Hackaday Links: March 22, 2026

March 22, 2026 by Tom Nardi 2 Comments

On Friday, Reuters reported that Amazon is going to try to get into the smartphone game…again. The Fire Phone was perhaps Amazon’s biggest commercial misstep, and was only on the market for about a year before it was discontinued in the summer of 2015. But now industry sources are saying that a new phone code-named “Transformer” is in the works from the e-commerce giant.

At this point, there’s no word on how much the phone would cost or when it would hit the market. The only information Reuters was able to squeeze out of their contacts was that the device would feature AI heavily. Real shocker there — anyone with an Echo device in their kitchen could tell you that Amazon is desperate to get you talking to their gadgets, presumably so they can convince you to buy something. While a smartphone with even more AI features we didn’t ask for certainly won’t be on our Wish List, if history is any indicator, we might be able to pick these things up cheap on the second-hand market.

On the subject of AI screwing everything up, earlier this week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported that The New York Times had started blocking the Internet Archive’s crawlers, citing concerns over their content being scraped up by bots for training data. The EFF likens this to a newspaper asking libraries to stop storing copies of their old editions, and warns that in an era where most people get their news via the Internet, not having an archived copy of sites like The Times will put holes in the digital record. They also point out that mirroring web pages for the purposes of making them more easily searchable is a widely accepted practice (ask Google) and has been legally recognized as fair use in court.

Assuming we take the NYT’s side of the story at face value, there’s a tiny part of our cold robotic heart that feels some sympathy for them. Over the last year or so, we’ve noticed some suspicious activity that we believe to be bots siphoning up content from the blog and Hackaday.io, and it’s resulted in a few technical headaches for us. On the other hand, what’s Hackaday here for if not to share information? Surely the same could be said for any newspaper, be it the local rag or The New York Times. If a chatbot learning some new phrases from us is the cost of doing business in 2026, so be it. Can’t stop the signal.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: March 22, 2026” →

Artemis II Agenda Keeps Moon-Bound Crew Busy

March 19, 2026 by Tom Nardi 33 Comments

With the launch of Artemis II from Cape Canaveral potentially just weeks away, NASA has been releasing a steady stream of information about the mission through their official site and social media channels to get the public excited about the agency’s long-awaited return to the Moon. While the slickly produced videos and artist renderings might get the most attention, even the most mundane details about a flight that will put humans on the far side of our nearest celestial neighbor for the first time since 1972 can be fascinating.

The Artemis II Moon Mission Daily Agenda is a perfect example. Released earlier this week via the NASA blog, the document seems to have been all but ignored by the mainstream media. But the day-by-day breakdown of the Artemis II mission contains several interesting entries about what the four crew members will be working on during the ten day flight.

Of course, the exact details of the agenda are subject to change once the mission is underway. Some tasks could run longer than anticipated, experiments may not go as planned, and there’s no way to predict technical issues that may arise.

Conversely, the crew could end up breezing through some of the planned activities, freeing up time in the schedule. There’s simply no way of telling until it’s actually happening.

With the understanding that it’s all somewhat tentative, a look through the plan as it stands right now can give us an idea of the sort of highlights we can expect as we follow this historic mission down here on Earth.

Continue reading “Artemis II Agenda Keeps Moon-Bound Crew Busy” →

Hackaday Links: March 15, 2026

March 15, 2026 by Tom Nardi 4 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.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: March 15, 2026” →

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.

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast Episode 361: Hackaday Podcast Mailbag, A Phone Is Not A Computer, 3D Printing History Is New Again” →

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.

Continue reading “Pokemon Go Had Players Capturing More Than They Realized” →

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.