How’s The Weather? (Satellite Edition)

August 22, 2025 by Al Williams 2 Comments

When [Tom Nardi] reported on NOAA’s statement that many of its polar birds were no longer recommended for use, he mentioned that when the satellites do give up, there are other options if you want to pull up your own satellite weather imagery. [Jacopo] explains those other options in great detail.

For example, the Russian Meteor-M satellites are available with almost the same hardware and software stack, although [Jacopo] mentions you might need an extra filter since it is a little less tolerant of interference than the NOAA bird. On the plus side, Meteor-M is stronger than the NOAA satellite on 1.7 GHz, and you can even use a handheld antenna to pick it up. There are new, improved satellites of this series on their way, too.

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How To Stop Zeus From Toasting Your Pi

August 22, 2025 by Heidi Ulrich 18 Comments

If you’ve ever lost gear to lightning or power spikes, you know what a pain they are. Out in rural Arkansas, where [vinthewrench] lives, the grid is more chaos than comfort – especially when storms hit. So, he dug into the problem after watching a cheap AC-DC module quite literally melt down. The full story, as always, begins with the power company’s helpful reclosers: lightning-induced surges, and grid switching transients. The result though: toasted boards, shorted transformers, and one very dead Raspberry Pi. [vinthewrench] wrote it all up – with decent warnings ahead. Take heed and don’t venture into things that could put your life in danger.

Back to the story. Standard surge suppressors? Forget it. Metal-oxide varistor (MOV)-based strips are fine for office laptops, but rural storms laugh at their 600 J limits. While effective and commonly used, MOVs are “self-sacrificing” and degrade over time with each surge event.

[vinthewrench] wanted something sturdier. Enter ZeusFilter 1.0 – a line-voltage filter stitched together from real parts: a slow-blow fuse, inrush-limiting thermistor, three-electrode gas discharge tube for lightning-class hits, beefy MOVs for mid-sized spikes, common-mode choke to kill EMI chatter, and safety caps to bleed off what’s left. Grounding done right, of course. The whole thing lives on a single-layer PCB, destined to sit upstream of a hardened PSU.

As one of his readers pointed out, though, spikes don’t always stop at the input. Sudden cut-offs on the primary can still throw nasty pulses into the secondary, especially with bargain-bin transformers and ‘mystery’ regulators. The reader reminded that counterfeit 7805s are infamous for failing short, dumping raw input into a supposedly safe 5 V rail. [vinthewrench] acknowledged this too, recalling how collapsing fields don’t just vanish politely – Lenz makes sure they kick back hard. And yes, when cheap silicon fails, it fails ugly: straight smoke-release mode.

In conclusion, we’re not particularly asking you to try this at home if you lack the proper knowledge. But if you have a high-voltage addiction, this home research is a good start to expand your knowledge of what is, in theory, possible.

Web Dashboard For Zephyr

August 22, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 7 Comments

Over time, web browsers have accumulated a ton of features beyond what anyone from the 90s might have imagined, from an application platform to file management and even to hardware access. While this could be concerning from a certain point of view, it makes it much easier to develop a wide range of tools. All a device really needs to use a browser as a platform is an IP address, and this project brings a web UI dashboard to Zephyr to simplify application development.

Zephyr is a real-time operating system (RTOS) meant for embedded microcontrollers, so having an easy way to access these systems through a web browser can be extremely useful. At its core, this project provides a web server that can run on this operating system as well as a REST API that can be used by clients to communicate with it. For things like blinking lights this is sufficient, but for other things like sensors that update continuously the dashboard can also use WebSocket to update the web page in real time.

The web dashboards that can be built with this tool greatly reduce the effort and complexity needed to interact with Zephyr and the microcontrollers it typically runs on, especially when compared to a serial console or a custom application that might otherwise be built for these systems. If this is your first time hearing about this RTOS we recently featured a microcontroller-based e-reader which uses this OS as a platform.

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Finding A New Model For Hacker Camps

August 22, 2025 by Jenny List 68 Comments

A nicht scene in a post-apocalyptic future, in this case an electronics bazaar adjacent to the rave area in EMF 2018 Null Sector. — Electromagnetic Field manage to get live music at a hacker camp right, by turning it into the most cyberpunk future possible.

A couple of decades ago now, several things happened which gave life to our world and made it what it has become. Hackerspaces proliferated, giving what was previously dispersed a physical focus. Alongside that a range of hardware gave new expression to our projects; among them the Arduino, affordable 3D printing, and mail-order printed circuit boards.

