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 9 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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New Artemis Plan Returns To Apollo Playbook

March 4, 2026 by Tom Nardi 54 Comments

In their recent announcement, NASA has made official what pretty much anyone following the Artemis lunar program could have told you years ago — humans won’t be landing on the Moon in 2028.

It was always an ambitious timeline, especially given the scope of the mission. It wouldn’t be enough to revisit the Moon in a spidery lander that could only hold two crew members and a few hundred kilograms of gear like in the 60s. This time, NASA wants to return to the lunar surface with hardware capable of setting up a sustained human presence. That means a new breed of lander that dwarfs anything the agency, or humanity for that matter, has ever tried to place on another celestial body.

Unsurprisingly, developing such vehicles and making sure they’re safe for crewed missions takes time and requires extensive testing. The simple fact is that the landers, being built by SpaceX and Blue Origin, won’t be ready in time to support the original Artemis III landing in 2028. Additionally, development of the new lunar extravehicular activity (EVA) suits by Axiom Space has fallen behind schedule. So even if one of the landers would have been ready to fly in 2028, the crew wouldn’t have the suits they need to actually leave the vehicle and work on the surface.

But while the Artemis spacecraft and EVA suits might be state of the art, NASA’s revised timeline for the program is taking a clear step back in time, hewing closer to the phased approach used during Apollo. This not only provides their various commercial partners with more time to work on their respective contributions, but critically, provides an opportunity to test them in space before committing to a crewed landing.

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Hackaday Links: March 1, 2026

March 1, 2026 by Tom Nardi 4 Comments

We’ll start this week off with a bit of controversy from Linux Land. Anyone who’s ever used the sudo command knows that you don’t see any kind of visual feedback while entering your password. This was intended as a security feature, as it was believed that an on-screen indicator of how many characters had been entered would allow somebody snooping over your shoulder to figure out the length of your password. But in Ubuntu 26.04, that’s no longer the case. The traditional sudo binary has been replaced with a one written in Rust, which Canonical has recently patched to follow the modern convention of showing asterisks on the password prompt.

As you might expect, this prompted an immediate reaction from Linux greybeards. A bug report was filed just a few days ago demanding that the change be reverted, arguing that breaking a decades-old expectation with no warning could be confusing for users. The official response from a Canonical dev was that they see it the other way around, and that the change was made to improve the user experience. It was also pointed out that those who want to revert to the old style of prompt can do so with a config change. The issue was immediately marked as “Won’t Fix”, but the discussion is ongoing.

Speaking of unexpected changes, multiple reports are coming in that the February security update for Samsung Galaxy devices, which is currently rolling out, removes several functions from the Android recovery menu. After the update is applied to phones such as the S25 and Fold 7, long-standing features, such as the ability to wipe the device’s cache partition or install updates via Android Debug Bridge (ADB), disappear.

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Hackaday Links: February 22, 2026

February 22, 2026 by Tom Nardi 5 Comments

We’ll start things off this week with some breaking news from NASA: just days after the space agency announced the Artemis II crew was preparing to blast off towards the Moon as soon as March 6th, a new problem with the Space Launch System rocket has pushed the launch back indefinitely. According to NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, problems encountered while loading helium into the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS) necessitate rolling the massive rocket back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) for diagnosis and repair.

The logistics of shuffling the vehicle 6.8 kilometers (4.2 miles) from the pad to the VAB is going to eat up at least a week, and sending it back the other way is naturally just as much of a production. Add in the time they’ll need to actually figure out what’s wrong with the ICPS and make the necessary repairs, and it’s easy to see why a March launch is almost certainly off the table. It’s frustrating to see the Artemis II mission get delayed this close to launch, but sending humans into space isn’t the sort of thing you can cut corners on.

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Ask Hackaday: Do You Have A Dead Man’s Switch?

February 20, 2026 by Tom Nardi 72 Comments

During the Cold War, the specter of a nuclear “dead man’s switch” was central to the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). In the event that one side was annihilated by the other, an automated system would be triggered to deliver a revenge strike that would ultimately destroy the attacker. It was the ultimate defense, as your enemy will never attack if they know doing so will inevitably lead to their own destruction.

The same idea has occasionally been employed by whistleblowers and journalists as well. Should the individual fail to check in regularly, a series of predetermined events will be set into motion. Again, the idea is defensive in nature. If somebody is in possession of information so damning that they could be abducted or even killed to keep it quiet, making arrangements to have that information be released to the public in the event anything should happen to them is a great way to stay safe.

A nuclear dead man’s switch is a key plot point in *Dr. Strangelove*.

But what about for the average person? In the past, there was no need for most people to think about something as elaborate as a dead man’s switch. But we live in interesting times, to say the least. In an information society such as ours, whistleblowers have never been more common, and the Internet has significantly blurred the definition of what it means to be a journalist.

For those living under a repressive regime or in a war zone, simply posting to social media can provide the outside world with an unfiltered look at what’s actually happening on the ground. A teenager with a cell phone has the potential to reach a wider audience than the legacy media — a powerful, but dangerous, proposition.

Even if you’re not in the middle of political upheaval, there are still reasons you might want to have previously secret information made available in the event of your death or incapacitation. Perhaps you’d like to send your loved ones a final personal message, or make sure the passwords for all your accounts get in the hands of whoever will be handling your estate.

Of course, one could argue that could be accomplished with little more than a notebook hidden in your sock drawer. But this is Hackaday, and over-engineering is the name of the game. So do you have a dead man’s switch? How is it implemented? Or is the whole idea just a bit too out there for you?

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