Mysterious Files PH

The Tasmota firmware is a popular choice for flashing to a range of Espressif microcontrollers to turn them into smart home devices. If you have such devices in your house, you might wish they were easier to integrate with the Apple Home platform. As it turns out, though, there’s a convenient app for that.

[Christof Müller] built an app called Tasmoshelf for just this purpose. Its primary claim to fame is that it can easily help port a Tasmota-based setup into the Apple Home universe. It can achieve this without requiring a Home Assistant server or MQTT broker or any other workarounds. This is thanks to the fact that Apple Home is compatible with Matter technology, as are ESP32 devices running Tasmota 13 firmware or newer. They can natively jump on an Apple Home setup, and even act as a bridge for older ESP8266 devices that can’t speak Matter themselves. The device is able to run network scans to automatically discover devices and advise whether they can hook up directly to Apple Home, or whether a bridge is needed.

If you’re running Tasmota devices and want to easily integrate them, you might find Tasmoshelf a useful addition to your smart home setup. Just note that it does require a one-off purchase if you intend to use it beyond three devices, a limit which some might find somewhat restrictive.

We’ve looked at Tasmota in detail before; it’s a great way to whip up a smart home to suit your own desires. Meanwhile, if you’re whipping up your own nifty integrations, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline.

Hackers, start your engines! We’re opening up ticket sales for our tenth, the 2026 Hackaday Supercon, to take place Nov 6-8 in Pasadena, CA. As always, because we haven’t announced the full slate of talks yet, we’d like to give the Hackaday True Believers out there a bonus: early bird tickets for $150 instead of the regular price of $296 (plus fees). If you know you want to attend (and you know that you want to attend) do not delay and order your tickets now!

As we mentioned before, there are a few exciting changes coming to this year’s Supercon. First off, we are moving to a larger venue on Saturday and Sunday: a few blocks south at the ArtCenter South Campus. We’re looking forward to two larger stages, more room for attendees, and more space to spread out and hack. No longer crammed into a cozy alley, we’ll sprawl out in a luxurious courtyard.

We have more tickets available than ever this year, which is great because Supercons past have all sold out. But we’re not expanding so much that we’ll lose the killer signal-to-noise ratio and friendly hacker atmosphere that makes Supercon our favorite con.

But do get your tickets soon! Whether you get in at the True Believer rate or not, Supercon is a bargain. Two and a half days of fully catered hacking and entertainment, plus the great talks, make it a bargain. Then we throw in sweet hackable badge over the top. But it’s truly the assembled crowd that makes it a priceless experience.

If you’re a Hackaday Supercon regular, we look forward to seeing you again soon! If you’ve always wanted to attend, but never pulled the trigger, the nice round number of Supercon Ten is a great excuse.

Of course, the best way to attend any convention is as a presenter, and our call for proposals just got extended for another two weeks. If you have something you’d like to say: let us know soon!

When mass-printed holograms appeared on magazines in the 1980s they were a huge novelty, before degrading to the level of kids’ stickers in the years since. At the time they were seen as not for ordinary people to make, but the truth is they can be created without lasers or an optics lab. [Jordan Matelsky] is here to show us how they can be made using as humble a device as a pen plotter.

The effect of an interference pattern from a set of fine lines in a thin film can be demonstrated at its simplest with an oily finger and a mobile phone screen, and once he’s demonstrated that he takes us through some of the theory involved in shifting the light to make an image. There are some false starts with different materials, but eventually he shows us some finished holograms scribed on the polycarbonate of a CD case. It seems you really can make a hologram with a pen plotter. If these images interest you, we’ve looked deeper into the subject in the past. Meanwhile, one of the plotter-scribed holograms can be seen below.

One of the great things of Linux as an ecosystem is that there is so much choice. Yet this is also its greatest weakness, as unlike on MacOS and Windows this means that simple questions often do not have a simple answer. The topic of distributing software is one of these vexing topics that never really goes away, with [Noam Lewis], as author of the Fresh editor, recently expressing their frustrations on this topic.

