Hackaday Podcast Episode 311: AirTag Hack, GPS Rollover, And A Flat-Pack Toaster

March 7, 2025 by Tom Nardi 5 Comments

This week, Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start off the episode by announcing Arduino co-founder David Cuartielles will be taking the stage as the keynote speaker at Hackaday Europe. In his talk, we’ll hear about a vision of the future where consumer electronics can be tossed in the garden and turned into compost instead of sitting in a landfill for the next 1,000 years or so.

You’ll also hear about a particularly clever manipulation of Apple’s AirTag infrastructure, how a classic kid’s toy was turned into a unique display with the help of computer vision, and the workarounds required to keep older Global Positioning System (GPS) hardware up and running. They’ll also cover DIY toasters, extracting your data from a smart ring before the manufacturer can sell it, a LEGO interferometer, and a new feature added to the Bus Pirate 5’s already impressive list of capabilities.

Capping off the episode there’s a discussion about the surprising (or depending on how you think about it, unsurprising) amount of hardware that was on display at FOSDEM this year, and the history of one of man’s most infernal creations, the shopping cart wheel lock.

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 listen from the comfort of your shopping cart.

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Microsoft (Again) Claims Topological Quantum Computing With Majorana Zero Mode Anyons

February 20, 2025 by Maya Posch 5 Comments

As the fundamental flaw of today’s quantum computers, improving qubit stability remains the focus of much research in this field. One such stability attempt involves so-called topological quantum computing with the use of anyons, which are two-dimensional quasiparticles. Such an approach has been claimed by Microsoft in a recent paper in Nature. This comes a few years after an earlier claim by Microsoft for much the same feat, which was found to be based on faulty science and hence retracted.

The claimed creation of anyons here involves Majorana fermions, which differ from the much more typical Dirac fermions. These Majorana fermions are bound with other such fermions as a Majorana zero mode (MZM), forming anyons that are intertwined (braided) to form what are in effect logic gates. In the Nature paper the Microsoft researchers demonstrate a superconducting indium-arsenide (InAs) nanowire-based device featuring a read-out circuit (quantum dot interferometer) with the capacitance of one of the quantum dots said to vary in a way that suggests that the nanowire device-under-test demonstrates the presence of MZMs at either end of the wire.

Microsoft has a dedicated website to their quantum computing efforts, though it remains essential to stress that this is not a confirmation until their research is replicated by independent researchers. If confirmed, MZMs could provide a way to create more reliable quantum computing circuitry that does not have to lean so heavily on error correction to get any usable output. Other, competing efforts here include such things as hybrid mechanical qubits and antimony-based qubits that should be more stable owing to their eight spin configurations.

Setup of a small lightbulb passing light through a thin film

Experimenting With Interference On Thin Layers

August 26, 2024 by Heidi Ulrich No comments

[Stoppi] has taken on a fascinating project involving the interference of thin layers, a phenomenon often observed in everyday life but rarely explored in such depth. This project delves into the principles of interference, particularly focusing on how light waves interact with very thin films, like those seen in soap bubbles or oil slicks. The post is in German, but you can easily translate it using online tools.

Interference occurs when waves overlap, either reinforcing each other (constructive interference) or canceling each other out (destructive interference). In this project, [Stoppi] specifically examines how light behaves when passing through thin layers of air trapped between semi-transparent mirrors. When light waves reflect off these mirrors, the difference in path length leads to interference patterns that depend on the layer’s thickness and the wavelength of the light.

To visualize this, [Stoppi] used an interferometer made from semi-transparent mirrors and illuminated it with a bulb to ensure a continuous spectrum of light. By analyzing the transmitted light spectrum with a homemade spectrometer, he observed clear peaks corresponding to specific wavelengths that could pass through the interferometer. These experimental results align well with theoretical predictions, confirming the effectiveness of the setup.

If you like pretty patterns, soap bubbles are definitely good for several experiments. Don’t forget: pictures or it didn’t happen.

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Solar Dynamics Observatory: Our Solar Early Warning System

July 9, 2024 by Dan Maloney 3 Comments

Ever since the beginning of the Space Age, the inner planets and the Earth-Moon system have received the lion’s share of attention. That makes sense; it’s a whole lot easier to get to the Moon, or even to Mars, than it is to get to Saturn or Neptune. And so our probes have mostly plied the relatively cozy confines inside the asteroid belt, visiting every world within them and sometimes landing on the surface and making a few holes or even leaving some footprints.

