A geothermal survey around Munich is using vibrotrucks to send controlled vibrations into the ground while a large network of geophones records the reflections. The project covers roughly 1,000 square kilometers, with more than 120,000 recording locations and about 86,000 planned vibration points.
Hackaday's Elliot Williams encountered the trucks in his neighborhood and followed them in the field. The vehicles press an exciter plate against the ground and sweep through low frequencies so researchers can reconstruct underground layers in 3D.
The plan for finding underground hot water starts with enormous trucks methodically shaking the neighborhood. It is sophisticated geophysics delivered with wonderfully brute-force hardware.
A Nico Nico Douga maker named Korori built a triangular machine for the anything-goes JCJC time-attack scene. The idea targets one of the course's hardest sections, the lane change, where roller contact can slow or destabilize a conventional rectangular chassis.
By making the body triangular, the design aims to reduce that contact near the crest. In the pursuit of speed, even the familiar shape—and effectively the usual four-wheel assumptions—of a Mini 4WD car are treated as optional.
Optimization gets wonderfully ruthless when “make the Mini 4WD faster” turns into “the rectangle is optional, and apparently four wheels are too.”
Maker heychaostheory built a small wheeled mouse droid with a 3D-printed body, ultrasonic obstacle avoidance, an Arduino Uno, motor control, and flashing LEDs. It can drive around on its own while avoiding objects.
Then there is the extra feature: a dedicated party-mode button. Pressing it triggers music, turning a practical autonomous robot into a mobile party machine on command.
Obstacle avoidance is useful, autonomous driving is sensible, and then someone decided the robot also needed a dedicated party button. That priority list feels exactly right for this droid.
Older CH-53 helicopters use an unusual system to warn crews about cracks in their rotor blades while airborne. Each blade is pressurized with nitrogen; if a crack causes pressure to drop, a mechanical indicator exposes a small amount of strontium-90.
A detector on the helicopter can sense that radiation, providing a warning without putting fragile electronics or complicated wiring on a spinning rotor. Hackaday revisited this decades-old solution.
Sending a sensor signal from a spinning rotor was difficult, so the solution became: expose a radioactive source and detect that instead. The engineering constraint is ordinary; the answer escalates spectacularly.
Ollie Q hacked a Roomba so people anywhere can drive it in real time through a web interface. A low-latency video feed lets remote players steer around the room and compete to see who can clean most effectively.
A Raspberry Pi and custom software keep the controls responsive, and Ollie even experimented with a racing-wheel controller. A machine designed to automate housework is deliberately turned back into a human-controlled activity—just with the humans moved onto the internet.
The final form of “gamifying chores” is apparently letting strangers on the internet drive your vacuum cleaner. An unusual direction for outsourcing housework.
GMO AI & Robotics Trading is introducing a maintenance vehicle dedicated to humanoid robots. When a robot breaks down, it can bring engineers, diagnostic equipment, spare parts, and even a replacement humanoid. If the machine cannot be repaired on site, it can be taken away while the substitute takes over.
The vehicle is designed as a mobile maintenance base staffed by engineers who routinely work on humanoids. Practical infrastructure for robots now looks surprisingly like emergency medical support for machines.
The ambulance does not just bring tools for the broken robot; it can arrive with a replacement robot too. Robot society is already developing something that looks suspiciously like emergency services.
After building a fully functional 7:1-scale Arduino UNO, UncleStem made a matching 7:1-scale version of the classic beginner turtle robot. The oversized parts mimic an UNO, L298N driver, ultrasonic sensor and jumper wires, while the internals are replaced with appropriately beefy hardware such as 12–24 V ride-on-toy motors and a pair of 300 W motor drivers.
The giant robot still behaves like the original classroom build: it pans an ultrasonic sensor, detects obstacles and drives around them.
The obvious question after building a giant Arduino is “what is it for?” The answer was not to shrink the Arduino—it was to enlarge the entire beginner robot around it.
Funnytronics now has an official X account. Selected stories from the site will be shared there, focusing on the ones that work especially well in a social feed.
The account is operated manually, so not every story published on Funnytronics will appear on X. If you want to see everything, the main site is still the place to look.
Account:
https://x.com/funnytronics
Now the weird technology can escape the website and wander directly into the timeline.
Uploading files to an e-paper reader felt needlessly awkward, so Nishant Joshi made an Xteink X3 appear on a computer as an ordinary network printer. Select it in the macOS print dialog, send a document, and the page appears directly on the reader's display.
Because the ESP32-C3 cannot hold a full high-resolution print job in RAM, the firmware processes incoming pixels row by row and writes them straight to the screen. Finished pages are also saved to the SD card, making a folder the printer's equivalent of an output tray. E-paper has become so paper-like that its interface loops back around to printing.
E-paper imitates paper long enough and eventually someone says “fine, I'll just print to it.” Digital reading has completed a very tidy circle.
Real Hot Wheels track runs from the roof and down the sides of a 1970s Chevy G10 van. Boogie Racers' Roller Boogie Machine does not use the track merely as decoration: visitors can send toy cars down the vehicle and into a roughly 30-foot, six-lane drag strip.
The setup includes an electronic starting gate, infrared finish sensors and a digital timing display, while the van interior keeps the 1970s theme with shag carpet and disco balls. Instead of making a real van merely resemble a toy, the project turns the real vehicle into infrastructure for playing with the toys.
It isn't enough to make a van look like Hot Wheels. The Hot Wheels also have to race down the van. The two scales have folded neatly into each other.
RotaryCell turns an old rotary telephone into something you can carry away from the phone line and use over a cellular network. The original handset, dial, switch hook and mechanical bell remain intact: dial a number normally and it places a mobile call; receive one and the old bell rings.
Maker fregacmols fits an ESP32-S3, cellular modem, battery and circuitry that imitates the telephone exchange the vintage phone expects. Rather than teaching the 1950s hardware new behavior, the project miniaturizes enough of its old infrastructure to make the phone feel at home on LTE.
Modernizing the rotary phone by shrinking the telephone exchange and bringing it along is wonderfully backwards. The old phone gets to remain completely itself.
Put transparent tape in front of a bare image sensor and the raw result normally looks like useless blur. Maker okooptics instead measures how that diffuser scrambles light and uses computation to reconstruct an image, then extends the same lensless approach into three-dimensional imaging.
Using a Raspberry Pi camera with a thin diffuser, different reconstructions of the same captured data can reveal views that behave like slightly shifted perspectives. Rather than adding more sophisticated optics, the project replaces the lens with something tape-like and transfers much of the difficulty into mathematics.
Instead of making the optics more elaborate, replace the lens with Scotch tape and make the math work harder. That's an impressively uneven division of labor.
The plan for finding underground hot water starts with enormous trucks methodically shaking the neighborhood. It is sophisticated geophysics delivered with wonderfully brute-force hardware.