2026-04-08 07:00:45
When LG left the smartphone market, quite a number of strange devices were left behind. While some, like the Wing, made it to consumers, others did not. The strangest of these would have to be their rollable phone concept; a device which would expand by unrolling a portion of the screen like a scroll. This never made it to market, but one managed to make its way to [JerryRigEverything’s] workbench, and we are fortunate enough to see the insides of this strange device.
There are a few interesting tidbits about the device before even entering the device. Very clearly this phone was ready to be sold, with a tidy user interface for expanding the display, and even animated wallpapers which which expand with it. The display, when rolled onto the back of the device, sits behind a glass cover to keep it protected from debris, and can be used to take selfies with the larger sensors of the rear facing cameras. You can also see a bit of the track that the screen rolls on, hinting at what lies inside.
One doesn’t have to get far into a teardown of this phone to find more. A tiny brush hides in the curved corner of the screen rolling mechanism, to keep debris out of the pocket the screen sits inside. This also gives a better look at the aforementioned track system, which guides the display around the corner and keeps it stable and secure.
Further inside, you can see the mechanism which allow the phone to unfurl. Two rather small, but powerful DC motors resting a rack and pinion move the surprisingly strong phone to its full sized state. A number of spring loaded arms provide stability to the mechanism, preventing racking. The mechanism is surprisingly strong, able to push a number of books out of its way. However, if its movement is resisted, it will display a warning that you might damage the phone.
Tearing down a phone that doesn’t exist is not terribly useful, so the focus was very much on the mechanism, with no detours or destructive disassembly. However, if destructive reverse engineering is what your here for, make sure to check out this teardown of a smart LEGO brick next!
2026-04-08 04:00:26
When you’re programming microcontrollers, you’re likely to think in C if you’re old-school, Rust if you’re trendy, or Python if you want it done quick and have resources to spare. What about Go? The programming language, not the game. That’s an option, too, with TinyGo now supporting over 100 different dev boards, along with webASM.
We covered TinyGo back in 2019, but they were just getting started at that point, targeting the Arduino and BBC:micro boards. They’ve grown that list to include everything from most of Adafruit’s fruitful suite of offerings, ESP32s, and even the Nintendo Game Boy Advance. So now you can go program go in Go so you can play go on the go.
The biggest drawback–which is going to be an absolute dealkiller for a lot of applications–is a lack of wireless connectivity support. Claiming to support the ESP8266 while not allowing one to use wifi is a bit of a stretch, considering that’s the whole raison d’être of that particular chip, but it’s usable as a regular microcontroller at least.
They’ve now implemented garbage collection, a selling point for those who like Go, but admit it’s slower in TinyGo compared to its larger cousin and won’t work on AVR chips or in WebAssembly. It’s still not complete Go, however, so just as we reported in 2019, you won’t be able to compile all the standard library packages you might be used to. There are more of them than there were, so progress has been made!
Still, knowing how people get about programming languages, this will please the Go fanatics out there. Others might prefer to go FORTH and program their Arduinos, or to wear out their parentheses keys with LISP. The more the merrier, we say!
2026-04-08 02:30:26
Adding another item on the list of things you probably shouldn’t be trying at home, we got [Brainiac75] giving magnetic levitation a shot using an unmodified induction cooktop and aluminium foil. Although not ferromagnetic, it turns out that aluminium can be made to do interesting things in the magnetic field created by the powerful electromagnet that underlies the induction principle.
Interestingly, although there’s a detection circuit in these units that should detect the presence of an appropriate (ferromagnetic) object, it appears that even a thin sheet of aluminium foil can completely deceive it. The effect is that of a force pushing the foil away from the cooktop’s surface, with foil areas that remain close enough to the ferrite bars on the electromagnet even heating up enough to begin melting the aluminium.
After a bit of fun with various shapes and types of aluminium objects, the video moves on to a scientific explanation of what’s going on. The surface resistivity of the foil is similar enough to ferromagnetic cookware that it fools the sensor, after which the skin effect of aluminium induces a current. This then does the typical Lorentz force things.
2026-04-08 01:15:27
Hackaday Europe is the continental version of the Ultimate Hardware Conference, taking place May 16th and 17th, and you need to be there! We’ll continue to announce speakers and workshops over the next couple weeks, because we got so many more great talks than we had anticipated that we’re negotiating for extra time.
This year, we’re moving to a new venue in Lecco, Italy, and it’s sure to be fantastic. Get your tickets now before it’s too late. And stay tuned for another round of talk reveals next week!
