Jenny List

European Correspondent and Contributing Editor at Hackaday

Engineer & tech journo. Hackaday contributing editor. Hackspaces, Trans Rescue, She/'Er. at JennyList at mastodon dot social at jennylist dot bsky dot social

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Articles

Another Old ThinkPad Gets A New Motherboard

4 days ago | hackaday.com | Jenny List

The Thinkpad line of laptops, originally from IBM, and then from Lenovo, have long been the choice of many in our community. They offer a level of robustness and reliability missing in many cheaper machines. You may not be surprised to find that this article is being written on one. With such a following, it’s not surprising that a significant effort has gone into upgrading older models. For example, we have [Franck Deng]’s new motherboard for the Thinkpad X200 and X201.
Restoring A Sinclair C5 For The Road

5 days ago | hackaday.com | Jenny List

The Sinclair C5 was Sir Clive’s famous first venture into electric mobility, a recumbent electric-assisted tricycle which would have been hardly unusual in 2025. In 1985, though, the C5 was so far out there that it became a notorious failure. The C5 retains a huge following among enthusiasts, though, and among those is [JSON Alexander, who has bought one and restored it.
A Single Chip Computer For The 8051 Generation

6 days ago | hackaday.com | Jenny List

The Intel 8051 series of 8-bit microcontrollers is long-discontinued by its original manufacturer, but lives on as a core included in all manner of more recent chips. It’s easy to understand and program, so it remains a fixture despite much faster replacements appearing. If you can’t find an original 40-pin DIP don’t worry, because [mit41301] has produced a board in a compatible 40-pin format.
There’s An Venusian Spacecraft Coming Our Way

2 weeks ago | hackaday.com | Jenny List

It’s not unusual for redundant satellites, rocket stages, or other spacecraft to re-enter the earth’s atmosphere. Usually they pass unnoticed or generate a spectacular light show, and very rarely a few pieces make it to the surface of the planet. Coming up though is something entirely different, a re-entry of a redundant craft in which the object in question might make it to the ground intact. To find out more about the story we have to travel back to the early 1970s, and Kosmos-482.
A Bicycle Is Abandonware Now? Clever Hack Rescues Dead Light

3 weeks ago | hackaday.com | Jenny List

A bicycle is perhaps one of the most repairable pieces of equipment one can own — no matter what’s wrong with it, and wherever you are on the planet, you’ll be able to find somebody to fix your bike without too much trouble. Unfortunately as electric bikes become more popular, predatory manufacturers are doing everything they can to turn a bike into a closed machine, only serviceable by them. That’s bad enough, but it’s even worse if the company happens to go under.
Open Source Commercial Synthesisers You Will Love

3 weeks ago | hackaday.com | Jenny List

Drumboy and Synthgirl from Randomwaves are a a pair of compact electronic instruments, a drum machine and a synthesiser. They are commercial products which were launched on Kickstarter, and if you’re in the market for such a thing you can buy one for yourself. What’s made them of interest to us here at Hackaday though is not their musical capabilities though, instead it’s that they’ve honoured their commitment to release them as open source in the entirety.
A Blacksmith Shows Us How To Choose An Anvil

4 weeks ago | hackaday.com | Jenny List

No doubt many readers have at times wished to try their hand at blacksmithing, but it’s fair to say that acquiring an anvil represents quite the hurdle. For anyone not knowing where to turn there’s a video from [Black Bear Forge], in which he takes us through a range of budget options. He starts with a sledgehammer, the simplest anvil of all, which we would agree makes a very accessible means to do simple forge work.
A Cheap Yellow Display Makes A Video Walkie Talkie

1 month ago | hackaday.com | Jenny List

The ESP32 series of microprocessors with their cheap high-power cores and built-in wireless networking have brought us a wide variety of impressive projects over the years. We’re not sure we’ve quite seen the like of [Jonathan R]’s video walkie talkie before though, a pair of units which as you might guess, deliver two-way video and audio communications. The trick involves not one but two ESP32s: an ESP32-S3 based camera module, and a more traditional Tensilica ESP32 in a screen module.
Jenny’s (Not Quite) Daily Drivers: Raspberry Pi 1

1 month ago | hackaday.com | Jenny List

An occasional series of mine on these pages has been Daily Drivers, in which I try out operating systems from the point of view of using them for my everyday Hackaday work. It has mostly featured esoteric or lesser-used systems, some of which have been unexpected gems and others have been not quite ready for the big time. Today I’m testing another system, but it’s not quite the same as the previous ones.
Repairing Classic Sound Cards

1 month ago | hackaday.com | Jenny List

Sound hardware has been built into PC motherboards for so long now it’s difficult to remember the days when a sound card was an expensive add-on peripheral. By the mid to late 1990s they were affordable and ubiquitous enough to be everywhere, but three decades later some of them are starting to fail. [Necroware] takes us through the repair of a couple of Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16s, which were the card to have back then.