It’s pretty important in 2024 to be able digitize documents quickly and easily without necessarily having to stop by the local library or buy an all-in-one printer. While there are plenty of commercial solutions out there, [Caelestis Cosplay] has created a simple document scanner that takes documents, as [Caelestis Cosplay] puts it, from papers to pixels. The build is probably what you’re expecting — it’s essentially a Raspberry Pi (in this case a 4B), a V2 Pi camera, and a handful of custom 3D-printed parts. [Caelestis Cosplay] says they had never designed anything for printing before, and w ..read more

At Hackaday, the projects we cover are generally a one-off sort of thing. Somebody makes something, they post it online, we share it with our audience — rinse and repeat. If a project really captures people’s imaginations, it might even inspire a copy or two, which is gratifying for everyone involved. But on the rarest of occasions, we run across a project like [Jay Doscher]’s Recovery Kit. To say that the Recovery Kit was an inspiration to others would be putting it mildly. Revolutionary would be more like it, as it resulted in more “Pi-in-a-Pelican” builds than we could possibly count. So i ..read more

A Pi Zero doesn’t need much to sustain itself, and it’s projects like the PhotonPower Zero that remind us of it its low appetite when we need this reminder most. The PhotonPower Zero board lets you power a Pi Zero board from a solar cell, with a LiIon backup, and a microcontroller for power management. Created by [David Murray], this board’s been a perfect solution for quite a few projects of his, and now he is sharing the design so that we can create outdoor-suited devices as easily as he’s been able to. Tested for months in Australian summer and winter conditions alike, the design pulls no ..read more

A cold boot attack is a way to extract RAM contents from a running system by power cycling it and reading out RAM immediately after loading your own OS. How easy is it for you to perform such an attack? As [anfractuosity] shows, you can perform a cold boot attack with a Raspberry Pi, with a reasonably simple hardware setup and a hefty chunk of bare-metal code. [anfractuosity]’s setup is simple enough. The Pi 4 under attack is set up to boot from USB drive, and a relay board has it switch between two possible USB drives to boot from: one with a program that fills RAM with , and another with a ..read more

A TV news pundit might on any given evening in 2024 look at the viewers and gravely announce that we are living in uncertain times. Those of us who’ve been around for a bit longer than we’d like to admit would see that, scratch our heads, and ask “Have we ever not lived in uncertain times?” If all this uncertainty is getting to you though, you can now reassure yourself as [Ian Williams] has, with a threat level monitor which displays the UK’s current level of projected fear threat level. The build is fairly straightforward in hardware terms, with a Raspberry Pi Zero and a Pimoroni e-paper dis ..read more

[Abigail] is a confectionery roboticist, and [Hazal] is a developer advocate at a robotics company. The two met recently and decided to collaborate on a smart cake, with amusing results. The resulting cake not only looks like a camera it also has a camera inside. When the camera detects people in its field of view, a NeoPixel is lit up in green to signal it’s spotted something. If you so desire, you can then hit a button and the cakera (cake-camera, keep up) will take your photo. The cake itself looks to be a sponge of some sort with fondant used to create the camera housing and a surrou ..read more

[akmnos22] was getting tired of moving one hand to the mouse and back to the keyboard. Rather than integrating mouse controls into a keyboard, they decided to really lean in and create a chording keyboard — one that creates characters with combinations of key presses, like playing chords on a piano. This project was inspired in part by the Infogrip BAT, which has graced these pages before. Much like the BAT, this uses a total of seven Cherry MX switches: one for each finger, and three for the thumb. In order to get the placement just right for you, [akmnos22] suggests laying your hand in a co ..read more

[Hunter Adams] has written a secondary bootloader for the RP2040 that uses an IR link and can be extended to behave like a polite worm virus. This allows the easy updating of a large cluster of co-located RP2040-based controllers. This could be handy in applications like swarm robotics or virtual cattle fencing. The project he demonstrates in the two videos ( below the break ) uses a pair of IR transmitters/receivers. But he purposely wrote the boot loader to be independent of the serial link, which could be infrared, radio, audio, or just wires. Not only did [Hunter] make a boot loader, but ..read more

[Oscar] at Obsolescence Guaranteed is well-known for fun replicas of the PDP-8 and PDP-11 using the Raspberry Pi (along with some other simulated vintage computers). His latest attempt is the PDP-10, and you can see how it looks in the demo video below. Watching the video will remind you of every old movie or TV show you’ve ever seen with a computer, complete with typing noise. The PDP-10, also known as a DECsystem-10, was a mainframe computer that usually ran TOPS-10. These were technically “mainframes” in 1966, although the VAX eclipsed the system. By 1983 (the end of the PDP-10’s run), aro ..read more

Ordering a PCB with mistakes sucks. We should help each other avoid such mistakes – especially newcomers. One of the best ways to avoid these mistakes, especially if it’s your first one, is to get a few other people to look at it. You deserve to get a PCB that is as functional and as helpful as humanly possible, so that you can be happy with your project, and feel ever so slightly more confident in yourself in whatever you shall set out to do next. At the end of last year, I put out a call for design review submissions, and we’ve received enough projects to make me feel overwhelmed for a bit ..read more