2026-01-30 00:30:42
Why press many button when few button do trick? That was the thinking of [Bike Cook Robots] when it came time to revamp his desk. To that end, he whipped up a tidy macropad to make daily computing tasks easier.
The build is based around an Adafruit RP2040 Feather ThinkInk devboard, chosen because it plugs straight into a readily-available 4.2 inch e-ink. The display is tasked with showing icons that correspond to the macro assignments for the 3 x 4 array of mechanical keyboard switches. Everything is wrapped up in a 3D printed frame, with an bracket to mount it to the monitor arms on the desk. The macropad is set up to talk to a custom Python app that runs on the host machine, which handles triggering actions and can also talk back to the pad itself.
The combination of e-ink display and button pad is a great way to display the function of each key without excess complexity. We’ve seen some other great builds in this space before, too.
2026-01-29 23:00:40
Like many of you, I have a hard time getting rid of stuff. I’ve got boxes and boxes of weirdo bits and bobs, and piles of devices that I’ll eventually get around to stripping down into even more bits and bobs. Despite regular purges — I try to bring a car-load of crap treasure to local hackerspaces and meetups at least a couple times a year — the pile only continues to grow.
But the problem isn’t limited to hardware components. There’s all sorts of things that the logical part of me understands I’ll almost certainly never need, and yet I can’t bring myself to dispose of. One of those things just so happens to be documents. Anything printed is fair game. Could be the notes from my last appointment with the doctor, or fliers for events I attended years ago. Doesn’t matter, the stacks keep building up until I end up cramming it all into a box and start the whole process starts over again.
I’ve largely convinced myself that the perennial accumulation of electronic bric-à-brac is an occupational hazard, and have come to terms with it. But I think there’s a good chance of moving the needle on the document situation, and if that involves a bit of high-tech overengineering, even better. As such, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks investigating digitizing the documents that have information worth retaining so that the originals can be sent along to Valhalla in my fire pit.
The following represents some of my observations thus far, in the hopes that others going down a similar path may find them useful. But what I’m really interested in is hearing from the Hackaday community. Surely I’m not the only one trying to save some storage space by turn piles of papers into ones and zeros.
Obviously, the first step in digitizing physical documents is image capture. The most obvious way to accomplish this is to simply use a flatbed scanner, and in some cases, there’s a solid argument to be made that it’s the best approach. Indeed, many of the documents that I’ve already filed away digitally were created this way. But it’s a tedious enough process that you may want to consider alternative methods.
If you’ve got a decent camera, you can get a couple of lights and put together a nice overhead photography rig without spending too much money. Put your document down under the camera, snap a picture, and keep it moving.
Imaging doesn’t get any faster than taking a picture, and so long as you’re not using some point and shoot from the early 2000s, the resolution should be more than sufficient. This method is particularly appealing if you’re planning on digitizing books or anything else that can’t be laid perfectly flat on a scanner.
The major downside with this approach is the setup itself. It’s one thing if you’re digitizing documents and books on a daily basis, but for occasional use, putting something like this together is a big ask. A flatbed scanner certainly takes up a lot less room, and you don’t have to worry about getting the lighting right, mounting the camera, and so on.
Whether you used a scanner or a camera, once you have the image of your document, you’ve technically digitized it. Congratulations, you’re now an amateur archivist.
If you’re looking to keep things simple, you could stop here. Stash the files someplace and be done with it. But depending on the type of content you’re working with and what your goals are, there’s a good chance you’ll want to touch up the images a bit. Luckily for us, the incredible ImageMagick project has many of the functions we need built-in, from cropping and resizing, all the way to image enhancement.
Consider the image below. It’s clear enough to read, but the text is rotated and the lighting isn’t consistent across the entire page.
We can fix both issues with a simple ImageMagick command via the convert tool:
convert input.png -deskew 30% -threshold 25% output.png
We won’t get too bogged down in the details, the ImageMagick documentation can break it all down better than I can. The short version is that we’re telling it to straighten out the image and convert it into pure black and white. The result looks like this:
The values can be tweaked a bit to refine the result, and as you might imagine there are many other ImageMagick functions that could potentially be brought in to clean up the result. Things do get more complicated if you’re working with something more complex than plain text, but you get the general idea.
This sort of post-processing is especially important if you plan on running the images through any sort of optical character recognition (OCR) to capture the actual text of the document. That first image might be perfectly legible to our human eyeballs. You might even prefer it over the stark look of the processed image, but tools like tesseract have a hell of a time picking the text out when the background isn’t uniform.
The process described here certainly isn’t for everyone, and that’s fine. If you’re not looking to invest the sort of time and effort it would take to make this work, there’s fortunately a far more approachable solution available. In fact, it might already be in your pocket.
The Google Drive mobile application offers a very impressive document scanning mode that essentially automates everything above. If you give it access to your device’s camera, it will automagically detect documents in the field of view, find their edges, compensate for angle and rotation to straighten out the image, and even run it through filters to make the text pop. It’s fast, works reasonably well, and is exceptionally handy for cranking out multi-page PDFs.
The downside is that you’ve got relatively little control over the process, and being a product of Google, there’s the usual concerns over what they may be doing with the information that’s passing through the system. For these reasons it’s not something I would personally recommend for any private information, and its automatic nature the lack of fine-grained control means it may not be a great choice if your needs venture too far from the beaten path.
Still, the speed and ease of use it offers is admittedly very attractive.
I’d love to hear the community’s thoughts on digitization, whether it’s hardware or software related. There’s surely some slick projects out there that aid in creating bespoke digital libraries, and there’s plenty of areas where real-world experience can help streamline and improve the overall process. For example, what’s your file naming convention look like?
