The Engineering Of The Falkirk Wheel

February 13, 2026 by Al Williams 18 Comments

We live in an age where engineering marvels are commonplace: airplanes crisscross the sky, skyscrapers grow like weeds, and spacecraft reach for the stars. But every so often, we see something unusual that makes us take a second look. The Falkirk Wheel is a great example, and, even better, it is functional art, as well.

The Wheel links two canals in Scotland. Before you click away, here’s the kicker: One canal is 35 meters higher than the other. Before 1933, the canals were connected with 11 locks. It took nearly a day to operate the locks to get a boat from one canal to the other. In the 1930s, there wasn’t enough traffic to maintain the locks, and they tore them out.

Fast Forward

In the 1990s, a team of architects led by [Tony Kettle] proposed building a wheel to transfer boats between the two canals. The original model was made from [Tony’s] daughter’s Lego bricks.

The idea is simple. Build a 35-meter wheel with two caissons, 180 degrees apart. Each caisson can hold 250,000 liters of water. To move a boat, you fill the caissons with 500 tonnes of water. Then you let a boat into one of them with its weight displacing an equal amount of water, so the caissons stay at the same weight.

Once you have a balanced system, you just spin the wheel to make a half turn. There are 10 motors that require 22.5 kilowatts, and each half-turn consumes about 1.5 kilowatt-hours.

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Practice Makes Perfect: The Wet Dress Rehearsal

February 12, 2026 by Tom Nardi 10 Comments

If you’ve been even casually following NASA’s return to the Moon, you’re likely aware of the recent Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR) for the Artemis II mission. You probably also heard that things didn’t go quite to plan: although the test was ultimately completed and the towering Space Launch System (SLS) rocket was fully loaded with propellant, a persistent liquid hydrogen leak and a few other incidental issues lead the space agency to delay further testing for at least a month while engineers make adjustments to the vehicle.

This constitutes a minor disappointment for fans of spaceflight, but when you’re strapping four astronauts onto more than five million pounds of propellants, there’s no such thing as being too cautious. In fact, there’s a school of thought that says if a WDR doesn’t shake loose some gremlins, you probably weren’t trying hard enough. Simulations and estimates only get you so far, the real thing is always more complex, and there’s bound to be something you didn’t account for ahead of time.

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PROFS: The Office Suite Of The 1980s

February 11, 2026 by Al Williams 12 Comments

Today, we take office software suites for granted. But in the 1970s, you were lucky to have a typewriter and access to a photocopier. But in the early 1980s, IBM rolled out PROFS — the Professional Office System — to try to revolutionize the office. It was an offshoot of an earlier internal system. The system would hardly qualify as an office suite today, but for the time it was very advanced.

The key component was an editor you could use to input notes and e-mail messages. PROFS also kept your calendar and could provide databases like phonebooks. There were several key features of PROFS that would make it hard to recognize as productivity software today. For one thing, IBM terminals were screen-oriented. The central computer would load a form into your terminal, which you could fill out. Then you’d press send to transmit it back to the mainframe. That makes text editing, for example, a very different proposition since you work on a screen of data at any one time. In addition, while you could coordinate calendars and send e-mail, you could only do that with certain people.

In general, PROFS connected everyone using your mainframe or, perhaps, a group of mainframes. In some cases, there might be gateways to other systems, but it wasn’t universal. However, it did have most of the major functions you’d expect from an e-mail system that was text-only, as you can see in the screenshot from a 1986 manual. PF keys, by the way, are what we would now call function keys.

The calendar was good, too. You could grant different users different access to your calendar. It was possible to just let people see when you were busy or mark events as confidential or personal.

You could actually operate PROFS using a command-line interface, and the PF keys were simply shorthand. That was a good thing, too. If you wanted to erase a file named Hackaday, for example, you had to type: ERASE Hackaday AUT$PROF.

Styles

PROFS messages were short and were essentially ephemeral chat messages. Of course, because of the block-mode terminals, you could only get messages after you sent something to the mainframe, or you were idle in a menu. A note was different. Notes were what we could call e-mail. They went into your inbox, and you could file them in “logs”, which were similar to folders.

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Is That Ancient Reel Of PLA Any Good?

February 10, 2026 by Jenny List 38 Comments

When it comes to knowledge there are things you know as facts because you have experienced them yourself or had them verified by a reputable source, and there are things that you know because they are common knowledge but unverified. The former are facts, such as that a 100mm cube of water contains a litre of the stuff, while the latter are received opinions, such as the belief among Americans that British people have poor dental care. The first is a verifiable fact, while the second is subjective.

