Kritik sah

Case modding took off in the late 90s, and taught us all that computers could (and should!) look awesome. Much of the aesthetic went mainstream, and now tons of computer cases come with lights and windows and all the rest. [WysWyg_Protogen] realized those simple case windows could be way cooler with a neat LCD hack, and set to work. The concept is simple. Take an old LCD monitor, remove the backlight and extraneous hardware, and then install it to the window in a computer case. When lit from behind via LEDs in the case, the screen creates a ghostly display through which the computer’s internals can still partially be seen. It’s a really compelling effect, and in theory, quite easy to achieve. All one need do is mount the stripped-down screen to the case and pipe it video from the graphics card. In practice, it’s a little tricky. Disassembling the screen and removing things like the anti-glare coating can be tough to do without damaging the delicate panel inside. The windows typicall

Airless tires have been “a few years away” from production for decades now. They’re one of the automotive version of vaporware (at least those meant for passenger vehicles), always on the cusp of being produced but somehow never materializing. They have a number of perks over traditional air-filled tires in that they are immune to flats and punctures, and since there aren’t any airless tires available at the local tire shop, [Driven Media] decided to make and test their own . The tires are surprisingly inexpensive to make. A few pieces of drainage tubing of varying diameters, cut to short lengths, and then bolted together with off-the-shelf hardware is all it takes, although they note that there was a tremendous amount of hardware needed to fasten all the pipe lengths together. With the structure in place they simply cut a tread off of a traditional tire and wrapped it around each of the four assemblies, then bolted them up to their Caterham street-legal race car for testing. While

Industrial machines have all kinds of moving parts that require regular lubrication in order to prevent wear and damage. Historically, these would require regular visits from maintenance personnel to keep them greased up and slippery. Automatic lubricators eliminate that job by regularly dosing machines with fresh grease, and [Big Clive] decided to see what makes them tick . The device can be set to deliver a full load of grease over a period of 1-12 months. The simplest models merely use a spring to slowly force grease out over time. Changing the spring changes the rate at which grease is dispensed. Chemical versions exist too. A chemical pill is selected and inserted into a chamber with liquid, which releases gas over time. As gas is released, it creates pressure which forces a plunger down, dispensing grease over time. Perhaps the fanciest versions are the electronic models, however, which have a dial on the back for selecting the rate of grease delivery. Turning the dial chan

We’ve seen a lot of camera slider builds here at Hackaday, and for good reason: having one really lets you take your project documentation, especially videos, to the next level. It’s one of those force multiplier builds — after you’ve completed it, it can help you make all your future projects just that much better. But we’re also no strangers to seeing these projects become overly complex, which can often make it difficult for others to replicate. But that’s not the case here. The motorized camera slider that [Sasa Karanovic] recently sent our way does exactly what you’d expect, and little else. That’s not meant as a dig — sometimes the best approach is to keep it simple. Unless you’re a professional photographer or videographer, it’s unlikely you need a complicated motion rig. This design is perfect for the hacker or maker who wants to spruce up their project videos, but doesn’t want to spend months fiddling with the design. A wheeled platform moves the camera along the extrusio

News just in from the folks at Raspberry Pi: the newest version of their Pico has WiFi and is called, obviously, the Pico W. We were going to get our hands on a sample unit and kick its tires, but it’s stuck in customs. Boo! So until it shows up, here’s what we can glean from the press releases and documentation. The Pico is, of course, the Raspberry Pi microcontroller dev board based on their RP2040 microcontroller . This in turn has two Cortex M0+ cores and a good chunk of onboard RAM, which has made it a popular target for MicroPython. They had some extra real estate on the PCB, so they’ve added an Infineon CYW43439 WiFi chip, and voila: Pico W. As of now, the WiFi is supported in both the C SDK and the pre-baked MicroPython image. It looks trivially easy to get it working, and it’s based on the time-tested lwIP stack , a classic in the embedded world. The CYW43439 is also Bluetooth capable, but there’s no firmware support for that yet, but we wouldn’t be surprised if it showed

Energy cannot be created or destroyed, but the most likely eventual conclusion of changing it from one form or another will be relatively useless heat. For those that workout with certain gym equipment, the change from chemical energy to heat is direct and completely wasted for anything other than keeping in shape. [Oliver] wanted to add a step in the middle to recover some of this energy, though, and built some gym equipment with a built-in generator . Right now he has started with the obvious exercise bike stand, which lends itself to being converted to a generator quite easily. It already had a fairly rudimentary motor-like apparatus in it in order to provide mechanical resistance, so at first glance it seems like simply adding some wires in the right spots would net some energy output. This didn’t turn out to be quite so easy, but after a couple of attempts [Oliver] was able to get a trickle of energy out to charge a phone, and with some more in-depth tinkering on the motor he fi

