The Least Annoying Of All Evils

September 26, 2026 by Elliot Williams 64 Comments

If you missed the hubbub this week, it was discovered that the Raspberry Pi Foundation added code in the firmware that locks the boot process up if non-original RAM chips are detected onboard. Hot-rodding your Pi is a time-honored tradition in these parts. We do wonder just how many folks are taking the risk of hot-airing the memory off the board, versus paying the extra cash to get one with more RAM. But according to Raspberry Pi, enough boards are showing up that have the RAM surreptitiously replaced, and often defective, that they took the step to lock the machine down.

Should users be alerted to potentially unscrupulous behavior by the companies selling them single-board computers? I think we’d all say “sure”. But should that entirely brick the device? And prevent people from upgrading their own? The hacker in me says “no”. Is there any way to reconcile these two? Our own [Arya Voronova] suggests that it’s no big deal to flash an older version of the initial firmware, and we concur, although it does leave behind all the improvements since 2023, and it will only get less fresh as time goes by.

How to announce that the board has non-factory memory without breaking it? [Jeff Geerling] suggested a non-matching-memory bit that users could check, but then they could also neglect to check. My cellphone has a screen that appears every bootup, and requires me to press the power button to continue, because I rooted the phone and installed an open-source OS. It’s a hassle for sure, but it’s a lot better than bricking the phone or disallowing user firmware entirely.

Doing the same thing for the Raspberry Pi isn’t as easy. You never know what, if any, peripherals are connected, so you can’t guarantee that there’s a screen to alert you or even necessarily a keyboard on which you could acknowledge. We’re reminded of a similar situation with FTDI USB-to-serial converter chips ages ago. Their driver software simply refused to work with counterfeit versions of their chips. Hackers were up in arms, largely because we couldn’t know if the parts were genuine at purchase time, and the counterfeits were widely distributed even by reliable resellers.

So what about it? Can you think up a tamper-evident signal that could run on boot on a Raspberry Pi, maybe a headless system installed in some difficult-to-reach place? Maybe ideally the equivalent of the cell phone’s scare message? It would have to be hard to overlook, but keep the machine running, notifying the user that things aren’t kosher, but not preventing them from getting to work. Sounds like a tall order to us.

2026 Hackaday Supercon: Announcing Our First Round Of Speakers

September 23, 2026 by Elliot Williams No comments

Supercon is the Ultimate Hardware Conference™ and you need to be there November 6-8 in Pasadena, California! Below is just the tip of the speakers’ iceberg, but if that’s not enough to convince you to attend, well, stay tuned and we’ll reveal more speakers early next week.

Speakers, workshops, food, drink, music, badge hacking, and general merriment? That’s what we do every year at our annual gathering. This year is even bigger, as we’re moving a few blocks south to the Art Center campus, so be sure to come join us. Get your tickets now.

Continue reading “2026 Hackaday Supercon: Announcing Our First Round Of Speakers” →

What Are Your Indispensable Software Skills?

September 19, 2026 by Elliot Williams 77 Comments

Using tools properly takes skill, and this goes for software tools as well as hardware. You don’t just buy a paintbrush and on day one paint the Mona Lisa. Similarly, you can’t just open up a CAD program and whip out whatever 3D objects your heart desires, or fire up Vim and start typing. Software tools take a bit of learning before you can wield them efficiently, if even at all. And because you can’t be skilled at everything, no matter how hard we are all trying, it’s good to have at least some of the software tools you know do double duty.

Tom and I were watching [Clough42] design an electronics cabinet for a CNC machine. He does a lot of CNC machining and design work, so he’s no stranger to CAD software. So he downloaded all of the parts that he needed inside cabinet, slid them onto virtual DIN rails, modeled the hinges, and made sure that everything fit before buying anything.

Now I know that some of you out there do CAD modeling like this all the time, but for Tom and I, who are 3D printerers and PCB layouterers, doing the CAD without then following through and finishing up with the CAM seemed a bit novel. I never open CAD unless I’m going to have a machine make the thing – otherwise I’d just draw it out on paper, right? But [Clough42]’s point is that getting models of all of the subparts is so easy these days, you might as well model it.

