Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they go over their picks for the best stories and hacks from the previous week. Things start off with a warning about the long-term viability of SSD backups, after which the discussion moves onto the limits of 3D printed PLA, the return of the Pebble smart watch, some unconventional aircraft, and an online KiCad schematic repository that has plenty of potential. You’ll also hear about a remarkable conference badge made from e-waste electronic shelf labels, filling 3D prints with foam, and a tiny TV powered by the ESP32. The episode wraps up with our wish for hacker-friendly repair manuals, and an interesting tale of underwater engineering from D-Day.

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 348 Show Notes:

News:

• A Friendly Reminder That Your Unpowered SSDs Are Probably Losing Data

What’s that Sound?

• Congratulations to [for_want_of_a_better_handle] for guessing the data center ambiance!

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Designing PLA To Hold Over A Metric Ton
• The New Pebble: Now 100% Open Source
• Magnus Effect Drone Flies, Looks Impossible
  • Your Quadcopter Has Three Propellers Too Many
  • KFC Winged Aircraft Actually Flies
• An Online Repository For KiCad Schematics
• Shelf Life Extended: Hacking E-Waste Tags Into Conference Badges
• On The Benefits Of Filling 3D Prints With Spray Foam

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
  • Get To The Games On Time With This Ancient-Style Waterclock
  • How To Design 3D Printed Pins That Won’t Break
  • Necroprinting Isn’t As Bad As It Sounds
  • Tiny Little TV Runs On ESP32
• Tom’s Picks:
  • Little Lie Detector Is Probably No Worse Than The Big Ones
  • Build Your Own Glasshole Detector
  • Portable Plasma Cutter Removes Rust, Packs A (Reasonable) Punch

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• Give Us One Manual For Normies, Another For Hackers
• How Cross-Channel Plumbing Fuelled The Allied March On Berlin

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

On What’s That Sound, Kristina got sort of close, but of course failed spectacularly. Will you fare better and perhaps win a Hackaday Podcast t-shirt? Mayhap you will.

After that, it’s on to the hacks and such, beginning with an interesting tack to take with a flat-Earther that involves two gyroscopes.  And we take a look at the design requirements when it comes to building synths for three-year-olds.

Then we discuss several awesome hacks such as a vehicle retrofit to add physical heated seat controls, an assistive radio that speaks the frequencies, and an acoustic radiometer build. Finally, we look at the joys of hacking an old Kindle, and get a handle on disappearing door handles.

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 347 Show Notes:

News:

• No news is good news! So we talk about Thanksgiving and what we’ve learned recently.

What’s that Sound?

• Who can say? Maybe you!

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Measuring Earth’s Rotation With Two Gyroscopes
  • No More Compass: True North via Earth s Rotation
• Baby’s First Synth Was Daddy’s First Project
• Barcodes, “Lasers”, And Fourier Transforms
  • The Eloquence Of The Barcode
• Retrofits Done Right: Physical Controls For Heated Seats
• Expensive Batteries Hide Cheap Tricks
• Assistive Radio Tells You What You Can’t See
  • Elli Furedy Brings Cyberpunk Games To Life

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
  • A PCB Can Be A Hydrofoil, If It Really Wants To
  • There’s Nothing Backwards About This Laser Cut Retrograde Clock
  • Building An Acoustic Radiometer
• Kristina’s Picks:
  • DIY TENS Machine Is A Pain-Relief PCB
  • DIY Polyphonic Synth Sings In 8-Part Harmony
  • Handling Human Waste In The Sky

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• The Unexpected Joys Of Hacking An Old Kindle
• Chinese Regulators May Kill Retractable Car Door Handles That Never Should Have Existed

Wait, what? Is it time for the podcast again? Seems like only yesterday that Dan joined Elliot for the weekly rundown of the choicest hacks for the last 1/52 of a year. but here we are. We had quite a bit of news to talk about, including the winners of the Component Abuse Challenge — warning, some components were actually abused for this challenge. They’re also a trillion pages deep over at the Internet Archive, a milestone that seems worth celebrating.

As for projects, both of us kicked things off with “Right to repair”-adjacent topics, first with a washing machine that gave up its secrets with IR and then with a car that refused to let its owner fix the brakes. We heated things up with a microwave foundry capable of melting cast iron — watch your toes! — and looked at a tiny ESP32 dev board with ludicrously small components. We saw surveyors go to war, watched a Lego sorting machine go through its paces, and learned about radar by spinning up a sonar set from first principles.

Finally, we wrapped things up with another Al Williams signature “Can’t Miss Articles” section, with his deep dive into the fun hackers can have with the now-deprecated US penny, and his nostalgic look at pneumatic tube systems.

Download this 100% GMO-free MP3.

