Author: Navarre Bartz

329 Articles

A map of the lower 48 US States with an overlay of various colorful bubbles indicating data center developments, whether proposed, contested, under construction, or operational. There are a lot of bubbles! Hawaii isn't pictured, but looks to have one project currently, but nothing in Alaska for now.

Who’s Building That Data Center?

July 21, 2026 by 55 Comments

One of the biggest “David versus Goliath” stories in tech right now is the towns beset by AI data center projects they may or may not have asked for. Powered By Who is tracking data center development in the US on this convenient map.

Currently, there are over 2,100 data centers being tracked by the project ranging from proposals to sites fully up-and-running. While you have to build bypasses data centers to keep the internet running (which we’re partial to here at Hackaday), there are certainly questions around the amount of power and water consumed by these sites, the emissions they’re sending into the surrounding community, and who exactly is reaping the benefits.

Whether you’re pro, against, or ambivalent about the proliferation of “AI” data centers, the map offers an engaging way to look at what projects are happening around the nation, especially when you start looking at clusters and how that interacts with the power generation and political makeup in a region. It’s particularly interesting how only three states account for roughly 70% of all the projects. Let us know if there’s a similar tracker in your area if you’re from one of the other parts of the globe!

Looking past the debate, there’s a lot of interesting engineering involved in keeping these data centers cool, although there are questions about where that heat ends up going. DC distribution inside the site, underwater data centers, and even putting them in space are some of the solutions for keeping the cooling loads tamed.

Two maps of London turned into hexagonal regions heat mapped from white to peach to purple. The left map is according to: density, ratings, surprise, cuisine diversity, and independent share. The map on the right of merged data assigns the dominant hub type in a region. Purple is assigned a value of "Elite", reddish orange is "Strong", peach is "Everyday", and white/grey is "Weak." The five locations deemed to be the highest scorers were Ealing-Acton, Kingston Upon Thames, Enfield, Bromley, and Havering.

Google Maps Killed The Restaurant Star

July 20, 2026 by 10 Comments

We all know that Google and other big players pick and choose what information people see, but we sometimes overlook it outside of the search and social media space. [Lauren Leek] decided to take a look at how Google Maps picks winners and losers in the restaurant scene in London.

Building a machine learning model to determine a new restaurant recommendation (as one does), [Leek] uncovered interesting, and perhaps concerning, elements of how Google Maps ranks restaurants. Broken down by relevance, proximity, and prominence, many new restaurants face the issue of not drawing traffic without reviews and vice-versa causing a vicious cycle. Relevance and proximity are fairly straightforward, but what goes into “prominence?”

[Leek] found that “it is not just what people think of a place – it is how often people interact with it, talk about it, and already recognise it.” This leads to chains and high foot traffic areas awash in reviews while more out-of-the-way places find it more difficult to draw traffic. Some of this is expected and would be happening even when word of mouth was the primary way to find out where to eat, but as with many things, the algorithm amplifies this, along with the undisclosed paid placement of restaurants in Maps results.

While still in its infancy, [Leek] built a public dashboard where people can sort restaurants in the city. The machine learning algorithm is designed to identify places that are hidden gems that punch above their Google Maps weight and may make you look like the trendy one (if you live in London).

Zooming out further, [Leek] found larger clusters that revealed restaurant “diversity, in other words, is not just about taste. It is about where families settled, which high streets remained affordable long enough for a second generation to open businesses, and which parts of the city experienced displacement before culinary ecosystems could mature.”

If you want to step outside the algorithm mayhem, how about a good old-fashioned Web Ring? We’ve also addressed what’s an AI versus an algorithm, and Cory Doctorow advised us on how to reverse course on the current wave of enshittification.

A quadcopter with a clear, U-shaped shield up front and red propellers navigates between a close stand of moss-covered trees.

Echolocation For Drones

July 20, 2026 by 7 Comments

Bats are remarkable creatures, able to fly at night or inside the confines of caves without light to guide their way. A team of researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) has determined how to use low power ultrasonic sensors to guide drones in obscured environments.

While radar, lidar, and GPS are all great for navigation and sensing, they can run into issues when light is obscured or can take too much power to be practical for the limited battery life of a drone. The researchers found that a dual sonar array could be used to implement a much lower power sensing system for a drone that performs well in environments that would stymie a computer vision system.

