DIY Router On X86 E-Waste: OpenWrt And OPNsense

September 21, 2026 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

In previous installments of this series we looked at how creating a DIY router using an e-waste-level PC has changed over the years, before attempting to boot OpenWrt for x86 on it. After an initial SD card booting failure on one system, another system with a newer mainboard – an Intel Board D2500CC – was used which happily booted OpenWrt from an SD card inserted into a USB card reader.

Unfortunately, OpenWrt didn’t see any usable Ethernet interfaces despite having no less than four Intel Ethernet controllers and two hooked up to active networks. After recently getting back to the project, I found out why both onboard Intel 82574L Ethernet controllers didn’t show up in OpenWrt: the drivers for the Intel 82574L controllers are in the e1000e driver package, while only the e1000 package is present in the provided x86 image. This issue persists in the ‘generic’ image profile to this day.

Yet rather than diving head-first into building my own image that includes the kmod-e1000e package, I decided to give OPNsense a shake first.

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Hackaday Links: September 20, 2026

September 20, 2026 by Tom Nardi 20 Comments

Some sad news to start this week off — after 52 years in business, Sherline has announced they are winding down their manufacturing operations. By the end of October they estimate they’ll have produced their last tool, and although they will no longer be making new products, they plan on supporting their existing customers for as long as possible. Although from the sound of the press release, that may mean simply keeping the website up and selling through their inventory of spare parts.

The company offered a range of American-made miniature lathes and mills, and while their manual machines may have been better known in our community, they did eventually branch out into CNC. The press release doesn’t go into a lot of detail about the chain of events that led up to this decision, but it does mention the challenges of modern manufacturing and the lingering aftereffects of the COVID pandemic.

At first blush, it might seem strange that the company would falter just as desktop CNCs appear to finally be gaining momentum, but of course that doesn’t change their ability to compete with overseas manufacturing in terms of price.

Of course, keeping competitive is only a concern when you actually have competitors in the first place. That’s the situation that NASA and Boeing may find themselves in should SpaceX decide to retire the Crew Dragon after 2030. While the International Space Station will (probably) be out of the equation by that point, the US space agency will still need the capability to fly humans to… somewhere, and that means there will be lucrative government contracts up for grabs.

The chances of any other American company developing and launching a human-rated spacecraft between now and the end of the decade are pretty much zero, which means Boeing will have to pick up the slack with their Starliner capsule. Or at least, try to, as Starliner hasn’t exactly had the best track record so far. Although by the 2030s SpaceX plans to have transitioned most, if not all, of its operations to Starship, one does wonder if a big enough check from Uncle Sam could change its mind.

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What Are Your Indispensable Software Skills?

September 19, 2026 by Elliot Williams 47 Comments

Using tools properly takes skill, and this goes for software tools as well as hardware. You don’t just buy a paintbrush and on day one paint the Mona Lisa. Similarly, you can’t just open up a CAD program and whip out whatever 3D objects your heart desires, or fire up Vim and start typing. Software tools take a bit of learning before you can wield them efficiently, if even at all. And because you can’t be skilled at everything, no matter how hard we are all trying, it’s good to have at least some of the software tools you know do double duty.

Tom and I were watching [Clough42] design an electronics cabinet for a CNC machine. He does a lot of CNC machining and design work, so he’s no stranger to CAD software. So he downloaded all of the parts that he needed inside cabinet, slid them onto virtual DIN rails, modeled the hinges, and made sure that everything fit before buying anything.

Now I know that some of you out there do CAD modeling like this all the time, but for Tom and I, who are 3D printerers and PCB layouterers, doing the CAD without then following through and finishing up with the CAM seemed a bit novel. I never open CAD unless I’m going to have a machine make the thing – otherwise I’d just draw it out on paper, right? But [Clough42]’s point is that getting models of all of the subparts is so easy these days, you might as well model it.

If, and this is the big “if”, you know your way around the CAD tool of your choice. If you don’t yet, it’s going to be a couple of days’ worth of effort to get there. But once you reach CAD nirvana, you’ll find it’s useful for sketching up anything that has a third dimension to it, not just stuff you need to print out.

What other software tools are like CAD in that once you know them well enough, a wealth of applications opens up before you? Of was this just an instance of having a hammer and everything looking like a nail?

Hackaday Podcast Episode 387: Superhuman Clocks, CAN In USB-C, And The Joys Of Bare Metal

September 18, 2026 by Tom Nardi 1 Comment

This week, Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start the episode off by discussing the latest CircuitPython developments before covering some impressive reverse engineering efforts, the benefits of modeling your projects in 3D, and some of the most incredible timepieces that have ever graced the pages of Hackaday.

You’ll also hear about the fascinating potential of combing 3D and UV printing, Linux on the ESP32, and a virtual TV station that pulls from the Internet Archive. The episode wraps up with a Hackaday Europe double-feature: one talk extols the virtues of keeping things simple through bare metal development, while the other covers off-world hacks and fixes that will make you want to sign up for Space Camp.

Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download, the MP3 way.

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast Episode 387: Superhuman Clocks, CAN In USB-C, And The Joys Of Bare Metal” →

This Week In Security: Flock Cameras Are Old, Microsoft Patches Patches, And Researchers Attack SSH

September 18, 2026 by Mike Kershaw 10 Comments

Leak site Distributed Denial of Secrets has released a dump of the filesystems of a Flock camera, and Micah Lee has published a dive into the contents. Apparently the Flock security model did not include “angry citizens with a hacksaw in the middle of the night” in the physical security category.

The first thing Micah notes is that the Flock hardware runs Android 8.1 (for those not keeping track, the current Android release is Android 17 released in June 2026). The version of Android running on the Flock camera was last patched in June of 2018, and the Linux kernel (3.18.71) is over nine years out of date, and the 3.18 series went end-of-life in 2019.

You might assume “wouldn’t an operating system this old have known vulnerabilities?”, and you’d be completely right. Micah calls out two in particular, one in the Qualcomm GPU which allows any program to manipulate kernel memory and gain root (similar, yet simpler, than the spate of kernel vulnerabilities this year that allowed manipulating memory via the disk IO cache), and the “WrongZone” vulnerability which allows a process to escalate to root via socket handling errors. You might also guess both of these have been patched, and again, you’d be right, in 2021 and 2018 respectively.

Digging deeper, Micah discovers that API keys with access into the Flock infrastructure appear to be hard-coded into the binaries. Each camera appears to request credentials from an authentication server, using the MAC address of the camera. After obtaining the credentials from an Okta Auth0 sign-in service, the Flock stores them, in plain text.

Also stored on the camera unencrypted are logs and position data: The camera dumped to Distributed Denial of Secrets came from a suburb of Milwaukee. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Flock Cameras Are Old, Microsoft Patches Patches, And Researchers Attack SSH” →

FLOSS Weekly Episode 882 With OSADL: Better Together

September 16, 2026 by Jonathan Bennett No comments

This week Jonathan chats with Jan Altenberg of the Open Source Automation Development Lab, a cooperative of nerds that care about Linux and Open Source! Jan and OSADL helped push Real Time Linux across the finish line, are looking at safety critical hardening, and general cooperating to make Open Source and Industry work better together.

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Linux Fu: Speak Up!

September 15, 2026 by Al Williams 23 Comments

Apparently, people hate typing. As every movie and TV show suggests, the future is talking to computers. There was a time when speech recognition was complex and not very good. But these days, even our lowly phones can do a pretty good job of speech recognition. Of course, one problem is that your phone probably isn’t actually doing the speech recognition. It sends it to the big business of your choice to interpret. I’ve been using Handy, a speech recognition system that works well for me. I’ve also looked at some that didn’t.

After all, it is sometimes nice to dictate to your computer, and it would be even nicer if you could keep your data local. On Windows, oddly enough, there is a well-developed speech feature that, as far as I can tell, almost no one talks about or uses. One video estimates that 99% of users don’t use it. Linux, of course, has many options, but historically, these have been difficult to set up or finicky.

Of course, the good news is that many of the Linux tools are open source and the models are quite good. That means other people have had the freedom to fork the tools and make them easier to use, at least in theory. The licensing of the models themselves may be different, but those will be hard to modify, anyway and they generally work well. The biggest problems on Linux isn’t the technology itself, but the tremendous variety of systems and setups.

Suppose you want to write a speech-to-text program. Will it work on ARM? What desktops will it integrate with? Can it use a GPU? What kind? What about specialized instructions in some CPUs? Then there’s the forced input situation; typing into arbitrary programs once you know what the user said. On X11, it is easy, but Wayland needs different handling.

A Shortcut

I’ve thought about using my phone with KDE Connect, which is an excellent program. It can let you use your phone as a keyboard and mouse for your Linux computer. Unfortunately, it is aimed at character-at-a-time input, and I’ve never found a way to make it work with voice.

Besides, the phone is beaming all the data to “the cloud.” You probably type things you’d rather not broadcast to the ether.

I had looked at Speech Note before, but it is sort of a speech recognition notepad. I didn’t find it seamless, and it didn’t work well on my system anyway. Vocalinux looks nice, but a quick test kept complaining that my Intel extensions were not available. Makes sense, since I have an AMD CPU. Even though the documentation said it should work, I was never able to get it to work.

The Easy Way

Turns out the application that worked readily on my machine was Handy. Keep in mind, Handy is just another tool that uses one of several models out there, along with other open-source tools. You might need to install some tools to deal with your system like xdotool or dotool, but they are probably already installed anyway. That isn’t to minimize the value of Handy. It is — well — Handy. You don’t have to load and configure models, set up a bunch of system-level hooks, or install a bunch of libraries. You install it, and it works.

You can configure it. The best model for you, for example, may depend on your machine and the languages you speak. You can configure the hotkeys and how the app types into your computer. But it does all the work of downloading and configuration. Continue reading “Linux Fu: Speak Up!” →