Author: Tyler August

619 Articles

[Avery] standing inside the inflating envelope of his airship

Don’t Worry, This R/C Airship Is Supposed To Be On Fire

October 6, 2026 by 15 Comments

We’ve had a lot of flying hacks here over the years, and that includes just about any way to get airborne you can think of — but very few of those have been airships. Fewer still have been 27-foot thermal airships, like the one [Avery Flies] designed and put together recently.

A thermal airship, in case the name doesn’t give it away, is a dirigible hot air balloon. Like a hot air balloon, it gets its lift from the density difference between hot air and the regular atmosphere. Unlike a hot air balloon, it has control surfaces and an engine so it goes where you tell it to. The craft uses good-old-fashioned radio control, and except for the nylon envelope he spends the first 15 minutes of the video below designing and sewing up, the technology mostly comes from be from the world of R/C aircraft.

The big exception is of course the a propane burner used to generate heat, said propane being supplied by a pair of small green tanks such as you might use on a portable barbecue. Everything that moves is electric, though: there’s a 70 mm (about 2¾“) electric ducted fan acting to push the air up into the balloon so it keeps shape, and a great big brushless DC motor pushing an 18” (about 457 mm) prop for thrust. The steering servo is actually a repurposed winch servo from an R/C sailboat, rather than anything from the world of model aircraft. But it makes sense, as the meter-scale fabric rudder is more like a sail than the control surfaces of most R/C aircraft.

You might expect a blimp to be the biggest flying machine we’ve featured on Hackaday, but some truly giant-scale R/C aircraft have come our way in the past. We’ve also seen some pretty teeny blimps.

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DIY Algae Biodiesel Is Harder Than You Think

October 6, 2026 by 53 Comments

There’s one thing [Silent H] wants you to know before you watch his video about making biodiesel, embedded below: he started this project before he’d even heard of the Strait of Hormuz. No, he’s just independent-minded and wanted to try making his own fuel when diesel was– in retrospect– cheap as chips. That’s probably a good thing, because while [Silent] gets his pint of fuel at the end of the video, it’s not from algae; it’s from a backup crop of sunflowers.

As it turns out, he picked what was the perfect algae and the absolute worst algae for making biodiesel from: Chlorella Vulgaris. It’s perfect because it’s easy to grow, and easy to extract from the growth medium, as it sinks when it is ‘ripe’, and has a very high oil content. Of course [Silent] didn’t want to toss algae cakes into a steam powered canoe, he wanted diesel fuel for his vehicle. That’s where the project broke down: Chlorella Vulgaris cells are exceptionally tough, and if you can’t rupture the cell wall, you can’t can’t get out any appreciable oil. A few grams by solvent extraction is all he manages before switching to more tractable feedstock.

That feedstock is sunflowers, which give up their oil through the application of violent pressure. That is to say, he crushes the seeds in an oil press. Oil acquired, he goes on to transesterfy the stuff, extracting glycerine to produce biodiesel– a process ripe for hacking that you’d think we’d cover more often.

We have covered the algae growth side of things before, but that algae seemed to be destined for other uses than fuel.

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Ambition, Thy Name Is A 3D Printed Transonic R/C Jet

October 5, 2026 by 32 Comments

Building anything that flies from scratch is an ambitious undertaking, even if it’s ‘just’ radio-controlled. 3D printing the aircraft isn’t that odd these days, but putting a hot jet engine into a plastic airframe is another ambitous reach. Getting said 3D printed airframe up to the transonic speed of Mach 0.8? Ambition, thy name is Kingchaser. Or at least, that’s the name [The Mach Initiative] give to their very ambitious aircraft, the video about which is embedded below.

The airframe is largely 3D printed from PETG– that’s all the orange bits– but there are carbon fiber rods and an aluminum frame to help take up the strain. The black section around the motor is printed from PPS-CF– that’s Polyphenylene sulfide with carbon fibre–wrapped in carbon fiber to take the heat. This all builds off a smaller PLA version that’s already flown called Kingfisher, which claimed the title of the first 3D printed jet. That flight is on their YouTube channel, if you’re interested.

Now with a bigger aircraft and a much bigger engine– 300 N or 68 lbf of thrust– they’re going for the speed record. If they get even close to the design goal of mach 0.8, they’re absolutely going to leave the world’s fastest drone– a 626 km/h quadcopter we’ve written about— in the dust.

The switch to PETG from PLA, for the record, was to deal with the expected aerodynamic heating at that speed, about 990 km/h or 615 mph. An interesting detail many don’t bother with when it comes to 3D printed airplanes is that the skin has all been polished smooth, since skin drag is dominant at that speed regime. The video is just chock full of those little details that it takes to defeat drag and get to the record speed, and there’s more to come from [The Mach Initiative].

Speaking of remote controlled speed records, we covered another batch of brits take home the land speed record a few years back. May [The Mach Initiative] see such success!

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Conveyor Belt GBoard Brings The Keys To You

October 5, 2026 by 19 Comments

It must be April in October again, because Google Japan has a new, hilariously impractical reimagining of the keyboard: a conveyor belt. This time it’s on GitHub with firmware, STLs, and a full build guide if you, too, want to wait a full cycle to get the ‘backspace’ key whenever you make a typo, or to write such fun words as “ooid” or “princesship”.

You can watch it in action in the video embedded below, but just the photo probably gives you the idea: the four staggered rows of keys are each 3D-printed chains holding mechanical key switches, driven from a motor in the base. Each row also has a flexible PCB to keep everything wired together, though it’s unclear how those electrical impulses from the key presses get off the conveyor belt and into your computer. That part of the build guide is “TBD” and the source code doesn’t appear to be complete.

Those details may be forthcoming, or it might never be revealed because this is obviously a joke, but now that they’ve gone to the effort of providing STLs, we’re now invested in figuring out how to actually make it work. A BLE-equipped microcontroller in each belt? RFID tags on each key, with readers in the base? SMD LEDs on the flex PCB that flash out the ASCII code of each pressed key as they whiz past a sensor? In theory, any of those should work, but which should we use? You decide!

We like Google Japan and their weird keyboards, and we have to say that compared to the hat from a few years ago, this one is almost practical, though the rotary-phone one wins on style points. In some ways, it occurs to us that this is the exact inverse of the chain printers of yesteryear.

Thanks to [CityZen] for the tip! If October for you is more “spooky” than “silly”, we still want to know about it. Or if you build any of the Gboards. Either way, let us know on the tips line what you’re up to.

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It’s GW-BASIC, Jim, But Not As We Know It

October 4, 2026 by 8 Comments

Back in the old days the IBM-PC, like most of its contemporary computers, shipped with BASIC in ROM. Even after it stopped living in ROM, IBM-Compatibles shipped with GW-BASIC, and now we have a project that asks: what if they still did? Thoreau BASIC is GW-BASIC, but updated for the 21st century.

It’s meant to be code-compatible with all old GW-BASIC code — which means, yes, line numbers and GOTOs abound — but it can boot from a modern x86 PC’s UEFI or run under Windows and take full advantage of modern hardware with 64-bit memory and multithreading support. Graphics are 24-bit at any resolution your monitor can handle, and there are a number of handy built-in commands to handle file management, graphics — including sprites — mouse and keyboard input, 32-channel sound, and more. It is also not strictly an interpreted language. Programs can be compiled to run under Windows or bare-metal on UEFI x86 machines.

It’s not open source, but the project is “pay what you want” over on Itch.io, where you can also see a number of examples.

We’ve seen other attempts to revive BASIC over the years, like MoonBASIC or BASIC-256, but we have to admit it’s never going to be the dominant force it once was, regardless of how nostalgic we might get. That’s probably for the best, but it’s still nice to know you can boot to BASIC if you really, really want to. Do you think it would work with our preprocessor?

AVR Laptop Pushes The Limits Of 8-Bit

October 4, 2026 by 40 Comments

If you saw a device that had a laptop form factor playing sound and video, alt-tabbing over to play a game or take some notes, then back to the video — well, that’s normal; that’s what laptops do. If you learned the heart of this machine was an Arduino-compatible AVR microcontroller board, you’d probably do the same spit-take we did. Well, put down your coffee, because [Vladimir]’s AVR Laptop project really is that impressive.

The micro at the heart of this amazing laptop is an ATmega2560. That’s a pretty powerful chip by 8-bit microcontroller standards, but it’s still an 8-bit microcontroller, so getting the FreeRTOS-based system and all of the functions he wants onboard took some careful coding. The ST7920 128×64 monochrome LCD isn’t being driven by any standard library, for example — [Vladimir] built his own driver that does only what he wants. Even in 1-bit color, getting 24 fps video playback was a challenge, especially with sound, and the write-up gets into how that was accomplished.

The code is pending review before release, but we do look forward to seeing how he pulled it all off. In the meantime, we can at least watch it in action in the demo video embedded below.

The vibe of making an 8-bit machine do things you don’t expect to fit in 8 bits reminds us of SymbOS for the Z80. For the sysadmins out there, we’ve also seen an AVR web server.

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Debloat The Internet With A Self-Hosted Compressing Proxy

October 3, 2026 by 14 Comments

It’s no secret that the size of webpages has been slowly — or not so slowly — creeping up over the years. Does a simple website need to span multiple floppy disks? [PortalRunner’s] doesn’t — or rather, he doesn’t want to burn that much of his limited mobile data. So he built a self-hosted HTTPS proxy to compress images and websites, block ads, and save his bandwidth.

The proxy itself is based on mitmproxy rather than reinventing the wheel. The biggest gains are, of course, from knocking images down to size — since he’s only going to be looking at them on a tiny screen, he can not only apply the better compression of .webp rather than the more common .PNG and .JPEG, but also toss unneeded information by reducing the resolution. Exactly how much quality to toss is left up to the individual user in a handy config.

Likewise, if you’re willing to wait a little longer for pages to load, you can force every webpage to get the highest possible level of compression — otherwise the server is only going to do that with ridiculous Java-heavy pages that absolutely need it. As a bonus, going through your home server means this acts like a private VPN to help protect your data on the go. If you want the details, check out the GitHub link above or the video embedded below.

This project is explicitly about saving data; it won’t help older hardware get online the way the publicly hosted FrogFind search engine or private-hosted MacProxy servers do. If you really want to escape the bloat of the modern internet, a proxy can also help you go way back.

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