2026-05-01 07:00:10
Back when phones used to ship with chargers in the box, you’d get a plugpack that could charge one device. Aftermarket manufacturers eventually started making chargers with four or five ports which were great for travelling. But what if you wanted to charge even more devices? You might build something like this rig from [DENKI OTAKU].
The goal was to build a charger that could handle 100 devices at once. The charger is designed to charge devices at up to 1.5 amps. That’s no mean feat, as the device would have to be able to deliver 150 amps total when fully loaded. As for the actual design, though, it’s relatively simple. [DENKI OTAKU] simply built a simple USB-C charger PCB based around an off-the-shelf chip which has ten individual chargers on it, and stacked it up ten of those in a housing made out of aluminium extrusion. To deliver the current to run all these chargers, the rig got two massive switching power supplies to feed the charger array a massive amount of current. The open enclosure design here makes sense, in that it probably helps keep everything cool.
The only thing missing from the build video? A heavy-duty test. We’d love to see if it actually holds up under full load with 100 phones connected. We have some suspicions as to whether the traces on the PCBs would hold up under a continuous 15 amp load, for example. Still, if you wanted to provide phone charging en-masse at an event or similar, this kind of simple stacked design could be an easy way to go.
Phone chargers are still moving forward; the last big leap was the adoption of GaN technology. Video after the break.
2026-05-01 04:00:17
One doesn’t generally associate cardboard with structural components like hinges, but [Itoshige Studio] assures us that you can absolutely create hinges out of this ubiquitous material. In total the video covers five different designs, ranging from the simple and straightforward to an interlocking tab design that approximates a typical steel hinge with paper rod to keep both sides of the hinge together.
The most simple hinge is unsurprisingly just a strip of craft paper, which is also demonstrated as the hinge for a wooden box in lieu of the typical metal hinge. This same principle is then demonstrated for a fancy cardboard box.
From here the hinge designs increasingly get more involved, with first a seamless hinge variation, and then a kamichoban hinge design that’s inspired by traditional Japanese room dividers and furniture, using panels that are interconnected with overlapping sections to create a fascinatingly flexible hinge that can fully fold either way.
The flush hinge design is somewhat like the craft paper hinge, but significantly fancier and probably sturdier, while also looking pretty good on something like a cabinet. Finally the interlocking tab hinge is effectively a cardboard version of the hinge design that’s found on every room’s door, with a similar level of flexibility. This is obviously the trickiest one to assemble and get right, but it has its own charm.
Considering that all of these examples use regular corrugated cardboard that we get shipped to our homes by the truckload, the cost to try these examples is your time plus some basic tools and glue. The author also sells a book that contains templates – in addition to digital versions – for these hinges and other designs, if you’d like to enjoy the 100% paper experience.
Thanks to [greg_bear] for the tip.
2026-05-01 02:30:06
The Osmo Pocket 4 is a handheld gimballed camera that’s perfect for shooting running content on the go. However, it’s got a weird sort of form factor and is limited when it comes to things like fitting filters or recording quality sound. To that end, [Byron Seven] whipped up an upgrade kit that turns the Pocket 4 into more of a “real” camera.
The idea is simple enough—the Osmo Pocket 4 is packaged in a 3D printed shell that expands its capabilities. It’s tucked into the structure with a USB power bank that greatly increases how long you can shoot before the batteries run out. In front of the gimbal head, there’s a fitting that allows attaching standard camera filters for visual effect. Topside there’s a handle for better physical control of the camera, along with a rail mount for a DJI wireless mic and a phone to act as a monitor. Down below, there’s a quick-connect fitting so the camera can be slammed on and off a tripod with ease. What’s great is that you can slot a Pocket 4 into this rig when you need, and pull it back out and use it as normal when you’re done.
If you’ve enjoyed the Osmo Pocket 4 but wished you could throw a polarizer on it or chuck it around more, this is a great build to explore. We’ve seen some fun stuff done with non-traditional cameras before, too.
2026-05-01 01:00:22
We’re used to seeing technologies move with the times, and it’s likely among Hackaday readers are the group who spend the most time doing that and are most aware of it. There’s one which we’ll all be aware of which has quietly slipped away for most of us almost without a word, I speak of course of 32-bit computing. For most of us that means 32-bit computing on x86 machines, and since the 64-bit x86 instruction set we all now use has been around for nearly a quarter century, its 32-bit ancestor is now ancient history.
In the world of software that means we’re now in an era of operating systems and browsers dropping 32-bit support, so increasingly keeping a 32-bit machine up to date will become a challenge. That sounds like something just painful and difficult enough to subject to a Daily Drivers piece, so just how practical is it to use a 32-bit machine for my daily work in 2026?
