Tom Nardi

When we reviewed the iFixit FixHub back in September, one of the most interesting features of the portable soldering station was the command line interface that both the iron and the base station o…

When we decided that Simple Add-Ons (SAOs) would be the focus of Supercon 2024, it was clear the badge would need to feature more than just one or two of the requisite connectors. We finally settled on six ports, but figuring out the geometry of getting all those ports on the badge in such a way that the SAOs wouldn’t hit each other was a bit tricky. In early concept drawings the badge was just a big rectangle with the ports along the top, but it was too ugly.

We’re big fans of OpenSCAD here at Hackaday — it’s free and open source software, runs on pretty much anything, and the idea of describing objects via code seems like a natural fit for producing functional parts. Rather than clicking and dragging elements on the screen, you can knock out a quick bracket or other simple component with just a few lines of code. But one of the things we don’t often get a chance to showcase is the incredible potential of generating 2D and 3D objects algorithmically.

As a general concept, fault injection is a technique that studies how a system reacts to unusual or unexpected external forces. The idea is that, if you can trigger a glitch at the precise moment, you might be able to use that to your advantage in disabling security features or otherwise gaining further access to the device in question. In the hardware world, this could be achieved by fiddling with the power going into the device, or subjecting it to extreme temperatures.

Back in 2020, we first brought you word of the Xiaomi LYWSD03MMC — a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) temperature and humidity sensor that could be had from the usual sources for just a few dollars each. Capable of being powered by a single CR2032 battery for up to a year, the devices looked extremely promising for DIY smart home projects. There was only one problem, you needed to use Xiaomi’s app to read the data off of the things.

[Surya Chilukuri] writes in to share JTAGprobe — a fork of the official Raspberry Pi debugprobe firmware that lets you use the low-cost microcontroller development board for JTAG and SWD debugging just by flashing the provided firmware image.

With so much data being thrown at our eyeballs these days, it’s worryingly easy for the actually important stuff to slip by occasionally. So when [Liam Jackson] wanted a way to visualize the number of test failures popping up in the continuous integration system at work, he went with a novel but effective solution — universal motorcycle tachometers.

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Back in November we first brought you word of a slicing technique by which the final strength of 3D printed parts could be considerably improved by adjusting the first layer height of each wall so …

At Hackaday, we see community-driven open source development as the great equalizer. Whether it’s hardware or software — if there’s some megacorp out there trying to sell you something, you should have the option to go with a comparable open source version. Even if the commercial offering is objectively superior, it’s important that open source alternatives always exist, or else its the users themselves that end up becoming the product before too long.