Every drone builder hits the same wall: limited flight time, no good way to bench-test drones without actually flying it, and worrying about a single crash causing catastrophe. This talk is about tearing down all three of those problems.
I’ll discuss Open Gimbal, a hybrid balloon-drone platform, and Janus — a morphing blimp-drone that detects its own balloon failure mid-flight and transitions to quadrotor mode in under half a second. Come find out what it takes to build aerial robots that go beyond the lab.
Troubleshooting is part of a maker’s DNA. Software encounters bugs, circuits short, and parts break — it is an expected part of the process when building something new. But what happens when your project is hundreds of millions of miles away—where you can’t see it, can’t touch it, and can’t press Ctrl-Z? This is the high-stakes world of anomaly resolution in space. This talk will explore how strong ingenuity, creativity, and strong problem solving skills have saved missions from a pre-mature end.
Besides the humble thermometer, a blood pressure monitor is the most common house hold medical device. I will go into an open-source project I developed that measures blood pressure, ECG, SpO2 and auscultations where I go step by step explaining how those signals are analyzed. This would include showing the electronics and signals analysis of pressure waveforms as well as the Pan Tompkins algorithm and how it works for the ECG signal.
Mapping caves presents multiple challenges: there’s no GPS, it can be muddy, wet, cold and tight – not a friendly environment for electronic tools. Cave surveying used to be done using analog tools – handheld compasses and inclinometers and tape measures! In this talk Phil presents the work he has done over the last 20 years to develop electronic cave surveying tools – called the Shetland Attack Pony.
What if a PCB wasn’t just a circuit, but a story prop? Most PCBs are designed for function, efficiency, and cost. But what happens if you start with a story instead? In this talk we’ll see how hardware and firmware decisions can be used to create narrative experiences for tabletop role-playing games. We’ll walk through the design process from concept to KiCad layout to fabrication. And show how electrical behavior can become part of the narrative rather than just a technical implementation detail.
The presentation details the in-depth process of reverse engineering the sensor protocol of the 12-line CCD, how to find out information about proprietary non-public components and implementing it in a portable camera using a Raspberry Pi 5, PIOLib, custom hardware and software capable of capturing extremely high resolution images. In total the process took around one year from the scanner to a functional camera.
In 1977, a 16-pin chip with no RAM, no stack, and a minimalist instruction set replaced racks of relays in industrial control systems. The Motorola MC14500B is a 1-bit CPU built to evaluate ladder logic directly in hardware, with a single-bit result register and discrete input/output lines.
A hands-on dive into industrial computing history and what minimalism can teach us about designing predictable, efficient logic systems.
You will get the opportunity to design and manufacture your own design on an ASIC! You will learn the basics of digital logic, the basics of how semiconductors are designed and made, how to use an online digital design tool to build and simulate a simple design, how to create the GDS files for manufacture on an open-source PDK.
Participants will have the option to submit their designs to be manufactured on the next shuttle as part of the Tiny Tapeout project. Participants will need a laptop. Mouse and headphones are strongly advised. Nothing needs to be downloaded, but good internet is required.
[If you read this far, you probably want tickets. Go get ’em!]
2026-04-07 23:30:51
It is a running gag around here that whenever a project posts, someone will inevitably point out that it could have been done with a 555 timer IC. [Stephen Woodward] went the opposite way and built a simple thermostat using the ubiquitous chip.
To be fair, this isn’t some sophisticated PID controller — it’s basically a bang-bang controller. Since the device has a comparator and the circuits use a thermistor, it seems like a clever but simple idea on the surface. However, there are some neat tricks. For example, if you tie the 555 threshold pin to Vdd, then the trigger pin acts as an inverting analog comparator. Another nice feature: the setpoint depends on a resistance ratio, so there is no need for a precise input voltage reference.
A simple circuit change can switch the circuit to power a heater or a cooler. The chip can handle a surprising amount of power, but for some applications, you may need some output drive circuitry. The simple circuit even has hysteresis, which you can set with a different resistor. Pretty impressive for a cheap chip, two resistors, a thermistor, and a battery.
We’ve seen a lot of strange 555 circuits in our contests. We even had a 555 Timer Contest.
2026-04-07 22:00:04
If you’ve ever bought a suspiciously cheap Ethernet cable from an online listing, there’s a decent chance you’ve encountered Copper Clad Aluminum. Better known as CCA, it’s exactly what it sounds like—an aluminium conductor with a thin skin of copper deposited on the outside. Externally, cables made with this material look largely like any other, with perhaps the only obvious tell being that they feel somewhat lighter in the hand.
