Two Decades Of Hackaday In Words

September 29, 2025 by Jenny List 24 Comments

I think most of us who make or build things have a thing we are known for making. Where it’s football robots, radios, guitars, cameras, or inflatable textile sculptures, we all have the thing we do. For me that’s over the years been various things but has recently been camera hacking, however there’s another thing I do that’s not so obvious. For the last twenty years, I’ve been interested in computational language analysis. There’s so much that a large body of text can reveal without a single piece of AI being involved, and in pursuing that I’ve created for myself a succession of corpus analysis engines. This month I’ve finally been allowed to try one of them with a corpus of Hackaday articles, and while it’s been a significant amount of work getting everything shipshape, I can now analyse our world over the last couple of decades.

The Burning Question You All Want Answered

A graph of "arduino" versis "raspberry", comparing Arduino and Raspberry Pi coverage over time. — Battle of the Boards, over the decades.

A corpus engine is not clever in its own right, instead it will simply give you straightforward statistics in return for the queries you give it. But the thing that keeps me coming back for more is that those answers can sometimes surprise you. In short, it’s a machine for telling you things you didn’t know. To start off, it’s time to settle a Hackaday trope of many years’ standing. Do we write too much about Arduino projects? Into the engine goes “arduino”, and for comparison also “raspberry”, for the Raspberry Pi.

What comes out is a potted history of experimenter’s development boards, with the graph showing the launch date and subsequent popularity of each. We’re guessing that the Hackaday Arduino trope has its origins in 2011 when the Italian board peaked, while we see a succession of peaks following the launch of the Pi in 2012. I think we are seeing renewals of interest after the launch of the Pi 3 and Pi 4, respectively. Perhaps the most interesting part of the graph comes on the right as we see both boards tail off after 2020, and if I had to hazard a guess as to why I would cite the rise of the many cheap dev boards from China.

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Spy Tech: The NRO And Apollo 11

September 25, 2025 by Al Williams 13 Comments

When you think of “secret” agencies, you probably think of the CIA, the NSA, the KGB, or MI-5. But the real secret agencies are the ones you hardly ever hear of. One of those is the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). Formed in 1960, the agency was totally secret until the early 1970s.

If you have heard of the NRO, you probably know they manage spy satellites and other resources that get shared among intelligence agencies. But did you know they played a major, but secret, part in the Apollo 11 recovery? Don’t forget, it was 1969, and the general public didn’t know anything about the shadowy agency.

Secret Hawaii

Captain Hank Brandli was an Air Force meteorologist assigned to the NRO in Hawaii. His job was to support the Air Force’s “Star Catchers.” That was the Air Force group tasked with catching film buckets dropped from the super-secret Corona spy satellites. The satellites had to drop film only when there was good weather.

In the 1960s, civilian weather forecasting was not as good as it is now. But Brandli had access to data from the NRO’s Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP), then known simply as “417”. The high-tech data let him estimate the weather accurately over the drop zones for five days, much better than any contemporary civilian meteorologist could do.

When Apollo 11 headed home, Captain Brandli ran the numbers and found there would be a major tropical storm over the drop zone, located at 10.6° north by 172.5° west, about halfway between Howland Island and Johnston Atoll, on July 24th. The storm was likely to be a “screaming eagle” storm rising to 50,000 feet over the ocean.

In the movies, of course, spaceships are tough and can land in bad weather. In real life, the high winds could rip the parachutes from the capsule, and the impact would probably have killed the crew.

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How Regulations Are Trying To Keep Home Battery Installs Safe

September 24, 2025 by Lewin Day 81 Comments

The advent of rooftop solar power generation was a huge step forward for renewable energy. No longer was generating electricity the sole preserve of governments and major commercial providers; now just about any homeowner could start putting juice into the grid for a few thousand dollars. Since then, we’ve seen the rise of the home battery, which both promises to make individual homes more self sufficient, whilst also allowing them to make more money selling energy to the grid where needed.

Home batteries are becoming increasingly popular, but as with any new home utility, there come risks. After all, a large capacity battery can present great danger if not installed or used correctly. In the face of these dangers, authorities in jurisdictions around the world have been working to ensure home batteries are installed with due regard for the safety of the occupants of the average home.

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The Impending CRT Display Revival Will Be Televised

September 23, 2025 by Maya Posch 112 Comments

Until the 2000s vacuum tubes practically ruled the roost. Even if they had surrendered practically fully to semiconductor technology like integrated circuits, there was no escaping them in everything from displays to video cameras. Until CMOS sensor technology became practical, proper video cameras used video camera tubes and well into the 2000s you’d generally scoff at those newfangled LC displays as they couldn’t capture the image quality of a decent CRT TV or monitor.

