Pulling At Threads With The Flipper Zero

July 15, 2025 by 1 Comment

Gone are the days when all smart devices were required an internet uplink. The WiFi-enabled IoT fad, while still upon us (no, my coffee scale doesn’t need to be on the network, dammit!) has begun to give way to low-power protocols actually designed for this kind of communication, such as ZigBee, and more recently, Thread. The downside of these new systems, however, is that they can be a bit more difficult in which to dabble. If you want to see just why your WiFi-enabled toaster uploads 100 MB of data per day to some server, you can capture some network traffic on your laptop without any specialized hardware. These low-power protocols can feel a bit more opaque, but that’s easily remedied with a dev board. For a couple of dollars, you can buy Thread radio that, with some additional hacking, acts as a portal between this previously-arcane protocol and your laptop — or, as [András Tevesz] has shown us, your Flipper Zero.

He’s published a wonderful three-part guide detailing how to mod one such $10 radio to communicate with the Flipper via its GPIO pins, set up a toolchain, build the firmware, and start experimenting. The guide even gets into the nitty-gritty of how data is handled transmitted and investigates potential attack vectors (less worrying for your Thread-enabled light bulb, very worrying for your smart door lock). This project is a fantastic way to prototype new sensors, build complicated systems using the Flipper as a bridge, or even just gain some insight into how the devices in your smart home operate.

In 2025, it’s easier than ever to get started with home automation — whether you cook up a solution yourself, or opt for a stable, off-the-shelf (but still hackable) solution like HomeAssistant (or even Minecraft?). Regardless of the path you choose, you’ll likely wind up with devices on the Thread network that you now have the tools to hack.

2025 One Hertz Challenge: Metronalmost Is Gunning For Last Place

July 15, 2025 by 9 Comments

We’ve just begun to receive entries to the One Hertz Challenge, but we already have an entry by [Mike Coats] that explicitly demands to be awarded last place: the Metronalmost, a metronome that will never, ever, tick at One Hertz.

Unlike a real metronome that has to rely on worldly imperfections to potentially vary the lengths of its ticks, the metronoalmost leaves nothing to chance: it’s driven by a common hobby servo wired directly to a NodeMCU ESP-12E, carefully programmed so that the sweep will never take exactly one second.

This is the distribution. The gap is around the value we explicitly asked for.

The mathematics required to aggressively subvert our contest are actually kind of interesting: start with a gaussian distribution, such as you can expect from a random number generator. Then subtract a second, narrower distribution centered on one (the value we, the judges want to see) to create a notch function. This disribution can be flipped into a mapping function, but rather than compute this on the MCU, it looks like [Mike] has written a lookup table to map values from his random number generator. The output values range from 0.5 to 1.5, but never, ever, ever 1.0.

The whole thing goes into a cardboard box, because you can’t hit last place with a masterfully-crafted enclosure. On the other hand, he did print out and glue on some fake woodgrain that looks as good as some 1970s objects we’ve owned, so there might be room for (un)improvement there.

While we can’t think of a better subversion of this contest’s goals, there’s still time to come up with something that misses the point even more dramatically if you want to compete with [Mike] for last place: the contest deadline is 9:00 AM Pacific time on August 19th.

Or, you know, if you wanted to actually try and win. Whatever ticks your tock.

2025 Hackaday One Hertz Challenge

A Collection Of Lightning Detectors

July 15, 2025 by 9 Comments

You would think detecting lightning would be easy. Each lightning bolt has a staggering amount of power, and, clearly, you can hear the results on any radio. But it is possible to optimize a simple receiver circuit to specifically pick up lightning. That’s exactly what [Wenzeltech] shows in a page with several types of lightning detectors complete with photos and schematics.

Just as with a regular radio, there are multiple ways to get the desired result. The first circuits use transistors. Later versions move on to op amps and even have “storm intensity” meters. The final project uses an ion chamber from a smoke detector. It has the benefit of being very simple, but you know, also slightly radioactive.

You might think you could detect lightning by simply looking out the window. While that’s true, you can, in theory, detect events from far away and also record them easily using any data acquisition system on a PC, scope, or even logic analyzer.

Why? We are sure there’s a good reason, but we’ve never needed one before. These designs look practical and fun to build, and that’s good enough for us.

You can spruce up the output easily. You can also get it all these days, of course, on a chip.

The Fight To Save Lunar Trailblazer

July 15, 2025 by 13 Comments

After the fire and fury of liftoff, when a spacecraft is sailing silently through space, you could be forgiven for thinking the hard part of the mission is over. After all, riding what’s essentially a domesticated explosion up and out of Earth’s gravity well very nearly pushes physics and current material science to the breaking point.

But in reality, getting into space is just the first on a long list of nearly impossible things that need to go right for a successful mission. While scientific experiments performed aboard the International Space Station and other crewed vehicles have the benefit of human supervision, the vast majority of satellites, probes, and rovers must be able to operate in total isolation. With nobody nearby to flick the power switch off and on again, such craft need to be designed with multiple layers of redundant systems and safe modes if they’re to have any hope of surviving even the most mundane system failure.

That said, nobody can predict the future. Despite the best efforts of everyone involved, there will always be edge cases or abnormal scenarios that don’t get accounted for. With proper planning and a pinch of luck, the majority of missions are able to skirt these scenarios and complete their missions without serious incident.

