Hackaday Links: August 2, 2026

August 2, 2026 by Tom Nardi 1 Comment

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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Hackaday Links: July 26, 2026

July 26, 2026 by Tom Nardi 15 Comments

At a time when so-called “artificial intelligence” seems inescapable, we were encouraged to see news that Amazon will be cracking down on third-party sellers that use AI-generated images for their product listings. They won’t be prevented from using the images, but they will need to clearly indicate that they don’t represent reality and were produced via artificial means. This comes in response to a recently enacted New York law that requires the disclosure of AI in advertisements.

Will this be the end of the cat sleeping bag?

But it’s not quite a clear cut as it might seem on the surface, as the New York law is actually about AI-generated people rather than products. Specifically, it’s designed to make it clear when a “synthetic performer” has been used in place of a human actor. As such, it would appear that the easiest way for Amazon sellers to dodge the new rule is to simply not include any humans in their AI slop images and videos. In other words, they can continue to post fake pictures of products without having to inform the consumer so long as they don’t show a fake person holding it.

Under normal circumstances we’d leave something like this next one for our weekly security column, but the utter lack of security in the Pope’s official “Click To Pray” mobile application revealed by researcher BobDaHacker on Friday is just too good a story to pass up. For one thing, who knew that there was an “official” prayer app? We don’t dabble in theology around these parts, but we’re fairly sure the good book didn’t mention anything about requiring a smartphone to give praise.

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Hackaday Links: July 19, 2026

July 19, 2026 by Tom Nardi 6 Comments

We’ll start this week off by giving our congratulations to Skyroot Aerospace of India for successfully launching the country’s first privately developed orbital rocket yesterday. The company’s Vikram-1 booster stands 24 m (79 ft) tall and uses a somewhat unusual four-stage arrangement, with the first three stages using solid propellant and the final liquid-fueled stage being responsible for putting the payload into a precise orbit. With this successful launch, India becomes only the third country in the world with a private company capable of performing orbital launches.

Generally, the rocket should be moving when the countdown hits zero.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have SpaceX’s prototype Starship, which elected not to leave Earth during a last-second (literally) launch termination on Thursday. Aborted launches are, of course, nothing new in the world of rocketry, especially when dealing with an in-development vehicle that has 33 engines that need to fire up at the same moment before it can leave the pad. But this dramatic abort was unique as it was the first time lift-off of the massive 124.4 meter (408 ft) rocket had been called off when the engines were already running.

Onboard systems took advantage of the very narrow window between the time the Raptor engines are switched on and the rocket actually leaves the launchpad to decide that it was not a good day to visit space after all. Word from SpaceX is that two of the Raptor engines on the first stage will be replaced and that they should be ready to make another launch attempt sometime this upcoming week.

While getting rockets off the ground is never easy, one thing that seems to have no trouble going up is the price of gasoline. Even still, Americans seem largely uninterested in electric vehicles, or at the very least, the slate of EVs that are currently available to them — especially now that the $7,500 federal tax credit has ended. Yesterday, TechCrunch ran an article about all the EVs that have exited the US market over the last year due to stagnant sales or import difficulties, and it’s quite a list.

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Hackaday Links: July 12, 2026

July 12, 2026 by Tom Nardi 14 Comments

Although we’d rather bring you news of clever modifications and repairs down on the farm, more often than not, the name “John Deere” has appeared on the pages of Hackaday because of their opposition to farmers actually being able to work on the machines their livelihoods depend on. But thanks to a settlement reached between the company and the Federal Trade Commission this week, farmers seem to have been handed a much-needed win in the Right to Repair battle.

When a lawsuit against a company ends in a settlement, it usually means spending money they would rather pay than go to court. Indeed, earlier cases against John Deere have resulted in plenty of checks being written. But this time around, the FTC agreement requires Deere to make its diagnostic and repair software available to owners and independent shops. It also has a clause that prevents them from retaliating against owners who want to handle their own repairs rather than going through the company’s official service channels — hard to believe that’s something that actually needs to be specified, but it does give you a hint as to just how bad the situation has been. We’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this story.

Sounds like the Feds were busy this week, as the Federal Communications Commission also gave the green light to Reflect Orbital to launch a prototype satellite for their controversial “sunlight as a service” concept. The company plans to put the spacecraft into a roughly 600 km orbit around the planet, where it will deploy its 324-square-meter reflector and angle itself to illuminate a spot on the ground. It might sound like something a Bond villain would come up with, but Reflect Orbital says the capability will be used to beam sunlight directly onto solar panels at night and to provide light for search-and-rescue operations.

