NASA is going back to the Moon! We’ll follow the crew of Artemis II every step of the way.
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Exposing A Radiation-Hardened 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi Receiver To 500 Kilograys
From outer space to down here on Earth, there are many places where ionizing radiation levels are high enough that they effectively bar access for humans, but also make life miserable for anything containing semiconductor technology. This is especially true for anything involving wireless communications, such as Wi-Fi. However, recently Japanese researchers have created a Wi-Fi chip that is claimed to be so radiation-hardened that it can be used even in gamma ray-rich environments, such as in the worst contaminated depths of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor.
The indicated dose exposure of 500 kilograys that the chip survived during testing is quite significant. A single gray (Gy) is the absorption of one joule of energy per kilogram of matter. In radiation therapy, a solid epithelial tumor can receive as much as 60 to 80 Gy in a single dose, for example.
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Simulating A Glowing Fireplace With An RP2040
Today, fireplaces, their cozy glow once a household staple, are mostly a thing of the past. In fact, a decent amount of old fireplaces are completely blocked up! [David Capper] brings back the atmosphere without the actual flames, with his RP2040-based fireplace glow simulator.
It’s not just a string of LEDs with some PWM brightness control, either. No, [David] goes into detail about the black body radiation that gives these fires their colors. He then uses the theory of black-body radiation to determine the colors that the LEDs glow to simulate the colors of a real fire.
But the colors alone don’t make for a good simulated fire, so [David] adds the heat equation. It starts with a grid wherein each cell has a temperature. Over time, cells are randomly selected to have heat added to them (increasing the cell’s temperature), then he applies the heat equation to diffuse and decay the heat within the grid for a nice simulated crackling fire. Add in a custom PCB and a nice little 3D-printed case and you’re ready for a cozy hacker time.
A Novel 555 Circuit In 2026
The humble NE555 has been around for over five decades now, and while during that time we’ve seen a succession of better and faster versions of the original, the circuits which surround it are pretty well known. There can’t be anything new in the world of 555s, can there? [Stephen Woodward] claims he’s made a novel 555 circuit, with his 1 MHz linear voltage to frequency converter. Since he’s been in love with the 555 since 1974, we’re inclined to trust him on this part.
It’s visibly the 555 astable oscillator we’re all familiar with, given the addition of a current source in place of the normal charging resistor. This makes for a much more linear sawtooth waveform, but it still doesn’t fix the linearity of the voltage to frequency curve. The novel bit comes in adding an extra resistor between the threshold and discharge pins, with a value calculated for a time constant with the capacitor to match the 555’s own switching delay. This provides the necessary compensation, and gives the circuit its linearity.
This is so brilliantly simple that it’s almost a shock that it’s new, but it’s also a great example of the old-school electronic engineer’s art. We can’t think of an immediate need for a 555 voltage to frequency converter on the Hackaday bench at the moment, but you can bet we’ll come back to this one if we do.
We had someone pushing a newer 555 variant to its limit, when we ran our component abuse challenge.
Reverse-Engineering The Holy Stone H120D Drone
There are plenty of drones (and other gadgets) you can buy online that use proprietary control protocols. Of course, reverse-engineering one of these protocols is a hacker community classic. Today, [Zac Turner] shows us how this GPS drone can be autonomously controlled by a simple Arduino program or Python script.
What started as [Zac] sniffing some UDP packets quickly evolved into him decompiling the Android app to figure out what’s going on inside. He talks about how the launch command needs accurate GPS, how there’s several hidden features not used by the Android app, et cetera. And it’s not like it’s just another Linux SoC in there, either. No, there’s a proper Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) running, with a shell and a telnet interface. The list of small curiosities goes on.
After he finished reverse-engineering the protocol, he built some Python scripts, through which you can see the camera feed and control the drone remotely. He also went on to make an Arduino program that can do the latter using an Arduino Nano 33 IoT.
