Samwise Makers' News
Friday, August 14, 2026
Supercon Ten Tickets On Sale Now
Hackaday Supercon 10 is coming November 6–8 to Pasadena, California — and tickets are now on sale. Early bird pricing starts at $150 (regular $296 plus fees) for the tenth annual celebration of hacker culture. This year brings a venue upgrade for Saturday and Sunday: the nearby ArtCenter South Campus, offering larger stages, more floor space, and an open courtyard instead of the beloved alley setup. The organizers have increased capacity while promising to preserve the tight signal-to-noise ratio that makes Supercon special. The call for proposals has been extended two more weeks — if you have something to say, now’s the time to submit.
Holograms, From Your Plotter
You don’t need a laser or an optics lab to make holograms — just a pen plotter. [Jordan Matelsky] has demonstrated that the interference patterns responsible for holographic effects can be scribed onto the polycarbonate surface of a CD case using an ordinary plotter. The technique exploits the same physics as the rainbow shimmer on an oily phone screen: fine curved lines etched at precise spacings diffract light into visible images. After some false starts with different materials, [Jordan] found that CD case polycarbonate gave the best results. The finished holograms are visible with regular light, no special illumination required, and the write-up includes theory, materials notes, and video.
Bladerunners And The Mother Of Invention
Van Phillips lost his left leg below the knee in a 1976 water-skiing accident, then spent years learning enough engineering to build a better prosthetic than the ones available at the time. The result was the Flex-Foot, a curved carbon-fiber spring that stores and releases energy the way the Achilles tendon does — giving amputees something conventional foot-shaped prosthetics couldn’t: spring. Phillips tested early prototypes on himself; they failed more than once before the geometry and fiber layup held. His Flex-Foot eventually became the Össur Cheetah running blade, now synonymous with Paralympic athletics. The engineering lesson: function matters more than mimicking form.
Removing Microplastics From Soil With Tumbling Magnetic Flakes
Filtering microplastics from water is relatively straightforward — soil is a different problem entirely. Researchers led by [Jeonghyo Kim] published work in npg asia materials describing a promising approach: Ti3C2Tx MXene microparticles combined with ferromagnetic nickel nanoparticles form flakes that can be driven through soil using an external rotating magnetic field. The flakes attract and physically collect polystyrene and PET microplastics as they tumble. Lab tests achieved roughly 81% removal of polystyrene particles and 72% of PET. A strong magnet then extracts the loaded flakes from the soil. Real-world soil conditions remain the open question, but the lab results are encouraging.
The Chernobyl NPP And Forty Years Of Robots For High Radiation Environments
When reactor #4 at Chernobyl exploded in 1986, the demand for radiation-hardened robots went from theoretical to urgent overnight. A new documentary by [Chornobyl Family] traces forty years of robotic development at the site — from early failures that saw humans doing the exploration instead, through the 1990s TR-series from Ukraine’s ISP NPP, which combined agility with magnetic wall-climbing capability to reach previously inaccessible areas, to the TR-7’s EKOR dust-immobilization missions and modern units designed to actively break down and remove hazardous material. The engineering constraints were brutal: cyclic load, extreme radiation, and terrain that shredded conventional wheeled or tracked designs.
Troubleshooting Video Delay On The Raspberry Pi
[MattKC] was building a clone of the WiiU gamepad — a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W receiving the console’s video stream and displaying it — when he hit a mysterious 50 ms latency that wouldn’t budge. Even dummy-frame tricks didn’t help. Drilling down, he found the video decoder took about 50 ms on the first frame, then just 5 ms after. The problem: his code wasn’t polling the decoder quickly enough, so lag carried forward through the pipeline. Switching to active polling eliminated the delay. The final result matches the latency of the original Nintendo hardware. The write-up is a clean case study in tracking latency to its actual source.
Tearing Down A Cheap Digital Caliper
[DiodeGoneWild] has published a detailed video teardown of a budget digital caliper, revealing the elegant simplicity inside an often-underestimated tool. The core measurement system uses an etched copper strip shaped like a repeating pattern of T-shapes acting as capacitive sensing plates — the moving jaw changes the capacitive coupling with fixed electrodes on the PCB, and the chip converts that into a distance reading. The mechanism is surprisingly clean and well-engineered for the price. Less elegant: the lack of a hard power cutoff means the caliper slowly drains its battery whenever it’s closed. [DiodeGoneWild] traces the full circuit and explains why the ‘off’ switch doesn’t fully disconnect power.
Top Crowdfunding
Kickstarter / Indiegogo
1. IFMAKER M5 5-Axis CNC — $912K pledged (Kickstarter LIVE)
2. HeyGears G1 Full-Color 3D Printer — $11.9M pledged (Kickstarter LIVE)
3. Hanboost T1 Laser Engraver — $1.09M pledged (Late Pledge)
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Upcoming Events
Maker Faire Hannover — Aug 15–16, Hannover, Germany
Maker Faire Bay Area — Sept 25–27, San Mateo CA
Hackaday Supercon 10 — Nov 6–8, Pasadena CA
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Curated by JD · samwise.agency
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