February 11, 2021
digital, FT8, Hackaday Columns, joe taylor, Original Art, propagation, QSO, Radio Hacks, The $50 Ham, weak signal, WSJT-X

The $50 Ham: Digital Modes With WSJT-X

As it is generally practiced, ham radio is a little like going to the grocery store and striking up a conversation with everyone you bump into as you ply the aisles. Except that the grocery store is the size of the planet, and everyone brings their own shopping cart, some of which are highly modified […]

January 29, 2021
Hackaday Columns, News, ransomware, Security Hacks, sudo, This Week in Security

This Week In Security: Sudo, Database Breaches, And Ransomware

January 26, 2021
airliner, concorde, France, Hackaday Columns, History, supersonic, Transportation Hacks, uk

The Politics Of Supersonic Flight: The Concord(e)

Every nation has icons of national pride: a sports star, a space mission, or a piece of architecture. Usually they encapsulate a country’s spirit, so citizens can look up from their dreary lives and say “Now there‘s something I can take pride in!” Concorde, the supersonic airliner beloved by the late 20th century elite for […]

January 24, 2021
Hackaday Columns, Microcontrollers, newsletter, Raspberry Pi, slider

New Parts, New Hacks | Hackaday

The biggest news this week is that Raspberry Pi is no longer synonymous with single-board Linux computers: they’re dipping their toes into the microcontroller business with their first chip: the RP2040, and the supporting breakout board, the Pico. It’s an affordable, capable microcontroller being made by a firm that’s never made microcontrollers before, so that’s […]

January 14, 2021
Featured, Hackaday Columns, listening device, Phone Hacks, phone line, pots, privacy, surveillance, teardown

Teardown: Tap Trapper | Hackaday

The modern consumer is not overly concerned with their phone conversations being monitored. For one thing, Google and Amazon have done a tremendous job of conditioning them to believe that electronic gadgets listening to their every word isn’t just acceptable, but a near necessity in the 21st century. After all, if there was a better […]

January 8, 2021
Hackaday Columns, Microcontrollers, Software Development, stm32

Bare-Metal STM32: Universal, Asynchronous Communication With UARTs

One of the most basic and also most versatile communication interfaces on an MCU is the UART, or Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter. Usually found in the form of either a UART or USART, the former allows for pure asynchronous serial communication, whereas the latter adds flow control. When working with MCUs, they’re also one of the […]

January 1, 2021
2020 Hackaday Remoticon, cons, finite element analysis, Hackaday Columns, How-To, mechanical engineering, primer, strain, stress

Remoticon Video: The Mechanics Of Finite Element Analysis

Hardware hacking can be extremely multidisciplinary. If you only know bits and bytes, but not solder and electrons, you’re limited in what you can build. The same is true for mechanical design, where the forces of stress and strain suddenly apply to your project and the pile of code and PCBs comes crashing to the […]

December 30, 2020
2020 Hackaday Remoticon, ASIC, cons, Hackaday Columns, silicon design, skywater, skywater-pdk, workshop

Remoticon Video: From Zero To ASIC; How To Design In Silicon

Designing your own integrated circuits as a one-person operation from your home workshop sounds like science fiction. But 20 years ago, so did rolling your own circuit boards to host a 600 MHz microcontroller with firmware you wrote yourself. Turns out silicon design isn’t nearly as out of reach as it used to be and […]

December 17, 2020
2020 Hackaday Remoticon, cons, graphical programming, Hackaday Columns, How-To, max, pure data, Software Development, workshop

Remoticon Video: How To Use Max In Your Interactive Projects

When you want to quickly pull together a combination of media and user interaction, looking to some building blocks for the heavy lifting can be a lifesaver. That’s the idea behind Max, a graphical programming language that’s gained a loyal following among anyone building art installations, technology demos (think children’s museum), and user Kiosks. Guy […]

December 15, 2020
astronomy, astrophysics, Biography, Featured, Hackaday Columns, hydrogen, milky way, stars, the Sun

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Saw Through The Stars

We as humans are limited in the ways we can look at things ourselves, and rely on on the different perspectives and insights of others to help make sense of things. All it takes is one person to look at a data set and find something completely different that changes our fundamental perception of the […]

December 14, 2020
advent, cgi, DCMA, De Bruijn sequence, github, Hackaday Columns, Hackaday links, linear box filter, qemu, raymarching, render, solar, sun, sunspots, youtube-dl