Hackaday Links: March 29, 2026
Whether it’s a new couch or a rare piece of hardware picked up on eBay, we all know what it feels like to eagerly await a delivery truck. But the CERN researchers involved in a delivery earlier this week weren’t transporting anyone’s Amazon Prime packages, they were hauling antimatter.
Moving antimatter, specifically antiprotons, via trucks might seem a bit ridiculous. But ultimately CERN wants to transfer samples between various European laboratories, and that means they need a practical and reliable way of getting the temperamental stuff from point A to B. To demonstrate this capability, the researchers loaded a truck with 92 antiprotons and drove it around for 30 minutes. Of course, you can’t just put antiprotons in a cardboard box, the experiment utilized a cryogenically cooled magnetic containment unit that they hope will eventually be able to keep antimatter from rudely annihilating itself on trips lasting as long as 8 hours.
Speaking of deliveries, anyone building a new computer should be careful when ordering components. Shady companies are looking to capitalize on the currently sky high prices of solid-state drives by counterfeiting popular models, and according to the Japanese site AKIBA PC Hotline, there are some examples in the wild that would fool all but the most advanced users. They examine a bootleg drive that’s a nearly identical replica of the Samsung 990 PRO — the unit and its packaging are basically a mirror image of the real deal, the stated capacity appears valid, and it even exhibits similar performance when put through a basic benchmark test.
Comparing The Power Usage Of 12 VDC And 240 VAC Kettles
If you have a 12 VDC power system, like the battery of a PV solar system or car, would it be more efficient to boil water for that cup of tea with that 12V straight from the battery, or use a 240 VAC mains kettle via a ~90% efficient inverter instead? That’s the question that [Cahn] decided to answer experimentally, using a bulky 3 kW inverter and a collection of electric kettles.
Although the used amount of 500 mL of water is boiled much faster in the 2,200 Watt mains kettle than in the 150 and 350 Watt low-voltage kettles, this obvious difference is somewhat irrelevant if you’re only concerned with efficiency. To measure the power used a Victron smart shunt was used with each run, keeping in mind that a perfect efficiency for heating 500 mL from room temperature to boiling is around 43-44 Wh.
With two runs per kettle, the 240 VAC kettle used 65-70 Wh. The first ‘150 Watt’ kettle pulled nearly 200 Watt to boil the water after about 20 minutes, using 62-64 Wh. The second ‘150 Watt’ kettle pulled around 180 Watt, took 23-25 minutes and used 68-74 Wh. Finally, the ‘350 Watt’ kettle drew over 420 Watt and used 50-56 Wh in just over 8 minutes.
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Reconstructed SC62015 Opcode Reference For Sharp Pocket Computers
Pocket computers like Sharp’s 8-bit computing marvels were a big part of the 1980s, providing super-portable processing power to anyone who wanted a bit more than what something like a scientific calculator could provide at the time. These days they are mostly just a collector’s item for retrocomputing enthusiasts, which also means that a lot of the knowledge about how to program the CPUs in them is at risk of being lost.
This is why [gikonekos] decided to combine as much knowledge they can glean from official documentation into a reference project on GitHub for the SC62015 equipped Sharp pocket computers like the PC-E550.
Generally you’d program in Sharp’s dialect of BASIC on these computers, such as the ‘PLAY3’ program that [gikonekos] recently unearthed from a November 1993 copy of ‘Pocket Computer Journal’ using which you can create polyphonic tunes. This only unlocks a small part of what the hardware can do, of course, so having a full opcode reference like this is important.
While still a work in progress, it’ll eventually contain the full opcode and register tables, addressing modes, instruction summaries and of course a full accounting of how all of this was reconstructed. As the original Sharp documentation wasn’t released to the public, providing these scans is also not a goal, especially not under any kind of free license.
A cursory search reveals an instruction table for the PC-E500 from 1995 by [Andrew Woods], so documenting this is not a new thing, although at the time these Sharp pocket PCs didn’t count as ‘retro systems’ yet.
