Radon Active

November 9, 2026 by Al Williams 7 Comments

When you think about nuclear radiation, you often think about power plants, but it turns out there’s radioactive stuff all over the place: smoke detectors, granite counters, bananas, and potatoes can all be mildly radioactive. Even some old tape dispensers. But those are all puny sources.

Radon is a colorless, odorless gas that is heavier than air. It is a byproduct of uranium decay, amonth other pathways, decays by emitting an alpha particle, and has a half-life of just about four days. As a gas, it escapes from rocks or soil. Usually, there isn’t much of it, so it vents harmlessly to the atmosphere. But it can easily get trapped in a house and accumulate. You might think your house is solid, but there are plenty of cracks, joints, and pipes where gas can weasel through, especially if your inside pressure is slightly lower than the pressure in the soil below, which is common.

As the radon decays, it can produce more radioactive material, including tiny amounts of polonium. With or without dust particles, these tiny bits of radioactive material can go airborne and end up in your lungs. There, they can further decay, and alpha particles damage cells and DNA. According to the EPA, radon exposure is the second leading cause of lung cancer in the United States, next to smoking.

Not So Speedy

If you get enough carbon monoxide in your home, you probably won’t see the next sunrise. But radon works very slowly. It is odorless and colorless. You won’t show any general symptoms to warn you that you might get lung cancer.

The effect can take years or decades. Of course, you can also have a house that has very little radon. However, nearly all homes have some radon. The EPA estimates that about 7% of homes have elevated radon levels.

Some areas are more prone to radon than others, but even if your area has low risk, there’s no guarantee that your house is safe. If you are lucky enough to not have a radon problem, you have nothing to worry about. But how do you know? Like anything, you need to test.

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I Think We Should See Other SBCs

November 5, 2026 by Arya Voronova 72 Comments

Are you currently designing a project for a common single-board computer (SBC), and do you expect other people to build your project, too? We routinely feature projects that do exactly this. Well, turns out SBC availability is a problem now – and I’d like to teach you how to pick SBC alternatives, mostly to the Raspberry Pi boards.

We had SBC shortages before, but 2026 has beat them all, and it doesn’t look like it’ll stop within even a few months. RAM prices have incinerated the supply side of single-board computer availability, and I suspect that consumer SBC use in Russian drones had a noticeable impact, too.

Less-utilized SBCs always brought their own advantages to the table. If you didn’t like that the Pi Zero came with only 512MB of RAM, you could always buy an Orange Pi or a Radxa board with 2GB or 4GB for a meager increase in price. Now, there’s even more of a motivation to explore what’s on offer!

This year, SBC prices and availability have both jumped up tremendously, and even the Zero 2W stocks have evaporated. Me, I had to make a few of my projects way more flexible way quicker. Now, I have some experience to share!

Finding Your New SBC Friends

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The First Business Computer Hits 75!

November 4, 2026 by Jenny List 10 Comments

Many of us will have followed the early history of electronic computing, from the urgent necessities of war, to universities, and then on into the wider world. Most of the firsts in that field are now well known, but there’s one that’s a little obscure. LEO was a commercial development of Cambridge University’s EDSAC that was produced at the behest of J. Lyons and Comapny, one of the UK’s largest mid-20th-century food producers. As such it was the first purpose-built electronic business computer, and since its 75th anniversary is upon us, the Centre for Computing History is holding an event to mark the occasion.

There’s a whole cultural essay to be written about the role of Lyons in twentieth-century Britain, but for Hackaday purposes it should suffice to say that there was little in the way of food production that they didn’t touch. The shops were full of Lyons cakes, biscuits, and tea, and a feature of many towns would have been a Lyons Tea Shop, a budget restaurant. The logistics of such a complex business made a computer of great interest to the company, and after some of its executives learned about ENIAC on a trip to the USA they sought out a machine closer to home. They found the EDSAC, a research computer, and commercialised it as Lyons Electronic Office, or LEO. This spawned a series of machines that lasted into the 1970s, the last one being used by the British Post Office.

