ESP32 Spectrum Analyzer Taps Into Both Cores

We probably don’t need to tell the average Hackaday reader that the ESP32 is a powerful and extremely flexible microcontroller. We’ve seen some incredible projects using this affordable chip over the last few years, and by the looks of it, the best is yet to come. That’s because it always …read more

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An Epic Quest for a Motorized Volume Knob

[Haris Andrianakis] likes his Logitech Z623 sound system. He likes it a lot. Which is why he was willing to hack in his own remote volume control rather than just get a new pair of speakers. But he certainly didn’t make things easy on himself. Rather than trying to tap …read more

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Giving Micro Channel Bus Computers A Sound Blaster Bark

Not many people today probably remember what ‘Micro Channel Architecture’ was about, though its acronym ‘MCA’ might ring a bell. Created by IBM to replace ISA (Industry Standard Architecture) and presumably claw back some of that sweet, sweet licensing money, it didn’t quite pan out as IBM hoped. As history …read more

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This Tabletop Lighthouse Will Get Your Attention

If you wear headphones around the house with any regularity, you’re probably missing out on a lot of audio cues like knocks at the door, people calling your name, or maybe even the smoke alarm. What if you had a visual indicator of sound that was smart enough to point …read more

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World Radio Lets Your Fingers Do the Walking

Listening to radio from distant countries used to take a shortwave rig, but thanks to the Internet we can now pull in streams from all over the globe from the comfort of our own desktop. With a few clicks you can switch between your local news station and the latest …read more

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The Floppy Disk As A Portable Music Format

We remember the floppy disk as the storage medium most of us used two decades or more ago, limited in capacity and susceptible to data loss. It found its way into a few unexpected uses such as Sony’s Mavica line of digital cameras, but outside those who maintain and use …read more

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Pause Your Tunes When it is Time to Listen Up!

“Sorry. I had music playing. Would you say that again?” If we had a money-unit every time someone tried talking to us while we were wearing headphones, we could afford a super-nice pair. For an Embedded C class, [extremerockets] built Listen Up!, a cutoff switch that pauses your music …read more

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Simple MP3 Player Hides Home Automation Brilliance

Like bubble wrap or the corkscrew, plenty of everyday objects have lost almost all ties to their original purpose. It could be that the original product had no market but was able to find one in an unexpected place, or simply that the original use case disappeared. We think that …read more

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Aesthetic DIY Bluetooth Speakers

DIY Bluetooth speaker projects are always a staple here at Hackady. In our latest feature of DIY audio builds, we have [Patrick’s] vinyl cylindrical speaker.

He found a pretty inexpensive Bluetooth audio amplifier on AliExpress. However, the amplifier module oddly enough had a few missing components that were critical to …read more

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