For a while it seemed that LCDs might indeed be just a flash in the pan, as it saw itself competing not just with old-school CRTs, but also its purported successors in the form of SED and FED in particular, while plasma TVs made home cinema go nuts for a long while with sizes, fast response times and black levels worth their high sale prices.

We all know now that LCDs survived, along with the newcomer in OLED displays, but despite this CRTs do not feel like something we truly left behind. Along with a retro computing revival, there’s an increasing level of interest in old-school CRTs to the point where people are actively prowling for used CRTs and the discontent with LCDs and OLED is clear with people longing for futuristic technologies like MicroLED and QD displays to fix all that’s wrong with today’s displays.

Could the return of CRTs be nigh in some kind of format?

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Jenny’s Daily Drivers: KDE Linux

September 22, 2025 by Jenny List 44 Comments

Over this series test-driving operating systems, we’ve tried to bring you the unusual, the esoteric, or the less mainstream among the world of the desktop OS. It would become very boring very quickly of we simply loaded up a succession of Linux distros, so we’ve avoided simply testing the latest Debian, or Fedora.

That’s not to say that there’s no space for a Linux distro on these pages if it is merited though, as for example we marked its 30th anniversary with a look at Slackware. If a distro has something interesting to offer it’s definitely worth a look, which brings us to today’s subject.

KDE Linux is an eponymous distro produced by the makers of the KDE Plasma desktop environment and associated applications, and it serves as a technical demo of what KDE can be, a reference KDE-based distribution, and an entirely new desktop Linux distribution all in one. As such, it always has the latest in all things KDE, but aside from that perhaps what makes it even more interesting is that as an entirely new distribution it has a much more modern structure than many of the ones we’re used to that have their roots in decades past. Where in a traditional distro the system is built from the ground up on install, KDE Linux is an immutable base distribution, in which successive versions are supplied as prebuilt images on which the user space is overlaid. This makes it very much worth a look. Continue reading “Jenny’s Daily Drivers: KDE Linux” →

Meta’s Ray-Ban Display Glasses And The New Glassholes

September 22, 2025 by Maya Posch 135 Comments

It’s becoming somewhat of a running gag that any device or object will be made ‘smart’ these days, whether it’s a phone, TV, refrigerator, home thermostat, headphones or glasses. This generally means somehow cramming a computer, display, camera and other components into the unsuspecting device, with the overarching goal of somehow making it more useful to the user and not impacting its basic functionality.

Although smart phones and smart TVs have been readily embraced, smart glasses have always been a bit of a tough sell. Part of the problem here is of course that most people do not generally wear glasses, between people whose vision does not require correction and those who wear e.g. contact lenses. This means that the market for smart glasses isn’t immediately obvious. Does it target people who wear glasses anyway, people who wear sunglasses a lot, or will this basically move a smart phone’s functionality to your face?

Smart glasses also raise many privacy concerns, as their cameras and microphones may be recording at any given time, which can be unnerving to people. When Google launched their Google Glass smart glasses, this led to the coining of the term ‘glasshole‘ for people who refuse to follow perceived proper smart glasses etiquette.

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A New Generation Of Spacecraft Head To The ISS

September 18, 2025 by Tom Nardi 22 Comments

While many in the industry were at first skeptical of NASA’s goal to put resupply flights to the International Space Station in the hands of commercial operators, the results speak for themselves. Since 2012, the SpaceX Dragon family of spacecraft has been transporting crew and cargo from American soil to the orbiting laboratory, a capability that the space agency had lost with the retirement of the Space Shuttle. Putting these relatively routine missions in the hands of a commercial provider like SpaceX takes some of the logistical and financial burden off of NASA, allowing them to focus on more forward-looking projects.

SpaceX Dragon arriving at the ISS for the first time in 2012.

But as the saying goes, you should never put all of your eggs in one basket. As successful as SpaceX has been, there’s always a chance that some issue could temporarily ground either the Falcon 9 or the Dragon.

While Russia’s Progress and Soyuz vehicles would still be available in an emergency situation, it’s in everyone’s best interest that there be multiple backup vehicles that can bring critical supplies to the Station.

Which is precisely why several new or upgraded spacecraft, designed specifically for performing resupply missions to the ISS and any potential commercial successor, are coming online over the next few years.

In fact, one of them is already flying its first mission, and will likely have arrived at the International Space Station by the time you read this article.

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