Hackaday Links: December 13, 2020

Our Sun is getting a bit frisky these days, and has rewarded us with perhaps the best screensaver image ever taken. The incredibly detailed photo of a sunspot was actually taken back in January by the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, a 4-meter instrument with adaptive optics that can image the sun from the near-infrared […]

December 8, 2020
3d printing, art, Hackaday Columns, How-To, investment casting, Lost wax casting, metal, molten metal, sla

How To Get Into Lost Wax Casting (with A Dash Of 3D Printing)

I’ve always thought that there are three things you can do with metal: cut it, bend it, and join it. Sure, I knew you could melt it, but that was always something that happened in big foundries- you design something and ship it off to be cast in some large angular building churning out smoke. […]

December 5, 2020
AI, Hackaday Columns, image enhancement, law enforcement, neural networks, News, Rants

Sufficiently Advanced Technology And Justice

Imagine that you’re serving on a jury, and you’re given an image taken from a surveillance camera. It looks pretty much like the suspect, but the image has been “enhanced” by an AI from the original. Do you convict? How does this weigh out on the scales of reasonable doubt? Should you demand to see […]

November 23, 2020
Hackaday Columns, linux, Linux Fu, Linux Hacks, networking, ssh, sshd, virtual private network, VPN

Linux Fu: VPN For Free With SSH

If you see a lot of banner ads on certain websites, you know that without a Virtual Private Network (VPN), hackers will quickly ravage your computer and burn down your house. Well, that seems to be what they imply. In reality, though, there are two main reasons you might want a VPN connection. You can […]

November 21, 2020
finishing, Hackaday Columns, Inspiration, newsletter, Rants

Why You Need To Finish

Mike and I were talking about an interesting smart-glasses hack on the podcast. This was one of those projects where, even if you don’t need a pair of glasses with LEDs on them to help you navigate around, you just couldn’t help but marvel at a lot of the little design choices made throughout. For […]

November 13, 2020
digital signal processing, dsp, fft, Fourier, Goertzel, Hackaday Columns, skills, spreadsheet

DSP Spreadsheet: The Goertzel Algorithm Is Fourier’s Simpler Cousin

You probably have at least a nodding familiarity with the Fourier transform, a mathematical process for transforming a time-domain signal into a frequency domain signal. In particular, for computers, we don’t really have a nice equation so we use the discrete version of the transform which takes a series of measurements at regular intervals. If […]

November 5, 2020
Hackaday Columns, hard drives, Hardware, hdd, Interest, magnetic tape, Original Art, QLC, Shingled Magnetic Recording, SMR, ssd, storage, tape drive

Bespoke Storage Technologies: The Alphabet Soup Found In Modern Hard Drives And Beyond

It seems like just yesterday (maybe for some of you it was) we were installing Windows 3.1 off floppy drives onto a 256 MB hard drive, but hard drives have since gotten a lot bigger and a lot more complicated, and there are a lot more options than spinning platters. The explosion of storage options […]

September 19, 2020
Coding, Hackaday Columns, minimalism, mistakes were made, newsletter, Rants

Code For Hackers | Hackaday

Mike and I were talking about two very similar clock projects we’d both built recently: they both use ESP8266 modules to get the time over WiFi and NTP, and they both failed. Mike’s failed because he was visiting relatives in a different timezone with different WiFi credentials, and mine failed because daylight savings time caught […]

September 17, 2020
data center, data centers, DataCenter, Engineering, Hackaday Columns, Network Hacks, News

Underwater Datacenter Proves To Be A Success

Back in 2018, Microsoft began Project Natick, deploying a custom-designed data center to the sea floor off the coast of Scotland. Aiming to determine whether the underwater environment would bring benefits to energy efficiency, reliability, and performance, the project was spawned during ThinkWeek in 2014, an event designed to share and explore unconventional ideas. This […]

September 15, 2020
atmega, attiny, binary, firmware, firmware update, gcc, gimp, gnu, Hackaday Columns, How-To, image, ld, linker, microcontroller, Microcontrollers, objdump, OTA, Software Development, STM32F4, update, xxd

Putting The Firmware In Your Firmware

Performing over-the-air updates of devices in the field can be a tricky business. Reliability and recovery is of course key, but even getting the right bits to the right storage sectors can be a challenge. Recently I’ve been working on a project which called for the design of a new pathway to update some small […]

Category: Hackaday Columns