A shield placed behind the array cuts down on the sound of the propellers that would otherwise drown out the signal, and further signal analysis via a neural net separates the echoes of objects in front of the drone from the background. The prototype could navigate in various simulated environments like forests, smoke, and snow. It looks like it even got a chance to go for a flight in the actual woods. All the code and hardware designs are Open Source, so have at it!

We’ve covered mosquito-inspired drone sensors before, and if you want to get into echolocation yourself, apparently humans can learn to do it too.

Continue reading “Echolocation For Drones” →

A black pickup sits in front of a snow-capped mountain range in the background. It has a white camper shell with a sci-fi looking "01" emblazoned on the side in black text. An orange, wedge-shaped tent pops up above the campershell and truck roof.

A Pop-Up Truck Camper For Less

July 19, 2026 by 15 Comments

We live in a veritable Cambrian Explosion of camping options, ranging from a tarp on the ground to multi-million dollar RVs. Somewhere around the middle is the pop-up truck camper, but [Further Fabrication] wanted to build his own.

As is often the case, he saw the cool pop-up truck campers on the market, but balked at the cost. To make matters worse, the options out there weren’t really available in his country. After getting a solid set of measurements from the truck and some materials, he set to work.

The most interesting part of this build is probably the aluminum/plywood sandwich [Further Fabrication] chose for building the main structure of the camper shell. While many would’ve chosen a tubing space frame for the build, he decided to sandwich two layers of plywood around plywood beams and large rectangular aluminum tubing. These were affixed with a combination of construction adhesive and screws to create a lightweight yet sturdy enclosure.

The tent portion uses a 600-denier PVC-coated waterproof polyester fabric, sewn with nice YKK zippers, and features large windows with screens for excellent ventilation. The roof consists of two sections of aluminum composite sandwich, and the side panels were made from cutoffs of the roof material. Instead of the standard cam-lock used on most camper shells, [Further Fabrication] chose a solenoid-actuated system and more conventional grab handles.

We’ve covered campers several times, including a solar-powered RV, a truck camper that expands lengthwise rather than up, and several bike-based campers.

Continue reading “A Pop-Up Truck Camper For Less” →

A man in a black shirt with the word "Mutiny" in yellow letters next to a short set of red, orange, and yellow stripes like a 1970s truck graphics package guestures to the camera while holding a sketch of a blurple truck consisting of a tube frame cab, flat loading deck, orange seat, and a silvery front bumper.

A New Challenger Approaches The Open Source Vehicle

July 6, 2026 by 51 Comments

Cheap vehicles are thin on the ground in 2026, but [Andy Didorosi] thinks he has the answer for low-speed applications with an open source kei truck.

Still in the early design phase, [Didorosi] has an old factory in Detroit that has been home to his bus transportation business for the last several years, as well as the Sendpai kei truck project to make the world’s fastest kei truck. His vision is to make an affordable kit car truck that anyone can build in the comfort of their own garage. The current plan includes hub motors, which have so far not made it into any production EVs in the US, likely due to the problem with high unsprung weight.

Continue reading “A New Challenger Approaches The Open Source Vehicle” →

A man standing next to an RC model of an Airbus A380 aircraft. The fuselage is at elbow height and the tailfin appears to be over his head.

World’s Biggest RC A380 Is A Big Deal

June 27, 2026 by 15 Comments

RC planes are a lot of fun, and the bigger the better! [Ramy RC] has built the world’s biggest RC A380.

At 29 ft (8.83 m) long, with a 32 foot (9.75 m) wingspan, and weighing 800 lb (362 kg), this 1/8 scale jumbo jet is not your typical model. The fuselage is built from CNC cut EPS foam layed up with fiberglass on the outside and carbon fiber inside. The wings have a combination of carbon, aluminum, foam, and wood components to handle the aerodynamic loads.

The attention to detail is wild. Instead of painting the windows, each one is an actual hole in the plane with a 3D printed window frame and acrylic window. You can actually see one falling out of the plane in the video below. An Airbus mechanic in the comments even notes the landing gear door order of operations are identical to the real thing.

If [Ramy] looks familiar, perhaps you remember his previous A380 build? Much like the 747, the full size A380 is no longer in production, but they can run on cooking oil while they’re still flying.

Continue reading “World’s Biggest RC A380 Is A Big Deal” →