2026-02-28 08:00:29
Having an AI assistant is all the rage these days, but AI assistants usually don’t know about your automation setups and may have difficulty dealing with tasks asynchronously. Enter zclaw. It gives you the option to have a personal assistant on an ESP32 backed by Anthropic, OpenAI, or OpenRouter. The whole thing fits in 888KB, and while it doesn’t host the LLM, it does add key capabilities to monitor and control devices connected to the ESP32.
You communicate with the assistant via telegram. You can say things like “Remember the garage sensor is on GPIO 4.” Then later you might say: “In 20 minutes, check the garage sensor and if it is high, set GPIO 5 low.” It has an RTOS for scheduling tasks and is aware of the timezone and common periods. Memory persists across reboots, and you can pick different personas.
Some of the use cases mentioned in the manual show how having something that can precisely schedule, control, or monitor devices might pay off. Ideas like bringing up a lab setup, scheduling plant watering, and more would be difficult to do with just a stock chatbot.
The AI can also introspect. For example, you could create a few tasks on a schedule and then ask the device to “show me my schedules.” You can also create up to 8 tools with a name, description, and action. This lets you describe something like “power_down_bench” and then tell zclaw to execute it on demand or even on a schedule. Overall, an interesting and well-documented setup.
We’ve seen many projects like this, and each has its own charm. And its own personality.
2026-02-28 05:00:15
Recently the Myrient game video archive announced that they’re shutting down on March 31st of this year, for a couple of reasons, but primarily the skyrocketing financial costs of hosting the archive. One advantage of Myrient over e.g. Archive.org is that – per the FAQ – every game on the site is curated and checked against a checksum of a known good copy. The site also focuses on fast downloads, making it a good resource if you’re trying to find ROMs of some more obscure old gaming system.
Amidst the mourning it seems also pertinent to address the reasons behind this shutdown. Although finances are the main reason for this hobby project to be shut down, it’s due to (paywalled) download managers that have recently appeared, and which completely bypass the donation requests and similar on the website. Despite use of Myrient for commercial, for-profit purposes having always been explicitly forbidden, this has been ignored to the point where the owner of Myrient had to shell out over $6,000 per month to cover the difference after donations.
Along with the rising costs of hosting due to rising storage and RAM prices courtesy of AI datacenter buildouts, this has meant that a hobby archive like this has become completely unsustainable. Barring good ways to block illegal traffic like these download tools and/or a surge in donations, it would seem that all archives like this are at risk of shutting down, along with other sites that contain commercially interesting content.
2026-02-28 03:30:27
Animatronic displays aren’t just for Halloween, and hackers today have incredible access to effective, affordable parts with which to make spectacles of light, sound, and movement. But the hardware is only half the battle. Getting everything synchronized properly can be a daunting task, so get a head start on your next holiday display with the Hauntimator by [1031-Systems].
After all, synchronizing movements, sound, and light by trial and error can get tiresome even in small setups. Anyone who makes such a display — and contemplates doing it twice — tends to quickly look into making things modular.
At its heart, Hauntimator works with a Raspberry Pi Pico-based controller board. The GUI makes it easy to create control channels for different hardware (for example, doing things like moving servos) and synchronize them to audio. Once an animation is validated, it gets uploaded to the control board where it runs itself. It’s open-source and designed to make plugins easy, so give it a look. There’s a video channel with some demonstrations of the tools that should fill in any blanks.
Intrigued by animatronics, but not sure where to begin? Get inspired by checking out this DIY set of servo-driven eyes, and see for yourself the benefits of smooth motor control for generating lifelike motion.
2026-02-28 01:00:31
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams met up to trade their favorite posts of the week. Tune in and see if your favorites made the list. From crazy intricate automata to surprising problems in Peltier cooler designs, there’s a little bit of everything.
Should bikes have chains? What’s the hardest thing about Star Trek computers to duplicate? Can you make a TV station from a single microcontroller? The podcast this week answers these questions and more. Plus, weigh in on the What’s That Sound contest and you might just score a Hackaday Podcast T-shirt.
For the Can’t Miss segment, Elliot had airships on his mind, while Al’s sick of passwords. But is he sick enough to take electronic pills that transmit his password?
Or download the bit stream and decrypt it by XORing each byte with zero.
2026-02-28 00:30:20
You see it all the time in science fiction: the heroes find old data, read it, and learn how to save the day. But how realistic is that? Forget aliens. Could you read a stack of punch cards or a 9-track tape right now? Probably not, and those are just a handful of decades in the past. Fast forward a few centuries, and punch cards will decay, and tapes will lose their coating. More modern storage is just as bad. It simply isn’t made to last for thousands of years. Microsoft has Project Silica, which aims to store data in quartz glass with a potential lifetime of many thousands of years.
As you might expect, this is a write-once technology. Lasers write the data, and polarization-sensitive microscopes read it back. Electromagnetic fields don’t matter. You can’t accidentally change the data while reading. A square glass platter the size of a DVD can hold about 7 TB of data.
While the program is not a new one, they’ve recently published results using ordinary borosilicate glass (like your Pyrex baking dish is made from) as a storage medium. They say writing is also more efficient, and reading now requires only one camera instead of the three in the original system. The paper identifies birefringent voxel writing, phase voxels, and more.