On my desk I have a Dell Latitude D610. It was made in about 2005 in the days when Dells were solidly made, and with its 1.6GHz Pentium M and 2Gb of memory it represents roughly the final throw of the dice for a 32-bit Intel laptop. Just over a year later it would have been replaced by one of the Intel Core series with the 64-bit instructions grudgingly adopted from AMD, but at the time it was a respectably useful machine.
It came into my possession about eight years ago when I used it to test the Revbank bar tab software for my hackerspace, and for the past six years it’s languished unloved in my box there. It’s got an ancient Ubuntu distro on it, so my first task is to pick a 32-bit replacement from 2026. That’s now a dwindling selection, so it’s time to start digging though some minimalist distros. With the supply of those based on mainstream distros drying up as they drop 32-bit support, it’s time to look into more esoteric offerings. This fits well with the ethos of this series, we’re all about the unusual here.
Cutting out the mainstream based distros certainly narrows the field, and out of the promising contenders in the minimalist field, I went for SliTaz. It uses Busybox and the Openbox desktop, that runs from RAM. I was looking for good application support in the repos, and this distro has the things I need. Download it, stick it on a USB stick, and let’s see what it can do. I know one thing, I wouldn’t have been able to download that ISO in five seconds with the internet connection I had in 2005.
With a few of the type of quirks you’ll always encounter with a new distro, the SliTaz instllation process was pretty painless. It required me to use Gparted to partition the spinning rust on the Dell, but otherwise the installation was mostly a case of filling in standard responses you’d find on any distro. Then it’s into the Openbox desktop environment. This thing is fast!
Graphical system administration is done through the Tazpanel application that as far as I can see uses the web browser, which soon had me connected to the internet and downloading GIMP so I could do my Hackaday work. The package library is comprehensive, which is pleasing to see. The default web browser is called Tazweb, which is modern enough to render most the sites I normally use, but which for some reason didn’t like Hackaday’s WYSIWYG editor so I was left writing in HTML source. It is quick though on this older hardware, something brought home to me when I downloaded Pale Moon. That browser is usable, but noticeably slow.
This was the first time using SliTaz for me, and I have to say I’m impressed. It’s small and fast compared to other full-fat distros I’ve used on machines of this age, and quirks aside, it’s easy to use and seems well supported. I’ve written most of this piece on it, and unlike some of the previous operating systems in this series, that has not been a painful experience. It has made the Dell into a useful machine again, one which while it’s no powerhouse, is at least no longer a piece of e-waste. There’s also a 64-bit version, making it a good choice for newer old hardware too. (The Raspberry Pi 1 port looks particularly interesting.)
So what have I proved here? A 21 year old 32 bit machine is a bit slow but still usable here in 2026 with the right software, which is to my mind a testament to the skill and dedication of open source developers and maintainers for keeping this ancient architecture alive. Researching this piece though it’s very obvious that much of the software necessary for modern computing is slipping out of 32 bit support, so I have to question how much longer they can keep it up. Considering that this machine has about the same intrinsic monetary value as a Core2-based machine made a little over a year later which supports 64 bit code I have to concede that what I’ve just done is a fairly pointless exercise. It’s necessary to keep old hardware usable as long as possible, but when it’s lasted over two decades as this one has them maybe we should concede that it’s time to move on. Find a 64-bit laptop from 2007, by all means install 64-bit SliTaz if you want a quick and small distro, and move forward with many more years of software support.
In a way the real star of this piece is the Dell itself. It was a corporate laptop, then as far as I know it was used by the Men In Sheds that shares the building with MK Makerspace, and when they tossed it I nabbed it to play with RevBank. Saved by a piece of Dutch open source software it’s sat unloved for years, and yet it’s still reliable, its battery still holds almost useful charge, its keyboard is robust if a little worn, and its joints are still tight. It’s a shame the architecture is sliding out of relevance, this is almost a useful laptop!
2026-04-30 23:30:20
Odd things sometimes pop up in the feed of a Hackaday scribe, not hacks as such, but stories with a meaning in our community. One such that’s come our way from a variety of sources over the last week features Ursa Ag, a small machinery manufacturer based in Alberta, Canada. The reason they’re in the news is because they have gained bulging order books by taking on the likes of John Deere with a tractor more like the one their customers’ parents bought back in the ’80s or ’90s. It’s a basic machine without much in the way of electronics, and certainly without all the DRM lockdown that has made those big manufacturers so unpopular.
