Building An ADS-B Receiver For Less Than You Think

November 1, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest No comments

If you’ve ever wondered about the planes flying above your head, you could always listen in to ADS-B transmissions to learn more about them. [thefatmoop] has built a rig to do just that, and it comes in under $50 in parts.

The build is based around the Meshnology W12 board, which combines an ESP32-S3 microcontroller with an LR2021 LoRa Radio. The latter is able to be tuned into transmissions in the realm of 1090 MHz and it can capture ADS-B traffic that uses OOK and Manchester encoding. The data is passed to the ESP32-S3 which validates the CRCs of the captured data and serves up the aircraft tracks on a simple web interface. A GNSS receiver can also be added in so the board knows its own location as well as the location of the planes that it’s tuning in.

[thefatmoop] reports decent performance with the rig, pulling in aircraft tracks from up to 150 nautical miles away using a 915 MHz antenna. There are some mods required to achieve this performance, though—namely, you’ll want to modify the filter configuration on the board to avoid it attenuating the 1090 MHz signals of interest.

There are lots of other ways to listen to ADS-B signals, too—you can always grab yourself an SDR and get going. If you’re cooking up your own cheap radio hacks, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline!

Thanks to [Moser] for the tip!

Huge PalmOS Development Archive Goes Online, Thanks To Personal Backups

October 31, 2026 by Donald Papp No comments

Palm OS, an operating system for a range mobile devices that predated mobile phones, is largely forgotten today. Or at least, that’s what [Aaron Ardiri] thought.

That all changed when he was contacted by a developer about some Palm OS software he had written decades ago. He soon realized there was a whole community of enthusiasts enthusiastically exploring a platform he had assumed was a forgotten layer in the strata of early mobile computing history.

This led [Aaron] to dust off and publish his substantial personal archive of development tools, source code, documentation, and more all related to his years of working with Palm OS in the early days of mobile computing.

When it comes to the importance of preserving computing history, we can’t put it better than [Aaron] himself so we’ll just quote him here:

Preservation is not simply about keeping old files. Source code, tools and documentation provide a record of how engineers solved problems under the constraints of their time. They also preserve knowledge that is easily lost when companies disappear and platforms are discontinued.

In many ways, Palm OS devices like the PalmPilot have very little in common with modern mobile computing platforms. They had to do more with less, and development reflected that. If you’re curious what these devices were like, here’s a great tour that includes a browser-based emulator.

A person's hands are shown holding a small camera. An aluminium cage runs around the outside of the camera, the viewfinder display is tilted up, and below the viewfinder a battery is mounted.

Upgrading An Action Camera With An External Battery

October 31, 2026 by Aaron Beckendorf No comments

[Evan Monsma], the prolific experimenter with cameras, found himself with an issue: he had a small Sony action camera with good performance in every respect but battery life, which was as low as twenty minutes. This was too short for practical everyday use, so [Evan] built an external adapter to add a larger battery and a few other features.

In fairness to the camera’s designers, it wasn’t really meant for consumer use; it was meant as more of a stunt camera, where endurance is less of a concern than size and weight. [Evan] wanted to use it for more general situations, hence the new battery. He first attached a small CNC-machined aluminium half-cage, which provided mounting points for additional hardware, including a screw-mount for a neutral-density filter.

[Evan] next designed, 3D-printed, and attached a mount and battery clip for a larger Sony camera battery; the mount also held a voltage converter to step the battery’s 7.2 V down to the original battery’s 3.7 V. A USB power adapter slotted into the battery compartment and broke out the power leads to the converter. Unfortunately, short battery life isn’t the camera’s only issue; it also eventually overheats with continuous use, which kept [Evan] from running a real battery-life test. He is, however, confident that it will last long enough for practical use.

We’ve seen a similar action camera mod before, as well as a mod to allow the use of third-party batteries in a vendor-locked camera. For larger cameras, we’ve even seen a hot-swappable battery pack.

Thanks to [Luis Mercado] for the tip!

Rooting An Amazon Echo Dot

October 31, 2026 by Maya Posch 4 Comments

The Amazon Echo Dot is one of Amazon’s so-called ‘smart speaker’ offerings that tie into their larger Alexa-fueled ecosystem, designed to be a pretty minimalistic device that gives you access to this voice assistant and also the Amazon AWS cloud access to your home. If that latter part isn’t really your jam, you can always try to unshackle the device from the Amazonian cloud by rooting the device, as [Andy] recently did with a 2018 Echo Dot 3.

In addition to the video there is also a blog post in which the steps required to root the device are covered. This is then used to turn the device into a Home Assistant voice satellite, using a Claude-vibecoded project created by [Julian Imhof]. As [Andy] notes, this code seems to work, but it’s completely unaudited so YMMV. Device support is also limited to only certain Echo Dot and Echo Show devices as listed on the project page.

The first step is to gain USB access to the board inside the device, which for USB-less devices like the Dot in question requires opening the device to solder a USB connector onto the test pads that are available on the PCB. For other Echo devices you can just use the existing USB port, which makes this first step slightly easier.

