Author: Tyler August

559 Articles

Muon Magnetic Moment Matches Model, Making Major Malaise

April 24, 2026 by 13 Comments

Sometimes, a major discovery is exactly what you were hoping not to find. That’s the case with a team at Penn State who seem to have recently closed the door on any new physics stemming from a longstanding discrepency in the magnetic moment of the muon. It turns out, the model was fine, and we just needed better calculations.

The Muon is a heavier cousin to the electron. Like the electron, it has an intrinsic magnetic moment, but the traditional methods to calculate it did not quite match experiments, which was very exciting because it made us hope our models could be improved. Rather than try the traditional approximation methods for the unsolvable equations, the group at Penn State set up what you can think of as the Quantum Chromodynamic equivalent of a Finite Element Model (FEM) simulation–a grid of discrete steps in space and time. Tiny ones, of course, because the muon, like the electron, is a point-like particle with no lower size limit. In any case, according to their paper in Nature, after a decade of refinement and increasingly expensive supercomputer runs, the mystery can be put to bed. Instead of the discrepancy that so exited physicists 25 years ago when it was first found, theory and experiment now match to 11 digits, or a 0.5 sigma discrepancy, if you prefer.

Statistically, the Standard Model works– and that kind of sucks. It sucks, because it’s the gaps in the model where new physics are possible, and everyone has been pushing at those few gaps for the last 50 years to try and find what might be behind the standard model. Even [Zoltan Fodor], the principle investigator behind this project, is sad to see it work out. Sure, it’s a feather in his cap to get the calculations right at last–but ask anybody in the field, and they’d rather keep the door open to new physics than be right. We were certainly hoping it was something novel, last time the topic came up.

You might think muons are the last thing a hacker would ever encounter, but since there’s a steady rain of them from the sky in the form of cosmic rays, it’s not only easy to interact with them, you can actually put them to practical use– like muon tomography, or navigation indoors and underground.

Header Image Credit: Dani Zemba / Penn State

Reviving Nintendo’s Early Arcade Game, Wild Gunman

April 24, 2026 by 13 Comments

There’s retrogaming, and then there’s retro gaming. This next project falls into the second category, as [Callan] of 74XX Arcade Repair digs into the original Wild Gunman, first released by Nintendo way, way back in 1974 — on 16 mm film. Yes, it was a film-based arcade machine, but how else were you going to get realistic graphics just two years after PONG?

The game had two 16 mm projectors, with four different sets of film reels available, each depicting five gunmen. Unfortunately for [Callan], the film is all he has, so he’s not so much repairing as re-creating the historic game. Luckily, he had the manuals, so at least he knew how it was supposed to come together.

One projector did most of the work, showing the gunmen and a hidden timing signal for the game to know when the user could shoot; the other only activated if the user pulled the trigger at the correct time. Interestingly the ‘gun’ has an IR illuminator that bounced infrared light off the screen to a detector in the cabinet — much like later TV remotes. That makes for a rather large circular hitbox around the enemy gunslinger, which is perhaps not a bad thing for a game likely to be found in a bar.

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Encrypting Encrypted Traffic To Get Around VPN Bans

April 23, 2026 by 31 Comments

VPNs, Virtual Private Networks, aren’t just a good idea to keep your data secure: for millions of people living under restrictive regimes they’re the only way to ensure full access to the internet. What do you do when your government orders ISPs to ban VPNs, like Russia has done recently?  [LaserHelix] shows us one way you can cope, which is to use a ShadowSocks proxy.

If you’re not deep into network traffic, you might be wondering: how can an ISP block VPN traffic? Isn’t that stuff encrypted? Yes, but while the traffic going over the VPN is encrypted, you still need to connect to your VPN’s servers– and those handshake packets are easy enough to detect. You can do it at home with Wireshark, a tool that shows up fairly often on these pages. Of course if they can ID those packets, they can block them.

So, you just need a way to obfuscate what exactly the encrypted traffic you’re sending is. Luckily that’s a solved problem: Chinese hackers came up with something called Shadowsocks back in 2012 to help get around the Great Firewall, and have been in an arms-race with their authorities ever since.

Shadowsocks is not, in fact, a sibling of Gandalf’s horse as the name might suggest, but a tool to obfuscate the traffic going to your VPN. To invert a meme, you’re telling the authorities: we heard you don’t like encrypted traffic, so we put encryption in your encrypted traffic so you have to decrypt the packets before you recognize the encrypted packets.

What about the VPN? Well, some run their own shadowsocks service, while others will need to be accessed via a shadowsocks bridge: in effect, a proxy that then connects to the VPN for you. That means of course you’re bouncing through two servers you need to trust not to glow in the dark, but if you have to trust someone– otherwise it’s off to a shack in the woods, which never ends well.

Don’t forget that while VPNs can get you around government censorship, they do not provide anonymity on their own. If, like tipster [Keith Olson] –thanks for the tip, [Keith]!– you’re looking side-eyed at your government’s “think of the children!” rhetoric but don’t know where to start, we had a discussion about which VPNs to use last year.

Analog Circuitry Lets You Blow This LED Out

April 21, 2026 by 11 Comments

LED candles are neat, but they’re very suboptimal for wish-making: you can’t blow them out. Unless you take the circuit from [Andrea Console]’s latest project that lets you do just that, using only analog electronics— no microcontroller in sight.

He’s using the known temperature-voltage behaviour of the LED for control here– sort of like the project we saw in last year’s Component Abuse Challenge that let you illuminate the LED with a butane lighter. Here it’s a bit less dramatic, relying only on the small cooling effect your breath has on the LED.

