Last Chance: 2025 Hackaday Supercon Still Wants You!

July 3, 2025 by 2 Comments

Good news, procrastinators! Today was going to be the last day to throw your hat in the ring for a slot to talk at Supercon in November, but we’re extending the deadline one more week, until July 10th. We have an almost full schedule, but we’re still missing your talk.

So if the thought of having missed the deadline fills you with regret, here’s your second chance. We have spots for both 40-minute and 20-minute talks still open. We love to have a mix of newcomers as well as longtime Hackaday friends, so don’t be shy.

Supercon is a super fun time, and the crowd is full of energy and excitement for projects of all kinds. There is no better audience to present your feats of hardware derring-do, stories of reverse engineering, or other plans for world domination. Where else will you find such a density of like-minded hackers?

Don’t delay, get your talk proposal in today.

It’s 2025, And We Still Need IPv4! What Happens When We Lose It?

July 3, 2025 by 76 Comments

Some time last year, a weird thing happened in the hackerspace where this is being written. The Internet was up, and was blisteringly fast as always, but only a few websites worked. What was up? Fortunately with more than one high-end networking specialist on hand it was quickly established that we had a problem with our gateway’s handling of IPv4 addresses, and normal service was restored. But what happens if you’re not a hackerspace with access to the dodgy piece of infrastructure and you’re left with only IPv6? [James McMurray] had this happen, and has written up how he fixed it.

His answer came in using a Wireguard tunnel to his VPS, and NAT mapping the IPv4 space into a section of IPv6 space. The write-up goes into extensive detail on the process should you need to follow his example, but for us there’s perhaps more interest in why here in 2025, the loss of IPv4 is still something that comes with the loss of half the Internet. As of this writing, that even includes Hackaday itself. If we had the magic means to talk to ourselves from a couple of decades ago our younger selves would probably be shocked by this.

Perhaps the answer lies in the inescapable conclusion that IPv6 answers an address space problem of concern to many in technical spaces, it neither solves anything of concern to most internet users, nor is worth the switch for so much infrastructure when mitigations such as NAT make the IPv4 address space problem less of a problem. Will we ever entirely lose IP4? We’d appreciate your views in the comments. For readers anxious for more it’s something we looked at last year.

The 2025 Iberian Peninsula Blackout: From Solar Wobbles To Cascade Failures

June 30, 2025 by 70 Comments

Some Mondays are worse than others, but April 28 2025 was particularly bad for millions of people in Spain and Portugal. Starting just after noon, a number of significant grid oscillations occurred which would worsen over the course of minutes until both countries were plunged into a blackout. After a first substation tripped, in the span of only a few tens of seconds the effects cascaded across the Iberian peninsula as generators, substations, and transmission lines tripped and went offline. Only after the HVDC and AC transmission lines at the Spain-France border tripped did the cascade stop, but it had left practically the entirety of the peninsula without a functioning power grid. The event is estimated to have been the biggest blackout in Europe ever.

Following the blackout, grid operators in the affected regions scrambled to restore power, while the populace tried to make the best of being plummeted suddenly into a pre-electricity era. Yet even as power gradually came back online over the course of about ten hours, the question of what could cause such a complete grid collapse and whether it might happen again remained.

With recently a number of official investigation reports having been published, we have now finally some insight in how a big chunk of the European electrical grid suddenly tipped over.

Continue reading “The 2025 Iberian Peninsula Blackout: From Solar Wobbles To Cascade Failures” →

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Hackaday Links: June 29, 2025

June 29, 2025 by 16 Comments

In today’s episode of “AI Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” we feature the Hertz Corporation and its new AI-powered rental car damage scanners. Gone are the days when an overworked human in a snappy windbreaker would give your rental return a once-over with the old Mark Ones to make sure you hadn’t messed the car up too badly. Instead, Hertz is fielding up to 100 of these “MRI scanners for cars.” The “damage discovery tool” uses cameras to capture images of the car and compares them to a model that’s apparently been trained on nothing but showroom cars. Redditors who’ve had the displeasure of being subjected to this thing report being charged egregiously high damage fees for non-existent damage. To add insult to injury, if renters want to appeal those charges, they have to argue with a chatbot first, one that offers no path to speaking with a human. While this is likely to be quite a tidy profit center for Hertz, their customers still have a vote here, and backlash will likely lead the company to adjust the model to be a bit more lenient, if not outright scrapping the system.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: June 29, 2025” →

Announcing The 2025 Hackaday One Hertz Challenge

June 26, 2025 by 54 Comments

It’s about time! Or maybe it’s about time’s reciprocal: frequency. Whichever way you see it, Hackaday is pleased to announce, just this very second, the 2025 One Hertz Challenge over on Hackaday.io. If you’ve got a device that does something once per second, we’ve got the contest for you. And don’t delay, because the top three winners will each receive a $150 gift certificate from this contest’s sponsor: DigiKey.

What will you do once per second? And how will you do it? Therein lies the contest! We brainstormed up a few honorable mention categories to get your creative juices flowing.

  • Timelords: How precisely can you get that heartbeat? This category is for those who prefer to see a lot of zeroes after the decimal point.
  • Ridiculous: This category is for the least likely thing to do once per second. Accuracy is great, but absurdity is king here. Have Rube Goldberg dreams? Now you get to live them out.
  • Clockwork: It’s hard to mention time without thinking of timepieces. This category is for the clockmakers among you. If your clock ticks at a rate of one hertz, and you’re willing to show us the mechanism, you’re in.
  • Could Have Used a 555: We knew you were going to say it anyway, so we made it an honorable mention category. If your One Hertz project gets its timing from the venerable triple-five, it belongs here.

We love contests with silly constraints, because you all tend to rise to the challenge. At the same time, the door is wide open to your creativity. To enter, all you have to do is document your project over on Hackaday.io and pull down the “Contests” tab to One Hertz to enter. New projects are awesome, but if you’ve got an oldie-but-goodie, you can enter it as well. (Heck, maybe use this contest as your inspiration to spruce it up a bit?)

Time waits for no one, and you have until August 19th at 9:00 AM Pacific time to get your entry in. We can’t wait to see what you come up with.

2025 Hackaday One Hertz Challenge

Announcing The 2025 Pet Hacks Winners

June 24, 2025 by 9 Comments

When you really love your pawed, feathered, or scaled friends, you build projects for them. (Well, anyway, that’s what’s happened to us.) For the 2025 Pet Hacks Challenge, we asked you to share your favorite pet-related hacks, and you all delivered. So without further ado, here are our favorites, as well as the picks-of-the-litter that qualified for three $150 DigiKey gift certificates. Spoiler alert: it was a clean sweep for team cat.

Continue reading “Announcing The 2025 Pet Hacks Winners” →

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Hackaday Links: June 22, 2025

June 22, 2025 by 16 Comments

Hold onto your hats, everyone — there’s stunning news afoot. It’s hard to believe, but it looks like over-reliance on chatbots to do your homework can turn your brain into pudding. At least that seems to be the conclusion of a preprint paper out of the MIT Media Lab, which looked at 54 adults between the ages of 18 and 39, who were tasked with writing a series of essays. They divided participants into three groups — one that used ChatGPT to help write the essays, one that was limited to using only Google search, and one that had to do everything the old-fashioned way. They recorded the brain activity of writers using EEG, in order to get an idea of brain engagement with the task. The brain-only group had the greatest engagement, which stayed consistently high throughout the series, while the ChatGPT group had the least. More alarmingly, the engagement for the chatbot group went down even further with each essay written. The ChatGPT group produced essays that were very similar between writers and were judged “soulless” by two English teachers. Go figure.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: June 22, 2025” →