Hackaday Podcast Episode 342: Poopless Prints, Radio In Your Fillings, And One Hyperspectral Pixel At A Time

October 17, 2025 by 1 Comment

It was Elliot and Dan on the podcast today, taking a look at the best the week had to offer in terms of your hacks. We started with surprising news about the rapidly approaching Supercon keynote; no spoilers, but Star Trek fans such as we who don’t have tickets will be greatly disappointed.

Elliot waxed on about taking the poop out of your prints (not pants), Dan got into a camera that adds a dimension to its images, and we both delighted in the inner workings of an air-powered squishy robot.

Questions? We’ve got plenty. Is it possible to take an X-ray without an X-ray tube? Or X-rays, for that matter? Did Lucille Ball crack a spy ring with her fillings? Is Algol set to take over the world? What’s inside a germanium transistor? How does a flipping fish say Happy Birthday? And how far down the Meshtastic rabbit hole did our own Tom Nardi fall? Tune in to find out the answers.

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DIY Telescope Uses Maker Tools

October 17, 2025 by 13 Comments

You’ve got a laser cutter. You’ve got a 3D printer. What do you make? [Ayushmaan45] suggests a telescope. The modest instrument isn’t going to do serious astronomy with only 8X worth of optics, but it would make a fine spyglass for a youngster.

The body is cut from MDF, and there are only a few 3D printed parts. The only other things you need are rubber bands and a pair of lenses. You don’t even need glue. We might have spray painted the inside of the scope black or used some black contact paper to cut down on reflections, although it probably wouldn’t make much difference.

Of course, depending on your lenses, you may have to make some changes. Or find new lenses, for that matter. We like that it doesn’t take any exotic parts. We also appreciate that it is easy for kids to take apart and put back together. It would be interesting to see how a motivated kid might alter the design, as well.

If a kid gets interested, you could move on to a more sophisticated telescope. Or maybe you’d prefer a nice microscope.

This Week In Security: F5, SonicWall, And The End Of Windows 10

October 17, 2025 by 12 Comments

F5 is unintentionally dabbling in releasing the source code behind their BIG-IP networking gear, announcing this week that an unknown threat actor had access to their internal vulnerability and code tracking systems. This security breach was discovered on August 9th, and in the time since, F5 has engaged with CrowdStrike, Mandiant, and NCC Group to review what happened.

So far it appears that the worst result is access to unreleased vulnerabilities in the F5 knowledge management system. This means that any unpatched vulnerabilities were effectively 0-days, though the latest set of patches for the BIG-IP system has fixed those flaws. There aren’t any reports of those vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild, and F5 has stated that none of the leaked vulnerabilities were critical or allowed for remote exploitation.

Slightly more worrying is that this access included the product development environment. The problem there isn’t particularly the leak of the source code — one of the covered projects is NGINX, which is already open source software. The real danger is that changes could have been surreptitiously added to those codebases. The fact that NGINX is Open Source goes a long way to alleviate that danger, and when combined with the security built into tools like git, it seems very unlikely that malicious code could be sneaked into the NGINX public code base. A thorough review of the rest of the F5 codebases has similarly come up negative, and so far it looks like the supply-chain bullet has been dodged. Continue reading “This Week In Security: F5, SonicWall, And The End Of Windows 10” →

Site Of Secret 1950s Cold War Iceworm Project Rediscovered

October 17, 2025 by 9 Comments

The overall theme of the early part of the Cold War was that of subterfuge — with scientific missions often providing excellent cover for placing missiles right on the USSR’s doorstep. Recently NASA rediscovered Camp Century, while testing a airplane-based synthetic aperture radar instrument (UAVSAR) over Greenland. Although established on the surface in 1959 as a polar research site, and actually producing good science from e.g. ice core samples, beneath this benign surface was the secretive Project Iceworm.

By 1967 the base was forced to be abandoned due to shifting ice caps, which would eventually bury the site under over 30 meters of ice. Before that, the scientists would test out the PM-2A small modular reactor. It not only provided 2 MW of electrical power and heat to the base, but was itself subjected to various experiments. Alongside this public face, Project Iceworm sought to set up a network of mobile nuclear missile launch sites for Minuteman missiles. These would be located below the ice sheet, capable of surviving a first strike scenario by the USSR. A lack of Danish permission, among other complications, led to the project eventually being abandoned.

It was this base that popped up during the NASA scan of the ice bed. Although it was thought that the crushed remains would be safely entombed, it’s estimated that by the year 2100 global warming will have led to the site being exposed again, including the thousands of liters of diesel and tons of hazardous waste that were left behind back in 1967. The positive news here is probably that with this SAR instrument we can keep much better tabs on the condition of the site as the ice cap continues to grind it into a fine paste.

Top image: Camp Century in happier times. (Source: US Army, Wikimedia)

A New Golden Age Of Browser Games

October 17, 2025 by 20 Comments

Arguably, the golden age of browser gaming occurred in the 00s mostly revolving around Adobe Flash. This was an era with high creativity and a low barrier of entry, and also decentralized from gatekeeping app stores. Sadly, these times have passed us by as the security concerns around Flash led to its discontinuation and most casual gamers have migrated to the app store for their fix. But that doesn’t stop some from continuing to bring gaming to the browser, even if those games were never intended for it in the first place like this browser port of Celeste.

