Using The Famicom Network System In 2026

August 16, 2026 by 1 Comment

Usually, the name ‘Famicom’ and the associated Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) don’t exactly bring to mind downloadable content and online services. However, at least in Japan, a modem add-on for the Famicom offered those features. Released in 1988, the Family Computer Network System (FCNS) offered all that using its modem to dial into Nintendo’s servers. Recently, [Throaty Mumbo] got his mitts on one of these units to try and see what you can still do with it in 2026.

Voiding that Nintendo warranty. (Credit: Throaty Mumbo, YouTube)

Although only mildly successful in the Japanese market, Nintendo still sold 130,000 of these modem add-ons, with tens of thousands of users for the stock brokering, banking, and Super Mario Club services offered. The experiences with the FCNS would form the foundation for Nintendo’s Satellaview for the Super Famicom and from there into today’s Nintendo Online offerings.

Of course, the main challenge with reviving the FCNS in 2026 is that the remote servers were turned off decades ago, along with the minor detail that to do anything with it you need to insert a special card. This was missing in the used version that [Throaty Mumbo] bought, but fortunately he got a workable Super Mario Club card. The next struggle? He doesn’t speak Japanese, so it took a while to eke out the details.

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Hackaday Links: August 16, 2026

August 16, 2026 by 2 Comments

We’re no strangers to unusual hardware failures around these parts, but even so, a swarm of jellyfish clogging up the works is a new one to us. That’s exactly what happened to the cooling system at the Gravelines nuclear power plant in France earlier this week, resulting in three reactors having to be shut down. This isn’t even an isolated incident, as POLITICO points out that the same thing actually happened last year around this same time.

So why are jellyfish staging an annual protest against nuclear power? A warming of the North Sea has extended breeding seasons and produced larger populations of the plankton that the jellyfish feed on. This is great for the gelatinous sea creatures, but not exactly ideal if you’re trying to pump the water they live in through a complex cooling system. The French installed filter screens and monitoring systems after this happened in 2025, but clearly they’re going to need to keep working on the problem.

From a new problem to a very old one, a BBC investigation has revealed that the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) Blood and Transplant department was inadvertently leaking private patient data by sending it in the clear over the pager network. Sniffing pager messages was fairly trivial decades ago, and is even easier these days thanks to the proliferation of cheap software-defined radios and open source decoding software. Given the fragility of the underlying communication network they use, the NHS announced they were going to stop using pagers by 2021, but clearly not everyone got the memo.

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Another Radio On A Chip Design

August 16, 2026 by 6 Comments

It used to be a rite of passage to build some sort of AM radio receiver. Many people started with a crystal radio, of course, but you’d graduate to maybe a TRF or superhet design. FM radio projects were not as common, because demodulating an FM signal was harder, as was making things work in the 100 MHz range. These days, though, you can get everything on a chip like the TEA5767, and [turtushig22-blip] has an open design that uses that device on a breakout board, a display, a knob, and an external amplifier. An ESP-32 pulls it together. You can see two videos about the project below.

Unlike older FM radio designs, the TEA5767 doesn’t require any adjustments. RF goes in, and stereo audio goes out. You can control the device through I2C or a 3-wire serial interface.

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Laser Layers For (Almost) Isotropicly Strong Prints

August 16, 2026 by 21 Comments

If there’s one defining factor about 3D printing you have to account for when you’re making a design, it’s probably layer adhesion. Sure, there are a lot of factors to consider, but having the z-axis of your part dramatically weaker than x- and y- is a pretty big deal in a whole lot of applications. [I Changed a thing] changed a thing to fix that — namely, he changed his 3D printer by strapping a couple of lasers to it. That’s the kind of hack we like to see!

What the lasers are doing is a very simple idea: they’re pre-melting the last-laid-down-layer just under the nozzle so that molten plastic is meeting molten plastic to create a much stronger joint than you get when you extrude onto an already-cold layer. The second layer keeps the hotspot warmer longer, which also helps the bond. The resulting parts are not purely isotropic, but he’s getting breaking strain along the z-axis of ABS that’s up to 94% of what he’s measuring in the x direction, while PLA still rates at 77.9%. That’s compared to 60% and 41%, for un-lasered samples, respectively. If you watch the video, you’ll get all the details for the printing process and can see more test data.

