2025-08-02 10:00:36
Do you use a spell checker? We’ll guess you do. Would you use a button that just said “correct all spelling errors in document?” Hopefully not. Your word processor probably doesn’t even offer that as an option. Why? Because a spellchecker will reject things not in its dictionary (like Hackaday, maybe). It may guess the wrong word as the correct word. Of course, it also may miss things like “too” vs. “two.” So why would you just blindly accept AI code review? You wouldn’t, and that’s [Bill Mill’s] point with his recent tool made to help him do better code reviews.
He points out that he ignores most of the suggestions the tool outputs, but that it has saved him from some errors. Like a spellcheck, sometimes you just hit ignore. But at least you don’t have to check every single word.
The basic use case is to evaluate PRs (pull requests) before sending them or when receiving them. He does mention that it would be rude to simply dump the tool’s comments into your comments on a PR. This really just flags places a human should look at with more discernment.
The program uses a command-line interface to your choice of LLM. You can use local models or select among remote models if you have a key. For example, you can get a free key for Google Gemini and set it up according to the instructions for the llm program. Of course, many people will be more interested in running it locally so you don’t share your code with the AI’s corporate overlords. Of course, too, if you don’t mind sharing, there are plenty of tools like GitHub Copilot that will happily do the same thing for you.
The review tool is just a bash script, so it is easy to change, including the system prompt, which you could tweak to your liking:
Please review this PR as if you were a senior engineer.
## Focus Areas
– Architecture and design decisions
– Potential bugs and edge cases
– Performance considerations
– Security implications
– Code maintainability and best practices
– Test coverage## Review Format
– Start with a brief summary of the PR purpose and changes
– List strengths of the implementation
– Identify issues and improvement opportunities (ordered by priority)
– Provide specific code examples for suggested changes where applicablePlease be specific, constructive, and actionable in your feedback. Output the review in markdown format.
Will you use a tool like this? Will you change the prompt? Let us know in the comments. If you want to play more with local LLMs (and you have a big graphics card), check out msty.
2025-08-02 07:00:47
Once upon a time, you could buy floppy drive cleaning disks at just about any stationary or computer store. These days, they’re harder to find. If you want to build one yourself, though, you might do well to follow [Gammitin]’s fine example.
[Gammitin] has been down this road before, having built head cleaning disks before. This time, a US patent was the inspiration. It basically indicated that the spinning cleaning disc inside should be made of spunbonded polyester or spunbonded olefin (such as Dupont Tyvek)—so those materials were sought out.
The project began with [Gammitin] disassembling a standard floppy disk down to its bare components. The spindle was then separated from the magnetic platter, and refitted with a disc of Tyvek material using super glue. The disk housing was then glued back together with more super glue, and labelled as a “Floppy Cleaning Disk.” Using the disk is as simple as putting a few drops of isopropyl alcohol on the Tyvek material, and inserting it into a drive. [Gammitin] tested it with an old Olivetti machine, and found it cleaned up the heads nicely.
Sometimes, when a commercial product ceases to exist, you can just make your own at home. This is a great example of that ethos. If you’re cooking up your own tools and accessories to keep your old machines running, we’d love to hear all about it on the tipsline!
2025-08-02 04:00:57
Electric guitars are great, but they’re just so 20th century. You’d think decades of musicians riffing on the instrument would mean there are no hacks left in the humble axe. You’d think so, but you’d be wrong. [Michael], for one, has taken it upon himself to reinvent the electric guitar for the digital era.
Gone are the strings, and the frets have vanished as well. The neck of this guitar is one long custom PCB, looking very sleek with black solder mask. Gold pads serve as touch sensors to give tone data over i2c (from unspecified touch sensing chips) to the Amtel Mega 32u4 at the heart of the build.
With no strings, strumming won’t work, so a laptop-style touchpad serves instead. That means every user interaction with this guitar is with capacitive touch sensors talking i2c. The X and Y coordinates of the touch, along with pressure are sent to the processor over the i2c bus, triggering an interrupt and offering quite a bit of opportunity for sound control.
Said sound control is, of course, done in MIDI. This lets the guitar control a whole variety of synths and/or software, and of course [Michael] is using more futuristic-sounding synths than a pack of guitar samples. That said, what exactly goes on with the MIDI controls is left frustratingly vague. Obviously fretting provides note selection, but does the touchpad just send a “note start” command, or are the X, Y and pressure data used in interesting ways? Is there multitouch support? The video doesn’t say.
How, exactly, the obviously-plastic body of the guitar was manufactured is also left unsaid. Is it a large resin print? SLS? It looks injection-molded, but that makes no sense for a one-off prototype. On the other hand, it looks like he’s selling these, so it may very well be an injection-molded production case we’re seeing being assembled here, and not a prototype at all.
For all the video leaves us wanting more information, we can’t help but admit the end product both looks and sounds very cool. (Skip to the 4:50 mark in the embedded video to hear it in action.) The only thing that would improve it would be a hurdy-gurdy mode. Thanks to [Michael] for the tip, and remember we want to hear tips about all the weird and wonderful hacked-together instruments you make or find on the web.
2025-08-02 02:30:00
Do you like buses, or do you just like the flippy-flappy displays they use to show route information? Either way, you’ll probably love the flip-disc clock created by [David Plass].