Obviously, this isn’t for the casual project. But we have to wonder if hackers could do something similar with lower densities, for example. Unlike other methods we’ve seen, no DNA is involved.
2026-02-27 23:00:45
An auspicious anniversary passed for me this week, as it’s a decade since I started writing for Hackaday. In that time this job has taken me all over Europe, it’s shown me the very best and most awesome things our community has to offer, and I hope that you have enjoyed my attempts to share all of that with you. It’s worth a moment to reflect on the last ten years in terms of what has made our world during that time.
With quite a few thousand articles under my belt I’ve sadly reached the point at which I can’t remember them all, indeed a hazard when thinking of new ones is that any idea might be something I’ve written before. But there are some of mine and from others which remain in the mind, such as our April Fool pieces, or my coverage of the needless panic about drone flights. Who can forget Brian Benchoff’s Apple Device, a spoof Apple take on a Raspberry Pi for which he even made real(fake) hardware.
Perhaps the only time I have ever found myself with what you might call a real scoop that has importance beyond Hackaday came at the end of 2018. London’s Gatwick airport was closed for several days due to drone sighting, soon followed by London Heathrow, and we were the first publication to pose the question as to whether the drone had existed at all.
The public were treated to a years-long saga of deceit from the authorities as they attempted to cover up the fact that they’d shut down two airports over nothing, with the eventual grudging admission made after years of Freedom of Information requests from activists, that there had never been any evidence of drone involvement at all. The craziest story in all of this was the time they chased a drone which turned out to be their own helicopter, which along with the rest of the sorry saga is related in a talk I did at a hacker camp in 2019. Given that in the week I write this there’s been an airspace closure over El Paso in Texas because of a mix-up over a US government test of an anti-drone weapon, it seems that drone panic is a story which will run and run.
It’s been my observation since long before Hackaday, that the hardware hacking world gains momentum following the appearance of new parts or technologies. I’ve referred to them in terms of epochs in the past. In the last decade we were fortunate that a happy confluence of several such events came within a short time; in the period from about 2005 to 2015 we received accessible and cheap single board computers, 3D printing affordable by mere mortals, cheap PCBs from China, and the explosion of parts and modules from AliExpress sellers. These have arguably been the backbone of Hackaday’s success, because you in our community have taken them and used them to craft such amazing projects. If I had to name a single part which embodies this it would be Espressif’s ESP8266, while it’s largely obsolete in 2026 its appearance in 2014 as a Wi-Fi enabled microcontroller for around a dollar was nothing short of revolutionary. Before the 8266 an Internet connected project was expensive and complex, afterwards it’s done as a matter of course, and ubiquitous.
If I have a perennial concern about where our community is going, it’s in wondering where the next of those epochs will come from. Sadly, we haven’t yet gotten our crystal ball working, but maybe it’s time to look ahead for a minute anyway.
Perhaps the most likely direction will come not from new parts or technologies, but from a reaction to the world around us. As trust in monolithic online services plummets I’m sure our community will respond, and I hope that in the next few years I can have a truly open-source smartphone devoid of links to large corporates, that I’d want to use. Projects that help disconnect from cloud services are going to be popular in the coming years.
I don’t join the general hype around AI, but I think that locally-hosted LLMs will increasingly find their way into projects featured here as the hardware to run them becomes commoditised. A semblance of a personality in our home automation for example is surely going to tempt some hackers, but maybe it won’t be the epoch I’m looking for. For that I see custom semiconductors as one promising future, and I hope that for example Tiny Tapeoput will be only the start. I know nothing about IC design, but I look forward to the time I first sit down to learn the ropes and order the Jenny Chip. It’s next-level now, but in 2036 it’s likely to be as normal as ordering a PCB is for us today.
I have spent a large proportion of my time in the world of hackerspaces over the last decade and before, ever since I saw my city had a group of people who’d started one. In them I have found my people, and found access to knowledge and experience well beyond my own. I’ve sat in spaces all across the UK and Europe and drunk caffeinated beverages with all manner of like-minded crazies, and it’s been a blast.
A good thing in that world over the years has been the extinguishing of the consensus model under which many early hackerspaces were run. I was a director of such a space whose drama level exceeded 1000 MilliNoiseBridges and it has marked me ever since, so it’s nice to see a much more sensible committee-based model take its place.
Every space has its own flavour, but the more recent ones I have been a member of in my peripatetic existence over the last few years have been blissfully stable and a joy to be part of. In Europe most established spaces are now in their second decade, and if I see a danger for them it’s in failing to keep attracting hackers in their 20s and fading into irrelevance. Maybe I’ll come back in another decade and tell you how that went.
A decade ago I was building a not-ultimately-successful electronic kit business when I saw one of Mike Szczys’ “We’re Hiring!” posts on my go-to hardware news website, and thought it looked like a fun thing to do. I didn’t realise that being the only electronic engineer who’d worked for the Oxford Dictionary put me uniquely in line for this, so from that happy accident onwards the last decade has been a blast. I’d like to thank you the Hackaday readers, my awesome Hackaday colleagues, and the wider community of crazy, weird, and talented people I have met along the way. The next decade of hardware hacking is now on.