These lasers look like a game-changer, but their mass might slow down the fast coreXY printers that are so popular these days. If you don’t want to slow down, remember that changing your layer patterns can boost a print’s strength on its own.

Thanks to [Josh Pensel] for the tip!

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A test setup for an actuator is shown on a benchtop. A power supply connects to a cylindrical actuator, which has an arm pressing against a load cell. The load cell's output is shown on a computer screen, which is labelled "Torque".

Building An Actuator For A Walking Robot

August 16, 2026 by 2 Comments

Unlike biological systems, which can use muscles, robots that try to imitate them don’t have particularly fast, powerful, compact linear actuators available. This puts walking robots at a particular disadvantage, since they can’t spread their actuators along a limb and have to place them right at the joint. [Food for Robots] took on the challenge of building such a joint-mounted actuator, and shared the results in a recent video.

[Food for Robots] is building a walking robot, so he needed a compact, lightweight, and backdrivable actuator capable of producing 20 Newton-meters of torque. He’d previously built a largely 3D-printed actuator, but when he tried to exceed 10 Nm of torque with it, various parts kept breaking. He therefore machined the second iteration out of aluminum; since it didn’t need to be 3D printed, he switched from a Capstan drive to a planetary gearbox. The gearbox sits in the center of the actuator, inside the stator, and uses several stacked layers of gears to increase strength within the limits of a small CNC.

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R-Selecting Tiny Probes To Shotgun Into Saturn’s Rings

August 16, 2026 by 21 Comments

In ecology, there used to be a concept — now largely unfashionable — that species could be described as r- or K-selected, depending on how they treat their offspring. An elephant that has one calf every few years and devotes immense resources to them is adopting a K-selection strategy — much as NASA traditionally has to its flagship probes, like Cassini. A sea turtle who leaves hundreds of eggs in a clutch on the beach and leaves without saying “good luck”, content in the knowledge that one of them will probably make it to adulthood is engaging in an r-selected strategy, and it’s this strategy that [Dr. Michael Rubenstein] is proposing for a next-generation mission to Saturn as part of NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts Program for 2026. Entitled “Actively Steerable Femtosat Constellations for In-situ Exploration of Saturn’s Rings, Atmosphere, and Magnetosphere”

The concept is pretty simple: the rings are a horrifying mess of dust, debris, and ice bits of all sizes that represent almost certain death for a spacecraft. By launching 10,000 femtosatellites, those odds of almost certain death become an almost certainty that one or more will make it through with precious data. In the immortal words of Lord Farquhar, “Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.” With Cassini, NASA would never consider such a sacrifice. With itty-bity femtosatellites, it starts to make sense. We’ve been saying for years that the future of space is tiny, but these sacrificial probes would make even modern cubesats and picosatellites look big.

Thanks to [Richard HT] for the tip! His tip was to a podcast featuring [Dr. Rubenstein] with [Fraser Cain], which we’ve embedded below. It has a lot more details than NASA’s official blurb page.

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Researchers Hack An Airline Analog

August 16, 2026 by 21 Comments

Modern airliners are rather complicated feats of engineering. Innumerable safety-critical components are connected with tens of miles of wiring, complex digital buses, and dozens (perhaps hundreds) of computers. But, as hackers, we know that any computer can be hacked and, of course, aircraft avionics are no different. 

Modern aircraft typically use the ARINC 429 protocol. This differs from many protocols we see where multiple transmitters are allowed. ARINC 429 has a single transmission source. This makes a transmission-override attack hypothetically difficult, as an attacker was thought to need to physically replace a legitimate transmitter (like a flight management computer), a rather daunting task. However, the ARINC 429 transmitters sit behind a pair of 37.5 ohm resistors, so by transmitting on the same line, an attack device can simply override the legitimate transmitter’s power.

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