Hackaday readers are rarely shy about sharing their opinions, so let’s hear them.
2026-01-29 20:00:06
Walkie-talkies are great fun, and [RealCorebb]’s bbTalkie project takes the concept a step further by adding some extremely cool features to make a highly refined, self-contained ESP32-based communicator. bbTalkie completely does away with a push-to-talk button by implementing robust voice detection that works reliably even in noisy environments. It was all designed with cycling in mind, so hands-free operation that stands up to noise is a big plus.
The core of communication is done over ESP-NOW, which is Espressif’s own protocol for direct device-to-device broadcasting. This removes the need to involve any sort of external service like SIM cards or internet access to transmit voice. Performance is best with an external antenna, naturally, but ESP-NOW doesn’t actually require anything other than the existing on-board hardware.
We’ve seen ESP-NOW used to make digital walkie-talkies before, but bbTalkie is a really evolved take on the concept, not least of which due to its hands-free operation.
Because volume-based automatic triggers are highly susceptible to noise, voice detection is done with the help of VADNet, a neural network-based model implemented locally on the device. This system can reliably detect human speech, even in noisy environments. This lets bbTalkie switch between transmit and listen modes automatically and hands-free, without false triggers.
Even when doing all that, there’s still spare capability to play with. Further to the goal of making bbTalkie useful for cyclists in a group, [RealCorebb] added a system that can recognize specific voice commands (like “turn left” for example, or “wait for me!”) which trigger synchronized animations to play on the displays of all connected units. There’s even some experimental support for controlling a camera over Bluetooth, though currently it only supports hardware from Sony.
Watch a tour of it in the video below (Chinese language, English captions available). The OLED screens and animations are adorable, and are great visual feedback of what the unit is doing at any given moment.
2026-01-29 17:00:13
When it comes to electromagnetic waves, humans can really only directly perceive a very small part of the overall spectrum, which we call “visible light.” [rootkid] recently built an art piece that has perception far outside this range, turning invisible waves into a visible light sculpture.
The core of the device is the HackRF One. It’s a software defined radio (SDR) which can tune signals over a wide range, from 10 MHz all the way up to 6 GHz. [rootkid] decided to use the HackRF to listen in on transmissions on the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. This frequency range was chosen as this is where a lot of devices in the home tend to communicate—whether over WiFi, Bluetooth, or various other short-range radio standards.
The SDR is hooked up to a Raspberry Pi Zero, which is responsible for parsing the radio data and using it to drive the light show. As for the lights themselves, they consist of 64 filament LEDs bent into U-shapes over a custom machined metal backing plate. They’re controlled over I2C with custom driver PCBs designed by [rootkid]. The result is something that looks like a prop from some high-budget Hollywood sci-fi. It looks even better when the radio waves are popping and the lights are in action.
It’s easy to forget about the rich soup of radio waves that we swim through every day.
2026-01-29 14:00:39
[Make Something] boasts he has made probably the fanciest picture frame you’ll ever see. He started with an original sign purchased on eBay and then made it to be bigger, brighter, and better. The frame is of solid walnut with back-lighting for the imagery all chasing that classic mid-century modern style. The backlit photo was taken the “hard way”, with an actual film camera and a road-trip to the picturesque site at Yellowstone. [Make Something] then developed the film himself in his home studio.
For the chimney [Make Something] used a new trick he learned in Autodesk Fusion: you take a photo of an object, convert to black and white, and then use the light/dark values to emboss or deboss a surface. To do this he took photos of the brick wall outside his shop and used that as the basis of the textured chimney he made with his 3D printer.
If you’re interested in other projects made from solid walnut, check out 3D Printed Spirograph Makes Art Out Of Walnut and Walnut Case Sets This Custom Arduino-Powered RPN Calculator Apart From The Crowd.
2026-01-29 11:00:35
You’ve likely seen an X-cube, a dichoric prism used to split light into its constituent colours–you know, those fun little cubes you get when tearing apart a broken projector. Have you considered that the X-cube need not be a cube for its entire existence? [Matt] at “Matt’s Corner of Gem Cutting” on YouTube absolutely did, which is why he ground one into a 216-facet disco ball.
That’s the hack, really. He took something many of us have played with at our desks thinking “I should do something cool with this” and… did something cool with it that most of us lack the tools and especially skills to even consider. It’s not especially practical, but it is especially pretty. Art, in other words.
The shape he’s using is known specifically to gemologists as “Santa’s Little Helper II” though we’d probably describe it as a kind of isosphere. Faceting the cube is just a matter of grinding down the facets to create the isosphere, then polishing them to brilliance with increasingly finer grit. This is done one hemisphere at a time, so the other hemisphere can be safely held in place with the now-classic cyanoacrylate and baking soda composite. Yes, jewelers use that trick, too.
We were slightly worried when [Matt] dumped his finished disco ball in acetone to clean off the cyanoacrylate– we haven’t the foggiest idea what optical-quality glue is used to hold the four prisms of an X-cube together and were a little worried acetone might soften the joints. That turned out not to be an issue, and [Matt] now has the most eye-catching sun-catcher we think we’ve ever seen.
We actually have seen suncatchers before, though admittedly it’s not a very popular tag around here. The closest build to this one was a so-called “hypercrystal” that combined an infinitiy mirror with a crystaline shape and dicloric tape for an effect as trippy as it sounds.
We also featured a deep-dive a while back if you want to know how these colourful, hard-to-pronounce coatings work.
