PETG: The PLA Filament Alternative That Just Works

September 1, 2026 by Maya Posch 36 Comments

A typical response to the previous article on why PLA filament is so darn brittle. This has led some people to not use PLA filament at all, while others promote using PLA only for prototyping and throw-away parts, especially in light of PLA being compostable under the right conditions. For many mechanical parts, people turn to PETG.

Much like the PET polymer used for everything from food containers to drink bottles, PETG is durable, more resistant to degradation through mechanisms like hydrolysis and its filament form doesn’t need to be coddled like PLA does. PETG, on the other hand, tends to come from crude oil and shrugs at industrial composting conditions.

In terms of durability, degradation mechanisms and recyclability, is PETG the basic FDM filament which we should all just be using?

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Defeating Bacteria In Hot Water Systems With A Heat Exchanger

August 31, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 64 Comments

The average hot water is a relatively simple appliance to understand. It uses gas or electricity to dump energy into water in the form of heat, keeping it at a pleasant temperature for uses like bathing and cleaning. Basic mechanisms are in place to ensure the water stays at a relatively constant temperature, neither too hot where it could cause burns, nor too cold such that it wouldn’t be fit for purpose.

One of the problems, though, is that sometimes storing water at the desired temperature can create the perfect breeding ground for bacteria. However, a neat little trick developed by NIST could solve that problem rather elegantly.

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Hackaday Links: August 30, 2026

August 30, 2026 by Tom Nardi 12 Comments

The big news today is, of course, the successful launch and deployment of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope earlier this morning. The space agency’s latest observatory lifted off at 7:26 AM Eastern from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, and by 8:00 AM it was separated from the rocket’s upper stage and flying on its own.

While the sound and fury of launch is exciting, it’s just the beginning of the journey for Roman. It will take several months for the spacecraft to complete its roughly 1.5 million-kilometer trek out to Earth’s second Lagrange point (L2), where it will set up shop near — in cosmic terms, anyway — the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Along the way, it will switch on and test various systems and components, with its primary 300 megapixel infrared camera scheduled to power up in three weeks or so.

There’s a lot to cover about the Roman Space Telescope. Built from spy satellite spare parts donated by the National Reconnaissance Office and featuring a field of view 100 times greater than that of Hubble, its launch is widely considered to be one of the most important scientific milestones of the decade. We’ll be bringing you more about the past, present, and future of this flagship mission as it progresses.

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Same As It Ever Was

August 29, 2026 by Elliot Williams 138 Comments

Whether you like it or not, the use of LLMs to write code is kind of a big deal at the moment. We’ve been asking ourselves what, if anything, this means for us here at Hackaday. Should we try to figure out what percentage of a project was done by an actual human and how much was done by a machine? Does it really matter? What is our AI policy anyway?

Clearly, Hackaday is pro-human. We’re in it for the hackers as much as for the hacks. Our community is, like Soylent Green, made of people. It’s your inspirations and innovations that keep us reading and writing every day. And we produce 100% of our content the old-fashioned way, with projects selected through the taste and judgement of our writers, and their own words telling the story.

What about the hacks? We’ve seen a lot of projects recently that were coded with the help of an LLM. Does that diminish the work? In the end, what rings truest to us is what has always been Hackaday’s editorial guiding star: Is there something special in the hack that makes it worth talking about? Then we write about it. Was it written using vim or emacs? Did the author consult friends or a chatbot while working on the project? That’s not really relevant.

But in the past few years, the BS-generation machines have found our hobby, and we’re finding a lot more projects that don’t have any spark to them. We’re seeing circuits that make no sense, and claims that defy physics. Of course, we always have. The LLM-nonsense project is today’s version of the perpetual motion machines of old. Just like we never trust a hardware project that is all renders, seeing only AI-generated images is a huge red flag. It’s our job to separate out the wheat from the chaff for you all, but it’s something that you must be doing everyday as well.

