Places To Visit: Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord

September 28, 2026 by Jenny List 10 Comments

There are many benefits to spending time in the park, but perhaps few of them have a Hackaday angle. There’s a park in Germany you might want to make an exception for, and it lies in the Ruhrpott city of Duisburg.

I was lucky enough last month to join a friend as she toured Germany for the first time with a caravan. It’s a large country with many beautiful places, so her choice might seem unexpected at first sight. The Ruhrpott, or Ruhr area, is a loose conurbation of industrial cities that loosely follows the river Ruhr on its trip to the Rhine on the western edge of the country. It’s close to deposits of coal and iron ore, so just like similar areas in other countries, it became a centre for heavy industry. Today that continues, but as you might expect it’s also dotted with the remains of former industries. It’s one of those which is our subject for today, and it offers a very unusual opportunity.

A view out over a wooded post industrial landscape against a grey cloudy sky. In the foreground is a hiuge traverser crane. — Looking out over the former ore bunkers shows just how huge this site is.

Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord is a forest park on the northern side of the city of Duisburg. But of course that’s not the whole story, because until 1985 it was the site of the Thyssen ironworks. In rehabilitating the site they chose to keep the main structures of the ironworks intact as they reclaimed the surrounding polluted industrial land, so today it may be one of the few places in the world where you can free of charge get up-close and personal with a fully-intact and preserved blast furnace. The site has three of them remaining along with their associated ore and gas processing plants, and the largest and newest, blast furnace number 5, is a structure you can climb to its top. If you’ve ever been curious about iron smelting, this is the place to come. Continue reading “Places To Visit: Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord” →

The FPGA Chronicles: Exploring The Tang Nano 20K

September 28, 2026 by Al Williams 14 Comments

FPGAs used to be mysterious, expensive devices, but these days you can buy surprisingly capable boards for very little money. Some years ago, I did an FPGA Bootcamp over on Hackaday.io. Much of that material still applies, but the hardware is dated. So I decided it was time to update it, using the inexpensive Tang Nano 20K and its GOWIN GW2AR-18 FPGA as the main platform, with perhaps a few excursions into other FPGAs.

History and Motivation

Once upon a time, if you wanted to have a custom IC, you went with a wheelbarrow full of money to a semiconductor company. However, some smart person at a semiconductor fab eventually realized they could make a chip with a lot of uncommitted blocks on it and then, for a custom chip, only design the wiring that connected them together. This still required a wheelbarrow full of money, but it was a smaller wheelbarrow.

Then one day, someone realized they could do the same thing but make the electrical connections between the blocks configurable. Maybe have fuses you can blow, or use EEPROM or RAM cells to remember which blocks are connected to which. It is complicated, sure, but then you can make many of these chips and sell them to people who could, in theory, make their own custom chips without your help.

When do you need an FPGA? A classic classroom exercise for an FPGA, for example, is a traffic light because it shows off how to do state machines, which are important for some kinds of FPGA designs. But other than as a learning example, why would you do this? Even a simple 8-bit CPU can handle a traffic light.

Suppose instead that you have hundreds of digital sensors on a rocket, and any one of them must raise an alarm within a few microseconds. A processor has to sample inputs in groups, service interrupts, or rely on extra hardware. An FPGA can simply implement the equivalent of one enormous OR gate. It watches every input continuously, and unrelated logic elsewhere in the FPGA does not steal execution time from it. Can you do it with a microcontroller? Probably, but not easily. For some classes of problems, an FPGA is the better answer.

Of course, you can also build a CPU on your FPGA and some FPGAs have CPUs in the same package. This is often a sweet spot because then things that are easy to do in software, you do in software. Things that are easier to do in hardware, you do in the FPGA.

Continue reading “The FPGA Chronicles: Exploring The Tang Nano 20K” →

Easy Ways To Sink A Hardware Startup

September 26, 2026 by Donald Papp 16 Comments

[Ryan Walker] may have written up his observations a few years ago, but the lessons are just as relevant today as they were back then. He shares five easy ways to sink your hardware startup.

It’s a reminder that while hardware startups are unique, there are basic business realities that still apply because the hardware itself is going to be only one part of a whole. These business fundamentals can be a drag, but it’s worth giving them some attention. But if that’s not your jam, no worries. As [Ryan] experienced, they will explain themselves one way or another.

A good one is skipping market research. Do customers actually exist for this thing? Or forgoing market testing — do the customers actually want it enough to pay for it? One of the worst things to be stuck with is a product that everyone likes, but nobody wants to buy.

Premature optimization is another good one that a number of our readers can probably relate to in one way or another. It’s one thing to buy a tool or a part that one doesn’t end up needing, but when that gets scaled up it can put a real dent in a fledgling business’s development.

We’ve also shared insights on what it takes to develop a product and get it out there, whether as a solo entrepreneur or as part of a larger team, to help nudge the process toward success.

Did The BBC And Sir Clive Get It Right Twenty Years Ago?

September 25, 2026 by Jenny List 17 Comments

Predictions of the future are often laughable when reviewed in the years for which they are made. For example, here in 2026 we neither live on the Moon, nor have flying cars. But sometimes they come closer to the reality than others, and in that the BBC Archive have an interesting offering. It’s a Newsnight feature from 2006 looking at the future of artificial intelligence, and since its main interviewee is none other than Sir Clive Sinclair, it’s worth a second look.

