Rants

533 Articles

The Unreasonable Power Density Of Lithium-Ion

March 21, 2026 by 60 Comments

We’re all used to it by now, but I’d just like to reflect on how insanely power-packed lithium ion batteries are, and everything that’s afforded us. I’m trying to think of a gadget, a hobby, or nearly anything in my house that’s not touched by the battery chemistry.

I’m looking at my portable wireless keyboard in front of me, with a LiPo pack inside. Oddly enough, I’m charging it with a LiPo-based power bank, simply because the cable to the nearest USB-C adapter is too short. A gaming console, cell phone, and a DSLR camera are all within arms reach and powered with lithium.

It’s not just consumer stuff either. I fly FPV quads and airplanes for fun when I can, and of course those are made entirely possible by the combination of smaller brushless DC motors and their drivers, and the high-power-density LiPo packs that power them. For field recharging, I have a huge self-made LiIon pack that can keep them all in the air all day. These days, LiPo and LiIon tech is the heart of hacker projects big and small. Heck, we even powered this year’s Hackaday Supercon badge with a LiPo that allowed it to run all weekend on a charge for many folks, where in the past swapping out AAs during the event was commonplace.

The application that still blows my mind is that we recently got a solar installation on our roof, which means a huge LiFePo battery in the basement. And while it’s one thing to power noisy little quads on the battery tech, it somehow seems another to power our entire house, for multiple hours per day, from a battery. Granted it’s not a couple of AAA cells in a little black plastic box, but it’s simply amazing to run a washing machine, the fridge, the stove, and even the heating off of what amounts to a battery pack.

Of course, I’m aware of the costs of producing the cells, both in terms of money and the environmental damage. It’s not a free lunch, and I’m looking forward to both cleaner and cheaper energy storage chemistries in the future. But for now, I’m still in awe of the many options that lithium-based battery chemistry has brought us. May your pillows remain non-spicy!

This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on the web version of the newsletter. Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning? You should sign up!

What Is A Computer?

March 14, 2026 by 36 Comments

On the podcast, [Tom] and I were talking about the new generation of smartphones which are, at least in terms of RAM and CPU speed, on par with a decent laptop computer. If so, why not just add on a screen, keyboard, and mouse and use it as your daily driver? That was the question posed by [ETA Prime] in a video essay and attempt to do so.

Our consensus was that it’s the Android operating system holding it back. Some of the applications you might want to run just aren’t there, and on the open side of the world, even more are missing. Is the platform usable if you can’t get the software you need to get your work done?

But that’s just the computer-as-a-tool side of the equation. The other thing a computer is, at least to many of our kind of folk, is a playground. It’s a machine for experimenting with, and for having fun just messing around. Android has become way too polished to have fun, and recent changes on the Google side of things actively prevent you from installing arbitrary software. The hardware is similarly too slimmed-down to allow for experimentation.

Looking back, these have been the same stumbling blocks for the last decade. In 2018, I was wondering aloud why we as a community don’t hack on cell phones, and the answer then was the same as it is now – the software is not friendly to our kind. You can write phone apps, and I have tried to do so, but it’s just not fun.

The polar opposites of the smartphone-as-computer are no strangers in our community. I’m thinking of the Linux single-board computers, or even something like a Steam Deck, all of which are significantly less powerful spec-wise than a flagship cell phone, but which are in many ways much more suitable for hacking. Why? Because they make it easy to do the things that we like to do. They’re designed to be fun computers, and so we use them.

So for me, a smartphone isn’t a computer, but oddly enough it’s not because of the hardware. It’s because what I want out of a computer is more than Turing completeness. What I want is the fun and the freedom of computering.

This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on the web version of the newsletter. Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning? You should sign up!

Choice, Control, And Interruption

March 7, 2026 by 47 Comments

We were talking about [Maya Posch]’s rant on smartphones, “The Curse of the Everything Device”. Maya’s main point is that because the smartphone, or computer, can do everything, it’s hard for a person to focus down and do one thing without getting distracted, checking their whatever feed, or getting an important push notification about the Oscars. She was suggesting tying your hands to the mast by using a device that can only accommodate the one function, like a dedicated writing tool or word processor.

[Kristina Panos] compared the all-singing, all-dancing black rectangle to an everything-device of old: the all-in-one stereo receiver with built-in tape player, record player, and not just FM, but also AM radio receiver. The point being, the hi-fi device also does a whole lot of things but isn’t similarly cursed. The tape player never interrupts your listening to the AM radio station. When the record is over, it doesn’t swap over to FM. Your agency is required.

Similarly, it’s probably not intrinsically problematic that the smartphone has a camera, a web browser, text messages, and heck even a telephone built in. It’s how they interact with each other and the user, each vying for user attention, and interrupting with popups and alarms. It’s maybe a simple matter of software! (Says the hardware guy.)