If, and this is the big “if”, you know your way around the CAD tool of your choice. If you don’t yet, it’s going to be a couple of days’ worth of effort to get there. But once you reach CAD nirvana, you’ll find it’s useful for sketching up anything that has a third dimension to it, not just stuff you need to print out.

What other software tools are like CAD in that once you know them well enough, a wealth of applications opens up before you? Of was this just an instance of having a hammer and everything looking like a nail?

Hunting The Wild Vibrotruck

September 9, 2026 by Elliot Williams 46 Comments

A few weeks ago, my wife was out walking the dog, and she sent me four or five photos of small orange boxes planted all around our neighborhood. (OK, I’ll bite!) They had little cards on them explaining that they were geophones, and a QR code on them that lead to a website with all the details. Munich was getting a large-scale seismic survey to map out our underground water, with the aim of using it for geothermal heat and power in the near future.

A geophone in its native habitat.

How do you map up to five kilometers under the earth? You pound the ground, sending shockwaves downward, and then listen for their reflections. At the boundaries between different layers, the change in the speed of sound in the different media cause reflections. Calculating the time it took for a given reflection to reach you lets you figure out how deep the layer boundary is.

The seismic survey procedure goes like this: geophones are set out at roughly 20 m intervals in lines spaced around 300 m apart that run roughly north-south, while “vibrotrucks” drive a roughly east-west course, creating mini-earthquakes every 20 meters along the way. Covering a surface of 1,000 km^2 with over 120,000 sample locations and exciting them 86,000 times is going to take a while. Lucky for me, they started in my part of town.

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Hackaday Europe 2026: Outdoors With Robots

September 8, 2026 by Elliot Williams 4 Comments

Erin Kennedy has been building robots for over a decade now, with a focus on smaller bots that interact with, or maybe even clean up, the outdoor environment. Still other bots are made to interact with people, and when the people are outside in the park, that’s where your robot needs to go.

Whatever the reason, Erin’s talk at Hackaday Europe 2026 is an invitation to take your projects out into the outdoors. But the great wide world outside of your lab is not necessarily the most friendly place for a little bot, and the other half of this talk is about practical design tips and lessons learned to help it survive. Continue reading “Hackaday Europe 2026: Outdoors With Robots” →

If At First You Don’t Succeed…

September 5, 2026 by Elliot Williams 12 Comments

… at least document what failed and give the failure analysis a good effort. And then later on, you can “try, try again” or let someone else carry on with the work; they’ll have a good basis to start from.

We were talking about a project to use 10 W blue lasers to post-smooth 3D prints when I came up with this not-very-catchy catchphrase. The project itself is very much “in progress”, which is a nice way of saying that it hasn’t yet fully met its goals. But nonetheless I was entirely happy to watch not one, but two, videos where [I changed a thing] discussed the intricacies of laser-smoothing 3D prints, precisely because it sounds easy but absolutely isn’t, and because the problems were laid out so well.

I definitely take for granted how easy the slice-it-into-layers nature of FDM 3D printers makes path planning. After all, you can print interlocking knots, hinges, and even entire sections of chain mail as long as you only have to go one layer at a time. When you print this way, you never have to worry about the print head crashing into something that you’ve printed before, or being unable to reach into a small valley. To smooth two or more layers of a 3D print into each other, you are suddenly out of the comfy flatland. You have to worry about collisions, obstructions, and all the rest of actual 3D.

But those issues and more were carefully documented as [I changed a thing] went through his attempts at writing the software to drive the laser-augmented machine, and honestly that attention to the problems that were confounding him was worth a dozen “success” videos. In that sense, it worked on me a little like nerd sniping.

Those were my takeaways from the video series, then. One, it’s hard to do laser smoothing uniformly. But two, documenting the difficulties, considerations, and failures for your future self, or for others, is not just good practice, but can also encourage other people to help you with your project, or to take it on themselves. The more thought you put into how and why your project failed, the more bait you’re laying out for the next nerd. And that’s at least one part of what makes the open-source ethos work.