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Showing posts from June, 2026

After the Dust Settles: Building Pebble Apps

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For a piece of wearable technology, Pebble has had a fairly “rocky” history. One of the most successful Kickstarters of its era, it went on to get acquired by FitBit, quietly shelved by them, then acquired by Google and open-sourced, where it’s now somewhat back in the hands of its original creator. Its new open source nature means that regular people can develop for these popular watches again, and [Coconauts] have developed a guide for these watches, new and old . The original watches had to be coded using C, which is a fundamental language but one that generally isn’t used much in the modern world outside of embedded systems and other areas where efficieny is important. C does much less hand-holding than modern languages, so there are a number of things to keep an eye on when coding for these watches that languages like Rust, Go, and Python handle on their own. Regardless, the two-person team recently built a pair of apps for the Pebble platform as part of an...

Bilingual E-paper News Feed Helps Brush Up Language Skills

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[Bob] recently completed LanguageLearner , a desktop device that increases his exposure to a second language by offering up bite-sized news items in Italian, with a complementary English translation. Even better, it’s a project made almost entirely from inexpensive parts he had on hand; it consists of little more than a Raspberry Pi Pico W, a 4.2″ E-paper display, and a 3D-printed stand. Here’s how it works: once every few hours, the system wakes up and uses its WiFi connection to fetch news from an Italian RSS feed. Having chosen a slice of current events, it translates to English with an API call then displays both versions on the display: original Italian up top, translated English below. Consisting of little more than a Raspberry Pi Pico W, an E-paper display, and a 3D-printed stand, it’s a great use of spare parts. E-paper is ideal for a semi-passive project like this because once data is written to the display, there it remains without needing power or u...

Know Your Food: Cheesemaking

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There’s a thing that people who grew up on farms all share: a connection with food production that isn’t some mystical rose-tinted woo from a TV chef, but instead a practical general knowledge from being there on the ground. A glance at a crop in a field and you immediately recognise what it is, if it’s ploughing time you’ll know the soil type, and there’s always either too little, or too much rain. For a given foodstuff you’ll know far too much about where it came from, because if your dad wasn’t involved in its production, the chances are someone he knew was. You take this for granted, after all doesn’t everyone have this general knowledge? Seemingly not. Hackaday is not a cooking channel, but I know we’re all interested here in how things are made. Shouldn’t that also extend to what we eat? It’s fashionable to follow a back-to-nature line that all commercial foodstuffs are somehow over-processed junk, but without the ...