Celeste is an indie platformer where the player climbs a mysterious mountain while confronting her inner struggles. Originally meant for consoles and PC, a group of friends including [velzie], [bomberfish], and [Toshit] aka [r58Playz] took this as a challenge especially after seeing someone else’s half finished web port of this game. Most of the build revolves around WebAssembly (wasm) and around “cursed” .NET runtime hacks which also allow the port to run the community-made Everest mod loader. It uses a multithreaded and JIT compiling version of mono-wasm backported from .NET 10 to .NET 9 to maximize performance. The team actually first started by porting Terraria to the browser, and then moved on to this Celeste port from there.

The port of Celeste can be played here, and their port of Terraria is also available, although may not support a ton of Hackaday traffic so some patience is advised. There are also GitHub repositories for Celeste and Terraria as well.  With impressive ports of relatively modern games moving into the browser, perhaps we’re entering a new golden age of browser gaming; we’ve also seen things like Minecraft implemented in only HTML and CSS lately as well.

Chicken Squisher 3000

Chicken Squisher 3000: Squish-Proof Security

October 16, 2025 by 21 Comments

Keeping chickens in predator-prone areas demands serious fortifications, but even the most robust coop can become a hassle without automation. That’s where [lcamtuf] steps in with his Chicken Squisher 3000, a clever DIY automatic door mechanism that opens and closes based on ambient light levels.

The chicken coop he previously built did not include a mechanism to automatically close the inner door at night, meaning that arrangements would have to be made should [lcamtuf] want to leave town for a couple of days. Not wanting to go with a commercial option for this door as that would require a good deal of modifications to the original door setup, the Chicken Squisher 3000 adds minimal parts to the existing door to now open and close the door at dawn and dusk.

Using a 12 V DC motor with a gear reduction, he was able to generate more than enough torque to open and close the thick wooden door. Instead of a complex geared rack and pinion setup, [lcamtuf] has the motor mounted to a smooth rod that then applies force across the swing of the door attached with a rod end bearing. Driving the door’s automation is an AVR16DD14 microcontroller which is used to read the NSL-A6009 light sensor. [lcamtuf] uses a DRV8231 motor driver for controlling power going to that 12 V motor with the added benefit of being able to adjust stall torque to dial in a value strong enough to overcome the wooden door’s friction, but weak enough to not endanger any of his birds. There are also buttons on the metal enclosure used to override the light sensor should he want to override it manually.

Thanks, [lcamtuf], for sending in your latest weekend project; we love the resourcefulness of using just a handful of cheap parts to make a robust solution for your coop. If you haven’t seen them yet, be sure to check out some of our other chicken coop door hacks featured before.

A Deep Dive Into Molten Bismuth

October 16, 2025 by 2 Comments

Bismuth is known for a few things: its low melting point, high density, and psychedelic hopper crystals. A literal deep-dive into any molten metal would be a terrible idea, regardless of low melting point, but [Electron Impressions]’s video on “Why Do Bismuth Crystals Look Like That” may be the most educational eight minutes posted to YouTube in the past week.

The whole video is worth a watch, but since spoilers are the point of these articles, we’ll let you in on the secret: it all comes down to Free Energy. No, not the perpetual motion scam sort of free energy, but the potential that is minimized in any chemical reaction. There’s potential energy to be had in crystal formation, after all, and nature is always (to the extent possible) going to minimize the amount left on the table.

In bismuth crystals– at least when you have a pot slowly cooling at standard temperature and pressure–that means instead of a large version of the rhombahedral crystal you might naively expect if you’ve tried growing salt or sugar crystals in beakers, you get the madman’s maze that actually emerges. The reason for this is that atoms are preferentially deposited onto the vertexes and edges of the growing crystal rather than the face. That tends to lead to more vertexes and edges until you get the fractal spirals that a good bismuth crystal is known for. (It’s not unlike the mechanism by which the dreaded tin whiskers grow, as a matter of fact.)

Bismuth isn’t actually special in this respect; indeed, nothing in this video would not apply to other metals, in the right conditions. It just so happens that “the right conditions” in terms of crystal growth and the cooling of the melt are trivial to achieve when melting Bismuth in a way that they aren’t when melting, say, Aluminum in the back yard. [Electron Impressions] doesn’t mention because he is laser-focused on Bismuth here, but hopper crystals of everything from table salt to gold have been produced in the lab. When cooling goes to quick, it’s “any port in a storm” and atoms slam into solid phase without a care for the crystal structure, and you get fine-grained, polycrystaline solids; when it goes slowly enough, the underlying crystal geometry can dominate. Hopper crystals exist in a weird and delightful middle ground that’s totally worth eight minutes to learn about.

Aside from being easy to grow into delightful crystals, bismuth can also be useful when desoldering, and, oddly enough, making the world’s fastest transistor.

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