In this week’s episode of the Hackaday podcast, hosts Elliot Williams and Jenny List discuss some interesting hacks they have come across this week, including a retrospective on the capacitor plague from the early 2000s, when several companies’ capacitor production went awry, leading to industrial espionage theories; a thermal camera modified to become a microscope, a long-range wireless power transfer solution that is highly inefficient but impressive, and a PCB-based resistance decade box.
They also reflect on some highlights from Hackaday Europe in Berlin last weekend, including an SAO’s impressively small blinky and a self-written GPS receiver, before moving on to a quick hacks segment, where they highlight a 1970s British synthesiser kit and an emulation of a 6502 system written in shell script.
Finally, in the “can’t miss” section, they consider a potentially tiny new microcontroller and the possibility that rare earth elements could be profitably extracted from waste coal ash.
