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 No 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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A Feature-Rich Drum Machine

July 20, 2026 by 3 Comments

A little over a month ago, we featured a project from [Igor] who built 64 bits of DRAM from scratch using discrete components. Jokes about memory pricing aside, he did have a use case for such a small amount of memory — he is using it in a custom-built drum machine. But featuring the memory build and not the drum machine was perhaps putting the cart before the horse, so in this video, [Igor] shows off the construction of each part of his impressive 16- or 64-step sequence drum machine.

This isn’t Igor’s first drum machine, either, although his previous build was a bit more limited. It had fewer steps in the sequence and didn’t quite have the range of his newer model. The upgraded version can play more steps but also includes force-sensitive drum pads based on piezo sensors and more voices (drums) as well. Each voice is built electronically using various op-amps and passive components, and [Igor] has the schematics for each of them, as well as every other part of the drum machine, for those looking to recreate any part of this on their own. There’s a lot going on in this lengthy video as well, so for the musically inclined, it’s worth taking a look in full.

Now that our horse is in the correct position in front of the cart, it’s worth going back and looking at the memory build if you missed it when it first ran. A small amount of memory makes the machine programmable rather than just playable, and truly expands the capabilities of a machine like this in the recording studio.

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Hackaday Europe 2026: Project Gigapixel

July 20, 2026 by 2 Comments

There was once a race to put out cameras with ever higher numbers of megapixels to snare customers eager to take the highest quality digital photos. These days, we know that things like optics, processing, and finer qualities of an image sensor are all very important beyond pure resolution. But, for a time, companies behaved as if megapixels mattered over all else.

But what if you could go farther—shooting not millions, but billions of pixels in a single image? That’s precisely what [Yannick Richter] came to Hackaday Europe to talk about, covering his Project Gigapixel build.

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Old SSDs Find New Life As Game Cartridges

July 20, 2026 by 13 Comments

Game companies might not like physical media much anymore, but gamers sure do. There’s nothing like pawing over your collection to find what to play, and inserting a cartridge with a satisfying click before sitting down to an old-school game like — wait, Cyberpunk 2077? Yeah, that wasn’t released on cartridge, but that didn’t stop [Jibril-sama] over on Reddit. The cartridges are 3D printed — stls on makeworld only, as of this writing — and contain old 2.5″ SSDs that [Jabril] was able to pick up in bulk.

This larger base seems ideal for building into a PC console, but either would work.

Inside the base unit is a simple USB3-SATA adapter that hooks to [Jabril]’s gaming PC. There are two versions of the base unit: a simple vertical unit, and a horizontal one with some springs to give a satisfying grip.

On each disk is a launch script that is vetted by a program on the PC that autolaunches only the cartridges you’ve told it to trust, which is a level of security we can appreciate. [Jabril-sama] has kindly made that available under the MIT license on GitHub.

We don’t know how much life is left in these cheap drives, but they should last a while if the only write is the odd save file. Hopefully [Jabril-sama] is cycling through his games fairly often, as SSDs are only non-volatile storage if your time horizon is short enough.

Thanks to [iliis] for the tip! Remember, if you use our tips line to share what you find, you’re not doomscrolling, you’re doing a public service.

Launching Rockets Is Hard, Bring Them Back Is Harder

July 20, 2026 by 10 Comments

Since the first V2 rocket sailed above the Kármán line back in 1944 and right up until the modern era, the trajectory of most space-bound rockets was more or less the same: after expending their propellants they would either crash into some desolate steppe or plunge into the ocean. In either event, the rocket was disposable. The important bit up top might go on to explore the stars or send a human crew off on their mission, but the booster rocket that lifted the spacecraft out of the atmosphere was always going to be sacrificed for the cause.

