Hardware Podcasts

Ep 313: Capacitor Plague, Wireless Power, and Tiny Everything

Hackaday Podcast · 21 Mar 2025 · 55m · Episode 313

What this episode covers

Hosts Elliot Williams and Jenny List recap Hackaday Europe, detailing the logistical chaos of the SAO badge production, including customs delays and the heroic work of Voyer Antonich in programming PIC microcontrollers. They discuss a retrospective on the early 2000s capacitor plague, analyzing Asianometry’s theory that thermal design failures, rather than industrial espionage, caused the systemic component failures. The episode highlights several hardware hacks, including a thermal microscope using germanium lenses, inefficient but large-scale wireless power transfer experiments, and the use of PCB spring connectors in passive resistance boxes. Finally, they examine the trend of extreme miniaturization, featuring Mike Roller’s tiny PCB blinky and Texas Instruments’ new ultra-small microcontroller, while noting the potential for extracting rare earth elements from coal fly ash.

Most relevant to

early-stage companies

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Rubicon, Nicikon, Decimo, Texas Instruments, Fitbit
Products
RTLSDR, Maplin 4600, Pebble, Kodak picture maker kiosk, Sun workstation
Also
Hackaday Europe, Xane Hacker Space, Voyer Antonich, Brett Wallach, Todbot, Asianometry, Mike Roller, Chris Dobble, Look Mom No Computer, Caleb CCF, snappiness

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