The build is based around four seven-segment flip disc displays. The modules in question are from Flipo.io. They use a hefty 0.5 amp pulse to create a magnetic field strong enough to flip the discs from one side to the other with coils placed underneath the fluro/black flipdots themselves. The modules are controlled by a Wemos D1, which uses Wi-Fi to query a NTP server to keep accurate time. It then drives the necessary segments to display the current time. The whole thing is assembled in what appears to be some kind of kitchen storage tub.
Notably, the clock flips a couple dots once every second to meet the requirements of our One-Hertz Challenge. This also makes it obvious that the clock is working when it would otherwise be static. However, [David] notes commenting out that part of the code at times, as it can be quite loud!
This clock has got fluro dots, it’s well-executed, and it’s a fine entry to the 2025 One-Hertz Challenge. We’ve also previously explored how these beautiful displays work in detail, too. Meanwhile, if you’re busy repurposing some other kind of mechanical display technology, don’t hesitate to let us know!
2025-08-02 01:00:03
BornHack is a week-long summer hacker camp in a forest on the Danish island of Fyn, that consistently delivers a very pleasant experience for those prepared to make the journey. This year’s version was the tenth iteration of the camp and it finished a week ago, and having returned exhausted and dried my camping gear after a Biblical rainstorm on the last day, it’s time to take a look at the badges. In case you are surprised by the plural, indeed, this event had not one badge but two. Last year’s badge suffered some logistical issues and arrived too late for the camp, so as a special treat it was there alongside the 2025 badge for holders of BornHack 2024 tickets. So without further ado, it’s time to open the pack for Hackaday and see what fun awaits us.
Both badges are the work of [Thomas Flummer], someone who has appeared here more than once over the years with an array of beautifully designed badges and SAOs. First out is the 2024 one, and it’s a slim rectangular board around 140 by 45 mm with a row of addressable LEDs and a BornHack logo on the front, and the electronics and LiPo battery on the rear. It’s elegant in its simplicity, with an ESP32-C3 Mini module, battery charger and power supply circuit, and an NT3H2x11 addressable NFC chip and associated antenna. There are also the usual SAO and QWiC connectors flus some GPIO pads for expandability.
The LEDs on the front can display pretty colours of course, but their intended use is for persistence-of-vision displays. On its GitHub repository are several firmwares should you wish to play around with this. Meanwhile the NFC chip is interesting in itself, as it’s both a passive tag that can be read when the badge is turned off, and a tag that can be addressed by the ESP32. It was intended for an NFC game at BornHack 2024, but it remains a part worth investigating.
Having given some attention to the 2024 badge it’s time to pick up the 2025 model, which is a large white PCB in the shape of an Ø character. On the front is a BornHack logo and a row of backlit status icons on the left hand side, while on the back you’ll find the electronics and a pair of AA batteries. It’s a LoRa experimentation board, so alongside another ESP32-C3 Mini there’s a European 868 MHz LoRa Module. There’s a PCB antenna on the board but this module has one of those tiny co-axial connectors and was supplied with a Molex stick-on antenna. Full design details can be found in its GitHub repository.
Out-of-the-box, this badge came with a Meshtastic node firmware, which for a hacker camp badge worked very well indeed. It’s easy enough to connect to the Meshtastic app on your smartphone, and soon a plethora of nodes sprang up. Most of you will be familiar with Meshtastic networks so it’s not worth going into too much detail on that front, but the site offered an interesting opportunity to test both those Molex antennas, and 868 MHz propagation in a real-world setting.
The BornHack site is not the least challenging location from a UHF radio perspective, being a series of former gravel pits interspersed with dense forest over a large area. Thus instead of line-of-sight it offers earth banks and dense foliage, neither ideal for radio propagation. I tested it by going to the far corners of the site and sending messages to my friends, and I was pleased to find I could cover the whole terrain with no more than a single intermediate badge providing a relay. This is as much to do with the clever tech behind LoRa as it is the Molex antennas, but I was still pleasantly surprised that they worked that well. In use it makes far more sense to take power from a USB-C source than those batteries, and I fond it didn’t appreciably accelerate my phone’s power drain.
So at the camp with two badges there was plenty to do with both of them, and it’s pleasing to see a design very much focused around life after the camp. I particularly like the “10” they form together as a reference to the tenth BornHack. The 2024 badge provides a fun light show and a chance to experiment with an interesting NFC chip, while there’s every chance you’ll encounter one of the 2025 badges providing Meshtastic service in a European hackerspace over the next few years, or being carried around as a personal node.
The two official badges weren’t entirely the end of the badge story for me at BornHack, because along the way I also picked up a sporklogic.com EMF Explorer badge from its creator [Darcy Neal]. It’s an analogue circuit for listening to ambient electric fields in glorious stereo which is enough fun, but the party piece is the UFO design backlit by a green LED. One of the most effective uses of unclad PCB I have seen on a badge.
2025-08-02 00:00:29
Another week, another Hackaday podcast, and for this one Elliot is joined by Jenny List, fresh from the BornHack hacker camp in Denmark.
There’s a definite metal working flavour to this week’s picks, with new and exciting CNC techniques and a selective electroplater that can transfer bitmaps to metal. But worry not, there’s plenty more to tease the ear, with one of the nicest cyberdecks we’ve ever seen, and a bird that can store images in its song.
Standout quick hacks are a synth that makes sounds from Ethernet packets, and the revelation that the original PlayStation is now old enough to need replacement motherboards. Finally we take a closer look at the huge effort that goes in to monitoring America’s high voltage power infrastructure, and some concerning privacy news from the UK. Have a listen!