But in the 1970s NASA had a wild idea: what if we didn’t smash a brand-new rocket valued at millions of dollars into the ocean every time we wanted to put something in orbit? Instead, they would build a hybrid space vehicle that blended the vertical takeoff and raw power of a rocket with the capabilities of an airplane, allowing it and whatever it was carrying to make a gentle runway landing at the end of its mission. As such, the Space Shuttle was born.

With the benefit of hindsight, we now know the Shuttle wasn’t quite the spaceflight revolution that NASA had hoped for. The age of reusable rockets didn’t truly begin until 2015, when SpaceX landed the first stage of their Falcon 9. To date they’ve repeated the feat nearly 600 times, all the while increasing the reliability and speed of their operations. Today the Falcon 9 is the most prolific launch vehicle in history, and nearly every other rocket in active development is being designed to include some element of reusability.

Most recently, China demonstrated that they could recover their Long March 10B rocket by gently bringing it down into what amounts to a giant butterfly net. While it might seem a bit quaint compared to rockets that land on their tails like something out of a 1950s sci-fi movie, the idea offers considerable promise.

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Earth-like LHS 1140b May Feature The First Atmosphere Found On Exoplanet

July 20, 2026 by 8 Comments

Finding another planet outside of our solar system that can comfortably be called ‘Earth-like’ is one of those discoveries that — if confirmed — would be a major event. The complication here is that with every exoplanet that we discover through observations, determining the type of planet is hard enough, never mind figuring out whether it has an atmosphere, much less what’s in that atmosphere. This makes a recent report on LHS 1140 b rather exciting, as it strongly suggests that this super-Earth may have something close to an Earth-like atmosphere.

In the paper by [Collin Cherubim] and others in Science, the findings of helium occasionally escaping from its atmosphere have led to considerable excitement, as this time-variable atmospheric escape of helium suggests a helium-rich upper atmosphere that’s further depleted in hydrogen.

It should be noted, of course, that these assumptions are based on observations from roughly 49 light-years away, so there’s always some room for later adjustments. Even if confirmed, the star that LHS 1140b orbits is a red dwarf, with a nearly 25-day orbital period and light levels less than half of what Earth receives from the Sun. This would make the surface of LHS 1140b with its proposed oceans rather dim, even if it’s conceivably at temperatures well within the comfort range of us Earth-based mammals.

At 49 light-years distance, it’s also not close enough that — barring an FTL drive — we could do direct observations or visitations, but if these results hold, it’d be on the short list along with a number of other plausibly habitable exoplanets to check out once we build that first warp drive-powered starship.

Could Reticulum Power A Post-Internet Network?

July 20, 2026 by 25 Comments

These days, it is easy to think you always have access to the Internet. But some wonder if — in spite of its ARPANET, nuclear-war-planning heritage — you can actually count on it to be there when things go pear-shaped. [The Tech Prepper], as you might imagine, is quite concerned with that last question, and is flogging Reticulum over high-frequency radio as a post-internet network in a video embedded below.

Reticulum is a cryptographic network stack, fully decentralized and amazing from a cyberpunk/hacker/survivalist perspective. Unfortunately for [The Tech Prepper], until the you-know-what hits the ventilation unit and the FCC and its counterparts in other countries are too busy to be concerned with such trifles, encrypted signals are banned on ham radio bands just about everywhere. That’s why his demo is using a dummy load on the Mercury HF modem instead of an antenna: the feds don’t care if the signal doesn’t leave the building. The video shows how to replicate the setup using his EmComm Tools suite on Ubuntu.

Perhaps more interesting is his vision of a Post-Internet network, be it in a disaster scenario, as he envisions, or simply because we get sick of what the internet has become. The idea of easily hooking an open-source radio modem to a PC running modem73, open-source SDR software, has a certain appeal. Reticulum isn’t your only option there: modem73 will let you run a BBS in the clear — that is, unencrypted and legal to transmit — and let’s face it, wasn’t life online more fun in BBS days?

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the Reticulum network stack, but last time it was operating at considerably shorter ranges over LoRA. 

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