Ask Hackaday, What’s Next?

September 6, 2024 by Jenny List 39 Comments

Writing for Hackaday involves drinking from the firehose of tech news, and seeing the latest and greatest of new projects and happenings in the world of hardware. But sometimes you sit back in a reflective mood, and ask yourself: didn’t this all used to be more exciting? If you too have done that, perhaps it’s worth considering how our world of hardware hacking is fueled, and what makes stuff new and interesting.

Hardware projects are like startup fads

An AliExpress page of Nixie clock kits — When AliExpress has hundreds of kits for them, Nixie clocks are a mature project sector, by any measure.

Hardware projects are like startup fads, they follow the hype cycle. Take Nixie clocks for instance, they’re cool as heck, but here in 2024 there’s not so much that’s exciting about them. If you made one in 2010 you were the talk of the town, in 2015 everyone wanted one, but perhaps by 2020 yours was simply Yet Another Nixie Clock. Now you can buy any number of Nixie clock kits on Ali, and their shine has definitely worn off. Do you ever have the feeling that the supply of genuinely new stuff is drying up, and it’s all getting a bit samey? Perhaps it’s time to explore this topic.

I have a theory that hardware hacking goes in epochs, each one driven by a new technology. If you think about it, the Arduino was an epoch-defining moment in a readily available and easy to use microcontroller board; they may be merely a part and hugely superseded here in 2024 but back in 2008 they were nothing short of a revolution if you’d previously has a BASIC Stamp. The projects which an Arduino enabled produced a huge burst of creativity from drones to 3D printers to toaster oven reflow and many, many, more, and it’s fair to say that Hackaday owes its early-day success in no small part to that little board from Italy. To think of more examples, the advent of affordable 3D printers around the same period as the Arduino, the Raspberry Pi, and the arrival of affordable PCB manufacture from China were all similar such enabling moments. A favourite of mine are the Espressif Wi-Fi enabled microcontrollers, which produced an explosion of cheap Internet-connected projects. Suddenly having Wi-Fi went from a big deal to built-in, and an immense breadth of new projects came from those parts. Continue reading “Ask Hackaday, What’s Next?” →

If Wood Isn’t The Biomass Answer, What Is?

September 5, 2024 by Jenny List 120 Comments

As we slowly wean ourselves away from our centuries-long love affair with fossil fuels in an attempt to reduce CO₂ emissions and combat global warming, there has been a rapid expansion across a broad range of clean energy technologies. Whether it’s a set of solar panels on your roof, a wind farm stretching across the horizon, or even a nuclear plant, it’s clear that we’ll be seeing more green power installations springing up.

One of the green power options is biomass, the burning of waste plant matter as a fuel to generate power. It releases CO₂ into the atmosphere, but its carbon neutral green credentials come from that CO₂ being re-absorbed by new plants being grown. It’s an attractive idea in infrastructure terms, because existing coal-fired plants can be converted to the new fuel. Where this is being written in the UK we have a particularly large plant doing this, when I toured Drax power station as a spotty young engineering student in the early 1990s it was our largest coal plant; now it runs on imported wood pellets.

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Australia Didn’t Invent WiFi, Despite What You’ve Heard

August 20, 2024 by Lewin Day 61 Comments

Wireless networking is all-pervasive in our modern lives. Wi-Fi technology lives in our smartphones, our laptops, and even our watches. Internet is available to be plucked out of the air in virtually every home across the country. Wi-Fi has been one of the grand computing revolutions of the past few decades.

It might surprise you to know that Australia proudly claims the invention of Wi-Fi as its own. It had good reason to, as well— given the money that would surely be due to the creators of the technology. However, dig deeper, and you’ll find things are altogether more complex.

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The Long, Slow Demise Of DVD-RAM

August 13, 2024 by Alexander Rowsell 35 Comments

While CDs were still fighting for market share against cassettes, and gaming consoles were just starting to switch over to CD from cartridge storage, optical media companies were already thinking ahead. Only two years after the introduction of the original PlayStation, the DVD Forum had introduced the DVD-RAM standard: 2.58 GB per side of a disc in a protective caddy. The killer feature? Essentially unlimited re-writeability. In a DVD drive that supports DVD-RAM, they act more like removable hard drive platters. You can even see hard sectors etched into the media at the time of manufacture, giving DVD-RAM its very recognizable pattern.

At the time, floppy drives were still popular, and CD-ROM drives were increasingly available pre-installed in new computers. Having what amounted to a hard drive platter with a total of 5 GB per disc should have been a killer feature for consumers. Magneto-optical drives were still very expensive, and by 1998 were only 1.3 GB in size. DVD-RAM had the same verify-after-write data integrity feature that magneto-optical drives were known for, but with larger capacity, and after the introduction of 4.7 GB size discs, no caddy was required.

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Hack On Self: Sense Of Time

August 6, 2024 by Arya Voronova 49 Comments

Every now and then, a commercial product aims to help you in your life journey, in a novel way, making your life better through its presence. Over the years, I’ve been disappointed by such products far more often than I have been reassured, seeing each one of them rendered unimaginative and purposeless sometimes even despite the creator’s best intentions. The pressures of a commercial market will choke you out without remorse, metal fingers firmly placed on your neck, tightening with every move that doesn’t promise profit, and letting money cloud your project’s vision. I believe that real answers can only come from within hacker communities, and as we explore, you might come to see it the same way.

This is the tip of the iceberg of a decade-long project that I hope to demonstrate in a year or two. I’d like to start talking about that project now, since it’s pretty extensive; the overall goal is about using computers to help with human condition, on a personal level. There’s a lot of talk about computers integrating into our lives – even more if you dare consult old sci-fi, much of my inspiration.

Tackling a gigantic problem often means cutting it down into smaller chunks, though, so here’s a small sub-problem I’ve been working on, for years now, on and off: Can you use computers to modify your sense of time?

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Radio Apocalypse: HFGCS, The Backup Plan For Doomsday

August 5, 2024 by Dan Maloney 15 Comments

To the extent that you have an opinion on something like high-frequency (HF) radio, you probably associate it with amateur radio operators, hunched over their gear late at night as they try to make contact with a random stranger across the globe to talk about the fact that they’re both doing the same thing at the same time. In a world where you can reach out to almost anyone else in an instant using flashy apps on the Internet, HF radio’s reputation as somewhat old and fuddy is well-earned.

Like the general population, modern militaries have largely switched to digital networks and satellite links, using them to coordinate and command their strategic forces on a global level. But while military nets are designed to be resilient to attack, there’s only so much damage they can absorb before becoming degraded to the point of uselessness. A backup plan makes good military sense, and the properties of radio waves between 3 MHz and 30 MHz, especially the ability to bounce off the ionosphere, make HF radio a perfect fit.

The United States Strategic Forces Command, essentially the people who “push the button” that starts a Very Bad Day™, built their backup plan around the unique properties of HF radio. Its current incarnation is called the High-Frequency Global Communications System, or HFGCS. As the hams like to say, “When all else fails, there’s radio,” and HFGCS takes advantage of that to make sure the end of the world can be conducted in an orderly fashion.

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End Of An Era: Sony Cuts Production Of Writable Optical Media

July 25, 2024 by Lewin Day 64 Comments

The 1990s saw a revolution occur, launched by the CD burner. As prices of writeable media and drives dropped, consumers rushed to duplicate games, create their own mix CDs, and backup their data on optical disc. It was a halcyon time.

Fast forward to today, and we’re very much on downward curve when it comes to optical media use. Amidst ever-declining consumer interest, Sony has announced it will cut production of writeable optical media. Let’s examine what’s going on, and explore the near future for writable optical discs.

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