How can a few grams of battery, geared motor, and some nifty materials get a jumping robot over 30 meters into the air ? It wasn’t by copying a grasshopper, kangaroo, or an easily scared kitty. How was it done, then? It’s been observed that of all the things that are possible in nature, out of all the wonderful mechanisms, fluid and aerodynamics, and chemistry, there’s one thing that is so far undiscovered in a living thing: Continuous rotation. Yes, that’s right, the simple act of going roundy round is unique to mechanical devices rather than biological organisms. And when it comes to jumping robots, biomimicry can only go so far. With this distinct mechanical advantage in mind, [Elliot Hawkes] of the University of California Santa Barbara decided to look beyond biomimicry and instead focus on using that very thing that nature can’t do: Continuous rotation. As explained in the paper in Nature and demonstrated in the video below the break ,  the jumping robot being considered uses

While some decent lasers are out there for under USD 400, they tend to be a little small. What if you wanted something a little nicer but didn’t want to jump to the USD 2000 category? The answer for [Owen Schafer] was to build it with parts he had lying around and a few strategic purchases . While he was initially planning on using a diode laser, doing anything more than engraving is tricky. He purchased a cheap 40W CO 2 laser tube, but it meant that he needed water cooling, mirrors, and more complex stuff that a diode doesn’t need. The frame is aluminum extrusion held together with 3d printed plates. Given there was a powerful laser bouncing around with mirrors, a plywood box formed the enclosure. The stepper controller is an Arduino Mega running the Marlaser firmware. However, [Owen] admits perhaps a laser cutter-specific driver board would have been better as he spent many hours trying to get the Arduino to do what he wanted. Air ventilation is a tube with a fan that vents out a

When [bornach] browsed through his office’s free-cycling box he found an old novelty toy that lets you play simple tunes on miniature steel drums. Such a thing is probably fun for about five minutes – if it’s working, which this one wasn’t. But instead of throwing it away, [bornach] spotted an opportunity in the capacitive touch pads on top of those little drums: they looked perfect to be modified into an unusual mouse cursor controller . The operation started with [bornach] ripping out the original PCB and replacing it with an ESP32 D1 Mini. That board has a handy stack of touch-sensitive pins which could interface directly with the drums’ touch pads. He then programmed the ESP32 to interpret the signals as mouse movements and button presses, and send the results to a computer through a BlueTooth connection. Operating the mouse drums is so straightforward that they almost appear made for this purpose: you slide your finger in circles along the touch pads to move the cursor in the X

Like today’s Intel-AMD duopoly, the market for home computer CPUs in the 1970s and ’80s was dominated by two players: Zilog with their Z80, and MOS Technology with their 6502 processor. But unlike today, even if two computers had the same CPU, it didn’t mean the two were software compatible: differences in memory layout, video interfaces, and storage media meant that software developed for an Atari 2600 wouldn’t run on an Apple I, despite the two sharing the same basic CPU architecture. [Augusto Baffa]’s latest modern retrocomputer design, the Baffatari 2600, cleverly demonstrates that the difference between those two computers really is only skin-deep. The Baffatari is a plug-in board that adds Atari 2600 functionality to [Augusto]’s earlier Baffa-6502 system, which was designed to be Apple I-compatible. Since both the Apple and the Atari are powered by 6502 CPUs, only a few peripherals need to be swapped to change one into the other. Sitting on the Baffatari board are two chips e

Even though not every Hackaday reader is likely to be a radio enthusiast, it’s a fair guess that many of you will have experimented with an RTL-SDR USB dongle by now. These super-cheap devices are intended for digital TV reception and contain an RTL2832 chip, which with the proper software, can be pushed into service as a general purpose software defined radio receiver. For around $10 USD they’re fantastic value and a lot of fun to play with, even if they’re not the best radio ever. How to improve the lackluster performance? One of the easiest and cheapest ways is simply to shield it from RF noise, which [Alan R] has done with something as mundane as a tubular fizzy orange tablet container . This is probably one of the simpler hacks you’ll see on this site, as all it involves is making an appropriate hole in the end of the tube and shielding the whole with some aluminium foil sticky tape. But the benefits can be seen immediately in the form of reduced FM broadcast band interference,

Drums are an exciting instrument to learn to play, but often prohibitive if there are housemates or close neighbors involved. For that problem there are still electronic drums which can be played much more quietly, but then the problem becomes one of price. To solve at least part of that one, [Jeremy] turned to using an Arduino to build a drum module on his own , but he still had to solve yet a third problem: how to make the Arduino fast enough for the drums to sound natural. Playing music in real life requires precise timing, so the choice of C++ as a language poses some problems as it’s not typically as fast as lower-level languages. It is much easier to work with though, and [Jeremy] explains this in great detail over a series of blog posts detailing his drum kit’s design. Some of the solutions to the software timing are made up for with the hardware on the specific Arduino he chose to use, including an even system, a speedy EEPROM, hardware timers, and an ADC that can sample at 1

With music consumption having long ago moved to a streaming model in many parts of the world, it sometimes feels as though, just like the rotary telephone dial, kids might not even know what a radio was, let alone own one. But there was a time when broadcasting pop music over the airwaves was a deeply subversive activity for Europeans at least, as the lumbering state monopoly broadcasters were challenged by illegal pirate stations carrying the cutting edge music they had failed to provide. [Ringway Manchester] has the story of one such pirate station which broadcast across the city for a few years in the 1970s, and it’s a fascinating tale indeed. It takes the form of a series of six videos, the first of which we’ve embedded below the break. The next installment is placed as an embedded link at the end of each video, and it’s worth sitting down for the full set. The action starts in early 1973 when a group of young radio enthusiast friends, left without access to a station of their

