Curated

76 Articles

Hackaday’s finest original content articles curated by the Hackaday editors

CCA Ethernet Cables: Not Up To Scratch, But Are They Dangerous?

April 7, 2026 by 21 Comments

If you’ve ever bought a suspiciously cheap Ethernet cable from an online listing, there’s a decent chance you’ve encountered Copper Clad Aluminum. Better known as CCA, it’s exactly what it sounds like—an aluminium conductor with a thin skin of copper deposited on the outside. Externally, cables made with this material look largely like any other, with perhaps the only obvious tell being that they feel somewhat lighter in the hand.

CCA is cheaper than proper copper cabling, and it conducts signals well enough to function in an Ethernet cable. And yet, it’s a prime example of corner-cutting that keeps standards bodies and professional installers up at night. But just how dangerous is this silent scourge, found lurking in so many network cabinets around the world?

Not Up To Scratch

CCA wire is typically made by wrapping an aluminium core with copper strip and then extruding it through a die. Credit: USPTO

Everything you need to know about CCA is in the name—it refers to an aluminium wire with a thin copper cladding, typically applied through a die extrusion process. The reasoning behind this exploits a real physical phenomenon called the skin effect, wherein higher-frequency AC signals tend to travel along the outer surface of a conductor. The idea goes that since most of the current moves through the outer copper skin layer anyway, the less-conductive aluminium core doesn’t unduly impact the wire’s performance. Using copper-clad aluminium wiring is, in theory, desirable because aluminium is much cheaper than copper, which can really add up over long cable runs. Imagine you’re wiring a building with with hundreds of miles of Ethernet cabling, all with eight conductors each—the savings add up pretty quickly.

There’s a problem with CCA cabling in these contexts, though. Due to prevailing cabling standards, any cable made with CCA is technically not even a real Ethernet cable at all. The relevant documents are unambiguous.

ANSI/TIA-568.2-D requires conductors in Category-rated cable to be solid or stranded copper. No other materials are acceptable, and thus CCA is explicitly excluded from use in Category cable applications. A cable with CCA conductors cannot legitimately carry a Cat5e, Cat6, or any related designation under any circumstances. Similarly, ISO/IEC 11801 has the same requirement. The U.S. National Electrical Code also states that conductors in communications cables, other than coaxial cable, shall be copper. This isn’t a suggestion or a best practice; it’s the letter of the code. Anything lesser is simply not allowed. Continue reading “CCA Ethernet Cables: Not Up To Scratch, But Are They Dangerous?” →

With Affordable Storage Options Dwindling, Where To Store Our Data?

April 6, 2026 by 60 Comments

These days our appetite for more data storage is larger than ever, with video files larger, photo resolutions higher, and project files easily zipping past a few hundred MB. At the same time our options for data storage are becoming more and more limited. For the longest time we could count on there always being a newer, roomier, faster, and cheaper form of storage to come along, but those days would seem to be over.

We can look back and laugh at low capacity USB Flash drives of the early 2000s, yet the first storage drive to hit 1 TB capacity did so in 2007, with a Hitachi Deskstar 7k100, only for that level of capacity in PCs to not really be exceeded nineteen years later.

We also had Blu-ray discs (BD) promise to cram the equivalent of dozens of DVDs onto a single BD, with two- and even four-layer BDs storing up to a one-hundred-and-twenty-eight GB. Yet today optical media is dying a slow death as the sole remaining cheap storage option. NAND Flash storage has only increased in price, and the options for those of us who have large cold storage requirements would seem to be decreasing every day.

So what is the economical solution here? Invest in LTO tapes using commercial left-overs, or give up and sign up for Cloud Storage™ for the low-low price of a monthly recurring fee?

Continue reading “With Affordable Storage Options Dwindling, Where To Store Our Data?” →

Ask Hackaday: How Much Compute Is Enough?

April 2, 2026 by 72 Comments

Over the history of this business, a lot of people have foreseen limits that look rather silly in hindsight– in 1943, IBM President Thomas Watson declared that “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” That was more than a little wrong. Depending on the definition of computers– particularly if you include microcontrollers, there’s probably trillions of the things.

