Hackaday Links: September 13, 2026

September 13, 2026 by Tom Nardi 4 Comments

We try to steer clear of politics and societal issues here at Hackaday, so a protest is not usually the sort of thing we’d cover. But we figure it’s safe enough to bend the rules a bit when the ones doing the protesting happen to be robots.

About 30 bots gathered — or at least were commanded to gather by the event organizers — in Warsaw to spur discussion about the impact AI and robots will have on the labor market. Beyond getting public and media attention, the demonstration was also designed to raise awareness of what modern humanoid robots can do. While we appreciate the idea of showing robots taking the “jobs” of the protesters, it does seem somewhat ironic that marching around and chanting for hours is exactly the sort of repetitive work that most people would be happy to see taken over by machines.

Although we hope these protests remain peaceful, there’s always a chance things can turn violent when tensions are high. Should things go south, take comfort in the knowledge that a company in Japan has introduced a robot ambulance service. It’s probably more accurate to compare it with roadside assistance, as the goal is to repair the robot on-site. That said, if the fault is more serious, they can bring the damaged bot back to HQ. Of course, the major difference between this program and a traditional ambulance service is that they’ll be able to bring along a spare robot that can take over the patient’s job while repairs are being made. Should anyone start doing that for humans, expect a few more protests.

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Hackaday Links: September 6, 2026

September 6, 2026 by Tom Nardi 7 Comments

Yesterday, Isar Aerospace secured its place in the history books when the upper stage of their Spectrum rocket put a payload of CubeSats into low Earth orbit (LEO). Not only does this make them the first European company to achieve such a feat, but it also marks the first time a booster departing from continental Europe has reached orbit. Not bad for a second attempt.

Standing 28 meters (92 feet) tall, the two-stage Spectrum rocket is just shy of half the size of the SpaceX Falcon 9 and designed to put a maximum of 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds) into LEO and 700 kg (1,500 lb) into the Sun-synchronous orbits used by Earth observation satellites. That puts its performance considerably ahead of other commercial launchers such as Rocket Lab’s Electron. Although the booster is not reusable, Isar Aerospace has stated they’re targeting a respectable launch cost of €10,000 ($11,700) per kilogram. The German company notes there are several more Spectrum vehicles currently in production, and when their new factory is operational, they’ll have the capacity to produce up to 40 of them each year.

In other European space news, BepiColombo has now entered what the European Space Agency (ESA) is calling the “arrival phase” of its nearly decade-long journey to Mercury. On Thursday, the spacecraft jettisoned its ion propulsion module as it had achieved the necessary trajectory and velocity to be captured by the planet’s gravitational field when it swoops by in November.

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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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Hackaday Links: August 23, 2026

August 23, 2026 by Tom Nardi 1 Comment

We’ll start this week off with some disappointing, though not entirely unexpected, news — the ambitious commercial mission to save NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is officially a bust. The space agency provided an update earlier this week explaining that the attitude control issues with the LINK spacecraft that started a few weeks after it launched will prevent it from being able to safely dock with the Swift Observatory and boost its altitude. As such, the space telescope is now expected to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and burn up before the end of the year.

Although LINK won’t be able to live up to its name, NASA did say operator Katalyst Space has been given permission to continue with the rendezvous attempt. The two craft won’t actually make contact with each other, but teams on both sides feel there’s lessons to be learned and data to be collected by seeing the orbital dance of these two vehicles play out for as long as possible.

Speaking of hardware that couldn’t quite hit its design goals, TechCrunch is reporting that a class action lawsuit has been filed against Oura by customers that say the company made misleading claims about the sleep-tracking accuracy of their smart rings. Namely, that the rings could somehow detect which stage of sleep the wearer was in with only the pulse and temperature sensors it has onboard.

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Hackaday Links: August 16, 2026

August 16, 2026 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

We’re no strangers to unusual hardware failures around these parts, but even so, a swarm of jellyfish clogging up the works is a new one to us. That’s exactly what happened to the cooling system at the Gravelines nuclear power plant in France earlier this week, resulting in three reactors having to be shut down. This isn’t even an isolated incident, as POLITICO points out that the same thing actually happened last year around this same time.

So why are jellyfish staging an annual protest against nuclear power? A warming of the North Sea has extended breeding seasons and produced larger populations of the plankton that the jellyfish feed on. This is great for the gelatinous sea creatures, but not exactly ideal if you’re trying to pump the water they live in through a complex cooling system. The French installed filter screens and monitoring systems after this happened in 2025, but clearly they’re going to need to keep working on the problem.

From a new problem to a very old one, a BBC investigation has revealed that the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) Blood and Transplant department was inadvertently leaking private patient data by sending it in the clear over the pager network. Sniffing pager messages was fairly trivial decades ago, and is even easier these days thanks to the proliferation of cheap software-defined radios and open source decoding software. Given the fragility of the underlying communication network they use, the NHS announced they were going to stop using pagers by 2021, but clearly not everyone got the memo.

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Hackaday Links: August 9, 2026

August 9, 2026 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

Bad news for anyone who was hoping for some relief from the memory shortage — Digitimes is reporting that the production capacity of major players such as Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix has already been booked for 2027 due to record demand. Their industry sources indicate that what we’re experiencing currently is just a prelude to when things get really ugly, which is why customers are paying a premium to lock in their orders so far out.

Although there’s been no official word from either side of the transaction, the Digitimes article further points out that these sort of agreements are usually 3 to 5 year contracts. If that’s the case, and nothing changes in supply and demand equation, we could be in for a very rough ride. There’s a potential opportunity here for other manufacturers to step in and start producing DRAM, possibly even focusing on lower-performance offerings intended for the consumer market, but setting up those production lines isn’t going to happen overnight. It’s always possible the AI bubble could pop in the next couple of years, but we’re not sure we’d put money on it.

There’s a developing story this weekend about the breach of customer data over at Framework. The maker of modular and repairable computers has recently sent an email out to all customers that their names, email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses were leaked due to an upstream zero-day attack against database provider Metabase.

Metabase disclosed the breach on August 3rd, but we were mildly surprised to see that Framework doesn’t seem to have made any public acknowledgement of the event so far. As far as we can tell, the only reason there are copies of the email from them circulating online is because several customers posted it to social media. In their statements to sources such as TechCrunch, Framework reps were also hesitant to give hard details such as how many customers were impacted. While we’re fans of what Framework is trying to do in terms of hardware customization and repairability, we have to admit that being cagey about this sort of thing isn’t a good look.

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Hackaday Links: August 2, 2026

August 2, 2026 by Tom Nardi 2 Comments

About a month ago, we brought you word that the commercial rescue mission designed by Katalyst Space to save NASA’s Swift gamma-ray observatory had reached orbit and early indicators were looking good. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for things to start going sideways, and up until very recently, the situation seemed pretty dire. But according to an interview with Katalyst’s CEO published yesterday by Ars Technica, the company has made some impressive progress on getting things back under control.

For reasons unknown, the robotic vehicle started tumbling out of control last week. Shortly after that, mission controllers lost contact with Swift. After 24 hours without contact from the ground, the spacecraft automatically performed a sort of “hard reset” in an attempt to regain communications. That got it talking again, but somewhere along the way the craft overheated, which in turn cooked the control circuitry for the reaction wheels, which would usually be used to control its orientation. Not great, not terrible.

As of yesterday’s update, we now know that engineers have figured out a way to gimbal the thrust from the craft’s xenon-fueled electric thrusters — which were originally intended for orbit-raising — to counteract its spinning. It’s slow going as these thrusters don’t have a lot of kick, but it seems to be working. We’ll keep an eye on this one and let you know when we know more.

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