2026-02-07 02:00:21
This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over coffee to bring you the latest news, mystery sound results show, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous seven days or so.
We found no news to speak of, except that Kristina has ditched Windows after roughly 38 years. What is she running now? What does she miss about Windows? Tune in to find out.
On What’s That Sound, Kristina thought it was a jackhammer, but [Statistically Unlikely] knew it was ground-tamper thingy, and won a Hackaday Podcast t-shirt! Congratulations!
After that, it’s on to the hacks and such, beginning with 3D printing on the nano scale, and a couple of typewriter-based hacks. Then we take a look at the beauty of the math behind graph theory, especially when it comes to circuit sculptures and neckties.
We also talk display hacking, macro pads with haptic feedback knobs, and writing code in Welsh. Finally, we discuss the Virtual Boy, and ponder whether vibe coding is killing open source.
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.
2026-02-07 00:30:26
The joy of camera hacking lies for many at the low end of the market. Not working with many-thousand-dollar Leicas, but in cheap snapshot cameras that can be had for next to nothing at a thrift store. [Marek Sokal] has a perfect example, in a 3D printed 35mm camera body using the lens and shutter assembly from a vintage Soviet Lomo Smena 8M.
The build is a work in progress, a printed assembly that holds the 35mm film cartridge, provides the focal plane for the film, and houses the take-up reel. It fits together with M2 screws, as per the Lomo lens.
We like this build, because we can see beyond the Lomo. In a box above the desk where this is being written there is a pile of old plastic snapshot cameras from the 1960s through 1980s, none of which is worth anything much, but all of which have a similar shutter and lens assembly. In many cases it’s not a huge task to do with them what [Marek] has with the Lomo and mount them to a back like this. The LEGO film camera may not have gained approval, but this prove that making cameras of your own is still pretty easy.
2026-02-06 23:00:56
When it comes to seaborne propulsion, one simple layout has largely dominated over all others. You pair some kind of engine with some kind of basic propeller at the back of the ship, and then you throw on a rudder to handle the steering. This lets you push the ship forward, left, and right, and stopping is just a matter of turning the engine off and waiting… or reversing thrust if you’re really eager to slow down.
This basic system works for a grand majority of vessels out on the water. However, there is a more advanced design that offers not only forward propulsion, but also steering, all in the one package. It may look strange, but the Voith Schneider propeller offers some interesting benefits to watercraft looking for an edge in maneuverability.
The Voith Schneider propeller design looks rather unlike any propeller you might have seen before. Perhaps the most obvious reason is because of its axis of operation. Traditional propellers tend to operate in an axis parallel with the waterline, or at least within a few degrees or so. However, the Voith Schneider design spins about the vertical axis instead. This is because it uses vertically-oriented blades mounted on a rotating plate. Each blade has a hydrofoil profile, which enables it to generate thrust when moving through the water. By spinning these blades at speed and varying their angle of attack, it’s possible to create a thrust vector in any direction on the horizontal plane. A special gear system is used to vary the angle of each blade as the plate rotates, such that the overall net thrust generated by all the blades is in the desired direction of travel.
This design has certain key advantages over a traditional maritime propulsion setup. Namely, by fitting a vessel with Voith-Schneider propellers, it’s possible to add a great deal of maneuverability, to the point where a traditional rudder becomes entirely unnecessary. Instead of having to thrust the ship forwards and then turn, it’s possible to directly push the vessel with each individual thruster in the direction that is desired. This can be particularly useful for low-speed operations like docking, and provides a much more instantaneous change of direction than is possible with a regular propeller and rudder setup.
Voith Schneider thrusters are particularly useful for ships like tugs where precision maneuverability is a huge aid to operations. Numerous thrusters are often to a given vessel, providing greater total thrust and additional control. It’s also typical to fit Voith Schneider propellers with a guard underneath, which prevents grounding damage and can act as a sort of nozzle that improves low-speed performance. These propellers are perhaps not the ideal choice for watercraft aiming for outright speed, but for lower-speed work, they can offer great benefits in control.
