Revisiting Borland Turbo C and C++

Looking back on what programming used to be like can be a fascinatingly entertaining thing, which is why [Tough Developer] decided to download and try using Turbo C and C++, from version 1.0 to the… | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 1 year ago

The Sounds Emitted By Plants Are Real But They Are Still Not Talking

A recent paper published by researchers at the university of Tel Aviv in Cell on the sounds they captured from ‘stressed’ plants had parts of the internet abuzz with what this meant, wi… | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 1 year ago

Even Amstrad Spectrums Need Their Bugs Fixing

The history of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum is one that mirrors the fortunes of the British home computer industry, one of an early 8-bit boom followed by a sharp decline as manufacturers failed to cap… | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 1 year ago

If They Fire The Nukes, Will They Even Work?

2022 was a harrowing year in a long line of harrowing years. A brutal war in Europe raised the prospect of nuclear war as the leaders behind the invasion rattled sabers and made thinly veiled threa… | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 1 year ago

RP2040 And 5V Logic – Best Friends? This FX9000P Confirms!

Over the years, we’ve seen some modern microcontrollers turn out to be 5V-tolerant – now, RP2040 joins the crowd. Half a year ago, when we covered an ISA card based …read more | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 1 year ago

Classic Film Camera Goes Digital With Game Boy Tech

Despite having been technologically obsolete for a decade or two, analog photography is still practiced by hobbyists and artists to achieve a particular aesthetic. One might imagine a similar thing …read more | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 1 year ago

Modern Dance or Full-Body Keyboard? Why Not Both!

If you felt in your heart that Hackaday was a place that would forever be free from projects that require extensive choreography to pull off, we’re sorry to disappoint you. Because you’… | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 1 year ago

Working With Old High-Voltage EPROMs Is Fussy

EPROMs, those UV-erasable memory chips of the 80s and 90s, once played a crucial role in countless electronic devices. They’ve become relics of a bygone era, but for enthusiasts of vintage el… | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 1 year ago

Dive Into the Microwaves, the Water’s Dipolar

When the microwave oven started to gain popularity in the 60s and 70s, supporters and critics alike predicted that it would usher in the end of cooking as we knew it. Obviously that never quite hap… | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 1 year ago

The 4004 Upgrade You’ve Been Waiting For

You know how it is. You have an older computer, and you can’t run the latest software on it. Time to upgrade, right? Well, if you have been in this situation a very long time, [ryomuk] may ha… | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 1 year ago

Recreating the ZX Spectrum Unboxing Experience By Manufacturing a New Boxed One

Why scour the internet for a rare-as-hen’s-teeth new in box ZX Spectrum computer when you can instead order up some parts, assemble a basically all new ZX Spectrum along with the box, instruc… | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 1 year ago

Clever Mechanism Powers This All-Mechanical Filament Respooler

No matter how far down the 3D printing rabbit hole we descend, chances are pretty good that most of us won’t ever need to move filament from one spool to another. But even so, you’ve go… | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 1 year ago

This Week in Security: USB Boom! Acropalypse, and a Bitcoin Heist

We’ve covered a lot of sketchy USB devices over the years. And surely you know by now, if you find a USB drive, don’t plug it in to your computer. …read more | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 1 year ago

Who Needs Gasoline When You’ve Got Sodium?

YouTuber and serial debunker [Thunderf00t] was thinking about the use of sodium to counteract global warming. The theory is that sodium can be used as a fuel when combusted with air, producing a cl… | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 1 year ago

Working with BGAs: Soldering, Reballing, and Rework

In our previous article on Ball Grid Arrays (BGAs), we explored how to design circuit boards and how to route the signals coming out of a BGA package. But designing a board is one thing – sol… | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 1 year ago

Commodore 64 Reports the News

In the late 80s and into the 90s, [Cameron Kaiser] aka [ClassicHasClass] was an aspiring journalist, first becoming interested in the career in elementary school and then working on various …read more | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 1 year ago

Homebrew Tire Inflator Pushes the Limits of PVC Construction

Let’s just clear something up right from the start with this one: there’s literally no reason to build your own tire inflator from scratch, especially when you can buy a perfectly servi… | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 1 year ago

RP2040 Runs Linux Through RISC-V Emulation

We’re used to running Linux on CPUs where it belongs, and the consensus is that RP2040 just isn’t up for the task – no memory controller, and nowhere near enough RAM, to boot. At … | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 1 year ago

8086 Multiply Algorithm Gets Reverse Engineered

The 8086 has been around since 1978, so it’s pretty well understood. As the namesake of the prevalent x86 architecture, it’s often studied by those looking to learn more about …read more | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

Laser and Webcam Team Up for Micron-Resolution Flatness Measurements

When you want to measure the length, breadth, or depth of an object, there are plenty of instruments for the job. You can start with a tape measure, move up to calipers if you need more precision, … | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

Review: XHDATA D-219 Short Wave Radio Receiver

As any radio amateur will tell you, the world of radio abounds with exciting possibilities. Probably the simplest pursuit of them all is that of the SWL, or short wave listener, who scours the airw… | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

Mice Play in VR

Virtual Reality always seemed like a technology just out of reach, much like nuclear fusion, the flying car, or Linux on the desktop. It seems to be gaining steam in the last five years or so, thou… | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

Modded See ‘N Say Teaches the Sounds of City Life

The Fisher-Price See ‘n Say was introduced back in 1964, and since then has helped teach countless children the different sounds made by farm animals. But what about our urban youth? If they&… | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

Flipper Zero Mayhem Hat Adds Camera, More Radios

For a device advertised as the “Multi-tool Device for Hackers”, the Flipper Zero already offers a considerable list of onboard capabilities. But some hard decisions had to be made to …read more | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