Where would a distraction-free, but fully featured, phone begin? With the operating system? It would be perverse to limit you to one app at a time, or to make switching between them more cumbersome. How about turning off notifications, and relying on changing context only when you think about it? Maybe that’s a middle ground. How do you cope with the endless distractions offered to you by your smartphone? By your main computer?

This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on the web version of the newsletter. Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning? You should sign up!

California’s Problematic Attempt To Add Age-Verification To Software

March 5, 2026 by 87 Comments

Last year California’s Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043) was signed into law, requiring among other things that operating system providers implement an API for age verification purposes. With the implementation date of January 1, 2027 slowly encroaching this now has people understandably agitated. So what are the requirements, and what will its impact be, as it affects not only OS developers but also application stores and developers?

The required features for OS developers include an interface at account setup during which the person indicates which of the four age brackets they fit into. This age category then has to be used by application developers and application stores to filter access to the software. Penalties for non-compliance go up to $2,500 per affected child if the cause is neglect and up to $7,500 if the violation was intentional.

As noted in the Tom’s Hardware article, CA governor Newsom issued a statement when signing the unanimously passed bill, saying that he hopes the bill gets amended due to how problematic it would be to implement and unintended effects. Of course, the bigger question is whether this change requires more than adding a few input fields and checkboxes to an OS’ account setup and an API call or two.

Continue reading “California’s Problematic Attempt To Add Age-Verification To Software” →

Art of 3D printer in the middle of printing a Hackaday Jolly Wrencher logo

The Joys Of 3D Printing

February 28, 2026 by 45 Comments

Al and I were talking on the podcast today about a sweet 3D printed wide-format camera build, and we got to musing on why we 3D-print.

For Al, it’s an opportunity to experiment with 3D printing itself: tweaking his machines to get the best performance out of them. Other people make small, functional objects that they need in their daily life, like bag clips or spare parts for broken appliances. Some folks go for the ornamental or the aesthetic. The kids in my son’s class all seem obsessed with sci-fi props and fidget toys. The initial RepRap ideal was to replace all commercial fabrication with machines owned by the individual, rather than by companies – it was going to be Marxist revolutionary.

But there’s another group of 3D printer enthusiasts that I think doesn’t get enough coverage, and I’m going to call them the hobbyist industrial designers. These are the people who design a custom dog-poop-bag holder that exactly fits their extra-wide dog leash, not because they couldn’t find one that fit in the pet store, but because it’s simply fun to design and fabricate things. (OK, that’s literally me.)

It’s fun to learn CAD tools, to learn about how things are designed, how they work, and how to manufacture them at least in quantity one. Dreaming, designing, fabricating, failing, and repeating until you get it right is a great joy. And then you get to use the poop-bag holder every day for a few years, until you decide to refine the design and incorporate the lessons learned on the tough streets of practical use.

Of course none of this is exclusive to 3D printing. There were always people who designed-and-built things in the metal machine shop, or made their creations out of wood. In that sense, the 3D printer is just another tool, and the real fun isn’t in using the 3D printer, but rather in the process of bringing things out of your mind and into the world. So maybe there is nothing new here, but the latitude that 3D printing affords the hobby designer is amazing, and that makes it all the more fun, and challenging.

So do you 3D print for necessity, to stick it to the man, to pimp your printer, for the mini-figs, or simply for the joy of the process of making things? It’s all good. 3D printing is a big tent.

This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on the web version of the newsletter. Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning? You should sign up!

Reflections On Ten Years With The Wrencher

February 27, 2026 by 26 Comments

An auspicious anniversary passed for me this week, as it’s a decade since I started writing for Hackaday. In that time this job has taken me all over  Europe, it’s shown me the very best and most awesome things our community has to offer, and I hope that you have enjoyed my attempts to share all of that with you. It’s worth a moment to reflect on the last ten years in terms of what has made our world during that time. Continue reading “Reflections On Ten Years With The Wrencher” →

The Curse Of The Everything Device

February 26, 2026 by 105 Comments

In theory having a single device that combines the features of multiple dedicated devices is a great idea, saving a lot of space, time and money. However, in reality it mostly means that these features now conflict with each other, force us to deal with more complex devices that don’t last nearly as long, and become veritable vampires for your precious attention.

Whereas in the olden days a phone was just used for phone calls, now it’s also a video and photo camera, multimedia computer, pager, and more, but at any point an incoming phone call can interrupt what you are doing. There’s also always the temptation of doom scrolling on one of the infinite ‘social media’ apps. Even appliances like televisions and refrigerators are like that now, adding ‘smarts’ that also vie for your attention, whether it’s with advertisements, notifications, or worse.

Meanwhile trying to simply do some writing work on your PC is a battle against easy distractions, leading people to flee to the digital equivalent of typewriters out of sheer desperation. Similarly, we increasingly see ‘dumb’ phones, and other single-task devices making a comeback, both as commercial options and as DIY projects by the community.

Are we seeing the end of the ‘everything device’ and the return to a more simple time?

Continue reading “The Curse Of The Everything Device” →