In our line there are similar received opinions, and one of them is that you shouldn’t print with old 3D printing filament because it will ruin the quality of your print. This is one I can now verify for myself, because I was recently given a part roll of blue PLA from a hackerspace, that’s over a decade old. It’s not been stored in a special environment, instead it’s survived a run of dodgy hackerspace premises with all the heat and humidity that’s normal in a slightly damp country. How will it print?

It Ain’t Stringy

In the first instance, looking at the filament, it looks like any other filament. No fading of the colour, no cracking, if I didn’t know its age it could have been opened within the last few weeks. It loads into the printer, a Prusa Mini, fine, it’s not brittle, and I’m ready to print a Benchy.

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Ask Hackaday: How Do You Detect Hidden Cameras?

February 9, 2026 by Al Williams 44 Comments

The BBC recently published an exposé revealing that some Chinese subscription sites charge for access to their network of hundreds of hidden cameras in hotel rooms. Of course, this is presumably without the consent of the hotel management and probably isn’t specifically a problem in China. After all, cameras can now be very tiny, so it is extremely easy to rent a hotel room or a vacation rental and bug it. This is illegal, China has laws against spy cameras, and hotels are required to check for them, the BBC notes. However, there is a problem: At least one camera found didn’t show up on conventional camera detectors. So we wanted to ask you, Hackaday: How do you detect hidden cameras?

How it Works

Commercial detectors typically use one of two techniques. It is easy to scan for RF signals, and if the camera is emitting WiFi or another frequency you expect cameras to use, that works. But it also misses plenty. A camera might be hardwired, for example. Or store data on an SD card for later. If you have a camera that transmits on a strange frequency, you won’t find it. Or you could hide the camera near something else that transmits. So if your scanner shows a lot of RF around a WiFi router, you won’t be able to figure out that it is actually the router and a small camera.

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I, Integrated Circuit

February 4, 2026 by Jenny List 78 Comments

In 1958, the American free-market economist Leonard E Read published his famous essay I, Pencil, in which he made his point about the interconnected nature of free market economics by following everything, and we mean Everything, that went into the manufacture of the humble writing instrument.

I thought about the essay last week when I wrote a piece about a new Chinese microcontroller with an integrated driver for small motors, because a commenter asked me why I was featuring a non-American part. As a Brit I remarked that it would look a bit silly were I were to only feature parts made in dear old Blighty — yes, we do still make some semiconductors! — and it made more sense to feature cool parts wherever I found them. But it left me musing about the nature of semiconductors, and whether it’s possible for any of them to truly only come from one country. So here follows a much more functional I, Chip than Read’s original, trying to work out just where your integrated circuit really comes from. It almost certainly takes great liberties with the details of the processes involved, but the countries of manufacture and extraction are accurate. Continue reading “I, Integrated Circuit” →

After 30 Years, Virtual Boy Gets Its Chance To Shine

February 3, 2026 by Tom Nardi 18 Comments

When looking back on classic gaming, there’s plenty of room for debate. What was the best Atari game? Which was the superior 16-bit console, the Genesis or the Super NES? Would the N64 have been more commercially successful if it had used CDs over cartridges? It goes on and on. Many of these questions are subjective, and have no definitive answer.

But even with so many opinions swirling around, there’s at least one point that anyone with even a passing knowledge of gaming history will agree with — the Virtual Boy is unquestionably the worst gaming system Nintendo ever produced. Which is what makes its return in 2026 all the more unexpected.

Released in Japan and North America in 1995, the Virtual Boy was touted as a revolution in gaming. It was the first mainstream consumer device capable of showing stereoscopic 3D imagery, powered by a 20 MHz 32-bit RISC CPU and a custom graphics processor developed by Nintendo to meet the unique challenges of rendering gameplay from two different perspectives simultaneously.

In many ways it’s the forebear of modern virtual reality (VR) headsets, but its high cost, small library of games, and the technical limitations of its unique display technology ultimately lead to it being pulled from shelves after less than a year on the market.

Now, 30 years after its disappointing debut, this groundbreaking system is getting a second chance. Later this month, Nintendo will be releasing a replica of the Virtual Boy into which players can insert their Switch or Switch 2 console. The device essentially works like Google Cardboard, and with the release of an official emulator, users will be able to play Virtual Boy games complete with the 3D effect the system was known for.

This is an exciting opportunity for those with an interest in classic gaming, as the relative rarity of the Virtual Boy has made it difficult to experience these games in the way they were meant to be played. It’s also reviving interest in this unique piece of hardware, and although we can’t turn back the clock on the financial failure of the Virtual Boy, perhaps a new generation can at least appreciate the engineering that made it possible.

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