Curated

76 Articles

Hackaday’s finest original content articles curated by the Hackaday editors

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

September 25, 2026 by 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.

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After Decades, NASA May Finally Replace Mars Relays

September 24, 2026 by 21 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.

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Smelting Bog Ore As It Should Be Done

September 23, 2026 by 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 167 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.

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The First Floating Nuclear Power Station

September 21, 2026 by 20 Comments

Nuclear power really hit its stride in the 1950s. In the post-war period, there was a rush to develop peaceful uses for splitting the atom, beyond its application as a weapon of war. Soon enough, nuclear reactors were hooking up to power grids and helping propel ships and submarines around the globe.

Eventually, this led to an obvious idea—what if a ship with a reactor could serve as a floating nuclear power station? That question would be answered in the mid-1960s, with an American project of some strategic importance.

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FCC ISM Rules May Shatter Lora Mesh Communities

September 17, 2026 by 128 Comments

Although everyone has their own reasons for exploring a new hobby, one of the driving factors behind the popularity of Meshtastic and MeshCore has been the incredible accessibility offered by off-grid LoRa mesh networks. You don’t need any expensive hardware or a license to get on the air — armed with a $20 microcontroller dev board and open source software, you could be on the mesh in minutes. Then came the really exciting part, seeing who else was out there. The low barrier of entry and ad-hoc nature of these projects meant there was a good chance you’d soon find yourself exchanging messages with other like-minded folks in the area.

Or at least, that’s how it used to be. With the recent revelation that their default radio configurations have potentially been in violation of the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) regulations governing amateur usage of the 900 MHz industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band, the users and developers of both Meshtastic and MeshCore have been sent scrambling. Getting in compliance isn’t necessarily a technical challenge. In fact, Meshtastic has already introduced changes aimed to address the issue and anyone running the latest alpha release can be sure that their initial radio configuration will meet FCC standards.

But unfortunately, this introduces a new problem. While it’s easy enough to get new installations of Meshtastic and MeshCore operating in a mode that keeps the FCC happy, doing so breaks compatibility with everything that’s already been deployed. The community will be fractured into distinct strata depending on when they first configured their hardware, with an added dash of confusion from the more rebellious users who will undoubtedly refuse to migrate over to the new settings.

What was once easy and accessible has just gotten a whole lot more complicated.

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Printing A Clock Fit For A Pope

September 17, 2026 by 12 Comments

When it comes to clockwork, there is a spectrum — some people love the ticking, and some people hate it, while most fall into the broad middle of indifference. Once upon a time, Pope Alexander VII fell into the “hate it” category, and commissioned a silent timepiece from [Fratelli Campani] in 1656. Three hundred seventy years later, [Many Vices] sought out to re-create the mechanism in extruded plastic thanks to the efforts of watchmaker [Carlo G. Croce], who documented his brass recreation in this PDF file and his own videos.

While the archaeology of recreating the mechanism from old photos is interesting, the mechanism itself is the real showpiece. The secret, as you might be able to tell from the photographs, is an eccentric crank escapement that provides continuous movement rather than the traditional anchor escapement whose periodic movements creates the distinctive ‘tick’ and ‘tock’. [Many] tests both in his video so you can hear the difference and see how much power is wasted with the crank escapement, which doesn’t keep going very long.

We wonder if carefully tuning the flywheel he’s using to match the frequency of the swinging pendulum would help a little there. Likewise, his linear-rail-based spring pendulum modification — though it does look awesome and we’d love a train-themed clock using it — doesn’t come close to providing the runtime of traditional clockwork. That’s probably why the anchor escapement persisted for centuries, even if some people and Popes couldn’t stand the tick-tock.

We’ve featured a lot of different 3D printed clocks, from wholly mechanical to electromechanical digital units to even ones based on D20s , so it’s hard to believe that not much more than a decade back, printing a mechanical clock was considered a challenge. Time marches on whether we can hear it or not.

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