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4980 Articles

Sega Meganet: Online Gaming In 1990

April 2, 2026 by 9 Comments

It’s easy to think of online console gaming as an invention of the 2000s. Microsoft made waves when Xbox Live dropped in 2002, with Nintendo and Sony scrambling to catch up with their own offerings that were neither as sleek or well-integrated.

However, if you were around a decade earlier, you might have experienced online console gaming much closer to the dawn of the Internet era. As far back as 1990, you could jump online with your Sega Mega Drive. But what did an online console feel like in the dial-up era?

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Ask Hackaday: How Much Compute Is Enough?

April 2, 2026 by 60 Comments

Over the history of this business, a lot of people have foreseen limits that look rather silly in hindsight– in 1943, IBM President Thomas Watson declared that “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” That was more than a little wrong. Depending on the definition of computers– particularly if you include microcontrollers, there’s probably trillions of the things.

We might as well include microcontrollers, considering how often we see projects replicating retrocomputers on them. The RP2350 can do a Mac 128k, and the ESP32-P4 gets you into the Quadra era. Which, honestly, covers the majority of daily tasks most people use computers for.

The RP2350 and ESP32-P4 both have more than 640kB of RAM, so that famous Bill Gates quote obviously didn’t age any better than Thomas Watson’s prediction. As Yogi Berra once said: predictions are hard, especially about the future. Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: How Much Compute Is Enough?” →

Ask Hackaday: Using CoPilot? Are You Entertained?

April 1, 2026 by 48 Comments

There’s a great debate these days about what the current crop of AI chatbots should and shouldn’t do for you. We aren’t wise enough to know the answer, but we were interested in hearing what is, apparently, Microsoft’s take on it. Looking at their terms of service for Copilot, we read in the original bold:

Copilot is for entertainment purposes only. It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended. Don’t rely on Copilot for important advice. Use Copilot at your own risk.

While that’s good advice, we are pretty sure we’ve seen people use LLMs, including Copilot, for decidedly non-entertaining tasks. But, at least for now, if you are using Copilot for non-entertainment purposes, you are violating the terms of service.

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Art of 3D printer in the middle of printing a Hackaday Jolly Wrencher logo

Improving FDM Filament Drying With A Spot Of Vacuum

March 31, 2026 by 26 Comments

Keeping your filament safely away from moisture exposure is one of the most crucial aspects of getting a good 3D print, with equipment like a filament dryer a standard piece of equipment to help drive accumulated moisture out of filament prior to printing or storage. Generally such filament dryers use hot air to accomplish this task over the course of a few hours, but this is not very efficient for a number of reasons. Increasing the vaporization rate of water without significantly more power use should namely be quite straightforward.

The key here is the vapor pressure of a liquid, specifically the point at which it begins to transition between its liquid and gaseous phases, also known as the boiling point. This point is defined by both temperature and atmospheric pressure, with either factor being adjustable. In a pressure cooker this principle is for example used to increase the boiling temperature of water, while for our drying purposes we can instead reduce the pressure in order to lower the boiling point.

Although a lower pressure is naturally more effective, we can investigate the best balance between convenience and effectiveness.

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Solar Balconies Take Europe By Storm

March 31, 2026 by 143 Comments

Solar power has been around for a long time now. Once upon a time, it was mostly the preserve of research projects and large-scale municipal installations. Eventually, as the technology grew ever cheaper, rooftop solar came along, and cashed-up homeowners rushed to throw panels on their homes to slash their power bills and even make money in some cases.

Those in apartments or rented accommodations had largely been left out of the solar revolution. That was, until the advent of balcony solar. Popular in Germany, but little known in the rest of the world, the concept has brought home power generation to a larger market than ever.

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Reflective pool of the Court of the Myrtles, looking north towards the Comares Tower. (Credit: Tuxyso, Wikimedia)

Medieval Alhambra’s Pulser Pump And Other Aquatic Marvels

March 30, 2026 by 8 Comments

Recently the Practical Engineering YouTube channel featured a functional recreation of a pump design that is presumed by some to have been used to pump water up to the medieval Alhambra palace and its fortress, located in what is today Spain. This so-called pulser pump design is notable for not featuring any moving parts, but the water pump was just one of many fascinating engineering achievements that made the Alhambra a truly unique place before the ravages of time had their way with it.

Although the engineering works were said to still have been functional in the 18th century, this pumping system and many other elements that existed at the peak of its existence had already vanished by the 19th century for a number of reasons. During this century a Spanish engineering professor, Cáceres, tried to reconstruct the mechanism as best as he could based on the left-over descriptions, but sadly we’ll likely never know for certain that it is what existed there.

Similarly, the speculated time-based fountain in the Court of the Lions and other elements are now forever lost to time, but we have plenty of theories on how all of this worked in a pre-industrial era.

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Spy Tech: Conflicts Bring A New Number Station

March 30, 2026 by 19 Comments

If you know much about radios and espionage, you’ve probably encountered number stations. These are mysterious stations that read out groups of numbers or otherwise encoded messages to… well… someone. Most of the time, we don’t know who is receiving the messages. You’d be excused for thinking that this is an old technology. After all, satellite phones, the Internet, and a plethora of options now exist to allow the home base to send spies secret instructions. However, the current-day global conflict has seen at least one new number station appear, apparently associated with the United States and, presumably, targeting some recipients in Iran, according to priyom.org.

As you might expect, these stations don’t identify themselves, but the Enigma Control List names this one as V32. It broadcasts two two-hour blocks a day at 0200 UTC and a repeat at 1800 UTC. Each message starts with the Farsi word for “attention” followed by what is assumed to be some header information as two 5-digit groups. Then there is a set of 181 five-digit groups. Each message is padded out to take 20 minutes, and there are six messages in each transmission.

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