We might as well include microcontrollers, considering how often we see projects replicating retrocomputers on them. The RP2350 can do a Mac 128k, and the ESP32-P4 gets you into the Quadra era. Which, honestly, covers the majority of daily tasks most people use computers for.

The RP2350 and ESP32-P4 both have more than 640kB of RAM, so that famous Bill Gates quote obviously didn’t age any better than Thomas Watson’s prediction. As Yogi Berra once said: predictions are hard, especially about the future. Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: How Much Compute Is Enough?” →

Reflective pool of the Court of the Myrtles, looking north towards the Comares Tower. (Credit: Tuxyso, Wikimedia)

Medieval Alhambra’s Pulser Pump And Other Aquatic Marvels

March 30, 2026 by 8 Comments

Recently the Practical Engineering YouTube channel featured a functional recreation of a pump design that is presumed by some to have been used to pump water up to the medieval Alhambra palace and its fortress, located in what is today Spain. This so-called pulser pump design is notable for not featuring any moving parts, but the water pump was just one of many fascinating engineering achievements that made the Alhambra a truly unique place before the ravages of time had their way with it.

Although the engineering works were said to still have been functional in the 18th century, this pumping system and many other elements that existed at the peak of its existence had already vanished by the 19th century for a number of reasons. During this century a Spanish engineering professor, Cáceres, tried to reconstruct the mechanism as best as he could based on the left-over descriptions, but sadly we’ll likely never know for certain that it is what existed there.

Similarly, the speculated time-based fountain in the Court of the Lions and other elements are now forever lost to time, but we have plenty of theories on how all of this worked in a pre-industrial era.

Continue reading “Medieval Alhambra’s Pulser Pump And Other Aquatic Marvels” →

Spy Tech: Conflicts Bring A New Number Station

March 30, 2026 by 21 Comments

If you know much about radios and espionage, you’ve probably encountered number stations. These are mysterious stations that read out groups of numbers or otherwise encoded messages to… well… someone. Most of the time, we don’t know who is receiving the messages. You’d be excused for thinking that this is an old technology. After all, satellite phones, the Internet, and a plethora of options now exist to allow the home base to send spies secret instructions. However, the current-day global conflict has seen at least one new number station appear, apparently associated with the United States and, presumably, targeting some recipients in Iran, according to priyom.org.

As you might expect, these stations don’t identify themselves, but the Enigma Control List names this one as V32. It broadcasts two two-hour blocks a day at 0200 UTC and a repeat at 1800 UTC. Each message starts with the Farsi word for “attention” followed by what is assumed to be some header information as two 5-digit groups. Then there is a set of 181 five-digit groups. Each message is padded out to take 20 minutes, and there are six messages in each transmission.

Continue reading “Spy Tech: Conflicts Bring A New Number Station” →

Soviet CDs And CD Players Existed, And They Were Strange

March 29, 2026 by 9 Comments

Until the fall of the Soviet Union around 1990 you’d be forgiven as a proud Soviet citizen for thinking that the USSR’s technology was on par with the decadent West. After the Iron Curtain lifted it became however quite clear how outdated especially consumer electronics were in the USSR, with technologies like digital audio CDs and their players being one good point of comparison. In a recent video by a railways/retro tech YouTube channel we get a look at one of the earliest Soviet CD players.

A good overall summary of how CD technology slowly developed in the Soviet Union despite limitations can be found in this 2025 article by [Artur Netsvetaev]. Soviet technology was characterized mostly by glossy announcements and promises of ‘imminent’ serial production prior to a slow fading into obscurity. Soviet engineers had come up with the Luch-001 digital audio player in 1979, using glass discs. More prototypes followed, but with no means for mass-production and Soviet bureaucracy getting in the way, these efforts died during the 1980s.

During the 1980s CD players were produced in Soviet Estonia in small batches, using Philips internals to create the Estonia LP-010. Eventually sanctions on the USSR would strangle these efforts, however. Thus it wouldn’t be until 1991 that the Vega PKD-122 would become the first mass-produced CD player, with one example featured in this video.

Continue reading “Soviet CDs And CD Players Existed, And They Were Strange” →