Hackaday Links: March 15, 2026

March 15, 2026 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

Some days, it feels like we’re getting all the bad parts of cyberpunk and none of the cool stuff. Megacorps and cyber warfare? Check. Flying cars and holograms? Not quite yet. This week, things took a further turn for the dystopian with the news that a woman was hospitalized after an altercation with a humanoid robot in Macau. Police arrived on scene, took the bot into custody, and later told the media they believed this was the first time Chinese authorities had been called to intervene between a robot and a human.

The woman, reportedly in her seventies, was apparently shocked when she realized the robot was standing behind her. After the dust settled, the police determined it was being operated remotely as part of a promotion for a local business. We’ve heard there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but we’re not sure the maxim holds true when you manage to put an old lady into the hospital with your ad campaign.

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Take Pi For A Spin In This Orbital Simulator

March 14, 2026 by Tom Nardi 7 Comments

It’s Pi Day, and while we know that many of you celebrate privately, those that take a moment to put aside their contemplation of all things circular and join us on this mathematically-significant day will likely know the name [Cristiano Monteiro]. Since 2022 he’s made it a yearly tradition to put together a themed project every March 14th, and he’s just put the finishing touches on the 2026 edition.

Generally, [Cristiano] sends in some interesting hardware device that visualizes the calculation of pi, but this year he surprised us a bit by delivering a software project. His Orbital Pi Simulator allows you to see what would happen to an orbiting spacecraft if it’s navigation system suddenly believed the value of pi was something different.

In broad strokes, we can imagine what would happen. If you plug in something significantly higher than 3.14, the orbit becomes elliptical to the point that the craft can fly off into deep space. Drop the value down, and the orbit will intersect with the Earth — a guaranteed recipe for a bad time.

The Kerbal Space Program players in the audience will no doubt point out that in the absence of drag a spacecraft in a stable orbit would more or less stay on that same trajectory indefinitely and not need to manually adjust its velocity in the first place. Further, they would argue that said spacecraft suddenly firing its thrusters retrograde because a flipped bit in its computer resulted in the value of pi suddenly being 1.2 isn’t very realistic. Those people would be correct, but they would also be no fun at parties.

Fans of math and/or circles will no doubt be interested in the previous devices [Cristiano] has built to mark this date. Last year he put together a robotic hand that counted out pi with its 3D printed fingers, and in 2024 he used the Pepper’s Ghost illusion to great effect. For those wondering, not everything he does is pi-related. The portable GPS time server he sent out way in 2021 was a particularly slick piece of hardware.

Hackaday Podcast Episode 361: Hackaday Podcast Mailbag, A Phone Is Not A Computer, 3D Printing History Is New Again

March 13, 2026 by Tom Nardi 2 Comments

Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they cover their favorite hacks and stories from the week. The episode kicks off with some updates about Hackaday Europe and the recently announced Green Power contest, as well as the proposal of a new feature of the podcast where listeners are invited to send in their questions and comments. After the housekeeping is out of the way, the discussion will go from spoofing traffic light control signals and the line between desktop computers and smartphones, all the way to homebrew e-readers and writing code with chocolate candies. You’ll hear about molding replacement transparent parts, a collection of fantastic tutorials on hardware hacking and reverse engineering, and the recent fireball that lit up the skies over Germany. The episode wraps up with a fascinating look at how the developer of Pokemon Go is monetizing the in-game efforts of millions of players.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download this episode in DRM-free MP3 so you can listen to it while doing unpaid labor in Pokemon Go.

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Pokemon Go Had Players Capturing More Than They Realized

March 12, 2026 by Tom Nardi 41 Comments

Released in 2016, Pokemon Go quickly became a worldwide phenomenon. Even folks who weren’t traditionally interested in the monster-taming franchise were wandering around with their smartphones out, on the hunt for virtual creatures that would appear via augmented reality. Although the number of active users has dropped over the years, it’s estimated that more than 50 million users currently log in and play every month.

From a gameplay standpoint, Go is brilliant. Although the Pokemon that players seek out obviously aren’t real, searching for them closely approximates the in-game experience that the franchise has been known for since its introduction on the Game Boy back in 1996.

But now, instead of moving a character through a virtual landscape in search of the elusive “pocket monsters”, players find them dotted throughout the real world. To be successful, players need to leave their homes and travel to where the Pokemon are physically located — which often happens to be a high-traffic area or other point of interest.