Watching the video it’s a shock to be reminded that 2006 was twenty years ago, as in so many ways it’s close enough to touch. Back then we had laptops with Windows or Linux, we had the Web, and HDTV, as we do today. But as we sat in our Ford Focus family car it would be on a Nokia that we rang home; while technically a smartphone it was nothing like the Apple and Android devices that would take the world by storm in the following years. Sir Clive is positive about the development of AI as he saw it then, seeing it as providing knowledge based services such as education or healthcare from your computer. The following interviewee from British Telecom perhaps puts his finger on the pulse the most, predicting a path “Over the next few years” that seems pretty familiar to us a couple of decades later.

So for once this is a future prediction that doesn’t seem too outlandish. Aside from Sir Clive’s appearance it’s packed with retro technology goodies, so it’s well worth a watch below.

Continue reading “Did The BBC And Sir Clive Get It Right Twenty Years Ago?” →

After Decades, NASA May Finally Replace Mars Relays

September 24, 2026 by Tom Nardi 18 Comments

We’ve yet to find any definitive evidence that there’s biological life on present-day Mars, but to say it’s a dead planet isn’t exactly accurate. Since the first Viking lander touched down in 1976, a revolving cast of humanity’s robotic envoys have worked on and around the Red Planet — and as access to space becomes cheaper and more routine, the mechatronic population of Mars will continue to grow.

Given the number of landers, rovers, and orbiting spacecraft that have been sent to study Mars over the last 50 years, you might be surprised to find that the communications systems in place to transmit all that critical scientific data back to Earth aren’t nearly as robust as you’d think. While it’s understandable that the first craft to arrive at Mars had to operate in isolation, even the flagship Perseverance and Curiosity rovers carry their own high-gain radio systems so they can communicate directly with Earth. Given the incredible premium put on the mass of an interplanetary craft, each mission that needs to bring along its own link back to Earth effectively reduces its payload of much scientific equipment.

It’s not that satellites in orbit around the planet aren’t used to relay signals between Martian ground assets and their controllers back on Earth. In fact these relay links are used extensively for bandwidth-intensive tasks such as image transfers. But it’s also true that the craft currently available to act as intermediaries between the two planets aren’t terribly well suited to the task. The current fleet of Mars orbiters were conceived primary as research vehicles, and so every decision regarding their design and positioning around the planet was made with that goal in mind. What relatively limited capability they do have as communication relays is further hindered by the age of their hardware.

But after decades of false starts and shifting budgets, NASA is closer than ever to finally establishing the Mars Telecommunications Network, a dedicated high-bandwidth communication relay that will ensure current and future missions always have a way to phone home.

Continue reading “After Decades, NASA May Finally Replace Mars Relays” →

Smelting Bog Ore As It Should Be Done

September 23, 2026 by Jenny List 18 Comments

Sometimes along comes a hack with a personal angle, and in a video showing Irish bog ore smelting, we find an appropriate follow up to a Hackaday expedition back in 2019. [Alec Steele] joined Irish Bloomery Iron, for a weekend with a medieval blast furnace.

Our brush with bog ore came in a trip to Hack42 in Arnhem, the Netherlands, where a team of Dutch hackers built a furnace from firebricks in an attempt to do the same thing. The Dutch attempt ended with a lot of mixed slag and very little iron, and looking at how the Irish furnace was constructed we see some clues to their success. Their air injection using a perforated sheet of clay and the air blast injected to form a venturi is particularly interesting,as is the shape of the furnace.

The iron bloom is lifted out through the top of the furnace rather than being tapped as molten iron, and we’re treated to it being worked into a usable bar of iron. Having spent a day with our Dutch friends doing the same work only to have scraps of iron, we’re mightily impressed with the results from the Irish smelters. You can visit their website at www.irishbloomeryiron.com.

Raspberry Pi RAM Restrictions No Big Deal, Frankly

September 22, 2026 by Arya Voronova 156 Comments

Hacking on Raspberry Pi board internals is one of my favourite topics. I know a bunch of obscure things about these cute little boards. Three years ago, I covered a Raspberry Pi 4 RAM upgrade story. Getting a BGA RAM chip and swapping it in seemed like a no-brainer to me – apart from all the numerous uncertain parts about it, you know. It was a joy to see hackers pull it off, and for it to function as well as it did!

Things changed. You can’t really get RAM chips anymore. You also can’t get RAM sticks. You can’t get even SSDs with RAM chips on them. Even getting Raspberry Pi boards can be hard unless you know where to look. This is where a recent three-minute video by [Jeff Geerling] finds us.

Turns out, Raspberry Pi Foundation pushed binary-blob bootloader changes that limit your ability to upgrade RAM. I’ve known about it since last year through the grapevine, and somehow, as I read about it, this didn’t bother me at all. Not enough to write a Hackaday article about it, even, much less talk about it more widely. Why didn’t it bother me? Today, I sat down and pondered this for a bit.

Here’s my conclusion: I don’t think it’s a big deal at all, even if it seems that many people would disagree. Come in, as you are, and I hope you find my thoughts on the situation entertaining.

Continue reading “Raspberry Pi RAM Restrictions No Big Deal, Frankly” →