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Plastic On The Mind: Assessing The Risks From Micro- And Nanoplastics

February 12, 2025 by 48 Comments

Perhaps one of the clearest indications of the Anthropocene may be the presence of plastic. Starting with the commercialization of Bakelite in 1907 by Leo Baekeland, plastics have taken the world by storm. Courtesy of being easy to mold into any imaginable shape along with a wide range of properties that depend on the exact polymer used, it’s hard to imagine modern-day society without plastics.

Yet as the saying goes, there never is a free lunch. In the case of plastics it would appear that the exact same properties that make them so desirable also risk them becoming a hazard to not just our environment, but also to ourselves. With plastics degrading mostly into ever smaller pieces once released into the environment, they eventually become small enough to hitch a ride from our food into our bloodstream and from there into our organs, including our brain as evidenced by a recent study.

Multiple studies have indicated that this bioaccumulation of plastics might be harmful, raising the question about how to mitigate and prevent both the ingestion of microplastics as well as producing them in the first place.

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The Science Behind Making Buildings Comfortably Non-Combustible

February 11, 2025 by 33 Comments

Although the most fire-resistant building is likely a windowless, concrete bunker, this tends to be not the vibe that most home owners go for. This is why over the years construction of buildings in areas prone to bush- and wildfires – i.e. an uncontrolled fire in an area with combustible vegetation – has adapted to find a happy medium between a building that you’d enjoy living in and a building that will not instantly combust the moment an ember from a nearby wildfire gently touches down upon any part of it.

To achieve this feat, the primary means include keeping said combustible vegetation and similar away from the building, and to make the house as resistant to ember attacks as possible. That this approach is effective has been demonstrated over the course of multiple wildfires in California during the past years, whereby houses constructed more recently with these features had a much higher chance of making it through the event unscathed.

Naturally, the devil is in the details, which is why for example the Australian standard for construction in bushfire-prone areas (AS 3959, last updated in 2018, 2009 version PDF) is rather extensive and heavy on details, including multiple Bushfire Attack Level (BAL) ratings that define risk areas and legally required mitigation measures. So what does it take exactly to survive a firestorm bearing down on your abode?

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How Do We Deal With Microplastics In The Ocean?

February 6, 2025 by 47 Comments

Like the lead paint and asbestos of decades past, microplastics are the new awful contaminant that we really ought to do something about. They’re particularly abundant in the aquatic environment, and that’s not a good thing. While we’ve all seen heartbreaking photos of beaches strewn with water bottles and fishing nets, it’s the invisible threat that keeps environmentalists up at night. We’re talking about microplastics – those tiny fragments that are quietly infiltrating every corner of our oceans.

We’ve dumped billions of tons of plastic waste into our environment, and all that waste breaks down into increasingly smaller particles that never truly disappear. Now, scientists are turning to an unexpected solution to clean up this pollution with the aid of seashells and plants.

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A Closer Look At The Tanmatsu

February 4, 2025 by 29 Comments

A few weeks ago we brought you news of a new palmtop computer for hackers, powered by the new Espressif ESP32-P4 application processor. The Tanmatsu (Japanese for “Terminal”) is a compact handheld device with a QWERTY keyboard and an 800×480 DSI display, and while it currently exists at the final prototype stage there is a pre-order page upon which you can reserve an early production model for yourself. We’ve been lucky enough to be invited to give one a close-up inspection, so it was time to hot-foot it on the train to a Dutch hackerspace in order to bring you a preview.

A Little History, And First Impressions

The Tanmatsu, held in both hands.
Recesses in the case fit well against the hands.

Before looking at the device, it’s time for a little history. The Tanmatsu has its origin in badge.team, the Netherlands-based group that has produced so many European event badges over the years, and it was destined to eventually become the badge for the upcoming WHY2025 hacker camp. As sometimes happens in any community there has been a significant difference of opinion between the event orga and the badge.team folks that it’s inappropriate to go into here, so now it exists as a standalone project. It’s destined to be open-source in its entirety including hardware and software (and we will hold them to that, never fear), but because of the events surrounding its conception the full repositories will be not be made public until some time late in the summer.

