on a Delidded Pentium III CPU Gone Wrong
Delidding a CPU involves removing the integrated heat spreader (IHS) that’s put over the bare die and the substrate that it is mounted on. The reason for …
Hackaday Podcast Ep 385: 3D Printers with Lasers, Wicked RAM Prices, and Reverse Polish Notation
As the calendar turns a leaf into September, Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List for our weekly look at all things Hackaday. In the news, our retrocomputing…
3D Printed Cubes Provide Passive Cooling
Passive evaporative cooling has been used for centuries to reduce temperatures. Heat is drawn off as water evaporates, which in turn reduces temperature. The mo…
This Week in Security: Baked-in Malware, Freezers Not Freezing, Zoom Snoops Clipboards, and AI Makes Things Worse, Faster
The AI platform ServiceNow which offers both hosted and on-premises versions just patched a trifecta of CVSS-10 vulnerabilities. CVSS rankings are determined by…
Take Tool Photo, Generate Custom Gridfinity Bin
What if the organization and storage benefits of tool shadowing could be had and improved with a modular, semi-automated process? Tracefinity attempts that by g…
The Birds Outside, Drawn For You Automatically
With artificial intelligence being the bête noir of the moment, there are some projects using it which maybe don’t bring much to the table. So it’s …
Push A Button And More At Maker Faire Tokyo 2026
INSTAGRAM I WEBSITE I FACEBOOK No Push, No Life “If there’s a button, you want to push it.” This is the premise of the OSEBA exhibit at the 20…
A Split Keyboard Designed for Human Hands
A surprising number of things we use in everyday life retain most of their design cues from their 19th century ancestors. The bicycle retains the same basic des…
Exploring the Downsides of Cooling Roof Paint
The idea of painting a roof or wall white in order to reflect sunshine and keep the building’s insides cool is hardly a new one, and even in the loosest &…
Hackaday Europe 2026: Fluid Kernels and Optimizing C++ for MCUs
Oftentimes, when we’re using a microcontroller, we’re whipping up some very specific code focused on executing a particular task. The device is set …
A Thoroughly Modern Minimalist Transceiver
Making a radio is so often a case of taking tried and tested designs and working with them to create something new. It’s a safe way to make something that…
From a Ten-Line Script to a Real Utility with Codex
I’m an experienced programmer, and I’ve worked in many different languages. Sometimes being a programmer is a two-edged sword. You want to accomplish something,…
Rescuing a Rescue Device With a DIY Battery Pack
If you find yourself lost in the woods or adrift in the ocean, a GPS-enabled Personal Locator Beacon (PLB) is certainly a handy thing to have as it will pinpoin…
Hundreds of Thousands of Eligible Kids Are Waiting for Childcare Assistance
A nationwide investigation reveals massive waitlists for government-funded childcare assistance, leaving low-income families stranded without essential ...