The design looks somewhat unintuitive and even futuristic, but it actually goes back a long way. The first prototype was actually designed as a water turbine for generating electricity. However, it proved unexceptional in this role. It was only when the device was tested as a pump that engineers realized it could be repurposed as a combined thruster to replace a traditional propeller and rudder. A patent was issued in Germany in 1972, and the first prototype was tested on the water all the way back in 1928, on a small 60-horsepower vessel known as the Torqueo. The design soon found use on a number of German vessels in the interwar period, including minesweepers. The Voith Schneider design can be operated quite slowly while still providing thrust, minimizing cavitation and thus sound signature, which is considered advantageous for this role. In some German designs, such as the failed Graf Zeppelin aircraft carrier, the thrusters were even installed alongside regular propulsion systems, and made retractable so they wouldn’t present additional drag when not in use. Some decades later, the US Navy itself would later field similarly-equipped minesweepers in the 1990s, though all examples were dismantled and sold off by the early 2000s. Beyond military uses, the thruster has found application in a number of ferries and tugs around the world, and remain in production today.
Despite their unique abilities, Voith Schneider propellers remain a curio rather than a fixture in the shipping world. In the past century of their existence, just 4,500 examples have been built, near exclusively by Voith AG, and thus they are equipping a relatively small amount of the global maritime fleet. They compete with more familiar designs, such as azimuth thrusters, which are widely popular and more intuitive to understand. Given their oddball nature, and moderate level of mechanical complexity, they’re perhaps never going to supplant the tried-and-true prop and rudder that propels most conventional vessels. Still, if you’re looking to build a ship that can elegantly strafe in any direction you want to go, it’s hard to go past the Voith Schneider concept for all the benefits it brings.
2026-02-06 20:00:01
Much like how BusyBox crams many standard Unix commands and a shell into a single executable, so too does BreezyBox provide a similar experience for the ESP32 platform. A demo implementation is also provided, which uses the ESP32-S3 platform as part of the Waveshare 7″ display development board.
Although it invokes the BusyBox name, it’s not meant to be as stand-alone as it uses the standard features provided by the FreeRTOS-based ESP-IDF SDK. In addition to the features provided by ESP-IDF it adds things like a basic virtual terminal, current working directory (CWD) tracking and a gaggle of Unix-style commands, as well as an app installer.
The existing ELF binary loader for the ESP32 is used to run executables either from a local path or a remote one, a local HTTP server is provided and you even get ANSI color support. Some BreezyBox apps can be found here, with them often running on a POSIX-compatible system as well. This includes the xcc700 self-hosted C compiler.
You can get the MIT-licensed code either from the above GitHub project link or install it from the Espressif Component Registry if that’s more your thing.
2026-02-06 17:00:05
Have you ever dreamed of making a bash script that assembles Intel 8080 machine code? [Chris Smith] did exactly that when he created xa.sh, a cross-assembler written entirely in Bourne shell script.
The script exists in part as a celebration of the power inherent in a standard Unix shell with quite ordinary POSIX-compliant command line tools like awk, sed, and printf. But [Chris] admits that mostly he found the whole project amusing.
It’s designed in a way that adding support for 6502 and 6809 machine code would be easy, assuming 8080 support isn’t already funny enough on its own.
It’s not particularly efficient and it’s got some quirks, most of which involve syntax handling (hexadecimal notation should stick to 0 or 0x prefixes instead of $ to avoid shell misinterpretations) but it works.
Want to give it a try? It’s a shell script, so pull a copy and and just make it executable. As long as the usual command-line tools exist (meaning your system is from sometime in the last thirty-odd years), it should run just fine as-is.
An ambitious bash script like this one recalls how our own Al Williams shared ways to make better bash scripts by treating it just a bit more like the full-blown programming language it qualifies as.
2026-02-06 14:00:28
The Commodore Amiga was famous for its characteristic Say voice, with its robotic enunciation being somewhat emblematic of the 16-bit era. The Commodore VIC-20 had no such capability out of the box, but [Mike] was able to get one talking with a little bit of work.
The project centers around the Adventureland cartridge, created by Scott Adams (but not the one you’re thinking of). It was a simple game that was able to deliver speech with the aid of the Votrax Type and Talk speech synthesizer box. Those aren’t exactly easy to come by, so [Mike] set about creating a modern equivalent. The concept was simple enough. An Arduino would be used to act as a go between the VIC-20’s slow serial port operating at 300 bps and the Speakjet and TTS256 chips which both preferred to talk at 9600 bps. The audio output of the Speakjet is then passed to an LM386 op-amp, set up as an amplifier to drive a small speaker. The lashed-together TTS system basically just reads out the text from the Adventureland game in an incredibly robotic voice. It’s relatively hard to understand and has poor cadence, but it does work – in much the same way as the original Type and Talk setup would have back in the day!
Text to speech tools have come a long way since the 1980s, particularly when it comes to sounding more natural. Video after the break.
[Thanks to Stephen Walters for the tip!]
