Day: May 14, 2026

Teardown: ChargeTab Emergency Phone Charger

May 14, 2026 by 7 Comments

If you own a modern smartphone, there’s an excellent chance that its battery has run dangerously low on you at least a few times. Murphy’s Law dictates that this will naturally occur at the worst possible moment, say when you need to make an important phone call or when you’re lost and need to navigate home.

With this in mind, it’s not hard to see how a product like the ChargeTab would have a certain appeal. A small $10 USD device that you can keep in the car or pack in a bag that’s always available to charge your phone in an emergency.

Because it’s not meant to be used regularly — indeed it may never get used at all — it’s not completely unreasonable that such a device would only be good for one or two charges before its spent and must be replaced. It’s a bit like keeping a road flare in the car; it’s unlikely you’ll ever use the thing, but if you do, it only needs to work once.

But then what? According to ChargeTab, once the gadget has depleted its internal ~3,000 mAh battery it cannot be recharged and is no longer usable. Now to be fair, they specifically tell you to not throw it in the trash. They’ll send you a free return label to ship it back to them, at which point it will be refurbished and put back into circulation. The company argues that this recycling program, combined with the fact that the batteries inside the ChargeTabs were supposedly diverted from landfills in the first place, makes their entire operation eco-friendly.

Yet here we have a pair of ChargeTabs that were thrown in the regular garbage and would have taken a one-way trip to the local landfill if it wasn’t for the fact that I habitually dig through garbage cans like a raccoon. So let’s take a look at what’s inside one of these emergency phone chargers and if the idea is as green as the company claims.

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British Street Addresses, When Licenses Collide

May 14, 2026 by 5 Comments

The world of open source — and in particular open source licenses — is something we cover regularly here at Hackaday with respect to hardware and software, but it’s not so often we find open source data stories. Today’s case of the open British address data then is a bit of an outlier, but it may have implications for open source data further than British counties.

UK government data is released under the Open Government Licence, which is why we Brits can peer into all sorts of datasets our taxes paid for. This includes data from local government, so English counties release data sets of local addresses as part of their auditing of council taxes under the licence.

This is a picture of Barbra Streisand, who might almost be the patron saint of unintended consequences. Unknown author / Public domain
This is a picture of Barbra Streisand, the patron saint of unintended consequences.

[Owen Boswarva] has been collating these databases in order to produce a national open source address database, but has found himself at the receiving end of a legal threat from the Ordnance Survey, the UK mapping agency. They claim the data is theirs, not open.

British address data is in a sense open to all, in that there’s nothing to stop anyone walking down Acacia Avenue and noting the position of Number 1, Number 2, Number 3, and so on. This is what happened with OpenStreetMap worldwide, as people with GPS devices contributed their data and mapped the UK and everywhere else. The Ordnance Survey used to have a nice little earner charging top dollar for UK geospatial data which has been slashed by the arrival of OpenStreetMap, and we’re guessing that the prospect of losing another income stream to an open source equivalent has them worried.

The question of whether the councils should have released the data is one which will no doubt be settled at some point by the courts, and [Owen] goes into some detail on the subject in his analysis. There’s a good case to be made that the mapping agency are pushing it a little, but whatever the outcome it could set a dangerous precedent for open source data. We’ll keep you posted if there’s more on this story.

British street: Bill Harrison, CC BY-SA 2.0

Barbra Streisand: Unknown author, Public domain

LiDAR Matrix Sensor Sees In 3D

May 14, 2026 by 5 Comments

[Mellow_Labs] picked up a few LiDAR matrix sensors and found them very exciting. While a normal time-of-flight sensor can accurately determine a range,  the matrix sensor is like an array of 64 sensors that can build a 2D map of distances from 2 cm to 3.5 m. [Mellow] wanted to add the sensor to his robot to help it see what was in front of it. You can see how it worked out in the video below.

The robot in question is Zippy, a 3D printed tank-like robot with an ESP32. By default, the robot requires control inputs, but using the sensor will enable autonomous operation. For good or ill, the sensor mounted to Zippy was seeing the floor with about half of the rows. That means about 50% of the data went to waste. However, we think having a robot be able to see the floor in front of it might be a good thing.

[Mellow] used an LLM to write most of the code, so there were a number of iterations required to get things working. This required decimating even more of the data from the sensor. Still, pretty impressive.

Want to learn more about ToF sensors? Or if you want to focus on the practical, there’s code you can borrow.

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