Ep 303: The Cheap Yellow Display, Self-Driving Under $1000, and Don't Remix that Benchy
Release Date: 01/10/2025
Ep 318: DIY Record Lathe, 360 Degree LIDAR, and 3D Printing Innovation Lives!
Hackaday Podcast
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 before they are fast enough chase us meatbags away, but it demonstrated for us how such competitions can be used to advance the state of the art. The week's stand-out hacks included work on non-planar slicing to improve strength of 3D prints. It's safe to say that the Cartesian 3D...
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Ep 317: Quantum Diamonds, Citizen Science, and Cobol to AI
Hackaday Podcast
When Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams need a break from writing posts, they hop on the podcast and talk about their favorite stories of the past week. Want to know what they were talking about? Listen in below and find out! In an unusual twist, a listener sent in the sound for this week's What's This Sound competition, so it turns out Elliot and Al were both stumped for a change. See if you can do better, and you might just score a Hackaday Podcast T-shirt. On the hacking front, the guys talked about what they hope to see as entries in the pet hacking contest, quantum diamonds...
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Ep 316: Soft Robots, Linux the Hard Way, Cellphones into SBCs, and the Circuit Graver
Hackaday Podcast
Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they talk about the best stories and hacks of the week. This episode starts off with a discussion of the Vintage Computer Festival East and Philadelphia Maker Faire -- two incredible events that just so happened to be scheduled for the same weekend. From there the discussion moves on to the latest developments in DIY soft robotics, the challenge of running Linux on 8-pin ICs, hardware mods to improve WiFi reception on cheap ESP32 development boards, and what's keeping old smartphones from being reused as general purpose computers. You'll...
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Ep 315: Conductive String Theory, Decloudified Music Players, and Wild Printing Tech
Hackaday Podcast
This week, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up across the (stupid, lousy) time zones to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous week. Again, no news is good news. On What's That Sound, Kristina didn't get close at all, but at least had a guess this time. If you think you can identify the sound amid all the talking, you could win a Hackaday Podcast t-shirt! After that, it's on to the hacks and such, beginning with a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation when it comes to a pair of formerly-cloud music players. We take a...
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Ep 314: It's Pi, but Also PCBs in Living Color and Ultrasonic Everything
Hackaday Podcast
It might not be Pi Day anymore, but Elliot and Dan got together for the approximately 100*Pi-th episode of the Podcast to run through the week's coolest hacks. Ultrasound seemed to be one of the themes, with a deep dive into finding bugs with sonar as well as using sound to cut the cheese -- and cakes and pies, too. The aesthetics of PCBs were much on our minds, too, from full-color graphics on demand to glow-in-the-dark silkscreens. Is automation really needed to embed fiber optics in concrete? Absolutely! How do you put plasma in a bottle? Apparently, with kombucha, Nichrome, and silicone....
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Ep 313: Capacitor Plague, Wireless Power, and Tiny Everything
Hackaday Podcast
We're firmly in Europe this week on the Hackaday podcast, as Elliot Williams and Jenny List are freshly returned from Berlin and Hackaday Europe. A few days of mingling with the Hackaday community, going through mild panic over badges and SAOs, and enjoying the unique atmosphere of that city. After discussing the weekend's festivities we dive right into the hacks, touching on the coolest of thermal cameras, wildly inefficient but very entertaining wireless power transfer, and a restrospective on the capacitor plague from the early 2000s. Was it industrial espionage gone wrong, or something...
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Ep 313: Capacitor Plague, Wireless Power, and Tiny Everything
Hackaday Podcast
We're firmly in Europe this week on the Hackaday podcast, as Elliot Williams and Jenny List are freshly returned from Berlin and Hackaday Europe. A few days of mingling with the Hackaday community, going through mild panic over badges and SAOs, and enjoying the unique atmosphere of that city. After discussing the weekend's festivities we dive right into the hacks, touching on the coolest of thermal cameras, wildly inefficient but very entertaining wireless power transfer, and a restrospective on the capacitor plague from the early 2000s. Was it industrial espionage gone wrong, or something...
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Ep 313: Capacitor Plague, Wireless Power, and Tiny Everything
Hackaday Podcast
We're firmly in Europe this week on the Hackaday podcast, as Elliot Williams and Jenny List are freshly returned from Berlin and Hackaday Europe. A few days of mingling with the Hackaday community, going through mild panic over badges and SAOs, and enjoying the unique atmosphere of that city. After discussing the weekend's festivities we dive right into the hacks, touching on the coolest of thermal cameras, wildly inefficient but very entertaining wireless power transfer, and a restrospective on the capacitor plague from the early 2000s. Was it industrial espionage gone wrong, or something...
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Ep 312: Heart Attacks, the Speed of Light, and Self-balancing
Hackaday Podcast
Elliot does the podcast on the road to Supercon Europe, and Al is in the mood for math and nostalgia this week. Listen in and find out what they were reading on Hackaday this week. The guys talked about the ESP-32 non-backdoor and battery fires. Then it was on to the hacks. Self-balancing robots and satellite imaging were the appetizers, but soon they moved on to Kinect cameras in the modern day. Think you can't travel at the speed of light? Turns out that maybe you already are. Did you know there was a chatbot in 1957? Well, sort of. For the can't miss stories: watches monitor your heart and...
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Ep 311: AirTag Hack, GPS Rollover, and a Flat-Pack Toaster
Hackaday Podcast
This week, Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start off the episode by announcing Arduino co-founder David Cuartielles will be taking the stage as the keynote speaker at Hackaday Europe. In his talk, we'll hear about a vision of the future where consumer electronics can be tossed in the garden and turned into compost instead of sitting in a landfill for the next 1,000 years or so. You'll also hear about a particularly clever manipulation of Apple's AirTag infrastructure, how a classic kid's toy was turned into a unique display with the help of computer vision, and the workarounds required to keep...
info_outlineAs the holiday party season fades away into memory and we get into the swing of the new year, Elliot Williams is joined on the Hackaday Podcast by Jenny List for a roundup of what's cool in the world of Hackaday. In the news this week, who read the small print and noticed that Benchy has a non-commercial licence? As the takedown notices for Benchy derivatives fly around, we muse about the different interpretations of open source, and remind listeners to pay attention when they choose how to release their work.
The week gave us enough hacks to get our teeth into, with Elliot descending into the rabbit hole of switch debouncing, and Jenny waxing lyrical over a crystal oscillator. Adding self-driving capability to a 30-year-old Volvo caught our attention too, as did the intriguing Cheap Yellow Display, an ESP32 module that has (almost) everything. Meanwhile in the quick hacks, a chess engine written for a processor architecture implemented entirely in regular expressions impressed us a lot, as did the feat of sending TOSLINK across London over commercial fibre networks. Enjoy the episode, and see you again next week!