Picking the Tanmatsu up and holding it, it’s a rectangular slab a bit larger and thicker than a CD case with that QWERTY keyboard and display on its front face, an array of ports including an SMA socket for a LoRA antenna on its sides, and an expansion connector on its rear. It has a sandwich construction, with a PCB front face, a 3D printed spacer, the PCB itself, and a 3D printed back cover all held together with a set of screws. The recesses on its bottom edge and the lower halves of the sides locate neatly with fingers and thumbs when it’s held in two hands for two-thumb typing. The keyboard is a silicone moulding as is common on this type of device, and while the keys are quite small it was not difficult to type on it. The display meanwhile feels of much higher quality than the SPI parts previously seen on badges. Continue reading “A Closer Look At The Tanmatsu” →

2024: As The Hardware World Turns

January 2, 2025 by 22 Comments

With 2024 now officially in the history books, it’s time to take our traditional look back and reflect on some of the top trends and stories from the past twelve months as viewed from the unique perspective Hackaday affords us. Thanks to the constant stream of tips and updates we receive from the community, we’ve got a better than average view of what’s on the mind of hardware hackers, engineers, and hobbyists.

This symbiotic relationship is something we take great pride in, which is why we also use this time of year to remind the readers just how much we appreciate them. We know it sounds line a line, but we really couldn’t do it without you. So whether you’ve just started reading in 2024 or been with us for years, everyone here at Hackaday thanks you for being part of something special. We’re keenly aware of how fortunate we are to still be running a successful blog in the era of YouTube and TikTok, and that’s all because people like you keep coming back. If you keep reading it, we’ll keep writing it.

So let’s take a trip down memory lane and go over just a handful of the stories that kept us talking in 2024. Did we miss your favorite? Feel free to share with the class in the comments.

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Release Your Inner Ansel Adams With The Shitty Camera Challenge

December 30, 2024 by 22 Comments

Social media microblogging has brought us many annoying things, but some of the good things that have come to us through its seductive scrolling are those ad-hoc interest based communities which congregate around a hashtag. There’s one which has entranced me over the past few years which I’d like to share with you; the Shitty Camera Challenge. The premise is simple: take photographs with a shitty camera, and share them online. The promise meanwhile is to free photography from kit acquisition, and instead celebrate the cheap, the awful, the weird, and the wonderful in persuading these photographic nonentities to deliver beautiful pictures.

Where’s The Hack In Taking A Photo?

Of course, we can already hear you asking where the hack is in taking a photo. And you’d be right, because any fool can buy a disposable camera and press the shutter a few times. But from a hardware hacker perspective this exposes the true art of camera hacking, because not all shitty cameras can produce pictures without some work.

The #ShittyCameraChallenge has a list of cameras likely to be considered shitty enough, they include disposables, focus free cameras, instant cameras, and the cheap plastic cameras such as Lomo or Holga. But also on the list are models which use dead film formats, and less capable digital cameras. It’s a very subjective definition, and thus in our field everything from a Game Boy camera or a Raspberry Pi camera module to a home-made medium format camera could be considered shitty. Ans since even the ready-made shitty cameras are usually cheap and unloved second-hand, there’s a whole field of camera repair and hacking that opens up. Finally, here’s a photography competition that’s fairly and squarely on the bench of Hackaday readers. Continue reading “Release Your Inner Ansel Adams With The Shitty Camera Challenge” →

Human Civilization And The Black Plastic Kitchen Utensils Panic

December 19, 2024 by 98 Comments

Recently there was a bit of a panic in the media regarding a very common item in kitchens all around the world: black plastic utensils used for flipping, scooping and otherwise handling our food while preparing culinary delights. The claim was that the recycled plastic which is used for many of these utensils leak a bad kind of flame-retardant chemical, decabromodiphenyl ether, or BDE-209, at a rate that would bring it dangerously close to the maximum allowed intake limit for humans. Only this claim was incorrect because the researchers who did the original study got their calculation of the intake limit wrong by a factor of ten.

This recent example is emblematic of how simple mistakes can combine with a reluctance to validate conclusions can lead successive consumers down a game of telephone where the original text may already have been wrong, where each node does not validate the provided text, and suddenly everyone knows that using certain kitchen utensils, microwaving dishes or adding that one thing to your food is pretty much guaranteed to kill you.

How does one go about defending oneself from becoming an unwitting factor in creating and propagating misinformation?

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