Chinese Regulators May Kill Retractable Car Door Handles That Never Should Have Existed

November 26, 2025 by Lewin Day 55 Comments

Headlights. Indicators. Trunk releases. Seatbelts. Airbags. Just about any part of a car you can think of is governed by a long and complicated government regulation. It’s all about safety, ensuring that the car-buying public can trust that their vehicles won’t unduly injure or maim them in regular operation, or in the event of accident.

However, one part of the modern automobile has largely escaped regulation—namely, the humble door handle. Automakers have been free to innovate with new and wacky designs, with Tesla in particular making waves with its electronic door handles. However, after a series of deadly incidents where doors wouldn’t open, regulators are now examining if these door handles are suitable for road-going automobiles. As always, regulations are written in blood, but it raises the question—was not the danger of these complicated electronic door handles easy to foresee?

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Mating Cycles: Engineering Connectors To Last

November 20, 2025 by Dan Maloney 56 Comments

If you take a look around you, chances are pretty good that within a few seconds, your eyes will fall on some kind of electrical connector. In this day and age, it’s as likely as not to be a USB connector, given their ubiquity as the charger of choice for everything from phones to flashlights. But there are plenty of other connectors, from mains outlets in the wall to Ethernet connectors, and if you’re anything like us, you’ve got a bench full of DuPonts, banana plugs, BNCs, SMAs, and all the rest of the alphabet soup of connectors.

Given their propensity for failure and their general reputation as a necessary evil in electrical designs, it may seem controversial to say that all connectors are engineered to last. But it’s true; they’re engineered to last, but only for as long as necessary. Some are built for only a few cycles of mating, while others are built for the long haul. Either way, connectors are a great case study in engineering compromise, one that loops physics, chemistry, and materials science into the process.

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Tech In Plain Sight: Pneumatic Tubes

November 17, 2025 by Al Williams 43 Comments

Today, if you can find a pneumatic tube system at all, it is likely at a bank drive-through. A conversation in the Hackaday bunker revealed something a bit surprising. Apparently, in some parts of the United States, these have totally disappeared. In other areas, they are not as prevalent as they once were, but are still hanging in there. If you haven’t seen one, the idea is simple: you put things like money or documents into a capsule, put the capsule in a tube, and push a button. Compressed air shoots the capsule to the other end of the tube, where someone can reverse the process to send you something back.

These used to be a common sight in large offices and department stores that needed to send original documents around, and you still see them in some other odd places, like hospitals or pharmacy drive-throughs, where they may move drugs or lab samples, as well as documents. In Munich, for example, a hospital has a system with 200 stations and 1,300 capsules, also known as carriers. Another medical center in Rotterdam moves 400 carriers an hour through a 16-kilometer network of tubes. However, most systems are much smaller, but they still work on the same principle.

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Moving From Windows To FreeBSD As The Linux Chaos Alternative

November 11, 2025 by Maya Posch 118 Comments

Back in the innocent days of Windows 98 SE, I nearly switched to Linux on account of how satisfied I was with my Windows experience. This started with the Year of the Linux Desktop in 1999 that started with me purchasing a boxed copy of SuSE Linux and ended with me switching to Windows 2000. After this I continued tinkering with non-Windows OSes including QNX, BeOS, various BSDs, as well as Linux distributions that promised a ‘Windows-like’ desktop experience, such as Lindows.

Now that Windows 2000’s proud legacy has seen itself reduced to a rusting wreck resting on cinderblocks on Microsoft’s dying front lawn, the quiet discomfort that many Windows users have felt since Windows 7 was forcefully End-Of-Life-d has only increased. With it comes the uncomfortable notion that Windows as a viable desktop OS may be nearing its demise. Yet where to from here?

Although the recommendations from the peanut gallery seem to coalesce around Linux or Apple’s MacOS (formerly OS X), there are a few dissenting voices extolling the virtues of FreeBSD over both. There are definitely compelling reasons to pick FreeBSD over Linux, in addition to it being effectively MacOS’s cousin. Best of all is not having to deal with the Chaos Vortex that spawns whenever you dare to utter the question of ‘which Linux distro?’. Within the world of FreeBSD there is just FreeBSD, which makes for a remarkably coherent experience.

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“AI, Make Me A Degree Certificate”

November 10, 2025 by Jenny List 139 Comments

One of the fun things about writing for Hackaday is that it takes you to the places where our community hang out. I was in a hackerspace in a university town the other evening, busily chasing my end of month deadline as no doubt were my colleagues at the time too. In there were a couple of others, a member who’s an electronic engineering student at one of the local universities, and one of their friends from the same course. They were working on the hardware side of a group project, a web-connected device which with a team of several other students, and they were creating from sensor to server to screen.

I have a lot of respect for my friend’s engineering abilities, I won’t name them but they’ve done a bunch of really accomplished projects, and some of them have even been featured here by my colleagues. They are already a very competent engineer indeed, and when in time they receive the bit of paper to prove it, they will go far. The other student was immediately apparent as being cut from the same cloth, as people say in hackerspaces, “one of us”.

They were making great progress with the hardware and low-level software while they were there, but I was saddened at their lament over their colleagues. In particular it seemed they had a real problem with vibe coding: they estimated that only a small percentage of their classmates could code by hand as they did, and the result was a lot of impenetrable code that looked good, but often simply didn’t work.

I came away wondering not how AI could be used to generate such poor quality work, but how on earth this could be viewed as acceptable in a university.
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The Channel Crossing Bridge That Never Was

October 27, 2025 by Lewin Day 17 Comments

*Full marks for clarity of message. Credit: Euro Route materials*

When the Channel Tunnel opened in 1994, the undersea rail link saw Britain grew closer to the European mainland than ever before. However, had things gone a little differently, history might have taken a very different turn. Among the competing proposals for a fixed Channel crossing was a massive bridge. It was a scheme so audacious that fate would never allow it to come to fruition.

Forget the double handling involved in putting cars on trains and doing everything by rail. Instead, the aptly-named Euro Route proposed that motorists simply drive across the Channel, perhaps stopping for duty-free shopping in the middle of the sea along the way.

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Built-In Batteries: A Daft Idea With An Uncertain Future

October 23, 2025 by Maya Posch 60 Comments

Having a gadget’s battery nestled snugly within the bowels of a device has certain advantages. It finally solves the ‘no batteries included’ problem, and there is no more juggling of AA or AAA cells, nor their respective chargers. Instead each device is paired to that one battery that is happily charged using a standardized USB connector, and suddenly everything is well in the world.

Everything, except for the devices that cannot be used while charging, wireless devices that are suddenly dragging along a wire while charging and which may have charging ports in irrational locations, as well as devices that would work quite well if it wasn’t for that snugly embedded battery that’s now dead, dying, or on fire.

Marrying devices with batteries in this manner effectively means tallying up all the disadvantages of the battery chemistries and their chargers, adding them to the device’s feature list, and limiting their effective lifespan in the process. It also prevents the rapid swapping with fresh batteries, which is why everyone is now lugging chunky powerbanks around instead of spare batteries, and hogging outlets with USB chargers. And the task of finding a replacement for non-standardized pouch cell batteries can prove to be hard or impossible.

Looking at the ‘convenience’ argument from this way makes one wonder whether it is all just marketing that we’re being sold. Especially in light of the looming 2027 EU regulation on internal batteries that is likely to wipe out the existence of built-in batteries with an orbital legal strike. Are we about to say ‘good riddance’ to a terrible idea?

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