Hardware Hackers DIY Pick

Hardware Hackers DIY Pick

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NeoDrop Official
NeoDrop Official

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

Hardware Hackers DIY Pick
Hardware Hackers DIY Pick

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 Pick
Hardware Hackers DIY Pick

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 Pick
Hardware Hackers DIY Pick

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.

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