It might be difficult to find a LEO in a museum today, but in the National Museum of COmputing at Bletchley you can find the next best thing in their recreation of EDSAC. It’s a decade since we visited, perhaps it’s time for a return.

Header image: Spudgun67, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Depiction Of Amateur Radio In The Movies And TV

November 3, 2026 by Jenny List 40 Comments

A constant in film and TV if you work with technology is to continually see wildly inappropriate depictions of it on screen. Whether it’s all those hacking scenes in which the teen wizard mashes a keyboard and instantly gains access to the military grade computer system, the infamous NCIS sequence in which two people work simultaneously on the same keyboard, or CSI‘s magical video enhancement technology, we’ve seen it all. But there’s one area of technology which surprisingly has had a few accurate portrayals on screen, and that’s amateur radio. Yes, just sometimes, film crews do their homework.

Comedy, Hero, or Excentric. Which Are You?

Tony hancock in black and white, holding a microphone, electronic equipment visible behind him. — Tony Hancock, radio amateur.

Writing this from the rainy edge of Europe, the depiction of a radio amateur non screen that first comes to mind dates from the early 1960s. The British comedian Tony Hancock devoted a whole episode of his series to it, in which he plays an inept operator with hilarious consequences. It’s not in any way accurate and some of the comedy is … dated, but it’s interesting to watch. There’s a whole genre of comedic episodes featuring the hobby, in researching this piece I found a 1965 episode of The Munsters in which Herman minstakes some kids at play for real Martians, and a Simpsons episode in which Principal Skinner is revealed to have a licence.

But amateur radio as a source of comedy isn’t the only genre at play. Radio amateurs are often depicted as heroic rescuers or communicators. alternately sending help to shipwrecked mariners, solving crimes, or providing emergency comms. In 1969’s The Red Tent starring Sean Connery for example a Russian radio amateur picks up a distress call from an airship crash, while in 2008’s The Bank Job is based on the true story of a London robbery in which a radio amateur heard the radio comms of the criminals. I’m sure many of you meanwhile will have seen Independence Day, in which radio amateurs use Morse code as a last ditch global communication system.

Probably the most frequent depiction though is through science fiction. 1996’s Phenomenon for example has amateur radio associated with paranormal events, and in a more comedic vein, 1980s TV’s ALF follows an amateur radio signal to Earth. Meanwhile The X Files has multiple episodes peripherally featuring the hobby, after all, us radio amateurs know the truth is out there, right?

There Are More Radio Amateurs In The Movie Business Than Hackers

Through all of this, when compared to hacking scenes in movies and TV, amateur radio gets off lightly when it comes to accuracy. Tony Hancock’s performance may be more comedy than radio, but frequently there have been real radio amateurs involved in the production somehow. Principal Skinner’s callsign is one previously held by the show’s executive producer David Mirkin for example, and the ARRL have some comments on the accuracy of 2011’s Super 8. Perhaps this is because people with the skills to be thought of as hackers by movie production crews tend to have jobs in allied fields and never come near a movie set, while radio amateurs are more widely spread among the population. The chances of a radio amateur being in proximity to a film set are high, while the chances of a hacker? No chance, the lights are too bright.

Looking For A Cellular Modem?

November 2, 2026 by Arya Voronova 20 Comments

Cellular modems come and go, and they can be tricky beasts to tame – yet, in every portable computer project I’ve worked with, “LTE modem” has been a top-three request from the audience. If you’re building a cyberdeck or a general Linux portable, then a cellular modem’s cellular data uplink, SMS support, and even voice calls, can be the killer addition you need to make your deck a true daily machine. These days, I see that the demand for cyberdecks is rising, my own projects could greatly benefit from modems too, and yet it sometimes it feels like informational drought. I think now is a great time to make a listicle, detailing a few modems you should keep in mind.

Testing out prospective modems can be costly and time-intensive – design a board, purchase a few sample modems at inflated prices, only to have your idea completely blocked by elusive firmware issues at the very last step. I’ve given some starting-from-scratch tips before, having shown how to use mPCIe cards for testbench purposes. Today, I’d rather give you a few battle-tested modems that others already use with great success, and describe the features you can get out of one.