Unfortunately, Lunar Trailblazer isn’t one of those missions. Things started well enough — the February 26th launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 went perfectly, and the rocket’s second stage gave the vehicle the push it needed to reach the Moon. The small 210 kg (460 lb) lunar probe then separated from the booster and transmitted an initial status message that was received by the Caltech mission controllers in Pasadena, California which indicated it was free-flying and powering up its systems.

But since then, nothing has gone to plan.

Continue reading “The Fight To Save Lunar Trailblazer” →

Will HP Create A Carfax System For PCs?

July 15, 2025 by 14 Comments

When buying used cars there are plenty of ways to check on their history. In many countries there are systems, like Carfax for parts of North America and Europe, that can provide crash history in some situations and alert a potential buyer of hidden damage. Not so for computers, where anyone can run an intensive mining, gaming, rendering, or AI application for years on hardware which might not otherwise show any outward signs of heavy use. And that’s just for hard use; there’s all kinds of other ways of damaging hardware. HP is hoping to solve this problem with a PC history report of sorts.

Aimed at the enterprise or business arena, where companies tend to follow replacement schedules for laptops and other hardware which might get discarded before reaching a true end-of-life, HP is suggesting adding a data recorder at the firmware level of some computers. This software would monitor the computer’s temperatures, SSD wear, and other telematics on the computer and store a record that could be viewed by a potential buyer when the IT department is ready to take them out of service. And, since it’s 2025, HP is also claiming that this system needs and uses an AI of some sort.

Although HP is billing this as a way to improve sustainability and limit e-waste, we’d theorize that even with a report like this available, the economic gain of a program like this would be marginal at best. While the idea of giving each decommissioned laptop a clean bill of health is noble, it’s hard to imagine overworked IT staff carefully curating device histories when most used enterprise machines are already sold by the pallet.

HP is also proposing something that sounds a lot like Intel’s Management Engine, which we’re not too thrilled about around here. And also keep in mind that this is a company that has failed to innovate in any industry-leading way for as long as we can remember so we won’t expect this system to be widely adopted anytime soon.

A Chip8 Emulator For 68000-based Macs

July 15, 2025 by 19 Comments

Among this crowd, it’s safe to say that the original 68000 Macintosh computers need no introduction, but it’s possible some of you aren’t familiar with Chip8. It was an interpreted virtual machine originally created for the COSMAC VIP microcomputer by [Joe Weisbecker] way back in 1977. It enabled coding simple games on the COSMAC VIP without getting into machine code on the VIP’s CDP1802 processor. For the obvious reason of “Why not?” [KenDesigns] decided to put the two together with Chip4Mac68000, a Chip8 emulator for the original Macintosh.

Chip4Mac68000 is not actually a Macintosh program; it doesn’t run in the System Software. Instead, it is a bootdisk that runs bare-metal on the 68000 processor, bypassing Apple’s ROM completely. Doing that is probably more impressive than emulating Chip8 — anyone who wants to get into writing emulators starts with Chip8. That’s not to knock on anyone who goes to the effort of writing an emulator, it’s just that given its origins in a 1970s micro, it’s understandably a very simple system. Not many people do bare-metal coding on this sort of hardware anymore; it’s not like there’s an SDK you can go grab.

Or there wasn’t, anyway, because in order to get this emulator to work, [KenDesigns] wrote a bare-metal SDK for 68000-based Macs. Note that when he says 68000, he does mean 68000 — anything newer than a Macintosh Classic is out. It’s 68000, not 680xx. It was not a trivial endeavour. In the demo video embedded below, you can see his 512k Macintosh in pieces because he’s been poking at it with a logic analyzer to verify the hardware does what he thinks it’s being told.

If you want to try it out, apparently you don’t need real hardware: [KenDesigns] says MAME is accurate enough to make it all work, but miniVmac is not. No word if it would work on the RP2040-based PicoMac; if you try it, let us know how it works out.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen people writing new software for old Macs of late. If you’re working new magic on very old machines, drop us a line. We’d love to hear about it.

Continue reading “A Chip8 Emulator For 68000-based Macs” →

Quasi-Quantifying Qubits For 100 Quid

July 14, 2025 by 2 Comments

As part of his multi-year project to build a quantum computer, hacakday.io poster [skywo1f] has shared with us his most recent accomplishment — a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrometer, which he built for less than $100.

The NMR spectrometer is designed to disturb protons, which naturally line up according to the Earth’s magnetic field, using an electric coil. Once disturbed, the protons nutate (a fancy physics word for wobble), and flip quantum spin states. [skywo1f]’s NMR device can detect these spin state changes, as he demonstrates with a series of control experiments designed to eliminate sources of false positives (which can be annoyingly prevalent in experimental physics). His newest experimental device includes a number of improvements over previous iterations, including proper shielding, quieter power topology, and better coil winding in the core of the device. Everything was assembled with cost in mind, while remaining sensitive enough to conduct experiments — the whole thing is even driven by a Raspberry Pi Pico.

Here at Hackaday, we love to see experiments that should be happening in million-dollar laboratories chugging along on kitchen tables, like this magnetohydrodynamic drive system or some good old-fashioned PCB etching. [skywo1f] doesn’t seem to be running any quantum calculations yet, but the NMR device is an important building block in one flavor of quantum computer, so we’re excited to see where he takes his work next.