Another chilly evening in Western Europe, as Elliot Williams is joined this week by Jenny List to chew the fat over the week’s hacks.

It’s been an auspicious week for anniversaries, with the hundredth since the first demonstration of a working television system in a room above a London coffee shop. John Logie Baird’s mechanically-scanned TV may have ultimately been a dead-end superseded by the all-electronic systems we all know, but the importance of television for the later half of the 20th century and further is beyond question.

The standout hacks of the week include a very clever use of the ESP32’s WiFi API to detect people moving through a WiFi field, a promising open-source smartphone, another ESP32 project in a comms system for cyclists, more cycling on tensegrity spokes, a clever way to smooth plaster casts, and a light sculpture reflecting Wi-Fi traffic. Then there are a slew of hacks including 3D printed PCBs and gem-cut dichroic prisms, before we move to the can’t-miss articles. There we’re looking at document preservation, and a wallow in internet history with a look at the Netscape brand.

As usual all the links you need can be found below, so listen, and enjoy!

Or download the podcast old-school, with a direct link to the MP3 file in question.

Episode 354 Show Notes:

What’s that Sound?

• Jenny got the sound right. Did you? Only one way to find out: put your handle and guess in here.

News

• One Hundred Years Of Telly
  • Mechanical Image Acquisition With A Nipkow Disc

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Make Your Own ESP32-Based Person Sensor, No Special Hardware Needed
  • espectre/micro-espectre at main · francescopace/espectre · GitHub
  • GitHub – francescopace/micropython-esp32-csi: MicroPython – a lean and efficient Python implementation for microcontrollers and constrained systems
  • Heart Rate Monitoring Via WiFi
  • Heart Rate Measurement Via WiFi, The DIY Way
• Pi Compute Module Powers Fully Open Smartphone
• These Ultra-Cute, Handsfree Walkie-Talkies Are Built For Cycling
• PLA Mold To Plaster Bust, No Silicone Needed
• Building A Light That Reacts To Radio Waves
• Bike Spokes, Made Of Rope
  • Gears Are Old And Busted, Capstans Are Cool
  • A Tentacle That’s A Work Of Art

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
  • Using 3D Printing And Copper Tape To Make PCBs
  • X-Cube Prism Becomes Dichroic Disco Ball
  • Light Following Robot Does It The Analog Way
• Jenny’s Picks:
  • Post-rampocalyptic Chip-Swap Provides Desktop Memory At Laptop Prices
  • Wikipedia As A Storage Medium
  • The Defunct Scooter Company, And The Default Key

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• Ask Hackaday: How Do You Digitize Your Documents?
  • Gears Are Old And Busted, Capstans Are Cool
  • Page-turning Book Scanner Roundup
  • DIY Book Scanner Processes 600 Pages/hour
• Zombie Netscape Won’t Die