Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams took a break to talk about their favorite hacks last week. You can drop in to hear about articulated mirrors, triacs, and even continuous 3D-printing modifications.

Flying on an airplane this weekend? Maybe wait until you get back to read about how the air traffic control works. Back home, you can order a pizza on a Wii or run classic Basic games on a calculator.

For the can’t miss articles, the guys talked about very low Earth orbit satellites and talked about readers who dumpster dive.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and don’t be shy. Tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

As always, this episode is available in DRM-free MP3.

Episode 354 Show Notes:

What’s that Sound?

• Congratulations to [Spybob42], who guessed last week’s sound. Come back next week to take your shot at a coveted Hackaday Podcast T-Shirt.

News

• Washington State Bill Seeks To Add Firearms Detection To 3D Printers

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• How To Use Tiny Open Loop Actuators For A Living Mirror
  • Making A Wooden Multi-Mirror Display Device
  • Daniel Rozin Wooden Mirror
• A Guide To Using Triacs For Switching AC
• Testing A Continuous Printing Mod For The Bambu Lab A1 Mini
  • swapmod A1m kit – SWAP SYSTEMS
  • 3D Printer Add On Makes Sharp(ie) Colors
• Accurately Aiming Audio With An Ultrasonic Array
  • Acoustic Mirrors: How To Find Planes Without RADAR
  • A Phased-Array Ultrasonic 3D Scanner From Scratch
  • Supercon 2024: Killing Mosquitoes With Freaking Drones, And Sonar
  • Build A Parametric Speaker Of Your Own
• Self-Powered Top Spins For Hours
• Inside Air Traffic Control

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
  • The Windows Interface You Didn’t Like, For Linux
  • Binary And Digital Gradients For Telling Time
  • Ordering Pizza On The Nintendo Wii (Again)
• Al’s Picks:
  • BASIC On A Calculator Again
    • https://github.com/ctosullivan/Python-101-BASIC-Games
  • Robot Sees Light With No CPU
  • Flux And Solder Paste Dispenser Looks Good While Doing It

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• Skimming Satellites: On The Edge Of The Atmosphere

• Ask Hackaday: Do You Curb Shop Components?

Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they swap their favorite hacks and stories from the week. In this episode, they’ll start off by marveling over the evolution of the “smart knob” and other open hardware input devices, then discuss a futuristic propulsion technology you can demo in your own kitchen sink, and a cheap handheld game system that get’s a new lease on life thanks to the latest version of the ESP32 microcontroller.

From there they’ll cover spinning CRTs, creating custom GUIs on Android, and yet another thing you can build of out that old Ender 3 collecting dust in the basement. The episode wraps up with a discussion about putting Valve’s Steam Deck to work and a look at the history-making medical evacuation of the International Space Station.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

As always, this episode is available in DRM-free MP3.

Episode 353 Show Notes:

What’s that Sound?

• Think you know that sound? Fill out this form for a chance to win a Hackaday Podcast T-Shirt.

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Simplifying The SmartKnob
  • Haptic Smart Knob Does Several Jobs
• Yamato-1: The World’s First Ship With Magnetohydrodynamic Propulsion
  • A Magnetohydrodynamic Drive In The Kitchen Sink
  • Bulked Up MHD Drive Makes Waves While Standing Still
• When Electricity Doesn’t Take The Shortest Path
• Looking At A Real Fake Raspberry Pi RP2040 Board
• An Open Source Electromagnetic Resonance Tablet
  • Glitching USB Firmware For Fun
• ESP32-P4 Powers Retro Handheld After A Transplant
  • Teardown: 168-in-1 Retro Handheld Game
  • GitHub – ducalex/retro-go: Retro emulation for the ODROID-GO and other ESP32 devices

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
  • Hacking The Krups Cook4Me Smart Cooking Pot For Doom
  • Great Trains, Not So Great AI Chatbot Security
  • An SD Card Of Your Own For Microcontroller Projects
  • Making A CRT Spin Right Round, Round, Round
• Tom’s Picks:
  • Smart Home? Make It Smart Quarters With This LCARS Dashboard
  • Windows? Linux? Browser? Same Executable
  • EnderSpark: Convert Your Broken Creality FDM Printer Into An EDM Machine!

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• A Linux Power User Puts SteamOS To Work
  • Welcome to the CachyOS Wiki
  • Bazzite – The operating system for the next generation of gamers

• ISS Medical Emergency: An Orbital Ambulance Ride

This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over coffee to bring you the latest news, mystery sound results show, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous seven days or so.

On What’s That Sound, Kristina had no idea what was going on, but [Flippin’ Heck] knew it was a flip dot display, and won a Hackaday Podcast t-shirt! Congratulations!

After that, it’s on to the hacks and such, with not one but two ways of seeing sound.  We also take a look at benchmarking various Windows releases against each other on 12-year-old hardware.

We also talk about painting on floppies and glitching out jpegs in a binary text editor. Finally, we discuss the history and safety of autopilot, and take a look at the humble time clock.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download in DRM-free MP3 and savor at your leisure.

Episode 352 Show Notes:

News:

• 2025: As The Hardware World Turns
• Only Known Copy Of UNIX V4 Recovered From Tape
• How Wind Nearly Took Down Boulder NTP

What’s that Sound?

• Congrats to [Flippin’ Heck] who knew this was a flip dot display!

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Seeing Sound For Under $200
  • Flow Visualization With Schlieren Photography
  • Measuring Caffeine Content At Home
• Quote Printer Keeps Receipts
• Modifying A QingPing Air Quality Monitor For Local MQTT Access
  • Jailbreaking The Amazon Echo Show
• Print Pixel Art To A Floppy Disk
  • It’s Like LightScribe, But For Floppies!
• Benchmarking Windows Against Itself, From Windows XP To Windows 11
• Messing With JPEGs In A Text Editor Is Fun And Glitchy
  • Not Acceptable!

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
  • Drive 1024×600 Pixels Via I2C With An ATtiny85
  • An RP2040 Powered ADS-B Receiver
  • Graphing Calculator Gets USB-C Upgrade
  • Qron0b: A Minimalist, Low-Power BCD Wristwatch
  • Print Your Next LED Bezel
• Kristina’s Picks:
  • Tired Of Burnt Fingers? Try PID Tuning The Hot Glue Gun
  • Super Mario 64, Now With Microtransactions
  • Popular Science Experiments In Sound During The 19th-Century

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• How Advanced Autopilots Make Airplanes Safer When Humans Go AWOL
• The Time Clock Has Stood The Test Of Time