As you might expect, providing such a service on a global scale would require many such reflectors, which is where the concern really comes in. Critics note that a sky full of literal mirrors can cause all sorts of issues, ranging from the scientific to the scenic. The American Astronomical Society points out that each satellite in the constellation could appear to be four times as bright as the full Moon, and that it’s possible an amateur sky watcher could get an eyeball full of redirected sunlight should one of them unexpectedly zip past the aperture of their backyard telescope.

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Hackaday Links: July 5, 2026

July 5, 2026 by Tom Nardi 8 Comments

Happy belated July 4th to all the readers from the United States — hopefully you aren’t reading this from a hospital bed after losing a hand or burning off your eyebrows. While we suspect amateur firework shows and their related injuries will be around for many years to come, we did note that many major cities switched over to drone shows this year.

At least on paper, the appeal is obvious. Beyond the fact that drones are safer and quieter than pyrotechnics, they’re also capable of far more complex displays. Good luck trying to draw George Washington’s face in the sky with exploding rockets. But even if it’s a little more than nostalgia, there’s still something about the sights and sounds of fireworks that enthrall audiences. For many, the whole “rockets’ red glare” thing is a bit more meaningful than the “drones’ red LEDs.”

Earlier this week, we brought you news that Sony would stop producing physical PlayStation discs in January 2028. Many gamers are understandably concerned about the long-term implications such a move will have for software ownership, and while the negative reactions online haven’t bothered Sony enough to get them to amend their plans, they have clarified the situation with developers by explaining that games published before the cutoff date aren’t impacted. So if a developer has a hit title that drops in the summer of 2027 and they want to keep cranking out discs, additional orders can still be placed. Not much of a reprieve, but it will give the community a little more time to figure out what comes next.

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Hackaday Links: June 21, 2026

June 21, 2026 by Tom Nardi 6 Comments

Today marks the summer solstice, the longest day of the year and the start of astronomical summer in the Northern Hemisphere. This doesn’t really have much to do with hacking hardware or building gadgets other than the fact that from this point on you’ll have progressively less daylight hours to do it in each day. Of course, if you do your best work in the middle of the night this won’t impact things much.

If you’re as likely to find a controller in your hand as a soldering iron in the evenings, you might be interested in a recent filing against Sony. Lawyers representing a group of four gamers allege that the entertainment giant is violating a California law that says digital storefronts need to make it clear that buyers don’t technically own the games in question but are merely licensing them — a license which, as we’ve seen in the past, can be revoked or modified at any time with no restitution made to the purchaser.

Now while we agree conceptually that selling gamers a license rather than an actual copy of the game is clearly a one-sided deal, we’re still not sure this case has a lot of merit. As far as we can tell, Sony does make it clear in the fine print that you’re not really going to own anything once they take your money. Or, at the very least, they make it equally as clear as any other company that’s selling digital downloads these days. Should the court actually find that said fine print is a little too fine, it could conceivably have ramifications throughout the entertainment industry. This is certainly a case to keep an eye on.

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Hackaday Links: June 14, 2026

June 14, 2026 by Tom Nardi No comments

Times are tough out there, and many are starting to feel the pressure at the grocery store checkout line or the gas pump. But whenever you start to worry about affording life’s necessities, take comfort in the knowledge that somebody is so flush with cash that on Friday they decided to treat themselves and spend $3 million for a sealed copy of Super Mario Bros for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Although we’re not going to say it necessarily justifies the insane price — a new record for the most ever paid for a video game, incidentally — Heritage Auctions does note in their press release that this is an exceptionally rare version of what’s admittedly one of the most iconic pieces of software ever produced. This is only one of three copies of this particular variant known to exist, which Nintendo apparently distributed to test markets in the United States ahead of the game’s official 1985 release.

In slightly more modern gaming news, Asha Sharma, the new head of Microsoft’s Xbox division, has been making some big swings to try and get Microsoft’s gaming division back on track after years of declining sales. As part of that effort, she recently penned an article detailing some of the challenges the company is facing, which includes some interesting hardware details.

According to the blog post, she claims that in February, the cost of memory and storage components for the Xbox console had doubled compared to the previous year. But those numbers have jumped again, and by the time the holidays roll around, she expects they’ll be paying five times what they did in 2024. That’s bad news for anyone looking to put an Xbox under the tree come Christmas, but even worse news as the company works on the console’s successor. Considering that today’s hardware from Sony and Microsoft can already set you back $700 USD depending on which version you get, it seems like we’re approaching a point where gaming consoles could price themselves out of the market.

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