Mysterious Files PH

As temperatures warm up in the Northern Hemisphere, one’s mind naturally turns to the outdoors and the garden — even if some of our gardens are still snow-covered. One secret to good gardening is that many of the plants we love take too long to grow if started from seed outside, at least in relatively temperate climes. There are a myriad of ways to grow seedlings indoors, and this new hack highlighted by [GrowVeg] looks like a great way to get started.

The idea apparently comes from the seedier side of Instagram, where [Farida Sober] has been popularizing it as a “seed snail”, a name they seem to have coined. The technique is very simple: take a sheet of something cheap that won’t disintegrate when moist like bubble wrap or cardboard, layer it with soil — up to 5 cm depending on your seed size — and you roll the whole thing up like a piece of sushi to produce the spiral shape that gives the hack its name. With a piece of tape to hold the roll, it’s just a matter of planting your seeds according to the packet directions. If that’s clear as mud, check out the video embedded below.

Once the seedlings have grown, it looks like it will be very easy to unroll the spiral and pluck them out to plant in the ground or bigger pots without overly traumatizing their roots, like we always do starting in flats. If it weren’t for those delicate roots, it certainly looks like the snail might save some space compared to, say, peat pots. Just remember that starting under the proper LEDs can make a huge difference to how quickly your seeds grow. No dirt? No problem — once sprouted, your plants can be made to grow hydroponically. For the really adventurous, there’s even aeroponics.

Al and I were talking on the podcast today about a sweet 3D printed wide-format camera build, and we got to musing on why we 3D-print.

For Al, it’s an opportunity to experiment with 3D printing itself: tweaking his machines to get the best performance out of them. Other people make small, functional objects that they need in their daily life, like bag clips or spare parts for broken appliances. Some folks go for the ornamental or the aesthetic. The kids in my son’s class all seem obsessed with sci-fi props and fidget toys. The initial RepRap ideal was to replace all commercial fabrication with machines owned by the individual, rather than by companies – it was going to be Marxist revolutionary.

But there’s another group of 3D printer enthusiasts that I think doesn’t get enough coverage, and I’m going to call them the hobbyist industrial designers. These are the people who design a custom dog-poop-bag holder that exactly fits their extra-wide dog leash, not because they couldn’t find one that fit in the pet store, but because it’s simply fun to design and fabricate things. (OK, that’s literally me.)

It’s fun to learn CAD tools, to learn about how things are designed, how they work, and how to manufacture them at least in quantity one. Dreaming, designing, fabricating, failing, and repeating until you get it right is a great joy. And then you get to use the poop-bag holder every day for a few years, until you decide to refine the design and incorporate the lessons learned on the tough streets of practical use.

Of course none of this is exclusive to 3D printing. There were always people who designed-and-built things in the metal machine shop, or made their creations out of wood. In that sense, the 3D printer is just another tool, and the real fun isn’t in using the 3D printer, but rather in the process of bringing things out of your mind and into the world. So maybe there is nothing new here, but the latitude that 3D printing affords the hobby designer is amazing, and that makes it all the more fun, and challenging.

So do you 3D print for necessity, to stick it to the man, to pimp your printer, for the mini-figs, or simply for the joy of the process of making things? It’s all good. 3D printing is a big tent.

Animatronic displays aren’t just for Halloween, and hackers today have incredible access to effective, affordable parts with which to make spectacles of light, sound, and movement. But the hardware is only half the battle. Getting everything synchronized properly can be a daunting task, so get a head start on your next holiday display with the Hauntimator by [1031-Systems].

After all, synchronizing movements, sound, and light by trial and error can get tiresome even in small setups. Anyone who makes such a display — and contemplates doing it twice — tends to quickly look into making things modular.

At its heart, Hauntimator works with a Raspberry Pi Pico-based controller board. The GUI makes it easy to create control channels for different hardware (for example, doing things like moving servos) and synchronize them to audio. Once an animation is validated, it gets uploaded to the control board where it runs itself. It’s open-source and designed to make plugins easy, so give it a look. There’s a video channel with some demonstrations of the tools that should fill in any blanks.

Intrigued by animatronics, but not sure where to begin? Get inspired by checking out this DIY set of servo-driven eyes, and see for yourself the benefits of smooth motor control for generating lifelike motion.

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams met up to trade their favorite posts of the week. Tune in and see if your favorites made the list. From crazy intricate automata to surprising problems in Peltier cooler designs, there’s a little bit of everything.

Should bikes have chains? What’s the hardest thing about Star Trek computers to duplicate? Can you make a TV station from a single microcontroller? The podcast this week answers these questions and more. Plus, weigh in on the What’s That Sound contest and you might just score a Hackaday Podcast T-shirt.

For the Can’t Miss segment, Elliot had airships on his mind, while Al’s sick of passwords. But is he sick enough to take electronic pills that transmit his password?

