Hardware Hackers DIY Pick

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One top DIY hardware project from Hackaday / r/electronics / Tindie this week, with BOM, schematic, and reproduction difficulty

Hardware Hackers DIY Pick2026-07-04

Build NOISFERATU, a $60 noise synth

This week’s pick is NOISFERATU, Robert Heel’s open generative texture synth built around the XIAO SAMD21, 45 DSP algorithms, USB-C power, and a $28-60 self-source BOM.

Hardware Hackers DIY Pick2026-06-27

Build this Zigbee keypad in a weekend

This week’s pick is Dominic Buchstaller’s Zigbee Touch Keypad, a slim ESP32-C6 and MPR121-based capacitive keypad for Home Assistant, with a $23–30 BOM, open files, and clear weekend-build tradeoffs.

Hardware Hackers DIY Pick2026-06-20

Solder it once: a panel-mount OLED module you can move between every project

Galopago's two-board KiCad stack (published June 16, 2026, covered by Hackaday June 18) fixes the chronic bare-OLED-enclosure problem. A display board packages an SSD1306-compatible OLED with a 3.3 V LDO, auto-reset, and six indicator LEDs; a connector board routes everything to a screw terminal block. The whole assembly fits inside a stripped $2–5 AliExpress panel meter. BOM totals $15–50; JLCPCB PCBs run $5–10 per set of five. Beginner-to-Intermediate difficulty — routine 0805 SMD work, plus one tricky step: a 30-pin, 0.7 mm pitch OLED flex cable.

Hardware Hackers DIY Pick2026-06-13

Six bash scripts, a $10 Pi, and a personal FM station

Trwmato's Pi-FM-Kitchen-Radio turns a Raspberry Pi Zero W and a $10 car Bluetooth FM transmitter into a 24/7 personal radio station — no soldering, no PCB, no GPIO. Six shell scripts handle playlist generation, RSS podcast downloading, content rotation, and Bluetooth routing, all managed by a systemd service that starts on boot. Full BOM is $30–50; build time is 2–4 hours. The project hit 550 Reddit upvotes and 148 Hacker News points within three weeks of its original post.

Hardware Hackers DIY Pick2026-06-06

CP/M on an 8-pin chip for $26 — meet the MCL8080+

Ted Fried's MCL8080+ squeezes a complete Intel 8080 emulator into an ATtiny85 (8 pins, 512 bytes of RAM) by offloading memory, storage, and I/O to a Teensy 4.0 over SPI, then adds a 128-byte direct-mapped cache inside the ATtiny85 to make it fast enough to boot CP/M at near-Altair 8800 speed. The full build — schematics, KiCad PCB, Gerbers, and both firmware files — is MIT-licensed on GitHub. BOM totals ~$26–30, all through-hole, Intermediate difficulty.

Hardware Hackers DIY Pick2026-05-30

A $15 ESP32 board + one SOIC8 chip = 13-platform retro handheld

DynaMight1124's CYD Emulator Station upgrades the $15 Cheap Yellow Display (ESP32-2432S028) into a 13-platform retro game handheld by soldering a PSRAM chip onto an unpopulated SOIC8 footprint and running Retro-Go v1.46. $30–45 BOM, Intermediate difficulty, weekend-build.

Hardware Hackers DIY Pick2026-05-23

$50 PVC turbine produces 200W from a 3-meter water drop — no concrete, no permits

Daniel Connell's Low Head Turbine turns a 3-metre head of flowing water into ~200 W DC using a $30–50 BOM of PVC fittings, a 120 mm PC fan, and a scavenged hoverboard hub motor — no PCB, no firmware, no soldering required.

Hardware Hackers DIY Pick2026-05-17

This weekend's build: Linux terminal inside a clamshell evening bag

Builder cc (bossbratox) packed a Raspberry Pi 3A+, touchscreen, and a full Python TUI OS into a pink clamshell purse — no soldering, $274 BOM, MIT-licensed, 1–2 day intermediate build.

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