It’s clear that Hackaday isn’t in the business of shilling Canadian tractors, but it should be of interest to readers because it represents an alternative route to challenge the DRM lockdowns than the legal and consumer routes we’ve previously reported on. The Ursa Ag tractor may be as niche Albertan as a Corb Lund CD, but it’s not the tractor itself but the idea which matters. We doubt much sweat will be shed by John Deere execs over a tiny company out on the prairies making a basic spec tractor, but given that Ursa Ag customers are reported as buying them because they have no DRM, the prospect of larger upstart competitors taking note and offering machines without it may cause them some sleep loss. The free market is held up to outsiders as perhaps the most American of ideals, and for it to eventually prove to be the means by which something intended to limit it might be defeated, is sweet justice indeed.
We’ve reported extensively on the Deere tractor saga over the years, but perhaps the best illustration of the self-inflicted damage the brand has suffered through DRM comes in their older products being worth considerably more than their newer ones.
2026-04-30 22:00:04
The telephone was an invention that revolutionized human communication. No more did you have to physically courier a letter from one place to another, or send a telegram, or have a runner carry the message for you. Instead, you could have a direct conversation with another person a great distance away. All well and good if you can speak and hear, of course, but rather useless if you happen to be deaf.
Those hard of hearing were not left entirely out of the communication revolution, however. Well before IP switched networks and the Internet became a thing, there was already a way for the deaf to communicate over the plain old telephone network—thanks to the teletypewriter!
The teletypewriter (TTY) has been around for a long time. The first device came into being in 1964, developed by James C. Marsters and Robert Weitbrecht, both deaf. Their idea was to create a method for deaf individuals to communicate over the phone network in a textual manner. To this end, the group sourced teleprinters formerly used by the US Department of Defense, and hooked them up with acoustic couplers that would allow them to mate with the then-ubiquitous AT&T Model 500 telephone. Thus, the TTY was born. A user could dial another TTY machine, and key in a message, which would print out at the other end. The receiving user could then respond in turn in the same manner.
The early machine used simple frequency-shift keying to encode the characters of the alphabet and some basic control codes, allowing text messages to be sent back and forth via a regular analog telephone call. In the US, where the devices eventually became known as telecommunications device for the deaf (TDDs), the devices used an improved development of Baudot code (the USA-TTY variant of ITA-2) to send signals over the phone lines.
This involved representing characters with five bits, which was enough to cover the 26 characters of the English alphabet, plus 0-9 and a few control codes. Transmission rates were slow—typically just 45.5 to 50 baud. With a 5-bit code, this limited transmission to approximately 10 characters per second.
TTYs quickly caught on as a useful device for the deaf and hard of hearing, and developed its own norms similar to other textual telecommunications methods that came before. Users would key “GA” for “go ahead,” to indicate the other party could “speak” on the half-duplex link, as two users typing at the same time would lead to garbled messages. “SK” stood for “stop keying” to indicate the ending of a call. Abbreviations were common to save effort, such as “CU” (see you) and “TMW” (tomorrow).
At its heart, the TTY was a very useful device for allowing its users to communicate via textual means to others with compatible hardware. However, alone, a TTY could not allow a deaf user to communicate effectively with regular telephone users. To enable greater accessibility, many organizations developed telecommunications relay services.
These first existed as a number that deaf TTY users could call in order to connect to a human operator with their own TTY machine. This operator would place calls on behalf of the deaf individual, speaking on their behalf to other parties based on the deaf user’s inputs to their TTY device. In turn, the operator would key out the responses from the called party so the deaf individual could read back the conversation.
The first relay service was established by Converse Communications in Connecticut in 1974. The concept was quickly picked up by many other telecommunications operators around the world to provide an accessibility aid to those who needed it. These days, relay services still exist, though a great many relay services now operate over IP-based systems rather than via phone lines and TTY devices.
TTY still exists to some degree out in the world today. There are still subscribers with analog phone lines, and the basic TTY technology still fundamentally works over these links. However, the rise of SMS text messaging and widespread Internet connectivity have somewhat negated a lot of use cases for TTY technology these days. There have also been cases where digital upgrades to the phone network have made TTY operation more difficult, though some efforts have been made to ensure compatibility in some networks, particularly for emergency uses.
Ultimately, TTY was a technology that brought telecommunications access to a greater number of people than ever before. Like the landline phone and the fax machine, it’s no longer such a feature of modern life. However, it was an important link to the world for many in the deaf and hard of hearing community, and was greatly valued for the connection and accessibility it provided.
