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I Think We Should See Other SBCs

November 5, 2026 by 71 Comments

Are you currently designing a project for a common single-board computer (SBC), and do you expect other people to build your project, too? We routinely feature projects that do exactly this. Well, turns out SBC availability is a problem now – and I’d like to teach you how to pick SBC alternatives, mostly to the Raspberry Pi boards.

We had SBC shortages before, but 2026 has beat them all, and it doesn’t look like it’ll stop within even a few months. RAM prices have incinerated the supply side of single-board computer availability, and I suspect that consumer SBC use in Russian drones had a noticeable impact, too.

Less-utilized SBCs always brought their own advantages to the table. If you didn’t like that the Pi Zero came with only 512MB of RAM, you could always buy an Orange Pi or a Radxa board with 2GB or 4GB for a meager increase in price. Now, there’s even more of a motivation to explore what’s on offer!

This year, SBC prices and availability have both jumped up tremendously, and even the Zero 2W stocks have evaporated. Me, I had to make a few of my projects way more flexible way quicker. Now, I have some experience to share!

Finding Your New SBC Friends

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As LLMs Devour The Storage Market, Fujifilm Bets On Tape

November 3, 2026 by 21 Comments

One of the interesting things about the slow-moving AI apocalypse we seem to be trapped in is watching the knock-on effects reverberate through communities and economies. We’ve seen how — and lamented that — the LLM-driven datacenter build up has increased demand for GPUs, RAM and SSDs directly, and we watched that in turn increase demand for traditional, spinning rust hard drives. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before demand came for the tapes, too. Yes, tapes: good old fashioned “sticky tape and rust”. With AI increasing demand for archival material, Fujifilm has announced they’ll be increasing production by 5x through 2028.

This production increase is specifically targeting about the latest and greatest 10th generation of Linear Tape, Open (LTO) which Fujifilm has produced since its inception. Indeed, Fujifilm has been in the tape storage business for almost as long as we’ve been storing data on magnetic tape, with their first forays into the field dating to the 1950s. The Ultrium10 tapes are available in 30 TB and 40 TB standard sizes, which are advertised as 75 TB and 100 TB based on a perhaps-optimistic 2.5:1 compression ratio. Given it’s already a linear standard and not exactly blazing fast at 400 uncompressed MB/s, there’s no reason not to compress the heck out of data being sent to cold-storage on tape. While not great by modern SSD or HDD standards, those are dizzying numbers if the last tape drive you used was a Datasette.

Still, it shows that the industry is reacting to the same trends that have hackers bringing surplus tape drives into their homelabs. This isn’t a small bet by Fujifilm, with 10 billion yen (about $63 million) at stake.

While some of us have been making more use of optical media these days, it looks like Sony isn’t reversing course on getting out of the Blu-ray business, so don’t expect to see giant disk changers coming to a server room near you. Tape bots are apparently a different story.

Header image: Fujifilm.

Looking For A Cellular Modem?

November 2, 2026 by 20 Comments

Cellular modems come and go, and they can be tricky beasts to tame – yet, in every portable computer project I’ve worked with, “LTE modem” has been a top-three request from the audience. If you’re building a cyberdeck or a general Linux portable, then a cellular modem’s cellular data uplink, SMS support, and even voice calls, can be the killer addition you need to make your deck a true daily machine. These days, I see that the demand for cyberdecks is rising, my own projects could greatly benefit from modems too, and yet it sometimes it feels like informational drought. I think now is a great time to make a listicle, detailing a few modems you should keep in mind.

Testing out prospective modems can be costly and time-intensive – design a board, purchase a few sample modems at inflated prices, only to have your idea completely blocked by elusive firmware issues at the very last step. I’ve given some starting-from-scratch tips before, having shown how to use mPCIe cards for testbench purposes. Today, I’d rather give you a few battle-tested modems that others already use with great success, and describe the features you can get out of one.

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2026 Hackaday Supercon: All The Speakers!

October 29, 2026 by 4 Comments

We announced our first round of speakers, and then the workshops, and we were going to dribble out updates on the rest of the speakers as they came in, but then time slipped away from us. So we are left here announcing a veritable cornucopia of twenty wonderful talks that you absolutely won’t want to miss.

Supercon is just about a week away, and there are still a few tickets left, so grab them now before it’s too late.

And the talks are just half the fun. Between food, merriment, a killer badge with the biggest e-paper display that you’ve ever seen, and all the assorted shenanigans, it’s the highlight of our hacking year. Come join us!

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JPEG-XL Is Back On The Menu

October 28, 2026 by 41 Comments

Many of the image formats we’re familiar with have been around for decades. We all know JPEG and PNG like the back of our hands, and GIF even had a bit of a resurgence when tiny annoying looping animations became cool again on social media. There has been a growth in newer formats, though, like WEBP, and AVIF, with various platforms and software companies adopting them for greater efficiency, performance, and image quality.

Amongst the new crop of formats vying for relevance is JPEG XL. It was touted as a format that improved on what JPEG could do in the lossy compression space, while also adding on a lossless mode. There were grand hopes that it would become a universal replacement for all existing raster formats on the Web. A major problem was that Google was seemingly against it, only to backflip—with the format now slated to hit the big time with renewed backing from the search giant. So what’s going on?

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Linux Kernel Drops AI Tag Requirement, Uses Meta AI For Code Reviews

October 15, 2026 by 99 Comments

Since we last covered the way that the Linux Kernel project has been dealing with the influx of code created using LLM-based coding assistants, all the way back in April, things have changed a lot, with most recently the Linux maintainers deciding to fully drop the requirement to mark LLM-assisted commits with the Assisted-by tag.

While not a fully uncontroversial decision – as also reported by Phoronix – with key maintainers already having made this decision it seems certain to proceed. This is not the only change made fairly recently, with a ‘Sashiko’ bot introduced that is supposed to handle code reviews.

In a July LKML post [Linus Torvalds] defends this decision, with a follow-up post in August by [Jakub Kicinski] it being stated that budget has been secured for using Meta’s LLMs, using said LLM-based resources for reviewing patches, as well as creating and editing commit messages. As noted by [Jakub] they’re running multiple frontier models on each patch to try and weed out confabulations.

Whether this will prove to be the right decision remains to be seen. Whereas most open source projects have firmly banished or heavily curtailed LLM-based contributions on slop, copyright as well as licensing grounds, the Linux Kernel project may be an interesting experiment in what the outcome of the exact opposite approach will be.

2026 Hackaday Supercon: Workshops Are Open!

October 14, 2026 by 12 Comments

Supercon is Hackaday’s annual gathering, and you absolutely need to be there.

Today, we’re pleased to announce our lineup of workshops, and it’s more than we’ve ever offered, thanks to moving to a bigger venue and to our awesome community of hackers stepping up to give them. There’s something here for everyone, so if anything strikes your fancy, be sure to book yourself a slot soon. (If you have a ticket already, you sign up for the workshop as an “add-on”, BTW.) Workshops always fill up fast, due to the small and hands-on nature of the beast.

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