We’ve seen amazing hacks over Hackaday’s 22-year history. Hackaday is older than YouTube and older than Stack Overflow. We’ve seen technology come and go. We’ve seen C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser gate. (OK, maybe not.) And in the end, our AI policy is our same-old policy: we write up hacks that inspire us in the hope that they inspire you.

So if you’re using Claude to help you with the UI bits, or if you’re hand-writing it all in assembly, or wiring up the logic in diodes, we just want to see your cool hacks. And we hope that our collective signal will be so loud that we drown out the noise, at least in our own little corner of the hacker universe.

Hackaday Podcast Episode 384: OCR MOD Records, Magical PCBs, And The Gravity Of Space Stations

August 28, 2026 by Al Williams 1 Comment

What did Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams read in Hackaday last week? Probably everything, but you can tune in and hear about their favorites on this week’s podcast. They heard from lots of listeners this week, and also saw DIY projects running from a 3D-printed Stirling engine, to clogs, to LEDs.

There are some over-the-top hacks like a refit for a decades-old watch to do tap-to-pay and a — for lack of a better word — a record player that optically reads MOD files. Want to emulate an iPod? Talk to Eliza? Print a hand-operated rail car? Hackaday is the place to read about it all.

The can’t miss articles included a talk from Hackaday Europe about making magical PCBs and a not-so-brief history of space stations starting in the 1800s.

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 in MP3 suitable for hand-decoding.

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This Week In Security: Android Malware, VOIP Hijack, Signal Contact Discovery, And TeamPCP Arrests

August 28, 2026 by Mike Kershaw 4 Comments

On GitHub, [AyaanB] details buying a cheap Android TV streaming device, looking for, and finding, baked-in malware.

Multiple warnings have been issued by the FBI and CISA regarding malware on media box Android devices. Many devices have been caught participating in botnets providing residential proxies, ad-click fraud, and DDOS services. [AyaanB] sets out to discover if a $30 set-top streaming box is pre-infected with malware, and extracting it – without ever letting the device talk to the Internet or access other devices on the local network.

Picking a device named in the advisories, [AyaanB] discovered that it was, indeed, preloaded with multiple app stores and applications that wouldn’t typically make sense on a set-top TV box. After identifying the serial port test pads and obtaining a low-voltage serial adapter, they were able to gain access to the bootloader and from there dump the contents of the MMC over TFTP.

With the entire filesystem accessible out-of-body, proving it was infected with malware at the factory becomes simple: the malware is signed as a system application, baked onto the system partition of the MMC, granted SELinux exceptions to mark it as a system binary with shell privileges, and has multiple launch scripts to make sure it is executed even if partially removed. With the malware identified, [AyaanB] continues to dig through to uncover the capabilities.

By installing hooks into the low-level Android process spawning system, the malware installs hooks into every application as it is launched: even if an application isn’t trojaned already, by the time it finishes executing, it’s definitely been subverted. The functions patched and the methods used match the Vo1d botnet, which is used for account takeovers, residential proxies, free “VPN” services, and other unfriendly behavior.

Further digging into the system showed hooks for ad-click fraud, where hidden browser windows are allowed to run unthrottled and display overlays are configured to obscure ads below where the user may click. Other included tools bid in real-time ad auctions, claiming to directly publish ads to the user which may or may not be visible. To cap it all off, a root level backdoor allows botnet operators to access the systems directly and install additional tools.

Be sure to check out [AyaanB]’s writeup for more details on exfiltration methods and other malware found on the devices. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Android Malware, VOIP Hijack, Signal Contact Discovery, And TeamPCP Arrests” →

FLOSS Weekly Episode 879: Easy Like Butter

August 26, 2026 by Jonathan Bennett No comments

This week Jonathan chats with Nathan Freitas of the Guardian Project! What is going on at the forefront of Open Source and privacy advocacy? Where are we on a true Tor browser on iOS? And what’s the ideal solution to the Android Lockdown issue? Watch to find out!

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