CCA is cheaper than proper copper cabling, and it conducts signals well enough to function in an Ethernet cable. And yet, it’s a prime example of corner-cutting that keeps standards bodies and professional installers up at night. But just how dangerous is this silent scourge, found lurking in so many network cabinets around the world?
Everything you need to know about CCA is in the name—it refers to an aluminium wire with a thin copper cladding, typically applied through a die extrusion process. The reasoning behind this exploits a real physical phenomenon called the skin effect, wherein higher-frequency AC signals tend to travel along the outer surface of a conductor. The idea goes that since most of the current moves through the outer copper skin layer anyway, the less-conductive aluminium core doesn’t unduly impact the wire’s performance. Using copper-clad aluminium wiring is, in theory, desirable because aluminium is much cheaper than copper, which can really add up over long cable runs. Imagine you’re wiring a building with with hundreds of miles of Ethernet cabling, all with eight conductors each—the savings add up pretty quickly.
There’s a problem with CCA cabling in these contexts, though. Due to prevailing cabling standards, any cable made with CCA is technically not even a real Ethernet cable at all. The relevant documents are unambiguous.
ANSI/TIA-568.2-D requires conductors in Category-rated cable to be solid or stranded copper. No other materials are acceptable, and thus CCA is explicitly excluded from use in Category cable applications. A cable with CCA conductors cannot legitimately carry a Cat5e, Cat6, or any related designation under any circumstances. Similarly, ISO/IEC 11801 has the same requirement. The U.S. National Electrical Code also states that conductors in communications cables, other than coaxial cable, shall be copper. This isn’t a suggestion or a best practice; it’s the letter of the code. Anything lesser is simply not allowed.
CCA cabling can be hard to detect, particularly where a manufacturer has intentionally hidden the fact that the inferior wiring is used. One way to be sure is to strip a wire and scrape away at the copper to see if there’s aluminium lurking inside.
The simple fact is that regulators demand a certain level of quality for communications cable, and CCA just isn’t it. In the specific case of Ethernet cabling, it is worth noting that the skin effect that makes CCA construction useful in other applications doesn’t really apply. That’s because the skin effect is frequency-dependent, and so it doesn’t apply to DC power as used in Power over Ethernet. In fact, the DC resistance of a CCA conductor of the same gauge is roughly 55% higher than copper of the same gauge. CCA cables also tend to be less flexible and more brittle than the proper all-copper equivalent. These are fundamental physical ways in which CCA doesn’t measure up to scratch. These differences aren’t enough to stop the cables working for their intended purpose in many cases, but it’s part of the reason that standards organizations mandate pure copper and nothing less.
The problem that stems from this is that installing CCA communications cable in a building can make the installation non-compliant and potentially even illegal in jurisdictions that adopt these relevant standards. Much of the concern comes down to fire ratings and insurance concerns. For example, the UL 444 standard lays out the requirements for cables to meet the CM, CMR, CMG, and CMP fire ratings you see printed on legitimate cable jackets. These rules require copper conductors. Thus, CCA cable cannot carry a valid UL listing and any install using it will not be compliant with fire safety regulations. A building with such cable installed would be potentially liable to have any insurance invalidated for not meeting basic code requirements. Any contractor installing such cable could be liable in turn.
Grabbing a cigarette lighter can also help determine if given cabling is pure copper or copper clad aluminium.
The question is, though—are CCA cables actually a real-world fire risk? That is harder to answer. The common concern is that a tightly-wrapped bundle of CCA Ethernet cables running Power over Ethernet could get hotter than intended due to increased resistance, eventually overheating, melting, or catching alight. With that said, we are yet to see any grand examples of buildings catching fire and burning to the ground because of CCA cabling. Such cables might not be to spec, and they might not do as well when used for Power over Ethernet due to their higher resistance, particularly over longer runs. However, issues are likely to be more related to insufficient power delivery rather than severe overheating. Where there’s no smoke, there usually isn’t fire. There would be plenty of photos online of melted CCA cables being pulled out of smoking rubble if this was occurring on the regular.
Ultimately, if you’ve got a CCA cable or two running around your house, you probably don’t have a lot to worry about. They might not survive as well as a proper copper cable, and they might be a little dodgy on long runs with PoE equipment, but they aren’t just going to burst into flames at the drop of a hat. With that said, they are technically uncompliant with all relevant standards, and if you’re trying to meet code, you should absolutely steer clear of CCA in all cases. This warning, and so many that have come before, won’t do much to stem the flow of CCA cables into the market, but it might at least stop you making a mistake the next time you’re speccing a new cable project. Stay safe out there.