As a game, it’s hard to imagine Pokemon Go being a bigger success. At the peak of its popularity, throngs of players were literally causing traffic jams as they roamed the streets in search of invisible creatures. But what players may not have realized as they scanned the world around them through the game was that they were helping developer Niantic build something even more valuable.

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Real-Time ISS Tracker Shows Off The Goods

March 9, 2026 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

What hardware hacker doesn’t have a soft spot for transparent cases? While they may have fallen out of mainstream favor, they have an undeniable appeal to anyone with an interest in electronic or mechanical devices. Which is why the Orbigator built by [wyojustin] stands out among similar desktop orbital trackers we’ve seen.

Conceptually, it’s very similar to the International Space Station tracking lamp that [Will Dana] built in 2025. In fact, [wyojustin] cites it specifically as one of the inspirations for this project. But unlike that build, which saw a small model of the ISS moving across the surface of the globe, a transparent globe is rotated around the internal mechanism. This not only looks gorgeous, but solves a key problem in [Will]’s design — that is, there’s no trailing servo wiring that needs to be kept track of.

For anyone who wants an Orbigator of their own, [wyojustin] has done a fantastic job of documenting the hardware and software aspects of the build, and all the relevant files are available in the project’s GitHub repository.

The 3D printable components have been created with OpenSCAD, the firmware responsible for calculating the current position of the ISS on the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 is written in MicroPython, and the PCB was designed in KiCad. Incidentally, we noticed that Hackaday alum [Anool Mahidharia] appears to have been lending a hand with the board design.

As much as we love these polished orbital trackers, we’ve seen far more approachable builds if you don’t need something so elaborate. If you’re more interested in keeping an eye out for planes and can get your hands on a pan-and-tilt security camera, it’s even easier.

Take A Ride On Wrongbaud’s Hardware Hacking Highway

March 9, 2026 by Tom Nardi 8 Comments

Regular Hackaday readers will no doubt be familiar with the work of Matthew Alt, AKA [wrongbaud]. His deep-dive blog posts break down hardware hacking and reverse engineering concepts in an engaging way, with practical examples that make even the most complex of topics approachable.

But one of the problems with having a back catalog of written articles is making sure they remain accessible as time goes on. (Ask us how we know.) Without some “algorithm” at play that’s going to kick out the appropriate article when it sees you’re interested in sniffing SPI, there needs to be a way to filter through the posts and find what’s relevant. Which is why the new “Roadmap” feature that [wrongbaud] has implemented on his site is so handy.

At the top of the page you’ll find [wrongbaud]’s recommended path for new players: it starts with getting your hardware and software together, and moves through working with protocols of varying complexity until it ends up at proper techno wizardry like fault injection.

Clicking any one of these milestones calls up the relevant articles — beginners can step through the whole process, while those with more experience can jump on wherever they feel comfortable. There’s also buttons that let you filter articles by topic, so for example you can pull up anything related to I2C or SPI.

Further down the page, there’s a helpful “Common Questions” section that gives you a brief overview of how to accomplish various goals, such as identify an unknown UART baud rate, or extract the contents of an SPI flash chip.

Based on the number and quality of the articles, [wrongbaud]’s site has always been on our shortlist of must-see content for anyone looking to get started with hardware hacking, and we think this new interface is going to make it even more useful for beginners who appreciate a structured approach to learning.

Hackaday Links: March 8, 2026

March 8, 2026 by Tom Nardi 8 Comments

As pointed out by Tom’s Hardware, it’s been 26 years since the introduction of the gigahertz desktop CPU. AMD beat Intel to the punch by dropping the 1 GHz Athlon chip on March 6th of 2000, and partnered with Compaq and Gateway (remember them?) to deliver pre-built machines featuring the speedy silicon just a week later. The archived press release announcing the availability of the chip makes for some interesting reading: AMD compares the accomplishment with Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier, and mentions a retail price of $1,299 for the CPU when purchased in 1,000 unit quantities. In response Intel “launched” their 1 GHz Pentium III chip two days later for $990, but supply problems kept it out of customer’s hands for most of the year.

Speaking of breaking a barrier, Mobile World Congress took place this week in Barcelona, where TechCrunch reports there was considerable interest in developing a sub-$50 smartphone. The GSM Association’s Handset Affordability Coalition is working with major telecom carriers in Africa and as of yet unnamed hardware partners to develop the low-cost 4G device with the hopes of bringing an additional 20 million people online. While the goal is worthy enough, industry insiders have pointed out that the skyrocketing cost of memory will make it particularly challenging to meet the group’s aspirational price point.

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