But there’s still one place within this warm and familiar neighborhood that remains mysterious and relatively unvisited: the Sun. That seems strange, since our star is the source of all energy for our world and the system in general, and its constant emissions across the electromagnetic spectrum and its occasional physical outbursts are literally a matter of life and death for us. When the Sun sneezes, we can get sick, and it has the potential to be far worse than just a cold.

While we’ve had a succession of satellites over the last decades that have specialized in watching the Sun, it’s not the easiest celestial body to observe. Most spacecraft go to great lengths to avoid the Sun’s abuse, and building anything to withstand the lashing our star can dish out is a tough task. But there’s one satellite that takes everything that the Sun dishes out and turns it into a near-constant stream of high-quality data, and it’s been doing it for almost 15 years now. The Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, has also provided stunning images of the Sun, like this CGI-like sequence of a failed solar eruption. Images like that have captured imaginations during this surprisingly active solar cycle, and emphasized the importance of SDO in our solar early warning system.

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Gentle Introduction To White Light Interferometry

March 13, 2024 by Maya Posch 3 Comments

Screenshot of the Zygo white light interferometry microscope software. (Credit: Huygens Optics)

White light interferometry (WLI) is a contact-free optical method for measuring surface height. It uses the phase difference between the light reflected off a reference mirror and the target sample to calculate the height profile of the sample’s surface. As complex as this sounds, it doesn’t take expensive hardware to build a WLI microscope, as [Huygen Optics] explains in a detailed introductory video on the topic. At its core you need a source of white light (e.g. a white LED), with a way to focus the light so as to get a spatially coherent light source, like aluminium foil with a pin hole and a lens.

This light source then targets a beam splitter, which splits the light into one beam that targets the sample, and one that targets the reference mirror. When both beams are reflected and return to the beam splitter, part of the reflected light from either side ends up at the camera, which captures the result of the reference and sample beams after their interference (i.e. combination of the amplitudes). This creates a Michelson interferometer, which is simple, but quite low resolution. For the demonstrated Zygo Newview 100 WLI microscope this is the first objective used, followed by a more recent innovation: the Mirau interferometer, which integrates the reference mirror in such a manner that much higher resolutions are possible, down to a few µm.

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Fancy Gyroscopes Are Key To Radio-Free Navigation

November 1, 2023 by Lewin Day 49 Comments

Back in the old days, finding out your location on Earth was a pretty involved endeavor. You had to look at stars, use fancy gimballed equipment to track your motion, or simply be able to track your steps really really well. Eventually, GPS would come along and make all that a bit redundant for a lot of use cases. That was all well and good, until it started getting jammed all over the place to frustrate militaries using super-accurate satellite-guided weapons.

Today, there’s a great desire for more accurate navigational methods that don’t require outside communications that can easily be jammed. High-tech gyroscopes have long been a big part of that effort, allowing the construction of inertial navigation systems with greater accuracy than ever before.

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Developing Warp Drive Might Take Antifreeze

February 8, 2023 by Al Williams 63 Comments

In Star Trek, dilithium crystals — whatever those are — are critical to the operation of a starship’s warp drives. But a Texas professor thinks he can make a baby step towards a warp drive using ethylene glycol, which is commonly found in antifreeze.

While superluminal travel has been regarded as impossible for many years, recent work has suggested ways we might be able to circumvent the light-speed barrier. Unfortunately, all of these mathematical theories require energy and types of matter that we don’t know how to create yet. But [Dr. Chance Glen] believes that by shaping the energy in a specific way through a dielectric, the math can work out so that there’s no exotic negative energy required.

The experiment involves shooting RF energy into an antifreeze container and using a laser interferometer to detect gravity waves. Of course, that will involve some very sensitive measurements to account for other tiny perturbations that might give false readings. As we’ve seen in the past, that’s a task easier said than done.

Does this make sense? Beats us. Our physics and math are too out of date to make a good guess about how much of this is real and how much is hype. Of course, if he does detect gravity waves, that will get us as close to warp drive as the invention of the telegraph got us to cell phones. Then again, you have to start somewhere.

If you want to know more about the state of rocket engines, including the nascent possibility of warp drives, we’ve discussed that before. Incidentally, if you think the experiment sounds a bit like the the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), you aren’t wrong.