Art of 3D printer in the middle of printing a Hackaday Jolly Wrencher logo

Giving Resin 3D Printers Another Shot After Six Years

July 21, 2026 by 1 Comment

My initial experience with a 3D printer came in 2020, when I got access to a buddy’s Creality LD-002R SLA printer. This was one of those awkward transition phases for SLA printers, where inefficient RGB LCDs finally got replaced by monochrome LCD panels, thus massively reducing the required exposure time and increasing the LCD panel’s lifespan.

The closely related Creality LD-002H is a monochrome SLA printer, but as this wasn’t the one that this friend opted for we had to learn the ropes on this more old-school printer. In terms of specifications this meant a build volume of 119 mm x 65 mm x 160 mm to play with and a claimed 26.1 µm resolution. Despite some struggles along the way, this machine churned out impressively high levels of detail with whatever cheap resin we threw at it, and even the post-printing processing became easy once we added a flex plate to the build plate and tweaked the cleaning and curing steps.

Despite all these positives, we both drifted away from resin printing, mostly due to the still messy and smelly printing process. FDM printers seemed like a better deal, especially after said buddy got his mittens on a used IDEX FDM printer. I would eventually go through a rather loathsome Creality Ender V2 experience before ending up with my current-day Elegoo Neptune 4, and resin printing seemed to be a thing of the past for me. Until recently, that is.

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Java Ring Restored After Nearly 30 Years

July 21, 2026 by 8 Comments

Back in the late 90s when absolutely everybody knew that Java was going to become the one programming language to rule them all, the Java Ring was handed out to folks at Java developer conferences as an example of how it was going to revolutionize smart wearable devices. Recently [Daisuke Yamazaki] got his mittens on one of these collector’s items to see about reviving it.

We talked about these rings and associated iButton devices before, with their intended use being primarily to act as authentication keys. For the Java Ring, this use was mostly just used as a kind of gag, whereby visitors to these conferences could specify their coffee preferences at a terminal, having this programmed into the ring so that they could get their desired cup of literal java at various bean juice dispensers around the conference site.

Talking to one of these iButton devices requires a so-called Blue Dot adapter, which [Yamazaki-san] purchased along with the ring. Although the device happily responded on the 1-wire bus, figuring out how to interact with the original Java-based firmware and answering the question of how much of the original information of someone’s coffee preferences in ’98 were retained would require more sleuthing.

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20 FPS On E-Paper Display Without Help

July 21, 2026 by 5 Comments

If electronic paper displays have one downside, it’s generally refresh rate. Earlier versions of the tech might only have been able to do single-digit frames per second, while modern, mid-range devices can sometimes manage 10-20 FPS — and that’s not including the frames needed to blank the display. Getting up past that double-digit barrier typically requires higher-end displays, more powerful processors or FPGAs, and more money. On the other hand, [Tony] was recently able to get 20 FPS out of an ESP32-based device without using any extra processing power.

The key to improving e-paper performance is understanding how the display actually works. The “ink” consists of microscopic charged pigment particles that physically move in response to electric fields, making the display much slower than LCD or OLED panels. Rather than fully erasing and redrawing every frame, the software takes advantage of the particles’ existing state by generating optimized driving waveforms that only move the particles needed to produce the next image. On the software side, an MPEG-like encoding is used so only changes between frames are transmitted and converted into these waveforms, reducing unnecessary data transfers and allowing much higher frame rates.

Tony’s method is able to drive 960×540 panels, like those found in the Lilygo or M5PaperS3, to 20 FPS, and these platforms are based on nothing more than the capable but limited ESP32 chip. It’s an impressive push, and worth checking out the video in the linked project page. We assume you’d need a little more to drive something like the massive e-paper display found in this home automation setup, though.

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Two maps of London turned into hexagonal regions heat mapped from white to peach to purple. The left map is according to: density, ratings, surprise, cuisine diversity, and independent share. The map on the right of merged data assigns the dominant hub type in a region. Purple is assigned a value of "Elite", reddish orange is "Strong", peach is "Everyday", and white/grey is "Weak." The five locations deemed to be the highest scorers were Ealing-Acton, Kingston Upon Thames, Enfield, Bromley, and Havering.

Google Maps Killed The Restaurant Star

July 20, 2026 by 3 Comments

We all know that Google and other big players pick and choose what information people see, but we sometimes overlook it outside of the search and social media space. [Lauren Leek] decided to take a look at how Google Maps picks winners and losers in the restaurant scene in London.

Building a machine learning model to determine a new restaurant recommendation (as one does), [Leek] uncovered interesting, and perhaps concerning, elements of how Google Maps ranks restaurants. Broken down by relevance, proximity, and prominence, many new restaurants face the issue of not drawing traffic without reviews and vice-versa causing a vicious cycle. Relevance and proximity are fairly straightforward, but what goes into “prominence?”

