Two For The Price Of One: BornHack 2024 And 2025 Badges

August 1, 2025 by Jenny List No comments

BornHack is a week-long summer hacker camp in a forest on the Danish island of Fyn, that consistently delivers a very pleasant experience for those prepared to make the journey. This year’s version was the tenth iteration of the camp and it finished a week ago, and having returned exhausted and dried my camping gear after a Biblical rainstorm on the last day, it’s time to take a look at the badges. In case you are surprised by the plural, indeed, this event had not one badge but two. Last year’s badge suffered some logistical issues and arrived too late for the camp, so as a special treat it was there alongside the 2025 badge for holders of BornHack 2024 tickets. So without further ado, it’s time to open the pack for Hackaday and see what fun awaits us. Continue reading “Two For The Price Of One: BornHack 2024 And 2025 Badges” →

Hands On: The Hacker Pager

July 31, 2025 by Tom Nardi 27 Comments

It should come as no surprise that the hacker community has embraced the Meshtastic project. It’s got a little bit of everything we hold dear: high quality open source software, fantastic documentation, a roll-your-own hardware ethos, and just a dash of counterculture. An off-grid communications network cobbled together from cheap parts, some of which being strategically hidden within the urban sprawl by rogue operators, certainly sounds like the sort of thing you’d read about it in a William Gibson novel.

But while the DIY nature of Meshtastic is one of its most endearing features for folks like us, it can also be seen as one of its weak spots. Right now, the guidance for those looking to get started is to pick a compatible microcontroller development board, 3D print a case for it, screw on an antenna from AliExpress, flash your creation with the latest firmware, and then spend some quality time with the documentation and configuration tools to actually get it on the air. No great challenge for the average Hackaday reader, but a big ask for the weekend adventurer that’s just looking for a way to keep in touch with their friends while camping.

Quality hardware that offers a turn-key experience will be critical to elevating Meshtastic from a hobbyist’s pastime to something that could actually be fielded for applications such as search and rescue. Plus, let’s be honest, even those of us who like to put together our own gadgets can appreciate a more consumer-oriented piece of hardware from time to time. Especially if that hardware happens to be open source and designed to empower the user rather than hold them back.

Enter the Hacker Pager from exploitee.rs. As the name implies, it’s still very much a device intended for hackers — a piece of hardware designed for the halls of DEF CON rather than trekking through the wilderness. But it’s also an important step towards a new generation of Meshtastic hardware that meets the high standard of quality set by the software itself.

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Power Line Patrols: The Grid’s Eye In The Sky

July 29, 2025 by Dan Maloney 18 Comments

Those of us who like to monitor air traffic with ADS-B aggregators such as FlightAware and ADS-B Exchange tend to see some interesting flight paths. I’m not talking about the truly ambitious pictures drawn by pilots, or even the more ribald ones, but rather flights that follow paths that seem to make little sense from either a commercial or leisure standpoint.

Most of these mystery flights have long straight stretches interrupted by occasional tight loops, and often cover great distances across rural and urban landscapes alike. A glance at the ADS-B data indicates that these flights are usually pretty close to the ground, and are often completed by helicopters. Occasionally, the registration of the aircraft will even indicate ownership by some “three-letter” federal agency.

Although mystery helicopters flying odd patterns in the sky seems like a good excuse to don a tinfoil hat and head to one’s bunker, chances are pretty good that these aircraft are engaged in a far less nefarious and far more useful endeavour: aerial transmission line patrols. These flights are key to keeping the transmission lines that form the backbone of the grid in tip-top shape, especially at a time of unprecedented growth in load and a shift in the generation profile away from fossil fuels towards renewables.

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A History Of Pong

July 28, 2025 by Al Williams 8 Comments

Today, creating a ground-breaking video game is akin to making a movie. You need a story, graphic artists, music, and more. But until the middle of the 20th century, there were no video games. While several games can claim to be the “first” electronic or video game, one is cemented in our collective memory as the first one we’d heard of: Pong.

The truth is, Pong wasn’t the first video game. We suspect that many people might have had the idea, but Ralph Baer is most associated with inventing a practical video game. As a young engineer in 1951, he tried to convince his company to invest in games that you could play on your TV set. They didn’t like the idea, but Ralph would remember the concept and act on it over a decade later.

But was it really the first time anyone had thought of it? Perhaps not. Thomas Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed a patent in 1947 for a game that simulated launching missiles at targets with an oscilloscope display. The box took eight tubes and, being an oscilloscope, was a vector graphic device. The targets were physical dots on a screen overlay. These “amusement devices” were very expensive, and they only produced handmade prototypes.

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Supersonic Flight May Finally Return To US Skies

July 24, 2025 by Tom Nardi 51 Comments

After World War II, as early supersonic military aircraft were pushing the boundaries of flight, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that commercial aircraft would eventually fly faster than sound as the technology became better understood and more affordable. Indeed, by the 1960s the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union all had plans to develop commercial transport aircraft capable flight beyond Mach 1 in various stages of development.

Yet today, the few examples of supersonic transport (SST) planes that actually ended up being built are in museums, and flight above Mach 1 is essentially the sole domain of the military. There’s an argument to be made that it’s one of the few areas of technological advancement where the state-of-the-art not only stopped moving forward, but actually slid backwards.

But that might finally be changing, at least in the United States. Both NASA and the private sector have been working towards a new generation of supersonic aircraft that address the key issues that plagued their predecessors, and a recent push by the White House aims to undo the regulatory roadblocks that have been on the books for more than fifty years.

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The Death Of Industrial Design And The Era Of Dull Electronics

July 23, 2025 by Maya Posch 191 Comments

It’s often said that what’s inside matters more than one’s looks, but it’s hard to argue that a product’s looks and its physical user experience are what makes it instantly recognizable. When you think of something like a Walkman, an iPod music player, a desktop computer, a car or a TV, the first thing that comes to mind is the way that it looks along with its user interface. This is the domain of industrial design, where circuit boards, mechanisms, displays and buttons are put into a shell that ultimately defines what users see and experience.

Thus industrial design is perhaps the most important aspect of product development as far as the user is concerned, right along with the feature list. It’s also no secret that marketing departments love to lean into the styling and ergonomics of a product. In light of this it is very disconcerting that the past years industrial design for consumer electronics in particular seems to have wilted and is now practically on the verge of death.

Devices like cellphones and TVs are now mostly flat plastic-and-glass rectangles with no distinguishing features. Laptops and PCs are identified either by being flat, small, having RGB lighting, or a combination of these. At the same time buttons and other physical user interface elements are vanishing along with prominent styling, leaving us in a world of basic geometric shapes and flat, evenly colored surfaces. Exactly how did we get to this point, and what does this mean for our own hardware projects?

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Power Grid Stability: From Generators To Reactive Power

July 22, 2025 by Maya Posch 41 Comments

It hasn’t been that long since humans figured out how to create power grids that integrated multiple generators and consumers. Ever since AC won the battle of the currents, grid operators have had to deal with the issues that come with using AC instead of the far less complex DC. Instead of simply targeting a constant voltage, generators have to synchronize with the frequency of the alternating current as it cycles between positive and negative current many times per second.

Complicating matters further, the transmission lines between generators and consumers, along with any kind of transmission equipment on the lines, add their own inductive, capacitive, and resistive properties to the system before the effects of consumers are even tallied up. The result of this are phase shifts between voltage and current that have to be managed by controlling the reactive power, lest frequency oscillations and voltage swings result in a complete grid blackout.

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