Hackaday Podcast Ep 373: GPS, Danger In Space, And Robby The Robot

June 12, 2026 by 1 Comment

Last week, Elliot got his foot stepped on by a 1.5 metric ton draft horse, and boy is he glad to be back to the relative safety of podcasting! Joining him today is Jenny List, no stranger to farm life, who has been trodden by a cow. It’s going to be one of those podcasts, folks.

Another thing the two hosts have in common is a love for the mystery of the numbers station. But did you know that GPS satellites, for the last 20 years, have broadcast literally millions of secret messages to everyone on the earth with a receiver? After that bombshell, we have an ATtiny85 emulating an 8080, a primer on how to embed magnets in 3D prints, definitive proof that more than one cassette mechanism is still being manufactured, and a look at what makes home automation enthusiasts tick.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download in DRM-free MP3 and play it in space.

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A Peek Inside The Secret Lagercrantz Suitcase Radio

June 12, 2026 by 7 Comments

What counts as portable is somewhat a matter of opinion, especially over the years. [Helge Fykse] has a portable spy radio of Swedish origin. For its time, it was considered very portable, crammed into a good-sized suitcase.

You can see the large crystal that sets the transmit frequency and a key to send Morse code. The receiver has a VFO, so it was more agile. Based on the regenerative knob, it appears the receiver was of the regenerative type. The suitcase had its own battery, and with tubes, it could probably put out some kind of signal if connected to anything metal, like bedsprings, a clothesline, or anything. There was a lightbulb to let you see when you were transmitting maximum power.

Speaking of tubes, there were five inside, two for the transmitter and three for the receiver. The radio had storage for spare tubes, and the agent could maintain the radio in the field.

You not only get a peek inside the suitcase, but a look at the schematic. The radio is a model of simplicity, but we are certain it did its job.

We love looking at exotic spy gear, especially radios.

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This Week In Security: Microsoft On Microsoft, Register Your Domains, Linux On ARM, And FreeBSD Joins The File Cache Club

June 12, 2026 by 12 Comments

Supply chain attacks continue, with Microsoft’s own open source Azure repositories being automatically disabled by GitHub following a compromise of the packages by the Miasma worm.

OpenSourceMalware reports that the infection resulted in 73 Microsoft-related package repositories being flagged and taken offline in a little over a minute by the GitHub automated security system, with over 40 repositories being related to Azure and the rest distributed across the Microsoft organization.

The center of the infection appears to be the Microsoft Durabletask package, which was previously compromised in May and used to push infected packages to PyPi. Considering that all of the supply chain worms also steal credentials for every service they can find in the build or developer environment they infect, it seems likely that credentials stolen in the original attack were never properly disabled.

Disabling the repositories can help stem the infected packages and GitHub actions from spreading and infecting more organizations, but of course any build processes depending on those packages will not function. In May, the Durabletask package showed over 400,000 downloads per month.

The OpenSourceMalware report includes a full list of the impacted repositories.

Microsoft Fixes GitHub Token Exploit

Microsoft has finally fixed a bug in GitHub which could steal a GitHub authentication token with access to all of an accounts repositories via the embedded web-based VSCode editor which is part of GitHub itself.

Ammar Askar discovered the bug and discusses it on their blog; by manipulating the sandboxed VS Code into treating an embedded web view as user keyboard strokes, it is possible to to cause it to install a VS Code extension which is then used to exfiltrate the GitHub authentication tokens of the user using the embedded VS Code instance.

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Glue-in Hinge Design Tries Something Different

June 12, 2026 by 15 Comments

Need a hinge in your 3D printed design and would prefer not to re-invent the wheel? You may find [Alex Krush]’s glue-in filament hinge useful.

This design (shown in this simple box as an example) makes a very close-fitting hinge point.

This design prints half the hinge as a separate piece — the u-shaped one in the picture to the side — that must be glued into the target object after printing. It’s a bit of extra work, but doing it this way has a couple advantages.

One is that printing some of the hinge elements separately means one no longer needs to choose between a print orientation that best suits the object, and a print orientation that works best for the hinge. Also, the length of 1.75 mm filament used as a hinge pin is held captive after assembly so there’s no need to glue the hinge pin itself.

[Alex] helpfully provides the parts in STEP format, which makes CAD tweaks and adjustments easy. While incorporating the design should be doable even if one is just using .stl or .3mf files because boolean subtraction and merging is all that’s needed, having the model in STEP format is so much better.