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How Britain Narrowly Escaped A Grid Blackout In June 2026

October 30, 2026 by Maya Posch 16 Comments

Amidst one of the worst heatwaves in European history, Britain’s national grid saw itself faced with a quiet crisis this summer. On June 23rd, the grid frequency dropped to 49.657 Hz, down from the nominal 50 Hz — getting very close to the lower bound before safeties would start disconnecting parts of the grid. In a video by [The Electric Brit] this event is investigated, including its causes and how France’s spare capacity managed to save the day.

Under normal operating conditions the UK grid is kept above 49.8 Hz, with the statutory lower limit being 49.5. Meaning that another drop of 0.157 Hz would have set in motion a series of quite extreme grid protection mechanisms including the possibility of local blackouts.

Fortunately the cessation of energy exports and the importing of French power from hydro and nuclear power stations managed to nip this issue in the bud before it could get any worse. Although an example of correct grid management, it also shows how poorly planned maintenance and events like a heatwave can line up quite a few holes in the cheese slices that invite disaster.

The problems here began weeks prior to the event, with 21.2 GW of generating capacity offline. Of this, 12.6 GW was planned maintenance, another 8.6 GW was unexpectedly offline, while another 2.6 GW of gas generation was mostly unavailable due to the heatwave curtailing production. A couple of interconnections with Ireland and other nations were also down for maintenance, leaving the grid control room with precious few options.

Although the UK’s transmission system operator (TSO) NESO had its predicted capacities for variable renewable sources (VRE) like solar, it could not see local demand and production from e.g. rooftop solar in the control room. This became rather exciting when the evening neared and rooftop solar output dropped. Here NESO turned out to be lucky, but such hidden factors form a major risk factor when such consumers return to grid power.

As VRE sources fell quiet across Europe that evening, this put the onus on remaining generating sources and brought the slowly developing crisis to its apex. Fortunately importing energy from France saved the day here, but there are many lessons to be learned here, many grounded in how complex AC grid management is once you consider all aspects that affect not just generators but also transmission lines.

This event is different from the frequency oscillations that triggered the blackout on the Iberian peninsula in 2025. In that case a problem existed with reactive power management, with oscillations amplified by grid-following converters from solar farms and insufficient capacity on the grid to absorb this surge in reactive power, ultimately leading to the cascading blackout.

Amidst these lessons on grid-management the discussions on whether baseload power generating is truly dead among other tropes, as well as the calls by European TSOs to make grid-forming converters mandatory on VRE generators will no doubt intensify.

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Replicating The Color-Changing Effect Of The Lycurgus Cup

October 29, 2026 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

Although most archaeological finds from ancient civilizations aren’t quite as exciting as what you might expect from the movies, occasionally you come across something that’s truly special. The Lycurgus Cup is one of those, with the 3rd or 4th century CE glass cup and its incredible detail surviving likely because it ended up in church treasuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Now its almost magical dichroic glass effect has been recreated in a modern take by researchers at the University of Sheffield.

The Lycurgus cup with light shining through it. (Credit: Chappsnet, Wikimedia)

Dichroic glass takes on a different color depending on the lighting conditions, with the Lycurgus cup appearing to be green glass when lit from the front and red when light passes through it from behind. This serves to give the portrayed scene – of the demise of King Lycurgus from Greek mythology – an extra boost with the right lighting.

The cause of this dichroic effect in this ancient marvel of glass work was unknown for the longest time, but research on a fragment of the glass revealed that it contains nanoparticles of both gold and silver. Since then a number of researchers have recreated this dichroic glass, with [Lars Kool] et al. using FDM 3D printing to create objects embedded with the same nanoparticles that also display this effect.

Where this work by the University of Sheffield differs is in that it creates the effect not only in glass, but also creating a piece of art in the form of a modified Atlas statue to use it. The resulting dichroic effect is rather similar, which isn’t too shocking since unlike over 1,600 years ago we can now literally see and measure nanoparticles in glass, while adding exact amounts of each to pure glass.

Here’s to raising a dichroic glass cup to bridging the millennia with recreated luxury glass recipes.