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GPS And Its Little Modules

September 8, 2025 by 17 Comments

Ever want to find your device on the map? Think we all do sometimes. The technology you’ll generally use for that is called Global Positioning System (GPS) – listening to a flock of satellites flying in the orbit, and comparing their chirps to triangulate your position.

The GPS system, built by the United States, was the first to achieve this kind of feat. Since then, new flocks have appeared in the orbit, like the Galileo system from the European Union, GLONASS from Russia, and BeiDou from China. People refer to the concept of global positioning systems and any generic implementation as Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), but I’ll call it GPS for the purposes of this article, and most if not all advice here will apply no matter which one you end up relying on. After all, modern GPS modules overwhelmingly support most if not all of these systems!

We’ve had our writers like [Lewin Day] talk in-depth about GPS on our pages before, and we’ve featured a fair few projects showing and shining light on the technology. I’d like to put my own spin on it, and give you a very hands-on introduction to the main way your projects interface with GPS.

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Hackaday Links: September 7, 2025

September 7, 2025 by 7 Comments

Two weeks ago, it was holographic cops. This week, it’s humanoid robot doctors. Or is it? We’re pretty sure it’s not, as MediBot, supposedly a $10,000 medical robot from Tesla, appears to be completely made up. Aside from the one story we came across, we can’t find any other references to it, which we think would make quite a splash in the media if it were legit. The article also has a notable lack of links and no quotes at all, even the kind that reporters obviously pull from press releases to make it seem like they actually interviewed someone.

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Psst… Got A Second? Here Are The 2025 One-Hertz Challenge Winners

September 5, 2025 by 20 Comments

Even with teachers with names like Kirchhoff and Helmholtz, old Heinrich Hertz himself likely didn’t have the slightest idea that his name would one day become an SI unit. Less likely still would have been the idea that Hackaday would honor him with the 2025 One-Hertz Challenge.

The challenge was deliberately — dare we say, fiendishly? — simple: Do something, anything, but do it once a second. Flash a light, ring a bell, click a relay, or even spam comments on a website other than Hackaday; anything at all, but do it at as close to one Hertz as possible. These are our favorite kinds of contests, because the simplicity affords a huge canvas for the creative mind to paint upon while still providing an interesting technical constraint that’s just difficult enough to make things spicy.

And boy, did you respond! We’ve received over a hundred entries since we announced the contest back in June, meaning that many of you spent 4,662,000 seconds of your summer (at least those of you above the equator) rising to the challenge. The time was well spent, with projects that pushed the limits of what we even expected.

While we loved ’em all, we had to winnow them down to the top three, each of which receives a $150 gift certificate from our sponsor, DigiKey. Let’s take a look at them, along with our favorite runners-up.

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Returning To An Obsolete Home Movie Format

September 4, 2025 by 7 Comments

A few years ago, I bought an 8 mm home movie camera in a second hand store. I did a teardown on it here and pulled out for your pleasure those parts of it which I considered interesting. My vague plan was to put a Raspberry Pi in it, but instead it provided a gateway into the world of 8mm film technology. Since then I’ve recreated its Single 8 cartridge as a 3D printable model, produced a digital Super 8 cartridge, and had a movie camera with me at summer hacker camps.

When I tore down that Single 8 camera though, I don’t feel I did the subject justice. I concentrated on the lens, light metering, and viewfinder parts of the system, and didn’t bring you the shutter and film advance mechanism. That camera also lacked a couple of common 8 mm camera features; its light metering wasn’t through the lens, and its zoom lens was entirely manual. It’s time to dig out another 8 mm camera for a further teardown.

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Bootstrapping Android Development: A Survival Guide

September 4, 2025 by 26 Comments

Developing Android applications seems like it should be fairly straightforward if you believe the glossy marketing by Google and others. It’s certainly possible to just follow the well-trodden path, use existing templates and example code – or even use one of those WYSIWYG app generators – to create something passable that should work okay for a range of common applications. That’s a far cry from learning general Android development, of course.

The process has changed somewhat over the years, especially with the big move from the Eclipse-based IDE with the Android Development Tools (ADT) plugin, to today’s Jetbrains IntelliJ IDEA-based Android Studio. It’s fortunately still possible to download just the command-line tools to obtain the SDK components without needing the Google-blessed IDE. Using the CLI tools it’s not only possible to use your preferred code editor, but also integrate with IDEs that provide an alternate Android development path, such as Qt with its Qt Creator IDE.

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Ask Hackaday: Now You Install Your Friends’ VPNs. But Which One?

September 3, 2025 by 75 Comments

Something which may well unite Hackaday readers is the experience of being “The computer person” among your family or friends. You’ll know how it goes, when you go home for Christmas, stay with the in-laws, or go to see some friend from way back, you end up fixing their printer connection or something. You know that they would bridle somewhat if you asked them to do whatever it is they do for a living as a free service for you, but hey, that’s the penalty for working in technology.

Bad Laws Just Make People Avoid Them

There’s a new one that’s happened to me and no doubt other technically-minded Brits over the last few weeks: I’m being asked to recommend, and sometimes install, a VPN service. The British government recently introduced the Online Safety Act, which is imposing ID-backed age verification for British internet users when they access a large range of popular websites. The intent is to regulate access to pornography, but the net has been spread so wide that many essential or confidential services are being caught up in it. To be a British Internet user is to have your government peering over your shoulder, and while nobody’s on the side of online abusers, understandably a lot of my compatriots want no part of it. We’re in the odd position of having 4Chan and the right-wing Reform Party alongside Wikipedia among those at the front line on the matter. What a time to be alive.

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