Should you need some pointers on incorporating either into FreeCAD, we have you covered.

The Hackaday Communicator Badge, Re-Imagined With New Firmware

June 12, 2026 by 15 Comments

Our recently concluded event in Europe saw the return of the Hackaday Communicator badge — a stylish handheld gadget with a QWERTY keyboard, a LoRa radio, and an ESP32. It came complete with a simple messaging app built into its MicroPython firmware, and by all accounts it was a great success.

But there was certainly room for improvement, which is where [Giovi321]’s new firmware for the badge comes in. It brings support for Meshtastic proper, as well as longer battery life support for GPS module. To install this firmware you will need to have the ESP-IDF but fortunately there are very comprehensive instructions provided to help you. Under the hood it’s running FreeRTOS.

It’s something which is so often missing with an event badge, any sense of how it might have a life after the event rather than becoming a piece of e-waste. The Communicator badge is such a nice physical design that it obviously has potential, so this firmware unlocks it and gives the badge a use out in the real world. We really like it for this, and we’ll be flashing a few of our badges over to give it a shot shorlty.

If you’re looking to upgrade the hardware on your Communicator, check out the custom RGB keyboard we covered last week.

It's rare to see an A1200 case fuller than this.

Amiga 1232 Storm CD Packs Every Upgrade Into One Wedge

June 11, 2026 by 23 Comments

You know what they used to say– once you go Commodore, you’ll never leave by any door. Well, they might not have said that, but given the prevalence of projects still using Commodore-branded systems decades after the company’s demise, perhaps someone should have. A case in point is [Jit06] with this writeup on his Ultimate Amiga 1200 — or “Amiga 1232 Storm CD”– which crams just about every upgrade you might think of into the 1990s wedge computer.

Of course it has the PiStorm 32, with a CM4 providing supercomputer performance, at least by A1200 standards. That’s rather old hat, though, and it’s everything else crammed into the old Commodore that takes the score. For one thing, there’s a slot-loading, slim-form DVD drive from an old laptop that’s been incorporated so smoothly it almost looks factory. Ditto for the compact flash card slot, which is also on the IDE bus. The two share a custom IDE cable– yes, kids, we did used to roll our on 44-pin cables back in the day, but you’d better believe no one did it unless they really had to. With the space constraints inside the A1200 case, [Jit06] falls into that category.

The optical and CF cards trigger the drive LED on the Amiga case by default, but [Jit] wanted to see access on the PiStorm’s SD card as well, so he wired a couple of red LEDs to the default lightguide to get a colour-contrasting flash. That SD card is also broken out with an extender for easy access without opening the case– and once again, it looks almost as good as stock. So does the modded-on VGA port, which is stealing space that once belonged to the Amiga’s RF modulator and fed by a ScanPlus AGA board.

The only thing that really stands out as modded is the volume knob on the floppy-drive side of the case; that controls a mixer that sits between the CD audio and Paula, the Amiga’s custom sound chip. This lets him use the A1200 as a CD-32 system, and is very handy to have as CD-32 games used CD audio tracks that apparently were not well mixed with the digital audio in the games.

With all the cutting and soldering, this is not a reversible mod, something people are becoming much more concerned with as these machines slowly increase in rarity. Still, as a quality-of-life improvement, this sort of upgrade might be worth it if can keep the old A1200 relevant for another three decades. For anyone else who never got over the Amiga bug, he’s also published a linux-native SD-card creator called emu68 bootstrap on github to help with making images for the PiStorm.

Thanks to [Jit] for the tip! With the easy OS-swapping he’s enabled with the SD-breakout, there’s no reason not to try the rediscovered Amiga Unix. If you want the same without cutting into a vintage case, the PiStorm can be a sidecar.

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So Many Analog To Digital Converters

June 11, 2026 by 40 Comments

An old algebra teacher used to say, “You have to take what you know and use it to get what you don’t know.” You might say the same thing about converting analog signals into digital. Computers know how to count and keep time. [Eric Explains] has a video purporting to explain “every type of analog-to-digital converter.” We aren’t sure he got every possible method, but there’s still a lot of information in the video, which you can see below.

From the flash ADC, using a ton of comparators to the successive approximation converter, which essentially plays a game of hi/lo, guessing the answer and figuring out if the real answer is higher or lower.

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