There are two parts to the circuit, really– a latching section to turn the thing on from a single button press, and breath-detecting section. The breath-detecting section relies on an op-amp acting as a comparator, comparing the voltage across the LED’s current-limiting resistor, and a reference stored in a 100 µF capacitor. Blowing on the candle spikes the voltage on the LED, and thus the current-limiting resistor too fast for the capacitor’s voltage to change, so the comparator flips, triggering a reset of the latching circuit. Could you do it with an Arduino? No doubt, but the fact is you don’t have to and this is a more elegant solution than just another microcontroller.Check it out in action with the video embedded below.

It reminds us of the sort of circuit we’d have found in a project book, back in the day. [Andrea] seems to have a knack for that sort of thing, as seen with the half crystal/half regenerative radio we saw previously. Continue reading “Analog Circuitry Lets You Blow This LED Out” →

Vintage Chyron TV Hardware? Of Course It Runs NetBSD

April 20, 2026 by 6 Comments

Perhaps at this point, getting NetBSD running on an obscure piece of hardware is a dog-bites-man story, and not worth reporting– their motto, after all, is “Of course it runs NetBSD”. So, the fact that [RetroComputingRanch] has got NetBSD running on a vintage Chyron Maxine broadcast computer is perhaps remarkable only for the fact that few people have even heard of Chyron before.

He’s already done a series of videos in which they explore this odd, old computer, which is powered by a Motorola 68040 on a VME bus and was once used to generate digital overlays– text and the like– on broadcast TV. NetBSD does have a port for the Motorolla VME SBCs, so he was able to vibe it onto the specific vme168 board that the Chyron is based on. It happens off screen, but apparently it was AI agent work that went into condensing the documentation for this machine as well as getting the NetBSD port set up. That’s a bit ironic, since NetBSD would never allow that in its commits. 

Again, the Chyron Maxine was never intended to be a general-purpose-computer, and certainly never intended to run UNIX– it was meant to overlay text onto TV signals. With 4 MB of RAM, NetBSD leaves very little free once booted in single-user mode, but he realized that with a few extra chips the proprietary RAM board could become an 8 MB module. It seems like a pittance nowadays, but anyone who’s played with classic UNIX knows you can do a lot in 8 MB– even if only about 3MB is ‘free’ according to TOP.

There’s work still to be done– right now, it boots, but he wants to use NetBSD to really own this machine, so that’ll mean getting the vintage video hardware set up. Last time we saw a NetBSD user, they were doing game dev on a G4 Macbook, but nothing will ever match the legendary NetBSD toaster– not even toaster-shaped callbacks.

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2026 Green Power Challenge: NFC Powers Command Write And Wake Of MCU

April 20, 2026 by 4 Comments

One of the more interesting categories of our ongoing Green Power Challenge is “anything but PV” — and since the radiated power of Near Field Communication is decidedly not photovoltaic, this hack by [caspar] to control a Pi Pico W from his phone using a tuned antenna absolutely counts.

Now, of course you’re not going to power the whole microcontroller that way, but [caspar] figures you don’t need to: the MCU is hooked to a battery, but through a transistor. That means it’s not asleep, but fully un-powered: only the leakage current of the transistor is draining that battery, so it can last a very long time. The waking is handled with a tuned NFC antenna hooked to a ST25DV04KC NFC chip. This chip is designed to be powered via NFC, and of course to accept commands. The ST25 then wakes the Pico — one GIPO on the MCU is used to latch that power transistor ON — and passes on the command via I2C.

Our favorite part might be the script he put on the Pico to live-tune the antenna coil, which you can see demoed in a video below, along with simplest possible demonstration of starting blinky on the Pico from the phone.

You aren’t limited to just a Pico and a blinky LED as in his proof-of-concept demo: [caspar] also uses the same technique with an e-ink display, which is pretty similar to the e-ink price tags you’ve likely seen at the grocery store, without the joy of reverse engineering.

Also without batteries, which is pretty neat, and arguably pretty green. If you’ve been hacking away at something that uses alternative energy, this challenge is still open — just get your project onto Hackaday.io and submitted by April 27.

2026 Hackaday Green Powered Challenge

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Can Claude Write Z80 Assembly Code?

April 19, 2026 by 28 Comments

Betteridge’s law applies, but with help and guidance by a human who knows his stuff, [Ready Z80] was able to get a functioning game of Wordle out of the French-named LLM, which is more than we expected. It’s not like the folks at Anthropic spent much time making sure 40-year-old opcodes were well represented in their training data, after all.

For hardware, [Ready Z80] is working with the TEC-1G single-board-computer, which is a retrocomputer inspired by the TEC-1 whose design was published by Australian hobbyist magazine “Talking Electronics” back in the 1980s. Claude actually seemed to know what that was, and that it only had a hex keypad — though when [Ready Z80] was quick to correct it and let the LLM know he’s using a QWERTY keyboard add-on, Claude declared it was confident in its ability to write the code.

As usual for a LLM, Claude was overconfident and tossed out some nonexistent instructions. Though admittedly, it didn’t persist in that after being corrected. It’s notable that [Ready Z80] doesn’t prompt it with “Give me an implementation of Wordle in Z80 assembly for the TEC-1G” but goes through step-by-step, explaining exactly what he wants each section of the code to do. As [Dan Maloney] reported three years ago, it’s a bit like working with a summer intern.

In the end, they get a working game, but that was never in question. [Ready Z80] reveals over the course of the video he has the chops to have written it himself. Did using Claude make that go faster? Based on studies we’ve seen, it probably felt like it, even if it may have actually slowed him down.

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