GOES-19 Goes Down, NOAA Investigating

July 16, 2026 by 17 Comments

Some breaking news from geostationary orbit, as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has announced that its newest Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) satellite unexpectedly went offline last night, and as of this morning, remains stuck in safe mode.

Launched in June of 2024, GOES-19 is one of four operational weather satellites that NOAA operates to provide forecast data and severe weather monitoring for the entire Western Hemisphere. The satellite is specifically responsible for covering the continental United States, Central and South America, as well as the Atlantic Ocean. This makes it a particularly critical asset even under normal circumstances, but the fact that it’s gone blind during the Atlantic hurricane season and while smoke from the raging Canadian wildfires is drifting over the Northeast and making the skies over Boston and New York City look like Mars is something of a worst-case scenario.

The good news is that two of the four satellites operate as orbital spares — the satellite that GOES-19 replaced in 2024, GOES-16, is still operational and can stand in as a backup for its coverage area. Obviously, it’s quite a bit older, having launched back in 2016, but it’s of the same design as GOES-19, and in good health, so there should be no degradation of service.

Still, getting GOES-19 back online will be critical for NOAA and the National Weather Service, and we expect they’ll be providing regular updates as the situation develops. Stay tuned.

Hackaday Europe 2026 – Build A Cable Modem For Your Arduino

July 16, 2026 by 20 Comments

Even for those of us that are quite technically minded, we spend precious little time thinking about the cables that carry our signals and do all the important work we need them to do on a daily basis. A great deal of theory and engineering goes into making things like telephone lines and HDMI cables work, but we mostly just plug them in and get on with whatever we’re doing.

If this is your experience, you might find the Hackaday Europe talk from [Michael Wiebusch] to be particularly interesting. He dives into transmission line theory from an accessible standpoint, explaining how two disparate signals can go in opposite directions on the very same wire. Then he demonstrates the theory by building a cable modem… well, sort of!

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Google Earth Desktop Client To Be Retired In 2027

July 16, 2026 by 45 Comments

Come next year, those looking to explore the globe virtually via Google Earth will have to do so on their smartphone or from within their browser, as the search giant has decided to discontinue the service’s desktop client in June 2027.

The good news is, the lights won’t be going out immediately. According to a post made on Google Earth’s official support community by Community Manager [Aamir F.], the June cutoff date applies to new downloads, but nothing is changing on the backend, so existing installs will continue to work.

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Transponder Mania

July 16, 2026 by 28 Comments

In order to not hit something, you generally need to know where that thing is. On land, the meager human eyesight tends to be sufficient. On the water, however, the prospects are more dangerous and complicated. So, technology is required to ensure safe ocean voyages in the form of the AIS transponder system. The off the shelf solutions tend to work quite well, but [peterantypas] was displeased with the commercial offerings, and built what appears to be the first open source AIS transponder called MAIANA.

Automatic Identification System (AIS) is a GPS tracking system designed for maritime applications. Broadly speaking, it broadcasts GPS and other data at intervals over VHF radio. AIS is what allows the precise tracking of vessels by authorities, and online hobbyists. AIS is also often received by other vessels to augment radar improving boat to boat collision safety.

Most commercial AIS transponders used by sailors are rather bulky, expensive, come with a large power budget. The MAIANA project avoids these pitfalls by being entirely self-contained. The RF portion is largely made up of a STM32L4 micro controller, a SI Labs Si4460 ISM RF chip, and a Quectel L76L-M33 with a Johansson ceramic chip antenna for GPS. With such simple hardware, the PCB is easily small enough to fit inside the antenna assembly.

This design eliminates the need for long runs of multiple shielded RF cables to a bulky transponder unit inside. Instead, a simple Ethernet cable is used to transfer data to and from the mast. Inside the boat, a USB decoder is used to pass the AIS data on to a PC. This whole setup is remarkably simple and reliable, with hundreds of units having been produced since the project’s start.

While this is the first full blown AIS transponder we have covered, we have seen other projects utilizing the protocol. We have also seen quite a number of projects with the aircraft equivalent, ADS-B.

Thanks [Bernerd] for the tip!

Chromatography As Art

July 15, 2026 by 7 Comments

You may or may not remember in some ancient chemistry class studying or even performing chromatography. The short definition is using media like paper or powder to separate a mixture. It is an old technique, but [Suchir2004] is using it as an art form.

Chromatography works because the parts of the liquid mixture travel through the media at different speeds. While experimenting, [Suchir2004] noted that black ink and water perfused into constituent pigments. A butterfly ensued.

Is it art? Yes! Is it science? Well, sort of. Especially since the post does talk about how the effect works and even does some simple tests to start. This would be an excellent project for a class where some students are more motivated by art and others by science. Even with an individual kid, it might show you where their interests lie.

There’s nothing particularly difficult. A sketch pen, some paper, a coffee filter, a glue stick, and a few other household items are all you really need to get started.

Want something more practical? How about measuring caffeine content?

Pinch Puts An Arduino On A USB-C Connector

July 15, 2026 by 23 Comments

Compared to the Arduino Uno of old, modern microcontrollers are absolutely tiny — especially for the amount of processing power and I/O you get. But if you need something really small, like fits-on-the-tip-of-your-finger small, most of the turn-key development boards on the market are still a bit too big.

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DOOM Runs (slowly) In A IBM PC-Compatible CSS Sheet

July 15, 2026 by 10 Comments

Just when you thought we’d run out of things to port DOOM to, here comes [Ahmed Amer] with his CSS-DOS, a massive 300 MB CSS style sheet, that runs not just DOS, but Windows 1.0 and, of course, DOOM. The CSS sheet isn’t holding a DOOM port this time, though — it’s holding a full IBM PC compatible, with a simulated 8086, 640 kB of RAM, floppy and VGA controllers. Yes, in one style sheet. We did mention it was 300 MB, right?

CSS is not a very good programming language. It’s got functions and if statements nowadays, but it doesn’t really do programs in the usual sense. That is, lists of instructions that feed one into another. You can’t change a variable without jumping through hoops. The sort of static behavior you get from a CSS sheet actually matches hardware architecture better than software, which was the key insight [Ahmed] had to make the project possible. It’s still not easy, or elegant, or perhaps even sane, as you can find out from the excellent write-up he has describing how he pulled this off. We particularly like the interactive guide to the full mountain of madness that is the .css file.

Now, we admit that “runs DOOM” may be an exaggeration — even if the maddeningly massive CSS sheet ran an IBM-AT full speed, that hardware can’t handle the game at any playable speed. It doesn’t emulate at anything close to full speed, though. Because this is such a gratuitously weird hack, it only runs at two instructions per second. No, not FPS, instructions, as in at the CPU level. Well, it could be worse, at least it’s not clock ticks. Still, if you’re time-dilated enough you can wait the 3 weeks to boot DOS, and the 3 months to load a level, you can play DOOM at 0.0001 FPS.

Look, we didn’t make the rules — they say everything has to try and run DOOM. They don’t say everything has to run it well.