Hackaday Podcast

Ep 366: DOOM on a Toaster, Music in LED Strips, and Old Drives in New Clothes

April 17, 2026·53 min
Episode Description from the Publisher

It's the evening before publication, and a pair of Hackaday writers convene to record the week's podcast. This week Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List, and it's a bumper episode! Of course, a bit of Hackaday news makes the cut, as it's time to make an entry in the Green Powered Challenge. Then we make the first of a couple of sojourns into AI, as we talk about the Linux kernel stance on AI code. In short: if you submit AI code you're responsible for its bugs. Meanwhile out of this world, we look forward to a time when astronauts breathe oxygen from moon dust. There are hacks aplenty for your enjoyment, starting with far more than you ever thought it was possible to know about  sound-reactive LED strips. Then we have among others a Mac on an ESP32 forming the UI for a weather monitor, Doom on a toaster, and a fascinating look at screw threads for plastic. In the longer reads we have our colleague [Tom Nardi] finding Chinese people's personal data on hard drives he bought in an electronics store, and an attempt to look at what an LLM can do that might be useful. Grab your headphones, and join us!

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