Episode 346 Show Notes:

News:

• Congratulations To The 2025 Component Abuse Challenge Winners
• Meet The Shape That Cannot Pass Through Itself
• Internet Archive Hits One Trillion Web Pages

What’s that Sound?

• [Andy Geppert] knew that was the annoying sound of the elevator at the Courtyard by Marriot hotel in Pasadena.

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Reverse Engineering The Miele Diagnostic Interface
• Hyundai Paywalls Brake Pad Changes
• The Simplest Ultrasound Sensor Module, Minus The Module
  • Good Vibrations: Giving The HC-SR04 A Brain Transplant
  • Bend It Like (Sonar) Beacon With A Phased Array
  • Fundamentals Of FMCW Radar Help You Understand Your Car’s Point Of View
• Casting Metal Tools With Kitchen Appliances
  • • Microwave Forge Casts The Sinking-est Benchy Ever
    • More Microwave Metal Casting
• Possibly-Smallest ESP32 Board Uses Smallest-Footprint Parts
  • Hacking A Pill Camera
• WWII Secret Agents For Science

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks
  • Damn Fine (Solar Powered) Coffee
  • Humane Mousetrap Lets You Know It’s Caught Something
  • In Praise Of Plasma TVs
  • Exploring The Performance Gains Of Four-Pin MOSFETs
• Dan’s Picks:
  • Making A Machine To Sort One Million Pounds Of LEGO
  • The King Of Rocket Photography
  • Cheap VHF Antenna? Can Do!

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• Hackers Can’t Spend A Penny
  • Penny Miser Copper Coin Sorter
  • I Made a Super Simple Penny Sorter!
• Tech In Plain Sight: Pneumatic Tubes
  • The Safe House Milwaukee

It’s a wet November evening across Western Europe, the steel-grey clouds have obscured a rare low-latitude aurora this week, and Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List for this week’s podcast. And we’ve got a fine selection for your listening pleasure!

The 2025 Component Abuse Challenge has come to an end, so this week you’ll be hearing about a few of the entries. We’ve received an impressive number, and as always we’re bowled over by the ingenuity of Hackaday readers in pushing parts beyond their limits.

In the news is the potential discovery of a lost UNIX version in a dusty store room at the University of Utah, Version 4 of the OS, which appeared in 1973. Check out your own stores, for hidden nuggets of gold. In the hacks, we have two cameras at the opposite end of the resolution spectrum, but sharing some impressive reverse engineering. Mouse cameras and scanner cameras were both a thing a couple of decades ago, and it’s great to see people still pushing the boundaries. Then we look at the challenge of encoding Chinese text as Morse code, an online-upgraded multimeter, the art of making lenses for an LED lighting effect, and what must be the best recreation of a Star Wars light sabre we have ever seen. In quick hacks we have a bevvy of Component Abuse Challenge projects, a Minecraft server on a smart light bulb, and a long term test of smartphone battery charging techniques.

We round off with a couple of our long-form pieces, first the uncertainties about iRobot’s future and what it might mean for their ecosystem — think: cheap hackable robotics platform! — and then a look at FreeBSD as an alternative upgrade path for Windows users. It’s a path not without challenges, but the venerable OS still has plenty to give.

As always, you can listen using the links below, and we’ve laidout links to all the articles under discussion at the bottom of the page.

Download our finest MP3 right here.

Episode 345 Show Notes:

News:

• Component Abuse Challenge
• Have They Found A Complete UNIX V4?

What’s that Sound?

• Think you know what the sound is?  Put your metaphorical two cents in here.

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Camera Capabilities Unlocked From A Mouse
  • Optical Mouse Based Scanner
  • DIY Optical Sensor Breakout Board Makes DIY Optical Mouse
• Medium Format, 3 GigaPixel Camera Puts It All On The Line (Sensor)
• Morse Code For China
  • UTF-8 Is Beautiful
  • UTF-8 – “The Most Elegant Hack”
  • Reproduced And Recovered: The First Chinese Keyboard-based MingKwai Typewriter
• Screen-Accurate Lightsaber As A Practical Effect
• Cheap Multimeter Gets Webified
• An LED Projector As A Lighting Effect

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
  • RP2040 From Scratch: Roll Your Own Dev Board Magic
  • Running A Minecraft Server On A WiFi Light Bulb
  • Nest Thermostat: Now 100% Less Evil
  • Testing Whether Fast Charging Kills Smartphone Batteries, And Other Myths
• Jenny’s Picks:
  • 2025 Component Abuse Challenge: Dawg Gone LED Tester
  • 2025 Component Abuse Challenge: Glowing Neon From A 9 V Relay
  • 2025 Component Abuse Challenge: The Slip Ring In Your Parts Bin
  • Have A Slice Of Bumble Berry Pi

Can’t Miss Articles:

• If IRobot Falls, Hackers Are Ready To Wrangle Roombas
• Moving From Windows To FreeBSD As The Linux Chaos Alternative