Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start this episode off with a discussion about Philadelphia’s budding hacker conference and the imminent retirement of the EZ80. After considering the parallels between the wide world of aviation headsets and our personal projects, talk moves on to the exciting developments in the world of software-defined radio on the ESP32, a Meshtastic pager from a bygone era, and how all the wild flying machines entered into DARPA’s Lift Challenge ended up losing to a simple helicopter.
You’ll also hear about turning plastic bottles into printer filament, pushing e-ink screens to their limits, and browsing the web on the PSP in 2026. To wrap things up they’ll marvel at all the modern abstraction sitting between software and the memory it’s running on, and revisit some RF concepts that might be particularly useful now that everyone is playing with a new SDR device.
Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
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Episode 391 Show Notes:
News:
Mailbag:
- You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but sometimes it can be fun. Thanks [Tom Brusehaver] for the headphone suggestions.
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
- ESP-SDR Can Now Transmit
- The ESP32, An SDR In Itself
- GitHub – h0m3us3r/eSpDR · GitHub
- GitHub – jochenhammes/esp32-sdr-trx: A software-defined transceiver from one ESP32-S3 board: rtl_tcp receiver for SDR++ and FM/SSB voice transmitter for 13 cm (experimental) · GitHub
- GitHub – z1000biker/esp32c3rxtx · GitHub
- Using An ESP32-C3’s RF Hardware For DVB-S2 Video Transmission
- GitHub – barisdinc/ESP32-DATV-SA: Stand-alone fork of SP8ESA/ESP32-DATV: ESP32-C3 DVB-S2 beacon/transmitter without a PC · GitHub
- Pager Converted To Meshtastic Node
- Mars Pathfinder: What Really Happened?
- DARPA Lift Challenge Won By Helicopter
- 2026 Retrocomputing Challenge: USBSID-Pico Has Two SIDs, Many Inputs
- Counting The PET Bottles Needed To Make 1 Kg Of Printer Filament
Quick Hacks:
- Elliot’s Picks:
- Tom’s Picks: