Meshtastic Does More Than Simple Communication

February 22, 2026 by 2 Comments

Meshtastic has been experiencing a bit of a renaissance lately, as the off-grid, long-range radio text messaging protocol gains a ton of new users. It’s been used to create mesh networks in cities, during disasters and protests, in small groups while hiking or camping, and for search and rescue operations. Although it’s connected plenty of people together in all of these ways, [GreatScott!] wanted to put it to work connecting some computing resources instead. He has a garden shed that’s too far for WiFi, so Meshtastic was used to connect it instead.

This isn’t a project to bring broadband Internet out to the shed, though; Meshtastic is much too slow for that. All he really wanted to do here was to implement a basic alarm system that would let him know if someone had broken in. The actual alarm triggering mechanism is an LED emitter-detector pair installed in two bars, one of which sends a 12V signal out if the infrared beam from the other is broken. They’re connected to a Heltec ESP32 LoRa module which is set up to publish messages out on the Meshtastic communications channel. A second module is connected to the WiFi at the house which is communicates with his Home Assistant server.

Integrating Meshtastic devices into Home Assistant can be pretty straightforward thanks to the various integrations already available, but there is some configuration to get these specific modules working as an alarm. One of the pins on the remote module had to be set up to watch the light bar, and although sending the alarm message out when this triggered worked well, the received signal never passed through to Home Assistant until [GreatScott!] switched to using the RadioLib library an an MQTT integration instead. But with perhaps more configuration than he planned for out of the way, [GreatScott!]’s alarm is up and running. Meshtastic projects often balloon into more than we had originally planned though, in more ways than one. You can follow along as our own [Tom Nardi] attempts to connect all of New Jersey with this new protocol.

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A grim reaper knocking on a door labelled "open source"

What About The Droid Attack On The Repos?

February 22, 2026 by 12 Comments

You might not have noticed, but we here at Hackaday are pretty big fans of Open Source — software, hardware, you name it. We’ve also spilled our fair share of electronic ink on things people are doing with AI. So naturally when [Jeff Greerling] declares on his blog (and in a video embedded below) that AI is destroying open source, well, we had to take a look.

[Jeff]’s article highlights a problem he and many others who manage open source projects have noticed: they’re getting flooded with agenetic slop pull requests (PRs). It’s now to the point that GitHub will let you turn off PRs completely, at which point you’ve given up a key piece of the ‘hub’s functionality. That ability to share openly with everyone seemed like a big source of strength for open source projects, but [Jeff] here is joining his voice with others like [Daniel Stenberg] of curl fame, who has dropped bug bounties over a flood of spurious AI-generated PRs.

It’s a problem for maintainers, to be sure, but it’s as much a human problem as an AI one. After all, someone set up that AI agent and pointed at your PRs. While changing the incentive structure– like removing bug bounties– might discourage such actions, [Jeff] has no bounties and the same problem. Ultimately it may be necessary for open source projects to become a little less open, only allowing invited collaborators to submit PRs, which is also now an option on GitHub.

Combine invitation-only access with a strong policy against agenetic AI and LLM code, and you can still run a quality project. The cost of such actions is that the random user with no connection to the project can no longer find and squash bugs. As unlikely as that sounds, it happens! Rather, it did. If the random user is just going to throw their AI agent at the problem, it’s not doing anybody any good.

First they came for our RAM, now they’re here for our repos. If it wasn’t for getting distracted by the cute cat pictures we might just start to think vibe coding could kill open source. Extra bugs was bad enough, but now we can’t even trust the PRs to help us squash them!

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Recreating Mega Man’s Mega Buster

February 22, 2026 by 4 Comments

Mega Man is a popular video game character who is perhaps most notable for having a sort of lasery-type blaster for an arm. A real hand cannon, if you will. It’s officially called the Mega Buster, and [Arnov Sharma] recently recreated it for cosplay purposes.

Key to any good cosplay build is getting the visuals right, and [Arnov] achieved that well. The Mega Buster was first recreated in Fusion 360, scaled to an appropriate size to fit [Arnov]’s arm. It was 3D printed in several sections, with the body including a grab handle and fire button inside, and the side panel and blaster nozzle having provision for installing LEDs. The former is the blaster’s “power meter” which shows how many shots it has left until it runs out of energy, with the blaster able to fire six times before needing to cooldown. A Raspberry Pi Pico controls the LEDs and provides sound effects with the aid of a PAM8403 class D amplifier module and a small speaker.