[Leek] found that “it is not just what people think of a place – it is how often people interact with it, talk about it, and already recognise it.” This leads to chains and high foot traffic areas awash in reviews while more out-of-the-way places find it more difficult to draw traffic. Some of this is expected and would be happening even when word of mouth was the primary way to find out where to eat, but as with many things, the algorithm amplifies this, along with the undisclosed paid placement of restaurants in Maps results.

While still in its infancy, [Leek] built a public dashboard where people can sort restaurants in the city. The machine learning algorithm is designed to identify places that are hidden gems that punch above their Google Maps weight and may make you look like the trendy one (if you live in London).

Zooming out further, [Leek] found larger clusters that revealed restaurant “diversity, in other words, is not just about taste. It is about where families settled, which high streets remained affordable long enough for a second generation to open businesses, and which parts of the city experienced displacement before culinary ecosystems could mature.”

If you want to step outside the algorithm mayhem, how about a good old-fashioned Web Ring? We’ve also addressed what’s an AI versus an algorithm, and Cory Doctorow advised us on how to reverse course on the current wave of enshittification.

Detection Of A Four-Carbon Sugar In Interstellar Space

July 20, 2026 by 2 Comments

Although life tends to find a way, something first has to kickstart said lifeforms. Exactly how the first biological cells formed on Earth – and potentially on other worlds – remains an enduring mystery. Some theories point to the early Earth’s surface conditions as a viable laboratory for the self-assembly of the first viable membranes, RNA, DNA and associated molecular machinery, while seeding of the Earth’s primitive atmosphere by sugars and other precursors from asteroids and kin is required in other theories.

Recently [Izaskun Jiménez-Serra] et al. added to this debate with the reported detection of four-carbon sugars in the form of erythrulose in the interstellar medium. Using the 40 meter radio telescope at Yebes and the 30 meter radio telescope at Granada the signatures of this sugar was detected in a molecular cloud near the center of the Milky Way.

These sugars likely form on these interstellar dust grains from more basic two-carbon aldehydes and alcohols, with them providing conceivably a source of energy for early metabolic processes of developing lifeforms. This specific type of sugar is highly prevalent in Earth’s fruits, and thus its prevalence in interstellar space is at the very least an interesting coincidence, if not another puzzle piece in the overarching question of abiogenesis.

Sail Virtually Aboard The “Itanic” With IA-64 Emulator

July 20, 2026 by 9 Comments

Intel’s Itanium architecture was an interesting experiment, but it has gone down in history as one of the chip giant’s bigger flops, so much so that it earned the name “Itanic” in the tech press. This is perhaps unfair, considering it did limp on until a quiet EOL in 2020. We didn’t know anyone missed it, but perhaps it was more the technical challenge than nostalgia for obsolete server hardware that led [Yufeng Gao] and [gdwnldsKSC] to spin up an instruction-set translator for the late, lamented, IA-64 architecture.

Note that it’s very much in alpha, version 0.1, so don’t expect all the things. Neither HP-UX and OpenVMS will boot, which is a pity since Itanium’s great success was arguably winning those OSes and thereby killing the bespoke architectures HP and DEC had at the time. Gentoo can get to a shell, as long as you use Kernel 6.6 or older, and Windows Server 2003 and XP-64 both apparently boot.

It’s not incredibly performant, with 486-level speeds when running on Ryzen 5000 series hardware, but then, it is a 64-bit hardware being emulated here, and pretty weird hardware at that. Itanium’s Very Long Word Instruction architecture was notoriously hard to program well. Specifically, it was hard to compile optimized programs for, so we expect optimizing an emulator is going to be similarly difficult. That’s why this is so impressive, even at this early stage.

The late, unlamented Itanium is probably one of the few systems not in the Virtual OS Museum, but perhaps eventually this project will change that.

via Raymii.org

A quadcopter with a clear, U-shaped shield up front and red propellers navigates between a close stand of moss-covered trees.

Echolocation For Drones

July 20, 2026 by 2 Comments

Bats are remarkable creatures, able to fly at night or inside the confines of caves without light to guide their way. A team of researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) has determined how to use low power ultrasonic sensors to guide drones in obscured environments.

While radar, lidar, and GPS are all great for navigation and sensing, they can run into issues when light is obscured or can take too much power to be practical for the limited battery life of a drone. The researchers found that a dual sonar array could be used to implement a much lower power sensing system for a drone that performs well in environments that would stymie a computer vision system.

A shield placed behind the array cuts down on the sound of the propellers that would otherwise drown out the signal, and further signal analysis via a neural net separates the echoes of objects in front of the drone from the background. The prototype could navigate in various simulated environments like forests, smoke, and snow. It looks like it even got a chance to go for a flight in the actual woods. All the code and hardware designs are Open Source, so have at it!

We’ve covered mosquito-inspired drone sensors before, and if you want to get into echolocation yourself, apparently humans can learn to do it too.

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