This is a familiar topic that we have covered before, mostly in the context of cross-platform installers. Whereas on MacOS and Windows you just pick any of a handful of standard installer frameworks that do roughly the same thing, on Linux you are dealing with a dizzying number of package managers, including distro-specific ones, NPM, Homebrew, Rust crates, third party repositories like Arch Linux’s AUR or stray APT repositories for Debian, and of course AppImage and Flatpak along with a host of other options.

After going through the entire list with help from the Fresh community, [Noam] ended up creating packages for all of them, and has a lot of thoughts. Since Fresh is a TUI-based editor, something like Flatpack is not a really good fit, while AppImage is just very slow due to mounting the image, which is annoying.

Overall, distro-specific solutions are just unpleasant in general, as they mean repeating the same work over and over, even if you can even get into a distribution channel. Ultimately the solution that [Noam] ended up at was to have a static binary with the musl runtime, along with an integrated updater, which is a solution that should be quite familiar for Windows users. Yet even if it fails some kind of purity test for certain Linux users, is it really a bad solution if it works for users of the software?

Now that MCUs like the ESP32-S3 are quite capable computer systems including USB host functionality, it only makes sense that you can connect USB peripherals like Logitech racing wheels to them. Of course, these aren’t basic HID USB devices, so they require a bit of setup to make them start spitting out the data updates which we’re interested in. Making this process easy is the goal of the LogiWheelHost project for ESP32-S3 by [Joel Kometz].

This single-header library supports the G29, G923, G920, G27, G25, DFGT, Driving Force Pro wheels, building on top of the EspUsbHost project. As explained in the README, these racing wheels do not start streaming all updates to their controls once powered on, but boot into a restricted mode in which only neutral or combined-axis data is sent.

To change this you need to trigger the so-called native mode switch in which far more detailed information as well as updates on extended features like separate pedals, all buttons and the gear shifter become available. This is done by sending a HID output report to the USB device, which is easy enough.

In addition to handling this detail the library also provides an API using which obtaining and using these controller states in your own code should be quite easy. Presumably the library will work on or can be ported to other ESP32 MCUs that support host USB mode, so this might be good news for anyone who is looking to do more with that old Logitech racing wheel.

A few weeks ago, we put out the call for participation for this year’s 2026 Hackaday Supercon, taking place in Pasadena, CA this November. Today was going to be the deadline, but like you, we often let things pile up and put things off, so we’re extending another two weeks until August 26th.

Which is not to say that we haven’t heard from a ton of you! We’re psyched to see so many familiar Supercon regulars on the list, but we also love to see first-timers give talks. We try to make sure that new folks get their time to shine, so if you’ve never given a Supercon talk before, or if it’s been a few years, take this as your cue to present in front of the friendliest audience of like-minded hackers around.

This year is Hackaday’s tenth in-person Superconference, and to celebrate we’ve gotten a larger venue, so more folks can watch the talks live. We’ll be running two tracks as always, and you have your choice of a 20-minute or 40-minute slot. Presenters get in free, and we’ll get you an early-bird ticket rate the submission, so don’t delay and register for your slot today! Or at least before August 26th, because we won’t extend the deadline twice.

Oh, and if you’re interested in tickets, swing by Hackaday about this time tomorrow — we’ll have some news for you.

In a few hours, there is a solar eclipse that will be visible with a track that goes from Spain up through Greenland. Too late to travel for it, but thanks to [jonty], you can find all the webcams that will have a view.

This may be ideal. No funny glasses. No looking at a projected image on a card. Of course, many, if not all, of these cameras aren’t looking directly at the sun, so it isn’t clear if you’ll be able to see the actual eclipse or just the effect it has on the surroundings.

If you prefer more science, try the NASA feed below.

Or, you could see what ESA is broadcasting from Javalambre, Spain:

Or, try the telescope view version:

Want to know what it might look like from a particular spot? Harvard has you covered. If you want to feel more realistic, try wearing some regular sunglasses while watching just for the fun of it.

We wish we could watch our eclipses from the lunar surface. Of course, you can always make your own eclipse.