Höre Hackaday Podcast

When Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams need a break from writing posts, they hop on the podcast and talk about their favorite stories of the past week. Want to know what they were talking about? Listen in below and find out! In an unusual twist, a listener sent in the sound for this week's What's This Sound competition, so it turns out Elliot and Al were both stumped for a change. See if you can do better, and you might just score a Hackaday Podcast T-shirt. On the hacking front, the guys talked about what they hope to see as entries in the pet hacking contest, quantum diamonds (no kidding), spectrometers, and several science projects. There was talk of a tiny robot, a space mouse—the computer kind, not a flying rodent—and even an old-fashioned photophone that let Alexander Graham Bell use the sun like a string on a paper cup telephone. Things really heat up at the end, when there is talk about computer programming ranging from COBOL to Vibe programming. In case you've missed it, Vibe programming is basically delegating your work to the AI, but do you really want to? Maybe, if your job is to convert all that old COBOL code.

Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they talk about the best stories and hacks of the week. This episode starts off with a discussion of the Vintage Computer Festival East and Philadelphia Maker Faire -- two incredible events that just so happened to be scheduled for the same weekend. From there the discussion moves on to the latest developments in DIY soft robotics, the challenge of running Linux on 8-pin ICs, hardware mods to improve WiFi reception on cheap ESP32 development boards, and what's keeping old smartphones from being reused as general purpose computers. You'll also hear about Command and Conquer: Red Alert running on the Pi Pico 2, highly suspect USB-C splitters, and producing professional looking PCBs at home with a fiber laser. Stick around to the end to hear about the current state of non-Google web browsers, and a unique new machine that can engrave circuit boards with remarkable accuracy. Check out the links over on Hackaday [https://wp.me/paBn4l-3eBW] if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

This week, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up across the (stupid, lousy) time zones to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous week. Again, no news is good news. On What's That Sound, Kristina didn't get close at all, but at least had a guess this time. If you think you can identify the sound amid all the talking, you could win a Hackaday Podcast t-shirt! After that, it's on to the hacks and such, beginning with a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation when it comes to a pair of formerly-cloud music players. We take a look at a crazy keyboard hack, some even crazier conductive string, and a perfectly cromulent list of 70 DIY synths on one wild webpage. Finally, we rethink body art with LEDs, and take a look at a couple of printing techniques that are a hundred years or so apart in their invention. 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 [https://hackaday.com/2025/04/04/hackaday-podcast-episode-315-conductive-string-theory-decloudified-music-players-and-wild-printing-tech/]!

It might not be Pi Day anymore, but Elliot and Dan got together for the approximately 100*Pi-th episode of the Podcast to run through the week's coolest hacks. Ultrasound seemed to be one of the themes, with a deep dive into finding bugs with sonar as well as using sound to cut the cheese -- and cakes and pies, too. The aesthetics of PCBs were much on our minds, too, from full-color graphics on demand to glow-in-the-dark silkscreens. Is automation really needed to embed fiber optics in concrete? Absolutely! How do you put plasma in a bottle? Apparently, with kombucha, Nichrome, and silicone. If you need to manage your M:TG cards, scribble on the walls, or build a mechanical chase light, we've got the details. And what exactly is a supercomputer? We can't define it, but we know one when we see it. Check out all the links over at Hackday! [https://wp.me/paBn4l-3ecA]

We're firmly in Europe this week on the Hackaday podcast, as Elliot Williams and Jenny List are freshly returned from Berlin and Hackaday Europe. A few days of mingling with the Hackaday community, going through mild panic over badges and SAOs, and enjoying the unique atmosphere of that city. After discussing the weekend's festivities we dive right into the hacks, touching on the coolest of thermal cameras, wildly inefficient but very entertaining wireless power transfer, and a restrospective on the capacitor plague from the early 2000s. Was it industrial espionage gone wrong, or something else? We also take a moment to consider spring PCB cnnectors, as used by both one of the Hackaday Europe SAOs, and a rather neat PCB resistance decade box, before looking at a tryly astounding PCB blinky that sets a new miniaturisation standard. In our quick roundup the standouts are a 1970s British kit synthesiser and an emulated 6502 system written in shell script, and in the can't-miss section we look at a new contender fro the smallest microcontroller, and the posibility that a century of waste coal ash may conceal a fortune in rare earth elements. Follow the links over at Hackaday [https://wp.me/paBn4l-3dSH].