Universal Serial Bus has been the de facto standard for sending information to and from computer peripherals for almost two decades, but despite the word “universal” in the name this wasn’t always the case. Plenty of competing standards, including USB, existed in the computing world in the decades before it came to dominance, and if you’re trying to recover data from a computer without USB you might have to get creative with how it’s done . [Ben] recently came across a 80486 with this problem, so he had to get creative to recover the contents of the drive. He calls it the “lunchbox” computer due to its form factor, and while it doesn’t have USB it does have a tried-and-trusted serial port to communicate with other computers. [Ben] wrote up a piece of software for both the receiving computer and the sending computer in order to copy the drive sectors one by one across a serial link to a standalone computer running Windows XP, and was able to recover the contents of the drive that wa

It’s fair to say that right now is probably the worst possible time you could choose to design a new piece of hardware. Of course the reality is that, even in the middle of a parts shortage that’s driving the cost of many components through the roof (if you can even find them), we can’t just stop building new devices. In practice, that means you’ll need to be a bit more flexible when embarking on a new design — it’s like the Stones said: “You can’t always get what you want / But if you try sometime you’ll find / You get what you need” For [Ryan Walmsley], that meant basing his new outdoor LoRa gateway on the ubiquitous Raspberry Pi was a non-starter . So what could he use in its place? The software situation for the Nano Pi Duo looked pretty poor, and while the Onion Omega 2+ was initially compelling, a bug in the hardware SPI seemed to take it out of the running. But after more research, he found there was a software implementation that would fit the bill. With his Pi alternative i

For some power users, the one-hundred-and-something keys on regular keyboards just aren’t enough for their everyday tasks. Macro keypads are a popular way of extending one’s input capabilities, and there are almost as many examples as there are power users. [Ulrich]’s latest project, dubbed the LowPow E-Ink ShortKeyboard , is a beautiful and meticulously documented design for a macro pad that includes several unusual features. Built around an ESP32-S3 microcontroller, the ShortKeyboard features nine programmable function keys plus an analog joystick and a rotary encoder. The keys are based on Cherry MX RED types commonly seen in mechanical keyboards, illuminated from below by by miniature RGB LEDs. A big e-ink display in the middle can be used to show the function of each key. That’s neat, but it’s the additional features that really make this device stand out from the crowd. One of those is connectivity: communication with the host PC can go through a regular USB-C cable, but than

The 2022 Hackaday Prize is focused on taking care of the planet. The theme of our second challenge round, “Reduce, Recycle, Revamp” is all about tailoring your projects to make use of existing resources and keeping material out of the landfill rather than contributing to it. Our judges have scrutinized the entries and handed me the sealed envelope. All of these ten projects will receive $500 right now and are eligible for the Grand Prize of $50,000, to be announced in November. We were looking for two broad types of recycling projects in this round, either projects that incorporate a significant recycled component in their build, or projects that facilitate recycling themselves, and frankly we got a good mix of both! On the first front, we saw projects that recycled plastic bottles , LCD screens , and the inevitable acrylic off-cuts that result when laser cutting. The X-PC even recycles most of the guts of laptop computers by creating a frame for mounting them as standalone deskt

When fully-3D video games started arriving in the early 90s, some companies were more prepared for the change than others. Indeed, it would take nearly a decade of experimentation before 3D virtual spaces felt natural. Even then, Konami seems to have shot themselves in the foot at the beginning of this era with their first foray into 3D arcade games. [Mog] shows us the ins-and-outs of these platforms while trying to bring them back to life via MAME . These arcade machines were among the first available with fully-3D environments, but compared to offerings from other companies are curiously underpowered, even for the time. They include only a single digital signal processor which is tasked with calculating all of the scene geometry while competing machines would use multiple DSP chips to do the same job. As a result the resolution and frame rate are very low. Nonetheless, [Mog] set out to get it working in MAME . To accomplish this task, [Mog] turned to a set of development tools pro

We’ve all heard of the smoke test, and we know that it’s the lowest possible bar for performance of an electronic device. If it doesn’t burst into flames when power is applied, you’re good to go for more functional testing. But the smoke test means something else for cars, especially those powered by diesel fuel. And passing diesel exhaust tests can become something of a chore. To make passing these tests a little easier, [Janis Alnis] came up with this diesel exhaust monitor that measures the opacity of his car’s emissions. The sensor itself is quite simple, and mimics what commercial exhaust analyzers use: a LED and a photodiode at opposite ends of a tube of a specified length. Soot particles in exhaust passing through the tube will scatter light in a predictable way, and the numbers work out that a passing grade is anything greater than 53% transmission. The sensor body is cobbled together from brass pipe fittings with glass windows epoxied into each end. Exhaust enters via a te