Or download the bit stream and decrypt it by XORing each byte with zero.

News:

• 2026 Hackaday Europe Call For Participation: We Want You!

What’s that Sound?

• Can you identify the sound? Al didn’t get it, but that is, admittedly, a very low bar. Enter your best guess here.

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Love Complex Automata? Don’t Miss The Archer
  • Retrotechtacular: The Original Robot Arm
  • Televox: The Past’s Robot Of The Future
  • [Fran Blanche] Goes In-Depth With The Maillardet Automaton
  • 3D Printed Mechanical Contraption Shows Live Weather Forecast
  • The Incredible Mechanical Artistry Of François Junod
  • The Bad Old Days Of Telephone Answering Machines
• Peltier Fridges Have Early Death
• Why Chains Are Still Better For Bicycles Than Belts
  • Electric BMX With Friction Drive
  • Chainless “Digital Drive” Bikes Use Electric Power Transmission Instead
• Control Your Smart Home With Trek-Inspired Comm Badge
• A TV Transmitter From An STM32
  • Retrotechtacular: TV Troubleshooting
• Panoramic Film Camera Made From 3D Printed Parts
  • Panoramic photography – Wikipedia

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
  • Easily Replaceable USB-C Port Spawned By EU Laws
  • The MOST Effective Thermal Mass Works Like A Sunburn
  • Random Number Generator Uses Camera Noise
  • Inside A Compact Intel 3000 W Water-Cooled Power Supply
• Al’s Picks:
  • X-Ray A PCB Virtually
  • Running In Printf
  • MicroGPT Lets You Peek With Your Browser

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• What One-Winged Squids Can Teach The Airship Renaissance
• Motorola’s Password Pill Was Just One Idea

You see it all the time in science fiction: the heroes find old data, read it, and learn how to save the day. But how realistic is that? Forget aliens. Could you read a stack of punch cards or a 9-track tape right now? Probably not, and those are just a handful of decades in the past. Fast forward a few centuries, and punch cards will decay, and tapes will lose their coating. More modern storage is just as bad. It simply isn’t made to last for thousands of years. Microsoft has Project Silica, which aims to store data in quartz glass with a potential lifetime of many thousands of years.

As you might expect, this is a write-once technology. Lasers write the data, and polarization-sensitive microscopes read it back. Electromagnetic fields don’t matter. You can’t accidentally change the data while reading. A square glass platter the size of a DVD can hold about 7 TB of data.

While the program is not a new one, they’ve recently published results using ordinary borosilicate glass (like your Pyrex baking dish is made from) as a storage medium. They say writing is also more efficient, and reading now requires only one camera instead of the three in the original system. The paper identifies birefringent voxel writing, phase voxels, and more.

Obviously, this isn’t for the casual project. But we have to wonder if hackers could do something similar with lower densities, for example. Unlike other methods we’ve seen, no DNA is involved.

An auspicious anniversary passed for me this week, as it’s a decade since I started writing for Hackaday. In that time this job has taken me all over  Europe, it’s shown me the very best and most awesome things our community has to offer, and I hope that you have enjoyed my attempts to share all of that with you. It’s worth a moment to reflect on the last ten years in terms of what has made our world during that time.

What Sticks In My Mind?

With quite a few thousand articles under my belt I’ve sadly reached the point at which I can’t remember them all, indeed a hazard when thinking of new ones is that any idea might be something I’ve written before. But there are some of mine and from others which remain in the mind, such as our April Fool pieces, or my coverage of the needless panic about drone flights. Who can forget Brian Benchoff’s Apple Device, a spoof Apple take on a Raspberry Pi for which he even made real(fake) hardware.

Perhaps the only time I have ever found myself with what you might call a real scoop that has importance beyond Hackaday came at the end of 2018. London’s Gatwick airport was closed for several days due to drone sighting, soon followed by London Heathrow, and we were the first publication to pose the question as to whether the drone had existed at all.

The public were treated to a years-long saga of deceit from the authorities as they attempted to cover up the fact that they’d shut down two airports over nothing, with the eventual grudging admission made after years of Freedom of Information requests from activists, that there had never been any evidence of drone involvement at all. The craziest story in all of this was the time they chased a drone which turned out to be their own helicopter, which along with the rest of the sorry saga is related in a talk I did at a hacker camp in 2019. Given that in the week I write this there’s been an airspace closure over El Paso in Texas because of a mix-up over a US government test of an anti-drone weapon, it seems that drone panic is a story which will run and run.