Large E-Paper Slow Movie Player Offers Great Docs

Over the last couple of years we’ve seen several iterations of the “slow movie player” concept, where a film is broken up into individual frames which are displayed on an …read more | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

This Open Hardware Li-Ion Charger Skips the TP4056

There’s a good chance that if you build something which includes the ability to top up a lithium-ion battery, it’s going to involve the incredibly common TP4056 charger IC. Now, …read more | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

Electronic Bandage Speeds Wound Healing

We’re a long way from the dermal regenerators in Star Trek, but researchers at Northwestern University have made a leap forward in the convenient use of electrotherapy for wound healing. …read more | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

Upgrade RAM On Your Pi 4, The Fun Way

The Raspberry Pi shortage has been a meme in hacker circles for what feels like an eternity now, and the Pi 4 seems to be most affected – though, maybe it’s just its popularity. Neverth… | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

A CRT Audio Visualiser For When LEDs Just Won’t Do

It has been a recurring feature of consumer audio gear since the first magic eye tube blinked into life, to have some kind of visualization of the sound being played. Most recently this has meant a… | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

Norm Abram is Back, and Thanks to AI, Now in HD

We’ve said many times that while woodworking is a bit outside our wheelhouse, we have immense respect for those with the skill and patience to turn dead trees into practical objects. Among su… | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

Move Over Steel, Carbon-Reinforced Concrete Is Here

Reinforced concrete is the miracle material which made possible so many of the twentieth century’s most iconic structures, but here in this century its environmental footprint makes it something of …read more | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

DIY Tool Makes Wrapping Wiring Harnesses a Breeze

If you’re making a lot of wiring harnesses, wrapping them can become a bit of a drag. [Well Done Tips] wanted to make this process easier and built a wiring harness wrapping machine. The R… | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

The Forgotten Commodore 900: A Look At a Rare Prototype

Of the computers produced and prototyped by Commodore, most people are likely well-acquainted with the PET, VIC-20, C64 and C128, as well as the never released Commodore 65. Of these systems many e… | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

New Possibilities from Fading Lighting Technology

Like the incandescent bulb before it, the compact fluorescent (CFL) bulb is rapidly fading into obscurity as there are fewer and fewer reasons to use them over their LED successors. But there are p… | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

Low Power Challenge: Keep Plants Green and Clean with e-Paper Smart Tags

There are plenty of reasons to devote oneself to the care of houseplants — after all, a room full of bright, glossy-leaved plants can be a joy to behold, and that’s not even one of the … | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

Answering Some Pico Balloon Questions

When the US Air Force shot down some suspected Chinese spy balloons a couple of weeks ago, it was widely reported that one of the targets might have been a much more harmless amateur radio craft. T… | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

Sailing on a Sea of Seven-Segment Displays

The amount of information the humble seven-segment display can convey is surprising. There are the ten numerals, dead-ringers or reasonable approximations for about half the alphabet, and even a few …read more | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

Supersized Laptop Laughs in the Face of Portability

Sometimes a project needs to go big, and [Evan and Katelyn] threw portability to the wind to build the world’s biggest laptop. Stretching the believability of “bigger is better,” this …read more | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

Lo-Fi Tchaikovsky

[Kevin] over at Simple DIY ElectroMusic Projects recently upgraded his Lo-Fi Orchestra. To celebrate his 400th blog post, he programmed it to play Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Two Arduino Nanos, four Arduino Unos, …read more | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

Tiny11 Makes Windows 11 Small

If you often spin up a virtual machine just to run Windows, you might be sad that you have to allocate so much space for it. The Tiny11 project provides a Windows 11 installer that strips and compr… | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

UV Photography Box Is Great For Shooting Fancy Rocks

If you want to shoot photographs of various fluorescent UV-related phenomena, it’s hard to do so when ambient light is crowding out your subject. For this work, you’ll want a dedicated … | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

Wi-Fi Sensor for Rapid Prototyping

There might seem like a wide gulf between the rapid prototyping of a project and learning a completely new electronics platform, but with the right set of tools, these two tasks can go hand-in-hand… | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

Watch Sony Engineers Tear Down Sony’s VR Hardware

Teardowns are great because they let us peek not only at a product’s components, but also gain insight into the design decisions and implementations of hardware. For teardowns, we’re used …read more | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

Tiny PCB Banishes Soldering Fumes, Automatically

A fan to remove fumes is a handy thing to have when soldering, even better is a fan furnished with a filter. Better still is a fan that activates only when the iron is in use, turning off when the … | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

Anatomy Of a Fake CO2 Sensor

The pandemic brought with it a need to maintain adequate ventilation in enclosed spaces, and thus, there’s been considerable interest in inexpensive C02 monitors. Unfortunately, there are unscrupulous actors out …read more | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

Quantum Interconnects Get Faster

If you are a retrocomputer fan, you might remember when serial ports were a few hundred baud and busses ran at a few megahertz at the most. Today, of course, we have buses and fabric that can run a… | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

BBS Builder Is A Framework For Running Your Own PETSCII Paradise

The 80s and 90s were the glory days of the BBS. The plain old telephone system was responsible for bringing us connection to other digital beings, along with plenty of spuriously-obtained software … | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago

Puya PY32: The Cheapest Flash Microcontroller You Can Buy Is Actually an ARM Cortex-M0+

There’s a bit of a contest going on when it comes to which is the cheapest microcontroller, yet most of the really cheap ones have one big trade-off in that they have one-time programmable (O… | Continue reading


@hackaday.com | 2 years ago