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OldVersion is Back, and Better than Ever

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You know what they say — you can’t keep a good website down. OldVersion.com, the repository of outdated software that has been serving up old versions of tools you need for the last twenty-five years, is not going away as we reported last year . Not only is it sticking around, it’s gotten a retro facelift inspired by Windows 3.1 or OS/2. Mostly Windows, given the screensaver, but we’ll let you find that for yourself. We’re thrilled to see that OldVersion has gotten the support they need to keep going after running into financial troubles. According to founder Alex Levine, some of that support came as a result of the Hackaday article reporting on the then-upcoming closure, so kudos to you guys for stepping up. While we absolutely love the retro redesign of the new website, that’s one thing notably lacking — an obvious donation button. Well, that and old-school HTTP support so you can get on with your retromachines, but that, at least, is in the works according to the site roadmap. ...
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Battery Tester Outperforms Cheaper Options

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Batteries are notoriously difficult pieces of technology to deal with reliably. They often need specific temperatures, charge rates, can’t tolerate physical shocks or damage, and can fail catastrophically if all of their finicky needs aren’t met. And, adding insult to injury, for many chemistries, the voltage does not correlate to state of charge in meaningful ways. Battery testers take many efforts to mitigate these challenges, but often miss the mark for those who need high fidelity in their measurements. For that reason, [LiamTronix] built their own . The main problem with the cheaper battery testers, at least for [LiamTronix]’s use cases, is that he has plenty of batteries that are too large to practically test on the low-current devices, or which have internal battery management systems (BMS) which can’t connect to these testers. The first circuit he built to help solve these issues is based on a shunt resistor, which lets a smaller IC chip monitor a much larger current by looki...
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Mercury Audio Cables, So Nobody Else Has To Do It

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We’ve seen our fair share of audiophile tomfoolery here at Hackaday, and we’ve even poked fun at a few of them over the years. Perhaps one of the most outrageously over the top that we’ve so far seen comes from [Pierogi Engineering] who, we’ll grant you not in a spirit of audiophile expectation, has made a set of speaker interconnects using liquid mercury . In terms of construction they’re transparent tubes filled with mercury and capped off with 4 mm plugs as you might expect. We hear them compared with copper cables and from where we’re sitting we can’t tell any difference, but as we’ve said in the past, the only metrics that matter in this field come from an audio analyzer . But that’s not what we take away from the video below the break. Being honest for a minute, there was a discussion among Hackaday editors as to whether or not we should feature this story. He’s handling significant quantities of mercury, and it’s probably not over reacting to express concerns about his proced...
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A Nebula Straight from the Stars to Your Table

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Space may truly be the final frontier, but maybe that frontier can be closer than you thought. Pictures of nebulae and planets bring the colorful sights of deep space right to your screen. You may even have models of some of the rockets used for those missions on a shelf. However, did you know that you could even have a model of those nebulae or planetary surfaces from [NASA]? While we have covered some distributed models from [NASA] here before , the catalog has expanded far past what 2016 had in store. Additionally, the catalog has been sorted into a more user-friendly, filterable interface than a simple GitHub repository. Most models even have a description attached, giving some basic background information on what the Crab Nebula is, for example . There could always be more; there don’t appear to be many models of the space shuttle or some other expected files, but what is there is incredible. Some non-3D model files can also be found from star maps to full planetary maps. Whi...
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LED Matrix Clock Proudly Shows Its Inner Wiring

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Some projects take great care to tuck away wire hookups, but not [Roberto Alsina]’s Reloj V2 clock . This desktop clock makes a point of exposing all components and wiring as part of its aesthetic. There are no hidden elements, everything that makes it work is open to view. Well, almost. The exception is the four MAX7219 LED matrices whose faces are hidden behind a featureless red panel, and for good reason. As soon as the clock powers up, the LEDs shine through the thin red plastic in a clean glow that complements the rest of the clock nicely. [Roberto]’s first version was a unit that worked similarly, but sealed everything away in a wedge-shaped enclosure that was just a little too sterile, featureless, and ugly for his liking. Hence this new version that takes the opposite approach. Clocks have long showcased their inner workings, and electronic clocks — like this circuit-sculpture design — are no exception. The only components, besides the Raspberry Pi Zero W and the LED m...
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How Small Can A Linux Executable Be?

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With ever increasing sizes of various programs (video games being notorious for this), the question of size optimization comes up more and more often. [Nathan Otterness] shows us how it’s done by minifying a Linux “Hello, World!” program to the extreme . A naive attempt at a minimal hello world in C might land you somewhere about 12-15Kb, but [Nathan] can do much better. He starts by writing everything in assembly, using Linux system calls. This initial version without optimization is 383 bytes. The first major thing to go is the section headers; they are not needed to actually run the program. Now he’s down to 173 bytes. And this is without any shenanigans! The final tiny ELF file The first shenanigans are extreme code size optimizations: by selecting instructions carefully (and in a way a C compiler never would), he shaves another 16 bytes off. But the real shenanigans begin when he starts looking for spaces in the ELF header that he can clobber while the program is still acce...
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An Oscilloscope The Way They Used To Be

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It’s likely that Hackaday has a readership with the highest percentage of oscilloscope ownership among any in the world, and we’re guessing that most of you who fit in that bracket have a modern digital instrument on your bench. It’s a computer with a very fancy analogue front end, and the traces are displayed in software. Before those were a thing though, a ‘scope was an all-analogue affair, with a vacuum-tube CRT showing the waveform in real time. [Joshua Coleman] has made one of these CRT ‘scopes from scratch , and we rather like it. Using a vintage two inch round tube, it includes all the relevant power supplies and input amplifiers for the deflection plates. It doesn’t include the triggers and timebase circuitry you’d expect from a desktop instrument though, so unless you add a sawtooth on its X input it’s only good for some Lissajous figures. But that’s not the point of a project like this one, because it’s likely even the cheapest of modern ‘scopes way exceeds any capabilities...
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