Hardware Hacking As A Series of Epochs

It’s been my observation since long before Hackaday, that the hardware hacking world gains momentum following the appearance of new parts or technologies. I’ve referred to them in terms of epochs in the past. In the last decade we were fortunate that a happy confluence of several such events came within a short time; in the period from about 2005 to 2015 we received accessible and cheap single board computers, 3D printing affordable by mere mortals, cheap PCBs from China, and the explosion of parts and modules from AliExpress sellers. These have arguably been the backbone of Hackaday’s success, because you in our community have taken them and used them to craft such amazing projects. If I had to name a single part which embodies this it would be Espressif’s ESP8266, while it’s largely obsolete in 2026 its appearance in 2014 as a Wi-Fi enabled microcontroller for around a dollar was nothing short of revolutionary. Before the 8266 an Internet connected project was expensive and complex, afterwards it’s done as a matter of course, and ubiquitous.

The Future

If I have a perennial concern about where our community is going, it’s in wondering where the next of those epochs will come from. Sadly, we haven’t yet gotten our crystal ball working, but maybe it’s time to look ahead for a minute anyway.

Perhaps the most likely direction will come not from new parts or technologies, but from a reaction to the world around us. As trust in monolithic online services plummets I’m sure our community will respond, and I hope that in the next few years I can have a truly open-source smartphone devoid of links to large corporates, that I’d want to use. Projects that help disconnect from cloud services are going to be popular in the coming years.

I don’t join the general hype around AI, but I think that locally-hosted LLMs will increasingly find their way into projects featured here as the hardware to run them becomes commoditised. A semblance of a personality in our home automation for example is surely going to tempt some hackers, but maybe it won’t be the epoch I’m looking for. For that I see custom semiconductors as one promising future, and I hope that for example Tiny Tapeoput will be only the start. I know nothing about IC design, but I look forward to the time I first sit down to learn the ropes and order the Jenny Chip. It’s next-level now, but in 2036 it’s likely to be as normal as ordering a PCB is for us today.

How has the hackerspace community fared?

I have spent a large proportion of my time in the world of hackerspaces over the last decade and before, ever since I saw my city had a group of people who’d started one. In them I have found my people, and found access to knowledge and experience well beyond my own. I’ve sat in spaces all across the UK and Europe and drunk caffeinated beverages with all manner of like-minded crazies, and it’s been a blast.

A good thing in that world over the years has been the extinguishing of the consensus model under which many early hackerspaces were run. I was a director of such a space whose drama level exceeded 1000 MilliNoiseBridges and it has marked me ever since, so it’s nice to see a much more sensible committee-based model take its place.

Every space has its own flavour, but the more recent ones I have been a member of in my peripatetic existence over the last few years have been blissfully stable and a joy to be part of. In Europe most established spaces are now in their second decade, and if I see a danger for them it’s in failing to keep attracting hackers in their 20s and fading into irrelevance. Maybe I’ll come back in another decade and tell you how that went.

How It All Began

A decade ago I was building a not-ultimately-successful electronic kit business when I saw one of Mike Szczys’ “We’re Hiring!” posts on my go-to hardware news website, and thought it looked like a fun thing to do. I didn’t realise that being the only electronic engineer who’d worked for the Oxford Dictionary put me uniquely in line for this, so from that happy accident onwards the last decade has been a blast. I’d like to thank you the Hackaday readers, my awesome Hackaday colleagues, and the wider community of crazy, weird, and talented people I have met along the way. The next decade of hardware hacking is now on.

[Matt Denton]’s SpoolBot is a surprisingly agile remote-controlled robot that doesn’t just repurpose filament spool leftovers. It looks exactly like a 2 kg spool of filament; that’s real filament wound around the outside of the drum. In fact, Spoolie the SpoolBot looks so much like the real thing that [Matt] designed a googly-eye add-on, because the robot is so easily misplaced.

SpoolBot works by rotating its mass around the central hub, which causes it to roll forward or back. Steering is accomplished by tank-style turning of the independent spool ends. While conceptually simple, quite a bit of work is necessary to ensure SpoolBot rolls true, and doesn’t loop itself around inside the shell during maneuvers. Doing that means sensors, and software work.

To that end, a couple of rotary encoders complement the gearmotors and an IMU takes care of overall positional sensing while an ESP32 runs the show. The power supply uses NiMH battery packs, in part for their added weight. Since SpoolBot works by shifting its internal mass, heavier batteries are more effective.

The receiver is a standard RC PWM receiver which means any RC transmitter can be used, but [Matt] shows off a slick one-handed model that not only works well with SpoolBot but tucks neatly into the middle of the spool for storage. Just in case SpoolBot was not hard enough to spot among other filament rolls, we imagine.

The googly-eye add-on solves that, however. They clip to the central hub and so always show “forward” for the robot. They do add quite a bit of personality, as well as a visual indication of the internals’ position relative to the outside.

The GitHub repository and Printables page have all the design files, and the video (embedded just below) shows every piece of the internals.

The kind of hardware available nowadays makes self-balancing devices much more practical and accessible than they ever have been. Really, SpoolBot has quite a lot in common with other self-balancing robots and self-balancing electric vehicles (which are really just larger, ridable self-balancing robots) so there’s plenty of room for experimentation no matter one’s budget or skill level.