Hackaday Podcast Episode 308: The Worst 1 Ever, Google’s Find My Opened, and SAR on a Drone
It’s Valentine’s Day today, and what better way to capture your beloved’s heart than by settling down together and listening to the Hackaday Podcast! Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny …read more


It’s Valentine’s Day today, and what better way to capture your beloved’s heart than by settling down together and listening to the Hackaday Podcast! Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List for this week’s roundup of what’s cool in the world of hardware. We start by reminding listeners that Hackaday Europe is but a month away, and that a weekend immersed in both hardware hacking and the unique culture offered by the city of Berlin can be yours.
The stand-out hack of the week is introduced by Elliot, Henrik Forstén’s synthetic aperture radar system mounted on a cheap quadcopter, pushing the limits of construction, design, and computation to create landscape imagery of astounding detail. Most of us will never create our own SAR system, but we can all learn a lot about this field from his work. Meanwhile Jenny brings us Sylvain Munaut’s software defined radio made using different projects that are part of Tiny Tapeout ASICs. The SDR isn’t the best one ever, but for us it represents a major milestone in which Tiny Tapeout makes the jump from proof of concept to component. We look forward to more of this at more reasonable prices in the future. Beyond that we looked at the porting of Google Find My to the ESP32, how to repair broken zippers, and tuning in to ultrasonic sounds. Have fun listening, and come back next week for episode 309!
We’d love it if you downloaded the MP3.
Episode 308 Show Notes:
News:
What’s that Sound?
- Congrats to [make piece not war] for guessing Olivia – Signal Identification Wiki
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
- Budget-Minded Synthetic Aperture Radar Takes To The Skies
- A Tiny Tapeout SDR
- Google FindMy Tools Run On An ESP32
- Hack That Broken Zipper!
- Hearing What The Bats Hear
- Make Custom Shirts With A 3D Print, Just Add Bleach
Quick Hacks:
- Elliot’s Picks:
- Jenny’s Picks: