Day: December 16, 2025

Thorium-Metal Alloys And Radioactive Jet Engines

December 16, 2025 by 22 Comments

Although metal alloys is not among the most exciting topics for most people, the moment you add the word ‘radioactive’, it does tend to get their attention. So too with the once fairly common Mag-Thor alloys that combine magnesium with thorium, along with other elements, including zinc and aluminium. Its primary use is in aerospace engineering, as these alloys provide useful properties such as heat resistance, high strength and creep resistance that are very welcome in e.g. jet engines.

Most commonly found in the thorium-232 isotope form, there are no stable forms of this element. That said, Th-232 has a half-life of about 14 billion years, making it only very weakly radioactive. Like uranium-238 and uranium-235 it has the unique property of not having stable isotopes and yet still being abundantly around since the formation of the Earth. Thorium is about three times as abundant as uranium and thus rather hard to avoid contact with.

This raises the question of whether thorium alloys are such a big deal, and whether they justify removing something like historical artefacts from museums due to radiation risks, as has happened on a few occasions.

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After Decades, Linux Finally Gains Stable GPIB Support

December 16, 2025 by 39 Comments

Recently, [Greg Kroah-Hartman] proclaimed the joyous news on the Linux Kernel Mailing List that stable General Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB) support has finally been merged into the 6.19 Linux kernel.

The GPIB is a short-range 8-bit, multi-master interface bus that was standardized as IEEE 488. It first saw use on HP laboratory equipment in the 1970s, but was soon after also used by microcomputers like the Commodore PET, Commodore 64 and others. Although not high-speed with just 8 MB/s, nor with galvanic isolation requirements, it’s an uncomplicated bus design that can be implemented without much of a blip on the BOM costs.

The IEEE 488 standard consists of multiple elements, with 488.1 defining the physical interface and 488.2 the electrical protocol. Over the decades a communication protocol was also developed, in the form of SCPI and its standardized way of communicating with a wide range of devices using a simple human-readable protocol.

Although the physical side of IEEE 488 has changed over the years, with Ethernet becoming a major alternative to the short GPIB cables and large connectors, the electrical protocol and SCPI alike are still very much relevant today. This latest addition to the Linux kernel should make it much easier to use both old and new equipment equipped with this bus.

Why Push A Button When A Machine Can Do It For You

December 16, 2025 by 21 Comments

Remote control is a wonder of the age, we press a button, and something happens as if by magic. But what happens if there is no remote control, and instead a real physical button must be pressed? [What Up TK Here], who regular Hackaday readers might just recognize, had just this problem, and made a remote control button presser.

It’s a 3D printed frame which we’re told is designed for a specific item, on top of which is mounted a hobby servo. Rotating the servo brings the lever down on the button, and the job is done. At the user end there’s a button in a printed enclosure that’s definitely not a knock-off of a well-known franchise from a notoriously litigious console company.

This is all good, but the interest for other projects lies in how it works. It’s using a pair of ESP32 microcontrollers, and instead of connecting to an existing WiFi network it’s using ESP-NOW for simplicity and low latency. This is a good application for the protocol, but as we’ve seen, it’s useful for a lot more than just button pressing.

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