If IRobot Falls, Hackers Are Ready To Wrangle Roombas

November 13, 2025 by Tom Nardi 44 Comments

Things are not looking good for iRobot. Although their robotic Roomba vacuums are basically a household name, the company has been faltering financially for some time now. In 2024 there was hope of a buyout by Amazon, who were presumably keen to pull the bots into their Alexa ecosystem, but that has since fallen through. Now, by the company’s own estimates, bankruptcy is a very real possibility by the end of the year.

Hackaday isn’t a financial blog, so we won’t get into how and why iRobot has ended up here, although we can guess that intense competition in the market probably had something to do with it. We’re far more interested in what happens when those millions of domesticated robots start getting an error message when they try to call home to the mothership.

We’ve seen this scenario play out many times before — a startup goes belly up, and all the sudden you can’t upload new songs to some weirdo kid’s media player, or the gadget in your fridge stops telling you how old your eggs are. (No, seriously.) But the scale here is unprecedented. If iRobot collapses, we may be looking at one of the largest and most impactful smart-gadget screw overs of all time.

Luckily, we aren’t quite there yet. There’s still time to weigh options, and critically, perform the kind of research and reverse engineering necessary to make sure the community can keep the world’s Roombas chugging along even if the worst happens.

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Moving From Windows To FreeBSD As The Linux Chaos Alternative

November 11, 2025 by Maya Posch 119 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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Medieval Iron, Survivorship Bias And Modern Metallurgy

November 5, 2025 by Maya Posch 44 Comments

When you hear it said that “Modern steel is disposable by design”, your ears perk up, as you just caught the unmistakable sound of faux romanticism along with ‘lost ancient technology‘ vibes. Although it happens sometimes that we did lose something important, as with for example the ancient Roman concrete that turns out to have self-healing properties as a result of so-called hot mixing, this is decidedly an exception.

We nearly lost that technology because of the technological and scientific bonfire that was the prelude to a thousand years of darkness over Europe: called the Dark Ages, Middle Ages as well as the medieval period. Thus when you come across a slideshow video with synthesized monotonal voice-over which makes the bold claim that somehow medieval iron was superior and today’s metallurgy both worse and designed to break, you really have to do a spit-take. The many corrections in the comment section further reinforces the feeling that it’s more slop than fact.

One of the claims made is that the bloomery furnace beats the blast furnace, due to beneficial additives to the iron. Considering that the video cites its sources, it’s at least worthy of a dive into the actual science here. Are modern iron and steel truly that inferior and disposable?

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Lithium-Ion Batteries: WHY They Demand Respect

November 4, 2025 by Arya Voronova 65 Comments

This summer, we saw the WHY (What Hackers Yearn) event happen in Netherlands, of course, with a badge to match. Many badges these days embrace the QWERTY computer aesthetic, which I’m personally genuinely happy about. This one used 18650 batteries for power, in a dual parallel cell configuration… Oh snap, that’s my favourite LiIon cell in my favourite configuration, too! Surely, nothing bad could happen?

Whoops. That one almost caught me by surprise, I have to shamefully admit. I just genuinely love 18650 cells, in all glory they bring to hardware hacking, and my excitement must’ve blindsided me. They’re the closest possible entity to a “LiIon battery module”, surprisingly easy to find in most corners of this planet, cheap to acquire in large quantities, easy to interface to your projects, and packing a huge amount of power. It’s a perfect cell for many applications I and many other hackers hold dear.

Sadly, the 18650 cells were a bad choice for the WHY badge, for multiple reasons at once. If you’re considering building a 18650-based project, or even a product, let me show you what exactly made these cells a bad fit, and how you might be able to work around those limitations on your own journey. There’s plenty of technical factors, but I will tell you about the social factors, because these create the real dealbreaker here. Continue reading “Lithium-Ion Batteries: WHY They Demand Respect” →

Expert Systems: The Dawn Of AI

October 29, 2025 by Al Williams 19 Comments

We’ll be honest. If you had told us a few decades ago we’d teach computers to do what we want, it would work some of the time, and you wouldn’t really be able to explain or predict exactly what it was going to do, we’d have thought you were crazy. Why not just get a person? But the dream of AI goes back to the earliest days of computers or even further, if you count Samuel Butler’s letter from 1863 musing on machines evolving into life, a theme he would revisit in the 1872 book Erewhon.

Of course, early real-life AI was nothing like you wanted. Eliza seemed pretty conversational, but you could quickly confuse the program. Hexapawn learned how to play an extremely simplified version of chess, but you could just as easily teach it to lose.

But the real AI work that looked promising was the field of expert systems. Unlike our current AI friends, expert systems were highly predictable. Of course, like any computer program, they could be wrong, but if they were, you could figure out why.

Experts?

As the name implies, expert systems drew from human experts. In theory, a specialized person known as a “knowledge engineer” would work with a human expert to distill his or her knowledge down to an essential form that the computer could handle.

This could range from the simple to the fiendishly complex, and if you think it was hard to do well, you aren’t wrong. Before getting into details, an example will help you follow how it works.

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Analog Surround Sound Was Everywhere, But You Probably Didn’t Notice

October 28, 2025 by Lewin Day 22 Comments

These days, most of the media we consume is digital. We still watch movies and TV shows, but they’re all packaged in digital files that cram in many millions of pixels and as many audio channels as we could possibly desire.

Back in the day, though, engineering limitations meant that media on film or tape were limited to analog stereo audio at best. And yet, the masterminds at Dolby were able to create a surround sound format that could operate within those very limitations, turning two channels in to four. What started out as a cinematic format would bring surround sound to the home—all the way back in 1982!

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