The 3D files are available on Instructables for the curious. Perhaps by virtue of its arm-mounted nature, this build reminds us of the venerable Pip Boy from Fallout, of which we’ve seen many grand recreations before. Video after the break.

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Inside A Compact Intel 3000 W Water-Cooled Power Supply

February 22, 2026 by 3 Comments

Recently [ElecrArc240] got his paws on an Intel-branded 3 kW power supply that apparently had been designed as a reference PSU for servers. At 3 kW in such a compact package air cooling would be rather challenging, so it has a big water block sandwiched between the two beefy PCBs. In the full teardown and analysis video of the PSU we can see the many design decisions made to optimize efficiency and minimize losses to hit its 80 Plus Platinum rating.

For the power input you’d obviously need to provide it with 240 VAC at sufficient amps, which get converted into 12 VDC at a maximum of 250 A. This also highlights why 48 VDC is becoming more common in server applications, as the same amount of power would take only 62.5 A at that higher voltage.

The reverse-engineered schematic shows it using an interleaved totem-pole PFC design with 600 V-rated TI LMG3422 600V GaN FETs in the power stages. After the PFC section we find a phase-shifted full bridge rectifier with OnSemi’s SiC UF3C065030K4S Power N-Channel JFETs.

There were a few oddities in the design, such as the Kelvin source of the SiC JFET being tied into the source, which renders that feature useless. Sadly the performance of the PSU was not characterized before it was torn apart which might have provided some clues here.

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Exclamation Point Indicates Worthy Notifications

February 22, 2026 by No comments

As far as punctuation goes, the exclamation mark is perhaps the most eye-catching of the bunch. That’s why [Conrad Farnsworth] thought this form would be perfect for his Home Assistant notifier build. 

The key to this build is the large bi-color printed housing in the shape of an exclamation mark. It makes for an attractive wall-hanging, but it also perfectly serves the purpose [Conrad] had in mind. Inside the enclosure is an ESP32, hooked up to a string of 16×8 LED matrixes which are commanded over I2C. These sit behind a white panel in the enclosure to nicely diffuse the light and make their output more readable. The ESP32 displays notifications on the LEDs that are fed from Home Assistant, such as when the mailbox sensor is triggered or if a vehicle is detected in the driveway. There’s also a bell on the unit to provide audible notifications, which us dinged with a solenoid fired via a 2N2222 transistor switching a 12-volt supply from a boost converter.

It’s a neat build that fits nicely into [Conrad]’s daily life and appears to have some genuine utility. If you’re looking for other ways to neatly display notifications where you can see them, you might consider whipping yourself up a smart mirror. Video after the break.

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Why Chains Are Still Better For Bicycles Than Belts

February 21, 2026 by 55 Comments

Theoretically a belt drive makes for a great upgrade to a bicycle, as it replaces the heavier, noisy and relatively maintenance-heavy roller chain with a zero-maintenance, whisper-quiet and extremely reliable belt that’s rated at an amazing 20-30,000 km before needing a replacement. Of course, that’s the glossy marketing brochure version of reality, which differed significantly from what [Tristan Ridley] experienced whilst cycling around the globe.

Although initially he was rather happy with his bike, its sealed car-like Pinion gearbox and Gates carbon belt drive system, while out in the wilds of Utah he had a breakdown when the belt snapped. When the spare belt that he had carried with him for the past months also snapped minutes later after fitting it on, it made him decide to switch back to the traditional bush roller chain.

Despite this type of chain drive tracing its roots all the way back to Leonardo da Vinci, they actually offer many advantages over the fancy carbon-fiber-reinforced polyurethane belt. Although with the Pinion gearbox the inability to use a derailleur gearing system is no big deal, [Tristan] found that the ‘zero maintenance’ part of the belt was not true for less hospitable roads

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Quieting Noisy Resistors

February 21, 2026 by 8 Comments

[Hans Rosenberg] has a new video talking about a nasty side effect of using resistors: noise. If you watch the video below, you’ll learn that there are two sources of resistor noise: Johnson noise, which doesn’t depend on the construction of the resistor, and 1/f noise, which does vary depending on the material and construction of the resistor.

In simple terms, some resistors use materials that cause electron flow to take different paths through the resistor. That means that different parts of the signal experience slightly different resistance values. In simple applications, it won’t matter much, but in places where noise is an important factor, the 1/f or excess noise contributes more  to errors than the Johnson noise at low frequencies.

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