These devices run Fire OS, so basically Android, which means a fairly standard process of unlocking the bootloader and installing the hassmic application that replaces Alexa. During testing [Andy] noticed that voice processing was rather slow, requiring switching from Whisper to Speech-to-Phrase to make simple things like turning a light on not take a minute.

Overall it seems like a pretty decent way to repurpose these devices as ESPHome devices, with a few gotchas when it comes to the resources required for local voice processing.

Continue reading “Rooting An Amazon Echo Dot” →

Voyager 1 Briefly Goes Silent, Scaring Everyone

October 31, 2026 by Maya Posch 7 Comments

It’s no big secret at this point that we are looking at the final years of the two venerable Voyager spacecraft. With their power supplies diminishing and their 1970s-era electronics still giving it all they got, their teams are working miracles to stretch out the time to the final goodbye for as long as possible. Despite these efforts Voyager 1 went silent for more than 24 hours on October 18 and 19, with the team still trying to figure out what happened.

The most recent change to Voyager 1 was the same ‘big bang’ switching of multiple instruments to lower-power versions, while keeping an eye on keeping the electronics and fuel at reasonable temperatures. This should give both spacecraft a few more years before power reserves fall below usable levels. Whether this switch is related to this communication blackout is currently unknown.

From the diagnostic data that the team obtained after communications were restored it’s clear that a group of thrusters went offline with backup units kicking in, indicating that the onboard computer detected some kind anomaly with the former. Whether this is a recurrence of the clogged fuel lines that has been observed before will have to be investigated.

We still fervently hope that both Voyagers can make it into the 2030s before both of them will fall silent forever. Final goodbyes are never easy, but we are most grateful to the Voyager teams over the decades for going above and beyond to make sure that literally everything has been attempted before those fateful days arrive.

Thanks to [Mark Stevens] for the tip.

DIY WiFi Analyzer Sniffs Out Congestion And Coverage Issues, Suggests Fixes

October 31, 2026 by Donald Papp 10 Comments

[Roni Bandini]’s JEV WiFi Analyzer is an interesting experiment that glues together a single-board Linux computer, a USB WiFi adapter, and a specialized AI model to create a new kind of automated tool that passively monitors WiFi activity to measure and profile coverage, congestion, and suggest possible optimizations.

Here’s how it works: a Python program connects to WiFi, cycles through available channels, and uses scapy to gather details like signal strength, number of clients, WiFi frames per second, and similar data about each given channel. That data is fed to Jev, a highly efficient sort of decision-making AI model responsible for interpreting that data on an ongoing basis.

Briefly, Jev is a new kind of AI that is completely unable to generate text or images. It outputs only numbers representing bounded decisions. We covered these decision-making models earlier, including locally-installed versions. Jev is cheap enough to throw at a variety of problems, but it’s also practical to run your own model on your own hardware.

In [Roni]’s analyzer, Python gathers the raw numbers and Jev takes care of classifying the WiFi network’s coverage, congestion level, and basic remedial actions if applicable. There’s a brief video embedded below (Spanish only) that shows the Jev WiFi Analyzer in action.

The AI isn’t making particularly deep analyses, but it doesn’t take much to imagine Jev taking a more active role like deciding which channels to spend more (or less) time monitoring. Using a decision-making model in this way is interesting, and makes us wonder if similar models integrated with other kinds of hardware is a branch of projects waiting to happen.

Continue reading “DIY WiFi Analyzer Sniffs Out Congestion And Coverage Issues, Suggests Fixes” →

Bring On Supercon!

October 31, 2026 by Elliot Williams 1 Comment

In just under a week from today, almost 700 hackers will be getting together in Pasadena, CA for three days of scheming, soldering, and socializing. If you’re able to join us, you absolutely should – there is no substitute for attending a hacker convention in person.

But even if you can’t make it to Supercon, you’re not shut out. We have an absolutely killer slate of talks, and we’ll be streaming at least one stage’s worth during the event. Watching a good talk isn’t just entertainment, but it can plant new seeds of possibility in your brain, or give you new perspectives on something that you thought you already knew. A super talk can launch a thousand hacks.

It’s a funny part of our culture, that even though we all have the Internet where the printed word and the video reign supreme, many of our best ideas are still transmitted the old fashioned way: one person who has thought deeply about a topic gets up in front of a room and lets loose. Maybe it’s because presentations require so much preparation that they’re so powerful? I don’t know, but I do know that I’ve seen a number of Supercon (and other!) talks that have literally changed the way I see the world. A good presentation sticks with you.

Hackaday strives to be the equivalent of the newspaper of record for everything going on in our scene. If there is a cool hack out there, we want to showcase it so that everyone can draw from it. In just exactly the same vein, we are stoked and honored to be the stage for the next round of great talks. Whether you’re there in the audience live with us, or watching along at home, and whichever of the topics you’re interested in, we hope that the signal gets out to you.