The result was a flowering of creativity and of a community we’d never had before.Visiting another city could come with a while spent in their hackerspace, and from that new-found community blossomed a fresh wave of events. The older hacker camps expanded and morphed in character to become more exciting showcases for our expression, and new events sprang up alongside them. The 2010s provided me and my friends with some of the most formative experiences of our lives, and we’re guessing that among those of you reading this piece will be plenty who also found their people.

And then came COVID. Something that sticks in my mind when thinking about the COVID pandemic is a British news pundit from March 2020 saying that nothing would be quite the same as before once the pandemic was over. In our community this came home to me after 2022, when the first large European hacker camps made a return. They were awesome in their own way, but somehow sterile, it was as though something was missing. Since then we’ve had a few more summers spent trailing across the continent to hang out and drink Club-Mate in the sun, and while we commend the respective orgas for creating some great experiences, finding that spark can still be elusive. Hanging out with some of my friends round a European hackerspace barbecue before we headed home recently, we tried to put our finger on exactly where the problem lay.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 334: Radioactive Shrimp Clocks, Funky Filaments, Owning The Hardware

August 22, 2025 by Tom Nardi 4 Comments

In this episode of the Hackaday Podcast, editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start out with a warning about potentially radioactive shrimp entering the American food supply via Walmart, and things only get weirder from there. The extra spicy shrimp discussion makes a perfect segue into an overview of a pair of atomic One Hertz Challenge entries, after which they’ll go over the latest generation of 3D printer filament, using an old Android smartphone as a low-power Linux server, some tips for creating better schematics, and Lorde’s specification-bending transparent CD. Finally, you’ll hear about how the nature of digital ownership influences the hardware we use, and on the other side of the coin, how open source firmware like QMK lets you build input devices on your terms.

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!

Or download in DRM-free MP3 to enjoy with your shrimp.

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Converting A Sprinkler System To DC

August 22, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 14 Comments

Famously, Nikola Tesla won the War of the Currents in the early days of electrification because his AC system could use transformers to minimize losses for long distance circuits. That was well before the invention of the transistor, though, and there are a lot of systems that still use AC now as a result of electricity’s history that we might otherwise want to run on DC in our modern world. Sprinkler systems are one of these things, commonly using a 24V AC system, but [Vinthewrench] has done some work to convert over to a more flexible 24 VDC system instead.

The main components of these systems that are set up for AC are solenoids which activate various sets of sprinklers. But these solenoids can take DC and still work, so no major hardware changes are needed. It’s not quite as simple as changing power supplies, though. The solenoids will overheat if they’re fully powered on a DC circuit, so [Vinthewrench] did a significant amount of testing to figure out exactly how much power they need to stay engaged. Once the math was done, he uses a DRV103 to send PWM signals to the solenoids, which is set up to allow more current to pull in the solenoids and then a lower holding current once they are activated.

With a DC power supply like this, it makes it much easier to have his sprinkler system run on a solar powered system as well as use a battery backup without needing something like an inverter. And thanks to the DRV103 the conversion is not physically difficult; ensuring that the solenoids don’t overheat is the major concern here. Another great reason to convert to a DIY sprinkler controller is removing your lawn care routine from an unnecessary cloud-based service.

This Week In Security: Anime Catgirls, Illegal AdBlock, And Disputed Research

August 22, 2025 by Jonathan Bennett 28 Comments

You may have noticed the Anime Catgirls when trying to get to the Linux Kernel’s mailing list, or one of any number of other sites associated with Open Source projects. [Tavis Ormandy] had this question, too, and even wrote about it. So, what’s the deal with the catgirls?

The project is Anubis, a “Web AI Firewall Utility”. The intent is to block AI scrapers, as Anubis “weighs the soul” of incoming connections, and blocks the bots you don’t want. Anubis uses the user agent string and other indicators to determine what an incoming connection is. But the most obvious check is the in-browser hashing. Anubis puts a challenge string in the HTTP response header, and JavaScript running in the browser calculates a second string to append this challenge. The goal is to set the first few bytes of the SHA-256 hash of this combined string to 0.

[Tavis] makes a compelling case that this hashing is security theatre — It makes things appear more secure, but doesn’t actually improve the situation. It’s only fair to point out that his observation comes from annoyance, as his preferred method of accessing the Linux kernel git repository and mailing list are now blocked by Anubis. But the economics of compute costs clearly demonstrate that this SHA-256 hashing approach will only be effective so long as AI companies don’t add the 25 lines of C it took him to calculate the challenge. The Anubis hashing challenge is literally security by obscurity.

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